Can We End the DNC?

Long term readers know that I am, by political affiliation, a Southern Democrat. This is one of the least comfortable positions in modern American politics, as you really do not have a home in either major party. There are tremendous difficulties in cooperating with either the national Democratic party or the Republican party, both of which stand firmly for things to which we are firmly opposed.

Nevertheless, hope springs eternal. I carry on believing that sooner or later the DNC's total lack of substance on foreign policy, combined with its latent anti-Americanism, will cause it to implode and be relegated to the fringes. The Southern Democrats are the only Democrats who can actually hope to defeat President Bush in 2004, both because we are the only Democrats who are stronger on foreign policy than he is, and because stripping Southern states away from Republican support is the surest strategy to Democratic victory. Without the support of the "solid South," Bush can't win.

That won't happen, though, as long as the national Democratic party continues to view 2004 as a revel deserving nothing but frivolity. Consider, for example, the DNC Party Platform, entitled "Prosperity, Progress, and Peace":

Today, America finds itself in the midst of prosperity, progress, and peace. We have arrived at this moment because of the hard work of the American people. This election will be about the big choices we have to make to secure prosperity that is broadly shared and progress that reaches all families in this new American century. In the year 2000, the Democratic Party stands ready to meet that challenge and to build on our achievements.

When Thomas Jefferson was elected as our Party's first president in 1800, America was a young country trying to find its place in the world. Two hundred years later, Democrats gather at a moment of vast possibility to nominate Al Gore as America's next president. A new economy founded on the force of new technologies and traditional values of work is giving rise to new industries and transforming old ones. Biological breakthroughs give us the chance to unlock the mysteries of humanity's deadliest plagues. While the globe is still beset with tragedies and difficulties, more people live under governments of freedom, liberty, and democracy than ever before in history. America enjoys unparalleled affluence at home and influence abroad.

Now I realize that this is the 2000 platform. I also realize that a new platform isn't traditionally due until the next Presidential election year. May I humbly suggest, however, that is a major reason for the debacle in the last elections?

An emergency session of the DNC should have been called sometime between 2001 and now to assemble a platform of suggested action in response to the end of prosperity, the threat to progress, and the destruction of peace. In 2002, the lack of such a platform meant that the party had nothing to offer in a time of war but, "We think Bush is rushing to war. Although we're still going to vote for his Iraq War Resolution. But he's wrong. Except we know war is popular, so he's not wrong. Maybe a little wrong. Vote Democrat!" Horseshit.

This year we still have no platform. The nine presidential candidates--none of whom is presidential--are each fumbling around trying to figure out what they want to say. So far they seem to be finding unity around a message of: "Bush is a liar. Taxes aren't high enough. Iraq is a mess, though we don't have any actual solutions, just complaints. Maybe we should apologize to the French."

That is a disaster waiting to happen in 2004. The solid South will vote for no candidate whose campaign is established around those principles. The wild-eyed radical base may be fired up, but they can't win the election by themselves--and, furthermore, they are a bunch of nutcases with whom we should be ashamed to be making common cause. (It is the role of the Southern Democrat to point that out now and again, and be ignored.) Mainstream Democrats will not be energized to vote for a candidate on those grounds, and swing voters--of whom there are more in this election than ever in recent politics--will trend to Bush. This is true even if Iraq is still a mess in a year, which is frankly not all that likely: our successes there have been underreported, and there is no reason to believe that a year from now we won't see a relatively stable Iraq, a dead Saddam, firm documentary evidence of WMD programs that will quell all but the aforementioned wild-eyed radicals, an Iraqi government enjoying wide legitimacy, and oil revenues already beginning to obviate the need for foreign investment. Meanwhile, the US government has decided to triple aid to Afghanistan, making progress there likely as well.

The Democratic Party should be happy about that! By Thunder, if the national party organizes itself so that any of the above is bad news for it, it deserves to be razed by the electorate and scattered by the wind. The Democratic Party should be the party of the people, and the people love America and take pride and pleasure in her success. Well they should! She is the hope of the world.

