A Fanboy's Notes - Nobilis has reached US warehouses and is supposed to be two weeks away from stores. Spiderman opens in three days. And the new Elvis Costello record is discussed, sometimes savagely, here and here. UO hasn't had a chance to listen yet; but be warned, it thought The Juliet Letters a masterpiece, though a lot of people consider it pretentious nonsense, and holds the Burt Bacharach collaboration Painted From Memory to be a fine, moving record. (The magician Teller's famous review of Juliet is, naturally, online.)

It All Fits Together! - Objectionable Content has a lot to say about a lot of different stuff, and damned if he isn't going to try to say it in a single post!

And speaking of tiny fonts, Christ, Jim, do something, huh?

Another Country Heard From - David Kimche, former Rabin aide, former Director-General of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Iran-Contra figure and architect of Ariel Sharon's disastrous Lebanon invasion in the early 1980s, not only thinks separation (UO still prefers "disgorgement") is a good idea, he's committed his organization to gathering a million Israeli signatures in favor of the idea.

WITHDRAWAL from the Gaza Strip and from the isolated settlements in Judea and Samaria would lessen the tremendous burden in manpower, materiel and budget of the defense forces; enable them to be used more effectively to lessen the threat of terror attacks; reduce the points of friction between Israelis and Palestinians; lessen the danger of violence spiraling out of control and into a regional conflagration; and, above all, it would safeguard the continuation of a Jewish, democratic State of Israel by saving it from the negative demographic trend which is turning the Jewish population between the Jordan River and the sea into a minority...It would free us from the moral burden of lording over another people. It would break the taboo against dismantling settlements.

(Link via Tres Producers.)

Northern Opponents Watch - Meanwhile, back in Afghanistan...

Osama bin Laden was able to escape the clutches of US troops in Afghanistan thanks to a powerful military commander currently serving with the Afghan government, a rival warlord said.

Commander Hazrat Ali helped the alleged terrorist mastermind flee from the eastern Tora Bora mountains during an intense US-led offensive last December, strongman Haji Zaman told reporters in this northwestern frontier city.

Ali was recently appointed security chief and commander of the country's eastern zone by Afghan interim leader Hamid Karzai, replacing the sacked Zaman.

Zaman said Ilyas Khel, another Afghan commander, had been appointed by Ali to guard the route by which bin Laden made his escape.

"Ilyas Khel was a supporter of bin Laden's al-Qaeda network and Hazrat Ali knew it," he said.

He said he was unaware of bin Laden's current whereabouts and denied allegations that he was himself instrumental in the al-Qaeda chief's escape.

"This is a lie. I captured 55 al-Qaeda fighters during the operation in Tora Bora and handed them over to the government," he said.

Never Mind - Michael Isikoff, whom conservatives and libertarians thought was a pretty good reporter when he was being inconvenient to Bill Clinton, says that the only story that seemed to tie the September hijackers directly to Iraq is...a load of crap.

Then, in the chaotic days after September 11, a Czech intelligence source inside Prague’s Middle Eastern community saw Atta’s picture in the media and reported that he had seen the same person meeting [Iraqi diplomat and likely spy] al-Ani at the Iraqi Embassy five months earlier. Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman publicly confirmed the story to CNN during a visit to Washington last November. But the uncorroborated report, some Czechs now concede, should have generated more skepticism. “These [informants] tend to tell you what you want to believe,” says Oldrich Cerny, the former director of Czech intelligence.

On closer scrutiny, however, the evidence became even less convincing. Although Atta had indeed flown from Prague to the United States in June 2000, the Czechs had placed the alleged meeting in April 2001. The FBI could find no visa or airline records showing he had left or re-entered the United States that month. The bureau does have records showing Atta was in Virginia Beach— where officials suspect he was casing U.S. naval facilities in the area - and Florida in April. “Neither we nor the Czechs nor anybody else has any information he was coming or going [to Prague] at that time,” says a U.S. official.

But intelligence officials have been reluctant to set the record straight— both out of reluctance to embarrass an allied government and because so many anti-Saddam hawks in the Bush administration had embraced the story.

No doubt Admiral Woolsey is still out there somewhere, looking for clues and reminding the dozen or so W.T. Tyler fans in the world of the pathetic Frank Dudley in Last Train From Berlin. Isikoff:

To be sure, administration hardliners aren’t ready to give up. Newsweek has learned that Pentagon analysts are still aggressively hunting for evidence that might tie Atta, or any of the other hijackers, to Saddam’s agents. It may yet turn up, but for now, at least, the much touted “Prague connection” appears to be an intriguing, but embarrassing, mistake.

If Design Govern in a Thing So Small - Ginger has a lengthy post about weblog design, text readability, font size and browser compatibility. She says she even increased her font size recently at the best of Gary Farber. It makes me wonder if my own font size is too small. (We keep nice narrow columns here, as we've mentioned many times.) I'm going to play around with it a little. One thing about the nice narrow columns is that, since this site seems to have a proclivity for interminable chin-pulling pieces, they stretch way the hell down the page. But we have our standards.

UPDATE: Eh. Font's bigger. Column slightly wider to accomodate. Not sure if I like it or not. Soliciting opinion on the change now. (Note: If the site looks the same to you, empty your browser cache and reload the page. Good chance to flush those porn files.)

Capitalism - In - SPAAAAAACE! - The Space Settlement Initiative site says the key to actually getting our Mars and Moon colonies is property rights. Far be it from Unqualified Offerings to disagree.

Must There Be an Unqualified Offerings? - For much of Tony Judt's much-discussed New York Review of Books essay on the Middle East this week, Unqualified Offerings wondered if it even needed to exist. UO first encountered Judt in the early 90s when he wrote, for NYRB, important, clarifying essays about ethical and philosophical sickness among European intellectuals during the Soviet era. (Particularly French intellectuals.) In the latest NYRB work, he brings the same acuity to the problem of the Holy Land.

In 1958, at the height of the Algerian crisis, with Arabs bombing French cafés in Algiers, Paris tacitly condoning the use of torture by the occupying French army, and paratroop colonels demanding a free hand to end terror, the French philosopher Raymond Aron published a small book, L'Algérie et la République.[1] Cutting through the emotive and historical claims of both sides, Aron explained in his characteristically cool prose why the French had to quit Algeria. France lacked both the will and the means either to impose French rule on the Arabs or to give Arabs an equal place in France. If the French stayed the situation would only deteriorate and they would inevitably leave at some later date—but under worse conditions and with a more embittered legacy. The damage that France was doing to Algerians was surpassed by the harm the Republic was bringing upon itself. However impossible the choice appeared, it was nonetheless very simple: France must go.

Many years later Aron was asked why he never engaged the heated questions of the time: torture, terrorism, the French policy of state-sponsored political assassination, Arab national claims, and the colonial heritage of the French. Everyone, he replied, was talking about these things; why add my voice? The point was no longer to analyze the origins of the tragedy, nor assign blame for it. The point was to do what had to be done.

In the cacophony of commentary and accusation swirling around the calamity in the Middle East, Aron's icy clarity is sorely missed. For the solution to the Israel–Palestine conflict is also in plain sight. Israel exists. The Palestinians and other Arabs will eventually accept this; many already do. Palestinians can be neither expunged from "Greater Israel" nor integrated into it: if they were expelled into Jordan, the latter would explode, with disastrous consequences for Israel. Palestinians need a real state of their own and they will have one. The two states will be delineated in accordance with the map drawn up at the Taba negotiations in January 2001, according to which the 1967 borders will be modified, but nearly all of the occupied territories will come under Palestinian rule. The Israeli settlements in the occupied territories are thus foredoomed, and most of them will be dismantled, as many Israelis privately acknowledge.

There will be no Arab right of return; and it is time to abandon the anachronistic Jewish one. Jerusalem is already largely divided along ethnic lines and will, eventually, be the capital of both states. Since these states will have a common interest in stability and shared security concerns, they will learn in time to cooperate. Community- based organizations like Hamas, offered the chance to transform themselves from terrorist networks into political parties, will take this path. There are numerous precedents.

If this is the future of the region, then why is it proving so tragically hard to get there? Four years after Aron's essay, De Gaulle extricated his countrymen from Algeria with relative ease. Following fifty years of vicious repression and exploitation, white South Africans handed over power to a black majority who replaced them without violence or revenge. Is the Middle East so different?

Okay, I'm liking this part because it echoes my own arguments. But it's a great comfort having someone as smart as Judt on your own side - even greater than having a creep like Michael Ledeen on the other side. More Judt.

Most Israelis are still trapped in the story of their own uniqueness. For some, this lies in the primordial presence of an ancient Jewish state on the territory of modern Israel. For others it rests in a God-given title to the lands of Judea and Samaria. Many still invoke the Holocaust and the claim that it authorizes Jews to make upon the international community. Even those who reject all such special pleading point to geography in defense of their distinction. We are so vulnerable, they say, so surrounded by enemies, that we cannot take any risks or afford a single mistake. The French could withdraw across the Mediterranean; South Africa is a very large country. We have nowhere to go. Finally, behind every Israeli refusal to face the inevitability of hard choices stands the implicit guarantee of the United States.

The problem for the rest of the world is that since 1967 Israel has changed in ways that render its traditional self-description absurd. It is now a regional colonial power, by some accounts the world's fourth-largest military establishment. Israel is a state, with all the trappings and capacities of a state. By comparison the Palestinians are weak indeed. While the failings of the Palestinian leadership have been abysmal and the crimes of Palestinian terrorists extremely bloody, the fact is that Israel has the military and political initiative. Responsibility for moving beyond the present impasse thus falls primarily (though as we shall see not exclusively) on Israel.

But Israelis themselves are blind to this. In their own eyes they are still a small victim-community, defending themselves with restraint and reluctance against overwhelming odds. Their astonishingly incompetent political leadership has squandered thirty years since the hubris-inducing victory of June 1967. In that time Israelis have built illegal compounds in the occupied territories and grown a carapace of cynicism: toward the Palestinians, whom they regard with contempt, and toward a United States whose erstwhile benevolent disengagement they have manipulated shamelessly.

Just as this site is wondering if it has a single opinion Judt is not capable of expressing better, he kindly says something with which one can disagree:

There is no magic moment when the walls come down, but the sequence of events is clear: first comes the political solution, typically imposed from outside and above, often when mutual resentment is at its peak.

Judt feels the key to peace is outside intervention. I think the record, particularly in the Middle East, shows that the opposite is more nearly the case. The actual breakthroughs, the ones that either worked (Sinai) or might have worked (Oslo) have been initiatives of the local actors themselves. It wasn't Kissinger's shuttling but Sadat's initiative that brought peace to the Suez. The negotiators of Oslo not only thought up the idea themselves, they attempted to keep negotiations secret from even the United States. We not only weren't the patrons of Oslo; we were shut out. Because the US is more or less continuously trying to jumpstart some peace process or other in the Middle East - and other parts of the world too - you get a lot of post hoc ergo propter hoc effects when peace does break out somewhere.

[Update: Reader "P Nielsen Hayden," who does not go by "Patrick Hayden" or "Leslie Nielsen" or "John Hadl," writes to point out that the first posted version of this piece linked to Airstrip One rather than Judt's NYRB article. "My ears are bleeding. Libertarian isolationists everywhere will pay," writes P Nielsen Hayden. Unqualified Offerings regrets the ears.]

To Go By Contraries - Emmanuel Goldstein, proprietor of the Airstrip One weblog, good-naturedly refers to Christopher Montgomery, who took over Goldstein's Airstrip One column, as his "improvement" on the feature. I wouldn't go that far, but Montgomery is a damned entertaining writer and today's contrarian take on the EU's "intentions" is especially provoking:

That is to say, if a British Foreign Secretary went to Brussels and laid down actual-factual proposals showing how the individual EU member states could be abolished and superseded by a Federal European state, by far the most probable outcome is that his continental peers would have to stare down at their tasseled loafers and mumble something quiet about how they didn't really want that thing they had squealed in favour of for so long.

Read the whole column. Montgomery wishes the EU would actually form their superstate, without Britain, so the Brits would have a big lumbering entity to play off against - us, my fellow Americans.

On the disappointing side, Montgomery hasn't produced my Sandbaggers DVD yet either.

You're Either with Unqualified Offerings or You're with the Terrorists - Thanks to Jane Galt and A Coyote at the Dog Show for linking to UO's item about British blog imperialism.

But say, shouldn't it really be "janegalt-dot-COM?" "Dot-NET" sounds sort of, well, collectivist.

New Media for Old - Another thing that comes readily to old-media writers is promoting their wares. They learned to either get jobs or keep those submissions in the mail long ago. So when experienced reporter Howard Owens started his blog, he sent a bunch of us e-mails asking us to announce it. (He seems to imagine that a link from Unqualified Offerings is actually worth some hits.) And he put some thought into it too, referring specifically to my recent piece about weblog winnowing to demonstrate familiarity with this site. Hey, UO knows that trick! ("I particularly admired the poems ______________, _____________ and _______________ in your Fall issue...") Howard describes himself as "a thoroughly conservative, non-aligned voter. I belong to no political party and have no allegiance to any political agenda. I believe fiercely in the values of American conservatism, though I do not always agree with prevailing conservative opinion." His site is very professional-looking, and he'll even sell you the design code for $95.

Holes Within Holes - Comes now the point where Unqualified Offerings really addresses what Steven Postrel identified as the central point of his original e-mail, which is linked somewhere below, and linked from Virginia Postrel's site too. I've been dilatory in getting to this for a few reasons:

1) I do this in my spare time, after work and wife and kids have gotten their modicums (modica?) of attention.

2) Believe it or not, the original piece took a lot out of me, and I wanted to leave it alone for awhile.

3) Things I mean to get to have a way of slipping away from me.

4) Sometimes if you leave a job undone, someone else does it for you. Ironically, considering the recent brouhahas (brouhahi?) over "libertarian isolationism," the blogger doing the job is Brink Lindsey.

Here is Steve's original point one, in his first e-mail to me:

IF there is to be a Palestinian state, and that state is to be hostile, and that state is to be on the West Bank, and that state is to be allowed the sovereign right to build up its own defenses and get aid from wherever it wants, THEN the Israelis will have to fight that state from an incomparably worse position than the one they enjoy today, just to get back to a position where they have the SAME options that they have today. As a bonus, you can kiss the Hashemite rule of Jordan goodbye, because Arafat (or his successors) will collaborate with Syria and Iraq to destabilize and take over there too (>50% of the Jordanian population is Palestinian now). I'm not sure in which order those two things would be most likely to occur, but the "libertarian isolationist" policy you advocate looks like an avoidance of these hard realtiies to me. There is zero tolerance among the Arabs for Israel's presence, the Arabs see concessions as weakness, and once an independent Palestinian state is in place it will be time for "phase 2," as Arafat or one of his buddies put it.

The part of this paragraph that I dealt with at length was the claim that "There is zero tolerance among the Arabs for Israel's presence," both in "Scorpions and Undershorts" (link a few items down) and in subsequent posts about Lebanon, deterrence and the control of Arab non-state actors by their patrons (e.g. Hezbollah and Iran). I argued in a fair amount of detail that the historical record shows repeated, if not necessarily enthusiastic, accomodations with Israel by Arab countries. I did not address the argument of the first sentence at the time for a specific reason: I had previously argued that all the alternatives to Israel unilaterally hawking up a Palestinian state in the territories by a kind of geopolitical Heimlich Maneuver were strategically and/or morally bankrupt. (The options were, once again, extermination, ethnic cleansing, disgorgement and More of the Same.) For that reason, I placed no value on having those options as such. Steve does and that deserves to be noted now and deserved to be noted then.

I still think he's wrong, though. The true Israeli aim should be to have not options but security. Particularly not bad options.

Another reason that this item avoided the top of the to-do list is that it involves dealing with a fair amount of theology: Steve's arguments against disgorgement rest on what I consider faith claims, and I don't share the faith. As a small example, he originally wrote to me "I want to respond to your well-written and provocative posts advocating passive policies by Israel." I utterly reject the characterization of unilateral disgorgement as "passive." At the time, it seemed polite to gloss over that part. But it's a faulty construction. Disgorgement on the Henley Plan has nothing of passivity about it. I can't speak for Tony Adragna, Charles Krauthammer, Andrew Sullivan, John Braue or any of the others who have advocated some version of unilateral separation from Palestine by Israel, but my vision of disgorgement is far from passive. Not least because I recognize full well that this would be the first time in history one country created another country that was, at least formally, at war with it. Brink Lindsey's characterization seems to me to be far more accurate than Steven Postrel's

The reason I prefer evacuate-and-isolate is that Israel takes the strategic initiative.

To consider SP's "central point" in detail, I'll quote from his e-mail to Tres Producers:

1) If the Israelis remove themselves from the territories, will they also isolate the Palestinians from the outside world? If they do, then they will have turned the territories into a giant prison camp, which would almost certainly be unsustainable in the face of international and US pressure. Such isolation would result in starvation and disease on a mass scale, unless you want the Israelis also to act as wardens and run the prison camp, in which case there really would be no separation at all. Furthermore, if the Palestinians are not allowed to commute into Israel to work, they will not be economically viable, and will have nothing else to do but plot aggression.

