JAY MANIFOLD HAS POSTED A REPLY to my TechCentralStation column from yesterday.

A POET FOR THE WAR SPEAKS.

THE SAMI AL-ARIAN CASE: Eugene Volokh says it well.

HEH. I’d read about this, but here’s the picture.

HAS THE LEFT SPLIT IN TWO? Very interesting post.

SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE:

If we’re seeking lessons from the past to help us deal with Saddam Hussein, then the way we dealt with Mussolini’s conquest of Abyssinia in 1935 is – as the Prime Minister understands – the place to look. I was particularly reminded of my own Abyssinia moment when I read about Saturday’s anti-war march – hauntingly matched by the Peace Ballot of 1935, the national referendum in which millions voted for peace at almost any price, thus unwittingly persuading Hitler and Mussolini that bold predators had not much to fear.

Then, as now, the authority of what was then the League of Nations and is now the United Nations was at stake. Then, as now, many felt reluctant to take action against a dangerous dictator, even with the authority of a body like the League or the UN, lest it lead to war. Then, as now, our difficulties were compounded by the duplicitous behaviour of the French.

In 1935, after many brave words and much wriggling, we fudged it. So Mussolini took all he wanted in Abyssinia, without hindrance. He and others drew conclusions from this display of impotence.

Vegetius’ famous statement, “if you want peace, prepare for war,” is usually read as evidence that preparation for war promotes peace. But it’s also true that too visible a wanting of peace tends to bring on war.

ADAM YOSHIDA is offering a Virtual March for Victory in response to the “virtual march for peace.”

EVELYN SAYS that antiwar feminists are betraying women.

SUSANNA CORNETT has taken my advice and signed up with MoveOn.org. She’s also sending pro-war faxes via TrueMajority.com.

Make your voice heard!

DAVE TROWBRIDGE IS asking for your help.

JACOB T. LEVY notes the bright side of Turkish intransigence: It opens the way to freeing the Kurds!

DICK GEPHARDT HYDROGEN CAR UPDATE: As I mentioned yesterday morning I emailed Gephardt’s campaign to ask where the hydrogen for the hydrogen cars would come from. No reply. I called yesterday afternoon and got referred to his Congressional office. No answer there, but today I called and spoke with a PR person who promised that someone else would call me back.

I’ll let you know when I hear something, but it’s sounding less and less like a carefully crafted plan.

UPDATE: If I don’t hear from Gephardt’s folks soon, I’m going to start doubting this story.

MORE ON VENEZUELA over at GlennReynolds.com.

UPDATE: I don’t know if these charges regarding Chavez and Al Qaeda are true, and I’m inclined to be pretty skeptical. But someone should look into them.

MOVEON.ORG has made it easy for you to express your support for the war. Just go here and register. There’s also some advice here.

UPDATE: Yes, I know that MoveOn is an antiwar group. But you don’t have to be antiwar to use their site. . . .

Nukevet has more advice.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Stefan Sharkansky is organizing a Virtual March on Hollywood!

SOMEBODY AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT gets it. Bravo.

“PEACE” PROTESTS MAKE WAR MORE LIKELY:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 19 — President Saddam Hussein’s government, apparently emboldened by antiwar sentiment at the U.N. Security Council and in worldwide street protests, has not followed through on its promises of increased cooperation with U.N. arms inspectors, according to inspectors in Iraq.

No Iraqi scientist involved in biological, chemical or missile technology has consented to a private interview with the inspectors since Feb. 7, the day before the two chief U.N. inspectors arrived here for talks with Iraqi officials. The United Nations also has not received additional documents about past weapons programs, despite the government’s pledge to set up a commission to scour the country for evidence sought by the inspectors, U.N. officials said.

Useful idiots? Looks that way to me.

ASSASSINATIONS AND ARRESTS OF OPPOSITION FIGURES: All in Venezuela, where Hugo Chavez is making it more obvious that he’s a dictator.

If it were “all about oil,” we’d have invaded there already. If it’s about human rights, then the time is coming. . . . And where are the “human rights” groups? Not making the kind of noise they’d make if a U.S. ally were involved, that’s for sure.

UPDATE: Here’s more. Also here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Randy Paul points out that human rights groups have complained. But, as I say, it’s not the kind of noise they’d make in other circumstances. Compare the attention to this with the attention that Guantanamo got, for example, or the complaints about Israel.

But here, via Randy, is a link to Human Rights watch’s comments. Not bad — but after the way the various human rights groups postured prior to the Afghanistan invasion and over Gitmo, it’s going to take a lot to impress me with their evenhandedness.

ROBERT PRATHER HAS MOVED. Adjust your bookmarks accordingly.

Also, I note that he’s plugging Oliver Willis’s new novel, Valley Girl. The first two chapters are available for free download at this link, so check it out.

I WAS ALWAYS A FAN OF WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS. Perhaps I was wrong to be.

UPDATE: Here’s a partial defense of one of Douglas’s claims.

AMERICAN DIPLOMACY — not so simplistic:

Compared to Parisian diplomatic contempt, American efforts begin to look remarkably deft. No sooner had France and Germany established their common opposition to American aims, for example, than the U.S. characterized them as “Old Europe” even as it worked to bring a “New Europe” into plain view. Now that Chirac has made his countermove—telling upstart Europe it should be seen and not heard—the American and British governments look like a pair of pretty smooth operators. . . .

