Since You Put It That Way - Matthew Yglesias has the only "anti" comment on the "Tech Central Station flap" that makes any sense to me. Dispositive? I wouldn't say so. But telling.

Lesser of Two Evils Watch - It seems pretty obvious that libertarians should be rooting for Democrats to kill the Republican Medicare expansion bill. With any luck, the ill will a successful fight engendered would prevent passage of any prescription drug benefit this term.

So far, they're not doing a very good job. "The [House] vote was 220-215," AP reports. I can't help but think the present Congress, faced with the proposal of a Democratic President, would have voted it down.

All up to the Senate now. Atrios is your source for news on stiffening Senatorial spines. Keep checking for updates.

Over There - Tacitus has an interesting report on an insider's take on Saudi Arabia. It is to say the least contrarian - at least, contrarian to a warblogger zeitgeist that even I have participated in. Needless to say I'm not in a position to judge its accuracy. However, it fits with my sense that the "Saudi Royal Sin" (if one may be so bold) is a ruinous caution, and it jibes with my theory of "the essential conservatism of the planet."

(Q: Hey Jim, if all you're going to do any more is link to your "Barber of Beirut" essay, do you even need a blog? A: Yes. I still read new comics every week.)

Split-Screen Republicanism Watch

"We do the national greatness stuff abroad and the leave us alone stuff at home."

Andrew Sullivan

Patriot Act Expansion Moves Through Congress

The government wants these powers in order to more effectively prosecute the "war on terrorism," although critics warn that, once given these powers, the FBI may use them in cases that are not relevant to terrorism in order to gather evidence against other targets of investigation.

Indeed, recent Senate hearings have covered incidents in which information about individuals was obtained by the FBI through the use of its counter-terrorism powers even though the investigations were directed against what the ACLU called "garden-variety criminals."

The provision not only permits the FBI to seize records from more kinds of businesses; it also forbids businesses from informing their clients about the seizures.

The neolibertarian contention has been not only that we could wage expansive war abroad without further restricting civil liberties at home, but that waging expansive war abroad would prevent further restricting civil liberties at home. The kindest thing one can say, two years along now, is that their case remains unproven.

Freedom Is Untidy - The hawks are right that John F. Burns' New York Times article of 11/16 on the new Iraq is very good. They make too much of one part of it, though:

At the Palestine Hotel, where I was taunted in the last weeks of Mr. Hussein's terror by officials of his information ministry as "the most dangerous man in Iraq" because of my articles about the regime's brutality, some of the same Iraqis, who now work as interpreters for Western news bureaus, caution me against staying in the 16th-floor room I used to inhabit.

(My emphasis.) Porphyrogenitus writes

So our "free press" are so annoyed by and opposed to censorship that they're employing their own minders now that Saddam is no longer able to pay them. And we wonder why the quotes they get from Iraqis - who aren't stupid and do know who worked for the Ba'athist regime - tell the interpreters the things they do, and the interpreters then tell the reporters, who then report back to America in a certain tone.

It would be foolish to say there can't be anything to this, though many minders were probably time-servers, or the sort of sycophants who would be among the quickest to "meet the new boss," and others, being functionaries, will be unknown to the people they meet in their new lives. Some ex-minders probably are loyal to the resistance. Some of the ones who aren't could rationally be mistaken for loyalists by nervous Baghdadis. Even if you don't recognize the loyalist interpreter, he probably has little signs to alert you that he is the Old Order's eyes and ears; and anyway, the first job of the resistance has been making Iraqis fearful of cooperating with the Westerners, so it's rational for locals to approach any interview warily.

There's a problem though. On this theory the negative press, supinely yoking itself to its old masters, is giving us a much bleaker picture than reality warrants. The problem is that the bad press reports largely gibe with the CIA's estimate of the situation and even Paul Bremer's. There are also the numbers, such as they are.

There seem to be two possibilities. One, that minders or no, the news reports are largely correct. Indeed, the pattern since summer has been that this month's outrageous negativism becomes next month's official yes, but. (Remember when it was absurd that the media said we were facing a guerrilla war?) Or, the CIA and CPA are themselves being led astray - faced with the terrible shortage of Arabic language skills, they've had to rely on "minders" of their own - what they learn comes to them filtered through Ba'athist functionaries they've had to turn to simply to function in an Arab country. This is surely the scarier of the two possibilities. Therefore I'm rooting for the first one.

Burns makes one point very clear:

But the random experiences of a week back in the country and among ordinary people I have talked to, by far the most common view has been that for all the American failures, as they see them, a guarantee of greater misery would still be the premature withdrawal of American troops.

After the bombing of the Italian command center, he interviewed members of the crowd on the scene:

"No, no!" one man said. "If the Americans go, it will be chaos everywhere." Another shouted, "There would be a civil war."

"If the Americans, the British or the Italians leave Iraq, we will be handed back to the flunkies of Saddam, the Baathists and Al Qaeda will take over our cities," another man said.

