On the torture Table - This subject actually depressed me too much to write about it much more. So some links: Radley adds some more to his argument. Gene Healy has questions for both of us. I answered his question for me by e-mail. If I get undepressed I'll publish the answers here. Two pieces I commend to your attention (somewhat abashedly, since they refer to my items favorably). Leonard of Unruled writes, among other things

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.

And Arthur Silber suggests, correctly I think, that my "because we're the fucking United States of America" argument is too narrow. Arthur says "it's because we're fucking human beings." He says a lot more besides.

Torture Talk II - Lest any liberal readers feel too smug about The Torturer Bush of the Republican Party, note this passage in Radley's item about a time torture "worked":

In 1995, we captured an al-Qaeda operative in California (San Diego, I think). We, er, "exported" him to the Phillipines -- who are happy to employ creative methods of questioning suspects -- where he revealed, after being tortured, a plot to simultaneously blow up eleven passenger jets over the Pacific.

Note that George W. Bush was not president in 1995. No Republican was. The problem is not an individual or a specific political party. The problem is government.

Torture Talk - Reader Kevin Maroney e-mails:

"Italy can survive the loss of Aldo Moro. It would not survive the introduction of torture."

--General Carlo Alberto Della Chiesa, head of the investigation into the kidnapping (later murder) of Prime Minister Aldo Moro, 1978

What broke my heart yesterday was when Radley Balko, whom I admire tremendously, came out with a "Torture? G'head." item. (He qualified it slightly in a later post.)

Should we torture him?

I think so. He's not an American citizen. He wasn't born here, or captured here. He's "an enemy combatant," if ever there was a time to use the phrase.

No. He's not an American citizen. We are. Dammit but I don't recall "By Any Means Necessary" appearing on the nation's coinage.

UPDATE: Anna Feruglio Dal Dan writes

I know it sounds ridicolous to nitpick over such a subject, and with one of the few people speaking sense, but precisely because I honor the memory of General Dalla Chiesa, and was moved by finding his name shining cleanly in this horrid discussion, I would ask you please to get his name right. It's CARLO ALBERTO DALLA CHIESA, not CARLOS Alberto DELLA Chiesa. CARLOS is a Spanish name. Dalla Chiesa was Italian. He was one of those people who would have told you they'd be glad to die for Italy, which he ended up doing, in the end.

Fixed! Thank you Anna. (Here italian-language blog is here.)

Promotional Message - Lots of reaction to Sunday's piece on Kenneth Pollack that I hope to get to over the next couple of days. Tonight I'm just feeling too darn lazy, though. Some critics complained that I was only dealing with Pollack's op-ed, not his (longer and more expensive) book. But reader Russel Wyvong decided that, rather than curse my darkness, he would light a single candle. He's having a copy of The Threatening Storm mailed to me from Amazon.com. I like Russel Wyvong. And tune in this weekend when I publish major, skeptical accounts of the merits of the first season of Babylon 5 on DVD, Canadian fishing vacations and larger, roomier houses than La Familia Offering currently occupies.

Meantime, if you're feeling overly happy, read this article about expected increases in the price of gasoline.

Welcome to the Southern Cone - Why shouldn't we have people like Khaled Sheik Mohammad tortured, even though they are mass-murdering scum? There are various prudential reasons, which I went into last year. Twice. But there's a more important reason.

Because we're the fucking United States of America!

I weep to think that we ever took it upon ourselves to criticize Argentina for the "dirty war" of the late 70s. Evil as the junta was, it was at least responding to a concerted campaign of urban guerilla warfare. ("At the time, political kidnappings, violent strikes and bombings had become commonplace," notes the Christian Science Monitor.) How little it took, really, to bring far too many Americans down to juntahood - a single, terrible, terrible morning. Perhaps al Qaeda already got its weapon of mass destruction, a virus capable of making all infected forget the most basic facts about who they are, or at least who they were supposed to be. We even know when they used it. From here out, we may live or die, may win or lose, but not as Americans.

On the Other Hand - Arthur Silber offers another view of the post-Warsaw Pact politicians I blogged about last week in a piece about an Investor's Business Daily article. Arthur says, based on his research, that he'll agree that three out of eight are rotten, but the others seem much better than IBD and I made them out to be. He probably has a point, though his research relies pretty strongly on "official" biographies. I can't help but grant his general point, though:

All in all, my conclusion is: believe very few secondhand sources, particularly if they are associated with organizations with very strong agendas. In other words: don't trust very much at all, and verify any information provided on your own if the subject is of concern to you.

The Ultimate Advantage: Unqualified Offerings! - Liberal blog pioneer Charles Dodgson, bless his heart, remembers that I suggested back on Halloween of 2001 (in "The Vodalus Approach")

Consider this: bin Laden tells his followers not to attack Saudi Arabia's oil production facilities because they represent "the wealth of the people" that he'll see gets redistributed when a just regime takes power in Riyadh. That's an awfully convenient sworn foe to have if you own that wealth, eh? And I realize Americans don't get comprehensive international news, but - you hear about bin Laden blowing up Khobar Towers; you hear about bin Laden blowing up the USS Cole. But has his organization struck any serious blow against the government in Riyadh? Killed any Saudi ambassadors, kidnapped any princes, bombed any ministries? al-Qaeda has proven its ability to commit violence on the penninsula generally and in Saudi Arabia specifically. You'd think someone sworn to bring down the regime would get to it.