An emergency session to plan a 2004 platform should be called immediately. The platform, if victory in 2004 is to be achieved, needs to include these items:

1) A strong statement on Democratic goals for the present war. This needs to include not the usual diplomatic vaugery, but specific statements on how to deal with each of: Eradicating Terrorist Networks, Hunting and Killing existing Terrorists, Preventing Terrorism In the United States and Europe, the Problem of North Korea, Preventing or Restraining Nuclear Proliferation, Destroying (through War or Other Means) State Sponsors of Terrorism, and Establishing Flourshing Democracy in Troubled Parts of the World.
2) One of the most important issues for the forseeable future is the overstretched US military. The strains felt by them have brought a number of military voters--conservative by nature, but dissatisfied by the current administration--into the swing voter camp. They need to know that the Democratic Party will defend their interests, which are: Expanding the Military, Constricting Deployments to areas where there is a Clear National Interest, Increasing Pay Rates, Ensuring Continued Technological Superiority, and Bettering Intelligence Sharing between the CIA and the Military.
3) The wild-eyed base needs to be quelled. The Democratic Party, if it is to be taken seriously as a national party, needs to make certain it is not associated with anti-Americanism in any form. Victory requires that we lose every Communist, Anarchist, Socialist, and any voter who would self-identify their political leanings with the preface of "radical." They are welcome to vote for us or against us, but our party platform should contain nothing for them. The Party of the American People ought to love America with all depth and purity of emotion--the American People do.

A continued failure to address these issues is running the DNC onto the rocks in 2004. If the DNC decides to stop running against Bush, and to start running on their actual merits, the Southern Democrats include several persons who could be of service in drafting a platform that could carry the party to victory. It wouldn't hurt, for the serious candidate, to try to draft Zell Miller as your Vice President.

Arts & Letters Daily:

Arts & Letters Daily has linked to Mr. Robinson's piece in the Spectator. They have also today a very interesting piece on the CIA's hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Scooping InstaPundit:

It's not often that one beats InstaPundit, Sage of Knoxville, to the punch. I thought based on yesterday's firestorm against the DARPA idea that I was out on a limb alone in supporting them, but this morning that turns out not to be true. Good to know that those who understand the business feel as I do. I thought I'd been a little rash, letting my temper get the better of me, when I called certain Senators "bloviating idiots," but I see that at least the "idiots" part has some support as well.

Alas for DARPA:

It appears that DARPA's plan to create a futures market for speculation on terrorism has died an undeserved death. This is due to a total lack of comprehension on the part of the US Senate, which simply isn't smart enough to understand why this was a remarkable and brilliant idea.

The business of predicting terror attacks is very much like the futures business, as it is like the actuarial business (the people who determine the rates for insurance companies are called Actuaries). A question the government has been considering for some time is this: given that the US has the finest actuaries and futures speculators in the world, how can we tap that knowledge for use in the terror war? The central problem is that the knowledge is out there, but that the government can't really compete with the market for the services of the very best of these guys. The top speculators make millions a year.

DARPA thought of a way to tap them: make a new market, one that rewards them in much the same way as the existing market. The potential value to the terror war was immeasurable. For example, when a terror threat comes in that is against NYC, the country really has no mechanism except to raise the terror alert for the entire country. That means that Cumming, Georgia goes on High (Orange) alert just like Los Angeles and NYC. The US government's resources are likewise spread across many threat-areas. Top actuaries would be able to predict much more accurately what areas are really threatened, allowing a better distribution of resources and a more accurate prediction of terror acts. Futures speculators would likewise bring a new perspective to predictive analysis, and would be better than military men at seeing nontraditional targets that terrorists could hit.

All that for a projected cost to DARPA of five million dollars. For five million bucks, you couldn't hire a handful of the top actuaries and speculators, but DARPA would have tapped potentially all of them. Gentlemen, I salute you--just because the Senate is full of bloviating idiots does not mean that your work is totally unappreciated. Better luck next time.

Wisdom from an old CIA hand:

James Woolsey writes:

I would add that, just as we eventually won the Cold War - and when I say 'we' here, I always mean Britain, the United States, the democracies, our allies - it was in no small measure because, while containing the Soviet Union and its allies militarily and with nuclear deterrence, we undermined their ideology.

We undermined it over a long period by convincing the Lech Walesas, the Vaclav Havels, the Andrei Sakharovs, the Solidarities, that this was not a clash of civilisations, not even a clash of countries, but a war of freedom against tyranny, and that we were on their side.

To exactly the same degree, we will surely be successful in this long war if we convince the hundreds of millions of reasonable and decent Muslims around the world who do not want to be terrorists, who do not want to live in dictatorships, that we are on their side and they on ours.

