DON'T YOU KNOW THIS ISN'T ALLOWED TO HAPPEN? From Best of the Web, more evidence that the Saudis may not be playing the role assigned them by the NYT. More damningly, the NYT somehow deemed news of this speech not fit to print.

RUBBER GLOVES AND SHARP STICKS: I highly recommend a blog from the Muslim Pundit, a Brit who delights in skewering the logical pretensions and the bigotry of certain of his co-religionists. The most recent entry on his site recounts in detail a campus clash between Jewish and Muslim organizations. Here's an excerpt, where he quotes and comments upon an e-mail from the university's Islamic Society:

"Today was cold and wet and windy, and yet the brothers and sisters stood strong and did not move... even if the heavens opened up form above we would stand strong Insha Allah."
Next time, I would suggest to God that he should try harder in giving these Muslims a hint. But then, of course, I still can't be certain that hint, however forceful, would ever register to these idiots down here.

It only gets better.
Of course, the insults have a certain poignancy, as they stem from love for what he sees as a more accurate rendition of his religion and pain at seeing it perverted.
In any case, I have enjoyed the blog for a while and will place a link on the "Links" sidebar as soon as I an get around to updating it.

YOU CAN CHECK OUT ANY TIME YOU LIKE, BUT YOU CAN NEVER LEAVE: Despite describing himself as a "lapsed historian," Joshua Marshall returns to his roots in a brief review of the book Moorish Spain by Richard Fletcher. Marshall notes that:

This isn't the sort of thought one is supposed to allow oneself in a book review - even a casual one. But what I find so captivating about this topic is how striking it is that this part of Europe - deeply Christian, speaking a Romance language, part of the western fringe of the Roman Empire - was Muslim for more than half a millenium. Mosques ruled over churches. The Christian population slowly converted to Islam. Arabic became the lingua franca - at least for the more refined and cultured portion of the population, and at least in the great cities. It's all very alien and weird - an alternative possibility for how Europe might have developed - and thus fascinating.

I don't see what's wrong with that thought - why isn't it appropriate to see the "alternative possibilities?"
UPDATE: Mr. Marshall has clarified that the thought one isn't "supposed to allow oneself in a book review" was the personal reaction of finding something "captivating," not the substance of the thought itself. Either way, I don't see a problem (and apparently he doesn't either.)

YOU SCRATCH MY BACK, I'LL... Thanks to Megan McArdle for being the first well-known "blogger" to mention this site. Pay her site a visit (you can use the "Live from the WTC" link on the right sidebar) and wish her luck in her job search.

THE GENIUS WITHOUT QUALITIES: I've touted Robert Musil before, and he currently has a viciously original piece on the resume of Al Gore.

THE VIEW ACROSS THE POND: From Instapundit, a wonderful satire of Eurosnobbery from James Lileks. It defies description, but is the subject of this prescription from Professor Reynolds:
[F]ace the Twin Cities, bow down, and repeat: "We are not worthy. We are not worthy." Say this especially if you are a journalist, and double-especially if you are an American correspondent from a British or Continental newspaper phoning in tripe like the piece that Lileks dissects.

ON A SNARKY ROLL: Michael Kelly's latest strikes gold again, with nasty comments that have the added virtue of being true. A twofer! Among the gems are:

In the opinion of the man who presided over 400-plus days of "America Held Hostage," George W. Bush's description of Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an "axis of evil" was "overly simplistic and counterproductive." Added the man who was once attacked by a rabbit, "I think it will take years before we can repair the damage done by that statement."
It is tempting to accept Carter's verdict as all the proof needed that Bush is solidly on the right track. But the argument needs to be addressed, not because it is not foolish but because it is the fashion among fools. And, as the great political novelist Ross Thomas once pointed out, when you've got all the fools in town on your side, you've practically won.
The reviews are in, and they are bad," recently declared Mark Lilla, who is a professor of something called social thought (presumably, there are professors of antisocial thought too, but no one knows who they are since they won't answer the phone). "President Bush's characterization of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an 'axis of evil' has been met by our allies' puzzled annoyance and by massive rallies in Iran that only strengthened hard-line elements there."
This is a fair summation of the fools' position, and it is almost entirely wrong.
And as a final jab:
Finally, there is the notion, voiced by both the former president and the professor of social thought, that Bush's rhetoric somehow served to give succor to "the hard-liners" and to set back the cause of peace. It may be generally noted that this has served as Trope Number One for the appeasement-minded since young Jimmy was studying at Uncle Neville's knee, and it has always been proved wrong, usually after the death of a very large number of people. Specifically, it may be added that anyone who takes "massive rallies" in the ayatollahs' Iran as a face-value manifestation of spontaneous popular sentiment is a hopeless naif. Or possibly a professor of social thought. Or possibly a former president.

