Clues Found in Iraq - From the New York Times . . .

In a significant retreat in American efforts to seize weapons held by Iraqi citizens, American and British officials said today that Iraqis would be allowed to keep AK-47 assault rifles in their homes and businesses.

While American officials gave no public explanation for amending what had been a much tougher plan to rid postwar Iraq of heavy weapons, military officials have said they recognize the difficulties in disarming citizens at a time when Iraqis feel their security is still at risk.

The article also has an interesting subplot on Ba'athist cells in the postwar Iraqi police force.

Mnemonic

30 days has September
Also June and November
All the rest have 31
Except for February, which is just weird
And April, which has lasted 61 freaking days so far!

2003: God Apologizes to the Water Table.

But even dangerous truths are still true - Fabulous Natalie Solent meditation about stickers on a professor's office door. No, really. Go read.

UPDATE: Usual Blogspot crap means the link is bad. Go to the main page and scroll down to "Selective political myopia." The item is much better than it sounds.

Mailbag - Obviously new reader Amit Singh writes

Yes, it's all true what you said. The people in Iraq will despise American troops and turn on them with a vengeance. It happened in Afghanistan. Oh wait, no it didn't. Well, it happened when we occupied Japan after WW2. Oh wait, it didn't. Germany. Nah, that didn't happen either.

What's wrong with you liberals? You folks said the war would last for months. It took 21 dsys to take over Baghdad. It took 84 days for Allied bombing t o stop Serbia. It took the British 2 and 1/2 months to recapture the Falkland Islands. Heck, it took Janet Reno 45 days to torch those kids at Waco.

The occupation of Japan and Germany lasted years. It's been two months and it's Vietnam all over again? God damn it, that as 40 years ago.

Wrong about Cold War. Wrong about 9/11. Wrong about Afghanistan. Wrong about Iraq. Will you liberals ever admit that you're wrong?

I'm told that H.L. Mencken kept a standard response card that he enclosed in all replies to reader complaints. It read You may be right.

John Emerson writes

Thanks for the heroin piece. I used to have a friend who was a medical student / alternative musician. He did research and found out that there is only one physical problem associated with careful use of heroin. After decades of regular use, a lung disease develops, though as I remember it was non-fatal and not very debilitating. (Keith Richard figured out the heroin rules right at the beginning and has never had a problem to my knowledge.)

The whole drug war is an attempt at an ideological purge or witchhunt. Since the American tradition and legal system do not allow the burning of heretics, certain physical objects associated with an attitude or way of life have to be made illegal. (In order to avoid the chemical-legal difficulties involved in specifying every single illegal drug all the way down to Hawaiian woodrose, about 1970 a legislator in the always-reliable state of Kansas introduced a bill making illegal the ingestion of any substance with the intention of getting high. But of course, that ruined the whole effect; we can only suppress intentions by outlawing substances).

I recall Keith Richards telling an interviewer once that he always cleaned up before entering the recording studio, and only did drugs to cope with the crushing boredom of touring. (I think this was in the classic collection of interviews with songwriters, Written in my Soul, by Bill Flanagan.)

Now, confession: I plan to read Sullum's book. I thought his last one, For Your Own Good, was quite fine. But with a seven-year-old who is also an advanced reader, I intend to be careful about leaving it around the house. Some people will cry Hypocrisy! But it's not hypocritical to believe that choices you don't want loved ones to make should nevertheless be legal for people to make. I figure I have a couple of years to figure out how to explain this distinction in child-friendly language. It will be neither the hardest nor the easiest balance I manage as a parent.

Cowboy Kahlil wrote several bloggers asking

First, I'm trying to determine if email is a viable method of organizing left leaning folks.

Gee, I hope not. That's the last thing we need, organized lefties - I like them much better in ones and twos.

Nick Sweeney was glad to read kind words for Richard Thompson.

I took my dad -- a friend of Sandy Denny in the late 60s -- to see him in Newcastle a couple of months ago, and it was great. (Better, of course, had we seen him solo, but you take what you're given.)

I actually prefer Thompson live with a band. I've seen him once solo and twice the other way. The last time was the Mock Tudor tour with his son, Teddy and others (see a show from that tour here), plus one from the Gregson and Collister era.

Finally, Nell Lancaster writes about Ariel Sharon and the "O"-word:

I'm afraid that Sharon's new frankness about occupation (and purported willingness to end it) is not really very good news. Apparently he wants to continue settlements and let The Wall handle the "occupying" job. Ampersand (Alas, A Blog) has a clarifying map, and a link to the Gush Shalom site with more information. I'm assuming part of our $3-$12 billion helps fund this...

I don't doubt that Sharon will still try to hold onto everything he can, and that we're far from out of the woods. (Ivan Eland says the US, Europe and Russia should just butt out until the Israelis and Palestinians are truly sick of war, which he doesn't think has happened yet. He argues that a premature, forced "peace" deal that, say, immires US troops in the Levant would be far worse for America than the appalling status quo.) But I come back to Eve Tushnet's principle of the salience of the rhetorical climate: it does, in fact, matter that Ariel Sharon formally, with whatever degree of sincerity, acknowledges the Occupation for what it is. That can lead in directions and distances he himself does not intend. (cf Gorbachev, Mikhail.)

"Iraq, man, there's nothing here" - Reader Melinda Haire tipped me to this SFGate.com story on A. Crassicauda, Baghdad's sole death metal group. Their big ambition: get the hell out of Iraq.

All their songs are in English. Heavy metal should be either in English or German, says rhythm guitarist Faisal Talal. "Arabic doesn't fit."

I'm pretty sure A. Crassicauda is old news to a lot of people, but I thought the new article had some interesting details.

I Say, I Say, That's a Joke, Son! - Ribble Fizz writes "the more I read the post the more certain I am that you were being facetious . . . " Two other e-mailers, presumably standing in for 100 other readers, seemed convinced I must sincerely believe "dog allies" exist and had been questioned by Iraqi weapons. (See "Mr. Language Person Attacks," below.)

There's something strangely humbling about that. Any ally of dogs is a friend of mine, though.

"One Dead Soldier a Day" - Some backup:

Already this week, ambushes carried out in Hadithah, Baghdad and Fallouja have left four U.S. soldiers dead and 15 others wounded.

Tyler Marshall, LA Times.

Conspiracy Theory - I put on my shiny tinfoil hat and interpret this story:

BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops raided the Palestinian Authority's mission in Baghdad and arrested 11 people after ransacking the building, a Palestinian official said Thursday. A top U.S. general said eight people were arrested.

The US story is that the PA mission had "unauthorized weapons." The PA spokesman says that all the embassies have weapons on hand to defend against looters, that the Americans shot out the locks on doors that were already unlocked and took food, water and documents.

Why? At a guess, Rumsfeld and the senior staff of the Defense Department would really like to stop this annoying "Road Map" business the State Department and White House are pushing, and even, if possible, derail Dubya's planned meeting with Palestinian Authority PM Abu Mazen next week.

It's my Life and It's my Wife? - I couldn't skip work today to take in Jacob Sullum's appearance at CATO to discuss his new book, Saying Yes: in Defense of Drug Use. But this excerpt on the real addictiveness of heroin is fascinating.

Mr. Language Person Attacks! - This headline is just wrong:

Iraq weapons questions dog allies

Come on, people! Subject-verb agreement, please:

Iraq weapons question dog allies. The verb "question" does not take an s with the plural subject, "Iraq weapons."

You'll have to read the article to find out whether the dog allies answered any of the questions from the Iraq weapons or not.

Quick, Change the Mood! - Well! Clearly, Mrs. Potatohead packed my angry eyes, just in case. Let's post some nice things, now, shall we?

I like to think of this as the ultimate Advantage: Unqualified Offerings! story.

Annoying but valuable indie comics publisher Fantagraphics is facing bankruptcy. If you buy enough from them they might not have to file. Eve Tushnet and I recommend Love and Rockets. (Via neilalien.)

I shouldn't include this story in a mood-changing post, but it fits with the darker suspicions I chased away at the time.

For something completely different, you can read the FAQ for the new Marvel Universe Roleplaying Game, which our gaming group had fun messing with last night.

It Was Fun While It Lasted - The victory, I mean:

“THE WAR has not ended,” the commander, Army Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, said after a U.S. soldier was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade while traveling in supply convoy north of Baghdad — the ninth U.S. service member killed in Iraq this week.

McKiernan, briefing reporters in the Iraqi capital, described the sporadic attacks as a new phase of the military conflict.

That's from MSNBC.com. And this Post story, "Female attacker inspires angry Iraqis," is about trends in early "martyrdom operations" against US troops. Soon enough women like the late Eman Mutlag Salih will figure out that throwing grenades is a sucker's game and they'll start wiring themselves up and detonating themselves right next to our troops, and the lethality will rise higher than its present, quiet rate of about one dead American soldier a day.

And what can we know about those soldiers now and deduce about the future? MSNBC again:

McKiernan said the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, which had been planning to return to the United States in June, would remain in Iraq until commanders decided it was no longer needed.

With recent attacks against U.S. soldiers, he said, there were no immediate plans to return the unit to its headquarters at Fort Stewart, Ga.

3ID has been at it nonstop since mid-March, and of course, they've been in theater longer than that. Their vehicles are short on parts and "senior leaders and logistics experts in the 3rd Infantry said most of the division was not ready for combat."

The 3rd Infantry’s supply line was a constant problem during initial fighting for control of Iraq. After the fall of Baghdad, senior officers determined that the division would be leaving within weeks and that its vehicles would be taken out of service, so they never filled orders for parts.

We can be sure of the following: the men and women of 3ID, like the rest of us, were lied to on the way to war. They expected a quick victory, a hero's welcome in Iraq and a quick rotation home. They sort of got one out of three.

