You all must read this long and terribly beautiful account of a Marine lieutenant colonel's journey escorting the body of a fellow Marine killed in Iraq to his hometown for the funeral.

Make sure you have many tissues handy.

(Link via Instapundit.)

Military blogger Bob Zangas has been killed in Iraq. Please click here to see his last post, and then click here to leave a message of condolences.

Few higher compliments can be paid to our country than to say that it produces men such as Bob Zangas. And it can suffer few greater losses than of a man like him.

(Link via Instapundit.)

It is hard to react rationally to events such as yesterday's massacre in Spain. Rationality and morality are the two qualities that most distinguish man from beast, and those two qualities are the very ones most renounced by actions such as these. First and foremost on a global scale, the attacks were an assault on what it means to be human. And that is true regardless of whether the culprits turn out to be ETA, al-Qaeda, neither or some combination thereof. While Spain has been one of America's foremost allies in the war on terrorism (a competition that unfortunately is not as tough as it should be), the meaning of the massacre would be true even if that were not the case. Ultimately, searching for the "reason" behind the attacks, or behind the choice of targets, is the very definition of pointlessness. For reason is nowhere to be found except in the struggle against such events, and their perpetrators. The war on terrorism is not a "clash of civilizations;" it is a clash between civilization and barbarism, between humanism and nihilism. The existentalists could only dream of something so meaningful (it is no wonder their intellectual descendants are disproportionally on the wrong side of this struggle).

As today's NYT editorial states: "We are all Madrileños now." To be human, we have little choice.

Left-leaning veteran blogger William Burton has returned to blogging after almost a year AWOL. Among other good things, check out his post on the pros and cons of a reinstated draft.

I think the upcoming trial of Saddam Hussein will probably lead to new tensions between the U.S. and Europe, with some potentially harmful spillover for the Democratic would-be-nominees.

It seems likely that if Saddam is tried by an Iraqi court, that court will have the authority to sentence him to death - an option unlikely to be discouraged by the US. And it also seems likely that even most death-penalty skeptics in the US - a smaller group to begin with than in most other countries - would, with respect to Saddam, adopt the position of Hank Hill from the TV show King of the Hill: "My position on capital punishment? As close as possible to the switch."
(This is to say nothing about the powerful practical reasons for Saddam to be put to death: Much was said about how the spectre of his possible return hovered over the Iraqi people and inhibited their cooperation with the Americans and their willingness to develop a free society; it's possible the same fears could return if Saddam is sitting in an Iraqi prison with many of his former loyalists still on the loose.)

By contrast, the consensus of the international war-crimes trial establishment (an awkward phrasing, but it aptly sums up the combination of NGOs, academics and journalists who have done great work on the subject, and European and other governments who are most active in advocating such trials) is, it's safe to say, that capital punishment should never be an option (and that only those barbaric Americans could feel otherwise). Things have changed since the Nuremberg trials, notwithstanding Saddam's efforts to live up to the example of those who were executed in 1947.

The difference between US and European attitudes (at least among their political elites) towards capital punishment has long been a source of transcontinental tension. I think that a potential death sentence for Saddam might present another opportunity for the usual suspects to preen about how they cannot possibly be involved with such a corrupted process, and that the aid that may be promised to Jim Baker will therefore be delayed or reduced. (Scroll down to the last two paragraphs in this item to see how these concerns might even affect England.)

Will the nations who had no problems aiding a country that featured the death penalty for untold thousands of innocent people, develop scruples about aiding that country for using the death penalty for the murderer of those innocents?

Put that way, the question almost answers itself. I hope I'm wrong.

Left to their own volition, the potential Democratic nominees should not be affected by any flare-up on this point; most Democrats who dream of higher office have made their peace with the death penalty when politically necessary (with respect to Kucinich, insert the classic P.J. O' Rourke abortion joke here).
Wesley Clark might not be so lucky. He has advocated the imprisonment of Osama bin Laden instead of execution. While that statement is unlikely to haunt him too much unless (hopefully soon!) bin Laden is in fact captured, a big part of Clark's platform has been to accomodate the concerns of our European allies. Will he be tarred with their anti-death penalty absolutism and be placed in the situation of defending Saddam? Not likely, but it might make for some uncomfortable moments.
(If Clark has made a statement with respect to Saddam similar to the bin Laden one linked above, or if he does so in the future, I expect it to be featured in GOP commercials if he makes it that far.)

I think everyone has heard about this by now:

The NYT has, among other features, a great account of how four current Iraqi leaders questioned their former tyrant.

Edward Said passed away today.

I'm not qualified to judge his scholarship, though the fact that two of his biggest targets were Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami doesn't inspire confidence. And I'm not going to dwell on his complicated relationship with his past , his unique variety of "political protest", or even his general Palestinian activism.

In a 1999 profile, A.O. Scott wrote :

More than anyone else in his generation, Edward Said has sought to embody an unfashionable, perhaps obsolescent idea of the intellectual--immersed in culture and committed to politics, placing "criticism over solidarity," speaking truth to power, and steering clear of gods that fail.
(Emphasis added.)

I'd argue that few if any intellectuals of his generation can truly be said to have been more devoted to "gods that fail." Said spent much of the 1970s and 1980s advocating for a two-state solution for the Israelis and Palestinians. But when faced with the possibility that such a solution might actually be possible, Said became a fierce enemy of the concept and the means of its realization. Rather than agitating for a way to make the Oslo Accords better, he denounced Yasser Arafat as a dictator and a sellout. (The "dictator" part was certainly true, but Said's sudden discovery of those tendencies after a long history as an Arafat adviser does not speak well of his powers of observance.) Rather than trying to work against Arafat to build a better Palestinian society during the Oslo years, he became a leader of the intellectual resistance to the whole two-state enterprise. His proposal was a "secular, binational state" - an idea that only makes sense in the ivory tower. It is well known that the Palestinians supported Yasser Arafat's refusal to accept the Palestinian state offered at Camp David, believing they could get all of Israel. They were encouraged in this hope by intellectuals such as Said:

The intellectual guardians of Arab nationalist orthodoxy--Said, the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, Egyptian cultural leader Saad Eddin Wahbe, Egyptian editor and pundit Mohamed Heikal--have never accepted the fact of Israel; they cannot envision a world without the rallying cause of anti-Zionism. Nothing could have been more infuriating to them than the sight of Yasser Arafat, the embodiment of Palestinian nationalism, shaking hands with Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's late prime minister. They never forgave Arafat for bowing to what Ajami calls "the logic of brute, irreversible facts." To them, the 1993 Oslo accords meant settling for a sadly truncated form of Palestinian self-rule without extracting an Israeli admission of wrongdoing. Indeed, Said and other rejectionists showed a perverse glee when Israel's dovish Labor Party was defeated by Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud. Here, again, was a world they could understand. "Men love the troubles they know," Ajami witheringly observes.

The terror war waged against Israel over the last three years is a direct result of such fantasies - the refusal to engage reality based on enthrallment to "gods that fail." And nobody embodied that peculiar type of "intellectual" better than Edward Said.
Fortunately, he can no longer avoid accountability for the consequences of his actions.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn does it better, quoting something he wrote not long after 9/11:

Take away all the infidel products and you’d be left with a loser in yak-wool boxers standing in a cave shouting to himself. Osama had an infidel watch (Timex Ironman Triathlon), infidel fatigues (army-surplus US battle dress), infidel hand-mike, infidel camera. This is presumably an example of what Professor Edward Said, the distinguished New York-based America-disparager, calls the “interconnectedness” of the west and Islam. The Prof deplores the tendency, in the wake of September 11th, to separate cultures into what he called “sealed-off entities”, when in reality western civilisation and the Muslim world are so “intertwined” that it’s impossible to “draw the line” between them.

This pitch isn’t getting a lot of respect. “The line seems pretty clear,” said Rich Lowry, editor of National Review. “Developing mass commercial aviation and soaring skyscrapers was the west’s idea; slashing the throats of stewardesses and flying the planes into the skyscrapers was radical Islam’s idea.”

...as a member of the Neocon Conspiracy to Conquer the World (TM), that is.

How else do you explain a column that begins with the following?

It's time we Americans came to terms with something: France is not just our annoying ally. It is not just our jealous rival. France is becoming our enemy.

France wants America to sink in a quagmire there in the crazy hope that a weakened U.S. will pave the way for France to assume its "rightful" place as America's equal, if not superior, in shaping world affairs.

The column is titled, of course, "Our War with France."

Aside from the concluding paragraph, there is nothing in the column that couldn't have come from the Weekly Standard, Opinion Journal or any of the other usual conspirators.

Interestingly, Friedman notes the following:

Yes, the Bush team's arrogance has sharpened French hostility. Had President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld not been so full of themselves right after America's military victory in Iraq — and instead used that moment, when the French were feeling that maybe they should have taken part, to magnanimously reach out to Paris to join in reconstruction — it might have softened French attitudes. But even that I have doubts about.
(Emphasis added.)

I guess he doesn't agree with Fred Kaplan about how US-European disagreements over Iraq are all President Bush's fault.

...in its contest with the Blair government for "Bigger Liar," that is. As Andrew Sullivan notes, the reporter in question is toast. Click here for an assessment of the BBC's claims and how they stand up. (Some of them do.)

Via Robert Musil, the Econopundit has some fascinating guesstimates of the impact of the effort to rebuild Iraq on the US economy.
Good stuff.

James Lileks' Bleat for today takes on an editorial in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and the mindset behind it. (Click here and scroll down for links to the editorial's sources). I cannot disagree with or excerpt from a single part of Lileks' rant; go read it.

Here's a great NYT piece on the connections between Saudi Arabia and Hamas, among other terrorist organizations:

At least 50 percent of Hamas's current operating budget of about $10 million a year comes from people in Saudi Arabia, according to estimates by American law enforcement officials, American diplomats in the Middle East and Israeli officials. After the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the Saudi portion of Hamas financing grew larger as donations from the United States, Europe and other Persian Gulf countries dried up, American officials and analysts said.

Four senior American law enforcement and diplomatic officials who reviewed the document did not dispute its authenticity, but declined to discuss its contents.

(Emphasis added.)

Here's a story about plans for a new emergency alert system in the American Jewish community:

It is believed to be the first crisis alert system serving a specific community in the United States.
The project, called Secure Community Alert Network, or SCAN, includes the leading Jewish organizations in the nation, as well as hundreds of Jewish community centers, federations and educational institutions.
...Hoenlein said in an emergency, SCAN will immediately notify about 150 contacts across the country via e-mail, pager, telephone and fax. SCAN will not stop signaling until the message is received. The contacts can then alert their memberships.
“We will activate this in a crisis, as circumstance demands,” Hoenlein said, stressing that the network “will be used on rare occasions” and not for general information.
An advisory team of law enforcement and Jewish officials will determine when SCAN will be activated.
Hoenlein noted that Jewish communities in South Africa, England and Australia have such alert systems, saying “it’s a good question” why American Jewry has lagged behind.

The network is apparently contracting to use certain communications technology that has previously only been used by the government and military.
This looks to be a fascinating experiment in creating small-scale information networks, and I'd expect it to be replicated if it works well. The story doesn't say, but it doesn't seem like the information flows from the bottom up. But a network on this scale should be able to accomodate such information flow.
This network could make the job of government easier in an emergency. Congratulations to the Jewish Week for picking the story up; it should attract more attention.

A while ago, William Kristol caught hell from many liberals for his twisting a phrase used to defend Joseph McCarthy into an attack on the Democrats:

There are plenty of legitimate grounds to criticize the Bush administration's foreign policy. But the American people, whatever their doubts about aspects of Bush's foreign policy, know that Bush is serious about fighting terrorists and terrorist states that mean America harm. About Bush's Democratic critics, they know no such thing.

I'd prefer to push different buttons - ones that will enrage certain liberals even more than a McCarthyite phrase. Remember the war-cry of Anita Hill's supporters in the Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991, when the insensitivity of the Democrat-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee somehow proved that Republicans "just don't get it?"
Well, most of the Democratic presidential candidates just don't get it.
I could be convinced that the policies of George W. Bush have been counterproductive in the war on terror. I could be convinced that the war on Iraq was a bad idea. I could be convinced that we're not doing the right things on homeland security.
But convincing me intellectually is only part of the battle. You (addressing the 9 Democratic candidates) have to convince me that you'd actually do better. And before I'll be convinced of that, I need to be convinced that you actually get it.
"Getting it" means that you understand that the most important question facing America today, and probably for the forseeable future, is whether untold thousands of people - like me - will go to work in places like Manhattan and never go home to their families, because a nuclear weapon was detonated by genocidal maniacs whose entire raison d'etre is to kill us for who we are.
Howard Dean's entire campaign is built on a rejection of that premise. For other candidates like John Kerry, basing a campaign on criticizing everything President Bush has done -including those things that Kerry voted for - is also a symptom of "not getting it." As I said, I could be convinced that Bush's policies may be wrong and counterproductive. But given a choice between someone who actually understands the threat we face and someone who does not, it's pretty reasonable to go with the one who actually "gets it." And I think many others will come to the same conclusion.
Andrew Sullivan says it well:

No democracy wants to believe it is under dire threat; no one wants the abnormality to endure; no one wants to absorb the truth that the war is still in its infancy and that greater atrocities lie ahead, unless we act forcefully to pre-empt them and build the kind of societies in the Middle East that are alone guarantees of our and their future peace and stability. I have made plenty of criticisms of this president; and will do so again. But he's currently the only leader in this country who actually gets the depth of our predicament and the need for innovative, enterprising and ruthless action to improve it. The paradox is that the more he succeeds and the more the threat of terror recedes, the more his opponents will take the calm as evidence that nothing much has to be done, that nothing much has been done, that America, by acting, is the real source of world conflict, and that retreat and amnesia are the cure-alls.

I was going to write up the sermon-style thoughts I'd had ever since 9/11 occurred. I tried to do so last year and couldn't. No better luck this year. So here's a link to what I wrote last year; it's still pretty relevant. (Sorry, Rabbi Josh - you're on your own for the sermon you're delivering this Shabbat.)

Here is a small sample of thoughts on the day.

Reuven Weiser:

A few days ago, a New York Times article reported that "nearly one-third of those questioned [in a recent poll] said that their lives have still not returned to normal." "It is as if the populace has stalled in its march toward fully being itself again." I think the pollsters, and authors, are missing the point.
True, it's not normal (as anyone who knows me can tell you) for me to stand on a street corner, staring at the sky, holding back tears. But then neither is it normal for two 110-story towers to crumble to the ground, killing the thousands inside.
It is not normal for people to fear travel on bridges and in tunnels, as the article reports many still do, but neither is it normal for those bridges and tunnels to be the target of terrorist plots.
I was not "being myself" when the snowflakes falling in downtown Manhattan last winter chilled my heart as well as my bones, reminding me of the day when little pieces of white ash fell in my hair and down my shirt. But to try to "march on" and wipe such thoughts from my mind would be an affront to the memory of those whose ashes were falling on me, and that isn't me either.
So I think that, since 9/11, we need to change our definition of "normal" and our conception of what it means to be ourselves. At least until (though probably even after) we have sufficiently dealt with those, here and around the world, who would deprive us of our sense of security and dignity. Only then can we hope to truly begin our return to normalcy.

James Lileks:

The picture at the top of this page is a sliver taken from a 9/11 camera feed. It’s the cloud that rolled through lower Manhatttan when the towers fell. Paper, steel, furniture, plastic, people. The man who took the picture inhaled the dust of the dead. Somewhere lodged in the lung of a New Yorker is an atom that once belonged to a man who went to work two years ago and never came back. His widow dreads today, because people will be coming and calling, and she’ll have to insist that she’s okay. It's hard but last year was harder. The kids will be sad and distant, but they take their cues from her, and they sense that it's hard - but that last year was harder. But what really kills her, really really kills her, is knowing that the youngest one doesn’t remember daddy at all anymore. And she's the one who has his eyes.
Two years in; the rest of our lives to go.

Stephen Green:

"The purpose of terrorism," wrote the 20th Century's first terrorist, "is terror." By that measure, our enemies have failed. And failed badly.
Are you, two years later, still unable to comprehend? Be honest now. Unless you've dived head first into the bloodiest part of the heart of darkness, then, no, you don't understand. You and I here in the West, or even that vast majority in the Muslim world, can never really know what makes an educated person do what those 19 men did two Septembers ago.
But are you terrorized?
Do you live in constant, unalterable fear?
For me, the answer is: "Hell, no!"
Dread is for the weak; defiance is, perhaps, the American virtue.
I'm saddened for 10,000 children who lost a mommy or a daddy that day. I'm angered every time I see a picture of the altered New York skyline. I know a wearied irritation that this instinctively isolationist nation has been dragged into yet another world war. There is real, physical pain in my belly when that sound comes back, unbidden. You know the sound I mean – the thunk-splat of meat hitting pavement, of living people who chose to jump rather than be burned alive.
Americans are defiant, even regarding the manner of death chosen for us by others.
Now go on and let yourself relive that day, just a little.
Remember the first reports that "a small plane" had crashed into the World Trade Center. Firemen who didn't just run into a burning building, they ran up into collapsing skyscrapers. Grounded planes. The stock exchanges, closed. The doubt, the fear, the "what will they do next?" And the realization: Oh my God, we're at war. War in the Old Testament sense, when the barbarians came to rape and to slaughter.
Relive, too, the days after.
The wall of inkjet "have you seen. . .?" photos. You, me, your friends, crying over obituaries in The New York Times. Widows grieving at Ground Zero, who breathed – breathed in – their husbands' ashes.
Remember, too, our just vengeance.
Our president told us, "I hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." And they do hear us, in Iraq and in Afghanistan. They hear us, not because we used our weapons to murder their civilians, but to bring down their tyrants. From our loss, we gave them hope. The loss felt in Baghdad and Kabul is that of Sisyphus without his stone. The sound they hear is the ring of freedom. And they hear us, even if only a whisper, in Syria, in Iran, and – yes – they hear us in Saudi Arabia, too.
Maybe defiance will prove as irresistible an export as Levi's, Coke, and MTV.
Two years later, I'm still angry – and I hope you are, too. But are we terrorized?
Hell, no.

Josh Marshall:

Two years ago today I rolled out of bed in the morning, still semi-conscious and half asleep. As I walked into my living room --- the TV was still on from the night before --- I saw the second plane slam into the World Trade Center and explode in an orange and black fireball.
I'll never know whether that was a live shot or a replay of the images from a few minutes before. It was just after nine. Still groggy, I had a hard time processing what I had seen. I knew it was a big deal. But I didn't at first grasp just how big a deal.
When I sat down at my desk my girlfriend was already typing out messages on IM from her office at work. Had I seen? Where was I? They (she worked on Capitol Hill) were next, she said.
Beside watching the plane crash into the building, what stands out in my mind about those few minutes was that I asked her why she was so sure it was terrorism.
Partly --- mainly, I think --- this was because I was still only half awake and still trying to process what I had seen. I'm not sure in those first moments I was quite clear on how large the planes were. But certainly part of what was happening was that I was still for a moment living in a pre 9/11 world, where something like this was still hard to comprehend, hard to imagine.
Then she said something like: Two planes one after another in to both buildings? What do you think it is?
With that, suddenly everything snapped into place. The sleep fell from my eyes. My mind cleared. Everything was obvious.

Finally, if you have a high-speed connection, I highly recommend you watch this.
(Thanks to Will Carroll for the link.)

Fred Kaplan is one of the better critics of the Bush administration's foreign policy, but it is barely believable how wrong-headed this piece is. Kaplan argues that in the wake of 9/11, America was the beneficiary of unprecedented international goodwill that could have been converted into permanent diplomatic benefits, but it was all blown by the evil unilateral neoconservatives. I was so stung by the piece's historical revisionism and simplisme that I...didn't write anything about it yesterday.
Fortunately, Andrew Sullivan rose to the occasion as only he can:

Does Kaplan believe that Chirac and Schroder were just desperate to help America win the war on terror in Iraq and that if we'd been so much nicer they would have come around? Puh-lease. They cared more about their own petty prestige than about supporting the U.S. after the atrocities of two years ago.
...Does Kaplan mean that the administration didn't bend over backwards to win the support of, say, Pakistan? That it rejected peace-keepers and troops from many nations to help police Afghanistan? That it spurned British, Australian, Polish, Spanish, Italian support - militarily and diplomatically - in order to go it alone?
...To put it bluntly, Kaplan's piece amounts to a series of wild stretches and utter fabrications. The U.S. did everything to win the support of as many countries as we could for a war which many, frankly, do not have the stomach to fight. And militarily speaking, there wasn't much the Big Europeans could have done anyway. Kaplan claims the Prague NATO summit wasn't deferent enough to the allies; and the U.S. should not have been so determined to go to war against Iraq. But he surely knows that deference to Germany and France would have meant one thing: no war. He surely knows that it was the French who scuttled any chance for a compromise on Iraq in the last days at the U.N. He knows that the Bush administration did everything it possibly could to bring the U.N. around.
...Almost a year ago this week, the president extended his hand to the U.N. Or doesn't that count?

