Who Loves Dictators?

It all depends on the dictator, but they all have their supporters. What's inexplicable is how Mark Steyn has tried to suggest that it's only liberals that get behind dictators. Really? Why then did Jonah Goldberg write such a loving eulogy for Augusto Pinochet? Why did Reagan send his buddy Don Rumsfeld to kick it with Saddam in the 1980s? Those are two examples off the top of my head, the fact is, I don't see dictator support as a liberal quirk.

Black, Rumsfeld, and the "Ostrich" Defence

On the way into work this morning I heard on the radio that the judge in Conrad Black's trial has said that Conrad cannot use the Ostrich defence in his trial (i.e.: his lawyers can't plead that he had his head in the sand about this whole thing if he was deliberately ignorant).

Meanwhile it appears that Rumsfeld is attempting the very same thing when it comes to the issue of torture at Abu Ghraib. It now appears that he deliberately made a show of not looking at photographs of what had happened. Andrew Sullivan writes:

"The most plausible inference is obviously that he covered his tracks and feigned ignorance and did not look at the photographs to create a record of complete deniability. The incompetence comes from ordering torture at Abu Ghraib and not realizing that evidence of it would spread and disseminate through new media that Rumsfeld probably wasn't that familiar with."

One wonders whether Rumsfeld will get away with this defence for what amounts to a war crime when Black has been denied this defence in a white collar crime trial.

Fantasy Reading

No, I'm not talking about the section your bookstore where every paperback cover has one of either a dragon, a wizard, or some kind of dude with pointy ears. Rather, here's what the Pentagon thought it would take to transition Iraq into some kind of functioning democratic, pluralistic state. This sort of "planning" was so amateurish that future generations studying this time period may well develop some kind of theory that Rumsfeld wanted to lose in Iraq, just because his plans for winning were so unrealistic.