Having analyzed the comparison between "Cheers and Seinfeld," Bill Simmons now takes on an even tougher dilemma: Al Pacino v. Robert De Niro. According to him, he's thought about the issue all summer.

In other TNR news, Gregg Easterbrook argues that biological and chemical weapons should not be lumped together with nuclear weapons in the term "weapons of mass destruction;" as it is far harder to use the former to cause mass casualties than the latter.

The New Republic has published an editorial critical of Al Gore - specifically, regarding his speech on Iraq:

[T]he former vice president's speech almost perfectly encapsulated the evasions that have characterized the Democratic Party's response to President Bush's proposed war in Iraq. In typical Democratic style, Gore didn't say he opposed the war. In fact, he endorsed the goal of regime change--before presenting a series of qualifications that would likely make that goal impossible.
First, Gore said that war with Iraq would undermine America's primary mission: fighting terrorism. This mission, he explained, requires ongoing international cooperation. And he suggested that "our ability to secure this kind of cooperation can be severely damaged by unilateral action against Iraq. If the administration has reason to believe otherwise, it ought to share those reasons with the Congress." But surely Gore also has an obligation to share his reasons for believing that war with Iraq will "severely damage" the war on terrorism. The argument, after all, is not self-evident: Germany, the U.S. ally most vocally opposed to attacking Iraq, has simultaneously intensified its assistance in the war on terrorism--signaling that it will take over the international peacekeeping force in Afghanistan. In fact, Gore provides no evidence to support his claim. And thus he fails the very evidentiary standard that he calls on Bush to meet.
Gore's second complaint concerns the timing of the administration's push on Iraq. "President George H.W. Bush," Gore noted approvingly, "purposely waited until after the midterm elections of 1990 to push for a vote. ... President George W. Bush, by contrast, is pushing for a vote in this Congress immediately before the election." But as we argued two weeks ago, it is far better, in a democracy, for legislators to vote on critical issues before an election--so citizens know where they stand when they go to the polls--than to delay such votes until after an election and thus shield legislators from accountability for their views. Gore went on to pronounce "a burden on the shoulders of President Bush to dispel the doubts many have expressed about the role that politics might be playing in the calculations of some in the administration," before adding, "I have not raised those doubts, but many have." But, of course, that is exactly what Gore was doing. And he should have taken responsibility for raising those doubts himself.
Gore's final critique of the administration's preparations for war is that they are proceeding without sufficient regard to international opinion. "[I]n the immediate aftermath of September Eleventh," Gore said, "we had an enormous reservoir of goodwill and sympathy and shared resolve all over the world. That has been squandered in a year's time and replaced with great anxiety all around the world, not primarily about what the terrorist networks are going to do but about what we're going to do." But this ignores the fact that there is not now, nor will there likely be in the foreseeable future, broad international support for regime change in Baghdad. The two honest ways to resolve this problem are to privilege regime change above international consensus--while trying, as the Bush administration has, to pressure and cajole as many allies as possible to go along--or to forego regime change in the name of solidarity without our allies. Instead, Gore swore fealty to both regime change and international consensus, while refusing to acknowledge the conflict between the two. The closest he came was a suggestion that "if the [Security] Council will not provide such language [authorizing force], then other choices remain open." But would Gore support those "other choices," i.e., war? From his San Francisco speech, you wouldn't know.
...[H]is speech--which included, as a two-sentence aside, the charge that on the domestic front the administration was conducting an "attack on fundamental constitutional rights"--consisted of neither honest criticism nor honest opposition. Rather, it sounded like a political broadside against a president who Gore no doubt feels occupies a post that he himself deserves. But bitterness is not a policy position.

I guess Martin Peretz really isn't in charge of TNR anymore!
UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg has a better headline for this development.

The Armed Liberal has one regarding a hypothetical nuclear attack on America by unknown parties. He asks the following questions:

For the hawks: How strong is the temptation to nuke somebody…anybody…who might have had anything to do with this, regardless of whether it gets the people who really planned it?
For the doves: How long after this happens does the first column come out in the New York Times that suggests that nuking Iraq won’t bring back our dead or rebuild our economy, and that we should pull in, buckle down, and take care of our own?
See, I see two likely outcomes from an event like this, (which I personally don’t believe would be all that hard to pull off).
One is that we go berserk, and turn the Middle East into a plain of glass.
The other is that we surrender our role as leader of the world, the economic and security benefits that come with that, and attempt to retreat into a Fortress America.
As you can imagine, I see problems with both.
What do you see as the outcome of a scenario like that? And how does it influence your thoughts on what to do today?

Good questions. I see this hypothetical as another reason to attack Iraq before the scenario materializes, since - as the anthrax episode shows - it may be very difficult to establish the identity and/or sponsorship of the perpetrators of such an event after it happens, and I can already visualize the editorials he expects.

On the Gore speech, check out Donald Sensing's lengthy demolition and Dan Drezner's concise dismissal. Drezner, who was an adviser to Condoleeza Rice during the 2000 campaign, says:

[D]uring the campaign, I pored over a lot of what Gore was saying about foreign policy during the campaign. I obviously disagreed with some of it, but certainly not all of it. I thought it was competent.
Gore's speech on Iraq, however, is not competent. Or coherent. Or consistent with Gore's previous musings on the topic. It's a grab-bag of objections, none of which has a great deal of substance (it also looks like it was drafted three weeks ago and no one bothered to update it in light of recent developments). My personal favorite, for example, is the claim that, "Great nations persevere and then prevail. They do not jump from one unfinished task to another. We should remain focused on the war against terrorism." Gee, I thought great powers were capable of doing more than one thing at a time. That's why they're called great powers. As for the facts, funny how in the same week that Bush promoted dealing with Iraq, significant progress was made on breaking Al-Qaida's back. Great powers can walk and chew gum at the same time.
...I disagreed with Gore before, but I did think he was serious. Not now.

For sheer over-the-top, delightful nastiness, you can't top Michael Kelly:

This speech, an attack on the Bush policy on Iraq, was Gore's big effort to distinguish himself from the Democratic pack in advance of another possible presidential run. It served: It distinguished Gore, now and forever, as someone who cannot be considered a responsible aspirant to power. Politics are allowed in politics, but there are limits, and there is a pale, and Gore has now shown himself to be ignorant of those limits, and he has now placed himself beyond that pale.
Gore's speech was one no decent politician could have delivered. It was dishonest, cheap, low. It was hollow. It was bereft of policy, of solutions, of constructive ideas, very nearly of facts -- bereft of anything other than taunts and jibes and embarrassingly obvious lies. It was breathtakingly hypocritical, a naked political assault delivered in tones of moral condescension from a man pretending to be superior to mere politics. It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible. But I understate.

Not wanting to be upstaged, Tom Daschle has attacked President Bush for allegedly "politicizing the war" (based on a misinterpretation of a line delivered by the President at a campign appearance). Drezner also explains why Daschle's speech was a disaster for the Democrats.

I have a longer post on related thoughts in the works. For now, I'd like to offer this post up, without further comment:

They say: "America supports tyrants."
We say: "Okay, we'll take those tyrants out."
They say: "NO! We didn't mean that."
All right.
They say: "America doesn't share aid with these countries."
We say: "Okay, we'll give aid to these countries, and trade with them."
They say: "You're supporting tyrants!"
Okely-dokely.
They say: "You created Saddam!"
We say: "All right, we shall correct our error."
They say: "NOOOOOO! Don't touch a hair on his precious head!"
Fair enough.
They say: "This embargo is killing the Iraqi people!"
We say: "All right, we'll take out Saddam and immediately end the embargo."
They say: "NO! We should give the embargo more time to work!"
Hmmmmmmm...
They say: "The Iraqis claim that some of these SAM attacks have resulted in civilian casualties!"
We say: "Okay, we'll get rid of Saddam so that the air raids are no longer necessary."
They say: "Wait a minute! These air patrols are a cost-effective method of containment!"
I see.
Or rather: I don't see, and I don't think I'm expected to see. Whatever America does, it's wrong.
They don't have policy prescriptions, i.e., a systematic plan for what America should do. All they have is bitching. No matter what action America takes, they reserve the right to bitch about it. Trade with Iraq? We're supporting a tyrant. Embargo Iraq? We're killing Iraqi babies.
When they're confronted with this, they always retreat to the stock answer "Well America created this situation in the first place!" In other words, confronted with the fact that they criticize all possible present and future American actions, they claim that it is past American actions that have brought about this odd state.
Not only is this wrong -- Saddam seized power himself without the aid of the CIA -- but it is irrelevant even if true. Even if America caused some problems in the past, surely there is some action we could take that would satisfy the Confused Left. But no-- if we do A, they whine. If we do not-A, they whine louder.
Further, as Christopher Hitchens points out, if it is true that America "caused all this," that makes it all the more morally necessary for America to solve the problem. The Left whines that America "created" the Taliban. Okay then-- doesn't that mean that America has the responsibility of removing the Taliban from power?
Of course not.

UPDATE: Welcome to all VodkaPundit readers! Just to clarify, all credit for the above should go to the author of this post (and technically, to a
commenter on Megan McArdle's blog who brought it to my attention). But one of our mottos here is that we are happy to free-ride on the labor of others, and we try to spread that happiness around. I hope that when I do get the longer post finished, Mr. Green will have a similarly high opinion of it.

Today's edition of the Onion is one of its best ever.

I just found this old Peter Beinart piece, where he argues convincingly that if a regime wants nuclear weapons badly enough, international non-proliferation agreements are unable to stop it, while such agreements are irrelevant to a regime that doesn't want them. His argument is based on the cases of India, Pakistan and South Africa.
This is why Saddam must be overthrown ASAP, as inspections are unlikely to work and Saddam has proven over the last decade that he will not be dissuaded from attempting to pursue such weapons.

The Transportation Security Agency has banned the old Transformer toys from airplanes.
As a commenter writes in the Corner (which provided the link):
It's also significant that Megatron and Shockwave are singled out and banned from airplanes -- "Toy transformer robots (this toy forms a toy gun)". What about the rest of the Decepticons? What about Starscream, who turns into a fighter jet with missles?
We eagerly await clarification from the TSA.

