Ducking Out - I'm giving up blogging - until I get my site moved. If things go smoothly you won't even notice. If they don't, well . . .

Right now I expect to be blogging tomorrow sometime. But that's as may be. If I get hung up I may find time to add an Iraq-related item or two to Stand Down. To keep yourselves amused, consider . . .

Glenn Reynolds at his best in this essay from his corporate blog: Who's right about what's wrong, Walter Olson or Arianna Huffington. Or do we even have to choose?

What if it’s both? (“That’s why we have a two-party system,” is one cynical reply). And, as is often the case, the cynics are probably right.

Two substantial musings on abortion, from opposite perspectives, by longtime UO favorites Ginger Stampley and Justin Slotman.

Julian Sanchez has a meditative wrapup of the John Lott Affair. For anyone who followed the case, it's essential reading. He also has tons more great stuff - just keep scrolling.

On Stand Down, Matt Hogan deals with the famous Condolezza Rice op-ed:

I too read Condoleeza Rice's NY Times accusation "Why We Know Iraq Is Lying". It has one major problem: as an argument, it really sucks.

As the Sunday Comics reader said in the famous radio blooper, "There. That ought to hold the little bastards."

TTFN!

UPDATE: My God! I almost forgot to boom this superb Colby Cosh consideration of Richard Thompson, one of my favorite musicians. You can still get an entire Richard Thompson concert in streaming video as a soundtrack to Colby's essay.

Creation Science and Pseudo-Econ - In the latest issue of Virginia Postrel Magazine (a meme that is spreading!) is a fine article about how, as in biology, people from outside the field are turning critiques from within the field to their own unscientific purposes.

Being a Hawk Means Never Having to Say You're Surreal - James Taranto of Best [Neocon-Approved Items] of the Web writes

And while the "old Europe" is falling back into old patterns--Germany embracing a genocidal dictator, France appeasing him--America has no shortage of allies on the Continent. "The new Nato allies of eastern Europe are lining up behind Washington in offering to join a war against Iraq with or without a UN mandate," London's Guardian reports from Prague

and writes

Earlier this week ABC's Peter Jennings interviewed Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein's deputy prime minister. . . No questions about Iraq's defiance of the U.N., support of terrorists or brutalization of its own people.

in the same column!

Department of There's Good and Bad in Everyone - GOP Senator Charles Grassley, whom I recall making a real ass of himself during the Iran-Contra hearings, has joined the fight against full funding for Total Information Awareness. He's not on the "zero it out" team, but

Grassley filed a proposal in the Senate that would limit the use of funds for the program to foreign intelligence purposes. He said he wanted to "protect against abuse that could violate the privacy of our own people."

A Grassley spokeswoman said he was talking to Senate Democrats in hopes of fusing their approaches and getting a bipartisan vote on curbing the data project later this week.

From Wired News.

90% of Blogging is Showing Up - Does Paul Helgesen of the newish CenterPoint have too much free time, or inspiration and perspiration to spare? Don't answer until you see what he did to Best [Neocon-Approved Items] of the Web.

Paul is another of several bloggers kind enough to link to this site but, well, confused enough to list me among left wingers. I don't think many people would be making that mistake if we had a Democrat in the White House.

Which reminds me of the story Patrick Nielsen Hayden told on Saturday. He and Teresa participated in some kind of inaugural protest in 2000. Before we continue, I'll mention that my opinion on the 2000 mess tracks much more closely with Newsmax.com than with Patrick, Teresa and the Democratic Party faithful, but this story isn't about me. As Patrick put it

We were carrying a sign that said "WE WILL NEVER FORGET." Some onlooker accused us of holding a grudge.

Thing is, he was wearing a Confederate uniform at the time.

And speaking of Saturday, Ginger Stampley has her own ANSWER to March Madness: "Friend of Friends, Enemies of Enemies, and Just Plain Trolls." Interesting comparison with clinic defense work she took part in during the 1992 Republican Party convention in Houston included:

There were a number of Republican women who came out to defend clinics who didn’t agree with Planned Parenthood on a lot of issues, and certainly didn’t agree with some of the fringe pro-choice groups and assorted hangers-on on what was purportedly their side. There were people on “my” side in ‘92 who made me nervous. I’m glad the Republican women thought the issue was important enough to overcome their dislike of the organizers of clinic defense and some of the people on “my” side and come out to do their part.

From pro-choice to pro-life (or from pro-abortion to anti-choice if you prefer) Eve Tushnet files a march report of her own - from Wednesday's March for Life in even colder DC. She also responds to a popular canard about abortion foes as a class. (For my part, I remain pro-choice, but not because of the way pro-choicers argue.)

And while we're still "All About Eve," she formally declares herself

tentatively anti-war, because I think MAD works, and the World Hideousness Level calculation favors Saddam with nukes over US invasion. (You can assume that my reasons there are largely Healy's.) But I'm not certain of my position enough to, for example, go to last weekend's anti-war rally. I don't like this half-stance at all but it seems to be where I'm stuck right now.

Which is too bad only because we could sure use her on Stand Down. The whole thing is very much worth reading.

And just to tie all threads together, one last march sight: Just past what passed for the counter-demonstration, a lone woman holding up a sign that read

PRO-LIFE AND ANTI-WAR

God I love heterodoxy! Though Eve could probably knock off a dozen paragraphs on the lack of contradiction there without even having to crack open her Collected Chesterton.

