Perhaps George Bush really wants to be remembered as the sodomy president

Excerpt from statement provided by Kasim Mehaddi Hilas, Detainee #151108, on January 18 2004:
I saw [name deleted] fucking a kid, his age would be about 15 - 18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard the screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn't covered and I saw [name deleted] who was wearing the military uniform putting his dick in the little kid's ass. I couldn't see the face of the kid because his face wasn't in front of the door. And the female soldier was taking pictures. [name deleted], I think he is [deleted] because of his accent, and he was not skinny or short, and he acted like a homosexual (gay). And that was in cell #23 as best as I remember.

The link is at the Washington Post (pdf).

Tip via Boing Boing

Why McGauchie is a brave, brave man

Telstra has estimated the cost of connecting fibre to every home in the country at $30 billion. This is beyond the company's capital resources unless it can get a long access holiday - that is, unless it is removed from the ACCC access regime until Telstra makes a return on capital from it.

An informal conversation has already started about this, along with a couple of fibre network pilots in Queensland.

The issue collides potently with privatisation.

The most efficient builder of a $30 billion national fibre network is the Government, just as it was the most efficient builder of the copper network. It is clearly essential infrastructure, to be used by future generations and should be funded by government debt - not the far more expensive private capital that Telstra can raise.

In fact, it would be a national scandal if Telstra funded this new network using expensive capital and then received an access holiday (that is, monopoly pricing) to pay for it, when the Government could do it for half the capital cost and make it available to all-comers.

But a new government network would destroy Telstra's existing infrastructure business. The Government owns half of Telstra and is a seller, motivated to preserve its value in the face of collapsing phone call prices. It has a huge conflict of interest.

This discussion is vastly complicated and important for the nation and for Telstra, and now leading it is Donald McGauchie - farmer, Reserve Bank board member and professional director. Let's all wish him luck.

Let's not. Let's ask instead why Telstra should not be split into a public network provider and a private access retailer. Especially when it is clearly abusing it's effective monopoly in a rent-seeking binge by raising retail phone costs and wholesale network access costs.

The Blogging of the President | Rumored Conjectures

I heard a high level former general speak a week and a half ago, and here are the two interesting things he said:

1) Prior to the election, there will be a crisis with Iran. Ariel Sharon knows that neither Kerry nor Bush will contradict him before an election, so he will foment a crisis with Iran to deal with their nuclear weapons program.

2) There will be a peace deal with North Korea. The deal should have happened two years ago, but wasn't because of diplomatic blunders. A deal will now happen because it is necessary to showcase Bush as a peacemaker.

N.Korea Ready to Negotiate Nuclear Program -Official:

A senior North Korean representative said on Tuesday his government was ready to end its nuclear weapons program if the United States changes its 'hostile policy' toward Pyongyang.

Reflecting recent progress in talks with the reclusive Stalinist state, North Korea's representative to the United Nations, making his first visit to Capitol Hill, said Pyongyang would not only freeze its nuclear weapons program but also refrain from transferring or testing nuclear devices.

'The Democratic People's Republic of Korea will give up its nuclear weapons program if conditions are met to end the U.S. hostile policy,' Gil Yon Park told a forum sponsored by the Korea Society and other groups in a U.S. Senate office building.

I guess it's all part of being a peace president. Apparently that's the same as being a war president. Because after all, Peace=War and George Bush is doubleplusgood.

Not the first 'closed' case for Negroponte

Q: 'Is it enough to allow the Iraqi Minister for Human Rights to investigate [the executions of six prisoners] allegedly done by his own Prime Minister?'

Downer: 'Iraq is a sovereign country now. Who else is supposed to investigate wrongdoing in Iraq? I think Mr McGeough should present his material to the Iraqi police so they can fully investigate these matters ... I would have thought, knowing what I know about Mr Allawi - and I've met him - it would be, on the whole, rather surprising if he has done this.'

Dear me, Alexander, does your office, on the whole, still have to tell you when to come in out of the rain?

Prime Minister Allawi, formerly a Saddam Hussein associate before he fled into exile to team up with the CIA, denied, before publication, the entirety of McGeough's two witness accounts.

For the sake of his health, McGeough had by then already felt it prudent to leave Iraq. John Negroponte's office responded to him by email: 'If we attempted to refute each [rumour], we would have no time for other business. As far as this embassy's press office is concerned, the case is closed.'

