It’s a gray and dreary February-sort of day both here in Chicago and, apparently, in the blogosphere. Here’s what’s caught my eye this morning:

• Beldar is back and training his sights on John Kerry again.
• Wretchard of Belmont Club makes an excellent point and it’s not one I’ve heard before:
  

  The strategic center of gravity of the American thrust into the Middle East was not Iraq the geographical entity, as so many have I believe, mistakenly put it, but the Iraqis. The war aim was access to an alliance with an unlimited pool of Arabic speakers, not a puddle of oil in the ground. The return of Iraqi security and intelligence forces will be a nightmare for regional dictators in the short term; but the advent of even a quasi-democratic Iraqi state will, without exaggeration, be their death-knell.

• A trip by Jeff Simmermom of And I Am Not Lying, For Real to an Iraqi Out-of-Country polling place that turned out a little differently than he had thought. Must read (hat tip: Isaac Schrödinger).
• So this morning I was hit by a ton of trackback spam and Ann Elisabeth has the explanation (hat tip: Jim Treacher).
• Now this observation from Wizbang is really interesting.

That’s the lot.

The Carnival of the Liberated, a sampler of some of the best posts from Iraqi bloggers, is now available on Dean’s World. This week it’s a special Iraq election edition and focuses on the reactions of Iraqi bloggers to the election. Most are happy, some ecstatic, a few don’t care. And Kurdo is already reporting preliminary results from Iraqi Kurdistan.

As I’ve been reading the coverage and commentary of yesterday’s election in Iraq in the mainstream media and in the blogosphere, there’s a question that hasn’t received as much attention as I would have thought: why wasn’t there considerably more terrorist violence in Iraq yesterday and the day before? Zarqawi, the terrorist chief, threatened it; many Western pundits predicted it. I’ve asked the question in the comments sections of a couple of blogs today and I’ve seen that the ubiquitous praktike has done the same in a few places but I haven’t seen any answers or much commentary on the subject.

Based on nothing much more than my not-too-well-informed intuition I can think of several possibilities:

• the Coalition and Iraqi defense forces have been successful enough at raising the cost of such incidents for the terrorists that a major incident didn’t materialize (and variants on this theme)
• the terrorists are biding their time until after the elections
• the “resistance” is tapped out

It’s possible that all of these are factors in varying degrees.

Despite the costs in lives among the Coalition and Iraqi police and national guard and Iraqi civilians it does appear that some headway has been made in increasing the cost to the terrorists. Look at the rocket attack the other day on the American Embassy. Within a very short time some pretty likely suspects had been apprehended. And the number of Iraqi civilian casualties over the last several months has made the terrorists look a lot less like a patriotic resistance and more like a competitive occupation force.

On the other hand I can’t imagine why the terrorists would delay their attacks if they had the capacity to execute them. This idea seems a lot to me like the always-predicted but never-materializing rising of the Arab street.

So I suspect that the answer is that the ”resistance” has done as much as they could manage: they’re tapped out. And, if that’s true, barring some new factor it should become progressively less able to mount attacks over time. It certainly seems to me that the terrorist are behaving less like a well-organized resistance and more like very well-armed hooligans without much discipline, organization, or coordination.

Anyone else have any ideas?

UPDATED: Submitted to the Beltway Traffic Jam.

Andrew Olmsted thows out an interesting aside:

The more I look at history, the more I come to believe that we could have avoided just about every war in our history had we chosen to do so. The decisions would have come with costs: staying out of the Civil War, for example, might have meant the end of the United States as we know it. Nonetheless, Lincoln could have avoided fighting that war had he gone along with conventional wisdom and agreed to let the South go. In some cases … it’s pretty clear in retrospect that we made some good choices …. In other cases … it’s pretty clear that we acted almost entirely from a desire to be an imperial power. In plenty of other cases the question is far more difficult: were our decisions to defend South Korea and South Vietnam good wars of choice or bad ones?

An Australian writer some years ago (sorry, can’t remember whom) made an interesting point: understanding why wars break out requires understanding why peace breaks out. If it is so difficult to stop a war when it hasn’t started, how is it that a war that has been in progress for years can be stopped? The reason, he asserted, is found in the notion of war as a continuum of non-war international relations. When a nation decides it can get more from fighting than it will lose, it is willing to fight. When two nations are willing to fight, there is almost a certainty of war.

In other words, wars start when two (or more) nations aren’t willing to give up what they might gain by fighting. Once one (or more) of those nations realizes that it will gain the most, or lose the least, by giving up, that side gives up.

