War with DPRK Watch:

Open sources, including the Straits Times of Singapore, are reporting that North Korea is doing pre-nuke bomb tests and has probably nearly finished reprocessing its plutonium. This confirms that we are not even a year away from a fully nuclear North Korea. At this point, there is probably nothing but war that can stop them from going fully nuclear. This is from the Sydney Morning Herald:

North Korea has conducted 70 high-explosive tests linked to nuclear weapons development, South Korea's spy chief was quoted as saying last night.

The claim was made just hours after the Prime Minister, John Howard, began reining in Australia's tough talk on North Korea, amid warnings that military threats could provoke a nuclear confrontation.

A senior source in Seoul said that Ko Young-Koo, a National Intelligence Service director, had told parliament: 'We have also noticed high-explosive tests being conducted in Yongdok district in Gusong City in [the north-western province of] North Pyongyang and we have been keeping track of the movement."

He also said that North Korea had apparently begun reprocessing spent nuclear fuel rods, a program that could yield enough plutonium for half-a-dozen atomic bombs within months.

John Howard, Prime Minister of Australia, spoke to the matter yesterday. He uses hopeful language, though this may be because his nation is wary (and weary) of supporting US-led wars:

Australia's Prime Minister, John Howard says he is still hopeful the stand-off over North Korea's nuclear weapons program can be solved diplomatically.

But Mr Howard says North Korea's statement that it is willing to go to war is worrying.

Mr Howard says Australia will join America in military training exercises in september to fine tune skills needed for the interception of vessels suspected of carrying nuclear weapons.

"Clearly the training that will take place over the next few weeks will mean that different countries, including Australia, are ready if we do decided to do that," he said.

Australia agreed on Thursday to contribute forces to interdiction training exercises at a meeting of the 11-nation Proliferation Security Initiative, in the Australian state of Queensland.

North Korea has said it's ready for war if America resorts to force.

Lied? Apparently not.

I've been giving my friends on the left a lot of leeway with the "Bush lied about..." claims that they have been making. After all, Bush is a politician, and in my experience, politicians lie a lot. Even the ones who don't lie do change their minds on matters that they had previously appeared to consider points of principle. So, I've been willing to consider that it was not impossible that Bush had stretched the truth a bit on this or that matter.

Even so, I've found him to be a relatively honest politician: in fact, I would say stunningly honest given that he occupies the Presidency. Normally Presidents have to be very dodgy because they know things that they can't say; and they can't say it because it's based on collected intelligence, which has to be treated gingerly because the lives and welfare of agents are on the line. In spite of that, Bush has been pretty straightforward about what he thinks.

Take the Axis of Evil, for example. When Bush linked Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, the response from the left was "What? Those are totally unrelated evils. You obviously are an idiot." (Actually, many of the folks on the left went a bit further, and argued that there was no such thing as evil. This space will treat that particular brand of foolishness another day.) Even from the right, the response was, "Obviously this is the scoring of a rhetorical point rather than a literal axis, since Iran and Iraq hate each other, and North Korea is on the other side of the world."

But ever since then it's proven out that Bush was just telling us, as straight as he could, what the intelligence showed. North Korean missiles have been sold to Iran, aiding the development of Iran's own weapons program, including the missile that can hit Israel. The DPRK and Iran have openly coordinated their nuclear programs. The Iran/Iraq frontier appears to have been far more porous that most of us believed, with groups like Ansar al-Islam operating on both sides and giving aid to al Qaeda. The smuggling of Iraqi oil out through Iran appears to have opened secret, but real, ties between those governments. We've recently uncovered a huge cache of documents belonging to the Mukhabarat, Iraqi intelligence, and I expect them to demonstrate far more serious and numerous ties than have heretofore emerged.

So, this claim that Bush lied about Iraq has to be put into a fence. Based on what is now open source, we can say that Bush's claims about Iraq have all borne out except the WMD claims. Those claims were beliefs shared by the United Nations, which had 18 Security Council resolutions on the subject and which wasted years and fortunes begging Hussein to let them inspect. The nations on the Security Council have some of the best intelligence services in the world, so we have to assume that the evidence on WMD was pretty emphatic. All intelligence is speculative, but the degree of unity of opinion here is remarkable.

So if it wasn't WMD as a whole that Bush lied about, then we have to limit ourselves to nuclear weapons. But here again, Bush's claims were only that he believed Hussein was preparing to reconstitute his nuclear program, not that there was a reconstituted nuclear program. That is the kind of thing intelligence can simply be wrong about. So we must draw the fence tighter and tighter to find an area in which we can clearly say that Bush lied.

