Have you heard the news? Perhaps not. One week ago New York Senator Hillary Clinton assumed the classic, forward political position: standing straight in smart clothes, brow furrowed, flanked by fellows, she read from a podium fixed between herself and the cameras an ultimatum to video game vendors who market sex and violence for American youth. "I believe that the ability of our children to access pornographic and outrageously violent material on video games rated for adults is spiraling out of control," she said, as part of her announcement of legislation and a Federal Trade Commission invitation to "make sure that parents have a line of defense against violent and graphic video games and other content that go against the values they are trying to instill in their children."

Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman actually submitted the bill, with Mrs. Clinton, two other Democrats and three Republicans as cosignatories. Entitled "The CAMRA Act," the draft would as law entrust the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development with $90 million to deliver to Congress elucidation on all things entertaining and electronic by 2011. As for the FTC, Clinton bid them place the video game industry under a microscope.

The junior senator from New York was motivated by a video game called Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, third of a series by Take-Two Interactive Software subsidiary Rockstar Games. Part Scarface, part Goodfellas, part Taxi Driver, the game allows players to assume the role of antihero in a modern urban underworld; language is poor, gameplay is both brutal and tawdry, objectives are morally suspect and Rockstar's commercial success from it is undisputed. Officially confined for sales to customers seventeen years of age and older, with the corresponding success rate of R-rated movies, Grand Theft Auto was hardly more controversial than its literary and cinematic influences until a Dutch hacker excavated program code responsible for a sexually explicit game sequence known colloquially as "Hot Coffee" — previously unknown to consumers and the industry — and globally distributed instructions on how to activate it.

Hackers have been altering their favorite (or most despised) games since delivery systems, especially the personal computer, supported the insertion, saving and execution of new code — resulting in programs designers never intended. Rockstar's initial public response to "Hot Coffee" was recriminatory, the company classifying the Dutchman's work as vandalism. Fair enough; the sex scene first showed up on the personal computer version. But then independent groups found it on Microsoft's Xbox, and then — poleaxing Rockstar's argument — a console whose applications cannot be modified, Sony's PlayStation 2. Deduction: well-hidden, but accessible, code that left the factory. Rockstar and Take-Two's responsibility.

I dug a little and found footage. The sequence is, unequivocally, pornographic. Those exposed to it will not only discover how illegitimate video game characters are made but understand, at least by sight, how the act can be corporeally accomplished. For the quibblers, what is contained in "Hot Coffee" would not be found on an American broadcast network, a billboard, a mainstream website, a standard cable arrangement, or the pages of any periodical not carried out of the store in a brown paper bag. Of course all of this tender is legal, so the judiciary tells us, and for every state legislature calling to regulate the sale of relatively violent or lascivious games there has been a state court interrupting No, not while the First Amendment still stands.

So, three questions. First, have the coarsest of video games coarsened in three decades? Second, how might that affect players who are in their teens or younger? Third, what might be done about Grand Theft Auto and "Hot Coffee"?

The first question is answered simply: yes, with a few qualifications. Study gaming history and you will find errant titles from as far back as two decades ago that are still offensive by their malicious intent. What about retailed titles? A casual computer player myself, I played in the early Nineties the action game Doom, wielding a variety of weapons to bloodily kill Martian-bound hellspawn; and a few years later the real-time strategy game Syndicate, directing the financial, scientific and tactical resources of an insidious, paramilitary European conglomerate to control the dystopia once known as Earth, law and human life be damned. For the sake of balance, the 1985 adventure game King's Quest II would strike down a player's character if he laid a hand on a certain kneeling, praying monk; and today's Star Wars-based Knights of the Old Republic sells because of its interactive moral scale, committing players to the consequences of their good or evil actions. But realism, aided by technology, has raised the potential for offensive content, finally, to that of film — and the public has noticed.

What has been the effect? Here the matter fragments and otherwise disparate politics connect. I would consider myself unscathed; Syndicate was more enjoyable to play than Doom but both games could be wearying for my heart. Games involving more violence than a lighter action movie or mandatory subversive themes do not interest me. We know that criminals are often aficionados of the lurid, yet there is no airtight syllogism. Last year Glenn Reynolds wrote about a curious intersection: an increase in simulated sex and violence crossing a decrease in dangerous and disreputable behavior among American teens. Reynolds awarded more credit to a perceptive, sagacious and self-correcting American people for the improvement than government action like "Harsher sentences, community policing, laws making it easier for citizens to carry concealed weapons." Well, then, why the popularity of the bad stuff among good kids? Reynolds did not say, but he correctly pointed out that corrupting influences cannot possibly be of consistent effect, thanks mostly to stable families and community mores.

Free speech can solve the problem of "Hot Coffee" in Grand Theft Auto. Senator Clinton only briefly cited the rating system responsible for video games on the market. Acting on behalf of the non-governmental Entertainment Software Association, the Entertainment Software Rating Board forms, with the all-embracing Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association and the consumer public, a triumvirate obligating vendor products to a content standard for commercial viability. The ESRB scale is similar to the scale used by the Motion Picture Association of America: "Early Childhood," "Children," "Children Ten and Older," "Teen," "Mature" and "Adults Only." And like movies, although a game is submitted for ESRB review voluntarily the IEMA, representing every major retailer in America, refuses to sell unrated games or the one percent of games warranting an "Adults Only" rating. The system is imperfect — parents can buy for their children, and the "Mature" rating implies parity between Grand Theft Auto and Halo 2 which, cinematically, would qualify as PG-13. But then, cinematically, Schindler's List is just as R-rated as the original MPAA appraisal of Desperately Seeking Susan. And back to Reynolds, some minors are mature enough to play or watch. Finally, ratings are enforced — employees can be and have been tossed out for selling a "Mature" title to a minor — without a bureaucrat.

For this defense of industry regulation to work, the ESRB must act seriously and declare that any content native to a retail product can qualify for audit — or Grand Theft Auto will turn the examination into a con game, tearing a rent in the system just wide enough for Washington's pricey good intentions. Hillary Rodham Clinton is as we have always known her, broad in rhetorical appeal and resoundingly statist in policy: Rockstar's oeuvre is not worth what prohibitive harrassment may come. The "Hot Coffee" sideshow would convince any ESRB panel excluding Hugh Hefner that Grand Theft Auto as currently marketed is "Adults Only," and the title would be whisked from shelves faster than you can say "pixelated hanky-panky." If Rockstar and Take-Two Interactive protested, they could be encouraged to re-press and re-ship the game, saving us inappropriately precocious youth, about sixteen pounds of upstart chutzpah and ninety million taxpayer dollars.

WHILE WRITING: ESRB has taken corrective action.

Progress can be be measured great and small in Japan. First, small but great: as discussed by panelists advising lawmakers in April to end the constitutional discrepancy between a country designed barely a year after Allied victory and today's second-richest and most discreet liberal democracy, Japan's military will receive under a ruling Liberal Democratic Party amendment outline a name slightly more representative of what it actually is. Currently known as "Jiei-tai," "tai" roughly translating to "a group of soldiers," the title could be altered to "Jiei-gun," "gun" meaning "armed forces." Rest easy, you English-speaking wary: the Hinomaru and Naval Ensign shall still wave over Japan's "Self-Defense Force."

