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A reader quotes me:

“I’m not excusing my confirmation bias, my broad brush against opponents of the war (although I refuse to accept that they were all skeptical of the WMDs’ existence; many were just anti-Bush and anti-war), or my violation of just war doctrine.”

I find your casual dismissal of the many who voiced concerns over the Iraq war rather small-minded.  Many in the intelligence communities around the world were skeptical about the WMD claim, including in the US.  The real reason was that many concluded that it lacked a factual basis, not because individuals were “anti-Bush” or “anti-war.”  The key source of the WMD claim came from Iraqi refuge/informant Curveball, who was interviewed by German intelligence, not the US.  Leading up to the Iraq war, German foreign minister Joschka Fischer publicly addressed the WMD claim, stating: “Excuse me, I am not convinced.”  Germany was far from the only US ally who refrained from participating in the invasion of Iraq on similar grounds.  Their position was also consistent with the findings of the UN weapons inspectors at that time, led by Hans Blix.  Instead of speculating as to why some were skeptical of the WMD claim, why don’t you ask yourself why you were not?

How do you go from my criticism of my own “broad brush” in describing the Iraq War opposition to an inference that I am casually dismissing the serious critics and skeptics of the WMD argument? I was doing the exact opposite. I was distinguishing between those I should have listened to and those who were blindly against the war, fueled by the simmering resentments of the 2000 election. As to why my skepticism was completely AWOL, I’ve said I was terrorized by 9/11 and fear overwhelmed doubt. I was also marinated in a DC culture that saw Saddam’s WMDs as a bipartisan matter, backed by the Clintons and Bush. And I genuinely believed that Saddam was such a monster and so convinced of US military skill that the moral question seemed clear. I was wrong on every count. But I was wrong in good, if nearly-blind, faith. And the opposition shouldn’t be painted with a virtuous broad brush either. I went to the anti-war marches. You think ANSWER was animated by the WMD question? Another writes:

I remain fascinated not so much by why commentators I otherwise respect got the Iraq war wrong, but by why even they – in their mea culpas – so rarely mention those who got the war right (except, perhaps Barack Obama) and it ties into one of most tiresome excuses people in the Bush Administration give for not finding WMD “Everyone got it wrong.” Except, that’s not true.

Look at how you dismissed Chirac. Was he less a man of honor than, say, Dick Cheney?

One thing that I noticed during the Bush administration about the Republicans’ (and news media’s) attitude towards France was how rarely we were reminded that the French not only had better sense than to join us in Iraq, but they also foiled a jet-into-tower attack before 9/11. Bush really didn’t want people to think too much about how some leaders managed to hear and follow up on their nation’s intelligence services while he opted to go fishing. Chirac did see the kinds of intelligence of our leaders saw. He and his government must surely have subjected it to some analysis. There’s no reason to believe that a nation with that many not-fully-acculturated Muslim citizens and immigrants would have been indifferent to any probable detonation of dirty bombs or nuclear bombs by Islamists.

Another:

I was 21 when we invaded, and a few years later I was in Iraq. I watched Colin Powell give his presentation on television. I was an early skeptic of this war – why are we moving on when we haven’t found bin Laden and Afghanistan is still a mess? And why does Saddam need to go, now, when this evidence is so sketchy?. But I had tremendous respect for Powell. I also knew that he wouldn’t go before the UN without real evidence. He had too much integrity. I was ready to be persuaded.

And then he stood there before the world, and tap-danced. This was the moment for the US to show its hand, and we had nothing. And Powell knew it. He wasn’t convinced. You could see it in his face. I felt embarrassed for him and terrified for the country and ashamed that someone with such integrity would  peddle something he almost certainly knew was a lie with such disastrous consequences.

To this day, more than anything else, it is Powell’s presentation I think back to when I try (and fail) to understand why so many people supported the war with such smug confidence, and such disdain for those who raised truly reasonable objections. And to read things like this now, 10 years later, after so much blood, and after the violent deaths of so many – of some I knew – makes me nauseous.

Another:

For my mea culpa, one name is burned into my brain: Judith Miller. I trusted her. I expect the government to lie to me. But I did not expect a NY Times reporter to lie like the most corrupt politician, an absolute snake in the grass. The Times carries a heavy burden of responsibility for that war.