Bless him twice over, Charles makes the connection with this Guardian story about the civil suit against the Saudi government by the families of September 11, 2001 massacre victims. Money quote:

Based on sworn testimony from a Taliban intelligence chief called Mullah Kakshar, they allege that Turki had two meetings in 1998 with al-Qaeda. They say that Turki helped seal a deal whereby al-Qaeda would not attack Saudi targets. In return, Saudi Arabia would make no demands for extradition or the closure of bin Laden's network of training camps. Turki also promised financial assistance to Mullah Omar. A few weeks after the meetings, 400 new pick-up vehicles arrived in Kandahar, the papers say.

Kakshar's statement also says that Turki arranged for donations to be made directly to al-Qaeda and bin Laden by a group of wealthy Saudi businessmen. 'Mullah Kakshar's sworn statement implicates Prince Turki as the facilitator of these money transfers in support of the Taliban, al-Qaeda and international terrorism,' the papers said.

Remember, get it from Unqualified Offerings today, or get it from major international newspapers a year and a half later.

Worth noting: The same article suggests a possible al Qaeda-Iraqi connection.

Finally the lawsuit alleges that Turki was 'instrumental' in setting up a meeting between bin Laden and senior Iraqi intelligence agent Faruq al-Hijazi in December 1998. At that meeting it is alleged that bin Laden agreed to avenge recent American bombings of Iraqi targets and in return Iraq offered him a safe haven and gave him blank Yemeni passports.

Definitely worth investigating. I wonder if the government, as opposed to the private sector, is doing so.

How'd You Get This Way - On the unreliable LewRockwell.com, a pretty good essay by Jeffrey Tucker of the Rothbard InstMises Institute. From a right-libertarian perspective, Tucker asks, what's up with the conservative enthusiasm for war?

Whatever happened to Russell Kirk's "politics of prudence," to pro-life politics, to rules against entangling alliances, to opposition to big government?

Tucker considers various explanations, including the supposed influence of ex-Trotskyite "neoconservatives," simple GOP loyalism, the influence of TV, (wait for it, Avedon Carol!) talk radio, the possibility that American conservative thought is "intrinsically corrupt," the vice of nationalism (as opposed to the virtue of patriotism). What surprised me is that he's remarkably skeptical of "The Neoconservatives Did It" theory for a paleo. He concludes, addressing his libertarian readership:

In any case, it becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for any friend of freedom to call himself a conservative. This seems to be some sort of important moment in history, a time when old ideological loyalties must be radically reassessed. Perhaps the problem runs very deep. Perhaps it is not the conservatives who are somehow diverging from the modal type. Perhaps this war reveals something more fundamental: namely that those attached to the idea of liberty are not conservative in either the European or modern American sense.

We have all had the feeling of reading some piece on National Review Online and thinking: I have nothing in common with these people! Well, perhaps it is they who are the conservatives, and you are not. We lost the word liberalism long ago, and only adopted the term conservative with the greatest reluctance. It is time to give it up too, neither describing ourselves as such nor allowing others to do so.

I've been there for awhile now. (I don't share Tucker's distaste for rap music, though.)

Poetry Corner - In another literary milestone, a new, never-before-published poem by someone other than me - in this case, my friend and colleague Frederick Pollack. Fred holds annoying socialist views but is nevertheless one of our finest living poets. Buy his books at Amazon and show him that capitalism works! The following is one section of a five-part poem. Some people might take it as mere "Bush-bashing," but I think they'd be scanting it:

Zombie Jamboree

2

An incredible snafu leaves
Bush completely on his own
one wintry afternoon in Europe.
Back home, heads roll. Back home goes to Def-Con III.
The Premier or Prime Minister or whatever
of Europe stands with Bush on the steps
of his palace and peers,
embarrassed, about, and offers
the use of his own Executive Guard
and limo.
The President shakes him off and decides to walk.
He knows the American Embassy
is just a short distance up
this boulevard. He's pissed
but unafraid. Perhaps
being used to his unobtrusive Secret Service
makes their absence less evident. Or
he draws on his deep personal faith
in Jesus. That's what it is.
He enjoys walking,
the chill air, the weird pompous buildings.
He encounters Europeans. They
wear leather coats and zebra shirts and feathers in their hats,
which conceal implanted antennas.
(When they aren't chattering to each other,
they appear to be talking to themselves.)
They recognize and surround him.
They remonstrate and gesture.
Cheney, back home, is moved to a safe location.
Bush knows what they might want to rag him about -
. Iraq
. the Kyoto Treaty
. Palestinians -
but he doesn't speak European.
Despite their noise they seem to bear
some strange metaphysical weight
that isolates them from each other. Also,
they're smoking, which slows them down.
Bush wonders if he's in danger.
The thin lips twist
mirthlessly; he squares his shoulders.
He recalls that he has been born again
and is justified in the Lord. But
the crowd parts, enfeebled
perhaps by that; perhaps
by that strange metaphysical weight.
The backwash of adrenaline leaves
the President melancholy,
and, nearing the Embassy,
he looks up at the sky -
unsure if the lights he sees
are the white bellies of birds,
the Pleiades, or an airstrike.

