Holiday Mail - Readers write about things other than the fate of Western Civilization - that is, about the sort of stuff I've been blogging about this weekend. Bruce Baugh:

Granted that I'm not having one myself this summer, but...right on, brother. The whole point of a burger is to get good meat, good condiments, and do very little to it. People who want to fancy things up should go play with something else.

I have spoken, and it is so.

He must be right because he agrees with me!

John "Zizka" Emerson on haiku:

My favorite is Jack Kerouac:

"Useless, useless --
the warm rain
drives into the sea".

Kerouac did tons, of varying quality. Gary Snyder did a few. Snyder, who studied Japanese diligently, admired Kerouac's haiku. Neither one counted syllables at all, IIRC. Reznikoff did lots of haiku-like poems. So did Pound, of course:

"The apparition
of these faces in the crowd --
petals on a wet, black bough."

I agree that matching the Japanese is impossible and undesirable, but the general idea of English haiku is good IMO. I actually improved the Kerouac slightly. I can't remember the exact original. The Pound one I sometimes quote without the "apparition". I know why "apparition" is there, but somehow it seems clunky. I have no ethics, really.

I instinctively rebel at the first line of the Kerouac example, which is not imagistic in the least. But the truth is, when I've read classical Japanese haiku in translation, they too seem to make room for abstract ideation. It may be that their Western forebears have pushed the primacy of the image farther than they themselves would have taken it.

Ultimately, this is my problem with haiku: I don't believe in the primacy of the image. Perhaps say, rather, the sufficiency of the image, its overriding importance, in poetry. I believe images are important building blocks of musical thought, but just as you can have a pile of bricks that are not a house, you can have one or two or a hundred perfectly realized images that are not a poem. There have been individual writers and entire movements in poetry that disagree violently - even contemptuously - with me on this. While I regret that kind of esthetic strife, these people are fuckwits.

Okay, that was a little strong. But they're incorrect.

I do like a lot of Gary Snyder poems, though, especially the famous one about cutting trails for the forest service.

Jesse Walker reminds me of his own adventure in 5-7-5 "haiku," and adds

The best high-school-formula English-language haiku ever was written by a classmate of mine:

Five four three two one Counting back from seventeen That makes poetry?

© 19__ Jesse's classmate.

Mmm! - DIana Moon offers a hamburger recipe for when you absolutely must cook your burger inside - e.g. when there's a blizzard or you live in Manhattan or both. (I can't really think of another reason.) Scroll down to "Gourmet Hamburger Recipes."

Meanwhile, could someone wise in the ways of Blogger's new interface help Diana finally get her item-specific permalinks working? I'm given to understand it's possible now, and she's writing a bunch of important, link-worthy stuff, so it would be nice to be able to actually link it. Contact her at the e-mail address on her website.

I Get It Now - Your Talking Dog has been blogging in "haiku" all week, I finally realize. Call me a pedant, but I hold with those who argue that the true form of the classical Japanese haiku in English is not three lines of syllable count 5-7-5.

Why do I disagree with your ninth-grade english teacher? Because there's a lot your ninth-grade english teacher never considered. The classical Japanese haiku is written in seventeen onji. Onji are sorta kinda syllables, but with some twists. There's a "syllabic 'n'," for instance. Japanese onji are, unlike American syllables, uniform in length and stress. Japanese tends to take more syllables to get across the same message than English does. Do literal translations of the great haikuists, like Basho or Buson, and you'll rarely require 17 syllables to do the job. You can usually do it in ten or twelve.

Next, the line count. Japanese haiku traditionally comes in one single line of characters. Also traditionally, there's a "cutting word" - a word that serves as punctuation - after the fifth OR the twelfth syllable. English doesn't have a system of cutting words. It has punctuation instead, and in verse, line breaks. So to account for the fact that the cutting word could come in either position 5 or 12 of seventeen, scholars like Arthur Waley created the 5-7-5 schema - an adaptation that was too long, too punctuated and too heedless of the verse characteristics of english, which is based far more often on stress or a combination of stress and syllable count than syllable count alone. (The 20th century mania for syllabics is something of an Asian import, actually.)

So how should English-language haiku be written? Trick question! They shouldn't be written at all. Same goes for sestinas. (We don't just pick on the Japanese forms around here.) But if you insist, as I did in my misspent youth, write your haiku more or less strictly as follows:

* about 2 lines (1-3)
* heavily punctuated between lines (dashes are cool; so are colons - if you're writing in three lines you can go easy between any two of them; you can of course punctuate virtually)
* about 7 total stressed syllables (5-9), unstressed syllables as necessary
* one of your two lines should be substantially longer than the other, in terms of stress count, e.g. 5:2 or 2:5 (obviously, if you're writing a one-liner or three liner, this changes)
* don't forget your season words! unless you're writing senryu.

Examples:

     dusk
not the ice cream truck
 . . . wind chimes

the heat
cinderblocks in the dirt yard

Those were the two of mine that I remember. Here's one of the few genuinely great haiku in English, by the late John Wills:

dusk   from rock to rock a water thrush

Note that the greatness of Wills' composition inheres substantially in his explotation of its Englishness. The whole poem is a single headless pentameter (five iambic feet, with the first one dropping the unstressed syllable):

DUSK [...] | from ROCK | to ROCK | a WAT | er THRUSH

The poem is bounded by a symmetry of rhyme. The short U-sounds of DUSK and THRUSH book-end the poem, and open and close our view of the action. The short O-sounds of ROCK, ROCK and WAT pace the bird's flight.

At five stressed syllables and a single line it comes in on the low end of the classical measurements I outlined above. But one wouldn't want to read it out of any canon. If you insist on trying to match Wills, read some books toward that end. If you want to see someone get even more wound up about the topic, read D-squared.

UPDATE: Minor edits. Fixed the misremembered word in one of the two haiku I remembered. Also, got rid of the "Japaneses" in para two.

Wow - Fresh Bilge reprints a powerful letter to the editors of a Vermont paper from the mother of a gay son. The letter dates from April 2000. Excerpt:

Many letters have been sent to the Valley News concerning the homosexual menace in Vermont. I am the mother of a gay son and I've taken enough from you good people.

I'm tired of your foolish rhetoric about the "homosexual agenda" and your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing as advocating sex with children. You are cruel and ignorant. You have been robbing me of the joys of motherhood ever since my children were tiny.

Read the rest. It's a stunning, flawless composition.

You have the audacity to talk about protecting families and children from the homosexual menace, while you yourselves tear apart families and drive children to despair.

"Other stories pushed Pentagon assertions so aggressively you could almost sense epaulets sprouting on the shoulders of editors." - Obudsman Daniel Okrent of the New York Times offers his own retrospective on the paper's prewar coverage of Iraq's WSD capability. Excerpt:

No one can deny that this was a drama in which The Times played a role. On Friday, May 21, a front-page article by David E. Sanger ("A Seat of Honor Lost to Open Political Warfare") elegantly characterized Chalabi as "a man who, in lunches with politicians, secret sessions with intelligence chiefs and frequent conversations with reporters from Foggy Bottom to London's Mayfair, worked furiously to plot Mr. Hussein's fall." The words "from The Times, among other publications" would have fit nicely after "reporters" in that sentence. The aggressive journalism that I long for, and that the paper owes both its readers and its own self-respect, would reveal not just the tactics of those who promoted the W.M.D. stories, but how The Times itself was used to further their cunning campaign.

It's a Party Party Weekend - For your grilling pleasure, particularly if you are a frou-frou sort, MSN offers 10 gourmet hamburger recipes. All of them assume you've bought into the Official Ongoing Ground Meat Scare and will cook your burgers for 14 to 18(!) minutes. They tend to involve things like cilantro and porcini mushrooms. Also, the interface for the story is itself a bit much. Me, I'm a burger minimalist. Give me good ground meat and a hot grill and even ketchup and mustard are more than I require. The planet's best foods - a good burger or steak; fresh berries - taste best unadorned. IMHO, you know? For my burgers, I like a rub, comprising

1tbl black pepper
1 tsp kosher salt
1 tsp mustard powder
1/2 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp marjoram

Mix it up good in a custard or tea cup. Dump onto a plate or cutting board and spread evenly. Dredge burgers on both sides. Grill until medium rare, or, if you insist, longer. Serve on a soft, whole wheat bun.

Ultimate Godwin's Law Violation - Hitler was worse than Hitler.

You Call That the Ding an Sich? You Call THAT the DING AN SICH???? - By way of slagging Wordsworth for narcissism, Aaron Haspel praises Hardy and Dickinson for looking at nature and seeing something other than themselves. Okay, they sort of do. But both of them inveterately moralize landscapes (spy human symbols in them), which is among the commonest and most understandable poetic vices. After all, chances are that most of us want our poets to do this most of the time. We'd do it ourselves except poets are ever so much better at it.

If you want to get away from that sort of thing, you go to Frost, who recognizes the temptation and spends much of his time relentlessly demoralizing his surroundings. That's the whole point of "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things," to teach us "not to believe the phoebes wept." If he weakens ("What but design of darkness to appall?") he immediately slaps himself across the face again ("If design govern in a thing so small."). Even in his comparative juvenilia ("The Vantage Point") he lampoons the poet's relentless hunt for human significance in nature:

My breathing shakes the bluet like a breeze, I smell the earth, I smell the bruisèd plant,
I look into the crater of the ant.

