Blissful Knowledge

2002-10-18T14:24:00.000-04:00

WORLD SERIES PREDICTION: I predict it will be won by the first team to win four games.
(Well, after the All-Star Game, you never know...)
Seriously, the teams look pretty evenly matched to me.

Points in the Angels' favor:
Slightly better bullpen, including the "K-Rod" (and I love that nickname) X-factor
A manager who's learned from his one postseason boneheaded in-game move
Home-field for seventh game
Lineup prone to unstoppable phases

Points in the Giants' favor:
Bonds
Slightly more reliable starting pitching
A manager who looked great compared to his NLCS counterpart
My brother's in-laws as fans

Both teams have been clicking on all cylinders and strike me as exceptionally solid from 1-25 on the roster, as opposed to relying on front-line talent as the Yankees did in their recent run.
Because I must make a pick, it'll be Angels in 7.
Check out Rob Neyer and Derek Zumsteg for some good analysis of why the
Angels should pitch to Bonds more often than not.

2002-10-18T00:25:00.000-04:00

MORE NORTH KOREAN FORESIGHT: Andrew Sullivan cites a Charles Krauthammer column from 1994 on the accord with North Korea:

(1) The NPT is dead. North Korea broke it and got a huge payoff from the United States not for returning to it but for pretending to. Its nuclear program proceeds unmolested. In Tehran and Tripoli and Baghdad the message is received: Nonproliferation means nothing. (2) The IAEA, if it goes along with this sham, is corrupted beyond redemption. It is supposed to be an impartial referee blowing the whistle on proliferators. Yet if Washington does not want to hear the whistle, the IAEA can be bullied into silence. (3) American credibility - not very high after Clinton's about-faces in Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti - sinks to a new low. This is a president easily cowed and dangerously weak. Said one government official to the New York Times, "It's one of these cases where the administration was huffing and puffing and backed down." Better though, said another, than "falling on our own sword over phony principle." If nonproliferation, so earnestly trumpeted by this president, is a phony principle, then where do we look for this president's real principles? This administration would not recognize a foreign policy principle, phony or otherwise, if it tripped over one in the street. The State Department, mixing cravenness with cynicism, calls this capitulation "very good news." For Kim Il Sung, certainly. For us, the deal is worse than dangerous. It is shameful.

On the other hand, Sullivan also cites an interview Jim Lehrer conducted earlier this year with the hapless Wendy Sherman (the coordinator for North Korean policy in the Clinton administration, cited below). Regarding the inclusion of North Korea in Bush's "axis of evil" formulation, Ms. Sherman said:

It was very understandable as a rhetorical device to rally the American people to cause against terrorism and to the cause against weapons of mass destruction, which none of us want. What I think was wrong about it in terms of North Korea is North Korea has negotiated successfully with us. We have a 1994 framework agreement that stops the production of fissile material, which is the plutonium, the kind of plutonium needed to build nuclear weapons. They agreed to that framework agreement. They have principally kept to that agreement and taken the steps that were necessary for it to take. It's not finished yet. We still have a ways to go, but they do and can follow through. We need to hold them to it. Our agreements have to be verifiable. They need to be tough but it can be done.

Read that again - "They have principally kept to that agreement and taken the steps that were necessary for it to take." I have nothing to add.

2002-10-17T20:56:00.000-04:00

WORLD SERIES PREDICTION: Coming tomorrow. I need to think a little more.

2002-10-17T20:50:00.000-04:00

GIVING BLAME WHERE BLAME IS DUE: Via InstaPundit, James Lileks has it all figured out regarding the Bali bombing. I especially liked this bit:

[I]n retrospect, Indonesia looks quite wise. If they had bowed to U.S. pressure, al-Qaida would think they'd joined Bush's mad crusade. Now they have a chance -- a precious, rare chance -- to show that wiser heads know best what to do: nothing. But we're not counseling rash inaction -- no, Indonesia must proceed with care, consulting friends and neighbors, before deciding which form their inaction should take. (After a suitable debate, that is.)

You think that's funny? Read the last sentence in this New York Times article, quoting Wendy Sherman, the Clinton administration's North Korea policy coordinator (time for Ms. Sherman to edit that part of her resume):

"One has to be careful, or you may end up in a circumstance that could be more precarious than you began with," Ms. Sherman said. "The administration ought to be multilateral, deliberative and very thoughtful about how we proceed here, because it is serious."

Life imitates Lileks...

2002-10-17T20:25:00.000-04:00

MEDIA MANIPULATION 101: Franklin Foer has a tremendous piece in the New Republic about how Iraq manipulates its coverage by the international media. Here is the first paragraph, with its unbelievable conclusion:

If the bombs begin falling on Baghdad, a broad swath of the TV-viewing world will quickly become intimate with Jane Arraf, CNN's Iraq correspondent for the past four years. Arraf files her reports from the third-floor landing of a blocky white building a few hundred meters from the Tigris River, with the ancient city's minaret-filled panorama behind her. CNN shares the building with the BBC, Associated Press, Reuters, and the handful of other news organizations that have a permanent presence in Baghdad. But there's an uncomfortable fact about this building to which these tenants don't often call attention: It's the Iraqi Ministry of Information.

Read the entire piece; it's very chilling.
I strongly believe that after the U.S. overthrows Saddam, there will be a tremendous unwillingess amongst leftists to admit that they were ever opposed to the U.S.' actions.

2002-10-17T20:20:00.000-04:00

TWO-SCORE YEARS AGO: Rob Neyer hs a fascinating piece on how the Angels' and Giants' peaks may each have come in 1962. (Presumably, he's only referring to the period after the Giants moved to San Francisco; they won a number of World Championships in New York.)

2002-10-17T20:17:00.000-04:00

MORE ON RABIN: Ha-aretz discusses the question of "what if Rabin had lived?" The author quotes a Netanyahu ally, who observes:

Had Rabin lived, he said, he would "most likely" have lost the elections to Netanyahu, who had a big lead in the opinion polls - even before the wave of suicide bombings in March 1996. "The Labor Party would then most likely have replaced Rabin with Ehud Barak and history would have played out the way it has."
Elitzur said the claim by many on the left that "the world would have been fundamentally different" had Rabin not been killed, was an attempt by the supporters of the Oslo accords to explain away the great failure of the process which Rabin led. "But in the end I don't think history would have been different. Yigal Amir did not change Oslo. The failure of Oslo was not the result of Rabin's absence."

There is much truth in those observations. Netanyahu led Rabin by 22 points in January 1995 and by 23 points in April 1995. Rabin's assassination gave Shimon Peres, by contrast, a big lead in the polls. Having been in Israel at the time, I can attest to the fact tha there was never less opposition to the peace process than in the aftermath of Rabin's murder. What changed the picture was an orgy of bus-bombings by Hamas. (A reading of the list will show that there were a large number of such bombings when Rabin was alive, as well - a large contributing factor to his low poll numbers.)
More importantly, ascribing the failure of the peace process to Rabin's murder ignores the proximate cause of the war of the last two years: the refusal of the Palestinians to compromise on the demands which they entered the Oslo process, most notably the "right of return." That final phase of bargaining would have arrived regardless of whether Rabin had lived, and I haven't seen a good argument that Rabin would have made any difference in the Palestinians' refusal to cross that line.
It is a natural tendency to assume that the most dramatic events were the most pivotal events, as well. But that is not always the case.

2002-10-17T19:58:00.000-04:00

MORE ON NORTH KOREA: Lots of embarrassing things were written several years ago regarding the accord which has now been blown to bits (pun not intended, hopefully). TNR's blog has one. More excruciating is a NYT editorial unearthed by Jonah Goldberg, which I will reproduce in full.

Diplomacy with North Korea has scored a resounding triumph. Monday's draft agreement freezing and then dismantling North Korea's nuclear program should bring to an end two years of international anxiety and put to rest widespread fears that an unpredictable nation might provoke nuclear disaster.
The U.S. negotiator Robert Gallucci and his North Korean interlocutors have drawn up a detailed road map of reciprocal steps that both sides accepted despite deep mutual suspicion. In so doing they have defied impatient hawks and other skeptics who accused the Clinton Administration of gullibility and urged swifter, stronger action. The North has agreed first to freeze its nuclear program in return for U.S. diplomatic recognition and oil from Japan and other countries to meet its energy needs. Pyongyang will then begin to roll back that program as an American-led consortium replaces the North's nuclear reactors with two new ones that are much less able to be used for bomb-making. At that time, the North will also allow special inspections of its nuclear waste sites, which could help determine how much plutonium it had extracted from spent fuel in the past.
A last-minute snag, North Korea's refusal to resume its suspended talks with neighboring South Korea, was resolved to Seoul's satisfaction. If Washington and Pyongyang approve the agreement, and if the North fulfills its commitments, this negotiation could become a textbook case on how to curb the spread of nuclear arms.
Hawks, arguing that the North was simply stalling while it built more bombs, had called for economic sanctions or attacks on the North's nuclear installations. The Administration muted the war talk and pursued determined diplomacy.
Reassuring the North paid off in the end. Given the residual mistrust between the two sides, the U.S. will now sensibly provide more tangible reassurance. It is moving toward diplomatic recognition, in the form of an exchange of liaison offices, and economic cooperation, in the form of heavy fuel oil from others in the U.S.-led consortium and the start of construction of new nuclear reactors.
In return, the North will put its nuclear program in a deep freeze by not refueling its nuclear reactor, arranging temporary safe storage of the spent fuel rods removed from that reactor and sealing its reprocessing facility to prevent the extraction of plutonium from those fuel rods. Implementing the freeze and allowing it to be verified are important tests of the North's good faith.
Then, in elaborately choreographed stages detailed in a confidential note, nuclear dismantling will proceed step-by-step with reactor replacement. That gives both sides leverage against reneging. At the end of stage one, with construction of the first reactor well under way but before key nuclear components have been supplied, the North will allow special inspections of its nuclear waste sites.
In stage two, as construction proceeds on the two reactors, the North will gradually ship its 8,000 spent fuel rods abroad for reprocessing. In stage three, as the second replacement reactor nears completion, the North will dismantle all its bomb-making facilities, including its old graphite reactors and reprocessing plant.
Critics say the U.S. is in effect bribing North Korea to comply with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Yet Washington has previously provided inducements to others, including South Korea, to refrain from bomb-making. It has gotten the North to do a lot more than the treaty requires, like dismantle its nuclear installations.
From the start, the hawks' alternative to diplomacy was full of danger. Their solution -- economic sanctions and bombing runs -- might have disarmed North Korea, but only at the risk of war. President Clinton, former President Carter and Mr. Gallucci deserve warm praise for charting a less costly and more successful course.

Those "hawks" look a little smarter now, don't they? At least Josh Marshall has enough intellectual integrity to admit that on many of the big foreign-policy questions over the last couple of decades, the "hawks" were right.
This John McCain quote cited by Rod Dreher holds up a little better:

On at least eight previous occasions, North Korea has lied to the Clinton Administration. With this agreement, Administration officials have willingly acquiesced in Pyongyang's almost certain further deception. Yet again, the Administration has mistaken resolving the North Korean nuclear crisis with merely postponing its apogee.
...I suspect that the Administration's willlingness to delay the resolution of this crisis is premised on their presumption that the bankrupt North Korean economy will force the regime's collapse before they violate the agreement. Unfortunately, their economy may be salvaged during the interim period by the hallf a billion tons of oil they will receive annually, the opening of trade relations with the U.S., and greater trade with its Asian neighbors, which the agreement [provides for]. Thus, the Administration has accomplished the remarkable feat of allowing the North Koreans to have their carrot cake and eat it too.

2002-10-17T18:30:00.000-04:00

IN CASE LOU PINIELLA ISN'T AVAILABLE: You, too, can apply for the Mets' managerial opening by filling out this application.

2002-10-17T17:27:00.000-04:00

THIS SOUNDS LIKE A HOAX: But it's funny.

2002-10-17T14:17:00.000-04:00

WISE WORDS FROM THE ECONOMIST: Here are excerpts from this week's lead editorial:

Reasonable people can and do disagree about whether it is worth going to war to defang Iraq. But how has the balance of that argument changed in light of the unsurprising fact that the terrorists have struck again? Did thinking about Iraq lower America's guard in South-East Asia, or anywhere else? There is no jot of evidence for this. Since September 11th, the Americans have intensified their intelligence-gathering in every sphere. Just recently this has led to a spate of arrests of al-Qaeda suspects around the world. If there was a failure in Bali, it does not seem to have been a lack of American attention but Indonesia's failure to heed the timely warnings it received from both America and others.
None of this is to argue that the Bush administration has performed flawlessly. As in any war, there have been both tactical errors and strategic ones. A tactical error in Tora Bora enabled the al-Qaeda leadership to escape. The Economist submits that it was a strategic error to confine Afghanistan's international peacekeepers to Kabul; and to give Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's military dictator, a green light to undermine what was left of his country's parliamentary system. There is, furthermore, serious force in the argument that an American war against Iraq might turn more Muslims against America. The war against Islamic terrorism must in large part be a war for the hearts and minds of Muslims. That is uncontroversial. The hard question is how to win this part of the war.
Some of America's critics counsel a generalised flaccidity, in the style of Mrs Megawati: keep a low profile and do nothing at all that might stir up the hornets. Others compose a list of useful chores for the superpower to take on right away, the one common feature of which is that none of them is Iraq. Solve Palestine, solve Kashmir, end world poverty, turn Muslim leaders into democrats, make the lion lie down with the lamb. Curiously, it is assumed in the case of Iraq that American intervention is pre-ordained to be incompetent and that the looked-for benefit will be outweighed by the unintended consequences. Everywhere else, American omnipotence is taken for granted. Solve Palestine? A decade of intensive American peacemaking led by Bill Clinton failed, yet it is blithely assumed that America has now merely to brandish a magic wand or big enough stick to make Israel disgorge the occupied territories it has been choking on for decades.
Even in its present muscular mood, even with its present unchallenged power, an America that is asked to do the impossible, or which promises it, is bound to disappoint. Deliver us from evil, goes the cry from every point of the globe; just make sure not to stir up any hard feelings while you're about it.
This is an impossibility. America cannot fight al-Qaeda without offending the millions of Muslims who persist in thinking that al-Qaeda has half a point. And though all the items on that list of chores matter, all require a long slog. The regional conflicts in Palestine and Kashmir are a thicket of thorns. Democracy? America can preach and nudge, but cannot at a stroke impose pluralist values on all the countries where people are denied them. In the meantime, one of the weapons America must deploy against al-Qaeda is traditional statecraft, which often entails opportunistic alliances with the sort of regimes—in Egypt, Kazakhstan, Pakistan—Americans would not choose to be governed by themselves. There may be ways to assuage some Muslim “grievances” without tipping into appeasement. But do not expect too much. The chain of causation that is said to lead from Palestine to the decision of a terrorist to murder young partygoers in Bali is not going to be easy to interrupt by making an adjustment in diplomacy.
Above all, America must not let the things which it cannot do right away stop it from doing the things that it must do right away. In the view of this newspaper, one of those is preventing Mr Hussein, a proven sociopath, from acquiring an atomic or biological bomb, and so the ability to threaten or kill millions of people. It is possible, if the UN cannot do this peacefully, that the only way to stop him is by war. It may also be possible that such a war will further inflame Muslim opinion against the West (even though millions of Iraqis will doubtless rejoice in his removal). But all of these things were true last week, before a gang of terrorists killed hundreds of innocents in Bali. How perverse it would be if that crime were to distract the world from an action that could yet save millions.

Read the whole thing.

2002-10-17T11:32:00.000-04:00

A REVIVED KOREAN CONFLICT: A couple of thoughts:
1) How ironic - and predictable - is it that not long after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, one of Jimmy Carter's signature accomplishments - the 1994 accord with North Korea - has been publicly revealed as a fraud? Geitner Simmons has more in a wide-ranging post.
2) Andrew Sullivan is right. I'm not sure that the Clinton administration had a better option, but the effect is the same; a foreign policy turns out to have been a short-term palliative at best, with the Bush administration left to clean up the mess.

2002-10-17T10:11:00.000-04:00

IN HIS MEMORY: Today is the seventh anniversary under the Hebrew calendar of the murder of Yitzhak Rabin. I mostly agree with thisthis Jerusalem Post editorial:

[W]e believe it is both idle and disreputable to speculate what Rabin would have done had he lived. At the very least, his memory should rise above partisan squabble.
...What is inarguable is that Rabin's legacy goes beyond the potentialities, illusions, and mistakes of Oslo. It goes, rather, to his participation in the 1941 Palmah raid into Syria; his role in freeing 200 illegal immigrants at the Atlit detention camp in 1945; his role in opening the road to besieged Jerusalem in 1948; his historic tenure as chief of staff in 1967; his distinguished ambassadorship to the US; his first turn as prime minister, during which the successful raid in Entebbe was carried out in 1976; the peace he signed with Jordan in 1994. As much as Oslo, all of these heroic chapters in Israel's history are a part of Rabin's legacy, and they must not be forgotten.
What is also fairly clear is that Rabin thought of himself, above all, as a champion of Israel, and that everything he did, Oslo perhaps above all, followed from that self-conception. This is very different from being, as Peres seems to be today, a disinterested advocate of "peace" or some other supranational interest. It means making loyalty to the Jewish people in their homeland the supreme criterion, which at times might entail striking peace treaties, at other times going to war, but never putting a mere idea ahead of the flesh and blood of a single Jew.
After Rabin's assassination, as Palestinian terrorism mounted, Rabin's epigones in Labor spoke of "making sacrifices for peace," even as those sacrifices entailed hundreds of Jewish dead. But blood sacrifices for "peace" was a logic alien to Rabin. To him, ideas existed in the service of men, not the other way around.
In coming years, as hagiography gives way to history, it will be fitting for Israelis to examine Rabin's life and legacy in a colder, more sober light. And indeed, the record is far from spotless. As with other martyred statesmen, from Gandhi to Kennedy, the reality of the man never fits the storybook version, and Rabin will merit close scrutiny no less than the others. This also is to the good. And Rabin's ghost, as blunt and unpretentious in eternity as he was in life, will smile on approvingly.

