Who'da Thunk It - Nick Gillespie suggests that it's suddenly the Republicans who can't come up with a politically-safe stance on gay marriage.

Call Me Wish Mail - A couple of early reactions to the Spectator piece on Democrats, Iraq and the "international community." Martial e-mails

Because we are in Iraq, and because both parties are going to keep us there, then it behooves us to at least try to do a good job. I know you have your well-founded suspicions that our government simply cannot succeed, and I agree that the current process has some built in defects. However, there are ways to do the job better, most of which, as you allude, include Iraqis doing the work.

Which isn't going to happen. Which is going to lead to more violence. Which is going to lead to failure. Which is going to annoy me. Damn.

In any case, I've thought of another built-in defect which is going to cause all sorts of trouble when Bush loses. The CPA is staffed by ideologues and Republican party climbers. The new Prez will need to change the staff almost completely (and most of them will probably resign anyway; no brownie points under the Dems) and whatever institutional memory exists will be taking the next flight out. Thus, (a) a fair amount of wheel reinvention with (b) several of the same old mistakes and wrong-turns, and (c) an Iraqi power structure that knows it can stall because there will always be another set of elections in the US.

And that isn't even taking into account how a Republican Congress will greet requests for funding.

So, either the Democrats need a really, really, really new strategy or they - and we - will be up to waist deep and still sinking in the big sandy.

Leaving aside the question of the ideological makeup of the CPA, it strikes me that there's definitely something to this concern. But how much responsibility is the CPA still supposed to have after July 2004? Note to self: Get up to speed on today's grand-strategic plan.

Loyal Reader Nell Lancaster:

Technically true [that "whatever Democrat might occupy the White House next year will have agreed in principle with the "preemptive war" doctrine"], but you know there's a real difference. The Dem administration of Dean or Clark is not going to have the destructive internal war between State/CIA and Defense (or experts and ideologues, as Josh Marshall has it). There isn't going to be any strong voice for PNAC adventures (though I'd be less equivocal about that if Dean's chief fundraiser hadn't been the director of AIPAC).

There isn't going to be the insane missile defense / space war push that has been Rumsfeld's project for 25 years. As a corporate boondoggle *and* poisoner of international relations missile defense has no equal.

I hope and expect Anthony Zinni will take a high-level position in the next admin, and if so he will work to undo the damage that Rumsfeld's "transformation" and the Iraq war are inflicting on the forces and reserves.

And a Dean or Clark admin will not mount constant assaults on civil liberties or flout and express open contempt for internationally agreed-on norms of behavior. I'm fully aware of the horrible damage the Clinton crew did with their "anti-terrorism" bills. But don't you honestly fear (or, um, have sober concerns about) the corrosive effects of another term of the current crowd on the state of American liberty and democracy? The equating of criticism with treason, the consistent pushing of the Big Lie (fusing Iraq with Islamic terror), the encouragement of the hard Christian right [Gen. Boykin is not just not fired from his political appointment, he's *in charge of Task Force 121*].... I could go on but don't need to -- you can supply as many or more examples yourself.

Should Bush pay a political price for the damage he's done to this country? How else can he be held accountable? Impeachment will be impossible and wouldn't be the best choice even if that weren't so.

I plan to be organizing from Wednesday, November 5 on to influence the next administration to get the hell out of Iraq. But if that admin is Bush again, I worry seriously about where that internal conflict will take us. I don't have that same worry with Dean or Clark.

The appeals court rulings are a wonderful breather, aren't they? But the real battle is to prevent Congress from legalizing the same abuses. The likes of Hillary Clinton don't inspire optimism in that regard. {God, I loathe her, as much as some Republicans do. It's just that I don't obsess about her.} I hope that a left-right alliance can stave off such a prospect and roll back the PATRIOT damage. That's hope based on actual optimism-generating events, not wishful-thinking-as-plan....

Nell makes some good points here, and some others. Among the others, the certainty that "Dean or Clark is not going to have the destructive internal war between State/CIA and Defense." Most administrations have internal wars between State and Defense, or State and the NSC. The CIA usually comes down between the two parties but closer to State. The Democratic Party has its Nation wing and its New Republic wing, its Vances versus its Bzrzezinskis, its Albrights versus its Christophers.

