MIKE CAMPBELL REPORTS that Canadian voters want better relations with the United States.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION: Gregg Easterbrook writes:

Saddam’s professional army is now fighting like it doesn’t plan to give up–exactly as the French fought in the early days of the Nazi attack in 1940. And that makes perfect sense: Saddam’s professional army doesn’t yet have to give up because it still has men and materiel. But every day it will have less of both, while every day the United States has more, as more forces enter the region. France in 1940 went from determined resistance to collapse almost without warning. This may still happen to Iraq, just not the in 48 or 72 hours that commentators foolishly predicted.

Read the whole thing.

IRAQI TROOPS have set the oil trenches around Baghdad on fire.

Perhaps this isn’t to keep us out, but to keep Iraqis in — as with the earlier Hussayn, Mohammed’s grandson, who lit a flaming trench to cut off his own retreat. (He died shortly thereafter, I recall. But isn’t he a Shi’a hero?)

ANICK JESDANUN discovers the price of reading weblogs: time. Heh.

On the other hand, this article by Gary Mullinax quotes me as saying something I never said. At least, I don’t remember it, it doesn’t sound like me, and it doesn’t show up in my site search.

I’ve emailed him.

UPDATE: He’s quoting Jonathan Last — it’s just clumsily worded so that it sounds like he’s quoting me. Here’s where I linked Last’s piece. Kind of weird that he quotes Last at such length, and in such a way, in a piece about blogs.

EGYPTIAN DEMOCRACY ACTIVIST Saad Eddin Ibrahim has been acquitted. This is good news.

(Via Hesiod).

I GUESS WE’RE JUST CONTRARY: Best quote on blogs and war this week is this one from Nick Denton:

“It’s standard Weblog style when everybody’s enthusiastic to say, `Wait a minute, war is ugly,’ ” said Nick Denton, publisher of Gawker, a Weblog devoted to New York news. “So when talking cable heads start to get gloomy, the Weblogs’ natural tendency is to say, `Well, it was always going to be difficult.’ “

Yep. (Via Reid Stott, who has lots of stuff worth reading).

TIM BLAIR has the last word on the Dixie Chicks: “Commercial reality is a bitch-stomp corrective to the anti-war artistic elite. Who knew their price was so low?”

Ouch. No wonder so many people fear him.

EUGENE VOLOKH POINTS OUT NEGATIVE SPIN on some war polls:

“JUST 38 PERCENT [OF AMERICANS] SAID THE CONFLICT WAS GOING WELL ON MONDAY,” says the first paragraph of an Associated Press story, citing a Pew poll. Uh, no. As the story says about ten paragraphs down, that’s the fraction who said the conflict was going very well.

The Pew summary of the poll seems to say that 41% said it was going fairly well; there’s a bit of ambiguity in how the summary describes this, but I think that’s what they’re saying. Thus, about 80% think it’s going well — in the sense of fairly well to very well — and “[o]nly 8% went as far as to say the war effort was not going well.” Surprisingly, none of this made its way into the AP story.

For shame.

H.D. MILLER writes on “The Moral Idiocy of James Carroll,” whose Boston Globe op-ed today has achieved what Miller calls a “trifecta of fecklessness.”

Personally, I think Miller is being overkind.

KANAN MAKIYA WRITES:

The bombs have begun to fall on Baghdad. Iraqi soldiers have shot their officers and are giving themselves up to the Americans and the British in droves. Others, as in Nasiriyah and Umm Qasr, are fighting back, and civilians have already come under fire. Yet I find myself dismissing contemptuously all the e-mails and phone calls I get from antiwar friends who think they are commiserating with me because “their” country is bombing “mine.” To be sure, I am worried. Like every other Iraqi I know, I have friends and relatives in Baghdad. I am nauseous with anxiety for their safety. But still those bombs are music to my ears. They are like bells tolling for liberation in a country that has been turned into a gigantic concentration camp. One is not supposed to say such things in the kind of liberal, pacifist, and deeply anti-American circles of academia, in which I normally live and work. The truth is jarring even to my own ears.