Second, great but small: on Friday the Group of Four that is Japan, Brazil, Germany and India spoke as one against the London terrorist atrocity before announcing its forthcoming resolution for a reconstitution of the United Nations Security Council, namely each member nation's ascension to it. Despite Washington's advice against and the machinations of rival caucuses in the General Assembly, G-4 will put their Security Council expansion to a vote in one week. Only horsetrading is for certain: the African Union and a faction led by Italy, South Korea and Pakistan will submit their own proposals. All of this means extra risers for a largely tone-deaf chorus, and the United States hopes to see Japan as one of "two or so" additional permanent members. China, however, opposes Japan's entrance altogether.

Why? For less compelling reasons, we can be sure, than those of our own government. "Six-Party Talks" convene in less than two weeks and North Korea's Kim Jong Il will be invited for the fourth time in two years to drop out of character for the sake of a "nuclear-free" Korean peninsula. The talks will take place in Beijing again. Many of those attending Freedom House's conference "Freedom for All Koreans," held in Washington about a week before the talks, would likely suggest that if more attention were paid to a free Korean peninsula a nuclear status would no longer matter.

Of the five, Russia and China would be the least moved by liberal talk — and according to Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei, North Korea is not the only business Beijing wishes to bring up. This August marks sixty years since Japan's unconditional surrender to the Allies, ending the Second World War. China remembers Japanese invasions and occupations; and it wants Tokyo to remember, again and again and again. Stay away from the Yasukuni Shrine, said Wu, and tell us how sorry you are for the old Empire's deeds. Pyongyang aside, talks in Beijing could be uncomfortable, and Japan's rightful induction into geopolitical leadership — for now, the United Nations Security Council — might be, thanks to China, a little rough.

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi should be careful how deeply his country invests in a morally inert world body and the concomitant paradigm under which Chinese rulers can regularly join hands, summon the ghosts of Hideki Tojo and his cabinet, and accuse Tokyo of haunting Beijing. Yasukuni Shrine, dedicated to Japan's military dead, is as inscrutable to the Japanese memory as the Second World War itself. Freeman nationalism is birthright like citizenship but for the Japanese it has been disfigured by black years of postwar shame. In his 1991 book Inventing Japan William Chapman described the shrine as a variable and an even undesirable prospect for statesmen expected, every Fifteenth of August, to visit or not visit — and explain why to the press and public. China's call for apologies is shrewdly disingenuous: Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka's angrily rejected obeisance in 1972 Beijing was retold by Chapman as just one attempt at unobtainable forgiveness.

Who encouraged blaming the atoned living for sins of the dead — who, the Chinese people? This past April's vandalism in Beijing, purportedly over Japanese history books, was as much instigated by Chinese authorities as it was directed at them. For those distracted by China's place on the elect council Japan is anxious to join, the People's Republic is a restless totalitarian state constrained only by its military inferiority to the combined free world. The victory whose sixtieth anniversary will be observed this August was Chiang Kai-shek's, not the Politburo's.

Four years after Japan's surrender and three years after Occupied Tokyo ratified a democratic constitution, Kai-shek and his militarist Kuomintang fled from Mao Tse Tung's Communist forces to the island of Taiwan. Progenitor of today's uprightly concerned People's Republic, Chairman Mao murdered in multiples of Tojo's toll and made possible a countrywide, six-decade rolling series of disasters. In 1987, two years before the Chinese military annihilated student protests in Tiananmen Square, Kai-shek's onetime refugees established a functional democracy, and Japan was on its fourteenth popularly elected prime minister.

For natural law tyranny is tyranny, degrees of mass execution irrelevant between one another, so while the crimson legacy of Communist China could be said as no worse than that of Imperial Japan, it is no different — save that the Empire is gone and totalitarian China is still here. In February of this year Japan subtly pledged with Washington to protect the Taiwanese from PRC aggression. That we can call turnabout. What authority, then, has the People's Republic to berate a society having long-since abandoned its imperious tradition, to display half-century old torture devices at Beijing's "Anti-Japan War Museum" while keeping silent on similar public policy instruments used just this morning? Authority that is wholly political, and seated in Turtle Bay.

In Taipei earlier this month, Taiwanese observed the Sino-Japanese Wars through a photography exhibition. Taiwan can be mindful of the past without falling into it, explained the capital city's mayor, quoted as saying, "The exhibition is not being held to celebrate victory in the War. Mistakes can be forgiven, but we cannot forget our history." Japan will need to choose its associations wisely.

Onetime Mayor of Cleveland and Governor of Ohio George Voinovich may very well be remembered as the senator who, briefly but memorably so, lost his composure during a long May 25th speech proscribing the sight of a United Nations General Assembly seat occupied by a hard-nosed, impolite, narrowly focused ambassador from the United States joining the other one hundred ninety hard-nosed, impolite, narrowly focused ambassadors. This ambassador, one John Bolton, former Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, would stray from the politics of Turtle Bay's international brotherhood — he would instead bring the politics of President Bush, the "forward strategy of freedom," defending freedom by defeating tyranny, and Senator Voinovich indeed argued that the president staffed departments to follow his delegation. Voinovich insisted on a "proclivity to support the president's nominee." But he made an exception for John Bolton.

The weeping took place six weeks ago and all the attendant guffaws and clever burlesque have receded to a low chuckle heard from the right, but matters encircling Voinovich's aria are yet locked on course. John Bolton's floor vote remains overdue, undone business in the Senate; the position on foreign policy held by about two-fifths of the Senate, as expressed by Voinovich, resolute. The present filibuster may be thwarted through procedure but with no political excurrent, Voinovich's late-May speech is something we will definitely hear again — even if Bolton goes to Secretariat — so worth scrutiny now.

George Voinovich drew generously from the testimony of other men he had as Senator nominated who should have, by the senator's own expectations, served President Bush's executive agenda — yet when in appointed office failed to do so, while Bolton did. And Voinovich never explained exactly why the White House would accept of Bolton what he could not, nor why Bush would reward failure, nor how subordinates could be more trustworthy in judgment of a peer than their mutual boss. Still, it was their word against Bolton's, and for Voinovich Bolton's lost.

Voinovich offered the Senate floor transcripts, among others, from Thomas Hubbard and Larry Wilkerson. Former Ambassador to South Korea Hubbard was summoned to explain why he believed a speech on North Korea, delivered by Bolton in July 2003, damaged the "six-party talks" that convened in Beijing one month later. Like every dictator before him, Kim Jong Il has assigned most of Pyongyang's resources to the acquisition of a better bastinado than obliterative artillery batteries aimed south at Seoul — the atomic bomb — and has abided commitments from the 1994 Agreed Framework to piecemeal bargains with all the diligence of a philanderer. The August 2003 talks were fruitless and Hubbard was willing to place blame on Bolton's "derogatory terms." Voinovich claimed that Bolton's sins — which included referring to North Korea as, spare us, a "dictatorship" and Kim Jong Il an "extortionist" — had violated administration orders by, in Hubbard's opinion, refusing to geld his script. Yes, Foggy Bottom sensibilities were pricked. But Bolton served the president, as did the department, and in January of 2005 Bolton was still in employment when then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice called out Pyongyang as one of seven "outposts of tyranny."

Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, was selected by Voinovich for his public estimate of Bolton's mettle. The estimate was low. Bolton was for Wilkerson "a lousy leader," "an abysmal ambassador," and, most important to the Ohio senator, "incapable of listening to people and taking into account their views." Oh? Wilkerson, a subordinate to the White House with Bolton, hailed President Bush's stance on Fidel Castro's Cuba as "the dumbest policy on the face of the Earth." Voinovich left that GQ magazine quote out.

The senator's speech was coherent while it was literal — while George Voinovich was telling the Senate chambers what somebody else said. When Voinovich concluded, his thesis unraveled. Though the senator was soon besotted with tears he must have seen to drafting his speech beforehand, and so the last passage — beginning with contradictions and ending with gibberish — can only reflect George Voinovich's soberest judgments on America's diplomatic prosecution of the war, and the strength of his defense of a vote for reform and against Bolton.

It was over President Theodore Roosevelt's favorite and memorable saying that the senator stumbled first. According to Roosevelt, one should speak — not walk, in Voinovich's words — softly and carry a big stick. Said big stick was the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the assertion, exertion and foreign intervention of American armed forces. President Bush has taken this conviction and expanded its province far beyond the nation's material interests, and in his January inaugural address submitted it as the nation's cardinal moral obligation. Voinovich suggested Roosevelt encouraged a light tread, failing to describe an inch of Roosevelt's character or a moment of his political and professional careers; a misreading that would have angered the man had he been alive to overhear.

From his political entrance by way of the New York legislature in 1881 — at age twenty-three — to his Long Island procession onward four decades later, Theodore Roosevelt was not one for complaisance. His ambition was reform, his method one of confrontation; disliked by those who preferred he stay put and mind his situation, Roosevelt won respect from others who recognized integrity in brusque action.

Did it occur to the senator that Roosevelt's impassioned, fortified nationalism was known as "jingo doctrines" to his political opponents? That as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, an office from where fighting words could be made with steel authority, he exclaimed that "no triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war"? That Roosevelt's cavalry charge up San Juan Hill was "the great day" of his life? The man Voinovich thought to have "walked" softly was the man who nearly occupied anthracite mines with the United States Army. True enough, contemporary William Roscoe Thayer lamented in an effusive 1919 biography of the late president that "many of us dismissed Roosevelt's warnings then as the outpourings of a jingo," wrongly, Thayer concluded, as "we misjudged him." But Roosevelt was vastly more pugilistic than John Bolton will ever be, and consequent to public record — as opposed to hearsay on Bolton — did not encounter such a fussy jury. Sometimes ignorance is ironic and sometimes it is painful; in Voinovich's absent-minded grab for an unexamined phrase, it was both.

Having confused Theodore Roosevelt with William McKinley, whose spine Roosevelt colorfully likened to "chocolate eclair," Voinovich went forth and asked the White House for "an ambassador who is interested in encouraging other people's points of view."

Full stop. What is he talking about? By definition, to negotiate one complies only with as many opposing demands as is necessary to score marked concessions or defend critical assets. Able practicing diplomats are stern stuff; they dicker but they do not acquiesce, and they certainly do not encourage other points of view. That much can be gleaned even from the likes of Larry Wilkerson. Unfortunately for him, and for Voinovich's working definition, diplomats are employed to follow executive policy; if their own "point of view" conflicts baldly enough, the "encouragement" they receive is towards the door.

Voinovich's request runs particularly counter to recent Near East overtures made by the United States' lead diplomat, Secretary of State Rice. In Cairo and Riyadh, the secretary challenged competing "points of view" that consisted of two brands of autocracy and the West's obsolete and morally diffident penchant for an unstable "balance of power." Qualification ran through Rice's speeches and the Bush administration's demands on behalf of Egypt's and Saudi Arabia's respective populations but the impulse was strong, an unmistakable repudiation of authoritarian societies than can violently circumvent otherwise constrained despot states — irrespective of the practice of liberalizing, which, however eventual, will prove in progress to be complicated and uneven.

George Voinovich ended with an intonation of hollow phrases, talking of "consensus builders" and "symbiotic relationships," as if extricating the free world from its fifty years of alternate placation and capitalization of tyrants were biological, or to be accomplished in a sit-down PTA meeting over lemonade and shortbread cookies. Or that John Bolton would become the only American envoy; he was nominated as Ambassador to the United Nations, not sole inheritor of the State Department. Why was Voinovich crying for the sake of an international body that has increasingly alleged its own sovereignty while falling to bureaucratic incompetence and dictatorial subversion? Oil-for-Food is tawdry enough to consider Bolton's quip that ten floors ought to be chucked from Secretariat. What about the Security Council's shoulder-shrug on genocide, be it Rwandan, Sudanese, Tibetan or Balkan? Blue-helmeted prostitution and rape in at least half a dozen countries has not been committed by a handful of criminal rogues, it has been systematic. What cut of man will the senator see put to work in Turtle Bay?

Incomprehensibly, George Voinovich devoted several sentences to diplomatic victories that were clearly hard-won by John Bolton: Article 98 agreements to protect against the para-state International Criminal Court, the Proliferation Security Initiative, the 1991 repeal of the anti-semitic Resolution 3379. Not enough. Voinovich held highest a man who would "promote diplomacy." Again — what?

On this, Teddy Roosevelt, the Commander-in-Chief Voinovich should have known better than to have invoked, warned that "the diplomat is the servant, not the master, of the soldier." It is hard to explain how the deposition of Saddam Hussein has not given the Bush administration the big stick keeping Syria out of Beirut and democratists active in every other Near East capital. Yet the senator from Ohio wants reform without dispute, policy success without discord, his language matching what comes chiefly from the left placing enormous weight on the opinions of the unhelpful and the adversarial. His May 25th speech betrayed a greater trust in the Washington bureacracy that has lost a succession of battles both political and ideological. While Voinovich remains one of the forty-odd in blockage, the nomination of John Bolton languishes.

What does George Voinovich believe? He professed faith in the work of John Bolton, if not the man himself. That will be a point of reference, as the senator's sympathy for traditionalist foreign policy was on May 26th stronger than any personal disaffection. Voinovich should understand that Bolton shares with President Bush a certain estrangement from the capital establishment, and that if Bolton does not go to the United Nations, someone very like him will.

