JUST BECAUSE THERE’S A WAR ON doesn’t mean that there aren’t idiocies elsewhere. Here’s a Texas Republican Congressman who wants to jail college kids for file-trading.

Why aren’t the Democrats protesting this suggestion? Oh, right, because they’re in the pockets of the entertainment industry. Charming.

Me, I think we should jail a few members of Congress as an example to the others. Let’s treat acceptance of illegal campaign donations as a strict-liability felony. Call it Sarbanes-Oxley II. . . .

Meanwhile, let me know who’s running against this guy next time, so I can send money. Legally, of course.

MORE EVIDENCE that resolution takes you farther than equivocation where arms-control is concerned:

The U.S. government has obtained potentially valuable new information on Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons programs in recent days from scientists and intelligence agents confronted outside Iraq with threats that failure to cooperate could mean unpleasant consequences when Baghdad falls, according to two U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the effort.

In a top-secret adjunct to an openly reported diplomatic initiative, U.S. and allied intelligence services summoned scores of Iraqi operatives in foreign capitals to present a stark choice. They were told “they could either ‘turn,’ ” said one official, using an expression for switching sides, or be expelled back to Iraq “to enjoy your very short stay in Baghdad.”

Another official with access to written accounts of the conversations said the Iraqis were told that when the United States sorts friends and enemies after toppling President Saddam Hussein, “they’ll be putting themselves and their families at the mercy of the new Iraqi government.”

Hmm. Why didn’t Hans Blix think of this approach? I’d ask him, but first I’d want to ask him where these scuds came from all of a sudden. . . .

A BUNCH OF LINKS over at Defense Tech, including one to this Wired story about thermobaric weapons going into the hands of individual soldiers.

WHY DIDN’T I POST MUCH last night? Because there wasn’t much actual stuff to talk about. Ken Layne notes: “Unlike the cable teevee news, we’re allowed to shut up when there’s nothing to report.” Layne has a lot of great observations on the events — and on the coverage. My favorite: “You know, I’m not an evil dictator or anything, but I’m pretty sure I could make a videotape today claiming it was actually Saturday.”

Howard Kurtz has a good roundup with links. So does Jeff Jarvis at his warblog. And James Lileks explains the true origin of “Shock and Awe.”

And the Command Center, a new warblog collective, is up and running for the duration, which I hope will be brief.

INTERESTING ANALYSIS of long-term strategy, from Stratfor, over at Bill Quick’s page.

SUMAN PALIT is blogging a lot.

STEPHEN GREEN:

Right up to the Red Army entering Berlin, Hitler was plotting a counterstroke, using divisions and regiments with all the combat power of companies and platoons. That is, if they still existed at all. You don’t tell the madman with the power of life and death anything he doesn’t want to hear.

Saddam won’t just be hiding in an underground bunker, he’ll be hiding from reality. And that works mostly in our favor.

Indeed. One can hope, of course, that he was hiding in the bunker we just struck, though life is seldom so simple.

SOME READERS DOUBT HIS AUTHENTICITY, others swear he’s genuine (and, of course, there’s no certainty either way) but Salam Pax is still blogging from Baghdad.

UPDATE: Boy, there are still lots of strong opinions. Personally, I hope that Salam is what he claims to be, and that he comes through this okay. But given the limits on Iraqi internet access — especially in light of reports like this one — his posting is, well, extraordinary. There are lots of explanations for that, and only some of them involve him being a propaganda tool. But some of them do involve him being a propaganda tool. Not that you shouldn’t read his blog, or enjoy it. Just treat it like any other news source, and don’t assume that it has to be true because it’s a blog and it’s written in first-person.

RAND SIMBERG SAYS it’s a big hostage rescue mission.

BUSH’S SPEECH: No surprises, really. I’m watching the CNN and Fox commentators, who have fixed cameras in Baghdad and who seem deeply disappointed that they aren’t showing any explosions. Next step: CNN dispatches special-effects technicians to set off phony blasts in camera range. . . .

