Atrios:

Josh Marshall on those who Sully the debate. He's right of course - Bush did submit to his critics, domestic and international, and it's ridiculous to pretend otherwise. That doesn't mean he's given in to a caricature of his critics being swatted around which has them being against war in Iraq under any circumstances. There are those people, of course, but they aren't the ones who are really a part of this public debate. And, sure, some people really don't think we should be going to war might be using the U.N./inspections issue as a cover. But, on the whole, most critics, from Kissinger on one end to Ritter on the other, have said we need to involve the international community, we need to push for inspections, and when all else fails perhaps war is necessary.

To paint a picture of Bush snookering his critics requires making the point that Bush himself is being dishonest - that war will happen regardless, and the rest is just show. That might be true, but it isn't exactly an impressive portrait.

Yet another reason why the guy's blog is practically my homepage nowadays.

Ok, the more time goes on the more it looks like everybody is trying to find an "out" to this international impasse over Iraq. One step in that was taken today by Saudi Arabia, which said in today'sNYTimes that:

The Saudi foreign minister indicated this weekend that his country would let the United States use its military bases in a United Nations-backed attack on Iraq, a sign that Arab nations may be dropping their resistance to an attack on Saddam Hussein.

The Saudi minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, said that if there was a Security Council resolution backing military action, all United Nations members would have to honor it. In a CNN interview from New York, first broadcast late Saturday, the prince was asked if the Saudis would make bases available to the Americans, and answered that if the United Nations warranted action, "everybody is obliged to follow through."

Prince Saud said he remained opposed in principle to the use of military force or a unilateral attack by the United States, but his remarks seemed to indicate an important shift in Saudi Arabia's posture.

There's a couple of related things here that I'd like to tease out.

First, of course, is who's saying this. The House of Saud has a bad rep in the U.S. nowadays and is obviously anxious to repair it before they're targeted themselves, but they can't look like they're just throwing over to the U.S. or they'll be seen as Bush's lapdogs by most of the Middle East. The "U.N. resolution" angle provides a perfect opportunity to them- they can look helpful to the U.S. while at the same time showing their commitment to the international system, to the U.N., to multilateralism and to the concept of "an Arab say in what's going on".

Second is the question of who's going to take credit for this thing. Some (usually neo-cons and wingers) are already saying that the international warming towards the U.S. that followed the Bush speech is due to his brilliant oration and "if you don't do what we say, you're irrelevant" posturing. To an extent this might be correct, but I think some credit is also due the critics of the unilateralism. Whether or not he was really reaching out to the body, Bush definitely gave a nod towards the importance of international action that he wasn't about to a few months ago. Even if the administration should get some credit for having rethought its position, the reality is that said rethinking is due to the critics that have already come forward. Frankly, as long as this thing end without Baghdad as rubble and Iraq littered with corpses, then I don't care who takes the credit.

Third is the question of what happens next. It would appear that Iraq is willing to let inspectors in, and that means both good things and bad things for multiple sides. It isn't surprising that they've relented; thanks to the U.S. finally getting on board with the U.N. (or vice versa), Iraq is finding itself without much in the way of support, and there never really was much support for the notion of an inspection-free Iraq in the first place, just the importance of respecting national sovereignty. If a successful inspection regime is implemented, then the Bushistas will try to take the credit and may even succeed... but there will be precious little reason to go to war with Iraq, and all the related strategic goals that would be aided by American control of Iraq will disappear. Indeed, an Iraq without WMDs is an Iraq without sanctions, and an Iraq without sanctions is an Iraq that is free to eventually rebuild itself into a regional power using conventional armaments. (Perhaps this rebuilding need not happen right away... Iraq might first rebuild its economy and then only later actually rearm when the region becomes somewhat more stable.. when the "heat dies down", so to speak.) If Saddam were wise, he would submit to the inspections now without any trouble at all and bide his time, as it would cement his presence, develop some "good will" on the part of several regimes, allow Russia to trade with Iraq without American intransigence, keep his regime intact, and frustrate American designs upon Iraq.

Of course, while Saddam isn't mad, I have severe doubts that he could be characterized as "wise".

Found over at Nick Denton's site, This:

Bush, on this day, a year ago: "We will make no distinction between those who committed these acts and those who harbor them." Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia: they should be captured, killed or deposed by now.

and this:

Al-Shibh was caught in Karachi, which adds to evidence that the Pakistani city is now Al Qaeda's main center.

Other than the "huh?" factor in naming Abdullah (didn't the Saudis kicking out Osama and Al Qaeda start this whole damned thing?) an interesting question has arisen. To wit, why the hell are we invading and "regime changing" Iraq (however long that takes) because they might have nukes sometime in the future...

...when Pakistan is well-armed, on a hair trigger with India, and is harboring Al Qaeda, the guys who this war was originally supposed to be against?

(Well, actually, it's because Iraq is "unfinished business" for the Bush family, but it's always nice to show just how oblique it is to the war on terror itself.)

Found on Patio Pundit, a comment by one Steve Smith:

I
Shall
Liquidate
All
Men

Sometimes, no comments are needed.

I don't know what's funnier... the fact that David Kreitman actually wrotethis about Oliver Willis:

Don't bother taking time to Fisk my commentary. You have a lot of football observations to make, and taking time to focus on matters of geopolitical consequence would detract from that. So call what I say spew and get back to dissecting the latest news of who threw a ball filled with air to who, and who caught it and who fumbled it. Critical stuff.

...after Oliver and Atrios tore him a new orifice over the stupid "Arabs luv Democrats" bit? The fact that he got completely bitten in the ass over the Florida med student debacle, when he posted this:

as I write this, certain adherents of the Most Peaceful Religion of Love and Happiness are being detained in South Florida where today they clearly intended to wreck death and devastation

...and never bothered to retract this vicious libel? The spectacle of an incoherent defense of invasion like this?

The fact of the matter is that there is nowhere to go in protecting the United States and the Western world from the Islamic menace if you decide there is nowhere else to go, invade, and reconfigure. Once you take a stand against moving against Iraq you cut off the military and dare I say "imperial" solution to the problem, and America becomes a pathetic, helpless bystander in Her own future and fate.

Or is it, really, the sorry sight of Instapundit actually linking to this?

Yeah, I was thinking the latter, too.

Wow.

Makes you wonder what Machiavelli (he of the "either this happens, or that happens" fame) could have done with modern flowcharting software.

If only there were some way of getting the percentage chances in there...

Another great Q&A on Hesiod's site about Saddam's deterrability.

Dammit, I feel superfluous. Maybe I should start blogging about video games or something.

Good piece by Kofi Annan in this month's Foreign Policy. It's part of a series that attempts to answer the question "what, exactly, is the international community?" Annan is actually fairly expansive about the whole thing:

What makes a community? What binds it together? For some it is faith. For others it is the defense of an idea, such as democracy. Some communities are homogeneous, others multicultural. Some are as small as schools and villages, others as large as continents. Today, of course, more and more communities are virtual, as people, even in the remotest locations on earth, discover and promote their shared values through the latest communications and information technologies.

But what binds us into an international community? In the broadest sense, there is a shared vision of a better world for all people as set out, for example, in the founding charter of the United Nations. There is a sense of common vulnerability in the face of global warming and the threat posed by the spread of weapons of mass destruction. There is the framework of international law, treaties, and human rights conventions. There is equally a sense of shared opportunity, which is why we build common markets and joint institutions such as the United Nations. Together, we are stronger.

Well put, and the article is a refreshing reminder of the necessity of an international community, especially in this current environment of nascent American colonialism and a sea of "there's no such thing as international law" self-serving wankery.

Atrios linked to an article in the Sunday Herald that shows that "regime change" in Iraq and what amounts to occupation of the Middle East had been a goal of most of the members of the nascent Bush administration long before it had gained power. Atrios pointed out that this wasn't exactly a new revelation, but I think he missed the point laid out by quotations like this :

The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein

I believe this pretty much cements the geopolitical aspect of invading Iraq as the key reason the U.S. is going to war. The WMD argument has more holes than Sonny Corleone's car, but that doesn't actually make any real difference, because it's never been the true reason for invading Iraq and installing a friendly regime. Human Rights isn't even on the radar. It's been about something much larger: "maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests".

(They said it, I didn't. Maybe the loony Left has a point?)

Some of the aspects of this goal are pretty damned disturbing. The Herald notes that the document:

-describes peace-keeping missions as 'demanding American political leadership rather than that of the United Nations'

(Explains a lot about the spectacle of George Bush lecturing the U.N. about its responsibilities and role, doesn't it?)

-reveals worries in the administration that Europe could rival the US

I think anybody who's actually paying attention has thought about this, which is why some people have been writing about the growing split between the regions and some more nationalistic Americans have been taking rather a lot of potshots at Europe lately.