© 2003 by Frederick Pollack

The Uselessness of the Democratic Party - From the New York Post:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton "fully supports" President Bush's Iraq policy, her office said last night - on the eve of her visit today to an upstate arsenal that makes military hardware like mortars and howitzers for U.S. troops. "Sen. Clinton fully supports the steps the president has taken to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction," said Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines. . .

That puts Clinton (D-N.Y.) squarely at odds with a majority in her own party, where one recent poll found an Iraq attack is opposed by 66 percent of "core Democrats."

That's actual Democratic voters. But why would Democratic party leaders listen to them? When John Smith asked if stopping the court nomination of Miguel Estrada was really more important than stopping a war that threatens to launch us into a generation-long folly, some liberal contributors to Stand Down excused the DP's focus with the War is inevitable, Estrada is not excuse. In other words, they were letting their political team get away with less effort against the war than they themselves are making.

Who Are You Going to Believe - "Me, or a forlorn logistical tail." Turkey says No Means No. The Pentagon says a northen attack from Turkey isn't essential. But we've still got the planned supplies for the northern front hanging around Turkish ports, just in case the Turks change their minds. Kind of makes you wonder how inessential the US really thinks the Turkish avenue is.

Back Rooms and Backbreakers - DC's Capitol Hill Blue continues to cover the politics of the Iraq situation, with a heavy emphasis on the White House political staff and Republican Party insiders. The latest: Advisors warn Bush he faces "humiliating" defeat on world stage.

Some Bush aides now admit privately that the President, for all his tough talk, may have to back down and postpone his plans to invade Iraq in the near future.

"The vote in Turkey fucked things up big time," grumbles one White House aide. "It pushes our timetable back. On the other hand, it might give us a chance to save face."

"Saving face" means backing away from a showdown with the UN Security Council next week and agreeing to let the weapons inspection process run its course.

The big problem is spinning any policy change. (Don't go feeling smug, liberals. A Democrat in this position would have the same political concerns.) Here fortune favors the administration nimble enough to sieze the opportunity:

"The arrest of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed gives us some breathing room," says a Bush strategist. "We can concentrate on the favorable publicity generated by the arrest and the valuable intelligence we have gained from that event."

The CHB piece is based on anonymous sources, with all the reliability problems that entails. One anonymous source concludes:

"We've always needed an exit strategy," admits one White House aide. "Circumstances have given us one. We shouldn't ignore it."

That "nimble enough to sieze the opportunity" thing is the big question now.

Real-ly - I've never watched a "reality show," but I've been meaning to link to Jesse Walker's take on them from a couple of weeks ago. I think he gets it right:

The best thing about the shows: You don't actually have to watch them. The simple news that a program like This Surreal Life exists is enjoyable enough; actually viewing more than one episode is going an extra mile. Our time is spared, and the network suits are forced to devise yet more novelty for our amusement.

I can testify. When I heard about how the first Survivor series ended (with the deciding voter, having lost his own chance at the prize, flipping a coin to determine who he'd give the million bucks to), I had a Whoah! moment. I haven't heard anything from subsequent shows to top or even equal it - my general impression is that "reality" shows have relentlessly prettied themselves up with ever less real people - but the end of that first series justified the whole phenomenon for me. I mean, I don't watch anything on TV except football anyway. At worst, it's no skin off my nose what they put on; at best, I get some sideswipe entertainment from something that, as Jesse says, I don't even have to watch.

Delink or Not Delink - As a blogger inside baseball issue, noise noisy wrangles over taking people off one's blogroll recur regularly. My question is, could there be a better reason for delinking someone than they make you look at a picture of !@#^%#@ Ron Jeremy on their site?????

At least he's clothed.

The Best We Can Do - Kenneth Pollack seems to have persuaded many fence-sitters to support war with his book, The Threatening Storm. I've been curious but cheap, basically hoping to get Pollack's case for free, and Dr. Manhattan kindly pointed me to Pollack's own condensation of his case in the New York Times of February 21. Pollack's main business in this article is to refute the case that Saddam can be deterred - a case made, among other places, here on this website. Pollack:

With the Bush administration set to put a resolution on Iraq before the United Nations Security Council next week, those opposed to war will rally around the notion that Saddam Hussein can be deterred from aggression. They will continue to say that the mere presence of United Nations inspectors will prevent him from building nuclear weapons, and that even if he were to acquire them he could still be contained.

Unfortunately, these claims fly in the face of 12 years — and in truth more like 30 years — of history.

And most of the rest of the essay is Pollack's reading of 30 years of history. A big question, though not the only question, is "How good is his reading?"