UPDATE: Email:

CNN doesn’t fake explosions. NBC does.

Respectfully,

Eric Jablow

Oh, yeah. Right.

BUSH WILL ADDRESS THE NATION AT 10:15.

UPDATE: Bombs over Baghdad — or cruise missiles, anyway. I wonder if these guys were involved.

THE SPACE SHUTTLE COLUMBIA’S flight data recorder has been recovered. Apparently, NASA expects to be able to get useful information out of it.

NICK DENTON:

In what conceivable way is France qualified to pronounce on friendship, loyalty, or even the European project? Its friends are corrupt African dictators and guilt-racked Germans; its loyalty to itself; and France has turned the European project into a vehicle for national vainglory and agricultural subsidies.

France has a Napoleon complex: it puffs up its chest, teeters on elevated heels, a dwarf country with public delusions of grandeur, and private self-doubt. There’s no need for the rest of Europe to humor it. If the continent is truly to be a force in world affairs, and a counterbalance to overweening US power, France first needs therapy.

Indeed. A reader emails that he saw de Villepin on French TV claiming that international law virtually requires that France be let in on postwar reconstruction contracts.

UPDATE: The French are worried.

JOSH MARSHALL IS WORRIED that we won’t kill enough Iraqis to ensure a stable postwar environment:

Not only did millions of Japanese and Germans die in World War II, but U.S. and British aerial bombing of major Japanese and German cities alone killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in what is now delicately termed “collateral damage.” And that’s not even counting the carnage caused by the atomic bombs we. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the final days of the war against Japan. . . .

Violence, death and destruction on such a massive scale have a profound conditioning effect on the psyches of individuals. And the same applies to whole nations. Japan and Germany weren’t just ‘defeated’ or ‘occupied,’ they were crushed — not just their armies, but their civilian populations too. This led to a sort of national humiliation and a transformative willingness to embrace defeat and change.

True defeat changes people and nations too. The fact that our subsequent occupation turned out to be so benign was extremely important. But part of that importance was the contrast between how much these populations had suffered during the war and how much better things got for them after we took over.

And thus our problem. If everything goes according to plan, the loss of civilian life in Iraq will be minimal.

Not that Josh wants people to die, he just thinks it has a valuable pedagogical function. I think, though, that the past twelve years of sanctions and Saddamo-tyranny has been bad enough to produce the contrast that he’s writing about. Let’s hope. Anyway, first we have to, you know, win the war.

UPDATE: Read this post by Donald Sensing from last year.

IT’S IN THE HANDS OF THE GENERALS NOW. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile Justin Weitz has a list of all the things that were tried before going to war. It’s a long one.

IT’S ALL ABOUT OOOIIILLL:

NEW YORK (AP) — Canada’s largest independent oil producer can be held liable for genocide if it can be proven it cooperated with the Sudanese government to wage war on civilian populations near oil fields, a judge ruled Wednesday.

Talisman Energy Inc. cannot escape trial on the civil claims contained in a class-action lawsuit filed on Nov. 11, 2001, U.S. District Judge Allen G. Schwartz said. A lawyer for the company did not immediately return a telephone message for comment. . . .

The lawsuit accused the company of collaborating with Sudan to commit gross human rights violations, including murders, forced displacement, war crimes, confiscation and destruction of property, kidnapping, rape and enslavement.

It described the current Sudanese government as a “Taliban-style Islamic fundamentalist movement” that was engaging in a “war of genocide” that has already claimed two million lives and displaced four million people, with the violence aimed at wiping out Christians and those practicing religions other than a strict form of Islam.

Hmm. Funny, I usually only hear American companies accused of this kind of stuff. No doubt it’s all somehow Dick Cheney’s fault, though.

Then there’s this story:

PARIS Six decades after his parents were arrested and deported from German-occupied France, an Austrian-born French Jew went to court here Wednesday to demand that France’s national railroad company accept its responsibility and express remorse for transporting Jews to Nazi death camps. . . .

