Bloggage will be light for the next few days, as I’m in Chicago for a conference. No doubt at some point Dan Drezner and I will commisserate with each other on being dropped from the blogroll at Virginia’s spiffy new digs.

Speaking of Chicago, it’s a good thing I wasn’t planning on flying into Meigs Field today…

Dan appears to be back; no sign of lowly me, however. Ah, well. :-). And for all zero people who cared, my panel on Thursday went OK.

Steven Den Beste today notes the rather curious relationship between Jacques Chirac and Franco-Belgian oil giant TotalFinaElf.

A brief history lesson for those who don’t follow French politics: in 2002, when M. Chirac faced reelection at the end of his seven-year term (since reduced to a five-year term), he was believed to be at the center of a giant campaign finance scandal dating back to the 1980s, and was only immune from further investigation—and prosecution—because of his position as French president. If the far-right National Front’s Jean-Marie Le Pen hadn’t unexpectedly edged ahead of the socialist Lionel Jospin, leading to a rally around Chirac’s campaign in the run-off round (thus illustrating a fundamental problem with majority run-off elections, including instant run-off voting), Chirac would now likely be facing charges stemming from his alleged involvement in the illegal financial shenanigans.

In other words, nobody should be surprised at Chirac’s behavior regarding Iraq: he’s been bought and paid for. Perhaps the only surprise is how many pockets he’s been paid from.

There’s more at Glenn’s place.

Pieter at Peaktalk has posted a brief overview of the political career of Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch conservative-libertarian politician who was gunned down by an animal rights extremist in 2002. No excerpts; go Read The Whole Thing™.

Posting will be light through Sunday evening, for the following reasons:

1. I need to finish my Midwest paper.

2. The Red-Blue Game is this afternoon.

3. I still need to finish up the promised LSblog work behind-the-scenes (mainly on the admin interface). If you read the RSS feed, you may have already noted the Open Directory categories that are now associated with each entry; that’s one of the new under-the-hood features (particularly interesting if you're interested in aggregating this content—I'll post some thoughts on that soon).

More blogagge soon…

Colby Cosh helpfully clarifies the Canadian government’s position on the Iraq conflict. It turns out that Paul Cellucci was simultaneously right and wrong to criticize Canada for their lack of support…

Alan E. Brain at the Command Post reports that the BBC World Service presented a “comprehensive dossier” on Baghdad blogger Salam Pax this morning. (Also see this post by Joe Katzman at Winds of Change.) If the information was in as much detail as Alan suggests, our favorite citizen of Baghdad could be in serious trouble.

I guess Andrew Sullivan doesn’t call them the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation for nothing…

Gethain Chamberlain of The Scotsman reports that Iraqi POWs captured in Basra indicate an al-Qaeda cell is operating in the city:

Near Basra, Iraq: British military interrogators claim captured Iraqi soldiers have told them that al-Qaeda terrorists are fighting on the side of Saddam Hussein’s forces against allied troops near Basra.

At least a dozen members of Osama bin Laden’s network are in the town of Az Zubayr where they are coordinating grenade and gun attacks on coalition positions, according to the Iraqi prisoners of war. ...

A senior British military source inside Iraq said: “The information we have received from PoWs today is that an al-Qaeda cell may be operating in Az Zubayr. There are possibly around a dozen of them and that is obviously a matter of concern to us.”

Nothing to see here; move along…

Via the Command Post and the Sydney Morning Herald.

Some remarks made by Paul Cellucci, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, during a visit to Toronto on Tuesday are causing quite a stir on both sides of the border. His speech to the Economic Club of Toronto raised hackles in Ottawa due to his criticism of the Chrétien government’s stance on the War in Iraq, while his responses to the media after the speech have caused a stir south of the border in the lefty and centrist wing of the blogosphere. According to The Globe and Mail, Cellucci said:

Mr. Cellucci said the relationship between the two countries will endure in the long term, but “there may be short-term strains here.”

Asked what those strains would be, Mr. Cellucci replied, “You’ll have to wait and see.” But he cryptically added it is his government’s position that “security will trump trade,” implying possible implications for cross-border traffic.

