OUR GERMANS ARE better than their Germans.

But then, turning on relatives who displease the state is a tradition of sorts there, isn’t it?

UPDATE: Reader Fred Boness emails:

Our Germans ARE better than their Germans and that’s always been true. During WWII who was the best German general?

The best German general of WWII was Eisenhower.

Heh. We had some others, too.

SADDAM DEFEATS FRENCH, GERMANS: At least, that’s probably the upshot of this report:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 9 — The top U.N. arms experts said tonight that they were unable to reach agreement with Saddam Hussein’s government on several key weapons issues they had traveled here to resolve in a bid to build support for continuing inspections.

The two chief U.N. inspectors, Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, failed to come away with the top three items on their wish list during meetings with high-level Iraqi officials on Saturday and today: significant amounts of new evidence about Iraq’s past weapons programs, safety guarantees from Iraq for reconnaissance aircraft they want to fly over the country; and a high-level declaration criminalizing the production of nuclear, chemical or biological arms.

Stay tuned. I guess Saddam figured out that the whole thing was really just a campaign to sneak an invasion force in under U.N. cover.

THE BENEFIT OF A HARVARD EDUCATION. (Via Dave Barry).

BARBECUE BLOGGING: Randy Paul writes about barbecue with a Brazilian flavor. I know some Brazilian folks who cook this, but I’ve never actually had any. I’ve had its Nigerian near-equivalent, though.

Good, but not as good as Calhoun’s — or, of course, the barbecue that I make, which is fit for a god. A damned lucky god.

CPO SPARKEY IS TAKING ME, and more particularly Eric Muller, to task for criticizing the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II. (He has updated posts here and here.) He says that MAGIC decryptions gave the authorities reason to suspect a lot of Japanese spies and saboteurs, and provides some excerpts.

This is news to me, but of course the last time I paid close attention to this subject, the MAGIC decryptions weren’t public. (MAGIC was, but not its results). It’s interesting, but I’m not sure how this supports Rep. Howard Coble’s statement that the purpose of the internments was to protect Japanese-Americans from mob violence.

HERE’S A LINK TO STREAMING VIDEO OF AN ANTIWAR PROTEST IN ANN ARBOR: The repeated chant: “We are not like President G. Bush.”

That seems to be the key message of the whole antiwar movement, doesn’t it? “We aren’t like him!”

Protest as solidarity good. The streaming video is cool, though.

LETTER FROM GOTHAM SAYS THAT EVERYONE HAS IT ALL WRONG about the New York City peace march planned by United for Peace and Justice. She reports that New York City is, in fact, willing to allow a “rally,” but not a “march.” (One stays still; the other moves.) And the reasons have to do with safety, not the message.

UPDATE: Jim Henley has responded.

ANOTHER UPDATE: And Gotham has responded to Henley.

JUST SAW AN ENORMOUSLY DISHONEST “60 MINUTES” PIECE on ballistic fingerprinting. It somehow neglected this report indicating that the technology isn’t good enough even to satisfy anti-gun California Attorney General Bill Lockyer. Instead, it made it appear as if a few mere technical quibbles on the part of the NRA were the problem, though in fact this report, dated last week, precisely echoes what the NRA representative was saying on “Sixty Minutes.”

Pathetic.

RAND SIMBERG REPORTS ON THE 21ST CENTURY CHILDREN’S CRUSADE: Also, his one-man psychological-warfare campaign appears to be bearing fruit.

Of course, I think he’s telling the truth, and the psychological-warfare talk is just disinformation. . . .

A REVIEW OF RADAR DATA suggests that something broke off of Columbia on Day 2 of its mission, perhaps as a consequence of a debris or meteor impact.

THOUSANDS OF SOUTH KOREANS attended a pro-U.S. rally earlier today. Meanwhile here’s a report that I can’t confirm, about U.S. threats to withdraw troops from South Korea and the reaction thereto. And here’s an article about the generational divide among South Koreans on the subject of North Korea’s dangerousness.

UPDATE: E. Nough has some comments.

INSTALAWYER has an lengthy email from a former juror regarding a medical malpractice case. Having served on a jury myself in a tort case (one far less complex than this one) it rings true. Best part, though, is InstaLawyer’s observation at the end:

By the way, the first thing I thought when I read the facts of the case was: How can this lady not know she’s pregnant, regardless of what the doctor’s office said. An obvious tragedy — losing a child — but what did she think that moving lump in her belly was? Too many burgers? I would have turned the case down on that point alone.

While there are lawyers out there who’ll take anything that walks in the door, my own observation on contingent fees has been that they make many plaintiffs’ lawyers reluctant to take cases that are far from frivolous. Many of the frivolous cases (e.g., the McDonald’s fat case) are really brought on grounds of ideology rather than profit.

THE AAAS HAS A PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS of the Bush 2004 science budget. The Department of Homeland Security becomes a major science funding center. I’m not convinced that’s a good thing. I mean, it’s not impossible for it to be a good thing, but. . . .

BILL HERBERT SAYS BUSH SHOULD CALL THEIR BLUFF ON IRAQ. And scroll down for his comments on the “irreplaceable” Harvey Pitt.

KIERAN HEALY HAS MOVED to a new bloghome. Adjust your bookmarks accordingly.

PRINCE CHARLES, ROBED ARABOPHILE? PunditWatch is up!

UPDATE: Here’s more on Charles.

MATT WELCH SUGGESTS THAT BUSH IS BETTER AT THIS DIPLOMACY THING than many — including many on his side — believe:

Last February, if UN resolutions were being discussed in public at all, odds were high that the debate was over the number of child deaths attributable to economic sanctions, not the exploits of Hans Blix and Co.

Colin Powell was muddling through a process of developing more targeted “smart sanctions,” aimed to ease some of the economic chokehold in deference to the French and Russians, who had long ago lost interest in enforcing the program. Weapons inspectors had been absent since 1998, and almost no one was talking about bringing them back.

Now, fast-forward a year. Instead of throwing up obstacles to economic sanctions, the French and Russians have become overnight converts to the idea of intrusive weapons inspections. Saddam Hussein himself, clearly spooked by the idea of being pulverized, has invited the inspectors back in, allowed one-on-one interviews with Iraqi scientists, and may soon cave on U2 surveillance flights.