DID THE NEW YORK TIMES GIVE PERMISSION FOR THIS TO HAPPEN? Despite the NY Times' best efforts, not everyone is cooperating in the rush to embrace the Saudi "peace plan" - specifically, the Saudis themselves, according to this article in Ha'aretz (the third item).
Also, in The American Prospect, Richard Just points out some problems with the proposal:
Israel's pre-1967 borders are militarily indefensible. It is possible not to care about this particular fact (Israel's detractors in the Arab world seem not to) but it is not possible to deny it. No country that has been invaded three times in 50 years should -- or will -- accept indefensible borders. At the same time, most Israelis understand that their country must -- for reasons moral as well as practical -- allow the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Most Israelis know that, broadly speaking, this means an approximate return to pre-1967 borders.
The key word, though, is approximate. It has long been understood that the pre-1967 borders will provide the rough outlines of a final settlement. The key to resolving the entire conflict rests in how to tweak the pre-1967 borders to make them defensible. (Measures such as the creation of an Israeli security strip along the Jordan River, the setting up of Israeli listening posts in the West Bank, and Israeli control over Palestinian airspace could accomplish this -- without undue infringements on Palestinian sovereignty.) The moderate Israeli belief -- epitomized by the views of Yitzhak Rabin -- that Israel could be both reasonably secure and allow the creation of a Palestinian state for years sustained the faith of the crucial Israeli center in the peace process. And that is exactly what seven years of negotiations were supposed to deliver: a compromise that recognized the Palestinians' right to a state on the vast majority of the West Bank and Gaza while also accommodating Israel's legitimate need for security. By throwing down what sounds like an all-or-nothing proposal, Saudi Arabia demonstrates that it still doesn't understand why negotiations have always been necessary -- and still are.
Also, Just makes the following welcome distinction:
The Saudi Arabian proposal also appears to dangerously conflate Israel's need for a Palestinian endgame with its need for a settlement with Syria. The two issues could not be more different: Settling with the Palestinians is both a moral and strategic imperative for Israel; settling with a Syrian dictator who has given every indication of being a dangerous anti-Semite is not. Unlike the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the occupation of the Golan Heights has never been a morally dubious enterprise, and it continues to be necessary. Here again, Prince Abdullah's proposal oversimplifies: He assumes that a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will also resolve the Israeli-Syrian conflict. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Just's specific points are valid, but his stressing the need for negotiations only hints at the real issue: Even if a peace agreement is reached, the result will not necessarily be peace. The second intifada has destroyed, for most Israelis, the belief that a peace agreement will put an end to conflict with the Palestinians. By turning down the offer at Camp David and starting the intifada as a counteroffer, the Palestinians showed that even the most unrealizable grievance - i.e., the "right of return" - could be a pretext for resorting to armed conflict, in violation of every agreement made in connection with the Oslo process. No realistic peace agreement could be expected to satisfy all Palestinian grievances, and the present intifada has shown that the Palestinians prefer violence to an imperfect peace.
Accordingly, those who look at the Camp David and Taba meetings and think that true peace was almost at hand - such as Yossi Beilin and the New York Times - are missing the point; they are confusing the appearance of peace with the thing itself.
As one last aside, Smarter Times skewers the NYT's proprietary hyping ot the Saudi plan, with the following point which Thomas Friedman knows but his editors have forgotten:
[M]ost of the Arab tyrants are not interested in normalizing relations with Israel. They are interesting in "talking" about it, because it reaps them the public relations benefit of changing the subject away from their own repressive human rights practices and their support for terrorist attacks against Americans.

A TRUE GENTLEMAN NEVER ASKS: Rob Neyer has an informative piece on the history of baseball players shaving years off their ages. Neyer shows that almost 25% of players in the major leagues in 1952 had what used to be called "baseball ages."
In his review of the 1952 players, Neyer has the following observation regarding Latin American and black players of the time, who were the groups most likely to reduce their ages by more than one year :

Historically, most players who've invented birthdays simply shaved one year. But most of the Spanish speakers and the American blacks figured if they were going to fib, they might as well get their money's worth.

