From Publishers Weekly
Born into a spiritually ambiguous family (his parents are nonpracticing Jews who follow the "Infinite Way"), Gartenstein-Ross grew up in the 1980s, in Ashland, Ore., a bucolic, posthippie paradise with a live-and-let-live ethic. Spiritually adrift through his teens, he discovers Islam through a classmate at Wake Forest University. Gartenstein-Ross—young and searching, like so many Americans of his socioeconomic class—quickly falls under the spell of fiercely committed Muslims. He begins working for al Harman, a radical Islamic charity that would eventually be linked to al-Qaeda, and soon starts a simultaneous process of being drawn deeper into the world of radical Islam and being repulsed by its brutal realities. Gartenstein-Ross fights an inner battle between his idealism, shaped by his socially conscious if somewhat scattered liberal upbringing, and his sense of the growing gap between his personal notion of Islam and the mounting list of rules and limitations its practice entails. This would seem compelling stuff, but throughout the story seems blunted. Even the chapters near the end that deal with Gartenstein-Ross's role as an informer for the FBI after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, lack tension and real insight into the dilemma faced by so many cut adrift in Western secular culture. (Feb.)
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From Booklist
Gartenstein-Ross reveals how widening doctrinal tensions are dividing twenty-first-century expressions of Islam in this memoir of his journey into and out of the faith. Raised by freethinking Jewish parents in a world of former hippies, Gartenstein-Ross finds himself pondering ultimate questions after two brushes with death. Friendship with a progressive Shiite Muslim offers answers. Gartenstein-Ross therefore converts. But both he and his Shiite friend subsequently encounter--and then cross over--the chasm separating moderates from radical orthodoxy. Gartenstein-Ross even works for a Muslim charity diverting funds to terrorists. After eventually turning away from the group hatreds and anti-intellectualism of radical Islam, Gartenstein-Ross embraces Christianity--and becomes an FBI informant. To his great joy, he subsequently discovers that his Shiite friend has likewise turned away from radicalism and has returned to moderate Islam. For readers trying to understand Muslims on both sides of the radical-moderate divide, Gartenstein-Ross' story will be an eye-opener. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
My Year Inside Radical Islam is a memoir of first a spiritual and then a political seduction. Raised in liberal Ashland, Oregon, by parents who were Jewish by birth but dismissive of strict dogma, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross yearned for a religion that would suit all his ideals. At college in the late nineties he met a charismatic Muslim student who grounded his political activism with thoughtful religious conviction. Gartenstein-Ross reflects on his experience of converting to Islam-a process that began with a desire to connect with both a religious community and a spiritual practice, and eventually led him to sympathize with the most extreme interpretations of the faith, with the most radical political implications.

In the year following graduation, Gartenstein-Ross went to work for the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a charity dedicated to fostering Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia's austere form of Islam-a theological inspiration for many terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda. Shortly after he left al-Haramain-when his own fan-aticism had waned-the foundation was charged by the U.S. government as being a source of funds for terrorist organizations. Gartenstein-Ross, by this time a lawyer at a prominent firm, volunteered to be questioned by the FBI. They already knew who he was.

The story of how a good faith can be distorted and a decent soul can be seduced away from its principles, My Year Inside Radical Islam provides a rare glimpse into the personal interface between religion and politics.

About the Author
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, who has worked as a clerk on the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court of Appeals and as a litigator at a major New York law firm, is now a full-time counterterrorism consultant. Currently involved in several terrorist investigations, Gartenstein-Ross is frequently asked to give recommendations to law enforcement and senior federal officials. He often writes about terrorism, religious extremism, and the law. His articles have appeared in a wide range of publications, including The Wall Street Journal Europe, The Weekly Standard, The Dallas Morning News, Commentary, The New York Sun, and The Washington Times.
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ABQ named one of top 10 movie-making cities
New Mexico Business Weekly - January 31, 2007
MovieMaker magazine has named Albuquerque the No. 4 best American city for making movies in its Winter 2007 edition.

The list, which has been created for seven years, ranks New York City, Philadelphia and Austin ahead of Albuquerque in the current month's edition. All those cities have appeared on the list before -- it is Albuquerque's first year to be named.

The article about Albuquerque's film business cites the city's sunny climate, the state's film incentive package and the construction of Albuquerque Studios and its eight sound stages as major factors in making the city a hot spot for filming.

Behind Albuquerque on the list are No. 5 Las Vegas, Nev., previously unlisted; No. 6 Shreveport, La., previously unlisted; No. 7 Memphis, Tenn., which rose from the No. 10 spot on last year's list; No. 8 Miami, dipping by one notch from No. 7 last year; No. 9 Portland, Ore., which dropped from third place; and Salt Lake City, also previously unranked.

The magazine says the absence of Los Angeles from the list is not a mistake, but a deliberate choice made after interviews and research for the list.