Nobody offered a dissenting view, though many said it would be best if the Americans achieved peace and left as soon as possible. These people, at least, seemed concerned that America should know that the bombers, whoever they were, did not speak for the ordinary citizens of Iraq.

But he also writes

But they can also be hard to please, as the Americans are discovering. The amiability that greets a Westerner almost everywhere outside the Sunni triangle, and even there when American troops are not around, masks a reflex commonly found among people emerging from totalitarian rule: the sense of individual and collective responsibility is numbed, often to the point of passivity. The Iraqis' instinct to blame their rulers for life's hardships, engendered by Mr. Hussein's regime and at the same time silenced by it, is the Americans' burden now.

There is a case to be made that so long as we remain, our presence will give an object to that totalitarian mindset. I remain reluctant to leave with Saddam Hussein at large, but worried that Iraqis want more than we can actually deliver, that they will blame us for failing to meet their unrealistic expectations and we will despise them for their lack of appreciation. Only a fool expects gratitude in international relations. To see one doing just that, scroll to the bottom of this page.

Lesser of Two Evils Watch - Libertarians (sort of) for Dean is keeping a wary eye on Howard Dean's disquieting expression of enthusiasm for "re-regulating" American business. See also Hit & Run and Virginia Postrel.

There is always the possibility that this is "rally the base" talk, to be quietly dropped come Fall 2002. There's also the possibility that it's not. It's a big negative, and Dean's "Stay the Course and Do the Job Right" Iraq policy means he's not a real peace candidate. I could as easily imagine President Dean announcing that he was increasing deployments to Iraq as President Bush. Then there's Dean's (likely stillborn) enthusiasm for raising taxes in a soft economy.

Against all this set Bush's awful spending, trade and national "security" policies, his administrations lousy record on civil liberties and his fair-weather federalism. (I'd mention the technophobia his administration has displayed on issues like cloning, but a Dean Administration could easily go "all Crooked Timber" on us.)

I'm by no means ready to commit my legion of follower (sic) to the Dean Cause. One thing remains with me, though: George W. Bush's administration has asserted or proposed that it be given the following chain of prerogatives:

o To strip enemy combatants of all habeas corpus projections
o To reserve full power to declare any non-citizen apprehended anywhere on earth, including inside the United States, an enemy combatant, with no institutional check on that power and no oversight or review from any other branch of government
o To strip Americans of their citizenship, again without review, oversight or appeal.

The chain of power and the mindset that seeks it are less than very few evils. A key question for Mr. Dean is, Which of these do you repudiate?

Don't Know Much About Geography - Hesiod notes that the borders of the "Sunni Triangle have grown . . . plastic.

I Feel Your Pain - Gene Healy explains the real harm done by Rush Limbaugh's drug use.

People were quick to invoke our last president when Limbaugh equivocated about his legal troubles. But in the passage above--with its faux-profound therapeutic introspection and its brazen presumption that we give a toss--poor Rush has never been more Clintonian.

Me, I worry about the children.

Making Hayes - In what I would have felt sure was a violation of local ordinances, my name has been uttered on Samizdata by my friend Jonathan Pearse, who wishes that I would "do better than just dismiss the Hayes story out of hand." As I wrote to Jonathan this morning:

It's not a matter of dismissing out of hand. Rather:

1) We've been burned before. That is not to say that the Feith memo material can't be both genuine and telling; simply that it is too soon to say so. The pattern heretofore has been: revelation gets trumpeted; revelation dissolves in the glare like ground fog.

2) Much of the Feith memo represents "moving the goal posts." Certainly the Hayes article acts as if THE question is, Were there ever contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq? But this is not the pertinent question. The pertinent question - the one worth going to war over - is, Was Iraq in on the planning and conduct of al Qaeda attacks on American soil? Thus only the latter items on Feith's list are terribly interesting - the ones having to do with facilitating the meeting in the Philippines, the alleged contacts with Mohammad Atta and two other hijackers etc.

3) The DOD statement does matter. "This is not new" means "This is information that has been through the analytical mill" means "Prior statements from the intelligence community and the administration that there was no proof of substantial cooperation between Iraq and al Qaeda have taken this info into account."

Proof that Iraq was in on the September 2001 massacres, or the subsequent anthrax attacks, would justify war. Proof that Iraq played footsie in a general way with al Qaeda in the 1990s would simply make Iraq like a number of other muslim countries we have not bombed. Based on the earlier Feith items, they don't even rise to the level of Pakistan, which let's not forget had ISI people still in Afghanistan a month into the war, let alone the Taliban. It would put them a rung below Saudi Arabia on the AQ buddy list. There's a lot of "Saddam was keen to explore," but no evidence that anything came out of the explanation.