Imagine how it must feel to be them now. You're nowhere you would choose to be, you're not going home after all, for the foreseeable future, your equipment needs time in the shop, the locals you thought you were helping are getting surly on you - more and more often, lethally surly. There are more and more stories of troops dying at the hands of seemingly innocuous people. You increasingly can't trust anyone you meet. Prudence dictates that you stay hard and ready and keep the locals at the other end of your gun. Less and less do you feel like helping anybody except your own. This is the thanks you get? Nerves fray, trigger fingers itch. Each new "incident" breeds the next demonstration, the next riot, the next "incident." All of this does nothing for the Iraqis' mood either. And it just gets worse. And it will.

God damn the men who put our troops in this situation. God damn the men who brought our country to this pass. God damn Cheney and Rumsfeld and their cadre of little geniuses. God damn the media poodles who obligingly spun the way they were spun. God damn Colin Powell for the narcissistic lie he told himself about how he was needed "inside the system" when he had the chance to blow it all open by publically resigning. God damn George W. Bush for accepting the advice of knaves and dreamers. God damn Tony Blair and the Third Way messianism that sees war as the engine of human progress, damn the cowardly Democrats in Congress for confusing their short-term political viability with the welfare of the country and damn the freelance cheerleaders, with blogs or syndicated columns, who imagined that their September 11-induced post-traumatic stress disorder was clarity and toughness rather than hysteria. Damn every Annie Hall with a keyboard demanding that Woody Allen come over and kill the spider now, and not just the one in her apartment but every spider on earth, dammit, because someday, someday, one of them just might bite her. God damn every fool who decided to support the war just because the protesters were icky.

Most of all, god damn you if you promise that if we just knock over Iran now, or Syria, or whoever, that all the old lies will come true. God damn your smug, cowardly little souls to hell.

Back! - Like much of the blogosphere, I have my site on a Hosting Matters server, so like much of the blogosphere this site was down all day because of a fire at the collocation site. Sorry to everyone, especially everyone coming in from Matthew Yglesias and Radley Balko to find out which presidents I want to impeach.

More tomorrow.

Music Notes - An interview with the great Richard Thompson and three live songs (solo acoustic) on VH1's website. Meanwhile, on Thompson's own site, a live streaming concert (audio only) and various other free download and streaming goodies.

Some Tyrants Are More Equal Than Others - Hesiod and Jeanne d'Arc have lots of info on a Middle Eastern despot who tortures, murders, fosters a cult of personality and, oh by the way, hosts major US troop deployments in his country. His depredations include boiling political opponents alive. If we do decide to put Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan on the regime change list, though, we might want to cut off the tens of millions a year in military and intelligence aid first, just to make it easier for us.

Crossing the Rubicon - Roman Days, a living history event, June 7-8 at Marietta Mansion in Glenn Dale, MD. Looks like fun. Expected attendance, somewhat light. As my friend Dave, with whom we'll be attending, puts it:

For bigger turn outs [in the midatlantic] perhaps they need to emphasize that Romans too had civil wars.

Holy Shit - Who said this?

“We don’t like the word, but this is occupation . . . To keep 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation is bad for Israel and the Palestinians.”

Ariel Sharon! I confess I am stunned. If this is one more "Likud strings the US along until it loses interest" maneuver, Arik's really going for the Oscar this time. But even it were, and I have no reason to believe it is, these things tend to take on a momentum of their own.

The dangers now are three: that Sharon's party heaves him over (see the quotes from angry Likudniks later in the MSNBC article), that some ultra shoots him or that the Palestinian Authority, with its matchless capacity to shit in its own nest, overreaches.

Maybe I was just a couple years pessimistic. As I've mentioned before, when Sharon won in 2000 I breezily assured Mrs. Offering that it was nothing so dire - it was going to take a Sharon to give back the West Bank and Gaza as it took a Begin to relinquish Sinai and - warning! political cliche coming! - a Nixon to, um, go to, well, I'm sorry! China. Then came all the trouble and I put that prediction in the Wrong Call column. I'd like to be able to haul it back out soon.

Many a slip, etc. but when it comes to the Mideast you take your good news where you find it.

Meanwhile, Richard M. Ebeling of the Future of Freedom Foundation has an essay sounding a theme previously touched on at this site: "Property Rights and the 'Right of Return' ." He stresses, correctly I think, that the injustice involved is one of property rights. The displaced owned personal and real property for which they were never compensated. Where I think he goes wrong is his purist prescription for "resolving" the problem:

If a settlement is reached between the Israelis and the Palestinians, justice would suggest that all legitimate property should be returned to its rightful owners and that residence by those owners on their property should be once again permitted. Indeed, one of the points made over the last 10 years concerning the wars in the former Yugoslavia has been that “ethnic cleansing” has driven people from their land and homes and that they should be allowed to return — even if the conquering group has now redistributed the property to members of their own national or ethnic group. Why? Because it is stolen property and the new occupants are in possession of ill-gotten gains.

If the present occupants of Palestinian properties wish to privately offer some monetary settlement to the rightful Palestinian owners, so that they may retain the land and related assets seized and redistributed to Israelis more than half a century ago, they should certainly be free to do so. And, indeed, many of the descendants of the originally uprooted Palestinian property owners might very well prefer a cash settlement to returning to a piece of land they have never seen. But if the original owners or their descendants did, in fact, wish to reclaim that which is rightfully theirs, justice and the principle of private property suggests that they must be allowed to do so.

I understand his theoretical case, particularly if you grant his hostility to "attempts to maintain ethnically or religiously based societies . . . " But I disagree with him on the praxis:

What would be illegitimate and inconsistent with the fundamental principles of liberty would be for the Israelis to expect U.S. taxpayers to foot the bill to cover compensation or resettlement costs of the displaced Palestinian families and their descendants as part of any “road map” for a Middle East peace agreement. Those who support or feel any personal ties to the maintenance of Israel as a Jewish state should be free to contribute money to buy the property titles from their original Palestinian owners.

A central concern for libertarians is, or needs to be, How do we get to a libertarian society? In the foreign policy sphere, how do we disentangle ourselves from our overbroad foreign commitments? One obvious, even promising answer, is to buy our way out. The US pays continuing monetary and political costs to maintain the current Israeli-Palestinian status quo. An investment that settled the "right of return" problem once and for all, and allowed the US to disengage from the region on the security front, would be among the soundest foreign investments the country could make.

Don't Tease the Squares - Endlessly fascinated by the ins and outs of the Jessica Lynch rescue, the extent to which it was and was not stage-managed for propaganda purposes and what the press did and did not report when and correct when? Me neither. BUT, your one-stop shop for sage Lynch commentary last week was Bruce Rolston of Flit, who brought vital perspective to some hyperextended BBC-bashing by the expected hawkish bloggers, including erstwhile UO foil Bill Herbert of Cointelpro Tool. Start at Bruce's last item and scroll down.

The Good News Front - After the spokesman for CATIC (the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center) suggested that "You can almost argue that a protest against [a war fought in the name of antiterrorism] is a terrorist act," some good news: California's attorney general, Bill Lockyer, who has oversight responsibility for CATIC, explicitly disavowed the spokesman's argument, according to the Sacramento Bee. (Thanks to Hesiod for the link.)

Lockyer also promises that "California won't track peace protesters, even those who engage in minor acts of civil disobedience, as it tries to head off terrorist threats." If Lockyer means it and makes it stick that will be welcome news.

Who Gets to Stay - The other day, Tagore Smith wondered, in e-mail, "out of the post WWII presidents, how many do you think shouldn't have been impeached?" (We had been talking about Bill Clinton and George W. Bush lying the United States into war.) Since then, I've been wondering. Keep in mind the question is not, Which Presidents do I think handled the job well. It's which Presidents I think didn't conduct themselves feloniously in office.

Counting forward from Truman . . .

I don't see much basis for impeaching Truman or Eisenhower.

JFK now, let's see: consorted with gangsters, plotted to assassinate foreign leaders, lied about the missile gap, but that was on the way in, not something that happened while he was there. What did he know about his father's electoral shenanigans in West Virginia and Illinois and when did he know it? You can make a decent case that he engaged in criminal conspiracy with known organized crime figures (Operation MOngoose). Recklessness is not itself a high crime or misdemeanor, so sharing a mistress with a mafia don gets a pass. Overall judgment: Iffy.

LBJ: Lied us into war (Gulf of Tonkin). God knows what else. A grifter clear back to his Texas legislature days. Overall judgment: probable impeachment candidate.

Nixon. Ask me a hard one. Overall judgment: slam dunk.

Ford. I know the pardon rankles some people, but it wasn't criminal. Neither is making Chevy Chase a bigger celebrity than he needed to be. Overall judgment: pass.

Carter. Simultaneously set in motion the destruction of the Soviet Union and the rise of al Qaeda. The ultimate mixed bag, but where's the crime in that? And he started the deregulation ball rolling too. Can't think of anything felonious about his actions. Overall judgment: pass.

Reagan. There was a moment during Poindexter's testimony before the Iran-Contra committee, something Poindexter said he did or didn't tell the President, that only made sense if Reagan knew about the diversion of funds from Michael Ledeen's First Bright Idea to the contra funding "Enterprise." Damned if I remember what it was, almost two decades later. Overall judgment: Sorry, Ronny, you gotta go.

Bush. While I wanted to believe the "October Surprise" theory of the 1980 election for awhile, I ended up reluctantly concluding that it didn't hold up. That brings us to the "lied us into war" issue. Did he know that the testimony of "Fatima" about Iraqi soldiers tossing babies out of Kuwaiti incubators was a fabrication of Hill & Knowlton and the Kuwaiti Embassy? Hard to say. Did he knowingly lie to the King of Saudi Arabia and the American people about satellite photographs supposedly showing Iraqi troops massed on the Saudi border ready to attack? Hard to say he didn't. Overall judgment: likely.

Clinton. Another easy one. Perjured himself when someone had the gall to apply a law that he himself signed (making the sexual histories of those accused of sexual harrassment fair game) to, um, him. Lied us into war in Kosovo. Started said war without congressional approval. Overall judgment: Outtahere!

