WORTHWHILE CANADIAN POLL:

Ottawa — Support for Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s handling of the Iraq war plunged in the past week, with opinion split virtually evenly outside Quebec, where antiwar sentiment is strongest, a new Globe and Mail/CTV poll suggests. . . .

Pro-coalition rallies were planned for today in Winnipeg, Ottawa and Red Deer, Alta., and in Calgary and Vancouver tomorrow. American flags are flying off the shelves in many western cities.

But here’s the really interesting part:

Approximately 47 per cent of respondents agreed Canada “turned our back” on the Americans, while 51 per cent disagreed. In Quebec, only 36 per cent agreed that the decision amounted to a failure to support the U.S. at its time of need, while 51 per cent of those in other provinces agreed.

Still, two-thirds of poll respondents said Mr. Chrétien’s stand has shown Canada is an independent player on the world stage.

As reader Michael Nunnelley, who sent this link, observes, being an “independent player” would seem to be the main driver of Chretien’s policy.

ONE DOWN, ONE TO GO writes Daniel Drezner. The defeat of Ansar Al-Islam isn’t getting enough attention, he says.

SPENT THE AFTERNOON IN THE RECORDING STUDIO — the real one, not the computer-based one at my house. Doug “InstaLawyer” Weinstein has been working on a demo tape for his band, The Verdicts, and wanted some help and another set of ears. Various triumphs ensued:

1. Unaccountable difference in levels between left channel and right channel tracked down to loose jack in patchbay; tightened and fixed. Finding this in the time it took was a triumph — even in our little studio, there are so many wires and connections that tracking down a bad one is a real job.

2. Flabby sounding kick drum tightened up with EQ. Not “more bass” which is what you might think, but a boost at 350 hz, which captures the crack of the beater striking the drumhead. Most of the sound of a kick drum is at low frequencies, but the beater-sound is what gives it definition and helps it cut through the mix.

3. Somewhat lonely sounding lead vocal on “Wonderful Tonight” brightened up by using a combination of delay and pitch-shifting to generate the illusion of female singers in the background. There are gadgets you can buy that do this, but I just reprogrammed a general-purpose effects box. It worked surprisingly well: subtle, but effective.

4. Request to give a trumpet solo “more shimmer” met by putting a very slight Leslie (rotating-speaker, somewhat akin to a tremolo) effect on the trumpet, and feeding that into its own reverb.

Okay, “triumph” is too strong a word, but still a very successful afternoon. I haven’t done that sort of thing in a while, and I’d forgotten how much I enjoy it. And, unlike computer music (or blogging) it doesn’t contribute as much to RSI.

PUNDITWATCH IS ON HIATUS:

Punditwatch is not going to grasp at the ether of pundit speculation and opinion on this war until enough time has passed to make it informed speculation and opinion. I trust David Brooks and Mark Shields to tell me who’s up and who’s down in the political arena. I don’t trust them to tell me where a war is and where it’s going after only 10 days.

Punditwatch will return when the fog of war lifts.

I know how he feels.

RALPH PETERS WRITES:

On one level, Arabs know that Saddam Hussein is a monster. They know he has killed more Arabs than Israel ever could do. Saddam has been the worst thing to happen to Mesopotamia since the Mongols razed Baghdad. But Arabs are so jealous and discouraged that they need to inflate even Saddam into a hero. They have no one else.

Try to understand how broken the Arab world must be, how pitiful, if the celebrated Arab “triumph” of this war is the execution of prisoners in cold blood and the display of a few POWs on TV.

We would be foolish to descend to their level and gloat. The world would be better off were Arab civilization a success. We all should pray that the Arab world might, one day, be better governed and more equitable, that Arab peoples might join us in the march of human progress, instead of fleeing into reveries of bygone glories.

Indeed. Read the whole thing, to see why Iraq matters.

WARBLOGFOGVERGNUGEN: Suman Palit has coined the term.

STEVEN DEN BESTE is rather critical of Amnesty International’s biased approach. He’s got a lot of links.

MAX BOOT WRITES ON THE NEW AMERICAN WAY OF WAR:

Watching images of the bombing of Baghdad brought to mind another American bombing campaign 58 years ago. On March 9, 1945, more than 300 B-29 Superfortresses attacked Tokyo. Their napalm bombs and magnesium incendiaries turned 16 densely packed square miles into an inferno. An estimated 84,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed, making this one of the deadliest days of warfare ever.

