ANOTHER LOOTING STORY LOOKS TO BE EXAGGERATED:

VIENNA, Austria – Experts from the U.N. atomic agency have accounted for tons of uranium feared looted from Iraq (news – web sites)’s largest nuclear research facility, diplomats said Friday. . . .

The diplomats did not detail how much uranium had been looted and where it was found, but it appeared much of it was on or near the site.

U.S. military officials who accompanied the IAEA team said last week that initial assessments indicated most of the uranium that had been stored at the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center was accounted for.

Although at least 20 percent of the containers which stored the uranium were taken from the site, it appeared that looters had dumped the uranium before taking the barrels.

Well, that’s a relief. As the fog of war lifts, lots of stories will no doubt be revised.

PLAYING THE GAME — DISHONESTLY: Tapped makes a big deal of the Christian Science Monitor’s report (noted here last night) that documents found by the Monitor implicating British antiwar MP George Galloway as a collaborator with Iraq appear to be forged. Tapped thinks that Andrew Sullivan owes Galloway an apology, and adds rather snippily: “It’s Sullivan’s game. We’re just playing it.”

Playing it rather dishonestly, though. Because what the Tapped post doesn’t mention is that the same expert who found the Monitor’s documents probably fraudulent also said that the Telegraph documents were probably genuine:

After examining copies of two pages of the Daily Telegraph’s documents linking Galloway with the Hussein regime, Mneimneh pronounces them consistent, unlike their Monitor counterparts, with authentic Iraqi documents he has seen.

Moreover, a direct comparison of the language in the Monitor and Daily Telegraph document sets shows that they are somewhat contradictory.

The trouble is, you can’t read this directly from their post because Tapped doesn’t link to the Monitor’s story. Instead, it links to this AP story about the Monitor’s findings, which doesn’t include that discussion. That’s funny, since Tapped’s post is timestamped 12:40 p.m. today, and the Monitor story has been available since last night. So why link to the AP story?

Unless, of course, you’re playing games. I think that it’s Tapped who owes an apology here. To Sullivan, and to its readers.

UPDATE: Okay, on reading this again maybe I’m a bit too hard on Tapped. It’s certainly possible that this was an honest, if careless, mistake. But since I’m revisiting this, I should also point out Galloway admits he was in Iraq when the Telegraph documents say that he was.

Tapped should either have been more careful, or less snippy. And I suppose it might turn out, eventually, that Galloway is altogether innocent — and that he supported Saddam out of conviction, rather than desire for lucre, if that’s better. But Tapped certainly didn’t prove that, and didn’t present even the evidence in existence in a complete or forthright manner.

I wonder if anonymous blogging encourages that sort of thing.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader David Mosier emails “Anonymous blogging is like the KKK hiding behind sheets.” I don’t agree with this, and I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with anonymous blogging per se. But an anonyblogger like, say, Atrios is still taking personal — if pseudonymous — responsibility. The anonymity of house blogs like Tapped encourages a sort of diffusion of responsibility, I think. However, I suspect that the real motivation for anonymous house blogs is that the people who run these publications don’t want their staff making a name for themselves via blogging. They might *shudder* ask for more money, or something.

Meanwhile, Horologium sees this as evidence of Tapped’s decline. Well, it was better back when Chris Mooney was doing it. Now it’s been Kuttnerized! (Take it away, Mickey Kaus. . . )

BUT THERE’S PLENTY OF MONEY FOR AIRBUS-RELATED BRIBES:

Tony Blair conceded today that a European Union donation to help fight Aids, TB and malaria would fall short of the $1bn (£600m) pledged by the United States.

The prime minister had made a joint call with French president Jacques Chirac for the EU to match America’s commitment to the UN’s Global Health Fund, set up to fight the three killer diseases.

But speaking at the EU summit in Greece, he said the smaller of the 15 existing EU members and 10 countries joining next year were not prepared to commit the money for 2004 because of “budget problems”.

The reader sending the link notes:

Bush promised the money, and he’s put up the money. The E.U. promised to match Bush’s money, and they haven’t.

But Europeans still think the U.S. is a bigger threat to safety in the world than Al Qaeda.

The E.U. is much, much bigger on making promises than on fulfilling them.

DUE TO BLOGGER PROBLEMS, Daniel Drezner has moved his blog here.

