AMIR TAHERI WRITES on the Iraq riots: “But take a deep breath: This is not the start of the much-predicted Iraqi civil war. ”

Read the whole piece. Among other things, it suggests that U.S. authorities should have moved against Sadr much sooner. This fits in with other accounts that the State Department’s insistence on evenhandedness among Iraqi factions was empowering thugs and marginalizing democrats.

“AIR AMERICA” is being called a “joke” in the Alternative Press Review. The crushing-of-diversity point, already mentioned in the blogosphere, is also discussed.

UPDATE: Steve Verdon: “Maybe Franken will get better with practice.”

CAPTAIN ED has been reviewing the 2000 Clinton national security report and observes that the Clinton Administration ranked missile defense as more important than terrorism. Funny — I keep hearing that it was a Bush obsession that distracted us from the Clinton Administration’s laser-like focus on Al Qaeda.

Though if that were true, you’d expect that the 2000 report would mention Al Qaeda somewhere, wouldn’t you?

UPDATE: Reader James Somers writes:

Good that Captain Ed’s all over the Clinton 2000 National Security Report. I saw something about this on Fox this morning too. But I see nothing about it yet in the NYT, WaPo, CNN or MSNBC. It’s still early. But my sense is that this story doesn’t fit The Story -and The Story this week is that Iraq’s in Chaos and Rice is Finally Testifying about the Bush Administration’s Failure to Stop 9/11.

Can’t let any troubling facts get in the way of The Story, I suppose.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here, including the observation that the Washington Times’ James Lakely is really putting the boot into the Big Media:

The scarce references to bin Laden and his terror network undercut claims by former White House terrorism analyst Richard A. Clarke that the Clinton administration considered al Qaeda an “urgent” threat, while President Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, “ignored” it.

The Clinton document, titled “A National Security Strategy for a Global Age,” is dated December 2000 and is the final official assessment of national security policy and strategy by the Clinton team. The document is publicly available, though no U.S. media outlets have examined it in the context of Mr. Clarke’s testimony and new book.

(Emphasis added.) Laziness? Bias? Looks bad either way. And check out the Bush Administration comment at the end. Ouch!

MORE: Biggest concern for the Clinton Administration regarding Afghanistan? Not Osama or a war on terror, but the drug “War.”

STILL MORE: Robert Tagorda has quite a few interesting insights. He also points to this observation from John Lewis Gaddis:

The differences are revealing. The Bush objectives speak of defending, preserving, and extending peace; the Clinton statement seems simply to assume peace. Bush calls for cooperation among great powers; Clinton never uses that term. Bush specifies the encouragement of free and open societies on every continent; Clinton contents himself with “promoting” democracy and human rights “abroad.”

Read the whole thing. And please bear in mind that I’m not criticizing the Clinton Administration for this. Before 9/11 — and what we learned afterward — I agreed with the basic strategy of trying to contain Islamist terror until it collapsed under the weight of its own stupidity. That was before I realized how widespread it was, and how thoroughly intertwined with hostile states it was. I don’t fault the Clinton people for not catching on before I did.

But I do fault the people who are peddling the absurd story that Clinton had this terror thing under control until Bush screwed it up. That’s partisan twaddle, and a real disservice in time of war.

KOS MAY SNEER AT ‘EM, but these guys seem to be earning their pay:

An attack by hundreds of Iraqi militia members on the U.S. government’s headquarters in Najaf on Sunday was repulsed not by the U.S. military, but by eight commandos from a private security firm, according to sources familiar with the incident.

Good work. (Emphasis added.) Hey, back when I was consulting with Al Gore’s “Reinventing Government” task force back in ’93 it was all about introducing efficiencies by getting the private sector involved. Looks like it worked!

UPDATE: More here. And though I’m kind of tired of the whole Kos story, a reader points to what should surely be the very last word: “Kos’s original offense, combined with his current stance? It’s sort of like eating a baby and then apologizing for burping afterwards.”

HOLLYWOOD’S FOREIGN POLICY: Chris Kanis notes what a difference a change in Administration makes.

ALPHECCA’S WEEKLY SURVEY OF MEDIA BIAS REGARDING GUNS is up, on a spiffy new MT-powered blog. Meanwhile, SayUncle has serious doubts about the Violence Policy Center’s credibility.

NANOTECHNOLOGY’S PR PROBLEMS: My TechCentralStation column is up.

And there’s more evidence of just how bad things have gotten here. It’s mostly self-inflicted, too.

“WE’RE NOT ALL NUTS, HELL-BENT ON WORLD DESTRUCTION:” Indeed.

