Gone Fishin' - I lied about updating the blog again before my trip. Sorry!

Fascinating stuff from Salam Pax appears pretty regularly, so you can read it. But he shouldn't worry

what happened to the months of “preparation” for a “post-saddam” Iraq. What happened to all these 100-page reports, where is that Dick Cheney report? Why is every single issue treated like they have never thought it would come up? What’s with the juggling of people and ideas about how to form that “interim government”? Why does it feel like they are using the [lets-try-this-lets-try-that] strategy? Trial and error on a whole country?

Fear not, Salam. Our forces have a plan. Indeed, a whole book of plans that guide every aspect of our endeavor. It's called How to Serve Iraqis. Remind us to have you for dinner sometime.

I Will Never Blog Again - Pound made Eliot cut an entire section from the draft of "The Wasteland" on the grounds that you can't beat Alexander Pope at his own game. But even Pound had never seen genius like this.

(Link via Balloon Juice.)

UPDATE: Cf. the passage in Brad Leithauser's novel, Hence, where narrator Garner Briggs describes finally reading the diary of his late father. Well go on, cf!

Things You Can Read while I'm off on what I laughably imagine to be my Spring Fishing Trip. (I'm taking the family, and so can already predict how the "fishing" will go.)

Eve Tushnet has written a book on jurisprudence. Actually it's a series of substantial blog posts on the subject. (Scroll down from the link.)

Julian Sanchez and Will Wilkinson remain much smarter libertarian bloggers than I am. And Julian just got a cool new job.

Will and Jacob Levy have some good X2 commentary. (Nope, haven't seen it yet.)

Radley Balko considers what a ten-year-old WSJ editorial tells us about conservative reactions to Rick Santorum and Bill Bennett. Don't look at me like that! Not only is it better than it sounds, it's an important account of a certain species of conservative hypocrisy.

Maybe you'd like to check out the variety of "Salam's back" messages. Here's a list of them from Daypop and one from Blogdex.

There's always the famous Seymour Hersh article, "Selective Intelligence," about Donald Rumsfeld's parallel intelligence shop in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans. There were a handful of things in this article that really struck me, but I won't quote them now. But man, the OSP people think DIA is too soft. That's hardcore! The Defense Intelligence Agency has a longstanding reputation as the most firebreathing act in the national-security circus. Strange days.

Don't go to the trouble of opening Google News and typing "mobile lab" yourself. Just click this link! That way you'll always be up to the minute. Apparently they found the latest mobile lab in question on April 19. And they say they're still not done testing it yet. So they kept it out of the papers for three weeks, Makes sense. Why not be sure this time before saying anything. But now it's in the papers even though they say they're still not sure. Huh.

Tacitus remains the best conservative blogger and he updates frequently.

Read Instapundit! It's like panning for gold in a clear California stream! Today's nugget: "Call me crazy, but [gambling] seems to me to do more to undermine society than gay people getting married.

I was just about to recommend Aaron Haspel's God of the Machine for its strong literary/philosophical bloggage, but he just said nice things about my Stevens poem so I'd better not. It would look like logrolling.

Alan Sullivan's Seablogger remains the great, undiscovered neolibertarian/conservative journal. Hurry up already, you hawkish bloggers, and catch on. Sure, you can get French-bashing anywhere, but ne'er so well express'd.

And fishing tips at the In-Fisherman website.

TTFN, though I'll probably update tomorrow morning too.

Ex Magisterium - That same Electrolite item quotes my snarky aside of the other week about online dictionaries, prompting a genuinely useful e-mail from librarian and obvious Electrolite reader Lois Aleta Fundis:

There are cheaper ways of accessing the OED.

Some people are very lucky to be affiliated with a public or university library which subscribes to the OED and makes it available to the library's patrons (you might need to enter your library card number or some other ID).

Not that I'm that lucky; the library I work for [1] is too poor. But members of certain book clubs such as the Quality Paperback Book Club and the History Book Club -- and that includes yours truly -- have access to the OED through their club memberships; all you have to do is log on to the club's website (again, ID is required). You're expected to buy a book now and then but it's still cheap in comparison.

Also, I join in your praise of Bartleby in general and the AHD in particular.

