Let's Not Kid Ourselves - Amid the back and forth between the Clinton and Bush camps over who did and didn't do enough to prioritize antiterrorism before the massacres of September 11, 2001, the lamest apologia for the Clinton Administration is that they couldn't have taken stronger military measures against al Qaeda because public support wouldn't be there. This from the gang that dragged NATO into Kosovo and began that war with no Congressional approval and with a minority of the public supporting it. When the Clinton Administration really wanted a war, they got a war. Bob Kerrey gets it right:

Testifying Tuesday were Albright, Powell, Rumsfeld and former Clinton Secretary of Defense William Cohen. The pairs of representatives agreed with each other on many broad issues, including the difficulties of targeting bin Laden and his allies prior to Sept. 11, 2001, and the perceived lack of political support for military action during those years. Some commissioners, particularly former Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., argued that both administrations could have rallied support for military operations just as they did in Kosovo and Iraq, respectively.

Now let's up front about this: I might well have opposed military action in Afghanistan at the time. But I opposed Kosovo too, and you'll notice that didn't stop anybody. Had the Clinton Administration gone into Afghanistan at the time against public opinion, it almost certainly would have enjoyed the same "rally round the flag" effect that Gulf War Phase I, The War for the KLA and Gulf War Phase II enjoyed.

Both administrations have a lot to answer for. And massive military action against al Qaeda at the turn of the millenium may even have been objectively unwise. You think I'm being an idiot isolationist again, but if an early attack on Afghanistan precipitated an Islamist coup in nuclear-armed Pakistan, you wouldn't like it. And, as was also pointed out in the hearings:

The officials from both administrations also struck a similar theme on the question of preventing the terror strikes, arguing that it is unclear how effective aggressive action might have been given the extent of the plot and the determination of the participants.

Imagine the post hoc ergo propter hocs if we had invaded Afghanistan and the World Trade Center attacks happened anyway - as they might have.

But for better or for worse, and to my mind it's for worse, any President who really wants a war can have one almost any time. Events prove that the Clinton Administration wanted to insert itself into a Balkan civil war a lot more than it wanted to go to war against anti-American terrorists in Southwest Asia. This excuses not a single Bush Administration failing. But let's not kid ourselves about a lost Golden Age of anti-terror vigor.

Aargh! Now They've Got Me Doing It - Reader Mark Shawhan e-mails

On reading your most recent post (on that special forces unit that got pulled out of Afghanistan), I noticed two things. One of them is a bit trivial: in the fourth paragraph from the end (the one beginning "back to the Guardian claim"), it seems like you reversed Iraq and Afghanistan (at least, the paragraph makes a lot more sense if you read it the other way round).

Help! When it comes to the war on terror I can no longer distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein!

Anyway, thanks to Matt, and I fixed the error. He continues:

As for the other thing: doesn't deploying special forces to Iraq in 9/02 damage the hawkish argument that President Bush went to the UN to pursue diplomacy, etc, in good faith? If we're already laying the groundwork for our invasion as W. is making his speech to the General Assembly, that doesn't look like we're really giving diplomacy a chance, now does it?

Well, yeah, but we disposed of that one more than a year ago.

UPDATE: Mark Shawhan, not Matt Shawn. Will no one fact-check my ass?

Fair's Fair - Virginia Postrel has a point:

Remember when putting troops on the ground in Afghanistan was a sure ticket to disaster, a military action hardly more conceivable than launching a nuclear attack? Remember the lessons of the Soviets and the British? Judging from this week's discussions, not many people do.

True! Which is why, at various times, I argued that the Bush Administration had handled Afghanistan about as well as it was possible to handle it. The last thing I wanted was huge numbers of regular infantry clumping around in easy truck bomb range of Taliban sympathizers or disgruntled warlords.

But I certainly didn't want these guys pulled out:

Fifth Group Special Forces were a rare breed in the US military: they spoke Arabic, Pastun and Dari. They had been in Afghanistan for half a year, had developed a network of local sources and alliances, and believed that they were closing in on bin Laden.

Without warning, they were then given the task of tracking down Saddam. "We were going nuts on the ground about that decision," one of them recalls.

"In spite of the fact that it had taken five months to establish trust, suddenly there were two days to hand over to people who spoke no Dari, Pastun or Arabic, and had no rapport."