Would a Democratic Administration lack "any strong voice for PNAC adventures." Maybe. Maybe we get more Haitis and Kosovos instead of Iraqs. However. A Democratic Administration would also likely lack a strong voice against PNAC adventures.

Let's consider the role of the Clinton Administration in our current predicament.

Properly considered, the Gulf War lasted 12 years from Winter 1991 to Winter 1993. Forget "Gulf War I" and "Gulf War II" - there was an effort to clear Iraqi troops from Kuwait that lasted for 6 weeks, an effort to depose Saddam Hussein without invading Iraq that lasted 12 years, and an effort to depose Saddam Hussein by invading Iraq that lasted nine months. I'm prepared to declare that very personal war over as of last Sunday. What we're doing now probably counts as a new one.

Eight of the twelve years of that war occurred under a Democratic President. For all of those years an executive finding authorizing lethal force against the ruler of Iraq was in effect. For all of those eight years we enforced no-fly zones which had among their aims to make Saddam Hussein look so ineffectual that nationalistic Iraqi generals would take him out.

George H.W. Bush started the engine and George W. Bush drove the thing home, but Bill Clinton kept the seat warm. Clinton found it politically useful to keep the heat on Iraq. His Administration's rhetoric so thoroughly aped that of the hawks that to this day, faced with some charge that "Bush lied" or "The White House exaggerated the threat from Saddam Hussein" hawks will cite Clintonian statements about supposed Iraqi weapons or declared Iraqi threats.

I fear that that is the best we can expect from a Democratic administration - a lull while the Best and the Brightest Mark II repair to their think tanks and journals and hone their rhetoric for the next go-round, and the whole time, a Democratic President and his national security team making oddly-similar noises.

All that said. "Should Bush pay a political price for the damage he's done to this country? How else can he be held accountable?"

Sure. I laid out the conditions that would lead me to think otherwise two months ago. Looking over my handy checklist, I see that the President is 0.5-for-7 so far. That's why I suggest, at the end of the article, that right wing doves should vote for a third-party candidate rather than Bush. The practical effect of recommending that conservatives and libertarians not vote for the Republican is to favor the Democrat, whoever it may be. That, though, is the extent of my enthusiasm.

A Fanboy's Labor-Saving Device - Everything you need to know about the reliability of Time.com's Andrew Arnold as a "comix" critic is that on his usual-suspects Top 10 of the year, Craig Thompson's Blankets gets the top spot. As if. Even early booster ADD eventually saw through this one.

Revealed: The Kevin Drum-American Spectator Connection - So the other week in a typically lively Calpundit comments thread, someone averred that the Democrats had "better ideas" about dealing with Iraq. I asked what those were, got the expected answer and explained why I didn't find it very compelling. Then I decided there was an article in it. "Wish Globally" is the result. I wonder if Daniel Drezner's correspondents ran out of energy already.

To Each Its Proper Function - Gene Healy has an important new policy analysis cautioning against the growing tendency to use the US military in domestic law enforcement work. As Jesse Walker said some time ago, we're a country that has been busy turning out police into soldiers and our soldiers into police. Bad business at both ends.

Slate on Alan Moore - Not much to disagree with in this attempt at an even-handed appraisal of comics scribe Alan Moore's ouevre. He even forebore to kick Moore around for his godawful post-nuclear attack graphic novel whose name escapes me. (Note to double-semi-comics bloggers: I know "comics scribe Alan Moore" sounds twee in our circles, but I have to clarify who the guy is for this site's non-comics readers.)

They Got the Weed and They Got the Taxis - Daniel Davies bursts my bubble about mellowed-out machine gun makers by pointing to Jamaica, a place with plenty of ganja and plenty of weapons. And plenty of kleptocracy and other tsuris too, but he recalls to my mind a truism of "intoxication studies":

One of the few things we do know about people's behaviour on drugs is that it’s very context-dependent and influenced by their state of mind at the time of taking them.

And the context, as I recall, includes cultural expectations too. For instance, a culture that "expects" drunks to be belligerent will have more belligerent drunks than a country that expects them to be mopey.

But bigger problems than the drugs Jamaicans use are the ones that pass through - as a transshipment point between South America and the US, it's as much a victim of drug prohibition as any American city or chemotherapy patient. And some of its most dangerous guns are the ones in the hands of its police. As you might expect, most of Jamaica's murders not committed by police are committed with illegal firearms. We also deport a lot of violent Jamaicans back to the island, and "According to the [Associated Press] report, in Jamaica, one out of every 106 males over the age of 15 is now a criminal deportee from the United States." There's not enough ganja in the world to mellow all that bad news out.