Sullivan also cites a great Fouad Ajami piece on the famous example of supposed French pro-American sentiment:

Much has been made of the sympathy that the French expressed for the United States immediately after the September 11 attacks, as embodied by the famous editorial of Le Monde's publisher Jean-Marie Colombani, "Nous Sommes Tous Américains" ("We are all Americans"). And much has been made of the speed with which the United States presumably squandered that sympathy in the months that followed. But even Colombani's column, written on so searing a day, was not the unalloyed message of sympathy suggested by the title. Even on that very day, Colombani wrote of the United States reaping the whirlwind of its "cynicism"; he recycled the hackneyed charge that Osama bin Laden had been created and nurtured by U.S. intelligence agencies.
Colombani quickly retracted what little sympathy he had expressed when, in December of 2001, he was back with an open letter to "our American friends" and soon thereafter with a short book, Tous Américains? le monde après le 11 septembre 2001 (All Americans? The World After September 11, 2001). By now the sympathy had drained, and the tone was one of belligerent judgment and disapproval. There was nothing to admire in Colombani's United States, which had run roughshod in the world and had been indifferent to the rule of law. Colombani described the U.S. republic as a fundamentalist Christian enterprise, its magistrates too deeply attached to the death penalty, its police cruel to its black population. A republic of this sort could not in good conscience undertake a campaign against Islamism. One can't, Colombani writes, battle the Taliban while trying to introduce prayers in one's own schools; one can't strive to reform Saudi Arabia while refusing to teach Darwinism in the schools of the Bible Belt; and one can't denounce the demands of the sharia (Islamic law) while refusing to outlaw the death penalty. Doubtless, he adds, the United States can't do battle with the Taliban before doing battle against the bigotry that ravages the depths of the United States itself. The United States had not squandered Colombani's sympathy; he never had that sympathy in the first place.
Colombani was hardly alone in the French intellectual class in his enmity toward the United States. On November 3, 2001, in Le Monde, the writer and pundit Jean Baudrillard permitted himself a thought of stunning cynicism. He saw the perpetrators of September 11 acting out his own dreams and the dreams of others like him. He gave those attacks a sort of universal warrant: "How we have dreamt of this event," he wrote, "how all the world without exception dreamt of this event, for no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of a power that has become hegemonic . . . . It is they who acted, but we who wanted the deed." Casting caution and false sympathy aside, Baudrillard saw the terrible attacks on the United States as an "object of desire." The terrorists had been able to draw on a "deep complicity," knowing perfectly well that they were acting out the hidden yearnings of others oppressed by the United States' order and power. To him, morality of the U.S. variety is a sham, and the terrorism directed against it is a legitimate response to the inequities of "globalization."
In his country's intellectual landscape, Baudrillard was no loner. A struggle had raged throughout the 1990s, pitting U.S.-led globalization (with its low government expenditures, a "cheap" and merciless Wall Street-Treasury Department axis keen on greater discipline in the market, and relatively long working hours on the part of labor) against France's protectionist political economy. The primacy the United States assigned to liberty waged a pitched battle against the French commitment to equity.
To maintain France's sympathy, and that of Le Monde, the United States would have had to turn the other cheek to the murderers of al Qaeda, spare the Taliban, and engage the Muslim world in some high civilizational dialogue. But who needs high approval ratings in Marseille? Envy of U.S. power, and of the United States' universalism, is the ruling passion of French intellectual life. It is not "mostly Bush" that turned France against the United States. The former Socialist foreign minister, Hubert Védrine, was given to the same anti-Americanism that moves his successor, the bombastic and vain Dominique de Villepin. It was Védrine, it should be recalled, who in the late 1990s had dubbed the United States a "hyperpower." He had done so before the war on terrorism, before the war on Iraq. He had done it against the background of an international order more concerned with economics and markets than with military power. In contrast to his successor, Védrine at least had the honesty to acknowledge that there was nothing unusual about the way the United States wielded its power abroad, or about France's response to that primacy. France, too, he observed, might have been equally overbearing if it possessed the United States' weight and assets.

As Sullivan notes, Kaplan is simply assuming his preferred conclusion; that inability to convince France and Germany to endorse the war should have been a fatal objection - i.e., that those countries should have had a veto power over the decision. That is a respectable and arguable position. But it is disingenuous to avoid the ramifications of that position by blaming Bush's "unilateralism" for the lack of an agreement; by the time the war began, it was clear that those countries would never agree to it.
The most shocking part of the piece is its utter unsophistication as to the depth, or lack of it, in the post-9/11 sympathy for America (as Ajami acidly describes). We evil "Likudniks" easliy recognize the phenomenon (when we take a break from running US foreign policy, that is) as a larger-scale version of the international sympathy accorded to Israel in the wake of each horrific terrorist attack - where such sympathy is deeply felt but somehow never extends to cover anything Israel might do in response.
( And remember, the time described by Kaplan was the same time when a never-ending diet of news items regarding international distaste for the US nourished many, many warblogs.)

I have been skeptical of the importance of the "Yellowcake Road" story. But if it is true that the White House has blown the cover of a covert CIA operative as a way to get revenge on a political opponent, that is a big deal. A very big, felonious deal. (Thanks to a Calpundit commenter for the link.)
Mark Kleiman and Tom Maguire (start here) have been all over the story, justifiably.
Maguire argues that the CIA (or certain factions therein) may have blown the cover of Ambassador Wilson's wife to advance its feud with the Administration - which would also be a big, felonious deal, albeit with repercussions not to the liking of the President's political opponents. To say the "jury is still out" is, literally, an understatement - it hasn't been convened. Yet.
What's that about the "coverup being worse than the crime?" If the story is true, then a story that, absent further action, would've been washed away with the blood of Uday and Qusay Hussein may have lead to felonious behavior from, depending on who is right, Administration officials in a Nixon-style counterattack or CIA officials for whom Federal law is a trifle when turf battles are at stake. Neither option is a good one.
I am no fan of Congressional investigations, but this situation is too important to be left to the journalists. (And given what Congress has done this year, even if the investigation doesn't lead to anything useful, it will at least keep them from doing more damage.)

In no particular order:
1) Kevin Drum is right about many things, but most notably about this one:

[E]ven if the specific evidence in the State of the Union speech was dubious, what was the general prewar assessment of Saddam's nuclear bomb program? Should George Bush have been talking about it at all?
So I pulled my copy of The Threatening Storm off the shelf and reread the section on nuclear weapons (pp. 173-175). It's unequivocal: writing in late 2002, Kenneth Pollack says there is a "consensus" that Iraq has an active nuclear program; it employs as many as 14,000 workers; experts "unanimously" agree that Iraq is working to enrich uranium; and Iraq might be able to build a bomb as early as 2004.
But unlike chemical and biological weapons, which might yet be found, a nuclear program is too big to hide. If we haven't found it by now, it just doesn't exist, and that means that something that was "unanimously" agreed upon in late 2002 has turned out to be flatly wrong.
By the end of January, with UN inspectors roaming freely around Iraq, the evidence for a nuclear program was dwindling fast. For some reason, though, Bush's advisors felt that chemical and biological weapons weren't enough for his State of the Union speech, so they seized on what little was left in order to keep the threat of nuclear bombs alive. That's bad enough, but even worse is how the collective intelligence agencies of the world misjudged what was happening in Iraq so badly. This isn't a small point of interpretation, it's a case of absolute certainty about a massive technical and industrial program that turned out to be complete fiction.
How did that happen?
(Emphasis added.)

Leaving out the obvious caveats about how it is still far too early to say that Iraq's nuclear program is a "complete fiction" and "if we haven't found it by now, it doesn't exist" (after all, the first round of inspectors didn't find Iraq's nuclear program until directed to it by defector Hussein Kamel, four years after inspections began), Kevin is absolutely right that the Niger "gotcha" game is a stand-in for the real issue of whether the world's intelligence services completely misread the situation. And if so, that scandal far outstrips any question of whether a particular claim should or should not have been in the State of the Union address. (For one, it clearly pre-dates the Bush administration, so the question of whether they improperly bullied the CIA is irrelevant.) And on the tactical level, this conflation - clearly being encouraged by some administration critics - will likely backfire, as the storm over the second question will likely dissipate once the US finds some store of chemical weapons - which (I think) is still likely - and also defusing the "Bush lied" storyline.
2) I still think that administration critics like Josh Marshall are semi-willfully blinding themselves to the main message of the Administration's arguments for the war. And because of that, I think they are overstating the importance of the Niger/uranium claim.
3) The "Bush lied" string is clearly based, in large part, on resentment over the way Republicans treated President Clinton and the 2000 election, and the according desire for revenge. Don't believe me? Ask Michael Tomasky, showing signs of Kool-Aid overdose. I found this piece strangely gripping:

Here, distilled into four paragraphs, is the liberal interpretation of the last 10 years.
After a long and in some ways well-earned stroll in the wilderness, Democrats finally elect one of their own to the presidency. He is a prodigiously talented man. He has flaws, to be sure, and some of them are important. But far more important is the way the rules of the game change upon his ascension. On election night, the nation's leading Republican goes on television and snorts that the victory is illegitimate; from that point on, a campaign is waged to destroy -- not tarnish or discredit or soften up, but destroy -- the new president and his wife. This campaign has no precedent in American political history. (Please spare us the Alexander-Hamilton-and-his-mistress parallel; the 1790s are not parallel to today's world, and Hamilton was attacked by one yellow journalist, not a network of operatives with tens of millions of dollars to spend.) Finally, he is caught in flagrante. Even then, the public asserts directly and repeatedly that it does not consider the offense a high crime or misdemeanor.
But no matter. Against the clear will of the people, impeachment proceeds. It fails, but the hounding, again mostly over pseudo-scandals (like a West Wing ransacking) that never happened but are endlessly hyped by a frivolous media, continues. And in its way, this technique succeeds: What was objectively a bountiful and comparatively humane period in American history -- prosperity, peace, low crime, reduced poverty, international goodwill; an era that should have demonstrated that Democrats knew how to run the country and left the GOP badly marginalized -- is successfully tarnished.
So the vice president seeks the presidency. He runs a soggy campaign, true. But again, it's beyond dispute that the majority of Americans who go to the polls intend for him to be the president. Yet he loses -- according to the rules, at least. But somehow the experience of the previous eight years has left us with the distinct feeling that, had the situation been reversed, other rules would have been found to ensure the same result. We are admonished to "get over it" by people we know would not have gotten over it if things had gone the other way.
The Republican takes over. For eight months, he convinces precious few who didn't vote for him that he's the man for the job. But then unprecedented tragedy occurs. Americans, the vast majority of liberals included, rally around their country; by and large we support War No. 1. We have serious reservations about War No. 2. But by now something more disturbing than a mere policy dispute has occurred. By now, simply asking questions, or refusing to accept the government's assertions at face value, is denounced as something tantamount to treason. We find this, um, troubling: Open debate and vigorous dissent, we were raised to believe, were once considered the quintessential American values. Now, they are taken as prima facie evidence of anti-Americanism. (We note also how ardently the other side seemed to believe in vigorous dissent when its members were the dissenters.) In Georgia, a man (and sitting senator) who sacrificed his body for his country is labeled unpatriotic. The president has it well within his power, by simply uttering a few morally forceful sentences, to put an end to this madness. But the demonization of the other side is what keeps him afloat politically, and he refuses to do so -- and, in the Georgia instance, goes so far as to implicitly play along.

Even if that description is 100% accurate (and I'm resisting the temptation to unload on the accusation of "asking questions=treason"), this is the best illustration of David Brooks' diagnosis of self-defeating rage. Ask the mischievous Mark Steyn:

They’ve let post-impeachment, post-chad-dangling bitterness unhinge them to the point where, given a choice between investigating the intelligence lapses that led to 9/11 and the intelligence lapses that led to a victorious war in Iraq, they stampede for the latter. Iraq was a brilliant campaign fought with minimal casualties, 11 September was a humiliating failure by government to fulfill its primary role of national defence. But Democrats who complained that Bush was too slow to act on doubtful intelligence re 9/11 now profess to be horrified that he was too quick to act on doubtful intelligence re Iraq. This is not a serious party.

Or ask the judicious John Judis, whose belief in an emerging Democratic majority does not blind him to the fact that Howard Dean's rage-based campaign is likely to end disastrously for the Democrats (ad viewing required):

Even if the United States remains bogged down in Iraq, and even if popular doubts about the invasion and occupation grow, Americans are still likely to credit Bush with trying to wage a vigorous war against terror. And they will consider voting for a Democratic candidate only if they believe he can do likewise. The Republicans will argue that an antiwar candidate like Dean who has no foreign policy experience is ill-equipped to protect the country from attack. And a lot of people will believe those charges. At the least, a candidate like Dean will have to spend a vital part of his campaign defending his credentials on homeland security and the war against terror rather than attacking Bush's economic program. Think of Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis (who, unlike Dean, served in the armed forces) unsuccessfully defending his foreign policy credentials against Bush's father in 1988.
...To put it in regional terms: Dean, a culturally libertarian New Englander who opposed the war, could virtually forget about winning any Southern or border states. Southerners are willing to support a Southern Democrat like Clinton with whom they can identify, but they will not vote for a Dukakis or Dean. Dean would not simply get trounced in the South: His candidacy would allow Bush to take the entire South for granted and move all his resources into states like Michigan and Pennsylvania that the Democrats have to win. In the end, Dean would be lucky to hold on to Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, D.C., Maryland, Illinois, Minnesota, California, Oregon, and Washington.

A final reason for why the "Bush lied" theme is mostly based on resentment and desire for revenge. Ronald Reagan made all sorts of weird economic claims (held in at least as much contempt by the professional economic set as Bush's claims) and other, shall we say, reality-challeneged statements. (I like the guy, but it's true.) While Democrats savaged him on all sorts of grounds, I don't recall them calling him a "liar" 250,000 times a day. That doesn't make it right to misuse/mangle/ignore facts, but you do get tired of seeing it called "unprecedented" on the NYT op-ed page twice a week when it's simply untrue. (A lie?)
After all, to quote Steyn again:

In 1998, when Bill Clinton launched mid-Monica cruise-missile attacks on Afghanistan and the Sudan, he hit a Khartoum aspirin factory and missed Osama bin Laden. The claims that the aspirin factory was producing nerve gas and was an al-Qa’eda front proved to be untrue. Does that mean Clinton lied to us?

4) Finally, the notorious site run by Al Gore's old roomate, the Daily Howler, has twice defended Bush against the charges of Niger-based lies (here and here; with links from Instapundit.).
After those posts, I will take their criticisms of George Bush and the media much more seriously.

I've started and stopped a few posts on the "Bush lied"/"Uranium/Niger" story and keep either getting sidetracked or bogged down in trying to link all the worthy items being written on the subject (from all sides). I've decided to link to this Daniel Drezner item and say "Indeed." (Very eloquent, if I may say so myself.)
OK, I can't resist linking to this David Brooks piece from a few weeks ago about the Democrats' creeping insanity:

Fury rarely wins elections. Rage rarely appeals to suburban moderates. And there is a mountain of evidence that the Democrats are now racing away from swing voters, who do not hate George Bush, and who, despite their qualms about the economy and certain policies, do not feel that the republic is being raped by vile and illegitimate marauders. The Democrats, indeed, look like they're turning into a domestic version of the Palestinians--a group so enraged at their perceived oppressors, and so caught up in their own victimization, that they behave in ways that are patently not in their self-interest, and that are almost guaranteed to perpetuate their suffering.
When you talk to Democratic strategists, you find they do have rationalizations for the current aggressive thrust. In 2003, it's necessary to soften Bush up with harsh attacks, some say. In 2004, we'll put on a happier face. Others argue that Democrats tried to appeal to moderate voters in 2002 and it didn't work. The key to victory in 2004 is riling up the liberal base. Still others say that with all the advantages Bush has--incumbency, victory in Iraq, the huge fundraising lead--Democrats simply have to roll the dice and behave radically.
But all of these explanations have a post-facto ring. Democratic strategists are trying to put a rational gloss on what is a visceral, unplanned, and emotional state of mind. Democrats may or may not be behaving intelligently, but they are behaving sincerely. Their statements are not the product of some Dick Morris-style strategic plan. This stuff wasn't focus-grouped. The Democrats are letting their inner selves out for a romp.

The Weekly Standard has been all over the failure of the American Association of University Professors to acknowledge the alleged activities of Sami-al-Arian, the former professor at the University of South Florida who has been indicted for running Islamic Jihad's American operations. Here's their latest update. For more, click here and here.

I know - I've procrastinated long enough about posting on the missing WMDs.
My original reaction to the "Bush lied" crowd was to dismiss them with reference to (among others) this, this, this, this, this, this, and all the links in this item. But - as tempting as it is to dismiss the "Bush lied" crowd with a sneer - it's hard to improve on the following formulations of Stephen Hayes:

There are serious questions the Bush administration will have to answer:
*How did a forged document about Iraq's pursuit of uranium make it into the State of the Union address?
*Why would President Bush tell the world that "we have found weapons of mass destruction," when quite plainly we have not?
*Before the war, the administration rightly focused on interrogating Iraqi scientists about WMD. What are the scientists in U.S. custody saying today?
*Is it possible that some of Saddam's WMD have already been distributed to terrorist networks?
For some of the not-easily-dismissable allegations that the Bush administration exaggerated the threat from Iraq, click here, here, here or any entry on Eric Alterman's blog.
One of my biggest problems with the emerging "Bush lied" meme is the way it shifts, for convenience's sake, to encompass several different concepts and arguments. Here are my takes on two different concepts that are conflated as necessary by Bush opponents:
1) The fact that we haven't found WMD yet shows that our intelligence about such weapons' very existence was flawed or false.
2) The fact that we haven't found WMD yet shows that even if they existed, the threat to the U.S. was exaggerated by the Bush administration to build the case for war.
The first argument can be disposed of by reference to any one of the links cited above (about my initial reaction to the "Bush lied" crowd), which is why the most intelligent administration critic - Josh Marshall - opines that "I still have a very hard time believing Saddam doesn't have chemical munitions stored somewhere." The second argument is best formulated by Marshall:

The public didn't get sold on this war because Saddam had nerve gas, or botulinum or even anthrax. True or not, a lot of people believed that. (I believed it -- and I still have a very hard time believing Saddam doesn't have chemical munitions stored somewhere.) The public got sold on the war because the administration argued consistently and vociferously that Saddam was on the brink of amassing far more fearsome weapons -- particularly nuclear weapons ("We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud") and that he had growing operational ties to terrorists to whom he might give these weapons or even some of his less threatening chemical agents.
It was fairly clear before the war that neither of those claims were true. Since the war it has become clearer by the day that they were almost certainly not true.
Those were the imminent threats that made the war necessary in March. No waiting for inspections, no building up of alliances, nothing. There was an imminent threat and countries respond militarily to imminent threats.
The only thing that's pretty clear is that there was no imminent threat. And there is a growing body of evidence -- much of which was known, frankly, before the war -- that the administration did everything it could to push the claim that there was an imminent threat using what was often very, very weak evidence.
(Emphases in original.)

I would argue very differently. The public got sold on the war because they bought into the worldview of the Bush administration shaped by 9/11. That worldview was based on a fear - I'd argue prudent, but reasonable people can disagree - of the unknown. We knew Saddam had all sorts of nasty weapons. We knew he had been trying to get nukes. And we didn't know what he had been doing since the inspectors were kicked out in 1998. The lesson of 9/11 is that what you don't know can hurt you, and that threats you thought were manageable may not be. The point of the Rice quote - "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" was almost exactly the opposite of what Marshall asserts. It was based on the fact that we didn't know whether the threat was imminent or not. That unknowability was the point.
Think about it. What else was the point behind the controversy of the new doctrine of "pre-emption" in the country's strategy of national security? If the administration's argument was that Iraq was an imminent threat, what was the big deal about pre-emption? It was only important because it was not based on the certainty of an immediate threat. The Bush administration's arguments to the country were based on uncertainty about the threats. That is one reason why the country has not turned against Bush yet, even though the weapons may not have turned up yet.

(I welcome citations to polling evidence regarding my argument about what swayed the American people, either pro or con.)

I know the topic deserves a serious post, but I can't resist this cheap laugh.
Writing about whether the Bush administration lied to the country about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, Josh Marshall opines:

Seldom, I think, has a country undergone such a subtle, textured, distinction-granting debate about lying and truth-telling.

Let's check the historical record...

It depends upon what the meaning of the word "is" means.
- President Bill Clinton, August 17, 1998

(And I'm not even touching the issue of the precise definition of "sexual relations.")

UPDATE: A warm welcome to all Instapundit referrees and commenters. Yes, I did read the rest of the post where Marshall writes:
Washington's newfound appreciation of the 'subtleties' of truth-telling and lies is, well ... what shall we call it?, a revealing contrast to the common-sense definitions bandied about through 1998.
So Marshall probably did mean to encompass the entire post-1998 period in his reference to a national debate about truth and lies. But the thrust of his piece also seems to be based on the premise that the current debate about the Bush administration is unprecedented, and that leaves him open to the cheap jibe.
And yes, the topic does deserve a far more substantive post than this effort, which is in the works (and you may assume that I am less troubled by the Bush administration's conduct than Marshall is). And I promise it will have no cheap Clinton-bashing - only substantive Clinton bashing will do.

I forgot to link this piece when it was published in the NYT last week, and now - thanks to the Times' new archiving policy - it's too late. But the IHT was kind enough to publish this great piece by Mark Bowden about the BBC's attempt to discredit the U.S. military about the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch (see here for a roundup of links debunking the BBC's effort):

But if the Pentagon was really attempting to sell a Hollywood scenario, they fell badly short. At his briefing, Brigadier General Vincent Brooks said that Lynch had been "retrieved," not rescued. He showed a videotape consisting of a brief muddy clip through a green night vision lens showing special operations soldiers carrying her on a stretcher from a Black Hawk helicopter.
If the Pentagon had wanted to manufacture a bogus firefight surely they could have done better.
In fact, Brooks acknowledged at the first briefing that there was no resistance inside the hospital. He said there had been gunfights going in and coming out, but did not characterize them as fierce.
There is no doubt that the American media took these bits and pieces from the fog of war and assembled them into a heroic tale. This is how the media works today, for better or worse. It happens without any prompting from the Pentagon.
It will be a while before what really happened to the ill-fated 507th is known. War is like that. Until then, we'll have to settle for the tendency to weave what little we know into a familiar shape - often one resembling the narrative arc of a film.

Peter Maas reveals the mystery of Salam Pax, world-famous Baghdad blogger. It's a great read.

