Blogger Code Question - Am I required to have an opinion on the Peter Arnett business?

Does It Get Any Better? - Early on, some people were titillated by the "Russian GRU site" perporting to offer inside dope on the Iraq War from contacts in Russian military intelligence. Others pooh-poohed it is likely inauthentic and of dubious accuracy. I figured the scientific thing to do was to wait awhile. Now they've got a track record to look at, and we can ask, have they done any better than the admittedly problematic US media. Answer: nah. Let's just take the first few days of postings, since they're the ones that have had the most time to test out.

First update, March 17:

It seems likely that the combat operations will begin on 19-22 of March at around 2-4 am local time.

Well okay, they got the day right, though by that point everyone on earth knew it was coming.

The first phase of the operation will consist of a strategic air operation which, according to the US command, will last between 8 and 10 days. The goal of this operation will be complete suppression of Iraqi air defenses, disruption of command and control structures, destruction of main command and communication centers, disruption of the main Iraqi forces, destruction of the military infrastructure and defense industry facilities.

In this and succeeding paragraphs, the Russians never quite get around to saying when the ground troops will roll. The impression given is that they're predicting a short version of Desert Storm II before Desert Saber Redux. The least you can say is that they failed to predict the near simultaneous launch of air and ground action, despite numerous anonymously-sourced reports in the western media that it would happen exactly that way.

March 18, 2003, 0126hrs MSK (GMT +3), Moscow - According to the information received from one of the Russian Defense Ministry's radio intercept units, certain aspects of the planned military operation against Iraq were uncovered by the Russian military intel. During one of the radio communications between Kurd troops information was intercepted indicating that during the next 48 hours there may be a large-scale airdrop of US troops in Kurd-controlled northern Iraq.

Maybe it's not entirely absurd that GRU contacts would share out "sources and method" info like this, so much else in Russia being on offer to reasonable bids, but let the record show that the 173rd Airborne Brigade didn't parachute into Kurdistan until the 27th.

BTW, I asked my own sources, meager as they are, "Why do you parachute into an airfield that your allies already control?" The answer I got was that you do this because it counts as a combat jump and you get nice wings.

The same item claims that some 200 British SAS troops are in Kurdistan scouting Iraqi forces. Google confirmeth not the claim, but god knows I can't rule it out. Undecided. Their claim that the northern front troops could be ready for combat operations within five days of landing has a chance to come true or not by Wednesday. Bruce Rolston doubts it.

March 19, 2003, 0403hrs MSK (GMT +3) - "Russian military intelligence" predicts line of advance that bears an arguable resemblance to the one we ended up with, if you allow for friction, and also predicts that the alleged drive on Basra would be feint. Someone should tell the British.

March 20, 2003, 1015hrs MSK (GMT +3) - Some claims about failed coups and Iraqi leadership security that, for all I know, is true.

March 21, 2003, 0930hrs MSK (GMT +3) - Gripping tale of the "possible" maneuvers of the US 4th Infantry and 1st Armord Divisions. Apparently, some of the First Armored is actually in Iraq. The rest of it should arrive sometime in April, along with the entire 4th Infantry Division.

To be fair to the Russians, they footnote their own report that "it can't be 4ID. And since the claim is that these reports are based on Russian signals intelligence, it's at least theoretically possible that the US was engaging in deceptive communications to confuse the Iraqis about which units they were facing.

March 22, 2003, 0800hrs MSK (GMT +3) - Scary. They puncture the "surrender of the 51st division story, correctly. They also claim a US plane was lost in action. To this day the coalition denies losing any planes. While I don't believe everything the coalition tells me, the loss of a plane seems like something that would generate talk even embedded reporters would pick up on. This item boldly predicts that a combined US-UK force is about to storm Basra.

And so on. It's not that they're never right. You just can't count on any given item being less wrong than what the US press has at that time. And there remains the question of whether their occasional hits are due to inside dope, decent analysis or sheer luck.

Why have I gone into this in so much detail? Because I still don't want to write about the weekend's suicide bombing!

With a Whimper - From ABC News . . .

No 'Smoking Gun'
Hit on Ansar Al-Islam Camp Finds No Signs of Chemical Weapons

. . . The site they hit was identified by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his argument for war before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 as a base for the radical group Ansar al-Islam. Powell said the group linked Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network to Saddam Hussein, and had plotted chemical attacks across Europe.

Powell showed a satellite photograph of what he said was a chemical weapons training center in northern Iraq used by al Qaeda and protected by Ansar al-Islam, calling it evidence of a "sinister nexus between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network."

We sent special forces (and ABC News) in, "expecting to find hard evidence Ansar al-Islam has biological and chemical weapons." Nada.

ABC reports that on This Week, Donald Rumsfeld explained that

We saw from the air that there were dozens of trucks that went into that facility after the existence of it became public in the press, and they moved things out," said Rumsfeld. "They dispersed them and took them away. So there may be nothing left. I don't know that. But it's way too soon to know."

It could well be. Of course, it means that, according to Rumsfeld, during the same run-up to the war when we were steadily bombing Iraqi air defense installations, we couldn't spare any bombs for convoys of trucks leaving an alleged chemical weapons facility. Or maybe Rummy's just saying stuff.

Oh Dear - Virginia Postel's weblog has a new address and a new design. You can link to a specific item by clicking on the "Printer Friendly Version" link. That's to the good. The font size is too small for these middle-aged eyes, though, and it uses "dark" grey rather than black type for the body text, making it worse. The design itself is clean and enjoyable. It would be quite a nice site if I could read it.

More Warblogging - Leonard of Unruled has a fascinating piece on the economics of the JDAM.

For the Defense (Dept.) - In which I try to make a case for the "rolling start" (if you believe it really is a rolling start and not just "oops! better send some more troops!"). Tacitus, who is doing some good analysis of the war, notes that the force levels currently in Iraq violate the principle of mass. To wit, "they cannot win the war," our four-odd divisions. So why start the war when you have to bring reinforcements from overseas before the big push?

The best answer I can come up with is that, by engaging the enemy, you force the enemy to concentrate in defense, which makes it easier to bomb them. That softens them up by the time you have enough troops in theater to attack in force. Had this war begun with a pure bombing campaign, wouldn't it have been much harder to identify ground force targets? Wouldn't the Iraqis have an easier time hiding their army?

That's the best I can do.

From the Front - Jay Price of McClatchy newspapers interviews refugees and prisoners in a field hospital in South-Central Iraq and gets testimony from the patients about Iraqi paramilitary units' exploitation of civilians. Excerpt:

Ghaleb, 43, a farmer, said that Iraqi Republican Guard troops sent a note to his home demanding that he report to them. Then, Ghaleb said, he and several hundred others were forced to dress as Iraqi soldiers and told to gather near a prominent road. Some were given fake guns.

Ghaleb said he thinks the idea was to reinforce the message that Iraqi troops were fighting, not running. They were told if they tried to flee they would be shot, Ghaleb said.

Ghaleb gets interviewed a lot. Here he is in the Post:

Among them was a man named Ghaleb, with bandages wrapped around his leg and a 43-year-old farmer and gunshot victim from Diwaniyah. He told reporters that U.S. Marines shot him on Tuesday, but he blamed Iraqi Republican Guard units. He said they forced him to stand between them and the Marines as a human shield.

Aside from the fact that the first sentence is awful (yeah yeah, I should talk), it's a prime example of the annoying Post habit of paraphrasing what people actually say. It's also a substantially different story.

Ghaleb also appears in a report by Mark Johnson of Knight-Ridder:

Ghaleb, a 43-year-old farmer from the Nasiriyah area, said Republican Guard troops forced him to put on an Iraqi army uniform, gave him a nonfunctioning rifle and told him and six or seven other men to stand at a highway checkpoint to draw the attention of American soldiers.

"They couldn't go back," a translator relayed, "because whoever goes back gets shot."

Iraqi army units waited to ambush the Americans, Ghaleb said. The ambush failed, but the Americans did attack and Ghaleb was wounded in the leg.

Which sounds a whole lot more like the McClatchy report than the Post report.

So what do we have here? On Ghaleb's testimony, he was impressed into military service against his will. He was not used as a "human shield," if we take that to mean "civilians placed between Iraqi fighters and coalition troops to restrain coalition troops from firing on the fighters." By putting Ghaleb in uniform they make him look less like a civilian. Coalition troops encountering Ghaleb and his unfortunate comrades believed they were encountering uniformed belligerents and acted accordingly, as they had every right to - that's how Ghaleb got shot in the leg. To use Ghaleb as a human shield, you would keep him in civvies and stand behind him.

None of the three hospital interviews presents testimony on the Big One - Iraqi troops forcing women and children ahead of them into battle. That emphatically does not mean that Iraqi soldiers or paramilitaries are not doing it. But if the media is taking any steps to confirm the story, they're keeping it to themselves.

In the hospital stories, the patient Abbas "said Iraqi troops had put an anti-aircraft gun in his residential neighborhood, and when it came under attack by coalition forces, his family tried to get out." This might be done as for tactical reasons (i.e. field of fire requirements) or in hopes that the coalition would be reluctant to target the weapon.

Regardless, we know Iraq is violating many of the laws of war. We know that Iraqi paramilitaries are fighting in civilian garb. We know that yesterday's suicide bomber was dressed as a civilian taxi driver. We know that Iraqi troops have engaged in false surrenders. (There are reports that the Iraqis have set up command posts in schools, but it turns out that we have too. So that one is a wash.) Given what the Iraqis have done, it's way too soon to move the "screens of women and children" story to the list of things that turned out not to be true. But it still looks premature to accept it as fact.

UPDATE: This New York Times story contains reports by American GIs who have seen Iraqi soldiers mixing among civilians.

Looking on the Bright Side - Hesiod thinks the war has about two weeks to go yet.

The reason for that is pretty obvious. We are now absolutely pulverizing Republican Guard units surrounding Baghdad.

We can certainly hope. One assumes that the current airstrikes are taking out some of those T-72s Btuce Rolston was worrying about. If the Republican Guard gets the idea that they can never counterattack, which means that they can never win, then the surrenders might come. And when totalitarian regimes collapse, they collapse fast. The things to worry about in the meantime are probably maintenance, fatigue in the front line troops and the supply of precision-guided munitions. Things for the Republican Guard to worry about in the meantime: getting blown to smithereens and the possibility that the unit next to you will surrender first.

Weekly Fitness Blog Post - 184 pounds, 36 5/8" waist. No change on the weight from last week, the final number represents an uptick from midweek figures, when the scale reached 182. I wouldn't be surprised to see another multi-pound drop by next week's item.

This week's item might be called "Strike Two for Atkins." I got my blood tests back, and while most things were good, including blood sugar, my lipid levels were awful - a deadly combination of high LDL and low HDL. Since I have other cardiac risk factors - high blood pressure and mitral valve prolapse - my readings are bad enough to indicate drug management. I see the doctor tomorrow and will find out if he wants to use medicine or diet as a first resort.

So far, I've demonstrated that I can lose a lot of weight on Atkins, but not that I can maintain healthy blood pressure or lipid chemistry. I should stress the limits of our findings so far: they apply to me, not necessarily anyone else; since there's been a three-year gap in my blood work, I don't know how much worse my blood pressure and cholesterol might have been before starting to diet; nor can I (yet) say that a different diet would have produced superior blood pressure or lipid benchmarks. Then there's the question of exercise - might reintegrating aerobics help one or both conditions? As always on these personal odysseys, there are an awful lot of uncontrolled variables. Assuming that my doctor and I decide to radically change the sort of things I've been eating, I'm still inclined to call the whole experience worth it. In addition to losing a lot of weight, I was able to break my relationship with some things that were unquestionably bad for me - sugared beverages and processed starch snacks, specifically - and to reduce portion sizes considerably. If I have to go to a low-fat diet now, it should be easier to do that than it was before. We'll see.

On the exercise front, a couple of readers wrote in about my back complaints. Reader Gilda Abromowitz suggests Pilates. "I've been doing Pilates for two years, and only in the last half year has everything really started to come together--but you need to use the abs to protect the lower back." And Dave Lull offers more links to information about the Egoscue Method, including a back pain page. I can certainly believe I have a posture problem, as my posture has always been bad. If anyone cares to report on their personal experience with Pilates or Egoscue, I'd love to hear it.

You Know Nothing, Nothing - Brendan I. Koerner has a semi-useful article in Slate on the "thumbs-up controversy" in Iraq. The question is whether Iraqi civilians giving the thumbs up to coalition forces mean it in a nice way. In the first week of the war, hawks assumed yes, while certain doves pointed out that "many veteran travelers insist that the gesture is a crass Middle Eastern insult" (meaning, essentially, "up yours"). Koerner points out the possibility that Iraqis making the gesture aren't being traditional, but rather adopting the western meaning from media and exposure to US troops during Gulf War Phase I.

According to a recent D[efense] L[anguage] I[nstitute] manual on international gestures, after the first Gulf War "Middle Easterners of the Arabian Peninsula adopted this hand movement, along with the OK sign, as a symbol of cooperation toward freedom." Iraqi civilians may have noted this shifting meaning, perhaps via TV reports.

Which may be true. So add the thumb gesture story to the list of things we just don't know for sure. As for why Koerner's article is semi-useful, couldn't someone just ask Iraqis? Or is that not done?

Music Notes - Warren Zevon's last album is almost done, per Rolling Stone.

Let's You and Him Fight - I thought I would do the "right winger gives advice to liberals" thing, because they love it so much. There's a bit of a disagreement between Atrios and Calpundit over the issue of mainstream versus fringe liberals. Calpundit, aiming for a New Republic sort of vibe, complains about "Congressmen who travel to Baghdad to criticize American foreign policy on nationwide TV, gay rights parades that seem deliberately designed to repulse as many ordinary people as possible, college professors who publicly hope for lots of American deaths in Iraq, and tooth-and-nail opposition to bans on partial birth abortion" and professors complaining about the Oscars. In return, Atrios argues that "The 'liberal extremists' only hurt the center because people like CalPundit keep apologizing for them. It's a great way to get a Fox News gig . . . "

This is strange. Atrios adores Bill Clinton as much as I despise him. Bill Clinton at least made rhetorical gestures in the "Calpundit direction" and won two terms handily. (Helped, of course, by the little man with the big ears and the annoying voice.) Atrios' other hero, Al Gore, turned away from his DLC roots and ran the most unabashedly liberal campaign since Walter Mondale - hell, maybe Hubert Humphrey - and couldn't get a majority with a strong economy and weak opposition going for him. The favorite explanation of your diehard Gorephiles - it was the So-Called Liberal Media that did him in - won't cut it, because the same people say the So-Called Liberal Media were unrelentingly vicious to Bill Clinton too. And Clinton won. The only Democrat to actually get his ass into the White House since the Iranian hostage crisis was the one who at least played the Anti-Liberal Extremist Game. The diehards next advert to the Evil Ralph or Stolen Election theory. But ask yourself: if Bill Clinton were eligible for a third term, would he have kicked GWB's ass or what? I think he obviously would have, though not through any doing of mine.

At the very least some epistemological modesty about what hurts the center and helps the center seems called for.

Everybody's a Critic Cont. - When a site called "Cointelpro Toll" showed up in my referrer logs, I expected something critical and was not disappointed. You can't beat "More Boneheaded Analysis from Jim Henley" as a subject hedder. He's responding to my items about the nascent meme of declaring the ordinary Iraqis we came to liberate for their deaths at the hands of coalition forces, which he calls a "strawman" argument, which seems to mean "argument I do not like" here. He wants substantiation of my charges and he wants it now, dammit.