Newsweek's editor-in-chief of its Arabic edition is in favor of the upcoming war on Iraq, for the following reasons:

Some Arabs are proud of Saddam’s development and possession of weapons of mass destruction. The more the Bush administration tries to prove that Saddam possesses those weapons, the further it gets from achieving its goal of winning converts to its cause. But the irony is that only an actual invasion of Iraq and the overthrowing of Saddam would produce a radical shift in public opinion, changing the terms of the reference of the public debate.
For now, the rhetoric used to convince American public opinion does not work at all to convince Arab public opinion. In fact, this rhetoric has become a source of inspiration for Arab sloganeering. This is in part the result of widespread anti-Americanism. But, more importantly, it’s a result of the fact that the Arabs are living part of their daily lives in a dream world. They sink into a political dream world, fed by the backlash to American rhetoric that is eagerly seized upon and spiced up by Arab intellectuals. The leaders of the Arab world are afraid to dispel or challenge those dreams, since they have no way to justify their own ineffective governments. As they see it, they have to employ doublespeak. In terms of the current crisis, this means publicly rejecting a strike against Iraq, while privately insisting that it should be a painful and final blow to a ruler and regime they all despise.
The Arabs need shock therapy, some kind of tremor that would bring them back to reality and away from their political dreamscape. Egypt’s loss in the 1967 war against Israel was the sort of shock that did away with the nationalist slogans prevalent since the July 1952 revolution carried out by Gen. Gamal Abdul Nasser. If the 1967 shock laid the ground for the spread of Islamism as an alternative to the nationalism, the “Saddam Shock” might be what is needed to launch the era of pragmatism. The Islamist mantra has not been dropped yet, but it was tested in the Afghan war and did nothing for its supporters except spark a few demonstrations here and there, which soon died out.
... But if the Afghanistan war has embarrassed the Islamic movements, there are at least two things that have prevented the collapse of the Islamic credo. The first is that, in purely operational terms, Osama bin Laden’s attack against the United States was successful and very painful, and it changed the face of America. The second is the uncertainty about the fate of bin Laden, the lack of clear-cut evidence that he was killed by American firepower. The mystery surrounding bin Laden’s fate has given the Islamic movements a chance to regain their balance. The fall of the Taliban was not a major coup for America, but the uncertainty about what happened to bin Laden is considered a coup for his supporters.
Nonetheless, the American war on terrorism will continue to weaken the Islamic movements. Most Arab regimes are only too happy to use this opportunity to further diminish their influence. I believe that the Islamic movements realize that it would be a mistake to support Saddam Hussein at this stage, and that they will not repeat the mistake they made when they supported him after the invasion of Kuwait.
Saddam’s fall will cause the Arabs to be shattered psychologically. Political depression will set in. I do not rule out the possibility that some Arab regimes will suffer from domestic unrest, triggered by public outrage. Those regimes will find themselves face to face with their people, forced to deal with domestic issues after the United States succeeds in shutting down the last despot who maintained the illusion that Arab slogans can nurture a people. If Washington should also succeed in making the Arab countries mediators in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rather than parties to a broader Arab-Israeli endless war, then the region will really be transformed.

Here's an interesting by Richard Just in The American Prospect dedicated to that defense. He makes some good points:

Without the U.S. News rankings, elite colleges would likely be turning over even larger numbers of coveted spots in their undergraduate classes to athletes, imperiling racial and intellectual diversity at the nation's top breeding grounds for future scholars and leaders. And state schools -- accountable to lawmakers and, ultimately, the public -- could find themselves pressured to squander even more money in pursuit of national championships many of them will never even come close to competing for.
... Sports is the only thing colleges do that can be quantified. It provides the only concrete claim a college can make to being better than another college. Is Harvard better than Yale? Impossible to say. But which school won the Harvard-Yale football game last year? That's an easy question to answer.
The U.S. News rankings have changed that. Critics of the rankings charge that they're meaningless, but the critics are missing the point. Of course it's meaningless to say that the University of Virginia is the twenty-third best school in America and Georgetown is the twenty-fourth. But the point is not whether the rankings are accurate in any sense, as if such rankings could ever be anything but vaguely arbitrary. The point is that by trying to quantify educational quality -- however imperfectly -- U.S. News sends a strong message that college academics matter and provides an incentive for universities to counterbalance the longstanding athletic arms race with an academic arms race. And that balance is a good thing for higher education as a whole.
.... In the absence of U.S. News, the only quantifiable game in higher education is sports. And that situation has real consequences for educational quality.
...By creating another highly-publicized arms race, U.S. News has diluted the sometimes-harmful influence of the athletic arms race -- and somewhat refocused the public's attention on the primacy of academics in higher education. In April, everyone knows who won the Final Four. In January, everyone knows who won the Bowl Championship Series. And now, in September, a decent percentage of Americans know what the number one school in the country is -- and more importantly, how the public schools in their states, which are funded with their tax money, measure up. Whether these ratings are impeccably fair is less important than the fact that they exist. It's the spotlight they shine on academic quality, not the precision of the measurements, that really matters. And it seems safe to assume that without them, the pressure for colleges to make unwise choices in pursuit of athletic glory would grow even more overwhelming than it already is.

This gem from a New York Times article on "Dr. Phil" and other daytime TV shows:
And while many television executives held high hopes for psychic talk shows modeled on the John Edwards show "Crossing Over," they were let down by the low ratings of "Beyond With James Van Praagh," the psychic's efforts to contact ghosts of loved ones. Nielsen, it turns out, does not include the dead in its sample pool of viewers.
Really?

Here is the official assessment of the Iraqi threat by the Blair government.
And click here for the text of the new National Security Strategy of the U.S. government. It apparently conforms to Dr. Manhattan's Official Guidelines for Policy Analysis(TM), which state that the advisability of a policy can be accurately measured by the number of heart attacks it induces among the members of any or all of the following institutions:
1) The State Department;
2) The United Nations; and
3) the New York Times' editorial board.

The New Republic now has a blog called "&c." It looks good.

Al Gore is criticizing the impending war with Iraq.
The NYT argues that Gore's address:
...suggested a shift in positioning by Mr. Gore, who has for 10 years portrayed himself as a moderate, particularly when it comes to issues of foreign policy, and repeatedly invoked his 1991 vote on the gulf war resolution as a way of distinguishing himself from the rest of his party.
Many people are too stubborn to learn from their mistakes, but Gore is exceptional: he refuses to learn from his correct decisions!
In response to Mr. Gore's speech, VodkaPundit has an open letter to Gore that must be read in its entirety. Also, Andrew Sullivan points out:
As to the coalition argument, Gore, of course, spent eight years assembling a wonderful international coalition on Iraq, which agreed enthusiastically to do nothing effective at all. Now he wants us to wait even further, claiming that the administration has abandoned Afghanistan, while vast sums of U.S. money are being expended on rebuilding the country. And then he reiterates the bizarre notion that undermining one of the chief sponsors of terrorism in the world will somehow hurt the war against terrorism. Huh?
More damningly, Sullivan and Henry Hanks both point out that seven months ago, Gore was calling for a "final reckoning with Iraq."

Meanwhile, Jason Rylander has been looking for Democrats to make good arguments against the war, and recently praised this op-ed by Democratic congressional candidate Hank Perritt. Mr. Perritt deserves credit for stating his views with such forthrightness (unlike most of the rest of his party) and enabling voters to consider such information in making their choice. Regardless of party affiliation, any candidate deserves credit for submitting to the accountability of the voters. Personally, I wouldn't vote for Hillary R. Clinton if my flesh was being flayed with metal combs (sorry, the Yom Kippur liturgy is still on my mind) but she deserves credit for putting herself on the electoral line, while eminences such as Colin Powell prefer to cling to a reputation of eminence from unelected positions via leaks to sympathetic journalists.
However, Mr. Perritt's bravery and integrity does not make his arguments any smarter.
He has a summary list of reasons for oppposing the war, each of which deserve consideration:
[N]o justification exists; an attack would cause a reaction that would threaten Israel's existence; it would undermine America's ability to lead international opinion; it would violate international law; it could mire the United States in a nasty, prolonged conflict; it would profoundly destabilize international relations to the detriment of U.S. interests because it would stimulate a rush to develop weapons of mass destruction to deter future U.S. action.
In turn:
1) [N]o justification exists;
The editors who published Mr. Perritt's piece do not agree:
Two decades ago, having consolidated his Iraqi dictatorship with blood baths and traded billions of petrodollars for modern weapons, Saddam Hussein set out to make himself master of the Middle East and its oil fields. He launched successive wars of aggression against Iran and Kuwait, amassed a large arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and raced to acquire nuclear arms. On his orders, his army committed some of the most horrific war crimes since World War II, gassing whole villages and massacring tens of thousands of innocent civilians at a time. Even after his crushing defeat in the Persian Gulf War, the dictator refused to give up his ambitions. He boldly preserved and even sought to expand his chemical and biological arsenal in defiance of numerous U.N. Security Council resolutions; even as his own people starved, he proudly awarded stipends to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. President Bush's assertion that the Iraqi regime remains a deadly menace to the region and a challenge to international order is not new; President Clinton made the same claim throughout his eight years in office, and the Security Council repeatedly agreed with him. Nor is Mr. Bush's insistence on ending Saddam Hussein's dictatorship a leap; Congress passed a law four years ago endorsing regime change as U.S. policy. For years the central question facing both the United States and the United Nations has been whether they are prepared to follow through on their own decisions.
Mr. Bush's choice to fully confront this challenge has been precipitated by two developments since his election. First came the crumbling of the containment policy that Mr. Clinton relied on to manage the Iraqi threat; then came 9/11. The administration's attempts to explain the implications of these events have been awkward and sometimes confused. It has asserted that Saddam Hussein has connections to the al Qaeda network but has provided no public evidence that this is so. It also has suggested that terrorists could strike the United States with chemical or biological arms supplied by Saddam Hussein; though this is plausible, again there is no evidence that the dictator has adopted such a strategy. The real case for acting now on Iraq is more intangible: It is that the breakdown of containment, and the new flow of resources that breakdown has provided to Saddam Hussein, has decisively raised the cost of postponing a confrontation; and the shock of 9/11 has given this country the lesson that, in an era in which enormous harm can be done by seemingly weak adversaries, threats such as that posed by Iraq must not just be managed but treated aggressively.
Alternatively, the Economist recently editorialized:

