Stand Down - From "Maximum Leader," by Brian Doherty of Reason Magazine:

And what to make of the throwaway detail from the USA Today piece that, "On March 17, before he delivered a 48-hour ultimatum to Saddam, Bush summoned congressional leaders to the White House. They expected a detailed briefing, but the president told them he was notifying them only because he was legally required to do so and then left the room. They were taken aback, and some were annoyed."

They should all have been more than annoyed; they should have been appalled and probably horrified. This is not a man who respects the nature and powers of his circumscribed role in a representative republic. The entire USA Today story presents a picture of a man drunk with power—and not even a joyful, hearty drunk, but a moaning, depressive one.

Nader Shmader, Gore Shmore - Lefty blogger Josh Buermann on Al Gore as lack of an alternative:

The infant mortality rate in Iraq in 2000 was more than double that of 1990 - because of the war and the sanctions regime - and was causing at least as much suffering for the Iraqis as the latter period of Saddam's regime. If we had elected Gore this would have almost certainly continued ad infinitum: in human terms this wouldn't have been much better than the present war so far as Iraq is concerned. I have yet to see any anti-war Democrats - nevermind how few there are in congress - address that problem in all their whining about Nader . . .

Warning: Florida 2000 mention included.

One (Small One) for the Hawks - MSNBC reports that reliable tests confirm the presence of ricin and botulinum toxins at the Ansar al-Islam camp at Sargat. This is the camp that Colin Powell meant in his presentation at the UN. (He identified it as "Khurmal.")

Pause to note that this was the camp that conducted the famous post-UN speech tour for reporters that seemed to show no chemical or biological weapons on site. My recollection is that I didn't blog that story at the time because all the stories noted that the hosts did not allow reporters to see the whole camp. (My February archives seem to bear this out, but I may have missed an item skimming. Readers are invited to prove me wrong.)

The import of Sargat and Ansar is still unclear. As this Kurdistan Observer article from last summer notes, Ansar's patron might be Iraq, Iran, Al Qaeda or some sort of timeshare arrangement. (Here's another KO article from later in the summer.) However, Human Rights Watch tends to substantiate the presence of foreign, likely al Qaeda-connected, fighters in Ansar's ranks:

While Human Rights Watch did not investigate these alleged links, the testimonies of villagers who had fled Biyara and Tawela and were interviewed in September 2002 appeared to support this contention. A number of them, including former detainees, said that there were foreigners among Ansar al-Islam forces, that on occasion they were interrogated by non-Iraqis speaking various Arabic dialects, and that they had heard other languages spoken that they did not recognize.

Scores of Iraqi Kurds affiliated to Ansar al-Islam, including key leaders, consider themselves veterans of the Afghan war. They had spent time in Afghanistan, initially fighting against Soviet forces during the 1980s. Representatives of other Iraqi Kurdish Islamist groups who maintain links with Ansar al-Islam told Human Rights Watch that a small number of Iraqi Kurds affiliated to the group had also fought alongside the Taliban, and that they then returned to Iraqi Kurdistan following the latter's defeat.

There are also other indications of possible Ansar al-Islam connections with al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan. Documents discovered in an al-Qaeda guest house in Afghanistan by the New York Times discuss the creation of an "Iraqi Kurdistan Islamic Brigade" just weeks prior to the formation of Ansar al-Islam in December 2001, and some Ansar al-Islam members in PUK custody have described in credible detail training in al-Qa'ida camps in Afghanistan. The existence of any ongoing links between al-Qa'ida and Ansar al-Islam is unknown.

A combination of chemical weapons - even "retail" ones like ricin and botulinum - and Afghan Arabs is genuine cause for concern. If you firmly established that the Iraqi government was not only fostering the group but knew about its pursuit of chemical weapons, you'd have an interesting "reckless disregard" case against Saddam and his gang. The alleged "Zarqawi link" is too tentative to my mind, so far. For Iraq to supply Ansar, they'd have to get materiel and, possibly, men across territory controlled by two different Kurdish groups. Iran has easier logistics, but there's another difficulty, noted in this Agence France-Press article of last fall:

The whole topic is very sensitive for the PUK, traditionally dependent on Iran during its past battles with the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the other main group in this enclave.