The Sun Will Come Out Samarra - We need to bring the troops home because I'm scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel for headlines now. Anyway, the Army has clearly decided to try to take back control of Samarra this week. Somewhere recently I read a claim that Samarra's clans were actually fierce rivals of the Tikriti clans, but I can't find the reference now. If true, it may say something about the nature of the resistance that Samarra is such a problem area. Then again it may not. And I might have misread.

Now THIS Is a Victory - Two, actually. The Second Circuit circumscribes the Executives "enemy combatant" discretion, and the Ninth Circuit shines the light of habeas corpus on Gitmo. I think the Ninth Circuit should let them grow their own pot too, though even I draw the line at permitting them to construct machine guns.

Thought for the Day - If the terrorists prevail, the terrorists will have won.

Congratulations to Randy Barnett of the Volokh Conspiracy. Other bloggers bitch about the prohibition on medical marijuana. Barnett did something about it - won a case before the 9th Circuit of the US Court of Appeals. Better yet, he won it on Commerce Clause grounds. That's a double whammy for freedom. You can read his recap of the case.

So apparently, the current state of Commerce Clause jurisprudence is this: you can't grow your own wheat without federal permission, but you can grow your own pot. I'd find that even more consoling if I did drugs.

McFreedom speculated last month, before the appeals decision, that

This brings to mind an intriguing future in which machine guns may be owned by ordinary citizens - if self manufactured - and in which marijuana may be grown by ordinary citizens. Since states would still be free to outlaw these activities (barring any Supreme Court decision applying the 2nd to the states via the 14th, of course), I rather suspect that there would be states in which one could grow marijuana (granted a gift of seeds from a passing stranger), and states in which one could make a machine gun, but very few states in which one could do both.

which is too bad because if someone's of a mind to make himself a machinegun I'd like him to be nice and mellow afterwards. See also his speculations on the implications of Stewart for the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. I tend to think, though, that filesharers have something pot growers don't - a large, well-connected lobby to complain about them.

Tis the Season - Care packages for the troops via USO. Packages are $25 a pop, you can donate online and include a special message.

(Via ThumbBlog.)

What He Said - Sean Collins, ladies and gentlemen, on Strom Thurmond:

[T]o him, black people may not have been good enough to go to the same schools or eat at the same counters or drink from the same water fountains and probably even to vote, if that were possible, but they were good enough to fuck and then discard.

About sums it up.

The D-Word - Oh by the way, Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province has officially adopted Sharia Law.

The provincial government dismisses such arguments along with the charge it is overseeing the creeping Talebanisation of North West Frontier Province.

"The Taleban were totally different," says the provincial law minister, Zafar Azam. "They were uneducated and revolutionary. We are doing things though through democracy."

Ooh, democracy! And it's true, they held a vote, and the bigger team won. The smaller team now may not charge interest, must teach more Koranic instruction in schools, cover its wicked wicked cheekbones if it is female, and all that.

I really regret the way we toss the term "democracy" around in our foreign policy rhetoric. It gives people the idea that the most important thing in politics is voting. But the most important thing in politics is freedom. The American model is not "democracy," it's constitutionally-limited government with a democratic component (even still). Far, far more important than the fact that Americans get to vote is the large category of things on which Americans don't get to vote. Locking up people who write bad things, jailing people for worshipping the wrong gods, compelling self-incriminating testimony in criminal cases, issuing bills of attainder and other items on an admittedly shrinking list. Even here, it's shameful that people can vote to prohibit behaviors that a sane country would call "making an honest living." But we had the idea right. Then we go an screw up explaining it to everyone else.

"Democracy," circumscribed, appears to be an indispensible component of the free society package. But it is not itself freedom and our evangelists could make that clearer. If they believe it. If they don't they should tell us, so we can better use our circumscribed votes next time they come up for election.

We're Jammin'! Jammin'! Jammin' Straight From Al-LAH! - Hesiod e-mails an interesting link re the Musharraf assassination attempt. The BBC reports that "officials say" that a radio jamming device in Musharraf's motorcade "may have blocked the signal to the remote-controlled bomb" that blew up after his entourage crossed a bridge in Rawalpindi. Could be. As Hesiod notes, it's the kind of thing you'd think the Pakistani Government would want to keep to itself, unless that Hindustan Times conspiracy theory article struck a nerve.

