MORE ON TORTURE: Reader Mostafa Sabet emails:

Please, please, please don’t compare us to Syria or Iran. PLEASE! Last I checked these weren’t beacons of freedom. My family came from Egypt where the torture was far, far worse than anything that was committed in Iraq by our troops. My maternal grandfather and my father’s uncle were both taken political prisoner and repeatedly whipped and maltreated. My father said his uncle lost all his hair and aged 10 years in the one year he was in prison.

That was a big reason my family came to this great country. What we did is not as vile as other countries and it is a testament to our great country that we are decrying and investigating these acts and that we will punish those responsible. That is what makes us great, not the fact that our torture is more mild. The internment of Japanese Americans was terrible even though we weren’t as bad as the Nazis. The morality of the act is not predicated on the actions of others (that’s moral relativism, something we often decry in others), but on the absolute morality.

The people in these prisons were probably terrible people, but that doesn’t make this treatment less odious. Heck, even the Nazis treated our troops pretty well. When part of the goal is liberation and winning hearts and minds, it is imperative that we maintain the moral high ground. Acts like this undermine the entire campaign and are a disservice to those that have made the ultimate sacrifice.

That’s true, and I agree with it all. There are dark moments, however, when I wonder if the world doesn’t hate us because we hold the moral high ground, and if many wouldn’t breathe a secret sigh of relief if we started living down to their standards.

But that makes an important point. If what we’d wanted was “stability” in Iraq, we could have had it easily by shooting a few thousand people, stringing the bodies up from lampposts, and leaving most of Saddam’s secret police in business under new management. For that matter, we could “solve” the Fallujah problem with a MOAB or two.

We’ve chosen a different path in Iraq, and I think that was the right thing to do. Nonetheless, it’s galling that this choice — which was the hard choice, not the easy one — is seen by so many as weakness.

UPDATE: Jeez, this guy sure misunderstands my point above. He seems to think I regret the approach we’ve taken, when actually I regret that people misunderstand it.

INTERESTING GRAPH of gasoline prices in constant dollars. What’s really amazing is the dataset — who keeps track of every gas purchase for 25 years? This guy!

UPDATE: A stirring defense of compulsive record-keeping:

Oh sure you[‘re] thinking this guy needs a life — but Im thinking this country needs more people like this! Nerds are necessary.

Indeed.

THIS SOUNDS GOOD TO ME:

The 2003 Nobel Peace laureate, Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi, called on the world community to stop giving financial assistance to governments and regimes that are not democratic. Ms. Ebadi made her comments Monday in a speech at the World Bank Headquarters in Washington. . . .

Ms. Ebadi pushed for the need to promote human rights and democracy alongside economic development. Without singling out any specific countries for criticism, she made it clear that financial aid to countries she described as “undemocratic,” only helps prop up repressive regimes.

“In countries that are undemocratic, where their governments are undemocratic, and where all the administrative, political and economic power of the society lies in the hands of one person or a special group or elites of a country, the granting of loans means assisting dictators and opposing people who are already oppressed,” said Ms. Ebadi. “In other words, to say it more clearly, if undemocratic countries receive loans and credits, they are strengthened to become more negligent of the rights of their people.”

Yes.

UPDATE: Here’s a related post by Gopi Sundaram from a couple of months ago — though it’s about trade, not aid, which is taking things considerably farther.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Sissy Willis notes that the Bush Administration has something like this in mind.

UNSCAM UPDATE: Roger Simon reports that Kofi Annan is stonewalling on the oil-for-food investigation. “Maybe it’s just me, but I find unbelievably contemptible the actions and pretences of a man who did little or nothing to save hundreds of thousands from genocide in Rwanda, yet fights tooth-and-nail to hide the most hideous de facto pro-fascist corruption in his own organization.”

It’s not just you, Roger.

UPDATE: Reader Paul Ulrich emails:

The torture stuff is bad, but here’s a take on it I haven’t seen anywhere: think about who suffered and in what ways, and think about the scale of their suffering, how many suffered and for how long; think too of the long-term consequences for those who suffered and those who abused them.

Now ask those same questions about the oil-for-food scandal and then compare the outrage over the two and the amount of coverage each is receiving.

