[Eugene Volokh, 12:10 PM]
THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE can be very complicated for immigrants like me -- somehow I never learned the subtle distinction between "want" and "wish" that seems to be invoked by your learned journalist, Robert Fisk (emphasis added):

[M]any Iraqis are now asking an obvious question: how many days? Not because they want the Americans or the British in Baghdad, though they may profoundly wish it. But because they want this violence to end: which, when you think of it, is exactly why these raids took place.

Thanks to the Politburo for the pointer; judging by their name, they must be good Russians like me (I'm sure the name was Moynihansky before he changed it), and appear to be equally perplexed by your highly nuanced language.

UPDATE: OK, on reflection I wonder if I might have been a bit ungenerous to Fisk -- perhaps he was the victim of an editing or publication error, and these errors sometimes do happen. I was influenced by my judgment that Fisk's reasoning has been so foolish in the past that this increases the likelihood of the "Fisk folly" explanation as opposed to "editor error" explanation; but perhaps this was a mistake.

     Also, just to be clear: I realize that "want" and "wish" may bear subtly different meanings in some situations. I just don't think that they can reasonably do so here.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 11:55 AM]
INTERVIEWING IRAQI CITIZENS IS NOT RACIAL PROFILING: Fellow lawprof Eric Muller points this out; see also the post immediately below that one, and some posts from me about this subject a few months ago, here and here. This doesn't mean the policy is necessarily sound (a difficult question that I'm not really competent to answer); and certainly the policy might be implemented in unconstitutional or unjust ways, for instance if it leads to illegal searches or arrests. But it's not the same as racial profiling or ethnic profiling.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 6:46 PM]
A BRITISH LIEUTENANT COLONEL'S SPEECH: Reader Robert Fairbarn pointed me to this Times (London) article, which quotes a speech attributed to "Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Collins, the 42-year-old commander of The Royal Irish battle group." I'm not sure I'd fully endorse the article's extraordinary praise for the speech, but it seems to me that parts are indeed very good, so I thought I'd pass it along:

The enemy should be in no doubt that we are his Nemesis and that we are bringing about his rightful destruction. There are many regional commanders who have stains on their souls and they are stoking the fires of Hell for Saddam. As they die they will know their deeds have brought them to this place. Show them no pity. But those who do not wish to go on that journey, we will not send. As for the others, I expect you to rock their world.

We go to liberate, not to conquer. We will not fly our flags in their country. We are entering Iraq to free a people, and the only flag that will be flown in that ancient land is their own. Don’t treat them as refugees, for they are in their own country.

I know men who have taken life needlessly in other conflicts. They live with the mark of Cain upon them. If someone surrenders to you, then remember they have that right in international law, and ensure that one day they go home to their family. The ones who wish to fight, well, we aim to please. If there are casualties of war, then remember, when they woke up and got dressed in the morning they did not plan to die this day. Allow them dignity in death. Bury them properly, and mark their graves.

You will be shunned unless your conduct is of the highest, for your deeds will follow you down history. Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood, and the birth of Abraham. Tread lightly there. You will have to go a long way to find a more decent, generous and upright people than the Iraqis. You will be embarrassed by their hospitality, even though they have nothing . . . .

There may be people among us who will not see the end of this campaign. We will put them in their sleeping bags and send them back. There will be no time for sorrow. Let’s leave Iraq a better place for us having been there. Our business now, is north.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 6:33 PM]
"THE COMMAND POST": A very good war news blog. Yeah, I'm sure you're laughing at me, saying "He thinks this is news? I found it minutes ago." But just in case you aren't, check it out.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 6:31 PM]
A PICTURE IS WORTH 1000 WORDS: But which thousand? Kos implicitly suggests one set; Tacitus urges another. Tacitus has by far the better of the argument, I think. (Thanks to InstaPundit for the pointer.)

 
[Eugene Volokh, 6:22 PM]
ELEANOR CLIFT ON BUSH: Eleanor Clift's msnbc.com column -- which is apparently also in Newsweek -- is just awful. I'm supposed to be proofreading my book proofs, so I can't give it the time that it deserves, but the ratio of personal attacks to evidence is just remarkable. What's striking is how perfectly normal behavior, behavior that politicians routinely engage in (and probably should engage in), is portrayed as something pathological. Just a few examples:

1. From the second paragraph:

   Bush has personalized this war to such an extreme that even if American forces take over all of Iraq and find weapons of mass destruction, the war will not be judged a success unless Saddam is captured or his body is found. It’s a Bush family trait to turn everything into a grudge match.

   First, the claim in the first sentence, even taking account of the hyperbole, is nonsense. The attacks on Hussein weren't of the "Hussein must die" variety; they were "we've got to kick him out." If Saddam somehow vanishes, a few people will be upset -- but I have no reason to think that Bush would be, or that much of the public would be. Second, to the extent that people will be upset, that has little to do with Bush's "personaliz[ation]"; people are naturally upset when a bad guy seems to have evaded justice. Would people have been happy if, for instance, Mussolini hadn't been caught? Sure, and not because it was somehow a Roosevelt trait to turn everything into a grudge match -- it's a human family trait to want to see evil people punished.



2. Immediately following:

   Anybody who crosses Bush gets the treatment. During last fall’s congressional races, Republican operatives likened Democratic leader Tom Daschle to Saddam Hussein because he stood in the way of passing Bush’s legislation. Daschle is again in the crossfire for criticizing Bush’s failure to resolve the impasse over Iraq with diplomacy.

   Uh, harshly criticizing political adversaries who try to obstruct your policies (and who, like Daschle, are relatively pugnacious about it) isn't a Bush family trait, either -- it, too, is a pretty normal trait among many humans.




3. Bush miscalculated when he assumed other nations would fall into line, but that’s another family trait: it’s called “to the manor born,” or “to the presidency born,” meaning that a family of Bush’s social status that has spawned two presidents assumes if they think it’s right, it’s right. A streak of religiosity further strengthens Bush’s belief in the rightness of his cause, which he initially called a crusade.

   Oh, yes, most prominent politicians (except that pathological Bush family) are just constantly overflowing with self-doubt. Good heavens, if Reagan thought it was right, did he then agonize? What about Clinton? Were they from families of high social status? Given that they weren't, might attributing Bush's confidence to his "family trait[s]," his "social status," or for that matter his "religiosity" (not a prominent trait in Reagan's or Clinton's personality) be just a bit questionable?

Oh, there's more, there's more, but as they say in the math books, responding to the rest is an exercise left to the reader -- I've got work to do. But this piece was just so awful that I couldn't resist.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 5:43 PM]
WHAT ANTIWAR PROTESTERS WHO REALLY WANT TO SAVE IRAQI LIVES SHOULD BE DOING: William Saletan writes, in Slate:

If you're an anti-war protester or politician, this theory of warfare [where the American military is trying to win by getting Iraqi soldiers to surrender, with minimum loss of Iraqi life] should change the way you think and act. Your efforts to generate resistance to the war before there is any evidence of killing, much less atrocities, contribute to the political strength of the enemy regime. You encourage uncertainty about the war's outcome, increasing the likelihood that the regime's soldiers will fight and die. You make it more difficult to separate the regime from its people. You frustrate the tipping [i.e., tipping the enemy forces from enmity to surrender] and bring on the crushing.

If you want to minimize the killing, stop resisting the war. Instead, do what you can to make the war transparent and to hold your government accountable for unnecessary deaths. Help the media and human rights organizations monitor the battlefield. Help them get reports and pictures to the people of your country and the world. Build an incentive system that will strengthen your government's will to spare lives. Its ability will do the rest.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 5:26 PM]
REPEAT AFTER ME: "I will not believe scientifically invalid polls." "I will not believe scientifically invalid polls." "I will not believe scientifically invalid polls, even if I like their results."

     Look, I'd like to think that most MTV viewers support the war; in fact, they might well support the war. But unless I misunderstand the way the poll described here (see also the InstaPundit link) was conducted, that poll doesn't tell us that. It doesn't tell us much of anything, because it counts only those people who choose to vote in it (key phrase: "Among people voting in MTVNews.com's polls . . .," and see also this sample of an mtv.com poll), and we have no reason to believe that they're a representative sample of MTV viewers, or of any other group.

UPDATE: Drat, The Corner falls for this, too.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 2:22 PM]
PLACES THAT HAVE NEVER BEEN RULED BY A EUROPEAN NATION: So here's the question for the weekend -- which inhabited countries (or parts of countries) in the world have never been ruled by a European nation? If you know the answers, please e-mail me at volokh at law.ucla.edu; if you believe your claim would be controversial, please check it first, and, if possible, e-mail me a URL supporting your assertion. There aren't a lot, but there are, I think, at least half a dozen or so.

     The answer will be posted early next week; I probably won't get a chance to respond individually to each response, but I will give credit to those who get pretty much the whole list. If you submit a response and then need to amend it, please resubmit your entire amended response, so I don't have to manually combine your messages. Please do not query what the definition of "ruled" is; yes, I know there's ambiguity there, but I'm not inclined to take the time needed to resolve it . . . .

 
[Eugene Volokh, 1:53 PM]
WHOOPS: It turns out I inadvertently marked a bunch of my blog posts today as drafts, and then was scratching my head, wondering why they hadn't come up . . . . Darn; well, now I've taken care of that, and they're posted below (marked with the original times that I composed them).

