NEW MUSIC, BOOKS, FILMS AND MEANDERINGS TO THE RIGHT After weeks of delay, I've updated my current cultural gleanings and included links to reviews or interviews that provide more context. Wander on, wander on.

GARY HART DOESN'T LOVE ME But he just started his own web log this week. Should be interesting to see how he uses it going forward. The comments section might implode on him though -- nothing like allowing a bunch of rabid wolves onto your site, pens in hand.

THANK YOU, PRESIDENT BUSH Not that the world wasn't going to Hell in a handbasket already, but former CIA analyst and current Center for International Policy fellow Mel Goodman sure knows how to warm up a crowd:

It is clear that there have been a great deal of successes for the US and UK forces, but there have been surprises as well and the fact that the invasion force is too small will make the war more protracted and far more costly in a military, political, social, and economic way. The protracted nature of the war will make it extremely difficult to establish a viable government in Baghdad and possibly impossible to establish a democratic one, which always appeared to be a far-fetched possibility at best. The international and security costs will be even greater and even point to the possibility of a victory that is a pyrrhic victory over the short and long term. There is every possibility that this war will lead to greater incidents of terrorism and greater possibility for the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. It is likely the instability in the Middle East will increase and that differences within the international security architecture will make the job of collective security far more complicated and costly. The European alliance system has been weakened by the war and the current argument over reconstruction in Iraq indicates that the UN will be a weaker institution and that the US will be increasingly isolated within the Western alliance system. A protracted and bloody battle for Baghdad will increase all of these costs.

NEVER MIND THE HEADLINES The BBC does one thing well. Actually, two things. It's quicker on the news turnaround than its American counterparts, and it offers up this frequently updated BBC Reporters' Web Log featuring brief updates from their reporters in Baghdad, Cairo, Amman, Damascus and dozens of other locations.

OPERATION PISS OFF THE PLANET The Onion returns to form with its continuing coverage of the war in Iraq.

BAGHDAD BREAKDOWN Mark Bowden, author of "Black Hawk Down," explains how an oppressed society latches onto immediate trauma to justify its actions. Also known as why Iraqis might currently support Saddam Hussein more than the United States. (NYTimes.com requires registration. login: buttermilk.com password: buttermilk)

But why would the citizens of Baghdad rally around such a tyrannical regime? After all, Saddam Hussein has turned what was once one of the most prosperous and modern of Arab nations into a destitute state. His terrorist apparatus, modeled on Stalin's, has tortured, imprisoned and killed hundreds of thousands.

The problem is that each war develops an interior logic. Immediate traumas supersede the larger context, just as the fog of war plays havoc with generals' plans. Allied military commanders have wisely waged a careful air campaign, leaving most of the city's nongovernment buildings undamaged and keeping civilian casualties low. But every death and wounding — of a child, a sister, a father, a neighbor — no matter how unintentional, creates passionate new enemies whose anger eclipses politics.

And even Iraqis who despise Saddam Hussein can be expected to recoil from a foreign invasion, which wounds national pride. There are reports of Iraqi expatriates who fled the regime now returning to fight for their country. For Iraqis who distrust the United States, it will be a choice between their own local devil and the Great Satan of the world. And Iraqis get their information from the propaganda ministries, which amplify the grief and play upon nationalistic sympathies.

YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED This is funny. Admit it.

YOUR ROCK-AND-ROLL CATECHISM You didn't realize there was one, did you?

Q. Should I rock in the body or in the soul? A. Rock lives chiefly in your soul, but if you take your body along it will be forever grateful. It is a bittersweet pill to be reminded that the circa-1991 ‘scene’ in Seattle has ended, but it must be said loudly and with great clarity: You should dance at shows, or at least sway, or pump your fist in the air, or show some sign that you are alive other than shifting your weight from one foot to the other while artfully holding a beer. The days of hipper-than-thou have mercifully passed and it is not only okay, it is downright polite to show the band you appreciate their performance by acting as if you are alive. If this sounds patently obvious to you, I would guess you’ve attended precious few rock shows, or merely followed Pennywise on tour, because I have been at shows where the audience was so busy posing I could have sworn I was in a warehouse full of mannequins. The days of standing still are over. Shake your moneymaker.