But I'd also like to point out the Merriam-Webster site as a good online dictionary. The definition of "magisterial" there is

1 a (1) : of, relating to, or having the characteristics of a master or teacher : AUTHORITATIVE (2) : marked by an overbearingly dignified or assured manner or aspect b : of, relating to, or required for a master's degree 2 : of or relating to a magistrate or a magistrate's office or duties synonym see DICTATORIAL

Again, the unkind, as you put it, definition comes later, and in fact is not all that horrible except for the synonym. And even there, under "dictatorial," where discussing several other words with similar meanings, it says,

MAGISTERIAL stresses assumption or use of prerogatives appropriate to a magistrate or schoolmaster in forcing acceptance of one's opinions [the magisterial tone of his pronouncements].

This is by far the least unkind of any of the synonyms described there. Though you may have had -- I know I did -- the experience of a teacher making magisterial pronouncements based on something other than fact.

I confess to not liking Merriam-Webster nearly as much as Lois does, partially because I love American Heritage's etymological info. But now you know how to get access to the online OED, cheap.

Am I Sage? - Yeah, yeah. There's my chin. Go on. Anyway, a lively comments thread has broken out on Electrolite about, of all things, the Unqualified Offerings color scheme.

Sage. Huh. I still think of it as sherbet green - ugly sherbet green, but that's in the eye of the beholder and the beholder's monitor.

Nuclear Responses - Arthur Silber and Leonard of Unruled have things to say about my Korea maunderings of last night. Both are worth reading. Leonard essentially thinks I should stick to my anti-interventionist guns, noting

at least two nations have already been socialist, despotic, and poor: the USSR and China. They certainly did pursue nukes, and they got them. Both countries have been problems for us, but neither has sold nukes to terrorists. It seems that while they were poor, they were not destitute enough for that, which, if you think on it, makes sense. Providing nukes to terrorists is a dangerous way to make money.

Why, in spite of their socialism/despotism, did the USSR and PRC not get desperate enough to sell nukes on the black market? It seems that in both cases, when the economy failed long enough, they reformed. North Korea has not reformed, thus far. Will it? Is the current situation transitory? I think so.

Leonard has a point. However, both the USSR and the PRC were, for much of their Cold War lives, status quo powers with very definite lines they would not cross. You could make a plausible argument that North Korea is a status quo nonpower - they don't seem to actively yearn to, say, conquer Japan. Their ideal vision of the future probably looks a lot like the present with more Western aid - that is, it looks like them still in power in the PRK, not them bestriding the Pacific like a colossus.

However, there are some differences: We didn't subsidize the USSR and PRC. They didn't demand that we subsidize them. They didn't explcitly threaten to sell nuclear weapons if we didn't keep the money coming.

That said, the most likely case is that North Korea is just pushing our buttons, trying to find the one that dispenses the candy. They know from studying US media and politics that our big worry is terrorists getting nukes, so they play up that possibility hoping to get a deal. They're trying to bluff an okay hand (war is a poor option for us) into a strong one. They would no more sell nukes to terrorists than I would start catblogging. Against that balance the fact that it is extortion and that political leaders can trap themselves in their own rhetoric and feel forced to follow through.

I completely agree with Leonard, though, that the only long-term solution to the dangers of proliferation is non-intervention. We agree on the end state completely. One of the questions that has preoccupied me lately is how to get there, an issue I hope to address in the coming weeks.

Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies grow up to be comic book professionals. Via Neilalien: Mark Evanier expands on his earlier caution to those who want to work in today's comic book business.

Frabjous Day - Salam Pax is alive and, with help from his friend Diana Moon, bloggin'! If you go there, you can find "what should have been 15 entries to the blog," plus introductory matter from Diana and Salam, plus end matter by Diana. Because these were intended as blog entries, they are in classic reverse order and reading them in reverse order makes for a fascinating experience. I'm about halfway through. The richness of detail marks Salam's chronicle as the first literary event of the conflict - it deserves to be noted among the classic memoiirs of war. There is a book here, is what I'm saying.

One of the pleasures of following Salam's blog, as I've said before, has been the privilege of watching the maturation of a writer, a real one. That growth has come to fruition.

