TRANSATLANTIC AXIS OF WEASEL UPDATE: It’s in the title of this piece in The Times (“Paris and Berlin: the axis of weasel”) by Ferdinand Mount, who writes:

In 1963 two ancient titans, de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer, were leading two renascent nations out of the ruins of war. Now in their different ways France and Germany are led by two weaklings. Schröder survived the German elections only by resorting to a humiliating pacifist stance which he didn’t even sound as if he believed in. Chirac managed to see off an ancient fascist and now exercises more or less unfettered power, which, as ever, he doesn’t seem to have much clue what to do with except cling to the Franco-German pact.

However, the newer members of the EU, as Le Monde has the grace to point out, don’t think of the Americans as demons at all. After all, if the Yanks had gone home, as those old post-war French graffiti used to demand, half of those new members would not be free today.

In Britain, too, you can feel the change. Whenever Macmillan or Wilson or Heath or Major was “let down” by the French, there was an audible “ouch” throughout the Establishment. Our foreign policy had been derailed again. We didn’t know where to turn.

But now? I haven’t met anybody outside the Foreign Office who gives a toss.

I think the French and Germans may be suffering from imperial overstretch.

UPDATE: This Christopher Hitchens column in Slate on Bush’s alleged “cowboy” ways is good, too. Excerpt:

To have had three planeloads of kidnapped civilians crashed into urban centers might have brought out a touch of the cowboy even in Adlai Stevenson. But Bush waited almost five weeks before launching any sort of retaliatory strike. And we have impressive agreement among all sources to the effect that he spent much of that time in consultation. A cowboy surely would have wanted to do something dramatic and impulsive (such as to blow up at least an aspirin-factory in Sudan) in order to beat the chest and show he wasn’t to be messed with. But it turns out that refined Parisians are keener on such “unilateral” gestures—putting a bomb onboard the Rainbow Warrior, invading Rwanda on the side of the killers, dispatching French troops to the Ivory Coast without a by-your-leave, building a reactor for Saddam Hussein, and all the rest of it.

Indeed.

GWEILO DIARIES IS UNIMPRESSED with E.U. diplomacy regarding North Korea. He’s not that thrilled with U.S. moves in Indonesia, either.

JAY MANIFOLD WRITES on Iraq/Georgia parallels, and why Iraq will suffer less in war than Georgia did under Sherman.

STEPHEN GREEN: Flaming Liberal.

DIANE E. IS GRATEFUL TO THE FRENCH. No, really.

“YOU GET WHAT YOU DESERVE” — Anti-American graffiti on a 9/11 memorial.

My response: be glad you’re not getting what you deserve, buddy.

RAND SIMBERG REMEMBERS THE APOLLO 1 FIRE.

I’ll note that it was memorialized, together with some other tragedies, by the Rainmakers in a great song called “Rockin’ at the T-Dance.”

YOU DON’T FIND A LOT of nice things said about George Tenet on this site, but this article from Time on the “CIA’s Secret Army” has an interesting passage:

It was George Tenet who began rebuilding the SOG five years ago when he took charge of the CIA, but the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, accelerated his efforts.

The CIA folks seem to have done an excellent job in Afghanistan, and I mentioned somewhere that whoever was behind revitalizing them deserved praise. If it’s really Tenet (I suppose this could just be after-the-fact PR puffery) then he deserves considerable credit.

UPDATE: Here’s my old post which was about Special Forces, not just the CIA paramilitary operations. The point still holds, though.

HERE’S MORE ON THE ALGERIAN TERROR CONNECTION, from the Christian Science Monitor. Excerpt:

Over the past six weeks, European investigators in four countries have arrested more than 50 people with suspected links to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network. Police have uncovered explosives, chemicals, fake passports, and documents, including maps of the London Underground.

Algerians are consistently among those detained – a fact that Western intelligence officials say points to the formation of a North African network of Al Qaeda that is preparing to act.

Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar, referring to the arrests Friday of 15 Algerians and a Moroccan in northeastern Spain, said police had broken up a “major terrorist network” linked to the Algerian Salafist group, a splinter of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), which he said had clear links with Al Qaeda. He said the network also had connections with suspects recently arrested in France and Britain.

Interesting.

APPARENTLY, THE COOKEVILLE DOG-SHOOTING INCIDENT was the result of improper training. Yeah, but who could have foreseen a problem with this?

NOBODY WANTS TO PAY FOR PUBLIC DEFENDERS. But, you know, nobody wants to convict innocent people, either. Do they?

JOHN COLE EMAILS: “This might be my snarkiest post ever.” It involves the French.

2245 MESSAGES are in the process of downloading from the server, into archival stasis. I read most of ’em, but not all. If I should have replied to yours, sorry. I do my best.

A PACK, NOT A HERD: Here’s an interesting article on citizen-based defense strategies.

THE DAMNING OF SADDAM: This article from The Telegraph has a nice summary of Saddam’s misdeeds, and says that Blix’s report has greatly strengthened the case for war.

HERE’S THE WEBSITE of United For Peace (“Soon to be ‘United for Peace and Justice!‘”), an anti-war group that seems to be trying to set itself up as an alternative to the nasty looniness of A.N.S.W.E.R. The differences with A.N.S.W.E.R. aren’t exactly played up on the site, but at least there’s no obvious Stalinism or anti-semitism. Jim Henley is hopeful.

MORE EVIDENCE of good sense:

WEST PALM BEACH – A judge threw out a jury’s verdict today in what had been considered a landmark case against the distributor of a gun used in the shooting death of middle school teacher Barry Grunow. . . .

