TIM BLAIR’S WEEKLY COLUMN IN THE BULLETIN opens with this wonderful pair of quotations:

“No one can doubt its cruelty and atrocities, but comparisons with the Third Reich are ridiculous.” – John Pilger on the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, November 15, 1999.

“The current American elite is the Third Reich of our times.” – John Pilger on the government of George W. Bush, January 29, 2003.

See, these international antiwar journalists have so much more perspective than we simplistic Americans. . . .

DEREK LOWE has a couple of posts on the VaxGen AIDS vaccine story, which seems a bit disappointing to me. He’s not quite as disappointed, though, and he knows a lot more about this stuff than I do.

CHARLES MURTAUGH WONDERS if the Klan is going Green. Or vice versa.

JOHN COUMARIANOS criticizes Paul Berman.

ANDREW SULLIVAN WRITES:

It is therefore a gamble Bush cannot completely lose (whatever diplomatic and popular damage it does would be more than undone by a successful war). But it’s a resolution the Security Council (and France and Germany) can easily lose. If the resolution is defeated, but war ensues, Bush will take a small hit at home, a huge hit abroad (still, how much worse could it get?) – but, precisely because of these things, an even bigger domestic gain if the war is successful. Bush will be seen as someone who did all he could to win over the U.N., but in the end, did what he believed was right. He will emerge principled and triumphant. Ditto Blair, especially if a liberated Iraq reveals untold horrors, human rights abuses and French arms contracts. Machiavelli’s dictum applies powerfully now: all that matters is that Bush win the war. If he does, this conflict will be deemed to have been just and justified. That’s why calling the French bluff is especially important – particularly if it isn’t a bluff.

This seems right to me. What’s interesting is that though Bush’s critics accuse the United States of “imperial overstretch,” it’s really the post-1945 international system that has obviously bitten off more than it can chew. It purports to be in the business of policing international relations according to some standard of civility, and of reining in rogue states before they become a threat to their neighbors, but in fact the current international system lacks the will and the wherewithal to do either.

As Jim Bennett noted last week, Bush and Blair are, in fact, engaged in a neck-or-nothing effort to save the international system. And those — like the feckless French and Germans — who oppose them are in fact the would-be midwives of something far less civilized:

In reality, a failure of the Bush-Blair coalition would sooner or later (probably sooner) give rise to a world in which a number of regional tyrannies who gradually, under the cover of their weapons of mass destruction, would annex first the states that are sovereign by convention, such as Kuwait, and eventually many that have been sovereign by circumstance.

The existence of such states would force other nations in the region to calculate that their own sovereignty depended on their acquisition of nuclear weapons. Given that most nuclear tyrannies would be happy to sell weapons to out-of-area states with ready cash, such proliferation could proceed more rapidly than many imagine. Alliances would be discounted; if America were to shy away from attacking a nation for fear of non-nuclear terrorism, it could hardly be expected to stand up to nuclear blackmail. This logic ends up favoring the nuclear over the non-nuclear, the ruthless over the constrained, and the closed over the open societies.

Some of them realize this, and think such a world would be fine. Others are just foolish and irresponsible.

JAY MANIFOLD reports from a real peace rally.

TED BARLOW’S GRAMMY ROUNDUP is a lot better than the real thing.

“HIGH STAKES FRAUD:” Joyce Malcolm has a Bellesiles postmortem.

UPDATE: Chris Mooney has a Bellesiles confession on his blog.

TALKLEFT says it best:

We are on the precipice of war. The American public is constantly reminded we are under high to very high terror alerts, and Ashcroft and Bush want to go after bong sellers?

Jeez. Oliver Willis has a photo of the particular menace to National Security in question.

TWO NEW PRO-WAR STUDENT GROUPS: Students Protecting America (organized by Harvard Law students) and Students For War. Check them out.

And here’s a page with links to other organizations at Brandeis, Columbia, Oxford and Princeton.

UPDATE: More links here.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING STORY:

A Muslim cleric, Sheikh Abdullah el-Faisal, was today convicted of soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred, in the first prosecution of its kind in Britain.

The Old Bailey jury found El-Faisal guilty of three charges relating to inciting racial hatred as well as three charges of soliciting murder. He was remanded in custody for sentencing on March 7.

El-Faisal had denied five charges of soliciting the murder of non-believers, Jews, Americans and Hindus, and four charges relating to inciting racial hatred.

The ground-breaking trial was the first prosecution of a Muslim cleric in Britain. It was also the first time potential jurors were banned from sitting on the jury because of their religion. The judge agreed to a defence plea not to allow Jewish and Hindu jurors – but in the end none came forward.

This last seems a bit much — it’s like the state engaging in the kind of discrimination the defendant is accused of. Isn’t it?

MORE ON OLD VERSUS NEW EUROPE.

THIS PICTURE doesn’t look much like “Four Horsemen” — but I like it!

PRO-WAR SENTIMENT IS GROWING IN AUSTRALIA: Tim Blair credits Margo Kingston.

I have more thoughts on the growing pro-war movement over at GlennReynolds.com.

HAPPY BLOGIVERSARY TO LETTER FROM GOTHAM and Cut on the Bias.

What a long, strange year it’s been.

UPDATE: And Sean Kirby, too! Go say hi.

IS DELAY WORKING TO THE UNITED STATES’ ADVANTAGE? Not politically, but maybe militarily.