In the Henley Plan - I'm sounding grandiose, but I want to be clear about the contours of Jim's Wall - no, Israel will not isolate the Palestinians from the outside world. The Henley Plan does not aim to produce a giant prison camp; it aims to produce Palestine.

Since the Palestinians are not isolated from the outside world, they will have at least the chance at basing their economy on something other than manual labor on behalf of Israelis. Being barred from Israel will nevertheless be an economic hardship. On one level, undue concern about this is almost stupefying: If two nations are at war, why would one nation let citizens of the other work in its territory? Why would the other nation even imagine that its citizens had that option? Unless one just doesn't think of the Palestinians as having a state even when trying to think about a Palestinian state, the worries seem strange.

Besides, this is one place where the active part of disgorgement comes in. Even after "conceding" statehood to the Palestinians, Israel still has cards to play, economic cards included. That's part of the Plan.

2) If the Israelis do not isolate the territories from the outside world, then the Palestinians will import weapons of all kinds from their various foreign suppliers. In particular, we can expect massive amounts of mortars and short-range rockets to be brought in, and man-portable SAMs if these can be acquired. With these, the Palestinians will be able to terrorize Israel, since the parties will be in close proximity and walls can't stop indirect fire weapons. The Palestinians will get lots of help from skilled Hezbollah specialists in tactics and maintenance for these weapons. At some point, chemical weapons may be employed, since these are relatively easy to synthesize from civilian-use precursor substances used in everyday industry.

There's an unambiguous claim here and an ambiguous one. The unambiguous one is that "Palestine will import weapons of all kinds," which I am sure is true. Then he says the Palestinians "will be able to terrorize Israel," which is not exactly the same thing as saying that they will do this. But he seems sure that they will. That is, he is certain that nothing will, in Brink Lindsey's formulation "induce the Palestinians to get off the warpath."

Again, I think this claim has more faith than reason or evidence behind it. It requires that a lot of myths be true - that Israel "offered the Palestinians almost everything they said they wanted," that only the Palestinians flouted provisions in Oslo, that the occupation and settlements not be a big deal, that only a powerless fringe of Israeli society was ever reluctant to surrender "Judea and Samaria" in return for peace, that there has not been an important faction in Israeli politics working hard to derail Oslo since it was signed; in short, that there be nothing but bottomless Palestinian hatred behind the collapse of Oslo and the present war. It also requires that Arabs be incapable of recognizing a balance of power. But let's imagine that it works out to be true in practice: that Palestine is not content and commences "Phase 2" on schedule, firing rockets and mortars over the border into Israel. To what sane strategic purpose?

3) If the Israelis respond to mortar and rocket attacks by shooting back piecemeal, they will not be able to suppress the incoming fire. Terror attacks don't require militarily important results, just random destruction, so massed fire and careful target registering would not be required of the Palestiinans; they could fire and move, hiding their launchers among civilians or camoflauged positions. The only way to shut off this type of attack will be to go in and perform an operation of the type the IDF has just completed, only under much worse military conditions against a more well-armed foe. IF they are lucky, the Israelis would win, with high casualties, the position THEY HAVE RIGHT NOW--the set of options {occupation, expulsion, surrender}. It would just be a long and expensive detour right back to square one, only with an even worse international position (bad PR from the Wall itself combined with the use of heavy weaponry in civilian areas).

Those who take the side of Israel's hawks advert to the horrors of the 1967 borders, with only 8 miles between Arab territory and the sea at Israel's narrowest point. Now recall what happened when Israel fought from those borders against a much broader coalition than it would be likely to face again, in any scenario where "Palestine" exists: it won. The war it won was called the Six-Day War, because that was how long it took.

Has the balance of power shifted against Israel in the meantime when it comes to conventional forces? Quite the opposite. Israel has proven itself able to take territory at will. Its devastation of Syria's air force and army during the Lebanon incursion in the early 1980s is credited with scaring the Soviet Union, Syria's supplier, into perestroika. In that war the only thing that saved the PLO leadership was the intervention of the United States. In terms of equipment, professionalism, motivation and sheer size, the IDF towers over both its real and its notional opponents. The idea that the Palestinians could, from a standing start, build a military that could succeed where every other Arab army in history has failed beggars belief.

Ironically, Israel's problems set in when it tries to hold territory - taking it is the easy part. Lebanon got bad for Israel only after it "won." Unconventional warfare is the only good card in the Arab hand. It seems fair to say that coiling in position to launch lightning warfare plays to the IDF's strengths. Under disgorgement, Israel is 8 miles wide at its narrowest point. Under occupation, Israel is no miles wide, because its enemy is inside its borders and free to roam.

Steve's critique of disgorgement relies not just on an outsized estimation of Palestinian hostility - he also seems to exaggerate their capabilities to a fantastic degree, while minimizing Israel's. And I would argue that, for the purposes of terror, suicide bombers are better than mortars and rockets. Mortars and rockets can miss. It's fair to say they usually miss. Suicide bombers don't. Pound for pound, they make better terror weapons.

So much for the military difficulties of the most fanatically hostile and stupid Palestine of the future. (Stupid because firing mortars at someone is an act of war, and it's really dumb to commit acts of war against a more powerful neighbor. Note: It's not necessarily dumb to commit acts of war against a more powerful occupier.) Let's look at the political issues. Steve says two things. From the Three Producers e-mail:

It would just be a long and expensive detour right back to square one, only with an even worse international position (bad PR from the Wall itself combined with the use of heavy weaponry in civilian areas).

From the Unqualified Offerings e-mail:

[Under the "Postrel Occupation"] they'll be reviled around the world, but I'm not sure they'd notice the difference at this point.

The oddest claim is "bad PR from the Wall itself." Again, on the Henley Plan, the Wall is part and parcel of Israel creating Palestine on something very much like the territory of the Taba map and - property rights advocates, please note - offering meaningful financial compensation to those Palestinians dispossessed in the wars of 1948 and 1967. Creating a Palestinian state is good PR Compensating the dispossessed is too. And if the new state of Palestine makes war on Israel, necessitating reconquest and reoccupation (for however long), then Israel will be able to say honestly what it can not convincingly say now - that it really did try everything for peace. Steve needs to minimize the difference in political difficulty between an Israeli defensive war against a Palestinian state that Israel creates and the Stasi-level occupation he advocates because one of the main intended benefits of unilateral disgorgement is precisely PR.

So let's consider whether attitudes toward Israel around the world could get worse enough that Israel would notice. So far, Israel is putting up with carping from the intelligentsia of small democratic countries and vicious libels from the intelligentsia of small undemocratic ones. Hey, what could be worse. How about the Pinochet Plan? How about Israeli politicians unable to travel abroad (except to the United States) for fear of arrest? Since every Israeli Jew has to do a stint in the IDF, how about every IDF veteran unable to travel abroad (except to the United States) for fear of interrogation (and possible detention) on suspicion of "war crimes?" How about sanctions? How about the loss of US financial and military support? A decade or two down the line, when the New Cold War between the US and EU is in full swing, how about a "humanitarian intervention?"

Oh yes, it can get a lot worse. At least some of the above strike me as likely consequences of the Postrel Occupation: Pinochet and sanctions. They strike me as likely outcomes of continuing on the present course, for that matter. None of them seem like plausible reactions to disgorgement.

4) During the period when the Palestinians had de facto control of their own state, protected from intervention by Israel's policy of "separation", they would also have time to try destabilizing Jordan, whose population is majority Palestinian. With a war taking place next door, in which their brethren were slugging it out with the Jews on more-equal terms, the passions of the average Jordanian are likely to be inflamed with the hope of imminent victory, and the collapse of the Hashemite dynasty in Jordan is a plausible (though not probable) outcome.

First, I certainly hope Steve has sent Glenn Reynolds a long e-mail explaining that the Hashemites are not nearly so formidable as he takes them to be. And yet, are they as vulnerable as they're painted here? Jordan has been heavily-Palestinian for quite the long time now, which didn't stop it from making first a secret and then a public peace. The Jordanians appear to have broken Abu Nidal. King II died peacefully in bed and King III seems to be doing okay for himself. In Steve's vision, the Hashemites take a strangely passive role in their destabilization. But these are the people who won Black September. We've already dealt with the question of whether Palestine would be fighting the Jews on more-equal terms: only barely more equal is the best one could say. While we're imputing future reactions to other people, I'd say the average Jordanian is likely to wonder what the hell his idiot cousins in Palestine think they're doing.

The worst-case scenario is that the government of Palestine takes over the territory of Jordan outright - the worst case for the Palestinians of the West Bank. Because irridentist Israelis and their supporters in the US (the Commentary crowd) have often told the Palestinians to "go try Jordan" if they want a state of their own. If Palestine conquers Jordan, the dream of Israel's maximalists is half fulfilled. Now they can reoccupy and ethnically-cleanse the West Bank at the slightest provocation, because hey look, the Palestinians do have a state, it's right over their like we always said.

5) The Wall would be perceived by all Arabs as a sign of weakness--the Jews are tiring! the Jews are giving in!--and would stimulate aggression by Hezbollah (Iran's proxy), Iraq, and possibly Syria (although I think Assad can be deterred).

I want to agree that at least some Arabs (and Persians) will see the Henley Plan as a sign of Israeli weakness. The question is whether it will be actual weakness. The answer is that Israel will still have the sixth-largest military in the world and a cache of "weapons of mass destruction." Let me state right out that the Henley Plan anticipates the real possibility that Israel would have to slap an emboldened aggressor down once or twice after fulfilling the dreams of Palestinian nationhood. (It is also very possible that Israel will manage to vitiate the goodwill factor of creating Palestine by holding on to too much territory east of the Green Line, refusing to settle the "right of return" financially, continuing to piss off its Arab citizens etc., making war more likely.) Let's face it, Israel will win those wars and win them handily. And the post-bellum situation will be a recognition, if reluctant, of Israel's continuing power, the tangible fact of a country the Palestinians won't want to lose, a far better PR situation for Israel and an Israel proper where killers can not explode at nearly the rate they do now.

Looking over Steve's Cliffs Notes of his argument

In short, hopes that Israel can avoid the painful realities of the situation by retreating behind a physical barrier are vain. Because the Palestinians must be prevented from acquiring weapons and organizing their forces, the Israelis must maintain a strong presence among them. (Economic reality also dictates Palestinian employment within Israel.) This presence prevents the destruction of Israel by relatively efficient weapons, but it opens the door of vulnerability to the less efficient weapon of the suicide bomber.

I think I've now addressed everything (by disagreeing with everything).

I'll close with just a couple more comments on Steve's "serious occupation." This is from the Tres Producers e-mail:

In order to minimize the suicide bomber threat, the Israelis will need a much more intrusive occupation, one that provides physical security to Palestinians, protecting them from one another as well as from Israelis. A much more intensive use of informers will be needed, to the extent that no Palestinian feels that he can safely plot with another. Provocation in the schools and local media will have to be ended. And economic self-betterment of the Palestinians will have to be encouraged, protecting their property rights, removing the more obnoxious settlements and allowing the Palestinians to spread out, constructing needed infrastructure, etc.

After a few years of this policy, civic opposition to the Israeli occupation will spontaneously develop along nonviolent lines. This opposition will garner great sympathy from the international community and from within the left-to-moderate-blocs in Israel. At that point, the Israeli government will be able to negotiate a land-for-peace deal with leaders whose interest will be in peace, with a people who have something to lose by choosing war. By that point, too, we can hope that we have put a more acceptable regime in charge of Iraq, cowing the Saudis, the Egyptians, and the Iranian government (which may be dissolved by its own people).

Let's forget "isolationism" for a minute. I am a libertarian. I don't know that Steve is - it's a seriously bad idea to assume someone's politics matches their spouses. But as a libertarian, here is what the Postrel Occupation looks like to me: a massive government program. Yes, as a good minarchist, I agree that the state's proper role is defense and security, but it is still the state. To put any faith in the Postrel Occupation, I would have to believe that the Israeli government is somehow free of the structural flaws of every other government. I would have to believe that Hayek's critique of central planning somehow didn't apply; that Public Choice Theory was not pretty clear on what the institutional imperatives of the occupiers would portend. I would have to believe that paternalism works if the IDF and the Israeli housing ministry are the paters, that a government that recently added a cabinet member who wants to disenfranchise Arab citizens of Israel would, for the first time in its history, take Palestinian property rights seriously while simultaneously taking more nearly absolute control over Palestinian lives than ever. And I would have to believe that a control regime so extensive that every occupation subject has to assume that he can't trust any other occupation subject he meets will lead to the political maturation of the occupied.

Call me an antigovernment extremist: I don't believe any of that. People being people, bureaucracies being bureaucracies and governments being governments, what you actually get with the Postrel Occupation is just a nastier occupation. While we're facing hard realities, there's one right there.

And Now for Something Completely Different - Anent the preceding, Ginger Stampley has reluctantly waded into the discussion of matters Middle Eastern. She has two meaty pieces this weekend that are worth everyone's time. The first I linked to below. This morning's piece elaborates on the vexed matter of ethnic cleansing and the limits of US support for Israel, including the strangely debatable question of whether there are or should be any.

But wait! There's more! I popped over to What She Really Thinks to get the link to Ginger's West Bank piece only to find another item that Ginger identifies as her "Last Word on Israel for a While, I Hope."

In Which Unqualified Offerings Revises and Extends Its Remarks - A passage in "What is the Opposite of a Stopped Clock," below, could be taken as a boast that only Tony Adragna, Steven Postrel and Unqualified Offerings have had anything interesting to say about the Middle East, or even about the relative merits of creating a Palestinian state versus intensifying the occupation. That is far from either the truth or my claims about it.

Well Now I'm Jealous - Leon Hadar writes to Tres Producers about matters Levantine but he doesn't write to me. What, I get nothing for reading Liberty all these years?

What's strange is that Hadar seems to give credence to the Jordanian Dream. One more time: Jordan gets what out of trying to clean up this mess, again?

What is the Opposite of a Stopped Clock? - Two of my favorite thinkers are Virginia Postrel and Ginger Stampley, and both have managed to get very nearly the same thing wrong. What are the odds? Virginia Postrel says specifically that

In his response [to Steven Postrel's proposal], Jim concentrated entirely on attacking the idea of "serious occupation" as an (undesirable but best available) alternative to a wall.

Ginger expands VP's claim beyond Unqualified Offerings itself to the blogosphere and even punditspace generally:

One thing I've noticed in all this discussion is that everybody is, as (V.) Postrel points out about Jim Henley's last round of argument on it, just knocking holes in everybody else's solutions.

Neither the general claim nor the specific claim are really true. Someone who reads my response to Steven Postrel's e-mail will see that, while I spend considerable time critiquing what Ginger aptly call's SP's nanny-state occupation plan, quite a lot of the article construes the historical record to show that a modus vivendi between Israelis and Arabs is not only possible but has been seen to occur. While this comes in the form of a rebuttal of someone else's argument - There is zero tolerance for the existence of Israel among the Arabs - its aim is to establish a positive claim. (The historical record shows that there is space for mutual accomodation, however grudging.)

But enough about me. Contrary to Ginger's claim, everyone in what I think of as the interesting part of recent middle east discussion in the blogosphere has staked themselves to a specific proposal and advocated for it - has, that is, promoted a positive vision. In the case of Tony Adragna and I, it has been different versions of a unilateral disgorgement by Israel of the Occupied Territories, drawing on thinkers ranging from the Likudnik American Right to the extreme Israeli Left; in the case of Steven Postrel, it's his vision of an altruistic, transformative occupation. Even Glenn Reynolds clings to his Jordanian dream with a doggedness that is, on some level, endearing.

Steven Postrel thinks his proposal is sound and that it would be utopian and suicidal for Israel to take my advice. I think my proposal is sound and that his own is at once timid and grandiose, fatally so. Because it matters whether his plan is more timid-and-grandiose than mine is utopian-and-suicidal, a certain amount of knocking holes in somebody else's solutions is necessary. Steven Postrel has put a great deal of energy into "attacking the idea of unilateral disgorgement as an (undesirable but best available) alternative" to ethnic cleansing, genocide, suicide and more of the same. He has had to do that, to attempt to show that there is a need for his own specific proposal. He then goes on to elaborate his own proposal in considerable detail. Since I think his "new" proposal is indistinguishable from the "more of the same" option I've already rejected, it's been incumbent on me to establish that.

Ironically for the purposes of Ginger's argument, VP's complaint that I "never really addressed" the central part of SP's original e-mail rests on the understanding that the "central part" was SP's critique of the practicality of unilateral disgorgement, not his proposed alternative; and further argues that my dereliction lies in not knocking holes in his holes. And this is true, though high up in his bill of particulars was an argument about what the situation in South Lebanon portends for Israel's relations with Palestine, and I've written quite a lot about Lebanon since. In those items, I've argued that what we really see in the Lebanon situation is that deterrence works, which means that both the Arab governments and Israel are showing themselves to be rational actors, which is a Very Hopeful Sign, and tends to support my views. That series of posts has constituted both knocking holes in other people's arguments and buttressing my own proposals. It's all tied together.