THE FRENCH PERSPECTIVE Too often of late, the media has glossed over the French perspective on Iraq, and on international order. French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin was in London this week, and he made some cogent remarks about both matters.

September 11 put an end to the emergence of a new world order.

Firstly, the world entered the age of mass terrorism. We now know that the terrorist organisations will stop at nothing to spread their message of hate.

Secondly, it changed the meaning of power: in a world where the weak can destabilise the strong,where ideologies deny the most fundamental rights, the use of force is not a sufficient answer. When the blade unites with new technologies, it sidesteps the classic rules of power.

Thirdly, it revealed the vulnerability of the United States, triggered a feeling of anger and injustice and led this country to change its view of the world. Attacked in the heart, America refocused its priorities on its own security, its own soil and its own population ...

Because they share common values, the United States and France will re-establish close co-operation in complete solidarity. We owe it to the friendship between our peoples, for the international order that we wish to build together.

Over the last few months, some have wondered about France’s reasons for its ways of going about settling the Iraq crisis. I would like to say loud and clear that our choices were not made against one country or another, but in the name of a certain idea of collective responsibility and of a world vision.

We shouldn’t underestimate the stakes here. We need to know by which rules we would like to live together: only consensus and respect for law can give force the legitimacy it needs. If we overstep this mark, could the use of force become a destabilising element?

We also need to know how to manage the many crises throughout the world. Iraq is not an isolated case. North Korea and other countries are raising new threats of proliferation.

We must therefore give ourselves the means to deal with them. We had started defining a disarmament method together and this method was giving results.

Lastly, we have a fundamental concern: how could we neglect the risk of increased misunderstanding between peoples? A misunderstanding that could lead to a clash of cultures. Isn’t that the major challenge of the day? Is it unavoidable? We must find the right answers and fuel the spirit of dialogue and respect amongst peoples.

In this respect we noted two elements that lie at the heart of resolution 1441: the international community is most effective when it is united ; the international community is truly legitimate when it assumes its full responsibility.

QUOTE DU JOUR From Robert Kaplan's "Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands A Pagan Ethos" --

Western policymakers believe that dictators can be defeated merely by removing them. The nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt writes: "Like bad physicians, they thought to cure the disease by removing the symptoms, and fancied if they tyrant were put to death, freedom would follow of itself." In the 1990s, Western governments demanded elections throughout the developing world, often in places with low literacy rates, weak institutions, and raging ethnic disputes. Dictators were replaced by elected prime ministers. But because the dictators themselves were manifestations of bad social and economic development, their removal frequently permitted the same uncivil practices to continue in democratic clothing; as for example in Pakistan and Cote d'Ivorie, two large bellwether states in South Asia and West Africa, where elected leaders stole vast amounts of money and played one ethnic group against the other, until by the end of the 1990s the military in both countries staged coups, which the local populations greeted with demonstrable relief. Of course, military rile solved nothing, and the unrest continued."

PANORAMIC IRAQ The Washington Post's Camera Works section has a series of Quicktime-driven, panoramic photos from Iraq that allow you to scroll the image 360 degrees. Pretty amazing views.

THE DANGER OF DETENTION Jose Padilla isn't the only person who has been behind bars without legal counsel for more than a year, but he's one of the few al Qaeda suspects among hundreds arrested and jailed who is an American citizen. But we're all learning how radical ideas like the right to legal counsel work these days ...

Jose Padilla has been confined in a military brig since June. An American citizen arrested in this country by civilian authorities, he is being held incommunicado, unable to speak even to his lawyers. Recently a federal judge ruled that this state of affairs could not persist: An American citizen detained indefinitely -- even during wartime -- must be able to respond to the government's allegations and, therefore, must have some access to counsel. This is hardly a radical suggestion. But even the barest hint of an adversarial proceeding is too much for the military these days. So the government last week informed Chief Judge Michael B. Mukasey of the U.S. District Court in New York that it will appeal his ruling.

MEDIA IN MEDINA When ABC's Ted Koppel decided to join the 3rd Infantry Division as an embedded reporter, he realized he was getting involved in the most dangerous assignment of his career. And as he's moved deeper into Iraq, he's engaged in some serious reporting, and serious decisions, says Howard Kurtz in this profile.

... in a remarkable moment late last week, Koppel conducted a long-distance debate with Charlie Gibson over whether to show the Iraqi TV pictures of dead American soldiers, arguing passionately that the media cannot whitewash such ugly images.