With each new U.S. “compromise” comes an audible tightening of the noose, and a frantic new round of Arab diplomacy to persuade Saddam to walk away before the Stealth Bombers take off. Rarely before has bluster yielded so many results.

Is Bush bluffing? “We may never know,” observes Welch.

OLD AND NEW EUROPE: Jim Bennett has some thoughts.

POWER LAWS, POPULARITY, AND THE VANISHING MIDDLE: Clay Shirky has some interesting observations on weblogs.

TOM FRIEDMAN IS ABSOLUTELY RIGHT: India should replace France on the Security Council:

Why replace France with India? Because India is the world’s biggest democracy, the world’s largest Hindu nation and the world’s second-largest Muslim nation, and, quite frankly, India is just so much more serious than France these days. France is so caught up with its need to differentiate itself from America to feel important, it’s become silly. India has grown out of that game. India may be ambivalent about war in Iraq, but it comes to its ambivalence honestly. Also, France can’t see how the world has changed since the end of the cold war. India can.

Indeed.

As I’ve said, the French/German diplomatic initiative is merely isolating those nations.

SUMAN PALIT IS UNFAZED by the French/German diplomatic counteroffensive. I think he’s right here.

Just now I caught a bit of an NPR program in which an expert was solemnly warning that Europe would become a “rival superpower” and asserting, as evidence, the “growing pacifism” among Germans.

I’m willing to run the risk of a pacifistic rival. In truth, Europe can’t become a rival superpower without structural change that would completely undermine the current meaning of “Europe” — a shift away from socialist welfare-state economics that would allow investments in military capacity, for example.

That could happen, but it’s not likely, and it’s not the kind of thing that happens gradually, or by accident.

Personally, I think that the French/German behavior here is further support for Steven Den Beste’s theory that they have something dreadful to hide regarding their relations with Saddam.

UPDATE: Reader Chuck Herrick emails:

Clearly, this is a credible alternative to democracy forced by war. Certainly not preferable, but definitely credible, meaning a butt-load of folks are going to believe in it.

So, why wait until it’s too late (so late)?

I think the point the Euro’s are trying to accomplish is the destruction of George W Bush, and the muscular, politically conservative agenda of America. Because, even if Bush takes us to war (I pray for this) and wins (I pray for this) and wins easily (I pray for this) and transforms the middle east into a domino-phenomenon that beings a democratic ripple throughout the region (I pray for this), the anti-war, America-haters are going forever to be able to brand America as “The Big Cowboy”.

For the Euros, this is not about presenting viable alternatives. This is about neutering America. This is about international competition of the most venal sort. Because if there were a shred of interest in presenting alternatives, this alternative would not have been presented so late in the game.

Look at the play-by-play, in slo-mo if you like. The Euros have played this brilliantly. This is going to be very difficult for the US to bat down in time before we go to war, and that I think is the whole point. The Euros want us to go to war with this proposal sitting on the table.

In other words, since this is not an honest proposal (serious, yes, honest no), they win big chips in the court of world opinion.

It’s poker baby, and the Euros have just called our hand. They suck, but play very well.

Yeah, but it’s a bluff, and it’s not going to work. First, this assumes that it’s bad to be thought of as the “Cowboy of the World.”

A year or two ago I might have agreed with this. But looking around the world I see a degree of cravenness and an appetite for appeasement that makes me wonder whether it’s worth it to play nice.

And my question for the French and Germans is this: If the Security Council fails to constrain Saddam Hussein, what makes you think that it will constrain America?

And how long can you demonize America as an imperialist power that doesn’t give a damn what other people think before it comes true?

And do you want to live in that world?

As I said below, of course, it would serve these guys right if Bush said: “We’ve mobilized the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, and we’ll transport 50,000 of your toops to Iraq starting on Thursday. But if you’re not ready to send them, we’ll dismiss you as a bunch of unserious kibitzers and go on as planned.”

I predict a different outcome, however, because this is, in fact, a transparent ploy.

AARON SCHATZ EMAILS:

Don’t know if you watch Saturday Night Live (I doubt it) but the theme of tonight’s show seemed to be “Europeans are morons.”

The opening sketch featured the UN Security Council. After Colin Powell finishes his statements on Iraq, the German foreign minister says “and now, I think we should do nothing.” Then the French minister says “actually, I think we should all go to lunch at the most expensive restaurant in town, and make the UN pay the tab.” For the next five minutes the ministers all discuss how they can find the most expensive restaurant, take the highest number of stretch limos, and block the largest amount of New York traffic. The minister from Syria suggests they use their UN immunity to shoplift at Cartier. At the end the camera turns to Powell, who is dumbfounded.

A later sketch featured an anti-war protest. The lead protester kept trying to discuss the war while the rest of the protesters kept interrupting him by screaming out other causes, including gay rights, legalizing drugs, saving the whales, and stopping smoking. Clearly a parody of ANSWER.

Later on, they ran a parody of a European pop music program, as the two hosts traded criticisms of the United States war on Iraq with horrible banalities about pop music, including a great spot-on parody of horrible European “rappers.” Later on they went into the “audience” of kids to get video requests, each kid said how much they hated America and then requested some American video. “Yeah, I want to say to George Bush, get your troops out of Turkey… and my favorite song is Jenny From the Block!!!”

Bet nobody ever thought they would see the day when Saturday Night Live had such a clear pro-war stance.

Well, SNL at its best is about satire, and satire is about puncturing pretentious empty twaddle. And we all know who has the market on that cornered.

UPDATE: Reader Devereaux Cannon emails:

I was struck by the concept of a pacifist superpower. Can such a thing exist?

In an old Death Valley Days episode, I think titled “No Gun Behind The Badge,” Ronald Reagan played the roll of a town marshal who tried to enforce the law without using a firearm. He was, of course, shot dead by a bad guy. This strikes me as being analogous to a pacifist superpower.

Well, it worked for Andy Griffith. But the world is not just a big version of Mayberry. Or even Munich.