I’VE GOT MORE ON SENATOR HATCH’S UNFORTUNATE ENCOUNTER with the Internet over at GlennReynolds.com. Meanwhile Howard Kurtz has the last word on the O’Reilly / Internet war. (“O’Reilly loves to stir up trouble, of course, but many of his targets don’t have a megaphone to shout back. That’s hardly the case online, where almost anyone can crank up the volume.”)

Both Hatch and O’Reilly seem to have come off the worse for dissing the Internet. Is there a lesson in that?

UPDATE: More on Hatch here, where we also learn that the story has made the Salt Lake Tribune.

ANOTHER UPDATE: This whole affair is restoring one blogger’s faith in the blogosphere. Well, good!

THE SHRILL ANTI-BUSH TONE of this Salon piece by Eric Boehlert is unfortunate, because the issue it covers is too important to be buried in the “maybe this will be the silver bullet the Democrats have been waiting for” drooling.

Leaving all that aside, Boehlert has a point. The Bush Administration has been far too resistant to probes of what was done before the 9/11 attacks. I’ve repeatedly noted here that nobody lost their job over this, despite some pretty obvious dropped balls. We haven’t seen the kind of accountability that we should, and the Bush Administration does itself no credit by its near-stonewalling on this subject.

Karl Rove should be thankful, though, for the screechily partisan note of these calls for an investigation, which have so far made them easier to ignore. But my advice to Karl is not to depend too much on the shrillness of his enemies, and to remember that if you act like you’re hiding something, people will sooner or later conclude that you’ve got something to hide.

I SAID EARLIER that local blogs would have a lot of impact. Bill Hobbs points to one that’s fact-checking newspaper bias in South Dakota at the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. Hobbs writes: “The reports, written by University of South Dakota law student Jason Van Beek, are blog-journalism at its finest.” Judging by the reaction from the journalists he’s covering, I think he’s having an impact already.

I think we’ll see a lot more local-blogging. In part that’s because local newspapers, almost always monopolists and often with too-comfortable relations with local politicos, are ripe targets.

SOME GOOD NEWS FROM IRAQ:

With no government to turn to, Ali and his neighbors decided to make their own, forming a neighborhood council and taking responsibility for getting power and water up and running, cleaning up the sewage, arranging delivery of cooking gas canisters, clearing the schoolyards and every other detail of municipal life.

And the headache of it all — the nitty-gritty, unsolvable, hair-tearing frustration of trying to run a city neighborhood with no money, office, phone or car — fills Ali with pure elation.

“We are appreciating this opportunity,” Ali, a slight, carefully dressed man with neat salt-and-pepper hair, said on a recent sweltering evening as the council gathered in the courtyard of the al-Ahud primary school. “We have suffered for a long period. This is the first time we are taking responsibility for ourselves.”

Today, representatives of neighborhood councils all over Baghdad will gather for the first time. The plan is to have them elect members to a district council, which in turn will choose representatives to serve on a Baghdad city council scheduled to be operational by the end of June.

But read the whole thing.

NOW THE WEASELS ARE EATING ONE ANOTHER:

BRUSSELS, Belgium, June 20 — Belgium’s government itself became the target Friday of a law that has damaged the country’s relations with the United States by allowing war crimes complaints against President Bush and other prominent Americans.

A small opposition party said it had filed a suit against Foreign Minister Louis Michel for authorizing a Belgian company to sell arms to Nepal. The New Flemish Alliance, a nationalist party from Belgium’s Dutch-speaking north, alleged the sale made Michel an accomplice in human rights abuses by the Nepalese armed forces.

”The law says every collaboration with these crimes is a crime itself and should be punished in the same way,” party spokesman Ben Weyts said. ”The sentence for this crime is life in prison.”

Or complete irrelevance, whichever comes first.

MERYL YOURISH REPORTS an astonishing lack of support for the Iranian freedom protests, over at IndyMedia.

IndyMedia was never about freedom.

TALKSHOW HOST AND BLOGGER Kevin McCullough writes that GoreTV will be outdone by the blogosphere.

I wish someone would give me ten million dollars.

THE GAY VICTORY: Jonah Goldberg writes:

The gays have won. The problem is no one will admit it.

The biggest and latest news is that Canada is poised to legalize same-sex marriage. But the signs of the gay victory have been all around for us for years.