Dan Drezner’s critique is reasonable, although I think he (along with Jacob T. Levy, Henry Farrell, Matthew Yglesias, and Kevin Drum of CalPundit) may be reading too much into an off-hand comment; a presidential administration has limited control over what annoyed members of Congress might attach to an appropriations bill, nor can it really control the effects of a grassroots economic boycott. And, like it or not, administration policy is that “security will trump trade”; it certainly trumps all sorts of other things, as both the War on Drugs and PATRIOT Act have proven.

On the other hand, others have different perspectives: Pieter Dorsman of Peaktalk believes that Cellucci was delivering a much-needed wakeup call to Canada’s political and business elite, Mike Watkins thinks it’s a good thing that Cellucci brought the issues of anti-Americanism and anti-Canadianism to the forefront (and notes a generational divide within his half-American, half-Canadian family), Tim G. in Toronto thinks Cellucci wasn’t nearly blunt enough, and Laurent seems to think (my French is a tad rusty) that it’s a big dustup over nothing: « le commerce prévaut sur la politique étrangère » (trade prevails over foreign politics).

As I’ve mentioned before, the Chrétien government has missed the boat on the “secure perimeter”; although Canada would have had to reform its asylum and immigration procedures somewhat to secure American agreement, the economic benefits of a Schengen-style union with an open border would greatly outweigh the loss of sovereignty associated with the arrangement (as in the case of NAFTA). As Cellucci discusses in the speech, there is increased coordination between Immigration Canada and the U.S. INS, but it’s a lot more hassle than would be necessary if both the U.S. and Canada could come to a common agreement on visa and asylum policy. Chrétien made this bed, and now he has to lie in it.

More perspectives via Feedster; Alec Saunders has a good roundup of Canadian reaction.

Jacob has just posted an update, including an email from a Canadian civil servant. There's one telling quote:

As a side note, I wonder if part of the problem in relations is that Bush's administration pays more attention to what other leaders say for domestic consumption than past administrations. There's some evidence that he's more aware of other leaders playing up anti-Americanism in their home countries than any other President before him; at the minimum, he is more bothered by it.

I think this is largely reflective of how Bush 43 deals with the world; since other countries’ leaders think nothing of using remarks he makes for domestic consumption (including everyone’s favorite bug-bears like the International Criminal Court and Kyoto, where his substantive policy is the same as Bill Clinton’s) against him, he feels entitled to do the same to them.

Dan Simon (found via Jacob) comments at length as well; the most important paragraph:

The real issue—the one about which Cellucci issued his veiled threat—is that of “homeland security”. For various reasons, the Canadian government has at times dragged its feet in dealing with terrorist groups, with the result that Canada has come to be viewed as something of a haven, and even a staging ground, for anti-US terorist cells. (Recall that Ahmed Ressam was caught importing bombing materials across the border from Canada in 1999.) As long as the border between the US and Canada remains wide open, American border security is in practice no tighter than Canadian border security, and Canada's generous immigration laws and occasionally lax attitude towards certain violent groups is thus of direct concern to US officials. Hence Cellucci's remark that “[f]or Canada the priority is trade, for us the priority is security….Security trumps trade.”

I think Dan’s hit the nail on the head.

Well, I know I was completely gung ho for the war, but Scott Ritter has convinced me that this is going to be the worst military defeat since the Little Big Horn. All hail Saddam, our new leader!

For new visitors, this is extreme sarcasm.

Radley Balko today discusses campaign finance “reform”, pointing out that it’s more about incumbent protection than restoring faith in the political process. I couldn’t agree with him more.

Michele at A Small Victory quite rightly takes to task those that make an analogy between our treatment of the Gitmo detainees from Afghanistan to Hussein’s treatment of allied POWs. However, it does raise the question: what’s the long-term plan for the Afghan prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay? Some have apparently been released recently, but many others still remain in custody, apparently indefinitely.

Obviously the idea is that eventually they’ll be put in front of some sort of tribunal, but there have been no public indications of when these tribunals will come about, nor are there any suggestions of handing them over to the new Afghan authorities for trial on charges there. It seems to me that the administration has, at the very least, dropped the ball on communicating what it plans to do to resolve the situation of the detainees.

Michele is hosting a debate on the burning issue of the day. No, not whether there’s an uprising in Basra… rather, who’s hotter: NBC’s David Bloom or Fox’s Rick Leventhal? If you’re a Bloomie, he’s losing bad, so you may want to contribute your opinion.

