Tommy This and Tommy That - Unqualified Offerings frequently sees fellow bloggers alluding to receiving "hate mal" or just "nasty messages." For some reason, that never happens to UO. The following letter is probably the single harshest e-mail this website has ever received, and even it crosses no bounds of propriety that UO would enforce, for all the excess of its conclusion:

It is not for generals to decide to go to war, it is for them to fight it. Nuclear engineers don't decide where we need new power plants they build them for those who make the decision. Generals have an attachment to their troops so clearly they might have a sentiment not to go to war.

To put any sort of meaning to generals not wanting war is just grasping for straws to be anti-war. My stance on whether we go to war or not is based on lots of issues, but whether ex-generals want to or not is not one of them. Why not poll ex-military personnel? Going to war is a policy decision for our country, and I don't recall you ever quoting generals concerning other policy. Are these generals fully up to date on the political ramifications of the middle east to our country and the stability of the world? What makes you think that they understand foreign policy any better than you or I?

Now if the generals told us that there was no way we could win a war because logistically we could not get troops there or the defenses in Iraq were to dense, then that would be a criticism with merit. But why in the world would I care about what they feel in terms of our country's policy in the middle east? They know combat strategy very well, should we ask them for their football picks? Their job is to command troops, fight for our country and know military strategy.

Your missive tries to deceive your readers into thinking that the generals' opinions should have some special sway, when in reality they are just persons with opinions. You should be embarrassed to display such faulty logic in your writing.

Surprise: Unqualified Offerings does not agree. Further surprise: Unqualified Offerings finds it massively wrong.

First, several of the generals quoted in articles that UO has linked discussed specifically military difficulties, such as readiness and availability of troops and materiel, plus strategic and operational issues attending a war with Iraq. (Here's a list of topics on offer currently for general officers at the US Army War College.)

The notion that one becomes and remains a general and a political naif both is...strange. Somehow we keep making them President and Secretary of State and National Security Advisor and Special Envoy here and Ambassador to There decade in and decade out - indeed, century in and century out. How did General Marshall come up with the Marshall Plan anyway? Why did Truman let him do it?

But let's put aside Marshall and Ike and Colin Powell and not just Tippecanoe but Tyler. It seems obviously unlikely that a general officer in the army of a nation that has strewn its forces from one end of the globe to the other, a man who must perforce consult with military and civilian leaders of other nations in the course of his work, because that's what generals do, there's not much leading the Imperial Guard into the teeth of the British guns these days, doesn't require at least an effective informal political education to do his job. It's structural. See this profile of war skeptic Anthony Zinni, another General who was tapped for political work by this very administration. Before that, he was head of Central Command, in charge of "36,000 troops based in Saudi Arabia, at a time of heightened tension between the US and Iraq." Can you imagine being responsible for coordinating all aspects of US military deployment in the Persian Gulf and not giving some attention to the relationships with and among the various countries where your men are stationed?

Characteristically, he began learning Arabic, read a string of books on Arab culture, and spent several months travelling to meet Arab leaders.

Before he retired last year, Zinni spent several months travelling across Central Asia attempting to improve US relations with a number of countries, including Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

"War is the easy part," Zinni told the Washington Post.

At a guess, I doubt my e-mailer has done more to educate himself about the Middle East and Central Asia than Zinni has. And I believe you'll find that many US generals have undergone the equivalent of advanced degree programs in relevant subjects or have advanced degrees outright.

There's a further peculiarity of the current generation of active and just-retired brass. They began their careers as junior officers in Vietnam. That gave them an incentive to think deeply about the political implications of using military force, especially the reckless use of military force. And before hawks smear them as excessively cautious because of that formative experience, I'll remind you that they won that first war with Iraq people keep pointing to to show how easy things will be this time.

The effort some hawks have made to minimize the skepticism of some of our generals toward their clever plans has led them to denigrate these men in a way that the hawks would never have stood for if Clintonites had done it. Whether my e-mailer should be embarrassed for such behavior, I'll leave to him to decide.

Have Some Pride - Remember the classic SNL skit, The Sinatra group, featureing a bunch of musicians in a McLaughlin-like roundtable? (Look! I find transcript for you! Blogs have many fine links, yes?) At one point Sinatra tells Luther Campbell that "You don't need to work blue! You'll never play the big rooms with that crap. Ask Redd Foxx. You don't need the blue stuff, kid, you got talent!"

Unqualified Offerings wants to tell Scrappleface that he doesn't need to do the same sort of lameass parodies based on strained WWII analogies that lesser bloggers resort to. He's got talent!

It's Not the Settlements, a Continuing Series - Gary Farber finds an important article in Ha'aretz and draws the obvious conclusions.

UPDATE: Warning - Blogger anchors seem to be on the fritz again. Look for the Amygdala item titled "THE PERNICIOUSNESS OF THE CURRENT ISRAELI SETTLEMENT POLICY."

A Fanboy's Letters - Interesting e-mails re "A Fanboy's Notes: the Morality of Power" below.

Reader/Gaming Buddy Greg Pearson writes:

...in regards to Unqualified Offerings' superhero/villain post, the answer to that question would be Wildstorm's The Authority by Warren Ellis (another entry on my three best comics of all time), which is based on exactly that premise. True, Ellis and his successor writers are a rather more sympathetic to the Authority's ultra-liberal agenda than UO will undoubtedly be happy with. On the other hand, even though the authors find the team's goals laudable, the end result ends up pretty similar to that discussed in the blog.

A page describing the Authority series, which is on UO's list of comics to get to, is here.

Neel Krishnaswami writes:

I've actually played a game with this premise, and the characters do not greatly resemble super-villains (or conventional superheroes). The reason for this is that in the standard genre setup, a character can either support or oppose the social order. Supervillains threaten the social order with their diabolical plots, and superheroes protect society from them. However, this is a false dichotomy: it doesn't admit the possibility of convincing people to change society and creating new subcultures.

For example, my character was a superintelligent monster. Her response to being the object of hatred wasn't to lash out at society. Instead, she began designing biological treatments to make radical alterations to the body as easy and cheap as putting on makeup. Her reasoning was that people, given this new capability, would make use of it, and that subcultures would form in which her own bizarre appearance would be typical.

Her powers were very comic-book, but her plans are not. "Give people new capabilities to let them increase social diversity" is a credo that's basically impossible to describe as evil, but it doesn't accept the existing social order as desirable or worth preserving.

It seems like the important factor in Neel's campaign was that it was the people's own choice to avail themselves of the new powers available - they weren't imposed on them.

And your Talking Dog writes:

...freelance do-gooders acting to advance their own agenda (rather than battle specific bad-apples) are probably best classified as "villains".

Of course, your opinion is clearly the product of your cowboy American "rugged individualist" upbringing, and shows the defectiveness and inferiority of the American way of life, and its intrinsic ad hoc-ness and disorganization.

Thus, in the superior Euro-Justice League, the spirit of transnational collectivism and the good of all prevails at all times, ahead of the vigilante piffle Americans have come to admire.

A typical mission would consist of (Note: character names are simuultaneously translated bureaucratically from English into Italian, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Finnish, Swedish, Danish, Greek, Dutch, Esperanto and Arabic; Euro-comic books are much longer this way, but at least they are only be priced in Euros, pounds, and Danish and Swedish krona) such characters as: Common-Man (like Superman, he too is an escapee from Krypton with superpowers, but he has renounced the use of them in the interest of neighborliness); Tall Dark-haired Woman (a cousin of Wonderwoman from whatever Greek island that chicks like that come from, but she prefers a more businesslike attire, and feels that since truth is all subjective anyway, there's no need for the stupid lasso); Flying-Mammal Man (like the other guy, except he is officially resident of Monaco, so that his fortune is not otherwised excessively taxed so that he can still afford the decent gadgets, which he, of course, devotes solely to the common good) and Cousteau-man (unlike that other water-borne guy, he REFUSES to exploit innocent sea horses to get around, preferring to hitchhike on French submarines). These Euro-heroes go on critical, world-saving missions, mostly serving international criminal summonses and warrants on notorious international criminals, so that NATO (or the anticipated European defense force) troops have an appropriate legal basis to bring these evildoers to Euro-justice.

I already have the comic books 1, 2 and 3 (Euro-Justice League serves an international warrant on Radan Karadzic, EJL serves a Spanish warrant on Augusto Pinochet, and EJL serves a Belgian warrant on Ariel Sharon.) I eagerly await the "Euro-Justice League repossesses Shimon Peres' Nobel Prize" and the "Euro-justice League serves a French information subpoena on Henry Kissinger" books; I'm told the last two are scheduled to come out later this year as the culmination of Denmark's EU presidency.

You know, with American lone-wolf vigilate "super-heroes", one wonders why anyone needs villains!

Indeed!

Poetry Sunday - (This poem was published by Poetry Ireland Review in 1993. To forestall any outbreaks of cognitive dissonance I should remind readers that I supported Gulf War I at the time, and for several years afterward.)

Kuwaitis at the Beach

Armistice Day, 1991

Pieces of what we thought was the city
litter the ground.
The scraps of metal, bright as money,
jutting from the sand,

don't even tempt the children. We could be checking
the serial numbers
of all the VCRs in the wreckage
of all the stolen cars

on Highway Eight, but instead we've come here
to get the best view
of the west, the holes in the government buildings where
the shrouded afternoon sun shines through.

We're the opposite of a Potemkin village.
They kicked the facade away
and there we were. The rest is a matter of salvage,
and what you can buy.

The greasy sky is as black
as American soil.
Children have built a sand castle
shot through with oil.

© 1993, 2002 by Jim Henley

Poetry Corner - Here's what purports to be the complete text of Amiri Baraka's "Who Blew Up America." The lines are short but the poem is long. It is not, repeat not, an "aggrieved black poet with dementia" parody by the Onion. It is not the work of Scrappleface. The link is included for completists only, since there's not much fun to be had in reading it. (Apex of literary achievement: "Who know what kind of Skeeza is Condoleezza")

Here's a New York Times story from yesterday by Matthew Purdy. And here's the surprising and gratifying part:

Mr. Baraka was briefly booed when he read his poem at the festival on Sept. 20, according to several people present.

In advance, UO would not have put good odds on the typical audience at a poetry festival booing such a poem. (Ask Alan Sullivan if you don't believe me.)

The New York Times has just posted a follow-up story by Purdy that doesn't get much beyond Poets say the darndest things.

Desert Island D*&#s - Unqualified Offerings is "blood on the tracks." And that's a good thing!

We Were Just Playing - This week's reading assignment is Killing Monsters, by Gerard Jones, and this week's assignee is Eric Garris of Antiwar.com, who, on the evidence of his imprecation against a new GI Joe toy in the Penney's catalog, could really learn something.

Deconstruction of Mass Weapons - Bruce Rolston of Flit weighs in. Gary Farber avers that he added an addendum to his original piece responding to Flit, but UO is darned if it can find it.

Never Confuse Politics with Current Events Dept. - As of this CNN.com story, we are officially past the point where you can believe anything you hear about the Turkish smuggling incident. Now we are told that:

o The Turkish police let the two suspected smugglers go for "lack of evidence." They've disappeared. (The smugglers, not the Turkish police.)

o The official 150g, nee 15kg, may or may not be weapons-grade Uranium - the Turks are having it tested at a nuclear research facility in Ankara and "the analysis was expected to be complete by Monday." (Monday is the traditional day for injured football players to get MRIs too, for those of you keeping track at home.)

o "Former U.N. weapons inspector David Albright suggested the men could have been trying to swindle potential buyers. But he said investigators should try to determine both the source and the intended purchaser." Unqualified Offerings is by no means a professional investigator but the technique of releasing suspects to disappear on one was not in the Hardy Boys' Detective Handbook. It's been thirty years, but UO is sure it would remember that part.

o Q: Is swindling a crime in Turkey? Where's Istanblog when you need him?

So let's look at the possibilities, shall we?

1) Some Turkish cops and some foreign reporters got way, way hysterical over what turned out to be nothing at all. Odds: Decent.

2) The US and Turkish governments have decided that, on second thought, they really don't want people worrying about this stuff right now. Why: If they know a bunch of stuff did get through, or if they realized that the Uranium was destined for someone decidedly other than an authorized villain. (Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel all suggest themselves, though you'd think the Israelis could produce all the Uranium they need.) Odds: Decent.

3) They're playing the "released" smugglers, expecting to trail them back to their boss. Odds: Decent, but would be higher if we lived in TV.

4) This was a US/British covert op that went wrong. Odds: Non-negligible

5) This was an Israeli covert op that the US decided was ill-timed. i.e. Israel wanted to make it look like, oh, Bashaar Assad was smuggling Uranium into Syria (which is probably happening anyway) to get Syria moved up the invasion list. But the US just isn't ready for that. Odds: Small, but maybe better than the US/British op theory.

6) You and me actually ever find out what happened. Odds: Negligible.

Conclusion: Become a comics blogger instead. You get nice e-mails.

Smoking...Cap Gun - That Turkish Uranium bust turns out to be not kilograms worth but, well, here's Ha'aretz:

The refined uranium caught by Turkish police Saturday weighed far less than originally thought, an official source in southwestern Turkey said Sunday.

It was originally believed that the Turkish paramilitary police had seized over 15 kg of weapons-grade uranium in the operation that also resulted in the detention of two men accused of smuggling the substance. The actual weight of the uranium turned out to be hundreds of grams, a fraction of the initial estimate.

(Note: UO itself misreported the amount as "23 pounds" rather than 33 pounds.) Mind you, the Turks could be lying. Someone may have discovered a post-bust wish to minimize the amount of stuff perceived to be floating around out there. But the safest bet is always that the initial report is exaggerated. Note also that Syria (or whoever) may prefer taking their shipments in travel-sized quantities and it's possible that the other twenty packages made arrived safe and on time. Yossi Melman in Ha'aretz again:

Smugglers use Turkey's porous eastern border to import drugs, and hundreds of thousands of migrants each year illegally cross the rugged frontier on their way to more affluent European Union nations.

Nuclear Nonproliferation: Your official comforting fantasy of the new millenium.

Weapons of Mass Deconstruction - Lengthy dissents from the "weapons of some destruction" meme have been issued by Gary Farber of Amygdala and Thomas Nephew of Newsrack. Gary concentrates entirely on Gregg Easterbrook's article and omits all discussion of Unqualified Offerings' own earlier piece on the same subject, presumably out of politeness to UO, since Gary's piece is composed in a white heat. Contrariwise, Thomas not only discusses both pieces but wonders, darkly, if UO's WSD piece wasn't an unacknowledged inspiration for Easterbrook's.

IUOHO (In Unqualified Offerings' Humble Opinion) the Amygdala piece is one of those more heat than light entries. He complains vociferously about strawmen and wrong-headed comparisons, then commits some important ones of his own. Particularly irrelevant are his figures for deaths attributed to poison gas in World War I. As a commenter on his own site put it, it's akin to adding up all the deaths from bullets in the same war and concluding that Enfield rifles are weapons of mass destruction. Strangely, he and Nephew both point out that some gas and germ attacks can lastingly disfigure or debilitate even some victimes who survive. This is surely true too, but cue "Waltzing Matilda."

Gary makes a stronger argument when he cites some of the history of Japan's biological warfare "experiments" in China toward the close of World War II. (Epidemiological historians attribute deaths in the mid five figures to various releases of infected animals.) The apples-to-oranges problem here is obvious. China was not only one of the poorest and most populous countries on earth, but its infrastructure had been devastated by, depending on how you want to count the years, between two and three decades of total war, from the time of the Nationalists' rebellion through the civil wars with the Communists and the Japanese invasion itself. The appropriateness of the comparison with the wealth, population distribution and infrastructure of the present-day US seems strained.

Thomas has some interesting speculation about spreading aerosolized anthrax through a domed stadium or an airport terminal during a holiday. There again, you have to subtract - more likely, divide - the people who don't actually get infected, the people who fight off the infection without even realizing what they've got and the ones who seek help and successfully undergo an antibiotic treatment. What's left are the people who die, and, as Thomas and Gary point out, the debilitated. That's if a conspiracy to smuggle that much aerosolized anthrax into the country, get access to the ventilation systems at such facilities and successfully disperse the agent succeeds. Admittedly, the terrorists would be opposed by the CIA and FBI, so they have that working in their favor.

When all is said and done, you probably have about as many kills as the Trade Center attacks caused. And that leads to the part of Farber's and Nephew's argument that UO considers a misimpression on their part. Nephew puts it well:

So bad guys could use anthrax, or they could use something else. This is not comforting.

Well, as they say, duh. But I think both of them are confusing an argument that "These are not inordinately effective" with "These are not effective at all."

Let's suppose that Saddam's air force is or becomes able to make a fuel-air bomb. Hell, let's just suppose that he (or Bin Laden, for those of you who can't tell them apart) buys one off some freelancing Russian colonel. Now, since we're scaring ourselves, combine: a suicide bomber, a fuel-air bomb, a truck or a small plane, an American city. I daresay that when it's all over you'll not only have at least as many dead as in Thomas's holiday germ attack, you'll also have quite a few folks who have been, to paraphrase Gary's account of some nonlethal casualties of gas, blinded for life, had most of their lungs burnt out and scarred (I think he means literally scarred) for life - and some more who, like Thomas' anthrax victiims, suffer "from fatigue, memory loss, and shortness of breath." (Post-traumatic stress syndrome.)