The danger Mr Hussein poses cannot be overstated. He is no tinpot despot, singled out for arbitrary American punishment. Nor is Iraq a banana republic. With the possible exception of North Korea, but perhaps not even then, Mr Hussein is the world's most monstrous dictator, who by the promiscuous use of violence has seized unfettered control of a technologically advanced country with vast oil reserves. He has murdered all his political opponents, sometimes squeezing the trigger in person. He has subdued his Kurdish minority by razing their villages and spraying them with poison gas. In 1979 he invaded Iran, thus setting off an eight-year war that squandered more than 1m lives. In 1990 he invaded and annexed Kuwait, pronouncing it his “19th province”. When an American-led coalition started to push him out, and though knowing Israel to be a nuclear power, he fired ballistic missiles into Tel Aviv, in the hope of provoking a general Arab-Israeli conflagration. Next time you hear someone ask why, in a world full of bad men, it is Mr Hussein who is being picked on, please bear all of the above in mind. He may very well be the worst.
And yet it is not simply in his record of aggression, cruelty and recklessness that the peril to the wider world resides. If that were all the story, the danger might be easily contained. The unique danger in Iraq is that this country's advanced technology and potential oil wealth could very soon give this aggressive, cruel and reckless man an atomic bomb.
The unique danger in Iraq is that its advanced technology and potential oil wealth could soon give this aggressive, cruel and reckless man an atomic bomb
How dangerous would that be? To judge by the reaction of Mr Bush's foreign critics, the magnitude of the threat is in the eye of the beholder. But it is not difficult to see why, after September 11th, Americans in particular find it hard to be sanguine about the prospect of a sworn enemy equipping himself with weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In the worst case, these might one day be used against the United States, either directly by Iraq itself or by some non-state group to whom Mr Hussein had transferred his lethal technology. At a minimum, a nuclear-armed Mr Hussein could be counted on to revive his earlier ambitions to intimidate his neighbours and dominate the Gulf. Prophesying is difficult, especially about the past. But if Mr Hussein had already had nuclear weapons when he invaded Kuwait 11 years ago, he might still be there.
Finally, to quote Peter Beinart:
...Saddam is prone to recklessly underestimating America's resolve--which is part of the reason he wasn't deterred from invading Kuwait. ... [W]hile deterrence "worked" vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, there's no guarantee it would have continued to work had the USSR endured for another 50 years. (Even during the cold war, after all, there were some very close calls.) The United States relied on deterrence against the Soviet Union not because deterrence was foolproof but because we had no other choice: We could never have preemptively attacked the USSR; the costs would simply have been too great. But the United States can preemptively attack Iraq. Deterrence is no longer our only option, and it isn't our safest one.

Next is Mr. Perritt's contention that
an attack would cause a reaction that would threaten Israel's existence;
Then why are the Israelis so strongly supportive of the impending attack? They are usually pretty good at judging threats to their existence- after all, they've survived for over 50 years while surrounded by enemies pledged to their destruction.
Also, what about the risks of leaving Saddam in power? Even if it was stipulated that renewed inspections could prevent or substantially delay Saddam's ability to obtain nuclear weapons (which is a pretty big stretch), Saddam has still been underwriting suicide bombers and training terrorists to attack Israel. The UN has not been known for its efficacy (or intentions) at stopping such activities.
Next,
it would undermine America's ability to lead international opinion;
It's amazing what showing conviction on the one hand, while throwing the "dogs of peace" a UN-flavored biscuit on the other, can do to lead international opinion.
Next try:
it would violate international law;
Never mind the innumerable UN resolutions of which Iraq is in defiance. More importantly, in the words of the Economist's editors:
[W]ith all due respect to the Security Council, the legal arguments its members deploy to justify their prior political choices are not especially gripping. The issue here is not Jarndyce v Jarndyce, a quarrel about small print. It is the danger Mr Hussein poses to the world, and whether that danger is big enough to justify the risks of a war.
If you believe that the danger posed by Iraq is truly great enough to justify a war, than international law proscribing such war (assuming it exists, which is a big assumption) is irrelevant. If you believe the danger is not so great, it is unnecessary.
Let's try again:
it could mire the United States in a nasty, prolonged conflict;
It could. On the other hand, this is a country whose troops surrendered wholesale in 1991, and whose military has been much degraded since then. Why is that outcome the likelier one?
If Mr. Perritt is not elected to Congress, he should have an easy time obtaining employment as a writer for the New York Times. All he needs to do is insert the word "quagmire" into the above.
Finally,
it would profoundly destabilize international relations to the detriment of U.S. interests because it would stimulate a rush to develop weapons of mass destruction to deter future U.S. action.
This is the point Perritt spends the most time on. Unfortunately, he again fails to consider the costs of not acting. If Saddam gets nuclear weapons, then that will do far more to incentivize other countries to do so than the U.S. failing to attack now, beacuse: 1) his neighbors will justifiably feel threatened, and 2) he will be able to deter us from interfering with his next plans to control the Persian Gulf, an example which other undesirables will wish to follow. Making an example of Saddam, by contrast, may help deter some other undesirables. Failing to do will provide a massive contrary incentive.

Mr. Rylander: if this is the best the Democrats can do, give it up.

I forgot to blog this gem-filled Charles Krauthammer piece:

The vice president, followed by the administration A Team and echoing the president, argues that we must remove from power an irrational dictator who has a history of aggression and mass murder, is driven by hatred of America and is developing weapons of mass destruction that could kill millions of Americans in a day. The Democrats respond with public skepticism, a raised eyebrow and the charge that the administration has yet to "make the case."
Then, on Sept. 12, the president goes to the United Nations and argues that this same dictator must be brought to heel to vindicate some Security Council resolutions and thus rescue the United Nations from irrelevance. The Democrats swoon. "Great speech," they say. "Why didn't you say that in the first place? Count us in."
When the case for war is made purely in terms of American national interest -- in terms of the safety, security and very lives of American citizens -- chins are pulled as the Democrats think it over. But when the case is the abstraction of being the good international citizen and strengthening the House of Kofi, the Democrats are ready to parachute into Baghdad.
...My point is not to blame France or China or Russia for acting in their national interests. That's what nations do. That's what nations' leaders are supposed to do. My point is to express wonder at Americans who find it unseemly to act in the name of their own national interests and who cannot see the logical absurdity of granting moral legitimacy to American action only if it earns the approval of the Security Council -- approval granted or withheld on the most cynical grounds of self-interest.

When Fareed Zakharia tells you to cut the crap, you know you're in trouble:

For the past 10 years France and Russia have turned the United Nations into a stage from which to pursue naked self-interest. They have used multilateralism as a way to further unilateral policies. The dust from the Persian Gulf War had not settled when the French government began a quiet but persistent campaign to gut the sanctions against Iraq, turn inspections into a charade and send signals to Saddam Hussein that Paris was ready to do business with him again. "Decades from now, when all the documents are available, someone is going to write an eye-opening book about France's collusion with Saddam Hussein in the 1990s," says Kenneth Pollack, who worked at the CIA and the National Security Council during those years.
...And then there is Germany, which cannot even claim the rationale of national interest for its bizarre actions. Pandering to public opinion, Gerhard Schroeder has broken with 50 years of tradition and publicly denounced American foreign policy. He has encouraged an atmosphere of anti-Americanism in his country, which hit its lowest note when his justice minister compared President Bush to Hitler. Schroeder is opposed to an attack on Iraq even if the United Nations authorizes it. He must think Saddam Hussein is harmless, except that his own chief of intelligence, August Hanning, told the New Yorker last year, "It is our estimate that Iraq will have an atomic bomb in three years." Oh, well, then, no need to worry about it.
...If France and Russia seek a world in which nations act purely on the basis of interest and power, they will get it. In it, America will do just fine. As the president's recent national security strategy document makes clear, it will remain the "hyperpower." But as France and Russia might have noticed, they're not very powerful anymore. They have seats on the U.N. Security Council only because they won the last great war 50 years ago. (I use the word "won" loosely when speaking of France.) Unless they act responsibly, they are now in danger of losing the next one.

Paul Krugman bravely criticizes 19th-century imperialism, and concludes with the following:
It's hard not to suspect that the Bush doctrine is also a diversion — a diversion from the real issues of dysfunctional security agencies, a sinking economy, a devastated budget and a tattered relationship with our allies.
The upcoming war with Iraq may have imperialist bases, but ones which have more in common with the Japan occupation after WWII than any 19th-century Kiplingesque adventures. Much more on that to follow.

Khaled Abu Tomaeh recently wrote an extensive and gripping article in the Jerusalem Post about how the second intifada, supposedly a spontaneous outbreak prompted by Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000, was in fact extensively planned by the Palestinians following the breakdown at Camp David:

In conjunction with the political offensive, which began almost immediately after Camp David, the PA was also preparing for a possible military confrontation with Israel. PA security officials interviewed in the local media openly talked about a looming armed confrontation. Some even warned that the PA areas would be turned into a "graveyard" for the IDF if Israel decided to reoccupy the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Their statements came in response to remarks made by former IDF chief of General Staff Shaul Mofaz, who warned that Israel would use tanks and jets if the Palestinians launched an armed offensive.
...As the Camp David summit was under way, Arafat's Fatah organization, the biggest faction of the PLO, started training Palestinian teenagers for the upcoming violence in 40 training camps throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Some PA officials and newspaper commentators also started calling for the adoption of the Hizbullah strategy, which, they believed, led to the withdrawal of the IDF from southern Lebanon a few months earlier. Hizbullah leaders, including secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah, appeared on Arab satellite television networks to mock Arafat and his negotiators, arguing that Palestine could be liberated only through the use of force, and not at summits like the one held in Camp David.
BY NOW the atmosphere in the Palestinian street was one of "the eve of war." PA ministers and representatives stepped up their criticism of Israel and the US as part of the PA's efforts to refute accusations that it was responsible for the collapse of the Camp David talks and that the Palestinians had missed yet another historic opportunity.
PA-appointed imams in West Bank and Gaza Strip mosques began referring to Israel as "the Zionist enemy" and urged all Muslims to mobilize for the war against the "infidels." In the words of one Gazan preacher, "All weapons must be aimed at the Jews, at the enemies of Allah, the cursed nation in the Koran, whom the Koran describes as monkeys and pigs, worshipers of the calf and idol worshipers."
Other imams spoke of the need and duty to liberate Palestine from the Zionist aggressors. This time the talk was not only about liberating the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Now the demand was for Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa and Ashkelon.
...An August 3 [2000] poll conducted by the independent Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research indicated that two-thirds of Palestinians supported a new intifada against Israel. This was the first time since the signing of the Oslo Accords that a majority of Palestinians said they supported violence against Israel.

In other news, Mr. Toameh has apparently had his life threatened by a senior aide to Palestinian Legislative Council Speaker Ahmed Qurei in response to a different story for the paper. The aide has been arrested.

According to the Jerusalem Post, Palestinian terrorists took advantage of the lifting of a curfew in Jenin, Tulkarm and Hebron to carry out several murderous attacks over the last few days, including today's killing of several people in a Tel Aviv bus bombing.