 
[Eugene Volokh, 1:48 PM]
THERE ARE NO LAZY READERS -- ONLY BUSY READERS: I'm just working on a short part of the Writing section in my forthcoming Academic Legal Writing book -- it should be an obvious point, but unfortunately I've found that not all law students fully grasp it:

There Are No Lazy Readers -- Only Busy Readers

Many writing tips stress simplicity, clarity, and brevity. Avoid unneces-sary long words and complex sentences. Get to the point quickly. Keep paragraphs short. Make things easier for your readers, and keep them from losing interest.

Some writers think this advice assumes that readers are lazy or stupid; those writers feel they’re being told to “dumb down” their prose for dumb readers. After all, smart, industrious readers wouldn’t mind long paragraphs filled with long sentences and long words -- they would focus on the sub-stance, not the form.

No. Your industrious and smart readers are busy people, precisely be-cause they are so industrious and smart. They can spend only limited time and effort reading your article -- not because they’re lazy or dumb, but be-cause they have other things to do.

They can parse complex words and sentences; but this parsing takes more work than reading simpler, clearer prose. Why waste my time wading through this murk, they’ll ask themselves, when I could be working on some-thing else? You can keep their precious attention only by making things as easy for them as possible.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 1:15 PM]
IRAQI CASUALTIES: From today's Wall Street Journal editorial:

The great paradox of the escalating Iraq War is that the attacking allies want fewer Iraqi casualties than does Saddam Hussein. We can't recall another war where this was true, but the insight is crucial to understanding how this struggle is likely to unfold, and how the Iraqi dictator hopes to survive. . . .

Well put.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 11:50 AM]
NOW THIS IS DIVERSITY:

A member of Ohio's 5694th National Guard Unit in Mansfield legally changed his name to a Transformers toy.

Optimus Prime is heading out to the Middle East with his guard unit on Wednesday to provide fire protection for airfields under combat. . . .

Prime took his name from the leader of the Autobots Transformers, which were popular toys and a children's cartoon in the 1980s.

He legally changed his name on his 30th birthday and now it's on everything from his driver's licence, to his military ID, to his uniform.

"They razzed me for three months to no end," said Prime. "They really dug into me about it."

"I got a letter from a general at the Pentagon when the name change went through and he says it was great to have the employ of the commander of the Autobots in the National Guard."

Prime says the toy actually filled a void in his life when it came out.

"My dad passed away the year before and I didn't have anybody really around, so I really latched onto him when I was a kid," he said.

Well, I can't say that it's my cup of tea, and I'm not sure, for instance, that I'd want to hire someone who changed his name this way -- not the most sensible judgment, I think. But, hey, he's serving our country, and that entitles him to a good deal of slack in my book. (Thanks to Faisal Jawdat for the pointer.)

 
[Eugene Volokh, 11:35 AM]
A BIT MORE ON THE LANGUAGE POLICE: Clayton is suggesting "If this was happening . . ." to refer to something that clearly isn't happening is wrong, and that "If this were . . ." is the only proper usage. But it seems to me that even a prescriptivist should have a hard time making this claim. Prescriptivists, as I understand it, suggest that what's right and wrong in language should be decided by the authorities, and not by usage; I don't quite agree with that, but I think that even on the prescriptivists' own terms, using "If this was happening . . ." -- using the indicative instead of the subjunctive -- is proper. I cited two authorities (a usage dictionary and a grammar book) for my claim that both "If this was . . ." and "If this were . . ." are correct; I've seen no authorities that support the assertion that "If this was . . ." is incorrect.

     Now some prescriptivists might object to this analysis, because most linguistic authorities today are themselves descriptivist. But if that's the objection, then what's left of the prescriptivist argument? If prescriptivists say that right and wrong in language is determined by authority, not usage, but then reject the authorities, then what do they appeal to, other than their own preferences?

     Of course, if the claim is simply one of preference (for instance, that "If this were happening . . ." is more elegant), then I wouldn't object; I might even agree. If the claim is of functionality -- that communication would be clearer if people consistently used "if this were" when they were referring to something they know isn't so, but "if it was" when they were referring to something that might or might not be so -- then I would object less; I'm not sure that this claim is correct, but it's at least plausible. But I understood Clayton's objection to be that "If this was happening . . ." is just wrong, under the rules of the language as set forth by the linguistic authorities. And the authorities that I've consulted do not bear this out.

     I bring this up, of course, because I think this issue is emblematic of a broader point: In lots of these cases -- where the matter is the subjunctive, split infinitives, prepositions at the ends of sentences, and so on -- the prescriptivist argument isn't even tenable on its own terms. The authorities are, I think, on my side on many questions (even though I'm sometimes willing to go even against them), not on the side of the Language Police.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 11:22 AM]
CONSERVATIVE SPEAKER GIVES SPEECH IN WHICH HE CALLS HILLARY CLINTON A "WHORE": Well, that actually didn't happen, and if it did everyone would be all over the jerk, quite correctly. But New Jersey Poet Laureate Amiri Baraka -- remember him? -- said pretty much this about Condoleezza Rice (using the term "skeeza"), and few people seemed to say much about it. I did a quick LEXIS search for "baraka and condoleezza" and found all of 20 references, though the poem (the same one that caused the outcry against Baraka's anti-Semitism) is now a year and a half old.

     A column by Gregory Kane, a black Baltimore Sun columnist, published the day before yesterday puts this well:

In front of an overwhelmingly black audience of about 100 at Coppin State College, Amiri Baraka, New Jersey's Lunatic Laureate, called national security adviser Condoleezza Rice a "skeeza."

For those of you not in the know, a "skeeza" is a derogatory street term used in reference to a woman and as offensive as calling her a prostitute. It's a noxious, bilious, disgustingly sexist term and one of the worst things you could call a woman.

It is something Rice certainly is not. Baraka knows she's not. Those blacks who laughed, giggled, tittered and applauded when Baraka said it know she's not. But what was the reaction of these black folks when Baraka finished his invective masquerading as poetry that he called "Somebody Blew Up America"?

They gave him thunderous applause and a standing ovation. At no time was there the indignation that was present when O'Malley said much less about Jessamy. I guess Baraka can get away with it because he hates all the right people. . . .

When he called Rice a "skeeza," liberal black leaders who couldn't wait to get their faces in front of a camera after the Trent Lott gaffe knew Baraka was lying. We haven't heard word one from these leaders regarding Baraka and Rice . . . .

It would be nice if one of those black state legislators who voted to fund the money that was paid to Baraka would say so.

(I of course think that all New Jersey legislators, black and white, should speak up about this.)

UPDATE: InstaPundit blogs about this, and stresses that Baraka's most recent speech was at a university; this, he says, is "Academia's Trent Lott Moment." An interesting point.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 11:08 AM]
CONFEDERATE FLAGS IN HIGH SCHOOLS: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit has upheld a school's power to restrict confederate flags. Other courts have done the same in the past, if there was fairly concrete evidence that the flags were likely to cause disruption in the school; the Supreme Court's Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969) decision allows that. But the 11th Circuit seems to be going further in its rationale, endorsing the lower court opinion which says:

Second [independently of the Tinker rationale], even if disruption is not immediately likely, school officials are charged with the duty to "inculcate the habits and manners of civility as values conducive both to happiness and to the practice of self-government." To
do so, they must have the flexibility to control the tenor and contours of student speech within school walls or on school property, even if such speech does not result in a reasonable fear of immediate disruption.

The lower court opinion cites Bethel School Dist. No. 403 v. Fraser (1986) for this proposition, and concludes that

Part of a public school's essential mission must be to teach students of differing races, creeds and colors to engage each other in civil terms rather than in "terms of debate highly offensive or highly threatening to others." . . . There is no evidence that the school district has attempted to suppress civil debate on racial matters, but the district had concluded that the display of certain symbols that have become associated with racial prejudice are so likely to provoke feelings of hatred and ill will in others that they are inappropriate in the school context.

     Now it's not easy to disentangle the "disruption" justification (which rests on Tinker) from the "civility" justification (which rests on Fraser), in part because uncivil speech often causes disruption. But there is a difference, especially since Tinker requires some plausible evidence of likely disruption, and not just sheer speculation.

     And I think the court's "civility" rationale overreads Fraser. Fraser upheld a school's punishment of a student for giving a speech laced with sexual innuendo; the decision specifically stressed that "[u]nlike the sanctions imposed on the students wearing armbands in Tinker, the penalties imposed in this case were unrelated to any political viewpoint." But to the extent that the Confederate flag is offensive, that's so precisely because of its viewpoint.

     Now I think there are plausible arguments for the school district's restriction, and even for far broader restrictions on speech in government-run schools, including restrictions that suppress particular political messages. Justice Black, for instance -- generally a free speech maximalist -- dissented in Tinker, and his dissent makes a powerful case. But I don't think the Eleventh Circuit decision is consistent with the existing rules that Tinker and Fraser set forth; and at least it's worth noting that it considerably broadens high school administrators' latitude to suppress their students' political speech.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 8:56 AM]
HE WASN'T IN A SUBJUNCTIVE MOOD: As the resident public defender for Language Court cases, I thought I'd come to the defense of people who say "If this was happening in every city . . ." instead of "If this were . . . ." (I defend them only against the were/was accusation -- on the merits, my coblogger's criticism was entirely apt.)

