Reading about the latest violence in the Palestinian Authority, I thought about the conference I recently attended at the Dead Sea, in Jordan. Hamas gunmen, as you know, are swallowing up the Gaza Strip, and the Fatah faction is openly blaming Iran: citing the simple fact that Iran is both funding Hamas and fomenting violence.

Well, at this conference, I witnessed a spectacular outburst from a Palestinian journalist, directed at an Iranian official. The Palestinian pointed out that Iran was acting as the enemy of the Arabs, sowing murder and chaos in Iraq, Lebanon, and the PA — arming and training Iraqi militias, Hezbollah, and Hamas.

I was further reminded of something that a high Arab official told me, at this same conference: Forget whether Iran acquires a nuclear bomb (a big forgetting, to be sure): They are bidding to be the Middle East’s hegemon regardless, spelling trouble for everybody.

It is worth bearing in mind: Israel and the United States aren’t the only countries that fear and hate the Iranian regime. And those who fear and hate that regime the most, of course, are Iranian citizens themselves.

‐Iran is tormenting Afghanistan, too. I quote an AP report, from yesterday: “A senior U.S. diplomat accused Iran . . . of transferring weapons to Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan — the most direct comments yet on the issue by a ranking American official.”

It is staggering how much trouble — how much sorrow, misery, and death — one government can cause (or contribute to).

‐Did you read this yesterday? “Suspected Sunni insurgents bombed and badly damaged a span over the main north-south highway leading from Baghdad,” making it “the third bridge attack in as many days in an apparent campaign against key transportation arteries.”

And did you read this Victor Davis Hanson piece from last week? (It is superb, and typically so.) VDH: “Money and know-how can rebuild Iraq along the designs of Western material society — but that only makes it more vulnerable as a single transformer blown up or a pylon brought down can suddenly take away the newly found improved life.”

And not only can “a suicide bomber with a $100 vest” destroy “$1 million worth of electrical infrastructure.” In a “gruesome equation,” he can “cast the American engineers into the role of the incompetent or sinister by their failure to repair and rebuild faster than an illiterate can destroy.”

That is one of the devilish challenges of Iraq, and like situations. (I think of the Shining Path and Peru, about which I wrote last year.) (Here.)

‐If you would like to see a riveting piece of reporting from Iraq, check out this story, by Michael Yon. It concerns an Iraqi official gone bad, and how the Americans — one in particular — handled him.

The piece also tells you about AQI — al Qaeda in Iraq — whose members “brazenly made Anbar province a home base and slaughter pad with their marketplace car bombs, beheadings, and reputation for hiding bombs intended to kill parents in the corpses of dead children they’d gutted.”

Do remember what al Qaeda is.

Two nights ago, I walked around Ground Zero with a friend. That event can seem long, long ago. When you’re there, however — where the Twin Towers were — it doesn’t.

‐Taiwan has very few friends in the world, and now it has fewer. China shells out big money, to induce Taiwan’s friends away. And Taiwan finds itself unable to compete in the bribery race. And Oscar Arias has made himself sound like the worst kind of beggar: a sniffy, judgmental, and ungrateful one. (An unprincipled one, too.)

But let me stop my fulminating and simply excerpt this report:

‐Taiwan has very few friends in the world, and now it has fewer. China shells out big money, to induce Taiwan’s friends away. And Taiwan finds itself unable to compete in the bribery race. And Oscar Arias has made himself sound like the worst kind of beggar: a sniffy, judgmental, and ungrateful one. (An unprincipled one, too.)

