Preaching to the Choir. Gary Hart is scheduled to be in New Haven tonight at 7:30. I'm tempted to go and do some real journalism. Then again, given the audience that an event billed as an anti-war speech is sure to attract, it might not be the best place for a person of my persuasion. We'll see.

UPDATE: I didn't go after all. I got wrapped up in writing a column, and when I finally checked a clock, it was after 7:30. Oh well.

Why am I not surprised? "French Rallies Against War Shift Focus To Israel." Police were on hand this time in order to prevent a repetition of last week's beating of left-wing Zionists. Disturbingly, young Arabs--no older than 15--chanted, "We are all Palestinians, we are all Iraqis, we are all kamikazes!"

How Americans Wage War. An amazing article in the NYT today, "Haunting Thoughts After a Battle." Beyond speaking to my life-versus-death thoughts of the day, it points to how justly and humanely we are waging this war. Said one soldier with a Grave Registration Team that was rounding up Iraqi dead and placing them in body bags along with personal items for identification purposes:

Basically we did the same thing with the Iraqi dead that we would have done with American dead.

Meanwhile, US forces found four of their comrades, executed by Iraqis and buried in a shallow grave near Nasariyah.

The NYT article also paints an utterly moving portrait of our troops, who reluctantly but without hesitation kill Iraqis who attack Bradley armored vehicles with AK-47s. Some quotes from one of our soldiers:

I mean, I have my wife and kids to go back home to. I don't want them to think I'm a killer.

When I go back home, people will want to treat me like a hero, but I'm not. I'm a Christian man. If I have to kill the other guy, I will, but it doesn't make me a hero. I just want to go home to my wife and kids.

We can and should be truly proud of them, and to many of us, regardless of their humility (or maybe, in part, because of it), they are heroes.

The Cult of Death. It turns out Jay Nordlinger had some words about the culture of death in yesterday's installment of Impromptus.

Every day, we see one of David Pryce-Jones's points borne out: that the Arabs are in the grip of a death cult, glorifying acts of murder--the more spectacular and gorier, the better--and rejecting life....Pryce-Jones is right about something else, too: Unless the Arab world frees itself of its death cult and its psychosis, no peace is possible, and anything like a normal life is out of the question, for Arabs.

Pryce-Jones is the author of an excellent history of the Arab world, The Closed Circle. In an article in the AIJAC Review, he roots this death cult in the high place that shame and honor have in Arab culture.

Fighting for a Culture of Life. Not surprisingly, Iraq has apparently adopted suicide bombing as part of its military strategy, killing four Marines near Najaf this morning and declaring that "it will be routine military policy." Just one more indication that this is an enemy--a terrorist enemy--that does not value life. We are fighting for much in this war. Among everything else, we are combatting the culture of death that has swept the world. We fight on the premise that every human life has value and meaning. While the enemy blows itself up, shoots its own civilians and uses them as human shields, forces soldiers to fight with guns to their heads, and executes POWs, we enter Iraq with an all-volunteer force that brings food and water to civilians, that bombs only military targets (even if that means a slower, longer conflict), that treats even enemy soldiers humanely and carries their wounded to safety for treatment.

"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." When the war first started a week and a half ago, one of the first things I did was to tear myself away from the TV and crack open the old atlas. Names like Basra and Umm Qasr and Faw and Mosul were rolling off the tongues of reporters (often not so easily) and scrolling across the screen, leaving me curious. Fortunately, I also have a stack of old National Geographic map inserts, and among them was one from 1991 titled "The Middle East." As the conflict progresses and troops move on several fronts and in multiple directions, it becomes difficult to place all the attacks and bombings and clashes geographically. Lucky for us, several sites are doing an excellent job putting out maps of the war.

• The Spokesman-Review publishes a map a day, chronicling the key events of the day, as well as keeping a tally of casualties.
  
• GlobalSecurity.org has a ton of great information, covering a broad range of topics. With a lag of a day or two, they've been posting maps of Iraqi Freedom showing general troop movements and clashes. They also have some very nice maps of Iraq that depict the country's administrative divisions, topography, population density, and religions. In the coming days, the maps of Baghdad will no doubt prove quite useful.
  
• If you want to see exactly how units break down (i.e. into mechanized infantry, armoured cavalry, air assault, etc.) and where they are, and if you're fond of NATO symbology, then this is the map for you.
  

(The quotation, FYI, comes from Ambrose Bierce.)

Back in Business (for now, at least). After a four-month hiatus, without fanfare, I return to the blogosphere--tentatively but with hope for a longer lasting effort. Much--too much, in fact, to hope to play catch-up--has transpired these past months, and there is much on my mind. And not just Iraq. But that, of course, looms large, and so I will deal with it largely. I'm not precisely sure what direction this will now take, though I suspect it might veer in a more news-based direction. And a color-change might also be in the works--something about the red, green, and white rubs me the wrong way. Then again, I obviously don't have much of an eye for color as it is. We shall see. But, for now, it's good to be back in blogdom.