Jonathan Rauch has yet another outstanding piece (05/09/2003)
in response to the familiar claim that Bush squandered the U.S.' post-9/11 popularity:

Bush's supporters retort that post-9/11 sympathy was ephemeral. At the end of the day, they argue, a strong America will attract more support than a weak one. In any case, France and Russia were determined to play the spoiler; it was the world that squandered America's goodwill, more than the other way around.
Probably, possibly, and maybe. It's all very complicated. But those arguments miss the larger point. The talk of squandering is fundamentally misconceived. Bush did not squander the world's goodwill. He spent it, which is not at all the same thing.
...Perhaps the most awkward and obnoxious of America's Cold War alignments were in the Arab world. Washington supported tyrannies and monarchies that wrecked their economies and stunted their politics. The Arab regimes wallowed in corruption and incompetence. They entrenched poverty and blocked middle-class aspirations. They jailed liberal dissidents and political moderates. They fertilized the soil for militant Islamists who provided the only outlet for dissent. They then attempted to neutralize Islamism by diverting its energies to hating liberalism, Americans, and Jews.
In both Iran and Iraq, Washington supported or tolerated corrupt and brutal regimes, with disastrous results in both places. Saudi Arabia has been a different kind of disaster, propagating anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism and Islamic extremism all over the world. Syria and Libya are disasters. Lebanon is between disasters. Egypt is a disaster waiting to happen. Maybe Jordan is, too.
In short, the United States has been on the wrong side of Arab history for almost five decades, and it is not doing much better than the Soviets. The old policy had no future, only a past. It was a dead policy walking. September 11 was merely the death certificate.
Bush is no sophisticate, but he has the great virtue -- not shared by most sophisticates -- of knowing a dead policy when he sees one. So he gathered up the world's goodwill and his own political capital, spent the whole bundle on dynamite, and blew the old policy to bits. However things come out in Iraq, the war's larger importance is to leave little choice, going forward, but to put America on the side of Arab reform.
...This is a breathtakingly bold undertaking. The difficulties are staggering. Everything might go wrong. But the crucial point to remember is that everything had already gone wrong. No available policy could justify optimism in the Arab world, but the new policy at least offers hope. It offers a path ahead, a future where there had been only a past. It is not dead. It puts America on the right side of history and on the right side of America.
Much of Europe is alarmed by the change, but then, it would be. American troops in Saudi Arabia guaranteed the flow of oil while turning the United States (along with Israel) into the scapegoat of choice for millions of angry Muslims, some of whom live in Europe. From Paris's or Amsterdam's or Bremen's point of view, what's not to like about that deal? Why must Washington go and stir everything up?

Read the whole thing.

I hope to write a longish post about the "Likudnik" theme that Mickey Kaus is beating into the ground. Until I have the time to do so, I instead refer you to this chilling David Brooks piece:

I occasionally get reports about conversations at sophisticated Washington dinner parties that turn into gripe sessions about the Israeli agents who have grabbed control of President Bush's brain. Accusing Jews of twisting U.S. policy to suit Israel is the same as accusing Catholics of taking orders from the Pope. It's also logically absurd, since Israelis are far more concerned about Iran and Syria than Iraq. But it's become commonplace nonetheless.
Not long ago I was chatting with a prominent Washington figure in a green room. "You people have infested everywhere," he said in what I thought was a clumsy but good-hearted manner. He listed a few of "us": "Wolfowitz, Feith, Frum, Perle." I've never met Doug Feith in my life and Wolfowitz and Perle I've barely met. Yet he assumed we were tight as thieves. After a few minutes of jibing I finally pointed out that there were many non-Jews who support the president's policy against Iraq. I mentioned Bob Kerry. "He's a shabbas goy. He's got a lot of Jewish money supporting that school" he shot back. Shabbas goys are Christians who perform tasks for observant Jews on Saturdays.
I am the last person who used to suspect people of anti-Semitism. I was never really conscious of it affecting my life until the last few weeks. But now I wonder. I watched a town meeting in northern Virginia a few weeks ago. A Vietnam vet got up to rail against U.S. policy on Iraq, which he said was engineered by "Paul Wolfowitz and Daniel Pearl." He got the wrong Pearl. He accidentally mentioned somebody who was beheaded for being American and Jewish. But the crowd didn't seem to notice. They roared with approval and slapped him on the back as he made his way from microphone. Why didn't he say Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Powell were organizing the Bush administration policy? They're higher ranking officials than Wolfowitz and actually members of the administration, unlike Perle. Would the crowd have roared as wildly if he'd mentioned Rice and Powell, I wondered, or did the words Wolfowitz and Perle somehow get their juices flowing?

Read the whole thing.

The estimable Kevin Drum, aka CalPundit, opines (echoing Matthew Yglesias):

Liberals have mostly been too busy protesting the war itself to spend any time pressuring the administration about post-war Iraq, and while this is understandable it also leaves a clear field for the neocon hawks in the administration to set any post-war policy they like.
But if there's a post-war agenda for liberals, promotion of democracy and human rights ought to be it. George Bush has repeatedly shown himself unwilling to take electoral risks — this is the big difference between him and Tony Blair — so it's up to the Democrats to make this issue their own. It's the right thing to do both morally and practically, and we should be willing to fight for it.

I agree - both liberals and conservatives should be willing to fight for it, and hopefully that is indeed one thing our troops are about to fight for.
But Mr. Drum falls into the same trap that has ensnared other smart liberals: instinctively assuming that this goal is not held by the "neocon hawks." But - to recap what I've posted on before - it is precisely those "neocon hawks," or "Likudniks," or "velociraptors," or "pencil necks who had their lunch money stolen by the cool kids," or ______ (insert your favorite slur here) who are most in favor of democratizing Iraq. The Powellites, usually given much more respect by hawkish liberals, are the administration faction that would be willing to install some allegedly-friendly general, beat a hasty retreat from Iraq and declare victory:

This is a notion regarded with deep skepticism at the State Department, where Powell and others tend to see the aftermath of an invasion as a long, world-class headache administered by an American general.
...Iraqi democracy, it should be said, is not the president's declared purpose of ''regime change'' in Iraq, which is to get rid of a very bad man with a fondness for terrorists and a hunger for weapons of hideous power. But it is, to many in the administration, including Wolfowitz, a large part of the enticement.

So Drum and other liberals rightly concerned about the possibility that the Bush administration may fail to follow through on democratization should swallow their qualms and make common cause with those "neocon hawks." Besides, many of them were former liberals.

If you have a high-speed connection and a few minutes, click on >this.
(Post title lifted from Big Arm Woman.)

Based on the recent terror alert, Metropolitan Transit Authority police have announced that they will begin spot-checking passengers and their baggage on commuter trains heading into Manhattan.
Atrios thinks this is shocking. (Archives are fouled up; scroll down to the item titled "Spot Searches on Trains.") I agree. I'm shocked they didn't do this earlier. It's about time. As a twice-daily Metro North commuter, I've always thought the commuter trains were an ideal place for a terrorist attack - either a bomb or a chemical/biological attack. (The commuter trains go underground and are plunged into darkness as they approach Manhattan, presenting close-to-ideal conditions for such an attack.)
I'm amazed at the unwillingess of some of the people on Atrios' comment board to concede that: 1) there just might be a reason to be concerned about security on the trains, especially given that the reports which spawned the latest alert apparently specified attacks to occur "underground" (see above re: why that could apply to commuter trains and not just subways), or 2) if the threat exists, maybe the authorities should actually do something about it.
Actually, there is an argument for concentrating investigative & enforcement resources in the population sectors most likely to contain suspects. A one-word summary of that policy is "profiling." Somehow, I don't assume Atrios' commenters are endorsing that policy.
I don't want to give the impression that I think profiling is a cure-all or completely unproblematic; is is neither. But that doesn't justify a nihilistic attitude aimed at pointing out all the flaws in all available options, while refusing to engage any questions of cost-benefit balancing that might lead to concrete recommendations - and don't forget, anything bad that happens is Bush's fault.

Here's the early entry for best newspaper front page of the year.

Last week, I linked to a Eugene Volokh article criticizing a New York Sun editorial that basically equated antiwar protestors with traitors. (I think I have the link chain right.)
Diane has been on the case, and argues that the protestors in question were making little secret of their desire to turn their planned gathering into a violent riot, and that the city was right to prevent them from marching. Here's her latest piece on the subject.

I don't agree with the viewpoint behind this cartoon, but it's very, very funny.

The Onion has another foreign policy scoop.

(Link via Daniel Drezner.)

Lots of people have noticed this Newsweek piece about the country's terror threat level has been raised to "orange" based on reports that al-Qaeda is mobilizing to attack Jews:

The FBI did appear to focus on one area: to identify hotels that are owned by Jews. The issue of possible attacks on Jewish-owned hotels was specifically raised by senior FBI officials with field-office chiefs during a 90-minute conference call on Friday, officials said. During the conference call, a senior official cited the recent Al Qaeda attack on a Bali nightclub that killed nearly 200 people last October, saying that the bureau now believes the facility was targeted because the owner was Jewish. NEWSWEEK could not independently confirm that assertion. Another recent Al Qaeda attack in Mombasa, Kenya, was aimed at a hotel that was frequented by Israelis.

Most Newsweek readers, and probably the FBI as well probably had the following reaction to these reports: "Hotels? What the @#@%@#&%?"
That was my initial reaction as well. Then a couple of thoughts followed, which seem all-too-plausible.

In a couple of months, thousands of Jews will be in hotels to celebrate Passover. Many large, well-known hotels have programs for Passover that attract hundreds of Jewish families. Those in NY can pick up a copy of the Jewish Week to see an amazing array of advertisements for such programs.
The schedules are known well in advance; it's not like Passover's scheduling can be changed, and the Seder ritual feast is always held the first two nights of the holiday (outside of Israel) after sundown. and the Seder is long enough that its conclusion on the East Coast can overlap with its commencement on the West Coast - which makes it easier to plan multiple attacks in different places.
Since 9/11, what has been the most "successful" episode of Jew-killing? Last year's "Passover Massacre" in Israel. That atrocity was perpetrated by Hamas, but al-Qaeda has been willing to crib techniques and tactics from other terrorist groups.
Security at hotels in Israel for this Passover is likely to be unbelievably strict after last year's attack. I am not sure the same can be said for such hotels in America, which in any case have far less experience of being terrorist targets as do Israeli establishments.
We thus have an upcoming situation which seems to fit the warning, a situation that gives terrorists opportunity to prepare and precedent on which to base such preparations.
I would be very scared if I was scheduled to got to a hotel this Passover.
I hope that the FBI has already thought along similar lines. Just in case they haven't, if anyone reading this entry knows someone in any position to do anything about this terrible possibility, please alert them.
I know that this post has been pure speculation. But we need to engage in more of it, in order to overcome the terrorists' advantages in the learning curve against reactive bureaucracies.

This morning, WCBS-880 radio reported that Rep. Jane Harman (D-Ca.), who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, had advised her daughter to avoid the New York City subways. The radio report also cited a nonconvincing denial by Harman that the warning was based on intelligence regarding potential terrorist attacks.
(I have not been able to find other verification of the report.)
I had lunch today with a client, who knows a captain in the NYPD. According to my client, this captain had advised his family to avoid the NYC subways "for the next ten days."
Rod Dreher describes nervousness in the NYC subway system. This is why.

Here's a great interview with Mark Steyn:

John Hawkins: There is a profound difference in the way that most Americans and most Europeans seem to view the conflict in Israel. What do you think accounts for that difference?
Mark Steyn: You have to differentiate between the British and the Continent. The British aren't anti-Semitic, but they're hot for Arabs. The British ruling class looks at the Arab and sees a desert version of his own most cherished myths: look at the Prince of Wales all togged out in his Lawrence of Arabia get-up just to have dinner with one of bin Laden's brothers. The Continentals are something else. Some just don't like Jews and resent having been unable to express that opinion honestly these last 50 years. But with the others the psychology's a little more complicated. Almost every European country was tainted by the Holocaust and Nazi occupation, but for the sake of the post-war settlement the world agreed to pretend only Germany was to blame. Not so. In France and Holland, the locals eagerly herded Jews onto those eastbound trains. In Belgium, industrial production went up under the Nazis. After half-a-century, the Continentals are sick of this guilt trip. They need to see Israel as the aggressor for their own psychological health. That's why that wacky Dutch broad who's married to the big Eurobanker keeps comparing Sharon to Hitler and Likud to the Nazis. It's a way of evening the score - "Sure, we had Hitler, you have Sharon; we have Auschwitz, you have Jenin." It's their way of belatedly taking a moral shower, a way of saying, "See, the score's one-one now. You're as bad as us. Let's just call it a draw and move on."

Read the whole thing.

Here's a speech he recently gave at a security conference in Munich.
Some excerpts:

The French and German objection, for reasons of calculated self-interest -- a very flawed calculation, I fear - to a routine American request to the North Atlantic Council to upgrade Turkey's defenses against the military threat from Iraq was a terrible injury to an Alliance that has served their broader interests well. For nearly three weeks, the United States, with fourteen of our eighteen European allies in the North Atlantic Council, has supported this necessary action, but has confronted a new unilateralism conceived in Paris and Berlin, a unilateralism that exposed the sneering in those capitals about the impulsive cowboy in the White House for the vacuous posturing and obvious misdirection it is. Whatever NATO decides, Franco-German unilateralism will have a lasting impact on trans-Atlantic security calculations. If this minority French-German obstruction is not overcome by NATO's deadline of Monday, France and Germany will have to answer to those who argue that Iraq could be to NATO what Abyssinia was to the League of Nations.
The United Nations Security Council risks that same fate should it not hold Iraq to account for its defiance. Patient American and British diplomacy at the U.N. delivered a unanimous vote in favor of Council Resolution 1441. France played a key role in negotiating the resolution and knew what they were voting for; Germany was fully aware1 of the debate as it prepared to assume the Council presidency in January. Americans, and many Europeans, were therefore astonished when France and Germany announced in advance of further consideration of the problem of Iraq that under no circumstances would they support enforcing the resolution's terms against Iraq.
...Foreign Minister Fischer recently warned against "primitive anti-Americanism." I thank and commend him for his statement. But I am concerned, we should all be concerned, not only with the "primitive" anti-Americanism of the street that resents America's successes, exults in our misfortunes, and ascribes to us motives that one must be a fool or delusional to believe. We should also be concerned with the "sophisticated" anti-Americanism, or perhaps more aptly, the "cynical" anti-Americanism of political leaders who exploit for their own ends the disinformed, "primitive" hostility to America voiced in some quarters of their societies; to further their ambitions to govern or to inflate perceptions of their international influence.
Just as some Arab governments fuel anti-American sentiment among their people to divert them from problems at home, so a distinct minority of Western European leaders appears to engage in America- bashing to rally their people and other European elites to the call of European unity. Some European politicians speak of pressure from their "street" for peaceful solutions to international conflict and for resisting American power regardless of its purpose. But statements emanating from Europe that seem to endorse pacifism in the face of evil, and anti-Semitic recidivism in some quarters, provoke an equal and opposite reaction in America.
There is an American "street," too, and it strongly supports disarming Iraq, accepts the necessity of an expansive American role in the world to ensure we never wake up to another September 11th, is perplexed that nations with whom we have long enjoyed common cause do not share our urgency and sense of threat in time of war, and that considers reflexive hostility toward Israel as the root of all problems in the Middle East as irrational as it is morally offensive.

Glenn Reynolds has a thought experiment about what the world would look like if America truly acted like the empire its critics accuse it of being:

An Imperial America would probably join with nascent superpower India to divide up and conquer the region. India could have Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran; we’d take Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Egypt.
What about the “Arab street?” The answer would be machine guns, labor camps, and bulldozed mosques. (Replaced, perhaps, by new mosques with pliable mullahs). Really troublesome populations would be relocated, a la Stalin and the Crimean Tartars. (If the task proved too ugly for American troops, we’d hire mercenaries — excuse me, “Foreign Legion troops” — from sub-Saharan Africa, East Timor, and other places whose populations dislike Muslims. There would be atrocities and brutality, of course, but that would be part of the plan.) The response to people who said the war was just about oil? “You’re right. And if you’re nice to us, we’ll sell you some.” To keep the Russians happy, they’d get a cut of the action so long as they played ball.

As Reynolds notes:

...I’m getting kind of tired hearing the United States accused of behaving like an imperial power when it isn’t. And I worry that these false accusations, repeated over and over, may actually make genuine American imperialism more likely, as the “American street” decides that if we’re going to be called an empire, we might as well act like one. What, after all, could Robert Fisk or his ilk say about America in reponse to the above that they haven’t already said anyway?

Read the whole thing.

Andrew Sullivan argues that resentment is at the heart of European anti-Americanism:

From any rational point of view, the end of the Saddam regime in Baghdad cannot be a huge blow to European interests. In fact, it's pretty much a no-brainer, a necessary international police action to remove an obvious potential threat from terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. Saddam is the easy case, not the hard one. So why the intensity of the opposition - even to the point of wrecking NATO and splitting Europe in two? Resentment, I posit. Resentment. And that resentment - which is not manufactured by European leaders, merely tolerated by them - is bound to have a deep effect on the future of international relations. This current crisis is just the beginning of a realignment that could be profound.

The New York Sun had a very offensive editorial yesterday coming too close to equating anti-war protest with treason. Eugene Volokh dismantles it quite expertly. I agree with him 100%.

In Salon (reading the article requires clicking though a somewhat-annoying advertisement) Ferry Biedermann has a very interesting dispatch from the "Arab Street"
regarding the likelihood of pro-Saddam unrest, or - more technically -lack of such.
She has many good insights. Regarding an anti-American rally in Jordan that was jointly organized by secular and fundamentalist groups:

While the conventional wisdom holds that Saddam's secular Baath regime and Islamic extremists regard each other with suspicion, the presence of the fundamentalists in the protests suggests that two sides are willing to put aside their differences and to join in battle against the United States. "We all hate the U.S. for what it is doing in the region," says Dr. Mohammed el-Oran, chairman of the Jordanian Medical Association and head of the Al-Ard political party, which he says is "very close" to Iraq's Baath party. As protesters chanted for "war, war, war against the Jews," and their banners proclaim the U.S. "the head of the snake," El-Oran blithely refuted the reports that his country will cooperate with the U.S. "We will not allow any American soldiers to cross Jordan to attack Iraq," he blusters. "If they even try they will be dead before they reach Iraq. They will be killed."
Such views neatly dovetail with those of fundamentalist Jordanians. Last year a meeting of Islamic scholars in Amman issued a religious edict, or fatwa, warning that support for the U.S. plans was un-Islamic. "It is considered a crime against Islamic sharia law what ruling governments have adopted in outlawing Jihad and preventing Muslims from fighting the aggressor U.S. invaders," according to the fatwa. "It is not permissible for any Muslim to help Americans in any way possible, whether by guiding him or her to roads that harm Muslims or filling their planes or cars with fuel or selling the aggressor a piece of bread or even giving them water."

Of course, it is inconceivable that the secular Saddam could cooperate with the fundamentalist al-Qaeda...

Regarding the Iraqi exiles:

Over the past decade, their hostility to Saddam has filtered down to the grassroots through much of the Arab world. In Baka'a, one of the Palestinian refugee camps near Amman, it is hard to find traces of the earlier enthusiasm for the Iraqi leader. The Palestinians were among the most ardent supporters of Saddam Hussein, partly because of his strident rhetoric toward Israel. But now, even with the intifada still blazing across the border, Baka'a stays quiet and offers few visible signs of support for Iraq.

And she gets her history right regarding a sensitive topic - the first Palestinian intifada:

Many Palestinians and other Arabs fear that when world attention is focused on Iraq, the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will crack down hard in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, maybe even expelling the population. Others recognize, however, that Israel will also be pressured by the United States to keep things quiet during an operation in Iraq.
That's what happened during the Gulf War, some say. "Look at what happened during the first intifada," says Ziad Abu Amr, the chairman of the political committee of the Palestinian Legislative Council. "Everything stayed quiet." The first intifada started in 1987 and petered out after Saddam's invasion of Kuwait when the world's attention was focused on Iraq.

The Oslo agreement in 1993 did not stop the first intifada; it had effectively ended beforehand.

And those espousing "containment" of Iraq would do well to heed her words:

Today, neither Iraq nor the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at the root of the region's problems, but each represents a flashpoint around which the discontented are likely to rally. Among many Palestinians, and throughout the Arab world, there is still instinctive sympathy with Iraq because of its anti-Israeli stance. Clearly, the U.S. is aware of this too, and every option seems to have enormous risks. But Bush administration officials apparently have decided that by overthrowing Saddam, short-term outrage here is likely to die down and go away. And if they're right, that would remove one of the main irritants in Arab-Western relations.
If the U.S. and U.N. work only to contain Saddam, they will need to keep troops and inspectors massed in the region. That might be effective in checking his development of weapons of mass destruction, and it might deter him from once again invading a neighboring country. And clearly, Iraq's neighbors -- Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and even Iran -- would be disappointed if the U.S. left the region to fend for itself. They have very little doubt that Saddam Hussein poses a real threat, maybe not now but certainly in the future if he's given a chance to rearm. And even among relief agencies operating in Iraq, there is no question that the regime spends huge sums on weapons and the army while neglecting the human needs of its own population. Then it magnifies those ills and blames them on the West.

In September, Biedermann had another good article describing the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" phenomenon that the U.S. faces in Arab public opinion:

In this suspicious, even paranoid climate, no matter what America does, it only reinforces the belief in the Arab world that Washington is attacking it. The U.S. is facing a classic "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario in Egypt and other Arab countries: Siding with the government makes the Americans unpopular with the people: "Why should we like somebody who helps our government oppress us?" says one human rights activist who wants to remain anonymous. But intervening is seen by most people, not only government officials and activists, as pernicious meddling in Egypt's internal affairs.
On human rights, many Egyptians accuse Washington of being more tolerant toward abuses perpetrated by friendly regimes because of the war on terror. But when the U.S. does take a stand, many of those same people accuse it of using human rights to curry favor with the Arab masses to clear the way for some anti-Arab, anti-Muslim scheme. This is what happened in the recent case of the prominent pro-democracy activist Saed Eddin Ibrahim. Human rights groups were initially appalled when Washington took no action when Ibrahim, who holds a U.S. passport, was convicted to seven years in jail in July for "damaging the image of the country abroad." Ibrahim is a sociology professor at AUC and heads the Center for Democracy and Democratization. He had previously been sentenced to seven years, on charges that included accepting money for his center from foreign sources, but that sentence was overturned and a retrial was ordered after an international outcry. The result remained the same, though.
After the trial, human rights activists condemned the inaction of the U.S. administration, charging the Americans with trying to stay on friendly terms with the regime because of the war against terror. Just a few weeks later, the State Department did announce it was taking steps against Egypt over the case. The administration said that it would not consider new aid to Egypt on top of the approximately $2 billion a year, mostly in military support, that it already gets. Surprisingly, not only the government but also the human rights groups who had called for action criticized the U.S. "This looks too much like the U.S. wants to make the point that it really does care about human rights and democracy, ahead of an attack on Iraq," says Hafez Abu Saeda, secretary general of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR). His organization thinks that using aid to apply pressure in the case of one man is not the right way to go about it. "If it were used consistently and long-term for furthering democracy and human rights, then I do think that aid can be used," says Abu Saeda. He warns that using aid as a stick at a time when the economy is not doing well will antagonize the Egyptian people, adding, "the aid is meant for them, not for the government."