2002-10-16T19:35:00.000-04:00

BACK TO BASEBALL: David Pinto, via STATS Inc., lists the top 10 finishers in each league in Bill James' "Win Shares."
A couple of notes on the leaders:
1) I'm surprised Alex Rodriguez and Miguel Tejada are so close; they were further apart under the short-form method of figuring Win Shares. Texas must have played as a really great hitters' park this year. I had thought that it would be a travesty to give Tejada the MVP over A-Rod; this indicates that they're closer than I thought.
2) One fascinating item in Bill James' book introducing Win Shares was a description of how often a team has the top two pitchers in the league. It happens surprisingly often, and occurred again this year in both leagues. But in the NL, Arizona had the top 3 pitchers in the league - which happens much less often.

2002-10-16T19:27:00.000-04:00

EVEN IN THE GUARDIAN.... Clive James argues that the bombing in Bali shows the foolishness of blaming the West for the terrorist attacks it suffers - an argument bordering on heresy at the Guardian. Here, he has some choie words regarding the war on terrorism and the Arab-Israeli conflict:

On Monday morning, the Independent carried an editorial headed: "Unless there is more justice in the world, Bali will be repeated." Towards the end of the editorial, it was explained that the chief injustice was "the failure of the US to use its influence to secure a fair settlement between Israelis and Palestinians." I count the editor of the Independent as a friend, so the main reason I hesitate to say that he is out to lunch on this issue is that I was out to dinner with him last night. But after hesitating, say it I must, and add a sharper criticism: that his editorial writer sounds like an unreconstructed Australian intellectual, one who can still believe, even after his prepared text was charred in the nightclub, that the militant fundamentalists are students of history.
But surely the reverse is true: they are students of the opposite of history, which is theocratic fanaticism. Especially, they are dedicated to knowing as little as possible about the history of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. A typical terrorist expert on the subject believes that Hitler had the right idea, that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a true story, and that the obliteration of the state of Israel is a religious requirement. In furthering that end, the sufferings of the Palestinians are instrumental, and thus better exacerbated than diminished. To the extent that they are concerned with the matter at all, the terrorists epitomise the extremist pressure that had been so sadly effective in ensuring the continued efforts of the Arab states to persuade the Palestinians against accepting any settlement, no matter how good, that recognises Israel's right to exist. But one is free to doubt by now - forced to doubt by now - that Palestine is the main concern.

2002-10-16T19:22:00.000-04:00

TWENTY QUESTIONS ABOUT THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN WAR: Barry Rubin plays the game and offers some answers.

2002-10-16T12:51:00.000-04:00

A "MEASLY, MOTH-EATEN NATION:" Steven Den Beste really dislikes France and its UN machinations regarding Iraq.

2002-10-15T22:59:00.000-04:00

FORGET "CROSSFIRE:" I want to see this talk show.

2002-10-15T18:36:00.000-04:00

ON HITLER IN HISTORY AND THE PRESENT: I agree with very little of what Michael Lind writes, but he has a fascinating piece in the Washington Post on Hitler analogies:

What is at issue here is a matter of moral intelligence, not just good taste or historical accuracy. This kind of casual and unreflecting use of the Hitler smear trivializes both Hitler and the radical evil of the Holocaust.
...The Holocaust cannot reasonably be assimilated to other historical events and trends. The mass death in Cambodia under the communist regime of Pol Pot was not an episode of "autogenocide" comparable to the Holocaust; most of the victims died of a famine caused by socialist agricultural policies, which produced the same result in Mao Zedong's China and Josef Stalin's Soviet Union. The mass executions of political opponents and "class enemies" in Cambodia and other communist states were monstrous crimes, but of a kind all too familiar from the history of dictatorships and revolutions. Nor was the ethnic cleansing of Albanian Kosovars by Serbia comparable to the Holocaust. While the Serbs carried out mass executions of military-age men and mass rapes of women, they aimed to deport, not kill, most of the Albanian population. The Nazis, by contrast, sought to extinguish entire categories of people.
Common sense is missing altogether when the plagues that decimated American Indian populations after their contact with Europeans are called a "Columbian holocaust." Conquerors and traders from Europe exploited and enslaved native Americans, but they cannot be held morally culpable for spreading Old World diseases by sneezing. If they could, then Americans suffering from AIDS and West Nile virus, diseases which spread from Africa, could be called victims of an African attempt at genocide in North America.

I agree, up to a point. Lind is correct to note the influence of early 20th-century theories of eugenics on the Nazis, but he argues:

Even if there had been no Jews in Germany or German-occupied Europe, there would have been a Holocaust of some kind -- the planned, putatively "scientific" extermination of so-called "dysgenic" groups. Stigmatized by pseudoscience as literal "subhumans," homosexuals, the mentally and physically handicapped, and ethnic minorities such as Jews and Gypsies could be exterminated like animals, using methods like those used in industrial agriculture -- the cattle car, the slaughterhouse and Zyklon B, an insecticide used against crop-destroying pests.

Perhaps, but (a) it would've been on a totally different scale, and (b) Lind fails to appreciate the centrality of anti-Semitism to the Nazis program. At most, the eugenics component provided a framework; the animating principle was anti-Semitism.
Lind concludes:

It follows from all this that there should be an absolute ban on Hitler analogies in every sphere of society and every form of partisan rhetoric. Hitler should not be revived in Baghdad, or the White House, or Denver, or the Maryland suburbs, or on the "Today" show. Hitler should be left in Hell, where he belongs.

Sounds good. But the arguments prove too much. Used intelligently (and I'll stipulate that it usually isn't, including most of the examples Lind cites), the Hitler example is: (a) a useful reminder that world-threatening evil does and can exist if we are not careful, and (b) provides a useful standard for inspiring action against lesser horrors. Not for lack of trying, Saddam may not equal the depravity of Hitler. But, as Quentin Tarantino, (of all people) might say, it's "not the same thing, [but] the same ballpark."
UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg has more on the subject.

2002-10-15T18:08:00.000-04:00

MORE ON GLENN REYNOLDS' HASHEMITE FANTASY: This Jerusalem Post article argues that the U.S. should revive the old "Jordanian option" of returning the West Bank to Jordan, and sweeten the deal for Jordan by giving it the lower two-thirds of Iraq. The remainder of Iraq would become an independent Kurdistan.
Without getting into many of the problems of that scenario (especially for Turkey, which would not want an independent Kurdistan on its border), I'll just say that the scenario is extremely unlikely; the Hashemites want more Palestinians in their territory, having learned the futility of trying to deal with Arafat back in 1970. I think it's more plausible that Jordan would be willing to give up some territory as part of a new Palestinian state, if that meant they'd be able to shed Palestinians along with the territory. The article is an audacious attempt to meet some real concerns (the viability of Jordan, the inability to trust the Palestinians with a state, but unlikely to actually occur. The writer himself indicates that the idea isn't presently being considered.

2002-10-15T17:51:00.000-04:00

PEANUT-FARMER PERSPECTIVE: VodkaPundit has an excellent summary of the record that warranted Jimmy Carter's Nobel Peace Prize. And Richard Cohen napalms the political considerations of the Nobel committee:

In their official announcement, the Norwegians -- the Peace Prize is the only one not awarded by the Swedish academy -- contrasted Carter's approach to the Iraq crisis to Bush's and then, as if no one got the point, its chairman, Gunnar Berge, told a reporter he was "unequivocally right" when he asked if the prize represented "a kick in the leg" to Bush. Unequivocally wrong! The kick was aimed a bit higher than that.
I have some questions for Berge. What if Bush is right on Iraq and Carter is wrong? What if the president's seemingly steadfast march to war mobilizes the rest of the world to finally do something about Saddam Hussein's concurrent march to acquire weapons of mass destruction? What if Bush actually gets the United Nations to enforce resolutions demanding that Iraq abide by the agreements it has signed? Who then will deserve the Peace Prize?
Or, to put it another way, what would you say, Mr. Berge, if the United States and its allies did nothing and Hussein got his hands on a nuclear weapon? What if he was then able to intimidate his neighbors or obliterate Israel, a nation where most of the population lives in two metropolitan areas? What would you say then, Mr. Berge?
In honoring Carter, the committee evoked the smugness of little powers -- the many nations whose role is to carp from the sidelines while America does the necessary business of protecting them from their own folly. In this regard, it will be a minor miracle if next year's prize does not go to French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who criticized the United States last week for its "simplistic vision of the war of good against evil."
"Young countries," Raffarin told the National Assembly, "have the tendency to underestimate the history of old countries." Oui! But old countries are sometimes world-weary and cynical, urging a "realism" that is sometimes a misnomer for the moral corruption they know so very well. I will take the idealism of the young any day.

2002-10-15T17:09:00.000-04:00

THE DEFINITIVE HIGH-SCHOOL YEARBOOK COMPANION: Bill Simmons has the last word on yearbook quotes.
UPDATE: The column proved so popular that Simmons added more.

2002-10-15T17:08:00.000-04:00

THE HEIR TO THE ENGLISH MR. BLAIR: Check out Tim Blair's page for important coverage of the Bali bombing. It appears that the attack may have a similar impact in Australia as September 11 did on the U.S.

2002-10-15T16:38:00.000-04:00

THE FBI NEEDS ALL THE HELP IT CAN GET: Jim Henley is one of the best places to go for news & commentary on the D.C.-area sniper. He has two plausible suggestions to help identify the killer; click here and here to read them.

2002-10-15T16:33:00.000-04:00

MOTHER'S MILK: If you want to read a truly heartwarming story, click here. (Via Iain Murray.)

2002-10-11T16:06:00.000-04:00

FORGET THE CONGRESSIONAL RESOLUTION; WE'RE DEFINITELY GOING TO WAR NOW: Apparently the President has Oprah Winfrey on his side regarding war with Iraq. That may be Bush's most impressive political achievement. I may just become a fan of hers.

2002-10-11T15:55:00.000-04:00

THE THREE KINGS PRINCIPLE: I saw the movie Three Kings when it was released to rapturous reviews in 1999. It was a very good movie (albeit not quite as great as some of the reviews made it sound, in my opinion). There was one particular disconnect between the reviews I'd read and the actual movie. It had been billed as an antiwar movie, and David Russell certainly had nothing good to say about the Gulf War. The most specific criticism made by the movie, though, was that the U.S. should have supported the rebels after the official end of hostilities and not allowed Saddam's forces to massacre them. A very good critique. But the implication of the ostensibly antiwar film was that we stopped killing people too soon! It's a unique antiwar movie whose moral is that we didn't kill enough people. And if you put it to the director in those terms, he'd probably recoil. But that's what the message was.
I've been reminded of that inconsistency a lot lately. A while ago I linked to this post, which crudely and effectively made a point that I'd been noticing for a while: that critics of American foreign policy generally, and of the war on terrorism and/or Iraq specifically, often make arguments whose logical implications are exactly the opposite of what they intend.
A good example of this phenomenon is the debate over what to do with Iraq after we've effected "regime change." Josh Marshall speaks for many administration skeptics when he argues:

Everyone who's thought this through believes that success will require a long-term committment of a robust and quite American peace-keeping force. The phrase peace-keeping really doesn't quite do it justice. What you're talking about is really an army of occupation and reconstruction -- more on the order of post-war Germany or Japan, than Bosnia or Kosovo. Ideally a substantial number of these troops would come from NATO and other well-situated Muslim countries. But a dominant US presence would be required to make the whole thing work.
Unfortunately, it is very difficult to suppose that the Bush administration has the stomach for an operation of such scope or duration. Very difficult.
This is a reasonable point, and the logical next step would be to agitate for a post-WWII-style occupaton and nation-building of Iraq after the war (and take credit for recent reports that the Bush administration is planning precisely that.) And, as reporters such as Bill Keller point out, it is Paul Wolfowitz and his fellow "velociraptors" who are the administration's foremost advocates for such an approach. Those people should be the greatest allies of advocates of nation-building such as Marshall.
Elsewhere, though, Marshall argues for deferring to Colin Powell's judgment in planning for war in Iraq:

Getting rid of Saddam really is necessary. But it has to be done right. So, Mr. President, when the time comes for you to make a decision about Iraq, talk with Paul Wolfowitz and let him tell you what the goal should be. Escort him to the door and lock it behind you. Then sit down for a serious talk with Colin Powell.

(The article doesn't say anything about briging Wolfowitz back into the room for postwar planning. Perhaps it was cut for space reasons.)
There's only one problem. The "nation-building" advocated by Marshall, among others, violates several of the rules in the "Powell Doctrine." Within the group of senior administration officials, Powell is as unenthusiastic as anyone else about undertaking the effort Marshall calls for. Ask Bill Keller:

This is a notion regarded with deep skepticism at the State Department, where Powell and others tend to see the aftermath of an invasion as a long, world-class headache administered by an American general. Not only within the State Department but elsewhere where foreign policy is discussed and formulated -- including the Capitol Hill offices of leading senators of both parties -- there reigns the view that Iraqi democracy is a utopian fantasy, that the country will fragment like a grenade into ethnic enclaves, that American garrisons will be targets for an eruption of Arab fury, that oil supplies will be endangered, that Americans lack the patience and generosity to midwife a free and pro-Western Iraq.

Marshall's beliefs about what to do in Iraq and his distaste for Richard Perle & Co. are pulling him in opposite directions.

2002-10-11T12:10:00.000-04:00

THE APPROVAL: Congress has approved the resolution giving the President to go to war with Iraq. Here's the text of the resolution. Click here to see how your Representative voted and here to see your Senators' votes.
UPDATE: Steven Den Beste notes:

We will now observe one of those marvelous paradoxes which keep appearing in politics. Since Bush won't require UN authorization for war, he'll get it. If the bill which passed Congress had included a requirement for UN authorization, it would not have happened. Isn't political logic grand?
...[It] will be evident to the members of the Security Council that the train is going to leave the station, and they can be on it or under it. With an authorization for war not requiring UN approval in his pocket, Bush will be far less subject to attempts at extortion by the veto powers, and they will recognize that refusing authorization will only harm the UN without any commensurate benefit. UN approval will still be useful, and Bush will be willing to pay a small price to get it, but he doesn't require it and he is in a good position to negotiate.
But if Congress had required Bush to obtain UN approval, then the veto powers in the Security Council would have had him up a tree, and would have attempted to extort huge concessions in exchange for their votes.
...In another of those marvelous political paradoxes, you're now going to see a lot more cooperation internationally. Denunciations will become rare and quiet, and offers of assistance and progressively more vocal support will appear. This is a critical political event for another reason: it will deflate those around the world, especially in Europe, who had still entertained the conceit that we actually cared what they said and that they could still influence the course of events by lecturing us. By its act of ignoring international criticism and obstruction today, Congress will actually encourage more international cooperation and less criticism and obstruction.
Because there is no requirement for a coalition, there's going to be one.

2002-10-11T12:03:00.000-04:00

THIS AUTHOR MUST HAVE BEEN A NEW YAWKER: This assessment of Frank Lautenberg is one of the best New Jersey disses I've seen:

Lautenberg, despite his grandfatherly reputation, is scrappy, sometimes mean, unpopular, occasionally nasty, and insecure. In short, he's New Jersey.
...As a legislator, Lautenberg became known for two things: nursing New Jersey with the bottle of federal largesse, and making sure the rest of America didn't stay out past curfew. He pushed laws that banned smoking on domestic airline flights, raised the national drinking age to 21, and nationalized legal intoxication for drunken driving at .08 blood-alcohol content. His instincts are reliably liberal—he's willing to federalize anything, he's liked by the Sierra Club, and he's loathed by the National Rifle Association. A 1996 amendment to the 1968 Gun Control Act bears his name: The Lautenberg Amendment prohibits anyone convicted of domestic violence, even a misdemeanor, from owning a gun. For that, the NRA dubbed him "an unprecedented danger to civil liberties."
Fortunately for Lautenberg, and unfortunately for his opponent, Doug Forrester, that's the kind of talk that gets you elected in New Jersey.

2002-10-10T18:53:00.000-04:00

THINGS TO GUARD AGAINST: Kevin Drum has an outstanding parody of what bloggers can sound like when they try a "Fisking." (Link via TAPPED.)

2002-10-10T18:09:00.000-04:00

NOW THIS IS A TAX CUT THAT EVEN DEMOCRATS SHOULD SUPPORT: Tony Woodlief discusses the "Incompetence Tax" we all pay every day.

2002-10-10T14:35:00.000-04:00

THE TAXONOMIST: In honor of the impending Congressional approval of the invasion of Iraq, check out this Mark Steyn item which I forgot to blog until now:

War is hell for left-of-centre parties. The British Labor Party is bitterly divided between those in favour of war with Iraq and those opposed to it. In the U.S. Democratic Party, meanwhile, it's even more complicated:
Faction A (the David Bonior option) is openly anti-war despite the party's best efforts to turn off their microphones. (Congressman Bonior appeared on TV live from Baghdad yesterday.)
Faction B (the Paul Wellstone option) is also anti-war but trying hard not to have to say so between now and election day in November.
Faction C (the Al Gore option) was pro-war when it was Bill Clinton in charge but anti-war now there's a Republican rallying the troops.
Faction D (the Hillary Rodham option) can go either way but remains huffily insistent that to ask them to express an opinion would be to "politicize" the war.
Faction E (the John Kerry option) can't quite figure which position alienates least of their supporters and so articulates a whole all-you-can-eat salad bar of conflicting positions and then, in a weird post-modern touch, ostentatiously agonizes over the "inherent risks" in each of them.
Faction F (the Jay Rockefeller option) thinks the priority right now should be to sit around holding inquiries into why the government ignored what it knew about al-Qaeda until they killed thousands of Americans. To Senator Rockefeller, it's vital that we now ignore what we know about Saddam so that we can get on with the important work of investigating the stuff we ignored last time round.
I may have missed a couple of dozen other factions. But, taken as a whole, the Democrats' current positions on Iraq form the all-time record multiple-contortionist pretzel display.

