This is old news that I missed while at the NewSpace conference, but Lileks has a screed up about Howard Dean and the war that’s still timely. It’s funny, and sad (as Lileks often is):

…the revelatory moment in Dean

Why is this not a functional declaration of war?

Iran awarded Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez its highest state medal on Sunday for supporting Tehran in its nuclear standoff with the international community, while Chavez urged the world to rise up and defeat the U.S., state-run media in both countries reported…

“Let’s save the human race, let’s finish off the U.S. empire,” Chavez said. “This (task) must be assumed with strength by the majority of the peoples of the world.”

This time, Mark Steyn takes on the moronic “chicken hawk” argument:

Aside from anything else, I wonder if the gentleman (if that’s the word) understands how freakish it would strike every previous generation of Americans (and, indeed, almost every other society in human history) to berate a blameless young lady for not grabbing a rifle and heading for the front. And, if the issue is “extraordinary disrespect” to the troops, it’s utterly self-defeating to argue that only active-duty servicemen get proprietorial rights in a war.

In fact, the notion that “fighting” a war is the monopoly of those “in uniform” gets to the heart of why America and its allies are having such a difficult time in the present struggle. Nations go to war, not armies. Or, to be more precise, nations, not armies, win wars. America has a military that cannot be defeated on the battlefield, but so what? The first President Bush assembled the biggest coalition in history for Gulf War I, and the bigger and more notionally powerful it got, the better Saddam Hussein’s chances of surviving it became. Because the bigger it got, the less likely it was to be driven by a coherent set of war aims.