And of course, the Yankees' "El Duque" Hernandez continues that tradition, shaving four years of his age in a fiction that receives lip service from the Yankees' front office and from no one else.
With the phenomenon being this widespread, we may have to adjust our expectations of players' career paths. Analysts have long pinpointed age 27 as being the peak time period for hitters (isolating an expected peak is much more difficult and inexact for pitchers, for reasons which I won't get into here). Is it possible that much of the data we've relied upon in reaching that conclusion has been false?
One other aside. According to Robert Creamer's biography Babe: The Legend Comes to Life, Babe Ruth did the reverse: he added a year onto his age in his youth due to some confusion (I don't have the book with me and don't remember the details), and according to creamer, never bothered to correct it even after the mistake was demonstrated to him during his career. Babe Ruth was always an original.

GROW UP: Via Instapundit, this piece from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung discusse neutrality in Europe and the intersection of pragmatism and idealism. Some excerpts:
None of the four states, who have long since stopped speaking of neutrality and have chosen instead the clever euphemism "freedom from alliances" to describe their partiality, ever left any doubt in past decades about where they really belonged. Finland alone was forced to accept the shadow of the Soviet Union as a constant reality. Geography was kinder to Austria. For although "permanent neutrality" was, for similar reasons, a condition of its sovereignty, it used the freedom this offered -- as did Ireland and Sweden -- to cultivate a noble image as the world's conscience, thus diverting attention from the fact that others were taking care of its security.
The end of this supposed superiority, which turned a pragmatically motivated decision in favor of a life between the fronts into a moral right to hover above the fronts, is today proving to be painful. Up above, the neutral states had an easy time, laying claim worldwide to issues like development aid, environmental protection, confidence-building and pacifism. Down below, meanwhile, alliances armed to the teeth thrashed about trying to achieve equilibrium in a bipolar world. Although no one seriously believed that the neutral states would be able to retreat completely from this world, least of all the states themselves, no one was allowed to say so out loud: for neutrality exists only in the eye of the beholder.
Yet these days, Europe is more of a dithering, neutral bloc than ever before in its history. In the war against terror, too, the Europeans are once again trying to avoid getting their hands dirty -- even in the course of defending their own interests. This in turn points to a deep-seated yearning for the kind of moral impeccability that the neutral states for so long indulged. Let no one claim there is no longer any place for them in Europe.

Isn't the moralism of the European elites like that of a college student who is takes for granted that Mommy & Daddy will pay the tuition and credit card bills?

TRUTH AND POWER: Matt Welch has an excellent article analyzing the true effect of sanctions on Iraq over the last decade.

THE TIDE TURNS: Via Andrew Sullivan, a pungent column by Michael Lewis on why Enron workers mostly are not the blameless innocents the media makes them out to be. I didn't realize that the lock-down in Enron shares encompassed such a small part of the collapse of the stock.
On a related topic, some of the best commentary on the Enron debacle has come from Robert Musil, a.k.a. the Man Without Qualities.

YOU TALKIN' TO ME? Fantastic piece by the fantastic Victor Davis Hanson regarding U.S. - Europe relations. I do think that the talk about the end of the U.S. - Europe alliance is overblown, but the Europeans do need to understand that the post 9/11 world is truly different; the P.R. indulgences of the past now reside there.

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES: Rany Jazayerli has resumed his regular look at the Kansas City Royals. This entry shows how the current GM may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater when he took over.
Along with Andrew Sullivan's site, one the foremost influences for this site was the work of Rany and Rob Neyer on the Royals. Their efforts, and Rany's subsequent project, have provided a model of an analytical approach fused with a weblog-style beat report on your favorite team. Check out Rany's reports at Baseball Prospectus.

ASIDE ALERT: My copy of Baseball Prospectus should finally arrive any day. As soon as it does, regular reports will appear here. You have been warned.

"I KNOW I'M RIGHT," HE EXPLAINED: Enjoy the last paragraph of Paul Krugman's latest.

BLINDING FLASH OF THE OBVIOUS: Richard Cohen reminds us that the vile anti-Semitism spouted throughout the Arab world, with the encouragement and support of the relevant governments, has consequences.