-says 'even should Saddam pass from the scene' bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently -- despite domestic opposition in the Gulf regimes to the stationing of US troops -- as 'Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has'

Somewhat outdated, obviously; American interests in Iran would probably be best served by staying on the down-low so as not to throttle a made-in-Iran democratization movement. Then again, I wonder whether subtlety and patience is a lost art in foreign policy nowadays, but that's a topic for another day. As for the U.S. permanently stationing personnel in the region, well... all that rhetoric about Muslims (especially Arab Muslims) being hopelessly backwards, ignorant, and murderous has to go somewhere, doesn't it?

-spotlights China for 'regime change' saying 'it is time to increase the presence of American forces in southeast Asia'. This, it says, may lead to 'American and allied power providing the spur to the process of democratisation in China'

Um.

Ummm...

This can't be serious. No, really, I know that Perle and Wolfowitz and the like have a rosy view of the power and place of American military might, but there's no way they can be stupid enough to actually try "regime change" in China, could they? I can't even begin to list all the ways that could go horribly wrong, and not a damned thing I've seen this administration do over the past two years has demonstrated that they have the skill or ability to manage something like this without having it blow up in their faces, despite the desperate and duplicious spinning on the part of those who either want the administration to look good or fear the prospect of the administration looking bad.

-calls for the creation of 'US Space Forces', to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent 'enemies' using the internet against the US

Ah, so that explains the Warbloggers. I was wondering.

hints that, despite threatening war against Iraq for developing weapons of mass destruction, the US may consider developing biological weapons -- which the nation has banned -- in decades to come. It says: 'New methods of attack -- electronic, 'non-lethal', biological -- will be more widely available ... combat likely will take place in new dimensions, in space, cyberspace, and perhaps the world of microbes ... advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool'

First off, anybody get MGS flashbacks from reading this? Second, while unsurpising, this is still rather disturbing, unless one is of the charmingly naive opinion that no U.S. government would ever dream of using these bugs for immoral or unethical purposes and no organization that would use them for such purposes would ever get ahold of these kinds of germs.

If nothing else, think of what would happen were some racist group to get some sort of bug that attacked other races. Shiver.

-pinpoints North Korea, Libya, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes and says their existence justifies the creation of a 'world-wide command-and-control system'.

Well, again, no surprises here, and I've just gotta say I love that term "world-wide command-and-control system". Sun never sets, hmm?

There's no doubt that there are other, saner influences on the Bush administration, and the people who wrote that might not be the same people who are running the show nowadays. Still, it's important to remember that no matter how far-out the accusation, it just might have some sort of basis in fact, which is why we can't quite dismiss the "loony left" so quickly. That, and the already-obvious insight that human rights and weapons of mass destruction (come to think of it, didn't the right coin that term in the first place?) have precious little to do with an invasion of Iraq. It's all part of a larger gameplan, a gameplan that existed long before the war on Terrorism and in actuality doesn't really have that much to do with it. They just dovetail rather nicely.

Also found on InstaPundit:

PAUL WRIGHT says that the antiwar movement is suffering from the generational imperialism of baby boomers mired in Vietnam-era thinking:

The old revolutionaries need to keep an image in mind before they put their hand up: Eisenhower. No-one could fault his ability at war, his patriotism or his intellect. So outflank him call him outdated, out of touch, a relic. But consider: his war was only 25 years out of date when JFK ordered the troops into Vietnam. Your war is older than that, and much more obsolete.

Actually, it was closer to 15 years -- but that only makes Wright's point stronger.

*COUGHGASPSPUTTERHACK*

Pardon me. I was choking on my own rage. Obsolete? OBSOLETE? I'm sorry, is there some sort of half-life for history that somebody neglected to tell me? Are we supposed to simply ignore the experiences and wisdom of our predecessors if they happened to live before a certain arbitrary (and obviously constantly-changing) date? Are we supposed to discard one war in favour of another because the other one is more recent?

(Then again, that'd make perfect sense considering the number of bloggers who seem to think the only relevant part of history started in-or-around 1936, judging by all the dreadfully myopic WWII citations that pass for historical reference most of the time.)

Well damn; better throw out every piece of knowledge gained before the current generation (regardless of whether or not it's relevant to the current situation). Throw out Aristotle, Socrates, and Cicero. Throw out Herodotes, Thucydides, Hobbes, and Machiavelli. Throw out Franklin, Paine, Locke and Mill. Throw out all the painful lessons learned from the mistakes of colonialism, and the even more painful lessons learned from WWI. (Well, it's pretty obvious that that's already been done, but for the sake of argument...) Throw out pretty much everything. If it hasn't been done already.

Update: just read Wright's blog entry (which was unavailable when I first read this.) By and large it's simply identification of the ideals of the left with the worst of the beneficiaries of those ideals, despite the clear and obvious fact that nobody on the left actually liked the Taliban or Osama before the war began, and I doubt they're big fans of Saddam as well. They just know better than to believe self-serving justifications by those who wouldn't even pay lip service to the principles they use for justification were it not in their interest. They also understand that you can't discard principles that serve a universal purpose when it makes it more difficult to deal with those whom they dislike.

(He also pulls out that ridiculous "you won't accept any argument or justification" strawman, which is not only abundantly silly but neatly misses the point that there may be justifiable conflicts, just not this one.)

Apparently he also thinks that technology renders history obsolete, at least according to his point-by-point rundown of how warfare is ever-so-much more professional and technical now than it was back "in the old days", so the old complaints don't apply. I would suggest that Vietnam is the war that is most applicable to that assumption, not the least. This ain't the first time we've thought this way. Hopefully it won't bite us in the ass again, like it did before.

Elsewhere, he also demonstrates profound ignorance with this little bit:

A moment to consider the word "coalition". There is no lower limit to how many make up a coalition, provided it is more than one. It can be two, or two hundred. Currently, the US has the backing of Australia and the UK, as well as a few others. Now this is, by any definition, a coalition. Is there an accepted lower number before the glorious Peace Crusade accepts that there is "international support"? Is there an accepted number at which point the US can declare "we have a coalition"?

There is a body of little thought that maintains the UN owns the rights to the Seal of Good Warmaking. But which part of the UN? Keep in mind that the question of Iraq has never been put to the General Assembly, so there has not been the required two thirds majority vote. The extant Resolution was passed by the Security Council, which is 15 nations, and they all don't all have to vote. When it comes down to tin tacks, the five Permanent Members run the show. All they need is their own vote, and three others to get a vote up. Is this the lowest number required?

I'm not really sure, but it's unlikely the First Gulf War had anything like unanimous approval. It might just have been an oversight, not getting the green light from Malawi, or failing to acquire the proper approvals from Monaco. Is the 1991 coalition the benchmark for future wars? No-one gets to invade anyone without the approval of the USSR. Oops. Or the Security Council, except that many of the nations that were on the Council then have rotated off.

Quite the accomplishment: he showed that he hasn't the faintest clue what multilateralism is, what the point of it is, what the "coalition" term stands for in this context, what the U.N. charter says, what the U.N. does, what the role of the Security Council is, what the role of the General Assembly is, where the point of conflict is right now, what happened during the first Gulf War, or, well, anything.

Enough. Waste of time, really, as is this entire line of argument, whether it's coming from N.Z. Bear or Paul Wright. Yes, there are situations where it would be acceptable to invade Iraq. Yes, there are situations where the left would agree that it would be acceptable. Yes, the left wants the right to be bloody well honest about the whole thing, and not try to hijack left issues like women's rights, poverty relief, or democratization when it's been patently obvious that the right didn't give a damn about those issues before they had a war to justify. (Human rights is a justification, not a reason- stop trying to pretend otherwise, it doesn't wash). Yes, if these things happened and the right actually presented its case honestly then the left might actually agree that the case is valid.

But...

No, there isn't enough evidence right now to convince anyone who wasn't convinced right off the bat sight-unseen. No, there isn't any reason why the left should buy the right's arguments. No, the U.N. shouldn't be rendered irrelevant, so that any conflict that the U.S. doesn't deign to get involved in turns into a brutal conflagration (like Rwanda.) No, national sovereignty isn't something that can be tossed aside by the U.S., because if they do so everybody else will, and that ain't a pretty situation. No, the left isn't going to only pay attention to the human rights abuses that the right is using to trumpet U.S. interventionalism when it's ignoring the human rights abuses that accompany that same policy, at least when the U.S. (and its most fervent supporters) are trying to portray itself as superior not only to loathesome little toads like Saddam but to the rest of the free world.

I don't know what's sadder; the weak-ass generalizations on the part of the left's "critics", or the fact that otherwise sensible people buy it.

Rather odd piece by the N.Z. Bear today, which claims, apparently, that the Associated Press selectively chose anti-war protesters of above-average lucidity and a pro-war speaker of below-average lucidity.