George W. Bush. Is it likely that Dubya had to know how much of the "evidence" for war was distorted, misstated or just plain untrue? I'd say so. As I've argued before, we clearly fought the war in a manner that indicated scant concern that Iraq might actually have sizable stores of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. Since Bush had to approve the war plans, he either got assurances that there was no need to worry about securing suspect sites because there was nothing to find there, or he recklessly approved plans without such assurances. Then there's his Injustice Gang at the DOJ. Overall judgment: can still fall back on the incompetence defense, but it doesn't look good.

So there you have it. Far from my reputation as reflexively anti-government, I'm firmly on the side of letting four of the last eleven Presidents finish out their terms. I hope this doesn't convince Leonard to de-link me.

Memorial Day - To all those who gave their lives in service to the country, thanks. Additionally, to those whose lives were wasted on the bad decisions and vainglory of some of our rulers, apologies.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 175 pounds, 34.5" waist. It looks like a precipitous drop from last week's 178, but I had been as low as 176 that week; the 178 was one of those daily fluctuations. Human weight is fuzzy.

Anyway, that's 41 pounds in the six months (exactly) since Thanksgiving. Probably 6 inches off my waist, though it's hard to tell since I was fooling myself about my pant size for so long. 10 pounds and two inches to go. It's actually time for before&after pictures, but I don't have an after photo yet. Check back next week if you care.

Diet stuff in the news: Slate did some taste tests of low-carb baked goods, candy and beer. They describe some of the breads as horrifying to the taste, but give passing marks to a couple of the candy bars. I try to stay away from that stuff, though I've had a couple of Atkins or Carb Solutions candy bars this year, and a few Atkins and Myoplex shakes. (Awful stuff.) The article doesn't review ice cream, but the Edy's Grand No Sugar Added line is actually quite good. Three grams of sugar in a serving - less than a teaspoon - and six grams of sugar alcohol. Very creamy and chocolatey. You can eat it with genuine pleasure.

Of course, the danger with all these substitute products is that you'll gorge on them, undoing the good you'd otherwise do. This is how Snackwells et al killed "low fat" dieting - by churning out lots of high-calorie, high-sugar "low fat" junk.

There were also newspaper reports of two new studies comparing low-fat and low-carb diets, touted in the newspapers as offering qualified validation to Atkins-style low-carb principles.

One has to be wary of newspaper reports of scientific studies. (The real papers are in the New England Journal of Medicine, but I haven't had a chance to read them yet: VA study abstract and Penn Med School abstract.)

In both studies, the Atkins dieters generally had better levels of "good" cholesterol and triglycerides, or fats in the blood. There was no difference in "bad" cholesterol or blood pressure.

The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine study found that the average dieter in their low-carb group lost 15.4 pounds in 6 months compared to 7 for the group on a low-fat diet. However, both groups gaine about a third of their weight loss back by the end of the year, leaving the Atkins group down a net of 9.7 pounds and the low-carb group down 5.5.

The year-end difference was not big enough to tell whether it was caused by the diets, Foster said.

Yeah, but who cares? Because the depressing thing is, the subjects in the Penn study "weighed an average of 217 pounds at the start." And in six months, they lost all of 15 pounds if they were on the low-carb diet. And at the end of a year, they had only lost 10 pounds - five if they were on the low-fat regimen. And 40 percent dropped out of both groups.

The VA study only has six-month figures: 12.4 for "Atkins" (scare-quote explanation forthcoming) and 4.2 for the low-fat group. Assume the same regain in the next six months as the Penn study had and they'd net out at 8 and 3 pounds respectively. The VA study abstract pegs the average body mass index of their subjects at 43.

Sheesh. Why bother?

Why the heck did both groups do so poorly compared to, well, me? (I reject the notion that it's because of my shining virtue.) Motivation may play a part, but one word that comes up in neither abstracts nor news reports is "exercise."

This is one reason for the scare quotes around "Atkins." Atkins insisted that regular exercise was part of his program and that, "If you're not exercising you're not doing Atkins." Most of the low-fat diets I've seen at least pay lip service to the need for exercise. You can criticise everyone from Robert Atkins to Susan Powter for setting their standards for what counts as exercise too low, or for misunderstanding the principles of it, but not for ignoring the concept altogether.

Generally, serious diet promoters stress the importance of exercise and serious exercise theorists insist on the importance of diet. The only exercise advocate I know who pooh-poohs the importance of diet is Leonard "Heavyhands" Schwartz, who may not have appreciated the uniqueness of his own metabolism. (And who may have changed his mind since the 1980s.)

The other reason for the scare-quotes around "Atkins" was a statement in one of the reports on the studies that it restricted the low-carb group to 35 grams of carbs per day or less. But you can be on Atkins and consume substantially more carbs per day than that, depending on your metabolism. I take so many free days now that I can hardly be said to be on Atkins at all, but I was up over 50 grams a day even when I was still pretty hardcore.

The next-to-bottom line on both studies comes from the Washington Post:

"It's another mixed nutrition message," said Robert H. Eckel, professor of medicine at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver.

That said, carb control advocates will take considerable satisfaction from serious studies saying that low-carb diets are no worse than low-fat diets. That in itself represents a serious about-face. And the better triglyceride levels for the low-carb subjects are worth noting too.

The bottom bottom line, I think, is that the Diana Moon Principle holds: the best diet is the one you can stick with.

Last diet news: Tim Rankin of Total Results in Sterling VA, the licensed SuperSlow facility that trains my mother and sister, e-mailed links to two new articles by SuperSlow founder Ken Hutchins on diet. (Again: exercise guys say diet is important. Of course, this can look like the software people telling you its a hardware problem and the hardware people telling you it's a software problem.) "So, Your Ambition Is to Become a Circus Fat Lady?!" flips the problem around, imagining that a "renowned movie producer contacted you and offered you one million tax-free dollars to star in his film about a circus fat lady. You accepted the role with one requirement in addition to your acting talent: You must weigh 300 pounds. The problem is that you presently weigh only 150 and your part is to commence filming in 6 months." There follows an amusing plan for gaining weight, which involves frequent fasting!

Part 2 of the series insists on the importance of counting calories. He compares not counting calories to not keeping a careful register in your check book. Pure personal experience response: I don't count calories. Truth is, I've stopped counting carbs. I just stay away from bad carbs and practice portion control. (Counting carbs let me get to successful portion control.)

Portion control is a wonderful thing once you can do it. For instance, that four dollar jar of shelled pistachios doesn't seem like such an extravagance when you know you'll get the nine snacks out of it that the Serving Size information insists are in the jar. Ditto the six dollar jar of mac nuts.

Department of exercise: Avram Grumer of Pigs&Fishes e-mails to endorse the Powerblock selectorized dumbbells discussed in last week's item:

Hey, Jim. I've been using a set of PowerBlocks -- the SportsBlock set, which goes from 3 lbs to 21 lbs in 3-lb increments. They're great, and I'd buy a heavier set if I could afford it right now.

Avram's also fitness-blogging (on his LiveJournal) and has taken up Heavyhands. He encloses this link to a starting routine. It's a good starting routine. I still encourage people interested in Heavyhands to hunt up Dr. Schwartz's books, though, as there is a lot more you can do than the four moves on the LeanLifestyle page. Just for starters, you can increase the range of motion on the pumps, you can change your stride (duckwalking is great for your quads), you can dance, shadowbox, ski-pole and more.

I ended up doing a third week of Heavyhands in a row, which means tomorrow will be my first weightlifting in a month. I'm curious to find out whether I'll equal, exceed or fail to match my last totals. I even doubled up HH sessions yesterday, in hopes of burning off some of Offering Boy's birthday celebration. (It seems to have worked.)

Salam Pax Item III - Notes from the Briarpatch. Despite everything, Salam writes

Not too hot about any of [the candidates for an interim Iraqi government] anyway and this way we get to blame the Americans for the screwing up of our future. They have been involved in creating the mess we are in now, they should take responsibility in helping us clear it up. Ummm, let’s put it this way so no one gets pissed off: Pretty please with sugar on top, don’t leave now and let the loony mullahs stick me on a pole and leave me in the sun to think about my “Sins”.

You break it, you bought it. Which is why we've increased troop levels in Iraq since winning the official war and will probably have to increase them further.

Better boo the Dixie Chicks a little louder. It won't do to think about the rest.

Salam Pax Item II - Regular readers know of my conflicted view of the paleolibertarians at LewRockwell.com. But here's Rockwell from a column from earlier in the month:

Second, none of these central plans can ultimately work because all of them partake of a problem that afflicts all central planning, namely that society and economic life are too complex to be run from the top down. A management blueprint for a whole country consisting of actual people is a ridiculous notion.

And here's Salam from this weekend:

The type of “humanitarian aid” reaching the southern governorates turns the situation into a sick comedy. Nasiriayh Hospital got 20 boxes; six of them had only shampoo in them.

Need a blood transfusion? Have shampoo, it smells nice.

Another four or five were full of past-use-date stitching thread. In Basra the trucks of “humanitarian aid” coming from Saudi Arabia have crates of Pepsi in them. The Pediatric ward there is running out of medicine to suppress a fever, but they do have Pepsi. If this was in a movie it would be hilarious.

Actually, it was pretty funny in M*A*S*H. Which was the ultimate chronicle and indictment of just the sort of bureaucratic cluelessness that is now Iraq's best hope.

Salam Pax Day Item I - Another meaty several-day item by Salam with all sorts of news, rumors and observations, worth several items for a less strategically-located blogger like me. So let's do several items. First up, de-Baathification may turn out to be a lot like de-Nazification after all, despite what we skeptics think. Consider:

One tiny bit of interesting news before I end this post.

The CIA is contacting Mukhabarat agents for possible cooperation. I swear I am not making this up. Officially there is something called a black list and gray list and pick-ur-color list, but what is happening behind the scenes is that they want to get three different groups.

The agents who were involved in work concerning the USA, they get shaken down for whatever they know and probably will be put on trial for various crimes.