Frost was a relentless skeptic who, during his time in London, got himself disinvited from Yeats' salons by snickering at some anecdote involving leprechauns. He even twits - Thomas Hardy. Hardy wrote (on "31 December 1900") "The Darkling Thrush," in which the poor bird has to bear quite a lot of significance indeed:

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carollings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessèd Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

Here is a bird with a soul, as fanciful a creature as ever an aged Irish spinster related to Mr. Yeats. And just over forty-one years later, Frost lets Hardy have it:

Come In

As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music -- hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.

Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.

The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush's breast.

Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went --
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.

But no, I was out for stars;
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked;
And I hadn't been.

Hardy's "Thrush" - composition deliberately though surely fancifully dated so precisely by the author - is taken to symbolize the hope of the new century. One Great War done and another on the way and that hope looks, in hindsight, premature. Frost's is surely an "answer poem" to Hardy's, and the immediate inclination is to read it as an answer poem in kind, full of symbols of lost hope. The sunlight "that had died in the west," the "pillared dark" - it's Spenglerian as it gets, right? And in light of Frost's staunch opposition to the prospect of US entry into the Second Great War, the ending reads like an isolationist fable: "NO. I was out for STARS!" (And stripes, presumably.) TTFN, Old Europe! "I would not come in," not having been "asked." ("Come In" first appeared in the February 1941 Atlantic Monthly.)

But that's not it either. Because Frost's real answer to Hardy is on another level entirely. This thrush is relentlessly a bird. Its song is "almost" like a call, and that's it. Almost. The bird being a bird means the poet is just a poet, not the United States at all. A man in the presence of a whole composition of putative objective correlatives for melancholy, feeling that pull ("to come in / To the dark and lament") and reminding himself that the so-called objective correlative is not objective at all - it's stuff we put there. He wouldn't go "even if asked," he insists, but the point is, I hadn't been.

Silly Thomas Hardy, Frost says. Did you really think it was about you? Frost sacrifices his own political allegory to make the larger point. He's the only poet I know whose poems really do deconstruct themselves, by design. No, not Ashbery. Ashbery's poems ship deconstructed from the factory. They're the poetical equivalent of pre-faded jeans. It is, vis a vis poststructuralist criticism, Stockholm Syndrome poetry. Frost's poems are like the magician's boxes that look solid and colorful when you first see them, but keep opening out until even the bottom has fallen away. They are the magician too.

(Postscript: That same thrush makes an uncredited appearance in my own "The Subject Was Bric-a-Brac," published here last month, as "some bird" whose "song is stubbornly its own." He keeps finding work. Rather, we keep finding work for him.)

A Reminder - Just because Michael Ledeen writes yet another breathless screed full of dubious to ridiculous reasons to conquer Iran with troops we don't have mere days after his close associate Ahmad Chalabi's organization becomes the target of an Iran-centric spy probe, it is not proof positive that Ledeen is himself an Iranian agent. He may not be. There is no reason to conclude without reservation at this time that Michael Ledeen's working relationship with Iranian intelligence officers has continued uninterrupted since the 1980s or been renewed since that time. While it is true that, reasoning paradoxically, we should immediately suspect Ledeen of having betrayed his country to the Mullahs or being duped into furthering their agenda, he is still an American citizen until such time as the executive branch sees fit to unilaterally revoke that status, and he is entitled to the presumption of innocence until such time as the executive branch decides that he is not. Furthermore, pace Trent Lott, Ledeen should not be rendered to a friendly if heavy-handed foreign government or consigned to a "special access program" so that any information he does have about any Iranian agenda he does serve can be tortured out of him. We are the United States of America and we don't do that sort of thing, not even to staunch defenders of close associates credibly accused of working hand-in-glove with a known terror-supporting country. No matter how many lives might be saved.

Follow-Up - The Army corroborates some aspects of Spc. Sean Baker's story and denies others:

The U.S. Army has confirmed the story of a former Kentucky National Guardsman who claims he was beaten by other soldiers.

Spc. Sean Baker told a Lexington, Ky., television station that he was severely beaten by U.S. soldiers at the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay in January 2003, WLKY NewsChannel 32 reported.

He said he was ordered to wear a prison uniform for a training exercise.

The Army said Baker was injured during the training session, but added that he suffered only minor injuries.

A spokeswoman said Baker's medical discharge last month was unrelated to those injuries, but she wouldn't elaborate, WLKY reported.

The Scotsman has more details, including the first interview I've seen with another soldier from Baker's unit.

De, as they say, veloping. According to the Scotsman there's a brain scan out there. Be interesting to see it.

Best Anecdote Ever comes from Jesse Walker.

Trouble with Liberals - The Poor Man has a where are they now item contrasting Tom Delay on Nancy Pelosi now with Tom Delay on the Kosovo War then. These kinds of things come up - Atrios has a minor sideline in such things. There's a valid point there, but I'm never sure it's the one the posters are making. Delay was within his rights back then, Pelosi is within her rights now and Delay is a big fat hypocrite. But it always feels like the liberal bloggers are going for the double whammy with these: somehow the Republican is supposed to have been wrong both times - now, for hypocrisy, and back then for criticizing the Dear Leader's Balkan crusade. And having lived through 1999, I remember Dems then playing the Delay Now card, tut tutting about conservative war critics giving comfort to our enemies and so on.

NB: Despite what you may have heard, the Poor Man is still funny.

The Media Really Does Suck - I suspect that much of what the military high command tried to tell us about the "wedding party assault" of last week is a crock. But there's no excuse for the egregious misquoting identified by Iraq Now. (Via Obsidian Wings.)

29,996 Liters to Go - Well, I'll be. It really was Sarin in last week's artillery shell.

In battle, such shells would have to be fired in great numbers to effect a large body of troops.

I wonder if we could do some kind of weapons buy-back program, where we swap Sarin-filled artillery shells for the real explosives that kill our troops when they blow up.

Knock the Vote - Jacob Levy and Matt discuss the possibilities of a libertarian revolt against the Republican Party this fall - that is, libertarians actually voting for the Libertarian candidate.

Matt thinks libertarians voting Libertarian is actually a good idea, and I like his reasoning:

The case for the LP is that no one really knows how many small-l libertarians are out there, other than that there are some of them, and they are usually aligned with the GOP. So how many anti-war, small government types are out there? 2 million, 4 million, who knows? It would be in their interests to be counted.

If those people go for Kerry and Kerry wins, the GOP will probably conclude that it ought to move left. If those people stay home and Kerry wins, the GOP will probably conclude that it needs more traditional base-mobilizing techniques like gay-bashing. If they vote Libertarian and Kerry wins, though, the GOP just might conclude that it needs to do something to attract their votes.

That strikes me as sound. I am, most days, in Dump Bush mode. I hold no brief for John Kerry, but I do support the idea of electoral punishment, and for reasons detailed at nauseating length on this site over the last two years, I believe the President has come to merit same. Quite apart from the war, the double-barrelled "enemy combatant" holding (any non-citizen can be declared an "enemy combatant" without rights and held without review, and any citizen can have his citizenship revoked without appeal) demands punishment. It is enough to outweigh my one reason for wanting Bush to continue in office. (I won't keep you in suspense: I think the Iraq War is an inevitable failure in the making. Part of me wants Bush and his team holding the bag for that failure so there can be no later weaseling about how We had it under control but weren't allowed to finish the job!)

So, how should libertarians vote if getting rid of the Bush Administration is the overriding goal? Depends.

Remember, the national popular vote doesn't matter. So the first question to ask is, Is my state competitive, or is the victory of either major-party candidate a foregone conclusion?

The libertarian in a non-competitive state should vote Libertarian. Even if you don't like the Party, and there are no end of reasons to dislike it, the Party can't actually screw anything up because the Party can't get its Presidential candidate elected. But if the Party makes a good electoral showing, it concentrates Republican minds.

For the libertarian in a competitive state, I suggest that the next question is, Who did you vote for in the last election? More generally, who normally gets your vote, all other things being equal?

If you voted for Bush last time, vote Libertarian this time. You cost the Republicans your vote without having to, you know, smear your thumb grease along the Democratic portion of the touch screen.

If you voted for Nader or Buchanan or some non-Libertarian third-party candidate, vote Libertarian this time. Matt is right.

If you voted for Gore, send me a detailed e-mail explaining what the hell you were thinking. But hey, you might as well vote Democratic again. You're used to it.

If you voted Libertarian last time, AND you live in a competitive state, AND untrammelled executive power to strip any citizen of his constitutional protections at any time bothers you AND, more importantly, the idea that a President goes out of his way to assert and defend such a power bothers you, that is, if you are a libertarian, well, maybe you really . . . should . . . vote . . . for . . . Teresa's husband. Isn't she a hoot, anyway? Don't you think she'd make a more entertaining First Lady than Laura Bush? (Not that I have anything against Laura Bush.)

An aside. Matt also writes

the libertarians I know are all hyper-rational individualists who look on the whole "voting" thing as crude, superstitious behavior roughly on a par with reading tarot cards as a means of political action.

Now I bet I know all the libertarians Matt knows, and while some of them definitely agree with the "Don't Vote, You'll Only Encourage Them" principle, not all of them do. I confess to having voted in every Presidential election since 1980. I'm pretty sure I wrote in a neighbor's name in 1996 or 2000, but I did vote. And I'm sure I wrote a friend in for Maryland Attorney General one time. We couldn't have done worse.