Those inclined to read Salam ideologically will find the material cuts both ways - enormous relief, even giddiness, at the ousting of a tyrant (and how could there not be); willful postwar optimism (Salam says he "chooses to believe" that the US will succeed in constructing a free society in Iraq); balanced with reportage that suggests these positive attitudes are far from universal, that the country is still plagued by fear, want and crime, and a clear-eyed assessment of the costs of war. ('Let me tell you one thing first. War sucks big time. Don’t let yourself ever be talked into having one waged in the name of your freedom. Somehow when the bombs start dropping or you hear the sound of machine guns at the end of your street you don’t think about your “imminent liberation” anymore.') If I had to guess, I would wager that over time Salam's attitude toward the invasion and overthrow of Saddam will become more enthusiastic rather than less.

Also, I think we can finally put the tiresome "Is Salam a fake" question to rest. It's just possible, I suppose, that an Iraqi expat with enough toll charges could get sufficient information from a Baghdad relative to construct these vivid reports. But we also have Diana Moon's testimony that she has spoken to Salam's boss and even his father, so Diana would have to be in on the hoax (or she was Salam all along!). I don't believe that.

One day soon, I hope, Salam will come to DC on his book tour. Then he can say "Jim, you jerk, if you'd had your way I'd still be stuck back there with that bastard Tikriti." I'll spread my hands and say, "I know, man. I'm sorry. I had my reasons and I have them still." And Iraq will be whatever it is to become and the US will be whatever we have made it.

But I Still Don't Know What I Think! about North Korea as a cautionary tale of intervention. On one level anyway. Contrast with the Middle East: our military withdrawal from Saudi Arabia is a tacit admission that, as doves insisted all along, our foreign policy has been a major recruiting aid to Al Qaeda. So is the neoconservative avowal of the need to democratize even nominally friendly Arab regimes.

But am I comfortable saying that if US troops weren't in South Korea, we wouldn't have to worry about North Korea? Not quite. Certainly US hostility and troop deployments make North Korea nervous and are likely the proximate cause of its drive for nuclear weapons. But even if we had pulled out in 1992, even if we'd let the Communists keep the South in 1950, the PRK might still be a problem. It would still have an adversary in Japan, and Russia and China would still be switching off the "uneasy partner" and "unfriendly neighbor" role. (In the classic SPI wargame, The East Is Red, North Korea entered the Sino-Soviet war on the Russian side. Things change, and sometimes they change back.)

The PRK would still have an incentive to pursue nuclear weapons. And socialism would still suck. So the PRK would likely still become a nuclear-powered basket case, or anyway try. And it would still be tempted to extort benefices from rich countries or make money selling its weapons on the black market. We're dealing in probabilities here, but its plausible that North Korea could still be a genuine US security problem even if the country had followed a Washingtonian grand strategy.

So it's hard to say for sure that declining to intervene in Asia would have spared us this particular dilemma.

On the other hand, every transaction needs a buyer and a seller. The buyers that matter to the United States are those motivated to acquire nukes to use against us. And that brings us back to Al Qaeda, and that brings us back to the role of US middle east policy in inspiring murderous creeps to band together to do us harm. The interventionists are right that we live in an interconnected world. That truth cuts against them at least as much as it cuts in their favor.

It All Becomes Clear to Me Now! - Probably Virginia Postrel's favorite jibe against libertarians like, well, me is that we have "a foreign policy that amounts to defending America on the beaches of Santa Monica." This has always struck me as wrongheaded even when I couldn't quite say why. It raises any number of questions, for instance: How far from the beaches of Santa Monica do we have to get? Aren't Guam and Hawaii quite far enough, thank you, without extending our footprint to Tokyo and Seoul? To what extent does the defensive perimeter concept lead to a vicious circle where now threats to the perimeter come to seem "existential threats?" (This plainly happened to Russia and then the Soviet Union. I'd argue that it has happened to us in the Middle East.) To what extent can aggressive "forward defense" (each word deserves scare-quotes) aggrieve increasingly powerful non-state actors, who may be more of a threat than other countries?

And not to be scanted, the old "What if everybody did that?" test. There is clearly an Iranian Virginia Postrel somewhere who considers it folly to "defend Iran in the alleys of Baneh." China in Tibet, China and Russia in Korea, Syria in Lebanon - there are certainly countries too wise and strong to defend their actual borders and it seems to lead to considerable trouble. They are mostly not countries you'd want to be, either.