UPDATE: Reader Dan Hollenbaugh emails:

I watched that show a lot growing up and it’s everywhere in reruns. Sheriff Andy Taylor never carried a gun when he didn’t need one, but in a number of episodes, when it appeared that the bad guys might be capable of violence, he showed no reluctance to strap on his own .38, or grab a rifle from the rack in his office. I think that might actually make a better point about a pacifist superpower – even the supremely gentle Andy knew that there are times that call for the availability of, and willingness to use, lethal force.

Good point. I’ll bet he knows the license number of the bankrobbers’ car that Barney ticketed, too. . . .

YEAH, I KNOW, I HAVEN’T BLOGGED MUCH TODAY: We’ve done a spell of spring cleaning at the InstaPundit household, and various other family activities have had priority. But hey, there’s a lot of new stuff over at Virginia Postrel’s page, and Charles Murtaugh has a lot of new stuff up, too.

And here’s an indication that war is near: Civil Reserve Air Fleet activation.

Meanwhile, don’t miss Colbert King’s thoughts on Harry Belafonte and Colin Powell, in light of Powell’s Security Council speech.

UPDATE: Okay, as I dip lightly into my ocean of email, here are a couple more worth reading: an indication that Homeland Security is still a joke, with armed uniformed Cubans not being noticed until after they’ve landed and given themselves up, and Steven Den Beste’s thoughts on the latest French diplomatic counteroffensive.

Den Beste’s worried about it. I’m not. First, I wouldn’t be surprised if bombs started falling before this jells (see above). But more importantly, the argument has now shifted: the question is now not whether Iraq should be occupied, but by whom. American troops? Or the French army?

Some questions answer themselves. Though it would serve the French right if we waved them in with bands playing, and with a warning that if Saddam does anything untoward, they’d best duck.

Of course, the French will abandon this when they realize that it was originally an American idea. Unless this is all some sort of devious diplomatic ballet. . . . Nah. Couldn’t be.

IN THIS ARTICLE ABOUT ANTI-WAR POETS AND LAURA BUSH, the author marvels at poets’ belief that poetry must be morally pure.

And well he might. It’s easy to understand why poets might like to think that poesy confers high moral stature — just as beekeepers may think that the apiary arts do the same. But the evidence, frankly, is stronger for the beekeepers’ position than for the poets’. In fact, what’s interesting, or perhaps revealing, is that genocidal thuggish dictators so often have artistic aspirations. As has been noted here before, there’s often a lot of overlap between mediocre artistry and murderous tyranny:

Yet in truth, our last century’s worst disasters came from bad artists with dumb political views (Hitler (lousy art), Stalin (bad poetry), Mao (worse poetry), etc.). Perhaps the resemblance between our neo-conceptualists and Hitler is greater than they imagine. Consider the following behaviors alluded to in the piece, and then consider who besides exhibitors at the Whitney and Brooklyn Museum routinely engaged in them:

Dressing up in dumb costumes and having picture made in public places (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, Pol Pot)

Filling warehouses with severed body parts and icky stuff (Above except, mostly, Mussolini)

Portraying political opponents as subhuman (all of the above)

Spouting mind-numbing political cant while imagining they are saying something original (all of the above)

Thinking that they speak for the masses when they are really playing out own neuroses/psychoses (all of the above)

Genocidal Fascist/Communist dictators or Conceptual Artists? You decide.

I’m not sure if Saddam has written poetry, but he’s certainly a novelist of some renown. And there’s something about the artist’s desire for total control over his or her work of art that seems to find resonance with the dictator’s desire for total control over society. Indeed, some dictators seem to regard themselves as artists, artists who work with people and nations.

So perhaps the “antiwar” poets simply recognize a kindred spirit.

I’M KIND OF BUSY THIS MORNING. Head on over to Betsy’s Page for lots of fresh posts. Back later.

UPDATE: Still busy, but go read Eamonn Fitzgerald’s on-site reports from the appropriately sited Munich conference on security.

HERE’S MORE ON “PATRIOT ACT II” — some astounding provisions . . . .

ON A MORE HOPEFUL NOTE, there’s this story.

CRUSHING DISSENT — AND LOVING IT! Eugene Volokh takes the New York Sun to task for its apparent approval of New York City’s efforts to forestall an antiwar protest. He’s right, and the Sun is wrong. And the Sun should know that it’s wrong — and, worse, probably does.

THIS IS INTERESTING:

Morale was very low, he said, both among his fellow conscripts and among civilians. “We want America to attack because of the bad situation in our country. But we don’t want America to launch air strikes against Iraqi soldiers because we are forced to shoot and defend. We are also victims in this situation.” . . .

The soldiers Abbas left behind, meanwhile, sit in their hilltop bunkers, pondering an unenviable fate. “We are all very tired,” Abbas said. “I haven’t heard of Tony Blair. But if George Bush wants to give us freedom then we will welcome it.”

Credible? I report. You decide.

BUT I DIDN’T LIKE THE FIRST ONE! There’s talk now of a “Patriot Act II” and I don’t like it. Read more about it here, here, and here.

Jeez. We need this like we need “Dude, Where’s My Car? II.”

A POODLE WITH TEETH: Jim Bennett writes:

The true peculiarity of the Bush-Blair relationship lies in the fact that the two share one important characteristic, albeit understood in different ways, while differing in another extremely important way. This creates a tension between cooperation and conflict that has characterized, and will probably continue to characterize, this peculiar instance of the Special relationship.

The shared characteristic is that Bush and Blair, almost alone of the world’s leaders, genuinely believe that they are facing not merely opposition, but evil. The unshared characteristic is that for Blair, one of the principal aspects of Saddam Hussein’s evil is his defiance of international law. Blair is not only a Gladstonian internationalist, but a robust internationalist, who believes that international order must be backed with effective action.

When words fail, Gladstonians, like Wilsonians, are willing to bring out the guns. In the Web logs, there is much talk about the rousing of the Jacksonian spirit in America. A careful reading of history would warn foreigners that the truly dangerous situation comes when the Wilsonians are aroused as well.

One of the many ironies in this situation is that here Blair is being a more consistent backer of the international order and the United Nations than his critics on the left, and on the European Continent. It is exactly the same motivation that leads Blair to criticize America for failing to ratify Kyoto that causes him to support Bush on Iraq.

