Absolutely fascinating article on how a little-known policy group (boasting some of the most prominent names in Bush’s coterie) has been pushing for war on Iraq for years and years. This article is an eye-opener from the opening sentences.

Sample:

An obscure, ominous-sounding right-wing policy group called Project for the New American Century, or PNAC – affiliated with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld’s top deputy Paul Wolfowitz and Bush’s brother Jeb – even urged then-President Clinton to invade Iraq back in January 1998.

“We urge you to… enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world,” stated the letter to Clinton, signed by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and others. “That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.”

The mission statement of this little group, PNAC, is downright prophetic:

“The history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire,” says the PNAC’s statement of principles. “The history of this century should have taught us to embrace the cause of American leadership.”

Read the whole article, then comb around over at this site for the full scoop on what PNAC is all about. (Be sure to check out the links in the right-hand sidebar.) This is really a bit of a revelation.

This is all thanks to a post from Orcinus, to whom all I can say is “Thank you.”

[Disclaimer: I wrote this post after drinking a can of Baron’s Strong Brew Beer, and only after I finished it did I see how high the alcohol content is. (I’m amazed they actually sell it here.) So I am not responsible for anything that follows; blame it on Barons.]

It is infinitely harder to blog in Singapore than in Beijing, and I am really facing a dilemma. Everything here is so status quo, so…predictable. The weather, the news, the weekends. (Yes, of course the weekends are predictable, because the only thing to do during the weekend is shop and eat.)

That is actually a compliment, of course. It’s what many societies strive to be — harmonious, workable, under control, contented….(boring?). It’s great for Singapore, but it really sucks for blogging.

China, of course, is a Western blogger’s paradise. So much there is, to the average Westerner, extraordinary, incomprehensible, a true shock to the mind and the senses. And, thanks to our friends in the CCP, life over there never ceased to amaze me, from the ubiquitous deification of Madman Mao to the insane rituals of the annual Party Congress (which this year was made just a bit more insane than usual — if such is possible — by that devious little pathogen we call SARS) to the machine-gun-toting guards who stand in front of the national TV station buildings (without a tightly controlled media, the Party stands naked and vulnerable)….

No, there was never a shortage of blog material in the PRC. In fact, from my memory bank alone, I could blog about China for years and years to come. If my mother and my current boss didn’t read this blog, I would tell you all stories that would make your hair stand on end. I wasn’t happy living there, but God, I miss it, at least from a blogging perspective.

I am jealous of Phil and Conrad over in Hong Kong, where they’ve got the best of both worlds; they’re a stone’s throw from all the lunacy over in the People’s Republic, and they’re in the center of a vortex, witnessing “history in the making” as Hong Kong wrestles with defining itself in the wake of reunification with a very foreign mother country. They have blog material handed to them on a plate, with a red ribbon tied around it.

And then we get to Singapore. Work, eat, shop, watch sanitized TV, sleep, work, eat, shop…. Sorry for whinging, but it’s getting on my nerves lately. It’s really nice, really comfortable, really pretty. But there’s no Wan Chai, and there are certainly no demonstrations in the streets, no political upheavals or convulsive controversies.

My day begins each morning with my alarm clock going off; a radio clock, it is tuned to the only classical music channel in town, and like everything else in this city-state-whatever-it-is, it’s maddeningly predictable. There are rules (and if anyplace loves rules, thrives on rules, it is Singapore). Each piece of music will be no longer than 10 minutes. There will be no complete symphonies or complete operas or complete musical works of any kind: only 10-minute-long, instantly digestible, pleasant, bite-sized nuggets of music. A movement of Eine Kleine Nacht Music; a cheerful excerpt from a Beethoven Symphony; lots of happy, innocuous 10-minute pieces by Teleman and Haydn (whom I love, but not in little chunks). Pre-digested and pleasant. Never any brooding Mahler or dark late Brahms or sensual Wagner. Not in Singapore.

So that’s how the day begins, with some classical cotton candy. Again, it’s sweet, but it definitely doesn’t match my sturm-und-drang temperament, my thirst for the broadest spectrum of emotional sensations, from the bitterest to the sweetest, from those blinding sunrises to those dark, disquieting midnights of the soul, where one’s mind can romp about and pay homage to what D.H. Lawrence refers to as the “dark gods.” There are no dark gods in Singapore.

Singapore. What is there to blog about in Singapore, except the difficulty of blogging here?!? I don’t know, but what I do know is this: I had better think of something fast or this blog will be cancelled for lack of material. God, what a challenge! And it only goes to underscore the basic nature of man, to be unsatisfied wherever he is. After all, in China I longed for stability and comfort, and now that I have it, I long only for chaos and pandemonium. No, I can’t win.

Josh Marshall, who tends to go out of his way to be decorous toward his fellow reporters, today uncharacteristically blasts William Safire to bits for questioning the loyalty of those who dare question Bush’s use of unreliable data to justify invading Iraq:.

