Ironically, many of those who profess to hate war, empire and poverty, and who strive for a just international order, accuse Bush and Blair of promoting those things. In reality, a failure of the Bush-Blair coalition would sooner or later (probably sooner) give rise to a world in which a number of regional tyrannies who gradually, under the cover of their weapons of mass destruction, would annex first the states that are sovereign by convention, such as Kuwait, and eventually many that have been sovereign by circumstance.

The existence of such states would force other nations in the region to calculate that their own sovereignty depended on their acquisition of nuclear weapons. Given that most nuclear tyrannies would be happy to sell weapons to out-of-area states with ready cash, such proliferation could proceed more rapidly than many imagine. Alliances would be discounted; if America were to shy away from attacking a nation for fear of non-nuclear terrorism, it could hardly be expected to stand up to nuclear blackmail. This logic ends up favoring the nuclear over the non-nuclear, the ruthless over the constrained, and the closed over the open societies.

We may be at a critical point in the defense of the open, democratic and commercial order America and many other nations have together built since 1945. Those who do not support this defense fail to understand that the entire idea of an international order of rules (already extended far beyond what reality can support) cannot be taken for granted, and must be defended forcibly against would-be empires. This is not some kind of game in which Saddam gets to have nuclear weapons if U.N Secretary-General Kofi Annan failed to say "Simon says" before Bush acts.

Failure to understand these points may soon lead us to a place where life for all is short, nasty, brutish and mean, and from time to time, radioactive.

Blix also told the Iraqis they would have to destroy casting chambers that could be used to produce engines powerful enough to propel a missile farther than U.N. limits. U.N. inspectors had destroyed those chambers several years ago, but Iraq rebuilt them.

Going in softly, which is taken to mean a short massive air campaign to prepare the way for ground troops, would also let the US make good on promises of fair treatment for any surrendering Iraqis. Such promises have been spelled out in massive leaflet drops over the south in recent weeks and also given to Iraqi unit officers in contacts established by US and UK undercover forces in Iraq.

"We're not going to destroy Iraq," he vowed during the interview, which was released Friday. If there is a war, "Once the regime has been eliminated there will be institutions that remain in place."

Responding to concerns that the United States might control Iraq's government after a war, he argued, "The United States' record is not one of imperialism. It is one of doing the job, bringing peace, restoring order and getting a responsible government in place.

If you agree that Saddam Hussein is a threat, as his Arab and Iranian neighbours do, then the choice between peace and war must begin with consideration of containment.

When told of The Chronicle's survey, Alex S. Jones, the director of Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, said, "The number of people (in a crowd) is a mythical number, and now you're going to turn it into a fact, and that won't be welcomed."

It is probably true that fear of retaliation kept Iraq from using chemical weapons against coalition forces during the gulf war. However, this should give us little comfort that he will be similarly deterred in the future. Before the 1991 war, Secretary of State James Baker warned his Iraqi counterpart, Tariq Aziz, that Iraq faced "terrible consequences" if it used weapons of mass destruction, mounted terrorist attacks or destroyed Kuwaiti oil fields.
Yet despite this warning, Saddam Hussein tried to send terrorist teams to America and did blow up the Kuwaiti oil fields — he simply gambled on which two of the three things Mr. Baker mentioned were unlikely to result in America ending the regime. (Many officials from that Bush administration have suggested, in fact, that Saddam Hussein didn't even make the right calculation.)

If we're seeking lessons from the past to help us deal with Saddam Hussein, then the way we dealt with Mussolini's conquest of Abyssinia in 1935 is - as the Prime Minister understands - the place to look. I was particularly reminded of my own Abyssinia moment when I read about Saturday's anti-war march - hauntingly matched by the Peace Ballot of 1935, the national referendum in which millions voted for peace at almost any price, thus unwittingly persuading Hitler and Mussolini that bold predators had not much to fear.

But is there a progressive alternative to this left or are we all ‘right-wing libertarians now’?

I would contend that there is a new left emerging, not out of the remnants of the ‘cold war left’ which must be left to die, but in direct opposition to it.

