Not Again - More boring "mostly law enforcement and intelligence stuff" this weekend:

LONDON (AP) - British Airways (BAB) and Air France on Saturday announced the cancellation of seven flights to and from the United States because of security concerns.

BA canceled four flights between Heathrow Airport and Washington on Sunday and Monday and one from Heathrow to Miami on Sunday. Air France canceled two Paris-to-Washington flights. There are no plans to raise the terror alert in the United States because of the latest threats, Homeland Security Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said.

1) What the heck is with these terrorist guys? Saddam was captured. We're safer now. Or do they hate America, like Howard Dean does?

2) Hey, maybe the "War on Terror" is mostly a matter of intelligence, law enforcement and international cooperation.

3) I thought France was our enemy now.

4) All kidding aside, American civilians in the US are not any safer since Saddam Hussein was captured; the threat of terrorism is real but geographically diffuse, while war is about geographic concentration of force - it will have a role, but there's a real limit to what it can accomplish.

The Mirror War for the UO Vote - A bizarre, unwitting, inverse campaign to make me love John Kerry ramps up this weekend. First, Bird Dog, the Joey Bishop of the Tacitus Rat Pack, offers three reasons for me to like Kerry, intended as criticisms of him:

o He's been attacked by UO bete noires Max Boot and David Brooks
o He has "scant legislative achievements," which is, frankly, the most a libertarian can hope for from a Democrat
o He told Tom Brokaw that

[t]he war on terror is less--it is occasionally military, and it will be, and it will continue to be for a long time. And we will need the best-trained and the most well-equipped and the most capable military, such as we have today.

But it's primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world--the very thing this administration is worst at.

which seems the purest common sense.

Then Matthew Yglesias tries to ruin things by defending Kerry, writing

I wouldn't want to say that there are no differences between the foreign policy views of Bush and his opponents, but at this point, they really aren't very big.

And Hesiod boasts that Kerry has "received the endorsement of one of Michigan's most powerful and activist Unions - The Michigan Education Association."

Oy.

Coming this Weekend - Watchmen-blogging roundup, including more e-mail and a Watchmen blogwatch. Consideration of this week's Now They Tell Us - Reuel Marc Gerecht's Weekly Standard article on Ayatollah Sistani and the caltrops strewn along the road to the democratic revolution. BruceR of Flit picks up on concerns that

a Sistani-blessed Iraqi state will likely have no choice but to repress the Kurds, if only to keep the neighbours happy. And so, in a few years from now, we'll likely come full circle. Perhaps the lack of chemical weapons at the Battle of Halabja (2007) will be a small blessing to some.

But what about the Gurlzzz?? Remember, only a few weeks ago, it turned out we had sallied forth to stop the oppression of Muslim women? Now, Iran Jr. Welcome to the real freaking world, warbloggers. You'll miss Victor Davis Hanson, I realize. But everybody gets dragged back here sooner or later.

What's After the Light at the End of the Tunnel? - Another tunnel. There have been some reports in the last week quoting US commanders as saying that they were close to "turning the corner" in defeating the resistance. These reports have recurred every couple of months since the summer. (Before that, you may recall, the story was that to call what was happening in Iraq a "resistance" was a wild exaggeration.)

Comes today's report that

Violence by insurgents in Iraq will escalate in the run-up to a handover of sovereignty, according to the top US general in the region.

General John Abizaid, head of US Central Command covering Iraq and Afghanistan, said Islamic militants and Baathists were the main threat.

"There are an awful lot of people that don't want an Iraqi sovereign entity... to emerge," he said.

Now let's be clear: after the capture of Saddam, some people predicted there would be a "spasm" of increased violence, a kind of last stand before the resistance petered out. Despite the rise in US combat deaths since Saddam was arrested, it's too soon to say that's not what's happening. But there seem to be an awful lot of corners to turn.

What the Future Holds - Thanks to the net.sorcery of Neilalien, you, yes you, can now divine the future via the legendary Orb of Aggamotto.

Annals of Overanalyzing - Is it just me, or is the CNN article on the newly-discovered Van Gogh condolence letter really jumping to conclusions? Here's the situation:

Historians have long speculated that Van Gogh was a "replacement child" for his parents, who lost an infant boy at birth on March 30, 1852. They named the stillborn child Vincent. One year later to the day, another boy was born whom they also named Vincent. He grew up to become a world-renowned artist. Very little is actually known about the family tragedy or how it affected Van Gogh as a child or an adult. Until now. This newly-found condolence note was written to Hermanus Gijsbertus Tersteeg after his 3-month-old daughter died. Tersteeg was the manager of an art gallery in The Hague where Van Gogh had previously worked. The letter was written in black ink on two sides of a single page and included lengthy quotations from the Bible. The long missive reads much like a sermon--at the time, Van Gogh was preparing to study theology--and broke just about every etiquette rule of the day for such notes, which were typically brief with a few well-chosen, comforting words.

And here's how the article reports some Van Gogh scholars interpreting the letter:

But there is one thing about the letter that has stunned experts: the passionless tone. It is this tone--bereft of much feeling--that seems to contradict theories by some of Van Gogh's biographers that he may have suffered from alienation as a "replacement child," reports Reuters. "There has been much speculation about the effect this event must have had on Vincent--the inevitable trauma of being the 'replacement child' and the influence this supposedly had on the development of his personality," Jansen and two colleagues wrote in a paper published by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in which the letter is now on display. They concluded, "There is nothing to indicate that Van Gogh dwelled excessively on the event; on the contrary, he attaches to it no personal emotion or recollection."

Hey, maybe he didn't. But I don't think you can tell that from the tone of this letter, which, after all, "broke just about every etiquette rule of the day for such notes." Is the note so unusual for its time because Van Gogh was rude, ignorant of convention, or moved by the similarity of plights? Is his tone "passionless" because replacement child status really didn't bother him, or because he deliberately mastered his emotions? I don't know, and if you read the little bit of what the scholars actually say that is quoted, they don't seem to either. Their paper merely notes that the letter can't be said to prove anxiety on Van Gogh's part. The uncredited article author then turns that into "seems to contradict." Someone needs to lend someone an ear.

More Devils in the Details - Couple of weeks ago I wrote about the surprisingly modest goals for the size of the new Iraqi military:

How is Iraq supposed to defend itself in that neighborhood with 40,000 soldiers and a bunch of guys with binoculars and jeeps? It's not. The numbers indicate the plan, and the plan is for Iraq to remain a ward of the United States for the foreseeable future. Alternatively, the plan is to similarly demilitarize Iran and Syria by force and trust the better angels of the Turkish nature. When you hear people learnedly assuring that the national greatness folks have lost favor, you have 40,000 reasons to believe otherwise.

Loyal Reader Nell Lancaster did some digging:

Devilish details indeed. I've been trying to find even a scrap of information about the command structure and leadership of the various "security forces", particularly the police and army. My research skills aren't good enough for me to decide that the information doesn't exist, and if it's out there it's probably not accessible online. But my guess is that even a determined, experienced, credentialed mainstream reporter would have trouble getting at the relevant facts. Dana Priest, I'm counting on you.

But, since we're paying for it, I'd like to know. The only addition to the Brookings chart (for which all info seems to come from the same State/DoD documents) is from a CPA press release in mid-December announcing hazardous pay increases to the various security forces. This was in reaction to the mass resignation of a big chunk of the first batallion in the new army in early December.

That press release lists bunches of security forces I had no idea existed, and more than the Brookings study follows. Questions arise: Are the various specific security details like the oil police, water, elec, and firemen subsumed in the "facilities protection service", or is the FPS an additional entitity? What ministries do these forces serve under? What's the deal with 'civil defense corps'? My best guesses in the 'chart' below; entries without question marks based on the CPA info.

Bunches of jails, 350 or so, have been (re)opened, and that makes sense from the standpoint of getting a handle on ordinary crime, but no way should the numbers of corrections officials be counted into overall security numbers. Oil police, maybe.

The extremely slow progress in boosting the army vs. the ballooning of other forces has plenty of non-sinister explanations, but also makes it clear that there is no way the Iraqi army will be THE Iraqi Army before sometime in 2020, at this rate. And, as you say, given the goal vs. neighbors' armies, probably never. Several news reports I googled while collecting info on the security forces contained phrases like "coalition forces, which are expected to remain in Iraq for years to come." Oh, why not? We're in 130 countries already, and we never seem to leave any place once we set up our quonset huts...

Iraqi security orgs goals / current (mid-Jan 2004)

Police 71,000 / 67,200
Civil defense corps 40,000 / 17,600
Army 40,000 / 1,100
Border patrol 25,700 / 20,300
Facilities protection services 50,000 / 97,200 (ballooned by 30K Oct, 10K Nov, 30K Dec)
(Min of Interior)

-Firemen (Min. of Interior)
-Electricity police (Min. of Interior)

-Oil police (Oil Min?)
-Water resources police (? Min)
-Ministry of finance security (Finance Min?)
-Iraqi media network security (? Min)
-Corrections officers (would have thought this was Min. of Interior?)
Surely corrections guys aren't part of 'facilities protection services'?

Total 226,700 / 203,400 (165,300 Dec 2003)

I personally don't see the Facilities Protection Services standint athwart the Iranian hordes, nor the police - it's not their job. Be interesting to find just how well-equipped and trained they expect the border patrol and civil defense corps to be.

Meanwhile, official confirmation of the implications of the Op-Chart military force goals has begun to appear:

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Army's top general said Wednesday he is planning for the possibility that the Army may be required to keep tens of thousands of soldiers in Iraq through 2006.

Trickster at Tacitus has found more, from "Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who is in charge of the U.S. program to build the new Iraqi army":

Current plans call for the U.S.-led coalition to train three light infantry divisions in the coming months. But `this is a tough neighborhood and three light infantry division do not provide, and will not provide, the end-state defensive requirement for the Iraqi ground forces - it never was intended to be so,' he said.

Eaton said about half of the armed forces must have tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and artillery backed by attack helicopters, air defense artillery and interceptor aircraft. `An extraordinarily complex affair, and it is expensive,' he said.