Jim's Assignment Desk - In which Unqualified Offerings takes its pathetic aping of Kausfiles one step further. Gary Farber links to a story about very bad places - psychiatric group homes in New York City

Stomach-turning, outrageous story of the horrific conditions of these places, many of which are larger than most state mental hospitals in other states. Endless paragraph after paragraph of people left to die, and their deaths not even investigated.

Oh, yeah, all the homes are privatised, and the owners are raking in huge profits, while the patients are left to die of heat stroke with no air conditioning, murder each other, and die in countless other uninvestigated ways. This is Willowbrook all over again, on a far larger scale. If someone can explain to me a solution for this that doesn't involve state regulation and enforcement, I'd be interested.

Unqualified Offerings nominates NYC-based More Than Zero for the job.

TardyPundit - Believe it or not, political commentators have been discussing Middle Eastern policy on the net. No, really! Would a site that constantly refers to itself in the third person lie to you? They have! Unqualified Offerings has owed Steven Postrel and the world a cleanup post from the "Scorpions and Undershorts" series - as it has been reminded publically - and hopes to get to it tomorrow. Today it did family things.

Cliche Watch - Unqualified Headquarters has a computer savvy kid, but the adults have traditionally held their own. However, let the record show that it was Offering Boy who figured out how to exit the Spiderman game for the PC. It was not a code problem, just - and Unqualified Offerings insists on this - confusing menus. That problem solved, UO amends its earlier comments on the game as follows: this site now recommends it unreservedly. It plays just like you were, well, Spiderman. If you buy only one game this year on the recommendation of a libertarian isolationist blogger, make it this game.

Joys of Capitalism - Freshwater Division - Three bass and a trout in an hour at Seneca Creek today downstream of MD 28. If you can find a better spring lure than a suspending Rapala in the Baby Bass pattern - buy it! (And tell Unqualified Offerings what you bought.)

Blink And You'll Miss Something - Apparently, this site was down for five minutes this afternoon:

At approximately 4:40pm EDT (20:00 UTC) our network systems indicated a loss of internet connectivity. This resulted in approximately 5 minutes of downtime. As of 4:45pm EDT (20:05 UTC) all systems resumed normal operations. We apologize for this brief service interruption.

Unqualified Offerings apologizes to the two or even three people that may have been trying to log on at that time.

Present at the Creation - Bruce Baugh, mentioned in one of the Nobilis items below, has taken the plunge and started a weblog of his own.

Appeasement Watch - The link imperialists at Airstrip One are trying to blackmail this site. "Reciprocal" links, they say, so long as UO makes the first move. Well sure, that's how it starts. Then pretty soon they have Unqualified Offerings announcing Saint George's Day celebrations and next thing you know we're changing our name to "A Libertarian Reads Hello." (Kyle MacLachlan's bride looks pretty hot!)

Unqualified Offerings will make its link decisions on its own timetable in the national interest. It is considering its options, linkwise, and will take such steps as are consistent with and enhance its security. It knows that giving in to terrorism only encourages further demands. Not that Airstrip One couldn't take confidence-building measures that would make the process more tangible, with specific dates, and with monitoring to ensure accountability and consequences for nonperformance.:

1) Airstrip One has improved greatly on the column width front. Now how about the larger font its loyal readers deserve?

2) Sandbaggers DVDs!

Has Unqualified Offerings ever mentioned the magnificence that was Sandbaggers? Thought not. Follow the link.

Before I'd Build a Wall I'd run a ton of op-eds about it. That diplomat and gasbag Dennis Ross finds grudgingly favorable things to say about unilateral disgorgement of Palestine by Israel ought, Unqualified Offerings supposes, to give it pause. But Ross is so darn reluctant, and so compelled to junk the idea up with diplomatic wedding cake - "we may want to work with the Israelis to make the withdrawal as practical as possible and to try to broker understandings between the Palestinians and Israelis to make the arrangements more stable and enduring. We may even consider the value of an international presence to fill in as the Israelis implement separation" - that UO is holding firm in its prescription. Ross manages to mix the sensible

While Israeli military operations have disrupted and destroyed much of the terrorist infrastructure in the West Bank, it is only a matter of time before it is reconstituted. It was neither technologically sophisticated nor expensive, and no shortage of recruits will come forward to replace the militants killed or arrested. The challenge therefore is to fashion a political strategy to transform the respite the Israeli military has provided into a more enduring reality. Can an international conference do that?

Not likely, as both sides will create conditions for it that tie up diplomacy but change nothing on the ground.

even the acute

As for Arafat, he will remain passive, waiting to be rescued by international intervention. In his mind, an imposed solution puts all the pressure on the Israelis and relieves him of the need to make a decision.

with the sort of inanity such people spend years learning in graduate school

If he cannot -- at this point a safe bet -- a second, more conventional, option exists: developing a timeline of mutual obligations. Only this time, in addition to security obligations, political negotiations and an agenda for the permanent-status talks would be integrated into the timeline with specific dates, and with monitoring to ensure accountability and consequences for nonperformance.

to the downright self-contradictory. Excerpt the first:

A state on 50 percent of the West Bank will not be acceptable even to those Palestinians who most want to live in peace with Israel.

Excerpt the second:

To make the political process more tangible, a Palestinian state within the 40 percent of the West Bank and the 60 percent of Gaza in which the Palestinians have at least theoretical responsibility today would be recognized on the timeline.

So 50 percent won't win 'em over, but 40 percent would. Gotcha.

A Libertarian Reads the Newspaper - and Gags - George Will cheerfully assures us that "The conservatism that defined itself in reaction against the New Deal -- minimal government conservatism -- is dead," and that the security of another country, one with nuclear weapons and the best army in its region, is the "largest issue" facing the United States today. But not to worry: in addition to a "largest issue," the country also has a "most momentous policy problem," which is pesky researchers trying to help us live longer, healthier happier lives, and Dubya is putting a stop to that. And we'll get school vouchers! Which will bring the nose of the regulatory camel under the private school tent, but never mind that.

Andy Kashdan, thou shouldst be living at this hour.

Shitty Little Countries - Unqualified Offerings meant to recommend Alan Furst's most recent novel, Kingdom of Shadows, the other month. It's probably Furst's best novel since Dark Star, which was the one that came out after his masterpiece, Night Soldiers. The hero of Kingdom of Shadows is a Hungarian playboy and spy, Nicky Morath, who lives in Paris on the eve of World War II. Nicky does jobs for his uncle at the embassy. Sometimes he even knows what they are. Nicky and his uncle are liberals in an illiberal time and patriots of a small country in a region big countries stride like elephants. That means that Nicky's uncle occasionally ends up doing favors for some of the nastier big countries. Once when Nicky complains, his uncle turns on him. Look at the map, he says angrily, and look at us. His point is that Hungary is not the master of its own destiny, and the task of its patriots is to be as decent as possible.

There is a kind of specifically American incomprehension. I like to think it's not just me. As the citizen of a large country, a powerful country, a country that has Done Things, I find myself amazed that someone from a country that is none of those things could have a passionate attachment to it. What's to love about Hungary? Costa Rica? Jordan? How could anyone get worked up about a shithole like Gaza? What have those places ever done anyway?

On a moment's reflection, it's obvious that people love the familiar, that love is anyway not about merit, that "merit," applied to nations, has its problematic aspects. One of the things that make's Furst's book so good is that he vivifies the patriotism of the citizen of the small country, and the limits on his sphere of political action.

Even at the time, this struck me as having everything to do with the contemporary situation(s) in the Middle East. David Bromwich had a good op-ed in the Post on Tuesday about what one might call Furstian limits in the Levant.

Suppose I am a Palestinian today in one of the camps. I live in the shadow of a well-known faction that is taken to represent me. I have reason to fear the members of this faction. Against them, I see nothing but an invading army reducing to rubble the entire structure of my society. How shall I speak and act? If, in the circumstances, I neither say nor do anything about terrorism, am I to be accounted morally identical with the most savage of the terrorists?

The deficiency of the Bush doctrine shows most starkly in its language. It relies, for every calibration of judgment, on just one word, evil. And indeed, someone who lures young people to acts of suicide and mass murder with the promise of a heavenly reward -- such a person is as evil as any creature that has walked on this earth. But what to make of the teenage recruit who, under pressure of plausible reasoning, decides that the bombings are well advised because things will mend in no other way? Such a person is deluded; what he or she does is wicked. Yet the seducer to wicked acts is surely worse than the person who commits them from despair.

What, then, of those who look on and say nothing? Such people are aware of the recruitment, and they may disapprove, but they do not risk their lives to stop it. These are ordinary people, with an ordinary mixture of weakness and self-protectiveness. Their prudence, their timidity, is not admirable, but they have been terribly pressed upon, and you cannot call them evil without dismissing at a single stroke a large portion of the human race. The ambiguity that is a condition of the lives of such people is denied by a doctrine that says those who are not with us are against us.

To my taste, Bromwich ends up praising the actual bombers with faint damnation. But the rest of his analysis is acute. And I'm down with his conclusion:

The fate of many nations depends on our ability to declare no more enemies than we have and to create no more enemies than we must.

Au Contraire - The Sequel - Will all of you people get off of Blogspot already? You're cramping my style! The purpose of this item is to link to an Airstrip One entry in which Emmanuel Goldstein argues that his antiwar.com colleague Justin Raimondo is far too sanguine about Jean-Marie LePen. But hey, all blogspot sights are experiencing their daily recess right now. So every now and then, log onto Airstrip One, which you should be doing anyway, and look for today's piece by Goldstein on LePen. (Airstrip One has multiple contributors.)

This Is More Like It - Small US special forces units are operating inside Pakistan near the Afghan border, with at least tacit permission of the Pakistani government. If this is what Dubya was holding out the textile duty reduction for, then, as the young people say, it's all good. But now is the time to drop those barriers then.

“I think there’s some confusion,” said Maj. Gen. Rashid Qureshi, whose nose grew visibly as he spoke. “What I’d heard earlier is that the only thing that may be happening is a communication link. I don’t think any Special Forces or Delta Force commandos are operating inside Pakistan.”

(Note: there may be a minor transcription error in this quote from the MSNBC.com story.)

The Prodigal Blogger - It looks like Diana Moon's resolve to cut back on Letter from Gotham or radically change its focus lasted...a couple of days. So if you stopped visiting Letter from Gotham, start again.

Au Contraire - If you wanted a contrarian view of Jean-Marie LePen, you knew that Justin Raimondo was your man. He includes a recent link to an interview with LePen by...Ha'aretz.

Oh come on, UO, quit pussy-footing around. Are you trying to say LePen isn't a xenophobe, an anti-semite and a neo-nazi, or not?

Answer: On the basis of the Ha'aretz interview, both what's said and what comes out around the edges, I think LePen is a crotchety old man with certain instincts that he has worked to master, not just for show but not entirely successfully. In some ways, LePen and Jews reminds me a bit of Senator Robert Byrd and blacks. The former Klansman has probably really tried to change his attitudes over the years, but occasionally the wrong thing slips out. Do I believe that LePen is more viscerally anti-Jewish than all too much of the European intelligentsia these days? (Gary Farber's Amygdala is an excellent source for the latest European outrages.) That would be a no.

There's Your Trouble - Unqualified Offerings has argued that Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories make Israel less rather than more secure. Here's an interesting datum from today's Post, "Israel Tallies Results Of West Bank Offensive":

The army did little in Hebron, the seething home to what one analyst called "the heart of hard-core terrorists," largely because military planners concluded an operation there would endanger the Jewish settlers in the center of the city, according to sources.

Israeli dove Ran HaCohen, who says things that raise even UO's blood pressure sometimes, argues that the settlement policy amounts to making Jews in Israel proper less safe for the sake of Jews in the West Bank and Gaza.

Israel cares much more about its 200.000 settlers in the West Bank than about its 6 million citizens inside the Green Line (indeed, most settlements are surrounded by a fence).

Given that HaCohen has opposed Operation Defensive Wall in its entirety, it's ironic that the Sharon government's method of conducting the war tends to buttress his claim.

Collateral Damage - Reader Mike Jacobs e-mails to note a stomach-turning item in yesterday's Washington Post:

A 5-year-old Colombian girl traveling alone on a commercial flight from Bogota to New York last week was discovered carrying more than two pounds of heroin concealed in her luggage, according to U.S. Customs Service officials.

Although officials cited numerous cases of unaccompanied minors apprehended smuggling illegal drugs, they said Monday that this was believed to be by far the youngest child.

"Sending a 5-year-old girl alone on a plane to smuggle heroin represents a new low -- even for drug traffickers," said Joe Webber, the Customs special agent in charge for New York.

Down the Road Apiece - Dan Hartung of the dormant Lake Effect blog kindly writes to note that Japan formally gave up its claim to Sakhalin Island in 1951. Unqualified Offerings bets they were real happy to do it, too. He avers that they still lay claim islands at the southern end of the Kuriles chain near Hokkaido, where Russia has been observing "nine tenths of the law" since the end of WWII. He provides two links for readers interested in learning more about Japanese land claims, both from the Japanese Foreign Ministry website, one a history of the Northern Territories Issue and the other a map. Dan also notes that Japan "only controlled half of Sakhalin from 1905-1945."

The essential point remains that Russia bumps right up against Japan and postwar Japan had reasons to worry about Soviet designs on them.

That Was Then, This Is Now - Of the misguided ideas floating around punditspace, the biggest is the notion that there is a "secret plan" for Jordan to take over the West Bank. But surely the Grand-Strategy-by-Analogy of conquering "six or seven" Arab countries and transforming them, just like we did with Germany and Japan, into liberal democracies who also happen to love Israel has a grandiosity the other misguided ideas can't touch. Leave aside cultural differences. Leave aside the fact that the Arab countries have a tradition of terroristic resistance that Germany and Japan didn't have.

Folks, there's no Soviet Union any more! Why do you think the Germans and Japanese really put up with us? Because it could have been worse - a lot worse. The bear was at both the German and the Japanese doors. Hell, the bear was half in the house. The Russians had their paws on a good chunk of Germany for forty-five years and showed every readiness to scarf up the rest of it if they got the chance. The Russians are still on Sakhalin Island. There is simply no comparable bogeyman to scare an occupied people into cooperating now.

Science Fiction Is What I Am Pointing At When I Am Taxing Science Fiction - Electrolyte has another reason why they call Republicans "the Stupid Party," a congressional candidate who proposes funding the space program with a one percent tax on "fiction books, science fiction comic books, space sciences books and any other space-related literature" plus related "toys, puzzles and games."

Why stop there? Let's fund the elimination of the IRS marriage penalty with a tax on romance novels. Let's pay for the CIA with Tom Clancy user fees. We can run HUD with a surcharge on Bob Vila videos. The war on drugs will be paid for by moving ABC After School Specials to pay-per-view. And while we're at it, tax comic books and make me a superhero, dammit.

When Karma Spews - The guilty secret of parenthood, Unqualified Offerings believes, is this - mildly sick children are just adorable. They look so woebegone and put out with their Dondi eyes and their pouty widdle wips, and their often fractiously complex consciousnesses are reduced to a single, contiuous snuggle reflex.

But when they get real sick, they make you pay for finding such satisfaction in the suffering of others. Saturday night the Littlest Offering commenced hosting a stomach bug, which she has been doing her best to purge in traditional fashion. What is in normal times an entrance has become an exit. And the exit - it has set ambitious traffic targets for itself and is meeting them handily. Ahem. "Handily." Yuck.

This morning, Offering Boy began to express solidarity with his sister. Okay, not solid arity exactly.

Anyway, blog entries may be interrupted at any time.

You're Either With Ohio Or You're With The Terrorists - Kevin Holtsberry's site has the story on the Ohio state legislature resolution in support of Israel. No, Unqualified Offerings doesn't care either. Instead you should read his careful demolitions of today's claptrap from Jonah Goldberg.

Because Kevin's a lot nicer to Jonah Goldberg than Unqualified Offerings intends to be.

A Fanboy's Notes Redux - Unqualified Offerings mentioned the roleplaying game Nobilis the other night. If you used to play games when you were younger and gave it up, this one might just rope you back in. The publisher's official site, the designer's unofficial official site and Philippe Tromeur's fan site are great places to learn more about the game. There is also quite the Offering-like piece, "Understanding Nobilis," on my Nobilis website/weblog, "Thought Records."

Unqualified Offerings was surprised to get a nice e-mail re the previous Nobilis mention from Bruce Baugh, one of the giants of the RPG hobby and the editor of Nobilis' new edition. Thank you, Bruce.

Three is a Trend - The results are in! Webloggers named Jim love Spiderman. Jim Treacher e-mails to say that he figures the hardcore Spiderfans will dislike what the movie does to the story, but that those of us who have not been enmeshed in fandom for awhile should really enjoy it. What Unqualified Offerings wonders is, are there even "continuity cops" any more? Can there be? Near as UO can tell, the major comic book companies restart their official continuity every few years, and even Marvel, the House Continuity Built, seems pretty willing to resort to alternate timelines for the sake of a story these days. (viz. the superb Earth X.)