And at last, I can't find one. The area that the left has focused upon is the Niger uranium. But Bush's claim in the State of the Union address was that the British had warned him of the purchase. While the CIA's document has been demonstrated to be a forgery, the British sources--we still don't know exactly what they were--are still supported by their government. Tony Blair, while playing down WMD generally, spoke to the Niger issue yesterday:

Mr Blair stood by the claim in the September dossier that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger to make nuclear weapons. He insisted the claim was based on different intelligence to the forged documents which have been dismissed by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Mr Blair said: "This is terribly important, because this has again been elevated into something that really is not warranted by the actual facts. There was an historic link between Niger and Iraq. In the 1980s Iraq purchased somewhere in the region of 200 tons of uranium from Niger. The evidence that we had that the Iraqi government had gone back to try to purchase further amounts of uranium from Niger did not come from these so-called forged documents. They came from separate intelligence. In so far as our intelligence services are concerned, they stand by that."

Now that leaves us here: Bush claimed the British had told him about Iraq seeking to buy uranium from Niger, and the British did just that. If you're going to pick a foreign intelligence service to trust, MI6 is one of the better ones. Even if Bush didn't believe them, he was still telling the truth when he said that the British had passed us that piece of information.

I think there is nothing much more to be said. InstaPundit, sage of Knoxville, has the story of the CIA officer who allegedly told Bush that the Niger documents were forgeries. What turns out to be a forgery is the CIA officer himself, who never worked for the Agency. There were other sources, apparently including the real CIA, who agreed that these documents were forgeries--but there is still the unseen British intelligence. Evaluating that as good or bad is not possible except as an act of faith.

That really is where we finish the inquiry: with faith. At the last you can only believe Bush is a liar if you choose to believe it. There is no evidence to support the claim. At the same time, you can't see the British intelligence he seems to have chosen to trust. So, there's no evidence to exonerate him either. I am going to choose to believe the man, simply because his record in the past has been one of openness with the American people on matters of national security, far more openness than I would have required or expected of a President. I don't see that we can move farther on this question unless new evidence emerges.

More on Iran:

Iranian agents may be behind the jamming of all US satellite transmissions to Iran. Neither private nor government signal is getting through. This report suggests the agents may be based in Latin America.

Iran:

Although I'm not sure why I would follow the advice of Andrew Sullivan, I will include a link to Iranian issues today, via Arts & Letters Daily. Here it is: The Backwardness of Islam. I must say that I am myself a friend to Islam, much as I am to Christianity. Nevertheless, there are some ideas here that Muslims will have to consider, especially as concerns market economies.

Arguing Against Heroism:

I am always surprised at how many people want to take up a stick to beat the notion of heroism. It seems to me that nothing could be more necessary to a peaceful human future than the heroic model. This has been argued extensively in the past on this page, but here's another chance to take it up again.

From J. Cohen's "Medieval Masculinities":

"As a political mythology, heroism is surprisingly quite poor" (Peter van Heusden): it offers a mode of behavior, but by making its best representative more than human (hypermasculine, sanctified, even perhaps divine), it disallows that mode's successful repetition. The necessary end for heroism is death, even if that death is construed as a valorization through "glory" of the preceding life; and so heroism as a gender code has built within its deep structure the inevitability of its own passing, and to a degree, its own failure.

"The necessary end for heroism is death[.]" Glad we've got that straight. Now, tell me--what kind of life has a different ending?

Grandma:

Not my own dear grandmother, but a heroic woman nonetheless:

Grandma set broken bones, dug lead out of men that had been shot, and when a smallpox epidemic raged in and around the sleepy village of La Luz, Grandma quarantined some houses to use as "pest houses" and then vaccinated dozens of La Luz residents. She used a vaccine she personally extracted from calves she had inoculated with virus of the disease.
Not everyone in La Luz was willing to be vaccinated. Grandma's technique was to scrape then slash criss-cross an area of skin on her patient's left arm with a sharp knife opening a wound of at least an inch and a quarter in diameter. She then would rub her vaccine into the bleeding wound. During 1898 and 1899 people who were vaccinated in this way did not come down with smallpox, while many who refused vaccination did.
In 1900, there were no corner drugstores in La Luz--the nearest was in the new town of Alamogordo, miles away by horseback. So Grandma kept a medicine chest of old frontier standbys--quinine, turpentine, coal oil and whiskey.

