Don't Forget to Worry About growing Islamic extremism in Bangladesh, while you're at it. See World Press Review and the Far Eastern Economic Review. The latter wants your money in return for the full story. Said story apparently ticked off the Bangladeshi government, according to this BBC article.

Many a Slip - LA Times analyst Robin Wright has a useful article in the growing "A UN resolution will not solve all our problems and may not even happen" genre. Included is continuing sotto voce snarkiness from unnamed administration officials, this time from the State Department:

"We also might lose the approval of French diplomats, which doesn't pain us very much," the senior administration official said. "And we'd probably lose a little in public opinion."

Hm. Could the unnamed official be Undersecretary John Bolton, widely considered an ally of DoD and Vice President Cheney (and a man undoubtedly contemplating his post-Powell future)?

Whatever. Back to that country list: India, Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh. Wright notes

Assistance from the latter three, with predominantly Muslim populations, is seen as particularly important to defusing tensions with the Islamic world and giving the occupation a broader legitimacy.

but also that these countries, not being rich, would probably want financial assistance for any deployments.

I've previously noted the political problems with troops from Turkey and Pakistan. (Turkey, bad for Iraq; Pakistan, bad for us.) India seems pretty obviously problematic too - its government is already on political Islam's shit list. So Bangladesh sticks out as the least troubling contributor on the face of things. The CIA Factbook reminds us that Bangladesh is very poor. Its annual military budget is under a billion dollars, 0.2% of GDP and 8% of its annual budget outlays. (If the CIA's figures are correct, by the way, Bangladesh spends about 2 billion more than it takes in annually. Presumably aid makes up most of the difference between its 2.9 billion in revenues and its 4.8 billion in outlays.)

Disappointingly, the CIA Factbook is very light on military data - they're keeping it for themselves! Strategy Page's South Asian military table, however, pegs Bangladesh's paid military manpower at 135,000, with an annual budget of $5,000 per soldier. That's not salary, that's everything - bullets, rations, radios, Saturday night sock hops at the base canteen. StrategyPage is at pains to note that its "active manpower" figures are soft ones. According to the official website of the Army of Bangladesh

The recent construction of barracks for troops and high rise buildings for officers and other ranks has solved long outstanding problem in [logistics and infrastructure].

No doubt! The official page says that Bangladesh currently has about 4500 troops deployed overseas, mostly in UN peacekeeping operations. AllAfrica.com reports that Bangladesh has pledged "a brigade of between 3,000 and 5,000 soldiers" to the UN's Liberian mission.

One way to look at the numbers is this: Liberia (3-5k troops) plus existing ongoing deployments (4k troops) plus a full division for Iraq (15-20k troops) would put Bangladesh's total overseas deployment at around 25,000 soldiers. Using the classic 2:1 home/field deployment ratio, that calls for another 50,000 troops at home, a total of 75,000 men. With an army of 135,000, Bangladesh can handle that easily, right?

The other way of looking at it is that you're talking about a commitment in the neighborhood of almost twice what the country has ever done, and a pretty sudden five-fold ramp-up in overseas deployments (from the current 4500 to around 25,000).

I suspect the latter gives us a truer picture of the scale.

Party On, Fanboy! - Small Press Expo is this weekend at the Holiday Inn on Wisconsin Avenue in Bethesda. Among the creators scheduled are Craig "Blankets" Thompson, Frank Miller and God. I'll be attending. Eve Tushnet will be attending. We hope to hook up with Sean Collins, who will be attending. Any other Team Comics bloggers who are attending, it would be great to hook up. E-mail me. We can have a Team Comics Blogfest. As a fallback to e-mail, I can assure you I'll be at the Finder panel from 2:30-3:30.

As I Was Saying about this UN resolution thing . . .

Some commentators seem to think Paul Wolfowitz is just being daft when he says that the movement toward a new UN resolution represents a change in policy by the UN, not by the US. That's not nearly paranoid enough! We have to consider at least the possibility that Wolfowitz is starting the insult war that DoD hopes will strangle a UN resolution aborning.

Juan Cole notes that now that there's at least movement toward a UN resolution, India's foreign minister is quickly coming up with new conditions for providing "peacekeeping" troops. I remember reading that Hitler approached Petain about having Vichy France join in the invasion of the Soviet Union. After the meeting, Petain said something like, It will take six months to discuss it, and six more months to forget the discussion ever happened. (World War II analogies: They're Not Just for Hawks Any More!)

