For Crying Out Loud when will the left-wing blogiverse give Dick Armey some love? The latest - per this article in the LA Times, the outgoing House Majority Leader "Urges End to Cuba Sanctions:"

In a vivid sign of waning support for the economic embargo on Cuba, House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) said he believes that the United States should open trade with the Communist regime and that he has backed the restrictions on travel and trade only out of loyalty to two Cuban American members of the House.

Speaking at a trade promotion event in Wichita, Kan., on Wednesday, Armey acknowledged that congressional support for the 4-decade-old restrictions is fading. "If they last a year, it will be the last year they last," said Armey, who plans to retire from Congress at the end of the year.

Let's add up the score. In the last month, Armey has

1) Lined out the TIPS program and national ID card from the scare-quote Homeland scarequote-security bill;

2) Come out against the idea that the US has any business engaging in prophylactic war;

3) Come out against maintaining the Fidel Castro Perpetuation Program - aka, the trade embargo against Cuba.

You are wimps, liberals, if you do not offer at least a grudging acknowledgement of this record.

The sequence of events suggests two things:

First, the prospect of retirement sure does loosen inhibitions in at least some politicos, eh?

Second, doesn't this pattern hint that Armey holds the President and leader of his party in a fair amount of contempt? These are serious hot-button issues. What's more:

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother, is facing reelection this fall in a state with a large bloc of Cuban American voters.

Unqualified Offerings can't get around it: Armey is not only speaking his mind lately, he's willingly crossing the President to do so. (Liberals must like that too, right?)

Another Conservative Demurs on Iraq - This time it's Arnaud de Borchgrave, of all people. Now editor-at-large for the Washington Times, back in the 1980s de Borchgrave was the hawk's hawk on Cold War matters. I recall a profile where he hinted broadly that a major news anchor was a Soviet agent. He wasn't speaking figuratively. (Unqualified Offerings was pretty sure he meant Walter Cronkite.) Now he writes (in the WashTimes)

Prior to two days of congressional hearings on Iraq last week, President Bush had painted himself into a rhetorical corner labeled Saddam=Hitler. Not going to war against Iraq would be tantamount to a remake of Neville Chamberlain's "Peace-in-Our-Time" appeasement follies at Munich in 1938. The hearings on both the nature of the Iraqi threat and the feasibility of a U.S. invasion to force Iraqi "regime change" gave Mr. Bush a chance to leap over the wet paint and find a dry spot for further reflection.

And he notes the quiet disappearance of a recently - and noisily - annunciated claim:

Another myth deflated was the belief in the let's-zap-Saddam-now camp that nothing succeeds like American success in the Arab world.

Remember that one? Our triumph in Afghanistan meant a huge leap in our prestige and influence because the only thing the Arab world understands is power. That sure translated into a lot of support on the Iraqi "regime change" front.

De Borchgrave notes, pungently,

In the Six-Day War in 1967, the Israelis inflicted a humiliating defeat on Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, destroying some 450 warplanes on the ground and decimating his forces. A few days later, Nasser was acclaimed as a hero at an Arab summit meeting in Khartoum, Sudan.

It inclines one to think that the post-Saddam dominoes won't necessarily fall as readily into the pro-US, pro-Israel camp as many Iraq War advocates expect.

Not Dead Yet - According to this morning's Washington Post

The Transportation Security Administration has warned airlines to be on the lookout for impostors wearing stolen uniforms trying to gain access to planes or airports, citing a series of recent thefts from flight crews.

Agency officials would not comment on the confidential warning, which was issued July 22 -- a week after burglars took airline uniforms, keys and identification tags from the New York apartment of two Delta Airlines flight attendants.

from Airlines Alerted to Imposters. But wait. There's more:

In May in Kansas City, Mo., someone stole a delivery truck containing uniforms for mechanics and other flight-line workers. The truck was later recovered, but the uniforms -- for employees of three airlines -- were gone.

FBI counter-terrorism agents consulted on that case and the one in New York but said they found no links to terrorism in either. FBI officials said they are keeping tabs on both situations but are no longer participating in the investigations.

Well, why would they? Oh:

Terrorists have been known to impersonate authority figures in other countries, such as when Palestinian attackers dressed as Israeli soldiers and bombed a bus last month in Israel. Earlier this year, London's Heathrow Airport was robbed twice in five weeks by bandits wearing security uniforms.

Is there anything else to worry about? Maybe...

In addition to theft, pilots and flight attendants say they increasingly feel they're being watched or even followed when traveling abroad.

The Northwest Airlines unit of the pilots' union issued a security alert to its members on July 2, warning that "flight crews from other airlines have reported being the subjects of obvious surveillance by Mid-Eastern looking males and females" while traveling in Frankfurt, Amsterdam and London.

One American Airlines flight crew member who asked not to be identified said a co-worker was in a London pub during a layover when "a Middle Eastern man started taking pictures" of her and other crew members.

"There are lots of stories of stalking, and I don't know of these kind of stories before 9/11," the American employee said.

It could be hysteria (using that word in the nicest possible sense) on the part of airline crews - these are nervous times. It could be that pilots and flight attendants just make excellent targets for garden-variety identity theft since they travel a lot. It could be Iraqi intelligence gearing up for Saddam's Own Samson Option in case of a US invasion. Or it could be al Qaeda, planning celebrations for its big anniversary.

You can see why the FBI doesn't care.

Meanwhile, in the war we're actually in, as opposed to the one that our leaders would clearly rather get to, the Post tells us that

Recent attacks on Christians and Westerners in Pakistan were part of a coordinated campaign by Pakistani Islamic militant groups linked to al Qaeda and the Taliban, military and security sources said today.

The suspects are "rogue elements" (naturally) of the allegedly banned Harkat ul-Mujaheddin and Jaish-i-Muhammad.

"The president was told that al Qaeda has waged a proxy war against Pakistan and its key strategic interests," one official said. "Most unfortunately, al Qaeda has been able to exploit Pakistani citizens and its soil for [al Qaeda's] ulterior motives."