He’s right, of course. Which is fine with me, even though it still irritates some people.

UPDATE: Stanley Kurtz writes that “Reynolds also acknowledges that there is at least a good argument to be made that gay marriage will end up undermining, rather than reinforcing, marriage.” Uh, no, I don’t. And I don’t see where he got that out of this post.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Kurtz responds that he was referring to this phrase from my earlier post:

There are some conservatives who say that the advocacy of gay marriage is part of a campaign by some liberals to undermine marriage in general — and I think there probably are some people on the left (or in whatever la-la land the MacKinnon / Dworkin types and their near-kin inhabit) who think that it will do that. But I rather suspect it will have the opposite effect.

Well, I guess I can see reading that the way he does, though the mention of MacKinnon / Dworkin la-la land should suggest how unfounded I believe such thinking is.

Meanwhile I’ll let Kurtz, and anyone else who is interested, make whatever they can of this new study. I’m not going there.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: “The bitter truth is that the Middle East wants the West far more than the West the Middle East.” He goes on to say:

For all the doom and gloom we are making amazing progress. If on the evening of September 11th, an outside observer had predicted that the following would transpire in two years, he would have been considered unhinged: Saddam Hussein gone with the wind; democratic birth pangs in Iraq; the Taliban finished and Mr. Karzai attempting to create constitutional government; Yasser Arafat ostracized by the American government and lord of a dilapidated compound; bin Laden either dead or leading a troglodyte existence; all troops slated to leave Saudi Arabia — and by our own volition, not theirs; Iran and Syria apprehensive rather than boastful about their own promotion of terror; and the Middle East worried that the United States is both unpredictable in its righteous anger and masterful in its use of arms, rather than customarily irresolute and reactive.

Finally, do not expect to read headlines like “85% of Baghdad’s Power Restored,” “Afghan Women Enroll in Schools by the Millions,” or “Americans Put an End to Secret Police and Arbitrary Executions in Iraq.” It is not the nature of the present generation of our elites — so unlike our own forefathers in postwar Japan or Germany — to express confidence in our culture, much less in the moral nature of our struggle to end the conditions that caused this war.

Yes, and if we lose this war, that will be why. Fortunately, however, what Andrew Sullivan correctly called a “fifth column” back in 2001 is limited in numbers and influence, despite its broad representation in media.

HOW RELIABLE IS THIS POLL? Beats me. But it’s interesting:

Iraq’s first opinion poll since the war, indeed in decades, showed that 73 per cent of Baghdad residents think the army has failed to enforce security in the city, which is still plagued by shootings, car-jackings and armed looters.

But in a candid acknowledgement that there is as yet no alternative, only 17 per cent of those polled by the independent Iraqi Institute of Strategic Studies said that the coalition should leave now. Half wanted the US forces to stay until a permanent government had been elected, a process that could take up to two years.

The rest of the article, however, is far more troubling, with emphasis on the persistence of disorder in and around Baghdad. It fits uncomfortably well with this report by Salam Pax.

Things seem to be considerably better elsewhere in Iraq, which is no surprise — the “Sunni belt” retains the most Ba’ath holdovers and is probably where Saudi Wahabbists are focusing their efforts to destabilize the country.

UPDATE: Reader Jody Leavell expresses irritation with Salam’s passivity and notes:

The American problem may be too few troops in place to adequately secure the city. The residents of Baghdad’s problem isn’t the Americans, nor the militants, it is their own apathy and failure to take responsibility for their plight and build a better future.

Yes. I spoke to a friend of mind in the defense establishment, who doesn’t have direct responsibility for Iraq but who is interested and perceptive. He remarked that the big intelligence failure was in underestimating just how badly Saddam had wrecked civil society in Iraq. But he also remarked that the Iraqis want to get back to civil society really badly, and he thinks they’re starting to overcome their shell-shock.

AN IRANIAN BLOGGER offers some cautionary advice about Iranian revolution. Read this.

ORRIN HATCH: Software Pirate and porno magnate?