As a practicing heterosexual, I should probably mention my thing for MSNBC’s Chris Jansing. Then again, maybe I shouldn’t…

One major reason I don’t have a lot of time for the conservative movement—“paleo” or “neo”—is the rabidly anti-immigrant character of much of it (yes, John Derbyshire, I’m talking about you). The story of Marine Lance Cpl. Jose Gutierrez, who was among the first casulaties of the war, ought to give them pause. Gutierrez, like most immigrants, came here to build a better life for himself, but, also like most immigrants, ended up building a better life for all of us. That a man who wasn’t even a citizen would put his life on the line for America not only reflects highly on him, it demonstrates the greatness of our country.

Found via Matt Welch and OxBlog.

More pessimism from the Beeb’s warblog in the past 24 hours. At 2252 GMT on Monday, David Willis helpfully comments on the status of the campaign:

It seems the army and militia men may well have set out from southern Baghdad with the intention of ambushing the convoys as they approach Baghdad and engage them in urban-style guerrilla warfare—the last thing the British and American forces wanted so early in the campaign.

The last thing? The BBC’s obsession with the alleged nightmare scenario is becoming preposterous, particularly since the worst-case is always what’s happening now. If on Thursday the Iraqis had strung up Saddam, Qusay and Uday with piano wire, the Beeb probably would have called that a nightmare scenario too.

Meanwhile, in today’s news, Jonathan Marcus (1045 GMT) tells us what’s going on in Basra—except, he’s in Qatar:

I think British forces are very reluctant to move into Basra, after all this is a largely Shia city they believed they would be welcomed in.

I’m not even certain that sentence parses. In the absence of any statement why the “British forces are very reluctant to move” in, it’s a complete non-sequitor that only makes sense if you live with Jonathan Marcus’s worldview. My response: “I think Jonathan Marcus is eminently qualified to tell us what’s going on in Basra, after all he’s sitting in Doha with the rest of the international press corps asking stupid questions at press conferences.”

Adrian Mynott (0845 GMT), who actually is where he’s talking about, thinks he has spotted why Umm Qasr is no longer giving the coalition fits:

The Americans tended to be much more confrontational. If they saw problems they tended to retreat and open fire if necessary. Whereas the British approach certainly has been to move in with a small squad, surround the area, and detain a few people. It seems to be working on the face of it.

Moving in, surrounding the area, and detaining a few people sounds pretty confrontational to me. But then again, I’m just a simplisme American.

Rageh Omarr (1310 GMT) fancies himself an expert on military hardware:

From my hotel room which is on the banks of the Tigris River, I can’t see across to the other side of the river bank. It’s an absolutely blinding sandstorm, and I would have thought it would be almost impossible for helicopters to be flying in this weather.

However it hasn’t stopped the bombardments of positions on the outskirts of the city. I’ve been hearing deep explosions and rumbles coming from the south, which must be very very heavy bombs because you can hear them in the here [sic] centre of the city from 20 km away.

That’s right, he apparently thinks we’re dropping precision-guided bombs on Baghdad and its outskirts with helicopters.

On the lighter side, Andrew Gilligan (0635 GMT) is putting his MI5 training to work:

We’ve seen no fewer than six ministers in the last three days. They’re travelling around incognito.

They lock you in the press conference so you can’t see where they’re going, but I sneaked out through the kitchens and saw them making off in a taxi. So they are actually still in Baghdad and still very defiant.

The name’s Gilligan. Andrew Gilligan.

Arthur Silber notes that someone else has gotten in on the war action—our friends at Focus on the Family:

“As soon as the dust settles after the conflict, (USAID will) be sending in the condom pushers and the sex educators,” Mosher said. “There is the view at USAID that we need to remake these societies in the image of Hollywood or in the image of Manhattan. (That) we need to attack the patriarchal family.”

USAID told Family News in Focus that their priority will be to provide basic health services to the Iraqi people, and those services will not include condom distribution. However, the fact that USAID has pushed its pro-condom and pro-abortion views in other countries has many conservative pro-family organizations thinking Iraq will be the next victim.

That’s right: of all the things they possibly could care about, they’re worried that the Iraqis might (gasp) get rubbers from American aid. I’m speechless.