But the penny dropped when I was thinking, yet again, about North Korea. I haven't written much about North Korea because I haven't known what I think about it. I have no problem with swapping a non-aggression treaty for Kim's nuke program - I would even have to grudgingly admire the PRK's daring in pulling off the deal. But bringing in demands to keep the aid spigot flowing is another thing entirely. That's extortion, tribute if you will, and billions for defense - yeah, hundreds of billions, I know - but not one cent etc. We went to war over (to my mind hysterical and unbecoming) fear that Iraq might try to use WSDs to extort things from us. North Korea is actually doing it. They've as much as said they might sell nuclear weapons to terrorists if we don't do what they want.

And yet the Administration and its apologists keep telling us that there are no easy answers to the North Korean problem. They're right, but not quite for the reasons they think.

The official reasons why there are No Easy Answers?

o China, a non-negligible rival of the US, would strongly oppose a US attack on North Korea, possibly to the point of war. China has many nuclear weapons. North Korea is right next door and China's solons have no intention of defending the country from the banks of the Yalu River.

o Our ally South Korea, where we've had 30,000 troops for 50 years, opposes military action, as does Japan.

o Related to the previous reason, a war risks massive destruction in Seoul, which is close to SK's border with the North. Quite apart from any nukes the North may have, we know they have massive batteries of long-range artillery trained on Seoul, more than any preemptive strike could take out and enough to devastate South Korea's capital and its inhabitants.

o Then there are our 30,000 troops, themselves at risk from any Northern counterstrike, nuclear, biological or chemical or conventional.

Here's the thing: wouldn't most of these objections melt away if defending the country far from the beaches of Santa Monica were all it's cracked up to be? Let's be clear on the situation: North Korea says it might sell nuclear weapons to make ends meet. Al Qaeda would love to have nuclear weapons and is very, very, very rich. If they get one, they will use it and not on Seoul either - on an American city. Los Angeles, New York, DC, wherever. So from an American perspective, isn't Seoul an easy trade for one of our own metroplexes? As for the 30,000 troops, didn't we hire them to die, if necessary, in the defense of the country? And surely China can be finessed - invade North Korea, conquer and . . . turn the place over to them. Here you go, fellas, it's yours. Again. We'll be going now. The Chinese may go to war, but they wouldn't likely go nuclear as a first resort. We'd have time to arrange a peace that - remember the stakes - prevents the loss of one or more American cities to terrorist nuclear attack. Sorry, South Korea, but what were you thinking putting five million people within artillery distance of your major adversary anyway?

I am being deliberately bloody-minded here, almost as bloody-minded as Daniel Pipes today in the New York Post:

Iraqi gains are very welcome, but they come as a happy byproduct of the coalition pursuing its own interests, not as the primary goal. It is proper to put coalition forces' lives at risk only to the extent that liberating and rehabilitating Iraq benefits the United States, the United Kingdom and the other partners.

Each state's obligations, in other words, are ultimately to its own citizens.

Hey, tell Samizdata. But somehow it doesn't seem to work that way. One or more of the following things is true:

o Moral costs matter, and it would be wrong for us to make a cold-blooded trade of Seoul for Los Angeles.

o Our troops in South Korea are not defending the United States, either by program or circumstance.

o Practical costs matter, and if we make a cold-blooded trade of Seoul for Los Angeles it will be the last trade we get to make, as no sensible country will ally with us thereafter.

o The mere existence of a risk does not justify precipitous action (war).

o The Bush administration were idiots to spike the North-South rapprochement early on.

I tend to think all of the above are true. (We can eliminate some other possibilities, like We waited too long! War during the Clinton administration would have posed the same risks to Seoul and Tokyo, and the same risks of war with China.) The "moral costs" argument strikes me as the least compelling, but even it has considerable force. Regardless, the list signifies major limitations on the utility of "foward defense" aka "entangling alliances" aka neo-imperialism. The beaches of Santa Monica have their charms.

A Notable Specimen - A lot of conservative columnists complain about the stifling of free expression. John Leo appears to actually mean it - that is, even when it's not right wing college students being hassled by left wing administrators.

(Link via Antiwar.com.)

Extra Extra! Extra! - New material on Amygdala too.

Extra! Extra! - A new issue of Objectionable Content Magazine.

Piling On - Bill Bennett! There. I was going to be guilty of a Blogger Code violation if I didn't say something.