Spider Hole of Redemption - At the American Prospect website, Matthew Yglesias points out that, well, Crazy Howard turned out to be right about the capture of Saddam Hussein not making Americans safer. Matt:

But why bring this up today? Just to brag? Well, yes, to brag a little, but for a more important reason as well. We seem to be repeating the very same sort of mistake that led so many to believe that Hussein's capture would lead to a significant improvement in the security situation. Just as taking the Hussein family out of play did nothing to dim the tide of Sunni rebelliousness, neither will achieving the current tactical goal of eliminating al-Sadr do much to end the Sadrist movement. One important fact little mentioned in the media is that the movement's leader -- Muqtada's father -- had already been killed several years ago by Hussein himself. Nevertheless, the movement persisted, a symbol of deep Shia disaffection from the Baath regime.

Now They Tell Us, the Continuing Story - The New York Times gets introspective:

Some critics of our coverage during that time have focused blame on individual reporters. Our examination, however, indicates that the problem was more complicated. Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.

I shouldn't be bitter, should I? The editors provide a useful online appendix to the editorial - an annotated set of links to the paper's prewar coverage. I can't decide whether their cowardly for protecting Judith Miller specifically or commendable for not hanging her out to dry while letting themselves off easy.

Get It Over With - You can register for the upcoming draft online, and better. (Via the Agitator.)

Left as an Exercise for the Reader - Interesting story from the Associated Press:

Baker was a member of the Kentucky National Guard from 1989 through 1997 and re-enlisted after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

In the interview, Baker said that as part of the training drill, he was given an orange detainee jumpsuit to wear and turned over to four soldiers. Baker said the soldiers beat and choked him, stopping when they saw he was wearing parts of an Army uniform.

Baker said he has undergone numerous treatments, but still has medical problems.

Attempts by The Associated Press to reach Baker by telephone Monday were not successful.

The incident, if it happened, took place at Guantanamo Bay.

Meanwhile:

A US Army sergeant who gave an insider's view of Abu Ghraib prison to the media has lost his security clearance and been disciplined by the military for speaking out, he said today.

Sergeant Samuel Provance said soldiers he served with in Iraq were treating him as a pariah, but that he would not change a thing if given a second chance.

"My soldiers who were at Abu Ghraib are so scared now they're not even talking to me any more - I'm like a villain, but would I do it again? Of course I would, because I stand behind what I said," Provance said in a telephone interview from Heidelberg, Germany, where his military intelligence unit is based.

"I knew what was being reported was not true."

Provance, 30, is with the 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion, a unit of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, which has been implicated in the alleged abuse at Abu Ghraib. The scandal broke after photographs were made public of US soldiers abusing prisoners, sparking worldwide outrage.

From the rabidly anti-Coalition, defeatist Daily Telegraph. NB: Fifth Corps has a plausible rejoinder:

"The last word I got is that he was given an order not to talk with anyone about the case while the investigation was ongoing, and if any type of action was levied against him, it would be a result of him not obeying that order," said Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Gainer. "It could compromise the whole investigation by putting out information and maybe influencing others."

This has the disadvantage of being both true (so far as we know) and a temptation to great mischief on the part of the Army because it is true.

He's Got a Little List - General Zinni has a Top 10, of all things, list of Iraq War mistakes. Number 1 is basically Had the Iraq War in the first place, with nine more flowing from that. Actually, 1-3 all fit under the rubric of "had the war in the first place." Number four (didn't internationalize the effort) begs the question of just how much further it could have been internationalized. It's not clear whether Five ("We underestimated the task") is better classed as mistake or malfeasance. I think it depends on what you mean by "we." 7 and 8 are similarly attributable to his problem three ("false rationale"). The famous lack of planning and insufficient troops on the ground make the most sense considered as components of a strategy to downplay the human and financial cost and level of effort in advance. Plus, as we are learning, we only have so many troops to go around.

Still, Zinni's list isn't bad, and he does get the big thing right.

Brood X sounds like a cross between vivisected monkeys and a transporter malfunction on Star Trek. Out my the window of my second-floor office stand the boughs of a huge tree, and I can see the cicadas flitting dozen on dozen from leaf to leaf and branch to branch. It makes my face itch.

L'Audace! Toujours L'Audace! - David Corn's report from a recent AEI conference suffers a bit by trying to generalize from a single paper to neoconhood as a whole, but I suspect there are a lot of Best and Brightest Mark II guys who not only want to "stay the course" but add some extra laps - sprinting. Good summary of recent second thoughts by mainstream Republicans at the beginning:

Columnist George Will has questioned Bush's inability - or unwillingness - to reconsider the mission in Iraq. Representative Henry Hyde, a leading Republican, complained, "It would be foolish, not to say ruinously arrogant, to believe that we can determine the future of Iraq." And Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of the Intelligence Committee, declared that Bush's vision may be unrealistic and unwise: "We need to restrain what are growing U.S. messianic instincts, a sort of global social engineering where the United States feels it is both entitled and obligated to promote democracy, by force if necessary."

Took you long enough, you guys.

Annals of Special Pleading - Michael Ledeen gets out his Ouija board and blames America first in the Chalabi Affair. This behavior is consistent with the theory that Ledeen is himself an Iranian catspaw and has been since the 1980s, but I'm sure there are alternate explanations that fit the facts too. Choosing among the instances of special pleading and misdirection in Ledeen's pettifoggery is difficult, but let's simply apply his own principle. Ledeen tells us that

1. Chalabi couldn't be an Iranian spy because he's spent so much time openly visiting Tehran.
2. The way to tell what's really going on is by "reasoning paradoxically."

Gee, the two assertions look kind of funny sitting right next to each other, don't they? Maybe this is why Ledeen puts so much space between them, and why he adds the bit about how "He went to Tehran all the time, in part because the State Department and CIA refused to support him . . . " Well, that's all the excuse anyone should need.

Dismantling the rest of Ledeen's twaddle is left as an exercise for the reader. But it's also worth noting that James Jesus Angleton, Ledeen's posthumous adviser in these matters, died in disgrace after nearly wrecking the CIA and ruining many lives.

It's All Connected! - During the height of the Gary Condit-Chandra Levy scandal, the Onion did a "Man on the Street" feature in which one vox pop asked, "What is it with Democratic politicians and these intern Jewesses?" More seriously, we might ask "What is it with these Republican defense ideologues making fools of the country at the hands of Iran?"

The accusation on the table is that Ahmad Chalabi personally handed Iranian intelligence classified American secrets so dangerous that "it could get Americans killed." It's also alleged that one of Chalabi's right-hand men is on Iranian intelligence's payroll. CBS asks, quite reasonably, Okay, who in the US government gave Chalabi such secret information in the first place?

The thing is, we've been here before. A few weeks ago, after Post columnist David Ignatius wrote a mild mea culpa about his support for the Iraq war, I e-mailed him to ask (paraphrasing, because the original is on a different machine):

My question is, How did you forget so much that you used to know? Your first novel, Agents of Innocence, was brilliant at, among other things, showing how a coterie of Republican hard-cases stumbled over their own naivete and arrogance in the Middle East. Our Iraq policy wasn't just made by the same sort of people. It was made, in many cases, by the exact same people.

Look at the names that have moved in and out of the War on Terror, either on the field of play or cheering from the sidelines: Elliott Abrams, John Poindexter, Michael Ledeen, Oliver North - all men who, had they the merest sense of shame, would have found themselves a job in a small-town title insurance office and stayed as far from the spotlight as possible after 1987, all men that any self-respecting administration would shun like drunk drivers who left the prom queen smeared along a guardrail one awful Spring.

And yet they have jobs either making or influencing policy.

Seventeen years ago, Oliver North sat before the Joint Committee and bombastically declared that "This country has enemies, Senator." Well, North was in a position to know after all - he'd been consorting with them for several years. At the very time the Islamic Republic of Iran was torturing American government agents in captivity in Beirut, Oliver North was running a program to get that country's military machine up and running again, and doing it in a way that, at any moment it chose, Iran could make the United States look like fools.

The more things change, baby.

And at that hearing, one of North's biggest apologists, chief exponent of the Why do we gotta talk about this stuff? line of defense among the Representatives on the committee, was Congressman Michael DeWine of Ohio, lately famous for firing an aide who published a sex-oriented blog under a pseudonym. As Mrs. Offering put it in conversation yesterday, the first rule of working on the Hill is "Don't embarrass your boss." This makes sense, but DeWine has, like most Congressmen, embarrassed himself so many times over that one wonders why he hasn't long since taken to conducting his entire life under a pseudonym. Faced with rank and arguably criminal incompetence in the preservation of the country's national security, Michael DeWine wanted to let bygones be bygones. Faced with a woman who simply gave as good as she got in the sex-charged culture endemic to legislature at all levels of American government, DeWine at last finds something he can't overlook.

Ye Gods.

Will Congressman DeWine be among those demanding to know the details of Ahmad Chalabi's relations with Republican bureaucrats and defense "intellectuals," and through him, their possible relations with Iranian intelligence? I doubt it. But I'd like to know. Isn't blowhard Michael Ledeen, for instance, just the sort of arrogant fool a foreign intelligence service would regard as the perfect mark? Aren't Ledeen's endless screeds demanding that the US topple the Iranian government the perfect cover for a witting or unwitting agent of influence? Where do the allegiances of (continuing!) Ledeen pal Manuchir Ghorbanifar really lie, and what damage has Douglas Feith done to the country by getting himself mixed up with the man? Are the Iranians crazy, for bringing US troops to their very borders, or crazy smart, having figured out just what a ten-division army bogged down in a sour occupation can and can't do to them? Inquiring minds want to know, and will be found nowhere near the offices of Michael DeWine.