Interesting.

FIRST THE COOKEVILLE DOG SHOOTING, NOW THIS. Jeez.

IT JUST GETS WORSE:

Gun control groups are downplaying questions about plagiarism after one organization issued a statement to the media containing language that is, in some instances, identical to passages in a copyrighted news report published four days earlier by the Associated Press.

Leah Barrett, executive director of Marylanders Against Handgun Abuse (MAHA), denied any wrongdoing in issuing a statement Monday that contained numerous statements that were mirror images of portions of an AP article that appeared in the San Jose Mercury News and other media outlets Jan. 30. . . .

Barrett issued a statement to CNSNews.com Feb. 3 in response to an inquiry for a news article being prepared about the Department of Justice taking over the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), confirming that the statement was sent by her exclusively to the Internet news wire in response to its inquiry.

“The rabid NRA has no better ally in Washington than Attorney General John Ashcroft, once featured in a National Rifle Association magazine cover story as ‘a breath of fresh air’ in the capital,” read a portion of Barrett’s statement.

In a Jan. 30 AP article about gun control, reporter Curt Anderson wrote: “Gun owners may have no better ally in Washington than Attorney General John Ashcroft, once featured in a National Rifle Association magazine cover story as ‘a breath of fresh air’ in the capital.’”

Barrett’s Feb. 3 statement contained other passages that were identical to parts of Anderson’s AP article.

Of course, as the reader who sent this link noted, it’s really the Associated Press who should be embarrassed — for publishing a news story that could be turned into an advocacy-group press release with only a few words being altered.

Conspiracy theory of the week: this is proof that the American gun-control movement is a tool of British intelligence. Lyndon Larouche, call your office!

UPDATE: Reader Drew Kelley emails: “My question Glenn, is: How do we know that the original AP news story wasn’t just a reworked press release from one of the gun-control groups?”

CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER: Readers of The Guardian are supporting war, according to this poll.

UPDATE: A persnickety reader emails with this shocking news:

When a web site invites people to participate in a “poll”, it is not actually a poll. The missing ingredient is representative sampling. In a self-selecting group, the results will be biased toward those who feel the strongest, or at least strongly enough to participate. For this reason, they cannot be deemed representative of the population as a whole. I suspect you already knew this.

You may have noticed disclaimers to this effect issued by reputable journalistic organisations engaged in such “polling”. I noticed that such a remark was omitted from your blog, but (as you have said) you are not a journalist.

Well, duh. No, unlike “journalists,” I assume that my readers aren’t idiots, and know that an online poll isn’t a scientific sampling.

I also assume that a sampling of Guardian readers, even if unscientific, is interesting when it goes in such an unexpected direction. Either (1) Guardian readers as a whole are persuaded, which isn’t implausible (I mean, if Mary McGrory is persuadable, there’s hope for anyone short of Noam Chomsky); or (2) pro-war people are so numerous and well-organized that they can flood a Guardian poll and overwhelm its natural tendency to go the other way, which is news in itself, no?

And — unlike those “journalists” you invoke — I think my readers are smart enough to figure this out on their own. But that’s where blogging differs from journalism, I guess.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The poll has swung the other way now, so I guess this has become a dog-bites-man story. Suspiciously, however, it wouldn’t let me vote.

NEW YORK POLITICIAN’S RACIST REMARKS GO UNREPORTED: I wonder why?

UPDATE: This isn’t very impressive, either:

O’REILLY: We’d save lives because Mexican wetbacks, whatever you want to call them, the coyotes — they’re not going to do what they’re doing now, so people aren’t going to die in the desert. So we save lives, all right, and we seal it down and make it 100 times harder to come across.

Ouch.

I GUESS THAT THE “ANALBRENDA” CHARACTER who’s been spamming the WarbloggerWatch list is really a warblogger herself. Heh.

UPDATE: Yep. Gotta be.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Just to be clear, the first link is to Susannah Breslin’s blog, but I’m not suggesting that she is the porn-spammer.

I’VE MENTIONED NEW STUDENT GROUPS AT YALE AND OXFORD: Now there’s one at Brandeis, too. Three instances constitute a trend, right?

UPDATE: Here’s a similar group at Columbia — “Students United for Victory.” They’re trying to bring back ROTC, too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: There’s also the Princeton Committee Against Terrorism.

SOME THOUGHTS ON AMERICA from Shanti Mangala — part of an ongoing discussion in the Indian portion of the Blogosphere.

TRUTH, LIES, AND WAR: All discussed over at GlennReynolds.com for your reading pleasure.

EAMONN FITZGERALD is blogging from the Munich Conference on Security Policy. Apparently, the choice of Munich for the conference was, well, appropriate. . . .

ERIC MULLER is fact-checking Howard Coble’s ass.

THERE’S AN INTERESTING DIALOGUE on the future of the space program over at Slate. Start here.

EARLIER, I BLOGGED ABOUT YALE COLLEGE STUDENTS FOR DEMOCRACY (essentially a pro-democracy, anti-dictator — and hence pro-war — student organization), and now there’s already a sister organization starting at Oxford. Maybe we’ve got a movement going here.

SHUTTLE WING DAMAGE HAS BEEN CONFIRMED by Air Force cameras:

High-resolution images taken from a ground-based Air Force tracking camera in southwestern U.S. show serious structural damage to the inboard leading edge of Columbia’s left wing, as the crippled orbiter flew overhead about 60 sec. before the vehicle broke up over Texas killing the seven astronauts on board Feb. 1.

According to sources close to the investigation, the images, under analysis at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, show a jagged edge on the left inboard wing structure near where the wing begins to intersect the fuselage. They also show the orbiter’s right aft yaw thrusters firing, trying to correct the vehicle’s attitude that was being adversely affected by the left wing damage. Columbia’s fuselage and right wing appear normal. Unlike the damaged and jagged left wing section, the right wing appears smooth along its entire length. The imagery is consistent with telemetry.

It’s still not clear what caused it, though.

UPDATE: This story is interesting, as is this earlier story, on upper-atmosphere electrical phenomena known as blue jets, elves, and sprites. (Also interesting — these phenomena were reported by pilots for years but the reports were dismised before scientists realized that they were real.)