The surest way to demonstrate this is the unmaking of tyranny. Rhetoric, psyops, public relations--these are only good as long as they are tools to the actual, the physical destruction of tyrants. Freeing men is our business, and the only right purpose of our war. So it says in the Battle Hymn of the Republic, which was written in the days when Christian symbolism did not excite dissenters:

As He died to make men holy,
Let us die to make them free.

Arts & Sciences: Outrages

Jonah Goldberg takes on a survey from the "science" of psychology that purports to demonstrate that conservatism is a kind of mental deformity. The continued acceptance of psychology as a science is one of the worst problems with American society, and one to which people are almost entirely blind. Given that, I will test my readers' patience by reprinting below my full remarks on the subject:

Arts & Sciences:

From the beginning of a piece on failed civilizations:

In particular many of the so-called hard scientists such as physicists or biologists, don't consider history to be a science. The situation is even more extreme because, he points out, even historians themselves don't consider history to be a science. Historians don't get training in the scientific methods; they don't get training in statistics; they don't get training in the experimental method or problems of doing experiments on historical subjects; and they'll often say that history is not a science, history is closer to an art.

Historians often say that history is not a science because history is not a science. One of the central problems with modern society is its increasing inability to tell the difference between what is a science, and what isn't. This is directly related to the prestige that has come to be associated with the label of "science" during the 20th century.

In part because of the tremendous material advances brought us by science, the concept of science enjoys considerable standing. The best way to make sure that your ideas are put into practice is to convince others that they are scientific: to say that something is scientific is commonly thought to be the same as saying that it is true beyond the possibility of counterargument. Psychology (from the Greek, psyche-, or "spirit/soul," and -ology, or "study of"), which claims to be the science of the mind, has so convinced the majority of Westerners that it is scientific that a psychologist's testimony alone can strip a man of his freedom, serve as reason not to hire him, or to fire him from a job he already has. A man can be subjected to forced injections of drugs and imprisonment based on nothing more than a psychologist's assessment.

This all rests upon a misunderstanding of just what science is. Science is one kind of inquiry, a particular kind that rests upon two general principles: the method of making no assertions that cannot be tested and falsified; and the complete transparency and open debate of all assertions being made, none of which are ever to be taken as invunerable. Science is indeed a great thing; it is indeed powerful.

It isn't -everything-, though, and it isn't all powerful. There are some endeavors that are not, and can not be, science. History is one of them. So, as it happens, is "psychology," which would be more honestly called philopsyche, after the fashion of philosophy. Anything which involves the working of the human mind isn't and cannot be a science. This is simply because the human mind isn't observable, and therefore, it is not testable. Regardless of how cautiously you design your tests, the fact is that you are simply guessing about the why of a given decision. You can't really observe the process of decision making.

Stripping these so-called "social sciences" of the notion that they are sciences is one of the greatest services we could do for our culture. There is nothing more noble than art, exactly because there is nothing more human than art. We ought to be proud to be performing the arts, practicing the arts. There are too many, though, who are unwilling to compete in a fair and open atmosphere. They wish to hide behind the authority of science, even if they must do so illegitimately.

And they must: science was never about stifiling debate, but always about enforcing it systematically. Psychology, sociology, and the rest do not--as history does--recognize honestly the fact that their methods simply cannot be scientifically tested, cannot be falsified, cannot be proven nor disproven. As such, all of their assertions deserve a healthy scepticism. That scepticism should be the healthier for the fact that these so-called disciplines will not admit the truth about their methods. They are a blight upon our way of thinking, and of conceiving the world.

Arts & Sciences:

In response to my contention that psychology is not a science (see Monday's log), I've been asked to read Our Inner Conflicts by Karen Horney, M.D. Dr. Horney was one of the founders of psychoanalysis, both a friend and competitor to Freud, and compiled the basis of psychology's theories of neuroses. One of psychology's defenders asked me to consider her work at length before I made up my mind that psychology was not a science. I have now completed my study of the work, and am ready to report.
Dr. Horney's work has several things to be said in its favor. In particular the vision of sanity she presents is appealing, and in fact almost perfectly echoes G. K. Chesterton's vision of sanity from Orthodoxy. Chesterton, of course, was not a psychologist, but a Catholic: his thoughts on why men departed from sanity did not hinge upon theories of psychological conflict, but sin. Yet the two visions of sanity are almost perfect copies: each is a vision of wholeheartedness, coupled with responsibility and an ability to respond to things genuinely and without pretense. Both visions are powerful, appealing, and deeply human. Either, or indeed both, could be correct.

