Close Calls Department - I was glad Bork lost at the time. Admittedly, I was a partisan Democrat back then. And admittedly he was the object of a partisan witch hunt. But he's gone to considerable effort to keep me glad they fitted him for the dunking stool. OpinionJournal's "Best [Neocon-Approved Items] of the Web," offers the following bit of classic Bork, from NRO: ""If there is a problem with Bush's order, it is the exemption of U.S. citizens from trials before military tribunals. . . . The trial of American terrorists in criminal court would pose all the problems of trying foreign terrorists there."

Man, if there's one thing you don't want to have to deal with, it's "problems" trying people. Meanwhile, as Ginger Stampley hints, the problem is that the point of a "trial" is to establish whether someone is a terrorist in the first place.

Good News, Bad News - I have a cold. (Boo!) So I'm taking NyQuil. (Yay!) Dennis Leary's famous NyQuil rant is on this page. You just have to hit Page Down a couple of times.

A Motto - Never confuse politics with "current events."

New Link - A chick who would surely blanch at dissing her husband to the media, writer Wendy McElroy, edits the website ifeminists.com. I'm a longtime fan of McElroy, having discovered her writing in the pages of Liberty (Motto: Print Magazines Don't Need Dynamic Websites) and enjoyed her book, XXX.

Gender Gap - The Post Style section has a chin-puller by Paul Farhi about "The Great Worry Divide." Women are more emotional in the face of the recent terror attacks, more prone to worry and depression, men more analytical, distanced; if they have an emotion, it is anger rather than sadness. As is usual in such pieces, actual men and women provide strikingly corroborative testimony, buttressed by thesis-supporting quotes from social scientists. But when Mrs. Offering and I discussed it, we noticed a disparity that Farhi passes by: On the evidience of the article, women are much more willing to criticise their spouses to a reporter for newspaper publication than men are. Unqualified Offerings does not want to overgeneralize. These sorts of articles tend to choose their sample from friends of friends of the writer. So it's more judicious to say that the kinds of chicks who end up in the social circles where they know someone who knows someone in media and policy circles are more willing to criticise their husbands for the benefit of strrgners than their (can we say -whipped on this blog?) husbands are to criticise them. Only Usual-Suspect-in-stories-like-this Deborah Tannen has a kind word for these fellows and their ways of dealing with things. For its part, Unqualified Offerings last found itself suffering spontaneous upwellings of tearful grief for the September dead about a month after their murders. Call UO a girly-man.

More Chapman on Iraq - This from his regular venue in the Chicago Tribune:

Take a people tired of being tyrannized, add an opposition force determined to overthrow the government, blend with a handful of B-52s, bake for a few weeks, and there you have it--victory. The United States used this recipe with startling results in Afghanistan, and a cadre of hawks insists it will work just as well in Iraq.

Their reasoning is like saying that if you can cook yourself breakfast, you would have no trouble making Thanksgiving dinner for 30.

Dear Prudence - Steve Chapman's article today in Slate makes a compelling case against the arguments of the National Greatness crowd for attacking Iraq. To the argument that Saddam is a psycho and he might do anything, anything - which is to say, that deterrence wouldn't work - Chapman points out that deterrence has worked on Saddam:

When he was fighting U.S. forces a decade ago, he left his chemical and biological weapons on the shelf even as he was enduring a humiliating defeat.

Why? Because the first Bush administration communicated to Iraq in unmistakable terms that it would retaliate with nuclear weapons. In other words, Saddam was deterred—much as the Soviet Union was deterred for the entire length of the Cold War. Given his record, there is no reason to believe he would use the bomb if he had it.

But wait! There's more!

Hawks think the only possible reason he would want them is to use them offensively. But even a peaceably inclined Iraqi government might feel a strong urge to follow the same course, purely as a matter of self-preservation—much as China did in the 1960s. After all, Iraq is bordered on the east by its old enemy, Iran, with which it fought a debilitating war in the 1980s and which is suspected of having nuclear ambitions of its own. To the west lies Israel, a nuclear power that launched a pre-emptive airstrike against Iraq in 1981, pulverizing a nuclear reactor before it came online. Possessing nuclear weapons wouldn't enable Iraq to agress against nuclear-armed neighbors with impunity. But it would give Baghdad some assurance that it wouldn't be attacked.

At least eight countries have nuclear weapons, including those bosom pals Pakistan and India. Since 1946, more people have died from boxcutters than from nuclear attacks. Robert Kagan's "argument" (I use scare quotes because I'm not convinced Kagan really believes it) that "Saddam can covertly and deniably provide weapons, know-how or weapons material to terrorists like bin Laden or Son of bin Laden" fails to convince. Chapman points out that if a terrorist nuke went off, the list of possible sources would be pretty short, Iraq would be at the top of the list and just how deniable is such a thing anyway? The US has already made it clear in Afghanistan that, when it comes to attacks on American soil, the country will not play Perry Mason rules. The risks to Saddam of actually attacking the US, covertly or otherwise, with "weapons of mass destruction" (or, in the case of anthrax, widely scattered destruction) are huge. Chapman takes deterrence logic even further:

In fact, there is only one situation in which it would make sense for Saddam to use any weapons of mass destruction he may possess: an American-led attack with the clear intent of eliminating his regime once and for all. If the U.S. Army were rolling into Baghdad, he would have nothing to lose by unleashing all the havoc he can muster—which, as the hawks have been telling us, could be considerable. If they get their way in dealing with Saddam, they may also realize their worst fears.

Here I think he goes wrong in one important way. I think the hawks fear not having more war more than they fear further attacks on the US. Call me cynical. But if there is one flaw with Chapman's article, it's that he buries the lead:

Absent proof that [Saddam] is bent on sponsoring or carrying out acts of terror against Americans, it's hard to see why we should be any more worried about Iraq today than we were Sept. 10.

The thing is, the Usual Suspects wanted war with Iraq (Iran, Syria, Lebanon, "parts of Egypt, China, Russia, someone) well before the September massacres. With Iraq it was "finish the job." We had to be prepared for conflicts with "resurgent Russia," and the arrogant Chinese. War and preparations for War are a tonic for the National Greatness types, and what the tonic cures is the shallow, materialistic, satisfied decadence that David Brooks and Anna Quindlen alike abhor, and that any sane person would take back in a minute if they could, along with the lives of our 4,000 murdered countrymen, and "National Greatness" be damned.

Well, That's Settled... Admiral R. James Woolsey writes in yesterday's post against the longstanding policy of propping up autocratic regimes in the Arab world:

This ought to be enough to make us call into question some of the European-generated "truths" about another region, the Mideast, that have generally guided our conduct there for the past 80 years: that Arabs and Muslims have no aptitude for democracy, that we are well-advised to stay in bed with corrupt rulers -- occasionally changing them if they seem to threaten, especially, our access to oil -- and that the general rule should be: better the devil we know than the devil we don't.

We have, on the whole, followed this European conceptual lead, and it has brought us Sept. 11, disdain and hatred. Only in Afghanistan, and in Iran, where we are perceived to be at odds with the repressive regime, do the demonstrating crowds chant "U-S-A."

So, if I read this right, Woolsey identifies the policy as a causal factor in the September massacres. And since those corrupt rulers are overseas, that policy would be a foreign policy. And since it's the policy of our government, that would make it US foreign policy. Which means that Woolsey is saying that the September massacres were, among other things, outcomes of US foreign policy. Woolsey is a fan of expanding the war, so you won't see Michael Kelly and Charles Krauthammer denouncing him, but here he's saying something the doves on the left and isolationists on the right have said.

Early Adopters Profit! from eerily-prescient Unqualified Offering items! Opinion Journal's "Best [Neocon Approved Items] of the Web" links to this NYT piece reporting that "Saudis Balk at U.S. Request to Freeze Bank Accounts." Unqualified Offerings first reported this as pre-news on October 31st, the day the USA Today reported that the Saudis would "freeze terrorist assets." Surely investors numbering in the high-single digits are glad they got the word ahead of time!

Ginger Stampley Says "Ashcroft has been nothing but a disaster as AG on issues cutting across the ideological spectrum" and she's right. It is small consolation that he follows one of the worst attorney generals of all time. It's small consolation that most attorney generals, as George Will would say, suck ass. Ed Meese, John Mitchell, Bobby Kennedy. It's only if you can't remember their names that you're probably dealing with an okay fellow. (I make an exception for Richard Thornburgh, because he graduated from my high school, and we both spoke at my graduation. He is my attorney general homeboy!) I don't recall Carter Administration AG Benjamin Civiletti launching any no-knock raids. Past that, you have a group of mostly frightening men and women.

I actually had a little hope for Ashcroft, who seemed good on the Second Amendment and federalism going into the job, and maybe not so bad on freedom of speech, but those small hopes have been dashed. Republicans were put on earth to disappoint libertarians. I'm as big on the Second Amendment as any non-gun owner, but dammit, there are nine others in the Bill of Rights too. As for federalism, Ashcroft's doings in California (medical marijuana raids) and Oregon (the so-called right to die) put paid to that idea.

Business Idea - As libertarian Alan Bock says of himself, I too have always been better at the theory than the practice of capitalism. But that could change! Prominent among the spam I've been getting are come-ons for penis enlargement. Almost as numerous are ads for mortgage refinancing. So it hit me: Why not one company that does both? One unsolicited e-mail! One easy-to-read bill! Think of the promotional possibilities: "We'll take those extra points off your mortgage rate and add them directly to your - nudge nudge - bottom line!"

Some might object that nobody would understand both the schwantz-magnifying and payment-reducing sides of the business. My proposal is to staff the company exclusively with telecom people, who are used to not knowing what they're doing.

A Fanboy's Notes - I am by no means sold on the new Justice League cartoon series yet. But there was an amusing bit in tonight's episode. Green Lantern is on trial on a distant planet for allegedly destroying its neighbor, standing before a panel consisting of what appear to be the images of three AIs on a giant screen. The Flash objects to the proceedings because there is no one speaking before the court for the accused.

Flash: Don't you have lawyers here?
AI Judge: We solved our lawyer problem long ago.

"The Scandal Is What's Legal," Michael Kinsley famously said. Last night I talked on the phone to an old friend of mine in the national security bureaucracy. Eventually the topic came around the the War, and the "What now?" question. Anent the possibility of war with Iraq (not to mention "Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and 'parts of Egypt' ") he adverted to the source of any uncertainty - no one can know, he said, because the ultimate decision is going to be made by "one man."

Folks, this is nuts. I realize that we've been allowing Presidents to get us into wars on their own say so for some number of generations now. And I realize that "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution II," passed in late September, technically authorizes the President to attack Diemos and Phobos if he feels like it - he just has to claim that terrorists are using them for low-gravity training. But as Kinsley said, that doesn't mean it's not a scandal that "one man" decides whether to take an ostensible republic to war.

While I didn't vote for him, I always thought Dubya seemed like a substantially decent guy, less corrupt than Clinton and less megalomaniacal than Gore. My concern is that, because of that perceived decency, we are less concerned about heaping powers on the Presidency than we should be. John Ashcroft has been bad enough. I shudder to think what the next Janet Reno will do with the "USA Quote Patriot Unquote Act" behind her. We have to demand that Congress do its job and deliberate further wars in advance. Another good idea is to vote against everyone who voted for passage of the Patriot Act no matter what you think of their other merits. (Note: The preceding sentence may qualify as political advocacy and require Unqualified Offerings to fill out FEC forms at some point. That too, is a scandal.)

Highclearing.com Pre-IPO - Despite frequent cracks about our "many loyal reader" (sic), recent reviews of server statistics lead management to believe that Unqualified Offerings' readership may actually be, according to our source, "in the high one-figure range." The editorial staff would like to thank our early adopters.

Even For An Opinion Slut Like Me I couldn't work up the energy to dismantle Barbara Kingsolver's stupid op-ed in yesterday's Washington Post. Or Friday's Post - I'm repressing. In it, Kingsolver compares the most appealing things (to a liberal) that Franklin Roosevelt said in one speech to the least appealing things (to a liberal) George W. has done. And, as with so many well-off lefties who have written about the war, to pine for privation - these people seem to really resent the fact that Dubya hasn't restricted the country to a single cup of coffee a day yet, like FDR did. However, warhawk Matt Welch did work up the energy, and his treatment of Kingsolver is amusing.

The Words Are the Same But the Tune Is Different - Two potted histories of civilian casualties in warfare, one by blogger Steven den Beste and one by paleocon historian Joseph Stromberg. For den Beste, the special status of civilians was a brief sentimentality of history that needs to be put aside. Stromberg doesn't think so. I'm with Stromberg, but you can read den Beste's essay and Stromberg's essay and decide for yourself.

