I have mixed feelings listening to the news that Saddam has been killed in tonight’s bombing.

I’m not unhappy he’s dead, but I think that it was much too easy, and ambiguous a death. Both to convince the Iraqis, and for reasons of basic justice, he should at a minimum have seen it coming, and suffered the public ignominy of Mussolini.

Scott Ott has an explanation for the Iraqi (dis)Information minister’s bizarre proclamations.

It’s a new word that I just coined, and that Matt Ridley describes well in this article from the Guardian.

As a change of pace, Brad DeLong has a simply stunning optical illusion. It demonstrates very clearly just how much vision is a cognitive process.

[via Brink Lindsey]

Here’s an interesting article for those who claim that Arafat had no control over terrorist acts.

So says Stephen Schwartz. He says that fellow-Muslim Kosovars may have some words of warning for newly-liberated Iraqis.

KOSOVARS can offer a valuable insight into the situation we expect to face in Iraq. The U.N., they point out, never supported the NATO bombing of Serbia in the first place, so why should U.N. functionaries care how they carry out a mandate given them for reconstruction? Americans were naive, say Kosovars, to believe that the U.N. would effectively fulfill the tasks ceded to it in Kosovo, after the international organization had opposed the intervention.

Many people seem to misunderstand what the U.N. is. They hear about potential United Nations involvement in Iraq, and believe that the peoples of the world will unite, through their U.N. ambassadors, to make Iraq whole after the war. But this perception is mistaken. The U.N. is not the nations of the world united. It is an enterprise located in a building in New York, with satellite operations around the world, employing a certain cadre of people of many nationalities, most of whom are time-servers and ideologues.

In my six years’ experience in postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, I never met a U.N. representative who failed to conform to a certain professional profile. They call themselves “internationals,” and are generally young and inexperienced, although the heads of their missions tend to be old and uninterested. They have a strong prejudice against privatization, and too many of those chosen for economic responsibilities hail from Sweden and other countries where statist socialism remains the political religion.

Here’s the conclusion:

The United States must not permit the U.N., with its terrible record in the Balkans, among the Palestinians, in Africa, in Cambodia, and elsewhere, to inflict its incompetence and neuroses on the people of Iraq. Iraq is fighting for its freedom, after the long brutalization it has endured. America the liberator must prove that we meant what we said about the freedom and prosperity of the Iraqi people–while the U.N., the E.U., and their associates preferred the status quo. Iraq deserves better–and so do we, for the sacrifices we shall have borne. The first step is to recognize what not to do in postwar Iraq. And the name of that tragedy is Kosovo.

To quote someone else, read the whole thing.

…to con a publishing house.

Hillary’s book–you know, the one that she received a record multi-million advance for?–is overdue, according to Drudge. It’s supposed to come out in August, and the publisher hasn’t even seen a title, let alone a manuscript.

I’ve always thought that the advance was a bribe of some kind, albeit a legal one.

…to con a publishing house.

Hillary’s book–you know, the one that she received a record multi-million advance for?–is overdue, according to Drudge. It’s supposed to come out in August, and the publisher hasn’t even seen a title, let alone a manuscript.

I’ve always thought that the advance was a bribe of some kind, albeit a legal one.

…to con a publishing house.

Hillary’s book–you know, the one that she received a record multi-million advance for?–is overdue, according to Drudge. It’s supposed to come out in August, and the publisher hasn’t even seen a title, let alone a manuscript.

I’ve always thought that the advance was a bribe of some kind, albeit a legal one.

For what it’s worth, a Saudi newspaper is reporting that the guy walking around the street with the armed cheering battalion (well, actually, it looked more like a platoon) was a double.