Edit: oopsie fixed.

Ok, I'm going to post some comments from one of my comments threads, because they should be seen on the front page. First, though, is this article written by Jay Bookman, which is a pretty accurate breakdown of exactly what the hell is going on here. It's not the first analysis I've seen of this type (I've made the point myself several times), but it explores accurately and intelligently exactly why the U.S. is moving in the direction of empire, despite the transparent rhetoric to the contrary from those who don't want the notoriously empire-averse American public to realize it's happening, or those who refuse to believe it themselves.

First is Yuval Rubenstein:

Certainly, this latest sideshow is maddening for its sheer irrelevance. However, when you stop to think about it, that's exactly what the pro-invasion crowd wants. Atrios just linked to what, IHMO, is the best analysis so far about the real motivation behind the desire to invade Iraq. The author, Jay Bookman, convincingly argues that invading Iraq is merely the neocons' first step in establishing an American empire. Lest you think this is merely crazed paranoia, Bookman offers some quotes from people like Robert Kagan who admit that this is their ultimate goal.

Therefore, I think those of us who consider ourselves anti-Imperialist (whether on the Left or Right)should be hammering home the point made by Bookman, instead of being bogged down in all these obfuscatory details. Specifically, we are wasting our time with all of our refutations concerning Saddam's WMD, connection to Al Queda, etc. because this only serves to deter us from discussing the real issue at hand. Of course, I could be dead wrong...

He's absolutely right, although the problem is that all these obfuscatory details serve as convenient justifications and if they're not refuted, they can be a problem. Fortunately, most of them avoid the real, basic critiques in question, and those that address said critiques are transparently weak (like trying to use the attempt on Bush 41 as proof that Saddam actually wants to get nuked.)

Next is Nick Sweeney:

It's the Bush modus operandi: objectives first, justifications once we think of them. Or even better, justifications once the original ones have been proven groundless. The means justify the end, because the end is the only constant.

The unfortunate part is that the ends are often so wildly arbitrary, and somehow manage to be both transparently obvious and yet difficult to address at the same time, thanks to the blizzard of annoying lies and spin brought up to justify whatever happens to be in their heads at the time. It doesn't necessarily even need to be consistent. We werenever at war with Europa and Oceania, citizen- to say otherwise is transparent WrongThink.

Finally is uber-poster Digby:

>>bullshit detectors are going off like obsessive-compulsive klaxons all around the world>>

You've got that right.

And Yuval's right about the Bookman piece. It's all there is anyone chooses to see it.

The problem is less that they don't know what the justifications are than that they are an undemocratic lot who are cynically using 9/11 as a pretext to launch this country into a completely new global foreign policy strategy that has nothing to do with it. They are obfuscating the reasons because they do not trust the citizens to allow them to do it if they know the truth.

Why am I not surprised that people such as this have huge hard ons for war and global empire?

They don't trust the citizens to allow them because they know they won't. That's the tricky little game involved in all of this. They say that Americans are reluctant of empire, and they're actually quite correct on that- but then they try to extend that to mean that the Americans that are currently in charge are reluctant of empire. As Bookman (and others) have pointed out, that's not correct in the slightest. It's a useful, entirely plausible defense against those who call "imperium" on them, though, because they can paint them as "conspiracy theorists" and take advantage of the tendency to paint all people of the same type (in this case, Americans) as having the same basic political culture, beliefs, and goals. Neo-conservatives are, as should be obvious, not like other Americans.

On OliverWillis:

The International Atomic Energy Agency says that a report cited by President Bush as evidence that Iraq in 1998 was "six months away" from developing a nuclear weapon does not exist.
"There's never been a report like that issued from this agency," Mark Gwozdecky, the IAEA's chief spokesman, said yesterday in a telephone interview from the agency's headquarters in Vienna, Austria.
In a Sept. 7 news conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Mr. Bush said: "I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied — finally denied access [in 1998], a report came out of the Atomic — the IAEA that they were six months away from developing a weapon.
"I don't know what more evidence we need," said the president, defending his administration's case that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction. The White House says Mr. Bush was referring to an earlier IAEA report.
"He's referring to 1991 there," said Deputy Press Secretary Scott McClellan. "In '91, there was a report saying that after the war they found out they were about six months away."
Mr. Gwozdecky said no such report was ever issued by the IAEA in 1991.
People should really "watch what they say". Lying about sex = rule of law. Lying about Iraqi capability = get yer war on!

As I said on his site, the problem isn't that this particular piece of "evidence" (and I use those scare quotes deliberately) or another is proven to be either a lie or wildly inaccurate spin, it's that there's no way it'll change anything. The Bush administration and their surrounding neocon policy community (and sympathetic online Echo Chamber) already know that they're right, and the only important question here is figuring out how to convince everybody else. If any one piece of information disappears, then they'll just dredge up another piece to place wildly out of context, hoping that this time the repetition of the latest Big Lie takes and those who question both within the country and without are finally convinced. They know in their hearts that they're right, and if they know they're right, then the ends justify the means.

Let's be frank, folks: this "debate" is a sham. It probably always have been. It's just one side throwing out one inane assertion after another and the other side racing around trying to disprove them, only to discover that the disproval is irrelevant due to the latest bit of nonsense that's come out. IAEA document proves to be a lie? Doesn't matter, Bush is going to prove that he has a legitimate case at the U.N. Bush crapped out after Iraq invited inspectors in? Doesn't matter, the "Blair Dossier" proves that Iraq is dangerous. Analysis shows that it does nothing of the sort? Doesn't matter- they just found weapons grade uranium near Iraq. Uranium turns out to be best measured in grams? Doesn't matter, Iraq proved they were irrational because they have come out against an American proposal that is as transparently designed to start a war as Austrio-Hungary's was before WWI. And so it goes. Can't wait to see what happens next.

That's why everybody is uncomfortable, angry, and/or frightened. It's not because they like Saddam, and it's not because they dislike Americans, and it's not because they're cowards, and it's not because of Trans-fucking-national Progressivism. It's because bullshit detectors are going off like obsessive-compulsive klaxons all around the world, but the people they're hooked up know they're powerless to do anything about it.

Bob Herbert makes some good points about judicial nominations:

But the appeals courts, divided into 13 regional circuits, are crucial arbiters and shapers of the American way of life. How easy or difficult will it be for a woman to get an abortion? How safe can we make the food supply? What happens at the many intersections of the environment and commerce? What's up with civil rights and civil liberties?

Whoever controls the appeals courts has tremendous say over whose values will prevail in the United States. And no one has a deeper understanding of that than America's right-wing conservatives.

This is why I'm not about to indict the democratic leadership on their attempts to refocus the debate to the economy by whatever means are necessary so as to win the election. Even if the war in Iraq goes swimmingly, the Bush administration has repeatedly demonstrated that if they were empowered with a double majority in Congress they'd push through more partisan legislation and partisan judges than Americans have seen in decades.

I'm sure they wouldn't lose a wink of sleep about it. Fairness, representativeness, and consultation are for the other guys. After all, why bother screwing around with that sort of stuff when you just know that your side (neo-conservatives) is right and that the other guys are both wrong and evil? Even when "the other guys" are the poor centrists in your own party?

I am of two minds about the news that Iraq has angrily denounced that proposed new resolution.

On the one hand, of course, it makes Bush's PR job somewhat easier, because he can point to this as being merely a tough inspection regime and say "see? Saddam doesn't want inspectors to succeed". There's no doubt that the Echo Chamber is going to look at it the same way as well; it's the one most in harmony with their own position, and God forbid that they should believe an inconvenient analysis.

On the other hand, however, it doesn't necessarily have to be seen that way. There's no doubt that Iraq (and rather a lot of states around the world, including perhaps the U.S. itself) see it as a trojan horse- an ultimatum that is calculated to ensure that even if Iraq cooperates, the U.S. will use it to invent some plausible reason for invasion. That requirement for "full documentation", for example, could easily be screwed with, and there are likely dozens of ways in which that "inspections at any time in any place" could be manipulated to ensure that Iraq would say "no".

(The requirement for diplomats from the five security council members could be a problem as well, as Iraq would likely think that they would all be intelligence plants, if not assassins. Iraq might even be right.)

In that case, than the Iraqi reaction makes sense, simply because they know that they're just playing the part of Serbia prior to WWI, which knows that it cannot agree to Austrio-Hungary's terms and knows that the ultimatum has been deliberately crafted to ensure that. They can't possibly survive by complying to this.

My own personal opinion on this is not that Iraq is now somehow being proven as unreasonable, but that they shouldn't have shouted it to the world but instead kept a low profile. It's very unlikely that the European and Asian contingents in the Security Council would have bought into this, because they know quite well what it's really supposed to represent and want no part of it. They also know that the UNMOVIC meeting with Iraqi officials is scheduled for tomorrow, and that there was no reason for the U.S. to push this thing before the negotiations about real inspections came to pass. The U.S. would likely lean on them, but they know that if the oil spigots get turned off in Iraq, Iran, and Saudi they'll be the ones that suffer, not the U.S. (which doesn't get a lot of its oil from the region.)

What really bothers me though, are the tidings to Iran. Not because I think that Iraq is actually going to successfully draw Iran into this (they simply don't like each other enough), but because it may be the first domino falling in a chain polarizing the entire region's governments against the west. I'm sure that Al Qaeda would love that.

Edit: Hesiod responds:

Why not require Saddam to dress in a bras and panties, and do the dance of the seven veils live on Al Jazeera, while we're at it?

Seven days?

It took Bush SEVEN MONTHS to figure out his Stem Cell policy.

True, but it does make sense... without that sense of urgency on Iraq, Bush's buddies in Congress would be strung up by his own economic policy. Makes me wonder... would we still be having this debate even if 9/11 didn't happen? Was invading Iraq close to an election always the plan after all?

Avedon on Instapundit:

Alex Frantz has a little primer on how to smear Al Gore, and raises an interesting question: What can we make of the likes of Instapundit, who continue to purvey these smears? Surely Glenn Reynolds cannot possibly be so ignorant that he still doesn't know that you can't believe a single thing the right wing says about Gore, especially if a lot of people on the right wing are saying it. When someone - particularly a right-wing source - tells you about the latest evil by Al Gore, you'd have to be a real idiot to respond with anything other than a lot of distrust and questions about what the real story is.