The Story Behind the Story - Instapundit quite properly crows about an item in the New York Times:

I mean," she continued, after insisting, understandably, that her name not appear in print, "it's a white powder, made by who, and cut with who knows what? Who is going to put that up their nose now?"

Instapundit had predicted soon after the first anthrax attacks that White Powder Fear was going to be hell on the cocaine trade, and the Times story constitutes early anecdotal evidence that he is right.

Now here's a question for that drone who replaced Barry McCaffery as Drug Czar (and yes, I forget the guy's name, and no, I don't have enough respect to make the comparatively simple effort to find it on the web): What does it do to your addiction theories if cocaine consumers are capable of giving up the drug in the face of new information that changes their risk-benefit calculus? Shatters it, maybe? We need the War on Drugs to protect us from what, again?

Cabalwatch - A skeptical account of "Colin Powell vs the War on Everyone Crowd." Though it appears in the Village Voice, it's refreshingly free of agony over the Taliban and al Qaeda themselves. Just how grandiose are the hawks' ambitions? Here's fellow traveler Michael Ledeen at a panel discussion at the end of October, as reported by Voice correspondent Jason Vest:

"No stages," he said. "This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. And all this talk about, well, first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq, then we will take a look around and see how things stand, that is entirely the wrong way to go about it. Because these guys are all talking to each other and are all working with one another. . . . If we just let our own vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to be clever and piece together clever diplomatic solutions to this thing, but just wage a total war against these tyrants, I think we will do very well, and our children will sing great songs about us years from now."

In Due Time - Instapundit writes:

Tell also ignores the real scandal of the "USA Patriot Act" -- which is that most of it isn't about terrorism at all, but is simply a bureaucratic grab for things that have been on wish lists for years.

When this crisis is over, some people in Congress, and in the agencies, need to be held responsible for what's in that act -- and for how the powers it confers have been used.

Two responses: 1) Good idea. If they let us. 2) Since Instapundit himself is all for extending the war to Iraq, on whatever combination of flimsy evidence and rank opportunism, and since the Wall Street Journal, mouthpiece of the Administration hawks, is urging successive attacks on Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and 'parts of' Egypt, and since the Enabling Act gives the President sole discretion to decide whom to attack from now until the end of time, just when does he think that "this crisis" will be over?

At Least It Wasn't Ellen Goodman - Unqualified Offerings must string together four words that it would normally rebel at putting together: Terrific Molly Ivins Column. It's not that the points she makes are original, but they're essential, and she states them with verve:

WHOA! The problem is the premise.

We are having one of those circular arguments about how many civil liberties we can trade away in order to make ourselves safe from terrorism, without even looking at the assumption - can we can make ourselves safer by making ourselves less free?

There is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. Less of one does not lead to more of the other. People with no rights are not safe from terrorist attack.

Then she gets into the specifics:

Let's see: If civil liberties had been suspended before Sept. 11, would law enforcement have noticed Mohamed Atta? Would the FBI have opened an investigation of Zacarias Massoui, as Minneapolis agents wanted to do? The CIA had several of the 9-11 actors on its lists of suspected terrorists. Exactly what civil liberty prevented it from doing anything about it?

In the case of a suspected terrorist, the government already had the right to search, wiretap, intercept, detain, examine computer and financial records, and do anything else it needed to do. There's a special court it goes to for subpoenas and warrants. As it happens, the feds didn't do it.

After a look back at excesses in reaction to the anarchist scares straddling the last century, and the irrelevant reminder that Sacco and Vanzetti were "finally exonerated by the state of Massachusetts in 1977" (the best historical thinking with which I am familiar is that one was indeed guilty and the other kept quiet out of solidarity), she rebukes British Home Secretary David Blunkett's denigration of "airy-fairy civil liberties":

The U.S. Constitution was written by men who had just been through a long, incredibly nasty war. They did not consider the Bill of Rights a frivolous luxury, to be in force only in times of peace and prosperity, put aside when the going gets tough. The Founders knew from tough going.

They weren't airy-fairy guys.

Indulgence Report - Unqualified Offerings has a new 19" flat screen monitor and is darned happy about it. Offering Boy's old monitor died, so rather than buy him one, I bought myself one and gave him my old one. I swear that just because my five and a half year old has a seventeen inch flat screen monitor that I am not an overindulgent parent! It's used! It's a hand-me-down! He only has a Pentium-133! That's my story.

I settled on a ViewSonic A90f, with 18 viewable inches. It's a noticeable improvement even over my 19" curved-screen monitor at work. The other option was the Samsung 955F, which was cheaper if you bothered to send in the mail-in rebate, but the colors on the Samsung seemed washed out next to the ViewSonic. I can't wait to try some games on this thing. I couldn't justify the expense of going flat-panel this time. Even though it was clearly true, looking at Best Buy's Wall o' Monitors, that a 17" flat panel looks, subjectively, just about the same as a 19" CRT, the best-looking flat panel on display, a ViewSonic A800F, was somewhat more than twice the cost of the A90f (which was $300, since you asked). Too bad - the A800F is a beaut, with a 17.4" screen and no problem keeping up with fast redraws. You could really see its superiority to the two 17" flat panels next to it.

But since I just told different search engines that this is not a "Day in the Life" blog, I'd best reach for some social significance: The stores were packed. That's not the judgment of a shopper - the stores always look packed to shoppers on the day after Thanksgiving - but of someone with a dozen years of retail management experience. I've long believed that recessions end when people get tired and bored of feeling recessed. That may be happening already, and if it seems too soon somehow, we've all been through a lot lately.

Return to Somalia - It keeps cropping up, not least because the fell hand of al Qaeda's Mohamed Atef has lately been seen behind the famous "Black Hawk Down" incident that precipitated the US withdrawal. And we have been told that that withdrawal convinced bin Laden that, if you inflicted minor casualties on the US, it would cut and run. (Supposedly the US withdrawal from Lebanon in 1983 taught the same lessons.) All but unspoken (that I have noticed) is the implication that if only we had stuck it out in Somalia and proved our resolve, we wouldn't be in this situation. This is a live issue because the parallels between Somalia then and Afghanistan now are strong - war-weary residents troubled by armed factions led by charismatic warlords who make national stability almost unimaginable.

I can ascribe nothing approaching a venal motive to President Bush the Elder's decision to undertake a humanitarian intervention in Somalia. The Cold War was over and the Horn of Africa had reverted from strategic crossroads to simple shithole. People were starving - you could see it on TV. There was no food and there were a bunch of "warlords" getting in the way of aid. The US military had the logistical resources to get sustenance into the country and the organizational capability to move it around in-country. We had a chance to do a lot of good. We were on the side of the angels, and the whole plan was based on indelibly racist assumptions.

I don't mean that in a bad way. No, really! Or let me put it this way - I don't accuse the Bush administration of racist malice. No, the racism of the Somali intervention had more to do with the familiar liberal/left "soft racism of low expectations." Because the reason some Somalis were starving was that other Somalis, with guns, wanted them to starve. Starvation was a weapon of war. "Warlords" were the root cause of starvation, and starvation was a means to an end, and that end was power. "Warlords" are nothing more nor less than politicians; if the claim offend thee, call them "politicians of a type." By making it its business to "prevent starvation" the Bush administration put itself in the business of thwarting warlord ambitions. That's not the racist part. The racist part is that, as was clear at the time, the idea that the warlords would take exception to this took the US government, media and public completely by surprise. Then the US announced its plan to disarm the warlords, which is to say, turn them into non-warlords, which is to say, vitiate their claims to power. Again, it wasn't racist to try to disarm the warlords as such. But one could only imagine the warlords not objecting to this, and violently, if one somehow couldn't imagine that these swarthy foreigners took themselves and their own ambitions seriously. One had to believe either that the warlords were attempting to shoot and starve their enemies into submission by mistake, and would be grateful when shown the error of their ways, or that they had made the decision to try to shoot and starve their way to power lightly, and that once US attention turned like the gaze of a stern yet kindly parent upon these errant children, they would cast their little eyes down, mutter "Sorry, mom," and go play right. In US perceptions, the warlords could have been idiots, children or cowards. What US policy could not have been based on was a sober appreciation that the US was setting itself against serious, adult power brokers who cared more for their own plans than American ones. (For my part, I have no problem calling the warlords evil, a moral judgment that assumes the moral capacity of the judged, though I don't see a basis for the "What's wrong with killing civilians?" brigade to do so.)

To indulge in self-quotation, (aka "to pull a Paglia"): It's called peacekeeping. But what it is is war. Having set ourselves the tast of thwarting the warlords, the warlords were going to attempt to thwart our attempts to thwart them. At that point, the intervening power has a handful of options: 1) Fake it; this was the course eventually chosen by many of the UN contingents that took our place. Put a premium on preserving the "peacekeeping" force itself, essentially letting the local belligerents dictate terms to you and do what they want. Cooperate with their checkpoints, let them through your own, sell them food and arms on the black market. Pros: If you have to be there anyway, particularly under the restrictive rules of engagement in force (i.e. "Dont' shoot unless they've already killed you"), this maximizes your chance of getting out alive, and maybe you make a little money. Cons: You might as well not be there at all, and you materially increase the power and status of the local belligerents. 2) Go all out and destroy your enemies. Your enemies become everyone who doesn't want you there. This takes time, treasure and blood, including yours. Pros: Enhances "our" credibility! May lead to the destruction of "local warlords," who, as a class, do not fall into the category of fuzzy, big-eyed things that people instinctively cherish. Cons: All the usual downsides to war in earnest, plus, gratitude for your efforts will be fleeting. Politics doesn't run on gratitude. Also, war may be as bad as or worse than what you wanted to prevent in the first place. 3) Run away! People in the US can't possibly care as much about the fate of Somalia (or wherever) as Somalis do. Pros: Saves American lives and recognizes the limits of American interest. Cons: Running away from something that's not that important to you can give someone like Osama bin Laden the mistaken idea that you'll run away from something that is.

It seems to me that Option 3 was the clear best choice in Somalia after Aideed's ambush of the 18 marines. And it also seems like the ambush, or something like it, was predictible in advance of the decision to intervene at all. Option 2 was nothing the country or even its elites were ready for. Option 1 is likely harder on national prestige than withdrawing outright - if you look like a coward for running away, you look like a bigger coward staying there and becoming some warlord's prison wife.

And out of the preceding ingredients the final, general case against "humanitarian intervention" arises like a word appearing in a bowl of alphabet soup - it's a cruelty to the people you profess to want to help. When Bill Clinton beat his breast about the failure of the West to intervene in Rwanda, he ignored the fact that the West intervened twice, both times to malign effect. There were Belgian "peacekeepers" in Rwanda the very day the massacres started - they had been there for quite some time. As soon as the Hutu government inaugurated its slaughter of the Tutsis, Belgium pulled the troops out, so they wouldn't get hurt. Belgian lives were more important to the Belgian government and people than Tutsi lives. The preference was forgiveable. The pretense that things were otherwise, which was what the deployment of "peacekeepers" constituted, was not. How many Tutsis died because of the false security Belgium's pantomime of concern engendered? Absent Belgium's "humanitarian" intervention, the Tutsi would have known ahead of time what was true anyway: they were on their own and needed to look to their own defense.

Then, after the Tutsi resistance ended the genocide the old-fashioned way, with a light infantry campaign that observers at the time said merited inclusion in future military textbooks, the West intervened again - the French created "safe zones" in the southwest of Rwanda that kept the resistance from bringing the francophone instigators of the massacres to account. Bill Clinton's belated nostra culpa that the "United States" should have intervened amounts to cheap grandstanding. He was President at the time! He didn't intervene because he knew perfectly well what logistics dictated, what differential interest dictated and what the political costs of intervening would be.

Well! Unqualified Offerings is still bitter about Rwanda! In fact, it was the calamity of Rwanda that confirmed my belated embrace of isolationism, the last libertarian block to be added to the foundation of my political house. I finally understood that isolationism was a kindness, and, in a world of differential interest, the only kindness one people could realistically do another.

Which brings us to the potential trap of Afghanistan. The country has persevered in the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda (or does Unqualified Offerings repeat itself?) because we have at least as much interest in their not ruling in Afghanistan as any Afghan does. And the answer to what Courtland Milloy imagines to be a rhetorical question, "Why are atrocities committed by the Northern Alliance more acceptable than those committed by the Taliban?" is simple: The Northern Alliance has shown no special interest in killing Americans.

So far. If we make it our business to thwart more warlords, more warlords will make it their business to thwart us. The US needs to finish the destruction of al Qaeda and the reduction of its Taliban appendage to a negligible force, then leave the "reconstruction" (really, construction) of Afghanistan to those with a greater interest in the matter. President Bush the Younger has already promised more than is wise. If we make the stability and justice of Afghan politics the test of our success, we really will be in a quagmire, whether the hawks like the word or not.