Enjoy the overhauled link sections on the right of this page. Some of the absences from the site over the summer were attributable, in part, to attempts at overhauling the format of the site and in efforts (now abandoned) to design a separate baseball blog. Instead, I've decided to keep everything in-house. I hope the links will augur a renewed dedication to the site.

Here he illustrates why he's skeptical of weapons inspections in Iraq.

Columbia is famous (infamous, if you're a student) for allowing films to be shot on the campus. But I never expected them to allow this movie to be filmed there.

James Surowiecki discusses the acumen of Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, noting the general applicability of many of his accomplishments:

Oakland's success is the fruit of what the legendary corporate theorist Michael Porter likes to call "strategic fit." Every part of its business is tightly linked with every other part, creating, in Porter's words, "a chain that is as strong as its strongest link." You get strategic fit only when you have a clear sense of what you are and of what you are not. "The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do," Porter says. By choice and by necessity, Beane decided that the A's would never be a team of conventional stars. And that has made him the best general manager in baseball.

Of course, this is an oversimplified portrait. First, a large part of Oakland's success has been due to the extraordinary performance of its top three young starting pitchers (Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito). Young pitchers are the most unreliable products in all of baseball, due to injuries; as such, Oakland has been extremely lucky. Second, Suroweicki does not discuss one of the most important strategies in the Oakland program: signing young players to long contracts very early in their careers, giving them financial security while saving money for the team in the long run. That way, the Athletics can have several "conventional stars" on their roster, contra Suroweicki's assertion (Miguel Tejada, their MVP-candidate shortstop, doesn't even walk much) - just at affordable prices. This strategy drove the Cleveland Indians' success in the 1990s, and is being successfully emulated by Oakland.
To back up Suroweicki's point about the difficulty of copying such methods, the Milwaukee Brewers and Detroit Tigers have tried to emulate the tactic of signing young players to multi-year deals. Unfortunately for them, the players they produced and signed were by and large not as good as those produced and signed by Cleveland and Oakland. Talent assessment if the most important part of building a winning team. Possibly the most important achievement of Billy Beane is that he has forced baseball to recognize that in assessing talent, the sabermetric methods used by Oakland can compete with the more subjective observations that have held sway throughout most of baseball history.

(Thanks to David Pinto for the link.)

To the embarrassment of those who took all the self-interested protestations at face value, Jordan is apparently negotiating with the U.S. regarding the use of its territory in an attack on Iraq - and for purpose of defending Israel, no less!

This must be seen to be believed:

The picture on the top of the dress is of Mohammed al-Durah, apparently killed by Palestinian gunmen.

Brad DeLong cites to a (subscription only) Wall street Journal article wondering why pharmaceutical companies get such bad press, and gives blame where it is due:
"I think this is a place where you have to blame Democratic politicians, so eager to grab for an issue with traction that they have forgotten what their jobs really are."

has been coined by Prof. Reynolds.

First, this is evil, and the Jewish terrorists responsible for it (or whoever else the guilty party may be) should be punished mercilessly. (Had there been any fatalities, I'd support the death penalty.) No "but" is applicable to the perpetrators.
That's all that should be said, and I know it's not worth it to waste cyberspace on this guy, but Eric Alterman really pushed my buttons with this post:

Ariel Sharon cannot or will not control the Jewish settler/terrorists. Perhaps he should be exiled from Israel and replaced with a leader of the Palestinians’ choosing. Also, the homes of the families of the Jewish settler terrorists should be blown up and their families should be exiled. Also, all the Jewish settlers who look like they might be terrorists should be jailed without trial and tortured. These people, after all, just don’t value human life the way we do.
Assuming Alterman is being grossly tongue-in-cheek, his real point is one of moral equivalene. And he's right to a degree; there is no moral difference between an Arab and a Jewish terrorist. But (and it feels ridiculous to have to point this out, but Alterman obviously does not get it) - the fact that individuals on both sides commit immoral acts do not mean that the two societies are morally equivalent.
When the Israelis:
1) grant extensive government support to groups like those who planted the bombs in question;
2) feature mothers who exhort their sons to kill themselves as long as they kill other innocent people as well (click here for another one)
(NOTE: The horrifying video links may no longer be working; I will attempt to update the links if this continues. Click here for a photo of Hamas family values.); and
3) feature waves of suicide bombers whose families are paid off by Iraq and Saudi Arabia (thus representing enemies (a) who are non-deterrable by conventional means and (b) whose families have a substantial incentive to encourage their career choice; see #2 above - the two unique factors behind the idea of destroying houses and/or exiling family members),
then Alterman can be taken seriously when he assumes a moral equivalence between Israeli and Palestinian societies. Until then, the correlation with and links between Palestinian society and its terrorists are far greater than those on the Israeli side, and our foreign policy deserves to reflect that disparity.
Recognition of the differences between Israeli and Palestinian society would seem to be a necessary precondition of an intellectually sophisticated approach to the conflict in the Middle East. But Alterman refuses to credit these nuances, preferring to see a black-and-white world where all are equally responsible for evil. Alterman's approach is appallingly simplistic. Is he channelling the spirit of the current president, whom he despises so? At least Bush correctly identifies black and white...

Brink Lindsey and Geitner Simmons both cite to this article by Charles Duelfer titled "The Inevitable Failure of Inspections in Iraq:"

[A]s demonstrated by the experience of the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from 1991 to 1998, any weapons inspectors sent into Iraq under the ground rules of the existing UN Security Council resolutions and the existing Iraqi regime are doomed to fail. The only uncertainties are how long they will last, whether they will inhibit Iraq’s programs at all, and what role their presence will have in the overarching politics surrounding their almost inconsequential presence. Although inspectors accomplished much during their time in Iraq, their successes were temporary. The categorical goals established by the Security Council were not achievable at a price either the council or Iraq was willing to pay. It turned out that the permanent disarmament goals imposed on Iraq were out of proportion with the inspectors’ tools and the rewards and punishments the Security Council could practically impose. The result was a political and military muddle with the inspectors caught in the middle.
...It quickly became clear that the Security Council could not be involved in issues other than major breaches, and Iraq learned that small offenses would not be punished. Simply put, would the council want to go to war because some scruffy, arrogant inspector could not get into a building that might be empty and that Iraq said was important to its national sovereignty and dignity? Clearly not. Baghdad developed a good sense of how to limit access rights incrementally in ways to which the council could not respond proportionately. It learned to keep its obstruction below the threshold that would trigger a response from the council.
...Inherent in the design of Resolution 687 was the assumption that Iraq would value the ability to export oil and engage in normal commerce more than it valued weapons of mass destruction capability—an assumption that turned out to be dead wrong. Discussions with senior Iraqi officials eventually revealed the enormous importance the regime attached to these weapons.
For the regime, possession of weapons of mass destruction was an existential issue. Deputy Prime Minster Tariq Aziz, among others, pointed out that, during the Iran-Iraq war, hitting cities deep in Iran with long-range missiles and countering of human wave attacks (particularly in the battle for al Fao) with massive use of chemical weapons saved Iraq. Moreover, Baghdad believes that its possession of biological and chemical weapons during the 1991 Gulf War helped deter the United States from marching on Baghdad. Thus, the regime has two experiences in which it feels its very survival was linked to possession of weapons of mass destruction.
Nothing in the UN resolutions changed that judgment by Iraq. If anything, the lesson Baghdad learned from the Gulf War is that such weapons—especially nuclear weapons—are even more important than they had thought. Senior Iraqis privately acknowledged that it had been a mistake to invade Kuwait before completing a nuclear weapon. They are convinced the outcome of the war would have been radically different if Washington had had to consider an Iraqi nuclear capability. Certainly, Saddam Hussein understands that today’s debate about invading Iraq to effect regime change would not be taking place if Baghdad could threaten to hit U.S. forces or Israel with a nuclear weapon.

Michael Kelly summarizes Iraq's decade of defying UN resolutions and inspections, and raws the appropriate conclusion: "I'd say the current Iraqi offer can be dispensed with, oh, now."

CHEM-WAR 101: Derek Lowe, a chemist, has a great series on the history and uses of chemical weapons. Start at the link and scroll up for all five posts on the matter.
(Thanks to Megan McArdle for the link.)

YES, THESE ARE NICHE HUMOR PIECES, BUT I LAUGHED SO HARD I COULDN'T BEAR NOT TO POST THEM: This first piece is aimed at Modern Orthodox Jews who are familiar with: (a) the intellectual crises that have been raging within Orthodoxy and one of its flagship institutions, Yeshiva University, (b) the tipping of segments (the size of which is disputed) of Lubavitch Hasidim into Christian-style messianism, and (c) the disputes about how to properly appreciate the complex legacy of the late Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. If you meet those criteria, check this out and start laughing.
You can't get a more different subject than this great Bill Simmons piece. It is aimed at those who: (a) spent way too much of their adolescence watching bad horror movies and (b) are devotees of ESPN's "SportsCentury" series. If you meet both those criteria, this piece is one of the funniest things you will read in your entire life.

THE CONTINUING RELEVANCE OF THE GREAT WAR: David Gelertner has a fascinating piece in the Weekly Standard arguing that the Europeans' actions and attitudes towards the war on terrorism are reminiscent of the 1920s, and show that the influences of World War I have been more lasting than those of World War II:

The First World War seemed unimaginable but turned out to be human, all too human when compared with the Second, which was too big for the mind to grasp. As the Second World War and its aftermath fade, they reveal a "new world order" that is strangely familiar--amazingly like the Western world of the 1920s, with its love of self-determination and loathing of imperialism and war, its liberal Germany, shrunken Russia, and map of Europe crammed with small states, with America's indifference to Europe and Europe's disdain for America, with Europe's casual, endemic anti-Semitism, her politically, financially, and masochistically rewarding fascination with Muslim states who despise her, and her undertone of self-hatred and guilt.
...Once upon a time we thought of appeasement as a particular approach to Hitler. We have long since come to see that it is a Weltanschauung, an entire philosophical worldview that teaches the blood-guilt of Western man, the moral bankruptcy of the West, and the outrageousness of Western civilization's attempting to impose its values on anyone else. World War II and its aftermath clouded the issue, but self-hatred has long since reestablished itself as a dominant force in Europe and (less often and not yet decisively) the United States. It was a British idea originally; it was enthusiastically taken up by the French. Today (like so many other British ideas) it is believed more fervently in continental Europe than anywhere else.