So, everybody who believes that every single anti-war protester was as articulate and polite as those quoted above, and that the only individual that this reporter could possibly find on the opposing side to quote was somebody "screaming" insults at the protesters, raise your hand.

Personally, what I wonder is why on earth N.Z. Bear seems to think that this sort of thing benefits the left. It's been practically a truism among those who actually *listen* to the anti-globalization movement that reporters will make a point of portraying everybody involved as stereotypical commies, loons, or simply dumb kids, regardless of whether or not they actually fit any of those stereotypes. That movement has been pretty much synonymous with the left for nearly a decade, and I don't recall the AP being a shining example of sympathy towards said movement. If the AP is biased towards the left, they do a damned poor job of it.

Besides, as Hesiod ably pointed out in his comments section, N.Z. Bear has no idea whether or not the AP piece was inaccurate. He simply assumes as much based on the quotations and the use of the word "heckler"(?), which is hardly conclusive evidence. There seems to be a lot of this going around by right-wing bloggers lately, and even Instapundit has commented on it:

N.Z. BEAR points out bias in an Associate Press story on antiwar protests by Angela Watercutter...Brian Carnell isn't very happy with UPI, either. And nobody likes Reuters. Hmm. I'm beginning to sense a more general problem. . . .

Indeed, IP, there's a problem. It's what appears to be an oversupply of incredibly sensitive and presumptive "media critics".

Funny bit from N.Z. Bear, but I think he kind of misses the point when he says:

I am frustrated, because it is beginning to feel like (some) opponents of taking action against Iraq will not be satisfied by any argument, or any evidence, that action is indeed necessary.

The problem isn't that they won't be satisfied by any concievable evidence, but that such evidence might simply not exist because action isn't necessary. That's kind of the achilles heel of that "debate is needed" point... a real debate has more than one conclusion, and most pro-invasion types aren't willing to seriously entertain the notion that those that they disagree with might be right. They'll listen, of course, and they'll nod their heads sagely, but there's no force on earth that could actually convince them. And N.Z. Bear also misses the important distinction that someone might "support action, just not this action" for entirely legitimate reasons... no "illusion" involved.

I have just one thing to say about this whole messy business:

Whoever said that what a person blogs about has to reflect whether they're "fun" or not to any real degree? I mean, fer christ's sake, I might be a candy raver, Zizka might be a fixture in any given mosh pit,Henry Hanks might kill 'em during open mike night at the local comedy hole, and Tom Tomorrow might spend every waking minute having interesting sex with a variety of partners of varying genders and species...

...but that doesn't mean we're going to blog about it.

And for the record, acknowledging that Welch and Layne aren't lefties doesn't make us fun-killers. It means we don't like having the opinions of those we fundamentally disagree with counted as our own. Considering that 90% of what passes for ethical debate nowadays is usually the right calling the left names because of what a few of them say and repeating that "the only sensible lefties" are people that (like Layne and Welch) who happen to agree with them, it's kind of a sticking point.

Now I'm going back to the chill room to play with my glowsticks until the drugs kick in.

Edit: Two words:

Jon Stewart.

Zizka has a different take on the Bush speech:

All this is to the good -- viewed in a vacuum. Some of it is just a fig leaf, though. It is clear that the UN is being given an ultimatum: "Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant? ...But the purposes of the United States should not be doubted. The Security Council resolutions will be enforced -- the just demands of peace and security will be met -- or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power." In other words, we will go to war with or without the UN, and if the UN fails to rubber-stamp our plans, it goes wherever the League of Nations went. And the demand for inspections and other improvements ("in days or weeks rather than months", in a different statement) seems pretty clearly to be a pretext. Regime change is what we're after.

I have earlier offered three readings of the Iraq-invasion controversy. First, that Bush and the Cheney-Wolfowitz-Perle cabal had lost the confidence of the conservative establishment; second, that the raving plans for WWIII filtering out of the administration were red herrings meant to make the administration's real eventual policy look moderate; and third, that the timing of the debate was calculated to divert attention from Enron, Harken, Social Security privatization, and a dozen other Republican domestic problems. None of these interpretations can be ruled out at this point. If the old conservative establishment really has nudged Wolfowitz and Perle out of the picture, we can only be happy (or at least relieved), but we should also remember that the fact that we have been forced to choose between our enemies means that we remain irrelevant to American foreign policy.

Yet more proof that the confusion of "understand" and "agree with" is pernicious as hell:

One of our values is that certain things are unforgivable. Some acts can never be justified or tolerated, and it is wrong to even attempt to justify them or even consider their motivation, let alone to act to remove the grievances of those who committed such unforgivable acts.

Many acts may be unforgivable, but to use that as an excuse for ignorance... feh. How can one understand why an act is evil if one refuses to comprehend all the facets of it, including motive?

Then again, when someone says "All those who grieve for our dead but... share no important values with us", they will obviously brook no disagreement, no matter how (Iraq) valid (squelching of speech) the questions (unilateralism) can be (Homeland security). What's worse, exactly.. perceived sympathy with killers, or using the deaths of their victims as an excuse to shame others into cowed silence?

And why should anybody have to make that choice?

I liked this comment I found over at Maxspeak:

OK, Rufus, this is a point worthy of debate. Does having the "loony left" as allies cost the "non-loony left" more than it gains them in the big picture?

I would argue that it doesn't. At least not when you factor in the cost of differentiating themselves from the loony left. And I actually think the reason you cite, because it gives your opponents an easy target to pin on you, is the only reason. I disagree with all sorts of people; I don't feel compelled to point that out every time I make a point on which I agree with these same people. I just don't get the compulsion to do so. It's like a nervous tic.

First of all, if Noam Chomsky did not exist, the right would invent him. They would find some other guy and distort HIS words into that same distortion of Chomsky's that they pin on Chomsky. (What about the right's distortions of Chomsky - sure he gives them legitimate targets to attack but they NEVER stop there.)

That is to say, as long as the right controls the discourse, the left has to learn to live with the bullshit. There's no easy way out and spending all your time differentiating yourselves from the loonies buys you nothing. Worse yet, it looks like craven begging. There's nothing more distasteful than a liberal pulling a punch just to avoid soundling like Chomsky.

I've brought this up a few times in the blogosphere recently but no one seems to get it's relevance - a picture is worth 1000 words - wish I still had a copy! In this case it's an old Fred Wright cartoon of cops billyclubbing pickets carrying signs reading "anti-communist union", with the police saying "we don't care what kind of Communist you are."

Secondly, I hate to say it, but what has the non-loony left accomplished lately, in say, the fight to prevent war in the Middle East? Seems to me the Democrats have been hoping to confine the campaign to domestic issues but the Republicans won't let them get away with that. In my opinion they HAVE TO talk about it and come up with a real policy.

The Republicans are the ones we need to differentiate from. The rest is a waste of time. Frankly, I'd lay off of you guys if you showed more of the former, as opposed to the latter.

No matter how nice a moderate liberal plays, he's never going to win winger friends by bashing leftists. They'll just smile, and nod, and either wait for you to join them completely (like Kaus) or tar you as a member of the "loony left" the nanosecond you diverge from them.

Good Q&A by Hesiod today on the concept of Iraq being deterrable. Here's one example:

6.Do you not believe that even the threat of nuclear retaliation is not a great deterrent to Saddam Hussein? If the answer is yes then how do you explain his deliberate attacks against the homeland of a nuclear capable state (Israel)?

Yes. I believe the threat of nuclear retaliation IS a great deterrent to Saddam Hussein. The reason he attacked Israel without fear was because he knew that his attacks were only conventional. Had he hit Israel with, say, a nuclear weapon, he'd be dead now.

The Gulf war example proves my point, and refutes yours. He was deterred in that war. We have uncontrovertable proof that he's deterrable. Tested under actual war conditions. No wargame in a neocon think tank could ever simulate that.

By all means, go read it for yourselves- it nicely summarizes why Saddam is deterrable.

As for the Bush speech, I tend to agree with Josh Marshall's interpretation... Powell seems to have had some influence, and it would appear that the Bush administration isn't quite ready to give up multilateralism entirely, no matter how much the Pax Americana crowd are panting for it. The big questions now are...

...whether Bush will wait for the Security Council to act (which is likely, as he would torpedo his credibility if he called them to action and then ignored them),

...whether the Security Council will act (which is also likely),

...whether that action will include the authorization of military force to ensure that the Iraqi government plays ball (somewhat less likely, but the U.S. is going to be set on it and most of the major players won't object as it would call their own actions into question),

...whether Iraq lets the inspectors in (as of yesterday, the answer appears to be "yes", at least according to this statement by one Iraqi ambassador (it's the Indian one, which means he's probably lower on the totem pole but he's also less likely to be playing silly games than, say, the American one),

...whether the U.S. is willing to settle for disarmament and give up "regime change", and that's the biggest and most important question of all for pretty much everybody involved. It's also the hardest to answer, because it pits the WMD argument against all those geo-strategic "let's take over Iraq for our own gain" goals, and those latter goals simply can't survive without the WMD question to shield them from internal and foreign criticism.