Just So You Know - I am not even a "middling blog." On the other hand, my resting pulse is back below sixty - not bad for a forty-three-year-old man, huh?

Congratulations are in Order to various folks:

My soon-to-be-neighbor Oliver Willis, for making blogging pay. And Oliver, we have the best blog parties down here too. See you soon!

Matthew Barganier, for his new paid job as editor of Antiwar.com. This can only be a good thing for both him and the site. See his condemnation of the Daily Mirror for its photo fakery yesterday for a taste of what I mean.

Timing Lag - Reading James Taranto making sport of the abuse of Reuters employees this morning reminded me of how so much of the historical discussion around the Iraq War and Bush-branded "War on Terror" (as opposed to the other wars against terrorists we might have fought) is bedeviled by bad frames of reference. For instance, disputants debate whether Iraq is "like Vietnam," but focus for the purpose of comparison on Vietnam in 1968 or later, when the better analog is 1963. (Last summer it was 1954 - see the recent film version of The Quiet American: time flies.) If Kerry really means it about needing more troops, then next year might be 1965.

Similar problems bedevil the infamous "Bush = Hitler" comparison. Bush isn't Hitler - don't be ridiculous. He's Kaiser Wilhelm at best. And Taranto and his ilk - columnist, blogger, message board or comment thread denizen - aren't Germans of the late 30s. They're Germans of the middle teens, soon enough to be Germans of the 20s. ("Stab in the back," anyone?)

Of course, things do move faster now than they did then.

As I Was Saying - Matt Hogan clues me in to partial confirmation of my speculation yesterday about Iraqi notables being tortured last year as part of the "special access program." From Michael Moffeit of the Denver Post:

The deaths include the killing in November of a high-level Iraqi general who was shoved into a sleeping bag and suffocated, according to the Pentagon report. The documents contradict an earlier Defense Department statement that said the general died "of natural causes" during an interrogation. Pentagon officials declined to comment on the new disclosure.

Another Iraqi military officer, records show, was asphyxiated after being gagged, his hands tied to the top of his cell door. Another detainee died "while undergoing stress technique interrogation," involving smothering and "chest compressions," according to the documents.

It was a year before that, actually, that Gary Farber wrote, "This is dark territory, and I fear it." People should have listened. More from Moffeit

"Torture is the only thing you can call this," said a Pentagon source with knowledge of internal investigations into prisoner abuses. "There is a lot about our country's interrogation techniques that is very troubling. These are violations of military law."

Something else is clear: the titillating pictures of naked dudes and bondage chicks serve to distract from the stories of the greater abuses. They are a diversion from garden-variety beatings and chokings and stompings and we don't yet know what else. So long as we can be conned into eyeballing photos of "sexual humiliation," apologists can spin their woolly coverings about "hijinx" and "not so bad." Don't fall for it.

New Frontiers in Comment Spam - My LiveJournal has - gasp! - comments. Today I got a clear non-sequiter comment from a LiveJournal user that was, well, not strongly connected with anything the post was actually about. It read like comment spam, but didn't have a URL to an actual porn site or anything.

But that's the fiendishly clever part! Out of curiousity I click through to her LJ, and what do I see in the top post?

"I finally got a webcam!!"

Well of course you did, honey. And clicking through to the webcam site I discover, surprise surprise, it costs money to join!

Truth is, I have a certain admiration for the subtlety of the approach. I reported her anyway, mind you, and no, I'm not putting a link here.

PowerPoint Hate? You Want PowerPoint Hate? - Well you should, and Brett Peters is your portal. All the links you need: Tufte, Norvig, Textism, Abraham Lincoln and even Tufte in PowerPoint form. I have to say, it speaks to me.

My favorite excerpt from Edward Tufte's new jeremiad:

Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.

There's plenty more to be had, via Brett's site.

Drip Drip Drip - If there's no pattern to this Iraqi prison abuse business, why do we keep getting official statements that are patently ridiculous, like this one in CNN today:

Sanchez said he put the prison under the command of a military intelligence brigade in November to improve the facility's defenses after a series of mortar attacks in late 2003.

Really? The way you keep a prison from being shelled is to put military intelligence in charge of it? That makes a whole lot of sense.

Campaign 2004 FWIW - Mrs. O's job brings her into contact with a lot of normally pro-Republican business people in political settings. Twice this week she's encountered, in those gatherings, frustration with and even hostility toward the President. Bill of particulars includes the War and the Administration's strictly so-so "pro-market" policies. And they all wonder why the hell they have to listen to a lot of talk about gay marriage rather than the economy.

On the other hand, a coworker of hers rides the subway with people she pegs as mostly ex-military or defense contractor types. She evesdrops on their conversations and they are all anti-Kerry.

Between the Lines - Rereading the latest Hersh story on Abu Ghraib and the "special access program" known, sometimes, as "Copper Green," I was struck by the following transition:

In mid-2003, the special-access program was regarded in the Pentagon as one of the success stories of the war on terror. "It was an active program," the former intelligence official told me. "It's been the most important capability we have for dealing with an imminent threat. If we discover where Osama bin Laden is, we can get him. And we can remove an existing threat with a real capability to hit the United States-and do so without visibility." Some of its methods were troubling and could not bear close scrutiny, however.

By then, the war in Iraq had begun. The sap was involved in some assignments in Iraq, the former official said. C.I.A. and other American Special Forces operatives secretly teamed up to hunt for Saddam Hussein and - without success - for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But they weren't able to stop the evolving insurgency.

My emphasis. Now here's the possibility that the article does not confirm: The methodology of the SAP against Al Qaeda is described as 'Grab whom you must. Do what you want.' There is a later stage, after the SAP has been expanded in Iraq to "cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets" Hersh's possibly self-serving intel source describes the CIA as balking. But there's also this, about the early days of the insurgency:

In the first months after the fall of Baghdad, Rumsfeld and his aides still had a limited view of the insurgency, seeing it as little more than the work of Baathist "dead-enders," criminal gangs, and foreign terrorists who were Al Qaeda followers. The Administration measured its success in the war by how many of those on its list of the fifty-five most wanted members of the old regime-reproduced on playing cards-had been captured.

Putting it all together:

The Special Access Program was involved in Iraq since the beginning of the post-invasion phase of the war.

Elements of the SAP infrastructure and superstructure only developed qualms once its purview expanded to the ordinary shlubs populating the Army prison system in Iraq.

So the question that arises is, did we, as part of the SAP, torture former regime scientists last summer as part of the WMD search? Last I checked, some of these people had never been released by US authorities, even though they pretty clearly had nothing much to tell. Is it because of what has happened to them while they're in custody?

A Bowl and Gram - Reformed paleo Gene Callahan is showing the influence of his new intellectual lodestar, Andrew Sullivan, at The Daily Douche.

Don't Be Fooled - Hiatal Moon has actually done quite a lot of blogging lately, on everything from Israeli-Palestinian issues to Abu Ghraib, all despite not blogging. NB Diana: On the question of Palestinians attacking Israeli soldiers rather than civilians. I'm pretty sure there was a journal article about this in 2002. If I recall correctly, the second intifada began with mostly non-suicide attacks mostly against military personnel, mostly by Fatah and allied secular groups. Problem was, they rarely succeeded in killing anyone. (Apparently the Israelis are even better at the "force protection" business than we are.) Then Hamas et al began detonating themselves in discos and pizza parlors (fuckers) to spectacular if ignoble effect, and the Fatah-ish changed strategies to keep up with their domestic constituency.

Let me be clear that I'm not defending the practice of targeting civilians. I condemn it. I'm just offering an explanation I saw for how things got this way.

If anyone can validate this memory with a source or link, I'd be grateful. (Mr. Jimmy, you out there?) And if any Blogger gurus can make Diana's item-specific anchors work, there will be much rejoicing on my part.

Maybe We Can Blame the Prison Scandal on Him Too - An INC spokesperson claims the US is cutting off Ahmad Chalabi's allowance. I say, check your wallet before believing, but maybe that Iranian money is all the fellow needs. Christopher Hitchens must be, as the French say, désolé.

Via Outside the Beltway, where I was actually looking for further sarin test confirmation. If we can't count on our leading conservative bloggers to give us the latest news on Weapons of Some Destruction, where can we turn?

Early Returns - Anent this morning's item, Nell Lancaster writes

I vote for lied to us, not themselves. Otherwise we'd have had confident, official lowball projections of cost, occ. length, etc., instead of "too great a range to say" and most of the cakewalk talk coming from deniable sources like Adelman and Woolsey.

If this was really about the bases, and I believe it was, then they figured we'd be there a long, long time. They (Rumsfeld and Cheney) _may_ have lied to themselves about the ease of installing a remotely operable "democratic strongman" Chalabi & Co., so that they could continue to believe the basing could be pulled off with the troops available. The panicky ratcheting-up of counterinsurgency tactics, most fatally the interrogation debacle, does indicate clueless flailing more than cool "we knew it would come to this" decision-making.

This sounds likely. And I do think it was always about the bases. Which means things could get very interesting over the next few months.