2002-10-10T13:51:00.000-04:00

MARITAL DISCORD IN THE EU: Andrew Stuttaford has an interesting observation in The Corner.

2002-10-10T13:50:00.000-04:00

IRAQ EDITORIAL ROUND-UP: In the New Republic, Jonathan Chait exhorts liberals to get over their hatred of President Bush and support the war (which is very credible, considering the source):

As American liberals contemplate the current president's proposed war with Iraq, it's worth pondering his predecessor's logic. For if you accept Clinton's reasoning--and few liberals objected at the time--you can hardly help but resolve that we must eliminate Iraq's nonconventional arsenal by any means at our disposal, including, if all else fails, war. Two things have changed since Clinton's comments: First, in late 1998 Saddam effectively shut down U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq, breaking the back of the already ailing inspections regime and granting himself four largely unfettered years in which to continue developing weapons of mass destruction; and second, in early 2001 Clinton was replaced in office by a Republican. The first of these points unquestionably strengthens the case for war: Saddam has provided strong evidence that he will not allow anything to deter him from pursuing weapons of mass destruction.
But many of my fellow liberals appear driven more by the second point. When asked about war, they typically offer the following propositions: President Bush has cynically timed the debate to bolster Republican chances in the November elections, he has pursued his Iraq policy with an arrogant disregard for the views of Congress and the public, and his rationales for military action have been contradictory and in some cases false. I happen to believe all these criticisms are true (although the first is hard to prove) and that they add more evidence to what is already a damning indictment of the Bush presidency. But these are objections to the way Bush has carried out his Iraq policy rather than to the policy itself. (If Bush were to employ such dishonest tactics on behalf of, say, universal health care, that wouldn't make the policy a bad idea.) Ultimately the central question is: Does war with Iraq promote liberal foreign policy principles? The answer is yes, it does.
...Deluded by the hope that they can have multilateralism and disarmament without the risk of war, liberals have concentrated their intellectual energies on the slim possibility that the United Nations will approve an airtight inspections system and that Saddam will submit to it. If that happens, they would not support a unilateral Bush war. And for that matter, neither would I. But the chance of that happening is small. We have eleven years of accumulated evidence suggesting that the United Nations will not approve loophole-free inspections and that even if it does, Saddam will defy it once more. Which is why it's strange to find so many liberals who consider themselves antiwar conceding that, if all else fails, they would support military action against Iraq. "All else" has failed for more than a decade. And barring a profound character reversal by Saddam, "all else" will likely fail again in the coming months. Just how many times are we supposed to go down this road before we realize our last resort may be our only option?

In the same issue, Robert Kaplan argues that Saddam is worse than Slobodan Milosevic, and that those who supported the interventions of the 90s on humanitarian grounds have no business objecting to the proposed invasion of Iraq:

Saddam is not just another dictator with whom we have to live. On a moral plane, even by the dismal standards of the Middle East, he is sui generis. The degree of repression is so severe in Iraq that whenever I would journey from Saddam's Iraq to Hafez al-Assad's Syria in the 1980s, it was like coming up for liberal humanist air. In Syria, despite the repression and the personality cult, you heard grumbling about the regime and could travel freely about the country, talking easily with people. Iraq was like the vast exercise yard of a penitentiary lit by high-wattage lamps, in the sense that nobody whispered a political complaint, and police permission was required to travel from one town to the next.
After I had my passport taken away from me for ten days by the Iraqi security police in 1986, an American diplomat in Baghdad told me that Iraq's was the most cowed population in the Arab world, and if the security services get it into their heads that you are suspicious, there is nothing anybody can do for you. Three years earlier, an American technician for Baghdad's Novotel hotel, Robert Spurling, had been taken away from his wife and daughters at Saddam International Airport and tortured for four months with electric shock, brass knuckles, and wooden bludgeons. His toes were crushed and his toenails ripped out. He was kept in solitary confinement on a starvation diet. Finally, American diplomats won his release. Multiply his story by thousands, and you will have an idea what Iraq is like to this day--at least, that is, until a Western leader has the gumption to stop it.
The only sensible comparisons with Saddam are Joseph Stalin, Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu, and Ethiopia's Communist tyrant Mengistu Haile Mariam, whose forced collectivization program in the '80s led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands in addition to the million or so who died of famine. Milosevic may be a war criminal, but his dictatorship was in many respects a subtle one that allowed for open power struggles and even for party politics and street protests. Milosevic did his share of political killing, but retaining his hold on power was often a matter of bribing and manipulating his political adversaries. Saddam only kills.
...Reagan's decision to deploy the nuclear missiles--a turning point in the cold war--could not by itself be defended by any universal morality, but it had a vast and profound moral result. The same will be true of an invasion of Iraq, just as it was of our invasion of Afghanistan. Make no mistake: This is a Reaganesque moment. For years intellectuals have pined for simple and consistent moral leadership on life-or-death foreign policy issues, leadership that does not cleverly parse words or twist and turn in the winds of politics and opinion polls for the sake of a tactical career advantage. Well, now they've got it. All of them, not just the neoconservatives, should support President George W. Bush's and Prime Minister Tony Blair's proposed humanitarian intervention in Iraq.

More notably, the Economist defends Israel against those who would equate its "defiance" of UN resolutions with that of Iraq. Of course, the article does not harp too heavily on the obvious points that Israel is neither run by a bloodthirsty dictator nor a pathological menace to its neighbors. But this is the Economist we're talking about here.) Perhaps they're trying to improve.

2002-10-10T13:41:00.000-04:00

HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE...Meryl Yourish enraged by items such as this Harvard Crimson article defending the anti-Israeli divestment movement at Harvard.

2002-10-10T13:03:00.000-04:00

SUGGESTIONS FOR A SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE SKIT: I wish that this poll of British writers was in fact a skit. It certainly reads like one. Unfortunately, I think it's serious. (Thanks to Diane E. for the link.)

2002-10-10T12:52:00.000-04:00

FEELING THE JOY: Michael Kinsley once wrote:

In the great philosophical dispute of our time—cable or satellite dish?—a big plus for the satellite is that it allows you to live out one of humanity's deepest fantasies: telling the cable company to go away.

Our apartment building has finally completed the installation of DirecTV. We had it installed on Monday. It doesn't even work perfectly yet, thanks to installers whose incompetence and non-responsiveness were worthy of a cable company. And the Yankees' early exit from the playoffs and the October date meant that the long-awaited availability of the YES Network wasn't too meaningful. (Although there are few experiences more surreal than watching the "Mike and the Mad Dog" talk show on TV.) But with all that, the joy of telling Cablevision to go away is something that every person should experience at least once in their lifetime.

2002-10-10T11:53:00.000-04:00

WOKE UP THIS MORNING, WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN: Apparently Tony Soprano got himself a blog.

2002-10-10T11:49:00.000-04:00

AS A NEW YORK TIMES READER, IT'S REFRESHING TO READ AN EDITORIAL THAT ACTUALLY MAKES SENSE: The Washington Post's lead editorial today mostly does so, as it advocates Congressional approval of the resolution giving the President the power to attack Iraq.

President Bush is correct in his assessment of the dangers in a world where Saddam Hussein is permitted, in long-standing defiance of United Nations demands, to assemble arsenals of chemical, biological and, in time, nuclear weapons. As even Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, a critic of administration policy, has acknowledged: "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein's regime is a serious danger, that he is a tyrant, and that his pursuit of lethal weapons of mass destruction cannot be tolerated. He must be disarmed." But we also believe that the congressional vote will be a step in a continuing diplomatic process, not a concluding declaration of war. As Mr. Bush said in his speech Monday evening, the course of U.S. policy is not yet set.
Both chambers of Congress this week have been conducting a serious and useful debate. Critics have emphasized risks that the administration had skated over and have urged an effort to build alliances, to which the administration had not always seemed committed. What the critics have not done is offer a cogent alternative policy. One could make a case that the risks of disarming Saddam Hussein outweigh the risks of living with his regime -- that he can be contained and deterred, that he will eventually die in his sleep or at an assassin's hand, that the unpredictability of war poses greater dangers than the threat of his regime. We would not be persuaded, but the argument is respectable; the dispute is a matter of judgment, with evidence carrying you only so far.
For the most part, though, the critics have not taken this tack. They have, rather, like Mr. Kennedy, acknowledged that Saddam Hussein is an unacceptable danger but then objected that Mr. Bush is responding too quickly or too aggressively. Or they have tried to have things more than one way, as in this statement from Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.): "Let there be no doubt or confusion as to where I stand: I will support a multilateral effort to disarm Iraq by force, if we have exhausted all other options. But I cannot -- and will not -- support a unilateral, U.S. war against Iraq unless the threat is imminent and no multilateral effort is possible." But if Saddam Hussein is dangerous now, he will grow only more so as he rearms without the restraint of international inspectors or meaningful trade sanctions. And if the threat is so great as to justify a war, can it really be safe not to act just because U.S. allies won't go along?

I agree with just about every word. The only possible slip-up in the editorial is the following:
In the end, much of the criticism can be understood as unease with the Bush administration's approach rather than disagreement with its assessment of Saddam Hussein.
That sentence glosses over the real reason - the Democrats' political difficulties with the issue; they fear getting killed with their base if they support the war and getting killed by the voters if they don't.

2002-10-10T00:09:00.000-04:00

THE GODDESS SPEAKS: Megan McArdle sums up her arguments in favor of war on Iraq.

2002-10-09T18:47:00.000-04:00

WELCOME BACK: VodkaPundit returns with a bang:

A very wise man once said that if we throw away our freedom, if we renounce our heritage, there can never be another America. Never again on this planet will the political, geographical, and philosophical stars align the way they did in 1776. There are no new continents to find, explore, settle, and to which to escape all the bloody history of the Old World. This is it – humanity’s one shot at a new creation.
But we might just blow it if Washington can’t protect it.
Be afraid of George W. Bush if you must. But your real fear should be your neighbors, if Bush fails us in this Terror War. We’re just one more attack away from trading a lot of freedom for a little security – and getting the neither that we deserve.
With al Qaeda hurt and scurrying, our biggest danger now lies in Iraq. Iran’s government is rotten fruit, ready to fall on its own. North Korea is starving. Saudi Arabia exists at our whim. Syria is hapless. Libya is like Italy under Mussolini – loud but mostly laughable. Pakistan is worrisome, but mostly to itself, not to us. Only Iraq has the combination of means and menace to threaten us directly.
A nuclear-armed Saddam doesn’t actually have to level Los Angeles or New York to put National Guardsmen on every street corner. He doesn’t actually have to spray us with smallpox to bring our economy to a halt. He doesn’t actually have to lob Sarin missiles into Israel to blow apart our foreign policy.
Saddam only has to demonstrate that he can. Then we become a very fearful people again, much worse than we were on September 12.
Part of what makes America special is our simple physical separation from the Old World. We have no Kaiser on our northern border, rattling his sword. Our southern flank is poor Mexico, not expansionist China. Enemy warships don’t patrol our coasts, threatening our lives and livelihoods. Those simple facts accord us much of our freedom. 9/11 showed that none of those facts count like they once did. So now we must either police our threats, or police-state ourselves.
Most civil libertarians fear what will happen to us if we attack Saddam. I fear what will happen if we don’t.

2002-10-09T17:10:00.000-04:00

ELECT THIS MAN TO CONGRESS: James Lileks expertly dissects those in Congress who consider alliances to be ends rather than means:

Would these people have supported the Vietnam war if the US had a pocketful of UN resolutions saying “go get ‘em, lads” and we had a multinational coalition spewing defoliants over the jungle canopy? Would they have cast a solemn YEA in favor of funding the Contras if the UN had passed a dozen resolutions condemning the Sandinistas, and sanctioned a multilateral force made up of armies from El Salvador and Guatemala? Sweet smoking jumped-up Judas on a Vespa, GIVE IT A REST! If the US cannot act without UN approval, then pass a resolution that gives command of the Armed Forces to Kofi Annan and start whistling “Hail to the Chiefs” when the Syrian delegation take their seats.
The more these people whine about the need for UN blessing, the more I wonder whether they wouldn’t vote yes to a UN-levied tax on American paychecks - why, our “go-it-alone” tax policy must be enflaming the world, to say nothing of our “go-it-alone” highway system. And of our “go-it-alone” Apollo program in the 60s, well, the less said the better. Did we get a permission slip to leave earth and plant a unilateral boot on the Moon’s virgin soil? I don’t remember.
...In either case: if any of my local Senators had bitched and moaned that the US was giving in to One-World Government and insisted that the US never work in concert with allies or coalitions, I would have thought they were flaming sacks of bat crap. These were instances that required remedies, and if the task fell to us - for whatever reason - the greater good that came our action outweighed any silly paranoia about the UN, and whether our participation in a coalition would lead to detention camps in South Dakota guarded by blue-hatted Dutchmen. Coalitions are fine, if they attend to the danger at hand. If they do not, then the entire idea of a “coalition” can be tossed out the window without a moment’s thought. It’s nice to have allies. But it’s not necessary. If you believe that coalitions are always necessary, then the worst thing about the JFK assassination wasn’t the president’s death, but the possibility that Lee Harvey Oswald was acting alone.
The Senators insisting on a coalition above all else are the left’s equivalent of the nutlog right-wing UN conspiracy crowd. The only difference is that Wellstone starts to worry if he doesn’t hear the black helicopters.

2002-10-09T16:56:00.000-04:00

ROSENBAUM GETS MUGGED BY REALITY: Many have linked to this already, but Ron Rosenbaum's account of how he has rejected leftism is the definition of a must-read. He reported from an anti-war protest in Central Park, and was not impressed. The article is too good to excerpt.

2002-10-09T16:53:00.000-04:00

BACK TO TRIVIAL THINGS: This item is very portentious; Hamas seems to have taken over the Gaza Strip:

Many senior Palestinian Authority security officials in the Gaza Strip have gone underground, fearing retaliatory attacks from Hamas activists following two days of clashes.
"Commanders of PA security forces are afraid to sleep in their homes," sources in the Gaza Strip said. "Many of them have stopped showing up at work."
..."Today the PA's power is effectively restricted to some neighborhoods in Gaza City," explained an academic living in Gaza's Sheikh Radwan neighborhood. "The fact that the colonel was kidnapped from this neighborhood is a slap in Arafat's face."
"Arafat has to face the fact that his forces have lost control over the majority of the Gaza Strip," said the Gaza academic. "The people here have more sympathy for Hamas and Islamic Jihad, because they believe they are their authentic representatives."
On Monday, a furious Arafat issued instructions to send 3,000 policemen to arrest suspects in the officer's murder at Nusseirat refugee camp. But only 400 policemen participated in the mission, which ended in failure after hundreds of civilians and Hamas gunmen blocked their way.
What makes matters even more complicated for Arafat is the fact that the killing took place shortly after 14 people were killed by the IDF in Khan Yunis.
Hamas leaders were quick to vow revenge against Israel. But, with the same breath, they also attacked the PA, accusing its top officials of helping Israel in its efforts to quell the intifada. Their veiled message to the Hamas gunmen is that the PA is also an enemy.

This may clear the way for more Israeli strikes in Gaza.

UPDATE: See James Bennet's piece for the New York Times for more. The "Arab Revolt" in the late 1930s ended in failure and spurred a near civil war of recriminations; it appears the current war started by the Palestinians is following the same pattern.

2002-10-09T16:48:00.000-04:00

MORE BASEBALL: A while ago, I discussed an assessment of Billy Beane written by James Surowiecki in The New Yorker.
I received the following e-mail from Mr. Surowiecki, from which he has permitted me to quote:

A couple of things: you're absolutely right that signing young players to long-term contracts has been key to the A's success. That point got left on the cutting-room floor because, well, I couldn't get it all into 950 words. I also think that that strategy isn't what's most distinctive about Beane's approach, since, as you point out, the Indians used it to such great effect in the 1990s.
On the question of how lucky the A's have been, though, I think the issue is more complicated than you make it sound. Schoenfield's historical analysis is interesting, but I think he in effect begs the question that he's trying to answer: namely, is Billy Beane's acumen the fundamental cause of Oakland's success. Schoenfield looks at history and effectively says, "No other team
has produced three homegrown star starters in a two-year span, and only the Braves did it in a three-year span. Therefore Beane must be lucky."
What if, though, Beane really is just better than anyone before him at drafting young pitchers, and what if the A's are better at developing pitchers and (very important) keeping them healthy? Then of course you'd expect him to have better results than anyone before him, precisely the way he does. Historical comparisons are useful, but by their very nature they can't tell us why things are different, only that they are.
I think there are some concrete reasons to think that Beane really is better, too. Take the most obvious fact about the three A's star starters: they were all college pitchers. Traditionally, baseball GMs have wasted draft picks on high school pitchers, when we know that very few high school pitchers -- and almost no right-handed high-school pitchers -- ever become stars. I don't
have the information, but I bet if you looked at the staffs of all the teams Schoenfield surveyed, a huge number of the pitchers were high-school pitchers. So it's not surprising that only a very low percentage of all the pitchers would be stars. Beane, by contrast, never wastes high draft picks on high-school pitchers, so he's got a big advantage right there.
The A's are also incredibly rigorous about pitch counts, not just for minor-league pitchers, but for their starters as well -- much more rigorous, maybe, than any team in history. You probably know this, but in the early part of the season the starters have much lower pitch counts than they do later in the season. That's crucial to keeping young pitchers healthy. And Rick Peterson, the A's pitching coach, is obsessive about mechanics, arm strength, and health. One of the reasons they kept Ted Lilly on the DL so
long after the Yankees' trade was to build up the strength of his back muscles. Again, all this increases the odds that Oakland would have successful starting pitching.
Finally, I think the A's general philosophy on pitching, which Beane and Peterson have inculcated through the whole organization, is a recipe for success: throw strikes, get groundballs, don't give up home runs, and don't worry too much about strikeouts. Again, this is far from conventional wisdom in baseball, especially when it comes to young pitchers. Hudson and Zito are great, but I don' t think they would be as great if they were pitching for a lot of teams in baseball. (Mulder probably would be.)
Anyway, sorry for going on like this. It's still very possible that Beane is lucky. But in this case, I think whatever luck he's had really is the residue of design, and he deserves credit for it.