Of course, the answer can be gleaned by simply looking at the facts- IP's getting his Rhino on, and has been for a while.

After all, i'ts not like it's a new observation to discover that IP links uncritically to dubious sources that agree with his POV.

Great little comment on Atrios' message board by Brian Newhouse, related to that silly Volokh article that I just blogged about:

Someday, some scholar will have an incredibly easy and highly productive time demonstrating the all-pervasive and unchallenged influence of Tom Clancy's novels on American politics and political thought from the time of their first publication on.

What's sad is that it isn't even based on the good Clancy novels from the Cold War, but the cheesy stuff that he put out from "Debt of Honor" on.

This speculative article by Eugene Volokh is astoundingly goofy, but no more so than right here:

Permanently withdraw all American troops and military advisers from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and all other Muslim countries, and agree not to become involved in any military action by one Middle Eastern country against another...

...Extradite to Iraq the traitors, spies, and saboteurs that you are currently harboring as supposed "dissidents" and "opposition leaders," as well as the blasphemer Salman Rushdie, who we believe is currently visiting your country.

One question: who honestly believes that Saddam would give a rat's ass about Salman Rushdie or about the Peninsula? One other question: why does this have to be Saddam and not, say, the Glorious Islamic Republic of Pakistan that the U.S. totally missed because it was laser-focused on Iraq? (Not that this is a new thing... remember when the U.S. government was beating its collective head against its collective desk after it "lost China"?)

I mean, Saddam is about the last person to pull half of the nonsense Volokh is spouting off about in this article. He values his regime a hell of a lot more than he does Iran's fatwa or Mecca, and there's no way his advisors are stupid enough to not know that were this to happen world opinion would be on the side of the U.S., not Iraq.

But, never let reason stand in the way of a good NRO appearance, hmm?

Atrios weights in on the death penalty question:

In a weird kind of way I almost agree with Instapundit, in that my objection to the death penalty has a lot to do with a reluctance to give the State the ultimate power to kill its own citizens....however, I don't see how that requires me to agree with this statement:

The notion that it's per se immoral for the state to kill peple is absurd -- or at least, proves too much, as killing people is the core function of nation-states, and always has been. Government power is based ultimately on violence; all else is superstructure.

I don't agree with it either. Yes, one of the aspects of a sovereign government is a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, but that doesn't necessarily mean lethal violence. Nor does that right necessarily entail some sort of moral obligation or moral priviledge. Any political actor, whether an individual or a state, can have the right to do something without it being moral in every situation or even most situations. It also doesn't necessarily mean that it has the right to kill citizens in cold blood as a method of punishment for crimes.

Just as there can be limitations implicit in situations where the rights of one individual comes up against another, so too can there be limitations implicit in situations where the rights of an individual come up against the rights that he and other individuals have invested in the state (including the right to legitimate violence). Even Hobbes agreed that an individual had a right to defend his life from the agents of the state, and modern conceptions of the state are far more narrowly defined than his were.

(This is somewhat true even for warfare. the point of warfare is not to kill, but to destroy your opponent's ability to fight... and if that could be done reliably without killing, then there's no reason why killing would be preferable.)

And by the way, IP seemed to have truly screwed up on one thing, which was rather surprising for a law professor. State power is based on obesience, not violence. While violence is one tool by which one can guarantee obesience, it is by no means the sole way, or necessarily even the best way by which to gain said obesience. Many (if not most) people obey the state because they've been socialized to and because they know that the benefits outweigh the costs, not because they fear the violent reaction. That isn't necessarily universal, of course, and sometimes this breaks down, but a state that relies solely on violence is usually not a very long lived one.

Edit: Just to clarify the following post is not intended as an indictment of the Republican party, or as an intimation that they are in any way connected or sympathetic towards Al Qaeda. Just in case anybody's wondering.

Oh, and Digby needs to get a blog, dammit. Go read his stuff in the comments section, it's spectacular. I might start just posting it wholesale, especially posts #29 and #30.

A little while ago I wrote about the possibility that the reaction of the Bush administration was exactly the reaction that Osama Bin Laden was looking for. The core goal of Al Qaeda remains a war between the West and Islam, and Bin Laden knew that the U.S., dissatisfied with their relatively simple (yet utterly messy) campaign and current problem-filled situation in Afghanistan, would start casting about for a larger conflict. This casting about would mean that Al Qaeda-as-enemy would be replaced by theocratic Muslim-as-enemy and (Bin Laden hopes) we'd finally end up with Islam-as-enemy. Whether or not that actually happened at the time, there's no doubt that Al Qaeda must feel that an American overreaction to terror is their own best weapon right now.

An additional element that I hadn't mentioned, however is that Al Qaeda may have (and may continue to have) the opinion that the neo-conservative wing of the Republican party is the best weapon they have right now in bringing their goals about, both because of their harsh rhetoric against Islam and because of their embracing of American exceptionalism and "might-makes-right" unilateralism. Whether or not this is true is unimportant. Al Qaeda has no doubt seen the Republicans prosecute this coming war on Iraq (a country they have precious little to do with), and know that while a Gore administration would have definitely acted against Afghanistan, it would be very unlikely to the point of impossibility that it would have gone on to prepare to unilaterally invade Iraq. A unilateral U.S. war in Iraq is probably perceived by Al Qaeda to be in their interests, as they know that it would polarize the world against the U.S., alienate both Arab governments and Arabs themselves from the U.S., remove a secular dictator that wasn't overly inclined towards any more religiosity than was necessary to achieve his goals, and (as Al Qaeda is no doubt inclined to believe the worst about the U.S.'s desire and ability to engage in nation-building) leave behind a shattered Iraq that would be a bonanza for them in recruits, weapon sources, friendly warlords, and general good old fashioned chaos.

The U.S. pressuring Saudi Arabia would do wonders here as well, and there's no doubt that the neo-conservative wing of the Republican party has been very, very critical of the House of Saud lately, and the beating heart of the "after Saddam, Saudi is next" rhetoric that waxes and wanes nowadays. If Saudi is threatened, of course, Muslims all over the world develop an immediate interest in the situation, and all the inflamed rhetoric about nuking Mecca and the like is going to make them very concerned, indeed. If the U.S. acts, then Al Qaeda may feel that this (and the raft of American anti-Muslim rhetoric that already exists and will likely only increase) will be the spark that ignites Muslims around the globe to become antagonistic if not violent towards the U.S. and its allies. It wouldn't actually be that tricky- translating and circulating the sort of thing that gets published in right-wing magazines and newspapers daily would do a good job of it, especially if presented the right way and if American actions also seemed to back up this interpretation.

(Again, whether this will happen or not and whether it is actually in Al Qaeda's interests or not is functionally immaterial... the point is the perception.)

So, it's very likely that Al Qaeda would like nothing better than the continuation and elevation of Republican rule, as they believe that the Republicans are more likely to elevate the current conflict into a war between the secular west and Islam. This isn't because they like the Republicans or vice versa, far from it- they want conflict and antagonism, and the Republicans are far likelier to give it to them. (They're also more likely to support Bush, which means that Bush gets a far freer hand to elevate the war and thereby increase the likelihood of a negative Islamic reaction.) It won't make their personal lives any easier and it might end rather a lot of them, but the Al Qaeda leadership might be thinking that it would accomplish what they're really after.

Oddly enough, however, if true this provides a scary possibility regarding the current election. Current polls show that Democrats lead on economic issues and Republicans lead on foreign policy (read, terrorism) issues. Whichever issue dominates the minds of voters is probably going to decide which side wins the election, and both sides know that. If Al Qaeda knows that too, though, then they'd also know that they have a control over this situation very close to the infamous "Hamas veto". All they'd need to do to ensure their favoured outcome is to arrange for a terrorist act close to the time of the election. It wouldn't need to be that big, or that spectacular, and probably shouldn't be... because the press would be all over it regardless and too big an act might rally world opinion around the U.S. again. That means that Americans become more security-conscious, and even though it's very unlikely that the Repubs would be stupid enough to try to take over advantage of it, their advantage in national security issues would push them over the edge in this very closely-fought election. It probably wouldn't lead to a sweep, but they'd end up controlling the balance of power. The neo-conservative right would have a free hand and be very, very anxious to use it.

Then again, perhaps I'm wrong, and the leadership of Al Qaeda is neither this Machiavellian nor this in tune with American politics. Perhaps they don't want Republicans to win because they hate Bush, or perhaps they're somewhat unclear on what exactly a "Republican" is. Maybe their goal of a grand war between Islam and the West is being left alone right now in favor of sheer survival.

Still, if I were Tom Ridge, I might consider turning up that terrorism meter a notch.

As I was watching Jon Stewart grill George Stephanopoulos tonight, I was reminded of just how useful and important the Daily Show has actually become. Not only is it bloody hilarious and not afraid to to take a critical stance on Bush and his administration (that "eeeexcellent" bit with Cheney and the riff on Bush's incredibly Simpsons-esque "embetterment" line were great examples), but Stewart is actually doing a lot of good things with his interviews.

For example, he's taking "policy guys" and he's making them interesting. One of the weirdest things about the Daily Show is that it's often the political wonks and administration figures (or diplomats, or congressmen, or whatever) are actually more interesting than the celebrities. The celebrity interviews are pretty good and it's often interesting to get their take on what's going on, but they're also pretty standard; it's the same sort of late-night interviewing that's been around since Carson. The wonks, though, not only get into much more interesting and detailed riffs back and forth with Stewart, but miraculously Stewart can take these guys and make them really, really funny. Not "be funny at their expense" or "be funny and ignore them", but actually help these guys to be funny in-and-of themselves.