If you want to understand the perceptual chasm that separates how Iraqis view this second Gulf war from how the rest of the Arab-Muslim world views it–or from how these antiwar elites here in Cambridge or, dare I say, in Turtle Bay or Paris or Berlin view it–then you must begin with the war that has already been waged on the people of Iraq by their own regime. Then you will know, horribly, how the explosion of a JDAM can sound beautiful. For Iraqis, the absence of this new American-led war is not the presence of peace.

Read the whole thing.

JIM DUNNIGAN HAS SOME INTERESTING THOUGHTS on where the war is going, why Iraqi TV is still on the air, and what the Big Media folks aren’t getting.

UPDATE: Read this, too. And there’s a great roundup, as every day, over at Winds of Change.

FIRST THE IOWA ROTC, now this:

Portland Fire Bureau officials Monday ordered U.S. flags removed from downtown fire engines, concerned that their presence might provoke dangerous confrontations with antiwar demonstrators. . . .

“Protesters have threatened our personnel and are burning flags in the street,” the memo said. “We do not want extremists attacking our apparatus or our personnel.”

Want to see more political violence in America? Then just keep rewarding it this way. Once people figure out that it works, you’ll see a lot more.

UPDATE: Portland has backed down. Let’s hope Iowa does the same.

HERE’S A NICE, CLEAR SURVEY ARTICLE ON NANOTECHNOLOGY by Kelly Hearn in the Christian Science Monitor. It mentions a lot of new nano-products that I didn’t know about.

UPRISING AGAINST SADDAM? There are a number of reports of one in Basra. Stay tuned. Here’s more.

UPDATE: Here’s a new AP story on Basra.

A THIRD GUILTY PLEA in the Lackawanna Al Qaeda case.

JUST IN CASE THE WAR ISN’T ENOUGH, here’s something to worry about:

The World Health Organisation mulled global travel restrictions as the incidence of a deadly respiratory disease escalated in Hong Kong and Singapore quarantined more than 700 people to contain its spread. . . .

As 25 more new SARS cases were reported in Hong Kong, the WHO head office in Geneva said a meeting planned on Tuesday will determine if there is need to impose travel restrictions to stem the spread of SARS, which manifests itself as a form of pneumonia.

Though it will probably turn out to be nothing major, this bothers me — particularly as I suspect that, through a combination of deliberate cover-up and simple underreporting, there are a lot more cases than we know about.

UPDATE: A friend who does business in China emails:

I cancelled my trip to Guang Dong, China, scheduled for the first week of April, because of SARS. I always fly into Hong Kong, then take a train or boat up to our factories in mainland China. I figured it wasn’t worth the risk. It’s funny that the illness is labeled SARS, and Hong Kong is called SAR.

This, of course, is why the Chinese have been downplaying it.

HEH:

“The war in Afghanistan, the one (Bush) should never have declared, has run into trouble. Just a few weeks into it and it’s obvious that the United States is fighting blind. The enemy is unknown, and the enemy’s country is terra incognita. We have virtually no one we can trust who can speak the languages of the people involved. With all our firepower and our technical assets and our spy satellites, it looks like we don’t know if we’re coming or going. …

“We are mapless, we are lost, and we are distracted by gusts of wishful thinking. That our high command could believe the Afghani peasantry or even the Taliban would change sides after a few weeks of bombing! This is fantasizing in high places. …

“Moreover, as hellish as the Taliban are, it appears that the ordinary people of Afghanistan prefer them to the brigands and bandits with whom we’ve been trying to make common cause … .”

Nicholas von Hoffman, November 14, 2001, quoted over at The Corner.

TIM BLAIR is handing out freedom beanies.

HERE’S A VERY NICE PAGE CELEBRATING WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH.

HERE’S A NICE ARTICLE on journalist warblogging by Hiawatha Bray. There’s also one on military bloggers in the Wall Street Journal today, by Matthew Rose, but it’s subscriber-only.

UPDATE: Here’s another by Dan Gillmor, and one by beloved-of-the-blogosphere Alex Beam.

DAVID WARREN WRITES:

In just five days all this has been achieved! And while the most grisly parts of the campaign still lie ahead, all the worst fears have gone unrealized, so far.