Watch This Space - We may have discovered an actual chemical weapon in Iraq, as you've probably read by now. Donald Rumsfeld warns us not to be too sure yet. Citizen Smash is collecting reactions from different corners of Opinionland (he also has a sensible take on what the preliminary reports may and may not mean). Interested parties should feel free to pigeonhole me as minimizing the importance of the discovery even if it proves out. You want reasons? Sure. Here's a quick list:

o My opposition to the war did not rest on the belief that Saddam had no chemical or biological weapons. I wrote a big long thing poo-poohing the notion that chemical weapons were really "mass destruction" weapons in the summer of 2002. The misadventure with today's IED can't prove my contention, but it sure didn't refute it.

o The shell was unmarked and, like a mustard gas shell in a report Smash also uncovered, its contents were apparently in a state of advanced decay. This tends to bear out the thesis that any chemical weapons Iraq had not destroyed were too old to be any use.

o I'm a libertarian. I believe a government that set out to destroy all of its stock of anything could overlook the odd remnant here or there. When we have the President's tens of thousands of tons and liters of stuff, I'll be impressed, though not swayed as to its political meaning.

o There are two ways to approach the question of any WMD find: 1) Is it big enough to provide what we might call "legal cover" for the Iraq conquest, that is, does this provide a plausible excuse based on UN resolutions etc? 2) Does it demonstrate that Iraq was a threat to the United States that only escalated war could remove? Does it demonstrate the capability and intention to launch a major attack on the United States? (I would class the September 11, 2001 atrocities as a major attack, if you're keeping score.) I only care about the second perspective. I profess only a spectator's interest in the first, because I was never, unlike the government, looking for an excuse to escalate the twelve-year war with Iraq.

Finally, I will be annoying and make an "It's all bad" claim. If this is the worst there is, it's garbage as far as justifying our hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of dead and maimed and their larger tally of dead and maimed. But if it's a sign that there really is a lot of stuff out there, so much the worse for the hawks - and for the rest of us. Because one of the reasons we gave for avoiding war in the first place was that, if Saddam possessed usable chemical and biological weapons, war itself was the most likely vector of putting them in the hands of terrorists. (See Gene Healy for an Advantage: Me! item on that score.)

No You're Not Missing Something - Kevin Drum figures it out :

But it's not that simple, is it? After all, we don't have several hundred thousand troops. I've heard some reasonable sounding suggestions that by mobilizing more reserves and doing a few other things we could dredge up another 50-60,000 troops or so, but nothing that would get us up to the 300,000 that Shinseki wanted. They just aren't there.

So it wasn't really a matter only of Bush and Rumsfeld wanting to wage war on the cheap. Rather, if they had accepted Shinseki's advice, they wouldn't have been able to wage their war at all - at least, not in the timeframe they wanted.

That's right, isn't it? Or am I missing something?

The only remaining question is whether the only lied to us - about troop strength, occupation length, financial cost - or to themselves too. The latter would move us into "worse than a crime, it was a mistake" territory.

Fitness Blogging has a new, more prolix home. Explanation here, look and feel very much in progress. From the UO end, we'll be doing nutrition politics and weekly pointers (maybe) to the training journal. The nitty gritty of marathon prep will be at the new home.

Disagreeable Item Prefatory to Everything that Comes After - To get the Keegan link in the mailblog item below this one, I had to go back and reread this lengthy November 2003 item critiquing Keegan's article. I think we need to give Keegan and Rumsfeld one point - Saddam really was caught "soon" after that article came out, barely over a month later.

But read the rest of it. I don't want to make a career of pointing this out, but it needs saying now and then: Iraq today looks a hell of a lot more like I said it would than like they said it would, for any official or unofficial hawkish "they" you care to aggregate.

The (Bloody) Road Not Taken II - Couple of e-mails on the subject. Rafe Colburn writes:

To me, the biggest hurdle is lack of a common language. Our soldiers simply can't communicate effectively with the vast majority of the Iraqis, and I don't see how that barrier can be overcome -- hence the Don't Loot video that I linked to on my site awhile back. How do communicate to a few guys who are collecting scrap wood that they shouldn't be doing that if you can't just tell them? Crush their car with a tank. Yeah, that's a good way to make friends.

Anyway, I think the language barrier confounds us as much as anything.

I suspect Rafe is right about this. Mrs. Offering tried to learn Arabic in grad school and found it terribly hard, and she was getting a real language course, which is true for very few of our troops.

Tacitus writes:

Basically, your "road not taken" post is correct. Those have, historically, been the tactics that work in counterinsurgency situations (well, aside from wholesale slaughter, which works too, but not in our grab bag of options). Myself, I think the country would stand for it -- it would, after all, represent a net saving of lives in the long run. Dunno about whether the soldiers would go for it, although I note that Marines have a long history of doing it, and doing it well.

I doubt Tacitus' optimism on the subject from two ends. You may not like Democrats or the idea of an opposition party in wartime, or at least an opposition party that, you know, opposes - but they're not going away. And they've made quite a bit of hay about inadequate body and vehicle armor. It's a chance to ding the Administration while placing oneself loudly on the side of Our Boys (and Girls). In our hypothetical scenario, the Administration responds, "But that's the strategy, dummy!" but that just means the Democrats counter that "It's a stupid strategy that wastes American lives and shows how little the President cares about OB(aG)."

And the vector by which inadequate armor became an issue is, near as I can tell, via the troops themselves. Soldiers and guardsmen bug their relatives; in many cases, troops or their stateside loved ones and neighbors buy gear out of their own pocket; then stateside loved ones go to Representative Hoo-Ah's town meeting and complain. Representative Hoo-Ah issues outraged statements to the media. Just look at the kinds of questions the troops asked Rumsfeld during his Iraq appearance the other day. An awful lot about personal protection. It would be a real battle to, on top of jerking our soldiers around on deployment length and leave schedules and everything else, to get them to do less than the most they could do to protect themselves.

(Note: two questions may get confused here. 1) Could we have spurned the force protection strategy from the beginning; and 2) could we abandon it now. I think the answer is No to both.)

Jonathan Hendry:

But would your idea work for someone else? Perhaps because, being non-American, there'd be less of a grudge, and they'd take fewer casualties.

[Ed: Yeah, but would they be stupid enough to invade Iraq in the first place? Okay, kidding - I know what Jonathan is driving at here, the mythical "international support." Still a fantasy, I maintain, for all the reasons I've maintained it all along. And I note that events have borne me out so far. And John Kerry? Don't kid yourself, JFK. Foreigners may like you, but not that much. Nobody else on the planet that you would want providing troops has the logistical capacity, the spare cash or the desire to provide troops in the quantity needed. We're not talking three battalions to secure some African airport road here. We're talking - say it with me now - a country the size of California.]

Don't the Brits basically follow your suggested approach, with decent success?

Answer: Seemingly, sort of, yes. At certain costs. The Brits have, as Mr. Keegan gushed some months ago, also made deals with local strongmen and theocrats, which has led to all the liquor store bombings and woman-harassing that were staples of the news from the Shiite South before Baby Sadr began stealing headlines.

It is unfortunate, though, that we don't have better experimental controls. It's a shame that the Brits get pretty much only Shiites while we've had, until the Spanish pulled out, pretty much only Sunni areas. It would have been instructive, from a bloody-minded imperialist perspective anyway, to see what the Brits could or couldn't do with Samarra. Or Fallujah. And how Basra would have liked a sustained American presence. Clearly we need to invade a bunch more countries to improve our database. Right after I drop this acid.

He's Got It Backwards or maybe sideways. Kevin Drum thinks the Kerry-McCain rumors are a chance for the rare "moderate Republican" to "make one last stand" by at least privately telling John McCain "it would be good for the country if he joined a fusion ticket with Kerry." But that's not the way it works in real life. In real life, the moderate Republicans make their stand by, entirely privately, threatening to George W. Bush to privately tell John McCain etc. No marks, no visible bruises, no pesky photos of naked Dubya crouching over Rumsfeld's bare bottom while Lynndie England whistles into her cigarette. All quiet, professional and, most importantly, within the party, not outside. Threaten the nuclear option but don't use it, or your future life as a Republican becomes unbearable. Then, in return for not encouraging McCain to join a fusion ticket, the Bush campaign gives the moderate Republicans some vital thing that they want.

Whatever the hell that might be. I have no idea, myself. Does anyone else? Is there something that "moderate Republicanism" stands for?

The (Bloody) Road Not Taken - Slightly edited version of a comment I posted at Arkhangel's site:

I have toyed with the following idea for some time of an entirely different approach to the occupation. Essentially, abandon "force protection" as the overriding goal. Ditch the body armor, change the rules of engagement, get out and mingle in small groups, strictly control the impulse to massive retaliation both at the instant of an attack and after. This is a policy of sacrificing many more soldiers' lives than we have lost with the aim of building much more mutual trust and sympathy than we have managed. By "many more lives" I'm imagining an order of magnitude more KIAs. The hope is that you overcome the "giant lizards from another star" phenomenon and that those locals who are not irremediably opposed to the US presence become so outraged at attacks on people they've come to like and depend on that "the sea of the people" dries up around the insurgent fish.

And as attractive as it sounds, I always end up thinking: 1) politically, the country wouldn't stand for it - we would loudly decry putting our boys out there "naked" on street corners once the bodies started rolling in; 2) the psychological toll on the troops would be unbearable, and 3) there's just no way I could ask people like Arkhangel and Ginmar and Captain Chown et al to lay themselves out like that. It amounts to "make yourself a bigger target" for some very speculative, notional payoff down the line.

Which is to say, the thing we're doing doesn't work and the thing that might work we can't do.

