Son of Crock Files - My contention that the "Zarqawi memorandum" likely constituted somebody's black op takes a hit today from Juan Cole, who doubts Zarqawi's authorship but nevertheless writes

I can, however, confirm that it was written by a radical Sunni Muslim, who hates Shiites and wants to fight the Coalition troops in Iraq in the most effective way. I did not see any false notes in it that might suggest it is a fraud.

Chance that I will end up eating my words on the authenticity of the memo, if not its claimed authorship: increasing.

Man Bites Dog - Worthwhile Charles Krauthammer column about terrorism. (No, you have not logged onto the wrong blog by mistake. I, Jim Henley, wrote that last sentence.) Krauthammer tackles what I've come to think of as the "Gene Healy Question" - why hasn't al Qaeda done anything in the way of further attacks on American soil. Krauthammer allows that

It is easy to understand why nobody wants to talk about this. The administration dare not take credit for what is on the face of it an amazing phenomenon, but one that can reverse itself in a flash. And the opposition hardly wants to highlight a development that might shed favorable light on this administration's post-9/11 stewardship.

Even commentators are uneasy about bringing it up. Any analysis could instantaneously turn into embarrassment.

Nonetheless, it seems odd to have a moratorium on so intriguing a question. I ask it of almost every intelligence expert I meet. Their speculations fall along two lines.

The first line is that the al Qaeda part of the war on terror has been spectacularly successful, that "al Qaeda has been so severely degraded and disrupted that it simply cannot do it." Krauthammer finds this wanting:

But I remain puzzled. Let's say that al Qaeda is so badly hurt that it cannot organize another Sept. 11 with 19 hijackers, four planes and years of training. But how much training, how much planning can it take to pack a few truck bombs and blow them up in a bunch of crowded shopping malls? Considering the economic and psychological havoc that would wreak, why haven't they done it?

Which brings us to line of speculation number two, which I have not encountered before:

Part of the appeal of al Qaeda -- what it uses to recruit people and funds -- is its mystique. Superhuman feats, brilliant execution, masterful planning. That aura feeds its ideology of historical inevitability, that ultimately it will prevail over Western decadence, because the seeming high-tech West lacks the diabolical and methodical will that Islamism brings to the war.

In other words, launching Intifada-style attacks inside the United States would compromise al Qaeda's brand identity.

This is intriguing, and I'm immediately adding it to the Healy Theory that there are just a lot fewer committed anti-American terrorists than we think there are on the list of plausible explanations. Which is more plausible? I'm sticking with Gene for now. After all, "al Qaeda" is, as we keep hearing, a pretty amorphous thing. I saw someone describe it this week as a kind of venture capital firm for Islamist militants. Since car bombs, dynamite belts and sniper rifles are so cheap, terrorists who wanted to unleash such attacks in the US wouldn't even need to approach al Qaeda for funding and approval - they could just do it.

Elsewhere in the article Krauthammer is inclined to give the administration credit for pretty much everything the Administration has done in the name of anti-terror policy, which is pretty much his "first line of speculation" on steroids. Even if explanation one (We kicked al Qaeda ass!) obtains, that doesn't mean everything the government has done since September 11, 2001 is wise or just, merely that the net effect, applied to whatever level of future threat existed, has been positive. So far. As Krauthammer notes of any available explanation, "It could prove catastrophically wrong tomorrow."

Outrage of the Week - Someone from the Toronto Star sent a hassling e-mail to blogger Damian Penny. Penny had done a critique-by-excerpt of a Star column by Thomas Walkom, using boldface to highlight the passages he considered especially outrageous. The Star representative accused Penny of violating the paper's copyright.

Granted that Penny's original item was light on analysis or even invective, and the excerpts are large. The bulk of the item is text taken directly from the Star. However, it's clear that in the context of internet writing that Penny's use of boldface as criticism constitutes original expression on Penny's part - it's a value-add, as it were. And as Penny notes, he appears to be in compliance with the Canadian copyright provisions on "fair dealing."

So, petty, groundless harrassment by some functionary is what we're dealing with here. Boo to the Star.

(Via Flit.)

Scandal Update - There are now two people who have told reporters they remember seeing Lieutenant Bush at the headquarters of the 187th Tactical Recon Group in Montgomery, AL - Joe LeFevers (scroll to bottom of article) and Lt. Col. John "Bill" Calhoun. The Boston Globe quotes someone who was supposed to be a supporting witness of the chief accuser of the "record cleanup" aspect of the scandal as contradicting said accuser's version of events.