Bottom line: I'm not dismissing the Feith memo, and if the stuff toward the end proves out, it gets us much closer to a casus belli. But just as I don't jump on, say, the NATO takeover rumor or every new report of a US casualty the day it runs, I plan to see how the Hayes article ages before getting too worked up about it. EventualPundit does not sin in haste! I brought the Hayes article up at all because it seemed important to acknowledge its existence.

Contrariwise, the hawks have embarrassed themselves time and again by wetting their pants over "revelations" that have turned out to be nothing of the kind. There's value in a less breathless approach to the latest updates. I'm sure there are instances of doves leaping on congenial stories that didn't hold up too. In such instances the blogosphere looks as farcical as the instant expert segments on the News Hour. The ultimate example of those was the day Flight 800 went down over Long Island. News Hour brought in terrorism experts that very night to tell us What It All Meant. Presumably they did not give their checks back when it turned out that Flight 800 had been done in by a spark in the fuel tanks.

Atlanti-Cyst - The allegedly conservative, supposedly extremely libertarian Bush Administration, not content with a real war, may be ginning up a trade war too. (Via Liberty & Power.)

Down to the Dregs - Virginia Postrel has a plausible explanation for why anti-homosexuality is such a feature of evangelical protestantism:

When I was a kid, evangelical churches disapproved of dancing, of rock music, of working women, of divorce. Now they incorporate all of those elements in their church programs. (They still don't like divorce--who does?--but today's evangelical churches not only have programs for divorced members, they even arrange their buildings' security so non-custodial parents can't swipe the kids.) What's left? Gays. That's why pastors tend to talk so much about them.

Substitute conservatives for "evangelical churches" and pundits for pastors, and I don't think the insight becomes any less true.

She also writes "I only hope that the movement toward gay marriage survives the ensuing backlash" of today's Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling. Me too. But for there to be movement at all, the backlash will have to be borne. That's easy for me to say, since I won't be a target, though.

Gender Studies Tuesday - Reading list:

o A purely infuriating article about the attitudes of successful New York City women who make more than their husbands (via Matthew Yglesias);

o An oddly complementary rant from the American Spectator about stay-at-home moms;

o A powerfully-told true-life tale on Body & Soul. Jeanne d'Arc:

Somewhere in those bits of stories, there's evidence of deep-rooted sexism in this society, and a moral about what constricted opportunity does to women and, indirectly, to men. But it's far from a simple morality play of bad men and suffering women -- although I could easily shape it into that if I wanted to. (My mother's friend wanted to, and did.) It isn't a story about the powerful and the powerless. Looking back on those people's lives, I can't see anyone really having any power.

And some relevant book talk by the same writer.

That's More Like It - Arthur Silber is blogging again. Better yet, it looks like the damnable MTA strike that had vexed him is coming to a close. Arthur notes

And over the next few months, I will definitely be exploring other options for my life in several areas -- so that I don't have to face this kind of calamity again.

Watch it, Arthur, or people will accuse you of being consistent with your beliefs.

Takes Me Awhile Sometimes - I missed an expansion and modification of my "ages of comics" essay by the Lazy Pundit until now. Oops. LP Kevin Shaum's contribution: consider the advent of free web content as another marker of the current (Amber) Age. Makes sense to me.

An Order of Magnitude Fewer Than 20 Questions - John Derbyshire wants to know

1. If "gay marriage" is legalized, will prisoners be able to marry their cell mates? If not, why not?

Ooh, that's a good darn question! If you're in a dorm. And half-stoned. Without a lot of homework due. Or if you're a prisoner, I guess.

2. In many jurisdictions, a marriage can be annulled if it has not been consummated. What, exactly, constitutes "consummation" of a gay marriage?

A demonstration is called for here. Before we can begin, you'll need to remove your head from its customary location.

(Via Calpundit.)

Crackin' Up - James Antle has the latest libertarian/conservative breakup article in the American Conservative. While most of the Gene's Couch crew are namechecked, including me, Antle goes well beyond us for quotes. Since I knew perfectly well these other people are out there, I never took the "incestuous sourcing" complaint about Noah Shachtman's article too seriously.

Antle's article inspires LewRockwell.com blog speculation on a "libertarian crackup" by Marcus Epstein, Karen deCoster and Norman Singleton, who is apparently amazed to discover opposition to war and socialism among writers for Reason Magazine. Um, yeah.

In some ways the "libertarian crackup" happened long ago. Near as I can tell the bad blood between Rockwellians and Postrelians predates the War on Terror and has the bitterness of the blood feud about it.

The LRC blog writers parse libertarians into paleos, neos and left-libertarians. But what about us mesos?

Cat and Mouse - Iraq Today has an interesting story about counter-insurgency operations by the fledgling Iraqi police.

Things to give you pause:

o The police commander of the Salahuddin governorate is a former Iraqi Military Intelligence officer. (Note that in some totalitarian countries, the military intelligence agency has a reputation as being less vile than the political intelligence arm, e.g. Abwehr vs. SS.)

o Official informs media his organization is doing excellent job!

