Mail Call - Eric Mauro writes

I liked that Cogent [Provocateur] post. I think his last couple paragraphs about fooling people are going to hit home with more voters than Bush etc expect. One piece of the "why" puzzle he misses is that the WMD story was nurtured through both Republican and Democratic administrations. Khidir Hamza was turned from a joker to Saddam's Bombmaker by Bill Clinton. There was no political opposition worth speaking of because both parties were completely corrupted, using the story to their own advantage.

Meanwhile, reader Grant Gould says he's run the numbers on gridlock and good government:

After someone made particularly perposterous claims about there being a "party of small government" (and, alarmingly, about the Republicans being that party) I put Senate, House, and presidency party makeups since 1929[1] into a spreadsheet, along with government spending as a fraction of GDP, and ran a correlation.

The House makeup had no correlation whatsoever with government size. Democrats in the Senate correlated strongly with government size. Republican presidents correlated strongly with big government. I am beginning to suspect that, from a purely functional point of view, the lesser-evil party is a carefully split ticket.

If this correlation is real then your analysis is correct and libertarians do have practical voting choices that could make a real difference. Which I, personally, would find delightful.

Republican governors seem to have a positive effect in this regard at the state level, but I haven't yet gotten that spreadsheet complete enough to say that definitively.

For more discussion - and denial, and deflection, of CP's "Operation Desert Snipe" essay and That Issue, see this Samizdata post by Jonathan Pearse and the associated comment thread.

Then I Felt Like Some Watcher of the Skies - My god. The Cogent Provocateur has uncorked what may be the first blog post to merit the word magisterial. It's basically why you shouldn't worry about my nightmare. The best writing about "missing WMDs" yet. Period. And I don't mean just the best thinking either. This item, has more fine turns of phrase and more verve than one might have expected from the medium before this.

(Note: Blogspot site. If link doesn't work, find "Operation Desert Snipe" on the main page or the April archive.)

Not So Fast There - Kos argues that "libertarians (with a small 'L') have a more natural home in the modern Democratic Party than with the GOP." Perry de Havilland, in a lengthy rebuttal, says that "Kos does not understand the nature of the pool they [sic] are fishing in." I'm inclined to cry, like Alvie Singer in Annie Hall, "You're both wrong!" But they're each right about some important things.

Perry is right about this, as far as it goes:

For example, when he wrote about how the Republicans have consistently opposed business regulation, admiringly quoting an article elsewhere decrying GOP attempts to deregulate economic matters, presumably Daily Kos thinks that having the state regulating the control of several means of production is unrelated to issues of personal liberty. Perhaps in his eyes anyone who runs a business is not a person-who-has-liberty but rather some sort of collective entity and creature of the polis to whom issues of liberty are simply not germane.

Right you are. And Kos is right about this, as far as it goes:

Traditionally, libertarians have sided with the Republican Party because of economic issues, notions of "small government", and the ever-important 2nd Amendment (gun control). It seems libertarians always assumed the courts would continue to protect their private lives from government intrusion, regardless what the wingnuts tried to do.

But things have changed. The Clinton Democratic Party balanced budgets and restrained spending -- both policies abandoned by the Borrow and Spend Bush Administration. Bush and his cronies have embarked on a coordinated and wide-spread assault on individual freedoms, keynoted by the overbearing PATRIOT Act. And Bush's judges have shown consistent hostility to notions of individual liberty -- a trend likely to worsen as Bush nominates more judges to the bench.

But how far does "it go" for either of them? Perry actually undermines his own argument, in a way, because he knows perfectly well that

Elephants and Donkeys both pretty much agree on the fact the state exist to 'do stuff' beyond keeping the barbarians from the gate and discouraging riots. The language and emphasis may be slightly different (forms of educational conscription with the tagline "No child left behind"... media control legislation described as "Fairness"... etc.), but the congress exists to do much the same sort of thing for both parties, just that whoever is their favoured group should have their snouts deeper in the trough.

Right. Righter than Kos, who simply says

Republicans promote markets free of government interference, a small government and a low or non-existent tax burden. Libertarians love this.

to which the only response is, what a wonderful world that would be! Republicans promote corporate welfare and an system of micromanaging the economy through targeted rather than universal tax breaks analogous to the plain ol' spending ideas of the Democrats.

What Perry doesn't seem to get is that, while it's probably true that " Democrats like Daily Kos cannot see that it is at the level of axioms and meta-context that libertarians disagree with them, not mere policies" (Kos' item is more about political strategy than political philosophy), the same thing or worse is true of the Republicans. They either don't understand what their own fitful "small government" rhetoric means, or worse, they employ it as an act of conscious deception. In either case, they besmirch our principles with their praxis. It's been argued by, um, me that

Their offense is much worse. They appropriate our rhetoric, drawing the support of many who appreciate our principles - small government, voluntary exchange, self-defense and free enterprise, responsibility and liberty - but they besmirch those principles by their actions. Instead of free enterprise, corporate welfare. Instead of small government, trivial nips and tucks calculated to annoy no crucial interest group, instead of free trade, price supports and tarrifs, instead of responsibility, drug wars. Republicans traduce our ideals, and the public comes to associate their practice with our principles. It's not fair, but it's the way the mind works.

Is Kos any more right than Perry? I think Kos seriously underestimates the difficulties. For instance, the Clinton era arguably gave us more fiscal prudence, but only because the Republicans saved us from his health plan. The PATRIOT Act is terrible, but Democrats voted for it, and it was Clinton who pushed the also awful Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. Joe Biden went out of his way to get the RAVE Act on the books, fully expecting that local authorities will favor established (read: connected) venue owners while sticking it to the sorts of shoestring operators who run raves and house concerts. Those of us who lived through the 1980s remember that it was Democratic politicians who egged on the Reagan and Bush administrations to ratchet up the drug war, for political advantage. (By framing drugs as a national security issue, they aimed to shore up their weakest area with voters. I was a Democrat and a prohibitionist back then and I remember thinking what a sound strategy it was. Oy.)

Ah but. Kos isn't really talking about extremists like me. Or Perry, a different sort of extremist. Kos is talking about "lesser of two evils" libertarians, the kind who accept the inevitability of the two-party system and tend to vote Republican, proboscis pinched between thumb and forefinger. I'm not his target market - I haven't voted for a Republican or Democrat for President since my conversion. His argument is that the Dems can convince LOTE libertarians that the lesser evil has switched places. For such people, the argument ought to have some traction.

Jesse Walker has a Citings item in the June Reason that isn't online yet, surveying a Milken Institute Review article by mainstream economist Jeffrey Frankel arguing that "Republican and Democratic Presidents Have Switched Economic Policies." Frankel's survey goes back as far as the Carter Administration, but Jesse points out that "Nixon, . . . the man who gave us wage and price controls would certainly seem to fit this pattern." Now, any "switch" is from awful to less awful, but certainly Clinton was better on trade than GWB has been, and Carter began the era of deregulation.

My own suspicion is that gridlock may indeed be good government, and the best gridlock may be Democratic President-Republican Congress, what we enjoyed in the 1990s. Republicans out of power are pretty good at opposing activist government. Republicans in power stink at the task. All of which is to say, for libertarians open to voting for either major party, the call has become a lot closer than Perry gives it credit for.

I'm still not a lesser of two evils guy, though "Pax" Americana, domestic "security" legislation, trade and the strong anti-libertarian rhetoric in the mainstream conservative press make it a much closer call than it used to be. What would it take to make the Dems attractive to my sort of libertarian, besides the continued depredations of the Bush White House? Tabula Rasa has a wish list that comes pretty close to "The Democrats should adopt the Libertarian Party platform." That seems not just unlikely but asymmetrical - you'd get lip service at best on most of his issues from the Repubs, and unfeigned horror at quite a few. Plus, TR's Brett Cashman seems to want to make the Dems grovel.

My test is, perhaps, more modest: let the Dems put as much real energy into getting rid of big government they supposedly don't like as adding big government they do. Campaign on ending the drug war and mean it. Dismantle corporate welfare instead of engaging in it. Restore the personal income tax exemption to its level in 1948 dollars while eliminating all or most itemized deductions. Promise to repeal all or most of the USA-PATRIOT Act, the RAVE Act and the DMCA. Stand as firmly for free trade as Clinton did. A party that did these things would still be very much a liberal party. Hell, it would be a more liberal party than the Dems are now. It would still support regulation and tax policies that libertarians hate, but it would have a credible claim to be Kos's "party of personal liberty" in the non-economic sphere. If the Republicans did not clean up their own act, it would be a damned hard Democratic Party to say "no thanks" to.

Don't give me a line about how "Democrats would love to do all this, but they reluctantly support the status quo because otherwise it's political suicide." Even if that were true, it still makes you useless to me. What you're saying is that I have to keep trying to change the rhetorical climate to make these policies politically viable, which will leave me precious little time or inclination to boom or even vote for your wussy, my-job-uber-alles candidates.

What are our chances of getting that Democratic Party? Slim, I fear. Because I think that the unifying principle of contemporary liberalism is "It Is So Our Business." Contemporary liberalism is about faith in government, so all of its energy goes into adding what it takes to be good powers, with little left over for getting rid of what it takes to be bad. Too bad, too. It would have been glorious.

Could You Answer a Few Questions? - A couple of academic researchers are conducting a survey on why people read weblogs, presumably because other academic researchers have not, making the results publishable. You can take the survey here.

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com has given us a link and further he knows
us and can verify that our survey is for academic purposes only.

Me, I looked for a link and verification on Instapundit and didn't find it, but that doesn't mean it isn't there.

Music, Music, Music - Here's a list of all the places you can get a new, limited-edition Richard Thompson EP coming out in advance of his new album. (Yeah, I'm old. I still say album.) Contents:

one song from 'The Old Kit Bag' [the forthcoming full-length CD], two live recordings of songs from Thompson's 'Semi-Detached Mock Tudor' album, and two never-before-released tracks, will be available in late April.

Get them while they're hot. (Link via the Elvis Costello Mailing List.)

Speaking of Links - Here's a good survey of Israeli blogs from the Israel21c website ("A Focus Beyond the Conflict"). It's by Israeli blogger Allison Kaplan Sommer. (Link via Head Heeb.)

Welcome - I'm in the process of updating the blogroll and such. So say hello to

Amitai Etzioni

Body and Soul

Calpundit

Dave Tepper

Josh Buermann

Kevin Holtsberry

Kieran Healy

Listen Missy

Mac Diva

Matthew Yglesias

Road to Surfdom

Tacitus

Ted Barlow

Unruled

Will Wilkinson

in their new homes to the left.

Warning to a select group of confreres: I may soon redo the New Crew section entirely, making it more "new" than most of it is. If I do, it won't mean I love the presently-included sites any less. It's just a way of helping new links keep from getting lost in the blogroll (that I admit is not even especially long).

I'm also about to add sidebar links to my RSS feeds.

Have a Nice Day - Tim Cavanaugh of Reason, raining on your parade:

The beauty of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is that he harbors no illusions about a serene future, for Iraq or for the United States. He knows, even if he doesn't quite come out and say, that we're going to be in the Middle East forever. There will be no disengaging—not from the Saudis, not from the Iraqis, not from the Israelis, not from anybody. This futureless land, where hatred, violence and madness constitute the coin of the realm, is our new home. That guy with the bloody head [from a Shi'ite religious festival in Karbala]? He's your new neighbor. Your children's children will be dealing with him. Say marhaba.

While We're Busy Hoping - Calpundit, noting yet another 55-gallon drum that turned out to be just a 55-gallon drum:

The fact that preliminary analysis is ultra cautious and doesn't usually pan out is perfectly normal.

Given that this is normal, however, the real question is quite different: why is the Pentagon releasing these preliminary results every time one pops up?

Not one for rhetorical questions, he continues:

Doesn't the Pentagon realize that this is eroding their credibility daily?

Of course they do, but these reports aren't aimed at journalists or news junkies like blog readers. Rather, they are designed to build up a vague impression among casual news consumers that we've been finding WMD all over the place. Say it often enough, and everyone starts to get foggy about which reports panned out and which didn't — or even whether any of them did.

Lowering the Bar - Julian said the other day that with the end of the war it's possible to resume reading Andrew Sullivan again. This turns out to be largely true, but it doesn't mean Sullivan is any more right than he was beforehand. Take today's item about the Telegraph's report of a planned 1998 meeting between the Iraqi government and an envoy of Osama Bin Laden. Sullivan:

The Sunday Telegraph's scoop of documents in Baghdad clearly linking al Qaeda with Saddam, if verified, means that an essential debate is over. Even opponents of the war against Saddam's dictatorship said they would be more inclined to support war if there were proof of a link to al Qaeda

No. "Link" is a Larouche word. We said we would be more inclined to support the war if there were proof that Saddam collaborated in the September 11, 2001 massacres in New York and Washington, or in the still-unexplained anthrax attacks later that fall. Hell, I at least would have demanded it. We are still far from having any proof of that. But we know that Pakistan, the Sudan and Saudi Arabia, among other countries, had much stronger links than any demonstrated for Iraq prior to that day, and they have gone entirely unmolested.