As Trickster puts it:

Ah, yes. The expensive part. If we're actually going to remove our forces from Iraq in three to five years, how much is this new armored Iraqi Army going to cost--and who exactly is going to pay for it?

Shhh. . . . Ask that after November.

And don't expect that 2006 date to stick either. It'll slip. But it's all worth it because . . . what's today's reason?

I Wanna Hold Your Hand - Your one-note blog joke of the day. If the author can sustain it, it will be, in its way, an impressive feat.

Weapons of Some Destruction Redux - At first I wondered if there was an echo around here, but Independent Institute honcho David Theroux assures me that "We also have been talking about this for years." Point of discussion? Ivan Eland's latest column, with the catchy title, "Weapons of Mass Destruction Are Overrated as a Threat to America." I like my title better, but read the Eland article.

Meanwhile, Hesiod takes out after the official administration position that "the prewar intelligence was faulty." And Leonard of Unruled has some follow-up thoughts from last night on unspectacular terror attacks and why the US itself has been largely free of them so far.

It Takes a Comics Blogger - No less a personage than the legendary Neilalien has fixed this site's problem with text selection in Internet Explorer for me. Neil: You. Da. Man. As of now, IE users can select as much or as little text as they want. The new problem introduced is that the two columns don't line up perfectly in all browsers - including my browser of choice. I'll work on that as time permits.

I had better become the most quoted blogger on the internet now.

Lengthy digression on my hatred for Internet Explorer belayed because of a scheduling conflict.

Instant Blogwatch - Mr. Jimmy has posted the rare update to Objectionable Content, this one about David Kay, employed until recently by the US government. Traditionally, a new OC post is followed by six more weeks of winter.

Walter in Denver offers the Drug War Clock, where you can watch your tax dollars at work.

Gary Farber comments on the much-linked "ribs dialogue" between President Bush and a reporter. "It belatedly occurs to me that I was unconsciously "hearing" an echo of the SNL/John Belushi "cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger" sketch in the back of my head when I read the dialogue."

And Sean Collins wonders "Do you think all this brown-nosing [re my recent Watch-blogging] will convince him to blog his thoughts on Jones's Incredible Hulk and Morales's Captain America?" Answer: Sure! Not today, but maybe tomorrow.

Sean by the way, is the latest blogger you can help financially. Details.

Weird Science - Matthew Barganier offers a history in quotes of John Ashcroft's repeated expressions of concern over "evil chemistry and evil biology."

Your Surprisingly Work-Safe Link of the Day - http://www.cummingfirst.com/organ.html.

Via the Agitator.

Failing to Report the GOOD News from Iraq - Today's culprits, Knight-Ridder reporters Hannah Allam and Tom Lasseter:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Whispers of "revolution" are growing louder in Baghdad this month at teahouses, public protests and tribal meetings as Iraqis point to the past as an omen for the future.

Iraqis remember 1920 as one of the most glorious moments in modern history, one followed by nearly eight decades of tumult. The bloody rebellion against British rule that year is memorialized in schoolbooks, monuments and mass-produced tapestries that hang in living rooms.

Now, many say there's an uncanny similarity with today: unpopular foreign occupiers, unelected governing bodies and unhappy residents eager for self-determination. The result could be another bloody uprising.

I say we charge the bastards for painting all their schools.

UPDATE: On the other hand, Palestinian intellectual Fawaz Turki, writing in Arab News, recants his prior opposition.

Mission Accomplished Just removed a bunch of typos and a few solecisms from the week's posts. God I suck sometimes. Somewhat better now. Tomorrow: more stuff about stuff.

Be Careful What You Wish For - I think Matthew Yglesias is, to coin a phrase, eerily prescient regarding the much-discussed conservative disenchantment with George W. Bush's presidency.

The upshot is going to be a really ugly campaign, grounded more in efforts to motivate Republicans by fear and loathing of the opposition than admiration for the GOP. You see this a lot already in the rightwing press where the ratio of Democrat-bashing to Bush-praising has been very high for a long time.

Yeah. That's what we have to look forward to, all right.

Who Watches the Watchmail? - It turns out that, after chili recipes and cover songs, Watchmen is one of the biggest mail-generatin' topics out there. So here we go . . .

Justin Slotman writes

JIM!

I always thought the pirate comic was just an idea of what a comic book would look like in a world where superheroes actually existed: all horror and bleak irony. The reverse of our world with the grim daily life and (at the time) bright 'n' colorful superheroes in the comic books. Something Moore would like putting in there, where beneath an outward perfection all this horribleness still finds a way to bubble up.

I'm sure you're aware that Watchmen vs. Dark Knight Returns is one of _the_ Comic Geek Great Debates. What do you lean towards? I tend toward Dark Knight, as it's a lot more energetic and still carries that force to this day. Watchmen, on the other hand, has for me gotten more lifeless over the years--all those symmetries make it seem mechanical to me. Plus, like another 80s comic with a high body count that was highly praised at the time--Batman: The Cult--it relies too much on the final shock in New York to convince you that something of importance has gone on in the previous 300 (or whatever) pages. Dark Knight Returns, on the other hand, is over the top from cover to cover and doesn't rely on any single event to get its point across.

Justin Justin Justin. That "the pirate comic was just an idea of what a comic book would look like in a world where superheroes actually existed" interpretation is so twenty years ago. Look, you don't need to devote that many pages to a particular pirate comic story if that's all you're trying to show. No, it's too elaborately worked into the flow of the action in the main story to be "just" anything.

But while we're on the topic, does anybody else have trouble buying the idea that a few pugnacious athletes in tights and dominos would kill reader interest in superhero comics? I mean, killed deader than it is in our time. Remember that the back matter about comics-writer Shea and pirate comics locates the fall of the superhero comic with the rise of the Minutemen. Makes no sense. Like saying a world with real crime would have no crime comics and a world with real love, none that publish romance stories. I guess since we have Latin American immigrants, Love and Rockets doesn't exist.

As for Dark Knight versus Watchmen, I'd gotta read Dark Knight again, and even then I might not want to choose.

Adam Clay Teter writes

1.) I have the softcover version of Watchmen. I bought it less than six months ago, but I couldn't find a print date. In my copy, Dr. Manhattan's speech before going to kill Rorschach is also in white instead of blue. If it's a misprint it's a brilliant one that has been carried through to the other editions.

2.) I found your comment that Watchmen "as with many leftist critiques of the Cold War the Soviet Union is strangely invisible" to be interesting for two reasons. Mostly, I'm a leftist myself (most would say "far leftist") and my initial reaction to Watchmen was that it was a critique of the left from the right. Veidt is clearly one of those on the far left who would be willing to do anything at all to avert war. Rorschach, on the other hand, is clearly of the right wing and is also clearly the story's ultimate hero. I thought that his final words about "one more body in the foundations" was a particularly telling comment about many leftist's view of what it takes to achieve peace. More than that, I saw it as a comment on the Soviet Union's bloody purge policies.

I'm not sure if it's fair to call Watchmen a leftist or a rightist work, though, as Moore is clearly and publicly an anarchist. I imagine that he would object to Veidt's government-like meddling in world affairs as much as he would the U.S./Soviet conflict. Just a thought.

Me, I think Moore sees both the despicable and admirable aspects of Rorshach and regards him, mostly, with fascinated horror. But respect. (Rorshach is damned clever, and can be droll.) I think it's a deliberate irony that Kovacs turns out to be right about so much that is going on.

As for the word balloon, I just bestirred myself to look at my copy of Watchmen 12 in periodical format. There too the word balloons in question are white.

D'Jyou Watch the Watchmen? Get it? D'jou Watch? Jew? - With sincere apologies to Alvie Singer. Reader Rich Puchalsky quickly picked up the baton I passed when I wrote

Walter "Rorschach" Kovacs, devotee of bigoted right-wing publications, is clearly Jewish. (So, less clearly, is Dan "NiteOwl" Dreiberg.) Discuss.

And discuss he did, but first. At one point, he asked, "it's worth asking what makes you think that Kovacs and Dreiberg are Jewish. Just their last names?"

And the answer is no, not just their last names. In the case of Daniel Dreiberg, I'm also taking his first name into account. If he were Matthew Dreiberg, or had some other obviously Christian first name, I'd class him with the gentiles. As it is, I'm less sure about him than Rorschach. In the case of Rorschach, not only is he a man named Kovacs who grew up in "a tenement" and worked in the garment industry, his mother's name was, for a time, Glick.

On with the analysis, which Rich offered in two parts. Part the first:

OK. I vaguely remember a historical survey that showed that Jews, in the 20th century were overrepresented in the ranks of activists in *all* political movements. In other words, not only were there a societally overrepresentative number of Communist Jews, there were also an unusual number of Fascists (at least until Fascism became clearly identified with anti-Semitism) and every other political system in between. So it wouldn't be that unusual to find a strongly believing right-wing Jew.

If you accept as true that "Jews tend to be unusually interested in politics", the next question is to ask why. I've heard two main explanations. The first is that something in Jewish culture encourages this. The second is that Jewish marginality encourages it -- that Jews, throughout most of the 20th century, were in societies that discriminated against them, and that naturally they looked for alternative social arrangements. The second of these appears more likely for Walter Kovacs. If I remember his backstory correctly, he grew up with an absentee father and prostitute mother, and there likely wasn't much cultural transmission of Jewishness. However, he is definitely an archetypal marginal figure.

It's worth noting that Judaism has an extensive religious social justice tradition, the strongest of any religion that I've encountered (Christianity incorporates it via the prophets in the Old Testament, but the New Testament weakens it). Dreiberg and Kovacs are the only two superheroes in Watchmen that appear to be primarily motivated by an interest in justice. (Veidt is a megalomaniac, the Comedian a nihilist, the Silk Spectre self-interested, Dr. Manhattan disinterested, and many of the earlier heroes in it either for psychosexual purposes or because they like authoritarian social control). They are the only two who end up making a real choice to confront Veidt at the end.

Part the Second gets very, very interesting:

Hmm. Watchman is so 20th century, and if I had to divide 20th century Judaism into two traditions, I think they'd be religious and secular. Neither one of these characters is religiously Jewish in any discernable form. And a common element in most Jewish traditions is that they're communal, which pretty much leaves out lone vigilantes. I guess that Dreiberg's romanticization of superheroes as knights working together might be a dim reflection of that tradition.