We all know this story, some of us more explicitly than others: The lady receives from her gentleman an anticipated gift but, opening the package, discovers that the dress inside is not the one she wanted; she asked for red in one style, and this specimen is white in another. The apparel box is upended, the dress falls to the floor and during the uneven fusillade that comes next no plea from the defense will convince the room of a new dress when heretofore there was none to claim; or that the article provided is fancier and actually cost a little more than the article desired. No: red or nothing, and the failure is a serious one of communication, judgment, respect and consideration, and just what were you thinking?

American faith in the government and national character of Japan has won Tokyo a chance for a permanent United Nations Security Council seat at Washington's side. Acting Ambassador to the United Nations Anne Patterson identified the qualifications for the "two or so" positions the United States was willing to open, and Japan met all of them. Early on the Bush White House noticed the prospects of America's economic second ready to embrace the military obligations of democratic sovereignty it had been denied at the end of the Second World War, spared during the Cold War; and which the Japanese themselves politely declined when called to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, submitting to the Western nations the pacifist constitution General Douglas MacArthur presented to Tokyo in the second year of Allied Occupation.

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and his majority Liberal Democratic Party have led their country towards a reckoning with foreign policy that is more tradition than reason; Koizumi has followed most of the United States' advice, principally suggestions that only a militarily confident and efficacious country belongs on the Security Council, made last year by President Bush's former Secretary and Deputy Secretary of State. Japan's foreign interests and strategic objectives have closely aligned with Washington's, startlingly close to mutual allies who are still at arm's length; cooperation includes missile defense partnerships, negotiation with belligerents and modest yet sincere deployments to prominent theaters. The Diet will debate constitutional amendments, now with committee reports cautiously endorsing the recognition of Japan's possesion of and right to armed forces; doing so under the most supportive postwar Japanese public.

What of the coveted Security Council seat? Tokyo was incensed when it heard the news.

Political editor for the rightist Yomiuri Shimbun Takashi Oda bitterly saluted "the day Japan's proposal for United Nations reform was dealt a fatal blow by the U.S. government" shortly after a panicky bureau story declared the Council bid "in jeopardy." Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura called the decision "unexpected" and another official derided the invitation as "an embarrassment." All this for a categorical nomination from the United Nations' underwriter? Just so, as Japan was instead hoping to join the club with its own clique — the "Group of Four," or "G-4," a compact with Council hopefuls Brazil, India and Germany. The quartet offered a draft resolution alternative to America's public intent: ten new Council seats, six of them permanent, four of the six to G-4 and the remainder to Africa. Meeting criticism, G-4 members debated softening draft language — expanding on the same scale but delaying the veto rights of new Council seats. Countries in the General Assembly were naturally supportive of diluting the Security Council's power but six permanent seats were not a part of a Washington offer.

In May, Machimura expressed not only Tokyo's preference for Council entry as part of the Group of Four but a curious uncertainty about acceptance if singly nominated. Tokyo has taken Washington's objective announcement as more eradicative than China askance. Oda tells us why: it is believed that G-4 failure will "most likely drive a wedge" between each of the democracies which Tokyo has, for the first time, courted by itself. Japan has taken quickly to the regional and intercontinental partnerships prerequisite to a superpower: India, Germany and Brazil are each attractive markets for trade and investment; should Japan's constitution provide a legal basis for collective defense the trio, especially India, would make for helpful allies. Japan's choice of friends, unfortunately, includes three countries whose governments opposed the liberation of Iraq. With joint statements and photo-op gestures of solidarity, Japan's lone induction will be a kind of embarrassment. But India, Germany and Brazil have experienced one of their own, without sponsorship to enter a troubled institution in a troubled world body whose seventeen-resolution surrender to Saddam Hussein they applauded.

Exclusivity carries the most value for those who haven't got it. The Group of Four's Security Council is a place of prestige and good standing; the United States' Council is a dysfunctional anachronism. Foremost on President Bush's mind is reform: in sixty years the United Nations has made quite a mockery of the rule of law, human dignity and self-determination. Morally, it is the dictator's last refuge for legitimacy and in the disgrace of the Oil-for-Food program, a monument to the corruption of oligarchy. With reforms proposed by the White House enabling democracies to work independently of the United Nations bureaucracy and its worst clients, Washington intends to keep allies close. The Security Council, then, would be a temporary arrangement, Japan rewarded for its merits alone.

When the gall over its first painful diplomatic letdown subsides, Tokyo should understand. The vignette about sparring lovers has an epilogue. One week later, the dress can be found carefully hung in the lady's closet.

Delaware Senator Joseph Biden spoke wisely and foolishly on television this weekend. He repudiated the latest invective from Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean but matched that statement with another.

"I think more Americans are in jeopardy as a consequence of the perception that exists worldwide with its existence," said Biden, "than if there were no Gitmo." The senator is a level-headed partisan, probably responding to the noise his office received from leftist constituents and interest groups. Less noble colleagues will happily use the man's standing as justification for his excessive judgment but whatever the motivation, condemnation of the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has stepped ahead of the allegations that might support it; a call for recompense where there is no injustice and an admission to the American public of exactly who enjoys the left's benefit of the doubt.

A fortnight after the Newsweek story about a Koran-soaking fell to scrutiny, Amnesty International executive Irene Khan accused the United States of many crimes against humanity — one of them the operation of a "gulag of our times," all without evidence. Amnesty International's insult arrived politically like a freight train rear-ending a second one sitting dead on the tracks. Hyperbole, smashing into discredited sensationalism, has made farce — and it's the left's mess to clean up. The now-disproven Newsweek claim was important because of the prominence it received after a tenuous attribution to riot killings on the other side of the world. The article and its reaction were to be a reflection of military carelessness and the deadly consequences, not an appeal for hardcover rights. Did Amnesty expect infuriated Americans and Westerners to demand an explanation for "forced labor camp" when "bible in the bowl" was retracted? Apparently not. Guantanamo Bay has become the catch-all for a manifestation of the left's worst delusions where, no matter how broadly and deeply one may access its terrorist detention facilities, an atrocity limited only by imagination is presumed to occur behind that door or under that concrete slab. But a powerful meme in radical circles can lie so far below the standard of proof that its peddlers are surprised to learn that they in fact carry the burden. Amnesty director William Schultz said as much to Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. Guantanamo a "gulag"? Not really, just an expression. Donald Rumsfeld an "architect of torture"? Another artful phrase, impossible to know but "fascinating" nonetheless. Schultz backpedaled to water's edge before Wallace, consigning any serious allegations of physical harm to the realm of what-if.

Spared from that capitulation was the matter of the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, the book distributed by the United States military under no obligation but America's guileless altruism. Rules prohibit guards from direct contact with the tomes and meticulous procedures for handling and inspection, quite a consideration for the kind of apostate who would join the Taliban or al Qaeda. Both in response to criticism and, hopefully, in the hopes of settling "Koran abuse" as chock nonsense, Brigadier General Jay Hood conducted and released a report on holy books in the Bay.

