Here’s one of those things that you come across during random surfing (apologies for having lost track of where I came across the link) that just makes you lean back in your chair and say, “whoa.” Anyway: HumanDescent’s page at b3ta.com. Update: Oh; the real site of the user in question, with even more wackiness, is here: HumanDescent.

Time for the morning batch of Smirking Chimp-derived articles about the administration’s WMD problem. From Jules Witcover: Not buying revisionist sales job on Iraqi weapons. Richard Gwyn: Bush’s weapons of mass deception. John Prados: Hoodwinked. Rupert Cornwell: Accountability missing in Bushland.

And a bonus link: From Salon: Can Bush be toppled? It’s a collection of Democratic pols weighing in on Bush’s beatability next year. The article itself is only borderline worth enduring the lame Microsoft ad to get the “one-day pass”, but the illustration of a Bush statue being pulled down before cheering crowds is definitely worth a look. Heh. Kudos to Bob Watts, Salon’s art director.

The Christian Science Monitor has a thought-provoking piece on how Fearless Leader, who once mocked Democrats for their nation-building proclivities, has managed to commit us to not one, not two, but three such projects, all at the same time: Building three nations at once (referring to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine).

Bush has high hopes for the last one, at least, despite the events of the last few days (see this piece from the BBC, for example: Bush upbeat on Mid-East peace plan). Of course he does; he’s still in that first manic flush of energy, when he believes that his innate Texan directness can cut through all those thorny complications that have thwarted previous efforts. We haven’t gotten to the ugly stage when his political handlers begin to separate him from the process, to disassociate him from the emerging failure, to shift the blame, to change the subject, to raise the National Terror Alert Level to REALLY, REALLY BRIGHT ORANGE or maybe even PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN BURGANDY.

Sigh. Someone clearly needs to stop obsessing about this stuff for the day, and take the kids bird watching.

From Danthar comes word of this droll link: The 3rd Annual Nigerian Email Conference. Heh. See you there!

The AP has published the results of a preliminary accounting of the number of non-combatant fatalities in Iraq: AP tallies 3,240 civilian deaths in Iraq.

The approach they used makes this very much a lower boundary, rather than a complete count. What they did was to go to about half the hospitals in the country, including most of the largest ones, and do interviews and examine death certificates. People whose bodies never made it to a hospital didn’t get counted. People who died in hospitals that didn’t distinguish between combatant and non-combatant casualties didn’t get counted. People who died before March 20 or after April 20 didn’t get counted. Overall, this sounds to me like it matches up pretty well with the earlier estimates of between 5,000 and 10,000 civilian dead.

That’s a lot of innocent dead people. I remember driving my daughter to school on September 11, 2001, and having her ask me on the way why it was such a big deal that those buildings had collapsed. I told her, “Because when they collapsed they were full of thousands of people.” Seeing the realization dawn on her 10-year-old face of what that meant isn’t the worst of my memories from that day, but it’s one that has stayed with me.

So hey, congratulations, America. In our fear and anger over those events, we’ve managed to inflict a comparable toll on the innocents of one country (Afghanistan) whose leadership arguably had some measure of responsibility for the events of that day, and a toll two to three times higher on the innocents of another country (Iraq) whose leadership arguably had nothing whatsoever to do with the events of that day.

So can our national scared/angry-toddler routine be over already? Have enough 5-year-olds had their bodies turned into bloody hamburger to appease our collective reptilian hindbrain?

Sigh. Thanks to janus/onan for the link. I guess.

From British tabloid The Sun, courtesy of Daypop: Face up to the facts, Mel. Not Michael Jackson yet, by a long shot, but yeah, scary.

It’s interesting to watch the process play out. Isolated bitching is turning into a steady chorus: Bush and the members of his team lied shamelessly to exaggerate the Iraqi WMD threat in the months before the war. Those making these claims don’t just have a “smoking gun,” they have a whole smoking arsenal.

Bush, on the other hand, has bupkis, and has begun the process of backtracking. Answering questions during one of those Reagan-esque not-quite-a-press-conference exchanges that allows him to pick and choose a question or two to answer, then feign deafness to follow-ups, Bush said yesterday he remains “absolutely convinced” that we will uncover evidence that Iraq had a “weapons program.” Not weapons, mind you, but a weapons program. He used the phrase three times in one brief response. From the LA Times: Bush tempers talk of weapons.

Right. But see, that wasn’t what you said, repeatedly, emphatically, and without qualification, in selling the war.

Checking in with the columnists: From Robert Scheer: Bad Iraq data from start to finish. From Paul Krugman: Who’s accountable? And from Geov Parrish: The impeachable offense.

Jay Bookman has a piece at Information Clearing House (again, suggested by Glen & Pilar), that does a really good job of laying out the background of the PNAC folks, and explaining just why Bush might have chosen to invade Iraq: The president’s real goal in Iraq.