You don't say. (Question: Will those hawks who deny that there is such a thing as "blowback" from US covert actions apply their precepts to Pakistan too? Because if there were such a thing as blowback, Pakistan suffering al Qaeda and Kashmiri terrorist attacks after doing so much to covertly promote al Qaeda and Kashmiri terrorist groups would sure look like it.)

"A full-fledged local al Qaeda is now active in Pakistan," a security official said. "We have got it from the horse's mouth."

Well, you didn't get it from toilet seats, fella.

Contrary to what a famous lapsed Larouchie inexplicably claimed to the Defense Policy Board, "the prize" has been and remains Pakistan, specifically its nukes. That war, al Qaeda's war, isn't over. Would it be too much to ask our "Defense" Department to spare some attention for it?

Birth Announcement - One of UO's favorite thinkers, the radically-libertarian Wendy McElroy, has started a blog, McBlog. The blog is not two weeks old yet.

A Question of Scale - Eric Mauro , who has been such a Force for Good in the comments sections of some weblogs UO reads that he really ought to have his own blog, e-mails to commend Dick Armey and to say "My fellow anti-war libs have to learn that you take help where you can get it." Unqualified Offerings thinks of itself as more anti-imperialist than antiwar as such, probably, but war can be the fruit by which ye shall know empire, so let's not push the distinction.

UO agrees with Eric. It has profited by reading and conversing with liberal and leftist bloggers during the "decadent phase" of the war on terror. But when the subject changes, well...

For instance, Hesiod on Counterspin has said some important things about whether targetting Iraq is reasonable, prudent and right. Though he's been a bit free with inflammatory terms, his analysis of questions like how likely Saddam is to give weapons-of-some-destruction to terrorists is acute, and that may understate its virtues.

But then there's an item like this one:

THE PLANET WOBEGON: Glenn Reynolds wants to see everyone in the world become rich.

Just like everyone who lives in Lake Wobegon is "above average."

A question for Glenn: If everyone in the world had a million dollars, how much would a hamburger cost?

The problem here is basic: Counterspin assumes Reynolds must be talking about money, when the item, in context, makes it obvious that Reynolds is talking about material well-being. Liberals and leftists are so focused on issues of relative wealth and poverty (a favorite bugaboo is income inequality), that they scant the more important issue of absolute wealth, particularly at the bottom end. On the world-historical scale, anyone with indoor plumbing and a ready supply of potable water is rich. There's a redundancy in "nasty, poor, brutish and short," and it's poor. Poverty is an index of a life's nastiness, brutishness and shortness. Wealth is a reduction in those qualitiies. The bottom quintile will always be with us, as Hesiod hints. But what clearly concerns Reynolds (and Unqualified Offerings) is whether it sucks less to be in the bottom quintile over time. (And the next couple quintiles too!)

Globally, there has been a phenomenal increase in this kind of "rich" except in those places with really bad political arrangements, especially cronyist bonapartism with a patina of socialist rhetoric. There are still plenty of places like that around, which means their number could decrease, which means that much more potential for gains in absolute wealth. It's possible to have real disagreements on the proper US role in bringing those changes about. Unqualified Offerings is sticking with "the friend of liberty everywhere, but the guarantors only of our own." It may yet nudge Glenn Reynolds (back?) onto this platform.

Call and Response - Glenn Reynolds has a hopeful post speculating on the possible demise of Big Record Weasel. (Chad Orzel avers that that day can't come soon enough.)

UO's new friends at The Minor Fall, The Major Lift, responding to Instapundit, are not so optimistic.

Meanwhile, if you're wondering, does anyone have even an ambiguously kind word for the RIAA and MPAA, the answer is Linxx Pherrett and Photodude.

We Got Us a Convoy - Unqualified Offerings is pleased to note the advent of another right-wing war-skeptic blog, called, simply, War Blogging. Proprietor George Paine writes without the fanciful perorations one sometimes sees, um, here. He's also the keeper of the Axis of Evil Index.

He's also very polite, which is nice. Unqualified Offerings can't restrain itself from noting that his item text is still that awful MovableType-default grey.

The Return of the Irrepressible - Moira Breen returns from shoulder surgery to give us more in the way of Inappropriate Response.

The Primacy of More Links - Ginger Stampley cites Right Wing Texan for his reminiscences of expatriate life in Saudi Arabia, but Unqualified Offerings was struck by this passage on marital navigation.

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This Green[e]house Effect guy: Unqualified Offerings is not wild about his politics, but it sure likes the way he writes. Anyone who isn't tired of reading about Cynthia McKinney ought to read Greg's fresh take on the matter of her reelection.

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Meat-and-Drink-to-Unqualified-Offerings Quote of the Day:

The anti-liberty line can be detected elsewhere, for instance among those sickly buffoons who claim that competition is bad for children, because losing can injure their self-esteem, and therefore every child must be made to feel like a winner. Even at first glance this kind of thing is nauseating enough, but further thought shows just how nauseating it really is: a penalty on success is a penalty on liberty.

from Steven Chapman, nee Daddy Warblogs.

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Anton Sherwood issues a cheery thought from Plato's Cave:

Larry Niven wrote, somewhere or other, that if you live long enough you're bound to get rich eventually. It occurs to me just now that, if you live long enough under an immortal dictatorship, sooner or later you're bound to be dragged away by the secret police (whereas if life is short anyway you're likely to die in bed if you keep your head down). Perhaps that is part of what Kim Stanley Robinson meant when he wrote in Icehenge that longevity raises the political stakes.

He also has an observation of great relevance to our times:

Saw a union picket today with a sign saying Catbert Corporation is Enron II. If you thought your employer was a house of cards, would you spend your time agitating to increase its labor costs, or look for a new job?

The Primacy of the Link is what Rebecca Blood, in The Weblog Handbook, takes to be the core characteristic of "the classic weblog." Why does Unqualified Offerings bring this up? Because the minor milestone this site has been approaching, its thousandth post (that is, this one right here), has intimidated UO just a bit. Shouldn't it be...good? Thoughtful?

Like Immodium for the imagination, that kind of thinking is!

