Atrios notes the president’s continuing inability to decide whether Osama bin Laden is the Most Important Dude Ever or else just “not a priority” before remarking, “It’s unclear if taking Bin Laden off the world stage would really reduce any threats of terrorism – how would I know.”

Well, I wouldn’t know either. I’ll pass on some notions about this that I’ve gleaned from others. One question in dispute is the extent to which the perpetrators of things like the Madrid and London bombings have actual communication with al-Qaeda Central, i.e. bin Laden and/or Ayman al-Zawahiri. For a while, the predominant sentiment was that there wasn’t any, but subsequent investigations seem to indicate that these people were in contact with someone or other in the vicinity of Pakistan, possibly the big two. Another thing is that some folks feel that bin Laden is simply very good at doing those taped performances and written statements. Were he killed or captured, someone else would step up, but that someone might be less skilled. On the other hand, at least some of America’s counterterrorism professionals maintain that Zawahiri rather than bin Laden is actually the brains behind that stuff. I recently heard Rand Beers take the view that simply nobody knows what the answer to that question is. Which, I guess, is a longwinded way of saying it probably would make a difference to kill or capture him, but nobody seems to me to have a convincing account of how big a difference.

That said, there’s a certain importance to simply having justice be done (as Atrios writes, “some reason I thought bringing a mass murderer to justice might be a wee bit important”) especially because the President once upon a time committed us to this end and launched a war that had getting OBL as one of its main aims.

This is pretty well outside this blog’s usual terrain, but last night I was hanging out with my friend Sommer and her sister Samantha who’s in town on behalf of Amnesty to raise awareness about a situation of which, I must admit, I was totally unaware of — the fantastically high rate at which women are being murdered in Guatemala, with the murderers operating with what amounts to utter impunity:

More than 2,200 women and girls have been brutally murdered in Guatemala since 2001. Up to 665 cases were registered in 2005; 527 in 2004; 383 in 2003 and 163 in 2002. In 2006, 299 cases have been reported between January and May — a faster pace than in 2005. . . .

According to Guatemala’s Human Rights Ombudsman, up to 70 percent of murders of women were not investigated and no arrests were made in 97 percent of cases. In the few cases that are investigated, the process is usually flawed — forensic evidence is not properly gathered and preserved, few resources are allocated to each case and witnesses are denied protection.

The full Amnesty report is here. There’s been very little coverage of this in the United States, but the BBC has done a couple of informative articles on the subject. Now, unfortunately, nobody quite seems to know exactly what the policy remedy is here in part because nobody quite understands what’s happening. Amnesty does have some ideas, however, and one of those web form letter thingies they’d like you to take a look at, so please do.

Chris Bertram notes that the “Euston Manifesto” movement “a British-based initiative by various self-described leftists some of whom were big supporters of the Iraq war and all of whom share an obsession with the idea that ‘Enlightenment values’ are under threat from a nefarious coalition of Islamists, postmodernists and Chomskyites” has launched an American outpost featuring — naturally enough — a new manifesto (or perhaps it’s a meta-manifesto) on the subject of “American Liberalism and the Euston Manifesto.” The curious thing, as Chris points out, is that:

[The list of signatories] contains figures not usually thought of as having much to do with the left as traditionally construed. They include Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Walter Laqueur, Martin Peretz and Ronald Radosh. Laqueur has become the victim of a Mark Steyn-like obsession with demography and recently gave a positive review of Michael Gove’s execrable Celsius 7/7 in the the TLS, Peretz – a member of the pro-war “Democratic Leadership Council” – has just joined the advisory board of Lewis Libby’s defense fund, and Radosh is a regular writer for David Horowitz’s FrontPageMag.

As a point of correction, let me note that Peretz is the owner/editor of The New Republic and has nothing in particular to do with the Democratic Leadership Council. Signatory Will Marshall is the head honcho of the Progressive Policy Institute which is the DLC’s think tank. The leadership of the DLC/PPI nexus is, however, composed of people who self-consciously identify as progressives and really ought to be viewed as such. Peretz and Radosh, however, are different cases. Much the same could be said of signatory Fred Siegel who’s not a hawkish liberal or a moderate liberal — he’s just not a liberal. You can ask him about that if you’d like. One searches in vain through his c.v. that signatory Robert Leiken is any sort of liberal. At any rate, I don’t recognize a lot of these names, so I’ll stop.

The combination of the roster of signatories with what can only be called the remarkable vacuity of the text suggests that this is another signpost on the road during which a certain number of liberal intellectuals will become conservatives. The doctrine spelled out explicitly — that fundamentalist Islam provides a poor basis for governance, that terrorist attacks are immoral, that it would be better if Iran didn’t build a nuclear bomb, that anti-semitism is bad, and that an Iranian nuclear first strike against Israel would be a very bad thing indeed — is almost frightening in its banality. The inference that the reader is plainly intended to draw from the statement — that those of us who’ve been agitating against those who are agitating to start a war with Iran are anti-semites, apologists for terrorism, and perhaps eager to see the population of Israel wiped out in an unprovoked nuclear first strike — is offensive in the extreme.