Like I Was Saying - Trent Telenko has an
interesting item on Seymour Hersh's New Yorker report on nuclear cooperation between Pakistan and North Korea. Telenko focuses on whether Hersh has apportioned blame properly between the Bush and Clinton administrations, but I was more struck my this excerpted passage of Hersh's:

A former senior Pakistani official told me that his government's contacts with North Korea increased dramatically in 1997; the Pakistani economy had foundered, and there was "no more money" to pay for North Korean missile support, so the Pakistani government began paying for missiles by providing "some of the know-how and the specifics." Pakistan helped North Korea conduct a series of "cold tests," simulated nuclear explosions, using natural uranium, which are necessary to determine whether a nuclear device will detonate properly. Pakistan also gave the North Korean intelligence service advice on "how to fly under the radar," as the former official put it--that is, how to hide nuclear research from American satellites and U.S. and South Korean intelligence agents.

and this one

An American intelligence official I spoke with called Pakistan's behavior the "worst nightmare" of the international arms-control community: a Third World country becoming an instrument of proliferation. "The West's primary control of nuclear proliferation was based on technology denial and diplomacy," the official said. "Our fear was, first, that a Third World country would develop nuclear weapons indigenously; and, second, that it would then provide the technology to other countries. This is profound. It changes the world." Pakistan's nuclear program flourished in the nineteen-eighties, at a time when its military and intelligence forces were working closely with the United States to repel the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The official said, "The transfer of enrichment technology by Pakistan is a direct outgrowth of the failure of the United States to deal with the Pakistani program when we could have done so. We've lost control."

which is to say, the nuclear genie is well and truly out of its cliched little bottle. It's also an illustration of some of the criticisms I made of the viability of nonproliferation last week. To pull a Paglia, I wrote

Nonproliferation is slowly failing. North Korea has won already, and other countries will win too. Why? Because the entire international community simply is not going to follow a course of nonproliferation in concerted cooperation. The "international community" is more fictitious than most "communities" that get invoked in domestic politics. Just as the United States is not, pace what you hear when the Democrats hold their conventions, "like a family," the nations of the world are not a meaningful community - or, if that offend thee, say rather that that community only extends so far. It's never going to be in every nation's interest to keep a given country from getting the bomb.

There's another illustration in the news. If you view, as the hawks do, the drive for conquering Iraq as militant nonproliferation in action, then the current behavior of France and Germany at the UN can also be seen as highlighting differential interests even among the nuclear haves (France, in this case). You can like it or not - and I don't like putting American security questions in the hands of other countries - but whether we like it or not is not the point. France is playing the game by the rules we ourselves wrote up (the UN charter) according to its view of What's Good for France. Germany has no veto, but its ruling party knows why it won the last election.

It's all very well to say "This proves France and Germany are no longer our allies." Hey, Washington warned us that those entangling alliances weren't going to last forever. But once you've established that, then what? (Both are hinting broadly that the US may convince them to withdraw cooperation against Al Qaeda too. It's a self-indulgence to bring it up, but I warned people about this almost a year ago.)

I don't like the idea of France making our decisions for us and I'd have had us out of the UN years ago. (How come nobody asked me?) But you couldn't ask for a clearer warning that the present aggressive course has the potential to unite a substantial, diverse opposition. It is already doing so.

Welcome Back - Yes, another database crash this morning as a kind of parting gift. I should have the site on a new host this weekend and all this will be a thing of the past (moving from Windows to Unix and Berkeley DB to mySQL).

We now return you to your regularly scheduled miscellaneous stuff.

One, Two, Three, Many - Chad Orzel calculates the fermi numbers on the count of people visible at the end of the march route. He shows his work on his blog. He comes up with roughly 25,000 who made it to the end of the march, which is in line with a 30,000 figure the police offered.

The question then becomes how many additional people showed up at the Mall but didn't march, or didn't march all the way or were around the bend at the terminus where I couldn't see them. I officially have no idea.

Letting the Air Out - Nice post from Jane Galt explaining the difference between good deflation and bad deflation.

Sanity Scores an Marginal Victory - From the Washington Post:

A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of New York children that claimed McDonald's food caused them to suffer health problems including diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity.

"If consumers know (or reasonably should know) the potential ill health effects of eating at McDonald's, they cannot blame McDonald's if they, nonetheless, choose to satiate their appetite with a surfeit of supersized McDonald's products," U.S. District Court Judge Robert Sweet said in a 65-page ruling.

Hey, case dismissed, right? What's "marginal" about that? Here's my problem:

It took the judge 65 pages? In a sane legal culture, a single sheet with the word PL-EASE! in 144-point type would suffice. And clowns on stilts would dribble the plaintiffs' lawyers out of the courthouse.

(Link via Franklin Harris.)

I Want an Opinion That Looks Like America - Matt Welch finally writes about the, you know, war. I suspect his opinions and uncertainties accord more with the bulk of the country than do the opinions of we partisans (of whatever view). Worth reading.

Meanwhile, speaking of Ken Layne, he writes

Iraq: A few people want a war, a few people don't, and the rest of us ... ah, who knows? How about we give the job to Israel? If Saddam strikes anybody with anything, Israel gets to smash Baghdad. It's a solution everybody won't like!

Which is startlingly close to the month's-old Offering Plan.

Worth Listening To - Ken Layne tells Salon what they should be doing. It seems for the most part like excellent advice. The only quibble I have, and it's an uninformed one, is that Layne seems to advise shutting down all the interactive parts, especially the fora (The Well and Table Talk). It seems to me that fora draw traffic, though.

But they could sure do worse. Highlight:

Finally, go to Apple or Sun or whatever Bay Area tech company and say, "We want $2.5 million a year. You're the sole sponsor." Then fire four of the remaining six business people.

(Link via Colby Cosh.)

Poetry Wednesday - I've been thinking about Salam, who appears to be having a rough time.

The Man He Killed

"Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!

"But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him and he at me,
And killed him in his place.

"I shot him dead because –
Because he was my foe,
Just so – my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although

"He thought he'd 'list perhaps,
Off-hand like – just as I –
Was out of work – had sold his traps –
No other reason why.

"Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown."