It may well turn out that Iraq gave material help to attacks on US soil. (Recall that I don't even dismiss out of hand claims that Timothy McVeigh was an Iraqi agent.) For instance, if the hijackers turn out to have trained at Salman Pak or to have carried passports Iraq provided, as alleged in the 9/11 victims suit, that would do it for me. We would still have to have a discussion about the consequences of our foreign policy, but we could stop discussing whether, regardless, Baathist Iraq was a threat to the United States.

We're still not there. So Sullivan gets ahead of himself when he argues

So what does a free country do when confronted with an enemy state, with WMDs, that we strongly suspect is in league with terrorists like al Qaeda, but cannot prove without invading? It's tough. My view is that, after 9/11, we have little option but to launch a pre-emptive strike and hope for retroactive justification. But I understand why people demand proof before such action. This new finding - and I bet there will be more like it - strengthens my position, I think.

Nope. Not yet.

Sullivan twofer: The next item in the same link says that France

acted in ways that make it clear that the country is not an ally of the U.S.

For that there is a strong case indeed. So maybe, like I suggested awhile ago, our hawks should stop urging France and other potentially-hostile European powers to beef up their militaries.

Welcome Back to my Nightmare - More from the LA Times. Excerpt:

By failing to secure suspect sites, Kay and others warned, the Pentagon could not guarantee that critical blueprints, weapons parts, precursor chemicals and other valuable material have not been spirited out of the country for sale to other nations or to terrorist groups.

"They've increased the proliferation threat," Kay said. "And they've made it more difficult to ever unravel what really happened. You can't reconstitute burned documents or stolen computer hard drives unless you find copies."

Terence Taylor, who heads the Washington office of the nonpartisan International Institute for Strategic Studies, said he fears there is a "real risk that certain materials could leak out" of Iraq.

(Thanks to Hesiod for the heads up. Link requires registration. You can use "laexaminer/laexaminer" thanks to Matt Welch and co.) The article includes various official excuses for the halting, chaotic and, bureaucratically-speaking, fratricidal beginnings of the hunt for Bad Things, interspersed with information about how bad things are. For instance, here's the secret location of "mobile labs" - our mobile labs:

The Pentagon hasn't supplied enough transport helicopters and military guards to the teams. This limits the teams' movements and their ability to use two highly sophisticated chemical and biological laboratories that were left at an air base in northern Kuwait in shipping containers. "They've been totally unusable," one official said.

Meanwhile . . .

So far, according to a U.S. intelligence official, the top scientists are all "sticking to the party line, that Saddam destroyed all his WMD [weapons of mass destruction] long ago."

A junior Iraqi scientist who surrendered has told U.S. interrogators that Iraq burned or destroyed chemical weapons and germ warfare equipment shortly before the war began, U.S. officials said. But the scientist joined the weapons program only in the 1990s, and "his depth and breadth of knowledge is very limited," said an official familiar with his debriefing.

Loyal reader, at this point we have to hope that those top scientists are telling the truth and that the Administration really was lying. Otherwise, we've got problems.

Because of the delays, scores of suspect Iraqi military sites, industrial complexes and offices were stripped of valuable documents, equipment and electronic data before U.S. forces or the exploitation teams reached them. Not all the looting appears to have been random, and U.S. officials believe Iraqi officials deliberately burned or removed some critical evidence to prevent detection.

Here's the thing. Reports indicate that much of the looting of the Iraqi National Museum was an inside job, possibly inspired and funded by international collectors. If an analogous situation obtains for Iraqi weapons, with outsiders (spelled a-l q-a-e-d-a) waiting for their chance to swoop in and grab their treasures off cooperative insiders - that is, if our enemies cared more about this stuff than our allies, then the Bush administration will bear a heavy responsibility for possible attacks down the road. They bear the heavy responsibility of running that risk already. Unless they knew there wasn't much of anything there in the first place, in which case they bear the responsibility of lying us into war.

I'm hoping real hard for the latter. Hey, I was hoping for the latter already, for partisan reasons, but now a keen self-preservation imperative comes into it too.

Treason D'Etre - The Brits are thinking of trying MP George Galloway for treason for a speech he made during the recent unpleasantness in Iraq urging troops to refuse to carry out their orders, according to the Observer:

The Observer can reveal that the Director of Public Prosecutions is considering pursuing the Glasgow politician for comments during the Iraq war when he called on British troops not to fight.

In an interview with Abu Dhabi TV during the Iraq conflict, Galloway said: 'The best thing British troops can do is to refuse to obey illegal orders.' Lawyers for service personnel claim his call for soldiers to dis obey what he called 'illegal orders' amount to a breach of the Incitement to Disaffection Act 1934. The maximum penalty is two years in jail.

The relevant part of the Act is Section 1, which states: 'If any person maliciously and advisedly endeavours to seduce any member of His Majesty's forces from his duty or allegiance to His Majesty, he shall be guilty of an offence.' Under the terms of the Act, the word 'maliciously' means wilfully and intentionally.

Two years is not exactly the chair, and Galloway makes an unsympathetic martyr: he seems to have paid his wife a five-figure consultancy out of the anti-sanctions fund he ran, and if documents the apparently prodigious Daily Telegraph claims to have found in Iraq are correct,

o Galloway's associates may have been scamming money from Iraq's oil-for-food program;
o Galloway's associates may have been scamming money from Iraq's oil-for-food program at his behest;
o Galloway may have essentially been an Iraqi agent paid out of the oil-for-food program.

And beyond that, he's a leftist British pol. What's to like, really?

Nevertheless, there's some question which is worse, Galloway or this "Disaffection Act" of 1934. Presumably Britain already had a law against treason, so one assumes that the sorts of behavior covered by this law were not considered definitively treasonous prior to its passage. An analogous Portuguese Disaffection Act might have covered the people putting flowers in the guns of Caetano's troops in April 1974. It's a recognized principle of international law, established by the US and Great Britain at Nuremburg, that wars can be illegal and that soldiers, officers and politicians have an affirmative duty to disobey illegal orders. Specifically, there is a duty to disobey orders to engage in a war of aggression, which is precisely what Galloway and other opponents considered Gulf War Phase II.

I suspect that, from a legal standpoint, there's a reasonable argument that such doves are wrong. As some of us have insisted over the last several months, including even some hawks, the first Gulf War never really ended. The dovish perspective on this is that any decisions Iraq made on cooperating or failing to cooperate with the United Nations inspections regime, any bellicosity of rhetoric, needed to be considered in light of a steady decade-long bombing campaign, the never-rescinded lethal finding against Saddam Hussein and the unilateral imposition of no-fly zones not contemplated in any UN resolutions. But the hawkish version has its strengths too: the Gulf War never ended. There was a cease-fire, subject to conditions, especially regarding disarmament, that Iraq never met, and a subset of the belligerents, at length, rescinded the cease-fire because of those violations. The Gulf War of 1991 may have been imprudent (my retrospective judgment) but it was in no sense illegal. Everything was nailed down tidy-like: the UN endorsed the war, for those who care about such things; the US Congress authorized force against Iraq (the Brits presumably sewed up their end); regardless of the UN, Iraq really did conquer Kuwait by force of arms, activating the accepted right of collective self-defense - if the recent conquest of Iraq really is the logical outgrowth of that legal, never-concluded war, then Galloway's obvious defense - the duty to disobey illegal orders - fails.

Of course, you can also argue that UNSC 1441 superceded the resolutions authorizing the original war and that only the US and Britain, of the permanent security council members, believed that 1441 authorized invasion without a further UNSC okay. I'm not saying the US cares or should care about UN legal sanction, or even that I do, but the Brits clearly put stock in it, so it matters for the Galloway case. There's also the argument, which I accept and have even made, that the US and Britain perverted the original UN mandate into a regime-change program it was never intended to be. Some people are beginning to suspect that Iraq really did disarm, as it claimed, which would undercut the "ceasefire violation" justifications. (More 55-gallon drums are being tested as I type.)

Well, it's a vexed issue. A political issue. And short of determining that Galloway sold his services, it should remain that rather than a legal one.

Tune in Next Week . . . - So, um, in a narrow, technical sense, also a wider, general sense, Free Comic Book Day was not yesterday. Like I said it was. Erroneously. Somehow I convinced myself that it was May. And here it's only just warming up. Reader Mary Kay Kare caught the error too. My apologies to any readers who actually made a special trip in search of freebies.

Free Comic Book Day really will be this Saturday, May 3. I wouldn't make this stuff up twice.

Weekly Fitness Blog Post - 180 pounds, 36" waist. That's the first uptick on weight since I started the diet, rising from 179 pounds last week. I blame Easter, OR it's not a problem OR it's the first sign of trouble. The pessimistic view is that my week is ending up with multiple "free days" in it. There's Wednesday night's gaming session, which usually has chips, plus, often, one weekend day with the family where we go out to eat and, possibly, some occasion at work. That's two to three contraventions of the diet a week. The optimistic view is that this was simply a week where I added some muscle mass - ironically for my first week with no weight training in a couple of months, I feel like I'm subjectively bulkier around the shoulders and arms.

Well, we'll just see. Since my waist did not expand, I'm not panicking. Funny thing is, my 36" pants are loose - but we've talked about the sheer dishonesty of American clothing sizes - or at least Target's clothing sizes - before.

Exercise: I only did three Heavyhands sessions this week rather than the official four sessions that Fortnightly Fitness Fun calls for. A half hour walk in the park last Sunday with the three-pound weights - absolutely the limit of what I could manage over that period of time, it turns out; a half hour park walk with one-pounders on Tuesday; and a half-pound dance/shadowbox session yesterday morning with dumbbells ranging from one to five pounds. Your genuinely useful information for this week: Garbage Version 2.0 is the perfect workout CD.

Thing that slapped me in the face this week: for me, at least, it's very easy to mildly injure oneself using Heavyhands. Particularly in freeform sessions, which is where the real fun is, it's easy to overdo. This week it's what feels like a mild groin pull during some overenthusiastic sidestepping yesterday morning. On the bright side: as I suspected from the kinds of next-day muscle soreness I experienced, Heavyhands is letting me work muscles that my weight-training routines have scanted, primarily the girdle of lower back and obliques, plus abs; Fortnightly Fitness Fun means any strains and pulls have a a week to heal during the slow-cadence weight-training phase.

Speaking of slow-cadence weight-training, while I can't endorse its enthusiasts' claims that it's "all the exercise you need," I can say that it's been a very safe exercise option - aside from charley horses, I haven't suffered a single genuine pull or tear.

Another thing I'm convinced of: Heavyhands or lesser aerobic options should be done at most every other day rather than every day. Aerobics too is, or should be, a muscle-building activity, and you need recovery time to build muscle. Unless you're Ah-nold maybe.

On the vitamin front, for reasons best not gone into, I'm convinced that the niacin and fiber really are clearing out my bad cholesterol, and that this is helping my blood pressure too. Famous last words. Next blood tests in early May.

That's all the fitness news for this week.

Department of Corrections - Officially it's a Jesse Walker correction, but it's a problem with his USA Today op-ed, caught by Steven Postrel, that I should have noted myself when linking the article. Jesse runs Steven Postrel's letter and his response.

A Fanboy's Notes - Tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day, when a dying industry tries to win back a handful of its lost market share in tandem with the release of a major movie. (This year, it's X-Men 2.) The variety of free comics available is astounding, from Donald Duck through X-Men to indie and small press titles, even "Christa's 100% guaranteed how-to manual for getting anyone to read comic books!" - itself a comic.

Go on. What's the worst that can happen? You end up like me since the Spiderman movie came out, buying a half-dozen titles or more a month and dozens of reprint collections in the last year? Your will is stronger than that, surely. Just a taste can't hurt you. All you have to do is plug your zip code into the Store Locator.

(Thanks to reader Bill Dowling for the e-mail reminder and the link to the promotional site.)

Technical Note - I've gotten a couple of inquiries recently, so I should probably announce that yes, I do have an RSS feed, here.

Ask a HARD One Why Don't You - Tacitus has an interesting item on the hard-to-find Iraqi Bad Things, in which he asks

(Kos suggests impeachment if WMD are not found in six months; does that mean Clinton should have suffered an additional impeachment once it was clear that the Serbs weren't perpetrating genocide upon the Kosovars?)

Well of course he should have. I'm glad we cleared that up. Also for starting a war without congressional authorization.

Well! It was nice having a chance to ride my hobby horse. Read the rest of Tacitus' item for his actual points, which are worth your time.

Tracking the Light of Reason - Arthur Silber's weblog seems to have changed addresses. At the new domain, he has the usual cornucopia of quality, including lots and lots of stuff on Senator Rick Santorum (R-Spanish Inquisition).

Reading Around - Some good stuff:

Jesse Walker on Iran, Iraq and nonviolent resistance in the USA Today.

Jonathan "Head Heeb" Edelstein is back on the Israeli politics beat, which means I don't have to get all my Israeli news from the Talking Dog. Jonathan has two good, in-depth items of interest. This one covers the vexed birth of the new Palestinian Authority government. In it, Jonathan offers at least the hope that Ariel Sharon may be willing to work with Abu Mazen, since he doesn't despise Mazen the way he does Yassir Arafat (who is, let's face it, an easy man to despise). And this one covers an issue I came across in a Ran HaCohen column months ago but didn't feel competent to judge, whether Ha'aretz keeps its harsher takes on Israeli news from its english-language readers. Jonathan makes a damned convincing case that it just isn't so.

