Though you'd need to be blind, a Ba'athist or a newsanchor to have believed that the doddering, off-balance old man politely motioning for "One side, one side" in Baghdad was Saddam Hussein, an interesting concensus is growing in the vanguard of media speculation that the deposed Iraqi dictator is still alive.

The New York Times in particular has run a story (link via Andrew Sullivan) encapsulating the most important parties' opinions:

If Mr. Hussein is alive, the prevailing view among intelligence analysts is that he is still in Iraq. These officials said they suspected that he would feel safer seeking refuge among his supporters in familiar surroundings, rather than risk fleeing to another country, where he could be at greater risk of discovery by American intelligence.

Beyond the intelligence officials, aides to President Bush have begun to express less certainty about the question, saying they do not know whether he is dead or alive. They include those aides who in the immediate aftermath of the war said Mr. Hussein was probably dead.

Increasingly, other officials in the United States and Britain have said publicly that Mr. Hussein probably survived the war. Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Fox News last weekend that "probably the majority opinion is that he is alive." The British defense secretary, Geoff Hoon, said in Australia this week that "my judgment and the judgment of the coalition remains that he is almost certainly still in Iraq."

My own intuition still says that the man is dead. Anyone else and the idea of the Ba'athists keeping their leaders' spector alive would seem silly - but Hussein's rule was derived directly from the terror he instilled. He'd be the perfect bogeyman to keep the Allies overfocused and the Iraqis trepidacious.

G. in Baghdad is largely impressed with the city's renewal after military liberation from the dreadful shadow of Hussein, but still worried of the dangers faced in the midst of inevitable post-war indecision and desperation:

I don’t want to give the impression here that every thing is all right and there is no crisis in Iraq, I just want to say that the Americans had - and still have - a perfect opportunity in Iraq, an opportunity they won’t have anywhere else, they could have won the hearts and minds of the Iraqis from the first week after the toppling of the regime, but instead they just provided the extremists with all the pretexts they need - as if they needed any- to attack the Americans they have wasted a good deal of good intensions and hope. please stop and start doing your homework properly, I don’t want my country to be another breeding place for Osamas and lunatic terrorists.

G., my friend, occupation is meant to materially and socially stabilize the country as best any foreign power can do. But the politics of your nation - from within an accepted boundary of pluralist, universal-suffrage representative democracy - are your business. Americans can maintain secure, secret ballots; they can't and won't run your city council election for you. Borrow a soapbox from the market, sketch up some visual aids if you'd like, invite your friends and ideological colleagues, and start stumping for whatever alternative you want to see avert the evils of Islamofascism and Pan-Arabism - yourself. Get cracking, kid. Liberty means work.

A report from the Chicago Tribune tells the story of more refugees, widows and orphans - made that way care of Saddam - returning, slowly, to their old lives:

The Marsh Arabs, a 5,000-year-old tribe of fishermen-hunters who lived on reed islands and paddled swamp waterways in elegant canoes, joined the revolt wholeheartedly, and when it failed they paid a terrible price.

Bombed, shot, imprisoned and poisoned by the regime--Iraqi helicopters reportedly dropped pesticides into marshland lakes to kill fish, a tribal staple--the Marsh Arabs' population in Iraq has dwindled from 250,000 to 40,000, human-rights groups say. Tens of thousands of the nomads now languish in Iranian refugee camps.

[...]

"We broke the dams when the Iraqi army left," said Qasim Shalgan Lafta, 58, a former fisherman whose village sits marooned, along with a few cracked canoes, in a landscape that looks like the Utah Badlands. "We want to teach our children how to fish, how to move on the water again." . . .

"Thanks be to Allah for giving our water back!" declared grinning old Mutashir, one of thousands of nomads displaced by Hussein's cataclysmic reclamation projects. His dingy robes flapping about him, he hugged himself with his scrawny arms and added, "Thanks be to George Bush!"