So: in the link shall be our salvation. Go read this entry by The Talking Dog. Let Unqualified Offerings rephrase: In the name of Goodness itself, go read this entry by The Talking Dog.

Your Iraq Links for Today - With apologies to this site's liberal friends, it's time to gush over Dick Armey again. According to today's New York Times, Armey is totally off the reservation on the Iraq thing, way beyond the tepid demurrals of those congresscritters like Senator Joe Biden, whose main concern appears to be getting a piece of the action. The Times:

Mr. Armey, speaking to reporters in Des Moines during a campaign swing for a House candidate, said, "If we try to act against Saddam Hussein, as obnoxious as he is, without proper provocation, we will not have the support of other nation states who might do so."

"I don't believe that America will justifiably make an unprovoked attack on another nation," he said. "It would not be consistent with what we have been as a nation or what we should be as a nation."

In response to a reporter's question, he said: "My own view would be to let him bluster, let him rant and rave all he wants and let that be a matter between he and his own country. As long as he behaves himself within his own borders, we should not be addressing any attack or resources against him."

In addition to making the conservative point that attacking other nations without a clear casus belli is UNamerican (as opposed to "anti-american), Armey also alludes to international law and lack of international support. If Unqualified Offerings understands this checklist it got from hawkish pundits, that makes Dick Armey part of the Anti-American Left.

In a sober, lengthy piece, More Than Zero tries to apply Prospect Theory to the deterrence problem and doesn't come up with an answer he likes. ("I can't sleep particularly well with either position, frankly.") Recommended.

Jason Soon, no friend of libertarian isolationism, writes skeptically of the Right's "Iraq Obsession" on Catallaxy Files.

Kevin Holtsberry argues, on Ideas Etc. that "

The argument is that our position is slowly being sapped and that a decisive victory over our strongest opponent is likely to extend our direct safety in the short term and, if used effectively, help us reassert our strength and influence in the near to long term. If we could be confident – not perfectly confident but reasonable confident – that in place of the menacing Saddam we could deal with a moderate regime willing to focus on the interests of its people rather than aggression and saber rattling we should act. This would even the balance of power in the region and at the same time send a message to our enemies that it does not pay to threaten us and to our allies that it pays to work with us.

Unqualified Offerings likes Kevin a lot, but his argument is as purely imperialist as you will find. Dick Armey would not approve.

Hesiod of Counterspin is fonder of calling people names than Unqualified Offerings is comfortable with. But maybe people who toss terms like "Euroweenie" and "Anti-American" around freely don't have the same objection. Getting past the rhetorical style, he makes some important points in response to Isntapundit and in response to Steven den Beste. The second piece deals with the question of Saddam giving nukes to plausibly-deniable terrorist groups:

First, Den Beste does not explain why Saddam would simply hand over a nuclear device to Ilamic radical terrorists, who could, at some point, just as easily decide that Iraq qould be a better place if it were run by, say, some radical Wahabi mullah? He'd have to exercise some degree of control over the operation, or risk them being used against himself. And that risk is not trivial. And the more control he exercised, the more of his fingerprints would be all over the operation. He cannot risk that his plans would be upset by, say, a Saudi or Jordanian intelligence mole in the terrorist camp would tip off the United States.

Moreover, there are very few places in the world where the technical expertise or materiel would be available for such an operation, and which are controlled by a regime hostile enough to the United States to even think about such an attack. Iraq qould be suspect numero uno right off the bat. And, given the horrible nature of the attack, Saddam would be, as I said, writing his own death warrant.

Of course, if the Administration has written his death warrant for him already, these objections don't apply. Which is a big reason not to do that.

UPDATE: The first edition of this post left out the link to the NYT article about Armey.

Your Unpromising Istanblog Headline of the Week - "Details on Turkish reforms." Go on, read it. It's good for you.

Perhaps wider appeal inheres in his contribution to The Great Humiliation Controversy. An excerpt:

The cultural war thing frustrates me because the rhetoric meshes so well with that of Osama bin Ladin and the others who have worked so hard to bring that war of cultures about. Al-qaeda's primary objective is not the destruction of America, but the unification of the Muslim world under their particular brand of Islam; war with the West is the tool they want to use to achieve that unity.

The Bush administration brilliantly avoided fighting the Afghanistan War on those terms, carefully cultivating Muslim support and making it a war of allies against an oppressive regime.

I hate to see the American public adopt bin-Laden's view that the West is at war with Islam, particularly if they cast his dark flavor of Islam as being that of all Muslims, because I would hate to see his dream made real.

It isn't necessary. If we're going to take it onto ourselves to remove an evil dictator, that's one thing, but he's not Islam, he's not the Arab world, he's not al-Qaeda, hell, he's not even a proponent of Islam, fundamentalist or otherwise. 9/11 roiled up a lot of emotion, and that emotion is channelling itself into jingoism to support the upcoming war. Since the target of our war doesn't seem to have been connected with the cause of 9/11, that channeling process is broadening the emotion, blurring our picture of exactly what this war is about.

He also has a link to another Arab-world news source that may be less annoying than Arab News. Unqualified Offerings can't help noticing that Muammar Qaddafi is a) back in the news, and b) makes the great Quentin Crisp look comparatively

1. Alive
2. Butch.

Poetry Thursday - (It was Unqualified Offerings' poetry night, so it blogged not. It will fill the time with a poem, this one dedicated to answering the question, "So how long have they had these crappy governments over in the fertile crescent anyway?" The poem's epigraph is available in a more expansive version in the online Perseus Collection, a repository that, by itself, justifies the entire internet.)

A World of Kings

"As soon as Cyrus was born, Astyages sent for Harpagus, a man of his own house to whom he entrusted all his affairs, and said, "Take the child of Mandané my daughter to your home and slay him, then bury him as you will."
Herodotus, The History

Because he was my relative
I could not kill the king's grandson
myself -- the shepherd let him live
and raised the baby as his own.

