Martin Hutchinson provides a useful history of the UN, and an explanation of why it was a mistake for the Administration to think that it would help to go there before removing Saddam. I disagree with his headline, though. The disaster was mitigated by the fact that the uselessness of the UN as an institution, at least for collective security, is now abundantly clear.

They haven’t done the movie yet, but Flashbunny has the comic book.

The “anti-war” protestors demonstrated how peaceful they are yesterday, by rioting and sacking a convenience store in Canoga Park, California.

Back at the beginning of the Cold War, with the threat of nuclear holocaust overhanging the nation, and the world, physicist Herman Kahn wrote a paper about “thinking the unthinkable.”

It was about nuclear war, and it ultimately resulted in the theory of “Mutually Assured Destruction,” with the appropriate acronym, MAD. No matter how horrible the consequences of some potential policy outcomes, they must be thought about, to minimize the probability of them occurring, or at least, of the damage resulting from their occurrence.

For the past month, NASA has been picking through the few recovered shattered shards of its first reusable spaceship, attempting to put together a tragic jigsaw puzzle, with misshapen pieces burned and warped, and most of them missing, in an attempt to try to find out definitively why it has to do so. But even before a conclusion has been reached, the agency has come under fire for alleged poor judgement during the flight, and for withholding information from the public in an attempt to provide upholstery for the keesters of senior management.

These accusations may turn out to be accurate but, to me, they’re premature, and, for now, misguided.

I say this not because I’m unable to believe that NASA would do such a thing, nor is it because I’m some kind of reflexive defender of the space agency. Anyone who’s been reading my columns in this space for the past year knows that, if anything, I’m the last person to defend NASA, an entity that I believe has been, in many ways, delaying and holding us back from our ultimate destiny in space for decades. In fact, I find it ironic, and frustrating, that in such circumstances I find myself in the position of defending the Shuttle program, and the agency itself. I do so not because I am happy with it, or even because I would like to see it continue to exist in its current form.

My concern is that, in a witch hunt to find out “what did they know, and when did they know it,” we’ll lose sight of the real issues, the fundamental issues of space policy that led to this disaster. In an era in which many of our government institutions have shown themselves to have feet of clay, it’s very easy to point fingers at one that has lost two orbiters with fourteen people, flown a supposedly orbiting vehicle into the Martian surface under complete agency control, and launched an ostensibly far-seeing telescope that turned out to need glasses, like some kind of multi-billion-dollar space geek. Moreover, it’s one that doesn’t seem to provide a lot of value for the money invested in it, at least as far as the ostensible purpose–progress in getting humans into space.

And of course, it’s always fun to play Monday-morning quarterback. When the apparent mode of destruction corresponds very closely with some engineers’ pre-entry predictions, it’s easy, and even gratifying, to cry “cover up”!

But in doing so, we fall into the trap of criticizing it for the wrong reasons, and once again being distracted from the real problem, which is that we don’t, as a nation, really know what we’re trying to accomplish in space. Until we resolve that issue, putting NASA into the stocks and throwing tomatoes at it is not only pointless, but counterproductive.

The people who work at NASA are, well, people. They’re even good people, for the most part. But put yourself in their place for a moment.

Columbia is in orbit, for better or worse. There may have been damage to the tiles on the wing leading edge. The damage may or may not be critical, even catastrophic. If so, due to decisions made decades earlier, decisions made by people, most of whom are retired or dead, there’s little that can be done about it. The thermal protection system has been accepted for years as a critical subsystem, just like a wing on an aircraft, and if it’s lost, the vehicle is lost. The only solution to that problem is to prevent it from being lost.

The notion that it has been fatally compromised, with no realistic solution, may be discussed as a “what if” scenario in an email, but it’s not something that can be easily contemplated as a reality.

To do so is to contemplate the loss of a quarter of the nation’s fleet of orbiters, and to consign seven brave and exemplary men and women to an almost instantaneous incineration. To do so is to “think the unthinkable.”