Now imagine this scene played out in one of the hundreds of nations on Earth still untouched by justice and liberty. Univeral democracy is why America exists, boys and girls. Let's support the drive to take a step outside ourselves and help our fellow man.

(Link via Instapundit, where you can read a larger excerpt if you don't want to register with the Tribune.)

(A spirited discussion at Sergeant Stryker's brought the following statement to my attention):

I think one obvious difference in the countries you refer [Germany, Japan] to is that there is currently no clear ambition to re-create a kind of Middle-Eastern Marshall Plan.

Not a correct contrast. Let's clarify what the Marshall Plan was, first. It was a broad reconstruction and revitalization program that affected most of Western Europe, from France to Germany to the Netherlands. One would expect that 3% of the Gross Domestic Product would be required to rebuild half of a continent (as opposed to one country, which is the only way your argument would have any traction).

Japan, on the other hand, was not a part of the Marshall Plan; it was run, of course, by General MacArthur and, once the State Department was politically swept aside (at least until Cold War events inviting the San Francisco System loomed), stayed very much an "independent" undertaking under the purview of MacArthur's GHQ. Though America did supply Japan with supplies and materiel and helped to physically rebuild industries, a great deal of Japan's infrastructure was created by employing - altered or not - existing institutions within Japan. The Diet, for instance, remained in session and under four different Prime Ministers (Shigeru Yoshida holding the post the longest by far). The zaibatsu plutarchical industry families, though greatly diminished, were not completely removed from economics. Meiji central planning remained a part of Japan's reconstitution, particularly during the early years.

Reconstruction was dedicated in Japan, but not connected to the immense, multinational price tag of the Marshall Plan. MacArthur used what was in front of him. That's why, though I think Germany holds many examples germane for Iraq, Japan is a much closer parallel.

(Then another question, with rhetorical intentions, but I answered it straight):

If America is so torqued about human rights, why did it do nothing about Iraq for the last 12 years, or indeed any of the other grim regimes in the world (Indonesia, Burma, Iran, Congo...take your pick).

You're separating American actions from the rest of the world, which is precisely what my argument accounts for!

George H.W. Bush faced a "coalition" mutiny if he so much as looked cross-eyed at Baghdad. While I have no respect for his decision that led to the slaughter of tens of thousands and twelve years of toothless United Nations haggling, I completely understand why a Cold War realpolitician (CIA background, no less) balked at deposition and democratization, especially when a world not quite separated from the Soviets was prepared to resist. It's sad, but logical.

And the "Why didn't America..?" question is ahistorical and unfair. You need to put events into perspective and understand the prioritization necessary for the burgeoning doctrine of universal democracy. The Cold War only ended twelve years ago. Before that, a valid concern existed that countries in the very expected, very necessary post-war disarray as Iraq would immediately be taken advantage of by the Soviets. For example, a Moscow-funded Communist subversion was attempted in Japan, culminating in a failed general strike on February 1st, 1947.

Before September 11th, American politics were generally opposed to the idea of nation-building precisely because the United Nations [was] the accepted medium, and the United Nations had spent the last fifty years demonstrating its complete incompetence. But the WTC attack changed many minds, including the president's (mine, as well).

Now, imagine fighting political inertia within the country, within one's own administration (read: the State Department) and the world that works against the idea of removing dictatorships as a means of destroying lawless scourges like terrorism. Add that to the laws of logistics, and it's obvious that threats must be dealt with in order and, at first, under the auspices of general security threats like "weapons of mass destruction" that everyone, including threats like Syria and China, can nominally agree to.

Stanley Kurtz returns sanity to the weapons debate:

Prior to the war, it was impossible to tell how close Saddam was to building a nuclear bomb. We hoped and believed that he was still at least a year or two away from success, although the possibility that he might be even closer than that had to be reckoned with. After all, our intelligence had once before proven wrong. We had underestimated the progress of Saddam's nuclear program, as we eventually learned from defectors. But even if Saddam was a couple of years away from a bomb, the need to invade was urgent. The point was precisely to stop Saddam before he got close enough to a bomb to exploit our uncertainty about his capacity and blackmail us. That, after all, is exactly what the North Koreans have been doing for some time.

