– The ongoing game between AQAP and the Saudis…

– …in particular, between Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri and Mohammed bin Nayef (little brother Abdullah Asiri having already sacrificed his life in vain on that score);

– That Fahd al-Quso was probably painted by the mole that got the upgraded package, no doubt with Saudi assistance;

– That Lil’ Squinty has been putting his feet down in the Tunbs, which is calculated to make the Emirates edgy and annoy the Saudis;

– That al-Asiri’s previous venture was thwarted in Abu Dhabi;

– That PETN is such damnable stuff: hard to detect and you don’t need much of it;

– That there is no question about which of the two Gulf powers AQAP and their pals in the Horn seem to willing to make common cause with, though they make strange bedfellows…

And that’s all just for starters. It’s enough to make your head spin.

Assuming that National Front supporters will more likely prefer Nicholas Sarkozy to today’s winner, the Socialist candidate Francois Hollande, a numerical defeat for Sarkozy today (27.9% for Hollande, 26.7% Sarkozy with 75% of the vote counted) may still translate into a victory in July’s runoff.

MSM reporters seem shocked that the National Front did so well. I’m not.

Today’s lesson? The law of unintended consequences.

Islamist Group Breaks Pledge to Stay Out of Race in Egypt

CAIRO — The Muslim Brotherhood nominated its chief strategist and financier Khairat el-Shater on Saturday as its candidate to become Egypt’s first president since Hosni Mubarak, breaking a pledge not to seek the top office and a monopoly on power.

I’m sure you are as gobsmacked as I am. Why, the next thing you know, the sun will come up in the East.

Beginning to impinge, I say, because there is one reality — the elephant, as they say, in the room — that he, and most of the academic and political leadership of the West, have yet to acknowledge. But Mecca wasn’t built in a day.

This is just unbelievable — by which I mean I don’t believe it. It makes no sense, and serves no purpose, because nobody else in the world — particularly those for whose ears it must be imagined to have been intended — will believe it either.

Update: And here’s Newt Gingrich, explaining things to Piers Morgan.

Our love’s labour there is done, it seems; we are busy gardeners, after all, and have other beds to till!

How noble we, to share our blessings so!

See also this overview of the “Arab spring” from STRATFOR.

Even though Egypt’s newly elected political leaders have now consolidated their parliamentary power in the wake of last year’s exhilarating “Facebook revolution”, their chief ideologist Yusuf al-Qaradawi (last mentioned in these pages here and here) realizes nevertheless that the long-overdue reforms his homeland yearns for will take time to implement, and must be phased in gradually.

Patience! It may be several years, for example, before there can be any chopping off of hands.

Learn more here.

Israel Upholds Citizenship Bar for Palestinian Spouses

Israel’s Supreme Court has upheld a law banning Palestinians who marry Israelis from gaining Israeli citizenship.

Civil rights groups had petitioned the court to overturn the law, saying it was unconstitutional.

“Human rights do not prescribe national suicide,” Judge Asher Grunis wrote in the judgement.

How about that! “National suicide”. Amazing that somebody can get away with calling a spade a spade like that in this day and age. As Dennis remarked (my emphasis):

Judge Grunis appears to be sound on what exactly constitutes a nation, that is, it consists of a people, not anyone who can manage to get to a physical location.

Very unfashionable notion these days, that.

What say you, readers? Should Israel be allowed to define itself as home to “a people”?

If you say ‘no’, then why not? If you say ‘yes’, then you probably know what I’m going to ask next.

Meanwhile, DEBKA reports that in Egypt, General Tantawi and the SCAF grow weary of their burden, and are negotiating an early handover of the reins of power to the Muslim Brotherhood (who reiterate that they are not bound by Egypt’s agreements with Israel). DEBKA also reports on a growing deployment of U.S. military resources to Israel:

Thousands of US troops began descending on Israel this week. Senior US military sources told DEBKAfile Friday, Jan. 6 that many would be staying up to the end of the year as part of the US-IDF deployment in readiness for a military engagement with Iran and its possible escalation into a regional conflict. They will be joined by a US aircraft carrier. The warplanes on its decks will fly missions with Israeli Air Force jets.