I didn't know. I didn't learn
until the king did, when the boy
was ten years old. At his return
the king claimed to feel only joy,

and let the shepherd live, and me,
and called a feast to celebrate.
When I had eaten my fill, he
had servants bring a covered plate

and show me, underneath the lid,
my own son's head and hands and feet.
Astyages laughed and said,
"Harpagus, did you like your meat?"

I said what pleased the king pleased me.
Revenge would take a decade more.
The feast continued, quietly.
I gathered gristle from the floor,

and spent the twilight shoveling,
poured in the scraps, his winter coat,
and knelt beside the opening
and stuck my fingers down my throat.

© 1999, 2002 by Jim Henley

Iraq my Brains - More folks have weighed in with serious, not to say po-faced, contributions to the Question of the Day:

Electrolite has a summary, touching both the "should we or shouldn't we?" and "Humiliation: What is it Good For?" topics.

Jane Galt worries about Saddam slipping weapons-of-some-destruction, especially nukes, into plausibly-deniable terrorist hands. She also says the coming Iraqi succession makes it more, not less urgent, to act soon." More on the ideas behind this approach later. But for now see "Precaution Goes to War," by Joe Kaplinsky of Spiked, for a perhaps surprising comparison.

The great Bruce Ralston of Flit contemplates the chasm we'd be crossing by launching a "preventive" war against someone:

What the Bush doctrine rejects is the notion of casus belli... that a civilized state requires a good reason to go to war on another country in advance. For the last 50 years, U.S. policy has been that it's right to go to war for one of three specific reasons:

1) If American citizens have or are likely to soon be harmed (Libya, Grenada, Panama);
2) If America itself has been attacked (WW2, Afghanistan);
3) If the Security Council and/or NATO have endorsed military action (Serbia, Kuwait).

As I stated, adding #4 (if a country's harbouring terrorists) to that list would not be a bad thing. But discarding the "capital offenses of states" so entirely (by basically saying war is acceptable whenever America feels threatened) is... imperiousness, nothing more or less. In the early nineteenth century, the Royal Navy justified forcing American citizens to serve as British sailors basically because, well, they could... America rightly protested at the time. If we are true to those early American ideals now, then war in the absence of internationally accepted justification, war because one can, really... even if the shoe's on the American foot now, then this war must be protested as well.

Jim Henley, 08:04 AM

You Like Me You Really Like Me Dept. - Thanks to Junius, Ted Barlow and Glenn Reynolds for recent kind mentions.

One Big Happy Family - Unqualified Offerings is an anti-interventionist libertarian isolationist who believes that war is indeed the health of the state, adn that includes several versions of the war we're fighting now. But it resists reading libertarian-inclined interventionists out of the movement as some others of its kidney do. Why? Because someone like Megan McArdle can be, in UO's opinion, very very wrong about war, but very very right on other matters. Her take on Hendrik Hertzberg, Robert Dahl and the Constitution is a treat.

Asses. Checking. Facts? - Newish blogger Lynxx Pherrett of Assume the Position offers an interesting response to UO's anti-Iraq war item below. To UO's assertion that

Deterrence requires two components:

1) A sure penalty for noncompliance.

2) A clear benefit to compliance.

US policy toward Iraq has lacked factor 2 for a decade. Current, stated policy is

1) If Saddam uses, acquires or conceals weapons of mass destruction, he dies.

2) If Saddam foreswears use, acquisition and concealment of weapons of mass destruction, he dies.

Lynxx Pherrett responds

UO mistakes rhetoric with reality. Saddam could pack his bags and spend his remaining years dodging lawsuits by flitting from one African, South American or European country to the next and the US would allow it. The "he dies" as part of any regime change in Iraq is simply an expression of the expectation that there is no carrot that he would accept to voluntarily join the pantheon of has-been dictators; it's also a blunt admission that the US has no qualms in killing him to effect a regime change as long as he poses a threat.

It's an interesting argument. It requires speculation about what the US has been "really" after since the end of the Gulf War. The Middle East is a rough neighborhood, and if you foment coup attempts against someone, you're making it very likely that your success is their death. UO rather likes the Talking Dog's Club Med for Dictators solution:

It was once suggested to your TD that the United States essentially set up a "super-nation" of "Club Med" type resorts operating under the protection of the United States military, in a network of individual glamorous venues around the world for the dictators of the world who are willing to VOLUNTARILY relinquish power. (Perhaps Ted Turner might want to sponsor THIS international initiative, in which case we could call the program "Club Ted"). Old dictators needn't worry any longer about nasty Ceaucesciu (however you spell the name of the late dictator of Romania, put to death by his own people) outcomes. In exchange for peaceful cessions of power, such dictators could be assured of being allowed to keep the first $1 billion they stole in their Swiss bank accounts (anything over that would go back to the treasuries of their former piggy banks -- ahem, countries), with Club Ted picking up the tab on food, housing, travel (within the network) and whatever debaucheries the former dictators could desire (we understand, for example, that Kim Jong Il of North Korea is partial to expensive cognac and Danish prostitutes; both could be provided in abundance, without causing massive starvation to North Koreans!) Saddam could retire as a private businessman (although limited to the $1 billion program limit for "seed money"). (It is unlikely that Castro -- who ostensibly ALREADY lives in a tropical paradise would go for this scheme, but no idea is perfect; of course, no credible plans to invade Cuba and remove him are currently under public discussion!)

Why do I bring this up now? Because I'm not sure anyone has played this out: we suspect Saddam has nasty shit in his arsenal now. If we make this a "to-the-death" thing without an honorable -- or at least, reasonable -- way out for this evil (but rational) dictator (short of a blitzkrieg-type rapid removal before he can do something) we will find out EXACTLY what he has saved up. Thus, I'm NOT sure that Tel Aviv (or for that matter, New York) actually being destroyed is an appropriate price to pay to ensure that...Tel Aviv and New York aren't destroyed!

The problem with TD's humane solution is that the busybodies have ruined it for everyone - after Pinochet's and Milosevic's post-abdication troubles, no dictator can count on retiring unmolested, no matter what agreements he thinks he has in place.

UO supposes it is saying that, on this issue, LP is mistaking "reality" for reality.