All of this was publicly discussed before the war. Opponents of invasion emphasized that Saddam was probably at least a couple of years away from building a bomb. And they argued that conventional deterrence could in any case keep a nuclear-armed Saddam under control. Proponents of the war argued that Saddam might be closer to a bomb than we realized, and that, in any case, it was necessary to strike him quickly, when he was (we hoped) too far from a bomb to blackmail us.

And now opponents of the invasion, left with little on which to stand, are trying to turn the argument into a question of Saddam even possessing those catastrophic weapons. Aside from the logical impossibility of those claims, this cynical, destructive strategy is, as I've said, not about Iraq or humanity: it's about the Left and its petty little theories.

I caught myself in a large-scale fray over at Tacitus' on the economic prospects of Iraq, insofar as the effect of significant imports.

I've said my peace over there, if you'd care to look. My only other comment, aside from offering you this fantastic, educational essay on free trade from CATO, is this: weren't the people who are now complaining about plummenting prices in goods and services gnawing their fingernails off right after hostilities ceased when the prices shot upward?

Amir Taheri reports a somewhat unexpected lobby in the formation of Iraq's government:

As Iraq's political parties and groups continue their wrangling over a new constitution, consensus seems to be taking shape on at least one issue: The future Iraqi state should not be described as "Arab." Some participants also want Iraq to withdraw from the Arab League to contemplate broader alliances in the region and beyond. The idea of dropping Iraq's Arabism is backed by most Shiite parties that want the nation's Islamic identity to be emphasized.

[...]

The Kurds also want Arabism to go because the see Iraq as a multi-ethnic nation in which no community should try to impose its specific identity and culture on others.

[...]

The Iraqi left is also favorable of abandoning what the poet Fadil Sultani calls "the illusion of Arabism." The reason is that Iraqi Socialists and Communists have been frequently persecuted and, at times, massacred, as enemies of "pan-Arab nationalism."

Iraq's democrats and liberals see pan-Arabism as a barrier to democratization.

I've always wondered which nations, in the beginning world order, will retain their ethnic identity and which will - like America and Britain, for example - gladly welcome all people to their shores, calling them their own. But the article grows even more interesting:

Most Iraqis wish to develop the alternative concept of Uruqua (Iraqi-ness) as a substitute for Uruba (Arab-ness).

Much like I, an Italian-Sicilian with speculative bits of Alpine and Berber, am as American as the next naturally born citizen. Universality is a wonderful thing.

Keep reading the article. Pan-Arabism, an unfortunate mixture of indigenous, tribalist tendencies and Western eugenics, may be dying out - from Libya to Bahrain, the steady progressivity of Qatar to the sullen depotism of the Sudan.

We must recognize a desperate, listless people as being at dangerous risk to radicalism - renewed from the past or reforged in a combination of new and old, like Pan-Arabism. The key, so says Taheri, is to be vigilant and hopeful:

These are early days. But the liberation of Iraq has triggered an unprecedented identity crisis in the Arab countries. If properly understood and put to good effect, that crisis could help the Arabs break out of their tribalism and join the democratic mainstream of contemporary politics.

Emancipation of the Near East - their entrance into living full, productive, free lives. And to think the Left considered challenging the region to be a Pandora's Box.

The topic of Saddam's biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs needs hardly any introduction. Iraq was not, in fact, found to be liberally littered with sarin gas tucked into shells or missle payloads (illogical, but that's besides the point). The small, one-room "dishwashers" used to enrich uranium have gone undiscovered. While two mobile biological labs have ostensibly been recovered, neither truck exhibits signs of contamination with the necessary substances. Ba'athists who were willfully prosecuting Saddam's search for non-conventional weaponry and now in Allied custody reportedly refuse to diverge from a stance of complete denial. Iraqis on the ground are, reportedly, still so saturated with fear - unhelpfully exacerbated by Ba'athist elements still harassing the 3rd Infantry Division - that they, too, have not withdrawn from their threatened silence.