- Thomas Hardy, 1902

John Lott Vindicated - I'll have more on this tomorrow, but James Lindgren has found a witness substantiating Lott's claim to have conducted a survey on defensive gun use in 1997. Lindgren interviewed this person at length and finds him credible. Julian Sanchez has some details here. (He uh, also has another item.) Lindgren says he'll be revising his report from "agnostic" to "more positive."

It's worth noting that among the several e-mails I've received from John Lott in the last week, some as part of group mailings, was one from yesterday, stating, "Lindgren¹s role in this process seems to be that of a prosecutor." So as recently as a day ago, Lott considered Lindgren to be no ally. I bring this up because some lefties and gunphobes are likely to dismiss Lindgren's corroboration on the grounds that Lindgren "got" Bellisiles, proving his bias. But having read Lindgren's evolving report on the "More Guns, Less Crime" issue, I get the impression of a dedicated scholar willing to follow the truth where it leads.

Now there remains some real doubt that Lott's sample sizes in either the 1997 or 2002 surveys are big enough to be meaningful. (Julian has an item on that too. His blog is like Teresa Nielsen Hayden's backpack.)

The argument, which makes sense to me, is that he questions enough people for his percentage figure for overall defensive gun uses to be meaningful. Rather than break a prepublication embargo with the real figures, let's use illustrative fakes. Say you surveyed 4000 people and 20 of them said they'd used a firearm in self-defense. And lets say 3 of those twenty said they actually killed their attacker dead with their gun. You'd be justified in saying that, nationally, one half of one percent of all Americans had used guns in self-defense - 20/4000. (This assumes your sample has been properly randomized etc.) You would not be justified in saying that "nationally, only 15 percent of those using firearms in self-defense kill their attackers" - 3/20. Because for this latter claim your sample size is now 20, not 4000, and the law of large numbers no longer applies.

That said, the serious charge at issue was fraud. In light of Lindgren's continued work, there is no reason to suspect that John Lott lied about conducting a survey on defensive gun use in 1997. Until someone comes up with solid evidence the other way, I consider the matter closed. I continue to believe that the "more guns, less crime" theory is largely correct (the English experience is suggestive), and that it is reasonable to expect that nonlethal defensive uses of firearms greatly outnumber lethal defensive uses.

Mutant March Mail - sometimes combined.

Jonathan Hendry writes:

Ya know, I kinda get the impression the judge in the [X-Men action figure] case was of the opinion that it was a stupid law, maybe that a favorable judgement for Marvel might mean cheaper toys for kids (and their overspent parents). So she came up with a judgement that let Marvel get out of the higher-price tariff.

Okay, the cheaper-toys-for-kids thing is unlikely. I'm just trying to imagine this bemused judge getting this case. It'd actually be kind of a fun respite from the dullness of everyday cases. The opportunity to creatively arrange a decision that allows an endrun around a silly law would be extra fun.

What really scares me is the reaction of the comic fans who feel betrayed. Dolts! Cheaper stuff! Courtroom arguments don't qualify as continuity breaches!

PS: I wonder if Tacitus thinks our troops in Central Asia are demonstrating an agreement with the policies of Uzbekistan by using a facility arranged for by that
government.

Matt Hogan writes

ANSWER = Act Now to Stop War and End Racism.

That's all they advertised on their posters. I support all that. Enough said.

If their fine print is commie-dom, I won't sign the fine print. Does it mean I am a Christian if I joined a civil rights march organized by MLK's Southern Christian Leadership Conference? Was every atheist, agnostic, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist co-marcher selling out? If a pro-war left-liberal counterdemonstrated with the Free Republic types, does that make them into libertarians? Are the pro-war Iraqi dissidents who joined the Freepers now neocons or neolibs by default?

PS -- It was sharp to notice 1956 (my undergraduate thesis) as the US birth as interventionists in ME. Technically untrue a bit but mostly dead-on. Actually that was a culmnation of a lesser known queit US-UK confrontational rivalry in Near East.

I've read stuff that suggests Matt is right about this last. The US put deliberate effort into elbowing Britain out of its position as dominant Western power in the Arab world. I can't say that looks like a shrewd move from here.

Eric Mauro finds "more good commies" from the World War II era, meaning Commies, loyal Stalinists and/or Maoists mostly, whom the US worked with against the Germans:

You forgot the French, Italian, Hungarian etc resistance movements, which
were very commie. Also Kim Il Sung, he was resistance. Also Ho Chi Minh?
Now I'm in ANSWER...

Ho actually got a fair amount of support from the US OSS. (Note: by longstanding rule, it is not permitted to write "OSS" without immediately following up with "forerunner to the CIA.") Sadly, those French bastards ruined it all for us. DeGaulle threatened to wreck NATO if we didn't back his effort to hold Indochina. I am making an effort to be nicer (see later in this item), but this is yet another example of the complete lack of gratitude that intervention buys one. That's not an argument for not fighting Germany, but it does mean that sane planners will expect no lasting thanks when contemplating interventions.

Bruce Baugh writes:

The late theologian Francis Schaeffer wrote a lot of hooey, but he also wrote some wise and insightful passages which have stayed with me through all my personal twists and turns. One of these is the notion of "co-belligerents". He wrote that there are one's allies, with whom one shares genuine long-term commitments and priorities, but that there are people you end up working with on specific projects beyond that. He might disagree greatly with, say, liberal Jewish writer Nat Hentoff, but they could end up cooperating on some fronts - their mutual opposition to abortion, for instance, and their mutual concern with freedom of religious practice. Schaeffer introduced to me the idea that it is not just acceptable but actively desirable to be able to cooperate with people very much like unlike yourself, when you share a sense of what's wrong and what would make it righter. They don't become your bosom buddies, but you fight together on this task. Hence "co-belligerents".