February 7, 2007
Military Wants More Civilians to Help in Iraq

By THOM SHANKER and DAVID S. CLOUD
WASHINGTON, Feb. 6 — Senior military officers, including members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have told President Bush and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates that the new Iraq strategy could fail unless more civilian agencies step forward quickly to carry out plans for reconstruction and political development.

The complaints reflect fresh tensions between the Pentagon and the State Department over personnel demands that have fallen most heavily on the military. But they also draw on a deeper reservoir of concerns among officers who have warned that a military buildup alone cannot solve Iraq’s problems, and who now fear that the military will bear a disproportionate burden if Mr. Bush’s strategy falls short.

Among particular complaints, the officers cited a request from the office of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that military personnel temporarily fill more than one-third of 350 new State Department jobs in Iraq that are to be created under the new strategy.

At a Senate hearing on Tuesday, Mr. Gates made clear that he shared the officers’ concerns, telling senators, “If you were troubled by the memo, that was mild compared to my reaction when I saw it.”

To back up his point, Mr. Gates also told senators that Mr. Bush himself had addressed his cabinet at the White House on Monday about the need for civilian agencies to “step up to the task.”

At one level, the conflict is a cultural clash between a military that has ordered hundreds of thousands of troops to Iraq in the last four years, and a Foreign Service that offers incentives for civilians to work in war zones but cannot compel diplomats to accept hardship assignments to places like Iraq.

Under Mr. Bush’s strategy, the military is pushing more than 20,000 fresh troops to Baghdad to augment the American military force of about 132,000 already in Iraq.

The State Department, leading an interagency effort, has been ordered to expand the provincial reconstruction teams in Baghdad and western Anbar Province to accelerate political and economic development at the local level.

Small teams of American personnel are to be placed inside Iraqi ministries to make sure that $10 billion in Iraqi funds committed to the effort are spent, and spent correctly.

The entire United States Foreign Service numbers only 6,000 people, about the size of a military brigade.

In defense of the diplomats’ role, David M. Satterfield, the State Department’s Iraq coordinator, told Congress in January that the department’s task in Iraq amounted to “the largest presence of the foreign service in any country in the world,” including more than 140 Foreign Service officers in Baghdad and over 50 more in the existing provincial reconstruction teams.

Last month, after Mr. Bush announced his new strategy, Ms. Rice told Congress that the department was “ready to strengthen, indeed to ‘surge,’ our civilian efforts.”

But Mr. Gates said Tuesday that Ms. Rice had told him that her department needed six months to locate and prepare civil servants and contractors to send abroad. “It is illustrative of the difficulty of getting other agencies to provide people on a timely basis,” Mr. Gates said.

Members of the Joint Chiefs and commanders in Iraq have been delivering the same message recently to the president and defense secretary about the necessity for other parts of government to join the effort, according to administration and military officials.

“The chiefs have made that point, and repeatedly,” said one senior Bush administration official who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions among the president, defense secretary, commanders in Iraq and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The officials said the commanders had also been expressing broader frustrations, including that the additional $1 billion in new money for reconstruction requested by the president may not be sufficient.

They also fear that additional contractors may not be readily available to assist, and that a large number of jobs that could be performed by civilians such as engineers, lawyers, veterinarians and accountants, are still conducted by military personnel at a time when the armed services are stretched thin.

The mounting tensions between the Pentagon and other departments are in some ways the mirror image of those that roiled the government before the 2003 invasion. Then, State Department officials grumbled that the Pentagon was usurping its role in planning the postwar civilian occupation; today, the military is eager to see others step in.

State Department officials say they are using both incentives and subtler pressures to induce employees to go to Iraq.

But from the standpoint of personal security, taking these jobs — many of them, by definition, outside the relative safety of the Green Zone — is widely seen as an unattractive career option.

Some Foreign Service officers and other civilians in the national security field spoke privately of their frustration at coming under pressure to serve in Iraq, a mission they view as bungled as the Pentagon rebuffed the involvement of experts in other government agencies.

“This is not at all a finger-pointing exercise,” said Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during his Senate testimony on Tuesday. “This is about the current status of our government to be able to respond, and it goes to the expeditionary nature or a lack thereof of most other departments in the government, understandably, based on the kind of wars we’ve faced in the past.”

General Pace argued that the United States government needed “to be able to get folks over to be able to help with judiciary systems, be able to help with engineering, be able to help with electricity and the like before a country devolves into a state where the terrorists can find a home.”

Tasia Scolinos, spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said in a statement that the agency “has devoted substantial resources” to training the Iraqi police and creating a justice system. She provided a fact sheet that showed that the Justice Department had 200 employees and contractors in Iraq as of last August.

“We are committed to working closely with the Defense Department and our law enforcement counterparts in Iraq to assess how we can best continue to support the reconstruction efforts in Iraq,” she said.

As evidence of the importance of civilian reconstruction, military officers involved in the internal debate are citing a recent classified study, conducted by the Defense Department’s Joint Warfare Analysis Center, based in Dahlgren, Va., that suggests violence in Baghdad drops significantly when the quality of life improves for Iraqi citizens.

