Posted Saturday, March 22
Tapped gets a dig in at the coalition of the willing:

(Tapped is sure that, when our men and women in uniform are under fire on the sands of Iraq, they will take moral sustenance from the support of such mighty nations as Afghanistan, Albania, Azerbaijan, Colombia, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia -- are they a country now? -- Nicaragua and the Philippines.)

This would seem to be the diplomatic equivalent of resume-padding.

This resembles the complaint made by Robert Scheer (and I thought also voiced by one of the Democratic hopefuls, but now google fails me) that it was made up of a bunch of countries "you could buy on eBay". (via Andrew Sullivan)

"Diplomatic resume-padding"--fair enough. The eBay thing is a cheap shot. Italy's reserve price will have to be at least equivalent to its GDP of 1.27 trillion. We all know that Italians are too caught up in their scheming, triple-crossing domestic politics to punch at their weight on the international scene, but having the world's sixth-largest economy has got to count for something in this analysis of Great Powers.

And that's the problem with this type of criticism, even though it is funny (hey, my own husband was doing it a few days ago). Once writers on the left start to say that we don't have to give much credence to the views of little po-dunk countries, they're on thin ice when it comes to promoting the legitimacy of the U.N. and other multilateral institutions. Taking this complaint at face value really means you have to say that most of the other Great Powers (along with their rinky-dink "allies") oppose action taken by the U.S. and Britain (along with our rinky-dink "allies"). It doesn't, at this point, become very compelling to point out that the other Great Powers have a lot more rinky-dink allies, since we've already established the premise that the Great Powers mail in the tops of cereal boxes to get these countries. In fact, the whole eBay/these are just joke countries routine could slide pretty effortlessly into the traditional neo-con complaints about the U.N., i.e.: Libya is chairing the human rights commission, we have to pretend we care what Cameroon thinks, etc. etc. Even worse, it could become a Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel thing: "Estonia? Huh-huyck! Your country talks funny!" I know Tapped doesn't want to go there.
Posted Thursday, March 20
Well, it started. That's a relief. Can it be over now, please? I felt so nervous and fidgetty all day that I had to do something. Feel nervous? Here are my useful suggestions:

1. Reorganize the toyboxes. Know-it-all childcare books always recommend that you leave just 1/3 of the toys out at any given time and then rotate them for excitement and freshness. Who ever gets around to doing boring things like that? Me. I even collected all the alphabetical animals from the Noah's ark toy and put them in their pockets. The unicorn is a stretch. And what the heck African gazelle-type creature starts with "x", anyway?

2. Read the whole internet. Warning: this will make you feel more nervous.

3. Get things together to do your taxes. April's just around the corner! If you approve of the war on Iraq, you can pay with a warm glow inside. "Maybe the cruise missile I helped pay for will kill Saddam!" If you oppose it, now is the time to take lots of sketchy deductions and ostentationsly check that public-financing for elections box in the hopes of electing Howard Dean next time.

4. Work on home furnishing projects. You know you want to make pillow covers and roman shades out of that vintage fabric you bought a while back, right? Now's the time to get cracking! (Note: just shuffling things around and measuring stuff is OK too.)

5. Clean your dresser! Bacteria breeds in old eye makeup--why not throw that stuff away? You could mix the ends of old nail polishes together to make cool new colors!

6. Make indian food. Lots of it. Naan isn't that hard.

7. Freak out completely.

Did we win yet?
Posted Thursday, March 20
45 countries in the 'coalition of the willing'.

The list of countries supporting war includes 15 that do not want to be publicly identified, a U.S. State Department official said.

Except Qatar got 'outed' on CNN about 10 seconds after I heard that on BBC. Doh.

Weird.

Is there any precedent for anonymous international relations on such a large scale? (Nice country you got dere. Shame if somethin' wuz ta happen to it.) Are we planning to put these countries in the witness protection program, like so many fidgety, flipped Mafia accountants? Move them to Arizona? Let them start new lives? (Will we be seeing the outlines of their borders on TV, blurred to protect their identities; nervous silhouettes, urgently interviewed by journalists?)

Aw, hell with it. Not a joking matter. All the best to our troops in the field and the huddled residents of Baghdad in their homes. I'm lucky to have a safe bed to crawl into. Right. Now.
Posted Wednesday, March 19
Watched the Commons debate on BBC. Had never really seen Blair in action. Really very impressive. The wife leaned over and whispered: there's Gordon Brown. Why, yes, he does look like his Economist caricature. I scrutinized him for Borimir-like behavioral tics: 'the ring should be mine.' But, no; Gordon just looked like he'd had two drinks today, and five every other day for the last 15 years. The BBC commentator had the worst teeth ever: a piano that kept trying to leap out the window of his mouth and crash to the ground. It was held in place by two carious, stalactite-like descending dentata that played chopsticks over and over on the heaving, roiling oral keyboard, hammering out the view that Tony Blair was, and Ian Duncan Smith was not, a terribly impressive speaker. No American network would let this man within 10 feet of a camera if he was the wisest commentator who ever commentated. And Ian Duncan Smith, may I say - meaning no contradiction of the judgement of the gentleman from the BBC - is a better speaker than almost anyone in the American Congress. And Tony Blair is obviously head and shoulders above any currently prominent American politician. And George Bush could not survive for five minutes in the wainscotted pirhana tank that is the British House of Commons. Cultural differences. And they redound to the credit of the British. Mental acuity, resulting in precise verbal expression is more valuable in a speaker than good dental work.