Ikram "Path of the Paddle" Saeed has a couple of useful Iraq pieces (here and here). Plus, Canadian stuff.

Speaking of Canadian stuff, Colby Cosh asks the musical, Toronto-quarantine-related question, "Funny how Canadians love squishy institutions of global governance until one of them acts the least bit peremptory towards them." Okay, it's not a question.

Balloon Juice proprietor John Cole wonders if " the Chinese secrecy and deception regarding SARS could be the foundation of an internal uprising, particularly when people in China start dying in the numbers that I unfortunately think they will?" I'd say there's an outside chance of this. Sure, the Chicoms slaughtered subjects in the tens of millions earlier in their history and got away with it, but the country is more open now and the elite less confident than the good old Gang of Four. SARS and the bureaucratic bungling of the epidemic might, and I stress the word might, have the same impact on the PRC that Chernobyl had on the Warsaw Pact - the beginning of the end.

Aziz Poonawalla gets nibbled to death by ducks. Aziz is one of the few bloggers I know who actually blogs to learn - most of us who do this already know what we think about most everything we write about. It's why we started our flippin' blogs in the first place. But one of the things that Aziz could stand to learn is that some criticisms aren't worth taking seriously. That said, regarding his item wondering if Israel really needs it's nuclear arsenal, my response is Hell yes they do. Put me in charge of Israel and I wouldn't give it up in a million years. Nonproliferation remains a fantasy and some of Israel's enemies (Iran comes to mind) are beyond the reach of its conventional forces. A secure deterrent is your best friend in a case like that.

Tacitus, dean of conservative bloggers, is back. He also ended up with a huge bandwidth bill from all the publicity his site got early in the war, so he's taking donations.

Franklin Harris Makes His Marvel. Kind of. He also defends Saddam Hussein . . . 's art collection.

The American Way of War - Here's the thing about the Chemical Ali rumors. They may be true or they may not be, but it's one more indication that this grand strategy of hitting the buildings of individual enemies with really big bombs may not be all it's cracked up to be. Bin Laden, Mullah Omar, Saddam Hussein, Ali Hassan al-Majid, Uday, Qusay and Zeppo, if we're going to make war on individuals, as we increasingly seem to do, we ought to consider doing it in such a way that we know whether or not we actually got them. We're still not sure about Bin Laden and Mullah Omar a year and a half later. It sure would be nice to know, rather than relying on wishful thinking or reflex skepticism.

This isn't a "hawk or dove" or "isolationist vs. internationalist" issue, at least not on first contact. It's a matter of matching means to ends. The preferred means would be the ones that let you know whether you got your target or not, which you would think means "boys who go to a particular place, at H-hour, occupy a designated terrain, stand on it, dig the enemy out of their holes, force them then and there to surrender or die." (I read it in a book, and discussed it in connection with Bin Laden's resurfacing late last year.)

Where it becomes a "hawk or dove" or "isolationist vs. internationalist" issue is when you start to suspect, as I do, that we choose the big-bombs-at-a-distance approach over the "dig the enemy out of their holes" approach because the political costs of the latter are too high.

The Origin of Chemical Ali - I wondered about this the other day. Russil Wvong e-mailed me a link to a Human Rights Watch report from this year. Further searching on their site led me to a 1993 report assigning the chief responsibility for the various gassings of the Kurds to Ali Hassan al-Majid. That's two years before the defections of Wafiq as-Samarra'i and Nizar Khazraji. This by no means clears either of those, um, gentlemen of subsidiary responsibility, though it's worth noting that if you search HRW for Khazraji material everything that comes up re chemical weapons is in context of the Danish case, and Samarra'i is hardly mentioned. Regardless, the HRW report establishes al-Majid's own culpability pretty clearly. Which makes it a drag that the latest reports from Iraq suggest that the bastard may not be dead after all.

Welcome to my Nightmare - One of the arguments against conquering Iraq by force presupposed Iraqi possession of chemical and biological arms. Like, for instance:

Those risks are: Nuclear Pakistan falls, or freelancing harabists in its military slip one of its bombs to a group like Al Qaeda; Al Qaeda picks up surplus Soviet nukes; the Chinese decide that the grand encirclement is proceeding too far, so they see to it that Al Qaeda gets the bomb; or, in the immediate postwar chaos of this much-desired conquest of Iraq, diehard elements of Saddam's armed forces slip some bioweapons into hostile hands.

Of these dire possibilities, only the Chinese angle seems less likely than a Saddam Bomb attack now, and all of them get worse in the aftermath of an Iraq conquest.

My emphasis of my original text.

So here is the situation if certain hawks are right to retain their confidence that Saddam had the gas and germs we said he did:

o the stuff is out there, unsecured;
o the Pentagon says it could take a year or more to get to all those sites;

Inescapable conclusion: any stockpiles of WSDs that exist are at high risk of reaching our enemies.

We're told that we have a list of thousands of suspect sites. That it would take so long to visit them all comes down to one obvious problem: force levels. We simply can't get expeditiously to all the sites we need to secure whatever weapons Saddam may have had. That suggests one of two possibilities:

o the "cakewalk plan" was sufficient to topple Hussein but incapable of fulfilling a major goal of the war (secure Hussein's Bad Things)
o the "major goal of the war" wasn't really a major goal of the war at all.

We're back to the old dilemma, incompetence or malfeasance.

Where's Nizar? - Who knows. A week later and there's still no confirmation of the report of the assassination of post-Saddam Saddam candidate Nizar Khazraji. Kendall Harmon sent me the text of a BBC Monitoring Service report in which one of Khazraji's colleagues denies that Khazraji has been killed. From Khazraji himself, nothing. Given that the only assassination report seems to come from a single Arab news service (al Bawaba), I'm skeptical.

Kendall has two items on his own blog. The Khazraji confrere quoted by the BBC claims that the general is in Kurdistan, a place that would seem to have a high torn-limb-from-limb factor, given his history there. While Khazraji denies that he had any role in the gas attack at Halabja or other gassings during the Anfal campaign against the Kurds after the war with Iran, he was still commander of the Northern Front during the whole unpleasant period, and Iraqi depredations went well beyond gas attacks.

But here's something for an enterprising sort to look into: the origin of "Chemical Ali." When I first started thinking about this issue, it seemed like the attachment of blame for the Anfal gassings to Ali Hassan al-Majid might have originated with Khazraji himself. With further research, I found a 1995 article from Middle East Quarterly in which another defecting Sunni general, Wafiq as-Samarra'i, a Sunni Arab from Samarra

refrains from blaming the Iraqi army for these crimes and satisfies himself with strong denunciations of Saddam Husayn and `Ali Hasan al-Majid, Saddam Husayn's paternal cousin and the operation's commander.

Samarra'i, by the by, has been little in the news since the war broke out, only popping up in the occasional uninformative profile.

There are two ways of looking at the matter: 1) Multiple knowledgeable sources confirm Ali Hassan al-Majid's responsibility for the war crimes of the late 1980s and now the bastard's dead. 2) A couple of operators with blood on their hands and an eye on the main chance settle on a patsy and make it stick. Both men have good connections to the US intelligence/military sector. Conveniently, their patsy gets killed by that sector before he can be asked a lot of nosy questions. 3) Why choose? Plenty of blame to go around. But it doesn't have to go around if it can be interred with the man with the flashy name.

Wait for Me! - Don't let me be the last one to quote these bons mots from Jesse Walker:

DISTINCTIONS:
Patriotism: I love my dad.
Nationalism: My dad can beat up your dad.
Imperialism: Here he comes now.

That about says it all.

Yet Utter the Word "Democratic" - Two useful demurrals.

Gene Callahan heightens the contradictions.

Will Wilkinson notes, quotably, that when you say "democracy" you've said very little:

Getting a democracy is rather like getting a mammal for a gift. Kittens are nice. Wolverines will lunch on your eyeballs. You don't drop a wolverine in your friend's lap, and then walk away feeling you've done them a favor, since the best pets are mammals. Democracy names a vast range of possible institutional structures.

There is, of course, more.

It's Worse Than That - I've been thinking of the Josh Marshall quote that Dave Trowbridge cited approvingly last week:

Iraq is a country of some twenty-four million people. It shouldn't surprise us that a few tens of thousands can be mobilized to support the withdrawal of American troops and the creation of an Islamic state.

True enough. Dave Trowbridge glosses Marshall thusly:

No, this is certainly not a reason for the beating of breasts and the uttering of cries of doom.

But you see, it works both ways. By the same standards, it shouldn't surprise us that a few hundreds or thousands can be mobilised to pull down statues on camera or hand out flowers to the troops. Theoretically that means the future is open, the attitudes of Iraqis beyond the current extremes fluid. In practice, you're back to that old Unqualified Offerings watchword, structure. And the structural situation is, we ain't from around there. The essential conservatism of the planet tilts against us still, as it has from the moment this misadventure entered the planning stage.

Full of News - I got the Noli Irritare Leones link below from Eve Tushnet's site, which is suddenly chock full of new stuff after several days' goldbricking.

Meanwhile, Avedon Carol is in newish, possibly temporary blog digs as she recovers from eye surgery. See Avedon's Other Weblog.

Justin Slotman is doing NBA playoff blogging, plus other stuff.

Meanwhile, Jesse Walker's weblog has become frighteningly active. I say frighteningly because, when he bothers to update it, it's so good you probably don't need the rest of us.

By Gun! - I would never have thought there could be a definition of "gun nuts" that I could accept, but Sappho, pacifist proprietor of Noli Irittare Leones, has come up with one:

. . . someone who vigorously defends the Second Amendment and doesn't care a fig about the rest of the Bill of Rights.

She continues:

And, while I don't ever plan, as a pacifist, to be out there organizing for my right to bear arms (it's my right not to bear arms that I want to defend so much as my right not to bear arms), I do recognize when a gun rights activist is my ally on these other Bill of Rights issues.

As my nine-year-old niece is fond of saying, "I have no problem with that." I would only add that it works both ways. That is, as someone fond of the entire Bill of Rights, I recognize that while "gun nuts" (by this definition) aren't my allies on most of the amendments, they are my allies when it comes to the Second.

In other gun news, I've made the links page of the very hardcore Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, and couldn't be happier. And Hesiod took exception to my reading of his earlier item on the subject. I disagree with his contention that "the John Lott controversy has show" much of anything except the reliability of Lott's own scholarship.

He concludes:

Governments are, ultimately, a means to manage and control the use of force to settle disputes.

The one word I disagree with here is the word that changes everything: "ultimately." You could replace it with "among other things" or "when they're working right" or "on some accounts intended to be." But "ultimately" reduces all the many dimensions of the assertion by one sector of society of a monopoly on violence to a very misleading scalar.

Weekly Fitness Blog Post - 179 pounds. I forgot to check my waist this morning. This side of Easter dinner I'll be damned if I'm checking it. But it feels like it's still somewhere between 36 and 37". Unless I've shrunk, I'm officially no longer obese as of this morning. My body mass index is now exactly 25. Still shooting for 165 pounds, which will be a BMI of 23.

Finally started Fortnightly Fitness Fun in earnest today by engaging in my first cardio workout in over two months - a half hour of Heavyhands, mostly in the nearby park, finishing up with bellyaerobics (Heavyhands' ab exercises) on the new workout bench downstairs. Decided to try the three-pound weights, which turned out to be absolutely my limit. I had to keep changing up arm moves to work different muscles.

It was fun. Nice to get out in the morning air with the dog and see other people out and about. Exercise is not supposed to be fun, the Super Slow people keep saying, but I enjoyed it anyway.

Fortnightly Fitness Fun, remember, works as follows:

Day 1: Super Slow weight training.
Day 2-5: Rest.
Day 6: Heavyhands panaerobics.
Day 8: Another Heavyhands session.
Day 10: Another Heavyhands session.
Day 12: Another Heavyhands session.
Day 14: Goto Day 1.

My other big learning experience this week was niacin flushes. I started taking niacin (vitamin B-3) in hopes of improving my cholesterol, after reader Kevin Marks mentioned taking niacin for his own cholesterol. When, one morning a week and a half ago, I started feeling hot and itchy in the car on the way to work, I thought it was because of a new laundry additive Mrs. Offering was trying. It was another week until I made the connection.

The niacin causes these small capilaries to get larger -- so they might be able to carry two or three blood cells at the same time.  This is a tremendous increase in blood flow.

You experience this as a reddening of the skin -- simply because there is more blood close to the surface of the body.  As this blood flows in these areas the cells of the small capilaries will also be getting rid of their waste products, and often they produce "histamine" as part of that process.  That histamine is another natural substance produced by every cell in the body -- when the cell is under attack, or is getting rid of toxins.

So explains Dr. Brooks at the website linked above.

The heck of it is, the niacin flush, unsettling as it is, appears to be good for you. And it's as close as most of us will come to knowing what it's like to turn into the Hulk. You can get "flush-free" niacin, but you can also just take regular niacin on a full stomach only if you want to avoid the flush. Me, I kind of like it now.

Philosophical topic of the week: fitness and narcissism. Curmudgeons claim that focusing overmuch on your body shape and appearance is narcissistic, and therefore bad. I'm willing to accept the first part (the narcissism) but not the second (the badness). Here's the thing: maybe it's just me, but I don't find that I think about my body more than I did before I started the Unqualified Road to Health Program. That's because I thought about my body quite a lot before I started losing weight. "How fat I am!" I thought. "I sure have gotten weak!" I also thought. "My heart sure does beat fast for even minor exertions!" I thought when not thinking the other things. "I look like a cartoon sperm with arms and legs!" was a thought that came up entirely too often.

