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Some random links I've been meaning to post (and a new one):

Eric Alterman thinks Jonathan Chait's piece for the National Review on homeland security--and the alarming extent to which the Bush administration has consistently failed to support it, apparently in an effort to keep spending down, necessary to maintain its popular tax cut--is "the single most important article of the year". Unfortunately, to read it online, you'll have to pay twenty bucks for a subscription. (Me, I plan to check my local public library.)
Paul Krugman cites the article, too, and adds the new fact that what money there is for homeland security is going disproportionately to states that are unlikely to be targets. And, as it happens, states that are most likely to vote Republican.
And we're paying almost $80 billion dollars for the few weeks of the war. David Broder on something we're not paying for:
the most effective anti-crime strategies -- and the least expensive -- are early childhood education, after-school programs and serious mentoring of youngsters who otherwise are almost certainly fated to be dropouts, delinquents and, yes, prison inmates.
Nick Penniman and Richard Just on "Why liberals need an affirmative position on Iraq":
Liberals have the skills that will be most needed in nurturing an Iraqi democracy: fostering tolerance and multiculturalism, building mixed and well-regulated economies, creating social safety nets, promoting public health and environmental cleanliness, fighting for civil liberties and beefing up education. Liberals will also be more likely than conservatives to demand that Iraqi oil be turned over to those who rightfully own it, that is, the Iraqi people. Can progressives really afford to leave these important objectives in the hands of Dick Cheney, Richard Perle and their corporate cronies?
The flip side of optimism is the administration's war plan, apparently based on the assumption that everything would go well. Here's Seymour Hersh's article about "The battle between Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon."
“Hope,” a retired four-star general subsequently told me, “is not a course of action.”
Sometimes to stay optimistic you have to make a special effort. For example, if you play war games to plan your invasion, and you lose, maybe the problem isn't that your plan is bad--maybe you just need to change the rules. From Julian Borger, last September:
Faced with an abrupt and embarrassing end to the most expensive and sophisticated military exercise in US history, the Pentagon top brass simply pretended the whole thing had not happened. They ordered their dead troops back to life and "refloated" the sunken fleet. Then they instructed the enemy forces to look the other way as their marines performed amphibious landings.
The story's been revived by Fred Kaplan, in Slate.
The Daily Howler is a constant source of fine-toothed media analysis. Yesterday's piece was great, quoting the Washington Post's William Raspberry:
Should debate about the war continue now that the war has actually begun? Raspberry “is inclined” to say that it shouldn’t, he says. “But what are we supposed to do,” he asks,” when we suspect that our desire for national solidarity is being exploited in quite cynical fashion?” The scribe continues: “What if we believe we are being manipulated into supporting positions we don’t believe in—positions we believe will be harmful to our long-term national interests?”
That's right: An American pundit has to ask himself whether we should object to policies that are harmful to our national interests.