Another Cockburn Heard From - In a sign of just how far I've travelled since my decade-long subscription to the New Republic lapsed, the Cockburn family have become, after Christopher Hitchens, my favorite pinkos. The Independent has an interesting piece by Patrick Cockburn on the Northern Alliance and the prospects for peace and stability in Afghanistan after the Autumn War. The article is probably even non-tendentious enough for US hawks to read without gagging. P. Cockburn replicates Unqualified Offerings' "whole schmear" theory of Northern Alliance behavior, and says, "The problem facing the Northern Alliance today is similar to that which faced the Taliban until a few days ago. Its base is too narrow for it to hold on to the power it has seized. The Taliban was able to capture 90 per cent of Afghanistan because of Pakistani and Saudi backing. The Northern Alliance has been able to make its great advances this month only because of the US air offensive."

Qualified optimism from Cockburn at the end, followed by a warning:

But there are also some reasons for optimism. Afghans are intensely war weary. There is a deep desire for a normal life at every level. Afghans with university education complain that their children are barely literate because the schools have been destroyed. In the fertile lands of the Shomali plains north of Kabul, the fields watered by rivers flowing out of the Hindu Kush, local doctors say that 80 per cent of the children are malnourished.

Afghans know that they now have an unprecedented opportunity to obtain foreign aid, but that this requires some form of civil peace.

The external pressures on Afghanistan should also be less. The Northern Alliance may exaggerate the degree to which the Taliban was a catspaw of Pakistani intelligence – but only by a little bit. Iran and Russia, the traditional backers of the Northern Alliance, will also want to expand their influence, but this is likely to be pacific. Neither wants a confrontation with the US.

Power in Afghanistan is fragmented and will remain so. Even villages behave like independent republics. A foreign peace-keeping force might help to reduce the friction between different parties, armies and ethnic groups. But, as the UN discovered in Somalia, failure to be seen as wholly neutral would have disastrous results.

I Told You So Department - Joanne Jacobs links to a Knight-Ridder story that seems to demonstrate that actual civilian casualties are about a fifth of the number the Taliban was putting about. Of course, Unqualified Offerings readers expected that, didn't they?

Workers of the World, Start Your Engines - Since gas prices and automobiles have been a minor theme this week, and since it's Thanksgiving, I want to move cheaper gas pretty high up the list of personal and social goods to remember today. Cheap gas is the friend of Labor. I say this as someone who commutes 20 miles each way. My willingness to do so is a big reason why I was able to get a job at all with my unimpressive credentials of two years ago, and why I was able to increase my income 60% in eighteen months, even as the economy started going south. It's simple supply and demand: the farther I can travel, the greater the supply of potential employers. My willingness to travel farther even helps those workers who are not, because it lessens the demand for work in my immediate area. Without cars and affordable fuel, the only way to take a job in Herndon would be to move to Herndon. It's a lot harder to move (sell this house, buy that one) than to drive.

Since I may just be facing reprisals soon at my current job, and times are hard, the widest possible selection of potential employers is something that means a great deal to me. Needless to say, "sprawl" (probably best defined as "where other people live") makes it cheaper to start businesses too, which increases the supply of employers. And it's the best antiterrorist program going, short of isolationism itself.

Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud Department - Many years ago, The New Republic had a cover story about why the economic news is always grim. If unemployment goes up, that's bad: recession. If unemployment goes down, that's bad too: inflation. (If it stays right where it is, the economy is dangerously stagnant.) You can play the same game with interest rates, commodity prices, productiviy, any economic indicator. No matter what happens, an enterprising business reporter can find analysts who find it "worrying." The latest enterprising journalist is William Drozdiak of the Washington Post, who warns us that "Cheap Oil Comes at a Price." Non-OPEC nations Norway, Russia and Mexico get the credit, or blame, for driving prices down with their production levels. The drop from pre-war highs of $31 a barrel, is the equivalent, Drozdiak notes, of a $250 billion tax cut. Unqualified Offerings drives 20 miles each way to work, and is damned glad for the relief. But that's its selfish, shortsighted personal interest talking! After all:

• Low prices could cause political turmoil in the Persian Gulf, especially for our "ally," Saudi Arabia. Boo hoo. The Gulf States that have done the most to liberalize and the least to encourage extremists will weather any difficulties best.
  
• "American oil companies could find their drilling costs prohibitively high if oil falls to around $10 a barrel." So? The negative effect on those few companies isn't going to undo the effects of what would be more like a $400 billion dollar tax cut if prices fell that far. Also, So? American companies aren't going to slaughter their fuzzy, big-eyed oil calves rather than feed them. Oil is a mineral. It will stay in the ground, undrilled. At some point in the future, the price is likely to rise. At that point, it becomes profitable to open those wells again, and when that happens, you'll get downward price pressure. Heck, oil being a commodity, just the knowledge that it is sitting in the ground generates a certain downward price pressure. It serves the country, if not JR Ewing, even if undrilled. And low prices mean that much less pressure to open up the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, which ought to make Democrats happy, if no one else.

  "Unless Russia and the others decide to follow OPEC in curbing supplies, prices will continue to fall and the first ones to suffer will be North American producers," said OPEC Secretary General Ali Rodriguez.

  
  OPEC's Secretary General sure is selfless, worrying about our fuzzy, big-eyed oil barons like that.
  

What is the proximate cause of our "woe?"

A clear split appears to divide the Russian government and the private sector over how to handle the current oil crisis. While Russia's deputy prime minister, Viktor Khristenko, says the country's political leadership found the world oil market "very worrying," the oligarchs who control Russia's oil operations have defiantly refused to offer OPEC anything more than token cuts.

Unqualified Offerings urges all of its reader, when enumerating its blessings preparatory to turkey consumption tomorrow, to put "the oligarchs who control Russia's oil operations" near the top of your lists. But don't worry: "said Mehdi Varzi, a prominent oil analyst for Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. 'It's relatively expensive to extract oil from the Siberian fields, and below $15 a barrel, they can't be profitable.' " When it happens, there will be an article about the downside of that, too.

Crock Files - Courtland Milloy of the Washington Post is as reliably stupid as he is reliably angry. Today's column is one more reason to despair that an effective barricade can be thrown up between us and the ever-widening war the hawks so dream of. He makes me want to nuke Baghdad just to spite him:

Why are we so happy that Afghans can now fly kites, shave their beards and wear short skirts when so few of us seemed to care about their plight before Sept. 11?

Gee, maybe it's because most of the country didn't know about the kite thing, but once you hear about it, man, what a pisser! Maybe some people did care - more than Milloy anyway - but decided, with whatever reluctance, that it just wouldn't do to start a war over beards, skirts and kites. War being a serious thing and all, people not employed by the Wall Street Journal, New Republic or Weekly Standard try to avoid them. But since the rulers of Afghanistan turned out to be butt buddies with an organization that made it their business to slaughter 4,000 of Courtland Milloy's fellow Americans (if he ever manages to think of himself that way, and on the evidence of many many of his columns I find it impossible to tell), the unlooked-for chore of destroying our enemies turns out to have kites, shaving and dress freedom as by-products, and that's kind of nice. Indeed, even if you never "cared about their plight," you'd have to be out and out churlish not to get a certain pleasure in seeing their plight lifted.

And speaking of churlish:

What about the millions of Afghans who are in danger of starvation this winter? Are they, too, flying kites amid the land mines and unexploded cluster bombs?

Probably not. Does Milloy want to ban kite flying again, on the "leave no child behind" grounds that if some Afghans are suffering, none of them should have any fun? I am unaware of any campaign by the US to plant land mines in the Autumn War, though the Soviets dropped the things like dandruff in the 80s. As for unexploded cluster bombs, yes, they certainly exist, and they are a good argument that wars should be chosen reluctantly, even by Michael Barone. But Afghanistan is the size of Texas and hasn't got appreciably more people. So there's probably some space between the UXBs. Meanwhile, far more food aid is likely to get to Afghanistan now that the Taliban is largely defeated than would have otherwise. Even a good leftie like Alexander Cockburn admitted that millions of people were in danger of starvation before the war ever started. Besides, wasn't it just a few weeks ago when the likes of Robert Scheer were claiming that the US was guilty of providing humanitarian aid to Afghanistan in exchange for clamping down on the heroin trade? Will the reflex left get back to the rest of us when they've settled on which incompatible complaints they want to keep?

It just gets worse. Milloy uncritically accepts that foreign aid is Good. It's possible he's not completely wrong about this, but he doesn't seem to have even heard of Dependency Theory. For Milloy, one might stint on aid for malign reasons only. He follows up "questions" about starvation, kites, aid and alleged Northern Alliance atrocities with

The answers wouldn't have anything to do with our selfish, short-sighted national interest, would it?

Answer: I sure as heck hope so. I wish the Taliban had made more decisions based on their own selfish, short-sighted national interest, and not based on the globalist messianism of a bunch of foreign (to Afghanistan) agitators. My country would have been spared 4,000 dead, the Office of Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, and yes, the guilt of war.

For about $15 billion a year, the 125 million children worldwide who have never attended school could be educated, says Oxfram International, a leading advocacy group for the poor. So why is it so difficult to invest in something that could help prevent war and so easy to spend that much and more to wage war?

Can Milloy name any evidence whatsoever education prevents war? Education is a fine thing, but we have a lot of it in the US, and Milloy clearly thinks we're too warlike for our own good. bin Laden went to Oxford, his top lieutenant is a doctor, pre-Desert Storm Iraq may have been the most "educated" country in the Arab world - after Lebanon, and boy did all that education do them a lot of good. Germany, my ninth grade english teacher thrilled to repeat every few days, had the highest number of PhDs in the world before World War II. Now educate 125 million children and leave them locked in the sort of statist kleptocracies that can't productively use and reward their minds, and the resulting alienation will give you all the wars you can handle. Viz. Mohamed Atta.

"We would agree with O'Neill that there has been a lot of misuse of aid, but much of that is because it has been given for political reasons," said Jo Marie Griesgraber, director of policy for Oxfram America.

She cited Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire as the worst example but could have included the Taliban and former U.S. pals Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden as well.

Myths die hard. But let's try one more time. There was no need for the US to give Osama bin Laden money to join the Afghan resistance. bin Laden's whole entree into the mujahedin scene was that he was rich as shit and willing to spend money to kill Soviet soldiers. The Saudis and Pakistanis in the Soviet-Afghan war were not just conduits of US policy - they were pursuing their own overlapping but not identical interests with their own resources too. Fun Fact: Every dime of aid the Russians ever gave Cuba was "for political reasons." This seems to bother neither Jo Marie Griesgraber nor Courtland Milloy enough to mention. And I am shocked, shocked, that the people who make aid decisions - politicians - would make them for political reasons.

Milloy clearly thinks everything the US has ever done internationally is wrong, with the possible exception of sanctions against South Africa in the eighties. I happen to think that much that the US has done internationally is wrong, especially in the last ten years. The difference between us is that Milloy wants us to do more! With that track record!

In Loco Parentis - Mrs. Offering insists on setting the clock radio to NPR, so I awoke to some fellow from the Economist this morning propounding the necessity of stiff new gasoline taxes to "wean motorists" from excessive dependence on oil generally, and driving specifically. The vocabulary is instructive. As PJ O'Rourke once put it when reviewing a popular book of the 90s, "the government is the village; you are the child."

Hey Kids, What's That Sound - The drumbeat grows ever louder. Neocon punditry assembled wants war with Iraq next. Elliott Cohen (OpinionJournal.com) writes:

Second, the U.S. should continue to target regimes that sponsor terrorism. Iraq is the obvious candidate, having not only helped al Qaeda, but attacked Americans directly (including an assassination attempt against the first President Bush) and developed weapons of mass destruction.

Republican loyalist Russ Smith warns that George Bush will not prove to be a great President unless, among other things, he overthrows Saddam Hussein:

Supposedly, European leaders have no stomach for a war with Iraq (with the exception of Britain’s Tony Blair, who’s bound to overcome internal protests), but that timidity is fraught with peril. There’s no point in conducting a piecemeal fight for modern civilization; all scores need to be settled, one right after the other. Nothing less is acceptable.

Michael Barone writes, "We know that Iraq has been trying to develop chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons for years. And Iraq has not concealed its hostility to our war against terrorism. The civilized world cannot consider itself safe so long as Saddam's regime remains in power in Iraq."

William Safire avers that "Only Saddam has both the capacity and the demonstrated will to destroy entire cities and launch worldwide epidemics."