Another:

I think you (and many others) miss a huge detail of how we got into the mess in Iraq. One of your posts highlighted how Clinton made it US policy to force regime change in Iraq … but this misses a big back story.  I wrote my masters thesis on the phenomenon of foreign lobbying as a kind of covert action, both by states and non-state actors. One of my case studies was Chalabi and his efforts to push for the passage of the Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998 (which is the act that made it US policy to promote regime change in Iraq). In short, I think in many ways the United States government and media were the targets of a very shrewd effort by a foreign entity, i.e. Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, to change US policy to its needs. It was able to do so in large part because of the lack of enforcement of US laws regulating foreign lobbying.

So beat yourself up all you want, but remember that there was a definite propaganda effort being pushed there, with a lot of help from trained intelligence professionals and professional lobbyists in Washington.  The sad thing is that much of this was revealed after the WMD commission was completed, so Chalabi’s role is largely forgotten in the official history of the lead up to Iraq War.

Read the whole recent Iraq thread here.

Kent Sepkowitz applauds how the latest episode of Girls depicts Hannah’s Obsessive Compulsive Disorder:

She inserts a Q-tip into one ear and traumatizes it, causing a bloody mess and giving the episode its great line (“I heard hissing” after the puncture). Then comes the requisite sitcom schlemiel-like ER visit with a doctor and some drops and some close-ups. But in the episode’s last scene, she grabs the difficult third rail of mental illness once again, showing us Hannah placing a new Q-tip into the other ear. And counting.

With this scene, it appears Dunham is willing to portray real OCD, not the scrubbed and kinda fun version where people are cleaning their hands at inopportune times or else hopping over cracks in the sidewalk. She is trying—I hope—to pull the mental illness away from the lighthearted and silly, and show it as the anguishing compulsion that requires immediate attention and a rain-dance-like repetitive activity to maintain the ordered rows and columns necessary to assure that true darkness remains way over there. The depiction seems promising enough that Dunhamalready has gotten thumbs-up from people involved with OCD treatment and research.

Relatedly, William Brennan advises never putting Q-Tips in your ears:

The problem with removing earwax (by Q-Tip or any other home remedy) is that earwax serves important functions: It is a lubricant, a defense against foreign objects, and even a natural antibiotic. Earwax becomes a problem when it is packed into the canal and hardens, causing “impaction” (or blockage), and evidence shows that Q-Tips can cause impaction.

A reader writes:

As the fine arts book buyer and assistant manager for an independent bookstore [seen above] in your newly-adopted city, I am disheartened to learn that you’re continuing to make affiliate revenue from Amazon, a corporation hell-bent on destroying print culture and, along with it, my job. From their loss-leading book pricing to their vile price-check app, Amazon has made itself the scourge of small booksellers everywhere.

You may not have much love for the publishing industry, but, like it or not, we need traditional book publishers to sift through endless submissions, just as we need highly-literate booksellers to promote exceptional new works to the public. I’m just not convinced digital self-publishing on its own can sustain literary fiction and scholarly nonfiction written by little-known authors. I have enormous respect for publishers like Farrar, Strauss and Giroux and Twelve Books that continue to release amazing new books each year. (Twelve Books published Hitchen’s superb memoir, incidentally.) I’m at a loss to understand how such “dead-tree” publishers have incurred your wrath.

I don’t deny e-books have their benefits, but they also have many drawbacks.

The books you buy for your Kindle aren’t covered under the first sale doctrine. You don’t technically own them and you certainly can’t resell them. E-books are not collectable, cannot truly be signed by authors, and, unlike printed books, make for lousy gifts. And forget about finding most illustrated books on art, photography, design, or architecture on you Kindle. And that goes for graphic novels, atlases, and children’s books, too.

Besides illustrated content, printed books themselves can be beautiful objects. Do we really want to entirely replace the tactile qualities of paper and cloth, along with their pleasing cover design, with pixels on a screen? More importantly, do we want to live in a world without bookshops?

In the past, you’ve linked to printed books when the e-book version is unavailable. Noel Malcolm’s edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan isn’t available on Kindle, for instance. You may not have noticed that Amazon user reviews for all previous editions of Leviathan appear on the same page, as if they were indistinguishable. This is just one of many indications of how Amazon sees selling books as no different than selling baby formula or toaster ovens.