Let me clarify: First, as I believe the original item makes perfectly clear, I was making a prediction. Arthur Silber already found another example. I'm saying there will be more as the war goes on. The test of my thesis takes place over time. Second, when I say "the Pentagon," I mean the Secretary of Defense and his merry band of civilian geniuses, not the uniformed military services, in that building or elsewhere. As I've made pretty clear over the last several months, I give great credeence to the argument that there is a serious rift between the two groups. Third, it's certainly possible that what I mean by "the Pentagon" may never need to make even sanitized, off-the-record versions of the arguments from the Ayn Rand Institute and Silent Running pieces - they may rely on their freelance apologists. In that case, I'll be partially wrong. In any case, watch the evolving policy to find out what they're thinking.

Ditto, Hed (sic) - God knows I disagree with much of what liberal alpha-blogger Atrios has to say. But there's not one word of this item that doesn't get a wholehearted "me too."

On the Othe Hand - Tory dove Matthew Parris argues that the Iraq War scenario may yet prove rosy - he provides some reasons why that might be so - and that, in that case, " Those who, like me, remain unconvinced of the case for war should prepare for a spell of unfashionability." Upshot:

How would I reply? I should then anchor my response in two arguments.
The first is very strong, but will cut no ice at all in public debate; in fact, it will sound pathetic. It is the same response we might offer a wayward brother who, against all advice, bet the family silver on a racehorse, at odds of two to one — and won. ‘You had no reason to be confident of that,’ we would murmur, morally certain that such strictures were fair, but resigned to the fact that they were unlikely to be heard above the popping of champagne corks. That a gamble might have gone horribly wrong tends to be overlooked when it happens to have gone right. ‘Ah well,’ sigh the wise, ‘our advice was sound — and no less sound for being unproven on this occasion.’ But few listen.

My second reply points to the anxiety we would feel about our wayward brother’s next investment. This, we would fear, will only send him back into the betting shop for an even bigger flutter. I hope Saddam and his administration turn tail now, and believe that they may; but I fear the new confidence this will engender in the President of the United States and the British Prime Minister — and a gathering international storm.

Radio Daze - I listened to a few minutes of the G. Gordon Liddy show this afternoon in the car. Yes, I know, I deserve what I get in that case. A caller talking about "exit strategies" wanted to remind Liddy that, while WWII ended in 1945, West Germany didn't become (nominally) sovereign again until after the Berlin Airlift, Japan not until some time after that, and the states of war with those countries only ended in the early 1950s and here it is 2003 and we still have 60,000 troops in Germany and umpty-ump in Japan and Italy and people needed a better sense of history, and Liddy agreed wholeheartedly.

Here's the thing: for both caller and host, all this info was supposed to be reason to worry less about the outcome of the adventure in Iraq.

New Frontiers in Spam

Your name was given to me as someone who might be interested in innovative medical solutions. First, you should know that "penis enlargement" is a myth propagated by unethical operators who prey on the insecure and gullible. And even if it did work, it's not as if you could display it before prospective conquests or work your new, larger member into casual conversations. Our patented Hand Elongation Technology, on the other hand . . .

TTFN - Gary Farber sees off Richard Perle. Of course, Perle isn't exactly gone. He's resigned from the chairmanship of the Defense Policy Board, but Rumsfeld has asked him to remain a member.

The Buck Stops in Qatar - From the Pentagon briefing today:

Q: Mr. Secretary, as you know, there has been some criticism, some by retired senior officers, some by officers on background in this building, who claim that the war plan that is in effect is flawed and our number of troops on the ground is too light, supply lines are too long and stretched too thin. Would you give us a definitive statement, if you would, to the effect that you agree that the war plan is sound and that this criticism is unfounded, or that there's some substance to it?

Rumsfeld: Well, we're one week into this, and it seems to me it's a bit early for history to be written, one would think. The war plan is Tom Franks' war plan. It was carefully prepared over many months. It was washed through the tank with the chiefs on at least four or five occasions.

Myers: Exactly -- more, more.

Rumsfeld: It has been through the combatant commanders. It has been through the National Security Council process. General Myers and General Pace and others, including this individual, have seen it in a variety of different iterations. When asked by the president or by me, the military officers who've reviewed it have all said they thought it was an excellent plan. Indeed, adjectives that go beyond that have been used, quite complimentary.

Rumsfeld is a standup guy. You have to stand up when you're hanging someone out to dry, after all. And I have to say, the transcript doesn't do justice to the effect of hearing Rumsfeld attach just about everyone in the national security bureaucracy to the Cunning Plan before tossing in "this individual" toward the rear of his mighty column of words.

But this article from Government Executive magazine on the genesis of the plan indicates that "this individual" made some important changes late:

By far the most dramatic and disruptive change to the battle plan, however, was Rumsfeld's decision last November to slash Central Command's request for forces. This single decision essentially cut the size of the anticipated assault force in half in the final stages of planning, and it had a ripple effect on Central Command and Army planning that continues to color operations to this day.

Notably, the Pentagon scrapped the Time Phased Force Deployment Data, or "TipFid," by which regional commanders would identify forces needed for a specific campaign, and the individual armed services would manage their deployments by order of priority. The result has meant that even as Central Command chief Gen. Tommy Franks was launching the war, forces identified for the fight continued to pour off ships in the Kuwaiti port of Doha, and not necessarily in the order of first priority.

There's more; for instance, the "Pentagon's decision not to activate many transportation Reserve units before last Christmas also created personnel shortages. Meanwhile, COSCOM itself has only 150 heavy transport trucks for an operation that Army planners estimate requires 700."

All this comes with the proviso that sudden developments may yet make Rumsfeld and his edition of the Best and the Brightest look like the geniuses they take themselves to be. But I ain't bettin' that way. Why? Look at the passage about the trucks again. Now remember the old adage: Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics, and consider the implications.

Stop the War! Bruce Rolston of Flit is taking the weekend off. No War Without Bruce Rolston Analysis! is my watchword.

Quote of the Day comes from Max Sawicky:

What we have seen here is a endless sequence of rumors whose durations dovetail end to end chronologically. By the time one story is finally put to rest, another has risen to take its place. The upshot is that the public digests a continuous dose of bullshit.

UPDATE: Waxy.org looks at who links to the rumors, who links to the corrections and who does both.

ISO INFO - Dear Readers: I would appreciate links/pointers to any authoritative, independent accounts of Iraqi use of human shields. By authoritative and independent, I mean not "coalition spokesmen say" but "we saw," or, especially, "here are the pictures. Thanks.

You Don't Deserve to Live - More on the . . . evolving attitude toward Iraqi civilians from Oliver Willis and Arthur Silber. Arthur, an objectivist, is positively offended at the item from the Ayn Rand Institute, and is in the process of responding in series. Part 1 is here; here's Part 2 and keep checking the main page for more. If this keeps up, I'm going to have to stop making fun of Objectivists.

Maybe - MSNBC reports "U.S. forces dig in for the long haul." Which is probably true. Or maybe there's a task force coming toward Baghdad from Jordan on a flanking maneuver right now, or maybe the 101st Airborne, part of it anyway, isn't heading up the highway to join the 3rd Infantry at all - or maybe only the 1st Brigade is, while the other two are being flown into western airfields secured by special forces. Maybe the reports of 120,000 reinforcements getting ready to ship out are a smokescreen. Hey, remember the pretend invasion of Kuwait by sea in 1991. Maybe, just as the war wasn't going nearly as well as the Pentagon pretended in the first few days, it isn't going nearly as badly as the critics think now.

Maybe.

Don't Be Fooled - Al Jazeerah is not Al Jazeera, the famous satellite network. How can you tell? For one thing, you can actually reach the Al Jazeerah website. (I don't recommend that you do - it's creepy.) You can't reach Al Jazeera.

The Lunatic Atmosphere of War - The mask is starting to slip, just a little, when it comes to Iraqi civilians. This article from the Ayn Rand Institute is representative of the first stirrings I'm seeing among the more firebreathing hawkish bloggers. From there it should spread to NRO and, in due course, the Pentagon:

Moreover, the objection contains a mistaken assumption: it is false that every civilian in enemy territory—whether we are speaking of Hitler's Germany or Hirohito's Japan or the Taliban's Afghanistan or Hussein's Iraq—is innocent.

        Many civilians in the Mid-East, for example, hate us and actively support, materially and/or spiritually, those plotting our deaths. Can one seriously maintain, for instance, that the individuals in the Mid-East who celebrated by dancing in the streets on September 11 are innocent?

        Other civilians in enemy states are passive, unthinking followers. Their work and economic production, however meager, supports their terrorist governments and so they are in part responsible for the continued power of our enemies.

No apologist for Hamas could put it better. Hell, Osama bin Laden couldn't put it better. Actually, the terror apologists make a superficially stronger case - that since Americans (Israelis, Brits, whatever) are citizens of a democracy they are more responsible for the actions of their governments than the subjects of a totalitarian regime. I reject the arguments of Hamas and Al Qaeda, so I have to reject this one too.

What's going on here? Frustration, and fury - the damned Iraqis are not, so far, playing their assigned part. If there are any "uprisings" outside of Kurdistan, they are minor and hesitant. They appear only fitfully grateful for such humanitarian aid as has been distributed. They seem to look on us as - invaders. And that's in the anti-Saddam south.

It was a month into the War For The KLA before the allies began deliberately striking civilian targets. It may yet happen in this war. There's a rational case to be made that less care for Iraqi civilians would save more allied soldiers, and end the war sooner, which is really good for everybody, and so on. But the Ayn Rand Institute article is about finding reasons to blame the civilians we kill. Look for more of it, mostly from the people who kept telling us pre-war that the US had no conflict with the people of Iraq, just their rulers.

Sorry, This is Unqualified Offerings. You Want rumsfeld@dod.gov - Subject header on e-mail come on from Art Today : "An easy way to manipulate your images."

Reading Around - Jim, you ask, are there any intervention skeptics out there who haven't completely lost their sense of humor? Oh indeed, Loyal Reader: Mr. Justin Slotman of the legendary (and legendarily ugly) Insolvent Republic of Blogistan. Musical questions asked, but not answered, include:

Dang it. When all the neocons form a giant robot, what do they call it? Imperius Rex? Rovinator? Machiavelli Max? Cybertron, my Cyberton, I weep rusty tears for ye.

Lively. Tonic. Slotman.

Teresa Nielsen-Hayden reports the news:

India and Pakistan have been firing off deeply alarming test missiles. North Korea’s just getting nuttier. The economy’s singing “My Heart Will Go On.” And the expectation that the Iraqis would give liberating US troops a rapturous welcome has been downgraded from “a disappointment” to “an embarrassment” to “a slot in the world history register of manifest follies.”

Eve Tushnet has a long colloquy with a reader about why she came to support the war.

Hesiod notes that the Coulter Plan is on schedule.

Speaking of fundamentalist Christianity and things I found on Counterspin, is it a sign of the end times when Moammar Ghaddafi starts making sense?

Radley Balko says Glenn Reynolds is setting the "victory" bar a little low. Okay, a lot low.

Kieran Healy wrote what is already a classic blog post the other day (if such things exist) about CNN, Al Jazeera and hypocricy. He follows that up with an attempt to improve on Descartes.

Your Talking Dog explains how Rumsfeld hamstrung the Iraq War at Camp Gitmo. Plus, because this is a Talking Dog entry, more.

Salam Pax still hasn't been heard from since Monday. Worth reading through the archives, though, all the way back before Salam discovered what Trotsky meant when he said "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."

Check Back in June for war news. Maybe we'll know something by then - not about what will happen, but about what has happened. Consider:

The US military has been forced to admit the 8,000 Iraqi soldiers they claimed to have captured last week are now battling British forces.

Meanwhile, there may not be a convoy of Republican Guards heading south to counterattack the US forces after all.

Return of the Long Twilight Struggle - Arthur Silber on what the hawks have wrought.

I have one cavil. Arthur titles his piece "THE PREDICTABILITY OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES." I think he's wrong that the consequences are unintended. The same group of wonks and journalists that argued us into the current war were agitating for a new cold war with China before Zacarias Moussaoui ever enrolled in flight school. They wanted to turn a single snafu over a surveillance plane into a casus frigid belli in the spring of 2001.

Now they're getting what they want, is all. This is the big reason you don't see much "It's all about Israel" on this blog - because I don't think it is. The conflation of (the neoconservative view of) US interests with (the Likud Party view of) Israeli interests is more a symptom than a cause of our present difficulties. If Israel did not exist, our benevolent hegemons would have to invent it. Their goal is what they call "national greatness." Support for Israel (as they define support) is a means to that, not the end of it.

Keep your eye on Russia too. During the first cold war, Moscow was the world's number one sponsor of international terrorism. Those days too could return if Russia decides to make opposition to the Bush Doctrine their central foreign policy principle.

Actual Warblogging Post - The hawks are surely right that we needn't worry about the ultimate outcome of the invasion phase of the war. Ultimately, the US has complete air supremacy, which makes genuine counterattacks by Iraq almost impossible. The bad news of Sunday and the apparent pause today probably don't add up to much. The big sandstorm will, like the snow that covered the Ardennes Offensive, end, and supplies will catch up with the ground troops. (Today's sally against the 7th Cavalry by a force of unknown size seems to have used the sandstorm for cover.)

The only worry I have is political: will Iraqi resistance be successful enough to cause the US and Britain to significantly loosen the rules of engagement, driving up civilian casualties and poisoning the postwar well? The other possibility is if the Administration undertakes siege warfare around Baghdad while waiting for the rest of the invasion force to arrive.

The military has clearly been fighting in a manner calculated to make their postwar lives as viable as possible, but if push comes to shove, the Pentagon and the White House will trade goodwill for victory. Let's hope they don't have to.

Things that are too recent and unclear to be worth talking about: the possible Basra uprising. Is it happening? How big is it? Are they just anti-Saddam or also pro-Coalition? (Or are they pro-Iranian?)

Things that are starting to become not too recent to talk about: the "chemical factory" where "U.S. military investigators have found no evidence that weapons have been made in recent years at a suspected chemical plant secured by U.S. troops in southern Iraq." The "decapitation strike": at this point we have to say that if Saddam is dead, it doesn't matter - the regime is holding together.

Final thought: I'm convinced that the regime is toast, but I'm not sure they are. Like the US, they seem to be fighting the war with political goals firmly in mind. The war crimes committed so far - the fedayeen attacking without distinctive insignia, as the laws of war require for guerillas; the attacks by soldiers pretending to surrender - are appalling but purposeful: they have the political effect of making the attackers distrustful of the locals and therefore making it more risky for the locals to cooperate. It's now much more dangerous for an Iraqi soldier contemplating surrender than it was last week, and otherwise friendly civilians have to fear US/UK troops will think them enemies.

Then there's the Iraqi air force. Someone on the radio in the last couple of days pointed out that allied air dominance is so complete that Iraq hasn't put a single plane in the air. But why not, I wonder? If this is gotterdammerung, what have you got to lose? The planes don't do you any good in their bunkers.

I can come up with two answers. They're saving them up for a last hurrah outside Baghdad. OR . . .

. . . they want to keep them for after the war.

Yeah, it sounds nuts that Saddam and Co. think they'll have an "after the war" to worry about. But as someone else on the radio put it, this gang has been around for thirty years now, and they've been "on their way out" for much of that time. They must look around the bunker and think, "We've been here before."

All of which leads to the one thing I think I've figured out about the war so far. You can't trust what anyone tells you, but watching how they fight will tell you what they're thinking.

Sign of the Times - I had my first fishing session yesterday, though you couldn't prove it by the fish. But while driving from spot to spot I determined that PepCo, our local power company, has closed its Rocky Gorge and Triadelphia reservoirs to recreational use. Until this year, you could pay $30 or so and hike, picnic, fish or hunt (bow and powder, in season) on PepCo's land. Fear of terrorists contaminating the water, which I'm given to understand would actually be very hard to do.

