In Time of Drought - During last fall's fishing trips along the Patuxent River above Triadelphia Reservoir, I was careful to note rocks and channels during the dead low water levels of the year, so that when spring came I would know where to cast even with all the runoff. No snow, no sleet, no rain to speak of since then and the river is, at the end of March, shallower than it was last October. Really, this drought has been going on since 1999 now.

News of the World - Ginger Stampley has put together a moving collection of excerpts from recent blog and non-blog items on the middle east. (She kindly included a bit of mine, but it would be fine work regardless.)

Perry de Havilland captures the full gravity of the ethnic cleansing option.

Diana Moon has an idea what's really going on while Arafat's bunker hogs the spotlight.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden has kind words for the piece below and very kind words for this weblog generally, which pleases me immensely, because he is such a good writer. Patrick says I'm his "favorite libertarian isolationist," which must be sort of like being someone's favorite canker sore.

How Shall We...Fuck Off, My Lord - Patrick Nielsen Hayden links to a disgusting little item in the Arab News, aprrovingly citing the same bogus Ben Franklin quote that appears on the Posse Comitatus website and other places. (No link to the Posse Comitatus website - Unqualified Offerings has its limits.) In the quote, "Ben Franklin" urges the Continental Congress to "exclude the Jews forever, [or] your children and your children’s children" will enjoy higher educational standards, a vocabulary enriched by yiddishisms, a vibrant urban intellectual culture, Hank Greenberg, a bunch of really good books and movies and a whole host of other intolerable things.

I am paraphrasing here.

Anyway. Faced with this vile antisemitic smear in what is supposed to be Saudi Arabia's "nice" media face to the anglophone world, PNH quite reasonably responds, "Dick Cheney met respectfully with these guys just last week. The Arab world calls them leaders. Not to put too fine a point on it, but: fuck them all."

I'm with you, Patrick. The question becomes how?

For starters, the US has troops in Saudi Arabia "defending" the kingdom from attack by Iraq. Pull them out. Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia all made nice at the Arab summit this week anyway. That means that Saddam is no longer "a threat to his neighbors" as far as his neighbors are concerned, at least, and if they've guessed wrong and he is, well, in the words of PNH: "fuck them all."

Let's play the Big Geopolitical Thinker Game for a moment. Let's say Iraq swept down and took over Kuwait and Saudi Arabia both. Oh no! Regional instability! Mind you, all the best blogs have urged us to see the upside of instability anyway. So let's look at the upside. If Iraq gets suddenly that much bigger, richer and more powerful, what about Evil Axis member Iran? Think they've got an incentive to make nice with the US PDQ?

Oh. The oil weapon. One more time: There is no oil weapon.

The next "fuck them all" questions are sensible Israeli policy and sensible US policy toward Israel. I've been full of advice for Israel this week, which is pretty cheeky for a libertarian isolationist, but I have a rooting interest: I have an emotional attachment to a sovereign Jewish state on the shores of the Mediterranean. I don't think you have one if Israel only survives because of US protection - whatever you want to call that, it ain't "sovereign." I think Israel is responsible for Israeli security and the US is not and shouldn't be. By the same token, Israel is not responsible for US security - it's as wrong for the US to try to micromanage Israel's relations with Yasser Arafat, as we have been doing the last 48 hours, as it is for the US to defeat all of Israel's enemies for it, as the neocons urge.

Which leaves the question of Israeli policy as such. I was so ardently pro-Israel for much of my life that I'd have made Eric Alterman's A-list if I were famous. All you Johnny-come-lately Likudnik bloggers, where were you a dozen years ago, when the touring Saudi Arabian national exhibit was making the rounds of American convention centers, with the big wall map on which Israel did not appear? That led to a two-hour blowup of the "How can you defend those people" kind with the future Mrs. Offering.

The point is, I've read an awful lot of pro-Israeli writing over the years, by Israelis and American supporters both, and the most poignant aspect of it was and remains the dream of being liked. The assumption, often stated outright but usually at least implied, was that "peace" meant normalization, recognition, diplomatic relations, trade and travel. The dream of being a normal country. Otherwise, Israel had to hold onto the occupied territories to be "safe."