Some Europeans know these details and some do not. But what every educated European knows is that World War I could have been prevented if only Europe hadn't been in such a demented hurry to fight. And the graveyards of World War I are a permanent feature of the European landscape. In consequence and in tribute, many Europeans are against all war on principle--defensive or offensive, just or unjust, mandatory or frivolous; and they hate Western civilization into the bargain. Can you blame them? The contempt for Western ideas, morality, religion, and traditions that is so prominent among European intellectuals is not the sheer malice it sometimes seems. Europe has earned the right to hate herself. If things go wrong, a scratch can fester. A pardonable act of (at worst) bad judgment--to whoop up a war along with throngs of your fellow citizens--can turn to scalding remorse as the death toll rises and rises. And such quiet emotions as private remorse can reshape history, when you sum up over a whole civilization.

There is much more, particularly on the resurgence of anti-semitism and anti-Zionism in Europe. Go read it.

GREAT MOMENTS IN JOURNALISM: A better-than-usual retrospective from the Miami Herald on some of its finer moments. Here are two of the all-time great corrections of printed stories:

``Last Sunday, The Herald erroneously reported that original Dolphin Johnny Holmes had been an insurance salesman in Raleigh, N.C., that he had won the New York lottery in 1982 and lost the money in a land swindle, that he had been charged with vehicular homicide but acquitted because his mother said she drove the car, and that he stated that the funniest thing he ever saw was Flipper spouting water on [coach] George Wilson. Each of these items was erroneous material published inadvertently. He was not an insurance salesman in Raleigh, did not win the lottery, neither he nor his mother was charged or involved in any way with a vehicular homicide, and he made no comment about Flipper or George Wilson. The Herald regrets the errors.''
The explanation? For a ''whatever happened to'' story about the 1966 Dolphins, an editor in sports pounded out some top-of-the-cortex stuff he made up as he sketched out an estimate for the length of the story. The ''dummy type'' came alive when reporters and editors working on the story copied the format and wrote over the fictional words -- except in the case of Johnny Holmes, whose name was typed in but not the real information about him. The dummy type made it into print. Holmes was never heard from.

• When police demanded a correction in 1995, Broward Managing Editor Joe Oglesby obliged: ``A Nov. 18 story about the firing of Oakland Park police officers Brian Rupp and Jay Santalucia incorrectly reported that they allegedly engaged in oral sex with juvenile prostitutes for 23 minutes during a videotaped sting operation. In fact, the tape is 23 minutes long, but the sex act lasted only part of the tape.''

(Via Nancy Nall.)

SOMEONE DOWN UNDER HAS HIS HEAD SCREWED ON RIGHT: Australian blogger Paul Wright has a wonderful post on the out-of-touch baby boomers in the media:

Last week Howell Raines, the editor of the New York Times no less, used Vietnam to twice trump discomfiting questioning on The News Hour, when asked why the NYT was running a campaign against the war, instead of just reporting it. Can you imagine the scorn a young Raines would have heaped on some 60 year old in 1964, who was trying to use a 40 year old war to explain Vietnam? But that is what Raines wants to do. His credentials as an anti-Vietnam protester have somehow proofed him against irrelevancy and fogiedom.
Home-grown Australian hipsters are still trading on their fame of decades past. It’s as if they refuse to realise the world has moved on. No, Che is still glamorous, Bush is the same as Nixon, they’re all in on it together. And if they use the occasional reference to acid and The Man, it will delay the onset of Relevance Deprivation Syndrome. Here’s a thought fellas: if you have to keep reminding your audience of how cool and revolutionary you were 35 years ago, people are entitled to wonder of what use you are today.
...There are no more draftee soldiers wasted on acid, no more draft card burnings, no moratorium marches. No-one cares if you’re a Conscientious Objector. Today’s military specialist is likely to be a college graduate with skills so rarified to be near magic. The soundtrack of the war will not be Hendrix or Joan Baez on a transistor. It’s industrial-techno downloaded at the base internet café, played on a personal MP3 player. Or maybe a Spanish language course for a final college credit. These are motivated, angry volunteers who fought hard and long to get where they are, and are as far removed from a conscript army as they are from Venusian Amazon women.
The only conscript soldiers that feature are the poor bastards in the enemy front lines. They know the score, because they heard it from the few that were lucky enough to live through the first Gulf War, and unlucky enough not to surrender. They understand that when the elite army is staying home, and their own officers are shooting deserters on the spot, the clock is ticking.
There are others involved who have no say. The passengers of jet liners turned into flying bombs. The office workers looking up from their spreadsheets to see religious bigotry at its finest hour. The beat-down families of Baghdad that stare dully as the cream of their army parks an anti-aircraft battery next to their kindergarten. The slaves of the Sudan. Starving North Korean parents eating bark so their children can live another day.
How can a 60’s radical make themselves relevant to an audience that has seen all the horror the Taliban has to offer? How do you stick up for the sovereign rights of a government that gleefully demands a new stadium as the condition for not using the UN-built soccer stadium for public executions? Where is the My Lai anger at seeing the sponsors of mass murder get pounded into jam?
Simple: shift the rules, and keep shifting them. The People’s Revolution has moved out of the basement and into the newspapers and the Senate Committee Room. Power to the People is now served by delay, equivalence, exploiting the balance of votes on the floor.
DEMAND PERFECT WAR. No civilian deaths. No civilian injuries. A thousand-fold decrease is not enough. Any civilian death is proof of aggression.
DEMAND PERFECT KNOWLEDGE. No action without proof to Western legal standards. No targeting without absolute certainty.
DEMAND Perfect Foresight. No action without a replacement government ready to go. Risk is uncertainty. Uncertainty is death. Don’t destabilise. Avoid quagmires. The future is unknown, therefore certain to be worse.
DEMAND Clean Hands. Don’t fight anywhere you have an interest. Don’t fight anywhere you have no business in. Failure to condemn is support. Failure to support is racism. Failure to intervene is corruption. Intervention is interference. The enemy is bad, but we are tainted too.
DEMAND Full Disclosure. Endless hearings. All secrecy is conspiracy. The ghost of Nixon stalks the earth.
The old revolutionaries need to keep an image in mind before they put their hand up: Eisenhower. No-one could fault his ability at war, his patriotism or his intellect. So outflank him call him outdated, out of touch, a relic. But consider: his war was only 25 years out of date when JFK ordered the troops into Vietnam. You war is older than that, and much more obsolete.

As Glenn Reynolds points out, the last figure is much closer to 15 years than 25 - making his point even stronger.

Wright also links to this post by Scott Koenig (aka the "IndePundit") arguing why it is likely that Osama bin Laden is dead or captured.

A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR ELECTION REFORM: Dave Barry has the last word on the latest election disaster in Florida.

THE ISRAELI NEOCONSERVATIVES: Here's an article describing how many prominent Israeli leftists have been mugged by the reality of the last two years.
Meanwhile, TIME magazine reports that up to 98% of the known Hamas military operatives in the West Bank have been killed or captured since the beginning of Operation Defensive Shield. Who said force would only be counterproductive? Perhaps it isn't "increasingly clear that the costs to broader Israeli interests far outweigh whatever short-term security benefits this military operation may be yielding."

THE DEFENSE OF THE NATION IS POLITICAL: I agree completely with these sentiments expressed by the editors of The New Republic:
...Washington's leading Democrats have neither taken a forthright position on an invasion of Iraq nor seriously answered the Bush administration theory of preemption that justifies it. No one today can honestly say he or she is a Democrat because of what the party believes about the greatest threat facing the United States. The Democrats are a party of bystanders, a party without a position on the issue that matters most.
...[I]f the Democrats succeed, if they make this fall's election a referendum on prescription drugs and pension reform, they will have done the voters a disservice. Elections should be about the most urgent issues facing the country; and compared with war with Iraq, the Democrats' litany of poll-tested standbys is frankly trivial.
The Democrats rationalize their efforts to keep Iraq off the campaign trail by insinuating that the Bush administration, by proposing a congressional vote on Iraq before Election Day, is exploiting the war for political gain (see "Hidden Profit" by Michael Crowley, page 18). But in fact, the real cynics are the Democrats, who are trying to conceal their views on the war until after November 5 and, thus, deny their constituents the information they need to cast an intelligent vote. As a matter of democratic process, the party's position is untenable. And it is self-defeating even as a matter of crass political self-interest. Today's polls may show the Democrats with an advantage on the domestic issues the public supposedly cares about most, but ultimately that advantage will not matter if the party is timid and irresponsible on questions of war and peace. Do today's Democrats really need to be reminded of the political history of the last two decades of the cold war?

The Michael Crowley piece suggests that even from a crassly partisan perspective, the Democrats may not be hurt by a vote. More importantly, accusations that the Republicans are trying to politicize the issue miss the point. What could possibly be a more proper subject for voters to consider than whether a candidate is in favor of a proposed invasion of another country?

BUSH TO UN: "YOU'RE A BUNCH OF WIMPS:" That's a little bit oversimplified, but not far off from the subtext of his speech earlier today. The flattering introduction to the UN noted how it was formed to be different from the ineffectual League of Nations, and the thrust of the speech was how the UN must act to enforce its ignored resolutions. Bush didn't actually say so, but the clear "or else" was "go the way of the League of Nations." I wonder if the media coverage will pick up on the reference.

LOOKING FORWARD: Another great James Lileks piece. It's worth it just for the picture at the beginning of the article, but the writing's good, too. His conclusion is absolutely right:

I curse the terrorists for their horrible triumphs, but those bastards cannot even begin to count the ways in which they failed.
(Emphasis in original.)

ALICE IN WONDERLAND ALERT: The Economist has an article sympathetically describing Arab discontent with America.
The article is in step with much of the Economist's coverage on Israel-Arab relations. But in one sentence, they outdo themselves:
"Instead of trying to douse extremism, says Raghida Dergham, who reports incisively from New York for a liberal daily, Al Hayat, the Bush administration has seemed intent on inflaming it."
(Emphasis added.)
According to MEMRI, this "liberal daily" has featured a Syrian columnist, Mu'taz Al-Khattib, who wrote on September 30, 2001 that: 1) 4,000 Jews had been absent from the WTC building on September 11; 2) a prescheduled interview of Ehud Barak by the BBC was proof of Israel's involvement behind the attacks;
On September 24, 2001, this "liberal daily" also published (according to MEMRI) a certain Saudi Prince Mamdouh bin Abd Al-Aziz, president of the Saudi Center for Strategic Studies, who wrote the following:

Anyone who even skims through The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Pieces on the Chessboard, or the book The World is a Pawn in the Hands of Israel, and follows current events, becomes convinced that the Jews are behind the world's current 'terrorized' atmosphere.... These three books concur that there is a Zionist conspiracy ... [the goal of which is] to channel everything, as much as possible, towards the interests of world Jewry, primarily those among them called 'Allah's Chosen People'....
Objectivity demands that we ask whether the disasters that have struck at the heart of the Arab and Islamic world over many long years were mere coincidence, or were the result of a conspiracy.... I have no doubt whatsoever that many Arab Islamic countries and organizations, both religious and pan-Arab, that acted in good faith, were infiltrated by the Jews....
In fairness, Al-Hayat has apparently also published a number of articles arguing against suicide bombings, at least on tactical grounds (click here and here for translations). So relative to its competitors, Al-Hayat may indeed be "liberal." However, what does it say about a society where even a "liberal" publication publishes items like the two excerpted above?
P.S. The Economist article also has the following money quote:
“Take Israel out of the equation,” says a businessman in Jeddah, “and, poof, we’ve basically never had a problem with America.”
That sentence just begs to be read in multiple ways.