Yes, though I’d favor proportionately more outrage over oil-for-food rather than less over the prisoner abuse. But — as always — there’s a clear double standard here.

DID THEY RUN THIS TITLE BY THE LIBEL LAWYERS? Nick Denton’s latest venture, a Los Angeles gossip blog called Defamer, is up. Motto: “We hope that L.A., the greatest, cruelest city in the world, is finally getting the gossip rag it deserves.”

And they’ve got spy reports from the Friends finale!

A MILLION THANKS is an effort to send a million thank-you messages to America’s military.

FRED OF THE FRAGMENTS FROM FLOYD PHOTOBLOG has set up a photo gallery on Exposure Manager. It’s worth your time.

REALCLEARPOLITICS is another blog you ought to be reading regularly, if you’re not.

EX-DIPLOMATS CRITICIZE BUSH: Roger Simon asks:

Never mind that this is a day late and more than a pound short — Sharon has already lost the fight in his own Likud Party for the “unilateralist” policy about which these people are complaining… And never mind too that the plan itself did not differ wildly from the parameters already discussed and nearly accepted (supposedly) at Camp David and Taba…

But since the list of signatories to this document contains a large number, probably a majority, of ex-ambassadors, etc. to Arab states, I have only two questions: Where are these people working now and who is paying them?

Given that the author and many signatories of a similar British letter last week turned out to be on Arab payrolls, that’s a very reasonable question.

UPDATE: Read this, too.

CHINESE MANAGEMENT PROBLEMS and their relevance to SARS. A troubling post.

HOTSPOT HAVEN is a pretty cool directory of wireless access points with a clickable map.

SUDAN IS PRACTICING GENOCIDE — but it will keep its seat on the United Nations Human Rights Commission. But of course. . . .

UPDATE: Link was busted. Fixed now.

WELL, WHAT DO YOU KNOW? “Federal Deficit Likely to Narrow by $100 Billion.”

UPDATE: This is interesting:

In the last two months, “withheld receipts jumped 12.5 percent annualized,” Wiegand said. “The message is, there is no way that you can see withheld income taxes rising unless there’s a decisive turn in labor market conditions, including payrolls, hours and compensation.”

Hmm. I’m no economic forecaster (and neither is anyone else, it seems) but none of this is good news for the Kerry Campaign. I suspect that this is why he’s flip-flopped on the jobs front recently.

AMIR TAHERI:

May 4, 2004 — WHAT to do about Iraq? I was bombarded with this question during a recent visit to the United States.

The question is based on two assumptions. First, that Iraq is about to plunge into one of the nightmare scenarios discussed by self-styled experts on TV. Second, that there is some kind of magic wand that one could wave to transform Iraq into a paradise of freedom and prosperity.

Both assumptions are false.

The nightmares are often peddled by those who had opposed the liberation because they didn’t wish to see a U.S.-led coalition bring down a Third World dictator. The doomsayers’ initial prediction was that, deprived of its oppressor, Iraq would plunge into civil war. That has not happened, so they now warn of chaos, and predict a nationwide insurrection against the Coalition.

But is Iraq really plunging into chaos? Anyone in contact with Iraqi realities would know that the answer is: No. . . .

What to do in Iraq? The answer is simple: Don’t lose your nerve!

Yes, Iraq can become another Vietnam – not because of anything that’s happening there, but because America and its allies, for reasons of domestic politics, might panic and transform victory into defeat.

Read the whole thing. Meanwhile, a warning about Vietnam nostalgia on the part of some:

FOR many of us, the words “Vietnam War” evoke only a sense of loss and a painful acknowledgement that this country suffered a dreadful defeat, with tens of thousands of lives snuffed out and tens of millions of Vietnamese consigned to life under the Stalinist jackboot.

For others, however, thoughts of the Vietnam War conjure up a sense of moral triumph. They opposed the war, and their opposition was a key element in this nation’s withdrawal from the battlefield over the course of the Nixon presidency. . . . Keep this fact in mind when considering the actions of CBS News and The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh.