The immediate dreams post-Oslo were of joint Israeli-Palestinian financial ventures, hands joined to build peace, two peoples recognizing their commonality and inseparability. Everyone knows that, objectively, Israel has a lot to offer the Arab world in terms of technical know-how, managerial acumen, you name it.

This part hurts: It will be years if not generations before anyone in the Arab world likes Israel. Some of that is Israel's fault, but only some. But it's a fact. "Peace" for Israel can not mean amity, regard, affection. It can mean respect (Israel-Jordan), disdain (Israel-Egypt), disinterest (Israel and the Maghreb). It can not mean love. It can not mean the quiet joy of mutual enterprise and quotidian exchange. It must be based on cold calculation: making it not worth various parties while to attack Israel.

Military deterrence is an important component of that. A territorial buffer zone across the river from Jordan is not. Continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza with a system of what amounts to colonial administration by Yasser Arafat or whatever successor Ariel Sharon imagines has already proven a lethally bad idea. It is hard to see how formal reoccupation of all occupied territories, with administration returned to Israel directly, would be any more successful. Glenn Reynolds still imagines that the Jordanians are stupid enough to take over the West Bank again and do Israel's dirty work. If this happens, I promise to post an "I Am An Idiot After All" item every day for a week. But I don't think I'm the idiot here.

External threats, whether conventional forces from Syria or NBC threats from Iraq and Iran, are matters for military deterrence. That leaves terrorism from the Palestinians. There the options are stark:

o Extermination: Evil
o Ethnic Cleansing: Evil and stupid
o More of the Same: A losing proposition
o The Jordanian Option: Fantasy
o Unilateral Separation: Smart!

Mind you, "Smart" != "Pretty." It means buying out the settlers who will be bought and abandoning the ones who won't. It means compensating the refugees of 1948 and 1967 who will be bought and washing one's hands of those who won't. It has to include dismantling the network of roads and checkpoints that make "Palestinian" territory a semitic bantustan, and abjuring fortifications along the Jordan river or it isn't really separation. It leaves the mess of Jerusalem to deal with.

But it gives the Palestinians a real state and forces them to make it go. Right now, their failures at nation-building can be blamed on the Occupation, often plausibly. Take that excuse away. And if the Palestinians militarize? People, nations have militaries. The question is what they do with them. Israel has the strongest military in the middle east. If Palestine attacks, have a real war against Palestine. (The truth is, there will have to be at least one. Peace comes when both sides are sicker of fighting than they are of not having what they want and neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians are there yet.) Set up real borders. Secure them. Negotiate with a sovereign enemy, not a captive people.

The alternative is a chain of escalating terror and reprisal. Arguments that the reprisal comes from the terror will not make Israel a tolerably safe place to live, forestall Jewish emigration from a fear-ridden land or dam the demographic tide. Israel should end the occupation for its own sake, not anyone else's.

Speaking of the Post - Any man's death diminisheth me, but the same does not apply to the Washington Post's op-ed cartoons. Since the passing of the legendary, boring and unfunny Herblock, the Post has been using rotating cartoonists, because, they solemnly intoned, no single cartoonist could replace the incumbent, or at least not yet. So Post readers been getting a rotation of Toles, Auth, Lukovich, Bok and other luminaries. The cartoon space hasn't gotten much less reliably liberal in the post-Herblock paper, but it's gotten a lot funnier. I hope the eventually lure Toles to the job. Hell, if the Post can't outbid the Buffalo News...

Out of the Mouths of Grad Students - Sean H. Smith, "a graduate student at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government," has an interesting contrarian argument about David Letterman and Ted Koppel in Today's Post. No, I didn't think "Kennedy School of Government" and "contrarian" went together either. But facts is facts. Smith argues that what he calls "pop television" actually better serves viewers political needs than officially-designated "news coverage:"

But over the last decade, while the elite media weren't looking, a funny thing happened: Letterman, Jay Leno, Oprah Winfrey, "Saturday Night Live" and MTV became the deliverers of the news mainstream Americans want. Pop culture shows pay more attention to politics and give it more time than their counterparts in the news division. According to the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a research group funded by the MacArthur, Ford and Pew foundations, among others, the average sound bite in the 2000 election fell to a mere seven seconds, three seconds shorter than in 1988. Voters who wanted to hear Gov. Bush or Vice President Gore couldn't rely on the network news. After Labor Day, the center found, reporters filled 74 percent of the airtime in the average evening news piece, while candidates talked 11 percent of the time. Other sources filled the remaining 15 percent.