FORWARD TO THE PAST: I forgot to blog this letter from James Lileks to his one-year-ago self. He summarizes what has happened in the year just concluded:

Does the World Community support this next phase?
What do you think? Of course not. We had their sympathy when we were down on one knee bleeding, but that evaporated with the Afghan campaign. The world likes America with a bloody nose, and hates us when we smash the hand that smacked us. Now only Britain stands with us without reservation: surprise. Europe dithers and fumes - one of the interesting pieces of collateral damage from the WTC attack was the relationship between ordinary Americans and Europe; many here now sense the open animosity the European intelligentsia has towards Americans, and Europe no longer feel like an ally. Remarkable, but true. It’s not that Americans don’t like them; we just don’t care what they think anymore. (Get this: the president will be quoted, second hand, as not “giving a shit what the Europeans think.” It’s come to that.) We realize we’re going to have to go it alone - and in most respects this feels right. No one cares much about the UN anymore, particularly since they elected Libyans to chair the Human Rights division.
Stop laughing; I’m serious. That’s the world in a year from now. Colin Powell will be booed at an international conference for criticizing Mugabe, who’s starving his people. Trust me: 9/11 will drive the collectivists, the fascists, the Luddites, the whole cotillion of idiotarians into a big soggy box, and from this box a great and ineffectual wail shall sound every day. It will dissuade the US not a whit. Great clarity will come from 9/11, and those who persist in seeing the US as the globe’s greatest malefactor will rant themselves into corners.

MORE THOUGHTS ON MORAL CLARITY: Here's another Mark Steyn piece (I'm making up for lost time.):

On September 12, the Ottawa Citizen ran a column by Susan Riley headlined "At Times Like This, We Thank God That We're Canadians". Oh, God, I groaned, not the usual moral preening. But no, Ms Riley skipped that and went straight for naked self-interest: "Our best protection may be distancing ourselves a little more explicitly from US foreign policy … pursuing a reasonable and moderate course in the world's trouble spots."
I've heard it a thousand times since and I still don't get it. By "distancing yourself" from the victims of September 11 you move yourself closer to the perpetrators, closer to barbarism. It may be "reasonable and moderate", but it's also profoundly self-corroding.
This isn't a "clash of civilisations" so much as a clash within civilisations - in the West, between those who believe in the values of liberal democracy and those too numbed by multiculturalist bromides to recognise even the most direct assault on them; and in the Islamic world, between what's left of the moderate Muslim temperament and the Saudi-radicalised death-cult Islamists.
I don't want to be "moderate and reasonable" in the face of Mohammed Atta. A world that "distances" itself from the US to get closer to him is a world that's more misogynist, bigoted, corrupt and superstitious.

And here's an excellent article by Martin Walker. It's tempting to quote it in its entirety, but here are some choice excerpts:

...Osama bin Laden's shock troops zeroed in on a haunting paradox of the modern world; that a strong and rich and self-confident America is good for a world that increasingly resents it.
... [A] weakened, chastened America is bad for a world that nonetheless loves to see the American colossus restrained and cut down to size -- even if the price is a global recession.
This paradox may be seen in the jeering response to America's first black secretary of state at last week's global summit in Johannesburg. It was on display in last week's meeting at the Arab League of foreign ministers whose regimes often rely on American support, and can constantly be encountered in the opinion pages of liberal European newspapers that should know better. And all of them seem to assume that America will continue to sit back and take it, like the good global citizen that America has tried to be in the last 60 years of defeating Fascism, Nazism, Communism and helping spread more wealth and more freedom to more people in more places than ever in human history.
They are wrong. The real effect of Sept. 11 is that American patience and tolerance for its global critics, most of whom do rather well out of America's benign hegemony, seems just about exhausted. And however it was that Osama bin Laden expected what he has called "the American Empire" to react to his murderous assault, if indeed he thought that far ahead, he seems not to have calculated that America might react by tearing up the old rule book of international affairs.

And regarding a recent conference of US and European officials:

From reports that have leaked from the usually confidential sessions, senior Bush administration officials had a blunt message to deliver. The European allies (the British excepted) were not pulling their weight in the alliance.
...But then the Europeans seem deaf to American arguments, whether over Iraq, or the reliability of Yasser Arafat as a peace partner or anything else. They brush aside Washington's cogent criticisms of the Kyoto Protocol as a cosmetic exercise that does not include the real pollution threats of the 21st century, the fast-growing and energy-hungry demographic giants of China and India. The Europeans were deaf to American appeals that an exception be made in the land mine treaty for the South Korean border, where fewer mines would require more troops to protect it. Only grudgingly did the Europeans accept that America as the only credible global policeman might have a unique difficulty with an International Criminal Court, after the Europeans had rejected a reasonable American compromise to submit cases to the UN Security Council.
"When the Europeans demand some sort of veto over American actions, or want us to subordinate our national interest to a UN mandate, they forget that we do not think their track record is too good," a senior U.S. diplomat said recently in private. "The Europeans told us they could win the Balkans wars all on their own. Wrong. They told us that the Russians would never accept National Missile Defense. Wrong. They said the Russians would never swallow NATO enlargement. Wrong. They told us 20 years ago that détente was the way to deal with what we foolishly called the Evil Empire. Wrong again. They complain about our Farm Bill when they are the world's biggest subsidizers of their agriculture. The Europeans are not just wrong; they are also hypocrites. They are wrong on Kyoto, wrong on Arafat, wrong on Iraq -- so why should we take seriously a single word they say?"

Good question.

ONE YEAR AGO, AND RELATED THOUGHTS: My son was born in the early morning of September 9, 2001.
Because the birth occurred so early and was wholly uncomplicated, mother and child were allowed to leave the hospital in the afternoon on September 10. We were all experiencing the daze that comes with the birth of a child – a feeling of “Is this really happening?”
The next morning was our daughter’s first full day of pre-school. Preparations for it ran later than I wanted. As I left the house, I was grousing over the fact that I was making a later train than anticipated.
As I was walking to the train, someone called out to me that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.
Like an idiot (see above re: daze) I continued walking to the train. (It did not register on me that Manhattan would be locked down, as there was no such reaction in 1993.)
As the train passed Yankee Stadium, I craned to see the familiar view of the World Trade Center. It was no longer familiar. I will never forget the smoking sight.
The train pulled into Grand Central and I tried to get into the MetLife building for work. The building was already closed down. I encountered a partner from my firm leaving the building who told me about the attack on the Pentagon.
Having finally realized what was happening, I tried to get on a train back home. A minute before the train was to depart, they announced the immediate evacuation of Grand Central. I will never forget the panic in the voice of the person making the announcement. A number of people were panicking as we tried to get out. Fortunately, we were very close to an exit and were able to get to the street in short order.
My mobile phone was not working. I walked to a restaurant which I regularly frequent, which allowed me to use their phone. After trying for a while, I was able to reach my family.
The restaurant had no television. I listened to the radio’s account of the towers’ collapse and of the crash of United Flight 93.
I finally walked to my brother’s apartment on the Upper West Side, where I spent many hours staring slack-jawed at the television.

The evening of my son’s birth had marked the beginning of the period preceding Rosh ha-Shana in which Jews say certain prayers of repentance every day (“Selikhot”). The rabbi had delivered a sermon before those prayers began, bemoaning the horrible year of terrorism in Israel which had just occurred and expressing hope that the upcoming year would be more peaceful.
We soon found out that certain evil men had other ideas.
At my son’s circumcision the next week (the “brit mila” or, colloquially, “bris”), the atmosphere was surreal. As the bris was taking place, the realization was sinking in that a prominent member of our synagogue had been murdered by the terrorists in the World Trade Center.

Rosh ha-Shana is usually viewed as an impetus for change – to review what you’ve been doing and resolve to do better. I looked at this Rosh ha-Shana as an impetus not to change; to resolve never to allow the meanings of September 11 to be diluted by time, or to be effaced by the rationalizations of so-called “sophisticates” who cannot confront the reality of evil.
Those lessons can endure, if we are vigilant enough.
My son provides daily motivation for being so.
P.S. My daughter often stretches bedtime for far longer than it should go, and I am often tempted to resist her entreaties for another story. But then I think to myself: "What if tomorrow is the day they nuke Midtown?", and she usually gets the story.

WHEN THIS DIDN'T SEEM LIKE A BIG DEAL: From Brad DeLong:

9/11 AND AGUNOT: Under Jewish law ("halakha"), if a married man disappears, there are extremely high standards of proof that must be satisfied before the man can be declared dead and his wife allowed to remarry. In the aftermath of 9/11, these issues had to be dealt with. Here's an article from a December issue of Ha-aretz describing the issues and the status of the efforts to deal with the widows' situations, and here's an article from today's Ha-aretz stating that all such men had been declared dead under the halakha.

FISKINGS (THE ANNIVERSARY EDITION): Charles Austin presents the 50th edition of his "Scourge of Richard Cohen" series, using this especially illogical Cohen special on Iraq as a jumping-off point.
In the tenously-existing Salon, Andrew Sullivan demolishes a recent NYT Op-Ed by Susan Sontag.

