Jonah takes issue with Susan Sontag’s editorial, in which she frets about “war without end.”

But wars never have a certain ending at the beginning, now do they? That?s why they?re so scary; we never know when they?ll end. Who knew when ? or how — World War Two was going to end? Does that mean it wasn?t a “real war” until it ended? The Hundred Years War must have seemed pretty endless to a few people with life-expectancies under 40. My dictionary?s definition of war doesn?t mention anything about a deadline.

He misses the point (surprising, because it’s one that he’s made himself in the past). While he’s right in arguing with her notion that this isn’t a real war, she isn’t demanding a schedule–she’s asking for a condition that will determine when the war is over. So am I.

A “war on terrorism,” which Jonah has rightly said is a misnomer, truly does have no end, because there will always be terrorists, just as we can never win a “war on drugs,” because there will always be some people who use drugs, regardless of how much of the Bill of Rights we shred.

As I said a couple of posts down, this war is really very similar to World War II–it just has different tactics (well, and strategies). If we declare war on Iraq, or on Saudi Arabia, or even on the ideologies that drive the current governments of those nations, then the war will be over when those governments that support those ideologies are defeated and overthrown.

There are individual Nazis and communists (and even Communists) still in the world, but there’s a broad consensus that Nazism and Communism have been defeated, and the war with them over, because we defeated their power and their expression, their instantiation, in the form of the Nazi regime of Germany and the Communist regime of the former Soviet Union.

Similarly, when we have defeated Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and Syria, and any other regimes that continue to harbor the toxic ideologies that support, encourage, and succor terrorists, then the war will be over, even if terrorism per se has not been eradicated from the earth (as it probably never will be, in any society with human liberties). But in order to do that, we must clarify who the real enemy is. As long as the simplistic answer is “terrorist,” then it will truly be a war without end, and a continuing danger to our civil liberties at home.

Amidst pointing out why the Soviet Union was deterrable, and Saddam may not be, Eugene Volokh makes an important point this morning on the subject of deterring Iraq.

Finally, we should recognize that while deterrence worked during the Cold War, it was a very high-risk strategy. We relied on deterrence because we had no choice. Right now, it seems like we do have a choice; we can preemptively strike against Iraq much more cheaply than we could have preemptively struck against the USSR. And if we miss this opportunity, we might be placed in a situation where deterrence won’t work nearly as well as it fortunately did work against the Soviets.

I’ve posted before on the problem with the argument that toppling Saddam puts us on a slippery slope (e.g., if Saddam, why not Mugabe, who is apparently as vicious, or Pakistan, which also has nukes), and that the response to this is that a number of factors go into the decision–no single one can justify it.

Professor Volokh points out one more. In addition to all the other reasons, like the dog that licks his own privates, we should take out Saddam because we can.

If we could have defeated the Soviet Union earlier at an acceptable cost and risk to ourselves, the Cold War would, and should, have been a hot one. We lived for over forty years in a very high-risk state (which also prevented us from decisively defending, for example, the people of northern Korea from communism) because we had no other choice, not because we had no cause to defeat the Soviets. Because they had nukes and the ability to deliver them, we could not risk an actual war with them. Had Hitler gotten them, we might very well have ended up with a stalemate in Europe just as long-lasting as the one with the Soviets.

The longer we wait to take out Saddam (and the other toxic governments of the region) the greater the risk that the risk of taking him out will become unacceptable. The notion that we should wait until he is closer to having nuclear weapons, or actually has them, before we respond to him, is simply bizarre.

Many of us in the Blogosphere have argued for months that we are not at war with “terror,” which is just a tactic, but rather with a particularly virulent sect of one of the world’s major religions–Wahhabism. While true, it opens us up to the charge that this means that we are therefore not justified in going after Saddam’s Iraq, which is after all a secular state, and the enemy of the Wahhabis to the south.

In today’s London Times, Michael Gove has come up with a sort of “unified field theory” of the Middle East, which helps square this circle. We are at war with two toxic ideologies, fundamentalist Islam, and Ba’athism in Iraq and Syria, both of which find a very fertile petri dish in the corrupt governance and culture of the present Middle East. He compares them to Nazism and Communism, two ideologies opposed to each other, but even more implacably sharing a hatred of the West.

Against these evils there can be no effective containment, just as there could be no lasting appeasement of the Nazis or no meaningful detente with Communists. Weakness in the face of evil only encourages its practitioners.

The events of September 11 did not follow assertions of Western strength. They were the acts of extremists emboldened by our irresolution in the face of terror, our preference for peace processes and bombing aspirin factories over the hard business of tackling evil at its source.

The enduring tragedy of that day is that we did not act before, to save the West from terror by saving the Middle East from tyranny. The enduring legacy of that day is that we cannot rest until that work is done, until we dismantle the cultures in which the poison still ferments.

[Via Jim Bennett email]

Wired reports that it’s not presently possible to clone humans without serious genetic damage. Here are the political implications for the cloning debate:

The study, however, has no impact on so-called therapeutic cloning, the researchers said. Researchers hope one day to use cloning technology to develop treatments or cures for various diseases. A bill that would ban the procedure languished in Congress this summer.

“It is important to remember that embryonic stem cells when combined with normal cells ?- as is the case with cell therapy — may function fine,” Jaenisch said.

Berg emphasized this point, and added that because lawmakers entwined the two types of cloning in their legislation, the United States is left with no regulation at all.