More importantly is the stunning fact that he's doing a damned good job of bringing out political issues and presenting them in a fairly easy-to-follow fashion, especially when it comes to the war. The way that Jon's questioning style and choice of questions tonight quickly, clearly, and effectively laid out the case against invading Iraq was amazing to behold. It doesn't feel dumbed down and the jokes about the whole thing worked pretty damned well, and even though Stephanopoulos managed to riposte him, Jon did an amazing job. Jon wasn't insulting or hostile either, and to be honest he never is (even when faced with Ann Coulter). He might disagree, and might poke fun, but it's no Crossfire.

(He also provides the deathblow to the idiotic "only conservatives have fun" meme, which is always handy.)

Probably the best aspect, though, is the way that he's approaching the political interviews and the choice of subjects. He tends to get people who know about politics but who aren't either partisans or pundits, and if he does end up with a partisan, he's pretty careful to keep things light and veer around the talking points as much as possible without making the discussion pointless. Compare that with the drubbing that Bill Maher and his guests got daily on Politically Incorrect at the hands of those hired-gun conservative mouthpieces that managed to dominate and muddy practically every second on that show where Bill wasn't blathering on himself. It's stunning, really.

Honestly, I've been somewhat of a fan of Stewart for a long time, and I'm glad that he seems to have finally found his niche. I don't think that Comedy Central knows what kind of talent they're sitting on (Steve Colbert is good enough to headline a show as it is, and Lewis Black is, well, Lewis Black), and I hope they catch on and give Jon the hour-long program that he deserves. Honestly, it really is one of the best shows on television.

Timothy Noah goes over the various complaints about Gore supposedly "flip-flopping", and finds them lacking at best and deliberate falsehoods at worst.

I've got to wonder, though... why the hell is this supposed to be a critique of the speech? Even if he's changed, that doesn't mean what he says isn't true, or that he doesn't believe it... just that his opinion has changed between 1991 and 2002. There's rather a lot of warbloggers out there whose opinions changed rather a lot over the past two years, so why the hell couldn't Gore's have changed over the past eleven? Even if his opinion changed only three months ago, who are these people to presume the reasons for that change? Do they have a direct pipeline into Gore's head of which I am not aware?

It's a dance around the substantive critiques in Gore's speech; a way of trying to make sure that the electorate doesn't start seriously questioning the party line on Iraq. If wouldn't even be possible were the media (and the Echo Chamber) not already desperately trying to keep that infantile "flip-flop" narrative intact, as Gore jumps in and plays a role that only he can. Predictable, yet still somewhat sad.

Found on The Bleat:

Well, it seems Gerhard Schroeder has won election in Germany.

Of course, Hitler did the same thing.

Indeed. Pity that Bush never quite managed it.

(I must have missed Schroeders brownshirts, by the way.)

TBOGG on Kelly's temper tantrum:

It's no suprise to anyone that Kelly doesn't like Gore, but for him to dismiss Gore's speech because of personal pique is sloppy journalism. Ever since 9/11 Kelly has been running around like a high school girl who discovers a big zit on picture day. His columns have become hysterical in a way that makes him sound like the freakish spawn of some bizzare mating ritual between Ann Coulter and Peggy Noonan. Now that's a scary thought.

Funny thing is that since there's no way that someone like Kelly is going to support Gore anyway, and considering that Gore's supporters will probably increase that support at the sight of the spectacle that was Kelly's frothing column, I think much of Kelly's frustration is that he's ultimately completely impotent when it comes to actually influencing Gore.

After all, what has the media done for him lately?

Edit: Bob Somerby makes a similar case.

Interesting bit on D-squared:

OK, a thought that struck me while on holiday, in the form of three questions;

1. Hands up if you believe that Benjamin Franklin was talking sense when he said "They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety" ....

2. Hands up if you believe that African governments are doing something wrong or stupid in rejecting genetically modified corn given as food aid.

3. Now ... hands up again if you still think [you] agree that "that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety"

Some people disagree on his comments board, particularly Matt Weiner, but it's good nonetheless.

Despite the wild frothing of the usual suspects and a few "respectable journalists", the Gore speech was actually probably a pretty good political move and, in some respects, an important one in general. (it certainly wasn't "the reprehensible piece of bloody-shirt-waving in American political history", but that should be bloody well obvious.)

(Atrios was right.. Michael Kelly really did lose it, didn't he? He made Neal Pollack look tame, and Pollack's blog is supposed to be satire!)

There's no doubt that the speech energized the base, which is something that's pretty key to this mid-term election. It also probably reflects the beliefs and sentiments of a hell of a lot more people out there than the blogosphere and fellow-travelling pundits like Kelly are willing to admit, and right now Gore is going to be seen as the only person out there who is articulating their point of view in the face of the nonstop beating of war drums in the national media. Gore is also effectively distancing himself from both the DLC and Republicans, but in this case I think that's a good thing, as that's been his goal for a while now..

It's very unlikely that this particular bit will come back and haunt him later. If he's wrong and the war happens and goes well, one speech from fall 2002 isn't going to sink his political career- there's simply too much time in between and too much ambivalence about the whole thing nowadays for it to turn the public against him. If either the war doesn't happen or something goes wrong, however, he can use it himself both to dominate the partisan-driven primaries and to provide a lightning rod for discontent about the war in Iraq by using the same argument that "the actual war on terror isn't being fought well because of this Iraqi adventurism" and be confident that it will help him more than it hurts him.

More importantly, though, is that I think something like this is pretty important in-and-of-itself. A lot of liberal commentators have decried the weak response of the Democratic caucus, wondering why there isn't and can't be a "loyal opposition" to ensure that there's a real debate between governmental officials and those who could form another government themselves (ie a party.) The answer is that there's no such thing in American politics: the Democrats have to be concerned about their re-election and the comparatively non-partisan American system is not particularly predisposed towards unified "official oppositions"; their positions are perfectly valid. Regardless, it still shows that there's a void out there, one that can't be filled either by letters to the editor or books by marginalized leftists with little to no connection to the actual left-wing party in the United States.

Enter Al Gore.

See, he doesn't have to worry about re-election, as he's not currently holding elected office. (Well, kinda, but let's ignore Florida for now.) 2002 isn't an issue for him, except generally as a member of the Democratic party. His goal is 2004, and that's a long way away. What he does need, however, is to remain in the public spotlight... to remain relevant. He needs to say something unique so that he differentiates himself from the other candidates, and he needs to say something that reflects the beliefs of the important voters (in this case primary voters) enough that they will identify with him and believe that he's speaking in their place.

The speech accomplishes both. First, it clearly differentiates him from Congress. Second, in its careful distinction between the invasion of Iraq and the necessity of the unfinished war on Al Qaeda, in its call for the cultivation of alliances with a larger section of the world community than Britain and Israel, in its articulation of the "where's Osama" question, and in its focus on the consequences of unilateral war it probably reflects a decent chunk of the general electorate and a massive section of likely democratic primary voters. (That poll I mentioned below certainly suggests that he's tapped into something.)

Because of this, Al Gore's speech (and perhaps the man himself) can serve in that role of the "official opposition" that congressional Democrats simply can't afford to take up. It's in the American public interest to have a major political figure articulating those points of view, and it's in his interest to articulate them. The fact that it irritates the E.C. blogger consensus and shark-jumping columnists like Kelly so much that it prompts hilarious strawman attacks (the one I quoted above is relatively mild) is just icing on the cake.

Maybe the economists are better at describing politics than I had thought. There was a market need, and Al Gore happened to be the political entrepreneur who exploited it. Win/Win situation. Well, except maybe for Lieberman.

A new Gallup poll suggest that the American public supports the impending war on Iraq, 57% to 38%. So Bush can expect widespread support, right? Well, kinda, but there's a huge caveat there. See, there's a series of other numbers that revolve around the question of whether he gets Congressional and U.N. support for the action or not. If he gets the support from either, his support shoots up: 69% in the case of Congress, and 79% in the case of the U.N. If he doesn't, then it drops: 37% support for the lack of either. There's only 38% support for invasion "if the United States has to invade Iraq alone", either, but that's pretty much a foregone conclusion anyway, and I don't think it'll make that big a deal compared to the first two figures.

So, what does this mean? Well, the question of how these questions connect is pretty important, and I wish they had broken it down further into "U.N. supports and Congress doesn't" (which is unlikely as hell) and "Congress supports and U.N. doesn't" (which is far, far more likely.) What it means in those situations kind of depends on the assumptions made by the subjects... it depends on whether or not they assume that the U.N. is onside when Congress is (or vice versa), and you can't assume that they'll all make the same assumption or that the "yeas" will cancel out the "nays". Still, there's a lot of useful knowledge to be gleaned from this using a Machiavelli-style "either-or" analysis, including figuring out who to watch and what will likely happen.

Either the U.N. supports the invasion, or it does not. If it does, the Congress will likely be onside too, and Bush will enjoy clear public support, congressional support, and U.N. support. Assuming the military side works out ok, it'll be smooth sailing.

If the U.N does not support the invasion, things get trickier. Congress will probably be onside anyway, due to the election and the twin pressures of neo-cons hawks leaning on the Republican candidates to toe the party line and Democratic fears of Republican attack ads. The public will, however, probably be deeply ambivalent if not opposed to the war due to the lack of U.N. (and therefore international) support and their knowing full well that real opposition within Congress is being stifled by these two forces. Bush can't survive this, and he probably won't try, because I'm sure that as much as the military brass are scared of the spectacle of an unpopular war, their fright would be dwarfed by that of Republican partisans. There might be a "rally 'round the flag" effect boosting support at first, but the underlying support won't be there. The public won't necessarily support a war just out of patriotism or fear; communism was just as scary in the 60's as terrorism is now, and the country was still getting over McCarthy at the time. There's the additional problem in that the public is still thinking "war on terrorism" and of retaliation for 9/11, and Iraq is only peripherally attached to either. They might stay onside after that initial boost, but Bush can't count on it, and his staffers should know it.

So, given those two choices, we see that Bush either needs to get the U.N. onside, or to convince the public that the U.N. is unnecessary, that their support doesn't matter, and therefore ensure that the public will still support him if the U.N. goes against the invasion. Either would remove the "U.N. factor" from the public support equation, and makes everything a lot easier. We've seen examples of both, but I don't think either is quite sticking, partially because he (somewhat optimistically) tried to accomplish both at the same time with the U.N. speech and the rolling out of that new multilateral party line from a few weeks ago.