Along with the redeployment of human assets came a reallocation of sophisticated hardware. The US air force has only two specially-equipped RC135 U spy planes. They had successfully vectored in on al-Qaida leadership radio transmissions and cellphone calls, but they would no longer circle over the mountains of the Pakistan/Afghanistan border.

British Press, so you have to check. Googling around suggests that, while 5th Special Forces really did have a good number of Arabic speakers, its Pashto and Dari was mostly picked up on the run. And that "given the task of tracking down Saddam" straight out of Afghanistan is hard to verify independently, because of secrecy and casual reporting.

But here they are in Afghanistan on November 12, 2001. It's where Master Sergeant Jefferson Donald Davis died on December 5 of that year. And there they are outside of Baghdad by August or September 2002.

This excellent St. Louis Post-Dispatch series about the life of one 5th Special Forces soldier and the death of another says that

They had deployed again in January 2003, had taken part in the fall of Baghdad and then had gone on the hunt for Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida.

This is what John Bolduc's old unit was doing by late-Spring 2003: "By late May, the team was providing security for several Iraqi politicians, a task that bored Morehead but that he understood was risky."

It wasn't until July 2003 that 5th Special Forces was assigned to the Saddam hunt, according to the Post-Dispatch series. But they're the kind of soldiers we absolutely want chasing down al Qaeda supporters and leaders, they're the kind of soldiers whose skills are rare and whose deployments represent therefore a clear choice - Send them on Task B and you are perforce prioritizing it over Task A. The Bush Administration's decision to send 5th Special Forces and Task Force 121 to Iraq rather than Afghanistan represents a clear choice to prioritize Iraq over al Qaeda. There are hawks who have spent considerable energy justifying that choice, but it makes no sense to deny that it happened.

Back to the Guardian claim. Does it represent a (misleading) compression of events for dramatic effect? Maybe. It's possible, though, that there were still elements of 5th Special Forces in Afghanistan after others had been moved to Iraq, that the quoted soldier was one of them and that these troops were pulled out in Summer 2003 to hunt Saddam. As the Times reported in November, General John Abizaid decided to merge Afghanistan's Task Force 5 and Iraq's Task Force 20 into the new Task Force 121 in July 2003. If that involved shifting Task Force 5 troops from Afghanistan to Iraq for the Saddam hunt, then Guardian reporter Philip James' source could have meant exactly what he said.

Now that Saddam has been captured, and only now that Saddam has been captured,Task Force 121 has been shifted back to Afghanistan to track down al Qaeda leaders. Priorities, priorities.

This excerpt from the Washington Times article is rich:

A Defense Department official said there are two reasons for repositioning parts of Task Force 121: First, most high-value human targets in Iraq, including Saddam Hussein, have been caught or killed. Second, intelligence reports are increasing on the whereabouts of bin Laden, the terror leader behind the September 11 attacks.

Task Force 121 isn't the sort of unit that just waits around for intelligence reports. Task Force 121 develops intelligence itself. Now, two and a half years after al Qaeda's slaughters in New York and Washington and a year after the start of our Mesopotamian detour, it's developing some in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Well, like I say, priorities.

Voting for the Terrorists - Well, which ones, darnit? Fafnir helps you make an informed choice. (Will you have the right to slap a "Don't Blame Me, I Voted for Apulus" sticker on your SUV?)

Sweet Relief - What's that floating away? At least a few libertarian anxieties about John Kerry:

For the first time, he will target a popular tax incentive, known as "deferral," offered to most U.S. companies that do business in lower-taxed foreign countries.

To soften the blow to corporations, Kerry will propose a one-time, one-year offer to tax at 10 percent any profits a company brings back to the United States and invests here, an expanded tax credit to companies that create domestic jobs, and a reduction in the corporate tax rate to 33.25 percent from 35 percent -- a 5 percent cut.

writes Jim VandeHei in the Post.

Drezner writes:

1) This is a lot more about symbolism than substance. According to the Post story, the total sums involved in these tax changes are around $12 billion. That sounds like a lot, but it's around 1% of the federal budget. Not a lot of money either way.

2) That said, the symbolism is important, in that "corprate tax reductions" sound a lot better to the business community than "Benedict Arnold CEOs."

3) The economic advisors quoted in the Post story are Roger Altman and Gene Sperling. They fall decidedly into the "sane" camp of Democratic economic advisors.

