IRAQI BLOGGERS OMAR AND AYS offer New Year’s thoughts.

AUSTIN BAY has thoughts on the terror war in 2004 — and on what we learned in 2003.

DONALD SENSING is back from vacation, and is posting on a number of topics including the worthlessness of the Army’s 9mm pistol. I’ve fired it, and I wasn’t impressed — it was heavy, for a 9mm, but somehow felt cheap. (Of course, I mostly shoot Sigs, so everything feels cheap by comparison. But even a Glock is MUCH better.) Apparently the critique goes much deeper than that.

Stopping power would be much greater, of course, using hollow-point ammunition but that’s a no-no for the military.

LT SMASH reflects on the past year.

ROGER SIMON:

I would like to know if one of our big media organizations is at work on one of the most disturbing mysteries of our time–where the billions in UN Oil-for-Food money in Iraq went and how it got there. Why aren’t the LAT, the NYT and WaPo on this? If they’re afraid of the answers, then shame on them. Until we fully understand the roots and extent of this scandal, the UN will not be able to function as an untainted organization. You would think believers in international government (which I am, with reservations) would want to clear that up.

Yes, you would think that.

POOR JOHN KERRY CAN’T CATCH A BREAK: Even the t-shirts are against him.

HERE’S MORE ON THE SIDE EFFECTS OF THE WAR ON TERROR, as African “hot spots” cool down.

PLAME UPDATE: Tom Maguire isn’t blogging, but he’s emailed comments to Mark Kleiman, which are included in this post of Kleiman’s. Maguire and Kleiman think that the Ashcroft recusal suggests that there’s serious Administration involvement. I’m not so sure about that — it seems to me that if Ashcroft was going to come down hard on, say, Karl Rove people would be unlikely to scream conflict-of-interest. Instead, it seems that his recusal would make more sense if people were likely to scream “whitewash” because Rove wasn’t involved. Kleiman mentions this possibility but discounts it.

Meanwhile, Eric Rasmusen has a different take:

1. The leaker has been discovered, but either the leak was not a crime or is too trivial to warrant prosecution. In this case, an honest prosecutor would come out saying that the Democrats were right in what they claimed occurred, but that it does not warrant prosecution. This, indeed, is what all the evidence so far is suggesting. The Democrats would make political hay of an official statement that Mr. X leaked the information but there would be no prosecution, saying that Ashcroft was just protecting his political allies. This is a little harder to do if someone other than an official Justice Department spokesman makes and defends the announcement.

2. The investigation has uncovered misbehavior, but by people in the CIA– perhaps Plame herself– who are opposed to the Bush Administration.
It is clear there was misbehavior in the CIA in selecting Wilson to go to Niger, since it was clear he would use the opportunity to embarass the Administration without collecting any real information. Someone ought to be fired for that. It may be that an actual crime has been committed, too— say, misuse of government money for political purposes by civil servants, or violation of a confidentiality agreement (by Wilson), or violation of a nepotism rule (by Plame), or something we don’t know about. If Ashcroft goes after the malefactors, he will be accused of trying to punish the victim or trying to punish whistleblowers. It is better to let a special prosecutor take the heat.

That’s more in accordance with my sense of where this case is, but I could be wrong. Mostly, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve taken my cues from Joseph Wilson, who isn’t acting like it’s a serious matter. As I said before:

Not knowing the underlying facts, I have to make my judgment by the behavior of the parties. And judging from that, the scandal is bogus, and Wilson is a self-promoter who can’t be trusted.

Nothing in Ashcroft’s recusal changes this part.

But Ashcroft isn’t the only recusal in this case. And will Novak be subpoenaed now? Stay tuned.

UPDATE: I think, by the way, that the credibility of Plame-scandal-boosters like Kleiman would be stronger if it weren’t for lines like this: “Go out and celebrate. The odds on a Democrat’s replacing George W. Bush just shortened considerably.”

2003: A good year for freedom. And, interestingly, for world peace, unless you’re one of those ethnocentric types who thinks that only wars in which America is involved count.

EVEN MORE ON OUTSOURCING, over at GlennReynolds.com.

READER DANIEL MCCARTHY emails:

Two thoughts: One of the great things about blogs is bloggers work through the holidays, as opposed to newspapers and magazines, which recycle the year’s news during the last week of the year to put together the inevitably boring “Year in Review” issue.

Second, a big media observation. Have you ever noticed that no matter how small the scale of the attack in Baghdad,the headline from the big media outlets will read something like “Huge Explosions Rock Baghdad” or “Baghdad Reels From Attacks”? I noticed an absurd example of this on the radio on Christmas Eve. My local ABC-radio affiliate interrupted regular programing to report that “huge explosions” had rocked the area near the Sheraton Hotel in Baghdad.

40 minutes later the end of the hour news update reported that an RPG had been fired at and missed the Sheraton, landing in the backyard. Big difference, huh?

Not to some people.

UPDATE: Virginia Postrel says that the first point is a “crock.” Well, obviously not all Big Media shut down, nor is that what McCarthy says. But we see a lot of lame “best of 2003” issues and lists, and a lot of “special holiday double issues” that contain a lot of ads and, ahem, “editorial support” for advertisers in a lot of publications. Surely she doesn’t intend to deny that things get rather, um, fluffy during the holidays? I’m sort of surprised at the tone of her response, here.