Right away there are problems. Pollack starts with establishing the mere fact of Iraq's attempts to procure nuclear weapons. To his credit, he later troubles to deal with the distinction between acquiring weapons and using them, but the way he makes his case on the former problematizes his credibility:

Four years later, the international agency was so certain that it had eradicated the Iraqi nuclear program that it wanted to end aggressive inspections in favor of passive "monitoring." Then a slew of defectors came out of Iraq — including Hussein Kamel al-Majid, the son-in-law of Saddam Hussein who led the Iraqi program to build weapons of mass destruction; Wafiq al-Samarrai, one of Saddam Hussein's intelligence chiefs; and Khidhir Hamza, a leading scientist with the nuclear weapons program. These defectors reported that outside pressure had not only failed to eradicate the nuclear program, it was bigger and more cleverly spread out and concealed than anyone had imagined it to be. . .

In the late 1990's, American and international nuclear experts again concluded that the Iraqi nuclear program was dormant: yes, the scientists were still working in teams; yes, they still had all of the plans; and yes, they probably were hiding some machinery — but they were not making any progress. Then another batch of important defectors escaped to Europe and told Western intelligence services that after the inspectors left Iraq in 1998, Saddam Hussein had started a crash program to build a nuclear weapon and that the Iraqis had devised methods to hide the effort.

Anyone with even a layman's interest in intelligence work knows defector reports must be approached with caution, for all sorts of psychological and political reasons. Defectors have, practically by definition, an ax to grind; they may feel they'll get a better reception if they tell their interrogators what they think the interrogators want to hear; they may be right about that; they may be plants from the hostile country or have had wrong info planted on them; they may lie to puff themselves up. During the Cold War, disputes over which defectors to believe and disbelieve came close to tearing US intelligence apart. The basic principle is that, though the adversary nation may be bad (and Iraq is plenty bad), that doesn't make every defector noble or reliable.

What concerned me when I first read the article is that Pollack must surely know this. He is "a former analyst of the Iraqi military at the C.I.A." But his article gives no hint of the inherent difficulties. Quite the opposite: the pattern is, We thought X, but defector reports proved Not-X. That was disturbing in itself, because it suggests a certain bad faith on Pollack's part. But it gets worse. Hesiod has done some legwork on Hussein Kamel and Khidir Hamza, in what will probably turn out to be the most genuinely important blog item of the month, reading the transcript of Kamel's debriefing by UNSCOM.

Kamel calls Hamza "a professional liar. He worked with us but he was useless and was always looking for promotions. He consulted with me but could not deliver anything." He says documents that Hamza provided UNSCOM were forgeries. The UNSCOM debriefer allows that they, too, had concluded that Hamza's information was worthless.

It gets trickier. As Hesiod notes, UNSCOM's Rolf Ekeus says the same thing about Kamel ("liar!"). It's entirely possible that Kamel was sent after Hamza to discredit him. It's possible Hamza is the poltroon that Kamel alleges. The problems are that

1) They can't both be telling the truth.

2) Quoting Hesiod again: "The Bush admninistration, and its pro-war allies, have been hyping the information provided BOTH from Khidir Hamza and from Hussein Kamal. The problem is...one of them has to be lying."

3) But there's one more problem. Pollack too touts both defectors to support his case, just as the administration does. And since Pollack was, after all, "a former analyst of the Iraqi military at the C.I.A.", who has written an entire book on Iraq since (supposedly) leaving the Agency, he must have known that Kamel and Hamza conflict. But he gives his Times audience no hint of this. He must also know that Kamel told UNSCOM that

there was no decision to use chemical weapons [during the 1991 phase of the war] for fear of retaliation. They realised that if chemical weapons were used, retaliation would be nuclear.

Since the theme of Pollack's Times piece is Saddam's "containability," that seems like a material omission. It would be one thing if Pollack never brought up Kamel's name. Then he could argue, plausibly, "I always thought Kamel was full of shit." Pollack could be right or wrong, but he would be consistent. As it stands, it's hard to find a good faith explanation for Pollack's particular pattern of inclusions and omissions. It sure looks like he throws the name in for the sake of authority while hiding the complicating details from his readers.

To his credit, Pollack also attempts to make the case, not just that Iraq is trying to acquire nuclear weapons, but that he will use them. Here his arguments are of mixed quality:

It is probably true that fear of retaliation kept Iraq from using chemical weapons against coalition forces during the gulf war. However, this should give us little comfort that he will be similarly deterred in the future. Before the 1991 war, Secretary of State James Baker warned his Iraqi counterpart, Tariq Aziz, that Iraq faced "terrible consequences" if it used weapons of mass destruction, mounted terrorist attacks or destroyed Kuwaiti oil fields.

Yet despite this warning, Saddam Hussein tried to send terrorist teams to America and did blow up the Kuwaiti oil fields — he simply gambled on which two of the three things Mr. Baker mentioned were unlikely to result in America ending the regime. (Many officials from that Bush administration have suggested, in fact, that Saddam Hussein didn't even make the right calculation.)

Really? (Speaking to the parenthetical.) Allowing for the limitations of the format, we should refrain from pressing Pollack too hard about which administration officials he means, when they made these suggestions, and what their reasoning was. But facts would appear to be facts: grant Pollack his claim that Iraq tried to infiltrate terror teams into the US and they were blocked with no contemporaneous publicity (or mention in hawkish circles until very recently). How did Hussein make the wrong calculation? He lit the oil wells. He refrained from using gas and germs on allied troops. He did not get nuked. He did not get deposed. That looks like making the right calculation. And really, how hard could it be? How hard is it for you? In advance, guess the circumstances in which the US is most likely to risk world opprobrium by using nuclear weapons for only the second time in 50 years:

1) A country with which it is at war dispatches a handful of kill squads.