Point 1 is partially undercut by the truism that everything important happens at the margin, but to the extent thatDrezner's right, the plan looks even better: offshoring is not the apocalypse, current Democratic rhetoric to the contrary. So dressing up minor countermeasures as a bold plan is actually reassuring. Assuming Kerry wins the election (a big assumption), the plan may be stillborn anyway, since many Democratis legislators and interest groups will hold out for something bloodier and Chamber of Commerce Republicans will carry water for the estimated one percent of all corporations that are projected to see tax increases under the plan - they happen to be the very largest corporations.

My preference is that taxes be: a) low, and b) revenue-neutral. The Kerry proposal has minimal virtues in the direction of the former. The "loophole"-closure does not seem to do special violence to the latter. There are some social-engineering aspects to the "job creation" provisions, but they're time-limited. There's another arguably-interventionist provision that is, by Democratic policy standards, sensible: you can continue to defer taxes on overseas income if you expand into a country to sell in that country. That is, if you build an auto plant in India to sell cars in India, you don't have to wear the Scarlet 'O' around your business-casual neck.

Other aspects of Kerry's anti-offshoring and "jobs-creation" platform are still troublesome. Some, like the "plan" to "invest in renewable energy and technologies that will create 500,000 jobs and make energy more affordable for businesses" are not just wasteful but downright silly. Then there's the "International Playing the Dozens" plank:

John Kerry will crack on countries that violate trade agreements . . .

President John Kerry today asserted that "Hey China! Your mama fucks better than she looks!"

Point is, there's plenty wrong with Kerry's rhetoric - he's certainly not making the anti-protectionist case. And there's plenty wrong with some of his substantive proposals. But from a libertarian perspective they could be worse, and Kerry's not running against a libertarian, but against a President who has committed copious economic sins of his own.

A Fanboy's Head's Up via this kind e-mail:

NPR's Morning Edition will be doing a feature on Mike Mignola/Hellboy this April 5th. I did a taped interview with Morning Edition this afternoon to be used in connection with the feature. Our local NPR runs from 5 to 7am and repeats from 7 to 9am. Your local may be different.

All the best,

P. Craig Russell

ps. Just came across your blog and have been enjoying it.

So. Just remember two things: 1. Hellboy feature on Morning Edition, April 5th. 2. I got an e-mail from freakin' P. Craig Russell.

Another Fanboy's Notes - Good article in the Guardian last week about John Updike, lifelong cartoon fan. There's no indication that he still follows the field closely, but his love of the medium and his own attempts at a career in cartooning have clearly marked him.

If all Updike's stray references to comics were gathered together, they would form a focused little thematic volume, superior in insight to almost anything else written on the subject.

avers author Jeet Heer.

Look Over There - In case you haven't learned it from everybody else, former Calpundit Kevin Drum is now essentially The Washington Monthly website - or at least, his relocated and renamed blog, Political Animal, is the most prominent thing about the place. Still indispensible for political analysis from a mostly-measured Democratic perspective.

Annals of We Are Not Making This Up - "Man told to stay away from mascot chicken" reports the Salem, Oregon Statesman-Journal:

He was released from jail later that morning, five days after he took Speckles home from outside Ray's Food Place, where the chicken is a longtime mascot and local favorite.

Kathy Dean, Gombos' wife, said they were not regular shoppers at the store and were only thinking of the chicken.

I blame gay marriage. (Link via Mrs. Offering.)

Plan Ahead - Will Wilkinson explains why you should go to Libertarian Summer Camp.

Blogger Makes Good - Now-Somewhat pseudonymous Diana Moon has published a profile of film-maker Albert Maysles in The Forward. (Link requires registration. "jhenley/jhenley" will work.) Being a film ignoramus, I learned a lot from it. Like that Maysles made the Stones documentary "Gimme Shelter," which I've actually seen, and which was a pretty amazing piece of work. Plus all sorts of information about Maysles newest project, a documentary about the "notorious 1913 blood libel trial in which a Ukrainian Jew, Mendel Beilis, was wrongly accused of the murder of a 13-year-old Christian boy." Sadly, the topic remains relevant.

Note to Diana: The new blog template is aces. But you' ve lost your item-specific anchor links. Time for a little template editing.