The central thrust of his speech (and the following talking points) was that the U.N.'s relevance was threatened by Iraq's refusal to obey the Security Council's resolutions, and that the U.N. should make those resolutions stick. This worked to accomplish both goals: it was simultaneously a goad to the U.N. to act and a reaching out the U.N. to involve them and, thus, ensure their support; and at the same time it was an insurance policy against the U.N. getting bogged down, because he could then go to the American public and say "look, they're bureaucratic and useless, whereas I'm strong and forceful. I will fix the problem and liberate the Iraqis. Support me". Bingo, both problems solved, which is no doubt why he used that particular strategy in the first place.

Unfortunately, Iraq has managed to frustrate both goals by inviting inspectors in. It frustrates the first because the U.N. sees a U.N. brokered and administered diplomatic solution, which they would prefer. It frustrates the latter because it appears to the public as if going through the U.N. actually works, and that it was the unilateralism of before that was the flawed approach. (To the point that some knee-jerk Bush defenders actually see it as a mere tactic.) Yes, there is that new party line that Saddam can't be trusted and that the letter shows that he's going to limit the available sites (which is actually one damned tortuous spin on said letter), but it can't really be used to support a unilateral strike even if the U.N. does buy into it. It would support a new resolution at best, and that resolution is not going to authorize regime change.. just a new and more intrusive inspection system. It doesn't look like the U.N. is going to go along with it, though.

The new "he's lying" party line isn't helping Bush justify his war to the public, either. After all, the Gallup poll is recent; it shows that even despite the new spin, the U.S. citizenry still wants the U.N. onside. He's not going to top the U.N. speech, so if they aren't convinced now, they aren't going to be. The only way Bush can recover this is if Iraq becomes extraordinarily belligerent and defiant, if it's obvious that Iraq will not allow inspectors in, and if the U.N. either ends up deadlocked or throws up their hands and gives their blessing to the U.S. This is incredibly unlikely, as preemptive strikes and especially "regime change" go against the Charter. The Bush administration knows that.

So what does all this mean? Essentially, that Bush is all dressed up with nowhere to go. It's clear that he's set up for a war in Iraq, and wants to fight it. Bush has staked his credibility on it, the neo-cons have been egging the administration on, the Bush admin knows that it's what is keeping Republicans from falling apart in the face of the still-weak economy and impending housing bubble burst...and the fact that Saddam really is a nasty SOB doesn't hurt, either. I doubt that the Bushistas and their fellow travellers care that much about the U.N., either. If he does invade, however, those polls suggest that the public's initial support will be fundamentally weak. He won't have the support to weather any setbacks or problems that stem from the invasion or (much more importantly) the following occupation. There's no doubt that the Bush administration will care about that- visions of Vietnam and Somalia will dance in their minds.

Still, the status quo cannot stand. Either inspectors have to go in or be in the process of going in (and thereby pretty much postpone invasion for a good while, unless the Bush administration wants to ensure that they look like imperial buffoons by invading despite present or impending inspectors) or the U.S. will have to invade, if only because the neo-conservative right would turn on Bush like a pack of starving jackals if he doesn't, just like they did his father. (I doubt they liked the multilateralist talk much either, which is probably why they're framing it as a tactic instead of a true policy shift.)

Therefore, the organization to watch right now is Hans Blix and UNMOVIC, not the Bush administration. Next Monday, according to the UNMOVIC site, their "concluding talks" will convene in Vienna. Depending on how those talks go, their advance team should arrive in Baghdad on Oct. 15. If all goes well, then Bush can't credibly invade and expect U.N. (and therefore public) support. Those troops in the Middle East get to cool their heels for a good while. But if Iraq stonewalls or otherwise screws around with UNMOVIC, the Bush administration can exploit that. At the very least they can get a new resolution from the U.N., but they could possibly gain the support of the American public despite U.N. intransigence. If that happens, it's war.

That's why I don't expect Iraq to be especially hostile or confrontational for a while. Aziz and the rest of the Baathist regime know perfectly well what's at stake, and Hussein no doubt knows as well. Right now UNMOVIC is their best friend, if not their lifeline. They have to at least act as if absolutely nothing is off the table, because they know that the Bush administration is watching over Blix's shoulder, hungry for even the slightest hint that Iraq will screw around with the inspectors and perfectly willing to spin absolutely anything into "hostile stonewalling by Saddam Hussein". We're living in the prelude to WWI, with Austrio-Hungary ready and waiting to attack Serbia and practically desperate to seize on an excuse, any excuse, to go in with swords drawn and guns blazing.

Come to think of it, the fact that this situation just might turn out differently is proof positive of just how important the U.N. is.

"Republicans reacted angrily, accusing Mr. Gore of using the Iraqi situation for political advantage."

Snicker.

I'll probably write more on this Krugman column later, but for now:

"for we won't bomb Iraq, then wash our hands of responsibility, will we?"

I wish I could believe that, Paul. I really do.

Rather odd situation going on at the U.N., as the U.S. proposes a security council resolution that would condemn Israel's demolition of Arafat's compound:

Seeking to avert a confrontation with Arab states over the siege, the Americans offered a draft resolution calling on Israel to "cease measures in and around Ramallah," saying that they "aggravate the situation" and that they "do not contribute to progress on comprehensive Palestinian civil and security reforms."

This is odd, considering that the current administration has all but given Israel carte blanche in conducting their own war against Palestinian terrorists (freedom fighters, militants, "islamists", whatever) and I had hardly expected that position to change. Indeed, that Stratfor analysis I had mentioned earlier had said that the U.S. would probably give Israel an even freer hand in exchange for the promise that Iraqi attacks on Israel would not be responded to. Even if one considers the current Israeli actions against Arafat to be an overreaction, overreaction isn't exactly unwelcome for the Bush administration.

On the other hand, the old tone hasn't completely disappeared, and sheds some light, I think:

The American draft, presented during an emergency session of the Council today to counter a Syrian proposal, cites two Palestinian groups by name, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, holding them responsible for the recent attacks in Israel. The proposal would require that they be treated as terrorists under a Security Council resolution passed last year to condemn the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

It was the first time that the United States had sought to equate, in the formal terms of a Security Council measure, the Palestinian suicide bombings and other attacks in Israel with the terrorism of Sept. 11, 2001.

As the NY Times article notes, this is partially a tactical move to ensure that a competing Syrian resolution doesn't get passed, but it's still worth looking at. It's interesting not for what it includes, but what it doesn't include, and what it doesn't include is Fatah. The coupling of these two positions together might mean that the administration is rethinking its policy on Arafat, or at least not quite as willing to label Arafat himself as a terrorist as they were, say, three months ago.

Then again, it might be simply because the U.S. didn't want its proposal to be utterly ignored, or to enjoy the spectacle of having to veto the Syrian proposal, as the article implies. Still, it seems to speak to an administration whose newfound multilateralism is perhaps constraining it more than it had been, or at least an administration that knows that it can't deliberately antagonize other players in the region while it gears up for a war in Iraq whose chief raison d'etre, the lack of weapon inspectors in Iraq, is fast disappearing.

Okay.... now Stratfor is saying the U.S. is going to invade Iraq. The article in which they stated it is an interesting breakdown of Iraq's strategic options, and perhaps I just missed the article where they said they had changed their minds, but when did that happen, and what has happened to invalidate the analysis they made before?

Ah well. Good bit about the Saudis here:

The Saudis' main concern is that the post-Hussein world would place Iran in the dominant power position in the Persian Gulf. A contained Iraq under Hussein is infinitely preferable to a disintegrated Iraq and an uncontrolled Iran. Their second concern is that an American victory in Iraq would set the stage for more intense demands by the United States on the Saudis -- and deeper intrusions into internal Saudi affairs in the search for al Qaeda. The Saudis would find this destabilizing and want no part of it.

Obviously, the Saudis are not indifferent to American power and cannot simply ignore overwhelming pressure. The compromise they seem to have reached is not to object to an offensive force being built up in Kuwait or to American air operations out of Qatar if a U.S. attack is inevitable. Since the Saudis want to be aligned with the winner, they might even cooperate with the United States if an attack becomes inevitable. It also increases their influence on post-war policies in Iraq. But what the Saudis would like most is for there not to be an attack. They would love to be in a position to withhold their cooperation and to have a legitimate basis for limiting U.S. operations out of Qatar -- and particularly Kuwait.

There's some other good stuff here, especially surrounding Hussein's interest in instability in the occupied territories so as to ensure that the Saudis (who don't want the war, as said above) can keep the U.S. off their backs and pressure Qatar and Kuwait to deny the U.S. access to those respective countries. There's also a rather insightful (and possibly scary) passage that mentions that "the argument now will be made that U.S. insistence on following U.N. resolutions on Iraq is hypocrisy, since the United States does not apply the same standard to Israel"... which may make both Israel and the U.S. vulnerable to Bush's own rhetoric.

Still, I would have preferred that Stratfor explain, even briefly, why their analysis was so easily and so quickly shifted. Their reputation is supposedly based on being able to predict what political actors do, and if they can't sustain that reputation, why on earth would anybody pay for their services?

Matthew Yglesias pointed to a really good blog entry by Mark A. R. Kleiman about the pharmaceutical industry, why it works the way it does, what the flaws are, and what the difference is between violation of a copyright or patent and good ol' fashioned theft. (He even brings out a neat term for it: "non-rival consumption", which sounds like SKO buffet.)

What really grabbed me, though, was this line about alternate systems: "the fact that there’s no perfect system doesn’t mean that the one we now have in place is the least bad that could be developed." This particular idea is something that would seem obvious and does when it's stated, but there's an awful lot of situations where it's clearly ignored in debate, discussion, and just simply what kind of assumptions people make.

Too often people will respond to critiques by saying "well, it's not perfect, but what is?" There's your answer, right there. Thank Mr. Kleiman for it.