Indeed. (If you’re not the scrolling-down type — and you should be, on this blog — you can click here for a much longer post on this topic.)

UPDATE: Justin Katz has thoughts on Vietnam nostalgia and observes by email:

Between Fallujah, Koppel, and Abu Ghraib, last week saw a hat trick for those longing to relive Vietnam (lived, as it was the first time, from the safety of suburbs and campuses).

Indeed.

THE VALUE OF AN EXAMPLE:

North Korea, probably the world’s most secretive and isolated nation, has offered an olive branch to the US by promising never to sell nuclear materials to terrorists, calling for Washington’s friendship and saying it does not want to suffer the fate of Iraq.

Hmm.

UPDATE: Tim Blair: “Maybe it was those prison photographs that scared ’em.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Kevin Drum says that I have this story backward, and that if you read this quote it suggests that North Korea is making its offer in spite of the invasion of Iraq, and that the only reason Korea has pursued arms was to pose a deterrent because of the invasion of Iraq:

Mr Kim rejected the notion that North Korea would never give up nuclear weapons. He argued that Pyongyang – branded by Mr Bush as part of the “axis of evil” – was developing nuclear weapons purely to deter a US attack. “We don’t want to suffer the fate of Iraq,” he told Mr Harrison.

That’s not the way I read it initially (and North Korea was pursuing nukes long before Saddam fell), but I think Kevin’s right and I was wrong here. The lead to the story (which is what’s posted above) may have shaped my perception — though I’m certainly not the only one to read it that way. Kevin’s right, of course, that you should follow the links and make up your own mind. Always! I don’t promise not to make mistakes, after all, just to fix ’em when I realize it. Which is why it’s also a good idea to scroll down and check for updates.

ANOTHER UPDATE: On the other hand, this comment over at Tim Blair’s indicates that this does represent a real change of position for the North Koreans.

A MAJOR DUMB STORY, involving gasoline prices and food, retracted.

(Via Betsy’s Page, a blog that you should be reading.)

NAZIS. I HATE THOSE GUYS. And they hate Tony Woodlief. He seems unperturbed.

FUNDAGELICAL? Well, now bloggers are using the word. . . .

UPDATE: Noting a contradiction.

Really, The Guardian should hire somebody who knows something about America. The embarrassments just keep accumulating. Heck, even the BBC is trying to remedy British media ignorance.

TORTURE UPDATE: Alan K. Henderson has a useful post on what’s going on in Iran, Syria, and elsewhere.

Where’s the outrage?

UPDATE: There’s this by the UN, too. Just, you know, noting what outrages people — and what doesn’t.

ANDREW SULLIVAN is asking for reader help on a couple of worthy projects.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING PIECE from the Washington Post on how online music is making it easier to be “discovered” and become a star:

About 16 months ago, however, the Los Angeles-based talent-finder sat at home scouting the globe for groups. He typed “New Zealand indie rock bands” into his computer search engine and found Steriogram, five lads from the town of Whangarei in New Zealand. They had a song and a video posted on a Web site but no record contract.

Excited by what he heard, Berman e-mailed Steriogram frontman Brad Carter asking for more music, sparking a swift chain of events. Carter mailed a demo CD of about five songs. Berman played the songs for Dan McCarroll, senior creative director for EMI Publishing. Impressed, McCarroll played the music for a friend, who happened to be the president of Capitol Records.

Two weeks later, Steriogram had a five-album deal with Capitol, home of the Beatles and Garth Brooks. Now, the band is touring the United States and has a video on MTV.

Read the whole thing. Er, and if you’re an online talent scout, be sure to visit the website for my brother’s band, Copper!

A NORTHWESTERN LAW STUDENT SENDS THIS LINK and observes:

There’s been a lot in the news today about incidents of anti-Muslim activity going on here in the States. Sadly, very few if any major blogs have chosen to cover it, which worries me. I am a very patriotic Muslim and to see that treatment of Muslims has gotten /worse/ since 9-11, I think, is absolutely terrifying. When Viet Dinh came to speak at the law school, he discussed the importance of trusting and then verifying. It’s impossible to trust or verify if there are acts of pre-emptively stabbing an innocent woman wearing a headscarf and calling her a terrorist. This represents the absolute worst we have to offer as Americans, and we need to be aware of it. Especially with the (rightful) concern over growing anti-Semitism in the world, we risk looking like hypocrites for criticizing Europe and other parts of the world for maltreatment of Jews when we can’t fully face up to the ill treatment of Muslims living right
here in America.