A Fangirl's Dear John Note - How I Got OUT of Comics, by Ginger Stampley.

The Democratic Capitalist Revolution Comes to Iraq - Raed (not Salam) gets a leaflet :

THREE to TEN years behind bars, is what I'll get if "they" got me buying petrol from the "black market"!!!! I was reading this leaflet printed and distributed last week with my eyes opened .. opened very much .. this way >> OO
YEARS? not DAYS?
Ladies and gentlemen , you either wait for 6 hours in the gas station queue, wondering how to keep theifs and bullets away from your cars, or you'll enjoy our prisons of freedom for the rest of your life.

Over to you, Samazdata!

quote>

Imitation Tech Blog Item - The previous item was the first one I've published through Movable Type's editor in weeks. Zempt is just too damn convenient to bother logging into MT itself any more. The downside of this is that I'm late updating the blogroll, which is not fair to the nice people at Obsidian Wings or any of the other blogs on deck for the New Crew. The one downside to Zempt is that it will let you paste text containing smart quotes, em-dashes and other characters it can't handle if those characters appeared in the text you copied. Then it chokes on the upload and you have to hunt them down and replace them. Very occasionally, like tonight, I can't find them all and just open MT and copy the item over.

Personal to Matthew Barganier: I have a strict rule against "reciprocal links." However, if the Antiwar.com blog adds UO to its links list, I'm willing to favor it with a permanent link, come January, from the original libertarian anti-interventionist weblog - all in the spirit of fellowship.

Metric System Interim Report - In the item linked below, Andrew Olmsted writes

U.S. forces in Iraq should stop handing out enemy casualty figures. The enemy will know when we've given him a pasting, and the removal of the focus on kill ratios and body counts will encourage more focus on the metrics that can help us win the war in Iraq, like the number of people will access to potable water and electricity.

So how is the Op-Chart update likely to look next month? Up and down, with chances for some more ups.

One obvious improvement will be the "Baathists Still at Large" line since, while Saddam's "people" are still in bondage, so is he. That's a big one.

Trends are also good, so far this month, on US Troops Killed, Hostile Fire. We are back to a "one-a-day" rate after the awful pace of November. Absent some more helicopter kills or a truck bomb in the Green Zone, we can expect to come in well below November's record total. And November doesn't count, Op-Chartwise, because the Op-Chart table only shows every second month. (See Antiwar.com's daily tracking report.)

A curious feature of that tracking report, by the way, is deaths from "non-hostile gunshot wounds." These might be accidents, but some could be suicides too. There is also always the question of which fatal vehicle accidents were actually caused by drivers attempting to avoid an attack.

Antiwar.com doesn't track non-US coalition casualties with the same detail as American casualties, so I can't give you any updates there. I have an impression that Iraqi security-force deaths (military and police) are way up, possibly reflecting a change in emphasis on the part of the guerrillas, but I have no numbers to back that up. Let's wait and see.

The CPA does not provide street crime figures on its website, or oil production or unemployment numbers. It still updates those electricity figures every day, though, and bless them for it. (Though, uh, they're still showing October pictures and charts on their electricity welcome page.)

So, what's up with electricity? The news is all bad. The nationwide seven-day average peak production stands at 3,234 Megawatts. That's below the Op-Chart compilers' pre-war figure of 3600. It's 1200 below the brief high reached on October 11, and less than half what the Iraq's Ministry of Electricity estimates as Iraq's full needs (7,000). That's from the electricity welcome page, as is the undated statement that

The MOE is preparing for fall maintenance, when power production will be reduced in the short term. Power plants were shutting down units according to a schedule designed to end before winter’s cooler months, when electricity demand for residential heating increases.

The 7-day average for Baghdad, which by the way you have to calculate yourself, is 1,191. It was 1196 on August 7 (first day CPA provides), 1237 on August 31, 1312 on September 30 and 1231 on the last day of November. In between it bounces from brief lows in the 800s to even briefer highs just over 1400.

Power situation: not good.