What did he find? With about thirty thousand interrogations, over fifteen hundred Korans on hand, the men most responsible for defiling the word of Allah were detainees. Hood's report describes the terrorist star witnesses for agitators like Amnesty International to be rather inventive themselves, and far more concerned with the welfare of a book than the human lives they'd once helped destroy in Afghanistan. Even so, detainees are confirmed to have ripped up, thrown about, urinated on and — a nod to Newsweek — tried to flush their Koran down the toilet. American conduct is fastidious to the point of obsequiousness: every one of the five confirmed incidents involving the Koran was met with an investigation, an apology and where determined, corrective action.

John Hinderaker, reviewing Hood's publication for the Weekly Standard, noted one of the American infractions to be the tossing of water balloons at a cell block. Grab that thread and pull. Start asking questions about water balloons — How many? What color? What shape? Were their nozzles tightly knotted or left open for an insuppressible delivery of hydraulic payloads? — and an incomparably greater volume of authenticated information on the respectful, almost sentimental treatment of one-time terrorists to unsubstantiated and tendencious cries foul becomes overwhelming. American men and women, many of them youthful, a few you might know, are assigned to the naval base, something lost amid a stream of innuendo that can ride on radical politics whose devotees stand ready to believe in conspiracies committed by people who don't exist. These soldiers are the target of allegations involving — currently, as the more serious stuff is regularly debunked — books. Books. And water balloons, and incidents less traumatic than what takes place during high school class changes. No one can take half-cocked charges of malfeasance seriously; how can we, one step away from Monty Python's torture instruments of choice, the "Soft Cushions" and "The Comfy Chair"? Press the brass: Did a Guantanamo detainee get a pie in the face to a muted trumpet's four half-steps downward? Anybody slip on a banana peel?

This, the archipelago, the gulag: Senator Biden's animus for dismantling Guantanamo's new wing and sending captured terrorists to some other place. To where, Joe? State prisons? Rock quarries? Chain gangs? Host homes? Summer co-ops? The rural Afghan-Pakistani border to reconvene occupations of murder and destruction? Biden can offer terrible advice because he won't be the first man held responsible for following it.

But the senator assumed as much — too much — about the public's perception of Guantanamo Bay. When Biden reached into what he thought was a grab-bag of reasonable assumptions about Guantanamo, out fell books and balloons. Arbitrarily shut down a wartime detention center for disciplinary breaches? For slander? Senator Biden may regret his Sunday sound bite contribution. Americans want to know what they are entitled to know but are not so predisposed to outrage over books or, say, a female interrogator unbuttoning her blouse a ways in front of a man who, three-and-a-half years ago, would have killed her if he couldn't throw her into a burkha. And Americans won't appreciate being led to believe that Guantanamo Bay is much more than that.

Looking back at talk of Republican decline three weeks prior, it was a bit much to be drawn from the small tactical victory Democrats found in the fourteen-senator "compromise" on President Bush's judicial nominees. Democrats pulled it off against Senate opponents who have won and strengthened a majority in three consecutive elections — in spite of a shamed former majority leader and a reputation as the president's least reliable allies. If that's what one flimsy branch of the Republican Party can hold, what does it say of Democrats? The national conversation is about far more than D.C. repartee and will be for a long time. The left overplayed its hand at a time when divisions between it and the electorate, if momentarily, were exposed as sharp and fundamental. Moderate Democrats may wish to expand their policy sources. Relevance is better than propinquity.

As a diplomat, Japanese Vice Foreign Minister Shotaro Yachi could well learn to speak more delicately when in binational conference but the minor furor erupting from a short, concise May 11th remark of Yachi's to South Korean legislators curled around, without grasping, the possibility that what Mr. Yachi said is probably true. The minister made known to Seoul his belief that Washington, D.C. under the Bush administration was frugal with intelligence on North Korea's nuclear armament — and not for lack of spies. Seoul seemed to take the revelation as a twin insult; first, that America left the country chopped in two by communist aggression out of the most important conversations and second, that it invited Japan to that executive table and in doing so favored Tokyo.

South Korea's government under Roh Moo-hyun, however justified its anger over public humiliation, has only itself to blame for daylight between it and the White House. Broadly, yes, the three democratic nations share common values and objectives. Activities pursuant to one definition of peace and stability as opposed to another are how Seoul has become divergent in being consistent. In January, Tokyo contemplated economic sanctions against Pyongyang to Seoul's blubbering. In February, the Koizumi government advised legislation for more timely missile defense against weapons the Moo-hyun government insisted weren't necessarily real; Seoul to be corrected by Pyongyang at about the same time as Yachi's statement. Junichiro Koizumi has invested a great deal of political capital to move his country towards a realization of its geopolitical maturity — a culture liberated from its authoritarian tradition, an increasingly powerful military, aspiration to world eminence — and an acceptance of the consequent responsibilities like the revision of Japan's postwar constitution, now supported by a slight popular and elected majority. Washington not only approves but has encouraged the transformation, most observers now very aware that Japan is being modeled as a self-reliant, Pacific deputy.

South Korea's appreciation of all this? Amnesiac. Six decades of docility and redemption weren't enough for President Roh Moo-hyun, a man who promised those who elected him he'd consider neutrality if his allies tried to liberate those trapped behind barbed wire in the starving, blood-soaked horror consuming the northern half of the Korean peninsula. Several weeks ago, when Japan dared not wear its hairshirt for the crimes of mostly dead men, Moo-hyun wanted — well, he wanted something more from Japan than its multiplying amends to nations indigent and wounded. The sound of knives sharpening to the north and east be damned, Tokyo would be made sorrier and sorrier for a self-satisfaction inching into obsessive vanity.

So do we ask how Washington could discover good reasons to keep South Korea as a junior partner in democratic collective security, or just consider what Yachi might have said if he'd completely thrown tact? Writing in the Australian, Greg Sheridan upbraided Canberra for its deference to old and tyrannical China over young and democratic Taiwan. Maybe "pusillanimous" is too strong a word to describe a government that, under John Howard, has stood fast as an ally in the war on terror; but Sheridan argues through quotation that Junichiro Koizumi's Japan is disliked by parties chafed by a man who "won't back down to bullies." Sadly, South Korea would be one of those detractors. Seoul should thank goodness no one takes it too seriously, for while that may mean a lighter D.C. dossier it also means very patient guardians; and that it suffered the honesty of Yachi, not Sheridan.

After obliterating part of a Sunday funeral procession the enemy produced his first single-explosion murder count in excess of fifty since the February slaughter of over one hundred in the Iraqi city of Hilla. Good neighbors from the Associated Press swung in to advertise the event, identifying through unknown, possibly clairvoyant means the combusted perpetrator as "Iraqi"; vividly transcribing the red fruits of terrorist malevolence; and then pulling back for a wider, political angle with an aspersion on Baghdad's national government, describing it as having "shut out Sunnis," a grotesque falsehood since Ibrahim al-Jaarafi awarded the Iraqi minority cabinet seats in generous excess of their National Assembly representation.