HERE’S AN INTERESTING INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT KAPLAN on how America should operate around the world. Excerpt:

In fact, one of the stories that got some attention, but perhaps not as much as it should have, is the number of visits by high-level Pentagon officials to Dearborn, Michigan, which is kind of the center of the Iraqi-American community. People in the U.S. government have been increasingly reaching out to Iranian-Americans in Los Angeles, to Iraqi-Americans in Dearborn, hopefully to Palestinians in northern New Jersey. They recognize that we aren’t tapping the “hyphenated Americans,” and increasingly we’re making progress. But just think about it. We have the most international country in the world. Large communities of Armenians, of Iranians, of Laotians, of Vietnamese, and of Arabs. Given this population base, there is no excuse for us not having a diplomatic and military corps that is the most erudite and linguistically sophisticated in the world. And we do, to an extent. But we have to get a lot better at it.

Yes. In an interestingly related post, Trent Telenko says that Rumsfeld and Shinseki are both wrong about the number of troops needed to rebuild Iraq.

MILLIONS VS. BILLIONS AT THE NEW YORK TIMES: Apparently, the new, improved fact-checking system hasn’t been rolled out quite yet.

HERE’S A NICE PIECE BY ANGELINA SCIOLLA on the relationship between blogs and Big Media. (Via Virginia Postrel).

I MENTIONED THE INDIAN TRUST FUND DEBACLE below. Jacob T. Levy has more here, here. and here.

ANOTHER Greg Packer?

SOME REASONS WHY CONDI RICE SHOULD BE ON THE TICKET IN 2004.

Here’s another, better reason:

In a telling anecdote, it is said that Condoleezza Rice, the White House’s national security adviser, asked a Korean government official if he knew the names of the two middle school girls killed last year by a U.S. armored vehicle. He answered yes right away. Then she asked if he knew any of the names of the sailors killed [by North Koreans last year] in the West Sea battle. The official stuttered, unable to answer the question. This embarrassing incident shows us how ridiculous our country may seem to the world.

You go, girl! (Via The Marmot’s Hole).

WELL, THEY’RE BOTH DEEP THINKERS AND GREAT AMERICANS: David Frum on gay marriage:

Gay marriage opens the doors to a series of changes in the law of marriage. Not the law of marriage for gays – the law of marriage for everybody. The whole point to gay marriage is to make the rules for gays the same as the rules for straights. Logically, then, the rules for straights will have to be the same as the rules for gays.

It’s a good guess, for example, that we will see an end to the concepts of “motherhood” and “fatherhood” in our legal practice. The law will increasingly see couples as interchangeable “parents.” This reinterpretation of motherhood as parenthood will have large impacts on, for example, custody decisions during divorce. Right now, the courts still tend to award custody to mothers, even if they work, even if they work more hours than their husbands do. (Some years ago, a Florida court awarded custody to an at-home dad over his working wife, and feminists raised a huge fuss against the sexist court that extinguished maternal rights just because the mother worked 70 hours a week.) But as the courts have to make new law to cope with gay divorces, look for the old idea of maternal preference to disappear. You can’t have maternal preferences when both parents claim to be the mother.

Rob Smith on gay marriage:

Having been through two divorces and seen first-hand how a man fares against a woman (although I DID get custody of my daughter, but NO Child Support because I was profiled as a man)), I have a couple of questions. If gay parents adopt, how does the court award custody? How is Child Support figured? How is alimony decided?

The more I think about those questions, the more I favor gay marriage. Maybe the courts will stop “profiling” ex-husbands as the scum of the earth, guilty of whatever went wrong in the marriage and due a richly-deserved financial enema for that evil. Maybe the woman doesn’t have a stacked deck in her favor anymore.

That would be a damned good thing.

Personally, I’m in favor of legalizing gay marriage. I don’t see that gay marriage diminishes marriage, any more than the many Jerry-Springer types who are allowed to get married now diminish marriage. I have gay friends who are, for all practical purposes, married. I don’t see why barring them from going to the courthouse benefits anyone.

There are some conservatives who say that the advocacy of gay marriage is part of a campaign by some liberals to undermine marriage in general — and I think there probably are some people on the left (or in whatever la-la land the MacKinnon / Dworkin types and their near-kin inhabit) who think that it will do that. But I rather suspect it will have the opposite effect. Let gays get married and they’ll become a bulwark of the bourgeoisie. That’s my prediction, anyway.

I also recommend this column by Radley Balko, which advocates getting the state out of the marriage business entirely.

MARY ROBINSON IS immune to irony. But we knew that.

MEDIA BIAS? Transnational Progressives who hate Bush? That’s crazy-talk!