By contrast, the pop culture shows offered viewers a chance to actually see and hear the candidates. When Bush went on Letterman in October 2000, he got 13 minutes of airtime. That's more time than he received on all the network news programs during the same month.

Similarly, when Secretary of State Colin Powell went on MTV last month to answer questions from a worldwide audience, viewers were treated to a free-flowing, 90-minute presentation on the government's priorities. The Bush administration was given a chance to deliver its message, unfiltered by broadcasters and Washington journalists, to an audience that MTV estimated at 370 million.

Interesting.

Can't Have Everything - In the course of a column supporting war against Iraq and discussing Tony Blair's upcoming trip to the US, David Ignatius writes

(I must caution my fellow scribe William Safire, grande plume of the New York Times op-ed page, that Blair will not be bringing evidence confirming secret meetings in Prague between al Qaeda operatives and Iraqi intelligence officers to plan the Sept. 11 attacks. The Brits, along with senior CIA officials, think that particular Iraqi conspiracy theory doesn't hold water.)

Now, this is Ignatius' idea of an argument for war:

The problem is, analysts don't seem to know where these dozen remaining Scuds are. Even one of them, armed with a biological or chemical warhead, could do catastrophic damage to Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia or any other target within the Al-Hussein's 650-kilometer range.

He is surely right. Thing One: Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, the countries theoretically threatened here, ought to be concerned. So should Iran, for that matter. It's significant that Iran doesn't make Ignatius' list somehow.Thing Two: The way Ignatius says it, you'd think the goal was to make sure Iraq doesn't file "even one of them." But he also says "analysts don't seem to know where" they are. So let's go over this one more time. If we start a war to effect "regime change" in Iraq, what are the odds that Saddam can successfully fire off at least one scud? Relevant historical record: Iraq shot off 93 scuds in the Gulf War. If we start a war to effect "regime change" in Iraq, what motivation does Saddam have not to fire off a biological or chemical warhead at Israel, Turkey or Saudi Arabia? Relevant historical record: In the Gulf War we kept Saddam from doing this by threatening to nuke him if he tried it. This time around, we're starting off by saying that Saddam can do nothing to save himself.

Our Iraq policy increases the likelihood of Saddam actually attacking Israel, Turkey or Saudi Arabia with a chemical or biological weapon to something approaching certainty. I sure hope they'll be grateful for our help.

Homeland Security - The appalling slaughter by a Palestinian suicide bomber at a Seder feast in Netanya yesterday is even more appalling to those of us who have had the pleasure of attending one, or many. The next time someone suggests letting an enemy nation off the hook out of respect for Ramadan, just throw this atrocity back in their face.

How did the killer get to the scene of the crime? He, Abdel-Basset Odeh, lived in the West Bank city of Tul Karm.

In the beginning of August, IDF troops arrested Hamas activist Nihad Abu Kishak in the area of the West Bank city of Tul Karm. Abu Kishak carried explosive devices he was supposed to deliver to two militants planning to carry out a suicide bombing in Israel. He also carried the will of one of the terrorists - Abdel-Basset Odeh.

Israel demanded that the Palestinian Authority arrest Odeh. Ten days later the Palestinian Authority said that they had arrested him, but later Odeh was released from prison.

During the last IDF operation in Tul Karm, soldiers tried to arrest Odeh at his home in the Nur A Shams refugee camp, but were unsuccessful.