Personally, I don't really have any objections to a U.N. sponsored inspection regime backed by force; it reinforces the necessity of international consensus, checks attempts by the American right to construct a hegemony of convenience, and ensures that the dangerous doctrine of preemptive warfare that could lead to open warfare across half the globe is nipped in the bud. I don't know whether the neo-cons would accept it, though, as their holy war would be nipped in the bud as well. They'd have to go back to the real war on terrorism, and that ain't going so well.

What bothers me about the florida debacle isn't that it was utterly predictable, but that it will no doubt happen again. Ad nauseum.

Truth stranger than fiction? Nope.It's the same damned thing.

A robber basically took a scam from Neil Gaiman's American Gods where a fake security guard set up a fake deposit strongbox and made off with thousands. Then he did it real life. And it worked.

Neil Gaiman's reaction: (Scroll down to Wednesday's blog)

And the strangest thing that happened today is that I got an e-mail from a Winnipeg reporter, wanting to interview me: currently, the Winnipeg police are reading American Gods, after a fake security guard with a fake night-deposit box got away with $40,000.

Of course, he could have got it from http://www.snopes.com/business/bank/guard.htm. Or he could have got it from Chuck Whitlock's Scam School, or one of the other books on scams it's mentioned in... but I suppose he may well have got the idea from me.

(Strange: I fogged the details of the credit card scam in American Gods because they were too easy to pull off, but I detailed that one because it seemed unlikely to the point of impossibility that anyone would read it in the novel and then try to pull it off.)

Not quite as weird as that 9-1-1 lottery thing, but pretty damned close.

Atrios spoke wisdom today.I can't improve on it, so I'll just quote it:

One year later, I would ask that the forgotten victims of 9/11 be remembered. Their names and stories were not printed in the New York Times and they have received barely any mention as a group let alone as individuals.

I am speaking of the civilian casualties, the "collateral damage," in Afghanistan.

One need not feel that the war in Afghanistan has been unjust or inappropriate, or that our military was callous or indscriminate in its choice of targets, or to "Blame America," to think that these indirect victims of the events of 9/11 deserve some consideration. Their deaths were a direct result of the events of 9/11, and the blame can be placed on those who planned and implemented the mass murder on that day.

The fact that some civilian casualties are an inevitable consequence of almost any military action does not make the deaths less tragic. Nor does my mentioning them imply that I am elevating the importance of their deaths above those Americans and non-Americans who died on 9/11. They are, however, also victims of 9/11, even if their deaths came later and their stories are not often told here.

Today is the first anniversary of the beginning of the war between Al Qaeda and the United States, a war that, no, the United States didn't start. While I have grave misgivings about some ways that the war is prosecuted and the necessity of an only dimly related conflict between Iraq and the United States, it is nevertheless true that Al Qaeda attacked the United States, and the United States is entirely justified in the pursuit of that conflict.

Yes, Al Qaeda had reasons for doing what they did beyond simple envy and evil. Their hatred of the House of Saud, their loathing of the presence of the Infidel in the Holy Land, their hunger for theocratic purity born in the fire of a war between a theocratic vision of Islam and the secular West: all can be understood quite easily even by the westerners that they have declared war against. Even so, none of these reasons justify the attack on innocent civilians, whether strategically, tactically, morally, or by any other standards. The legitimate grievances of some parts of the world (even the middle east) against the foreign policy of the United States don't enter into this either; Al Qaeda isn't about the Palestinians (and vice versa), about the perceived exploitation and subjugation of the third world, about the problems of capitalism, or about any other such supposed political economic failing of the United States. They never were. Nor would any such grievance justify the attack on New York even if they were at the root of the whole thing- nobody could ever bring down global capitalism and American hegemony by destroying World Trade Centre. Or, for that matter, the Pentagon. It would be, and was, a gesture made even more monstrous by its uselessness.

So all I can possibly offer today is one word: Remember. Remember who did this, and why, and what they wanted. Remember the organization that was actually responsible, not just the tool they used. Remember the reasons they actually had, not the reasons that others give them. Remember why they thought this act would further those reasons, and how wrong, counterproductive, and self-defeating their reasons and their act were both pragmatically and morally. Remember the war they seek, and why it is so vital not to give it to them. Remember who the United States is really at war with, and who they are not.

Remember Osama Bin Laden.

Remember Al Qaeda.

Remember.

The International Sentinel, the site that Carla Passino wrote the preceding commentary, actually includes an interesting entry from "Mooraq" about European and American differences:

As somebody who is daily in contact with people from every latitude, I believe a lot of this is due to the stereotypes that still guide most of our reciprocal dealings. Ask most Europeans and you will be told that all Americans are obese, uneducated and overly armed brutes bent not so much on world domination, but on covering the globe with asphalt and McDonald's drive-t(h)roughs. Ask most Americans and you will be told that Europeans are foppish imbecilles that would currently all speak German or Russian if not for the US intervention and that should give daily prayer to the US for teaching democracy to the world.

Needless to say, both views are wrong, but it is surprising how our perceptions are still shaped by these stereotypes. Take Saddam: Europeans see Bush as the sheriff shooting from the hip and asking questions later. Americans in turn see Europe as an anti-semitic continent bent on pampering Arab terrorist.

I am afraid we need some effort from both sides to improve understanding and go beyond the easy stereotypes. We have to remember that our divergences are still trivial compared to the values and the culture of democracy we share. Enemies of both would like nothing better than see us bitterly divided.

Well put.

found on Calpundit:

Glenn Reynolds links to a post by Carla Passino, who has the same complaint as Sullivan, except this time it's the Post that's too liberal and she's comparing their coverage to the Times of London. Among other things, Passino complains that while the Times says Iraq could produce a nuclear weapon if it acquires fissile material, the Post says it could produce a weapon but only if it acquires fissile material. "Two more words, an entirely different meaning," she says.

Calpundit called it "medieval scholasticism at its worst"... I just call it meaningless warhawk blather. "If" and "but only if", in these cases, mean exactly the same thing, and if anything the latter better reflects the IISS opinion, which is that Saddam does not have fissile material, won't be able to develop it without years and extensive foreign help, and it's unlikely (but possible) that he might get it from outside sources.

In other words, he doesn't have nukes and isn't likely to get them anytime soon. He wants them, sure, but I'm reminded of a saying involving beggars, wishes, and horses.

The best part is that the post in question ends with "don't you just love journalism?" Not as much, Carla, as I love "media analysis".

Every time I think this administration couldn't sink any lower...

I'll just quote:

President Bush Monday told world leaders it will be the responsibility of the whole international community, rather than the United States, to determine what kind of regime should replace Iraqi President Saddam Hussein if his government is toppled by U.S. military action, European diplomats told United Press International.

During a call to the current head of the European Union, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Bush made it clear he felt "not his responsibility to define" who or what would replace the Iraqi president, according to one diplomat

Bush "expressed the view that any alternative is preferable" to Saddam, added the diplomat.

So, we've got an administration that's willing to make the mess (for what appears to be extraordinarily dubious reasons), yet not willing to clean it up. We've also got a profound example of hypocrisy in the Bush administration claiming the importance of international input in the regime that follows Saddam, but not in the removal of the regime that exists in the first place. That's ludicrous- "regime change" is more than just busting a cap in the leaders that you don't like then letting everybody else clean up the bloody mess.

Perhaps Bush is trying to throw a bone to internationalists, but I don't that they're going to interpret it that way- it just means that the U.S. government isn't even willing to deal with the consequences of its actions. (As if the neglect of Afghanistan and Kosovo now that a new sandbox has presented itself wasn't proof enough.) If anything, this is more irresponsible than what was proposed before, because at least it demonstrated some responsibility on the part of those who were planning to arrogate the decision of which governments live and which will die.

The U.N. does not exist to clean up the messes left behind by U.S. foreign policy, Mr. President. Internationalist or unilateralist... pick one and stick with it.

Avedon makes a great point here, worth repeating:

The primaries, of course, are another matter. There, you do your best to figure out who really is the best person for the job and make every effort you can to get that person the nomination. Even school board elections are important (remember Spiro Agnew?); at the lowest, local levels you have the most power. Seats really have been won by only one vote, so people who moan about the nominees in the GE frequently have only themselves to blame. If you think about all those people who voted for Nader in 2000, imagine what they could have accomplished if they'd put their efforts toward getting progressive Democrats onto the ballots and working for them throughout the campaign. To win, candidates need more than just people who will vote for them in November; they need people who will work for them long before the general election. One reason progressive candidates have been doing so badly in the Democratic Party is that so many progressive activists have abdicated in favor of spoiler politics or even just staying home. (As I keep reminding people, Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 with fewer votes than George McGovern received when he lost to Nixon.)