     As William & Mary Morris's Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage says (quoting Porter Perrin), "the subjunctive is a trait of style rather than of grammar and is used by writers chiefly to set their language a little apart from everyday usage." Likewise, the Oxford English Grammar says that "The past indicative was is more usual than subjunctive were in contexts that are not formal." Thus, today, both the subjunctive ("If this were" used to refer to things that are known not to be so) and the indicative ("If this was") are grammatically correct, at least in spoken usage. One may prefer one to the other on esthetic or functional grounds, but neither is wrong.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 8:40 AM]
NONCOMMERCIAL CHILD PORNOGRAPHY AND THE COMMERCE CLAUSE: Reading U.S. v. McCoy reminds me that at least one past case, U.S. v. Corp, from the Sixth Circuit, reached a rather similar result. I say "similiar" because Corp can be read not as holding the statute unconstitutional as applied to particular cases, but rather as holding that the Constitution required the statute to be interpreted narrowly, and the defendant wasn't covered by the narrow interpretation. Nonetheless, this case is quite close to Judge Reinhardt's opinion in McCoy -- and, for whatever it's worth, the panel there consisted of three Reagan appointees.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 10:17 PM]
20% SURRENDER: Let's hope this is accurate:

British military sources told Fox News that 20 percent of Saddam Hussein's elite Republican Guard had surrendered or were in the process of surrendering.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 9:16 PM]
THE U.N.: From, Slate's William Saletan:

"The Security Council has not failed," [German Foreign Minister Joschka] Fischer told fellow council members . . . "The negotiations on the Iraq crisis . . . have shown how relevant and how indispensable the peacemaking role of the Security Council is. There is no alternative to this."

Let's see. The Security Council negotiation process failed to give pro-war nations the legitimacy they sought. It failed to give anti-war nations an effective veto. It failed to keep the peace. A massive American-led assault on Iraq is underway -- I'd call that an alternative -- and nobody's paying attention to Fischer's urgently relevant remarks. I've underestimated the German sense of humor.

[French Foreign Minister Dominique] De Villepin followed Fischer's speech with an equally indispensable lecture on the wisdom of France. The U.N. weapons inspections, he explained, had merely been "interrupted" and would soon resume. To those who think this war will eradicate terrorism, de Villepin warned, "we say they run the risk of failing in their objectives."

Fair enough. So here are our options: the risk of failure or the certainty of it. Gentlemen, gentlemen. Your words are as compelling as your deeds.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 8:14 PM]
"FIRST CASUALTIES: 16 DEAD IN U.S. CHOPPER CRASH". 12 Britons and 4 Americans. The helicopter crashed within Kuwait; it may well have been an accident, rather than hostile fire, but the exact circumstances are apparently unknown.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 5:01 PM]
ANOTHER ARGUMENT ABOUT WAR AND PRECEDENT, from Andrew Coyne in the National Post. (Thanks to Sean Engemoen for the pointer.)

 
[Eugene Volokh, 4:59 PM]
BREAKING NEWS: If you're really desperate for breaking news, this site will generate it for you. (Thanks to Chris Lansdown for the pointer.)

 
[Eugene Volokh, 4:56 PM]
THE MOMENT OF LIBERATION: Charles Freund, at Reason's Hit & Run, passes along the following:

New York Times reporter John Burns, interviewed from Baghdad Wednesday night, was asked by Gwen Ifill of PBS' NewsHour to describe "the mood tonight on the streets of Baghdad." Here's what Burns said:

Well, you would imagine there is a great deal of apprehension ... [but] I think America should know that there is also a good deal of anticipation. Iraqis have suffered beyond I think the common understanding in the United States from the repression of the past 30 years here. And many, many Iraqis are telling us now -- not always in the whispers that we only heard in the past, but now in quite candid conversations -- that they are waiting for America to come and bring them liberty.

IFILL: They are actually anticipating ... eagerly anticipating war?

BURNS: It's very hard, though, for anybody to understand this. It can only be understood in terms of the depth of repression here, and it has to be said that this is not universal, of course. Having traveled throughout Baghdad in the last few hours, I can tell that you there are occasions when people are angry ... There are, of course, people who, because they are loyalists of the regime or out of fear or out of suspicion of America's motives, don't want this war at all....

All I can tell you is that ... the most extraordinary experience of the last few days has been a sudden breaking of the ice here with people in every corner of life coming forward to tell us that they understand what America is about in this. They are very, very fearful, of course ... and they are very concerned about the ... American military governance that they will come under afterwards.

But ... there is absolutely no doubt, no doubt that there are many, many Iraqis who see what is about to happen here as the moment of liberation.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 2:44 PM]
SADDAM'S BUNKER LOCATED, by a Volokh Conspiracy reader, as a matter of fact. Gerard Van der Leun writes:

It's obvious, isn't it. I mean, if you were Saddam where would you put the your bunker?

You'd put it deep beneath the building in which all the Western Reporters and their satellite up-links were sequestered.

Wouldn't you?

. . .

I'd like to be on record as the first person outside of Delta Force to have figured this out.

You heard it here first.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 2:20 PM]
AN UNFORTUNATE DISCOVERY ABOUT TECHNOLOGY AND SPEED: No matter how fast my Internet connection is, no matter how many war news sites I visit, and no matter how often I reload them, I cannot get news updates any faster than they are written, or than the news happens. Drat! And here I thought technology would make our lives better.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 2:16 PM]
RSS OF CNN: David Janes has put together two RSS news feeds of CNN coverage -- if you use RSS, this could be a great feature for you.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 2:13 PM]
MORE ON FEDERAL POWER AND POSSESSION OF CHILD PORN: A reader writes:

I'm not sure what the correct result is, although as you say, the Ninth Circuit's result is certainly plausible. Moreover, the real stakes here go far beyond child pornography laws. If Congress can't prohibit the intrastate possession of child pornography intended "for personal use," how can it prohibit the intrastate possession of narcotics intended for personal use? Read the analysis in the McCoy case with the word "narcotics" substituted for "child pornography," and you get a sense of its potential implications.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 12:05 PM]
REMARKABLE FEDERALISM DECISION: Just saw Orin's post below, and I'm printing out the case to read this afternoon. It may well be the correct result, both under the Court's caselaw and under a proper reading of the Constitution, which was indeed intended to considerably limit Congressional power to regulate intrastate possession. But whether or not it's correct, I predict that the Supreme Court will agree to hear the case, unless the Ninth Circuit reverses it en banc. Maybe the Justices might even affirm this; but when a court holds a federal statute unconstitutional (even in part), the Court is quite likely to consider the matter.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 11:44 AM]
A REPORT FROM THE SCALIA SPEECH: Reader Bruce Batista writes:

I attended the Scalia speech yesterday to the Cleveland City Club. Although there did not appear to be any TV cameras, there were plenty of TV reporters present -- not to mention at least 2 video cameras close to the dais along with about 6 still photographers. Your point about not wanting to be taken out of context is very cogent. As you know, Scalia has a reputation for an acid wit -- which was on vivid display yesterday. The topic for his speech was "Constitutional Interpretation." It was basically an exposition on his originalist approach to interpretation and denigration of the concept of the "living Constitution." There were probably at least 20 comments that he made which -- if shown solely by themselves, out of context -- would surely end up on somebodies "Parade of Horribles" highlight reel about conservative or Republican judicial appointments. While the numerous comments chastising conservatives would be ignored. For example, he was quick to condemn conservatives for using the "living constitution" argument to support bans on flag burning. He said, "A pox on both their houses."

As an aside, ff anyone is going to condemn Scalia for restricting "free" speech, they should also condemn the City Club -- after all, attending Scalia's speech wasn't free. Our firm paid $2500 for a table of 10 at the luncheon. And you couldn't get in without a ticket.

There really is no such thing as a free lunch.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 11:05 AM]
MESSAGES THAT START BY INSULTING THE RECIPIENT: A flurry of such messages -- generally responding to my attacking-Iraq-as-precedent piece in Slate -- led me to put my standard response to such messages on a Web page, so that I can simply link to it rather than retyping the whole thing.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 6:05 PM]
GUN SAFETY: Don't much like the picture at the top of this article. Always keep your finger off the trigger until you're ready to shoot. I mean, didn't Pulp Fiction teach us anything?

UPDATE: Matt Rustler agrees, and cites the basic weapons safety rules (crediting the Marines, who ought to know).

FURTHER UPDATE: Chris Lansdown has some notes, with an exchange he had with me about this.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 5:52 PM]
OVERWHELMING: The front page of the New York Times Web site currently contains the following blurb:

SLIDE SHOW
War Is Imminent
America's rationale for using force exposed an overwhelming opposition to war.

Hmm, I don't think we've really been overwhelmed here.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 5:07 PM]
RED, WHITE, AND BLUE: So why are these colors so common in flags? Chile, Cuba, the Czech Republic, the Dominican Republic, France, Laos, Nepal, the Netherlands, North Korea, and more -- all red, white, and blue. Russia is, too, but the blue is lighter.

     I know other colors are quite popular, too; flags of Muslim countries, for instance, generally have some green, but there's a reason for that. What's the reason for the red, white, and blue? If you know the answer, as opposed to just loosely speculating about one, please e-mail me at volokh at law.ucla.edu.

UPDATE: Virginia Postrel writes:

I'm pretty sure these colors are common on flags because prior to the invention of synthetic dyes they were among the easier colors to produce and, hence, became widely used for symbolic purposes.

Aha!

 
[Eugene Volokh, 4:48 PM]
MAUREEN DOWD: Yes, I know I'm risking a patent infringement lawsuit from Josh Chafetz, dean of Dowd-fisking, but I couldn't resist commenting on Maureen Dowd's latest:

The Perpendicular Pronoun
By MAUREEN DOWD

Sometimes I feel as if I've spent half my adult life covering a President Bush as he squares off against Saddam Hussein, an evil dictator who invades his neighbors and gasses his own people.

