The Rest of the Story - After Andrew Olmsted linked to "Late Night Thoughts of a Defeatist," Andrea Harris accused me, in his comments section, of inflating "one incident" - the probable drowning of Iraqi blogger Zeyad's cousin by American troops - into some kind of generalized pattern of abuse and mistreatment. This was surprising, since you would think Harris, whose grasp of prose style is as sure as her handle on geopolitics is shaky, had heard of synecdoche before.

The number of US brutality stories that appear far exceed the number that I link to. Sometimes I consider them poorly sourced. But some dead horses are just too painful to beat. I dislike running "Look! Our boys crossed the line again" items, to the point where one of my regular correspondents and fellow bloggers has accused me of being "soft on the military."

Everyone who reads the news knows there is a lot more than "one incident" out there. The latest is the Meet the new boss, same as the old boss report from Abu Ghraib prison. Here Saddam used to torture prisoners and here we've been doing it too. If it's not lunch time, you can see some of the pictures. (Link via Tacitus.)

This too is surely just "one incident" and "still under investigation," just like the rest of them. Mind you:

Gary Myers, the lawyer for one of the enlisted men charged, said in an interview that the military had treated the six soldiers as scapegoats and had failed to address adequately the responsibilities of senior commanders and intelligence personnel involved in the interrogations.

according to James Risen in the New York Times.

Of the pictures, Gary Farber writes

Horrific. Simply horrific. Enough to lead to Godwin's Law violation. Unbelievable. I SERIOUSLY warn you not to look at them unless you are prepared to have a reaction that is likely to include vomiting, bursting out in tears, and pounding your fist against the wall while cursing and screaming. I am not kidding. It's no different than looking at concentration camp pictures, except it's "us."

I would add something to that. Most of the Abu Ghraib photos don't have the look of "exposé pictures" - that is, furtively-snapped got to smuggle this out so people see what's going on shots. Many of these photos show American troops posing for the camera. Hamming it up. The soldiers shown aren't just indifferent to the abuse and indignity around them - they're grooving on it. To them, someone photographing the scene isn't "uh oh! evidence!" It's lessez les bontemps roulez!

Here's my own Godwin's Law violation: In Junior High, we had to watch films the Nazis shot of the concentration camps. One of the most disgusting viewing experiences you could ever endure, and should endure. But the thought I could never escape was: These people thought it was okay to film this. They weren't ashamed to have a record of themselves doing this.

Are we "as bad as Hitler?" No. Are we "as bad as Saddam Hussein?" No. Not So Far. That's not good enough!

The "right wing" critique of the sort of interventionism that has led to the current state of the Iraq war was always simply that it is incompatible with republican virtue. That case has been well and truly proved by events. We ship people to foreign countries to be tortured based on evidence extracted by torture in the first place. We torture foreigners in their own land, then carefully circumscribe the attribution of responsibility. We lock American citizens detained in the US away without counsel and maintain they should have no right to appeal or review. We excuse ourselves by saying we're not as bad as some departed despot.

We used to have more pride than that, and it was justified. I want it back.

(See Farber and Tacitus for more thoughts and links.)

Bargain Wins - Kelly Jane Torrance considers remainders, and links to Terry Teachout describing his emotions on learning of the remaindering of a recent book of his own. "He seems much more philosophical about it than I imagine I would be," she writes.

Harlan Ellison always said he couldn't wait until his books went out of print. He inserted a clause in every contract giving him the right of first refusal to purchase his own remainders from his publisher at the prevailing market rate. He then sold them directly at readings and conventions. The practical effect is to go from making around $3 on a $25 book to making $22 on the same sale. Of course, you have to be pretty darn sure that you can sell them or you've got a basement full of mildew farms and a sinking feeling. But a writer with a reputation and a following - like Teachout - can do pretty well on his publisher's dead stock.

Poets face a minor-league version (of course) of the same economies. Poets like to buy stock directly from their publishers at 40% off to sell at readings. All but the most famous poets will sell most of their books themselves, and make a much better margin on their direct sales than off royalties on such sales as they get from stores.

Helpful Pointer - You know how, sometimes, Flit is kind of quiet? Not today, boy. What've we got in the way of indispensible bloggery for you from our military correspondent north of the border? Let's see.

Item. You know the big Iraqi flag controversy this week? Here's a twist for you:

The new flag is the work of an Iraqi artist resident in London called Rifat Chadirji whose design was the best of those considered. He is also the brother of Nassir al-Chaderchi, the chairman of the IGC committee charged with choosing a new flag for Iraq.

Found via Flit.

Item. A pointer to much better military analysis than we get from the cheerleader blogs. (The casualty-ratio analysis that Flit excerpts is the best part. Some of the rest seems iffy.)

Item. A pithy summation of the stakes of the Maher Arar case:

Obviously, if names of random acquaintances screamed on the rack count as evidence of terrorism by a Canadian citizen, all of us who know or work with a Muslim are potentially suspect to similar persecution passing through the States; last I looked, that's just about everybody.

But really, I'm sure you don't have to be Canadian to get that deal. We're eligible too.

Item. Just about as much time as the Insight Magazine "expose" on how we really did find Saddam's weapons of . . . you know, is worth.

Item. And, mirabile dictu! a readable Mark Steyn column. And how would we know, if Flit didn't tell us?

Even Homer Nods Dept. - The normally excellent Andrew David Chamberlain tries to get all counterintuitive on us regarding taxi medallions, as libertarians and economists are wont to do. I hesitate to quarrel with my betters in these matters, but I think he makes some errors.

His goal is to leave aside the justice of the government monopoly for a minute and simply calculate whether a medallion is "worth" $300,000. His plan is to calculate the present value of the medallion based on future income, and his method the time-honored economist's procedure of pulling numbers out of his ass. I want to stress that this last is not, in itself, a bad thing. Enrico Fermi was famous for such maneuvers. We have to get our numbers from somewhere, and if, at the end, we're able to tie our results back to a known fact in the world, we'll decide our ass was a pretty good place to start.

Maybe I'm not telling this right.

Anyway, assuming a five percent ROI on whatever else the medallion purchaser could do with his money, and a twenty-year useful life for the medallion, Andrew calculates that the owner's future revenue from the medallion would have to be $28,300/year. Then he goes looking for a real world number to relate that too and discovers that the typical New York cabbie makes . . . $30,000!

Voila! Except. I don't think so.

Here are the things I think Andrew isn't taking into account. First, undervaluing the opportunity costs for the individual cabbie buying his own medallion. If I put $300K into real estate or mutual funds, I sit back and let the money roll in (my - roughly - five percent). I imagine my readers who actually invest in real estate are laughing bitterly right now. Okay, scratch real estate. Stick with a truly passive investment. If I put $300,000 into my own taxi medallion, I am in the freaking cab 12 hours a day, six days a week for those twenty years. I can't use my time to earn an income unrelated to my investment. This means I'm "spending" a whole lot more to get my $30,000 a year, and my "portfolio" - capital plus labor - is less diversified. Everything I do is tied up in that goddam cab. If my mutual fund tanks, I still have my day job. If my cab breaks down, I am any income until it's repaired. Be clear: by regulation, if you buy an individual medallion, you must drive your own cab. It's not transferrable the way the more expensive corporate medallion is.

I'm not going to push too hard on his twenty-year career guesstimate even though what little I know of contemporary cabbies suggests that estimate is high.

I see the New York Post says that drivers "can earn about $49,000 a year," which is more than $30,000, though "can" has the whiff of a pitch about it - it's a word you expect to see on telephone pole flyers about making money with your computer.

For comparison purposes, the average corporate medallion went for $689,655 in a separate auction (per the NYPost). The income calculation is straightforward - it's just the daily rental times 365. Google is not giving up a current rental figure easily. It's upward of $115 a day. Call it $125. That's an income of $45,625. Interestingly, Andrew's downloadable Excel decision model (see his item link above) tells me to stay the hell away from corporate taxi medallions once they go over $480k.

Complicating all of the above is the resale value. You can sell a medallion and realize capital gains, though that is true for the investments you might make instead.

Anyway, while it was outside of the scope of Andrew's item, remember: government-mandated scarcity, backed by force, is bad. Bad bad bad. Bad!

Big City Rackets - The "best" ones are run by the governments. See Radley Balko on New York's scandalous taxi medallion auction - a government-mandated cab scarcity program that benefits large (campaign-contributing) companies and penalizes both riders and would-be independent operators. Commenter Peter has some great info about just how the existing policy punishes the poor immigrants who drive for the major companies. (Scroll way down.)

One reader raises the curious objection that you couldn't completely deregulate big city cab service because "there is no efficient way for a consumer to price shop. Nor is there a way to prevent them from getting gouged." This makes little sense.

First, "gouged" is one of those inherently problematic terms. "Gouging" is what the City of New York is doing to would-be cabbies now, with the medallion system. It requires not just a monopoly of service provision but a monopoly of force. The NYC government can get away with their gouging because they allow taxi operators no exit from their system. That's gouging. A cabbie who has your luggage locked in the trunk and demands $10 more than you agreed to pay when you got in his vehicle is "gouging" - actually he's perpetrating fraud and blackmail. The guy who will only take you to the airport for $20 more than you feel like paying isn't obviously "gouging" you - your own expectations may simply be unreasonable.

There would still be ways to "price shop" in an unregulated cab market. Possibilities - probabilities, really - range from large companies with advertised rates to solo operators with prices painted on the outside of their cars to consumer guides in newspapers and websites to word of mouth. "Efficient?" The thing to keep in mind is that, in some circumstances, "price shopping" is itself both inefficient and immaterial. If I'm Here and I want to go There, and you stop and offer to convey me for, say, $10, it is either worth $10 to me at that moment or it's not. I may, in fact, be more interested in the possibility of saving $2 by waiting for another offer than I am in getting underway, Right Now. I may place a premium on speed. If the latter, my willingness to get in your cab rather than explore whether someone else might do it cheaper expresses itself in the difference between the $10 and the $8 or $7 I might have learned I could get away with paying if I waited.

In that case, it's more "efficient" to pay an amount I'm willing to part with right now than to spend extra time "price shopping." All kinds of factors influence my decision, from how much of a hurry I'm in and how tired I am to whether I'm getting reimbursed by someone.

This is no more mysterious or invidious than the fact that some people buy TV's for more than the lowest discounter sells them, or gas from a station that is more expensive than the one down the road.

At some point either the savings or just the comfort level of price shopping exceed the convenience of flying blind. People who take a lot of cabs will have an incentive to learn the most they can about price ranges and alternatives. It will be worth it to them to become knowledgeable shoppers and good bargainers.

Poetry Corner - Aaron Haspel tackles the problematic distinction between poetry and prose, with an eye toward figuring out which free verse counts as poetry and which doesn't. An interesting exercise, and worth it for the scansion he gives for a W.C. Williams effort. BUT, I think he's hung up on the wrong oppositionals. "Poetry" is an inherently problematic word - used sloppily it doesn't just describe, it enjoins. ("If I feel the top of my head has been taken off etc. Poetry in motion and like that.) The distinction one can make is between prose and verse, which is just writing in lines. Prose is what goes all the way to the end of the page.

I'm not sure we can get to a definition of "poetry," distinct from verse, that is not normative at bottom. Certainly the distinctions Aaron draws between his Williams example and the one he picks on by Frank O'Hara is normative - Aaron doesn't just find O'Hara "not poetic," he finds the unpoetical quality blameworthy.

If there is a distinction we can draw, the key probably lies in the etymologies - the root of "poet" is "maker," the root of prose is "straightforward." A poem is a made thing in some way that a passage of prose is not. Of course, prose is made, too, so we're looking for qualities of artifice that something we'll call poetry has and something we'll call prose doesn't. The issue has gone unsettled for a long time now, of course. But for most of that time we didn't have blogs!

Hey, What's Out of that Bottle? - Oh. The genie:

The increase in the estimate would underscore the strides North Korea has made in the past year as the Bush administration struggled to respond diplomatically while waging a war against Iraq in an unsuccessful effort to search for such weapons there.

Via Kevin Drum. Kevin makes an anti-Bush point, which is sort of fair. But the real point is, as I've said all along, nuclear non-proliferation is a fantasy. Any strategist worthy of the name needs to be spending less time thinking about how to stop nuclear proliferation and more time figuring out how to live with it.

The Rhythm of the Week - Blah blah blah gaming night tomorrow, blah blah blah, usual midweek slowdown, blah blah blah. I ain't saying there will be no blogging until Thursday - there will be. Just nothing heavy, most likely.

I apologize to people whose e-mail I'm sitting on. I'm getting through it as well as a dilettante can.

Leonard Dickens points out that I scanted the likely major role for South Korean troops in a post-invasion DPRK. He says, "Think Germany after 1989." True. I should have laid more stress on that. It works best if South Korea approves an invasion in the first place. They seem to have their own ideas on how to proceed - the "Sunshine policy" the US has done its best to quash. Since they're the ones with all the artillery tubes pointing at them, and the ones who will have to clean up any mess, if they want to pursue detente and gradual reform, we should let them.

Josh Buermann points me to the Nautilus Institute's DPRK Briefing Book. I haven't had the chance to dig into it yet, but I pass it along.

As I Was Saying - It's not like they can actually give him a medal or anything, but Bradley Burston in Haaretz says what I've maintained for years: wittingly or not, Mordechai Vanunu benefitted Israeli security by blowing the lid on its nuclear weapons program. If I were of a conspiratorial mindset, I'd want to see this solitary confinement cell he was in. But since I got over the Myth of the Omnicompetent Mossad years ago, I figure the Israeli government just got lucky.

Oddly amusing part of the article:

The restrictions include a ban on leaving Israel for a full year, a prohibition against speaking to foreign nationals unless granted prior permission, restrictions on where Vanunu can sleep and reside and an order barring him from Internet chats.

"And no internet chats, Vanunu."

"What's that?"

The man's been in prison since 1986, right? What does he know about the internet?

As a reminder, though it supposedly makes me a bad peacenik and a bad right wing isolationist, I think Israel should have nukes. I've said that before too.

(Link via -mail from Hiatal Moon.)

TANSTAAFL Alert - I hope I've conveyed a certain skepticism about the wisdom and propriety of our decision to take over Mesopotamia by force. I try to be clear. Still, I shake my head at the latest from Massoud Barzani, momentary president of the Iraqi Governing Council, who complains in the Herald:

MASSOUD Barzani, Iraq's governing council president, said yesterday that the US has only itself to blame for the military deadlock at Najaf and Falluja because it allowed "an army of liberation" to turn into "an army of occupation".

Barzani warned that the United States must not act softly in the besieged cities and give insurgents "the impression that they have the upper hand" but also must make sure that civilians are not harmed if military force is used.

We've actually heard a fair number of statements from both ordinary and prominent Iraqis, going back to the invasion phase of the war itself, that We'll be grateful to be liberated, but if you turn it into an occupation we'll hate you.

People. Really. Do you think anyone does this kind of thing for free? You think anybody goes all that way purely for the sake of what you want? People who are that naive ought to be given their own warblog - we can pay their Typepad fees out of the reconstruction money.

In addition to the gratitude, there's Mr. Barzani's shrewd advice for handling the uprisings in the West and South - "must not act softly" and "must make sure civilians are not harmed." This is like Dungeons and Dragons players telling the GM they intend to "move quickly and quietly down the corridor." Sure you do, fellas. Actually, it's like some kibitzer passing through the common room advising the D&D players: Hey guys! Tell the GM you're moving quickly and quietly! That way you get there fast but nobody hears you!

If you needed any proof that the IGC has no power, this is surely it.

Ironically, it also shows that the members of "the puppet council" are representative of ordinary Iraqis after all, and not just Iraqis. Barzani demands the same impossible combination of joys much of the rest of Iraq wants from an Uncle Sugar that gave them every impression that We are here to serve you. Heck, they are even representative of us. Don't occupy us! But don't leave! Cut our taxes! Pay for our prescriptions! And pie for dessert!