Of course. One only has to consider Negroponte's record as US ambassador in Honduras to know he is a loyal servant of Republican Washington who sees and knows nothing. An estimated 10,000 Nicaraguans and Honduran political opponents died at a time when, as The New York Times reported in September 2001: 'The diplomat who presided over that embassy from 1981 to 1985 was a great fabulist.

'John Negroponte saw, or professed to see, a Honduras almost Scandinavian in its tranquillity, a place where there were no murderous generals, no death squads, no political prisoners, no clandestine jails or cemeteries. [He] exercised US power in ways that still reverberate throughout that small country. His most striking legacy, though, is the Honduras of his imagination.

'Most people who lived or worked in Honduras during the 1980s saw a nation spiralling into violence and infested by paramilitary gangs that kidnapped and killed with impugnity. Negroponte would not acknowledge this. He realised the Reagan policy in Central America would lose support if truths about Honduras were known, so he refused to accept them.'

This same man, with an embassy regime of more than 1000 American 'foreign service officers', plus American advisers 'salted throughout Iraqi ministries' as well as 140,000 US military personnel, now has absolute covert power in Iraq.

Of course 'the case is closed'.

Perhaps we should be grateful the Foreign Minister of Kleenex did not see into Allawi's soul. This business of replacing investigations with soul-searching is dangerous.

How to catch the tube

Neville de Mestre was eight years old when he started bodysurfing. That was in 1946, 10 years before surfboards started to make a splash in Australia. Today, he is the world Iron Man champion in the 60-64 age group as well as professor of mathematics at Bond University in Queensland.

This month, de Mestre published the world's first scientific paper on the sport he loves. 'It got to a stage where I thought it was about time that someone who's a fluid dynamicist actually tried to put together the mathematics and physics of bodysurfing,' he says.

This is a profound evil. It is against all the laws of nature to reduce catching a wave to a matter of metrics and equations.

Clinton minds the Gap

What was Bill Clinton saying about the US Administration not getting involved in Australian politics?

Following Denton's interview with Clinton, to be screened on the ABC tonight, the pair chatted about East Timor's Foreign Minister, Jose Ramos Horta, and his appearance on Enough Rope . Despite the cameras still rolling, the intriguing portion of the interview can't be shown because the pair were standing out of frame. However, Spike has a transcript, which certainly makes for interesting reading:

Clinton: "I'm glad you liked Horta. I liked him, too."

Denton : "Oh, he was very, very impressive."

Clinton: "Yeah, he's good. Very supportive. That whole crowd, all those guys are, you know, the top two or three guys are interested people."

Denton: "They are and ... you know they're such a fragile nation."

Clinton: "Um, if they resolve that [Timor Gap oil and gas] dispute."

Denton: "It certainly would. I'm not sure if this administration."

Clinton: "Yeah. You guys can cut them a little slack and, you know, a little bit of money will go a long way there and if we could get enough money through that to give them some infrastructure, I have talked to hotels over the world I think you could make it sort of, like, the middle-class vacation destination for a lot of South-East Asia because you could keep the costs down so low."

The whole interview is online now. Cutting them a little slack is precisely what the Australian government refuses to do. In the short term this means East Timor continues as the largest aid donor to Australia. In the long term, it means the Timorese are condemned to be a client state just like the others we're developing in the South Pacific.

Iraqi PM executed six insurgents: witnesses

MAXINE McKEW: Paul McGeough, thanks for joining us.

Paul, as you've also made clear in your article, Prime Minister Allawi has flatly denied this story.

Why then is the Herald so confident about publishing it?

PAUL McGEOUGH, 'SYDNEY MORNING HERALD' AND 'AGE' FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT: Well it's a very contentious issue.

What you have is two very solid eyewitness accounts of what happened at a police security complex in a south-west Baghdad suburb.

They are very detailed.

They were done separately.

Each witness is not aware that the other spoke.

They were contacted through personal channels rather than through the many political, religious or military organisations working in Baghdad that might be trying to spin a tale.

And they've laid it out very carefully and very clearly as to what they saw.

MAXINE McKEW: You haven't identified these witnesses but why have they felt free to talk about such an extraordinary story?

PAUL McGEOUGH: Well, they were approached through personal connections and as a result of that, they accepted assurances.

They were guaranteed anonymity, they were told that no identifying material would be published on them and they told what they saw.