In other words, I was just as "narcissistic" when I was obese. I was simply a lot more morbid about it.

Finally, I note the passing of Dr. Robert Atkins this week, a casualty of the Winter We Had Winter. (He slipped on the ice in early April and never regained consciousness.) The word "controversial" will probably stick with Atkins' name so long as we have language, but 37 pounds later, I have to count in his favor. I'm not doing a true Atkins diet these days, and haven't for a few weeks now. I've stopped counting carbs, for instance. But I still stay away from sugar and white starch, and take "good carbs" in moderation several times a day. Most of what I eat comes from the walls of the grocery store (the produce, dairy and butcher areas), not the interior. It was Atkins' book that got me started and gave me hope. I can't scorn that.

Bye and Bye - Tell me again how if we just vote the evil Republican Bushies out of office our liberties will be safe. This just in:

Retail employees who sell violent video games to minors would face a $500 fine under a bill passed by the Washington state Senate.

The measure, approved 47-7, targets games that depict violence against women and the killing of police officers. It was passed by the state House last month and is expected to be signed into law by Gov. Gary Locke.

Governor Locke is a Democrat. State House bill sponsor Mary Lou Dickerson is a Democrat. The House passed the bill 81-16 and the Senate, 42-7. The roll call offers a heartening picture of Republicans and Democrats, men and women, joining hands across the aisle to threaten poorly paid store clerks with the majesty of the law if they should flout the legislators' superstitions and mania for control. That fine is equal to two to three weeks' take-home pay for a cashier, though Washington State legislators and the people who want favors from them can no doubt easily drop that much on lunch.

The title of this item is a translation of the Washington state motto, "Al-Ki," a Chinook phrase also translated as "Hope for the Future." As if.

Blogwatch Auxiliary - Some things out there:

Perverse Access Memory. I can't read this site from home because of some stupid, still unfixed routing problem on the part of my ISP. But when I was reading it from another machine today there were several good things.

Leonard of Unruled does requests! I asked him if he would write something about the current chaos in Iraq from an anarcho-capitalist perspective. "Mere Anarchy" is the result.

Jesse Walker has a really good item on Passover, a "radio fable" and the last word in political taxonomy.

Making Light. Teresa Nielsen Hayden, "almost certainly a man," notes that "I’m getting linked to by various blogs that are full of spluttering indignation about how I obviously value a museum full of trinkets over the lives and liberty of the poor oppressed Iraqi people" and goes on to explain how full of shit these critics are. Actually, there's just a bunch of good stuff on Making Light right now. Read it all.

Body and Soul comments on a stunning bit of moral opacity from CNN, "Sally Field imperialism," she calls it.

. . . not only do we bomb you, take over your country and exploit your resources, but when we do, you must like us, really, really like us.

Also a good set of links to Iraqi Museum looting developments.

The Agitator has more on "your Weekly Standard/National Review guide to appropriate Catholicism." Plus, fan mail. And it's his birthday tomorrow, so put some good wishes in his comments box.

Electrolite has, well, fuck-all. All week now.

Tacitus, apparently felled by a Movable Type upgrade gone bad, has the same.

Flit has a manful "Where I Went Wrong" post about flaws in his contemporaneous analysis of the war. Not that he did badly in the first place.

God of the Machine has a long, informative review of the latest novel by Richard "Clockers" Price and the only good-natured retrospective on Gulf War Phase II that I've seen. (I do these blog watches to help you find the sort of things you ain't going to find here.)

Redwood Dragon seems to have redesigned. Proprietor Dave Trowbridge has a table of political contribution figures by companies that have gotten Iraqi reconstruction contracts and some postwar optimism, if "we're going to be on [the occupation job] for a good long while" counts as optimism. Dave explains why he thinks it does.

Best Libertarian in a Libertarian Role - Have I mentioned lately that Julian Sanchez still kicks ass and his blog is a must-read? Just start at the top and read everything you haven't read yet.

Note: Some people may wonder how I can say Julian is our "best liberartian blogger" while also saying that his fellow CATO mafioso Radley Balko has the best weblog period. Am I saying that Radley's somehow Not Really Libertarian? No. I think of Radley's Agitator site as a general interest blog, with a sizable portion of politics, run by a libertarian. Julian's site more purely devotes itself to politics and political philosophy. Notes from the Lounge: libertarian blog. The Agitator: blog by a libertarian.

I'm glad we cleared that up.

More Catholic than the Pope - Radley Balko has good sport with the "Catholicism stops at the water's edge" crowd at the Weekly Standard and National Review.

The Wrong Man for the Job - Good Instapundit demolition of John Ashcroft, somehow the attorney general of the United States.

Which brings up a question: how did he get that job?

And Deepen on Palmyra's Street - So what's up with Syria and chemical weapons? According to the Federation of American Scientists Syria report:

"Syria has a mature chemical weapons program, begun in the 1970s, incorporating nerve agents, such as sarin, which have completed the weaponization cycle. . . "

"Syria has been producing chemical warfare agents and munitions since the mid-1980's. . . "

"In addition to mustard gas, Syria is known to be manufacturing nerve gas agents, and can pack CW agents into a wide variety of munitions, including ballistic missiles. . . "

"Syria first acquired CW artillery shells as a "gift" from Egypt just prior to the 1973 war. . . "

"Israeli Chief of Staff Ehud Baraq told an audience of leading industrialists in Tel Aviv on December 6, 1991 that Syria's chemical weapons capability was 'larger than Iraq's' . . . "

So there you have it. Independent observers have long been convinced of Syria's chemical warfare capability. (Internal evidence suggests that the first version of the FAS article dates from late 1991 or early 1992.

Now here's the thing: the strongest argument the Iraq hawks had was that Saddam Hussein had repeatedly used poison gas against his enemies. We skeptics were forced to argue that he had never used them against an opponent capable of effective and personal retaliation and had never, despite a history of supporting anti-Israeli terror groups, shared out the chemical weapons he was known to have or the biological weapons he was suspected to have. He had specifically declined to use chemical weapons against an opponent capable of retaliating not just in kind but in more than kind. (That would be us, in 1990-91.) I considered and still consider the skeptics' arguments decisive, but they didn't carry the day. One can understand that, since the hawks could point to Iraq's actual use of what it had.

With Syria, the picture is much more clearcut. On the evidence, the country has had deliverable chemical weapons for almost 30 years. During that time it fought at least two wars directly with Israel (1973 in the Golan and 1982 in Lebanon), a proxy war with the US in Lebanon in the early 1980s and a proxy war with Israel (via Hezbollah) for the next eighteen years. Plus the wars against Lebanon's Maronite Christian Phalange that gave Syria supremacy in that country.

And in all that time, it never used the chemical weapons it had available.Throughout, it has supported various Palestinian resistance groups, pretty much all of whom include terrorism among their options. In all that time it never passed chemical weapons to terrorists for attacks on Israel.

It's not hard to see why. Israel would have pretty quickly hit back with poison gas and probably nuclear weapons if Syria tried it. (It's also possible that even a loathsome figure like the late Hafez al-Assad found actually using chemical weapons too . . . nasty.)

So there's a deterrability case regarding Syria too. It's much easier to make than the one for Iraq. Those who would argue otherwise face a heavy burden.

The Case Against - The Luxury of Conceit argues that "As long as Jordan has any influence, official or otherwise, on a franchise's personnel decisions, that franchise will never succeed." He has his reasons. I like to think he's mistaken, but my record on the issue is not good.

Repeating Rifles and handguns, and what-have-you. Eve Tushnet address the Iraqi gun question in her latest Jewish World Review column. To my mind, the beginning of the article leans too heavily on a weak Jane Galt counter to the famous New York Times article, but Eve closes strongly:

Simply because one right, in isolation, is not enough to bring down a modern totalitarian state, that in no way implies that the right is useless in warding off tyranny; useless for other purposes; not really a right at all; or a right we can sharply curtail or do away with entirely.

This echoes a piece of reader mail I got from a someone who's practice is to explicitly tell me those occasions when I'm free to use his name and who didn't tell me this time:

I also do buy the canary in coal mine but better analogy is that gun rights are like a receipt -- you can lose your receipt and still enforce your rights, but it's harder; you can keep your receipt and still lose your rights, but it's better to keep it as a policy.

A government that says, if you dont trust us, here's your guarantee (receipt): you can keep your guns and organize with them. That's a governement in good faith.

This seems to be a logical problem for some gun phobes - they argue, implicitly or explicitly, that if gun rights aren't a perfect guarantee of liberty or personal safety, then they are worthless and can be dispensed with. We have an example on Counterspin this very morning. This is akin to arguing that habeas corpus hasn't helped Mike Hawash, so we might as well dump it.

Is Our Bloggers Learning? - Yes, I believe they might be. Near as I can tell without really, you know, looking, relatively few hawkish bloggers boomed the "buried mobile labs" story. Which was smart, since

The 11 cargo containers were filled with new laboratory equipment apparently intended to make conventional weapons, said team leader Chief Warrant Officer 2 Monte Gonzalez.

That per CNN a few hours ago. Sites I searched: Popdex, Instapundit, On the Third Hand and AndrewSullivan.com. Near as I can tell, even Best [Neocon-Approved Items] of the Web didn't pick it up.

It goes without saying that Iraq may yet turn out to have Weapons of Some Destruction. It may be encouraging that our hawkish friends (and adversaries) have gotten burned enough by the topic to approach initial reports cautiously. Of course, it may be that they just want to change the subject, since WSDs have not been a good one for them so far.

End of the Road? - Add to the list of things that may be true the assassination of Nizar al-Khazraji, who was, according to Al Bawaba, on his way to the US-sponsored opposition-group meeting in Nassiriyah. (Or Ur, depending on the precision of Iraqi geography.) I found nothing about this on the sites of CNN, MSNBC, the Post or BBC. It may not be true. It may be. (People may mount "20'x20' containers" on semi trailers and rail cars too, even though standard semi trailers and rail cars are half that wide and half again as long or more.)

For what it's worth, the BBC was referring to Khazraji in the present tense as recently as "7 hours ago," according to Google News. Khazraji was in Denmark recently, under house arrest, but disappeared, as noted by Michael Young in Slate. For the record, al-Khazraji was under house arrest in Denmark on suspicion of helping to direct the famous gassing of Halabja. Khazraji maintained that was just his enemies making stuff up. The top theory for how Khazraji got out of Denmark involves the CIA, said to favor him for the role of post-Saddam Saddam. If he's dead, there will be a lot of plausible suspects. Khazraji's was not a life lived with an eye toward minimizing the number of people who would like to kill him.

Help! I'm Bored with the Fate of the World! - Lots going on. The US is trying to provoke Syria while also letting it be known that war is not on the table. For now. If you can believe what you read. (Here's a tip: you can't.) In an example of the genius of our two-party system, where Democrats try to sound more hawkish than Republicans on international issues while Republicans try to sound more compassionate than Democrats on domestic issues, Senator Bob Graham declared Saturday that the US "ought to consider launching cruise missiles or another form of warfare on terrorist camps in Syria after giving Syria time to dismantle the camps" according to Newsmax according to the Miami Herald.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi occupation already begins to resemble the nightmare scenario doves warned against, with demonstrations in Nasiriyah, protesters in Mosul shot dead during an encounter with US troops, the least influential and most influential actors in postwar Iraq spurning the US-sponsored loya jirga (or whatever), plus ethnic cleansing in Kurdistan. (A mistake! say some Kurds quoted in the article. Not, say some others.)

And I just can't get arsed, he said Britishly, to say much about it all right now. Didn't we just do this? If history is going to repeat as farce, shouldn't it be funny?

I realize this ennui is a personal failing, but after all this is a personal website.

On the bright side, US troops caught Abu Abbas, mastermind of the Achille Lauro hijacking and murderer of harmless American tourist Leon Klinghoffer, singled out for death on account of being Jewish. The chance to lock Abbas up and throw away the key is small but meaningful consolation.

Tinfoil Hats and Others - Amusing article about, yes, Iraqwar.ru in The Progressive Review. I doubt its central speculation - that the Russian GRU was using the site to try to pass helpful information to the Iraqi government, but the fallback speculation seems possible:

It's quite a notion: Russian spooks blogging concrete advice to Iraq. It's a notion that Strafor's Matthew Baker termed "nonsense." He said, "A website is not the way to get information to the Iraqis; a phone or radio is better."

Baker sees it, rather, as an expression of an internecine struggle among various Russian military and espionage interests wrestling over whether to align more closely with the U.S. or seek a counterweight axis with Germany and France. He said, "They're not putting it up for amusement or profit, but for reasons to do with Russian politics." He ad! ded, "It's an agit-prop campaign by those who argue that sticking close to the U.S. is wrong."

This seems entirely possible. It was the same for all the players in the war period - you couldn't believe what they told you, but you could learn something from what they wanted you to believe.

(Thanks to Hesiod for e-mailing me the article.)