The Left in America and abroad, proved completely wrong about everything up until this point - from the strength of the Ba'athists to the precision of the Allies, the reaction of the Iraqis and the so-called "Arab street" - could not consider themselves rhetorically defeated, and thus most certainly clambered onto this piece of driftwood to launch barrage after barrage of specious accusations. Tony Blair risks politically charged investigation from Parliament, indeed his own party; and while the majority of Americans understand both the underlying principle of the war (it wasn't the weapons as much as it was who controlled them) and the circumstances (Saddam had eight months before Security Council Resolution 1441, five months after that), liberal Democrats and smarting, isolationist Republicans are trying to chip away at the administration's credibility. The CIA meets with Congress next week to answer the insulting charges that their intelligence was flimsy where it wasn't browbeaten.

None of us who lack classified information have any substantive leads - and one could bet that if the White House is sure of to where the weapons were schlepped away, diplomacy and strategy demands it be kept close to the chest.

So we're left with a mystery that invites, in its vacuum, loss of confidence on the Right and mercenary opportunity on the Left. The two questions asked are either What did Saddam do with his weapons? and, more egregiously, Did he ever have weapons to the extent suspected? Then come the suppositions that action taken might have been either premature or wrong altogether, simply because expectations - cultivated by the White House or not - were not immediately met. Additionally, because the matter is so large - encompassing one-and-a-half decades, two United Nations disarmament programs, three administrations and eighteen Security Council resolutions - we can come to believe the absurd by isolating one element from the other.

Newsanchors and pundits alike have come to the rescue of reason in the past week by emphasizing the disreality into which one must wade to accept the idea of some massive, deceptive conspiracy on the parts of Messrs. Blair and Bush. I present my own six absurdities along with their dispelling, in ascending order of logical esophoria:

1. The nature of Saddam, the Ba'athist Party and its relationship with the people of Iraq alone are illegitimate reasons for regime change.

Though with stern qualification, this is technically subjective and therefore the least of the abjectly ludicrous. Isolationists, pacificists, anti-American squalls and pro-authoritarian groups could make a case that the suffering of a people is absolutely no concern to them. From here, however, each argument can be picked apart and destroyed.

Pro-authoritarian groups like the crypto-Stalinist Workers World Party, whose activist arm, ANSWER, organized a majority of anti-liberation marches in America, are by definition morally bankrupt. The WWP's inception was borne on the back of the Hungarians' bloody defeat by the Soviets in 1956 and it has since supported totalitarian regimes on a questionable basis of "Socialist" or otherwise anti-American ideology, including China, North Korea and Kosovo. Genocide and mass slaughter has little effect on these groups' loyalty to a statist credo - need more be said?

Pacifists abhor war, presumably because property is destroyed and people are killed. How do they justify, however, a state apparatus that largely prohibits private ownership and murders systematically, yearly and audaciously, with numbers in Iraq alone climbing into the millions? How could one justify that position now, with civilian deaths from Operation Iraqi Freedom below one thousand and the Iraqis now finally freed from their attrition? If help can be offered, withdrawal from human affairs on principle is not virtuous.

Isolationists remain in a pre-1916 state of early industrial autarchy, refusing to believe in the interdependence and relative proximity of all nations - free or otherwise - in modernity. Thus, they would prefer that biological, chemical or nuclear threats be voiced by dictatorial or terrorist entities before action is taken; unfortunately, one is left with two dismal possibilities of either a ruined urban center and millions of casualities or a totalitarian armed with effective deterrence and thus greater means to esurient ends. The fact that neither Germany nor Japan have given the world any military trouble since their democratization seems lost on isolationists, especially in light of the change that will soon be undertaken in Iraq.