I don't really disagree with Surowiecki's points. The one thing I'd stress is that it is far too early to determine whether Oakland's methods really constitute a better mousetrap in terms of developing pitchers, or if it's just a matter of three pitchers who've been lucky enough not to get hurt yet. Surowiecki is right that Oakland is doing just about everything that analysts recommend in terms of developing young pitching. But the actuarial statistics on pitchers are so gruesome that, even though it seems clear that Oakland is reducing its odds somewhat by its program (especially drafting college rather than high-school pitchers, for which there is copious evidence as to its lessening the chances of catastrophic injury), it's just way too early to say that the program yields better systematic results.
I draw on two particular points of caution:
1) The Atlanta Braves have a program where pitchers throw every day, rather than taking days off completely as most pitchers do. For much of the 1990s, the Braves had a deserved reputation for keeping their pitchers healthy. In 1999-2000, though, so many pitchers broke down at all levels of the organization that Baseball Prospectus joked in one of its books that the team was getting "bulk discounts on Tommy John surgeries."
2) The Seattle Mariners got religion a few years ago and, among other things, have gotten strict with pitch counts at all levels of the organization (including the big club) Perhaps as a result, they have started producing young pitching at a great rate. Two of their best prospects, Gil Meche and Ryan Anderson, have broken down in career-threatening fashion despite being handled very carefully. (Admittedly, they were both drafted out of high school.)

2002-10-09T14:28:00.000-04:00

SO WHAT NOW? The Yankees are at a pivotal stage. Their minor-league system has been very depleted due to a combination of Johnson and Rivera graduating to the majors, the failure of Marcus Thames and Drew Henson to progress, the Weaver trade and a few strategic injuries (most notably to Brandon Claussen). They need to get younger, especially in the pitching staff. Also, for the first time in a while, they're stuck with several bad contracts which they may find diffcult to get rid of due to the new collective bargaining agreement. Here's a preliminary mission statement. I'm not going to speculate on which players from other teams may be made available, with a few exceptions.
A - Pitching
1. Be stricter with pitch counts for all the starters. Under Torre, the Yankees' starters have (at least since about 1998) historically had the highest pitch counts in the league. That was partially due to the fact that they were the best in the league and thus didn't get knocked out early too often, but I think that they should be stricter so as to save pitches for the postseason. I can't find a link, but Thomas Boswell had a column in 2000 pointing to increased pitch counts early in the season for Mike Mussina as a reason for an early-season slump that year. Torre should look for opportunities to pull them early, and cut 10 pitches off the number he'd usually let them throw.
2. Don't commit big bucks for Roger Clemens. He's just not that good or physically reliable anymore, and already has $10.3 million coming to him from the Yankees due to the weird extension he signed a couple of years ago. If he wants much more than that, let him go.
3. Pick up Andy Pettite's option, assuming his elbow is OK. If so, open up talks on a reasonable extension. He's not a truly great pitcher (and his last few postseason starts should put the lie to any claims of his being a "big-game pitcher," but he's reliably above-average with the potential to have an outstanding season.
4. I know he has a no-trade, but I'd rather trade David Wells than El Duque. Wells was not nearly as good as his won-lost record would indicate, and I don't like his chances to have another big season. I think he will combust suddenly when the time comes.
5. Notwithstanding the above, I would trade El Duque if he can fetch good prospects. I doubt that he will, due to age and unreliability.
6. Make Sterling Hitchcock disappear. Please?
7. Notwithstanding the need for youth, I'd sign Greg Maddux if he can come at a reasonable price (and especially if money is cleared by numbers 2 and 6 above). I know he can't pitch too long in a game and has issues with the postseason, but he's still great, even if not as great as he once was. He'd be an improvement over Clemens, for example.
8. Only re-sign Mike Stanton if he'll come cheap.
9. Re-sign Ramiro Mendoza.
10. Look seriously at the Cuban defector, Jose Contreras, if he becomes a free agent. If he is good, he would represent improvement without having to give up players.
11. Play vulture: pluck the bones of franchises in chaos. The commissioner's office may not approve a vulture-like trade with Montreal, but look to Florida, a franchise with great young pitchers (if Jeff Torborg hasn't blown their arms out), clueless management and no money. A promising combination.
B - Lineup/Defense
1. Strongly consider moving Derek Jeter to third base. Seriously. Third base would utilize his strenghts (coming in on softly-hit ground balls, strong arm) while minimizing his serious weakness - very little range, especially to his left. I'm not sure who would replace him at short, though.
2. I have to see the final defensive numbers on Soriano before deciding whether his defense is so bad that he needs to be moved, but I know it's not good (especially on turning the double play). Have him work extensively on his defense (and plate discipline) in the off-season.
3. Sign Hideki Matsui. He's allegedly very good, and there are two more important reasons: 1) He wouldn;t cost players, and 2) since the Hideki Irabu misadventue a few years ago, the Yankees have essentially ceded the Pacific Rim to the Mariners and Dodgers. The Yankees cannot afford to write off an entire region and maintain their dominance. Signing Matsui can help, even if he's not quite as good as advertised. (See this Keith Olbermann piece for a description of how the signing might work in a luxury-tax-friendly manner.)
4. Continue to reduce the number of games Giambi plays at first base in favor of Nick Johnson.
5. Move Bernie Williams to left field; his Gold Glove days are far beyond him. If not other moves are made, Juan Rivera can probably play a better center than Bernie at this point.
6. Make Rondell White and Raul Mondesi disappear. Pretty please? (As an aside, isn't it amusing how many people who ripped the Yankees for making the move out of "gluttony" are now falling over themselves to point out how bad Mondesi is now? If so, weren't the Yankees doing the rest of baseball a favor?)

2002-10-08T22:49:00.000-04:00

IN MEMORIAM: It's hard to be too analytical about the Yankees' loss to Anaheim. When 9 out of 10 pitchers get absolutely shelled, there's not much else to say. The defense was bad, the pitching was awful, and the Angels played brilliantly.
It is silly to criticize the offense; it averaged six runs a game in the playoffs. It is doubly silly to say things like the following:

Under Torre's watch, the Yankees used to know how to stare down a rival pitcher, but this year the batters too often went out and took their hacks.

A few facts to consider in response to that assertion: In 2001, the Yankees drew 519 walks and had a .334 on-base percentage. In 2002, the Yankees who "went out and took their hacks" drew 640 alks and had a .354 on-base percentage.
The Yankees' revamped lineup played shoddy defense, but the players they replaced weren't much of an improvement at that stage of their careers (with the exception of Giambi v. Tino at 1B, and that wasn't what cost them the series. The Yankees' failings were elementary enough; there is no need to attibute them to other factors.

2002-10-08T22:37:00.000-04:00

WATERING THE SWAMP: This important item in Ha-aretz states that Saddam has transferred over $15 million to Palestinian families over the last two years, and trained many Palestinian terrorists:

Rakad Salim, the Secretary-General of the pro-Iraqi "Arab Liberation Front" organization in West Bank, who was arrested by Israel last week, told his interrogators that he had close connections with the Iraqi Ba'ath party.
According to the Shin Bet report, Salim said he met with Saddam Hussein two years ago, and that Saddam himself had decided to transfer funds to Palestinian families, as well as setting the various amounts of money.
The funds were then transferred through a branch of an Iraqi bank in Amman to a Jordanian bank in the city, and from there passed to a branch of the Jordanian bank in Ramallah, where the group had an account.
...The Shin Bet report states that Salim held regular meetings with representatives of Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in order to plan terror attacks. Furthermore, the Shin Bet said, Salim had served as political advisor to Yasser Arafat. He added that the PA was also involved in the transfer of funds.
The Shin Bet said that Palestinian ministers, mayors and members of the Palestinian Legislative Council took part in ceremonies to hand over the Iraqi money to the families of victims, including the relatives of suicide bombers.
...Over the past two years, the Shin Bet has arrested 16 Palestinians who underwent training in Iraqi military camps. Most of those were under the direction of Abu Abbas' Baghdad-based Palestinian Liberation Front. Sources in the security establishment said that Iraq has clear intentions of increasing its involvement in terror attacks in the territories.

This is one reason why people aren't crazy to suggest that an invasion of Iraq will help salve the Israeli-Palestinian war, rather than inflame it further.

2002-10-07T00:28:00.000-04:00

MORE IRAQ-NO-PHOBIA: Speaking of Jonah Goldberg, he has devoted two columns to summarizing and responding to the main arguments used by the opponents of war with Iraq. They are very good, and can be found here and here.

2002-10-07T00:25:00.000-04:00

MORE ARGUMENTS AGAINST AL GORE FROM HIS AMEN CORNER: Peter Beinart argues that a successful war in Iraq can help the war against terrorism rather than hurting it, as has been argued by Al Gore, among others.

State Department officials say no country has even privately threatened to cut off anti-terrorism cooperation over an Iraq war. In fact, the German government, fearful that its vocal antiwar stance makes it look like an unreliable ally, has actually increased its antiterrorism assistance--allowing an Al Qaeda suspect to be extradited from Pakistan to the U.S. even though Germany has legal jurisdiction and promising to expand its role in Afghan peacekeeping.
Germany is acting rationally. Few governments want to incur Washington's wrath, and those that oppose America's war against Saddam are unlikely to compound the diplomatic damage by simultaneously stiffing us on the war on terrorism. That's especially true because shared intelligence flows both ways, and governments in places like Russia, Egypt, and Pakistan are at least as threatened by Islamist terrorism as the United States. Some dovish commentators worry that even if those governments want to maintain cooperation, public opinion will force them to cut it off. But intelligence cooperation is almost by definition covert; virtually no government policy is less subject to public opinion. If Hosni Mubarak really feels pressure to throw Egypt's anti-American masses a bone in the wake of a U.S. invasion of Iraq, it's more likely he'll announce a boycott of U.S. products or publicly spurn a meeting with President Bush than stop his regime's clandestine cooperation with CIA personnel tracking Al Qaeda fanatics in Egypt.
The third way a war in Iraq could undermine the war on terrorism, according to Kennedy, is by "swell[ing] the ranks of Al Qaeda sympathizers and trigger[ing] an escalation in terrorist acts." But while Al Qaeda might be stronger during a war with Iraq, it would probably be weaker after one. Take the war in Afghanistan as a model. U.S. bombing sparked anti-American protests in much of the Muslim world. But once the U.S. toppled the Taliban, the protests diminished dramatically. For one thing, would-be Al Qaeda recruits saw the hopelessness of confronting American power. For another, they saw that the people of Kabul weren't on their side.
An American victory in Iraq would probably have a similar effect. Once we win--which pretty much everyone concedes we will--the anti-American protests will end. The image of the United States as a paper tiger, which animated Islamists in the 1990s, will be dealt another blow. And the image of the United States suffocating the Iraqi people through sanctions, long a staple of Al Qaeda propaganda, will likely be replaced by images of American GIs being welcomed as liberators. It's true that over time the euphoria might dissipate, and an American peacekeeping force in Iraq could generate Arab resentment. But with Saddam out of power, the United States might be able to withdraw its troops from another part of the Middle East: Saudi Arabia. And given that it is the presence of U.S. troops near Mecca and Medina that led bin Laden to turn against the United States in the first place, an American withdrawal from Saudi Arabia would probably do more to undermine Islamist recruiting than an American occupation of Iraq would do to fuel it.

I think Beinart is right. More generally, I think that the assumption that a war with Iraq will hurt the war on terrorism is usually exactly that - an assumption, with little evidence cited. As Jonah Goldberg points out:

Taking America's side in a war is a very public act; cooperating with America's law and intelligence services is a very private affair. The ability to publicly snub America on Iraq while privately earning America's gratitude in the war on terror may seem like a boon to many world leaders. Pakistan's Musharaf would probably leap at the opportunity to denounce a war on a Muslim country — with a wink and a nod from the U.S. — while quietly rounding up members of al Qaeda and currying favor with America. Indeed, this is pretty much what Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Indonesia, Russia, and France have been doing for most of the last year — denouncing American belligerence toward Iraq while cooperating fully with the U.S. in the fight against al Qaeda.
Sure, if the U.S. went to war with Iraq, some nations might stop cooperating in the fight against al Qaeda. But you can't simply assert that this is so. Because the counter-argument is at least as compelling.
As for the second leg of the argument, I just don't get it. The war on terrorism/al Qaeda is not an intensively military war, at least outside Afghanistan. The numbers of military troops dedicated to the fight against al Qaeda inside Afghanistan is between four and five thousand. Roughly the same number of troops are spread out throughout the rest of the region, as well as in places like Yemen. The current military was built up on the assumption that the United States might have to wage and win two full-blown wars simultaneously, i.e., fight North Korea and Iraq at the same time. Now that the Taliban has been deposed, the war on terrorism doesn't use many tanks, aircraft carriers, artillery batteries, etc. The idea that a war against Iraq would drain the war on terrorism is simply not true if you're talking about materiel and troops.
Now, it is likely that a war on Iraq would divert some special forces and intelligence assets from Afghanistan to the Persian Gulf. Fair enough. But do we really want to make the argument that we cannot go to war because a few hundred men are stretched thin? We have an active-duty military of about 1.4 million people, and you're telling me they might as well stay in the barracks if a subgroup smaller than a softball league is busy? And if it's a matter of too few spy drones and cruise missiles, the answer is pretty simple: Buy more.

2002-09-26T18:58:00.000-04:00

THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION OF OUR TIME, VOL. II: Having analyzed the comparison between "Cheers and Seinfeld," Bill Simmons now takes on an even tougher dilemma: Al Pacino v. Robert De Niro. According to him, he's thought about the issue all summer.

2002-09-26T13:34:00.000-04:00

WHY "WMD" IS A BAD ACRONYM: In other TNR news, Gregg Easterbrook argues that biological and chemical weapons should not be lumped together with nuclear weapons in the term "weapons of mass destruction;" as it is far harder to use the former to cause mass casualties than the latter.

2002-09-26T13:22:00.000-04:00

AIR-TRAFFIC CONTROLLERS ARE DIRECTING A SUDDEN INFLUX OF PIGS IN THE AIRSPACE, AND THE TEMPERATURE IN HELL JUST DIPPED BELOW 32 DEGREES FAHRENHEIT: The New Republic has published an editorial critical of Al Gore - specifically, regarding his speech on Iraq:

[T]he former vice president's speech almost perfectly encapsulated the evasions that have characterized the Democratic Party's response to President Bush's proposed war in Iraq. In typical Democratic style, Gore didn't say he opposed the war. In fact, he endorsed the goal of regime change--before presenting a series of qualifications that would likely make that goal impossible.
First, Gore said that war with Iraq would undermine America's primary mission: fighting terrorism. This mission, he explained, requires ongoing international cooperation. And he suggested that "our ability to secure this kind of cooperation can be severely damaged by unilateral action against Iraq. If the administration has reason to believe otherwise, it ought to share those reasons with the Congress." But surely Gore also has an obligation to share his reasons for believing that war with Iraq will "severely damage" the war on terrorism. The argument, after all, is not self-evident: Germany, the U.S. ally most vocally opposed to attacking Iraq, has simultaneously intensified its assistance in the war on terrorism--signaling that it will take over the international peacekeeping force in Afghanistan. In fact, Gore provides no evidence to support his claim. And thus he fails the very evidentiary standard that he calls on Bush to meet.
Gore's second complaint concerns the timing of the administration's push on Iraq. "President George H.W. Bush," Gore noted approvingly, "purposely waited until after the midterm elections of 1990 to push for a vote. ... President George W. Bush, by contrast, is pushing for a vote in this Congress immediately before the election." But as we argued two weeks ago, it is far better, in a democracy, for legislators to vote on critical issues before an election--so citizens know where they stand when they go to the polls--than to delay such votes until after an election and thus shield legislators from accountability for their views. Gore went on to pronounce "a burden on the shoulders of President Bush to dispel the doubts many have expressed about the role that politics might be playing in the calculations of some in the administration," before adding, "I have not raised those doubts, but many have." But, of course, that is exactly what Gore was doing. And he should have taken responsibility for raising those doubts himself.
Gore's final critique of the administration's preparations for war is that they are proceeding without sufficient regard to international opinion. "[I]n the immediate aftermath of September Eleventh," Gore said, "we had an enormous reservoir of goodwill and sympathy and shared resolve all over the world. That has been squandered in a year's time and replaced with great anxiety all around the world, not primarily about what the terrorist networks are going to do but about what we're going to do." But this ignores the fact that there is not now, nor will there likely be in the foreseeable future, broad international support for regime change in Baghdad. The two honest ways to resolve this problem are to privilege regime change above international consensus--while trying, as the Bush administration has, to pressure and cajole as many allies as possible to go along--or to forego regime change in the name of solidarity without our allies. Instead, Gore swore fealty to both regime change and international consensus, while refusing to acknowledge the conflict between the two. The closest he came was a suggestion that "if the [Security] Council will not provide such language [authorizing force], then other choices remain open." But would Gore support those "other choices," i.e., war? From his San Francisco speech, you wouldn't know.
...[H]is speech--which included, as a two-sentence aside, the charge that on the domestic front the administration was conducting an "attack on fundamental constitutional rights"--consisted of neither honest criticism nor honest opposition. Rather, it sounded like a political broadside against a president who Gore no doubt feels occupies a post that he himself deserves. But bitterness is not a policy position.

