I HAVE BEEN SWAMPED WITH WORK since Wednesday and am home only briefly until I return to work this afternoon. I will try to post again this evening while I watch Sunday Night Football on ESPN.

As you might imagine, December is the busiest month of the year for those of my vocation, but not only for the obvious reason of Christmas-related events; it is a month when people become ill, too. I conducted two funerals this week, on Friday and Saturday; I remember a funeral-home owner once said that people die "when the sap rises and when it falls."

(I notice that Glenn Reynolds took yersterday off, so there's a lot of "busy-ness" going round.)

Trent Lott is "The Internet's First Scalp," says John Podhoretz. He says the outrage over Lott's endorsement of Thurmond's Dixiecrat platform began in the blogosphere and has been driven by it.

The drumbeat that turned this story into a major calamity for Lott, and led directly to President Bush's welcome disavowal of Lott's views yesterday, was entirely driven by the Internet blogosphere.

Honduras is a deadly place to fly, as five American soldiers tragically discovered Wednesday evening. They were flying in a US Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter when the craft went down on a mountain 85 miles north of the nation's capital. Tegicigalpa. All five died. Peacetime is dangerous, too.

I spent a tour in Honduras in 1989 and went all over the country, mostly by helicopter. It is very mountainous except in the southeast, where it is flat jungle. I flew from on a Black Hawk from one end of the jungle to the other one day to visit a Honduran military base on the Caribbean coast. It was a fantastically clear day. For a long time, from horizon to horizon there was only the solid green jungle canopy. If we had gone down for some reason the jungle would have swallowed us like a crocodile gulping a frog.

US forces in the country are headquartered on the Hondurans Air Force Base, Soto Cano. There are no US-only installations in the country as there are in Germany, at least when I retired in 1995, and I am 99 percent certain that nothing about basing arrangements has changed since then. The US and Honduras have no agreement for permanent basing of US troops, meaning that families of US troops don't go with them, there is no Status of Forces Agreement, and with only a few exceptions, all US troops there are assigned for temporary duty, TDY is military parlance, rather than a Permanent Change of Station, or PCS.

When I was assigned to Joint Task Force Bravo in 1989, there were about 1,200 US Army and Air Force officers and enlisted troops, the majority being Army. We had a few folks stationed in Tegucigalpa, about 90 miles away as I recall, including a captain who worked for me. He was an Air Force officer who worked out of the US embassy. The Special Forces Military Assistance Teams fell directly under embassy supervision, not ours.

JTF-Bravo is dependent on helicopters for its mobility because roads in Honduras are so few and generally poor. During much of the 1980s, the major project the Army carried out there was to build a modern, high-capacity highway from the interior north to the port of San Pedro Sula. The road would hasten the economic development of the country once completed. Surely by now it is complete, but I haven't checked. The construction was carried out mostly by US National Guard units who spent their two weeks ADT there, road building. Especially during the summer there were many Guard units rotating in and out all the time.

They would bring their own aviation assets and pilots. I remember one North Dakota ARNG Huey pilot with whom I flew most of two days. His civilian job was the governor's personal pilot. He had a gazllion hours as command pilot, and I have never seen anyone who could make a Huey do things he could do. He was the smoothest pilot I have ever seen; riding with other Huey pilots afterwards felt like riding on an off-balance washing machine.

Not long before I arrived, a JTF-B CH-47, a big cargo chopper with two enormous twin rotors, front and rear, dropped straight down from 5,000 feet one day and killed all three crewmen. No one else was aboard. The two big rotors overlap, synchronized by a mechanism with a connecting rod that runs from the front transmission to the rear one. On this unfortunate helicopter, investigation revealed that the rod broke. Instantly the synchronization was lost, the rotors splintered each other to shards, and the chopper dropped like an anvil.

During my tour there was a signal station set up on a remote mountainside (all mountains in Honduras are remote, actually). A Huey flew in to drop off rations, mail, water, stuff like that. There was no place to land, so the resupply choppers would hover over a cleared stretch of mountainside and drop the stuff off - strictly routine flying, really, for terrain like that. This Huey suffered LTE at the worst time of helicopter flight, during the transition. LTE means Loss of Tailrotor Effectiveness, a euphemistic way of saying that the tail rotor spun off the tail boom into thin air. Transition is the part of the flight when the helicopter is, well, transitioning from forward flight to hover, or vice-versa. Aerodynamically and inertially, it is the worst time to suffer LTE.

The tail rotor prevents the chopper from spinning around the main rotor's axis in the opposite direction of the main rotor. Mr. Newton's laws are absolute in helicopter flight. The rotor goes one way round and the rest of the bird goes the other, unless held in place by the tail rotor.

For LTE at full forward speed, pilots know to point the nose toward the ground and keep the airspeed above 100 knots. Aerodynamic pressure on the tail boom keeps the bird from spinning like a top, it just wobbles back and forth rapidly until the pilot piles it onto the ground in a barely controlled crash landing, with emphasis on the crash. It can be done, and has been, and crew have even survived it, but it's an awful thing to have to do.

But the alternative is worse, and that's what happens when you suffer - and I do mean suffer - LTE during transition, as the helicopter concerned did. There's insufficient forward speed to keep the tail boom in place. Instead, the chopper immediately spins. This one spun like a top and veered down the mountainside. It smashed into the ground 40 meters or so downhill from the signal station, whose detachment was observing in horror.

The main rotor exploded into a thousand pieces and the bird rolled down the mountain. It was lightly wooded there, scrub brush mostly, ending in thick growth at the base about 750-1,000 feet down. After a few revolutions on the ground the tail boom flew away, leaving the basic fuselage, which is shaped like a fat football.

The chopper, of what was left of it, kept rolling and bouncing all the way to the bottom, where it disappeared into the growth. It took detachment troops 40 minutes to make their way down the mountain, expecting to find only pieces of wreckage and pieces of bodies.

Instead, they found the pilot, the co-pilot and the crew chief sitting on tree trunk that the chopper had knocked down, drinking coffee and sucking on unlit cigarettes, the risk of fire being too great to light them. They were unhurt and too numbed to speak.

Other helicopters came in to evacuate them and the remains of the Huey. It had impaled itself on a four-inch-thick tree that drove through the floorboard and out the top. When I last saw the wreck, the tree was still there, except the parts that had extended outside the fuselage, of course, which had been sawn off. It had barely missed the crew chief.

Near the end of my tour, a Columbian 727 airliner flew straight into a fog-shrouded mountain while trying make Tegucigalpa's airport. As I recall, about 300 people died. I had flown that same approach a few months earlier in similar weather en route from Panama on a Tennessee Air Guard C-130. My two pilots let me sit in the cockpit on an upended tool kit when I told them I was a Tennessean also.

We flew across Costa Rica and then out over the Pacific to avoid overflying Nicaragua, which was communist in those days. being jokesters, the two pilots thought it would be great fun to tease the Sandinista air defenses. The internationally-recognized territorial limit was three miles from the coast, so they flew three miles and, oh, 10 feet out. All up the coast they showed me the air defense radar warnings on their avionics. One color light for detection radar, another color for targeting radars that actually guide the missiles. For some reason they thought it was pretty cool to watch the different colors come on and off.

We cranked into a vertical turn over Tiger Island, owned by Honduras but claimed by El Salvador and Nicaragua. The three countries converge at Tiger Bay, in which sits the island. To stay in only Honduran air space was tricky since the margin of error was tiny. But they did it perfectly; we just had to fly Chinese for awhile - Won Wing Lo. Nobody shot at us.

Tegucigalpa is surrounded by mountains. There is not even a railway to the city because the terrain is too rough. From the south the air approach's glide path to the runway is parallel to the descending slope of the mountains; you lose several thousand feet of altitude while remaining 400 feet above the ground the whole way. The you land and jam on the brakes because at the other end of the runway is a cliff. It's no problem for a C-130, but for 727s, the largest plane the airport can handle, pilots have to waste no runway and hit reverse thruster and brakes immediately. It's the closest thing to carrier landings in commercial aviation.

Honduras has some beautiful country, but it can be a treacherous place to fly.

"We'll nuke you back" is a threat we probably would never carry out. Charles Johnson points out this news story of the Bush administration's threat to retaliate with atomic weapons against states that use them against us.

The threat was contained in a White House document, called the "National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction," to be delivered to Congress on Wednesday.

The six-page statement underscores long-standing policy that the United States "reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force — including through resort to all of our options — to the use of WMD (weapons of mass destruction) against the United States, our forces abroad and friends and allies."