Meanwhile on the John Kerry front, we have a name for the alleged object of his affection (Alex Polier), an age (24 now), and a date range (four years ago, when Polier was 20). Warning: British press! The young woman's parents seem to confirm that they perceived an interest on Kerry's part in their daughter, but it's unclear if things ever developed into full-blown hanky-pankey - perhaps because of the vigilance of Mom and Dad. See the virtues of heterosexual marriage for child rearing? (Though if true, the story is at best win-some, lose-some , heterosexual marriagewise.) Or, you know, maybe the Poliers imagined the icky aspects of Kerry's interest in their daughter.

Meanwhile, in the American Prospect ("Left of the New Republic, Right of the Nation"), Murray S. Waas reports that "Two government officials have told the FBI that conservative columnist Robert Novak was asked specifically not to publish the name of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame in his now-famous July 14 newspaper column. The two officials told investigators they warned Novak that by naming Plame he might potentially jeopardize her ability to engage in covert work, stymie ongoing intelligence operations, and jeopardize sensitive overseas sources."

What is by no means clear is that the "two government officials" are the "two White House officials" originally reported as the leakers, lo these months ago. I'm assuming not, based on the way reporters use terms-of-art phrases like "government official" and "senior administration official" and such. (Hey, there's an idea for a useful web page: a glossary of terms that explains which formulation means what.)

Is the Prospect story really about trying to shift as much blame as possible to Robert Novak? If it worked there would be dry eyes across the political spectrum. Will it work? That's complicated.

Getting the Memo - The Coalition Provisional Authority has what it calls "Text from Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi Letter" online. It's an interesting if curious document: six numbered sections, no preamble, light on the "God willings" compared to comparable documents I've seen. The Arabic version seems to have more of the apparatus of a letter about it, judging from the shape of the text on the page. Presumably the English-language version comprises excerpts. I think I have the odd reader who understands Arabic, and I would be keen to receive any insights they care to provide on the Arabic text and how it compares with the English translation.

Going by the English translation, the author is a man of diverse views, mostly about the same topic. We go from

Praised be to Allah, however, with relentless effort and searching we have acquired some places and their numbers are increasing, to become base points for the brothers who will spark war and bring the people of this country into a real battle with god's will.

to

There is no doubt that our field of movement is shrinking and the grip around the throat of the Mujahidin has begun to tighten. With the spread of the army and police, our future is becoming frightening.

and

As we get closer to the decisive moment, we feel that our entity is spreading within the security void existing in Iraq, something that will allow us to secure bases on the ground, these bases that will be the jump start of a serious revival, god willing.

Note: Christopher Dickey, in Newsweek, writes that, having read the Arabic version, he finds the language and subject matter plausibly authentic. He also calls the English translation "politically correct excerpts, which left out the first nine of 17 pages." He reports that

But as an American here in Iraq, I don't find the letter much consolation.

The writer, sinister idealist that he is, complains that too many of the home-grown fighters in Iraq are reluctant to be suicidal martyrs. Instead, he says, these Iraqis lay landmines, launch missiles, fire mortars and then go home to their wives and kids. He doesn't really want to have anything to do with them, nor they with him.

Unfortunately for us, these are the guys, precisely, who are attacking American forces every hour, killing an American every day, and costing us a billion a week. And so far, there's no sign at all that they're giving up.

Developing.

UPDATE: Yeah, this was one of those type-as-you-research items. Q: Am I admitting error in calling the Zarqawi Memorandum a probable fake? A: Not yet. If it hasn't been convincingly deprecated by the Ides of March, I'll be all like mea culpa already. Until then, two words: mobile labs.

Defenders of Civil (mumble) - Jesse Walker had a good article on Reason's site this week about the muted response of some "civil liberties" groups to the FCC's sudden interest in cracking down on indecency (which predates and transcends the Super Bowl controversy). Well how come?

Meanwhile, many defenders of free speech have backed themselves into a corner. Last year's movement against media consolidation was an uncomfortable alliance between people who wanted to expand the available range of expression and people more eager to eliminate expression they dislike. The anti-consolidationists' strongest ally within the FCC was Michael Copps, and it'' no secret which category he fits. Many of the movement's self-described civil libertarians are being awfully quiet about Copps' efforts to suppress speech - perhaps because they don't want to break with the commissioner, perhaps because they've gotten into the habit of looking to the FCC to manage the nation's airwaves, or perhaps because the biggest forfeitures are falling on Clear Channel, the largest and most hated of the radio chains.