Oil production and export: According to Brookings' Saban Center, proximate source of the original Op-Chart metrics, Iraq's November oil production was 2.1mbbl/day, essentially unchanged from October. Remember that November doesn't count, though. There are no in-progress December numbers. (The Saban Center data is frustratingly incomplete, which is itself a metric - when getting good data from Iraq becomes a routine matter, that will be one of the most important signs of progress yet.)

Fuel available to the population numbers look bad, which jibes with the reports of gas lines. Diesel, Kerosene, Gasoline/Benzene and LPG (like "liquid natural gas," but not natural) weekly averages for December so far are all down from November. All of them except kerosene are way down from October. (Kerosene availability is slightly up.)

Now if this week's successes against the current insurgency continue, an improved security situation could start all the metrics trending upward. As it is, the security news is better than it's been and the economic news worse.

Too Late! - I used all my good Samarra titles already. So I'll just send you to Andrew Olmsted for the latest.

Much Better - I didn't look at Daniel Drezner's paper, but his critique of yesterday's speech is Dean-bashing done right.

Give Me a Break - So I finish my article about the inadequacies of the Democratic candidates' Iraq policies, including Howard Dean, and now David Brooks tries to get me to like Dean more:

Dean did not argue that the U.S. should aggressively promote democracy in the Middle East and around the world.

Instead, he emphasized that the U.S. should strive to strengthen global institutions. He argued that the war on terror would be won when international alliances worked together to choke off funds for terrorists and enforce a global arms control regime to keep nuclear, chemical and biological materials away from terror groups.

Dean is not a modern-day Woodrow Wilson. He is not a mushy idealist who dreams of a world government. Instead, he spoke of international institutions as if they were big versions of the National Governors Association, as places where pragmatic leaders can go to leverage their own resources and solve problems.

I'm not big on many "global institutions." If I never hear "Kyoto" again it'll be too soon. But "international alliances worked together to choke off funds for terrorists" - that sounds pretty darn good. Meanwhile, per Brooks, what's supposed to be great about George Bush is the unceasing grandiloquence of his rhetoric. Because "conservatism" is all about massive transformational projects.

It's For The Family! - Wrapping up the final edit on my forthcoming Spectator piece on what passes for the Democratic alternative on Iraq, I figured I ought to check Howard Dean's big foreign policy address today to make sure there are no surprises that would throw off the article. And dammit, it's not worth [Spectator article rate censored] to put myself through this.

The whole point of becoming a libertarian is to save time that would otherwise be spent reading major-party position papers. What have I done?

Department of SNARF! - From PhotoDude:

And this is where I proceeded to get tickled: "When asked 'How are you?' said the official, Saddam responded, 'I am sad because my people are in bondage.' When offered a glass of water by his interrogators, Saddam replied, 'If I drink water I will have to go to the bathroom and how can I use the bathroom when my people are in bondage?'"

And in a flash, a quote from Martin Mull came to mind: "You know why so many men 'nickname' their penis? Because they don't want all the important decisions in life being made by a complete stranger." And I wondered if that's what Saddam named his: "My People." "I am sad because My People are in bondage. My People want to be free. How can I go to the bathroom when My People are in bondage? Mark my words, My People will rise up against you, or perhaps that cute Corporal over there."

UPDATE: And get your new talking points at Big Picnic.

A Work E-Mail Exchange from today.

Him: Did you see the news last week? Mathematicians found the biggest prime number ever. It's too long to type, though, so I can't send it to you.

Me: Just send me the factors. I'll multiply it out myself.

This has been your unbelievably nerdy blog item for December.

Power to Tax Indeed Power to Destroy - Corner Comics surrenders. The owner couldn't afford to continue the fight, especially with the New Year's deadline looming. "The power of the blogosphere" was no match for the Forces of Darkness - if only the IRS agent a) were somewhat well-known; and b) committed a verbal gaffe. Then we'd have his ass on a plate with hash browns. It's what we're good at.

Dirk Deppey has the details in a superb investigation into the issues at stake here - essentially, Corner Comics became another front in the IRS's never-ending war against cash-based accounting. In fact, Sean Collins observes that Dirk's web operation has single-handedly put his magazine's print news division in the shade. His reporting on Corner Comics deserves to be read well beyond comics circles. (The comicsphere's gain is the larger internet's loss. Were Dirk's purview not limited by his occupational mission, his gifts as a reporter and a critic would be more widely-recognized. His biggest failing - not infrequently disagreeing with me - would remain, but this turns out to be no bar to blog stardom.)