To read this as "Jim says don't worry about gas and germs" is to miss the point, which is that a sober estimation of threats is your friend.

Lastly, UO doubts that Easterbrook was cribbing from Unqualified Offerings, so much so that it assumes that no cribbing took place unless it gets demonstrated otherwise. But it's nice to be loved.

A Fanboy's Notes: the Morality of Power - So UO's roleplaying group has been talking about possibly doing a superhero game. We were discussing one of the problems of superhero games, which is that superheroes are structurally reactive - they spend their time thwarting the designs of bad guys. So we asked ourselves, what if you had superheroes that instead had activist agendas to pursue, some plan for using their powers to bring about their own vision of the just society, and the answer we came up with was that what you would actually have in that case would be villains.

Ahoy There! - Unqualified Offerings has been keeping Seablogger to itself, which is not very generous of it. Only partially-accurately billing itself as "A Nautical Journal," Seablogger is the personal site of Alan Sullivan, poet, critic and old friend of Unqualified Offerings. Alan's literary archive, Cruising with Catullus, is itself a treasure trove, just not as frequently updated. It includes Alan's essays on poetry (including substantial pieces on A.D. Hope, Robert Francis and Richard Wilbur), a memoir of his sailing life, an online poetry collection, Jade Mountain, substantial passages of the verse translation of Beowulf he completed with his life partner, Tim Murphy, and, as they say, more.

But let's say you're not up for all that. Then Seablogger is the site for you. Unqualified Offerings knows what you are thinking: What do I need with another blog by a (self-described) homocon named "Sullivan?" Answer: Alan Sullivan writes real good! The "Fresh Bilge" link on the main page is where the latest entry is to be found. Seablogger tends to do one substantial entry at a time, rather than dashing off several smaller ones. The current item, "High Noonan," is his effort at what he describes (in e-mail) as "a (quasi) libertarian argument for taking down the Baath regime in Iraq." Along the way he meditates on the political effing up the personal:

But then came the hostage crisis. I remember visiting some gay friends on the night of Reagan's election. They all thought an American theocracy would soon be preparing a gulag for us. Tim and I scoffed at them. Reagan would be busy purging the economy of stagflation and bringing home the hostages. His fundamentalist supporters would go back to their churches and shut up.

We lost some friends that night.

Unqualified Offerings doesn't buy his argument for conquering Iraq (as if you expected it too), but it likes the matter-of-fact way he puts things. Earlier entries may be found at - where else? - "where the bilge goes." Try "Orchard in Autumn," where he talks about the roots of his political beliefs during the course of a memoir of a much-loved plot of land.

I'll Take My Stand...Where? - Reuters reports that Turkish police arrested smugglers with 23 pounds - that's critical mass - of weapons-grade Uranium. Glenn Reynolds reads more into the article than is actually there - he's already convicted Iraq of being the "demand side" of the transaction. It may well be; the article doesn't say. It could be Iraq trying to complete a bomb before the US can start the invasion; it could be Syria trying to complete a bomb before the Bush Administration turns its sights southwest from Baghdad; it could be an unsociable NGO like al Qaeda. (It could also be a black op to provide precisely the "smoking gun" Reynolds descries.) The suspects are in custody and Unqualified Offerings does not doubt the ability of the Turkish police to get any answer they fancy out of them.

Iraq is certainly the logical first suspect, though. Unqualified Offerings has never based its case against conquering Iraq (and Iran, and Syria, and Saudi Arabia, and...) on the thesis that Saddam Hussein wasn't trying to acquire nukes, germs and chemical weapons. UO has believed and continues to believe that nonproliferation is a fantasy and a lost cause, and that pursuing it seriously will do more harm than good. (See several of the "Best of" pieces linked at left. The Turkish story is especially interesting in light of the actual thought-provoking parts of Eugene Volokh's article yesterday in National Review Online about what Saddam Hussein might do with nukes. (There's also a major Freudian slip in the piece that we'll get to as well, in another item.)

For the next phase of the conflict over the conflict, UO sees two issues: First, the "soft opposition" to conquering Iraq is going to have to decide which way to jump. UO suspects that if you assign primacy to keeping weapons of some destruction out of the hands of Saddam Hussein, as many administration critics do, you're ultimately going to have to come down on the pro-war side. Long-term, any opposition to the war has to cluster around one of two sets of principles, which we'll tentatively - and tendentiously - call "pro-american" and "anti-american."

"Pro-American": Deterrence works in combination with a non-interventionist foreign policy; the risks of pursuing what amounts to an imperial foreign policy outweigh the risks of Iraq or any other international actor carrying through with a desire to attack the United States with weapons of - you know.

"Anti-American": The US does not deserve to be secure from other countries' arsenals; the US is a bigger "roque state" than Iraq or any other international actor; the proper US role is to put its wealth in the service of the "international community"; the US can not complain about any steps its victims decide they need to take in their struggle with American hegemony.

The first thing that must be noted is the similarity between the two views. Both think US imperialism is bad. Both expect that imperialism begets hostile reaction (our old friend "blowback"). You might argue, with some justice, that the two positions are substantially the same shape, but substantially different colors. to be a bit cheeky, one is red, white and blue (and with a field of thirteen stars), while the other is - let's say green and red?

The problem for any effective antiwar movement will be, of course, that the two tendencies will instinctively despise each other. That can limit cooperation.

UPDATE: Don't you hate these discursive bloggers? UO wrote that it saw two issues, then dealt with only one of them. Gaaah! The other one, another item, another time. Off for an afternoon out with Offering Boy.

Sequel to Where's Osama? Announced - File this one under Hunh!

An Iraqi doctor who fled to Iran says the Iraqi leader has not appeared in public since 1998, and uses at least three men who act as his doubles. The exiled doctor says the doubles take President Saddam's place at all appearances, including top government meetings.

Appearing on German television Thursday, the doctor (identified as Moslem al-Asadi) pointed out differences between the real Saddam and the look-alikes, including smaller ears, jutting jaws and thinner cheeks.

The doctor alleges that most television footage of Saddam Hussein is archival, and he believes the real Saddam may have disappeared.

via Voice of America News.

On the Other Hand... - Christopher Hitchens, who has a lot more credibility with Unqualified offerings than anyone in the Bush Administration, offers some interesting anti-Iraq arguments in his final Nation column. Based on his own reporting, he places a high probability of an Atta-Al-Ani meeting in Praque, and he writes ruefully of friends of his among Iraqi officialdom who have suffered losses at Saddam's hands. An excerpt:

But what I cannot bear is the sight of French and Russian diplomats posing and smirking with Naji Sabry, Iraq's foreign minister, or with Tariq Aziz. I used to know Naji and I know that two of his brothers, Mohammed and Shukri, were imprisoned and tortured by Saddam Hussein--in Mohammed's case, tortured to death. The son of Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz was sentenced to twenty-two years of imprisonment last year; he has since been released and rearrested and released again, partly no doubt to show who is in charge. Another former friend of mine, Mazen Zahawi, was Saddam Hussein's interpreter until shortly after the Gulf War, when he was foully murdered and then denounced as a homosexual. I have known many regimes where stories of murder and disappearance are the common talk among the opposition; the Iraqi despotism is salient in that such horrors are also routine among its functionaries. Saddam Hussein likes to use as envoys the men he has morally destroyed; men who are sick with fear and humiliation, and whose families are hostages.

Now the thing is, this sounds rather like Joseph Stalin, so we are right back to the issue of the odious-but-deterrable bastard. And knowing that the Atta-Al-Ani meeting happened is, properly, only the beginning of an investigation, not its end point. A country that had been pursuing a sane Iraq policy the last dozen years would issue an ultimatum that Al-Ani be produced for questioning, a la the demands, eventually successful, that Libya turn over the Lockerbie bombing suspects. Our actual policy however, has been to make it explicit to Saddam Hussein that there is no reward whatsoever available for cooperating with us.

One reads this passage

I am much more decided in my mind about two further points. I am on the side of the Iraqi and Kurdish opponents of this filthy menace. And they are on the side of civil society in a wider conflict...

and wonders, how long will we be on the side of Saddam's Kurdish opponents after the conquest? (Not very, as I have argued.)

Still, unlike some otherwise libertarian hawks, Hitchens isn't shy about telling you where he departs from the Administration's brain trust:

Only a fool would trust the Bush Administration to see all of this. I am appalled that by this late date no proclamation has been issued to the people of Iraq, announcing the aims and principles of the coming intervention. Nor has any indictment of Saddam Hussein for crimes against humanity been readied. Nothing has been done to conciliate Iran, where the mullahs are in decline. The Palestinian plight is being allowed to worsen (though the Palestinians do seem to be pressing ahead hearteningly with a "regime change" of their own). These misgivings are obviously not peripheral.

Hitchens may get UO's coveted "Hawk of the Year" award twice running.

Football: an Intellectual Journey - Asked how to become a writer, Ray Bradbury famously said, First, write a million words. Asked how to become a great pro football coach, Steve Spurrier said, First, work through your Danny Wuerffel obsession.

You Want I Should Answer Trick Questions? - Unlike lots and lots and lots of people, Unqualified Offerings can't get worked up about Dick Armey's response to a reporter's question in Florida about the differences between liberal and conservative Jews. It seems like one of those questions whose very structure makes it impossible to answer without pissing someone off. (UO is working from this story in the Cleveland Jewish News.) Had he launched into a peroration speculating on whether the tradition of rabbinical disputation is especially in tune with the "rule by experts" principle behind the managerialist state, it's unlikely his critics would have been happier. Not that his critics are unhappy now. For sheer insincerity, it's hard to top this from the joint statement of Reps. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) and Martin Frost (D-Texas):

"It's very disappointing to us that a high-ranking leader of the Republican Party and the House of Representatives would make such divisive remarks."

Translation: This rocks! We practically pissed ourselves with joy when we heard this story! How long can we keep it going do you think?

I Suppose Neo-Phalangist is Right Out! - Eve Tushnet has an interesting item about trying political labels on for size:

..., what are my options? I can't make up a word like "jfaoheihah" and use that to denote my political beliefs; I'm stuck with words that already exist, words that people understand.

She also doubts that the EU is a fascist superstate in the making.

The Dog Ate My Homework - Charles Kuffner of Off the Kuff was kind enough to ask me what I thought about libertarian Republican congressman Ron Paul's recent manifesto on national security. The first thing I think is, it's an awful lot to get through! I'm working on it, Charles, honest! but this is one statement for the Congressional Record where it would be nice if the author had reserved the right to "revise and reduce."

So You Say - National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said on TV that the Administration has evidence that Saddam is "sheltering members of the Al Qaeda terrorist network in Baghdad and helping bin Laden's operatives in developing chemical weapons" and that "details of the contacts will be released later," according to this story on FoxNews.com.

Wake Unqualified Offerings when it happens. UO is serious. The Administration has earned the benefit of zero doubt on the Iraq qusestion.

How's That Again? - Has Greil Marcus really earned the right not to make sense? Must've. Unqualified Offerings was playing around with the new Google News and came across the Salon squib Marcus wrote on the terminal illness of Warren Zevon.

Playing: "Mohammed's Radio," the churchy live version from the 1982 "Stand in the Fire" ("Even Jimmy Carter's got the highway blues"); the delirious rising in the 1978 "Johnny Strikes Up the Band"; the regret in the melody of "Looking for the Next Best Thing" in 1982; the shared dread of "Run Straight Down" in 1989; the delicacy of "Suzie Lightning" in 1991 and "Mutineer" in 1995. From 1976, when he went public with "Desperadoes Under the Eaves" on the album "Warren Zevon," it has been more than a quarter century of gunplay and bravado, not for a moment concealing Zevon's loathing for his own betrayals and those of the world around him. "I was in the house when the house burned down," he sang in 2000. From afar he has been a good friend.

Uh, right. Give UO Virginia Postrel on the subject any day.

Now speaking of Google News, the first thing UO sees for them to work on is jiggering the algorithm so that you don't get two dozen versions of the exact same AP story at the top of the results list. (Check the "Warren Zevon" results if you haven't already experienced this.)

Speaking of Google itself: WE'RE NUMBER TWO!

That's right, Unqualified Offerings is now the number two Henley on Google. UO has outcompeted the Henley Management College. Has-been singer Don Henley has seen the Deadhead sticker on UO's cadillac. Square in the sights of Unqualified Offerings? Some boat race.

The Second Time as Farce Dept. - A lot of NFL observers have knocked Denver Broncos QB Brian Griese for being too injury prone. And that was before this happened.

Unqualified Offerings: If You Don't Get It, You Don't Get It - Sensible thinking on "weapons of mass(?) destruction." Get it from the New Republic now or get it from Unqualified Offerings three and a half freaking months ago! And the New Republic is having all sorts of bandwidth problems. You, ahem, never have to worry about that here.

(Apologies to the Washington Post for recycling their old slogan.)

Standing Athwart Canadian History Yelling Stop - Your official Colby Cosh quote of the Day:

Any true, hardcore conservative would be happy to return us to the world of mail-order laudanum.

Why? Read all about it here.

Danger! Danger! - As a public service for this site's Canadian readers, Unqualified Offerings passes on the following warning obtained via the Elvis Costello Mailing List:

For those of you in Toronto, Sam the Record Man on Yonge (the big one) is giving out 2 free tickets to Ron Sexsmith's wednesday show at the Phoenix when you buy his new album Cobblestone Runway.

Presumably if you avoid Toronto, or at least the Sam the Record Man store on Yonge, you should be safe.

We'll Transform Their Culture, Like We Did with Germany and Japan - Hawks inside and outside the Bush Administration are cranked off about things that Gerhard Schroeder said to get re-elected in Germany - basically, swearing as vociferously and, likely, as forthrightly as Woodrow Wilson once did that he would keep his country out of other people's wars. Here's an interesting passage from the Washington Post's coverage:

The Social Democrats and Greens won a second term in office by the narrowest of margins. Schroeder had trailed badly in opinion polls until he began opposing U.S. policy on Iraq. His position tapped a strong pacifist sentiment that mobilized his supporters and energized his campaign.

"Strong pacifist sentiment." Where did that come from? Oh right. And damn if they can't just turn it on and turn it off to suit us.

UPDATE: This item gets an Advantage: Nick Denton! and even an Advantage: Slate! descriptor, it turns out.

FURTHER UPDATE: Gary Farber e-mails to point out Germany's break with its past in its last election, choosing a Chancellor not named "Helmut." Unqualified Offerings regrets the error. Once you get past John Major in Britain and Prime Minister Poutine in Canada, UO has a little trouble keeping all these foreign leaders straight. Gary also commends to the attention of this site's three or so readers that actually agree with it ideologically (as opposed to coming here for the jokes) this item on his own blog, Amy G. Dala. Unqualified Offerings commends it too.

(Stealth) Digital Rights Management - So the London Sunday Times included, curiously, a free Elvis Costello CD this week. And the free Elvis Costello CD included...

Hardware supporting Microsoft's Secure Audio Path DRM technology seems to have arrived, albeit somewhat bashfully, and as if that wasn't enough, today the UK Sunday Times newspaper unleashed a neat little trojan that'll upgrade you to Windows Media Player 9, complete with all those lovely facilities to protect 'your' music. If you're not careful, that is...

The hardware could get kind of tricky to avoid, but the file format itself is currently less so. Which makes today's Sunday Times exercise rather interesting. As far as we know this is the second such exercise performed via a ST freebie. We didn't pick up on the first (Oasis, sorry people), but we've had a good look at this one.

It consists of preview tracks from Elvis Costello's When I was Cruel - Collector's Edition, due out on Monday...

From The Register

Everybody's a Critic (Some of Them Are GOOD Critics) Dept. - Gene Healy on the Sopranos:

Here’s the point of the Sopranos, to the extent a show as rich and multifaceted as it is can have “a point.” The show is about an evil man with some vestigial traces of a conscience making his way in a world that has decided that feeling warm and fuzzy about yourself is more important than being a decent person. And everywhere Tony Soprano goes—Jennifer Melfi’s office included—he finds people willing to indulge that view. His depression, which is palpable, is largely a result of that conscience. He knows he’s a reprehensible person, and he’s half crying out to hear it from someone.

Gene officially joins Radley Balko and Myles Kantor as great, essential and libertarian critics of the show.

UPDATE: Mr. Mike of Random Ruminations points out that UO forgot to link to Gene Healy's essay, which is considerably longer than the quoted bit and well worth reading. UO can be such a dumbbell sometimes.

Military Census - More retired generals urge against rushing to war in Iraq (and Iran, and Syria, and Saudi Arabia, and...), as reported by the New York Times - three, in fact, all with three stars. No doubt your NRO and Weekly Standard types will soon inform us that these men too are washed-up has-beens, like all the other retired and active-duty brass who have been pooh-poohing their clever plans. Makes you wonder how the US got to be a superpower in the first place, if all our past and present generals are such blinkered time-servers as we keep being told.