He also argues, persuasively, that in Unbreakable, Bruce Willis in the poncho was supposed to look like the Spectre. This makes perfect sense.

And Jim of Objectionable Content writes to share his own squib of Spiderman hype from the winter.

There Was a Loss of Essence - Blogger kept timing out last night. But it's a new day, with new Offerings to come.

Try Telling That To An Angry Mob - Unqualified Offerings intends to whip a crowd of supporters into a frenzy in front of the Washington Post building this weekend, then lead the crowd in a protest burning of today's paper. Why? Because UO didn't get mentioned in Howard Kurtz's article on political weblogs!

Not that this site is bitter.

Wilderness of Germs - A worker at Fort Detrick has tested positive for anthrax, says FoxNews.com. This is veddy interesting, since Fort Detrick figures heavily in the "domestic theory" scenarios that have gained evidentiary ground lately.

A Fanboy's Notes

1. Amazon.com has a Spiderman store in anticipation of the movie. Unqualified Offerings feels that its entire youth has been validated.
2. To digress momentarily on business matters - you'd think Amazon.com could have made a better Spiderman store. There is a ton of printed matter out just now - movie tie-in books, graphic novels, picture-free novels, histories, art books. There are soundtracks. There are videos of the old TV series. This is all the kind of stuff Amazon sells. But the "Spiderman store" displays only toys and a video game.
3. Speaking of video games, Unqualfied Offerings has obtained a copy of the PC version of Activision's Spiderman game. Plays great. That's important because, at least on the computer at Unqualified Headquarters, you never get to stop.Choosing "Exit to Main Menu" just dumps you back to the beginning of the level you're currently on.
4. Watched Unbreakable for the first time last night. (New DVD player, new TV. Time to christen.) Pretty amazing. The prologue in the early-60s department store was flawless, the way little glances and forms of address convey the racial tensions in the scene. There's the great shot toward the end, when the shadow of Willis' poncho hood falls across the bridge of his nose and down his cheeks in precisely the shape of a classic superhero's cowl. How long did they work on the lighting for that one? More to say sometime in an item with a spoiler warning.
5. Just two weeks to the Spiderman movie.
6. Soon, the new edition of Nobilis will be in stores.

What a great spring to be a geek!

Buy My Book! When It Exists... - Unqualified Offerings agrees with the Postrel-Willis thesis that one of the best reasons to start a weblog is to sell your book(s). Here are the books that Unqualified Offerings encourages you to buy, as soon as it gets around to writing them:

The Day of What We Both Said: Frost and Men and Women and Poetry - A consideration of gender relations in the poetry of Robert Frost, with special attention to "West-Running Brook;" "Two Witches;" "Home Burial;" "Maple;" and "The Housekeeper." The perspective of feminist theory is considered, but decentered, sharing space with sociobiology and libertarian economic analysis.

Another Man's Name: Paul M.A. Linebarger and Cordwainer Smith, His Life and Their Times - A "dual biography" of a single person (sort of), scholar/CIA titan Paul Linebarger and his pseudonym, classic science fiction author Cordwainer Smith. Something like the dust jacket for this book actually exists as the last half of a previous Offering.

Against Simplicity: Poems - This book actually exists. In manuscript form(s) anyway - publishers have so far found it resistible.

Note that Willis' suggestion that book sales are the "killer app" of weblogging (or is it really the other way around?) tends to strengthen the argument about the relation between blogging and old media writing/publishing propounded below and other places.

Blogwatch Beyond - What's "hot?": Crises of confidence; winnowing.

Where are the blogs of yesteryear? In the last month or so, the trend is previously-active bloggers cutting back on their posting levels, ceasing to update their sites or coming right out and announcing an intention to stop blogging or to radically recast their weblogs:

Sgt Stryker: Famously wrote "I think I've run out of shit to say" on April 16. Then went on to say the scary stuff:

Blogging's a flash in the pan. The better writers will get hired by traditional sources to write on the web or in print. More and more journalists will start up "blogs", and soon everyone else will hop on the bandwagon. Those blogs will be bland because they will want to have broad appeal. Most everyone else around right now will soon get bored, get jobs or get jiggy doing something else. Blogs as we know them will probably morph into something else and people will look back on these things like they do the old 'zines.

Since "giving up blogging," Stryker has posted 7 items, a perfectly respectable think-blog rate of 1.4 items a day. But the words linger.

Letter From Gotham - The selenously-pseudonymous Diana Moon announced Thursday that she was getting out of the warblog vocation, and intended to return her site to something like its original conception:

I had originally planned to write a blog devoted to one subject: New York City, post 9/11. And that's what I'm gonna go back to. A virtual version of Man With a Camera, so to speak. I will have fewer hits, but so what? And, as I said, I will continue to suggest articles to other bloggers without thought of a link or a mention, but because I think they should be read, or because I think it will help their blog.

Her stated reasons resonate with me, given what my own recent concentration on politics has meant for my productivity as a poet:

My real passion is music. Music takes not only physical dexterity, but a certain mindset, and that mindset is not the politically contentious one that this blog has made me focus on. When I come home I used to switch into music mode. Now I switch into "compose the post" mode. And since I can't have two obsessions, this has got to give. I have a recital coming up and I find in the middle of a piece that something Robert Fisk wrote intrudes. Not good.

Remember that word: obsession...

Newsrack - Blogfests kill! Thomas Nephew's last post dates from March 19, a recap of the Mid-Atlantic Blogfest I symposium on drug legalization. Mid-Atlantic Blogfest itself was Marhc 16. Actually, Blogfest itself is probably innocent of the slumber of Newsrack. I believe the culprit to be the tyrant, real life.

A Libertarian Reads the Paper - Andy Kashdan announced Thursday that

I've decided to close down the printing press. I'll spare you the reflections on the blogger medium, or at least a long version of it. Although perhaps I can occasionally provide a unique view or a useful filtering service (or most importantly, a dissent on the war frenzy), I'm skeptical about the value of adding one more voice to the fray when there are countless others linking and commenting on the same things. There is value, I think, in doing some more substantive writing, and maybe I'll return to give it a shot when I have the time and the inclination to do it. Others, of course, are already moving in that direction.

The sad thing here is that, while Andy sometimes linked to the same articles as other political bloggers, he rarely had the same take on them as everyone else. Attempts to talk him out of his decision have been unsuccessful. Yesterday, he posted "This site will self-destruct in 30 days . . . "

I like to think that 30 days is plenty of time to change his mind.

Inappropriate Response - "I probably be won't be doing any blogging for a while," wrote Moira Breen on April 9, and so far she has stuck to that. She also said, though, to check back in a week or two at www.moirabreen.com. So far, that URL still points to her idle blogspot domain. Perhaps Moira is just migrating to Movable Type or some such.

Dropscan - Shiloh Bucher explained to her readers in late March that she was working on a research project involving health-care policy that left little time for her site. Her last post was April 2.

The Insolvent Republic of Blogistan - "POSTING BECOMES SPORADIC: As I enter the pit of mine own education," insisted Justin Slotman on April 6. Of course, since then he has published as many new items as all of the previous sites in this list combined. (I count 39 entries, albeit many of them short, an average of more than two a day.) You can't take anything kids kids these days say seriously.

Natalie Solent - On the other hand! Ms. Solent went through her slowdown in March, jetting off to glamorous locales and, presumably, sewing. Posting just a handful of items a week. But since the second week of April, le deluge. Is this the future of several of the weblogs listed above. (Hell, it's Seargent Stryker's present.) Or does No mean No for most of them?

So then. Whatdoesitallmean? I think it means that blogging is nothing more nor less than writing, and the bloggers are subject to the same pressures, jealousies and anxieties as anyone else. (Which is to say, I agree with Sarge mostly.) There is a lot less difference between the position of the blogger and that of the old-media writer than we sometimes pretend. Indeed, consider a list of the most steadily productive folks in or near political blogdom: Virginia Postrel, Glenn Reynolds, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Gary Farber, Matt Welch, Ken Layne, Mickey Kaus, Andrew Sullivan, Joshua Marshall, James Lileks, Ginger Stampley, Oliver Willis. Most of those folks have spent a long time in old-media. Ginger Stampley is a tech writer, so she's used to producing text steadily. Willis says "I aspire to be a writer, but I'm not one yet."

Willis is wrong. He is a writer right now. He may not be making much money on it, but he's producing a steady body of work, day in and day out.

Willis would seem to be the contrapositive to my argument, mind you, to the extent that I have one. I would say that writers discover their vocation in different ways at different times. For some of these people, post-9/11 political blogging will be the way it happens. They will be true new-media writers, owing nothing to the Old Ways. (As an exceedingly minor poet with a few dozen publications in magazines of negligible circulation, UO counts itself among the old-media migrants.) Other continuously productive bloggers will turn out, if we examine their histories, to be longtime text-producers for usenet, mailing lists or bulletin boards. The Quasipundit proprietors and others came out of Slate's Fray. They come to us substantially pre-winnowed, in other words.

As writers, bloggers are prey to the nagging questions familiar to writers: Am I famous enough? Am I saying anything others aren't saying better? Why is so-and-so more celebrated than I? Are the opportunity costs of doing this worthwhile? Does my family hate me now, and do I care? Can I live without saying this stuff?

As more answers come back No, the winnowing process will continue.

Who will drop out? There is a famous quote of Trotsky's: "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." Last September, many Americans discovered for the first time that war found them fascinating. Their natural reaction was to take a reciprocal interest, at least for a time. Some of them started weblogs. In the absence of fresh, varied expressions of interest by the suitor, War, these bloggers' previous uninterest will reassert itself. At that point they will either decide to use the medium for their sustainable interests, or they will shut down. (As politics is the continuation of war by other means, to flip a phrase, the preceding holds for politics generally.) There will be no shame in it either way.

Commonplace Book

"Silence!" cries Freydag. "I did not call thee in for a consultation!"
"They are my innards! I will not have them misread by a poseur!"

- Roger Zelazny, Creatures of Light and Darkness

Cavil - In retrospect, the preceding item seems rather...sweeping. I'm not saying that enemies and neutrals are an unalloyed good. I am saying that the "with us or against us" approach is not always wise.

You're Either With Us or You Have Your Uses Anyway - Gary Farber, with much trepidation and that's what it calls for, went and invoked the 1930s the other day, as an analogy to the Present Moment. Appeasement versus Resolution and all that. Unqualified Offerings suggests the 40s as an alternative. There was, as they say, a war on, pitting some better guys (US, UK) and some worse guys (USSR) against some really bad guys.

There were also the tweeners - Turkey, Switzerland, Spain, the unoccupied Scandinavian nations, Ireland, Argentina and the like. Some leaned in one direction; some leaned in another. Pressed by Hitler to declare war on Russia, the traditional autocrat Franco instead encouraged the fascist members of his coalition - the Blue Shirts - to serve on the Eastern Front as volunteers. This kept Hitler sweet while getting the Blue Shirts, potential rivals, out of the country. If Unqualified Offerings recalls correctly, many, many of them met their deaths in the Stalingrad campaign, and UO imagines that Franco had no trouble mastering his grief.

Was it "wobbly" of the US and Britain not to declare war on Spain, on the grounds that "If you're not with us you're against us?" Sweden? Switzerland?

No. Neutrals and even hostile nonbelligerents have their uses. They are not your friends, but they may be your tools - that is, they can be useful. Need to open a back channel with your adversary, arrange a prisoner swap, move money to a resistance, infiltrate agents, exfiltrate defectors, steal a weapon? Swipe a code book?

Perhaps most importantly, do you need a reality check on your own propaganda? For all these things, you need countries that are neither with you nor against you.

Which brings us to truculent Egypt and its use to its nominal peace partner, Israel. Egypt, rhetorically, is not "with us." Egypt is "with the terrorists," to the extent the terrorists are Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade. For precisely that reason, Egypt was very, very useful to Israel this week on the matter of The Question of Jenin. Massacre or slugfest? Wanton slaughter of civilians or the carnage of war. Thanks to the much-cited al-Ahram interview with "Omar the Engineer," Islamic Jihad bomb-maker, we know that resistance by Palestinian ultras was fierce and that Israeli claims about the ubiquity of booby-traps are at least plausible:

"Of all the fighters in the West Bank we were the best prepared," he says. "We started working on our plan: to trap the invading soldiers and blow them up from the moment the Israeli tanks pulled out of Jenin last month."

Omar and other "engineers" made hundreds of explosive devices and carefully chose their locations.

"We had more than 50 houses booby-trapped around the camp. We chose old and empty buildings and the houses of men who were wanted by Israel because we knew the soldiers would search for them," he said.

"We cut off lengths of mains water pipes and packed them with explosives and nails. Then we placed them about four metres apart throughout the houses -- in cupboards, under sinks, in sofas."

The fighters hoped to disable the Israeli army's tanks with much more powerful bombs placed inside rubbish bins on the street. More explosives were hidden inside the cars of Jenin's most wanted men.

Connected by wires, the bombs were set off remotely, triggered by the current from a car battery.

According to Omar, everyone in the camp, including the children, knew where the explosives were located so that there was no danger of civilians being injured. It was the one weakness in the plan.

"We were betrayed by the spies among us," he says. The wires to more than a third of the bombs were cut by soldiers accompanied by collaborators. "If it hadn't been for the spies, the soldiers would never have been able to enter the camp. Once they penetrated the camp, it was much harder to defend."

And what about the explosion and ambush last Tuesday which killed 13 soldiers?

"They were lured there," he says. "We all stopped shooting and the women went out to tell the soldiers that we had run out of bullets and were leaving." The women alerted the fighters as the soldiers reached the booby- trapped area.

"When the senior officers realised what had happened, they shouted through megaphones that they wanted an immediate cease-fire. We let them approach to retrieve the men and then opened fire.

Booby traps, ambushes, fake cease fires, the complicity of nominal noncombatants in the defense plan. It's all there. But the statements have a lot more evidentiary value out of Omar's mouth, in an Arab paper, than it does out of the mouth of an IDF spokesperson. Not that the IDF is more likely to lie than Islamic Jihad - rather, the al-Ahram story constitutes an "argument against interest," to the extent that the interest of the Palestinians is to paint the Battle of Jenin as a festival of war crimes. Arguments against interest are always powerful.

A notion Unqualified Offerings has been toying with is that empire - and don't kid yourselves, that's what a program of changing "six or seven" governments is, and what a "serious occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza would be - suffers from the same fatal weakness that Hayek saw in the central planning of economies: it destroys information the information the system needs to work in the first place. Restated, the claim is merely that socialism and empire both destroy truth. Perhaps that is not so shocking. Happily, an important truth about the current war in the Levant has survived.

Hot or Not Setting the Terms of the Debate? - Instapundit links to another of those survey/test things. At least in this one, you're not rating yourself, you're judging others! It's called Public Intellectual or Not? and it's based on Hot or Not, which Unqualified Offerings never visited, and Richard Posner's The Public Intellectuals, which Unqualified Offerings hasn't read. Nevertheless, this site thinks it gets the joke. The survey shows you pictures of people and you rate them on a zero-to-ten scale where zero is "Cheap Hack" and ten is "Modern Solomon." The picture sequence seems semi-random, and it seems to make no effort to keep you from voting more than once per person - repeats are common. UO knocked Virginia Postrel down to a 9 because of the whole interventionism thing, gave a 10 to Milton Friedman and favored William Bennett with the lowest possible rating - every time he came up.

Unqualified Offerings will keep voting until it gets a chance to rate Justin Slotman.

Marshall Marshall Marshall! - Plan, that is. These days, the "modest" are suggesting one for Afghanistan, while the more ambitious want one for the Palestinians or the entire (suitably conquered and occupied) Arab world east of the Med, with Persia as an addendum. Jesse Walker in Reason yesterday wonders if the original Marshall Plan was all that History claims:

As for the actual Marshall Plan, its effects are somewhat overstated. The economist Tyler Cowen has noted that the European countries that received the most Marshall Plan aid after World War II suffered the slowest growth over the next eight years, while those who got the least aid grew the fastest. (Cowen's article is summarized here.) At best, the plan tided people over with humanitarian aid before their pre-war institutions--the kind that are absent in Afghanistan--could reassert themselves. At worst, it was little more than a Cold War propaganda ploy.

Unoffered Qualifications - Unqualified Offerings has been at the office since 9 this morning and is just leaving. So not much action on this site tonight. Sorry.

Those Who Will Not Learn From History won't care about this fascinating item from Wednesday's Washington Post Food section: "Who Was General Tso And Why Are We Eating His Chicken?" But Unqualified Offerings found it worthwhile. You learn about the actual General Tso, in some ways the William Tecumseh Sherman of China. But what about the chicken? A couple of theories are offered that would make the dish considerably younger than its namesake:

The details of Tso's life are easy to document. But how the chicken got named for him is another matter. In "Chinese Kitchen" (Morrow, 1999), author Eileen Yin-Fei Lo says that dish is a Hunan classic called "chung ton gai," or "ancestor meeting place chicken."