Relying on surveys and other data on those wounded and killed in the violence as compiled by the military, the study found that a two percent increase in job satisfaction among Iraqis in Baghdad correlated to a 30 percent decline in attacks on allied forces and a 17 percent decrease in civilian deaths from sectarian violence.

The study did not examine the security benefits of adding troops to Iraq or compare it to the nonmilitary portions of the new strategy, according to those who have been briefed on the classified document.

But its emphasis on the importance of reconstruction is being cited by senior military officers and Pentagon officials as more evidence that Congress and the government’s other civilian departments must devote more money and personnel to nonmilitary efforts at improving the economy, industry, agriculture, financial oversight of government spending and the rule of law.

Fukuyama talk at SID
I just emailed Vonne to pick me up his State Building book, that I used glancingly in BFA but am now realizing, based on his talk today, I need to revisit for Vol. III WRT Development-in-a-Box's applicability (I xeroxed the parts I liked from a library copy last time and realize now I probably missed a bunch of stuff given my focus in BFA), because he notes the parts of state-building that are obvious--in Steve's language--"repeatable solutions" and counterposes those to the tougher-to-translate parts. DiB is centered--naturally on the repeatable chunks.

Our problem in Iraq, I believe, is that we went long on the non-repeatables (those highly politicized processes that must be adapted to local concerns) and short (and sloppy) on the repeatables. Thus, DiB focuses on stengthening that weakness by pulling in private-sector backbone providers (not the usual ODA crowd--at least judging by SID's membership) as upstream in the interventionary process as possible by emphasizing standards that reduce their sense of operational and investment exposures.

Fukuyama's larger point: the nonrepeatables require intense local knowledge and thus deep training.

Another: respecting local sovereignty is a big hindrance here. We need public-private partnerships that more aggressively insert themselves in the good governance development process.

Music to my ears.

Reagan Considered Invading Poland, Author Says
By Kevin Mooney
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
February 06, 2007

(CNSNews.com) - Just a few weeks before assuming the presidency in January 1981, Ronald Reagan seriously considered the idea of using military force to prevent a Soviet invasion of Poland, according to a political scientist.

Reagan discussed the possibility of deploying U.S. forces in Poland with his incoming defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, says Paul Kengor, a political science professor at Grove City College in Pennsylvania.

The discussions took place after pre-inauguration security meetings, which highlighted the precarious position Poland was in at the time, Kengor told Cybercast News Service in an interview.

Reagan ultimately decided it was not possible to use U.S. troops in Eastern Europe, since the military had been so "gutted" during the 1970s by then-President Carter, he added.

The details of Reagan's meetings with Weinberger and other key figures such as William Clark, who became national security advisor, are detailed in Kengor's new book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.

When it became evident the U.S. was too ill-equipped to confront the Soviets militarily, Kengor writes in the book, Reagan settled on alternative strategies that included forging a partnership with the Vatican, and in particular with Polish-born Pope John Paul II.

The early meetings Reagan held with defense and national security advisors show the 40th president to have been a shrewd and innovative policymaker, he argues.

While the U.S. rebuilt its military, Reagan had cultivated unlikely alliances and used creative counter-measures to boost the anti-communist Solidarity movement in Poland.

The partnership between Reagan and the Vatican took on heightened importance in December 1981, when Poland's communist authorities declared marital law in a bid to clamp down on the opposition, amid fears the Soviet Union would invade to support its Warsaw Pact satellite (as it had done in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968).

When Weinberger told Reagan that the U.S. was not in a position to "successfully come to the aid of the Poles, if they were invaded," the incoming president interjected, "Yes, I know that, Cap. But we must never again be in this position. We must never again not take action that we think is essential because we're not strong enough to do it."

Additional insights into Reagan's Cold War strategy and his thoughts on a military option in Poland come from Clark, whom Kengor describes as "cautious" about discussing sensitive matters.

"Measures were discussed," Clark told Kengor in a 2001 interview. "Some might call them extreme, but they might have been necessary. The instructions were that we cannot allow a repeat of the Hungary or Czechoslovakia invasion. And it was touch and go. The Soviets did move troops up to the line. We decided that, effectively, force would be met with force."

The revelations make it clear, Kengor said, that "Ronald Reagan determined to meet the Soviets toe to toe, troop to troop, solider to solider on the ground, if need be."

He said Reagan's "prudence" and "creativity" are often overlooked in the mainstream media, where the image of Reagan tends to be one of a "dangerous hawk with his finger on the button."

By early 1989, with the threat of Soviet invasion lessened as a result of President Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost policies, Poland's communist rulers began negotiating with Solidarity.

Legalized in April 1989, Solidarity scored an overwhelming victory in elections two months later, even though the voting process was rigged to favor the communists.

By the following year, the Soviet alliance system had collapsed, the Cold War was declared over, and Solidarity leader Lech Walesa was president of Poland.