The Associated Press did not report Iraq's denuciation of the attack as "a crime and a massacre," and in treading superlatives missed two indications of successive failure, drawn from the enemy and his bestial work. When Hilla was attacked on the last day of February, London's Telegraph compiled a list of terrorists' major bombing murders in Iraq from the start of 2004: eight of the seventeen blasts were assaults on civilians while nine were directed at Iraqi security forces and particularly, like the target of today's bombing, recruits. Eliminating the bravest and most physically capable of Iraqis would have seemed a logical objective to terrorists but the enemy miscalculated, perhaps wrongly taking Iraqis for a people complacent from years couched in the libertine safety of free nations and markets, and his animal mind has since precluded any deviation from straight bloodletting. Try as terrorism's collection of Western publicists have, Iraqis quickly separated the terrorist's simplistic intentions from his rhetorical broadsheet and have rejected the imposition of fear, quietly marshalling their state. Ranks of civil and military defenders have grown from literally nothing to tens and hundreds of thousands. Today's butchery, then, should only spur Iraqis on.

How have the terrorists fared? Despite the fixation with capturing single leaders in terrorism's markedly horizontal mass of brute force, the enemy's speech is more helpful when he believes no one will overhear. In an apparently captured letter from one magniloquent thug to the next:

This is the path, but where are the men? We ask God to guide them. What has happened to me [and] my brothers is an unforgivable crime. ...By God, the one and only God, you ask about what happened to us, because you didn't ask about the situation of the immigrants. ...But morale is weakening and there is [exhaustion/confusion] among the ranks of the mujahedeen, and some of the brother emirs are discriminating among them. God does not accept such actions. ...This is my last request: to meet you, because there are many things that are secret and the truth is that I no longer trust any person who says that he is coming from the sheik's side. We are tired and we have suffered a lot.

Where is the glory? The piety? Many suppose the virgins can be reserved for another. General John Abizaid was correct two months ago: terrorists are in perpetual decline, reliant on a media charactization of local disruptions of normalcy as epidemic, increasingly surrounded by a liberal Iraq with the means to preserve itself. One year ago the enemy could congregate by the hundreds and, if unsuccessfully, battle American troops; now he settles for a job queue and white-hot adjectives inked in 12-point font.

Since authoritarianism spans miles, nations and continents a news item from freelance Near East correspondent Jennifer Griffin on the exploitation of a cretinous Palestinian, airing last night on Fox News, is worth examining to chart the course of the region's culture of death. A young man named Turkoumen, primed for murdering Israelis by al-Aqsa gangsters, was pulled off assignment when the roughnecks saw an opportunity to be included in the formation of Mahmoud Abbas' armed street authority. I paraphrase Griffin's voiceover during clips of her "interview" with the would-be killer:

Turkoumen did not appear to think for himself. He barely understood our questions, even in his own tongue. Al-Aqsa members told him what to say.

Griffin's chilling deadpan was offset by footage of Griffin seated to face Turkoumen and his puppeteers. In ducked audio one could hear Griffin address the poor idiot, whereupon he'd turn to his gun-toting comrade for the answer to a yes-or-no question. No, very happy to hold off on the explosive belt, to do what he's told. Angry about Israel. Palestinian state, Yes! Will Turkoumen ever see his shining moment on international television? That he should only be so lucky as maladroits in Iraq, whose greatest punishment might be humiliation and a prison sentence. When the policeman gig is up al-Aqsa will likely turn their monosyllabic human bomb loose and that will be that.

Not all strongmen are simpleminded muscle, of course — bin Laden's squads for the attacks of September 11th were men with all provision but no appliance, stranded by birth in countries promising them lives as nameless, silent accessories to the local dictatorial arrangement. The Allies make war for a reason; in the absence of liberty festers evil. But the hollowness of that evil couldn't be more bared than on a bloody day like today. Meet the footsoldiers of terror, desperate professionals and bridled imbeciles.

One event to which democratists should look forward this spring is the release of Freedom House's "Freedom in the World 2005," a comprehensive on governance and liberty across the globe. Of special interest should be the appraisal of polity in Iraq and Afghanistan, as each country has both progressed and held a free election in the interim. At the time of consideration for the last report, administrative control of Iraq had recently been transferred to the [second] of two provisional governments; terrorism and sabotage was at a higher level and the National Assembly election was months away.

Out of curiosity, an admiration for Freedom House's methodology and a desire to judge the polity of Iraq as objectively as possible using a respected scale, I present my own layman's determination of civil and political freedom in Iraq. Freedom House's outline-form "checklist" has been reproduced here. My opinion of each category's satisfaction and scoring thereof is in corresponding boldface type:

POLITICAL RIGHTS

A. Electoral Process

1. Is the head of state and/or head of government or other chief authority elected through free and fair elections? Yes, he is nominated by an elected National Assembly — 3.

2. Are the legislative representatives elected through free and fair elections?
Yes, they are selected by parties who win support in direct elections protected by robust law — 3.

3. Are there fair electoral laws, equal campaigning opportunities, fair polling, and honest tabulation of ballots?
Iraq's January 30, 2005 election was objectively judged as free and fair, although terrorists conducted attacks and voter turnout was both locally and regionally low in areas affected by violence and intimidation — 2.

B. Political Pluralism and Participation

1. Do the people have the right to organize in different political parties or other competitive political groupings of their choice, and is the system open to the rise and fall of these competing parties or groupings?
Yes, over one hundred parties and independent candidates competed in the first National Assembly elections. Many parties, including the largest and most successful coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, were multi-sectarian — 4.

2. Is there a significant opposition vote, de facto opposition power, and a realistic possibility for the opposition to increase its support or gain power through elections?
Despite a demographic primacy of Shiites, parties among every major ethnic group are numerous and politically diverse. Iraq's current law ensures that even a strong majority parliamentary coalition must negotiate with its opposition, and there is no evidence that parties will remain in their current collective associations for future ballots — 3.

3. Are the people’s political choices free from domination by the military, foreign powers, totalitarian parties, religious hierarchies, economic oligarchies, or any other powerful group?
Allied powers encouraged free and independent association. Iraq's military played no noticeable role; any exploitation of administrative power by members of the transitional government exerted little or no influence on the electorate. The formation and campaigning of political parties was largely free of foreign interference — 3.

4. Do cultural, ethnic, religious, and other minority groups have reasonable self-determination, self-government, autonomy, or participation through informal consensus in the decision-making process?
Current Iraqi law follows principles of federalism; pluralism is intentional but without a formal constitution pending — 2.

C. Functioning of Government

1. Do freely elected representatives determine the policies of the government?
For the first time in history, Iraq's permanent constitution will be drafted and ratified by elected representatives of the Iraqi people. As part of that document, Iraq's polity will be conducted as a fully sovereign parliamentary democracy — 3.

2. Is the government free from pervasive corruption?
No, it is not. Iraq ranked dismally in Transparency International's 2004 Corruption Perceptions Index. Cultural and societal vestiges from Iraq's authoritarian past linger. Government transparency and honesty is an important topic of debate to both citizens and statesmen, however, lending support to a public anti-corruption effort — 1.