GOOD NEWS: Business confidence is at a twenty-year high:

Confidence among US business leaders is stronger than it has been for 20 years, according to a long-running measure of boardroom attitudes, as rising profits finally encourage companies to start hiring.

The quarterly survey by the Conference Board confirms last week’s official employment data suggesting concerns about a jobless recovery may be waning.

In other news, the air is getting cleaner: “All pollution regulated by the Clean Air Act is declining, has been declining for years, and continues to decline.”

UPDATE: Here’s more (mostly) good economic news, from the Joint Economic Committee: “A Surge in Job Growth.”

IT’S KENNEDY VS. KERRY, over at GlennReynolds.com.

YES, IT LOOKS LIKE A QUAGMIRE to me, too. What will Ted Kennedy say about this?

LT SMASH has a report from the San Diego demonstration: “We spot a single man carrying the banner of ‘Veterans for Peace.’ Maybe he should change that plural to a singular?”

MORE ON THE U.N. OIL-FOR-FOOD SCANDAL:

Today, evidence suggests U.N. officials abused the program, enriching themselves, Saddam and favored foreign companies. The Iraqi Governing Council has hired accountants and lawyers to investigate Iraqi documents it says provide proof of corruption and fraud in the oil-for-food program.

Iraq’s media have cited at least 270 suspects, including French and Russian firms, a senior U.N. official and a company linked to the son of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Last month, a U.S. congressional investigation estimated that Saddam siphoned $10 billion or more from the program in kickbacks and bribes.

Keep digging.

THE SADR REVOLT SEEMS OVERRATED:

As a fighting force, Sadr’s militia impressed neither U.S. commanders nor the Iraqi officers at one police station they occupied for three hours.

“Mahdi Army! They’re not an army!” Officer Haider Raheem said of the unemployed young men who took over one station by brandishing grenades. “They’re a bunch of looters.” Before running off at the sound of approaching tanks, Raheem said, they scooped up everything from rifles to food for the prisoners. “Can you believe they even stole the water cup from the restroom?” he said.

Andrew Sullivan notes that Zeyad has updated his earlier post, and observes: “No, this is not a quagmire. It’s the brightest opportunity for real change in the world since the end of the Cold War. We have to seize it.”

UPDATE: It’s still going on, though, as of Tuesday afternoon.

INTERESTING SECOND AMENDMENT OPINIONS from the Ninth Circuit. These are dissents, but the number — and forcefulness — of the judges involved is nonetheless news. You wouldn’t have seen anything like this a few years ago. (Via Bashman and Volokh).

IT’S JOHN THUNE WEEK over at Hugh Hewitt’s page. No doubt because of the Thune blogads here.

HOW TO APOLOGIZE: An illuminating example.

ZEYAD APPEARS TO HAVE ANOTHER SCOOP:

A coup d’etat is taking place in Iraq a the moment. Al-Shu’la, Al-Hurria, Thawra (Sadr city), and Kadhimiya (all Shi’ite neighbourhoods in Baghdad) have been declared liberated from occupation. Looting has already started at some places downtown, a friend of mine just returned from Sadun street and he says Al-Mahdi militiamen are breaking stores and clinics open and also at Tahrir square just across the river from the Green Zone. News from other cities in the south indicate that Sadr followers (tens of thousands of them) have taken over IP stations and governorate buildings in Kufa, Nassiriya, Ammara, Kut, and Basrah. Al-Jazeera says that policemen in these cities have sided with the Shia insurgents, which doesn’t come as a surprise to me since a large portion of the police forces in these areas were recruited from Shi’ite militias and we have talked about that ages ago. And it looks like this move has been planned a long time ago.

No one knows what is happening in the capital right now. Power has been cut off in my neighbourhood since the afternoon, and I can only hear helicopters, massive explosions, and continuous shooting nearby. The streets are empty, someone told us half an hour ago that Al-Mahdi are trying to take over our neighbourhood and are being met by resistance from Sunni hardliners. Doors are locked, and AK-47’s are being loaded and put close by in case they are needed. The phone keeps ringing frantically. Baghdadis are horrified and everyone seems to have made up their mind to stay home tomorrow until the situation is clear.

I’m not seeing anything about this elsewhere yet. It’s bad news if things are as bad as this sounds. This report from Dow Jones says that Bush is predicting more violence in Iraq.

UPDATE: D’oh. This seems to regard last night’s events, not something new. I was thrown by the time difference, I guess. Still news, but not new news. On the other hand, it’s still going on. And reader Robert Penfield is worried about people worrying:

Will this be W’s Tet Offensive? In other words, a scary uprising that ends in total defeat for the US’s enemies and drastically advances US interests at minimal cost to us and great cost to our enemies, but which is spun so negatively by the domestic press that American voters perceive it as a crushing defeat . . .

