A MINOR BUT REAL DIPLOMATIC SUCCESS:

Senior Vatican officials have decided to put aside their differences with Tony Blair over the war in Iraq, calling for multinational troop reinforcements to secure the country’s fledgling democracy.

In February last year, both Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican secretary of state, offered some of the fiercest denunciations of Mr Blair and President George W Bush for their strike on Saddam Hussein. . . .

Their private criticism of Mr Blair was made embarrassingly public by Vatican officials, who revealed at a press conference that the Pope had urged him to “make use of all the resources offered by international law to avoid the tragedy of war”.

Now, in light of the post-war chaos, Cardinal Sodano has announced a newly hawkish line on Iraq from Rome. “The child has been born,” he declared recently on behalf of the Vatican. “It may be illegitimate, but it’s here, and it must be reared and educated.”

So before the child of Iraqi freedom was born, the Vatican was ready to kill it? This calls for a headline: Sodano abandons pro-abortion stance!

READER MARY LITTLETON sends word of a fearsome strike. Could it affect the election? Who knows?

THE AUSTRALIAN ELECTIONS AND IRAQ: Tim Blair has much more:

Let’s take another look at Tim Lambert’s claim that Iraq was “hardly an issue” in the election. “Anyone who has been following the election would know how little it was discussed,” says Tim.

Anyone who watched the election debate between the two leaders would have heard Iraq mentioned 25 times (“Latham puts Iraq on the election table,” wrote Margo Kingston, a source Lambert may find trustworthy).

Latham mentioned Iraq three times during his campaign launch (his promise to bring the troops home was a major part of his election platform, driving much media coverage); Howard’s launch mentioned Iraq twice. Iraq was mentioned 27 times in questions and responses following Howard’s Press Club speech in the final week of the campaign.

Game, set, match to Tim. Er, the Blair one.

CLIMATE OF FEAR UPDATE: “Offices that house President Bush’s re-election campaign in Spokane were broken into and vandalized last night, the latest in a string of crimes at Republican offices across the country.”

AFGHAN ELECTIONS UPDATE: Scott Norvell reports from Kabul:

It was a regrettably typical comment from an American reporter in this part of the world. “At least it’s news,” he said of the Afghan election scuffle over the weekend. “Otherwise, this is just a success story.”

God forbid it be a success story.

But that’s what it was here, no matter how hard the international media tried to spin it. There were no car bombs raining body parts all over the polling stations. There were no last-minute assassinations. There were no drive-by shootings. The best they could come up with for “news” was grumbling from hopelessly trailing opposition candidates about washable ink and threats of a boycott. The media’s disappointment was palpable.

I’m sure that it was.

HERE’S A MEDIA ANALYSIS of bogus draft fears, in which we learn that a gullible and inaccurate CBS was outperformed by local papers.

Yeah, yeah, I know: dog bites man. But still.

HEALTHCARE BLOGGING: You want it, Grand Rounds has got it! Everything from Vioxx, to the flu vaccine shortage, to dangerously resistant staph infections, to the importance of nurses — and much more.

RUDY GIULIANI ON KERRY AND TERRORISM:

“For some time, and including when I spoke at the Republican Convention, I’ve wondered exactly what John Kerry’s approach would be to terrorism and I’ve wondered whether he had the conviction, the determination, and the focus, and the correct worldview to conduct a successful war against terrorism. And his quotations in the New York Times yesterday make it clear that he lacks that kind of committed view of the world. In fact, his comments are kind of extraordinary, particularly since he thinks we used to before September 11 live in a relatively safe world. He says we have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance.

I’m wondering exactly when Senator Kerry thought they were just a nuisance. Maybe when they attacked the USS Cole? Or when they attacked the World Trade Center in 1993? Or when they slaughtered the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972? Or killed Leon Klinghoffer by throwing him overboard? Or the innumerable number of terrorist acts that they committed in the 70s, the 80s and the 90s, leading up to September 11?

This is so different from the President’s view and my own, which is in those days, when we were fooling ourselves about the danger of terrorism, we were actually in the greatest danger. When you don’t confront correctly and view realistically the danger that you face, that’s when you’re at the greatest risk. When you at least realize the danger and you begin to confront it, then you begin to become safer. And for him to say that in the good old days – I’m assuming he means the 90s and the 80s and the 70s — they were just a nuisance, this really begins to explain a lot of his inconsistent positions on how to deal with it because he’s not defining it correctly.