War gamers, military planners, RAND Corporation analysts, are used to doing so. NASA engineers are not.

Many will complain that this is a result of budget shortfall. To the degree that that’s true, it has little to do with recent NASA budgets.

It’s a result of a budget shortfall a quarter of a century ago, when we decided that we would have a single vehicle provide access for humans to orbit, when we decided that that vehicle must not only deliver humans to orbit, but sixty-thousand-pound payloads, and have a thousand miles of cross-range capability on landing, and act as a space station, rather than simply a delivery truck.

Most importantly, it’s when we decided that we would only provide half of the money that engineers said would be required to develop such a vehicle, so compromises were made, that resulted in multi-segment solids that destroyed the Challenger in 1986. It also resulted in a fragile thermal protection system that looks increasingly like it doomed Columbia a little over a month ago, in a way that was beyond the means of frustrated engineers at NASA–and the United Space Alliance, and Boeing–to do anything about, to the point that it was painful to even think about.

Let me propose some (apparently) unthinkable thinking, that might get us out of the rut that we’ve been digging since the end of Apollo.

Let’s think about multiple vehicle types for people to orbit, all American. Let’s think about vehicles that can deliver anyone who wants to go, and has the money to do so, instead of government employees. Let’s think about generating huge markets for space activities, instead of constraining ourselves to paltry notions of three, or six civil servants permanently in orbit at once. Let’s think about building infrastructure, on the ground and in orbit, that will provide “tow-trucks,” and hangars, and maintenance capability for vehicles in trouble, just as we do in every venue on earth.

Let’s think the truly unthinkable–making space not a program, but just a place.

It’s not just Patty Murray. Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur is now equating Osama bin Laden to the Founding Fathers.

“One could say that Osama bin Laden and these non-nation-state fighters with religious purpose are very similar to those kind of atypical revolutionaries that helped to cast off the British crown,” Miss Kaptur said.

You know, like George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, and all those other religious fanatics who murdered men, women and children by the buildingload to impose Christianity on the world.

Do these people ever listen to what they say?

She has some helpful advice, per the usual:

The Catholic tradition calls for embracing the poor and the dispossessed, Miss Kaptur said. Rather than initiating military action, the United States should try to counter the poverty and repression that breed terrorism in the Mideast.

Not to imply that those conditions are what breed terrorism, but that’s exactly what we’re doing, Marcy. Once Saddam is gone, repression will be immensely relieved, as will poverty, in Iraq.

Some of the strain is starting to show among our Arab “friends.”

Sheikh Ahmed stormed out into a media scrum. As panicky Qatari security guards tried to pull the cameras away, he proceeded to denounce Iraq and say that time was running out. ?Today the Iraqi regime showed what is really in its heart ? the hatred of its neighbours. Now it will take a miracle to stop what is happening and we are not living in an age when miracles take place.?

Looks like at least some of them can see the handwriting on the wall.

They have some samples of past intramural abuse as well:

Arab summit, 1970: Colonel Muammar Gaddafi on inviting King Hussein of Jordan: ?What?s the use of getting him? He?s crazy. Isn?t his father in an asylum in Istanbul??

August 1999: Mustafa Tlas, Syrian Defence Minister ?The difference between Yassir Arafat and a stripper is that she becomes more beautiful with every piece of clothing she removes; Arafat gets more ugly with every concession he makes to Israel?

Arab summit May 1989: Tariq Aziz addressing Farouk Charaa, the Syrian Foreign Minister ?The honorable minister, the demagogue and the liar”
Mr Charaa replied, calling Aziz ?his excellency, the minister and terrorist?

Boy, I thought that Arabic was supposed to be such a flowery and eloquent language. Tim Blair can come up with much better insults than this. The comparison between Arafat and the stripper was particularly lame. Maybe they come out better in Arabic.

You know, this is going to make a great National Lampoon movie. The script writes itself. Time to bring Chevy Chase out of retirement.