But to others, General Tso's chicken recipe may be no more ancient than 1972, and may have more in common with Manhattan than with mainland China.

Read the whole thing. The article also points to "The Definitive General Tso's Chicken Page."

Deterrence - It's Not Just For Superpowers Any More - Those soft-headed peaceniks in the Israeli Defense Force say "Tension has eased on northern border" (Ha'aretz):

Head of IDF Intelligence Brigadier General Aharon Ze'evi said Tuesday that tensions have eased on Israel's northern border. According to Ze'evi, the Hezbollah has understood "that this is not the time for escalation on the northern border. We see this because the alertness and readiness of Hezbollah militants has gone down."

1) Best [Neocon-Approved Items] of the Web attributes this, in an uncharacteristically charitable gesture, to Colin Powell's visit to Lebanon and Syria. But as Unqualified Offerings has been reporting (and reporting), the parties to the "Northern Front" dispute were were already ratcheting down on their own.

2) Isn't there a "wobbly watch" item here for some enterprising Likudnik pundit? Did you notice that the head of Israeli military intelligence calls them "Hezbollah militants" rather than "Hezbollah terrorists?" Is he a stringer for Reuters or something?

When Peaceniks Collide - Libertarian isolationist Alan Bock of Antiwar.com relates his meeting with - Robert Fisk!

Mr. Fisk writes for the Independent newspaper in London, which strikes me as a bit more left-wing in policy than the Orange County Register, for which I write. He has been an outspoken critic of Israeli policies, more so than I am. I didn't know whether he would strike me as an ideologue.

He turned out to be much more reporter than ideologue and utterly charming and delightful.

Hey, maybe a lot more of us are easier to take in person, as opposed to in print, than we realize! The following comes near the end:

While being quite critical, as we expected, of Israel, Mr. Fisk made sure to point out that it has taken two sides to create a volatile standoff. He suggested that "in the Muslim world there is little self-criticism, no self-questioning, a tendency to fall back on myths." There has never been a Muslim equivalent of the Renaissance, a period of respectful questioning and refinement of religious and cultural traditions.

He still runs into Arabs who believe the Mossad pulled off the World Trade Center attacks and don't want to be confused with facts. In fact, throughout the Muslim world, he says, it's very difficult to have serious and respectful disagreements.

Sobering but fascinating, our conversation left us with little hope that America will be able to pull a peace rabbit out of a hat any time soon.

Worth reading in its entirety, but I would say that of Bock's articles most weeks.

Our Long Casa Cortlandt Nightmare Is Over - What She Really Thinks and Ones and Zeros are back up.

You've (Not) Got Mail - Still no response from Rafiq Hariri, Prime Minister of Lebanon to Unqualified Offerings' first-ever interview question. It's busy work, being Prime Minister of Lebanon.

Just, Lasting Middle East Peace Imminent - How does Unqualified Offerings know? Because what Unqualified Offerings wants, Unqualified Offerings gets! Viz. Tom Toles has been hired by the Post, just like Unqualified Offerings wanted.

The Death of Slate is nigh. Gregg Easterbrook has taken Tuesday Morning Quarterback to espn.com. The first installment in the column's new home went up today, in honor of this weekend's NFL draft. Easterbrook:

It's NFL draft week, and that means there are more mock drafts in circulation than Middle East peace plans. Of course, every single mock draft everywhere will be completely worthless in a couple of days -- hmm, again like Middle East peace plans. But Tuesday Morning Quarterback wonders, why don't mock drafts actually mock the draft? Here's one that does...

You can't beat this for a contributor's note: "Gregg Easterbrook is a senior editor of New Republic, a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is believed to be the first Brookings scholar ever to write a pro football column."

Cyberspace Held Hostage - Day 2 - What She Really Thinks is still frozen. (You can still read current items and archives.) Ginger's gaming blog, Turn of a Friendly Die has a blank current message area, but if you scroll to the bottom, there are archives. And guy-pal/husband Michael Croft's Ones and Zeros is in the same frozen state as Ginger's main blog. Developing...

Resource Renewal - Mickey Kaus, who talks like he gets the weblogging thing but still doesn't have item-specific permalinks alerts the world to the latest John McCain media bubble - the wish-cum-prediction among some reporters that McCain switch parties and run against Dubya in 2004 as a Democrat. Unqualified Offerings is cool with this so long as it keeps McCain prominent in the news, for the country's sake: people who don't have the time to follow politics can do pretty well by just finding where John McCain stands on an issue and taking the opposite position. One day, this site would like to stop following politics and get back to writing poems, so UO needs John McCain.

Rubber-Necking - Perry de Havilland pointed me to a superb piece of Middle East analysis on Flit. While I don't accept his prescriptions (essentially he advocates what I've called the Postrel Plan, after the proposal in Steven Postrel's e-mail), his analysis of the dynamics of the US war on terror, Israel's war with Palestine, America's relations with Israel. and even the blogosphere are close to unassailable:

The force is irresistable. The object is not immovable. At some time in the future, sooner, or later, Israel will withdraw its settlements from the majority of the West Bank, and behind some kind of security wall, maybe on the green line, maybe a kilometre or two to the east of it. When that happens, many Arabs will see this as a victory, and immediately start planning Israel's final destruction... no doubt. But it will still happen. All that Israel can do is choose the manner and time of their leaving. This has nothing to do with world pressure... just the conditions on the ground. The majority of the settlements are unsustainable. The majority of the West Bank will be surrendered to a hostile enemy. And Israel will be 8 miles away from destruction again. Such are the injustices of ground and demographics.

One suspects Sharon cannot do this. Nor can his likely successor, Netanyahu. They owe the settlers too much, and fear the results. It could be 20 years before the circumstances are right for the evacuation and Israel can finally withdraw behind its last defence line... in the meantime the killing will continue, maybe more at times, maybe less. For all his efforts, Richard the Lionhearted only postponed the inevitable... bought the Crusader kingdoms a few more years. He had to have seen the writing was on the wall, as did all his knights, just as easily as Sharon can.

What happens after that, I may not live to see. I hope I won't, actually, for I fear the worst for the Israelis. But that's a long way off. As to the immediate concern, Bush's war on terrorism... hey, it ended in Afghanistan. If there was any likelihood of a second round, it's been utterly scotched now. Arafat will die peacefully, in bed. So, more than likely, will Saddam Hussein. The Americans will continue to hunt down Al Qaeda members wherever they hole up for a year or more, and help rebuild a somewhat better life for the Afghans. But the moral clarity we all thought we had six months ago is gone: we're all getting increasingly shrill as we realize it. Another terrorist strike will lead to forceful Western reprisals, of course. But there will be no pre-emptive wars fought against those who harbour terrorists: democracies have never been very good at pre-emptive attacks anyway, as anyone who remembers the Suez or October Crises well knows: we've been kidding ourselves to think we were different. The "war against terrorism" will never be declared to be won (that would lead to the release of all those extrajudicially-held Cuban prisoners, among other things), or over... it will just drag on, like the British wars of Empire or the Cold War did. That's the world I shall grow old in: I'm fairly certain of it now. Hopefully my children will live to see one better.

I think he's too pessimistic about Israel's post-partition future. Israel will still have much the largest military in the Middle East, plus all those, ahem, weapons of mass destruction. But his point about the decision curve strikes me as shrewd.

Yeah, it's a week old. I don't get out much.

Tony Adragna has a long article on the Middle East today, after a weekend's absence.

A Libertarian Does His Taxes IV

The Bush administration is poised to complete the biggest increase in government spending since the 1960s' "Great Society," the result of conducting the war on terrorism while substantially boosting the education and transportation budgets, according to a detailed analysis of government spending patterns.

Spending on government programs will increase by 22 percent from 1999 to 2003 in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to the analysis by The Washington Post and vetted by budget experts in both parties.
Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post

"We do the national greatness stuff abroad and the leave-us-alone stuff at home. Sign me up."
Andrew Sullivan

A Libertarian Does His Taxes III

You're already reaping the benefits of the 2001 tax law changes - your child tax credit is based on a rate of $600 per dependent, up from $500 under the rules before the 2001 legislation. Consider yourself lucky, because this increase is one of the few tax relief provisions actually available in 2001.
Tax Law Assistant, TaxCut 2001 Deluxe Edition

A Libertarian Avoids Doing His Taxes I - Now it's Ginger Stampley who has fallen foul of technical difficulties. She is working directly with the MT people to try to save her archives from some hellish technical snafu. At risk, every permalink to every What She Really Thinks article ever posted. Developing...

A Libertarian Does His Taxes II

The fact that the IRS allows you to deduct money you paid a CPA to do your taxes is a tacit admission of guilt.
Eve Tushnet

A Libertarian Does His Taxes I

The 2001 tax law changes ushered in several provisions intended to make a dent in the "marriage penalty" - the extra tax burden faced by two-income families over what the couple would owe if unmarried.

In 2001 itself, relief is limited to putting married filers on equal footing with singles in the new 10% tax bracket for the last half of the year.

In 2005 you and your spouse will begin to see further relief in the form of a wider 15% rate bracket and a large standard deduction.
Tax Law Assistant, TaxCut 2001 Deluxe Edition

Well, Come to papa, 2005! Unqualified Offerings says. Oh. They said "begin to see" in 2005. Boy.

It's Always Darkest Before the Long Twilight Struggle - The Middle East is rushing headlong toward a catastrophic regional war which risks leaving several countries devastated by weapons of mass destruction. Or not. I'm beginning to think that those same weapons of mass destruction are casting the region's actors - the national actors at least - into some very familiar roles. Middle East: Meet MAD; MAD: Meet the Middle East. The Shebaa Farms situation discussed below may prefigure the future of relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors (and more distant muslim kibitzers). There's now enough Nasty Stuff in the arsenals of both sides that neither dares try to achieve its maximum aims by force of arms.

Maybe. I think so. The contours of the current international struggle - proxies yes; low-level sniping yes; direct conflict among the major actors, no - looks awfully familar to anyone over the age of about 35. This theory rests on the axiom that the leaders of both Israel and the Arab and Persian states are rational actors more interested in their own personal, political and national survival than in their own martyrdom. (Other people's martyrdom, clearly, is okay.) My readers inclined toward the views of antiwar.com will doubt that this is true of Bibi and Arik. My readers inclined toward the views of Commentary will reject the axiom for Iraq, Iran and Syria.

By their fruits ye shall know them, I say. The only proof one ever has that MAD is working is negative, and necessarily provisional: The actors haven't destroyed themselves. You also have to look at what they do and don't do by way of attaining their political aims. (Shell Shebaa Farms, but not Haifa. Bomb Hezbollah, but not the Syrian Army.)

From the perspective of a friend of Israel, there is an obvious upside here: by freezing something like the present situation in place, it pretty well guarantees Israel's survival against the major threat to its existence, classically understood - conquest by its neighbors. There is a downside: MAD does little good for either the Palestinians or Israel's relations with them. The Palestinian's clearly don't feel they have a stake in the status quo, and Israel and Palestine are too enmeshed geographically for Israel's nukes to do it any good.

Most of the leaders of most of Israel's Arab enemies are not good men. But for precisely that reason, they love power and privilege, and they've afforded themselves quite a lot of both. The leaders of the Soviet Union were not good men either, but they saw reason. This model of Arab and Iranian dictators and monarchs as rational actors meets a lot of resistance among hawks in and outside the blogosphere. But the "SANE tyrant" looks like it better fits the facts than the " CRAZED tyrant" model. And it has some important implications for US and Israeli policy:

1) MAD works only among stakeholders. (I believe there may have been a movie about this recently.) An actor has to feel he has something crucial to lose by flouting deterrence. So policies that give an adversary "no way out" are foolishly dangerous. (Yes, that would be our current policy toward Iraq.)

2) Among Israel's enemies, the Palestinians are the ones who clearly don't count as stakeholders in the current situation. They're also the ones without any NBC capability whatsoever, so maybe the more hardbitten don't care. But until the Palestinians have a status quo they'd regret losing, they have a strong incentive to try to destabilize rather than stabilize the situation.

3) Long twilight struggles are not "passive" situations. There will be probes, gambits and research programs. The subsidiary goal remains to win. The trick is to keep it so that the main goal is not to lose.

Psst! - This site turns out to be your number 19 source for "pretty egyptian models" according to Google. Unqualified Offerings will be working tirelessly to improve that ranking.

Walking On Broken Glass - The Scotsman reports that British peacekeepers came under fire Friday night. What can be learned of the attackers is unsettling:

Six of the detained men turned out to be members of the Afghan police service and the seventh was a serving member of newly-constituted Afghan army. Five were in police uniform and one in combats when captured.

On the same day, this:

the Afghan interim government said there had been fierce fighting involving forces loyal to an Islamic fundamentalist warlord who has been urging Afghans to begin a holy war or Jihad against Western troops in the country.

Unqualified Offerings is not sure if it's The Scotsman or the Afghan interim government that is being curiously uninformative here. Presumably "fighting" involves at least two sides, only one of which is identified in the article. Was the other side "the Afghan interim government?" Forces loyal to a warlord who hasn't been urging jihad against Western troops? Western troops? Or Martian tripods?

Delays mean not all the 1700 Royal Marines from 45 Commando, based in Arbroath, have arrived yet at the Bagram air base, north of Kabul, which is headquarters to the US-led coalition troops in the country.

"Delays" presumably refers to Pakistan's refusal of transit rights reported on this site last month.

An Afghan government intelligence officer, working alongside the coalition forces, said his men have been monitoring scores of radio transmissions from al-Qaeda fighters across the border in Pakistan, indicating they are operating as small detachments.

The Afghan interim government has no natural fellow-feeling for the government of Pakistan, given the whole, you know, Taliban thing. So the intelligence officer might have a motive to lie to the press about this. On the other hand, the Afghan government is a creature of the Brits and Americans and it's pretty clear the last thing they want to do is take the war in Pakistan's direction. Pakistan is a hard country to police too, though even harder if you're not motivated to police it.

Last Thursday the government announced it had seized a large number of weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades they said were destined for Hekmatyar’s forces. On Friday fierce fighting broke out between Hekmatyar’s fighters and a rival group west of Kabul. The government said at least six people died in the fighting.

A spokesman for the Afghan defence ministry, Mirjan said: "The people responsible for these incidents are against the peace process and implementation of stability here."

He said the incidents aimed to disrupt preparations for a traditional Afghan conference of politicians, tribal and religious leaders and representatives of different ethnic groups that is scheduled for June and which the international community as well as the Afghan government hope will pave the way for democratic elections and a stable future.

And a cure for cancer, effective, fun weight loss regimens and an end to bad dreams. (Link via Antiwar.com.)

Cloning - I'm for it.

That's my only line!

Death of Irony Reports Premature, Experts Say - The Post Outlook section does a Q&A this week with Rafiq "I'm Prime Minister of Lebanon and I have Bashar Assad's permission to say so" Hariri. Highlights...

Some people say that Syria controls your country. Your response?
They don't control, they help.

...

Do you want those Palestinians [exiled in Lebanon] to return to Israel or to a Palestinian state?
It is not our decision where they go, but we don't want to keep them in Lebanon.

...

Isn't 100 percent of your tax revenue going to pay the interest on the debt?
Yes, because our taxes are very low.

...

Israel did withdraw 100 percent according to the U.N. secretary general.
Lebanon has a disagreement with the U.N. on this. The U.N. says that Israel complied with [Security Council] Resolution 425 and that Lebanon has no right to claim Shebaa Farms. But we say Shebaa Farms is Lebanese. . . .

Either because the Washington Post is a merciful media god or because The Media Really Does Suck, the paper forebears to ask the obvious question, so UO will ask for it:

The UN and Israel say that Shebaa Farms is part of Syria, specifically the Golan Heights territory that Israel has occupied since 1967. You say the Shebaa Farms land belongs to Lebanon. If everyone in the Middle East drops acid and Israel withdraws from the Golan as envisioned in the Abdullah/Friedman Plan, will you press Lebanon's claim to Shebaa Farms against Syria? How?

Actually, Unqualified Offerings has decided to really ask. (And they say bloggers don't do real reporting.) Official version of The Question:

Dear Mr. Hariri: I read your Q&A in the Washington Post with interest. I echo the sentiment of your official statement in favor of a serious peace in the region.

As the Post left an interesting question unasked, I hope you might do me the favor of answering it: The UN and Israel say that Shebaa Farms is part of the Golan Heights territory that Israel has occupied since 1967. The Abdullah Plan calls for Israel to withdraw from all territories occupied in that war. In the event that this withdrawal takes place, do you envision pressing your claim to Shebaa Farms with Syria? And, in your expert political opinion, would you anticipate HEZBOLLAH pressing that claim?

I thank you for your time and attention and look forward to your reply.

And if you too, Loyal Reader, have a question for the Prime Minister of Lebanon, just click here and ask. Hey, it's the information age. And there's a checkbox you can click if you want to grant the PM permission to make your message public. (Oh come on. Like you need to ask.)