Laura "Tegan" Gjovaag confirms Dirk's account of the issues at stake.

Publications will be destroyed because of this. Stories shredded. Pleasure reduced. Accrue that, why don't you?

First, Roll Your Tinfoil into a Cone - It didn't take long for the conspiracy talk to start swirling in the wake of the weekend's events. No, not Mrs. Offering's standout performance getting the emergency room to pay attention to newly-asthmatic Offering Boy - everybody recognizes that for the unimpeachable achievement in mothering that it was. Rather, Hindustan Times reports that "highly placed sources in Islamabad say that [Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf] may have engineered" the failed assassination attempt against him "to retain Washington's support as key ally in the war against terror and to strengthen his hold on power." That's an interesting word, "may." I don't dismiss the possibility out of hand. One report said that, according to Musharraf's own statement, the "near-miss" was off by "just half a minute or one minute." At Presidential motorcade speed, that's a nice safe distance. If "Flypaper Theory" really worked and these clowns came to Iraq, they'd blow up Kuwait. (Musharraf link via a skeptical Instapundit.)

Meanwhile, what would momentous events in the Middle East be without Zionist conspiracy theories - in this case, a conspiracy theory by Zionists. Debka is claiming that "these seven anomalies point to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein was not in hiding; he was a prisoner."

Not an American prisoner, mind you, but the prisoner of a group of Iraqis who had been negotiating with the US for the reward money since shortly after Saddam's November 16 tape. Debka being Debka, the whole thing is clear proof that the Sharon government needs to give up its accomodating ways and kick some ass. (Hat tip: Hesiod, who connects the Debka story with the curious Rep. Roy LaHood interview two weeks ago.)

I won't believe a word until I hear it from Con Coughlin.

Toon In, Turn On - Good article by Jesse Walker in the Baltimore Sun about the politics of popular adult cartoons. Covers the Simpsons, King of the Hill and South Park. What's good about it is that, unlike some other critics, Jesse doesn't imagine that all three shows comport perfectly with his world view.

Who Lost Russia Mail - Reader Greg Pearson has a different reading of the history than my own (original UO text italicized):

This is actually a subject I know something about. In the late 90s, I worked for an organization that specialized in Russia. Among my other duties, I spent an hour or three every day reading news reports from Russia and the surrounding countries: everything from poor translations of local papers to international news agencies to U.S. government propaganda (Radio Free Europe, in other words). We concentrated specifically on political, military, and law enforcement news.

Where did Putinism come from? Answer: from Chechnya.

I think you have that exactly backwards. The second Chechen war came from Putinism, not the other way around. The first Chechen war led to Putinism only in the sense that Saddam Hussein led to National Greatness Conservatism. In both cases, the point was to have a war, not to have any specific war. If it hadn't been Chechnya (Iraq), it would have been somewhere else (Syria).

By 1998, it was clear that Yeltsin was going to be stepping down as President in the fairly near future. The big score in Russian politics was to become his chosen successor. For the next two years, the Russian government looked like the Italian one: They went through a Prime Minister, at most, every six months. The new PM was inevitably Yeltsin's golden boy and his likely successor. Until, suddenly, he was forced out of office and became an instant political has been. This was probably partly due to Yeltsin's fear that a clear and strong successor would force him from office before he was ready to go and partly due to maneuvering for power among various factions in the Kremlin.

The last of these Prime Ministers of the month was Putin. He'd learned from what happened to his immediate predecessors. Eschewing the typical government strategy of setting up your friends to loot the state oil companies, he turned his energy to starting a war in Chechnya. The point wasn't that there was a great deal of popular outrage at Chechnya or that things were particularly bad there, it was simply that he figured that nobody would dare dump the PM during a war, especially not if he was prosecuting it vigorously. That led to crackdowns in Chechnya, which led to the Moscow apartment bombings (maybe by Chechens, maybe by Putin, maybe by the mob, maybe by Saddam
Hussein), which led to the second Chechen War. And, lo and behold, crushing the evil separatists is popular. The public thinks that continuity of strong leadership is important in wartime. And Yeltsin resigns and names Putin his chosen successor. Funny how that works.

The Yeltsin government, which for all its flaws had many liberal-
in-the-European-sense ministers...