"We don't show the faces of the dead," Koppel said yesterday. "We don't show the faces of the wounded, especially in this time of satellite television. We don't want to be in a position where we on television are notifying the next of kin.

"But I think you do show bodies, shooting them in as responsible a fashion as possible. In time of war we don't want to soft-pedal what is going on here. That would be contrary to the whole purpose of our being here. One thing you cannot do is leave people with the impression that war is not a terrible thing."

Koppel says: "There's obviously a very fine line between being protective and being careful that you don't somehow provide information that could be helpful to people trying to kill the men you're traveling with. I can't deny that my feelings toward these men are very, very warm."

Still, he said, "I made it very clear to everyone I've spoken to that my objective here is to report as fairly and objectively as I can. If bad things happen, I will be reporting them. They understand that. They accept that. They have been as open as they could be. Whether this is an experiment the U.S. government will want to repeat again, I don't know."

BE GAY. JUST DON'T ACT GAY. Texas talked itself into curious corners at the Supreme Court yesterday in defense of its anti-gay sodomy law. As argued by Texas, apparently there is no problem with homosexuality, and there is no problem with sodomy, there is simply a problem with homosexual sodomy. Slate provides one of the best recounting of the -- sometimes hilarious -- exchange at the Supreme Court yesterday.

NOW, LET'S SEE... WHERE DID I PUT THAT LAW BOOK? From Slate's Michael Kinsley today, an homage to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and a lamentation on international law. What a great led --

If Daniel Patrick Moynihan hadn't died this week of complications from a burst appendix, he might have died of embarrassment. Not necessarily over what his country is doing in Iraq, but over what his country's leaders are saying about it. The late senator from New York was a man of policy passions, and one of them was international law. "In the annals of forgetfulness," Moynihan wrote in 1990, "there is nothing quite to compare with the falling from the American mind of the idea of the law of nations."

We care, above all, because we want our soldiers who have been captured to be treated well. We also care because of the propaganda value of asserting that the enemy is behaving shamefully even by the low standards of war among nations. International law can help by establishing, in detail and in advance, what exactly those minimal standards of war etiquette are. (This is no time to be awaiting an answer from Miss Manners.) And even though there are no police to enforce it, international law can also create a fairly powerful incentive to obey the rules it lays down.

How does it do that? By creating a web of rules, each of which is stronger for being part of the web than if it were a single thread dangling alone. Every nation will have rules it cares more about and rules it cares less about, times when short-term national self-interest is served by some rules and times when obeying requires some short-term sacrifice. But a vested interest in being seen as obeying the rules—and in seeing others obey most of the rules most of the time—can overcome the temptation to break any individual rule when it suits your purposes.

THE FOUR-PART WAR Jack Shafer takes a shot at the NYTimes' R.W. "Johnny" Apple, who transitions from international restaurant reviews to wartime analysis this week, and then goes on to use Apple as an example of the media cycle during wartime. (We're somewhere between Part 2 and 3 right now.) --

In Part 1 of the wartime news cycle, the press stands slack-jawed at the withering display of U.S. air power and high-technology battle gear (Kosovo, Afghanistan, and now Iraq). Bombs have gotten smart! the press writes. In Iraq, the bombs have become so smart, many of them have earned advanced degrees in their spare time. Geniuses at the Pentagon are revolutionizing warfare with amazing tactics. Special ops are the ultimate force multiplier. The locals are about to rebel. And so on.

Having exhausted that vein, the press demands a new angle, and the vagaries of war supply them with Part 2 of the cycle. Victory wasn't as instant as we were led to believe! U.S. forces have "bogged down"! The early blitzkrieg could not be sustained, and U.S. forces are increasingly vulnerable to counterattack. The uprising has failed to gel. You can't win a war from the air; you need lots more troops on the ground.

After bogging down in the "bogged down" angle, the press stages a rally in Part 3. They discover that Milosevic, Bin Laden, Saddam, et al., are the real geniuses. The enemy commanders are cum laude graduates of the international war college and masters of the art of asymmetrical warfare as practiced in Vietnam, Northern Ireland, and Israel. The enemy is fighting the battle on its terms. Unnamed sources in the Pentagon fret about the previously lauded American tactics.