Read the whole thing. Maybe Kerry was right to be afraid. On the other hand, Power Line is actually defending Kerry on this point: “I don’t understand Kerry to be saying that we should give terrorism the same type and limited level of attention we gave it pre-9/11; rather I think he was providing a realistic, though tone-deaf, assessment of what it is possible to achieve in the war on terror.”

That’s probably right, though I also agree with Power Line that Kerry’s statement that September 11 didn’t affect his thinking is far worse than the “nuisance” bit — especially when you see what that thinking consists of.

Meanwhile, Eugene Volokh has a followup post on this, which you should read. It links to several earlier items.

There are also interesting thoughts here on Kerry’s message problem:

The bigger issue is that Kerry thinks his theories are just too complex for us. I’m a pretty intelligent guy. You will never win points with me by saying that I won’t get it. That says more about you than me. It says that you think that I’m stupid. It says that you think I need to be coddled. No thank you. What it means is that you don’t know how to express yourself well enough for me to understand. Or worse yet, you just don’t want to try.

Kerry does seem to have problems along these lines. “I have a plan, but it’s too complicated to explain” doesn’t instill confidence. Reader Jay Allen’s comment on this post underscores the point:

I think what Kerry is trying to say here is, “I’ve always considered terrorism a danger – unlike the President, who didn’t swing into action until after 3,000+ people were killed on American soil. I recognized the danger in the African embassy bombings, in the attack on the Cole, in the attack on the WTC in the early 90’s. I agreed with Gary Hart and others who were sounding the alarms well before we were struck at home. 9/11 gave me the ammunition I needed to convince others that we needed to step up our fight against al Qaeda.”

Whether that’s *true* or not is an open question, but it’s not as morally bankrupt a statement as you and Powerline are making it out to be.

Does Kerry mean this? I don’t think so, actually. [LATER: Eric Lindholm emails: “Keep in mind that Kerry missed 76% of the Senate Intelligence Committee meetings including every meeting the year after the first attack on the WTC.” Ouch.] But if he does, well, then he should have said it.

UPDATE: Timothy Goddard emails:

I think that your reader, Jay Allen, is attributing a bit too much boldness to Kerry. He never argues, to Bai at least, that he was warning about Al Quaeda for years. I gather from the article that Bai made it clear that he wouldn’t stand for that sort of exaggeration. Instead, Kerry was talking about his crusade against international money laundering–certainly a worthy cause, but a very small one, that Kerry has inflated. As I argue at my own blog, after 9-11, Kerry “seized upon the one thing in his small political repertoire that he could connect with the attacks–in this case, international money laundering, or what Kerry expands to become ‘this entire dark side of globalization,’ which Bai discusses in greater detail later on–and determines that, if only we had all listened to him, this whole thing could have been averted.”

Here’s the post from Goddard’s blog.

Reader Rick Schmick observes:

Jay Allen’s recent post makes a good point in that Kerry seems to be saying that he recognized the threat of terrorism before the President. This leads me to another question…so why didn’t he do something about it? Listening to Kerry gives you the impression that he knows how to fix all the major problems that we face, and he knew it before anyone else, even if he doesn’t want to bother sharing many of the details with those of us in the cheap seats. So, why hasn’t he done anything in his 20 year Senate career to take on this problems? What bothers me most about this guy is that now he has all the solutions, but he doesn’t have any legislative history to show he’s been trying to fix them before.

That does undermine his case somewhat.

James Lileks, on the other hand, agrees that the “nuisance” language isn’t the big issue:

Mosquito bites are a nuisance. Cable outages are a nuisance. Someone shooting up a school in Montana or California or Maine on behalf of the brave martyrs of Fallujah isn’t a nuisance. It’s war.

But that’s not the key phrase. This matters: We have to get back to the place we were.

But when we were there we were blind. When we were there we losing. When we were there we died. We have to get back to the place we were. We have to get back to 9/10? We have to get back to the place we were. So we can go through it all again? We have to get back to the place we were. And forget all we’ve learned and done? We have to get back to the place we were. No. I don’t want to go back there. Planes into towers. That changed the terms. I am remarkably disinterested in returning to a place where such things are unimaginable. Where our nighmares are their dreams.