Both the Herald and McGeough are sticking to their guns, if you'll forgive the expression.

Hawking cracks black hole paradox

After nearly 30 years of arguing that a black hole destroys everything that falls into it, Stephen Hawking is saying he was wrong. It seems that black holes may after all allow information within them to escape. Hawking will present his latest finding at a conference in Ireland next week.

The about-turn might cost Hawking, a physicist at the University of Cambridge, an encyclopaedia because of a bet he made in 1997. More importantly, it might solve one of the long-standing puzzles in modern physics, known as the black hole information paradox.

It was Hawking's own work that created the paradox. In 1976, he calculated that once a black hole forms, it starts losing mass by radiating energy. This 'Hawking radiation' contains no information about the matter inside the black hole and once the black hole evaporates, all information is lost.

But this conflicts with the laws of quantum physics, which say that such information can never be completely wiped out. Hawking's argument was that the intense gravitational fields of black holes somehow unravel the laws of quantum physics.

Other physicists have tried to chip away at this paradox. Earlier in 2004, Samir Mathur of Ohio State University in Columbus and his colleagues showed that if a black hole is modelled according to string theory - in which the universe is made of tiny, vibrating strings rather than point-like particles - then the black hole becomes a giant tangle of strings. And the Hawking radiation emitted by this 'fuzzball' does contain information about the insides of a black hole.

The Man of Steel may have to abandon the black hole in his private office and go back to using plain old shredders to deal with children overboard, SIEX-X, the dangerous Tampa refugees he's admitted to Australia, the Manildra meeting he as sure his advisers had told him he did not attend, the qualifications to prewar Iraqi intelligence and a number of quantum politics anomalies.

Allawi shot inmates in cold blood, say witnesses

Iyad Allawi, the new Prime Minister of Iraq, pulled a pistol and executed as many as six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station, just days before Washington handed control of the country to his interim government, according to two people who allege they witnessed the killings.

They say the prisoners - handcuffed and blindfolded - were lined up against a wall in a courtyard adjacent to the maximum-security cell block in which they were held at the Al-Amariyah security centre, in the city's south-western suburbs.

They say Dr Allawi told onlookers the victims had each killed as many as 50 Iraqis and they 'deserved worse than death'.

The Prime Minister's office has denied the entirety of the witness accounts in a written statement to the Herald, saying Dr Allawi had never visited the centre and he did not carry a gun.

This bears watching. The journo, Paul McGeough, has always been reiable.

The crane is still my neighbour

On the off-chance you have a passion for slightly obscure Australian poets, you can get the complete works of John Shaw Neilson in a variorum edition here. I still think ripples are thoughts that go out to the edge of a dream.

Lord Butler delivers Iraq verdict

The quality of the intelligence used to make the case for Britain going to war with Iraq has now been thrown into doubt, the Butler inquiry has said.

The 196 page report says MI6 did not check its sources well enough, and sometimes relied on third hand reports.

Lord Butler was asked by No 10 to look at the accuracy of Britain's pre-war intelligence after the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

He is now outlining his report, before Tony Blair faces MPs at 1330 BST.

The whole report is now available for download.

U.S. News obtains all classified annexes to the Taguba report on Abu Ghraib

Among the more shocking exchanges revealed in the Taguba classified annexes are a series of E-mails sent by Major David Dinenna of the 320th MP Battalion. The E-mails, sent in October and November to Major William Green of the 800th MP Brigade, and copied to the higher chain of command, show a quixotic attempt to simply get the detainees at Abu Graib edible food. Dinenna pressed repeatedly for food that wouldnt make prisoners vomit. He criticized the private food contractor for shorting the facility on hundreds of meals a day, and for providing food containing bugs, rats, and dirt.

"As each day goes by tension within the prison population increases," Dinenna wrote. "...Simple fixes, food, would help tremendously." Instead of getting help, Major Green scolded him. "Who is making the charges that there is dirt, bugs or what ever in the food?," Major Green replied in an E-mail. "If it is the prisoners I would take it with a grain of salt." Dinenna shot back: "Our MPs, Medics and field surgeon can easily identify bugs, rats, and dirt, and they did." Ultimately, the food contract was not renewed, an Army spokeswoman says, although the contractor holds other contracts with the military.