Rebels in the Air - Tonight at a Reason party I met Tim Pozar, who runs the Bay Area Research Wireless Network. Out of his own pocket pretty much, BARWN is wiring up as much of the third world and as many economically-depressed areas in the US as possible for wireless internet connectivity - Oakland, Bhutan etc. They put 802.16 transmitters, which operate in the unlicensed portion of the RF spectrum, get donated bandwidth and spread the word through a kind of viral marketing. Now I'm a vector. Tim might be happy to fund his efforts out of your pocket too. His first US effort is Oakland. It occurs to me that if you've got the cash, he's got the expertise, and could help you contribute similarly to your own community.

Or you could wait until someone passes a law, I suppose.

Works for Me - Not easy reading, but Vietnam Vet Bill Larsen's "Mike MacParlane Taste Test" strikes me as exactly the right one to apply. It's not dissimilar from the "My Sister Libertarianism" that I discussed on this site back in olden times. I am fully aware that there will be some, even many, hawks who will say that the Iraq War passes the Taste Test for them, and some of them will neither be kidding themselves or us. But it doesn't pass mine.

(Via Antiwar.com blog.)

More Great Power, Less Responsibility - Franklin Harris says superheroes are not killing the comic book industry.

The industry to fashion a pillow large enough for the rest of the world to bite? - Be advised that this website does not exist. It is the basest conspiracy theorizing to suggest otherwise. Its Statement of Principles doesn't exist either. Nor does this Thomas Friedman column. Oh no no no, it would be irresponsible to even suggest that any of the links in this post were working links.

"America is in danger of someday not being at war."

The 300 - Comics criticism in general-interest right wing fora week continues. Today's entry, Brian Doherty praises Dave Sim's Cerebus in the American Spectator.

More Gaudy Night blogging tomorrow or Thursday. Tonight I have time only for the apologies:

I slipped three bonehead errors past my editor. My description of Hellboy as a "Dark Horse property" was misleading. Dark Horse publishes Hellboy, but creator Mike Mignola owns the rights. I also spelled Tim O'Neil's name wrong and misidentified the subject of his Comics Journal review. It was Grant Morrison's The Filth, not the same author's Invisibles. I apologize to my editor, Mike Mignola and Tim O'Neil. Tim has an excellent response item at The Hurting, and Bill Sherman applies the "literature of ethics" principle to the current Superman: Secret Identity miniseries - which, by the by, I am enjoying. Bill's review is a good place to find out why. Kip Manley sketches a response he might make if he had the time (don't I know the feeling). Other leads here.

No Duh - More from the front lines of "benevolent hegemony":

NATO secretary-general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has accused Kosovo Albanians of orchestrating violence against minority Serbs which drove thousands from their homes last week.

"What happened last week, orchestrated and organised by extremist factions in the Albanian community, is unacceptable ... it should be condemned and it's a shame," he told a press conference during a visit to the southern Serbian province.

But remember, all that matters is fighting fascism. Even if you were doing so on behalf of, you know, other fascists.

Up to 30 Serb Orthodox churches and seven villages were torched, almost 300 houses were levelled and some 600 people were injured when men from the ethnic Albanian majority rampaged in the worst violence since the war.

NATO rushed fresh troops in to support the 17,000 foreign soldiers already in the impoverished province.

By the time they started arriving on Friday most of the damage had been done.

One searches the article in vain for any indication that, beyond uttering some concerned noises, that NATO or the Albanian government intend to lift so much as a finger to get the dispossessed back into their homes. This part is especially rich:

Before meeting the NATO Secretary General, Mr Holkeri and Kosovo's ethnic Albanian Prime Minister, Bayram Rexhepi, visited an apartment building in Pristina which had been burned and looted.

The building had housed most of the last Serbs remaining in Pristina after the end of the war.

All fled when the mob attacked on Wednesday, leaving belongings which were subsequently stolen.

"We will repair the damage but the lives of the people cannot be brought back," Mr Rexhepi said.

Translation: Over my dead body! But the repaired buildings - probably repaired at government and possibly NATO expense - will make fine new residences for ethnic Albanian Muslims.

Now I'm an anti-imperialist. If NATO were not essentially fostering the ethnic cleansing of this particular Serbian province, I'd agree that it was none of our business. But that's what we're doing: fostering the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo province. Those mobs are our mobs, incited by the people whose agenda we fulfilled in 1999. A purer example of the moral bankruptcy of "humanitarian intervention" can not be found, and I absolutely include Iraq among the candidates.

