# Posted 9:10 AM by Patrick Belton  

MY QUICK BEST OF THE WEB for today, before I head off to hide in a library for the foreseeable future and write (¡híjole!) a dissertation, my first Dearborn article, and an article on Hizbullah operations in Latin America. (As someone in a similar situation once remarked to a family member: The glow-worm shows the matin to be near, and 'gins to pale his uneffectual fire: adieu, adieu, Hamlet: remember me)

So now for the round-up... The Economist makes a point I've been talking about for a long time: namely, that there are at least several promising signs from Central Asia that democracy tends to moderate Islamist parties, whereas state oppression drives pious moderates into the hands of radicals. To wit - Tajikistan, after an extraordinarily bloody civil war in the mid-1990's, now boasts one of the world's most moderate Islamic parties in the guise of its Islamic Revival Party, the only legal religious party in Central Asia. However, in Uzbekistan on the other hand, where all religious activity outside of state control is harshly repressed, lifelong moderates have told me that Tashkent's harsh religious policies against non-state-sanctioned Islam have made them sympathetic toward the radicalized Hizb-ut-Tahrir (a group which it is not in our interests to see gain any influence, anywhere). The prospect that participation in democratic mechanisms may promote moderation in Islamic parties may well give us reasonably strong grounds for hope; on the other hand, one cautionary note is that in the Tajik example, the IRP's most hard-core fringe split from that party (a la the Provo, and later the Real, IRA) when it remade itself as a democratic electoral party, a pattern which is likely to occur in many instances where democratic participation has been preceded by an armed Islamist insurgency.

In this morning's Journal, our friend Tim Bergreen (for whom we occasionally happily provide OxBlog's little-known web debugging services) co-authors a piece with Donna Brazil in which he recapitulates his core arguments that the Democrats should not cede the issue of national security to the Republican Party, and must take action to that end (thanks to Greg Wythe for e-mailing us with the link).

On a lighter note, the Standard has pieces this week on both Buffy and Matrix (in which Cornel West takes time out from his bruising academic schedule to cameo).

In Mexico, Reforma has several pieces (in Spanish; like German, it is a required language for reading OxBlog) seeking to put a new legal migration accord on the binational agenda, now that the administration is making signs it will focus more on the hemisphere post-Iraq. (We, of course, want it to focus both on the hemisphere and Iraq). Moves to shift migratory flows into legal status are in both nations' political and security interests, and are clearly in the humanitarian interests of all. Much more effective counterterror surveillance of the border may be introduced by legalizing and better controlling this inescapable migratory flow which absolutely no border control mechanism has ever succeeded in stemming. (Although Operation Hold the Line led to a massive increase in the numbers of injuries and fatalities suffered by migrants, all demographers agree that it did not result in any dimunition in the number of Mexican nationals entering the United States annually without documentation - only augmenting the suffering they would undergo in doing so.) By introducing "smarter," electronically unfalsifiable visas which clear long before the point of border control the most frequent, trusted border crossers and legalized economic migrants, the United States will free up more time at the border to check more intrusively and thoroughly the automobiles, trucks, and persons of less trusted crossers for narcotics or implements of terror. This is to say nothing of the humanitarian good involved in extending legal cover to an enormous swath of U.S. residents which currently lacks most of the protection of laws and state. (Although the Court has held that the Bill of Rights and due process guarantees, for instance, apply equally to all persons on U.S. territory irrespective of whether they are U.S. nationals, employers of undocumented laborers often cruelly use their undocumented status against them to force on them unsafe and brutally unfair working conditions. Down this path lies the example of Rome before the Social Wars, with its class of non-citizen laborers; that is not our way.) But steps which can be taken fairly easily to extend the cover of the laws to a population which has been fairly stable over time irrespective of our efforts to diminish it both serve a human good and permit us to improve our security at the same time.

Finally, CNN is reporting that Christine Todd Whitman plans to resign as EPA administrator (presumably to follow her good friend Ari into the sunset). And now it is my turn to fly off as well - the owl of Minerva does after all take flight at dawn.... Remember me.

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