The people who were involved in work concerning Russia, they are being called to interviews selectively.

And the people whose specialty was Iran, they are welcomed, asked if they would be kind enough to contact their colleagues and would they be interested in coming aboard the groovy train?

Sorry this is just wrong, Mukhabarat? You wouldn’t get your Mukhabarat ID if they didn’t know you were a sick fuck who would slit his mother’s throat to get up the party ladder. Or does Bremer’s “de-baathification plan” not include the secret service types?

I'm sure Salam doesn't have time to read Unqualified Offerings like he did before the war, but I have to tell him that this decision fits a pattern:

Major General Reinhard Gehlen headed the Foreign Armies East section of the Abwehr, directed towards the Soviet Union. Gehlen had begun planning his surrender to the United States at least as early as the fall of 1944. In early March 1945 a group of Gehlen's senior officers microfilmed their holdings on the USSR. They packed the film in steel drums and buried it throughout the Austrian Alps. On 22 May 1945 Gehlen and his top aides surrendered to an American Counter-intelligence Corps [CIC] team.

After the War, the United States recognized that it did not have an intelligence capability directed against the Soviet Union, a wartime ally. Gehlen negotiated an agreement with the United States which allowed his operation to continue in existence despite post-war de-nazification programs. The group, including his immediate staff of about 350 agents, was known as the Gehlen Organization. Reconstituted as a functioning espionage network under U.S. control, it became CIA's eyes and ears in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union.

Hundreds of German army and SS officers were released from internment camps to join Gehlen's headquarters in the Spessart Mountains in central Germany.

How did it go, in purely practical terms?

But by the mid-1950s it became increasingly apparent that many of the assets of the Gehlen Organization were in fact controlled by Soviet intelligence. Dozens of operations, hundreds of agents, thousands of innocent civilians had been betrayed, many at the cost of their life.

Has Iran managed to penetrate the Mukhbarat, or will they manage to penetrate the post-Mukhbarat Mukbarat? They'll certainly be highly motivated to do so.

More on American employment of former Nazis in the early cold war can be found in this Boston Globe series, plus any number of Cold War histories.

Excuse Me! No blogging all day because it's (drumroll!)

OFFERING BOY'S SEVENTH BIRTHDAY!

Today was the family celebration, with us, the Matron of All Offerings and my sister's family. Much fun, though we had a minor barbecue tragedy. I did ribs in the smoker, but I didn't like the taste - somewhat acrid. They also got much blacker on the outside than they have previously. I see two possible problems:

1) too much hickory smoke - I used only hickory chunks this time (six bags full) instead of some hickory atop lots of charcoal;

2) "smoking uphill" - the bottom of the smoke chamber has a little drain in it for grease to run out into a hanging can; hours into the process, I realized that the slope of the ground put the drain at the high end of the unit, so most of the grease stayed in the bottom of the smoke chamber and bubbled;

3) I may have gotten the mixture of Mike's Rib Rub wrong in my haste this morning; I don't think so but you never know.

Okay, so that's three. This priceless article on smoking pork shoulder by Elder Ward seems to leave both 1 and 2 as possibilities. Got to clear this up before next month's Stand Down barbecue.

Offering Boy says he enjoyed his birthday regardless (the ribs were for the adults more than him), and we got fine haircuts this morning and I gave him some swag from the superb Beyond Comics in Gaithersburg.

Blogarama After-Action - Enjoyable if somewhat sparsely attended time last night at the blog party. Much time talking with Julian Sanchez and Brink Lindsey. (Brink: "Am I still a neolibertarian, Jim?" Jim: "I don't know. Have you changed your mind about things?" But the conversation went uphill from there.) Marie Gryphon tried, with some success, to convince me that school vouchers were not simply the State's nose under a tent it hadn't managed to enter yet. Julian and I talked about Two Different Types of Libertarian (no, not pragmatic versus principled or paleo versus neo - a different schema I'll come back to. I had an okay Ethiopian dinner that Martial of De Spectaculis kindly watched me eat. (He was not himself hungry.) Some of my favorite folks missed the party, so damn if I'll give them the satisfaction of mentioning their names.

And I had the honor of meeting CATO's David Boaz (pronounced like the speaker company), whom I've admired for years. Met Henry Farrell of Gallowglass and got to see faithful blogarama habitue, Dave Tepper of Interrobang.

To the best of my knowledge, no one took pictures this time. Are we all getting jaded?

UPDATE: Martial of De Spectaculis writes:

Jim, I just asked my wife if was in Washington Friday evening. She assures
me that I was, in fact, here in Boston, where I went out to get her pizza
and we watched the Red Sox game. Now, had I been in DC, I would certainly
have made every effort to attend the blog-bash. I guess I'm pleased that
my doppelganger turned out.

I hope he was worthy!

These Matrix agents will stop at nothing to confound me!

All right, Chuck, who really did have dinner with me, as opposed to Martial, who did not: remind me what your URL is please.

Blogarama at Kalorama tonight! 7:00 - ? at the Rendezvous Lounge on 18th Street in Adams-Morgan.

Objectively Anti-Empire - No time to discuss it now, but Arthur Silber points out this substantial critique of "neo" interventionism by Objectivist scholar Chris Matthew Sciabarra. I've never been a Randian, nor even read Rand's own work, but Sciabarra quotes some very sensible statements about foreign policy. His argument is that many current Objectivists, generally enthusiastic about the Iraq War and beyond, are distorting Rand's principles. What I particularly like is that he identifies the salience of Hayek's critique of central planning for nation-building and interventionism. The longer I watch our government's adventures and misadventures abroad, the clearer this connection becomes to me.

Now That's Inconvenient - Jeff Jarvis translates a German-language interview with Salam Pax, in which Salam says

Actually, the situation is much better than we imagined before the war...

What the heck is Canadian fussbudget David Warren to make of that?

(Salam also says "One thing is sure: No one is relying on the Americans. No one expects that they will do anything for us." So he's clearly not 100% with the program, which must still mean he's the enemy.)

No Slippery Slope Here! - From an Oakland Tribune article on CATIC, the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center, which played a major role in the runup to the Oakland police assaults on shipyard protestors in April:

"You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that (protest)," said Van Winkle, of the state Justice Department. "You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act."

Look people, I rest my fucking case, understand?

Said Van Winkle: "I've heard terrorism described as anything that is violent or has an economic impact, and shutting down a port certainly would have some economic impact. Terrorism isn't just bombs going off and killing people."

Or has an economic impact. What was I saying? Oh yeah. I rest my fucking case.

The state's anti-terror center also operates without a clear definition of terrorism. Asked for one, Van Winkle replied: "I'm not sure where to go with that. But as a state organization, we have this information and we're going to share it."

It's a heck of a question to ask a counterterrorism official, "What is terrorism?" One of those ambush questions, I suppose.

Another One of Those Self-Tests - You don't get graphics to paste up on your website, but this short quiz for would-be occupiers from Airstrip One has its moments.

The I-Word Revisited - Oh Imperialism! Are you the right word or not?

Consider this passage from the NYT story discussed below on Baghdad's woes, electrical and other:

But because the system is a hodgepodge of Chinese, French, Russian, American and other parts, replacing what is stolen has not been easy — since spare parts were also stolen.

Turn now to a WashPost story from yesterday, in which "The U.S. executive selected by the Pentagon to advise Iraq's Ministry of Oil suggested today that the country might best be served by exporting as much oil as it can and disregarding quotas set by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries."

No, that's not it. I mean, it would do, but there's more:

Hussein's government had an official policy of steering contracts for drilling services, joint production and machinery to companies based in France, Russia and China, whose governments tended to be more supportive of Iraq in the United Nations Security Council.

And those contracts are all . . . up for review. "Though Carroll did not single out any potentially imperiled contracts, he asserted that the old system of preferential treatment ended with the demise of Hussein."

Indeed, we shall have a new system of preferential treatment! And we will punish France, Russia and China for opposing us at the UN too. But that's still not (quite) it. There's one more key piece:

Carroll stressed that his first priority is resuming enough production of oil, gasoline and cooking fuel to relieve painful domestic shortages. Questions about Iraqi exports and the country's participation in OPEC remain moot for now.

Iraq is about to begin importing gasoline from Kuwait, according to this AP story. US and Iraqi experts at the Oil Ministry allow that they will not meet their target of restoring Iraqi oil production to half its prewar levels in June:

"We shall meet that target" 1.5 million barrels a day "at a later date."

If your overriding priority were to get Iraq's oil industry back on its feet as fast as possible - the US plans to use the money to fun Iraqi reconstruction - the logical thing would be to turn to the people who best know Iraq's physical plant and systems, the Iraqis themselves (check) and . . . the French, Russian and Chinese companies who were already doing business in Iraq and know its infrastructure.

But if you put a higher priority on punishing France, Russia and China (and possibly rewarding your own industries), you wouldn't. And that's where we are - making decisions on Iraq's key revenue source for it, based on the imperatives of American geopolitics rather than what makes sense for Iraq economically. And that's about as pure an example of "imperialism" as you'll find.

Who Turned Out the Lights II - Last week or so I wondered why Baghdad was without power when the Pentagon stated before and during the war that they were going to go lightly on Iraq's infrastructure this time. Did they misspeak, did the old Iraqi regime take the power down for reasons of their own or what? Reader Nell Lancaster e-mails a useful New York Times story that indicates the power outage is mostly due to - looters.

While some of the damage to the electrical grid resulted from the war, as advancing troops plowed past power lines, most of the difficulties are the result of looting, according to Dr. Hassan, the senior Iraqi electricity official. "They are taking anything," he said.

Thanks, Nell, for clearing that up.

Postwar Tour - Salam Pax has a long report on his tour of southern Iraq with a charity survey. Idiots will want to anxiously vet the contents for the proper attitudes. The rest of us can simply profit from the most vivid reporting coming out of Iraq, from a perspective you won't get elsewhere.

Dammit, by the way, I was the first blogger to suggest that Salam would/should bring out a book.