Vague Hints and Indirect Indications Dept. - From yesterday's Associated Press, via FoxNews:

WASHINGTON — An FBI supervisor, sounding a prophetic pre-Sept. 11 alarm, warned FBI headquarters that student pilot Zacarias Moussaoui was so dangerous he might "take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center," a congressional investigator said in a report Tuesday.

But really, what are the odds. More:

In the other example, a Phoenix FBI agent's warning in July 2001 that Usama bin Laden might be sending terrorists to train at U.S. flight schools was deemed "speculative and not particularly significant," said the report by Eleanor Hill, staff director for the House and Senate intelligence committees' joint inquiry into the attacks.

New York-based agents already knew Middle Eastern flight students associated with bin Laden were training in the United States, but believed he wanted them to transport goods and people in Afghanistan, she said.

In presenting her report to the committees, Hill did not suggest that better handling of the Moussaoui case or the so-called Phoenix memo or any other lead would have prevented the Sept 11 attacks. But she said the country could have been better prepared if those cases had been tied together and with other clues

Gosh, I suppose so. Remind Unqualified Offerings again who got fired over all this.

Advantage:...? - Well now! A golden oldie topic resurfaces in a striking way!

President George Bush decided to turn to the United Nations after being advised that the U.S. military was unprepared for a war with Iraq.

Related factors included a simulated defeat of U.S. naval forces by Iraq in the Millennium Challenge military exercises last month and an intelligence dispute between the CIA and the DIA.

Western diplomatic sources said Bush's surprise call for the return of UN weapons inspectors stemmed from a recommendation by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the United States required up to six more months to prepare for any war against the regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The sources said U.S. Central Command was preoccupied with the the war in Afghanistan and possessed insufficient assets, logistics, and supplies in countries that neighbor Iraq.

The shortcomings in the U.S. military were pointed out in the Millennium Challenge exercise launched last month, Middle East Newsline reported. The exercise sought to simulate a U.S. attack against a Middle East enemy that resembled Iraq.

Officials said in the simulation U.S. naval forces were decimated by an Iraqi missile and weapons of mass destruction strike. The Iraqi side in the exercise used cruise missiles to overwhelm the U.S. Navy's GS radar and sink the entire simulated Blue Armada fleet of 16 ships.

So says an article in the World Tribune. Mind you, it could all be disinformation. But, to repeat: Well now!

Memo to Jane Galt: See paragraph 3. It relates to a question you had yesterday.

Jane also weighs in on bikinis and burkhas, with an interesting consideration of sexuality and the forbidden.

Imitation Music Blog Post - 'Yes, you are a groupie'
And 35 more things every rock critic should know from the Austin American-Statesman's SXSW 2002 section, including, but not limited to

1. Writing for rollingstone.com isn't the same as writing for Rolling Stone. But then, these days writing for Rolling Stone isn't the same as writing for Rolling Stone.

5. The first person is not the First Amendment. It's a privilege, not a right.

7. It's a record review, not a term paper.

13. Stop trying to make Richard Thompson famous. Ain't gonna happen. [Sigh. - UO]

17. Saying you like Radiohead's "difficult" albums will only encourage them.

22. Don't you dare cross the street to avoid Mojo Nixon. Five years ago you were sucking up to him.

28. Greil Marcus has earned the right to not make sense. You haven't.

29. Having Courtney Love hit on you during an interview is as special as a free coffee refill.

35. Re: the Strokes. Make up your mind already.

All of which reminds Unqualified Offerings: "Paradise," the song that's half from a suicide bomber's POV on The Rising? How come nobody has mentioned that it's secretly "The Sounds of Silence?" (Listen, children, and you shall hear.)

Imitation Hip Blog Link - This long text animation is oddly compelling. (Note: No dirty pictures, but adult language and sexual situations.) It's like, a flash animation or something. Yeah, Unqualified Offerings is hopeless as a non-political blogger The sequence has a great jazz soundtrack too. Link via Where is Raed via Eve Tushnet. The proprietor, Salman Pax, also offers some Iraq-War items from a different viewpoint than the rest of the blogosphere - literally.

Three Two-Piece Pieces - Aziz Poonawalla revises and extends his bikini remarks from yesterday. Unqualified Offerings commends it to your attention, though it thinks Aziz is playing out a losing hand here. He makes some interesting points about modesty as a virtue, but never, to UO's mind, bridges the gulf between that virtue and oppression. Several of the commenters make this and allied points. (And on the Really, What Are the Odds? front, Unqualified Offerings got a chuckle out of this passage: "I'll assume that [Jim] holds similar views as Steven Den Beste...")

UO should stress that it never thought that Aziz was defending the forced imposition of the burkha on women. While UO doesn't think bikinis are bad things, its argument was that even if that is true, there is still the question of degree (which is worse?) and that question is easily answered.

Diana Moon of Letter from Gotham weighs in on bikinis, lookism, heightism and suchlike here. But now, UO has to wonder; shouldn't it be Letters From Gotham? There's way more than one.

And Glenn Reynolds, who agrees that Aziz "makes a lot of worthy points," offers a coda:

Is it a "power play" when women want to wear bikinis to please men? Is it a "power play" when men dress or groom or whatever in a particular way to please women? And -- even assuming that this statement is true -- what precisely is immoral about it? Not much that I can see.

I'll go along with that.

Dialogue in a Toys 'R' Us

Mrs Offering: We have to find something for this child.
Unqualified Offerings: How about the Jim Morrison Action Figure in the next aisle?
Mrs. Offering: Jim Morrison of the Doors???
Unqualified Offerings: Honest to God.
Mrs. Offering: How could there be a Jim Morrison action figure??
Unqualified Offerings: Okay, a Jim Morrison Indolence Figure, then.
Mrs. Offering: That makes more sense.

Make that a Double - Unqualified Offerings loves this entire post by Hesiod Theogony, but especially this passage:

At bottom, I think my biggest problem with this war is that, apart from it being unnecessary, it really goes against the fundamental principles and character of our nation. We do not start wars, we finish them.

As for the question of whether and when the US may become an empire, Hesiod Theogony, meet Garet Garrett.

#*$@%$ by an Angel - Hm. Colby Cosh: at least as funny as The Poor Man. And kids, it's humor with a point:

No, Della and Michael aren't that kind of angel: they're the kind who help retarded kids raise money at bake sales. And presumably it's some other angel's job to shatter the kid's chromosomes in the first place. I dimly recall that Touched by an Angel has flirted with this theme, actually--but a truly Christian presentation would try to actively convince the viewer that the "bad" angel's purposes, which are the Lord's will, are every bit as much to be applauded and cheered for as the "good" angel's. How about a whole spinoff devoted to the bad guys? Mutilated by an Angel. Decapitated by an Angel.

Not going to happen, I guess. We are often told that America is the most Christian society left in the world, but for how many people is it a trivial Christianity--a thinly disguised cult of whimpering zombie niceness? A lot, I suspect, or the Christian clergy wouldn't stand for televised Manichaean nonsense trafficking under its brand name.

We Get Letters - Loyal Reader Kevin Maroney writes to quibble with an aspect of the Godwin's Law item, below:

Adolf Hitler was never Adolf Schickelgruber. His father was born Alois Schickelgruber, but changed his name to Hittler as part of the condition of marrying his third wife, Klara; Adolf was born several years later.

I don't know why this is an issue for me. On the first level, I find making fun of people's names to be pretty much the lowest form of insult humor. (I'm sure the fact that I was subjected to a lot of it when young has nothing whatsoever to do with this.)

Also, I know that within Hitler's lifetime, the "Schickelgruber" name was used as a class insult against Hitler. It's a Bohemian, not a "true German", name. So mockery of the name is tied in with precisely the nationalism which is supposed to be one of the reasons the Nazis were bad.

Finally, the fact of Alois Schickelgruber's illegitimacy fuelled rumors that Alois's father was Jewish. It strikes me as disturbingly likely that this had significant historical consequence. Harping on it seems to be a recapitulation.

It's an interesting idea. Unqualified Offerings was, needless to say, casting about desperately for a way to avoid using "Hitler" twice in the same sentence. Perhaps next time it will cast farther.

Everybody's a Critic, Including Unqualified Offerings - Otherwise-reasonable Aziz Poonawalla averred today that "Actually, the bikini is as much a tool of female oppression as the Saudi burka," which is, much as UO admires Aziz, nevertheless a crock.

1) This would be a shade closer to true if western women who ever tried to wear something other than bikinis - like, say, a business suit - GOT THE SHIT KICKED OUT OF THEM FOR DOING SO. But there's more: 2) We may feel very ambivalent about it, but women's sexual power is real. In a REAL patriarchy, as opposed to a half-assed one, it's practically the only power women have available. Afghanistan is a real patriarchy for sure, and the burkha robs women of their sexual power by design. That is its function. But we're still not done. 3) A bikini-clad woman has a face. Men can see when she is happy, when she is sad, when she is cogitating, when she is pissed off and, especially, when she suffers. There are some sick bastards who get off on visible evidence of female suffering. But even most squishy sexists are as squeamish as the rest of us about seeing torment play across the face of another human being. This too is what the burkha takes away by design. There is simply no comparison that is not invidious.

Updates Dept. - Gene Healy seems to have successfully made the transition to Movable Type. This means that about a week's worth of stillborn Blogger posts have been salvaged and published as part of the import process, so there's lots of new material.

Timothy Virkkala e-mails to say that you can access the "Instead of a Blog" archives by clicking the "Past Comments" button.

Colby Cosh has a couple of excellent, funny pieces supporting the legalization of pot, which just makes sense somehow. See here and here.

He's a man who knows how to respond to critics, too:

Finally, American-living-in-Edmonton Sam Mikes has a rebuttal to my thoughts on pot. And, er, also a rebuttal to my thoughts on Canadian healthcare. Jesus, Sam, isn't there another goddamn pinata you can go whack? Hit me all you like, I don't shit candy.

That Was Fast - The Elvis Costello News Blog already has its own domain. Currently on offer, a setlist from last night's Seattle show.

Good News for Doves! - We have captured the coveted "simplistic" designation from our opponents! You may recall that one Hubert Vedrine, of the Republic of France, gave an interview last winter criticising the US for its "simplistic" ideas about foreign policy. Ever since then, the hawks (with and without blogs) have worn the term "simplistic" like a badge of honor.

Well, guess what, fellow anti-interventionists: It's ours now! UO's favorite hawkish blogger, Megan McArdle, today wrote

I just realized one of the things that really, really, bothers me about a lot of the anti-war arguments; it's the huge number of people who want to cast this in the simplistic terms of a morality play.

This so rocks! Give up now, Imperialists! Our simplisme will refute you at every turn!

Everybody's a Critic Dept. - In which Unqualified Offerings is not universally beloved!

Selenously pseudonymous Diana Moon of Letter from Gotham says that UO seems "to have joined the anti-aircraft battery-on-the-roof-crowd," which you'll know, if you follow Diana's blog as religiously as UO does, is supposed to be a bad thing. To UO's contention that Iraq is more properly Israel's problem than America's, and that Israel, with a whole government and military of its own to look after its affairs, Diana replies:

Meaning that's not terribly realistic, is it? After pretty much shackling Israel's hands behind its back for the past few years, to then unleash them to do the dirty work we can't be bothered to do would seem a mite, well, expedient? Phony? Conduct unbefitting a great power with a reputation for honor? Cowardly?

It's an interesting picture, really, the US "shackling" Israel's hands. UO wonders if Katherine Gear might not be able to profitably work it into her map of fetishes: the bondage games of nations. What does it say about the US that we're paying for it?

On a more serious note, Diana has hit on a real issue: it sucks to be a client state sometimes. That's the strategy Israel's leaders chose to pursue, though. UO likes to think they soberly considered whether 'twas better to be the largest recipient of US aid on the planet, and the proximate cause of the second-largest amount of aid the US dishes out (to Egypt), along with a certain amount of "shackling," versus the free, manly life of a true regional power beholden to no overlord, however fitfully. UO happens to think they chose wrong and would have things otherwise. It invites Ariel Sharon to join it on this path.

Newish blogger D.S. Monoclonius turns out to be someone else who took exception to "It's So Easy II," on September 13. (It just showed up in UO's referrer logs yesterday.) He explains our Japanese triumph as follows:

Well, he is utterly wrong of course. What we did was take an expansionist, murderous, and extremely dangerous, anti-modern Japan and make it into a very junior partner in our much broader hegemonic project. We fought wars in Asia (Korea, Vietnam, a coming conflict with China perhaps) exactly so Japan would keep to its own business and not lift its head up from its designated task at all. While that country is stagnant economically and somewhat infantile politically and socially, it has proven itself to be an excellent partner in a wide variety of ways, for example, supplying our economy with a phenomenal array of high technology products, buying ours, and forcing our flabby car industry to actually build decent cars. Don't get me wrong, I am no fan of the trade imbalance we have with Japan, nor of our dependence on them (I still a remember "A Japan That Can Say No"), nor of our lack of maneuverability in Asia. But this was the Acheson-MacArthur vision, no doubt about it. It worked well for all involved (except for the American working class).

All of this is supposed to be a good thing. UO finds him on surer ground in some of his passages on Germany, though there is also this curious parenthetical:

(The EU may be corporatist, but fascist? What definition are you using?)

Answer: Pretty much the same one that UO's friends at Samizdata use, it supposes. More seriously, this website's thinking about the term "fascism" has been heavily influenced by the work of Stanley G. Payne, and A. James Gregor's remark that fascism is "a marxist heresy." (See also this superb article by David Ramsey Steele, "The Mystery of Fascism.") Corporatism is certainly a big part of it.

Leninism aimed to forge a militant class consciousness. Italian fascism aimed to forge a militant national consciousness. German national socialism aimed to forge a militant racial consciousness (not the same thing as "national consciousness"). Islamism aims to form a militant religious consciousness. (UO endorsed the term "islamofascism" - and there was much rejoicing - way back here.)

Clearly the EU is trying to aggressively forge a new group consciousness, whether one call it "supranational" or "continental" or whatever. How militant is that consciousness intended to be? That's open to discussion. (Start by asking these people.) Clearly, the EU as it stands is not aggressively militarist. (Except, perhaps, toward its own subjects...)

That certainly makes the EU an attempted evolution of the corporatist regime. The EU is also very much a work in progress. This is not separable from the other signal characteristic of revolutionary marxism and fascism - the identification of an enemy other - Capital (Marx); Finance(Ezra Pound); the industrial powers of the day (Mussolini); International Jewry (Hitler); the "Jew-Crusaders" (Bin Laden).

A live question regarding the EU is, since it has embarked on a fascist project, will it have to resort to classically fascist means to further it? That is, will circumstance require its shepherds to lead the flock down an increasingly militarized, oppositional path? And who will be the bogeymen. So far, the EU bogeyman is the resident "xenophobe" - that is, pretty much anyone within the member states who opposes the EU's aggrandizement in any aspect whatsoever - and they've gotten some good mileage out of this. If the present, internal bogeyman ceases to suffice, what external candidate looks especially suitable?

That would be us. (Also Israel. Which could put the EU, too, in opposition to the "Jew-Crusaders.")

Man, this is way more than Unqualified Offerings intended to write on the subject. Anyway, this site's more hawkish readers should consider adding D.S. Monoclonious' blog, Unsullied and Undismayed, to their rotations. They will find much to enjoy there, such as this lengthy series on "Terrorism, Globalism and American Empire." (Start at the link and work down.)

Finally, UO's writing has been compared to "the ramblings of a mad man on LSD" on - wait for it! - Free Republic.com. (I'd like to thank the members of the Academy...)

And no, they weren't talking about the post you are currently reading! The thread in question was devoted to UO's meditation on Amersand's Green critique of the Democrats. Sadly, since the re-post wasn't properly formatted, it wasn't even a fair test. (The FREEP version loses all formatting, so you can't tell where UO is blockquoting someone and where it is speaking in its own voice.)

The undignified part? One lousy hit from the whole thirty-message thread!

Future History from Flit:

Fifty years of scores to settle. A nation ruled for centuries by a Sunni minority, but largely composed of rebellious Kurds and Shiites. No history of democracy. And an American nation, satiated by its short-term success, as in 1991, as in Afghanistan, content to leave the scene to some pathetic peacekeeping force (less the bases it carves out for itself as the modern equivalent of Danegild, as they did at Kandahar and Bagram), because after all they're really not into nation-building. By hook or by crook, an American-supported strongman will take over, like Musharraf, like Mubarak. And Iraq will become just like Egypt. America's best Arab ally. And the oppressive, soul-destroying home of Mohammed Atta and Ayman al-Zuwahiri. And a decade or two from now, their successors will blow up something else dear to (the by then even more widely hated than now) America. And thousands more will die, and we'll look again to the "roots of Muslim rage." That's the most likely scenario. And I think everybody with sense knows it...

