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."