Notice the gauzy language and the vagueness of the indictments. Also the lies - just how has Saddam demonstrated the will to launch worldwide epidemics anyway? Safire actually slips the real argument in at the end of his piece:

The elder Bush once called political momentum "the big Mo." Nothing gathers support like a sense of inevitability.

Which is to say, Since we're, like, already fighting people, it should be easy to slip this other war in too. Stay tuned.

Is That Love? - The US is offering $25 million for Osama bin Laden's capture. Surely we can do better than that, the cost of missiles and fuel air bombs being what it is. A billion would be a bargain.

One Little Glitch - Two Cato Institute officers weigh in with the latest in the ever-growing genre of anti-Saudi opinion pieces, a genre Unqualified Offerings not only can't get enough of but has been known to contribute to. Unlike your Brookings folks, Cato analysts have a nodding acquaintance with supply and demand, and the thesis of the column is "Don't worry about the 'oil weapon' because the Saudis can't afford to use it."

The common wisdom is that we must turn the other cheek and stay on friendly terms with the Saudi autocrats because we need their oil. Nonsense. They need our money more than we need their oil. Repeat after us: "There is no ‘oil weapon.' "

I find their analysis compelling. But there's one consequence of pushing out the House of Saud or being seen to let it fall that does bother me. bin Laden is a rich Saudi exile who has a beef with the United States. An ouster of the Saudi royal family would create a lot more of those.

Saleemwatch - The anti-Saudi campaign that so frets Justin Raimondo is spreading! Now Farrukh Saleem's latest column (in The News of Pakistan) takes the royal family to task for spending too much on weapons and building an apparatus of repression in which "one out of every one hundred Saudis is in the military and one out of every ten Saudis is employed by an intelligence agency." Here is the conclusion of the article. Note that it comes not from the Weekly Standard but from a left wing Pakistani with no love for the United States:

September 11 has now put all Saudi policies on trial including the Kingdom's human rights record and its treatment of women (two things Saudi Arabia has in common with the Taliban).

Target Acquisition - There's an icky item on indymedia.org in which the author posts a list of all those "supposed to have been killed in the attack on the Pentagon on September 11." "Supposed" is a nice touch. It leaves open the possibility that Samantha Allen, 36, Hillside, Md. budget analyst, U.S. Army Reported missing, Pentagon employs ten Samantha Allen impersonators and, safe in the top-secret Allen Cave, continues to plot the destruction of - the Pentagon budget, I suppose. But the point of posting the names of the Pentagon missing is not really to cast doubt on their deaths. No, it is to urge left wing activists to drag the names of the dead through the mud:

Can independent reporters do some investigating on these people? For example, regarding those who worked for the US army, navy, and marines: would it be possible to get an estimate of how many people they might have killed during military operations they might have performed? How many Koreans, Vietnamese, Central Americans, or other Third World People’s have these US military personnel killed or helped other to kill?

...

And how many people have died as a result of the use of the arms systems which these weapons contractors have helped to design or build?

The article is headed "Comparing Killers: Mohammed Atef and those who died in the Pentagon (english)" and I'm going to leave the author's unconvincing claims that "I AM NOT saying that one should make harsh judgments regarding US military personnel." His syntax and rhetoric give away that game. Instead, I want to talk about the pragmatic outcome of the September massacre plan and lessons to draw therefrom.

The first thing one notices is that the author posts no similar list of World Trade Center victims. He probably believes in concepts of "economic exploitation" which would make many of the dead office workers guilty parties too - "What is the evil of the man who robs a bank compared to the evil of a man who founds a bank? as Brecht put it. Well, fuck Brecht. But the point is that the author clearly regards that kind of guilt as a much harder sell. He recognizes, in other words, the distinction between killing civilians and killing soldiers. Most of us recognize this instinctively. Maybe four people in the Western world, including George Orwell at the height of his war fever, do not.

Now imagine for a minute that al-Qaeda had attacked only the Pentagon. Imagine then that they attacked it with an empty plane. It's clear to me that, while the US would still be at war, we would be having a much harder political time of it. As an arguably military target, its destruction alone would not trouble the consciences of the soft left in this country and the casual anti-Americans in others. 200 dead workers in a policy factory whose product many people in this country and more oversees consider malign was simply not going to command the deference to US retaliatory impulses that 4000 bystanders to history have. There was no swell of outrage and grief in the US or abroad when the Cole was blown up. Americans felt bad, and cheesed off, about Khobar Towers. The 1998 embassy bombings came and went. Outside of neocon policy circles, these events occasioned regretful shrugs and not much more. Partly it's because those attacks happened Far Away. But it's relevant that in the Cole and Khobar Towers incidents, the dead were soldiers - the people a country designates to be ready to die. Read Keegan on the role of the British infantry at Waterloo. Even the embassies contained mostly people who had freely chosen to serve the government and assume the risks of doing so.

Nobody assigned the workers in the Trade Center towers the job of dying for us.

Virginia Postrel noted on the day of the attacks that much foreign commentary dewlt on the symbolic shock to America of the loss of the WTC buildings. Nonsense, Postrel countered, nobody in the US had much of an emotional investment in the buildings It was all those people.
It was precisely by adopting the "Orwell postulate" that it is not worse to kill civilians than soldiers that al-Qaeda ensured a level of (universal) outrage sufficient to the task of their own undoing. As the war against our attackers continues, we do well to keep the lesson in mind.

Primitive Visions - Offering Boy and I were on the road this morning at 4am, in search of peak Leonid storm action. The idea was to get out of the inner suburbs to the country, away from the (normal, non-nuclear) glow of Washington DC. My mother, whom we sometimes refer to as The Weather Channel for the frequency and accuracy of her telephone updates, had warned us that we may run into "patchy fog." Well. The fog was perhaps patchy in the global sense, but on the scale of suburban Washington, it was more like a whole quilt. Upper Montgomery County from Darnestown to Ashton was pure batting; you couldn't make it thicker with a fog machine. We drove for an hour and a half, during which Offering Boy fell asleep. When we finally found a clear spot between Ashton and Cloverly on Route 650 at 5:30 and I woke him up, all he wanted to do was go straight home. He never did get out of the car, but I did, and even the off-peak meteor action was worth it. Despite growing up in the country, I'd never seen even a single shooting star before.

But forget that. First, the long, obscure drive between Damascus and Emmittsville, long because it was unwise to go much faster than 30 miles per hour. Out there it's two lanes and only occasional streetlamps, and lots of curves, so in fog, you'd best go slow. Good idea anyway, since there are deer, and my first impression was that a deer was what I was instinctively breaking for around one sudden curve. But my second impression was that it was much smaller than a deer, with thick grey fur and paws rather than hooves. I got a good look at him and he got a good look at me as I started up again and he moved to the shoulder.

It was a wolf. In Montgomery County.

Worse Than Hitler, A Continuing Series - One is abashed to draw the comparison. And If Unqualified Offerings has to read one more "if today's media covered WWII column" it will push for amendments to the Patriot Act forbidding same. It's all been downhill since Admiral Woolsey wrote the first one in - whenever it was. Way long ago, Younger Readers. Still, Mullah Omar's last statements do have a certain familiarity to them. Omar, recent head of the government of Afghanistan says that the situation in Afghanistan - his side getting overthrown and getting their asses kicked up and down the country - isn't the important thing at all. The important thing is "the extinction of America," which is proceeding according to plan.

Now, going into the Autumn War, the rep was that Afghans were "fiercely nationalistic," unyielding in their opposition to foreign domination, the graveyard of empires and all that. Unqualified Offerings does have a low opinion of politicians generally, but would still expect that most rulers of most countries would think that the situation in their country is very important indeed. Omar's professed lack of interest in his chief pro forma responsibility - um, Afghanistan - is as far from "fiercely nationalistic" as you can get. And (sorry in advance) in the last days of the second world war, Hitler remarked that the German people deserved all the suffering they got - he still believed his racial theories were right, so it must be the German people that were wrong. They had failed him, or his absurd ideas of them. Like Omar, Hitler was the farthest thing from a nationalist. To him the country of Germany was nothing but a staging ground for the revolution of the volk. Omar's latest statements reveal that his own country is, to him, nothing but a staging ground for the revolution of his sect's ideas of the Ummah, the community of the muslim faithful. "Islamofascism" is the apposite term after all.

Archives! - Missing a forward slash in a setting path. Yes, it was that simple.

To Quag or Not to Quag, That Is the Question - Both MSNBC.com and The News (Pakistan), are reporting problems between the Northern Alliance (soon to change their name to The Northern Opponents) and British special forces. MSNBC.com says the Northern Alliance has demanded that the 120 commandos now in Afghanistan leave. (The same article also reports that the Northern Alliance says 15 of 60 can stay, so pick the story you like.) The News' summary simply reports the NA as saying that the Brits at Bagram airbase are in the country without "authorization." Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph reports that the Brits plan to send 6,000 troops "to try to prevent a recurrence of the bloody internecine warfare that followed the fall of the city to the Northern Alliance in 1992."

Let's take it real slow here for a minute. You can't "prevent" - ahem; try to prevent - what someone doesn't want to do. Contrariwise, if you try to prevent someone from doing what they want to do, that makes the two sides opponents. And if what they want to do involves violence and your means of trying to prevent involves violence or the threat of same (like two brigades worth of your army), that's called war. Excuse me. That's called "peacekeeping." But what it is is war. Viz. Somalia 1992-1993.

Pundit and weblog luminary Andrew Sullivan left off quoting Orwell long enough to quote Churchill the other week: "Facts are better than dreams." The Northern Alliance surely agrees, which is why they occupied Kabul in advance of the "comprehensive political settlement" of everyone's dreams. Says one Far Side orca to the other, as they eye the trainer holding the mullet above them, "Forget the fish, I'm going for the whole schmear." The Northern Alliance decided to go for the whole schmear. That hardly means they're guaranteed to keep it. Kabul has changed hands in April 1978, December 1979, February 1989, April 1992, September 1996 and now November 2001. There's no reason to think the current conquest will be more permanent. But it does mean that whoever tries to dislodge them, including the US or Britain, becomes the enemy of the occupiers.

Was that part of the plan?

Any Man's Death Diminisheth Me...In the Abstract - Taliban spokesman Mullah Maulvi Najibullah says Mohamed Atef, al-Qaeda military chief, is dead. Atef is suspected of being the guiding hand behind not ony the September massacres, but also the 1998 embassy bombings and the 1993 Mogadishu shootdown. As Loki said on the death of Baldur, "With a dry eye will I weep for him" Assuming, that is, that the Taliban spokesman is telling the truth and not just providing cover for Atef to go underground.

All Means Short of War - The Daily Telegraph reports that five of those "British" muslims who went to Central Asia to fight, um, Britain, died in the fighting for Mazar e-Sharif:

Hassan Butt, a spokesman for the group who is based in Islamabad, said: "They all died as martyrs fighting the so-called coalition against terrorism. They went out there to fight for the Taliban and were prepared to give their lives.

Hassan, bubalah! Just change your last name and maybe you won't feel so angry all the time! Talk to Johnny Fuckerfaster about it. He'll tell you.

Even Sandworms Turn - Ken Layne is shocked, shocked by the following quote from the New York Times: "It seems the Americans only want to support Israel and attack the Muslims. And if this is a war between Christians and Muslims, we ought to fight." As Layne explains

That quote is from the owner of a rental car agency in ... Kuwait.

Fahad al-Munaif, 27, was 17 years old when his little oil emirate was invaded by Iraq. Oh, and his sister's baby is named "Osama," after the caveman himself.

It's bad enough when Islamic radicals (and the Western left) forget the very recent wars America fought specifically to protect Muslims from slaughter, but now the rich, pampered oil babies of Kuwait are whining? Kuwait?

Yes, Kuwait. This is why some of us become neo-isolationists, after all - the evanescence of the gratitude our "help" buys us. Right now Afghans are damned grateful and moderate Pakistanis are optimistic and Arabnews.com dutifully reports that America is not so bad after all and the Taliban are not so great after all and please please please don't shrug those shoulders and topple the House of Saud. All the blogs agree that "the best propaganda is victory."

This too shall pass, folks. It has passed before and it will pass again.

Where's Osama? - Almost anywhere, according to these Central Asian media reports compiled by The International News. Next thing you know, he and Mullah Omar will be turning up on top of the World Trade Center with a backp - oh, that won't work, will it? Guess the bastards should have thought of that beforehand.

The Meditations - The sister of Unqualified Offerings got laid off today, from the same company where Unqualified Offerings itself works. That has put it in a reflective mood; rather, a mood of frantic, baseless optimism, after the manner of the Tony Robbins CDs popular among the sales force that was also let go:

If someone hands you a lemon, make lemondate.