UPDATE: Bruce left out what comes next. In the face of the next terrorist atrocity, hawks argue vociferously that the key to our future security is going to war against whatever country we didn't get around to fighting last time. In no way does the new attack mean that their previous achievement - pushing the US into the conquest of Iraq (et al) - was, in retrospect, kind of dumb. They remind us that their skeptics are "appeasers" who "hate the United States."

Yes, Unqualified Offerings is feeling cranky this weekend. Why do you ask?

FURTHER UPDATE: Forgot the link! God that's rude. UO apologizes.

In Case You Were Wondering - Ampersand answers the musical question:

Okay, for all you Democrats who have no idea why we Greens don't support your party: have you been watching the news?

Yes, John Kerry has said a couple of good things. So (surprisingly) has Al Gore. But, overwhelmingly, the "debate" over invading Iraq has been between Republicans (Powell et al) and other Republicans (Cheney et al).

Where have leading Democrats been in this debate?

I don't know, but I can tell you where they have not been.

And then he does. For no reason Unqualified Offerings understands, Ampersand, which kindly maintains a link to this site, lists UO among the "Fellow Travelers" rather than in its "Alas, Some Righties" sections, but here's a right-wing explanation for the Democratic Party's abdication: they love power. First, they are deathly afraid of losing seats in Congress, and what are a certain number of foreign lives compared to that? Second, whatever else it is, war is a massive government program. It hits them in their weak spot. That chimera, nation-building, especially is a massive government program.

Tony Adragna stated the matter with exasperating accuracy yesterday:

In truth, the Dems have been very clear about what they oppose — "unilateralism" — and have been telling Mr. Bush that their support only requires a dropping the "screw multilateralism" rhetoric and making a strong case (rather than the nebulous al Qaeda linkage): Mr. Bush did, and the Dems do.

The party that took us to war on behalf of the al Qaeda-connected Kosovo Liberation Army is simply not the timber from which one can build an antiwar house.

Both the Democrats and Republicans are fundamentally government parties. That always puts each at the disadvantage of the other in sphere's where the other energetically pushes for the use of government power. That leaves Democrats reduced to ineffectual carping when Republicans push foreign interventions and limits Republicans to mere halting (and frequently disingenuous) obstructionism when Democrats push domestic interventions. The Democrats don't have the genotype to argue persuasively that what is needed in the Middle East, including Iraq, is way less intervention than we've had, because that means arguing that the government should do less.

Literary Corner - Interesting interview with a UO favorite, historical espionage author Alan Furst, here

Mail Call - Kevin Maroney writes

The impending death of Warren Zevon bothers me more than I thought it would. I listened to Life'll Kill Ya over and over and over again when it came out, to the point where my officemate ordered me to stop.

I do take some small exception to your characterization that "I owe Zevon for a lot more than some great records he made in the 70s and Oughts. (Betweentimes, Homer nodded.)" Sentimental Hygene is a terrific album--not every song on it is great, but the great songs on it make up for its occasional weaknesses. "Boom Boom Mancini" and "The Factory" are songs anyone could be proud to write, and "Even a Dog Can Shake Hands" is one that I think only Zevon could have done.

In fact, Sentimental Hygiene came out in 1987 and Zevon's earlier 1980s work included the live Stand in the Fire, which is simply superb; The Envoy, which is pretty darn good (see this Virginia Postrel appreciation; and yes, Virginia, I once heard Zevon explicitly say that the title track was about Philip Habib); and Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School, which is also pretty darn good.

Unqualified Offerings is listening to Sentimental Hygiene right now. "The Factory" sounds a little too programmed - the airwaves were lousy with self-conscious "working class rock" anthems back in the day. "Boom Boom Mancini" is every bit as good as Kevin reminds:

They make hypocrite judgments
after the fact
but the name of the game
is be hit and hit back

Overall it's a very good record, with some top-drawer songs even if the CD ias a whole is not top drawer. Upshot: UO wishes to revise and extend its earlier remarks.

To UO's skepticism that Robert A. Heinlein was really a "hard science fiction" writer, Patrick Nielsen Hayden e-mails a gratifying "Exactly," and follows with

Heinlein was always as interested as any "New Wave" writer in the business of "pushing the genre's boundaries." In the 1940s, he and Campbell essentially operated as an avant-garde literary movement to yank the field's standards up to the level of slicks like COLLIER'S.
One of the most interesting revelations in GRUMBLES FROM THE GRAVE, the posthumous collection of letters, is that from the 1960s on, Heinlein was a big fan of metafictionist John Barth. The several sprawling, discursive, meta-whoozy novels of Heinlein's later career, often derided by his core fans, make more sense if you consider that he may have been trying to write stfnal John Barth novels. (It doesn't necessarily make them any better, but it does cast some light on them.)

Anyway, a great deal of what we call "hard SF" is rooted more in stance and attitude, and turns out to be surprisingly light in substantive science or technological speculation. It's been pointed out more than once that SF stories that mostly feature guys arguing about libertarianism generally get categorized as "hard SF," while SF stories by women like Nancy Kress that burst with real science often get tossed onto the "soft SF" pile. In a similar vein, note that one
of the commonest assertions about Heinlein -- that most of his heroes are engineers -- is flatly, provably untrue.

I don't have much to say about Bester that hasn't been said before. I should really re-read TSMD. To my mind, it's his short stories, like "Fondly Fahrenheit" and "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," that clinch his greatness.

UO cannot let pass an opportunity to commend another Bester short story, "5,271,009."

Jeanne De Voto, who maintains an interesting non-blog website, takes issue with one of UO's dawn items from September 11, 2002, titled "It's So Easy II." In that item UO expressed doubt that the US had done such a fine job of transforming the cultures of Germany and Japan as the maximalist hawks have been crediting us with. UO wrote:

We've created a Japan that is incapable of defending itself from its most significant regional rival and that is so mired in paternalism - you think occupation may have reinforced that? - that they can't even rebuild a city after an earthquake. As for Germany, it's the driving force behind the EU, and we know what we right-wingers think of that. See any connection between the EU's pathological anti-militarism plus its mania for criminalizing dissent and the denazification experience? With its corporatist ideology and self-conscious attempt to create a "European" identity, the EU can be said to be, at best, "fascism with a human face." (Note that I do not say human brain. Or heart.) The ideology may run from Brussels, but it's made in Germany. I would suggest that we are good at transforming cultures, but not to our specifications. I can just imagine how Iraq turns out.

Jeanne writes:

I'm not at all sure this is a fair criticism; in fact, I'm pretty sure it's not.

Granted, the Germans wouldn't piss on us to put us out if we were on fire. And granted, both Germany and Japan have social problems. In neither case did a perfect society emerge from the combination of their postwar condition, their history, and our occupation.

But "creating a perfect society" wasn't on the agenda; solving the existing problem was. Neither Japan nor Germany is militarily aggresssive today. It's been well over half a centiry, and neither has displayed the slightest inclination, in action or in the popular imagination and will, to attack its neighbors. Neither is militaristic. Neither is politically unstable or likely to fall victim to a coup d'etat. Both are world powers. Both are peaceful and prosperous, Japan's economic malaise notwithstanding.

I'd say that's doing pretty good. I'd also say that if we can say those things about Iraq in sixty years, we'll be entitled to pat ourselves (and the Iraqis) on the back, even if their society isn't perfect - and even if they're not especially friendly toward us. Creating allies is a nice bonus, but it's not the point of the exercise, now or then; creating societies that are able to live in peace with their neighbors is.

Jeanne makes some good points, and Unqualified Offerings is unsure how far it would want to push its thesis. It's certainly not the top item on UO's list of reasons not to commence an era of US-Israeli suzerainty in the Cradle of Civilization.

And yet there may be something to it. Consider this fascinating article about the Munich Olympics massacre that Glenn Reynolds unearthed earlier this month, particularly this passage:

Worse followed. The Germans had 17 officers hidden on the 727 to capture or kill the first two terrorists, but they grew worried about their mission, and fearful for their own safety in the plane. An officer held a ballot and, in an act of sheer cowardice, all 17 men voted to leave. The helicopters carrying the terrorists were already landing and there was no time to hide a new squad on the 727.

I would argue that a culture where such a thing can happen has definitely been transformed, but to no one's credit. Nor is the problem simply "cowardice" brought on by doctrinaire anti-militarism. As German reader Ralph Georgens wrote to Instapundit.com (same link):

When fighting terror Germany is walking on thin ice, though. If German authorities had dealt with the terrorists in Munich as harshly as it seems appropriate now, with the benefit of hind-sight, your paper might very well have published an article called "The German way with massacre". alluding to some altogether different historic parallels. Today's world opinion would be happy to draw the same parallels if Germany did not act with the restraint it shows right now.

Once at Clyde Peeling's Reptiland in Allenwood, PA, I got to see a timber rattlesnake that had had its venom sacs surgically removed. Reptiland is the place for such a thing, as it is fit for captivity only. And Germany is lucky. (And European fascism has other avenues of growth.) Japan is also no threat to its neighbors, but its neighbors, China and Russia, are decidedly a threat to it. I'd also give our "work" higher ratings if it didn't involve keeping troops in place to this very day.

If, 60 years from now, we still have toops in Iraq (and Iran, and Saudi Arabia, and Syria, and...), no, I will not feel we've done such a great job. We're not Iraq's neighbor anyway.

All's Right with the World - Rothbardian critic Myles Kantor is back on the Sopranos beat. The first installment his commentary on the new season is less meaty than his previous writing on the topic, but the new season is young. For a more detailed review of the first episode of the new season, see Radley Balko. Check Kantor's archive, starting with "Made Men and Whores" and working backward from there.

On the Move - Scrappleface has moved to his own domain. Update your bookmarks. Today's news: "Iraqi Republican Guard Moved to Undisclosed Location."

Thought for the Day - Isn't it...odd, when people who for months have been calling their skeptics "appeasers" and likening everyone from Saddam Hussein to Yasser Arafat to Adolph Schickelgruber suddenly invoke Godwin's Law when those opponents start tossing in a Hitler reference or two? (For a single example among the possible, scroll to the bottom of this Steven den Beste item.)

Radio is a Sound Salvation - Craig Danuloff, proprietor of the Trainspotter's Guide to Elvis Costello site has, quite sensibly, started the Trainspotters' News weblog with links to new Elvis info. File this one under Highly-Qualified People Blogging on Subjects They Know Well.

Expanding Universe - I've been trying to get myself out of a rut of following the same blogs all the time. There are some newish bloggers - and some that are just new to me - that deserve attention. Here's a quick list:

Aziz Poonawalla (unmedia) - An American muslim blogger, apparently of Indo-Pak descent, doing a very fine, rational job of questioning the expansion of the War on Terror.

The Poor Man - This demoblogger is just way, way funnier than I am. I despair, frankly. Here's a sidesplitting takedown of a silly Mark Steyn column. The Poor Man has affectionately referred to me as a "corporate shill" on a (presently unavailable) archived post. To this I can only say that

Unqualified Offerings uses Zildjian cymbals.

Or would, if it played drums.

Jesse Walker - It seems like all the real energy in the blogosphere lately has been among the lefties. So it's nice to be able to cite a fellow libertarian. Walker is a longtime contributor to libertarian magazines and the author of a book on the history of radio. What am I chopped liver moment: Walker quotes an e-mail from longtime Liberty magazine contributor Clark Stooksbury in which Walker says Stooksbury "praised me for being, by his count, 'the second non-evil blogger.' (The first? Gene Healy.)" Dammit, Clark, I was "non-evil" months before these parvenus even heard of Blogger! Here's a taste of Jesse Walker:

More from the president: "We have no specific threat to America, but we're taking everything seriously." I love this man. No, really. Everything he says sounds like a Zen koan or an acid revelation. You can ponder his words for hours, and you'll never quite make sense of them, but maybe, just maybe, you'll attain enlightenment.

Colby Cosh is funny, Canadian and about as libertarian as can be expected up there. He has an interesting post on Canada's healthcare squeeze. His first ever post was a rioutously funny attack on US drug czar Asa Hutchinson for basically butting in where he wasn't wanted. (Canada. Not that he's wanted here either.) Item-specific anchors seem to be a recent improvement, so go to the bottom of this archive page for the Asa Hutchinson piece.

Speaking of Liberty magazine contributors, Timothy Virkkala offers Instead of a Blog. On offer right this minute is a longish piece on novelist Paul Auster. Well, it would be long on a blog. Well, not this blog. But a lot of them. Turn-ons: Nice design. Virkkala's a fine writer. Turnoffs: How the hell do I get to the archives?

Kelly Jane Torrance - This blog is very new. In fact, it started yesterday. (I met Kelly last night at Blogorama - yes, yes, I need to get to that story too.) Kelly says she'll be writing about culture rather than politics, and commences with a piece about a concert of the National Symphony Orchestra. Keep an eye on this one. Inaugural annoyance: You know how a lot of Movable-Type based weblogs feature the default grey text on a white background instead of more readable black text? Kelly has taken it a step farther: grey text on a grey background!

This is Sports Center with Unqualified Offerings - How good a football analyst is retired Redskin great John Riggins? With a couple of hours to kill between work and the Blogarama in Kalorama last night, UO chose to eat fast food in the car so it could listen to Riggins' Thursday evening show on WTEM rather than, well, eat in a more civilized fashion. Perhaps Riggins' personal history has made national venues leary of using him, which is a shame. People who haven't heard him probably wouldn't believe it, but Riggins is a brilliant observer of the sport. He talks in real english, not cliches, goes beyond the easy notions and is, perhaps most surprisingly, a keen appraiser of human character. (Apparently it's all the therapy.)

He's getting more ESPN work lately. Don't miss him.

In other football news, according to Defensive Coordinator Tim Lewis the Pittsburgh Steelers will attempt to improve their anemic pass rush this weekend by "only counting to three-Missippi [sic]" before rushing, rather than the five-Missippi the team used in weeks one and two.

And if That Doesn't Work, the EXTRA-Special Republican Guard... - Interesting link via Instapundit to a Guardian story doubting the reliability of Iraq's Republican Guard. Oops! Unqualified Offerings left off the regulation "Elite" descriptor! Ohnoooooooooooo!

Anyway. The Guardian first says

But the Republican Guard would not be allowed to join street-fighting inside Bagh dad. Its forces would be kept outside the centre, defending three access routes to the capital, where they would be at the mercy of US bombers.

The Guard, which numbers 50,000-60,000 men, was originally set up as a counterweight to the regular army, and to protect the Iraqi regime, especially the presidential palace in Baghdad. It grew dramatically during the 1980-88 war with Iran, developing a broader role as an elite force.

Although highly privileged and well-equipped in comparison with the regular army, it has become less trusted as a result of several coup plots involving officers from the Guard. One plot, unmasked in 1990, two months before it was due to take place, included a brigadier-general from President Saddam's home town, Tikrit. A member of the Iraqi leader's own tribe was also arrested but later freed.

Pause to note that while, while we are frequently reminded of all the folks Saddam has killed, not a few of them were trying to kill him. Iraq had its first military coup in the 1930s. But here's the rich part:

This led to an expansion of the super-elite Special Republican Guard (SRG), which is now the only major force trusted enough to operate in central Baghdad. Members of the SRG come mainly from areas of Iraq that are noted for their loyalty to President Saddam, including Tikrit. Several of the top officers are drawn from his own family.

Ooh, no one expects the Special Republican Guard!

The Guardian does not say whether the SRG's chief weapon is fear - surprise and fear - but it stands to reason. There's more of course:

Various other forces dedicated to intelligence and internal security - possibly totalling more than 100,000 men - could theoretically be deployed in a last-ditch defence of the regime. These include the Special Security Service, the General Intelligence Directorate, the Military Security Service, Military Intelligence and the Border Guards, which all have paramilitary elements.

And you can bet that each of these groups despises most of the rest of them. What, you think interservice rivalries among intelligence agencies only happen here? It's an iron law of the universe, like the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But what if the groups listed just aren't...creepy enough? Not to worry:

In addition, there is the Saddam Fedayyeen, a thug militia run by President Saddam's elder son, Udai, which specialises in internal repression - such as cutting off tongues and beheading prostitutes.

Members cover their faces and alternate between white uniforms in summer and black in winter. There is also a youth wing for the under-18s. It is doubtful, however, whether the Fedayyeen's skills would be much use in a full-scale war.

Not likely, since the US tends not to invade using the Elite Callgirl Corps, and our Army has a proud tradition of "living off the land" on that score, rather than depending on a complex logistical, um, tail.

Unqualified Offerings will stop now.

Cynics might note that, when the US wants to plant, well, propaganda, it has a history of using foreign left wing media where possible. Which doesn't, however, mean the story isn't true. There could be powerful incentives for a Republican Guard commander to take out La Famille Hussein, secure Baghdad with his own troops and gamble that the Americans will cut him in on the postwar action rather than expend more blood and treasure than necessary. It worked for the Northern Alliance guys in Afghanistan.

Make That Two - Philip Gold writes "An Anti-War Movement of One" for the Seattle Weekly. He's not as lonely as he thinks.