We have to get back to the place we were.

No. We have to go the place where they are.

Indeed.

MORE: Bill at INDCJournal observes:

My verdict: the comments were politically stupid because he should know that they’d be truncated and taken out of context, but a lot of people are, in fact, taking them out of context. He was clumsily grasping for a way to describe the ominpresence of terrorism in much the same way that Bush told Matt Lauer, “‘I don’t think you can win” this war. Of course, the Dems spun that perceptive statement to Hell and back, so fair is fair.

That being said, there’s no doubt in my mind, that based on his description of a “global test,” his drastic anti-war and anti-defense history and his previous description of the WOT as primarily a law-enforcement operation, that John Kerry plans on pursuing a foreign policy that devolves US strategic thinking back to an approximation of the Clinton Administration’s weakness. Such a defensive posture will be more likely to steer us towards disaster.

I think that’s right. And I don’t blame Kerry — much — for regarding terrorism as a “nuisance” in the 1990s. That’s what I thought, too. I was wrong. He hasn’t admitted that he was, but instead wants to turn back the clock.

A CANADIAN READER who has sent me a lot of email on the subject notes that CNN will look at terrorist sanctuaries in Canada tonight at 10 pm Eastern.

THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN BLOG ROUNDUP has been posted. Check it out — you may find some blogs you like better than this one!

UPDATE: Reader Brian Sament emails that I shouldn’t make recommendations like this:

You’re getting like the stereotypical hero guy who always insists while mugging for the TV camera that “it’s nothing, it’s what anyone would do.”

Do you NOT want people to visit your blog? Do you think your blog SUCKS and feel ashamed that people are visiting it?

Recommend other blogs, but it’s downright strange when you tell people not to visit your own blog.

Well, I’m not telling people not to visit my blog. But the blogosphere is a big place. Judging from the complaints I get from some readers that I’m not writing enough about stuff they consider important, InstaPundit is not, in fact, a one-size-fits-all blog. And neither are any others! I think it’s important for people to find blogs they like. Lots of people come to InstaPundit and read it, and a few other blogs that I link to a lot, and don’t venture further into the blogosphere. I try to encourage people to get beyond that because (1) I might not be around forever; and (2) I think those other blogs deserve more traffic, too. The blogosphere is more important than any one blog, and no single blog is everything to everybody, or should try to be.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Bill Graham emails:

I’m not sure if I agree with Brian’s comment or not in whole, but this is how I view your work:

You are not Twain, Poe, Tolstoy, nor Shakespeare, etc. You sir, are the librarian who took the job because (s)he loves to read. One pass by your desk and I can get a plethora of suggestions and just the right amount of commentary about each one. No plots given away, just a sampling and a suggestion to go find the same enjoyment you have experienced. And like any good librarian, you often repeat the suggestion that if I am only reading the Cliff Notes, I am really just cheating myself.

And like most librarians, you’re doing this on a volunteer basis. Thank you.

Well, I’m a librarian’s son. . . .

IN RESPONSE TO THIS POST, READER Nathan Wilkes notes some useful advice to Daniel Okrent.

A SERVER BELONGING TO INDYMEDIA HAS BEEN SEIZED by the FBI, pursuant to a foreign court order.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. I’m no fan of Indymedia, an outfit that blurs the line between dissent and incitement. But they’re also a news service of sorts, and I rather doubt that any more “mainstream” service would get this kind of treatment almost regardless of the conduct involved. (And despite the fact that, I believe, posts on IndyMedia have in the past called for people to bring down InstaPundit through extra-legal means, I don’t want Indymedia treated differently by the authorities than a more “respectable” outfit would be, if engaged in the same conduct).

Orin Kerr and Eugene Volokh have far more detailed observations.

UPDATE: Hey, maybe it’s actually an anti-Bush move! After all, those guys are recycling InstaPundit posts mocking the antiwar movement, so they must be Karl Rove puppets.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader sends this explanation for why the servers were pulled, not just copied:

I work in a huge company with a lot of rack-mounted servers.

We have no “documented process” that an Operator (or even Technician) could provide the contents of a server.

We have mainframe tape drives and remote backup systems, but they are all proprietary – and complicated to use.