Click here for it. And make sure you aren't eating or drinking anything when you do.

Scrappleface scoops the rest of the media, describing new evidence regarding Iraqi conduct to be presented today by Colin Powell.

...if more of them were as intellectually honest as Matthew Parris.

No comments, because none are possible. Just read this.

Osama bin Laden gives his State of the Union address.

That's what you'll do after reading this summary of French military history by Silflay Hraka.

Apparently even Regis Philbin is fed up with the French's obstinancy and unilateralism over the war with Iraq. He joins Oprah Winfrey in embracing the new zeitgeist.

I think the Regis & Oprah moments represent the obverse of the legendary LBJ story, where he supposedly watched Walter Cronkite come out against the Vietnam War on his newscast and asserted: "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost the country."

I've harped on how critics of American policy post 9/11 never seem to come to grips with the ramifications of their own arguments (click here and here, but James Lileks does it much better than I ever could:

One of the speakers quoted in the article said we’d insulted Arab cultures: “Long after the Gulf War was over, we had arms depots outside of mosques, American servicewomen dressed inappropriately for where they were.” So women shouldn’t be in the military? No, of course they should serve. So they shouldn’t be posted to the Middle East? No, they should have the same opportunities as men. So they should wear the veil while they’re on the base? No, but we have to understand that their presence upsets the local culture. So you support overturning the governments that impose strict miserable sexist regulations on females? No, we just have to realize how they see us. And then we do what? I don’t understand the question. Once we realize that they see us as a Godforsaken culture that lets women drive cars AND planes AND wear shorts and thongs, AND dance with someone they just met five minutes ago AND have a day job operating machine guns, then what? Well, we enter into a cross-cultural dialogue that enables a syncretic process aimed at facilitating strategies of coexistence. Yes, but what if they want to kill us because we actually think that their concepts of female servitude are negotiable? Well, I don’t accept your definitions; I think we have to change the terms of the debate so violence is never an option. It’s an option for them. It’s Job One, as the Ford ads used to say - oh, look, it’s a fellow with a bomb-belt, running towards us. Should I shoot him? Violence never solves anything. It’s about to solve you, ma’am. It’s about to solve you for good.

As has often been the case since 9/11, Chirstopher Hitchens has the last word on European timorousness in the face of Saddam and "toughness" (or at least hysteria) in the face of America. He discusses the applicability of the term "cowboy" to President Bush's behavior:

How well—apart from some "with us or with the terrorists" rhetoric—does the president fit the stereotype?

To have had three planeloads of kidnapped civilians crashed into urban centers might have brought out a touch of the cowboy even in Adlai Stevenson. But Bush waited almost five weeks before launching any sort of retaliatory strike. And we have impressive agreement among all sources to the effect that he spent much of that time in consultation. A cowboy surely would have wanted to do something dramatic and impulsive (such as to blow up at least an aspirin-factory in Sudan) in order to beat the chest and show he wasn't to be messed with. But it turns out that refined Parisians are keener on such "unilateral" gestures—putting a bomb onboard the Rainbow Warrior, invading Rwanda on the side of the killers, dispatching French troops to the Ivory Coast without a by-your-leave, building a reactor for Saddam Hussein, and all the rest of it.
In the present case of Iraq, a cowboy would have overruled the numerous wimps and faint hearts who he somehow appointed to his administration and would have evinced loud scorn for the assemblage of sissies and toadies who compose the majority of the United Nations. Instead, Bush has rejoined UNESCO, paid most of the U.S. dues to the U.N., and returned repeatedly to the podium of the organization in order to recall it to its responsibility for existing resolutions. While every amateur expert knows that weather conditions for an intervention in the Gulf will start to turn adverse by the end of next month, he has extended deadline after deadline. He has not commented on the eagerness of the media to print every injunction of caution and misgiving from State Department sources. The Saudis don't want the United States to use the base it built for the protection of "the Kingdom"? Very well, build another one in a state that welcomes the idea. Do the Turks and Jordanians want to have their palms greased before discovering what principles may be at stake? Greased they will be. In a way, this can be described as "a drive to war." But only in a way. It would be as well described as a decided insistence that confrontation with Saddam Hussein is inevitable—a proposition that is relatively hard to dispute from any standpoint. It's true that Bush was somewhat brusque with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, but then Schröder is a man so sensitive that he recently sought an injunction against a London newspaper for printing speculation about his hair color and his notoriously volatile domestic life. What we are really seeing, in this and other tantrums, is not a Texan cowboy on the loose but the even less elevating spectacle of European elites having a cow.

I haven't done a full-scale rant about an editorial from the NYT recently, but this one is too much to let slide. Shall we?

We urge the administration to brake the momentum toward war. Saddam Hussein is obviously a brutal dictator who deserves toppling. No one who knows his history can doubt that he is secretly trying to develop weapons of mass destruction. But this war should be waged only with broad international support. To go it alone, or nearly alone, is to court disaster both domestically and internationally.

It's a good thing that the administration isn't intending to "go at it alone, or nearly alone," as described in this article (which attempts to show the paucity of allies but ends up demonstrating the opposite). Or , as a certain NYT editorial states:
Britain, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Australia and a number of Persian Gulf states have offered military assistance or access to bases...

(That's the same editorial? More on that later.)

Mr. Bush has enough support among American voters to undertake the kind of clean, quickly successful military action his father directed in the Persian Gulf war of 1991. But every poll, every anecdotal reading of the American mood makes it clear that he has not sold the public on anything difficult or drawn out. Iraq is a large and complex Arab nation of 24 million people in the heart of the Middle East. America's overwhelming advantage in firepower might not prevent a prolonged period of street-to-street fighting in Baghdad that would be murderous to Americans and Iraqis alike. A desperate Iraq might try to attack Israel, disable Saudi and Kuwaiti oil fields or even destroy its own oil industry before it fell into American hands. It might fire whatever chemical and biological weapons it has against American troops. These are risks that could be well worth taking, but the American public has not signed on for them. This nation should never begin a fight it is not prepared to carry out to the bitter end, no matter what the cost.

Well, as Bill Keller points out, President Bush's father had much less public support when he launched the first Gulf war. More to the point, I don't think anyone believes that the military phase of the battle will take a very long, even if every possibility mentioned by the Times editors occurs and causes casualties.
More fundamentally, the Times' editors "misunderestimate" the American public's likely response to the casualties if they occur. The Times' editors assume that the public's immediate response would be to turn tail and concentrate its fire on President Bush. But the majority of the public is not the Clinton administration after Mogadishu.
Bush may pay an eventual political cost, but what would happen first if Iraq used chemical weapons against our troops? Wouldn't the American public's initial reaction be a lot closer to "NUKE THE BASTARDS!!!" (Not that we should.) Outside of the Times' offices, the blame would first be focused on those actually responsible for the evil, as opposed to those who try to stop it.

That isn't true of this engagement, and the fault lies mainly with the president himself. Mr. Bush has never been open with the American people about the possible cost of this war. He has not even been clear about exactly why we are preparing to fight. Sometimes his aim appears to be disarming the Iraqis or punishing Baghdad for defying the United Nations; sometimes the goal is nothing short of deposing Mr. Hussein. The first lesson of the Vietnam era was that Americans should not be sent to die for aims the country only vaguely understands and accepts.

Let's see... "Sometimes his aim appears to be disarming the Iraqis or punishing Baghdad for defying the United Nations; sometimes the goal is nothing short of deposing Mr. Hussein. " DING-DING-DING - we have a match! The general criticism of the administration being unclear about its goals may have some merit, but is that the best the Times can do? Draft some bloggers - they'll tell you what to say...
And Vietnam pops up, for the first time...

The second lesson of Vietnam was that the country should never enter into a conflict without a clear exit strategy. We have nothing close to a plan for how, once in Iraq, we get back out again. Even if Mr. Hussein is easily eliminated, the United States will be left to govern and police Iraq for an extended period. Without clearly acknowledging the possibility to the American public, Washington could easily find itself involved in an open-ended occupation.

I'll let Max Boot handle the argument for the necessity of a clear "exit strategy." And perhaps the Times needs to review its archives; they might discover some references to an administration plan for postwar Iraq.

These risks would be tolerable if the rest of the world were working alongside the United States, prepared to share the danger of the invasion and — much more critically — the responsibility for creating a more humane and progressive Iraqi government in its wake. There are some threats and some causes that require fighting even if America has to fight alone, but this isn't one of them. And the world — like the American public — is not yet really convinced that a Hussein-free Middle East is a goal worth fighting a war for.
Britain, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Australia and a number of Persian Gulf states have offered military assistance or access to bases, but there should be no mistaking this ad hoc group for a united international front. France, Germany, Russia, China and even Canada are not on board. They may all have their parochial reasons for not joining the fight, but their resistance to war should be a powerful signal that if anything goes wrong — and something will go wrong sooner or later — the United States will bear the responsibility alone.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the Bush administration's campaign to get broader international support is the implication that France or any other nation that fails to get on board now will be cut out of the administration of postwar Iraq and its oil fields. Freeing the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein's brutality and freeing the world from the threat of his belligerence are causes worth fighting for. Winning control of Iraq's oil fields is not, particularly when the attacking nation is a country whose wasteful use of energy is an international scandal.

Even Canada? Say it isn't so!
More seriously, what's the likelihood that those nations' "parochial concerns" accurately noted by the Times' will be mollified by anything the US does in the future? And if, as the Times notes in the next paragraph, "[f]reeing the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein's brutality and freeing the world from the threat of his belligerence are causes worth fighting for", does it become less worthy if those nations' parochial concerns prevent them from seeing it?

Forty years ago, the United States entered into a conflict in Southeast Asia with good intentions. When it emerged, it was torn at home and humbled abroad. The men and women now preparing to take the country into war in Iraq are, in the main, products of the Vietnam generation. They should be the first to remember how easy it is for things that begin well to end badly.

Here we are: the Times' true target is the Bush administration's unwillingess to learn the "proper" anti-military force lessons of Vietnam. With that viewpoint, it's easy to see how the U.S.' energy consumption patterns are a greater international scandal than the Franco-German axis of appeasement; how other nations' parochial interests overrule that which is worth fighting for, and all other forms of unsophisticated views which the rubes in the Administration insist on holding to despite the NYT's lessons to the contrary.

Joanthan Rauch compares the war against terorrism to the Cold War, and knocks down certain historical myths about the latter:

Communism and the Soviets were, of course, very different from jihadism or Saddam or Kim. Yet the casting of the Cold War as a chess game between two titans is all hindsight. "Right now, we look back at Communism as centralized and so easy to contain," said Leebaert in an interview, "but that's not how it looked at the time." Communism could mean Moscow or Beijing, Cuba or Vietnam, North Korea or Nicaragua. It could mean armored divisions or shoeless guerrillas or palace coups. It had a hundred guises and a hundred redoubts. And the United States intended to fight them all, everywhere? Surely this was madness.
Today's Americans congratulate themselves on the patient determination that finally brought down the Soviet Union; but, again, that was not how it looked at the time. "So much of the Cold War activity was just winging it, just stumbling along, not getting serious," Leebaert says. U.S. policy fluctuated between poles of confrontation and accommodation. Consistency? You must be joking. Critics said, often rightly, that America was applying double standards left and right.
And for what? Cozying up to murderous African or Latin dictators was no way to win converts to American values; it would mainly create new Communists. Militarily, the Cold War wasn't winnable, as even hawks conceded. If the battle was ever to be won, the decisive front would be economic, and there America's military spending was more hindrance than help. The Cold War was thus the problem, not the solution.
All plausible -- and yet. We know how the story ended.
...Like Truman, Bush has set the country on a potentially long course of wearying and far-flung conflict, not because he wants to, but because "the alternative is much more serious." Is he biting off more than the country can chew? Probably, but so did Truman.

Lee Harris has an excellent piece on how today's anti-American protestors pledge fealty to Marx bututterly misinterpret him:

Those who, speaking in Marx's name, try to defend the fantasy ideology embodied in 9/11 are betraying everything that Marx represented. They are replacing his hard-nosed insistence on realism with a self-indulgent flight into sheer fantasy, just as they are abandoning his strenuous commitment to pursuit of a higher stage of social organization in order to glorify the feudal regimes that the world has long since condemned to Marx's own celebrated trash bin of history. ...The belief that mankind's progress, by any conceivable standard of measurement recognized by Karl Marx, could be achieved through the destruction or even decline of American power is a dangerous delusion. Respect for the deep structural laws that govern the historical process--whatever these laws may be--must dictate a proportionate respect for any social order that has achieved the degree of stability and prosperity the United States has achieved and has been signally decisive in permitting other nations around the world to achieve as well. To ignore these facts in favor of surreal ideals and utterly utopian fantasies is a sign not merely of intellectual bankruptcy, but of a disturbing moral immaturity. For nothing indicates a failure to understand the nature of a moral principle better than to believe that it is capable of enforcing itself.
It is not. It requires an entire social order to shelter and protect it. And if it cannot find these, it will perish.

Read the whole thing.

Last year, Joan Didion's writings on U.S. politics were brilliantly eviscerated by Joe Klein in the New Republic:

Didion's political essays seem very dated now. They are artifacts of the most placid and prosperous moment in American history, a time when allegedly serious news organizations and journals of opinion turned to cynics and stylists--people who knew little about politics and nothing at all about policy--to make pronouncements about public life. These people practiced a form of theater criticism, assuming and sometimes even asserting that politics was a lesser branch of show business, that politicians were merely actors reading lines, that political performance consisted only of public speaking and image-making; while the quiet work of governance, the true work of elected officials, was largely ignored. This was, almost by definition, a flagrantly superficial conceit. It is probably finished now. When reality visits, there is no need for political fictions.

Unfortunately, her fatuous preaching has continued with respect to the aftermath of September 11 and the proposed war in Iraq. Andrew Sullivan has a wonderful demolition of her views and though-processes, or lack of such:

She doesn't seem to grasp that people who differ from her views about this might also have read history, theology, sociology, philosophy, and so on. Does she think that Bernard Lewis or Fouad Ajami have not devoted years to inquiring into "the nature of the enemy we faced"? Does she think that my own post-9/11 essay, "This Is A Religious War," was devoid of any historical or philosophical analysis? Does she think that John Keegan and Victor Davis Hanson are uninterested in military and diplomatic history? The sheer intellectual snobbery of Didion blinds her to the real scholarship on the other side of the debate. Which makes life easier for her, but it doesn't help shed any light for the rest of us.
Perhaps this is a function of being in a liberal intellectual cocoon. When the only educated people you know hold identical views to yours, it's an easy step to assuming that all those other mysterious creatures out there who disagree with you are simply dumb anti-intellectual jingoists. The cocoon blinds Didion in other ways as well. Many times in the piece, she recounts going out into the country to talk to real people about 9/11. She doesn't seem to realize that the people Joan Didion might meet in bookstores -- the ones who have come explicitly to hear her speak, no less -- might not be completely representative of the country as a whole. Memo to Didion: Get out a little more.

There's much more.

What a serendipitous day for those three misunderstood nations!
Iraq has given VX nerve gas to al-Qaeda.
North Korea announces it is reactivating its plant for nuclear weapons.
And now it is revelaed that Iran has two secret nuclear sites, ideal for making atomic weapons.
Undoubtedly, just another day at the office for those three countries.

1) Glenn Reynolds has recently reported an apparent increase in urgency among state public health officials charged with dealing with smallpox, among other horribles.
In the last day, the following two items are also being reported:
2) President Bush has decided to revive a nationwide smallpox vaccination program, beginning with soldiers and emergency personnel and eventually extending to the entire country.
3) Apparently Iraq has recently supplied VX nerve gas to al-Qaeda.
I suspect there may be a connection between items 1-2 and 3.

As many of you may already know, one of the chief weapons inspectors now beavering away in Iraq has, shall we say, an unusual resume. This topic was made for Mark Steyn, and he doesn't disappoint.
The only comparable thing I've ever read was P.J. O'Rourke's incomparable beginning to the chapter on agricultural policy from his book Parliament of Whores, which I will not recap since children and rabbis allegedly read this blog. (But it's worth the price of purchase.)

A report in Ha'aretz cites this article from the Kenya Daily Nation stating that the terrorists who blew up the Israeli-owned resort in Kenya and tried to shoot down an Israeli airliner were Iraqis with ties to al-Qaeda.
The Kenya paper has the following damning allegations:

Kenya's security agencies were warned four times of an impending bombing a clear eight months before last week's suicide attack near Mombasa...
They were told a terrorist mission was planned at the Coast;
that a bomb had been smuggled into the country;
the names of the terror group linked to Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda movement that was responsible;
and they were even given the names and pictures of two Iraqi terrorists who planned to enter Kenya from Somalia to carry out the attack.

If true, this certainly does not reflect well on Kenya's security services (although it should make commiserating with the CIA and FBI easier at future security conferences). The independent commission recently formed to investigate 9/11 should examine the Kenyan paper and use it as a model if similar neglect comes to light (though I doubt it will; more on that later).
But perhaps more importantly, this is the first allegation
I'm aware of linking Iraq to the attacks. Could this be the "smoking gun" linking Iraq to al-Qaeda that skeptics have insisted on seeing before approving of war with Iraq, or do attacks after 9/11 not count? And even if the terrorists were Iraqis and Iraqi state involvement is demonstrated, will the usual suspects argue that attacks against Israelis are somehow different? ("Yes, such attacks are inexcusable when directed against any party, whether Israeli or Palestinian, but we must not lose sight of the fact that the conflict occurs in a political context...") I think I know the answer; after all, Saddam's underwriting Palestinians who murderer innocent people usually hasn't been cited as a casus belli.

UPDATE: This Newsweek piece contains the following quote from an Israeli intelligence source:

An Israeli security official also said that authorities had stopped two Palestinian cells in the past year whose members were trained in Tikrit, Iraq, in a plot to fire missiles at airliners taking off from Tel Aviv airport. "We know these ideas [hitting airplanes upon takeoff] originated in Iraq," he said.

Richard Just has an outstanding piece on why liberals should support an invasion of Iraq:

Anti-war liberals have derided the prospect of a liberated Iraq serving as a model for Arab democracy -- and starting a domino effect that could liberate the Muslim world from the grips of petty despots and theocratic lunatics -- as fanciful. But for all their talk about the "root causes" of terrorism, my fellow liberals have spoken very little about how they plan to remedy the situation. Deterrence is not going to address the "root causes" of terror. It will likely make them worse. At best it will leave a madman in check and leave much of the Muslim world in an ongoing mood of simmering disdain for America. At worst it will empower a madman to bide his time in manipulating the Muslim world's ongoing disdain for America. It is not a policy of hope; it is a policy of little imagination and puny moral spirit.
These arguments are almost all well-trodden territory at this advanced stage in the debate. But it is this last point -- the sudden puniness of the liberal worldview as embodied by its prescription for Iraq -- that saddens me most, and that liberals have grappled with least. Think of the major policy advances of the last century. The New Deal, the Great Society, the civil-rights movement -- all were fueled by a moralistic ambition and a faith in the power of humans to repair their world through action and ideas. There have never been any great liberal strains in American life that were fueled by a desire to just let things be. Think of the domestic causes championed by liberals at this magazine and elsewhere: public financing of campaigns, measures to conserve the environment, universal health care -- they are all ambitious in the great progressive tradition. No one at this magazine would ever say that corporate funding of campaigns is probably a detriment to American politics, but perhaps the best solution is to leave the system as is -- by meddling, we only risk making it worse. What's more, the American left has a rich tradition of ambition in the international arena. It was a liberal president who proposed the League of Nations and thus created an entire school of foreign-policy thought. It was a liberal president who stared down conservative isolationists and began preparing America -- years before Pearl Harbor -- to help rescue the Jews of Europe from genocide and the world from the greatest evil it had ever seen. It was a liberal president who invoked the lesson of that war to argue for intervention in countless conflicts during the 1990s. And it is liberals who have, over and over again, called attention to human-rights abuses, injustices, killings and torture throughout the world for decades upon decades -- and urged their government to do something, anything about them.
But here we are, on the brink of an attempt to remove one of recent history's most odious men from the world scene, and liberals have surveyed the situation and asked, "How can we find any rationale not to get involved?" They have noted that Saddam Hussein may be evil but that there are plenty of other evil people in the world. Or that conservatives are in it for the oil. Or that there are risks involved. Or that containment could prevent the dictator from ever using nuclear weapons.
All those arguments may well be true.
But not one of those arguments will lead to the liberation of a frighteningly Orwellian society based on fear and torture. Not one of them will protect the citizens of the Middle East's democratic nations against future attacks with weapons of mass destruction. Not one of them could lead to a beachhead -- however small -- of democracy in the Arab world. Not one of them will help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian standoff. Not one of them will allow America to take initial steps toward addressing the "root causes" of terror. Not one of them is worthy of the deeply moral traditions of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And not one of them will lead to progress in the Middle East -- yet these objections are apparently all most "progressives" have to offer.