When you look at what passes for "resistance" nowadays, you cringe in embarrassment that this is what's left of the left. Pompous. Arrogant. Self-righteous. Self-referent. Impotence chic at its finest. Punch up www.notinourname.net and read their "pledge of resistance." Or imagine my feelings--I almost said, "Feel my pain"--when I did a local church panel recently. A man in the audience asked if America would die like Rome, Nazi Germany, and the British Empire. One panelist agreed that, yes, America will die. The audience applauded.

And that's why I've come to be an anti-war movement of one, talking to anyone who will listen, not about how evil or how good we are, but about the world as it is and the vortex we're approaching.

(Squint and) Get Your Freak On - Teresa Nielsen Hayden discusses, and generally praises, a map of fetishes by Katherine Gear. She also links to it, which Unqualified Offerings will not, on the off chance that having the URL in the page code here would cause site availability problems for readers. Unqualified Offerings does not disapprove of the subject matter as an object of study mind you, but these old eyes can't read the damn map! Maybe if it were in braille. With chocolate syrup all over i - hey, where were we? Oh yes. Teresa's critiques of the map seem pointful:

What do I think is missing? First, she locates the entire S/M constellation in the "pleasure through pain" area, leaving out its aspect of cession/assumption/exchange of control. Second, she doesn't draw any connection between piercing, marking, tattooing, etc., and the other varieties of body modification and transformation. And third, while she's found places on the map for vampires, furverts, ponygirls, adult babies, etc., there's no overall siting of roleplaying and costume play as a major sub-theme in its own right.

Oddly enough, one time on the Elvis Costello Mailing List, Unqualified Offerings allowed that it was, as readers of this site know, "into roleplaying games." It turned out that many many readers thought UO meant sexual roleplaying - alter ego adventure games never crossed their mind.

Unqualified Offerings ain't saying about the other kind.

We Interrupt This Warblog with stunning news. With no fanfare, the legendary Thomas Nephew has once again begun updating Newsrack Blog. Thomas was a very early warblogger, starting on 9/25/01. Unqualified Offerings should stress, for those coming in late, that Thomas was something of a big wheel as a pundit blogger. (Much moreso than this site, for certain.) He was also an attendee - indeed, the ringleader - of the first DC Blogfest. That otherwise happy event immediately preceded (some would suspect precipitated) a lengthy absence from blogging.

But he's back! His index page shows an item from 8/19, though UO is not convinced he actually posted it then. (This site eventually stopped checking Newsrack regularly, but it believes it has been to the page more than once in the last month.) There is another item on German politics from today. UO's liberal readers will be glad to know that Thomas is himself of Southpaw extraction (a requirement of living in Takoma Park, MD).

So Welcome back, Thomas! UO says. The rest of you, check him out.

And There You Have It - Score one for the folks that predicted that the Bush Administration would ask Congress for a "blank check resolution" that would permit it to launch a full-scale war anywhere in the middle east, while supposedly asking for authorization to use force against Saddam Hussein. Here's the money shot from the Administration's proposed resolution:

Now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This joint resolution may be cited as the “Further Resolution on Iraq”.

SEC. 2. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.

The President is authorized to use all means that he determines to be appropriate, including force, in order to enforce the United .Nations Security Council Resolutions referenced above, defend the national security interests of the United States against the threat posed by Iraq, and restore international peace and security in the region.

(Emphasis added.) The text is, to say the least, perfectly consistent with the hopes of the maximalists (that are also the fears of the minimalists) that the conquest of Iraq will cause the middle east to spin "out of control," "necessitating" further US action against and in other regional countries. Those of scientific bent might also mutter, darkly, that the mark of a fruitful hypothesis is its predictive value, and here the prediction would be, of course, that the Administration will make damn sure that things spin out of control, necessitating further action against and in other countries. "Sweep it all up," as the man wrote. "Things related and not."

And so here we are. And there we shall be.

Think of It as Science Fiction in Action - Natalie Solent has a further thought on UO's cranky e-mail to her of Monday evening. It's a good thought, and Unqualified Offerings takes her point. It has a response nevertheless. Actually, UO wrote the response last October. (No wonder Dhalgren made sense to this website!) As a bonus, you get to read insults to Ellen Goodman.

Speaking of Science Fiction there are a lot of bigtime bloggers out there who are bigtime science fiction experts and serious political bloggers. Yet when UO searches for pieces using Alfred Bester's classic The Stars My Destination as a jumping-off point for thinking about the very live question of weapons-of-some-destruction proliferation, the only thing it finds is this James Pinkerton article from last fall.

What, as they say, is up with that? Jim's assignment desk:

Avedon Carol
Avram Grumer
Christine Quinones
Gary Farber
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Go to it, please. Anyone (listed above or not) who has, in fact, already done a "Stars My Destination" piece, by all means fact-check UO's ass and this site will run a correction and a link.

Bonus question: Isn't Pinkerton wrong when he declares that Stars has a "pessimistic conclusion?" UO did not read it that way at all.

We Get Letters - Feedback indicates that - readers like science fiction! Samizdatist Tom Burroughes writes that

Quite a lot has of course been written about the snobbery shown by so-called mainstream literary types towards this genre. And yet I fail to see why. A lot of speculative sf is both first-class storytelling and often says a lot about present-day concerns but, because it is set in the future, can look at issues and themes in interesting ways. I am currently reading "Fountain of Youth" by Brian Stableford, which as the title suggests, looks at things like fear of death, man's hope for immortality, etc. A friend of mine once noted that SF is one of the few genres where you still get genuine romantic fiction (romantic as Rand would have used the term).

And of course SF is a reach seam of libertarian gold - Niven, Heinlein, Anderson (Poul), Maclead, Hamilton, Benford, Brin, E. Paul Wilson, L. Neil Smith

UO is not a massive fan of most of the canonical "libertarian SF" writers, though it has read quite a lot of Heinlein and Niven, both of whom are probably better writers than their fans give them credit for. Try Niven's story "Convergent Series" for a solid example of what the lit'ry types - like UO - think of as "real writing." As for Heinlein, this site is not infrequently struck that he almost seems miscategorized as a "hard SF" writer - once one gets beyond the children's books - and his lasting achievement seems precisely a literary one: he changed the way SF stories were told. (Borges might have been describing Heinlein's method when he wrote that a camel is not exotic to an arab. I believe it has been established that Borges read Heinlein at some point.)

And Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword is just a stunningly cold achievement - as impressive, in its way, as a contemporaneous saga by JRR Tolkein.

What's interesting is the libertarian sensibility running through non-movement authors like Dick and Delany. (I believe that Delany's books have been nominated for a Prometheus Award more than once. I wonder how the acceptance speech would have gone...)

Micah Holmquist e-mails that he likes Delany because "unlike many writers in the genre, I never got the sense he was a SF writer as opposed to just a writer. Then again, I probably enjoy his essays more than his SF." UO has always been big on the essays in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, but feels, overall, that French criticism eventually ruined Delany as a fiction writer.

Daryl McCullough e-mails that

Vonnegut was one of my favorite science fiction authors ("Slaughterhouse Five", "The Sirens of Titan", "Cats Cradle", "Player Piano") before I found out that he wasn't a science fiction author. It's a strange contrast between his establishment-defying novels and his need to be accepted by the real literary establishment (which I don't think he is, actually).

About Dahlgren---to me, what is best about science fiction is not the science part (which is usually pretty bogus) but the fact that the freedom achieved by throwing out the restrictions imposed by realism allow the author to tell stories that couldn't otherwise be told. Of course, this loose description fits fantasy and South American "magical realism" as well as science fiction, I guess.

I could never force myself to read the book reviews in The New York Review of Books. The reviewers always seem to have their noses high in the air, and almost always have a (philosophical or political) axe to grind that gets in the way of an honest review.

Point taken, though some of UO's favorite thinkers, such as Tony Judt and John Searle, have been regular NYRB contributors. Mind you, another (valid) complaint against NYRB is that they do nothing to foster new talent - you pretty much have to be famous already even to get your letter printed. And they are the mouthpiece of the increasingly execrable Gary Wills too.

Unqualified Offerings guesses there's good and bad in everyone!

Blog on the Move - Brendan O'Neill has a redesigned site at a new domain. Update your links accordingly. Unqualified Offerings generally gives it one thumb up. Turnoffs:

o Grey typeface
o No link to UO!
o A lot of recycled material from his blogspot blog, possibly excused by testing needs
o His "anchor line" is ambiguously placed. UO has noticed this problem on more than one weblog. "Anchor line" is UO's term for the line that generally includes the item time/date stamp, the item-specific link/anchor, and often author credit and comment link too. e.g "Jim Henley, 08:54 PM" or "posted by Jane Galt at 5:04 PM | Comments [31]"". The problem is that on blogs like Brendan's (and yours too, Gene Healy!), the anchor line ends up equidistant between the bottom of one post and the top of the next - you're not sure, if you're in the middle of the page, which item it takes you to. Since some bloggers put their anchor lines at the top of their posts and others put them at the bottom, there's no standard assumption to fall back on.

So it would be cool if Brendan (and Gene!) would "change his printer ribbons" (black text, gentlemen, black!) and move his anchor line a little. But Unqualified Offerings will certainly be checking Brendan's site every day, and recommends that you do the same. (Gene's too!)

UPDATE: Oh yeah. The actual link to Brendan's new blog was missing from the first version of this post.

One for the Hawks - This morning it looked like the Bush Administration had been caught flagrantly refusing to take Yes for an answer on the matter of Iraqi inspections. Certainly the Administration's opaque claim that the issue is "not a matter of inspections... [but] disarmament" (and how does one verify disarmament, fellas?) was obvious bad faith. But if this report in the London Evening Standard is correct that Iraq is talking about unfettered access to "military sites only" then the word "unconditional" simply doesn't apply to Iraq's acceptance. This doesn't especially matter to Unqualified Offerings, but to those war skeptics who nevertheless feel it important to disarm Iraq and verify that it is disarmed, it logically should. (It won't matter to Brendan O'Neill either, mostly for the same reasons it doesn't matter to this site.)

Mind you, Iraq doesn't seem to have said it was their final answer. There may be another round left to play. Nor is it necessarily the US government's final answer either. As one commentator wrote back in mid-December - oh it was me -

Meantime the Administration is pushing for a reintroduction of "UN inspectors" into Iraq. Eerie Prescience Bid: the idea is likely to get the inspectors in, then claim that Saddam is not cooperating with the inspection regime, building the complaints into a casus belli

Haven't lost that one yet...

This is Sports Center with Unqualified Offerings - After last night's Eagles-Redskins game, Unqualified Offerings is inclined to think that the so-called rejuvenation of John Madden has been oversold. On one first-half incompletion by Shane Matthews near the Eagle end zone, Madden repeatedly explained that a hit on Matthews as he threw the ball kept him from being able to get the ball all the way to the receiver, Rod Gardner. He repeated this as the replay, repeatedly, showed the ball hitting Gardner's hands. On another play he said, several times, that an Eagle receiver had victimized Redskin cornerback Champ Bailey when it was, as the replay showed, Fred Smoot.

Since Monday Night Football manages to show just about every play from scrimmage at least twice, there's no shortage of opportunities to correct one's impressions.

Meanwhile, the poor, beloved Steelers of Unqualified Offerings and Ideas Etc. and Balloon Juice have managed to look awful in losing to teams that a) employ a spread offense, b) pass on every down and c) run only as an afterthought. This means not only that the Steelers look like a longshot to win the AFC North Division right now, but they may well be the worst team in the CFL.

Blogging Tribulations - Natalie Solent deals with e-mail from a crank.

Get Outta Town - Gary Farber rightly contemns Margaret Atwood's mealy-mouthed maunderings about science fiction in this (where else) New York Review of Books review (of Ursula K. LeGuin).Atwood is one of those literati who has written books set in the (not to say overly programmatic) future who fairly quailed at the prospect that the term might be applied to them. One of the reasons Unqualified Offerings despised Kurt Vonnegut was his famous "Do what you want with the girl, but leave me alone" essay in which he noted that critics of the day universally mistook SF for a kind of textual urinal. Vonnegut did not demand that critics overcome their prejudices. He demanded that they stop thinking of him as a science fiction writer.

Unqualified Offerings will take Samuel R. Delany any day. After he wrote the ambitious, trippy Dhalgren, outraged old guard critics and readers cried that the book wasn't really science fiction. Is so, Delany said. Is not! they sputtered. Is so, he maintained. What the hell else do you call a mobius strip-shaped novel about a hippie stuck in a time loop?

Solidarity forever!

Only Semi-Related Aside: Paul Theroux, in his essays has betrayed some appreciation for the genre. Strange that his own novel set in the future, O-Zone, is unreadable, while its predecessor set in the present, The Mosquito Coast, is not just a far better book, but far better science fiction.

Not Which But Both - I really like Eve Tushnet's pieces about working at a crisis pregnancy center. Here she responds to an e-mail from a fellow pro-life Catholic about whether "sav[ing] a life" or "empower[ing] the woman" takes priority in Eve's mind. Lots of good stuff, but here's the nut:

So really, the best thing I can do for the baby is to provide an example of love and Christian witness for the mother, I think. Our handbook uses the slogan, "How can you convince a woman to love the child she can't see if you won't love the woman you can?"

You're Either with Us Cont. - Glenn Reynolds shrewdly suggests that US intelligence has penetrated the Al Jazeera TV Network to good effect, and Unqualified Offerings doesn't say "shrewdly" just because Glenn averred that this website's praise for him is "rare," rather abashing UO. No, Unqualified Offerings says this because - hand on heart - it had the same thought over the weekend and, if it were not a lazy weblog, really really really intended to write something about it, honest. Reynolds:

I imagine that, had [Al Jazeera reporter Fouda] cooperated, his name would have been left out of the reports. I also think that this is bad for Al Jazeera in general. Notice how many people who have given interviews to Al Jazeera have either (1) disappeared without a trace; (2) been killed; or (3) been captured?

You'd almost think that Al Jazeera was a stalking-horse for the CIA.

He bases the surmise on an unlinkable Bloomberg report and this Washington Post story about Binalshibh's capture.

UO's only concern is that burning the Binalshibh interviewer, Fouda, may be satisfying in the short term - he's no friend of the US - but in the long term, we'd surely be much better off with a trusted pipeline to our enemies that we've got completely sewn up than...an untrusted pipeline to our enemies. (Viz. Operation Double Cross during World War II.) Unqualified Offerings would like to have a lot more dilemmas like the one Binalshibh presents, where UO's principled opposition to the death penalty wars with its impulse to propose a lottery whose prize is a place on the firing squad.

Point of pride: UO has previously written about the utility of those neither with us nor against us, in a general way.

One other thought: From time to time, those considering the merits of prophylactic war against Iraq or mulling the possibility of Iraq-al Qaeda ties allow that "perhaps the government has very scary evidence that they can't show us" because of concerns about that famous duo, Sources and Methods. Unqualified Offerings notes that in cases like Binalshibh's, where the government considers the matter important enough, and where the evidence has been solid, the government has shown itself pretty willing to compromise sources and methods to make a capture or a point. Which suggests that when it comes to Iraq, the government either doesn't consider the matter important, or doesn't have solid evidence, or is making some culpably strange judgments.

Production Metric - How desperate are the hawks to somehow link Saddam Hussein to the massacres of last September, and how how thin are the links? This thin:

A draft version details how two leading al-Qaeda members, Abu Zubair and Rafid Fatah, were trained in Iraq and are still linked to the Baghdad regime.

(Text from the Sydney Morning Herald.) What's thin about that, you ask? This:

US and British intelligence officials say the Blair dossier will reveal how during the 1990s Zubair's Supporters of Islam organisation was sent by Saddam into northern Iraq to assassinate leading Kurds and to build chemical warfare facilities.

Zubair has reportedly defected from Saddam to al-Qaeda, but his family still enjoys privileges in Baghdad. He reportedly ran training camps in Afghanistan for bin Laden before September 11 last year but vanished just before the US-led invasion. Fatah, also known as Abu Omer al-Kurdi, was also trained by Saddam and worked with Zubair against the Kurds, the dossier says. It is not known when Fatah left Iraq but he too became a leading al-Qaeda member. His whereabouts are not known.

So, Saddam Hussein trains some creeps to do nasty business for him. Later, they go off and do nasty business for bin Laden instead. On the face of it, this is about as impressive as the fact that the US got Osama bin Laden into the jihad business, another creep who began by doing nasty business (not that Unqualified Offerings is complaining) for one party before going off to do nasty business for someone else (whether your preferred "someone else" is himself, the Pakistani ISI, the Saudi Royal Family, elements of either of these last two groups, or whatever.

To reiterate: it is possible that Saddam Hussein sponsored the murders of September 11, the anthrax attacks, the OKC bombing, the first WTC bombing, the death of of Princess Diana and the career of Faith Hill. But the evidence for any of these things that has been presented sucks rocks. Compare the amount of detail offered about, say, the genesis and development of the Hamburg Cell with the amount of detail offered about a supposed Saddam-al Qaeda marriage (of convenience or otherwise).

