DanKohn.com

The WP reports on dirty bomb material scattered across rural areas of the former Soviet republics. This would make great fodder for a screenplay.

Is invading Iraq about pre-emptively destroying weapons of mass destruction (WMD)? Maureen Dowd has an alternative view: it’s about “turning Iraq into a model democracy/gas pump”. Great turn of phrase. Personally, I think it’s about all three, but I support it for the WMD and democracy reasons.

Deeply, horribly upsetting look at illegal detention in America. It caused me to donate to Amnesty International.

Surprisingly testosterone-laden editorial from the WP decrying French and Russian obstructionism on the Security Council. Your worldview may be shattered by this news, but the French are being hypocritical: “In fact, even as Mr. Chirac was proclaiming the sanctity of the United Nations’ authority over war-making, some 1,000 French troops were intervening unilaterally to protect French interests in Ivory Coast; Paris never dreamed of forging an international coalition or consulting the Security Council.”

James Fallows on what would be entailed to administer post-invasion Iraq:

“This could be a golden opportunity to begin to change the face of the Arab world,” James Woolsey, a former CIA director who is one of the most visible advocates of war, told me. “Just as what we did in Germany changed the face of Central and Eastern Europe, here we have got a golden chance.” In this view, the fall of the Soviet empire really did mark what Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history”: the democratic-capitalist model showed its superiority over other social systems…. What is required is a first Arab democracy, and Iraq can be the place.

“If you only look forward, you can see how hard it would be to do,” Woolsey said. “Everybody can say, ‘Oh, sure, you’re going to democratize the Middle East.’” Indeed, that was the reaction of most of the diplomats, spies, and soldiers I spoke with — “the ruminations of insane people,” one British official said.

Woolsey continued with his point: “But if you look at what we and our allies have done with the three world wars of the twentieth century — two hot, one cold — and what we’ve done in the interstices, we’ve already achieved this for two thirds of the world. Eighty-five years ago, when we went into World War I, there were eight or ten democracies at the time. Now it’s around a hundred and twenty — some free, some partly free. An order of magnitude! The compromises we made along the way, whether allying with Stalin or Franco or Pinochet, we have gotten around to fixing, and their successor regimes are democracies. Around half of the states of sub-Saharan Africa are democratic. Half of the twenty-plus non-Arab Muslim states. We have all of Europe except Belarus and occasionally parts of the Balkans. If you look back at what has happened in less than a century, then getting the Arab world plus Iran moving in the same direction looks a lot less awesome. It’s not Americanizing the world. It’s Athenizing it. And it is doable.”

Athenizing = Athens = democracy (it took me a moment as well). Of course, this is by far the most optimistic view. Still, how can you not love gibes by anonymous British diplomats.

From the NYT, doesn’t this sound like a bad movie: ‘A group of black-clad F.B.I. agents jumped out of a truck and swarmed a white van, guns drawn, yelling to to the driver: “Hands off the wheel! Hands off the Wheel!” After they cleared him, they jumped back in their truck and zoomed off, presumably to stop another van.’

Michael Kinsley takes some (well-deserved) potshots at the Bush administration’s build-up to war:

Ambiguity has its place in dealings among nations, and so does a bit of studied irrationality. Sending mixed signals and leaving the enemy uncertain what you might do next are valid tactics. But the cloud of confusion that surrounds Bush’s Iraq policy is not tactical. It’s the real thing.

I’m supportive of attacking Iraq not because it is part of the war on terror but because the threshold of what represents a “clear and present danger” dropped on 9/11. However, I think the Bush administration has done a pathetic job of convincing Americans and the world, particularly in their dealings with the UN Security Council.

Two Kuwaiti gunmen were killed after attacking a marine training exercise near Kuwait City. Call me unoriginal, but if I were a terrorist, I would think attacking marines in their barracks (e.g., Beirut and Saudi Arabia) or onboard a ship that thought it had reached a safe harbor (the Cole) would make a lot more sense then attacking armed soldiers on a training exercise.

I wish more people realized how extraordinary our court systems are. The idea that parties with grievances would stand before a neutral third party and submit to its judgement (and that conviction further requires the unanimous agreement of 12 peers) is a revolutionary concept compared to how humankind has conducted itself for most of history. The NYT reports on Johnny Michael Spann’s fathers contention that John Walker Lindh (who the WSJ memorably called the Marin mujahidin) killed his son:

“Proximity is not guilt,” the judge said. He told the father that his son, a former marine, was clearly a hero, but added, with a directness that seemed to surprise Mr. Spann, “Of all the things he fought for, one of them is that we don’t convict people in the absence of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Did you know that OBL was planning “attacks on natural gas resources or nuclear weapons facilities in the United States”, including use of biological weapons, that would be so big that within 6 months, they would make people forget about September 11th? Not that any were needed, but this is the best possible confirmation on the necessity of the invasion of Afghanistan.

The most fundamental coginitive dissonance in how the Bush Administration sees (as opposed to talks about) the world is on the question of democracy. Realpolitik says that democracy-lovers are a bunch of wimpy goo-goos (good goverment types). I believe, as does an NYT editorial today, that “Terrorism will retreat where democracy advances, not where autocrats muzzle political expression or buy peace at home by financing violence abroad.” That is, supporting democracy is, counter-intuitively, the essence of real-politik, and that American interests and security will never be assured until the whole world consists solely of democracies.