You Run Along Now - Emmanuel Goldstein has got himself a nice weblog, Airstrip One, which I check several times a day. And he was doing so well about staying out of the Guantanamo Bay discussion there for awhile, on the British-nationalist grounds that it's an American issue, not a British one. But then he weakened:

Now I'm not a fan of the liberal media (and I don't think the bay of brigs is a Limey's business) but they need to be defended. Let's be clear here, Guatanamo Bay raises a lot of questions. To me the legal innovation of "unlawful combatants" is a worrying development (see Alan Bock for a more detailed exposition of the doubts on this front). To others the conditions of the American penal system seem somewhat horrific.

I actually thought that was one of Alan Bock's weaker columns, and there aren't many bigger Alan Bock fans than me. So, as EG would say, Let's Be Clear Here:

• Mazar-e-Sharif
  
• The hospital revolt
  
• At least two uprisings in Pakistani prison camps
  

That's a trend. And the trend is, We'll kill you if we get even a moment's opportunity to do so. This is way past Hogan's Heroes.

And in the name of all that's decent, man, do something about those column widths on your site finally, would you?

Split-Screen Republicanism Watch

We do the national greatness stuff abroad and the leave us alone stuff at home.
Andrew Sullivan

Charles Dodgson picks up on a WaPo article about what Charles calls "The Safe and Pleasant World of Tomorrow." Says the Post:

Federal aviation authorities and technology companies will soon begin testing a vast air security screening system designed to instantly pull together every passenger's travel history and living arrangements, plus a wealth of other personal and demographic information.

Says Charles - well, Charles says several things, all quotable, but let the conclusion suffice until you read his piece yourself:

Rights concerns are minimal, of course, since no one is obligated to use the system. If you don't want your living arrangements, travel history and demographic data to be collated and spit out on demand, just stay in your room and never go anywhere.

Unqualified Offerings knew there was a reason it bought off Charles' blogspot banner the other week.

Speaking Truth to, Well, Not Power Exactly - Thomas Nephew has an important item about suicide bombers (bad) and settlements (also bad). After noting that, since Oslo, Israel has built 20,000 housing units for settlers in the occupied territories, he concludes

I don't for a second hold with suicide bombings of civilian targets. That, more than anything else, is why I have been closing my eyes to the settlements issue; the people who do such things are not seeking real negotiations, in my view. If Israel dismantled every settlement and retreated to pre-1967 borders, such people would continue their war; to them, Israel itself is the provocation, not the settlements. Such people must be defeated no matter what; at the end of the day, Israel's right to defend its citizens against such criminality is paramount and undeniable, by any means necessary.

But in the long run, and in fact even in the middle and short run, Israel's right to occupy Palestinian(/Jordanian) land and provoke, humiliate, and sometimes abuse its inhabitants is not paramount and is eminently deniable**. I should think even the most fiery "warbloggers" over here (in fact, especially the most fiery ones) might well find themselves ardent Palestinian nationalists if they were to walk a mile in Palestinian shoes, and would find themselves sorely tempted to split hairs, set aside scruples, and lie, cheat, steal and kill generally in the fight against their enemies.

Mr. Newsrack agrees, as do I, that the Palestinians should not have rejected the Barak plan out of hand, though he does not note that the Barak Plan as written not only left the settlements intact but also gave Israel exclusive control and even use of a network of roads connecting the settlements and criscrossing "Palestine," meaning that Barak offered the Palestinians a state of rags and tatters.

Old Media Odyssey - This is hardly the first capital and credit crunch the American economy has suffered. Heck, even in the go-go eighties, truly visionary entrepreneurs had trouble getting funded. I remember when my buddy Doug and I quit our bookstore jobs to publish a line of art-books-on-cassette. "Listen to a Great Artist on Your Next Trip" was our can't-miss slogan. Plus, we pointed out, think of the production savings! You don't have to pay for all those expensive reproduction plates.

But even then old media had trouble seeing the value of new media.

So I turned my attentions to the then-scalding magazine field. My first idea was a subject that touches everyone, in at least a minor way, every day. But the powers that be were cool to the prospects for UPCWorld: The Magazine of Universal Product Codes. Their excuse was that all the action was in the so-called vertical markets, highly-specialized magazines that enabled advertisers to saturate a particular target audience.

Hence my proposal for Black Beekeeper, which would guarantee that every pair of african-american beekeeping eyeballs in the United States saw your ad. I still think it could have been huge. In its field, I mean.

Thank heavens I have the internet now.