Magna Carta:

Here is what almost passes as a conservative case for radical socialism, if such a thing can be imagined. It references the Magna Carta as a document that lays the foundation for the common right of access to the forests. It's an argument worth considering for those of us who tend to be private-property advocates. It's worth remembering that private property has its limitations in the American tradition too, especially where corporations come into play: James Jackson's wrath against the Yazoo land conspiracy, for example, was entirely American. Jackson, hero of the American revolution and "Prince of Duellist," was enraged by the Yazoo land law precisely because it stripped from the citizens of Georgia the chance to be small land holders, yeoman-farmers of the sort he and Thomas Jefferson prized. It may be that this point ought to apply in the Amazon, too. It's worth considering.

Anti-American:

Did you know that the current stream of anti-American thought has its roots in Nazism? Did you know that there were four previous streams of anti-American thought, the first of which was put down by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson? For my more philosophical readers, here is a link to an article on the history of anti-Americanism.

Ah, yes, California:

The Golden State screws us again:

Shorn of LaLaLand [that is, California], in May America would actually have seen a net gain in employment - an extra 4,500 jobs - but then the monthly figures from California came in - another 21,500 layoffs - and drove the national figure down again. Meanwhile, if you drive in California, your vehicle registration just tripled: if it was 200 bucks last year, it's 600 now.

Thanks to Mr. Steyn for that.

Ah, the Turks:

On April 24th, US forces captured a dozen Turkish commandos who had come to Iraq to cause mayhem:

The Turkish Special Forces team put up no resistance though a mean arsenal was discovered in their cars, including a variety of AK-47s, M4s, grenades, body armor and night vision goggles. "They did not come here with a pure heart," says U.S. brigade commander Col. Bill Mayville.

Now another team has been caught. This time they are rumored to have been planning to carry out an assassination:

Turkish government officials said about 100 American troops raided a Turkish special forces office in the northern Iraqi city of Sulaymaniyah, detained 11 soldiers, and took them to Kirkuk.

The Hurriyet newspaper said the detentions followed reports that Turks were planning to kill a senior Iraqi official in Kirkuk. While there was no word on the identity, the city recently elected a Kurdish lawyer, Abdulrahman Mustafa, as its mayor amid concerns that the new administration may favor one ethnic group over another. The city is divided between Arabs, Kurds, ethnic Turks and Christians and has been the scene of ethnic tensions.

Turkey rejected any suggestion of a plot.

I've Seen This Movie:

Send in the Marines? I can't think why, when we will surely need them elsewhere soon enough. The threat of the Marine Corps is lessened tremendously when they are already bogged down somewhere else. With only two US Army divisions available to deploy for combat operations, it seems that even a few thousand Marines might be better kept for other purposes.

Additionally, I'm against going just because the UN said we should. I think the lesson of the last year ought to be that the UN be roundly ignored on all matters. Unless we have a pressing national interest, we ought not to go. Besides, the press reports from there are turning purple. Leftists who long for the US to be the army of the UN, and never act otherwise, have begun to really hype Liberia since the UN vote last week. Doesn't this lurid AP report sound like the movie Casablanca crossed with Aliens?

Liberia, fraught with danger and drunk killers, awaits U.S. forces
By Jonathan Paye-Layleh, Associated Press, 7/4/2003 19:57

MONROVIA, Liberia (AP) Trapped in Liberia's besieged seaside capital, more than 1 million desperate, hungry residents and refugees dream of American troops coming to the rescue disarming rebel and government fighters locked in a vicious civil war.

Yet ending Liberia's nightmare is being weighed against the cost of U.S. intervention that would put American soldiers between AK-47-toting gunmen for whom mutilation and summary execution is commonplace.

Another reason to avoid Liberia: president Charles Taylor is being described as "indicted war crimes suspect" Charles Taylor. Ya'll remember that Bush, Blair, and Gen. Franks are also "indicted war crimes suspects." The ICC and similar organs are trying to use things like this to build legitimacy behind the idea that international bodies can violate national soverignity in order to seize people that the UN/ICC/whoever has voted to indict.