Lies, Damn Lies and Richard Morin - The Post's "[Alleged] Unconventional Wisdom" offers a frustratingly tantalizing item today, buried between a piece agitprop for food fascism and an unsurprising "secret shopper" report. The middle item would like to establish statistically what many of us have suspected to be true: the internet and file-swapping may be bad for blockbuster music, but it's good for fringe acts.

These researchers analyzed weekly album sales as reported on the Billboard 200. They found that the number of different artists that appeared each year on the charts increased by 31.5 percent between 1991 and 2000, suggesting to them that more new artists are hitting the charts, at the expense of established musical acts, they claimed in a research paper on their findings.

The biggest rate of change occurred from 1998 to 2000, when there was a 10 percent increase in the number of fresh faces making the Billboard 200, they found. In 1999 alone, about one in every four artists with an album on the charts was a performer who had not appeared in the previous eight years.

You've already spotted the post hoc ergo propter hoc problem. There's one more difficulty: the problematic relationship between new acts and actual diversity or, god forbid, quality. A "fresh face" might be nothing more than the latest boy-band or nymphet fabricated by the same starmaker machinery that created the "pop music superstars" the new acts displace. If "Established Musical Act" = Steve Earle, and "Fresh Faces" = Christina Aguilera, there is no net loss to the conglomerate model.

A separate survey by the same team sounds more promising:

They also tracked Internet usage and -- in a separate survey -- the buying habits of college students. They found that downloading or "sampling" songs from the Internet (it's called "piracy" by its critics) encourages people to go out and buy CDs of lesser-known groups. At the same time, cyber-swiping from established stars may have hurt their sales or had no positive effect, reported Bhattacharjee, his colleague Ram Gopal of the University of Connecticut and Lawrence Sanders of SUNY at Buffalo.

Unfortunately, Unqualified Offerings can not find a link to the study itself on the web, and Morin's reporting on it inspires no confidence.

The Right Way and the Wrong Way to "Wobble" - Compare Egyptian immigrant journalist Mona Eltahawy with senescent house liberal hack Mary McGrory from today's Washington Post editorial page.

Just a Little Further Down and You'll Find It - Ginger Stampley responds to UO's "RPG suicide" item on her gaming blog.

Slackwatch - The Untold Story - NO, UNQUALIFIED OFFERINGS HAS NOT DONE ITS TAXES YET! WHY DO YOU ASK??

Slackwatch Continued - Electrolite signs back on with several fine items, including one that will probably make most readers of this site laugh until they cry, or cry until they laugh.

Slackwatch - A number of previously AWOL bloggers have begun to check in with us, their loyal readers:

Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit."

Justin Slotman has a piece that fans of women's pro soccer everywhere will love, so try to find those people and tell them, please.

Airstrip One - There will always be an England, but why on earth should it have to be in the South Atlantic if we don't want it to be? and more.

The Iluminated Donkey, with bravura diegesis, offers a triply-nested letter about the Mayfly Coup in Venezuela. Or NOT-a-Coup, according to the letter.

Also, while Libertarian Samizdata worked yesterday and is not properly part of the Slackwatch report, this afternoon Perry de Havilland offers an excellent item in his series on Britain's developing Panoptikon State, and David Carr charts the dire future history of the International Criminal Court, in an essay that will surely make libertarian isolationists of us all - maybe even David Carr.

A Kinder Gentler Machine-Gun Hand - They don't make military coups like they used to. Hugo Chavez returns to the Venezuelan Presidency.

Fun fact: Chavez himself led a coup attempt in 1992, when he was a paratrooper. It didn't work either.

Libertarian Fratricide Watch Continued - Joseph Stromberg responds to Brink Lindsey, among others. His tone and style are a little shirty, but no more so than anyone else's in this debate.

Libertarian Fratricide Watch - Outside perspectives: Conservative Kevin Holtsberry, in "Tone and Style Matter," objects to the rhetorical tone of much anti-interventionist libertarian writing, specifically Justin Raimondo and the LewRockwell.com stable. It's not that I disagree, but I think he's kidding himself if he imagines that the "anti-idiotarian" circle can't match the LR.com crowd for "snide comments and personal insults to make a point."

My own objection to the Rockwell group goes beyond their inclination to demonize otherwise-libertarian thinkers with what I consider to be mistaken views on foreign policy. Rockwell made a conscious, strategic decision that for practical political purposes, libertarians could best realize our goals of smaller government and (George) Washingtonian foreign policy through a fusion with the Christian Right. I don't doubt that there are votes and activists to be had among the trads, and I don't scorn them, with certain important qualifications.

Broadly speaking, I have no problem joining with trads to remove government barriers preventing they themselves from living what they consider godly lives - frex, clearing many of the spiteful barriers thrown in the way of homeschoolers. I have a very big problem with helping trads erect government barriers that would prevent the rest of us living our chosen lives; e.g. wearing rubbers; getting divorced; sporting with partners who have the same kind of genitalia we do; listening to records with dirty words in the title. That is, I am okay with letting Rockford be Rockford, but only if the trads will let San Francisco be San Francisco.

But the LR desire for fusion with the trads seems so complete that trad sensibilities end up exerting veto power over libertarian sensibilities. Hence, all the LR links to pro-Creationist articles; all the Karen de Coster-type articles attacking "non-traditional" men and non-traditional women; the inclusion of fetal protection in the "libertarian" program when one issue libertarianism absolutely doesn't solve is abortion; the automatic allegiance to the Confederacy; all presented as "libertarian," when they are properly paleoconservative. As I've said before, I like paleoconservatives; I just don't agree with them on everything. But either rockwell.com's embrace of the trads is sincere, in which case they are trads and not libertarians, or it's every bit as cynical as the lip service the Straussian neocons pay to the same folks.

Back to Antiwar.com for a minute, one of the odd tics among warbloggers is to conflate the site as a whole with Justin Raimondo's column specifically. I think this is because of the laziness of the self-professed "anti-idiotarian" community. As Kevin points out, Justin often obliges his critics by giving them an excuse to focus on his tone and style rather than his substance. (Glenn Reynolds says he has ignored the arguments of anti-interventionist libertarians because "the antiwar Left actually affects the debate, while the antiwar libertarians really don't." Forgive me for thinking the real reason is that the anti-war left is just a lot easier to refute.)

Soon I Shall Rule - The World! - Unqualified Offerings does not take weekends off. Compare:

A Libertarian Reads the Paper - Dark
Airstrip One - Dark
Amygdala - Dark
Andrew Sullivan - Dark
Balloon Juice - Dark
Electrolite - Dark
Eve Tushnet - Dark
Insolvent Republic of Blogistan - Dark
Kausfiles - Dark
Letter From Gotham - Dark
Quasi-Pundit - Dark
The Illuminated Donkey - Dark
Through the Looking Glass - Dark
Unqualified Offerings - Bloggin'!

(Props also to Ginger Stampley, Virginia Postrel, Natalie Solent and Libertarian Samizdata, who clearly have their priorities in order. And our thoughts are with Catallaxy Files in their time of technical difficulties.)

Joys of Capitalism: Quasi-Marxist Caucus - From this morning's New York Daily News profile of Elvis Costello:

Unsurprisingly, Costello considers himself something of a singles obsessive, not to mention a record junkie. "It's my one extravagance. I'm not much of a fashion plate. I don't care what shoes I wear. But I love to buy records. I much prefer that to getting them for free. Queueing up [in a store] is part of it."

Link via the Elvis Costello Mailing List.

Ohmigod. The System...Works? - Both Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post and Steven Postrel in e-mail have laid out plausibly dire outcomes from the current cross-border sniping between Hezbollah and Israel among southern Lebanon, nothern Israel and the Golan Heights. Hezbollah gets funding and support from Iran and Syria. Here's Krauthammer's analysis of the possible dangers:

Hezbollah is armed with 8,000 Katyusha rockets. Practically all of northern Israel lies under its guns. They are ready for firing. Hezbollah's spiritual leader, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, threatened Monday to hit Haifa with Katyusha rockets if Israel dared to respond to Hezbollah attacks.

Were that to happen, the northern front would explode. Israel has been sending urgent messages through the United Nations and the United States that it would not tolerate such aggression. It would be forced to counterattack -- on Lebanon, on Syrian army positions in Lebanon and possibly on Syria itself, Syria being Hezbollah's boss and patron.

Syria could not withstand such an Israeli attack conventionally. It might then launch its missiles equipped with chemical weapons into Israeli cities. And that could trigger Armageddon. Israel was established so that never again would the gassing of Jews be permitted.

The Lebanon seed could flower into Nuclear/Biological/Chemical Hell.

Krauthammer and Professor Postrel apparently aren't the only ones to see this danger and worry. Comes this interesting story on the BBC website:

Iran has called for Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrilla group and Israel to rein in their cross border attacks, to prevent a wider inflammation of the Middle East conflict.

"There is concern that Israel could extend the perimeter of war in the region," said Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi after meeting his Lebanese counterpart, Mahmud Hammud, in Beirut.

Israeli troops have responded with retaliatory strikes on Lebanon

"We should exert self-restraint in the face of Israeli provocations," he said.

Note: Unqualified Offerings commends not this report unto its readers because it agrees with Minister Kharazi's assessment of blame. You aren't going to go to Hezbollah's biggest state patron for a judicious account of events. But he sure doesn't sound like he's enthusiastic about "extend[ing] the perimeter of war in the region" - you can be darn sure he doesn't want to extend it to Iran.

It certainly seems like deterrence is working. UO does not kid itself that Iran wants peace. It and Syria must still want Hezbollah to keep poking at the Golan region. And Hezbollah, fanatics that they are, surely would love to lob some shells into major Israeli cities, just as Castro tried to hector Kruschev into nuking Washington over the Cuban missile crisis. Israel would surely like complete cross-border calm; but its minimum requirement is that Hezbollah leave its major population centers unmolested. Israel has said, "Don't go there." Iran has now echoed them. Israel in turn appears not to consider the present level of violence worth the catastrophic risks to it that a general war would bring.

The Iranian Foreign Minister is on his way to visit officials in Lebanon's parent corporation, Syria. It will be very interesting to hear what gets said during that visit.

Gasp - Is Emmanuel Goldstein the only blogger/pundit to have this thought?

So farewell then Hugo Chavez of Venezula...Pound to a penny that some "Agricultural Attache" or "Junior Trade Consul" with the American Embassy is up to his ears in this one.

Inverts - Andrew Sullivan links to an OpinionJournal finger-wagging that blames rogue Catholic breeders for gay pederasty by priests. I mean, the hets use contraception and everything, and the American hierarchy forebeareth to thunder:

The fact that this crisis for Catholicism revolves around sexual misconduct is not coincidental either. For too long Catholic pastors have given lip service to the more controversial Church teachings on sexual behavior while quietly tolerating the violation of those norms. Most prelates have chosen to ignore the abundant evidence that many Catholic married couples use contraceptives and that many Catholic priests are active homosexuals. The gross inconsistency between public teaching and private practice has given rise to a culture of hypocrisy and secret vice.

There's a very interesting, um, inversion here. Anti-gay activists are forever arguing that societal acceptance of gay conduct undermines "the family," meaning heterosexual-couples-with-children like Unqualified Offerings, Mrs. Offering, Offering Boy and The Littlest Offering. Now finally, a religious conservative accuses heterosexual couples of undermining, by their conduct, the morality of gays!

Bad gays! Bad straights! Bad bad bad!

Wobbly Watch - My mother has this cat. I don't hate it nearly as much as I hate my own cat - my mother's cat is pretty inoffensive. Until you put it in a car. Then it complains, loudly and without cease, in excruciating fashion. This comes up chiefly when my mother in northern Silver Spring, MD, who does not drive, makes an extended visit to my sister in Sterling, VA - about a thirty-five-mile trip. The driver ends up being either me or my brother-in-law, the finest man I know, and a craftsman who will make you superb custom jewelry, so go buy some.

But that's not important right now. He and I have often suggested to my mother that, the way they make cars these days, there is simply no chance whatsoever that a cat in a properly-designed carrier could suffocate or otherwise come to harm riding in the trunk. But you know how people get when they get older. My mother just refuses to listen to reason on the subject. As it happens, my sister just had a new baby girl, Skylar, last week. My mother went over to "help," then decided to help more my going home again. For reasons that don't bear going into, she left the cat at my sister's place for a few extra days. And since I work over in Virginia, I got the task of driving the squalling thing home. By myself. No witnesses.

I had it in the trunk. I had the engine on. I had the lights on. I had my seatbelt on! Then I popped the lock, popped the door, popped the trunk and popped the cat into the backseat. Then I cranked the radio in self-defense.

Now how in hell is a country that has such wimps in it supposed to win a war on terrorism?

The Second Time As Farce - Reader and gaming buddy Mike Jacobs sends this link about the parents suing Sony Entertainment because they blame the addictive nature of the massively-multiplayer computer roleplaying game Everquest for their son's suicide.

Some of us were around when the "D&D suicide" genre was at its zenith. For me, the high point was the Post article about a Virginia boy who killed himself - the local sherrif solemnly informed the media that a search had turned up D&D "paraphernalia" in the teen's room. You just couldn't beat that for loaded verbiage. During my hiatus from roleplaying games (it lasted a decade), I apparently missed the Vampire: the Masquerade murder genre.

The standard gamer reaction to such stories is to adduce non-gaming features of the case in question like psychological history, home situation, social disappointments - the same issues that crop up in the suicides of non-gamers. Another approach is to advert to demographic data that suggests the suicide rate for gamers is lower than the suicide rate for non-gamers. For my part, I have no trouble believing that, all things considered, some bad thing that happened in RPG play has been the proximate cause of someone's suicide at some point, probably more than one case. Heck maybe as many as two orders of magnitude fewer people than have killed themselves because they hated being MIT students have killed themselves because they lost their half-elf cleric or everyone walked out on their campaign. Will they, on examination, turn out to have had other personal problems? You betcha. But would it turn out that the game reversal was the last straw? I have a harder time believing this has never happened than believing that it has happened at some point.

Trying to defend an activity on the basis of its utter safety is a losing proposition. Perhaps there is something that is utterly safe. But nothing worthwhile is utterly safe. I wouldn't still be in that hobby if I didn't think it worthwhile. The only way to defend freedom, either in the general or the specific case, is to affirm the moral worth of risk.

But Ne'er So Well Express'd - The indispensible Andy Kashdan weighs in, again, on current criticisms of libertarian isolationists and "libertarian isolationists." Here's the money shot:

[Brink] Lindsey seems to think that because not every country that the U.S. has ever meddled in wants to kill us, there is no such thing as "blowback." In our next foreign adventure, it will be said that perhaps, theoretically, those kooky non-interventionists had a point, but now it's too late, again. I have just one question: When will it be a convenient time to start learning from history?

One Lee-tull Problem - In Wednesday's column, "Short Takes," Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo comes that much closer to just getting it over with and starting a blog. But that's not what I wanted to talk about. It's the section about Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute and relations with Pakistan in Monday's column, largely devoted to attacking Virginia Postrel and Brink Lindsey. (Yes, Loyal Readers, I do have Things to Say about the "libertarian isolationist"-libertarian, um, non-isolationist crossfire of recent days. That's coming this weekend, after which perhaps no one will be speaking to me. But now is not the time.)

Anyway, Justin is aghast that Carpenter advocates invading Pakistan:

Yes, Pakistan, the most loyal and completely cooperative of our Muslim allies. According to Carpenter, it would be "misplaced gratitude," you see, to a government that has cracked down on Islamic militants, whose army has fought Al Qaeda and whose support was instrumental in the Afghan war to refrain from doing so. Why? Because, we are told, there is "overwhelming evidence" that Pakistan is "harboring" Al Qaeda – indeed, it is so overwhelming that Carpenter doesn't even bother citing any of it. Even Donald Rumsfeld, the chief hawk in this administration, shied away from the suggestion that the US might turn on General Pervez Musharraf, the country's ruler, but this is just not acceptable to super-hawk Carpenter...Will we invade Pakistan, perhaps with Indian help, and set off the first fully-nuclearized war? Will we invade and "liberate" Pakistan, as we did Afghanistan, and install an army of occupation? What a wonderful lesson for our Muslim-Arab allies. Fail to cooperate, as in Afghanistan, and we'll crush you; agree to cooperate, and we'll still crush you. Oh, yes, that's the way to build a broad united front against international terrorism….

Now, on the one hand, I sort of take Justin's point here. It's bad realpolitik to teach other countries that there's no reward for cooperating with you. And yet. And yet.

What if it's true? That is, what if (Warning: Fictitious Entity Invocation!) "The Pakistani Government" really is playing footsie with al Qaeda and the Taliban - or at least the ever-popular "elements of Pakistani intelligence" are, and Musharraf and the Army either can't or won't stop them? What if the Pakistanis, perhaps in cahoots with their buddies the Chinese, really are watering the quag until it's good and mired for us? Then what?