As a result of the political upheavals in the region, Israel’s security situation has deteriorated sharply in the past year, and the buildup of U.S. forces there is unlikely, in my opinion, to be reversed any time soon. This tightening encirclement of Israel by its mortal enemies, who are in political ascendancy on all sides, will lead to an increased Israeli dependency on the United States to guarantee its survival. This in turn will give the United States — whose current administration shows no particular fondness for Israel to begin with — increasing leverage with which to pressure Israel as regards its accommodation of Palestinian demands, which are themselves merely a proxy for the eliminationist sentiments of the regional Islamic community.

A commenter recently remarked, in response to my unvarying pessimism about how the ‘Arab Spring’ was likely to affect Western interests in the region:

In the end the “Arab Spring” might turn out to be an unmitigated disaster but at the very least it allows for possibilities not imagined in many decades.

That’s certainly true. Likewise, if I were to put on a blindfold while driving, it would allow for possibilities not imagined by nearby motorists.

The Muslim Brotherhood (or “Ikhwan”) differs from militant Islamist factions like al-Qaeda not in its goals, which are more or less the same, but only in its strategy: it has no moral or philosophical aversion to violent jihad, but considers it unnecessarily provocative, and therefore counterproductive. As such, it can make an ostentatious public display of distancing itself from terrorism, and so it is embraced by gullible Westerners — for whom the only imaginable threat from Islam is terrorist violence — as a “moderate” Muslim organization to be supported and embraced. This suits the Ikwhan, whose avowed strategy is to sabotage secular democratic societies from within, just fine.

The Obama administration, however, which has made “outreach” to the Muslim world a priority (even going so far as to make NASA’s “foremost” mission helping Muslims “feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering”) clearly feels the the Muslim Brotherhood is an outfit it can do business with. We should not be surprised to see — in fact we should be astonished not to see — the Ikwhan seizing the opportunity now taking shape in Cairo, for which it has worked and waited so long. We should also not be surprised to learn that they will do so with the overt or covert support of the United States: so broad is the Brotherhood’s influence in Egypt that it is almost unimaginable that they will not take the reins, and you can be sure that Foggy Bottom and the Oval Office have already made the appropriate calculations.

For my trouble, I was berated in the comment thread for having made, under the bewitchment of “confirmation bias”, an assertion that was “unsupported by fact” and unable to “withstand even the slightest amount of scrutiny”.

A lively eleven months have passed since then, and we have yet to see any flowering of secular Jeffersonian democracy in the region, despite the lavish and effervescent optimism with which the initial disturbances were greeted by most observers here in the West. As was suggested at the time by those of us who have rather less faith in the universal appeal of Western ways, and a more sober understanding of the history of the area and its people, the likeliest outcome of these populist upheavals would be a transition to Islamic governance, with a concomitant erosion of Western interests in the region, and deepening existential peril for Israel.

Now, as Andrew McCarthy notes here, The Hindu reports that the Obama administration has turned to none other than Yusuf al-Qaradawi — the Muslim Brotherhood’s principal ideological theorist and dawa-jihad strategist — to negotiate the terms of our accommodation with the Taliban.

More confirmation bias, no doubt (after all, it’s just the Hindu, not the New York Times). We’ll just have to see.

Her crime, if you haven’t followed the case, was to comment disapprovingly on Mohammed’s deflowering of his nine-year-old wife Aisha.

Well, tolerance is paramount in a decent society, I guess.

Meanwhile, Christmas masses have been canceled in Iraq due to fears of anti-Christian violence.

North Korea: North Korea is demanding that foreigners either remain in their homes or leave the country. Pyongyang authorities ordered some foreigners to leave, according to Chinese nationals who frequently visit North Korea.

A Chinese student in Pyongyang said North Korean professors ordered their Chinese and Russian students to avoid leaving their residences. According to a Chinese man who flew out of Pyongyang on 20 December, foreigners were not allowed to leave their accommodations after the announcement of Kim Jong Il’s death on the 19th.

North Korea also is deporting some foreigners from Pyongyang, Sinuiju and the Rajin-Sonbong special economic zone, Chosun reported on 21 December. Missionaries and US businessmen engaged in charity work in Rajin-Sonbong and Sinuiju have been forced to leave. North Korea is preventing foreigners from entering the country and will not issue any new visas until after 29 December.