France’s problem isn’t the upstart applicant counties and their supposed “allegiance” to Washington; major EU member states with successful economies also stand with the U.S. France’s problem is French global pretension: Chirac wants applicant nations to kiss his ring. The applicant nations see the EU as being about a democratic Europe of which they are a part, while France perceives the EU as being an instrument of French global stature. Currently, it can boast primarily of maintaining a neo-colonial presence in Africa, and of suppressing the struggle for independence in Corsica. Running Europe would considerably brighten its resume.

Well, I can’t entirely blame them for wanting to keep Corsica. After all, it’s the home of Laetitia Casta. (LATER: Iain Murray emails that Laetitia Casta is now a tax exile living in London. Seems fitting, somehow.)

UPDATE: Here’s a summary of angry reactions from the New Europe courtesy of the BBC. And as proof that the French are on their way out, Molly Ivins is defending them.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Dwight Green emails:

Thanks for posting the Molly Ivins link where she defends France. While I hate the phrase, she constantly proves that she just doesn’t get it. Repeatedly. Yes, many wonderful French people died in World War I and World War II. But she fails to ask the question “why?”

The folly of French leaders this century has been the single-most reductive thing to the population (and stature) of France. The beef that Americans have with “the French” isn’t with your average French person… it’s with the iincompetence of their leadership. Since the average American isn’t immersed in French culture (contrast that to the bombardment of American ‘culture’), the view here is shaped by the posturing and silliness that is their lleaders.

He’s right, of course. Meanwhile reader Gautam Mukunda emails:

I just wanted to mention to you that Ivins is (as usual) factually inaccurate, not just inane. France had more (and better) tanks than Germany. What it did not have was any sort of doctrine of how to use them. It wasn’t poor equipment, but an inability to think through the consequences of the equipment that they did have, that doomed France in 1940.

De Gaulle, interestingly enough, actually made a decent stab at inventing the first effective anti-blitzkrieg doctrine during the German assault. He was (IIRC) an armored regiment commander in the French Army. It was just too little, too late.

Yes, the French military defeat was — like so many of the diasters of the 20th Century — not the fault of circumstances so much as it was the result of the arrogant ineptitude and shortsightedness of French leaders.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ross Douthat at The American Scene writes that Ivins’ is the worst column ever. Oh, I don’t think she’s accomplished quite that much.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: More on Molly: “She said one thing accurately, but it was by mistake.”

TOMORROW WILL BE THE ANNIVERSARY OF DANNY PEARL’S MURDER. Today, his father observes:

In a world governed by reason and leadership, one would expect world leaders to immediately denounce such racist calls before they become an epidemic. However, President Bush was the only world leader to acknowledge the connection between Danny’s murder and the rise of anti-Semitism: “We reject the ancient evil of anti-Semitism whether it is practiced by the killers of Daniel Pearl or by those who burn synagogues in France.” No European head of state rose to John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” with the morally equivalent statement “Today, I am a Jew.”

Not surprisingly, our unguided world has seen an alarming rise of anti-Semitic activity in the past year. Tens of millions of Muslims have become unshakably convinced that Jews were responsible for the Sept. 11 attack. Egypt’s state-controlled television aired a 30-part program based on the notorious anti-Semitic book “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and Egyptians were fed another fantasy, that Jews are plotting to take over the world. Syria’s defense minister, Mustafa Tlas, released the eighth edition of his book, “The Matzah of Zion,” in which he accuses Jews of using the blood of Christians to bake matzah for Passover. And on the sideline, while these flames of hatred were consuming sizable chunks of the world’s population, traditionally vocal champions of antiracism remained silent.

Silent, and increasingly discredited.

UPDATE: Here, courtesy of reader Gregory S. Taylor, is a link to the Daniel Pearl foundation.

HOMELAND SECURITY CONCERNS may be destroying model rocketry.

That seems idiotic to me — like most things being done under the “homeland security” umbrella.

MSNBC. MARGO KINGSTON. INDYMEDIA. And now my Shermanesque march through the lefty media continues, with an oped column in — yes — The Guardian.

Or maybe I’m just a lefty after all. An Abbie Hoffmanesque one. I blog, you decide.

PUT MY DAUGHTER TO BED tonight. No news there, but it reminded me how fast she’s growing up. We used to read together — we went through the Harry Potter books and the Narnia books and so on many many times. But now she reads to herself. She just finished a book about Molly, a plucky little girl who made it through life on the home front during World War Two. Tonight, she read to me from a book about Emily, a plucky little girl who made her life in the Jamestown Colony.

Then she got out her old “Arthur’s Bedtime Stories” book and had me read the (Arthurized) Three Little Pigs, Red Riding Hood, and The Princess and the Pea, complete with all the voices and sound effects I used to do every night. She knows she’s growing up, too, and she’s not quite ready to leave that behind. Yet.

HERE’S A REPORT that NASA really is going ahead with plans for the Orbital Space Plane as a replacement for the Shuttle. Rand Simberg will be thrilled.