Webb of Prescience

In TAPPED comments, Bob Somerby directs is to this 2002 op-ed from Virignia’s newly elected Senator:

Other than the flippant criticisms of our “failure” to take Baghdad during the Persian Gulf War, one sees little discussion of an occupation of Iraq, but it is the key element of the current debate. The issue before us is not simply whether the United States should end the regime of Saddam Hussein, but whether we as a nation are prepared to physically occupy territory in the Middle East for the next 30 to 50 years. Those who are pushing for a unilateral war in Iraq know full well that there is no exit strategy if we invade and stay. This reality was the genesis of a rift that goes back to the Gulf War itself, when neoconservatives were vocal in their calls for “a MacArthurian regency in Baghdad.” Their expectation is that the United States would not only change Iraq’s regime but also remain as a long-term occupation force in an attempt to reconstruct Iraqi society itself.

The connotations of “a MacArthurian regency in Baghdad” show how inapt the comparison is. Our occupation forces never set foot inside Japan until the emperor had formally surrendered and prepared Japanese citizens for our arrival. Nor did MacArthur destroy the Japanese government when he took over as proconsul after World War II. Instead, he was careful to work his changes through it, and took pains to preserve the integrity of Japan’s imperial family. Nor is Japanese culture in any way similar to Iraq’s. The Japanese are a homogeneous people who place a high premium on respect, and they fully cooperated with MacArthur’s forces after having been ordered to do so by the emperor. The Iraqis are a multiethnic people filled with competing factions who in many cases would view a U.S. occupation as infidels invading the cradle of Islam. Indeed, this very bitterness provided Osama bin Laden the grist for his recruitment efforts in Saudi Arabia when the United States kept bases on Saudi soil after the Gulf War.

In Japan, American occupation forces quickly became 50,000 friends. In Iraq, they would quickly become 50,000 terrorist targets.

In fairness, if he didn’t say this to you personally it doesn’t really count, so the war’s critics were really all just reflexive pacifists…

Who Is With Jane Galt?

I note here that Al Gore’s pre-war remarks hold up rather better than the predictions of the war’s cheerleaders, despite attempts to claim that everyone was equally wrong. Atrios does us the favor of collecting some of the contemporaneous reaction to Gore’s speech(including Neal Pollock’s dead-on Michael Kelly parody.) I particularly enjoy this from Andrew Sullivan, who after upbraiding Gore for not being terrified of the nuclear weapons Saddam was about to send to the U.S. on the wings of armor-plated unicorns said:

He says we have “squandered” the good will generated by the attacks of September 11. Really? A liberated Afghanistan, where women can now learn to read, where a fledgling free society is taking shape? No major successful terrorist attack on the homeland since the anthrax attacks of last fall? Growing support among Arab nations and at the U.N. for enforcing U.N. resolutions that Gore’s own administration let languish? Signs that Arafat may soon be sidelined on the West Bank? Squandered? The only thing that’s been truly squandered is what’s left of Gore’s integrity. At least Lieberman has been consistent. I must say, as a former Gore-supporter who was appalled by his campaign lurch to the left, that there are few judgment calls I’m prouder of than having picked Bush over Gore two years ago. Now I’m beginning to think we dodged a major catastrophe in world events.

Yeah, that holds up really well today, especially the claims about Bush’s competence.

Meanwhile, while we’re doing flashbacks just for fun I thought I’d bring up my favorite example of McArdle’s use of personal anecdotes as an all-purpose trump card. In explaining why John Roberts was right to claim that the government should use civil rights laws designed to prevent terrorists from obstructing the exercise of constitutional rights shouldn’t apply to anti-abortion terrorists trying to prevent women from exercising their constitutional rights, McArdle said:

Similarly, Mark Kleiman’s attempt to excuse NARAL’s ad by calling Operation Rescue a terrorist group is an abuse of the word. Is Operation Rescue attempting to keep women from having abortions by making them feel shame and public humiliation at an extraordinarily vulnerable time? Undoubtedly. Have they attempted to physically block women from entering clinics? Indeed they have. But speaking as one who used to form a human chain in front of clinics to help women through the protesters, I’ve never seen anything from Operation Rescue that even remotely qualifies as terrorism, nor seen anyone physically threaten a woman (shoving a picture of a fetus in her face does not count).

I suppose it would be too uncharitable of me to wonder if McArdle’s activism took place in front of the A. Pocryphal Health Clinic. But even if this is true, let’s remember that in 1991 alone there were “2 cases of murder or attempted murder of abortion providers, 9 bombings/arsons (or attempted bombings/arsons), 83 cases of invasions, assault and battery, vandalism, death threats burglary or stalking, and 3,885 arrests at blockades. To take one example, by the end of a seven-week Operation Rescue operation in Wichita that summer, “police had arrested 1,734 people for 2,657 acts of trespassing, resisting arrest and violating injunctions against blockading.”" But I’m sure none of this was intended to intimidate abortion patients and providers, because McArdle didn’t witness every one personally! Or perhaps she looked into the heart of every vandal, obstructionist, and issuer of death threats and saw that frightening women was the last thing on their minds. (Just as she can tell in advance that anti-war protesters deserve a good, swift, but non-intimidating 2×4 to the head.)