THE MAESTRO SPEAKS: Andrew Sullivan describes the evolution and ramifications of "blogging," as comprehensively as anyone can. Sullivan's site has become a real sensation in journalism in the last year or so. Having been a fan since virtually the moment he set it up, it's been fun watching and drawing inspiration from it.

HAPPY PURIM: The Gulf War cease-fire was declared right around the holiday of Purim in 1991 (whether it was the exact day, I don't recall). On that note, I'm off to synagogue, hoping for similar events (but with a more solid achievement to justify the joy). Happy Purim to everyone.

THE BEST ARGUMENT FOR A MASSIVE INCREASE IN THE DEFENSE BUDGET: According to this article in the Washington Post, the military is short of much necessary materiel needed for further attacks on places such as Iraq.
I remember when Bill Clinton became President, a potent political argument for his tax increases was that we had enjoyed the propserity of the 80s without paying for it, and the bill was now coming due.
It now appears that we enjoyed the peace and prosperity of the 90s without paying for a large part of them, and the bill is now coming due.

IRAN TO IRAQ: An excellent piece by Kenneth Pollack in the latest Foreign Affairs on why we should overthrow Saddam ASAP, and why it will require a U.S. invasion.
The best argument against doing so is, as set out by people such as Steve Chapman, is that:
a) Saddam has been deterred up to this point from using unconventional weapons by our (and Israel's, in the context of the Gulf War) broad hints at nuclear retaliation if he were to use such weapons, and
b) that deterrence would likely not work if Saddam knew we were coming to finish him off; he'd have no incentive not to fire everything he has (i.e., tons of chemical weapons, whatever rudiments of a nuclear weapon he has, etc.)
The problem with this argument is that it underestimates the likelihood (which, absent an act of God, is close to a certainty given Saddam's track record) that we will have to run the risk of nuclear confrontation with Saddam anyway, and it will be on his timetable if the U.S. does not act. Think a re-run of the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, only this time with a promise by Saddam that he will use nuclear weapons against us if we try to replay the Gulf War.
As people should have learned from the 1990s, sanctions do not work for the same reasons that cartels do not work; it depends on cooperation of many actors, every one of which has a tremendous incentive to cheat. Only "regime change" will be able to prevent Iraq from acquiring nuclear weapons, and, as seen by the rationalizations of those such as Leon Fuerth and Jacob Weisberg, there will be no shortage of statesman-sounding reasons not to attack Saddam until we are forced with the risk of letting Saddam run free in the world or facing nuclear attack.

AND AS LONG AS WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT: William Safire has a much more realistic and pungent view of the recent Saudi "offer:" "warmed-over whining in new bottles."

WAKE UP: Jim Hoagland has a deeply cynical view of Pakistan and Pervez Musharraf, strikingly at odds with much of the positive press he has received since 9/11. There is no doubt that Musharraf has done many good things since that date - his moves against the terror-supporting elements of his country go much further than anything Yasser Arafat has dreamed of doing - but it if Hoagland is correct, it is important to face up to the flaws that remain.
Contra the NYT's constant bleating, the disintegration in the Israeli-Palestinian "peace process" is not because the Bush administration disengaged from the region. Far more responsible was the Israeli and American years-long refusal to face the ramifications of the skin-deep commitment of the Palestinians to a peaceful compromise - the refusal to admit that the massive arming of the innumerable Palestinian "security" forces or the constant hatred taught by the Palestinian schools and media meant anything. If Musharraf's efforts are similarly flawed (even through no fault of his own), the worst thing the U.S. can do is to wish those flaws away as it did with the Palestinians.

FROM THE LION'S DEN: I've been meaning to write about this piece for a while. While I haven't been on Columbia's campus for a while, I did spend much of the 90's there getting undergraduate and law degrees, and I loved the place despite itself. The description in the article sounds all too plausible.
What irritates me most about the prevalence of shallow anti-Americanism on Columbia and other campuses is not even the substance itself (though that's bad enough) or the atrocious quality of thought that goes into much of what passes for argument from those quarters. It's the conviction that they are being non-conformists, bravely rebelling against conventional thought. Campuses - and Columbia is no exception, which I know from first hand experience - are among the most suffocatingly conformist, and homogenous in thought, places in the U.S. today. Here's a tip: You aren't being non-conformist when everyone around you thinks exactly the way you do.
I would appreciate hearing from people with recent first-hand exposure to the Columbia campus as to whether the attitude described above reflects their experience. Click on my "name."
There are too many links to choose from to help illustrate the atmosphere on Columbia campus. Try this article. He's overstating the case to compare Columbia's atmosphere to North Korea, but it's irritating enough.