This is a threat that is necessary to make; as the article points out, it is intended to deter hostile regimes. But it's probably not a threat that we would or should make good.

During the Cold War the US always said it stood ready to use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union if the situation warranted. But the US and USSR were approximately evenly matched, and both were colossi; there could be no limited war between them because they could each escalate so rapidly to the level of inflicting total destruction on the other. Mutual Assured Destruction was a fact, and both sides knew it. Just as importantly, the struggle between the US and USSR was never primarily military anyway; it was a war of ideas. What the Soviets wanted to do was convert the world to communism, not destroy it. Having come to power through revolution, Stalin and successors wanted to foment similar revolutions in other countries. Yet successful revolutions are mass movements. They require masses of people to be converted, emotionally, to the revolutionary side, either actively to participate or passively support it. Persuasion, not destruction, was always the linchpin of the Soviet export of Marxism-Leninism to other lands. Not everyone in a country needed to be converted, but a large enough number had to be so that without a "critical mass" of True Believers, communism could not be established except as a fringe movement. (Of course, the Cold War was violent, but only on the peripheries of the US and USSR.)

But today there is no Mutual Assured Destruction between the US and any hostile state. There is the threat that Iraq, Iran and North Korea could develop WMDs that could be used against the US proper or its forces overseas, but none of the potential threats measure up to the total destructive potential of the old USSR. So these nations will someday be able to hurt us badly, but not destroy us. We, on the other hand, can destroy them utterly.

That's the calculus that the administration's is hoping that hostile regimes will figure: that any WMD attack against the US or US forces would assure their destruction, not their victory. But will it actually deter them?

Leave aside atomic weapons; of the three countries of the Axis of Evil, only North Korea has any (so it claims). Iraq has been working desperately to build one or more, but almost certainly has not succeeded. Iran's emphasis has been long range rocketry, not atomic warheads, although the nation is technically capable of producing them if it could obtain the specialized equipment and atomic material.

Hence we are left with the threat of chemical and biological weapons. This probably leaves out North Korea, which has pursued atomic weapons to gain great power status. North Korea's ideology has always called for its communist government to rule over a unified Korean peninsula; it wants to conquer South Korea, not destroy it. Bioweapons are too dangerous to use because they could backfire against the North. Just as daunting, they could propagate into neighboring China, which North Korea simply cannot afford. Chemical weapons the North may have, but there is no point using them unless someone invades the North, and no one is about to do that anytime. North Korea is the arms factory of the Axis, but not its combatant.

Iran's leaders, even the extremists, would certainly prefer that Iran not be destroyed even if the alternative was conquest by the US, which is not a prospect being discussed anyway. So Assured Destruction will deter them provided they find the threat of it credible. Besides, the US is not saber rattling at Iran, so the mullahs surely know that their best chance to stay in power is not to so something stupid, like attack the US.

That leaves Iraq. We know from the previous years of UN inspections that Iraq has developed both biological and chemical weapons and was nearing success in obtaining atomic weapons. The US is already committed to regime change there. So to save his skin and power, Saddam would resort to using WMDs if necessary. But our threats to use nukes as retaliation against Iraq is not credible. We are not making war against the Iraqi people, whom we have already declared are in need of liberation, not conquest.

Using atomic weapons against Iraq would accrue to the US no strategic or tactical benefit. Conventional weapons are now so destructive that nukes are not necessary just to destroy enemy formations and installations. The idea that we would nuke cities is repulsive: our objective is not to destroy Iraq but to liberate its people from murderous repression.

I discussed this subject in detail in my Nov. 15 posting, "Why the US cannot retaliate against Iraq if Iraq uses WMDs." Also, I discussed in detail why using WMDs against US troops is a no lose move for Saddam.

Some famous apologies are compared to Trent Lott's recent weasel words by Jesus Gil. He compares the RC Act of Contrition with Lots's pseudo-apology for his racism-tinged praised of Strom Thurmond, then offers other apologies examples from Saddam Hussein, Jerry Falwell, Bill Clinton and Cardinal Bernard Law. Then he asks, "do any of the above apologies meet the criteria for a true apology?"

Here's more on the Scud missiles seized at sea yesterday.

Saddam's rope-a-dope of the inspectors has a new angle now. Glenn Reynolds reports that Saddam is sending his nuclear scientists to Syria, Libya and Sudan and putting low-level techs in their places. Glenn concludes, "The whole thing is a charade, and everyone knows it. Soon, even Hans Blix will figure it out."

Blix, figure it out? There is nothing for Blix to figure out - as I wrote earlier, "Blix is acting openly in opposition to the interests of the United States and indeed to the interests of the UN Security Council. IMO, Blix is way past being a useful idiot for Saddam is is in fact actually, deliberately allied with him."

Why pro-choice must mean weaker government. Fred McMahon writes in Canada's National Post that prosperity starts with economic freedom. Observing that the wealthiest Canadian province, Ontario, is poorer than all US states except West Virginia, Montana and Mississippi, Fred says that for prosperity to come later, economic freedom must come now.

Economic freedom is about personal choice -- the right to spend the money you earn as you wish without onerous taxation or regulation, the right of individuals through free markets to determine what is produced without government meddling, and the right to work for or employ someone through mutual agreement without government interference. The study measures these factors by examining size of government, taxation and labour market freedom.

Why is freedom important? Any freely negotiated transaction must benefit both parties. If not, the disadvantaged party would kill the deal. This has consequences throughout the economy. Consumers only choose products with superior quality or price. That forces producers to seek constant improvements. Billions of mutually beneficial transactions power the dynamic that spurs productivity growth and increasing prosperity in free economies.

Restrictions on freedom prevent people from making mutually beneficial transactions. Such transactions are replaced by government action, marked by coercion and lack of choice. Instead of gains for both parties, citizens pay their taxes and accept whatever service is offered. Government attempts to "plan" economic growth have disastrous results.

Clergyman says Santa's reindeer would burn up from atmospheric friction if they flew as fast as would be required to makes Santa's rounds, Richard Heddleson reports.

Youngsters at a Christmas carol service were devastated when the Reverend Lee Rayfield told them Santa Claus was dead.

Even parents at the service in Maidenhead, Berkshire, were shocked to hear Mr Rayfield say it was scientifically impossible for Father Christmas to deliver so many presents so quickly. . . .

Mr Rayfield also told the youngsters that reindeer would burst into flames if they had to travel at the speeds necessary.

Mr Rayfield, whose comments came from an internet story on how scientific research could dispel the myth of Santa, is now writing a letter to parents apologising for the blunder.

What an idiot! While he has obviously been taking a little too good care of the communion wine, he has failed to stay current on the scientific research into Santa Claus.

Here is the old, disproven skeptical theory about Santa Claus, and the modern rebuttal to it:

No known species of reindeer can fly.

There are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not completely rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

There are 2 billion children in the world. But since Santa doesn't appear to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.

However, Canadian Jim Mantle responds that this supposition depends on -

"a uniform distribution of children across homes. Toronto/Yorkville, or Toronto/Cabbagetown, or other yuppie nieghborhoods, have probably less than the average (and don't forget DINK and SINK homes (Double Income No Kids, Single Income No Kids)), while families with 748 starving children that they keep showing on Vision TV while trying to pick my pocket would skew that 15% of homes down a few percent.

Back to the old theory:

Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house.

Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 mile per household, a total trip of 75,000,000 miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc. This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, or 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a pokey 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized Lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds each. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could pull 10 times the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. For comparison - this is four times the weight of SS Queen Elizabeth.

353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second, each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to acceleration forces 17,500 times greater than gravity, or 17,500 g's. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

In conclusion - If Santa ever did deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead, unfortunately.

But Jim Mantle takes care of all that, too:

I just barely passed Physics and only read Stephen Hawking's book once, but I recall that there is some Einsteinian Theory that says time does strange things as you move faster. In fact, when you go faster than the speed of light, time runs backward, if you do a straight line projection, connect the dots and just ignore any singularity you might find right at the speed of light. And don't say you can't go faster than the speed of light because I've seen it done on TV. Jean-Luc doesn't have reindeer but he does have matter-antimatter warp engines and a holodeck and that's good enough for me.

So Santa could go faster than the speed of light, visit all the good children which are not uniformly distributed by either concentration in each home or by number of children per household, and get home before he left so he can digest all those stale cookies and warm milk. Yech!