Both are empirical. Neither is scientific. Understanding why psychology is not science requires a short examination of what science is. The religious view is not in any danger of being taken for science, as it has no pretenses in that direction. The religious view takes its authority from faith, which is ultimately not testable beyond the confines of one man's heart. But psychology partakes of studies, not prayer; it holds conferences, publishes journals, engages in peer review and debate: how can I hold that it is a thing more like religion than like physics?

Science requires that all principles be not only testable, but falsifiable. Newtonian physics felt, at the turn of the 20th century, that it had basically solved all but a few straggling problems, and was remarkably close to a complete explanation of how the universe worked. It still viewed atoms as unsplittable, and had no knowledge of quarks or quantums. When the "new physics" came along, it undermined the entirety of the discipline as it existed. Everything had to be cast out or reexamined: a resolution is still out of reach.

Psychology's bedrock claims are not similarly falsifiable. Behavioral psychology claims that the mind is an illusion of the brain: its evidence is that it can explain behavior by reference only to chemical properties of the brain, and therefore a mind is unnecessary. That kind of argument is a logical fallacy known as argumentum ad ignorantiam, that is, the argument from ignorance. The fact is that behavioral psychology cannot show that there is no mind, any more than it can show that there is. At the last, it is engaged in an act of faith, upon which principle no scientific inquiry is possible.

Behavioral psychology is not alone: all psychology ultimately is based upon unscientific principles which must be accepted, or not, on faith. Freud's Oedipal complex, for example, was meant to exist in all men; if analysis showed something consistent with it, the psychologist said, "Aha! The Oedipal complex at work!" If analysis failed to show anything consistent with it, the psychologist replied, "Aha! You are repressing your Oedipal complex." The fact that the complex might not exist was not possible, therefore it could not be the case. Jungian psychology similarly posits a "collective unconscious," and it is ultimately your acceptance of the existence of that collective unconscious which qualifies you to practice Jungian analysis. You can't be a Jungian and not accept the collective unconscious. Cognitive dissonance theory posits that the human mind (or brain) can't accept two mutually exclusive propositions without feeling agitation to resolve them. I have occasionally debated this point with cognitive therapists, and found that evidence against this central proposition is finally dismissed. It has to be, as the central principle can't be proven, nor can it be disproven: it must be accepted on faith.

Yet psychology retains the respect due only to real sciences, and with it the force to legally deprive a man of his freedom, his job, or certain rights which are available only to those held to be "mentally competent" to exercise them. Psychology's ability to maintain this illusion is due to its empiricism--that is, to the fact that it bases its conclusions on real-world examples, which gives it the flavor of science. Empiricism, practiced by Aristotle, was indeed the precursor of science. I said that Dr. Horney was empirical, and she is. She really has done a lot of research, and a lot of analysis, and a lot of thinking about the examples she has met. Empiricism is not science, however. That is another way of addressing the line of questions which takes the form, "But if (e.g.) behaviorists can in fact explain all human behavior without reference to a mind--if they can really do it--does that not show that they are right?" The answer lies with the Greeks.

Ancient Greek navigators developed a complex mechanical device for navigation, called the Antikythera mechanism. It aided navigation by predicting where certain stars should be in the sky at given times of the night, at given points of the year. The Greeks thought that the earth was the center of the universe, however, which should pose a problem for correct prediction of astral movements. When they encountered those problems, though, they just thought around them:

The Greeks believed in an earth-centric universe and accounted for celestial bodies' motions using elaborate models based on epicycles, in which each body describes a circle (the epicycle) around a point that itself moves in a circle around the earth. Mr Wright found evidence that the Antikythera mechanism would have been able to reproduce the motions of the sun and moon accurately, using an epicyclic model devised by Hipparchus, and of the planets Mercury and Venus, using an epicyclic model derived by Apollonius of Perga. (These models, which predate the mechanism, were subsequently incorporated into the work of Claudius Ptolemy in the second century AD.)

Epicycles were able to correctly account for the movement of astral bodies without discarding the core--and inaccurate--principle of the earth's centrality. The development of epicycles is an astonishing, indeed a magnificient, human accomplishment. It is a beautiful piece of human artifice. Its only flaw is that it fails to be correct.