Interesting that the upper reaches of the US military command were just not interested in anything more than making a problem go away by ignoring it. It's also interesting that, for all the scare stories about the need for intelligence justifying anything and everything, Taguba found so many prisoners were simply never interrogated and political pressure from Washington for actionable intelligence was driving the chaos and violence at Abu Ghraib.

It's almost as though this one prison served as a metaphor for the whole of Iraq.

agressively not apologising

British PM Blair 'Considered Resigning

Blair, who has seen his ratings tumble in opinion polls since last year's war in Iraq, had been 'seriously considering his position' following a series of attacks on his leadership, the broadcaster said in an unsourced report.

Three cabinet colleagues, Health Secretary John Reid, Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell and Education Secretary Charles Clarke met Blair, urged him not to quit and sought to assure him he had wide government support, it said.

'I'm not going to speculate on what I see as Westminster gossip,' Jowell told BBC radio Saturday. 'Tony Blair is our prime minister -- the most successful prime minister of modern times. He will continue to lead our government.'

US findings turn up heat on Blair as he awaits the Butler report

The United States Senate committee�s damning findings last night piled more pressure on Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, as he and his ministers braced themselves for criticism from Lord Butler�s inquiry into intelligence on Iraq next week.

Lord Butler, a former Cabinet secretary, will report on Wednesday and will cast serious doubt on the quality of British intelligence reports that the Prime Minister said made military action in Iraq a matter of urgent national interest.

While Mr Blair is likely to avoid a direct rebuke, his September 2002 dossier on Iraq may be targeted by Lord Butler, as may Sir Richard Dearlove and John Scarlett, the current and future heads of MI6.

In the face of controversy over the MI6 role, Mr Blair decided earlier this year to promote Mr Scarlett to replace Sir Richard at the end of this month. Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, a former head of the joint intelligence committee, last night told the BBC that the Butler report could make it impossible for Mr Scarlett to take over as head of the Secret Intelligence Service.

"You do have to ask the question whether somebody who�s been deeply involved and possibly criticised in the findings of the Butler report is regarded as a suitable person to head [MI6]," Dame Pauline said.

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, yesterday emerged as another possible target for Lord Butler, who is expected to reveal that he over-ruled Foreign Office lawyers who said military action could not be justified in international law.

Meanwhile, back at the fort:
Now say sorry for war, PM told

The Labor Party yesterday called on the Prime Minister to apologise for taking Australians to war under false pretences, after an American inquiry's damning findings about US intelligence failures over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd said John Howard talked a lot about character these days.

But, he said: "A core part of character is telling the truth. It's time John Howard at last told the Australian people the truth - that the reasons he gave them for going to war were wrong."

The US Senate committee has said most key judgements in the intelligence community's major October 2002 report on Iraq's WMD programs were overstated or not supported by the underlying intelligence reporting. The intelligence community suffered from a "collective presumption" that Iraq had an active and growing WMD program. "Group think" led to ambiguities being put aside or ignored, and usual mechanisms for challenging assumptions not being used.

Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat member of the committee, said the lapses "rank among the most devastating... intelligence failures" in American history. "We in Congress would not have authorised that war... if we knew what we know now," he said.

Really, it's weird how the party of personal responsibility seems to think a war for WMD's that don't exist is not even a case for an apology.

The crane is my neighbour

The bird is my neighbour, a whimsical fellow and dim:
There is in the lake a nobility falling on him.

The bird is a noble, he turns to the sky for a theme,
And ripples are thoughts coming out to the edge of a dream.

He bleats no instruction, he is not an arrogant drummer:
His gown is simplicity � blue as the smoke of the Summer.

The bird is both ancient and excellent, sober and wise,
But he never could spend all the love that is sent for his eyes.

How patient he is as he puts out his wings for the blue:
He is an old guest of the sunlight � a child of the dew.

I always liked John Shaw Neilson. There's a furious textual argument over whther Line 3 reads this way or:

And waves are as thoughts coming out to the edge of a dream

Old People May Hold Key to Human Success

'What we looked at is differences in the proportion of people who were living to be older,' Caspari said. Some individuals may have lived to great age, but at some point humans as a species began living longer on average than other primates and Caspari and Lee wanted to find out when and why.

They divided the fossils into two groups -- adults of reproductive age, which they settled on as 15 years, and adults that lived to be twice as old, 30, based on tooth wear.

In primitive societies, people are often grandparents at 30, Caspari pointed out.

