Here’s what I had to say about the possible capture of Saddam a month or so ago.

Back in early April, I observed that the Iraq campaign was a war of absences. Some of the mysteries posed by those absences have now been resolved. For example, everyone now knows that the Weapons of Mass Destruction did not exist. But the big remaining mystery is Saddam. It seems pretty clear that he got away from Baghdad safely, and likely that he’s still alive.

On thinking about it, I have the feeling that Saddam is, in a sense, the key to the entire situation. On the one hand, suppose Saddam is caught or (more likely) killed. Whether or not this led to a reduction in terror/resistance attacks, the pressure for a quick American withdrawal would, I think, quickly become irresistible. For most of the Americans who still support the war, this would, I think, count as “Mission Accomplished”, whatever happened in Iraq afterwards.

On the other hand, as long as Saddam is at large, and the security situation remains anything like it is at present, a US withdrawal will be seen as “cutting and running”, and will therefore be resisted with great vigour.

Now we’ll see if this analysis stands up.

I notice even those who would like it to be true are holding off from endorsing this Telegraph report of an Iraqi memo proving not only that Saddam Hussein arranged the training of S11 terrorist Mohammed Atta and planned the attacks, but that the Niger uranium story was true after all.

The Telegraph seems to have a unique capacity to discover Iraqi memos proving whatever would be convenient on any given day. In the world of Telegraph memos, ties between OBL and Saddam are old news.

Then there’s the memo that supposedly showed that pro-Saddam MP George Galloway received large payments from Saddam. This is currently the subject of court action, but similar documents published by another newspaper have already been discredited.

Update It looks as if this kind of speculation may be irrelevant, if, as reported, Saddam has been captured

This is one of a series of posts where I include bits cut from longer articles for space and other reasons.

Oddly enough, to the extent that there is anything remotely new in generational rhetoric, it was perfected by members of a generation that is never mentioned in these discussions, and even lacks a name. Those born in the low-birthrate years between 1930 and 1945 were too young to join the ‘Greatest Generation’ that fought World War II, and too few to share in the experiences of the Baby Boomers.

Nevertheless, they were the first cohort to be known as ‘teenagers’, the first to experience a ‘generation gap’ and both the first and last to have music that was specifically their own, creating both rock music and the now-cliched postures of rebellion that go along with it. The archetypal phrase ‘never trust anyone over 30’ was popularised by Abby Hoffman (born in 1936) and Jerry Rubin (born in 1938) – not one of the famous Chicago Seven was a Baby Boomer.

Robert Corr has kindly spent much of his weekend fixing up the database corruption problem that affected the whole mentalspace domain. This leads me to reissue a warning that I had hoped was no longer necessary. If you’re writing what you think may be deathless prose in a comments box, keep a backup copy!

Hi. Robert here. We’ve encountered a problem with John’s blog (and mine and a couple of others) involving database corruption.

My first priority has been to get John posting again, and it seems that is now possible.

Next on the list is to restore his archives. I’ve created 1426 empty placeholder posts, one for each of John’s real posts to date, which will protect his permalinks from being over-written by new posts. Over the next few days, I’ll go back and replace those placeholders with the real text.

When that’s finished, we’ll work on the comments. Hopefully everything will be back to normal by the end of the week — and this time, we’ll have a more rigorous backup regime to make life simpler when things like this happen!

The elections in Northern Cyprus this weekend could turn out to be the most important held in 2003, even though there are only 140 000 voters and the result won’t be recognised anywhere outside the Northern Cyprus enclave and its increasingly reluctant sponsor, Turkey.

The elections raise the prospect that Turkish Cypriots will finally dump separatist leader Rauf Denktash and join the rest of Cyprus when it enters the EU next year. That in turn would remove the biggest single obstacle to the admission of Turkey to candidate status, a process that would probably lead to Turkish entry to the EU around 2010. The EU has rightly kept Turkey at arms length while demanding improvements in human rights and efforts to resolve the Cyprus question, but any further delay can only be seen as the product of a search for excuses.