Keep Iran's support of "good Kurds" in mind when the national greatness types start sounding the anti-Iran tocsin in the next couple of months. But where was I? Oh yeah. Ansar pushes a very Wahabist/Talibanish Islam in its territory - see the HRW story for details. And it spends the rest of its time fighting Iran's friends, the PUK. So it's not immediately clear what Iran would like about Ansar.

Unsettling loose ends dept. MSNBC reports that tests show only trace amounts of toxins in the camp. Either there wasn't much to begin with, or it was moved. This gets back to the question of why the US and Britain let the Sargat camp continue to operate if they had solid evidence of a threat. Imagine that coalition paratroopers siezed the camp - beyond the reach of Iraq's military, remember - and found both chemical weapons and documentary evidence tying Ansar to the Iraqi government. Suppose Iraqi government representatives were in the camp when they did this? How differently might the UN arguments have gone? (Heck, how differently might this site have read?) So why didn't they, if the evidence of not only chemical weapons but a connection to both Al Qaeda and Iraq was there to be had? Was it?

RIP - I kicked Michael Kelly pretty hard when the occasion presented itself and it would no doubt have presented himself again. He completely accomodated himself to the idea of an "imperial mission" for America by the end of his life - became, that is, the archetypal neocon. But he was a good writer, particularly if you agreed with him about the topic at hand (as I tended to when the topic was Bill Clinton), a fine editor and a superb war reporter. I found his New Republic dispatches from Gulf War Phase I vivid and moving. (They later became the book Martyr's Day.) I'm sorry he died yesterday, but comforted that he died at his best, in the field, exercising his reporter's eye and writer's mind. I can just about imagine the column he would write about his own death - the rueful detachment, telling detail and good humor, something consoling thrown in for the people he talked about in this column that Gene Healy - and I - both liked.

Shoutout to my Homeys - In other DC-Area libertarian weblogs . . .

Gene Healy, war opponent that he is, offers Sympathy for the SecDef.

Julian Sanchez considers that he's done a better job of blowing bridges than Saddam Hussein, though he doesn't put it that way. Also, meditations on giving up cigarettes.

James Landrith takes exception to the much-reported (and blogged) remarks of a Corporal Dupre about wanting to get his hands on "an Iraqi." Maybe it's just me, but I read Dupre's imprecation as containing an unspoken suffix of "paramilitary" or "officer" or "government official." Reason: in the context of the article, what has set Dupre off in the first place is the suffering of "an Iraqi" - a child killed in the confusion of battle. While I have worried about the potential for "empathy depletion" more than once, I see Corporal Dupre is well this side of the danger zone. See also items on secret courts and timely budget cuts for VA hospitals.

Radley Balko wins the drug war:

That gives me an idea. You wanna' see marijuana get legalized overnight? Run this headline:

"CASA STUDY: MARIJUANA CAUSES INCREASED SEX AMONG MARRIED COUPLES."

I am so there. Plus more great stuff, which makes sense, since, pound for pound, The Agitator gets my vote for best weblog period. (It would probably be Gene Healy if he posted more, but he doesn't. Bastard.)

Kelly Jane Torrance posts her spring weblog entry. Kidding! She's started a book colloquy with The Ambler, who would be my homey if he didn't live in, like, Canada. Point being that Kelly could be posting as often as every couple of weeks while the colloquy continues.

Leonard of Unruled writes about the apparently confused concept of "supporting the troops."

The Real Enemy - I don't care what Ariel Sharon says, our next target has to be these bastards. Best of all: no nation-building required.

Bruuuuuuuuuuuuce! Rolston of Flit offers plausible arguments for thinking the war will be over at the six to seven week mark, and continues to opine that "evidence that the Iraqis have no serious weaponized chemical capability, at least in the south, continues to grow, too."

Rumor Mill - File under FWIW: Sara Rimensnyder reports that Jeff Jarvis reports that John Quiggin reports that "a colleague has e-mailed" to report that Al Jazeera reports that

. . . salam pax is wounded in hospital. He seems to be in the city of Najaf. The doctor said that he was on his computer when his house was hit by a bomb.