It's a dumb game nobody can win. The reason it sort of works here is that we can't escape the fact that we do it to ourselves. Our government isn't "us," it's our government. But the people who run it are, broadly speaking, from here, and we've established reliable procedures for seeing the backs of at least the most visible individual members. The Iraqis haven't the same sense of investment and the same salvaging sense of control. We're outsiders, we imposed ourselves on them and we intend to leave when we're good and ready

A surer formula for ingratitude has not been devised.

Adventures in Pictorial Biography - Kevin Michael Grace gives us the life of Mark Steyn.

Thinking Outside the Box - Hesiod suggests that we ought to be worried that Al Qaeda might assassinate Baby Sadr. It's actually a pretty good point.

Peninsula Woes - The Korea section of last week's Grand Strategy item, revisited. Note that I have already recanted my enthusiasm for promiscuously nuking the place.

Korea is hard.

In some ways it's not. On basic non-interventionist grounds, it's simple: leave the DPRK alone. Its mere existence threatens no US core interest. It poses the biggest threat to South Korea, a vastly richer and militarily more powerful country that, anyway, has been trying, with some success, to make nice with the North for a decade. It poses the next biggest threat to Japan. Three generations ago, it seemed wise to structure Japan so that it was incapable of defending itself. Surely that time has come to an end. And again, Japan clearly prefers the soft approach to Kim Jong-Il's squalid little gulag. There's a humanitarian case for "regime change" - I accept everything about that case except that the United States should do it.

Nor is the problem simply that North Korea is developing nuclear weapons. Desperately poor, tyrannical Communist regimes have had nukes before and we've had the last laugh on those bastards. The Soviet Union wilted like old lettuce and the PRC is busy exploring the frontiers of post-charismatic fascism - like Italy but nobody can give a speech. North Korea has supported terrorists, but so did the USSR. You could get into an argument whether North Korea is what international relations types call a status quo power or a "rogue state," however defined, but even that wouldn't settle the issue. The same theorists had long arguments about whether the USSR was a status quo power and, if so, just when it became one.

But even I worry about the DPRK. North Korea is a weapons proliferator, for sure, just like Pakistan. While most Stalinist and Maoist regimes have transitioned into their next phase peacefully, Crazy Kim just might be the guy to go out in the nuclear spasm we always feared - a smaller spasm, but a spasm nonetheless. But the big thing is that North Korea has already arguably tried to engage in nuclear blackmail and we've already essentially let him get away with it. Under Clinton, we pretty much paid the North not to pursue their nuke program. The exact sequence of events is in dispute, but at some point the DPRK had renewed their program and the US had slowed or stopped its agreed aid. The Bush Administration made a big show of ditching the Clinton-era plan, but quietly readopted an indistinguishable approach. All this, and, as Time Asia reported last summer:

Intelligence sources say North Korea is working its way up the ladder of nuclear sophistication by acquiring the ability to make not just crude, clumsy A-bombs but also warheads small enough to fit atop its missile arsena - and Pyongyang has already warned it would be willing to sell its expertise and nuclear material unless the U.S. delivers aid and security guarantees.

Now this last claim is surprisingly hard to pin down. I've been looking for a direct quote from a North Korean official that puts the threat baldly, but haven't found one. It's even outright disputed by David Wall in a Japan Times op-ed from May 2003, that pins it all on a willful misunderstanding by US Assistant Secretary of State Jack Kelly. The North later specifically disclaimed any "intention of transferring any means of that nuclear deterrence to other countries." And there's another reason to tentatively disconfirm the claim: StrategyPage treats it as fact.

Absent a clear attempt at blackmailing financial aid from the US by threatening to sell nuclear weapons if we don't pony up, my concerns about Korea diminish considerably. But if you accept the (here we go again!) "intelligence reports" on that score, then as a candidate for "preemptive self-defense," North Korea makes Saddam Hussein's Iraq look like Norway.

The only hard part is doing anything about it.

Thanks to the Iraq adventure, we've pretty much shot our offensive bolt for the next couple or few years. Philip Carter explains why in Slate. We are tapped out. We are maximally deployed. While out pre-po stocks of materiel in Asia remain untouched (so far), and could theoretically supply an invasion of the North, we got no troops to use those stocks. Our force in Korea is a tripwire force, not a force that can take the offensive. Put simply, they are there to die, and their deaths to necessitate a US military response - nuclear, under Cold War doctrine - to an invasion of the South.

You want to draft troops for your humanitarian intervention or preventive self-defense mission. Fine. See you in five years. It will take that long to add the 300,000 bodies that will enable us to send 100,000 to Korea for an attack, to procure weapons for them and move them over there, and to train them. This is on top of the 500,000 we're being urged to draft to put an extra 200,000 troops in Iraq, since, you may have heard, we must not cut and run. How long will it take us to train up 800,000 draftees to the level of the current all-volunteer force? Answer: You will never train 800,000 draftees up to the level of the current all-volunteer force.

So, institute draft; start training; increase the defense budget to buy cool gear for all the extra soldiers; start shipping soldiers to hilly, wooded Korea. And if you're Kim Jong-Il, what are you doing while this happens, assuming you are close to attaining nuclear weapons or have them already?

Yeah, I would too.

But let's paint a rosy scenario. Maybe Kim will be as dumb as Saddam Hussein, convinced that we were only going to bomb for awhile, so he won't react. And maybe Korean Army morale is as low as Iraqi Army morale was. Maybe psy-ops and liberal amounts of cash will get the bulk of forces to lay down their arms. It worked in Afghanistan and it worked in Iraq. Crucially, maybe we can buy off the frontier artillery units that, at least on paper, could make Seoul look like the Dresden Museum. Maybe the change in terrain from lots of flat desert to lots of woods and mountains won't discommode the Army's doctrine of Land-Air Battle. Maybe South Korea lets us launch and the PRC is so sick of Kim Jong-Il that they don't mind American troops coming all the way to the, uh, Yalu River.

Let's assume all that is true, because it might be. It's an awful lot of "might be" and too little "surely must," but it could happen.

Now we own North Korea. Desperately poor, terribly unfree North Korea. Population 22 million (roughly the same as Iraq's). The good news is that North Korea really does have no history of ethnic strife as in the Balkans. Maybe Paul Wolfowitz got his notes mixed up. Here's what the CIA Factbook has to say:

North Korea, one of the world's most centrally planned and isolated economies, faces desperate economic conditions. Industrial capital stock is nearly beyond repair as a result of years of underinvestment and spare parts shortages. Industrial and power output have declined in parallel. The nation has suffered its tenth year of food shortages because of a lack of arable land; collective farming; weather-related problems, including major drought in 2000; and chronic shortages of fertilizer and fuel. Massive international food aid deliveries have allowed the regime to escape mass starvation since 1995-96, but the population remains the victim of prolonged malnutrition and deteriorating living conditions. Large-scale military spending eats up resources needed for investment and civilian consumption. Recently, the regime has placed emphasis on earning hard currency, developing information technology, addressing power shortages, and attracting foreign aid, but in no way at the expense of relinquishing central control over key national assets or undergoing widespread market-oriented reforms. In 2003, heightened political tensions with key donor countries and general donor fatigue have held down the flow of desperately needed food aid and have threatened fuel aid as well.

Do I have to draw you a diagram?

Well, what a fine thing it would be to free such a people, right? Leave aside the old argument about whether it's proper for the United States to spend its young people and fisc for anything but the defense of American lives - you know where I stand on that. Tell me when the North Koreans would be free. I wouldn't anticipate nearly the level of violent resistance to the postwar occupation that we've seen in Iraq. The nightmare scenario is pathological docility - a people so beaten down by six decades of the most unreconstructed Communism that they hardly know how to begin anything approaching self-rule and individual enterprise.

I suspect that, as little as we knew about what life was really like in Iraq, we know even less about life in North Korea. We know it's pretty awful. But we know less than nothing about what that awfulness looks like to the Koreans themselves. We suffer, in other words, the classic information deficit that bedevils central planning of all sorts, but turned up to 11.

We've surely learned to be less confident in the face of ignorance, right?

So. A non-nuclear conquest of North Korea is not currently an option. Preparing for it will be visible, and a nuclear power will know we are coming to get it. South Korea will know the North will have a strong incentive to either attack first or just threaten to incinerate Seoul if it allows fresh US troops on ROK soil. And if we win, we gain custody of 22 million serfs.

This is why I say the hawks don't have a lot to offer on the Korean problem. This is surely why, as the Contra Costa Times article that Michael Cardell found put it, "Bush, who once labeled North Korea part of an "axis of evil," has not mentioned the country in public for weeks."

There is basically nothing to fall back on but deterrence. This is especially true because the three regional powers with the most to lose, the ROK, Japan and China, are currently dead set against stronger action. Whatever threat North Korea poses to us, it poses a bigger one to them (less to China). A US withdrawal from the Korean Peninsula underscores their responsibilities without harming our deterrent power. Our chances of gaining certain intelligence of Kim Jong-Il playing footsie with Islamist terrorists are surely as spotty as my various critics say. That's a problem for their own preferred approaches too, though. Having 30,000 troops in the DMZ probably isn't making our intelligence significantly better. And it's driving anti-American sentiment in the South. Since the South is surely our best source of human intelligence on the North, and since absence makes the heart grow fonder, we should go.

More on other sections throughout the week. No, that's not a threat. What do you mean?

A Fanboy's Ditto - Rather than write all kinds of stuff about the delight that is Superman:Secret Identity 4 of 4, I'll just point you to Johanna Draper Carlson's appreciation and urge you to buy it. And also note that the miniseries as a whole is a great example of the "literature of ethics." If you haven't read this - maybe you're not a regular comics reader - pick it up when it's collected.

Less, But Still Somewhat, Grand Strategies - Matthew Barganier weighs in with a UO-like program, which is not surprising. He wisely steers clear of saying anything about Korea.

Tonight I'll start in with responses to the reactions to specific topics of my original item. I figure on handling these largely piecemeal: Korea tonight and maybe Israel; NATO, "humiliation" and ancillary topics later in the week.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item. Weekly?? Weekly???? - Well, whatever. 168 pounds, up seven from my low of 161. (Or is it six from my low of 162? I don't remember.) Down 48 from my official high of 216. Anyway, I was pushing 170 a couple weeks ago so this is progress. The great thing about buying size 30 pants last fall is that they do not let you imagine that you aren't letting yourself go to hell again. They are the Jiminy Cricket of slacks.

This morning I did my first Heavyhands session since last fall. (I think.) How embarrassing will my report be? This embarrassing: I took the one-pound weights along. Considering that six months ago I was doing everything with five-pounders, that's pretty pathetic. But you gotta (re) start somewhere. I also walked a total of four miles this week, at lunchtime Monday and Tuesday.

Today's Heavyhands walk/run was the beginning of my marathon training in earnest. Your Talking Dog and I are in the Marine Corps Marathon lottery under the team name "Gym Set."

In other fitness blogs . . .

Oh Ye of (appropriately) Little Faith - Bruce Baugh so despaired of my ever taking these bulletins up again that he switched his own weekly reports from Saturdays to Mondays. Bruce is doing very well on a vegetarian Weight Watchers program. Since his current approach is so different from my own, I find his bulletins especially interesting.

Chicken Check - Johanna Draper Carlson ate at PF Chiang's the other night and had a crock pot chicken yesterday. I mean, presumably she didn't eat the whole crock pot chicken, but she prepared one. Not much exercise talk yet, but food coverage pretty much every day.

Speaking of not Updating - Michael Nielsen was doing very well as of February 8, but no reports since. Michael is following the "Give your weight in kilograms so it's smaller" plan. The big problem is that it increases your waist size at the same time. Michael's was up to 185.

That's what I got so far. I could swear these things used to be longer, but then, I'm really really tired. Been a big family-type Sunday with lots of errands and chores on top of that morning cardio session. I'm sneaking off to bed. More next we -elllllll, let's just see how it goes, shall we?

But What About the Truth? is Arthur Silber's question. A useful consideration of Richard Clarke's recent writing, and much more. Money quote from Clarke:

Once we recognize that the struggle within Islam - not a "clash of civilizations" between East and West - is the phenomenon with which we must grapple, we can begin to develop a strategy and tactics for doing so. It is a battle not only of bombs and bullets, but chiefly of ideas. It is a war that we are losing, as more and more of the Islamic world develops antipathy toward the United States and some even develop a respect for the jihadist movement.

I do not pretend to know the formula for winning that ideological war. But I do know that we cannot win it without significant help from our Muslim friends, and that many of our recent actions (chiefly the invasion of Iraq) have made it far more difficult to obtain that cooperation and to achieve credibility.

Cf. an excellent related item from Matthew Yglesias this morning. And we might as well throw in my item on "Muslim reconstruction" blogs from November 2002.

Oh the Irony - One of the knocks on the idea of partitioning Iraq is that the Kurds and Shiites get all the oil, leaving the Sunnis with nothing. This is not thought to be a recipe for regional harmony.

Of course, if 70%-Sunni Kuwait were "the 19th province of Iraq" and given over to the post-Iraq Sunni entity, then the Sunnis would have 10% of proven world reserves . . .

We've got to work on our timing. This running the world is tricky stuff.

Before We Begin II - I've gotten lots of good e-mails on the Grand Strategy brouhaha, and I hope to get to all of them, but this one from Matthew Hogan stands out:

I just saw Juan Cole talking about Perle shilling for Chalabi at a hearing he (Cole) was also testifying at. Now it may not have occurred to Cole until afterwards but if not,.. his writing reminded me of my grievance at too little nastiness -- because why didnt he say exactly that point at the hearing if he could: "Senators, my copanelist is ACTUALLY testifying in favor of turning Iraq into an undemocractic regime for the benefit of a favored man of dubious credibility." We need to say these things, not just carp about it.

I don't like granting the warbloggers the burden of proof. Our answer ought to be "My policy prescription was simply the obvious: to not run into a burning building in an unknown neighborhood while doused in gasoline. The results were easy to forsee and they happened. I don't NEED to explain what I woud have done differently because no one should have to offer an alternative or be an expert on firefighting to have a right to say DONT RUN INTO A BURNING BUILDING DOUSED IN GASOLINE! Do I have an idea what should be and have been done differently? Yes, but it doesnt matter. And if I do have a prescription, it doesnt matter if it's smart or not. It doesnt matter if my answer is a suggestion to do nothing. The point is YOU GUYS said: 'run into a burning buidling doused in gasoline.' I pointed the idiocy out. Correctly. The burden is on you Mr./Ms. Hawk to explain your idocy not make me have to disprove mine as on this issue I have been shown correct for the reasons I stated."

Don't claim or concede the burden of proof on Iraq.

I completely agree with Matt's general point: the hawks don't get to be the ones to judge what's wise or just or anything else. Their fancy that they are the thesis committee before whom the rest of us must defend our ideas and even our attitudes was arrogant before Iraq War Phase III. Now it's just absurd.

However. There are good reasons to wade into the question of How Do We Get There From Here. As a minor matter, some hawks are wavering and others have reversed themselves. While I wish this had happened sooner - soon enough to have prevented this mess in the first place - I have no interest in stuffing, um, non-premature doves into hairshirts. It's not practical, for one thing. Why make it hard for people to join your team? I think the most important political lesson I've learned in the last three years is that a libertarian must take his allies where he finds them - entangling alliances aren't for us, either! And a lot of the waverers and reversers are people I'll be genuinely glad to have "back" - either individuals of whom I've always been fond or simply types of people for whom I have instinctive sympathy.