There are signs of a left that is able to see through the fog of the past century and reclaim the original aim of progressive politics – to build upon the hard-gained achievements of liberal democracy, to defend it fiercely when it is threatened and, what should distinguish the left from others, to expand its principles to benefit all layers of society in all corners of the world.

The North Korean ship that last year delivered Scud missiles to Yemen transferred a large shipment of chemical weapons material from Germany to North Korea recently, U.S. intelligence officials said.

If the USA had two billion people in it and an economy twice its present size and growing really fast, and if all its internal checks and balances had either been castrated out of it by a succession of Julius Caesars (and there are some who say that exactly this last bit has already happened or will shortly happen) or else if the USA had never had any checks and balances in the first place – instead of a mere three hundred million (??) people and an economy chugging along okay, and a Constitution and a democratic political tradition that still counts (in my opinion) for a hell of a lot – then I wonder what I would think about the USA hegemonising in all directions the way it is now doing? Power corrupts, and absolute power, … etc. With a USA like that, I might regard even the occasional serious terrorist stunt in places like my own London SW1, even with WMDs, as a price worth paying to avoid such a world.

But as it is: go Uncle Sam. And then keep on going. Just don't fuck up.

The charge has a surface plausibility because Iraq does have the second-largest known reserves in the world. But we certainly don't need to send 250,000 soldiers to get at it. Saddam Hussein would gladly sell us all the oil we wanted. The only thing preventing unlimited sales are the United States-enforced sanctions, which Baghdad (and the big oil companies) would love to see lifted. Washington has refused to go along because Saddam Hussein flouts United Nations resolutions. This suggests that our primary focus is the threat he poses, not the oil he possesses.

It's true that overthrowing Saddam Hussein would lead to the lifting of sanctions and a possible increase in oil exports. But it would take a lot of time and money to rebuild Iraq's dilapidated oil industry, even if the regime didn't torch everything on the way out. A study from the Council on Foreign Relations and the James A. Baker III Institute at Rice University estimated that it would take three years and $5 billion to restore Iraqi production just to its pre-1990 level of 3.5 million barrels a day. That would increase total world production by only 1.3 percent, and might not reduce prices at all if other countries cut output or banded together to keep prices stable. …

Nobody would claim that America's global intentions have always been entirely pure. Still, our foreign policy — from the Barbary war to Kosovo — has usually had a strain of idealism at which the cynical Europeans have scoffed. In the case of Iraq, they just can't seem to accept that we might be acting for, say, the general safety and security of the world. After more than 200 years, Europe still hasn't figured out what makes America tick.

Soft-money contributions were previously the main source of financing for the national Democratic Party, which roughly kept pace with the Republicans in collecting them. By contrast, Republicans last year raised nearly twice as much hard money as the Democrats, evidence of a much broader base of contributors that Democrats believe has put the Republicans in a dominant fund-raising position as the 2004 presidential and Congressional races approach. While campaign experts had predicted that the Republicans would have an advantage, the gap has been even wider than expected.

Finally, members of both parties have been startled to learn the law's penalties. A violation of McCain-Feingold — be it a national party official's soft-money raising, or a senator's acting as a host at a fund-raiser on behalf of a governor — is a felony carrying a prison sentence of as much as five years.

At a recent weekend retreat for Republican members of Congress, Mr. Reynolds began an after-dinner discussion about the new law by announcing that those who ran afoul of it, even out of ignorance, faced the possibility of criminal sanctions.

It turns out that the law also includes a provision requiring that federal candidates appear full-faced for the last four seconds of their campaigns' television advertisements and personally attest that they stand behind the advertisements' content.

No Iraqi scientist involved in biological, chemical or missile technology has consented to a private interview with the inspectors since Feb. 7, the day before the two chief U.N. inspectors arrived here for talks with Iraqi officials. The United Nations also has not received additional documents about past weapons programs, despite the government's pledge to set up a commission to scour the country for evidence sought by the inspectors, U.N. officials said.