Excellent entry by Josh Marshall about the idiotic phrase "regime change", and how despite the citation of Orwell by several conservative commentators lately there's no doubt that Orwell would take great pleasure in tearing that little euphemism into tiny bite-sized pieces. Marshall uses it to complain about the nature of the public debate...

[The public debate is] one in which assertions which are widely understood to be false are stated and not corrected, in which important distinctions are clouded with obscuring phrases, and in which discussion of the long-term consequences of specific actions are trumped by slogans. And that's a very big deal.

He dishes it out to both supporters and opponents of invasion, but I think he misses the important point that there are different reasons for each, and the opponents are much more "under the gun" than the supporters; there's a reason that Democrats avoid the issue, and it's a valid one.

Besides, I can think of at least one commentator who has been pretty damned clear about exactly why he believes what he believes, and a lot of opponents are opposing it because of the rules it would break and the precedents it would set that go far beyond the one country of Iraq. The implicit argument is that those rules exist for a reason, and breaking them would create global problems that dwarf even the prospect of a nuclear-backed Iraq. The burden of justification is on those who are arguing in favor of invasion, not those who are arguing against it, because invasion would have many, many more repercussions. they need to prove not just that the action is necessary, but that it is so necessary that the repercussions are something we can live with. As most pro-invasion types seem to think that those rules (such as the ones enshrining national sovereignty) don't even exist, it's necessary to first explain why those rules are important.

As those reasons can be complex, and as rather a lot of pundit types seem to dislike complex, "nuanced" arguments, it's kind of an uphill battle.

Digby on Eschaton:

[I]t has become clear that the immaturity and inexperience of our President is becoming a real danger. He is caught between two competing philosophies, one the realist internationalist philosophy of his father and the other the extremist philosophy of certain advisors who have a radical global agenda. This important battle is taking place in public with the President extolling both philosophies simultaneously despite the fact that they are incompatible. Apparently, he doesn't realize that he must make a choice.

I predicted a week ago that the neocon hawks would not give up this fight and they certainly have not. They are zealots and they will do whatever is necessary to advance their cause. According to the Washington Post that includes lying to the President and the public about intelligence and military preparedness.

This is the most dangerous thing I believe we've learned recently. They are underestimating the costs, both financially and militarily, to accomplish their goal of overthrowing Saddam and completely ignoring the subsequent costs of occupation. This betrays a form of magical thinking that will lead this country into graver trouble than we have ever seen. It's one thing to coldly and pragmatically propose an invasion. It's quite another to rely on wishful thinking to accomplish the task.

Atrios said that Digby needs to "get his own #%@#$@#% Blog". I don't know if I agree, because what the heck would the rest of us do with all that free time, with him so eloquently criticizing the Bushistas for us?

(Maybe I'll take up Go or something.)

Now that I stop and think about it, I'd like to repost here something I said in one of Atrios' comments threads, because I think it's important:

Pretty much everything that the warblogger/neo-conservative right have been calling for is pretty much exactly what Osama wanted, so much so that I wonder whether he wasn't much, much smarter than we've given him credit for. After all, he wanted the U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia, he wanted the House of Saud overthrown, and he wanted war between the west and Islam... and by inflaming the rage of Americans with his attack and then making sure that Al Qaeda is too difficult and diffuse a target to satisfy that rage, he's moved a lot closer to those goals than anyone would have dreamed a while ago.

(Heck, I doubt he was a big fan of Saddam either, and Saddam would be the perfect loud patsy to enrage Arabs and set them against the Americans, and possibly isolate the U.S. from the world over the issue of invading Iraq. Israel/Palestine is too tricky and too secular, but he had to know that Iraq would be target #1 after his Taliban buddies were wiped off the map. He could use Saddam without even talking with him.)

Perhaps we're using the wrong word after all. Perhaps he was never trying to create terror, and therefore this isn't terrorism. Perhaps he was trying to create exactly the kind of rage that resulted from 9/11, knowing exactly what it would entail, who would be targeted, and what kind of ideas and ideologies it would bring to the fore. I wouldn't be overly surprised, but the fact that it seems so damned plausible is also damned frightening.

Atrios on invasion:

Despite the rather cynical and mocking tone I've taken with respect to the whole Iraq thing lately, the truth is that all along I've had a rather Marshallian view of the issue (Josh, not Alfred). Though I wasn't convinced by the Washington Monthly article he wrote, I suppose that I, like him, was quite open to being convinced. I have been open to all of the possible justifcations for invading Iraq - humanitarian, national security, realpolitik, defense of Israel, etc... But, for me, all of them have fallen completely flat. Josh lays out one reason why:

But let me discuss with you for a moment what I find the most difficult about this debate. The more ardent supporters of regime change lie a lot. I really don't know how else to put it. I'm not talking about disagreements over interpretation. I mean people saying things they either know to be false or have no reason to believe are true. Perhaps the word 'lie' is a very slight exaggeration. Perhaps it's better to say they have a marked propensity to assert as fact points for which there is virtually or absolutely no evidence. How's that?

From the desperate attempts to link 9/11 to Saddam, to the repeated claims that he's a "bad man who gassed his own people" (with our support and our gas, essentially), to the misrepresentations of analyses of his potential for nuclear capability, to the knowingly false claim he "threw out the inspectors" (a failing process, admittedly), etc... etc... Not one element of this debate from the Hawks has been, by any stretch, honest.


I could have even lived with that, perhaps. But what I can't live with is that combined with the *zero* effort (And I Mean *ZERO*) to present (or formulate?) any conception for what Step 2 would be. No description of what an occupying force would be like - size and length. No description of plans for transition to a new government. Nothing.


The only guide we have are the collected writings of his advisors. And those are scary.

Indeed. Then again, it could be because of the siege mentality- they know that they're under fire and that a widely-supported invasion becomes less and less likely every day, and also know that a unilateral invasion would be militarily possible but politically suicidal. They've been thrashing about, looking for some way to bring their critics onside, or at least marginalize them to the extent that it's no longer a big problem, and they can get the multilateral support that despite their unilateralism they obviously crave. (There's no other reason to explain Bush's appearance at the U.N.)

To be honest, that situation makes the lack of "what's next" pretty understandable. Those that might formulate it simply don't have the time, and those that do are either too optimistic, too incoherent, or too batshit insane to do any useful work in this regard. Then again, maybe the plan exists, but they don't want their critics getting their claws into it. Like so much else that comes out of that crowd, a scary thought.

Wow. Out of curiosity, I ran a search for "Demosthenes" on Google, wondering where I placed in the search.

It was, um, first.

The Blogosphere really does play merry hell with Google, doesn't it?

Odd... I keep getting that "503: Unable to load template file" error, but it's publishing, and it does use the template. The normal workarounds don't seem to be working here, either.

Is this unique to my own little journal, or are others having the same problem?

This oughtta be good.

On Friday, the Bush administration will publish its first comprehensive rationale for shifting American military strategy toward pre-emptive action against hostile states and terrorist groups developing weapons of mass destruction. The strategy document will also state, for the first time, that the United States will never allow its military supremacy to be challenged the way it was during the cold war.

Hmm... anyone else notice scary echoes of that think-tank document that the Sunday Herald brought to light a little while ago? The one that myself and others responded to that basically called for the U.S. to stomp on all that would oppose it, and that was written by the same folks who are running the country now?

The formalization of this doctrine will probably jettison whatever good relations that the U.S. still has with the U.N., which by definition is opposed to this sort of thing (and for damned good reasons.) Especially that latter goal... the former can be justified, but what will happen if (as I've theorized in the past) Europe binds even more closely together and develops a joint military strength that rivals the U.S.? Or if China's impending status as a economic powerhouse leads it to massively develop its military might? Or, heck, what happens if Japan renounces their "self-defense clause", gets into the business of force projections, and uses some brute-force military keynesianism to pull itself out of its current malaise?

Are they the next targets?

And can they afford to assume that they won't be?

Scary stuff.

Astounding.

Apparently a Germany minister claimed that Bush was akin to Hitler. Well, not really, but she definitely made the comparison:

Justice Minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin told a small group of labour union members on Wednesday that "Bush was going after Iraq to divert attention from domestic problems. 'That's a popular method. Even Hitler did that,' the German newspaper, Schwaebisches Tagblatt, quoted her as saying.

First, I wasn't actually aware that that was the reason for Hitler's expansionism.. I had always thought it was more intrinsic to the fascist system itself. Still, accurate or not there's no doubt whatsoever that this is going to inflame the opinion of the right and of Americans in general. Looks like the rhetoric continues to heat up in the German election.

She appears to realize this, however, and addressed it with a bloody hilarious backhanded comment:

The minister called the report misleading but did not deny the remarks. "I would regret it very much if this matter were to cast the slightest shadow on my respect for the president of the United States," she said.

Notice she never said what that level of respect actually was. Snicker.

Judging by that comment, it's really hard to say that she's stupid enough not to realize the heat she's going to get, so why make it? Only explanation that makes sense is that she thinks that she'd benefit more by attacking the U.S. president in such an outrageous manner than she would lose, and the only way she'd think that is if sentiment on the ground in Germany was so anti-Bush that not even a comparison to the architect of Germany's darkest hour would be considered inappropriate and over-the-top.

The incumbant Social Democrat party was quick to distance themselves from the comment. They have to. If they win, they need to actually work with Washington for the next few years. I don't think that Daeubler-Gmelin was necessary a loose cannon, though, and I wonder whether or not she made her comments on the orders of her party superiors. If so, regardless of the validity of the comparison, the fact that it could be credibly made speaks volumes. It's rather a disturbing comment on exactly how far apart European and American sentiments are on Iraq, and what is to be risked by Bush ignoring the U.N.'s imminent resumption of WMD inspections and going to war anyway.

(For those who say "who cares? Europe isn't a real military power", I have a simple response: "not yet".)

Well... somehow, for reasons I'll probably never entirely fathom, yesterday featured the largest number of visitors I've yet had, more even than the pseudonymity battle.