But while on the surface this seems like Groundhog War, the father-and-son duels in the sun with Saddam are breathtakingly different. The philosophical gulf between 41's gulf war and 43's gulf war is profound and cataclysmic -- it has sent the whole world into a frenzy -- yet it can be summed up in a single pronoun.

"The big I," as Bush senior calls it.

The first President Bush was often teased about his loopy syntax. But it was a way of speaking that signified the modesty and self-effacement his mother had insisted upon. He was so afraid to sound arrogant if he used the first person singular that he often just dropped the subject of a sentence and went straight to the verb.

"Mother always lectured us -- in a kinder, gentler way -- against using the big I," Poppy Bush said. He is so shy of "I" that he has never written a personal memoir.

Even though he came to politics with a sparse résumé, compared with his dad's stuffed one, the cocky W. was always more comfortable with the first person perpendicular. . . .

During his war overture on Monday night, W. was not afraid of the first-person spotlight: "This danger will be removed. . . . That duty falls to me as commander in chief by the oath I have sworn, by the oath I will keep."

The whole approach of the father, who had once served as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and loved nothing more than to drag world leaders out on his cigarette boat and give them mal de mer, was a clubby "we." He and his secretary of state, James Baker, had a coalition of 90 countries for Desert Storm, and they constantly schmoozed world leaders and trying to maintain international order.

The hawks of Bush II are not afraid of disorder in the pursuit of American dominance. They have no interest in any coalition -- except their own. They see the international "we" as an impediment to joy -- and to destiny. The Bush doctrine is animated by "the big I." That self-regarding doctrine, concocted by Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle back when W. was still merely a presidential gleam in Karl Rove's eye, preaches preventive pre-emptive preternatural pre-eminence. . . .

Three thoughts:

1. Is it at all noteworthy that in a piece condemning the Presidential "I" -- an "I" that isn't actually much on display in her quotes from Bush (only two references) -- two of the first six words (decontracting the contraction) are the journalist's own "I"? I'm usually reluctant to psychoanalyze people, but might there a bit of subconscious projection here?



2. Beyond this, Dowd is using the wrong pronoun. The standard condemnation of people who use "I" too much is that they're too egocentric or immodest. But Dowd is faulting Bush not for being too Bush-focused, but too America-focused. America, though, is a "we," not an "I." One can claim that Bush is not concerned enough about building alliances, but that's a charge that he's using too small a "we" ("we Americans," or even "we hawks," rather than "we members of the international community"). Calling him "I"-focused is a different charge entirely -- a more serious charge, and one that to my knowledge is actually quite unfounded.



3. Finally, a small tangent -- consider this paragraph:

   The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that even though Mr. Cheney receded into the background for months, he was choreographing events like Pluto, lord of the underground. In his undisclosed locations, he had dinner parties with anti-Saddam intellectuals and reached out to Iraqi dissidents and plotted the war with his old pal Rummy, letting Colin Powell vainly spend his prestige at the mealy-mouthed U.N.

   Seems to me that if you want to analogize someone to the lord of the underworld -- a not very flattering analogy -- you should at least get the analogy right. It's been a while since I read my mythology, but I don't think that Pluto was known for choreographing events; other than the little misunderstanding with Persephone (or Proserpine, if you prefer), he was mostly happy to stay home and wait for people to come to him. At the very least he was no more interventionist or manipulative than most of the other gods. Petty, yes, I know, but there is a point here: It's a bad sign when an author is so eager to smear someone that she's willing to throw in unfavorable analogies that don't even work as literary figures.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 3:23 PM]
WHOOPS: balockquote>A man spent hours chained to the wrong building Tuesday in an ill-planned effort to protest war with Iraq, police said.
Jody Mason padlocked himself to an entrance of the Washington State Grange building at 924 Capitol Way S., thinking it was a sub-office of the U.S. Department of Energy.

Grange employees found him about 11:45 a.m. Tuesday and asked what he was doing. . . .

Police officers used heavy-duty bolt cutters to free Mason.

"He asked for help because he didn't have the key," Olympia police Cmdr. Steve Nelson said. . . .

 
[Eugene Volokh, 1:48 PM]
USPS VS. CIA: From the Washington Post:

[We reported yesterday that] the Central Intelligence Agency has been stuffing unstamped postcards into residential mailboxes in the neighborhoods surrounding the agency's Langley headquarters.

CIA spokesman Bill Harlow sounded a tad grumpy when we told him that dozens of alert readers had pointed out that the CIA's mail drop was a violation of federal law. "I'll look into it and get back to you -- after the war," Harlow told us. When we persisted, he groused: "No, no, no, no. I've got all kinds of important issues to deal with -- al Qaeda and Iraq. We'll get to the postal regulations when we can."

But the Postal Service viewed the matter with a teensy bit more urgency. It turns out that the CIA is in breach of United States Code, Title 18, Section 1725: "Whoever knowingly and willfully deposits any mailable matter . . . on which no postage has been paid, in any letter box established, approved, or accepted by the Postal Service . . . shall for each such offense be fined under this title."

Postal Service spokesman Gerry McKiernan told us that yesterday "our inspection service got in touch with the CIA and advised them that we would hate for their certainly well-intentioned lapse to happen again. We don't think they did this 'knowingly and willfully.' But if it happens again, then it will be 'knowing and willful.'"

 
[Eugene Volokh, 1:34 PM]
SLATE PRECEDENT PIECE MAKES MSNBC: Very glad to see that.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 1:28 PM]
A STRIKING VISUAL, from the New York Times Web site front page today -- "Britain's Royal Irish Rangers moving toward Iraq in the Kuwaiti desert today" (photo credit AP). Powerful and evocative on many levels.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 1:13 PM]
HEY, I CAN READ GERMAN! Or at least I can read the headline of this otherwise foreign-language piece. Thanks to InstaPundit for the pointer.

UPDATE: They changed the headline (which read "You Can't Fuck With America," in quotes -- thanks to reader Jon Ravin for the precise text) after this was posted. Drat!

 
[Eugene Volokh, 1:06 PM]
BOOK PROOFS FOR ACADEMIC LEGAL WRITING HAVE ARRIVED: Sounds like I'll get this thing published yet, and more or less in time (i.e., before the end of the semester). But first, one more proofreading pass . . . .

 
[Eugene Volokh, 11:37 AM]
AGAIN WITH THE REFUSAL TO ACCEPT PREMATURE SURRENDER: From the Times (London),

In the mainly Shia Muslim south, Kuwaiti border guards are having to turn Iraqi soldiers back -- telling them that they must wait until an attack begins before they can surrender.

As I mentioned before when such a story was reported,

The story is reported as somewhat amusing, and I suppose it is (assuming that it's accurate) -- but what do you think happened to the soldiers when they returned to Iraq? Even in a civilized army, this sort of behavior is likely punishable; in the Iraqi army, I suspect that the punish is quite severe, and possibly fatal. Is it really the case that "[t]here was nothing [the British] could do other than send [the Iraqis] back"? Perhaps there's some rule here that does command this, but couldn't they have just treated them as defectors, and turned them over to Kuwaiti authorities?

After all, that would be . . . fewer Iraqis who could kill or wound some allied troops when the war starts; it would be . . . fewer Iraqis who might be killed by allied troops when the war starts; and it would be . . . fewer Iraqis who might be killed by Saddam before the war starts. True, it's possible that they might have actually been saboteurs or infiltrators, but I presume that they could have been disarmed, and locked up by the Kuwaitis in some safe but not terribly expensive surroundings -- surely both the allies and the Kuwaitis have some plans for dealing with prisoners of war when some are indeed taken. Wouldn't letting them stay in Kuwaiti custody be a win-win scenario (at least for everyone but Saddam)?

Now maybe this doesn't much matter when the war seems likely to start in a matter of hours, or a day or two at most -- but still, a lot of returned would-be defectors could still be killed in those hours, or could end up being killed in the first hours of the attack. Is there something I'm missing here, some compelling reason why these premature surrenders couldn't be accepted? After all, some surrenders seemingly are being accepted -- or is it just a matter of subtle differences in timing? --

Fifteen Iraqi soldiers have crossed the border into Kuwait and surrendered to US troops, a US officer said.

The 15 were handed over to Kuwaiti police after laying down their arms and giving up, said Captain Darrin Theriault, headquarters company commander of the First Brigade of the US Army's Third Infantry Division.

The surrenders came amid the 48-hour ultimatum given by President George W. Bush to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to leave his country or face a massive attack. . . .

UPDATE: Matt Rustler has more thoughts on this.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 11:09 AM]
"JUSTICE BANS BROADCAST MEDIA FROM SPEECH": I've seen several e-mails about this story:

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has banned broadcast media from an appearance Wednesday where he will receive an award for supporting free speech.

The ban on broadcast media, “begs disbelief and seems to be in conflict with the award itself,” C-SPAN vice president and executive producer Terry Murphy wrote in a letter last week to the [Cleveland] City Club. “How free is speech if there are limits to its distribution?”

The City Club, which regularly hosts appearances by public figures, is presenting Scalia with its Citadel of Free Speech Award.

It usually tapes speakers for later broadcast on public television station WVIZ. But Scalia insisted on banning television and radio coverage as a condition of his appearance.

“I might wish it were otherwise, but that was one of the criteria that he had for acceptance,” said James Foster, the club’s executive director.

The City Club selected Scalia for its free speech award because he has “consistently, across the board, had opinions or led the charge in support of free speech,” Foster said.

Cameras and recording devices are banned from the Supreme Court chamber, and Scalia prefers not to have camera coverage in other settings, said Kathleen Arberg, spokeswoman for the court. . . .

