ALPHECCA’S WEEKLY MEDIA GUN-BIAS FEATURE is up. Enjoy!

BUT IT’S TOO BAD WE INVADED UNDER “FALSE PRETENSES:”

A MASS grave containing the remains of 200 Kurdish children has been discovered in the northern Iraqi province of Kirkuk, the Kurdish newspaper Taakhi reported today.

“Citizens discovered on May 30 a communal grave close to Debs, in Kirkuk. But this is different from other mass graves discovered since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s terrorist regime because it contains the remains of 200 child victims of the repression of the Kurdish uprising” in 1991, the paper said.

“Even dolls were buried with the children,” it said.

Dozens of mass graves have been uncovered all over Iraq since Saddam’s ouster by invading US-led forces on April 9.

Krugman’s right: It’s unfortunate that we interfered with Iraq’s internal affairs, preventing more of these.

UPDATE: Lileks says it better, of course.

SALAM PAX’S GUARDIAN COLUMN IS UP, and it’s very interesting reading. Things don’t sound great, but they don’t sound as terrible as some would have us believe, either. I won’t even try to excerpt it — just go read it.

UPDATE: Oh, okay, I can’t resist this one bit:

I got five papers for 1,750 dinars, around $1.50, it felt like I was buying the famous bread of bab-al-agha: hot, crispy and cheap. When the newspaper man saw how happy I was with my papers he asked if I would like to take one for free. Newspaper heaven! It turns out that no one is buying any copies of the paper published by the Iraqi Communist workers party; he just wants to unload it on me. Look, I paid for the Hawza paper so why not take the commie one gratis?

Although the ministry of information has been broken up and around 2,000 employees given the boot, the media industry, if you can call it that, is doing very well. Beside all the papers we now have a TV channel and radio; they are part of what our American minders have called the Iraqi media network. My favourite TV show on it is an old Japanese cartoon (here it is called Adnan wa Lina). It is about what happens after a third world war when chaos reigns the earth. Bad choice for kids’ programming if you ask me. Some cities have their own local stations and there are two Kurdish TV channels. But the BBC World Service killed in one move a favourite Iraqi pastime: searching for perfect reception. The BBC Arabic service started broadcasting on FM here and it is just not the same when you don’t hear the static.

The staff of the ministry of information is being given $50 as a final payment these days: lots of angry shouting and pointing at al-Jazeera cameras. Other civil workers had better luck – the people at the electricity works got paid by the new salary scheme suggested by the Bremer administration (the range is from 100,000 to 500,000 dinars, $100-$500: the people at the lower end got a raise and the people at the top got the cream taken off their pie) and as if by magic the electricity workers try a bit harder and the situation gets better.

Magic.

JESSICA LYNCH UPDATE: Seems it was the BBC that was shooting blanks:

On Friday’s NBC Nightly News, Avila reported that hospital staff “say the so-called blanks were actually flash-bang grenades used to stun and frighten hospital workers and potential resistance. No bullets or blanks were fired inside the hospital. And the Americans had every reason to expect trouble. Hospital workers confirm the Iraqi military used the basement as a headquarters.” A doctor told Avila that “what he calls the big heads of the Iraqi army left just six hours before the raid.” Avila added that “the Iraqis told NBC News the American soldiers’ behavior was humane.” For instance, when one of the physicians said the handcuffs “hurt and they were too tight,” the “soldiers immediately loosened them.”

Interesting.

UPDATE: Apparently BBC lies don’t die — they just go on vacation.

THE TRUTH IS MARCHING ON:

WASHINGTON, June 2 (UPI) — As the U.S. media still digests the shock and lessons of the Jayson Blair affair at The New York Times, a far older and far worse journalistic wrong may soon be posthumously righted. The Pulitzer Prize board is reviewing the award it gave to New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty more than 70 years ago for his shamefully — and knowingly — false coverage of the great Ukrainian famine.

Interesting.

WHITE HOUSE LIES AIMED AT WAR WITH IRAQ:

The Clinton administration is preparing a cowardly attack on the people of Iraq in which countless innocent lives will be sacrificed to further the interests of American big business. This is the reality behind the efforts of the president and his top advisers to create the illusion of a popular consensus for savaging an already shattered nation. . . .