It’s wonderful that you provide healthcare for your interns, but I had hoped the revenue from subscriptions would have covered this. Maybe I’m overstepping my bounds, but I’d love to see you link to indie bookstores like Strand, McNally Jackson, or Community Bookstore in the future. Not only would you be helping local businesses in your city, you’d also be taking the right (and, dare I say, conservative) stand.

Noreen Malone rolls her eyes at the lengthy and self-aggrandizing “Acknowledgements” page of Sheryl Sandberg’s new book and complains about what the practice has become:

While Sandberg is the latest egregious example, she’s in good company. E.J. Dionne, a master of the form, tends to include just about every famous person he has ever met in his end pages. “[I]f these acknowledgments are a bit long, I hope the reader will forgive me. It’s because I have a lot of debts to pay,” he writes at the close of Why Americans Hate Politics. (The list is actually very useful in that it offers a much more concise evocation of why Americans hate politics than the book itself: Look no farther than his lengthy list to be reminded of Washington’s much-maligned clubbiness.)

Chelsea Clinton was recently thanked in the acknowledgments of Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree, and also scattered faux-carelessly amidst the long list of Brooklyn writer types who’d read drafts of Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s A Sense of Direction, suggesting either that Ms. Clinton has a particular interest in highbrow modes of self-discovery, or that those interested in highbrow modes of self-discovery have a particular interest in her.

David Haglund counters:

“Perhaps readers already know that book publishing is an insular, back-scratching industry,” [Sam] Sacks says, “but does it have to be revealed quite so openly?” Why wouldn’t we want it to be? The real inspiration for a work of literary art may be mysterious, but the process by which that work reaches us should not be. Transparency is good. And so is gratitude.

But there’s gratitude and then there’s the literary equivalent of fellating every conceivable human being who had anything even faintly to do with the project. It’s a bit unfair to pick on EJ – revealing my own Washington clubbiness – because I bet he’s just a Catholic making sure he is not being ungracious. But he’s the exception to the rule.

There is, of course, the hathetic response: a gleeful examination of the author’s network of influential friends and literary connections. They tell you something about an author.

Less than 24 hours before it was scheduled to go into effect, a judge struck down Bloomberg’s ban on large sodas as “arbitrary and capricious.” The mayor’s response:

Rick Hills, observing that the ban was struck down for being too narrow rather than too broad, is uneasy with the judge’s ruling:

How can it make sense to force the Health Department into such a judicially tailored straitjacket, requiring bureaucrats to pursue an all-or-nothing policy whenever they implement a law? Is Justice Tingling really demanding that agencies jettison consideration of cost, administrative feasibility, personal privacy, or financial feasibility when they pursue their primary mandate? Such reasoning is not unprecedented: Recall FDA v. Brown & Williamson‘s argument that the FDA would have to ban cigarettes entirely if they were an unsafe “medical device” and not merely regulate cigarettes’ advertisements.

Frum considers the broader implications:

The serving ban obviously had problems. It represented an experiment that might or might not have achieved results. But if incremental – sorry, “arbitrary and capricious” – steps are not permissible, what is? Or is the plan that government can do nothing about the obesity problem except continue to defray through Medicare and Medicaid the large and rising costs of the super-sizing of the American population?

And Alex Koppelman wonders whether Bloomberg’s successor will support the ban:

Tingling’s ruling could well be overturned at the appellate level—the ban was widely expected to survive legal challenges without too much trouble—but that can only happen if the case gets that far. Bloomberg’s administration will go to a higher court, of course, but he’ll be out of office next year, and not everyone who’s vying to replace him supports the ban. The issue was bound to surface during the upcoming election; now it’s all but certain to, and the key question to the candidates will be whether they’ll continue the court fight if they’re elected, or if they’ll simply let it drop.

Bruce Barcott argues that America needs a safe place to store its nuclear waste. Some tips on getting a community to support the construction of a nuclear waste site:

“With an issue like this, explicit cash payments make people very uncomfortable,” says Michael O’Hare [a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley who has studied Not In My BackYard problems for more than thirty years]. “They feel that this is not the kind of thing that ought to be traded in money.” When people consider a NIMBY project, whether it’s an airport, a prison, or a nuclear waste site, they impute a moral content to their behavior. Compensation sullies their motivation. “Crudely caricatured,” he wrote in a recent report, “a compensation offer can appear to ask, ‘How much do we have to pay you to give your children cancer?’”