It’s not as easy to reduce to a picket sign as those “blood for oil” and “he tried to kill my daddy” explanations, but it has the benefit of actually accounting for the available evidence (or, in the case of the WMD justification, the available non-evidence).

Again, this particular piece won’t give any shocking revelations to anyone who has been paying attention, but it does a really nice job of “connecting the dots.” (Heh. We can use that expression, too.)

Here’s a nice smoking-gun piece from Fair.org, courtesy of those excellent link-suggesters Glen & Pilar: Dissent, disloyalty & double standards. Basically shows how people like Hannity, Limbaugh, and Savage apply radically different standards for what constitutes “patriotic dissent” and what constitutes “treasonous backstabbing of our men and women in uniform,” based on which party’s president ordered the troops into harm’s way.

Not like this is a shocking revelation or anything, but it’s good to get the examples down in black and white for those few who might be both unaware of this kind of deception and capable of being influenced by having it exposed.

Here’s a whimsical little headline I saw on NTK today. I’m no expert on the editorial practices of major news sites, so I don’t know if it was pulled from MSNBC due to a brief moment of good judgement, or if that’s just policy for AP stories that are a week old — but god bless news.google.com for pointing out plenty of other places that carry the same story.

Dipping back into some of the militarily-informed commentary I was feeding on steadily during the Iraq war proper, I came across several links to this piece, by Phillip Carter writing in the Washington Monthly: Faux Pax Americana. Basically argues that yeah, Rumsfeld’s small, agile, high-tech invasion force can indeed defeat an enemy on the cheap. But it can’t necessarily hold the resulting conquered territory afterward.

On the shelf of nearly every Army officer, you’ll find a book by retired Col. T.R. Fehrenbach on the Korean conflict titled This Kind of War. At the end of World War II, confronted by the military revolution brought on by the atomic bomb, America cut its military from a wartime high of 16 million down to a few hundred thousand. Bombs and airplanes–not soldiers–would now protect America’s shores and cities. After fighting as a grunt in Korea, Fehrenbach thought otherwise. Transformation was great for the Air Force and Navy, but for the Army and Marine Corps, the essential nature of warfare remained unchanged.

“You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life,” wrote Fehrenbach. “But if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud.” It’s time Don Rumsfeld brushed up on his Fehrenbach.

There’s a storyline that ties these sorts of criticisms together, and I think it’s an important one in terms of working against Bush in the 2004 election. People like me are already going to vote against Bush, at least if we can avoid sinking into depressed apathy. But the swing voters who will actually decide the election aren’t going to care about a lot of the stuff I talk about here. Bush lied? BFD. They want someone who can protect the country against a scary world. So do I, for that matter.

So talk about the combination of arrogance and naivete that leads people like Bush and Rumsfeld to ignore the warnings of the career military types when deciding when and how to go to war. Weird ultralefties who froth about cabals and conspiracy theories are easy to dismiss. Generals with decades of military experience who question Bush & Co.’s ability to avoid Vietnam-style quagmires may get more of a hearing.

Robert Kagan has a column in the Washington Post that makes fun of the notion that Bush lied about Iraqi WMDs: A plot to deceive? It’s clever, and entertaining, but I think it’s basically an example of the straw man fallacy. Those claiming Bush lied are not arguing that Saddam never had any weapons of mass destruction. They’re saying that Bush misrepresented ambiguous evidence as being much more certain than it actually was, in order to build support for an immediate invasion, as opposed to the slower approach represented by things like sanctions and continued UN weapons inspections. Which, as far as I can see, is a legitimate criticism. True, it’s not as bad as if Bush had invented the idea of an imminent Iraqi WMD threat out of thin air, but it’s still dishonest, and needs to be looked at carefully by anyone being asked to believe what Bush says in the future.

Here’s a provocative piece from Steve Gilliard at Daily Kos: Is Bush lying? Interestingly, and, I think, insightfully, Gilliard thinks the answer is no. In Gilliard’s attempts to make sense of Bush’s actions with respect to Iraqi WMDs, he comes to the conclusion that rather than being a liar, it is far more likely that Bush (and Rumsfeld) have simply been played for marks by adept conman Ahmad Chalabi.

Today’s New York Times contains the following editorial: Was the intelligence cooked?

Righty bloggers have no doubt already swung into action, linking the “idiocy” of the editorial to the same muddled thinking that gave us Jayson Blair and the Raines resignation. But I wish they could forget the messenger for a minute, and concentrate on the message. It’s important. It’s also clear, unambiguous, and untainted by elliptical distortion.

Maybe it was just reading those accounts of Leo Strauss’s appeal for an actual questioning dialog, one that seeks to illuminate the truth, rather than the kind of partisan sophistry I’ve been wading through lately, but I’m getting tired of people whose claims of certainty increase rather than diminish when the evidence supporting their position starts eroding.

