Melanie Phillips is back- and making excellent points.

There may be something faintly odd about the way she stands apart from her fellow journalists and lambasts their standards, but if she weren't making those points, from a British perspective who would be?

I love Melanie's attack on Sir Max Hastings. Barely tolerable when a successful, influential journalist in the early nineties, I've totally maxed-out on Hastings. His inability to articulate even basic distinctions in his blind criticism of Tony Blair and George Bush is combined with a sneering superior tone which makes him like a double migraine expressed in text.
Particularly ridiculous is his attack on Bush, who he says 'indulges both Ariel Sharon and Putin in any means they see fit, to suppress those who use terrorist methods, without heed to the need for diverse political responses, as well as sensitive military tactics'.

Lumping these two together is absurd. Sharon's policies have achieved some demonstrable success, and Sharon is a figure with both a strategy and unarguable democratic (as opposed to demagogic) credentials. Furthermore, Bush has limited influence over Putin, as the Russian opposition to the Iraq war showed. Oliver Kamm has amplified my views on Sharon's strategy (something I haven't pointed out till now). I'd characterise Sharon's plan as having a defence, an offence, and a whole game strategy- as an American sports coach might put it.

The main thing I agree with Melanie on however is that mindless attacks on public policy are effectively suicidal when all the time Jihadis are looking for how they can grab the initiative in enforcing fear and panic in the West. Hasting's Kerryesque mantra of using all the levers of politics and diplomacy, intelligence and special forces, is about as useful as taking nail-clippers to a tree infested with ivy. In fact you need secateurs- which combine raw power with a satisfying delicacy.

I think we need to support Putin in his attempt to build a political structure in Chechnya (after all, they just had a kind of election). How support can be given is another matter, but anything to increase the sense of hope of moderate Chechens. While Russia has been fairly criminally heavy-handed in Chechnya, they are facing problems that result from the diminution of post-Soviet Russian power, and the upsurge of potentially corrosive criminality, nationalism and religious fascism. that can't have been easy. All of these facts are evidenced by this Command Post article from Alan E. Brain (best to ignore the comments, I think).

The trouble with Chechnya, it seems, is that poverty and the desire for independence are not the only forces at work, and not the most coordinated. Islamism is the strongest force, because the best coordinated, and uses the others to rally its vicious ideology- because unlike the the first two it has a live ideology- unlike, say, poverty whose ideology, communism, is a fallen idol. Thus, according the Command Post and Dan Darling at Winds of Change (a post I linked to earlier, but a good one which really illuminates some things), the conflict has morphed gradually into a religious one- which suits Islam the religion of Jihad.

One thing I am sure of: Sir Max isn't helping.