More, still, could have been achieved, in this very short time, had the Americans and their allies not been playing to the most exacting moral rules ever devised for warfare. They are restricted by, for instance, a general order not to engage any target at all — including snipers and saboteurs within towns — unless they have a clear sight of it. They allowed, for instance, a dozen Republican Guard to fire rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons at Apache helicopters from the roof of a building in one location south of Baghdad, entirely unmolested, because the helicopter pilots, who could have taken them out in a few quick keystrokes, couldn’t be sure of avoiding “collateral damage” to civilians who might be lurking in the building below. Giving the benefit of the doubt to surrendering soldiers cost most of the U.S. Marine casualties so far, in a single incident near Nasiriyah, as a suicide ambush was mounted under cover of white flags.

Even media folks are starting to notice. As Sgt. Stryker reports in the post I link below:

Dan Abrams of MSNBC is pissed. It’s kind of wierd to see a television anchorman displaying frustration and disbelief at certain things going on. The whole thing about the Iraqis dressing in civilian clothes and shooting from protected sites has really stuck in his craw. First he hammered Gen. Trainer about it, and the General explained LOAC and all that good stuf, but Abrams just wasn’t buying it. I tlooked to me that he just wanted to blurt out, “Why can’t we blow up that mosque, if they’re killing Marines?”

Then he had a retired JAG on and hammered him about the same thing. And then I heard something I thought I’d never hear an “objective” journalist say, and I paraphrase, “So our guys have to check with lawyers before they fire back? So we have these self-imposed rules that lawyers impose on our troops and the government imposes on itself and now Marines are dead because of it.” That last line was a statement, not a question. The JAG guy’s trying to explain about PR and the rest of it, but Abrams was on a roll. “Those Arab TV networks are going to show us supposedly targeting and killing civilians no matter what we do while we follow the Rules of War.” It was nothing short of astonishing to hear that. I don’t know what prompted all this. Perhaps he saw the tape of the Americans executed and exploited on TV. Who knows? But man, it was something to see.

That last is the question, isn’t it? It’s one thing to be merciful and careful above-and-beyond-the-call. But if we’re going to get no credit for it, is it worth the cost in American lives? The powers-that-be think it is. May they prove to be right.

SOME PRAISE FOR MEDIA COVERAGE over at SgtStryker.com.

Porphyrogenitus is less impressed.

I GOT ABOUT 600 EMAILS yesterday, just to the InstaPundit account. If you’ve sent me something, and I haven’t responded, well, sorry. I try to dip into the flood, but I just can’t keep up.

SOMEBODY VANDALIZED THE ROTC OFFICE at the University of Iowa. But the response seems to me exactly wrong:

An act of vandalism against a symbol of the U.S. military on the UI campus over Spring Break prompted leaders Monday to stop requiring cadets to wear uniforms to class.

Authorities are looking for a person who smashed two glass doors at the Reserve Officer Training Corps office in the South Quadrangle building and spray-painted such slogans as “Stop U.S. military research” and “Fuck all wars” on four other UI buildings between March 20 and 21, UI police records show.

“I am not concerned for the safety of the cadets, but I worry that their uniforms may provoke attention from a person who is looking to aim his antiwar sentiments at someone,” said Lt. Col. Carol St. John, a professor of military science.

I think they should wear their uniforms every day. It’s funny to me that a University that would never respond to racist speech by asking minority students to “try not to be so noticeable” would respond to this kind of behavior in such a meek fashion.

(Via David Hogberg).

UPDATE: Hogberg has looked into how the University handled an earlier incident involving only threats, but no actual vandalism or violence. The University’s response was rather more forceful. Hogberg asks: “Why the different responses? Wouldn’t have something to do with campus politics, would it?”

Maybe someone should ask them.

MORE EVIDENCE OF CORRUPTION at the European Union:

French politician Edith Cresson has become the first former European Commissioner to be charged with corruption during her time in office.

A Belgian investigating magistrate has charged Ms Cresson, a former French Prime Minister, with counterfeiting and personally benefiting from EU contracts, say judicial officials.

The charges follow an inquiry into allegations made by Belgian Euro-MP Nelly Maes in 1999, which accused Ms Cresson of operating a fraudulent training scheme.

I’m willing to predict that she won’t be the last.