I think that the closest approach to Jewish tradition in Watchmen is Kovac's final confrontation with Dr. Manhattan. Dr. Manhattan is, symbolically, God -- Moore confirms this by his odd mention, later on, of Dr. Manhattan's plans to create human life. Kovacs is the righteous man who demands or negotiates justice from God, a common figure in Jewish tradition. Here's where my knowledge fails, because I can't think offhand of which of the many possible religious figures comes closest to this particular story.

Perhaps it could be seen as a sort of cruelly twisted variant of Job. Kovacs is captured, has what he values (his mask) taken away, is wounded on the approach to Veidt's hideout, and finally is defeated. He is left bitterly complaining about the injustice of what has happened -- and is assured by people who are much smarter and who operate on a much larger scale than he does that the apparent injustice is really part of a necessary plan. But in the end, there is no restitution and new life for him, only destruction. It may be significant that what he leaves is a *book*. If the end of his story is inverted, and God does not give in before human righteousness, than the value of the book (which contains truth, and is therefore symbolically holy) is inverted as well, becoming an implement of destruction.

In a follow-up e-mail, Rich added one more idea:

I just thought of the traditional figure that was eluding me earlier when I was trying to think of which Kovacs was closest to. It's Jeremiah. (Issued many warnings that if the people didn't become righteous, they were headed for destruction and exile, imprisoned, God treats him really badly (according to his own complaints), left a book).

And there you have it!

Mailblog - Rather than update Unruled, Leonard Dickens spends his time e-mailing other bloggers. Hey, no biggie, I like Leonard and I like e-mail too. He writes about the weekend's piece about the (possibly) Incredible Shrinking Terrorist Threat. First:

Actually I would say that both [sick Arab political culture and hatred of American foreign policy], along with the key additions of patriotism, religious fervor and pan-Arabism are breeding the trickle of terrorists, along with the resentful but largely uninterested masses. But was there ever any doubt but that the numbers were small? Muslims are normal people, just like people everywhere. Look at Operation Rescue's numbers compared to those pro-life, and then compare those to the number of actually violent people.

True. The blogosphere is full of people who speak fairly broadly about the ravening Arab hordes. But I agree with Leonard.

Second, I wondered if maybe interventionists and anti-interventionists both needed to place less stress on the threat of terrorism as support for our case. Leonard again:

I think in both cases what people worried about is not large numbers of small events, ala Israel - though that is bad enough. Rather we are worried about rare big events. Like 9/11 itself, or, say, nuking Baltimore. That's the event that I worry about. And that's where isolationism and "invade the world" differ sharply. The neocons and their supporters believe that by invading and threatening we can prevent anyone unsavory from getting a bomb. Ever. Which is a fool's hope in the long run, IMO. Whereas I regard the libertarian side as the realists: "they" are going to get a bomb, sooner or later (and we can hope and work for later, but it will happen). The question then becomes, what are "they" going to do with it? Isolationism makes us not a target.

I agree with this too. But there's a genuine puzzle - why don't America's terrorist enemies apply the "Israel model" to strikes against the US? Is it because they don't think it will do any good, or because they don't have the resources to mount a sustained campaign?

Sean Collins writes on the same topic:

You may well be right about al Qaeda's capabilities in the States, but I'm not sure it's wise to draw the conclusion that such killers aren't being produced. They are, and though they don't appear able to do a lot of killing in the U.S., they're certainly making up for it in Turkey, Iraq, Palestine, Israel, Russia, Algeria, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, etc. That Muslim terrorists seem only able to act in countries with majority-Muslim or large-minority-Muslim populations is kind of heartening, but I'm sure it won't surprise you to learn that I don't think we should be content with that and leave them alone from now on.

Heaven knows we haven't left them alone to this point. Would they even know what to do with themselves if we did?

Clumsy topic transition. Way back like a week or so ago, I carped that the Iraq War had achieved its real objective of preventing any conservative challenge to Dubya in the Republican Primaries or any serious third-party challenge from the right. Godless Capitalist of Gene Expression writes

you said that "if there is a significant third party candidacy, it will be from disaffected liberals rather than disaffected conservatives".

i disagree. you underestimate the anger over this immigration amnesty, which is a disaster. more here

He could be right. Immigration doesn't bother me, so I may insufficiently appreciate the issue's salience for other conservatives. Note: Godless adds

btw, i agree with you now re: iraq and the neocons. i believed wmd would be there and didn't realize how crazy the neocons *were* until after the fact.

Cool! Now I just have to bag Tacitus, Glenn Reynolds and Sean Collins and my work here is done.

And Zizka wrote in about that hot-button issue, political bias in acadamia:

I think that college presidents most often are drawn from people who studied "Administration." You can call this a liberal art if you want, but not in front of me. My second alma mater (Portland State University) has many, many masters programs, perhaps 10-15, called " * Management" or "* Administration" or the like, designed to train the people one or two steps higher up than the engineers, teachers, nurses, doctors, policemen, civil servants, etc., who do the actual work. These are autonomous fields. On the one hand, the best teacher / salesman / policeman / engineer night be the worst manager. On the other hand, though, making the program autonomous means that the hands-on people can end up being managed by others who have only a glancing second-hand knowledge of the work being done. (If people in these programs come from the field they could be good programs; but if people specialize in them from the beginning -- and there's no reason not to, because managers always get paid better -- the practical components will end up being though of as "requirements" to be minimally satisfied for certification purposes.) I think that those are the places that libertarians should look to locate their enemies. The liberal arts / humanities are pitiful survivors and most students ignore that stuff. When you're talking to any management person (including business management) and find them repeatedly failing to hear what you're saying, seemingly deliberately, it's because they've been trained to do so, and they think that they're being professional, and that you are merely showing your ignorance and naivete. (As professionals of course, they will *never* come out and say that, though they *will*.sneer at you). Politically I'm a liberal but when I face that kind of thing I feel about the same way I bet you do (i.e., postal. -- wait, I didn't say that).

PS: I think that you underestimate the degree of political indoctrination in tech and science programs. I can think of examples from geology (mining connection), veterinary (Oregon State specifically) , forestry (of course), and engineering. To say nothing of economics and business.

Okay, that get's us back through about ten days worth of in-box. I've still got mail from the sixth through the seventeenth to process before I dare call the situation managed.

Truth Commission - Democracy Now tangles with Wesley Clark over Kosovo and other matters. My affinity is with Democracy Now here, but Clark gives nearly as well as he gets. Until he gets to the commuter train incident. After that it's all downhill.

Warning - I have either been infected with the latest worm that's going around, or my Supplanter address is the victim of sophisticated mail spoofing. I'm inclined toward the latter view right now, but, let me be clear:

I have not sent you an e-mail with no text, a vague subject header like "Hello" and an unsolicited attachment. If you get such an e-mail, nuke it.

They Do the Work, So I Don't Have To - Bruce Rolston is on the Con Coughlin beat now. My previous Con items are here, here and here. The last is of the most immediate relevance to Bruce's item.

Literature of Ethics Blogging - Brandon Thomas offers the attitude comics creators should take towards the "waiting for the trade" phenomenon. Don't like it? Don't whine. Make it fricking impossible for the reader to bear waiting:

These titles should be jumping with so much electricity that they DEMAND to be purchased in monthly form. Don't take this the wrong way, but if you're sitting back and waiting to read my book in trade form seven months down the line, I'm gonna make your comic buying existence miserable. My intent is to create such a noticeable buzz about what is going on in that book, that your friends, that your message boards, that your own mother, cannot stop talking about it. I will create a situation in which choosing to ignore this title implies that you do not like comics. You're going to wait for the trade? That's what the fuck you think.

That's the spirit! Just write and draw books no one can bear to pass up. To that end, Loyal Reader, I give you: Daredevil #56. Bendis and Maleev return. Matt Murdock is the new Kingpin of Hell's Kitchen. It works for him and for the neighborhood. It doesn't work for various friends of his, various law enforcement agencies or various crooks. Now, because this is a Bendis-written book, there is a lot of what Brandon Thomas characterizes as "this guy is talking, and that guy's talking, and she's talking too." But Bendis also fits Thomas' vision of the future:

Decompressed storytelling will comprise a small segment of the larger whole, relegated to the writers that do it best.

I couldn't imagine waiting six months for Bendis Daredevil. Hell, I barely got through the interminable David Mack intermission as it was. Buy buy buy. Buy it to see Dr. Strange in t-shirt and shades. Buy it to see Matt Murdock's "devil"-ish goatee. Buy it for the set-piece confrontation between Matt and the delegation of superheroes-in-mufti that come to see him, including Peter Parker's peroration on moving to Pittsburgh - "this guy is talking, and that guy's talking" and every word of it kicks definitive ass. And yes, Bendis' Daredevil is the literature of ethics at its peak.

Meanwhile, there's the problem of otherwise fine works exceeding a Stupid Threshold that makes them insupportable despite their admirable qualities. This week's villain is Darwyn Cooke's highly-praised New Frontier from DC. New Frontier reimagines DC continuity from the close of the Second World War through the coming of the Silver Age. The first issue takes us from 1945 through the end of the Korean War. And it's at that end where the book crosses the stupid threshold.

There's this fighter pilot in the USAF named Hal Jordan. And, his commander tells us in the official report that provides the captions to the Jordan arc, USAF pilot Hal Jordan has one admittedly controversial quirk: he refuses to kill anybody.

Omygodjustfuckingspareme.

If you're going to write war stories, have the goddamn balls to acknowledge that killing people is what the participants in a war do. No, New Frontier is not pitched as a hyper-naturalistic story, but the combination of things we're required to swallow - that someone who joins the Air Force refuses to kill; that the Air Force lets him join anyway and invests the umpty-ump dollars required to train this dilettante; that his commander acknowledges Jordan's idiosyncratic attitude toward the basic responsibility of a fighter pilot (to shoot down enemy planes) - is gag-worthy.

And it gets worse. Because the narrative makes clear that what Jordan does do is engage in flight maneuvers designed to bring enemy plans into the sights of his squadron mates, so they can kill them.