Why were the Israelis expecting a hostile...state? tribe? NGO? to do preserve Israeli security? Loose in Palestine, there is only so much harm an Abdel-Basset Odeh can do. Suppose there were real borders and real border checks. Suppose there were an independent Palestine and the Israelis refused entry to its citizens because, "Frankly, you people have issues." Suppose Israelis did not rely on Palestinians for manual labor and could afford to do without them. Suppose, in view of proven danger, Palestinians had to apply for visas to get in, if allowed in at all. Suppose, in view of hostilities, Israel repatriated its settlers with financial compensation, because it can't guarantee their safety in a foreign country: Palestine.

You will tell me that no border is airtight and you will be right. You will tell me that Mohammed Atta got into the United States, and you will be right. You will be implicitly arguing that Israel must inevitably use clowns to secure its borders, as we do, but never mind. I will tell you that, even if there are breaches, it beggars belief that the border would be so porous that the present one-enormity-per-day rate would continue.

There is a single viable alternative at the level of grand strategy, and that is ethnic cleansing. Israel could drive all Arabs from the West Bank, killing enough to convince the rest to get moving. This was what the gregarious cabinet minister, Mr. Ze'evi proposed. Pretend for a moment that there are no moral objections to ethnic cleansing. Where would the survivors be driven? Obviously, Jordan. The ethnic-cleansing option entails consciously inflicting a vicious refugee problem on the country with which Israel has the most stable peace. There's a smart idea. So long as Jordan finds no incentive to allow its territory to be the invasion path for Iraq or Iran, any invading force has to take Israel "lengthwise." Only the trans-Jordan route offers the quick path to the sea. Non-belligerency with Jordan must be preserved. (Some observers fantasize that the secret plan is to "give" the West Bank back to the Jordanians, rather like one might "give" someone a scorpion in their undies. These pundits profess to admire the Hashemites, while apparently also believing they have the IQ of salt. Besides, Jordan formally foreswore its claims to the West Bank, if I recall correctly. If they try to reassert it, they are giving their Arab "brother" states an opening for mischief-making.)

Ethnic cleansing: It's not just mean! It's mean and stupid!

The other "solutions" being floated aren't solutions at all. Some people want to kill Arafat because he's proven he's either unable to stop the violence or actually behind it. Okay, Arafat is either unable to stop the violence or actually behind it. If he dies, I'll weep with the driest of eyes. And then...? There is presently no viable Palestinian leadership that is not at least hostile to Israel.

Some hawks have suggested occupying much of the Arab world and transforming the culture, on the model of postwar Japan and Germany. Here is an update: The West Bank and Gaza are already occupied. The cultural transformation still hasn't come.

Which gets back to the unilateral partition option that Tony Adragna and I, to our joint amazement, agree on with Charles Krauthammer. Here is the thing: right now the Palestinians are a scorpion in Israel's shorts. It is plain dumb to walk around like that. You set that thing down and back away.

Two Sides of the Same Paisa - The Times of India says "General Musharraf finally begins to lose." Jim Hoagland of the WashPost writes, "President Pervez Musharraf's failure to match promises with sustained action undermines Bush's campaign to make his war on terrorists a clear struggle of good vs. evil." Whether this is due to Musharraf's weakness, disgust that the aid tap never got turned on or the trade walls removed, or conviction, both articles agree that Pakistani cooperation with the US war in Afghanistan has waned. Hoagland continues:

When U.S. commanders in Afghanistan talked last week of going into Pakistan to find the al Qaeda and Taliban forces that escaped from American operations earlier this month, Pakistani spokesman Maj. Amir Uppal insisted there was no need: Pakistani forces had sealed the border so efficiently that there was "no possibility" of escapees being in Pakistan.

U.S. officials know that is a lie. They also know that Pakistan has resumed helping guerrilla groups to infiltrate into Kashmir and India in recent days, despite Musharraf's promises to Powell.

And they know that Pakistan's cooperation in the investigation of the brutal murder of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl has been far from complete. Pakistan's intelligence service had custody of Sheik Omar Saeed, the chief suspect in the case, for a week before disclosing that fact to U.S. authorities -- and probably to Musharraf.

The Times of India article notes that

After 26 weeks of willing cooperation with the United States and Britain in the war on terror, Pakistan appears finally to have lost its desire to please its Western cheerleaders and there are increasing calls for General Musharraf’s head.