If someone hands you shit, make a shit souffle.

If someone hands you piss, make piss wine.

If someone hands you snot, make snot custard.

If someone hands you eye boogers, make eye booger crumb cake.

If someone hands you earwax, make earwax s'mores.

If someone hands you...

Bloomwatch Bonanza I - Justin Raimondo is making this feature too easy lately. After the heartwarming title of today's column, "LET'S DECLARE VICTORY – and get out!" things go quickly downhill.

So that's why we fought this war: so the Afghans could absorb the hip hop wisdom of Eminem, show off their naked chins, and bare their hairy legs. Oh, for joy!

Well, yeah.

Antiwar.com is sponsored by the Center for Libertarian Studies. Now apart from the merits of Eminem (considerable), and whether the locals were playing Western pop when they broke out the tunes (the papers don't say, and I suspect they were playing something much more like the intriguing Iranian instrumentals I heard last week), joy is precisely the libertarian word for freedom from a bondage so severe that the government decides how you'll groom yourself and what you'll wear! There is a case to be made against the United States making it its mission to deliver other countries from that level of (speaking of libertarian words) statism. But what lib worthy of the name can consider it a small matter whether the government shaves your face, or you do?

Osama bin Laden, A Parable - In the 70s for awhile, Steve Gerber wrote and Gene Colon drew a Howard the Duck newspaper strip. One particular strip stayed with me over the years and has been much in my mind since the massacres of September.

Howard and Bev have been captured by "Nihilists," dour, robed fellows pledged to bring oblivion wherever Being has been, and are aboard their flying Viking longship. When the Head Nihilist waxes poetic about the glories of nonbeing to Howard and Bev, Howard asks, "If you guys are so big on oblivion why don't you just off yourselves and leave the rest of us alone?"

The head nihilist draws himself upright, and responds, tenderly:

"Because we care."

Watch What We Say, Not What We Do - According to the International News (Pakistan), the Pakistani government "on Thursday continued to maintain it was not sending its armed forces to its western borders with Afghanistan to stop Taliban and al-Qaeda people from slipping into the country." Oh sure, the Pakistani government says, "increased vigilance would be done to ensure that those people involved with the Taliban and the al-Qaeda did not cross over," but they're not rushing troops around.

Questions that spring to mind are, So what form does non-troop-sending increased vigilance take? Do they ask refugees, "Did you pack your own bags?" Do they confiscate nail clippers? If someone tries to cross the border with a copy of Samuel R. Delaney's The Fall of the Towers, do they pull them out of line? Do refugees have to get to the border two hours early?

But forget what the Pakistani government is actually doing. What strikes me is that even in the face of massive Taliban reversals and concomitant US success, they're soft-pedaling the notion that they would take military measures to seal their borders against Taliban/al-Qaeda escapees. Taliban/al-Qaeda escapees would be armed and not necessarily peaceable. They'd likely want to use Pakistan as a base for attacks back across the border, as has been the recent history of exiled Afghan militants. That is, they're precisely the sorts of troublemakers most countries would want to keep the heck out. But the Pakistani government doesn't want to sound like it's trying very hard to do that. It seems pretty clear that the Musharraf regime is still worried.

Archive Blues - Can NOT make Blogger upload any archives. Get error 552. Anyone among our loyal reader who understands and can fix an error 552 problem, please e-mail to the address at left.

Stratfor Watch - Here's one that it would be nice if stratfor.com is right about:

But the situation is not nearly as dire as the public has been led to believe. Although many of the most optimistic pundits pegged a U.S. recovery to next year, close scrutiny of the numbers shows the so-called "recession" is over. The economy is already in the midst of a major recovery this quarter, with continued strong growth to occur in 2002.

U.S. gross domestic product contracted only 0.4 percent in the third quarter this year, far less than what many, including STRATFOR, were expecting. When the depth of the terrorist attacks and the relative strength of the GDP figure are compared, it becomes apparent that the United States was well into a robust recovery before the strikes.

I went to Stratfor.com looking for follow-up on their briefing quoted below, claiming that the Afghan's were strategically withdrawing rather than falling apart. They seem to have a follow-up, but you have to be a member to read it: "Omar: Desperate Bluff or Credible Threat?" is one, and "Ground War Strategies Part 4: What's Next for the Taliban?"

As an obvious opinion slut, Unqualified Offerings can't see why you'd try to make people pay for it.

Another Country Heard From - Actually, the same one we've been hearing about. MSNBC.com quotes exiled Afghan King Zahir Shah's radio address today:

The king called on “all warlords to heed international conventions concerning prisoners of war. People who surrender should be treated with respect.”

We are just not used to addressing, unironically, "warlords" in this country. I wonder if that's what their business cards say.

Sauce for the Gander - Brock Meeks on the laughably-named Patriot Act in MSNBC.com:

If you don’t think a surveillance society is a totalitarian one, try this little experiment: next time there’s a police action of any kind near you. Stop, whip out your video camera and stick in the face of a nearby cop. Try that in D.C. these days, especially if it’s a federal cop of any kind and you run the risk of arrest or at very least, being cuffed up beside the head.

Cops get real jittery, real quick, when you stick a camera in their face. That should tell you something right there about the “equality factor” of living in a surveillance society.

Bloomwatch - Justin Raimondo's Wednesday column goes severely astray in its central thesis, which is that "Islamofascism," aka "Fascism with an Islamic Face," is nothing but and nothing less than a new antisemitic (the other semites) canard. He begins witha hearteningly full-throated denunciation of Antisemitism Classic, the accusation that a country's Jews represent a cosmopolite fifth column loyal only to themselves:

This, of course, is an ignorant smear, one that, furthermore, has such an ugly history that it no longer seems necessary to refute it: the simple statement of it, in its self-evident absurdity, is enough to discredit anyone who makes such an argument.

He then continues:

It is passing strange, then, that another form of anti-Semitism has reared its ugly head in wartime, one which bears a remarkable similarity to the old version, except for one thing: it is directed against Arabs, who are also Semites – and it is being pushed, quite vigorously, by many of the very people who have, in the past, been victimized by anti-Semitic bullies.

Raimondo spends much of the rest of the article denouncing Steven Emerson and Daniel Pipes for their claims about anti-American agitation and networking within the American muslim community, then bemoans the "anti-Saudi campaign being whipped up by this same crowd." What he never does do is get around to the factual questions. After all, the primary problem with the classic antisemitic canards - "Jews constitute a traitorous fifth column"; "Jews control the world's levers of power and use them to maximize their own wealth"; "Jews bake matzoh from the blood of Christian children" - is less that they are mean things to say than that they are demonstrably not true. So are the new Islamofascist "canards" factually true or not. In the latest Commentary, Pipes is careful to say that a very small number of American muslim residents are moved to violence against the country. If Raimondo wants to refute Islamofascism, he needs to go beyond insulting Pipes, Emerson, Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan (all of whom come in for abuse):

1) Is it true or not that most American mosques are led by preachers who espouse militant Antiamericanism. (I mean, if it's true for the UCC...)
2) Did many of the hijackers have legal residency in the United States? Did the 1993 WTC bombers?
3) Fascism has been best described as "a Marxist heresy." The "heresy" takes the form of substituting some other collective struggle for the class struggle, typically race (Nazism) or national group (Italian fascism). Is it conceptually possible to substitute religion? Is militant Islam characterized by ressentiment and grandiose ambition? Do we have many, many statements from Taliban and al-Qaeda spokesmen valorizing death over life? Discuss.
4) Raimondo says, "In his increasingly dreary 'weblog,' Sullivan delights in quoting the most absurd snippets from Arab newspapers and then holding them up as somehow emblematic of Islam per se..." Let's give him the part about Sullivan's weblog becoming increasingly dreary. Are the "snippets" Sullivan and Instapundit quote, from major figures and institutions in government-controlled media, fringe statements rather than mainstream opinion? In what way?
5) Raimondo loves to play cui bono and so does Unqualified Offerings. How is Sullivan really sure bin Laden wants to overthrow the Saudi monarchy?
6) Raimondo writes: "We are constantly reminded that most of the hijackers were Saudis, but so what? In the 1970s, the Japanese Red Army, whose members were Japanese nationals, carried out a number of terrorist attacks worldwide. Did we blame Japan? Of course not." Question: Did Japan stonewall investigations into Red Army atrocities?

Raimondo is against what I am against: opportunistically widening the current al-Qaeda focused war. We'll need better arguments than he presents in his Wednesday column to do that.

Which Game Are We Playing? - As of yesterday, Stratfor.com was reporting the Taliban's retreat as being a strategic withdrawal, with a plan to regroup in their own ethnic strongholds. Meanwhile the Pentagon characterizes the retreat as a rout, and the Taliban/al Qaeda forces as essentially broken. It's not that Stratfor's claim is implausible on its face, nor does it make sense to believe everything the Pentagon tells one about the progress of the war. Stratfor says

In order to evaluate whether the Taliban withdrawal from northern Afghanistan was the routing of a defeated force or a strategic maneuver, we must first look at the evidence on the ground.

Perhaps the key feature of the withdrawal is that it has come almost without a fight. Neither the U.S. bombardment nor the Northern Alliance offensive adequately explains this. The Taliban have a hardened army with many veterans of the war against the Soviet Union. Taliban forces were renowned for their dogged combat, stunning the Northern Alliance in previous battles by advancing undeterred through minefields.

Before Sept. 11, the Taliban controlled some 95 percent of Afghanistan and appeared poised to mop up the remnants of the opposition. In the weeks before Mazar-e-Sharif fell, the Taliban soundly repelled a series of Northern Alliance attacks on the city, and even the Northern Alliance admitted they had not had time to prepare for a serious offensive.

Stratfor goes on to argue that the Taliban deployed screening forces and timed withdrawals (as from Kabul) to minimize casualties. What's more, Stratfor says that they largely sacrificed foreign troops to the delaying actions. And they offer some useful lessons from Afghan military history:

The speed of the Northern Alliance's advance was not surprising. Rapid advances are the norm in Afghanistan. The Taliban swept through the country as quickly when the group first emerged in 1994 and 1995. Russia's initial invasion of Afghanistan took only a few weeks.

Population density explains much of this phenomenon. Afghanistan has about 41 people per square kilometer -- less than a third the density of neighboring Pakistan -- and this does not take refugees into account. Rugged terrain means that much of Afghanistan is nearly uninhabited or is settled in small villages. It is easy to sweep through this territory; there is little to get in the way.

But there is a catch. Ethnic divisions, limited resources and logistical difficulties have constrained the size of the armies that fought over Afghanistan. At their peak, the Soviets had only about 90,000 troops in the country, and the Taliban and Northern Alliance armies were far smaller. Small armies and vast distances make frontal warfare difficult and dangerous. Armies cannot afford to spare the troops necessary to garrison the land they have overrun if they are to maintain a viable army at the front.

This leads to thin front lines, with troops concentrated at key nodes and with little reserve behind them. Once a front breaks or withdraws, an opposing force can make tremendous advances. Anyone who has played the board game "Risk" will recognize this.

I've quoted at length to be fair to their argument. But here's why they could easily be wrong. If it's fair to adduce Risk then it must be fair to adduce other games. Those of us who have played wargames are familiar with the class of games where you can only use your air power combat factors against troops that you have ground units in contact with. But often your ground units can be relatively puny; they nevertheless let you leverage your air power into terrific odds. Something like that may well have happened in Afghanistan. Northern Alliance forces that are not necessarily impressive in themselves can be, in combination with US aircraft, devastating. Andrew Sullivan is certainly wrong to assert that "air power alone" vanquished the Taliban (to the extent that they are vanquished). "Air power alone" didn't defeat Serbia in Kosovo either. In both cases, US airpower with local allied ground troops did win. Local ally ground attacks expose the locations of enemy forces, which US (and British) airstrikes devastate. The local forces are then in position to exploit breakthroughs.

Carp-Free Blog - Tonight, no worries about the long view. Genuine Moral Equivalence (TM) has the evening off. Tonight, Unqualified Offerings is content that the Taliban are in retreat, many of their foreign legionnaires are dead, and there are rumors that UBL himself may soon be run to earth (and soon thereafter, hopefully, planted in it). Unqualified Offerings would shave its beard in celebration if it had ever, in its entire life, been able to grow one. Mrs Offering already celebrated by traveling about the town unaccompanied and uncovered. What else could complete the picture? Ah yes. Music! UO now turns to the selection of tunes. Good night, world.