So Darwyn Cooke's Hal Jordan is a chickenshit. Not a physical coward by any means. But a moral one, one who participates in acts requiring others to do what he himself will not. He lacks the guts to either follow through on the implications of his own code, abjure violence and take the role of a conscientious objector, or to commit himself to the ethic of the vocation he himself has chosen. He's not principled but squeamish.

How am I supposed to take this character seriously as a hero? How am I supposed to take the setting seriously as a world? If I were the sort of person who throws books across the room, this comic would have gone flapping into the wall like some newsprint bat. Yes, it's fantasy, it's a superhero story, but it's a superhero story with obvious pretensions to saying something about history and politics. HUAC plays a role. The promotional material promises us examinations of (naturally) racism and sexism in 1950s America. Somewhere among Cooke, his editors and DC management, someone made a desperately bad eshetic decision. If the rest of New Frontier is flawless, this misstep will still drag the routine down. And there's no reason to think more such howlers aren't coming.

UPDATE: I am well aware of studies that show that squeamishness (not to mention raw fear) among military personnel can be a major phenomenon; frex, the WWII study where it turned out that, of an entire platoon of GIs who charged a hill, only two discharged their rifles. And I have also read that, when it comes to fighter pilots specifically, a small minority of pilots traditionally account for the vast majority of kills. During the Kosovo War, there were widespread reports of Italian bomber pilots dropping their loads in the Adriatic rather than on their targets. I'm sure there have been and will continue to be soldiers in militaries throughout the world who decline to kill. What we're talking about here is something very different: a soldier explicitly refusing to kill - coming right out and telling his superiors and peers that he won't do it. That's what carries the Jordan story across the Stupid Threshold and throws it on the Stupid Bed for its Wedding Night of Stupid Bliss.

On the Hustings - Obviously the blog of an anti-government extremist is not the place to come for primary blogging, which is what people seem to be into now, but you might enjoy Diana Moon's firsthand report of canvassing in New Hampshire - I did. Takes me back to my own experience volunteering for John Anderson in 1980. (With my kindergarten class! Maybe they'll buy that!) I remember that not only was Manchester a hell of failed industrialism, but so was some coastal city or other. That was the year I learned, to my surprise, how many Francophones live in New Hampshire's cities - a lot. The word was that the Larouche people were going around to their apartments with absentee ballots and having them fill the things out on the spot. Oh yeah, that was when I learned about Lyndon Larouche. I remember a couple of us stopping in a Larouche storefront and surveying the literature.

"This one's my favorite," said an acolyte of a book called Will the Soviet Union Win in the 1980s? Inside, a lot of examples of the "bar graph school of military analysis" - here's a blue bar showing the number of US tanks and a red bar for the number of Russian tanks and, shit! we're doomed!

Basically, Larouche shared an approach to Soviet Studies with Time magazine.

Somehow John Anderson did not win. Fear my enthusiasm, politicians! It has been almost universally deadly to your hopes, the sole exception being Bill Clinton in 1992. (O Ancient of Days.)

Diana also has another entry in her series on Al Sharpton. She's right about Sharpton. The man has blood on his hands. He has no chance of getting the nomination, and these days, serves chiefly as yet more proof of how wrong Fitzgerald was about that "no second acts in American lives" business. But to see him treated with respect - welcomed to the debate stage and paid deference as if he were not a thoroughgoing villain - rankles.

Possible Interruption Update - Thanks to the good people at Hosting Matters, the service interruption I feared and mentioned the other day will not occur. You get uninterrupted whatever it is we do here. I can't stress enough how happy I've been with HM since switching last year, especially compared to my previous host, by the way.

I Watches the Watchmen II - Finished the whole thing. What jumps out:

The last chapter, which I remembered in insufficent detail, tends to bear out the "Eve theory" of the pirate comic more than my alternative.

Also, something suddenly seems very important about the last page: When Seymour reaches for the "crank file" containing Rorchach's journal, it is by no means clear that he will select the journal for publication. He might select something else, leaving Veidt's secret safe - for now. We don't know.

And this is itself a criticism of Veidt's Cunning Plan: We don't know. The morality of Veidt killing "half New York" is predicated on absolute certainty of nuclear war otherwise happening, and absolute certainty of it not happening if the VCP succeeds. Moore doesn't need to show that the secret definitely gets out to give the lie to Veidt's justifications. All he has to do is reestablish the primacy of uncertainty.

Some things worth noting about the decisions heroes make in the aftermath of Veidt's massacre - they are decisions made in the aftermath of Veidt's massacre. The deaths are a fait accompli, as Laurie herself notes. Dreiberg and Juspeczek are not deciding whether to approve the plan itself, but what is the best course of action now that it's happened, and now that early indications are that it is achieving its goals.

Rorscach demands that Dr. Manhattan kill him. The fact that I can see all kinds of reasons why he would do this - from simple rage and death wish to himself not wanting to succeed in exposing Veidt's plan, despite his sense of duty to do so - speaks well of the work.

Here's a helluva note: in the hardcover collections I own, Dr. Manhattan's speech to Silk Spectre and NiteOwl in Ozymandias' presence immediately prior to following Rorshach outside and murdering him is presented in white word balloons, like those of the other humans, rather than the blue ones characteristic of his speech. I believe these are the only white Dr. Manhattan word balloons in the entire novel. Production lapse, or deliberate signification?

God how I hate Veidt. I hated him even at the time, before the collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War entered the ultimate judgment on his grandiose and narcissistic enterprise.

It's Not as if He Didn't Warn Us at the Time Dept. - Reread the mock Daniel Dreiberg article on owls. Tell me that it can't be read as Moore's own caution about the limits of Watchmen's approach to superheroes. Then get real.

Along that line, isn't it past time to stop discussing Watchmen as a work of hyper-realism? It is anything but. It is elaborately and artificially architected, from the way the "chorus characters" all collect by the newsstand immediately prior to the irruption of Veidt's monster to the various set-piece speeches that Eve notes to the impossibly swift international responses in the wake of Veidt's atrocity that indicate his plan is, on the functional level, succeeding. Publications like The New Frontiersman certainly existed in the 1980s and exist still, but no publication with TNF's frank racism managed the level of attention TNF gets in the mass media - it's as if the statements and creators of the Spotlight or the Thunderbolt regularly provided fodder for network news. (Note that Watchmen's world is enough like ours that African-Americans can be respected professionals in an integrated workforce.) Yes, there is a lot of naturalistic dialogue, but there is quite a lot - most everything out of the mouth of Bernard, the newsvendor - that is theatrical in execution and intent. Moore and Gibbons deploy naturalism for effect and discard it as readily.

Oh the Irony: Walter "Rorschach" Kovacs, devotee of bigoted right-wing publications, is clearly Jewish. (So, less clearly, is Dan "NiteOwl" Dreiberg.) Discuss.

Finally, needless to say, Watchmen fits my "literature of ethics" precept. It is therefore officially okay to like it.

Previous installments: Revealed at Last! Who DOES Watch the Watchmen!

I Watches the Watchmen.

Time to Play What If - A few things that may fit together:

Via mansizedtarget, the stirring statement of U.S. District Judge William Young sentencing shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Here is the merest taste:

In a very real sense Trooper Santigo had it right when you first were taken off that plane and into custody and you wondered where the press and where the TV crews were and he said you're no big deal. You're no big deal. . . .

Next, Calpundit on the Bush Administration's approach to the War on Terror:

This is not a garden variety partisan policy dispute. It's war, and if George Bush considered it to be truly serious he would have done everything he could to build a bipartisan consensus and wide public support for his actions. But he didn't.

And an old Gene Healy item from early 2003. It has aged well:

If AQ had a deep bench, like Hamas, the big event could happen a lot more frequently. If the country were riddled with sleeper cells, we'd see airliners downed, malls blown up, school buses hijacked, and Muhammed-and-Malvo-style sniper attacks on a monthly basis. If AQ had a lot of members/associates in-country, the panicked atmosphere of late 2001 would continue unabated. And very quickly, we'd have national gun registration, Total Information Awareness, widespread use of military tribunals and, yes, internment camps.

But it's becoming increasingly difficult to avoid concluding there aren't that many of them.

In other words, what if, perversely, Kevin Drum is not only right that the Bush Administration does not consider the the terrorist threat to be "truly serious," what if the Bush Administration is, objectively, right about that? What happened in September 2001 was certainly a serious, outrageous and vile event, but was it a repeatable one?

I have no idea. I don't know what combination of zealous international efforts against AQ abroad, stepped -up security at home and simple inadequacy on Al Qaeda's part explains the absence of further spectacular attacks on American soil. It might even be a function of time horizons. After all, almost a decade passed between WTC I and WTC II. On that basis alone, the post-2001 quiet can't be counted as an American success or an Al Qaeda failure. File under Insufficient Data.

But suppose Manhattan had been struck by an earthquake that killed 3,000 people, and the President and his political supporters insisted on dedicating hundreds of billions of dollars, the bulk of the nation's attention and influence to "An End to Earthquakes"? The analogy is far from precise, but I wonder.

I'm not saying we should have had no response to the September massacres, or a purely law-enforcement response. Particularly at the time, it was worth acting on the possibility and even likelihood that more atrocities of that scope were possible, planned and even imminent. As time moves on, though, it may make sense to reevaluate. At the very least, Gene Healy's suggestion that there are not massive numbers of Arabs and Muslims intending to commit violence against the United States in our own country seems more and more likely to be true. This seems to present problems for two theories, one of which I haven't held and one of which I have: 1) That serious sickness in Arab political culture is breeding massive numbers of anti-American terror warriors, and therefore we need an expansive effort to change Arab political culture by force; 2) Hatred of American foreign policy is breeding massive numbers of anti-American terror warriors, and therefore we need to curtail our interventionism in the Middle East. It would appear that one or the other or both are breeding small numbers of anti-American terror warriors. And it appears that maybe, just maybe, both the "reconstructionists" and the anti-interventionists have placed more stress on the threat of terrorism as a justification for our preferred policies than the argument will bear.

