APPARENTLY, THE COOKEVILLE DOG-SHOOTING INCIDENT was the result of improper training. Yeah, but who could have foreseen a problem with this?

NOBODY WANTS TO PAY FOR PUBLIC DEFENDERS. But, you know, nobody wants to convict innocent people, either. Do they?

JOHN COLE EMAILS: “This might be my snarkiest post ever.” It involves the French.

2245 MESSAGES are in the process of downloading from the server, into archival stasis. I read most of ’em, but not all. If I should have replied to yours, sorry. I do my best.

A PACK, NOT A HERD: Here’s an interesting article on citizen-based defense strategies.

THE DAMNING OF SADDAM: This article from The Telegraph has a nice summary of Saddam’s misdeeds, and says that Blix’s report has greatly strengthened the case for war.

HERE’S THE WEBSITE of United For Peace (“Soon to be ‘United for Peace and Justice!‘”), an anti-war group that seems to be trying to set itself up as an alternative to the nasty looniness of A.N.S.W.E.R. The differences with A.N.S.W.E.R. aren’t exactly played up on the site, but at least there’s no obvious Stalinism or anti-semitism. Jim Henley is hopeful.

MORE EVIDENCE of good sense:

WEST PALM BEACH – A judge threw out a jury’s verdict today in what had been considered a landmark case against the distributor of a gun used in the shooting death of middle school teacher Barry Grunow. . . .

Bob Montgomery, a prominent personal injury attorney who won an $11.3 billion settlement against the tobacco industry, had sought $76 million in damages against Valor. The case was closely watched because it was the first to combine claims that Saturday night specials are inherently defective and should be sold only with safety locks.

Next, the defendant should seek sanctions.

MORE ON MATERIAL BREACH.

HOW MANY PEOPLE HAS SADDAM HUSSEIN KILLED?

The terror is self-compounding, with the state’s power reinforced by stories that relatives of the victims pale to tell — of fingernail-extracting, eye-gouging, genital-shocking and bucket-drowning. Secret police rape prisoners’ wives and daughters to force confessions and denunciations. There are assassinations, in Iraq and abroad, and, ultimately, the gallows, the firing squads and the pistol shots to the head.

DOING the arithmetic is an imprecise venture. The largest number of deaths attributable to Mr. Hussein’s regime resulted from the war between Iraq and Iran between 1980 and 1988, which was launched by Mr. Hussein. Iraq says its own toll was 500,000, and Iran’s reckoning ranges upward of 300,000. Then there are the casualties in the wake of Iraq’s 1990 occupation of Kuwait. Iraq’s official toll from American bombing in that war is 100,000 — surely a gross exaggeration — but nobody contests that thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians were killed in the American campaign to oust Mr. Hussein’s forces from Kuwait. In addition, 1,000 Kuwaitis died during the fighting and occupation in their country.

Casualties from Iraq’s gulag are harder to estimate. Accounts collected by Western human rights groups from Iraqi émigrés and defectors have suggested that the number of those who have “disappeared” into the hands of the secret police, never to be heard from again, could be 200,000. As long as Mr. Hussein remains in power, figures like these will be uncheckable, but the huge toll is palpable nonetheless.

Where’s Marc Herold when you need him?

FAREED ZAKARIA WRITES that our previous policies toward Iraq and its neighbors have been so bad that war might well make things better:

Of course, not everyone would be helped by a successful war. The ruling elites in the Middle East—particularly those that remain stubbornly set in their old ways—will be challenged, threatened and eventually overturned. For these potentates and their courtiers it would mean the end of one of the richest gravy trains in history. That is why they will fight change as fiercely as they can. But for the people of the Middle East, after the shock of the war fades, it could mean a chance to break out of the terrible stagnancy in which they now sit.

There are always risks involved when things change. But for the past 40 years the fear of these risks has paralyzed Western policy toward the Middle East. And what has come of this caution? Repression, radical Islam and terror. I’ll take my chances with change.

Let’s hope it turns out well. But at least “better” should be easy to achieve.

ARAB NATIONS ARE “FALLING INTO LINE” regarding the war.

BELLESILES UPDATE: Howard Bashman reports that the Ninth Circuit has gone back and removed citations to the work of Michael Bellesiles, author of the now-discredited Arming America. from its recent Second Amendment opinion, Silveira v. Lockyer. Sadly, they left the rest of the opinion intact.

Does this mean the Ninth Circuit thinks the Supreme Court might conceivably grant cert. on this case, and doesn’t want an obvious red-flag in the very first footnote? Beats me. I’ll leave the tea-leaf-reading concerning this action to the tea-leaf readers.

I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO HEARING EXPLANATIONS AS TO WHY THIS ISN’T MATERIAL BREACH:

The document indicates that 13,000 chemical bombs were dropped by the Iraqi air force between 1983 and 1998, while Iraq has declared that 19,500 bombs were consumed during this period. Thus, there is a discrepancy of 6,500 bombs. The amount of chemical agent in these bombs would be in the order of about 1,000 tons. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, we must assume that these quantities are now unaccounted for. . .

I turn to biological weapons. I mention the issue of anthrax to the council on previous occasions, and I come back to it as it is an important one. Iraq has declared that it produced about 8,500 liters of this biological warfare agent, which it states it unilaterally destroyed in the summer of 1991.

Iraq has provided little evidence for this production and no convincing evidence for its destruction.

There are strong indications that Iraq produced more anthrax than it declared and that at least some of this was retained over the declared destruction date. It might still exist. . . .