“It looks to me that this issue is dead for this session of Congress,” he said. “That means at the moment there’s no legislation for continuing to do therapeutic cloning, or even to clone a person, which is stupid. They should have passed a prohibition on cloning people and let it go at that.”

There’s another problem. The results of this study cannot, and do not, prove that we will never be able to clone humans–just that we don’t know enough to do so safely at present. But many of the arguments against human cloning don’t even center on the viability of the process. Even if it can be done safely, many still think that it should be illegal (which is one of the reasons that the two types of cloning became intertwined–the opponents simply opposed cloning of all forms on raw religious grounds).

If we are going to legislate this issue, we should at least attempt to separate out not only the two types of cloning, but also separate out the rationales for outlawing it, or not. If it’s for religious reasons, then circumstances will never change (at least for the people who are opposed to it for that reason, barring a conversion to another belief system), but if it’s because we simply want to avoid creating unhealthy people, then that’s not an argument against cloning per se. It’s just an argument against doing it badly, and as our understanding of the process improves over time, and we develop the necessary confidence in our ability to clone healthy humans, the issue should be revisited, because banning it does in fact entail a cost in fundamental human freedom.

For instance, legislation based on current flaws in the process, as described in this research, might be sunsetted, expiring in, say, five or ten years, at which point Congress would have to redebate it in the context of the state of the technology at that time. If the arguments against it are then not sufficiently strong, we could revert back to the current default (that which is not illegal is legal).

But if we’re going to put into place legislation that bans it for all time (at least until new legislation can be passed undoing the ban), then those proposing it should have to make that case, and this research result, which may be ephemeral, shouldn’t be allowed to help justify such a law.

I just saw a commercial for Southwest Air Lines. A bunch of folks are having a telecon, and are surprised to find that one of the participants is not in the office, and thus unavailable. A secretary pops her head into the conference room, and says that so-and-so is about to join them in person.

Then the announcer makes the point that travel is affordable–Southwest will get you anywhere for $299 one way.

Yeah, well, that’s nice, I guess.

The problem is, that when I go to LAX, the longest security line that I see is at Terminal 1–Southwest. This is particularly irritating, because it holds up vehicular traffic as well, and since it’s Terminal 1, it creates a bottleneck into the airport for other terminals. Once past the first terminal, the traffic flow improves signicantly.

Sure, you can fly cheap, if your time has no value, but who wants to stand in a long security line? Now admittedly, this may be because Southwest is prospering with its low fares, and low costs, and black ink. But they have to understand that they’re not going to pull in business travelers with ads about how cheap their tickets are, if they know that they’re going to have to get to the airport an hour earlier to stand in line in security. And you can’t just blame Norm Mineta and his confederacy of dunces at DOT (though they undoubtedly make the problem worse), because it seems to be a problem unique to Southwest.

My question–is it just LAX, or are the Southwest lines worse than the others in other major cities?

I was really counting on the stupidity of Florida Democrats, as demonstrated in 2000. But now McBride is up over Reno by two points.

It doesn’t say whether it’s a poll of adults, registered, or likely voters, but I’m still pulling for a surge in the idiotarian vote.

In the most detailed accounting yet of the air defense situation last September 11, there’s an interesting article in Aviation Week. It says that the inadequately-armed pilots of the Air Guard F-16s considered ramming Flight 93.

Hutchison was probably airborne shortly after the alert F-16s from Langley arrived over Washington, although 121st FS pilots admit their timeline-recall “is fuzzy.” But it’s clear that Hutchison, Sasseville and Lucky knew their options were limited for bringing down a hijacked airliner headed for an undetermined target in the capital city. Although reluctant to talk about it, all three acknowledge they were prepared to ram a terrorist-flown aircraft, if necessary. Indeed, Hutchison–who might have been the first to encounter Flight 93 if it had, indeed, been flying low and fast down the Potomac–had no other choice.

Sasseville and Lucky each had 511 rounds of ammo, but that only provided roughly a 5-sec. burst of the 20-mm. gun. And where should they shoot to ensure a hijacked aircraft would be stopped? Sasseville planned to fire from behind and “try to saw off one wing. I needed to disable it as soon as possible– immediately interrupt its aerodynamics and bring it down.”

He admits there was no assurance that a 5-sec. burst of lead slugs could slice an air transport’s wing off, though. His alternative was “to hit it–cut the wing off with my wing. If I played it right, I’d be able to bail out. One hand on the stick and one hand on the ejection handle, trying to ram my airplane into the aft side of the [airliner’s] wing,” he said. “And do it skillfully enough to save the pink body . . . but understanding that it might not go as planned. It was a tough nut; we had no other ordnance.”

While Stacy at Sekimori does great stuff, she’s not the only web designer out there. Anyone looking for an upgrade might want to consider Bill Simon (not the one ineptly running against Gray Davis) at Next Paradigm for site design. As you can see, he just helped me do a little spiff up of the Transterrestrial site.

Those lucky Iraqis get to vote next month whether or not to keep Saddam as their fearless leader. And they say there’s no democracy in the Arab world.

Martin Walker says that America has had enough of European hypocrisy and lousy advice.

“When the Europeans demand some sort of veto over American actions, or want us to subordinate our national interest to a UN mandate, they forget that we do not think their track record is too good,” a senior U.S. diplomat said recently in private. “The Europeans told us they could win the Balkans wars all on their own. Wrong. They told us that the Russians would never accept National Missile Defense. Wrong. They said the Russians would never swallow NATO enlargement. Wrong. They told us 20 years ago that d