There's more - read it.
First Ronald Brownstein's election post-mortem from yesterday, and now Just's piece - if tightly written and logically compelling articles continue to appear in TAP, bloggers like myself and Mickey Kaus may have to stop making fun of it so often! (Of course, given Just's track record of producing good articles - see here and here for examples - Robert Kuttner will probably force him out before too long.)

David Frum discusses the UN resolution regarding Iraq and observes that President Bush's diplomacy follows a predictable pattern:

Step 1: Bush threatens to go it alone.
Step 2: Liberals and foreign allies holler.
Step 3: Threatened with irrelevance, Congress/the UN/the Arab League/the IMF offers to do 80% of what Bush wants.
Step 4: Bush reluctantly agrees to work with Congress/the UN/the Arab League/the IMF.
Step 5: Admiring articles about Colin Powell appear in the New York Times.
Step 6: Conservatives panic.
Step 7: Bush does precisely what he intended to do from the very beginning.

The United Nations may be the world's most hypocritical, wasteful, vexatious, and absurd organization. But there's no getting around the fact that a favorable Security Council resolution is a very useful thing to have.

Mark Steyn is upset at the media coverage of the Washington-area sniper:

...CNN finds it easier to call Mr. Muhammad "Mr. Williams," a formulation likely to be encouraged by the guy's lawyers, once they're in place, just as, in the hands of the ever sensitive media, Abdul Hamid and Abdullah al-Muhajir were tactfully restored to their maiden names of John Walker Lindh and Jose Padilla. (By the way, was that a picture of Cassius Clay on the front of the National Post last week?) My local radio news described Mr. Muhammad as "an ex-soldier" and "an African-American male." Anyone spot the missing category? You can discern the preferred narrative: an African-American male from a deprived background driven psycho by military culture. But he left the army years ago and his transformation into a killer seems to be more or less coincidental with his transformation into Mr. Muhammad.
But pay no attention to that. Even though the crime (the random murder of Americans of all types, ages, genders and races) and the accused (an anti-American Islamist) are a perfect match, the network criminologists continue to profess themselves perplexed by the apparent lack of motive, as if we'll shortly discover that Mr. Muhammad had been denied a promotion at Burger King or he'd been abused as a child. It doesn't really matter whether Muhammad al-Sniper was acting on orders or simply improvising. The jihad-inciters in the Middle East are happy with either. If anything, the freelance approach suits them better: you don't need complicated and traceable communications and wire transfers; the punks on the ground will act independently just to impress you.
The media lapsed into the same denial mode the last time a forty-year-old radical Muslim called Mohamed opened fire on U.S. soil. July the Fourth, LAX, the El Al counter, two dead. CNN and The Associated Press all but stampeded to report a "witness" who described the shooter as a fat white guy in a ponytail who kept yelling "Artie took my job." But, alas, it was -- surprise! -- a Muslim called Hesham Mohamed Modayet.

And regarding those who equate Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell et al with Islamic fundamentalists:

Unfortunately, for the old moral equivalence to hold up, the Christians really need to get off their fundamentalist butts and start killing more people. At the moment, the brilliantly versatile Muslim fundamentalists are gunning down Maryland schoolkids and bus drivers, hijacking Moscow musicals, self-detonating in Israeli pizza parlours, blowing up French oil tankers in Yemen, and slaughtering nightclubbers in Bali, while Christian fundamentalists are, er, sounding extremely strident in their calls for the return of prayer in school.

I missed this Wasington Post editorial over the weekend regarding facile comparisons between Iraq and North Korea. An outstanding piece which should be read in its entirety.

Check out this piece from the Bellingham Herald regarding the suspicions raised by John Allen Muhammad/Williams during his stay in Washington state:

The Rev. Al Archer, director of the Lighthouse Mission where Muhammad lived off and on for months, remembers him as a guy who made a good first impression - too good.
"On the surface he was squeaky clean," Archer said. "He was almost too good to believe. I kind of quit believing."
After he got to know Muhammad better, Archer grew so suspicious of his odd behavior that he suspected him of being part of a terrorist organization, and he called the FBI. But that was in October 2001, in the aftershock of the World Trade Center massacre, and Archer doesn't think he got the feds' attention.
...Muhammad's frequent flier status seemed odd to other people. One of them was Greg Grant, a real estate agent in Bellingham who owns and manages an apartment complex about two miles south of Sumas on Highway 9. Last year, Grant said, he would often drive residents of Lighthouse Mission - including Muhammad on several occasions - to the apartments to do yard work and other chores, then back to the mission once the work was done.
Once, Muhammad told Grant that he had to travel a long distance, possibly to Jamaica or the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean, to sign some papers on a land sale, Grant said. Grant said he wondered why Muhammad would fly to do that when the job could be handled by mail.
In the post 9-11 climate, Archer felt it was worth a call to the FBI.
"I felt like he was part of an organization. I felt like he had some connection with terrorists. ... I said he's got connections somewhere with somebody who's got money," Archer remembered telling the FBI.
He also contacted Bellingham police with his concerns.
"We both agreed there was something not right, but there was nothing they could nail him with," Archer said.

I hope the authorities follow up on where a man who spent months in and out of a homeless shelter got the money for his weapon, a car and several plane flights.

Toren Smith notices a report that alleged al-Qaeda terrorists arrested in rome this month were apparently planning an attack at a U.S. military cemetery:

Maybe they're going to practice killing dead people first, then work their way up? Or did they think this sort of thing would lead to a really impressive "body count"...? Or did they think that they could do the Mormon thing, and by re-killing people after the fact, this would count as deaths in some sort of holy war—sort of a retroactive killing?

Andrew Sullivan cites a Charles Krauthammer column from 1994 on the accord with North Korea:

(1) The NPT is dead. North Korea broke it and got a huge payoff from the United States not for returning to it but for pretending to. Its nuclear program proceeds unmolested. In Tehran and Tripoli and Baghdad the message is received: Nonproliferation means nothing. (2) The IAEA, if it goes along with this sham, is corrupted beyond redemption. It is supposed to be an impartial referee blowing the whistle on proliferators. Yet if Washington does not want to hear the whistle, the IAEA can be bullied into silence. (3) American credibility - not very high after Clinton's about-faces in Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti - sinks to a new low. This is a president easily cowed and dangerously weak. Said one government official to the New York Times, "It's one of these cases where the administration was huffing and puffing and backed down." Better though, said another, than "falling on our own sword over phony principle." If nonproliferation, so earnestly trumpeted by this president, is a phony principle, then where do we look for this president's real principles? This administration would not recognize a foreign policy principle, phony or otherwise, if it tripped over one in the street. The State Department, mixing cravenness with cynicism, calls this capitulation "very good news." For Kim Il Sung, certainly. For us, the deal is worse than dangerous. It is shameful.

On the other hand, Sullivan also cites an interview Jim Lehrer conducted earlier this year with the hapless Wendy Sherman (the coordinator for North Korean policy in the Clinton administration, cited below). Regarding the inclusion of North Korea in Bush's "axis of evil" formulation, Ms. Sherman said:

It was very understandable as a rhetorical device to rally the American people to cause against terrorism and to the cause against weapons of mass destruction, which none of us want. What I think was wrong about it in terms of North Korea is North Korea has negotiated successfully with us. We have a 1994 framework agreement that stops the production of fissile material, which is the plutonium, the kind of plutonium needed to build nuclear weapons. They agreed to that framework agreement. They have principally kept to that agreement and taken the steps that were necessary for it to take. It's not finished yet. We still have a ways to go, but they do and can follow through. We need to hold them to it. Our agreements have to be verifiable. They need to be tough but it can be done.

Read that again - "They have principally kept to that agreement and taken the steps that were necessary for it to take." I have nothing to add.

Via InstaPundit, James Lileks has it all figured out regarding the Bali bombing. I especially liked this bit:

[I]n retrospect, Indonesia looks quite wise. If they had bowed to U.S. pressure, al-Qaida would think they'd joined Bush's mad crusade. Now they have a chance -- a precious, rare chance -- to show that wiser heads know best what to do: nothing. But we're not counseling rash inaction -- no, Indonesia must proceed with care, consulting friends and neighbors, before deciding which form their inaction should take. (After a suitable debate, that is.)

You think that's funny? Read the last sentence in this New York Times article, quoting Wendy Sherman, the Clinton administration's North Korea policy coordinator (time for Ms. Sherman to edit that part of her resume):

"One has to be careful, or you may end up in a circumstance that could be more precarious than you began with," Ms. Sherman said. "The administration ought to be multilateral, deliberative and very thoughtful about how we proceed here, because it is serious."

Life imitates Lileks...

Via InstaPundit, James Lileks has it all figured out regarding the Bali bombing. I especially liked this bit:

[I]n retrospect, Indonesia looks quite wise. If they had bowed to U.S. pressure, al-Qaida would think they'd joined Bush's mad crusade. Now they have a chance -- a precious, rare chance -- to show that wiser heads know best what to do: nothing. But we're not counseling rash inaction -- no, Indonesia must proceed with care, consulting friends and neighbors, before deciding which form their inaction should take. (After a suitable debate, that is.)

You think that's funny? Read the last sentence in this New York Times article, quoting Wendy Sherman, the Clinton administration's North Korea policy coordinator (time for Ms. Sherman to edit that part of her resume):

"One has to be careful, or you may end up in a circumstance that could be more precarious than you began with," Ms. Sherman said. "The administration ought to be multilateral, deliberative and very thoughtful about how we proceed here, because it is serious."

Life imitates Lileks...

Franklin Foer has a tremendous piece in the New Republic about how Iraq manipulates its coverage by the international media. Here is the first paragraph, with its unbelievable conclusion:

If the bombs begin falling on Baghdad, a broad swath of the TV-viewing world will quickly become intimate with Jane Arraf, CNN's Iraq correspondent for the past four years. Arraf files her reports from the third-floor landing of a blocky white building a few hundred meters from the Tigris River, with the ancient city's minaret-filled panorama behind her. CNN shares the building with the BBC, Associated Press, Reuters, and the handful of other news organizations that have a permanent presence in Baghdad. But there's an uncomfortable fact about this building to which these tenants don't often call attention: It's the Iraqi Ministry of Information.

Read the entire piece; it's very chilling.
I strongly believe that after the U.S. overthrows Saddam, there will be a tremendous unwillingess amongst leftists to admit that they were ever opposed to the U.S.' actions.

Lots of embarrassing things were written several years ago regarding the accord which has now been blown to bits (pun not intended, hopefully). TNR's blog has one. More excruciating is a NYT editorial unearthed by Jonah Goldberg, which I will reproduce in full.

Diplomacy with North Korea has scored a resounding triumph. Monday's draft agreement freezing and then dismantling North Korea's nuclear program should bring to an end two years of international anxiety and put to rest widespread fears that an unpredictable nation might provoke nuclear disaster.
The U.S. negotiator Robert Gallucci and his North Korean interlocutors have drawn up a detailed road map of reciprocal steps that both sides accepted despite deep mutual suspicion. In so doing they have defied impatient hawks and other skeptics who accused the Clinton Administration of gullibility and urged swifter, stronger action. The North has agreed first to freeze its nuclear program in return for U.S. diplomatic recognition and oil from Japan and other countries to meet its energy needs. Pyongyang will then begin to roll back that program as an American-led consortium replaces the North's nuclear reactors with two new ones that are much less able to be used for bomb-making. At that time, the North will also allow special inspections of its nuclear waste sites, which could help determine how much plutonium it had extracted from spent fuel in the past.
A last-minute snag, North Korea's refusal to resume its suspended talks with neighboring South Korea, was resolved to Seoul's satisfaction. If Washington and Pyongyang approve the agreement, and if the North fulfills its commitments, this negotiation could become a textbook case on how to curb the spread of nuclear arms.
Hawks, arguing that the North was simply stalling while it built more bombs, had called for economic sanctions or attacks on the North's nuclear installations. The Administration muted the war talk and pursued determined diplomacy.
Reassuring the North paid off in the end. Given the residual mistrust between the two sides, the U.S. will now sensibly provide more tangible reassurance. It is moving toward diplomatic recognition, in the form of an exchange of liaison offices, and economic cooperation, in the form of heavy fuel oil from others in the U.S.-led consortium and the start of construction of new nuclear reactors.
In return, the North will put its nuclear program in a deep freeze by not refueling its nuclear reactor, arranging temporary safe storage of the spent fuel rods removed from that reactor and sealing its reprocessing facility to prevent the extraction of plutonium from those fuel rods. Implementing the freeze and allowing it to be verified are important tests of the North's good faith.
Then, in elaborately choreographed stages detailed in a confidential note, nuclear dismantling will proceed step-by-step with reactor replacement. That gives both sides leverage against reneging. At the end of stage one, with construction of the first reactor well under way but before key nuclear components have been supplied, the North will allow special inspections of its nuclear waste sites.
In stage two, as construction proceeds on the two reactors, the North will gradually ship its 8,000 spent fuel rods abroad for reprocessing. In stage three, as the second replacement reactor nears completion, the North will dismantle all its bomb-making facilities, including its old graphite reactors and reprocessing plant.
Critics say the U.S. is in effect bribing North Korea to comply with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Yet Washington has previously provided inducements to others, including South Korea, to refrain from bomb-making. It has gotten the North to do a lot more than the treaty requires, like dismantle its nuclear installations.
From the start, the hawks' alternative to diplomacy was full of danger. Their solution -- economic sanctions and bombing runs -- might have disarmed North Korea, but only at the risk of war. President Clinton, former President Carter and Mr. Gallucci deserve warm praise for charting a less costly and more successful course.

Those "hawks" look a little smarter now, don't they? At least Josh Marshall has enough intellectual integrity to admit that on many of the big foreign-policy questions over the last couple of decades, the "hawks" were right.
This John McCain quote cited by Rod Dreher holds up a little better:

On at least eight previous occasions, North Korea has lied to the Clinton Administration. With this agreement, Administration officials have willingly acquiesced in Pyongyang's almost certain further deception. Yet again, the Administration has mistaken resolving the North Korean nuclear crisis with merely postponing its apogee.
...I suspect that the Administration's willlingness to delay the resolution of this crisis is premised on their presumption that the bankrupt North Korean economy will force the regime's collapse before they violate the agreement. Unfortunately, their economy may be salvaged during the interim period by the hallf a billion tons of oil they will receive annually, the opening of trade relations with the U.S., and greater trade with its Asian neighbors, which the agreement [provides for]. Thus, the Administration has accomplished the remarkable feat of allowing the North Koreans to have their carrot cake and eat it too.

Here are excerpts from this week's lead editorial:

Reasonable people can and do disagree about whether it is worth going to war to defang Iraq. But how has the balance of that argument changed in light of the unsurprising fact that the terrorists have struck again? Did thinking about Iraq lower America's guard in South-East Asia, or anywhere else? There is no jot of evidence for this. Since September 11th, the Americans have intensified their intelligence-gathering in every sphere. Just recently this has led to a spate of arrests of al-Qaeda suspects around the world. If there was a failure in Bali, it does not seem to have been a lack of American attention but Indonesia's failure to heed the timely warnings it received from both America and others.
None of this is to argue that the Bush administration has performed flawlessly. As in any war, there have been both tactical errors and strategic ones. A tactical error in Tora Bora enabled the al-Qaeda leadership to escape. The Economist submits that it was a strategic error to confine Afghanistan's international peacekeepers to Kabul; and to give Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's military dictator, a green light to undermine what was left of his country's parliamentary system. There is, furthermore, serious force in the argument that an American war against Iraq might turn more Muslims against America. The war against Islamic terrorism must in large part be a war for the hearts and minds of Muslims. That is uncontroversial. The hard question is how to win this part of the war.
Some of America's critics counsel a generalised flaccidity, in the style of Mrs Megawati: keep a low profile and do nothing at all that might stir up the hornets. Others compose a list of useful chores for the superpower to take on right away, the one common feature of which is that none of them is Iraq. Solve Palestine, solve Kashmir, end world poverty, turn Muslim leaders into democrats, make the lion lie down with the lamb. Curiously, it is assumed in the case of Iraq that American intervention is pre-ordained to be incompetent and that the looked-for benefit will be outweighed by the unintended consequences. Everywhere else, American omnipotence is taken for granted. Solve Palestine? A decade of intensive American peacemaking led by Bill Clinton failed, yet it is blithely assumed that America has now merely to brandish a magic wand or big enough stick to make Israel disgorge the occupied territories it has been choking on for decades.
Even in its present muscular mood, even with its present unchallenged power, an America that is asked to do the impossible, or which promises it, is bound to disappoint. Deliver us from evil, goes the cry from every point of the globe; just make sure not to stir up any hard feelings while you're about it.
This is an impossibility. America cannot fight al-Qaeda without offending the millions of Muslims who persist in thinking that al-Qaeda has half a point. And though all the items on that list of chores matter, all require a long slog. The regional conflicts in Palestine and Kashmir are a thicket of thorns. Democracy? America can preach and nudge, but cannot at a stroke impose pluralist values on all the countries where people are denied them. In the meantime, one of the weapons America must deploy against al-Qaeda is traditional statecraft, which often entails opportunistic alliances with the sort of regimes—in Egypt, Kazakhstan, Pakistan—Americans would not choose to be governed by themselves. There may be ways to assuage some Muslim “grievances” without tipping into appeasement. But do not expect too much. The chain of causation that is said to lead from Palestine to the decision of a terrorist to murder young partygoers in Bali is not going to be easy to interrupt by making an adjustment in diplomacy.
Above all, America must not let the things which it cannot do right away stop it from doing the things that it must do right away. In the view of this newspaper, one of those is preventing Mr Hussein, a proven sociopath, from acquiring an atomic or biological bomb, and so the ability to threaten or kill millions of people. It is possible, if the UN cannot do this peacefully, that the only way to stop him is by war. It may also be possible that such a war will further inflame Muslim opinion against the West (even though millions of Iraqis will doubtless rejoice in his removal). But all of these things were true last week, before a gang of terrorists killed hundreds of innocents in Bali. How perverse it would be if that crime were to distract the world from an action that could yet save millions.

Read the whole thing.

A couple of thoughts:
1) How ironic - and predictable - is it that not long after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, one of Jimmy Carter's signature accomplishments - the 1994 accord with North Korea - has been publicly revealed as a fraud? Geitner Simmons has more in a wide-ranging post.
2) Andrew Sullivan is right. I'm not sure that the Clinton administration had a better option, but the effect is the same; a foreign policy turns out to have been a short-term palliative at best, with the Bush administration left to clean up the mess.

Clive James argues that the bombing in Bali shows the foolishness of blaming the West for the terrorist attacks it suffers - an argument bordering on heresy at the Guardian. Here, he has some choie words regarding the war on terrorism and the Arab-Israeli conflict:

On Monday morning, the Independent carried an editorial headed: "Unless there is more justice in the world, Bali will be repeated." Towards the end of the editorial, it was explained that the chief injustice was "the failure of the US to use its influence to secure a fair settlement between Israelis and Palestinians." I count the editor of the Independent as a friend, so the main reason I hesitate to say that he is out to lunch on this issue is that I was out to dinner with him last night. But after hesitating, say it I must, and add a sharper criticism: that his editorial writer sounds like an unreconstructed Australian intellectual, one who can still believe, even after his prepared text was charred in the nightclub, that the militant fundamentalists are students of history.
But surely the reverse is true: they are students of the opposite of history, which is theocratic fanaticism. Especially, they are dedicated to knowing as little as possible about the history of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. A typical terrorist expert on the subject believes that Hitler had the right idea, that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a true story, and that the obliteration of the state of Israel is a religious requirement. In furthering that end, the sufferings of the Palestinians are instrumental, and thus better exacerbated than diminished. To the extent that they are concerned with the matter at all, the terrorists epitomise the extremist pressure that had been so sadly effective in ensuring the continued efforts of the Arab states to persuade the Palestinians against accepting any settlement, no matter how good, that recognises Israel's right to exist. But one is free to doubt by now - forced to doubt by now - that Palestine is the main concern.

Steven Den Beste really dislikes France and its UN machinations regarding Iraq.

I agree with very little of what Michael Lind writes, but he has a fascinating piece in the Washington Post on Hitler analogies:

What is at issue here is a matter of moral intelligence, not just good taste or historical accuracy. This kind of casual and unreflecting use of the Hitler smear trivializes both Hitler and the radical evil of the Holocaust.
...The Holocaust cannot reasonably be assimilated to other historical events and trends. The mass death in Cambodia under the communist regime of Pol Pot was not an episode of "autogenocide" comparable to the Holocaust; most of the victims died of a famine caused by socialist agricultural policies, which produced the same result in Mao Zedong's China and Josef Stalin's Soviet Union. The mass executions of political opponents and "class enemies" in Cambodia and other communist states were monstrous crimes, but of a kind all too familiar from the history of dictatorships and revolutions. Nor was the ethnic cleansing of Albanian Kosovars by Serbia comparable to the Holocaust. While the Serbs carried out mass executions of military-age men and mass rapes of women, they aimed to deport, not kill, most of the Albanian population. The Nazis, by contrast, sought to extinguish entire categories of people.
Common sense is missing altogether when the plagues that decimated American Indian populations after their contact with Europeans are called a "Columbian holocaust." Conquerors and traders from Europe exploited and enslaved native Americans, but they cannot be held morally culpable for spreading Old World diseases by sneezing. If they could, then Americans suffering from AIDS and West Nile virus, diseases which spread from Africa, could be called victims of an African attempt at genocide in North America.

I agree, up to a point. Lind is correct to note the influence of early 20th-century theories of eugenics on the Nazis, but he argues:

Even if there had been no Jews in Germany or German-occupied Europe, there would have been a Holocaust of some kind -- the planned, putatively "scientific" extermination of so-called "dysgenic" groups. Stigmatized by pseudoscience as literal "subhumans," homosexuals, the mentally and physically handicapped, and ethnic minorities such as Jews and Gypsies could be exterminated like animals, using methods like those used in industrial agriculture -- the cattle car, the slaughterhouse and Zyklon B, an insecticide used against crop-destroying pests.