In Part 4 the press informs us with great surprise that Saddam wasn't the only warrior who learned from past battles. Unconventional warfare turns out to be unconventional for a reason: It is a superb form of suicide. Reporters pretend they never doubted the outcome. The United States wins and promptly loses interest in the region. So does the press...

BIAS? HOW ABOUT PLAIN OLD STUPIDITY? Editor & Publisher takes a look at the significant media misreporting during the first week of the war in Iraq, and how it has shaped public expectations. The snapshot is a result of a phone call from a major network that wanted to do a piece on why the public had high expectations that the conflict would be swift and easy -- without focusing on the role of the media. The Editor & Publisher writer wonders where else the public would get such expectations, and charts some of the news items fumbled by the media so far:

1. Saddam may well have been killed in the first night's surprise attack (March 20).
4. Most Iraqis soldiers will not fight for Saddam and instead are surrendering in droves (March 22).
5. Iraqi citizens are greeting Americans as liberators (March 22).
6. An entire division of 8,000 Iraqi soldiers surrendered en masse near Basra (March 23).
7. Several Scud missiles, banned weapons, have been launched against U.S. forces in Kuwait (March 23).
8. Saddam's Fedayeen militia are few in number and do not pose a serious threat (March 23).
9. Basra has been taken (March 23).
11. A captured chemical plant likely produced chemical weapons (March 23).
12. Nassiriya has been taken (March 23).
13. Umm Qasr has been taken (March 24).
14. The Iraqi government faces a "major rebellion" of anti-Saddam citizens in Basra (March 24).

A VOICE HAS FADED Michael Barone described Daniel Patrick Moynihan as "the nation's best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson." He certainly was one of the more passionate voices in the political landscape, especially in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s when a rising tide of poverty and economic disparity erupted in America's urban core. He was a voice for the disinfranchised, a strong internationalist. His voice has been notably absent since he concluded his 24 years in the U.S. Senate in 2000. He died this week at the age of 76.

IRAQ THE VOTE MTV News provides a different spin on news from the Middle East at this site, including a slew of cultural and pop-related headlines that speak to the war. Where else will you find headlines such as, "Beasties, Audioslave Say Protest Songs An Important Part Of Our Culture"?

WHAT DOES "WIN" MEAN? Thomas Friedman lists six measurements for success in Iraq in his NYTimes column today, three of which will be critical for the evaluation of this war and its after-effects:

-- Have we been able to explain why some Iraqi forces are putting up such a fierce fight? Are these the most elite, pampered Special Republican Guard units, who have benefited most from Saddam's rule and are therefore willing to fight to preserve it? Or are these primarily Sunni Muslim units, terrified that with the fall of Saddam the long reign of the Sunnis of Iraq will end and they will be replaced by the Shiite majority? Or is this happening because even Iraqis who detest Saddam love their homeland and hate the idea of a U.S. occupation — and these Iraqis are ready to resist a foreign occupier, even one that claims to be a liberator? Knowing the answer is critical for how we reconstruct Iraq. It is not at all unusual for Arabs to detest both their own dictator and a foreign occupier. (See encyclopedia for Israel, invasion of Lebanon, 1982.)
-- Has an authentic Iraqi liberal nationalist emerged from the U.S. occupation to lead the country? Some pundits are already nominating their favorite Iraqi opposition figures to be Iraq's next leader. My gut tells me the only person who is going to be able to rule Iraq effectively is someone who has lived through Saddam's reign, not sat it out in London or Washington, and who is ready to say no to both tyranny and foreign control in Iraq. But even if he is an Iraqi exile, the next leader of Iraq has to emerge through some sort of consensual process from within Iraq. If the Bush team intends to force Iraq's next leader to quickly embrace Israel, if it intends to impose someone who has been dining with Richard Perle, such a leader will never take root.
-- Is the Iraqi state that emerges from this war accepted as legitimate by Iraq's Arab and Muslim neighbors? That is very important, both for the viability of whatever Iraqi leadership follows Saddam, and for the liberalizing effect it may have on others in the neighborhood. In the absence of any U.N. endorsement for this war, the successor regime to Saddam will have to legitimize itself by becoming something that Arabs and Muslims will point to and say, "We don't like how this was done, but we have to admit America helped build something better in our neighborhood."