Weekly Fitness Blog Post - 178 pounds, 35" waist. On one perspective, weight loss has slowed to a crawl. But poundage and waistline continue to decrease, more or less, given the tolerance of my crummy scale.

This week: shilling for corporations, plus fitness method evaluations.

Let's shill first. Via the first issue of Muscle & Fitness I ever bought, I discovered Powerblock selectorized dumbbells. These things are expensive but cool. If I had an Amazon Wish List I'd put these on it, if Amazon carried them.

When it comes to dumbbells you traditionally have two only partially satisfactory options: 1) "Adjustable" dumbbell rods using the classic weight-plate-and-stoppers method; 2) A variety of cast dumbbells, each a single piece of fixed weight. The problems with the first option are safety (the stoppers can slip and send weight plates flying, plus this kind of dumbbell has sharpish and pointy bits) and convenience (it takes too much time to swap out plates in the middle of an intense workout). The problems with the second are space and expense.

I went with cast dumbbells because Mrs. Offering had some lying around and it just made sense to continue into heavier models as I progressed. But now I've got five feet o' dumbbells lining the rec room floor, from one-pound Heavyhands through 35# cast-iron Keys handweights. As of today's purchase of 35-pounders we have an even dozen sets. It's hard to cut down, since one person needs different sets for different exercises. (I'll only be using the 35-pounders for squats for the next month, most likely. I do most everything else with 25-pound dumbbells, going as low as 15 for a couple of exercises.) Theoretically you can sell or give away the old ones as you progress, but really - to whom? Plus, Mrs. Offering sometimes lifts, so she may progress into weights that I no longer need. Plus, I need three or four sets for Heavyhands routines at any given time, with progression to higher loads there too.

So you end up with a lot of dumbbells. Even at $.40 a pound for the cast iron ones, you end up spending quite a bit, and respending. Buy 25-pound weights today (50 pounds total). When you buy 30-pound weights next month you pay for 50 pounds again when what you really need is 10 extra pounds (five for each hand), not sixty. At some point you have to consider buying a rack to hold them, which is more expense and space.

The Powerblocks only take up two square feet on a single pedestal. Depending on which set you buy, one set covers between 5 and 40 or 5 and 60-100+ pounds. Way it works is, you have a handle set with square-ends that sits in a kind of basket of weighted endcaps. You insert a pin arrangement to determine how much of the "basket" comes along when you pick up the handle. I got to play with a set today and it's pretty simple and quick.

I reluctantly decided against buying them, based on the expense of the Powerblocks themselves and the sunk cost of the dumbbells I already own. But if I knew then what I know now (that Powerblocks exist) I'd have done it differently.

There's another set of selectorized dumbbells from ProBell. I haven't seen these but they are dial-based, have a more traditional form factor and boast that you don't need a color-coded pedestal to tell how much weight you're choosing. They look like they might be easier to handle for certain exercises than Powerblocks. Problem is, their "bigass model" only goes up to 30 pounds, which will only take you so far.

By the by, the reason I bought Muscle and Fitness is that it has a pullout dumbbell-and-bench workout in it, and another article on strength training at home without machines. The magazine is too focused on bodybuilding to interest me on a regular basis, but Fitness Blog Item readers know I can't resist new dumbbell workout info. The current issue's articles are not available on the website. There is a lot of material on the website. Here's a suggestion from their boxing-based cardio workout that I will not be rotating into my repertoire:

5) 10 6-8-pound medicine ball chest passes against a wall. Stand in a semi-staggered stance facing a wall about 15 feet away. Hold a 6-8-pound medicine ball at your chest. Execute a chest pass as hard as you can into the wall

Guys, this is not how you subvert those stereotypes.

Exercise evaluation section - Damn if I'm not getting sucked back into the "Heavyhands - the Ultimate Exercise!" mentality. I did two weeks of Heavyhands in a row, instead of weight training every other week as planned, because I wanted the most possible cardio exercise before yesterday's cholesterol test blood sample. Subjectively, I made at least as many gains in muscle mass and definition as I've tended to get from slow-cadence weight training. And my resting pulse is down to the low 60s. And no injuries in two weeks, either - perhaps my earlier assessment of the injury potential of Heavyhands was too harsh. Maybe it really is all you need. (I'm lifting tomorrow anyway. I mean, I have to use the #^$@@$ 35# dumbbells, right?)

For what it's worth, here are my tips for successful Heavyhands training, based entirely on personal experience and no physiological expertise whatsoever.

1. Get one of Dr. Schwartz's two books.

2. Do NOT, when starting out, do the different movements (pumps, flyes, presses, ski-poling etc.) in 5 and 15-minute blocks, as the book seems to suggest. Rotate arm movements every minute or so at the most. This cuts down on strains and pulls and lets you keep your intensity up. The idea is to let you maximize time at your target heart rate without tearing your limbs apart.

3. Adopt the following mindset: Aerobics is strength training. At least, it is if you're doing it right. Work short sessions with the next weight up into your indoor routines. When you walk outdoors, you're stuck with one weight size, so mix in intervals with wider ranges of motion. That uses different muscles and more energy.

4. Aerobics is strength training so only work out every other day. Work hard, let your body build muscle on your day off, repeat. If you're very sore on the second day, consider resting again. A half hour of intense Heavyhands four times a week will give you two more hours of effective exercise than most of the country.

5. Your abs are just more muscle. That means you need to work them hard, rest them and then work them harder the next time. The Heavyhands abdominal routines are perfect for this - you can increase speed, duration and weight from session to session.

The lesson has been spoken.

Fitness blog bonus material: 8 Healthy Foods. I'm down with five of these: quinhoa I never heard of before; yogurt I'll eat when it dies; and tea I reluctantly abjured when I gave up sugar and caffeine. But it's a pretty tasty list. Weight Watchers (the publishers of the article) are good for something.

Wither Canada (sic) - Are Canadians pussies? New evidence from Miss Manners:

I am a telesurveyor (we do not sell anything) in Canada and have been making calls to the USA recently. The people on the East Coast and in the Southern states do not have a clue how to be polite on the phone or use proper phone etiquette. I realize the nature of the business causes people to be upset and irascible but in the States the people are particularly vulgar and rude. In contrast, when I make calls up north the disposition and demeanor changes 180 degrees.

(My emphasis.) Remember that this very early Offering enables you to deal with telemarketers the Unqualified Offerings way.

Crime Waves and Crime Particles - A final query about the police numbers in the British Crime Survey. (Link is a pdf. See page 57.) The BCS is surely right that the recording change of 1998 explains the discontinuity between the 1997 figures and the 1998 ones, and Lambert is surely right that the discontinuity problematizes Malcolm's comparison of 2002 to 1997. But the police trend after 1997 is not flat. Over the three years after 1998, reported crime rises by about a third. How reasonable is it to attribute the post-change rise to the recording change, as the BCS authors do. The discontinuity, sure. But if what we're dealing with is a discrete change in recording practice beginning in mid-1998, wouldn't we expect to see a graph with a flattish line on the left, a sudden, discontinuous jump and a higher flattish line on the right? Do the BCS authors (and Tim Lambert) maintain that it has taken years for some precincts to catch on to the new system, so that a rolling compliance wave means a new set of precincts every year finally implements the new standards?

If so, the argument has a surface plausibility, but doesn't seem obviously true. The 1998 discontinuity itself argues for immediate compliance in a large set of precincts. (Almost all?) If this is the argument, when would Lambert and the BCS authors expect the "rolling compliance effect" to level off? (I should mention that this is a sincere question, not a rhetorical one.)

Now, I propose a test for someone qualified to run it:

The discontinuity implies that many precincts complied immediately with the new policy.

1. Isolate those precincts.
2. Trend crime reported by those precincts for the years after 1998.
3. Compare that trend to the national trend on page 57 of the BCS.

If the "early adopter" line is substantially flatter than the national line, you'd have a pretty good argument for the rolling compliance effect. If it substantially resembled the national line, I think you'd have to doubt the BCS/Lambert argument.

Go Figure - Tim Lambert is pretty good about linking to everything Lott&Lambert that pops up on the web. But if you go by what he writes about my interminable item of last night on guns, statistics and crime, you'd think my minor aside about his faith in the methodology behind the British Crime Survey was my sole point. It wasn't. But now that he mentions it . . .

[Henley] is concerned that I am too trusting of the British Crime Survey. As far as I can tell they have used standard practices for victimization surveys and since many people are involved I don't see how the data could be cooked without someone finding out. I would also expect victim surveys to be more accurate than police reports because the police are directly responsible for controlling crime, while the statisticians and surveyors who run the BCS do not.

There are several oddities here. I'm pretty sure many people put Enron's books together, and they weren't caught for years. The way "data could be cooked without someone finding out" is if no one bothers to look. Had Clayton Cramer and James Lindgren not actually investigated the accounting of Michael Bellisiles, and had Lambert, Lindgren and Gryphon not poked into the methodology and data of John Lott, no one would have "found out" about their issues either.

Next oddity: Lambert notes that "police are directly responsible for controlling crime." But that can cut a number of ways. One possibility is that the police want to look good, so they suppress crime statistics. But it's the police statistics that show an increase in crime. Mind you, another option is that the police feel they benefit from higher crime rates as it leads to the budget increases and social controls that cops hold dear. Which is to say that the police are certainly interested parties, but that we can't really say what their interest means for their reporting.

Come once again to the BCS. Lambert writes that "the statisticians and surveyors who run the BCS" are not "directly responsible for controlling crime." True enough. But their bosses are permanent civil servants and ministerial appointees who have a keen political interest in crime and the public's perception of it. I doubt that those people have no managerial role in the publication of the BCS. And it's worth recalling another recent British government report in this context.

Let me be clear: I am not accusing the BCS of cooking their books. I'm saying that the BCS is composed by men and women embedded in institutions, and that there is always the question of interest and the possibility of bias and chicanery in that context. Lambert's seems not to consider this. (In his letter to Reason, he says he found the BCS on the web and went straight to the chapter on violent crime, presumably skipping any paraphernalia on methodology etc. It's entirely possible his letter to Reason simply left those steps out, of course.) That, in my book, is a limitation.