It IS About Oil - After Saturday's item in which I wondered if the "Miles Ignotus" 1975 Harper's article about seizing Saudi Arabia's oil fields mightn't have been more of a US bluff than a serious policy proposal, reader Duane Griffin and Hesiod each sent links to articles tending to establish that the seizure was a plan in earnest. See the Washington Post and Salt Lake Tribune.

Hesiod adds

Not being a fan of either the Neocons or Kissinger, I'd say that this had a lot more to do with strategic security and realpolitiks than with PNAC-style grand illusions.

Seems likely. And Kissinger ended up building a very profitable relationship with Saudi Arabia in after years.

It's Not About Oil - Gas, a buck sixty-one at the off-brand stations this weekend. Jeez. Could we make it about the oil after all? I see by the Saban Center Iraq Index that we're still pumping less oil out of Iraq than the pre-war levels (link is pdf). On the bright side, production is up 20% since October. (Check out the Ministry of Oil's goal for December 2004, though - it's hitting Saban's figure for pre-war production. Oy.)

I Watches the Watchmen -I am indeed rereading Watchmen. Of course, the first thing that jumps out on re-reading is the very first page, where Rorschach, in his journal, avows that, when the time comes, and degraded New York begs him to save them, he will say, "No." And of course the time comes and they don't know to beg and he does try.

What strikes me about the style of the book: quite a number of the transitions walk right up to the edge of facile, the sequential-art equivalent of what screenwriters call "on-the-nose" dialogue. This is the esthetic downside of the preoccupation with puns and twinning that Eve identified.

What strikes me about the substance: Here's how you solve "the problem of the superhero story in the post-Watchmen era" - don't worry about it so much. I've reread five issues so far and I'm more convinced than ever: Watchmen is not a story about "what superheroes would really be like." It's a story about Cold War America. The "masks" are the way they are because that approach lets Moore dramatize his anxieties about US politics and culture. Hey, don't believe me. Believe Alan Moore. Here's the actual text of his "bad mood of fifteen years ago" remark:

The apocalyptic bleakness of comics over the past 15 years sometimes seems odd to me, because it's like that was a bad mood that I was in 15 years ago. It was the 1980s, we'd got this insane right-wing voter fear running the country, and I was in a bad mood, politically and socially and in most other ways. So that tended to reflect in my work. But it was a genuine bad mood, and it was mine.

No wonder he has spent so much post-Watchmen time developing more benign takes on the genre - he wasn't trying to "deconstruct superheroes" in the first place.

Watchmen is barely the first word in thinking seriously about superheroes. For one thing, there's only one "superhero" in it, meaning, only one character with superhuman powers. Everyone else is a masked vigilante with no more powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men than you or I have. "Hollis Mason" tells us in his memoir that you had to be pretty off the wall to dress up in a costume and fight crime, which is surely true for us regular folks. But is it as true for someone who can fly, or fire beams from their hands? Watchmen won't tell us. It doesn't care. The only guy who can fly and shoot beams from his hands wears no mask at all.

As Moore suggests, the problem is less what's left of the superhero story after Watchmen than too many creators "still working out the ramifications of me being a bit grumpy 15 years ago."

As a way forward, I suggest reading Tagore Smith's recent item about volunteer firemen. Watchmen can't explain why volunteer firemen do what they do. (It's not trying to.) Neither can Tagore, but he'd sure like to know:

What I'd like to do is ask a few firemen: what could possibly make them think that it was worthwhile to risk their own lives to save others. This isn't a question of bravery, per se- I have run into an inferno to find my own cats (I have been in more than one fire). What I want to know is what is it that makes you run into a fire, if you don't even know one individual that might be in there. It takes no bravery to save what you love. It takes a lot of bravery to save what you don't personally care about, if that salvation comes at risk of your life.

I'd like to say more about the imnplications of that idea - but in the end I am really afraid of them. Maybe some other time.

The entire item contains Tagore's account (pieced together from sources) of how he was thrown out of a burning building as an infant and - I ruin the ending for you - caught. Very much worth your time.

Actually, Tagore is asking about firemen in general. I'm specifying volunteer firemen because doing so eliminates one obvious motive: Hey, it's a living. And of course the core question, "what could possibly make them think that it was worthwhile to risk their own lives to save others," can be spun and flipped in a number of important ways. From Why do firemen do what they do? to Why don't the rest of us do what they do? to Why shouldn't the rest of us do what they do? and even What right do we have not to do what they do? To me, superheroes become an interesting way of addressing these questions. I would argue that, if science fiction is the literature of ideas, the superhero story is the literature of ethics. Or say, rather, it should be. As "literature" need not mean frowny-faced drudgery I would even say the formulation holds for kids' superhero books.

The core question of the superhero story might be phrased as What do we owe other people? The problem is that comics have typically answered the question before they've barely asked it: "With great power must come great responsibility!" Really? Are you sure about that? And how much is "great," anyway? What part of my life can I keep back for myself?

You may have noticed that these questions are salient whether you wear tights or not. They apply to you. Because most of us, certainly most of us in the developed world, have more power, wealth or wherewithal than somebody. Certainly almost everybody reading this blog item could, in principle, quit their present jobs and work pro bono for an African AIDS clinic while subsisting on donated food, or maintain a couple of homeless people instead of taking vacation, or - join the Volunteer Fire Department. Depending on your politics, you may believe that people like yourself or people like Bill Gates really do owe some non-trivial portion of time, wealth, influence or attention to - something or someone. The poor, the ill, the frightened, alienated, the "doomed, damned and despised" as Jesse Jackson once put it.

And having had the thought, you've got more problems. Which will it be, first of all - the poor, the ill or the frightened? Just how should you help them? And when, if ever, do you get off-duty?

Fantasy provides external analogs of internal conflicts, and the subtype of fantasy about superheros is a way of externalizing questions of duty, community and self. How should the powerful behave? (Most Americans are, in global-historical terms, "the powerful" in one aspect or another.) And there is still, almost twenty years after Watchmen, a global political dimension to this. Because the question of what responsibilities impinge on the powerful has everything to do with the position of "hyperpower America" in the present world situation. There are bad moods and good moods yet to have with masked men and women.

Thanks to Eve Tushnet and Johanna Draper Carlson for conversations at SPX and after about versions of the above. And see Peiratikos on Watchmen. Excerpt:

Not only masked vigilantes and big blue superguys threaten the world with their attempts to impose a moral meaning or pattern. Adrian Veidt, Dr. Manhattan, Rorschach, Dan and Laurie, Nixon, all have an asymmetrical power relationship with the rest of the people in the world - I mean, they're potentially better equipped than others to create and manipulate patterns of meaning in the world. Veidt and Nixon are especially similar, in that they both choose methods of acheiving their goals which kill millions of people.

UPDATE: Doh! Added actual link to Tagore Smith. Hurm.

A Fanboy's Instant Blogwatch - Liberal political blogger Abu Aardvark offers a rueful appreciation/regret about the conclusion of Cerebus.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - Sandy Szwarc has a piece attacking the recent WHO proposals on "Globesity." I am temperamentally and ideologically inclined to skepticism about anything WHO does, and about coercive public health approaches to nutrition and weight management. So I wish I hadn't had prior problems with the work of Szwarc and I wish the new article weren't so link-poor - lots of footnotes to papers you can't read. It was summaries of studies at variance with what they actually said that got Szwarc in trouble with me in the first place, it's a major issue.

Loyal Fitness Blog Item Reader Dave Lull sends a related link to a New York Times guest editorial on the same subject from the other side, by food fascists Kelly D Brownell and Marion Nestle.

Now I'll say this: I'm persuaded that limiting "free sugar" intake is a good idea. And near as I can tell, there's no way WHO's recommendations could be binding on any sovereign country. "Plaintiffs" lawyers might use them to support one of the ongoing or planned class action suits against various food industry sectors, but that's a problem of American legal culture, not necessarily a problem with the science. You can make a case that what we're seeing in response to the WHO report is good old fashioned "state capitalism" aka "rent-seeking" - the sweetener industry fears lost sales and calls on government to save it from the market.

In other fitness blogs. Shawn Fumo writes about weight problems in popular manga series. No he doesn't either! That's a joke, son! Shawn picks up on my misgivings about the profusion of "low-carb products" and ties it to a discussion of advertising I don't completely agree with. (The people who want to sell you "low carb maple syrup" are trying to make money, yes. But so are the people who sell you Granny Smiths and raspberries. As for the four-bladed razor, don't knock it till you've tried it! Me, I haven't, but if too few people find value in it for the manufacturer to make money it'll be gone soon enough. Note: Shawn gratifyingly refers to last week's fitness blog item as "a pretty interesting entry." So there, critics! (Okay, I love you guys too.)

One day I will write a single post incorporating comic books, obesity and the problems of interventionist foreign policy. Then I will retire. I mean, I'm getting clobbered by Tacitus and Drezner in the Drysdale voting anyway.

Bruce Baugh, down two more pounds.

Marathon Prep This Week.

1. Sent the Talking Dog a thank-you e-mail for the training books he sent me.

2. There is no number 2.

Actually, I did a little sprinting this week just because it's been so goddam cold there were times I didn't want to walk. I have seen some people out on the trails and sidewalks during the current frigid spell. I admire those crazy people.

Plus, Zack Ajmal of Procrastination offered his ideas and a link to the ExRx marathon training schedule. Zack's advice includes, "Also, do run in a shorter race (5K/10K/half-marathon) or two before the marathon," which certainly sounds like a good idea. I almost ran my first 5K last fall but had some kind of scheduling conflict.

Vital signs: Weight 161, waist 33", resting pulse around 60. The weight is down five pounds from last week, which means only that I'm still bouncing between 161 and 166 from week to week. The waist represents something of an improvement over recent bloating, and the pulse is heading back down. You know there's a theory that a human heart works for a certain number of "reps," right, and that the slower your pulse rate the longer it takes you to use them up? Just mentioning. More next week.

Looking Over the Fence of the Rez if not actually off it:Tacitus.