Comment: Control of foreigners, including expulsion, is one of the national civil readiness measures prescribed in a semi-war state of alert, which is a preparatory stage of war preparations for an attack as well as for defense against an attack. Such measures are out of sync with a global and increasingly integrated economic system, but for North Korea they are normal during conditions of stress, such as leadership change.

Kim Jong un’s first military order, according to Korean news services, was to order all military units to return to garrison. His military mentors, most likely Vice Marshal Ri, the chief of the General Staff, had him sign this order on 18 December. This also is prescribed in a semi-war state of alert for rear and mobile military units. For forward forces just north of the Demilitarized Zone, they are supposed to report to wartime defenses and commence tunnel living.

Comment: The context for this order is that the annual Winter Training Cycle for the Korean People’s Army began on 1 December. Winter is the period of the most intense and extensive training for the entire Army.

In December, which is the first month of the cycle, soldiers are in classrooms or at shooting ranges and other basic field training sites for the early phases of the cycle. The cycle culminates in large unit – corps- and multiple corps- echelon — field exercises in early spring.

Confining units to garrison means the early phases of the training cycle have been interrupted and the entire cycle must be truncated by at least a month. Army readiness peaks in April, after the cycle ends and remedial training is completed for units that failed to meet standards. The Army cannot now meet that schedule without sacrificing readiness.

The North Korean Marshals and Generals will appreciate that the coming year will be a period of extraordinary military vulnerability until the summer training cycle is completed. They may be expected to be prickly and prone to violence over perceived provocations by the Allies.

The order to confine troops to barracks during a time of internal stress always means the leadership does not trust its lower echelons of leadership. It does not want troops to have access to live ammunition and will not risk normal training because of the danger of a military revolt.

Special comment: The succession of Kim Chong il in 1994 was not peaceful or smooth, despite western punditry and North Korean propaganda. There were multiple assassination attempts against Kim Chong il during his first year as leader, although he was his father’s understudy for more than a dozen years. An entire North Korean Army Corps revolted against him in early 1995 and requested American and South Korean assistance, which it did not receive. Its leaders fled to China. The corps was disbanded.

Despite the North Korean propaganda and the shallow Western news coverage, the succession of Kim Jong un is likely to be much more unstable than was Kim Chong il’s, once the mourning period ends in January 2012.

All the video reports and written news items on the home pages of the Korean Central News Agency stress that the Army and the people support Kim Jong un. Every video of Kim Chong-il during his life shows Kim Jong un in the background. But all the images are quite recent and they are few. Kim Chong-il did not take his designated heir everywhere with him, as his father did with him.

Moreover, the videos and other reports do not mention that the communist party or the government support Kim Jong un. The Army always is listed or mentioned first. The North Korean people will understand that for now they are under army rule.

Finally, North Korea is an oriental despotism as described by Professor Karl August Wittfogel in his seminal book “Oriental Despotism.” It is not inscrutable or unpredictable or mysterious. It is Asian.

That means that an extended royal family governs and risks being destroyed if the government changes. It will exhibit no interest in reform that jeopardizes its status and life style.

That family pampers and depends on the loyalty of the armed forces leaders. That means that every army corps commander has a villa, Mercedes Benz personal vehicles, Rolex watches, flat screen HD TVs and all the luxuries that North Korean can afford. Kim Chong il never neglected his senior commanders and they are now in charge of national security.

All of that means that peace with South Korea is highly unlikely because the generals and vice marshals will lose their life style and the Army will lose its reason for existence.

Internal economic reform will be measured by whether it helps the Kim extended family. The young Kim is a victim of the decisions of his grandfather and father.

Anecdote: South Korea’s director of the National Intelligence Service told the press today that US satellite photos show that all of the leadership trains used by Kim Chong-il were in their normal parking areas in Pyongyang rail yards on 17 December, the day Kim died.

This means that Kim could not have died on a train during a field tour, as the Pyongyang government announced on the 19th, and as the official media broadcast. He died with no heroics.