Pretty rich, you say, a defense of national soverignity coming from a guy who favors using the USMC to knock of tyrants anywhere we please? Touche. But you must understand that I support the old order, whereby national--presumably, democratically accountable--governments hold the power to choose war or peace. The international order is antidemocratic, as you must have noticed by now. Far better for matters of such importance to be in the hands of the people, not career bureaucrats drawn from the ranks least likely to understand or feel inclined to use force in a firm, just fashion. There are plenty of folks in those bureaucracies with ranks and titles, but damn few who understand what nobility is about.

One thing I do like to see though: Charles Taylor hopped pretty quickly in response to that US warning that he had 48 hours to step down, didn't he? The decapitation strike may not have gotten Saddam, but it put the world's tyrants on notice. Come the 49th hour, the bombs can already be on their way.

Our Predecessors:

Many of our Islamist enemies have come to consider "Crusaders" to be just another word for "American" or, at best, "Coalition." So it's interesting that on the 4th of July the Israelis broke into a cistern that was built by the real Crusaders.

A Bolt from Heaven:

An evangelist calls upon God for a sign, and God delivers:

A member of the First Baptist Church said a guest evangelist was preaching repentance and seeking a sign from God when lightning struck the steeple.

Ronnie Cheney called the incident "awesome, just awesome!"

Cheney said the lightning traveled through the microphone, blew out the sound system and enveloped the preacher, who wasn't hurt.


Afterward, services resumed for about 20 minutes until the congregation realized the church was on fire. The building was evacuated.

This reminds me of the movie about the life of Sergeant York, wherein a bolt of lightning knocks a drunk Alvin York off of his mule just by the church. However, that was Hollywood. One has to leave the metaphysics aside for a moment and just take it in--it is an awesome story.

All hat, no...

Cowboy hats on the runway in Milan. It's supposed to be a 'virile' symbole of an 'American tough-guy image.' Well and good. My hat is a Stetson, one that belonged to my grandfather before his days ran out, and now belongs to me. Don't reckon he ever expected to be setting the style for the Milanese fashionable, but he was certainly a tough American guy.

Dirty Bombs:

Dirty bombs are the terror weapon that provides the greatest danger to the U.S. economy:

On 13 June, a Thai national was arrested in Bangkok with a large quantity - reportedly 30kg - of caesium-137, a radioactive isotope that could be used in a radiological weapon (a so-called 'dirty bomb'). Narong Penanam confessed he had smuggled the radioactive material into Thailand from neighbouring Laos. He was detained in a sting operation by officers posing as potential buyers.

It is believed that the suspect's intended customers - possibly the Southeast Asian terrorist network Jemaah Islamiah - were planning to target US interests in Thailand, perhaps the embassy or other diplomatic premises. US customs officials had asked the Thai police to investigate uranium trading in Thailand, which they suspected was bound for terrorist groups in Iraq or North Korea.

It is not clear if the 30kg seized in Thailand included the weight of the case as well as the caesium-137, which could turn out to weigh as little as 100g. Regardless of the amount seized, the arrest highlights the continuing problem of nuclear smuggling.

The use of even a small amount of caesium in a radiological weapon would necessitate an expensive decontamination operation and, apart from injuries caused by the actual explosion, could cause a rise in cancer cases in the long term. Uranium, however, would have to be highly enriched for use in even a crude nuclear device.

On 18 May it was reported that during a routine raid, Georgian police seized strontium and caesium in boxes from the boot of a taxi in the capital, Tblisi. The police suspect the substances were being smuggled into Turkey. A device made from that radioactive material could contaminate a 500-600m radius.

The damage to the US economy from 9/11 was as great as it was because of the disruption of the airlines. Although a massive amount of communications equiptment went down with the two towers, America's communication system is remarkably capable of regeneration. The shutting down of the airlines for a full day, though, created transportation problems for every industry in the country. The main trouble was not the transportation of people, but of goods: factories ran short, orders were not delivered, every industry was disrupted in shockwaves.

A similar, but worse, effect is possible with dirty bombs. Major airports could be shut down, not for hours, but for weeks. Sadly, some of this disruption could be handled: the falloff of air traffic since 9/11 means that there is excess capacity in the airports of the country. There would still be a stern depressive effect upon the economy at a point--the airlines--where we are still limping.

DPRK Nuke Test:

This page has been arguing for months that a nuclear weapon test by the DPRK was coming. Once they've tested a nuclear weapon in an underground location, they'll have thereby irradiated enough material to make many more bombs, thus making the point moot as to their uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing plants. Now, Kenneth Quinones, one of the Clinton Administration's negotiators who worked with the DPRK, says that he agrees. Such a test may well come, he says, by the end of the year.

