There's been some good blogger commentary on Representative Howard Coble's (R - N.C.) recent radio call-in show appearance, in which he defended the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. Read, for example, the comments on Is That Legal? here. The latest development (as a newsobserver.com article notes) is that Coble claims that he was "just stating historical fact" when he claimed that internment was justified for security reasons and also as protection for Japanese-Americans themselves.

One problem with Coble's account is that the federal government itself repudiated such justifications about twenty years ago. You can read excerpts from Personal Justice Denied: the Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, here. Note the Report's title. It is also published by the University of Washington Press. Also check out the NCRR (Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress) home page.

To his credit, Coble was expressing his disagreement with a caller who argued that Arab-Americans should be interned. Still, the smart course for him now is simply to apologize and admit that he hasn't really studied the issue. His position as Chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security makes his comments, and his ignorance, all the more frightening.

GAO is wimpy.

I don't know why this is cool, but it is.

According to the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, France and Germany have an idea on how to deal with Iraqi resistance to disarmament: UN peacekeeping troops, with weapons, in Iraq, along with an expanded no-fly zone, a beefed-up sanctions regime, and closer partnerships with neighboring countries to prevent oil smuggling. In addition, U.S. troops that are already in the area are supposed to remain there to provide the military threat necessary to force the Iraqi regime to accept this expanded inspections program.

Der Spiegel, the news weekly from Hamburg which broke the story, says that the plan is for a U.N. "Invasion." Selections from the original article are available on their website. There, Schroeder is quoted as declaring that "simply saying 'no' won't suffice anymore."

The name for the plan? "Mirage." An unlucky choice, perhaps. But is this the kind of thing that Kofi Annan had in mind when he said, today, that the U.N. itself should be responsible for enforcing its own resolutions? (Read the Guardian's coverage of Annan's speech here, and Le Monde's coverage here.) The Germans and French have apparently been working on this plan since the beginning of the year, in other words, for about five weeks at most. Did Kofi Annan know about the plan? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps more importantly: is it too little, too late? Maybe. Although now, at least, there is an alternate plan out there, however rough, that can be used to test the U.S.'s willingness to work with allies on the issue.

Der Spiegel reports on hopes that this kind of intensive inspections force could weaken the current Iraqi regime and could help create the conditions for the development of a serious domestic opposition. Many questions remain unanswered, perhaps unanswerable at this stage: how long are the troops going to stay? How much support are they supposed to give to opposition forces? How narrowly will their mandate be drawn?

World Net Daily has an article here, adding that Schroeder is going to address the plans on Thursday in a speech to the Bundestag. The Australian repeats most of the same information here.

Lilla and Rorty on Iraq: Die Zeit has a good collection of 7 short essays from prominent (mostly U.S.) intellectuals on the question, "should the U.S. wage a preventive war against Iraq?" Some of the essays are unsurprising: Yale Law Professor and occasional pro-Bush pundit Ruth Wedgwood says "go," as she does here, in english. One person argues that a war on Iraq will harm the war on terrorism, in particular the war on al-Qaeda and its ilk --New York Review of Books contributor and Hebrew University Professor Avishai Margalit makes this argument. Ronald Dworkin worries that the administration's war plans will weaken the U.N.

To my mind, the most interesting essays come from Mark Lilla and Richard Rorty, however. As far as I can tell, neither has articulated their positions in print on this side of the Atlantic in a readily accessible form.

Neither has particularly kind things to say about the Europeans. Rorty argues that the Bush administration's "contempt" for the European position is partly justified, since the folks in Brussels, Berlin, and Paris have not developed their own policies with respect to the proliferation of WMD's. Lilla argues that Europeans are simply "unwilling to pay a price for the political freedom of others," as they showed in the Balkans.

Lilla's argument is ultimately more interesting than Rorty's. For one, he states at the outset that he is against the war that the Bush administration seems to be planning, although he is "more strongly against" anti-war folks who oppose the war for the wrong reasons. For Lilla, the "no blood for oil" argument doesn't make sense. Indeed, he argues, if the administration were only concerned about oil, its foreign policy would likely be more moderate and realist, less likely to risk dyspepsia on Wall Street, less likely to risk the destabilization of Saudi Arabia. And if influence in the Middle East were the reason for the administration's main concern, he continues, Bush would probably try to avoid conflicts with "radical Islam."