Incidental Learning

Ezra has some interesting observations on inadvertent learning and the blogosphere. By getting our news predominantly from blogs and online sources, he suggests, we run the risk of missing out on articles or discussion tangential to our focus but nonetheless interesting. I can certainly see where he’s coming from, as I think I read a lot less of the New York Times now than when I had a print copy, in part because I don’t feel compelled to read every article in the international section, and most parts of the op-ed. Then again, I often find myself wandering the wilderness of Wikipedia learning all kinds of interesting new things.

In part because of our eclectic approach to blogging, I’d like to think that LGM does a pretty solid job with the “incidental learning” thing. Come here and your likely to randomly pick up bits about the Oregon Ducks, constitutional law, Kaus/Althouse/VD Hanson bashing, feminism, abortion litigation, hockey, baseball, battleships, counterinsurgency, movies, deposed monarchs, and whatever the worst thing to ever happen on this particular day was. I suppose that we might try to create alternative feeds for our different authors (or possibly organize the feeds thematically), but that would seem to defeat the purpose of having the blog in the first place.

Quiz Time

Which entity poses a greater threat to civil liberties?

(a) an administration that has detained foreign “terrorists” without trial for more than five years; mustered law enforcement agencies to surveil the phone calls and bank records of ordinary citizens without judicial warrant or oversight; narrowed the definition of “torture” to include nearly anything short of organ failure or death; spent untold quantities of federal revenue to monitor elderly peace activists, stoned hippies and harmless Quaker meetings — all while discovering exactly zero credible domestic terror threats.

or (b) prosecutors like Patrick Fitzgerald and Mike Nifong, whose work — however flawed — takes place under the scrutiny of actual courts and actual journalists; lacks the formidable resources of the national security state; and by design can intrude upon the lives of (at most) a handful of individuals at any particular moment.

If you were a reasonable, thoughtful person, this question would not be too difficult to answer. If you were Victor Davis Hanson, however, the answer would be a no-brainer of a different sort.

Bastard

Not so fondly, Loomis remembers 18th-century serial rapist and diarist William Byrd II. But since Byrd clearly didn’t rape every woman with whom he came into contact, we should resist feeling any “autopilot compassion” for the “Tallow-faced Wench” whose injured arm presented no obstacle to Bryd and his fraternity brothers.

Not so Immortal

Bo Yibo, last of the Eight Immortals of the Communist Party, has shuffled off his mortal coil. Bo Yibo is one of the very last of the Long March generation, which ascended to power in China at a relatively young age and held onto it until the 1990s. Bo Yibo was a political conservative, and spoke out in defense of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. However, like many of his generation, he cooperated in the process of economic reform in China upon the ascension of Deng Xiaoping.

I had him on my death list for 2006, but not for 2007. Since Chinese New Year isn’t until February 18, I’m going to count him in the plus column.

More On Campus Rape

In light of the recent discussion about rape on campus, it’s particularly worth reading Courtney Martin’s article about this country’s dearth of rational sex education and the extent to which this may contribute to the problem. She also adduces some useful data:

Every two and half minutes someone is sexually assaulted in America. Many of these assaults take place on college campuses; 80 percent of rape victims are under age 30. Two-thirds of all rapes are committed by someone who is known to the victim, not a stranger in a dark alley. (Though rape statistics are notoriously inaccurate, we can assume that these, from the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) are at least close to the truth, as they are derived from a survey of multiple studies, including the National Crime Victimization Survey from 2005.)

All the more reason that this shouldn’t be dealt with as if it were academic misconduct.

And Some of the Scripts Were A Little Pedantic

From the recent Times article about attempts to turn Atlas Shrugged into a movie:

Under Mr. Aglialoro’s sponsorship a succession of writers and producers developed at least four scripts. One writer was Mr. Peikoff’s ex-wife, Cynthia Peikoff, who had been Rand’s typist. Some of the scripts, she said, were too sci-fi, others reduced the novel’s characters to caricatures, and she was told that her own attempt was no better than “workmanlike.”

Reduced?

Not only that, but some of the scripts eschewed dramatization and just had the characters give interminable speeches outlining the author’s philosophy or its strawman opposition! What a betrayal of Rand’s artistic vision!

The Day Patterson Office Tower Exploded

So, I’m sitting in my office minding my own business when I hear dripping. My office is on the fourth floor of Patterson Office Tower, so I don’t typically worry about flooding, especially from above. A few second after I hear the dripping, I hear some excited chatter down the hall, which I do my best to ignore. A few seconds after that, dirty water begins pouring through my ceiling and into my office. Emergency evacuation procedures ensue, as I rescue my laptop then proceed to assist with the rescue of computers, printers, and copy machines in adjacent offices. Hearing someone say “Whoa, dude, the fifth floor is, like, totally flooded”, I feel compelled to visit and find an office with a ceiling completely blown out. Near the office was a distraught, wet young woman who had apparently suffered a drenching and had lost her keys and cell phone. I gallantly rescued the cell phone and keys, although I have deep reservations regarding the future of the former.

At this point my office is largely flooded, although the fact that my office computer immolated itself over break provides some comfort; at least it didn’t live to see this. Two Patterson school faculty offices will be unusable for the immediate future, as will the student room. We’re now on the lookout for sounds of dripping, which has recently been detected in one of our storage rooms. As the water pipe that exploded apparently carried hot water, the ambient temperature on the fourth floor has increased by four or five degrees.

Courage.

What’s Actually Important

Make sure to wish Jane well.