As I Was Saying - In this space was a long post recommending Demoblogger William Burton's weblog (which is cleverly titled William Burton) albeit a post with one tiny flaw (an unclosed HTML tag). What happened after that is just further proof that Kathy Kinsley is right about my needing to switch hosts soon. Check out the following entries in particular:

Stopping Terror, Not Just Stomping Terror - A good, Kausfiles-like SeriesSkipper recap of Robert Wright's Slate series on approaching the War on Some Terror.

Tilting at Strawmen - A response to what Burton takes to be caricatures of Wright's positions by Eugene Volokh.

Daschle Won't Be Stampeded - A shrewd analysis of the politics of a congressional vote authorizing the use of (further) force against Iraq.

Members Only - eLibertarian.com is a new site that aims to become "a community site for libertarians where they can meet, trade and exchange information," and, what's more, to make money doing so. The least you can say is that it's an ambitious concept. (They intend to offer a "libertarian dating" service. Presumably these are dates where the "non-initiation of force principle" is observed by both - or however many, I suppose - parties. I am sure we would all agree that this is the best kind of date.)

There's at least an implication that by using the site one could manage to cut non-libertarians out of one's life entirely. In addition to dating, it offers "libertarian lodging," "libertarian jobs," "libertarian friends," and "libertarian" goods and services. ("Exchange...with people who believe in the sanctity of contract.")

I certainly understand the impulse toward finding a fellowship of the likeminded. Being a libertarian in Montgomery County, MD is a bit like being a rabbi in Iran. I'm also very sure that it's a bad idea to restrict yourself to nothing but a fellowship of the likeminded. It's also unclear that it's possible to deliver a meaningfully "libertarian" job, for instance. Whatever contractual arrangement you and the employer imagine yourselves to come to, the regulatory state and an expansive tort system don't disappear and won't let you make them. Both of you could swear up and down not to go outside the terms of your contract, but the state apparatus will be available to whichever of you changes your mind, I suspect.

Then there's the competition. There are a lot of us on the net giving it away. Libertarianism on the internet is like pornography on the internet - if you're paying for it, you're just not looking hard enough.

But eLibertarian's links page looks interesting (this site appears under the "personal pages" section) and the columns for Libertarianism, Objectivism and Anarcho-Capitalism each include a section called "Opposing Views." I, uh, didn't find one of those on Democrats.com.

Contest Announcement - On What She Really Thinks, Ginger Stampley invites you to prove her wrong.

(Note: On the item immediately below her contest, she actually is wrong. She writes that "Blogging, Like Amateur Poetry, Is Really for Other Practicioners." In fact, contemporary professional poetry is also really for other practitioners, at least in this country.)

Hasten Down the Wind - A couple of good Warren Zevon links:

Eric Olsen has some thoughts and links on Blogcritics.com.

A pretty good LA Times story.

Probably a better story in the USA Today by Edna Gunderson. (Fair's fair: Unqualified Offerings kicked Gunderson around pretty good over Bruce Springsteen last month, so it's nice to be able to applaud her.)

The official Zevon website offers an e-mail address where you can send good wishes.

The Zevon Fan Web Page has a message board where people are leaving their thoughts.

If it would do you some good to vent a little hostility, try this substantially clueless and cliched item from E! Online. It does exhume a cool quote, though:

"If you're lucky, people like something you do early and something you do just before you drop dead. That's as many pats on the back as you should expect," Zevon once told Entertainment Weekly.

RollingStone.com's Zevon page offers a free MP3 of "I Was in the House When the House Burned Down" (link goes direct to the sound file) - or claims to. (It hasn't actually loaded on my PC yet.)

Yes, this story is really bugging me. And I'm not the only one. The Minor Fall, The Major Lift sounds uncharacteristically subdued. And Instapundit.com says, succinctly, "that sucks."

The French Inhaler - The news that Warren Zevon has inoperable lung cancer is one of those awful tidings made more bitter because it makes perfect sense somehow.

I owe Zevon for a lot more than some great records he made in the 70s and Oughts. (Betweentimes, Homer nodded.) Not that I don't owe him for those. The incongruous yodel that begins "Little old lady got mutilated late last night..." The stately piano at the beginning of "Frank and Jesse James" (a song that, by today's standards, surely qualifies as a hate crime). It takes, no matter how much he might deny it, a poet to string together the phonemes of

And he dug up her grave and built a cage with her bones

and a prodigy to set it to that long, fluttering descant.

The lot more: A famous Zevon profile in a c. 1980 Rolling Stone issue led me to read the Lew Archer novels of Ross MacDonald. Lucky the young man at loose ends who stumbles upon these books, in so many of which a young man at loose ends tries to figure out how to live like a decent human being. MacDonald was my gateway to the wondrous world of the American mystery. Zevon also led me to the better sort of spy novel - I remember showing up for a concert at the Bayou in Georgetown with a copy of Ross Thomas' classic, Chinaman's Chance - hoping, of course, that Zevon would notice and make me his pal - didn't happen. Hey, the Bayou never started concerts on time! You had to entertain yourself before the show somehow. (At that one, a fan yelled out a request for "Carmelita," the Mexicali-flavored lament of a junkie novelist. Zevon's response: "I would rather stick things in my eye.")

The two Artemis reconds from 2000 (Life'll Kill Ya) and this year (My Ride's Here) are damn good. A couple of Life'll Kill Ya tracks suffer from the producers' apparent insistence that he sing them well out of his range. But on other Life tracks Zevon does some of his best singing.

The full course of his up-and-down fortunes I don't know. There were apparently some real downs. On a World Cafe interview a couple of years ago he was asked about an apparent change in his songwriting style from the earlier days. He explained, politely, that "There came a time in my life when I could no longer afford a grand piano," so he began writing all his songs on an acoustic guitar. He told another interviewer that the stripped-down production on "Life" was so that he could, if necessary, put the songs across playing solo in "some bar in Soeul."

I love this passage from "Don't Let Us Get Sick". I'd play the whole song for you now if I could:

The sky was on fire
When I walked to the mill
To take up the slack in the line
I thought of my friends
And the troubles they've had
To keep me from thinking of mine

Don't let us get sick
Don't let us get old
Don't let us get stupid... all right?
Just make us be brave
Make us play nice
Let us be together tonight

Imitation Tech Blog Post - Corel Photo-Paint has about the only photo-to-art filter I've found in a consumer-level graphics program that actually works (the watercolor filter). This is important to me, because a staple of one of the games I play, based on Roger Zelazny's Amber novels, is portrait cards called "trumps" which do all sorts of swell things. Problem is, neither I nor most Amber players can draw for beans. Some people cheat and publish "photo trumps," which I consider an abomination. Other people try art-effect filters, but most of those work about as well as I draw. For one thing, they all hose the eyes. For another, the end product usually looks less like a painting than like a photo that's had some weird filter run on it.

To my taste, the Photo-Paint watercolor filter actually turns photographs into something that really does look like a painting instead. (Not to say a good painting!) You can see some examples here.

Imitation Geek Blog Post - And if you're so burned out on commemorative things that even fan fiction - worse, game fiction - seems like a viable alternative, there's always this short story I put up yesterday involving an infant prince of Amber and all the terms for "breasts." About 2700 words.

Hey, I can't link to a Tech Central Station column like Radley Balko can!

Why We Write - I should have noted a big reason why I didn't undertake a blogging moratorium today - the example of Glenn Reynolds a year ago. If it was right, useful and necessary to blog during the event itself - and I have previously written about the greatness of the service Reynolds performed that day - then I don't see that it could have been otherwise on the anniversary.

Because I'm an anti-interventionist and Reynolds is not just an interventionist but among the most important of them, and because the question of intervention is the salient question of our day, an awful lot of references to his writing here are critical. I have to make my case. But some of my fellow anti-interventionists who came upon Reynolds' work late simply don't have the same relationship to it that we early adopters do.

A Last Post Before Starting Work - Crossed the American Legion Bridge into Virginia under the aegis of a circling Blackhawk, behind an Exxon tanker and a dump truck with a tarp over it. When the trucks hit the other side of the river and kept going, I felt like I'd won something. The timing worked out that I pulled off the Toll Road during ESPN Radio's moment of silence, and hit the booth as the President began his speech. And there, straight ahead, a passenger jet, climbing from Dulles into the morning sky. They're beautiful, planes. The President's address was not bad. The plane was better. God bless us, every one, says the agnostic.

Off to Work - Fixed some typos in this morning's items, all of which were composed without eyeglasses. I suppose I've proved that vows of silence just don't fit me.

Altogether Right and Fitting - James Lileks writes that we should remain angry about the murders of last year, and gives an example why:

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.

I'll demur on a couple of points. First, I'll plump for "hatred" rather than anger as the emotion of choice. Second, I'll try to explain the difference.

A few months ago, driving from work to poetry I found myself swelling with rage, not at the hijackers in general but at Marwan al-Shehhi specifically. Why him? Because of his picture.

Let's face it: Mohammed Atta looked like Satan's friend from school. But al-Shehhi looked like nothing so much as the dweeb in the next cubicle. You wouldn't give him a second thought if you saw him on the street. He could have been any of a million immigrants writing code, running restaurants, driving cabs, taking temperatures. My country is nowhere near as kind abroad as it imagines itself to be, but here at home, there are huge swatchs of the country where people like Marwan al-Shehi are not just tolerated, not just accepted, but welcomed.

"How's it going, Marwan?"

"Fine."

"Have a good week?"

"Soon I will kill you all!"

"O-kAAAY there. Catch you later, dude."

Marwan al-Shehhi was a fucking prick.

The moment of rage ebbed. The hatred remains. These people used what waws best about us to do their worst to us. If I had one of them before me I could cheerfully shoot him in the stomach and settle back on a rock to watch him die.

What's the difference between hatred and anger? Partly the fact that anger actually says so little about moral content. I can be angry at my wife - furious - without hatred, and without the anger meaning she had actually done wrong. I suppose that applies to hatred too - its mere existence guarantees no particular moral content.

No, for me the difference is in that word Lileks uses: "overwhelming." It is the difference between an emotion you wield and one that wields you. The difference between self-mastery and servitude. God forbid, indeed, that we not move from one pole to the other.

It's So Easy II - Many hawks say we should conquer Iraq (and Saudi
Arabia, and Iran, and Syria, and...) and "transform their cultures like we did with Japan and Germany after World War II." I've written before about the problems I have with the analogy. But there's another question: How did that whole post-WWII transformation work?

We've created a Japan that is incapable of defending itself from its most significant regional rival and that is so mired in paternalism - you think occupation may have reinforced that? - that they can't even rebuild a city after an earthquake. As for Germany, it's the driving force behind the EU, and we know what we right-wingers think of that. See any connection between the EU's pathological anti-militarism plus its mania for criminalizing dissent and the denazification experience? With its corporatist ideology and self-conscious attempt to create a "European" identity, the EU can be said to be, at best, "fascism with a human face." (Note that I do not say human brain. Or heart.) The ideology may run from Brussels, but it's made in Germany. I would suggest that we are good at transforming cultures, but not to our specifications. I can just imagine how Iraq turns out.

It's So Easy - Liberal critics of the Administration note, correctly, that it wants to rush off and straighten out Iraq, but Afghanistan is a mess. I can't join them on their next step, though, which is the claim that the problem is because the administration hasn't committed to "nation-building." The implication is that if only we brought in bigger aid packages and spread the peacekeepers around and set about to fostering a liberal society, that Hamid Karzai would not be, essentially, a ward of the US government, and Afghanistan would have hope.

I think that's naive.

The Soviet Union conquered Afhganistan in jig time in 1979. You could look it up. That's when the trouble started. I think the Administration recognizes perfectly well that more "peacekeepers," more domestic advisors and more aid workers would simply mean more targets. To coin a cliche, our quarrel is not with the Afghan people but with select factions, some foreign to Afghanistan, some domestic, who are or would be highly motivated to attack us, no matter how benign our mission (to us). "Warlords" don't become warlords because they "lack hope," they become warlords because they love power. They take their power seriously, even if Westerners don't. To "disarm" a warlord is to make yourself his enemy. (Cf. "Return to Somalia" in the 'best of" section at right, if you haven't.)

If anything, our mistake has been in the other direction, selling the war to topple the Taliban as a humanitarian mission when it was not. It was an attempt to dislodge our sworn enemies and proven attackers (al Qaeda) from their power base. At that, it was largely successful. For propaganda purposes, though, we spoke as if it were a war for the general improvement of Afghanistan. That has not occurred, nor could we, realistically, have accomplished it. Most women still wear the burqa. Most armed factions still go armed. Afghanistan's various groups hate only one thing more than each other, and that's whichever foreigner is attempting to redo their country on them.

I think the Administration recognized this all along. It has left them with a lot of bad policy options and they chose the least bad. Afghanistan is still at risk of lapsing into quagmire or outright failed state again. It's why, while I think the Afghan War doves were wrong, they weren't wrong by much.

Timing - Gene Healy writes, anent Christopher Hitchens' "exhilaration" at seeing the face of his enemy 365 days ago:

It reminds me uncomfortably of Bill Clinton's wistful comment in the twilight of his presidency, that he wished he'd had the challenge of a war, as a crucible in which to prove his "greatness". There's something a little warped here, a baby-boomer conviction that, in the end, it's all about me. Disgust, yes, rage, of course--but exhilaration? Pleasure at the prospect of fighting (in Hitchens' case on the battlefields of Vanity Fair and the Atlantic Monthly) in such an interesting war?

After the initial disbelief and rage, for me the feeling that remained was a kind of nausea: History was back and it was going to grind a lot more people under its wheels before it was through. I guess that's interesting enough, but I can't take even a grim pleasure in it. I'd rather be back talking about Chandra and Condit.

There was another kind of nausea too, for people like me and (presumably) Gene. Al Qaeda made it harder to argue for policies I think are in the long term interest of the United States. Moreover, they made it impossible, for a time, for the US to carry them out. I felt and feel that we should disengage from the Middle East tar baby, in all its aspects. But the component steps of that have to be taken, and seen to be taken, on our own initiative. To do so in the face of attacks demanding those very actions is simply to invite people to start killing us whenever they want something. (Dilemmas of the right-wing peacenik.) On top of all the other reasons to despise the killers of September 11 and their patrons, I felt toward them the same rage I felt toward Timothy McVeigh, who sullied the critique of the increasing militarization of law enforcement just as we were actually making headway on getting the country, and even its elites, to understand the baleful things Waco portended.

To say all that is not to agree that we should contrariwise install a generations-long suzerainty from Suez to Samarkand, as too many hawks urge us to do. It's to acknowledge that the atrocities of last year make "de-intervention" a project requiring the nimblest diplomatic and military maneuvers - and that if we had a government that saw the wisdom of the policy.

Happy Anniversary? - Truck bombs on multiple Potomac River bridges. A bomb at the base of the Empire State Building. An airport massacre. A cropduster spraying memorial crowds at Shanksville with poison.

If nothing like that happens today, it's a sign of just how much we're winning.

Last fall, we could legitimately worry that our enemies could pull off an atrocity on the scale of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks every month. We now know that they can't. Living in Washington DC, I have enough friends and neighbors doing highly classified work to hear, relatively often, "My spouse/parent/child says that if we could hear all the things they're hearing, we'd never get to sleep," and I'm sure that's true. But so far, whatever hidebound and haphazard countermeasures thrown together have been adequate to the task, and our enemies have not been. While it's true that the toppling of the Taliban has scattered some dangerous people all over the globe instead of keeping them in one place, it has done so at our initiative, not theirs. Bin Laden almost certainly was making a recruiting video a year ago today, not trying for a tangible tactical victory. This is what all the ascriptions of "nihilism" to al Qaeda miss - they're playing on a bigger time scale than that.

But not an infinite one. To truly hurt this country, or to convince others that it can be hurt, nothing less than a steady diet of spectacular attacks will do, and spectacular attacks on US soil at that. One plausible outcome of this week is that police throughout the world round up a lot of the Islamist diaspora as its constituent elements independently - and desperately - attempt to pull off something to mark the baleful anniversary. Another possibility - I like to think a smaller one - is that something really bad happens today or tomorrow. Whatever doesn't happen is the measure of their defeat.

And here's another - this morning's MSNBC headlines on my MSN homepage:

Terrorist risk level raised to 'high'
Bush calls on Americans to be strong
Christopher Reeve improving

Go, Christopher Reeve!

Media Glut - The networks, teh cable shows, the pullout sections of the newspapers. The, um, blogs. If it all seems like too much, remember, it's not all for you. There's more than you need because more people than you have needs. And not, this is crucial, only on the demand side. Capitalism is like that.

There will be people trying to use this day to harness your emotions to their ambitions. There will be people trying to use this day to harness your emotions to their bank accounts. Take what you need and let the rest go by. I've said fairly freely this week that if we're making this kind of deal over the September massacres next year at this time, we will definitely have gone overboard. By that point, you could say for sure that the nation as a whole was lovingly caressing a scab. This is not next year.

So Much for Just Another Day - All kinds of reasons for sleeping poorly tonight - the humidity returned yesterday but we kept our windows open; my hair has gotten a tad longer than is comfortable at night (I buy "for oily hair" shampoo and use it every day out of necessity); an ear infection has my right ear so full of fluid that it is sometimes completely deaf; a restless child in and out of the bed with Mommy and Daddy (ah but what made him restless?); pillows I really need to replace; the adrenalyn of having finished a writing project late last night. But all that just lay the track on which my mind has been running a mile a minute. Thoughts of those bastards from last year and everything since. I renounce sleep. I'm a victim! Good morning.

