On my last day in Stockholm among other things I went to the Tekniska Museet where I was able to learn about Christer Fuglesang, the first Swede in space. Obviously not a celebrity figure obscure in the US, but he has 3,890 followers in Twitter:

At any rate, Stockholm is a great city to visit. What it lacks in terms of the truly blockbuster tourist attractions of some European cities, it makes up for on all the key livability requirements: Lively yet pleasantly green and low-key, easy to get around, nice people, bike sharing service with a tourist-friendly three-day card option, diverse population and culinary offerings, great people-watching, etc. A bit on the cold and rainy side this time of year but compared to last December’s trip to Helsinki the weather’s a breeze. Thanks to whichever among my readers suggested I stay in Södermalm; love the neighborhood.

From a Washington Post article on how Afghans see the war:

“If you look around, you see nothing but jobless people,” said Qari Imam, 30, who sells children’s clothing in the market here. “A lot of people who join the Taliban are jobless, too. If you want to stop the fighting, don’t send us more troops; build us more factories.”

Of course we could build a bunch of factories, but that wouldn’t do any good unless the factories had customers. If I’m reading these slides right then textile products made in Afghanistan are not eligible for duty-free sale in the United States. Changing that rule might encourage some factory-building in Afghanistan. Similarly we see here that some of Afghanistan’s key trade partners have very high tariffs on Afghan agricultural products. Perhaps we could persuade Turkey and India that they don’t need to be charging 50+% taxes on imports of Afghan grapes. India is Afghanistan’s largest export market right now despite those high taxes; changing it would open some additional economic opportunities for people.

To some, the modern American right-wing looks intellectually moribund. Steve Hayward thinks there’s some truth to that, but also powerful minds working on serious issues; people like . . . Jonah Goldberg. The idea that Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism represents one of the peaks of right-of-center political thinking is, I think, a more damning indictment than anything any liberal could possibly come up with.

Thomas Friedman offers us a little schematic:

Second, in this war on terrorism, there is no “good war” or “bad war.” There is one war with many fronts, including Europe and our own backyard, requiring many different tactics. It is a war within Islam, between an often too-silent Muslim mainstream and a violent, motivated, often nihilistic jihadist minority. Theirs is a war over how and whether Islam should embrace modernity. It is a war fueled by humiliation — humiliation particularly among young Muslim males who sense that their faith community has fallen behind others, in terms of both economic opportunity and military clout. This humiliation has spawned various jihadists cults, including Al Qaeda, which believe they have the God-given right to kill infidels, their own secular leaders and less pious Muslims to purify Islam and Islamic lands and thereby restore Muslim grandeur.

This is an interesting idea, but doesn’t common sense suggest a much more complicated situation in which Muslim opinion exists along a pretty broad continuum. There’s a huge conceptual space between wanting to “embrace modernity” in a way that a secular American Jew like Friedman or I would have amenable (after all, the Republican Party doesn’t meet that standard) and wanting to roam around the world killing everyone in the name of purifying Islam. If the entire Muslim world were governed by rights-respecting democracies it might be relatively easy to draw clear lines between dangerous violent people, and people just advancing a conservative political agenda. But that’s not the situation that exists, so you have a muddle of different actors who embrace violence to differing degrees against different targets and for different purposes.

I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s probably helpful to think about the wave of “propanaganda of the deed” terrorist attacks in the late 19th century. Alexander II, President of France Sadi Carnot, Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, King Umberto I of Italy, US President William McKinley, Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolyin, Spanish Prime Minister José Canalejas, and King George I of Greece were all killed between 1881 and 1912 by anarchists. And that’s to say nothing of various failed assassination attempts, random bombings, etc. It was a big problem at the time. And Europe was chock-a-block with left-wing political movements at the time ranging from the ancestors of modern-day Social Democratic parties to the Bolsheviks. Simply expressing a desire for real political democracy counted as a radical left-wing stance in most of Europe. At the time you could place people on a continuum of violence and radicalism, but it would have been hard to simply draw a line and say “here’s the war, go fight the bad guys.” And in retrospect, of course, nobody talks about anarchist violence because a then-obscure Russian splinter group wound up taking over a major country and killing dramatically more people than the anarchists ever had.

One interesting aspect of the Iran nuclear debate has been the behind-the-scenes disagreement from various western intelligence agencies as to what exactly the Iranians are doing. Everyone agrees that their enrichment activities could be helpful in building a nuclear weapon, but the US intelligence community reached the judgment some time ago that Iran was not actively researching warhead construction. Israeli intelligence hotly disputes this, with the French and German intelligence agencies somewhat closer to the Israeli position than the American one. More recently, British intelligence came around to agreement with France and Germany. But Mohammed ElBarredei, head of the IAEA and the guy who tried to warn the world that the Bush administration was full of it on Iraqi nuclear issues, has been in the US camp. Today, however, comes word that the IAEA staff seems to think ElBarredei has this wrong and they’ve concluded that Iran has acquired “sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable” nuclear weapon.