In so far as the address was an attempt to justify the impending assault on Iraq, it consisted of a series of half-truths and outright lies. It began with a fantastic depiction of America and the world on the eve of the 21st century. The cold war was over, democracy was on the rise, peace and prosperity for all were around the corner. Only one obstacle stood in the way–what Clinton called “outlaw nations and an unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers and organized international criminals.”

He continued: “We have to defend our future from these predators of the 21st century they will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.”

Heh.

LARRY LESSIG OFFERS SOME INTERESTING HISTORY on the public domain — in the year 868. And scroll to learn about the petition he’s sponsoring.

RAND SIMBERG WILL BE ON THE RADIO talking about space beginning at 7 p.m. PDT tonight. Follow the link to find out how to hear him, on or off-line.

THE TUCKER MAX INJUNCTION: It’s all about sexism on the bench, apparently.

FACT-CHECKING PAUL KRUGMAN: Wunderkinder and Donald Luskin are on the job. I love this bit from Luskin:

Paul Krugman’s New York Times column,
today:

The public was told that Saddam posed an imminent threat. If that claim was fraudulent, the selling of the war is arguably the worst scandal in American political history — worse than Watergate, worse than Iran- contra.

Paul Krugman’s New York Times column,
January 29, 2002:

I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society.

Heh. Of course, Krugman needs to address all those statements about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that the Clinton administration made — or maybe he figures that, since they didn’t do anything about the problem, it doesn’t matter?

Meanwhile David Hogberg notes that Krugman is engaged in Maureen-Dowdesque selective quotation.

UPDATE: Roger Simon says the problem isn’t the mistakes, but the heavy-handed politics:

But Krugman must get the demon Bush, using any pretext he can, the WMDs in this case. But let’s give Paul his due. Let’s stipulate, even though we have no way of knowing at this point, the presence of these weapons was exaggerated by the administration; I still say—so what? Saddam’s gone. It was worth it. And I ask Krugman this simple question: What if some leader had used a similar ruse to get rid of Hitler in 1940? What would he think of that?

Prediction: We won’t be hearing a Krugman answer to that one any time soon.

That’s a safe one, I think.

UPDATE: Andrew Philip Winerman emails:

Roosevelt DID use something of a ruse. He used Pearl Harbor to get us into the war (with Japan) and then attacked Germany first. Granted, Germany declared war on the US two days after we declared war on Japan. Still, the public was demanding Japanese blood in the weeks after Pearl Harbor, not German, and Roosevelt made Europe his first priority.

True enough. And that’s why FDR is reviled by — oh, wait. . . .

HERE’S AN INTERESTING BBC TRANSCRIPT on weapons of mass destruction. Excerpt:

George Eykyn:
Not only that but they also didn’t say that they were working on the basis of an assumption, did they? In fact, if I remember that Tony Blair told Parliament that Iraq could actually use its weapons of mass destruction within something like forty-five minutes. It was that kind of specific information which gave the impression of a clear and imminent danger to western society.

Simon Henderson:
Yes there is two parts to that. One is that we know and the United Nations knows – and even the UN inspectors of Hans Blix etc. were unable to discover what had happened to all the weapons or the capability of making weapons – the raw materials for it – that we know Iraq had had and Iraq had failed to give a good explanation. Forty-five minutes – I always read that as not as if there was going to be a missile firing at us in forty-five minutes time. That some of this material – chemical and biological, but certainly chemical, was for use on artillery shells, and these artillery shells, equipped in this way, could be distributed to front line Iraqi army units within that time, if necessary. . . .

George Eykyn:
Dr M.V. Diboll, United Arab Emirates asks: Why is it that in the 80s, when it was no secret that he had and was using chemical weapons, Saddam was a tyrant we were more than happy to do business with? Why did Britain and America suddenly decide that Iraq’s alleged possession of WMDs was a casus beli – a reason to go to war?

Simon Henderson:
Well I think the questioner there is rewriting history. It’s not the way that I remember the 1980s. The 1980s – and I ended up writing a biography of Saddam Hussein in 1990 – I did a lot of work in Iraq in the 1980s and the people who were supplying military equipment to Saddam’s Iraq were noticeably the Soviet Union and the other parts of the Soviet bloc – China, France. And Britain and the United States supplied extremely little military equipment to Saddam because we realised what a diabolical regime it was. And so your questioner is pointing his finger in the wrong direction in terms of blame. . . .