Well, for those new to the site, welcome, and I hope you stick around. Feel free to check out the archives on the left. (I really need to set up one of those "best of" article indices, although I wouldn't know which articles to put there, really.)

(What is it about Den Beste that prompts this sort of thing, anyway?)

Well... Iraq has responded to the Bush speech... and if this story is to be believed, it went over rather well with the U.N., if not with the U.S.:

The speech to the U.N. General Assembly — one week after Bush addressed the gathering — was greeted with loud applause by diplomats from around the world.

But in Washington, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the speech "presented nothing new and was more of the same."

"The speech is an attempt to lure the world down the same dead-end road that the world has traveled before and, in that, it represents a disappointing failure by Iraq," Fleischer said.

Appearing in the afternoon at the homeland security command center, Bush told reporters he had not heard the speech by Iraq's foreign minister.

"Let me guess, the United States is guilty, the world doesn't understand, we don't have weapons of mass destruction — it's the same old song and dance we've heard for 11 years," he said, calling anew for the United Nations to pass a get-tough resolution.

Other than the resounding silliness of Bush's personal response (and why the hell didn't someone brief him?) I'm struck by how lame the administration's party line is sounding in the face of Iraq basically begging the U.N. to inspect whatever they please.

Then again, with the news that Congress is planning to quickly pass a resolution authorizing force, it may be that Bush's abortive attempt towards bringing the U.N. onside might not stop him from invading Iraq after all, although I'm sure that Powell and the rest know exactly what it would mean if Iraq invited inspectors and the U.S. invaded anyway. Needless to say, it wouldn't be pretty.

As Aziz Poonawalla happens to be Islamic himself, his own response to SDB is particularly interesting, and is a substantial critique of many of Steven's "cultural eradication" arguments. Plus, Aziz wrote the email that prompted the response, so his own take is particularly enlightening.

(For those who are wondering why I keep returning to the topic of the essay when I have expressed little desire to write a lengthy response, I'll just say that I'm definitely interested in what others have to say about it. After all, why write a lengthy response when others are doing it so adroitly for you?

Edit: more adroitness, this time from Amitava Mazumdar.

While critical of the "protocols of the Elders of Zion" comparison Hesiod made (a critique which Atrios admits is valid), Charles Dodgson nonetheless wrote a rather brutal takedown of the SDB "American Man's Burden" essay that has raised rather a lot of blogger ire lately. It also happened to lead to my dismissal of SDB as a useful source of analysis and debate, but that's more because I've spent rather more time than most addressing his arguments in the past, and grew heartily sick of it when I realized that the whole enterprise was relatively meaningless and discovered both that he deliberately writes to a conclusion and that he refuses to do any real research on the political topics he writes about at such great length.

Dodgson makes a number of good points:

The striking thing to me about den Beste's essay is the lack of connection between the ends, elimination of the terrorist threat from Islamist radicals, and the means, a military attack on, and defeat of, the secular Baathist regime in Iraq --- a regime which the Wahhabi-inspired religious fanatics who drive al-Qaeda view as an ally of convenience at best. (If at all; Dubya's crowd is soft-pedaling the argument that Hussein has something to do with al-Qaeda, because they haven't been able to show convincing evidence).

So, suppose we fight what den Beste views as the battle of Iraq in the War on Islamia, or something like that, and suppose we win. Will that, in fact, refute any of the arguments of the Islamists? No. It will play into their hands. We will show them an Arab country which has adopted a secular regime, with no religious trappings, getting the pants beat off of it in a conflict with the actual West, which will only reinforce their argument that religious revival is a road to glory. And, as Demosthenes points out, it will play into their own "clash of civilizations" rhetoric. The mere fact of a military defeat, particularly of a secular regime, won't dampen their movement --- in fact, by den Beste's own argument, it is a sustained record of military defeats at the hands of the West, over hundreds of years, which has given rise to it.

The logical response to this is that Saudi Arabia will be next, but that opens up a whole host of other issues were that to happen. It is assuredly the case that if the U.S. decides to invade Saudi Arabia they will not only be going it alone but will be actively opposed by pretty much every other country on the planet, a position that no sane administration wants to be in. Besides, a logical counter-argument presents itself in the Iranian revolution, where a U.S. sponsored dictatorial regime was deposed and replaced by the current theocratic/quasi-democratic regime; while that latter regime isn't especially strong, it's proof positive that U.S. backed rulers are hardly invincible, even when opposed by those which SDB believes to be dangerous throwbacks.

This last paragraph was incisive and insightful too:

By the way, if the idea is to establish a "beacon of democracy" in the larger Muslim community --- well, there are other places we could try that. Indonesia, where we... umm... sponsored a coup. Iran where... umm... we put the Shah in power, displacing an elected prime minister who didn't like the way the West was running his oil industry. (That worked out great, huh?) Pakistan, where our current "bastard in the region" --- who's taking over that role from ummm... Saddam Hussein --- is rapidly converting himself into a military strongman. (By the by, he's also a former sponsor of Kashmiri terrorists whose disavowals of support for their current operations are less than completely convincing. And he certainly has WMD. I have a sick feeling we may be hearing more about that in the years to come). And of course, Afghanistan, where we have in the past supported, ummm... Islamic fanatics against the Soviets, and where the regime we installed just this year is hanging on by its fingernails...

Charles is right- the track record isn't that promising, and SDB's utterly consequentialist argument simply doesn't work if the consequences are even remotely in doubt.

It's somewhat disturbing that this sort of xenophobic nonsense is taking the place of real issues on the sites of people like Hesiod and Atrios, but at least it's laying bare the real argument for invasion of Iraq, and just how weak that argument is. I'm somewhat glad that Bush decided to go to the U.N. and consequently ensured that invasion would be difficult at best and most likely politically impossible, while at the same time (accidentally) prompting a new inspection regime. Now that the WMD fig leaf has been torn away, the real arguments for invasion are surfacing. With luck, they'll be seen as the ludicrous fantasies that they are, and be swept away by those sensible and realistic enough to not be caught up in them. That will be the first step towards truly insuring that Osama, dead or alive, doesn't get exactly what he wants.

Interestingly, the exchange I mentioned in my last post wasn't the first... there has been a back-and-forth between Hesiod and SDB since at least this posting. This is causing me to wonder something... is dealing with SDB's enormous essays, Tom Clancey-esque worldview and sheer unwillingness to listen to any dissenting opinion (despite his claims otherwise) just kind of a "phase" that liberal bloggers go through before they realize that he's the political equivalent of a crank scientist and move on to more important and relevant things?

Just wondering.

Speaking of Hesiod, he's got a great excerpt of an email conversation where he plays merry hell with SDB's choplogic and simultaneously outlines where exactly the administration is right now, how Powell and the military brass were likely instrumental in getting us here, and the price Bush (and Blair) would pay now for unilateral action. (Hesiod believes that if Iraq agrees to inspections and Bush invades anyway, Blair must break off or his government will fall, which is probably substantially true. That leaves the U.S. truly alone. Scary prospect.)

It's sad, really. I know that I'm probably known as SDB's biggest and most strident critic, and I'm sure that those who have read this and see me that way are expecting a point-by point takedown or something of the like.

I mean, it's not like there's not a lot there to look at. The naive notion that what happened in Japan can be easily replicated, for example, even if the jury didn't remain out on whether the "Salaryman" culture that resulted after the war isn't in the process of meltdown. Perhaps he insane belief that deliberately erasing an ethnicity and culture is somehow not genocide (which has absolutely nothing to do with PoMo and everything to do with the difference between genocide and mass murder.) There's the absolute paranoia, borderline racism, absurd stereotyping, pathetic invocation of "political incorrectness", parroting of Raymond's anti-Islamism, incredible overreaction, and the downright evil South-American dictator style use of medical terminology to try to describe chaos, violence, and death.

Heck, even the silly "they're just jealous of our freedom" argument rears its ugly head, when time and time again arabs in the region say that they don't particular dislike the U.S. itself... just its foreign policy. (Whether that dislike is justified is quite suitable for debate, but doesn't remotely fit this "jealous" paradigm.) It's even coupled with the traditional breast-beating statements that the United States is the best country in the history of the world, "economically and technologically and militarily and even culturally", a statement of dubious validity at the very least, and abject hilarity to anybody who isn't trying to rally the faithful.

I could. Easily.

But....

I just don't see the point. All I really get from this is a vague sense of nausea that someone could think this way, and relief that by and large most others don't. I have visions of SDB revving that motorcycle, shouting "aaayyy" right before he jumps the sharktank. I look around and see that he's reduced himself to an article of fun on Eschaton. Hesiod easily skewers it as well, making a damned good point when he calls it the "Protocols of the Elders of Mohammed". While the charges and rhetoric are different, it is still an assault on a ethnocultural group, just as anti-semitism is, and would anti-semitism be any less so if the anti-semite wasn't advocating that the jews all be killed, but forced at gunpoint to give up their religion, culture, and identity, just as Mr. Den Beste has said should be the policy of the United States? And all because 19 Al Qaeda Members flew some planes into some buildings hoping to start exactly the cultural war that SDB is calling for? Is he even aware that he's become Bin Laden's posthumous marionette?

For that matter, why is he so bloody eager to basically replicate what happened to the Native Americans?

Honestly, while I have no doubt that this particular article will play well with those who are hungry for enemies to hate, cultures to attack, and grand purposes to no doubt utterly screw up, it completely finishes him as any sort of worthwhile and objective commentator. He might as well get a contract with Newsmax, start hanging out with Ben Shapiro, and suck back the Scaife dollars. TransProg was silly and funny, but this is the end. It's beneath contempt.

You know, it's kind of funny... every time I think the Bush administration can't sink any lower, they pull out something like this. Picking and choosing scientists to suit their pre-determined views isn't particularly surprising on the part of the administration that dismissed an EPA report as "just something from the bureaucracy", but this goes beyond simple bias to almost, well, post-modernism.