Next, I'm serious about changing our country's approach to defense and foreign policy. I know what I'd like to see. The question is how to get there. This is not a matter of submitting ideas to the thesis committee for approval. Nor, really, is it a matter of laying down my own law. It is a tricky business to stop riding the tiger, and hegemony is a tiger. Libertarians want to give up all kinds of interventions, in foreign affairs, in the domestic economy, in social relations. The question is how to do so. If you decide to "get rid of social security," what form does that take? What about people very close to retirement age who made a lifetime of decisions on the assumption that it was there? Imagine you got elected mayor on a libertarian platform. What could you do, practically, about the drug war, given the imposing presence of federal law and law enforcement? In the absence of true legalization, would ratcheting down enforcement of what remains a fundamentally criminal enterprise in your bailiwick simply draw crooks from other jurisdictions? In the case of moving from willful empire to non-interventionism, there are a host of practical and moral problems.

One thing I'm certain of is that I am not smart enough to figure them all out myself. If any one person were, then we wouldn't need this cumbersome business of representative democracy. Putting ideas on the transition into the public sphere accomplishes a number of things. It brings more brains to the problem. It demonstrates to people of good will that it is possible to imagine an alternative to the current mess, that we needn't be prisoners of our own momentum.

Even carping criticisms can be useful, because they may spark useful ideas. For instance, my initial stab at the question of North Korea was pretty messed up. I'm not ashamed of this. As you may have noticed, the hawks haven't a clue what to do about North Korea either. We get a mixture of denial - at one point Glenn Reynolds judged that Kim Jong-Il, who actually has tried to use the prospect of nukes as blackmail, was somehow less dangerous than Saddam Hussein, who didn't even have nukes to play with - and fantasy (we'll invade!). The Clinton Administration came up with an unsatisfactory policy. The Bush Administration denounced it, but ended up, so far, pursuing the same approach. Which really is unsatisfactory. But by zeroing in on the Korea section, critics both fair-minded and foul have helped me rethink the matter, about which more in a later post.

Lastly, do not imagine that I overestimate either my own power or that of non-interventionists generally. We are weak now and have been weakening for more than a century. I am prey to the pessimistic counsels you might expect. There was a question Andy Kashdan asked two years ago this month. There is the ending of the I, Claudius miniseries, Claudius on his death bed conversing with the Sybil: And the Empire, he asks? Will the Empire fall? To which the Sybil replies

The Empire will go on and on and on.

Official US policy may continue to ignore me and my ilk as comfortably as it has done so far. Should that happen, we can at least have provided a counter-tradition that may be useful to whoever succeeds us, as someone will, a voice from the jester's chair reminding it didn't have to be this way.

Before We Begin there's something we need to get clear. I am speaking to the hawks here, especially the liberal ones.

You are the last people on Earth who get to say someone else is "naive," "impractical" or ignorant of how the world really works at this point. The absolute last.

I'm glad we cleared that up.

More this weekend, in the meantime, responses, from very different perspectives, from Diana Moon, Josh Buermann and Alan Sullivan.

Everybody's a Critic but some of them are temperate and judicious. Andrew Olmsted responds to my Grand Strategy, as does Jay Currie. Michael Cardwell offers a more Armed Liberalish rejoinder. Responses will be a matter for the weekend.

A Fanboy's Chick Check - This is exciting - Johanna Draper Carlson, legendary proprietor of Comics Worth Reading, has started a blog. She promises a focus on food, reading and writing, including, I suspect, a fair amount of fitness blogging. I'm really looking forward to following this one. The blog format will give her a place for the kind of stuff that doesn't fit in the well-crafted comics reviews that have been CWR's stock in trade - shorter things; longer, rambling things; non-comics-related things. See, for instance, the "Chick Check for This Week's Marvels."

A Mighty Wind - My Grand Strategy has drawn a - analysis? no; critique? not exactly; hm . . . reaction from the self-styled "Armed Liberal" of Winds of Change. (Maybe abreaction would be better.) It's my poetry night, so it'll be awhile before I can tackle such substance as the item contains. But for now, it strikes me that most of what you need to know is contained in his title, "Autarky in the USA." It's a revealing confusion of terms. "Autarky" is the deliberate policy of abjuring commerce with other countries or regions. My Grand Strategy calls for more trade and travel. (In fact, Lean Left took me to task for this very aspect.) But to a self-styled liberal hawk, if you decline to scatter your troops around the globe and attack other countries that have not attacked you, you're just not relating.

(Cf. Patrick Nielsen Hayden on the "war on world conservatism.")

Read All About It - Reader Jennifer Marcalino tips me to ReadPrint.com, an ad-free online library with similarities to Bartleby. What I cherish Bartleby for is the reference library, and ReadPrint doesn't have one, but I really like its layout for the classic works it does have.

The Rest of a Grand Strategy - Interesting reactions so far to the other day's Grand Strategy item. Two things stand out:

1) Boy did I overdo the nuking North Korea thing. The true deterrent is deposing Kim Jong-Il and there are non-nuclear ways to do that. If Kim Jong-Il hadn't outright threatened to sell his country's nukes to third parties, I wouldn't be so concerned about the People's Republic as a threat to the United States. But he did. You could make a case that this is the international relations equivalent to joking about a bomb in the airport ticket line, and say we treat those either too harshly or just right. But I agree with reader Madeleine Ferwerda that the initial version of my proposal touching North Korea was over the line and I plan to modify it accordingly.

2) Lots of people laughed, with varying degrees of bitterness, about the foreign student humanities requirements. It's interesting that this one is such a hot button, since I think it's the section I most heavily qualified in the proposal itself. Certain Agitator commenters took issue with the notion that America's universities are "the glory of our educational system." Hey, I can relate. But: they're a damn site better than the secondary schools; they are clearly a draw, since foreigners flock to them, particularly at the post-graduate level. I might as easily have said "America's graduate schools are the glory . . . "

Also, many people seem to have mistaken my meaning about the value of the humanities course requirements, pointing out that the average collegiate American Studies course is no place to indoctrinate one in love for the American System. True but not the point. The idea is to put foreign students in classes where they must tackle cultural and political issues with people from backgrounds other than their own. And I'd be as happy if they studied Dostoyevsky as Tocqueville.

In any case, I am not without ideological qualms about such a grand federal mandate. Consider it an optional part of the Great Disengagement. Let's face it, a tiny proportion of the Muslim students who come to the US become terrorists, and the proportion of those few who would be saved from sin by my educational scheme is likely to be pretty small.

But as for the rest of it, boy am I smart! Do what I say, now!

"It's hard to say which of these sides is more contemptible" - Tim Cavanaugh tells us what he really thinks about the equivocal second thoughts of certain hawks and their hawkish critics.

Boy, do I understand the impulse. I also hear a little "Better late than never" voice in my head. But a lot of the second-thoughters really are going in vile directions, wanting to impose a strong man against the locals' will. They don't seem to have repented of intervention, just the (imagined) kinder, gentler version. I suppose they also serve, if they help well-intentioned "humanitarian" interventionists see how their bright hopes inevitably crash.

I've been toying with the idea that Iraq presents a classic Pick Two Out of Three situation, a la "fast, cheap and good." Iraq's three would be Stable, Democratic and Pro-American. Define "stable" as unitary and mostly free of civil strife, "democratic" as regular change of government by free and fair elections and "Pro-American" as allowing enduring bases, allowing those bases to be used to pressure or conquer other countries in the region and taking America's lead on issues touching Israel. It would be very revealing which two the various interventionist factions would choose if forced. (That one in the middle looks vulnerable!)

Problem is, I can't convince myself that two out of three are possible.

Non-Iraq-Free Blogwatch Item - Ginmar has the latest from the front.

Tacitus says we're too nice re Fallujah. Tex says we're just losing. I say, OUTLOOK UNCLEAR TRY AGAIN LATER.

The Command Post discovers that, per the Jerusalem Post, a French insurance company will "compensate Jews who owned property in Iraq and fled in the early 1950s, a precedent that could pave the way for reparations for some 850,000 Jews who left Arab countries, officials said Tuesday."

Very Quickie Blogwatch - Daniel Drezner suggests a hopeful irony regarding the FCC's sudden enthusiasm for massive fines.

Courtney Knapp has your ice cream futures report.

Cafe Hayek ponders radical calorie restriction diets. For my tastes (as it were), there's a huge difference between 1150 and 1950 calories a day, though.

Andrew David Chamberlain considers how not to be boring about the boring subject of government regulation.

Brett Peters applies the "Don't Tread on Me" principle, with followup links to advice on exerminating the brutes..

PJ Doland reports that Hellboy's success means the Watchmen movie gets the green light. W00t!

Did I use "W00t" right?

Help a Blogger Out - If there's a link to the "final" Sunday Peanuts cartoon on the web, I can't find it. This is the one from early 2000 with Peppermint Patty in the rain after the ball game that is not funny at all - it is rather one of the great achievements in utter bleakness. It may not actually have been the final original-content Peanuts color strip; it just felt that way. If your Internet Fu exceeds my own, and you wish to demonstrate it by sending me a link, I'd be grateful.

(I realize that a browser screen probably doesn't do the cartoon justice. Still, it would be worth having a link to point people to when I want to discuss it. And yes, I realize that the last 30-odd years of Peanuts were not funny at all. This was a very different kind of not funny.)

Now You Can't Say You Didn't Get the Memo - Dig in. It'll probably be Thursday until I've turned it into digestible blog bits. You might want to read Jason Vest's article on same too.

How Waffle - From the Borowitz Report:

OSAMA: PIRACY THREATENS TERROR-TAPE INDUSTRY

Bin Laden Bemoans Free Downloads of Spooky Pronouncements

(I'll grant you that the piece goes downhill somewhat after the subhed.)

Pet 'raq's - Proving that notions of the speed of "internet time" are exaggerated, Matthew Barganier tackles the "pet Iraqi" phenomenon in his latest column. (I should talk about speed, right?) There's a bit of ahistoricism in his account of the Salam Pax Phenomenon - Salam was never universally admired by hawkish bloggers. And by restricting himself to a Salam-Zeyad contrast, he misses how hawkish affections have moved on to even more congenial bloggers like the Iraq the Model folks, whose very site name heralds acceptance of the expansive "reverse domino" theory of Arab democratization. But these days I understand how word count limits work a lot better than I used to. There's just never enough time to cover everything.

Stay Tuned - Our Man Deeds is heading home. He promises

NLT the 23d of April, I hope to publish a two part After Action Report of my time with CPA. What I thought was good, what was bad and what was plain Ugly.

I look forward to reading it. My hope is that, back home, he'll feel free to be a bit more candid than a lot of his on-the-scene blogging struck me.

Late Night Mail to a Defeatist - Yeah, I'm a week late. I apologize. But there's some good stuff commenting on last week's "Late Night Thoughts."

From Sean T. Collins:

Jim, that really was some post, and I do know how you feel. I just wonder why doves feel this way about human suffering through violence when the U.S. has gotten involved, but such 30-graf long dark posts of the soul are nowhere to be found when it's Saddam Hussein or whoever else who's doing the killing. Hussein, of course, would not be clawing the ground to prevent himself from being dragged into Grozny. He'd go directly to Grozny, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. I look at our current conflict with a Shiite rebellion, and I look at Saddam's conflict with a Shiite rebellion from the early 90s, and I can't understand how anyone can see the former as being somehow worse than the latter

I've been pretty clear all along that I care much more about the United States than any other country, and that my principle is Hippocratic. Sins of omission are less malign than those of commission. Nor am I consoled by the prospect of inserting "not as bad as Saddam Hussein" into the Pledge of Allegiance. And keep in mind that it's early days yet. If we really do resolve to do whatever it takes to win, who knows where we end up? On his own blog, Sean makes it clear how wrongheaded he finds my parochialism:

Though I do not lose sleep over the death of fascist myrmidons, I also do not think that the life of one American is of more inherent value than the life of one innocent Iraqi or Rwandan or Afghan.

He says a lot more, ending by comparing America's duty to that of Christ himself. In other words, a political messiah complex. From there it's a short distance to a martyr complex. Sean's call to continually spend American blood and treasure until some imagined final victory over evil is the international relations version of co-dependency.

Richard Puchalsky writes

I know that this moment in history feels really bad, but you should try to stop giving yourself so much responsibility just so you can agonize over it. You spoke out against the war from the start, but there was no way of stopping it -- the Republicans controlled the Presidency, Senate, House, and Supreme Court, and majority American opinion is divided between the apathetic and the jingoistic. Nor will you have any ability to speed the ending of the war. That will happen as soon as the American middle class starts to feel that its sons may have something to lose, or that they are losing too much financially. At that time they will seize on the writings of a few token peaceniks, which they will suddenly find themselves in agreement with, so that they won't have to feel bad about supporting the war at long as it was other people's families dying. But if there were no currently writing token peaceniks, I'm sure that they could get by on exhuming Gandhi or Jesus or somebody.

Hey, I feel better now!

Aziz Poonawalla offered a personal reflection:

I've hardly been able to marshal my own thoughts recently. I've begun to question my own assumptions, and extricate my own interests. Wouldnt it be great, as an American Shi'a, to fly into Baghdad as easily as I can London, take a taxi to Karbala, and pay my respects to Imam Husain AS? Wouldn't it be great if an Arab democracy existed to give lie to all the arguments of non-believing Clash-of-Civilizations-clutching self-proclaimed experts on my faith? Wouldn't it be wonderful if an Arab Renaissance were to blossom?

I never, not once, believed the neocons' domino-theory. But it is seductive enough to have made me perhaps more willing than I should have to grant benefit of the doubt to the good faith of its architects.

More on his own blog.

About the issue of guerrillas targeting American troops to aggravate antiwar sentiment in the US, Diana Moon writes

Let’s be thankful that the “enemy” in Iraq isn’t terribly hip to this, as the Vietnamese WERE. They were aware of the fact that the free press of the US and the antiwar movement aided their cause. This is something I haven’t wanted to write about on my blog (I did glance upon it only to turn back) because it’s true. It’s not the main reason for sagging morale but it certainly contributes. If the Arabs only understood this (the Pals sort of do, but not really), they would be much more formidable. They really are amateurs.

Steve Wolfson writes

just the other day i was thinking about the reaction of right wingers if the roles were reversed. if the US was the weaker country that is being "liberated" by a stronger country who believes that its ways are better than the USA ways, that they are going to show us what is good for us because they know better than we do, whether we like it or not. my god, the U.S. right wing would be leading the charge of resistance and calling the liberals among us who wanted to negotiate with "the enemy, the oppressors" traitors and cowards. they would be fighting in the name of Jesus, and everything that we value about our American ways. oh my god, the "liberators" would be calling these right wing folks, who see themselves as patriots of the homeland, why they would be calling them "terrorists" and "thugs"! can you BELIEVE the nerve of those liberators, distorting our noble ends to label us as terrorists and thugs?

One of my regular correspondents today was complaining about the war being supported by "Red Staters." The irony is that most of the world consists of "Red States." They just don't happen to have Americans in them.

Tacitus tells me stuff I didn't know:

I know that this is focusing on a detail rather than the actual point of your piece, but this awoke the nitpicker in me:

"Artillery is not a precision weapon...."

Not in Russian hands, it's not. But the things we can do with artillery today are amazing. One of the most fascinating days of my brief Army career was Indirect Fire Day at Fort Bragg back in summer 1996. Artillery units attached to the 82nd Airborne spent the day showing us how they could hit pretty much anything they wanted to, EXACTLY on target, with various rounds calibrated to do varying amounts of damage. Surprisingly, modern technology (GPS married to computing power) has transformed artillery into the same sort of pinpoint weapon as "smart" bombs. I'm sure it's only improved in the past eight years.

This isn't to say it's infallible or somehow clean, but I point it out to say that I wouldn't regard American resort to artillery with the same foreboding as, say, Russian resort to artillery. There's a massive qualitative difference.

A useful point, and, for an old wargaming geek, cool. In further correspondence, Tacitus agreed that "Of course there are more collateral damage issues with any heavy weaponry than there would be with small arms."