In a calculated rebuff, Islamabad has refused permission to nearly 2,000 British troops and their 105 mm light guns to use Karachi as a staging post for their journey to Afghanistan.

The British troops are being deployed in Afghanistan at the specific request of the US to fight the "remnants" of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. They are to be under overall American command.

Speaking of Divergent National Interests Best [Neocon-Approved Items] of the Web has figured out a slight downside to the Administration's public commitment to a regime-changing war against Iraq:

It's also true, though, that if Baghdad unleashes weapons of mass destruction, victory could come at a steep cost to Israel. The ideal outcome surely would be to topple terror-sponsoring regimes one at a time, starting with a U.S. attack on Iraq with "moderate" Arab support. Despite public statements to the contrary, there's reason to think some such support--or at least a willingness to fall into line--exists. London's Guardian reports that "the US Air Force has begun preparations to move its Gulf headquarters from Saudi Arabia to Qatar, to bypass Saudi objections to military action against Iraq." The Army also has a substantial presence in Kuwait.

Certainly it's in Saddam's interest to widen the war quickly so as to take the heat off him. Little wonder the Iraqi regime has increased its payments to Palestinian suicide bombers' families (all the while complaining that U.N. sanctions are starving Iraqi children). Warren is right at least to fear that the war will become wider and deadlier than the U.S. would prefer. If it does so, there is no doubt the right side would prevail--but if Saddam unleashes weapons of mass destruction, victory could come at a high price to Israel.

For some time now, I've been wondering why Saddam Hussein wouldn't use any doomsday weapons or terrorist options he has available as quickly as possible - there seems to be no downside for him. The message out of Washington is that, no matter what he does, he can not save himself and his rule. So he gets no benefit from restraint. That leaves only Saddam's sheer decency as a preventive force, which is to say, leaves no preventive force at all. There is an alternative policy that does not suffer this defect. It's called deterrence, and it works.

Hey Kids! Let's Put on a Show! - Mrs. Offering continues, stubbornly, to wake up to NPR each morning, which is her right as an autonomous human female person. But today Unqualified Offerings misheard a reference to "Puccini's Madame Butterfly" as "Dick Cheney's Madame Butterfly."

And that's when it struck Unqualified Offerings: What else do these folks have to do in their undisclosed location anyway? UO can hear it now: "That's a great idea, Dick! This bombproof bunker makes a great sound stage." "And I've got some old camouflage netting we could use for curtains!"

The Other Path - Tony Adragna offers a solution to Israel's Palestinian terror problem that was first suggested by Charles Krauthammer back in August 2001. It made sense then. It makes sense now. One Leet-ull problem: The US would oppose it. Says Tony:

Too bad Sharon blew the opportunity (as Charles predicted he would). What’s even worse, though, is that Charles' other prediction – that if Sharon failed to take this course, “then the next [Israeli] government will” – may be at peril of not coming true. The peril isn’t presented by what the next Israeli government might be willing to do in its own interest, but by what the U.S. is doing right now to bring about a diplomatic solution that meets our interest.

Think my concern is unfounded? Review what happened the first time we went up against Saddam – in the interest of keeping our “Arab Allies” on board we asked Israel to stay out of a fight in which Israel was a target of belligerence.

I’m worried about the sacrifices that we’re asking Israel to make – this is going to cost Israel, and Israelis aren’t going to get anything out of it.

Uh, Tony, some of us think the US won't get anything out of it either.

There are two problems beyond the one Tony adduces: the US tacking into the Arab wind for the sake of the Administration's designs on Iraq. The Krauthammer plan means evacuating the settlements or leaving them to their own devices. I have no problem with this, but almost every Israeli government since the late 60s has. The last Israeli politician to move seriously in this direction was Yitzhak Rabin, and the extremists killed him for it. The other is Israel's economic enmeshment with Palestinians from the territories. This was Israel's other great strategic mistake, to give in to the temptation of a ready-made helot class. It has fostered a mutual loathing as great as the mutual dependence. Why do you think suicide bombers even get into shopping malls anyway? Because they ride in like all the servants and day laborers. Then, perversely, on those rare occasions when Israel has shut the gates against visits from the occupied territories, the Palestinian Authority screams bloody murder. People have jobs, dammit!