Meanwhile, Iraq's "foreign minister" says Turkish troops are not welcome in any peacekeeping mission, thank you. (Link via antiwar.com.) This causes the Turks to get downright shirty. Is it too snarky of me to put "foreign minister" in scare quotes? Let's let time test this other Turkish statement first:

Responding to a question about the statement of Zebari who said that Turkish soldiers should not be sent to Iraq, [Foreign Ministry Spokesman Huseyin] Dirioz said that ''it is seen that the statements of a person who was charged by the approval of the U.S., are in full condradiction with the U.S. government's application to our government. We believe that the U.S. will clarify the issue.''

If the Iraqis don't get to veto Turkish troops, that gives the game away. You're not a real foreign minister if another country gets to make all your policies for you.

And "Australia will not send peacekeepers to Iraq even if the U.N. Security Council supports a new multinational force to help U.S. troops there, Prime Minister John Howard has said." (Link via Counterspin.)

Sweet Victory - Well I'll take a 16-13 win, particularly for a first game of the season when you expect defenses to have the advantage over offenses. It sure looked like the Skins were trying to have one of their famous late-game collapses, but they pulled it out.

Notes:

I believe that, with Lisa Guerrero, the sideline bimbo concept enters Imperial Overstretch. Final degradation: the postgame interview with Patrick Ramsey, where she clearly confuses him with injured Jets QB Chad Pennington of the Jets. (She told Ramsey she had seen him talking to his "ex-teammate Lavernues Coles" before the game and wanted to know if there was still a lot of respect there or some such. But Coles is Ramsey's current teammate. She was clearly thinking of footage that showed Coles and Pennington talking.) While "Patrick Ramsey is the new Chad Pennington" is the meme of the week - at least around here! - we don't mean it literally . . .

John Madden does not approve of third-down passes in which some receivers run routes short of the first-down marker and some quarterbacks throw to those receivers. I would greatly appreciate it if this observation were widely publicised throughout the blogosphere, because then perhaps Madden would not feel he had to impress this opinion upon viewers several times every goddam game the way he has for the last twenty years. Get the word out so John can give it a rest.

Damn. How could you boil that down to something that would fit on a poster board you could take to a game?

JOHN
SHUT UP
ABOUT
THIRD DOWN
ALREADY

Needs work. But I like the idea.

Thank God That's Over, the NFL offseason. Jets-Redskins in five minutes. TTFN! Tomorrow night: Manga, dammit!

There You ARE - Micah Holmquist informs me that Salam Pax's book is indeed scheduled for US publication in October, but under a completely different title, Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi. In a strange conjunction of this site's preoccupations, the cover looks oddly like the cover of an alt.comic.

Dunno if you can trust the fragmentary data Amazon provides, but interestingly, their writeup says the book will be 288 pages. The British edition is 202 pages plus about three pages of acknowledgements. Of course, the Amazon UK writeup for the British edition says it's 176 pages. So you're on your own, guys!

Does Not Compute - Let's not get too carried away about the possibility of a UN deal re Iraq. It probably is the least bad option available. The administration's liberal critics seem to be practically swooning (The UN! [hand-on-heart]). It's defenders seem to be busy recanting their arguments of two weeks ago (because ultimately, whatever the Bush administration does is what they'll defend). But there are all kinds of reasons the sky is either not falling or dawning - some of them in the Post op-ed by Peter D. Feaver, and some in this blog item by Juan Cole.

Some of this is many a slip stuff:

We don't actually have a resolution yet. A lot can go wrong in the negotiations. Some bad blood among the actors (US and Britain vs. um, everyone else). The possibility that the Best and the Brightest Mark II in DoD will work to sabotage any agreement with the hated UN. The likelihood that a lot of countries are saying "We can't help without a UN resolution" because it's much more polite than "What are you, nuts??" which is what they really mean. Which is to say, we can't be sure these countries will pony up substantial troops after a resolution is passed.

Then there's the numbers game. Cole:

If the US can get a division each (15,000 - 20,000 men) from Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Turkey, it could at least replace many of the reservists it will lose in March. I do not know whether the US has enough carrots to offer them to pull this off, but it is trying.

That's 80,000 troops from four countries! And eager Poland can't even fill out a full division. Prediction: a UN resolution nets us 20,000 international troops tops.

Let's say I'm wrong about this because I'm a defeatist. Let's say we get troops in the 60-80,000 range. What that does is bring the total force complement in-country, including existing US, British and "Willing" troops, up to the minimum level experts suggest is needed to even think about restoring security. That does not get our troops a ticket home. They're still stuck in hell with the budget blade looming. OR we get to ship (some) troops home by holding aggregate force levels constant, in which case less-equipped troops less familiar with the situation than our own are trying to do the same job. Result: no improvement in the security situation at best.