Sapphire &: Steel, Adventure I - The "crack in time" episode, about two parents in an old English country house who disappear reading a nursery rhyme to their daughter. (My order from Deepdiscountdvd.com arrived in jig time.) Six half-hour episodes (minus titles and such), so about two and a half hours of story. The Adult Offerings give it one thumb up. Mrs. O liked it less than I did, though she agreed that it got better as it went along. Pluses: You're talking some really primal storytelling material here. Nursery rhymes, old crimes, abandonment, mistrust and longing to believe. You can see the story in writer/director PJ Hammond's head, and it's a powerful one. On the minus side, you view it through the smudgy glass of low-budget late-70s British TV. What are essentially ghosts frequently take the form of a small spotlight crawling across walls and floors - the sort of thing your cat would chase. The dialogue ranges from acceptable to less so, as does the acting. In the second half of the adventure, fellow operative Lead appears, and he's written as an Afro-British stereotype.

I've never been one of those people who enjoys cheesiness for its own sake. I dislike camp and kitsch as esthetics, so what I liked I liked in spite of things other people would probably get a knowing chuckle out of. But like I said, it gets better as it goes along. There's a scene in the last episode of the first adventure that's positively gripping. I have hopes future episodes will be even better.

Chown Strike - More from Captain Chris Chown, USMC, somewhere in Western Iraq, who, in an e-mail from his unclass marine corps address, notes it "should put to rest your searching around for info on me being who I say I am." This time around, he offers what he describes as the first part of his answer to my original question two, which was about the progress the Marines have been seeing in Iraq.

Captain Chown: Some of the progress we are making has to do with our Civil Affairs detachment. I should explain that when we got in country, one of the units attached to my battalion was a det from the 1st Civil Affairs Group. The CAG does not exist in the active duty Marine Corps, so these guys are all activated reservisits. Anyway, their job is to meet with what equates to city council members of local towns/ villages to identify the civic needs of that particular town, and then fill those needs. School renovation, construction, improvements to the community (parks, soccer fields, community centers, etc.) are the big ticket items. We are also helping to train the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps (ICDC), which is kind of halfway between the police (who we are also providing equipment/ training for) and the new Iraqi Army. Anyway, the reason we are focused here is for a number of reasons. First, (and obviously)helping to fill the civic needs benefits the community. This statement is not as trite as it first may appear. If we are doing the things that help people's families, it makes them less inclined to shoot at us. Also, by identifying construction/ contracting type projects, it allows Iraqi general contractors the opportunity to come in and do the work. What this does is allows us to put money into the infrastructure without making it look like we're just giving money to them. I mentioned before about the "macho"ness of Iraqi culture, the typical Iraqi man doesn't want a handout, he wants a job so he can support his family. It ties in with the "shame" concept of Arabic culture. If a man doesn't have a job, his family thinks of him as less than a man, because he can't provide for them. This man feels like he's under so much pressure to provide for his family, that he's willing to take money from terrorists to shoot an RPG at the Americans. Anyway, the idea is to identify opportunities to provide jobs for Iraqis 1)So they're too busy working to shoot at us, and 2)They're less inclined to shoot at us because their happier at home. We measure the success we are having by how quiet it is at night (when most of the mortar and rocket attacks occur) and by the number of "walk-in" intelligence leads we get. As the security situation stabilizes, people feel less afraid to come and talk to the Americans.

I have to get off this computer now. Other Marines are in line behind me, but I will write more later.

More to come, and I guess we can put that rumor about e-mail access being cut off to rest. In the meantime, see Ginmar's reflections on Abu Ghraib and Arkhangel's reaction to the first Captain Chown interview. (He's jealous of the Marines, basically.)

Ginmar:

Maybe it's the idea that these soldiers just weren't the scary-looking weirdos in the alley we'd like to believe they are. It's so easy to look at the mob and hang their savagery on their religion, their country, whatever. But when the mob is one of our own, I think it's important to claim them and confront whatever it was that made them do it.

This is good advice, and not just for our side, as the pictures of the beheading of Nick Berg make clear.

Bitter Truth II - Johanna Draper Carlson:

When creators get bored, it's always easier to change the character than to reach deeper inside themselves.

She's talking about superhero comics, but the principle applies beyond.

Your Fitness Alternative - Extreme Ironing: "the latest danger sport that combines the thrills of an extreme outdoor activity with the satisfaction of a well pressed shirt."

Hat tip: Mrs. O.

Rack Me, I'm Out - Finally got that boingboing link. I can stop blogging now.

The Bitter Truth - Nate on used bookstores:

Part of getting old is realizing that used bookstores, while very cool, are not quite as cool as you think they are when you first start browsing them in college. The realization comes gradually as you start to see many of the same books in diverse stores. Those certain titles that were wildly overprinted five and ten and twenty years ago find themselves clogging musty shelves across the country - and they're probably not the titles you're looking for.

A big exception, as he points out, is Baldwin's Book Barn in West Chester, PA. Worth a trip if you're ever even vaguely in the area.

That's Nice to Know - So Andrew Sullivan wants us to know that, as of now, he just barely supports the decision to escalate the twelve-year war with Iraq, in retrospect. Maybe I've gotten too cynical. As big a fan of Sullivan's as I used to be, nowadays this kind of thing from him has an inescapable whiff of positioning about it - establishing himself as the sort of iconoclast you want to commission pieces from without having to reassess his fundamental premises. (He falls back on the "Bush's incompentence was the only real problem" argument.)

Like a Pervert in the Schoolyard of Nations - Ogged explains another dimension of the "Abu Ghraib problem":

. . . what happened at Abu Ghraib is, in terms of America's image in the rest of the world, worse than a massacre or systematic repression because it makes Americans seem gross. Of course wanton killing is shameful and disdainful, but it's not weak and depraved in the way the Abu Ghraib torture is weak and depraved. Abu Ghraib is a new image of America, and it evokes neither respect nor fear.

Do the Math, the Continuing Series - Pete Guither at Drug War Rant reports a study that indicates that, no, marijuana is not addictive, and no, it's not a gateway drug - particularly if its use is legal.

Via Walter in Denver.

pre-war Dept. of Preliminary Explanations - Yesterday I lwrote about Congressman Buyer's request to be assigned, as a reserve LTC JAG, to the postwar Iraqi detention system. He was turned down. I wrote that this, among other evidence, showed that "Abu Ghraib worked precisely the way the high command wanted it to work."

Comes Mr. Joyner with an alternative hypothesis:

Or perhaps the Pentagon decided that they could get by without the advice of a part-timer whose last relevant experience was as, what, a captain during the Gulf War?

Must be it! Gerald Ford's SecDef, the Veep who ran the Gulf War, the NSA and Deputy Secretary of Defense who made their reps in Cold War days and the various functionaries last heard from during the Iran-Contra scandal didn't want a lot of old fogeys pressing the dead hand of the past on the Scales of History.

Note: Mr. J. does have some further objections touching on the separation of powers. Actually, a politically-sensitive Congressman in the Abu Ghraib chain of command might have been just the thing that would have headed off the degenerate practices that ensued. We make a lot of a soldier's duty to refuse illegal orders, and rightly so. But in practice, it's hard to do so absent more courage than most of us are given or, as in Buyer's case, some outside connection on which to stand. But the real import of the Buyer story, I think, is that it exemplifies the Pentagon civilian leadership's decision to cut the JAGs out of the interrogation process.

The Sheep Will Have Two Heads and 2000 Life Points - If you ever wonder, "How come nobody's adapted the Book of Revelation as a Pokemon adventure?" it just means you haven't looked hard enough yet.

(Hat tip: RGB Bill.)

Financial Self-Defense - CNBC offers "3 'creative accounting' red flags for investors." Iron law of the financial universe: Mature companies grown more slowly than developing companies. Every developing company that survives will become a mature company. That means that its growth will slow at some point. When that happens, its management will have an incentive to obscure the trend. The CNBC article provides some ways you can recognize if that's happening.

Draw Your Own Conclusions - I can't resist a good cri de couer, and goodness knows I've written them myself, so do read Tacitus' wrestling with the What Now? question. It's very well expressed. Still, there's this part:

As I said, a difficult conclusion indeed, for I share many of the premises that inform the work of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. The possibility of forcible cultural change via military action; the need for a fundamental reordering of the Islamic world; the necessity of smashing old paradigms and strictures on American behavior; the questioning of shibboleths of the international order; the aggressive promotion of American hegemony as the only alternative to chaos: these are things I strongly believe in, and it is unlikely that I will ever again see an Administration with personnel so very much in accord with these principles. And yet. What good are they if they are discredited in the execution?

Seems to me that if an Administration is uniquely in accord with a set of principles, and the outcome is a total cock-up, it's at least possible the principles aren't what they're cracked up to be. I'll grant you, four out of five of Tacitus' premises fill me with unfeigned horror. (I think a fundamental reordering of the Islamic world is absolutely necessary. I think our trying to force that reordering at gunpoint is a fool's errand.) But this Administration has gotten everything it wanted but the results. Its brain trust has prepared for This Moment for periods of time ranging from a decade to a quarter century. All those essays in the quarterlies, all those conferences at think tanks, all those meaningful conversations in hallways. Outcome: it ain't that pretty at all. These were the people who wanted to do it doing it to the best of their abilities. The real cause of their discontent? The premises were faulty in the first place.

Letters to a Young Whatever - Anent last night's advice on getting one's poetry writing education, Greg Turner e-mails the following:

One of the best pieces of advice about writing that I ever received came from Debbie Harry of Blondie by way of a fiction teacher I had as an undergraduate: "Learn to play your instruments; then get sexy."

I'm not really sure about the punctuation of the phrase, but the sentiment seems to ring true across nearly everything.

Chain of Command - CNN reports

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A congressman with experience in military detention said Saturday that the Pentagon rejected an Army plan to send him to advise the military police commander who oversaw Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison in the early months of the war in Iraq.