2) A country sets some oil wells on fire.

3) A country attacks US troops with chemical and biological weapons when the US has always maintained that any country that did so riske a nuclear response.

Door Number Three doesn't look like a tough conclusion somehow. Indeed, I'm a little miffed at Baker for somewhat casually devaluing our nuclear deterrent by hinting at its possible use in obviously frivolous circumstances. And again I have to wonder at Pollack's good faith. "Terrible consequences" looks less likely to be diplospeak for "depose Saddam" than "nuking Saddam."

Pollack is on superficially stronger ground in the next section, where he argues that, far from believing that they had a green light to invade Kuwait in 1990, Iraq expected the conquest of Kuwait to lead to military confrontation with the US and prepared for it:

Much of the evidence for this remains classified, but at least two points can be made using public material: Tariq Aziz has told reporters that this was what Saddam Hussein thought at the time; and we know that when the Republican Guards invaded Kuwait they moved quickly — even before they had consolidated control over the country — to set up defenses along Kuwait's borders and against amphibious and airborne landings.

The PBS Frontline interview with Tariq Aziz confirms this. But while we're taking Tariq Aziz at his word, the Frontline interview contains a number of other interesting passages as well, for instance, Aziz discusses Iraq's dispute with Kuwait over oil production levels as the real motive for the invasion. (" If we had Kuwait in our mind for takeover, we could have done that in the '70s....if you look at the political scene, regionally and internationally it allowed such things, more than it allowed in the '90s.") Not proven, but worth exploring. Also:

Q: And during the build up of American troops in Saudi Arabia, was there discussion among the leadership of 'Let's make a deal, let's back down'?

Aziz: We were reviewing the situation all the time. Whenever there is a political or military development, we used to review the situation, but we didn't think that there will be a change in the strategy and tactics of George Bush and Margaret Thatcher.

You know, at that time, until the resignation of Margaret Thatcher, she was telling everybody that 'we will attack Iraq even if Iraq withdraws from Kuwait,' you know that. She was asking for the dismantling of Iraqi armament even if Iraq withdraws from Kuwait. . .

The more things change, the more they stay the same. We'll come back to "No Way Out" syndrome and its problems for deterrence.

It's very likely that Pollack knows Aziz said this too:

Q: Why didn't you use your chemical weapons?
Aziz: Well, we didn't think it wise to use them.

Q: Can you tell me in more detail....?
Aziz: That's all I can say. It was not wise to use such kind of weapons in such kind of war, with such an enemy.

Q: Because they had nuclear weapons?
Aziz: You can....... make your own conclusions...

That's two different Kuwait-War era Iraqi officials admitting that the threat of US retaliation kept them from using chemical or biological weapons against the coalition. That's also two more than Pollack admits too.

There is a further problem when Pollack attempts to extend his accurate statement that Iraq expected a confrontation with the US over its Kuwaiti conquest:

In other words, Saddam Hussein thinks we tried to deter him, and that we failed. He was ready and willing to fight the United States for Kuwait.

The second part is true enough. The first deserves looking into. Another passage from the Aziz interview:

Q: In August or July 1990, if George Bush had said, 'Do not invade Kuwait or we will fight you', what would you have done?
Aziz: We would have told him, tell the Kuwaitis to stop threatening Iraq, to stop their wrong policies, deliberate wrong policies against Iraq and we will not go to Kuwait, very, very simple.

Q: And if they didn't stop?
Aziz: That means that the war has already started and you have to act.

Let's be clear: an on-the-record statement to a reporter by the official of a totalitarian regime can by no means be considered definitive. Far from it. (Nor can the statements of officials of democratic regimes.) At best it's an interesting starting point. Pollack brought Aziz into the conversation in the first place, and we know about the mythical status of enough other aspects of the run-up to the Kuwait War that we can't dismiss it out of hand. But at minimum, Aziz's response suggests that there never was an unambiguous prewar attempt by the United States to dissuade Iraq from attacking Kuwait. ("IF George Bush had said . . . ") Aziz's frankness earlier in the interview about not being surprised about America's hostile reaction to the invasion strengthens the suggestion. Had there been a pre-invasion deterrent effort it's the kind of thing Aziz would have brought up in response to the question, given the pattern of his other responses.

Moving on. Pollack:

Even that crushing defeat, however, didn't dim his adventurism. Just two years later he attempted to assassinate the emir of Kuwait and former President Bush. This was not a rational act but a meaningless bid for revenge.