A Pack of Iraqis, Not a Herd - From a Saturday Red Cross report:

Alwiya Children's Hospital: This 125-bed hospital, the main pediatric medical facility in Baghdad, had been protected from looting by the presence of armed medical staff living in the hospital. The wards were closed, but some 100 consultations per day were being performed for out-patients. The staff were defending the hospital with courage and conviction. They definitely need protection and additional personnel. Some paediatric drugs were lacking.

My emphasis. Thanks to reader Tom Scudder for the link.

Every Dog Has His Say - Your Talking Dog e-mails about regime change collectible card games:

Honestly, Jim-- the cards are really perfect. Can you think of a more apt metaphor for our riverboat gambler in chief than a deck of playing cards? I can't. 55 no less. (That would be three jokers; in 3-D, Dubya, Dick and Don, perhaps? Or is it Beshar Assad, Kim Jong Il and Ayatollah Khamani. Ah, what a wonderful game!) There's nothing more charming than a riverboat gambler who thinks he's on a winning streak.

Well, we're at Day 25, and no WSDs, no WMDs, no anthrax, no mustard gas, no RBS-- just some freaking pesticide... Assuming that this really was ever about the bad stuff, this sure would be awfully embarassing. Fortunately, we both know that Saddam hid all of them in Syria, so that will solve that mystery. Colin Powell sounded awfully sure we would find the bad stuff. Of course, he sounded awfully sure we'd get 9 UNSC votes too, as I recall.

Or did Saddam hide it all in Iran? I keep forgetting. No matter.

Well, the bright side is that this might be really good for Amram Mitzna. If we go ahead and remove all of Israel's existential threats, Arafat will have to clean up his act instantaneously. At that point, the Israeli electorate might feel safe enough to dump Likud once and for all, clearly an angle the neo-con hawks failed to consider.

Its a good thing the Tigris-Euphrates has supported civilization for 8,000 years. Cause methinks we're gonna be there for a while.

Me, I have various thoughts about the WSDs that didn't bark (so far), but that's for another time.

When Doves Cry - Well, not cry exactly. Jesse Walker has a fabulous consideration of the aftermath of war from the standpoint of an opponent. Writing like this is why I've been a Jesse Walker fan for years.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 180#, 36.5" waist. That's "still" on the waist, but a two pound improvement over last week. One more pound and my body mass index will hit 25 and I'll officially no longer be overweight. At that point I'll write a bestselling book, From Fat to Flabby in Just Five Months. Who wouldn't buy that?

Getting in shape is a lot like cleaning your house after you've let it go for awhile. Every step you take to tidy up reveals some new level of mess that, while you didn't notice it before, seems to jump right out at you now. 36 pounds lighter than my Thanksgiving weight, I find myself looking askance at my posture - I'm working on carrying myself straighter - and thinking that my stomach muscles are still distended from all those years of overeating and under-exercising, and realizing that I'm now at a weight and fitness level that began to bother me in my mid-thirties. So, miles to go before I veg out.

The other thing this demonstrates is how loose the BMI standards are. I will not feel slim at 179 pounds. Of course, after tonight's anniversary dinner, I might be some time getting back to this morning's weight of 180! Strip steak, my first serious french fry consumption in months, and the cheescake I promised myself 10 pounds ago. (Mrs. Offering at less but had silly girl drinks like - no lie - a chocolate martini and coffee with booze in it.)

Now for the reader mail section - in some ways the most important part of these updates since it proves that not everybody skips the fitness items. So there.

Adrian Turtle suggests a culprit in the Case of the Cereal Headaches:

I noticed you mentioning getting headaches on the days you ate a high-fiber cereal sweetened with Splenda. Splenda is a migraine trigger for me, and might be causing problems for you as well. (Nutrasweet is a very, very strong migraine trigger for me, and is known to cause headaches for lots of people...the sucralose effect is a bit subtler and less well-known.) You might want to try eating cereal without the Splenda. I like it with some frozen blueberries.

This could be. I haven't consumed much Splenda on my diet, content to let my sweet tooth atrophy. But if it is true, that will be too bad, since Splenda is really really good. It's the only artificial sweetener I can stand, and I find it nearly indistinguishable from sugar.

Meanwhile, Kevin Marks had a suggestion for my cholesterol problem:

I was told to do this too, and tried the '8-week cholesterol cure' diet, including Niacin and Phytosterols (which block LDL absorption from food), and oatmeal for breakfast. My HDl went up, my LDL didnt' budge.

Then, I started taking soluble fibre (metamucil) 3 times a day. Within 3 weeks my total cholesterol dropped 70 points. The fibre absorbs the cholesterol and you crap it out.

Thanks to Kevin for nudging me about fiber. I was taking fiber earlier in my diet, but gave it up as I increased my carbohydrate intake. Since Kevin's e-mail, I've worked it back in (also Niacin). We'll see how it works. I'm eating less red meat too, when it's not my anniversary, and I've given up breakfast eggs.

On the exercise front, my mother is taking a hiatus from her Super Slow weight training (see most previous fitness blog items). She needs to get a shoulder fixed and the doctor wants her to hold off weight training until after the procedure and physical therapy afterwards. She was pretty clearly looking for an excuse to give it up anyway. She says the leg press hurts her feet (which suffer from neuropathy) and the pain around her artificial knees has not improved. I consider this a shame because, starting from just about zero, she's made definite functional gains in just a couple of months. She manages steps better and more easily gets in and out of chairs. It's hard training though. I'm close to a wreck for two days after my own workouts. We'll see what happens.

Frabjous Day - True, I had to work all day at my consulting gig with my old company, but it was sunny and pleasant, we got all our prisoners back alive, which would be the high point of any normal day, but beyond that, it was twelve years ago today that Mrs. Offering and I officially commenced our Unqualified Enterprise, so we added a lovely dinner and dessert to the day's other good news.

I have just two words for you, Loyal Reader: Huh. Zah!

A Fanboy's Political Notes - I've never liked collectible card games. They always seemed like a marketing scam. First they get you to pick up the basic deck, then you feel like you need one booster pack after another to keep up. Out come the foil-embossed one-offs. Then the marketing department stretches for ever less plausible expansion sets.

It wastes money and time, among other things. Find another hobby.

I Don't Feel Like Satan But I am to Them - It just occurred to me that Natalie Maines has the voice to carry off Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World."

Empire Statements - Arthur Silber says the E-word is apposite.

Preempt This - Here's an atrocity that "preemptive war" has signally failed to stop. (Thanks, if that's the word, to reader Jeremy Osner for the heads up. Jeremy writes "It is worthy of gales of laughter and bemused disbelief when you wake up at night and remember reading about it." He also makes sure to inform me that "I got the link from Sisyphus Shrugged," presumably to make clear that Jerry is not the sort of grown man who spends his time browsing the Teen Hollywood site.)

Tikrit or Treat? - I'm going to get optimistic. The reports are that the US is preparing for a major assault on Tikrit, the city with the "Birthplace of Saddam Hussein!" billboards next to the Cracker Barrel franchise. I think there's a good chance that Tikrit too will surrender without much of a fight, if any. Sure, Tikrit did well under Hussein; sure it's likely to be the "most loyal" enclave in the country.

But how dumb and stubborn are they? It's over. Things aren't going to be like they were. They may be better, they may be worse, but even in Tikrit people have to be asking themselves, "Well, what now?" Why become Grozny-on-the-Tigris for no upside whatever?

I'm tempted to tie the pattern of sudden collapses of resistance in our recent wars to the "Feiler Faster Hypothesis" Mickey Kaus is always booming.

The basic idea is this: The news cycle is much faster these days, thanks to 24-hour cable, the Web, a metastasized pundit caste constantly searching for new angles, etc. As a result, politics is able to move much faster, too, as our democracy learns to process more information in a shorter period and to process it comfortably at this faster pace. Charges and countercharges fly faster, candidates' fortunes rise and fall faster, etc.

I think the phenomenon extends beyond democracy, because "24-hour cable, the Web, [and] a metastasized pundit caste" and the whole armature of the information age extend beyond the democratic world. In a recent Everyday Economics column on Slate, Steven E. Landsburg argued that every war begins with at least one side being overconfident almost by definition - if both sides have a clear view of the likely outcome, either the attacker knows better than to attack or the defender has the sense to knuckle under beforehand. There would have to be some exceptions regarding matters of indelible honor - countries that go to war knowing they will lose, but concluding that the loss of prestige or conscience in surrendering ahead of time outweighs the consequences of defeat. But in general, it seems reasonable to say that both sides imagine their chances look at least decent and one of them has to be wrong.

I argued before that Iraq began the war expecting to win. But at some point, it became clear to somebody that Saddam's was a lost cause. Then, thanks to the Feiler Faster Hypothesis, it became clear to everybody, and just like that it's Sauve qui peut. The collapses of official resistance in Iraq, Afghanistan, Serbia and Iraq in 1991 all fit the pattern. May they process information as efficiently in Tikrit. I would say that, unless Saddam himself is there with many henchmen, and maybe not even then, they will. Hell, they might have surrendered while I was trying to find the link to Landsburg's essay.

UPDATE: Thanks to reader Olvax Starshatterer for digging up the link to Landsburg's essay after the first edition of this piece hit the web.

Return of the Anthraxblog Post - The Baltimore Sun reports that "sources" close to the Army's project to reverse-engineer the anthrax used in the Fall 2001 murders on the Eastern Seaboard have concluded that "

it was made using simple methods, inexpensive equipment and limited expertise, according to government sources familiar with the work.

The findings reinforce the theory that has guided the FBI's 18-month-old investigation - that the mailed anthrax was probably produced by renegade scientists and not a military program such as Iraq's.

The article includes a speculative demurral by a former UN weapons inspector, Richard O. Spertzel.

The big clue that this was a DIY operation and not the gift of some government's biowarfare stocks? The lack of an additive coating:

"Everybody was looking for a coating, but there wasn't one," the investigator said.

There is a downside to this conclusion:

The new research, carried out at the Army's biodefense center at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, raises the disquieting possibility that al-Qaida and other terrorist groups could create lethal bioweapons without scientific or financial help from a state.

Well yes. As I've said before, nonproliferation is a fantasy.

(Link via Counterspin.)

Declare the Pennies on your Eyes - Jesse Walker reports on fiscal reform in Free Iraq.

With Friends Like These - The Modulator on George W. Bush, "Friend of Capitalism":

W 'built' most of his wealth on the backs of the local taxpayers who will be paying for the Texas Ranger's stadium for many years to come. And there is nothing about this that is anywhere close to the free market capitalism I think Luskin would espouse.

If the elimination of the double taxation of dividends (see the Luskin quote above) were part of a cohesive, well documented, long term plan to move us toward a truly capitalist society I might accept his argument. But this is not the case and there is little else, if anything, that W has initiated that suggests tht this is his goal.

More Guns, More Blogs - Interesting items by DipNut and Givernment Monkey.

Dipnut:

We find that individual arms are neither necessary nor sufficient for freedom. But they help immeasurably, more than any other material asset. And the question of whether a disarmed society can remain free for long, is still open. I personally doubt it. The gun embodies the will to resist. Let it be taken from you, and in a generation or two the culture will have lost its backbone.

Which may be true. Government Monkey provides an amusing reading of a Washington Post report of US marines on a house sweep in central Iraq:

The interesting thing though is that the Marines didn't consider an AK-47 to be anything to worry about, and that in fact they are common items in Iraq. Weird...here in the USA I couldn't own a full auto AK-47 without an annual tribute to the Treasury and the entry of my name into a Federal database run by the BATF. Land of the free, home of the brave, and all that. I'm assuming that given the weapons cache the Marines found that the Iraqi in question is either Kim Du Toit's long lost brother or (much more likely) a member of the Fedayeen. This raises an interesting question as to just how "even" private weapons distribution was in Saddam's Iraq, and just who got to own what. How one would go around researching that I don't know, but it would be interesting to find out.

Meanwhile, Derek James tries to find more data on the distribution of guns through Iraq's population, but concludes "The resources for this sort of information on the net are pretty paltry, and even after quite a bit of digging, I'm not satisfied that I'm any closer to the truth on this issue."

Note: Charles Dodgson feels I mispresented his gun item from earlier in the week. He may be right that I read more emphasis on partisan politics than the piece contained. I plan to revisit that question over the weekend, but for now I just want to register his disagreement.

It Doesn't Add Up - Someone needs to get to the bottom of this:

Jayde Hanson is on the lookout for a new assistant - and quite possibly a new girlfriend - after leaving the previous incumbent with a gashed head on live TV.

The circus star was trying to break his own world record (120 knives thrown in two minutes) live on ITV’s This Morning when one knife got a little close to Yana Rodianova’s head.

Jayde continued to throw knives before realising something was amiss when Yana clasped her hand to her head . . .

ITV of course warned viewers "not to try this at home." But here are the parts that don't go together. Hanson says, “In 11 years of performing, I’ve only hit my assistant on five occasions.” Megastar reports that "Hanson is now advertising for a new assistant as Yana, who bears two scars from other wayward knives, wants to quit to concentrate on her Hula-Hoop act" and further that "His previous assistant also quit after being hit in the foot - her third knife injury." So what is it, five times or six? What is Jayde Hanson hiding? Why is the lapdog media just repeating his story instead of investigating? Are they that in thrall to Big Novelty Act? Surely the blogger who pursues this story to the bitter end wil become the next Instapundit or Atrios.