But he's right that Unqualified Offerings was at least a little loose rhetorically with the "he dies" talk. So let UO clarify that for the flourish of "he dies," substitute this other UO passage from the famous Jane Galt comments thread. Saddam wants to

1. to live
2. to maintain power until a peaceful death
3. bequeath the rulership of Iraq to his chosen son (the Syria model)

The US and Israel, separately, can make it clear that actually using a nuke on New York (that would be the US) or Tel Aviv (that would be Israel) scotches all three goals. Once again, the Afghan War has enhanced the power of this deterrent threat immensely, by making clear that the US will change your regime on you if you support people who attack the United States. That's why, with all the problems the Afghan War has encountered, UO still respectfully disagrees with those of its anti-interventionist confreres that think toppling the Taliban was wrongheaded or just wrong.

Current stated US policy gives Saddam scant chance of achieving goal number one and no chance whatsoever of achieving goals 2 and 3 no matter what he does. That's a trapped animal.

Lynxx Pherrett provides a useful correction to another of UO's rhetorical flourishes later on:

UO: Saddam has never used "weapons of mass destruction" against an opponent capable of responding in kind.

LP: Not completely true. Although Iran effectively had no chemical weapons capability at the start of the Iraq-Iran war in 1980, Iran did have limited chemical weapons production before the end of the war in 1988. There is disagreement over Iran's actual use of chemical weapons against Iraq during the later stages of the war, but there is no disagreement that after Iran did have some chemical weapons available Iraq still persisted in its use of chemicals against them.

This is a valid point of LP's even though this site has pretty much ruled most chemical weapons out of the "weapons of mass destruction" category, because this site, alas, doesn't get to make the rules. Iraq did use lethal chemical weapons against Iran beginning in 1983. It's interesting that by 1983 the tide of the Iran-Iraq war had turned decidedly against Iraq. (Useful potted history, from the leftie Federation of American Scientists, here.) Suggestive comparison: At that time, Iran's stated goals were - regime change!

Iranian resistance proved strong, however, and Iraqi troops had withdrawn from the occupied portions of Iran by early 1982. Nevertheless, Iranian leader Ruhollah Khomeini declared that Iran would not cease fighting until Saddam's regime was toppled. Iran began a series of offensives, which proved successful enough to cause Iraq to resort to the use of chemical weapons (see poison gas), a tactic reviled by the international community.

(via Information Please Almanac.)

UO said "suggested comparison." It meant suggested comparison with this

An assessment of Iraq’s capabilities says that the US is unlikely to knock out many, if any, of President Saddam Hussein’s mobile missile-launchers in a first wave of airstrikes. It raises the possibility of Baghdad hitting an Israeli city with a missile carrying biological agents, saying that Saddam is likely to use chemical and biological weapons.

Israel’s likely reaction would be nuclear ground bursts against every Iraqi city not already occupied by US-led coalition forces. Senators were told that, unlike the 1991 Gulf War, when Washington urged Israel not to retaliate against Iraqi missile strikes, Israeli leaders have decided that their credibility would be hurt if they failed to react this time.

(The London Times reporting on Anthony Cordesman's testimony before the Senate - link via Antiwar.com) and this

Military sources said the Israeli intelligence estimate is that Iraq could use medium-range missiles with biological or chemical warheads against Israel amid any U.S.-led war against Baghdad. The sources said the intelligence estimate has concluded that Iraq has several dozen extended-range Scud B missiles capable of reaching the Jewish state.

The prospect of an Iraqi WMD strike against Israel is not certain, the sources said. They said the prospect depends on whether he feels any chance of surviving a U.S. attack and Iraqi capability.

(link via The Talking Dog.)

(Note: Steven den Beste writes "But if [an opponent] misjudges the situation, attacks you and you do then use your deterrent, it may be satisfying but it didn't accomplish its mission of preventing the initial attack against you." This is true enough but it cuts both ways. If you go to war to prevent someone from "attacking his neighbors with weapons of mass destruction" and in response he attacks his neighbors with weapons of mass destruction, then the war didn't accomplish its mission.)

But there goes Unqualified Offerings getting sidetracked from LP's argument, which isn't fair to LP. Let's recap. LP says that Iraq used poison gas against Iran and that by late in the war Iran had at least the capability of using poison gas in response, whether they did or didn't, and that didn't stop Iraq. Unqualified Offerings indeed needs to revise and extend its prior remarks. Iraq did use poison gas on an opponent that

1. could respond in kind.
2. did not have the capacity to retaliate with disproportionate force, as the US and Israel can.
3. Had a stated policy of "regime change."
4. Had no "excess threat capacity" to make Saddam and his power structure pay personally for the escalation.

Which still means that Saddam has never used weapons-of-some-destruction against a target that could make him pay for it (see Saddam's Three Goals above).

Lynxx Pherret closes with an interesting suggestion:

As I said here: The current bluster seems designed to push Saddam into either backing down (like Qadhafi) or making a irrevocable mistake that can justify a US attack. If he does the former, there will be no US/Iraq war, if he does the latter he will be toast.

Unqualified Offerings would like to think the current regime was that subtle.

Testing (Again) - Unqualified Offerings had another of its periodic database crashes late Tuesday. Happily it had a two-day-old backup and only had to reimport eleven posts. Best of all, with the reimport, all the permalinks are the same as before the crash, so if you've linked to something on this site recently your links still work.

No, you don't care. That's why this is called a test post.

Now You See Her - If you stopped checking Eve Tushnet's blog because she was away, start again: she's back. Mind you, she says she's going away again for a couple of days, but all that does is give us, her fans, time to read the screensful of good stuff she posted just in the two days she's been back from London.

Boss Bits - The very new, music-oriented blog, The Minor Fall, The Major Lift, has two interesting pieces on Springsteen, despite the fact that "we were hoping to declare TMFTML a Springsteen-free zone." Not that they are Springsteen haters:

We like him fine. Nebraska is patently a work of genius. Tunnel of Love is a much underrated record. Even Lucky Town had a few decent tracks. Springsteen does not enter our Pantheon of Godlike Genius, but that is a small club, with admittedly difficult membership requirements.

