This is equal parts alarmist speculation and anonymous sources. That said: When Reagan was considering an invasion of Nicaragua (you remember that, right?) he supposedly signed an executive order providing the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) broad powers to control "violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition against a US military invasion abroad." That's chilling enough, but it gets much, much worse.

John B. Judis has a piece in the otherwise infuriating American Prospect in which he reverse-engineers the Bush Administration's Iraq policy.

The Smoking Gun has some odd documents showing the meeting minutes of the birth of Al Queda. They come out of some case of a charity group that was raising money for Al Queda. It's chilling to see this petty and bureaucratic beginning to this group. Members had to pledge to be early-rising and obedient and they were only supposed to take members who had good references, good manners and were good listeners. http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/bifladen1.html The Smoking Gun also has Al Queda's terror manual. http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/jihadmanual.html

He wrote The Threatenting Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq. Pay attention to his editorials in the New York Times and his interview with Talking Points Memo.

England is giving Blair lots of grief for palling around with George Bush. Brits are really squeemish about Bush's dogmatic Christian rhetoric. That's especially interesting because this is the country the US broke away from because of its dogmatic Christianity. The BBC's Jeremy Paxman asked if he prayed with Bush. Blair curtly responded: "No, we don't pray together. No, Jeremey, No." Newsweek was great to point out that in the US, politicians would have jumped at the chance to brag that they prayed with Bush, no matter how much that flew in the face of the establishment clause.

On the Iraq issue, I have some serious reservations about the war, but I have even more reservations about the opposition. I often hear that the U.S. should not trade "blood for oil." This suggests that the United States is going to oust Saddam Hussein in order to control the second largest oil reserve in the world. This betrays some very soft thinking. Iraq would be more than happy to sell us all the oil we want. We have, in fact, strongly defended sanctions on the country which prevent Iraq from producing at full capacity. Say, for the sake of argument, that we hope a new Iraqi regime would flout OPEC and flood the market with cheap oil. That's unrealistic. A new Iraq would be compelled to join OPEC for the same reason everyone else does: price controls and amicable relations with its neighbors. Why would a new Iraq sell oil for less? It's going to be the lifeblood of the new country, and making itself a bargain on the world oil markets is self-defeating.

The United Nations Security Council unanimously approved Resolution 1441 compelling Iraq to submit to UNMOVIC weapons inspections. Iraq is given seven days to agree to the resolution. The French and Russian proponents of the two-step process, as well as the one-step US delegation, claimed victory. The wording of the resolution was negotiated over two months, and each side was able to derive what they liked from the resulting language. Most significantly, the United States was able to retain the "material breach" language it wanted. The New York Times was good enough to provide the subsequent remarks from United States Ambassador John Negroponte.