Psychology is in just this position. Insofar as it simply wishes to guide a given ship to a given port (say, an unhappy person to that vision of sanity) it may serve as a perfectly useful model. So long as it is applied to that, and only that, it may be functional. The problem arises when you start making wider judgements based upon its core principles--for example, what sort of people ought to enjoy freedoms, or ought to hold jobs. If the core principle is wrong, you could end up making very bad, hurtful judgements.

Ultimately epicycles were set aside because they partook of the realm of physics, and better methods of observation allowed us to see plainly that the earth was not the center of the universe. Psychology is a different animal because its core principles are finally untestable, unfalsifiable, and unscientific. There is no evidence that can be brought to bear, either today or conceptually in the future, that could really put an end to the question of whether or not we have minds separate from our brains; or whether "inner conflicts" yield "disorders" from some kind of normality, rather than simply informing the development of a unique person who wasn't meant to be anything other than what they are. These things at last can't be tested.

I have nothing against people making decisions in their personal life on the basis of psychology, if they feel inclined. I don't mind them choosing this thing over that thing on the basis of Tarot card readings, for that matter. I have said that arts are the noblest of human endeavors precisely because they are the most human. Psychology is an art. It should be proud of it. It must also, however, discard the false authority that it has laid claim to under the guise of being a science. People can--should!--choose to build their lives around the mastery of some art that is particularly appealing to them. No government or corporate entity, though, should make decisions involving fundamental liberties on the basis of signs and portents, the readings of seers, or the analysis of a psychologist.

Horn'd helmets all around:

Hagar the Horrible, the Movie. More likely: Hagar, the Horrible Movie.

Bless Harold Bloom:

The Atlantic Unbound has an interview with Harold Bloom. It is worth reading in full, but of course I won't quote it at that kind of length. I will only include a couple of the most excellent parts:

There's a line in the first chapter of your book Hamlet: Poem Unlimited that seems to encapsulate your approach toward literature: "I think it wise to confront both the play and the prince with awe and wonder, because they know more than we do." As a literary critic, how are you able to analyze a text with this kind of humility instead of assuming a dry, superior tone as some other critics do?

Harold Bloom:

Superior? To William Shakespeare?

...

This attitude of reverence is what sets you apart from many of your colleagues. You don't seem to belong to any particular school of literary criticism.

Harold Bloom:

Well, it's such a complex thing. I left the English department twenty-six years ago. I just divorced them and became, as I like to put it, Professor of Absolutely Nothing. To a rather considerable extent, literary studies have been replaced by that incredible absurdity called cultural studies which, as far as I can tell, are neither cultural nor are they studies. But there has always been an arrogance, I think, of the semi-learned.
You know, the term "philology" originally meant indeed a love of learning�a love of the word, a love of literature. I think the more profoundly people love and understand literature, the less likely they are to be supercilious, to feel that somehow they know more than the poems, stories, novels, and epics actually know.
And, of course, we have this nonsense called Theory with a capital T, mostly imported from the French and now having evilly taken root in the English-speaking world. And that, I suppose, also has encouraged absurd attitudes toward what we used to call imaginative literature.

My Jewish readers (as well as the several of you who express an interest in comparative religion) will want to continue on through the interview to the parts on Kabbalah.

Is It Vietnam Yet?

Iraq certainly is not Vietnam. Indeed, even Vietnam isn't Vietnam. These days Vietnam is Indochina:

French ambassador Antoine Pouillieute said Vietnam is a priority partner of France in Asia, not only because of its traditional relationship but also because of the potential for cooperation between the two countries.

France is a sincere and trustworthy partner of Vietnam. This finds expression on our loyalty, effectiveness and fraternity. . . . I note that the two countries have similar views and ideas, which will help to make ASEM a success. The dialogues are often made on three aspects � political, economic and socio-cultural. On security and anti-terrorism, Vietnam and France have shared views and on economics, the two countries support economic development linked with social development. In social and cultural fields, Vietnam and France see the need to preserve national identity, as well as political, economic, linguistic and cultural diversity.

On Bastille Day, too. I suppose it's good to know that France is a sincere and trustworthy partner to somebody.