Aha, you say. Jean-Luc has matter-antimatter warp engines, Santa only has reindeer. Where does he get the power to move that fast? The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy. Per second. Each. This is an ample supply of energy for the maneuvering, acceleration, etc., that would be required of the loaded sleigh. The reindeer don't evaporate or incinerate because of this energy, they accelerate. What do you think they have antlers for, fighting over females? Think of antlers as furry solar arrays panels.

If that's not enough, wathc the news on the 24th at 11 o'clock. NORAD (which may be one of the few government agencies with more than 3 initials in it's name and therefore it must be more trustworthy than the rest) tracks Santa every year and I've seen radar shots of him approaching my house from the direction of the North Pole. They haven't bombarded him yet, so they must believe too, right?

The final proof: How do you otherwise account for all the presents every Christmas morning? Huh?

I rest my case.

A world without international law would be a jungle, said former Labour Member of Parliament Tony Benn, in response to a suit filed by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in England, urging the UK's High Court, "to declare it against international law for the UK to go to war against Iraq without a fresh UN resolution."

The case marks the first time a government has been challenged in the courts over the possibility of a declaration of war.

Mr Singh told the court: "We intend to submit that it does not authorise the use of armed force against Iraq in the event of its breach."

There was a "general principle of international law" prohibiting force unless it was in self-defence or specifically authorised by the Security Council, which was not the situation in the Iraq case.

Outside court, veteran former Labour MP Tony Benn, a long-time peace campaigner, said of today's challenge: "This has to be done because a world without international law would be back to the jungle - we simply can't allow that to happen."

Let's see: terrorists fly airliners into American buildings (kill thousands), bomb a nightclub in Bali (kill and injure hundreds), bomb embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (kill hundreds), bomb a hotel in Kenya (kill and injure dozens), fire SAMs at civilian airliners and claim they have the right to kill millions of Americans, and call on all Muslims everywhere to kill Americans wherever they are found.

Nope, no lawlessness here. No jungle, either. Nothing to see, move along, please. Thanks to Tom Cohoe for the link.

Why North Korea is in the Axis of Evil. A cargo ship, tracked since departing from North Korea, was stopped by Spanish and US forces east of the Somali coast. The ship was carrying a dozen Scud missiles. We haven't learned of its intended destination, but gee, let's see: maybe Iraq? Iran?

Update: The Washington Times reports that the missiles were headed for Yemen, and that the ship had been tracked since leaving North Korea several weeks ago. The Spanish warships that stopped it fired shots across its bow when it refused to heed signals to heave to.

An administration official said the Yemeni government had promised the U.S. government that it would not purchase any more Scuds from North Korea, a promise the latest shipment would violate, the official said.

Another official said the cargo may have been intercepted before it reached Yemen to avoid embarrassing the government there. . . . Yemen has been a key supporter of the U.S.-led war against international terrorists. In October, the CIA conducted a missile attack in the country using an unmanned drone aircraft that killed six al Qaeda terrorists.

The media aren't buying the celebrities' war protests, at least that is my impression from scanning a few reports on cable news today. Both Headline News and MSNBC were somewhat less than complimentary in the segments I saw a little while ago.

I no longer try to analyze why people like movie stars make such gestures. They just hate America and freedom is my conclusion.

Jesus' birth to a virgin: Text and Context. Steven Den Beste recently garnered debate about the history and meaning of the Christian doctrine that Jesus' mother, Mary, was still a virgin when she became pregnant with the Christ-child. The genesis of Jesus in Mary's womb is told in the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke.

What's the difference between the divinity of Jesus and the divinity of, say, Achilles, the tragic hero of the Trojan War? See the rest of this post at my Religious News blog.

Banner waving for Kerry already, The New York Times announced today that its first weekly installment "about the prospective candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination begins with Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts."

Get that? The next presidential election is 23 months away and the Times is starting a weekly series about the Democratic prospective candidates. That's about 100 stories. Anyone want to bet that the series will stay only weekly?

Nope, no bias here.

That sounds like an excellent reason to nuke Hanoi and fire Trent Lott! When I was a battery commander in 2d Battalion, 3d Field Artillery Regiment, 3d Armored Division, V Corps, US Army Europe, my first sergeant was an old school Vietnam veteran. If you saw the movie We Were Soldiers and remember the sergeant major, then you have a good idea what my 1st Sgt. was like.

Top had a simple solution to every world problem: nuke Hanoi. No matter what bad thing happened anywhere in the world, his response always was, "Sir, that sounds like an excellent reason to nuke Hanoi." When the Libyans set off a bomb in a Berlin discotheque, killing US soldiers, President Reagan sent Navy and Air Force bombers to civilize Moammar Qhaddafi.

The 1st Sgt's observation the next morning? "The Commander in Chief didn't finish the job the last night. Hanoi is still standing."

So now I hear a rumor that the new-again Senate Majority Leader, Trent Lott (D-Miss - the "D" not meaning Democrat here, but dumb), made a comment that a lot of people think opposes the integration of the races since World War II. I have no idea what Lott said. I don't really care. I'm calling for his resignation from the Senate Majority Leadership slot anyway.

I have an attitude toward Lott that my old 1st Sgt. would understand. I don't care what happened, when, where, to whom, or why. I just want Lott to step down. Did it snow in DC last week? Lott must resign! Did the Redskins lose? Lott must go! Did the sun come up in the east or is water still wet? Lott, hit the road!

For those of us who have zero confidence in Lott's leadership of the Senate Republicans, any reason for him to step down is a good one.

Understatement of the week: "The West has mastered the problem of reconciling religion and freedom, while several Middle Eastern nations have not," James Q. Wilson, professor of political science at Pepperdine University. Cite.

Who sank the Bismarck? A few days ago CPO Sparkey had a posting about who sank the German battleship Bismarck. Seems a Discovery Channel show reopened an old debate about whether it was sent to the bottom by British shells or by the Germans scuttling it.

As I write this, the History Channel's show on the ship's one and only battle cruise is ending. It said that in the final battle between Bismarck and the British fleet, the Brits fired 2,900 shells at their enemy, almost all of them eight inchers or bigger - very many were much bigger. Four hundred of them hit. By the time the German crew abandoned the battleship, it was in flames from bow to stern.

HMS Dorsetshire was ordered to fire torpedoes at the flaming hulk. The Brits were determined that Bismarck must rest on the ocean's bottom. Dorsetshir fired three torpedoes, but while they were enroute Bismarck capsized, according to the men who were there.

Scuttled ships do not capsize. Like all warships, Bismarck had wheels and pipes designed to enable the crew to sink the ship rather than allow it to fall into enemy hands. This system floods the ship from the keel upward. If the ship capsizes air can be trapped in the hull, which is steel plate with no hatches, keeping the ship afloat. It can't be sailed like that, obviously, but an enemy could exploit the wreck for intelligence secrets - codebooks and crypto and the like.

So the fact that Bismarck capsized mitigates against it being scuttled. But some surviving Bismarck crewmen insist that they did open the seacocks to flood the ship before they dived into the ocean.

So what happened? My guess is that the damage to the ship by the 400 British hits was sufficient to sink it. The Germans did open the seacocks before abandoning the wreck. But either the flooding from battle damage was enough to capsize it, or the combination of battle damage and scuttling actions did the trick.

In any case, one German survivor who said he had personally opened some of the seacocks said it he had no doubt who sank the ship - the British did.

BTW, the Discovery Channel will rebroadcast the James Cameron special about exploring the sunken Bismarck Dec. 8 at 9 p.m. EDT.

Update: Cameron's show says that Bismarck capsized after being hit by Dorsetshire's three torpedoes. The History Channel said it was before.

If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullhockey. Iraq has turned in its report on its weapons programs, titled, "Currently Accurate, Full and Complete Declarations." It's 12,000 pages long.

Saddam's latest tactic is simply to bury us in paperwork.

What happens after today with Iraq is discussed by David Warren.

As I write this, Mr. Blix has announced that he intends to conceal the most interesting parts of the document from the United States and other Security Council members until he has had time to consider them. This will add another dimension to the confusion. The U.N. bureaucracy has further announced that it will also take the time to carefully collate the Iraqi declaration with more than a million pages it has accumulated from previous U.N. weapons inspections, pausing to ask for clarifications as they go along.

David also exposes Hans Blix for the fool that he is; his mishandling of his assigned work is so serious that it cannot be mere ineptitude. Blix is acting openly in opposition to the interests of the United States and indeed to the interests of the UN Security Council. IMO, Blix is way past being a useful idiot for Saddam is is in fact actually, deliberately allied with him. But, says David,

If the United States and allies cannot eliminate so obvious a malefactor as Saddam, the "war on terror" is over, and we lost. The future of state-sponsored terrorism is secure, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction will accelerate, their use in blackmail becomes inevitable, the check on their actual use is relaxed, the annihilation of the people of Israel can be safely predicted, and the rest of us must learn to live our lives under the threat of smallpox, anthrax, nerve gas, Scuds, and radiation.