For all the sport Warbloggerworld makes of Justin Raimondo, I've never made a secret of the fact that he and I are in complete agreement on a very important thing: that we keep the focus of the War on Terror on our actual attackers, al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, and not invoke it as an excuse to go tearing around the rest of the world putting it to alleged right. But what if the goal of destroying al Qaeda and showing the rest of the muslim world what stand-up guys we are by sticking with the Pakistanis conflict? Here is Pakistani leftist Tariq Ali on the subject:

The story everyone wants to know is Al Qaeda’s links to Pakistani military intelligence. Most people believe the links are there, and they were there on Sept. 11. Whether [the military] knew about [bin Laden’s plans] no one knows. People don't even speculate – they don't want to know. But the links were definitely there. These people were going in and out of Pakistan, landing in Pakistani airports. The circumstantial evidence is there to suggest that Daniel Pearl had got close to this story, and that rogue elements within the intelligence agencies laid a trap for him and he fell into it.
The thing is, the United States must know this. This is the shocking thing. They must know it. Whereas Colin Powell has gone out of his way to say, "We know the Pakistan government was not involved." How do you know that? No one in Pakistan believes that. General Musharraf himself described Daniel as "an over-intrusive" journalist.

I got the link from Ken Layne's site, mind you, but the website where I first discovered Tariq Ali a couple of years ago was Antiwar.com.

Independent Expenditure Watch - Michael Croft discusses actual politicians running for office on Ones and Zeros. I hope it's more than sixty days until the elections there in Texas.

Lies, Damn Lies and Psychotic Episodes - The Illuminated Donkey has the Last Word on the latest hot topic in the blogosphere: site traffic metrics. Pray that he does, anyway.

Holy Hanna! - Bruce Bawer has a blog! Anyone who remembers when The New Criterion was actually worth reading must rejoice at the news. Thank heavens the net now has a devoutly Christian, gay protestant to offset the blogosphere's alarming level of Romish influence.

Brother Arabs - Charles Dodgson has a useful quibble with an aspect of "Scorpions and Undershorts":

First, [The unhappy experience of the Palestinian diaspora] sheds light on the true motives of the "support" the Palestinians get from their Arab brethren, which isn't to improve their lot, but rather to preserve their squalor as a casus belli.

Second, the existence of the refugee camps for a separate population of "Palestinian Arabs" within Arab states is itself a historical anomaly. Historically, Arabian nationalism has been pan-Arab; the current Arab states in the region and their borders are to a great extent colonial artifacts, which are seen by the Arab themselves as fragments of the historic caliphate, and even recent history has seen repeated attempts to put Humpty Dumpty back together (like the United Arab Republic which for a brief time united Egypt and Syria). And there was certainly no "Palestinian nation" before 1948; if the Arabs there identified with any Arab state at all before that time, it was Syria.

So, Palestinian nationalism is itself a fact that the Arab governments have created for political purposes, much as the Israeli annexationists are trying to "create facts" with the settlements. But, at this point, it's a fact regardless, which Israel has acknowledged as such at Oslo. Much as the annexationists would like to contest it, it's probably too late now.

I would largely agree, though I think Palestinian nationalism is also, as I said, a recognition by the Palestinians that they've been jobbed by the existing Arab governments and can't look to them for their deliverance.

The Northern Front - Steven Postrel feels I have not taken sufficient heed of the situation in South Lebanon since Israel's unilateral withdrawal from there, and it's lessons for Israel's situation in the Occupied Territories. Charles Krauthammer agrees with him, and devotes today's column to the topic. I'll have more to say on this and similar matters when I'm working less. The Thursday Post has a news item on the subject too, available, by the miracle of the internet, Wednesday night.

What Am I, Chopped Liver? Dept. - This hurts:

The idea of a "wall" between Israel and the Arabs in Judea and Samaria has merit. It also has some disturbing implications, however, and I think that we might do well to look at them before settling on this policy.

The principal advocate (not necessarily in the sense of believing it, but certainly in the sense of putting it forward) of this idea in the blogosphere is Tony Adragna.

John Braue, in the Rat's Nest.

Hey, we kid because we love. Tony, BTW, continues to worry that bone of an idea today.

A Minor Streak - Unqualified Offerings enjoys Richard Cohen maybe a third of the time. The rest of the time it thinks he's a gasbag. But the man has had two good columns in two weeks now. In today's, he demolishes a recent op-ed that went out under the byline of Saudi Ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who first came to public prominence during the Iran-Contra hearings

The truest thing in Bandar's piece is his anger. It is white hot. He feels, to his very depth, that the Palestinians are being -- and have been -- pushed around. He feels that they are treated like dirt.

I'm with Bandar on that. The persistent expansion of West Bank settlements is an outrage. Palestinians have been living under occupation long enough. When Arafat's man in Washington said on "Meet the Press," "I, Hassan Abdel Rahman, have been in exile 29 years," it overlaid the personal on the political so that it was, for once, easily understood.

Bandar may be entitled to his anger. But we are entitled to ask just what exactly his government did until very recently to advance the peace process. We are entitled to ask, in other words, what was the Saudi role before its own nationals started flying airplanes into American buildings and the kingdom embarked on a public-relations campaign, once again throwing money at a problem.

In an April 2nd column about the War in Israel and the Territories, he made some points I thought of working into my various pieces on disgorgement. Specifically, he compares the situation between Israel and the Palestinians to the Algerian civil war with France:

The Battle of Algiers is now being fought in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, in Haifa and Netanya -- anywhere a Palestinian suicide bomber can infiltrate. It is being fought, too, with increasingly desperate Israeli tactics -- first pre-emptive assassination, now the virtual reoccupation of the West Bank.

The turn that the war -- the Palestinian struggle -- has taken may be lost on Sharon and, it seems, President Bush, but not on some of those involved. "If they kill us, we kill them," said Muhammad Odeh. "It will never stop." Odeh knows whereof he speaks. His son, Abdel Basset, blew himself up in Netanya last week, killing 22 others at a Passover seder.

In the week since reading it, I've come to realize that the "Algiers" column is not valuable chiefly for sort of echoing my own ideas on the topic, nor even as advice to Israel. No, it is most valuable for its implicit warning to the Palestinians. It does matter, however some deny it, how you win your independence. Algeria prevailed over France by adopting a Fanonist strategy. Their enthusiast, Jean-Paul Sartre famously said that "to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man; the survivor, for the first time, feels a national soil under his foot."

Things have worked out real well for independent Algeria. It's been suffering a vicious civil war between Islamist radicals and the aging socialist revolutionaries Sartre and Fanon so celebrated since the Algerian Army nullified the election of 1992. The Islamist parties turned, of course, to terrorism. The government to brutal counterinsurgency. But one of the things that hamstrung the government in the "hearts and minds" battle was its own genesis. Algeria was birthed in terrorism. Its founding myth necessarily reified that "dead man and free man" stuff. Its civic education stressed the rightness of terroristic violence in the nation's struggle for "freedom."

And their civics lessons bit them in the ass. Because while the religious radicals may have despised the Old Guard, they also took it as their model. And the Old Guard had no moral case to make over the heads of the terrorists to their people.

Palestinians who want the West Bank and Gaza for some reason other than the chance to engage in factional bloodletting unmolested should think about the Algerian example long and hard.

Reading Around - New Liberty on the newsstand reminds me that: 1) Their website still sucks; 2) Dang, I wish Stephen Cox had a weblog.

Ginger Stampley has redesigned What She Really Thinks! It looks great, nearly as devoid of visual interest as UO. Ginger writes to say that Movable Type 2.0 is "sweet." She's got new entries about the changing world of beef, her usual sharp comments on immigration news, and a bit spreading the Gene Wolfe meme, along with

Eve Tushnet, who, despite the fact that she is a bigtime blogger now, was kind enough to announce this site's return from DNS Hell. It occurs to Unqualified Offerings that there just may be some people who read this site and don't read Eve's - stop that! In attempting to describe the tenor of her site, I have temporarily settled on "funky gravitas."

Justin Slotman has apparently, happily for his readers, renounced that silly "give up blogging for studying" plan he rashly adopted last week. As long as he keeps the Insolvent Republic of Blogistan going, surfers need only one site for all the basketball, pornography-business, middle-east policy and libertarian inside baseball news you need.

I mentioned the Objectionable Content blog in the "Scorpions and Undershorts" post two items below. I want to specifically recommend it. Not just because of his great domain name either. Jim is an American, and another self-described "libertarian isolationist," about which class one can read much in the blogosphere these days. He's also (self-described) half-Palestinian. Even if you don't agree with what he has to say about the Middle East - he clearly seeks a grand coalition of Palestinian and Israeli peaceniks - he offers a different perspective on some much-blogged topics. Mind you, if I leave you with the impression that all he writes about is Israel and Palestine, I'll have done his site a disservice. You also get stuff like this:

A remix of Bjork's "Big Time Sensuality" is on the radio during the time change. It seems almost ridiculous to find a song called "Big Time Sensuality" sexy. You like to believe that you are far too sophisticated in your reactions to art to actually respond to something so overtly titled.

Just after Bjork said "yeehow!" I realized I wanted her.

Thanks to Gary Farber and (yikes!) The Sarge for referencing last night's long, long post.

When All the Time There's This Great Plank In Your Own - Among the things libertarian isolationists favor is getting one's own house in order before "fixing" the rest of the world. France, where marching against Israeli policy seems more important than protecting the lives and property of French Jews, could use a little libertarian isolationism. (Link via Amygdala.)

Of Scorpions and Undershorts: A Response to Steven Postrel [LATE LATE UPDATE: You may be following a link to this piece from Virginia Postrel's site. In the item linking to this, she points out that I left an important element of Steven Postrel's original argument undiscussed below. (As if what follows weren't long enough...) A (lengthy!) response to what both Postrel's consider Steven Postrel's "central point" can now be found here. It would still be tremendously generous of you to read the following article first, though. UO]

The following piece kind of got away from me. It is too damned long, it rambles, and is no doubt full of loose ends. By way of recompense, I have tossed in several points where various readers will stop in disgust. Best I could do.

A few days ago, Steven Postrel wrote to disagree with the Offerings/Adragna Plan for unilateral disgorgement by Israel of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. There is a lot to say in return, because it was a detailed argument resting on some important assumptions. Ideally, I would like a way to respond to the specific points he raised without falling into tit-for-tat, usenet-style interlinear mode, partly because interlinear exchanges tend toward a certain level of snarkiness, and partly because they end up making each atom of an argument look equivalent, when many times they are not. I think it is fair to say that SP's central claims are

1. "There is zero tolerance among the Arabs for Israel's presence"
   
2. That "the Israelis have not really tried a serious occupation"
   
3. That Israel has the option, now, of a "serious occupation," with gradual progress, on Israel's timetable, toward a Palestinian state.

He also adds an important strategic option to the previous mix (extermination, ethnic cleansing and separation): separation as part of a continued, but firmer occupation. Most of his specific criticisms seem to rest on those three legs. I certainly invite Steven Postrel to tell me if I've misconstrued his argument, and I invite readers to follow the link above to the complete text of his e-mail and decide for themselves if I have interpreted wrongly.

I think all three of his core claims are wrong.

First the question of Arab tolerance. This is surely the key. The blogosphere does not lack for examples of irridentist rhetoric against Israel by Arab journalists and politicians. There is absolutely a core constituency for Israel's destruction as a state, both in Palestine and outside it. And yet. "Zero tolerance" seems a serious overstatement.

In 1948, the entire Arab League banded together to attempt to prevent the establishment of the State of Israel. In 1967, only the front line states - Egypt, Syria, Jordan - plus Iraq participated. By the end of the War of Attrition (1970), Jordan had ceased belligerency. The Lebanese war pitted Israel against Syria only. (For the purpose of this analysis and, for that matter, almost anything else, Lebanon does not count as a separate country.) In my lifetime the number of Arab countries formally at peace with Israel has gone from zero to three, and the number of Arab countries that would rather not be bothered - just about every Arab country west of Sinai, plus many of the Gulf States - has grown larger yet. (Though Operation Defensive Shield is getting them interested again, which actually helps my argument.) In Steven Postrel's and my lifetime, the word "Israel" did not cross the lips of any Arab politician, let alone a PLO official. The only way Arab politicos referred to Israel was as "the Zionist entity." Now the Arab League adopts a resolution formally offering peace and normal relations to Israel by name, in return for a withdrawal to the 1967 borders. Leave aside for the moment the exact mixture of sincerity and publicity stunt in the "Abdullah Plan" (or "Friedman Plan" if you prefer). I can't help recall the widespread belief that Sadat's offer to "go to the Knesset" was a publicity stunt too, and hey, maybe it started out that way. Just as wars develop their own momentum, so can peace. A generation ago, the Abdullah Plan couldn't even have been offered as a ruse.

The tide, in other words, runs in both directions. We can expect a violent, irridentist faction to persist among the Arabs generally and the Palestinians particularly. The question is what Israeli policies will move enough Arabs and Palestinians to the "can't be bothered" column that the irridentists wither as an effective force.

The obvious answer is ending the Occupation.

There is, among warbloggers and pro-Israel old-media punditry, a tremendous unwillingness to credit Palestinian sincerity about hating the Occupation. The claim is either that resistance to the Occupation is "really" always resistance to Israel's existence as such, that no matter how awful the Occupation is, it doesn't justify terrorism, or that, while the Occupation might be "rough" in some abstract way, really the Palestinian diaspora has been treated far worse by the Arab nations. Let's start with the last: the Arabs say that, while the Arab-Israeli wars might be tough on the Jews, "really" the Jews have been treated far worse by the Europeans, and they should seek their recompense from the Germans, the Poles, the Russians, even Spain - hell, it was the Romans who scattered the Jews in the first place, so, say the Arabs, why come here for redemption, Jews, when your problems are in Europe.

It's a spectactularly impractical argument in both cases, and the Palestinians can as easily flip it around: "Yes, we are sick of cleaning Kuwait's toilets and scrounging vaccines in Lebanon's camps. The only solution to our woes is a national one - a state of our own on our ancestral land."

The middle claim is that the Occupation does not justify the murder of civilians. I agree completely. What the Occupation justifies is the Palestinians' conviction that they need their own country - not the means chosen by many Palestinian leaders.

Lastly: the claim that it's not Occupation the Palestinians object to, but Israel itself. Let's be careful here: there are surely some Palestinians, including all of Hamas, all of Islamic Jihad and at least some of the PLO, for whom the problem is Israel itself. But to argue that, despite Palestinian and outside Arab statements to the contrary, the Occupation is not the issue for enough of them to make all the difference in the world for Israel's prospects is another claim altogether. There is the further possibility that the specific history of the Occupation has convinced a sizable number of Palestinians and other Arabs that destroying Israel as a state is the only way the Occupation can be ended. That is, it is possible that Israeli policy makes irridentists of people who need not be such.

At bottom this is the "Are they all a bunch of fanatics?" question. I suggest, for starters, the empathy test. I do not say "sympathy." I am not so interested in whether any given reader's heart aches for the people of Palestine. As I've said before, if you were twelve years old for the Munich Olympics, you have a hard time, even thirty years later, having much in the way of heartaches for the people of Palestine. No, it is reason, not emotion, I want to summon; but - this is important - reason about emotion. Theirs. And not just their emotions, but their reason too.

Since the signing of the Oslo accords, the settler population in the West Bank and Gaza has grown about 72%, and housing by about 50%. (The figures come from Peace Now, but I've already accepted that I'm not going to be making a lot of friends with this piece. Anyone who has figures showing a static or declining settlement population since Oslo is invited to send them.) Grown. The annexationist elements in Israeli politics - never just the religious fringe, or even just "the right" - have always had a term for the settlement policy: "creating facts." Since Oslo, many, many facts have been created.

Then there's "Barak's generous offer" at Camp David. There is a Shockwave presentation of the actual contours of the Camp David Plan on the Gush Shalom site. The authors note that

1. Their map does not reflect the Israeli-controlled roads and checkpoints that would vitiate the territorial integrity of even this rump Palestine.
2. That the PLO actually accepted the successor "Taba Plan" (last slide in the Shockwave presentation) as a basis for negotiation, but that Barak withdrew the Taba offer on his way out of office.

(Steven Postrel says that for Israel to give up the heights along the Jordan River would be "military malpractice." Take a look at the final Barak Plan contours of Palestine - what would you call a government that accepted those contours? "Military malpractice" would be praising such a move with faint damnation.)

Okay, let's talk "roads and checkpoints" for a second. "Checkpoints" is not a word that conveys much flavor. So let's give it a try:

Everyone talks about how officious, degrading and stupid airport security has gotten since al Qaeda massacred 3,000 people last September. To get a sense of what "checkpoints" means for one's daily life, imagine a similar experience every few miles. Every day. Now, populate airport security with people that you believe despise you and all your kind. If you are white, imagine checkpoints staffed entirely by resentful African-American municipal employees from any large American city. If you are black, imagine that they are run by the department store detectives that lock onto you the instant you cross the lease line, or the rental agents who - what a coincidence - find that there are no units available all of a sudden.

Now give them guns.