NOSTALGIA ALERT: I was going to give Paul Krugman a pass for today's column, which doesn't have the usual overt snideness we've grown used to (and even has a touch of humilty at the end, a drink which the Professor needs to imbibe freely). I did think something was funny about his characterization of the $300/$600 tax rebate as an advance on future tax cuts, though - and then saw this letter cited by Andrew Sullivan, worth reproducing in detail:
It might be worth pointing to today's Krugman column as an example of how intellectually slack this once able economist has become. He completely mischaracterizes "line 47" (the rate reduction credit on the 2001 Form 1040) as some sort of snatching away of the $300/$600 tax credit we all received last fall. In fact, it is an opportunity for those who did not receive a check they should have received to claim the credit. And the $300 was not, in any case, an "advance on future tax cuts", it was the immediate implementation of the 2001 tax cut retroactive to the beginning of 2001. Doesn't this guy check his facts anymore?
So, here's today's corrective: This 1999 Slate piece discusses the good and bad -actually, just the bad - of recessions.

THIS WEEK'S SIGN THAT THE APOCALYPSE IS UPON US: I'm listening to the "Mike and the Mad Dog" radio show (sports talk, with hosts who in many respects haven't entered the 1990s yet) as I work, and the sole topic of conversation is the figure skating competition last night.

IF IT'S IN OUR PAGES, IT MUST BE TRUE: The NYT gets carried away with the "story" that Thomas Friedman broke in his previous column regarding the Saudis' supposed willingness to spearhead an offer of full recognition and normal relation with Israel in return for a withdrawal to the 1967 lines. Friedman was far more skeptical than his own editors, and appropriately so. Let's wait until this proposal is actually made before getting excited about it, OK? I suppose the editorial page couldn't resist the temptation to appear above the fray.

IF YOU RUN SOMEONE OVER, YOU DON'T UNDO YOUR MISTAKE BY BACKING THE CAR UP: Another outstanding piece by Yossi Klein Halevi in The Jewish Week regarding the attempts by "the very people who once assured us that the terrorists had transformed themselves into peacemakers" to recycle their ideas which didn't work in the past. For those who aren't familiar with Halevi's work, try this article regarding the "cycle of violence" and this interview with Salon.

WRIGHT IS WRONG: In Slate, Robert Wright has been a persistent critic of just about every move the Bush Administration has made in the war on terrorism. His latest effort shows how even razor-shrp logic will lead you astray if it starts from the wrong premises.
The flaws in Wright's approach can be summed up in one sentence: he hasn't read his Bernard Lewis. Fundamental to Wright's critiques is the belief that if the U.S. acts wisely (i.e., in accordance with Wright's prescriptions), it can drastically reduce the number of Muslims who hate the U.S. and thus reduce the pool of future terrorists. The corollary to that argument is that if the U.S. acts unwisely (i.e., everything the Bush administration has done), it will expand the ranks of those Muslims who hate us and accordingly expand the pool of future terrorists. As such, Wright's critiques are merely a higher-class version of the familiar voices who seek to blame certain American policies for "why they hate us;" he merely substitutes game theory for a general animus towards Israel or U.S. policy during the Cold War.
The problem with Wright's (and his cohorts') approach is that, as elegantly explained by Lewis in this November article in The New Yorker and in this prophetic 1990 piece from the Atlantic Monthly, "they hate us" for what we are and what we represent (the "House of War," to use Lewis' phrase), and that our actions directed at the Muslim countries are of secondary importance in influencing Muslim attitudes - and when such actions are important, they often don't cut the way people assume Wright and his ilk assume they do. (See Lewis' New Yorker piece regarding the U.S.' relations with Sharon and the Shah.)

THE WORST FEARS: Apparently Daniel Pearl has been murdered by his captors. We should all pray for his family, and for the destruction of his murderers and those who supported them.

MORE FROM THE SPECTATOR: Matt Ridley praises Bjorn Lomborg's book The Skeptical Environmentalist and bashes its critics.
I have not read the book - and would appreciate hearing from anyone who has (click my name at the bottom of the post) - but the controversy surrounding it sounds eerily like that which surrounded Gregg Easterbrook's A Moment on the Earth (one of my favorite books) when it was published in 1995.

