OCCAM'S RAZOR MEETS THE STATE OF THE UNION: An irresistible Michael Kelly column gets this off to a good start. Two selections from a column full of them, on common predictions of disaster if the U.S. moves against Iraq:

It is "simplisme." It is simplistic, or simple-minded, as the French foreign minister, whose name is Petain or Maginot or something, sniffed last week. C'est vrai. It is indeed "simplisme" to pick fights with evil regimes just because those regimes want to kill you or enslave you or at least force you to knuckle under and collaborate in their evil, when one might choose the far safer and far more profitable path of shrugging one's shoulders in a fetchingly Gallic fashion and sending one's Jews off to the camps, as one's new masters in government request.

And,

The Arab Street will rise in flames. The "street" in any given Arab country consists of 278 state-sanctioned mullahs already preaching death to the Americans and the Jews, five state-controlled newspaper opinion columnists preaching ditto, 577,000 state security officers making sure nobody says anything to the contrary and 73 million people who would very much like to be living in New Jersey. In Kabul, they cheered and kissed our soldiers. In Baghdad, they'd love to have the chance.

The power of inertia over critical thinking is always stunning. Don't people remember the Iraqis trying to surrender to anything that moved in 1991? And about the French...well, there's nothing like Mr. Kelly sticking the knife and giving it a good twist. The media needs to be more cynical towards Europe in examining their motives for criticizing everything the U.S. does, rather than accepting it at face value and using it to validate their own impulses.