This is something I worried about back on 9/11. But in fact most of my fears haven’t been borne out. There have been incidents (some of them fake) but there has been no major outbreak of violence. (And the report described above is from CAIR, which has proven itself unreliable even beyond the usual standards of advocacy-group problem-hyping.) Plus there’s this bit:

The report cautioned that the jump partly reflected an increase in the number of regional offices opened by the Washington-based advocacy group, which allowed more cases to be documented.

This leads me to believe that the problem isn’t really comparable to the revival of antisemitism in Europe, even ignoring the, um, rather different historical contexts. But I could be wrong. Anybody know more?

UPDATE: Reader Barry Dauphin emails:

We should be concerned about anti-Islamic hate crimes. Still it is important to keep relative statistics in mind. On the FBI website anyone can download reports (pdf) of hate crimes for various years. The latest year available is 2002. The number of anti-Jewish hate crimes in US in 2002 was 1039 according to FBI statistics. The number of anti-Muslim hate crimes was 170. This can be checked out at http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm. The site doesn’t have information for 2003 yet.

Here’s the link — go to page 18.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Walter Wallis sounds a theme echoed by several readers:

Until CAIR forms an equivalent to the Japanese-American 442nd Infantry Regiment in WWII, I shall continue to consider American Islamic silence as approval of Islam terror. You can’t draw money out of the bank until you put some in. The same goes for patriotism.

That’s a bit harsh, and one shouldn’t have to enlist in the Army to be make one’s community safe from hate crime, but the U.S. Muslim community certainly could do more to speak out against extremism. There are some mosques that have rejected Saudi money, etc. — but I’m not aware of many, much less conspicuous displays of community patriotism of the sort Wallis mentions. But perhaps those things aren’t getting much attention. Anybody know of some?

FALLUJAH AND IRAQ: As I wrote this Friday, and as Andrew Sullivan notes today, it’s very hard to tell what’s going on. One school of thought is that it’s a disaster, that we’ve chickened out, and that we’re letting the enemy get away, literally, with murder. (That’s Bill Quick’s take, essentially). Another, typified by Belmont Club (here and here) is that the Marines are, in fact, doing pretty well in a messy situation in Fallujah without producing the wholesale massacre that is, of course, well within our power to produce at any moment. Killing lots of people is always an option, and it’s one that our enemies can’t take away. But that’s not what we want to do. (See this email at Andrew Sullivan’s for more along those lines.)

The same is true for Iraq overall. John Kerry got a lot of flak for his talk about “stability” as opposed to democracy — and probably rightly — but we’re not going to turn Iraq into Connecticut, or even Turkey, overnight. It’s going to take time, and there will be lots of ups and downs along the way. There’s a tendency to get fixated on whatever’s happening at the moment, like Fallujah, and stop thinking about the big picture, especially as “big picture” information is very hard to come by, and often from suspect sources.

The question is what to do. Robert Kagan — taking essentially the Bill Quick line — thinks that the Bush Administration is too casualty phobic (thanks, Ted!) and that its fears have led to a loss of will that is inspiring our enemies and dispiriting our friends.

Regardless of what’s going on on the ground, I think that the combination of anti-war posturing by the likes of Koppel and Kennedy at home, and uncertainty from the Bush Administration, is having the effect on morale that Kagan describes. And Kagan’s right here:

The truth is, if the goal is stability, that the alternatives are no easier to carry out and no less costly in money and lives than the present attempt to create some form of democracy in Iraq. The real alternative to the present course is not stability at all but to abandon Iraq to whatever horrible fate awaits it: chaos, civil war, brutal tyranny, terrorism or more likely a combination of all of these — with all that entails for Iraqis, the Middle East and American interests.