When we last left our intrepid, noble (albeit dimwitted) human shields, they were high tailing it out of Baghdad, having belatedly discovered that the Iraqis wanted them to shield actual targets, instead of hospitals and orphanages.

“We painted a huge sign on the roof saying human shields, so when any planes bombed the target, they’d see they were killing us — Englishmen and Finns and Turks.”

Yes, right next to the words “Baby Milk Factory.”

Some 50 other Swedish anti-war human shield activists who had traveled to Iraq began to leave on Monday, saying they had wanted to protect hospitals and schools but had been forced out to refineries, power plants and water works.

But now, the owner of the double-decker buses, having driven west from Baghdad, ran into a problem–the Mediterranean Sea. His buses aren’t amphibious, so he’s driven as far west as he can go, and is stuck in beautiful downtown Beirut, Lebanon, with no funds to ship the buses home.

“The buses have to be shipped back. It’s just not practical to drive them…I am not even really sure how much money I’ve got, but I’m sure it’s not enough,” said owner Joe Letts, adding that he would fly to London on Thursday to try to raise cash.

“I thought I would let people know it’s a problem,” he added, sitting in a makeshift kitchen on his bus in central Beirut.

No problem for us…

He didn’t seem to manage his money very well. But we’re not surprised about that, are we?

When he left London, he thought he had enough money to pay to ship the buses home, but ended up spending his personal finances to help pay for the trip.

But here’s his real problem:

“I own these buses and they are my livelihood and my family’s livelihood. And all along I was there really to take the people down and then come back,” he said.

…”I had promised my wife I would get the buses home,” he said. “If I don’t get them home, we’re absolutely stuck.”

All of a sudden that busless trip to London to raise money isn’t looking very fun. Wives and mothers of the ancient Spartan warriors admonished their men to come home “with their shield, or on it.” I guess for this modern (or postmodern?) warrior, it’s more like, “with your bus, or in it.”

Maybe he’s just better off setting up residence in Lebanon. Plenty of work for human shields there, from what I hear, especially in the south.

For those who aren’t insane with hatred of Amerikkka and George Bush, at least the moral case for removing Saddam is apparently compelling.

Assos Hardi, the editor of Hawalati, the liberal newspaper in Sulaimania, was more mathematical in his appraisal. He said: “How many people do you think will die if America attacks Saddam? It will probably be less than the number of people he kills in a single month.”

As the drums of war beat ever louder, I am still unsure of the strategic wisdom of opening a second front in the war against terror. But of the moral rectitude of such a course, there can be no doubt.

Andrew Sullivan points to this picture over at Rush Limbaugh’s site, ostensibly of the north Atlantic, Europe and Africa, as the terminator crosses them, taken from the Columbia on its last mission.

I thought it looked a little suspicious. The altitude seems much too high, and it would be amazing to see this much of the earth at once with absolutely no cloud cover. Also note that you can see the mid-Atlantic ridge, which shouldn’t be viewable through thousands of feet of water.

Keith Cowing over at NASA Watch confirms my suspicions. Both Andrew and Rush were taken in. It’s a computer simulation. You can find it at this cool site (they do it for the Moon as well), and the particular view on Rush’s site can be generated here, with real-time lighting conditions.

Rush needs to verify his sources a little more carefully.

[Update at 3 PM PST]

Snopes has it wrong, too.

Glenn points to a couple links to discussions as to whether our latest war trophy should be tortured to garner requisite information from him, both to gather up members or terrorist cells and, more immediately, to prevent attacks that may be planned and imminent.

I don’t have any firm opinions on the subject, at least at this late hour, but I do wonder–once we’ve squeezed all the information out of him, and he’s a dessicated lemon, what then? What punishment should be in store for him?

I’m not into Biblical, or Hammurabian justice myself, but if you’re an “eye for an eye” type, it seems to me that an appropriate retribution might be to take him up to the observation floor (86th) of the Empire State Building, and face him south, toward downtown, so he could view the site of his atrocity. Confront him with a flamethrower, and offer him a choice, just as his victims had…