Yeah, Bush being PoMo seems a little weird. Think about it, though. How else could you describe the actions of someone who decides that they don't like the truth they've been presented with and go shopping for a different one? The only way that's even possible and remotely justifiable is if one believes that there is no ultimate truth that can be found, and that sounds pretty damned PoMo to me. If it were that the committees and scientists in question were accused of bias that'd be different, but that simply isn't the case, and the ones that are being brought out are by no means demonstrably more fair-minded.

Bush as PoMo. Who'da thunk it?

Paul Wright Responds.

He quotes me as saying:

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.

All true, although it's telling that he only quoted this one paragraph.

He then responded:

Which gets it off your chest, but doesn’t answer the questions:
So you want a Coalition? Then define your terms please. After all, this is your idea:
1. How many nations? A firm number please.
2. Which nations?
3. Why not the others?

Interesting. He neatly ignored everything but that one "coalition" issue, when the response (and the article it responded to) was about the role of the U.N. in general. Why use the reductive tactic of trying to bring up coalitions over and over again? It's especially odd when you consider that he attempted to accuse me of the same thing by ignoring a ridiculous ending paragraph about supposed U.N. racism- a passage I omitted out of a sense of good taste and no small amount of empathetic embarrassment.

Still, responses in order:

1)Firm numbers are impossible- it depends on the severity of the action, the region, the countries involved... it varies from situation to situation.

2) Usually it would be a good idea to have the security council members either onboard or abstaining as they represent Great Power nations (in the case of Russia, the U.S., and China) or general regional interest (France and England). Obviously you'd want at least some regional governments onside, as they'll have to deal with the fallout of your actions most directly. The support of regional powers will make the job a lot easier as well, although it's not necessarily required. Finally, you'd want some sort of consensus in world public opinion (or at least elite opinion)... it wouldn't have to be ironclad, but it should be strong enough that the country in question couldn't be accused of unilateralism.

3.) Why not indeed? Again, it depends... some countries (like China) are hardliners on national sovereignty, so you'll never get them to agree to any sort of domestic intervention, but they'd likely abstain. Some regional powers may either publicly oppose the coalition or at least stay away from it due to their own political and strategic interests; that's to be expected. (They might back it, quietly, so as not to inflame domestic opposition). And world opinion rarely reaches an absolute consensus; there will probably always be those who oppose a particular action for one reason or another. It isn't something that can be quantified; politics is as much an art as a science, after all.

Then again, to a large extent the U.N. can and does fulfill these roles; it's a pity that Mr. Wright seems unable or unwilling to do the basic research required to understand what exactly the U.N. does and how it assists in the creation of a coalition as a diplomatic, agenda-setting, and multilateral body.

Finally, he asks what I'd consider a justifiable conflict, and asks for concise reasons. Sadly, as that's a topic that libraries of books have been written on, concise reasons are impossible for anybody who isn't satisfied with mouthing simplistic catchphrases and self-serving talking points. As blog entries are theoretically supposed to be short, I'll have to get back to him on that.

Found on Samizdata's Glossary:

Tranzi
noun. Derived from 'Transnational Progressive', a term popularised by John Fonte. Transnational Socialists. Not a term of endearment.

Bah. The proper word is TransProg, which summons up juuust about enough contempt for the entire concept to suit those of us who didn't self-interestedly buy into the concept of TransProg as a way of categorizing that which irks wingers.

(Interesting, though, that the new TransSoc variation shows people already slowly moving back to the pathetically obvious source of TransProg: the oft-demonized International Communism.)

Well, Iraq's offer to allow inspectors in appears to be catching the Bush administration flat footed, if this AP piece is accurate:

U.S. President George W. Bush said today the United Nations Security Council "must not be fooled" by Iraq's promise of unfettered weapons inspections. He told wavering world leaders to maintain pressure on President Saddam Hussein to disarm.

"You can't be fooled again," the president said as his administration sought to head off attempts by Saddam to rally support at the UN. Privately, Bush advisers said Saddam may be getting the upper hand in the public relations war.

Noting that Iraq has repeatedly made and broken similar pledges since the Gulf War, Bush said: "You've got to understand the nature of the regime we're dealing with. This is a man who has delayed, denied, deceived the world. For the sake of liberty and justice for all, the United Nations Security Council must act - must act in a way to hold this regime to account, must not be fooled, must be relevant to keep the peace."

The strong words came after Russia - a powerful veto-holding member of the Security Council - said a new resolution is unnecessary now that inspectors were welcomed back.

This was and is the achilles heel of the new Bush attempt to co-opt the U.N... the focus on enforcing existing security council resolutions and on WMDs can be neatly circumvented by Saddam simply saying "go ahead and bring them in". Indeed, I think that the Iraqi regime might actually be honest in their offer, because while Saddam is almost definitely intent on becoming a nuclear power, he knows that his regime is at stake here. By allowing the inspectors in, he renews the division between the U.S. (which has designs upon Iraq that only obliquely involve the WMD issue) and the U.N. (which is largely concerned with WMDs, and is hardly interested in granting the U.S. the control over world oil prices that control of Iraq would entail.) It's certainly in his own best interests.

This leaves the Bush administration in somewhat of a bind. Bush can't simply retract his reaching out to the U.N. without looking foolish, untrustworth, and erratic, so a successful return of U.N. inspectors to Iraq would preclude an invasion. Nor can he easily dismiss Iraq's latest gesture. Those lame accusations and protestations aside, there's no way that the French, Russians, or Chinese are going to dismiss Iraq's invitation of inspectors on a U.S. say-so. The best that the U.S. can hope for at this point is a new resolution- the U.N. endorsement of invasion and regime change is out of the question, unless Iraqi officials are far dumber than they've proven themselves to be up to this point.

What bothers me is that this was and is utterly predictable, and should have been anticipated well in advance by the administration. Far from being the masterstroke of politics that it has been characterized as by the media, it looks like Bush's Sept. 12 speech has just allowed Iraq an "out" that Bush can't readily deal with. Perhaps those cries of "brilliant maneuvering" were a little hasty. Instead of finally realizing its ambitions, the administration looks to be hoist by its own petard.

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.

Courtesy of Atrios:

Media Whores Online discovered that:

CBS News has learned that barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq — even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.

..."Go massive," the notes quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

This was pretty obvious to everybody who wasn't swept up in the hype, but it still bears repeating: the cases for and against invading Iraq predated the War on Terror and are only dimly and remotely related to it. An invasion of Iraq is not just another theatre in the wider war- it is a seperate conflict, roped in for P.R. purposes. (Well, aside from all those "strategic" analyses that presume to use Iraq as some sort of base of operations for a war against Arabs.)

Does anybody else find it ironic that Andrew Sullivan is hyping the fact-checking abilities of the Blogosphere:

I love the fact that the self-important pooh-bahs at 43rd Street now have to worry that they'll be corrected on a daily basis by a bunch of former nobodies. Go, Instapundit. It helps defuse the self-serving pomposity of much of the journalistic clerisy

...when I doubt there's anybody outside of Ann Coulter who's been more thoroughly and consistently fact-checked right out of the ballpark than Sullivan himself? And for that matter, what the heck is an admitted self-promoter like Sullivan doing complaining about "self-important pooh-bahs"? Not that I'm one for forced humility, but people in stone houses shouldn't throw glassware and whatnot.

Then again, his statement that "I take less time, worry less about polish, and care less about the consequences on my blog" speaks volumes.

Edit: thanks to Marc Ramsey, who pointed out a nasty little mixup of mine.

Be warned- this is a long 'un.

Molly Ivans is pissed. Why? Well, I'll let her put it in her own terms:

Excuse me: I don't want to be tacky or anything, but hasn't it occurred to anyone in Washington that sending Vice President Dick Cheney out to champion an invasion of Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein is a "murderous dictator" is somewhere between bad taste and flaming hypocrisy?

This is the opening paragraph to an essay where she lays out precisely how and why Cheney profited from Saddam's regime and others like it- how his old company, Halliburton, made billions of dollars dealing with just the sort of dictator that he's attacking now that he's the infamous Saddam Hussein. Atrios wonders why nobody else had said it before; he has a good point, but I think it's besides the real point.

See, whether or not Dick Cheney made millions off brutal dictators isn't the issue, not really. It's an issue, and an important one, but it's not the issue. Right now he's more than just Dick Cheney- he's the spokesperson for the administration, and in some respects should be criticized in that respect. No, the important issue is, as always, "why Saddam"? As Ivans points out in the essay, Halliburton made billions of dollars not just from Saddam but from all manner of dictators just as evil as he is.

There's the rub. "Just as evil". Seems odd, doesn't it? This is Saddam Hussein we're talking about... he's supposed to be the reincarnation of Hitler, right? Gassing his own people and everything? Well, not really; I think anybody who sits down and studies his past behaviour would quickly notice that on comparison with any number of dictators, past and present, he's not actually that different. Although the right takes great pains to try to portray him differently, those who call him "just another tinpot dictator" are essentially right- there's little that seperates him from many other dictators, and compared to some, he's downright pleasant. (Mugabe easily comes to mind, but anybody who studies the history of African and South American dictatorships could probably come up with lots of others.)

See, there's been an excellent public relations job done on behalf of the United States government to demonize Saddam more so than any other dictator around the planet, it's been going on for a long time, and I personally believe it's one of the real reasons why invasion may be inevitable. What started it is simple- poppy had a war to fight. No, don't worry, I'm not about to pull out the whole "the Gulf War was all about oil" argument. The Gulf War was about a lot of things. It was about oil, yes, but it was also about national sovereignty, international stability, national security, middle eastern security, the reputation of the United States as a peacemaker (a role that Bush the Elder took seriously), and perhaps most importantly, the credibility of the United Nations as a body for resolving national disputes and organizing collective responses to unilateral attacks on one of its members by another of its members (or a non-member). Saddam did something Very Wrong, and he knew it, but he also thought that the U.S. would let him get away with it (thanks to the infamous contradictory signals he was getting at the time) and there was no way that was happening. Not where he was- not with Kuwait being what it is. Maybe if he lived in Africa it would be different, but he doesn't. The United States takes the middle east seriously.

