Welcome Just One Minute readers!

Thanks to Just One Minute for linking to my post on the Dodd-Byrd controversy. Good to have you stopping in. Ya'all come back now, y'hear?

--HOUSE OF PAYNE

The last word on the 9/11 hearings

With the release of the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing, which some had claimed was proof of Bush's forewarning of the September 11 attacks, I think we can say that there is no smoking gun. I struggle to understand how any reasonable person could read this document and believe that it implicates Bush as negligent (or worse). The brief is little more than a page long and says little more than any decent magazine article on Al Qaeda from that time would have said. There's nothing new, nothing we didn't already know.

I could say more, but it's already been said better by others. So, I direct you to read two brilliant posts. First, read Gregg Easterbrook's alternate history of the Bush presidency. After reading it, ask yourself if alternate-universe Bush could have saved his presidency by pointing to the August 6 PDB. Answer: No.

The second thing for you to read is Did Bush Do Enough? from Grim's Hall. The answer: Not enough to stop the attack, but as much as any president could have been expected to do. I agree. Think of any of the presidents in this country's 200+ year history. You can even think of Al Gore, if you like. Imagine what they would have done, or could have done, in Bush's position. Would it have stopped the September 11 attacks without getting us to the Easterbrook scenario? (If any of your imagined presidents lead you to a 'Yes,' I would be happy to hear about it.)

Okay, then. You're done. You don't have to pay any more attention to the hearings. There's nothing else for anyone to say, other than, "Clinton rulez, Bush droolz."

--EL DOLOR

Brunching Shuttlecocks should have done this

Okay, this is just too cool. It's a computer program that tries to guess whether you are a Dictator or Sitcom Character. Now that's cool. (Thanks to Ace of Spades and Florida Cracker.) The program nailed me when I was Zoidberg, but missed me as Bokassa.

Great little web toy. But what ever happened to the minds who brought us Perfume or Marvel Supervillain and Porn Star or My Little Pony? Alas.

HOUSE OF PAYNE

Continued fighting in Iraq

Good summary of the continued fighting in Iraq from Grim's Hall:

This kind of fight is exactly what our forces are trained to do. This is the kind of fight we should be glad to have. There is nothing more we can ask of Iraq than that the enemies of stability should be out in the field, engaged in battle with us. They are now a clear military problem, one for which the officers in the field have studied and the men in the field have trained. They are engaged in a stand-up fight with us. They can't hope to prevail, and in fact are breaking: witness today's shift on the part of al-Sadr's forces to hostage taking. Having gotten them into the field, we shall clear the field. Iraq will enter its successor government with a whole lot fewer insurgents, and witnessed memories of the abject failure of insurgency against US forces.

To those who report without understanding, however, this looks like bad news. It's scary, like the Tet Offensive was scary; there are fires and angry men with guns who hate us. The news crawl startles them--US forces engaged in fourteen cities across Iraq! What they forget, or rather never knew, is that the US forces were designed for simultaneous engagement on up to three continents. The instability won't last. The wave will break, the Coalition will bind these insurgents in fourteen rings of steel, like the one cast already around Fallujah. In a few days those who have not been captured or killed will be hiding in fear. We will be flush with victory, and in possession of a great deal of new intelligence information on who is backing these groups--whether it is official government aid from regional powers, or factional aid from folks like al-Sadr's cousin, the leader of Hezbollah. Then we can tailor the next phase of action, to take the fight to those who hoped to bring the fight to us.

Our enemies have revealed themselves, and thus doomed themselves to destruction at the hands of the world's finest military. Americans do not desire bloodshed, as is attested by the time, effort, and money we have invested to rebuild the country that we conquered one year ago today.

American servicemen and women in Iraq, our hopes and our prayers are with you always. May God bless you and keep you safe in your selfless mission, and grant you victory over our enemies. And may His Holy Spirit touch the people of this country, and the people of Iraq, that they may feel not despair, but hope.

--DAOUD AL-RAHIMI

Drezner, Lott, Dodd

I've been commenting in response to a post over at Drezner earlier today. I'll edit my thoughts and put in some links and stuff later. Right now I have to get back to work.

--HOUSE OF PAYNE

Aspiring martyrs

Sadr has left the Tomb of Ali in Kufa where he and his thug militia had been hiding out. Defiant rhetoric (see previous entry) supported the notion that Sadr was hoping to provoke a violent coalition response in order to rally other Shiites, who would be incensed at such an incursion of infidels into this holy site.

Apparently, though, Sadr decided that this was the wrong moment for him to become the latest Shiite to become a martyr in Kufa. (Thanks to the Belmont Club for calling attention to the article in Der Spiegel.) He still says he will "win martyrdom" if authorities try to arrest him. But I'm skeptical. Islamist leaders all preach the glories of martyrdom, but when the chance comes, they usually choose life for themselves and their loved ones.

The good news, though, is that Sadr's goon squad still seems happy to throw themselves onto American bayonets. Fine by me. They are glad to be out of this world, and the rest of the world is glad to be rid of them. Everyone's a winner.

