Iran is probably going to accelerate its weapons procurement, given that the theocrats (with two ex(?)-terrorists now running the show) need some sop to Persian nationalist prestige to quiet things, and they sense that the U.S. voted present during the recent upheavals.

Scotland, I think, assumed that the new administration was more therapeutic than in the past, and would not object too much to its release of a terrorist murderer, given that we are loudly pursuing our own interrogators rather than more terrorists — and mostly for reasons of partisan expediency. In the wake of the Bush success in stopping another 9/11, and breaking up numerous plots aimed at mass murder in the U.S., it was Eric Holder, after all, who once proclaimed to CNN that the Geneva accords did not apply to Guantanamo.*

I once wrote an article in September 2008 in World Affairs on Afghanistan and the Democrats, pointing out that Obama & Co. had not anticipated that the “bad” war would quiet down and the “good” one heat up — at just the time they were chest-thumping during the campaign about “taking our eye off the ball” and “let me at ‘em” in Afghanistan, hot pursuit into Pakistan, etc.

Ralph Peters has a good article today about the synergy of all this, and the insidious message it is sending abroad to wannabe terrorists, who, like rust, remerge seemingly out of nowhere once they think there is no longer American intellectual or military deterrence against them.

When Yale censors cartoons, when Obama administration officials and allies in Congress boast about trying CIA officials, and when our allies in Iraq and Afghanistan sense we’ve about had it with both efforts, I think we are ever so gradually returning to a September 10 mentality — predicated on the now popular notion that the Bush war on terror was constructed, and there never was much of a threat other than one day of a few hijacked planes or so in our skies.

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*Holder:

“One of the things we clearly want to do with these prisoners is to have an ability to interrogate them and find out what their future plans might be, where other cells are located; under the Geneva Convention that you are really limited in the amount of information that you can elicit from people.
It seems to me that given the way in which they have conducted themselves, however, that they are not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. They are not prisoners of war. If, for instance, Mohamed Atta had survived the attack on the World Trade Center, would we now be calling him a prisoner of war? I think not. Should Zacarias Moussaoui be called a prisoner of war? Again, I think not.”