See Boss Man Blues and Boss Man Blues cont. In the first, TMFTML savages Paula Zahn for trying to imply that Springsteen was trying to "exploit" the September massacres. ("Now, we don't know Paula Zahn. We're not sure if she considers herself a serious journalist (although no one who has worked for Fox News can ever consider themselves a serious journalist ever again). But if she does, someone should tell her this: she is an entertainer. Her show has less in common with Edward R. Murrow than it does with any radio station's morning 'zoo crew'.") In the second, TMFTML admits disappointment that Springsteen made another rock record, though they don't say whether they would prefer he make more folkie-drone IWW singalong CDs or go techno.

It looks like a fun blog, though UO may well be the wrong demographic for it.

Speaking of Springsteen, while Unqualified Offerings disagrees with Brian Doherty on the merits of The Rising, this bit from his Reason article shows why he's one of the best commentators on music going:

Springsteen is an interesting case as a rock and pop performer. His growth and maturity have, arguably more than any other such artist, mirrored those of a typical American man's life. He started as a smartmouthed street punk with a gift of gab and an observant eye; he didn't seem much different than the lowlife characters he sang about. Then he began dreaming of escape from the straitened circumstances in which such street punks inevitably find themselves. Then, even as he left that world behind, he became the bard of blue-collar work and its disillusionments. (Now and again he took brief intellectualized side trips into the world of Woody Guthrie, after his manager Jon Landau got him reading books.) Later, the travails of adult love obsessed him.

Springsteen is indeed the rocker who grew up. While Unqualified Offerings is not his biggest fan, it always appreciated that about him.

The War. on Drugs - Unqualified Offerings is pretty sure that it's Ginger Stampley who sometimes refers to the maximal version of the war on terror as the "Forever War," after the classic Joe Haldeman novel. Comes Bruce Ralston of Flit to inform us that there's something to the sobriquet. In Haldeman's novel, the power-suited infantry spend most of their war tripping, not in a do-it-yourself way, like many US soldiers in Vietnam, but on Government Issue drugs pumped into them by their armor. Flit writes

The Toronto Star is having a lot of fun with its scoop this week that almost all American pilots in theatre over Afghanistan are heavily medicated, using both uppers on mission, and sleeping pills back at base. This obviously has bearing on the actions of Maj. Psycho Schmidt that killed 4 Canadians in April. The British papers have picked the story up, and are having fun with it... oddly nothing on the issue coming out in the mainstream American papers, yet.

Digital Rights Mismanagement

The nightmare scenario for this sort of music marketing is that what is actually turning people off isn't the dressing du jour on the industry's plastic puppets, but just that they are in fact plastic puppets, poured into a commercial mold formed entirely by record executives who are completely out of touch with their audience.

On a few occasions, in the history of the industry, some producers have taken a different approach. In the early 1960s, for instance, the producer in charge of a novelty label for EMI was introduced to a bar band from Liverpool, and took the radical step of not trying to remake them into something more commercial. Most of the songs they released as singles were songs they themselves wrote (a rarity at the time); their first album, in fact, was basically their standard stage set, recorded live in the studio, featuring several original songs, including the title track, and culminating in a wild, shreiking cover of an Isley Brothers tune, "Twist and Shout". It was a smash, and the Beatles went on to make quite a bit of money for EMI.

That couldn't work nowadays of course. The world has moved on, and if they can't sell records nowadays from the talent that the marketers are trying to push, it's got to be the fault of those evil file swappers on the Innernut.

Charles Dodgson on record weasels and product-in-development Amanda Latona.

Thinking Inside the Box - The Pentagon's hawkish Defense Policy Board has now gotten the "Saudi Arabia is our enemy" argument laid out for it formally, according to Thomas E. Ricks of the Washington Post, who seems to have the best access to people representing all points of view in the Administration. Actually, they got it on July 10, and we're just now hearing about it. Agenda-speculators, start your engines! Naturally, the notion that the Saudis are really our enemies is supposed to be a reason to conquer Iraq. The concept that, if the Saudis are really our enemies, one can just deal directly with them was apparently considered too complicated for the DPB.

The report concludes by linking regime change in Iraq to altering Saudi behavior. This view, popular among some neoconservative thinkers, is that once a U.S. invasion has removed Hussein from power, a friendly successor regime would become a major exporter of oil to the West. That oil would diminish U.S. dependence on Saudi energy exports, and so -- in this view -- permit the U.S. government finally to confront the House of Saud for supporting terrorism.

Iraq would sell us all the oil we wanted tomorrow if we let it. Oil is worth money, Iraq wants money, we have money. We've gone out of our way to minimize the amount of oil Iraq can sell for ten years. One of the government's big complaints against Iraq is that it keeps trying to sell more oil than it's allowed to.

"The road to the entire Middle East goes through Baghdad," said the administration official, who is hawkish on Iraq. "Once you have a democratic regime in Iraq, like the ones we helped establish in Germany and Japan after World War II, there are a lot of possibilities."

The sheer vainglory of the Iraq/Germany-Japan comparison is one of the enduring follies of the Iraq hawks. As UO has noted before, quite apart from the cultural issues, both Germany and Japan were staring down the barrel of a far worse fate than US occupation - conquest by the Soviet Union. There was something worse out there to worry them. Here in Monopolarworld, there is no comparable threat.

Boss Backlash - Reader Mikal O'Dalaigh alerts Unqualified Offerings to this Brian Doherty piece arguing, basically, that Bruce Springsteen has jumped the shark and that The Rising is...not so good. Unqualified Offerings is a big fan of Brian Doherty's, but has come to believe that Doherty and the Washington Post's David Segal are wrong.

UO expects to write on the CD at greater length. But for now, Doherty and Segal have made the best "anti" case.

Labor-Saving Device Alert - First off, apologies to this site's early adopters for the following long damn post. It revisits many arguments made here in the last 9 months. But it can't be helped.