Marketing Campaign Idea - This one's offered for free - after this, interested companies have to pay. Unqualified Offerings loves Uncle Ben's Brown and Wild Rice, Mushroom Recipe, and The Littlest Offering shares its enthusiasm. She not only loves the taste, she apparently finds it an incredibly amusing food too. Just this morning (yes, we ate this product for breakfast today), she made a big production of begging daddy's rice while Mrs. Offering looked fondly on, laughing merrily after every swallow. And there's your slogan:

Uncle Ben's Brown and Wild Rice - A Guffaw in Every Spoonful

Institutional Acronymism - All this talk about SOTU in the bloggerverse and print media. But for those of us in the Amber geek portion of the bloggerverse (this one, and that one and, of course, right here at Unqualified Headquarters), we've been talking about SOTU for years now. So when "SOTU analysis" makes no reference to the famous Library Scene or the relationship between Pattern and Trump, it takes us maybe an extra moment to catch up with what everyone else is saying.

I think I deserve a federal subsidy.

Waco World - Paper Topic: We are told by many this week that, as Charles Krauthammer puts it, "the real war, is not about last Sept. 11. It is about preventing the next Sept. 11 -- and in particular, a nuclear, chemical or biological Sept. 11," and we are told that the way to do this is to make war on countries that are potential threats - e.g. have programs to acquire nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, a general hostility to the US, Israel, the West - whether or not they have done material harm to the United States or give evidence of planning to do so. Is this international impulse congruent with the domestic impulse to ensure perfect safety through gun control and the sort of behavior modification characteristic of what conservatives long since nicknamed "the Nanny State?"

What They Really Thinks - Unlike William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer has never been a White House Staffer, just a columnist and a doctor. So even when pursuing the same program as Kristol, there's less spin:

Thank God for North Korea. Mentioning it is the equivalent of strip-searching an 80-year-old Irish nun at airport security: It is our defense against ethnic profiling. Right now North Korea is too destitute and too isolated to be capable of anything but spasmodic violence. But it has the virtue of being non-Islamic.

Look Over There! - Things had been so quiet on Eve Tushnet's site that Unqualified Offerings was starting to worry. On 1/8 she posted that she had joined an Objectivist reading group - after that, nothing. UO had visions of an apartment full of multi-level marketers and mechanical engineers refusing to let her leave until she agreed to six simultaneous, incompatible definitions of "selfishness."

But Eve escaped, and been assimilated by the Bloggerborg, with a third-level Blogspot domain to prove it. Her new site already has a couple of interesting items on it, including an interesting reflection on activist psychology called "Food Not Bombs." Check it out.

This weekend Unqualified Offerings will finally get around to a "Libertarianism and my Sister" sequel of sorts, based on some interesting remarks of Eve's via pmail. (See "The Citizen or the Police," linked at left, for the original.

Two Writers, One Column - Alan Bock has a column on Bush's State of the Union address and so does William Kristol. In some ways, they might almost be the same column, as they both interpret the speech in a substantially similar way. Only difference is that Bock is appalled while Kristol fairly quivers with joy.

What She Really Thinks about the Saudis, the Rockefellers, Justin Raimondo's column and more. Ginger Stampley on crony capitalism and foreign policy.

Wouldn't That Be a Wonderful World Dept. - A nice fellow from avant-go.com writes in regard to the recent spider infestation

thousands of handheld users may be subscribing to your site through us

Market Solutions to Market Problems Dept. - After Unqualified Offerings complained about MSN search behavior, Air Force Virginia (aka PendingPundit!) comes through again with practical suggestions:

After reading "Something Else Sucks Too" I wondered if you knew about the Google toolbar for Internet Exploiter. http://toolbar.google.com/

I did not know about the Google toolbar. Sounds pretty cool. She then goes on to evangelize, briefly, for Mozilla. Here, an admission of bias. Though you'd never guess it from this page, Unqualified Offerings has done enough web design to despize Netscape 4.x, which was too busy adding "Shop" buttons to the toolbar to bother complying with HTML 4.0 and CSS2, at a time when Internet Explorer offered pretty complete compliance with both. During the time it was designing the Amberway II site, an IE browser monopoly just could not arrive fast enough for Unqualified Offerings' liking.

It is just barely possible that others may feel differently.