3. Is the government accountable to the electorate between elections, and does it operate with openness and transparency?
Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allwai's fall from political grace is perhaps the best example, if anecdotal, of culpability for poor performance as judged by the Iraqi electorate. Furthermore, elected and appointed government representatives openly discuss graft and incompetence in the context of reform — 3.

CIVIL LIBERTIES

D. Freedom of Expression and Belief

1. Are there free and independent media and other forms of cultural expression?
The freedom of speech is widely and increasingly celebrated. Broadcast television is centralized in the absence of commercial entities to adopt state channels left over from Saddam Hussein's regime. Private newspapers, however, flourished immediately after the Ba'athists fell and continue to burgeon. Private radio stations are in operation. Iraqis have fairly easy commercial access to satellite television networks and unrestricted access to the internet — 3.

2. Are there free religious institutions, and is there free private and public religious expression?
Some localized harrassment and persecution occurs on a fairly regular basis, although these acts are publicly and popularly denounced, and perpetrators are often terrorists and seditionists — 2.

3. Is there academic freedom, and is the educational system free of extensive political indoctrination?
All major centers of learning, including universities, have been in operation, offering full enrollment, since 2003. Education has been stripped of Ba'athist propaganda and associated ideological coercion. Several campaigns to build and reconstruct local schools are underway — 4.

4. Is there open and free private discussion?
Discussion is vigorous, intimidation from terrorists notwithstanding, with more Iraqis joining private and public debates as the country rebuilds — 3.

E. Associational and Organizational Rights

1. Is there freedom of assembly, demonstration, and open public discussion?
Peaceful protest and the freedom of association has been respected and protected by law and authority since April 2003 — 4.

2. Is there freedom of political or quasi-political organization?
Political parties and associations are numerous and diverse — 4.

3. Are there free trade unions and peasant organizations or equivalents, and is there effective collective bargaining? Are there free professional and other private organizations?
Iraqi trade and labor unions have been actively establishing themselves in the new state. They are receiving aid from foreign counterparts to organize and operate with their respective industry's management — 3.

F. Rule of Law

1. Is there an independent judiciary?
Iraq's judiciary has been independent under the Transitional Administrative Law since March 24, 2004 — 4.

2. Does the rule of law prevail in civil and criminal matters? Are police under direct civilian control?
Despite tactical disadvantages against some lawbreakers, including terrorists, and some degrees of corruption, Iraqi police yield to both a civilian authority and the law — 3.

3. Is there protection from police terror, unjustified imprisonment, exile, or torture, whether by groups that support or oppose the system? Is there freedom from war and insurgencies?
Civil authorities are held accountable by the public and international observation. The concept of unlawful imprisonment has received great attention from Iraqis and detainment, even that of terrorists, receives public scrutiny. Though terrorism and lawlessness is present it is not pervasive. — 2.

4. Is the population treated equally under the law?
Civil and military authorities have gone to great lengths, often adopting artificial requirements and qualifications, to invite pluralism and ensure equal protection under the law — 4.

G. Personal Autonomy and Individual Rights

1. Is there personal autonomy? Does the state control travel, choice of residence, or choice of employment? Is there freedom from indoctrination and excessive dependency on the state?
Self-determination is encouraged. Iraqi citizens can come and go as they please — 4.

2. Do citizens have the right to own property and establish private businesses? Is private business activity unduly influenced by government officials, the security forces, or organized crime?
Some constraints placed on the operation and ownership of major industries to protect national assets, particularly oil production, are still in place. Crime is high and organized criminals are understood to be working interchangeably with foreign terrorists. Private enterprise and entrepreneurship is widespread, however, and Iraq's current economic laws are among the world's most liberal — 3.

3. Are there personal social freedoms, including gender equality, choice of marriage partners, and size of family?
Iraqi culture is sufficiently modern, pluralist and secular; citizens enjoy reasonable autonomy in accordance with some national and regional mores — 3.

4. Is there equality of opportunity and the absence of economic exploitation?
Despite destruction and intimidation by terrorists, Iraq's economy has grown enormously since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Foreign entities and nations have been very active in the rehabilitation and actualization of regions and peoples persecuted under Saddam Hussein. Works projects, outreach and donations all contribute to compensating those who have not yet benefited from the country's windfall — 3.

KEY

POLITICAL RIGHTS (PR)

RAW SCORE: 27
PR RATING: 3

CIVIL LIBERTIES (CL)

RAW SCORE: 49
CL RATING: 2

COUNTRY STATUS: FREE (2.5)

Freedom House's report will be noted here as soon as it is released, and the two aggregate scores can be compared. I expect Freedom House to be less generous in its scoring than I, magnifying continuing gangsterdom and terrorism to a degree I might describe as untoward; but in respecting the institution's use of skepticism for the interests of veracity will defer to Freedom House's specialized, thorough and expert judgment. Iraq would then likely be classified as "Partly Free," launching it into the ranks of liberalizing nations as those in Eastern Europe and Asia. While that might not be as stunning a leap from an abject ranking of "Not Free" to "Free" in just two years, it will yet be a testament to idealism, vision and determination of the free world — one that now includes the nation of Iraq.

An uncredited journalist walked a mile for the Near East's street-roaming fascists this weekend, calling those who have been detonating a handful of car bombs in Iraq every other day "anti-coalition," when an observer not acclimated to certain prescriptions might easily conclude that terrorists were simply trying to kill as many free Iraqis as they could. In a sentence helpfully pruned of imaginative language, another Associated Press reporter described one strike in the "stepped up" "wave," or "surge," or what have you:

A vehicle packed with explosives was driven into a crowd gathered in front of a popular ice cream shop in Baghdad's western al-Shoulah neighborhood Sunday, police Maj. Mousa Abdul Karim said.

Two dozen Iraqis, police and civilians who arrived to help the wounded, were murdered shortly afterwards when a terrorist set off a second car bomb in their midst. A similar two-bomb attack — luring good men to their death — was staged in Tikrit. Whither the destruction of frozen desserts? The terrorists' intent and capabilities were obvious months ago, unchanged since: they cannot assemble as a force and directly assault Iraqi military forces without substantial losses, let alone provoke Allied troops. Work consists of drive-by shootings, bombings and varied campaigns of thuggery against the defenseless or suitably unprepared targets — which would be completely useless if not for the value of reading one's small-time work in globe-spanning headlines three times too large, spelled out under the byline in nervous prose. Iraq's enemies do not stand up well as fighting men. April began with one gang's sorry attempt on the American assignment at Abu Ghraib prison. Just last week a haphazard rocket attack — the natural amalgam of criminal minds and a countryside littered with its erstwhile dictator's weapons — met an American response that, from the list of ordnance used, would be considered overcompensatory for the incineration of a dozen terrorists if it weren't such a stunning reminder of the enemy's limited prospects.

One Oliver Poole of London's Telegraph reports that one of these objectives has been partially met in select parts of the country, like Husaybah in the extreme west and Mosul in the north; where he cites one Marine commander and several letters to editors, respectively, describing the numerical and operative shrinking of Iraqi security forces.