Suggested Reading - I come across a lot of people who say they used to like Instapundit.com but can't stand it any more. Those people might want to try GlennReynolds.com, the MSNBC-sponsored sister site. The writing-to-citing ratio is much greater, the posts are more textured and nuanced and there's less - almost no, really - reflex linkage to the most mouth-breathing of hawkish bloggers. Here's a good post on victory conditions for the Iraq war and another on Matt Welch's "keep your eye off the ball" principle. Even the obligatory French-bashing piece has a certain air of detachment.

I kind of ignored the MSNBC site at first, but it's developed a distinctly different personality from Reynolds' main site, and isn't simply leftovers from Instapundit.

The Good Old Days - The Pontificator doesn't think of them that way, but I sure do. But the worst irony of all? While a lot of Republicans criticized Bill Clinton's War for the KLA, not enough of them did. Too many "We’re in it, so we’ve got to win it" McCainiacs in the GOP.

Opening a Door into a Dark Room - Max Sawicky has a good list of things we don't know about the war yet. Some of his commenters have added useful items.

The Sun Never Sets - Interesting writing on neo-imperialism and its discontents.

Max Sawicky: ANTI-IMPERIALISM: AS AMERICAN AS CHERRY PIE. First of a planned series.

Gene Healy: Anti-Imperialism: The American Way. Mark Twain, the Anti-Imerialist League and left-right alliances of yesteryear.

Arthur Silber: THE "NEW" COLONIALISM: CALL IT WHAT IT IS, AND RECOGNIZE ITS COSTS.

Which brings up something else: the other day, Virginia Postrel wrote

It's common on the left and even more common among isolationist libertarians to charge that the United States is, or is becoming, an "empire" because of interventions abroad. Hearing it the other day, I was struck by how utterly absurd the term is.

Well I resemble that remark. But aside from the fact that I think she's just wrong about the applicability of the term, her list of offenders seems awfully partial. How about neoconservative intellectual Dinesh D'Souza ("In praise of American empire", Christian Science Monitor)? Max Boot ("The Case for American Empire", The Weekly Standard)? Sebastien Mallaby ("The Reluctant Imperialist: Terrorism, Failed States, and the Case for American Empire," Foreign Affairs.) That's leaving aside all the, ahem, code words like "Pax Americana" and "benevolent global hegemony."

A couple of things, Virginia allows that " Saying the word empire is the wrong one doesn't imply that U.S. foreign policy is correct, merely that another term is needed. A 21st-century representative democracy with a large regulatory bureaucracy and many overseas involvements may be problematic." In return, I'll allow that "neo-imperialism" or the ungainly coinage "neo-empire" might be more appropriate than "empire" per se, if the alternatives weren't so ungainly. For that reason, I'll still use the term from time to time, with the proviso that I mean by it what its present-day enthusiasts mean.

Everybody's a Critic - First, from the Being a Hawk Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry Department, blogger Andrew Olmsted says I should get with the program:

We're at war in Iraq now. Regardless of whether it was a good idea or not, it's happened. The debate over war is over. Now it's time to worry about what we need to do next. Rebuilding Iraq, for example, is going to be a long process where we'll often be tempted to take shortcuts. Do we need to set another target after Iraq? What about North Korea? These are all important issues that demand intelligent discussion. Maybe it's time to worry less about who was right and who was wrong, and worry more about what we can do from here.

I skipped the personal stuff about me, because it's the general point that matters. At first I thought Andrew was merely wrongheaded - not so much about the fact that I've been a bit of a slacker about pointing readers toward all the problems that are cropping up with the war so far (Hesiod's your man for that) but about the whole "let's talk about the future now, we've put the past away" aspect of it. We can't decide the wisdom of "setting another target" without determining the wisdom of having set this one, for instance. Heaven knows that , if the war goes reasonably well, which it yet may, it will be presented as an argument for "setting."

That was what bothered me until I remembered what Andrew wrote last summer, when advocating a Congressonal debate on declaring war:

Those who oppose such an invasion would have to explain and defend their position, and place themselves on the record should a future attack prove to have come from Iraq.

So, no "Regardless of whether it was a good idea or not, it's happened" when the option is peace. No placing oneself on record if the option is war.

I ain't takin' that deal.

In other news, Gary Farber has an interesting response to my item about the "code word theory" response to critiques of neoconservatism. In some ways it's a "depends on what your meaning of is is" post. Gary argues that when I wrote

If you seriously maintain that "neoconservative" is a code word for "Jewish," you are an ass.

I might better have added "inevitably" or "always" to the verb. (Reader Andrew Shimmin e-mailed the same opinion.) I see the point, however, I was not responding to nuanced statements. See William Kristol ('He dismisses the claim "that neoconservatives, which really means Jews, hijacked the Bush administration. It's a little creepy." ') and David Horowitz ('Third, I am not a "neo-conservative," whatever that means, other than Jew').

I don't see much nuance there, and it's not hard to come up with other examples of neoconservatives making such blanket accusations. Horowitz is especially instructive, since he denies that the term could mean anything "other than Jew." Coming from a former leftist who turned right because of perceived excesses in the civil rights movement and dismay over the left's softness on foreign policy - that is, coming from an archetypal neocon - it's absurd.

Note that in the clear-cut case of "neoconservative = Jew" that David Frum adduces in his hit job on right-wing peaceniks, there's no "code word" issue whatsoever: Joseph Sobran, who creeps me out, writes 'The situation changed somewhat when many Jewish intellectuals, upset by liberal criticism of Israel, became what were called “neoconservatives.” This term implied no deep adherence to conservative principles, but only the adoption of a few ad hoc principles useful to Zionism, with no basic departure from New Deal liberalism insofar as it was useful to Zionism. “Neoconservatism” was really a sort of “kosher” conservatism.' That's pretty uncoded. I take Sobran as meaning what he says. (And I avoid him, for that reason.) I take the writers who don't make the equation as meaning what they say too.

UPDATE: Andrew Olmsted responds. He apologizes for any personal offense and elaborates his original argument. I still think he's wrong, and that he misunderstands my purpose. The bottom line is, we disagree on what's best for the country. I don't see any way to square that. But that's the issue - what's best for the country.

Weekly Fitness Blog Post - 184 pounds, 37" waist. Down two more pounds from last week.

Of the various fitness factors commonly adduced - muscular strength, resting pulse, blood pressure, work capacity, endurance, oxygen transport etc. - the single most important would have to be "dominating your age-gender cohort. Thus my sheer, egotistic joy at Thursday night's Pinewood Derby for Offering Boy's cub scout den, when I realized that I was in better shape than most of the men in the room. This was the most exhilaratiing diet benchmark since the day, sometime around the turn of the year, when I was, for the first time in years, able to see my dick when I peed without having to bend forward at the urinal.

No, you're wrong - you did need to know that.

Speaking of benchmarks, I bought three new pairs of pants today, size 36". (They fit - remember, clothing manufacturers lie like hell. And my 38" pants stopped hanging right even with a belt this week.)

On the downside, Mrs. Offering and I did a lot of housecleaning yesterday, and our backs just killed us. Among other things, this means I haven't found a good lower back exercise for my workout routine yet. For the record, the general routine is:

Dumbbell squats
Calf raises
Leg lifts (hip abduction)
Shoulder press
Biceps curls
Prone chest flyes
Ab crunches

All exercises are with dumbbells. The leg lifts were useless, in fact, until I started letting a ten-pound weight rest on my leg while doing them. Then, whooh! That's work.

About every other week I swap in stiff-legged dead lifts, which should be working the lower back but plainly aren't.

We now have a control for the Super Slow principles experiment, as Mrs. O simply refuses to give up her Firm tapes for slow-cadence weight training only. Her exercise experiment will make a useful comparison.

More fitness a week from now.

Return of the Chili Blog Post - Mrs. Offering and I just got back from an Oscar party at the swank South Baltimore rowhouse of Jesse Walker and his new fiancee, and I can now report that Jesse's chili is absolutely the best I've ever tasted. Period.

Just Like Oscar I'm staying away from war news today. This is your good news distraction blog for until Monday AM.

It Followed Her to School One Day - I guarantee I did not wake up expecting to see the following Lycos headline:

Police Probe Classroom Sheep Beatings

The story is, unlike the headline, far from amusing.

March Madness - Bruce Rolston of Flit has a morning analysis, current as of General Franks' morning (EST) briefing. Skip CNN and stick with Flit, I say.

Nothing from Salam Pax since just before "A-Day" began. Hang in there, Salam.

More useful looking military charities: books for the troops (via Electrolite) and CDs (via Virginia Postrel). These are likely to be especially useful - remember, the war will probably be short, but the occupation will be forever. Our guys and gals are going to need some way to pass the time.

Note: I will update as soon as the RIAA declares that sending used CDs to service members constitutes theft.

On the War is the Health of the State front, this report on preliminary details of war finance, from Reuters. The article says the Bush administration is proposing a $75 billion war finance package, but the numbers suggest otherwise. The plan, per Reuters calls for $62 billion for the defense department, $13 billion in foreign aid - which is $75b right there - plus, "Billions more will beef up security in New York and other possible terrorist targets in the United States." On top of that

Under pressure from some lawmakers, the administration is also considering including aid to cash-strapped U.S. airlines.

and

Experts say occupation costs could far exceed the direct military costs of the war.

Congress has already trimmed the President's tax cut proposal by $100 billion, just to be ready, I guess. (Surely liberals will learn to love this war.)

Where's the humble foreign policy I was promised, dammit.

Nothing to See Here, Folks, Move Along - From the Sydney Morning Herald:

The United States closed its embassy in Pakistan yesterday for an indefinite period as protests grew countrywide against the US-led attack on Iraq.

Non-essential embassy staff flew out of Pakistan on Thursday, leaving a small number of personnel and marine guards. Private US citizens have been advised to consider leaving the country, as have nationals of allied countries, including Australia.

Pakistan. That's the muslim country that really does have nuclear weapons, right?

The war itself seems to be going well. The rest of the world? Not so well.

A Fanboy's Notes - Finally got around to watching Minority Report tonight with Mrs. Offering. I liked a lot of it - the "we don't cut off your security access once we start hunting you down like a dog" thing gave me pause - but I can now say for sure that the best Philip K. Dick movie is still the one not based on a Philip K. Dick story.

Prepare! - Just in case there's something to the whole six guys in Mexico thing, remember to review these helpful antiterrorism tips.

It's So Easy - The Pentagon tells us that bomb damage assessment is hard and takes time. CNN and its analysts, on the other hand, can instantly tell, based on the coverage I saw at lunchtime today, whether bombs have struck civilian targets or not. Turns out the bombs never do.

The Lunatic Atmosphere of War II - Justin Raimondo on jerk protesters in San Francisco. Not all the lunatics are hawks.

The Lunatic Atmosphere of War I - Now and then I dip into Best [Neocon-Approved Items] of the Web to see if it still stinks, and it always does. Today it reads

It turns out Rangel doesn't think very much of those who actually are making the sacrifice of serving in our volunteer military. This morning Rangel was one of only 11 House members to vote "no" on a nonbinding resolution "expressing the support and appreciation of the nation for the president and the members of the armed forces who are participating in Operation Iraqi Freedom." (The Senate unanimously approved a similar resolution yesterday.)

This was not a pro-war resolution, just a show of support for the troops. Along with Rangel, the following members, all Democrats, voted "no":

A bald-faced lie. Skipping past the Whereases, we come to the Resolveds:

Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That
the Congress expresses the unequivocal support and appreciation of the
Nation--

(1) to the President as Commander-in-Chief for his firm leadership and
decisive action in the conduct of military operations in Iraq as part
of the on-going Global War on Terrorism;

(See resolution text.) That's not all the Resolveds - clauses 2 and 3 thank and praise the troops and their families. After praising the President for "his firm leadership and decisive action." But first this Republican-drafted resolution has to praise the President first. AND claim that "operations in Iraq" are "part of the on-going Global War on Terrorism," which, as even James Taranto should know is, as a practical matter, the very heart of the dispute over the wisdom of the war.

Going through the Whereases too will make it even clearer that Taranto speaks the opposite of the truth - this was a thoroughly political resolution and a pro-war resolution. It's the simplest of blue-pencil exercises to turn the actual text into the kind of resolution Taranto only claims it to be. All the reports on the debate make it clear that the political content was the sticking point.

This is no doubt why Taranto links to the roll call itself but not the text of the resolution or any news reports about it. What a sham. And anyone who forces me to sympathize with Charles "Tax cuts are racist" Rangel gets my undying enmity.

On a related topic, Joseph Stromberg suggests that "Not for the first time in US history, the evil and stupid parties have changed places." Me, I just figure that nothing makes the Democrats look quite as good as removing the reins of power from their sweaty little hands. Of course, that goes for the Republicans too. Stromberg also says it's time to impeach Antonin Scalia. And his suggested method of following war news would make a great weblog idea, actually. It involves making four columns.

(Link via Franklin Harris, who has a lot of red meat posts for anti-interventionist types the last day or two.)

UPDATE: I should acknowledge that the early Whereases say nice things about the troops before segueing into policy matters. What you actually have is a sandwich with troops on top, troops at the bottom, and a whole lot of politics in the middle. I wouldn't eat it, myself.

More Support - Nell Lancaster's Lexington, VA based peace group's site points me to Operation Uplink, which takes donations. OU (note: not "UO") provides service members and their families with free phone cards. I can't imagine that this is much use if you're crossing the Iraqi desert, but surely it could benefit rear-echelon troops immediately. For the next few days apparently, you can also get donations of useful items to the American Friends Service Committee. They will air-ship it to Jordan and from there get it to Iraqi refugees.

I have no personal experience with or knowledge of the bona fides of either effort, though you figure the Quakers aren't going to rip you off, right?

Not Exactly - Glenn Reynolds quotes this MSNBC report

In the town of Safwan, Iraqi civilians eagerly greeted the 1st Marine Division.

One little boy, who had chocolate melted all over his face after a soldier gave him some treats from his ration kit, kept pointing at the sky, saying “Ameriki, Ameriki.”

and comments

This is the "peace" movement's worst nightmare, isn't it?

Speaking on behalf of my little corner of the "peace" "movement," I have two that are worse: first, what this kid's parents think about "Ameriki" in one year, what his older brother thinks in five and what he thinks in twenty. That will be the measure of our practical success. Second, that Americans will imagine that the immediate reaction of the locals decides the question.

Warblogging - Find the best by Bruce Rolston of Flit. He's a Canadian military officer and his expertise adds genuine insight to the links. He's got a regularly updated map, too.

Public Notice - If you seriously maintain that "neoconservative" is a code word for "Jewish," you are an ass. The only question is whether you're an ignorant ass, one who somehow missed a thirty-year-plus intellectual tradition and yet feels unaccountably qualified to comment on political matters, or a dishonest ass.

William Kristol can't plead ignorance. Some of the rest of you may have had an excuse. No longer.

Supporting the Troops if not their bosses. Operation Homefront takes donations to help military families in San Diego and El Paso. I'd bring the families' loved ones home tomorrow, but it's not up to me and it's not up to them either If this had been an actual emergency, you'd want these people between you and trouble. You can help their families, who make do with crappy pay and the dislocations attendant on separation from spouses and parents. Fair warning: Operation Homefront is not rated by Charity Navigator and I know nothing about their bona fides. (Link via Virginia Postrel.)

Quote of the Other Day

The correct terminology here is obviously not "code name", for Christ's sake, but "brand".

Colby Cosh on "Operation Iraqi Freedom."