     Of course, there's no claim of actual legal violation here: The City Club is a private entity, and Justice Scalia is entitled to ask them, as a condition of his appearance, not to allow the event to be taped or broadcast. The claim, rather, is that this demand is somehow improper or unfair on Scalia's part, especially given that the lecture is about free speech.

     Because we're talking about subjective judgments of propriety, rather than about somewhat more clearly delineated rules of law, people will naturally differ about this. But it seems to me that Scalia's request, and the Club's acceding to the request, are quite proper. Speakers are entitled to ask that their speech not be taped, especially when they have reason to think that tiny excerpts will be replayed, perhaps out of context, on the evening news. That's traditionally been seen as each person's prerogative -- the media is generally free to broadcast that which it has in its possession (though subject to copyright law and some other restraints), but that doesn't mean that all of us should maximally accommodate the media by allowing them to tape us on private property.

     Nor is there anything different about speeches in honor of free speech. Scalia, after all, gets this award for helping protect speakers from governmental punishment (though it turns out that, while his views on free speech are quite defensible, they are somewhat less speech-protective than those of most currently sitting Justices). He has never claimed to be a force for maximum media coverage of speeches on private property, or maximum dissemination of speakers' positions. It's perfectly consistent for him to say "I believe in the rights of the media to speak free of government punishment, but I don't believe that speakers have an obligation to make their speeches available for the media to tape."

     But even if Scalia acted quite properly, might the City Club -- which prides itself on being "the oldest continuous free speech forum in the country, renowned for its tradition of debate and discussion" -- be faulted for agreeing to his request, rather than just saying "No, if you don't want to be broadcast, don't come here"? My tentative sense is that they shouldn't be so faulted. They had a choice: Have Justice Scalia come out and speak to their members, and have the event be covered by the print media, or not have him come out to speak at all. Either way, the broadcast media wouldn't have gotten to broadcast the Scalia speech; but at least the choice that the City Club made allowed some listeners to hear it. That seems like a reasonable decision, though the opposite decision would have been reasonable, too.

     More broadly, I think this is a reminder that not all restrictions on speech -- or on information gathering, which is the precise question at stake here -- violate free speech rules or free speech principles. Saying that one will only speak (again, on private property) if the speech isn't rebroadcast is quite consistent with those rules and principles.

UPDATE: Someone pointed out one other item: Speakers often give more or less the same speech in many different places; they may be reluctant to let their speech be broadcast because then it makes it less novel for future audiences. Now this may be less of an issue if the broadcast is just on a local public television station, but it may still be something of an issue (for instance, if Scalia comes back in a year or two to give a talk at a Cleveland law school), and it may also help explain why some speakers get used to asking that the speech not be broadcast.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 11:04 AM]
A BRIEF EXCHANGE ON PRECEDENT: Paul Robinson, a professor at University of Hull in England -- and a friend of Iain Murray's -- passed along the following:

Actually the problem about precedent isn't quite what your friend
thinks it is.

I used to think, for instance, that what was wrong with NATO's Kosovo war was that it created a dangerous precedent which others could follow. Now I realise that I was wrong, and in that sense agree with your friend. But what I missed then, and he misses too, is that it did and does create a dangerous precedent -- FOR US!

Having got away with this sort of thing once -- in Kosovo -- we are now doing it again, and if we get away with it cheaply this time, we will be tempted to do it yet again. Kosovo is already being cited time after time by the government and its supporters as providing
justification for this war. This war will then be used as justification for the next one we want to do.

So, there is the real problem -- We are creating dangerous precedents for ourselves.

I responded:

Interesting argument, but I'm pretty skeptical -- are we really doing what we're doing in Iraq because of Kosovo? If we didn't go into Kosovo, would we now be saying "No, let's not go into Iraq" (or would we even be substantially more likely to say it)? Conversely, if we thought that going into Iraq wasn't in our national interest, would we now be saying "But we went into Kosovo, so we ought to go into Iraq, too, to be consistent"?

I don't think so, which is why I think talk of "precedent" is out of place here. Claiming that we should avoid A because we're afraid that doing A will "set a precedent" for B is claiming that doing A will materially increase the chance of B over what it would have been had A not been done. (That is in fact what happens in legal precedent, to which I take it the "precedent" claims here are drawing an analogy.) That's true in some situations, but not, I think, here. Our doing A (participating in the Kosovo campaign) did not materially increase the chances of our attacking Iraq; our deciding to attack Iraq will not materially increase the chances of our attacking another country.

The one caveat to that is that our attacking Iraq may give us extra information -- whether information we uncover in the Iraqi files, or, more likely, information about how effective these sorts of wars are -- that will affect our judgment about future wars. But that's a plus, not a minus, because it allows our future decisions about whether to go to war to be based on somewhat more knowledge.

Prof. Robinson further responded:

In reply, I would say that I really do think that attacking Kosovo made the Iraq war more likely. I think that it gave Blair in particular a taste for this sort of thing. It made him think that force was a suitable way of dealing with tricky problems, and that if you stuck to your guns and ploughed on, you would end up as a hero.
It also made him and others think that they could ignore the prohibition on waging aggressive war and ignore the UN Security
Council. The fact that he and his followers keep citing Kosovo as a precedent suggests to me that it did play some role in their thinking.

I think my response was still correct -- and to the extent that there was an effect, it was the one identified in the last paragraph as being a good effect -- but I thought I'd pass along the whole exchange to our readers so you can decide for yourselves what to make of it.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 10:49 AM]
LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT:

Text of a Letter from the President to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate

March 18, 2003

Dear Mr. Speaker: (Dear Mr. President:)

Consistent with section 3(b) of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 (Public Law 107-243), and based on information available to me, including that in the enclosed document, I determine that:

(1) reliance by the United States on further diplomatic and other peaceful means alone will neither (A) adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq nor (B) likely lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq; and

(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.

Sincerely,

GEORGE W. BUSH

This is of course the determination that is required by the Congressional resolution in order for the President to use force (setting aside the question whether this requirement is legally binding):

In connection with the exercise of the authority granted in subsection (a) to use force the President shall, prior to such exercise or as soon thereafter as may be feasible, but no later than 48 hours after exercising such authority, make available to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President pro tempore of the Senate his determination that--

(1) reliance by the United States on further diplomatic or other peaceful means alone either (A) will not adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq or (B) is not likely to lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq; and

(2) acting pursuant to this joint resolution is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorist and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.

Thanks to InstaPundit for the pointer.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 9:45 AM]
LIBERTY: There's no news hook for this -- I'm not trying to comment on any current events -- but Bill Bennett's recent foxnews.com column reminded me of this excerpt from a Lincoln speech (his Address at a Sanitary Fair, Baltimore, Apr. 18, 1864), so I thought I'd post it. I've always found this quite a thoughtprovoking piece, and a useful reminder that "liberty" in the abstract is not self-defining; most rhetoric that simply refers to "liberty" -- whether in the context of slavery, where Lincoln said this, abortion rights, national sovereignty, and so on -- rests on assertion about the proper definition of people's or institutions' rights, and it's that definition that should often be at the heart of the debate.

The world has never had a good definition of liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in need of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name -- liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names -- liberty and tyranny.

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures, even in the North, and all professing to love liberty. Hence we behold the processes by which thousands are daily passing from under the yoke of bondage, hailed by some as the advance of liberty, and bewailed by others as the destruction of all liberty. . . .

Always worth keeping this in mind, when the debate starts being about "liberty" in the abstract, rather than on how one defines concrete liberties.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 9:22 AM]
CITE-CHECKING PAT BUCHANAN: My friend Jack Schaedel passes along the following:

I don't know if this is something you're interested in discussing, but there's been something missing from what I've seen of the blogosphere's criticism of Buchanan for his recent anti-Jewish polemic -- he intentionally distorts Max Boot's "admission" that neocons support Israel. To wit:

Yet Boot readily concedes that a passionate attachment to Israel is a "key tenet of neoconservatism." He also claims that the National Security Strategy of President Bush "sounds as if it could have come straight out from the pages of Commentary magazine, the neocon bible." (For the uninitiated, Commentary, the bible in which Boot seeks divine guidance, is the monthly of the American Jewish Committee.)

Boot actually wrote:

Second, support for Israel -- a key tenet of neoconservatism -- is hardly confined to Jews; its strongest constituency in America happens to be among evangelical Christians.

Got that? Boot says support for Israel is a key tenet of neocon. Pat says Boot said a passionate attachment to Israel is a "key tenet of neoconservatism." (Boot also pointed out that a number of evangelical Christians support Israel; Pat must've missed that.)

Pat goes on:

We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America's interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We charge them with deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people's right to a homeland of their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity.

Not in our lifetimes has America been so isolated from old friends. Far worse, President Bush is being lured into a trap baited for him by these neocons that could cost him his office and cause America to forfeit years of peace won for us by the sacrifices of two generations in the Cold War.

They charge us with anti-Semitism -- i.e., a hatred of Jews for their faith, heritage, or ancestry. False. The truth is, those hurling these charges harbor a "passionate attachment" to a nation not our own that causes them to subordinate the interests of their own country and to act on an assumption that, somehow, what's good for Israel is good for America. . . .

This last part is completely outrageous. Again, "passionate attachment" is Pat's term, not Max Boot's! When you describe someone else has having a passionate attachment to something, that is never a neutral observation. The person either shares your passionate attachment, or you are sneering at his inappropriately passionate attachment. . . .