This case dates back to 1991 when Schaechter, a retired musical instruments salesman, was searching in France’s National Archives in Toulouse for information about his parents, both of whom were killed by the Nazis. Shocked by the evidence he found of French cooperation with the Germans, he violated regulations by removing documents to be photocopied, then returning them to their files. Over nine months, he copied more than 12,000 documents.

Among these was a letter written by the SNCF and dated Aug. 12, 1944, nine weeks after Allied troops landed in Normandy, demanding payment of 200,000 francs from the regional government of the Haute-Garonne Department in southern France for transporting Jewish detainees from concentration camps to the French border with Germany. In the letter, the SNCF warned that interest would be charged if the payment were not made on time.

This was just one of the myriad documents that Schaechter used in his long, and to date unsuccessful, campaign to have France open up its wartime archives, most of which remain sealed.

I guess that Andrea Peyser is right. But you watch — the same people who are covering this stuff up will be piously claiming to sit in judgment on how the United States conducts the war.

JAMES MORROW worries that international conventions may kill civilians in Iraq.

SKY NEWS reports that bombing has started, involving targets that may possess chemical or biological weapons.

THIS ARTICLE ON STUDENT ACTIVISM in the Washington Post lists and links quite a few student pro-liberation groups.

Meanwhile the Brandeis student group is organizing a multi-campus support-the-troops campaign and invites students from all over to participate. They’ve reportedly faced vandalism and harassment at Brandeis, but they’re not letting it stop them.

A SPACE SUMMIT involving representatives of many different space advocacy groups has produced a call for human settlement. Read the story — I’ll be writing more about this later.

MORE FRENCH CORRUPTION:

The current trial follows the sleaze allegations which surfaced over an arms for kickbacks scandal, which centred on the now notorious liaison between former foreign minister Roland Dumas and a woman who dubbed herself “The Whore of the Republic”.

The trial is being keenly watched in France, where it has stirred up charges of endemic corruption during the last years of late president Francois Mitterrand’s rule.

Elf was controlled by the state at the time of the scandal.

It is now part of French oil firm TotalFinaElf which is negotiating multi-billion dollar deals with Iraq.

Negotiate all you want, guys, but I don’t think those deals will be worth much.

ANOTHER REPORT that the fighting has started. Here’s another that’s not quite so clear.

LOTS OF NEW WAR COVERAGE over at The New Republic, including this from Gregg Easterbrook, and this from Kanan Makiya.

Also check out Howard Owens’ new warblog for the Ventura County Star, and, of course, Jeff Jarvis’s new syndicated weblog, which has links to raw video feed from the region.

IRANIAN-AMERICANS hope that Iran will be next:

Despite a generally festive celebration at San Rafael’s McNears Beach Park last night in anticipation of the end to the Iranian calendar year tomorrow, the mood for at least some was tempered by a looming war in Iraq and the hope that perhaps the next step in America’s Middle East plans would include their former homeland.

“I think most everybody here is for it,” said San Rafael resident Iraj Zolnasr, 40, who left Iran in 1975 to study accounting at San Francisco State University, of the nearly 1,000 attending the festivities on a crisp night under a full moon. . . .

Even though he still has family living in Iran, he said he supports a U.S. war because that part of the world desperately needs democracy. The militant administration ruling the country fosters suicide bombers by not providing decent homes and jobs, he said, and does not represent how the majority of Iranians feel.

“Most people don’t like them,” he said, referring to the Iranian government.

I suspect that quite a few Iranians in Iran share these hopes.

UPDATE: Pejman Yousefzadeh has some thoughts.

THE FRENCH are starting to feel left out. I wonder how they’ll feel about their new ambassador from America?

UPDATE: This News Analysis piece from the International Herald Tribune says that France and Germany are wondering if matters have gone too far. Read the whole thing.

Personally, I think the French could have saved themselves a lot of diplomatic trouble by reading weblogs.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Love the headline, agree with the sentiment. No wonder they’re nervous.