MORE REFLECTIONS: N.Z. Bear says it best:
"One year ago today the world changed not at all, but our comfortable perception of it shattered forever. "
This is not true for those who lost loved ones on 9/11, but the larger point is true; we were forced to confront the war which had been declared on us long ago.
He continues:

I fear that our remembrances this year will be dominated by resignation and passivity; will avoid the hard reality that the deaths of our fellow citizens were not accidents, but rather deliberate acts of murder by an enemy whose forces are still at large, and continue to covet American blood.
As you watch today's ceremonies, ask yourself: if you did not know the truth, could the speech you are watching; the ceremony you are witnessing, be equally appropriate if those two towers had collapsed in an earthquake?
If the answer is "yes", then my fears have been borne out.
Perhaps I will be proven wrong, but the track record up until this point is not good. We seem to be embracing the role of victim; not just commemorating it, but celebrating it. We are in danger of remembering what occurred a year ago today as a tragedy that just "happened".
But what is being overwhelmed in the cult of victimhood is that forty men and women refused to accept their role as passive victims. They saw the face of the enemy; they learned the evil it had done already and the work it still had left to be done on that day.
And they said "no more". They drew the line: this far, and no farther.
Flight 93.
And suddenly, there it is. Amid the senselessness of that day, a clarity appears: a meaning that can be drawn from the death and madness.
The conflict we face now did not begin last September. Whether you define the war against Islamic fascism as beginning in 1979, or in 1993, it had been with us for years; we simply failed to acknowledge that there were indeed fanatics who were sworn to kill us. And so, as horrible as the loss of life was in the Towers and at the Pentagon, as events they were unique only in degree, not in kind.
But something unique did happen that awful day. Something the murderers did not expect; something they had not planned.
We began to fight back.
It deserves a name of its own. Whether you call it the "Battle of Shanksville", the "Battle of Flight 93", or just "The Turning Point", it was an event inexorably tied to --- and yet distinct from --- the black sorrow of the rest of that day. And it should not be subsumed under the easy grief that we have come to associate with "9/11".
For it marked the first time in this war that Americans had fought back. In those few scant minutes after the first hijackings, American society finally woke up, analyzed the threat, and acted. Forty people gave their lives in the effort, but the battle was won. There would be no third target on that day; the only harm that Flight 93 would do would be to a deserted field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Years from now, I hope the emphasis with which we commemorate the events of this year past will have changed. The loss of life and grief should not be forgotten or minimized. But I think that given time, and perspective, it will become clearer that the event that we should remember most keenly on this day is not the massive loss of life that the terrorists inflicted on us.
It is that one, small battle that occurred over the skies of Pennsylvania, where a group of unarmed American civilians stared their murderers in the face, and in refusing to quietly accept their fate, earned our nation its first victory in this war.

START MAKING PERMANENT VACATION PLANS, SADDAM: In other Iraq-related news, U.S. Central Command is moving from Florida to Qatar. Shouldn't be long now...

REFLECTIONS: The always reliable Mark Steyn writes:

September 11th was, according to CBS' special commemoration, "The Day That Changed America." Fox, slightly less passive, has gone with "The Day America Changed." But the best proof that nothing has changed are the networks' day-that-everything-changed specials themselves. My pleas not to Dianafy September 11th have fallen on deaf ears. The all-star sob-sisters will be out in force with full supporting saccharine piano accompaniment. The networks have decided America's anger needs to be managed. It's a very September 10th commemoration of September 11th.
So be it. Nations do not change in a day. The only change that occurred on September 11th was a simple one. When Osama bin Laden blew up the World Trade Center, he also blew up the polite fictions of the pre-war world. At Ground Zero, they've been working frantically to clear away the rubble. Likewise, at the UN, EU and all the rest, they've also been working frantically not so much to clear away the mess but to stick it back together and reconstruct the great fantasy world as it existed on September 10th, that bizarro make-believe land where NATO is a "mutual defence alliance" and Egypt and Saudi Arabia are "our staunch friends." Even in America, some people are still living in that world. You can switch on the TV and hear apparently sane "experts" using phrases like "Bush risks losing the support of the Arab League."
...Everything that mattered after September 11th -- Bush's moral clarity, the Afghan innovations and the crystal-clear understanding that this is an enemy beyond negotiation -- was present in the final moments of Flight 93. They're the bedrock American values, the ones you don't always see because everyone's yakking about Anna Nicole or the new "reality-based" Beverly Hillbillies. But we know that when you need them in a hurry they're always there.
Bush will need them in the years ahead because he has chosen to embark on the most ambitious change of all, a reversal of half-a-century of U.S. policy in the Middle East. The polite fictions -- Prince Abdullah is "moderate," Yasser Arafat is our "partner in peace," the Syrian Foreign Minister is as respectable as New Zealand's -- will no longer do. They led to slaughter.
Europe, for one, hasn't caught up to September 11th: When it comes to Saddam, the Continentals are like the passengers on those first three planes; they're thinking he's a rational guy, just play it cool and he won't pull anything crazy.
But America learned the hard way: it's the world of September 10th that's really crazy.

The great British military historian John Keegan ruminates on Iraq:

Saddam is deeply anti-Western, if only because it is the western States, particularly America, which frustrate his ambition to become a regional warlord and leader of the Arab Middle East. He has undoubtedly financed terror in the past, finances and supports the Palestinian suicide bombers and covertly endorses terrorism as an anti-Western program.
Moreover, if allowed to proceed to the development of nuclear weapons, Iraq could be enabled to support terrorism with impunity. Hence the urgency of the Bush program to overthrow the Saddam regime while the opportunity still exists.
Once the Iraqi nuclear program is complete, invasion of the country will become perhaps impossible and certainly very difficult and fraught with terrible risk. Saddam would then possess the means to devastate any sort of ground force launched against him, either from land bases or by an amphibious operation in the Gulf.
He already possesses the necessary rocket launchers, crude and relatively short-range as they are. He only needs the warheads, which he may soon possess.
THOSE stark facts make Western opposition to the president's anti-Saddam policy difficult to understand. Those who argue that new United Nations approval for an attack is necessary or that a pre-emptive offensive would be an offense in international law are living in the past.
...IN the circumstances, it seems incomprehensible that sensible Westerners can possibly doubt the need to prevent Saddam acquiring nuclear weapons. Those in the United States who oppose military action seem motivated by short-term fears, particularly that action might make things worse. Those in Europe who oppose it reveal an old-fashioned anti-Americanism.
In Britain, where a solid minority supports President Bush, his most vocal opponents are often former members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, who, at the height of the Cold War, wanted the United Kingdom to give up its nuclear weapons as a gesture to promote general disarmament. It is paradoxical that they now, in effect, support Saddam's efforts to become a nuclear warlord in his own right.
...WORDS of caution may seem wise at the moment. How will they sound when Saddam has the bomb? It will be too late then for the opponents of action now to say that they meant well. Saddam does not mean well at all.

OUR BRITISH FRIENDS: Click here and see the pictures.

ZAKHOR: Click here for one of the most prominent and fanciest memorial websites.
Read this Dave Barry column on Flight 93:

You've been on planes. Think how it feels, especially on a morning cross-country flight. You got up early; you're tired; you've been buckled in your seat for a couple of hours, with hours more to go. You're reading, or maybe dozing. You're essentially cargo: There's nowhere you can go, nothing you can do, no role you could possibly play in flying this huge, complex machine. You retreat into your passenger cocoon, passive, trusting your fate to the hands of others, confident that they'll get you down safe, because they always do.
Now imagine what that awful morning was like for the people on Flight 93. Imagine being ripped from your safe little cocoon, discovering that the plane was now controlled by killers, that your life was in their bloody hands. Imagine knowing that there was nobody to help you, except you, and the people, mostly strangers, around you.
Imagine that, and ask yourself: What would you do? Could you do anything? Could you overcome the fear clenching your stomach, the cold, paralyzing terror?
The people on Flight 93 did. With hijackers in control of the plane, with the captain and first officer most likely dead, the people on this plane got on their cell phones, and the plane's Airfones. They reached people on the ground, explained what was happening to them. They expressed their love. They said goodbye.
But they did not give up. As they were saying goodbye, they were gathering information. They learned about the World Trade Center towers. They understood that Flight 93 was on a suicide mission. They figured out what their options were.
Then they organized.
Then they fought back.

Also, I found (via a commenter on Little Green Footballs) a television archive site which has portions of the live TV coverage of the attacks from numerous sources. I personally watched this clip from ABC's Good Morning America. I was struck by the following two feelings:
1) How utterly shallow and stupid the show was before the news broke; and
2) Wishing that the stupidity and shallowness would continue, rather than be blown away by the intrusion of the horrible reality that could no longer be ignored.

Charles Johnson also has pictures and links regarding the Palestinian celebrations on 9/11, many of which were removed from their original sources after Palestinian threats.

To clarify: "Zakhor" is Hebrew for the imperative to remember.
UPDATE: Apparently the Palestinians are importing lighters commemorating 9/11.
Here's a picture.

I COULDN'T HAVE SAID IT BETTER MYSELF: In an apparent attempt to come out against war with Iraq without actually saying so, the NY Times' editors praise the doctrine of deterrence:
...Some of the debates that preceded its adoption sound strikingly similar to arguments being made today. During the Truman administration, some strategists suggested attacking the Soviet Union while it was still militarily weak to prevent the rise of a nuclear-armed Communist superpower. Wiser heads prevailed, and for the next 40 years America's reliance on a strategy of deterrence preserved an uneasy but durable peace.
One advantage of deterrence is that it induces responsible behavior by enemies as a matter of their own self-interest. Even dictators tend to put certain basic interests above all else — pre-eminently their survival in power, with their national territories and a functioning economy intact. Aggression becomes unattractive if the price is devastation at home and possible removal from power. By contrast, the threat that America will strike first may give foes an incentive to use their military forces, including unconventional weapons, before they lose them.
The logic of deterrence transcends any particular era or enemy. It has worked, for example, to restrain further North Korean aggression since the Korean War. A decade ago, a clear message of deterrence delivered by the first Bush administration persuaded Saddam Hussein not to use his chemical and biological weapons against America or Israel during the Persian Gulf war.
...[B]y and large, we believe that deterrence can still be a powerful force in managing many of the threats the United States faces. Protecting America's security requires weighing all available policy options and choosing the wisest. Deterrence, the least risky and most time-tested tool in America's national security arsenal, should not be hastily discarded.

I agree. And that is why Saddam Hussein must not be permitted to gain weapons that would enable him to deter us from checking his aggression, even if that means war.
As an aside, the debate over Saddam has eerie similarities to the debate over missile defense, in the refusal of most people on both sides to acknowledge that a main issue was not our ability to deter others, but others' ability to deter us. See this Lawrence Kaplan piece and this Robert Kagan article. Also see this skeptical Bill Keller article.