It’s not like we can just burn a DL-DVD (or 10+) and provide a backup of the hundreds of gigs of data that a server holds. Not only do we not have the burner or the media, we also don’t have the procedures. If it’s not documented and approved, an Operator cannot perform the action on the production data. And only an Operator can perform tasks relating to production data – not Technicians.

It would be far, far easier to just shut down the boxes, pull them, and give them to the Feds. Two non-production servers could be re-assigned and automated restores queued. The process for swapping out failed servers (which is what this simulates) is documented and proceduralized.

That’s how we would handle it, if it ever came up.

This makes sense to me, though I don’t know that much about this stuff.

TIM BLAIR has more on the Australian elections, where blaming the government for terrorist attacks seems to have played badly with the electorate.

UPDATE: In the comments to Tim’s post, a compelling reason to be glad that the Aussies are still on our side: “Speaking from experience with the stuff, all vegemite is weaponized.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Aussie blogger Arthur Chrenkoff weighs in — and somewhat splits the difference — on a question that has divided the two Tims:

This seems to be a classical case of “heads I win, tails you lose”; if Howard had lost the election it would have been a referendum on Iraq; but since he won, the election was obviously about other issues. This is quite reminiscent of the media spin of the European Parliament election results a few months ago – it seems that the war in Iraq simply cannot be shown as anything other than an electoral liability. . . .

Sections of the media and the punditry, together with the rabid left (mostly associated with the Greens) had tried to make Iraq the issue of the campaign. For that small but vocal section of the Australian electorate the election was always going to be the referendum on Iraq – hence the unprecedented attempt to attack John Howard in his own seat of Bennelong. Neither the government nor the Labor opposition would however much oblige, preferring to campaign largely on domestic “bread and butter” issues. This is not to say that Iraq and the war on terror were absent from the campaign altogether: the voters were from the start given a clear choice on these issues. According to Labor, the war in Iraq was wrong and it made us more of a terrorist target. Hence we should pull out our troops by Christmas and concentrate on fighting the war on terror in our region, in cooperation with our Asian neighbors. According to Liberals, the war in Iraq was right and our troops should stay until their mission is accomplished. As for the war on terror, we shall fight it wherever we can, in Indonesia by all means, but in the Middle East too, if necessary.

Voters were quite aware of this choice, and to the extent that the people had voted for the complete policy package, the Liberal foreign policy option has clearly proven to be the preferred one. From that point of view, the pro-war position was victorious on Saturday. But it’s also clear that the issue of whom to trust to manage Australia’s booming A$800 billion economy had also played on voters’ minds, particularly in marginal seats, which are experiencing large housing growth and are therefore more receptive to concerns about the interest rates.

If the issue of Iraq did not seem to have been on the forefront of the Australian election campaign, it’s because by contrast with the US presidential campaign it wasn’t there to anywhere near the same degree. But the reasons it didn’t need to be as prominent is that the voters have already had three years in which to acquaint themselves with the Liberal and the Labor positions.

So there it is, in a “nuanced” package. With regard to the U.S. media, it’s quite clear that his first paragraph is the operative one, though. And given the fate of those taking the Michael Moore line (see the first link, above) I think that efforts to take the war out of the election seem like spin to me.

OAS BRIBERY SCANDAL UPDATE:

The resignation of Organization of American States (OAS) Secretary General Miguel Angel Rodríguez amid accusations that he received bribes while he was president of Costa Rica is making big headlines. But too little attention has been paid to the French telecommunications giant Alcatel, which reportedly paid the suspected bribes. . . .

But that’s only the beginning of the story. Rodríguez supporters say Costa Rica’s current president, Abel Pacheco, demanded Rodríguez’s resignation from the OAS last week as a way to divert attention from his own Alcatel payment scandal.

It turns out that Pacheco, as well as his rival in the 2002 election, received a $100,000 contribution from Alcatel that he failed to report to election authorities. Pacheco has conceded that he received the Alcatel money for his 2002 campaign, but says that the payment was not conditioned to any favors on his part.

”I told them they didn’t need to give a campaign donation to be treated fairly, but they said they wanted to contribute to democracy anyway,” the president was quoted as saying by the daily Al Día.

Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Bad link above. Fixed now. Sorry.

HERE’S A PAPER by Dave Kopel and Michael Krause on the Drug War’s negative impact on freedom and human rights.

JOHN FUND HAS MORE on voter intimidation and the new climate of fear in America.