UPDATE: Reader George Carney points out that Buchanan's "passionate attachment" probably refers to George Washington's phrase from his farewell address warning against "passionate attachments" to other nations; this phrase is a favorite among anti-interventionists. This might well have been Buchanan's intention -- but Buchanan never cites Washington's address in his article, and the only two references to "passionate attachment" are the two cited above: "Boot readily concedes that a passionate attachment to Israel is a 'key tenet of neoconservatism,'" which is a misdescription of Boot's point (Boot speaks only of support), and then the quoted "passionate attachment," which in context appears to be a further reference to Boot (since again the phrase is mentioned nowhere else). So I think that Buchanan's description of Boot's position remains quite erroneous.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 8:41 AM]
TALK ABOUT "TOUGH LOVE": Jacques Chirac about Saddam Hussein:

I'm sure that as a leader he loves his people . . . .

Uh-huh. I realize that this might be just diplomatic-speak (Chirac is also saying that Saddam should have stepped down, so maybe he thinks that saying this might somehow help persuade Saddam to do this; who knows), but one way or another it's pretty funny, in a grim sort of way. Thanks to Best of the Web for the pointer.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 8:37 AM]
SERIOUS CONSEQUENCES: Best of the Web points out:

The Washington Post reports that Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin is warning America of "serious consequences" if it goes ahead and enforces the U.N.'s mandates on Iraq. We guess this means the French are threatening to send Hans Blix to Washington.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 8:12 AM]
"BORN AMERICAN, BUT IN THE WRONG PLACE": Peter Schramm writes:

There is a very interesting conference coming up in Southern California (at Chapman University School of Law) this Friday and Saturday. The subject is "American Citizenship in the Age of Multicultural Immigration." The impressive lineup includes fine minds like John Fonte, John Zvesper, Bill Allen, Tom West, Peter Skerry, Paul Gigot, John Eastman, Viet Dinh, Joel Kotkin, et al. My participation will be rather simple. I will try to explain what my father meant in response to a question when we were about to leave Hungary (I was ten years old). I asked him where we were going. He said we were going to America. I asked why to America, and he said this: "We were born Americans but in the wrong place." . . .

Well put.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 7:06 AM]
AN ODD METAPHOR: Thomas Friedman's New York Times column starts with the following analogy:

President Bush is fond of cowboy imagery, so here's an image that comes to mind about our pending war with Iraq. In most cowboy movies the good guys round up a posse before they ride into town and take on the black hats. We're doing just the opposite. We're riding into Baghdad pretty much alone and hoping to round up a posse after we get there. I hope we do, because it may be the only way we can get out with ourselves, and the town, in one piece.

An interesting metaphor -- except that the good guys round up the posse because the good guys are a very small group, and need a lot of other guns by their side. If they don't have them, they might be outnumbered, and the bad guys might win. Of course that's not the case here at all; the allied force (which indeed is mostly the U.S. force) is already plenty large enough to be a posse.

     Now I realize this is something of a quibble -- naturally, no metaphor is intended to provide a perfect analogy. But the point of using the metaphor is that the analogy has to be at least close enough to provide more enlightenment than distraction. Here, the analogy seems to me pretty distant, and thus more misleading than helpful.

     Friedman's broader point is a fair one: We need to engage the rest of the world in helping rebuild Iraq, which will make our actions seem retroactively legitimate in the rest of the world's eyes. I'm not sure whether this requires an "attitude lobotomy" on the Administration's part or requires it to "get off its high horse," but I agree that it would be helpful to have more help from other countries there than we got with the war.

     But it would also, I think, be easier. Many nations' objections to endorsing a war -- which at least ostensibly have to do with pacifism and a fear of destabilizing the region -- aren't likely to carry over to the rebuilding process. It won't be trivial (or cheap) to enroll countries in the rebuilding, but it should be easier than enrolling them in the fighting. Again, the analogy to the posse is quite unhelpful here: Rounding up a posse for social work is very different from rounding it up for a shootout. Perhaps in the West of the movies, finding willing social workers was harder than finding willing gunslingers, but I suspect that these days it will be the other way around.

     So, as I've said before (see the post labeled "AVOID THE FIGURATIVE, BUT NOT LIKE THE PLAGUE"), metaphors can indeed be useful and legitimate. But we should examine metaphorical arguments carefully, to see whether they rest on insightful analogies or on inaccurate ones. When the more accurate summary ends up being something like this,

President Bush is fond of cowboy imagery, so here's an image that comes to mind about our pending war with Iraq. In most cowboy movies the good guys round up a posse before they ride into town and take on the black hats. We're doing something different. We already have so many regular deputies that we don't really need a posse to actually get rid of the black hats. We're riding into Baghdad with our own posse of 250,000. But when we kill the black hats, we need to find some people to help take care of their widows, orphans, and surrendering sidekicks (compassionate cowboys that we are), especially since the orphans are getting near fighting age, and we don't want them coming back in a few years to take their revenge. So I hope we do work hard to find these people, because it may be the only way we can ultimately get out with ourselves, and the town, in one piece.

then we know the original metaphor wasn't terribly apt.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 10:00 PM]
HUH? Bill Bennett has a pretty good pro-war piece at foxnews.com, but the brief summary phrase that foxnews provides on the front page is just mystifying:

Bush is labeled a warmonger for putting together a coalition

Mystifying.

UPDATE: The summary has been changed to the more sensible "Bush is labeled a warmonger for making plans to oust a tyrant."

 
[Eugene Volokh, 6:16 PM]
ALTERNATE CAPTIONS FOR THE OFFICIAL WARNING PICTURES: Mark Kleiman was right -- these are laugh-out-loud funny.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 3:40 PM]
THE "ATTACKING IRAQ WILL SET A BAD PRECEDENT" ARGUMENT: I discuss this argument -- which is close kin to the slippery slope argument that I've been writing about recently -- in Slate today. The piece has just been posted, so get it while it's e-hot. Here is the conclusion (which I hope is supported by the rest of the article):

Precedents and slippery slopes can be powerful forces and can sound like powerful arguments. We should indeed think about the indirect consequences of our actions, not just the immediate ones. But the phrases "what about the precedent?" and "where do you stop?" don't magically mandate inaction. Rather, people who make these arguments must concretely explain how our action today would supposedly help lead to others' action tomorrow. They haven't done so here.

Our invading Iraq will not set a dangerous precedent or much of a precedent at all. We should focus on the costs and benefits of this war, and not on its supposed precedential effects on future wars.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 2:48 PM]
DISSENT: Daniel Drezner has an excellent point (for links, go to his post):

Op-eds like Stanley Kutler's in today's Chicago Tribune always puzzle me. Here's Kutler's two first paragraphs:

"As we march to war, the Bush administration's interest is to discredit, even foreclose, dissent.

Passivity and a sense of powerlessness are pervasive everywhere. Tabloids and cable channels refer to the 'treason' of celebrities who oppose President Bush. Our political leaders march in lockstep with the president. The so-called 'opposition' hedges its bets, 'patriotically' supporting Bush's actions, but ever hopeful he will stumble on the economy and give them the opportunity of 1992 all over again."

It's painfully obvious that dissent is not being stifled. It's painfully obvious that serious media organs have raised qualms about the Bush administration's actions. It's painfully obvious that some Democrats support the President on principle and some oppose him out of principle (then there's John Kerry). Why would Kutler write these patently silly lines?

Perhaps because anti-war advocates can't are losing the argument with the American people. Why are they losing their argument? Click here for one possible answer.

First rule of politics -- if you lose an argument, blame the messenger, not the message.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 2:45 PM]
U.K. FOREIGN OFFICE ON THE LEGAL BASIS FOR THE ATTACK ON IRAQ: Here's their statement. Thanks to lawprof Alan Meese for the pointer.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 1:25 PM]
TONY BLAIR'S SPEECH: It's available here, and it's worth reading in its entirety. Here are a couple of key excerpts:

Last Monday, we were getting somewhere with [a proposed resolution]. We very nearly had majority agreement . . . .

Then, on Monday night, France said it would veto a second resolution whatever the circumstances. Then France denounced the six tests. Later that day, Iraq rejected them. Still, we continued to negotiate.

Last Friday, France said they could not accept any ultimatum. On Monday, we made final efforts to secure agreement. But they remain utterly opposed to anything which lays down an ultimatum authorising action in the event of non-compliance by Saddam.

Just consider the position we are asked to adopt. Those on the security council opposed to us say they want Saddam to disarm but will not countenance any new resolution that authorises force in the event of non-compliance.

That is their position. No to any ultimatum; no to any resolution that stipulates that failure to comply will lead to military action.

So we must demand he disarm but relinquish any concept of a threat if he doesn't. From December 1998 to December 2002, no UN inspector was allowed to inspect anything in Iraq. For four years, not a thing.

What changed his mind? The threat of force. From December to January and then from January through to February, concessions were made.

What changed his mind? The threat of force. And what makes him now issue invitations to the inspectors, discover documents he said he never had, produce evidence of weapons supposed to be non-existent, destroy missiles he said he would keep? The imminence of force.

The only persuasive power to which he responds is 250,000 allied troops on his doorstep.

And yet when that fact is so obvious that it is staring us in the face, we are told that any resolution that authorises force will be vetoed. Not just opposed. Vetoed. Blocked.

And in another vein -- and this is a good response to those who (correctly) point out that 3000 deaths on Sept. 11, while tragic, isn't that much in a grand scheme of things and then (incorrectly) limit the discussion to how we should act given the risk of similarly deadly attacks:

[W]hat was shocking about September 11 was not just the slaughter of the innocent; but the knowledge that had the terrorists been able to, there would have been not 3,000 innocent dead, but 30,000 or 300,000 and the more the suffering, the greater the terrorists' rejoicing.