Actual separation of the kind Krauthammer and Adragna and - ahem - Unqualified Offerings advocate will be a cultural earthquake for both peoples. That might not be such a bad thing.

Note that Ariel Sharon recently opposed the unilateral partition plan. I don't find his arguments convincing.

But it's his country.

Spiked - Reader Martin Wisse writes to inform that

Spiked Online is the new project of the editor of the old LM magazine, which used to be called Living Marxism. So yes, it's a leftist magazine, but of a somewhat unusual kind, having arrived at a more ...libertarian outlook regarding some issues.

They're also not afraid to slaughter some holy cows of either right or left wing origin...

Distinctions II - I think little of the Palestinians as a political entity. I think hardly more of the Arab world as a polity. If there is such a thing as political adolescence, of the most infuriating kind, the Arab nations generally and the Palestinians specifically have been mired in it for decades. If the Palestinians had had the decency and the discipline to raise up their own Ghandi or King during the first Intifada, to pursue a campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience, they could have three or four states by now if they wanted. Instead they chose to respond to real grievances by bringing war and terror against a superior force. Mean and dumb.

But there is war and war. While following links from the Layne piece on Iraqi support for suicide bombers, I read about two distinctly different suicide bombers. Here is one:

At about 11.30pm they walked into Jerusalem's crowded Ben Yehuda pedestrian shopping mall and, in the midst of the bright lights and chatting teenagers, pulled the detonators. Nails and shrapnel, mixed in with the explosives, mutilated anyone within 20 feet of these two exploding human bombs. Eleven Israelis were killed and 37 injured. There was little of the bombers left to pick up.

And here is another:

In June this year, Ismail Masawabi, 23, drove a car packed with explosives into a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip and waited for a passing Israeli patrol. When they were within range, he flicked a switch on the dashboard and blew them and himself up. He killed three soldiers.

The first is a terrorist, and contemptible. The second, a guerilla, and not. One reason it's easy to dislike the Palestinians is that few of them seem to see the difference. That can be said of some American pundits.

Distinctions - Ken Layne's FoxNews column is devoted to Saddam Hussein's financial support for Palestinian suicide bombers. The factual case is persuasive. This isn't clutching-at-straws propaganda like the endless futile attempts to tie Iraq to the September massacres or the anthrax attacks. There is no doubt that Hussein's actions make Iraq Israel's enemy. There's no reason Israel shouldn't deal with Iraq as it thinks best. It would be wrong for the United States to try to stop it.

Israel is not the United States, though.

The theory behind Zionism was not just that, in a world of nationalisms, the Jews deserve a national homeland in their place of origin as much as any other people. (They certainly do.) Zionism always argued that an independent Jewish state was necessary as a safe haven from the haters of Jews, and the slaughterers of the Jews in diaspora. I've had more than one Jewish friend say that Israel is important to them because it means that "If things ever get bad here, I'll have a place to go."

But if Israel's survival depends on unswerving US support, or on the US destroying Israel's enemies for it, then Zionism has failed. Because then Israel is not independent at all, and the US is just one more potentially unreliable protector of Jewish lives in its control. As Israeli strategy has evolved, "if things ever get bad here," Israel is sunk. I can't help thinking that Israel made a major strategic error when it yoked itself so tightly to American protection. No one country can count on any single other country indefinitely. For the duration of the latter half of the Cold War, a tight link with the United States probably made sense. Since then, less so.

Just today, Ariel Sharon complained about the restraints imposed on him by the Bush Administration in 2001:

The prime minister told the newspaper Yediot Ahronot that President Bush asked him repeatedly in the past year not to harm Arafat physically or expel him from the region.

“My consent may have been correct at first,” Sharon told the newspaper. “But from a certain stage in the conflict, it was a mistake. I should have told them [the Americans], ‘I can’t keep that commitment.’”