OBSCURED FUTURES As much of the world sits glued to the screen watching bits and pieces of war-fighting, the citizens of Baghdad look to the skies, writes one of the better reporters still in the city, Anthony Shadid:

During six days of war, Baghdadis looking to the heavens for omens have had much to contemplate. A terrifying cascade of U.S. bombs has been followed by the apocalyptic smoke of oil fires lit by Iraqi forces, so dense that cars almost collided. The smoke was joined by today's storm, which abruptly ended Baghdad's struggle to reclaim ordinary life. Shops again were shuttered and streets were deserted as a sickly yellow cloaked the sun.

Weary residents spoke of divine intervention, and in the storm they saw God's determination to aid Iraq. But beneath the surface were churning impulses -- of fear and flight, of fatalism and bravado, of grief and dread. With few exceptions, Iraqis still consider political discussions taboo, especially with a foreign journalist shadowed by an official escort. But the storm seemed to draw out anxieties about a future that no one seems willing to predict.

SEEING THE UNEXPECTED Philip Kennicott offers an interesting twist on this war, one seen through images -- the images America expected to see versus the images America is actually seeing. He suggests that a war with Iraq was framed by the administration to be well-scripted, and we are discovering that there are unexpected acts in this play. The script was to contain a first act laying out the evil of Iraq, followed by a celebratory last act. Everyone forgot that between the beginning and the end of all morality plays there is tragedy, despair or the emergence of something dark or unexpected.

Americans awoke this week to newspapers filled with crisp images of the ups and downs of war, and live television feeds of vehicles stalled in the orange blur of a sandstorm. The pace was slowing and the script growing denser with unforeseen incidents. Commentators have observed (and was there a measure of complaint in their voices?) that this war didn't begin the way they expected. If it doesn't end the way they expected, America's fundamental sense of its identity -- as protector and liberator of the oppressed -- will be further shaken, if not shattered.

A photograph by Eric Feferberg of Agence France-Presse (used in both The Washington Post and the New York Times) showed a half-dozen American soldiers rushing to take positions after being attacked near Nasiriyah. Their guns point in three directions, suggesting not just surprise but an enemy on all sides. The palm trees behind them, however, send a more subtle and disturbing message. America has fought plenty of wars among the palm trees -- in Grenada, Panama, Kuwait -- but these palm trees, taken together with an enemy on all sides, suggest only one war. The war that no one wants to think about whenever the country goes back to war. The war that ended one presidency, the war that cast this nation as an oppressor, the war that continued because the people we were fighting to liberate just kept coming, with guns.

Two images are, so far, missing. To give this war some sense of moral purpose, we must see (and believe in) the clamor of happy people, and we want to see American GIs standing warily over a cache of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

If there was something discordant and troubling about many of the images that emerged yesterday, it was perhaps because they clash so sharply with our short-view logic for war. The short-view thinking was built upon a basic, simple, obvious premise. The regime was bad, the people oppressed. If that first premise was right, then many happy conclusions would necessarily follow. The regime would collapse. The people wouldn't resist. Let the cakewalk begin. (The visual icons: toppled statues, torn posters.)

QUOTE DU JOUR

"The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it" -- Albert Einstein

WAR IN PIXELS Digital photography has changed the pace -- but not the face -- of war. Dozens of the best photojournalists in the world are in Kuwait and Iraq right now, and their views of war and its consequences are splashed in newspapers, magazines and websites throughout the world. USC Annenberg's Online Journalism Review explores the changes in war journalism in recent time, and discusses the benefits and challenges with Corbis' Brian Storm and the Washington Post's Tom Kennedy, who will be viewing and selecting from thousands of photos in the coming weeks to tell powerful stories.

"Storm expects a backlash against rapid-fire surface coverage by television or other media and a demand for in-depth photo essays that stand the test of time. “Great storytelling requires time -- time to understand what’s going on, time to spend with your subject, not at the laptop transmitting but really making great pictures. We’re still hindered by the production toolsets that are available. In the next few years we’ll see a dramatic improvement in the way people can put stories together and package materials."