Since Alanis Morrisette could swap this in for one of the verses that isn't really "ironic" at all, one instinctively doubts.

he ran a little blog
all about the war
they dropped a bo-o-o-o-omb
and it blew off his door

and isn't it ironic
don't you think
a little too ironic

And yeah, I really do think. How and why, if he was in his house when the bomb hit, how the hell would he have gotten to a hospital in Najaf?

But you never know, right? I hope he's okay, and I hope Saddam packs it in or some of his homeboys pack him in, saving us all a lot of bother. A hospital in Najaf would not be a Mukhbarat dungeon somewhere. A hospital in Najaf could be better than a lot of possibilities.

Speaking of Al Jazeera, the network's english-language site is back up and unhacked. Reason's Tim Cavanaugh cites and endorses a Slate defense of the network on Hit & Run. A Google search for "salam pax" on Al Jazeera's english site only turns up nothing.

Queen of Mean - Eve Tushnet has some characteristically pointful demurrals about Tony Hoagland's essay on "meanness" in poetry, which I linked below. Eve's coolest insight:

Part of the problem is that Hoagland still, relentlessly, focuses on the character of the poet--a legacy of the confessionalism he half-rejects.

I think Eve is right when she argues that

If "meanness" is a Socratic willingness to deny the gods of the city; if it's a willingness to follow one's thoughts to their conclusions, rather than drawing back for fear of giving offense; if it's painful observation, a willingness to follow Lear onto the heath, to howl when howling is needed, to cauterize one's audience or oneself; to give oneself and others something more than what we want; then I'm there. If "meanness" is a belief that truth is opposed to charity, that the artist is beyond good and evil (and thus it's OK to be cruel in art because hey, it's great art, who are you to stand in its way?), or that destruction is cooler than creation, I think that's stupid, and highly unlikely to produce good rather than self-indulgent poetry. Hoagland mostly means the former stance, I think, but his language tends to confuse it with the latter.

I would say Eve is right as far as it goes. Casting about for what to call that thing in poetry that Hoagland calls "meanness" that isreally Eve's denying the gods of the city, I've sometimes favored "savagery" but finally settled on "ruthlessness." Where I might disagree with Eve is if she's saying that following her Option Two will yield no good poems. I think it will yield few, but every approach yields few good poems in ratio with all poems produced. The truly mean can still win the lottery. But in that case, the virtues the rest of us find in it are likely to be different than the virtues the poet imagines it to hold.

Happy Holidays - It's April Fool's and Make Fun of the Cheneys Day too. Scroll down for more.

Even During a War some people have too much time on their hands.

Link via Radley Balko.

Only Good News Today - Congratulations to PFC Jessica Lynch and, most especially, her rescuers.

Literary Corner - The virtues of meanness, in poetry and life, by Tony Hoagland Excerpt:

In fact, it's significant that ugly-truth-tellers are much more common in our fiction than our poetry. Much of our mainstream poetry is confined by an ethic of sincerity and the unstated wish to be admired (if not admired, liked; if not liked, sympathized with). American poetry still largely believes, as romantics have for a few hundred years, that a poem is straightforward autobiographical testimony to, among other things, the decency of the speaker. And, for all the freedom and "opening up" engendered by Confessionalism, to be uninhibitedly mean, we all know, is itself prohibited. Welcome to Poetry City: Hurt someone's feelings: Go to jail.

From Poetry Daily.

Blogger Code Question - Am I required to have an opinion on the Peter Arnett business?

Does It Get Any Better? - Early on, some people were titillated by the "Russian GRU site" perporting to offer inside dope on the Iraq War from contacts in Russian military intelligence. Others pooh-poohed it is likely inauthentic and of dubious accuracy. I figured the scientific thing to do was to wait awhile. Now they've got a track record to look at, and we can ask, have they done any better than the admittedly problematic US media. Answer: nah. Let's just take the first few days of postings, since they're the ones that have had the most time to test out.

First update, March 17:

It seems likely that the combat operations will begin on 19-22 of March at around 2-4 am local time.

Well okay, they got the day right, though by that point everyone on earth knew it was coming.

The first phase of the operation will consist of a strategic air operation which, according to the US command, will last between 8 and 10 days. The goal of this operation will be complete suppression of Iraqi air defenses, disruption of command and control structures, destruction of main command and communication centers, disruption of the main Iraqi forces, destruction of the military infrastructure and defense industry facilities.