Perhaps, but (a) it would've been on a totally different scale, and (b) Lind fails to appreciate the centrality of anti-Semitism to the Nazis program. At most, the eugenics component provided a framework; the animating principle was anti-Semitism.
Lind concludes:

It follows from all this that there should be an absolute ban on Hitler analogies in every sphere of society and every form of partisan rhetoric. Hitler should not be revived in Baghdad, or the White House, or Denver, or the Maryland suburbs, or on the "Today" show. Hitler should be left in Hell, where he belongs.

Sounds good. But the arguments prove too much. Used intelligently (and I'll stipulate that it usually isn't, including most of the examples Lind cites), the Hitler example is: (a) a useful reminder that world-threatening evil does and can exist if we are not careful, and (b) provides a useful standard for inspiring action against lesser horrors. Not for lack of trying, Saddam may not equal the depravity of Hitler. But, as Quentin Tarantino, (of all people) might say, it's "not the same thing, [but] the same ballpark."
UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg has more on the subject.

This Jerusalem Post article argues that the U.S. should revive the old "Jordanian option" of returning the West Bank to Jordan, and sweeten the deal for Jordan by giving it the lower two-thirds of Iraq. The remainder of Iraq would become an independent Kurdistan.
Without getting into many of the problems of that scenario (especially for Turkey, which would not want an independent Kurdistan on its border), I'll just say that the scenario is extremely unlikely; the Hashemites want more Palestinians in their territory, having learned the futility of trying to deal with Arafat back in 1970. I think it's more plausible that Jordan would be willing to give up some territory as part of a new Palestinian state, if that meant they'd be able to shed Palestinians along with the territory. The article is an audacious attempt to meet some real concerns (the viability of Jordan, the inability to trust the Palestinians with a state, but unlikely to actually occur. The writer himself indicates that the idea isn't presently being considered.

VodkaPundit has an excellent summary of the record that warranted Jimmy Carter's Nobel Peace Prize. And Richard Cohen napalms the political considerations of the Nobel committee:

In their official announcement, the Norwegians -- the Peace Prize is the only one not awarded by the Swedish academy -- contrasted Carter's approach to the Iraq crisis to Bush's and then, as if no one got the point, its chairman, Gunnar Berge, told a reporter he was "unequivocally right" when he asked if the prize represented "a kick in the leg" to Bush. Unequivocally wrong! The kick was aimed a bit higher than that.
I have some questions for Berge. What if Bush is right on Iraq and Carter is wrong? What if the president's seemingly steadfast march to war mobilizes the rest of the world to finally do something about Saddam Hussein's concurrent march to acquire weapons of mass destruction? What if Bush actually gets the United Nations to enforce resolutions demanding that Iraq abide by the agreements it has signed? Who then will deserve the Peace Prize?
Or, to put it another way, what would you say, Mr. Berge, if the United States and its allies did nothing and Hussein got his hands on a nuclear weapon? What if he was then able to intimidate his neighbors or obliterate Israel, a nation where most of the population lives in two metropolitan areas? What would you say then, Mr. Berge?
In honoring Carter, the committee evoked the smugness of little powers -- the many nations whose role is to carp from the sidelines while America does the necessary business of protecting them from their own folly. In this regard, it will be a minor miracle if next year's prize does not go to French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who criticized the United States last week for its "simplistic vision of the war of good against evil."
"Young countries," Raffarin told the National Assembly, "have the tendency to underestimate the history of old countries." Oui! But old countries are sometimes world-weary and cynical, urging a "realism" that is sometimes a misnomer for the moral corruption they know so very well. I will take the idealism of the young any day.

Check out Tim Blair's page for important coverage of the Bali bombing. It appears that the attack may have a similar impact in Australia as September 11 did on the U.S.

Apparently the President has Oprah Winfrey on his side regarding war with Iraq. That may be Bush's most impressive political achievement. I may just become a fan of hers.

Apparently the President has Oprah Winfrey on his side regarding war with Iraq. That may be Bush's most impressive political achievement. I may just become a fan of hers.

I saw the movie Three Kings when it was released to rapturous reviews in 1999. It was a very good movie (albeit not quite as great as some of the reviews made it sound, in my opinion). There was one particular disconnect between the reviews I'd read and the actual movie. It had been billed as an antiwar movie, and David Russell certainly had nothing good to say about the Gulf War. The most specific criticism made by the movie, though, was that the U.S. should have supported the rebels after the official end of hostilities and not allowed Saddam's forces to massacre them. A very good critique. But the implication of the ostensibly antiwar film was that we stopped killing people too soon! It's a unique antiwar movie whose moral is that we didn't kill enough people. And if you put it to the director in those terms, he'd probably recoil. But that's what the message was.
I've been reminded of that inconsistency a lot lately. A while ago I linked to this post, which crudely and effectively made a point that I'd been noticing for a while: that critics of American foreign policy generally, and of the war on terrorism and/or Iraq specifically, often make arguments whose logical implications are exactly the opposite of what they intend.
A good example of this phenomenon is the debate over what to do with Iraq after we've effected "regime change." Josh Marshall speaks for many administration skeptics when he argues:

Everyone who's thought this through believes that success will require a long-term committment of a robust and quite American peace-keeping force. The phrase peace-keeping really doesn't quite do it justice. What you're talking about is really an army of occupation and reconstruction -- more on the order of post-war Germany or Japan, than Bosnia or Kosovo. Ideally a substantial number of these troops would come from NATO and other well-situated Muslim countries. But a dominant US presence would be required to make the whole thing work.
Unfortunately, it is very difficult to suppose that the Bush administration has the stomach for an operation of such scope or duration. Very difficult.
This is a reasonable point, and the logical next step would be to agitate for a post-WWII-style occupaton and nation-building of Iraq after the war (and take credit for recent reports that the Bush administration is planning precisely that.) And, as reporters such as Bill Keller point out, it is Paul Wolfowitz and his fellow "velociraptors" who are the administration's foremost advocates for such an approach. Those people should be the greatest allies of advocates of nation-building such as Marshall.
Elsewhere, though, Marshall argues for deferring to Colin Powell's judgment in planning for war in Iraq:

Getting rid of Saddam really is necessary. But it has to be done right. So, Mr. President, when the time comes for you to make a decision about Iraq, talk with Paul Wolfowitz and let him tell you what the goal should be. Escort him to the door and lock it behind you. Then sit down for a serious talk with Colin Powell.

(The article doesn't say anything about bringing Wolfowitz back into the room for postwar planning. Perhaps it was cut for space reasons.)
There's only one problem. The "nation-building" advocated by Marshall, among others, violates several of the rules in the "Powell Doctrine." Within the group of senior administration officials, Powell is as unenthusiastic as anyone else about undertaking the effort Marshall calls for. Ask Bill Keller:

This is a notion regarded with deep skepticism at the State Department, where Powell and others tend to see the aftermath of an invasion as a long, world-class headache administered by an American general. Not only within the State Department but elsewhere where foreign policy is discussed and formulated -- including the Capitol Hill offices of leading senators of both parties -- there reigns the view that Iraqi democracy is a utopian fantasy, that the country will fragment like a grenade into ethnic enclaves, that American garrisons will be targets for an eruption of Arab fury, that oil supplies will be endangered, that Americans lack the patience and generosity to midwife a free and pro-Western Iraq.

Marshall's beliefs about what to do in Iraq and his distaste for Richard Perle & Co. are pulling him in opposite directions.

Congress has approved the resolution giving the President to go to war with Iraq. Here's the text of the resolution. Click here to see how your Representative voted and here to see your Senators' votes.
UPDATE: Steven Den Beste notes:

We will now observe one of those marvelous paradoxes which keep appearing in politics. Since Bush won't require UN authorization for war, he'll get it. If the bill which passed Congress had included a requirement for UN authorization, it would not have happened. Isn't political logic grand?
...[It] will be evident to the members of the Security Council that the train is going to leave the station, and they can be on it or under it. With an authorization for war not requiring UN approval in his pocket, Bush will be far less subject to attempts at extortion by the veto powers, and they will recognize that refusing authorization will only harm the UN without any commensurate benefit. UN approval will still be useful, and Bush will be willing to pay a small price to get it, but he doesn't require it and he is in a good position to negotiate.
But if Congress had required Bush to obtain UN approval, then the veto powers in the Security Council would have had him up a tree, and would have attempted to extort huge concessions in exchange for their votes.
...In another of those marvelous political paradoxes, you're now going to see a lot more cooperation internationally. Denunciations will become rare and quiet, and offers of assistance and progressively more vocal support will appear. This is a critical political event for another reason: it will deflate those around the world, especially in Europe, who had still entertained the conceit that we actually cared what they said and that they could still influence the course of events by lecturing us. By its act of ignoring international criticism and obstruction today, Congress will actually encourage more international cooperation and less criticism and obstruction.
Because there is no requirement for a coalition, there's going to be one.

In honor of the impending Congressional approval of the invasion of Iraq, check out this Mark Steyn item which I forgot to blog until now:

War is hell for left-of-centre parties. The British Labor Party is bitterly divided between those in favour of war with Iraq and those opposed to it. In the U.S. Democratic Party, meanwhile, it's even more complicated:
Faction A (the David Bonior option) is openly anti-war despite the party's best efforts to turn off their microphones. (Congressman Bonior appeared on TV live from Baghdad yesterday.)
Faction B (the Paul Wellstone option) is also anti-war but trying hard not to have to say so between now and election day in November.
Faction C (the Al Gore option) was pro-war when it was Bill Clinton in charge but anti-war now there's a Republican rallying the troops.
Faction D (the Hillary Rodham option) can go either way but remains huffily insistent that to ask them to express an opinion would be to "politicize" the war.
Faction E (the John Kerry option) can't quite figure which position alienates least of their supporters and so articulates a whole all-you-can-eat salad bar of conflicting positions and then, in a weird post-modern touch, ostentatiously agonizes over the "inherent risks" in each of them.
Faction F (the Jay Rockefeller option) thinks the priority right now should be to sit around holding inquiries into why the government ignored what it knew about al-Qaeda until they killed thousands of Americans. To Senator Rockefeller, it's vital that we now ignore what we know about Saddam so that we can get on with the important work of investigating the stuff we ignored last time round.
I may have missed a couple of dozen other factions. But, taken as a whole, the Democrats' current positions on Iraq form the all-time record multiple-contortionist pretzel display.

Andrew Stuttaford has an interesting observation in The Corner.

In the New Republic, Jonathan Chait exhorts liberals to get over their hatred of President Bush and support the war (which is very credible, considering the source):

As American liberals contemplate the current president's proposed war with Iraq, it's worth pondering his predecessor's logic. For if you accept Clinton's reasoning--and few liberals objected at the time--you can hardly help but resolve that we must eliminate Iraq's nonconventional arsenal by any means at our disposal, including, if all else fails, war. Two things have changed since Clinton's comments: First, in late 1998 Saddam effectively shut down U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq, breaking the back of the already ailing inspections regime and granting himself four largely unfettered years in which to continue developing weapons of mass destruction; and second, in early 2001 Clinton was replaced in office by a Republican. The first of these points unquestionably strengthens the case for war: Saddam has provided strong evidence that he will not allow anything to deter him from pursuing weapons of mass destruction.
But many of my fellow liberals appear driven more by the second point. When asked about war, they typically offer the following propositions: President Bush has cynically timed the debate to bolster Republican chances in the November elections, he has pursued his Iraq policy with an arrogant disregard for the views of Congress and the public, and his rationales for military action have been contradictory and in some cases false. I happen to believe all these criticisms are true (although the first is hard to prove) and that they add more evidence to what is already a damning indictment of the Bush presidency. But these are objections to the way Bush has carried out his Iraq policy rather than to the policy itself. (If Bush were to employ such dishonest tactics on behalf of, say, universal health care, that wouldn't make the policy a bad idea.) Ultimately the central question is: Does war with Iraq promote liberal foreign policy principles? The answer is yes, it does.
...Deluded by the hope that they can have multilateralism and disarmament without the risk of war, liberals have concentrated their intellectual energies on the slim possibility that the United Nations will approve an airtight inspections system and that Saddam will submit to it. If that happens, they would not support a unilateral Bush war. And for that matter, neither would I. But the chance of that happening is small. We have eleven years of accumulated evidence suggesting that the United Nations will not approve loophole-free inspections and that even if it does, Saddam will defy it once more. Which is why it's strange to find so many liberals who consider themselves antiwar conceding that, if all else fails, they would support military action against Iraq. "All else" has failed for more than a decade. And barring a profound character reversal by Saddam, "all else" will likely fail again in the coming months. Just how many times are we supposed to go down this road before we realize our last resort may be our only option?

In the same issue, Robert Kaplan argues that Saddam is worse than Slobodan Milosevic, and that those who supported the interventions of the 90s on humanitarian grounds have no business objecting to the proposed invasion of Iraq:

Saddam is not just another dictator with whom we have to live. On a moral plane, even by the dismal standards of the Middle East, he is sui generis. The degree of repression is so severe in Iraq that whenever I would journey from Saddam's Iraq to Hafez al-Assad's Syria in the 1980s, it was like coming up for liberal humanist air. In Syria, despite the repression and the personality cult, you heard grumbling about the regime and could travel freely about the country, talking easily with people. Iraq was like the vast exercise yard of a penitentiary lit by high-wattage lamps, in the sense that nobody whispered a political complaint, and police permission was required to travel from one town to the next.
After I had my passport taken away from me for ten days by the Iraqi security police in 1986, an American diplomat in Baghdad told me that Iraq's was the most cowed population in the Arab world, and if the security services get it into their heads that you are suspicious, there is nothing anybody can do for you. Three years earlier, an American technician for Baghdad's Novotel hotel, Robert Spurling, had been taken away from his wife and daughters at Saddam International Airport and tortured for four months with electric shock, brass knuckles, and wooden bludgeons. His toes were crushed and his toenails ripped out. He was kept in solitary confinement on a starvation diet. Finally, American diplomats won his release. Multiply his story by thousands, and you will have an idea what Iraq is like to this day--at least, that is, until a Western leader has the gumption to stop it.
The only sensible comparisons with Saddam are Joseph Stalin, Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu, and Ethiopia's Communist tyrant Mengistu Haile Mariam, whose forced collectivization program in the '80s led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands in addition to the million or so who died of famine. Milosevic may be a war criminal, but his dictatorship was in many respects a subtle one that allowed for open power struggles and even for party politics and street protests. Milosevic did his share of political killing, but retaining his hold on power was often a matter of bribing and manipulating his political adversaries. Saddam only kills.
...Reagan's decision to deploy the nuclear missiles--a turning point in the cold war--could not by itself be defended by any universal morality, but it had a vast and profound moral result. The same will be true of an invasion of Iraq, just as it was of our invasion of Afghanistan. Make no mistake: This is a Reaganesque moment. For years intellectuals have pined for simple and consistent moral leadership on life-or-death foreign policy issues, leadership that does not cleverly parse words or twist and turn in the winds of politics and opinion polls for the sake of a tactical career advantage. Well, now they've got it. All of them, not just the neoconservatives, should support President George W. Bush's and Prime Minister Tony Blair's proposed humanitarian intervention in Iraq.

More notably, the Economist defends Israel against those who would equate its "defiance" of UN resolutions with that of Iraq. Of course, the article does not harp too heavily on the obvious points that Israel is neither run by a bloodthirsty dictator nor a pathological menace to its neighbors. But this is the Economist we're talking about here.) Perhaps they're trying to improve.

The Washington Post's lead editorial today mostly does so, as it advocates Congressional approval of the resolution giving the President the power to attack Iraq.

President Bush is correct in his assessment of the dangers in a world where Saddam Hussein is permitted, in long-standing defiance of United Nations demands, to assemble arsenals of chemical, biological and, in time, nuclear weapons. As even Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, a critic of administration policy, has acknowledged: "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein's regime is a serious danger, that he is a tyrant, and that his pursuit of lethal weapons of mass destruction cannot be tolerated. He must be disarmed." But we also believe that the congressional vote will be a step in a continuing diplomatic process, not a concluding declaration of war. As Mr. Bush said in his speech Monday evening, the course of U.S. policy is not yet set.
Both chambers of Congress this week have been conducting a serious and useful debate. Critics have emphasized risks that the administration had skated over and have urged an effort to build alliances, to which the administration had not always seemed committed. What the critics have not done is offer a cogent alternative policy. One could make a case that the risks of disarming Saddam Hussein outweigh the risks of living with his regime -- that he can be contained and deterred, that he will eventually die in his sleep or at an assassin's hand, that the unpredictability of war poses greater dangers than the threat of his regime. We would not be persuaded, but the argument is respectable; the dispute is a matter of judgment, with evidence carrying you only so far.
For the most part, though, the critics have not taken this tack. They have, rather, like Mr. Kennedy, acknowledged that Saddam Hussein is an unacceptable danger but then objected that Mr. Bush is responding too quickly or too aggressively. Or they have tried to have things more than one way, as in this statement from Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.): "Let there be no doubt or confusion as to where I stand: I will support a multilateral effort to disarm Iraq by force, if we have exhausted all other options. But I cannot -- and will not -- support a unilateral, U.S. war against Iraq unless the threat is imminent and no multilateral effort is possible." But if Saddam Hussein is dangerous now, he will grow only more so as he rearms without the restraint of international inspectors or meaningful trade sanctions. And if the threat is so great as to justify a war, can it really be safe not to act just because U.S. allies won't go along?

I agree with just about every word. The only possible slip-up in the editorial is the following:
In the end, much of the criticism can be understood as unease with the Bush administration's approach rather than disagreement with its assessment of Saddam Hussein.
That sentence glosses over the real reason - the Democrats' political difficulties with the issue; they fear getting killed with their base if they support the war and getting killed by the voters if they don't.

Megan McArdle sums up her arguments in favor of war on Iraq.

VodkaPundit returns with a bang:

A very wise man once said that if we throw away our freedom, if we renounce our heritage, there can never be another America. Never again on this planet will the political, geographical, and philosophical stars align the way they did in 1776. There are no new continents to find, explore, settle, and to which to escape all the bloody history of the Old World. This is it – humanity’s one shot at a new creation.
But we might just blow it if Washington can’t protect it.
Be afraid of George W. Bush if you must. But your real fear should be your neighbors, if Bush fails us in this Terror War. We’re just one more attack away from trading a lot of freedom for a little security – and getting the neither that we deserve.
With al Qaeda hurt and scurrying, our biggest danger now lies in Iraq. Iran’s government is rotten fruit, ready to fall on its own. North Korea is starving. Saudi Arabia exists at our whim. Syria is hapless. Libya is like Italy under Mussolini – loud but mostly laughable. Pakistan is worrisome, but mostly to itself, not to us. Only Iraq has the combination of means and menace to threaten us directly.
A nuclear-armed Saddam doesn’t actually have to level Los Angeles or New York to put National Guardsmen on every street corner. He doesn’t actually have to spray us with smallpox to bring our economy to a halt. He doesn’t actually have to lob Sarin missiles into Israel to blow apart our foreign policy.
Saddam only has to demonstrate that he can. Then we become a very fearful people again, much worse than we were on September 12.
Part of what makes America special is our simple physical separation from the Old World. We have no Kaiser on our northern border, rattling his sword. Our southern flank is poor Mexico, not expansionist China. Enemy warships don’t patrol our coasts, threatening our lives and livelihoods. Those simple facts accord us much of our freedom. 9/11 showed that none of those facts count like they once did. So now we must either police our threats, or police-state ourselves.
Most civil libertarians fear what will happen to us if we attack Saddam. I fear what will happen if we don’t.

James Lileks expertly dissects those in Congress who consider alliances to be ends rather than means:

Would these people have supported the Vietnam war if the US had a pocketful of UN resolutions saying “go get ‘em, lads” and we had a multinational coalition spewing defoliants over the jungle canopy? Would they have cast a solemn YEA in favor of funding the Contras if the UN had passed a dozen resolutions condemning the Sandinistas, and sanctioned a multilateral force made up of armies from El Salvador and Guatemala? Sweet smoking jumped-up Judas on a Vespa, GIVE IT A REST! If the US cannot act without UN approval, then pass a resolution that gives command of the Armed Forces to Kofi Annan and start whistling “Hail to the Chiefs” when the Syrian delegation take their seats.
The more these people whine about the need for UN blessing, the more I wonder whether they wouldn’t vote yes to a UN-levied tax on American paychecks - why, our “go-it-alone” tax policy must be enflaming the world, to say nothing of our “go-it-alone” highway system. And of our “go-it-alone” Apollo program in the 60s, well, the less said the better. Did we get a permission slip to leave earth and plant a unilateral boot on the Moon’s virgin soil? I don’t remember.
...In either case: if any of my local Senators had bitched and moaned that the US was giving in to One-World Government and insisted that the US never work in concert with allies or coalitions, I would have thought they were flaming sacks of bat crap. These were instances that required remedies, and if the task fell to us - for whatever reason - the greater good that came our action outweighed any silly paranoia about the UN, and whether our participation in a coalition would lead to detention camps in South Dakota guarded by blue-hatted Dutchmen. Coalitions are fine, if they attend to the danger at hand. If they do not, then the entire idea of a “coalition” can be tossed out the window without a moment’s thought. It’s nice to have allies. But it’s not necessary. If you believe that coalitions are always necessary, then the worst thing about the JFK assassination wasn’t the president’s death, but the possibility that Lee Harvey Oswald was acting alone.
The Senators insisting on a coalition above all else are the left’s equivalent of the nutlog right-wing UN conspiracy crowd. The only difference is that Wellstone starts to worry if he doesn’t hear the black helicopters.

Many have linked to this already, but Ron Rosenbaum's account of how he has rejected leftism is the definition of a must-read. He reported from an anti-war protest in Central Park, and was not impressed. The article is too good to excerpt.

Speaking of Jonah Goldberg, he has devoted two columns to summarizing and responding to the main arguments used by the opponents of war with Iraq. They are very good, and can be found here and here.

Peter Beinart argues that a successful war in Iraq can help the war against terrorism rather than hurting it, as has been argued by Al Gore, among others.