HEH.

TONY ADRAGNA IS FACT-CHECKING ROBERT FISK. As always, the results are amusing — especially the Beckett reference.

I GOT HOME YESTERDAY and there was a fat manila envelope in the mail. Sadly, it wasn’t stuffed with small, unmarked bills — but it did contain something almost as nice: the prototype issue of the Los Angeles Examiner newspaper that Matt Welch and Ken Layne are starting with a little help from some guy named Riordan.

It looks very good, and it has a different feel from most alt-weeklies: no pretending that it’s put out by a bunch of 23-year-old hipsters in a basement, a pose that has grown increasingly lame as the actual readership, and staff age, of most alt-weeklies climbs toward the mid-40s. Instead, it’s a paper for actual adults. I like it. Not as much as an envelope stuffed with cash, but . . . .

ERIC ALTERMAN has a new book out. But Pejman Yousefzadeh has posted a critique of Alterman’s latest article that’s long enough to be a book. Well, almost. . . .

UPDATE: Oh, I should link to the website for Alterman’s book, What Liberal Media? You can read the first chapter for free.

THERE’S AN INTERESTING BACK-AND-FORTH concerning deterrence, rogue nations, and weapons of mass destruction over at The Cardinal Collective, a Stanford group-blog.

ANOTHER TARNISHED ICON: Did William O. Douglas fake his military record? Quite possibly. How much does this matter? It depends, I guess.

A SMOKING GUN OF A DIFFERENT SORT?

Expurgated portions of Iraq’s December 7 report to the UN Security Council show that German firms made up the bulk of suppliers for Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs. What’s galling is that German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and his minions have long known the facts, German intelligence services know them and have loads of information on what Saddam Hussein is hiding, and Schroeder nonetheless plays holier than thou to an easily manipulated, pacifist-inclined domestic audience.

If it’s not the height of hypocrisy and opportunism, Schroeder’s preemptive “no war. period” stance on Iraq and insistence on a “German Way” (Deutscher Weg) certainly come close. German Way? Haven’t we heard that sort of talk before sometime, somewhere? But leave that be. It falls in the same category as Schroeder’s former justice minister’s comparison of US President George W Bush to Adolf Hitler in last summer’s election campaign. Not only Schroeder and that unfortunate lady, but politicians elsewhere are of limited mental accountability when desperate about winning an election, and suffer lapses of speech and memory.

There’s much more, in this piece from Asia Times. It seems like some other media outfits might want to look into this. It certainly dovetails with Steven Den Beste’s theory that the German and French governments are desperate to avoid war because they know that once a war is over we’ll find out just how thoroughly in bed with Saddam they were. And, perhaps, still are.

THE FAMILY OF THE MAN THE U.N. INSPECTORS TURNED OVER TO THE IRAQI SECRET POLICE is appealing to Amnesty International for help.

Good luck, folks.

I GUESS THIS IS A STUDENT PRO-WAR GROUP:

NEW HAVEN, CT, February 6, 2003 – Undergraduate students at Yale University have formed a proactive group for the defense and perpetuation of democracy around the world.

Yale College Students for Democracy (YCSD) is a new coalition of Yale students from across the conventional political spectrum that seeks to further the “protection of liberal democracies and the expansion of those universal rights and liberties we exercise here in the United States,” according to YCSD President Matthew Louchheim.

Student members believe in the following principles:

That targeting innocent civilians is an unjust act;

That governments are established to uphold justice and serve their citizens;

That human dignity demands respect for people of every religion, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation;

That the rule of law and self-determination are necessary to protect these rights from an arbitrary authority;

That the United States must continually strive for moral clarity in the formulation of foreign policy.

And that democratic countries, including the United States and its allies, have the right to vigorously oppose those despotic regimes and terrorist organizations that threaten international security.

YCSD exists because “many in the Yale community ignore human rights abuses and injustice abroad and continue to focus on so-called evils of the American government,” Louchheim said. “They fail to recognize the vulnerability of the United States and other democracies in the face of despotic, intolerant, and illiberal regimes and terrorist organizations.”

There’s a bunch of contact information for various Yale students, but I won’t publish that here. If you’re a journalist and want to reach ‘em, email me and I’ll copy you.

DAVID ADESNIK has some thoughts on how Colin Powell’s speech affected views on the war.

RAND SIMBERG WRITES:

The lesson we must take from the most recent shuttle disaster is that we can no longer rely on a single vehicle for our access to the new frontier, and that we must start to build the needed orbital infrastructure in low earth orbit, and farther out, to the moon, so that, in the words of the late Congressman George Brown, “greater metropolitan earth” is no longer a wilderness in which a technical failure means death or destruction.

NASA’s problem hasn’t been too much vision, even for near-earth activities, but much too little. But it’s a job not just for NASA–to create that infrastructure, we will have to set new policies in place that harness private enterprise, just as we did with the railroads in the 19th Century. That is the policy challenge that will come out of the latest setback–to begin to tame the harsh wilderness only two hundred miles above our heads.

Read the whole thing.

ANOTHER SMOKING GUN?

Though he would not have known it at the time, the deputy’s congratulatory telephone call to two men accused of murdering the US diplomat Laurence Foley last October – killed in the garden of his Amman home by a volley of eight shots – was an error of incalculable proportions. The call was intercepted by Western intelligence services, possibly America’s National Security Agency (NSA) or Britain’s electronic eavesdropping service at GCHQ, Cheltenham, and allowed coalition operatives to trace the man from Syria, then to Turkey.

When he arrived in Turkey, those intelligence operatives took the decision to pounce. The al-Qa’ida deputy was seized and taken to one of the interrogation centres covertly operated in the region by the US Central Intelligence Agency. In many cases, America prefers certain prisoners to be questioned by the intelligence services of countries where the rules governing the use of torture or psychological pressure are less strict. In this instance, it appears America led the interrogation, using, in the words of one official, “unspecified psychological pressure” to obtain information.