More detail comes from the Times’ Week in Review piece by Steven R. Weisman: Truth is the first casualty. Is credibility second?

Update: The Washington Post takes a similar, if more restrained, position in its own lead editorial today: Hunting Iraq’s weapons.

Actually a fairly boring article in the classic gee-whiz mode, but I can’t resist linking to it. From CNN: New research aims to catch liars in the act.

Despite a BS in political science from a major university (earned 20 years ago, though), I’d never heard of Leo Strauss until his name started being brought up by critics of the neocons in the Bush administration, reputed to be Straussians all. I still don’t know much about Strauss, but the following pair of pieces, found on some random righty blog I’ve since misplaced, argue that letting Bush’s critics color my perceptions of the man might not be the best idea.

Anyway, some of the things said here about Strauss sounded interesting. Proceed at your own risk: From the NYT, an op/ed piece by Struass’s daughter: The Real Leo Strauss. And from the Jerusalem Post’s Bret Stephens: Hands up, Straussians!

Just to add to the train wreck of journalistic integrity that has occurred as a result of Wolfowitz’s comments recently, I’ve discovered that another media player has decided to one-up Guardian by simply ADDING quotes to what he said!! This interesting blogger reveals Pravda’s take on Wolfowitz’s comments. Also included is some additional explanation (or backpedaling/damage control) by Guardian on their error regarding this story.

Here’s a fun link, courtesy of Aaron/Hiro: Girls teach teen cyber gab to FBI agents. Update: And now, thanks to the wonders of ymatt, a new topic icon! Woo!

Keith Burgess-Jackson shows off his philosophy skillz in Bush’s critics meet the logic police. His main point is that Bush’s having lied about why he was going to war is not relevant to an analysis of whether the war was justified.

Either there is a justification for the war (objectively speaking) or there is not. If there is, then it doesn’t matter what motivated President Bush. If there isn’t, then it doesn’t matter what motivated President Bush. Either way, it doesn’t matter what motivated President Bush.

There’s an interesting game he’s playing here. Yes, it’s true that the question of whether or not Bush lied about his motivations is orthogonal to the question of whether or not the war was justified.

We can construct a matrix of possibilities:

If you ask any given person whether the war was justified, and whether they think Bush lied about his motivations for waging it, you can map which of the four sectors that person falls into, in terms of which sector they believe accurately describes reality: Sector I (Bush didn’t lie, war was justified), II (lied/justified), III (didn’t lie/not justified), or IV (lied/not justified). War supporters would land in sectors I or II; opponents would get III or IV.

Any one of the four sectors is a legitimate contender at the outset. What Burgess-Jackson is arguing is that the mere fact that Bush was known to have lied wouldn’t mean that everyone automatically had to move to sector IV; there could still be a safe haven for war supporters in sector II.

Which is true enough. But it kind of misses the point. The articles claiming Bush has been dishonest aren’t only about the horizontal dimension of the graph (didn’t lie/lied). They’re also about the vertical dimension of the graph (justified/not justified). See, Bush’s stated motives have basically been a laundry list of every conceivable justification for going to war. If a bunch of those justifications turn out not to be grounded in reality, then yeah, it will mean Bush was probably lying, and the partisan folks at the New York Times or the Guardian are going to make hay with that. But it will also weigh heavily in any rational determination about whether the war was justified. Not because Bush was lying per se, but because of what it was he was lying about (namely, the evidence he supposedly used in making his own decision about whether the war was justified).

It’s significant, too, that there are war supporters who aren’t even seriously considering whether the war was justified. They’re simply taking Bush’s word for it when he says that it was. In a sense, such people are guilty of the same logical fallacy Burgess-Jackson accuses the liberal media of: conflating the question of Bush’s honesty with that of the war’s justification, albeit in the opposite direction. (I believe Bush is telling the truth; therefore, the war is justified.)

I suspect Burgess-Jackson of intentionally obscuring these points. Still, it’s an interesting argument that he makes. Thanks to those clever partisans at The Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web page for the link.

Here are a couple of really scary Steve Gilliard pieces at Daily Kos: No end in sight and Iraq Sunni cleric calls for jihad. He predicts Iraq will be in a full-fledged civil war before September.

We are facing a total collapse of our Iraq policy not within years or months, but weeks. If the pace of combat increases and we have to hunt down guerrillas through every village, and deal with platoon and company-sized ambushes, we will be fighting to hang on.

I think this could get very Vietnam-esque. Would we stay, and pay that terrible price, or leave, and watch Iraq fall to one anti-US faction or another?

The person elected president in 2004, whoever he or she is, is going to need to have a plan for dealing with this. And it seems increasingly possible to me that that person is going to be a Democrat.