I think this is just basically not true. I don't think there was a significant liberal-in-the-European-sense faction in the Russian government since the of Grigor Yavlinksy's term as Prime Minister in the early 90s. Probably the best back-of-the-envelope way of judging the influence of the liberals in Russia is to track the size of the Yabloko party in Parliament and the number and importance of the cabinet positions held by it's members. I leave that as an exercise for the reader, but you won't find the numbers as encouraging as the Clinton administration would have liked you
to believe.

Continuing with this site's (very recent) tradition of hard-hitting reader interviews, I followed up with a question:

So Chechnya was quiet for a time between the first war and the second? My memory played tricks on me.

Quiet is a relative term, of course. The provincial government paid lip service to being part of Russia and not much more. The central government actually had very little control of the province. There were occasional bouts of separatist guerilla/terrorist activity (most notably the raid on a Russian hospital in 199...7?) and a general low-level insurgency. The whole place was run by gangsters of one form or another.

But that doesn't make it horribly different from other Central Asian Russian provinces (see particularly Daghestan and North Ossetia; one or the other of which would probably would have been the target of Putinism if Chechnya didn't exist). Chechnya was worse. But the Chechen government basically had a live and let live accommodation with the Feds. The Russian military made the occasional desultory raid on the guerillas in response to the worst of the provocations, but mostly they only paid lip service to fighting them. Things there sucked, but nobody really cared until Russian politics required a war.

I take Greg's point, but sometimes the distinction between "quiet" and peace is important - such as in Iraq, where, whatever the twelve-year intermission between land combat was, it was not, with its sanctions, coup-fostering and 34,000 bombing runs a year, peace. Still, Greg's reminder is important. It isn't just that pointless wars can advance the fortunes of political creeps. Creeps can also advance pointless wars to improve their fortunes.

There's Your Trouble, Continued - Diana Moon explains why Iraq's Shi'ites haven't expressed more gratitude to the US for getting rid of Saddam. It makes a lot of sense.

Share the Joy - Laura "Tegan" Gjovaag sings. Tacitus celebrates the success of 4ID while moderating his hopes for any substantial lessening of the insurgency. Juan Cole recalls Saddam's crimes and, like Tacitus, doubts the impact on the insurgency. Contrariwise, Josh Chafetz of Oxblog has the optimistic view. David Post, on Volokh, takes the press to task for "some powerful need to pretend that we understand the world much, much better than we do or can that overwhelms our reason -- at least, that's my current theory." Hey, it's mine too. Last word to Gene Healy:

[I]t's always a good day when you see a murderous, once-mighty tyrant looking like a bedraggled drunk rousted from the bus station. I hope we turn him over to the Iraqis and they hang him high. And I hope this improves our chances for a rapid and dignified exit. Maybe now we can work on capturing that other guy.

Joy to the World - Celebrate the capture of Saddam with the perfect Auden poem, recalled to us by Nick Weininger of the Agitator.

He's Baaaaaaaaaack! - The aptly named Con Coughlin, that is, who so amused us with the Statement of Lieutenant-Colonel al-Dabbagh last week. This time he has a twofer. First

Iraq's coalition government claims that it has uncovered documentary proof that Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks against the US, was trained in Baghdad by Abu Nidal, the notorious Palestinian terrorist.

That's from a "handwritten memo, a copy of which has been obtained exclusively by the Telegraph," dated July 21, 2001. Hey, it could be true!

And how convenient that the exact same memo contains a second section

which is headed "Niger Shipment", [which] contains a report about an unspecified shipment - believed to be uranium - that it says has been transported to Iraq via Libya and Syria.

How fortunate for us that Iraqi intelligence thought, two years ago, to provide a single document establishing Saddam's connection to September 11, and the authenticity of the "Niger story." (Pity the poor hawks who have been pushing a "Bush never said Niger" line for months, and must now pirhouette on that matter.)

There are a couple of little problems, like, for instance, the fact that

o The entire validation of the memo we have is a statement by "Dr Ayad Allawi, a member of Iraq's ruling seven-man Presidential Committee"
o The Telegraph reported in August 2002 that

Abu Nidal, the Palestinian terrorist, was murdered on the orders of Saddam Hussein after refusing to train al-Qa'eda fighters based in Iraq, The Telegraph can reveal.