Encouraging things:

o Aljuburi says his force is building solid intelligence on resistance activity in his area.

The bad news is that the number of bombs being found is growing with each day. The good news is that the network of informants that Iraqi police have been building for the last two months is uncovering most of them.

Things to make you go Hm:

In the process, say many who work around him, he's proof that Iraqis are best equipped to secure the country.

Metric System Encore with bonus Op-Chart Addenda.

Now Diana wants everyone to say what they think is "the main problem in Iraq right now." Haggai tells her, apparently by e-mail, that it is "the vacuum that would result if we left."

I'll talk about why I think that's probably not true (that it's the main problem) some other time. For now, let me give my own answer by cribbing from an e-mail to Eve.

My main thesis is that Iraq is a political problem and that the biggest problem is that we are not Iraqi. I don't mean this in a purely moralistic sense. I mean, operationally, we're not from there and they will therefore not necessarily see things the way we do. There are two things I know, or think I know, that overdetermine the course of events in a situation like this. (If I know two things, I can't be a hedgehog I suppose, but I'm not as smart as a fox either. So what am I?)

1) The purpose of a nationalist guerrilla resistance is to split foreign and local. Their job is always aided by what I've called "the essential conservatism of the planet."

2) The most dangerous and unstable time for a repressive society is when it begins to liberalize. In those situations, expectations can easily outstrip progress, leading to bitterness and vioent reaction.

Since those are the only two things I know, I torture every bit of Iraq news into answering the questions, Are we thwarting the enemy's attempt to drive a wedge between our forces and Iraqis (Thing One)? and, Are we keeping ahead of the expectations curve (Thing Two)?

My reading of the NYT Op-Chart is that it is impossible to answer Yes to either question based on the data therein. And some of the data - the geometric increase in US KIAs; the unemployment rate; the electrical situation in Baghdad - seem to slant No-ward. And when we're so obliging to the insurgents as to pull stuff like this, I worry that they're working on their own "Mission Accomplished" banners in their free time.

Events like the an Nasiriyah demo below - especially much bigger ones - would tend to tell against my concerns.

Photo, Shopped? - For the item above (hey, RSS people, it'll be there, just hang on!), I wanted to include a "counter-factual," a bit of news that I would acknowledge as cutting against my concerns. More of this, I would say, would tend to mean I was wrong. So when I saw that Sgt. Stryker had a photo from a pro-Coalition, anti-terror rally in an Nasiriyah, I clicked over to get a look and a link. The picture is credited to Azzaman.

What is up with the shadows in the picture? Is it some lens curvature issue? They seemed very odd on first viewing - the ones on the right side of the lens seem to slant left while the ones on the left side seem to slant right. But it occurs to me that they could all be falling toward a vanishing point somewhere well behind the space between the two signs, and this could be some digital camera or fisheye lens thing I simply haven't encountered before. Any insights appreciated.

UPDATE: It's got to be a camera thing. The sign is a soft sheet, and would have a hard time billowing like that, no? So we're seeing an image warped by the way it is shot.

UPDATE UPDATE: You can't really say, on the basis of this picture, that the demonstration is small. The ranks behind the english-language sign are thin, but it may be that the main body of demonstrators are behind the arabic sign, off to the right of the frame.

UPDATE³: Reader Mike Trettel confirms

Jim, the shadow distortion you see in the photo is a classic result from using a superwide angle or fisheye lens from up close-if you look at the shadow on the left you can see that it's from the photographer. It's also why the sign appears to "wrap" or curve across the frame-it's the same cause but rendered differently. If you project the lines they will go to the center of the photo.

and follows up with:

Yep, as I've heard it said "Cameras don't lie, they just don't tell the truth". I've often though that every photojournalist should be limited to just a 50mm lens (i.e., standard lens closest to the human eye), and that's it. In my case the 24mm wide angle is one of my favorites, it makes everything look so big and small all at the same time. That particular shot looks like 20mm or even a 17mm, it's pretty distorted because the photgrapher was so close to the subject(s). But that's guesswork on my part and it's worth what you paid for it.

Which brings us back to the question of the size of the parade. Was it shot from close up to deemphasize its small size? Or to make the english words on the sign clearer, and the bulk of a large parade is outside the frame? Does it make a difference to our judgment that Azzamman is an Arabic-language paper, and presumably places no premium on pictures of english signs as such?

Zayed of Healing Iraq describes the protests as huge.

Look Over There - Eve Tushnet has rounded up all the latest Iraq-al Qaeda connection controversy commentary so I don't have to. Go there. Hawks sincerely puzzled (as opposed to insincerely puzzled) why non-hawks aren't bowled over by the Feith memo reported on by the Weekly Standard, may gain some insight by substituting "Fisk" for Feith and "BBC" for Weekly Standard.