Unfortunately, however, none of these particular justifications, as valid as they were, were really useful in convincing the U.S. to stay onside, and everybody and his dog remember that the last major conflict the U.S. public paid attention to, Vietnam, was a complete public relations disaster. One of the responses to that was the tight control over information that characterizes the U.S. military to this day, but one of the other responses was to make damned sure that the public was onside for this one. The fact that the Gulf War was probably not going to lead to heavy casualties outside of worst-case scenarios didn't matter. Generals famously always fight the last war, and the last war was Vietnam, a war that many believe was lost in the minds of the American public long before it was lost in the jungles of Vietnam. They had to make sure that people didn't sympathize with Iraq. So, they took Saddam Hussein, the dictator, and turned him into Saddam Hussein, the monster.

They did a fantastic job. (Who is "they"? Excellent question, and I won't presume to guess, although I had a friend who swore he knew somebody who worked at the P.R. firm who were the architects of the whole thing.) The news before the Gulf War was covered with stories of Iraqi atrocities, and carefully guided and shaped stories about Saddam Hussein that portrayed him as (as I said earlier) the worst dictator that the world had ever seen, basically the reincarnation of Adolph Hitler. The rhetoric was fierce and unrelenting, and soon became a vicious circle, with both politicians and journalists outdoing each other in digging up rumors, stories, and theories to make the man into the monster.

By and large, the public believed it. especially convincing was when they heard that he "gassed his own people"- an act hauntingly familiar of Hitler and his horrific factory-like gas chambers. What Saddam and Hitler did are hardly the same, of course, but they're still close enough to make the connection viable and plausible, so the connection can be made and on some level justified. (It's a tactic that Cheney, and others, deliberately exploit when they pull that out to demonstrate Saddam's supposed irrationality.) Not that Saddam's use of chemical weapons against the Kurds is in any way defensible, of course, yet neither is it unique- it's only the nature of the weapon that seperates it from the sort of "ethnic cleansing" and pacification that is probably going on somewhere as I write this. The choice of weapon does not make someone any more or less dead- the genocide in Rwanda was no less a genocide because it was due to machete-wielding Hutus hacking Tutsis (and suspected sympathizers) limb from limb, over and over and over and over, day after day, as others call on the radio to slaughter the Tutsi "cockroaches"...

(Did I mention that there's much worse out there than Saddam? I don't know whether it's relieving or disturbing that most westerners have little idea just how bad it can get, and how relatively benign Saddam really is. To this day, I have trouble thinking about the genocide in Rwanda.)

In any case, the problem is that they did their job too well. Bush the Elder's administration knew that trying to depose Saddam would be much more controversial both in the U.S. and around the world than kicking him out of Kuwait. Many thought it wasn't an issue. Nobody expected Saddam to retain power after the Gulf War, yet he remains, defiant as ever. Yes, he was an international pariah, and ruled over a broken, poor, and besieged country by a combination of the fear of secret police and sheer force of will, but he still remained. This was, of course, a major problem for Washington. Between the end of the Gulf War and the start of the War on Terrorism there was a definite thread of latent hostility between Iraq and the United States. Remember, the United States never stopped operating in Iraq; the whole reason the inspectors got pulled was because the U.S. was going to start Desert Fox and resume bombing Iraqi targets. Any given issue of the National Review featured some hawk arguing that Iraq needed to be "dealt with", using the same arguments we hear nowadays- Iraq will (somehow) build up a vast array of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, and (somehow) use them on the United States or its allies.

Of course, this line of argument, as old as the Gulf War, returned with a vengeance after 9/11. In most respects it's the same bloody thing we've heard for a decade now, but with a twist- Saddam's delivery system might be terrorists, and therefore getting Iraq is somehow part of the "War on Terrorism". The same hawks that were advocating the ouster of Saddam back then are either part of the administration or are closely listened-to advisors of the administration, and thanks to the War on Terror they're finally able to put their arguments into action- finally able to "get Saddam". It isn't new, of course; nothing about it is new. It's just hawks harnessing new fears to aid an old argument, nothing more.

The problem with this whole line of argument is that there's any number of dictators out there who could theoretically get ahold of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and who hate the United States. So why Saddam? Those of us who either didn't believe or didn't listen to the propaganda (for that is what it was) continue to ask that question, and with good justification. Despite Cheney's (and others') rhetoric, there are definitely worse than Saddam, and quite a few others who could theoretically develop NBC capabilities (or might even have them already) and who might theoretically use such weapons on the United States or its allies. Certainly Iran is higher on this list than Iraq, and I'd imagine that Syria, Egypt, and (possibly) Saudi Arabia would be more inclined as well. Saddam would be seriously foolish to even contemplate such a thing; he's suspect #1, watched like a hawk, is threatened from all sides, and has an uneasy relationship with theocratic Muslims that might turn his own weapons against him. So why him, as opposed to, say, Khaddafi?

If you think of him as "Saddam Hussein, the dictator", then it makes no sense, none at all. Even if he were irrational, he'd have to be near suicidal... not just suicidal, either, as it would endanger the carefully-groomed succession of his son, and his legacy as the leader of Iraq, something that he's obviously very, very interested in. It would mean that the United States would win the game he's playing, the game of survival. After all, as long as he stays in power it's a victory of a sort; the kind of victory that rankles those hawks who value U.S. preeminence over all else, but would hardly trouble anybody who understood the real interests of the U.S.

But. Look again. Look at him as "Saddam Hussein, the monster", the hideous mental creation of the Bush administration, born of the necessities of the Gulf War. Suddenly, it makes perfect sense. He isn't rational, isn't sensible, doesn't care about his own life, the lives of his family, or his precious power. He lives only to kill, to destroy, to (if he could) personally cut the throat of every westerner he sees. The Saddam of mythology is a madman, totally obsessed with the United States, and willing to do anything, sacrifice anything, if only he could kill just one more American. He gasses his own people, oppresses everyone around him, and leads a totalitarian state such as the world hasn't seen in decades. He is Cheney's "worst dictator in the world". He is Hitler reincarnate, with all that that implies, and cannot be predicted, trusted, understood, or bargained with any more than Hitler could have been. All attempts to do so are Chamberlain-like "appeasement" which, thanks to the obsessive focus on WWII by most Americans looking for historical comparisons to modern situations, are acts of almost transcendental cowardice, fear, and evil.

Unfortunately, outside of the United States this portrait of "Saddam as monster" never really took. Most see him as yet another dictator, but didn't really support him and hoped to see him gone. As I said, international pariah... at least up until the U.S. administration, emboldened by public support for the (somewhat unrelated) War on Terror/Islam/whatever and success (of a sort) in Afghanistan finally started talking invasion. When that happened, those who realized that really meant the end of national sovereignty as we know it started backing an unloved dictator whose ouster nonetheless represented something much bigger. Saddam was ignored- now, Russia is making deals with him, and country after country is lining up to publicly support his legitimacy. They don't see him the way Americans do- as this reincarnation of Hitler. They see him as what he is- a dictator, unremarkable (tragically) in his cruelty and desire for power, who invaded the wrong country and pissed off the wrong hyperpower. They wonder who'll be next.

They wonder if it might be them.

Seeing The Forest is fuming about the "big lie" techniques used by the right in this faux-debate over those supposedly anti-American NEA study guides.

What get's me is that Mona Charen knows that the NEA didn't do what she's writing. She is lying, and knows it, and is getting paid well to repeat these lies because the end result is people believing bad things about the NEA, and "liberals." And all the others participating in this lie, like George Will and Ollie North and Rush Limbaugh and all the rest of this crowd. It is a lie. They know it is a lie. They are repeating it because focus groups have shown that this particular lie will stir up the public in certain lasting ways, and if they keep circulating lies like this the public becomes more inclined to vote Republicans into power so they can give big tax breaks and defense contracts to their cronies. And, of course, pay Mona Caren and the rest of them lots of money.

We know how this works. (Read "Blinded By the Right." This is from the guy that started the whole "Clinton Scandals" lie. He talks about how they do it, how much they're paid, and the people doing it. People like Ted Olson, rewarded by Bush with the job of Solicitor General of the United States.) We know that they circulate lies to achieve their political goals...

...How long can this character assassination/lie machine go on before enough of us are telling the rest of us what it is, making it ineffective? It worked on Carter and got Reagan elected. It kept Clinton from accomplishing very much. It got Bush elected. It threatens to take us into perpetual war now.

Well put, but I think that the author of the site, "Issuesguy", should remember that it's only some of these people who actually know that it's a lie; once the ball gets rolling, it can be considered truth (or "true enough") and therefore worth repeating. Someone like Will, or North, or Limbaugh might actually think that these charges are true, and are already predisposed to dismiss any attempts to debunk them as the actions of the hated liberals.

In fact, if I was going to lay a finger on the biggest problem of the "big lie", it's the latter aspect- the deliberate attempts to invalidate and discredit those who disagree. After all, any statement made publicly can be rebutted publicly, but the whole point of the thing is to sway the public... and how can the public be able to properly evaluate any argument if they've been conditioned to distrust the source? The problem isn't any single lie, or spin, or bias, or whatever. The problem is the attempts by people like Coulter and Hannity to preemptively discredit anybody who disagrees, using weak logic, base namecalling, and ludicrous strawmen.

It's not like the Blogosphere isn't prey to it either. Just look at the rabid, hateful, foaming rhetoric aimed at so-called "idiotarians" and ask yourselves what the purpose of that could possibly be. Is it to forward an argument? To advocate a position? Hardly. It's to discredit the opposition, so that readers will never give a fair reading to a dissenting voice. It's an attempt to win the argument before it begins... to use Sun Tsu-like tactics to ensure that battle is won before a sword is ever drawn from its scabbard.

IssuesGuy, if you want to change the way that people debate, the first and most important step is to deal with the ridiculous, hateful, and sickening rhetoric aimed at the left, the kind that neo-conservatives specialize in and that the left (both moderate and radical) has ignored and explained away for far too long. And yes, that includes people who, like Kaus, attempt to gain centrist cred by mocking those to the left of them, the worst scourge that both liberals and social democrats have facing them right now. Once people start treating liberal arguments fairly, rebutting the lies will take care of itself.