Via Radley Balko.

Andrew Sullivan frequently carries items on the leftist slant of the BBC, Britain’s state-funded (out of a per-household tax on television possession) media outlet. He notes that the Beeb’s bias is finally being discovered on this side of the pond:

I’m somewhat thrilled my little obsession of the past couple months has begun to find new converts. Not exactly my persuasive powers. More due to the fact that suddenly the BBC is being broadcast live to Americans. That funny, subtle sound you hear is of a few thousand jaws dropping. The Mickster suddenly sees what I’ve been going on about. Here’s Rand Simberg too.

People not familiar with the Beeb, or not familiar with how Britons normally speak, may miss some of the subtleties. One that may be of particular interest to my fellow Americans: listen closely, and you’ll find that there are not one, but two BBC pronunciations of “American”: one form is the descriptive, and one form is the “sneer.” The version with the i pronounced as a long “e” is the sneer; the version with the i prounounced as a ə (schwa), as most Americans would pronounce it, is the descriptive.

However, this is a largely subjective approach. Another way to discover BBC bias is to read their reporters’ largely unfiltered weblog entries. For example, Andrew North writes (emphasis mine):

The commanders of this US marine unit here have admitted that they were surprised by just how hard and how determined the Iraqis fought yesterday.

Now, admitted is a pretty loaded word. Rene J. Cappon, in The Word (now retitled as The Associated Press Guide to Newswriting), explicitly warns against using it:

Admit, as in admitting a crime, implies yielding reluctantly under pressure. The company chairman admitted that interest rates had not been factored into production estimates suggests that he came clean after an astute reporter put the thumbscrews to him. In fact, he volunteered the information. Use said or acknowledged.

Peter Hunt, however, won’t be outdone by Andy:

It is the very worst possible news for the British military. They have suffered a series of setbacks and now this—two servicemen missing in southern Iraq.

The very worst possible news? No, I think the very worst possible news would be that Saddam had flattened a Kuwaiti airstrip with a tactical nuke, killing thousands of British and allied servicemen. While the loss of two servicemen is sad, Peter really needs to get some perspective.

Let’s examine some of yesterday’s coverage while we’re at it. Ian Pannell writes:

One expects within 24hrs the pictures of the captured servicemen will be shown on American TV networks.

I don’t think it will change people’s minds about the war because they are rallying behind the troops. But after the war it may raise problems for the president.

Perhaps Ian could enlighten the rest of us as to what problems he expects might come of this, because I’m completely at a loss. Meanwhile, Andrew Gilligan blogs from Baghdad, noting the Iraqis’ “search and rescue” techniques, which Lt. Gen. John Abizad rightly derided in todays’ press conference as leaving “a lot to be desired”:

They combed the banks of the Tigris just opposite the hotel and for a second time today they were burning the shrubbery to flush out any downed enemy pilot.

Odd that Andy would forget to mention the Iraqis that decided to fire their Kalashnikovs into the Tigris, which I suspect was the most vivid memory anyone took from the video footage of the “search.” Fellow BBC reporter Adrian Mynott, somewhere near Umm Qasr, has some issues of his own:

The suggestion that was being made in the planning of this operation—that this may take a day or a few hours to sort our [sic] have proved to be very wrong—this is proving to be a major thorn in the coalition’s side and indeed something of an embarrassment.

Yeah, it was pretty embarrassing to the Allies when they landed in Normandy and they hadn’t captured Paris by the end of the day, too. What is this guy smoking? Adrian’s confusing an optimistic estimate with the benchmark the operation’s supposed to be held to.

Finally, Steve Kingstone takes the biscuit for the most idiotic statement:

As the Pentagon and any US official you speak to sees it, there is confusion in the control and command structure of the Iraqi regime.

We have no way of knowing if that is true but it seems they think the more they say it, it will filter through.

Great mind-reading, Steve. Alternate thesis: perhaps they keep saying it because they believe it to be true.

Now, I won’t go out on a limb and say the Beeb is “pro-Saddam,” or even leftist. I don’t know how many leftists there are in Broadcasting House. At the very least, I think the BBC takes its “mission statement” too seriously, in the sense that they are excessively critical of British government policy, and confusing opposition with objectivity; an instructive comparison is to the U.S.-funded Voice of America, which manages to critically examine the U.S. and allied governments without the exaggeration that characterizes the BBC. However, that does not explain, in and of itself, the BBC’s criticism of America, which suggests a far more sinister explanation: that the BBC sees its mission as transformational rather than informational. If so, a lot of British taxpayers should quite rightly object.