Quote of the Day

gevalt, if either our side or theirs is faking a gay anti-war anti-Saddam weblog, either they are much smarter than I thought or the CIA is no longer screening for current drug use

Eve Tushnet

Modest Proposal - I've argued, along with Robert Wright and others, that the real problems come after the current war. Broadly speaking, they are the likely dangers of the occupation and the temptation to use Iraq as a base for what John Smith calls the Rolling World War. I'd like things to work out for us and the Iraqi people more than I would like to be right about the dangers, and I'm not temperamentally suited to root against an easy victory that would tend to lead us into further temptation. Prudence demands we get the hell out after winning. But what about the reconstruction? There needs to be some sort of transition. The question is, if not a US-run regency, what? I don't trust the UN to do it. (I told you people I was a right winger.) UN officials would have the women of Iraq in Bosnia-style brothels quicker than you can say "padded expense account." Plus the UN largely comprises the sort of thuggish kleptocrats we're supposed to be ushering out of Iraq. That's one of the problems with turning the job over to the Arab League too - another case of "meet the new boss . . . "

So, who fills the bill? To this, a general answer and a specific one.

For my sins I listened to the CNN radio feed today. And Ari Fleischer or whoever began the White House press conference by talking about the ever-growing Coalition of the Willing to do Everything but Say Who They Are. But some of them do say who they are, and Fleischer made much of "countries that have themselves only recently escaped tyranny" who have signed on.

And there's your transitional administration: the best liberal politicians and government officials from Eastern Europe. They understand, in the transition from tyranny to freedom, what has to be tossed out, who has to be held to account and when, instead, mercy must do the work of justice. They've lived it. They understand ethnic strife and where, unmanaged, it can lead. One country has even provided the rare example of constituent parts divorcing peacefully.

Which leads to the specific answer: some one foreigner has to be in charge of all this for a time. It would be a fine thing if it were not an American military officer for political reasons. It should be someone friendly to the United States, fierce in devotion to freedom and individual rights, renowned for conscience and, not incidentally, currently underemployed.

Ladies and gentlemen, the sane, logical and inspired choice:

Vaclav Havel. Pass it on.

What Now - To be perfectly clear, it isn't important what I choose to do with this website in the changed circumstance of a formal shooting war between Iraq and the US. Atrios has had a lot of fun with the grandiloquent pronouncements of some bloggers - well, you ain't catching me, Mr. 15,000 Visits a Day! The world will little note nor long remember what I say here. With a couple of exceptions: it matters to me, by definition, and probably to some subset of the people who are kind enough to read this site on a regular basis. So here's the plan:

As to the war itself, I hope we win and win quickly, with minimal loss of American life and minimal loss of Iraqi life. And I hope that whatever happens in the coming years to underscore the folly of the "Bush Doctrine" and the grand strategy of "benevolent hegemony" first laid out in 1992 is, miraculously, nearly pain free in terms of actual lives lost and ruined. We'll see. What I won't be doing:

o Stopping with the "antiwar" talk, as Radley says he will;

o "Warblogging" in the "following every twist and turn of every available report" sense. Hesiod and Glenn Reynolds, from their separate perspectives, were the most energetic This-Is-Blogistan reporter sorts yesterday, and I suspect that will continue. I enjoy following such blogging, with reservations, but have neither the work schedule nor the inclination to engage in it myself. In a very real sense, I consider it a waste of time. Three factors tend to make most up-to-the-minute war reporting useless - the media gets initial reports reliably wrong; the allies fill the airwaves with propaganda and misdirection; the Iraqis do likewise. There may indeed be mass surrenders of Iraqi troops, for instance. But some "pre-war" reports of these appear to be wishes fathering thoughts. (See John Smith on the situation in Northern Iraq.) I doubt the validity of this poorly sourced Independent story about a supposed Iraqi helicopter attack on a Kurdish village yesterday. There are strong operational and political reasons for both parties to the war to lie and structural reasons for the press to sieze on rumors. Hesiod and Instapundit both spent much of yesterday tracking and then refuting the rumor that Tariq Aziz had defected, been captured or killed. They did a good job, but they can have it. Obviously, as long as his access lasts, Salam Pax is your source for news from Baghdad itself.

o I won't be installing the Iraqi Body Count doodads, as suggested by my Stand Down colleague Rachel Cunliffe. I'll regret each death, but my opposition to the war has always been rooted in a concern for Americans, not Iraqis. I also instinctlively distrust the reliability of such tracking programs - the people behind them have agendas too, and their own motives for fudging the figures.

o Hawks will sieze on every short-term thing that goes right with the war as proving its merits. After a dozen years of WTC I, the African embassies, the Cole and the massacres of September 11, 2001, one still encounters hawks saying that there was no terrorist backlash from Gulf War Phase I, as opponents had predicted. I will try to resist the countervailing temptation to trumpet every reversal we encounter during the battle as demonstrating that I was right all along. We'll see how I do.

o Return to writing in the third-person impersonal as a symbolic protest. UO promises.

What I will do:

o Write about the war and US foreign policy from what I hope will be a somewhat longer view.

o Link to war coverage by bloggers and others that strikes me.

o Write about other things. Fitness blogging and (soon!) fishing reports will continue, so also with items on domestic politics, comic books, games and, who knows, maybe even music and movies at some point.

o Continue to make the case for a foreign policy grounded in republican virtue and discretion. I obviously have a lot of work to do here.

o Track the injuries to decency that I've been cataloging under that phrase of Orwell's, "the lunatic atmosphere of war."

o Finally clean out my @##$%^ inbox. I apologize for having been so lame about it. Part of the in-box cleaning will include the Kenneth Pollack and torture-related mail that came in this month. I would disagree with any argument that these issues are no longer relevant "because the war changes everything." The war, I think, changes very little (not least because it's been going on for twelve years already). As I've said before, never confuse politics with current events.

o Try to figure out what the hell ant-interventionists should do next. I have, simply, no flipping idea right now.

Anyway, all that starts tonight.

News That Stays News

Our names shouted in a certain dawn...a message...a summons...There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said... no. But somehow we missed it. Well, we'll know better next time

Tom Stoppard, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead"

The Lunatic Atmosphere of War - "Sergeant Stryker" goes down an ugly path in this upbraiding of that moral reprobate - Salam Pax:

God forbid war should cut-off Mr. Oppressed Person's Internet access. I've often wondered how someone who lives in such an oppressed country could afford all he describes. It is curious.

Although I do agree with him. We shouldn't have a war for the sole purpose of bringing democracy to people who would rather live with the status quo under a dictator than live free. It's so much easier to be a smart-ass on a computer than to actually risk your life and leave or stay and fight. Of course, the Kurds and Marsh Arabs actually tried and we left them holding the bag the last time. But at least they tried, unlike our friend here who lives in apparent luxury compared to those outside Baghdad and who would have much to lose if those that have been ground under Saddam's boot actually have a say in how things are run after the war. The Good Days are about to end, Salam. Your patron will be gone shortly and a settling of accounts will take place. Our bombs are the least of your concerns.

The sheer obtuse viciousness on display here is boggling, and I say that as someone who has not previously had any particular axe to grind against Stryker. It's never appealling when the citizen of a relatively free country sits in luxuriant moral judgment of the ordinary subject of an oppressive one. The ordinary person encountering Salam's description of his quotidian existence might react less with conviction that Salam must be an agent of the regime than by adjusting his mental picture of the texture of ordinary life under totalitarianism. Having done that, said person might better understand how totalitarian regimes are able to maintain themselves.

Beyond all that, two ugly features: first, the way war and its prospect foster hatred of the people of the enemy nation; second, the same mindset that justifies terror. Stryker says, as much as dammit, that Salam personally has it coming for allowing Saddam Hussein to do bad things. By this same logic our enemies argue that we have it coming - after all, we (unlike Iraq) are a democracy, so we perforce consent to whatever our government does and are therefore legitimate targets. They're wrong and so is he.

Gosh, Jim, aren't you being rather harsh on what is probably the military equivalent of pre-game locker room talk? Maybe. That's the point, though. In kinder times, Stryker, on the evidence of his writing, was a pretty decent guy. The inevitable deforming of the personalities of decent guys, for what one hopes is a temporary period, is one of the chief moral reasons why one should never fight "optional wars."

Must Read - Salam Pax, on the eve of war.

Salam, I hope you and your family live through this. Odds of that are fair to very good, I'd think. And I hope the better life the hawks are sure you'll live is waiting for you on the other side of the imminent unpleasantness. But my apologies in advance if the odds go wrong. And thanks for a great blog.

The rest was best said by someone else.

Over There - In an interesting item, Max Sawicky, disagreeing with Justin Raimondo and I (and does that take nerve or what?) about the wisdom of "direct action," argues that Gandhi would see things differently. Max offers all sorts of stipulations about the kinds of civil disobedience he thinks would be counterproductive, but concludes

. . . there is no getting around the symbolic power of peaceable disruption of business as usual, not to mention the war machine itself.

I'm sure he's right about Gandhi, but Gandhi's campaign had a crucial advantage. He was protesting the actions of an alien Other. Even if his movement inconvenienced locals in doing so, the locals instinctive identification was with the protesters, the people "like them." The instinctive identification of, say, harried commuters or most news viewers will be, not with a bunch of ectomorphs with black do-rags over their faces, but with the people working on behalf of state policy.

The Lunatic Atmosphere of "Social" "Science" - PulpCulture's Franklin Harris on problems with the latest study purporting to show that violent kids television leads to "aggressive" adults.

The Lunatic Atmosphere of War - A couple of signs that suggest just how bad things could get. From the Seattle Times:

OLYMPIA — An anti-terrorism bill has spurred debate among lawmakers: Is a gun a weapon of mass destruction?

The fight could jeopardize the sweeping bill proposed by Gov. Gary Locke and Attorney General Christine Gregoire to create six new terror-related crimes with harsher penalties than allowed under current state law.

A group of House Democrats wants House Bill 1210 to specifically include firearms as weapons of mass destruction, to make it clear that a terror-related gun crime would be punishable by the stiffer penalties.

Link via Jesse Walker on Hit and Run.

From IDG News Service:

Witnesses and representatives at the U.S. House Judiciary Committee (news - web sites)'s Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property hearing Thursday did express fears that profits from widespread copying of movies, music, and software outside the United States were being funneled into terrorist organizations, but the hearing produced no concrete examples of that happening.

Show me a hobby horse and an organized interest group and I'll show you an attempt to yoke it to the "war on terror." This is our near future. (Our farther future I prefer not to contemplate just now.) We're about to launch a war not so we can be safe but so we can feel safe, for a time at least. That means every rent seeker in the lobby of every legislature in the country will try to make us feel unsafe - unless his favored subvention or prohibition is swiftly and zealously enacted.

This has, by the way, everything to do with the enthusiasm for torturing "terrorists," a word whose meaning determined operators will be seeking to expand for some time to come. So read Arthur Silber on Hannah Arendt on torture.

What Oft Was Said - Radley Balko saves me a lot of typing. Scroll up for some interesting follow-ups.

Hawks all too Clear on the Concept - Your neocon quote of the day, from the Sacramento Bee . . .

"It takes little imagination to dream up other scenarios that might call for pre-emptive military action," said Thomas Donnelly, a military analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank that has led the charge for war against Iraq.

Yeah, that's the problem all right.

No Action - Superb column this morning in which Justin Raimondo upbraids "direct action" advocates in the antiwar movement. Excerpt:

Nothing is wrong with peaceful and legal protests on the day war breaks out, but the advocates of disruption who self-righteously howl "No business as usual!" and advocate illegal acts have got to be told off, in no uncertain terms. How dare they endanger the rest of us, and subject the organized antiwar movement to State repression at a fateful moment like this?! It's outrageous, and impermissible. In San Francisco, in the aftermath of the last mass protests, a contingent of self-proclaimed "anarchists," who go under the vague general rubric of the "Black Bloc," split off from the main march and descended into the financial district, breaking windows, throwing rocks, and creating havoc. Dozens were arrested, but most were out of jail in a few hours later, and all charges were dropped.

As to the notion of a "general strike," it apparently takes a right-winger to remind leftist organizers that

Most people, of course, can't afford to miss a day of work, and, in this economy, can hardly afford to be fired.

Well worth everyone's time, particularly frustrated peace advocates who might be otherwise tempted toward the "asshole path." As a bonus, the "I-word" does not appear.

Weekly Fitness Blog Post - 186 pounds, waist still fluctuating between 37 and 38". It's no longer a gut issue so much - it's my damned haunches. My largest remaining stores of fat are north of the buttocks to the bottom of the rib cage and laterally - your classic (and I hate the phrase) "love handles." Fat seems to be melting preferentially off other areas, like arms and legs. My new plan is not to worry unduly. So long as I keep losing, it has to come off eventually.

Last week I wrote about Atkins for the first time. One reason I hadn't brought it up is its "red flag" quality, as seen in the recent Reason brouhaha. Another is that I consider my personal Atkins jury to be out until I get not only transitional (during weight loss) but maintenance blood test results.

While I consider the effectiveness of Atkins very much an open question - even thirty pounds later - a concern I have is that there seem to be at least two Atkins plans that people debate: the one Atkins actually wrote and the one people seem to think he wrote. For instance, Fumento's original critique quotes the 1973 AMA report:

"The notion that sedentary persons, without malabsorption or hyperthyroidism, can lose weight on a diet containing 5,000 calories a day is incredible," the article says.

The "5,000 calories a day" we'll get to. It's the "sedentary persons" I have problems with. I've never seen a copy of Atkins original book, but the newer one explicitly, repeatedly and voluminously preaches the need for exercise, stating, in so many words, that if you're not exercising you're not really on the Atkins program.

The "5,000 calories" figure is also one I didn't encounter in the book I read. It has its cousin in RiShawn Biddles joke that " three steaks a day isn't exactly going to keep the pounds off either."

This is also at variance with anything I've actually read by Atkins, who repeatedly also says that No, you can't eat as much as you want, you should eat only until you feel full - not stuffed.

There's also the curious claim I've seen in various places that Atkins doesn't work because people who go off the diet gain the weight back. Here I'm not sure quite what they mean. I have no doubt that if I were to once again make soda, fries and chips my core food items I'd be back up to 220 pounds and beyond, particularly if I stopped working out. But how would that be the fault of the Atkins diet itself? A claim that people on the maintenance phase of the diet can't actually maintain their goal weight would be at least a sensical criticism, and one that could be tested. But that doesn't seem to be what they're saying.

Many of the less useful critics also imply that the induction phase - when carbohydrate intake is limited to 20 grams a day from salad vegetables only - is the whole of the program. In fact, you get to add both number of carb grams and variety of carb sources back as the diet progresses. I'm presently consuming about 50-60 grams of carbohydrate a day, with spikes on indulgence days. Those carbs come mostly from vegetables, berries and nuts, though I now have a slice of whole wheat toast under my eggs in the morning. (Never could stand to eat just eggs by themselves - it's a texture thing.) I ate more healthy vegetables a day during induction (the most restrictive phase) than I ever did before I started my diet, when my carbohydrates came chiefly from sugar and processed starches.

I happen to think that portion control more than dietary composition per se probably is the real key to weight loss. I also think that Atkins is an effective way for some people to achieve portion control. (I agree with Diana Moon when she says that "The weight-loss regimen that works for you is the one you can stand to do consistently." Not everyone can stand to do a controlled-carb diet.) I also think that the key to Atkins is to exercise to a level of fitness where you maximize the number of good carbohydrates you can eat. I think, if you're a classic meat & potatoes man like I was, you need to pick one or the other. I think a whole bunch of other things that I can't prove but have only sort of subjectively experienced.