Peter Caress addresses a different topic, the Offering Plan for mideast peace:

This reminded me of a columnist who wrote, "I have always quite liked the slogan 'a democratic, secular state of Palestine'. Territorially the thing would look quite elegant, a proper blade-shaped sliver running from Lebanon to Eilat.... And everybody living together: Arab, Jew and Christian. Just as in the (mostly) tolerant days of the Ottoman Empire, except with voting and without an official state religion." To which blogger Damian Penny replied, "And while we're dreaming, I'd like a Mazda Miata. In British racing green. With alligator seat covers and a solid gold gearshift knob. Oh, yeah, it has to have the ability to fly."

I'm all for ending the settlements - in fact, I think it's shameful for the US to be giving aid to Israel while Israel pours settlers into the Occupied Territories. But articles like this lead me to believe that no Palestinian leader could possibly formally relinquish the right of return. I also have little enthusiasm for financial compensation to Palestinian refugees, mostly because I don't think it will do much to close out the issue, but also because I balk a little at shelling out for Arab refugees over 50 years after the 1948 war when Arab states have never offered a penny of compensation to the Jewish refugees they dispossessed after Israel's creation. Coddling the Palestinians' belief that they are the only ones who have suffered doesn't do much to advance peace.

I don't think any serious proposal for financial compensation to the individual Arabs dispossessed in 1948 has ever been made. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong, please.) Peter may well be right that Arafat, at least could never renounce the right of return. But the expulsion of Jewish citizens by Arab governments after the founding of Israel strikes me as a red herring. Yes it happened. Yes it was wrong. (And yes, Israel wanted as many Jews as it could get, for demographic reasons, and still does.) But the last thing the Middle East needs is to mire itself in more collectivist resentment than it already has. Israel's greatest diplomatic successes have come by picking up peace partners one by one as the moment was ripe. IF a money-for-claims deal could be worked out with the Palestinians, it wouldn't make sense for Israel for it to insist on lumping everything into one big indigestible grievance ball.

As I said months ago, Israel has about four options regarding the Palestinians:

1. Expulsion.
2. Extermination.
3. Separation.
4. More of the same.

Your more rabid Likudnik bloggers (or maybe we should call them Kach bloggers) have been hinting or outright urging 1 for months, and a few of them even walk up to the edge of excusing option 2. Diana Moon recently explained why these options are impossible and wrong. That leaves 3 and 4. Four sucks. If a compensation deal will get to 3, a compensation deal should be done.

A British libertarian notes recent efforts at protest coalitions in that country, both the Privacy International and the recent Countryside March. About this latter:

The Countryside Alliance march in September last year, which included a number of libertarians because of protests against bans on hunting. However, many marchers were folk demanding continued government subsidies for farming, planning controls on building development, and other Statist stuff which a free marketeer like me opposes. Does that mean the libertarians on the march were hypocrits or useful idiots? Nope. We hoped once again to spread libertarian ideas at the event. Okay this may be naive but what other alternative do we have?

Maybe the same thing could happen with your involvement in the anti-war campaign. I must say that quite a lot of the folk photographed at the march had some eccentric and offensive views, but surely quite a few are against war for rational reasons. Mind you, it strikes me as depressing that the anti-war case requires dim-bulbs like the ANSWER group to organise a march.

We did run into a nice group of Libertarian activists handing out literature Saturday. (They were hanging with Leonard of Unruled for awhile, or vice verse.) Meanwhile, the next big marches will be sponsored by United for Peace.

Gary Utter writes

I've been reading your blog for quite a while now, to get the antiwar perspective. At one time you seemed to be a reasonable and intelligent human being. Of late, that has changed. As war appears more and more likely, you have become more and more of a reflexive hater.

Where once you would present well thought out reasons to oppose war, you now present sneering critiques of anyone who thinks war is a better step than letting things continue as they are. Useless, and boring.

Additionally, you seem to think these A.N.S.W.E.R creeps are acceptable allies. Apparently, as your infection with the rabies virus progresses, it impairs your judgement.

I'm sure you could not care less if I read your blog, but if your goal is to do more than just win backslaps from your fellow travellers, you are failing.

You have devolved from a persuasive advocate to a braying ass.

See ya.

My initial assumption was that Gary might have something of a double standard, insisting on one level of decorum for doves and a rather more lax standard for hawks. (The genre of "Fisking" is nothing but sneering as quasiliterary sport.) One notion I reject utterly is the one that many hawks seem to hold, which is that doves are obliged to argue their points in a manner acceptable to hawks and hawks are obliged to argue their points in a manner acceptable to . . . hawks.

However, in a follow-up exchange, Gary wrote that I was in danger of turning into another Misha the Rottweiler, so clearly Gary isn't cutting the hawks any slack either. (As I replied to Gary, "You really know how to hurt a guy.")

I made an overly rude reference to Megan McArdle yesterday, and I regret that. (I was rude about Tacitus too and I'm trying to regret it!) Hell, I stopped reading Andrew Sullivan months ago for reasons similar to Gary's complaints about me. I think there's sneering enough to go around, and hawkish sneering pisses me off. I don't see "nice" hawks spending much effort to distance themselves from the nasty ones, and that gets annoying too. I suppose you could say that "an imperialist metacontext drives me absolutely batshit," to coin a phrase. Also, from my perspective, most of the arguments have already been made on both sides (Gary disagrees with me on this), so during this period of phony war our most readily available pastime is getting on each other's nerves.

Still, it bears thinking about. No promises if the kinder, gentler me will take, or be worth reading though.

UPDATE: Mixed up options 1 and 2 in the sentence about Likudnik bloggers originally. Fixed now.

A Fanboy's Notes: ISO "Adult Themes" - Robert Frost famously wrote, "The woods are lovely, dark and deep." Why? One reason is that darkness and depth are not the same things. While they may coincide, one does not guarantee the other. But try telling many comic book authors this.