Let's You And Him - Oh - After weeks of covering the Justin Raimondo beat, suddenly Unqualified Offerings discovers that it is the Justin Raimondo beat. See "Crony Capitalism and War" if you're not a regular antiwar.com reader. No time for a response today (it was Unqualified Offerings' gaming night), but see the archives for the piece Raimondo references, "Aim at the Target, Please." Consider reading "The Vodalus Approach too, if you are of a mind.

Priorities in Order - I loved Glenn Reynolds piece tonight about missing the State of the Union address to read a Harry Potter book to his daughter:

Patrick Ruffini says it was strong and appropriately war-focused; the New York Times quickie is less sympathetic, but basically says the same thing. I'll read the transcript and check the highlights later -- but we get SOU addresses every year, while very soon my daughter will be reading those books all by herself.

For the record, tonight was my poetry night, so I missed it too, but I never watch them. There's always something more worthwhile.

Something Else Sucks Too - Unqualified Offerings is sometimes too lazy to Google, and contents itself with typing "go [keywords]" in Internet Explorer's File-->Open... dialog. You get internet casino popunders doing that but, it's fast. But their feature that sometimes takes you right to the "obvious" page is a very mixed blessing. Sure, if I type "go espn" I'm happy to go to - ESPN. But I just typed

go "Exile on Main Street"

and was taken straight to the webpage of a record store in Vermont, with no choice in the matter. Hurm.

The General Decline in Standards - More was baleful about the AFC playoffs Sunday than the Steelers' special teams play and run-blocking. Unqualified Offerings loves and respects Sheryl Crow. She is, like most celebrities, a political idiot, especially in interviews. Put a guitar in her hand, though, and she's one of the best social critics going, and Globe Sessions was the best Rolling Stones album since Exile on Main Street.

[Oh wait! I can't finish this item right now! I was searching in another browser window for a good Sheryl Crow link and a popunder ad appeared for an online casino so of course I'm going to click it right away. Back later!]

[Later.]

Oh by the way: The official Sheryl Crow site sucks. But Unqualified Offerings is rapidly losing the thread here. UO loves Sheryl Crow. Indeed, maybe only Offering Boy loves her more. UO hates lip-synching halftime extravaganzas. So it really hurts that she was obviously lip-synching the new song she premiered at halftime.

Advantage: Unqualified Offerings! - From the much-cited WaPo article on alienation in hyperstatist Arab countries, published Friday:

Similar woes afflict millions of young people in the Middle East and North Africa, where unemployment averages 15 percent -- in Algeria, it is close to 30 percent -- and is particularly prevalent among the relatively well-educated. Their plight was a matter of no great interest in the West before Sept. 11, but it is stirring anxiety now, especially since some of the men identified as carrying out the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were educated -- notably their apparent ringleader Mohamed Atta, a 33-year-old Egyptian with an engineering degree.

Economic questions about the Middle East and North Africa suddenly loom large: Why has the region reaped such paltry rewards from globalization? And why aren't the United States, its rich allies and international lenders doing more to help these countries succeed economically?

Egypt's experience illustrates some of the answers. As in most other Arab countries (Lebanon being an exception), an authoritarian regime has for decades maintained a heavily state-managed economy that discouraged private investment, entrepreneurship and dynamism of the sort that has powered growth in other developing countries.

From Unqualified Offerings, published Friday two months ago:

Can [Courtland] Milloy name any evidence whatsoever that education prevents war? Education is a fine thing, but we have a lot of it in the US, and Milloy clearly thinks we're too warlike for our own good. bin Laden went to Oxford, his top lieutenant is a doctor, pre-Desert Storm Iraq may have been the most "educated" country in the Arab world - after Lebanon, and boy did all that education do them a lot of good. Germany, my ninth grade english teacher thrilled to repeat every few days, had the highest number of PhDs in the world before World War II. Now educate 125 million children and leave them locked in the sort of statist kleptocracies that can't productively use and reward their minds, and the resulting alienation will give you all the wars you can handle. Viz. Mohamed Atta.

The Moral? Read Unqualified Offerings every day, of course...

Dubious Sources - Scott Ritter doesn't think much of the Iraqi National Congress as a source, based on his experiences on the UN inspection team in the 90s:

For example, there was the "engineer" who allegedly worked on Saddam Hussein's palaces who spoke of a network of underground tunnels where crates of documents were allegedly hidden during inspections. Inspectors did find a drainage tunnel. However, despite the fact that no documents were discovered, Chalabi took the tunnel's existence as confirmation that documents also existed, and spoke as if they were an established fact.