They, Who Were Not the Ones Dead - A couple of bloggers I respect a lot, Chad Orzel of Uncertain Principles and your Talking Dog, have announced a blogging pause tomorrow for the anniversary of the September massacres. Each has serious reasons for taking this step, and I can't gainsay them. There may be others doing this, too.

As of now, I won't be one of them. If I don't put up anything tomorrow, it will be because of contingencies unforeseen. (Or because I wake up feeling vastly different than I do now.) I thought seriously about keeping Offering Boy out of school and driving up to Shanksville. But Mrs. O. was understandably uncomfortable having him skip school, and other people have pointed out that the area will probably be mobbed; parking is anyway limited there. (On the bright side, if al Qaeda were to try anything funny at the spot, one thing Western Pennsylvania does not lack is guns...) Nor will I necessarily be writing exclusively, or even any, anniversary pieces. I have no idea what I'll write. I understand the complaints about overkill, wallowing, sentimentality and the sheer inadequacy of most outlets to the task.

But writing is what people like me do. I cherish the fact that people exist who are happy to read what I write - I got a touching e-mail just today from someone I'd never heard of, and it really lifted my spirits. But as the cliche goes, I do it as much for myself as for anyone. It's how I "deal." The other thing I do is read a lot, and I expect to do that too. If you're on a reading moratorium tomorrow, that too is nothing I'd want to challenge or have a right to challenge. I hope you'll come back Thursday. Be well.

Wacky - "Accounts in Israeli banks used for terrorism, central bank believes" says Ha'aretz. Israel's commendable bank secrecy laws are temporarily slowing progress on the investigation, but the

Supervisor of Banks informed the Justice Ministry that he was willing to hand over details of the suspect accounts and transactions discovered by the banks, but requested that the ministry first solve the legal impasse that prohibits him from violating banking secrecy laws.

The Bank of Israel would like a formula similar to the one adopted by the Prohibition of Money Laundering Law, which requires the banks and the Bank of Israel to report to the Anti Money Laundering Authority any suspected violations of the law.

Big Time - Here it is only Tuesday, and I've already locked up Cynic of the Week!

Unqualified Offerings would like to thank the little cynics...

(Going for two in a row next week when I suggest that a government more interested in security than applause would let Jose Padilla enter the country unmolested and follow his ass all over the place to see whom he meets with. But in the meantime, Shh!)

Road to Smurfdom - Radley Balko explains why

Just goes to prove that while socialism might work for a short while, sooner or later everybody's going to get fucked.

Word Find - In Alan Bock's column today, he discusses the difference between preemptive war and preventive war, noting that "preemption" has a pretty settled meaning in the laws of war and that the proposed conquest of Iraq doesn't fit it:

"There’s a well-accepted definition for preemptive war in international law," Joseph Cirincione, Director of the Non-Proliferation Project of the Carnegie Endowment, told me on the telephone last week. "Preemptive war is justified by an imminent threat of attack, a clear and present danger that the country in question is about to attack you. In such a case a preemptive attack is recognized as justifiable."

(One paragraph later, Bock typos the 1967 Arab-Israeli War as "1973." Make the mental correction as you go.) Bock points out that what the Hawks are pushing for is more properly called "preventive" war. (Keep the scare-quotes too, because the attack being "prevented" is itself uncertain.) Unqualified Offerings still considers "prophylactic war" to be more apt yet.

Canada, Land of Peace and Tolerance - From the Globe and Mail:

Security officials at the university said the event was called off because about 200 protesters crowded inside the downtown university building where Mr. Netanyahu had been scheduled to speak.

Protesters inside the building tossed chairs and newspaper boxes at police before being driven back by police batons and pepper spray.

Police arrested at least five people following a melee inside the F. Hall building as other demonstrators tried to get in by smashing a window.

Netanyahu is a creep. (Says Unqualified Offerings.) The protesters are creepier.

Flit provides a link to a chilling report from the pro-demonstrator side.

Deprecation - Besides, how can this woman be Saddam's mistress? Everybody knows he's gay.

UPDATE: Oops! Scooped by Counterspin who has a photo!

Incubator Tales - Reader Eric Mauro noted this Christian Science Monitor story about another legend of Gulf War I - that Iraqi troops were "massed on the Kuwaiti border" for an attack on Saudi Arabia:

When George H. W. Bush ordered American forces to the Persian Gulf – to reverse Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait – part of the administration case was that an Iraqi juggernaut was also threatening to roll into Saudi Arabia.

Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated in mid–September that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key US oil supplier.

But when the St. Petersburg Times in Florida acquired two commercial Soviet satellite images of the same area, taken at the same time, no Iraqi troops were visible near the Saudi border – just empty desert.

"It was a pretty serious fib," says Jean Heller, the Times journalist who broke the story.

The White House is now making its case. to Congress and the public for another invasion of Iraq; President George W. Bush is expected to present specific evidence of the threat posed by Iraq during a speech to the United Nations next week.

But past cases of bad intelligence or outright disinformation used to justify war are making experts wary. The questions they are raising, some based on examples from the 1991 Persian Gulf War, highlight the importance of accurate information when a democracy considers military action.

Bruce Rolston of Flit has also commented on this article. Author Scott Peterson quotes former congressman Lee Hamilton:

"My concern in these situations, always, is that the intelligence that you get is driven by the policy, rather than the policy being driven by the intelligence," says former US Rep. Lee Hamilton (D) of Indiana, a 34-year veteran lawmaker until 1999, who served on numerous foreign affairs and intelligence committees, and is now director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. The Bush team "understands it has not yet carried the burden of persuasion [about an imminent Iraqi threat], so they will look for any kind of evidence to support their premise," Mr. Hamilton says. "I think we have to be skeptical about it."

Hamilton did not note this upcoming opportunity for skepticism specifically, but he might as well have.

Drip Drip Drip - A pretty stunning episode in the annals of pre-9/11 national security just came out. Michael Isikoff reports in Newsweek that

At first, FBI director Bob Mueller insisted there was nothing the bureau could have done to penetrate the 9-11 plot. That account has been modified over time—and now may change again. NEWSWEEK has learned that one of the bureau’s informants had a close relationship with two of the hijackers: he was their roommate.

Who, when and where?

But both agencies can share in the blame. Upon leaving Malaysia, Almihdhar and Alhazmi went to San Diego, where they took flight-school lessons. In September 2000, the two moved into the home of a Muslim man who had befriended them at the local Islamic Center. The landlord regularly prayed with them and even helped one open a bank account. He was also, sources tell NEWSWEEK, a “tested” undercover “asset” who had been working closely with the FBI office in San Diego on terrorism cases related to Hamas. A senior law-enforcement official told NEWSWEEK the informant never provided the bureau with the names of his two houseguests from Saudi Arabia. Nor does the FBI have any reason to believe the informant was concealing their identities. (He could not be reached for comment.) But the FBI concedes that a San Diego case agent appears to have been at least aware that Saudi visitors were renting rooms in the informant’s house. (On one occasion, a source says, the case agent called up the informant and was told he couldn’t talk because “Khalid”—a reference to Almihdhar—was in the room.)

Malaysia as in the Kuala Lumpur al Qaeda meeting in January 2000 monitored by Malaysian intelligence and the CIA. Both men moved out of the informant's house by the end of 2000.

In the meantime, the CIA was gathering more information about just how potentially dangerous both men were. A few months after the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, CIA analysts discovered —in their Malaysia file that one of the chief suspects in the Cole attack— Tawfiq bin Attash—was present at the “summit” and had been photographed with Almihdhar and Alhazmi. But it wasn’t until Aug. 23, 2001, that the CIA sent out an urgent cable to U.S. border and law-enforcement agencies identifying the two men as “possible” terrorists.

What's the least supported part of the article? This part:

The bureau did not realize the San Diego connection until a few days after 9-11, when the informant heard the names of the Pentagon hijackers and called his case agent

As Unqualified Offerings has previously noted, there is still the question of just how the government was able to provide the names of all the hiijackers as quickly as it did. This latest doesn't quite get us the answer yet. Is there more out there yet to discover? The congressional intelligence committees think there might be. Isikoff:

But the belated discovery has unsettled some members of the joint House and Senate intelligence committees investigating the 9-11 attacks. The panel is tentatively due to begin public hearings as early as Sept. 18, racing to its end-of-the-year deadline. But some members are now worried that they won’t get to the bottom of what really happened by then. Support for legislation creating a special blue-ribbon investigative panel, similar to probes conducted after Pearl Harbor and the Kennedy assassination, is increasing. Only then, some members say, will the public learn whether more 9-11 secrets are buried in the government’s files.

An aside, by the way. Liberals despise Isikoff for his role in covering the shenanigans of the last administration. Neocons have been pretty hacked off at his skeptical reporting on the legendarily unproven "Prague meeting" between Mohammed Atta and an alleged Iraqi intelligence officer. These things help convince UO that Isikoff is the best reporter in the country.

Crank Manifesto - Q: Jeez, Jim, are you going to disbelieve everything the administration tells you unless they present incontrovertible proof?

A: Yes. They want it too bad. As we now know, Donald Rumsfeld set the first Iraq attack plans in motion while firemen were still hosing down the Pentagon.

"Go massive," the notes quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

The author of the CBS News story, David C. Martin, wrote a superb book about cold-war era espionage, Wilderness of Mirrors, that has provided this site with many item titles.

Q: You don't trust your own government on something this important?

A: You'd have to be an, I don't know, idiotarian or something, to do so.

Due Date - In the Christian Science Monitor, Tom Regan reminds us, "When contemplating war, beware of babies in incubators:"

[Regan's brother] was a father, and he had just heard that Iraqi soldiers had taken scores of babies out of incubators in Kuwait City and left them to die. The Iraqis had shipped the incubators back to Baghdad. A pacifist by nature, my brother was not in a peaceful mood that day. "We've got to go and get Saddam Hussein. Now," he said passionately.

I completely understood his feelings. Although I had no family of my own then, who could countenance such brutality? The news of the slaughter had come at a key moment in the deliberations about whether the US would invade Iraq. Those who watched the non-stop debates on TV saw that many of those who had previously wavered on the issue had been turned into warriors by this shocking incident.

Too bad it never happened.

It later developed that the stolen incubator story was a confection whipped up by the PR firm of Hill & Knowlton, then in the employ of the Kuwaiti government. The striking "Nayirah" who testified that she saw Iraqi soldiers tossing premies out of their terraria turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington, and was, needless to say, nowhere near occupied Iraq.

The debunking came well after the war itself. Nobody deliberating the question of war - no congressman, no reporter - pressed the question of the testimony's truth value. (Its value was of another nature.)

Regan's conclusion is odd:

In his excellent book on war reporting "The First Casualty (of War is the Truth)," British journalist Phillip Knightly shows how important it is for the media to remain vigilant. While war with Iraq may truly be inevitable, it serves us all well if we make sure the reasons we go are legitimate ones, and not ones cooked up by richly funded public relation firms.

Unqualified Offerings might be forgiven for ascribing that strange last sentence to our old friend, liberal bias in the press. As if "richly funded public relation firms" just take it into their heads to do stuff like that for fun. Hill & Knowlton was paid by the Kuwaiti government and its work product was in service to the American government. Regan will never hit the target if he keeps aiming low.

So the question has been, when do this year's incubator stories start. The answer appears to be "this weekend." George Bush and Tony Blair announced that a 1998 IAEA report concludes that Iraq is 6 months from acquiring nuclear weapons. You would think that means that the 1998 IAEA report said that Iraq was 54 months away or something - they sure can call 'em at the IAEA. But apparently that's not what it said:

Instead, Windrem reported, the Vienna, Austria-based agency said in 1998 that Iraq had been six to 24 months away from such capability before the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the U.N.-monitored weapons inspections that followed.

The war and the inspections destroyed much of Iraq’s nuclear infrastructure and required Iraq to turn over its highly enriched uranium and plutonium, Windrem reported.

In a summary of its 1998 report, the IAEA said that “based on all credible information available to date ... the IAEA has found no indication of Iraq having achieved its programme goal of producing nuclear weapons or of Iraq having retained a physical capability for the production of weapon-useable nuclear material or having clandestinely obtained such material.”

Oh. So the White House clarified its position:

A senior White House official acknowledged Saturday night that the 1998 report did not say Iraq was six months away from developing nuclear weapons. “What happened was, we formed our own conclusions based on the report,” the official told NBC News’ Norah O’Donnell.

Who can doubt that they did?

The IAEA also demurs at Bush and Blair's alarm over "new construction" at previously-identified Iraqi nuclear research facilities.

Get ready for a lot more "conclusions" to be formed.

Jim Henley, 09:56 PM

Tired so for tonight, just another episode of

Cooking with Unqualified Offerings - Remember, experts say there are a variety of appliances that will help you to prepare food indoors when the weather prohibits grilling or barbecuing. Not that there's any reason to discuss them here. Tonight, a nice recipe for Grilled Salmon fillets with mustard sauce from Sunset Magazine's site.

For Unqualfied Offerings, recipes are like roleplaying game rules - a nice place to start. This particular recipe, UO adapted as follows:

1. Unqualified Offerings was out of tarragon, so the staff substituted dill.

2. Once the sauce was boiled down, UO stirred in a half cup of olive oil.

3. Wobbly Watch: Sunset would have you believe you need to cook the salmon over indirect heat. Phooey. Let the coals burn down, put the salmon on the grill skin side down and slather the fleshy tops with the sauce. Close the lid on the grill. When the fillets are almost done, flip them. After another couple of minutes, pull them off, peel away the skin and serve.

4. Sunset recommends 35-40 minutes over indirect heat. For direct heat, cut that in half.

Yummy!

Why We Hate Them - The following article is part of a blogburst - a simultaneous and cross-linked posting of many blogs on the same theme. This blogburst commemorates the Munich Olympics Massacre , which began in the dawn hour of September 5th, 1972. Go to the The Index of the Munich Massacre Blogburst to find links to all the other articles.
**********************

I'm not much of a joiner. I haven't participated in "blog bursts" before and don't know when I will again. But I was twelve years old at the time of the Munich Olympics and I saw the whole, awful thing, and the experience never left me. Enthusiasts for the Palestinian cause, however defined, might profit from pondering why that is.

It was obvious to me, watching the masked gunmen on the balconies, and later the garish, uninformative spotlights on the runway, what I was seeing: a crime. I was watching bad guys. My first sustained exposure to "the plight of the Palestinians" was to villains acting in their name. Being twelve, I knew that the villains couldn't win, right up to the moment the good guys lost.

Then came the "discourse." Draw attention to the cause! I'd type more catch-phrases, but it's not worth the disgust. The 1970s were the high-water mark of Fanonist mendacity. It dumbfounded me then that anyone could believe such things, that people like George Habash were allowed to sit for interviews and go unmolested by local police anywhere on earth. Even then, Europe accepted such arguments in a way most Americans instinctively rejected them. To me, Yasser Arafat and the PLO were simply the masterminds of a loathsome criminal act. Weightlifters. That'll show 'em.

I think I'm far from the only American that Munich made a lasting impression on, and to the Palestinian's detriment. Later there was Entebbe and Khartoum and Leon Klinghoffer to reinforce the impression, but it was the sheer squalid cruelty of Munich that set the tone. Even after Oslo, the part of me that hoped for peace warred with the part that couldn't accept that Yasser Arafat should be allowed to live comfortably as a free man.

It was not just the crimes, it was justifying the crimes.

The Palestinians have always had a case. Whether their case was particularly egregious in a global-historical sense is a matter for debate, but you can't blame the Palestinians themselves for a certain lack of detachment in the matter. You can blame their leaders for indulging in a decades-long orgy of apocalyptic gesture, though. And you can note that in their smug self-justification for turning crime into politics, they lost for decades the sympathy of the one country on earth that could bring them something like surcease and recompense: my country.

Readers of this blog know that I am pretty hard on Israel. I believe that many of its remaining security problems are substantially, though not entirely, of its own making. I believe that, at bottom, a critical mass of its political elite would rather have the West Bank than peace. I believe that the founding of Israel in 1948 represented many, many instances of what the Fifth Amendment refers to as a "taking" and that the individual property-holders affected should be compensated financially. I believe that, so long as Israel maintains a distinction between subjects in the West Bank and Gaza and citizens in Israel proper, that there is an occupation, and it is illegitimate. I believe that if Israel can't survive without continued US aid, that Zionism has failed at its stated purpose of ensuring a refuge for the Jews. These are intellectual positions. Since the proportion of Americans polled who say the US needs to pressure Israel to do more for peace grows ever closer to the proportion who think the US needs to pressure the Palestinian Authority, I'd wager that these are increasingly common beliefs. But at least on my part, they come with no particular emotional attachment to the situation of the Palestinians themselves. This is an ascription of collective responsibility for the crimes of a few, and the apologetics of more than a few. It is my failing.