Battle of the Hawks - Not much to say on this newsy day. Nothing to say about the airline crash, a sad event that probably just...happened. Little to say on the apparent gains of the USAF-supported Northern Alliance against the Taliban, since its long-term meaning is unclear. Andrew Sullivan makes much of it, wants the Alliance to march into Kabul, and sees behind the administration's apparent caution, as so often these days, the fell hand of Colin Powell, who is rapidly becoming for Sullivan what Snowball was for the bad pigs. Actually, that's not fair - Sullivan isn't a bad pig himself, just too credulous of them (Wolfowitz, Perle et al):

I suspect too much State Department micro-management here and not enough go-for-it military strategy. I was, as usual, dismayed by Colin Powell on Meet The Press. Why is this man declaring that we'd never contemplate using nukes against bin Laden? Why limit ourselves in any way?

L'Audace, Andrew! Toujours L'Audace! But Sullivan's fellow hawk, young Patrick Ruffini, has a different view.

The trap we're falling into is that we're starting to think of Afghanistan as a state and of the Taliban as its sovereign rulers. We think we can capture key cities, and eventually the capital (Kabul), and cause the Taliban to collapse. All Hitler had to do to terminate the French nation-state as it had existed was march into Paris. It won't be that simple in Afghanistan. Afghanistan represents Hobbes's anarchy more than anything else. It is ruled by tribal warlords of which the Taliban aren't even a majority (they extend their reach over the majority of the country through alliances with local tribes). Any square inch the Taliban controls is a potential base for terror, even if they don't control the "Afghanistan", even if they don't have Kabul. It won't be enough to set up a new government but leave the Taliban in control of the areas that really matter. Osama bin Laden is just as dangerous with 10% of Afghanistan to run around in as he is with 80%. And as this still-relevant Arab News piece points out, Bin Laden's hiding options are already strictly limited because the Taliban actually exercises total control over only a small part of Afghanistan. Even if the Taliban are routed from 90% of Afghanistan (surely one of the Pentagon's better-case scenarios), they will still control these areas. Mazar-i-Sharif is a sideshow because it doesn't provide us with direct access to the areas we need direct access to.

Taking over Mazar-i Sharif was easy. It's in Uzbekistan's back yard, and by all accounts, the Northern Alliance is more popular there anyway. What won't be easy is getting at the south, especially if we rely on the Northern Alliance, who I take it couldn't care less about ruling there.

If we are going to do this right, we must go to the source. We must go to Kandahar. And we must do it ourselves.

I haven't had much use for Ruffini since he urged the government to lie to us about what it did and didn't know about anthrax attacks. I only half accept his conclusion. (If we're to usefully find bin Laden in Kandahar we're going to need local clients there too.) I might ask what going to Kandahar has to do with bombing power plants. But his argument that the Northern Alliance can take the US so far toward its statedwar aims and no further seems sound.

The Myth of Afghan Invincibility? - From Unqualified Offerings' (blissfully unaware) friends, The News of Pakistan, a skeptical reassessment of Afghan military history by A H Amin. (No, I have no idea who A H Amin is.) An excerpt:

Now we come to the romantic tales of Afghan invincibility in the British period. The British are in the habit of dramatising the odds they faced and giving it a poetic touch. Thus the First Afghan War became a subject of many myths and fantasies which to date many of our worthy writers have failed to comprehend in their true perspective.

Lots of analysis and interpretation in the full article, which is worth a read.

Bin Laden Interviewer Interviewer Interviewed - CNN.com has an article about their attempts to authenticate bin Laden's interview by a correspondent for Pakistan's Dawn. As part of it, CNN interviews correspondent Nic Roberston, who interviewed Dawn reporter Hamid Mir about his trip to bin Laden. (Note: By presenting CNN's interview with its interviewer of the interviewer of Osama bin Laden, Unqualified Offerings feels that it must now be acknowledged as the worldwide leader in fifth-hand journalism.)CNN.com quotes Robertson quoting Mir as describing bin Laden's location as a command post where, "about four times an hour, bin Laden was contacted, being given updated military reports on the progress of the war, particularly as it progressed around the key northern city in Afghanistan of Mazar-e Sharif." That's a lot of access for an "honored guest" of the Taliban government, quarter-hourly updates on infantry action, if what Mir tells Robertson tells CNN.com tells us is true.

Reasons to be Cheerful - The biggest worry about the possible fall of the House of Saud is what would happen to the price and supply of oil. An article on US-Saudi relations in an Australian paper, The Advertiser, includes the following:

An analysis by Professor George Perry, a senior economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington, argued that if Muslim extremists managed to win control of Middle Eastern oil supplies, the price would shoot up from the current $US20 ($30.8) to $US161 a barrel.

Since most Brookings economists wouldn't understand markets if you broke the concept down to Teletubby level and let them watch the video on Dipsy's tummy screen, we can all feel secure in believing that things can't get anywhere near that bad.

Annoying unrelated fact: The Advertiser story tends to confirm Prince Abdullah's claim that President Bush apologized to him for anti-Saud stories and essays in the US media. Note to Abdullah: Unqualified Offerings is not sorry.

The Link to End All Links - Ginger Stampley commends the following Daily Telegraph story to everyone's attention. Here's just one key bin Laden quote from the video the Telegraph obtained:

He says: "The towers were supposed to be filled with supporters of the economical powers of the United States who are abusing the world. Those who talk about civilians should change their stand and reconsider their position. We are treating them like they treated us."

As has been said, "Well, there you have it." Obviously, the video could have been faked by US/British intelligence for propaganda purposes. But yesterday's items on this site, including the links Michael Croft provided, establish a context in which I feel justified in regarding the new video as authentic until proven otherwise. Besides, in the best early speculation on the motives and strategy of bin Laden, the antiwar paleocon Gary North argued that a recruiting video was precisely bin Laden's goal in launching the massacres. Now we have a recruiting video.

Mind you, even North didn't get everything right: "My prediction: there will be no air strikes," he wrote.

Department of Corrections Department - Michael Croft writes:

So, I read your blog. Your friend's logic may be fine, but her statement is false because her starting premises are wrong.

I dispute your friend's facts. Osama bin Laden has never admitted responsibility for any of the terrorist actions al-Queda has committed. Look at the record. His reaction has been to praise and justify those responsible. Had he admitted any of it, the Taliban would have had to openly support terrorism long before this.

Cynical Michael wonders what your friend thinks happened to a certain Egyptian airliner...

Nov 11, 2000: http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/terror_001113.html
Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden denies links to the October attack on the USS Cole that killed 17 and maintains he has no ties to members of an Islamist group arrested in Kuwait for allegedly plotting to blow up U.S. targets in the Persian Gulf.

June 10, 1998:
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/terrormain980610.html
When asked about the Riyadh bombing and other specific attacks, bin Laden refuses to answer directly. But he does praise the bombers: "We look at these young men as great heroes and martyrs who followed the steps of the prophet, peace be upon him. We called and they answered."

Michael is too polite to point out that I should have actually checked my Iranian friend's claims before posting them. In a follow-up message, he writes:

I think, btw, that your friend's desire to explain it all away is a human impulse, rather than anything tied to religion or race or culture. What person wouldn't want to find a reason that someone like them couldn't possibly have done something this awful?

related MP3: http://www.asylumstreetspankers.com./leestrawberry.mp3

The song is a (pointful) hoot.

Two Things - First, Joel Achenbach has an excellent piece in this morning's Washington Post. The key paragraph strikes me as this one:

There is an argument being made that this war is likely to drag on for a long time, that its objectives are difficult to achieve and subject to change, that American military actions could exacerbate Muslim rage against the West, that we're fighting in Afghanistan even though our larger problem has roots in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, and that even the narrow objective of killing or capturing Osama bin Laden may be unachievable. What's disturbing is that this is the argument of the people who SUPPORT the war.

The whole essay is worth reading.

I said I had two things. The second is what I have to consider a bizarre misreading of Achenbach's essay on Instapundit.com. Apparently it's the word "quagmire" that sets Reynolds off, to the point where he feels compelled to lump Achenbach, a fine writer, in with the worst of the war's media critics. You make the call.

Instapundit: (What, I live in Knoxville, and Achenbach lives more or less within sight of the blasted Pentagon, and the purpose of the war isn't obvious to him?) It's the lame familiarity of the antiwar people.

Achenbach: Most Americans support this war, and, contrary to stereotype, are not seeking instant military gratification. We're patient. We're realistic. This isn't like Vietnam in part because we're not fighting primarily on behalf of someone else. This time it's personal -- we were attacked and have an obligation to do whatever we can to stop the terrorists.

I don't know how Glenn Reynolds squares "we were attacked and have an obligation to do whatever we can to stop the terrorists" with "It's the lame familiarity of the antiwar people." I don't think one can. And where was Reynolds two weeks ago when Krauthammer and Kristol were complaining about quagmires? If Reynolds is going to restrict his energies to promoting greater zeal among the menfolk, he risks attaining to the condition of ideal Confederate womanhood.

Well, There You Go - Had the utterly dispiriting experience of hearing from an Iranian friend of the family yesterday that, "It could have been the Jews," followed by a repetition of the "4,000 Jews were warned" canard. She also said that she was sure bin Laden was not behind the September massacres because he said he did not do it. She didn't say this out of any evident admiration for bin Laden. Nor was her logic on the narrow issue of the bin Laden denial completely off the wall. She said, "Every awful thing he has done before, he has not only admitted to but bragged about," so it would be breaking an established pattern for him to do something he denied.

Let us turn then to the latest interview with bin Laden in Dawn (Pakistan) as reported by msnbc.com:

“America and its allies are massacring us in Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, and Iraq,” he reportedly said. “The Muslims have the right to attack America in reprisal. The Islamic Shariat says Muslims should not live in the land of the infidel for long. The Sept. 11 attacks were not targeted at women and children. The real targets were America’s icons of military and economic power.”

And there you have it. This isn't bin Laden coming right out and admitting culpability, but he does justify the attacks as muslim actions and discourses on the alleged purposes of the attacks with a certainty that only their author could claim.

Oh The Irony Department, Anthrax Division - In Jerry Pournelle's Monday "View" (November 5), he includes the following item:

And from Trent Telenko:

They picked up suspects in N.J. for the anthrax mailings.

They are being held on immigration charges.

And they are by no means "Mid-Western Right Wing White Guys."

The link:

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/US_ANTHRAX.html

Times change! Go to that same link now and the lead story is headlined:

Terror Portrait
Bitter Loner Believed Behind Anthrax

Nov. 9 — FBI profilers say anthrax-laced letters to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, NBC News and The New York Post were likely mailed by the same person, an angry young man with a grudge.

Profilers have been wrong before - I think it was the Green River Killer whose age they underestimated by ten years, then lamely explained away the error by claiming that the ten years the guy had spent in prison didn't count. And the story does not include the Florida envelope in the bunch. It practically requires another level of complication on top of what some already find unacceptably coincidental. Instead of two unrelated terror campaigns (the September massacres and a domestic germ warfare campaign), try three (the September massacres and two independent domestic germ warfare campaigns). It's a stretch.

Pournelle is too wedded to Iraq-based explanations for Unqualified Offerings' taste, but he says something important:

I know that Iraq has lots of reasons to want us to believe this stuff did not come from Iraq. I presume the US has reasons not to want it to look as if security was so lax that some of this stuff got out into the world. And Russia has a heck of a lot of reason to not be suspected.

If there is NOT disinformation flowing about, that would be astonishing, given the motivations of everyone concerned.

Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan are not only convinced that "Iraq did it;" They've suggested that the government can already prove that Iraq did it and will do so at a time of its own choosing. All the stuff about possible domestic anthrax origins is, they think, disinformation.

Okay, if it is, then isn't the general principle that we should be very careful about believing what we're told about the war and its progress generally?

Annals of Ressentiment - Today our purpose is not to praise Pakistani columnist Farrukh Saleem but to bury him. (Figuratively.) Also to tie some recent Unqualified Offering themes - empire, the Pakistani press, drug prohibition - together into one big bundle of personal preoccupation. Wait! I mean, of overarching insight! In a September 7 column, "American Pretense of Virtue Breaks Down," Salim writes

The Grimmett Report (named after Richard F Grimmett, the author) titled "Conventional Arms transfers to Developing Nations, 1993-2000" is out, and the United States has, once again, been named as the biggest supplier of conventional weapons on the face of the planet. According to another report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) titled "The suppliers of major conventional weapons", aggregates for the years 1996-2000 show that the US exported some $50 billion worth of conventional weaponry to everyone and anyone who was willing to pay for it. Russia, the second largest supplier, was at a distant $15.69 billion. Russia was followed by France, UK, Germany, Netherlands, Ukraine (320 T-UD tanks for $650 million to Pakistan), Italy, China (major buyer was Pakistan) and Belarus (the ranking for 1995-1999 wasn't much different).