TALES OF MIGRATION Radio Netherlands has created a series that explores global issues from the perspectives of different international broadcasters. "Global Perspectives" delves into the sometimes bleak, sometimes promising world of immigration at a time when many developed nations are tightening restrictions. Each program in the series looks at individuals -- in the Netherlands, Canada, Australia and other countries -- who have struggled with crafting new lives in strange cultures. Links to additional audio stories and websites adds depth to the series. As human trafficking and smuggling begins a hidden norm, it's helpful to think about the individual lives involved. The first program is on Rwandan refugees in the Netherlands:

Last year 6000 unaccompanied minor refugees requested asylum in Holland. In the past, most of these children were allowed to stay and were given citizenship. Now, under a strict new policy, 80 to 90 per cent will be deported. On their 18th birthday they have 28 days to leave the Netherlands. In the meantime they wait out their time in asylum centres where they are discouraged from taking part in Dutch society. In 28 Days we look at the stories of two Rwandan girls. The pair were best friends in their home country. They both came from wealthy families, and both say they lost everyone and everything in the genocide.
Last year, by pure coincidence they were reunited in the Netherlands. One of the girls, Diana, arrived three years ago. She was granted refugee status and is planning her future with optimism. Her friend, Louise, arrived last year. She falls under the new policy and her situation is one of despair and depression. Her case is a catalogue of neglect and bureaucratic blundering. And last month she was told her 28 days were up.

QUICK! LOOK TO THE RIGHT! New music just sitting on my iPod, eating away at my earlobe's navel. This month with links to interviews with those crazy artists.

GETTING GROOVY Meet the perkiest trio in pop music today (excepting you, of course). The Washington Social Club is getting sexy press from everyone these days, and if you spend a moment perusing their website you'll get understand why. Sharp design, subtle wordsmithing and good, stark pop music. Or as a reviewer scribed after their set at Pop Montreal 2002:

After hearing their opening song, my girlfriend turned to me and said, "They're the Who!" While that's probably an overstatement, it's a hard one to disagree with. Frontman Marty Social seems like a rock-god-in-training, his yelpy vocal delivery recalling Roger Daltrey or Mick Jagger, while his numerous guitar poses would undoubtedly earn a Pete Townshend Seal of Approval. It helps that bassist Olivia and drummer Randy (last names aren't rock 'n' roll, man) complement Social extremely well. Seeing the band live, it's very easy to imagine that if the European press finds them, the Washington Social Club could be as big as the Strokes/White Stripes/Hives. Assuming, of course, that they'd want to.

ARREST THOSE CHURLISH CANUKS! Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the Canadian orchestral-punk ensemble with the frequently moving exclamation point, were detained by the FBI at an Oklahoma gas station after a diligent citizen alerted authorities that terrorists might be in the nighborhood. Apparently, the sight of nine urban punks in white vans freaks out people in rural communities.

AIN'T THAT AMERICA? Ah, life during wartime. Courtland Milloy shows that being black and inquisitive in a city under seige can cause all sorts of problems. Take one part public paranoia, two parts overzealous Park Police and one part restrictive civil liberties legislation. Shake well. Go directly to jail.

NIGENDWO IN AFRIKA Caroline Link's outstanding film, "Nowhere in Africa," won an Oscar for best foreign language movie. Producer Peter Hermann explains the joys and challenges of making the film, which was shot on location in Kenya, Germany and the North Sea.

F.T. REA REPORTS FROM RICHMOND Terry Rea (Come on, you remember Slant Magazine! Don't you? Oh.) provides a well-written, balanced look at yesterday evening's pro-peace or anti-war (choices, choices) rally and march in Richmond, Virginia.

FRIEDMAN AND SULLIVAN GRAPPLE WITH MEANING I stopped linking to Andrew Sullivan some time ago, partly because our web logs were tripping over much of the same source material, but mostly because his interpretations often gave me a headache. So, I read him, but saw little need to carry his water (with my 200 readers). But this weekend, he took the NYTimes' Thomas Friedman to task for his use of the term "unilateralism" to describe this current adventure in Iraq.

Friedman responded today with two letters to Sullivan, which are on his "Daily Dish" site. I liked the second one enough to drop it here in it's entirety, but feel free to visit Sullivan's site for any updates in their friendly debate.