In this and succeeding paragraphs, the Russians never quite get around to saying when the ground troops will roll. The impression given is that they're predicting a short version of Desert Storm II before Desert Saber Redux. The least you can say is that they failed to predict the near simultaneous launch of air and ground action, despite numerous anonymously-sourced reports in the western media that it would happen exactly that way.

March 18, 2003, 0126hrs MSK (GMT +3), Moscow - According to the information received from one of the Russian Defense Ministry's radio intercept units, certain aspects of the planned military operation against Iraq were uncovered by the Russian military intel. During one of the radio communications between Kurd troops information was intercepted indicating that during the next 48 hours there may be a large-scale airdrop of US troops in Kurd-controlled northern Iraq.

Maybe it's not entirely absurd that GRU contacts would share out "sources and method" info like this, so much else in Russia being on offer to reasonable bids, but let the record show that the 173rd Airborne Brigade didn't parachute into Kurdistan until the 27th.

BTW, I asked my own sources, meager as they are, "Why do you parachute into an airfield that your allies already control?" The answer I got was that you do this because it counts as a combat jump and you get nice wings.

The same item claims that some 200 British SAS troops are in Kurdistan scouting Iraqi forces. Google confirmeth not the claim, but god knows I can't rule it out. Undecided. Their claim that the northern front troops could be ready for combat operations within five days of landing has a chance to come true or not by Wednesday. Bruce Rolston doubts it.

March 19, 2003, 0403hrs MSK (GMT +3) - "Russian military intelligence" predicts line of advance that bears an arguable resemblance to the one we ended up with, if you allow for friction, and also predicts that the alleged drive on Basra would be feint. Someone should tell the British.

March 20, 2003, 1015hrs MSK (GMT +3) - Some claims about failed coups and Iraqi leadership security that, for all I know, is true.

March 21, 2003, 0930hrs MSK (GMT +3) - Gripping tale of the "possible" maneuvers of the US 4th Infantry and 1st Armord Divisions. Apparently, some of the First Armored is actually in Iraq. The rest of it should arrive sometime in April, along with the entire 4th Infantry Division.

To be fair to the Russians, they footnote their own report that "it can't be 4ID. And since the claim is that these reports are based on Russian signals intelligence, it's at least theoretically possible that the US was engaging in deceptive communications to confuse the Iraqis about which units they were facing.

March 22, 2003, 0800hrs MSK (GMT +3) - Scary. They puncture the "surrender of the 51st division story, correctly. They also claim a US plane was lost in action. To this day the coalition denies losing any planes. While I don't believe everything the coalition tells me, the loss of a plane seems like something that would generate talk even embedded reporters would pick up on. This item boldly predicts that a combined US-UK force is about to storm Basra.

And so on. It's not that they're never right. You just can't count on any given item being less wrong than what the US press has at that time. And there remains the question of whether their occasional hits are due to inside dope, decent analysis or sheer luck.

Why have I gone into this in so much detail? Because I still don't want to write about the weekend's suicide bombing!

With a Whimper - From ABC News . . .

No 'Smoking Gun'
Hit on Ansar Al-Islam Camp Finds No Signs of Chemical Weapons

. . . The site they hit was identified by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his argument for war before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 as a base for the radical group Ansar al-Islam. Powell said the group linked Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network to Saddam Hussein, and had plotted chemical attacks across Europe.

Powell showed a satellite photograph of what he said was a chemical weapons training center in northern Iraq used by al Qaeda and protected by Ansar al-Islam, calling it evidence of a "sinister nexus between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network."

We sent special forces (and ABC News) in, "expecting to find hard evidence Ansar al-Islam has biological and chemical weapons." Nada.

ABC reports that on This Week, Donald Rumsfeld explained that

We saw from the air that there were dozens of trucks that went into that facility after the existence of it became public in the press, and they moved things out," said Rumsfeld. "They dispersed them and took them away. So there may be nothing left. I don't know that. But it's way too soon to know."

It could well be. Of course, it means that, according to Rumsfeld, during the same run-up to the war when we were steadily bombing Iraqi air defense installations, we couldn't spare any bombs for convoys of trucks leaving an alleged chemical weapons facility. Or maybe Rummy's just saying stuff.

