The Belmont Club has an interesting treatise on war crimes and battlefield ethics.

Over at Power Line, Scott Johnson notes that sarin may have been found in Falluja. If true, this could be a very big story.

Also, if true, this would mean that President Bush’s decision not to go into Falluja in April might have needlessly endangered his reelection bid.

Update, 4:50 p.m.: Powerline now has up a bevy of reader input on what the vials in the picture really are. So far, the consensus seems to be not sarin, but either sarin antidote or sarin testing formula. Whatever the case, Scott Johnson is to be commended for being totally vigilant and transparent with this developing story.

Tom Maguire deconstructs the stat that abortions have been on the increase under Bush.

On November 3rd, we heard a lot about how scared liberals and homosexuals were by the mass of the great unwashed lurking Out There in flyover country. I have contended, repeatedly, that the values divide in America is actually quite narrow. Many of my liberal friends have disagreed with me, particularly on the question of homosexuality and gay marriage. I have been told that bigotry is rampant in conservative America, that it is a “scary” place.

As further evidence of how close we are, I submit this Washington Post story about a gay, Christian, Oklahoma high school student.

His evangelical church rallied around him when a group of nutjobs from a Kansas church came into to town to picket him. (The Kansas church, the Westboro Baptist Church, headed by a fellow named Fred Phelps, runs a website called “GodHatesFags.com.” Lovely.)

Here’s my point: Even out in the most conservative, evangelical precincts of America, the GodHatesFags crew was able to field just nine protestors. According to the Post, the Oklahoma church arrayed some 500 members of its conservative, Republican to defend the young man. In a perfect world, would there be groups like GodHatesFags? No. But even Out There, the ratio of good-hearted Christians to wacko bigots is something like 500 to 9.

If you want to beat up on George W. Bush, you should ignore Michael Moore (and Michael Kinsley, for that matter) and study George Will. His column today is devastating. He poses a river of rhetorical questions for Condoleezza Rice, including:

Did you see the television coverage of Yasser Arafat’s funeral — riot as mourning, gunfire as liturgy? Is it reasonable to expect that in the Jan. 9 elections to choose Arafat’s successor, the Palestinian polity will select what the president called (June 24, 2002) a necessary condition for progress — leadership “not compromised by terror”?

The president says it is “cultural condescension” to question “whether this country, or that people, or this group, are ‘ready’ for democracy.” Condescending, perhaps, but is it realistic? Tony Blair says it is a “myth” that “our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture.” Are there cultural prerequisites for free polities? Does Iraq have them? Do the Palestinian people, after a decade of saturation propaganda inciting terrorism and anti-Semitism? Does the United States know how to transplant those prerequisites?

If you can believe it, it gets tougher from there.

Jody Bottum has a fantastic review of the new Tom Wolfe book. I haven’t read I Am Charlotte Simmons yet, but Bottum’s essay is so good that at times it feels like he’s channeling Wolfe:

THERE’S AN ENVY to Tom Wolfe’s usual run of detractors, of course, but something more than envy–a resentment, an ache, a fury: If I could write like that, a small cat snarls inside each of their heads, I’d . . . I’d change things in this rabid, racist, right-wing world. I’d zola the rich bastards until they burbled for mercy. I’d dickens the corporate polluters until they drowned themselves in their own sick sludge. I’d thackeray, I’d balzac, I’d dostoyevsky everyone who doesn’t get it–it, IT, the ineffable IT of political conscience, the mystical rightness that lets a Princeton professor be a revolutionary and, well, a Princeton professor at the same time. God–or Charles Darwin, maybe, or some freak of perverse genetics–put a sword in Tom Wolfe’s hands, and the oblivious creep won’t use it to smite the ungodly. The man doesn’t deserve his sentences. Prose belongs to us, by divine right and right of conquest. And here comes this white-suited fake dandy, this reporter, to set up camp right in the middle of it, like John Ashcroft–or Gary Bauer or, I don’t know, Elmer Gantry–buying the prettiest summer house on Martha’s Vineyard.

Wonderful stuff.

Sigh. Now add David Brooks to the chorus of smart people on Porter Goss’s side of the CIA fight.

The Smart Theory is that this is a high-minded conflict about the future organization of the CIA. Maybe it is. But from the information on the table, it still looks to me like your typical Washington bureaucratic fight. And again, the fact that it is Goss’s aide–not Goss himself–who is rubbing people the wrong way suggests that either (1) Goss’s people are feeling their oats out at Langley, or (2) if this is a principled fight, Goss is waging it by proxy and trying to make the CIA career people’s lives unpleasant, instead of just forging ahead and changing the things he wants changed. If you’ve spent any time in an office environment, surely you’ve seen this sort of passive-agressive warfare waged by the underlings who serve new management.

In sum: I remain unconvinced! (But I am going a bit wobbly.)

R. Scott Rogers has a fascinating and persuasive post on big picture of Theo van Gogh’s murder. Rogers is an American living in Amsterdam and his observations are must-read.

Among his conclusions:

* “The problem today is not Dutch tolerance. It is that, for the first time since the Inquisition, a significant religious minority actively rejects pluralism and wishes to use violence to force others into submission. Dutch pluralism is not the problem. It is the victim.”

*”Almost all of the ‘reprisal attacks’ committed against the Muslim community in the Netherlands have amounted to penny-ante vandalism. The ‘firebombs’ described in the American press have been the sort of ineffective improvised devices American high schoolers regularly build for pranks. These have mostly been dead-of-night events, the breaking of a few windows here and there when no one could get hurt (or caught). . . . There have been a few cases of serious arson, but those have been committed by Muslims against Christian churches and schools.”

* “In the United States, we have had terrorist attacks and we have popular resentment of unassimilated immigrants. But we have not had terrorist campaigns waged against us by resented immigrant groups. Imagine that Mexican Zapatistas assassinated the governor of Texas. Of course there would be reprisal attacks against Mexican immigrants if that happened. . . . how much worse would it be if the Mexican community harbored a massive fifth column of terrorists and their sympathizers bent on overthrowing the U.S. government and destroying Western civilization? So the ‘reprisal attacks’ and rising resentment of Muslims in general does not prove European moral hypocrisy. It simply demonstrates the greater immediacy of the terrorist threat in Europe.”