Iraq is a huge country. For European viewers, I believe it’s twice the size of France and France itself is the biggest country in western Europe. It is the size of California, if you are an American. It is huge. It is not difficult to hide things in such places. You don’t just pour it into the sand. I suppose some of it might have been hidden in that way but you store in some way and eventually it will be found. There were not just hundreds, there were thousands of technicians, scientists, engineers working on these projects when we knew that existed back in the ’80s. Some of them were retained into the ’90s and they will have stories to tell. Perhaps they haven’t come forward yet, or their debriefings haven’t been released.

Read the whole thing, which I suspect won’t get the attention it deserves.

UPDATE: Rich Lowry points out that it’s rather dishonest for people to pretend that the Bush Administration somehow invented the notion that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were a major threat, and he has scads of quotes from Clinton Administration officials to prove it. He adds:

The failure so far to find WMD in Iraq is a major embarrassment for President Bush, and congressional hearings into the intelligence prior to the Iraq War are welcome. But the post-Iraq debate shouldn’t proceed on false pretenses: Everyone this side of famed Iraqi prevaricator Baghdad Bob believed that Iraq had WMD. In the run-up to the war, the United Nations, the “axis of weasel” (France and Germany) and high-profile Democrats all agreed about WMD.

The specific figures in Secretary of State Colin Powell’s U.N. presentation about Iraq’s unaccounted-for WMD came from U.N. inspectors. France and Germany didn’t argue that Saddam had no WMD, but inspections could rid him of them. Clinton and Al Gore dissented from aspects of Bush’s policy, but agreed about WMD. “We know,” Gore said, “he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons.”

The question was what to do about a dictator with ties to terrorism who for 12 years had defied the procedures set out by the world to confirm that he no longer had dangerous weapons. For the Bush administration, Sept. 11 meant erring on the side of safety, and so continuing to accept Saddam’s denials and defiance wasn’t an option.

As someone once warned: “This is not a time free from peril, especially as a result of the reckless acts of outlaw nations and an unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers and organized international criminals. We have to defend our future from these predators of the 21st century.” Even if the rhetoric was shrill, Bill Clinton had a point.

“Unholy axis?” My goodness: simplisme!

TIM BLAIR has some current-events jokes. Samples:

Q: How do you confuse a blonde?
A: Tell her that the same people who predicted hundreds of thousands of casualties and a massive refugee crisis are now condemning US intelligence for supplying inaccurate information about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Q: How many New York Times writers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Ten. Nine to change the bulb, and one to claim the byline.

Pretty funny but, uh, don’t quit your dayjob, kid.

BLOGGING AS A DISTRACTION from studying for the bar exam? Hmm. Is this such a good idea?

UPDATE: He’s not alone.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Good grief: They’re everywhere!

KEN JOSEPH, the Assyrian peace activist who went to Iraq before the war and then left when he realized what Saddam was all about, has returned to Iraq and offers a distinctly positive view of the situation there:

The answer is very complicated while at the same time very, very simple. It is the “politically correct” thing to do to complain about the Americans, say they are not wanted and tell them to “go home.”

The reality, though, is very different.

As usually happens throughout Iraq, people look around before they tell their true feelings. Simply put they are still afraid to speak the truth. Before it was Saddam, now it is the Shiites and others who frighten them.

“The Americans are doing wonderfully. We want them to stay forever,” I hear.

I am not surprised. It is exactly like I thought. When I was in Iraq before the war, the reported feelings were that while the people of Iraq did not like Saddam, they would fight for their country and were against the war.

As I said then, the people wanted the war to come so they could be liberated from Saddam but were not free to talk. The same situation with a different twist exists today.

It is not widely reported, nor fashionable to say the Americans are loved and wanted in Iraq, but in fact as they were wanted before the war, they are wanted now.

“We hope they stay forever” is the true feeling of the silent majority in Iraq, contrary to what is reported.

The logic is very simple — the Iraqis do not trust their leaders. Faced with a very complicated situation of a 60 percent Shiite majority, a former police state, Iran at their doorstep trying with all its might to destabilize their country, and desperately relieved and happy to be finally liberated from nearly 30 years of Saddam, they want the United States to stay.