But let me stop my fulminating and simply excerpt this report:

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (AP) — Costa Rica’s president criticized Taiwan on Thursday for being stingy with aid to its handful of allies, while other Latin American nations struggled with whether to remain loyal to the democratic island or strengthen ties with Taiwan’s diplomatic rival, China.
Taiwan is lobbying to hang on to its 24 remaining diplomatic partners after Costa Rica announced Wednesday it was switching relations to China. Taiwan’s allies, many of them poor countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, help bolster its claims of international legitimacy. . . .
Taiwanese Foreign Minister James Huang accused China of offering Costa Rica “an astronomical figure” to ditch Taipei. He did not specify what it was.
Costa Rican President Oscar Arias acknowledged that the decision to go with Beijing was related to Costa Rica’s desire to bolster its economy, and he criticized Taiwan for giving “insufficient” aid to its allies.
“I was always critical of the Taiwanese, and I can say now that I always told them . . . if you want to have friends in the world, you should be more generous,” he said.

If that’s the way the world is run, it’s a pretty lousy world, indeed. And the police-state behemoth wins out over the plucky little democracy.

By the way, Oscar Arias is a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Yeah, a big hero, he is.

‐Remember Prince Bandar, the guy who was Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to our country for about a hundred years? Remember how rich he was — gargantuan home in Colorado, etc.? Well, he may be even richer than we think. As we learn here, “A British company allegedly paid a Saudi prince more than $2 billion as part of an $85 billion arms deal between Saudi Arabia and Britain in 1985, a newspaper reported Thursday.”

Hey, I know we live in a money-soaked world — but $2 billion is still a lot of smackers, in my book.

‐So, CBS boss Les Moonves has called Dan Rather “sexist,” for what Rather said about Katie Couric. Glad to see that Moonves is tough on Rather (now). Would that he were half as tough on the dictator Castro — Moonves is one of those who go down to Havana to pay court.

But don’t get me started . . .

‐Can we doff our caps to Michael Griffin, even though he has expressed some regret (though not quite performing a Maoist self-criticism)? In a radio interview, the NASA administrator said, “I have no doubt that . . . a trend of global warming exists. I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with.” (For more information, go here.)

Heresy, heresy — and the enforcers of orthodoxy howled. But it was nice to hear honest words from the chief of NASA. He cannot be a total scientific dummy, can he?

‐I guess it was in the mid-1990s that I first heard of the “Islamification of Britain.” I thought that people were being a little alarmist, even somewhat chauvinist and kooky. But, today, we read a headline such as “Mohammed likely to top British boys’ names list by year-end” — and the worriers from the mid-1990s appear in a different light.

‐A lot of people have had a chuckle over George W. Bush’s popularity in Albania. What a laugh, that such a backward, weird people should exult over a leader all normal people recognize as a moron and failure! In his column yesterday, the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson wrote, “George W. Bush, Hero of Albania! At least there’s one place in the world where they show the Decider some love.”

In 2002 — on the first anniversary of 9/11 — I traveled to Greece and Albania, at the behest of the State Department. Before I went, I was told that surveys had shown Greece to be the most anti-American country in Europe; and Albania the most pro-American.

When I got home, I wrote a piece for National Review called “European Communities.” I thought you might be interested in an excerpt from it today:

On the northwestern border of Greece is Albania, a country that experienced the worst that Communism had to offer. For 50 years, it was a virtual dungeon, a kind of European North Korea, with no one coming in and no one getting out. So pure a Communist was the dictator, Enver Hoxha, that he broke from both Moscow (in 1961) and Peking (in 1978), judging them dangerously liberal. In the last years, Albania suffered near-famine.
Now, however, it is struggling to rejoin the world, and the country is as good a friend as America has in Europe, if an unfortunately powerless one. Albanian fondness for America is longstanding, going back to at least 1913, when Woodrow Wilson declared that the country should go its own way, have its independence, instead of being carved up by its neighbors. Albanians speak of Wilson as if he had been president yesterday.
Shortly after Communism fell in 1991, Secretary of State Baker made a visit, and he was thronged by cheering, weeping, practically delirious Albanians in the main square of Tirana, the capital. Some even kissed his car. Adding to the regard for America was the U.S. role in the Yugoslav war. Whereas Greeks are likely to decry American intervention — anywhere — Albanians are likely to plead against American withdrawal or disengagement of any kind, seeing U.S. forces as the only thing between humanity and the beast. In the present war on terror, Albanians are so supportive of America that other Europeans have sneered at them, “You’re the Israel of the Balkans!” I suggest, using a trite American political phrase, that the country ought to wear this as a badge of honor.
Albania is often cited as a Muslim nation, and it is true that a majority of its citizens profess Islam. But this is misleading. For one thing, Balkan Islam is apt to be nominal, and if it is not, it is of a distinctly non-Saudi, tolerant style. For another, the main “religion” of Albania is something called “Albanianism,” a national feeling or devotion intended to thwart clashes among Muslims, Orthodox, and Catholics. The Saudis and other Gulf Arabs, however, are doing their best to radicalize and thus destabilize the country. They spread money around, virtually bribing mothers to veil their daughters, and to send their sons to Islamic schools, often far away. If those sons do go, they come back changed, frighteningly. Throughout Albania, Gulf Arabs have refurbished madrassas long disused: The price for such physical refurbishment, of course, is an adherence to Wahhabist ideology.
Most local analysts do not believe that Albania will be sucked in: Their Islam is too different, and they wish desperately to be integrated into Europe. If all goes well, Albania will have its EU membership in 20 years. Right now, it is the poorest country in Europe, “except possibly for Moldova,” one journalist notes. (This reminds me of the old saying in Arkansas: “If it weren’t for Mississippi . . .”) In truth, Albanians would rather deal with Americans than Europeans, on the grounds that Americans are more straightforward, more direct, less slippery. Certainly the Albanian intelligentsia — and, yes, there is one (as more people will realize once Ismail Kadare wins the Nobel Prize in literature, as he almost undoubtedly will) — is with America, and baffled at the anti-Americanism in other parts of the continent. One Albanian journalist recounts to me his experience on a panel with an editor for Le Monde. Wide-eyed, shaking his head, he remembers that this man was not only pro-Castro and pro-Chávez, but perilously close to pro-bin Laden.

On two trips to Albania, I have met with several former political prisoners, one of whom spent 19 years in a dungeon. (His story alone is mind-boggling.) These people, in my observation, were remarkably cheerful, hopeful, and free of bitterness. They were also strikingly clear about the contemporary world and its problems. I admired them, and wondered whether, in their shoes, I could do so well.

At any rate, the world can laugh its ass off over the Albanians’ reception of Bush, but I won’t.

‐Let’s have a quick shift to the world of music. For a review of the New York Philharmonic, under Riccardo Muti, with the pianist Lang Lang, soloist, go here. And for a review of the pianist Dmitri Alexeev in recital, go here. Both reviews were published in the New York Sun.

‐I saw a stroke of advertising genius the other day. The sign said, “Yoga for your mouth — Soy Joy.” As I understand it, Soy Joy is a health-food snack bar.

Have you ever seen a better marriage of slogan and product? “Yoga for your mouth — Soy Joy.”

If the bar doesn’t sell like hotcakes in Berkeley and Ann Arbor, I’ll eat my hat.

‐Finally, a New York story — a couple of them, and cut from the same cloth.

A friend of mine works in the opera biz. He approached a man on the street and said, “Excuse me, are you John Bolton?” The man — looking slightly apprehensive — said, “Yes, I am.” My friend said, “I just love you. Thank you for the work you do.” Bolton looked surprised and grateful — as you might imagine.

Another friend of mine, who also works in the arts, sent me a note: “During Fleet Week, I went up to three (female) soldiers in the subway to thank them for what they do for our country. [I should mention that this friend is female, too.] When I first walked up, they drew back — almost like they were afraid I was going to spit on them or something. They were so surprised by what I said that one gasped and another took my hand.”

Wingery in Manhattan — and in arts circles? Oh, yeah. Or more like common sense and appreciation.