'We found this proportion of older to young adults in the fossil record increased over time,' Caspari said.
'In the Upper Paleolithic that proportion just skyrocketed. It was just unbelievable. It increased five-fold. We didn't expect that.'

Caspari and Lee rechecked their numbers and analysis.

'But then we started to think about it and thought we really shouldn't be surprised, because there is a behavioral change that took place over time at the same time,' Caspari said.

'You start to see a change in symbolic behavior. You see art. You see a large number of people being buried with jewelry, with body ornaments.'

Perhaps around this time people started to value and take care of the weak and the old, and in turn benefited from their help and experience, Caspari sad.

This could be when the uniquely human condition of menopause evolved and started to have an effect, Caspari said. Women not burdened by childbearing could focus on their grandchildren and other kin.

'We live in a society that is so geared toward younger people. It is nice to realize that it might be older people that make us human after all,' Caspari said.

Now if only the economic rationalists had a decent grip on politics in the Upper Paleocene we could have avoided centuires of economic inefficiency in caring about the weak and the old. Damn!

Speed of light may have changed recently

The speed of light, one of the most sacrosanct of the universal physical constants, may have been lower as recently as two billion years ago - and not in some far corner of the universe, but right here on Earth.

The controversial finding is turning up the heat on an already simmering debate, especially since it is based on re-analysis of old data that has long been used to argue for exactly the opposite: the constancy of the speed of light and other constants.

A varying speed of light contradicts Einstein's theory of relativity, and would undermine much of traditional physics. But some physicists believe it would elegantly explain puzzling cosmological phenomena such as the nearly uniform temperature of the universe. It might also support string theories that predict extra spatial dimensions.

The threat to the idea of an invariable speed of light comes from measurements of another parameter called the fine structure constant, or alpha, which dictates the strength of the electromagnetic force. The speed of light is inversely proportional to alpha, and though alpha also depends on two other constants (see graphic), many physicists tend to interpret a change in alpha as a change in the speed of light. It is a valid simplification, says Victor Flambaum of the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

It was Flambaum, along with John Webb and colleagues, who first seriously challenged alpha's status as a constant in 1998. Then, after exhaustively analysing how the light from distant quasars was absorbed by intervening gas clouds, they claimed in 2001 that alpha had increased by a few parts in 105 in the past 12 billion years.

Yikes (if you're a traditional physicist) or wow (if you're anyone else or a traditional physicist with lots of imagination).

Big spender: Howard's $29m ad bill

With the Prime Minister, John Howard, still playing bluff on calling an election as early as tomorrow, new figures reveal the Federal Government is accelerating bumper taxpayer-financed advertising of its policies.

Latest industry figures show the Government spent $29 million in the past six months, up nearly 60 per cent on the same period last year.

More than $4 million was spent in just one week last month on promoting measures including the Medicare changes and the $600 child payment.

Spending by the Department of Health, largely on the Strengthening Medicare campaign, topped $10.5 million in the six months, according to Nielsen Media Research AdEx.

The Department of Family and Community Services spent $1.1 million and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet $3.2 million.

There is much more to come according to information released to the Opposition, which has estimated the advertising bills will total $122 million this year. The Government says the figure is about $90 million.

Mr Howard, who insisted yesterday he would rely on 'gut instinct' on when to go to the country, would not rule out calling the contest tomorrow, for an August 7 poll.

While most insiders say a move tomorrow is unlikely, government departments in recent weeks have rushed to clear any policy initiatives before the election campaign puts the Government into caretaker mode.

We really need better rules on government advertising and we need a fixed date for federal elections.

The constitution says:

Duration of House of Representatives.
28. Every House of Representatives shall continue for three years from the first meeting of the House, and no longer, but may be sooner dissolved by the Governor-General.

That's just not good enough. Note that the term is not 3 years and there's no provision for when a new House must meet after the election. The last federal election was 10 November 2001. The last day for the next federal election, because of the gap between election day and the first meeting of the House, is 16 April 2005. That is too long and too flaky.

The government does not go into caretaker mode until the House is actually dissolved by the governor-general on the prime minister's advice. Politicised ads, paid for by public funds, are entirely legal until the dissolution. The government not only determines the date but is in a position to run a massive advertising campaign immediately before announcing the date. The Herald report merely confirms what we already guessed.