My still-in-progress essay on this particular topic addresses the vital paradigm shift that free nations must take - insofar as mounting an irreconcilable, ideological opposition to authoritarianism in all forms, where the mere presence of dictatorship would offend liberally democratic humanity enough to immediately seek out and destroy the dictator.

2. Iraqi defectors lied to discredit Saddam or were misled.

Though possible that one would lie for attention, this is unlikely. Fear of reprisal is practically a genetic tendency of Iraqis even when living in the West. Why invite harm to oneself by casting aspersions on Saddam and putting the Americans on a false trail? If suitably protected, why risk credibility?

In fact, qualifying one's exposition in favor of Saddam seems in fact to be a tactic used in the hopes of being welcomed back to the Ba'athist Party without punishment. General Hussein Kamal, fugitive son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, while being interviewed by Western entities in Jordan in 1995 after defecting earlier that year, discussed the breadth of Iraq's bio-chem-atomic studies and possessions, and reportedly claimed to have signed an order to destroy all unconventional weapons at the end of the Gulf War - and called premier scientist and fellow defector Dr. Khidir Abdul Abas Hamza a "liar."

Contrary to Kamal's claim, as of February 1998, the following stockpiles were destroyed under supervision of the United Nations Special Commission:

38,537 filled and empty CW munitions 480,000 liters (690 tons) of CW agents 3000 tons of precursor chemicals 8 types of delivery systems The al-Hakam BW production facility 48 Scud missiles 6 operational mobile launchers 28 operational fixed launch pads 32 fixed launch pads under construction 30 chemical warheads 14 conventional warheads Other related equipment

Kamal returned to Iraq in 1996 and was promptly murdered.

Hamza, who never returned to Ba'athist Iraq, described Kamal - who took command of the nuclear program in 1987 - as an Iraqi general clearly as ruthless as his father-in-law, who was indeed "crazy, but he managed to produce in a month things that would normally take a year," adding, "fear works well."

In any case, the descriptions both men offered as to Saddam's weapons programs, at least up to the Gulf War, can be corroborated. Which brings us to the next absurdity.

3. All proceedings in the United Nations Security Council on Iraq, from 1991 to 2003, in light of Saddam's lack of possession or research for bio-chem-atomics, were unwarranted and therefore farcical..

One could call the Security Council's efforts fruitless and toothless. But groundless? This is intensely difficult to prove, barring a lone dash to claim a massive conspiracy against the hapless Tikriti-born Stalinist. Russia, who supplied Iraq with more than half of its conventional weaponry and France, who attempted to nuclearize Iraq and succeeded as far as the 1981-bombed Osirak reactor, spent their Security Council tenure during the 1990s hedging, abstaining and in general objecting to Iraq's indictments. But the record is weighty and damning:

UNSCR 687 - April 3, 1991: The creation of UNSCOM, the United Nations Special Commission; demands that Iraq "unconditionally agree" to suspend all production and possession of nuclear, chemical and biological weaponry in diplomacy and deed.

UNSCR 707 - August 15, 1991: Condemnation of "serious violation" of the prior resolution, UNSCR 687, "which constitutes material breach" by way of incomplete disclosure, obstruction of UNSCOM, and general "attempts to conceal, move or destroy any material related to its nuclear, chemical or biological weapons or ballistic missle programmes, or material or equipment relating to its other nuclear activities, without notification to or prior consent of the Special Commission."

UNSCR 715 - October 11, 1991: Another admonition demanding full compliance with disarmament verification inspectors.

UNSCR 949 - October 15, 1994: Another admonition demanding full compliance with disarmament verification inspectors.

UNSCR 1051 - March 27, 1996: Demands for reports of dual-use equipment to possibly be used for weapons production, further admonition insofar as ordering Iraq to "allow immediate, unconditional and unrestricted access."

UNSCR 1060 - June 12, 1996: Further admonition that "deplores" Ba'athist obfuscation. A second demand for Iraq to "Allow immediate, unconditional and unrestricted access."