They're making a mistake. You needn't like Clear Channel to recognize that an FCC which revokes licenses and imposes draconian fines isn't going to refrain from penalizing college stations and low-power broadcasters. One of the opening shots in the new war on indecency was the $7,000 fine imposed on the Oregon community station KBOO in 2001. Its crime: playing a feminist rap called "Your Revolution," which mocked the check-out-all-my-bitches school of hip hop in terms that were sometimes a little profane themselves. In that case the fine was eventually rescinded, but that's hardly a reason to sleep easy - it took the FCC two years to reverse itself, and still it declared that it was a "very close case." And this was David "It's OK To Say 'Fucking'" Solomon of the Enforcement Bureau speaking, not the more politically attuned appointees atop the commission.

Will liberal free expression watchdog groups allow anti-corporate bias to trump their declared mission?

Another Tac - Continuing to probe the Tacitus business, I'm finding that there are reasonable grounds for suspecting Hezbollah culpability in the Khobar Towers bombing of 1996, which certainly post-dates the Proxy War. The US secured indictments against, among other suspects, two Iranian intelligence officers fingered by the suspects the Saudis arrested. Complicating factors: the suspects were "interrogated" by Saudi authorities before confessing their affiliation and sponsorship; some observers ascribe culpability for Khobar Towers to al Qaeda rather than Hezbollah; the Saudi establishment of 1996 would be highly motivated to lay blame elsewhere than al Qaeda.

Of course, if it was both Hezbollah and al Qaeda the "Tacitus thesis" would strengthen accordingly. If it was Hezbollah alone, that is still more recent violent hostility from Hezbollah than I have credited. If it was just al Qaeda, my critique is undimmed.

Interestingly, the Defense Department's formulation has Bin Laden "Praising the 1996 terrorist attack on the U.S. Air Force barracks in Khobar Towers, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia" rather than carrying it out.

On the subject of unimpeachable sources, one DEBKAfile article I found ascribes the Khobar bombing to al Qaeda, while another not only pins it on Iran/Hezbollah, but claims that the Saudis extracted an "Okay, I promise never to do it again" from Iran afterward, based on information they "did not share with the United States." (The same article alleges that the Iranians almost openly bragged of breaking that promise with the Saudi bombings of last May.) That article has al Qaeda working on behalf of Iran.

SITUATION UNCLEAR, TRY AGAIN LATER is what it all adds up to.

Tac Two - Continuing my piecemeal response to Tacitus' desire that the United States war on every group out there that professes belief in "jihad" whether that group has, like al Qaeda, attacked the United States or not.

Henley's implicit contention that the only violence against Americans we should hold against it is post-1983 violence makes no sense. Is there a statute of limitations on such things? Will we forgive al Qaeda in 2021? Prior to 9/11, Hezbollah held the record for most Americans slaughtered by terrorists in a single blow, which ought to count for something for those with memories of average capacity.

We might call this "Zimmerman Telegram logic." Recall that Germany wanted Mexico to burn with martial indignation about losing the Mexican War 70 years later.

No, I don't want to re-fight the Lebanese Proxy War of the early 1980s. Nor do I want to sail back to Indochina and teach those Vietnamese Communist bastards a lesson. Had Hezbollah continued an active campaign against US targets I would say differently. They haven't, judging by the examples Tacitus gives of their post-Beirut activity - Hamas symps running a cigarette-smuggling ring out of the Carolinas and Hamas terrorists bombing two Israeli targets in Argentina 10 and 12 years ago.

"Forgiveness" doesn't enter into it, and the comparison with al Qaeda is, like most of the analogies Tacitus has reached for in this discussion, inapposite. Al Qaeda attacked American civilian targets in our country, and have made clear they intend to do so again when they get a chance. Hezbollah attacked American military and government targets in their country, and ceased to do so after our withdrawal. Am I saying it doesn't bother me that Hezbollah killed American troops, diplomats and spies? No, I am not. I am saying that our actual response - immediate retaliation and withdrawal from a situation where we could do no further practical good - was the right one, and closes the matter. That is not a more radical or less patriotic position than that taken by the Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and - so far - Bush II administrations, because it's the same position.