Now we must ask ourselves what's best for the party in November '04. It's not necessarily electoral success. If the President wins reelection this fall, then the elements of the party that feel free to ignore core conservative principles have won. Victory is, after all, the ultimate validation. And defeat is the ultimate rebuke: is that the level of rebuke we need to get the party leadership back on the principled path? I don't mean to indulge in a repudiation of political pragmatism and enter the realm of the tiresome zealots one meets at CPAC: but I do think we need to examine whether the pendulum has swung too far. There is a separability between the conservative cause and the Republican party, but let's be honest and admit that one without the other is essentially impotent. Our current course means that split is, I think, coming sooner or later, to the detriment of both. I'm willing to take a pretty big hit to head that off.

Revealed at Last! Who DOES Watch the Watchmen? - Eve Tushnet does, in a justly-lauded essay on the Shakespearian method to the classic Moore-Gibbons miniseries. If you ever read Watchmen, this essay is well worth your time.

Big Yes! moment: "The superhero stuff has gotten the most attention, but in my opinion the infusion of existential questions into the murder-mystery tropes is more crucial to the book."

Biggest Maybe... moment. Eve has a plausible take on the thematic importance of the pirate comic interludes:

The pirate comic is a story of despair as a self-fulfilling prophecy: The castaway assumes that the black freighter's crew has devastated his hometown, and so he himself causes the carnage he feared. Veidt assumes that without his hideously gory intervention, the world will end, and so he himself causes the book's greatest destruction. I am pretty sure that part of the point of the pirate comic is to suggest that Veidt is wrong, that his deadly plan was not the only way to prevent World War Three.

Like I said, plausible. But another possibility has to be considered: the castaway stands not for Veidt but for America, and the "auto-genic carnage" (to coin a phrase), for the logical outcome of America's Cold War national security policies. If that's the case, the valence of the interpolation changes radically. Now, something to consider: Eve talks about the "realism" of the world of the Watchmen, its tangibility. So, let us recall that the pirate comic exists within that world, being read by a kid in that world, and it was perforce authored in that world too. It's a horror comic. So, which anxiety are writer and/or artist likelier to have that motivates the tale, an anxiety about a retired superhero's secret plan or an anxiety about a country's nuclear policy?

Note that this doesn't settle the issue. The pirate comic can easily mean one thing to its (notional) creators and another thing entirely to us. It can mean both things. Eve's entire essay is about the twinnings, near-symmetries and false symmetries of Watchmen's architecture.

For what it's worth, I always thought that, with the end-matter mock-essay "Dr. Manhattan: Super Powers and the Super Powers," Moore did just a little too good a job of mimicking an academic Soviet apologist. Watchmen is - I state the crushingly obvious - only about superheroes to the extent necessary to be about America, and as with many leftist critiques of the Cold War the Soviet Union is strangely invisible. But it's been years since I read the book and who knows if I will think the same when I reread it. And it's here in front of me as I type, and reread it, thanks to Eve's inspiration, is what I'm going to do right away.

(John Jakala provides, like me, but footnotes to Tushnet, but they're good footnotes. Check it out.)

Wilderness of Magazine Archives - You know how a lot of magazine websites hold their newsstand content back from web publication for a bit? Harper's website just got up to 1975. Link via Polytropos, who offers a pretty good recap of what is, for such a comparative whelp, ancient history. I think he might be missing one possible angle though.

As Nate notes, the article appeared in Harper's March, 1975 issue under the pseudonym "Miles Ignotus" (Latin: "Unknown Soldier") and advocated seizing the Saudi oilfields. I recall a similar article in Playboy sometime between 1975 and 1978. Or was it Penthouse? Clearly, I read it for the articles - I just don't remember which one I read. But where was I? Oh yeah, the US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James Akins, attacked the article in a television interview, saying that the author was "either a madman, a criminal, or an agent of the Soviet Union."

Actually, Nate points out that the best available evidence is that it was Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

(So Akins got two out of three! And some of your firebreathing conservatives always did think Henry the K was working for the Kremlin! But I'm losing the thread again.)

Okay, Nate talks about the practicality and the ethics of the "Ignotus Plan":

Anyway. It's an interesting read, especially because a matter-of-fact policy argument that's so brutally aggressive would never fly today. We're left with the question of whether, in those smoke-filled back rooms, the architects of America's current foreign policy look back on assessments like Ignotus' with chagrin or with nostalgia.

Here's the possibility I think he's missing: what if the article was the plan? That is, what if the point wasn't to advocate seizing the Saudi oil fields, but to be seen to do so - to send a Kissingerian message about not pushing the US too far? If that were the case, you would want the Saudis to be able to figure out who the real author was, and you'd sacrifice Akins (who got fired about a month after the interview). Might be worth following Akins' future fortunes to see how soft a post-ambassadorial landing he made. There may not really have been a desire to seize the oilfields at all, for all the reasons Akins and Nate, from their positions thirty years apart, rehearse. But there probably was a desire to make the Saudis think we might seize them, or that we could one day be pushed to it. If Ignotus really was Kissinger, that strikes me as the most likely explanation.

It's an Honor Just to be Nominated II - Thanks to everyone whose vote made this site a finalist for a "Drysdale" (best non-liberal blog). Now whoever gets the most votes among the finalists will win the award. Apparently you vote by simply posting a comment to the Drysdale finalists item saying who you want to win.

Just mentioning.

Fair Warning - There's an outside chance that this site will have a bit of a service interruption some time over the next couple of days. It could be down as much as a week. Or not.

Shoot if You Must this Old Grey Head - Paging Barbara Fritchie - they're after the Stars and Stripes again:

So the Pentagon is basically telling us that the reason Stars and Stripes exists - to provide a real newspaper to troops during wartime - is just too gosh darned expensive to fund. And we're talking about just a few million dollars here, piss in a pot for the Pentagon's bloated budgets. It's not about money. It's totally political. It's about trying to kill Stars and Stripes.

As the article points out, "this comes just a few months after our survey of the troops got front page play in the Washington Post and was a huge embarrassment to the Pentagon."

Will Wonders Never Cease - Christopher Deliso quotes Derrida on terrorism and I find myself seeing the old French bastard's point. Derrida suggests that "One day it might be said: 'September 11' - those were the ('good') old days of the last war. Things were still of the order of the gigantic: visible and enormous!"

Now, you may be thinking, at first blush, not another European intellectual aestheticizing the brutality of the September Massacres! Spare me! But that is not what Derrida is doing at all, as his next statement makes clear:

...(however) nanotechnologies of all sorts are so much more powerful and invisible, uncontrollable, capable of creeping in everywhere. They are the micrological rivals of microbes and bacteria. Yet our unconscious is already aware of this; it knows it, and that's what's scary."

In other words, Derrida fears the passing of an era when the scope of a terrorist act was at least comprehensible. Because there is no real "End to Evil," the day is coming when the threats to the West will be everything from rogue nanotech to designer viruses. I would add that there is no reason to think enemy "rogue states" will play a substantial role in fostering such terrorism. They will mostly be incapable of producing the bleeding-edge weapons terrorists will wish to wield. No, as with the September Massacres, the terrorists will succeed by commandeering our own productions and turning them against us. This may happen by outright theft, as with the planes used against New York City and Washington DC, or suborning cooperation from disaffected members of our military-industrial complex. Of course, disaffected members of our military-industrial complex may cut out the middleman and engage in terror themselves, as may have happened with the still-unsolved anthrax attacks.

Against this real, major and long-term threat, we've erected - distraction. It's as if the goal was to keep ourselves so busy there would be no time for darker and larger thoughts about the scope of our danger. As Deliso puts it:

The US government knows it too, but admitting as much would not reassure the people. Therefore it must substitute the old enemy, and the old war - a specific villain (Saddam) in a fixed place (Iraq) - for the inescapable reality that the rules have been changed. Without an Iraq War thrown into the mix, and without the media whipped up into a subsequent frenzy, the government would have had to publicly confront the unpleasant reality of the new world disorder on two fronts: first, an historical one (the disastrous results of a policy of massive global intervention); and second, the philosophical one (the reality that the "war on terror" is a farce due to terrorism's very non-territorial and globalized nature).

I've previously considered some of the implications of the present situation and the situation to come in "A Brief History of the Future." And is even a single Presidential candidate discussing the larger problem? Not that I've heard.

Let's Play What If? - The Financial Times story on Ahmed Chalabi's joining the call for early elections in Iraq contains the following passage:

US officials have said direct elections cannot be held without an accurate census and voter registration, which could take months or years.

Okay, here's the game. It's January 2003. Saddam Hussein agrees to "free and fair elections" but allows that it will take "months or years" to complete "an accurate and voter registration."

What is the Bush Administration's response?

Department of Priorities II - Self-styled freelance journalist and activist Eric Smith sent around a press release about his theory that the US has already captured Osama Bin Laden and the Bush Administration is waiting to announce the news at a politically propitious time. I see no reason to believe that that has happened, and little reason to believe that it wouldn't. Conspiracy theory? Sure, but there are plenty of those to go around on all sides. But one particular passage struck me as a perfect summary of a particular kind of left-liberal mindset:

The consequences of surrender will be incalculable: one by one, like dominos, institutions we cherish will fall -- environmental laws, social security, independent media, healthy advocacy groups, assistance for the unemployed, impoverished and disenfranchised -- and, foremost, the right to choose our leaders.

Transfer payments, regulation and "health advocacy groups." (Eat more fiber!) Those are the big things that come to Mr. Smith's mind. Not habeas corpus, "extraordinary rendition," revocation of citizenship, or that Bill of Rights stuff. And again the misconception that "foremost" is "the right to choose our leaders" when foremost is the right to be free of "our leaders" in broad areas of our lives. It's the Bush Administration's dogged assault on this real "foremost" right that marks it as a menace.

Bet he's in trouble with someone for leaving abortion off his list, though.

Department of Priorities

As you can see from that Globe and Mail piece, the Canadian press continues to be all over this story despite the search on and threatened arrest of Juliet O'Neill (which seems to be totally backfiring). The American press, which might well have stronger legal protections than any country in the world, runs wire stories about Arar's lawsuit on page 17. The White House, as far as I can tell, has not been asked about the case once. But God knows we needed 48 hours of hand-wringing over Howard Dean's Iowa caucus speech.

Katherine at Obsidian Wings. (Who else would it be?)