Dark Continent - Nate at Polytropos has a roundup of the latest developments in last month's underreported arrest of a planeful of mercenaries in Harare, Zimbabwe. Meaty and full of informed speculation.

A Fanboy's Essay - I reworked some of my recent superhero apologia writng, added some new material and called it an essay. The title is still "Gaudy Night." You can read it at Brainwash. Some parts will be familiar to regular readers, but there's new stuff too.

Costs of Outsourcing discovered by RiShawn Biddle. Excerpt:

Chances are that Premji has his assistants looking around at data and he'll hire some Washington lobbyists to make his case to Congress. But this isn't exactly free money: The more cash Wipro spends on participating in the political process, the less it will dedicate to such things as R&D and marketing, things that ultimately improve shareholders value and employee paychecks.

The political process also loses. One of the biggest complaints among the very same kind of people who oppose outsourcing is that corporate special interests are corrupting politics. But the reason why companies make campaign donations is to either get governments to help advance their interests a la AOL and other competitors of Microsoft, or in the case of a Microsoft or Wipro, protect themselves from unnecessary government interference. When governments screw around with the markets, companies will naturally protect their best interests and try to win the favor of the burghers and bureaucrats who run them. You reap what you sow.

Wrong $@#@#%*($ Corner Mail - Some theories about why US military deaths increased this month that hit my in-box. From Tacitus:

A few plausible explanations:

1) More troops in-theater means more casualties as per proportion.

2) They're using the overlap in rotation as a temporary force increase to conduct more operations.

3) I can't confirm this one, but I hear that cell phones are becoming more and more available in the country. These are massively useful in the detonation of explosives (recall that the Madrid bombs were apparently detonated via cell). This could be reflected in IED deaths.

1 makes sense. 2 was actually reported in advance (that we'd use the temporary increase in troop strength to do more.) 3 is a new idea, and plausible. I'd also add 4 - February's low total (20) was as much a statistical outlier as November's 87, as I suggested earlier this month. (For that matter, I think that back in December I pointed out that the 87 might be an anomaly rather than a trend.)

Eric Mauro writes

Hi Jim, maybe the troops who were leaving just stopped patrolling. I actually read a guy whose commander said "let's just hunker down here until we can rotate the fuck out of this place". Maybe they didn't want to get killed on their last month in Iraq.

The flaw in that approach is that the guerillas are too strong, and aren't simply angry about the troops. They want to take over again. So they start killing or intimidating the Iraqi police, who by the very nature of their provisioning must be less well armed than the guerillas. (They can't be well armed, because then some start attacking the US soldiers with decent weapons.)

I think StrategyPage had an article this last week arguing that the Iraqi police were increasingly well-armed and armored, which was why the guerrillas had started attacking even softer targets like hotels. But if so, to Eric's point, it was apparently Iraqi police that killed blogger Bob Zangas

"The Dorkiest Use of Spring Break Ever" - Katherine of Obsidian Wings continues to give the Maher Arar story the sort of detailed coverage we normally reserve for important issues like Janet Jackson's nipple shield. Longtime readers who recall the Torture Brouhahas (this site has been involved in two of them) shouldn't miss a passage Katherine excerpts from the Globe and Mail:

"They tortured him until he told them, 'What do you want me to say?' Imam Hindy said in a recent interview. ". . . He said, 'What if I used a truck?' They said, 'Okay, very good idea but which building are you going to hit?'

". . .So he said, 'How about the Parliament Buildings?' They said, 'Oh, it's a very, very good idea.'

"So he wrote everything and signed, and after that they didn't touch him and they sent him to Egypt," Imam Hindy said.

It's Just an Old War / Not Even a Cold War - Atrios channels Marianne Faithfull. ("What are you fighting for? / It's not my security").

This is sounding more and more like the scandal of the age, where scandal is less a synonym for "peccadillo" than "willful dereliction of duty."

Clarke relates, "I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden; we have to deal with al Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, 'No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.'

"And I said, 'Paul, there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States in eight years!' And I turned to the deputy director of the CIA and said, 'Isn't that right?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's right. There is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States."

As a libertarian, I believe we are always going to be governed by fools and knaves. But these are the wrong damn fools and knaves.