Of all the good and useful things said on the subject, the one that most resonates with me is from Gene Healy:

t's one thing to lose $8 million bucks gambling. It's another thing entirely to lose it on slot machines and video poker. That's for old ladies in Vegas and fat farmers spending their subsidy checks at riverboat casinos in Moline, for Chrissakes. If I was going to squander gobs of cash at casinos, I'd pick something a little more James Bond. What a loser.

I had the same reaction, less pungently. When I think about the fun parts of gambling - not my vice, but I have an imagination - I think of guessing right, staring down or looking off the competitor across the table, choosing in the face of the unknowable - a matrix of the intellectual, the social and the unpredictible. I suppose video poker gives you some of the intellectual challenge, since I think there are choices to make, but slots? and, per the report, to avoid interacting with other people? How furtive and pathetic.

Eve Tushnet spins a silk purse out of a sow's ear of a scandal here and here.

For the record, I find Bennett's latebreaking declaration that les jeux sont fait for him to be quite dignified.

Via John Cole and Radley Balko I found other useful writing on the subject, some of which I actually read.

UPDATE: The bit about Eve's items is open to misinterpretation. I meant that Eve offers insights that transcend the unpromising material to hand (the Bennett scandals).

Poetry Monday

(All that gardening talk in yesterday's fitness blog item inspired me to drag out this older poem about Wallace Stevens. Many poets express willful incomprehension that Stevens could be both an insurance executive and a major poet, probably the greatest American poet of the 20th Century. This has more to do with the sociology of contemporary poetry than any genuine conceptual difficulty. Still, it may help if one think of Stevens as toiling, essentially, in the construction business, since his specialty was surety claims, explained briefly in what follows.)

Some Affluence of the Planet

I.

To imagine, seriously, gardens in winter
while browsing through seed catalogs, it helps
to have intimate knowledge of a plot of land,
knowledge that comes not through the eye alone
but knowledge in the legs, legs that have walked
the plot, and stopped, and knelt, and risen. Then
while the right hand scratches the necessary figures
for prices, quantities, and growing seasons,
the phantom left can feel the textures of leaves
in all their grades of glossiness and coarseness.
One may, while dozing, dream a bean plant twining
its rigging of pipes and wires, and see the leaves
jerk in a silver fusillade of rain.

II.

Wallace Stevens's job in Surety Claims
was minimizing loss. The filigrees
of tendrils that we ink into our money--
stock certificates, bearer bonds, plain cash--
are not there only to foil counterfeiters.
Vulgar as the approximations are,
they stand for the fruits of life. When a contractor
defaulted on a project, it was Stevens
who decided which would cost less: pay off the claim
or pay to see the job through to completion.
Balance sheets, correspondence, clauses and commas,
and the skeletal hints of the construction site
cohered into a vision of the structure
complete or incomplete. It had to be
imagined as an inevitable knowledge.

III.

On a business trip to Philadelphia,
the city of his youth, he surprised a young assistant
by making the two of them an hour late
for an important meeting, surprised him further
by offering round for general consumption
the pastries from a favorite bakery
that he had acquired by their delay.
Before the actual pastries in that room
was their imagined sweetness, and before that
the real taste sticky in his younger mouth.

© Jim Henley 1997, 2002.

A Fanboy's Notes - Codas to Free Comic Book Day.

Galactus' weblog. Funny! if you have the requisite, um, education. (Via Long Story Short Pier.)

A pre-Day article in the Detroit Free Press Hesiod sent me. Warning: Headline contains "Pow" followed by an exclamation point.

Neilalien has a little list of other blog reports on the Day. Plus, I learn that there's a Jim Hanley who owns a comic book store in Manhattan and contributes to internet comic book discussion fora. I remember checking the history of "Hanley" as a name, but I don't remember if it turned out to be the same name as Henley or not. I don't think so.

Via Franklin Harris, this Motley Fool article on Marvel's winning streak at the box office and what it means for the troubled company's financial health.

Meanwhile, Mark Evanier offers a more pessimistic assessment of the industry's overall health than Hanley or the Fool:

I do not recommend trying to make one's career in the comic book business these days. It is not a healthy field in which to invest the kind of creative energy and passion that is usually required to break into a new line of work, and I think it will get worse before it gets better.