As a general matter, Tacitus is right about one thing in this discussion - there is a collection of groups out there that share aspects of an ideology. Some of these groups are declared enemies of the US and have actively set out to war on it. Others have not. The dumbest thing in the world is to act to unite your potential enemies rather than divide them. That's the heart of my disagreement with the Tacitus Program.

Why the Kerry Story Matters - Not to me. Near as I can tell, Kerry hasn't a) perjured himself, and b) tried to use the entire machinery of government to ruin a young woman's life. So I say live and let live. I mean, it matters to Kerry.

Hold That Thought - Tacitus has a response to my critique of the other day. I'm too tired to respond in detail right now, but rest assured I still think he's wrong. More anon, but his Kitty Genovese analogy at the end is overheated and as wrong as his original "like going after the SS and leaving the Wehrmacht alone" simile. Israel and India are neither so helpless nor so innocent as Genovese; nor is Tacitus arguing simply that we should "call the cops" - he's demanding that we be the cops.

Bimbo Eruption - Hey, I don't know if you've read anything about this or not but apparently there are rumors about - oh. You have.

Well you see I had to work late.

Anyway, one of the great things about practical politics is it offers so many no-lose propositions for the libertarian psyche. Either Kerry is an examplar of the hypocrisy, recklessness and arrogance of power, OR his enemies prove just how much venality and viciousness exists in the world of "public service."

Now there's been a lot of irresponsible speculation and theorizing about the fragmentary details, and I'm disappointed. That you started without me. So, here's a Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory for you.

Republican-inclined bloggers are saying, It's gotta come from the Chris Lehane/Wesley Clark/Clintons axis. Democrats say No, it's obviously the Republicans. And if it was the Lehane/Clark team at the behest of Bill and Hillary, then why would Clark have dropped out of the race and why would he be flying out tomorrow to formally endorse John Kerry for President.

Easy! Clark and Lehane put the rumor out there at the behest of Kerry. Because the rumor is a crock, and when it is so proved, it will innoculate Kerry against scandal for the rest of the campaign.

Remember, when this turns out to be true, I'll be asking you to pretend I wasn't kidding when I said it. Should it turn out to be as baseless as all the other theories floating around today (squared), I'll thank you to remember that I wasn't really serious.

Snakehandling - I was kidding Julian Sanchez in e-mail for boldly redefining libertarianism as support for tax increases in his article for Reason Online yesterday. Actually, his proposal is that

Perhaps, then, it is time for proponents of smaller government to let themselves be inspired by Urban's wonky lovefest and offer a compromise to the other side: We'll accept the rollback of the Bush tax cuts if you join the fight on the spending side.

He has his reasons:

In a world where legislators felt obligated to keep outlays connected by some tenuous thread to revenues, tax cuts would entail smaller government. But we don't live in that world: Absent that condition, tax cuts aren't the same as smaller government. Smaller government is smaller government. If fiscal conservatives want to have any credibility with moderates and liberals when they insist that federal spending on education or healthcare be rolled back in the name of responsibility to future taxpayers, we're going to have to begin acknowledging that fact.

I see where he's coming from. But at the very least, let's be clear what's worth a grand compromise and what isn't. Actual elimination of programs is. Spending caps, budget "reductions," and other gimmicks are not. As we've seen, if you hack back a federal program but leave it alive, it will bide its time and return, stronger and richer than ever.

I've come to reject the alleged grand strategy of starving government by stealth, which was what a lot of both liberals and conservatives imagined to be the real aim of the Bush tax cut package. If I oppose dragging the country into a national security strategy by misdirection, how can I support the same approach to fiscal matters? But if we're going to agree to a distinction between tax cuts and smaller government, and give up the former, we need to make damn sure we get the latter. I'd be eager for Julian to develop his strategy for doing so further than in this initial proposal.

We Were Winter Soldiers Once, And Young - Diana Moon has two letters from veterans about John Kerry home from Vietnam.

Memo to self: schedule series of Kerry criticism posts for next week. Don't want to go getting all sappy.

Crock Files? - Billmon explains his own suspicions about the alleged "Zarqawi memorandum." Interestingly, Donald Rumsfeld is distancing himself from the question of the memo's authenticity. That may be a "once bitten, twice shy" thing, to which one can only say, it's about time. The same VOA article reports that

General Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says he has seen a translation of the document, allegedly written by a terrorist linked to al-Qaida named Abu Musab Zarqawi.