UNSCR 1115 - June 21, 1997: The Security Council "condemns repeated refusal of Iraqi authorities to allow access." A third demand for "immediate, unconditional and unrestricted access."

UNSCR 1134 - October 23, 1997: An extension of the prior resolution which adds the prior resolution to the list of resolutions defied by Iraq.

UNSCR 1137 - November 12, 1997: Further admonition of Iraq, including a phrase that "Reaffirms the responsibility of the Government of Iraq under the relevant resolutions to ensure the safety and security of the personnel and equipment of the Special Commission and its inspection teams." Additionally, the Security Council decided to remain "seized of the matter."

UNSCR 1154 - March 2, 1998: Warning to Iraq that noncompliance risks the "severest consequences for Iraq."

UNSCR 1194 - September 9, 1998: Condemnation of Iraq's decision to refuse cooperation to UNSCOM. Further repetition of the appeal to Iraq for "immediate, unconditional and unrestricted access."

UNSCR 1205 - November 5, 1998: Further admonition of Iraq for intransigence in its noncompliance.

UNSCR 1284 - December 17, 1999: Creation of UNMOVIC, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspections Commission. "Immediate, unconditional and unrestricted access" demanded once more.

UNSCR 1441 - November 8, 2002: The final resolution against Saddam Hussein and Ba'athist Iraq, with similar demands to the previous thirteen resolutions explicitly concerned with its unconventional weapons research and possessions. "Serious consequences" to Ba'athist Iraq given as a warning.

In addition, thirty statements on Iraq's noncompliance were delivered from the President of the UN Security Council between 1991 and 1998.

Which delivers us to the next level of illogical conclusions.

4. In spite of repeated United Nations Security Council resolutions against him, Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist Iraq was wrongfully accused.

Between his immediate violations of disarmament protocol beginning in 1991 and the subsequent discovery and destruction of supposedly nonexistent weapons through 1998 presented above, Saddam's duplicity is rather obvious. Indeed, the following weapons were never accounted for before UNSCOM's demise (from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute source as cited for the list above):

Scud missile components, warheads and propellant 17 tons of growth media for the production of BW agents Items of CW production equipment 4,000 tons of CW precursors 750 tons of VX precursors 100 al-Hussein missiles 31,000 CW munitions 20 R-17 Scud-B -type missiles 40-70 CBW-capable missile warheads Significant quantities of biological warfare agents Significant quantities of 155-mm ammunition rounds

Further, if innocent, why would Saddam risk sanctions against his internationally robust oil exports? Or limited military action from President Clinton in 1998? Or the buildup of overwhelming, Allied military force for an impending deposition that was finally executed in March of this year?

Sociopathy, not complete irrationality - nor a lack of a sense of preservation of life and rule - was Saddam's.

5. The United States Congress, some of whose members are now claiming deception, were complicit in this deception through the last decade.

Markedly absent from these weeks of histrionic accusations are members of intelligence committees in either the House or Senate - those who would actually be in contact with intelligence. A bipartisan deception, from liberal and conservative alike, spanning three administrations and changes of control in Congress?

6. George H. W. Bush, William Jefferson Clinton and George W. Bush, along with their democratically elected counterparts abroad, are all less trustworthy than Saddam Hussein.

This is the height of mindboggling, lunatic delusion; it encompasses the previous five absurdities and in fact somewhat brings us full-circle. Only those who have historically supported totalitarian states over liberal democracies boast this, overtly or implicitly, as a platform of their politics. Do those who carelessly flirt with the possiblity of Anglo-American deception in the last eighteen months seriously wish to consider themselves allied with those who support despotic, marauding regimes? The Earth may as well be at once flat and the center of the universe.

Returning again to the realm of seriousness: So where have the weapons gone? Four years passed between the dissolution of UNSCOM and final warning (when UNMOVIC could actually find its way "appreciably" into Iraq), and Saddam would have been a fool not to have worked to perfect his already tenacious scheme of deception and evasion; and as stated above, Saddam was given over a year's notice that George W. Bush intended consequences from noncompliance to be carried out. Reports speak of Libya, Syria and Syria's puppet Lebanon as possible caretakers for the Ba'athist's highly frangible bio-chem-atomic enterprise.