I guess Martin Peretz really isn't in charge of TNR anymore!
UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg has a better headline for this development.

2002-09-25T23:59:00.000-04:00

A CHILLING THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: The Armed Liberal has one regarding a hypothetical nuclear attack on America by unknown parties. He asks the following questions:

For the hawks: How strong is the temptation to nuke somebody…anybody…who might have had anything to do with this, regardless of whether it gets the people who really planned it?
For the doves: How long after this happens does the first column come out in the New York Times that suggests that nuking Iraq won’t bring back our dead or rebuild our economy, and that we should pull in, buckle down, and take care of our own?
See, I see two likely outcomes from an event like this, (which I personally don’t believe would be all that hard to pull off).
One is that we go berserk, and turn the Middle East into a plain of glass.
The other is that we surrender our role as leader of the world, the economic and security benefits that come with that, and attempt to retreat into a Fortress America.
As you can imagine, I see problems with both.
What do you see as the outcome of a scenario like that? And how does it influence your thoughts on what to do today?

Good questions. I see this hypothetical as another reason to attack Iraq before the scenario materializes, since - as the anthrax episode shows - it may be very difficult to establish the identity and/or sponsorship of the perpetrators of such an event after it happens, and I can already visualize the editorials he expects.

2002-09-25T20:19:00.000-04:00

SPEECHES AND MORE SPEECHES: On the Gore speech, check out Donald Sensing's lengthy demolition and Dan Drezner's concise dismissal. Drezner, who was an adviser to Condoleeza Rice during the 2000 campaign, says:

[D]uring the campaign, I pored over a lot of what Gore was saying about foreign policy during the campaign. I obviously disagreed with some of it, but certainly not all of it. I thought it was competent.
Gore's speech on Iraq, however, is not competent. Or coherent. Or consistent with Gore's previous musings on the topic. It's a grab-bag of objections, none of which has a great deal of substance (it also looks like it was drafted three weeks ago and no one bothered to update it in light of recent developments). My personal favorite, for example, is the claim that, "Great nations persevere and then prevail. They do not jump from one unfinished task to another. We should remain focused on the war against terrorism." Gee, I thought great powers were capable of doing more than one thing at a time. That's why they're called great powers. As for the facts, funny how in the same week that Bush promoted dealing with Iraq, significant progress was made on breaking Al-Qaida's back. Great powers can walk and chew gum at the same time.
...I disagreed with Gore before, but I did think he was serious. Not now.

For sheer over-the-top, delightful nastiness, you can't top Michael Kelly:

This speech, an attack on the Bush policy on Iraq, was Gore's big effort to distinguish himself from the Democratic pack in advance of another possible presidential run. It served: It distinguished Gore, now and forever, as someone who cannot be considered a responsible aspirant to power. Politics are allowed in politics, but there are limits, and there is a pale, and Gore has now shown himself to be ignorant of those limits, and he has now placed himself beyond that pale.
Gore's speech was one no decent politician could have delivered. It was dishonest, cheap, low. It was hollow. It was bereft of policy, of solutions, of constructive ideas, very nearly of facts -- bereft of anything other than taunts and jibes and embarrassingly obvious lies. It was breathtakingly hypocritical, a naked political assault delivered in tones of moral condescension from a man pretending to be superior to mere politics. It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible. But I understate.

Not wanting to be upstaged, Tom Daschle has attacked President Bush for allegedly "politicizing the war" (based on a misinterpretation of a line delivered by the President at a campign appearance). Drezner also explains why Daschle's speech was a disaster for the Democrats.

2002-09-25T20:06:00.000-04:00

A TEASER: I have a longer post on related thoughts in the works. For now, I'd like to offer this post up, without further comment:

They say: "America supports tyrants."
We say: "Okay, we'll take those tyrants out."
They say: "NO! We didn't mean that."
All right.
They say: "America doesn't share aid with these countries."
We say: "Okay, we'll give aid to these countries, and trade with them."
They say: "You're supporting tyrants!"
Okely-dokely.
They say: "You created Saddam!"
We say: "All right, we shall correct our error."
They say: "NOOOOOO! Don't touch a hair on his precious head!"
Fair enough.
They say: "This embargo is killing the Iraqi people!"
We say: "All right, we'll take out Saddam and immediately end the embargo."
They say: "NO! We should give the embargo more time to work!"
Hmmmmmmm...
They say: "The Iraqis claim that some of these SAM attacks have resulted in civilian casualties!"
We say: "Okay, we'll get rid of Saddam so that the air raids are no longer necessary."
They say: "Wait a minute! These air patrols are a cost-effective method of containment!"
I see.
Or rather: I don't see, and I don't think I'm expected to see. Whatever America does, it's wrong.
They don't have policy prescriptions, i.e., a systematic plan for what America should do. All they have is bitching. No matter what action America takes, they reserve the right to bitch about it. Trade with Iraq? We're supporting a tyrant. Embargo Iraq? We're killing Iraqi babies.
When they're confronted with this, they always retreat to the stock answer "Well America created this situation in the first place!" In other words, confronted with the fact that they criticize all possible present and future American actions, they claim that it is past American actions that have brought about this odd state.
Not only is this wrong -- Saddam seized power himself without the aid of the CIA -- but it is irrelevant even if true. Even if America caused some problems in the past, surely there is some action we could take that would satisfy the Confused Left. But no-- if we do A, they whine. If we do not-A, they whine louder.
Further, as Christopher Hitchens points out, if it is true that America "caused all this," that makes it all the more morally necessary for America to solve the problem. The Left whines that America "created" the Taliban. Okay then-- doesn't that mean that America has the responsibility of removing the Taliban from power?
Of course not.

UPDATE: Welcome to all VodkaPundit readers! Just to clarify, all credit for the above should go to the author of this post (and technically, to a
commenter on Megan McArdle's blog who brought it to my attention). But one of our mottos here is that we are happy to free-ride on the labor of others, and we try to spread that happiness around. I hope that when I do get the longer post finished, Mr. Green will have a similarly high opinion of it.

2002-09-25T20:02:00.000-04:00

LAUGH SO HARD YOU'LL CRY: Today's edition of the Onion is one of its best ever.

2002-09-24T19:14:00.000-04:00

IF REGIME CHANGE IS THE ANSWER, WHAT IS THE QUESTION? I just found this old Peter Beinart piece, where he argues convincingly that if a regime wants nuclear weapons badly enough, international non-proliferation agreements are unable to stop it, while such agreements are irrelevant to a regime that doesn't want them. His argument is based on the cases of India, Pakistan and South Africa.
This is why Saddam must be overthrown ASAP, as inspections are unlikely to work and Saddam has proven over the last decade that he will not be dissuaded from attempting to pursue such weapons.

2002-09-24T14:05:00.000-04:00

AIRLINE SECURITY IS REALLY GETTING SERIOUS NOW: The Transportation Security Agency has banned the old Transformer toys from airplanes.
As a commenter writes in the Corner (which provided the link):
It's also significant that Megatron and Shockwave are singled out and banned from airplanes -- "Toy transformer robots (this toy forms a toy gun)". What about the rest of the Decepticons? What about Starscream, who turns into a fighter jet with missles?
We eagerly await clarification from the TSA.

2002-09-24T13:10:00.000-04:00

YOU THOUGHT BERNARD LEWIS WAS HARSH? Newsweek's editor-in-chief of its Arabic edition is in favor of the upcoming war on Iraq, for the following reasons:

Some Arabs are proud of Saddam’s development and possession of weapons of mass destruction. The more the Bush administration tries to prove that Saddam possesses those weapons, the further it gets from achieving its goal of winning converts to its cause. But the irony is that only an actual invasion of Iraq and the overthrowing of Saddam would produce a radical shift in public opinion, changing the terms of the reference of the public debate.
For now, the rhetoric used to convince American public opinion does not work at all to convince Arab public opinion. In fact, this rhetoric has become a source of inspiration for Arab sloganeering. This is in part the result of widespread anti-Americanism. But, more importantly, it’s a result of the fact that the Arabs are living part of their daily lives in a dream world. They sink into a political dream world, fed by the backlash to American rhetoric that is eagerly seized upon and spiced up by Arab intellectuals. The leaders of the Arab world are afraid to dispel or challenge those dreams, since they have no way to justify their own ineffective governments. As they see it, they have to employ doublespeak. In terms of the current crisis, this means publicly rejecting a strike against Iraq, while privately insisting that it should be a painful and final blow to a ruler and regime they all despise.
The Arabs need shock therapy, some kind of tremor that would bring them back to reality and away from their political dreamscape. Egypt’s loss in the 1967 war against Israel was the sort of shock that did away with the nationalist slogans prevalent since the July 1952 revolution carried out by Gen. Gamal Abdul Nasser. If the 1967 shock laid the ground for the spread of Islamism as an alternative to the nationalism, the “Saddam Shock” might be what is needed to launch the era of pragmatism. The Islamist mantra has not been dropped yet, but it was tested in the Afghan war and did nothing for its supporters except spark a few demonstrations here and there, which soon died out.
... But if the Afghanistan war has embarrassed the Islamic movements, there are at least two things that have prevented the collapse of the Islamic credo. The first is that, in purely operational terms, Osama bin Laden’s attack against the United States was successful and very painful, and it changed the face of America. The second is the uncertainty about the fate of bin Laden, the lack of clear-cut evidence that he was killed by American firepower. The mystery surrounding bin Laden’s fate has given the Islamic movements a chance to regain their balance. The fall of the Taliban was not a major coup for America, but the uncertainty about what happened to bin Laden is considered a coup for his supporters.
Nonetheless, the American war on terrorism will continue to weaken the Islamic movements. Most Arab regimes are only too happy to use this opportunity to further diminish their influence. I believe that the Islamic movements realize that it would be a mistake to support Saddam Hussein at this stage, and that they will not repeat the mistake they made when they supported him after the invasion of Kuwait.
Saddam’s fall will cause the Arabs to be shattered psychologically. Political depression will set in. I do not rule out the possibility that some Arab regimes will suffer from domestic unrest, triggered by public outrage. Those regimes will find themselves face to face with their people, forced to deal with domestic issues after the United States succeeds in shutting down the last despot who maintained the illusion that Arab slogans can nurture a people. If Washington should also succeed in making the Arab countries mediators in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rather than parties to a broader Arab-Israeli endless war, then the region will really be transformed.

2002-09-24T10:30:00.000-04:00

IN DEFENSE OF THE U.S. NEWS COLLEGE RATINGS: Here's an interesting by Richard Just in The American Prospect dedicated to that defense. He makes some good points:

Without the U.S. News rankings, elite colleges would likely be turning over even larger numbers of coveted spots in their undergraduate classes to athletes, imperiling racial and intellectual diversity at the nation's top breeding grounds for future scholars and leaders. And state schools -- accountable to lawmakers and, ultimately, the public -- could find themselves pressured to squander even more money in pursuit of national championships many of them will never even come close to competing for.
... Sports is the only thing colleges do that can be quantified. It provides the only concrete claim a college can make to being better than another college. Is Harvard better than Yale? Impossible to say. But which school won the Harvard-Yale football game last year? That's an easy question to answer.
The U.S. News rankings have changed that. Critics of the rankings charge that they're meaningless, but the critics are missing the point. Of course it's meaningless to say that the University of Virginia is the twenty-third best school in America and Georgetown is the twenty-fourth. But the point is not whether the rankings are accurate in any sense, as if such rankings could ever be anything but vaguely arbitrary. The point is that by trying to quantify educational quality -- however imperfectly -- U.S. News sends a strong message that college academics matter and provides an incentive for universities to counterbalance the longstanding athletic arms race with an academic arms race. And that balance is a good thing for higher education as a whole.
.... In the absence of U.S. News, the only quantifiable game in higher education is sports. And that situation has real consequences for educational quality.
...By creating another highly-publicized arms race, U.S. News has diluted the sometimes-harmful influence of the athletic arms race -- and somewhat refocused the public's attention on the primacy of academics in higher education. In April, everyone knows who won the Final Four. In January, everyone knows who won the Bowl Championship Series. And now, in September, a decent percentage of Americans know what the number one school in the country is -- and more importantly, how the public schools in their states, which are funded with their tax money, measure up. Whether these ratings are impeccably fair is less important than the fact that they exist. It's the spotlight they shine on academic quality, not the precision of the measurements, that really matters. And it seems safe to assume that without them, the pressure for colleges to make unwise choices in pursuit of athletic glory would grow even more overwhelming than it already is.

2002-09-24T10:10:00.000-04:00

TALK ABOUT MISREADING YOUR AUDIENCE: This gem from a New York Times article on "Dr. Phil" and other daytime TV shows:
And while many television executives held high hopes for psychic talk shows modeled on the John Edwards show "Crossing Over," they were let down by the low ratings of "Beyond With James Van Praagh," the psychic's efforts to contact ghosts of loved ones. Nielsen, it turns out, does not include the dead in its sample pool of viewers.
Really?

2002-09-24T09:58:00.000-04:00

PRIMARY DOCUMENTS: Here is the official assessment of the Iraqi threat by the Blair government.
And click here for the text of the new National Security Strategy of the U.S. government. It apparently conforms to Dr. Manhattan's Official Guidelines for Policy Analysis(TM), which state that the advisability of a policy can be accurately measured by the number of heart attacks it induces among the members of any or all of the following institutions:
1) The State Department;
2) The United Nations; and
3) the New York Times' editorial board.

2002-09-24T09:44:00.000-04:00

JOINING THE 21ST CENTURY: The New Republic now has a blog called "&c." It looks good.

2002-09-24T01:35:00.000-04:00

ALL SPINE AND NO BRAINS MAKE AL & HANK DEAD CANDIDATES: Al Gore is criticizing the impending war with Iraq.
The NYT argues that Gore's address:
...suggested a shift in positioning by Mr. Gore, who has for 10 years portrayed himself as a moderate, particularly when it comes to issues of foreign policy, and repeatedly invoked his 1991 vote on the gulf war resolution as a way of distinguishing himself from the rest of his party.
Many people are too stubborn to learn from their mistakes, but Gore is exceptional: he refuses to learn from his correct decisions!
In response to Mr. Gore's speech, VodkaPundit has an open letter to Gore that must be read in its entirety. Also, Andrew Sullivan points out:
As to the coalition argument, Gore, of course, spent eight years assembling a wonderful international coalition on Iraq, which agreed enthusiastically to do nothing effective at all. Now he wants us to wait even further, claiming that the administration has abandoned Afghanistan, while vast sums of U.S. money are being expended on rebuilding the country. And then he reiterates the bizarre notion that undermining one of the chief sponsors of terrorism in the world will somehow hurt the war against terrorism. Huh?
More damningly, Sullivan and Henry Hanks both point out that seven months ago, Gore was calling for a "final reckoning with Iraq."