As I reported to the council on the 19th of December last year, Iraq did not declare a significant quantity, some 650 kilos, of bacterial growth media, which was acknowledged as reported in Iraq’s submission to the Amorim panel in February 1999. As a part of its 7 December 2002 declaration Iraq resubmitted the Amorim panel document but the table showing this particular import of media was not included. The absence of this table would appear to be deliberate, as the pages of the resubmitted document were renumbered.

In the letter of 24th of January this year to the president of the Security Council, Iraq’s foreign minister stated that, I quote, “All imported quantities of growth media were declared.” This is not evidence. I note that the quantity of media involved would suffice to produce, for example, about 5,000 liters of concentrated anthrax.

There’s much, much more. But this is enough.

UPDATE: Robin Roberts emails:

Regarding the excerpts of Blix’s report you posted, I note that he mentions the great quantities of anthrax unaccounted for. I have this vague recollection of people being killed in this country with anthrax …. and a bungled FBI probe of same.

Hmm. I seem to recall something of the sort too, but it’s probably entirely unrelated.

WHO I VOTED FOR IN THE GRAMMIES — plus an Axis of Weasel roundup — is reported over at GlennReynolds.Com.

JAMES LILEKS reports on the Super Bowl ads and on what he found by Googling the “ordinary Americans” in a Star Tribune story about the antiwar movement.

WHEN POLICY KILLS — U.N. complicity in mass murder in the Balkans:

The Bosnian Muslims were told by the U.N. that they didn’t need weapons of their own; instead, they would have immediate access to the upper echelons of U.N. and NATO “peacekeeping” forces. As noted in U.N. documents, Bosnia-Herzegovina president Izetbegovic “was in favour of the UNPROFOR [United Nations Protection Force] proposal, which, as he understood it, meant that the Bosniacs would hand their weapons over to UNPROFOR in return for UNPROFOR protection.” . . .

By the summer of 1995, the population of Srebrenica, a designated safe area, had swelled with refugees. By the time of the massacre, it was an island of Bosniacs in Bosnian Serb territory — an island the U.N. had sworn to protect.

But the U.N. would not honor its pledge. As the BBC later reported, “A former United Nations commander in Bosnia has told a Dutch parliamentary inquiry into the Srebrenica massacre that it was clear to him that Dutch authorities would not sacrifice its soldiers for the enclave.”

And, indeed, on July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces entered Srebrenica without resistance from Bosniac or U.N. forces; not a shot was fired. (The Bosniac general in Srebrenica had recently been recalled by his government, leaving the Bosniac forces leaderless.) Ethnic cleansing and genocide followed. The men and boys were separated from the women, then taken away and shot.

“Don’t worry — the U.N. will protect you!” Unfortunately, it seems to devote most of its efforts to protecting dictators from the United States. Why, it’s almost as if anti-American dictators are a constituency group within the U.N., while innocent civilians aren’t. Say. . . .

UPDATE: This piece that I wrote a while back is probably relevant enough to link here.

DUANE FREESE WRITES:

In 10 weeks, on April 3, the United Nations will celebrate the 12th Anniversary of United Nations resolution 687. In that resolution, the Security Council directed Iraq to provide a list of all weapons of mass destruction, their components and parts in 15 days. Iraq was directed to comply unconditionally. It had agreed to such compliance when it agreed to a ceasefire that ended military action.

Four years, four months and a fortnight ago on Sept. 10, 1998, Iraq delivered a deficient 800-page report detailing its biological and chemical weapons, before kicking U.N. inspectors out.

President Bush’s threat of military action forced Saddam Hussein to capitulate and let those inspectors back in.

Iraq lost the war. Knowing that, Saddam made a bargain to avoid destruction. He’s broken that bargain.

STOP THAT, OR I’LL SIC HANS BLIX ON YOU: SKBubba is researching weapons of mass destruction.

ON A LESS SERIOUS NOTE: Here’s a State of the Union drinking game that everyone can enjoy.

Well, everyone with a liver the size of Vermont, anyway.

ANOTHER ONE BACK FROM HIATUS: Prof. Jeff Cooper is back, with wine recommendations and a Kausfiles mystery.

Actually, I know the answer to the mystery, but in my new status as a minion of Microsoft I’m forbidden to speak of it.

(Note to credulous readers/media conspiracists: No, not really.)

YOU ALL KNOW ABOUT Dave Barry’s new blog, right? And that the puppies are Ken Layne’s fault doing contribution?

MICKEY KAUS calls Rep. Robert Matsui “the man who lost Congress” for the Democrats.

WILLIAM SJOSTROM notes more disrespect for the French — and in The Independent, of all places, where Bruce Anderson writes that “French perversity has denied Europe any influence over American foreign policy,” and goes on to note:

They believe that their foreign policy is not only more compatible with a desirable balance of global forces; they think that their superior intellectual and moral stance also expresses French self-interest. They are thoughtful and independent; we, muddled and subservient.

It is easy to make that argument on paper, as many French commentators have recently demonstrated. There is only one problem. It has no purchase on reality. When Donald Rumsfeld dismissed the Franco-German position on Iraq as “Old Europe”, one French minister retorted that in growing old, Europe had acquired wisdom. But this apparent intellectuality is just so much flummery; the French are still desperately seeking compensation for their loss of global influence.

The whole thing is very much worth reading.

ANDREW SULLIVAN has advice for Bush on the State of the Union address and how to make the case for war.

I also recommend this lengthy essay by Bill Whittle.