The Smaller the (Record) Weasel the Better - According to this story in the Christian Science Monitor, if you're not a music-industry oligarch, you're probably doing okay.

While executives at those labels wail about the industry's imminent collapse, indie labels and artists are singing a much happier tune. Profits are up - in some cases by 50 to 100 percent. That's in contrast to overall album sales, which dropped about 11 percent in 2002.

"We don't do too much crying over here," Cameron Strang, founder of New West Records, admits proudly. The home of artists like Delbert McClinton, the Flatlanders, and John Hiatt has doubled its business for the past three years and is projecting a $10 million income in 2003.

The big secrets? Eschew graft. Market to adults.

You won't hear many of these labels' artists on pop radio - and ironically, that's one of the secrets to their success. By avoiding the major expenses associated with getting a tune on the air - which can cost upwards of $400,000 or $500,000 per song - independent labels are able to turn a profit far more quickly, and share more of those profits with their artists. Another secret of their success is that the labels target consumers - namely, adults - who are still willing to pay for their music, rather than download it for free.

Okay, good for the independent record companies. What about the poor artists? At least according to the article, things are looking up there, too:

At a major label, most artists are unlikely to earn anything unless they sell at least 1 million albums, and even then, they could wind up in debt. Everything from studio time to limo rides are charged against their royalties, which might be only $1 per disc sold. That compares with an indie artist, who can sell a disc for $15 at a concert. If they make $5 profit a disc on 5,000 discs, they pocket $25,000.

Plus more equitable expense sharing, plus artists get to keep more of the rights to their work.

Unexplained in the article: a photo of Aimee Mann looks rather like a blond Marilyn Manson. Strange. But here's her United Musicians site, which provides support for independent artists.

Some More Warblogging! - Also from David Ignatius' Post column yesterday:

The intelligence officials offered a tantalizing coda for conspiracy-mongers. They said the "crude forgery" received by U.N. weapons inspectors suggesting the Iraqis were trying to buy uranium from Niger as part of their nuclear program was originally put in intelligence channels by France. The officials wouldn't speculate on French motives.

Let the conspiracy theories begin! (I, of course, believe Batroc the Leaper has a hand in this somehow.

Some Warblogging! - A quick tour through the Op-Ed page of the Post today. The situation on the ground is fluid, as the triumph of the war per se slides seamlessly into the chaos of victory. It's great to see statues of tyrants topple and read fragmentary reports of children being freed from prison (assuming we didn't simply liberate a reform school). It's sobering to read stories of mob murder and the third known suicide bombing of American troops since the war began.

I didn't blog about the first one because I was too goddam mad, at the bombers, and at the people who put American troops in that entirely predictible situation. I opposed this war because the best-case scenario was always that the suicide bombings would start after we won. In the event, they couldn't wait that long. Also, I vowed at the beginning of the war not to obsessively follow every momentary twist and turn of the conflict. To the extent that I followed my own advice, I saved myself a lot of "UPDATE" entries and worse. (Link via every blog in the world except Salam's. Stay safe, guy.) The one time I picked up something like "breaking news," I got burned.

So, sticking with this site's tidy sideline in the Long View, let's bloviate about bloviators for the rest of this item, specifically today's "Fall of Baghdad" columns in the Post.

David Ignatius offers reasons things have gone so well so far. Some good, if obvious points. And this:

Hussein's mental condition seemed to worsen after U.S. planes tried to kill him March 20 in a bunker outside Baghdad. One official said that intelligence assets reported that afterward, the steely Iraqi was "behaving oddly" and "showing psychological instability." After the March 20 surprise attack on the leadership, the officials said, it was never clear who was in charge of Iraqi military decisions.

Hunh. So I guess they knew he was alive the whole time.

Ken Adelman publishes the most restrained "I told you so" column possible. He's entitled. I'll give him "cakewalk" (silently amended to "cakewalk into hell") if Tikrit doesn't end up becoming Grozny-on-the-Tigris. I'll give him "weeks rather than months" if the last pockets of armed resistance (not suicide bombers and snipers - that wouldn't be fair) are snuffed out before May 19. Odds look good. Here's the surprising grace note that made me like the column:

Turkey proved a disappointment in its decision not to allow U.S. ground troops to rush in from Baghdad's north. Nonetheless, having an Islamic democracy is worth the wrong decision it made.

From your lips to Dubya's ears, Ken. It's hard to see how ratifying the will of 90% of your population is a "wrong decision," but his attitude sure beats "screw all those who cross us to the wall."

Next to Adelman and the uneven Ignatius, Charles Krauthammer's column suffers from a repetitious and somewhat premature triumphalism. He writes

These "irregulars" were not insurgents; they were counterinsurgents. They did not represent the people they used as human shields; they ruthlessly repressed them.

Most of these enforcers were Sunnis from northern tribes, alien to the Shiite population they ruled. In the secret police prison in Basra, seven of the 16 officers were surnamed Tikriti, i.e., they came from Tikrit, Hussein's hometown in Sunni north-central Iraq. They were not guerrillas, Mao's "fish swimming in the sea of the people." They were aliens who survived by torturing the locals and, when the British liberators arrived, by shooting civilians in the back.

True enough. But we've spent comparatively little time so far among "Sunnis from northern tribes." We'll see how many fish are in that sea soon enough. Krauthammer, by the way, has dubbed this the Three Week War. Contrariwise, Hesiod thinks we've still got a week to go.

The uneven Richard Cohen gets what Krauthammer doesn't:

The trap would be to think that the jubilant Iraqis of today will be the Iraqis of tomorrow. Unlike the people of Eastern Europe, who loathed communism and admired the United States, it's likely that most Iraqis loathed Hussein but have no particular fondness for the United States. Among other things, we have been bombing their cities and killing their soldiers for the past three weeks.

The United States is once again in a part of the world that is not Christian and not Western and not particularly enamored of America's values -- everything from its hip-hugging secularism to its unstinting support of Israel. Americans have been welcomed in such parts of the world before -- Lebanon, Somalia -- and then sent packing when elements of the local population turned homicidal. This could happen in Iraq as well.

Actually we've been bombing them for twelve years, but you get the idea. As usual with Cohen, you have to endure a certain amount of talk about his feelings, so come prepared. He's also enthusiastic about involving the United Nations, a subject on which I'm of two minds. The UN may be good at delivering humanitarian aid, as Cohen says, but they're not so good at ending aid - at moving prostrate people from dependence to independence. (The classic example is UNRWA, which still exists to "help" the displaced Palestinians of the wars of the late 40s.) The other argument for involving the UN is that it brings "credibility" independent of the United States. I don't think this is true. I think that, to the extent that the UN cooperates with US policy, it will be seen as the tool of that policy. That is to say, I don't think it will take the heat off us.

On the other hand, I'd like us out of Iraq (and Saudi Arabia) as soon as possible, so nobody gets any bright ideas about all the other places we could be attacking.

Mind you, Robert Novak reports that Colin Powell doesn't think that's going to happen.

The fact that Powell, not Rumsfeld, delivered this message [warning Syria] was widely interpreted as a signal that the United States has not designated Syria as its next military target. Powell is not signing on to World War IV. He believes (and surely hopes) that Bush shares his outlook.

Powell puts a high premium on pursuing Bush's road map for a Palestinian state, a prospect that evokes little enthusiasm among Pentagon civilian chiefs and even less in the Israeli government. The secretary of state considers it an essential component for U.S. foreign policy and restoration of the world's good opinion of America. That will be Colin Powell's burden in the months ahead.

Either Colin Powell wins the 21st Century Taking the Long View Award or President Bush is Lucy with the fooball. I'll hold out the hope of peace with Iran and Syria and you come running up and kick it.

Gun Wails - Writing about guns inspires passionate responses. Who knew? Much mail. Also, interesting blog items (that I have found at Electrolite (the action is in the comments), Unruled, Asymmetrical Information and Through the Looking Glass. I'll be coming back to most of these. For now I'll say that I think Jane Galt's skeptical piece on Iraqi firearms is marred by assuming that the news reports that indicate widespread gun availability are incomplete and the various stories of Iraqi rebellion and non-rebellion are complete. (Broadly, there must be more to the story of Iraqi gun availability than the New York Times reports of John Farquhar, but if Jane hasn't read about Iraqis turning guns on the Fedayeen - as opposed to ripping them to shreds or stabbing them - it must not have happened.) Charles Dodgson makes some good points about curtailments of liberty during the Ashcroftschina, but his piece would benefit from engaging the concept of "necessary but not sufficient." It also suffers, to my mind, from more attention to party politics than to structure - something Charles is typially much less prey to than more popular, less visible liberal blogers.

In Electrolite's comments, Derek James doubts that guns are evenly distributed throughout Iraqi society. "I am highly skeptical, for example," he writes, "that there is any sort of parity of gun ownership between the Shia and Sunni populations. Can anyone point to reliable sources on this?" This strikes me as a great thing for Derek James to research and blog about. It would also explain the disparities Jane Galt seems to note in the news reports from southern Iraq - if a disparity were proven and if the news reports from southern Iraq are complete and accurate. Which does not strike me as likely.

But enough about my fellow bloggers. Let's get to the mail, shall we? We're going to do this "Eve Tushnet style" with lots from readers and little from me. Except I know how the blockquote tag works.

Speaking of Eve, she suggests checking the "Deacons for Defense" items in this archive page from her site.

First up, Julian Davies, proud, and I use that word advisedly, subject of the sceptered isle:

For gawd's sake American,

come down off your high horse. Remember, the internet cuts across national boundaries.

It's astonishing how even the brighter and more urbane citizens of your country can't help moralising about the tritest of issues.

Guns. You want 'em. We don't. Not good enough apparently.

"...gun rights as canary in the coal mine. On this theory, the right itself is less important than the possible loss of it - that is, when a government ceases to trust its citizens (if we can still use that term) and a people cease to trust themselves and their neighbors to responsibly wield potentially lethal force, that society has become chronically . . . cowardly? decadent? distorted? This argument I accept wholeheartedly..."

Well thanks a bunch, pardner. And the same to you with brass knobs on.

Cowardly? How so? We fought off Hitler single-handed, alone in Europe, for years until the Japanese kicked the US off the fence. Our forces have just taken Basra. Politically stupid, but not cowardly.

Decadent? Well perhaps you're not so urbane after all. Yes cities have a decadent influence, and the UK is perhaps more citified than the States. But where, in the excesses of Hollywood and New York, does the US hold the high ground here?

Distorted? Well this at least makes some kind of sense. All foreign cultures seem like a distorted reflection of our own. Only an American could try to make this sound immoral.

"...but when we see Britain first confiscate guns and then propose curtailing jury trials things suggest themselves..."

Just lay off Britain, will you? I suggest your own country has enough problems of its own with the Patriot Act, holding prisoners without charge or representation, et-bloody-cetera. Blunkett's controversial proposals are a radical, possibly misguided attempt to cut the costs of trial for certain trivial offences. Compared to the fate of 'suspected' terrorists in your country they seem wholly benign.

A little lesson in another culture:

We don't have guns here because we don't want them. We don't consider we would be safer if we had them. They weren't 'confiscated' from us; we never had them in the first place because we didn't want them. Their main use was criminal. Properly licensed guns are still legal here for deer-culling or whatever. To the extent that we are worried about invasion by other countries we prefer to spend the money on a well-trained and equipped military. We do not think that giving up our guns leaves us vulnerable to a tyrannical government. A pop-gun is no defence against a tank anyway.

Britons generally find American's obsession with guns as bizarre as you no doubt find our position. What seems most bizarre is the moral convolutions Americans will take to 'justify' their obsession.

Boy is Julian Davies going to be mad when we return to the subject of Britain, crime, gun control and societal sickness later in the week!

Mike "Epoch" Sullivan thinks the political value of guns does not require that you can win against the State:

Something I always thought was a useful feature of private ownership of guns was not that it allows you to fight off government army action -- rather, that it forces the government to bring the army against you (as you mentioned, in the case of the Branch Davidians).

What good is that? Armies are noisy. They're big. Your neighbors know all about them. And they can't take you quietly at night. When the government brings massive overwhelming force to bear against its own citizens, the media notices, and gets involved. And, however superficially, your grievance with the government, or the government's grievance with you, gets aired.

That, I think, is the protection against tyranny. Not that you can somehow battle the government to a standstill -- you can't now, and you couldn't in Revolutionary War days. But that everyone can see what the government is doing, and then they can oppose it if they choose to.

This theme recurs in Leonard's item on Unruled. (See link above.) The Branch Davidians famously lost, but the outcry over Waco, MOVE and Ruby Ridge changed the way federal law enforcement approached later confrontations with fringe groups. It doesn't seem to have dissuaded drug warriors from no-knock raids, though. And societies with guns can still have people quietly disappear, as the friends and family of Mike Hawash will attest. And somewhere on Where is Raed, Salam Pax recounts the apparent "disappearance" (in the transitive, Argentinian sense) of his boyfriend.

Speaking of Iraq, one of the news reports I read yesterday included observations of civilians making their way around the city with Kalashnikovs. These were not presented as Fedayeen and they were not described as engaging American troops in combat. They could have been Iraqi soldiers who deserted with their weapons. In any case, a strange report, since the article found the sight unremarkable and US troops seem not to have reacted. Any more reliable than anything else we've read about the war? Beats me.