A USB toothbrush?

TONY ADRAGNA NOTES de Villepin’s admiration for tyrants and futility.

Explains a lot.

MY 3:30 FACULTY MEETING got put off until 4:00. It’s shocking how happy that makes me.

Well, partly because now I can post this link to photos of the Castel/Dodge blogger wedding. Drop by and leave ’em your best wishes!

WILLIAM SHAWCROSS WRITES on “Why Saddam Will Never Disarm:”

But the reality to remember is that Saddam will never voluntarily give up his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) as resolution 1441 and 16 other resolutions demand. They are integral to his sense of his regime. His record shows that he considers no cost too high to retain his biological, chemical and whatever exists of his nuclear capability.

In 1991, the surrender agreement ending the war in Kuwait specifically guaranteed that Iraq would surrender its weapons of mass destruction within 15 days. Till then sanctions, imposed after his invasion of Kuwait, would remain. His refusal to do so has meant that the UN oil embargo has stayed for 12 years, costing Iraq more than $180 billion and its ordinary people great suffering. It is wrong to blame the West, or the UN, for the starvation and deaths of Iraqi children – Saddam is to blame and he considers it a small part of the price to pay for his proscribed weapons.

Saddam’s obsession with his WMD has deep roots at home as well as abroad. First, he sees the threat of such weapons as a means of internal control over the 60 per cent of Iraqis who are Shia. The use of chemical weapons against the Kurds in 1998 taught the Shia the dangers of revolt. In 1999 a Shia revolt in the town of Najaf was crushed by Saddam’s security forces accompanied by troops in white uniforms wearing gas masks. People were terrified that Saddam was about to gas them – with the weapons that Saddam denies having and for which the UN is still vainly searching. The Shia have been mostly cowed since.

WMD also helps to keep the regular armed forces in line.

Read it all. But here’s one more excerpt:

The inspectors may find some banned materials, by luck, perseverance and good intelligence – and because Saddam has made cunning tactical concessions. They will never find the bulk of the illegal weapons. But that is not their job. That is to monitor his voluntary disarmament. He is not doing that and he never will. He is in clear breach of resolution 1441 and he always will be. The decision the world faces is: will we let him get away with it again? George Bush and Tony Blair say No. They are right.

Keep this in mind: Saddam will do whatever he can get away with.

And France, Germany, and the “peace movement” want him to get away with everything, because — for reasons of their own that vary — they’d rather see that than a war.

Keep that in mind when you hear Chirac say that “inspections are working.” They are working — for Saddam, and for Chirac.

BILL WHITTLE HAS ANOTHER POST UP. That should be all I really need to say.

REPORT FROM THE NEW EUROPE:

WARSAW Waiting for a McKielbasa sandwich at an outlet in central Warsaw of the world’s most ubiquitous American fast food chain, the 29-year-old economist did not hesitate when asked where he would stand if asked to choose between the United States and Europe.

“America is a better partner for us and I trust America more than France or any other country,” said Maciek Wesolowski, joking that he was buying the McDonald’s sandwich, a Polish sausage on a hamburger bun, in honor of Polish-American friendship.

Poland, the largest and most economically promising of the 10 countries set to join the European Union next year, is unapologetic about its enthusiastic American allegiance and its vocal resistance to the current quest by traditional European powers, France and Germany, to establish their political independence from the United States. . . .

The Union now has 15 member nations, but with the addition next year of 10 mostly former Communist states, France and Germany may find their traditional dominance harder to maintain. Certainly, the very public admonition by President Jacques Chirac to the Central and East European candidate nations – who support the American position on war with Iraq – to keep silent rather than undermine European unity won France no friends in Poland.

“He is trying to treat the EU candidates as a French colony or a French suburb,” Wesolowski said over his McDonald’s sandwich.

Heh. Then there’s this:

Thanks from the United States to Poland for standing by us. Germany is living in a dream world on politics these days. I have urged President Bush and six American senators to move US troops out of Germany as much as possible and into countries like Poland and Hungary, if they would like that to happen.

Germany is simply too expensive to do business with these days. Its taxes, labour costs and consumer prices are all too high. Besides, the Middle East is the area of concern, and Poland and Hungary are closer anyway.

More and more we are seeing growing anti-German and anti-France views here and for good reason. I hope Poland and Hungary take up the slack as American consumers are quietly moving to boycott German and French products.

I think it’s the McDonald’s reference that will upset Chirac the most, though.

KAIMI WENGER found something interesting at the New York Times website, and now Mickey Kaus is picking up on it:

“The stimulant ephedra is banned from Olympic sports, college sports and the N.F.L.,” wrote George Vecsey in the NYT last week. “It may soon be banned from sale in Suffolk County on Long Island. But it was not banned from the locker of the late Steve Bechler.” And, Vecsey might have added, it’s not banned from the NYT’s web site, which still runs ads for “Ephedra Super Caps: 850 mg. pure ephedra extract.” …

Heh.

REGIS DEBRAY’S DUMB OPED from the New York Times didn’t attract as much attention in the Blogosphere as it might have.

That’s because we were all waiting for James Lileks to administer this righteous Fisking, which renders anything we might have said surplusage anyway.

PICTURES FROM THE L.A. BLOG CONFERENCE can be found here. Welch looks as if he’s been partaking.