The Weekly Standard: The Tempting of the President

The president will be under enormous pressure from Europeans, Middle East leaders, and top advisers in Washington to withdraw American troops and civilian officials from Iraq within months, not years. He shouldn't. The military occupation of Japan after World War II lasted seven years, and Japan is homogenous, not divided as Iraq is among three often hostile ethnic groups. American forces won't need to stay that long, but it will take at least a year, maybe two or more, to restore order, foster a viable economy, and establish democratic institutions with roots deep enough to survive.

The Weekly Standard: Beyond Baghdad

On September 24, 2002, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman warned his readers about a "definite whiff of imperial ambition in the air." The next month he was certain about the coming occupation of Iraq. "The administration has offered many different explanations, some of them mutually contradictory, for its determination to occupy Baghdad."

Effective with the fall of Baghdad last week, Krugman inverted his critique, in the process establishing his own impeccable credentials when it comes to "mutually contradictory" arguments. "There is a pattern to the Bush administration's way of doing business that does not bode well for the future--a pattern of conquest followed by malign neglect," Krugman wrote April 11. "After the triumph," he wrote of the Bush administration, "when it comes time to take care of what they've won, their attention wanders, and things go to pot."

It's hard to predict the future, but there's no sign yet that the administration is suffering from attention deficit disorder. Indeed, postwar planning continues apace in Washington and Kuwait.

Andrew Sullivan: THE ME GENERATION'S PROTEST: Julie Burchill does her best Camille Paglia impression today (before Camille went soft on the war). Man, does she nail it:

"I've just heard a snippet of the most disgustingly me-me-me anti-war advert by Susan Sarandon, in which she intones, "Before our kids start coming home from Iraq in body bags, and women and children start dying in Baghdad, I need to know - what did Iraq do to us?" Well, if you mean what did Saddam do to America The Beautiful, not an awful lot - but to millions of his own people, torture and murder for a start. Don't they count?

"Surely this is the most self-obsessed anti-war protest ever. NOT IN MY NAME! That's the giveaway. Who gives a stuff about their wet, white, western names? See how they write them so solemnly in a list on the bottom of the letters they send to the papers. And the ones that add their brats' names are the worst - a grotesque spin on Baby On Board, except they think that this gives them extra humanity points not just on the motorway, but in the whole wide weeping, striving, yearning world. We don't know the precious names of the countless numbers Saddam has killed. We're talking about a people - lots of them parents - subjected to an endless vista of death and torture, a country in which freedom can never be won without help from outside."

Amen, sister. The day of reckoning is not just coming for Saddam Hussein. It's coming for the anti-war movement.

George F. Will: Containment ‘Deadlier Than War’

Last week, Walter Russell Mead of the policy think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, writing in The Washington Post, argued that containment is "deadlier than war," especially for Iraqi children.

The 1991 Gulf War killed between 21,000 and 35,000 Iraqis. Between 1,000 and 5,000 were civilians.

But the United Nations itself estimates that the current U.N. policy of trying to contain Saddam with economic sanctions kills 5,000 Iraqi children under 5 years old — every month. Sixty thousand a year.

Mead says that some estimates are lower.

But, he says: "By any reasonable estimate containment kills about as many people every year as the Gulf War — and almost all the victims of containment are civilians, and two-thirds are children under five."

Saddam ‘Lets Babies Die’

Under the U.N. sanctions, Saddam is allowed to sell enough oil to purchase food and medicine to meet the basic needs if the Iraqi people.

But Saddam uses the money to fuel his war machine, and lets the babies die.

So another 10 years of containment would involve the slaughter of at least another 360,000 Iraqis — 240,000 of them children under five.

Mead says those are the low estimates.

If the United Nations' numbers are right, another decade of containment would kill one million Iraqi civilians, including 600,000 children.

So, as Americans debate the morality of the war against Iraq, remember these numbers — and remember a picture of an Iraqi child, suffering the effects of the current policy of "containment."

‘Time-Traveler’ Busted For Insider Trading

Federal investigators have arrested an enigmatic Wall Street wiz on insider-trading charges -- and incredibly, he claims to be a time-traveler from the year 2256!

ZDNet UK: War has toppled sex as the most popular search term among Web users as the conflict in Iraq captures the attention and apparently lowers libidos of online Britons, top Internet service Freeserve says.

AndrewSullivan.com: WILL THE FRENCH VETO? No firm statement yet either way. TF1 declares that France is putting aside the idea of a veto for the moment. The Communists and Socialists urge a veto, but Chirac's party, officially repesented in the parliament by Alain Juppe, talks instead of looming "noises of mobilization." Meanwhile, we have this odd statement from the increasingly erratic Chirac, after meeting with Spanish prime minister, Aznar: "We oppose all new resolutions." Huh? I thought France was promoting a new one. Maybe Paris at this point just wants the whole issue to go away. I still don't have a clue what Chirac is up to; but I certainly think there are many subtle signs that the French don't want to veto - especially if the Russians and Chinese simply abstain. Solitary French isolation at the U.N., combined with encirclement of Anglospheric nations in the E.U. is becoming France's nightmare. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch, could it?

Eject! Eject! Eject!: We are a strong nation. We’d damn well better be, because we carry the genes and mythologies of the most confident individuals on the planet, people unwilling to endure repression, persecution and enslavement by taking a chance on a place unknown to them, except perhaps in their dreams. We have come from every country in the world, from the free and prosperous, to the hellish and horrific. Each individual immigration, from the native Indians crossing the Bering Straight, through Plymouth Rock, Ellis Island and LAX – each one an act of optimism and hope for something better.

Common Sense and Wonder: And another Iraqi exile asks what will the protesters do if the liberation of Iraq is thwarted by their marches. I’ll side with Max in saying they really don’t give a hoot about the wellbeing of the Iraqis as long as they manage to diminish the U.S. in any way they can. They didn’t care about the people of the Soviet Union and its captive states. They never marched against Pol Pot or any of the other totalitarian murderers of the past 50 years. But they will gladly march with International ANSWER, a group that still proudly proclaims allegiance to the memory of Stalin, a mass murderer of stupefying enormity. A man who is credited with saying “one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”

NYTimes: “Mr. Blix and Dr. ElBaradei cannot be left to play games of hide-and-seek. This is not like Washington’s unproved assertions about an alliance between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. There is ample evidence that Iraq has produced highly toxic VX nerve gas and anthrax and has the capacity to produce a lot more. It has concealed these materials, lied about them, and more recently failed to account for them to the current inspectors. The Security Council doesn't need to sit through more months of inconclusive reports. It needs full and immediate Iraqi disarmament. It needs to say so, backed by the threat of military force.”