Note that I do not claim this as a basis for invalidating every argument Lambert has made about John Lott, Joyce Lee Malcolm, guns, crime and X2: X-Men United. My item of yesterday broadly assumes the integrity of his work as he broadly assumes the integrity of the BCS. In principle, though, I coud be wrong about Lambert and Lambert could be wrong about the British Crime Survey.

Dept. of OTOH - Jack Shafer of Slate writes

If Hersh's interpretive/predictive streak holds, we should expect to find proof of WMD and a direct link between Iraq and al-Qaida within the next two weeks.

Of course, Shafer's piece ran on May 6. Clock is ticking!

Faith-Based Intelligence: the Sequel - Remember the Office of Special Plans, the Pentagon intelligence shop that Seymour Hersh wrote about in the New Yorker earlier this month? They were the outfit set up to assume Saddam had an active WSD program and ties to al Qaeda and collate evidence that fit those theories. According to the Forward, they've got a new assignment:

At a lower level, two sources said, Iran expert Michael Rubin is now working for the Pentagon's "special plans" office, a small unit set up to gather intelligence on Iraq, but apparently also working on Iran. Previously a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East policy, Rubin has vocally advocated regime change in Tehran. He did respond to e-mails seeking comment.

Republic of Tar - From today's New York Times: "In Reversal, Plan for Iraq Self-Rule Has Been Put Off":

One Iraqi who attended the meeting said Iraqi opposition leaders expressed strong disappointment over the reversal.

I daresay. Cockeyed optimists may prefer the conspiracy-theory view of the announcement: The administration doesn't mean it. This is a chance for their preferred clients (the exiles of the INC) to gain local cred by visibly opposing the administration. The exiles noisily demand independence. The US gives it to them. The exiles are heroes in Iraq and the administration is happy. How do I know the conspiracy theory is wrong? Because it requires that the administration at least appear to lose a contest, and I don't think they can stomach that.

The Matrix Refigured - Justin Slotman is right on:

The Philip K. Dick influence is all in the "question reality" themes and nowhere else. If Dick was writing the Matrix, Neo would've still gotten out and possibly saved the world, but been unhappily married and in love/lust with a coworker. And his wife--someone who lived their life in the Matrix and wasn't ever thinking about getting out--would've had a much larger role. Dick did some weird stuff, but it all happened to real people.

Yeah. If Dick had written it, Neo would be a shoe salesman. (No, I haven't seen the movie yet.)

More Guns, One More Time - Composing the previous post brought to mind the work of Joyce Lee Malcolm on the history of gun control and crime rates in Great Britain. She's written a book, Guns and Violence: The English Experience, which I have not read, and an article for Reason, Gun Control's Twisted Outcome, which I have. Malcolm's thesis is that 80 years of increased legal restrictions on firearms ownership in Britain have correlated with rises in violent crime over that time, and that the former are substantially responsible for the latter.

A bit of Googling determined that Malcolm's Reason article was challenged by Tim Lambert, well-known critic of John Lott and others. In an October item on his site and a letter to Reason, he argues that Malcolm errs by using police data rather than the government's British Crime Survey, which measures crime victimization. He agrees with the authors of the BCS that a recording category change in 1997 drives the large jump in the police statistics. The BCS shows several categories of violent crime falling between 1997 and 2002, the period in which the police rates more than double.

Malcolm replies to the Reason letter (see link to letter and scroll down) and to this companion item of Lambert's. In general, Lambert comes off better, on my reading, on the grounds of clarity of argument, ability to stick to the point and other, subject-independent means of judging the credibility of disputants. (For instance, Lambert asks Malcolm about the 2002 BCS survey and she replies with a critique of the 2000 survey.)

Lambert has biases of his own, mind you. He has fiercely probed every aspect of the data and methodology of John Lott's surveys, and more power to him - that's how science advances. But he seems to accept the bona fides of the BCS survey readily - I may have missed mention of it, but he doesn't seem to inspect how the BCS conducted their survey, weighted their sample, settled on categories etc. But the BCS is conducted by the British Home Office (analog to the US Justice Department), which has an institutional stake in demonstrating progress against crime. This doesn't mean they did cut corners or engage in outright chicanery. But there is no reason to regard them as disinterested, as Lambert seems to.

In other ways, though, Lambert is very careful about his claims. ("Malcolm also misses my point about whether the decline in violent crime was caused by the handgun ban. Handguns were already tightly regulated, so the ban did not represent that much of a change on previous policy and consequently it is not reasonable to attribute large changes in crime rates to the ban.")

Which gets to my larger point: for all Lambert's largely justified debunking of Lott's work, and this aspect of Malcolm's, the most you can say for the counterfactuals he presents (chiefly, other surveys) is that gun control doesn't seem to have much effect on crime one way or the other. This is certainly a challenge to the shibboleths of libertarians and (some) conservatives. But it's as big a challenge to the enthusiasts of gun control - bigger, I'd argue.

Take the long term trends in the English murder rate that Lambert includes here. As Lambert himself glosses the data:

The homicide rate in England declined after gun control was introduced in 1920, though this could have been the continuation of a long term trend. The rate increased again after 1970 and is now almost as high as is was in the 1880s.

Here's the data as Lambert presents it. My clean, readably-narrow columns will probably chop it up, but follow the preceding link to see it on one line. I will not fiercely probe his figures as I find him an honorable fellow. Please drop me a line if he's putting one over on us.

1860 means decade starting 1860 i.e. 1860-1869
1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990
 1.7  1.6  1.5  1.1  0.9  0.8  0.7  0.8  0.8  0.7  0.7  1.0  1.2  1.4

The big gun control initiatives were in the 1920s, 1950s and 1990s. I'm damned if they seem to have had any noticeable effect. Lambert notes that the 1920s murder rate was slightly lower than the pre-control rate for the teens, but scrupulously acknowledges that this looks like the continuation of a preexisting trend. You could plausibly argue that the loss of so many young men in the wars of the teens and forties left a smaller pool of potential criminals in the 1920s and 1950s, and that as the pool of young men refilled after each war, homicide rates rose concomitantly. You could plausibly argue all sorts of things. But at least when it comes to murder rates, gun control seems beside the point.

The reason this is a bigger problem for gun controllers than for gun rights advocates is that the whole justification for gun control is that it will reduce crime. The British data, and American surveys debunking Lott show, by Lambert's reckoning, no such effect.

Which brings us all back to individual cases and the principle of the thing. My principles are these:

Self-defense is the most basic right.
If the net societal harm of a practice is unclear, err on the side of permission, not prohibition.
Gun control is inherently infantilizing. (I/we don't trust myself/my neighbors/ourselves to handle deadly force responsibly.)
Gun control reflects paternalism on the part of a nation's rulers.
Paternalism on the part of a nation's rulers is bad.

Malcolm makes most of these political arguments and I find them stronger than her statistics. (Lambert does not attempt to show that British police don't exhibit an infuriating paternalism and insouciance about the crime victims they can't get to in time. As always, unless I missed it.) Mark Kleiman sounds a similar note when he writes

[Editorial note: That leaves me favoring shall-issue, especially as part of a package including a crackdown on sales to ineligibles; if giving a bunch of people something they intensely desire does no demonstrable (net) harm, then why not?]

All of the above leaves aside the dubious "data" that antigun groups have retailed for many years. Still, one must police one's own ranks. Gun rights supporters have been guilty of laziness. We thought we had the ultimate labor-saving device in Lott's original concealed-carry data and we fell in love with it. Nothing wows Americans like a slam-dunk practical argument. You can ignore all that messy business of political philosophy and ethics and the nature of the good. But the device doesn't work as advertised.

Back to work.

The News from 1984 - Via Avedon Carol, this handy, eloquent jeremiad against Tony Blair's New Labour and what they've made - and unmade - of Britain. Author Philip Bowring writes, among other things:

People who once ran important civil society organizations supporting civil liberties and the welfare of immigrants are now ministers backing draconian infringements on liberties and harsh policies toward asylum seekers.

This is not just a reflection on individuals. It raises the question of whether such organizations are being run by people dedicated to principles or by opportunists using them as stepladders to political office.

which is a criticism that goes way beyond Tony Blair, and way beyond Britain. I have to wonder if Avedon realizes just how far it goes. It's an indictment of the class that forms the backbone of both the Labour Party and America's Democrats - not the voters, but the cadres and candidates.

These X2 Tie-Ins Are Going Too Far - MSN link text for ESPN story:

Mystique couldn't save the Lakers

The Lazy Blogger's Guide to Success III - Let other bloggers do the work. I was going to write a fair amount about the inaccuracies and agendas of the semi-famous David Warren article slamming Salam Pax. I don't have to do near as much now, though, because Eve Tushnet, Jesse Walker and some others have done it for me. Quotable Eve:

But in particular cases, hello, sometimes people are just weird. Sometimes people are conflicted, risk-averse in geopolitics but risk-taking in their personal lives, irrational, intermittently insightful and wilfully blind, and a bit random. Welcome to the world of the unreliable narrator.

If nothing else, you'd think you could learn that from blogs.

Quotable Jesse Walker:

They offer a number of reasons for this thesis [that Salam's purpose is spreading Ba'athist disinformation], but their case boils down to this: Salam Pax's posts do not reflect our worldview. To reassess our worldview would be a terrible hardship. Therefore, his posts are lies.

Needlenose troubles to point out just a couple of examples where Warren's claims about what Salam has written are demonstrably at variance with actual text on Salam's weblog. I could come up with more without too much trouble. The funniest of Warren's malfeasances, for me, has to be this one:

He drops many hints that he is a homosexual, suggesting reckless candour. (I'm inclined to doubt these.)