Friedman's key points? 1) Liberals who supported this war needed international legitimacy, which was seen through the lens of U.N. aproval, while the neo-con hawks see legitimacy through their narrow lens of Gulf-Arab allies and their own long-restrained sense of righteousness. 2) U.N. approval on the front-end would have been hugely useful for many reasons, but U.N. participation in the reconstruction needs to be managed tightly to avoid a micromanaged disaster. Here's Friedman in his own words:

Dear Andrew: Upon further reflection, it seems to me the argument we are having is an illuminating one and I want to continue it one more round. Maybe my use of the word "unilateral" so often was more indicative than I thought and your heated objection more revealing than you thought. Let me try to explain.

It seems to me conservative hawks are not facing up to two issues here and liberal hawks at least one. Why is it that liberals, such as myself, who were ready to support the war, so desperately wanted U.N. approval for it? It was for a couple of reasons -- one that is already apparent and one that will become more apparent.

First, because this is such a huge, unprecedented task, taking over a whole country half a world away, that the more international legitimacy we had going in, the more time and space we would have to do it right. I want the world, to the extent possible, rooting for us to succeed. You don't have that feeling right now, and that has both psychological and material implications, especially if the war drags on.

Second, and this comes from having lived and traveled so long in the Arab world, I wanted U.N. approval because I knew that just because many Arabs are anti-Saddam, does not mean that they are pro-American or will automatically embrace whatever we do. This is the biggest mistake the neo-cons make. They deal with a very tiny slice of the Arab world -- a slice that has not only bought into our war, but also our story, a slice that also knows how to tell us what we want to hear. That is not true of the wider Arab and Moslem world, which has its own story, which may not be ours or Saddam's.

Indeed, the neo-cons, it seems to me, have always been so caught up with their sense of the justness of this war, they have not paid enough attention to the sheer complexity of the Arab world in general and Iraq particular. I wanted U.N. approval for this war because I felt that it would be easier to win the support, or acquiescence of those Arabs and Moslems who dislike Saddam and America as well. (My views on this have been deeply influenced by a documentary I have been making for the last seven months, based on travels across the Moslem world, on the real roots of 9/11. It's running this Wednesday night on the Discovery Channel.)

The longer the war goes on without the cover of U.N. approval, the more difficult it is for Arab leaders to manage their streets. (They would still be having a difficult time. even with U.N. approval, but, again, their margin of error, like Bush's, is decreased.) This will be true even when the war is over, as we will be telling the Iraqis they have been "liberated" and many in the world, particularly the Arab world, will be telling them they have been "occupied." The absence of U.N. legitimacy will be felt in that debate as well.

Upon reflection, I think what our argument was about was that you believe (and this seems to be true of the Administration as well) that because we have allies in this war - from the serious, such as Britain and Poland, to the absurd such as Rwanda - it is the same as having U.N. approval. Or, to put it another way, conservatives want to believe that this war is truly multilateral and that multilateral is morally the same as U.N.-approved. Andrew, it is not, and I think you make a mistake in believing that it is. Some important moral authority was sacrificed in not getting U.N. approval and there is no way around it. (We can debate how much of that failure is Bush's and how much Chirac's, but that is for another session.)

But, as I said, now that the war has started we have to win and winning all depends on what sort of Iraq we reconstruct. But here liberal hawks have to be honest with themselves. Gulf War II is different from Gulf War I. Gulf War I was about liberating Kuwait. It was not about nation-building. And it is much easier for America to lead a coalition whose only task was winning a war. Gulf War II is about both winning a war and nation-building. I wish we had more allies for winning the war. I wish we had many more allies for paying for the war afterwards. But, I realize, you cannot do nation-building by committee, especially in Iraq. It will require a firm hand from the top. Or, to put it another way, maybe you can do it by committee in tiny Bosnia and Kosovo, but not in Iraq. Given the problems we had with France at the U.N., I cannot imagine trying to nation-build in Iraq with them. All the factions inside would try to play off the different big powers.