They’re afraid that if we leave, the “crazies” will take over, as in Iran. Read the whole thing, as they say. This suggests to me that one of the most important things we can do is make clear that we won’t be chased out, a la Somalia.

UPDATE: Virginia Postrel doesn’t think this is a positive account. I disagree. The story we’re hearing is that Iraqis hate us, and crazy Shiite clerics are in charge. This says Iraqis don’t hate us, and crazy Shiite clerics are having to threaten people to get any traction. That seems better than the conventional wisdom to me.

Virginia seems a bit miffed about Tim Blair’s New York Times jokes, too. But if the Times had more writers like Virginia, people wouldn’t be joking.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s why people are all over the Times, Virginia. And, sadly, lots of other places are just as bad. Reporting may be hard — but lying is easy. Guess which one they choose, sometimes.

JON REISMAN WRITES that state efforts to, in essence, adopt the Kyoto Protocol are assuming powers that belong to the federal government, not the states, under the Constitution.

He’s pretty clearly right about this: two former students of mine wrote an excellent article on state foreign-policy efforts in Foreign Affairs a couple of years ago that made the same point. Their article focused on efforts to sanction Burma/Myanmar (which, constitutional issues aside, I would favor) but the point is the same. Foreign policy is messy enough without the states getting involved, particularly as the states who do get involved often aren’t the ones who would bear the brunt of any consequences.

Fixing potlholes and funding education should be the responsibility of state and local governments. Foreign policy should be the responsibility of the feds. Neither is doing so superbly in its assigned sphere that it can afford to spend time poaching on the other’s turf, however politically appealing such efforts might be.

FRED TURNER WONDERS when the 1960s generation bought into the class system:

But there is another flavor in the fear. I recognized it with astonishment, and once I did, it was unmistakable. It was the fear of losing one’s class standing, of being “cut” by one’s “set,” of being labeled not quite “pukka,” not quite “our sort,” a loss of caste. What had happened, I realized, was something absolutely astonishing; that in some way the cultural revolution of the ’60s had begun an attempt to reinstitute a class system that America had, out of its own inner nature and best genius, rejected. Rejected in the American Revolution, rejected in the Civil War, rejected in the decision to welcome immigration from Ireland and Southern and Eastern Europe and China, rejected in the Civil Rights movement. But still the urge toward the pleasures of snobbery kept reasserting itself in new forms; this time it was a snobbery of radical liberal intellectuals in the university, the school system, the press, the judiciary, and the charitable foundations, with wannabes in government, the caring professions, and even the hipper reaches of the corporate campus.

Aspiring middle-class folk adopt this snobbery in order to sound “Ivy”; Ivy people wear it like a comfortable old pair of $500 loafers; the rich, once the best educated people around, put it on in order to keep up with the better-educated professionals that define its canons.

So Eustace Tilley, the gentleman with the monocle on the cover of The New Yorker, is now the heir of Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza protests, beards and beads and all. You can see the class system evolving in the movie “The Big Chill,” where William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, and Meg Tilley all articulated its characteristic cool and style. Of course it has settled down since then, and has adapted to tweeds and fume blanc and Francophilia. It is an entirely unconscious snobbery.

Oh, not entirely.

UPDATE: Talk about ahead of the curve — Michael Barone wrote about “The New Snobbery” back in 1966! Advantage: Barone. Which isn’t to say that Turner hasn’t done a good job of noting its spread, and the signs of its blooming decay.

BLOGS OVER BAGHDAD — PAUL BOUTIN WRITES:

There’s a great opportunity: American computer makers should be seen over there setting up a few dozen free public PCs with high-speed access. Or just leapfrog into the new decade by handing out wireless laptops.

Last week, I disembarked into notoriously Internet-disabled San Francisco International Airport after three months away. I nearly fell to my knees when I saw the Centrino banners announcing the airport’s new network. That’s when it hit me: This is the flag that should be flying over Baghdad.