Next week: calories in, calories out, and conservation laws.

All Niger, All the Time! - I continue to be on this story like a tick on your eyelid. The latest reports deepen the Italian Connection:

WASHINGTON -- Phony weapons documents cited by the United States and Britain as evidence against Saddam Hussein were initially obtained by Italian intelligence authorities, who may have been duped into paying for the forgeries, U.S. officials said Friday.

Which is not to say that the Italians just made them up . . .

U.S. officials said Friday that they still do not know who forged the documents, but the disclosure that they were first obtained by Italian authorities sheds light on how they came to the attention of American intelligence.

"I don't mean to suggest that Italy created the documents. I don't think they have any reason to," one U.S. official said. "It's conceivable that some con man sold it to them."

But you could fairly accuse the LAT of burying the lede here:

The CIA first heard allegations that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger in late 2001 but did not obtain the documents until about a month ago, and it promptly turned them over to U.N. inspectors, the official said.

Initially, the existence of the documents "was reported to us second- or third- hand," the official said. "We included that in some of our reporting, although it was all caveated because we had concerns about the accuracy of that information."

What interesting timing. The CIA got the documents "about a month ago." The President gave his State of the Union address, where he brought up the Niger claims, two months ago. So the President was selling Congress and the American people information that "was reported to us second- or third- hand."

Rockefeller's move provoked a pointed response from the committee chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.).

"The implication of Sen. Rockefeller's letter is that the intelligence community forged these documents to somehow bolster the case against Iraq," he said in a statement. "The United States does not need this one piece of evidence to make its case against Iraq."

If their other pieces of evidence are so good, why do they keep throwing this crap out there?

Preemptive Punditwatch - The Pontificator lists the questions that need to be asked this morning. One cavil: he's hot to blame things on the CIA, which would be weird, the CIA being a hotbed of antiwar sentiment. (After the State Department, the CIA is reliably the second-most dovish national security organ on almost any policy.)

In fact, this Washington Post article claims

The CIA, which had also obtained the documents, had questions about "whether they were accurate," said one intelligence official, and it decided not to include them in its file on Iraq's program to procure weapons of mass destruction.

Of course, it also claims that

But Iraq never surrendered the blueprints for its nuclear program, and it kept teams of scientists employed after U.N. inspectors were forced to leave in 1998.

which is sort of, in its way, true, though the implication is that Iraq forced the inspectors to leave, which isn't true.

The latest reports suggest that

Forged documents that the United States used to build its case against Iraq were likely written by someone in Niger's embassy in Rome who hoped to make quick money, a source close to the United Nations investigation said.

But quick money from whom, is the question. Some obvious candidates:

Israel - It's way too soon to conclude, as Justin Raimondo does, that it must be the Israelis. They're a logical cui bono suspect (rather like Iraq was a logical suspect in the September 2001 massacres), but that can only be a starting point, not an ending point. One imagines that the Mossad could produce better fakes.

Iran - This one comes a bit out of left field, but there are some indications that Iran hopes to advantage itself in the confusion. My first question was, Are the Iranians that stupid? After all, they're number two or three on the Official Regime Change list. Iraq may be their ancient enemy, but why help the US to a base of anti-Iranian operations right next door? The answer that has since come to me is, if you think the Americans are coming anyway, and you think you can successfully create a buffer zone of renegade Iraqis between you and them, you might take the gamble. Strikes me as pretty high-stakes though.

Turkey - Depending on how much they really want Kirkuk and Mosul. (These documents have been around since well before the parliamentary defeat for US basing rights.)

China - if you believe the "China's grand strategy is to draw the US into overextending itself" argument. China is our strongest geopolitical rival and has nnot been engaging in the kind of veto talk we hear from France and Russia. I assume this is because they don't need to - not so long as France and Russia are up for the job.

Jordan - if they think there's a "Hashemite Restoration" possibility. (Connection: doesn't Prince Hassan live in Rome?

Kuwait - progenitors of the "Incubator Myth" and possibly the concocters of the "GHWB Assassination Attempt" too.

Time Bomb - I've speculated before that there might be a covert war against the war being waged by the US/UK intelligence bureaucracies. Including a crude fake in the Iraqi bill of attainder might have been intended to cause later embarrassment.

More likely, we're simply witnessing the curruption - perhaps "beat-down" might be a better way of putting it - of the intelligence analysis function by its political masters. In the face of relentless pressure from above, dubious defector reports get upgraded to reliable, dodgy-looking documents get reclassified as authentic. Then its off to the UN or the Halls of Congress (SOTU, e.g.) with the "evidence."

That's What I'm Tonkin About! - From ABC News:

The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee asked the FBI on Friday to investigate forged documents the Bush administration used as evidence against Saddam Hussein and his military ambitions in Iraq.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia said he was uneasy about a possible campaign to deceive the public about the status of Iraq's nuclear program.

Probably not in time to stop the war, but maybe, just maybe, we won't have to wait quite so long for the lies to be detailed this time. Of course, it could be a short, easy probe if the FBI talks to the right people:

Secretary of State Colin Powell has denied the U.S. government had any hand in creating the false documents.

"It came from other sources," Powell told a House committee Thursday. "We were aware of this piece of evidence, and it was provided in good faith to the inspectors."

So, first stop: Colin Powell. First question: "Um, Colin. So where did this thing come from?"

Come to think of it, what do we need the FBI for? Why couldn't - I don't know - ABC News ask him?

I'll have to ask you to forgive my ignorant questions. I was born in a different country, and I'm still getting used to how things work in this one.

Airplane Glue - Bruce Rolston of Flit on the "smoking gun" "unmanned chemical warfare vehicle" that turns out to have been, well, a model plane:

NOTE: Does this mean I think the Iraqi drone on display, that can only fly 2 miles, is the best they've got at their little ersatz Area 51? Of course not. When war comes, and the Humvees pull up with the keys to the blast door of the secret hangar, they will find the drone Mk. 2, that can fly at least 100 per cent farther than that. With an actual lawnmower engine this time. And carrying a small hand grenade.

He also writes:

Speaking of press appearances without substance, it's getting to difficult to find ANYTHING in Colin Powell's presentations to the UN that can stand up to any scrutiny.

Reminder: this is (inexplicably) a war supporter talking. He also links to a New Republic story about more pro-war falsehoods.

All of which makes this Charles Dodgson item seem particularly relevant. (Warning: Major Godwin's Law violation. But the antiwar camp is running a major Godwin's Law deficit compared to the pro-war camp so far, so Dodgson comes in under budget.)

Department of I Did Not Know That - Atrios appears to have signed on as a contributor to "Billboard" group blog of the famously right wing - and fabulously entertaining - New York Press.

Fantasy Girl - Avedon Carol responds to my ribbing about her Gore fantasies. She also wonders if she should add Julian Sanchez to her "Loyal Opposition" list. Well duh! was my first reaction. Julian rocks, and he could probably even explain about how libertarians have already figured out that "all Big Institutions can turn ugly on you, even when they are privately-owned." But the question got me thinking: who else should be on Avedon's list of the "loyal opposition." Herewith, my nominations:

Eve Tushnet - because what blogroll is complete without a brilliant, pro-life, anti-authoritarian Catholic conservative? Eve already has some impressive synergy going on with Christian leftists like Jeanne d'Arc, but she makes a great "loyal opposition" for almost anyone.

Julian, of course.

Colby Cosh - Because Canadian conservatism was never this funny. As for opposition value on Avedon's site, I don't think he's even against the war. Particularly underrated!

Franklin Harris - Anarcho-capitalist fanboy. Who doesn't want to know what someone like that thinks?

Unruled - Sort of like Franklin Harris, but without the insights into Battle of the Planets. A sharp, no-nonsense writer.

I'd offer a longer list, but I've stopped reading any blog who's author uses the verb coinage "Fisk" without irony.

Toothless Hags - In internationalist gospel, the problem with the League of Nations was that it lacked enforcement powers and/or the power of the United States to compel states to respect its decisions. Thus it could neither prevent nor reverse Italy's conquest of Abyssinia, which aggression led, with other things, to World War II. Meantime, the United States is at least declaring that the UN can't prevent it from conquering Iraq. Critics can justly call the UN irrelevant no matter which way things shake out - if the US goes to war without the blessing of the Security Council, the UN is impotent and irrelevant. If the US actually secures authorization, the UN is nothing but a (balky) rubber stamp for determined US policy. A toothless hag like the League of Nations.

But one of the Fates was a toothless hag too. Let's turn it around for a second. Don't look at the 1930s from the perspective of the "international community." Look at it from the perspective of Italy. Would Italy have been smart to heed the clear sentiment of the League? They conquered Abyssinia, and thereby set in motion a train of events that led to ruinous war, German and then allied occupation and, not incidentally for the country's political class, the execution of much of the government.

Not such a good deal for the Italians. I'd argue that the League condemnation was a signal of what they were letting themselves in for. My point is not that US policy toward Iraq is nothing but Italian policy toward the Horn of Africa. My point is that one ignores alarms at one's peril. I would never want the UN to have veto power over US security. It's a talking shop, and should be. But what the talking shop is saying is that the "coalition of the unwilling" threatens to metastasize. We'd be fools not to take that seriously.

Read it and Weep - The UN Convention Against Torture, signed and ratified by the United States of America. (link via So It Goes. Pedro has been on the torture beat - in German - since February.) See particularly Articles 2 and 3:

Article 2

2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

Article 3
1. No State Party shall expel, return ("refouler") or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.

Article 2, Section 2 and Article 3, Section 1 about cover all the legal issues. They told us in college that ratified treaties have the force of US Law. Article VI, Clause 2 of the US Constitution reads - and forgive me for this exercise in nostalgia - "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."

Moral issues aside, it appears to be illegal to do what we're doing. Period. If the government wants to open a campaign to withdraw from the UNCAT, I'll take my chances on the debate. As it stands, many officials appear to be breaking the law under color of official duty. That sounds like a high crime rather than a misdemeanor.

Long Fuse - The torture proponents keep bringing up the hypothetical "ticking bomb" scenario. They also adduce the famous 1995 "Philippines Affair" on the effectiveness of torture as an investigative tool, about which Eve quoted a report yesterday:

The Philippine intelligence agencies, suspecting a plot, arrested and tortured a man they thought was one of the terrorists. They broke most of his ribs, burned his genitals with cigarettes and poured water into his mouth until he couldn't breathe. After 67 days, he came up with the information which enabled the Filipinos, together with the Americans - who were provided with the fruits of the interrogation - to frustrate the plot.

67 days. A committed subject can hold out against unspeakable cruelty for 67 days. Do the timers on those Al Qaeda nukes go up that high?

Old joke: Man asks a woman in a bar, "Would you sleep with me for a million dollars?" Woman allows that, well, for that kind of money, she supposes she would. How about for this shiny new quarter? the man continues. The woman, outraged, demands, "What the hell do you think I am??" "We've already established that," the man replies. "Now we're just haggling over the price."

And that's the function of the "ticking bomb" scenario.

Over There - I just posted a few observations on the ever-dicier British situation on Stand Down.

Self-Parody Watch - I adore Avedon Carol, but this adventure in wishful thinking reminded me of a column I read in 1980 by George Will or William Buckley or someone like that, in Jimmy Carter's voice, in which, for the good of the country, he laid out all the reasons why he was withdrawing from the Presidential race and urging Americans to vote for his opponent, Ronald Reagan, instead.

Compare and Contrast - In his No to War post, Arthur Silber reminds us that most legislators voted for the USA-PATRIOT Act without having read it. Similar stories have appeared about legislators not knowing the details of what was in the McCain-Feingold bill either. It's an open secret that our legislators actually read relatively few of the bills they consider.

Meanwhile, there's Sarbanes-Oxley and its "knowledge standard" for CFOs and CEOs, Section 302 of the law, reviewed on a law firm's site here. As my boss explained the knowledge standard the other day, CEOs and CFOs are personally liable for knowing everything about their companies' finances and accounting. There is no "I had no idea" excuse available.

Sauce for the . . . ?

It's Not Just Liberals like Jonathan Edelstein and others jumping off the war bus now. Arthur Silber says "Not This War, Not This Way." Excerpt:

So, to go back to the beginning, this is where I stand now: protect the lives and the rights of U.S. citizens. Take quick strikes against our enemies when and where you must. Avoid long-term foreign intervention. But as for this war being urged by the Bush Administration, to be pursued by the specific means they are employing, and to be followed by decades of foreign involvement together with the necessary, and strangling, domestic bureaucracy required to support it: no, thank you. And I say that as a truly loyal American -- loyal to the founding principles of this country, which our current leaders appear to have abandoned long ago.

And I repeat, and this is the point that must be remembered: the seeds for the destruction of our remaining liberties and freedoms are already present -- and, in many instances, much more than just the seeds. And one final thought: if we should come to an almost fully and completely regulated and controlled state, where our every move is watched and recorded, we may not need to fear attacks from foreign nations or terrorists, and we may indeed have a "peaceful" country.

The Dark Stain - Jonathan "Head Heeb" Edelstein traces the subcontracting of torture by the US government back farther than Al Qaeda and beyond antiterrorism:

A running theme throughout these comments is that subcontracting torture is something new to the terror war - a "canary in the coal mine" indicating a trend toward repressiveness in the United States. The truth is, however, that this particular canary has been dead for at least thirty years. Subcontracting of torture by American authorities is an old, old story, originating in another dirty war - the "war on drugs."

There follows a detailed and depressing history of connivance and outright participation in torture abroad by federal agents, and an even more depressing legal history in which the courts have repeatedly declined to strike down the practice.

It just goes to show that almost everything baleful really does start with the war on drugs. It also, in the same post, impels Jonathan off the fence onto the anti-war side of the Iraq crisis.

BETTER TO DIE LIKE A MAN THAN LIVE LIKE A BEAST is the item where Eve Tushnet starts her powerful, eloquent and thrilling response to the question of torture. One of the finest adventures in the felt thought (and examined principle) that I can remember reading. Read down from the link provided. I would quote - oh how I would quote - but superb as the excerpts are, the original is better. Read.

(Memo to Brad DeLong: Eve Tushnet can fairly be classified as a "religious conservative.")

More succinct if less complete is Glenn Reynolds:

All I can say is, that (1) the French did it a lot in Algeria; and (2) they still lost; and (3) it's wrong. Even if you can explain away (1) & (2) by noting that, well, we're talking about The French here, that doesn't work for (3).

I should have thought that, for Glenn's crowd at least, "the French did it" would be all the argument one would need. (CalPundit suggests the same.)

Here, more or less, is what I wrote to Gene on the subject this weekend. Among other things, Gene wanted to know why I was famously (in the limited circle of my longtime readers) okay with "gutshooting Osama Bin Laden and watching his agonizing death":

1. If I shoot Bin Laden and watch him bleed to death, it's in the name of a purely personal satisfaction. It doesn't implicate the country. We should also consider the possibility that I'm not such a great guy for doing such a thing. That's my cross to bear. To turn that into an official act is rather a different thing. Remember that ace student of power, Lenin's core questions: "Who? Whom?" When you go from bullet to cheese grater, whom stays the same, but who changes drastically.

2. I doubt I'd go through with it anyway. I'd just blow him away and call someone to pick up the body. And I do oppose the death penalty, so again, there's a difference between my avenging a grief and the state claiming official retribution. (I would be against an officer of the state killing Bin Laden in cold blood. Killing him in the press of battle or the heat of the chase would be another thing.) And I may still be wrong to kill an enemy I've already rendered harmless. Just because I want to do it, just because I'm pretty sure I would do it, doesn't make it justifiable.

