My apologies to the listserver subscribers, several hundreds, and surprisingly --- considering that I haven't had a chance to do any publicity for the web site --- several hundred other visitors for not posting new entries more frequently.

The trouble? Lots of competing claimants on my time, I fear -- including a lengthy article for publication. Also, still trying to learn enough text editing with HTML to simplify the tasks of entering a commentary developed in Word, then saving in plain text (even saving it in HTML format won't help), then entering it at the control panel for the home page, and reformatting. Fortunately, some help is on the way.

Best wishes to all of you, The Buggy Prof

PART ONE

1) Introductory Comments:

Written by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the article in question --- "Iraq: An Unnecessary War," --- has been widely regarded as the most effective criticism to date of the Bush administration's policy toward Iraq . . . . especially its alleged shift away from a containment and deterrence policy of Saddam's regime and his WMD programs as risky and futile and to a goal instead of toppling that dangerous, Islamo-fascist regime, a pre-condition of its complete disarmament. Not surprisingly, the article's argument has not only been seized on by moderate and informed critics of the Bush policy, but touted widely in radical and appeasement circles as evidence that war or even vigorous coercive diplomacy aren't needed for dealing with Saddam and his regime. That seems odd, this enthusiasm in radical and pacifist circles. M&W, as it happens, are well-known realist theorists: they take power politics for granted, believe in active armed balancing as essential for the US, and take essentially a managerial view of dealing with conflicts among states, with war, presumably, not needed except in extreme cases as an instrument for dealing with major security problems

What would justify war these days in W&M's view? It isn't clear in the article. Maybe nothing.

1) FASCISM AND THE WAR ON TERRORISM

A little clarification about "fascism" and its meaning is in order, particularly since our commentaries here refer repeatedly to Islamo-fascism, Islamo-fascist totalitarianism like Iraq's, Syria's, and Iran's regimes, and Islamo-fascist fundamentalism of the militant sort that flourishes in Shia Iran, Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, Taliban Afghanistan, and in movements like Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad and Hamas.

Note in passing that the concept of fascism for analytical purproses, as opposed to stigmatizing political opponents for propaganda purposes, has been called into question the last two or three decades by certain specialists in interwar European history. Why? The more they studied specific fascist-like countries ---Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, reactionary and clerical Spain under Franco or Portugal ruled by Salazar, and a half dozen to a dozen more fascist-like states in East Europe both before and after WWII --- the more they found noticeable differences. So what? Specific historical inquiry

Our thanks to Captain Evans, US Army armor, for the following excert from the January 22nd op-ed column in the Washington Post by Michael Kelly: "Marching with Stalinists".

Click on the link for the Kelly article, and the Buggy Prof's reply.

Over the last three years, the Buggy Prof --- though a card-carrying member in the Sierra Club, and a committed environmentalist --- has been left aghast at the extravagantly overwrought efforts of ultra-greens, including numerous scientists of a marked policy-partisan orientation, to ram the Kyoto Treaty into law in the industrial democracies . . . Russia, East Europe, and the developing countries like China and India exempt from any obligations themselves to reduce alleged greenhouse gas emissions, especially C02.

Like many moderates environmentalists, too, he finds the recent efforts of politically correct scientists of a witch-hunting caliber in Scandinavia, above all Denmark, to slander and stigmatize the impressive work of Bjorn Lomborg's THE SKEPTICAL ENVIRONMENTALIST . . . a remarkably systematic study sifting through wads of statistical materials in order to identify the nature of recent trends since WWII in environmental, demographic, and resource-laden controversies, in the process separating truth from exaggerated doom-doom fiction. Lomborg isn't the first to do this, Julian Simon in the US having . . .

Michael:

Congratulations on your web site. I'm looking forward to logging on frequently.

Here's a question: I'm reading in the Christain Science Monitor (1-17-03) that U.S. forces have been training in a mock city built for urban warfare scenarios in Fort Polk, Louisiana. The location is known as the village of Shugart-Gordon, named after two commandos that were killed in the rescue operation of the Black Hawk helicopter in Mogadishu in 1993. The context here is that Saddam's Republican Guard has built concentric rings of defenses around the city and is the city is expected to be a brutal holdout location, with the battles reminiscent of some during WWII. Americans could expect large casualties, dwarfing the loss of life during the first Gulf War, and dividing American public opinion.