Robert Theron Brockman:

We aren't sacrificing the soldiers. George Bush isn't sacrificing the soldiers. The soldiers are sacrificing themselves. The US has an all-volunteer military. Each and every one of those soldiers voluntarily swore an oath to uphold and defend the constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. Each one of those soldiers broke that oath by engaging in war without constitutional authorization. "Just following orders" doesn't help them here -- their loyalty is supposed to be to the Constitution, not the President or their CO.

Now these troops are 10000 miles from home, trying to impose a government on the locals without the consent of the governed. Things are starting to go bad, and both US troops and Iraqi civilians are dying. What a surprise.
I wonder if these troops, having become "experienced in urban pacification," won't later be used to enforce the coming fascism in the US that Arthur Silber keeps talking about.

Recently I had a very ugly exchange with Dr. Palmer over at CATO. In essence, I proposed that maybe we'd all be better off if these dishonorable men with machineguns didn't come home, if the desert swallowed them up as a lesson to others that blind obedience of authority over principles has consequences. It wasn't a very nice thing to say, but for the life of me I can't convince myself that these soldiers aren't fully responsible for what's happened here -- that the "support the troops" stuff isn't just a bunch of crap. (It would be different if this war had been declared properly, as Ron Paul attempted. But this would have required Congress to take responsibility. As if that were likely.)

In light of the above, if you can explain to me logically why I should feel sorry for these soldiers, I shall be much obliged.

I'd feel more inclined to bring logic to bear if the proposition weren't so inherently galling: Presidents spend 55 years flouting the plain meaning of the Constitution; legislators spend 55 years letting them get away with it; courts resolutely run away from the issue, and I'm supposed to expect profiles in courage from the soldiers themselves? Man, the shit really does roll downhill.

Truth is, I would be thrilled if at least one soldier pulled a Michael New over the constitutionality of the sorts of wars Presidents get us into these days. (And I have no beef with Michael New himself, by the way.) But there's precious little encouraging any of them to take that step. The Supreme Court has had numerous opportunities to declare unilateral Presidential wars unconstitutional. Meanwhile, Gulf War Phase III comes closer to having real congressional authorization than any intervention since Gulf War Phase I. Any Congressman or Senator who wasn't willfully naive knew perfectly well he was voting in October 2003 to let George Bush invade.

Wayne Wides writes

I'm writing to point out that even if the worst does come to pass in this situation, I wish to point out that there is still a segment of Iraq that supports the American presence - the Kurds.

It's why I argued on my own weblog that if the situation worsens something can still be salvaged by effectively Balkanizing Iraq itself into three states - a Sunni one, a Shi'ite one and a Kurd one

I have nothing particular against Iraq balkanizing. Us balkanizing it for them is somewhat problematic. That's Iraqi business. But Wayne's point about the Kurds dovetails with Karen Kwiatkowski's own suggestions of ways forward in her latest Military Week column.

Tomorrow: Crux mail and more, including some "manual Defeatist trackbacks."

Department of Plans - Arkhangel responds to criticism from various angles. Useful, especially his clarification of what he means by "training" Iraqi security forces.

A Grand Strategy for the Rest - The Unqualified Offerings Plan, not just for Iraq but for terrorism generally:

1) Stop borrowing trouble.

2) "Wait" for the people behind the trouble we've already borrowed to get old and tired or die off outright.

No, they don't "hate us because we're free." Or put it this way, they may hate us because we're free, but very, very, very few people can get worked up enough about our freedom to dedicate themselves to ending it - absent concrete American interference in their business. There's a big difference between hating someone and troubling to cross the world to try to kick their ass.

I want to be perfectly clear that this policy does not instantly remove all dangers. The first law of organizations is self-perpetuation. The existing anti-American terrorist organizations, like Al Qaeda, are not going to call off their jihad just because we pull out of Iraq and Saudi Arabia and stop writing blank checks to the Likud. But absent fresh humiliations, fewer and fewer young Muslim men will find the tired old call to yet more jihad worth heeding.

"Wait" is in scare quotes because it sounds more passive than the policy I intend. For one thing, I would continue to harry the men and organization behind the September 2001 atrocities to the ends of the earth. "Don't Tread on Me" is my policy, and that's what Al Qaeda did. Bite back hard. At the same time, don't pretend that everyone on earth doesn't respond to the same impulse - go tromping in the dens of others and they will bite back too. This country's conservatives of old were smarter about this kind of thing: they didn't think they were the only conservatives in the world. They didn't imagine that you could deploy troops in 150-odd countries without provoking a reaction. They wouldn't imagine that the reaction was noble, but they respected the force of nature that is the essential conservatism of the planet.

For another thing, I believe the American system, as conceived if not always as practiced, is deeply attractive. So let's be American. Let's be free, for one thing. Kill the excresences on the Constitution the current administration as brought forth - the PATRIOT Act, the evisceration of habeas corpus, the asserted power to unreviewably revoke citizenship and declare someone an enemy combatant. Let's trade and travel and welcome visitors to our shores. Let us, in other words, have the faith that we are our own best advertisement. Thence comes your Muslim reformation.

About those visitors. An obvious trend presents itself: young Muslim students who come to the West for a specifcally technical education, who become radicalized politically by a poisonous combination of culture shock, homesickness, youthful hormones and - ironically - insularity (isolating themselves among other young Muslim men). America's university's are the glory of our educational system. And from what I've read, our graduate technical departments depend on a steady stream of foreign students to keep afloat. But I'd make it a requirement of a student visa that recipients take a heavy dose of humanities, especially American studies courses. I'd also have the State Department screen applicants better, though this would probably be of limited use. (I think the salient problem is students who are moderate at home and become radicals here.) Will cramming humanistic education down the throats of engineering students do any good? The college I dropped out of thinks so. MIT always bragged that it had the toughest humanities requirements of any elite school, glossing over the fact that it had to: it's the only way most of its students would take those courses. I don't for a moment believe the humanities requirement would convince every foreign student to love the United States. But it will help engage them with American culture in an open, nonviolent way. If nothing else, it's an opportunity to let off steam.

What about the oil? Buy it, same as we do now. Who's not going to want to sell it to us? Saddam Hussein himself would have sold us all the oil we could use, absent sanctions. You can't eat the stuff. It doesn't even make a good salad dressing.

What about Iraq? Bring the major players together in one room - anyone with a constituency. Tell them, "fellas, we're out of here in time for Christmas. Start talking. You've got a chance to make your country something much better than you could have imagined. Or you can turn it into hell on earth. It'll be your doing one way or another." Stop paying non-Iraqis to do work Iraqis can do.

Who will defend Iraq against its neighbors? Look at the place now. If you were the neighbors, would you want to bite that off? The real military estimated it would take a half-million US troops to secure the joint. You think Iran or Syria or Turkey dare to even try to scrape up that kind of manpower?

What if Iraq becomes a weak state complete with Al Qaeda training camps and weapons labs? See scare quotes around "wait" and the part about harrying the people behind the attacks on the US to the ends of the earth, above. If camps set up, we pound hell out of them. It's not like we don't know how to bomb Iraq.

What About Israel and the Palestinians? Pull them in and tell them two things. 1) Israel will be paying its own way from now on. They can have what military equipment they can buy. 2) But we also will not be restraining them from any action they may wish to take to safeguard what they imagine to be their security. If they really want to kill Yasser Arafat, we're not going to stop them. If they want to nuke Tehran, that's Tehran's lookout. Concentrates the mind. But Israel will have to stand on its own two feet, financially and politically. If Israel can't survive as an independent country without ceaseless American financial aid and political backing, then Israel has failed as a refuge for the Jewish people - it's simply a different version of the very dependence on powerful patrons that the early Zionists were trying to get beyond. I think Israel can survive, with prudent leadership. Ironically, the key to the survival of the Jewish people is actually the diaspora: it's much harder to exterminate the Jews if they aren't conveniently gathered in one place.

Some have feared that anti-Israeli terror groups would make the US actually evicting Israel's Jews by armed force the price of peace. We would refuse, of course, and destroy those groups if they messed with us. See "Don't Tread on Me," above.

What about cooperation against international terror? I'm for it. For instance, I favor using American law to interdict fundraising and organizing for Hamas, Lashkar, the Tamil Tigers and the IRA within the United States. "Terrorism" will be strictly defined as war crimes by non-state actors, so say that we'll suppress fundraising for any armed rebellion - it's bad international relations juju. For the duration of our Al Qaeda problem, I'd keep bases at Diego Garcia, in Turkey, Oman and Qatar and Afghanistan. I'd be willing to provide American troops to help overmatched foreign governments against anti-American terror groups in their midst, but I'd do due diligence to make sure we weren't just being suckered into settling someone else's quarrel for them.

What about NATO? Remember when you were a kid, and you had a really good friend, so you started hanging out together constantly, and staying over at each other's house all the time and suddenly you realized you were really getting on each other's nerves? That's us and continental Europe. And the way Iraq is going, I think there's a good chance it's us and Great Britain within one to five years. We all need some quiet time to ourselves, in a politico-military way.

What about Korea? Something like 50% of the South Korean population lives within artillery range of the North. I don't recall recommending that settlement pattern, do you? On the theory that South Koreans aren't stupid, I take it to indicate their true estimate of the danger from the North. South Korea is a rich, powerful country that can afford as much defense as it needs. Nevertheless, North Korea has to be watched carefully, since it is desperately poor and either on the verge of becoming a nuclear power or already one. We tell Kim Jong-Il that if he so much as glances in the direction of anyone remotely associated with Osama bin Laden, including the Pakistani ISI or the "government" of Saudi Arabia, we will make his country look like a jamboree of Osirak reenactors. And if we get the idea that he's trying to sell a nuke, we will provide him more than one of our own.

That's more or less the Grand Disengagement at a high level. Like I said, I see it taking a generation for the aftershocks to subside. That is, I'm solving the terror problem in no more time than the "reconstruct the entire Middle East" hawks, for a lot less money, with a lot less ammo and preserving a lot more freedom here. If they hate us because we're free, they'll really fucking hate us when I'm done.

What if there's another catastrophic terror attack? That will really suck. It will be important to summon up the resolve to stay the course if that happens. Look, there are no guarantees in life. And if we get attacked tomorrow, do you think the uberhawks will tell you that this proves they were wrong all along? No. They'll say it proves how urgent it is that we reconstruct the entire Middle East and probably Venezuela when we get a chance, and they'll remind us that it's going to take a generation. Like I said before, Fine, but then non-interventionism gets a generation too.

It takes time for things to play out. The atrocities of September 11, 2001, were in many ways the culmination of two taste treats that decidedly did not go together - the US buildup of militant Islam against the Soviet Union in the latter days of the Cold War and Phase I and II of the US War Against Iraq. (Now in Phase IV.) Phase III of the Iraq War - the invasion that began in March 2003 - was the sort of hideous foreign policy mistake that a country simply can't avoid paying for in numerous ways. Pulling out will lead to a loss of prestige and will embolden our enemies. For a time. Dragging things out another year or five will cost even more prestige and foster even more emboldening. But we are not looking at the Apocalypse either. Losing Vietnam cost us prestige and emboldened our enemies. Within five years we were tightly cooperating with one of those enemies (China) against the other, and within 15, the other (the USSR) was no more. We cut and ran and won. The Soviet Union stayed the course in Afghanistan and bled to death.

UPDATE: Now with less promiscuous nuking of North Korea. See modifications item from 4/21/04.

The Military Side of War, the Clarification - Look folks, I've been writing a lot about the supply situation, which I think looks bad. "Bad" in this case means a serious threat to take the lives of many US troops. This doesn't make me happy. Actually, it scares the crap out of me.

Of course, for it to even be a problem, there would have to be an actual war, as opposed to just proper or improper attitudes and stances toward a war and discussions of who has which. Maybe I'm getting worked up over nothing.

Must - Control - Snark - of - Death! - From the BBC:

[Tony Blair] insisted that the 30 June deadline for handing back power to the people of Iraq would remain.

Advice to any Iraqi readers: Do not get anywhere near Paul Bremer on June 29th.

But perhaps there is one man adequate to the task.

The Military Side of War, the Continuing Series - Tacitus finds a Reuters report on continuing trouble along our lifelines. Tac's notes a proposed solution: "declare the outbound highways off-limits to civilian traffic, and then feel free to blow away what remains." In addition to the military and moral difficulties with this approach that he himself identifies, it would pretty much kill the import/export traffic vital to the reconstruction effort, wouldn't it? (Remember Iraqi reconstruction?)

Guys, I meant the Stalingrad comparison metaphorically. But you know, this doesn't look so good.

UPDATE: By e-mail, Tacitus confirms something I surmised and meant to put in this item: "reconstruction" traffic is already at a standstill because of the uprising itself. Good point. Is that also true for foreign trade generally, not just KBR convoys but ordinary international commerce? Iraq is not an autarky.

Touched by Arkhangel - More on Arkhangel's "Victory" item of the other day. As I said, this is a thoughtful, substantive detailed plan. And it's doomed, for all kinds of reasons. Matthew Yglesias explains one reason: too much of the plan constitutes "Shit that Ain't Gonna Happen." And Arkhangel commenter and frequent UO correspondent Rich Puchalsky explains why that's just as well:

The proposal is a tissue of fantasies. Let me take them in order:

Increase Troop Strength: Sending in lots of poorly trained conscripts results in -- Grozny.

Intense Cultural Training: A 5 day (!) course is supposed to make a difference?? Look, there's a reason why real life training takes longer.

Mixing It Up With the Locals: AKA "presenting lots of targets for the guerrilas" and soon, as the conscripts react with paranoia and rampant violence, AKA "pissing off the locals".

Properly Training Iraqi Security Forces: to be what, Quisling-led death squads? What kind of proper training helps someone support the occupation of their country and shoot their own people?

Reconstructing Infrastructure: the reason it's in bad shape is because people keep blowing it up, not because of investment problems.

Dismantling the Militias: let's see -- there is no order in the country, no source of legitimate political power, and you want people to communally disarm themselves?

We Have to Give Iraqis a Stake in Their Destiny: we can do that by getting out of their country.

I largely agree with Rich's take. Where I disagree, it's in an arguably more pessimistic (from the perspective of US "victory") direction. Frex, we appear to be, unwittingly, training Iraqi security forces to be an at least partially-effective nationalist force - that is, there seems to be a real limit to what they'll do for us. I would also say there's no way we can "dismantle" the militias. The most we could hope for is that the militias voluntarily disband. There is no way, no way in hell, we can disarm the militias by force. Not with the troops we have now, not with the 200-300,000 troops of Arkhangel's dreams.

I am also, for the record, not sanguine about what happens after a US pullout - I am not sure that it leads to Iraqi factions feeling a stake in their common destiny rather than commencing a war of all against all. Pulling out is a bad option, strategically and morally. It's also, I am convinced, the least bad option.

There's another huge problem with the Arkhangel Plan: timing. To pass the laws and implementing legislation relating to a combatant and non-combatant draft, staff the bureaucracies, induct the recruits and train them to a passable level is the work of, at a high-level guesstimate, one to two years. In which time, much happens in Iraq and none of it good.

The arguably more practical approach is to immediately denude pretty much the entire rest of the world of US troops and shift everything into Mesopotamia and Afghanistan - including our Korean troops. Ironically, from a libertarian perspective, this has a certain appeal, since on the surface it means going from troops in 150-odd countries to troops in a half dozen or so (Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan (shh!), Turkey and a couple of 'stans) The anti-interventionist can even hope that a few countries will be so ticked off at losing their cohort that they'll refuse to let us back in afterward.. It's not that simple, of course. Various bases between here and there - in Central and Eastern Europe particularly - are important links in the supply chain. And the wheels of diplomacy grind slow. In any case, every regular Flit reader knows you need two troops at home to support one troop abroad, and of every three troops in theater, two exist to enable the third guy to actually fight. (Which also means that Arkhangel can only double troop strength in Iraq if he increases the Army and Marines total strength by a half million, not a mere 150-200,000.)

Note that the shifting deployments strategy suffers from many of the same training deficiencies that Rich Puchalsky identifies.