US officials quoted by The New York Times say the deputy revealed that Zarqawi was operating a cell out of Iraq, that he had been given medical assistance there and that he was planning and conducting attacks across Europe and the Middle East with up to 24 al-Qa’ida fighters. Mr Foley, 62, head of America’s Agency for International Development mission, was the first of the cell’s targets.

How many of these do we need, anyway?

U.S. CHEMICAL STRIKES AGAINST IRAQ? Well, sorta, kinda, in a way. I’m inclined to doubt this. Under what circumstances would this be useful?

WHAT HATH BLOG WROUGHT? TAPPED has responded to the Dave Kopel piece that was responding to TAPPED’s earlier post involving an email from Kopel about a post of theirs commenting on an email of his that was posted here in response to an email responding to an email of Kopel’s that was inspired by a post of mine.

Or something like that.

UPDATE: Steve Verdon is unimpressed by TAPPED’s response.

SUBLIMINAL MAN strikes an editorial from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

THE CRACKED-SHUTTLE-WING PHOTO IS BOGUS, according to Snopes.

NOT EVERYONE is persuaded by Colin Powell’s speech. But this “they lied to us before” argument cuts both ways. The “peace” folks told us that the Afghan war would lead to deliberate “silent genocide,” with millions starving, etc., etc. They knew, or should have known, that these statements were false — I think it’s fair to call them lies.

UPDATE: Robert Crawford replies.

HAS SADDAM LOST THE ARAB STREET?

“SOULLESS ROBOT BLOWFISH” — it’s a Layne-ism, of course. I guess Layne will never work at The American Prospect now. . . .

ADVICE FOR JOURNALISTS AND NEWS ORGANIZATIONS:

Next time a really big news story breaks in your news organization’s back yard, create a temporary weblog.

I think a lot of news people are catching on.

FIRST NORWAY, NOW SPAIN.

DANIEL DREZNER says that creeping Rainesism has hit the International Herald Tribune. Excerpt:

“Initial reaction from Asian countries on Thursday indicated that most remained unmoved by Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation of Iraq’s noncompliance with United Nations mandates.”

If true, this would certainly be newsworthy. Read the story, however. Malaysia is the only country with officials quoted as being unconvinced. In contrast, foreign policy leaders from Australia, Japan and the Philippines are all quoted with expressions of solid support for the U.S. position. The story acknowledges the extent of Japan’s policy shift:

“Moving as close as Tokyo has come to backing the use of military force against Iraq, [Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro] Koizumi added: ‘Iraq holds the key to whether this matter can be resolved peacefully or not.’”

By my count, then, shouldn’t the headline read, “ASIA SWAYED BY POWELL’S DATA”?

Jeez.

THANKS TO THE WARBLOGGERWATCH FOLKS, I’m now getting email from “AnalBrenda.” (Trust me — that doesn’t mean that she’s compulsively organized. . . .) I’m not sure if this is directed at me personally, or if she’s just the only one posting to the WarbloggerWatch list. At least her emails are, um, friendly.

And the spelling’s better. I thought of signing them up for regular emails from Soldier of Fortune by way of reply, but that seemed a bit much.

MARK STEYN WRITES that the U.N. is toast. And good riddance:

When the Cold War began, the UN structure quickly ossified into two mutually obstructive veto-wielding blocs: whatever its defects, this too neatly distilled the political realities of the age. But since the collapse of the Commies, the UN has reflected not the new realities but a new unreality, an illusion.

In the real world, Libya is an irrelevance. So is Cuba, and Syria. In the old days, the ramshackle dictatorships were proxies for heavyweight patrons, but not any more. These days President Sy Kottik represents nobody but himself. Yet somehow, in the post-Cold War talking shops, the loonitoons’ prestige has been enhanced: the UN, as the columnist George Jonas put it, enables ‘dysfunctional dictatorships to punch above their weight’. Away from Kofi and co., the world is moving more or less in the right direction: entire regions that were once tyrannies are now flawed but broadly functioning democracies — Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America. The UN has been irrelevant to this transformation. Its structures resist reform and the principal beneficiaries are the thug states.

Yes.

MARY MCGRORY says that she’s persuaded by Colin Powell’s speech. Well, I figured that Stephen Green would bring her around. . . .

UPDATE: Gotham thinks it’s an avalanche.

CHARLES MOORE WRITES IN THE TELEGRAPH THAT IT IS THE HAWKS WHO ARE AHEAD OF THE CURVE:

Every time I go to Washington – I returned from there this week – I find a seriousness and depth of thought about terror, the Middle East and the nature of power that, whether one agrees with it or not, is not matched by an alternative vision this side of the Atlantic.

As long ago as the 1980s, thinkers such as Andrew Marshall, the head of the Office of Net Assessment in the Pentagon, were predicting the global re-ordering that would follow the end of the Cold War. They spoke of what has been termed the “revolution in military affairs”, in which technology mattered much more for Western superiority, and the enemies of the West, unable to win any spending race, would resort increasingly to terrorism. . . .

It followed from all this that the hawks were the only Westerners not surprised by September 11. The attacks that day fitted with how they thought the world was going, and they were therefore ready with the analysis and with the counter-attack. The “war against terrorism” and the “axis of evil” were not mere phrases – they were formulations of doctrine.

Because the hawks are so dark in their view of what is happening, European elites make two mistakes about them. The first is to suppose they are “gung-ho” and rush unilaterally into action. This is not so. President Bush got Nato and the world behind him before the attack on Afghanistan, and yesterday’s performance by Mr Powell was only the latest whirl in a long diplomatic dance with the UN that, he hopes, will at last sweep even the French off their feet. Yes, America reserves its right to act unilaterally, but it bases its policy on the paradox that it is only by convincing people of your readiness to be unilateral that you can win multilateral support. . . .

To the European cynic, an Iraqi leader such as the head of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmed Chalabi, who shares Western values, is a mere “saloniste”. To the hopeful hawk, he is a big step in the right direction. And if Iraq can be reborn, the same optimist reasons, something similar might start to happen in all the broken polities of the Islamic world.

Is some of this rather starry-eyed? Perhaps. Is it a rhetoric that seeks to justify in moral terms the bald assertion of American power? Certainly. But if the conflict is between extremists who hate the West and want to destroy it and the political and cultural values that all European nations claim to share, why is it so wrong? And what, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroder, is the alternative?