Over on Live from the WTC, Jane Galt asked for people to make real, not straw-man arguments for or against war with Iraq. In response a number of people have posted pro and con arguments, including some excellent antiwar work by e-mailers named Brian Greenberg and dsquared and a weblogger named - oh yes - Jim of Objectionable Content.

The temptation is simply to quote Jim at length. So why the heck not!

The point in bringing up that Saddam is a former client of ours and that we created him is not to say that we should now take our lumps since we made this mess to begin with. The point is that in previous dealings, Saddam demonstrated himself to be a rational actor. A bastard, but rational. And rational actors can be deterred, as Jason McCullough pointed out re: Qadaffi.

We had Saddam under control before, by paying him, and it worked for years as he fought Iran for us. In all this time and since, Saddam acted in his own self-interest, and demonstrated little regard for the lives of Kurds or Iranians. In all these years, the U.S. did nothing to protect the Kurds, just as we haven't in Turkey. It wasn't in our interest.

Many argue that it is in our interest to remove Saddam because he is essentially a madman. But is he?

Saddam's invasion of Kuwait is rational when considered in the context of a U.S. green-light. His decision not to use weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. in the Gulf War (assuming jim b is right) is rational when considered in the context of a nuclear reprisal from us. There is not a "total lack of compunction about using WMD," Jane, just a lack of compunction when there is no consequence to him. An argument for deterrence again.

The pattern I observe is not irrational at all. It is predictable and therefore subject to deterrence.

...

If Iraq was responsible for 9/11 then many people (like myself) who argue against a war would argue for one. There are lots of folks who support attacking Afghnistan in order to put al Qaeda out of business, but who do not support a war on Iraq. The reason is that al Qaeda attacked us, and Iraq hasn't.

...

But I'd read those stories of a fantasy world as evidence that he lies to his underlings to get them to fight for him, not that he believes his own bullshit. [Or that Iraqi defectors tell Western debriefers what they know the western debriefers want to hear - UO.] Still, it's possible he's irrational. The way to test that is to offer him some alternatives, with threats and incentives as appropriate, and see how he reacts -- while ensuring that we do what we have to do to keep the U.S. safe.

I just remain unconvinced that a war is "what we have to do."

Jane asks, reasonably:

But Jim, isn't that what we've done? We're talking about a man who has chosen starvation for his people over surrendering his WMD. Admittedly, for the past eight years he hasn't exactly been playing against the varsity. But still, I would expect less belligerence given the sheer level of destitution.

Here Unqualified Offerings thinks Jane is conflating categories, specifically "tender concern for his subjects" and "rational actor." The Clinton Administration throughout the nineties, and the Bush Administration since, have said right out that simply cooperating with the inspection regime would not get them to support lifting sanctions - only Saddam's loss of power would convince them to do that. And everything the US has said and done for the last ten years indicates that it expects Saddam to die as part of the "regime change."

Deterrence requires two components:

1) A sure penalty for noncompliance.

2) A clear benefit to compliance.

US policy toward Iraq has lacked factor 2 for a decade. Current, stated policy is

1) If Saddam uses, acquires or conceals weapons of mass destruction, he dies.

2) If Saddam foreswears use, acquisition and concealment of weapons of mass destruction, he dies.

Here's another policy we have going:

1) If Saddam subsidizes the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, he dies.

2) If Saddam stops subsidizing the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, he dies.

Ask yourself: According to the US government's stated policy ("regime change" no matter what), what benefit does the USG offer Saddam for ceasing to subsidize suicide bombers?

Answer: None.

Unqualified Offerings has previously noted that Saddam has been successfully deterred in the past. Saddam has never used "weapons of mass destruction" against an opponent capable of responding in kind.

TIME OUT: Let's cut the "weapons of mass destruction" crap, shall we? Saddam has used chemical weapons against targets unable to respond in kind, but never against a target (Israel, America) that could itself retaliate with chemicals or nukes.

In fact, the US has never even contemporaneously censured Saddam for using chemical weapons. As Jeremy Scahill notes in Counterpunch

Most glaring is that Donald Rumsfeld was in Iraq as the 1984 UN report [detailing Iraqi use of poison gas against Iran] was issued and said nothing about the allegations of chemical weapons use, despite State Department "evidence." On the contrary, The New York Times reported from Baghdad on March 29, 1984, "American diplomats pronounce themselves satisfied with relations between Iraq and the United States and suggest that normal diplomatic ties have been restored in all but name."

Do not mistake Unqualified Offerings. The point is not "It's all America's fault, so we can't complain." The point is that in the years leading up to the Gulf War, the US put no premium on discouraging Saddam's acquisition or use of chemical weapons. Saddam's use of chemical weapons against Iran in the early 1980s and against the Kurds at Halabja are not cases of deterrence failing.

Consider the words of the Talking Dog, who favors removing Saddam from power but nevertheless notes

Both [Arafat and Hussein] seem to know exactly how far -- to the inch -- they can go, before disaster strikes, such as Saddam's crazy-like-a-fox decision to fire CONVENTIONAL scuds at Downtown Tel Aviv in the Gulf War. Had Saddam used chemical or bio-agents, or a small nuke, he would now be dead and Baghdad off the map (probably by the United States, and if not, unquestionably by Israel).

Instead, Saddam did just enough (along with the not so subtle suasion of the Bush family's Saudi friends and benefactors) to convince the first Bush Administration that it was better off leaving Saddam in place, in a "box", because he was "rational", and a final drive to remove him would result in something crazy (like, well, Scuds containing chemical or bio agents being showered all over Israel, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait). Saddam needn't worry about an internal religious crazed uprising (as Arafat does); Saddam more or less murdered all of HIS effective opposition. His concerns tend to be external.

What does this mean? Saddam is NOT Bin Laden (or even Hamas): he knows that dead is dead, and there ain't no 72 virgins. He has no problem killing OTHER people, of course, but he seems unlikely to engage in a suicide mission (ditto Arafat, of course). What this means is that if we push him against a wall, he will suddenly unleash whatever crazy shit he has stored up. Obviously, if we are correct, this will only be conventional stuff. If we wait too long, of course, it won't be. Just keep in mind that the USA under Reagan (Poppy was the Veep) did business with Iraq -- to help it against the TRULY IRRATIONAL AND DESTRUCTIVE IRANIAN CLERICS (who are still there). Why? Saddam is evil -- but he is more or less predictable: he tends to act out of personal interest and self-preservation.