This may have happened. Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article casts some serious doubt. I'm agnostic. If it was real it was a true confederacy of dunces, going by the Hersh report. It's interesting nevertheless to assume that Hussein really did try to assassinate GHW Bush and ask, would such an act be irrational and meaningless? Tough question. We know that Lyndon Johnson believed that Fidel Castro had Kennedy killed for trying to kill him. We know that Lyndon Johnson called off our "damn Murder Incorporated in the Caribbean." We know that GHWB signed a "lethal finding" right after the end of the Kuwait War that "ordered the CIA, in essence, to get rid of Saddam." (See this Washington Post story from 1998. History did not begin on September 11, 2001. Nor did it skip ahead to that date from the Munich Agreement.) How "irrational" (as opposed to "unkind") is it, really, to attempt to kill the man who set in motion a machinery of attempts to kill you? If there really was an assassination attempt against ex-president Bush, and Iraq really was behind it, Saddam might have hoped that Clinton would pull an LBJ and back off.

Or not. But you can forgive Brink Lindsey, when he writes about the importance of the alleged assassination attempt, for not knowing about the context of the lethal finding, and the circumstantial case (at best) for the attempt even happening. Pollack, based on his background, must know these things. And he keeps them to himself when writing his article.

Pollack is not done contradicting his own claims:

Then, in October 2000, he dispatched five divisions to western Iraq. All of the evidence available to the American government indicated that, with the acquiescence of Damascus, he intended to move them through Syria and into the Golan Heights. In response, Washington began preparing a military strike far greater than Desert Fox of 1999 (which itself prompted revolts throughout Iraq for six months), and the Israeli military planned its own crushing response. Only American and Saudi diplomatic intervention with Syria, combined with the Iraqi military's logistical problems, quashed the adventure.

That's one version of events. GlobalSecurity.org has another:

The best assessment of the US was that it was indeed training activity, and that the Iraqi forces had not postured themselves to be in a threatening posture from which they would do some threatening act towards any of their neighbors. The forces did not have with them the essential elements of logistic support that would be required in order to use them in an offensive or a threatening manner. There was still a lot of Iraq to the west of where the forces were located. The movements seem to be local and training and administrative in nature. In the Middle East this was being interpreted as a massing of Iraqi troops on their western border in support of Palestinians. But the US Defense Department did not agree with that characterization.

But let's grant Pollack the stronger fact set anyway. What's he saying, then? To repeat, Pollack writes:

. . . the Israeli military planned its own crushing response. Only American and Saudi diplomatic intervention with Syria, combined with the Iraqi military's logistical problems, quashed the adventure.

Translation from the hawkish: If there was a serious intention on Iraq's part to attack Israel with Syria's cooperation, the combined efforts of Israel, Saudi Arabia and Syria successfully deterred an attack.

And this is what Pollack does over and over again in his article: adduce, as evidence that Saddam can not be deterred, instances where Saddam was deterred.

We are almost done with Pollack's handling of the evidentiary context. We need to repeat an earlier theme:

With more than 150,000 American soldiers taking positions on his borders he continues to run the international inspectors in circles, foolishly confident that his minor concessions will stave off an invasion. Is there any other person on earth who wouldn't turn his country inside out to prove that he did not have more weapons of mass destruction?

Yes, someone who believes, on the basis of months and months of statements from the US government - really, years and years - plus actions of the US government, that it doesn't matter what he does, that no action he takes can "appease" the United States. The Post reports this weekend that

One sign of the innovative nature of the plan is that, without much public notice, its first phase is already underway. Special Operations troops are executing missions inside Iraq to prepare the way for later attacks. U.S. and British warplanes ostensibly enforcing the "no-fly" zones in northern and southern Iraq have increased the number and intensity of airstrikes, and recently expanded their list of targets to include Iraqi surface-to-surface missiles. They were attacked, defense officials said, not because they were in the "no-fly" zones and threatened U.S. aircraft but because they were in range of U.S. troops mustering just over the border in Kuwait.

"We've already got a lot of stuff underway -- the air campaign, psychological operations, Special Ops," said Robert Andrews, a former Pentagon official who oversaw Special Operations activities.

It ain't deterrence if there's no reward for being deterred. Pollack must know this too. If even much of the US antiwar movement believes, on the evidence available to them, that war is inevitable, surely Iraq, which knows perfectly well what our special ops troops and bombers are doing, could rationally believe it too.

One more very odd claim by Pollack before we jump from context to metacontext:

Our experts may be split on how to handle North Korea, but they agree that the Pyongyang regime wants nuclear weapons for defensive purposes — to stave off the perceived threat of an American attack. The worst that anyone can suggest is that North Korea might blackmail us for economic aid or sell such weapons to someone else (with Iraq being near the top of that list). Only Saddam Hussein sees these weapons as offensive — as enabling aggression.

I don't know about you, but Pollack is not making me feel better about the North Koreans here. Worst they can suggest is that North Korea might blackmail us for economic aid? As for the someone else North Korea might sell its nukes too, how about Al Qaeda? He seems strangely blithe about the DPRK. Perhaps the CIA's former Korea analysts are blithe about Iraq.

Now to the metacontext. Pollack sounds a theme familiar from some of the franker hawks:

Most ominous today, we have heard from many intelligence sources — including some of the highest-level defectors now in America and abroad — that Saddam Hussein believes that once he has acquired nuclear weapons it is the United States that will be deterred. He apparently believes that America will be so terrified of getting into a nuclear confrontation that it would not dare to stop him should he decide to invade, threaten or blackmail his neighbors.