I Forget, is Two a Trend? - Another conservative blogger writes to complain about something I wrote. Kevin Holtsberry e-mails

I think your post about small government conservatives was a bit disingenuious. The very next sentence after the paragraph you quote is: "The major programmatic fault of the speech is also that of his presidency: There was too much spending." Combine this with the fact that the paragraph above says "most" makes your point rather unfair. It may be true that small government conservatives have little voice in the Republican Party but NR's editorial doesn't prove your point, hence the two cheer thing.

Well, I don't think I was disingenuous at all, oddly enough. There's a lot more to "small-government conservatism" than spending. There's federalism, there's constitutionalism, there's separation of powers. There's the notion that government should shy from social engineering. Everything in the paragraph I quoted shows the President contravening those principles and NR cheering him for it. (PATRIOT Act, funding for marriage promotion, butting into state control of schools - drug testing - and marriage laws, federal abstinence education. "Here's today's movie, Health Class. See Joe not putting his dick in Jane? Do just like Joe.") I notice that NR's editors don't even manage to sound as upset about spending as John Cole. (I like John Cole, but I think we can all agree he's a partisan Republican.)

If small government conservatism were just about spending, the combination of SOTU and the NR editorial would still establish that 1) the president has nothing for SGCs; and 2) NR's dismay at this is minor. But small government conservatism is about federalism, constitutionalism and the sense that there are things the government shouldn't mess with. It's not the same as libertarianism by any means - a small government conservative may be just fine with a local school board instituting drug testing - but the belief in federal limits is, or used to be, a core conviction of a sizable swath of the Republican Party. Those folks have been abandoned at best and at worst betrayed.

Responsible Mail - The item about hawkish responsibility for Iraqi outcomes in general and Tacitus' responsibility in particular drew several e-mail responses, not least from Tacitus himself:

Re: "For the benefit of those keeping score at home, yes, this is the same Tacitus who argued (if that's the word) that those of us who marched in an ANSWER-organized antiwar rally gave off penumbras and emanations that made us personally responsible for starvation in North Korea and a bunch of other stuff including, I believe, dutch elm blight."

Wow. I never argued that at all. I said you lent your legitimacy to a pro-Stalinist organization (damning enough in itself); not that you were "personally responsible for starvation in North Korea." I'm really surprised you'd resort to this sort of dishonest statement. It's worthy of....well, Kieran Healy.

As for my "minimizing" the dangers of shari'a, that's refuted in the comments to the post you link to, and discussed here as well. . Short version is that saying that I minimize it is baseless. The comparison of shari'a vs. Ba'athist law was made by others to whom I was responding -- as a read of Kip's original post should have made clear.

Finally, since I know you read this thread (which is merely one of many) from a while back -- I would assume that the charge that I simply do not pay attention to the actions and shortcomings of the leadership would not be hurled in my direction.

I don't mind policy disagreements, as you know -- in fact, I am moving closer to your position these days in any case -- but I do think this post of yours was pretty egregiously misrepresenting.

There are a few issues to disentangle here. First, on the matter of International ANSWER and penumbras and emanations I'll plead not dishonesty but memory - I certainly didn't reread the original. I just did reread it (some days this job isn't worth it) and I concede Tacitus' point about what he was actually saying. My bad.

Re minimizing the dangers of Sharia. In retrospect, I may not have placed sufficient weight on the italicised (by me) phrase in the passage below:

Presumably Iraqi women would have been better off under the constant threat of outright execution or rape at the Mukhabarat's hands; now, horrors, they must face Islamic law! I'm facetious here -- Islamic law is pretty bad, and it's definitely unjust to make a population live under it. (Not sure the family law part is as bad as a murderous police state, though.)

but in toto, it still seems coy to me - 1. Introduce comparison. 2. Disavow comparison. 3. Wonder if comparison doesn't after all have something to it. I doubt I'm the only one for whom the disavowel got lost. I appreciate the clarification. I've seen the unclarified version from a lot of hawkish commentators in the wake of the Sharia story, though, so I'll point my original response to the Sharia-Saddamism comparison wholly at them.

On the issue of the shortcomings of the leadership and Tac's attention to same, my problem is that the item he cites dates from late June. I still think that rather late in the game, given the Wolfowitz testimony of late February alone.

Rereading my article, I wish I had left the ANSWER stuff out of it and had managed a sunnier tone. And as I said in the update to that post, my argument with Tacitus is as nothing compared to my argument with the Bush Administration, or even with most other hawks. But I stand by more core critique:

The critique does not assume "total foreknowledge of all events and consequences." It simply assumes, correctly, that intentions are not enough - your responsibility extends not just to the desired but to the likely and foreseeable results of your actions. You can be responsible for bad outcomes even if you did not foresee them if you should have foreseen them.

Among stronger criticisms of Tacitus than I am comfortable making, Richard Puchalsky's e-mail makes a point about "total foreknowledge":

[Tacitus] must have had strong suspicions that it might happen or he wouldn't have been warning about it for months, as he points out in his own defense.

Sean Collins e-mail re Sharia isn't as bad as Saddam justifications should be understood, in light of Tacitus' clarifications, to apply to apologists who are not Tacitus:

I mean, isn't that the whole point of the new hawkishness: that tyranny, terrorism and theocracy are ALWAYS unacceptable, no matter who's using them? That's certainly why I got on board--I was ashamed of fifty years of "he's a bastard, but he's OUR bastard" foreign policy.

To say "sharia's bad, I guess, but hey, Saddam's gone!" is to miss the entire point of going into Iraq in the first place.

The kid's got a good heart. I hope one day he'll see the distinction between "fighting fascism" and fighting fascism on behalf of other fascists, which is so often what we end up doing.

As Opposed To . . . ? - Ronald Bailey has a good piece on HSAs at Reason's site, but has unwittingly activated one of my tics:

Because health spending in the United States soared by 9.3 percent in 2002, the largest increase in 11 years, according to a report from U.S. Health and Human Services officials in the journal Health Affairs. (The total spending was $1.6 trillion, around $5,440 for every man, woman, and child in the nation.) Health care expenditures now account for about 15 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product.

My instant reaction is, So? We spend a lot on health care. Health care is good. The ideas behind health care are

1) You don't die as soon as you would have otherwise.
2) You get better from illness or injury.

Those sound like pretty valuable outcomes. Value attracts spending dollars. What's a better use of your money - not dying as soon as you would have otherwise, or one of the cool new TVs we have now? You can't watch TV when you're dead. One of the reasons health care costs have gone up is that there are ever newer and cleverer ways to not die so soon, and those ways cost money.

Don't get me wrong. There may be all kinds of problems with the way we're spending our health care dollars, starting with the fact that our system is based on "insurance" that is less insurance as such than a system of service contracts. Instead of pooling risks, group health "insurance" as it exists pools certainties. And because it's tied so tightly to employment, it makes things harder for the unemployed, the self-employed and even businesses than things need to be. Moving to a model of HSAs and genuine insurance (pooling risk), may alleviate the flaws of the present system. But the mere fact that health care spending is a certain proportion of GNP, or rising at a certain rate faster than inflation is itself no proof of a problem.

(Note: I'm mostly just echoing something Mickey Kaus said years ago.)

Do Not Adjust Your Set - The site may look momentarily weird as you check in tonight. Some of the "under the hood" changes are billowing up through the seams of the hood from time to time. I'm trying like hell to fix the text selection problem in Internet Explorer but not, so far, having much luck at it.

However, for diehard NS4 users for whom I broke the main page, I've added an NS4 index page. I may not be the most popular blogger out there, but I surely have the most indexes.

UPDATE: The text selection problem still defeats me. I give up for the evening. People who are dying to quote from Unqualified Offerings can still

o View | Source in IE
o Just select and go in Opera or any version of Mozilla

Still working on the problem.

Do You Not Exist or Do You Just Not Count? - Small-government conservatives, I mean. Take a look at National Review's unsigned "Two Cheers for the Speech" editorial:

There was something in the speech for most conservatives. Law-and-order conservatives learned that the president is prepared to defend the Patriot Act during the campaign. Free-market conservatives got a renewed call for making the tax cuts permanent, beefed-up health savings accounts, tort reform, and - above all - continued support for personal accounts in Social Security. Social conservatives got increased funding for abstinence education, drug testing in the schools, rhetoric against steroid abuse by athletes, and, perhaps most important, some presidential support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

Small-government conservatives are certainly "free-market conservatives" too, but once you get past tax cuts, HSAs and rhetorical nods in directions the administration has no intent of actually going (tort and social security reform), Bush's SOTU address has less than nothing for you. It is useful of National Review to point out, if only by omission, the complete elimination of limited government as a Republican Party principle.

That About Sums It Up - Peter David explains why I can't watch American Idol.

Some of these people, the moment they open their mouth, it's clear they don't know an E flat from a Salt Flat. Why then in God's name would the producers send them up the line? Only one answer comes to mind: Knowing these people are horrendous, they send them before the three judges and the TV camera specifically so they can humiliate themselves on national TV. I'm not sure why I never realized that before, but that has to be the case. 'Wow, this guy is so awful, we've got to share him with America." Seems kind of--oh, what's the word--cruel.

Also, they seem to go for the sorts of bombastic pop singers that keep Diane Warren in business. But the cruelty thing is the real problem.

"See, They Return, One and by One - Andrew David Chamberlain is back with the sort of simultaneously philosophical, economically rigorous and plain funky libertarian blogging that you can't get here. See "METROSEXUALS, KARL MARX, AND MAKING OUT IN THE BACK SEAT" among others.

Stray SOTU Stuff - Most useful SOTU commentary I've seen so far . . .

Gene Healy with a contrarian take on the "steroids in sports" passage."

Kevin Drum has your metric system for you, right here and here.

Related to the second Drum link, Electrolite vamps on Smoking gun-related activity program initiatives.

Tacitus asks, "What about the role of athletic supplements in marriage? What about activist judges who defy the will of the people who want athetic supplements? What about marrying your athletic supplements?" and other stuff. (Scroll up and down.)

Also from Tacitus, and this is important:

Is there any question that the Patriot Act reauthorization is meant to play the same role in the '04 cycle as the Homeland Security bill did in '02? Not too classy.