The reader may not think it can be that simple, and there would seem to be majorities in Canada and Europe who crave a more complicated view. But as Winston Churchill spent the later 1930s trying to explain to the smug, and the intellectually sophisticated, it IS that simple.

The essay is quite good, so read it all.

The US Constitution is not a "living document" and Eugene Volokh shows why it isn't (link via Instapundit). Writing on interpreting the Second Amendment through a lens of "evolving standards," Eugene shows that such an exegesis actually serves to buttress, rather than weaken, the argument that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to keep and bear arms, but it's still the wrong way to apply the Constitution.

"The very purpose of a Bill of Rights," Justice Jackson wrote in the 1943 flag-salute case, "was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One's right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections." Words to live by, it seems to me.

But there is another major reason the Constitution should not be seen as liable to trendy interpretation - it can be amended.

The fact that the Constitution can be amended means that it can indeed be "evolved" - through a legally prescribed manner. When judges "look not to the Framers, not to the 1868 Ratifiers, not to state constitutions, and not even to polls ? but only to what they think is right, or perhaps to what the social class to which they belong (elite urban lawyers) thinks is right," then they are shorting the procedure for how the Constitution truly can evolve. That shows contempt for the Constitution, not respect.

I have scooped the Washington Post by a day in pointing out the gross contradictions between what Bill Clinton said about confronting Iraq now compared to what he said when he was president. Now a WaPo editorial today makes the same point, but unlike me, gives reasons Clinton (and some other Democrats) have "settled on a weaselly third way: to criticize almost everything Mr. Bush does in his Iraq policy without actually opposing war."

That way, if anything goes wrong, they will have presciently warned the country; but if war comes and is a success, they will not face the same kind of second-guessing as occurred after 1991, when most Democrats had voted against the Persian Gulf War. . . .

But the nexus of the weaselly way is this:

What's so striking about this is not the characteristically calculated positioning but the contrast to Mr. Clinton's own views as president -- or what he said were his own views. There was a time when Mr. Clinton seemed to understand that Saddam Hussein and terrorists were not separate problems at all. In 1998 he called Iraq a "rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists, drug traffickers or organized criminals who travel the world among us unnoticed."

Congrats to the Post for an eloquent editorial, but advantage . . . One Hand Clapping!

Towards an Islamic Reformation I still think that Islam needs its own version of a Reformation. Some Muslim voices think so, too, such as Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, an Egyptian university professor, whose book on the subject is explicitly titled: Toward an Islamic Reformation: Civil Liberties, Human Rights and International Law. An-Naim says that Islam simply must reform because, according to reviewer Farish A. Noor, a Malaysian political scientist . . .

Muslims today no longer find themselves living in homogeneous societies that are cut off from the outside world. Factors such as globalisation, migration, the legacy of colonial rule and others have brought Muslims into close proximity with the non-Muslim world. Yet the ulama still rely on a body of historically dated shari'ah laws to rationalise, guide and police the relations between Muslims and others until today. . . .

For `as long as Muslims continue to adhere to the framework of historical shari'ah, they will never achieve the necessary degree of reform which would make Islamic public law workable today' (p. 34).

What does this reformation entail for An-Na'im? For a start, it must be pointed out that it does not entail a rejection of Islam per se or Islamic ethics in particular. On the contrary, An-Na'im insists that the Islamic principles of tolerance and the rule of reciprocity should play a central part in any attempt to revise and expand the shari'ah in the present day. The most pressing need is for Muslims to develop an ethnics of engagement with the Other, both in terms of differences within the community as well as learning to cope with differences without.

On the need for the recognition of pluralism within the Islamic world itself, An-Na'im is clear: "The toleration of unorthodoxy and dissent is vital for the spiritual and intellectual benefit of Islam itself."

Ironically, it is Islamist terrorists themselves who may be forcing the rest of Islam toward liberalization and reformation.

"Is Islam a violent religion?" is a question that is neither sensible nor relevant, says Charles Krauthammer.

The question is absurd. It is like asking whether Christianity is a religion of peace. Well, there is Francis of Assisi. And there is the Thirty Years' War. Which do you choose? . . .

The real issue is . . . the actions of actual Muslims in the world today. [But] this says nothing about inherent violence; most Muslims are obviously peaceful people living within the rules of civilized behavior.

He lists a summary of Muslim violence against other religions from Africa to the Far East, then quotes Salman Rushdie,

"The Islamic world today is being held prisoner," writes Salman Rushdie, "not by Western but by Islamic captors, who are fighting to keep closed a world that a badly outnumbered few are trying to open." And "the majority remains silent."

As I wrote last Aug.7:

Islam is what Muslims do.

There are definitely enough Jew- and Christian-hating Muslims in the world, especially including in America and Europe, to make me seriously ponder whether the hatred spewed forth by mullahs and Muslim editorialists is in fact the real McCoy of what Muhammed started. True, there was a 500-year period or so when the Islamic eastern Mediterranean was the flower of the world's civilizations, but that went away by the European Renaissance. Only the Ottoman Empire retained its legacy, and they were gone a hundred years ago.

If what we are experiencing is not the real Islam, then the rest of the Muslims need to get the Islamic house in order. They need to understand that the present crisis is not just that of Islamists against the West, it is the Islamists against everybody who does not tow their line.

Hey you -- you "moderate" or "non-radical" Muslims! You're next. Better choose sides, because either side that wins will remember.

Fighting a winter campaign in Iraq was the topic of a long post I wrote in August. In light of what I talked about in my last post (below) I thought I'd bring it to your attention again. I talked about:

The Iraqi chemical threat and operationals factors (retaliation threat, delivery systems, countermeasures)

Effects of winter weather on ground operations

Effects of winter weather on air operations

Winter makes chemical warfare less likely

Weather is important but not decisive for timing the campaign

The political season matters, too

The Reserves and National Guard

My crystal ball says . . .

Bush not hurrying to attack Iraq, but will continue his rope-a-dope strategy even after Iraq's weapons declarations are shown to be lies. So says Newsweek's Howard Fineman. Bush is under no pressure from Congress or the American people to strike Iraq soon. This, says Fineman, gives Bush considerable leeway.

Bombs almost certainly are going to fall at some point, but not as soon as Bush's campaign-trail warnings made it seem.

I keep telling anyone who will listen that Bush is a methodical fellow, more cautious and patient than his West Texas barroom swagger would indicate. He is under no political pressure at home or abroad to launch a strike. Quite the opposite, if anything. The Pentagon isn't ready to roll and neither are our military allies, both active and passive, including Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

(I have been saying since last spring that the US would not attack Iraq in 2002. Bush has followed exactly the strategy I predicted then.)

The next phase begins on Saturday - Pearl Harbor Day, as it happens. Saddam is expected to turn over to U.N. inspectors what is supposed to be a complete, detailed list of any and all weapons of mass destruction and the components thereof. Look for the list to include something along the lines of a few bottles of Clorox bleach, three economy-size cans of Raid and a beaker of formaldehyde from the biology lab at the Baghdad High School of Science.

I'm guessing, but I think the list is unlikely to convince independent observers that Saddam is being either complete or truthful. But does that mean we go to war the next day? No.

Correct. The reason Bush has time is that Saddam is aggressively pursuing WMDs, especially nukes, but does not now have them. It is true that Saddam has copious quantities of chemical and biological agents, but as yet no real means to deliver them. He has WMD components, but not yet the weapons. Of course, his WMD programs must be ended, but let's get real: they don't have to be stopped this month.

I think it was no accident that the media (led by my colleagues at NEWSWEEK) last week reported on the Saudis' casual efforts to monitor the flow of cash from their charities. The resulting political firestorm in Washington put the Saudi Embassy on the defensive. Within days, the Saudis, eager to prove their cooperativeness, were letting it be known that the Americans could use their Saudi-based command center as the nerve center of any eventual assault on Saddam in Iraq.

The Turks will require special care. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was in Ankara recently, trying to convince Turkey to allow for the use of its bases as a massive staging area for an allied invasion of Iraqi territory. The new Islamic-oriented government was cautiously supportive, but it wants to wait for more proof of Iraqi lies and more U.N. support before saying "yes." Administration sources tell me they think they can provide it, sooner rather than later.