Or dare to follow through on its twelve-year old policy of regime change by one means or another. Here's the metacontext: Pollack takes it for granted that it is our right and duty to intervene in the Gulf, the "we have to intervene so we can continue to intervene" argument. That Iraq's neighbors include a nuclear power, a near-nuclear power and a large conventional power that could probably go nuclear if it felt the need, and that the ordering of the region might more properly fall to them (Israel, Iran and Turkey are their names), never seems to occur to Pollack. He takes for granted that our proper place is there.

On the evidence of his Times article, there's nothing special about Pollack or his case. I got into this because Dr. Manhattan asked, quite politely I should stress, if I knew of any doves who had responded to Pollack's arguments. It turns out the answer is yes, but only because Pollack's arguments are the same ones every other war proponent has made. They are no more convincing coming from him.

Weekly Fitness Blog Post - Weight: 191. Waist: 37 1/4".

A rueful week, fitnesswise. It's not the slight gain in weight (one pound). That's either from too many known indulgences or that combined with some muscle building. (The waist drop is a good sign.) The new office is prone to ordering in lunch food. We had pizza Tuesday and Chinese Friday. (Lovely, sugary, breaded orange chicken.) Too many snacks at gaming Wednesday night, and to top it all off, an old friend's open house yesterday where we ended up, for some reason, sitting around the snack table.

All of those things can easily be moderated. What's disappointing me is that I finally saw my doctor after two years and got a blood pressure reading: 150/100. It's never been worse, and it shows just how unreliable those grocery store machines really are. I have to go back on medication now, and I was hoping the weight and fitness gains I've made would be sufficient control.

Dang. Since that was my first official reading in two years, I don't know how high my blood pressure may have gotten when my body was falling apart. But since I'm feeling subjectively more fatigued in the chest area the last couple of weeks, my suspicion falls on the experiment in slow-cadence weight-training as my only exercise. And buried in Doug McGuff's article on training for BMX racing is this striking passage on incompatible goals:

Conditioning for power and endurance are mutually exclusive activities. It is an either-or proposition; you cannot have it both ways. Think of your physical conditioning as a spectrum that runs from power on one end and endurance on
another.

POWER----------------------------------------ENDURANCE

For any significant improvement in endurance you make, you will suffer a concomittant decrease in your power.

This is not quite saying there's such a thing as "cardiovascular fitness" after all - he's still talking in terms of skeletal muscle. Specifically, he refers to the arragement and role of the different kinds of muscle fibers:

We have several different types of muscle fibers, but for simplicity's sake, we will focus on 3 general categories: slow twitch, intermediate twitch and fast twitch. The names don't just refer to how quickly these fibers contract. Slow twitch fibers have slow contraction velocity, fatigue slowly, and recover quickly. Slow twitch fibers are arranged in relatively small groups (motor units) that are activated by a single nerve. Therefore a nerve going to a slow twitch motor unit will produce a small amount of force. Fast twitch fibers have fast contraction velocity, fatigue quickly and recover slowly. Fast twitch fibers are arranged in larger groupings (motor units). Therefore a nerve going to a fast-twitch motor unit will produce a higher degree of force. Intermediate fibers fall somewhere between these two extremes. Slow and Fast twitch fibers are fixed in their characteristics, so they cannot alter their behaviour based on training. Intermediate twitch fibers can take either more fast or slow-twitch characteristics depending on specific demands.

Since high-intensity training, including slow-cadence training, aims to exhaust the fast-twitch fibers qiuckly, promoting their growth, it stands to reason that it would train intermediate-twitch fibers to behave more like fast-twitch than like slow-twitch fibers, leading to relatively less endurance than a program that trained intermediate-twitch fibers to behave like slow-twitch fibers. (McGuff says your actual mix of slow, intermediate and fast-twitch fibers is determined by your genes and can't be altered.)

And now I'm thinking of Heavyhands again. Because Heavyhands developer Leonard Schwartz claimed to have identified a separate fitness component - "strength-endurance" - distinct from pure endurance and pure strength, essentially the ability to bear moderate muscle loads over a period of time. A good explanation of Schwartz's claims for strength-endurance can be found in the Clarence Bass article on Heavyhands that I have referenced before:

Probably Dr. Schwartz's most provocative contention is that Heavyhands training produces a unique form of fitness. He calls this separate fitness factor "strength-endurance fitness," claiming it is more than pure strength plus endurance. "The best proof of that is that the strongest strength athletes don't enjoy much of it," he asserts, "and the best pure endurance athletes don't either." Strength-endurance, according to Dr. Schwartz, is gained through strength-endurance training, such as Heavyhands moves which condition all major muscle groups.

Pure endurance training, such as running, he points out, does not build strength. On the other hand, he says, strength training in which muscle groups are isolated and exercised in sequence does not produce strength-endurance. According to Dr. Schwartz, strength-endurance is only produced when as much muscle as possible is loaded simultaneously and for a prolonged period of time.

Schwartz doesn't cast his theory in terms of muscle fiber types, but it's interesting to speculate that aerobic weight training - Heavyhands, basically - may do things for intermediate-twitch fibers that other forms of exercise don't.