Put your daily experience - these people control whether you get to your job, if you have one; whether you make it to the family dinner - in the context of settlement activity and a map that suggest that this will not end in your lifetime. Now don't forget the stupid part. Because at the same time you are undergoing what President Bush calls "humiliations," you see on the news that another suicide bomber has gotten through. The airport security metaphor is complete: at least as far as you can tell, checkpoints ain't working. They're just there to piss you off.

I've said it before: Few of my fellow warbloggers would abide such conditions for one minute.

And that's the good news. Because we are reasonably people, and we know, after a moment's reflection, that the Occupation would fill us with rage. Which means there is a possibility that the Palestinians - enough of them - are reasonable people who are just really really really pissed off by conditions that are within Israel's power to change. Of course, just because the Palestinians may be reasonable doesn't mean that they are. But this item is so damned long for a reason: we've had to cover some history and the history provides a context, and that context is that there is more than zero tolerance among Arabs for the existence of Israel and it's possible for Israeli actions to move parties from belligerency to non-belligerency. And speaking of history, the al Aqsa Intifada has not been going on forever. Palestinian resistance, in both terrorist and non-terrorist manifestations, has a history too. There is more to say about that.

Time next for Steven Postrel's second core claim: that Israel has not tried "a real occupation, with all the dirty and messy problems that entails--informers, arrests, reprisals against the families of terrorists, control of the schools, provision of economic opportunity, setup of tame governing bodies which could be transitioned toward democracy, etc." This is at least partly a semantic claim. Certainly Israel has used "informers, arrests, reprisals against the families of terrorists." The Palestinians, among others, would probably agree about the provisioning of economic opportunity. (In a follow-on e-mail, SP said he was not advocating that Israel use lethal reprisals against the families of terrorists; rather he suggests more comprehensive economic reprisals than bulldozing people's houses because, with the survivor payments to suicide bomber families, they still profit even after house destruction is factored in.) I suppose whether you consider Israel to have simply not done enough in the way of informers, arrests and reprisals against families of terrorists is a question of opinion, or taste. I doubt Karl Popper would class it with the falsifiable claims. But it's inarguable that Israel has always used informers. During the 1980s Intifada, almost the only people the Palestinians actually killed were "collaborators," and while that term certainly included people whose "crime" was selling property to Jews, or doing "too much" business with Israelis, it also included quite a number of Shin Bet assets.

The real question is whether Israel can try "a real occupation" now. (And it's significant that SP uses the word "try," I think - it implicitly acknowledges that "a real occupation" is also a gamble; the wisdom of it is as provisional as any of my suggestions, or Tony Adragna's, or Gershom Gorenberg's.) Pause very briefly to ask who would pay for "a real occupation?" Where does the manpower come to enforce it? The Israeli economy is already pinched by the reserve call-ups for Operation Defensive Shield. What are the chances that an armed occupying power actually finds it politically feasible to provision economic opportunity against possible short-term interests of some of its own constituent groups? Note that the ANC has already shown how to oppose "control of the schools" - you just don't go. This turns into a tragedy, of course, because an entire generation grows up ignorant, but it happens anyway.

That leaves tame governing bodies and gradual easing of the occupation if progress is being made. The tame governing bodies are another difficulty: SP says that under "a real occupation" that there would be casualties, "but they'll be uniformed ones." Well, no they won't either. They'll be the Palestinians foolish enough to join the tame governing bodies. One of the things terrorism and guerilla warfare have always been about is scaring your own people out of cooperating with the enemy. Whatever the contours of the SP occupation in practice, terrorists will strike the weak points of it, not the strong. Indeed, the terrorists will do their best to see to it that "progress" never gets made. They want draconian measures because they want mass hatred of the occupier.

And all the time, the Demographic Bomb ticks.

That's the real weapon of mass destruction that Israel needs to fear. There are actually two of them. The smaller one ticks between the Jordan and the Med: the Palestinians. The larger extends from Gibralter to the Euphrates. Strategy is supposed to be your grand scale thinking, I believe, and the D-Bomb is about as grand as the scale gets. Vaster than anthrax, and more slow.

I'm damned if I see more than two possible solutions to the D-Bomb:

1. "Exterminate them all," where "all" = "all arabs." I would remind my readers that this option is: a) as evil as evil gets; and b) kind of hard to do.
   
2. Convince the arabs not to use it. That is to say, Israel needs to become just not that big a deal any more to Arabs outside the Levant, and not the worst thing in the world to the Palestinians. (The notion that a caring US occupation and transformation of the entire Arab world on Israel's behalf will make Arabs less hostile toward Israel strikes me as suffering the same flaws as the SP Occupation Plan itself, but this piece is already overlong and overly scattered. The issue goes in the Some Other Time bin.)

NB: I have in the past and continue to agree that Israel needs a "doomsday deterrent" relevant to the concerns of Arab decisionmakers, which is to say, their tender concerns for their own pampered skins, their power and their privileges. Nukes are an important component of that, plus delivery systems that can guarantee the obliteration of any government that launches a "final solution" attack on the State of Israel. As a strategist, Steven Postrel undoubtedly recognizes that "deterrence" does not mean only the ability to wipe out someone else's population. (Justin Raimondo and Ran HaCohen just stopped nodding and gagged.)

Now, finally, the biggie. (No, I promise: finally.) The fatal flaw of the SP Plan is the same as the fatal flaw in Israel's implementation of Oslo: "gradual easing." Once again, we need to temper game theory with history.

When news of Oslo broke, I figured, "There will be a Palestinian State in five years." Bad prediction. Smart assumption though.

Oslo was signed in 1993 - two to three years after the failed Moscow Coup, the overnight dissolution of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the suppression of Tienanmen. And in 1985, Gorbachev was taking the first steps toward Glasnost. It's a truism of political history, particularly the history of revolutions, that the time of maximum danger and instability is when a repressive regime begins to liberalize. Viz, Russia 1917 and 1989. Viz, France in the late 18th century. Liberalization raises expectations, which lead to revolutionary change or an iron fist, or both. Maybe, clueless analysts suggested in 1989, some kind of provisional German reunification would be possible in a generation.

Uh huh.

If any Israeli strategists seriously saw Oslo as the first steps in a generation-long evolution, well, "anti-idiotarians" should not need to search far for applicable vocabulary to describe them. The evidence was staring them in the face. As John LeCarre wrote in another context, "Nowadays, these things are done quickly or not at all." Once Israel started down the Palestinian Authority road, it needed to prepare for a quick divorce.

Let me be clear: when I say "repressive regime," I mean not Israel as a whole, or the Israeli government as such. But I do mean the Occupation. All the defensive blather about how really the Palestinians have it much worse in Arab countries does not mean that they do not, in an absolute sense, have it bad in the West Bank and Gaza. Nor does the fact that there was a time, at least, when the Occupation made military sense. Countries can't become prisoners of their own illusions about themselves. The National Greatness types are big fans of Pericles. Pericles, of course, famously told the Athenians regarding their own empire that "what you hold is, to speak somewhat plainly, a tyranny..." - or at least Thucydides would have us believe that he said that. Now hawks everywhere love the part that comes next:

...to take it perhaps was wrong, but to let it go is unsafe.And men of these retiring views, making converts of others, would quickly ruin a state; indeed the result would be the same if they could live independent by themselves; for the retiring and unambitious are never secure without vigorous protectors at their side; in fine, such qualities are useless to an imperial city, though they may help a dependency to an unmolested servitude."

A fine, tough speech. Athens lost. Athens was, in fact, conquered by its enemies. I don't believe Steven Postrel's suggestions keep Israel from suffering the same fate. I think unilateral disgorgement remains the more practical course.

(Note: I am grateful to Objectionable Content for links to maps of Camp David and Taba and to the figures on Israeli settlement activity in the Oslo Era.)

Big Government Ruined My Long Weekend - The weather didn't help either: two inches of snow on Deep Creek Lake and the surrounding mountains last night and flurries all day. But the big thing - Mrs. Offering forgot a prescription medication that she takes every day and expects to for the foreseeable future: doctor's orders. She called our GP to ask him to phone a tide-over quantity to a Western Maryland pharmacy. GP was on vacation. So she phoned her OB/GYN, who has her medical records on file and knows of the GP's prescription. The office took a message. Next morning, the office responded: No, her OB/GYN refused to prescribe four pills.

Between the War on Drugs and the liability climate, doctors are scared to death to make this kind of accomodation. The upshot: My wife was sick unto immobility with nausea and unable to even discuss food by Saturday morning. We cut our trip short by a day, and the most one could say is that at least she was well enough to sleep most of the trip home rather than whimper - that would not have been a fun drive.

So a doctor's decision led directly to my wife getting sick. But since it wasn't a decision to prescribe pills, it's okay with the FDA and the DEA and the licensing board.

Unqualified Offerings is tired now. Tomorrow: Postrelfest.

One From a Wall - This "daily affirmation" was on the wall of a pizza parlor in Oakland, Maryland yesterday:

Lord, Today I have not been jealous; I have not gossiped; I have not assumed the worst of my fellows, nor been sarcastic; mean-spirited nor selfish. I have not been negative; no unkind word has passed my lips; no unkind thought aimed itself toward anyone of my acquaintance.

But soon, Lord, I shall be getting out of bed, and...

And the Lion Shall Lie Down With Unqualified Offerings - Unqualified Offerings had to read the most recent Andrew Sullivan item several times to truly absorb its import. (Note: the supposed permalink doesn't seem to work. Look for a Friday April 5 item headlined "Bush's 'Reversal.' ")

Its clear and unmissable emphasis is the right one: that the prime responsibility for the violence in Israel and the West Bank in the last few months lies squarely with the terrorist, Yassir Arafat, and his accomplices. To say he has failed to live up to a single one of his promises to restrain violence is an under-statement. But it is equally true that re-occupation of the West Bank is not and should not be an option. Nor should maintenance of the settlements.

Andrew Sullivan calls for dismantling the settlements and, implicitly, for the establishment of a Palestinian state. I know it's hard for this site not to sound ironical but let me try: I am stunned. Stunned into something like hopefulness. Sullivan still manages to pack some things I disagree with into the very same item, but he completely (unconsciously, needless to say) bursts the tidy box to which I had consigned him.

Unqualified Offerings Solves Your Marketing Problems - Here's an idea for the next wave of Viagra ads: Bob Dole, in leotards, hands on hips, swiveling his torso, pelvis forward, chanting, "I must - I must - I must increase my lust!"

Remember, all Unqualified Offerings marketing campaigns are free to the user!

Signs and Portents - Around Garrett County, several roadside banners averring, "Allegheny Power: Financially Sound But Morally Bankrupt." I am not sure what the issues are, but the signs convince me that while I may consider investing in Allegheny Power, for the time being I will forebear to attend worship services on their premises. Another set of banners proclaims them to be "Anti-Worker, Anti-Union, Anti-Family and Anti-Consumer." Whether the company puts "profits before people" could not be determined at press time.

Boy does this keyboard suck.

While Waiting for more substantial Offerings, including a reply to Steven Postrel's e-mail, go read Perry de Havilland's essential essay on the stupidities and cruelties behind too much of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. I bet Perry that the item would be much-praised in e-mail but little linked in the blogosphere. This is my small attempt toward losing my own bet.

The Return - After Unqualified Offerings checked with its host yesterday morning, it learned that said host renewed the domain but didn't update the nameserver entries. Grr. But things seem to have propagated.

UO is currently at a library in Oakland, MD, in the extreme western end of the Free State, where this website, Mrs. Offering and Offerings, The Next Generation are trying to find an acceptable summer rental at Deep Creek Lake. That's not so easy this time of year, since most places are already rented. But it's a couple of days away from the office and a few days away with the family. It's cold here, with snow flurries much of the day, not unheard of for this time of year in the Alleghenies, but not normal either. This keyboard sucks, so there will be no substantive posts before Sunday. But know that UO braved the cold yesterday afternoon for an hour and was rewarded with a three-pound bass that grew overfond of a suspending Rapala.

Offerings Held Hostage - Day 3 - Supposedly, this domain is propagating through DNS again since yesterday morning. At least from my corner of the net, however, it doesn't exist. Nor does my "supplanter mail" address work yet. So this probably won't even successfully post yet. But we try.

Oh Crap - My beloved domain, my host's night support tells me, has expired. That's supposed to be something they maintain, according to service agreement when I signed up. Not that you can read this explanation, since every one of my sites is in limbo now. Grr.

Isolated Isolationist - Highclearing.com's mailserver was working at 6:30 when Unqualified Offerings left work, but hasn't been working since this site arrived back at Unqualified HQ. Hence any late e-mails on the middle east, where there is news lately, will not be taken into account in tonight's meanderings. Even if you wrote earlier today and I read it, I can't read it now because it's still on the server.

This Will Not Stand - Thanks to Virginia Postrel for sending readers to see the Steven Postrel e-mail below. Come back tonight for the big "Why Steven Postrel Is Wrong" post. In the meantime, check out Tony Adragna's items and links on the same subject. (Link two items below.)

Swell the Chorus - Unqualified Offerings is trapped at work this evening and has other responsibilities when it gets home. But here is an op-ed by Gershom Gorenberg that appeared in today's Washington Post. It bears some relevance to recent items here...

Another Postrel Heard From - Steven Postrel, self-described "spouse of the famous Postrel," who writes the nicest "You are so totally wrong" e-mail conceivable, which he has granted permission to use on this site. I run it unedited because it is substantial, and a strong challenge to the option that Unqualified Offerings, Tony Adragna and the odd couple of Charles Krauthammer and Israeli Dove Ran HaCohen have all, with variations, suggested. When I'm not stuck at work, as I am tonight, I want to respond to the points Steven raises:

I want to respond to your well-written and provocative posts advocating passive policies by Israel.

Let me cut to the chase: You need to do a better job of backward induction, as we say in the game theory business. IF there is to be a Palestinian state, and that state is to be hostile, and that state is to be on the West Bank, and that state is to be allowed the sovereign right to build up its own defenses and get aid from wherever it wants, THEN the Israelis will have to fight that state from an incomparably worse position than the one they enjoy today, just to get back to a position where they have the SAME options that they have today. As a bonus, you can kiss the Hashemite rule of Jordan goodbye, because Arafat (or his successors) will collaborate with Syria and Iraq to destabilize and take over there too (>50% of the Jordanian population is Palestinian now). I'm not sure in which order those two things would be most likely to occur, but the "libertarian isolationist" policy you advocate looks like an avoidance of these hard realtiies to me. There is zero tolerance among the Arabs for Israel's presence, the Arabs see concessions as weakness, and once an independent Palestinian state is in place it will be time for "phase 2," as Arafat or one of his buddies put it.

Your suggestions about Israeli territorial concessions also seem flawed. From a tactical point of view, the hills on the Jordan river are critical to Israel in any military confrontation; even the lefty military types in Israel always contemplated hanging on to those for elementary security reasons. Giving up the high ground would simply be military malpractice.

If the Israelis think removing some of the settlements would help them compactify their lines of defense, fine. But any such move will be seen by the Arabs as another sign of weakness and will encourage immediate aggression (c.f. Barak's ingenious withdrawal from Lebanon, which legitimized Hezbollah, energized the Palestinian ultras, and now apparently has inflitrators regularly crossing into Israel over the security fence). Removal of settlements only makes sense in the context of a real occupation of Palestinian territory.

So far, the Israelis have not really tried a serious occupation (for which physical separation from Israel proper should be an adjunct, not a substitute). They screwed around a little bit under Begin, but never really bit the bullet. I mean a real occupation, with all the dirty and messy problems that entails--informers, arrests, reprisals against the families of
terrorists, control of the schools, provision of economic opportunity, setup of tame governing bodies which could be transitioned toward democracy, etc. Policies would start out in a draconian but predictable fashion and be gradually eased if progress is being made. You know the drill. They'll take casualties, but they'll be uniformed ones; they'll be reviled around the world, but I'm not sure they'd notice the difference at this point.

In the context of this kind of policy, the removal of settlements could also be used to show that Israel plans for there to be a Palestinian state at such time that that would not represent a mortal threat. This aspect is similar to Jonathan Rauch's idea, although he would probably hate the occupation plan.

Your idea of separating Israeli and American foreign policy goals is not completely doable either. If the US solves its urgent Iraqi problem and establishes a friendly and quasi-democratic regime there, the entire correlation of forces in the Middle East would change favorably for Israel. Similarly, if the Israelis show that they can't be pushed around, the US gains face because they are an ally. But the Iraq issue is too big a topic to tackle here (I'm afraid I don't agree with you there, either).

Anyway, keep up the good work of being the only intelligent critic of an aggressive war against Islamofascism. Or better yet, change your mind and help the rest of us figure out how to solve some of the thorny problems of implementation such a war entails--we can use the help!

--Steven Postrel

Perhaps the only greater pleasure than being called "the only intelligent critic" of anything is the chance to exhibit false modesty about it, but I think there is a much longer list than me. The biggest claim I might be able to make is to being the only critic of an aggressive war against Islamofascism that agrees that there is such a thing as Islamofascism.