At the moment this is the only claim of its kind and is contradicted by corroborative, if slightly dated, reports. Arthur Chrenkoff's monthly collection of news from Iraq today includes three stories detailing advances made on terrorists in and around Mosul. From two weeks ago, a Marine colonel marveled at precocious Iraqi troops earning their own Area of Operations more swiftly than anticipated, his concern shifting from Iraqi competence to American disengagement. One day later, a reporter assembled evidence of a "waning" terrorist presence in the city, including a measure of increasing citizen participation in their neighborhoods' safekeeping. Three days after that, a soldier's biographical abstract included numbers on enemy activity in Mosul: halved in frequency. Having last tried to square with Iraqi police in January after thirteen straight failures, terrorists slither in alleyways.

Husaybah was the location for an April 12th report on Allied successes, primarily the effective compromise of a border nexus for Syrian aid to terrorists in Iraq. It was here that the enemy was shredded in an attack against the American presence one week after dismal failure at Abu Ghraib. Finally, it was suggested last week that problems with Iraqi forces stem from discontent, not fear. Terror has only occasionally slowed enthusiastic widening of military and law enforcement ranks, ranks which Chrenkoff's news montage attests are diversifying and sharpening in skill and purpose.

Yet fear has been marketed well by the elite press — ring up an online story from this week and you're likely to find an article about attacks in one side of the country matched to a picture of an attack from the opposite side, replete with implications that ministerial haggling has made hardened criminals and terrorists really angry, enough to take a circuitous revenge on those partaking in double-scoop with chocolate syrup. Certainly, the enemy of freedom would have Iraqis forget their long and growing list of victories and sacrifices over the last two years, and knuckle under for another five decades of servitude. And terrorism has its sympathists, only too eager to portray a grotesque concentration of violence on the innocent as a serious challenge to Allied and Iraqi authority.

With January 30th still resonant, Iraqis know that if they can withstand the stabs of murder and terror they will forge an adamantine national character. Dredging three score out of a river could not have reminded them of anything other than Saddam Hussein, the nightmare they escaped; and the wanton butchery dolled up as religious devotion they know to be the sickness wafting from the rot of Arab socialism. Some commentators ascribe reasonable motives to those abetting or supporting gangsterdom in Iraq; those who daily surmount fear know better.

Terrorists will not last for too much longer if they can only hope to gain attention by killing someone, anyone; or if murder and sabotage exacts a steady amount of their number killed or captured by authorities led to them by indignant citizens. For those responsible, the recent downing of a helicopter and apparent slaughter of its single surviving occupant should have been more spectacular than it was. But within days perpetrators were being walked into jail cells, exposed by Iraqis who feared the loss of their rights as men more than their lives. There is a name for a place where horrific crimes are swiftly punished by a government founded on a popular common good: civil society. The stature of terrorism has been hewn another few inches, no matter how powerfully it is received abroad.

BREADTH AND LENGTH: More on the how and why of the enemy's failures against American troops from Chester, while Mohammed considers terrorism's impotence when liberals carry the momentum.

For those who took the bigoted bottle-flinging and window-breaking in China this past week as absurd on its face, a Politburo tantrum poorly translated into an awkward popular spectacle that scuffed the Red regime as much as Japanese effigies, Tokyo's official response can be celebrated as both deserving and merciful:

[Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi] made clear his irritation with Beijing, and its tolerance of weekly demonstrations that have often turned to violence against symbols of Japan, including diplomatic offices and shops. In a interview to be broadcast on Australian television, Mr Koizumi insisted that relations with China remain good but added: "I hope that the Chinese will, shall we say, become more grown up and will be able to look at friendly ties from broader perspectives with, shall I say, a cool head."

Shall he? You can get a taste of a man's character by placing him under duress, watching to see if he breaks, bends, snaps or — should there be something of worth inside — sharpens, redoubles or fortifies. If nations reflect men, Beijing has committed the equivalent of breaking up a dinner party under the pretenses of a missing salad fork, knocking over a decanter while rising in a huff, stammering out a poorly worded malediction and then tripping down the grand staircase with napkin in pocket. China wants Taiwan; no secret. Taipei will have none of Beijing's threats; no secret there, either. The American promise to defend Taiwan, despite a "One China" policy carrying all the modern sense of pantaloons, becomes less speculation and more policy overruling charter by the month. Charter, military charter, has entered the Tokyo Diet as a subject of debate; the House of Councillors is halfway to revising Japan's constitution to accommodate its long-standing Self-Defense Force, the House of Representatives three-quarters. How, not if, is the prevailing questoin. Entitling the use of force may take Japan's lawmakers as many years as led up to the moment when House Speaker Yohei Kono received the revision panel's report. But Japan's intentions are unmistakable and abiding, driven by self-preservation as much as responsibility. It, too, has stepped up to suggest that the Taiwan Strait is for transport and recreation, not invasion.

China cannot accept this. For all the danger it promises for a free world weak or unwary, the country's industry burns a totalitarian fuel — it runs hot and fast, and won't sustain. Dictatorships consume. Individuals produce so, deprived of the simplest rights, they cannot; and any authoritarian state will devour itself if it can't sink its teeth into a more productive neighbor. (Bashar Assad wants Lebanon for more than beachfront property.) In recent commentary on that constraint, Japan's success was enough to refute the economic and cultural indomitability Beijing has advertised for free in many intellectual circles. Man for money, the island nation is thirty times more productive, with far fewer natural resources and no crude gluttony: very straight math. What have China's cherrypicked economic reforms won it? A few years before the inevitable, writes Michael Ledeen:

No doubt the oligarchs worried that the Chinese people might notice that the regime's policies were a shambles, and that they might come to suspect that things could improve if only the people were free to choose their own leaders. Thus, one of the delicious paradoxes of our time: China threatens Taiwan with huge armies, but Taiwan threatens China with freedom, and may well win in the end. As Janet Klinghoffer put it, "China is facing the same innovation roadblock the Soviets did." The Soviet Union could never match Western technological innovations, because Soviet citizens were never given the freedom to do so.

There is a black comedy in tyranny's clumsy tries to ape what free men do naturally. In the hours during and the first few after Hezbollah's pro-Syrian rally in Beirut, Bashar Assad's sympathists and the Cedar Revolution's skeptics contemplated exactly what the Islamist terror group wished them to: were authoritarians still able to extract praise from a nation enduring three decades stripped of autonomy, prosperity and identity? When the frenzy was over, Hezbollah's charade fell forward and down flat, its repellent and foul-mouthed crowds of Damascus faithful now suddenly alongside a brilliant panoply of Lebanon's independence protesters. The Cedars held a final series of rallies that dwarfed Hezbollah's best and no more major demonstrations have taken place since, democrats the uncontested masters of public opinion. Beijing has been more couth than most dictatorships but the oligarchy is just as incapable of conceiving or controlling what it does not understand. Syria's decline is daily marked by its bewilderment to the free world it so long shut out but chanced six weeks ago; fitting, then, that China's tyrants might have brought on the beginning of their end by the same institution they simply intended to mock.