Doug Turnbull of the dormant Beauty of Gray blog writes

Two additioanl objections to the idea of extending the rights of private ownership to all weapons as a means of combatting tyanny.

First, simply having the right to own a helicopter gunship is meaningless for most citizens, since they can't afford it. Even with quite a large budget, the war in Iraq shows that it's really not possible to oppose the US (or any other first class military) with any conceivable force that could be built up in private.

This is a big part of why governments exist. The formation of strong central governments and nation states was largely predicated on their ability to marshall the resources necessary to supply, equip, and maintain standing armies, something which smaller groups or individuals could not rival. With the advance of military technology, and the corresponding acquisition and maintenance costs, this disparity between government and individuals has only gotten larger.

Second, even if you could equalize the armament between the government and all private citizens, it's hard to see how this would have a positive effect. It might eliminate the possiblity of tyranny, but only at the cost of anarchy. Somalia is the obvious example here. Afghanistan, too. This sort of warlord-driven anarchy is held off by the Leviathon of state power. Take that enforcement mechanism away, and the rule of law is replaced by the right of power.

The question of Somalia is interesting. There are intriguing suggestions that it is coming to terms with statelessness rather nicely, and that impressions of the country's turmoil are now some years out of date. I want to investigate a lot further before accepting the Somali rosy scenario though. Leonard's discussion of genocide bears on Doug's points, but I'll admit to generally agreeing with Doug that the alternative to governments is less-regulated armed gangs. This is why I'm a libertarian and not an anarcho-capitalist, but the anarcho-capitalists consider that they have good reason to think otherwise.

Finally (for now!), Jonathan Hendry echoes one of the themes in Charles Dodgson's item:

The problem with this theory is that gun rights are the *only* rights which Mr. Ashcroft and the Bush administration seem to consider sacrosanct.

Rights are being curtailed, but the canary is still singing along just fine.

The Republicans, not known for their hostility towards gun rights, are precisely the people who want to make the Patriot act permanent and institute Patriot II. Meanwhile, Ashcroft resists using gun purchase records to look for terrorists.

Seems to me that widespread gun ownership would probably be useful for an authoritarian right wing administration, seeking to keep people in line through volunteer militias - something like the 'bourgeois riot' in Florida, but with guns.

Here again, what I consider a misplaced focus on partisan politics. If the Patriot Act becomes permanent, it will happen with the cooperation of Democratic politicians, just as it was first passed. Perhaps an authoritarian left wing administration would be able to do nicely without volunteer militias, though the various right wing authoritarian governments out there also seem to have done well enough without them.

The other problem with Jonathan's thesis is that we have had serious gun control in this country for between 30 and 130 years, going back to the post-Civil War ban on private (read: labor union) ownership of gatling guns. So the canary has already taken some bad air.

More on a structural consideration of gun control later in the week.

Back at You - Andrew Olmsted muses about my, ahem, military reform proposals. It's an interesting enough piece, though our different goals and understandings are clear when he writes

A strong navy protects trade, a key plank in American prosperity. Almost as important in the Cold War and post Cold War world, a strong navy allows America to project its power overseas.

Indeed. I've come to consider this a bug rather than a feature, for the same reasons I discussed in my original item. It's become clear that, just as, if the government has money it will spend it freely, if the government has rampant military superiority it will employ it freely. Therefore, we must put the government on a diet of both cash and force.

Now, I take Andrew's point about the proud history of the American Navy, and I said cut it, not eliminate it. But as for protecting trade, I think it's been quite some time since the US Navy saw much anti-piracy duty. Come to think of it, it's not as if they lack for opportunities to do just this if so inclined. Huh. A new cause beckons. Demand that our navy fight the scourge of sea raiders!

But where was I? Oh yeah. PJ O'Rourke once said "Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." I'm aware that O'Rourke would not agree, but it appears that giving money, power and large navies and long-range bombers to government is like giving whiskey, car keys and handguns to teenage boys.

I believe in a strong defense. I also believe that far too little of our national security policy involves "defense" at all. (It has as much to do with "defense" as current interpretations of the Commerce Clause have to do with interstate commerce.)

Anyway, my bold stand has already sewn up the coveted Chip Taylor vote, so it's just a matter of time until I'm using the IRS to launch vendettas against my enemies.

Meanwhile, both Aaron Haspel and Ikram of Path of the Paddle pick up on the recent discussion of "meanness" in poetry. Aaron Haspel joins Eve and me in the "What to call it if not meanness?" game and plumps for hatred. For my part, hatred isn't the word I was going for, which is fine, since Aaron can go for his own words. I tend to think of hatred as just another stance that can produce good or great poems, but is neither necessary nor sufficient in itself.

Ikram sets out to do something very interesting, which is apply Tony Hoagland's "meanness" precepts to Andrew Motion's recent antiwar poem, "Regime Change," in the Guardian. Ikram partly conflates meanness with challenging your audience. I think that much is probably wrong, though challenging your audience is important. Epatez les epateurs! was my watchword as a poet, to the extent that I had one. Certainly the Guardian's readership is primed to nod approvingly at war protest from the poet laureate, in that mutually reaffirming way that drives anyone with any gumption whatsoever crazy at the typical poetry reading. (You approve my sentiments! That makes you good, and me too! And vice verse! And so on!)

I don't think Motion's poem is very good. It's padded and full of stock figuration. Free verse chauvinists might say, by way of condescending excuse, that "the form [heroic couplets] is forcing" Motion to write this way. Nonsense. Form never forced poets to do anything. Some poets settle, that's all. Motion wrote something topical and didn't hold it back for revision long enough.

Mind you, I've disliked Motion ever since his hatchet-job biography of Philip Larkin, but I don't think my animus is leading my taste astray here.

Now, for gratuitous meanness in poetry criticism, I should mention that every single poet I've read on the Poets for the War site, which is a lot fo them, sucks ass. Couldn't they recruit at least one real poet from the ranks of the hawks?

Tomorrow: More Guns, Less Sublime.

To Swell a Progress - Kieran Healy compares the size of the winter's antiwar events with a database of event sizes in recent American history. His conclusion: these were indeed big marches. (Sorry, Mayor Bloomberg - rally, in your case.)

A protest with ten thousand participants puts you right in the big leagues, up in the 98th percentile for the period. Only a very, very few events — less than forty out of 6,774 — have reported estimates of more than fifty thousand participants. A good number of these are now-famous civil rights or anti-Vietnam war protests.

Based on news reports, quite a number of recent anti-war protests have had many more than 50,000 participants and several, notably in New York and San Francisco, have had more than 100,000. Only about 20 events in the dataset have a reported size greater than this.

The database he's using is currently restricted to 1960-1975, something of a Protesting Golden Age, if you like that sort of thing. I have a couple of hesitant demurrals. The country is bigger now by almost 50% and communications have improved considerably. It's easier to organize an event now than it used to be. But I suspect post-1975 data will still show the winter protests to have been pretty darn big regardless.They just didn't work, for you pick your favorite reasons.

Dialogue from a Bad Movie

"Disarm, or face the consequences!"

"You don't scare me. You can only kill me once."

"Wrong, villain!"

(It's the hockey mask. Get that off him and he can't come back any more.)

Gun Rights Now - Not a slogan, the title. Rather, an acknowledgement that those of us who believe in gun rights have work to do in light of two recent developments. My immediate occasion here is an item by Patrick Nielsen Hayden about Iraq and guns - it turns out Iraq has quite a lot of them in private hands. (Something - warning! Advantage: Unqualified Offerings item coming! - readers of this site knew in January.) Patrick's reasonable question:

If gun ownership is such an effective and important bulwark against tyranny, how is it that a country in which most households own at least one gun turns out to be one of the most oppressive dictatorships in the world?

He links to a Timothy Noah article on the matter that I haven't read yet because IT'S LAZY BLOGGER NIGHT.

Patrick does not discuss the recent controversy over John Lott's work. Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, has faced serious doubts about the existence or, failing that, soundness of a 1997 survey he says he carried out on defensive gun use. (Libertarian Julian Sanchez has been one of the most tireless dogs on Lott's evidentiary leg. Much of the investigative work has been by Tim Lambert.) Most of my earlier discussion of the Lott case is on this archive page (several items). After hearing from Lott himself and following Julian's investigations and analysis, I've arrived at my original, snap judgment:

Again, it stands to reason that most people fire their guns only as a last resort. But we can not currently use Lott's work as proof of this.

So. Two big issues that gun rights supporters need to address (and not duck, as some of Lott's famous friends seem to prefer). It's Lazy Blogger Night, so I'll just toss out a couple of preliminary things. I'm hoping some of my heavy-hitter colleagues will weigh in soon.

The Iraq matter speaks to the question of private guns as a defense against tyranny. Iraq has plenty of private guns, but little freedom. One possible explanation - Iraq is not remotely as bad as painted - I reject as unlikely. That leaves two possibilities:

1. Private gun ownership enables a people to resist tyranny, but only if they want to.

2. Private gun ownership isn't worth squat for this purpose. Helicopter gunships in private hands might mean something. Rifles and pistols? Nah.

I hate to say this - I think I've managed to avoid using this phrase for the entire life of this weblog so far - but I suspect the truth lies somewhere in the mid - . . .

Man, this is embarrassing. As to possibility one, Iraq's wide distribution of private weapons is one more reason I was disinclined to spend American blood and treasure "liberating" Iraq.

But I think there's a lot to possibility two. In pre-weblog days, when planning an essay on Waco, I expected to write about what that atrocity showed regarding the limits of firearms ownership as a defense against government. The government will always have "the big battalions." Inconvenience them, as the Branch Davidians did by successfully fighting off the BATF, and they will simply call in the reinforcements (the FBI's "Hostage" "Rescue" Team, in that case).

There are two possible programmatic responses to this. One is radical: insist that any weapon the government may have, private individuals may have - the Gully Foyle Solution if you will. Needless to say, this one is a tough sell. I only half buy it myself. In addition to the sheer fright value, it rests on a "More guns, less crime" principle itself, and implies a "More guns, less politics." That is, an armed society is a polite society, to coin a phrase. In any case, such a society, better or worse, would be so different from what we're used to that the prospect can't but frighten most anyone who considers it.

I can't think of what the other programmatic response is.

But there's another perspective: gun rights as canary in the coal mine. On this theory, the right itself is less important than the possible loss of it - that is, when a government ceases to trust its citizens (if we can still use that term) and a people cease to trust themselves and their neighbors to responsibly wield potentially lethal force, that society has become chronically . . . cowardly? decadent? distorted? This argument I accept wholeheartedly. We are talking about a process that unfolds over time, but when we see Britain first confiscate guns and then propose curtailing jury trials, things suggest themselves. Ask a western Canadian about Canada's gun restrictions and you can probably get a list of similar baleful developments.

That's a semi-practical objection. We'll save the moral objections for later.

Next: X Guns, Y Amount of Crime.

Weekly Fitness Blog Post - 182 pounds, 36.5" waist.

Health developments: My doctor wants to put me on Lipitor and a low-fat diet for my cholesterol. "Low-fat" in this case meaning no land animal flesh or products for six weeks. I could keep nuts, olive and canola oils and eat fish for protien. I was ready to try this in the spirit of science. I've done a high fat diet and learned some things - I could learn some things from going in the opposite direction.

But I've decided against it for now. I still want to try losing the rest of the weight I want to lose and changing my exercise regimen first. He doesn't think these steps will reduce my LDL enough, but we'll see. I'm due for a complete physical this fall, so I'll monkey around with other solutions until then. If my cholesterol is still too high, then I'll do it his way.

Two things settled me on this approach. First, looking over blood tests from three and four years ago, it's clear that my HDL has been in the thirties for quite some time and my LDL has simply been creeping up with age. That means that the Atkins plan as such hasn't caused my cholesterol levels. The most you can say is that it hasn't, so far, alleviated it. Second, don't tell Michael Croft, but I tried making vegetarian chili this week, from peppers, onions and mushrooms, finely diced. (Recall that I am bean-averse.) I used the same spices, tomato paste and beer from my standard chili recipe. It was - okay. Then I added an extra ingredient - beef - and it got a lot better.

Anyway. I plan to work in more fish and white meat chicken and reduce beef. I'm also trying to give up eggs for breakfast in favor of high-fiber cereal in skim milk with Splenda sweetener. The cereal isn't bad, but the two days I've done it so far have been two days of major headaches by mid-morning. Accident? Coincidence? Conspiracy?

On the exercise front, it's time to roll out Fortnightly Fitness Fun in earnest. This program will run on a two week cycle as follows:

Sunday⁰ - Slow-cadence weight training
Saturday⁰ - Heavyhands panaerobic workout
Monday¹ - Heavyhands panaerobic workout
Wednesday¹ - Heavyhands panaerobic workout
Friday¹ - Heavyhands panaerobi workout
Sunday² - Slow-cadence weight training.
Saturday² - etc.

And we'll see how it goes. I'm scheduled for more blood tests in six weeks. If cholesterol is still bad, I'll shake it up again - maybe add even more fiber and cut back to one day of red meat a week.

Got a nice exercise bench that inclines and allows me, if I choose, to do leg exercises with weight plates. It would be an excuse to give up those beastly squats, but that might be wimping out.