3. This gets to whether torture is worse than executing someone - or rather, it gets to why torture is worse than executing someone. I think there's a cleanliness to killing one's mortal enemy that is not found in the act of torture. I alluded, in one of those spring 2002 items, to "all that self-ownership stuff." I think what I meant by that is that torture aims at, in an important sense, enslaving someone, not just on the physical but on the mental and spiritual levels. Slavery may just be a worse sin than murder. [Addendum from this morning: Eve writes "Death is what you wish for when being tortured."]

4. Just as a factual, legal matter. I believe the US has signed the convention against torture.

5. Eugene Volokh says torture wouldn't bring us down to the level of Al Qaeda because "ends matter" and ours are nobler than Al Qaeda's. In other words, the ends justify the, well, you know. Read Leonard again.

6. Here's where we could be pretty soon, Gene: We're about to take over Iraq, whose "territorial integrity" we plan to guarantee. You and I know how many groups in Iraq are against that. When they attack our troops, which will be called terrorism, though it will actually just be guerilla warfare, we could find ourselves shipping our internal Iraqi enemies - they've killed our people, they may know of plans to kill more, they may have allied with our enemy, Al Qaeda, we might think they had access to Bad Things from Saddam's inventory that we haven't been able to find - off to be tortured. At that point, Gene, we will have overthrown Saddam Hussein for, among other reasons, the fact that he tortured his internal enemies, so that we can do it instead.

7. I thought we weren't supposed to like France. So why do we want to be them? We are just about to the point of making the same justifications for the same behavior that the French government did during the Algerian Civil War. That didn't work out so good from either a practical or a moral perspective.

8. If anything should be simple, if anything should twang the That's Just Wrong bone, the considered infliction of cruelty on another human being should do it, especially when the consideration is official.

Origin Story - Joseph Stromberg offers a biography of those famous twins, Shock and Awe.

Just Asking - So the IAEA says, as you've probably already read on your more punctilious blogs, that "A key piece of evidence linking Iraq to a nuclear weapons program appears to have been fabricated . . .

Documents that purportedly showed Iraqi officials shopping for uranium in Africa two years ago were deemed "not authentic" after careful scrutiny by U.N. and independent experts, Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told the U.N. Security Council.

ElBaradei also rejected a key Bush administration claim -- made twice by the president in major speeches and repeated by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell yesterday -- that Iraq had tried to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes to use in centrifuges for uranium enrichment. Also, ElBaradei reported finding no evidence of banned weapons or nuclear material in an extensive sweep of Iraq using advanced radiation detectors.

"There is no indication of resumed nuclear activities," ElBaradei said.

Faked?

Knowledgeable sources familiar with the forgery investigation described the faked evidence as a series of letters between Iraqi agents and officials in the central African nation of Niger. The documents had been given to the U.N. inspectors by Britain and reviewed extensively by U.S. intelligence. The forgers had made relatively crude errors that eventually gave them away -- including names and titles that did not match up with the individuals who held office at the time the letters were purportedly written, the officials said.

The punch line?

"We fell for it," said one U.S. official who reviewed the documents.

The IAEA is happy to play along:

A spokesman for the IAEA said the agency did not blame either Britain or the United States for the forgery. The documents "were shared with us in good faith," he said.

Okay, so here's my question. That's a serious matter, isn't it? Forging documents intended to be used in all seriousness to decide questions of war or peace? Is anyone going to investigate the provenance of those documents? The IAEA? The media? Does the Post betray the slightest interest, in the article, where such things might have come from?

I can actually answer the last question: No, it doesn't.

Weekly Fitness Blog Post - Weight 187. Waist unchanged from last week. It appears to be the case that you can lose fat and build muscle combining diet with slow-cadence weight training, just as Ken Hutchins and Diana Moon said you could. It hasn't cured my blood pressure, but maybe no exercise program would.

Quick exercise stuff. It turns out there is a full, lavishly-photographed suite of dumbbell-and-bench exercises in Body for Life, by Bill Phillips. I'll probably but the book just for those, converting them to slow-cadence routines and ignoring the rest of the book. Tonight Mrs. Offering started on the same routine. She was still able to make it up the stairs at the end of it, which only means we haven't found the right weight for her squats yet . . . My mother is starting to feel genuine changes in her physical capability. I let her in on the secret tests I'd been running: for years she has needed help with curbs and steps, using a banister if available or a relative if not. The last couple times, I took her hand as usual, but dropped my arm at the same rate as her step, so that she was really doing the whole thing on her own. And she did. This wouldn't have been possible before her exercises.

My plan was to talk lots and lots about the Reason-mag-centered Atkins Diet controversy this weekend. Michael Fumento had a sharply critical piece on NYT Science correspondent Gary Taubes somewhat famous NYT Magazine article about Atkins, quoting a nutritionist saying, in so many words, that Taubes "sold out" for the sake of a book contract. Taubes responded to Fumento on Reason's site. Fumento responded to the response and, if I'm getting all the nuances, at some point Fumento and his editors got really mad at each other. (Rishawn Biddle has that story here and here. Jeremy Lott suggests the letter Fumento might have written to his editor instead.) Atkins follower Avedon Carol has an interesting response on her own site.

I haven't made much of being on Atkins myself in these posts. I was going to sieze the occasion to do so this weekend. But I got busy, and I just did my exercises and my arms are quivering. So hold that thought.

On the torture Table - This subject actually depressed me too much to write about it much more. So some links: Radley adds some more to his argument. Gene Healy has questions for both of us. I answered his question for me by e-mail. If I get undepressed I'll publish the answers here. Two pieces I commend to your attention (somewhat abashedly, since they refer to my items favorably). Leonard of Unruled writes, among other things

Torture is the canary in the coal mine. When your society starts seriously talking about torture, it means you've fucked up and become repressive.

And Arthur Silber suggests, correctly I think, that my "because we're the fucking United States of America" argument is too narrow. Arthur says "it's because we're fucking human beings." He says a lot more besides.

Torture Talk II - Lest any liberal readers feel too smug about The Torturer Bush of the Republican Party, note this passage in Radley's item about a time torture "worked":

In 1995, we captured an al-Qaeda operative in California (San Diego, I think). We, er, "exported" him to the Phillipines -- who are happy to employ creative methods of questioning suspects -- where he revealed, after being tortured, a plot to simultaneously blow up eleven passenger jets over the Pacific.

Note that George W. Bush was not president in 1995. No Republican was. The problem is not an individual or a specific political party. The problem is government.

Torture Talk - Reader Kevin Maroney e-mails:

"Italy can survive the loss of Aldo Moro. It would not survive the introduction of torture."

--General Carlo Alberto Della Chiesa, head of the investigation into the kidnapping (later murder) of Prime Minister Aldo Moro, 1978

What broke my heart yesterday was when Radley Balko, whom I admire tremendously, came out with a "Torture? G'head." item. (He qualified it slightly in a later post.)

Should we torture him?

I think so. He's not an American citizen. He wasn't born here, or captured here. He's "an enemy combatant," if ever there was a time to use the phrase.

No. He's not an American citizen. We are. Dammit but I don't recall "By Any Means Necessary" appearing on the nation's coinage.

UPDATE: Anna Feruglio Dal Dan writes

I know it sounds ridicolous to nitpick over such a subject, and with one of the few people speaking sense, but precisely because I honor the memory of General Dalla Chiesa, and was moved by finding his name shining cleanly in this horrid discussion, I would ask you please to get his name right. It's CARLO ALBERTO DALLA CHIESA, not CARLOS Alberto DELLA Chiesa. CARLOS is a Spanish name. Dalla Chiesa was Italian. He was one of those people who would have told you they'd be glad to die for Italy, which he ended up doing, in the end.

Fixed! Thank you Anna. (Here italian-language blog is here.)

Promotional Message - Lots of reaction to Sunday's piece on Kenneth Pollack that I hope to get to over the next couple of days. Tonight I'm just feeling too darn lazy, though. Some critics complained that I was only dealing with Pollack's op-ed, not his (longer and more expensive) book. But reader Russel Wyvong decided that, rather than curse my darkness, he would light a single candle. He's having a copy of The Threatening Storm mailed to me from Amazon.com. I like Russel Wyvong. And tune in this weekend when I publish major, skeptical accounts of the merits of the first season of Babylon 5 on DVD, Canadian fishing vacations and larger, roomier houses than La Familia Offering currently occupies.

Meantime, if you're feeling overly happy, read this article about expected increases in the price of gasoline.

Welcome to the Southern Cone - Why shouldn't we have people like Khaled Sheik Mohammad tortured, even though they are mass-murdering scum? There are various prudential reasons, which I went into last year. Twice. But there's a more important reason.

Because we're the fucking United States of America!

I weep to think that we ever took it upon ourselves to criticize Argentina for the "dirty war" of the late 70s. Evil as the junta was, it was at least responding to a concerted campaign of urban guerilla warfare. ("At the time, political kidnappings, violent strikes and bombings had become commonplace," notes the Christian Science Monitor.) How little it took, really, to bring far too many Americans down to juntahood - a single, terrible, terrible morning. Perhaps al Qaeda already got its weapon of mass destruction, a virus capable of making all infected forget the most basic facts about who they are, or at least who they were supposed to be. We even know when they used it. From here out, we may live or die, may win or lose, but not as Americans.

On the Other Hand - Arthur Silber offers another view of the post-Warsaw Pact politicians I blogged about last week in a piece about an Investor's Business Daily article. Arthur says, based on his research, that he'll agree that three out of eight are rotten, but the others seem much better than IBD and I made them out to be. He probably has a point, though his research relies pretty strongly on "official" biographies. I can't help but grant his general point, though:

All in all, my conclusion is: believe very few secondhand sources, particularly if they are associated with organizations with very strong agendas. In other words: don't trust very much at all, and verify any information provided on your own if the subject is of concern to you.

The Ultimate Advantage: Unqualified Offerings! - Liberal blog pioneer Charles Dodgson, bless his heart, remembers that I suggested back on Halloween of 2001 (in "The Vodalus Approach")

Consider this: bin Laden tells his followers not to attack Saudi Arabia's oil production facilities because they represent "the wealth of the people" that he'll see gets redistributed when a just regime takes power in Riyadh. That's an awfully convenient sworn foe to have if you own that wealth, eh? And I realize Americans don't get comprehensive international news, but - you hear about bin Laden blowing up Khobar Towers; you hear about bin Laden blowing up the USS Cole. But has his organization struck any serious blow against the government in Riyadh? Killed any Saudi ambassadors, kidnapped any princes, bombed any ministries? al-Qaeda has proven its ability to commit violence on the penninsula generally and in Saudi Arabia specifically. You'd think someone sworn to bring down the regime would get to it.

Bless him twice over, Charles makes the connection with this Guardian story about the civil suit against the Saudi government by the families of September 11, 2001 massacre victims. Money quote:

Based on sworn testimony from a Taliban intelligence chief called Mullah Kakshar, they allege that Turki had two meetings in 1998 with al-Qaeda. They say that Turki helped seal a deal whereby al-Qaeda would not attack Saudi targets. In return, Saudi Arabia would make no demands for extradition or the closure of bin Laden's network of training camps. Turki also promised financial assistance to Mullah Omar. A few weeks after the meetings, 400 new pick-up vehicles arrived in Kandahar, the papers say.

Kakshar's statement also says that Turki arranged for donations to be made directly to al-Qaeda and bin Laden by a group of wealthy Saudi businessmen. 'Mullah Kakshar's sworn statement implicates Prince Turki as the facilitator of these money transfers in support of the Taliban, al-Qaeda and international terrorism,' the papers said.

Remember, get it from Unqualified Offerings today, or get it from major international newspapers a year and a half later.

Worth noting: The same article suggests a possible al Qaeda-Iraqi connection.

Finally the lawsuit alleges that Turki was 'instrumental' in setting up a meeting between bin Laden and senior Iraqi intelligence agent Faruq al-Hijazi in December 1998. At that meeting it is alleged that bin Laden agreed to avenge recent American bombings of Iraqi targets and in return Iraq offered him a safe haven and gave him blank Yemeni passports.

Definitely worth investigating. I wonder if the government, as opposed to the private sector, is doing so.

How'd You Get This Way - On the unreliable LewRockwell.com, a pretty good essay by Jeffrey Tucker of the Rothbard InstMises Institute. From a right-libertarian perspective, Tucker asks, what's up with the conservative enthusiasm for war?

Whatever happened to Russell Kirk's "politics of prudence," to pro-life politics, to rules against entangling alliances, to opposition to big government?

Tucker considers various explanations, including the supposed influence of ex-Trotskyite "neoconservatives," simple GOP loyalism, the influence of TV, (wait for it, Avedon Carol!) talk radio, the possibility that American conservative thought is "intrinsically corrupt," the vice of nationalism (as opposed to the virtue of patriotism). What surprised me is that he's remarkably skeptical of "The Neoconservatives Did It" theory for a paleo. He concludes, addressing his libertarian readership:

In any case, it becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for any friend of freedom to call himself a conservative. This seems to be some sort of important moment in history, a time when old ideological loyalties must be radically reassessed. Perhaps the problem runs very deep. Perhaps it is not the conservatives who are somehow diverging from the modal type. Perhaps this war reveals something more fundamental: namely that those attached to the idea of liberty are not conservative in either the European or modern American sense.

We have all had the feeling of reading some piece on National Review Online and thinking: I have nothing in common with these people! Well, perhaps it is they who are the conservatives, and you are not. We lost the word liberalism long ago, and only adopted the term conservative with the greatest reluctance. It is time to give it up too, neither describing ourselves as such nor allowing others to do so.

I've been there for awhile now. (I don't share Tucker's distaste for rap music, though.)

Poetry Corner - In another literary milestone, a new, never-before-published poem by someone other than me - in this case, my friend and colleague Frederick Pollack. Fred holds annoying socialist views but is nevertheless one of our finest living poets. Buy his books at Amazon and show him that capitalism works! The following is one section of a five-part poem. Some people might take it as mere "Bush-bashing," but I think they'd be scanting it:

Zombie Jamboree

2

An incredible snafu leaves
Bush completely on his own
one wintry afternoon in Europe.
Back home, heads roll. Back home goes to Def-Con III.
The Premier or Prime Minister or whatever
of Europe stands with Bush on the steps
of his palace and peers,
embarrassed, about, and offers
the use of his own Executive Guard
and limo.
The President shakes him off and decides to walk.
He knows the American Embassy
is just a short distance up
this boulevard. He's pissed
but unafraid. Perhaps
being used to his unobtrusive Secret Service
makes their absence less evident. Or
he draws on his deep personal faith
in Jesus. That's what it is.
He enjoys walking,
the chill air, the weird pompous buildings.
He encounters Europeans. They
wear leather coats and zebra shirts and feathers in their hats,
which conceal implanted antennas.
(When they aren't chattering to each other,
they appear to be talking to themselves.)
They recognize and surround him.
They remonstrate and gesture.
Cheney, back home, is moved to a safe location.
Bush knows what they might want to rag him about -
. Iraq
. the Kyoto Treaty
. Palestinians -
but he doesn't speak European.
Despite their noise they seem to bear
some strange metaphysical weight
that isolates them from each other. Also,
they're smoking, which slows them down.
Bush wonders if he's in danger.
The thin lips twist
mirthlessly; he squares his shoulders.
He recalls that he has been born again
and is justified in the Lord. But
the crowd parts, enfeebled
perhaps by that; perhaps
by that strange metaphysical weight.
The backwash of adrenaline leaves
the President melancholy,
and, nearing the Embassy,
he looks up at the sky -
unsure if the lights he sees
are the white bellies of birds,
the Pleiades, or an airstrike.

