FRED PRUITT has found some interesting Iraq news. And scroll down for some interesting, but unsurprising, Qatar news.

WAR AIMS

DANIEL PIPES says he prefers the term “bureaucratic leftism” to “transnational progressivism.” But his analysis works either way.

JOHN HAWKINS reports that Osama was allowed to slip away, and he’s got tape. Er, well, streaming audio.

THE NEW SMARTERHARPER’SINDEX IS UP.

JACOB T. LEVY responds to Todd Zywicki’s comments on John Dean’s call to repeal the 17th Amendment, which was itself inspired by something else that Zywicki wrote. Interesting stuff in every link.

STEPHEN GORDON speculates on a possible deal to get rid of Arafat. Speculation is what it is, but it’s interesting.

HERE’S A NICE PIECE on how weblogs can work for journalists.

For the record, I’m apparently the only weblogger who’s not offended at not being quoted in the New York Times’ recent article on journalists and weblogs. I get more attention than I deserve anyway.

TO THE RESCUE: Daniel Drezner says Gore’s speech has saved the week for the Bush foreign policy team.

FLIGHT 93 REVISITED: Wow, I just ran across this excellent oped by Elaine Scarry in the Boston Globe. It’s a true must-read, even though much of it will be familiar to Blogosphere denizens. But it’s a major cultural milestone, I think, to see a piece like this in the Boston Globe:

When the plane that hit the Pentagon and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania are looked at side by side, they reveal two different conceptions of national defense: one model is authoritarian, centralized, top down; the other is distributed and egalitarian and accords with what the Framers of the Constitution expected of the citizenry.

When the US Constitution was completed it had two provisions for ensuring that decisions about war-making were distributed rather than concentrated. The first was the provision for a congressional declaration of war – following an open debate in both the House and the Senate involving what would today be 535 men and women. The second was a major clause of the Bill of Rights – the Second Amendment right to bear arms – that rejected a standing executive army (an army at the personal disposal of president or king) in favor of a well-regulated militia, a citizens’ army distributed across all ages, geography, and social class of men. Democracy, it was argued, was impossible without a distributed militia: self-governance was perceived to be logically impossible without self-defense (exactly what do you ”self-govern” if you have ceded the governing of your own body and life to someone else?).

To date, this egalitarian model of defense is the only one that has worked against aerial terrorism on American soil. It worked on Sept. 11 when passengers brought down the plane in Pennsylvania. It again worked on Dec. 22, 2001, when passengers and crew on an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami prevented an apparent terrorist (now called ”the shoe bomber”) from blowing up the plane with plastic explosives. The danger itself was averted not by the fighter jets that accompanied the plane to Boston or the FBI agents who later rushed aboard but by men and women inside the plane who restrained the 6-foot-4-inch man using his own hair, leather belts, earphone wires, and sedatives injected by two physicians on board.

That’s a major change from the “leave it to the professionals” attitude that one tends to associate with the Globe. You should read the whole thing, which has some comments on speed, decentralization, and learning curves that are reminiscent of this piece and this one. I’m not sure I agree with what appears to be Scarry’s ultimate conclusion, but there are a lot of important points along the way.

I NOTICE that a lot of people are linking to this article on how Starbucks seems to actually be creating business for independent coffeehouses. This seems right to me. Starbucks is coming into this area, and my brother-in-law, who owns two neighborhood coffeehouses, is unfazed. “My customers aren’t their customers,” he says. “But some of their customers will turn into my customers.” That seems to be how it’s working out.

BURKA/BIKINI UPDATE: Aziz Poonawalla replies to Jim Henley. He makes a lot of worthy points, but this concluding passage just seems wrong to me:

I said that women wearing a bikini solely to attract the attention of men is comparable to women being forced to wear the burkah by men. This is a manifestation of men’s control over women, and it is that control which I am labeling immoral. I was careful to only use the word “immoral” in the context of focring women to wear burka (or the power play which makes women want to wear a bikini to please men).

Is it a “power play” when women want to wear bikinis to please men? Is it a “power play” when men dress or groom or whatever in a particular way to please women? And — even assuming that this statement is true — what precisely is immoral about it? Not much that I can see.