Now let's look at things from the standpoint of American strategic interests. There are all kinds of reasons (spelled K-U-R-D-S) to worry about letting the Turks in. Pakistan??? Given the strong al Qaeda sympathies among Pakistanis, you're talking about 15,000 potential terrorist collaborators. Plus, given the problematic levels of Pakistani cooperation against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan itself, wouldn't mixing US and Pakistani forces to such a degree in Iraq tend to limit our freedom of action in Central Asia?

In fact, there you have the proof of one of the oldest anti-Iraq war arguments going - that conquering and occupying Iraq would interfere with the war against al Qaeda.

Again, I'm not sure I have a better idea, and neither do the whiz kids. (Cole: "Creating two new US divisions for Iraq would take 5 years and cost $30 billion, so expanding the US military is no solution in the short term.") I still favor withdrawal, though the fact that Saddam hasn't been caught yet makes me queasy about this. Apart from the military limitations, I don't trust the UN bureaucracy to work effectively or well. The UN is still populated by the people who couldn't make a career in their own country's diplomatic corps, for the most part. It's not the near-exclusive "club for dictators" that it used to be, but there's still plenty of that going on.

If the President said, we're sending all our troops from Europe, Japan and Korea to Iraq to find Saddam and guard pipelines while we rearm the Iraqi army, then we're bringing them all home permanently, I'd have to admit that that, at least, was a plan. But the rest calls for a separate "defeatism" item.

Paternity Suits me. Polytropos becomes only my second official child blog at Blogtree. As you can see, over time my blog army platoon squad fire team waxes.

And it's nice that Ones and Zeros has a new brother.

More from Eve on "Thinking for Berky," the virtue of prudence and the difference between prudence and quietism.

Book Notes - My copy of Salam's book, The Baghdad Blog, came today. Hurrah! Trim orange trade paperback, digest-sized, with all sorts of Designed to Appeal to Young People touches on the cover (mostly in the typography). This is a British edition with no American price info on it. Amazon UK has an entry, Amazon.com does not.

But I got a copy free, nyah nyah, which I might as well brag about outright rather than "subtly" work it in somehow. Few are the perks of this avocation; this is probably the best of them.

Yes, like any normal egotist who gets a free book, I paged through it looking for mentions of me as soon as I got it open. But I've since had time to do more than that and . . .

Cool! Yes, the book is pretty much the Where is Raed archive pages through June in hardcopy. Date stamps, time stamps and everything. What were links on the blog become footnotes at the bottom of the page. It works somehow, albeit with an odd "kids playing dressup" feel to the apparatus.

So why on earth would you pay eight pounds for this thing, given that almost everything except the introduction and acknowledgements (yep, went there first) is on the web for free? A few reasons:

1. Salam's actual blog uses the ugliest template Blogger offers.
2. Fits in a backpack!
3. It is a lot easier to read the book in sequence than to read the weblog that way, earliest to latest.
4. This matters because, as I've written before, Where is Raed is not just an indispensible chronicle; it's a record of the growth of a writer. The book is the biography of a voice. (Not the autobiography - Salam's writing is free of anxiety or pride about writing itself.) Reading the entries in order lets you take that all in.

Stray thoughts: in hindsight, is it even conceivable that people thought the man who wrote this

I checked my stats today and found out that I have been linked by Pandavox. That's the second link in two days. The goddess of linkylove has blessed me. Burning that modem and doing my sacred linkwhore dance worked.

was a Mukhbarat officer?

Whatever happened to the "Wacky Iraqi" anyway?

The early entries, where Salam plays footsie with other young bloggers from outside the political blog set like the Legendary Monkey, are as enjoyable as I remember them. The hell of it is, I seem to remember that period stretching for longer than it actually did.

No, not all the early entries are reprinted in the book. For instance, the book skips straight from September 7 to September 19, skipping a number of entries between and the September 4 entry. And yes, there appears to be some "cleanup". Here's the Sept 7 entry on the weblog:

supersexygoodlink (thank you raed). quite amazing. and does this guy know that he is proposing the map of the historic city of baghdad as a memorial. boy-o-boy-o-boy would that interesting.
preparing my emergency lists these days. any suggestions are welcom. at the moment I have:
Candles
Alcohol (maybe red wine ?)
Good books
Crunchy munchies
I think that will get me thru the bombing quite nicely

And here is the book version:

I'm preparing my emergency lists these days - any suggestions are welcom. At the moment I have:

Candles

Alcohol (maybe red wine ?)