So the Arkhangel Plan is a non-starter and wouldn't work if it weren't a non-starter. What makes Arkhangel so important then, as an analyst? He grasps the scale of the problem. He troubles to actually define victory, as distinct from somehow "not losing," and he shows what would have to happen to achieve said victory. If what has to happen is too outlandish to credit, that tells you something important.

The Military Side of War Cont. - AP reports that

The U.S. military closed down two major highways into Baghdad, the latest disruption caused by intensified attacks by anti-U.S. insurgents.

Remember, people: "Amateurs talk strategy; generals talk logistics."

(Via Obsidian Wings.)

You're Fired - Khidir Hamza doesn't get to be the Apprentice any more:

After the war, Dr Hamza was rewarded, to the distress of many Iraqi scientists, with a well-paid job as the senior advisor to the Ministry of Science and Technology. Appointed by the Coalition Provisional Authority, he had partial control of Iraq's nuclear and military industries.

It was not a successful appointment, according to sources within the ministry. Dr Hamza seldom turned up for work. He obstructed others from doing their jobs. On 4 March, his contract was not renewed by the CPA. It is now trying to evict him from his house in the heavily guarded "Green Zone" where the CPA has its headquarters. He could not be contacted by The Independent but is believed to have taken up a job with a US company.

Find out which one and sell it short.

Warblogging IV: Returning of the Snark - This just in, from the Borowitz Report:

CHENEY DEMANDS PAY RAISE FOR DOING BUSH'S VOICE

Joins 'Simpsons' Actors on Picket Line

Vice President Dick Cheney today joined the cast of the animated series "The Simpsons" on the picket line, demanding a substantial pay raise for doing the voice of President George W. Bush.

"Vice President Cheney has been providing the voice of President Bush since January of 2001," a spokesman for the Vice President told reporters. "All he wants is a salary that reflects that contribution."

Hat tip: Mrs. Offering.

Warblogging III - The argument that "the Arabs" or "Muslims" respect strength and strength alone never made much sense to me. Mark Steyn writes that most of them just want to be on the winning side, which must surely mean that the vast majority of Palestinians want to be on Israel's side, right, since Israel's been kicking their butts for 55 years? And Al Jazeera must be full of admiring profiles of Israeli and US puissance.

But the latest counterfactual must be Fallujah and Najaf. In Fallujah the insurgents are holding their own, but in Najaf, the Sadrists clearly still have the upper hand. But Fallujah is also getting the crap pounded out of it, bit by bit, and it's Fallujah that is the cause celebre. Given arguably successful defiance of the Occupation at two different sites, the one that resonates is the one where we're Showing the Most Resolve^TM.

What's it mean? It's the humilation, stupid.

Warblogging II - Stayed home yesterday to do taxes and discovered that our regular mailman is back on his route - home from Iraq on his reserve stint. Where in Iraq? Fallujah. I'm glad he's back, my neighbors are glad he's back (I've talked to them about it), he's glad he's back, and we hope he's back for good.

Thousands of other Americans are not back from Fallujah. His being back means that someone else has to be there (at least by the logic of intervention). We're glad anyway, which means we're glad someone we know slightly is out of a danger that someone we don't know at all is in. Why is that? The answer is the beginning of political wisdom.

Warblogging I - At Better Angels of Our Nature (fast becoming the most important blog going), Arkhangel lays out his plan for winning in Iraq, as opposed to just not losing. It is substantial and thoughtful, probably the single best real plan I've seen, and I'd like to say more about it tonight or this weekend. In the meantime, I suspect it's doomed. Not just because it requires scraping up 300,000 military personnel either. It relies on flooding Iraq with non-combatant civil affairs personnel - Peace Corps equivalents acquired via draft - that the insurgents have already made it a priority to drive away via kidnapping and murder.

Here's what we know about the O.G. among the resistance: they are perfectly willing to turn Iraq into Greater Lebanon to get the US out. (The Lebanon of the early 1980s.) That means, first, making every foreigner a target. The American public reaction when unarmed, drafted 20-year-old reconstruction personnel start buying it from drive-byes and car bombs will, well, test that resolve the hawks are always adducing.

But maybe that's just me. And Arkhangel has at least given us more than "stay the course," which is a real service. You're certainly not going to get that kind of thing from the government.

Mission Accomplished - Ah, taxes. I put them off and put them off and by the time I've installed TaxCut and opened the forms, it's over in a couple of hours. The only bad part is writing the check to the Free State of Baltimore Stadiums. Mind you, it "helps" that last year was a tight one financially, and that I am, in Alan Bock's formulation, better at advocating capitalism than practicing it - the Unqualified income streams are few, small and clear: pebbly little brooks of wages and a freshet or two of dividends.

TaxCut shows you how your wages and taxes compare with the national average, from which I conclude that: the middle class is not heavily taxed at the federal level. Almost unavoidably, any tax relief plans are going to take more dollars off upper-class earners. This suggests that the bulk of voters will be a lot more exercised about the prospect of tax increases than energized by the possibility of tax cuts, which surely has as much to do with the loss of momentum toward shrinking the federal government as Republican fecklessness.

And here's another thing: tax preparation software has gotten so good that for ordinary earners - wages, income, dividends, mortgage-plus-state-tax-plus-charity deductions - completing a return is a cinch. And from what I can tell, the programs seem to handle all sorts of contingencies I barely understand, let alone have a need for. That means that an awful lot of voters don't feel the pain of a complex tax code either - the computer handles the hard part. You can say that the code's complexity makes it hard to plan, but even there, a lot of the tax and financial management programs can help that area too.

That means that we libertarians face a serious annoyance gap: not only are middle-class voters not feeling especially taxed, they're not feeling the pain of our bizarrely involuted tax code either. That tax code still comes with huge transaction costs and philosophical problems - it's still a congeries of social engineering initiatives disguised as a revenue system. (Ironically, the social engineering probably fails because the code is too complex for ordinary voters to plan around.) But politics favors the pissed. And we don't have a mass movement of the pissed now when it comes to taxes.

Burning Down the House - Hellboy reviews from Peiratikos (pro) and Johnny Bacardi (anti). Also, Franklin Harris from last week (pro). I remain mildly pro. But you should definitely buy the books - at the very least Seed of Destruction and Right Hand of Doom.

Bang, You're Dead - The LA Times suggests gun rights groups are not all that pleased with how the Bush Administration turned out. The Democratic field as a whole has gone a long way toward undoing the damage Al Gore did with his embrace of gun control in 2000. A combination of better Dem rhetoric and uninspiring Repub performance may accomplish the most the Kerry campaign can expect, which is to cool off that particular hot button.

And it's not just guns:

Surprisingly, the issues that have most alienated many gun groups from the Bush administration have little to do with firearms, but rather with the Patriot Act and other homeland security measures instituted after Sept. 11. Opposition to such laws has aligned gun-rights activists with unlikely partners, such as liberal Democrats and the ACLU.

"It's not just gun rights for us, it's the Bill of Rights," said Angel Shamaya, executive director of KeepAndBearArms.com, which claims tens of thousands of supporters. "A lot of gun-rights advocates are from mildly upset to livid over President Bush and his administration."

It's a shame these groups are "unlikely partners." Liberal rights groups have been terrible on gun issues. Certain gun rights organizations have been pretty quick to go "Do what you want with the girl, but leave me alone" on the First Amendment rights of the entertainment industry when it seemed expedient. Can't we all just get along?

Keep Those Cards and Letters Coming In! - I've got some great mail I'm having to neglect for the next couple of days. My apologies - gaming night and taxes wait for no one. We should have a really good mailbag item or two toward the end of the week. Lots of "Defeatist" and "Crux" mail.

Look Over There - I pontificate on incestuous blogospheric issues. At - the Agitator??? Yes.

Pep Talk - Tacitus lists some successful (on his terms) counter-insurgency wars, and concludes

This war will continue. Changing presidents won't change that. It will be on your headlines and your television for years to come. The question before you as an American, then, is whether, how, and by whom you want it won. In that order.

which is seriously out of order. (And for that matter, "by whom" and "whether" seem redundant.) My order:

1. Define winning.
2. Figure out how or if you can "win" per item one.
3. Determine whether the how is worth the win as defined.

Ridiculously In-Group Sourcing - Inside-the-Beltway libertarian and UO personal pal Chaim Karczag, official housemate of journalistic superstar Julian Sanchez, has started an education-oriented blog. He's managed to produce content for a week now, so it's probably safe to link.

The Military Side of War - One of the arguments out there is that the Iraqi insurgents can't hope to prevail militarily because of our superior force. They can only sap our political will. But that may not be entirely true. The various rebel groups have been playing havoc with our supply lines in and out of the country all week. At one point there was no safe land route from Baghdad out of country. And they're still at it. Add to that last week's complaints from some US units that they were short on ammo (if they weren't disinformation).

Airlifts into Baghdad will only get you so far. At the very least, we might reach a point where the supply situation makes it hard to conduct offensive operations. Again, we somehow keep forgetting, but Iraq is very, very far from the United States. We have a logistical capacity second to none, but we may not have adequate forces in theater to protect our own supply lines.

If we believe Herodotus' accounts of what has been known throughout the ages as Victor Davis Hanson's War, the Persians in Greece outnumbered the local defenders by an order of magnitude or more. But Xerxes had to turn around anyway once his supply line was cut. The retreat wasn't pretty. (Note: One of my military experts does not consider the above speculation crazy.) Anyone thinking of reinforcing our existing contingent has to add not just enough firepower to increase our offensive capability, but enough to better secure not only our existing logistical tail but the larger one more reinforcements require.

Eye in the Sky -Reader Oyster Gal sends a picture of a "hole-punch cloud." The explanatory text contains the word "virga," which doesn't sound work safe, but is.

On my Radar - New-to-me blog, The Better Angels of Our Nature. The proprietor, Arkhangel, is apparently a liberal soldier who has been in and out of Iraq and has a lot of level-headed analysis. I'm just really digging into this site, but there's no reason you need to wait for me.

The Crux - Wish I had more blogging time tonight. There's some excellent mail and interesting reaction elsewhere to Saturday night's item (looks like Sunday morning to you). I hope to get to it, somehow, between gaming night and taxes. In the meantime, Kevin Drum has a useful critique of Fareed Zakaria that nevertheless reminds me that I have miles, miles, I'm telling you, to go before I sleep:

Thanks to the Bush administration's arrogance and unwillingness to make realistic plans on the ground, America's ability to credibly project power will probably be lower next year than it has been since the end of Vietnam - and that's not due to ANSWER protests or speeches by Ted Kennedy. This is George Bush's national security legacy to the nation.

I don't exactly disagree. But underneath a lot of criticism of what the Bush Administration has done and not done in Iraq is the suggestion that a smarter Presidential team could have made the whole thing work. This belief is probably prevalent among the liberal readership I've picked up because I'm so critical of the war the Republican Administration started.

I get the pragmatic politics of this stance. Focusing on missteps after the invasion phase of the war seems safer than attacking the war as such, especially given that the Democratic Party did essentially nothing to stop it. And as I've said before, whatever else war is, it's a massive government program. Your average Democrat figures there has to be a way to make that kind of thing work.

But I think they're wrong, and I need to start spending more time on why. This thing was always going to go in the pooper. We'd be in the pooper even if George Bush appointed Al Gore to run the National Security Council. Granted, maybe a different pooper. But the war has gone the way it has for reasons that merely changing personnel wouldn't fix.

Let's hold up a couple of mirrors. In this one, Republican loyalists complain that the crypto-treasonist left, unwilling to make common cause with a hated conservative President, snipes and lowers morale and just generally keeps the Bush team from doing everything they'd like to do to bring about the free, peaceful and incidentally pro-Israel Iraq of our dreams. This is not the hypothetical part of our exercise.

Well, okay Republicans. We'll always have the Democrats. And we'll always have a sizable contingent of people like, um, me who refuse to get with the nationally great program. And this is still a representative democracy and your guy is still going to have one eye on November and the other on - actually, that one's on November too.

You're just not going to get better conditions than you actually got. If those conditions make it impossible to run the enterprise the way you're sure it had to be run, you should have thought of that before you left home.

Now, let's flip it around. John Kerry, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, [Your Dream President Here] has just concluded a smashing desert offensive, and now it's hot and the power is out all over Mesopotamia. You have such plans, though!

And you've got domestic opponents you have to get them past - those snarling troglodyte Republicans who were so beastly to Bill Clinton about saving Kosovo, to whom your marvelous mulitlateral stewardship concepts are anathema, who hate the Democrats so much that they'd guzzle sour milk as soon as let one accomplish anything he wants to accomplish.

They're not going anywhere either. And, you know, Democratic Presidents too have been known to take electoral concerns into account in their decision-making. And they have, in the DLC and at the New Republic and hanging around Brookings, quite a few opinion leaders whose views are not really that distinct from those of the PNAC and the Weekly Standard.

Pick any vision of "postwar" Iraq, and you've got no chance of seeing it through. And that's not even taking into account how the pesky Mesopotamian clients react. The Iraq War was an inherently grandiose undertaking, and grandiose is just what our government is ill-suited to accomplish. Thank God, I say. You may feel differently. But it don't matter how you feel. I mean, I care about your feelings, but reality doesn't.

A Fanboy's Wish-Fulfillin' Notes - Acrobatics negates falling damage! From the Melbourne Herald Sun (link forthcoming):

A junior gymnast fell from a fourth-floor hotel window -- and performed a somersault on the way down to land feet first.

Steven Jehu, 17, tumbled 10m [33'] after a metal bar on the window broke when he tried to open it.

Jehu, a British junior champion was in the Slovenian captial Ljublijana, preparing for the European titles.

He twisted as he fell and escaped with a broken ankle after landing on grass.

See? Daredevil is real! Real!

Department of Corrections - I wrote

Jesus but Captain Chown is everything we could ask for in an American fighting man.

Adam Cole writes

Well, everything except for a Y chromosome. Capt. Chris Chown is a "she", at least according to this.

I blame 80s literary fiction, when people like Jayne Anne Phillips and Anne Beattie gave all their female protagonists male-identified nicknames. Captain Chown was probably born a few years before that, but that doesn't mean I don't need some kind of scapegoat.

UPDATE: Jeff Parks caught this too.

FURTHER UPDATE: I've become convinced that this was a misunderstanding based on a typo - that the Times printed "she" but meant "he." There are soldiers in Iraq, and female soldiers under fire, but female marines are excluded from the combat arms.

Suspense - Ghaith Abdul Ahad, known throughout the blogosphere as G. in Baghdad, reflects in the Guardian on the Friday's anniversary of the toppling of the statue in Firdos Square. There's an awful lot about the hopes renewed, dashed and persisting, concluding:

Do I regret the war, especially now that things seem to be moving towards chaos here? Not at all. I still think we are much better off than under Saddam. At least now we are free to dream.

I think everything hinges on the following set of questions: How many Ghaith's are there? What can they accomplish? What will the US let them accomplish?

Capsule Comics Reviews - Bunch of stuff I bought this week, with an unplanned prurient focus.

Queen and Country, Operation: Storm Front (Greg Rucka and Carla Speed McNeil) - $15 trade paperback. An improvement in every way over the previous volume, Operation: Blackwall, to which I was lukewarm. The plot makes more sense this time around and Speed McNeil's art works very well. For one thing, she's wrestled protagonist Tara Chase's tits into submission, which has not usually been the case with other artists. As Tom Crippen put it when reviewing the earlier volumes, it has often been the case that Chase's breasts "could kill livestock if swung properly." Let me hasten to point out that I have nothing against prodigious racks in real life - I married Mrs. Offering, after all - but in the context of adventure comics, they have a certain fanboyish disreputability about them. (Never wear anything on your chest that's bigger than your head.) Speed McNeil's Tara Chase is a plausibly attractive professional woman with a body built for effective action, not teetering display. Apparently some people don't like Speed McNeil's anime-influenced (to these ignorant eyes) art, but I'm in the tank for it. There's a superb, charcoaled car crash at the end of Chapter 3, and two terrific pages early in Chapter 4 of Tara slinking through an alley after a kidnapping, taking advantage of every woman's quick change ability. And the kidnapping attempt itself is nicely handled, both the writing and the art. Speed McNeil's expressionist lettering is a treat, too. (And if you want a Finder in-joke, the Caracas medical examiner at the beginning of the book is an obvious Medawar.)

