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

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

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

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

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

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

In Due Time - Instapundit writes:

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

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

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

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

WHOA! The problem is the premise.

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

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

Then she gets into the specifics:

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

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

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

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

They weren't airy-fairy guys.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the proximate cause of our "woe?"

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

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

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

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

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

And speaking of churlish:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was a wolf. In Montgomery County.

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

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