I will say that, as a man of the right, seeing conservatives and self-styled libertarians advert to claims by Janet Reno's Justice Department makes me sigh heavy as a goth girl in a coffee house.

Oops! Weekly Fitness Blog Item! - It would be cheating to check out yet. Weight 163, waist 32.75". No increase in poundage, but the waist shows slippage. Still in an exercise rut. Blogging too much? Will stop now, run in the morning.

Greeblie blog is trying to encourage his personal trainer to take up blogging. That would mean at least one fitness blogger who knew what he was talking about. Fear: PT checks out Steven Den Beste as suggested. Is instantly cured of the temptation.

Bruce Baugh is trending down again.

The Washington Post Sunday business section has an article about how marketers and designers attempt to accomodate the America's broadening horizons:

Pity Debora Senytka, a design engineer in General Motors' human/vehicle integration department. Her challenge: to create normal-looking vehicles that can accommodate the expanding derrieres of the expanding American without giving up the cup holders and consoles, the built-in DVD screens and air bags that U.S. drivers have come to expect in their vehicles.

. . .

Companies of all kinds are adjusting their designs, measurements, marketing, menus and training in an effort to find ways to prevent, accommodate -- even profit from -- growing waistlines. In fact, as obesity has become an inescapable factor in U.S. culture, it has also become a major force in American business.

But obesity's place in the culture has not been easy for many businesses to deal with. While some embrace it, others are scared of it, and some companies just won't talk about it. That is the typical reaction of American business to any "momentous sea change in the public," said Bobby J. Calder, a marketing professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

On that cheery note I'll leave loyal fitness blog readers to their devices until next week.

That Ought to Hold the Little Bastards - A weekend's (unplanned) furious blogging comes to an end. Y'all come back now, hear?

This is Sports Center with Unqualified Offerings - Panthers 20, Redskins 17. Sigh. Not a complex story, though:

Steven Davis came up big while his replacement Trung Canidate came up small.

The coaches wasted an entire half on Canidate before going to the far more effective Rock Cartwright. Look guys, I don't care if he's a converted fullback making league minimum - Cartwright is the only player you've got who can run with the football.

Patrick Ramsey was just off today. Throws he usually makes he muffed. Bad timing since the plays were there to be made.

A Fanboy's Capsule Reviews - Stuff I bought and didn't buy recently. (I now have a schedule for picking up Palomar and Sgt. Rock. Big Planet Comics announced a 30% off Thanksgiving Day weekend sale. Yippee!)

Seamonsters & Superheroes - I liked Scott Mills' Cells so much that I started looking for his other work, and this was the cheapest thing available. It's . . . cute. There's a difference between mocking genre conventions and mocking them to effect. However, there are a few sequences where the latter happens. I'm after his more substantial work next.

H-E-R-O 10 - One of the better recent Astro City stories.

Batman: Death and the Maidens - On the one hand, I can feel like we're losing the thread here. On the other, Bruce Wayne's differential experience of his mother and father after drinking Ra's potion has some interest value, and you get Arab bandits with swords.

Ultimate Six 4 - Truth is, I just like everything about this book, even the way there's something downright unlikeable about how Fury and the US government use the Ultimates and how the Ultimates allow themselves to be used. A Bendis crime comic on super-soldier serum.

Fantastic Four 506 - For the length of a genuinely frightening page, it looks like writer Waid is going to foist a sitcom-standard MOS on us. Then he twists the knife. I might argue that FF is the single best superhero comic going. Points off for Nick Fury's sleeveless, weapon-bedecked body suit, though, which makes him look like the newest Village Person, Spy Guy.

Not Buying . . .

Daredevil 53 - Yeah, it's paintings and collage and all sorts of art techniques that go beyond what we usually see in comics. However: 1) Things are supposed to happen in stories; 2) Mack's method is actually somewhat limiting - good for "deranged" viewpoint characters, but incapable of a whole range of tones and effects amenable to boring old cartooning. I would argue, by the way, that the same applies to latter-day Bill Sienkiewicz.

1602 4 - Why buy the cow when you're still only half sold on the milk and you can borrow it from your buddies anyway?

Captain America 20 - Nazis are evil, but so is whoever told Dave Gibbons he could write dialogue. I'm sorry, Sean, I really tried to like it. Also, enough with the freakin' scales, Marvel. I know the Sub-Mariner saved Cap from freezing, but that doesn't mean he has to pay endless tribute by incorporating blue fish hide into his outfit. Even with John Cassaday it sometimes looked like Cap had some kind of condition.

First Santa Claus, then the Easter Bunny and now this.

A Fanboy's Notes: The Next Generation - I've previously written that Offering Boy is all for superheroes, just not for comics. (He loves superheroes in cartoons and computer games.) But this weekend we turned the corner. I took him with me to the comics shop and he happily picked out not just the two most recent Justice League Adventures but a Loony Tunes comic and the latest Power Puff Girls "for [The Littlest Offering]." (In fact, Offering Boy loves PPG as much as any sensible individual of any age, but he did let her read it.) After making our purchases, we headed to McDonalds and each read our own comics over a late lunch - him with Looney Tunes, me with Ultimate Six and Fantastic Four.