Andrew has some more reader mail today on the topic.

Incidentally, I distinctly remember another, heavily biased entry that alleged that the bombings in Baghdad were deliberately targeted in a line so the international media would see them. It apparently has been deleted since.

That’s what Robyn is now advocating (in comments at Michele’s place) in response to the treatment of U.S. POWs by Iraq. Ian Pannell in the BBC’s warblog is both right and wrong:

One expects within 24hrs the pictures of the captured servicemen will be shown on American TV networks.

I don’t think it will change people’s minds about the war because they are rallying behind the troops. But after the war it may raise problems for the president.

There has been a great deal of anger.

There has been a great deal of anger. But it will only “raise problems for the president” if those responsible, including the Iraqi information minister, aren’t either killed in action or put on trial after the war. The evidence of executions of prisoners of war, if borne out by further investigation, will result in rage against Saddam Hussein and his henchmen. The words of Gen. Wesley Clark in Monday’s Times of London are particularly prescient:

The scenes of those American soldiers held captive and, possibly, executed, will inflame US public opinion; opinion that is already 75 per cent in favor of this operation. Those who are demonstrating against the operation will have to contend with even stronger public sympathies for the troops. This may well strengthen support for the policies that took us to war. As for the leaders of the coalition, President Bush and Tony Blair, there is no turning back. They, of all people, understand clearly that they must press ahead with even more determination.

The Iraqi regime, or what is left of it, has grossly miscalculated if they believe we will have a Mogadishu Moment in response. And when they’re sitting in front of a war crimes trial in Baghdad or Basra in a few months, perhaps those of Saddam’s minions responsible will ponder why they traded their chance at a new life in post-Saddam Iraq for a firing squad.

I’ve added a new feature: you can now change stylesheets using the new options on the right sidebar, and it will persist between visits using cookies. Note that the “run-in” style doesn’t seem to work except in browsers that are highly compliant with CSS level 2, which at the moment means recent Camino™, Mozilla, and Phoenix releases (and possibly Netscape 7). Newer builds of Safari may also produce the desired effects. However, the “serif” and “sans-serif” styles should be fine in any recent browser.

As expected, the run-in look (which I'm now using on my system as a default) works nicely in Safari (and, by extension, KHTML). However, Opera and IE have trouble with the :first-child selector, which stops them from working right. (IE also has trouble with :after.) I've also added a few new things to the stylesheet that produce neat effects in newer browsers.

Also behind the scenes, I've combined the CGI and Publisher versions of the page-handling code. The next step is to improve the administrative interface (which, frankly, sucks at the moment) and convert it to be XHTML-compatible (the front-end already is; it's not served or declared as XHTML for various reasons). After that, I think I'll be ready to put up a public release.

Now, Jacques, this would qualify. As the old phrase goes, the Palestinians never seem to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. First 1991 (which got all of the Palestinians thrown out of Kuwait), then the intifada, then rejecting Oslo, then the 9/11 celebrations (which cost the Palis whatever goodwill they had in America), and now Iraq. You think they'd learn eventually.

Link via Glenn Reynolds.

My NCAA tournament bracket is doing fairly well so far. Thanks to Kate and the gang at The Kitchen Cabinet for hosting the contest!

I don’t have a lot to say about the war today; however, I think it’s a safe bet that the 3rd Infantry Division is much further than the “100 miles inside Iraq” that CNN has been reporting for the last day or so, especially considering that they are still moving.

Well, the so-called “shock and awe” hasn’t been particularly shocking or awesome (although see Michele’s parody thereof), but there’s still some fascinating stuff going on.

• The live footage via satellite phone on the networks is simply stunning, even if it looks like RealVideo circa 1998. Other TV coverage has been hit-or-miss; the BBC (via BBC America) in particular seems to be spending a lot of time in the studio, as is the CBC (via Newsworld International), while the US-based networks seem to have a lot more field reporting.