THE ULTIMATE QUESTION OF OUR TIME: Bill Simmons considers it, in the final question of his regular "Mailbag" segment.

I'M BACK: No more posts lost by Blogger after hours of work. From InstaPundit, this Mark Steyn article is an absolute riot - and spot-on, too! (As they say in the UK.) For another must-read from Steyn, try this classic about the U.S., Europe and the Palestinians.

SOME BRAINS NEED A GOOD WASHING: OpinionJournal's "Best of the Web" is always a must-read, and today's entry has, among other jewels, the following priceless entry:

The Des Moines Register offers a revealing view on the militant Muslim mind from David Baugh, a civil-liberties lawyer who's represented al Qaeda members in court: "When the American press talks about suicide bombers, Muslims become upset for the same reason you would be upset if your son died trying to save a drowning child. Your son sacrificed his life for another. If someone walked up to you and said, 'I'm sorry about your son committing suicide,' you'd probably want to punch them." Murdering Jews, saving a drowning child--what's the difference, really?

INTOLERANCE: Saul Singer often has interesting pieces in the Jerusalem Post, and this article is no exception.

WE'LL BELIEVE IT WHEN WE SEE IT: Thomas Friedman is appropriately skeptical about the supposed willingness of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah to offer a full peace to Israel in return for a withdrawal to the 1967 lines. The dog has eaten these proposed peace offers too many times. But it's better than refusing to make the offer even in theory, I guess.

THE MEN WITH THE GOLDEN ARMS: Great piece by Michael Wolverton at Baseball Prospectus regarding the correlation of runners cought stealing by catchers from year to year. This earlier piece demonstrated just how much a catcher's throwing arm can make up for a relative offensive deficiency. For another example, see this ESPN.com piece comparing Ivan Rodriguez and Mike Piazza. In sabermetrics, much of the action over the last few years has been in measuring aspects of defensive performance. The best part of Bill James' New Historica Baseball Abstract was the defensive component of James' Win shares method, which extends his offensive formulas to measuring defensive performance.
In the current Wolverton piece, he notes that a further column will examine the deterrent effects of a catcher's arm (i.e., how runners may stop trying to steal on a catcher) and how to measure such effects. In the New Historical Baseball Abstract, Bill James states that teams steal more often when they are ahead than when behind, meaning that bad teams face more stolen base attempts than good teams. It thus appears that a true measurement of a catcher's arm would have to take into account not only the deterrrent effects of a catcher's arm, but also the team's won-lost record. Perhaps James has a formula for adjusting expected stolen-base attempts based on a team's won-lost record. We await publication of his Win Shares book for the answer.

NOSTALGIA INTRO: As feared, Paul Krugman has gone over the edge again. Accordingly, for the benefit of those of us who were big Krugman fans before he got the NYT job and devolved into the equivalent of a tape-recorded screech on continuous play, I am inaugurating a new feature. For each monotonous Krugman screed that graces the NYT Op-Ed page, I will link to a better, more substantive example of Krugman's writing from his previous incarnations. Most of the links will come from Slate, but not all. Today's entry was originally published on May 16, 1997 in Slate regarding rational choice theory as an explanation for political corruption. This may have been one of Krugman's weaker Slate pieces, which gives you an idea of how far he has descended with his NYT efforts.

IMPRACTICAL IDEALISM: Michael Nauman, the editor of the German weekly "Die Zeit," has a piece in the NYT that wastes no time becoming disjointed:

In June 1981, Israel's prime minister, Menachem Begin, ordered a posse of F-16 jets to take out Saddam Hussein's two nuclear reactors. With vast petroleum reserves, Iraq had no imaginable need for nuclear energy — except to make bombs. And Mr. Hussein had openly declared his intention to attack Israel.
Publicly, Begin was scorned for his outrageous breach of international law. Privately, however, many politicians agreed: Why not destroy Iraq's potentially murderous nuclear toys? Mr. Hussein did go on to start two wars. But he lost both, and if he had been armed with nuclear bombs world history could have taken a very ugly turn.
However, while the man is dangerous and crazy, we do not know that he has weapons of mass destruction. He seems to have had precious little connection to Sept. 11. His army has been destroyed. Therefore, two decades after Begin's attack, America's European allies would deplore a repetition of the Persian Gulf war. Their doubts are born from an ingrained sense of realpolitik. Europe learned a lesson in World War I: slipping into a conflict, with no clear moral sense of one's mission or of the likely military outcome, became a basic fear. Europeans' great source of anxiety was the prospect of being caught in an uncontrollable military escalation.