Which, if McGuff is correct about the genetic basis of fiber-type proportions, may still get any given person only so far. If you haven't got all that much intermediate-twitch fiber in your makeup, there may be limits on what Heavyhands can do for you. It might turn out that Schwartz himself is someone with a lot of intermediate-twitch fiber who stumbled on an ideal way to train it.

I have to run these questions by people who know what they're talking about.

Mail call: Dave Lull found a link to a fuller discussion of Pete Egoscue's body alignment principles, discussed last week. Egoscue also has a radio show. The archive's are here. Something that struck me when reading McGuff's BMX essay is that it implicitly offers a separate and incompatible explanation for the injury-proneness of the modern professional athlete. McGuff claims that genetics determine not just your mix of fibers, but also the efficiency of any given type. That can lead to glory and pain:

Neurological efficiency is simply the percentage of a muscle's total mass that you can voluntarily contract at one time. Someone with high neurological efficiency might be able to contract 90% of his muscle's fibers simultaneously. Someone with average neurological efficiency can contract only 40% of their muscle at one time. Having a high neurological efficiency can offset a disadvantage one might have in their fiber type mix. That is, someone with 70% slow twitch may still be able to explode out of the gate quite impressively if they have a neurological efficiency of 90%. In fact many of the world's best athletes have this combination of slow twitch predominance with high neurological efficiency. They have the ability for great power and explosiveness, combined with amazing endurance...they just don't get tired. You may wonder why nature would want anyone to have 40% neurological efficiency. The answer is...self preservation. If you contract 90% or more of a muscle at once, the forces that are produced may be so high that the tendon pulls off the bone or the muscle tears.

Am I changing any plans yet? No, I'm going to give the pure strength-training the full introductory six weeks anyway, in the interests of science. Then I'll consider switching to the Fortnightly Fitness Fun plan.

And I'm going to watch my eating more carefully this week too.

Huzzah! - I held off noting the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, "the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks," yesterday, because bloggers and other media have been burned too often on breaking news stories. But now it looks solid.

Mohammed was indicted in the United States in 1996 for his alleged role in a plot to blow up 12 American civilian airliners over the Pacific and intelligence officials in the Philippines said he was also part of cell accused of plotting to kill Pope John Paul in that country in 1995.

In addition, he is suspected of involvement in the bombing of U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and the attack on a U.S. warship, the USS Cole, in Yemen in 2000.

And a Pakistani newspaper linked him to the kidnapping and murder of U.S. reporter Daniel Pearl, saying investigators believed Mohammed was the man who slit Pearl's throat in front of a video camera after the journalist disappeared in Karachi in January 2002 while investigating a story on Islamic extremists.

Even if the last is not true (Pakistani sources may wish to lay off responsibility for the Pearl murder on convenient foreigners), Mohammad appears to have done far, far more than enough for Americans to want his corpse tossed to a pack of courtyard dogs.

Is there a creepy part that takes the edge off the joy? Alas, yes:

A U.S. official said Mohammed was expected to be interrogated in an undisclosed foreign country.

Gary Farber has written repeatedly on just what "interrogated in an undisclosed foreign country" means. My tender concern is not for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. It's for us.

Urgent! Spam Results! - Herewith the results of my Personal Spam Survey, begun last week. Breakdown of mail, Sunday-Saturday:

Spam: 16
Legit: 81
Mailing Lists: 497

"Spam" is unsolicited commercial e-mail. "Legit" includes mass mailings I unambiguously signed up for - Art Today promos, Best (Necon-Approved Items) of the Web, Reason Express, about a dozen pieces, all told - plus all blog-related and personal mail. I waffled on where to put unsolicited pure publicity mailings from fellow bloggers (affectionately known in the trade as "link whoring"), but ended up putting it here. There were only about a half dozen of those.

"Mailing Lists" is actually 477 Elvis Costello list e-mails and 20 from the Nobilis mailing list. Costello traffic was always high, and I delete most of it unread these days, but it was especially high this week because a) much talk about EC's participation in the Grammy Awards Joe Strummer tribute; b) people noticed that there was a possibility of a war breaking out, and became exercised. (Costello-L has never been one of your reliably on-topic listservs.) As a result of an unnamed agitator who joined the discussion, no fewer than 31 messages from various participants bear the subject header "Kurdish Suppression."

Spam breakdown:

Porn: 1
Nigerian: 1
E-mail Addresses (meta-spam!): 5
"Career" "Opportunities": 9

Toss out Costello-L mail because most people aren't gluttons for that kind of punishment, surely. That leaves 16 Spam, 81 Legit, about 1/6 spam. Add the Nobilis traffic and the ratio falls to 1/7. Which is within the range I figured before I began this pointless exercise. And yet, Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Gary Farber each e-mailed a response to my original item saying that their spam proportion is 3/4 or 4/5. And I got a brief look at Mrs. Offering's inbox today and it looked majority-spam too.

So what am I doing right? Beats me. I've had my current e-mail address for three years. I haven't set up any spam filtering at the server level. I do very little shopping online. I always take the time to check "Not interested" in hearing about interesting offers on websites requiring registration. I don't register on porn sites or pay for porn. Is there more to it? Is there anyone out there who gets little spam and knows why they get little?

If so, you can, um, e-mail me.