This is indeed a crossing point if those reports prove accurate. The point of the war on terror and the war for freedom is that lawlessness and the rule of force will breed wherever they are given land; like tumors, they will use every last inch of habitation to exist. Saddam was the conventional military keystone of the Near East culture of death, but he is the first step in destroying Islamofascism, not the last. As long as corners remain dark to liberty and free thought, terrorism and its use of modern weapons will be able to play a deadly shell game, and continue to threaten civilization. Thus, the prosecution must follow the trail Islamism's cowards have set for us, and continue the search for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons - into the places where they have been secreted away.

Instapundit has a powerful post, itself serving as a nexus for other insights that are comforting in this time of expectation and, often, impatience. It's my understanding that I'm the "usually reliable reader" who sent him some troop numbers, essentially to debunk the poisonous, opportunistic "We need more boots on the ground" shibboleth (yes, the one that, as with the near-altercation yesterday, makes me a bit jumpy). Sadly, the remark has mileage because quite a few people haven't pinned down the numbers - and the reality of the matter - themselves.

I can help.

American forces numbered 430,000 in late 1945; 200,000 in 1946; 120,000 in 1947; 102,000 in 1948. From that point, numbers began to increase in concert with Cold War tensions. After the San Francisco System was agreed upon by Tokyo and Washington, force strength grew to as much as 260,000 in 1951-1952.

Remember, the population of Japan at that time was 70 million. Thus at the height of American military presence, troop saturation was one for every 162 Japanese but quickly fell to one for every 350, then one for every 580; and at the nadir, one for every 685 Japanese.

Iraq, according to the CIA, has a population of 25 million (24 million to be more exact, but I thought I'd be generous to the opposing argument). As Allied forces in Iraq stand now, Central Command has one occupation soldier for every 170 Iraqis.

In other words, the Bush administration would need to recall a bit more than half of its force before matching the per capita level in Occupied Japan. We have twice as many soldiers for democratization than we did in Japan.

At this point, I'd expect a contrarian to point at my argumentative victory and demand that the process move more quickly and smoothly, what with a larger complement of stationed troops. My response? Just wait.

After searching a few headline stores - Drudge and the like - I settled on Glenn Reynolds' Instapundit, read the latest in his string of extremely dry jabs at the left, and in a bit of bother flew right past it - and assumed he was, like Andrew Sullivan, beginning to complain about the unavoidable instability in newly post-war Iraq. I sent him a firm e-mail - something I could have legitimately done for Sullivan in addition to the blog responses I posted. But no - I did it for the wrong guy.

I can imagine, if by some cast of bad luck he read it, what the scene must have been like:

"Ubaldi...he's the...that's the...uh...whoa! What? No! No! Joke! Joke! It was a joke! Haven't I been doing this for weeks? Don't you get...the...what?...joke! Geez! I...well, the nerve!....I...no! Joke! Joke!"

And so on.

As I said in my unbelievably necessary follow-up letter, I need some powder for this blush.

God help the world from the scourge of us occasionally choleric Mediterraneans!

As one bit of face-saving, Drudge has up a lead on a story that reports dissent and bitterness in the Baghdad-bound Army. You know what? GIs resented Japan, too. They got through it.

UPDATE: He got it. Read it. Responded. Good-natured, as always. The letter wasn't as overly serious as I remember. Isn't this the time where I sulk back to the apartment and eat lots and lots and lots of chocolate to make myself "feel better"?

UPDATE II: No chocolate at the pad - though I do have Edy's Rocky Road from this afternoon's hot dog cook-in. Dramatic sulking and sadness-eating begins....n..n-now.

UPDATE III: And no, I won't gain weight. I filled out after college, but no more. "Slight build," as they say.