Considering your earlier remarks regarding the Mearsheimer/Walt article in the current Foreign Policy, what are your views on . . . (to continue: click on link)

1) Brinksmanship: The Rising Spiral of North Korean Belligerence

The behavior of the Pyongyang Communist government, headed by Kim Sung Il (the son of the previous all-powerful dicator), and its increasingly strident rhetoric --- right down through today's warnings that if the US or others take the North Korean challenge to the UN Security Council, it will resume ballistic missile tests of medium and long-range reach --- are the clearest example of brinksmanship that you can find in decades: first, admitting in October that it had a secret nuclear weapons program going on that violated its 1994 accord signed with the US and others, then --- escalating the behavior --- tossing out UN atomic-energy inspectors and opening up two plutonium-enrichment plants (they produce weapons-grade material), then warning the US that any efforts at trying to impose economic sanctions, unilaterally or otherwise, would lead to war.

This is a serious crisis, whether full-blown or emerging is hard to pin down, all depending on whether the brinksmanship has a clear behavioral limit and will remain largely rhetorical --- its aim on both levels, assuming the regime isn't bent on war, to force the US into negotiations with Pyongyang and make concessions to it. We'll return in a moment or two to the North Korean brinksmanship, and the likely logic behind it.

Dear Michael, I would like to take this opportunity and congratulate you for the new webpage. I have only had a brief look at it so far, as it is quite late here now, but I must say that I am quite impressed. Well done! I am sure that you must have some mixed emotions about this site. On the one hand, the whole shift is an exciting development (or should we say technological evolution). On the other hand, it must be a bit sad to close down the list serve, which has been a very good source of information, and entertainment at times throughout the last few years. I am also happy that I had the chance to be a member of that list (and even to occasionally contribute some thoughts to it). I will continue doing so in the new format of discussion. Long live the Internet.

1. Is the term "peace activist" accurate regarding Saddam Hussein's regime? Is "peace movement"? In a Front Page article yesterday, a good left-wing columnist asked --- Christopher Hitchens, has denounced his former radical colleagues at The Nation and elsewhere as American-hating dupes of reactionary and Islamo-fascist terrorists and terrorist-supporting state --- why we call the leaders of the protest movements opposed to President Bush's and Prime Minister Blair's jointly coercive policy towards Iraq "peace" activists when, after all, especially in retrospect, we don't call the British and the French appeasers of Hitler in the late 1930s peace activists. A good question, yes? Which, you'll recall, we've dealt with repeatedly the last 16 months here in our listserver commentaries.

And for that matter, a perfectly good question to raise back in the lat 1930s era of fascist appeasement. There were far more prescient, clearheaded observers and even politicians at the time who foresaw the disasters inherent in such appeasement, recognizing that it only delayed an inevitable war that would come when Hitler was far more powerful . . . the resulting war itself destructive on a vast monstrous scale, some 50 million people left dead around the globe by the time it ended in 1945. Among those opponents of appeasement was Winston Churchill, a Conservative MP (Member of Parliament), kept out of office in the Conservative-Liberal governments of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain throughout the decade . . . Churchill, in their illusion-charged views, too much of a rambunctious agitator for war; and too strong-headed and independent to boot. A very unreliable chap, better left on the backbenches in the House of Commons.

1) North Korea Keeps Its Diplomatic Lines to the US Open

As we noted about a week ago, for all their bellicose behavior and scary bluster, a form of crude binksmanship, North Korea's Communist regime has been actively seeking to find ways to negotiate with the US about its nuclear weapons programs, in return for a US guarantee that it won't attack the Communist state . . . or so Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a former Clinton UN ambassador, has said. His view here reflects three days of talks with North Korean diplomats.

Why did they choose Richardson as an interlocutor? Hard to say for sure, what with the intense secrecy that surrounds North Korea's leadership's policymaking, along with the tightest thought-control system in the world . . . a nightmarish Orwellian state. Still, on the face of it, most likely because they were using their scare-tactics as a means to force the Bush administration into talks, and to send North Korean diplomats directly to deal with the administration would undermine those tactics and indicate that they've been largely bluffy. This way, they were talking to a non-US government official