JIM DUNNIGAN ARGUES that even if North Korea has developed nuclear weapons, it’s probably not an immediate threat. Maybe not — he’s right that building something that goes bang is different from building something that’s deliverable as a weapon. But didn’t India and Pakistan make that transition fairly quickly? And, once it has those, aren’t things rather a lot worse?
More reason to do what we can to hasten the Kim Jong-Il regime’s demise. As if these aren’t enough.
NICK DENTON’S PORN BLOG, “Fleshbot,” is now sporting a “coming soon” label. It’s work-safe at the moment, but I rather doubt it will be once it’s up and running.
UPDATE: Some people are upset about this development. Or are pretending to be. . . .
A RATHER COOL COLLECTION OF PHOTOS (this one is my favorite), from Sugarmama.
CIDER THAT’S NOT CIDER? When will this madness stop?
STEPHEN F. HAYES has an article on Saddam / JAl Qaeda connections that I missed during my limited-blogging weekend. If you missed it, too, then you may want to check it out. I think there are still more questions than answers, but there are rather a lot of questions.
PORPHYROGENITUS WONDERS “where have all the flower children gone?”
Ok, so I’ve been reading the news accounts of the latest round of bombings in Iraq. I figured that if anything was deserving of such protection as having a ring of human shields to prevent bombing, it might be a Red Cross facility dedicated to succoring the Iraqi people. But no mention of any human shields. But then I thought: Of course, they left Iraq after the fighting (some left during the war). But of course now they should be planning on returning to Iraq, right?
Riiiight.
FACT-CHECKING NEWSWEEK — from “a lowly blogger sitting in Northern Virginia with little more than Google and a good memory for stories.”
I supported the war on Iraq darn near unequivocally. I thought — and still think — that Saddam Hussein posed a strategic long-term threat to US interests. I thought that the only viable alternative to war, sanctions, were unspeakably cruel to the populace, while doing little to either punish Hussein, or remove him from power. And I believed that we could build a stable democracy in the Middle East. In the long run, I thought we’d all be better off. And in the short run, if it cost me some money — well, it was a price I was willing to pay.
But my inclination to support the war rested on the assumption that once it was over, we would be ready, willing, and able to rebuild Iraq after we invaded. If we aren’t going to do this, why invade in the first place? In order to convince the world that we’re the superpower equivalent of a malevolent toddler who smashes anything that catches his eye? Even if you didn’t support the war, isn’t the folly of refusing to pay for reconstruction evident? If we pull out now, with Iraq in a shambles, we’re writing Al-Qaeda’s recruitment brochure for them. And we’re utterly destroying any credibility we might have with the rest of the world.
But while I still think we can help Iraq transform itself into a functioning free society, I’m terribly afraid that we won’t.
Bad enough that anti-war protesters — who were terribly, terribly concerned about the plight of Iraqis before we invaded — are now staging demonstrations to urge us to pull out immediately now that we’re the only thing standing between those Iraqis and anarchy. But there are actually rumors that the White House is contemplating accelerating our departure, which seems lunatic to even discuss when the country doesn’t appear to have a functioning anything.
I hope those rumors are false. Because if the White House — by which, in this case, I mean George W. Bush — decides to drop the ball on this, I’ll probably vote Democratic, even if Kucinich is the nominee. A half-hearted war is the very, very worst kind. I think that Bush understands that. He’d better.
UPDATE: Martin Devon takes a more positive view.
PHIL BOWERMASTER offers this important cautionary note:
The trouble with the future is that it can be harder to predict than a lot of experts would like to make out, especially when they’re committed to a particular conclusion.
Yes.
MICKEY KAUS responds to the Easterbrook flap by posting the case against editors.
He has thoughts on blogs and libel, too!
UPDATE: Stephen Green finds that having editors isn’t enough to guarantee quality.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Eugene Volokh has worthwhile observations.
ROBERT TAGORDA HAS MORE ON DEAN AND HALLIBURTON, concluding that there’s not a whole lot to the connection he found beyond, well, the connection he found.
UPDATE: Link was broken. Fixed now — sorry. Meanwhile Al Giordano says there’s more to come in terms of close ties between Dean and the energy industry. Do I believe him? I dunno — he also thinks that Bolivia is moving toward authentic democracy. . . . . But that’s a question of analysis, not facts, and he’s got links. Make up your own minds.
CNN IS FINALLY STARTING TO FIGURE OUT THIS BLOG THING, but Justene Adamec isn’t overly impressed with their latest effort.
UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis characterizes Justene’s post as pissy. I didn’t read it that way — I thought it was more about the CNN story’s lack of context. I certainly didn’t see it as reflecting badly on BigWhiteGuy, or his blog, and I didn’t mean for my post to do so either.
ANDREW SULLIVAN IS FISKING CLARK AND KERRY over at The New Republic.
WHY WOULD ANYONE ATTACK THE RED CROSS? Clifford May explains. Again.