He says the question of its legitimacy is still undergoing study. "Authenticity is still being evaluated," he said.

Shall this too pass? In Billmon's own content, he notes that NYT columnist William Safire offers an account of the memo's provenance that directly contradicts the original NYT reporting on the subject - specifically on the first report's assertion that it "did not pass through Iraqi groups that American intelligence officials have said in the past may have provided unreliable information." This isn't dispositive either, since Safire has compiled a record of inaccuracy, misdirection and fantasia in his Iraq reporting to scare any sane reader off making too much of what he says.

So, as they say, developing. I'm sticking with my prediction that the memo as reported will prove bogus, but I'm not declaring victory.

The Latest from Iraq - Tachyon transmissions from the future of the Iraqi reconstruction have arrived in present-day Haiti. Might be from one of those alternate futures one hears about. Here's hoping. Memo to our hawkish friends: I'm not on "the left" and yes, I opposed Clinton's Haiti intervention at the time.

Smear the Queer - If "the culture of fear" doesn't work, there's always "the culture of flouting federalism in the name of atavistic revulsion."

King of Slightly More Media - What I like to think of as my first piece for Reason, on the tragedy of having a good man running the National Endowment for the Arts, is online now. ("Abandoned libertarianism??" Fie, I say! You can have my libertarianism when you pry it from my cold, dead utility maximizer.)

And last week's Official NFL apology got linked from an online erotic toy store. Cool! Gonna have to devote more blog time to boob socks to keep the new readers happy.

It's Not Just a Violation of Godwin's Law, It's a Bad Idea - Prologue: The other day, Matthew Yglesias wrote

Bush and I are looking at the same Saddam Hussein, but he sees a threat to the United States where I do not. If, however, you accept both the Bush Doctrine (there's no difference between a terrorist and a helper of terrorists) and the AIPAC Doctrine (anti-Israeli terrorism is continuous with anti-American terrorism and both are, at root, independent of US and Israeli policy decisions) then attacking Saddam Hussein really does seem like an element in the War on Terror.

Main Event: In a not obviously related item yesterday, Tacitus wrote

There is a continuity and a universality to jihad. Jihadist groups and players interlock and interchange; they share the same enemies; and broadly the same goals. One will sometimes hear that the United States is fighting (or ought to fight) al Qaeda alone. Lashkar, Hamas, Hizbullah: these are not our problems. This contention is utterly wrong: it is the logical equivalent of confronting the SS but not the Wehrmacht.

Speaking of utterly wrong, that's a fair characterization of Tac's analogy. The SS and the Wehrmacht were part of the same unified national command structure. Hamas, Hezbollah, al Qaeda, the Chechnyan resistance, even after our best efforts at pushing them together, are not. A more precise analogy would be: Focusing on al Qaeda is the logical equivalent of confronting Nazi Germany but not Spain or even, after Pilsudski shut down parliament, confronting Nazi Germany but not Poland. Hey, our enemy was "totalitarianism," remember? And hawks are always telling us that we needed to act sooner in the thirties, relying on the evidence then in hand.

Hezbollah has avoided attacking US targets since the Late Unpleasantness in Lebanon. To my knowledge, Hamas has avoided targetting the US entirely. Lashkar e Taiba is focused on a conflict of zero interest to Americans. A certain level of cooperation against these groups at the law enforcement level makes sense, for Neutrality Act reasons if nothing else. I suspect Ismail Royer was telling the truth that his band of jihad enthusiasts intended to fight India only. But we shut down Fenian attacks from US territory into Canada in the 1860s and the same principle obtains: don't borrow trouble. Similarly, we shouldn't allow US soil to be used to plan attacks on Israel. That kind of mutual cooperation makes perfect sense, and leaves the primary responsibility where it belongs - the US is more responsible for dealing with al Qaeda than Israel is; Israel is more responsible for dealing with Hamas than we are; India more responsible for handling the issue of Kashmir than either Israel or the US.

But that's a far cry from making it America's business to solve Israel or India's security problems for them. Realism also plays a role. We only have so many troops and intelligence assets to go around, and only so much diplomatic capital. The same is true for India and Israel. For instance, India has begged off involving itself more deeply in Iraq because of its problems with Pakistan and Kashmir. We have to respect that. Similarly, we need a level of cooperation with Pakistan that India doesn't, because of al Qaeda. If too eagerly taking sides against Lashkar e Taiba pushes Pakistan completely to the other side, then we've failed our primary duty to our own security.