The enormity of the destruction is almost impossible to comprehend today, because the American armed forces fight so differently now. The new way of war emphasizes precision and aims for minimal casualties on both sides. This approach represents a considerable advance, but it also brings its own set of problems.

Although air strikes on Baghdad have intensified, leading to what Iraqi officials claim are more than 70 civilian casualties, the city is hardly being pounded into rubble. Electricity and other services remain. In the war’s early days, Baghdad residents even stood on their balconies to watch bombs and missiles pummel their city — secure in the knowledge that only a handful of government buildings would be hit.

This is a bit reminiscent of the first Battle of Bull Run in 1861, which drew as spectators the crème de la crème of Washington society. It is almost as if the United States has left behind the total war of the 20th century and returned to an earlier time of more limited combat, when columns of professional soldiers marched toward each other across open fields and civilians were hurt only by accident.

Boot’s not entirely sure that this is a good idea.

CAROL RICHARDS SAYS she protested Vietnam, but this war is right.

SARS UPDATE: U.N. politics may be trumping health concerns in the region:

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) When a deadly flu-like virus began spreading through Asia earlier this month, a group of Taiwanese doctors sent an e-mail to the World Health Organization asking for help in investigating the mysterious bug.

No one responded. No investigators from the U.N. agency visited. . . .

WHO is apparently waiting for permission from the People’s Republic of China. Odd.

REMEMBER NORTH KOREA? Looks like some pressure is being brought to bear:

BEIJING – For three straight days in recent weeks, something remarkable happened to the oil pipeline running through northeast China to North Korea – the oil stopped flowing, according to diplomatic sources, temporarily cutting off a vital lifeline for North Korea.

The pipeline shutdown, officially ascribed to a technical problem, followed an unusually blunt message delivered by China to its longtime ally in a high-level meeting in Beijing last month, the sources said. Stop your provocations about the possible development of nuclear weapons, China warned its neighbor, or face Chinese support for economic sanctions against the regime.

Such tough tactics show an unexpected resolve in Beijing’s policy toward Pyongyang, and hint at the nervousness of Chinese leaders about North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and North Korea’s tensions with the United States.

With the Bush administration asking China to take a more active role, Beijing’s application of pressure could convince North Korea to drop its demands for talks exclusively with the United States – a demand that Washington rejects. . . .

“We can’t afford to shield North Korea any longer,” Zhu Feng, an international security expert at Beijing University, said in an interview last month. “There is increasing recognition here if North Korea is finally armed with nuclear weapons, it will be a big threat to China.”

Very interesting. And what surprises me is how long it’s taken the Chinese to realize that nobody, but nobody wants a regime as kooky as North Korea’s on their border, armed with nuclear weapons. Read the whole story, which is chock-full of interesting stuff.

UPDATE: How kooky? This kooky:

ALL triplets in North Korea are being forcibly removed from parents after their birth and dumped in bleak orphanages.

The policy is carried out on the orders of Stalinist dictator Kim Jong-il, who has an irrational belief that a triplet could one day topple his regime.

Sheesh. If I were the Chinese, I’d be worried, too.

THE NATIONAL GUARDSMAN WHO CHANGED HIS NAME TO “OPTIMUS PRIME” now has a weblog. This seems to me to be a moment of deep cultural significance.

MICKEY KAUS is asking a lot of questions about strategy that are also being asked by others. I don’t know the answer to these questions, and I’ve refrained from this kind of speculation because I think it’s largely meaningless in the absence, of, you know, actual facts. But his post offers a nice central repository of the “what’s Rumsfeld’s hurry?” school of thought.

Kaus also asks:

But I’m still skeptical about the Iraqi claims that two U.S. missiles have now struck crowded marketplaces and killed dozens. Why do these errant missiles always fall in crowded marketplaces and kill dozens? Why don’t they ever fall in back alleys and kill one or two people?

The answer appears to be that they’re errant Iraqi SAMS rather than errant U.S. missiles. A reader adds:

For the last few days, I’ve been wondering how come Bob Fisk hasn’t been jumping up and down waving bits of metal with “Raytheon” printed on it. Surely the Iraqis have enough of the stuff lying about the place by now…

Heard Iraqi caller to BBC phone-in yesterday (not some sort of coalition media shill, his English was lousy and he didn’t “project” as the saying goes); he said that from calls to Baghdad, the locals all believe that the Saddam regime is behind these attacks.