The Littlest Offering loves her PPG comic and had me read it to her at bedtime. She's three, and responds primarily to the art. "I could meet the little girl alien chicken," she repeated several times.

The experience crystallized an understanding for me. I don't need to worry about any "mature content" in the comics I buy because Offering Boy shows no interest in reading my comics. I don't think this has anything to do with the storylines being too complex or the words too big. He doesn't even pick them up. I think that, like his younger sister, he's responding first to the package, and something - probably, everything - about the art and design in the mainline books I buy, whether from Marvel, DC, Light Speed or Fantagraphics, communicates "not for me" signals to elementary and pre-school kids. He gravitates to Justice League Adventures and shies from JLA.

I don't know the age at which that flips. As a self-interested adult reader of comics, including superhero comics, it doesn't in itself bother me that kids are put off by the kinds of books I like to read. But it certainly means that if comic book companies want to get the next generation of readers, they need to target them specifically. DC at least has a line of books that aims to do this. Marvel doesn't. Does that make sense for them?

UPDATE: By the way, I should stress that my son has seen DC's line of kids comics before. So his previous lack of interest in comic books did not stem from my showing him the wrong ones. He's had a genuine change of tastes.

A Fanboy's Notes 11/16/03 - Surprising and dismaying conversation with my friendly local comics shop owner, who I stress is one of the ones who knows how to run his business. Summary:

There's too much product coming out. Sales are good but I can't make any money because I have to order too much to keep up.

"It is happening again."

As I Was Saying - One of the hopeful indicators in the NYT "Op-Chart" is the increasing proportion of Iraqis in the overall security structure. I cautioned, though, about the problems rapid expansion of police and army units entail. Now comes Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service:

In just the last two weeks, the number of men under arms has doubled to about 118,000. Under these circumstances, as the Washington Post noted Friday, training is virtually nonexistent, while screening of recruits for Ba'athist sympathies has necessarily also been reduced.

Lobe, deliciously if you're in a bloody frame of mind, references the doubts on this score of the Weekly Standard's William Kristol and Donald Kagan.

Let's keep in mind that some version of the same problems apply to the most gung-ho alternative on the table: recognize that our existing commitments have stretched us too thin; admit that sufficient foreign help is not in the offing; and expand the army from 10 divisions to 12, whether by draft, recruiting inducements or some combination.

First off, the "CBO Hammer" falls in March 2004. It is a physical impossibility to even to turn out two divisions full of men in their pajamas by that point. Expanding the army is not a short-term solution. Rapidly expanding the army means adding two divisions of greenhorns to what has been not just the best-equipped but the best-trained military in the world. It means rushing them into a situation for which they are not prepared, quite possibly one that has deteriorated even from the current level.

It is, in short, no answer to our present manpower problems. It's a solution for "the next Iraq," not the present one. It only makes sense if you intend to continue a program of frequent and massive overseas interventions. And given our recent experience, I think we really need to talk about whether we want to continue following that program.

Who's the Dork Now, Huh? - Find out at Ask Brendan.

How Did I Forget to reference the most devastating "cut & run" item yet, from Charles Dodgson on Thursday? Charles dares to consider that the case for seeing it through may be founded on narcissism - an unexamined conviction that we must surely be a cure for instability rather than a cause. He quotes some reports that suggest quite the opposite.

Return of the Liberal Hawk Watch - Actually, so far it seems to be just Hesiod Theogony, who makes a lengthy argument against Cut & Run.

To my way of thinking, he never does quite disentangle Why George Bush is blameworthy for leading us to this pass from What the United States, as a country, should do now. He never grapples with the "Atriosian" insight that there may be a hard limit on what we can do, and it would be foolish to transgress those limits. (See Kevin B. O'Reilly on "sunk costs.") Hesiod's argument boils down to We must show resolve as much as any Opinion Journal contributor.

And Hesiod, seriously: When you start making analogies with Normandy, it's time to step back and rethink. Come on, pal: deep breath. Yes, the situation is appalling. Yes, we are down to choosing among degrees of failure to some extent. But we need to remain calm and clear-eyed.

Ne'er So Well Express'd Item - Diana Moon reviews Master and Commander:

It was a very ugly scene, shame-inducing. The thought of getting up and singing "The Marseillaise" (a la Casablanca) crossed my mind, but I didn't want to embarass my friend.

Lots more on a movie that she says "was technically spectacular, and emotionally empty."

Blogwatch Weekend Continues now that our long and, so far, little-noted consideration of Iraqi metrics is over.