--DAOUD AL-RAHIMI

Over our dead bodies

More on the fighting in Iraq from the NYT this morning:

"The only way the Americans will enter this city is entering over our bodies," said Sheik Abu Mahdi al-Rubayee, a commander in Mr. Sadr's private army, estimated to number in the tens of thousands.

All-righty, then!

--DAOUD RAHIMI

Bad guys, good news?

Things are heating up in Iraq, but I think this is not such bad news. Polipundit points out that "the US military is far more capable than [journalists] realize. Just remember that the media has vastly exaggerated the difficulty of every US military operation since Vietnam. Think back to their egregious coverage about a year ago. And Afghanistan before that."

Self-described coalition "mercenary" Grimbeorn reads the uprising by the Shiites in Baghdad's slums as a desperate attempt by Muqtader al-Sadr to distract his constituency from his own crimes. (And by crimes, he means the kind of things that Iraqi Shiites would be upset about, like the assassination of other Shiite clerics carried out inside the Tomb of Ali, a sacred site.)

And Instapundit passes along a thoughtful reader email:

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.

So it's good, because it allows the US military to kill bad guys, which is what the US military is best at and happiest doing. And the bad guys have to get killed in order for Iraq to prosper.

Victor Davis Hanson has pointed out many times the surprising downside of swift American victories in Afghanistan and Iraq: too few bad guys were killed:

MOST OF the Baathists among our current enemies in Iraq chose to flee rather than stand and fight. The homes of Saddam's henchmen were not all bombed. Their friends were not killed. Their pride was only temporarily lost?to be regained, evidently, upon their discovery that it is easier and safer to murder an American who is building a school and operating under strict rules of engagement than to take on Abrams tanks barreling into Baghdad under a sky of F-16's.

Such are a few of the ironies entailed in our stunning military success, even if overlooked in analyses of the recent turmoil. And there are still more. Hard as it may be to accept, a rocky peace may well be the result of a spectacularly rapid victory. Imagine our war instead as a year-and-a-half continuum of active combat, stretching from the late-March 2003 invasion until the scheduled assumption of power of the Iraqi provisional government this coming July. Now suppose that over the course of this time frame, about 5,000 of Saddam's hardcore killers had either to be killed, captured, or routed from the country if there were ever to be any chance for real peace to emerge. Somehow, under conditions of full-scale combat, one suspects the job would have been much easier.

Of course, we must not wish the war would have lasted that long in order to allow us freely to destroy Saddam's remnants, but we must at least appreciate that short wars by their very nature often require messy clean-ups. After the shooting stops, the aid workers arrive; the hard-core, hypercritical journalists remain; and soldiers must build rather than shoot.

. . .

Many Americans have come to believe that war is the worst thing that can happen to humans. It would probably not have been easy in 1991 to convince them of the need to prolong our "highway of death" in southern Iraq, even if doing so would have prevented Baathist troops from escaping to Basra and killing innocents; or of the need to bomb Serbians in Sbrenica in order to prevent them from killing women and children; or of the need to annihilate fleeing Taliban fighters to prevent them from drifting back into Kabul months later to shoot young Frenchwomen trying to feed the poor and hungry.

So bad guys are doing bad things right now, but in doing so they have become targets. And, hopefully, they will be destroyed, so that they cannot destroy the new Iraq.

--DAOUD RAHIMI

Alien Tort Claims Act

An interesting story a couple of days ago in the Washington Post about a Paraguayan woman who won $10 million in an American court suing the man who tortured her brother to death. The crime occurred in Paraguay, but she was able to sue here in the US under the Alien Tort Claims Act.

The act, enacted in 1789, allows noncitizens to bring civil lawsuits for human rights abuses committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.

The court opinion became the basis for nearly 20 other successful cases in behalf of people from El Salvador, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, Ethiopia and the Philippines and involving torture, summary executions, disappearances, rape and slavery.

She won her suit twenty years ago; the only reason she's in the news today is that the Supreme Court is reviewing the constitutionality of the law under which she won her suit. Again from the Post:

The human rights community is worried that if the Supreme Court rules against the act, victims of gross human rights abuses will no longer be able to bring claims in U.S. courts against perpetrators who come here or have substantial contacts or a base of operations here.

But the Bush administration is concerned that the law could compromise the fight against terrorism and the assistance some allies might offer.

I recently spoke with a friend in the D.C. area who told me about suits that he is bringing against various countries for infringing on human rights. (If memory serves, one of the suits involved child slavery in the chocolate industry.) The whole idea caught me off guard. Foreign parties, including governments, having standing to sue and/or be sued in US courts? I had never known that such a thing was possible.

After a little thought, though, a few examples of this kind of legal action came to min. For instance, various non-Libyan domestic courts played an important role in bringing Moammar Gaddafi to heel. And Spanish courts punished Pinochet for crimes committed when he was dictator. But in both of these examples, the courts were seeking redress for actions committed against fellow citizens. Under the Alien Tort Claims Act, neither the offender nor the offended need be American.

So I'm still not sure what I think about this. In the right hands, it seems a powerful tool to do good. But I wonder what such an instrument might do in the wrong hands.

--JAN DEPAUW

Kerry Kyoto update

Lileks noticed Kerry's duplicity on Kyoto, too.

--JOHANNES CLERK