Good books

Crunchy munchies

I think that will get me thru the bombing quite nicely.

The deletions are a tricky business: on the one hand, you give the book buyers what they presumably came for - a war diary. On the other hand, you obscure the story - the way the political comes to devour the personal as War, in Trotsky's formulation, becomes increasingly interested in Salam.

As for the punctuation changes, the editors may have a point. Grammar cleanup? Not sure it's necessary or desirable, but it doesn't ruin things.

Hey, if you're emphasizing the war stuff, why cut the September 4, 2002 entry?

All that said, the book still looks valuable. I look forward to exaggerating my relationship with the author in later years, eventually telling my great grandkids how Salam and I used to go up on the roof of his house at night with whiskey from a Christian liquor store in Basra, swigging from the bottle while watching Shock and Awe.

Let us REASON Together - Two good new articles at Reason. In the first, self-described "cowardly agnostic" on the Iraq War, Matt Welch, ends up making quite the concise and coherent dovish case:

When Republicans start sounding like teachers unions (all we need is lots more money!) it might be time to take a step back.

(Disclosure: I'm linked, neutrally, in the article.) In the second, Julian Sanchez addresses What, Me Worry? apologias for the PATRIOT Act, and puts the burden of proof back where it belongs:

Lowry's demand amounts to: "Show me just one classified, top-secret abuse of power!" As such, the request is disingenuous at the very least.

I've loved Reason for years, but the addition of Welch and Sanchez has really kicked it up a notch.

Lazy Blogger Night - so you get a quickie blogwatch.

Soon, soon I shall unburden myself of My Thoughts On Manga, which will save (some subset of) us all (somehow). Manga, I mean, not my thoughts. In the meantime, the locus of discussion sits between Forager23 (here and here) and Sean Collins. Famous instigator Dirk Deppey chips in too.

Whither Blogs? If you insist on asking, and Ed Heil does, Polytropos and Letter from Gotham have some answers. If anyone wants to know, I'm glad Ed Heil has a blog - among other things it's how I found out about Nine Worlds, an intriguing-looking roleplaying game.

Ridin' with the King. Glen Engel-Cox brings my attention to Mark Evanier's take on last week's NYT article on comics great Jack "King" Kirby. For those who don't follow these things, Mark Evanier was Kirby's assistant and colleague for many years.

I've Got a Bridge I'd Like to Sell You - Arthur Silber provides but footnotes to Riverbend on where your Iraqi reconstruction dollars are going. Actually, Arthur adds quite a lot of context to Riverbend's tale of our attempt to bring cost-plus accounting to the Middle East. The context won't make you feel any better.

It's a paradox! Eve Tushnet muses on the Stafford poem that provides this blog's tag line. Interesting, but I wonder if what she's really doing is simply demonstrating that all texts really do deconstruct themselves if you stare hard enough. (Item-specific link coming when Blogspot starts working again.)

Johnny Bacardi reviews Marvel's 1602.

More on courts, prosecutors and "finality", the dubious virtue, from Greg Morrow. To my conservative friends, a reminder: we are not talking about people arguing that their guilt is immaterial because the State failed to file some form or intone a particular catchphrase. We are talking about people making credible claims of innocence. As Greg Morrow puts it, "the state's interest should only be justice." Of course, only a liberal (like Greg) could imagine that the State's interest actually is justice, but he's right on the principle.

What a Shame that weblogs have, by and large, as little influence as Michael Fumento says they do, because there are a couple of crucial items on Avedon Carol's Sideshow right now. In a better world, they'd cause quite a stir.

In item one, she puts together a bang-up summary on the "mystery" of international reluctance to give more support to the reconstruction of Iraq, culling interesting comments from a Calpundit post. Kevin Drum himself:

They started a war no one else wanted, they treated anyone opposed to the war as virtual traitors to humanity, and they are still insisting that America needs to be 100% in charge of everything that goes on in Iraq.

But despite all that they're "puzzled" about how to get the rest of the world to pony up to help us out of our mess? Even though the rest of the world warned us repeatedly about the likely result of our adventure? What planet are they living on?

For chrissake, we told the rest of the world to go to hell before the war, and they haven't forgotten.

And commenter Mary:

My personal favorite reason for others to be wary of helping Bush by providing more troops or money -- what do you think he will do if he can free up "his" military? Which country will he invade next?