“I’ll be honest with you. I struggled for some time trying to think up a way to discuss Safire’s Monday morning column. But the whole thing was such a cynical mix of half-truths, untruths and twisted logic that it ended up besting me.”

He finally does come up with a way, and it’s great reading. The whole post seethes, which again is uncharacteristic of the usually reserved Marshall, and the closing paragraph is priceless.

A test to see whether I can upload images.

I just watched an episode of the new BBC series, Holidays in the Axis of Evil, in which a reporter visits the world’s most evil empires, like Iran, Libya, North Korea and Cuba, and sees what they have to offer the holiday goer.

Tonight’s evil empire was North Korea, and it was every bit as surreal as I would have expected, and then some.

The reporter’s tour guide (and you can’t visit North Korea without one) walks him through one war museum after another where, predictably, the electric lights are always out due to perennial power shortages. She takes him to a bookstore where virtually every book (and there are lots) are either books by Dear Leader or his father Great Leader, or books about the two of them.

They visit the DMZ, where the tour guide explains how the Korean War began when the “US imperialists,” as they are always referred to, invaded North Korea. The reporter asks, incredulously, how so many North Korean troops made their way so deep into South Korea if they were simply defending themselves from an invasion coming from the south. Oh, that’s all propaganda, the tour guide blithely explains.

Most amazing, at least visually, was the reporter’s visit to the annual celebrations of Dear Leader, where 100,000 North Koreans put on this spectacular show in a huge stadium. Holding up diffferent-colored pieces of cloth, the masses create gorgeous and complex frescoes, one after another — I can’t describe it in words; anyone who has seen it knows it is quite beyond belief. Crazy, but beautiful in its way.

This really drove home just how bonkers North Korea is. In one scene that looked like it was going to be a bit normal, the tour guide takes the reporter to relax at the beach. Finally, something that kind of resembles life as we know it! But alas, the camera then zooms in on the fence behind the sandy beach — an electrified fence that the tour guide warns could kill a man. This is to protect N. Korea from American imperialists when they try to attack the beaches in scuba gear; they will fry on the fence. (It reminded me of the opening of Die Another Day, where 007 surfs his way onto the N. Korean beach.)

This is a great series; it renewed my faith in television. Don’t miss it.

It will be interesting to see how Andrew Sullivan responds to this article in the WaPo. Sullivan’s been on the rampage lately against ABC-TV for its recent interviews of US soldiers in Iraq who said on the record they believe Rumsfeld should resign.

What would Sullivan say about the White House’s apparent efforts to smear the ABC reporter by publicizing that he’s….gay? Not just gay, but also Canadian! (Can you imagine?) Read the article; it’s worse than you think.

This administration’s gleeful willingness to pulverize anyone it perceives as being in its way is frightening. What’s more frightening is that they seem to be getting away with it. Maybe I’m wrong; is there a lot of outrage back home about this in the mainstream press, on TV, etc.?

[Via the best news blog in DC.]

It’s interesting that on the US home page of Yahoo the story of Dr. Kelly’s death was listed for a couple of hours among the top stories and then vanished, while on the UK home page it’s been the No. 1 story since last night, with two separate entries in the top stories of the day. It’s all we’ve been hearing about on the BBC here in Asia, but if you go to the NY Times site, you have to scroll down to the International listings to find the story, well below the photo of Kobe Bryant and the day’s top stories. Interesting.

It’s apparent that in the UK, this is a true bombshell. I suspect there’s going to a wave of stories like this over the next couple of days, and Tony Blair’s battle will soon be a veritable siege.

The NY Times book review begins thus:

This is sure to be the most often repeated brutal detail from Jon Krakauer’s new book: that a Mormon Fundamentalist named Dan Lafferty spoke briefly to his 15-month-old niece on July 24, 1984, just before he killed her with a 10-inch boning knife. Mr. Lafferty explains to the author from his permanent home in a Utah state prison, “I told her: `I’m not sure what this is all about, but apparently it’s God’s will that you leave this world. Perhaps we can talk about it later.'”

Don’t get me wrong; as a member of a minority religion that has seen its share of intolerance, I am a firm believer in religious freedom and tolerance. Still, I’ve always had problems understanding Mormons, and this was exacerbated after I worked in a predomionantly Mormon office for nearly two years. (I can tell lots of stories about that.)

Anyway, check out the article and see why, in a world of many strange and outlandish religious sects and cults, the Church of Latter Day Saints stands out proudly as perhaps the most bizarre. And, at least in the US, the bloodiest.

Could conspiracy freaks ask for anything better than this? British scientist David Kelly, WMD expert who has been a key figure in the debate on whether the notorious British dossier was fraudulent or not, vanishes into thin air after taking a walk some hours ago, and a body is found outside his home.

Update on the blaring television — the body has been identified as Kelly’s. It will be a busy blog day.

I’m planning on moving my whole site over to Movable Type, so brace yourselves for some changes here. (I’m quite nervous, as I hear MT involves a steep learning curve, and I have enough trouble opening my email. Hope I’m not doing something stupid.) More over the next day or two.