Hints that he is a homosexual! Mr. Warren, one does not "hint" with a megaphone. Salam doesn't just come right out and say he's gay, his tone and text are, in Jerry's classic words from Edward Albee's play, The Zoo Story, "Queer, queer, queer, with bells ringing and banners snapping in the wind."

So what the article really tells us is that Warren's Gaydar needs servicing. Also that the psychological phenomenon of projection lives. Warren insists not just that Salam's writing reflects his class, but that Salam's purpose is to advance his class interests. But the clearest thing about Warren's article is that his entire purpose is to advance the class interests of, first, his fellow neocons, and second, their favorite Iraqi exile personalities and groups. Warren's piece is a lightning ball of free-floating resentment against anyone and everyone who dares to bring news undermining the prewar rosy scenerios of himself and his fellow world-beaters. That is: what Jesse said.

My own biases are that I don't like Warren's crowd and I do like Salam. (Even though I spent much of this week convinced, for the first time, that he really was a Western fake. Then I reminded myself that I was absolutely sure who wrote Primary Colors, and it wasn't Joe Klein.) Keep that in mind. But there's no way Warren's checkable claims about Salam survive contact with a fair reading of Salam's oeuvre.

The Lazy Blogger's Guide to Success II - Don't pick up stories in the first place. Saves you from having to run the retraction later.

Oddly enough, I suppose it didn't work in this case, but the principle is sound!

The Lazy Blogger's Guide to Success I - Have your readers do all the work for you. Robert Theron Brockman III sends the following AP article and comment:

US military tells Iraqis to turn in all guns or face arrest

Baghdad, Iraq-AP -- The US military is now telling Iraqis they cannot own or sell guns. Any Iraqi who does faces arrest, according to a new radio spot running in the country.

Lieutenant General David McKiernan, who is commanding US forces on the ground, says a new set of laws in Iraq are aimed at rebuilding law and order.

Ok, so now they’re going to try and disarm the population, making them totally vulnerable to looters and armed gangs. As usual, only the law (such as it is) abiding will cooperate, and then only if they lack any intelligence whatsoever. This will also put the USG at odds with whatever ad-hoc citizen police forces (vigilantes) have been attempting to restore order.

Swell.

There's nothing more to say!

UPDATE: Well, maybe I do after all. Putting on my warblogger hat for a minute, I must assume that the Bush Administration is playing a deep, brilliant game, right? Okay, it's a eugenics program designed to raise the average IQ of the Iraqi population over the next generation. The stupid people give up their weapons, the stupid people get killed, the rest pass on their genes. Ruthless but with a certain logic to it.

Looks Like I Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue - Sometimes the pleasure of these Advantage: Unqualified Offerings! items is at best rueful. Two headlines:

Rumsfeld: No Idea Where Bin Laden Is (from leftist agitprop vehicle foxnews.com)

'Terrorist cell 'was led by Tora Bora caves fighter (from the London Telegraph, hotbed of anti-americanism)

As I wrote last November

We fought the Afghan War against Al Qaeda in such a way that we couldn't even know whether we won or not, if winning is defined as the certain destruction of Al Qaeda's leadership and ability to wage terror against us. We did it for some serious reasons - fear of US military casualties, fear of Afghan civilian casualties, fear of public opinion in South Asia, the Middle East and the US, fear of (oh yes!) quagmire.

But when all is said and done, we did it in a manner that meant, in important ways, we couldn't win. At least not decisively.

We may have repeated one of the two possible errors to this approach in Iraq (the other possible error is fighting the war at all if the available means don't allow you to achieve the victory you need), where Saddam Hussein may be not only alive, as almost everyone concedes, but directing the nascent guerilla resistance to the occupation.

The problem may be getting worse. Just yesterday Secretary Rumsfeld announced the exciting news that "U.S. forces in Iraq used, for the first time, a new, small missile capable of striking enemy forces hidden in bunkers and other hardened complexes," which takes us further yet from Heinlein's "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."

Lastly, a lot of hawkish pundits spent more than a year assuring us, not without a certain smugness, that Osama Bin Laden was dead, dead, dead. Would those people please affect at least a mild humility for awhile?

Geography-Challenged - On the evidence, "al Qaeda" is a loose-knit network of the like-minded, some of whom are stupider than others:

A key suspect in last year's Bali bombings said Wednesday the intended targets of the attack were "the enemies of Islam," especially Americans, and that he regretted the high Australian death toll.

I guess figuring out that comparatively few Americans, as opposed to Australians, vacation in Bali would have taken more time than this murderous dipshit had. And you thought American schools didn't teach students anything about the world.

Ignorant bastard.

Past the Legal Limit - I shouldn't duck saying what I think about shooting looters (see next item), whether that's our plan or not. First, I completely take Alan's point on the distinction between shooting looters and an atrocity like My Lai. At least theoretically, we shoot looters right here in our own country during riots and national disasters, so it's not picking on the Iraqis per se.

It's not justice, though, since you're making one (young, tired, jumpy, far from home) individual "judge, jury and executioner." And by loosening the restrictions on violence, it probably marginally increases the risk of genuine atrocities. It may be less bad than allowing looting to continue, though.

Basically, my instinct recoils, but I have no alternative that does not involve time machines and second thoughts.

They Call It Instant Justice - With impeccable timing, Alan "Seablogger" Sullivan e-mailed yesterday:

Say, I was just reading UO, and I see much grumbling about disorder in Baghdad. There’s a simple, brutal answer. In such situations, during the chaotic aftermath of war, occupying troops have traditionally shot people for looting. The effect is quite bracing. Civil order returns promptly.

If we’re too squeamish to run a successful occupation, we shouldn’t be there in the first place. (I know…you said that.) But the problem is not lack of troops. The problem is lack of guts. In an age of embedded reporters and live television, it may not be politically possible for any administration to achieve what Truman’s did after WW II.

Please don’t regard these comments as an endorsement of atrocities. There’s a difference between shooting looters in Baghdad and slaughtering villagers at Mi Lai.

And just an hour or so after I got that e-mail, new Iraq proconsul L. Paul Bremer announced that the US would start shooting looters. Clearly Alan needs to e-mail me about what the US needs to do to find Saddam's Hidden Arsenal and establish a stable, united federal Iraq. Then we can all take the weekend off.

Alan later e-mails that

it will be more difficult to restore order now than it would have been, if post-victory procedures had been properly planned before the campaign. This is a fruitful topic for criticism of adminstration policy, but most warbloggers are still too busy kissing Dublya’s…ring.

I actually saw either a hawkish blogger or a pro-war commentator on a hawkish blog say that he now believed the administration had mishandled the postwar situation.

But the Knight-Ridder report on Bremer's first press conference says

The former ambassador to the Netherlands denied reports that he had floated the idea of shooting looters to send a new tough-on-crime message.

Based on earlier reports that have held up, I can state categorically that US troops occupied Baghdad in April, sweeping aside light resistance. More recent events will surely come clear with time.

Out of the Mouths of . . . Talking Dogs, this e-mail answering my question of a few days ago, how Baghdad lost its power:

It seems obvious what has happened in Baghdad, and other cities in Iraq. The reports of Saddam burning up his stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons were quite true. Unfortunately, it looks like he was burning them to run his electric generating stations, and he seems to have used up his stockpiles at an incredibly inopportune time.

Now, we look doubly bad-- first, we can't find the bloody weapons that were our supposed casus belli (in fact, Saddam's power generation using bio and chem agents was SO efficient, it didn't leave any trace of the fuel). And second, we look like absolute asses in not even being able to get the lights on, foolishly assuming that Iraqi generating stations ran on petroleum, when in fact, we forgot that Saddam had more chemical and biological weapons than he did petroleum (President Bush even let the UN in on this.)

If only we could get those damned sanctions lifted (don't get me started on the French and the Russians and the Roqueforts) we could IMPORT some more chem and bio agents from Syria and Iran, and get the Iraqi power back on.

So there you go!

Poetry Corner - Newish blogger Tagore Smith covers the poetry beat with items on W.H. Auden and Sylvia Plath. He joins Aaron Haspel, Ikram Saeed and me as punditspaces poetry correspondents. With any luck, he'll change his tiny text font soon.

Credit Where Credit Is Due II - Matthew Yglesias gets it right in this item on blog cheers for the Bushies:

I think this is completely accurate and, in a way, sums up everything that's bad about the Bush administration. A "dream Sunday" consists not in making substantive progress on issues that would improve the lives of Americans -- employment, homeland security, nation-building in Iraq, North Korea, health care, etc. -- rather it consists in the revelation of embarrassing information about its enemies.

He's surely working from different definitions of "substantive progress" than I am, but his point holds regardless.

The Salesman Turned Around Said Boy You Break That Thing You Bought It - From today's Washington Post (subhed, Iraqis, U.S. Officials Want More Troops):

Baghdad residents and U.S. officials said today that U.S. occupation forces are insufficient to maintain order in the Iraqi capital and called for reinforcements to calm a wave of violence that has unfurled over the city, undermining relief and reconstruction efforts and inspiring anxiety about the future.

My emphasis, but then again, it was my emphasis back in October too.

You know how the slug who runs the DEA keeps saying the "War on Drugs" and the "War on Terror" are the same war? There do appear to be some similarities, according to the Post article:

Reports of carjackings, assaults and forced evictions grew today, adding to an impression that recent improvements in security were evaporating. Fires burned anew in several Iraqi government buildings and looting resumed at one of former president Saddam Hussein's palaces. The sound of gunfire rattled during the night; many residents said they were keeping their children home from school during the day.

Surely when people decided to back a war to make Baghdad more like Washington DC they were thinking Federal Triangle, not Anacostia at the height of the crack wars.

"Imagine spreading 150,000 soldiers in the state of California and then ask yourself could you secure all of California all the time with 150,000 soldiers," McKiernan told reporters last week. "The answer is no."

Right. So when did the geniuses running the Pentagon first "[i]magine spreading 150,000 soldiers in the state of California?" Last week? The week before?