Yet, I still hope that the U.N. can be brought in to legitimate such a nation-building project afterwards and help to fund it. I still think that would be useful. But not to run it. This is a dilemma. I don't know how this gets finessed. My hope is that this rebuilding task, to the extent that it is multilateralized, will be handed over to NATO -- which we lead, is serious, and at the sametime has a broader legitimacy. Maybe U.N. approval and NATO forces? I don't know. I guess it will depend on how the war goes.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. (No need to print them if you don't want. I have my own column!) I just wanted to take this argument to its conclusion, as it was helping to illuminate my own feelings. Allbest. Tom

INVENTING REASONS The Washington Post and New York Times both begin to dig into the origins of documents -- apparently forged -- passed by the U.S. to U.N. weapons inspectors. The documents implicate Iraq in an alleged purchase of uranium from Nigeria, and now everyone wants to know who created the fake papers. Jack Shafer in Slate provides some background:

The CIA covers its ass today in both the Washington Post and the New York Times, further distancing itself from the forged documents the Bush administration forwarded to the United Nations to support its case that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium. News that the documents were forged has given succor to Bush administration critics, who accuse the government of ginning up evidence against Iraq to justify war.

The story behind the forged documents and how they made their way from the United States to U.N. inspectors is important because it suggests the Bush administration is 1) incompetent; 2) stupid; 3) corrupt; or 4) all of the above.

TURNING OUR ATTENTION TO FRANCE "My Blue House" chats up the books, the movies and the essential -- The 1815 Diary of a Farm Girl in Nova Scotia.

KITTEN LOVE Nothing beats a puppy singing "Lady In Red" accompanied by a kitten choir. Nothing.

RAED RETURNS Salam gets back online after three days, and provides a snapshot of life in Baghdad. Try this link if the previous one is sticky.

WHAT'S IN A NAME I don't know. Maybe it was the phrase "Retro Fetish Goth Vixen." More likely it was the fact that her legal name is Miss Acid PopTart.

LAYERS OF DISSENT As an observer at an anti-war protest, and a participant at both an interfaith prayer service and a Buddhist peace vigil last week, I've concluded that there are as many messages as there are protesters. And that my own liberal inclinations toward thoughtful, pragmatic response don't make good street theatre, which is fine since I'm a pretty crappy puppet maker. The American Prospect's Robert Kuttner pegs the antiwar movement in his broad sweep --

The antiwar movement is actually two rather different movements that partly overlap. One movement is in the streets and on the Internet -- often led by radicals, sometimes joined uneasily by liberals. The other is pragmatic and mainstream. Both were nonplused, but only temporarily, by the outbreak of war, and neither has gone away.

The radical antiwar movement opposes war in general, and the global projection of American military and corporate power in particular. A minority of this minority, such as the group International ANSWER, can be described fairly as Marxist. Many others, with varying degrees of pacifism, simply reject what they see as the Bush administration's plans for global hegemony. It was this wing of the antiwar movement that organized the stunning worldwide demonstrations of last month, the largest in history. A great many ordinary people also joined in, however, out of plain revulsion against Bush's Iraq policy.

This movement continues to mount large-scale protests, most of them peaceful. Relatively small numbers of nonviolent demonstrators have gotten themselves arrested in scattered sit-ins around the country. These protests could swell.

One of the largest peaceful antiwar groups, MoveOn.org, is organizing a massive e-mail drive to enlist signatures for a citizens' declaration, which reads in its entirety: "As a US-led invasion of Iraq begins, we, the undersigned citizens of many countries, reaffirm our commitment to addressing international conflicts through the rule of law and the United Nations. By joining together across countries and continents, we have emerged as a new force for peace. As we grieve for the victims of this war, we pledge to redouble our efforts to put an end to the Bush Administration's doctrine of pre-emptive attack and the reckless use of military power."And here is where the two antiwar movements overlap. The sentiments in that statement could be endorsed by much of the American foreign policy establishment. The second face of the antiwar movement is entirely non-radical, pragmatically opposed to the administration's doctrine of preemptive war and alarmed at its contempt for diplomacy. We might call this the "realist" antiwar movement, after the realist school of foreign policy.

Interestingly, while it had echoes in street demonstrations, the prolonged debate about whether to go to war was conducted entirely within the American mainstream. The realist foreign policy school is not opposed to the use of military power. But it values international institutions and international law, not for reasons of idealism but out of plain self-interest. James Fallows, writing in the Atlantic Monthly last November, used extensive interviews to show that many foreign policy hawks are alarmed by the administration's views on preemption and unilateralism. From this viewpoint, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, Vice President Cheney et al. are the radicals. They just happen to be running the U.S. government.

BE STILL MY BEATING HEART Aaron McGruder returns to the topic of war and calamity in "The Boondocks." Target: Dick Cheney.