RATIONALIZATIONS, PART XLVI - THIS TIME, IT'S PERSONAL: In my absence, Steven Den Beste posted a couple of attacks on pseudonymous blogging.
Obviously, I'm a self-interested party to the discussion. In my heart, I agree with much of what Den Beste said; you should not be afraid to own up to your opinions, and an observer is certainly entitled to give more credence to the blogger using an (alleged) real name, rather than the name of a superhero from a somewhat-dated but still classic comic series. I agree with Glenn Reynolds: "If you want to blog anonymously, fine. That's your privilege. Responding to your anonymity differently than they would respond to your True Name is other people's privilege. You pays your money, and you takes your choice."
I do think that Den Beste is still too harsh on the phenomenon. Would I lose my job if I used my real name on the blog? Probably not. But I felt that I could be freer with my opinions if I didn't, and blogging is meant to enable people to freely express and elucidate their opinions. (At least that's the way I see it.) There are some bloggers whose jobs may truly prevent them from using their names, and the blogosphere would be much poorer if the option of pesudonymnous blogging was not viable. See, for example, "Mindles H. Dreck," "Robert Musil" and "Max Power," all of whom blog pseudonymously for what I believe are work-related reasons.
I would not be presumptuous enough to compare my far-too-irregular posts with those of the aforementioned bloggers, but pseudonymous blogging allows quality contributions to the debate which would otherwise be blocked.
I'll agree that blogging in your own name is the ideal. But pseudonymous blogging should be actively encouraged as a second-best solution. Whatever increases contribution to the marketplace of ideas is good.

BOUNDED RATIONALITY: One of the most common and seemingly persuasive arguments against going to war with Iraq is based on an appeal to Saddam's rationality. It's not a joke, as expressed by Jim Henley ("Saddam has been successfully deterred in the past. Saddam has never used "weapons of mass destruction" against an opponent capable of responding in kind.")
among others. This argument doesn't accomodate:
1) The expansion of options rationally available to Saddam once he gains nuclear weapons (such as invading Kuwait and using his nuclear weapons to deter us from acting against him, a context for action at least as rational as the "green light" the U.S. allegedly gave him in 1990);
2) The likelihood that Saddam could dodge responsibility for giving weapons to Al Qaeda or the like, at least for long enough for the chorus of respectable voices to attempt to dissuade us from hasty action. Just think about it: it takes the CIA & FBI a year to make the link, and then the editorials are cut and pasted about how "international support for the U.S., so strong a year ago in the wake of the attack, is now fading..." If that doesn't convince you, then how are we doing on finding the anthrax culprit? And why might Saddam not rationally take comfort from the stumbles of our law-enforcement agencies in figuring what he can get away with?
A final problem with the argument is that it ignores at least one prominent episode in our relations with Saddam: the attempted assasination of George H.W. Bush in 1993. That would have been an attack against an important American target (at least symbolically), with clear state-sponsored links, notwithstanding our massive deterrent edge. (And remember the pinprick response, which can only have emboldened Saddam.) Shouldn't that example make us hesitate before getting too confident that Saddam would never, for example, pass biological weapons to Al Qaeda?
In fact, the attempted assassination may have been more important to Saddam than we give it credit for. To put it mildly, Sadddam obviously has an extreme case of Sun King syndrome. ("L'etat c'est moi.") An attack on the former President of the United States, the leader of the country which defeated Iraq in war, may well have been intended by Saddam as an attack on the United States to a far greater degree than it would have been seen by Americans. (If so, the low-level response to the attempt may have been viewed as an even weaker gesture than we realize.)

ANGRY ABOUT 9/11? GOOD: I thought James Cramer was a good financial writer, but he can do other subjects, too. This is a lengthy quote, but it's worth it:

Now I can't get it out of my head how unsafe we are. I can't get it out my head how much I believe that unless we destroy this enemy with the same deliberate force that we used to destroy our enemies in World War II, including the use of unthinkable weapons when it was clearly necessary to do so, my dreams of what my children and their children will want are, quite simply, so much pipe smoke.
And my belief colors everything I do. I go by the World Trade Center's mass grave every day, and it surely is as much a grave as those Civil War battlegrounds that I have seen in Gettysburg, Pa., and Antietam, Md.
I think these acts of war in 2001 were mere warnings of what is to come. Because the terrorists' success -- and they were far more successful than Pearl Harbor's attackers -- emboldens a whole movement to believe that the U.S. can be erased from the earth. That such a fate could come to pass seems almost fanciful as we debate whether we should attack Iraq -- a worthy debate given that the hijackers were mostly from Saudi Arabia and tacitly backed by that cowardly regime, not Iraq -- but to me, the Ground Zero site I go by each morning reminds me that such a nightmare can become fact, not remain fiction.
I keep thinking that these same terrorists -- don't forget, they are alive and uncaptured -- are thinking, now, for irony's sake, let's get an El Al airplane, hijack it, bring a nuclear device on board and crash it into a children's hospital for a few laughs. Laughing all the way to our Armageddon.
I now regard our great bulwark of laws that protect individual rights against the right of a potential intrusive government as a plaything of our enemies. I regard the defenders of the Middle Eastern status quo, where the hijackers got their sponsorship as appeasers, as the kind that Winston Churchill faced in Neville Chamberlain and his appeasement policy. I regard the dissent from the war effort against the nations that hide and nurture Al Qaeda terrorists as a flirtation with treason. And I think the way to remember the dead is not so much to view them as the casualties of a horrid moment but as a precursor to what will happen to you and me if we act as if this were a matter of law enforcement for a free society.
Stop the mourning, and start the bombing, if you want it in the plain Wall Street way we are taught to express ourselves. If we act like this is business as usual, just another enemy like the Soviets during the Cold War, or yes, even the Nazis of World War II, we will be playing into precisely the hopes of the terrorists: that we approach their unconventional American genocide with a conventional, and ultimately, Vietnam-like, war effort, one that ends with us exhausted and them triumphant.
We can't let that happen.
Strong military? Can't make it strong enough. I hope my children join up when they are old enough, and I wish I were younger so I could serve. Heck, I want my kids to go to the military academies. Strong FBI and CIA? I regret that these organizations have been so emasculated by organizations and politicians I once supported. The need to vanquish our enemies? It's life or death to me -- their deaths, not ours.
So, we talk about Sept. 11 in dulcet tones and worried voices. We tiptoe around what happened. We mourn. The media's still grieving, for heaven's sake, even as the victims' families are trying so hard to move on.
But for me, it is a day that will be repeated again and again in our country unless we recognize that the evil we fight is just beginning its assault against us. And the masterminds, again, alive and well in radical mosques and cells around the world, aren't happy so far with what they have accomplished.
They, the enemy, have much more to do. Meanwhile, some of us are still trying to figure out whether this enemy is really worth fighting because perhaps there is some sort of just cause behind the enemy's movement, or worse, because it is inevitable that the enemy will strike again, so what can we really do about it?
The terrorists' cause is not Islam, it is not even radical Islam. It is nihilism. The terrorists believe in absolutely nothing other than destroying the lives of others. That's the terrorist creed; think of it as if the devil himself finally had a home team, and don't for a moment try to understand them or reason with them or believe our laws are meant to protect them.
Yes, my heart has been hardened by what my head saw on that awful day and it will remain hardened until the good guys -- and don't doubt for a moment who they are, either -- wipe out all of the bad guys. Do we have to go it alone? Who cares? England went it alone. Our allies weren't attacked as we were. They don't know what it's like or have long forgotten what it's like to be bombed as we were a year ago.
How can one justify such a swing in thinking on the basis of just one day's worth of attacks? Go back in history. Look at the people in this country who were opposed to fighting the last Axis of evil that proclaimed us as an enemy. In the U.S., we had isolationists and pacifists and disarmament types galore in the 1930s and even in the first year of a new awful decade, 1940. Then Pearl Harbor happened, and only the cranks and the fools stayed that course. The nation united in recognizing the need to preserve and defend itself at all costs.
That's where we are now. For those of you who don't know that yet, I recommend you go see the sailors of the battleship Arizona in its permanent lagoon tomb. Or take a look in my closet, where I keep the pair of Rockport wingtips that I wore Sept. 11, untouched, because I know what made up those gray ashes wedded to the soles and the uppers that fateful, horrible day.
In years to come, there will be people who stayed pacifist or ignorant or oblivious to what has happened, and they will be looked upon in later history as cowards or dreamers or fools. And then there will be the people who saw Sept. 11 for what it was, a declaration of war against us, and acted accordingly. I want nothing more than to be in the latter camp, if only because yesterday was and always will be Sept. 11 until our enemies are vanquished.

Meanwhile, James Lileks understands when something is truly "for the children:"

Tonight I was googling around looking for a picture of Christine Hanson, the daughter of Kim Ji-Soo and Peter Hanson. She was two. The family was flying to Disneyland when the terrorists slaughtered the flight attendants, stabbed the pilots to death, and drove the plane into the building.
...Little Christine was Gnat’s age, give or take a month; bin Laden’s lackeys killed her - and did so to ensure that other fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters died as well, preferably by the tens of thousands. This little girl’s death wasn’t even a comma in the manifesto they hoped to write. They made sure that her last moments alive were filled with horror and blood, screams and fear; they made sure that the last thing she saw was the desperate faces of her parents, insisting that everything was okay, we’re going to see Mickey, holding out a favorite toy with numb hands, making up a happy lie. And then she was fire and then she was ash.
I feel the same anger I did on 9/11; I feel the same overwhelming grief. Nothing in my heart has changed, and God forbid it ever does.
UPDATE: Like Prof. Reynolds, I should have noted the objectionable part of Cramer's piece: "I now regard our great bulwark of laws that protect individual rights against the right of a potential intrusive government as a plaything of our enemies." I don't think that's correct; though they can be if we are not careful; I would understand Cramer's statement as an exhortation not to let that happen.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON REFUGEES AND RESETTLEMENT: Here's a useful primer.

WHY DIDN'T I TRY THIS CAREER? There is a young boxer who is a budding star and an observant Jew, thanks to Lubavitch. (Thanks to Mighty Max Power for the link.)

IRAQ ROUND-UP: In my various absences, many harder-working bloggers have been having the "robust debate" called for by just about every editorial board in the country, albeit at a level of quality that would be unrecognizable by most such editorial boards.
I'll take my own stab at the arguments later. Here is a very incomplete list of some of the better entries:
Anti: Jim Henley has done a great job here, here and here. Hesiod tries here. Via Jason Rylander, here's a not-too-convincing piece from The Progressive.
Pro: Stephen Den Beste has been very prolific on the subject. Examples are here, here and here. Joe Katzman has plenty of great stuff; try this one.

HITTING HOME AND HEARTH: I ate at this place many times.