On the Table - Let's put snark and rancor aside and give "The Chart" (it's really a table) in yesterday's New York Times a look. (Link via Sean T. Collins.) It's been much discussed in the last day or so, and is supposed to show that some important trends in Iraq really are encouraging. When not blogging, I spend a fair amount of time putting together corporate metrics, so let's synergize, shall we?

Warning: long post follows. And since there are tables, spacing may be funny.

First, boo to the New York Times for not providing a bigger graphic linked to the one in the article. What we get is a tricked up "photo" of a printout with some legends hard to read. Fie.

Next, let's consider the limits of this kind of exercise. We are among other things at the mercy of what the writers have chosen to include and chosen to leave out. Consider that trends on "number of political parties" would look very encouraging. "Number of violent anti-American underground movements" might look less so. Neither is available. We don't have month-by-month prewar figures, nor do we have last-year data for the same calendar months. Either would help us get a better handle on what matters, which is what these numbers tell us about the subjective experience of Iraqis. (People don't kill you or cleave to you based on the facts, but upon how they feel about the facts.) Also, to fit the tables into its self-chosen space restrictions, the Times gives us only four data points for each metric - April, June, August and October. In one crucial statistic, Annualized Murder Rate in Baghdad per 100,000 Residents, that decision kills our ability to tell what's going on.

Of all the problems, I most feel the lack of the missing months. But let's see what we can see.

Category	April	June	August	October
Top 55 Ba'athists still at large	40	23	16	15

What we see here is rapid progress early, with a clearance rate that has now slowed to a crawl. I don't find this particularly surprising or dismaying. The early numbers reflect success catching or killing the dumb, the unlucky and the fugitives who figured they could afford to turn themselves in. We're now down to the smart, desperate, touched by fortune and way the hell gone from Iraq already. The only serious failure tucked into the number is that one of the 15 is, well, you know who.

Category	April	June	August	October
Total Ba'athists killed or arrested	500	1000	1000	750

I thought we didn't do body counts any more. This row strikes me as particularly hard to draw any conclusions from. For one thing, I'm not even sure if by "Ba'athists" they mean Ba'athists or "any anti-US forces." Or is it a mix? Does it include former officials rounded up on war crimes who may or may not be involved in the resistance? Islamist foreign legionairres? I have no idea. Is the drop from 1000 to 750 noise? A consequence of having fewer enemies to kill? An indicator that our enemies are getting more elusive? Beats the heck out of me. Are we, to ask the Rumsfeld Question, killing them faster than the replacement rate? I don't know that either. Sorry. The fact that I can't tell is the point. No, really.

Category	April	June	August	October
US troops in Iraq (thousands)	145	146	140	130
Non-US troops in Iraq (thousands)	40	12	16	24
Iraqi security forces (thousands)	0	25	48	85.5
Iraqi security forces by type (police/military/other)	0/0/0	20/0/5	24/0/14	55/.7/29.8

A 10% decline in US troops strength since the end of "major combat operations." At this rate (10% every 7 months), we'd be out of Iraq in just over 5 years, but the one thing we can be sure of is that, one way or another, we will not withdraw troops at a linear rate over the next five years. The overall decline in coalition troop strength is greater - from 186k down to 154k, about 20%. If there's good news in the above numbers, it's this:

o US soldiers make up a decreasing portion of total security resources (US + Coalition + Iraqi).
o Iraqis make up an ever greater proportion of the total security structure.
o Police (Iraqi) are a bigger slice of the pie, and military smaller.
o Iraqi force size is growing at something close to a geometrical, rather than an arithmetic rate. (We'll come back to this.)
o We've doubled the total international contribution since the Occupation began.

Note: I moved some rows around to group Iraqi forces with non-Iraqi forces because it seemed to make the story clearer (the story being, well, "Iraqification"). Taken on its face, this is surely the best news in the report. Can we take it on its face? I have some concerns.

Query: What the hell is "Other?"

Any time you rapidly upsize a police force, you run risks - of lowering standards, of scanting on training, of letting bad apples slip through the background checks. (See Washington DC in the 1990s.) Given CPA limitations on area knowledge and language skills, those risks would seem to be high. But the proof is in the performance:

Category	April	June	August	October
Typical number of daily attacks	5-10	6	15	30
US troops killed, hostile fire	10	15	14	33
US troops killed, non-hostile causes	12	14	22	10
Coalition casualties, non-US	6	0	7	3
Annualized murder rate in Baghdad per 100,000 (Wash DC rate 46/year)	100	135	185	140

Okay, I am not considering this a good news portion of our data. Attacks are increasing at a geometric rate, roughly doubling every two months. US troops killed by hostile fire are trending sharply up even as US troop strength has dropped. The Coalition casualty rate looks like noise. A missing piece of data that would be great to have is deaths of Iraqi security forces in action. We know that, with the helicopter downings, November's US KIA number will exceed October and may double it.