The big problem with Queen and Country has always been that it's a great, self-conscious Sandbaggers homage, but has largely stalled out at that level. It's not just that writer Rucka hasn't taken the story "beyond" its source material. He hasn't equalled it. There's been nothing so far with the emotional intensity of the death of Laura Dickens or the pity and terror of D. Int's treason or the horror of the shooting of Willie Caine in Malta. There are a half dozen and more episodes of Sandbaggers that are as gripping as anything ever done for television, and that with crappy late-seventies ITV production values. Rucka has given us a terrific, brief sequence related to 9/11 in the earlier Operation: Crystal Ball, but his own obvious love for the source material deserves better.

I suspect, though, that if, like almost every other person on earth, you never saw Sandbaggers in the first place, you'll be able to enjoy QandC for its solid story-telling. However, you really should pick up the DVDs. (And so should I! Next paycheck!)

Mrs Offering complains: I'm sick of Minder Three being killed off all the time.There's been at least three of them so far.

Thessaly, Witch for Hire 3 of 4 (Bill Willingham and Shawn McManus) - The legendary, heretofore immortal witch tries desperately to learn how to destroy a "tharmic null," which is coming to get her in issue 4. She gets the answer, but it's in oracular form. Some fun, fairytale-style visuals. Basically, a nice diversion. Won't change the way you look at life, will let you pass the time pleasantly. Another in Vertigo's recent push to convince people it's not all darkness and anomie all the time for them, just like in the more enjoyable

My Faith in Frankie 4 of 4 (Mike Carey, Sonny Liew and Marc Hempel) - In which we conclude the story of the god, Jeriven, and his sole worshipper, seventeen-year-old Frankie Moxon. Hunh. I just realized this item amounts to a Stories of Small-Breasted Women roundup, what with the previous two titles and this one. In Frankie, your male wish-fulfillment comes not from mammaries but from female b-i-s-e-x-u-a-l-i-t-y. (Not shown.) Hey, I'm not immune to the charms! But I also recognize that it's very much a convention of male fantasies, so the conclusion feels a little flat. Too bad, as this has been quite the sweet series - easily the nicest light-hearted comedy about young love, pagan worship and demonic possession I can remember reading. Writer Mike Carey proves he can work on a much more intimate scale than the Nobilis-like epics of his Lucifer series, and Sonny Liew is an expressive cartoonist. It's also interesting to see him inked here, since I believe that his independent series, Malinky Robot, is shot directly from pencils.

Captain America and the Falcon 2 (Christopher Priest, Bart Sears and Rob Hunter) - So much for the small-breasted women portion of our survey! Anyway, this really blows.

Batman: Death and the Maidens 8 0f 9 (Greg Rucka and Klaus Janson) - That's a lot of parts. It feels like we lost the thread back there somewhere. I think THE Story is supposed to be a contrast of how anti-hero Nyssa and hero Batman are molded by their respective parentage issues. (Nyssa is the daughter of Ras al Ghul, and Batman, if you've never read, lost his parents to crime as a child.) The best parts of the series were Bruce's psychopharmaceutical reunion with the shades of his mother and father. The problem is that, right now, that sequence looks mostly gestural - his mother laid certain injunctions on Bruce about how to live in a way that would honor his parents. The story of how he tried to square those injunctions with his self-chosen calling as a vigilante would make an interesting story, but with only one issue left and the action focused on whether Nyssa will accede to the leadership of her father's organization, it doesn't look like we're going to get it. Oh well.

Oh! You want to know about breast sizes, don't you! Nyssa and Talia, both reasonable, if a bit more flamboyant than Tara Chase or Frankie Moxon. Still, nothing science-fictional in their tunics.

Supreme Power 9 of 12 (J. Michael Straczynski, Gary Frank and Jon Sibal) - Or at least, it was supposed to be 9 of 12, right? There is no longer any indication in the cover or indicia that this "Ultimate JLA" title is a limited series. I'm still enjoying it a lot. It's a dark book, and it's still wrapped up in the interaction of imagined super powers and real-world politics I pronounced myself bored with a couple of months ago, but it's holding my interest anyway. Hyperion has figured out that the US military has lied to him about pretty much everything his whole life. Since he's no longer under government control, he's considered a government threat. So they make a serious attempt to wipe him out. Does it work? Well, we don't find out yet. Interestingly, since this is an out-of-continuity title, there's an outside chance that Hyperion really does go down for good - there's at least minimal, genuine suspense in the cliffhanger. No breasts to speak of in this male-centered chapter.

UPDATE: Ras al Ghul and Batman have never had a child together. A certain comma has been added to its proper place. Thanks to Teresa Nielsen Hayden and Kip Manley for the heads up.

Imitation Tech Blog Item - I wanted to take the quiz that tests whether you can tell LGF commenters from actual German Nazis, but Geocities shut it down for exceeding its bandwidth allocation.

But here's the thing: the shutdown page is graphics-heavy, with banners and ads and pictures, and no one knows ahead of time not to click through because that's all they're going to see. So how much bandwidth is Geocities saving themselves?

UPDATE: My informant who sent me the link suggests that since the Geocities shutdown page has an ad on it, it's at least generating revenue.

Also, I got a 77 out of a possible 100. Interestingly, my relative accuracy had nothing to do with any particular gap in virulence between the Little Green Footballs comments and the words of Late German Fascists. In fact, of the three I got wrong, I missed two of them because I decided the comments were too exterminationist to be other than that of actual Nazis. But in most cases the tip-off is not hatefulness but unavoidable internal markers - anything about "deserving a State" is obviously Palestinian-related etc.

Kinder, Gentler UO I - In all seriousness, isn't there a bright side to the fact that

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A battalion of the new Iraqi army refused to go to Fallujah earlier this week to support U.S. Marines battling for control of the city, senior U.S. Army officers here said, disclosing an incident that is casting new doubt on U.S. plans to transfer security matters to Iraqi forces.

as reported by Thomas E. Ricks in the Post today?

Ricks writes

Eaton said members of the battalion insisted during the ensuing discussions: "We did not sign up to fight Iraqis."

It's damned inconvenient for us right now, true. And some Iraqi security forces have not just refused to fight but have actually fought against us. But Iraqi armies have been all to willing to "fight Iraqis" in the country's history. This may be an odd kind of progress.

Late Night Thoughts of a Defeatist - As I alluded last night, I've been heartsick over the Iraqi situation, the politics of it and my own relation to those politics. My defense mechanism has been a black humor that led the estimable Andrew Olmsted to ask me today, "Are you turning your site into just a snarkfest these days?" which is a fair question. In fact I've been a cauldron of emotions about things, which I've avoided addressing directly here because a) it's hard to write about, and b) past a certain point it's self-indulgent. Yesterday, while reading this Post story about the battle for Fallujah at lunch I found myself tearing up. The proximate cause was the juxtaposition of two passages, one at the end of the article

As the Marines contemplated how to intensify attacks on the enemy without alienating the general populace, several officers said they were keenly aware that one mistaken shooting could create hundreds of enemies, and that coming under constant fire could numb military forces to the humanity around them.

"I hope we don't get to the point where we are so jaded we start rolling down the streets in tanks and shooting at everything that moves," said Capt. Chris Chown. "If you start to lose that sense of humanity, you've lost your mission."

and one at the beginning:

After four days of round-the-clock street clashes with elusive, heavily armed urban guerrillas, U.S. Marines moved Thursday to beef up their fighting capacity and take more aggressive action against an enemy that is proving both stubborn and resourceful. Helicopter gunships over the city made repeated dives at clusters of fighters, and artillery was brought in for the first time.

(My emphasis.)

Jesus but Captain Chown is everything we could ask for in an American fighting man. I am absolutely convinced that he is the norm in our military, with a sound sense not only of his own moral duty but of the practicality of maximum feasible decency.

And he is hitched to an engine called circumstance dragging him down a hard black road to a destination labeled GROZNY, and he will claw at the pavement the whole way there trying to slow his progress and in the end he will get there anyway, because the outskirts are visible already: "artillery was brought in for the first time."

Artillery is not a precision weapon, which is why it wasn't part of the initial assault. I even read an article before the Fallujah operation began in which the commanders said they were sticking to infantry as much as possible to be as precise as possible, to do as little damage to noncombatants and property as possible because shelling gives you this and this and this and that's what Captain Chown's superiors were hoping to avoid, but they also intend to win, and if they can't win without artillery they'll win with it.

And elsewhere in the Post article, Lieutenant Colonel Byrne "estimated that 80 percent of Fallujah's populace was neutral or in favor of the American military presence," which means that 20% of Fallujah is hostile, which is 60,000 people, and a marine assault force expanded today, Saturday, to about 3,000.

Well, there we are. I said earlier in the week that I had no doubt we could suppress the current revolts militarily, but I didn't know if we could do it without major self-inflicted political wounds.

And I had spent the morning reading GinMar's journal from her arrival in Kuwait to the aftermath of the ambush in what was pretty clearly Kut, and over the month and a half's worth of entries you can really see one of two things happening: relations with the locals sour measurably, OR, GinMar simply gets familiar enough with the culture to perceive the animosities that have been there all along. Either way, the trajectory of her entries provides a bass line to April's crescendo of violence - it makes the claims that the Sadrist uprising is unconnected to any generalized mass hostility sound distinctly off-key.

And Deeds puts on a brave face about sitting unmolested in the Green Zone with a drink on his terrace despite reports that some group or other vowed to overrun the Green Zone, when the real story is not that he's safe in the compound but that he dare not leave it. And Salam stops blogging and Zeyad loses faith and Raed, bless his heart, tries to apologize for kidnappings that are in no way his fault and what I am contemplating is the likelihood that these good people, folks of whom we've grown internet-fond, are slaughtered - Western-identified secular cosmopolitans in a country where, as of the much-touted February poll, "only" ten percent of Shiites approved of attacks on Americans, which is to say, ten percent of 60 percent of 24 million people, which is to say, 1.4 million people more or less, plus 30 percent of Iraq's Arab Sunni population, which is to say 30 percent of 20 percent of 24 million people, or, actually, another 1.4 million people. And here and there Captain Chowns lose their battle to hang on to their humanity, and our people go nowhere but in armor and in force and at breakneck speed when they go at all and if they violate any two of these rules they die, and when they obey all three they strike the locals as like "giant lizards from another star."

And I saw it coming - really, I did - and I begged people not to go through with it and, like I said, here we are.

And now I feel anger, frustration, bitterness and guilt, which I think we can all agree is a pretty poisonous brew. Anger that Paul Wolfowitz could sit in front of Congress and say, with a straight face, Iraq has no history of ethnic strife - the sheerest, most bald-faced lie - and be allowed to do so much as discuss politics while bagging groceries at his new, more suitable position let alone keep the second-most important job in the Defense Department. Anger at the fundamentally dishonest metacontext in which questions of war and peace have been framed and continue to be framed. Anger every time an American soldier is blown up or shot, killed, blinded or lamed. Frustration that events of the last two years have made it that much harder to move the United States to a sane foreign policy and that much longer until we could reap the benefits of doing so. Bitterness about, well, whaddaya got?

And guilt. All kinds, really. Guilt that no intellectual is immune to the satisfaction of believing he has been proved right, and in this case the proof comes in the form of staggering misfortune to numerous others, countrymen and not. Guilt that my convictions as to what's best for the country alienate me not just from fools and knaves - they can go fly - but from good people like Andrew and from the combat soldiers themselves. We doves believe that we "support the troops" by trying to spare them from the wastage of "wars of choice" - the deaths, the maimings and the brutalizations - but many, maybe most of the troops themselves don't see it that way. I know because I've been told. Here's commenter Mike Shafer on Andrew Olmsted's site:

Jim,

Reading the entries posted make me sick. The only decent remarks are from Grey. I serve with LTC Sassaman and I was there. The News reports concern this event are mistrued, sadly Americans buy headlines and gossip and newspapers are in the business of selling. I wish I was allowed to tell you the truth but OPSEC has it that I can't. We were in Balad which is no secret, how many things do you hear in the news concerning the area we just left? None, our city is still secure and safe unlike the rest of the Sunni triangle. Ever wonder why that is? What concerns me is that we have done tremendous things over there and we have sent numerous articles to several papers that never got printed. What I read here is the classic case of the man in the arena. I want you to know that soldiers in the Battalion will follow LTC Sassaman anywhere, any time. You will never know what that is like. You say grey confuses patriotism for team spirit well fortunate for you, you will never have to look into a 19 year old kid's eyes after 11 mortar rounds have just landed on you with some of your men wounded and say "move out, get to your CP on the north side". Or would you say hey let's go out and tell them that's not nice. Only we will understand.

And I never will understand. And I'm sorry that, not only have I said things that sicken Mike Shafer and those like him, but that I'll do it again, even knowing how he feels. One of the things that has most angered me about this war is that people like Lieutenant Colonel Sassaman and his charges - two of whom are accused of drowning blogger Zeyad's cousin - were needlessly put in a position where the fear of irregular warfare, the unceasing mistrust, would coarsen good men and pressure a certain number of them into brutality of the kind that is not just a crime but a mistake. I want to save Mike Shafer and LTC Sassaman and Captain Chown and their fellows from not only that situation but from as many future similar situations as possible. Mike Shafer and many of his fellows, however, figure that the situation is what it is, so just don't, for God's sake, make it any harder.

The chasm between those two perspectives is terrible.

And I won't stop, because this is the overriding issue of our time - how we got to where we are, how we get out, and how we prevent the people who got us here from dragging us in deeper - but people like Mike will feel the spittle of every invective and jibe I hurl at the fop who is presently his commander in chief, and some of the evidence for how the civilian leadership has gone wrong will be found in what the soldiers under their command suffer or mete out. But I've said all along, I'm a right-winger, and the whole basis of the right wing critique of political correctness is that feelings are not trumps. Understanding what it is like to be in that situation is important, but it is not the only thing that matters about that situation. And three soldiers have died in action in Balad just this week by my count. But I really am sorry.

I'm already rambling, but there's one last area of guilt to tackle. The other complaint of not just hawks but many soldiers is the argument that doves sap the national will and encourage our enemies to attack. After all, goes this argument, the only way an inferior force like the various resistance movements in Iraq can beat the US Army is if a critical mass of the home front turns against the war. The surest driver of domestic loss of enthusiasm is casualties. Thus our enemies have an incentive to kill troops so long as doing so will increase antiwar sentiment. Therefore antiwar sentiment increases the danger to soldiers.

There is something to this. Let me be very clear: I think the effect is much smaller than hawks imagine, and it misses an entire other side of partisan warfare: nation-building by the resistance. Guerrillas don't just aim to turn the occupier's home front against the war. They first aim to turn their own home front against the occupier. I've written about the mechanisms at length: provoke the occupation troops into overreactions that will alienate them from the locals and force the locals to choose between "us," the resistance, and "them," the foreigners. And you kill as many of the ones who choose the foreigners as possible. Iraqi guerrillas have killed a few hundred American soldiers, but they've killed as many or more translaters, ministers, local contractors and other "collaborators." I've read that the first victim of the Algerian resistance against the French was an assimilationist Algerian schoolteacher. It's pretty obvious that civilians in the United States can cheerfully bear the deaths of any number of Iraqi bureaucrats, entrepreneurs and fixers. So sapping American will can't be why the resistance murders them. The pattern shows just how important the "nation-building" aspect of guerrilla warfare is. And the killings of American soldiers would serve that end even if no domestic lip ever quavered - guerrillas kill soldiers so that soldiers will force locals to jump into rivers and so that soldiers will shoot innocent civilians at checkpoints because of bad cases of nerves so that the actions will produce more guerrillas and more sympathizers.