Survey, Pot. Pot, Survey. - The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has one of those Neoconservatism in One Lesson articles today. They're especially interested because of the connection with that city's Bradley Foundation, which they identify as a major funding source. Interesting statistics are in this part:

The neoconservatives argue that we no longer live in a bipolar world, as when Russia faced off against the United States. They see a unipolar world, with America as the Rome of the 21st century, a colossus that can dictate its will to the world, noting that America spends as much on defense as the next 15 countries combined and has troops stationed in 75 countries.

75 countries. And they say we tried isolationism and it didn't work.

Thought for the day: statists charge and anti-statists hope that the purpose of even such minor and dilatory tax cuts as President Bush has proposed in his first two years is to starve the government of money so that in time it must do less. I'm absolutely okay with this principle. The implication is that those of us who still want that "humble foreign policy" we were promised need to put the defense department on a diet too. Pay the troops we keep a living wage, continue R&D and cut overseas deployments way back. Demand that we get out of half those 75 countries in the next four years, then half again in the next four. Don't even be too particular about which countries - pass a kind of interventionist version of the old Gramm-Rudman Act that sets a ceiling of, oh, a dozen countries we can have troops in at once in peacetime. Once you hit a dozen, any new deployment automatically triggers a withdrawal. Reduce the navy; keep up the nuclear deterrent.

We'd never get this enacted in the present climate of course. That means the first task remains to change the climate.

Streamside - I haven't felt ready to fish yet this year, so instead I've been making surveys of local trout waters. This entails walking the banks, observing stream flows, identifying likely fishing spots and testing my equipment with casts into the water using real lures and even, forthoroughness, bait. This is at least theoretically dangerous, as it is possible that a fish might, not understanding my intent, sully the purity of my investigations by striking at my lure or bait. Fortunately, this has only happened once in three outings, and I was able to shake my lure free of that fish well before I got my line completely reeled in. I can only pray this near-total success continues.

Stand Down - From "Maximum Leader," by Brian Doherty of Reason Magazine:

And what to make of the throwaway detail from the USA Today piece that, "On March 17, before he delivered a 48-hour ultimatum to Saddam, Bush summoned congressional leaders to the White House. They expected a detailed briefing, but the president told them he was notifying them only because he was legally required to do so and then left the room. They were taken aback, and some were annoyed."

They should all have been more than annoyed; they should have been appalled and probably horrified. This is not a man who respects the nature and powers of his circumscribed role in a representative republic. The entire USA Today story presents a picture of a man drunk with power—and not even a joyful, hearty drunk, but a moaning, depressive one.

Nader Shmader, Gore Shmore - Lefty blogger Josh Buermann on Al Gore as lack of an alternative:

The infant mortality rate in Iraq in 2000 was more than double that of 1990 - because of the war and the sanctions regime - and was causing at least as much suffering for the Iraqis as the latter period of Saddam's regime. If we had elected Gore this would have almost certainly continued ad infinitum: in human terms this wouldn't have been much better than the present war so far as Iraq is concerned. I have yet to see any anti-war Democrats - nevermind how few there are in congress - address that problem in all their whining about Nader . . .

Warning: Florida 2000 mention included.

One (Small One) for the Hawks - MSNBC reports that reliable tests confirm the presence of ricin and botulinum toxins at the Ansar al-Islam camp at Sargat. This is the camp that Colin Powell meant in his presentation at the UN. (He identified it as "Khurmal.")

Pause to note that this was the camp that conducted the famous post-UN speech tour for reporters that seemed to show no chemical or biological weapons on site. My recollection is that I didn't blog that story at the time because all the stories noted that the hosts did not allow reporters to see the whole camp. (My February archives seem to bear this out, but I may have missed an item skimming. Readers are invited to prove me wrong.)

The import of Sargat and Ansar is still unclear. As this Kurdistan Observer article from last summer notes, Ansar's patron might be Iraq, Iran, Al Qaeda or some sort of timeshare arrangement. (Here's another KO article from later in the summer.) However, Human Rights Watch tends to substantiate the presence of foreign, likely al Qaeda-connected, fighters in Ansar's ranks:

While Human Rights Watch did not investigate these alleged links, the testimonies of villagers who had fled Biyara and Tawela and were interviewed in September 2002 appeared to support this contention. A number of them, including former detainees, said that there were foreigners among Ansar al-Islam forces, that on occasion they were interrogated by non-Iraqis speaking various Arabic dialects, and that they had heard other languages spoken that they did not recognize.

Scores of Iraqi Kurds affiliated to Ansar al-Islam, including key leaders, consider themselves veterans of the Afghan war. They had spent time in Afghanistan, initially fighting against Soviet forces during the 1980s. Representatives of other Iraqi Kurdish Islamist groups who maintain links with Ansar al-Islam told Human Rights Watch that a small number of Iraqi Kurds affiliated to the group had also fought alongside the Taliban, and that they then returned to Iraqi Kurdistan following the latter's defeat.

There are also other indications of possible Ansar al-Islam connections with al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan. Documents discovered in an al-Qaeda guest house in Afghanistan by the New York Times discuss the creation of an "Iraqi Kurdistan Islamic Brigade" just weeks prior to the formation of Ansar al-Islam in December 2001, and some Ansar al-Islam members in PUK custody have described in credible detail training in al-Qa'ida camps in Afghanistan. The existence of any ongoing links between al-Qa'ida and Ansar al-Islam is unknown.

A combination of chemical weapons - even "retail" ones like ricin and botulinum - and Afghan Arabs is genuine cause for concern. If you firmly established that the Iraqi government was not only fostering the group but knew about its pursuit of chemical weapons, you'd have an interesting "reckless disregard" case against Saddam and his gang. The alleged "Zarqawi link" is too tentative to my mind, so far. For Iraq to supply Ansar, they'd have to get materiel and, possibly, men across territory controlled by two different Kurdish groups. Iran has easier logistics, but there's another difficulty, noted in this Agence France-Press article of last fall:

The whole topic is very sensitive for the PUK, traditionally dependent on Iran during its past battles with the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the other main group in this enclave.

Keep Iran's support of "good Kurds" in mind when the national greatness types start sounding the anti-Iran tocsin in the next couple of months. But where was I? Oh yeah. Ansar pushes a very Wahabist/Talibanish Islam in its territory - see the HRW story for details. And it spends the rest of its time fighting Iran's friends, the PUK. So it's not immediately clear what Iran would like about Ansar.

Unsettling loose ends dept. MSNBC reports that tests show only trace amounts of toxins in the camp. Either there wasn't much to begin with, or it was moved. This gets back to the question of why the US and Britain let the Sargat camp continue to operate if they had solid evidence of a threat. Imagine that coalition paratroopers siezed the camp - beyond the reach of Iraq's military, remember - and found both chemical weapons and documentary evidence tying Ansar to the Iraqi government. Suppose Iraqi government representatives were in the camp when they did this? How differently might the UN arguments have gone? (Heck, how differently might this site have read?) So why didn't they, if the evidence of not only chemical weapons but a connection to both Al Qaeda and Iraq was there to be had? Was it?

RIP - I kicked Michael Kelly pretty hard when the occasion presented itself and it would no doubt have presented himself again. He completely accomodated himself to the idea of an "imperial mission" for America by the end of his life - became, that is, the archetypal neocon. But he was a good writer, particularly if you agreed with him about the topic at hand (as I tended to when the topic was Bill Clinton), a fine editor and a superb war reporter. I found his New Republic dispatches from Gulf War Phase I vivid and moving. (They later became the book Martyr's Day.) I'm sorry he died yesterday, but comforted that he died at his best, in the field, exercising his reporter's eye and writer's mind. I can just about imagine the column he would write about his own death - the rueful detachment, telling detail and good humor, something consoling thrown in for the people he talked about in this column that Gene Healy - and I - both liked.

Shoutout to my Homeys - In other DC-Area libertarian weblogs . . .

Gene Healy, war opponent that he is, offers Sympathy for the SecDef.

Julian Sanchez considers that he's done a better job of blowing bridges than Saddam Hussein, though he doesn't put it that way. Also, meditations on giving up cigarettes.

James Landrith takes exception to the much-reported (and blogged) remarks of a Corporal Dupre about wanting to get his hands on "an Iraqi." Maybe it's just me, but I read Dupre's imprecation as containing an unspoken suffix of "paramilitary" or "officer" or "government official." Reason: in the context of the article, what has set Dupre off in the first place is the suffering of "an Iraqi" - a child killed in the confusion of battle. While I have worried about the potential for "empathy depletion" more than once, I see Corporal Dupre is well this side of the danger zone. See also items on secret courts and timely budget cuts for VA hospitals.

Radley Balko wins the drug war:

That gives me an idea. You wanna' see marijuana get legalized overnight? Run this headline:

"CASA STUDY: MARIJUANA CAUSES INCREASED SEX AMONG MARRIED COUPLES."

I am so there. Plus more great stuff, which makes sense, since, pound for pound, The Agitator gets my vote for best weblog period. (It would probably be Gene Healy if he posted more, but he doesn't. Bastard.)

Kelly Jane Torrance posts her spring weblog entry. Kidding! She's started a book colloquy with The Ambler, who would be my homey if he didn't live in, like, Canada. Point being that Kelly could be posting as often as every couple of weeks while the colloquy continues.

Leonard of Unruled writes about the apparently confused concept of "supporting the troops."

The Real Enemy - I don't care what Ariel Sharon says, our next target has to be these bastards. Best of all: no nation-building required.

Bruuuuuuuuuuuuce! Rolston of Flit offers plausible arguments for thinking the war will be over at the six to seven week mark, and continues to opine that "evidence that the Iraqis have no serious weaponized chemical capability, at least in the south, continues to grow, too."

Rumor Mill - File under FWIW: Sara Rimensnyder reports that Jeff Jarvis reports that John Quiggin reports that "a colleague has e-mailed" to report that Al Jazeera reports that

. . . salam pax is wounded in hospital. He seems to be in the city of Najaf. The doctor said that he was on his computer when his house was hit by a bomb.

Since Alanis Morrisette could swap this in for one of the verses that isn't really "ironic" at all, one instinctively doubts.

he ran a little blog
all about the war
they dropped a bo-o-o-o-omb
and it blew off his door

and isn't it ironic
don't you think
a little too ironic

And yeah, I really do think. How and why, if he was in his house when the bomb hit, how the hell would he have gotten to a hospital in Najaf?

But you never know, right? I hope he's okay, and I hope Saddam packs it in or some of his homeboys pack him in, saving us all a lot of bother. A hospital in Najaf would not be a Mukhbarat dungeon somewhere. A hospital in Najaf could be better than a lot of possibilities.

Speaking of Al Jazeera, the network's english-language site is back up and unhacked. Reason's Tim Cavanaugh cites and endorses a Slate defense of the network on Hit & Run. A Google search for "salam pax" on Al Jazeera's english site only turns up nothing.

Queen of Mean - Eve Tushnet has some characteristically pointful demurrals about Tony Hoagland's essay on "meanness" in poetry, which I linked below. Eve's coolest insight:

Part of the problem is that Hoagland still, relentlessly, focuses on the character of the poet--a legacy of the confessionalism he half-rejects.

I think Eve is right when she argues that

If "meanness" is a Socratic willingness to deny the gods of the city; if it's a willingness to follow one's thoughts to their conclusions, rather than drawing back for fear of giving offense; if it's painful observation, a willingness to follow Lear onto the heath, to howl when howling is needed, to cauterize one's audience or oneself; to give oneself and others something more than what we want; then I'm there. If "meanness" is a belief that truth is opposed to charity, that the artist is beyond good and evil (and thus it's OK to be cruel in art because hey, it's great art, who are you to stand in its way?), or that destruction is cooler than creation, I think that's stupid, and highly unlikely to produce good rather than self-indulgent poetry. Hoagland mostly means the former stance, I think, but his language tends to confuse it with the latter.

I would say Eve is right as far as it goes. Casting about for what to call that thing in poetry that Hoagland calls "meanness" that isreally Eve's denying the gods of the city, I've sometimes favored "savagery" but finally settled on "ruthlessness." Where I might disagree with Eve is if she's saying that following her Option Two will yield no good poems. I think it will yield few, but every approach yields few good poems in ratio with all poems produced. The truly mean can still win the lottery. But in that case, the virtues the rest of us find in it are likely to be different than the virtues the poet imagines it to hold.

Happy Holidays - It's April Fool's and Make Fun of the Cheneys Day too. Scroll down for more.

Even During a War some people have too much time on their hands.

Link via Radley Balko.

Only Good News Today - Congratulations to PFC Jessica Lynch and, most especially, her rescuers.

Literary Corner - The virtues of meanness, in poetry and life, by Tony Hoagland Excerpt:

In fact, it's significant that ugly-truth-tellers are much more common in our fiction than our poetry. Much of our mainstream poetry is confined by an ethic of sincerity and the unstated wish to be admired (if not admired, liked; if not liked, sympathized with). American poetry still largely believes, as romantics have for a few hundred years, that a poem is straightforward autobiographical testimony to, among other things, the decency of the speaker. And, for all the freedom and "opening up" engendered by Confessionalism, to be uninhibitedly mean, we all know, is itself prohibited. Welcome to Poetry City: Hurt someone's feelings: Go to jail.

From Poetry Daily.