The main political point is that Bush is under no pressure to release the laser-guided ordnance over Baghdad. He has the almost total support of his own party and the forbearance of just about everyone else on the American political scene.

Here is Fineman's piece de resistance:

If I had to guess, I would say the bombs will fall in February or March.

As I wrote on Aug. 12:

We cannot plausibly wait until next spring or summer, although I suppose we could delay until the end of March. So, if the campaign is scheduled for 2003, it will be during the first quarter.

Much earlier than that will not be feasible. Replenishment of munitions stocks and maintenance of naval and air systems is much needed because both were used up a lot to take down Afghanistan. These two tasks will take almost all the rest of this year. By then the Iraqi winter has begun, anyway. It makes little sense, given a choice, to start the campaign at the beginning of the poor weather rather than near the end. So I predict a D-Day from mid-February to mid-March (if there is a D-Day at all).

Don't you love it when a plan comes together?

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

A GPS-linked wristwatch is now available from Timex. It's called the Ironman Speed + Distance system. It is marketed as a sport watch that uses Garmin® GPS to continuously transmit speed, pace and distance data to the watch via a digital FM signal. "The watch then displays your performance while walking, running, biking, skiing, and more…it’s a true multi-sport system!" Pretty amazing stuff. When I was a young man i ran a lot of long-distance runs. (I didn't run a marathon but my wife did; she placed second her first time out.) I can see how such a watch could help serious runners and other distance athletes. They are $200+ on the Timex site, for those whose money is burning a hole in their pockets.

Bill Clinton Makes Case for Strike Against Iraq.

Bill Clinton offered his most detailed public explanation to date for why curtailing Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs is worth going to war. Clinton said Iraq's history of "delay and deception" over weapons inspections since its surrender in the 1991 Persian Gulf War has created an impasse in which a U.S. military strike may be "the only answer."

Clinton insisted that the US weapons inspectors must have "free, unfettered access" to Iraq's weapons sites.

Clinton portrayed the crisis in a broad historical context, drawing an implicit parallel between the challenge facing the United States and its allies today and the crisis that resulted in the appeasement of Nazi Germany that was later blamed for the onset of World War II.

"In this century we learned through harsh experience that the only answer to aggression and illegal behavior is firmness, determination and, when necessary, action," Clinton said. "In the next century, the community of nations may see more and more the very kind of threat Iraq poses now: a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists, drug traffickers, or organized criminals, who travel the world among us unnoticed.

"If we fail to respond today, Saddam and all those who would follow in his footsteps will be emboldened tomorrow by the knowledge that they can act with impunity," he said.

Clinton devoted time to documenting what he called a long history of Iraqi evasion of the terms of its surrender in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Clinton made it plain that U.S. grievances are aimed directly at Saddam Hussein.

Under the terms of the cease-fire agreements of the Gulf War, Clinton said, Saddam Hussein agreed to "make a total declaration" of his biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs, as well as the missiles that would carry these weapons.

"Now, instead of playing by the very rules he agreed to at the end of the Gulf War, Saddam has spent the better part of the past decade trying to cheat on this solemn commitment," Clinton said. He noted that Iraq has filed false reports about what programs it has and that the UN learned the truth about extensive biological weapons programs only after Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, defected in 1995.

If Saddam Hussein refuses to let inspectors go where they want, Clinton said, "he, and he alone, will be to blame for the consequences."

Oh, Clinton said all this on Feb. 17, 1998. Just compare this post with this Washington Post article of Feb. 18, 1998, which I pasted or paraphrased here.

The article reveals that Clinton never envisioned any measures sterner than short-term aerial bombing of Iraq, which means he never envisioned actually solving the problem. Clinton began rattling his sabers in early 1998, maybe earlier, because Saddam's regime lied and obstructed the UN inspectors. So finally, Clinton pulled the inspectors out in September. It was December before he ordered the bombing to commence. It was a four-day campaign joined by the UK.

Here is what Clinton and then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said about the impending attack on Iraq in November and December 1998. Yet today neither Clinton nor Albright support President Bush's efforts to end Saddam's threat and in fact have spoken publicly against it.

All Clinton did was play whack-a-mole with Saddam, but he is working to undermine President Bush, who intends to end the threat with finality.

Being drafted into someone else's fight

The New York Times has obviously devoted itself to laying siege to Augusta National golf course, site of the fabled Masters Tournament. It seems that Augusta, a private organization, admits only men as members. This makes the editors of the Times choke in their latte.

Let one fact be repeated: Augusta is private club, not a public one. Legally, it may not be forced to admit anyone. When its male-only members go there, they are exercising their Constitutional right of their freedom peaceably to assemble. They have the right to associate with whom they please.

But their exclusion of women from membership enrages the Left. Let it be noted, though, that excluding women from membership does not exclude them from playing golf there. In fact, more than 1,000 women play golf at Augusta every year.

Now the NYT has called on champion golfer Tiger Woods to boycott the upcoming tournament to protest the club's admission policy. Apparently, the mere thought of Woods not playing will shame and frighten the club into opening its rolls to the fairer sex.

The Times is attempting to draft Woods into a fight that isn't his. Woods is a professional athlete who will compete at a club operating quite legally under the laws of the land. The Times does not explain why the legal membership policy of Augusta is Woods' concern, or for that matter, even any of his business.

To Woods' credit, he immediately rejected the Times' ludicrous call. He surely saw through the fog of leftist lunacy the Times' crusade shows. Consider: the Times really asked Woods to forego his very livelihood in order to carry a purely symbolic act of very questionable potential effectiveness and highly dubious integrity. Playing golf is what Woods does. The Masters is the most prestigious tournament in America, as well as one of the best paying. To ask Woods to skip it is to ask him to take a huge cut in pay and forego a professional accomplishment that almost every other golfer dare not even dream of.

Note, though, that Woods has no offsetting benefit. Even if Augusta totally caved and admitted women members starting tomorrow, it can never make the slightest difference to Woods personally or professionally. He won't make more money later by foregoing some today and the prestige of the green coat will not be enhanced simply because women are members.

The Times tried to enlist Woods in a fight that isn't his because symbolism is all the Left has these days. They are bereft of real ideas for making a better world - all they have left is iconoclasm, the bashing of institutions the perceive as outdated or intolerant. For the Times to devote the ink and column inches to this battle, among all the ones it could have chosen, shows how fallen the mighty have become. Liberalism, before it was hijacked by the far left, used to be the friend of the poor, but now the Times is crusading on behalf of wealthy women, not poor ones, because you'd better believe that single welfare moms will never see the inside of Augusta except as scrub women.

Only rich women could join Augusta, and it's their banner the Times wants to carry - on Tigers Woods's dime and time. And that's worse than sad, it's pathetic.

Update: Best of the Web Today reports,

Newsweek mocks the Old Gray Lady for having published, as of the beginning of last week, 32 articles "on the issue of whether the Augusta National Golf Club, which hosts the Masters Tournament, would admit women as members."

It seems the Times ran a story that accused CBS (which will broadcast the Masters) of "staying silent" about Augusta's membership policy. That led one Times staffer to tell Newsweek that the Times used to report events that actually happened, not non-events (CBS's silence) that didn't happen.

More evidence of no war this year. The large-deck aircraft carrier USS Harry S Truman is deploying with its battle group to the Persian Gulf. The Dept. of Defense insists this deployment is a "regularly scheduled" one.

My long-time readers will recall that I have said since last spring that if the USA brings force against Iraq, it will be after the New Year. A lot of preparation has been going on for several months, including the relocation of Headquarters, US Central Command, from Florida to Qatar, now complete. If the Truman's task force deployment is indeed regularly scheduled, IMO it reinforces my view that the administration has never intended to confront Iraq with arms this year.

I also heard on radio news that DOD is preparing for a massive call-up of reserve component units. Reserve components consist of the National Guard plus the services' reserve units. If that process is just about to begin, it is more evidence that there will be no war this year. These units can't be activated, trained up and deployed before Dec. 31.

I think that things are going pretty much according to plan. The real unknown is how President Bush will finesse rejecting the work of the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, if it turns out that they are ineffective (as there is every expectation they will be).

Update: The New York Times reports,

. . . the Pentagon is expected in the next several days to activate as many as 10,000 reservists, mainly military police units, for security duty here and abroad, officials said. They would join the 50,755 reservists now mobilized for the defense of the United States after Sept. 11 and for the war in Afghanistan.

But if President Bush orders an attack against Iraq, the Pentagon has plans to summon to active duty roughly as many reservists as it did during the Persian Gulf war in 1991, when about 265,000 members of the National Guard and Reserves were called up. No final decisions have been made on these larger mobilizations, officials said.