A brilliant letter:

From Mark Steyn's mailbag. Steyn himself is all too frequently praised on this page for me to pretend to evenhandedness, but this letter written to him by one of his readers deserves to be widely reprinted:

EVERYONE HAS THE RIGHT TO HIS OWN TYRANT
WMDs were the main reason to remove Saddam Hussein, but none were found yet. As his removal was unwarranted and in blatant breach of many UN charters, wouldn't it be fair, at least as an interim measure, to install a tyrant in Iraq, until the weapons are found?

I'm sure North Korea or Cuba could lend one, and some of Pol Pot's cronies are still around.

This way, we can, at least partially, redress the gross injustice forced upon the Iraqi people.

Kalman Dee
Canberra, Australia

Readers might want to see Steyn's obit for Strom Thurmond, while there.

Pravda is of two minds:

Today's analysis of the Iraq situation (emphasis added):

The war against the occupation force is turning into some kind of a religious struggle; under these conditions the situation in Iraq may become less stable and predictable.

Elsewhere in Pravda, this report on regimental priests, under the subhead (emphasis added) "Are faithful soldiers more predictable?":

A seminar of the subject "Vicarial service in present-day army" was held in the Russian city of Ryazan on June 24. The seminar was organized by the RF Defense Ministry and the Moscow Patriarchate Department for cooperation with the armed forces and law enforcement structures. Main goals of the seminar are to determine objectives that the Orthodox Church pursues while working in the army, to find out the instruments it uses at that or plans to employ in the future.

Outstanding!

This story from Utah shows what happens when legislators get sensible about gun control:

The Jordan School Board gave preliminary approval Tuesday to a policy outlining the conditions under which district employees may carry a concealed weapon on school property with a valid permit.
Employees must keep the weapon concealed and employees who legally use a concealed weapon on school grounds do so in their individual capacities, not their scope of employment.

That sounds right to me. The law respects the free citizen's right to bear arms, but it doesn't provide them any special protections or restrictions based on the fact that they happen to be employed by the school. That is to say, it treats the right to bear arms as a right: a perogative of a citizen, the exercise of which ought not to be subject to any burdens by any entity except those the state legislature duly enacts, so long as those enacted burdens are in line with the principles of the 2nd, 9th, 10th, and 14th amendments.

Texas Terrorism:

There is a report on the wires today that terrorists are targeting Texas. The FBI is being cagey, as usual, as to what their sources are. They say there is not a credible threat, but that they've heard some things that make it possible, etc, etc.

Well, of course there was the recent lad from Texas who proved to be an al Qaeda member. But also, about three weeks ago Jihadunspun.net had a post claiming a successful Qaeda attack on a Texas oil refinery. JUS has pulled it, but the original text is below:

[S]ome American sources mentioned that a huge explosion took place in the main oil refinery in Texas. According to Lieutenant Paul Limoin from Niches police station, the explosion fires spread from 300 to 400 feet vertically in the air that could be seen and heard from miles. The explosion was so strong that it resulted in very strong pressure in the area.

The local American TV station KFDM was the only one to transmit the incident live on Tuesday the 20th of May at about 11 PM. KFDM attributed the incident to a tough explosion in a natural gas tube line at Jefferson district.

Lieutenant Limoin was among a number of officers who closed high ways 347 and 336 for several hours because people from neighboring areas and hundreds of cars moved to watch the incident which jammed the traffic and hindered all kinds of communication by phone and the radio was the only thing that worked.

An eye witness said that that she heard the explosion of the tube line that was very tough to the extent that she saw the orange flames in the sky, yet the inhabitants of the area stayed as they were because they trusted the efficiency of the firemen.

Ronda Vize a KFMD employee said that policemen confirmed that after 15 minutes, the flames disappeared from the sky. Nevertheless, she doubts what the policemen said because even hours after the explosion she still could see the fire in the area. However, Paul Limoin said that the blows lasted for 10 minutes or more but there were no injuries among the residents of the area which raised doubts about the police attempts to hide the incident. Police sources added that the explosion is attributed to an electric sparkle that hit one of the oil tankers, but this story contradicts what some eyewitnesses said.

It turned out to be nothing of the sort--an explosion at a SUNOCO gas pipeline near a loading station. But I thought you'd like to know, Texas readers--al Qaeda is thinking of you.