Bush's SOTU speeches have been useful because they really have heralded the way he has tried to govern (viz. the Axis of Evil speech where Bush fully incorporated the doctrine of "preemptive" "defense".) If there was any remaining doubt that under Bush's leadership, the Republicans have become an authoritarian party, this speech removes it. Small-government conservatives, libertarians and traditionalists can no longer imagine that Bush's Republican Party is somewhat wrongheaded. It is an outright menace.

New Republic Writer Jim Henley is how I'd like to be referred to from now on. After all, I sold them a single article back in 1993. In Andrew Sullivan's world (scroll down to "FIFTH COLUMN WATCH"), ever publishing a single article with a venue makes you a "[that venue] writer," and - hey how about that - Andrew Sullivan was TNR's editor when my article was published.

Maybe I'll get new business cards.

Tired - The Swedish Mobile acted up in a major way today. I got home late and am way too tired to deal with SOTU, Iowa, superhero thoughts, Captain America thoughts or the, you know, massive demonstrations in Iraq. So you'll have to look elsewhere for stuff to read. For instance, Katherine at Obsidian Wings has finished her series on Maher "The US sent me to Canada and all I got was this lousy two years of unending hell" Arar. (Scroll up from the bottom. Memo to Katherine: scrolling up and reading down at the same time sucks. Better to have a header post with links to all 13 installments that the reader can keep coming back to.)

Annals of Cheek - From an op-ed in the NYT by Lebanese law professor and author Chibli Mallat:

The way forward, then, is simple. The 10 members of the governing council whom I met with agree on this: the council, as a national unity government, should be unconditionally recognized as in charge of Iraq's destiny, with the support of the United States-led coalition and whoever else wishes to join in a democratic course of reconstruction.

As such, the council would be deemed the official interim government of Iraq - making the United States plan to select a national assembly by July 1 unnecessary. The council would be empowered to draft a constitution and set the parameters for what a new government would look like and when and how it would be elected.

Pretty amazing. Mallat talked to ten politicians, all of whom agreed that it made a great deal of sense that the organization in which they held power should be maintained, strengthened and perpetuated. I don't doubt that his reporting of their sentiment is accurate.

(Via Hit and Run.)

Actually It IS Your Responsibility - kip at Long Story Short Pier blames the hawks for the IGC's imposition of Sharia. ("Blame" is a word that, like "firetruck" starts with F and ends with -UCK, right?)Tacitus calls his argument "ridiculous":

The logic of the critique above is ridiculous, as it assumes total foreknowledge of all events and consequences.. One might as well blame Abraham Lincoln for the Klan and Jim Crow. Had he only not invaded! The fact is that I've been discussing, warning, fulminating, and exhorting on the need to confront and ward off Shi'a theocrats in Iraq for long months now.

For the benefit of those keeping score at home, yes, this is the same Tacitus who argued (if that's the word) that those of us who marched in an ANSWER-organized antiwar rally gave off penumbras and emanations that made us personally responsible for starvation in North Korea and a bunch of other stuff including, I believe, dutch elm blight.

But that's not the point. The point is, Tacitus is wrong on every count. The critique does not assume "total foreknowledge of all events and consequences." It simply assumes, correctly, that intentions are not enough - your responsibility extends not just to the desired but to the likely and foreseeable results of your actions. You can be responsible for bad outcomes even if you did not foresee them if you should have foreseen them. Conservatives have no problem recognizing this truth when it comes to domestic policy. When liberals desire benign outcome X, but the policy they implement results in dire consequence Y, conservatives blame liberals, and rightly. We hold alcoholics to account for the gap between intentions and results. I meant to take the kids to the park but I lost track of time. *Hic!

In the case of Tacitus specifically, it's all well and good that he's been discussing, warning and so on for long months now. What he should have been doing for long months before that is reading his goddam Hayek, particularly the part in The Road to Serfdom about where the enthusiasm for central planning comes from. One of these days I'll dig out the exact quote - it becomes more relevant by the day. But in paraphrase, large diverse coalitions will form in favor of central planning because the constituent members of the coalition each favor some specific policy that central planning would enable. The problem is that the various policies favored by the various factions tend to be incompatible - so once the planning regime comes, many, many people find themselves disappointed.

The Iraq war and occupation have been run by people stupider and more venal than Tacitus, who is neither stupid nor venal. But as a citizen he had a responsibility to see the actual decision makers for who they were. The minute that Paul Wolfowitz stated that Iraq lacked the sort of ethnic and sectarian strife that plagued the Balkans, Tacitus and every other intelligent hawk should have thrown the replay flag. Upon review, the principled hawks needed to realize they were being asked to back a war led by clowns. The incumbent duty strikes me as obvious.

One other matter. Echoing comments I've seen by other hawks, Tacitus minimizes the Sharia decree by comparing it to the horrors of the previous regime:

Presumably Iraqi women would have been better off under the constant threat of outright execution or rape at the Mukhabarat's hands; now, horrors, they must face Islamic law! I'm facetious here -- Islamic law is pretty bad, and it's definitely unjust to make a population live under it. (Not sure the family law part is as bad as a murderous police state, though.)

It's not that there's nothing to this argument, but there are two problems: 1) it's true that, in principle, every Iraqi woman was at risk for arbitrary execution or rape at the hands of the Hussein regime. But from the perspective of an Iraqi woman rather than an armchair theoretician, it's a question of odds. What were the chances of any given Iraqi woman would be arbitrarily executed or raped? What are the chances that a given Iraqi woman will fall foul of Sharia in the new domestic code? If the second odds are substantially greater than the first, then Iraqi women really may feel they are worse off. That's not for me to say, of course, but it's not for Tacitus to say either. 2) It has yet to be established how much better than the Hussein regime future Iraqi governments will be. It would be fatuous to say that Iraq has seen its last massacre, arbitrary detention or extrajudicial execution.

UPDATE: You know, rereading the above, it spends too much time on Tacitus and not enough time on the US goverment. The real responsibility lies with the latter.

Bridging the Generation Gap - More gaming news from the weekend: we took the plunge and bought Offering Boy his first Yu-gi-oh! cards - two starter decks, so that he and I could play each other. I have stayed away from collectible card games until now, and avoided encouraging OB in that direction too - the last thing I want to be doing is driving him to tournaments on Saturdays and explaining why I won't shell out for $5 booster packs. But he started playing with schoolfriends this week and clearly enjoyed it and hey, like his dad is going to forbid him to play games.

Anyway, having now played several games, I understand why kids play collectible card games - they can read the goddam cards. That puts them ahead of me, unless I squint. If the light's bad? Forget it.

Kind of fun, though. I realize Yu-gi-oh is far from the most sophisticated CCG out there, and I can see the little tricks in the rules that are meant to encourage you to BUY MORE CARDS. But like I said: fun.

Welcome Interstate Managers - RealOne is streaming the most recent Fountains of Wayne album this month. I had liked the single, "Stacey's Mom," a lot, but what it didn't prepare me for was how beautiful this album is. Many songs have a reflective quality and a lyricism I didn't expect. "Valley Winter Song" is my favorite. "All Kinds of Time" is a stunner - a lush, stirring ballad about - football. No really. Lots of funny, trippy stuff too, a nice country pastiche, and a couple of guitar-pop rockers, but it's the ballads that make this CD a revelation. Two thumbs up. They're both mine, but I'm making an effort here.

Happy Martin Luther King Day - Spent the afternoon with Nate "Polytropos" Bruinooge and gaming buddy Classic Dave playing Paul Czege's My Life with Master. It turns out that the game deserves its substantial reputation. Very easy to pick up; the mechanics are simple but intricate and certainly enable the players to produce "gothic style" stories together. At ten bucks it's a steal. I could say that the games' themes of domination, accomodation and resistance are appropriate to the holiday, but really, we were just taking advantage of the day off. For actual appropriate to the holiday material, Sean Collins has posted the entire text of the 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial. I admire King's politics while having no use for his economics. But more than anything I'm in awe of his courage. MLK Day is the holiday that demands that each of us be that much braver than we're comfortable being.

This is Sports Center with Unqualified Offerings - Sincere condolences to hoosier Radley Balko after today's Indianapolis-New England game. I was pulling for you. But congrats to Charles Dodgson, whose Pats really are a nice team, though their continued success risks more "face down individualism" from his state's senior senator, which would suck. And to Atrios, diehard Eagles booster, neener neener neener from your NFC East neighbor.

I'll be rooting for the Pats in the Super Bowl, but not rooting against Carolina. I like them, and Steven Davis still has my heart. But I almost always root for the AFC team if the Redskins aren't playing. Predictions? Are you kidding?

UPDATE: Adam at Throwing Things offers the Five Stages of Eagles Grief, which I found immensely cheering. Also, the Curse of William Penn.

Best Wishes - So I thought to check to see if Our Man Deeds (aka "John Galt") had anything on today's big explosion at the too-well-named Assassin's Gate entrance to the CPA's Green Zone. He didn't. Then I got to worrying.

"We have indications that some of those that were killed were American citizens, U.S. contractors," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said during a news conference in Baghdad. "We believe the current number at two. We're waiting for firmer confirmation."

Which description fits John Galt (among many other people). I hope he's okay. And I regret all the Iraqis killed in the attack too.

Sigh. The Sydney Morning Herald notes that "A suicide driver detonated a powerful car bomb outside the main gate to the headquarters compound of the US-led coalition yesterday, killing at least 25 people and wounding about 130, as the United States prepared to ask the United Nations to play a far greater role in Iraq." There may well be a relation. The pattern of past spectacular attacks is that they've acted to discourage UN and other international involvement in the occupation.

Meanwhile, in John Galt's most recent available message we see all the frustrations to which the social engineer is heir. The Shi'a aren't playing ball. The IGC's sharia thing threatens the rule of law. Will "John Galt" ever connect what he finds himself doing with what his namesake had to say about grandiose state schemes? I hope he is well and whole and will have the time to decide such a question is worth pondering.

(SMH link via Counterspin.)

Dept. of Interesting Stray Finds - While researching the previous item I happened upon an interesting Ha'aretz article about Israeli government leaks to the press.

In most cases a l