I bring this up because I bought and read the first issue of Vertigo's BAST miniseries last week. Bast, the cat-goddess of the Egyptians, was a recurring character in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, and gets her own three-issue story now.

Now stop me if you've heard this one before: two teens with repressive parents become the worldly focus of the supernatural forces. He's the child of born-agains. She's the daughter of a drunken slob who blames her for the loss of their mother. (Dad kills even a kitten.) They're the butt of abuse from thoroughly rotten schoolmates who also torture cats. There's a teen suicide at the end when one tries to escape.

It's all so numbingly familiar, like the author (Caitlin R. Kiernan) had a list in front of her - "Ingredients for Sure-Fire Comic Book Seriousness," drawn up in the late 1980s and never revised - and crossed each item off as she worked it in to the story. It's a shame too, since there's some genuinely good writing in the book, particularly the scenes between the two teenagers in their secret refuge. I don't know what else Kiernan may have done, but she has the capacity to write well. But her story is as much a prisoner of comic book conventions as any superhero story with the villain just back from the dead.

Recommended Reading - Child pornography and the law, by Avedon Carol:

I'm forced to rely on sources from other countries to tell me how much actual child porn is really on the 'net, because there is no legal way for me to do primary research. So I can never give first-person accounts on a matter I'm a relative expert on; I can only report what others have said. I'm certain that the police have made highly misleading statements on the subject; I just can't prove it. Many activists and journalists simply take the cops' word for it and state it as fact. I can't, because a lot of it makes no sense. (A few years ago the cops were claiming that there were warehouses full of child porn up and down the country, but that they had no powers to investigate. Leaving aside the fact that there really wasn't any reason to believe such warehouses existed in the first place, there is no question that if the police had any evidence that they exist, they have had all the power they need to investigate since 1976 when the original child porn laws were passed.)

There's lots more, as she dissects coverage of the Pete Townshend incident in the British press.

Caught in the Middle - Interesting story about ordinary Kurds along the Iraq-Turkey border trying to make a living. From the Saint Petersburg Times. The locals fear war but, if it's going to come, they'd rather get it over with.

The Man Who Sprang Bin Laden is said to be Abdallah Tabarak, aka Abu Omar, according to this interesting Washington Post story:

A Moroccan who was one of bin Laden's longtime bodyguards took possession of the al Qaeda leader's satellite phone on the assumption that U.S. intelligence agencies were monitoring it to get a fix on their position, said the officials, who have interviewed the bodyguard, Abdallah Tabarak.

Tabarak moved away from bin Laden and his entourage as they fled; he continued to use the phone in an effort to divert the Americans and allow bin Laden to escape. Tabarak was captured at Tora Bora in possession of the phone, officials said.

"He agreed to be captured or die," a Moroccan official said of Tabarak. "That's the level of his fanaticism for bin Laden. It wasn't a lot of time, but it was enough. There is a saying: 'Where there is a frog, the serpent is not far away.' "

Tabarak now resides at Guantanamo Bay, where he has attained the status of prisoner poobah:

Tabarak's authority there "comes from his proximity to bin Laden, because of the confidence Osama bin Laden had in him," said a Moroccan intelligence officer, noting that the former bodyguard outranks other senior prisoners including former leading officials in the Taliban administration. "He has charisma, and all the combatants at Guantanamo are deferential to him."

Tabarak, also known as Abu Omar, is respected even more because he helped bin Laden escape, the official said. The ploy involving the satellite phone is widely known and celebrated among the prisoners at the military prison, now called Camp Delta.

Tabarak seems to have a bit of a false modesty problem, though:

Tabarak's dedication to his cause has continued at Guantanamo Bay, where he has steadfastly refused to cooperate with the U.S. interrogators, insisting as he did at the time of his capture that he is a textile trader who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

That would be a wrong place, wrong time thing, wouldn't it, being caught with Osama Bin Laden's satellite phone in a war zone heading the opposite direction.

The Moroccans say they'd love a chance to talk to Abdallah in Morocco:

"We could play on our common culture, our religion and use his family," said an official involved in the interrogation of al Qaeda prisoners.

Th-th-th-that's All, Folks - Come back tomorrow and we'll talk about other things. A John Lott windup, most likely, plus whatever else.

Happy Martin Luther King Day - My earliest political memory is from third grade, just after the assassination. A kid I didn't like saying, at lunchtime, "I don't blame that white guy for killing him." This was in north central Pennsylvania for those of you tracking geography. I think there might have been a black person between the West Branch of the Susquehanna and the New York state line at some point or other, maybe when the Lewisburg High football team came up to play the Montoursville Warriors, but I'm damned if I ever saw one. But I already knew that that was a deeply, deeply creepy and wrong thing to say, and I was secretly glad to have my dislike of this kid to be confirmed.

But that's not actually praise for Martin Luther King or even my little eight-year-old self. That's praise for my mother, who reared me right. Because of her, I can not get the N-word past my lips, even when speaking clinically. King's genius was to realize that people like my mother - a lifelong Republican, by the way - could be reached. I admire that. But most of all I admire his courage. And I'm grateful for it.

Ironic ANSWER Redux - Last call, honest, and only because we're way past Godwin's Law violations now anyway.

For the vast majority of the current hawks, the worst imaginable sin of political thought is questioning the wisdom of US entry into World War II. So you figure they look kindly on all those agitating for war in the late thirties and early forties. But there's the rub: except for not-quite two years between late summer 1939 and early summer 1941, the big pro-war movements of the late thirties and the second half of 1941 were heavily involved with real Stalinists, the kind that actually had Stalin around. Much of this effort was Communist-led.

Well, it's tricky, this political stuff.

