Pooh Bahism

The great head of the multicultural pooh-bahs--Fareed Zakaria--has held forth on the events in Mumbai.  Read it if you must.  He has mastered the art that is the one essential of a keeper of conventional wisdom: saying nothing in a way that sounds important and meaningful.  The art of keeping the conventional wisdom is to make policy proposals and diagnoses that a) involve no value conflicts that threaten the elite, b) call for more resources to flow to the elite and c) blame something (if not the entire problem) on Bush. 

Here is a report from India itself that actually contains information.  Turns out the victims were tortured before being killed, no doubt the result of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.  The special forces that finally won the battle after they had determined that the hostages were all dead did not play nice:

The doctors who
conducted the post mortem said the bodies of the terrorists were beyond
recognition. "Their faces were beyond recognition."

There was no
way of identifying them," he said. Asked how, if this is the case, they
knew the bodies were indeed those of the terrorists, he said: "The
security forces that brought the bodies told us that those were the
bodies of the terrorists," he said, adding there was no other way they
could have identified the bodies.

An intelligence agency source added: "One of the terrorists was shot through either eye."

A senior National Security Guard officer, who had earlier explained the operation in detail to rediff.com,
said the commandos went all out after they ascertained that there were
no more hostages left. When asked if the commandos attempted to capture
them alive at that stage, he replied: "Unko bachana kaun chahega (Who will want to save them)?"

Good thing for them they don't have the ACLU.