State Department officials say no country has even privately threatened to cut off anti-terrorism cooperation over an Iraq war. In fact, the German government, fearful that its vocal antiwar stance makes it look like an unreliable ally, has actually increased its antiterrorism assistance--allowing an Al Qaeda suspect to be extradited from Pakistan to the U.S. even though Germany has legal jurisdiction and promising to expand its role in Afghan peacekeeping.
Germany is acting rationally. Few governments want to incur Washington's wrath, and those that oppose America's war against Saddam are unlikely to compound the diplomatic damage by simultaneously stiffing us on the war on terrorism. That's especially true because shared intelligence flows both ways, and governments in places like Russia, Egypt, and Pakistan are at least as threatened by Islamist terrorism as the United States. Some dovish commentators worry that even if those governments want to maintain cooperation, public opinion will force them to cut it off. But intelligence cooperation is almost by definition covert; virtually no government policy is less subject to public opinion. If Hosni Mubarak really feels pressure to throw Egypt's anti-American masses a bone in the wake of a U.S. invasion of Iraq, it's more likely he'll announce a boycott of U.S. products or publicly spurn a meeting with President Bush than stop his regime's clandestine cooperation with CIA personnel tracking Al Qaeda fanatics in Egypt.
The third way a war in Iraq could undermine the war on terrorism, according to Kennedy, is by "swell[ing] the ranks of Al Qaeda sympathizers and trigger[ing] an escalation in terrorist acts." But while Al Qaeda might be stronger during a war with Iraq, it would probably be weaker after one. Take the war in Afghanistan as a model. U.S. bombing sparked anti-American protests in much of the Muslim world. But once the U.S. toppled the Taliban, the protests diminished dramatically. For one thing, would-be Al Qaeda recruits saw the hopelessness of confronting American power. For another, they saw that the people of Kabul weren't on their side.
An American victory in Iraq would probably have a similar effect. Once we win--which pretty much everyone concedes we will--the anti-American protests will end. The image of the United States as a paper tiger, which animated Islamists in the 1990s, will be dealt another blow. And the image of the United States suffocating the Iraqi people through sanctions, long a staple of Al Qaeda propaganda, will likely be replaced by images of American GIs being welcomed as liberators. It's true that over time the euphoria might dissipate, and an American peacekeeping force in Iraq could generate Arab resentment. But with Saddam out of power, the United States might be able to withdraw its troops from another part of the Middle East: Saudi Arabia. And given that it is the presence of U.S. troops near Mecca and Medina that led bin Laden to turn against the United States in the first place, an American withdrawal from Saudi Arabia would probably do more to undermine Islamist recruiting than an American occupation of Iraq would do to fuel it.

I think Beinart is right. More generally, I think that the assumption that a war with Iraq will hurt the war on terrorism is usually exactly that - an assumption, with little evidence cited. As Jonah Goldberg points out:

Taking America's side in a war is a very public act; cooperating with America's law and intelligence services is a very private affair. The ability to publicly snub America on Iraq while privately earning America's gratitude in the war on terror may seem like a boon to many world leaders. Pakistan's Musharaf would probably leap at the opportunity to denounce a war on a Muslim country — with a wink and a nod from the U.S. — while quietly rounding up members of al Qaeda and currying favor with America. Indeed, this is pretty much what Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Indonesia, Russia, and France have been doing for most of the last year — denouncing American belligerence toward Iraq while cooperating fully with the U.S. in the fight against al Qaeda.
Sure, if the U.S. went to war with Iraq, some nations might stop cooperating in the fight against al Qaeda. But you can't simply assert that this is so. Because the counter-argument is at least as compelling.
As for the second leg of the argument, I just don't get it. The war on terrorism/al Qaeda is not an intensively military war, at least outside Afghanistan. The numbers of military troops dedicated to the fight against al Qaeda inside Afghanistan is between four and five thousand. Roughly the same number of troops are spread out throughout the rest of the region, as well as in places like Yemen. The current military was built up on the assumption that the United States might have to wage and win two full-blown wars simultaneously, i.e., fight North Korea and Iraq at the same time. Now that the Taliban has been deposed, the war on terrorism doesn't use many tanks, aircraft carriers, artillery batteries, etc. The idea that a war against Iraq would drain the war on terrorism is simply not true if you're talking about materiel and troops.
Now, it is likely that a war on Iraq would divert some special forces and intelligence assets from Afghanistan to the Persian Gulf. Fair enough. But do we really want to make the argument that we cannot go to war because a few hundred men are stretched thin? We have an active-duty military of about 1.4 million people, and you're telling me they might as well stay in the barracks if a subgroup smaller than a softball league is busy? And if it's a matter of too few spy drones and cruise missiles, the answer is pretty simple: Buy more.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

has been coined by Prof. Reynolds.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

THE ALIENATOR: I haven't read Caleb Carr's book on terrorism yet, but if yesterday's NYT op-ed concerning the Israeli attack on Shehade is any indication, he should stick to novels.
Regarding the condemnation directed at Israel after the attack, Carr writes:
The reason was not Mr. Shehada's death ... but the fact that the Israeli military and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon understood that the attack in a densely populated neighborhood, at night, would result in many civilian deaths. The raid was nonetheless ordered — and the world received its clearest demonstration yet that the Israeli government is prepared to knowingly inflict substantial civilian casualties in its response to Palestinian suicide attacks.
Despite Carr's assertions, it appears that Sharon did not, in fact, know that the attack would kill many civilians. And a big reason for the criticism was that the seeming carelessness with civilian lives was a great exception to Israeli practice and capabilities - in other words, a recognition of the fact that Israel had not been "prepared to knowingly inflict substantial civilian casualties in its response to Palestinian suicide attacks."
Carr also says:
The Sharon government is more diplomatically isolated than ever, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad, two Palestinian groups widely reported to have been considering a trial cessation of attacks against civilians, now say they will step up their assaults.
"More diplomatically isolated than ever?" I won't bring up 1967, 1982 (when President Reagan publicly placed a photo of a Palestinian child casualty on his desk) or any number of past dates. What about Operation Defensive Shield in April, when international public opinion was ready to string Israel up for nonexistent "massacres?" Is Isarel's international standing so much worse than it was then? I doubt it. For evidence, see this report that the President is not interested in taking up the cause most dear to the hearts of Middle East "sophisticates," an end to Israeli settlements.
And about that supposed "cease-fire," see this piece, as well as this summary from the Times of London:

If those Palestinian terror groups under Yassir Arafat’s leadership were ready to end suicide bombings then such an initiative would be hugely welcomed in Israel. But the proposal floated would not have ended attacks on Israeli soldiers, did not bear the signatures of any Palestinian leaders and comes after all too many protestations of peace more honoured in the breach than the observance.
Above all, the ceasefire offer did not have the backing of Hamas, the organisation led by the intended target of Monday night’s attack, Salah Shehade. Given his record, and that of his organisation, the likelihood of any cessation of hostilities from Hamas seems wildly improbable.
I haven't studied the larger historical issue of the effects of civilian killings in warfare, but I'm suspicious of his historical claims given Carr's misstatements regarding the present.
UPDATE: Orin Judd directs me to his review of Carr's book, which seems plausible. It seems all too convenient to say that a usually-evil tactic is always counterproductive. Before operation Defensive Shield in April, it was apparent that Palestinian terrorism was working, despite its evil.

RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL PUNDIT: "MuslimPundit" Adil Farooq has returned, at long last. He discusses the meaning of the term "jihad."

DEPARTMENT OF "HELL FREEZES OVER," VOL. II: When intellectually honest and generally outstanding pieces appear nearly simultaneously in both The American Propsect and the Nation, you know there must be something in the water (probably arsenic). Seriously, TAP's Ken Silverstein shreds the argument that an oil pipeline in Afghanistan had anything to do with the war in Afghanistan, while the Nation's David Corn blasts 9/11-themed conspiracy theories and theorists. (Having not learned their lesson, certain of the people flayed by Corn responded, only to be cut down again by Corn's rejoinders.) Enjoy.

ARE YOU SURE THIS ISN'T A WAR CRIME? Steven Den Beste has been on a crusade (completely justified) against U.S. participation in the International Criminal Court. Here's his most detailed elaboration of why the Court would likely be a disaster for U.S. interests, and here's his explanation of the principles involved.

I COULDN'T HAVE SAID IT BETTER MYSELF, VOL. II: The Professor cites an outstanding (and long!) article by David White in New Zealand on the clash of civilizations embodied in the war on terrorism. It's too long to excerpt, but it's great. Print it out and read it over lunch.

MORE ON GREAT MOMENTS IN 9/11 PREVENTION: Mark Steyn is even better than usual in demolishing the clueless loan officer who encountered Mohammed Atta before 9/11:

Ms. Bryant has come forward now because she thinks "it's very vital that the Americans realize that when these people come to the United States, they don't have a big 'T' on their forehead." No, indeed. In some cases, they have a big "T-E-R-R-O-R-I-S-T" flashing in neon off the end of their nose. Ten days ago, I pointed out that these fellows made virtually no effort to blend in. They weren't in "deep cover," they were barely covered at all. Atta was the brains of the operation, and he did a marginally better job of it than Leslie Nielsen would have. His one great insight into Western culture was his assumption that he could get a government grant to take out the Pentagon. Yet no matter how dumb he was, officialdom was always dumber.
"If they watch this interview and they see the type of questions that Atta asked me," Ms. Bryant told ABC News, "then perhaps they will recognize a terrorist, and make the call that I didn't make." Meanwhile, here are some signs to look for:
1) He threatens to cut your throat.
2) He talks about the destruction of prominent landmarks.
3) He enquires about security at said landmarks.
4) He hails Osama bin Laden as a great leader.
...The good news is we're up against idiots. The bad news is we're also up against the suppler idiocies of current Western orthodoxy. Thus, the U.S. government's new plans to photograph and fingerprint visitors from countries "believed to harbour terrorists" have already been attacked by Mary Robinson, the UN Human Rights honcho who's never met an Arab dictator she didn't like. Islamists want to kill us in the name of Islam. Regrettable, but there it is. If we pretend otherwise, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Canadian Islamic Congress and the Islamic Society of Britain might be nice to us. But, speaking personally, I can't say I care. If Islamic lobby groups throughout the Western world really want to hitch their star to a bunch of psychopathic morons, good luck to them. It's a free country. Hey, we'll even give you a government grant to tell us how racist we are.

WHAT IS AND WHAT SHOULD BE: A great prescription from Strategy Page for the ultimate shape of the war on terrorism. I think this piece is more prescriptive than descriptive of current U.S. thinking:
President Bush indicated in a recent speech that all governments which continue to use terrorism as instruments of state policy, if only to deflect their own people's anger away from themselves towards us, will be forcibly replaced. He did not, however, mention what will happen when replacing a government won't improve the situation, which will usually be the case with failed/failing states.
Their fate will be extinction. I.e., failed and failing states which have served as terrorist sanctuaries will be conquered and occupied by a friendly country (us if necessary) with the means and ruthlessness to root out terrorist infrastructure.
This is a fundamental change in the post World War II order. Borders will change and whole countries cease to exist. The world will be rearranged to further our domestic security, and we will act preemptively rather than waiting for attack. These are logical and necessary implications of America's new policy, i.e., we'll get there eventually despite claiming the contrary now. Great events and major policy changes by Great Powers are dynamic instead of static. They create new environments which foster further changes.
The author is accurately facing the great unanswered question of conventional U.S. thinking - it's one thing to say that we cannot live with the current government of Iraq, for example, but what if the domestic alternatives aren't any better? One option is the current paralysis affecting the U.S. vis-a-vis Arafat; that is not feasible when the U.S. is the direct target. The alternative is for America to act like an empire with regard to such states. It won't be pretty, but what's the alternative?
Regarding the priorities of the war:
The extent of Iraq's biological weapons threat cannot be known until after its conquest, but Iraqi intelligence agents with quasi-mythical abilities, using anthrax spores of the quality used last fall, could theoretically kill several million Americans. A Pakistani nuke in terrorist hands could kill 80,000 - 100,000 Americans, while a fizzly ex Soviet nuke might kill several thousand.
This huge disparity in potential harm dictates the magnitude and order of action. Iraq's immediate conquest has the highest priority. Elimination of Pakistan's nuclear threat need not take a military form. We should, however, immediately start formulating strategies towards that end.
Threat elimination next in priority starts with terrorist-supporting states possessing chemical weapons - Iran, Syria-Lebanon and Libya. Iran's regime might not last the year even if we do nothing, and will almost certainly be overthrown by its pro-American people when we conquer Iraq. Libya recently offered a billion dollars compensation for the Lockerbie bombing to buy its way off this list. Syria's regime continues to support Lebanese terrorists so it must be destroyed, possibly with Turkish and/or Israeli proxies.
Then we must eliminate Saudi Arabia's regime as it is the chief source of Islamic terrorist funding. That might not be enough, though, as Saudi culture has an Islamic extremist base of several centuries' standing. Elimination of Saudi terrorist funding will likely require that its people be denied the physical means, i.e., the U.S. will control Saudi oil-producing areas and use the revenue to fund America's new empire.
Don't tell the State Department, but people in the U.S. are now considering such overt imperialism much more seriously. Why, Bill Kristol has even admitted as much in public to a European audience!

EVERYTHING YOU NEVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT "DIRTY BOMBS" AND AL-QAEDA'S CAPABILITIES: An indispensable primer from Joe Katzman, regarding the ramifications of yesterday's arrest. Also, William Saletan has an excellent description of the consequences of the all-too-likely panic that would ensue.
In his chapter on nuclear power from the book A Moment On the Earth, Gregg Easterbrook refers to the debate over nuclear power as "trans-rational," where the logical factors concerning the subject are "not just ignored, but actively shunned." The risks of most radiation exposure are much less than people think, and the anti-nuclear power advocates (with their allies in the media) have encouraged such hysterical thinking over the last few decades. If a "dirty bomb" is detonated, we may see the consequences of enocuraging such untruthfulness.
(This is not a recommendation to build more nuclear power plants; they make very little financial sense because of the costs and time required to build - not to mention their current role as potential terrorist targets. As Easterbrook wrote: "Nuclear power was supposed to be dangerous, dirty and cheap. Instead, it is safe, clean, and expensive.")
(Note: All Easterbrook quotes are from memory - the book had a lot of good quotes that are easy to remember. If I have not rendered a quote with 100% accuracy, I will correct it when I get home and can retrieve my copy of the book.)
UPDATE: More on the same from Strategy Page.

"WAS THERE EVER A TIME WHEN PEOPLE WITH WHOM YOU DISAGREED WERE SO GLORIOUSLY STUPID?" James Lileks asks the question in a Bleat too funny to excerpt. New Yorkers will appreciate another aspect of the piece: the frighteningly accurate description of the local real-estate market.

TALK ABOUT HINDSIGHT: This story beggars belief on many different levels - such as the sheer idiocy of the official: If what she's saying is true, she literally wouldn't know a terorrist if one threatened to slit her throat.
On the other hand, it is reassuring on two levels:
1) It shows that Al-Qaeda is not made up of geniuses - trying to recruit a government official you just met into Al Qaeda? Seriously?
2) I'd like to think that many people who would've been similarly oblivious before 9/11 would not be so now, so that any such slip-ups would be noticed & reported before thousands die.
We can hope.

OUR FRIENDS THE FRENCH: Jeff Goldstein cites a report in the New York Observer regarding the French edition of Saul Bellow's book Ravelstein, based on the life of Allan Bloom. Apparently, the cover of the French edition of the book contains a picture of a man which resembles classic anti-Jewish caricatures. The Observer story has a picture of the cover; judge for yourselves.

SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER: I know I'm late to the party, but this needs to be noted. Nicholas Kristof's most recent column contained a shocking amount of good sense:

As we gather around F.B.I. headquarters sharpening our machetes and watching the buzzards circle overhead, let's be frank: There's a whiff of hypocrisy in the air.
One reason aggressive agents were restrained as they tried to go after Zacarias Moussaoui is that liberals like myself — and the news media caldron in which I toil and trouble — have regularly excoriated law enforcement authorities for taking shortcuts and engaging in racial profiling. As long as we're pointing fingers, we should peer into the mirror.
The timidity of bureau headquarters is indefensible. But it reflected not just myopic careerism but also an environment (that we who care about civil liberties helped create) in which officials were afraid of being assailed as insensitive storm troopers.
So it's time for civil libertarians to examine themselves with the same rigor with which we are prone to examine others. The bottom line is that Mr. Moussaoui was thrown in jail — thank God — not because there was evidence he had committed a crime but because he was a young Arab man who behaved suspiciously and fit our stereotypes about terrorists.
...The Moussaoui case neatly exposes intellectual dishonesty on all sides. The Bush administration has engaged in widespread detentions of Muslims, twisting the law to keep them behind bars while denying that civil liberties have been abused. That's nonsense: the administration has wallowed in precisely the kind of hysterical wartime infringement of civil liberties that history always ends up judging harshly.
Yet civil libertarians are also dishonest in refusing to acknowledge the trade-off between public security and individual freedom. It would be admirable to insist on keeping our hands off potential terrorists until there is evidence that they have broken the law — but only if one frankly acknowledges that the price is a greater risk of terrorism.
...We must also relax a taboo, racial profiling, for one of the lessons of the Moussaoui case is that it sometimes works.
Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta bars airport security screenings based on religion or ethnicity. That's why aging nuns are plucked out of airport lines for inspections of their denture bags, why women with underwire bras are sometimes subjected to humiliating inspections after the metal detector goes off. But let's be realistic: Young Arab men are more likely to ram planes into nuclear power plants than are little old ladies, and as such they should be more vigorously searched — though with no less courtesy. El Al, the Israeli airline, has the world's most effective air security system, and it's all about racial profiling.
...As risks change, we who care about civil liberties need to realign balances between security and freedom. It is a wrenching, odious task, but we liberals need to learn from 9/11 just as much as the F.B.I. does.

While these thoughts to not qualify as "news" to many of us, it is safe to assume that they are considered shocking in the context of the NYT's editorial pages. Accordingly, Kristof truly deserves credit for telling his editors and many of his readers what they do not want to hear.

PRIORITIES: Apparently Saddam Hussein is giving millions of dollars to residents of Jenin who lost their homes in Operation Defensive Shield.
Two thoughts:
1) By Saddam's standards, this is an improvement over conditioning his cash grants on murdering innocent civilians (see the same article).
2) Just wondering...Iraq has money for this project, but not for food and medicine for its own civilians?

TERRORISM OF GLOBAL REACH: Apparently Richard Reid, the "shoe-bomber," may have links to Hamas and Hezbollah, "which would mark a dramatic shift in tactics by the militant groups."
Eventually I will publish my long-in-the-works post about why there is no reason to assume that Palestinian terrorists won't attack the U.S., and why a Palestinian state will make such attacks more likely.

HAMAS SUPPORTER TO GIVE HARVARD COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS: This is not a joke. Check out Matthew Yglesias' site for all the details and relevant links: he owns the story.

JUST ANOTHER DAY AT THE OFFICE: Israel has apparently intercepted bombs being transported by people posing as journalists. (Via Best of the Web.)

CIA=CYA, CONT'D: An excellent New Republic piece on why the CIA probably leaked the news of the August memo to President Bush.

WHY DO WE CARE, AGAIN? Slate has an unintentionally hilarious piece of selections from European newspapers stating that the cause of U.S.-European tension is President Bush's unwillingness to listen to their sagacious counsel. Or something like that.
Now, for the take-downs:
1) In the Times of London, Michael Gove:

This unseemly pattern of resentment towards US power, free-riding on US strength, and then patronising insistence that US decisions be subjected to “civilising” restraint, marked EU behaviour before September 11. And it has got even worse since then. From griping about Guantanamo Bay to deprecating the vulgarity of the axis of evil and sniping at US support for democracy against terrorism in the Middle East, Europe has never missed an opportunity to bite the hand which shields it.
...The current trajectory of European political development is driven by elites who, unlike America’s political leadership, find the moral burden of operating in a world of nation states too onerous. The direct accountability of parliaments is being supplanted by the closed power-broking of European bodies insulated from effective scrutiny.
...Instead of being able to project power against threats to our interests and values, Europe’s leaders seek to manage conflict through the international therapy of peace processes, the buying off of aggression with the danegeld of aid or the erection of a paper palisade of global law which the unscrupulous always punch through.
Europeans may convince themselves that these developments are the innovations of a continent in the van of progress, but they are really the withered autumn fruits of a civilisation in decline. Elites that shy away from electoral competition, demur at shouldering military responsibilities and temporise in the face of danger are destined for eclipse.
The Middle Kingdom sought to convince itself that behind its ramparts a uniquely cultured mandarinate preserved values to which the West’s barbarians could never aspire. Now, behind the tariff walls of the common agricultural policy and the borders hostile to new immigrants, Europe’s elites tell themselves that their low-growth, low-birthrate, low-wattage home still has something to teach America. It does. The dangers of failing to keep your nation free, open, vigorous and proud.
2) The inestimable Charles Krauthammer:

Everyone knows that all the talk of the "coalition" in Afghanistan was a polite fiction. Europe, in particular, was reduced to the sidelines because its technology is so far behind America's that what little aircraft, munitions and transport it might have contributed would only have gotten in the way.
For a continent that for 500 years ruled the world, this impotence is difficult to accept. It helps explain Europe's petulant complaints about American "arrogance" and "unilateralism." It also explains why NATO, as a military alliance, is dead. It was not always so. For four decades the alliance fielded huge land armies that successfully deterred the Soviet Union at the height of its power. With the end of the Cold War, however, NATO lost its enemy. With the demonstration of its military irrelevance in the Afghan war, NATO lost its role.
What to do? Madeleine Albright, never at a loss for offering yesterday's conventional wisdom, says that we should make clear to our allies that they must modernize their militaries. Why? Europe is a collection of democracies. And grown-ups. They make choices. Toward the end of the Cold War, they made the conscious, near-continental decision to radically reduce their military forces and turn inward in order to build "Europe."
They slashed defense spending and essentially demobilized. It was a perfectly reasonable response to the end of the Soviet threat.
Why should we be hectoring them to reverse that, to divert money from their cherished welfare states to their militaries? So they can become America's junior partner in policing the world against "axis of evil" threats that they believe are exaggerated in the first place? To join us in wars that they have no desire to fight anyway? If Europeans want to rearm and join the posse, fine. But we should not be pressuring them. America neither resents nor inhibits European strength. On the contrary. For a half-century, we supported the project of European integration and enlargement. For almost as long, under the rubric of "burden sharing," we urged the Europeans to increase defense spending.
They politely declined. Why should we be greater advocates of European power than the Europeans themselves? They have practiced international affairs long enough to know that diminished power means diminished influence -- and a radically diminished NATO, their place at the decision-making table.
3) Finally, Steven Den Beste:

I saw some sympathy, but I saw damned little solidarity in the aftermath of the September attack. I saw the US make plans to take out al Qaeda and the Taliban, and I saw round denunciations of nearly everything we planned or did from the capitols of Europe. I saw us accused of war crimes; I saw us being told repeatedly that we were going to lose; I saw us being told that we were going to cause a humanitarian catastrophe. None of those things happened.