The author of that story? Hey, guess. (Hat tip: Pandagon.)

Now, you may be saying, The memo dates from 2001, and Abu Nidal was murdered in 2002. So where's the contradiction. By doing so, you're saying that Abu Nidal was okay with training Al Qaeda terrorists for Saddam in Summer 2001, but not okay doing so in Summer 2002. There's the further problem of whether Abu Nidal was even in Iraq in Summer 2001. Con's older report declares that

According to reports received from Iraqi opposition groups, Abu Nidal had been in Baghdad for months as Saddam's personal guest, and was being treated for a mild form of skin cancer.

Jane's also reported that

A senior Iraqi official said on 20 August that Abu Nidal, who had returned to Iraq several months earlier bearing a false Yemeni passport and was placed under house arrest, killed himself after Iraqi agents accused him of conspiring with anti-Iraqi forces, including Kuwait [and Saudi Arabia]

Nidal backed Kuwait during the 1991 war.

The point is, "several months ago" from August 2002 does not seem likely to extend as far back as July 2001. Nidal appears to have been in Baghdad in 2000 and again in 2002. He may or may not have even been in Baghdad in 2001 to have that stunning change of heart. ("I have trained an Al Qaeda operative for the biggest terror strike in history"/"I won't train Al Qaeda operatives".)

Like I said, it could be true. Maybe Nidal was in Baghdad in July 2001. Maybe Mohammad Atta was too. Maybe there was something a hard case like Atta could only learn from Abu Nidal, and maybe Nidal taught it to him that summer.

But it would be foolish, given his track record, to accept that on Con's say-so. Oh, and the original "Niger memo" from British intelligence covered events in the late 1990s. They're slow shippers in Niger.

(Telegraph link via - of course! - Instapundit.)

Dangling Modifiers Are Not Our Friends - From the current version of the MSNBC report on Saddam's capture:

From hiding, U.S. commanders have said Saddam played some role in the anti-U.S. resistance that has killed hundreds of soldiers and civilians in Iraq.

Get me rewrite!

Well, Now - Take a couple of days off to: discover your son has asthma; run a million errands, and; sleep like the dead; and they go and make news on you. The nerve.

The capture of Saddam is better than I hoped, as I figured the US government would prefer dead to alive. It removes my biggest qualm about an early withdrawal - that if we pulled out with Saddam free, he could crawl back into power and put the hammer down on anyone who showed the slightest pleasure in his downfall. And what comes out of any interrogation and trial could be grimly entertaining: Mick Jagger's boardroom scene in performance ("Gentlemen, you aaaaaaaallllllll work for me!"), the denouement of Goodfellas ("Everywhere we went, somebody had their hand out").

We will now learn much. Will Saddam's capture break the back of the armed resistance? MSNBC reports Army commanders saying that it appeared Saddam played "some role" in directing resistance activities. But according to CNN:

Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the commander of the 4th Infantry in Tikrit, said that Saddam was armed with a pistol, but was "very disoriented," and did not resist U.S. forces.

The soldiers found Saddam hiding in what they called a "spider hole," six-to-eight feet deep, equipped with a rudimentary ventilation system and camouflaged with bricks and dirt.

which does not necessarily sound like the mastermind of a guerrilla war. Given that early reports are always wrong, there's no point in teasing definitive conclusions from the little we think we know.

If the coalition can get Saddam to issue a statement calling on the guerrillas to lay down their weapons, will they do so? Coming at it from the other angle, will the obvious relief among Iraqis at Saddam's capture translate into more cooperation against any resistance that remains? Hawks have long argued that fear of Saddam's return was the big dampener on ordinary Iraqis' willingness to embrace the occupation, the transition and the anti-insurgent effort. We should find out how true that is over the next several months. Some doves, meanwhile, have claimed that only fear of Saddam's return kept Iraqis from being more anti-coalition than they have been. We'll find out how right they were too. And of course there is much yet to learn about weapons programs and Al Qaeda ties or the lack of such things.

We have a better chance now to meet some of our stated goals in Iraq.

From the standpoint of yesterday, Saddam's capture is wonderful news. From the standpoint of a year ago, it is a sigh of relief well down the road of a wrong turn. Saddam Hussein was one of the world's bigger bastards and deserves whatever is coming to him. That statement remains independent of the wisdom of the US undertaking to give it.