The more interesting parts of Lilla's argument concern the influence of what Lilla calls "eschatological and messianic" democratic thinking on the part of the post-September 11th Bush administration. According to Lilla, the administration is really concerned with "global democratization." The ascendant American right is not concerned with "interests" so much as with "ideas," and the left, European and otherwise, has had a difficult time recognizing this fact.

For an influential blogger's global democratization manifesto, go to Oxblog's announcement of the creation of the Oxford Democracy Forum.

Lilla is skeptical of the democratizing argument behind the push for war on Iraq. He argues that there is "no example whatsoever of non- or half-modern cultures, that suddenly prove to be fruitful ground for liberal democratic government." He argues that Iran and Algeria would have given the old-style Republicans pause: democratic tendencies and friendliness with the U.S. do not go hand in hand. What's needed for liberal democracy is "modernization."

Lilla finds the administration's position on global democracy unrealistic, but nonetheless more "noble" than the position of the western European opponents of war, who rely on "cynicism and indifference." The urge for democracy and Wilsonian self-determination certainly makes sense. And eastern Europeans, for example, are right to remember the failure of Western Europe during the cold war:

As Reagan called out, in Berlin, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," the western Europeans laughed and rolled their eyes; Poles and Czechs didn't, and today they support the war on Iraq because they still share Reagan's belief in democracy.

Speaking in my own name, I share Lilla's skepticism here, although, as I've said before, I come at the question from a different direction. I just don't think that the administration's fantasy of regime change in the direction of a democratic Iraq is going to work. It's very hard to establish democracy with the barrel of a gun; the administration has not done a good job at preparing the public for the task (as Tom Friedman argued recently); other priorities are likely to intervene; and the goal would be more easily achieved if there were more consensus behind the war effort.

I could be wrong on all these fronts. And the administration is actually building a coalition, even if that task is in some conflict with its desire to play tough in order to occupy the strongest bargaining position vis-a-vis Iraq. Nonetheless, if the administration doesn't end up following through on its stated goal to start the process of democratization in Iraq, for whatever reasons, the critics on the anti-imperial left will have their justification.

[MORE ON DIE ZEIT'S SERIES ON SUNDAY]

For some reason, I couldn't pick up the CNN and Jane's Review articles I wanted right away, so I got distracted and started looking for my kin, distant or otherwise. The list below is from the distant category.

Gwen Marston -- QUILTER, on Beaver Island, Michigan. You can buy her quilting picture books.

MARSTON MINING ENGINEERS AND CONSULTANTS: "Excellence and Innovation in Mining"

THE MARSTON TIMES: "It's not just a church magazine."

CONTROVERSY IN THE "QUIET CORNER": Eugene Volokh has some insightful things to say about a controversy in Norwich, CT (not far from whence I hail) over a school building named after John Mason, a seventeenth century founder of Norwich who led a brutal raid on a Pequot village. The raid culminated in the massacre of 400 men, women, and children. The local NAACP has asked the school board to change the name of the building to "Virginia Christian" to honor the city's first black City Council member. Christian was elected to the Council in 1965. Read the Norwich Bulletin story here. Read the blog that inspired Volokh's commentary here.

As Volokh argues, naming public buildings is an action of government; names are meant to express honor, esteem, gratitude, reverence, and memory. It seems to me that it's a good thing for there to be debate and discussion about those actions, even if the debate can make people uncomfortable.

An article from the Hartford Courant linked by the Bulletin indicates that the roots of this conflict lay in a 1994 dispute in Groton, CT, concerning the fate of a statue erected in the late nineteenth century in Mason's honor. One thing is clear: it's a heck of a lot easier to change the name on a building than to dispose of a 23-ton monument. It was eventually moved to Windsor, CT. The Bulletin doesn't mention any resistance to the request, but an article in The Day (New London) from today does. One school board member wrote a reply to the local NAACP claiming that a discussion of the name change would be a waste of time and that the NAACP was trying to "bully" the school board. Other folks in the town welcome the debate.

An important piece of background for the story is the meteoric rise of the Mashantucket Pequots, descendants to the people whom Mason tried to exterminate in the early seventeenth century. In the past two decades, the Pequots have built Foxwoods, one of the most profitable casinos in the world. Resurgent tribal power has helped to put the memorial issue on the map.

