More reasons to be infuriated with the new airline security regime:

The folly is much the same with respect to the liquids and gels restrictions, introduced two summers ago following the breakup of a London-based cabal that was planning to blow up jetliners using liquid explosives. Allegations surrounding the conspiracy were revealed to substantially embellished. In an August, 2006 article in the New York Times, British officials admitted that public statements made following the arrests were overcooked, inaccurate and “unfortunate.” The plot’s leaders were still in the process of recruiting and radicalizing would-be bombers. They lacked passports, airline tickets and, most critical of all, they had been unsuccessful in actually producing liquid explosives. Investigators later described the widely parroted report that up to ten U.S airliners had been targeted as “speculative” and “exaggerated.” [...]

“The notion that deadly explosives can be cooked up in an airplane lavatory is pure fiction,” Greene told me during an interview. “A handy gimmick for action movies and shows like ‘24.’ The reality proves disappointing: it’s rather awkward to do chemistry in an airplane toilet. Nevertheless, our official protectors and deciders respond to such notions instinctively, because they’re familiar to us: we’ve all seen scenarios on television and in the cinema. This, incredibly, is why you can no longer carry a bottle of water onto a plane.”

But, hey, you can never put too much hassle into air travel.

I’ve linked to John Burns’ lengthy 1998 Benazir Bhutto profile for The New York Times before, but since she’s back in the news here it is again. It makes clear that her corruption (and that of her husband, nicknamed “Mr. Ten Percent”) wasn’t run-of-the-mill developing world graft, but really big-time stuff by Pakistani standards.

I don’t mean to just harp on the failings of the dead, and political assassinations of this sort are a horrible thing, but it’s not a good idea for western journalists to get into the habit of lionizing massively corrupt politicians just because they worked on the Crimson (I seem to recall that Pol Pot went to a fancy western university while Abraham Lincoln was self-taught). Michael Hirsch says “In the end, Benazir Bhutto could become in death the kind of hero for democracy in Pakistan that she never quite became in life.” Maybe so.

To follow up on yesterday’s post on Ken Pollack, it’s worth considering in more detail his recommendation that Iraq “move to something closer to a cantonal system along Swiss lines.” Now, Switzerland is a very successful multiethnic country. One that, unlike Belgium and Canada, isn’t even wracked by periodic political crises over its multiethnic nature.

At the same time, ethnosectarian conflict is a major problem in many parts of the world. Not just Iraq, but Lebanon, Russia (Chechyna), China (Sinkiang/”East Turkestan”), Turkey (Kurdistan), Congo, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, etc., etc., etc. If you could really solve these problems by simply pointing out that the Swiss political system is very successful, don’t you think we wouldn’t have all these problems? But, of course, the thing about Switzerland is that Swiss society is so very rare. And that’s just the rub — there’s an extraordinary sociological naiveté involved in these recommendations that Iraq just be less like a war-torn post-colonial state and become more like a stable western one. Of course Iraq should become more like a stable western country and less like a war-town post-colonial state. But how?

It’s hard these things don’t just happen because the American ambassador says they ought to. The situation is different, the age-structure of the population is different, the attitude of the neighbors is different, the oil makes a big difference, the presence of a giant foreign occupying army is different, everything about it is different.

(Beyond all that, how much familiarity do we really think Kenneth Pollack has with the Swiss constitution? Nothing in the article suggests that he really means that Iraq ought to have the distinctive features of the Swiss constitution — tons of direct democracy, a seven-person collective presidency, a bicameral parliament, etc., etc., etc.)