Jeff Jarvis joins in:

This will not take much. The plan is this simple. It needs:
1. Bandwidth. MCI is over there installing mobile phones. It would take nothing — nothing — for them to bring Inernet POPs to a handful of locations in the major cities at the same time. If I were running MCI, I’d do it as a mitvah, considering the hell my company had caused the world. But a foundation could underwrite this as well.
2. Computers. My commenter is right: Lots of companies — Dell, HP, IBM, Apple, Gateway, Microsoft, Intel — can afford to donate machines. It won’t take many, just a few hundred.
3. Tutor. Iranian webloggers needed Hoder to explain how to blog. Salam Pax could do likewise.
4. Space. The U.S. and British military should find space for temporary Internet cafes that could be used by servicemen for X hours a day to email home and by Iraqis most of the day to exercise their newfound free speech.
5. Guru. Somebody needs to bring this together, getting companies and foundations to donate bandwidth and machines and getting the government to facilitate this (and see that it is in America’s interest to encourage such free speech). I’ll volunteer. So will many others, I’m sure.

What comes out of this: A hundred Salam Paxes. A thousand Salam Paxes. The intelligent, caring, involved future of Iraq will come online to share their experiences and opinions and hopes and fears and Iraq will be better for it; so will the world, for we will build bridges to Iraqis online.
History has never had a better, cheaper, easier, faster means of publishing content and distributing it worldwide. Now is the time to take advantage of this for sake of democracy and freedom and nothing less than that.

Microsoft? Dell? Apple? Intel? It’s time to step up to the plate. How about it?

JOHN DVORAK PREDICTS:

Let me stop here for a moment and make some specific predictions. Within the next year, both David Letterman and Jay Leno will make jokes about blogs and even discuss them. “Nightline” will do an entire show on blogging. San Jose journalist and blog promoter Dan Gillmor will be a guest for the episode. This is the point where blogging will become mainstream. Shortly thereafter, we will see blogging millionaires, as venture capitalists figure out ways to make money from the trend.

That’s a fairly astonishing reversal from Dvorak’s earlier, ahem, skepticism toward weblogs, isn’t it?

And there’s this revelation: “Steve Ballmer is supposed to have a secret blog someplace.” (Via Nick Denton).

SALAM PAX WAS Peter Maass’ interpreter in Baghdad. Heh:

My inner journalist tells me to draw back at this moment and write about the larger significance of my encounter with Salam Pax. That working alongside—no, employing—a star of the World Wide Web and being blissfully unaware of it is a lesson about the murkiness of today’s Iraq, a netherland of obscurity in which you cannot know who was a Baathist and who was not, or whether the man in the middle of the street with a gun is going to shoot you or not, or whether the country is spiraling out of control or just having teething problems before becoming a normal nation. My inner blogger, however, tells me to skip the What This Means stuff and write about my life with Salam Pax.

Read the rest. And my Big Picture take is that when a journalist as good as Peter Maass can have Salam Pax as his interpreter and not figure it out until he’s back in the States, we should take all the reporting from Baghdad as, at best, tentative.

UPDATE: Nick Denton reports:

Peter leaves out one nuance. On Thursday night, his first evening back in New York, a bunch of us went out for dinner. Peter, who was taking some time to realize what a celebrity Salam had become, would tell his war stories. But all anyone wanted to know, gallingly oblivious of media status, was this: “So, Salam, what’s he like? What was it like working with him?”

Such is fame and the blogosphere.

JULES CRITTENDEN SAYS THE COMMITTEE TO PROTECT JOURNALISTS IS WELL, BASICALLY LYING, at least by conscious omission, about the tank fire that killed two reporters in Baghdad:

Great weight is given to reporters’ assertions that the tankers, who had been engaged in combat for up to 30 hours, should have been able to recognize them at a distance of three-quarters of a mile. The report doesn’t question how reporters who didn’t realize their own building was hit by a high-explosive tank round can definitively state that no fire was coming from the hotel’s vicinity.

CPJ ignored my remark that French reporter Jean Paul Mari told me he understood fire from an anti-tank battery south of the hotel might have been seen as coming from the hotel’s vicinity.

It is indisputable that the Pentagon should have ensured that units in Baghdad were aware of sensitive sites. By failing to do so, they failed their own soldiers and placed our journalistic colleagues in jeopardy. But a lawsuit by the Cuoso family targeting the soldiers involved, and CPJ’s second-guessing aspersions are not helpful.