© 2003 by Frederick Pollack

The Uselessness of the Democratic Party - From the New York Post:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton "fully supports" President Bush's Iraq policy, her office said last night - on the eve of her visit today to an upstate arsenal that makes military hardware like mortars and howitzers for U.S. troops. "Sen. Clinton fully supports the steps the president has taken to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction," said Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines. . .

That puts Clinton (D-N.Y.) squarely at odds with a majority in her own party, where one recent poll found an Iraq attack is opposed by 66 percent of "core Democrats."

That's actual Democratic voters. But why would Democratic party leaders listen to them? When John Smith asked if stopping the court nomination of Miguel Estrada was really more important than stopping a war that threatens to launch us into a generation-long folly, some liberal contributors to Stand Down excused the DP's focus with the War is inevitable, Estrada is not excuse. In other words, they were letting their political team get away with less effort against the war than they themselves are making.

Who Are You Going to Believe - "Me, or a forlorn logistical tail." Turkey says No Means No. The Pentagon says a northen attack from Turkey isn't essential. But we've still got the planned supplies for the northern front hanging around Turkish ports, just in case the Turks change their minds. Kind of makes you wonder how inessential the US really thinks the Turkish avenue is.

Back Rooms and Backbreakers - DC's Capitol Hill Blue continues to cover the politics of the Iraq situation, with a heavy emphasis on the White House political staff and Republican Party insiders. The latest: Advisors warn Bush he faces "humiliating" defeat on world stage.

Some Bush aides now admit privately that the President, for all his tough talk, may have to back down and postpone his plans to invade Iraq in the near future.

"The vote in Turkey fucked things up big time," grumbles one White House aide. "It pushes our timetable back. On the other hand, it might give us a chance to save face."

"Saving face" means backing away from a showdown with the UN Security Council next week and agreeing to let the weapons inspection process run its course.

The big problem is spinning any policy change. (Don't go feeling smug, liberals. A Democrat in this position would have the same political concerns.) Here fortune favors the administration nimble enough to sieze the opportunity:

"The arrest of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed gives us some breathing room," says a Bush strategist. "We can concentrate on the favorable publicity generated by the arrest and the valuable intelligence we have gained from that event."

The CHB piece is based on anonymous sources, with all the reliability problems that entails. One anonymous source concludes:

"We've always needed an exit strategy," admits one White House aide. "Circumstances have given us one. We shouldn't ignore it."

That "nimble enough to sieze the opportunity" thing is the big question now.

Real-ly - I've never watched a "reality show," but I've been meaning to link to Jesse Walker's take on them from a couple of weeks ago. I think he gets it right:

The best thing about the shows: You don't actually have to watch them. The simple news that a program like This Surreal Life exists is enjoyable enough; actually viewing more than one episode is going an extra mile. Our time is spared, and the network suits are forced to devise yet more novelty for our amusement.

I can testify. When I heard about how the first Survivor series ended (with the deciding voter, having lost his own chance at the prize, flipping a coin to determine who he'd give the million bucks to), I had a Whoah! moment. I haven't heard anything from subsequent shows to top or even equal it - my general impression is that "reality" shows have relentlessly prettied themselves up with ever less real people - but the end of that first series justified the whole phenomenon for me. I mean, I don't watch anything on TV except football anyway. At worst, it's no skin off my nose what they put on; at best, I get some sideswipe entertainment from something that, as Jesse says, I don't even have to watch.

Delink or Not Delink - As a blogger inside baseball issue, noise noisy wrangles over taking people off one's blogroll recur regularly. My question is, could there be a better reason for delinking someone than they make you look at a picture of !@#^%#@ Ron Jeremy on their site?????

At least he's clothed.

The Best We Can Do - Kenneth Pollack seems to have persuaded many fence-sitters to support war with his book, The Threatening Storm. I've been curious but cheap, basically hoping to get Pollack's case for free, and Dr. Manhattan kindly pointed me to Pollack's own condensation of his case in the New York Times of February 21. Pollack's main business in this article is to refute the case that Saddam can be deterred - a case made, among other places, here on this website. Pollack:

With the Bush administration set to put a resolution on Iraq before the United Nations Security Council next week, those opposed to war will rally around the notion that Saddam Hussein can be deterred from aggression. They will continue to say that the mere presence of United Nations inspectors will prevent him from building nuclear weapons, and that even if he were to acquire them he could still be contained.

Unfortunately, these claims fly in the face of 12 years — and in truth more like 30 years — of history.

And most of the rest of the essay is Pollack's reading of 30 years of history. A big question, though not the only question, is "How good is his reading?"

Right away there are problems. Pollack starts with establishing the mere fact of Iraq's attempts to procure nuclear weapons. To his credit, he later troubles to deal with the distinction between acquiring weapons and using them, but the way he makes his case on the former problematizes his credibility:

Four years later, the international agency was so certain that it had eradicated the Iraqi nuclear program that it wanted to end aggressive inspections in favor of passive "monitoring." Then a slew of defectors came out of Iraq — including Hussein Kamel al-Majid, the son-in-law of Saddam Hussein who led the Iraqi program to build weapons of mass destruction; Wafiq al-Samarrai, one of Saddam Hussein's intelligence chiefs; and Khidhir Hamza, a leading scientist with the nuclear weapons program. These defectors reported that outside pressure had not only failed to eradicate the nuclear program, it was bigger and more cleverly spread out and concealed than anyone had imagined it to be. . .

In the late 1990's, American and international nuclear experts again concluded that the Iraqi nuclear program was dormant: yes, the scientists were still working in teams; yes, they still had all of the plans; and yes, they probably were hiding some machinery — but they were not making any progress. Then another batch of important defectors escaped to Europe and told Western intelligence services that after the inspectors left Iraq in 1998, Saddam Hussein had started a crash program to build a nuclear weapon and that the Iraqis had devised methods to hide the effort.

Anyone with even a layman's interest in intelligence work knows defector reports must be approached with caution, for all sorts of psychological and political reasons. Defectors have, practically by definition, an ax to grind; they may feel they'll get a better reception if they tell their interrogators what they think the interrogators want to hear; they may be right about that; they may be plants from the hostile country or have had wrong info planted on them; they may lie to puff themselves up. During the Cold War, disputes over which defectors to believe and disbelieve came close to tearing US intelligence apart. The basic principle is that, though the adversary nation may be bad (and Iraq is plenty bad), that doesn't make every defector noble or reliable.

What concerned me when I first read the article is that Pollack must surely know this. He is "a former analyst of the Iraqi military at the C.I.A." But his article gives no hint of the inherent difficulties. Quite the opposite: the pattern is, We thought X, but defector reports proved Not-X. That was disturbing in itself, because it suggests a certain bad faith on Pollack's part. But it gets worse. Hesiod has done some legwork on Hussein Kamel and Khidir Hamza, in what will probably turn out to be the most genuinely important blog item of the month, reading the transcript of Kamel's debriefing by UNSCOM.

Kamel calls Hamza "a professional liar. He worked with us but he was useless and was always looking for promotions. He consulted with me but could not deliver anything." He says documents that Hamza provided UNSCOM were forgeries. The UNSCOM debriefer allows that they, too, had concluded that Hamza's information was worthless.

It gets trickier. As Hesiod notes, UNSCOM's Rolf Ekeus says the same thing about Kamel ("liar!"). It's entirely possible that Kamel was sent after Hamza to discredit him. It's possible Hamza is the poltroon that Kamel alleges. The problems are that

1) They can't both be telling the truth.

2) Quoting Hesiod again: "The Bush admninistration, and its pro-war allies, have been hyping the information provided BOTH from Khidir Hamza and from Hussein Kamal. The problem is...one of them has to be lying."

3) But there's one more problem. Pollack too touts both defectors to support his case, just as the administration does. And since Pollack was, after all, "a former analyst of the Iraqi military at the C.I.A.", who has written an entire book on Iraq since (supposedly) leaving the Agency, he must have known that Kamel and Hamza conflict. But he gives his Times audience no hint of this. He must also know that Kamel told UNSCOM that

there was no decision to use chemical weapons [during the 1991 phase of the war] for fear of retaliation. They realised that if chemical weapons were used, retaliation would be nuclear.

Since the theme of Pollack's Times piece is Saddam's "containability," that seems like a material omission. It would be one thing if Pollack never brought up Kamel's name. Then he could argue, plausibly, "I always thought Kamel was full of shit." Pollack could be right or wrong, but he would be consistent. As it stands, it's hard to find a good faith explanation for Pollack's particular pattern of inclusions and omissions. It sure looks like he throws the name in for the sake of authority while hiding the complicating details from his readers.

To his credit, Pollack also attempts to make the case, not just that Iraq is trying to acquire nuclear weapons, but that he will use them. Here his arguments are of mixed quality:

It is probably true that fear of retaliation kept Iraq from using chemical weapons against coalition forces during the gulf war. However, this should give us little comfort that he will be similarly deterred in the future. Before the 1991 war, Secretary of State James Baker warned his Iraqi counterpart, Tariq Aziz, that Iraq faced "terrible consequences" if it used weapons of mass destruction, mounted terrorist attacks or destroyed Kuwaiti oil fields.

Yet despite this warning, Saddam Hussein tried to send terrorist teams to America and did blow up the Kuwaiti oil fields — he simply gambled on which two of the three things Mr. Baker mentioned were unlikely to result in America ending the regime. (Many officials from that Bush administration have suggested, in fact, that Saddam Hussein didn't even make the right calculation.)

Really? (Speaking to the parenthetical.) Allowing for the limitations of the format, we should refrain from pressing Pollack too hard about which administration officials he means, when they made these suggestions, and what their reasoning was. But facts would appear to be facts: grant Pollack his claim that Iraq tried to infiltrate terror teams into the US and they were blocked with no contemporaneous publicity (or mention in hawkish circles until very recently). How did Hussein make the wrong calculation? He lit the oil wells. He refrained from using gas and germs on allied troops. He did not get nuked. He did not get deposed. That looks like making the right calculation. And really, how hard could it be? How hard is it for you? In advance, guess the circumstances in which the US is most likely to risk world opprobrium by using nuclear weapons for only the second time in 50 years:

1) A country with which it is at war dispatches a handful of kill squads.

2) A country sets some oil wells on fire.

3) A country attacks US troops with chemical and biological weapons when the US has always maintained that any country that did so riske a nuclear response.

Door Number Three doesn't look like a tough conclusion somehow. Indeed, I'm a little miffed at Baker for somewhat casually devaluing our nuclear deterrent by hinting at its possible use in obviously frivolous circumstances. And again I have to wonder at Pollack's good faith. "Terrible consequences" looks less likely to be diplospeak for "depose Saddam" than "nuking Saddam."

Pollack is on superficially stronger ground in the next section, where he argues that, far from believing that they had a green light to invade Kuwait in 1990, Iraq expected the conquest of Kuwait to lead to military confrontation with the US and prepared for it:

Much of the evidence for this remains classified, but at least two points can be made using public material: Tariq Aziz has told reporters that this was what Saddam Hussein thought at the time; and we know that when the Republican Guards invaded Kuwait they moved quickly — even before they had consolidated control over the country — to set up defenses along Kuwait's borders and against amphibious and airborne landings.

The PBS Frontline interview with Tariq Aziz confirms this. But while we're taking Tariq Aziz at his word, the Frontline interview contains a number of other interesting passages as well, for instance, Aziz discusses Iraq's dispute with Kuwait over oil production levels as the real motive for the invasion. (" If we had Kuwait in our mind for takeover, we could have done that in the '70s....if you look at the political scene, regionally and internationally it allowed such things, more than it allowed in the '90s.") Not proven, but worth exploring. Also:

Q: And during the build up of American troops in Saudi Arabia, was there discussion among the leadership of 'Let's make a deal, let's back down'?

Aziz: We were reviewing the situation all the time. Whenever there is a political or military development, we used to review the situation, but we didn't think that there will be a change in the strategy and tactics of George Bush and Margaret Thatcher.

You know, at that time, until the resignation of Margaret Thatcher, she was telling everybody that 'we will attack Iraq even if Iraq withdraws from Kuwait,' you know that. She was asking for the dismantling of Iraqi armament even if Iraq withdraws from Kuwait. . .

The more things change, the more they stay the same. We'll come back to "No Way Out" syndrome and its problems for deterrence.

It's very likely that Pollack knows Aziz said this too:

Q: Why didn't you use your chemical weapons?
Aziz: Well, we didn't think it wise to use them.

Q: Can you tell me in more detail....?
Aziz: That's all I can say. It was not wise to use such kind of weapons in such kind of war, with such an enemy.

Q: Because they had nuclear weapons?
Aziz: You can....... make your own conclusions...

That's two different Kuwait-War era Iraqi officials admitting that the threat of US retaliation kept them from using chemical or biological weapons against the coalition. That's also two more than Pollack admits too.

There is a further problem when Pollack attempts to extend his accurate statement that Iraq expected a confrontation with the US over its Kuwaiti conquest:

In other words, Saddam Hussein thinks we tried to deter him, and that we failed. He was ready and willing to fight the United States for Kuwait.

The second part is true enough. The first deserves looking into. Another passage from the Aziz interview:

Q: In August or July 1990, if George Bush had said, 'Do not invade Kuwait or we will fight you', what would you have done?
Aziz: We would have told him, tell the Kuwaitis to stop threatening Iraq, to stop their wrong policies, deliberate wrong policies against Iraq and we will not go to Kuwait, very, very simple.

Q: And if they didn't stop?
Aziz: That means that the war has already started and you have to act.

Let's be clear: an on-the-record statement to a reporter by the official of a totalitarian regime can by no means be considered definitive. Far from it. (Nor can the statements of officials of democratic regimes.) At best it's an interesting starting point. Pollack brought Aziz into the conversation in the first place, and we know about the mythical status of enough other aspects of the run-up to the Kuwait War that we can't dismiss it out of hand. But at minimum, Aziz's response suggests that there never was an unambiguous prewar attempt by the United States to dissuade Iraq from attacking Kuwait. ("IF George Bush had said . . . ") Aziz's frankness earlier in the interview about not being surprised about America's hostile reaction to the invasion strengthens the suggestion. Had there been a pre-invasion deterrent effort it's the kind of thing Aziz would have brought up in response to the question, given the pattern of his other responses.

Moving on. Pollack:

Even that crushing defeat, however, didn't dim his adventurism. Just two years later he attempted to assassinate the emir of Kuwait and former President Bush. This was not a rational act but a meaningless bid for revenge.

This may have happened. Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article casts some serious doubt. I'm agnostic. If it was real it was a true confederacy of dunces, going by the Hersh report. It's interesting nevertheless to assume that Hussein really did try to assassinate GHW Bush and ask, would such an act be irrational and meaningless? Tough question. We know that Lyndon Johnson believed that Fidel Castro had Kennedy killed for trying to kill him. We know that Lyndon Johnson called off our "damn Murder Incorporated in the Caribbean." We know that GHWB signed a "lethal finding" right after the end of the Kuwait War that "ordered the CIA, in essence, to get rid of Saddam." (See this Washington Post story from 1998. History did not begin on September 11, 2001. Nor did it skip ahead to that date from the Munich Agreement.) How "irrational" (as opposed to "unkind") is it, really, to attempt to kill the man who set in motion a machinery of attempts to kill you? If there really was an assassination attempt against ex-president Bush, and Iraq really was behind it, Saddam might have hoped that Clinton would pull an LBJ and back off.

Or not. But you can forgive Brink Lindsey, when he writes about the importance of the alleged assassination attempt, for not knowing about the context of the lethal finding, and the circumstantial case (at best) for the attempt even happening. Pollack, based on his background, must know these things. And he keeps them to himself when writing his article.