Most of the rest of the article is a recitation of world trouble spots where the US supplies arms to one or more sides. I don't want to argue that it is always or even ever virtuous for the US to sell weapons to other countries, some at peace, some at war. But Saleem makes the classic mistake of gun controllers, drug warriors and leftists in general: demonize the supplier and the thing supplied; ignore the consumer and the desire to consume. Shut down the gun shows, interdict the drug shipments, shut off the supply and no one will get hurt. But just as there is a drug trade because lots of people want to use drugs, and there are gun shows because many people enjoy guns, there is an international arms trade because lots of international actors want big honking firepower. Yes, the US is the biggest single purveyor of military hardware. Saleem quotes an NGO report that calculates US arms exports from 1996-2000 at $50 billion, with Russia second at just under $16 billion.

First off, let's face it: if you want military hardware for whatever reason and you have the option of getting either US goods or Russian, you'd be nuts not to buy American. The relative merits of the, er, product lines have been repeatedly proven in use. But that's not the main point. Does Saleem imagine that if the US stopped selling arms, that all its former customers would pursue a path of peace and light? Saleem says US M16s were prominent in the recent slaughters in East Timor. But M16s didn't cause either the independence movement or the violent reaction against it. A Czech gun will kill you just as dead; what drives the phenomenon of arms sales is a buyer's desire to be ready to kill. In his own country, Saleem can find ready supplies of local knockoffs of the AK-47.

Saleem is not the only student of the history US intervention. The pattern I see repeated over and over is local actors who want warmaking means for local reasons. I do not ask the Saleems of the world to admire the US government or its military-industrial complex for taking advantage of the fact. I only ask him to stop scapegoating.

The Wild, The Innocent, and the, Frankly, Pretty Damned Tame - Rollcall.com's "Heard on the Hill" column today has a piece about Oklahoma Republican JC Watts's trip to Canada for a reunion with former CFL Ottawa Rough Rider teammates. A pleasant visit for all, apparently, but not without the following whiff of scandal!

But it was inevitable that some would start telling tales about the conservative leader's more wild days as the quarterback who took his team to the Grey Cup, the Canadian equivalent of the Super Bowl, in 1981.

Teammate Dean Dorsey noted that Watts had a love-hate relationship with the home fans and reminisced about the day his temper flared, a far cry from the Baptist minister who's now cool as a cucumber.

"J.C. had marched the ball from deep in our own end to the other team's 20," recalled Dorsey. "But then he threw a lousy pass and they got on him. So he comes to the huddle and says, 'You know, I feel like dropping my pants and mooning these people.' The players were all so stunned that he'd said that, they just sort of stood there, and we got a time-count penalty."

Whoah! Lamar Odom got nothing on Wild Child Watts!

Southwest Asian Time Capsule - What sorts of things were they talking about in Pakistan on September 9? This, among other things.

Update - I carelessly linked to Furrukh's index page, not the column itself. Here is the specific column on offer.

The Unending Search for Bad Role Models - LA Clippers star Lamar Odom has been suspended by the National Basketball Association for failing a marijuana test. Okay, it's probably absurd to use "LA Clippers" to modify "star," but not as absurd as the league-level drug-testing regimes in force in all the major sports.

If recreational drugs are as bad as the drug warriors claim, you hardly need to test for them - the "drugged out" athlete should play himself out of a job in short order. Every time it happened you'd have another object lesson that "Drugs are bad for you." I'm sure that some players have drug problems of a scope that they do play themselves out of a job. But pro athletes play themselves out of jobs for all kinds of reasons - work habits, coachability, age, injury, just not being as good as somebody else, being more expensive than management feels like paying. What's more, athletes who play themselves out of jobs often manage to play themselves back in later, perhaps better for the lessons learned. Pro sports are notorious for giving athletes enough drugs to let them play with injuries, and if you are in the business of, say, paying people to play offensive tackle, you already accept the principle that people should be able to engage in personal behaviors (like playing offensive tackle) that risk long-term health problems. Pro sports are also notoriously unsentimental about getting rid of players who are too old, too out of shape or too expensive.

The inconvenient fact for drug warriors is that some (many?) athletes can use recreational drugs and still perform at a high level. Like Michael Irvin, they can make the Pro Bowl. So the only sure way to find drug-using athletes is to go looking for them. Hence drug tests. Lamar Odom isn't sitting out games because his pot "habit" wrecked his game, he's sitting out games because he failed a urine test.

They tell us athletes are role models, and drug-using athletes "send the wrong message." Well okay. The leagues could pass rules against players using drugs publically. They could suspend athletes convicted for violating drug laws. (They could even bar those players permanently from the league, but let's be serious, there are tickets and jerseys that need selling.) But look: nobody knew or cared that Lamar Odom smoked pot until his test results hit the news. You can't be a "bad role model" if no one knows you do bad things. You're just a shmoe who discreetly smokes pot, one among millions in the US. The league drug testing regimes are actually bad role model creation programs.

So why do they do it? Pressure, group think, image. Probably most owners and league officials are hidebound enough to actually swallow the gummy bundle of hypocrisies that drive drug "policy" in this country. The "policy" is to use raw power to enforce lies as truth. They have to have drug testing for athletes because drug use doesn't necessarily harm athletes. They just jacked up the penalties for Ecstasy because the objective risks of Ecstasy are apparently not high (oops!) enough to deter young people on their own. (For us non-young people, "Ecstasy" is two points off the mortgage rate.) They unearth "bad role models" with tests. Since anyone can tell that, say, pot hasn't made Lamar Odom a bad basketball player - I mean, so bad he can't even play for the Clippers - talk radio woofers like Jim Rome fall back on what amounts to (Warning: Genuine Moral Equivalence (TM) coming!) Soviet Psychology Theory: Lamar Odom, or whoever, knew the risks of failing a drug test. So if he did drugs anyway, he must have a Real Problem! Sure. And Drew Bledsoe, currently nursing a lung his own ribs punctured in September, knew the risks of playing behind the New England Patriots offensive line and did it anyway. He must have a real problem too!

Athletes are young and full of juice and used to having their way with the world. You can't walk onto the field or the court for a game unless you're the personality type who knows the career-ending injury won't happen to you, the rep-destroying blooper will be made by someone else. And maybe some of them just get ticked off at the absurdity and injustice of the leagues' drug regimes, and figure they'll stick their thumb in The Man's eye. "We" have uses for such people. Once we load the sins of the tribe on them anyway.

Fake Moral Equivalence Rebuked! Christopher Hitchens does it in his latest Nation column. It begins, "If there is one expression that ought to be discarded from the current discourse right away, it is 'The Street.' " He then discourses on the hypocricy of trying to understand the fascist impulses of some unruly mobs but not others. When 200 louts marched on a mosque in the midwest next month, no one in the mainstream media counseled the importance of the feelings of the American "street." Rather, they averred that unruly, violent mobs are a bad thing. The principle holds outside the US too.

New TMQ - Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback column for Slate is for those of us who are either football fans with intellectual pretensions or intellectuals with football fan pretensions. This week's column is especially good. Easterbrook is sometimes funny and sometimes sophomorically funny, but he loves the game and actually knows what he's talking about:

Watch Jerome Bettis carefully—despite his rep, he jukes constantly to avoid contact while rarely lowering his shoulder. That's why he's still barreling after nine years.

The weekend airwaves are full of dolts who characterize Bettis' style as blunt instrument running because - well, because other dolts on the airwaves said it before. Easterbrook actually accepts the evidence of his eyes.

Even better, his analysis of Tennessee's signing of free agent bust-in-the-making Kevin Carter:

Carter may become an expensive discard. He signed for what looked like a $10 million bonus, and in theory a gentleman who just cashed a huge check cannot be cut for years because proration of the bonus would crash-land onto the salary cap. Carter's agent boasted that the deal made his client waiver-proof—funny that he was worried about this. But Carter actually got $3 million up front ($1.5 million per sack so far); the balance is a "split bonus," due next winter. Here's the math: If Tennessee pays the second bonus, Carter will count $2.4 million against the 2002 cap and much more against future caps. If he is released, the 2002 cap charge would be an all but identical $2.5 million. So from a cap standpoint, the man practically has a sign taped to his back that says WAIVE ME. If the Titans keep him, Carter will haunt the team's cap for years, whereas if they cut him, he'll be gone from the books in 2003.

Thus, Tennessee management carefully structured the Carter deal so this gentleman could be ditched. When you let a good player go and trade a No. 1 pick for a guy you're already worried about getting out from under, you are pointing the compass south.

Easterbrook is a big time policy journalist and author of one of the fattest books I ever saw. The attention paid to analyzing the details of Carter's contract with the Titans shows that Easterbrook really is a football geek. My own interest in the game is at an ebb right now - throughout adult life I've oscillated from intense concentration to complete uninterest. A few years ago I was known to watch preseason games with a notebook and pen handy - and no, I've never been stupid enough to bet on games. Now I watch just the Redskins and Steelers, and not obsessively either. But I never miss TMQ.

The Grand Strategy That Dare Not Speak Its Name - I haven't been a big fan of Scott McConnell's antiwar.com columns. But he has a good piece in The New York Press this week. First he addresses the problems with the "Iraq did it" theory, covering means, motive and opportunity deficiencies in three paragraphs:

Officials scrutinizing anthrax assert that Iraq is probably not the source. So the case for Iraqi complicity rests on the fact that Egyptian hijacker Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi diplomat/spy in Prague. That’s a thin reed to hang a new war on, especially one that would be opposed by every European and Arab country, leaving the United States and Israel isolated against much of the Muslim world. Can one imagine the Arab government whose intelligence service Al Qaeda terrorists have not met with? Indeed, there are more reports of CIA contacts with Al Qaeda than Iraqi ones.

Iraq lacks a plausible motive. Certainly Saddam’s thuggish regime has every reason to oppose the United States, to hate both the American president who drove it out of Kuwait and his son, George W. Bush. But why would it risk provoking an American attack now?

By every visible measure, Baghdad was easing its way from the straitjacket that has enshrouded it since 1991. UN weapons inspectors are gone. The sanctions, while still partially in place, have been loosened. During the past spring, Colin Powell and Great Britain were exploring ways to ease them further–at the urging of much of the Arab world. Saddam’s regime–canny enough to survive 10 years of isolation and hostility from the West–could not only see light at the end of the tunnel, it had practically reached the open air. Indeed, the anti-Iraq crowd’s motives for starting a war now are far more apparent than Saddam Hussein’s.

I have one "Wilderness of Mirrors" cavil with the above. The New Scientist did indeed report that tests on anthrax attack samples indicate that it was created with a characteristically US drying process. Okay, and for the first half of the 80s the Afghan resistance fought the Soviet Army with Kalashnikovs and other Soviet arms - because that's what we supplied them with, through Egypt, because it allowed the US to maintain the fiction that we had no idea what had gotten into those people, killing Soviet soldiers like that. IF you were Iraq and IF you wanted to inaugurate a campaign of covert germ warfare against the United States, you would love it if you could do it with US-nameplate germs.

But "Wilderness of Mirrors" can work the other way too. Not only is McConnell surely correct about the ubiquity of foreign, and apparently US, contacts with al-Qaeda operatives, consider this: IF you were either al-Qaeda or a state other than Iraq sponsoring the September massacre operation, you would very much like to throw suspicion off on someone else. You would love to have Mohammed Atta seen in the company of an Iraqi intelligence officer - you would dangle Atta before the Iraqis and let their own curiousity get themselves on the hook.

Like McConnell, I can't see what Iraq would think it had to gain by 9/11 or anthrax war. The risks attendant on being caught, or even suspected, are huge. The gain? I'm not sure there is much, from the Iraqi perspective. I'm not saying they're too nice to have done such an awful thing. Saddam and his folks are rat bastards. But as McConnell says, things were looking up for the Baath Party anyway. Now they're at real risk.

But what I wanted to get to is McConnell's longer term points. On Ginger Stampley's Mark I blog, which has sadly passed out of this space-time continuum, she asked, What US foreign policy would eliminate the possibility of scare-quote blowback. The short answer is that no foreign policy eliminates even the possibility of blowback. But there is an approach to international relations that drastically minimizes it. The word for this approach exists in establishment political discourse only as insult or caricature. It is never characterized fairly by the sorts of people who get regular column gigs for metropolitan newspapers. Like "conservatism," it comes in "neo" and straight flavors. The word we are looking for is "isolationism." The time we are looking for it is necessarily after the country has destroyed the organizations that attacked us.

Saudi Arabia, home to three-fourths of the hijackers, barely cooperates with American investigators. Ditto Egypt, recipient of $2 billion in annual aid...On the streets of Baghdad, people greet an American visitor warmly. Iran–where there has been no significant American presence for a generation–offers to rescue downed American pilots.