The hell of it is, this is not necessarily bad news to the geniuses. They want a big mideast footprint and chaos in postwar Iraq is an excuse to have one.

"I don't see it getting better. We can't be everywhere, can we?" said Pfc. Jacob Weber, 21. "I feel like a cop, but I'm not a cop."

Finally someone to apologize to, as so many hawks have demanded: Sorry, son. Not for opposing the war. For not opposing it well enough. If I could have kept you out of that job, I would have.

Credit Where Credit Is Due - My favorite Green, Josh Buermann (okay, he's the only Green I like), finds something nice to say about - the Republican Party:

On CSPAN today Foley and Gingrich discussed third parties briefly, in which Gingrich said that Republicans made it an overt strategy to co-opt libertarian voters in '94. That's important, when the Republicans saw a lost election because of a third party they did something about it beyond petty whining.

Josh's point is that the Dems might try this kind of thing instead of blaming Green Party voters and candidates for choosing not to vote Democratic. But Josh should keep in mind that after the Repubs co-opted libertarian voters in 1994 we got - bupkus. Okay, they killed the 55-mph speed limit. Last I checked, the Commerce Department and National Endowment for the Arts were still there, the tax code was a mess, Creeping ClintonCare advanced via baby steps and corporate welfare dwarfed real welfare for public expense and economic impact.

Franklin Harris notes today that "Republicans are useless at best and evil at worst" from a libertarian perspective.

The funny thing is, this 1998 academic article he links to argues that

If the Republican sweep in 1994 can be seen as a referendum on big government, then this election can be seen as a referendum on "lifestyle liberalism," and lifestyle liberalism won big. Over the past 30 years it is possible to observe the following paradox in American political beliefs: America has increasingly embraced political conservatism and rejected political liberalism. Yet at the same time Americans have become more conservative politically, they have become more liberal socially and culturally.

What has been called "lifestyle liberalism" has advanced in tandem with political conservatism.

Hm. I know what to call that combination. The authors, who don't like "lifestyle liberalism" one bit, complain that "Republicans have made no serious public argument about lifestyle liberalism," but with those poll results it may be just as well. The authors go on to allow that "They made no serious argument in this election about big government, either, though government has continued to grow larger even though President Clinton has declared "the era of big government is over." In other words, Republicans didn’t make much of an argument about anything at all."

Their conclusion, " Republicans lack civic courage, and this constitutes the chief ground of doubt that they will ever be a serious governing party," seems true enough, but what of the Democrats, who lacked the stones to oppose a war they believed to be disastrously misconceived and dishonestly promoted, and which their own base disliked intensely? I'm not convinced we have a "serious governing party" on offer in this country. The elections will all continue to have winners though.

Cue Mencken: Democracy is the theory that the people deserve to get what they want and get it good and hard.

Does This Mean Moussouai is Innocent? - When the Saudis announced that they were seeking 19 terrorists in connection with the since-realized plans to kill westerners in Riyadh, I had a hm moment. "19 there, 19 killers on September 11. What gives?" It passed. John Cole found a sura from the Koran in which there are 19 angels doing, um, something or other that confounds unbelievers.

John says that's all he's found, which seems to leave nineteen well shy of the ubiquity of the number 40 in the Bible. I strongly suspect that what we have here is a big fat coincidence or something less. For starters, it depends on what your definition of "nineteen" is. Do the creeps who funded the September 11 massacres count? The ones who helped plan it, provided logistical support, were supposed to come but couldn't get visas? What about possible other terrorists meant to strike that day who got grounded instead? Did nineteen-man teams bomb Khobar Towers, the African embassies or the Cole?

Were the Riyadh bombings even carried out by nineteen men? Near as I can tell, our assurance on that comes from the Saudi government, about whose statements regarding al Qaeda I believe precisely nothing. And here's what I mean by "less than a coincidence" - the Saudis could have chosen "nineteen suspects" as the current announced number because there were nineteen murderers in the WTC/Pentagon attacks.

Note: John Cole didn't sound overly-impressed either. It's worth noting that he found the sura in the book, The Age of Sacred Terror. What this suggests to me is that its authors may have been straining after numerological phantoms themselves.

UPDATE: RGB Mike Jacobs solves the riddle:

[19] is the amount a cribbage hand cannot score. (well and those above what the highest possible score is). when playing and you get a hand with total crap, one says 'nineteen!'

It's a clue!

Scattergories - Matt Yglesias gets it wrong when he writes

Needless to say, that's exactly what makes [Tacitus] the best conservative blogger in the eyes of non-conservatives like Henley and myself — he's not a very good conservative.

Actually, he gets two things wrong. He should use "me" in place of "myself," and Tacitus isn't a bad conservative. He's a bad Republican. One must not take the one for the other.

Now Tacitus is by no means perfect. He's soft on empire, for all that he seems to rue it. Even here he has an excuse though. Conservatism, as has been much noted, is more a temperament than a philosophy, all about keeping what has been. American empire has a century-long pedigree now (as does opposition to it) so it's not surprising that some contemporary conservatives might feel attached.

I've never seen him misuse "myself" though.

Who Turned Off the Lights? - I'm asking because I don't know. Early in the war, broadcast reassurers showed us pictures of the illuminated Baghdad skyline at night to illustrate how precise the bombing was and how we were leaving Iraq's infrastructure untouched "this time" because we were going to have to fix anything we broke. (Note: the point was not to get people wondering how badly we damaged Iraq's infrastructure last time, or what purpose strategic bombing really served in a six-week limited war.)

Postwar stories, like this one in the Washington Post, note that

In Baghdad, many neighborhoods still lack electricity and running water . . .

But when and why did that happen? I don't recall any news stories that the US had started bombing infrastructure. (Mind you, I didn't follow all the war news obsessively.) Did I miss the memo? Or did something else take out Baghdad's utilities?

That Was Then, This is Now - From the London Times, February 12, 2003:

AMERICAN war planners believe that they have little more than 48 hours from the start of a ground war to kill President Saddam Hussein if they are to avoid a protracted conflict and a complicated peace.

From the London Telegraph, today:

"These attacks show that Saddam, his family and senior members of his regime are still in Iraq and still pose a threat," a spokesman for the interim government said.

"We have received reports that Saddam is hiding in the area between north Baghdad and Tikrit and is attempting to direct guerrilla attacks against Coalition forces and to disrupt attempts to set up a new government in Iraq."

And add to your list of "things we're not bothering to look for/at in Iraq":

Although Washington claims to have samples of Saddam's DNA, no officials from the Coalition forces in Iraq have visited either of the two ["decapitation strike"] bomb sites in Baghdad to collect samples.

In my most cynical moments I've wondered if the "decapitation strikes" weren't pure entertainment from the start - mummery and flimflam to wow the domestic audience (and secondarily to awe the Iraqi one). There was certainly a lot of excitement around my office the day after the first one. "My neighbor works at the Pentagon and they think they really got him" stuff. I still rate this as unlikely, but only because those tinfoil hats are scratchy.

In for a Penny - If Tacitus were President, we'd have been told this ahead of time: "we're going to need more troops for the occupation than we did for the war." But in that case, we might not have had the war at all. In any case, it's why Tacitus could never be President.

Red Meat Antiwar Stuff - Those readers who prefer their war skeptics diffident if not downright apologetic might prefer to skip down to this week's fitness blog entry. For the rest of us, a couple of fun items. From the New York Press, Matt Tabibi, whose thesis is that

It has become fashionable on the left and in Western Europe to compare the Bush administration to the Nazis. The comparison is not without some superficial merit. In both cases the government is run by a small gang of snickering, stupid thugs whose vision of paradise is full of explosions and beautifully designed prisons. Toss in the desert fatigues motif and the "self-defense" invasion tactic, and there does seem to be a good case.

But it’s way off. It’s wishful thinking. The Reich only lasted 12 years. The Soviets reigned for 75. They were better at it than the Nazis, and we’re better at it than the Russians. Ask anyone who’s lived in a communist country, and he’ll tell you: Modern America is deja vu all over again. And if ever there was a Soviet spectacle, it was Bush’s speech last week.

Tabibi appears to be your third-generation gonzo school columnist. ("Jennifer Lopez and Tom Clancy would have been perfect fits in the Soviet Union; they would have worn medals in public and ridden the trains for free.") But the excerpt of an Ari Fleischer press conference in David Corn's latest Capital Games column provides the supporting paragraphs to Tabibi's column-worth of thesis statements. It's unrelieved cant, pure party line, language strangled in the crib of meaning and then paraded before the national family in a bizarre Santorumesque healing ritual. It's also too long and painful to excerpt, so follow the link.

Corn has been hitting the question, not so much "Where are Iraq's WMDs" as "Why doesn't the administration act all that concerned about Iraq's WMDs" for a couple of columns now. And why not? Can there be a bigger issue? The Bush Administration either knew they were making the whole thing up, or they were criminally negligent in putting together the war plan. As I've said before, I hope they knew they were making the whole thing up, because if they really cared more about demonstrating how small a US force could conquer a foreign country than about how big a force would be required to secure dozens to hundreds of real WSD sites then we're in big trouble, not least because the same clowns have at least two more years left to run the country. Corn has more:

On May 4, Barton Gellman in The Washington Post reported that a specially-trained Defense Department team was not dispatched to the Baghdad Nuclear Research facility until May 3, after a month of "official indecision." The unit found the site--which was the home to the remains of the nuclear reactor bombed by Israel in 1981 and which stored radioactive waste that would be quite attractive to a dirty-bombmaker--ransacked. The survey conducted by the team, Gellman reported, "appeared to offer fresh evidence that the war has dispersed the country's most dangerous technologies beyond anyone's knowledge or control." Sometime in mid-April, US Central Command had sent a detachment to guard the gate to the facility. But for two weeks--until the special team arrived--this security detail allowed Iraqis who claimed to be employees of the research center to come and go. The detachment had no Arabic speaker and could not question those entering and leaving. Nor was it able to handle the looters, who some days numbered in the hundreds. A mile away, the Tuwaith