Religion of Peace watch: "Everywhere in the Muslim world people usually stop fighting for Ramadan," said Sheikh Jaffar Mustafa, referring to the attacks made on his troops this week by al Qaeda allies in the eastern part of the autonomous zone in northern Iraq. (Link via Instapundit.)

Right behind you, Nasrallah!

OpinionJournal reports that Sheik Hassan Nasrallah declared in Lebanon recently, "Martyrdom operations--suicide bombings--should be exported outside Palestine. I encourage Palestinians to take suicide bombings worldwide. Don't be shy about it."

Yeah, buddy, lead the way. Please!

Politically correct December greetings

Sent to me by a friend:

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all...and a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling, and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2003, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great, (not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country or is the only "AMERICA" in the western hemisphere), and without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith, mental capacity, choice of computer platform, or sexual preference of the wishee.

(By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms. This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for her/himself or others, and is void where prohibited by law, and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher. This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year, or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.)

What Patton did in North Africa with the amateur, inexperienced American Army led the German commander, General Erwin Rommel to observe, "No army knows so little or learns so fast as the American army. If I had the American air force for a month, I would control North Africa at the end of that month."

In North Africa, the US Army, which included the air force then, perfected air-ground coordination far beyond anything the Germans achieved. That fact and the enormous superiority of American artillery offset the inferiority of American tanks. Although the German 88-mm gun was much feared by US troops, the smallest American cannon was a 105-mm howitzer, the M101, firing a larger projectile. What really distinguished American artillery, though, was the fire direction center (FDC), developed in the 1930s.

Battery and battalion FDCs managed the fire of the artillery pieces. Tactical fire control determined which batteries or guns would fire, what shell and fuze combination were best for the target, how many shells to fire, and when. Technical fire control computed the actual ballistic solution for the firing of the shells. Through innovative techniques and equipment, American fire direction was much faster and more efficient than any other army's, including even the British. Where this effectiveness paid off was in massing of fires - many different artillery units, well dispersed, hitting the same target at the same time. This "time of target," or TOT mission, was a major challenge of command, control and communications. The Germans and the Brits could do it, too, but much slower and therefore less responsively. The Russians couldn't do it; instead, the Russians just used a lot more cannons and fired them straight ahead.

As a result, the Germans in North Africa could not mass for long, say to mount an attack, before they would come under severe, accurate artillery fire. Then US fighter-bombers would swoop in. Once the coordination between artillery attack and air attack was perfected, the Germans basically lost the capability to take the offensive.

However, I had occasion to participate in TOT missions by many artillery battalions that were not pre-arranged, even by a single radio call. When I was the operations officer, S3, of 2d Battalion, 92 Field Artillery (8-inch self propelled howitzer) in Germany in 1985-1986, we conducted our live fire training at the Grafenwoehr Training Area in Bavaria, named after the town there. "Graf" had been used for military training since World War I, at least. In 1985, the local Germans successfully lobbied for all artillery fire to be forbidden between midnight to 6 a.m. We could do other kinds of training, but not live fire.

Well, be careful what you ask for, because you might just get it. Without prior coordination, every artillery battalion training at Graf decided to conduct a TOT mission every night at 11:59 p.m. and another at 6:01 a.m. The standard for TOT missions was that all shells had to impact +/- three seconds of the designated time. There were 18-24 battalions of all calibers training there year round. With 18 guns per battalion, there would be several hundred shells detonating within six seconds of each other!

The evening salutation would begin with bright muzzle flashes lighting up the horizon. When there was the usual low cloud cover, the light would reflect eerily off the clouds. The impact area was near the center of the whole training area, so the muzzle flashes formed a near-complete circle around it. Because all the shells were supposed to detonate on the target at the same time, the guns fired over a 10-15 second time because times of flight were different for different units. Then came the noise of the firing, low rumbles of varying loudness. Finally, the noise and light of the shells detonating was incredible. It lit up the whole horizon and you could feel it in your feet.

Every day there were two perfectly fired TOTs by dozens of artillery batteries, and neither of them were pre-arranged!

The backward thinking of anti-war religious pronouncements

is explained in excellent detail and fine clarity by a Catholic theologian, George Weigel, who takes his own church to task for its faulty reasoning on the Iraq crisis. This is a long essay, but much worth reading for those interested in the convolutions of Just War Theory (JWT). Austin Bay emailed me the link, coincidentally shortly after I had posted my own essay on the fallacies of pacifism. I will use Weigel's work as a springboard for my own further discussion of Just War and the present crisis, referring to Weigel's work at times.

Weigel says that the eagerness with which so many church leaders today claim that no military action against Iraq could be justified is really to place war and its conduct outside the reach of moral reasoning. But no human activity should be held to be outside moral reasoning. Clerics have only themselves to blame because religious leaders (i.e., bishops of the Catholic church and the Protestant denominations that have an episcopal structure) have ignored JWT for several decades. As a result, says Weigel . . .

. . . the just war tradition, as a historically informed method of rigorous moral reasoning, is far more alive in our service academies than in our divinity schools and faculties of theology; the just war tradition lives more vigorously in the officer corps, in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and at the higher levels of the Pentagon than it does at the National Council of Churches, in certain offices at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, or on the Princeton faculty.

I can confirm this. In my four years of divinity school (at Vanderbilt) there was not the slightest interest shown in the moral content of warmaking or peacekeeping; the assumption was always, "war bad, peace good." Which may be true, but reciting slogans fit for bumper stickers does not help us define a moral path to the future. Sometimes peace ain't so hot, either, especially when the threat of mass destruction looms. Remember the Cold War and the "duck and cover" drills that school kids used to do? (But the Cold War was more manageable than the present war.)

Weigel says that the official pronouncements on the Iraq crisis from the mainline denominations are literally backward. That is, there is a procedure to be followed in moral reasoning about war and the pronouncements have skipped some essential steps.

. . . the just war tradition recognizes that there are circumstances in which the first and most urgent obligation in the face of evil is to stop it.

What religious officialdom has generally failed to do is recognize, much less understand, the circumstances that have led the American people, their president and their Congress to be prepared to make war against Iraq. Lets's take, for example, the October missive from the United Methodist Council of Bishops (my own denomination). As I wrote in my rather scathing critique of it,

There are merely perfunctory nods about the evil of Saddam Hussein et. al., and no acknowledgement at all of the possibility that Saddam poses a real and reasonably imminent threat to the lives of Americans and Israelis (a threat Saddam reissued just this week). I can only conclude that Bishop Christopher and the rest of the Council of Bishops have not attempted to acquaint themselves of the facts and opinions of America's national security in the age of terrorism. I do not demand that the bishops simply accept the Bush administration's claims. I do expect that they would know what they are, and would treat them with at least the seriousness that the US Congress and the national commentaries have.

The point is that there are three broad areas of moral reasoning about war, and first and foremost is reasoning about the facts and circumstances that make continuing the status quo so unacceptable that war seems preferable. This is what the mainline churches' leaders have failed to do seriously. They fairly casually acknowledge that Saddam is bad man, but they do not seem interested in the details of why he is at least probably a threat to the United States and Iraq's neighboring countries.

If we churchmen deny that war, qua war, could possibly be a moral enterprise at all, we cannot really object to the means by which nations wage it. As an analogy, opponents of capital punishment hold all means of execution (hanging, electrocution, lethal injection) as equally immoral. Similarly, if we say that any use of military force is automatically, irredeemably immoral, then we will have little influence over the means our national leaders and soldiers use it. After all, if precision bombing command-and-control facilities in Baghdad is just as immoral as carpet bombing the area, why not do thet latter and be done with it?

The fact is that the moral reasoning of whether war is warranted in the first place must precede all other questions about war's objectives and the means by which the war would be fought. Certainly, it is imperative that all peaceful attempts be made to resolve the causes of potential war, but correct moral reasoning will acknowledge that such solutions cannot always be reached, as history certainly shows. There are intractable differences, irresolvable conflicts of nations' interests and irreconcilable ideologies. This fact is what is usually denied by the religious (and non-religious) Left, which tends to insist that another conference, another resolution, another dialog will somehow lead to peace in our time. But pastors cannot even prevent many husbands and wives from divorcing, so how can we claim that nations' differences can always be resolved short of extremity?

To recognize that sometimes a nominal state of peace can be less tolerable than war is an essential component of moral reasoning about war. Hence, JWT does recognize that fact, but also limits the categories of just cause of war. Aggression and conquest are ruled out. Hitler hated the Slavic peoples and wanted lebensraum for the German Volk, but neither hate nor desire for more territory can ever be just cause of war.