Of course, I’m probably a slave to false consciousness. Certainly all my work at maintaining chiseled, hairless pecs seems to be wasted now.

UPDATE: Reader Amy Torres writes:

That guy has it completely assbackwards! Women wear a bikini to attract men, yes, but only so we can turn you all into cooperative love-puppies. What American women have learned through the trials and errors of women’s lib is simple: hairy armpits, no makeup and a rejection of men’s more chivalrous impulses are failed techniques Today they are practiced and preached only by women who truly hate men. Us bikini babes love and appreciate men! We understand that our ability to attract and entice is empowering – and truly liberating. Wearing a bikini allows women to celebrate their existence joyously and openly. Try doing THAT in a burka.

No thanks.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Aziz emails:

The target of my immorality label is more subtle than that – you’re right, the desire of the woman (or the man) to please the man (or the woman) is perfectly acceptable (in fact, celebrated in the Shi’a interpretation of Islam).

I am targeting those specific instances, when a woman wears the bikini because her entire sense of self-worth (or “self-merit”) is founded on the reaction she is trying to induce in men. I am not saying the woman is immoral and I am not even saying the man in this scenario is immoral. What I am labeling as immoral is the force acting on her to subsume her sense of self merit into a stereotypical perception of herself as sex object.

Re-reading this, I realise that it sounds exactly like what I said earlier, clearly I am not doing a good job of differentiating and expanding my arguments in response to the original confusion. *frustrated*.

Well, this sounds like the point is that it’s immoral to be shallow. I don’t think that’s true. It’s shallow to be shallow. I don’t believe in putting any single value at the core of your self-worth. Even religion. Indeed, there are few shallower than those who build their sense of self-worth on piety — and unlike those who focus on their appearance, the latter are seldom able to leave others alone. (I want to be clear, though, that I’m not putting Aziz in this camp).

Another (male) reader wrote on behalf of unspecified female friends to say that the quote from Ms. Torres, above, gives feminists insufficient credit for the freedom she enjoys today, though he seems to be doing a bit of stereotyping himself:

The woman who stands up for the “right” of American women everywhere to wear bikinis and calls those who oppose it man-haters fails to realize that the only reason she can wear a bikini in America in the first place is because those same man-hating feminists won for her much more significant rights before she was even born. She does have a right to wear a bikini, but she should worship the women who faced ridicule, burned bras and spurned the condescension of the men who prevented them from voting, working in desirable fields and filing rape charges against rapists. Instead, she heaps scorn on them, as though she somehow “earned” her place on that beach blanket. I don’t know her, but from the way she speaks, I’d guess that she earned nothing – that she had it handed to her.

It seems to me that women were voting and wearing bikinis before anyone ever heard of Betty Friedan. Interestingly everyone writing about this seems to be male. The only response to this post that I’ve received from a female reader was a comment on my “hairless chiseled pecs” that I won’t reprint here. Trust me, sister: fantasy is better than reality in this as in so much else.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Diane E., er, weighs in and says the issue is “looksism,” which men suffer from along with women. (And men suffer from “heightism,” too!) And Jim Henley has responded. So has Megan McArdle, who says “What Aziz is arguing for is, in my opinion, a well meaning but futile attempt to take sex out of male-female relations.”

HOWARD BASHMAN HAS THE TEXT of the South Dakota jury nullification amendment along with links to some additional discussion.

ANDREW IAN DODGE is forecasting civil unrest in Britain. And it’s not over the war. Well, not over the war with Iraq, anyway.

“NOT GETTING AMERICA” is the topic of today’s column by Jonah Goldberg, and it’s a good one.

A BLOG FROM BAGHDAD, via Eve Tushnet. Wonder if he’s one of the two people in Iraq who have bought Mobius Dick CDs via the Web? He looks the type. Er, and that’s a compliment, of course.

ANOTHER STORY ON THE IRAQ / OKLAHOMA CITY CONNECTION.

CONGRESS FEARS DILUTION OF WAR EFFORT: We should focus on the actual attackers, and not other, peripheral countries say some.

MARC FISHER WRITES IN SLATE that the U.S. / Germany rift is real.

UPDATE: Robert Musil reflects on the “German Resistance.”