Oh Dear - Virginia Postel's weblog has a new address and a new design. You can link to a specific item by clicking on the "Printer Friendly Version" link. That's to the good. The font size is too small for these middle-aged eyes, though, and it uses "dark" grey rather than black type for the body text, making it worse. The design itself is clean and enjoyable. It would be quite a nice site if I could read it.

More Warblogging - Leonard of Unruled has a fascinating piece on the economics of the JDAM.

For the Defense (Dept.) - In which I try to make a case for the "rolling start" (if you believe it really is a rolling start and not just "oops! better send some more troops!"). Tacitus, who is doing some good analysis of the war, notes that the force levels currently in Iraq violate the principle of mass. To wit, "they cannot win the war," our four-odd divisions. So why start the war when you have to bring reinforcements from overseas before the big push?

The best answer I can come up with is that, by engaging the enemy, you force the enemy to concentrate in defense, which makes it easier to bomb them. That softens them up by the time you have enough troops in theater to attack in force. Had this war begun with a pure bombing campaign, wouldn't it have been much harder to identify ground force targets? Wouldn't the Iraqis have an easier time hiding their army?

That's the best I can do.

From the Front - Jay Price of McClatchy newspapers interviews refugees and prisoners in a field hospital in South-Central Iraq and gets testimony from the patients about Iraqi paramilitary units' exploitation of civilians. Excerpt:

Ghaleb, 43, a farmer, said that Iraqi Republican Guard troops sent a note to his home demanding that he report to them. Then, Ghaleb said, he and several hundred others were forced to dress as Iraqi soldiers and told to gather near a prominent road. Some were given fake guns.

Ghaleb said he thinks the idea was to reinforce the message that Iraqi troops were fighting, not running. They were told if they tried to flee they would be shot, Ghaleb said.

Ghaleb gets interviewed a lot. Here he is in the Post:

Among them was a man named Ghaleb, with bandages wrapped around his leg and a 43-year-old farmer and gunshot victim from Diwaniyah. He told reporters that U.S. Marines shot him on Tuesday, but he blamed Iraqi Republican Guard units. He said they forced him to stand between them and the Marines as a human shield.

Aside from the fact that the first sentence is awful (yeah yeah, I should talk), it's a prime example of the annoying Post habit of paraphrasing what people actually say. It's also a substantially different story.

Ghaleb also appears in a report by Mark Johnson of Knight-Ridder:

Ghaleb, a 43-year-old farmer from the Nasiriyah area, said Republican Guard troops forced him to put on an Iraqi army uniform, gave him a nonfunctioning rifle and told him and six or seven other men to stand at a highway checkpoint to draw the attention of American soldiers.

"They couldn't go back," a translator relayed, "because whoever goes back gets shot."

Iraqi army units waited to ambush the Americans, Ghaleb said. The ambush failed, but the Americans did attack and Ghaleb was wounded in the leg.

Which sounds a whole lot more like the McClatchy report than the Post report.

So what do we have here? On Ghaleb's testimony, he was impressed into military service against his will. He was not used as a "human shield," if we take that to mean "civilians placed between Iraqi fighters and coalition troops to restrain coalition troops from firing on the fighters." By putting Ghaleb in uniform they make him look less like a civilian. Coalition troops encountering Ghaleb and his unfortunate comrades believed they were encountering uniformed belligerents and acted accordingly, as they had every right to - that's how Ghaleb got shot in the leg. To use Ghaleb as a human shield, you would keep him in civvies and stand behind him.

None of the three hospital interviews presents testimony on the Big One - Iraqi troops forcing women and children ahead of them into battle. That emphatically does not mean that Iraqi soldiers or paramilitaries are not doing it. But if the media is taking any steps to confirm the story, they're keeping it to themselves.

In the hospital stories, the patient Abbas "said Iraqi troops had put an anti-aircraft gun in his residential neighborhood, and when it came under attack by coalition forces, his family tried to get out." This might be done as for tactical reasons (i.e. field of fire requirements) or in hopes that the coalition would be reluctant to target the weapon.