The Baghdad murder rate figures really suffer from the lack of surrounding data. October is sharply down from August, but still above June. We don't yet know if it heralds a downward trend, if August was an outlier, or what. Whichever, the Baghdad murder rate remains four times that of America's murder capital, and Washington DC is something of an outlier itself - even most dangerous US metro areas have a murder rate in the 20s.

The thing is, the casualty and murder numbers problematize the good news on the changes in security force structure. The change in inputs (force structure) looks good, but the accompanying outputs (violence) don't.

We can smooth out our trends somewhat if we reverse the laborious effort by administration spokespeople to separate KIAs from non-combat death. If we combine US hostile fire, non-hostile and Coalition deaths into one number, we get:

April: 28
June: 29
August: 43
October: 46

This tells a smoother story, but an unfortunately clear one - Coalition deaths jump in mid-summer and stay at their higher level. You then need to add about two levels of perspective to that. 1) 46 out of 154k troops is a death rate of .03% per month. That is, needless to say, small in absolute terms. 2) However, guerrillas don't try to win by killing all the occupiers off. Guerrillas kill as a means of driving a wedge of mistrust and insecurity between occupier and occupied. The Times Op-Chart simply lacks data that would let us quantify that phenomenon.

That's the end of the security indicators section of the Op-Chart. In my judgment, the Times authors' claim that "the most accurate long-term outlook is one of guarded optimism" is, on this front, a stretch.

Next comes the shorter section of economic indicators.

Category	April	June	August	October
Unemployment rate	60+%	60+%	50+%	50+%

Pause for a second. Can you even imagine 50% unemployment? Every second person who wants a job unable to find one? US unemployment during the Great Depression peaked in 1933 at 25%. It was above 20% for only three years of the long trough. (See third graph.) That rate was considered so horrifying we, rightly or wrongly, changed our entire political economy forever after. To find unemployment rates that high in this country, you have to go to an indian reservation. We are talking about an entire nation, the size of California as they say, with twice the proportion of unemployed that the United States has ever seen. Now, jobs are a lagging indicator. But that's real lagging.

Category	April	June	August	October
Electricity produced nationwide - megawatts (pre-war level 3600* very hard to read, could be 3300)	0	3200	3300	3900
Electricity produced, Baghdad (pre-war level 2300)	0	700	1280	1250

There appears to be good news and bad news here. The good news comes when you subtract the Baghdad figures from the nationwide numbers to get "Everywhere but Baghdad":

Pre-war: 1300
April: 0
June: 2500
August: 2020
October: 2650

The figures suggest that outside of Baghdad, power production is now double pre-war levels. This is a good thing, because as longtime readers of Where Is Raed know, pre-war power levels in Iraq sucked.

Which brings us to the bad news. Baghdad is 20% of the population, home to Sadr City, the bulk of the country's intelligentsia, the center of US and international media attention, the fulcrum of the "Sunni triangle" and the center of gravity of the occupation. So the situation in Baghdad is

o Pre-war power levels were woefully inadequate;
o We've barely managed half that in the postwar period;
o We're stalled at half the pre-war figure - we've made no meaningful progress for three months.

This part does not inspire cautious optimism either. It represents a huge political problem, and with Baghdad's commercial status, a huge economic one too.

Lastly, oil, or as the hawks like to say, ooooiiiiiiiiiiiiiilllllllll!

Category	April	June	August	October
Oil production Mbbl/day (prewar 2.5)	0	0.7	1.4	2.1
Deisel/kerosene available to Iraqis - MegL/week (no prewar figure)	0	10	16	24

Without a prewar figure for the deisel/kerosene indicator, it's hard to make definite judgments.

As to oil production, I have a hard time seeing the good news. Iraq's prewar production was problematic. (Sanctions starved the industry of spare parts and investment. Iraqis kept the oil pumping, but using techniques that risked permanent damage to their fields. See here and here.) The Coalition seized the fields with minimal damage early in the war - no massive well fires like Kuwait in 1990. The Ministry of Oil building in Baghdad was famously high on the immediate post-invasion protection list. All that and we're still just reaching 2002 levels, let alone Iraq's salad-days high of 3.5 million barrels a day in 1979 (See pdf chart, Production 1958-2002).

We'll pass lightly over the early predictions.

Bottom line on the economic indicators? That unemployment rate is just a killer. The oil production could be worse. We're back up in "oil for food" range, and prior to Oil for Food, Iraq only had four decent years of production since 1980 - the brief interval between the Iran-Iraq War and Gulf War Phase I. The electricity situation is hopeful outside of Baghdad, awful within and not getting better there. Heating and cooking fuel? Beats me. Is the increase enough for the coming winter? Don't know. Is it better or worse than before the war? Don't know.

Are the authors right to say that "the most accurate long-term outlook is one of guarded optimism." I wouldn't say so. I would say that the figures undercut unalloyed pessimism. Alloyed pessimism, in fact, is what they leave me feeling.