Rep. Steve Buyer said he was disappointed by the decision -- which came months before the Army first reported allegations that prisoners at Abu Ghraib were being abused.

"It was pretty dumbfounding to me," he told CNN, "and disappointing that the Army had this plan to send me and the [Office of the Secretary of Defense] said no."

Buyer, an Indiana Republican and a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, served as a legal adviser in 1991 during the Persian Gulf War, he said during a telephone interview with CNN about a story first reported by The Associated Press.

He served the 800th Military Police Brigade -- the same brigade assigned to Abu Ghraib.

Memo to anyone still maintaining the "few bad apples" explanation: Stop kidding yourselves. Abu Ghraib worked precisely the way the high command wanted it to work.

U.S. TO HAND OVER BLAME ON JUNE 30

In a nationally televised address, President George W. Bush revealed that the blame for the Iraqi prison abuse scandal would be transferred from the U.S. to the new Iraqi government on June 30.

"Accepting blame for the prison abuse scandal is an important step in Iraq's evolution towards democracy," Mr. Bush said, adding that accountability for the scandal must go to the highest levels of Iraq's yet-to-be-appointed government.

From the Borowitz Report.

Baleful Chronology - A chronology of rhetoric and reality by Will Saletan. I can't read past this part:

"SFC Snider grabbed my prisoner and threw him into a pile. . . . I saw SSG Frederic, SGT Davis and CPL Graner walking around the pile hitting the prisoners. I remember SSG Frederick hitting one prisoner in the side of its [sic] ribcage. The prisoner was no danger to SSG Frederick. . . . I saw two naked detainees, one masturbating to another kneeling with its mouth open."

Let This Be an Example - Radley has a moving meditation on the last days of Bill W., founder of AA. "There are a couple of different ways of looking at alcoholism," he begins, then makes a persuasive case that we've chosen the wrong one.

You Don't Have to Leave Home to find serious prison abuse, either, as James Joyner points out. Money quote:

Still, it's hard to see how these conditions don't constitute cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment

Roll of Honor - William J. Kimbro. Pass it on.

For the record, singling out a sailor for praise because he refused to torture prisoners is indeed a sign of how far we as a nation have sunk. But that's no slur on William J. Kimbro.

Weakly [sic] FItness Blog Item - 168 pounds, two miles walking, one weightlifting session, blah blah blah. Attempted to shop for running shoes today. This is an elaborate business for would-be marathoners, involving stepping onto paper towels with wet feet and looking at your crummy old shoes to find the crummiest, oldest parts. Problem is, nobody in a mall shoe store, even a so-called "athletic" shoe store, is qualified to help you turn what you've found into a sensible shoe purchase. I did get a recommendation for a local "serious" running shoe store, but it closed before I could get there. (Much Mother's Day activity beforehand.)

Anyway, Your TD and I are in the Marine Corps Marathon officially as of this week, so there's no turning back. We must, as Seth put it, stay the course. The race goes off Halloween Day. I confess to being scared and intimidated. But once I have those shoes, man!

Dave Lull e-mailed me a Guardian article about scientists who argue that it's possible to be healthy and fat. It's got too much strawman-jousting in it, especially re how nutritionists supposedly view Body Mass Index. (In fact, even most popular treatments of BMI hedge themselves round with qualifiers.) The article kind of meanders from its point, actually, but from what I've read, an overweight person who exercises may well be better off than a sedentary person of "appropriate" weight who does not. All other things being equal, less fat on your bones is better than more, to a point. (Get too fat free and your skin cracks like Death Valley and bad stuff starts to happen chemically - body fat is a solvent for some necessary reactions. Plus you look like fucking bog people.)

Booke Oberwetter covers the controversy over McDonalds in film and film criticism. From her you can find links to what else you need on the subject.

More next week. Must start endurance training in earnest now. Less than six months until race day.

Small World - So first I wrote that Captain Chris Chown, USMC, quoted in the Post before the beginning of the assault on Fallujah, was "everything we could want in an American fighting man." Then I got a couple of reader e-mails informing me that, according to the London Times, Captain Chris Chown was a "she," not a he. Then at the end of April I got yet another e-mail on the subject:

Sir, I must say I protest your Dept of Corrections on 11 Apr. 04, 8:27 AM blog. As Mr. Adam Cole writes "Capt Chris Chown is a female." Or words to that effect. Well, somebody better tell my wife, and explain to me how I am the father of three children then. If [anyone had checked], he would find that females are not currently allowed to serve in US Marine Corps infantry unit.

Sincerely,

Captain Christopher M. Chown
Air Officer
1st Battalion 5th Marines

Well, dang. My correspondent has a pretty good argument, particularly given a 2003 picture of Capt. Christopher Chown, USMC helicopter pilot, standing next to "embedded media reporter Gen. Oliver North." (Scroll down. And let's do the old Ross Thomas joke together, shall we? General? The Marine Corps would never - but of course it would. Congratulations.)

Naturally, I apologized - it looks like the sole evidence for the femininity of Captain Cown was a single London Times pronoun, clearly, in retrospect, a typo. And naturally, I asked Captain Chown if he'd consent to be interviewed. He agreed and I sent him six starter questions. I reproduce his answers below, unedited.

A word about authenticity before we get started. It is the case that someone could be scamming me here. If so, shame on you, Pretend Captain Chown. You're not just having a joke at my expense. You're putting words in the mouth of a real person in a lot of danger who may at any point make the ultimate sacrifice while you're turning him into a practical joke.

I did a bit of Googling around and I viewed headers, none of which activity was dispositive. But at this point, after the "Is Salam Pax real" and "Is Ginmar authentic" kerfuffles, I'm erring on the side of assuming correspondents are who they say they are. Since starting this blog, I've heard from a Pakistani academic whose work I quoted in 2001 and a soldier I am absolutely confident served in Balad under LTC Sassaman. People write you if you write about them. I have no reason to believe my e-mailer is not who he says he is, it's plausible that I should hear from him, and one other puzzle piece fits with the overall design: I haven't heard from Captain Chown in a few days now, after a steady exchange of e-mails. And two different sources have reported rumors that as of this week, Kellogg Brown and Root has been ordered to cut off "nonessential" internet access for our troops in Iraq for at least 90 days. Again, this proves nothing. But it fits with the authenticity hypothesis.

I'm presenting Captain Chown's responses unedited, which is no less than he deserves. I will append the occasional comment for context. Note that he states very clearly that he believes the mission on which he has been dispatched by the civilian leadership is appropriate: "I really do believe what my leadership is telling me, and that we DO need to be here, helping the Iraqis." It would be beyond churlish for me to try to talk him out of that opinion. Time enough for that after he and his fellows are safely home. If I get the chance, I'll have further questions and if he's willing to answer them, I'll run them here. (If you think my questions were lame, keep in mind that a) I was just warming up, and b) it's not as if I'm particularly good at this.) He explicitly consented to be quoted by name.

Here we go:

UO: Were you in Iraq with the Marines during last year's tour too, and if so, how would you compare the atmosphere between the two stints?

Capt. Chown: Yes, I was in Iraq last year. I was with the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU). My job then was different than this year (I'm a helicopter pilot by trade), so I didn't have a lot of direct contact with Iraqis. Plus, we never really got much further north than An Nasiriyah. The people I saw would wave as we flew past. The times that I was on the ground, I experienced a lot of the same thing I see these days when outside the city, and that's smiling, waving happy to see us. I guess the main difference is that last year was more of a high-speed drive to Baghdad, fighting in the open desert and bypassing cities and towns wherever we could. The speed with which we were able to move essentially collapsed the Iraqi army command and control network, which is why they were unable to mount effective resistance. This year, we are going into the cities and towns, trying to engage the population, and help rebuild what Saddam Hussein let waste for years. You can really tell which areas were favored by Saddam, where the money went to. This is in stark contrast to the rural areas, which live in abject poverty. It's also more uncertain this time. I'm sure you've seen all the news about Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). There are a lot more being found than make the news, because we are getting pretty good at finding them before they go off. We also get a lot of intelligence from local people who will come up to a patrol and communicate through gestures where "something bad" is. We have interpreters, but not as many as we would like, and they are extremely busy.

[EDIT: In an early e-mail, Captain Chown wrote the following about local reactions: "One thing for sure, though. This is a very strange place we are in. Outside the cities, the people are friendly and glad too see us, but in the city, not so much." Quick UO comment: Note this apparent direct contradiction of my "Red State World" hypothesis.]

UO: [EDIT: In an earlier e-mail, Captain Chown explained both his view of the marines' mission and his attitude toward the deployment: "We are still in Iraq, and plan to be here for as long as it takes to provide a secure environment for non-government organizations and other agencies that are better equipped than the military (civil projects, health care, infrastructure, etc.) to handle the kinds of things that Iraq needs to get back on its feet. [Passage about country vs. city reaction quoted above.] We are doing good things here which are hopefully making some of the news services. I know it sounds like a robot towing the "party line", but I really do believe what my leadership is telling me, and that we DO need to be here, helping the Iraqis. Slowly (almost agonizingly so), we are making progress. It may not look like it from wherever you are, but here on the ground, the Marines see it every day."] Can you tell me about some of the progress you're seeing?

Capt. Chown: Question 2 is another email subject entirely. I will try and answer this one later.

UO: What's it like? Do you, as some of us imagine, assume that just about any Iraqi you meet might try to kill you, or are you able to trust most of the locals most of the time?