All of which by way of saying: I have nothing intelligent to say about this war we are going to fight. I hope, I hope, all goes well.
Posted Tuesday, March 18
Here in Singapore we are - like everyone - waiting for the shooting to start; plus glancing nervously at GoogleNews every couple hours to see how the SARS count up Hong Kong way is going. Up it goes. (But here's the spookiest link.) Let's hope it stops going up. I really hope it stops. It appears to have levelled off in Singapore. Cross our fingers for tomorrow's news. I have a wife with asthma and a history of respiratory ailments. (I was very proud to be able to move her to the tropics where she'd be safe.) I have a two-year old daughter. She is the tipmost taper on the candelabrum of cuteness. I can't vouch for her robust immune system. This is nervous-making stuff.

A big part of my paranoid problem with all this is that I have no good conception of why new viruses like this one fail to infect everyone. I basically have the Prell Shampoo folk theory of infection. (Remember the ads?) 'And they tell two friends. And they tell two friends. And so on. And so on.' Only now the verb is less friendly.

Judging from the fact that we aren't all dead - long before we were born, for that matter - there's got to be something fundamentally wrong with this folk theory of mine. I keep telling myself that epidemiology obviously doesn't work that way. And it obviously doesn't.

The Chinese are assuring everyone everything is fairly peachy in Guangdong, where it all appears to have started. Their patient zero - very evocatively titled 'du huang' (poison emperor) - only took out 300-odd sick and very few dead. So they say. In cosmic terms - compared, say, with the 20 million dead in the 1918 influenza epidemic - I can live with that. I hope.
Posted Monday, March 17
Lawyers have to do their best for their clients, even unpromising ones who think they are God. This is a bit of a stretch, though. From the NYT, via TalkLeft:

Long [Smart kidnapping suspect Brian David Mitchell's attorney] suggested that giving his client a light sentence could encourage kidnappers to keep their captives alive.

``If we can somehow set up some structure where the message gets out that if you bring the girl back alive, that there's some kind of commutation of the sentence, we may be much better off as a society,'' Long said.

Right. We're way ahead of you there, Mr. Long, which is why we've already created the incentive of not getting charged with murder. I'm not sure the message has gotten out, though.
Posted Sunday, March 16
Well, I guess that answers the torture question. A few choice quotes from a WaPo article full of practically exuberant in-the-know "sources" telling us Al Qaeda is on the ropes:

In addition, Mohammed began providing information to his CIA captors soon after his arrest, officials said. Some of the information is unverifiable, said one U.S. government official, but other information is "things we didn't know and are very glad we know now." Mohammed is also providing translations of coded letters found among his belongings, U.S. sources said.

Providing translations of coded letters, you say. How...helpful.

Also, with a handful of other high-ranking al Qaeda members imprisoned and undergoing CIA interrogation, the information "can be bounced off five other senior guys now anxious to tell us what they know," said one knowledgeable intelligence expert.

Anxious to tell us what they know? Sure, we can bounce all kinds of things off these guys.

I feel queasy about my own reaction to this, because I'm not hopping mad about it. Instead, I am glad that we are getting the information, don't hunger for the details, and at bottom don't seem to care that these men are being tortured by my government. I don't feel happy or proud about this, but there it is.

I have been in the embrace hypocrisy school up till now, though Eugene Volokh doesn't approve. That is, I think torture should be very illegal and people who practice it should get in big trouble, secure in the knowledge that in a genuine ticking nuclear bomb in Manhattan scenario Dirty Harry will get off via jury nullification. I think such a scenario is very implausible and that explicitly liscencing torture for use in that case would lead to the government torturing people willy-nilly. (Make that nilly.) I think torture is immoral and evil and like Eve Tushnet I have been shocked at how many people are willing to condone it, often in a casual way. It is a big deal.

The fact that I would support the use of torture in the ticking nuke scenario never really moved me that much, because we all know it is possible to construct hypothetical utilitarian justifications for just about anything. I will go on the record as saying that if hyper-intelligent aliens turn up with the demonstrable power to destroy the earth and all its inhabitants, and they say they will either do so or accept the body of my child, then I will kill my child. But does it follow that I think killing my child is somehow OK? Does social services need to come take her away from me now? Obviously not.

But here we are with Khalid Sheik Mohammed, and though he may not have control of any ticking nuclear bombs, he might well know about another September 11-level plan already in motion, and almost certainly knows about quite a few smaller plans, where smaller means like the Bali bombing. Can we please change the subject now? And not to that mysterious respiratory disease that's already struck Singapore? (I can't decide whether to make Zoë stay inside and watch Teletubbies for the next two weeks.) Wait, was that why no one but us was in the pool today? F@#%!