Pollack is not done contradicting his own claims:

Then, in October 2000, he dispatched five divisions to western Iraq. All of the evidence available to the American government indicated that, with the acquiescence of Damascus, he intended to move them through Syria and into the Golan Heights. In response, Washington began preparing a military strike far greater than Desert Fox of 1999 (which itself prompted revolts throughout Iraq for six months), and the Israeli military planned its own crushing response. Only American and Saudi diplomatic intervention with Syria, combined with the Iraqi military's logistical problems, quashed the adventure.

That's one version of events. GlobalSecurity.org has another:

The best assessment of the US was that it was indeed training activity, and that the Iraqi forces had not postured themselves to be in a threatening posture from which they would do some threatening act towards any of their neighbors. The forces did not have with them the essential elements of logistic support that would be required in order to use them in an offensive or a threatening manner. There was still a lot of Iraq to the west of where the forces were located. The movements seem to be local and training and administrative in nature. In the Middle East this was being interpreted as a massing of Iraqi troops on their western border in support of Palestinians. But the US Defense Department did not agree with that characterization.

But let's grant Pollack the stronger fact set anyway. What's he saying, then? To repeat, Pollack writes:

. . . the Israeli military planned its own crushing response. Only American and Saudi diplomatic intervention with Syria, combined with the Iraqi military's logistical problems, quashed the adventure.

Translation from the hawkish: If there was a serious intention on Iraq's part to attack Israel with Syria's cooperation, the combined efforts of Israel, Saudi Arabia and Syria successfully deterred an attack.

And this is what Pollack does over and over again in his article: adduce, as evidence that Saddam can not be deterred, instances where Saddam was deterred.

We are almost done with Pollack's handling of the evidentiary context. We need to repeat an earlier theme:

With more than 150,000 American soldiers taking positions on his borders he continues to run the international inspectors in circles, foolishly confident that his minor concessions will stave off an invasion. Is there any other person on earth who wouldn't turn his country inside out to prove that he did not have more weapons of mass destruction?

Yes, someone who believes, on the basis of months and months of statements from the US government - really, years and years - plus actions of the US government, that it doesn't matter what he does, that no action he takes can "appease" the United States. The Post reports this weekend that

One sign of the innovative nature of the plan is that, without much public notice, its first phase is already underway. Special Operations troops are executing missions inside Iraq to prepare the way for later attacks. U.S. and British warplanes ostensibly enforcing the "no-fly" zones in northern and southern Iraq have increased the number and intensity of airstrikes, and recently expanded their list of targets to include Iraqi surface-to-surface missiles. They were attacked, defense officials said, not because they were in the "no-fly" zones and threatened U.S. aircraft but because they were in range of U.S. troops mustering just over the border in Kuwait.

"We've already got a lot of stuff underway -- the air campaign, psychological operations, Special Ops," said Robert Andrews, a former Pentagon official who oversaw Special Operations activities.

It ain't deterrence if there's no reward for being deterred. Pollack must know this too. If even much of the US antiwar movement believes, on the evidence available to them, that war is inevitable, surely Iraq, which knows perfectly well what our special ops troops and bombers are doing, could rationally believe it too.

One more very odd claim by Pollack before we jump from context to metacontext:

Our experts may be split on how to handle North Korea, but they agree that the Pyongyang regime wants nuclear weapons for defensive purposes — to stave off the perceived threat of an American attack. The worst that anyone can suggest is that North Korea might blackmail us for economic aid or sell such weapons to someone else (with Iraq being near the top of that list). Only Saddam Hussein sees these weapons as offensive — as enabling aggression.

I don't know about you, but Pollack is not making me feel better about the North Koreans here. Worst they can suggest is that North Korea might blackmail us for economic aid? As for the someone else North Korea might sell its nukes too, how about Al Qaeda? He seems strangely blithe about the DPRK. Perhaps the CIA's former Korea analysts are blithe about Iraq.

Now to the metacontext. Pollack sounds a theme familiar from some of the franker hawks:

Most ominous today, we have heard from many intelligence sources — including some of the highest-level defectors now in America and abroad — that Saddam Hussein believes that once he has acquired nuclear weapons it is the United States that will be deterred. He apparently believes that America will be so terrified of getting into a nuclear confrontation that it would not dare to stop him should he decide to invade, threaten or blackmail his neighbors.

Or dare to follow through on its twelve-year old policy of regime change by one means or another. Here's the metacontext: Pollack takes it for granted that it is our right and duty to intervene in the Gulf, the "we have to intervene so we can continue to intervene" argument. That Iraq's neighbors include a nuclear power, a near-nuclear power and a large conventional power that could probably go nuclear if it felt the need, and that the ordering of the region might more properly fall to them (Israel, Iran and Turkey are their names), never seems to occur to Pollack. He takes for granted that our proper place is there.

On the evidence of his Times article, there's nothing special about Pollack or his case. I got into this because Dr. Manhattan asked, quite politely I should stress, if I knew of any doves who had responded to Pollack's arguments. It turns out the answer is yes, but only because Pollack's arguments are the same ones every other war proponent has made. They are no more convincing coming from him.

Weekly Fitness Blog Post - Weight: 191. Waist: 37 1/4".

A rueful week, fitnesswise. It's not the slight gain in weight (one pound). That's either from too many known indulgences or that combined with some muscle building. (The waist drop is a good sign.) The new office is prone to ordering in lunch food. We had pizza Tuesday and Chinese Friday. (Lovely, sugary, breaded orange chicken.) Too many snacks at gaming Wednesday night, and to top it all off, an old friend's open house yesterday where we ended up, for some reason, sitting around the snack table.

All of those things can easily be moderated. What's disappointing me is that I finally saw my doctor after two years and got a blood pressure reading: 150/100. It's never been worse, and it shows just how unreliable those grocery store machines really are. I have to go back on medication now, and I was hoping the weight and fitness gains I've made would be sufficient control.

Dang. Since that was my first official reading in two years, I don't know how high my blood pressure may have gotten when my body was falling apart. But since I'm feeling subjectively more fatigued in the chest area the last couple of weeks, my suspicion falls on the experiment in slow-cadence weight-training as my only exercise. And buried in Doug McGuff's article on training for BMX racing is this striking passage on incompatible goals:

Conditioning for power and endurance are mutually exclusive activities. It is an either-or proposition; you cannot have it both ways. Think of your physical conditioning as a spectrum that runs from power on one end and endurance on
another.

POWER----------------------------------------ENDURANCE

For any significant improvement in endurance you make, you will suffer a concomittant decrease in your power.

This is not quite saying there's such a thing as "cardiovascular fitness" after all - he's still talking in terms of skeletal muscle. Specifically, he refers to the arragement and role of the different kinds of muscle fibers:

We have several different types of muscle fibers, but for simplicity's sake, we will focus on 3 general categories: slow twitch, intermediate twitch and fast twitch. The names don't just refer to how quickly these fibers contract. Slow twitch fibers have slow contraction velocity, fatigue slowly, and recover quickly. Slow twitch fibers are arranged in relatively small groups (motor units) that are activated by a single nerve. Therefore a nerve going to a slow twitch motor unit will produce a small amount of force. Fast twitch fibers have fast contraction velocity, fatigue quickly and recover slowly. Fast twitch fibers are arranged in larger groupings (motor units). Therefore a nerve going to a fast-twitch motor unit will produce a higher degree of force. Intermediate fibers fall somewhere between these two extremes. Slow and Fast twitch fibers are fixed in their characteristics, so they cannot alter their behaviour based on training. Intermediate twitch fibers can take either more fast or slow-twitch characteristics depending on specific demands.

Since high-intensity training, including slow-cadence training, aims to exhaust the fast-twitch fibers qiuckly, promoting their growth, it stands to reason that it would train intermediate-twitch fibers to behave more like fast-twitch than like slow-twitch fibers, leading to relatively less endurance than a program that trained intermediate-twitch fibers to behave like slow-twitch fibers. (McGuff says your actual mix of slow, intermediate and fast-twitch fibers is determined by your genes and can't be altered.)

And now I'm thinking of Heavyhands again. Because Heavyhands developer Leonard Schwartz claimed to have identified a separate fitness component - "strength-endurance" - distinct from pure endurance and pure strength, essentially the ability to bear moderate muscle loads over a period of time. A good explanation of Schwartz's claims for strength-endurance can be found in the Clarence Bass article on Heavyhands that I have referenced before:

Probably Dr. Schwartz's most provocative contention is that Heavyhands training produces a unique form of fitness. He calls this separate fitness factor "strength-endurance fitness," claiming it is more than pure strength plus endurance. "The best proof of that is that the strongest strength athletes don't enjoy much of it," he asserts, "and the best pure endurance athletes don't either." Strength-endurance, according to Dr. Schwartz, is gained through strength-endurance training, such as Heavyhands moves which condition all major muscle groups.

Pure endurance training, such as running, he points out, does not build strength. On the other hand, he says, strength training in which muscle groups are isolated and exercised in sequence does not produce strength-endurance. According to Dr. Schwartz, strength-endurance is only produced when as much muscle as possible is loaded simultaneously and for a prolonged period of time.

Schwartz doesn't cast his theory in terms of muscle fiber types, but it's interesting to speculate that aerobic weight training - Heavyhands, basically - may do things for intermediate-twitch fibers that other forms of exercise don't.

Which, if McGuff is correct about the genetic basis of fiber-type proportions, may still get any given person only so far. If you haven't got all that much intermediate-twitch fiber in your makeup, there may be limits on what Heavyhands can do for you. It might turn out that Schwartz himself is someone with a lot of intermediate-twitch fiber who stumbled on an ideal way to train it.

I have to run these questions by people who know what they're talking about.

Mail call: Dave Lull found a link to a fuller discussion of Pete Egoscue's body alignment principles, discussed last week. Egoscue also has a radio show. The archive's are here. Something that struck me when reading McGuff's BMX essay is that it implicitly offers a separate and incompatible explanation for the injury-proneness of the modern professional athlete. McGuff claims that genetics determine not just your mix of fibers, but also the efficiency of any given type. That can lead to glory and pain:

Neurological efficiency is simply the percentage of a muscle's total mass that you can voluntarily contract at one time. Someone with high neurological efficiency might be able to contract 90% of his muscle's fibers simultaneously. Someone with average neurological efficiency can contract only 40% of their muscle at one time. Having a high neurological efficiency can offset a disadvantage one might have in their fiber type mix. That is, someone with 70% slow twitch may still be able to explode out of the gate quite impressively if they have a neurological efficiency of 90%. In fact many of the world's best athletes have this combination of slow twitch predominance with high neurological efficiency. They have the ability for great power and explosiveness, combined with amazing endurance...they just don't get tired. You may wonder why nature would want anyone to have 40% neurological efficiency. The answer is...self preservation. If you contract 90% or more of a muscle at once, the forces that are produced may be so high that the tendon pulls off the bone or the muscle tears.

Am I changing any plans yet? No, I'm going to give the pure strength-training the full introductory six weeks anyway, in the interests of science. Then I'll consider switching to the Fortnightly Fitness Fun plan.

And I'm going to watch my eating more carefully this week too.

Huzzah! - I held off noting the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, "the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks," yesterday, because bloggers and other media have been burned too often on breaking news stories. But now it looks solid.

Mohammed was indicted in the United States in 1996 for his alleged role in a plot to blow up 12 American civilian airliners over the Pacific and intelligence officials in the Philippines said he was also part of cell accused of plotting to kill Pope John Paul in that country in 1995.

In addition, he is suspected of involvement in the bombing of U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and the attack on a U.S. warship, the USS Cole, in Yemen in 2000.

And a Pakistani newspaper linked him to the kidnapping and murder of U.S. reporter Daniel Pearl, saying investigators believed Mohammed was the man who slit Pearl's throat in front of a video camera after the journalist disappeared in Karachi in January 2002 while investigating a story on Islamic extremists.

Even if the last is not true (Pakistani sources may wish to lay off responsibility for the Pearl murder on convenient foreigners), Mohammad appears to have done far, far more than enough for Americans to want his corpse tossed to a pack of courtyard dogs.

Is there a creepy part that takes the edge off the joy? Alas, yes:

A U.S. official said Mohammed was expected to be interrogated in an undisclosed foreign country.

Gary Farber has written repeatedly on just what "interrogated in an undisclosed foreign country" means. My tender concern is not for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. It's for us.

Urgent! Spam Results! - Herewith the results of my Personal Spam Survey, begun last week. Breakdown of mail, Sunday-Saturday:

Spam: 16
Legit: 81
Mailing Lists: 497

"Spam" is unsolicited commercial e-mail. "Legit" includes mass mailings I unambiguously signed up for - Art Today promos, Best (Necon-Approved Items) of the Web, Reason Express, about a dozen pieces, all told - plus all blog-related and personal mail. I waffled on where to put unsolicited pure publicity mailings from fellow bloggers (affectionately known in the trade as "link whoring"), but ended up putting it here. There were only about a half dozen of those.

"Mailing Lists" is actually 477 Elvis Costello list e-mails and 20 from the Nobilis mailing list. Costello traffic was always high, and I delete most of it unread these days, but it was especially high this week because a) much talk about EC's participation in the Grammy Awards Joe Strummer tribute; b) people noticed that there was a possibility of a war breaking out, and became exercised. (Costello-L has never been one of your reliably on-topic listservs.) As a result of an unnamed agitator who joined the discussion, no fewer than 31 messages from various participants bear the subject header "Kurdish Suppression."

Spam breakdown:

Porn: 1
Nigerian: 1
E-mail Addresses (meta-spam!): 5
"Career" "Opportunities": 9

Toss out Costello-L mail because most people aren't gluttons for that kind of punishment, surely. That leaves 16 Spam, 81 Legit, about 1/6 spam. Add the Nobilis traffic and the ratio falls to 1/7. Which is within the range I figured before I began this pointless exercise. And yet, Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Gary Farber each e-mailed a response to my original item saying that their spam proportion is 3/4 or 4/5. And I got a brief look at Mrs. Offering's inbox today and it looked majority-spam too.

So what am I doing right? Beats me. I've had my current e-mail address for three years. I haven't set up any spam filtering at the server level. I do very little shopping online. I always take the time to check "Not interested" in hearing about interesting offers on websites requiring registration. I don't register on porn sites or pay for porn. Is there more to it? Is there anyone out there who gets little spam and knows why they get little?

If so, you can, um, e-mail me.

Bosses from Hell at the FBI:

In an effort to ensure that all FBI field offices respond to a war in similar fashion, each office was ordered to send its plans to Washington. After those were reviewed, FBI management sent a plan back to the field offices with a list of things to do, said the official.

"We said, 'These are the ground rules we want to achieve,' so there is consistency," the FBI official said. "It's for any potential terrorism issues that arise."

(From the LA Times.) Maybe it's just me, but if I were working on plans for an FBI field office, I'd wonder why Washington couldn't have sent me my ground rules before I did all that work.

Lots of stuff in the article about possible sources of terror attacks should war come.

A Fanboy's Notes - InQuest Magazine will have a 72-page pullout preview edition of the new Marvel Universe Roleplaying Game in its April issue, which should be on sale this week. Such facts as are known about the game so far sound very promising.

The Evidence is In - Radley Balko put together an entire series of "Ashcroft Sucks" posts. Scroll up from this one to the conclusion:

Seems to me, one could have made one of two conclusions vis-a-vis Ashcroft at the time: either he's a racist, or he's a principled "states' rights conservative," willing to weather the racist label in order to uphold the principles of federalism.

Seems clear to me now that Aschcroft doesn't give two shits about states' rights or federalism (see the five posts below). Seems to me he's hellbent on imposing his morality on the rest of us, the Tenth Amendment be damned.

Draw your own conclusions.