That is what President Bush has been saying all along. But Bush himself is the great mystery in this mounting debacle. His commitment to stay the course in Iraq seems utterly genuine. Yet he continues to tolerate policymakers, military advisers and a dysfunctional policymaking apparatus that are making the achievement of his goals less and less likely.

And it’s hard to fix that sort of thing in an election year. But it’s very, very important that we get this right. My concern is that if we don’t, we’ll have a much bigger war on our hands, in which we’ll be forced to adopt the approach to casualties — our own, and others’ — that we took in World War Two. That was right then, and I suppose it could be right in some horrific future situation, but I’d far rather avoid that situation.

But it’s important to remember, as I say above, that Fallujah isn’t the war on terror; it’s not even Iraq. Indeed, it’s interesting how little we hear about the rest of Iraq, which is a pretty good indication that things are better everywhere else. There’s a lot of excessive gloom — much of it driven by people with an agenda, foreign or domestic — out there.

As Belmont Club notes: “That these elementary and almost self-evident observations have heartened readers is testimony not so much to the optimism of the Belmont Club but to the gloom that has descended on the campaign, or at least its treatment in the media.” That doesn’t mean that it’s not important to point out problems, but it does mean that it’s important to retain perspective. This war is about American will to continue as much as it is about particular events in Iraq. It’s worth remembering that, too.

UPDATE: If this report is true, it’s probably a sign of too much political interference.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Tacitus is sure that we’ve gone too soft in Fallujah, and that the result will be bad. Blackfive basically agrees, but many of his commenters don’t. And Michael Totten is unabashedly confused. Meanwhile Mickey Kaus notes that quick elections seem to be working in some parts of Iraq, and suggests that we try to implement them by July everywhere: “Do you really want to try to make it to January while holding out for Baker v. Carr-level fairness? The results so far using ration cards seem to be crudely representative and legitimate (and non-fundamentalist).” Excellent point, and I’m inclined to favor the swift approach.

I still don’t know what I think about Fallujah, but it’s certainly the case that where the United States has gotten in trouble in my lifetime, it’s usually been because we didn’t push things to a military conclusion when we could have. Fred Kaplan, on the other hand, thinks that developments in Fallujah may bode well for the future, as a too-heavy-handed approach becomes more deft. Go figure. I sure hope he’s right. (Betsy Newmark probably has the best advice: “These armchair generals should just cool it and wait to see how things turn out.” Newzilla has a related post.)

Steven Den Beste has a much longer analysis of the overall situation, in which he says that we’re being “too nice,” and concludes:

More generally, when will the Bush Administration finally get around to dealing with the core problem facing us: the Saudi deal-with-the-Wahhabist-Devil and their ongoing practice of providing funding to support export of Wahhabist extremism all over the world? Before this war can end, that is one of the things which has to stop.

The biggest long term benefit from crushing the Taliban, crushing Saddam, and rewarding Qaddafi, is to establish a strong precedent for others in terms of what they can expect from us. But by letting Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia get away with murder (and in that I’m not speaking figuratively), we blow that precedent.

Instead, we establish an entirely different one: we make clear that we can be mollified by empty gestures and insincere promises. That is not the message we want to send to the governments of that region; it will ultimately cause far more damage than we would suffer even if all three of those nations were ultimately taken over by radical Islamists.

What I sincerely hope is not the case is that Bush and/or his campaign strategists have decided that we Americans can be mollified by empty gestures, insincere promises and tough talk. This war isn’t even close to being over, and this is no time for Bush to start taking his foreign policy cues from Senator Kerry.

Indeed. As someone wisely told another President Bush, this is no time to go wobbly.

WINDS OF CHANGE has its regular war news roundup posted. As always, it’s chock full of information that you’re unlikely to find elsewhere without a lot of work.

ARMED LIBERAL reminds us of how odious Rep. Jim “MBNA” Moran is. Aside from taking dubious loans from MBNA as he voted on a bankruptcy bill it favored, Moran is best remembered for this comment: “if it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this.”

Is Moran a Democrat for the 21st Century? His Democratic primary opponent, Andy Rosenberg, doesn’t think so. And Armed Liberal is encouraging you to go visit Rosenberg’s site and make a donation. Sounds like a good idea to me.