It's not that Ritter's reading of Iraq is more authoritative than the Wolfowitz-Perle-Woolsey triad he sideswipes in his column. But it isn't less so. And he notes,

At this very moment, US intelligence personnel are poring over documents, uncovering the depth of the anti-American plotting of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network. Al Qaeda prisoners are being interrogated in an effort to unlock past secrets and interdict future threats to the United States and the world. As this investigation proceeds, the web of terrorist networks forged by Mr. bin Laden in his struggle against the West is becoming clear.

Some of the exposed links are not surprising - including Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Notably absent is Iraq. Given the spate of post-Sept. 11 media reports linking Iraq with bin Laden, one would expect a flood of evidence coming from Afghanistan confirming such a relationship.

Of course, Ritter is fighting the last war here. Iraq hawks have never changed their goal - war with Iraq - but they have changed their reasons. It's no longer because of what he did but for the sake of what he might do, they say.

Huzzah! - Best bit from Doug Casey's current WorldNetDaily column:

Once airport security is federalized, the airports will resemble the local DMV, with employees who are overpaid, sloppy, slow, hostile, dimwitted and impossible to fire. But, to look at the bright side, at least they'll be armed.

The House of Whom? - A reader writes (it's Mrs. Offering, actually)

I haven't read Justin Raimondo's piece about the Rockefellers and Saudi Aramco, but you are aware that Aramco is the company Dad worked for; and it's now _Saudi_ Aramco because the Saudi gov't bought out the American shareholders in the mid-70s. Which is not to say that the Rockefellers couldn't own a piece of Aramco, but since the entire idea behind the original treaty was for the government eventually to exploit the country's natural resource (starting in 1975, I think it was), not outsiders, it does beg questions about the state of the House of Saud's finances if the Rockefellers are heavily involved. Or is Raimondo saying that the House of Saud is really Jay Rockefeller in a kafiyah and thobe? I guess I should read the article.

Unqualified Offerings was indeed wondering about just that Saudi Aramco thing when first reading Raimondo's column, but it was ancillary to the main point.

Hm. Saudi Aramco is owned by "the Saudi government," which is to say, lots of little princes. Abdallah announces in 1998 that he wants to open it up to competition, which is to say, make things rough for hundreds of trust fund babies in the kingdom. Someone might have to earn a living! Might some of those princes decide to play footsie with, oh, al Qaeda?

(Answer: Beats me.)

Blotto is not dead! The folks who gave you "I Wanna Be a Lifeguard" and "My Baby's the Star of a Driver's Ed Movie" have, as don't we all, a website.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about.

I want to talk about something that is blotto, at least in the wasteland that is "alternative" radio: "girl singers." (viz. Blotto, "We Are the Nowtones.") Post-grunge "alternative" rock is all nu-metal and rap-metal, and it eventually came to me that I never, ever hear female artists any more on the local, self-described, modern rock station. (The sole exception: poseur Gwen Stefani's duet with Moby on "South Side," admittedly the most compelling radio song all last year.) They just can't scream loud enough, I guess. I can't recall such a complete absence of women from the rock airwaves in my life.

Delicious Turn of Phrase Award goes today to Natalie Solent, of the cleverly-titled Natalie Solent blog, about Aboriginal-Australian websites linked by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

...there was nothing I would confidently describe as crappy about the actual aboriginal material, although much of it had the laboured, wheezy tone of a culture being muffled by subsidy.

The Plot Thickens - 27 users supposedly logged into the website right now and every single one of them with a third-level address from avantgo.com. Every single one of them showing dynamist.com/scene.html as a referrer. Which would suggest that Virginia Postrel's and my sudden popularity is among robots only, or that dynamist.com is suffering a denial of service attack and I'm getting spillover. Problem with the robot theory: I've never seen that many spiders from the same company at once, even a net company like avant-go. Problem with the denial-of-service theory: It ain't working - at least, I can open the Scene page with no trouble. Third theory: Someone is actually attacking avantgo.com. But I can open their page fine too.

Hm. Is it the Saudis, or the Chinese? (Dun Dun DAH!)

Who Is Everyone? - This site has been proud to be on Virginia Postrel's link list since around Christmas. It gets a nice bunch of referrals from there every week. Now and then VP finds some specific item worth mentioning and Unqualified Offerings sees a gratifying spike in visits. But today is something else again. UO is getting an order of magnitude more referrals from dynamist.com than it ever has in one day, all from the link - there are no new citations directing people here; the proprietess even mentioned yesterday that she is out of town.