Bob Montgomery, a prominent personal injury attorney who won an $11.3 billion settlement against the tobacco industry, had sought $76 million in damages against Valor. The case was closely watched because it was the first to combine claims that Saturday night specials are inherently defective and should be sold only with safety locks.

Next, the defendant should seek sanctions.

MORE ON MATERIAL BREACH.

HOW MANY PEOPLE HAS SADDAM HUSSEIN KILLED?

The terror is self-compounding, with the state’s power reinforced by stories that relatives of the victims pale to tell — of fingernail-extracting, eye-gouging, genital-shocking and bucket-drowning. Secret police rape prisoners’ wives and daughters to force confessions and denunciations. There are assassinations, in Iraq and abroad, and, ultimately, the gallows, the firing squads and the pistol shots to the head.

DOING the arithmetic is an imprecise venture. The largest number of deaths attributable to Mr. Hussein’s regime resulted from the war between Iraq and Iran between 1980 and 1988, which was launched by Mr. Hussein. Iraq says its own toll was 500,000, and Iran’s reckoning ranges upward of 300,000. Then there are the casualties in the wake of Iraq’s 1990 occupation of Kuwait. Iraq’s official toll from American bombing in that war is 100,000 — surely a gross exaggeration — but nobody contests that thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians were killed in the American campaign to oust Mr. Hussein’s forces from Kuwait. In addition, 1,000 Kuwaitis died during the fighting and occupation in their country.

Casualties from Iraq’s gulag are harder to estimate. Accounts collected by Western human rights groups from Iraqi émigrés and defectors have suggested that the number of those who have “disappeared” into the hands of the secret police, never to be heard from again, could be 200,000. As long as Mr. Hussein remains in power, figures like these will be uncheckable, but the huge toll is palpable nonetheless.

Where’s Marc Herold when you need him?

FAREED ZAKARIA WRITES that our previous policies toward Iraq and its neighbors have been so bad that war might well make things better:

Of course, not everyone would be helped by a successful war. The ruling elites in the Middle East—particularly those that remain stubbornly set in their old ways—will be challenged, threatened and eventually overturned. For these potentates and their courtiers it would mean the end of one of the richest gravy trains in history. That is why they will fight change as fiercely as they can. But for the people of the Middle East, after the shock of the war fades, it could mean a chance to break out of the terrible stagnancy in which they now sit.

There are always risks involved when things change. But for the past 40 years the fear of these risks has paralyzed Western policy toward the Middle East. And what has come of this caution? Repression, radical Islam and terror. I’ll take my chances with change.

Let’s hope it turns out well. But at least “better” should be easy to achieve.

ARAB NATIONS ARE “FALLING INTO LINE” regarding the war.

BELLESILES UPDATE: Howard Bashman reports that the Ninth Circuit has gone back and removed citations to the work of Michael Bellesiles, author of the now-discredited Arming America. from its recent Second Amendment opinion, Silveira v. Lockyer. Sadly, they left the rest of the opinion intact.

Does this mean the Ninth Circuit thinks the Supreme Court might conceivably grant cert. on this case, and doesn’t want an obvious red-flag in the very first footnote? Beats me. I’ll leave the tea-leaf-reading concerning this action to the tea-leaf readers.

I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO HEARING EXPLANATIONS AS TO WHY THIS ISN’T MATERIAL BREACH:

The document indicates that 13,000 chemical bombs were dropped by the Iraqi air force between 1983 and 1998, while Iraq has declared that 19,500 bombs were consumed during this period. Thus, there is a discrepancy of 6,500 bombs. The amount of chemical agent in these bombs would be in the order of about 1,000 tons. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, we must assume that these quantities are now unaccounted for. . .

I turn to biological weapons. I mention the issue of anthrax to the council on previous occasions, and I come back to it as it is an important one. Iraq has declared that it produced about 8,500 liters of this biological warfare agent, which it states it unilaterally destroyed in the summer of 1991.

Iraq has provided little evidence for this production and no convincing evidence for its destruction.

There are strong indications that Iraq produced more anthrax than it declared and that at least some of this was retained over the declared destruction date. It might still exist. . . .

As I reported to the council on the 19th of December last year, Iraq did not declare a significant quantity, some 650 kilos, of bacterial growth media, which was acknowledged as reported in Iraq’s submission to the Amorim panel in February 1999. As a part of its 7 December 2002 declaration Iraq resubmitted the Amorim panel document but the table showing this particular import of media was not included. The absence of this table would appear to be deliberate, as the pages of the resubmitted document were renumbered.

In the letter of 24th of January this year to the president of the Security Council, Iraq’s foreign minister stated that, I quote, “All imported quantities of growth media were declared.” This is not evidence. I note that the quantity of media involved would suffice to produce, for example, about 5,000 liters of concentrated anthrax.

There’s much, much more. But this is enough.

UPDATE: Robin Roberts emails:

Regarding the excerpts of Blix’s report you posted, I note that he mentions the great quantities of anthrax unaccounted for. I have this vague recollection of people being killed in this country with anthrax …. and a bungled FBI probe of same.

Hmm. I seem to recall something of the sort too, but it’s probably entirely unrelated.

WHO I VOTED FOR IN THE GRAMMIES — plus an Axis of Weasel roundup — is reported over at GlennReynolds.Com.

JAMES LILEKS reports on the Super Bowl ads and on what he found by Googling the “ordinary Americans” in a Star Tribune story about the antiwar movement.