That failing is thirty years old tonight.

Th-Th-That's All Folks for now. Church is in session!

So How's That Going? - Best joke in the world:

Q: Ask me what the secret of humor is?

A: Okay, what is th -

Q: Timing!

Best joke in the world reprinted in honor of Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan just inaugurated a new set of awards for pundits who averred that the Afghan War might present difficulties who are now claiming that the Iraq War will present difficulties. So Andrew, how's that Afghan thing going?

Hell No He Won't Go - Julian Sanchez finally weighs in on escalating the Iraq War, and is firmly against.

It’s possible that tomorrow, photos will be released of Saddam and Osama sharing a tall milkshake with two straws. If that happened, I’d be duly embarrassed, and revise my assessment of the Iraqi threat. Under most conditions, though, the power vacuum created by the dramatic sort of regime change the administration envisions triggers a process of re-equilibriation at least as dangerous as the status quo. Deposing a dictator establishes a kind of political arbitrage opportunity, which political entrepreneurs are eager to exploit. In these cases, though, the transaction costs typically involve guns, bombs, and other implements of commerce in destruction. As post-invasion uncertainty rises, parties on the ground rush to exploit perceived differentials in local knowledge, and we see the same kind of flurry you would on a stock floor when a hot bit of news leaks… if the NASDAQ allowed traders to carry grenades.

After You - Ehud Barak writes in the New York Times:

Freeing the region of Saddam Hussein would also create an opening for forward movement on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was only after Mr. Hussein's supporter, Yasir Arafat, found himself beaten and isolated in 1991 that he was willing to go to Madrid and enter fully into the Oslo peace process.

Nothing can be assured in advance. But the opportunities far exceed the dangers. The greatest risk now lies in inaction. The history of the last century showed us clearly what the price of paralysis can be. The public debate over Iraq policy must continue. But the readiness to act, once the time is ripe, should not fade away.

Ehud, bubelah. You make it clear that Israel thinks something should be done about Iraq. And you've got hundreds of nuclear weapons and the fourth-largest army in the world. Go for it.

Omission - Can't find Stephanie Dupont on jumptheshark.com. What's up with that?

Quickies - As always, Wednesday was UO's gaming night. So just this 'n' that:

1. My stat server has been unreliably up for some time. The fault of my host, Half Price Hosting, and their software vendor, mystatserver.com. That means that if you posted something on your blog referring to this one - perhaps pointing out that I am full of crap about something - there is a chance I will not notice. So please let me know if you think I should.

2. You can hear full-length streaming versions of all songs on Aimee Mann's new album, Lost in Space, on her website. Mann made one of the best albums of the 90s (Whatever) and had a good one after that too (I'm with Stupid). To my taste, her last record before this one, either the Magnolia soundtrack or Bachelor No. 2 being substantially the same record, was a real comedown - mired in mid-tempo romantic recriminations. (The previous records had uptempo romantic recriminations and downtempo romantic recriminations too. Kidding actually. They had that and a lot more. Since this is breaking news and I'm just two songs into it myself, I'm not prepared to say which records are the more apt comparison.

3. Important piece by Jim Webb in today's Post about the Iraq occupation (to come). As of this afternoon, the few blogospheric responses I'd seen hadn't laid a glove on Webb's arguments. Start with this Instapundit mention to find the attempted rebuttals.

4. Apparently some readers can't get enough of lazy World War II analogies! (Note: If that's not the case, then some writers' market research firms are leading them astray.) If you're one of them, you can always try this Jonah Goldberg column. One of us has to.

5. Crisis Magazine is a Catholic cultural review. Their website has a pretty striking article (about why Christian parents would be wise to let their children read non-christian and even anti-christian children's books) by a young writer of considerable promise.

6. Virginia Postrel is back, bigtime. The most striking of today's many posts? Why southern "hyperliberals" are the way they are. Excerpt:

They're aggressively liberal because their thinking was formed by the civil rights movement, when local conservatives were really, really bad. I am not being ironic when I say that. Unless you were a southern liberal when being "liberal" meant being in the very small minority that believed in ending segregation and treating black people as equals, it is hard to imagine how Manichean the divide was and, in these journalists' minds, still is. (Nowadays, the civil rights movement is like the French resistance. Everybody supported it. But everybody didn't.) They see the conflict as civilization vs. barbarism. Also, if you've lived where evangelical Christians are in the aggressive and overwhelming majority, and you don't share their views, they're a lot more likely to give you the creeps. The same can be said of small-minded self-described liberals when they're in the aggressive and overwhelming majority.

In other words, southern liberals in Big Media are liberals because they think that's the side of good, and they're self-righteous about it because they've seen southern conservatism at its worst. The problem is that they're surrounded by people who think all things "liberal" are good and true, and they haven't adjusted their political categories in 30 or 40 years.

Shh! 2 - Avram Grumer of Pigs&Fishes and Diana Moon of Letter from Gotham stick up for public libraries - the ones in New York anyway.

Are We to be Spared Nothing Dept. - Libertarians are so wacky that they believe, after F.A. Hayek, that state attempts to regulate citizen activities first fail to achieve their objectives, thus justifying further, more intrusive regulations to close the gaps, and so on. Libertarians believe that, say, Greece, in an attempt to prohibit online gambling, will end up banning just about everything that looks like a computing device, like in this ZDNet story:

Law Number 3037, enacted at the end of July, explicitly forbids electronic games with 'electronic mechanisms and software' from public and private places, and people have already been fined tens of thousands of euros for playing or owning games.

Internet cafes are allowed to continue to operate, providing all gaming is prohibited: if a client is found to be running any sort of game, including online chess, the café owner will be fined and the place closed. The law applies equally to visitors from abroad: "If you know these things are banned, you should not bring them in," said the commercial attaché at the Greek Embassy in London -- who declined to give her name.

The law was passed to prevent illegal gambling.

Fun fact: the European Union's "harmonization" process tends to propagate the most draconian laws on any given social "ill" through the rest of the member states.

Adriana Cronin writes on Libertarian Samizdata (whence came this link):

Now, so many words spring to mind - most of them not suitable for a 'family' blog. I will restrain myself and focus my disbelief and fury on one point - the government imposes a blanket ban on games (electronic in this case presumably because it has already banned the other kind) because it is incapable of distinguishing innocuous video games from illegal gambling machines! Not only have governments been preventing people from all sort of activities, now they can't even be bothered to find out what exactly it is they don't want us to do!

Think of it as Evolution in Action - Gary Farber invites us to contemplate advances in human understanding during these last days of the animal kingdom's primacy.

Paradoxes of Capitalism I

Dear Bill: Don't get me wrong, I love the overall quality of Spidey, the Hulk and the X-books these days. BUT without naming names it seems recently that certain Marvel writers like [J. Michael Straczynski] are inserting their own left-of-center political bias into the work being published that is making some politically moderate fans uncomfortable. . . . . I think that MAX titles should stick to the more controversial material and let the PG rated titles stay relatively non-radical. You might think I'm a right-wing nut for letting something printed in a comic book disturb me, but it is a growing concern of mine.

Dear Greg,

You are not a right wing nut, you have valid a point of view. JMS does not have a political "bias", he has a valid point of view. You both have every right to express your views, but Joe gets to do it on the pages of Amazing Spider-Man because he has tripled the sales of that book in under one year, while you (and I) are stuck typing our views on AICN.

Marvel Comics honcho Bill Jemas and a reader in the Don't Ask section of the official Marvel Comics website.

Paradoxes of Capitalism II - Interesting passage from Christopher Caldwell that invites mulling over:

People ask why it is that rich states tend to be more liberal than poor ones. Massachusetts, which is always among the richest handful of states, tends to like tax-and-spenders, while dirt-poor Mississippians are suckers for politicians who will "let you keep more of your own money." (All 62 bucks’ worth!) More specifically, people in the poor states tend not to care if the rich get the lion’s share of the benefit from President Bush’s tax cut, as long as they themselves get something. People from the rich states tend to deplore tax cuts tilted toward the rich. How can this be? Are people in Massachusetts stupid? No. People in Massachusetts are perfectly logical. The most treasured commodity in these parts is oceanfront property–which happens to be the commodity that academic economists use to illustrate "superstar economies" like ours, typified by widening gaps between rich and poor.

If the commodity under discussion is an extremely limited, non-mass-producible one, like oceanfront property (or healthcare, but we can leave that discussion for another time), then our economy works in such a way that a rising tide (to abuse a nautical metaphor) does not lift all boats. The number of dollars in your pocket or in your bank account is not what matters–not unless you’re hell-bent on accumulating crap. What matters is your position relative to the guy who wants to bid against you for the house one street closer to the ocean. In this economy, yes, the rich are now worth 10 times as much as they were 10 years ago and the upper-middle class are worth twice as much. And this does not mean a vastly better life for the former and a considerably better life for the latter. Wrong. It still means a lot more for the rich, of course. But for the middle and upper-middle classes, it means getting bumped out of places like Osterville, MA, or Half Moon Bay, CA, or Everett, WA–and into places like Chandler, AZ, or Arlington, TX, or Gaithersburg, MD.

Caldwell ignores the role of property tax increases in driving people out of homes they already own. And it's not as if oceanfront property were the only good - or even that all desirable goods are non-reproducible like oceanfront property. But I suspect he's onto something about the psychology of resentment in affluent regions and, for that matter, in affluent times.

Decision Tree - The Cogent Provacateur has a substantial piece exploring the popular issue of what to do about the Mesopotamian Pissant, a piece that is indeed both cogent and provocative. Link via Kathy Kinsley, who points out that CP does that rare thing, bring up some stuff you haven't heard a dozen times already.

Kathy herself has more zany excerpts from a fun-loving Islamist/Jihadist/Islamofascist website, including one fellow who apparently really does want to kill me. There is a qualification:

But this should be in the case of jihaad under the leadership of one of the leaders of the Muslims, or his deputy.

Certainly, anyone who recognizes as a "leader" someone like bin Laden, who after all claims to be one and is leading a conscious jihad, that person is definitely my enemy, and not just my civilization's rival.

In a Name - Kevin Maroney e-mails to say he disfavors "jihadists" as a term for hostile muslim millenialists:

I don't like the term "Jihadists" because there really are Muslims--good, decent people--who use the Islamic term "jihad" in its broader, and Islamically authentic, sense of things beyond just "bloody war against the infidel". I don't think it's fair to the people who use the term in its broader sense to use the term in the narrow sense that the worst Muslims use.

It strikes me as being sort of like calling Christian religious fascists "witnesses" or "preachers". It's just not accurate.

Unqualified Offerings asked if Kevin thought "Islamist" was any better. He said yes:

Yes, I think it is. It's not the same as "Islamic" or "Muslim", and clearly refers to an Islam-first movement. It's not a term for a specific small number of people that a broad number of people might use to describe themselves. I think it's a sub-optimum term, because it's not clearly enough differentiated from "Islamic".

I actually like the sense of "Islamofascist", though I think it's a clumsy term. "Wahhabbist" is probably better still.

Note: UO has previously defended the salience of the term "Islamofascist" here. The term fits. It's just clumsy. And like the original term "fascist," its meaning tends to drift over time to cover general bad behavior by people one doesn't like.

More Like This - Eve Tushnet says the War on Terror needs less Roosevelt (both) and more Reagan.

And on Libertarian Samizdata, Dale Amon thinks that September 11, 2002 would be the perfect day to officially launch the invasion of Iraq. This is surely true from an esthetic standpoint - the shift in focus from the war against our attackers to the war our rulers would much rather fight has been a brazen and arguably successful feat of sleight-of-hand. Finalizing the bait-and-switch on September 11 has a symmetry that's hard to deny.

Samizdata also has a superb set of pieces by Amon and Perry de Havilland about the salience or lack thereof of gene clusters - what you call "race." The capper is this one.

Did You Hear the One About...? - Interesting developments in the matter of Jackie Mason and Ray Hanania over the weekend. Blogger Al Barger of Culpepper Log had an e-mail exchange with Hanania himself after Barger apparently googled an angry letter that Hanania wrote to the Lebanese Daily Star that was published on June 4. In the letter, Hanania decried the Sharon government, calling it "nazi-like," calling on all Arab governments that have relations with Israel to end them, and arguing that "it is clear to nearly everyone that Sharon has opened the door to the new possibility of correcting the original injustice of 1948 and restoring Palestinian control over all of Palestine, an action that the pro-Israel American apologists have dubbed as the 'destruction' of the state of Israel."

I'm not particularly scandalized by anything in Hanania's letter to the Daily Star, with a single exception. It would be unusual to find someone of Arab or Palestinian descent who does not sincerely believe that the founding of Israel in 1948 represented several kinds of injustice. To demand that they think otherwise is at least naive and at most pernicious. As the old saying goes, you make peace with your ememies, not your friends, and if you insist that your enemy exchange his view of the conflict for yours in advance of a settlement, then peace is not your top desire. (It is, of course, usually necessary that your enemy be able to understand your view of the conflict between you, and vice verse, but that's not the same thing as discarding his own view.)

Hanania's letter is undated, but there's some textual evidence to be had in the other letters on the 06_04_02 page, most of which bear dates in early April. So Hanania's letter was probably written around the time of the siege of Ramallah. There's internal textual evidence to support this - his reference to Arafat being interviewed while under siege reads as a contemporaneous observation.

The part that bothers me is his statement that "the second intifada is working." There's not a word of praise for suicide bombings as such, but there's a passage of stunning moral opacity regardless:

It proves that by standing up to Israel’s brutality, and even in the face of losing so many innocent Palestinian lives either to Israeli Army murder or suicide bombings, the Palestinians will defeat Israel

Innocent Palestinian lives lost to suicide bombings? Uh, Ray, I think they did it on purpose.

Okay, so at the height of the Jenin incursion, Hanania got hacked off and said shit, and failed to own up to how sheerly squalid the second intifada became over time. That's one plausible reading of the sequence of events. And frankly, as a weblogger, it's strongly in my self-interest to uphold the principle that someone should be judged by the totality of their body of work rather than any given item. Still, just as the Mason camp has shuffled from story to story until it found one that it liked, Hanania's statements on the matter too have...evolved. Here was Hanania in the August 30 Daily Herald:

The Middle East conflict is raw and filled with emotions. It is hard to resist getting pulled into the cycle of hatred and emotion.

I have even succumbed, dragged in by events that stir personal emotions. I have family living in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and I can feel the pain of their suffering. That causes people - human beings - to say things they sometimes regret. And I have certainly said a few things I regret.

But overall, I believe I am a good person who believes in fairness. You don't judge people by one column that is tough and pushes reason to the edge. You judge a person by his overall views. And mine are based on fairness and respect.

I'm with him through most of paragraph two. But from there on out there is something about his tone that is not...manful. "A few things I regret" is evasive. And stand-up guys do not avow that "I believe I am a good person." And there's something weaselly about alluding to saying "a few things" and "one column that is tough" without specifying just what the few things were in the one column, for readers coming in late. I could hang with a Hanania who said Look, people like my dad and grandparents lost their homes to atone for Europe's sins, not theirs. And the guy running Israel right now has always wanted the rest of us gone too, and that hacks me off. You may not see it that way, but these ideas don't come out of nowhere. So I popped off, and wrote this this this this and this, and this and this was a load of crap, and this was poorly expressed, and this was how I feel but I know we all have to overcome that or the abyss yawns, and this and this I'll defend to my dying day. Instead we get evasion. "I have succumbed." And at the end of the column

But sometimes, laughter can break through.

It is not the only way out. But I felt it could help. Sadly, Jackie Mason didn't see it that way. He felt obligated to defend himself against claims I never made. I must have looked easy to pounce on. But the real problem is bigger than even Jackie Mason.

Just as it is difficult to bring Arabs and Jews together across a military battlefield, the same hatred and attraction to confrontation that consumes both sides seems to keep them apart everywhere, including a stand-up comedy stage.

There's something almost Nixonian about this level of self-pity. ("I must have looked easy to pounce on.") As for Mason himself, there's no indication that he did the same research Al Barger did before the storm hit (a point made by the Talking Dog), so he still looks like a jerk. What we have here is one Jew, one Arab, and not a mensch to be found.

(Hanania tries again in this statement on his website.)

Blogorama II is what CATO Mafioso Gene Healy is calling the event scheduled for September 19 at the Rendezvous Lounge in Adams Morgan. Others might think of it as Midatlantic Blogfest III...

Regardless, here is the Quatro Uno Uno:

Date: September 19
Time: 7ish. Or thereabouts.
Place: Rendezvous Lounge, 18th and Kalorama (same as Blogorama, the first)

All D.C. bloggers, friends of bloggers, readers of blogs, friends of readers of blogs, loathers of blogs, and those indifferent to blogs are invite and encouraged to attend. Bloggers are encouraged to promote the event. On their blogs. Of course. Blogorama I was a smashing success. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 people.

Rendezvous was a pretty loud venue, not least because the management flat refused to turn the music off, even though their entire clientele was logocentric - that is, bloggers. But as Gene notes, you can't argue with success. Be there, like Unqualified Offerings will.