Liberals and progressives need to nominate real Democrats and then get behind them all the way. Anyone who believes in democracy, anyone who believes in civil liberties, needs to get on board. The Republican leadership has made it clear that the only thing they care about is their own power. They'll protect their own property, but not yours. They will talk about "rights" when it suits them, but they won't enforce your rights because, frankly, they don't believe people like you are entitled to rights.

The greatest weapon the right has is apathy and "moral purity" on the left. Primaries are the place to ensure you get the candidate you want, but once it comes down to November 4th Avedon's got the right of it when she says "I've become one of those people who would vote for a yaller dawg if it was the Democratic nominee, rather than do anything that would help a seat go to a Republican."

This is probably one of the most important elections in decades. If the Republicans take all three elected branches, they'll make damned sure they can push through as much as possible on the chance that Bush might lose the presidency in '04. They're also largely united- there's a sense of movement identity on the right (and hatred of RINO-ism) that makes them much more dangerous than any equivalent electoral makeup would on the left, and a ton of holes in the judicial system that will be filled by only the most conservative nominees possible. They could push through a ton of bills, making sure that each of their sacred cows becomes law. Heck, they could even work against any sort of democratic backlash in the future, because if the Repubs win, then Scalia's probably going to become the chief justice. Then they'll follow it up by placing a conservative on the SC that will easily on Scalia's level. If not more so. And we know that the presidency work to push the whole thing even further to the right- we have a deeply conservative administration and president, and we can be sure that the cheerleading from the right will only push him farther over. Sure, he's looking at election in two years, but two years is a long time in politics, and he can do an awful lot.

If any election should inspire progressives, liberals, leftists or whatever to get out there and vote, then this is that election.

I tend to agree with the Globe and Mail's interpretation of the IISS study... it's contradictory. On the one hand, Saddam supposedly has the ability to create the nuclear devices, but he hasn't got any fissile material, any ability to create it, or any ability to acquire it, which kind of makes his nuclear program a big bust. (It's a nice make-work program for Iraqi military engineers, but other than that...) If he gets it from someone else then he might be able to make a bomb... but then again, considering what you could find on the Internet these days, most of you could probably make a bomb were you to have the fissile material.

As for chemical and biological weapons, it's somewhat less contradictory, although IISS thinks that Saddam has less than a dozen missiles that could actually get to Israel in the first place, and it's anybody's guess as to whether the bloody things would work... and apparently owing to their "impact fuses", they'd do a damned poor job of it anyway. They also say that Saddam has maintained stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, but I do wonder about Ritter's critique of that point of view... that most chemical and biological weapons degrade and that he hasn't had the ability to produce them. Dead biological weapons aren't too scary, and inert chemicals less still. I'd like to read the reasons why the IISS believes that Saddam has production capabilities, and how and why they believe that he could "resume producing both (biological and chemical weapons) within weeks or months", as the G&M said.

To be honest, I just want to read the damned thing myself. Anybody got a URL?

(I guess now we get to wait until Bush makes his big speech.)

For those who would actually want to check out such things, I've switched the privacy level on my sitemeter. I just couldn't think of any earthly reason to keep it secret when the extreme counter is public, and it's not like hiding such things provides any sort of competitive advantage. (Against who? For what reason?)

Anyway, feel free.

Y'know, considering the relatively low amount of both blogging and readership of blogs (or at least my own) on the weekend, I've gotta ask...

Is the blogosphere really just a way of killing time at work?

It'd explain so much.

Edit: Fixed a sentence.

Jay Caruso took a potshot at me today, first in a post:

(Honestly, I wouldn't have even responded to this, but what the hell... it's the weekend.)

Yep. The United States was attacked. By Al Qaeda.

Rather a lot of "imposed forgetting" going on, isn't there?

Trying to justify plunging the Middle East into violent chaos and invading Iraq that way is like a German trying to justify invading Belgium because the IRA blew up the Reichstag.

Yes Demos, attacked by Al Qaeda, and now there is evidencing surfacing that Iraq helped them before and after 9/11.

I really don't want to sound mean here, but do people who believe that the Middle East is stable and our attacking Iraq would bring about chaos, realize how utterly ridiculous they sound? 'Stability in the Middle East' is a bigger oxymoron than 'jumbo shrimp.' This was the same ridiculous argument being used to oppose the Gulf War (amongst other wrong reasons) and it's just as bogus now as it was then.

and then as a response in his comments section:

If you actually believe the Middle East has EVER been stable and that a military conflict will THEN make it unstable, then you really need a HUGE dose of reality pills

As should be obvious, Jay's using a falsely binary way of describing the situation- stable vs. not stable. Even if there is some instability in the middle east, it pales compared to what could happen, which is the exact reason why every administration since WWII has tried to protect what stability exists there. Not surprising there- he's pushing a simplistic argument, and acknowledging that degrees of things even *exist* devastates that argument almost by definition.

I mean, look at it like Pakistan. Pakistan is terribly unstable right now, yes. That happens when you have a lot of theocrats rubbing up against a military dictatorship. That doesn't mean it begins to compare to the instability that could exist there, and anybody who doesn't understand that should start mainlining those reality pills that Jay was trying to Ad hominem me with.

And as for his other argument? That "evidence" is practically nonexistent, always has been, and will remain so barring something extraordinary*. If it existed, Bush would be using it. It'd be an instant justification for invading Iraq, and save both him and others a lot of grief and effort. They would have pulled it out a looong time ago. He isn't, even though Cheney has gone on the record telling intelligence officials that he wanted the proof of such a connection to be their first priority. That says volumes.

If I was feeling uncharitable, I'd suggest that Jay should stick to taking cheap potshots at Tom Daschle, completely misunderstanding how the U.N. human rights commission works, and making nonsensical remarks about class sizes that contradict every study ever written on the subject, because he's punching above his weight. Since I'm a nice guy, though, I'll assume that Jay's just having a bad blogging week.

*Yes, it is possible that he'll pull out some sort of connection when he addresses the U.N. I find the prospect extraordinarily unlikely, however, because it makes any such address unnecessary and the entire WMD argument utterly pointless. Besides, why wait? It only means that the U.S. couldn't use the facilities and resources of its allies up until the address, damage the U.S.'s relationships with its allies, and would only work as a political tool against the Republicans who have been against it, because the Democrats have been careful to avoid positioning themselves as against invading Iraq. As a tactical move, it's weak. As a strategic tool, it's counter-productive. I can't believe the Bush admin is that stupid.

by the way..

The answer is that the picture is rather graphic proof of the one thing anti-war activists are doing their damndest to try to make everyone forget: we were attacked first. See, if people thought about that part it might make them think we actually have a legitimate reason to go to war.

Yep. The United States was attacked. By Al Qaeda.

Rather a lot of "imposed forgetting" going on, isn't there?

Trying to justify plunging the Middle East into violent chaos and invading Iraq that way is like a German trying to justify invading Belgium because the IRA blew up the Reichstag.

Edit: A little bit of copyediting. Thanks to Ampersand for pointing it out. Great cartoonist, by the way.

just to let Steven know:

It's finally sinking in amongst some that the only way they can dissuade the Bush administration is by coming up with a viable alternative, and the ones proposed so far don't cut it. Most people are now coming to understand that the existing inspection protocol was a pointless waste of time, what with Iraq in some cases resisting inspections with force of arms. (There are reports during the 1990's of inspectors showing up at a facility only to have guards fire over their heads to keep them away, while others carried boxes of "something" out the back into waiting trucks to be carried away.)

The "somethings" were documents. Not surprising, nor necessarily proof that the Iraqis have WMDs. As Scott Ritter has taken great pains to point out, documents don't produce weapons, factories produce weapons. Iraq doesn't have them.

Then again, considering that the whole post is an attempt to discredit the notion of inspections because (I'm paraphrasing here):

-"Iraq doesn't want them" (contradicted by their own statements),

-"nobody else would want Americans to command them" (based on what?),

-"the forces wouldn't be trustworthy" (and America is? I seem to recall scandals involving U.S. intel plants helped create this problem in the first place)

-"they would be ambushed by Iraqi forces" (Saddam is not that stupid)

and the big one:

-"Iraq is going to get a bomb within a few years, and the inspectors would never find it in time" (based on little but Steven's own unsupported assertions that because finished weapons can't be found, the facilities with which they are produced can't be found either, and Iraq is so close to having nukes that this is actually an issue.)

Personally, I have to bring up a timing question here. Why now? Why wouldn't Saddam have developed the weapons before now, or still have a long way to go before he could get anywhere near deployment capability? Sure, 9/11 was a huge event in the U.S. and for Al Qaeda, but it doesn't change the pace and nature of Iraqi nuclear research one whit.