Regardless, we know Iraq is violating many of the laws of war. We know that Iraqi paramilitaries are fighting in civilian garb. We know that yesterday's suicide bomber was dressed as a civilian taxi driver. We know that Iraqi troops have engaged in false surrenders. (There are reports that the Iraqis have set up command posts in schools, but it turns out that we have too. So that one is a wash.) Given what the Iraqis have done, it's way too soon to move the "screens of women and children" story to the list of things that turned out not to be true. But it still looks premature to accept it as fact.

UPDATE: This New York Times story contains reports by American GIs who have seen Iraqi soldiers mixing among civilians.

Looking on the Bright Side - Hesiod thinks the war has about two weeks to go yet.

The reason for that is pretty obvious. We are now absolutely pulverizing Republican Guard units surrounding Baghdad.

We can certainly hope. One assumes that the current airstrikes are taking out some of those T-72s Btuce Rolston was worrying about. If the Republican Guard gets the idea that they can never counterattack, which means that they can never win, then the surrenders might come. And when totalitarian regimes collapse, they collapse fast. The things to worry about in the meantime are probably maintenance, fatigue in the front line troops and the supply of precision-guided munitions. Things for the Republican Guard to worry about in the meantime: getting blown to smithereens and the possibility that the unit next to you will surrender first.

Weekly Fitness Blog Post - 184 pounds, 36 5/8" waist. No change on the weight from last week, the final number represents an uptick from midweek figures, when the scale reached 182. I wouldn't be surprised to see another multi-pound drop by next week's item.

This week's item might be called "Strike Two for Atkins." I got my blood tests back, and while most things were good, including blood sugar, my lipid levels were awful - a deadly combination of high LDL and low HDL. Since I have other cardiac risk factors - high blood pressure and mitral valve prolapse - my readings are bad enough to indicate drug management. I see the doctor tomorrow and will find out if he wants to use medicine or diet as a first resort.

So far, I've demonstrated that I can lose a lot of weight on Atkins, but not that I can maintain healthy blood pressure or lipid chemistry. I should stress the limits of our findings so far: they apply to me, not necessarily anyone else; since there's been a three-year gap in my blood work, I don't know how much worse my blood pressure and cholesterol might have been before starting to diet; nor can I (yet) say that a different diet would have produced superior blood pressure or lipid benchmarks. Then there's the question of exercise - might reintegrating aerobics help one or both conditions? As always on these personal odysseys, there are an awful lot of uncontrolled variables. Assuming that my doctor and I decide to radically change the sort of things I've been eating, I'm still inclined to call the whole experience worth it. In addition to losing a lot of weight, I was able to break my relationship with some things that were unquestionably bad for me - sugared beverages and processed starch snacks, specifically - and to reduce portion sizes considerably. If I have to go to a low-fat diet now, it should be easier to do that than it was before. We'll see.

On the exercise front, a couple of readers wrote in about my back complaints. Reader Gilda Abromowitz suggests Pilates. "I've been doing Pilates for two years, and only in the last half year has everything really started to come together--but you need to use the abs to protect the lower back." And Dave Lull offers more links to information about the Egoscue Method, including a back pain page. I can certainly believe I have a posture problem, as my posture has always been bad. If anyone cares to report on their personal experience with Pilates or Egoscue, I'd love to hear it.

You Know Nothing, Nothing - Brendan I. Koerner has a semi-useful article in Slate on the "thumbs-up controversy" in Iraq. The question is whether Iraqi civilians giving the thumbs up to coalition forces mean it in a nice way. In the first week of the war, hawks assumed yes, while certain doves pointed out that "many veteran travelers insist that the gesture is a crass Middle Eastern insult" (meaning, essentially, "up yours"). Koerner points out the possibility that Iraqis making the gesture aren't being traditional, but rather adopting the western meaning from media and exposure to US troops during Gulf War Phase I.

According to a recent D[efense] L[anguage] I[nstitute] manual on international gestures, after the first Gulf War "Middle Easterners of the Arabian Peninsula adopted this hand movement, along with the OK sign, as a symbol of cooperation toward freedom." Iraqi civilians may have noted this shifting meaning, perhaps via TV reports.

Which may be true. So add the thumb gesture story to the list of things we just don't know for sure. As for why Koerner's article is semi-useful, couldn't someone just ask Iraqis? Or is that not done?