Meanwhile, Jason Rylander has been looking for Democrats to make good arguments against the war, and recently praised this op-ed by Democratic congressional candidate Hank Perritt. Mr. Perritt deserves credit for stating his views with such forthrightness (unlike most of the rest of his party) and enabling voters to consider such information in making their choice. Regardless of party affiliation, any candidate deserves credit for submitting to the accountability of the voters. Personally, I wouldn't vote for Hillary R. Clinton if my flesh was being flayed with metal combs (sorry, the Yom Kippur liturgy is still on my mind) but she deserves credit for putting herself on the electoral line, while eminences such as Colin Powell prefer to cling to a reputation of eminence from unelected positions via leaks to sympathetic journalists.
However, Mr. Perritt's bravery and integrity does not make his arguments any smarter.
He has a summary list of reasons for oppposing the war, each of which deserve consideration:
[N]o justification exists; an attack would cause a reaction that would threaten Israel's existence; it would undermine America's ability to lead international opinion; it would violate international law; it could mire the United States in a nasty, prolonged conflict; it would profoundly destabilize international relations to the detriment of U.S. interests because it would stimulate a rush to develop weapons of mass destruction to deter future U.S. action.
In turn:
1) [N]o justification exists;
The editors who published Mr. Perritt's piece do not agree:
Two decades ago, having consolidated his Iraqi dictatorship with blood baths and traded billions of petrodollars for modern weapons, Saddam Hussein set out to make himself master of the Middle East and its oil fields. He launched successive wars of aggression against Iran and Kuwait, amassed a large arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and raced to acquire nuclear arms. On his orders, his army committed some of the most horrific war crimes since World War II, gassing whole villages and massacring tens of thousands of innocent civilians at a time. Even after his crushing defeat in the Persian Gulf War, the dictator refused to give up his ambitions. He boldly preserved and even sought to expand his chemical and biological arsenal in defiance of numerous U.N. Security Council resolutions; even as his own people starved, he proudly awarded stipends to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. President Bush's assertion that the Iraqi regime remains a deadly menace to the region and a challenge to international order is not new; President Clinton made the same claim throughout his eight years in office, and the Security Council repeatedly agreed with him. Nor is Mr. Bush's insistence on ending Saddam Hussein's dictatorship a leap; Congress passed a law four years ago endorsing regime change as U.S. policy. For years the central question facing both the United States and the United Nations has been whether they are prepared to follow through on their own decisions.
Mr. Bush's choice to fully confront this challenge has been precipitated by two developments since his election. First came the crumbling of the containment policy that Mr. Clinton relied on to manage the Iraqi threat; then came 9/11. The administration's attempts to explain the implications of these events have been awkward and sometimes confused. It has asserted that Saddam Hussein has connections to the al Qaeda network but has provided no public evidence that this is so. It also has suggested that terrorists could strike the United States with chemical or biological arms supplied by Saddam Hussein; though this is plausible, again there is no evidence that the dictator has adopted such a strategy. The real case for acting now on Iraq is more intangible: It is that the breakdown of containment, and the new flow of resources that breakdown has provided to Saddam Hussein, has decisively raised the cost of postponing a confrontation; and the shock of 9/11 has given this country the lesson that, in an era in which enormous harm can be done by seemingly weak adversaries, threats such as that posed by Iraq must not just be managed but treated aggressively.
Alternatively, the Economist recently editorialized:

The danger Mr Hussein poses cannot be overstated. He is no tinpot despot, singled out for arbitrary American punishment. Nor is Iraq a banana republic. With the possible exception of North Korea, but perhaps not even then, Mr Hussein is the world's most monstrous dictator, who by the promiscuous use of violence has seized unfettered control of a technologically advanced country with vast oil reserves. He has murdered all his political opponents, sometimes squeezing the trigger in person. He has subdued his Kurdish minority by razing their villages and spraying them with poison gas. In 1979 he invaded Iran, thus setting off an eight-year war that squandered more than 1m lives. In 1990 he invaded and annexed Kuwait, pronouncing it his “19th province”. When an American-led coalition started to push him out, and though knowing Israel to be a nuclear power, he fired ballistic missiles into Tel Aviv, in the hope of provoking a general Arab-Israeli conflagration. Next time you hear someone ask why, in a world full of bad men, it is Mr Hussein who is being picked on, please bear all of the above in mind. He may very well be the worst.
And yet it is not simply in his record of aggression, cruelty and recklessness that the peril to the wider world resides. If that were all the story, the danger might be easily contained. The unique danger in Iraq is that this country's advanced technology and potential oil wealth could very soon give this aggressive, cruel and reckless man an atomic bomb.
The unique danger in Iraq is that its advanced technology and potential oil wealth could soon give this aggressive, cruel and reckless man an atomic bomb
How dangerous would that be? To judge by the reaction of Mr Bush's foreign critics, the magnitude of the threat is in the eye of the beholder. But it is not difficult to see why, after September 11th, Americans in particular find it hard to be sanguine about the prospect of a sworn enemy equipping himself with weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In the worst case, these might one day be used against the United States, either directly by Iraq itself or by some non-state group to whom Mr Hussein had transferred his lethal technology. At a minimum, a nuclear-armed Mr Hussein could be counted on to revive his earlier ambitions to intimidate his neighbours and dominate the Gulf. Prophesying is difficult, especially about the past. But if Mr Hussein had already had nuclear weapons when he invaded Kuwait 11 years ago, he might still be there.
Finally, to quote Peter Beinart:
...Saddam is prone to recklessly underestimating America's resolve--which is part of the reason he wasn't deterred from invading Kuwait. ... [W]hile deterrence "worked" vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, there's no guarantee it would have continued to work had the USSR endured for another 50 years. (Even during the cold war, after all, there were some very close calls.) The United States relied on deterrence against the Soviet Union not because deterrence was foolproof but because we had no other choice: We could never have preemptively attacked the USSR; the costs would simply have been too great. But the United States can preemptively attack Iraq. Deterrence is no longer our only option, and it isn't our safest one.

Next is Mr. Perritt's contention that
an attack would cause a reaction that would threaten Israel's existence;
Then why are the Israelis so strongly supportive of the impending attack? They are usually pretty good at judging threats to their existence- after all, they've survived for over 50 years while surrounded by enemies pledged to their destruction.
Also, what about the risks of leaving Saddam in power? Even if it was stipulated that renewed inspections could prevent or substantially delay Saddam's ability to obtain nuclear weapons (which is a pretty big stretch), Saddam has still been underwriting suicide bombers and training terrorists to attack Israel. The UN has not been known for its efficacy (or intentions) at stopping such activities.
Next,
it would undermine America's ability to lead international opinion;
It's amazing what showing conviction on the one hand, while throwing the "dogs of peace" a UN-flavored biscuit on the other, can do to lead international opinion.
Next try:
it would violate international law;
Never mind the innumerable UN resolutions of which Iraq is in defiance. More importantly, in the words of the Economist's editors:
[W]ith all due respect to the Security Council, the legal arguments its members deploy to justify their prior political choices are not especially gripping. The issue here is not Jarndyce v Jarndyce, a quarrel about small print. It is the danger Mr Hussein poses to the world, and whether that danger is big enough to justify the risks of a war.
If you believe that the danger posed by Iraq is truly great enough to justify a war, than international law proscribing such war (assuming it exists, which is a big assumption) is irrelevant. If you believe the danger is not so great, it is unnecessary.
Let's try again:
it could mire the United States in a nasty, prolonged conflict;
It could. On the other hand, this is a country whose troops surrendered wholesale in 1991, and whose military has been much degraded since then. Why is that outcome the likelier one?
If Mr. Perritt is not elected to Congress, he should have an easy time obtaining employment as a writer for the New York Times. All he needs to do is insert the word "quagmire" into the above.
Finally,
it would profoundly destabilize international relations to the detriment of U.S. interests because it would stimulate a rush to develop weapons of mass destruction to deter future U.S. action.
This is the point Perritt spends the most time on. Unfortunately, he again fails to consider the costs of not acting. If Saddam gets nuclear weapons, then that will do far more to incentivize other countries to do so than the U.S. failing to attack now, beacuse: 1) his neighbors will justifiably feel threatened, and 2) he will be able to deter us from interfering with his next plans to control the Persian Gulf, an example which other undesirables will wish to follow. Making an example of Saddam, by contrast, may help deter some other undesirables. Failing to do will provide a massive contrary incentive.

Mr. Rylander: if this is the best the Democrats can do, give it up.

2002-09-24T01:07:00.000-04:00

PRIORITIES: I forgot to blog this gem-filled Charles Krauthammer piece:

The vice president, followed by the administration A Team and echoing the president, argues that we must remove from power an irrational dictator who has a history of aggression and mass murder, is driven by hatred of America and is developing weapons of mass destruction that could kill millions of Americans in a day. The Democrats respond with public skepticism, a raised eyebrow and the charge that the administration has yet to "make the case."
Then, on Sept. 12, the president goes to the United Nations and argues that this same dictator must be brought to heel to vindicate some Security Council resolutions and thus rescue the United Nations from irrelevance. The Democrats swoon. "Great speech," they say. "Why didn't you say that in the first place? Count us in."
When the case for war is made purely in terms of American national interest -- in terms of the safety, security and very lives of American citizens -- chins are pulled as the Democrats think it over. But when the case is the abstraction of being the good international citizen and strengthening the House of Kofi, the Democrats are ready to parachute into Baghdad.
...My point is not to blame France or China or Russia for acting in their national interests. That's what nations do. That's what nations' leaders are supposed to do. My point is to express wonder at Americans who find it unseemly to act in the name of their own national interests and who cannot see the logical absurdity of granting moral legitimacy to American action only if it earns the approval of the Security Council -- approval granted or withheld on the most cynical grounds of self-interest.

2002-09-24T00:58:00.000-04:00

A WAKE-UP CALL TO EUROPE: When Fareed Zakharia tells you to cut the crap, you know you're in trouble:

For the past 10 years France and Russia have turned the United Nations into a stage from which to pursue naked self-interest. They have used multilateralism as a way to further unilateral policies. The dust from the Persian Gulf War had not settled when the French government began a quiet but persistent campaign to gut the sanctions against Iraq, turn inspections into a charade and send signals to Saddam Hussein that Paris was ready to do business with him again. "Decades from now, when all the documents are available, someone is going to write an eye-opening book about France's collusion with Saddam Hussein in the 1990s," says Kenneth Pollack, who worked at the CIA and the National Security Council during those years.
...And then there is Germany, which cannot even claim the rationale of national interest for its bizarre actions. Pandering to public opinion, Gerhard Schroeder has broken with 50 years of tradition and publicly denounced American foreign policy. He has encouraged an atmosphere of anti-Americanism in his country, which hit its lowest note when his justice minister compared President Bush to Hitler. Schroeder is opposed to an attack on Iraq even if the United Nations authorizes it. He must think Saddam Hussein is harmless, except that his own chief of intelligence, August Hanning, told the New Yorker last year, "It is our estimate that Iraq will have an atomic bomb in three years." Oh, well, then, no need to worry about it.
...If France and Russia seek a world in which nations act purely on the basis of interest and power, they will get it. In it, America will do just fine. As the president's recent national security strategy document makes clear, it will remain the "hyperpower." But as France and Russia might have noticed, they're not very powerful anymore. They have seats on the U.N. Security Council only because they won the last great war 50 years ago. (I use the word "won" loosely when speaking of France.) Unless they act responsibly, they are now in danger of losing the next one.

2002-09-24T00:51:00.000-04:00

TAKE YOUR MEDS, PROFESSOR: Paul Krugman bravely criticizes 19th-century imperialism, and concludes with the following:
It's hard not to suspect that the Bush doctrine is also a diversion — a diversion from the real issues of dysfunctional security agencies, a sinking economy, a devastated budget and a tattered relationship with our allies.
The upcoming war with Iraq may have imperialist bases, but ones which have more in common with the Japan occupation after WWII than any 19th-century Kiplingesque adventures. Much more on that to follow.

2002-09-23T18:11:00.000-04:00

THIS IS WHAT A "CHILLING ATMOSPHERE" MEANS: Khaled Abu Tomaeh recently wrote an extensive and gripping article in the Jerusalem Post about how the second intifada, supposedly a spontaneous outbreak prompted by Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000, was in fact extensively planned by the Palestinians following the breakdown at Camp David:

In conjunction with the political offensive, which began almost immediately after Camp David, the PA was also preparing for a possible military confrontation with Israel. PA security officials interviewed in the local media openly talked about a looming armed confrontation. Some even warned that the PA areas would be turned into a "graveyard" for the IDF if Israel decided to reoccupy the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Their statements came in response to remarks made by former IDF chief of General Staff Shaul Mofaz, who warned that Israel would use tanks and jets if the Palestinians launched an armed offensive.
...As the Camp David summit was under way, Arafat's Fatah organization, the biggest faction of the PLO, started training Palestinian teenagers for the upcoming violence in 40 training camps throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Some PA officials and newspaper commentators also started calling for the adoption of the Hizbullah strategy, which, they believed, led to the withdrawal of the IDF from southern Lebanon a few months earlier. Hizbullah leaders, including secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah, appeared on Arab satellite television networks to mock Arafat and his negotiators, arguing that Palestine could be liberated only through the use of force, and not at summits like the one held in Camp David.
BY NOW the atmosphere in the Palestinian street was one of "the eve of war." PA ministers and representatives stepped up their criticism of Israel and the US as part of the PA's efforts to refute accusations that it was responsible for the collapse of the Camp David talks and that the Palestinians had missed yet another historic opportunity.
PA-appointed imams in West Bank and Gaza Strip mosques began referring to Israel as "the Zionist enemy" and urged all Muslims to mobilize for the war against the "infidels." In the words of one Gazan preacher, "All weapons must be aimed at the Jews, at the enemies of Allah, the cursed nation in the Koran, whom the Koran describes as monkeys and pigs, worshipers of the calf and idol worshipers."
Other imams spoke of the need and duty to liberate Palestine from the Zionist aggressors. This time the talk was not only about liberating the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Now the demand was for Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa and Ashkelon.
...An August 3 [2000] poll conducted by the independent Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research indicated that two-thirds of Palestinians supported a new intifada against Israel. This was the first time since the signing of the Oslo Accords that a majority of Palestinians said they supported violence against Israel.

In other news, Mr. Toameh has apparently had his life threatened by a senior aide to Palestinian Legislative Council Speaker Ahmed Qurei in response to a different story for the paper. The aide has been arrested.

2002-09-19T18:55:00.000-04:00

NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED: According to the Jerusalem Post, Palestinian terrorists took advantage of the lifting of a curfew in Jenin, Tulkarm and Hebron to carry out several murderous attacks over the last few days, including today's killing of several people in a Tel Aviv bus bombing.

2002-09-19T18:51:00.000-04:00

NOT WORTH THE WAIT, BUT OFFERED FOR YOUR AMUSEMENT NONETHELESS: Enjoy the overhauled link sections on the right of this page. Some of the absences from the site over the summer were attributable, in part, to attempts at overhauling the format of the site and in efforts (now abandoned) to design a separate baseball blog. Instead, I've decided to keep everything in-house. I hope the links will augur a renewed dedication to the site.

2002-09-19T16:53:00.000-04:00

LILEKS RULES, AGAIN: Here he illustrates why he's skeptical of weapons inspections in Iraq.

2002-09-19T14:26:00.000-04:00

HIGH STANDARDS AT MY ALMA MATER: Columbia is famous (infamous, if you're a student) for allowing films to be shot on the campus. But I never expected them to allow this movie to be filmed there.

2002-09-19T11:00:00.000-04:00

THEY REALLY SHOULD TEACH THIS IN BUSINESS SCHOOL: James Surowiecki discusses the acumen of Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, noting the general applicability of many of his accomplishments:

Oakland's success is the fruit of what the legendary corporate theorist Michael Porter likes to call "strategic fit." Every part of its business is tightly linked with every other part, creating, in Porter's words, "a chain that is as strong as its strongest link." You get strategic fit only when you have a clear sense of what you are and of what you are not. "The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do," Porter says. By choice and by necessity, Beane decided that the A's would never be a team of conventional stars. And that has made him the best general manager in baseball.

Of course, this is an oversimplified portrait. First, a large part of Oakland's success has been due to the extraordinary performance of its top three young starting pitchers (Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito). Young pitchers are the most unreliable products in all of baseball, due to injuries; as such, Oakland has been extremely lucky. Second, Suroweicki does not discuss one of the most important strategies in the Oakland program: signing young players to long contracts very early in their careers, giving them financial security while saving money for the team in the long run. That way, the Athletics can have several "conventional stars" on their roster, contra Suroweicki's assertion (Miguel Tejada, their MVP-candidate shortstop, doesn't even walk much) - just at affordable prices. This strategy drove the Cleveland Indians' success in the 1990s, and is being successfully emulated by Oakland.
To back up Suroweicki's point about the difficulty of copying such methods, the Milwaukee Brewers and Detroit Tigers have tried to emulate the tactic of signing young players to multi-year deals. Unfortunately for them, the players they produced and signed were by and large not as good as those produced and signed by Cleveland and Oakland. Talent assessment if the most important part of building a winning team. Possibly the most important achievement of Billy Beane is that he has forced baseball to recognize that in assessing talent, the sabermetric methods used by Oakland can compete with the more subjective observations that have held sway throughout most of baseball history.

(Thanks to David Pinto for the link.)

2002-09-19T10:25:00.000-04:00

FOLLOWING THE STRONG HORSE: To the embarrassment of those who took all the self-interested protestations at face value, Jordan is apparently negotiating with the U.S. regarding the use of its territory in an attack on Iraq - and for purpose of defending Israel, no less!

2002-09-18T17:14:00.000-04:00

ARAB FASHION SHOW: This must be seen to be believed:

The picture on the top of the dress is of Mohammed al-Durah, apparently killed by Palestinian gunmen.

2002-09-18T16:52:00.000-04:00

PUTTING PEOPLE LAST: Brad DeLong cites to a (subscription only) Wall street Journal article wondering why pharmaceutical companies get such bad press, and gives blame where it is due:
"I think this is a place where you have to blame Democratic politicians, so eager to grab for an issue with traction that they have forgotten what their jobs really are."

2002-09-18T16:13:00.000-04:00

THE WORST CONCEIVABLE INSULT: Has been coined by Prof. Reynolds.

2002-09-18T15:59:00.000-04:00

ERIC ALTERMAN IS UNCOMFORTABLE WITH NUANCE: First, this is evil, and the Jewish terrorists responsible for it (or whoever else the guilty party may be) should be punished mercilessly. (Had there been any fatalities, I'd support the death penalty.) No "but" is applicable to the perpetrators.
That's all that should be said, and I know it's not worth it to waste cyberspace on this guy, but Eric Alterman really pushed my buttons with this post:

Ariel Sharon cannot or will not control the Jewish settler/terrorists. Perhaps he should be exiled from Israel and replaced with a leader of the Palestinians’ choosing. Also, the homes of the families of the Jewish settler terrorists should be blown up and their families should be exiled. Also, all the Jewish settlers who look like they might be terrorists should be jailed without trial and tortured. These people, after all, just don’t value human life the way we do.
Assuming Alterman is being grossly tongue-in-cheek, his real point is one of moral equivalene. And he's right to a degree; there is no moral difference between an Arab and a Jewish terrorist. But (and it feels ridiculous to have to point this out, but Alterman obviously does not get it) - the fact that individuals on both sides commit immoral acts do not mean that the two societies are morally equivalent.
When the Israelis:
1) grant extensive government support to groups like those who planted the bombs in question;
2) feature mothers who exhort their sons to kill themselves as long as they kill other innocent people as well (click here for another one)
(NOTE: The horrifying video links may no longer be working; I will attempt to update the links if this continues. Click here for a photo of Hamas family values.); and
3) feature waves of suicide bombers whose families are paid off by Iraq and Saudi Arabia (thus representing enemies (a) who are non-deterrable by conventional means and (b) whose families have a substantial incentive to encourage their career choice; see #2 above - the two unique factors behind the idea of destroying houses and/or exiling family members),
then Alterman can be taken seriously when he assumes a moral equivalence between Israeli and Palestinian societies. Until then, the correlation with and links between Palestinian society and its terrorists are far greater than those on the Israeli side, and our foreign policy deserves to reflect that disparity.
Recognition of the differences between Israeli and Palestinian society would seem to be a necessary precondition of an intellectually sophisticated approach to the conflict in the Middle East. But Alterman refuses to credit these nuances, preferring to see a black-and-white world where all are equally responsible for evil. Alterman's approach is appallingly simplistic. Is he channelling the spirit of the current president, whom he despises so? At least Bush correctly identifies black and white...