Let's be honest here. The opposition to inspections from parties both offline and online has nothing to do with their accuracy or their efficiency. The case for invasion of Iraq has never had much at all to do with weapons of mass destruction. It's about a created villian that we let go when we could have killed him. It's about the desire to create a friendly client state in the region. It's aboutt he unwillingness of neoconservatives to admit that their opponents might have a point. It's about the pseudo-realist doctrine that the United States should ignore interests it has in common with other states in favor of perceived interests that differ from them. And, of course, it's about the need for an illusory focus for a focus-free war that, if handled logically, would have precious little to do with the internationally isolated, largely disarmed and utterly secular Iraqi regime.

Period.

I hate to attack such a popular guy, but what on earth is Lileks talking about?

In just 18 months, this administration has made drastic changes in the United States' approach to preserving world peace. They denounced and discarded the ABM Treaty, the no-first-use doctrine and several international accords. The first two were linchpins of international stability in the nuclear age. The last were imperfect, but important, products of nations working together to create a better world.

Linchpins of stability. Snort. Let’s assume that the US had completely, utterly, unilaterally disarmed in the 70s and 80s, while holding on to the ABM treaty and the no-first-use doctrine. There would be red flags over Paris. Well, more than usual. Without a credible deterrent, those “linchpins” were cardboard shields.As for the “several international accords” Dayton mentions, his priorities are revealed: “important” trumps “imperfect.” The tangible effect on US security and strength matters less than the shiny-eyed groping towards “a better world.” Whether a "better world" might result from a planet rid of the Taliban, the Tikrit mafia, and any other changes the coming war will force on the Middle eastern satrapies isn't even considered, because they did not originate in a position paper penned by a UN diplomat who has lunch with his Syrian counterpart and tears up his parking ticket when he returns to his double-parked limo.

Nowhere in the quoted section does Mark Dayton even make a peep about unilateral disarmament, so why does Lileks feel the need to build up a particularly precarious strawman? Absent that strawman, what exactly is wrong with Dayton's statement? The ABM treaty and no-first-use doctrine enshrine the idea of MAD, which was deeply disturbing but still key to preventing both conventional and nuclear war during the Cold War.

For that matter, what's with Lilek's baffling misinterpretation of the word "imperfect"? He seems to have that common hawk misconception that warfare is a magic wand with which one can make problems magically disappear, instead of a dangerous and chaotic tool that should be used only when necessary and with great care when such situations occur.

(I won't address the misconception of the word "interest" that occurs later on in the article, except to say that it's sad that some people seem to think that the it's against U.S. interests to have good relations with other countries.)

I don't know; although I do think that it's more and more likely that war is inevitable (whether it's just, necessary, or honest or not), the arguments in favour of it and the rebuttals of those who are against it get weaker and weaker by the day. It's gone beyond dangerous and annoying to just somewhat, well, dull.

You have GOT to be kidding me.

Courtesy of Les Dabney comes the latest spin from the idiot right: the idea that Scott Ritter is an Iraqi agent. The usual suspects (Newsmax, Fox News, the Weekly Standard, etc.) have been passing around the story that Ritter was given 500 thousand by the Iraqis to make a video. Les quotes an interview with Ritter where he takes down these ridiculous charges, and it's pretty obvious he's mad as hell:

Basically, if they call me an Iraqi agent, they're accusing me of committing a crime against my country. I find that to be a horrible charge, the absolute worst charge you could make against someone, anyone, whether they're a former Marine or whether they were serving their country in another way, as a worker or an office manager or what have you. You can't make these charges lightly. The fact that I am sitting here talking to you right now, with so much attention being put on me by the FBI and other law enforcement organizations, speaks volumes as to just how clean I've been. Shame on them. These are baseless charges being brought by people who are unwilling to debate the message that I am trying to get out, so they take the cheap tactic of attacking the messenger.

(Italics mine.) I encourage you to check out Les' more detailed quotation of the interview so that you'll be forewarned and forearmed when some idiot tries passing this off as legitimate, but I personally want to highlight how downright evil it is to use this sort of tactic against critics that make you uncomfortable. It's dishonest, it's disgusting, it's fascistic if not Stalinistic, and it's against everything that conservatives profess to hold dear.

Yet more proof that neo-conservatives have nothing but contempt for the traditions that conservatism is supposed to stand up for. No wonder the Bull Moose left.

Ignatz (by Sam Heldman) comments on that whole "southern liberals are guilt-ridden" line being pushed by Sullivan et al:

So far, it appears, I am the only person in the world flabbergasted by the arrogance of the suggestion that Southern liberals don't really have honest and considered opinions as other folks do, just manifestations of personal psychology.

...[R]ather than trying to figure out why Andrew Sullivan and Mickey Kaus say the silly things that they do (is it that the former is ashamed of being British and therefore looking for someone to look down on, and the latter was taunted about a certain Disney character in elementary school?), I eagerly await their belated recognition that they have said something silly, or their explanation that everybody's political opinions are just psychological symptoms. And yes, you can see that this is getting under my skin a bit.

The weird thing about that whole sort of argument is that anybody who's come within shouting distance of Brock's book (and I'm tempted to set up a bloody Amazon connection, I've been hyping it so much) knows that neo-cons can be accused of a whole laundry list of psychological hang-ups and disorders. Why on earth would a group that is so vulnerable to such criticism itself attempt to use such tactics on others? Projection? The desire to "do it to them before they do it to us?" Or is it just an unwillingness to admit that a liberal might actually say something intelligent?

O. Dub has managed to summarize every warblog ever written.

Judah Ariel gives me a little hope:

Hopeful survery results from Search for Common Ground:

80% of Palestinians would support a large-scale non-violent protest movement and 56% would participate in its activities.

78% of Israeli Jews believe that the Palestinians have a legitimate right to seek a Palestinian state, provided that they use non-violent means.

A strong majority (62%) of Palestinians thinks that a new approach is needed in the Intifada and overwhelming majorities (73-92%) approve of Palestinians using various methods of nonviolent action.

Perhaps the cries of "paleostinians" are a little premature. As well as being, y'know, offensive as hell and deliberately stupid and whatnot.

(How much you want to bet this little study doesn't end up on LGF or Instapinion?)

Krugman, once again, shines a light:

if history is any guide, many reporters will soon return to their usual cringe. The next time the administration insists that chocolate is vanilla, much of the media — fearing accusations of liberal bias, trying to create the appearance of "balance" — won't report that the stuff is actually brown; at best they'll report that some Democrats claim that it's brown.

...Once an administration believes that it can get away with insisting that black is white and up is down — and everything in this administration's history suggests that it believes just that — it's hard to see where the process stops. A habit of ignoring inconvenient reality, and presuming that the docile media will go along, soon infects all aspects of policy. And yes, that includes matters of war and peace.

The trouble is that eventually reality has a way of asserting itself. And in case you are wondering, ignorance isn't strength.

Whether you agree with Bush's policy positions or not, the methods by which he advances those positions are obviously dishonest. Then again, with a media desperate to accomplish the impossible task of pleasing neocons crying "liberal bias" in order to further their agenda, why not?

Josh calls it:

It's always irksome to lean in to defend someone who's wrongly accused, only to see them buckle and beg forgiveness because they can't stand the heat. But that's precisely what's happened here. Say what you want about the Times, or anti-regime change bias, whatever. The Tyler/Purdum article's characterization of Kissinger was right on target. I've explained why several times already so I won't do it again here. (For a really good explanation see this new article by John Judis.)

Josh, and the case of the NYT, has shown us something important: Big Lies work. They work well. In fact, they work spectacularly. Repeat it loud enough, and often enough, and stridenly enough, and you will wear down those who disagree because either they aren't numerous enough, not powerful enough, or not strong enough to resist it.

Who knew it would be so easy for a few conservative columnists and their yahoos-in-waiting to bitch-slap the Times into saying that up is down or humiliate two good reporters who zigged when the neos were demanding a zag?

Right over here, Josh. There's a reason I started this blog: it's everywhere, and it's appallingly easy. Frightening, too... not just because of the examples that we know about, but all the ones we don't.

Chad Orzel's Uncertain Principles (which is a great read; if you haven't been there, check it out) has an excellent entry about what he calls "lies-to-children". I'll let him explain:

Terry Pratchett has a great phrase he uses to describe the way we "dumb things down" to explain them to people who lack the background to understand the real situation: "lies-to-children" (its first appearance may be in The Science of Discworld, though the idea certainly exists in Hogfather). The explanation you give when you lie to children isn't really true, but it's close enough to the truth to get the basic idea across, and you figure you can correct the misapprehension you've created sometime later, when the children are a little older.

It's like when we teach children that we vote to elect the President of the United States. In reality, we vote to choose electors, and the Electoral College votes to choose the President, except if nobody gets a majority of the electoral votes, in which case the task passes to Congress, unless it's a year that ends in three zeros, when-- but by the time you get there, their cute little eyes have already glazed over, and you fall back on "we vote to elect the President." You can explain the real process later-- barring a truly bizarre set of circumstances, they don't really need all the details.