The second item concerns attempts by prosecutors to make it impossible for convicted felons to use DNA tests to establish their innocence. The details of the cases quoted make one's blood boil. Avedon nails the problem:

The thing that worries me the most is this idea prosecutors seem to have lately that "finality" is a more important value than the guilt or innocence of the accused.

Pace David Byrne, worry 'bout the government.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 166 pounds, 33" waist, an uptick of a pound from last week, girth stable, 50 pounds lighter than when I began my official diet last Thanksgiving.

In other weblogs: Michael Fumento continued to make fun of Rich Hailey and taunt "the blogosphere" on his weblog, Advise and Dissent, while claiming, somewhat amusingly, that his weblog isn't really a weblog but a place where "[o]ccasionally I will post a short item." Demarcated with a date stamp. Michael Fumento, meet Rebecca Blood. In his attempt to prove he's not a real blogger he quotes the one supportive blogger he encounters but doesn't link to her, which makes him not a non-blogger, but a rude one.

My referrer logs tell me that Mr. Fumento has clicked through to this site (with that design there's no way he could be employing a professional webmaster), but he's made no substantive response about his problematic claims I identified last week.

Michael Fumento says he has a lot of readers. I've been one of them for years. Now I'm a reader who wonders what other topics I should distrust his work on.

Last week's items got a lot of response. I was actually in the middle of a "low-carb brouhaha" for the first time - I've been content until now to be the only blogger ever, apparently, to mention the "A-word" and not get deluged with cavils.

Rich Hailey has started what he promises will be a series on "Atkins myths." He correctly identifies Myth Number One as a claim by Atkins that "You can stuff yourself and lose weight, as long as you keep the carbs low." And he provides a handy set of citations from Atkins' own book refuting the myth.

Howard Owens chipped in, complete with picture and blood work. Stephen Gordon has put together his own low-carb plan after reading much more than I have. I've only skimmed it, but it's interesting to see that he's dubious about free days, while I consider them essential.

Just to repeat: I am not presently on the Atkins diet. I believe that the master keys to weight regulation are portion control and exercise, including weight training and "interval-based" aerobics - what Glenn Reynolds calls 'the "eat less, exercise more" plan.' I think the Atkins diet can be a good way for obese people to work toward portion control if they can be happy eating the sort of foods the early stages of the diet indicate. I believe sugar and processed starches are the Devil, and Iscariot stuffed into his mouth. I eat them once a week anyway.

It worked for me. It may or may not work for you.

Running along. Your Talking Dog has been posting occasional items about his preparations for the New York Marathon. I worked up the nerve to ask him if anyone ever tries a "walk/run" strategy. By his account, most runners are walking by the end of the marathon anyway. So why not start walking before you need to? His answer:

Most people, though, like to think of themselves as "runners" and do at least try to run, at least at the beginning, even if a more "conservative" approach might serve them better...

Ah the math is beguiling, though. I'm no runner, but I can do .3 miles in two minutes, cantering. Walking for two minutes at a standard 20-minute-mile pace, I can do a tenth of a mile. String those four minutes together and you've gone .4 miles. You have 15 four-minute intervals in an hour. That's six miles. Four of those and you're done.

Problem one is that there's no way I could do that at my present level of conditioning. Problem two is that, for all I know, nobody else could either.

Next week: Nothing about Atkins, no matter what!

If Guns Are Outlawed . . . From Riverbend's blog, which you need to be reading even though she never musters quite the detachment that Salam Pax can:

The looting and killing of today has changed from the looting and killing in April. In April, it was quite random. Criminals were working alone. Now they’re more organized than the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) and the troops combined. No one works alone anymore- they’ve created gangs and armed militias. They pull up to houses in minivans and SUVs, armed with machineguns and sometimes grenades. They barge into the house and demand money and gold. If they don’t find enough, they abduct a child or female and ask for ransom. Sometimes the whole family is killed- sometimes only the male members of the family are killed.

For a while, the men in certain areas began arranging ‘lookouts’. They would gather, every 6 or 7 guys, in a street, armed with Klashnikovs, and watch out for the whole area. They would stop strange cars and ask them what family they were there to visit. Hundreds of looters were caught that way- we actually felt safe for a brief period. Then the American armored cars started patrolling the safer residential areas, ordering the men off the streets- telling them that if they were seen carrying a weapon, they would be treated as criminals.

Emphasis mine.

Other Business: In a sign of the maturation of the Iraqi blogosphere, the very first Hot Iraqi on Iraqi Blogfight Action. This is surely an example of the progress we keep reading about in the work of pro-war writers.