The rest of the article is far from a claim that the hawks have everything right. But it does point out that failing to engage their ideas (what, those papier-mache statues of Bush don’t count?) is foolish and unserious.

JEFF JARVIS IS SUCCINCT: “Let’s get this straight: Sex sells. Sex is fun. Sex is good. Gotta problem with that? Then you’re the freak, geek.”

UPDATE: Justin Katz responds.

“VA. TROOPER SHOT, ONE KILLED DURING WATER CONTAMINATION PROBE:” I wonder if there’s more to this story than we’re getting.

UPDATE: Here’s another story, though it’s still unclear exactly what was going on.

COMPUTING GRIDS, SMALLPOX, AND YOU: The Bloviator has an interesting item on efforts to mobilize computing power to find a new treatment for smallpox. Very interesting. It’s kind of like SETI@Home, though I hope that the marketing guys are smart enough not to name it “Smallpox@Home.”

THE THEORY THAT THE COLUMBIA WAS HIT BY A METEOR — or a piece of space debris — is not implausible, but I doubt it’s the most likely explanation. As between the two, the odds favor debris; in Low Earth Orbit there’s about twice as much manmade debris as natural meteor flux.

But assuming the impact occurred during re-entry, the Shuttle was a bit low for that. It would have had to collide with something that was re-entering (or in the case of a meteorite, just entering) the atmosphere at the same time, which is far less likely than an on-orbit collision.

DON MCARTHUR has noticed yet another invasion of Internet privacy. I may amend my Terms of Use to specify that such ‘bots are unauthorized and their users subject to suit for theft of services.

PHYSICIST / SCIENCE FICTION WRITER GREGORY BENFORD looks at post-Shuttle space programs.

NORTH CAROLINA LAW-PROFESSOR-BLOGGER ERIC MULLER is all over the Howard Coble story. I meant to blog this yesterday, but as you may have noticed it was a light-blogging day — faculty meetings and assorted other projects do get in the way of this hobby from time to time.

Anyway, Coble expressed the view — which Muller correctly calls “bizarre” — that the Japanese-American internments were for their own protection. Uh, right. As Muller notes:

Folks, this is the guy running the show on homeland security in the House of Representatives. The guy who will have oversight over how well Tom Ridge’s new department is balancing national security with individual liberties.

If he’s not already doing so, Dennis Hastert should be looking for a new Chairman for Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security.

Indeed. Muller also paints a larger political picture that Karl Rove should probably pay attention to.

UPDATE: Here’s a suggestion that Coble doesn’t even know the history of his own party on the subject.

HIGH-SCHOOL BLOGGER DAVID RUSSELL, quoted here a couple of days back, has hit the big time — he’s now being quoted by Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post.

VIRGINIA POSTREL WRITES:

The danger may make international support more valuable. But that support does not significantly reduce the risks of war. The only reason to go to war, taking enormous risks today, is to prevent greater risks tomorrow. Wisdom dictates that we make that decision based on the worst-case assumptions about war today, not on happy scenarios of easy victory with minimal casualties. That’s true with or without international support. And it was true before Powell’s speech.

Indeed.

IT’S ROPE-A-DOPE AT THE UN:

The administration’s refusal to supply its opponents with the answers they demanded on their schedule emboldened them. There were anti-war rallies. Democrats in the Senate began finding fault with the president. Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle basically said he feared the administration was making up reasons to go to war.

The administration remained patient, waiting until it was ready to speak. And by doing so, the president and his team also showed once more that they possess an astonishingly high level of strategic and tactical intelligence in dealing with the messy realities of world politics.

Powell’s masterful and inarguable presentation yesterday means the administration has once again outflanked its adversaries and out-argued its opponents – just as it did in September, when Bush went to the United Nations and began the process that led to the unanimous passage of U.N. Resolution 1441.

Via Betsy’s Page.

GEORGE WILL WRITES:

It would be more difficult for the president to wage war against Iraq if the United Nations did not exist. But if the United Nations, having passed 1441, now refuses to authorize war, the United Nations will essentially cease to exist.

There is the outline of a satisfactory outcome: Saddam Hussein removed, the United Nations reduced.

The United Nations’ power — like that of France — grows mostly out the the United States’ unaccounted willingness to pretend to take it seriously. But that’s getting steadily harder with both.

MICKEY KAUS gives Hillary’s war speech a failing grade:

The cynicism is clear — if there’s another terrorist strike, Hillary can say it was because the Republicans didn’t earmark that extra $150 million for interoperable radios. But mainly what comes through is state-of-the-art lack of imagination. It’s Robo-Senatoring.

He also asks, weirdly, if the Spector-mansion shooting will prove a shot in the arm for gun control efforts. I don’t see why it would. Especially because even areas with strict gun control always make exceptions for rich and famous people, as the distribution of New York concealed-weapons permits demonstrates.

MARK STEYN DECODES FRENCH DIPLOMACY.

UPDATE: Vaara emails to point out the following:

Hi Glenn,

I just thought I’d mention that on Tuesday evening, the U.N. Security Council *unanimously* passed Resolution 1464, which authorizes the existing deployment of French and African troops in Ivory Coast.

He’s right (he? I guess). I’d missed that development. Here’s a story on the subject, from VOA.

This seems to me to suggest that the French have hit upon a wonderful strategy — invade first, ask permission later. I think that it’s one you might see employed again in the near future. . . .

STEVEN DEN BESTE ANALYZES FRENCH STRATEGY. They’re not our allies.

JAMES LILEKS WRITES:

“How can we possibly go to war without the approval of the United Nations?”

This question would make sense if there was a big red button marked “START WAR” in a locked closet at the U.N. Secretariat, and we had to beg Kofi Annan for the keys. The United States can go to war whenever it likes for its own reasons, and all the United Nations can do is pass more worthless paper. The only way a resolution could stop a truly determined president would be if they wrapped it around a rock and threw it at George W. Bush’s head.

Read the whole thing.

UNILATERALISM, MY ASS!

Statement of the Vilnius Group Countries

For the record: 5 February 2003, Wednesday.