Self defense and defense of the relatively helpless (i.e., Kuwait invaded by Iraq, 1990) have for centuries been recognized as just causes of war. With the Iraq crisis, we are faced with self defense issues in which awaiting Iraq to strike first with WMDs is unacceptable because that blow could be so terribly lethal, either to the US itself, to Israel or other Middle Eastern nations. Hence, the problem: is it just, within the tenets of JWT, preemptively to strike against Iraq, effect a regime change, and eliminate the lethal threat Saddam's regime poses now?

This is exactly when and why close, serious moral reasoning is required, because the choice today is not between peace and war, as the official statements of churches seem to think. We have not been at peace with Iraq since 1991. The choice is between more violent, but controlled, warfare now (or soon) or the very real possibility of truly terrible war later. That is why I said that theologians err when they hold there to be no higher aspiration of international relations than peace, because peace is contingent on other things, justice (the "right ordering of things" in classical definition) being chief. Perfect justice would yield unbroken peace, but human justice can never be perfect. As theologian Reinhold Niebuhr recognized, the best justice humanity can attain will only roughly correspond to perfect justice. Human justice will always involve contests of power because different groups make opposing claims that they consider rightful or indeed, non-negotiable. However, "no contending group can have all it wants . . . and hence must [sometimes] be restrained by force." This state of affairs is not the best we can imagine, but it is the best we can do. Hence, says Weigel . . .

. . . there are times when waging war is morally necessary, to defend the innocent and to promote the minimum conditions of international order. Grasping that . . . only requires us to be morally serious and politically responsible.

What the vocal theologians have done, says Weigel (a point I have also made) is to skip this first step and the second step and plunge straight to the last step, which is the question of means. The conclusion that war may be unavoidable if the moral order of international relations is to be upheld ("just cause") should lead not to the consideration of just conduct of the war but the just end of the war. Because the only justification of war is to create a more just peace, the terms that define a more just peace need to be defined as well as possible. In other words, what outcomes would make the sacrifice of lives and treasure meaningful and beneficial for posterity?

Only then can the questions of means be addressed because only then is there a context with which to frame the discussion. Weigel says:

Moral seriousness and political responsibility require us to make the effort to "connect the dots" between means and ends.

Thus the just war tradition is best understood as a sustained and disciplined intellectual attempt to relate the morally legitimate use of proportionate and discriminate military force to morally worthy political ends. In this sense, the just war tradition shares Clausewitz's view of the relationship between war and politics : unless war is an extension of politics, it is simply wickedness.

But the most prominent theological voices today start with means, which they, uh, preemptively reject as possibly just, and thereby conclude that no end achieved through those means can possibly be just either. That being the case, it is only a short step to conclude that because no possible just end can be achieved there cannot be any just cause for military action. After all, there is no right reason to do a wrong thing, so there cannot be a just cause for committing injustice.

The means of war are inherently violent. But Weigel says that a presumption against violence is the wrong starting point for reasoning about war.

The just war tradition begins somewhere else [italics his]. It begins by defining the moral responsibilities of governments, continues with the definition of morally appropriate political ends, and then takes up the question of means. By reversing the analysis of means and ends, the "presumption against violence" starting-point collapses bellum [state force used for public good] into duellum [private force used for personal good] and ends up conflating the ideas of "violence" and "war." The net result is that warfare is stripped of its distinctive moral texture. Indeed, among many American religious leaders today, the very notion of warfare as having a "moral texture" seems to have been forgotten.

As historian T. R. Fehrenbach said, "The object of warfare . . . is not to destroy the land and people, unless you have gone wholly mad." It is true, as Clausewitz observed, that killing is the sine qua non of war, but killing is not the point of war.

The "presumption against violence" starting-point is not only fraught with historical and methodological difficulties. It is also theologically dubious. Its effect in moral analysis is to turn the tradition inside-out, such that war-conduct [in bello] questions of proportionality and discrimination take theological precedence over what were traditionally assumed to be the prior war-decision [ad bellum] questions: just cause, right intention, competent authority, reasonable chance of success, proportionality of ends, and last resort. This inversion explains why, in much of the religious commentary after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, considerable attention was paid to the necessity of avoiding indiscriminate non-combatant casualties in the war against terrorism, while little attention was paid to the prior question of the moral obligation of government to pursue national security and world order, both of which were directly threatened by the terrorist networks. . . .

To . . . imagine that the role of moral reason is to set a series of hurdles [of the conduct of war] that statesmen must overcome before the resort to armed force is given moral sanction - is to begin at the wrong place. And beginning at the wrong place almost always means arriving at the wrong destination. The retrieval and development of classic just war thinking must include a recovery of the classic structure of the just war argument. That means getting the starting-point right.

Ask Osama - advice for wayward Muslims. Coming to light for the first time is that Osama bin Laden once had a job as a sort of Arab Ann Landers, writing an advice column for people with problems they couldn't get help for elsewhere. Some examples:

Dear Osama, please help me. I am a 16-year-old girl in Medina. When my father was transferred to London a few years ago he took his family with him, you know? Now we are back in Medina, and things here are, like, so dull, you know? I mean, like wow, there are no clubs here and it's like, you know, dullsville. Plus everybody stops work five times a day to chant Koran verses on their faces in the sand - I mean, like gross! Anyway, my question is, like, how can I ditch daddy and get back to London? Your friend, Hagar.

Dear Hagar, as I see it, you have two choices. You can get a job this summer and save your money to bribe the right officials to give you a passport, then buy a ticket on a British air carrier. But this is risky because if your father finds out, he will be unhappy. I think the best thing is to enter a local Muslim girls' school and sign up to be an exchange student in Kabul. My friend Mullah Omar will make sure all your needs are met there. Good luck, Osama.

Dear Osama, I want to kill infidels wherever I find them. Does not the holy Q'uran command us to slay unbelievers in the name of Allah (may his name be praised)? Can you tell whether it would be better to shoot them or blow them up? Signed, Ahab, the Arab.

Dear Ahab, I am shocked! Do you not know that Islam is an official Religion of Peace (TM)? Killing infidels on sight is so medieval! Surely we are more civilized than that! Please put these thoughts of violence out of your mind and work for world peace. Oh, and take a trip next month to see my friend Mullah Omar in Kabul, and he will reveal to you the real truth of the holy Q'uran. Peace, brother; Osama.

Dear Osama, my brother-in-law the aviation engineer says that a Boeing 767 airliner, fully laden with fuel, would make a real mess if it crashed into a tall building in New York City or a five-sided office building in Arlington, Virginia. What do you think? Signed, Mohammed.

Dear Mohammed, as a construction expert I can assure you that the tall buildings in New York were designed to withstand the impact of jet airliners. Surely it is only rumor that if more than 600,000 gallons of jet fuel exploded and burned the support structures of the tall buildings would be so weakened that the buildings would collapse, killing several thousand people. Why would anyone do such a thing? But let me recommend you contact a representative of my friend Saddam Hussein. I understand his people in Prague know a lot about these things. Thanks for writing, Osama.

Dear Osama, is it true that George W. Bush is a moron? Abdul.

Dear Abdul, no, of course not. That was his predecessor.

Dear Osama, my wife is not properly respectful of me in public. Often she refuses to walk three steps behind me and does not lower her eyes when addressing me in the presence of others. This is damaging my reputation. What should I do? Signed, Salmon.

Dear Salmon, you must not be so insecure. I am sure that your wife respects you very much. Isn't it time we Arab men accepted our wives to walk beside us? However, if this really does bother you, there is a finishing school that your wife may attend in Kabul. It will teach her how to be a proper Muslim woman. Good luck! Osama.

Dear Osama, what are precision guided weapons, and do we have any reason to fear them? Your friend, Abu Ali al-Harithi.

Dear Abu, although the United States has many weapons that are so accurate they can swat a fly from a camel's butt from hundreds of miles away, in total darkness, we have nothing to fear from them. So go about your business in Yemen without concern for your safety. Good to hear from you. Osama.

Dear Osama, what are your plans for the future? Are you always going to be an advice columnist? Sincerely, Ozmun.

Dear Ozmun, yes, I probably will do this the rest of my life. On the other hand, I have always wanted to work for peace in Afghanistan. I have also always wanted to explain to western nations the basic tenets of radical Islamic fundamentalism, but I suppose I'll never get that chance.