Conclusion: Virginia's own site has been mentioned somewhere Big and is itself getting a huge spike in visitors, a fraction of whom go link-hopping and end up here. I'd be grateful if any new visitor here who came from The Scene would tell me what's going on by e-mailing to the address on the top left of the page.

Deterring Iraq - During what came to be known as "The Raimondo Dogpile" last week, Moira Breen asked for clarification of the views of various warbloggers in light of some things I wrote. I would argue that the responses she did and didn't get , when added to what the the bloggers in question have written since then about Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and other countries among the usual suspects, support my essential claim that "The cheerleader blogs...have completely accomodated themselves to the aims of the 'National Greatness' conservatives" in prosecuting the war. (The single, major amendment my original piece requires is removing all references to Matt Welch, who did not fit my argument and was not mentioned in Justin Raimondo's original piece.) Specifically, the self-described anti-idiotarians continue to call for prophylactic war on Iraq, and have agreed with neocon, neoimperial pundits that it is up to us, not the government of Saudi Arabia, whether we remove the troops "defending" it.

Be that as it may. Perry de Havilland (naturally) troubled to make a rigorous argument for the merits of going to war with Iraq specifically (scroll down for comment):

The trouble with applying 'nucelar deterrent theory' to Saddam Hussein is that he is not playing by the same rules. Do you really think he cares as much about the death of 1 million Iraqis as much as the USA would care about the death of 10,000 Americans? Threaten him with nuclear destruction and he might reply by trying to take out a US carrier in the Gulf with a tactical nuke, which is not beyond the pale of technical reality once we has usuable warheads... and if left to his own devises long enough he clearly will have nukes. It is only 1940's technology for goodness sake.

I agree with Perry that Saddam lacks the tender concern for Iraqi citizens that Dubya has for American ones or Tony Blair has for his own loyal subjects. I don't agree that Saddam can't be deterred from using weapons of mass destruction.

Let us stipulate first of all that Saddam is a rat bastard, and that that understates his vileness. The general issue of whether it is the United States' business to remove rat bastards from power for the sake of improving the world is left for another time. (It's not hard to figure out where this site stands on the issue.) The specific question Perry raises is, If rat bastard Saddam Hussein has nukes or chemical weapons, can the United States deter him from using them against it. My answer is, first, yes, and second, we already have.

We are reminded that Saddam "used chemical weapons against his own people" (the Kurds) and also against the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq war. What Saddam has never done is use WMDs against a target that can respond in kind. The Iraq hawks remind us now and then that the UN inspectors found functioning chemical arms in stock after the Gulf War. Saddam could have used them but did not. It's not hard to see why: The US said that if he did, we would respond with nukes.

So there's a record of Saddam actually being deterred. Why does it work, if he doesn't worry much about the deaths of millions of Iraqis? Because hostage-population "nuclear deterrent theory" isn't the only deterrence model out there - indeed, nuclear deterrent theory always went beyond population destruction anyway. Back in that college I discuss a couple of posts below, in a course called "Determinants of Strategic Nuclear Forces" taught by William Kaufmann, we spent quite a lot of time on counter-force deterrence models; that is, structuring a nuclear force posture that would ensure that the Soviet Army and government could not function in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange. You can't rule the world if you can't get to it or talk to it.

This kind of deterrence is very much alive, indeed, the unhappy fate of Mullah Omar makes it more plausible than ever. For better or for worse, since at least the Panama invasion of 1989, the US has had a policy of not scrupling to target hostile national leaders personally. One of two competing explanations of our glorious victory on behalf of the al-Qaeda affiliated KLA in 1999 is that Milosevic capitulated when NATO air forces started targeting him specifically. (The other explanation is the "Northern Alliance" model: local allied ground troops - the KLA - draw enemy forces into convenient bombing targets and then rapidly exploit.) Saddam may not care about Generic Iraqi Citizens, but he seems to care very much about himself, his family and the Republican Guard.

(Why do I say "for better or for worse?" Because at some point, a hostile leader will decide that two can play that game, and start attacking American leaders directly. Then the fear factor kicks in, and you really don't want to see the version of the PATRIOT act that comes out of that...)

"Deterrence" != "Killing massive numbers of civilians"
"Deterrence" = "Demonstrating the ability and will to rob a potential enemy of what they care about more than harming you"

The beautiful thing about the Don't Tread On Me War is that is has removed all doubt about our will - we will absolutely destroy a government that attacks the United States, shelters our attackers or is the creature of our attackers. As for ability, we didn't even have to go to the nuke bag to do it.