UPDATE: BruceR of Flit points out that the Fenian attacks were in the 1860s, not the 1840s, as I originally wrote. This is what comes of working from the memory of a high school diplomatic history course, gone lo these five years and, uh, more.

Patience, My Little One - Yes, it'll be a busy Fitness Blogging Sunday, all right.

Comics Blogwatch Addendum - How did I miss alerting you to the Dark Knight blogging on Peiratikos? Is it because I suck? Maybe. Read

Batman: "He was too big..."
Batman: "You let them do it. I always knew you would."
"The Commissioner is an excellent cop - but, I think, a poor judge of character."

More is promised, so keep checking.

Well, Crap - Fragmentary reports are that John Kerry has accused the Republican Party under George Bush of spreading a "culture of fear." And it turns out he's been saying it since January.

Crap. I may not be able to maintain my traditional aloofness between the two major hopefuls. Because this is the overriding issue facing the country right now: will we live bravely again or will we forever shiver in post-traumatic stress from our Very Bad Day two and a half years ago? And as I've said over and over, what's despicable about the Bush Administration is that it wants us to wallow in perpetual, low-grade panic. That is what I can't forgive.

Which brings us to Kerry. It was already vital that the Bush Administration utterly reform or go. But a major Presidential candidate running a forthright campaign against fearmongering would have incalculable value. It would make up for everything I am fated to dislike - even hate - about John Kerry. It is the whole ball of wax. It is the national soul. It trumps fiscal policy, regulatory policy, even the particulars of how any particular politician did or did not vote on the use-of-force resolution in late 2002 or the PATRIOT Act before that. Because let the country recover its courage, and these other matters can be mastered. Keep the country in terror and we are doomed on all fronts.

Here are some words David Brooks put in the mouth of President Bush today:

President Bush: Tim, I know I'm repeating myself, but I am a war president. Do you remember how you felt on Sept. 12, 2001? Do you remember the incredible sense of shock, sadness, anger and pride, all welling up into a consuming sense of urgency? That's how I still feel every day.

To which must be appended:

Because I am a sniveling coward.

I'm talking more about Brooks here than about the President, but also everyone who read Brooks and was stirred. If you still feel "every day" the way you felt on September 12, 2001, and you did not personally lose a loved one to the savages, there is something wrong with you. Snap out of it. You are indulging yourself and it is unseemly.

We need not be that nation. Every possible parsing of the preceding sentence applies.

Will Kerry do it? Will "culture of fear" somehow expand to cover tax cuts and social security privatization and every other Republican policy Democrats don't like? Or will his campaign wield it with responsibility and focus? The man's a politician, so there's little enough cause for hope. But there's a chance. I can hardly believe it but there's a chance.

Comics Blogwatch - Johnny Bacardi is back with tons of good stuff. Just keep reading.

Shawn Fumo has the demographics that Shonen Jump gives its advertisers. On the downside, its circulation about matches Batman: Hush. On the upside, most of the readers are people who have no idea what Batman: Hush is. (And are thus luckier by far than yr corrspndnt.)

Meanwhile, Kevin Melrose reports estimated dollar sales for manga in the US at - cue Dr. Evil voice - 100 meelion dollars. So that's 10 million books, roughly. The 80/20 rule tells us that one fifth of the audience bought 8 million of them - call the one fifth "Okatu." If you knew how many books the average Otaku bought last year (10? 20? 40?) you would have, at the Fermi number level, everything you needed to estimate the total audience. If someone wants to offer an informed guess on the Annual Otaku Purchase Rate (AOPR), please do so. ("Informed" could simply be, my manga-reading friends and I each bought about X.) 20 seems entirely reasonable - that's less than two books a month. I'm reluctant to estimate 40 without expert urging.

My instinct is that the total audience falls somewhere between 500,000 and two million. I'm inclined to think that it's at least a million as of the end of the year. Certain correspondents will be aware that my mid-year estimates were lower. 100% growth is 100% growth, and that's what Publisher's Weekly (via Kevin Melrose) is reporting.