As I’ve said before, the admission of Turkey to the EU (or its exclusion) is in many ways, the biggest single geopolitical question facing the world today. For a start, it would mean that Europe would have borders with Iran, Iraq and Syria. More generally, the success or failure of Europe in integrating Muslim countries, beginning with Turkey, will do more to determine future relations between Islam and the West than any military expedition.

In a couple of recent posts, I mentioned estimates that higher speed limits adopted by a number of US states cost 1900 lives between 1996 and 1999, and, presumably, a similar number since then. One of those killed was motorcyclist Randy Scott, run down by Congressmen Bill Janklow, a chronic speeder and advocate of lax speed enforcement.

Today’s NYT runs an Op-Ed piece by Judy Blunt defending the repeal of speed limits. I couldn’t find anything here substantive enough to comment on, but I’m providing the link so readers can make up their own minds.

In a report in today’s AFR (subscription required), Law Council of Australia president Bob Gotterson attacks a proposal to have medical malpractice lawsuits assessed by a panel of doctors before proceeding to trial. As he says

professionals should not be able to veto a citizen obtaining compensation from one of their colleagues

In a spirit of compromise, I offer the following suggestion. Why not appoint a panel of doctors and let them arbitrate on complaints against lawyers

In my last post on the American Enterprise Institute, I lumped Charles Murray in with James Glassman, Karl Zinsmeister and Lynne Cheney, as someone who had contributed to the loss of the AEI’s reputation for scholarship (John Lott, the main subject of the post is in a class of his own). Regular reader Jack Strocchi objected, and I thought that this would be a good time to set out my views on Murray, and more particularly on The Bell Curve with Richard Herrnstein, which is, I think, his most significant work.

The Bell Curve got a thorough hammering on statistical grounds when it came out (this Heckman review is one of the more favorable but is still pretty damning. But the thing that most annoyed me when I read it was their discussion of the Flynn effect, namely that average scores on IQ tests have risen steadily over time, by amounts sufficient to wipe out the differences between racial groups on which Murray and Herrnstein rely. As Thomas Sowell points out in this review (reproduced by Brad de Long), it’s hard to see how any claim that differences in IQ test scores observed in Western societies are mostly due to genetic factors can stand up in the face of this observation. But Murray and Herrnstein slide straight past it, saying that they are concerned with contemporary inequality not with time trends. This is about as reasonable as a “nurturist” deciding to ignore twin studies on the grounds that most people aren’t twins.

Update Marginal revolution and Aranda Blog have more on the Flynn effect. And Brad de Long says “pretty damning” is too kind a description of Heckman’s review. He prefers “the impeccably right-wing Jim Heckman flayed Murry and Herrnstein alive and hung their skins on his office door”.
Read More »

The tireless Tim Lambert exposes yet more sociopathic behavior from pro-gun economist John Lott. This time it’s yet another sock puppet who, among other things gives Lott’s books glowing reviews on Amazon. (I won’t document Lott’s long rap sheet on this kind of thing, but Tim’s blog has all the details).

Various people have been asking how Lott manages to keep his job at the American Enterprise Institute. Given that this outfit now houses Karl Zinsmeister, James Glassman, Charles Murray, Lynne Cheney and others, I think the more relevant question is how the few remaining legitimate scholars left over from the days when AEI was a reputable, if conservative, institution can justify their continuing ties.

But it is interesting to ask why so few individual conservatives and libertarians have dumped Lott. Michelle Malkin did so at the time of the Mary Rosh expose (and copped a nasty review from one of Lott’s sock puppets as a result), and of course the expose itself was due to the work of Julian Sanchez.

But Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit, who led the charge against Lott’s liberal counterpart Bellisles, is still saying “all this is way too complex for me” (check the comments thread here at Calpundit, and his attitude appears to be far more representative.

Update The Glenn Reynolds comment was too good to be true, and was someone taking the mickey (see comment by Tim L). Still, it’s a pretty fair summary of Reynolds’ position.