All of us who placed ourselves in harm’s way in Iraq knowingly risked death at the hands of the Iraqis and the Americans. Both sides were responsible for journalists’ deaths. Unfortunately, the Committee to Protect Journalists showed its colors early on, when it condemned, protested and demanded answers about U.S. actions against journalists, while mourning, monitoring and voicing concern about Iraqi actions. There was no condemnation of the Iraqi leadership’s decision to use civilian vehicles, clothing and suicide bombers for assault purposes, which unquestionably placed non-embedded reporters in danger. Those tactics forced the tankers to fire on civilian buildings and vehicles in Baghdad.

It’s sad that you just can’t trust these people. And you can’t.

DESPITE DAVE WINER’S objections, I am still writing about the war, and the postwar, because I think it’s important.

That said, I do sympathize with this guy.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis weighs in.

YES, THIS CARTOON IS ANTISEMITIC, and the Chicago Tribune should be deeply ashamed.

What’s next, big-lipped black people being lured with watermelon?

UPDATE: Here’s Don Wycliff’s column in the Trib about it. But Wycliff isn’t being honest. He says that “the cartoon carried several other messages that could be seen as drawing on anti-Semitic symbols and stereotypes.” Could be seen? You mean the absurdly hook-nosed Jew staring greedily at money, with the Star of David on his sleeve while the President supinely offers more cash?

“Could be seen?” Let’s be honest here: The equivalent would be a blubber-lipped Jesse Jackson eating watermelon and saying “I sho’ lub ‘dese Democrats,” while Tom Daschle beamed in the background. That cartoon never would have seen print, and the columnist would have been fired. The racial stereotyping here was just as obvious — and, historically, tied to even worse things than Jim Crow — and if it was really published out of ignorance, then the folks who oversaw it are too ignorant to work in the news business.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Rick Skeean emails: “I wouldn’t like the cartoon in any case, but to me it looks like Sharon is supposed to be wearing a hawk totem.” As I said, absurdly hook-nosed.

Reader Tim Henrion notes:

Their deputy editor picked this cartoon out of an unknown number that crossed his desk. He would most likely be out of a job if he had picked a similar racist cartoon.

Indeed.

ERROR CORRECTION UPDATE: Oops. Somehow I attribute to Don Wycliff a statement that was actually him quoting another Chicago Tribune editor. I’m sorry about that — I read it several times, and I don’t know how I managed to get that wrong. On rereading, it’s clear that Wycliff’s views of the cartoon are harsher than that. My mistake, and I’m sorry about that.

I don’t promise not to make mistakes — just to fix ’em when I do. Luckily my readers, in this case reader John Althouse Cohen, tend to let me know.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: On the other hand, the OmbudsGod points out a different problem with Wycliff’s response, which he says misrepresents the relationship between the cartoonist and the Tribune.

FIRST IT WAS STARBUCKS, but now photo-fascism seems to be spreading.

NOW THIS IS INTERESTING:

LAST Sunday saw a remarka ble event in Washington – one that defied stereotypes about Muslims and the Bush administration’s “hard-liners”: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, widely identified (and denounced) as the main architect of America’s Iraq intervention, won multiple standing ovations from an audience of hundreds of Muslims.

He praised the coalition’s use of force to remove evil, and he hailed the new reality in Iraq. For the first time in 26 years, he said, Shia Muslims had freedom to observe their Arbaeen festival in Iraq. The room exploded in applause.

The venue: the first-ever national convention of Shia Muslims from the United States and Canada.

Read the whole thing.

FAREED ZAKARIA WRITES:

The most important person who will not be at any of the meetings this week is, of course, Arafat. And make no mistake, Arafat will try to derail this peace process. He has absolutely no incentive to see Abu Mazen succeed. He will try to keep his fingers in the operations of the Palestinian Authority, in particular in controlling the security forces. The day that Arafat swore Abu Mazen into office, he set up a new national-security council, with himself as chairman, controlling all matters related to law and order. He will thwart the efforts to crack down on terror. He might even encourage some groups to engage in low-level terror. The message Arafat will try to send the world is “Abu Mazen is a nice guy but he can’t deliver. If you want to deal with the Palestinians, you have to deal with Arafat.”

Oh, Arafat should be “dealt with,” all right.