Statement by the Foreign Ministers of Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in response to the presentation by the United States Secretary of State to the United Nations Security Council concerning Iraq:

Earlier today, the United States presented compelling evidence to the United Nations Security Council detailing Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs, its active efforts to deceive UN inspectors, and its links to international terrorism.

Our countries understand the dangers posed by tyranny and the special responsibility of democracies to defend our shared values. The trans-Atlantic community, of which we are a part, must stand together to face the threat posed by the nexus of terrorism and dictators with weapons of mass destruction.

We have actively supported the international efforts to achieve a peaceful disarmament of Iraq. However, it has now become clear that Iraq is in material breach of U.N. Security Council Resolutions, including U.N. Resolution 1441, passed unanimously on November 8, 2002. As our governments said on the occasion of the NATO Summit in Prague: “We support the goal of the international community for full disarmament of Iraq as stipulated in the UN Security Council Resolution 1441. In the event of non-compliance with the terms of this resolution, we are prepared to contribute to an international coalition to enforce its provisions and the disarmament of Iraq.”

The clear and present danger posed by the Saddam Hussein’s regime requires a united response from the community of democracies. We call upon the U.N. Security Council to take the necessary and appropriate action in response to Iraq’s continuing threat to international peace and security.

That’s in addition to the earlier letter of support from Britain, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Denmark. The diplomatic isolation of “Old Europe” continues.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh thinks the Security Council has Leagalized itself. That’s a new term he’s coined, referring to international bodies that replicate the League of Nations.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Jody Green emails:

I really like the statement that we need “a united response from the Community of Democracies”. Community of Democracies (COD). Got a ring to it, eh. How about abandonding the U.N. and creating COD. No more fascists heading human rights committees. Bye bye Syria, China, Iraq and all you other fascist pigs. We have a new club and if you want to join, you must change your ways and we can show you how. Good plan, don’t you think?

I’m sure the French will denounce its simplisme.

I CERTAINLY CAN’T VOUCH FOR THE ACCURACY OF THESE REPORTS FROM NORTH KOREA, but if true they suggest that North Korea is indeed close to collapse.

THE NEW REPUBLIC CALLS POWELL’S CASE FOR WAR “BRUTALLY COMPELLING:”

No doubt about it, Colin Powell laid out a brutally compelling case for war with Iraq at the U.N. Security Council today. The audio tapes of high-ranking Iraqi military officers conspiring to hide evidence of chemical and biological weapons; the satellite footage of Iraqis sanitizing chemical and biological weapons facilities; the descriptions of Iraqi mobile production facilities and un-manned delivery vehicles–all these pieces of evidence were both damning on their merits and dramatic in their effect.

TNR wonders if Powell didn’t make more arguments than he needed to. I guess that depends on who you think the audience is.

FRED KAPLAN AT SLATE SAYS THAT COLIN POWELL DELIVERED THE GOODS ON SADDAM:

Secretary of State Colin Powell’s briefing to the U.N. Security Council was far more powerful than anyone had predicted. Not all his points were equally compelling: Some, as he admitted, were open to interpretation; some were vaguely sourced (if understandably so). But contrary to his own (clearly low-balling) remarks of recent days, Powell did produce the proverbial “smoking gun.” And, while his evidence may not have been quite as shattering as Adlai Stevenson’s U-2 photos of Soviet missiles in Cuba, it came remarkably close—so much so that, if the Security Council does not now take action against Iraq, it might as well disband.

Sounds like win/win to me.

NICHOLAS PACKWOOD IS CALLING IT “GATESGATE” — the scandal over CBC interviewer Jennifer Gates’ remarks about American “arrogance.” He’s posted the CBC’s reply (several readers were kind enough to forward me copies, too — thanks!) and has his own analysis. Since Nicholas is Canadian, I think it’s appropriate for him to take the lead on this.

STEVE VERDON is unimpressed with Bush’s budget and suggests that libertarians may start bolting the G.O.P.

MORE SAUDI PERFIDY: Best of the Web reports on how the Saudis are helping terror witnesses avoid testifying, and training up new terrorists in America.

MY THOUGHTS ON MARIJUANA PROSECUTIONS, JURIES, AND THE TRUTH ARE NOW UP, over at GlennReynolds.com.

DAVE KOPEL TAKES TAPPED TO TASK for shady editing and more.

DODD HARRIS points out a report that Gerhard Schroeder is facing domestic political heat — not only over the economy, but on his position relating to Iraq.

I LISTENED TO POWELL ON NPR, and it seems to me that he’s made the case that the UN must act, or become the League of Nations. The Russian response, though, seems weak so far. We may need another resolution? Or maybe more than one additional resolution? The Security Council will resolve itself to death under that approach.

HEY, NOW THE STORMFRONT GUYS ARE calling InstaPundit’s content “atrocious!” My day is made.

My new slogan: “InstaPundit: Even more atrocious in 2003!”

Or, as another professor once said, “Nazis. I hate these guys.”

UPDATE: Reader James Foster emails:

They would also probably hate that most of your readers are pro-Second Amendment. Just like Condoleezza Rice’s pastor father, who organized shotgun brigades to protect his church and community from their hooded brethren during the dark days of civil rights protests in Birmingham.

Yep. They probably share Hitler’s view on civilian disarmament. Several readers also sent this line from the Blues Brothers movie:

“Who are those guys?”

“Nazis.”

“In Skokie? Illlinois?”

“Illinois Nazis.”

“I hate Illinois Nazis!”

Yep.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT:

Meanwhile, outside an estimated 500 pro- and anti-Bush demonstrators clashed in a savage snowball fight.

“There was about 10 inches on the ground,” reported Ehlers, so opposing forces had plenty of ammo.

By the time order was restored, several demonstrators were arrested. But Ehlers, a professor at UC-Berkeley in the 1960s, wasn’t impressed.

“Nothing like a Vietnam protest,” he said of the melee, in which outnumbered Bush supporters routed their opponents, according to one participant, by using “better target selection and superior firepower.”

Heh.

MICHELLE MALKIN has a very unsympathetic treatment of the John Lott controversy.

MORE ON WHY Germany + France does not equal Europe.

UPDATE: Chris Lawrence has more.