So: 1) Israel's actions in 1981 were appropriate and helped save the world from a nuclear-armed Saddam, 2) Saddam remains "dangerous and crazy" (and is indisputably subordinating his country's welfare to the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction), and 3) therefore, we should not move against him now. Did I miss something?
More importantly, Nauman's explanation for European reluctance is, in my opinion, completely off-base. The reluctance to move against Saddam is not grounded in realpolitik. It is grounded in a peculiar, legalistic form of idealism - alluded to in Nauman's comment that Saddam appears to have little connection to September 11. The argument for removing Saddam now is a prophylactic one - grounded solely in arguments of national self-interest. The Europeans (and U.S. Democrats, for that matter) approach the question of removing Saddam from a legalistic perspective - i.e., has he committed a specific wrong against the U.S. which gives it the right to oust him? The founders of realpolitik no longer recognize the rationale of raison d'etat.

STILL WORKING AT IT: I will have some of these formatting issues fixed soon.
UPDATE - TOLD YOU SO: I have now figured out how to add links, and the e-mail link to my name should be working.

MORE ON WHY SOME TEAMS STAY BAD: In an otherwise unremarkable dispatch from the Yankees' spring training camp in Tampa, Joel Sherman has this note on the neighboring Devil Rays:

Yesterday's Tampa Tribune had a headline that read, "Few Jobs Open as Rays Open Camp." That is interesting since here in Year 5 of their existence, the Devil Rays have never won 70 games and lost 100 last season.
For Tampa to have few jobs open, then its leadership is either delusional or the players' abilities are being scored on a curve even outrageous for French pairs figure skating judges.

KRUGMAN'S END: Jonathan Rauch is always worth reading, and this piece on Paul Krugman and his Enron money is wonderfully nasty. I personally don't object to his Enron fees as Andrew Sullivan and others have; his problem is his recycling the same half-baked political screed over and over again, as Rauch wonderfully shows.
Krugman's column today is actually slightly better than some of his other efforts, so I will wait to inaugurate my planned Krugman feature. Hopefully it will be irregular. More on it as events develop.

BUD SELIG'S WORST NIGHTMARE: Check out this preview of the Minnesota Twins for a look at how good the Twins can be in the upcoming years. Even allowing for the fact that Sickels is a Twins fan, you can see how much young talent they have stockpiled.
Here's a handy way to show why you should never believe Bud Selig. How often have you heard the Commisioner say a variation of the following: "At the start of spring training, there no longer exists hope and faith for the fans of more than half our 30 clubs."
Now take out a copy of last year's standings, and compile a list of teams which, as spring training begins again, have "hope and faith" of making the playoffs if things go right. As Peter Gammons points out, your list will probably include between 16-22 teams. If anything, I'd say he's being too pessimistic about the Padres. Even Detroit has a chance to be good in the near future, now that they have a real GM. In any case, even if your criteria are stricter than Gammons', there is no way your list can exclude half the teams in the game. (And historically, if your criteria are much stricter than Gammons, you stand a good chance of being shocked on a regular basis. More on that another time.)
There is a lot to say on the subject of competitive balance in baseball, and this site will hopefully say some of it. But as an introductory principle, you can't go wrong with this: Don't believe Bud Selig.
UPDATE: This David Schoenfeld piece elaborates on Gammons' list, and shows another point about which much more could be said: many of the teams that have "no hope and faith" cannot use the lack of resources as their excuse.

AND, IN HONOR OF THE ACADEMY AWARDS, WE PRESENT THE HEIR TO PAULINE KAEL: Bill Simmons strikes again with this review of "Rollerball." I have never seen the original and certainly won't see the remake, but Simmons' movie writing is always good for laughs (most of which are meant to be intentional). Yankee fans can torture Red Sox fans who are still giddy over the Patriots' victory with this homage to "The Godfather."

THIS ARTICLE IS VERY GOOD NEWS: For those of us who look at eight hours' sleep as 2-3 days' worth.

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.