Lies-to-children needn't be told to actual children, of course. The cocktail-party explanation of what it is that I do for a living (on the research side, at least) is a lie-to-children, whatever the age of the people I tell it to. Lies-to-children are part of the price of doing business in a technical field. The tricky part is crafting the lie in such a way as to minimize the amount of damage done through misinformation.

Being a site about science, not politics, Chad takes this concept and uses it to explain why scientific education is tricky, but it's as applicable to politics as well. Many of the principles, ideas, and concepts that people use in political debate on a popular level (when such debate exists) are based on these sorts of "lies-to-children".. where complex political or economic concepts are "dumbed down" so that the general public doesn't have to learn the sometimes extensive rationales and bases that these ideas come from. This is especially pronounced in popular economic debate, but it's present in politics as well. Political philosophy and political theory can be just as complex, as anybody who has had to wade through the first twelve chapters of "Leviathan" can attest. Nowadays it's in some respects even worse, because a lot of the empirical work in the field is based on either some sort of statistical analysis or the application of game theory.

There's a lot of problems with this. Sometimes these sorts of "lies-to-children" are deliberately crafted to support a point of view. This is the difference between science and politics; politics is usually a means to an end, and simple arguments often convince people better than more complex ones. Complex arguments often contain flaws or assumptions underlying the work that are almost inevitable due to their complexity, but a simple argument can be straightforward enough to be nearly ironclad, whether it's correct or not. It also tends to appeal more; people look for simple answers so as to order and understand the world around them.

Sometimes a simple answer isn't some sort of political weapon- as in Chad's example, it might be a genuine attempt to explain a complex system using simple concepts. Unfortunately, once a simple answer enters into the public consciousness it becomes incredibly difficult to dislodge. Qualification, complexity, and nuance is ironed out in the search for simple answers and simple solutions. Eventually, it usually displaces and competes with the complex answer itself. If it wins (and it usually does), you end up with products that rarely resemble the works that started them.

In some respects this process is necessary in order to influence the public or at the very least help them to understand the true conflicts involved, but it's highly dangerous, because any simple argument contains a number of complex assumptions, and those assumptions themselves might be controversial. Since the simple arguments require them, though, and since people depend on these simple arguments to explain the world around them, any attack on those underlying assumptions becomes a direct threat to someone's worldview, and all you get as a response is cognitive dissonance.

The world isn't simple, folks, and neither is politics. Anybody pushing simple answers, whether well-meaning or not, is usually lying to you. Whether or not it's in your best interests and in a sincere attempt to assist you in understanding something that's complex, there's complexity behind it. Without understand that complexity, you're functioning at a disadvantage, and neither do not nor cannot understand what's really going on.

I hadn't read Jason McCullough's "Hronkomatic" much, but I'm somewhat tempted to run through the archives after reading this jab:

This article, linked from Instapundit, is the silliest justification for invading Iraq so far I've seen.

Construction at the Abu Ghurayb Presidential Palace features extensive and complex water works. U.S. government web site notes that the Iraqi officials claim extensive crop damage due to drought. Photo shows use of scarce water resources to ensure that the lakes of Saddam's palaces are filled and grounds are well tended. CREDIT: U.S. Department of State.

Filling your swimming pool when there's a drought on = justification of overthrow, apparently. The suburbs of the U.S. better watch out.

There seems to be a fundamental confusion here between liberalism and realism (in the IR sense). A realist doesn't pay attention to the morality of different countries, but to their (converging and diverging) interests. A liberal, on the other hand, pays attention to the morals, but must also (in order to avoid inconsistency) look at the morality of the warfare itself in addition to the morality of the actors that is being used to justify the warfare. Yes, Saddam might be causing poverty and hardship, but the chaos that an invasion would case would create more hardship, and (very likely) a bumper crop of corpses to go along with it before everything settles down.

If one is going to argue morality, then look at it in its totality, not whichever facet you find useful.

Yeesh, now I know why Instapundit doesn't normally have a comments section: you end up with drek like this, with dozens of RightThink-spewing automatons, mistaking ad hominem attacks for legitimate criticism. A few stand out (at least Jane Galt made legitimate points, and both "pj" and Jason McCullough did their best to stand against a sea of blather), but by and large...feh.

By the way... thanks for the link, Ampersand.

One odd thing, though; Ampersand referred to one of my earlier entries as an "essay"... I just thought of it as an entry. I'm constantly forgetting just how much of an anomaly long postings are in blogdom, and a post that I think of as, y'know, adequate length is probably a monster to everybody else.

Well, not everybody.

Seeing The Forest did a little research:

I did something fun today. I went to the Heritage Foundation's PolicyExperts.org and looked up some right-wing organizations. All I did was sort by "National Research Organizations" so it shows me the entire list.

Then I started picking a right-wing organization at random and going to Cursor's Media Transparency to see who is funding them. I did this several times. Guess what I found? There are hundreds of right-wing organizations, but they are almost all funded by a foundation whose name contains Scaife, Olin or Bradley, and a few others.

The public, the media and policymakers think they hear a wide range of voices. For example, you might see on C-SPAN or MSNBC a panel with experts from five or six different organizations. But in fact the likelihood is you are hearing the voice of Scaife, Olin, Bradley or one or two other billionaires. NO WONDER so much of the national policy debate is about giving huge tax cuts to billionaires!

Try it yourself.

Now, don't get me wrong; I'm not about to rail against these organizations and those that fund them. What always astounded me, however, is how relatively cheap the whole enterprise is. According to David Brock, Scaife funds the whole thing for, what, 57 million or so a year? That's chump change; easily matched by someone who wanted to support the media and research arm of any liberal movement.

The catch, of course, is that there is no such movement, so how could you fund it? Between far leftists attacking the center-left in order to ensure that they're sufficiently "radical", "critical", and free of supposed hypocrisy and centrist neo-liberals (like Mickey Kaus) bashing everyone to the left of them in order to disassociate themselves with the far left and ingratiate themselves with the right, there's more movement apart than together. It's a shame. If there's one thing that the neo-cons have taught everybody else, it's that a sense of movement identity, properly channeled and exploited, can lead to extraordinary power and influence.

Warren Ellis has a weblog! Go read it, dammit!

And if you don't know who Warren Ellis is, you obviously haven't read Transmetropolitan yet. Which means that you have something to do this weekend.

Very nice breakdown of the concept of "libertarian socialism" over at Lake Effect. I tend to refer to such things as "left-anarchism" myself, but perhaps that label isn't quite accurate, and it's refreshing to read both a treatment of Noam Chomsky's politics that isn't base namecalling and an examination of the politics of the far left that looks at it as it actually is, instead of as one wants it to be (ie, TransProg.)

And to resolve an instant question: no, "libertarian socialism" is not self-contradictory. He explains why.

Avedon weighs in on the attempt by SDB to recruit feminists into the War on Islam. She ain't happy:

I have been trying to come up with a response to this rant from Den Beste but I just keep sputtering. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Gah! is it wrong! Back in the '70s when I used to try to warn folks about the increasing danger of Islamofascism, the only people I could get to listen to me were the women's libbers and a few other lefties. And where were the conservatives? Why, they were telling me that all that abuse and oppression was the way things should be.

The people who are suddenly talking about the oppression of women as an excuse for war are, to my mind, coming awfully late to the cause - and not, I think, in good faith. I'm not going to jump on their bandwagon just because they are trying to hitch a ride on mine.

This is serious business. We really don't need this kind of sophistry thrown into the mix. I want to see people freed, but I don't think rewriting history is going to achieve that.
(Sorry to disappoint, Ginger, but I'm just inarticulate with disgust.)

Hardly inarticulate. Still, no matter how long the subject piece, all that's needed sometimes is a well-timed "Horseshit".

Well damn... looks like I didn't make it onto Altercation after all. Ah well; I'll have to try harder next time.

(Pity I've been busy over the last week or so; Jeralyn from TalkLeft probably noticed that I been sporadically updating and thought it was permanent or something.)

Then again, the additions are all great stuff, so I have no complaints. And it's not like I'm a heavy permalinker either, so I probably shouldn't complain anyway. Heh.

Sadly, as one friend of mine put it recently, the internet is something of an 'echo chamber,' and this means that even the flimsiest vitriol gets posted and reposted, annotated and updated ad nauseam until the accumulated pettifogging becomes a kind of beslobbered palimpsest that looks and reads like a snot rag.

Hey, don't look at me. She must have got it from somebody else. I happen to like the Rittenhouse Review, and somehow doubt that she's going to remember the E.C. effect when she's passing on the latest factoid about the demonic, monolithic "Left". No doubt, though, that this is going to be a useful quote for future Norah critics.