Double Cross and golden spies. "Spooky" stories of World War II are told by Steven Den Beste. The British, he says, actually arranged for two "turned" German spies in England to plant bombs in a target site so the German controllers would not know the two spies had gone over to the British side. No one was hurt.

In fact, every German spy in Britain was captured by MI5. Most were "turned" to work for the British, sending false reports back to Berlin. The Brits called this counter-espionage activity Operation Double Cross. The Germans never learned that all the information the got from their spies in the UK was fed to them by British authorities. The Germans were successful in counter-espionage themselves. They code named their effort in Holland, "North Pole," and it was equally as successful there as the British were at their end. But eventually the allies discovered that the Germans knew everything in Holland.

And there came a time when the British figured out that the Dutch resistance had been infiltrated and kept sending agents to their deaths anyway so that they could turn the tables on the Germans and use this as yet another way to feed them false information.

But all this pales next to the fact that British security and intelligence services told the Germans in advance of the British-Canadian raid on the French port of Dieppe in August 1942. The raid was a disaster for the attackers, who suffered more than 1,000 dead and 2,340 captured in only nine hours.

Stanley Lovell, second in charge of the USA's Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the war, related in his now out-of-print book, Of Spies and Stratagems (check the initials) that there was a German agent in Britain who had been turned to work for the British, who had simply promised him knighthood for his efforts after the war ended. This agent was given the details of the Dieppe raid, in advance, and ordered to transmit them to his German controllers. He did. The commandos were met at the beach and slaughtered.

Giving the Germans accurate operational information was a common tactics the Brits used to great advantage with double agents. But they would give it slightly too late to be useful. The information would have been priceless to the Germans if delivered on time, but valueless if not. Lovell relates one case in which a double agent was given accurate information to transmit of a pending British commando raid in a German station on an Icelandic island. The German navy rushed to the island to discover the raid had just taken place. Another tack was to have the agent send information today that was already scheduled for declassification a week or so later - and arrange its release to appear sort of "grudging," as if the Brits didn't see any point in keeping it secret any more.

But there was a huge problem in that the Brits running the double agents were not themselves closely coordinating with the military commands. The information and coordination chain was rather labyrinthine. Its defects became catastrophic when the Dieppe raid came up. The original plan, says Lovell, was for the double agent to warn the Germans of the attack the day after it occurred. But the raid was postponed for two days and the double's handlers were not told. The message went out as scheduled - only now it was actually a day early. The Germans, fully warned, destroyed the British and Canadian forces with ease.

So angry and upset was the British high command that Double Cross was almost terminated and its German doubles either imprisoned or shot. Soon, though, cooler heads prevailed and the disaster's cause was recognized for what it was - the Brits' own organizational inefficiency. That was corrected and direct liaisons were established between the military staffs and the Double Cross office.

But from this cesspool of defeat their grew a golden rose of opportunity. MI5 realized that they now were in control of a German double agent whose reputation with the German high command was extraordinary beyond description. Here was a spy who had caused the destruction of an entire Allied task force! The Germans could not possibly doubt anything he had to say henceforth; he would be the most cherished asset of both sides.

Fast forward to June 1944. Because of the enhanced liaison between MI5 and SHAEF headquarters, MI5 knows immediately when General Eisenhower postpones the Normandy invasion from June 5 to June 6. And MI5 knows immediately when the landings really do occur.

Around noon on June 6, the double agent sends his message: the landings at Normandy are a diversion, a feint, designed to draw German forces away from the real objective area at Pas de Calais. There, powerful allied armies under the command of General George S. Patton, Jr., whom the Germans dreaded, would be landed to drive straight toward Paris. (A huge deception operation that invented from thin air a ghost army under Patton had been conducted for months around the English countryside opposite Pas de Calais. Radio traffic was faked, plywood and canvas installations were constructed, inflatable tanks and vehicles were used extensively in order to deceive the Germans.)

The German commander in Normandy, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, begged in vain for Hitler to release to him the armored divisions in reserve to fight the allies in Normandy. Hitler refused, convinced that landings at Pas de Calais were yet to come. After all, he had in his inbox the message from his greatest spy, the man who had told them of the Dieppe raid, the man whose word was nearly holy writ - and that man said the Normandy landings were a secondary effort. By the time the Germans realized they had been duped, it was too late. In less than a month, a million allied troops were in Normandy.

The British kept their word to the German double agent (whose native nationality was actually Danish, as I recall). He was knighted after the war, but his identity was tightly classified by the British.

Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten said that for every soldier who died at Dieppe, 10 were saved on D-Day. He never indicated whether he was referring to the work of Double Cross and its golden double agent.

Why is the Left suddenly nostalgic for the Cold War and Mutual Assured Destruction? Charles Krauthammer reminisces that the Cold War and huge nuclear arsenals weren't all they are now cracked up to be - by, unaccountably, the formerly nuclear-terrified Left.

ONE CANNOT LEAVE THE SUBJECT of the opposition to deterrence during the Cold War without noting the hypocrisy of the antiwar movement's current newfound affection for deterrence. It spent the better part of the Cold War not only trying to scare the hell out of the citizenry about living under deterrence, but trying to establish its fundamental immorality. In 1983, for example, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a famous pastoral letter on nuclear war at the height of the controversy over the nuclear freeze and the deployment of American Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe (to counter the Soviets' installation of intermediate-range SS20s in their part of Europe). Not surprisingly, the bishops found that deterrence, which rested, of course, on an American threat to launch a nuclear attack, violated just war theory: "It is not morally acceptable to intend to kill the innocent as part of a strategy of deterring nuclear war." Twenty years later, the bishops are again invoking just war theory to argue for the immorality of a preemptive war on Iraq--"We fear that resort to war...would not meet the strict conditions in Catholic teaching for overriding the strong presumption against the use of military force"--a war whose very purpose would be to strip Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction and thus escape the dilemmas (and immoralities) of deterrence.

With that, I invite you to read my essays:

Why deterrence worked against the Soviets - But would be losing bet against Saddam Hussein

Saddam's most dangerous failure - Saddam's fundamental ineptitude as a leader is exactly what makes him singularly dangerous.

Would all the snivelers and whiners please, please, please read this?

The future soul of Islam is discussed by Ralph Peters. As I have said before, non-violent Muslims need to wake up because Islam's soul is being murdered. Peters says that the future of Islam is not in Araby but in the expanding periphery of Islam - India, Indonesia and even the United States. (Remember that Arab Muslims are very much a numerical minority of worldwide Muslims.)

It is time to recognize, belatedly, that Islam's center of gravity lies far from Riyadh or Cairo -- that it has, in fact, several centers of gravity, each more hopeful than the Arab homelands. On these frontiers, from Delhi to Jakarta to Detroit, Islam is a dynamic, vibrant, effervescent religion of gorgeous potential. . . .

Our strategic blunder has been to attempt to work outward from Islam's inner sanctum. But in terms of population density and potential wealth (not to mention power), Islam's centers of gravity lie not to the west of Afghanistan, but east -- in the countries of India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Peters cites several examples of why those nations are much more religiously tolerant than the Arab countries. But Arab-Islamic money is trying to buy influence in the non-Arab Islamic lands, with carying degrees of success. Saudi money in particular is endemic.

According to Prof. Fouad Ajami of The Johns Hopkins University, Islam has been "the handmaiden of the state" since the beginning of the modern Saudi realm, resluting from "an alliance between a desert chieftan, Muhammed bin Saud, and a religious reformer named Muhammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab. This partnership anchored the kingdom. The House of Saud defended the country and struck bargains with world powers, while the descendants of the Wahhab family dominated the judiciary and an educational system suffused with religion.

The real enemy of Western civilization today is not Islam. It is arabism: a system of political and social authoritarianism in Arab lands using Islam as its handmaiden. This is the expansionism we must combat, while encouraging religious tolerance in other Islamic cultures.

B-52s bomb Afghanistan again. But they only dropped seven bombs to help out a US Army patrol that was under fire.

The news came as rival factions in western Afghanistan traded heavy artillery- and machine-gun fire in fighting that one warlord said had left at least 11 of his soldiers dead and seven injured.

It was not immediately clear if the U.S. patrol was involved in the fighting, had been caught in a cross fire, or was the target of a separate attack.

Ammanullah Khan accused his longtime adversary, Herat Gov. Ismail Khan, of ordering a massive attack late Saturday night with tanks, artillery and rocket launchers on his positions in Zer-e-Koh district, about 15 miles south of Shindand air base in Herat province.

Ammanullah Khan said American planes bombed front line positions at Zer-e-Koh - not Shindand - trying to stop the fighting.