Capt. Chown: The guidance we have received is "Think as if every Iraqi is trying to kill you, but DO NOT treat them that way." The intent behind this message is to keep the Marines on their guard so if anything DOES happen, they are ready, but otherwise, treat citizens with respect.

UO: What kind of prep did you get in advance of the current tour - e.g. language instruction, cultural training etc?

Captain Chown: Before we came over here, we received a broad brush culture course, in order to introduce us to the differences between American culuture and Iraqi/ Arabic culture. This training included a sort of "what not to do" class, where we learned the things that we might do to inadvertently offend, such as eating, doing other things with the left hand, pointing bottoms of feet at people. Also, we were taught Iraqi naming convention, and how somebody's name is their personal name, then the name of their father, grandfather, great grandfather, etc., then the name of their tribe, then the region they are from. We were taught this in order to show us the importance of family to their culture, but also, if we were to roll into a city and ask "where's Hussein?" (an American would assume we were talking about Saddam) chances are if the Iraqis felt inclined to tell us, then it would be someone else, other than who we were looking for, but to an Iraqi, that's who we asked for. We had a limited number of Marines (mostly down at the squad leader level) who were able to take a six week course in Arabic speaking and writing. They were taught basic conversational Arabic, mostly focused on "who what when where why" type questions, and they can basically ask for directions as well. The dialect in Iraq is apparently different from what they were taught, but it is still common enough that they can make themselves understood. We also have interpreters, but as I mentioned they are very busy. Also, we were taught that since Iraqi culture is sort of a "macho" one, meaning that if you don't have a mustache, you are seen as less of a man, so my commanding officer directed the battalion to grow mustaches. One of the talking points we are using is "No better friend, no worse enemy" and the mustaches were a part of the "no better friend" piece. We had Iraqis tell us that they understood we were trying to be sensitive to their culture by growing mustaches, and that they appreciated it. When we went to Fallujah, we shaved off the mustaches as kind of a visual sign we were entering into the "No worse enemy" piece. The bottom line is that the intent when coming over here was to conduct operations that would result in a secure environment for the transition to Iraqi self government (which also entails civil and infrastructure development). The operations that we execute all have this overarching goal, whether it is helping to rebuild a school, get water and electricity turned on, or utilizing precise combat power to neutralize a threat to U.S. personnel and innocent Iraqi citizens.

[Edit: The language and culture training sounds better than what Arkhangel describes Army units as getting.]

UO: This is the question that I imagine might present the most problems: What the heck, in your view, is going on in Fallujah? Over here, the apparent "handover" is being variously viewed as everything from clever rope-a-dope to politicians leashing the marines to a pretty face put on an actual defeat. What's up with Saleh et al (the FPA)? [EDIT: The reference to Saleh kind of dates the interview period, doesn't it?]

Captain Chown: Defeat? I don't think so. The other side is just yelling louder. I may have to wait a while to answer the rest of this one.

UO: Another sensitive area: what's the supply situation like? For awhile it seems every artery out of the country was closed. There has been major media reporting on the topic, so it seems like it's in bounds to inquire.

Captain Chown: I couldn't even begin to answer this one. Right now, all I can see is what's going on directly in front of me. Don't get much in the way of news, so I'm not really sure I understand the question.

End notes: You can find Captain Chown's "mustache story" repeated at SpaceWar. This is of course consistent with both the theory that Captain Chown is who he says he is and that someone who has done about as much Chown-googling as I have is impersonating him. Like I said, I believe him. I'm believing my ear, basically. He sounds authentic, likeable yet formal. And I think anyone who wanted to shine me up would either present himself as a total Administration tool or, more likely, act like my secret antiwar sympathizer in the Marine Corps, the better to leave me flopping foolishly on the bottom of the boat once I'd bitten.

UPDATE: As I mentioned in my initial e-mail to Captain Chown, a big reason why I was ready to credit the feminine pronoun in the London Times story is that I was heavily under the influence of Ginmar's LiveJournal at the time, and thought nothing of reports that here was another American woman in uniform going into harm's way. Also: No, Captain Chown's response to the question about trusting Iraqis is not quite an answer. Perhaps he'll choose to expand on the topic later. Give me access to Donald Rumsfeld or someone from Abu Ghraib and I'll press them mercilessly on every topic. Give me a regular line soldier in harm's way with no blemish on his record, whom I barely know, and I won't. Simple as that.

Poetry Corner - It is far from clear to me that I should be giving advice on the writing or publishing of poetry, but people keep asking. A correspondent to be named later (if he chooses) asks "What suggestions would you have for someone who would want to try his hand at poetry? (And whose previous attempts were awkward teenaged belchings?)" To which I writ:

What would I recommend as far as "trying your hand?" Start by slavishly imitating poets you admire. This is the opposite of the standard advice that you need to concentrate on "finding your own voice." Don't take this wrong, _____, but fuck your own voice. Your own voice will take care of itself as your craft matures. Your own voice will, if you're going to have one, insist on emerging. In the meantime, learn the craft. Learn the vocabulary and practice of meter. Learn rhyme schemes. Learn the ways that free verse gets written that yet contains music. Reread poets you admire, read about them and then read the poets they get compared to. Take a class, particularly a class in prosody. Pick an approach to poetry writing that you dislike and take a class in that too. Put every poem you write away for six months and then pull it out and look at it again. (Fun fact: I only settled on the word "gutters" in the last line of Friday's poem when I opened it Friday morning. Before that it was "rises." "Gutters" is so much better I can hardly believe I ever accepted the earlier choice, but six years gives you the time to think of this stuff.) When your completed poem drafts have sat around long enough that you have some distance on them, show them to people whose taste you trust. Not before. We'll just piss you off.

Read Samuel R. Delany's novel, Dhalgren, which has two poets in it, and contains the absolute best advice I know about how to handle other people's opinions of your work. And it is without a doubt the finest novel about a crazy guy caught in a time loop who fucks a tree that I have ever read.

Above all, don't worry about whether you "are" a poet. Just worry about poems. They're what matters.

Pouty Little Girl Watch - From yesterday's hearings:

LIEBERMAN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Secretary, the behavior by Americans at the prison in Iraq is, as we all acknowledge, immoral, intolerable and un-American. It deserves the apology that you have given today and that have been given by others in high positions in our government and our military.

I cannot help but say, however, that those who were responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11th, 2001, never apologized. Those who have killed hundreds of Americans in uniform in Iraq working to liberate Iraq and protect our security have never apologized.

Joe. I'm not raising Mrs. Jihadi's kids.

Daily Reminder to my Fellow Citizens - We torture people. As a matter of policy.

This isn't about news cycles. This is about our self-respect. Leonard Dickens, a year ago:

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

Never Mind The link code on the post that was here is terminally hosed. Pay it no mind.

Poetry Friday - (Every now and then, someone expresses regret that I stopped posting poems here. Color me appeased. The one below is hardcore meta-poetry, based loosely on an actual conversation between my two favorite 20th Century poets, who, naturally, didn't like each other all that much.)

The Subject Was Bric-a-Brac

Frost and Stevens at Key West sit looking
neither out far, nor in deep, nor at nothing.
Nor at each other, save in sidelong glances.
Other bathers sprawl on other chaises
further down the sloping sands. Somebody's
uncle seems to try to read the shadows
of fluttering gulls, while from the trees, the tone
of some bird's song is stubbornly its own.

A sad man gives no quarter to another
merely for also being sad. With a
nod of his massive head, Stevens says, "Robert,
your trouble is your poems are full of subjects."
Frost works his brow, deepening deep cracks.
"Well, your damn poems are full of bric-a-brac."
They rest. There has been attack and counterattack.
Below the beach, in ceaseless repetitions,
the surf gutters and crests like reputations.

© 1998, 2004 Jim Henley

Music Notes - The new Mary Chapin Carpenter songs available from the Morning Edition episode page sound pretty good - less overproduced than typical "radio country," even less so than some of her own past hits, but still full-sounding. ("Grand Central Station" is pretty stark.)

Transuranic Heavy Elements May Not Be Used Where There Is Life - Unwinding tonight by checking out Sappher & Steel websites. I've never seen the somewhat legendary British science fantasy series about two (more or less) time policemen, but it's sounded intriguing. Now I learn there is finally a complete Region 1 DVD set. Via the sapphire & steel q&a site I discovered The Anorak's Guide to the series, and - comics bloggers note - the Look-In comic strip adaptation archives. The comics are not exactly up to code, they have their moments. Johanna might appreciate Sapphire's agency - Steel is as likely to call on her to save him as the reverse.

Stop Thinking Some More! - I've updated yesterday's popular item on the "Protecting" "Children" from Peer-to-Peer "Pornography" Act of 2003.

PSA for Masochists - Comes today an e-mail informing me that

The Democratic National Convention Committee is pleased to announce that for the first time ever, bloggers will be offered Convention access through the official media credentialing process.

Lemme know how it goes, everyone. I'll be sitting this one out. If you've got more of a sense of adventure, e-mail Periodicals@saa.senate.govor apply through the DNC Press Gallery.

Hm. You know who would be good at blogging the Democratic Convention? Megan McArdle. She might even enjoy it. But I think I'd like to send Brooke Oberwetter, because I bet sending her would piss her off, and she does her best writing when she's pissed. Not that she isn't a terrifc writer when she's not pissed, but there's that extra gear she has. Also, we should NOT send Josh Marshall, just to mess with people's heads.

Stop Thinking! It's for the children! Protecting Children from Peer-to-Peer Pornography Act of 2003 makes pee