UPDATE: Interesting:
BAGHDAD (Reuters) – A U.S. general said the one attacker captured in the bombings that killed 34 Monday had a Syrian passport, fueling suspicions that foreign fighters were behind a rising tide of violence.
Interesting, but not surprising.
BLOG TV: Just saw the MSNBC report on Chief Wiggles’ Iraqi toy drive. It was a nice segment, and it was fun to see, and hear, the Chief. Only caught the very end of Matt Welch’s appearance on O’Reilly earlier, but I’m going to try to catch the rerun if I can stay awake.
UPDATE: Welch was great on substance — but lose the glasses, Matt. . . .
ANOTHER UPDATE: Hey, another blogger was on TV. I missed it.
PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH: Satisfying Katha Pollitt since, er, today!
HARRY’S PLACE is one of many blogs I should be paying more attention to. Now he’s got an interesting post on reactionary nihilism on the Left:
It is clear that the Iraq war has shown that a certain section of the left really has nowhere to go except self-hatred and that a reactionary antipathy to the US and the western democracies has moved from beyond the ultra-left fringes into the mainstream of left-liberal oppositionalism.
It is precisely the spreading of ‘pure oppositionalism’ that makes it worthwhile looking closely at the activities of the Socialist Workers Party and others. Because while the details of their quasi-Trotskyist ideology remain restricted to a tiny minority, their broader outlook has gained something close to hegemony on the radical left.
Marginalizing it politically, but making it more of a threat in terms of “politics by other means.” Harry notes:
If the left’s old internationalism, anti-fascism and militant defence of democracy is finally defeated by the spread of reactionary nihilism it will not only be the left who are the losers.
Yes.
UPDATE: Andrea Harris: “If hating Amerikkka is wrong, we don’t want to be right!”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Michael Totten calls A.N.S.W.E.R. “the new skinheads.”
And I have some further thoughts over at GlennReynolds.com.
YET ANOTHER UPDATE: But is hatred a family value?
MORE: And still more on the spread of political hate here.
FIRSTHAND REPORTING: Sasha Castel is featuring posts from Major Sean Bannion in Baghdad. Meanwhile OxBlog has firsthand reports from Kabul.
As a (still) registered Democrat, I wish Michael Totten were running in my party’s primaries. I’m serious.
Me, too.
THE REAL TRUTH ABOUT OSAMA AND SADDAM: As reader John Davies emails: “Strangely, the mainstream liberal media are silent on this issue.”
Indeed.
CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS, a collection of economics- and business-related blog posts from all sorts of bloggers, is up.
A PRODUCER AT MSNBC emails that, barring sudden complications (always a risk with TV) a story on Chief Wiggles’ Iraqi toy drive will air at about 10:52 p.m. Eastern time tonight.
UPDATE: And, in an entirely unrelated development (er, except for the blogger-on-TV angle), Matt Welch will be on Bill O’Reilly’s show tonight.
JOHN HART ELY has died, at the age of sixty-four. I got to know him when we were both visiting professors at the University of Virginia school of law, ten years ago. He was a gentleman and a scholar, in the truest sense of both words.
REPORT FROM CHINA: A while back I posted an email from a friend who travels regularly to China on business who cancelled some summer travel plans because of SARS fears. She just got back and sends this report:
On the mainland everyone was very welcoming – not many westerners have returned to the factories, but they are starting to schedule visits. At the hotels the westerners seemed to be predominately Germans and Indians – and that is a big change. We also met some guys from France, but they were ??tourists?? Not many tourists come to the special economic zones (i.e., factory areas). They said they were from France, and tourists (remember the coneheads?). None of the Taiwanese or Chinese brought up SARS, and the few times that a foreigner said anything, the subject was immediately changed.
There is an incredible national pride in the “space mission,” unbelievable Chinese patriotism. I think that there’s going to be lots more coming our way from the east. It’s such a cliche, but the Chinese are so industrious, and they are accustomed to working toward a common goal. Space is the perfect goal as they are evolving into capitalism – the government was brilliant in pushing the launch. A common goal with so many side benefits – scientific innovation, military development, and a reason to work together for the good of the nation. Geez.
Anyway, when we got back to Hong Kong for a couple of days rest, I saw a woman with a facemask on and realized that she was the first person we had seen wearing one. Usually there are lots of people wearing masks because of the heavy air pollution. It seems that the predominant feeling is one of confidence, or trying to show confidence, that SARS is no longer a threat. The newspapers reported that the government investigating committee on SARS is trying to discover how the virus spread so quickly, and who is to blame. But when the space launch occurred, it overshadowed all other news. Hmm- another side benefit…
There does seem to be some worry that SARS might reappear this fall. And here’s more reason to eschew handshakes in that connection.
UPDATE: She sends this postscript:
PS- We were wined and dined on some of the most elaborate meals that we’ve ever had in China. And there was no exotic meat this time. Remember – we go to Guang Dong Province, where SARS is believed to have originated, in the meat markets. Usually we can count on eel, snake, maybe frog; but this time it was duck, lobster, fish and chicken every time.
Good.
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