The conclusion is inescapable: the less we are there, the more we are liked, or at least the less motivation there is to kill us.

Wilderness of Mirrors - Here is what we, the public, can be pretty sure we know about the massacres of September 11. A couple dozen muslims, mostly arab, and those mostly Saudi and Egyptian, slaughtered unoffending air travelers as a way to slaughter unoffending office workers. The hijackers have links to Osama bin Laden who is either a ward or sponsor of Afghanistan's Taliban regime, and a man with lots and lots of connections to the upper crust of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Here is what we don't know: Just about everything else. (Here is what we know about the anthrax attacks: They came through the mail.)

Among the reasons we don't know more, one stands out: The perpetrators don't want us to know more. bin Laden himself denied any role initially, though his subsequent public statements amount to a tacit admission of guilt. The National Greatness types insist that Iraq must be behind the attacks because, because - well, they hate us! The Hashemite Restoration crowd (Unqualified Offerings is in the junior auxiliary) think that prominent Saudis are at the very least accessories after the fact. Paranoid ravings on this very website imply that bin Laden might be anything up to and including a secret operative of the Saudi government. And Mustafa "Blood Libel" Tlass maintains it must be the Israelis because everyone Mustafa Tlass knows is a dipshit and complicated stuff is beyond them.

Saudi Arabia dumped its intelligence chief in the month before the WTC massacres. Arabnews.com has been running an interview with the man over the last couple of days. Strikingly, there's no blatant anti-Jewish language in the interview. He's critical of Israel and US support of Israel, but what can we expect? He's not some Christian Coalition spokesman; he's a former high official of an Arab government. Of course he's critical of Israel. Doesn't make him right, it makes him Arab. I was inclined to read his reiteration of the official Saudi position, "Palestinian problem must be resolved in a just manner," as code - "just manner" = "Israel obliterated." But the next paragraph of the interview references those old favorites, UN Resolutions 242 and 338, which, unless the Saudis have done their own tortured legal exegesis, confirm Israel's right to exist.

But why is this guy being sent out to play good cop? In the wake of 9/11, the assumption (mine for sure, but also others, I think) was that Prince Turki al-Faisal had been pushed out for being too close to bin Laden. In that case, if you're the Saudi government and you're getting nervous about American reaction, you might think having Prince Turki sound almost...nice about things would seem reassuring.

But there's another possibility. What if Turki is saying these things because they're what he thinks? What if he had to resign from his position not because he was too chummy with al Qaeda but because he wasn't chummy enough?

Silver Linings - One thing the neocons have been proven right about is the depth and breadth of antisemitism in muslim and arab media and government circles. (Yeah yeah. Arabs are semites too. You know what the word means in this context.) This is depressing, and not just because it sucks when the neocons are right. So one takes one's good news where one finds it. In the official Saudi site, arabnews.com, they're having a poll. Here are the results:

"Who do you think is carrying out the Anthrax attacks?

Votes
A white supremist group in America 22% 899
Supporters of Osama bil Ladin 43% 1717
Right wing Israelis 24% 969
Other 8% 336

3921 votes total

Only one in four picked "Right wing Israelis," Arab media trends notwithstanding. I'm even inclined to a small glimmer of hope in the wording of the option: "Right wing Israelis" as opposed to the more official "Mossad" or more general "Israel."

Note: Unqualified Offerings did not take the survey, as "No fucking idea" was not on the list.

Pakistan Search Engine Watch - In my previous visits to The International News site, one thing I regretted was the lack of a search engine. I was sure there wasn't one. Today there is, in a pretty prominent place, so either it is new or I missed it before. First thing I put in, of course, was "anthrax." Oh ho! All that came up were "Sponsor's Links" to three general information sites. No links to news articles at all. Here was proof of what I had come to suspect from browsing the news in the last several days - Pakistan is keeping a tight lid on "Pakistani anthrax" stories in their own press. But then I decided to search for some other keywords - "Taliban"; "bin Laden"; "Kashmir"; "US aid" and so on. Pretty much nothing comes up in the search engine after October 1. So it's not surprising that the search engine finds no link to anthrax stories. (Note to our younger readers: people didn't used to think or talk about anthrax much.)

Now here's my question: How much of the reporting we're getting on this, to us, unfamiliar part of the world is distorted by reporters not doing simple baseline tests?

Silver Linings - Any man's death diminisheth me. Nevertheless, I was struck by this story on Pakistan's International News site. The Pakistani Interior Ministry released a report on the impact of terrorism in that country over the last decade. Here's a passage:

...during the period 1990-2000 as many as 955 innocent persons were killed and 4,341 injured in 1034 incidents of bomb blasts. During the year 2000, it says, 110 people were killed while 569 were injured in 118 incidents of bomb blasts.

The first thing to note is a chastening fact for some of my fellow proponents of the "blowback" aspect of the September massacres on our eastern seaboard. Lots of countries are free, 'decadent' and full of spunky women,, goes the argument, but terrorists don't attack them. In fact, terrorists attack lots of countries, and many countries face far more terrorism (in number of incidents) than we do.

But get all bloodless and analytical about those numbers for a minute. 955 people died in 1034 bomb blasts. Bombs - big, scary exploding things - managed to kill about nine tenths of a person per kaboom, and injure slightly over four. The pattern holds for the Y2K numbers too. (Injuries increase to 5 per bomb.) Bombs.

50,000 people worked in the World Trade Center. Thousands more visited or shopped there at any one time. In the awful hours of September 11, we were told to brace ourselves for death figures in the tens of thousands. The current estimate is an order of magnitude fewer deaths. Early estimates of Pentagon deaths were above one thousand, revised to 800+ and turned out to be a couple of hundred. In the minutes and hours after the Loma Prieta earthquake in San Fransisco we braced for thousands if not tens of thousands of deaths in that stretch where the upper deck of the Expressway collapsed on the lower. It was a light traffic day and the actual toll was in the low hundreds.

Every one of those deaths was a calamity, in every one of those incidents. But there's a clear pattern here: it's never as bad as you think. We were told that Saddam had a million men in Kuwait, and we encircled them. I remember Norman Schwartzkopf's cease fire press briefing. What happened to all of those troops, General? His answer, included the statement, "There are an awful lot of dead." One inferred hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed in the "complete encirclement." In fact, the encirclement was far from complete, Iraq probably had considerably fewer troops in Kuwait than they (and we) claimed, and we seem to have deliberately let a bunch escape for fear that Iran might rush in on an undefended enemy. The US is currently under an onslaught using "weapons of mass destruction," with the death toll from anthrax under a dozen. During and after the Kosovo war, NATO's official "estimate" of ethnic Albanians massacred kept dropping, from 100,000 early in the fighting to 10,000 toward the end to "more than a thousand" as searches for mass graves proved fruitless.

There are cases in which lethality figures hold up, the Holocaust and Stalin's forced collectivization of agriculture most prominently. (In each of those cases, those who had the correct figures came under vicious, sustained attack from politically motivated opponents. Still do in the case of the Holocaust. Those provide important cautions to minimizers.) But there is also an important sense in which those atrocities differ from the kinds of spasmodic violence that concern us here. Both the Holocaust and Stalinization were sustained, bureaucratic enterprises - murder as the Motor Vehicle Administration would do it. They are not much like commandeering jetliners or dropping smart bombs or even, and this is where I'm going with this, spreading germs around.

Aum Supreme Truth had Sarin on crowded trains and got fewer than 20 kills. We know about anthrax. This matters. I've seen articles claim that smallpox could kill tens of millions of Americans; I've even seen people put the figure above 150 million. I've also seen articles that say smallpox has a 20% lethality rate. This is a big, big country. I don't believe you can even expose half of its people to a germ, let alone kill them from it. Yes, smallpox is incredibly contagious. But people adapt to threat conditions. In gambling parlance, take the under. Do so also with Taliban civilian casualty figures and, if Pentagon press conferences get to the body count stage, allied figures on enemy military dead.

Guess You Had to Be There - There is a picture on the left hand side of the front page of my edition of this morning's Washington Post. It is a full-length shot of Michael Jordan being interviewed after a recent game. The only man in the picture, Jordan stands against the wall, hands behind his back. Huge bags of ice taped to his slightly bent knees. His head angles to one side. Two flanking, hand-held microphones point toward either side of his face. The photographer is Robert Reeder, and the picture establishes him as a genius. He need never take another and his posterity is secure. Because the picture is a stunning piece of iconography - its echo of the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastien is uncanny. The hands behind the back, as if tied, the body in pain, the pointing microphones like metaphoric arrows. Since Ralph Leahy's accompanying article chronicles the physical punishment Jordan's comeback decision has inflicted on his body, the "cycles of bad days and better days," the tendinitis, Jordan's unprecedented stoicism about his limitations, the correspondence deepens with the context. Camille Paglia would wet her pants over this.

Now here's the problem: you can read the article but you apparently can't see the picture. It does not accompany the online version of the story, nor does it appear anywhere else on the website that I can find. From this I draw two lessons: 1) You can't find everything on the internet; 2) Someone at washingtonpost.com goofed.

Get That Man a Blog! - While researching the Pakistani anthrax story (in vain!), I stumbled across columnist Kamran Shafi of Jang Group Online. This guy is great - droll, biting, cheerfully scornful of all that is illiberal in his country's politics. Deeply humane too. As a sampler, try "Hypocrisy, Oh Hypocrisy," dated October 20. Warning: jang.com.pk loads slow - at least, it does here. Shafi writes weekly and I'll be bookmarking him.

Archives Work Now. I had the path pointed wrong in Blogger.

Anthrax in Pakistan - The first incidents seem to have involved US firms receiving spores via international mail, according to Pakistan's International News website. That story dates from 10/24, and references samples sent to a hospital for testing on "Friday last" - presumably the 19th. The more recent incident involves an envelope hand-delivered to the offices of The Daily Jang.

Someone hand-delivering a contaminated envelope in Pakistan is unlikely to be a member of a domestic US hate group. (I can actually think of a vector by which a US hate group could do this, but it has to rank pretty low on the possibility list.) So let's move al-Qaeda-connected terrorists back up the suspect list. Now tell me: What are they thinking?

They Say that a major aim of al-Qaeda is to separate Pakistan from the US and "Talibanise" it, depriving the US of a staging platform for the Afghan war and either a) grabbing some Pakistani nukes, or b) provoking some combination of the US, Israel and India into using force to grab the nukes first. Our Enemy - whether it is the Taliban, Iraq, Saudi Arabia or a combination - either gets nukes or the propaganda victory of all time. But invoking the sacred Unqualified Offerings principle of Genuine Moral Equivalence (TM), the Germers seem, on the face of it, to be trying something very stupid - inspire Pakistanis to support you by attacking them. Bombing people doesn't make inspire them to support you. Flying occupied planes into occupied buildings does not encourage a country to soberly reflect on its foreign policy. And I can't think that launching germ warfare on your fellow muslims is going to convince them that you're the folks they want to team up with. The Pakistani anthrax attacks can be explained by the "The Terrorists Are Stupid" theory, but I still resist TTAS, because from here the campaign against America looks like pretty effective economic warfare so far. So what is going on?

Naked Emperor Sighting - Washington Post movie reviewer Stephen Hunter is right about almost everything - politics, movies, you name it. He keeps the streak going in today's edition, with an article about how 2001: A Space Odyssey...sucks.

Stray Thoughts on Bellicose Soccer Moms - Yes, middle and upper-middle class white women with children are big on the war and hot for revenge. But is this really playing against type? These are the people who made a folk hero of Janet Reno because her underlings burned dozens of people to death, and because she sicced the big dogs on those swarthy Univision refugees. Soccer-Maternal Bellicosity has its dark side.

Gene Callahan Points Out that it is okay to complain about the progress of the war - if your program is that we need to add more enemies to the list more quickly and use force less discriminately. William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer this week moaned essentially the same moans about "bogging down" that one has heard from leftist and libertarian skeptics. But it's apparently not "disunity" or "defeatism" if you're undermining the administration from the hawkish side. I've been meaning to write about this, but Callahan already did it.

Halloween Postmortem - Reports on the level of Halloween activity this year vary from region to region and blog to blog. Here in Silver Spring, just across the Beltway, traffic was definitely down on our block. A fraction of the number of kids of all ages compared to last year - I thought about a third, though a neighbor believes it was more like a fourth or less. And while there was definitely a dropoff in tykes, I think there was an even bigger dropoff in older kids, the high elementary and middle-school ages. That probably makes sense: They're the kids who are aware enough of the news to scare themselves silly about it. Meanwhile, that e-mail chick's Afghan boyfriend seems to have gotten sidetracked on his way to the mall.