Is Sharon right or was Bush right? Wrong question. Here's the operative one: Did the US perceive certain national priorities best fulfilled by Israeli restraint, and did Israel feel obliged to heed its patron? Yes. So if Sharon was right, did the US prevent Israel from taking the course most in Israel's interests? Yes, if Sharon was right. And has the US spent the last month pushing a total farce of a peace process, one the Israeli government clearly chafes at, so that the Administration can pursue its larger interest of lowering Arab objections to war against Iraq? Yes.

Contrary to William Bennett, Israel's interests and America's are not necessarily the same. A case for US blood, US treasure and US war has to be based on US interests. And Israel needs the freedom to pursue its own interests as it thinks best, whether rightly or wrongly.

Advantage: You Know - An Instapundit reader excitedly points to today's Dick Morris column, in which Morris susses out the Bush Administration's clever plan for Iraq:

But, instead of Saddam playing Bush, it will be Bush who is playing Saddam. The minute Saddam resumes his old game of telling the arms inspectors they can't visit sites without notice or barring them from certain areas, Bush will immediately issue an ultimatum to Iraq demanding that Saddam either permit unfettered inspections or face invasion.

Saddam will give in, of course, but then (after a suitable interval) again try to restrict the inspectors. But Bush will then move immediately to start military action - and, when Saddam backs down, say "too late." The war will start.

Like I said, that's today's Dick Morris column. This is Unqualified Offerings from, hm - that would be December 15, 2001:

Meantime the Administration is pushing for a reintroduction of "UN inspectors" into Iraq. Eerie Prescience Bid: the idea is likely to get the inspectors in, then claim that Saddam is not cooperating with the inspection regime, building the complaints into a casus belli.

Say it with me now, people...

Learning From History - Air Force Major "JH" sends a link to this interesting historical site, devoted to the Battle of Kontum in 1972 South Vietnam. He may have done this because he thinks Unqualified Offerings is unduly dubious of the results from Shah-i-khot - he doesn't really say. For whatever reason, it's always nice to get mail from readers. Thanks, Major.

A Famous Victory? - Interesting account of what your lit-crit types might call multi-valent versions of the battle of Shah-e-khot by Brendan O'Neill of Spiked Online. Spiked appears to be a generally left-wing site and skeptical-to-hostile not just of the wider war but of the war in Afghanistan. However, O'Neill's account is well-sourced. (And in an unrelated essay, another Spiked columnist takes environmentalist book reviewers to task for comparing Bjorn Lomborg of Skeptical Environmentalist fame to holocaust deniers. So there seems to be some intellectual probity at work in Spiked.ville.)

For a lot of reasons, some touched on in O'Neill's article, we are not going to know what really happened near Gardez for a long time, if ever. In these cases, the macro view may be the only one available. Unqualified Offerings still thinks the most significant thing about Shah-e-khot was that months after being driven from power, Taliban and al-Qaeda forces were going out of their way to get back into Afghanistan. The other thing O'Neill's piece suggests is the beginnings of friction between our troops and commanders and those of our local allies.

Writ Large - Stephen den Beste and Victor Davis Hanson want to occupy much of the Arab world - plus Iran most likely - and reconstruct its culture. This sounds like a recipe for turning the entire region from the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush into a really really big version of the West Bank. Whee. (link via the Viceroy of Araby.)

Credit Where Credit Is Due - I don't read The Corner. I get quite enough in the way of opinions congenial to the National Review crowd on my daily blog run. But something bugs me. Yes, it's a blog. A group blog. By a magazine. Okay fine. New York Press's Daily Billboard beat them by months.

REJECTED Rejected Campaign Slogans - Here are the contest offerings Eve found insufficiently qualified to include. Note that one of the Libertarian slogans is a play on a pamphlet the Party still hands out, presumably because it has extra copies.

Green Party: Vote Green! Even Though You're Probably Not Good Enough.

Democrats: You Need Us to Protect You From Your Own Worst Interests.
At Least We'll Let You Fuck Each Other.

Republicans: Trimming the Ballast on the Ship of State.
Hey! DON'T Stick It THERE!
The Republican Party: Come on. 'The Other' IS Kind of Scary.