On the 18th, however, the North Koreans did move a leadership train from Pyongyang, apparently and belatedly recognizing their gaff.

The South Korean intelligence chief reported that Kim most likely died in bed, or at least in Pyongyang. The story about dying on the train was part of the mythology the North Koreans love to indulge, but which no North Koreans believe.

Final comment: The New York Times published an absurd article about a massive intelligence failure because the US did not know that Kim was dying in his villa in Pyongyang, and learned of his death from official North Korean press statements … as it did when Kim Il-sung died in 1994.

The intelligence failure thesis reveals an ingénue’s complete misunderstanding of US intelligence. No one knows or can know when a national leader is dying suddenly, including the Chinese, even in a Web 2.0 world. There is no App for dying national leaders.

One of the consistent lessons of history, from Aristagoras to Gorbachev, is that authoritarian systems place themselves at great risk when they attempt to liberalize. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is learning this lesson today; they have unleashed forces that they have no idea how to control.

First: you may have heard about the kerfuffle that arose recently when the home-improvement chain Lowe’s decided to yank its sponsorship of the “anti-Islamophobic” television series All-American-Muslim. (Dozens of other sponsors soon joined them; all are now predictably being tarred as “racists” by the ummah‘s useful idiots on the Left, although opposition to the spread of Islam in the West has nothing whatsoever to do with race, and everything to do with a perfectly sensible wariness toward a totalitarian, intolerant, and virulent ideology.) Robert Spencer comments here.

Also: what with the recent persecutions of Geert Wilders, Elisabeth Sabaditch-Wolff, and Lars Hedegaard, the witch-hunt for “instigators” following the Anders Breivik rampage (which has made the Norwegian writer Fjordman’s life a living hell), the imprisonment of (the admittedly loutish) Emma West, and the stifling effect of Europe’s incremental dhimmitude on free speech in general, it should be no surprise that the OIC, the global organizing body for dawa jihad, is feeling its oats these days — and has its eye on that last bastion of free expression, the United States.

With that in mind, Clare Lopez at American Thinker has had her eye on a meeting, now presumably concluded, between OIC and our Secretary of State. Read her substantial article here.

Since Cameron’s “No,” there’s been much chatter about the return of Britain’s “bulldog spirit.” Self-delusion is a lingering attribute of former imperial nations adjusting to a lesser reality.

Let’s unpack that a little:

Yes, you were once a great nation and people, but no longer, and good riddance. You are now a sagging, broken, deracinated little country, just as we planned — with nothing left to sustain you but empty traditions and fading memories, and no hope for the future but to submit to the will of your new masters.

Kneel!

In response (and with a hat tip to David Duff), here’s Ed West of the Daily Telegraph:

Of course the EU has brought wonderful benefits. In the old days one had to go through the palaver of changing currencies before going on holiday; now, thanks to the EU, that is no longer a problem, as no one can afford holidays. And, of course, after 45 years of European peace, a peace maintained by the US military (protection which, alas, has created a sort of infantile anti-Americanism among Europeans, the same sense of resentment a grown-up child living with their parents feels), the EU has done an amazing job of bringing Europeans together. The German chancellor is rarely off the front page of the Greek press, and Irishmen love the fact that their budget must first be discussed in Berlin before anyone in Dublin has a say.

But of course the EU is not about economics, and never has been – it’s a moral idea with the millennial goal of destroying nationalism, which is why for four decades British Eurosceptics have been cast as moral deviants or caricatures (incidentally the latest YouGov polls show less support for the EU among women than men). That is why Guardian readers – and I imagine it is quite similar with New York Times readers – are always surprised to find normal, affable people who hold conservative views.

That last bit — about educated liberals who have been so deeply marinated in the warm crock-pot of smug multi-culti PC groupthink for so long that they’re genuinely surprised, upon finally making the acquaintance of an actual conservative, to find that he lacks horns and a tail — I can vouch for personally. Where I live, it happens all the time.

You can read the rest of Mr. West’s piece here.

Well, good for him, I say, for refusing to surrender England’s ancient sovereignty to a lot of unelected Eurocrats as their doomed continent falls under the all-too familiar shadow of coalescing German dominance.

To quote Winston Churchill:

“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”