You know the weather is bad when SUNY Oswego cancels classes. At first, just morning classes were canceled, but now it looks like they've called off the whole show for today. When I arrived around 10:00 this morning, they were still digging out the lecture hall where my American Government class was supposed to be held.

You know you're getting used to Oswego weather when shoveling 8 inches of snow seems like no big deal. It's light snow, after all.

Old man winter is at it again in Oswego county, NY. Check out the forecast and snow advisories.

Moellemann remains an FDP man. Read the Frankfurter Rundschau's article here. The party leadership in Nordrhein-Westfalen couldn't muster the 2/3 majority it needed to expel him. Moellemann's controversial tenure with the Free Democrats (or "the Liberals," web site here) has seen the already electorally vulnerable party go from the party of German liberalism (as in, free markets and business interests) to the party of German liberalism and antisemitism. Check out the Moellemann File for a look at some of his recent statements.

If you haven't seen Brendan O'Neill's argument that the anti-war "no blood for oil" argument is hollow, go here. O'Neill is himself an anti-war guy, for complex reasons which you can read about on his web site here. This kind of self-criticism on the left is a very healthy thing.

Today's Tagesspiegel describes the financial and structural woes of Berlin's Pergamon Museum. Around 800,000 people visit the museum each year; highlights include the Altar of Pergamon (a full scale reconstruction of the entrance to a Greek temple, and much of the original frieze, taken from Bergama, Turkey; Turkish officials would like the pieces back) and the Ishtar gate from the 6th century BCE. The museum and its neighbor museums on the Museum Island are in serious need of major repairs: parts of the building are structurally unstable; the entrance to the building is poorly designed; inside, it is hot in the summer and cold in the winter, which isn't particularly good for the collection of antique rugs, for example. Pipes have burst on occasion, threatening to destroy precious artifacts. The electrical wiring is a planless maze. And let's not forget the sixty year-old bullet holes that still checker the facade.

Plans for the restoration of the museum have been developed, but the government is balking at the 325 million Euro (around $350 million) price tag. It looks like serious work isn't planned to begin until 2015 or later.

I first saw visited the museum in 1989 as an exchange student in West Berlin, while the island was still in what was called East Berlin. The monumental exhibits are simply unbelievable unless you see them in person: much more impressive than the Temple of Dendur at the Met, for example. This museum was responsible for an important part of my education. If you haven't seen it, go. Aside from the exhibits, the interplay between bullet holes, German fascination with classicism, and the heritage of East German economic and political failure is worth seeing. According to the article, there's no hurry; let's just hope the museum can stay open while the repairs are on hold.

You can look at the Pergamon Museum's official web site in English here, and the web site for the Museum Island as a whole, here.

So one objection to the administration's hopes for a postwar democratic regime installation is that it will be too expensive and won't garner the necessary, long-term support from the American public. As Parris notes, however, this objection is also a thin reed on which to build a real doubt about a U.S. led invasion; perhaps the commitment will materialize, and perhaps international support for a postwar reconstruction effort will also materialize. If that happens, then I was just dead wrong on that score. I've got no problem with that. I also thought the Red Sox would win the World Series sometime during the last third of the twentieth century. I don't want to jinx my baseball predictions for the twenty-first century by going into more details about my current hopes, either. . .

A more fundamental doubt intrudes, however. The problem with "strategic hamlets" was not that we didn't commit enough resources to ensure the conditions for their success. The problem was that the whole idea was a mistake: walling off villages, attempting to keep out the NVA [oops! more appropriately, the Viet Cong -- BEM], and hoping to create loyalty toward occupation troops. I don't think that my argument relies exclusively on fears about getting "mired down" in a hopeless guerrilla conflict. Again, perhaps preliminary impressions from Afghanistan are a red herring; perhaps Somalia (or Lebanon or Haiti) isn't the right comparison; perhaps there will be significant support from the population and significant support from peacekeeping troops and at least non-opposition on the part of Iran. Perhaps Kurds can be brought into the bargain. Perhaps the terrorist threat within Iraq can be minimized. At least I've got a list of topics on which to consult the experts. . .

So, let's say all of these things cut the right way for the U.S. What's left is an objection based on uneasiness about the U.S.'s role as an imperial power. Now some of the uneasiness undoubtedly derives from the sense that things never cut the right way for empires all the time. In addition, what "cuts the right way" for the "center" will be perceived quite differently at the "periphery." Moral relativism? Hardly. It's the question of being on one side of power or the other.