2002-09-18T15:06:00.000-04:00

WHY KOFI ANNAN IS ACTING LIKE A FOOL: Brink Lindsey and Geitner Simmons both cite to this article by Charles Duelfer titled "The Inevitable Failure of Inspections in Iraq:"

[A]s demonstrated by the experience of the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from 1991 to 1998, any weapons inspectors sent into Iraq under the ground rules of the existing UN Security Council resolutions and the existing Iraqi regime are doomed to fail. The only uncertainties are how long they will last, whether they will inhibit Iraq’s programs at all, and what role their presence will have in the overarching politics surrounding their almost inconsequential presence. Although inspectors accomplished much during their time in Iraq, their successes were temporary. The categorical goals established by the Security Council were not achievable at a price either the council or Iraq was willing to pay. It turned out that the permanent disarmament goals imposed on Iraq were out of proportion with the inspectors’ tools and the rewards and punishments the Security Council could practically impose. The result was a political and military muddle with the inspectors caught in the middle.
...It quickly became clear that the Security Council could not be involved in issues other than major breaches, and Iraq learned that small offenses would not be punished. Simply put, would the council want to go to war because some scruffy, arrogant inspector could not get into a building that might be empty and that Iraq said was important to its national sovereignty and dignity? Clearly not. Baghdad developed a good sense of how to limit access rights incrementally in ways to which the council could not respond proportionately. It learned to keep its obstruction below the threshold that would trigger a response from the council.
...Inherent in the design of Resolution 687 was the assumption that Iraq would value the ability to export oil and engage in normal commerce more than it valued weapons of mass destruction capability—an assumption that turned out to be dead wrong. Discussions with senior Iraqi officials eventually revealed the enormous importance the regime attached to these weapons.
For the regime, possession of weapons of mass destruction was an existential issue. Deputy Prime Minster Tariq Aziz, among others, pointed out that, during the Iran-Iraq war, hitting cities deep in Iran with long-range missiles and countering of human wave attacks (particularly in the battle for al Fao) with massive use of chemical weapons saved Iraq. Moreover, Baghdad believes that its possession of biological and chemical weapons during the 1991 Gulf War helped deter the United States from marching on Baghdad. Thus, the regime has two experiences in which it feels its very survival was linked to possession of weapons of mass destruction.
Nothing in the UN resolutions changed that judgment by Iraq. If anything, the lesson Baghdad learned from the Gulf War is that such weapons—especially nuclear weapons—are even more important than they had thought. Senior Iraqis privately acknowledged that it had been a mistake to invade Kuwait before completing a nuclear weapon. They are convinced the outcome of the war would have been radically different if Washington had had to consider an Iraqi nuclear capability. Certainly, Saddam Hussein understands that today’s debate about invading Iraq to effect regime change would not be taking place if Baghdad could threaten to hit U.S. forces or Israel with a nuclear weapon.

Michael Kelly summarizes Iraq's decade of defying UN resolutions and inspections, and raws the appropriate conclusion: "I'd say the current Iraqi offer can be dispensed with, oh, now."

2002-09-18T14:57:00.000-04:00

CHEM-WAR 101: Derek Lowe, a chemist, has a great series on the history and uses of chemical weapons. Start at the link and scroll up for all five posts on the matter.
(Thanks to Megan McArdle for the link.)

2002-09-18T01:05:00.000-04:00

YES, THESE ARE NICHE HUMOR PIECES, BUT I LAUGHED SO HARD I COULDN'T BEAR NOT TO POST THEM: This first piece is aimed at Modern Orthodox Jews who are familiar with: (a) the intellectual crises that have been raging within Orthodoxy and one of its flagship institutions, Yeshiva University, (b) the tipping of segments (the size of which is disputed) of Lubavitch Hasidim into Christian-style messianism, and (c) the disputes about how to properly appreciate the complex legacy of the late Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. If you meet those criteria, check this out and start laughing.
You can't get a more different subject than this great Bill Simmons piece. It is aimed at those who: (a) spent way too much of their adolescence watching bad horror movies and (b) are devotees of ESPN's "SportsCentury" series. If you meet both those criteria, this piece is one of the funniest things you will read in your entire life.

2002-09-17T16:56:00.000-04:00

THE CONTINUING RELEVANCE OF THE GREAT WAR: David Gelertner has a fascinating piece in the Weekly Standard arguing that the Europeans' actions and attitudes towards the war on terrorism are reminiscent of the 1920s, and show that the influences of World War I have been more lasting than those of World War II:

The First World War seemed unimaginable but turned out to be human, all too human when compared with the Second, which was too big for the mind to grasp. As the Second World War and its aftermath fade, they reveal a "new world order" that is strangely familiar--amazingly like the Western world of the 1920s, with its love of self-determination and loathing of imperialism and war, its liberal Germany, shrunken Russia, and map of Europe crammed with small states, with America's indifference to Europe and Europe's disdain for America, with Europe's casual, endemic anti-Semitism, her politically, financially, and masochistically rewarding fascination with Muslim states who despise her, and her undertone of self-hatred and guilt.
...Once upon a time we thought of appeasement as a particular approach to Hitler. We have long since come to see that it is a Weltanschauung, an entire philosophical worldview that teaches the blood-guilt of Western man, the moral bankruptcy of the West, and the outrageousness of Western civilization's attempting to impose its values on anyone else. World War II and its aftermath clouded the issue, but self-hatred has long since reestablished itself as a dominant force in Europe and (less often and not yet decisively) the United States. It was a British idea originally; it was enthusiastically taken up by the French. Today (like so many other British ideas) it is believed more fervently in continental Europe than anywhere else.

Consider the "Continental attitude" towards our proposed war against Saddam Hussein. If you had the Second World War in mind, you might think: Nothing could be more dangerous than to dither while a bloody-minded tyrant builds his striking power. It is crazy to let him choose D-Day, on the theory that if you leave him alone long enough, he will switch personalities and call the whole thing off. Human adults do not switch personalities--but if someone were going to blaze a trail and be first, a bloody swaggering dictator is not the man. Hitler didn't change even when his whole world had burnt to ashes. The last testament he composed in his bunker in 1945 is strikingly like "Mein Kampf," dictated in the comfort of his five-star prison cell in 1924.

The wisdom of "act first, dither later" as an approach to threats from tyrannies was borne out by Western experience in the Cold War. When the Soviets threatened Western interests directly by trying to starve West Berlin, put nuclear missiles in Cuba, and float the Arabs to victory against Israel (in 1973) on a tidal wave of weaponry, America did not wring her hands and ponder; she acted fast, and won.

But suppose your attitudes were shaped, consciously or not, by the First World War and its aftermath. In that case, the lesson you'd take away would be very different: Whatever you do, never rush a war. Austria did not have to declare war against Serbia on July 28, 1914, but she was in a hurry to forestall proposed negotiations. Russia did not have to mobilize on the 30th, she was under no military threat, but she mobilized anyway. Germany did not have to go crashing into Belgium on August 4, she was in no danger of being overrun by hot-headed Flemings, but once she had mobilized (which she had to do because Russia had), her famous master-plan (to concentrate on the Western front, pivot through Belgium, and come down on France like a sledgehammer) would be exposed and rendered as useless as lightstruck film unless she hit right away.

Some Europeans know these details and some do not. But what every educated European knows is that World War I could have been prevented if only Europe hadn't been in such a demented hurry to fight. And the graveyards of World War I are a permanent feature of the European landscape. In consequence and in tribute, many Europeans are against all war on principle--defensive or offensive, just or unjust, mandatory or frivolous; and they hate Western civilization into the bargain. Can you blame them? The contempt for Western ideas, morality, religion, and traditions that is so prominent among European intellectuals is not the sheer malice it sometimes seems. Europe has earned the right to hate herself. If things go wrong, a scratch can fester. A pardonable act of (at worst) bad judgment--to whoop up a war along with throngs of your fellow citizens--can turn to scalding remorse as the death toll rises and rises. And such quiet emotions as private remorse can reshape history, when you sum up over a whole civilization.

There is much more, particularly on the resurgence of anti-semitism and anti-Zionism in Europe. Go read it.

2002-09-17T14:32:00.000-04:00

GREAT MOMENTS IN JOURNALISM: A better-than-usual retrospective from the Miami Herald on some of its finer moments. Here are two of the all-time great corrections of printed stories:

``Last Sunday, The Herald erroneously reported that original Dolphin Johnny Holmes had been an insurance salesman in Raleigh, N.C., that he had won the New York lottery in 1982 and lost the money in a land swindle, that he had been charged with vehicular homicide but acquitted because his mother said she drove the car, and that he stated that the funniest thing he ever saw was Flipper spouting water on [coach] George Wilson. Each of these items was erroneous material published inadvertently. He was not an insurance salesman in Raleigh, did not win the lottery, neither he nor his mother was charged or involved in any way with a vehicular homicide, and he made no comment about Flipper or George Wilson. The Herald regrets the errors.''
The explanation? For a ''whatever happened to'' story about the 1966 Dolphins, an editor in sports pounded out some top-of-the-cortex stuff he made up as he sketched out an estimate for the length of the story. The ''dummy type'' came alive when reporters and editors working on the story copied the format and wrote over the fictional words -- except in the case of Johnny Holmes, whose name was typed in but not the real information about him. The dummy type made it into print. Holmes was never heard from.

• When police demanded a correction in 1995, Broward Managing Editor Joe Oglesby obliged: ``A Nov. 18 story about the firing of Oakland Park police officers Brian Rupp and Jay Santalucia incorrectly reported that they allegedly engaged in oral sex with juvenile prostitutes for 23 minutes during a videotaped sting operation. In fact, the tape is 23 minutes long, but the sex act lasted only part of the tape.''

(Via Nancy Nall.)

2002-09-17T13:51:00.000-04:00

SOMEONE DOWN UNDER HAS HIS HEAD SCREWED ON RIGHT: Australian blogger Paul Wright has a wonderful post on the out-of-touch baby boomers in the media:

Last week Howell Raines, the editor of the New York Times no less, used Vietnam to twice trump discomfiting questioning on The News Hour, when asked why the NYT was running a campaign against the war, instead of just reporting it. Can you imagine the scorn a young Raines would have heaped on some 60 year old in 1964, who was trying to use a 40 year old war to explain Vietnam? But that is what Raines wants to do. His credentials as an anti-Vietnam protester have somehow proofed him against irrelevancy and fogiedom.
Home-grown Australian hipsters are still trading on their fame of decades past. It’s as if they refuse to realise the world has moved on. No, Che is still glamorous, Bush is the same as Nixon, they’re all in on it together. And if they use the occasional reference to acid and The Man, it will delay the onset of Relevance Deprivation Syndrome. Here’s a thought fellas: if you have to keep reminding your audience of how cool and revolutionary you were 35 years ago, people are entitled to wonder of what use you are today.
...There are no more draftee soldiers wasted on acid, no more draft card burnings, no moratorium marches. No-one cares if you’re a Conscientious Objector. Today’s military specialist is likely to be a college graduate with skills so rarified to be near magic. The soundtrack of the war will not be Hendrix or Joan Baez on a transistor. It’s industrial-techno downloaded at the base internet café, played on a personal MP3 player. Or maybe a Spanish language course for a final college credit. These are motivated, angry volunteers who fought hard and long to get where they are, and are as far removed from a conscript army as they are from Venusian Amazon women.
The only conscript soldiers that feature are the poor bastards in the enemy front lines. They know the score, because they heard it from the few that were lucky enough to live through the first Gulf War, and unlucky enough not to surrender. They understand that when the elite army is staying home, and their own officers are shooting deserters on the spot, the clock is ticking.
There are others involved who have no say. The passengers of jet liners turned into flying bombs. The office workers looking up from their spreadsheets to see religious bigotry at its finest hour. The beat-down families of Baghdad that stare dully as the cream of their army parks an anti-aircraft battery next to their kindergarten. The slaves of the Sudan. Starving North Korean parents eating bark so their children can live another day.
How can a 60’s radical make themselves relevant to an audience that has seen all the horror the Taliban has to offer? How do you stick up for the sovereign rights of a government that gleefully demands a new stadium as the condition for not using the UN-built soccer stadium for public executions? Where is the My Lai anger at seeing the sponsors of mass murder get pounded into jam?
Simple: shift the rules, and keep shifting them. The People’s Revolution has moved out of the basement and into the newspapers and the Senate Committee Room. Power to the People is now served by delay, equivalence, exploiting the balance of votes on the floor.
DEMAND PERFECT WAR. No civilian deaths. No civilian injuries. A thousand-fold decrease is not enough. Any civilian death is proof of aggression.
DEMAND PERFECT KNOWLEDGE. No action without proof to Western legal standards. No targeting without absolute certainty.
DEMAND Perfect Foresight. No action without a replacement government ready to go. Risk is uncertainty. Uncertainty is death. Don’t destabilise. Avoid quagmires. The future is unknown, therefore certain to be worse.
DEMAND Clean Hands. Don’t fight anywhere you have an interest. Don’t fight anywhere you have no business in. Failure to condemn is support. Failure to support is racism. Failure to intervene is corruption. Intervention is interference. The enemy is bad, but we are tainted too.
DEMAND Full Disclosure. Endless hearings. All secrecy is conspiracy. The ghost of Nixon stalks the earth.
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. You war is older than that, and much more obsolete.

As Glenn Reynolds points out, the last figure is much closer to 15 years than 25 - making his point even stronger.

Wright also links to this post by Scott Koenig (aka the "IndePundit") arguing why it is likely that Osama bin Laden is dead or captured.

2002-09-17T13:43:00.000-04:00

A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR ELECTION REFORM: Dave Barry has the last word on the latest election disaster in Florida.

2002-09-13T16:48:00.000-04:00

THE ISRAELI NEOCONSERVATIVES: Here's an article describing how many prominent Israeli leftists have been mugged by the reality of the last two years.
Meanwhile, TIME magazine reports that up to 98% of the known Hamas military operatives in the West Bank have been killed or captured since the beginning of Operation Defensive Shield. Who said force would only be counterproductive? Perhaps it isn't "increasingly clear that the costs to broader Israeli interests far outweigh whatever short-term security benefits this military operation may be yielding."

2002-09-13T16:40:00.000-04:00

THE DEFENSE OF THE NATION IS POLITICAL: I agree completely with these sentiments expressed by the editors of The New Republic:
...Washington's leading Democrats have neither taken a forthright position on an invasion of Iraq nor seriously answered the Bush administration theory of preemption that justifies it. No one today can honestly say he or she is a Democrat because of what the party believes about the greatest threat facing the United States. The Democrats are a party of bystanders, a party without a position on the issue that matters most.
...[I]f the Democrats succeed, if they make this fall's election a referendum on prescription drugs and pension reform, they will have done the voters a disservice. Elections should be about the most urgent issues facing the country; and compared with war with Iraq, the Democrats' litany of poll-tested standbys is frankly trivial.
The Democrats rationalize their efforts to keep Iraq off the campaign trail by insinuating that the Bush administration, by proposing a congressional vote on Iraq before Election Day, is exploiting the war for political gain (see "Hidden Profit" by Michael Crowley, page 18). But in fact, the real cynics are the Democrats, who are trying to conceal their views on the war until after November 5 and, thus, deny their constituents the information they need to cast an intelligent vote. As a matter of democratic process, the party's position is untenable. And it is self-defeating even as a matter of crass political self-interest. Today's polls may show the Democrats with an advantage on the domestic issues the public supposedly cares about most, but ultimately that advantage will not matter if the party is timid and irresponsible on questions of war and peace. Do today's Democrats really need to be reminded of the political history of the last two decades of the cold war?

The Michael Crowley piece suggests that even from a crassly partisan perspective, the Democrats may not be hurt by a vote. More importantly, accusations that the Republicans are trying to politicize the issue miss the point. What could possibly be a more proper subject for voters to consider than whether a candidate is in favor of a proposed invasion of another country?

2002-09-12T12:48:00.000-04:00

BUSH TO UN: "YOU'RE A BUNCH OF WIMPS:" That's a little bit oversimplified, but not far off from the subtext of his speech earlier today. The flattering introduction to the UN noted how it was formed to be different from the ineffectual League of Nations, and the thrust of the speech was how the UN must act to enforce its ignored resolutions. Bush didn't actually say so, but the clear "or else" was "go the way of the League of Nations." I wonder if the media coverage will pick up on the reference.

2002-09-12T11:37:00.000-04:00

LOOKING FORWARD: Another great James Lileks piece. It's worth it just for the picture at the beginning of the article, but the writing's good, too. His conclusion is absolutely right:

I curse the terrorists for their horrible triumphs, but those bastards cannot even begin to count the ways in which they failed.
(Emphasis in original.)

