Heh. I was right last night; the troops are pushing towards Baghdad. It’s been a successful advance so far. Note the destruction of the dam in that last story; that was a definite coup, since there’s been some worry that Saddam would be able to flood the river valley and slow down advancing troops. This is another point at which Saddam is likely to use chemical weapons if he has ‘em. Up till now there’s been no new convincing evidence that he does, but one of the BBC embeds filed a report that his troops found instructions to an Iraqi Chemical Warfare Officer. (John Simpson, at 11:11 GMT.) Not hard evidence, just the most relevant thing we’ve found so far. I don’t count the chem warfare suits, no. We have a bunch of those too.

Josh Marshall discusses victory conditions (original) today. I have a simple victory condition; the day Bush announces we’ve won the war, I’m gonna call the State Department and ask about getting a visa to travel to Iraq. If they recommend against it, I don’t think we’ve won. This sets the war in the appropriate context, that of the War on Terrorism. As a standard, it willfully ignores the question of military victory, which will come far earlier — but since Bush has set the bar at a stable democracy in Iraq, I feel OK about waiting till it’s safe to travel there until I declare victory.

Edit: quick primer for the Den Beste readers, since Den Beste himself didn’t bother to read any of my other posts… I think Arnett deserved to be fired. I think it would be exceedingly difficult to try Arnett for treason; it’s not as easy as you think it is. Faulting someone for providing readily available information to Iraq is silly (that’d be this post). Back to your regularly scheduled post… Den Beste has his own commentary (original) on the Arnett issue, and completely misses, and I think it’s a bad enough miss to be worth some discussion. ...

Current Department of Defense thinking about post-war Iraq includes an extension of the 1996 Iran-Libya Sanctions Act (original). The ILSA called for sanctions on any country which made 40 million dollars or more in new investments in Iran; this includes such countries as Britain, Italy, and Japan. The ILSA has never been invoked before, unsurprisingly. Remember, folks, Bush is a master of diplomacy. Actually, this would make sense if he’s planning on cutting Rumsfeld loose — focus the resentment of the world on the DoD, and let Powell and State ride in to save the day. I’ve been wondering this flurry of negative press about Rumsfeld is a way of preparing the ground for such a move, but Seymour Hersh (original) is kind of an unlikely agent of the Republicans. So it seems doubtful. ...

Michael Everson has submitted two new Unicode characters, combining heart above and combining heart below. (Warning: PDF link.) “One user group has been overlooked during the development of the UCS, namely that of young adolescent women.” Good catch on his part. (Via Typographica (original).)

How Appealing is blogging the Supreme Court oral arguments in the University of Michigan affirmative action cases. Sort of like the Agonist for the war, but with silly wigs. Wait: I’ve been corrected, that would be the British legal system. Sorry.

Sometimes, it all depends on what your cause is. Kevin Drum took some heat recently for arguing that liberal extremism drives away the mainstream. He clarified later, exposing one of those unfortunate side-effects of a democratic winner-take-all system — you need to appeal to the middle of the road to get elected, so the fringes need to be carefully managed. This has the effect of muting certain extremes of discourse… A tangent, here. By forcing extremists to mask their views in order to gain any kind of political power, we make them more effective. Interesting little paradox. If the Patriot movement could win some political success without sneaking into the Republican Party, they’d be a far clearer target for those who oppose their views, and I could say similar things about various leftist groups. It’s like the TB virus — by forcing it to evolve in order to get past antibiotics, we make it stronger. Anyhow, I was talking about something else. ...

serious vulnerability present. all doomed. over. is I think my favorite 4/1 posting of the day. Possibly the best of all time. The brilliance of it is that it’s completely accurate. A distributed denial of service condition is present in the election system in many polypartisan democratic countries. A group of determined but unskilled and not equipped low-income individuals, usually between 0.05% and 2% of overall population of the country, can cause serious disruptions or even a complete downfall of the democratic system and its institutions, and wreak havoc and destruction without using any force. ...

Peter Arnett has found a home (original) at the Daily Mirror, UK tabloid par excellence. Screw the silly treason charges; he’s pretty much blown any chance of being taken seriously as a journalist now. It’s fairly obvious that his priority is remaining in front of the cameras, and I think they teach you at journalism school that you aren’t supposed to be the story. Anyhow, the New York Times pretty much nails it. Note also this Walter Cronkite editorial. ...

It occurs to me that the ideal system for a Malazan Empire game would be Hero Wars. Which makes more sense the more I think about it; the Malazan Empire is heavily informed by Steven Erikson’s background in anthropology and archeology, after all. Glorantha is right up there with Tekumel in the upper echelons of similarly-influenced worlds. It seems you can’t write this sort of fantasy without an understanding of the way the mythic touches the everyday, and Hero Wars is admirably suited for that sort of thing. It is designed to scale from the mundane to the realms of the gods. ...