Towns that entertain the thought of a nearby nuclear waste dump often have an economic rationale for doing so, but they’re also wary of being bought off. The key, O’Hare said, is to find indirect ways of compensating the local community that builds on a sense of pride in the facility.

The latest from the Papal betting markets:

Andrea Tornielli previews Conclave, which begins today:

[W]hen the 115 voters will shut themselves in the Sistine Chapel for the election, a fair number of votes (some mentioned 35, others 40) should go to the Archbishop of Milan, Angelo Scola, who has the support of various European cardinals and a few Americans. If he is elected, the papacy will become Italian again, thirty-five years after the election of John Paul I. Another candidate who should gather a fair amount of consensus is the Archbishop of São Paulo, Odilo Pedro Scherer, a Brazilian with a long experience in the Curia.

Unconfirmed reports on the eve of the Conclave – which of course need to be taken with a pinch of salt – suggest the Brazilian could get 25 votes. A third candidate who might stand out from the beginning is the Canadian Marc Ouellet, Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops who is believed to be able to draw to himself twelve votes from South America and the United States.

Rocco Palmo dismisses the horserace mentality:

The road to a Conclave never begins with a slate of “contenders,” but the discernment of issues and exchange of ideas – in this instance, 115 slates of experiences, philosophies, priorities and concerns on what’s needed most at this moment in history, all weighing a mix of skill-set, background, personal qualities and, yes, image, plus the sliding scale of sending a message to the wider world while, internally, providing the optimal substance of leadership.

In short, the path begins with a question in each elector’s mind: “What is the situation of the church?”  It ends with which melding of those answers in human form can make it to 77.

Alice Park spoke to David Jones about his new book, Broken Hearts: The Tangled History of Cardiac Care, and the reasons why bypass surgery and angioplasty aren’t all they’re cracked up to be:

Each intervention, promising lifesaving relief, was embraced with enthusiasm by cardiologists and cardiac surgeons—and both techniques often do provide rapid, dramatic reduction of the alarming pain associated with angina. Yet, as Jones painstakingly explains, it took years to show whether the procedures prolonged lives; in both cases, subsequent research deflated those early hopes. The interventions—major procedures, with potentially significant side effects—provided little or no improvement in survival rates over standard medical and lifestyle treatment except in the very sickest patients. …

“There’ve been focus groups with prospective patients who have stunningly exaggerated expectations of efficacy. Some believed that angioplasty would extend their life expectancy by 10 years! Angioplasty can save the lives of heart-attack patients. But for patients with stable coronary disease, who comprise a large share of angioplasty patients? It has not been shown to extend life expectancy by a day, let alone 10 years—and it’s done a million times a year in this country.”

Kevin Hartnett outlines the reasons we continue to use the procedures:

As Syria degenerates further, the Guardian pieces together “the story behind one of the most shocking images of the war” – 110 civilian corpses washing ashore along the Queiq River in Aleppo:

The concrete ledge from where the bodies were recovered is now covered by waters which, on 29 January, had receded leaving the sodden remains exposed, blood oozing from single bullet wounds to each of their shattered skulls. … “The image of my cousin was horrifying. His face was wrapped with nylon bag and with a tape to make sure he will be dead not only from the bullet but from suffocating. It is heart breaking. Killing Bashar and all of the shabiha won’t be enough revenge.” …

“Before I left the prison, they took 30 people from isolation cells and killed them.” Abdel Rezzaq said he was being held in Block 4, within earshot of the solitary confinement cells and the area where he alleges the prisoners were taken, then executed. “They handcuffed them and blindfolded them and they were torturing them till they died.” “They poured acid on them. The smell was very strong and we were suffocating from it. Then we heard gunshots. The next day they put me and some of the others in front of men with guns, but they didn’t shoot at us. They freed me later that day.”

“I heard women screaming. They were pouring alcohol on us and cursing us. Only God got us out of there, no-one gets out alive. And only god knows what happened to the rest of the people who were in there. I will fight for this cause because I want the whole world to see what is happening.”

Videos and more details here. A more graphic and haunting image after the jump:

(Photos by JM Lopez/AFP/Getty Images)