The strongest argument for attacking Saddam is one that the government dare not make, but a commenter on [someone's] site did. Unqualified Offerings is finding itself utterly unable to find the damn thing. So here's a paraphrase:

Saddam was a rational actor, but defeat in the Gulf War, the sanctions regime and the use of UNSCOM personnel to foster covert ops aimed at his removal have been the geopolitical equivalent of teasing a dog with a stick - actually it's been the equivalent of teasing a dog with a stick while saying, "I'm going to kill you soon." The US has made a mad dog, yes, but now there's no alternative but to shoot it, while resolving to do better next time.

There is no better argument Unqualified Offerings has seen for taking on the expense of blood and treasure necessary to conquer Iraq and try to remake it into something sustainable. But even this argument ignores something crucial: This is the middle east we're talking about. Making up after determinedly trying to kill each other is Chapter 3 in the "How to Be a Regional Despot" book. Syria fought (half-heartedly) with the Coalition in Gulf War I. The latest word is that Syria is covertly supplying Iraq with military hardware. Saddam may or may not have intended the conquest of Saudi Arabia in 1990 when he conquered Kuwait. Saudi-Iraqi relations are as warm as they've been in years. Iran and Iraq are "ancient enemies." Iran just turned down a secret Iraqi request to buy weapons, according to the London Times, but what's significant is that Iraq even thought it worth asking. Jordan's King Hussein vocally supported Iraq during the Gulf War, and made no protest when Iraq fired token missiles through his airspace at Israel. Within four years he had signed a formal peace treaty with Israel.

Say this for your Arab tyrants. They try not to take stuff personally.

We Can Fact-Check Your Rock Criticism

With his new album, The Rising, Springsteen wades into the wreckage and pain of that horrendous event and emerges bearing fifteen songs that genuflect with enormous grace before the sorrows that drift in its wake. The small miracle of his accomplishment is that at no point does he give vent to the anger felt by so many Americans: the hunger for revenge.

Kurt Loder, Rolling Stone

Elsewhere, Springsteen acknowledges the fury that welled up in many bereft New Yorkers after the destruction of Manhattan's two most towering landmarks: "I want a kiss from your lips/I want an eye for an eye/I woke up this morning to an empty sky."

Kurt Loder, Rolling Stone

On the plains of Jordan
I cut my bow from the wood
Of this tree of evil
Of this tree of good

Bruce Springsteen, "Empty Sky"

House is on fire, vipers in the grass
A little revenge and this too shall pass

Bruce Springsteen, "Lonesome Day"

We Get Letters - Kevin Maroney writes that Bill Clinton's awesome retribution on the Sudanese analgesic industry and an unknown number of jihadist Afghan goats for their role in the destruction of two US embassies in 1998 did not get the President's grand jury testimony off the front page:

It just put something else on the front page with it--namely, the shit-storm of accusations that Clinton was bombing Afghanistan just to drive the testimony off the front page.

I can't say whether Clinton *hoped* it would drive his grand jury testimony off the front page, but it demonstrably failed.

Unqualified Offerings declines to fact-check the ass of Kevin Maroney by looking at actual front pages from August 1998. But as a treat for this site's left-wing friends, here's a link to their favorite Clinton hagiographer.

Dynamism vs. Stasism: This Time It's Personal

I hate death. I hate illness and disability, too.

I live a life greatly constricted by severe and largely untreatable failures of various parts of my body. Whatever cure there may be will probably involve doing things to my body nearly as drastic as revival from death, and in some ways more so, since whole systems will have to be overhauled and rebuilt. I'm not holding my breath waiting for that, though I remain hopeful, since things move from maybe-possible to on-the-horizon to here faster than expected a lot of the time. But in the meantime, I'm stuck, and it sucks.

So I have a real sympathy for anyone out there pushing on the boundaries in the hopes of being able to say "nor is this incurable". Whatever people learn about health, injury, and recovery in the course of cryonics research is likely to have wider implications. Maybe for me, or maybe for someone else out there with very different but equally nasty problems.

If individuals - and communities of like-minded individuals - choose to face the prospect of disability and death with equanimity and acceptance, that's not only their choice, I support it vigorously. I think that everyone should feel that they're doing the right thing, and should have good reasons for thinking so. We need to be able to live with ourselves. And important insights come out of the process of coming to terms with what seems insurmountable.

But good things also come out of the refusal to accept the apparently inevitable.

from Bruce Baugh, "Cryonics and Me"

Technical Difficulties - This site had server problems yesterday. Apparently another site on the same server at UO's virtual host had an out-of-control script running for much of the day. Since then there have been some routing problems specifically from the machine here at Unqualified Headquarters which made it pretty much impossible to publish new material. The site still isn't loading right from here (maybe a caching problem) but the whole thing loads if you go through Anonymizer. Must be a bizarre regional backbone thing. (Note: Anonymizer loads this site's right-hand column on the left side of the page and the sidebar at the very bottom.)

Unqualified Offerings had a vague notion of reaching Post 1,000 this weekend, but is now unlikely too. In the meantime, go read Chad Orzel's fiery criticism of the McKinney story on Uncertain Principles. Chad is very unhappy about the way the blogosphere has pursued the matter, alarmed at what he considers to be the mindset behind it, and disappointed in Unqualified Offerings specifically. UO feels that it made several of Chad's points itself, though not in the same tone. But check out his piece for yourself.

UPDATE: After further consideration, Chad Orzel decides that Unqualified Offerings is "Way Better Than Pond Scum," in a piece with that title. This would make an excellent alternative tag line to "War, Peace, Freedom, Fish, More," UO believes. UO can't agree that McKinney "speak[s] her mind in public without adequately thinking things through." But that's as may be.