Further, there's a bizarre asymmetry here. Stipulate that doves are responsible for a certain number of attacks on our troops in theater. Obviously the government, by putting them there in the first place, and hawks, for supporting the deployment, are responsible for many more. Were the troops in places I'd like to see them, no Iraqi could get at them or would bother.

And one can question just who the hawks' argument is with, really. People like Max Sawicky and I were opposed to the Occupation of Iraq before the war ever started. The attacks on our troops haven't changed our minds at all. Any "will-sapping" operates on people who aren't like Max and me - people who support the war until they decide a certain level of futility has been reached. So the theory winds up being that doves have an obligation to shut up at the point when other people are inclined to start listening to them, because only a combination of war criticism and war setbacks sways the swayable - neither setbacks nor criticism alone will do it.

All that said, I accept the argument that, at the margin, the existence of antiwar sentiment in the US encourages the hope of more, which means more attacks on our soldiers than there otherwise would be, which means doves have a share - and only a share - of responsibility in the deaths of our soldiers. (Max denies this in his essay, with which I otherwise largely agree.)

And all I can say is, I'm sorry; and, it can't be helped. In a free country, decisions of war and peace are public decisions. Pace Tacitus, some wars are not worth winning (or, in some cases, "winning"), even if they can be won. A trivial violation of Godwin's Law suggests an immediate example, but there are plenty of others out there. Hawks often liken the Iraq war to "one battle" in the whole War on Terror. I think the "one battle" it is is Stalingrad, a snare we cleave to for a prestige value that we merely imagine to outweigh other imperatives. I could be right or wrong, but I'm not the only one who thinks this way, and in an open society we can only hope to prevail openly. I think the war has been bad for the country and that extending it to Iran and/or Syria would be worse and, this is where the guilt comes in, I think the matter is urgent enough to trump such encouragement as the argument gives our enemies in Iraq. But what that means is that I am as ready to sacrifice a certain number of soldiers for the national weal as any hawk, and just like them I'm doing the defining myself. I'm sacrificing far fewer than they are, and if I got my way, it would be fewer yet. But it doesn't feel good. And it doesn't matter how I feel, either. It is what it is.

And that's that, really. Nothing about the present situation feels good. And it's made me savage lately. But now that I've gotten this all out, maybe I can be somewhat less so. Most of the time.

Retroactive Answer to the Well, what would you do, smart guy? question from Mithras:

Since we're outsourcing the war, don't you think it might have been better to pay some Blackwater Security Contractors a few thousand bucks to assassinate Saddam, and then taken the $150 billion we've spent (so far!) and air-dropped it on the Iraqi people? They could have bought themselves a new government and satellite television.

Sure, but would they have had the critical infrastructure in place to govern themselves by the end of Ju - oh. Never mind.

Present at the Creation - I'm actually too upset by the Iraq situation and the politics of it to blog at length this evening. But if you haven't already, read ginmar's LiveJournal. She's a soldier in Iraq. There's a terrific piece on surviving an ambush the other day in a place that's pretty clearly Kut, but really, it's worth starting with her February 20th flight out of the States and scrolling up to the present. This is fine writing from a primary source (authenticity resolved to my satisfaction in a lengthy Making Light comment thread). I would rank its importance with Salam Pax's entries of last Spring and Summer. (And speaking of being upset, here's a contributor.)

UPDATE: GinMar quite reasonably locked the siege entry. Brad DeLong has the most complete quotation I've found.

Look on the Bright Side - Sean T. Collins thinks outside the box about current events. You know, it makes a certain amount of sense.

What Is To Be Done I - I promised the other day that in between the endless carping about the present situation I would try to provide some answers to the constant question hawks ask of doves, Well, what would you do, smart guy? But before we get started, I had a Eureka moment on this very topic a couple of days ago. Think of it as establishing the ground rules by which I play that game. Another mention that "The President warned us it would be a long, hard war and, really, it's going to take a generation to etc." and it hit me: okay, that cuts both ways then. I as a dove am entitled to that much time for any Cunning Plan of my own to work.

The New Minutemen - Flit finds that the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps is on the job. He's too harsh on Glenn Reynolds and Andrew Sullivan, though. It's not like the original Minutemen were helping the British. So maybe the comparison stands.

Nothing to Rice Home About - Condi Rice's testimony before the 9/11 commission. Didn't see it. Work for a living. Read various reports. Oddly, Republican commentators tended to view her performance more favorably than Democratic commentatorys. Who knows why. Public commission hearings tend to be one of the worst ways we know to get at important public truths - maybe, a la Churchill, the worst way except for all the others, but plenty bad in its own right. This goes for actual Congressional committees too. The commissioners are there to strike poses as much as explore uncertainties. Because the poses struck typically involve the ritual savaging of whoever is unfortunate enough to be in the witness chair, no sane person sits himself in front of such a gathering but with her quills out and a mouthful of ready mush, to be regurgitated Orangutan-style in the brief silences between commission perorations. The Poor Man imagines an alternate universe where such things function as intended, and if you're feeling especially bitter, it will deepen your mood.

To the extent that such commissions produce anything of value, it's in the staff work phase, away from the cameras. For that reason, it will be interesting to read that August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing, though.

Quick Links - Take them for what they're worth:

Conservative hawk Tish Durbin's Iraq pieces are interesting because she gets out among actual Iraqis. Among the things you learn from her latest article is that our occupation authorities mostly don't. Durbin admits to her first bout of serious pessimism.

Here's the "It's a broad Shiite revolt article" from the NYT that everyone else linked to. I might as well.

Or not just Shiites: AFP reports that a column of Sunni and Shia Iraqis bulled through a Fallujah checkpoint to bring relief supplies to the embattled town. It's like the classic Silver Surfer comics from the 1960s, when the Surfer, appalled by humanity's fractiousness, launched demonstration attacks in hopes that he would inspire Earth to unite against him. Cool, we're the Silver Surfer! But I guess now we know what the government spokesmen meant when they said we were committed to the territorial integrity of Iraq.

Tilt, Game Over - From the Associated Press:

FALLUJAH, Iraq (AP) - A U.S. helicopter fired three missiles at a mosque compound in the city of Fallujah on Wednesday, killing about 40 people as American forces battled Sunni insurgents, witnesses said.

Cars ferried bodies from the scene, though there was no immediate confirmation of causalities.

Part of the wall surrounding the Abdul-Aziz al-Samarrai mosque was demolished, said AP reporter Abdul-Qader Saadi, though the mosque building was not damaged.

The strike came as worshippers gathered for afternoon prayers, witnesses said. They said the dead were taken to private homes in the area where temporary hospitals have been set up.

Angry residents gathered around the mosque after the strike. The offices of an organization of Sunni clerics next door was also lightly damaged.

We'd like to thank the people of the United States for participating in the Imperial Sweepstakes. Please pick up your "I tried to remake the Middle East, and now I'd be a fool to even take public transportation" t-shirts at the door.

We have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire. If you ask when, the answer is that you cannot make a single stroke between day and night: the precise moment does not matter. There was no painted sign to say: 'You are now entering Imperium.' Yet it was a very old road and the voice of history was saying: 'Whether you know it or not, the act of crossing may be irreversible.' And now, not far ahead, is a sign that reads: 'No U-turns.'

Garet Garrett, The Rise of Empire, 1952

From yesterday's Washington Post:

On Monday, residents of Adhamiya, a largely Sunni section of northern Baghdad, marched with followers of Moqtada Sadr, the militant Shiite cleric whose call for armed resistance was answered by local Sunnis the same afternoon, residents said.

AP story via: The Talking Dog.

Fodder - There's a lot of material in the latest George Will column on Iraq, much of it between the lines. Out from under his stiff upper lip come some pretty damning admissions. ('The transfer is to be from the Coalition Provisional Authority, whose authority does not extend throughout the country. A U.S. official in Baghdad says Sadr will be arrested if he appears "any place that we control." ') And there are the gallingly familiar, unconscious warhawk ironies, such as "freeing" Iraq by establishing our "monopoly of violence."

Consider this one of those bookmark items.

Lexicon - Behind on your gang lingo? Embarrassing yourself in front of your set with faux pas? The City of Houston wants to help. Funny, some of these terms were in my Hardy Boy's Detectives' Handbook back in the seventies, and that book hadn't been updated in twenty years. Others are pop culture commonplaces. Scanning the list for a term that wouldn't be pretty obvious if you heard it used in a sentence, the only one I'm finding is "putting in work." And even that one might be clear in context sometimes. Something tells me at least a couple of these are probably spurious, too.

Anyway, if you hear your child using these terms, there's a good chance he's either hanging out with a very wrong crowd OR watching too much Sports Center.

(Link via Mrs. Offering, who did NOT have to go to the emergency room tonight. The Matron of the Offerings is the official term for my mother.)

Busy Busy - Ferrying the Matron of the Offerings to the emergency room tonight for a recurring, non-life-threatening matter. It's a newsy day, but this site claims to be more about politics than current events anyway. The Command Post is actually a pretty good source for breaking news, and its famously hawkish contributors turn out to be surprisingly restrained in their CP writing. Max Sawicky has an important analysis of the Baby Sadr situation. Meanwhile, on Crooked Timber, John Quiggin vows that he's going to try to stick to saying "what should be done from here onwards" (Aussie for "going forward"), and will "try hard from now on to avoid debating whether the war with Iraq was a mistake." I won't be nearly so noble. Why? Because the people who got us into this would love to do it again down the road. Compiling a record of their misjudgments, misstatements and outright lies is a vital prophylactic - pre-emptive self-defense, if you will. But I will get into "what we should do from here onwards" as well.

CliffsNotes from this week: We can beat the current Sadrist uprising militarily. There's no question about that. Can we do it without two, three, many Groznys? I'm not so sure. We're certainly trying, judging by the altogether sensible words of the commander of the separate Fallujah assault. But what matters is the trendline - more Iraqis violently resisting the US, in more places, in more sophisticated attacks. Insurgents are, briefly at least, holding territory. That's new. Simply putting down the current wave of uprisings will not mean that we've destroyed the desire, capacity and will to resist. Indeed, it won't mean we haven't increased it.

These are bad times.

UPDATE: Yes, "desire" and "will" are two different things. Same with "misstatements" and "lies." So there.

Get Out Your Erasers - From CNN:

In his prewar presentation to the United Nations, Powell said, "Zarqawi's activities are not confined to this small corner of northeast Iraq. He traveled to Baghdad in May 2002 for medical treatment, staying in the capital of Iraq for two months while he recuperated to fight another day."

But one senior U.S. official now says that previous reports indicating al-Zarqawi had lost a leg "have been called into question" and that it now appears to be "seemingly true" that al-Zarqawi has both legs and is not impaired.

That official cautioned, "since we don't have him, we can't know for sure." The official would not discuss what is behind the change in opinion.

Pretty soon I'm going to start to doubt there was ever anyone named "Saddam Hussein" running Iraq. (Hat tip: Atrios.)

Seems Like OLD Times - I can commend this Glenn Reynolds item without reservation.

Change Partners - Perry de Havilland sees the bright side:

... in openly taking up arms against the coalition and its Iraqi supporters, radical leader Muqtadar al-Sadr has changed the equation: what could have been a long term intractable political problem has been turned onto a military problem with a fairly obvious and direct solution.

Word is that gas is effective in these situations. You might think, Dude! Then I have to bury all these bodies! but it's not so bad: you just dump a buch of them into the same big hole, cover it over and you're done. Till next time. But Iraq is, as you may recall from the WMD search, the size of California. There's room for a lot of holes.

Meanwhile, Alan Sullivan starts to remember everything he used to know about the effectiveness of government action.

Shall we link to the same Hayek cartoon twice in one evening? Let's.

Walk on the Wild Side - I will absolutely and totally take this one:

Which Famous Homosexual are you?
Brought to you by Rum and Monkey

Via Fresh Bilge.

My Blog Wants to Party All the Time - It's another Blogarama in Kalorama, Thursday, April 8 around 7 at the Rendezvous Lounge. Be there or be legacy media. Love to see some new blood there. Rumors that you can only attend a Blogarama if you've memorized The Road to Serfdom are entirely unfounded.

Watch Your Back - By common consensus, the most important blog item of the day is Zayed's report of what he calls a "coup" by Baby Sadr in Iraq. (I think when you've got armed mobs with a mass base in several cities it's actually, for better or worse, a revolution rather than a coup. Does "revolution" = Good and Just and Wise? By no means. But it's what it is.)

But I'm inclined to nominate this Tex entry on Antiwar.com's blog, collecting a pattern of reports in which, to quote one item

the ICDC, a paramilitary force trained by the Americans, turned on the US soldiers and started to shoot at them, according to Amid.

There's a lot of those, from Basra to Fallujah:

Members of the new Iraqi army and the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps were to play support roles in the operation, but some had to be sent home today when they reported without their uniforms or ID cards, Marines said.

I imagine a number of them will make it to the battle anyway.

Well, what do you expect from a rabid anti-American site like Antiwar.com, or a rabid, anti-American public figure like US Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer:

In response to Gov. Abdulah Hassan Rashid's plea for more police officers in his province of 1.2 million people, Bremer said: ``The key is to have professional police, not just to add people who aren't trained. Many of these people who are already in the police force are corrupt, they don't understand human rights, and some of them are engaging in attacks on the coalition.''

That's from Ken Dilanian of Knight-Ridder.

Capsule Comics Reviewsso I'll suck less as a comics blogger.

Ultimates 13 (Millar and Hitch) - Finally, the conclusion to "volume one." Long, apocalyptic battle scene with a lengthy epilogue. The core of nastiness inside this work remains, but isn't as obtrusive this time around. In the right moods, I decide the book is nasty because the State is nasty; the rest of the time, I figure nasty is simply what Mark Millar knows how to do. On balance, I only sort of like this title, but I'll say this: Millar's writing of "Ultimate Hulk" is the best thing about the book. The art is full of detail and very kinetic.

The Moth Special (Martin and Rude) - This would actually make a pretty good kids comic, if there was any chance of a kid (boy) coming across it and deciding to shell out five bucks or convincing a parent to do so for a comic about a character he's never heard of. Which there isn't. The book dispenses with both the genuinely adult and pseudo-adult trappings of recent genre practice - the dialog is the furthest thing from naturalistic (on purpose, I hope); the plot is full of boy-friendly tropes from circuses to cool motorcycles. Artist Steve Rude is commonly called Kirbyesque, but there's more than a little Ditko to him, too. Truly, I'm not sure if this is a comic for boys or for our memory of boys.

Arrowsmith 6 of 6 (Busiek and Pacheco) - Last issue of this miniseries. This book has its old-school aspects as well. Specifically, writer Busiek is very, very chatty in this one. The narrative device is a single letter to two comrades about an experience all three of them shared. By the standards of contemporary comics, this issue feels overwritten. By the standards of latter-day soldier's letters, maybe it passes muster. We should pause here to contemplate the fallacy of imitative form. Carlos Pacheco's art remains magnificent. Too bad he'll be squandering it on the unreadable Superman/Batman book next. I confess to mild disappointment at the wrapup of a series I've otherwise enjoyed hugely.

The Pulse 2 (Bendis and Bagley) - Bendis pulls the same narrative trick here that he did in the recent Daredevil arc, "Hard Core" - basically, this entire issue is a flashback explaining how we got to the last panel in issue one. It's good though. That Bagley, he's an expressive cartoonist: just while writing up this comment I'm flipping through the book admiring the things he does with our (momentary) protagonist's bangs. She's adorable! All of his female characters are adorable! not in a cheescake-y look at her cleavage and gams way, but in a bigeyed, Mary Tyler Moore way. For all I know, his men are adorable too - maybe even the Vulture, who has a cameo, is unusually adorable for the Vulture. The problem comes when series star Jessica Jones shows up (which doesn't happen in issue two) - she's adorable too. Too adorable, too cute and dainty, considering the way she was rendered in her previous series, Alias. I mean, women really do glow in the early stages of pregnancy, but the visual transition between the two books has been abrupt. I'm not reconciled yet. I like everything else about Bagley, but someone needs to feed him some grumpy pills for the pages containing Our Heroine.