Three kilograms of VX from a rocket launcher would contaminate a quarter of a square kilometre of a city.

Millions of lethal doses are contained in one litre of Anthrax. 10,000 litres are unaccounted for. 11 September has changed the psychology of America. It should have changed the psychology of the world. Of course Iraq is not the only part of this threat. But it is the test of whether we treat the threat seriously.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 11:53 AM]
WHERE EUROPEAN GOVERNMENTS STAND: Andrew Sullivan excerpts a headcount from Stratfor:

There are three categories: countries that explicitly support the U.S position; countries that support it but wanted a second resolution; and countries that oppose war against Saddam. In the first camp, we have the United Kingdom, Spain, Denmark, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Macedonia, Croatia, Portugal, Bosnia and Montenegro. In the second camp -- supportive -- we have

the Netherlands, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Slovakia -- a bloc of five. But of these, The Netherlands sent Patriot missiles to Turkey before NATO approved the shipment, while the Czechs and Slovaks have sent chemical detection teams to Kuwait.

I'd put those five into the broadly positive column myself. That makes a total of 21 European countries in favor of war. Then we have the neutrals: Ireland, Austria, Finland, Serbia, Switzerland and Norway. And the opponents: France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden and Greece.

As Sullivan points out, this should be kept in mind when one hears that "Europe" opposes the war. (Naturally, polls of the European public -- which I'm told are generally anti-war -- are also relevant, but as recent polls show, the public in democracies often does follow their government's lead on such matters.)

UPDATE: Daniel Drezner points out that some non-European governments support our position too, most significantly the governments of Australia, Japan, and South Korea. Not quite "unilateral," seems to me.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 8:38 AM]
"BILL CLINTON, HAWK": Mickey Kaus has the quote from Clinton's op-ed in the Guardian:

As Blair has said, in war there will be civilian was well as military casualties. There is, too, as both Britain and America agree, some risk of Saddam using or transferring his weapons to terrorists. There is as well the possibility that more angry young Muslims can be recruited to terrorism. But if we leave Iraq with chemical and biological weapons, after 12 years of defiance, there is a considerable risk that one day these weapons will fall into the wrong hands and put many more lives at risk than will be lost in overthrowing Saddam.

The piece repeatedly praises Tony Blair, and I assume that Clinton published it in an English newspaper to try to help Blair, who's under heavy assault right now within his own party. But I might well be wrong on the latter point; I have no real sense for internal British politics.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 8:27 AM]
MORE ON THE FREEWAY HORSEMAN: Reader Gerard Van der Leun writes:

I encountered the Horseman in Laguna Beach along the Pacific Coast Highway. He had been pulled over by the Laguna Beach police for an interview. I pulled the car over, got out, and took a number of pictures of this encounter. [EV: I've posted one here.]

It seemed that this man was on his way to Texas. He said he'd started at the Canadian border and his plan was to ride to San Diego and turn left.

He had what he called a "shoulder pass" which he drew from his pocket and presented to the officer. Animal control also showed up and that officer informed the cowpoke that he did not have his dog on a leash (!) He replied sensibly that his dog (named, I swear, "Dog") knew how to follow along, and that if he put a leash on him from the saddle he risked strangling the dog. ("Horse goes one way, Dog goes another. Tough on Dog, officer.")

The animal control officer began a lecture which was interrupted by the officer in charge who informed everyone that what they were going to do was let this man continue on his way and give him a police escort out of town.

I assume the officer saw the issue of providing transport for two horses to some undisclosed location as well as the dog, while they were working the cowboy as just far too much paperwork to be contemplated. That and noting about 15 citizens gathered and ready for a sincere chat with the city council probably gave him pause as well.

The cowpoke rolled a smoke, nodded, saddled up and was escorted out of town.

I like to think he's still out there making his way from Canada to Texas via a left turn in San Diego.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 8:18 AM]
FAMOUS POLES: I got lots of responses, many of which matched my own -- which either means that we're all right or we're all wrong, but makes me feel better in any case! Recall the puzzle:

Name the four greatest Polish-born figures in the arts, letters, and sciences. . . .

My answers, which were also shared by readers David Howard, Rick Horvath, Matt Bower, Joyce Park, Davis King, David Hecht, Mark Garbowski, Kate Coe, Debra Doyle, and J.A. Frazier (names listed in order their messages arrived):

1. Nicolaus Copernicus (one that many people missed, but he's got to be #1).
2. Frederic Chopin.
3. Marie Curie (nee Skolodowska).
4. Joseph Conrad (ne Korzeniowski), born in Berdichev, which is now in the Ukraine and was then in the Russian Empire, but which used to be in Poland; and Conrad was ethnically Polish and, to my knowledge, a native Polish speaker.

Other plausible names (to replace Conrad or Curie, I think, since Chopin and Copernicus clearly have to be in the top four): Ignacy Paderewski, Henryk Sinkiewicz, and Isaac Bashevis Singer (yeah, I know the obvious objections and the obvious responses to that one). But I like mine better (they're mine!).

 
[Eugene Volokh, 9:12 PM]
POLAND: I'm something of a Polonophile -- in Russia, my parents got much of their knowledge of the West through magazines they got from relatively liberal Poland, and they always had good things to say about that much-abused country -- and I'm happy to see that they'll be contributing a force, albeit a token one (200 soldiers), to the war.

     In their honor, here's a puzzle: Name the four greatest Polish-born figures in the arts, letters, and sciences. Honorable mention to the first message to volokh at law.ucla.edu that matches my answer, whether my answer is correct or not. No questions about the rules, please; you'll have to figure out who counts as Polish-born on your own -- the boundaries of Poland have been notoriously variable, so I'm focusing on someone born a Polish speaker in the general area of Poland.

UPDATE: The answers are here.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 12:47 PM]
MORE STUART TAYLOR ON TORTURE: Stuart Taylor points to some alleged cases of U.S. military and law enforcement officials abusing detainees -- if the accounts are accurate, they are extremely troubling. Moreover, Stuart's reputation as a balanced and nondoctrinaire commentator, both in general and on this issue, adds considerable force to his allegations. (I speak here just about allegations of abuse; allegations that some people might be "wrongly classified as enemy combatants" are a different matter, for complicated reasons that I've blogged about before.)

 
[Eugene Volokh, 11:52 AM]
FREEWAY HORSEMAN MYSTERY SOLVED? Responding to my post about the man riding his horse on the freeway (with another horse in tow, a dog in front of him, and an apparent police escort behind), reader Mark Seecof suggests a possible explanation:

Camp Pendleton [a large U.S. Marine Corps base] occupies the entire littoral between San Onofre and Oceanside, except for the I-5 right-of-way.

California ordinarly forbids pedestrians, bicyclists, people riding or driving horses or oxen, and other riff-raff ;-) to use freeways -- but this rule is relaxed when a freeway is the only road available.

Before 9/11 non-motor traffic along the coast through Camp Pendleton was diverted for safety onto the former US Highway 101 pavement, parallel to I-5. However, that road is now closed for security reasons (it's not fenced). So the only remaining road is I-5, which means that horsemen get to use the freeway.

I doubt that that CHP escort was mandatory -- it was probably a courtesy.

For lagniappe, there's a portion of I-5 on the Northern edge of San Diego between Genesee Ave. and Sorrento Valley Road which enjoyed a similar rule waiver for decades, because it was the only road. There were permissive signs posted at the street ends of those ramps, and forbidding signs ("pedestrians, bicyclists, etc. MUST EXIT...") on the freeway near those exits.

Mystery solved (maybe).

 
[Eugene Volokh, 10:11 AM]
STANFORD TO "INVESTIGATE[]" ANTI-IMMIGRATION FLYERS FOR SUPPOSED "INTOLERANCE"? From The Stanford Daily. The oddly named Acts of Intolerance Protocol is a pretty mysterious document, so it's hard to tell exactly what the "investigation" would involve or lead to, but the controversy seems to bear watching. I hope the student government official is not accurately predicting Stanford's reaction.

A group of Stanford students complaining that the flood of skilled international graduate students is making the job search more difficult for U.S. citizens posted fliers throughout east campus graduate student residences at the beginning of the month. Posters reading “Beware! H1B and L1 visa programs forcing Americans into unemployment” appeared in Escondido Village and Rains Houses, provoking many graduate students to label the claims racist and ignorant. . . .

Graduate Student Council Financial Officer Jeff Catalano, a fourth year doctoral candidate in geological and environmental sciences, pointed out the applicability of the University’s Acts of Intolerance Protocol.

“These fliers may be considered acts of intolerance, and will probably be investigated by the University,” Catalano said.

UPDATE: The Cardinal Collective suggests that the Protocol doesn't really allow any punishment for mere speech, but just aims at providing some sort of mediation to soothe hurt feelings -- hope they're right.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 9:37 AM]
MARK KLEIMAN ON TORTURE: Mark criticizes the Stuart Taylor piece that I linked to a few days ago; I don't think I fully agree with Mark's analysis, though his bottom line might be correct (I remain torn on the subject) -- but in any case, Mark's post is definitely worth reading.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 9:09 AM]
CLAYTON CRAMER: I'm delighted to report that Clayton Cramer, a prominent Second Amendment historian and a noted blogger in his own right, is tentatively being assimilated to -- er, is tentatively joining The Conspiracy. As I've mentioned in the past, this sort of thing is always an experiment; perhaps he might ultimately decide that solo blogging is the way to go, and we'd entirely understand that. But we think that this will prove to be a fruitful collaboration, for him and his readers and for us and ours. Clayton's e-mail address is clayton, followed by the at sign, followed by claytoncramer.com.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 8:50 AM]
THE LIMITS OF POLLS: Pollingreport.com just added a CBS News poll that was done over the weekend (margin of error +/-3%). Here are two questions (output slightly reformatted):

"Which of these comes closer to your point of view about the U.S. taking military action against Iraq? (1) The United States should take military action against Iraq even if the United Nations opposes that action. (2) The United States should take military action ONLY if the United Nations supports the action. OR, (3) The United States should not take military action against Iraq at all."