THE UNITED STATES SHOULD NOT TRY to play a “neutral arbiter” in the Israeli/Palestinian dispute. We should, in fact, be doing our best to make the Palestinians suffer until they change their ways, because, to put it bluntly, they are our enemies. Just read this post and follow the links to see how they feel about America.

And read this piece by Amir Taheri on the Iraqi “resistance,” which notes Palestinian terror connections by the Iraqi insurgents, and features a Palestinian “journalist” egging them on.

These folks are our enemies, and deserve to be treated as such. They don’t deserve a state of their own. It’s not clear that they even deserve to keep what they’ve got. (Why is Arafat still in power?) I don’t think this means that the Bush Administration should be taking direct action against them — closing off their funding via shutting down Saddam is a good start, and a policy of slow strangulation directed at Arafat and his fellow terrorists is probably the most politic at the moment. We need to try to squeeze off the EU funding, too, especially now that it’s been admitted to be part of a proxy war by the EU not just against Israel, but America.

But let’s stop pretending that what’s going on between Israel and the Palestinians is some sort of family misunderstanding. It’s war, and the Palestinians — and their EU supporters — think it’s a war not just against Israel, but against us. We should tailor our approach accordingly.

UPDATE: Reader Matt Gaffney emails that this post is “too shrill.” Well, that’s why I don’t like writing about the Palestinian issue — if you tell the truth, which is that these guys are enemies of civilization, in the grip of a psychotic death cult that will probably lead to their destruction, then you sound shrill.

I also don’t write about it much because the Palestinians, fundamentally, are the cannon fodder of other people who don’t like the United States, and the real way to resolve this problem is to deal with those other people. And so it’s those other people who get the bulk of my attention.

But the amount of pious crap spouted about the Palestinians is so vast that every once in a while I do feel the need to cut through it by pointing out the facts.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Now this, from a reader who signs himself “AK,” is shrill:

You should be ashamed of yourself posting such intolerant hateful bullshit. You sound like Goebbles reincarnate.

I’m reminded of the now dead hater: Barbara Olsen and how life has a way of catching up with people of your ilk.

Thus speaks the voice of the “peace movement” on the Middle East.

This, on the other hand, may not be “shrill,” exactly — but I promise it won’t sound good. And I would never subject any human being, even Yasser Arafat, to such a horror. . . .

MORE: Matt Gaffney wants to make clear that he doesn’t agree with AK. And Nelson Ascher observes:

If I understood the guy correctly, he (or maybe she) is not just in favour of capital punishment, but also thinks someone might deserve it for a mere opinion, and that even without due process. Tell me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this what used to be called a totally anti-free speech and very, very extreme right-wing position? It is as good an example of pure totalitarianism as one gets.

Indeed. One hears that sort of thing rather a lot from the “peace” movement these days.

TIM BLAIR is soliciting predictions for 2004. This one seems safe: “France will whine and seethe about something Bush does.”

So does this one: “More long, slow, leisurely, expensive LUNCHES for Tim.”

And I like this one: “‘Fisk’ will make it into the Oxford English Dictionary.”

RICH GALEN HAS A NEW REPORT FROM BAGHDAD UP: It includes a photo of him with David Letterman on Christmas. He also has pictures of Hanukkah in Tikrit!

TACITUS:

I’ve noticed a disturbing tendency on the American left to minimize both the dangers of communism and the threat it presented in the Cold War. With the benefit of hindsight, defense buildups and what were at the time wholly rational fears are dismissed on the grounds that it was all going to rot away anyhow; some claim that this means anticommunism as a policy movement was essentially pointless; and at its most extreme, a few assert that opposition to international communism only exacerbated the problem. Every one of these beliefs is wrong. . . .

The second error commonly committed vis a vis communism is that it’s somehow a “noble ideal” that was just executed really, really, poorly. Yep, every single time it was ever tried. Leaving aside the whole battered-wife syndrome evident in this attitude among the apologists (“Maybe next time he won’t beat me, nor shoot countless political prisoners!”), there’s the basic fact that communism is not a fundamentally noble ideal.

Indeed.

UPDATE: By the way, Jonathan Rauch has a good piece on the left’s unwillingness to face the historical truth about communism in the Atlantic Monthly. Sadly, it’s pay-only, but you can read an abstract here.

NOPE, the Reynolds Vineyards guys aren’t any relation to me either. They make good wine, though, and I like the way their site uses video (see here, for example).

I AGREE WITH JEFF JARVIS that the Command Post deserves lots of praise.

SOME BACKGROUND ON AIR FRANCE:

The company put in charge of security for Air France flights employed a convicted murderer and a number of others with serious criminal records, it emerged yesterday. . . .

As a result of a search of criminal records more than 30 agents were grounded as a potential security risk.

The police also looked into the record of Pretory’s sub-contractors.

This led to unconfirmed reports that some guards had been sent for arms training courses in Middle Eastern countries suspected of harbouring terrorists.

Ouch.

JOHN HAWKINS OFFERS A ROUNDUP OF THE BEST (OR WORST) QUOTES from Democratic Underground for 2003. It’s a must-read.

GAME THEORIST JAMES MILLER SAYS don’t try Saddam — make an example of him.

AL QAEDA VIDEOS found in Iraq weapons cache. This is interesting.

DAVID ADESNIK: “I told you so.”

PARIS WHO?

AH, A blast from the past, courtesy of Tim Blair.

WHY IS TOM MAGUIRE’S BLOG blank?