Laura Tegan Gjovaag and Alan David Doane have new reviews. Usefully, they are reviewing different books. Laura is also in the grip of Immediate Post-Blankets Enthusiasm, which has claimed so many bright young minds. There oughta be a law.

This just in: Dave Fiore thinks that superhero comics have a lot to do with Transcendentalism. I've figured out one particular thing he's been saying that bothers me though. I realize there's a lot of controversy about the relative contributions of Stan Lee versus Jack Kirby on the one hand and Steve Ditko on the other. Dave takes this to the extreme of suggesting, usually tacitly, that Ditko was essentially the author of Spider-man and Doctor Strange, while Kirby was the author of the Fantastic Four, Hulk and Thor. He seems to base this on the undeniable difference in sensibilities between the two titles.

This strikes me as dicey. To quote a member in good standing of Dave's beloved American Renaissance, "I am large. I contain multitudes." The fact that Whitman was basically wrong about himself - far as I'm concerned, any two pages of Leaves of Grass will pretty much resemble each other - doesn't mean he wasn't right about others. Some authors obsessively pursue a handful of themes. Others range widely among tones, subjects and approaches. This is especially true of early-midcentury American commercial writers, and whatever else Lee was, he was one of those.

Mark Evanier is the man to memorialize longtime DC editor Julius Schwartz, who passed away over the weekend.

Bruce Baugh is right about the early Silver Age Marvels - I know from the three-to-a-package bargain comic assortments you could get in country stores in those days. There was a certain continuity between the end of Marvel's monster era and the beginning of its superhero phase. No doubt Stan Lee obsessively pursuing his themes.

The Zarqawi Memorandum - With some hesitation, I'm calling bullshit on the alleged memo from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or someone like him to "senior leaders of Al Qaeda" reported yesterday in the New York Times.

Daniel Drezner explains persuasively why the contents of the memo are such good news about the security situation. I'd go beyond that: the memo is not just good news about the security situation but about the whole "grand strategy" for Iraq (to the extent there still is one). This is the biggest problem: the memo is too good to be true. The voice of an avowed enemy of the United States validates the US's every talking point. Summary: We are losing. We need to kill Shi'ites to stir up trouble. We already have killed Shiites to stir up trouble. The Americans are too resolute to ever leave. The new Iraqi defense forces will spell the end for us. Once the handover to a democratic government is complete, we're well and truly fucked.

If you made a list of things you hoped to hear out of the mouths of an Islamist radical in Iraq, you'd be hard-pressed to come up with anything that didn't appear in the memo.

That leaves three possibilities: we're on the verge of a smashing success; the memo is genuine but blinkered, all the sectarian problems of apportioning power among Kurd, Shiite and Sunni still loom outside the scope of the author's concerns; the memo is a fake. The temptation is surely to say I'm plumping for the last because the idea of good news from Iraq just kills me. That's the sort of thing I can't disprove. But I'm really saying two patterns continue to obtain: 1) intelligence coups and political breakthroughs that dissolve on inspection; 2) the "Zarqawi memo" is eerily of a piece with much other "good news" reporting from Iraq in that "the real good news is in the predictions." That is, "Zarqawi's" worst news (aka our best news) is pending: as soon as the Iraqi police are trained, we're screwed. As soon as "This is the democracy," we're SOL.

If Con Coughlin had fished this one out, I'd be calling it phony without hesitation. As it is, the Times itself has a lot to answer for.

So if it's a fake, whose fake is it? Candidates include, singly or in combination: British Intelligence, US Intelligence, Israeli Intelligence, Jordanian Intelligence (Zarqawi is Jordanian), Pakistani Intelligence (hot rumor is that the letter was on a CD-ROM carried by Pakistani al Qaeda courier Hassan Ghul) and various interested Iraqi parties. (The article is careful to quote an American official saying that the memo did not pass through, well, the INC's hands.) I should state that I don't think the memo was intended primarily as black propaganda against the US or other coalition country audiences. I think its primary audience is the Iraqis themselves, particularly the Shiites: Anything bad that happens to you is the fault of these outside agitators and there's no call to take it out on your domestic rivals. That we are discussing it in these parts is simply textbook blowback.

Then again, I could be wrong.

Modest Proposal - Liberal blogger Zizka suggests that libertarians vote for the Libertarian candidate for President, whoever he turns out to be. He particularly means libs who have voted Republican in the past and are down on the Bush Administration but just. can't. make. themselves. vote. Democratic!