I saw NATO invoke Article V, and the total extent of NATO commitment was to move half a dozen AWACS planes from Europe to the United States, to free up American planes to commit to combat. Also, a small number of NATO ships were moved into the eastern Mediterranean, far away from any potential combat. The only other thing NATO did was to try to claim that because Article V had been invoked, that the US no longer was permitted to do anything militarily unless it got permission from Europe first.
Oh, yeah, and the French moved one frigate into the Arabian Sea to help protect American carriers from any potential attack by the Afghan navy.
"If you'd just listen to what we're saying, you'd come to agree with it. We've explained it to you a dozen times before, so why can't you see the wisdom of our words? Surely it must be an intellectual deficit in you, Mr. President. Perhaps a problem with the water in Texas, or inbreeding. But we're your friends, and we're patient and kind, and we'd be glad to explain it yet again, more loudly. And maybe this time you'll come to agree with us, if only you'll attempt to apply your pea-brain fully to the task of trying to comprehend our position which is the product of our vastly greater intellectual prowess, worldly experience, and wisdom."
It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that we in the US fully understand the European position, and still disagree with it. We understand their point of view. We understand all the arguments for that point of view. We've heard them every time in the past that they've lectured us about it. And we still don't agree. Listening to it yet again isn't going to change that.
Good and honest men can come to different conclusions about things. It's not time for Bush to listen; and it isn't time for Europe to listen either. It's time to agree to disagree.

THIS IS WHAT PEOPLE SHOULD REALLY BE WORRIED ABOUT: Since the end of the Cold War, the India-Pakistan conflict has taken up at least 8 spots on any list of the "Top 10 Scenarios Most Likely to Produce a Nuclear War." This is why.
For a pro-Indian view of the whole thing, see this blog by Suma Palit.
Jim Hoagland has also written extensively about how Musharraf's vaunted "cooperation" with the U.S. in the War on Terrorism is a sham, and how Musharraf is a graduate of the Yasser Arafat School of Manipulation.
UPDATE: As always, Steven Den Beste has a skillful post on the subject - specifically, outlining a nightmare scenario. Let's hope he's wrong.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Jim Hoagland is at it again.

THE HUMAN TRAGEDY: William Saletan defends the Bush administration against the hindsight-based charges of negligence regarding the threat of September 11 in a fascinating way, by comparing the reports of Al Qaeda warnings to parallel warnings of Tamil attacks.
His analogy is wrong, though, in one fundamental way: it ignores the simultaneous notifications & warnings that Al-Qaeda terrorists were in fact in the U.S., training at flight schools. Someone should have put that information together with the predictions cited by Saletan and sounded an alarm.
If we had, or do have, intelligence that Tamil terrorists are in the U.S., training to steer submarines (however one would obtain such training) or other activities consistent with their past attacks, then someone should have the foresight to put that intelligence together with the predictions cited by Saletan and sound the alarm. The problem isn't that the government didn't follow every possible mode of attack. the problem was that the government ignored distinguishing intelligence which would have told them which possibilities to focus on and which to ignore.
Has this problem been fixed? I doubt it.

DOESN'T ANYONE REMEMBER THAT THERE'S A WAR ON? The government has apparently decided not to allow pilots to carry guns onboard planes.

CIA (OR FBI) = CYA: Apparently President Bush was warned before 9/11 that Al Qaeda was planning to hijack airplanes. I cannot believe how little has changed on the domestic front since that date. Glenn Reynolds has a selection of opinions on the subject.

IN THEIR WORST NIGHTMARES: A chilling account of what the U.S. was considering in World War II if the atomic bombs did not force the Japanese to surrender. It illustrates what we are capable of if faced with a true existential threat. It is also true that the massive imbalance of power in the world today means that the U.S. is unlikely to be faced with such an existential threat and thus is unlikely to have to resort to such actions. When you hear anti-globalists bemoaning the fact that the U.S. is so much more powerful than the rest of the world, keep that in mind.

THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO: Professor Reynolds has an interesting discussion with his readers about how smart or dumb Al Qaeda is, and how lethal and ruthless the U.S. will be if the "clash of civilizations" sought by Al Qaeda actually ensues.

DON'T SAVE THE IRA - OR, WHAT IS "GLOBAL REACH?" I had never put forth the effort required to learn about the issues underlying the conflict in Northern Ireland, and thus my thoughts on the matter were limited to incohate feelings of "terrorism bad - peace good."
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, I thought it might be a good idea for Britian, with the U.S.' encouragement, to mount a campaign to utterly exterminate the IRA. It wasn't that I thought the IRA had anything to do with September 11. Rather, irrelevance to September 11 was the point; in a war on terrorism, it would help to make the point that white European terrorists were just as worthy of destruction as Islamic fundamentalists. As Charles Krauthammer said regarding the inclusion of north Korea in Bush's "axis of evil," it would have been the "equivalent of strip-searching an 80-year-old Irish nun at airport security: It is our defense against ethnic profiling." Not long after September 11, though, there were signs that the IRA had been scared straight, quite unlike the Palestinians.
Now it appears that the IRA has resumed their activities which make them subject to President Bush's declaration of war against "terrorist groups of global reach."
Apparently they have been training Colombian and Palestinian terrorists in the fine arts of bomb-making.

FIRST, GOOD NEWS FROM THE TIMES: Nicholas Kristof has a shockingly good column today, noting, among other things, that poverty is not a "root cause" of terrorism:

...Osama bin Laden's tricycle was probably gold-plated, and we all know that the 9/11 hijackers came from privileged backgrounds. Look at ETA in Spain, Red Brigades in Italy, Aum Shinrikyo in Japan, the I.R.A. in Ireland or Timothy McVeigh: they suggest middle-class alienation rather than third-world deprivation.

ABOLISH THE STATE DEPARTMENT: I'm almost serious. Not content to be the U.S.' representatives in the League of Appeasement, it now seems like the State Department has been actively working aganist President Bush's policy of "regime change" in Iraq.
First, Jim Hoagland describes how the State Department is working overtime to undercut the Iraqi National Congress so as to claim that there is no viable alternative to Saddam:

Unable to dissuade Congress and the White House from backing the only Iraqi opposition group with a record of fighting against Saddam Hussein and for democracy in Iraq, the State Department is now trying to strangle the Iraqi National Congress with red tape provided by State's inspector general's office.
The tip of an ugly struggle between the INC and the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs surfaced this week when the opposition group was forced to shut down satellite television broadcasting into Iraq. The rebels had plunged $2 million in debt broadcasting propaganda against the Iraqi regime after State cut off funding in February in a dispute over accounting procedures.
This was no isolated event: The INC television shutdown came immediately after the White House rebuffed Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage's effort to funnel $5 million to the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank working to promote rival Iraqi groups. Armitage had failed to notice that Ned Walker, the head of the institute, had publicly scorned President Bush's "axis of evil" metaphor as "ridiculous."
...The funding cutoff to the INC, an amazingly detailed and fussy set of audits that the inspector general's office was instructed to perform on the Iraqi group, and State's abrupt cancellation of the Walker grant are matters of public record. Armitage's urgent telephone call to Henry Hyde to get the chairman of the House International Relations Committee to let the Walker grant go ahead -- despite serious questions the astute Republican legislator had -- is confirmed by State and Hyde's office. The White House role? I trust my sources.
State Deparment animus toward the Iraqi National Congress -- much of it generated by old and festering quarrels between the group's leaders and the CIA over toppling Saddam Hussein -- is also an established reality. Since Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 to force the Clinton administration to fund the INC as the core of an effective Iraqi opposition, the Near East bureau has worked to undo the intent of the legislation while avoiding responsibility for doing so.
Enlisting the weight of Armitage's office and the inspector general's staff conveniently accomplishes both goals, INC leaders charge. Well, they would say that, wouldn't they? But their suspicions are shared by some officials at the State Department who have witnessed the trial by auditing and persecution by leaks to the press that the Iraqi group has endured.
"I have never seen a group we are told to help treated the way the INC has been treated," says an authoritative source. "Any group trying to run an espionage and guerrilla campaign is going to have accounting problems, of course. This kind of find-every-flaw approach only happens when there is pressure from the top to change an outcome."

In a previous column, Hoagland assessed the State Department's attitude by putting his words into Sharon's mouth:

You think I just fell off the cabbage truck? You think I don't know what is going on in Washington? That I don't see the serious and widening differences between Powell and the White House on fighting the war on terrorism? It is a priority for State, the priority for Bush.
What was it Henry Kissinger told me about the State Department? That it would never frontally fight a big policy decreed by the White House but would undo that policy one small decision at a time? That means that protecting a Musharraf or a Mubarak -- or an Arafat -- becomes the purpose of today's decision, rather than advancing the long-term goal of going after the killers and fanatics that these "leaders" protect or encourage. Improving relations with China, with Russia, with Crown Prince Abdullah, that's the important business of foreign policy that State is eager to get back to.

If that isn't bad enough, Joshua Marshall has the following scoop regarding Cheney's trip to the Middle East:

This evening I was talking to a very knowledgeable insider on Middle Eastern affairs, and he said that the State Department had sent out word to folks in the region to give Cheney an earful. Among other things, said my source: "[Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs] Bill Burns met with a prominent Arab ambassador here and he told him, 'Don't tell me your views on Iraq. When he goes there you guys tell him.' So this is the vice president going to the region to hear Arab views and he came back and reported to the president 'The Arabs are not on our side.' They set him up. They set him up."

I'm not sure where bureaucratic warfare morphs into treason, but that seems pretty close.

THOSE SIMPLISTIC, VIOLENT EUROPEANS: Yet another great piece by Mark Steyn on the contrast between American and European reactions to September 11:

Well, sure enough, the crude, xenophobic rednecks did assert themselves. But not in America — in Europe. Muslims kill thousands of Americans in America, and there’s a big anti-Muslim backlash ...in France! Oh, and also Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal and those other provinces of the land of sophistication where explicitly Islamophobic parties are now a significant part of the political calculus. What d’you reckon Le Pen’ll get this weekend? Just his 17 per cent base? Maybe 20? And how many voters will stay home? France’s domestic intelligence agency has apparently advised the government that Le Pen will pull at least 30 per cent. That seems rather high for a chap BBC announcers, demonstrating their famous impartiality, describe as ‘virulent’. There can’t, surely, be that many French electors willing to vote for M. Le Virulent, can there? I mean, this isn’t Mississippi, is it?
For the Europhiles in the US media, the events of recent weeks are bewildering. It’s barely two months since they were reporting approvingly every snotty crack by Chris Patten and Hubert Vedrine and regretting that Washington was so out of step with Europe. But then the synagogue attacks became too frequent to ignore, and M. Le Pen whupped Jospin’s sorry ass, and frankly, if you can pick only one place to be out of step with, Europe’s an excellent choice. Like the man almost said, I do smell destabilising violence in the wings. In fear, the Continent, to my mind, has always proved mean-spirited and violent. M. Le Pen is certainly ‘mean-spirited’; the synagogue burners and kosher-butcher shooter-uppers and Jewish schoolbus stoners are certainly violent. And somehow, when Messrs Patten and Vedrine were deploring American ‘simplisme’, it never occurred to us that their idea of sophistication was a culture in which the most interesting political question is which strain of anti-Semitism — anti-Jew or anti-Arab or anti-both — is more potent.
...Almost every ‘American’ nightmare the elites warn against is, in fact, an already well-established European reality: downmarket TV, xenophobic electorates, Wild West lawlessness.
...Muslims killed thousands of Americans, but America doesn’t have anti-Muslim political parties — just a goofy President who hosts a month of Ramadan knees-ups at the White House and enjoins schoolkids to get an Islamic penpal. America has millions of Muslims, but they don’t firebomb synagogues and beat up Jews, and, if they did, the police wouldn’t turn a blind eye. Meanwhile, France has a presidential candidate who makes oven jokes, a foreign minister who believes in the international Jewish conspiracy, and a number-one bestseller which claims the plane that crashed into the Pentagon never existed. But look on the bright side: Europe may be ‘mean-spirited and violent’, but at least it’s not American.

MY ALMA MATER SLIPPED UP IN ITS HIRING: A visiting professor at Columbia Law School makes some points which seem obvious, but I never expected to hear them expressed by a member of the faculty there:

Nothing the UN has done in recent memory justified a shift in earlier attitudes. On the contrary, in the past year the UN sponsored a vicious antiSemitic World Conference "Against" Racism in Durban that wrongly characterized the "plight of the Palestinian people" as one of racial persecution, fanned the flames of anti-Semitism and provoked irrational passions that undermined both the cause of peace and of human dignity.
...Seeking to rid itself of a serious image image problem in view of its highly selective interest in terrorism, the Security Council last fall adopted Resolution 1373. It called upon member states to report back about action they had taken to combat terrorism. Defining terrorism was omitted. Reports poured in - more than 150 by now - and those from Arab states repeatedly invoke the Arab Terrorism Convention. It says armed struggle "by whatever means . . . against foreign occupation and aggression for liberation and self-determination" is not an offense [while excluding any such action directed at Arab states]. Those reports are being considered by the council's Counter Terrorism Committee, which is making sure no posssible queries or criticism of this distinction leak out.
Not that such criticism will ever be forthcoming. Syria - one of the nations the American State Department has designated as a state sponsor of international terrorism - is on the Security Council wreaking havoc. The council is now a platform for continuous advocacy of terrorism as a strategy of this state's political interests. These interests, shared by the rest of the Organization of Islamic Conference, were sufficiently powerful at the UN to defeat in January the adoption of a Comprehensive Convention Against Terrorism. The OIC is holding out for a license to kill Israelis.
The Security Council call for a Jenin investigation, and continuing efforts at the council to draw fire away from Palestinian terrorism, is part of familiar UN strategy. For years, the UN has been the Palestinians' personal, well-financed advocate. There are hugely disproportionate numbers of UN resolutions on Israel (19 in the 2001 General Assembly, eight in the 2002 Human Rights Commission) while allegations of human-rights violations anywhere else are routinely ignored. Nothing ever on China or Syria, for instance. There are myriad reports over decades on Israel by three UN bodies and by an entire UN division dedicated to Palestinian rights. All of this goes on while Israelis are kept on the outside as the only UN state not permitted to stand for election to the full range of UN bodies.
In the din, the UN endgame has been obvious for years. The UN has the answers: Jerusalem belongs to Yasser Arafat, as General Assembly resolutions have proclaimed. Enormous numbers of Palestinian refugees should be able to return so as to destroy the Jewish character of the state of Israel, according to the UN Durban Declaration - now metastasizing its way through the entire anti-racism program of the UN. And these "solutions" should be imposed by international intervention under UN auspices.
...In short, the UN turns the war on terrorism, and the meaning of human rights, on its head. Suicide bombing is right. Self-defense is wrong.

For a more usual reflection of how Columbia Law School responds to the war on terrorism, see these reflections from the most recent alumni magazine. While the fora took place not long after 9/11, the reactions haven't aged well.

THE ADVISER PRESIDENT BUSH SHOULD BE LISTENING TO: Bernard Lewis cautions the President against believing the conventional wisdom that asking the "moderate" Arab regimes for permission to destroy Saddam Hussein, and reducing our support for Israel, will enahnce stability in the region:

The submission to being scolded and slighted, as Secretary of State Colin Powell did in his recent meeting with the king of Morocco, and his failure to meet with the president of Egypt, make the U.S. seem it is reverting to bad habits. That only further contributes to a perceived posture of irresolution and uncertainty on the part of the U.S. administration.
This irresolution on our part has brought a corresponding uncertainty on the part of our nervous and hesitant allies, not without reason. Their fears have deep roots in the memory of what happened after the Gulf War when we called on the people of Iraq to rebel against Saddam Hussein and then abandoned them. Having granted Saddam a cease-fire, we sat and watched as he destroyed the rebels, group by group and region by region, using the helicopters we had thoughtfully allowed him to retain.
The leaders of al Qaeda launched their war against the U.S. in the belief that they were attacking a soft and demoralized enemy. They thought they could proceed with impunity. It would be wise not to let that misapprehension creep back.

THE GLASS-HOUSE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD: What on earth are the Saudis thinking? Apparently they plan to threaten President Bush with all sorts of horribles if they do not immediately bring Sharon to heel.
"It is a mistake to think that our people will not do what is necessary to survive," the person close to the crown prince said, "and if that means we move to the right of bin Laden, so be it; to the left of Qaddafi, so be it; or fly to Baghdad and embrace Saddam like a brother, so be it. It's damned lonely in our part of the world, and we can no longer defend our relationship to our people."
This, from the nation that spawned 15 of the 19 hijackers on September 11, from the nation that sponsors terrorism all over the world. If Bush gives in to their blackmail, the war on terrorism will be over and we will have lost. Rich Lowry has the right idea: Bush needs to be the one making Abdullah feel scared.

AN ALTERNATE PROGRAMMING SCHEDULE: Via InstaPundit, Tim Blair offers a TV schedule for the Middle East.

YOU ARE NOW ENTERING....Victor Davis Hanson offers a glimpse at an alternate universe.

THE EXPERTS HAVE NO CLOTHES: Steven Den Beste has established himself as one of the most perceptive writers on the Web. Today's entry dissects the conventional wisdom about the Powell mission to the Middle East and the upcoming Iraqi campaign. I san't pick excerpts; go read the whole thing.

THE "DOMINO THEORY" REVISITED: Bernard Lewis suggests that democracy can take hold in Iraq faster than we think, and that if it happens, other countries in the region will undergo similar, positive change.
I have no idea if he is right, but Lewis has been on target for years in describing the rage endemic to Arab Middle Eastern societies and prophetic in predicting the results. Accordingly, his views should be taken more seriously than those who fell all over themselves to predict how the U.S. was doomed to fail in Afghanistan, among other things.

THE FORTY QUESTIONS (MORE OR LESS), OR "WHY IS THIS WAR DIFFERENT FROM ALL OTHERS:" Victor Davis Hanson has that many (mostly rhetorical) questions regarding war-related issues.
Here are some of them:

Is there a difference between Palestinians preferring to kill Israeli civilians rather than soldiers, and Israelis preferring to kill Palestinian fighters rather than civilians?
Why are the EU and international agencies vocal about well-fed and humanely treated prisoners in Cuba, and yet said nothing when depraved comrades of these detainees recently executed an American soldier upon capture in Afghanistan, and murdered Danny Pearl?
If America forced Israel to give back every inch of the West Bank, if America withdrew all its troops from all Arab countries, if America increased its aid to Egypt, Palestine, and Jordan, if America sought to placate Saddam Hussein, remove all U.N. sanctions, and normalize relations with the Iraqi dictatorship, and if America sought to restore full relations with Iran without conditions, would the Muslim world really like the United States?
Why do Middle Easterners become far more enraged at Israelis for shooting hundreds of Muslims than at Iranians, Iraqis, Jordanians, Syrians, Indians, Algerians, Russians, Somalis, and Serbians for liquidating tens of thousands?
If nearly two-thirds of the Arabic world believe that Arabs were not involved in September 11, why should any American believe anything that two out of three people from that region say?
Will Palestinians cheer when Saddam Hussein launches chemical-laden missiles against Israel when we invade his country?

Just wondering...

SPEAKING TRUTH TO WEAKNESS: An outstanding piece by Michael Walzer, a leftist intellectual with tremendous intellectual integrity, in the latest issue of Dissent. He harshly criticizes his colleagues on the left for the feebleness of their response to the war on terror.
I would quote examples, but there were too many great bits to choose from. Go read it.

AND THE PROBLEM IS? Legendary anti-American and anti-Israeli columnist Robert Fisk has a piece in the Guardian where he loyally voices the supposed desires (for the U.S. to abandon Israel) and fears (that the U.S. will move against Iraq) of the Arab governments. No doubt faithfully repeating their thoughts, he writes:
Privately, pro-western leaders in the Arab world have grave concerns about the Bush theory of "regime change". For if Iraqis were helped to overthrow their dictatorial government, what if Egyptian or Saudi citizens also decided on a little "regime change" of their own?

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: This item must be seen to be believed.

ANNIVERSARY ITEM: In honor of the semi-annual anniversary of 9/11 and the horrifying images we witnessed again last night through CBS' extraordinary 9/11 documentary, here's a reminder of what one journalist saw on 9/11 in Lebanon. (Via Rod Dreher on National Review Online's "Corner.")

MORE ON "IT'S NOT OVER TIL IT'S OVER:" Another look at how we will know the war is over, from James Lileks.

THIS IS WHAT VICTORY MEANS: Another great column by Mark Steyn regarding the war. Here are his criteria for victory:
*Regime changes in Iraq and Iran.

*The embrace by the Middle East of the same reforms Turkey embarked on 80 years ago.

Worth considering. Even if you have reservations about points #2 and 3, the larger point is inarguable: we've only just begun.

THE VOICE OF THE PAST: Another excellent historical perspective from Victor Davis Hanson.

ARE YOU SURE HE WASN'T A SURGEON? Charles Krauthammer carves up the Saudi "peace plan."