Last Words - Those twin sappers of writerly energy, boredom and annoyance, are swiftly setting in when it comes to the warblogger-driven tempest about marching in ANSWER-organized events (see this GlennReynolds.com item for representative links), but I have a few things to toss out on the way:

Evidently we go on, as we always have. From day to day. At this moment we work against Operation Dandelion. Later on, at another moment, we work to defeat the police. But we cannot do it all at once; it is a sequence. An unfolding process. We can only control the end by making a choice at each step.

Philip K. Dick, THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE

Those are the thoughts of the Abwehr man, Wegener, back in Germany in a car with Heydrich's men. In concert with the Waffen SS and the people around Heydrich, Wegener figures he can prevent a nuclear first strike against the Japanese home islands. But it means working with Heydrich and the Waffen SS, squalid, squalid people.

I bring this up for a few reasons: firstly because the people who started this have long since violated Godwin's Law in some comment thread or other, so I'm entitled. Second because Dick gets right to it: the need to weigh evils. I believe that an American conquest of Iraq would be nothing less than a disaster for my country in the medium to long term and even, possibly, in the short. There is nothing ANSWER can realistically do to the country that would be as bad. That's why it's fatuous to say, as Tacitus did, that you mustn't work with any group unless you are willing to see their entire vision carried out. (Is that true for the Northern Alliance, I wonder? The Kosovo Liberation Army?) This "principle" would make political coalitions impossible.

Now I am perfectly well aware that Dick's principle cuts both ways, and that the hawks can argue that the half truths, lies and bad faith of the government during the last twelve years of war with Iraq have been in the name of averting a greater evil. That's why I try not to attack the morals and character of the hawks unless responding in kind. This despite

General Nizar al-Khazraji, prominent Iraqi opposition figure, praised by the US government as having "the right ingredients" for leadership. Chief claim to fame? Field commander at Halabja in 1988. (Gassing the Kurds, remember?)

Max Boot, who regretted that so few US troops died in Afghanistan because more blood would be good for our character, and who wrote a book celebrating our various shitty little police actions in Latin America and elsewhere, holding them up as a praiseworthy example of how the country should act in the future.

Michael Ledeen, whose famous doctrine holds that "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business," and who is constantly being favorably, even adoringly, cited by hawkish writers.

Larry Kudlow, who urged President Bush to conquer Iraq for the sake of the stock market.

Those are some pretty loathsome people to have on one's side. But there's a big difference between them and ANSWER: the hawk monstrosities are much better positioned to influence US policy than ANSWER is.

I got bored and annoyed when the Clinton Administration and its allies responded to demands for the truth about Waco and Ruby Ridge by saying, "Well, the Aryan Nations and Tim McVeigh don't like it either, so you're on the side of the racists." I get bored and annoyed when NRO types claim that those of us who support gay marriage are on the side of NAMBLA, and when liberals say that those of us who oppose affirmative action are working for David Duke. And I'm bored and annoyed now.

Thank heavens for Diana Moon, who is less interested in grandstanding than making serious points. Hers is the one j'accuse worth reading. Diana is as always a vigorous writer, so one encounters phrases like "slithers away" and "morally squalid," but she troubles to develop an argument and it merits response.

First, she classes government actions and positions separately from the actions and positions of advocacy groups, on the principle that advocacy groups have more freedom of action. Then:

There is no comparison between the policies of the government of an advanced industrial democracy and the mandate of an advocacy group. This is not thinking: it's wild and desperate attitudinizing, a substitute for thought.

To go to a demonstration organized by ANSWER is to give them legitmacy. To lend legitmacy to an organization is to create an association between you, the individual who makes moral choices, and them, the organization that stands for certain things. You, the moral actor, have consented to take part in a demonstration, a sacred public constitutionally protected activity that they have organized. The association is clear, public and can't be erased.

She continues:

The only morally acceptable answer to Tacitus' charge is to say that you accept the association between you and ANSWER because you think that demonstrating against a US-led invasion of Iraq overrides any reservations you have about ANSWER'S politics.

I actually agree with her here, which is the whole point of that Dick quote above, and for that matter the point of Dick's entire novel and for that matter the whole point of what I said yesterday about "inept and inefficient Stalinists." If you take the product of the downside of the coming war for the United States and its likelihood of happening it is larger than the product of ANSWER's repulsive desires and their chances of bringing them about. My disagreements are twain:

1) I figure any decent person who participates in an ANSWER protest has already made that calculation if he is aware of ANSWER's views, even if he doesn't make a point of telling me about it.

2) I don't imagine that this person owes an explanation to the likes of Tacitus and Megan McArdle.

(pace Diana, Justin Raimondo's response of "Go fuck yourself, Tacitus," is all the response that was owed. Those of us who went beyond that were in Bonus Time.)

Now to the serious philosophical issue. Diana's schema seems to me to be incomplete. As a heterodox conservative, she's going to excuse classes of government action that I, as a libertarian, will not. Perry De Havilland has suggested that what makes a libertarian is the belief that no special rights inhere in Society and the State that don't inhere in individuals. But I see where Diana is coming from. And I see her distinction between the moral positions of the advocacy group and the government. But she seems to be leaving out an essential corner of her moral diagram.

She discusses the moral position of the government, the moral position of the advocacy group and the moral position of the individual choosing to support an advocacy group. But she's silent on the moral position of the individual choosing to support governments, particularly governments in their capacity as doers of what Diana calls "crazy things." Do those people get a pass?

For many years, the US government supported Pol Pot's claim to Cambodia's seat at the UN. A better illustration of moral squalor would be hard to come by. How would we describe individuals who supported this government policy? If General Kazraji ends up running Iraq, how shall we judge the hawks who supported the war that put him there? For my part, I can't accept a moral system that would hold the opponents of government misfeasance to a higher standard of purity than its supporters. The odds favor the House already.