I've been down with this program for some time and have said so, and not just for foreign policy reasons. The impression I've developed, though, is that if you're for the expansive interpretation of the phrase "War on Terror," that trumps everything else. You'll pull the lever for Bush no matter how much you hate his domestic security policies, or his protectionist flirtations, or his runaway spending, or his restrictionism on everything from cloning to gay marriage.

One might suspect that, on some level, that's what the war is for.

You Just Made That Up - Hesiod finds more on the "We were almost all wrong" front in the Times:

A classified "fabrication notification" about the defector, a former Iraqi major, was issued by the D.I.A. to other American intelligence agencies in May 2002, but it was then repeatedly overlooked, three senior intelligence officials said. Intelligence agencies use such notifications to alert other agencies to information they consider unreliable because its source is suspected of making up or embellishing information.

Because the warning went unheeded, the officials said, the defector's claims that Iraq had built mobile research laboratories to produce biological weapons were mistakenly included in, among other findings, the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which concluded that Iraq most likely had significant biological stockpiles."

Hesiod thinks it's the same Iraqi major who shows up in Colin Powell's famous UN presentation:

Finally, a fourth source. An Iraqi major who defected confirmed that Iraq has mobile biological research laboratories in addition to the production facilities I mentioned earlier.

Essential Reading - Michael Lind in the Nation on the neocons. (Via Gene Healy.) Long, detailed and devastating without being merely snarky. The passage demolishing the contention of Brooks that most of the people labelled neocons don't even know each other very well is breathtaking fun.

Gene also has good items on extradimensional traveller Victor David Hanson and the President's interview with Tim Russert.

Jeremy Lott on how archaeology could make markets for cultural treasures work better than the present system, where prohibitionism, the consequent black markets and the tendency of museums to shut artifacts away in storage combine to hamper scholarship and public appreciation alike.

Remember, political bloggers: Journalista is your source for news on freedom of expression issues involving cartoonists here and abroad. You want to know which cartoonist has been arrested in Myanmar or had his strip pulled in Miami? Read Journalista every day. Best of all from your perspective, that kind of news is always toward the top of the daily entry.

Scott Ritter begs to differ about David Kay's "We were all wrong" claim. It's not just a nyah nyah I said it all along article, but a nyah nyah these other people said it all along too article.

Calpundit finds that 1st Lt. George W. Bush was sent to the corner.

Julian Sanchez has a cool Watchmen movie poster from another dimension - perhaps the one where Victor Davis Hanson lives.

Gee Whillickers! - Hosting Matters doesn't just have 24/7 online technical support - it has 24/7 online billing support. They're trying to straighten out the domain registration tangle that may take this site down for a little while, and if they weren't there I'd have lost two extra days. Add that to the reasonable prices and sound infrastructure on the list of reasons to host your blog with them.

UPDATE: If the site suffers downtime, the supplanter e-mail address will go out too. Be warned. And remember, you'll still be able to find Unqualified Offerings at http://medea.hmdnsgroup.com/~clearing/ and the XML feed at http://medea.hmdnsgroup.com/~clearing/index.xml

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - Fitness? Hah! I hibernate and eat. Let' s cut straight to the links, shall we?

Dave Lull tips me to a Steven Milloy article on FoxNews.com, criticizing recent reports of successful high-carb diet routines. Milloy determines, not before congratulating himself for doing so, that the studies cited actually show that the "high-carb" dieters who lost weight were actually eating fewer calories than a low-carb control group - by 400 to 600 calories per day. All well and good, but if the high-carbers were able to achieve satiety on that regimen and stick to it for 12 weeks, that's still something, no? After all, when people complain that all low-carb diets do is create a calorie deficit in the obese, those of us who defend low-carb diets respond, "And your point was - ?" If someone can stick to a diet and lose weight without incurring nutrition-related health problemsm, that diet has some value.

Carb control partisans can take provisional pleasure in this result, though:

After 12 weeks, the study subjects on the control diet weighed the same as when the study started.

That was on 2800 calories a day with no exercise. And they didn't gain a pound.

Milloy works at CATO so we're practically cousins, but this particular article doesn't strike me as necessarily more rigorous than the studies it criticizes.

Neil Steinberg reports on his Week of Eating Dangerously.

Marathon prep this week: Thought about marathon. Dashed through cold to car. Put on heat.

Weight 165, waist 33.5". See you next week.