• Some of the live blogging is great; Sean-Paul Kelley has been running continuous updates, while the Command Post has lots of contributors keeping things up-to-date as well. Particularly interesting is the BBC’s weblog (URL changes daily), which has frequent updates from reporters from the field, while Salam Pax has semi-regular updates from Baghdad (at least until the power goes out).

• Chuck Watson continues to have great satellite images of southern Iraq; he reports that he’s averaging 1000 pageviews/hour.

• The U.S. peace protests have evaporated and the anarchists and vandals have taken over, from everything I can tell. I can’t say I’m particularly surprised.

• The Iraqi regime seems to be falling apart as we speak. Good riddance.

It appears that the battle for Basra is imminent, assuming that the Marines are still tasked for that region. We may yet see some shock and awe before the night is through.

Chuck Watson of Shoutin’ Across the Pacific has been assembling NOAA weather satellite imagery of the Iraq region for the past few months. Today, he notes the sudden appearance of new smoke plumes near Basra in southeastern Iraq, near the Kuwaiti border.

Also of interest may be the continuous updates on Sean-Paul Kelley’s website (which I inadvertently omitted from my previous post).

CNN is reporting at 10:00 CST that the Pentagon has verified that there are two oil wells on fire in southern Iraq. Advantage: Chuck!

Dima (now safely ensconsed in his new, Movable Type-powered digs) is having trouble deciding how best to cover the war in his blog. I think, for the most part, blogging won’t be all that important in the early stages, unless there are any “embedded bloggers” out there (ground-pounders like LT Smash are in a good position to report, but they have more important jobs to do), although a bit of live blogging of key events may be useful. It seems to me that analysis is probably the best approach, for two reasons:

1. Traffic: Most blogs don’t draw enough traffic for “quickie” updates to be all that useful to readers. While you might be able to build traffic by focusing on updates, I’m not sure there’s that big an unsatiated demand out there for it. If there is such demand, I think VodkaPundit and Glenn Reynolds already have it covered.

2. Perspective: Especially during the early days of the war, Fox News, CNN, the BBC, the major networks, and even the newspapers are likely to be giving very superficial, “what’s happening this instant” coverage. Bloggers may be able to take a step back and give some more thoughtful commentary, or tie some disparate threads together.

But, of course, I could be completely wrong. (Just now, for example, I’m resisting the urge to liveblog Captain Combover’s remarks.)

The new blog PeakTalk is the weblog of an expat living in western Canada. He's got a great post on the failure of Jean Chrétien and the Liberals to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their biggest trading partner and military protector. As he says:

If you still believe, in spite of the all strong arguments noted above, that after 12 years of arguments and sanctions it is not right to attack Iraq, you may very well make that point, but you lose all credibility if you fail to support your closest friends that are willing to stand up to the source of evil that is confronting the world. With American, British and Australian soldiers likely to die in the next few days, the least you could do as a friend and ally is to express some level of support to your friends and especially to your closest neighbor who also happens to be your major customer, in this case buying 85% of everything that you export abroad. And not only that, that southern neighbor also provides for your security as you have miserably neglected to do anything about your own defense and you have indicated a considerable degree of unwillingness to integrate security arrangements for a North American perimeter that might have benefited the security of your and your neighbor's citizens. The legacy of Prime Minister Chrétien is that he has relegated the status of a once powerful nation like Canada to that of a completely irrelevant bystander that even in times of acute danger can not bring itself to support those that are willing to contain the danger and are taking on the dirty work.

There's lots more. In particular, the failure of the Chrétien government to cooperate in creating a so-called “secure perimeter” has been a remarkably short-sighted development that has set back the development of NAFTA and stalled the integration of the North American economy, hurting economic growth in both the United States and Canada.

In terms of Canadian domestic politics, I am not as confident as PeakTalk that this will undermine the Liberal government. Due to the highly fractured nature of Canadian politics, it is hard to imagine any credible alternative to the Liberals emerging in the short term, at least until the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservatives (Tories) come to some sort of arrangement and are able to campaign effectively in Ontario. On the other hand, far stranger things have happened in Canadian politics—the wipe-out of the Tories in 1993, for example—and after a decade in office, Chrétien is overdue for being turfed out onto the street.

Patrick Carver has kindly laid down a Fisking of this rather idiotic column in Tuesday’s Daily Mississippian.