The combination of us “reducing” Fallujah and having the opportunity to crush the Shiite militia menace while we have our best troops positioned to do so is a good one for the US and Coalition, but I fear no matter how it turns out, it will be perceived as a defeat.

Reader Eric Hall agrees, and sees this as an opportunity:

Look, this latest series of events in Iraq are a good thing. If that statement surprises you (which I suspect it does), then you really need to get in front of this subject.

Let me back into this for you: We invaded and occupied Iraq with a loss of American life roughly equivalent to the city of Chicago’s annual murder count. That is far too low considering the accomplishment. It has been so low precisely because we deferred some of the major combat. We are now having to engage in that combat, and that is unfortunate, but it is far better that we do so now than allow it to happen later.

The sunni baathists are a special-interest minority group with a history of political terrorism — these are the same knobs that were feeding their brothers into the industrial plastic shredders. Instead of killing them as we were expecting (and as we probably should have), we allowed them to go home to see if they would adapt to the new reality. They have since expressed that they have chosen not to adapt, so now they will be made to adapt, and it is far better that we do so while we have well-armed and well-armored marines on the ground.

Meanwhile, Sadr is equally intent on denying elections, since it has become apparent that he will lose. His only chance at establishing his theocratic powerbase is to drive the wedge, and to do so before the handover. We knew that there would be islamicist tyrants and that we’d have to fight them, and so now we are where we expected to be, just late.

Sadr has volunteered his militia to Hezbollah and Hamas, has praised the 9/11 attacks as a “gift from God”, and is defying the moderate clerics. He’s the freaking posterboy for the conflict we expected. Again, much better to fight him now than later.

The upsurge in conflict is only “bad” in comparison to the relative ease and simplicity of the military operation, but it is not bad in comparison to the war effort we had expected, and indeed, being able to thin the Iraqi gene pool of these knobs before the handover is a good thing.

Nobody wants to come back later and “finish the job” yet again, right?

Well, they’ve certainly come out into the open. If I were them, I would have waited. Reader Jonathan Isernhagen has a similar take:

I’m not at all sure this is a bad thing. If we take if for granted that there’s a heavily-militarized faction of Iraq that refuses to accept democracy, would we rather that they continue to attack us from shadows or face us down in the street? To the extent we can bring sufficient force to bear, this may be just the thing needed to cement the authority of the Council and the elected democracy that follows it.

If it happens, it will have been necessary.

Stay tuned.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg responds to the original post:

This makes for riveting reading and Glenn and Andrew are both right for posting it. But just to be clear this is not a coup d’etat and it is not, as Andrew suggests, a civil war. It is an attempt at a coup d’etat. A coup d’etat by definition is the successful sudden overthrow of a government. A civil war is something more than an uprising. It seems to me it is simply way too soon to say it’s either. The government in Iraq is still the Coalitional Authority under Paul Bremer. I don’t think anyone thinks he’s been overthrown or is about to be. I don’t know that much about all of this but I bet you I’m right when I say this is all a big deal, but not that big. And, it may prove to be good news or bad. If Sadr’s forces are smashed and arrested, that could result in a worse climate or a better one. It’s just too soon to tell.

And will be, for quite a while. But Sadr seems to have overplayed his hand and isolated himself:

An aide to Mohammad Bahr al-Uloum, a member of the U.S.-installed Iraqi Governing Council, said Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, regarded as Iraq’s most powerful cleric and a rival of Sadr’s, supported the Iraqi seminary’s appeal.

“The Hawza (seminary) is unanimous on this,” the aide said.

“We asked Moqtada (al-Sadr) to stop resorting to violence, occupying public buildings and other actions that make him an outlaw. He insists on staying on the same course that could destroy the nation.”

It’s worth emphasizing that this is factional fighting, not popular uprising, and that Sadr is not particularly popular outside his own faction.

MORE: Michael Ubaldi emails:

I don’t know if the Bush administration is as strategically inclined as Eric Hall suggests, but to have deliberately brought on last-ditch mayhem from extremists while full troop strength would be present – rather than a year from now – is a brilliantly calculated risk. Al-Sadr, particularly, was basically handed the brush to paint himself with crosshairs.

But I can see the elite headline: “BUSH MISLEADS SUNNI AND SHIITE EXTREMISTS.”

“Bush lied — terrorists died!” That works for me.