Defending Iceland:

The heroic ethic in Ancient Greece is often stated by historians as, "Help your friends, harm your enemies." In fact it was rather more complicated, and was only one branch of Indo-European heroic ethics. Still, helping your friends and harming your enemies is a good start.

So when we decided to pull our air defenders out of Iceland without giving them time to get defenses of their own up to speed, it was a bad sign. It's true that we need those fighters elsewhere. It's also true that we've had a relationship with Iceland for fifty years, providing their military defense in return for what was, during the second World War and the Cold War era, access to a strategic island of great importance.

The sudden end of the relationship has given Iceland's sons a feeling of betrayal, which earlier this week led to a stabbing involving a US serviceman. The soldier is being tried by Icelandic law, though the US is demanding that he be turned over to face military justice. The report below is from the AFP (I don't have a link):

Washington has based its extradition claim on a 1951 Defense
Agreement between the two countries and a long tradition of handing
over servicemen involved in offences in Iceland to the United States
for military trials.
However, the agreement, which calls for consultations between
the two countries, is already up in the air after Washington
unilaterally decided in June to pull out its F-15 fighters and rescue
helicopters from the Keflavik base.
That decision angered Iceland, which has no military of its
own and would be left without air defenses.

No big deal, you say, because who would want to attack Iceland? Our common enemies have noticed. This ran on pro-al Qaeda website Jihad Unspun:

And what of Bush saying the United States will help its friends and punish its foes? Well, it seems that Mr. Bush cannot be trusted to take care of his friends. Iceland was one of the countries that signed up to Bush's so-called "coalition." How has Bush repaid the North Atlantic nation? By writing a letter to Iceland's prime minister stating that the United States will, after 46 years of providing for the NATO nation's defense, pull its military forces from the soon-to-be defenseless island state.

We are leaving old friends at the mercy of our common enemies. Iceland's sole defense against mujahedeen is going to be its nature spirits. Let us hope that this is enough, if our leaders do not reconsider this unwise decision and make allowances for the sons of Iceland to develop their own defenses. If not, we can only hope that our enemies will meet the same resistance as the warlock sent by King of the Danes, Harald Bluetooth, son of Gorm the Old:

King Harald told a warlock to hie to Iceland in some altered
shape, and to try what he could learn there to tell him: and he
set out in the shape of a whale. And when he came near to the
land he went to the west side of Iceland, north around the land,
where he saw all the mountains and hills full of guardian-
spirits, some great, some small. When he came to Vapnafjord he
went in towards the land, intending to go on shore; but a huge
dragon rushed down the dale against him with a train of serpents,
paddocks, and toads, that blew poison towards him. Then he
turned to go westward around the land as far as Eyjafjord, and he
went into the fjord. Then a bird flew against him, which was so
great that its wings stretched over the mountains on either side
of the fjord, and many birds, great and small, with it. Then he
swam farther west, and then south into Breidafjord. When he came
into the fjord a large grey bull ran against him, wading into the
sea, and bellowing fearfully, and he was followed by a crowd of
land-spirits. From thence he went round by Reykjanes, and wanted
to land at Vikarsskeid, but there came down a hill-giant against
him with an iron staff in his hands.

Hail the land spirits. May they do what we ought to be doing, at least until our friends and old allies are equip't and trained to do it themselves. No good comes of the betrayal of friends.

Honored Guns

Good revolutions are not a thing understood by the UN. No surprise. We who honor the old American way can not agree. For myself, I choose a weapon not entirely "light": the Smith & Wesson M629-4, chambered in .44 Remington Magnum.

Bush, Saddam and al Qaeda:

From InstaPundit, sage of Knoxville, comes an article from a judge for whom he used to clerk. The fellow, a lifelong Democrat, was in Iraq with ORHA, and has uncovered documented evidence that Saddam assigned a Mukhabarat agent to work with Osama bin Laden:

The document shows that an Iraqi intelligence officer, Abid Al-Karim Muhamed Aswod, assigned to the Iraq embassy in Pakistan, is ''responsible for the coordination of activities with the Osama bin Laden group.''

No word on the date of this yet. We know that Saddam had approached al Qaeda in the early 1990s, but many reports suggest that they fell out quickly. Everything changes if this is a more recent, and ongoing, relationship. Or rather, everything changes for us who live in the open sources: it looks as if Bush, who has been saying this all along, is borne out again. See Thursday's post on that subject.

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.