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.