(Sadly, Diana's mother is ill, so she probably won't be returning to the subject any time soon. Please think good thoughts for the two of them.)

Mutie Scum Are Not Human - This is your official wacky humor link of the day. And yet . . . there's something a little unsettling about it:

Judge Judith Barzilay huddled late last year with a telepathic professor and a cast of mutants to ponder an age-old question: What does it mean to be human?

In her chambers at the U.S. Court of International Trade, in New York, the judge examined Prof. X and the rest of his band of X-Men, all of them little plastic figures at the heart of a six-year tariff battle between their owner, Marvel Enterprises Inc., and the U.S. Customs Service.

Her ruling thundered through the world of Marvel Comics fans. The famed X-Men, those fighters of prejudice sworn to protect a world that hates and fears them, are not human, she decreed Jan. 3. Nor are many of the villains who do battle with Spiderman and the Fantastic Four. They're all "nonhuman creatures," concluded Judge Barzilay.

Mind you, says the libertarian, with true free trade this never would have come up. There wouldn't be a separate tariff rate for dolls and toys and no need to sue. (Go ahead, Liberal Readers! Explain how a benevolent federal government increases the common good by taxing imported dolls more than imported toys.) Still, the Judge creeps me out.

(via Boing Boing via Jesse Walker.)

The Scales Fall - I was pretty set in my view of this ANSWER stuff, but thanks to this item I now see the error of my ways.

Who Knew? - Turns out James Lileks has written novels. That means I have to revise my answer: it's not either/or.

That's It! - Somewhere in this endless comment thread, Tacitus wonders, incredulously, if I'm saying that "It's okay to march at a Stalinist-sponsored event so long as they're inefficient and inept Stalinists?"

Actually, that's exactly what I'm saying.

Ironic ANSWER - ANSWER are unpleasant whackbrains whom no sane person would want to attain genuine political power in this or any other country. Among hawks this weekend there have been many claims that anyone who attended this weekend's marches are sullied by the ANSWER association. After all, if the march is a success, then doesn't ANSWER get the credit, and aren't they Slobo-loving Juche enthusiasts who cheer the Butchers of Beijing? Answers: Not exactly, and Yes.

Yes they are Slobo-loving Juche enthusiasts who cheer the Butchers of Beijing. But as for that "credit," there's a huge irony at work.

A big complaint of the hawks has been that the mainstream press has been downplaying ANSWER's unsavory aspects. But the extent to which the press is giving ANSWER a free ride on Slobo and Kim Jong-Il is also the extent to which ANSWER is failing to get their whole (tedious and annoying) message out. This Post article has it right:

A.N.S.W.E.R., the most radical of the networks mobilized against an attack on Iraq, has been able to reach more moderate groups by sticking to a singular message -- that the United States has not made the case for a unilateral war on Iraq -- and spreading it through the Internet.

When ANSWER hides their full program (or the press hides it for them), ANSWER buries their full program. ANSWER's stances on Korea and China and Yugoslavia don't matter because most marchers aren't looking to ANSWER for guidance on those issues. Many marchers won't even know that ANSWER has positions on those issues. Hell, most marchers aren't looking to ANSWER for guidance on Iraq. They oppose the conquest of Iraq for reasons of their own - some good, some bad - and there's a march to go to, and they go.

You Can't Tell the Players . . . - Matt Hogan of Stand Down has speculated together that the much-maligned Paul Wolfowitz is actually the best of the neocon hawks. Mind you, he has plenty to answer for, having written the blueprint for US hegemony that this administration has been following. But he's also the one who alluded to the suffering of the Palestinians at the pro-Israel rally in Washington last spring (and got booed for it). And now he's making noises about the settlements, according to Ha'aretz. (They seem to be picking up a lot of their material from the David Ignatius column I mentioned Friday.):

In an interview in the Washington Post on Friday, Wolfowitz said, "Our stake in pushing for a Palestinian state will grow" after the war, and he noted that he preferred "concrete steps, like dealing with the settlements" over the advancing of diplomatic issues as part of a "process."

Wolfowitz is the most senior Jewish member of the political and defense branches of the current U.S. administration. He is considered to be the architect behind the current closing in on Iraq, a clear supporter of Israel, and a leading member of the Jewish right in Washington, which includes Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith, and the National Security Council adviser on the Middle East, Elliot Abrams.

Ha'aretz reports that the sentiment may be spreading:

However, reports have reached Jerusalem about comments on the settlements made by Elliot Abrams, who is the administration figure for preparations for "the day after." Abrams, known for his sharp criticism of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat, has asked, "What do they [the Israelis] want with these settlements?"

That part's easy, actually. The settlements were always intended to make it politically impossible for Israel to give up the West Bank and the Gaza strip.

The problem is that pressing the Israelis to make peace is still Imperium - ideally it would be Israel's business whether holding onto the territories is worth the consequences. However, because Israel depends on US support, Israel's territory decisions also have major consequences for us too. Ideally, a US-brokered agreement between Israel and the Palestinians would enable us to finally get free of the middle east tar baby we so eagerly grasped in 1956. (And isn't that one that, in retrospect, we'd like to have back? We wrecked a functioning Israeli-British-French alliance, resulting, in later years, in an Israel wholly dependent on the US and a Europe and Israel increasingly estranged from each other. In return for warping Israeli and US security policy, the gratitude of the Arab and Third Worlds generally did not, you may have noticed, manifest itself.) Israel would end the settlements, the Palestinians would give up the right of return and the US would spring for financial compensation for Palestinians dispossessed during Israel's founding (what the Fifth Amendment would term a "taking"). What a wonderful world that would be.