2002-09-12T11:34:00.000-04:00

ALICE IN WONDERLAND ALERT: The Economist has an article sympathetically describing Arab discontent with America.
The article is in step with much of the Economist's coverage on Israel-Arab relations. But in one sentence, they outdo themselves:
"Instead of trying to douse extremism, says Raghida Dergham, who reports incisively from New York for a liberal daily, Al Hayat, the Bush administration has seemed intent on inflaming it."
(Emphasis added.)
According to MEMRI, this "liberal daily" has featured a Syrian columnist, Mu'taz Al-Khattib, who wrote on September 30, 2001 that: 1) 4,000 Jews had been absent from the WTC building on September 11; 2) a prescheduled interview of Ehud Barak by the BBC was proof of Israel's involvement behind the attacks;
On September 24, 2001, this "liberal daily" also published (according to MEMRI) a certain Saudi Prince Mamdouh bin Abd Al-Aziz, president of the Saudi Center for Strategic Studies, who wrote the following:

Anyone who even skims through The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Pieces on the Chessboard, or the book The World is a Pawn in the Hands of Israel, and follows current events, becomes convinced that the Jews are behind the world's current 'terrorized' atmosphere.... These three books concur that there is a Zionist conspiracy ... [the goal of which is] to channel everything, as much as possible, towards the interests of world Jewry, primarily those among them called 'Allah's Chosen People'....
Objectivity demands that we ask whether the disasters that have struck at the heart of the Arab and Islamic world over many long years were mere coincidence, or were the result of a conspiracy.... I have no doubt whatsoever that many Arab Islamic countries and organizations, both religious and pan-Arab, that acted in good faith, were infiltrated by the Jews....
In fairness, Al-Hayat has apparently also published a number of articles arguing against suicide bombings, at least on tactical grounds (click here and here for translations). So relative to its competitors, Al-Hayat may indeed be "liberal." However, what does it say about a society where even a "liberal" publication publishes items like the two excerpted above?
P.S. The Economist article also has the following money quote:
“Take Israel out of the equation,” says a businessman in Jeddah, “and, poof, we’ve basically never had a problem with America.”
That sentence just begs to be read in multiple ways.

2002-09-12T00:27:00.000-04:00

FORWARD TO THE PAST: I forgot to blog this letter from James Lileks to his one-year-ago self. He summarizes what has happened in the year just concluded:

Does the World Community support this next phase?
What do you think? Of course not. We had their sympathy when we were down on one knee bleeding, but that evaporated with the Afghan campaign. The world likes America with a bloody nose, and hates us when we smash the hand that smacked us. Now only Britain stands with us without reservation: surprise. Europe dithers and fumes - one of the interesting pieces of collateral damage from the WTC attack was the relationship between ordinary Americans and Europe; many here now sense the open animosity the European intelligentsia has towards Americans, and Europe no longer feel like an ally. Remarkable, but true. It’s not that Americans don’t like them; we just don’t care what they think anymore. (Get this: the president will be quoted, second hand, as not “giving a shit what the Europeans think.” It’s come to that.) We realize we’re going to have to go it alone - and in most respects this feels right. No one cares much about the UN anymore, particularly since they elected Libyans to chair the Human Rights division.
Stop laughing; I’m serious. That’s the world in a year from now. Colin Powell will be booed at an international conference for criticizing Mugabe, who’s starving his people. Trust me: 9/11 will drive the collectivists, the fascists, the Luddites, the whole cotillion of idiotarians into a big soggy box, and from this box a great and ineffectual wail shall sound every day. It will dissuade the US not a whit. Great clarity will come from 9/11, and those who persist in seeing the US as the globe’s greatest malefactor will rant themselves into corners.

2002-09-11T16:58:00.000-04:00

MORE THOUGHTS ON MORAL CLARITY: Here's another Mark Steyn piece (I'm making up for lost time.):

On September 12, the Ottawa Citizen ran a column by Susan Riley headlined "At Times Like This, We Thank God That We're Canadians". Oh, God, I groaned, not the usual moral preening. But no, Ms Riley skipped that and went straight for naked self-interest: "Our best protection may be distancing ourselves a little more explicitly from US foreign policy … pursuing a reasonable and moderate course in the world's trouble spots."
I've heard it a thousand times since and I still don't get it. By "distancing yourself" from the victims of September 11 you move yourself closer to the perpetrators, closer to barbarism. It may be "reasonable and moderate", but it's also profoundly self-corroding.
This isn't a "clash of civilisations" so much as a clash within civilisations - in the West, between those who believe in the values of liberal democracy and those too numbed by multiculturalist bromides to recognise even the most direct assault on them; and in the Islamic world, between what's left of the moderate Muslim temperament and the Saudi-radicalised death-cult Islamists.
I don't want to be "moderate and reasonable" in the face of Mohammed Atta. A world that "distances" itself from the US to get closer to him is a world that's more misogynist, bigoted, corrupt and superstitious.

And here's an excellent article by Martin Walker. It's tempting to quote it in its entirety, but here are some choice excerpts:

...Osama bin Laden's shock troops zeroed in on a haunting paradox of the modern world; that a strong and rich and self-confident America is good for a world that increasingly resents it.
... [A] weakened, chastened America is bad for a world that nonetheless loves to see the American colossus restrained and cut down to size -- even if the price is a global recession.
This paradox may be seen in the jeering response to America's first black secretary of state at last week's global summit in Johannesburg. It was on display in last week's meeting at the Arab League of foreign ministers whose regimes often rely on American support, and can constantly be encountered in the opinion pages of liberal European newspapers that should know better. And all of them seem to assume that America will continue to sit back and take it, like the good global citizen that America has tried to be in the last 60 years of defeating Fascism, Nazism, Communism and helping spread more wealth and more freedom to more people in more places than ever in human history.
They are wrong. The real effect of Sept. 11 is that American patience and tolerance for its global critics, most of whom do rather well out of America's benign hegemony, seems just about exhausted. And however it was that Osama bin Laden expected what he has called "the American Empire" to react to his murderous assault, if indeed he thought that far ahead, he seems not to have calculated that America might react by tearing up the old rule book of international affairs.

And regarding a recent conference of US and European officials:

From reports that have leaked from the usually confidential sessions, senior Bush administration officials had a blunt message to deliver. The European allies (the British excepted) were not pulling their weight in the alliance.
...But then the Europeans seem deaf to American arguments, whether over Iraq, or the reliability of Yasser Arafat as a peace partner or anything else. They brush aside Washington's cogent criticisms of the Kyoto Protocol as a cosmetic exercise that does not include the real pollution threats of the 21st century, the fast-growing and energy-hungry demographic giants of China and India. The Europeans were deaf to American appeals that an exception be made in the land mine treaty for the South Korean border, where fewer mines would require more troops to protect it. Only grudgingly did the Europeans accept that America as the only credible global policeman might have a unique difficulty with an International Criminal Court, after the Europeans had rejected a reasonable American compromise to submit cases to the UN Security Council.
"When the Europeans demand some sort of veto over American actions, or want us to subordinate our national interest to a UN mandate, they forget that we do not think their track record is too good," a senior U.S. diplomat said recently in private. "The Europeans told us they could win the Balkans wars all on their own. Wrong. They told us that the Russians would never accept National Missile Defense. Wrong. They said the Russians would never swallow NATO enlargement. Wrong. They told us 20 years ago that détente was the way to deal with what we foolishly called the Evil Empire. Wrong again. They complain about our Farm Bill when they are the world's biggest subsidizers of their agriculture. The Europeans are not just wrong; they are also hypocrites. They are wrong on Kyoto, wrong on Arafat, wrong on Iraq -- so why should we take seriously a single word they say?"

Good question.

2002-09-11T16:16:00.000-04:00

ONE YEAR AGO, AND RELATED THOUGHTS: My son was born in the early morning of September 9, 2001.
Because the birth occurred so early and was wholly uncomplicated, mother and child were allowed to leave the hospital in the afternoon on September 10. We were all experiencing the daze that comes with the birth of a child – a feeling of “Is this really happening?”
The next morning was our daughter’s first full day of pre-school. Preparations for it ran later than I wanted. As I left the house, I was grousing over the fact that I was making a later train than anticipated.
As I was walking to the train, someone called out to me that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.
Like an idiot (see above re: daze) I continued walking to the train. (It did not register on me that Manhattan would be locked down, as there was no such reaction in 1993.)
As the train passed Yankee Stadium, I craned to see the familiar view of the World Trade Center. It was no longer familiar. I will never forget the smoking sight.
The train pulled into Grand Central and I tried to get into the MetLife building for work. The building was already closed down. I encountered a partner from my firm leaving the building who told me about the attack on the Pentagon.
Having finally realized what was happening, I tried to get on a train back home. A minute before the train was to depart, they announced the immediate evacuation of Grand Central. I will never forget the panic in the voice of the person making the announcement. A number of people were panicking as we tried to get out. Fortunately, we were very close to an exit and were able to get to the street in short order.
My mobile phone was not working. I walked to a restaurant which I regularly frequent, which allowed me to use their phone. After trying for a while, I was able to reach my family.
The restaurant had no television. I listened to the radio’s account of the towers’ collapse and of the crash of United Flight 93.
I finally walked to my brother’s apartment on the Upper West Side, where I spent many hours staring slack-jawed at the television.

The evening of my son’s birth had marked the beginning of the period preceding Rosh ha-Shana in which Jews say certain prayers of repentance every day (“Selikhot”). The rabbi had delivered a sermon before those prayers began, bemoaning the horrible year of terrorism in Israel which had just occurred and expressing hope that the upcoming year would be more peaceful.
We soon found out that certain evil men had other ideas.
At my son’s circumcision the next week (the “brit mila” or, colloquially, “bris”), the atmosphere was surreal. As the bris was taking place, the realization was sinking in that a prominent member of our synagogue had been murdered by the terrorists in the World Trade Center.

Rosh ha-Shana is usually viewed as an impetus for change – to review what you’ve been doing and resolve to do better. I looked at this Rosh ha-Shana as an impetus not to change; to resolve never to allow the meanings of September 11 to be diluted by time, or to be effaced by the rationalizations of so-called “sophisticates” who cannot confront the reality of evil.
Those lessons can endure, if we are vigilant enough.
My son provides daily motivation for being so.
P.S. My daughter often stretches bedtime for far longer than it should go, and I am often tempted to resist her entreaties for another story. But then I think to myself: "What if tomorrow is the day they nuke Midtown?", and she usually gets the story.

2002-09-11T15:16:00.000-04:00

WHEN THIS DIDN'T SEEM LIKE A BIG DEAL: From Brad DeLong:

2002-09-11T14:23:00.000-04:00

9/11 AND AGUNOT: Under Jewish law ("halakha"), if a married man disappears, there are extremely high standards of proof that must be satisfied before the man can be declared dead and his wife allowed to remarry. In the aftermath of 9/11, these issues had to be dealt with. Here's an article from a December issue of Ha-aretz describing the issues and the status of the efforts to deal with the widows' situations, and here's an article from today's Ha-aretz stating that all such men had been declared dead under the halakha.

2002-09-11T14:02:00.000-04:00

FISKINGS (THE ANNIVERSARY EDITION): Charles Austin presents the 50th edition of his "Scourge of Richard Cohen" series, using this especially illogical Cohen special on Iraq as a jumping-off point.
In the tenously-existing Salon, Andrew Sullivan demolishes a recent NYT Op-Ed by Susan Sontag.

2002-09-11T13:32:00.000-04:00

MORE REFLECTIONS: N.Z. Bear says it best:
"One year ago today the world changed not at all, but our comfortable perception of it shattered forever. "
This is not true for those who lost loved ones on 9/11, but the larger point is true; we were forced to confront the war which had been declared on us long ago.
He continues:

I fear that our remembrances this year will be dominated by resignation and passivity; will avoid the hard reality that the deaths of our fellow citizens were not accidents, but rather deliberate acts of murder by an enemy whose forces are still at large, and continue to covet American blood.
As you watch today's ceremonies, ask yourself: if you did not know the truth, could the speech you are watching; the ceremony you are witnessing, be equally appropriate if those two towers had collapsed in an earthquake?
If the answer is "yes", then my fears have been borne out.
Perhaps I will be proven wrong, but the track record up until this point is not good. We seem to be embracing the role of victim; not just commemorating it, but celebrating it. We are in danger of remembering what occurred a year ago today as a tragedy that just "happened".
But what is being overwhelmed in the cult of victimhood is that forty men and women refused to accept their role as passive victims. They saw the face of the enemy; they learned the evil it had done already and the work it still had left to be done on that day.
And they said "no more". They drew the line: this far, and no farther.
Flight 93.
And suddenly, there it is. Amid the senselessness of that day, a clarity appears: a meaning that can be drawn from the death and madness.
The conflict we face now did not begin last September. Whether you define the war against Islamic fascism as beginning in 1979, or in 1993, it had been with us for years; we simply failed to acknowledge that there were indeed fanatics who were sworn to kill us. And so, as horrible as the loss of life was in the Towers and at the Pentagon, as events they were unique only in degree, not in kind.
But something unique did happen that awful day. Something the murderers did not expect; something they had not planned.
We began to fight back.
It deserves a name of its own. Whether you call it the "Battle of Shanksville", the "Battle of Flight 93", or just "The Turning Point", it was an event inexorably tied to --- and yet distinct from --- the black sorrow of the rest of that day. And it should not be subsumed under the easy grief that we have come to associate with "9/11".
For it marked the first time in this war that Americans had fought back. In those few scant minutes after the first hijackings, American society finally woke up, analyzed the threat, and acted. Forty people gave their lives in the effort, but the battle was won. There would be no third target on that day; the only harm that Flight 93 would do would be to a deserted field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Years from now, I hope the emphasis with which we commemorate the events of this year past will have changed. The loss of life and grief should not be forgotten or minimized. But I think that given time, and perspective, it will become clearer that the event that we should remember most keenly on this day is not the massive loss of life that the terrorists inflicted on us.
It is that one, small battle that occurred over the skies of Pennsylvania, where a group of unarmed American civilians stared their murderers in the face, and in refusing to quietly accept their fate, earned our nation its first victory in this war.

2002-09-11T12:58:00.001-04:00

START MAKING PERMANENT VACATION PLANS, SADDAM: In other Iraq-related news, U.S. Central Command is moving from Florida to Qatar. Shouldn't be long now...

2002-09-11T12:58:00.000-04:00

REFLECTIONS: The always reliable Mark Steyn writes:

September 11th was, according to CBS' special commemoration, "The Day That Changed America." Fox, slightly less passive, has gone with "The Day America Changed." But the best proof that nothing has changed are the networks' day-that-everything-changed specials themselves. My pleas not to Dianafy September 11th have fallen on deaf ears. The all-star sob-sisters will be out in force with full supporting saccharine piano accompaniment. The networks have decided America's anger needs to be managed. It's a very September 10th commemoration of September 11th.
So be it. Nations do not change in a day. The only change that occurred on September 11th was a simple one. When Osama bin Laden blew up the World Trade Center, he also blew up the polite fictions of the pre-war world. At Ground Zero, they've been working frantically to clear away the rubble. Likewise, at the UN, EU and all the rest, they've also been working frantically not so much to clear away the mess but to stick it back together and reconstruct the great fantasy world as it existed on September 10th, that bizarro make-believe land where NATO is a "mutual defence alliance" and Egypt and Saudi Arabia are "our staunch friends." Even in America, some people are still living in that world. You can switch on the TV and hear apparently sane "experts" using phrases like "Bush risks losing the support of the Arab League."
...Everything that mattered after September 11th -- Bush's moral clarity, the Afghan innovations and the crystal-clear understanding that this is an enemy beyond negotiation -- was present in the final moments of Flight 93. They're the bedrock American values, the ones you don't always see because everyone's yakking about Anna Nicole or the new "reality-based" Beverly Hillbillies. But we know that when you need them in a hurry they're always there.
Bush will need them in the years ahead because he has chosen to embark on the most ambitious change of all, a reversal of half-a-century of U.S. policy in the Middle East. The polite fictions -- Prince Abdullah is "moderate," Yasser Arafat is our "partner in peace," the Syrian Foreign Minister is as respectable as New Zealand's -- will no longer do. They led to slaughter.
Europe, for one, hasn't caught up to September 11th: When it comes to Saddam, the Continentals are like the passengers on those first three planes; they're thinking he's a rational guy, just play it cool and he won't pull anything crazy.
But America learned the hard way: it's the world of September 10th that's really crazy.

The great British military historian John Keegan ruminates on Iraq:

Saddam is deeply anti-Western, if only because it is the western States, particularly America, which frustrate his ambition to become a regional warlord and leader of the Arab Middle East. He has undoubtedly financed terror in the past, finances and supports the Palestinian suicide bombers and covertly endorses terrorism as an anti-Western program.
Moreover, if allowed to proceed to the development of nuclear weapons, Iraq could be enabled to support terrorism with impunity. Hence the urgency of the Bush program to overthrow the Saddam regime while the opportunity still exists.
Once the Iraqi nuclear program is complete, invasion of the country will become perhaps impossible and certainly very difficult and fraught with terrible risk. Saddam would then possess the means to devastate any sort of ground force launched against him, either from land bases or by an amphibious operation in the Gulf.
He already possesses the necessary rocket launchers, crude and relatively short-range as they are. He only needs the warheads, which he may soon possess.
THOSE stark facts make Western opposition to the president's anti-Saddam policy difficult to understand. Those who argue that new United Nations approval for an attack is necessary or that a pre-emptive offensive would be an offense in international law are living in the past.
...IN the circumstances, it seems incomprehensible that sensible Westerners can possibly doubt the need to prevent Saddam acquiring nuclear weapons. Those in the United States who oppose military action seem motivated by short-term fears, particularly that action might make things worse. Those in Europe who oppose it reveal an old-fashioned anti-Americanism.
In Britain, where a solid minority supports President Bush, his most vocal opponents are often former members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, who, at the height of the Cold War, wanted the United Kingdom to give up its nuclear weapons as a gesture to promote general disarmament. It is paradoxical that they now, in effect, support Saddam's efforts to become a nuclear warlord in his own right.
...WORDS of caution may seem wise at the moment. How will they sound when Saddam has the bomb? It will be too late then for the opponents of action now to say that they meant well. Saddam does not mean well at all.