Light Brigade 2 of 4 (Tomasi and Snejbjerg) - I almost didn't pick this up, but I'm glad I did. (See review of last issue.) The story takes an interesting turn: all the GIs now know, for sure, that there is a God in Heaven, with Jesus and the saints and all the prophets, and much of the book is about how the knowledge changes or doesn't change the way they act. This wrinkle redeems the premise of the book - as others have noted, by seeming to ascribe the evil in our world to rebel angels and nephilim, issue one threatened to rob the story of moral valence. Issue two provides us with a more than worthy substitute. I'm in all the way now.

It's Time - That NPR Hellboy segment I tipped you to last week is available.

What did I think of the movie? Up and down. Some enjoyable stuff along the way. Ron Perlman was nice. I don't sweat comparatively minor changes like the geographical contraction of Hellboy's origin. However, I have to utter a big "the book was better" about the movie's (anti) climax. The graphic novel version of the story contains a clever, hallucinatory twist on the "true name" concept, to which the film version stands in relation as a blow-up love doll to a sexy human partner. But you gotta love a movie in which a huge red demon lures a chick out of a mental hospital with the line, "I've got beer."

Sean Collins, on the other hand, hated it.

The Wild Colonial Boy - BruceR has more on Zayed and the hawks, including this:

It's time for [Jeff Jarvis] to say whether he stands by Zeyad now, or not. Every day now that he doesn't is one more day we'll think Jarvis only likes to tout the "colonial" bloggers so long as their obeisance level remains high.

I would only add that the structural problem of imperialism is that the cooptation impulse preys on hawks and doves alike. Doves too have tended to adopt our pet Iraqis, based primarily on how much ammo they provide. Does this mean anti-interventionists are "as bad" as interventionists? Not at all. We're either better or worse, depending - worse, because we're supposed to be alert to that kind of thing; better, because this kind of institutional condescension is what we were trying to avoid in the first place.

Old business: On the Salam Pax courage Watch: Salam is working as an interpreter and employee for western media organizations, one of the most dangerous jobs in Iraq. James "Fuck you, Salam" Lileks is still e-mailing columns from his house in Minnesota.

From the Insight magazine link:

The other truly scary aspect of this is that the killings of Omar Kamal (Time magazine) and Selwan al-Niemi (Voice of America) were not random violence. They were threatened for working with American media outlets and then stalked and killed. Selwan was killed with his child and mother. When his wife, who worked as a fixer for Knight-Ridder, returned from out of the country to bury her husband and their child, banners at the mosque announced she was next. She's since fled the country. As has another Time fixer who worked with Kamal.

A fixer who worked for the Washington Post had a grenade thrown at his house and was warned to not work for journalists. The Post, as has Time, has moved its bureau to what the newspaper considers a more secure location. The new location is a hotel complex that regularly gets hit by rockets and mortars by insurgents.

These killings and threats not only mean that reporters have become specific fair game for anticoalition insurgents, but it also means that the killers know who we are, where we live and whom we employ.

So, hey: Fuck you, Lileks.

Turning the Wrong $@#*()&%# Corner, Redux - I think history may well decide that the day the CPA closed Baby Sadr's toy paper was the day we definitively lost the Iraq War. They'll disagree on whether it was inevitable, which has been pretty much my position. See Rafe Colburn for historical parallels. Rafe has noticed that there has been history before and after Europe 1938-45. Who knows what other lessons lurk therein?

Dept. of Old Business - I believe generally pro-US Iraqi blogger Zayed was called all kinds of names for insisting that US troops dragged off a couple of locals near Samarra and caused one to drown. Comes today's Washington Post:

The Army is investigating an allegation that U.S. troops killed an Iraqi detainee when they forced him and another man to jump from a bridge into the Tigris River, and a battalion commander has been disciplined for impeding the probe, officers familiar with the investigation said.

Essentially, the soldiers under investigation have admitted forcing the Iraqis to jump into the Tigris. The investigation now comes down to whether both men made it out alive, as the soldiers claim, or only one, as the one known survivor insists.

A body was recovered from the river about 10 days after the incident, Rudesheim said, but military authorities are not sure it is the man who was detained that night. Investigators have received another report that the man is alive in Samarra. To this day, Rudesheim said, soldiers in the patrol "still contend they saw both men getting out of the water, up a slight embankment, as they departed."

In any case, he said, "forcing these detainees into the water was very wrong, and soldiers are facing either judicial or nonjudicial action, pending the outcome of the investigation."

Sassaman's "lapse in judgment," Rudesheim said, was in not telling investigators that it was true the Iraqis had been forced into the river.

Just Kos - Am I required to have an opinion on last week's dustup over Marcos Zuniga's deprecation of the contract security personnel killed and mutilated in Fallujah? Crap. That's what I figured. How about if I have a bunch of opinions?

1) Private Military Corporations are inherently problematic institutions. This gets to why I'm not an anarcho-capitalist. All governments are gangs, but they're not the only gangs. Back in my usenet days, someone said something in a discussion of the competitive defense provision advocated by anarchist libertarians that has stuck with me: "Competition in goods and services is a market. Competition in force is war."

And actually, the anarcho-capitalists could be right about both the moral legitimacy and practical effectiveness of private military agencies under anarchy and it wouldn't speak to the valence of such organizations in a state system. In a state system, the PMC has a single customer, the State, and no market to discipline it. The PMC in a state system is, at best, no worse than the government with which it contracts.

2) Kos, a veteran, was upset that the Blackwater victims got more attention than the five uniformed service members also killed that day. But it seems obvious that it was the dishonor, not the death, that determined the headline placement. Ritual humiliation of corpses has more news value than garden-variety death. Homer will explain.

3) Tacitus has a good post getting beyond the notion that All PMC employees care about is profit stereotype. His case makes sense. It also doesn't change the structural problems with PMCs.

4) Blackwater is still maintaining, and various hawkish commentators are accepting, that their employees were guarding a food shipment meant for the Iraqi people when they were killed. Given the apparent lack of any other vehicles than the two SUVs in their convoy, I assume either that a) The Fallujah Papa John's is outsourcing, or b) Blackwater's account lacks completeness and accuracy.

5) I think Kos' remarks were obnoxious and silly, with a big helping of the familiar leftist horror that anyone, anywhere is doing something for money.

6) I've never been a big Daily Kos reader. My Aggregator has hit the limit on partisan Demobloggers. That said, I value space for strong opinions. As commenter Jimm put it on Maxspeak:

Are you free or what? Because, if you accept that there is "official" truth, and that leaders can legitimately "frame" the acceptable bounds of discussion, THEN YOU ARE NOT FREE!

And yes, by the way, I feel the same way about the controversy over Kim duToit's "Pussification of the Western Male" brouhaha of a few months ago. I reject completely Tacitus and Mark Kleiman's attempt to make the shunning of Kos some kind of litmus test of seriousness or patriotism, and tend to think that if Tac were to lay down the moral arbiter scepter for awhile, society would yet escape mass cannibalism and wholesale collapse.

7) I wouldn't go so far as to say the outrage over the Kos remark was either fake or even, exactly, "manufactured." But I do think it has chiefly served to distract attention from events in Iraq to altogether less salient concerns: it's yet more Wish harder, citizen! trying to plug a strategy vacuum.

This Time They've Gone Too Far - Not just mass murder, but now Spanish Islamists step on a perfectly good punch line.

Four terrorists and a Spanish special forces officer died. I feel bad about the Spanish special forces officer.

The special forces officer who died in the explosion was identified Sunday as Javier Torrontera, 41. He was married and had two children.

Vaya con Dios, Sr. Torrontera.

We're from the Government and We're Here to Help Your Culture - RiShawn Biddle says Hollywood should thank the governments of Europe for subsidizing national film industries, making American dominance of movies inevitable, and cheaper to boot.

Quote of the Day comes from Radley Balko:

If I had kids, I would probably teach them not to smoke. But I'd also try to teach them not to grow up to be pissant, podunk, power-hungry small town city council members.

Comedy Is Not Pretty - April Fool.

Well, am I an asshole or what? In honor of the holiday I pretended to have changed my mind on a rather important matter and it generated quite a lot of reaction. The truth is, I still think superhero stories are a perfectly valid genre, whether you're or not you're getting laid.

Actually, it wasn't that one so much. Nor even the item where I, in contradiction of my long-held libertarian views, equated bureaucracy and society. It was that other one.

So I had in mind two objects of satire: hawkish "silver lining" rhetoric and the tropes of the "conversion narrative," as exemplified most recently by Anthony Gancarski. I took the title from among the more famous ones, by Collier and Horowitz. The satirical impulse got mixed up with the imperatives of the April Fool's joke itself, whose object is, after all, to trick people. I worried that there was no way I could sell something like "remote control bombs = a victory for the culture of life = the President's policy works" as an idea I or anyone else could seriously hold, especially given the holiday. I forgot that: deadpan I can do. I once had a buddy convinced, over the phone, that Harvard's Groombridge Astronomy Catalog took its name from a Charles River crossing point that figured prominently in the tradition of on-campus weddings. And he's no dummy.

Judging from my e-mail, a lot of people got the joke and appreciated it, a substantial number of people got snookered and a detectible minority got the joke but considered it to be in at least questionable taste. There was no particular pattern as to which group e-mailers and linkers fell into. Some hawks saw through it (Jeff Goldstein and Kathy Kinsley), some didn't. Some longtime readers took me at my word. Are there two bloggers I respect more than Diana Moon and BruceR of Flit? There are not. Both of them believed me for as long as it took to write about it. The bad taste position was well stated by Moshe Brandelwyn, who wrote

Assuming this is in fact an April Fool's joke, I have to say, Jimski, the humor is very, very dark, and in questionable taste. You'll undoubtedly get slammed for this one, and not entirely without justification.

And it was very dark. I'll plead yeah on the questionable taste part. "Humor black as a charred corpse hanging from a bridge" might be the new blog tag line if I were to make a habit of such items. Such defense I'll offer ranges from the fact that the calendar waits for no one to the tradition of savage satire, but my defense won't be universally persuasive.

As to the ethics of the thing, they are problematic. The April Fool's joke depends on a successful abuse of trust. The trust has to exist in the first place. Then there's the matter of time. The in-person April Fool's joke ends mercifully quickly. The in-print one doesn't offer the immediate relief of someone assuring you he was only joking after all. Ken MacLeod e-mailed his congratulations on fooling him for a solid ten minutes - just exactly what I would have hoped for, but calibrating that precise level of bamboozlement across a few thousand-odd readers is, of course, impossible. And as enjoyable as it is to imagine, in advance, hoodwinking one's adversaries, that is structurally unlikely - my adversaries mostly don't read me. Therefore any japery will work primarily on allies and friends.

So, What Did We Learn Here? Firstly, my readers are really, really nice folks. The folks who got it were very complimentary. The folks who feared I had lost my head were very, very kind about it. And the folks who thought I was being a jerk were sympathetically frank rather than nasty. Second, to the extent there are any lessons to be drawn, they're more for writers than readers: people approach your writing more in a spirit of trust than skepticism, even on the most unreliable day of the year. I bought Nate's prank to the extent of misreading the e-mail in which he assured me he was not serious. And the reaction tells us nothing whatsoever, I think, about the relative merits of hawkishness or dovery as such. Like I said, some hawks got it, some didn't, most didn't read it in the first place. More of my favorite doves were fooled than I would have expected, but this doesn't mean doves are especially credulous as a class - it's an artifact of the sample.

Anyway, that's what I got to say. I thank everybody that enjoyed it. I thank everybody that put up with it. Individual, private apologies are available on request. Anyone who's really mad may enjoy the first half or so of this Atrios comment thread. The holiday is over now.

Real Community - In the comments to my Brainwash essay, Rich Puchalsky writes

Not to mention that what some consider to be "bureaucracy", others consider to be society.

I hadn't thought of it like that.

UPDATE: April Fool!

Good Point - Maybe I overdid the "superhero defense" thing. Tim O'Neil points out

And anyway, superhero books are repressed... the things are just full of sublimated sex and misplaced aggression, the type of stuff that appeals to - ahem- sexually repressed tweens and teens (not to mention those sexually repressed members of the electorate who are old enough to vote and drink). If you don't see it, I don't know what to say, other than I have no more time or desire to discuss this now. (Was that a weasel answer or what?)

Tim or someone said earlier that most people stop responding to superheroes around the time they start getting laid. And it occurred to me recently that most of the adult superhero comic readers I know are married, so getting laid is largely out of the question. I now think superhero comics might be okay for Eve, whose chastity is religiously motivated, but not necessarily for the rest of us.

UPDATE: April Fool!

Second Thoughts - I think Glenn Reynolds said about what there is to say about yesterday's Fallujah riot, which is very little. (This is all bound up in my changed thinking about the war.) The people of Fallujah are like the famous headless fowl - flapping around something fierce briefly now that their day is almost over. (I don't agree that the attacks on American civilians are entirely John Kerry's fault, though.)

It's embarrassing to admit you were wrong about something as big as the war, and it's even harder to say why. Aside from everything else the pro-America side has pointed out - the evil of Saddam's regime; the nexus of terror and terrible weapons (which doesn't go away just because, in this particular case, there were no terrible weapons and not that much explicit connection to terror: it's coming); the prospect that continuing to oppose our efforts to rebuild a free Iraq just emboldened our very real enemies - what really tipped it for me was the Madrid bombings. You might say that, like the Fallujah rioters, I too have been flapping around something fierce since that day - and I think that, in that, I was like the "antiwar" movement as a whole.

It all comes back to what Charles Johnson, Glenn, Steven Den Beste and others have called "the culture of death" in the Arab/Moslem world - people who would rather annhilate themselves along with us than build something positive. I had objected that President Bush's policies, by seeming to confirm the worst fears of the inhabitants of the region, exacerbated rather than cured this derangement.

But then I thought of Madrid. One detail has gotten lost. The killers detonated their bombs by cell phone. They themselves got off the train safely, though alert action by the Aznar government rounded several of them up in short order.

They didn't kill themselves too.

Yes, they murdered hundreds. Yes they are evil men, mass murderers who should be killed after trial and sentencing. Yes, we have a long way to go. But they were not suicides like the destroyers of the Cole and Khobar Towers, the WTC hijackers and the numberless slaughterers of Jews in Israel and elsewhere. The President has already taught these aficionados of martyrdom to value their own lives, if not yet others. That's progress. That's a start. It is not, obviously, a final victory. But it's proof that our government's plan to change the culture of death is starting to work. Once our enemies realize the central principle of our own culture - that life is sweet - for themselves, then the next lesson is to apply the principle to others.

How do we teach that lesson? The same way we've taught the first one. And - this is crucial - with the same teachers. Soon, I expect we'll have cornered Bin Laden and Zawahiri in Pakistan or Afghanistan, started to drive American deaths back down in Iraq and provided the beginnings of a stable, multi-ethnic society in the very place it's most needed, the heart of the Arab Middle East. I like to think the path will be just a shade clearer with me no longer obstructing it.

To my Loyal Readers who have followed me this far, I very much appreciate the years of support. I realize this may lead to something of a rupture with some of you, at least for a time. But do me a favor. Think about this stuff. Just think about it.

I'm reminded of Craig Thompson's narrator, "Craig," in his graphic memoir Blankets, to which I was rather unfair in the past. The point is, "Craig" never stopped seeking the truth as he saw it, never bound himself to received ideas - his own or others. We can do no less.

UPDATE: April Fool!