Interesting.

UPDATE: Well, ask and you shall receive. Fisk is jumping up and down, and may even be right, sort of — though if it’s American it’s a HARM missile that was probably fired at an Iraqi mobile radar placed in the market area. Tim Blair has more.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Tim Blair has even more here.

JIM BENNETT WRITES on why the “Anglosphere” concept is more about peace than war. He also has some comments in response to Jacob T. Levy’s recent piece in The New Republic.

JIM TREACHER HAS SO MANY FUNNY POSTS that I can’t figure out which one to link to. So just go read ’em all.

SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE BLOGGERS. You kind of want to make fun of a series like this, but it’s actually good.

REVERSE-ASYMMETRICAL WARFARE: Edward Boyd has a suggestion.

HERE ARE SOME MORE PICTURES from today’s pro-America rally in Ottawa.

Meanwhile, here’s a revealing portrait of an anti-war protester, via Clayton Cramer’s blog.

UPDATE: They’re planning a big rally for America in Toronto on Friday.

AN EMAIL FROM THE FRONT that’s worth reading.

MARK STEYN WRITES:

After little more than a week, is this war coverage in trouble? Already questions are being raised about whether the media’s plan was fatally flawed. Several analysts are surprised that, despite overwhelming dominance of the air, television and radio divisions have so quickly repeated the mistakes of Afghanistan. Meanwhile, on the ground, rapidly advancing columns become stalled in Vietnam-style quagmires around the second paragraph.

He has a lot of eminent retired military guys critiquing the journalists’ strategy, too.

JUDICIAL WATCH IS GOING AFTER CHIRAC: You can read the complaint here. Here’s an article summarizing things.

WHY OIL IS BAD for national economies, and democracy.

AZIZ POONAWALLA has some interesting observations regarding asymmetric warfare. In a not-unrelated note, Fred Kaplan says the war is vindicating Van Riper. I think it’s a bit early to say that, but the piece is worth reading.

Meanwhile, this story says that Saddam has sacked his air-defense commander for doing more damage to Baghdad than the allies have. The usual skepticism toward, well, everything is appropriate here, of course, but it’s interesting.

(Via Tacitus).

AN EDITOR OF THE COLUMBIA POLITICAL REVIEW, which has an interesting group blog that I don’t think I’ve seen before, is distancing himself from Prof. Nicholas De Genova’s remark that he’d like to see the United States lose in Iraq to the tune of a “million Mogadishus.” What’s interesting, though, is that the real anger is reserved for Nader supporters.

This post from the same blog, however, betrays muddled thinking, or at least writing:

It’s amazing to me how quickly conservatives forget the first amendment when attacking their ideological opponents but cling to it staunchly whenever a conservative academic makes remarks that draw criticism. DeGenova may not be an enlightened political thinker (his comments were both ridiculously inflammatory and uninformed, and are worthy of much criticism), but the day Columbia starts making hiring and firing decisions based on a person’s politics is not a day we should look forward to.

“The First Amendment” is not actually a synonym for “free speech,” which is what the writer here presumably actually means. Not being the government, Columbia isn’t directly bound by the First Amendment. But principles of free speech should bar firing De Genova — though as someone else commented, it’s doubtful that Columbia would be as enthusiastic about De Genova’s free speech rights if he had called for “a million Matthew Shepards.”

And as for the part about dreading the day when politics start affecting Columbia’s hiring and firing decisions, well, the most charitable thing I can say is that it reveals a charming naivete.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Actually, Columbia’s President is wrong. Columbia U. does not protect free speech. They have a draconian hate speech code that prohibits hate speech on campus. So it seems that by their own rules, they SHOULD fire De Genova for what he SAID (just as they could legally punish anyone who called for a million matthew sheperds). I’d love it if someone put this question to Bollinger.

Interesting. I’m not very familiar with Columbia’s speech code. Neither, I’d bet, is Columbia’s President, Lee Bollinger, who is a pro-free-speech guy, generally.

THOUSANDS OF CANADIANS SHOWED UP at a pro-America rally in Ottawa. Follow the link for a story and pictures.