Even if UN Opposes 49%
Only if UN Supports 40%
Not At All 9%
Don't Know 2%

"What if the UN Security Council votes against taking military action against Iraq? Would you approve or disapprove of the U.S. taking military action against Iraq if the UN votes against such action?"

Approve 54%
Disapprove 40%
Don't Know 6%

The two questions seem to describe the same events -- but on the key issue, which is whether the U.S. should go to war even without U.N. support, the first poll yields a 49-49% while the second yields a 54%-40% for.

     The difference in the margins is large enough to be statistically significant, but I want to suggest that it is not actually significant -- that the true margin of error in a poll exceeds the statistical one, in large part because a lot of people are undecided enough that you can't really capture an opinion that they don't really fully have.

     Yes, there are differences in the wording that might explain the difference in result; I suppose it's theoretically possible that some fraction of people would "approve" of U.S. action even though they think the U.S. "should not" take the action, or think the U.S. should go to war "if the UN votes against" but not "if the United Nations opposes the action." But the likelier explanation is that there's a huge swing vote that's undecided, and that's sensitive to subtle cues in the question that change the mood of the voter rather than changing the real meaning of the question.

     This poll thus suggests a 40-20-40 split or at most a 50-10-40 split more than a 49-49 split on one issue and a 40-54 split the other way on a virtually identical one. That's something worth keeping in mind, I think, whenever we hear about 54-40 polls on this issue, or probably on many others.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 8:39 AM]
ALDAILY: I was delighted to see that aldaily.com, a site I've long much liked, lists David Newman's and my short Legal Affairs piece on Slippery Slopes at the very top of the page. If you haven't read it yet, it's your big chance . . . . (Yes, the immediately preceding sentence is logically meaningless, but it sounded right at the time.)

 
[Eugene Volokh, 10:12 PM]
"WE'LL ONLY SAY GOOD THINGS ABOUT SADDAM TO YOU": From a San Francisco Chronicle article (thanks to Tim Blair for the pointer):

[O]ne man pulled aside a reporter. "Don't believe anything anyone says here, because we all know that your translator is a government spy," he said. "We'll only say good things about Saddam to you. But 90 percent of us want Saddam to go. We'll cheer the Americans if they come and get rid of him."

Looking nervously around him, he continued: "We want all these regime people to be killed."

The government, for its part, is making few attempts to whip up the public into a war-fighting frenzy. Although it has scheduled a patriotic parade of militias from Hussein's Baath party today, there are few soldiers on the streets, and the sandbag installations that have been thrown up on major avenues or in front of government buildings seem more symbolic than functional. . . .

What do Iraqis really think, and how will they act once the invasion happens? I certainly can't tell for sure; my sense of human psychology is that they hate the brutal regime under which they live, and have no desire to die for it; but I realize I might be mistaken. I am sure, though, that interviews with Iraqis that take place in sight of government watchers -- which to my knowledge account for the great majority of the "Iraqis support Saddam" reports -- are about as reliable as the 100% results in Saddam's "elections."

 
[Eugene Volokh, 1:52 PM]
POLLS: The two posts below remind me to remind all of you about pollingreport.com, an indispensable and to my knowledge highly reliable site that contains the results of (1) a long list of past polls, together with (2) the text of the questions, and (3) the margins of error. Newspaper accounts of these polls are often just appalling; they incorrectly paraphrase the text of the questions, omit important elements of the findings, ignore the margins of error, and so on. Pollingreport.com is the best way that I've found to check the results. Consult it yourself whenever you see a newspaper article that mentions a poll.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 1:45 PM]
FALSE DICHOTOMY: Here's a quote from a Newsweek/msnbc.com report:

Most Americans, 85 percent, say they would still prefer that the United States attack Iraq with the full support of the United Nations Security Council. However, approval for the Bush administration’s decision to attack Iraq alone has increased six percent from the first week of February, to 43 percent.

OK, quick: What percentage of Americans support the Bush administration's current plan, which to my knowledge is to attack Iraq together with Britain and perhaps a few other allies, even if the U.N. Security Council doesn't give the go-ahead?

     If you said 43%, you're mistaken -- but that's just because the article suckered you into the mistake. The 43% number is if the U.S. were to attack truly alone, without even one or two allies (something that I believe is not the current administration decision). Here's what the poll results actually were:

"Please tell me if you would support or oppose U.S. military action against Iraq in each of the following circumstances. What if [see below]? Would you support or oppose U.S. military action in this circumstance?"

Would Support [/] Would Oppose [/] Don't Know
% % %

"The United States JOINED TOGETHER with its major allies to attack Iraq, with the FULL SUPPORT of the United Nations Security Council"
3/13-14/03 85 [/] 12 [/] 3
. . .

"The United States and ONE OR TWO of its major allies attacked Iraq, WITHOUT the support of the United Nations"
3/13-14/03 54 [/] 41 [/] 5
. . .

"The United States ACTED ALONE in attacking Iraq, WITHOUT the support of the United Nations"
3/13-14/03 43 [/] 54 [/] 3
. . .

This is still more confusion, I think, sown by the casual misuse of "unilateral" meaning "together with some other countries but not with the U.N.'s approval." The Administration's current plan, which seems to be to attack together with Britain and some other countries, seems to be supported by a 54%-41% majority, rather than opposed by a 43%-54% majority.

AND ONE MORE MISSTATEMENT: Finally, the statement that "Most Americans, 85 percent, say they would still prefer that the United States attack Iraq with the full support of the United Nations Security Council" seems to be incorrect, too, at least if the Polling Report summary describes the entire poll. The only 85% number is the percentage of people who answer "would support" to

"Please tell me if you would support or oppose U.S. military action against Iraq in each of the following circumstances. What if [see below]? Would you support or oppose U.S. military action in this circumstance?" . . .
"The United States JOINED TOGETHER with its major allies to attack Iraq, with the FULL SUPPORT of the United Nations Security Council"

This tells us nothing about the fraction of people who would prefer attacking with the U.N. Security Council's full support and with the help of the major allies, presumably preferring it over attacking with a few allies, or with none -- rather, it's the fraction of people who would support such an attack, without any comparison to any alternatives. The fraction who would prefer the support of the Security Council may be over 85%, exactly 85%, or under 85%; the poll (again, unless there are other questions that pollingreport.com doesn't mention) says nothing about this.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 1:23 PM]
MARGINS OF ERROR: A Newsweek piece, up at msnbc.com, begins with the following:

While support for a war against Iraq remains strong, confidence in the Bush Administration’s handling of the conflict has weakened, according to a new NEWSWEEK poll.

The survey, taken on March 13 and 14, puts approval ratings for President George W. Bush’s handling of the Iraqi situation at 56 percent, down from 60 percent six weeks ago. Bush’s approval rating, meanwhile, has declined to 53 percent, down 8 points from the first week in February. . . .

But wait a sec: The survey's margin of error was +/-3%. That means that 56% and 60% are statistically equivalent -- the supposed "weaken[ing]" may well be an artifact of pure chance. The 8% approval rating decline is statistically significant, but that's a general approval rating, which gives us no specific reason to think that the change was due to the administration's Iraq policy.

     Of course, perhaps public confidence in the Bush Administration's actions related to Iraq has indeed weakened -- it's just that the poll doesn't tell us that.

UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias and Noah Snyder suggest I'm mistaken in my math here, and that the difference might in fact be statistically significant. I'm looking into the matter right now; their criticisms seem potentially apt, but I need to (1) think about it some more, and (2) check with Sasha, who's the statistician in the family. But for now, I wanted to flag this as a potential error, just so readers would be on notice. (None of this, by the way, undermines my nonmathematical criticism in the post right above this one.)

FURTHER UPDATE: Sasha -- who knows statistics very well -- reveals the truth, and it turns out that I was correct (though my analysis was too simplistic). The 60% to 56% fall is indeed not statistically significant, since the aggregate margin of error when comparing the polls is +/-4.3%.

 
[Eugene Volokh, 9:50 AM]
UPRISINGS IN IRAQ? A reader points to a report in the Telegraph (U.K.):

Open acts of defiance by opponents of Saddam Hussein's regime have intensified in the past week, with saboteurs carrying out attacks against Iraq's railway system and protesters openly calling for the overthrow of the Iraqi dictator.

The most blatant act of sabotage took place 20 miles south of the north Iraqi city of Mosul when members of the Iraqi opposition blew up a stretch of track on the Mosul-Baghdad railway, causing the derailment of a train.

Before fleeing back to their base in Kurdistan, they left piles of leaflets by the side of the track urging the Iraqi soldiers who were sent to investigate the explosion to join the "international alliance to liberate Iraq" from "Saddam the criminal". In a separate incident, a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at a train illegally transporting fuel from Baghdad to Syria.

Demonstrations were also reported to have taken place in Kirkuk, where an estimated crowd of 20,000 marched on the Ba'ath party's main administrative headquarters demanding Saddam's overthrow. Three posters of the Iraqi leader were torn down and a grenade was thrown at the government building. One senior Ba'ath official was reported killed in the attack.

Have no idea whether it's true, but I hope it is.