History seems to bear out this line of argument, and leaders (as opposed to some of their followers) seem to be pretty rational about decisions to go to war. This indicates that our best bet to quell the Ba’athist part of the Iraq war, at least, would be to give the Ba’athists hope for non-reprisal and some shot at political integration. For the jihadis, being religious zealots, we probably won’t be able to do better than kill them or drive them out.

In any case, I don’t think it will take more than another two years to bring Iraq to the point of relative peace and stability. I hope I am correct in this.

Dustbury waxes nostalgic about the old IBM keyboards:

Old keyboards, at least on the Wintel side of the aisle, still have a great deal to offer: they have solid feel, they don’t have a bunch of Windows-specific keys to mess with, and they last forever.

There’s actually a serious issue here. I have a client who’s only able to use an IBM keyboard (or equivalent keyboard with a hardware keyclick). He’s quadraplegic and needs the auditory feedback. This presents an upcoming problem: USB to PS/2 converters don’t work (power draw problems) and fewer and fewer notebook computers have PS/2 ports.

I’ve found a solution for him. But the issue remains: technological change (particularly in the computer industry) is not an un-alloyed blessing. I could give dozens of examples of this. Take the old Singer Workstation, for example. Probably the perfect tool for dozens of everyday business tasks. It wasn’t until the advent of programs like Quickbooks that the industry began to return to the level of efficiency that it represented—and they’re still not as efficient.

Here’s what’s caught my eye this morning:

• Lileks and Power and Control comment-fisking DU.
• Brad DeLong gives the highlights of a Social Security reform plan I’m completely
  in favor of (not surprising since I’ve been saying nearly all of these things for 30 years).
• Tigerhawk has the latest installment of his Carnival of the Commies (the best of the Left).
• The indispensable Dan Darling has some of the best commentary on the Iraqi election that you’ll find
  in the blogosphere over on Winds of Change.

• If you’re looking for an opponent of the Bush Administration who strikes precisely the right tone in his reaction to the Iraqi election, you need go no farther than Bull Moose. This is especially worthy of consideration:
  

  However, in light of this weekend’s success, intellectual honesty compels progressives to acknowledge two difficult propositions. First, despite his myriad mistakes, President Bush deserves credit for pressing forward with the elections. Second, despite his enormous contributions to progressivism for which we are all indebted, Senator Kennedy committed a severe error by suggesting a withdrawal of our troops on the eve of the elections.

  Last week, the Senator stated, “The U.S. military presence has become part of the problem, not part of the solution.” No, our troops are for the time being the only defense against Iraq falling into the abyss. That was the wrong message at the wrong time.

• Crooked Timber has the feature you’ve been looking for: Ask a 19th Century Whaling Expert. Questions anyone?
• As usual, the best round-up on the Iraqi election is from Joe Gandelman of The Moderate Voice.
• Please address all complaints on the subject of recovered memory vs. false memory to Shrinkette.

That’s the lot.

The Iraq campaign and reconstruction will be a success in general if we leave behind a functioning country with a representative government. Today’s vote makes that almost certain.

To be a strategic victory in the Terror Wars, though, will require something more. Victory will require that Iraq not have one election, but many, and that when the leaders are voted out of power, they go peacefully. Victory will require the decisive defeat of the terror campaign in Iraq, destroying or converting the Ba’athist elements and destroying or driving out the jihadi elements. Victory will require that other countries in the region begin to reform in response to the changes in Iraq, or that we undertake the same process in at least several of those other countries. Victory will require and it will require building institutions that are of the country, not of the person or party currently in power. Only when these things are done will we have struck at the root of jihadi terrorism, because only then will we be able to demonstrate the difference between Arabs under tyranny (religious or otherwise) and free Arabs are more different than alike, and the free West and free Arabs are more alike than different. And only when we have demonstrated this will the jihadi appeals to the sorry lot of the Arabs being caused by lack of fundamentalist Islam finally lose their currency.

Which is one reason why this makes me very, very happy. It appears that at least one of the key elements is coming into place. That the Iraqi Army appears to be non-political in the officer corps (hopefully this is widespread) is a critical feature necessary to ensure that Iraq doesn’t slide back into tyranny.

If Allawi loses and steps down, another key element will be in place. (If Allawi wins, we won’t be able to test this until the approval of the permanent Iraqi Consitution and the first transitional election after that in particular.) If the Ba’athists over the next 18 months accept their defeat, another piece will be put in place.

Time will tell.

The Carnival of the Recipes, a collection of recipes from some of the best cooks in the blogosphere is available. This week it’s hosted by Kin of Kin’s Kouch.