Sketches of thoughts rather than argument. Well, it's Monday, after all. And you're reading this for free.

A good article called "A Dove's Guide: How to Be an Honest Critic of the War." Via Eugene Volokh.

Thoughts after reading it:

As I noted a little while back, my main (personal, far from professional) reservation about the possibility of U.S.-led invasion of Iraq is that we will not in fact commit the resources necessary for the tough task of democratic transitioning Iraq -- and, yes, I'm using "transition" as a transitive verb on purpose, because I can't think of a correct verb that would capture what I think the administration is proposing here. Perhaps "Marshall planning" Iraq.

I am not attempting to use geeky grammatical tactics as an excuse for argument, either. I am asking for a little slack because it's late and I really should be going back over my notes on American federalism for my lecture tomorrow morning. But I am ambivalent about the neoconservative optimism regarding a democratic post-war Iraq, an optimism that I labeled "naive silliness" in an earlier blog. On the one hand, the idea of a democratic Iraq is very attractive for numerous reasons. I doubt that anyone but a truly cruel person would mourn the passing of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, at least if that regime were replaced with something less horrific. On the other hand, though, the dream of a democratic Iraq created under the aegis of a U.S. occupation really does strike me as a "too good to be true" story about the benefits of the projection of American power.

The strongest argument for going to war against Iraq -- regardless of the number or strength of our allies or our opposition -- is the alleged connection between Iraqi weapons production and terrorism. And this is an argument where solid proof of a connection would help, but, because of the catastrophic results of a successful terrorist attack with WMD's, anything looking like proof needs to be weighed pretty heavily. Grind out the results of a prudent risk calculation and a low-probability catastrophic event is still very worrisome. I'm thinking here strictly of the reasons that I believe are likely to weigh heavily in this administration's actual thinking when it allocates its resources. My conclusions are based on my reading of the administration's justifications for its own actions. I obviously don't have a mole in the White House, so whatever I say is what it is, and nothing more.

That said, it seems to me that the objective of preventing low-probability catastrophic events is expansive enough to crowd out longer term goals, like the massive financial and military commitment that would be necessary to "establish" democracy in Iraq. Maybe I'm wrong. And perhaps Afghanistan, Haiti, and Somalia are not the best historical cases for use in judging what an American projection of force for the purpose of establishing democracy in Iraq would look like. But U.S. involvement in Haiti and Somalia between 1992 and 1995 did cost $1.6 billion and $2.2 billion, respectively. Read the GAO report here. One would think that an occupation of Iraq is likely to be much more expensive, especially if international help is fairly limited. Add to that cost the difficult security measures that are likely to be necessary to sustain any kind of serious commitment to what Bush derisively called, in a more secure and complacent time, nation-building.

My worries have a natural limitation: it's not easy to peer through the fog of a postwar peace, of course. But arguments that attack the optimism of the regime builders also aim at the optimism that the Bush administration is trying so deperately to instill, through its swaggering rhetoric and confident reminders of American military predominance, namely, that American power and American technology can actually remake the world in its own image, one terrorist-harboring country at a time, and, in the end, eradicate terrorism entirely. We would certainly like to feel secure in the face of the terrorist threat; projections of power have a kind of magical significance to ward off the fear.

Here's the question in a nutshell: are proposals for remaking postwar Iraq proud invocations of the heritage of the Marshall plan, or reminders of the hubris of the "strategic hamlet"? I honestly do not know, but my gut says it's the latter.

Schroeder's SPD got slammed in elections in Hessen and Lower Saxony, as predicted. Read the BBC's report here.

The Times of India gives a bigger headline to Iraq but more space to Kalpana Chawla. Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes has expressed an apparent Indian refusal to allow U.S. troops to use Indian facilities for any "unilateral" operation that is not taken "under the aegis of the United Nations."

Read ToI's editorial taking leave of Kalpana Chawla. Read also about her home state's memorialization of her in the form of scholarships for girls excelling in engineering.

On Friday the Washington Times published an interview with Ejaz Haider. Still outstanding is a good official defense of the INS actions. Unsurprising, but still wrong.

For a brief comment on the Ejaz Haider detention and a look at a very cool web design job, go here. Read also the Talking Points Memo article here.