Dirk Deppey has a useful roudup of press treatment of the holiday. The item segues into a discussion of the bookstore market. Warning: meets Comics Journal specifications for gratuitous slamming of superhero comics.

Free Comic Book Day - We made it a family affair, and hit two stores, the fine Big Planet Comics in Bethesda and the equally fine Beyond Comics in Gaithersburg. (I stumbled on a third store on a solo trip for auto parts, but I didn't like it well enough to mention.) Offering Boy's choices were free to him but not to Mom and Dad, but it's always Free Comic Book Day when you're Offering Boy. The Littlest Offering spurned all available choices, making it highly doubtful that she is really my child.

Mrs. Offering, who is definitely her mother, picked up a Tintin book, also not free. Different stores had different books available depending on when you got there, and different rules for the promotion. At Big Planet you could pick any five while Beyond Comics limited customers to one per person. Also, at various shops, indie creators donated copies of their work even though not part of the official promotion. I got

Batman Adventures - This is the "juvie" Batman book, based on the legendary animated series of the 1990s. Offering Boy loves the analogous Justice League Adventures comic and series, but shies away from the Batman book for some reason.

Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things - An easy choice for my one book from Beyond Comics. Franklin Harris has boomed this series so I was curious. It turns out to be every bit as good as he claimed, and I'll probably pick up the collected edition. In issue one, a babysitter, a changeling, goblins. Cool. Also, the story moves. Sometime after Frank Miller introduced naturalistic dialog to the superhero comic book, writers began taking their own sweet time about finishing stories, or even having overmuch happening. In Ultimate Spiderman it takes five issues for Uncle Ben to get shot. In The Ultimates, the new-continuity reprise of the Avengers, they've spent about three issues preparing to attack the base of some alien invaders. (In one legendarily bad Gerry Conway Justice League story from the 1980s, the supervillain Despero spent the entire issue just descending from earth orbit to its surface.) Courtney gets two thumbs up as Mrs. Offering liked it too.

X-Men Unlimited - An anti-animal cruelty relevance issue. A little tiresome only because it has the ten-thousandth insensitive, gun-toting rural father in mainstream comics. They should just form a secret society and try to take over the world, like Hydra.

The Amazing Spiderman - Written by the Babylon Five guy (darned if I'm going to look up the spelling). Not bad, really. I've resisted getting heavily into superhero continuity titles since picking up the habit again, so I'd been restricting my Spiderman reading to the reprint volumes of the Ultimate series. (That's the one where they restart the continuity with Peter Parker in high school at the turn of the millenium. It's actually very good, despite my ribbing above. The sequence where Peter tells Mary Jane his secret in Volume 3 - while Aunt May is convinced they're having sex - is pricelessly, screamingly funny.)

Rocket Comics Sampler - Three stories that I liked, but not well enough to add any of those series to my regular reading (and buying).

There were a couple dozen other books I didn't get or didn't see. Chances are most stores still have some free product left this week, and I imagine they'll be giving it away.

Weekly Fitness Blog Post - 179 pounds, 35.5" waist. Haven't we been here before? No, because my waist size continued to shrink, which means more muscle and less fat at the end of this two-week uptick and downturn. It's an on-week for Heavyhands, but instead of a session this morning, I mowed the lawn and shredded a hundred gallons or so of sod with a mattock, as Offering Boy has decided we must have a garden. Definitely worked some back muscles doing that.

As for the gardening, we'll be using the Square Foot system and planting lettuce, green beans, tomatos, peppers, carrots and other good things. Maybe radishes. Since the idea came so late, we didn't properly prepare the soil last fall or even earlier this spring. Fortunately, the particular patch of ground is the one where I expected to start a garden seven years ago and, not having a little boy's enthusiasm propelling the effort, didn't. But most of the rocks are gone and at the time I mixed in two big bags of vermiculite, plus some manure which has surely since been eaten by the grass that regrew there. It's good not to have to do that part again, as the soil native to our clime is basically red modeling clay shot through with stones. (And bricks in our case. I get the impression that previous inhabitants may have intended to build a barbecue.)

Off to buy 34" slacks at Target this week as the 36"-ers bunch up too much when belted. Not to get too excited - my 36" jeans are still the right size. They're not "relaxed fit" jeans, meaning "We won't lie for you."