Poor Sully. Fact-checked beyond all recognition, forced to write articles for a site that's pretty obviously just using him to create some controversy (against their readers, for some reason) now that nobody can take David Horowitz seriously, and reduced to arguing against the obvious.

Now you may agree or disagree with the idea that Iraq is a state that sponsors terrorism. You may agree or disagree that such states should be opposed or attacked. You may have all sorts of reasons to oppose a war on Saddam. But to argue that the Bush administration has never been clear about this, that it has only recently conjured up a campaign against Saddam, or that "another war" has been "grandfathered" onto an old one, is ludicrous on its face. The issue of Iraq was on the table before the campaign against the Taliban had been waged; it was on the table before Enron hit the headlines; it was on the table when Bush's ratings were in the stratosphere; it was on the table as long ago as 1990 when Colin Powell, in the last Gulf War's endgame, helped pave the way for our current predicament.

This was the closing paragraph of his most recent article in Salon. When I read this I was rather surprised. Does anybody honestly not believe that Iraq was on the agenda regardless of whether or not it actually had any ties to terrorist organizations? Even if the Rumsfeld memo didn't imply it, many of the neo-con hawks in the Bush administration had been making the argument that invasion of Iraq is a necessity long before they came into power, and certainly before 9/11. The attacks didn't change the goal, just the rhetoric- the start of the War on Terrorism prompted a change of tactics, but not the ultimate target, which had been around (as Sullivan acknowledged) since 1990.

I mean, some of the things Sullivan says makes me wonder whether he even cares about credibility. How on earth did Colin Powell "pave the way for the current mess" in 1990? Not invading Iraq had precisely nothing to do with Al Qaeda's attack on the United States; it can be argued that the Gulf War itself did, but certainly not the decision by the previous Bush administration to obey the U.N. resolutions and restrict their actions to the liberation of Kuwait. Iraq had little to nothing to do with Al Qaeda- if such a connection existed, it would have long ago been trotted out in order to support the invasion. Sullivan's citation in the article of the belief that Saddam had something to do with it that existed shortly after the attack doesn't explain anything now, either; at first we didn't know who was responsible, but we do now. Quoting former CIA chief James Woolsey as saying that they need to "develop some confidence that Iraq is involved in terrorist incidents against us, not meaning Sept. 11" right after the attack misses the point: that confidence never was developed, and we need to function knowing that, not in denial of it. His examples of the assassination attempt on Bush the Elder and the (supposed) development of WMDs as "terrorist acts" is absurd on its face; the latter would make half the countries on the planet terrorists (including India and Pakistan) and the former tactic has been endorsed by the Bush administration itself. That doesn't make the U.S. a terrorist nation, of course- it means that such acts aren't terrorism. Saddam may be a thug, but he's no terrorist.

Without that connection, then what's the point of attacking Iraq in order to forward a war on terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda? Very little- at best, it's useful to create a (theoretically) friendly regime in the region (which we don't need, and already have in countries like Jordan), and to protect the U.S. against the incredibly dubious threat of Saddam passing WMDs to terrorist organizations that are about as friendly to Saddam as Bush is. The harm done by this sort of invasion probably outweighs the benefit, but whether that's true or not, it means precisely nothing when it comes to actually dealing with terrorist organizations...they will still have failed states to operate within, friendly regimes that the United States can't touch as they weren't demonized a decade ago (like Pakistan, which is absolutely untouchable, and is one revolution away from arming terrorists with as many nukes as they desire), sources of funding, and an increased zeal to attack the United States and its allies.

I'm not the only one that's come to this conclusion.. practically every government outside the United States has (including those in the first world) and the split within the formerly united Republican party speaks volumes. The Democrats can't critique the administration for political reasons, but that doesn't mean they agree either. More and more, no matter from what angle you look at it, Sullivan is wrong- Iraq is another war, another battle, one that predates the war with terrorist organizations (started by Al Qaeda, not Saddam) and is barely related to it. Nobody's buying the administration's arguments anymore. If Sullivan keeps on parroting them, nobody's going to buy his, either.

If that's the case, then by definition the war on Iraq is "grandfathered in". Despite administration rhetoric to the contrary, it predates the war on terror and is only dimly related to the real targets and stated goals . The Bush administration saw their opportunity to justify the war that they had been calling for for a decade within the new paradigm of a war on terror, and they took advantage of it. Whether or not this war has anything to do with or real terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda has nothing to do with it. Sullivan's (or Dubya's) transparent attempts to try to shoehorn Iraq in won't change that.

I know I start a lot of entries with this lately, but...

huh?

Jay Reding, in reaction to the TRR article I referred to earlier, had this to say:

Look, if you're going to make an argument, tossing out some ad hominem attacks isn't the way to do it. In fact, I'd love to see the Review, or any other leftists go on the record and say that a free and democratic Middle East is a bad thing. It would be great to hear them say that Iran should remain an oppresive theocracy rather than be allied with the US. If they're going to start that line of reasoning, they should finish. Let's get all the Left on the record as being anti-capitalism, anti-freedom, and anti-American. The American people deserve to see the real face of the Left.

Jay, as long as you're pulling out absolutely absurd charges (in the same entry with which you define selective quotation as "ad hominem"), why not just say "anybody who doesn't want the United States to invade the Middle East rapes kittens for fun and profit" and be done with it?

As always, nobody argues that democracy is a bad thing, least of all the Rittenhouse Review (which is, like everybody else, no member of a monolithic Left.) The question is whether or not the methods advocated by people like Michael Ledeen would a) work and b) create more problems than it solves. To pull out absurd arguments that say that "if you don't agree with my pet solution you're evil and deserve the scorn of all right-thinking Americans" only makes your own arguments look that much weaker.

In the comments section of my post on Saddam: myth vs. man (or whatever), a few people pointed out that Iraq is simply the first step- that the fact that Saddam is really just another dictator who happened to invade the wrong country at the wrong time is meaningless because he's only the first of many dictators that will be the subjects of American intervention. This isn't a new theory, although I hadn't been directly addressing it, preferring to stick with the simpler question of invasion of Iraq and what it would mean for the concepts of sovereignty and legitimacy, as well as the usefulness of deterrence. (I might set up a "best of" link on the side so I can simply point people in the right direction... at the moment, however, a quick trip to the most recent set of archives should turn up ample links to this sort of thing.)

However, as seen on The Rittenhouse Review, this sort of argument is becoming more mainstream, now being found on the pages of the Wall Street Journal in this article by Michael Ledeen, whom TRR calls "the most dangerous man in the world".

TRR isn't exactly sympathetic:

The über-hawk advocates not just one war but four wars, or more accurately, one gigantic, almost simultaneous war against Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, in that order. (Not Libya?)

Not surprisingly, Ledeen's contribution to the national debate includes some of the most dubious propositions and questionable assertions currently in circulation, all presented with an arrogant certaintude that displays a complete disregard for history, politics, religion, and, indeed, humanity.

Not that this is anything of a surprise, of course, but TRR follows up with a series of quotes from the article in question. TRR quotes a whole laundry list, but I'll just bring up one or two.

"If we come to Baghdad, Damascus and Tehran as liberators, we can expect overwhelming popular support."

Um, no. Whether they have sympathy for democracy and the West or not (and why would they? Baghdad and Tehran are the home of the "Axis of Evil") they're not going to be friendly to an invading foreign power that has been demonized by their society for a generation. Whether that demonization is valid or not is unimportant- it exists, and it must be acknowledged. Any attempt to democratize the Middle East is going to be the act of a foreign power against a hostile citizenry, especially if it follows up an invasion.

(This will be especially true if the situation in Afghanistan doesn't improve, because it will prove their belief that American attempts at societal change are flighty, unserious, and transitory, to be overlooked when the Next Big Thing comes along.)

This is the other one that caught my eye:

"This war cannot be limited to national theaters; we face a regional challenge and must respond accordingly. But it is both a just war and one for which we are marvelously well suited."

Actually, the United States is unique in how badly suited it is for just such an enterprise. This the heart of the (oft-overstated) leftist critique- that the United States cares little for democracy and liberality outside of its own borders, and will act against it when its interests are involved. The United States might be uniquely suited to armed intervention, but any attempt by the United States to effect democratic change is going to be resisted hard, and long, and through the use of endless examples of American hypocrisy. Whether or not these charges are true or not is immaterial; the simple reality is that the United States is not seen internationally as either a disinterested party, an honest broker, or a force for democracy outside of its own narrow interests, and that perception will poison any attempts by the United States to introduce liberal secular democracy into the region. Even if it's done with the best intentions, nobody will believe it. While it's a valid goal and something that needs to be done anyway, attempts to force or cajole the Middle East into doing what the U.S. wants them to do will almost definitely backfire. The U.S. has too much of a history- somebody else needs to do it.

Who that "somebody else" should be is, of course, the question. I have an idea in mind, but I'll save that for later.