Reform Party: We Believe Th - No We Don't! - Yes We Do! - No We Don't! - Yes We Do!
Character Counts. Just Count Our Characters!
This Slogan Temporarily Enjoined in Federal Court.

Libertarians: Vote Libertarian - Boggle Our Fucking Minds, Why Don't You.
America's Newest Third Party, Unless You Count the Ones Since.

Oscar Shmoscar - Good gravy! It looks like Unqualified Offerings darn near swept Eve Tushnet's Rejected Campaign Slogans contest! At least UO has the top spot on three of four categories (Dems, Greens, Libs) and the second spot on the fourth (the Repubs). Well, Unqualified Offerings likes to think it won, and that the, ahem, Catholic Right isn't going in for Caucus Race-style contests.

Can you make an acceptance speech in third person? "Unqualified Offerings would like to thank the little blogs..." Oh wait. It is a little blog.

And We Are Not Saved - Sure enough, The Motion Picture Academy remains the last anti-SF holdout. These half-wit popinjays may not know art, or science, or math, or anything else beyond who's in and who's out, but they know what they like, and what they like is movies that make it possible to imagine themselves as Serious People. (They are anything but.) Thus big-time Oscars for "A Beautiful Mind," which Virginia Postrel has persuasively argued is a piece of claptrap, and only technical Oscars (cinematography and work your way down from there) for "Lord of the Rings," which - ahem - Unqualified Offerings has persuasively argued is a work of genuine heft.

Unqualified Offerings reminds its readers that, as with the Grammy's, you should still not take the Academy Awards seriously. This has been a public service announcement by Unqualified Offerings.

Actual Nefarious Microsoft Action? And More... Unqualified Offerings was browsing Snopes, and right-clicked on the item about proven fluctuations in trading on 9/11-affected securities in the days before 9/11. And what does not appear when UO right-clicks? The "Open Frame In New Window" option. Hurm.

Happily, Snopes is kind enough to print a page link at the bottom of each item, including this one:

Claim: In the days just prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks, the stocks of United and American Airlines were shorted by parties unknown.
Status: True.
...
The Chicago Board Options Exchange is investigating each of these trades and at this time is declining to offer comment on its progress. The volume traded and the one-sidedness of the trades, however, make it clear that those who had knowledge of the details of the attacks (which airlines would be involved and that the World Trade Center was a target) were behind them and stood to profit mightily from them.

The item was last updated on October 3, 2001. So. How's that investigation going, guys?

Repent at Leisure Day - Sometimes something crops up that seems so intriguing that one writes about it or links to it hastily. And you know what happens when you do something in haste. Unqualified Offerings embarrassed itself by propagating "Hunt the Boeing" awhile back. Now it is time to spread the "not so fast" joy.

1) Much remarked was the story out of Britain that US troops had found a "biowar lab" near Shah-e-Kot in Afghanistan. Um, maybe not:

The only evidence of a biological weapons laboratory was the discovery last December of an abandoned, half-finished building containing medical equipment, near the Taliban's former power base of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. This had been reported previously.

The Observer has established that the source of the claims was an off-the-record briefing by Tony Blair's senior foreign policy adviser, David Manning.

A Downing Street spokesman said it 'stuck by the thrust of the story' - that it had evidence al-Qaeda was 'interested' in acquiring such weapons. But Manning had 'not actually told' reporters a cave lab had been discovered.

2) Much in the news last month was the Gallup poll of attitudes in the muslim world, showing high levels of dislike for the US and, shockingly, that most muslims don't believe muslims were behind the September massacres in New York and Washington - according to a recent Gallup poll. The reporting on which had some statistical problems:

These eye-opening results were "actually the average for the countries surveyed regardless of the size of their populations," the NCPP noted. "Kuwait, with less than 2 million Muslims, was treated the same as Indonesia, which has over 200 million Muslims."

It's as if California and South Dakota each were allocated the same number of electoral votes in presidential elections.

The problem would be particularly worrisome if there were big differences in the results across the nine countries. And there were, at least on some key questions. For example, 36 percent of those interviewed in Kuwait said the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were morally justifiable, compared to only 4 percent in Indonesia.