Meanwhile, here’s more on how outside-the-mainstream Sadr is, from ABC News:

April 5— Shiite Arabs in Iraq express relatively little support for attacks against coalition forces such as those that occurred Sunday. And while most do express confidence in religious leaders and call for them to play a role in Iraq today, most do not seek a theocracy, and very few see Iran as a model for Iraq.

A nationwide poll of Iraqis conducted in February for ABCNEWS also found that very few Shiites express support for Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose militia mounted the deadly attacks against the U.S.-led occupation. . . .

In terms of al-Sadr, a bare 1 percent of Iraqis name him as the national leader they trust most. On Iran, just 3 percent name it as a model for Iraq in the coming years, and just 4 percent say it should play a role in rebuilding Iraq.

This guy — an unpopular tool of the Iranian mullarchy — and some Saddam leftovers. As I said, not a popular uprising.

STILL MORE: The Belmont Club offers a lengthy military/political analysis. Excerpt:

I mentioned the Jihadi penchant for using counterseige tactics. Whenever they are surrounded or under attack, they go off and burn down some town or perpetrate some spectacular slaughter. And here they go again. Same old, same old. These are calculated for media effect.

Read the whole thing. He wonders how deeply Iran is willing to invest itself in Sadr. A deep investment would be dumb, but the mullahs often are.

MICHAEL CROWLEY WRITES IN SLATE that Max Cleland isn’t what the Kerry Campaign needs:

Cleland’s image as Bush’s ultimate victim suits Kerry’s campaign all too well. There are no bold new ideas in the Democratic Party today, no coherent policy themes. Even Kerry’s supporters are hard-pressed to explain what he stands for. What does define and unify the party is a sense of victimhood—and a lust for revenge. Cleland is compelling not because of anything he’s done—he was a mediocre senator and a clumsy candidate—but because of what was done to him. His consignment to a wheelchair only heightens this sentiment. The wheelchair itself is a metaphor for his political trauma. In this sense, Cleland is reminiscent of another fairly ordinary man: Abner Louima, who was brutalized by New York City cops in 1997 and became a symbolic hero to New York liberals convinced Rudy Giuliani’s law-and-order regime had gone too far. But New York liberals were never able to get the upper hand on Giuliani. And if the symbolism of Max Cleland defines his campaign, John Kerry won’t topple Bush, either.

It’s actually worse. “What was done to him” by who, exactly?

I REALLY LIKE MY NIKON D70, and I wrote a short review on Gizmodo last week.

But now DPreview.com has a much longer review posted. Bottom line: they like it a lot.

THERE’S A VIRGINIA POSTREL POINT in this story, somewhere:

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – Ingvar Kamprad, the Swede who founded furniture retail chain IKEA, has overtaken Microsoft’s Bill Gates as the world’s richest man, Swedish TV news reported on Sunday.

It’s all the money he saved by leaving out one crucial fastener in each box. . . .

CHRIS DODD, ROBERT BYRD, AND TRENT LOTT: Henry Hanks is stirring up trouble.

ECONOBLOGGING: This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up. Meanwhile Steven Antler looks at the jobs-and-employment numbers and wonders what’s going on.

IT’S A BLOG CATFIGHT: I’m staying out of this one. Brrr!

UPDATE: It’s all explained by science!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s an exclusive photo!

From Michele’s comments: “The Thrilla on Mozilla!”

BLACK HAWK DOWN AUTHOR MARK BOWDEN writes on how to respond to Fallujah:

It is a mistake to conclude that those committing such acts represent a majority of the community. Just the opposite is true. Lynching is most often an effort to frighten and sway a more sensible, decent mainstream. In Marion it was the Ku Klux Klan, in Mogadishu it was Aidid loyalists, in Fallujah it is either diehard Saddamites or Islamo-fascists.

The worst answer the U.S. can make to such a message–which is precisely what we did in Mogadishu–is back down. By most indications, Aidid’s supporters were decimated and demoralized the day after the Battle of Mogadishu. Some, appalled by the indecency of their countrymen, were certain the U.S. would violently respond to such an insult and challenge. They contacted U.N. authorities offering to negotiate, or simply packed their things and fled. These are the ones who miscalculated. Instead the U.S. did nothing, effectively abandoning the field to Aidid and his henchmen. Somalia today remains a nation struggling in anarchy, and the America-haters around the world learned what they thought was a essential truth about the United States: Kill a few Americans and the most powerful nation on Earth will run away. This, in a nutshell, is the strategy of Osama bin Laden.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Hmm. And things seem to be moving in Fallujah. You can follow the news at — where else? — The Command Post.