A serious criticism that might be lodged is that I want the US to duck out on its "responsibilities." Okay, got me. At the same time, I don't think peace can be successfully imposed from without. I think it only comes when both the warring parties themselves want it more than they wanted whatever they went to war for. And in the meantime, Wolfowitz' confreres will have us in Iraq and maybe "six or seven other countries."

March Madness - More march reports from James Landrith, who marched with veterans groups, and Bob Morris, with a left perspective on the San Francisco march.

Meanwhile war-skeptic Will Wilkinson calls foul on the various DC signs invoking Martin Luther King, since "I have no idea what the man would have thought of our present situation, and I doubt others are in a much better position."

Imitation Diet Blog Post - 199 pounds this morning, just one lower than last week's reading and, truth be told, within the range of uncertainty of our crummy bathroom scale. Waist still 39". Temporary slowdown? Exchange of fat for muscle as exercise program continues? Last night's fajitas? Who knows. But I expect the needle to keep moving as I ramp up the exercise routine. I added in ab exercises last week, I'm now doing bilateral dumbbells instead of one at a time, I've begun work on the five flights of stairs at the office in hopes of helping my unfortunate knees and I've worked in some running intervals with the walks. I figure I'm now past the point where walking counts as training. That means I've gone from being in awful shape to being in bad shape! Such are the athletic triumphs of my life. This week: more panaerobics!

Reading Around - eRiposte has a long article arguing that the recent INS roundups of American muslims, and talk of internment, are counterproductive.

Diana Moon, back at her old address, argues that an Israeli "transfer" of the Palestinians would be impossible, worse than useless if not impossible, and bad for American Jews because it would lead to an antisemitic backlash. It goes without saying that if such a thing comes to pass, those of us who oppose US intervention and many of Israel's policies will have a duty to fight any renewed American antisemitism with the vigor we currently bring to protesting the war and the government's "anti-terror" measures.

Bo Cowgill is shocked, shocked to find that the leaders of South Korea act on their own perceptions of South Korean interests rather than reliably following the US line.

Micah Holmquist excuses what we might call the moderate antiwar faction from the fray. Like Max Sawicky and I, Micah has long argued both that "There's no evidence Iraq wants weapons of mass destruction" is a poor argument against war, and that "Iraq wants weapons of mass destruction" is a poor argument for it. Mainstream Democratic Party critics who have based their case on the insufficiencies of the Bush Administration while accepting its premises (existence of weapons = casus belli) are likely to face a point where they either have to give in to the Administration or change their arguments in mid-stream. That won't make them worse than the hawks, who have readily shuffled through arguments for war over the last year, but it won't make them look better, either. Anti-"unilateralism" was never a solid foundation for the case for peace.

And your Talking Dog reports that Amram Mitzna's campaign is going the way of George McGovern's. Bummer. I liked Mitzna.

You Make the Call - Is James Lileks stupid or lazy in this rant against John LeCarre? I haven't got much use for LeCarre's politics myself, which are fairly conventional British Labour variety. (Albeit the wing of the Labour Party that did not sell out to the Soviets during the Cold War.) On many matters my views are surely closer to Lileks than to LeCarre. But gawd, how asinine is this part?

I’m pretty sure Stephen King is skeptical about the war, for example. I know his politics. But he hasn’t made the leap so common to others in the scribbling, warbling and gesturing arts - he doesn’t think we’re all dying to hear his prescriptions for Middle East foreign policy. Oh, interview him on the matter and he might pop off, but I can’t imagine him sitting down, firing up a Winston Light, and telling himself that this 1200 word essay will change the world, because people will think: hey, it’s Stephen KING talking! He wrote “The Stand,” and his fictional account of the repercussions of biological weapons programs gives him a unique perspective. Let’s lend an ear!

Has Lileks actually read John LeCarre's books? Is he aware of the concept of political novelist? Does he know that LeCarre has been writing political nonfiction for years? Has it occurred to Lileks that LeCarre is at least as well-qualified as James Lileks to write opinion pieces, or that LeCarre, whose connections and appetite for research are legendary, may have vastly more of what the average reader would consider to be qualifications to write about international politics than Lileks? (Or me, for that matter?) Has Lileks ever crouched beneath a jeep in Cambodia during a firefight as LeCarre once did? Does Lileks have even the faintest evidence that LeCarre thinks we'll care what he has to say because of his name alone - rather than the default likelihood that he's a writer, and writers write and then try to publish what they write?

In other words, is Lileks ignorant of a whole batch of knowledge, specific to LeCarre and general to literature and journalism itself, that would disqualify him from having an informed opinion on the matter? Or is he just reaching for any stick that comes to hand with which to beat his target, however flimsy and warped from true that stick might be?

Imagine that James Lileks wrote some novels. Would that mean he was no longer qualified to opine about politics? Should readers say to themselves, Wow. James Lileks calls his daughter cute pet names. I'll bet he has marvelous insights into war and peace and what John LeCarre should be writing? For that matter, mightn't some of that research into biological weapons give Stephen King a certain valid insight into some questions, if he chose to opine on them?

Me, I'm voting for lazy. And you can trust me on this, because I refer to my kids by cute pet names too.

The Bondsman's Lash - Lynxx Pherrett says I'm at least partially wrong about human trafficking in Bosnia, but he says much more. This impressive and lengthy item is practically your one-stop shopping point for information on chattel slavery worldwide.

Department of This Really Sucks Post - Once-great singer Carlene Carter, Nick Lowe's ex-wife and Johnny Cash's stepdaughter, has compounded her legal troubles. First a heroin bust in the summer of 2001, now two counts of identity theft. ("She stole a dead man's identity to obtain prescription drugs.")

Dammit, when Offering Boy was riding with me to day care in Virginia a few years ago, we had a Carlene Carter tape that we played every day, singing along so loudly they could hear us in other cars. Human fallibility, the music industry and the war on drugs sure suck.