Harradine set to quit after 29 years

A Catholic conservative and former right-wing member of the Labor Party, he was first elected as a senator for Tasmania in 1975. He has been a key player in the Senate's balance of power, particularly during the Howard Government's first term, when he often found himself with the deciding vote.

Told of Senator Harradine's retirement plans by a reporter while campaigning in the Tasmanian electorate of Bass yesterday, Prime Minister John Howard said he had great admiration and respect for the senator.

'I have found him to be an immensely decent, committed person, a very fine Australian and someone who's worked very hard for the people of Tasmania,' Mr Howard said.

Senator Harradine was widely recognised for winning $150 million of concessions for Tasmania when he cast the deciding vote for a 30 per cent sale of Telstra in July 1998.

But he nearly sank the GST in 1999 when he voted against it, forcing the Government to make a deal with the Democrats. Other important votes on the Wik Native Title legislation, the private health insurance rebate and the second part sale of Telstra went the Government's way.

Election analyst Antony Green said a decision by Senator Harradine not to contest the election would open the way for the Greens and Labor to benefit in Tasmania. 'It will probably make the Senate contest easier to pick: three Labor, two Liberals and a Green,' he said.

This should drive the last nail into the Magic 38 thesis.

2002-03 Redistribution of Commonwealth Electoral Boundaries

The Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 provides three triggers for a redistribution of Commonwealth electoral boundaries. Under section 59 of the Act a redistribution shall occur:

• when there is a change in the representational entitlements of a state or territory
  
• when more than one third of the divisions in a state or territory vary from the average divisional enrolment for the state or territory by more than ten per cent for three consecutive months, or
  
• if seven years ('seven year rule') have elapsed since the last redistribution in the state or territory.
  

A redistribution of Commonwealth electoral boundaries occurred during 2002 and 2003 in Victoria, Queensland and South Australia. The redistribution in Victoria was occasioned by the 'seven year rule', while the redistributions in Queensland and South Australia were triggered by a change in the representational entitlements of the two jurisdictions.

The second trigger, malapportionment of electoral divisions, has not occasioned a redistribution since the three triggers were incorporated in the Act in 1984.

Worth reading for the impact of boundary changes, especially in Queensland and South Australia.

The Northern Territory missed a second seat by 295 voters. This was fixed by the House of Representatives (Northern Territory Representation) Act 2004 which restores the territory's second seat.

Into the Abyss

Around Iraq, the States that have most to fear from an American collapse are Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Each in its own way, all three depend on American support. All suffer under severe social strain, whether against an ethnic background%u2014as in Jordan where Bedouin and Palestinians clash%u2014or a religious one as is mainly the case in the other two. As unrest spreads from Iraq probably not all three will see their regimes overthrown, but one or two might well undergo this fate. Jordan being a small and weak country, its fate will be of concern mainly to its immediate neighbors such as Syria%u2014which, if it tries to intervene, will have Israel to reckon with%u2014Israel, and Saudi Arabia. By contrast, the collapse of Saudi Arabia, or a situation whereby Egypt turns into an Islamic republic and abrogates its peace treaty with Israel, would have world-wide economic and strategic implications that are hard to foresee.

In the short run, the greatest beneficiary of the war is Israel. The destruction of Iraq has created a situation where, for the first time since the State was founded in 1948, it has no real conventional enemy left within about 600 miles of its borders. If Sharon had any sense he would use this window of opportunity to come to some kind of arrangement with the Palestinians. Whether he will do so, though, remains to be seen.

In the longer run, the greatest beneficiary is likely to be Iran which, without having to lift a finger, has seen its most dangerous enemy ground into the dust. Even before President Bush launched his war against Iraq, the Iranians, feeling surrounded by nuclear-capable American forces on three sides (Afghanistan, the Central Asian Republics, the Persian Gulf), were working as hard as they could to acquire nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles to match. Now that the U.S. has proved it is prepared to fight anybody for no reason at all, they should be forgiven if they redouble their efforts.

Even if the Islamic Republic is overthrown, as some hope, the new government in Tehran will surely follow the same nationalist line as its predecessor did. A nuclear Iran is likely to be followed by a nuclear Turkey. Next will come a nuclear Greece, a nuclear Saudi Arabia (assuming the country can survive as a single political unit), and a nuclear Egypt. Welcome to the Brave New World, Mr. Bush.

This is the sort of thing that happens when you confuse a throwaway line in a speech to Congress with the grounds for making war and peace.