HOW BIG IS WADI-US-SALAAM CEMETERY?....As we all know, there's currently a lot of fighting going on in Najaf, home of the Imam Ali Mosque and one of the holiest cities of Shiite Islam. It's also home of the adjoining Wadi-us-Salaam (Valley of Peace) cemetery, a vast and ancient burial ground that's become the site of much of the fighting.

But just how vast is it? News accounts make the following suggestions, in order of alleged grandiosity:

"one of the biggest and most revered in the world by Shiite Muslims"

"the largest cemetery in the Middle East"

"the largest in the Arab world"

"Islam's biggest"

"one of the largest graveyards on the planet"

"the second largest in the entire world"

"the world's biggest cemetery"

This disagreement isn't surprising since there doesn't appear to even be a firm consensus about how big Wadi-us-Salaam is — either physically or in number of burials. CNN claims it is approximately 3km by 5km — or 3,500 acres — but this satellite photo seems more authoritative and puts its size at 1,485 acres. The most common estimate of the number of people buried there seems to be about 5 million.

But how does that compare to other cemeteries? The Guiness Book of World Records claims that the world's biggest cemetery is the Ohlsdorf Cemetery in Hamburg, Germany, but at 990 acres and 1.4 million burials, it doesn't seem to be in the same league. What's more, even in Europe the Zentralfriedhof in Vienna has more burials (2.5 million people) and Brookwood Cemetery ("London's Necropolis") is physically bigger at 2,000 acres — but only 232,000 burials.

By comparison, Arlington National Cemetery weighs in at a svelte 200 acres and 260,000 burials; Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, the famously kitschy final resting place of, among others, my grandparents, is only slightly bigger at 300 acres; and even Rose Hills Memorial Park, which claims to be the "largest single-operated cemetery in the world," is only 1,400 acres.

So what's the biggest cemetery in the world? Wadi-us-Salaam gets my vote so far. Does anyone have a serious contender for a larger one?

LESS MOORE....It looks like Fahrenheit 9/11 won't be shown at U.S. army bases. But this has nothing to do with its anti-war point of view:

Judd Anstey, public affairs specialist for the Army and Air Force Exchange Service which books movies for military base theatres, denied any suggestion the decision not to book the film had anything to do with its content and was solely based on business.

....The time between when "Fahrenheit 9/11" would be played in base theatres and when it would be sold on DVD was too short to allow it to make money, Anstey said. "This was based on business standards," he told Reuters.

I report, you decide.

NUCLEAR TERRORISM....Nick Kristof follows up Wednesday's column with another one about nuclear proliferation. He's not happy with our current efforts to stop it:

The Nunn-Lugar program to safeguard [nuclear] material is one of the best schemes we have to protect ourselves, and it's bipartisan, championed above all by Senator Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican. Yet President Bush has, incredibly, at various times even proposed cutting funds for it. He seems bored by this security effort, perhaps because it doesn't involve blowing anything up.

This is the flip side of Bush's obsession with grand strategy: more prosaic things like this just aren't exciting enough to get his attention. Maybe an "iron butt for grunt work" wouldn't be such a bad trait in a president after all?

KERRY AND IRAQ....Bob Somerby, in his usual tolerant and long-suffering way, is a wee bit upset with press coverage of John Kerry's position on the Iraq war:

What is Kerry’s stand on Iraq? Readers, get ready for some real brain-work! Here goes: Kerry says Bush should have had the authority to go to war, but then went to war prematurely. Wow! Have you finished scratching your heads about all the nuance involved in that statement?

In fairness, let's all admit that Kerry is not exactly a wizard at making his positions clear and unequivocal. He does bring some of this on himself.

Still, Bob is right: Kerry might not be the best speaker in the world, but his position on the war has been pretty consistent all along. Even William Saletan, the best known critic of Kerry's "caveats and curlicues," came to the same conclusion after examining a Republican video of Kerry's supposed flip-flops on Iraq: the RNC video carefully edits Kerry's quotes to make them look inconsistent, but in fact every one of them tells the same story. He summarized the RNC clips in a Slate article on Thursday:

Kerry wants pressure and inspections....doubts Iraq would comply with inspections, but he thinks we have to go through the process of trying....doesn't like the way Bush is pursuing the goal, particularly because it "alienated our allies."

....consistent with Kerry's previous statements calling for "heat," "inspections," "process," and cooperation with "allies."....No conflict here....voting to turn up the heat and get compliance with inspections....Bush betrayed two of Kerry's principles: process and allies....it isn't a change of position.

....This is the same position Kerry has stated all along: compliance, inspections, skepticism, process....There you have it. Edwards says if Kerry had been president, we would have found out Iraq had no WMD, and "we would never be in this place." Kerry emphatically agrees with this translation.

You can decide for yourself whether you like this position, but it's not hard to grasp. That's especially true for the press, since they know very well that there are lots and lots of liberal hawks and other former war supporters who have exactly the same position: pressuring Saddam was good, inspections were good, and eventually war might have been good too.

But Bush blew it: he failed to rally world opinion, he failed to get the Arab world on our side, he failed to let the inspections process run its course, and he failed to plan properly for the postwar occupation. The result is a loss of American power and prestige, a diminished chance of Iraq becoming a pluralistic democracy, and an al-Qaeda that's been given a second lease on life thanks to George Bush's Queeg-like obsession with Saddam Hussein.

Not so hard to understand at all.

STRATEGY vs. EXECUTION....Dan Drezner asks:

Which is better: a foreign policy with a clearly articulated grand strategy but a f#$%ed-up policy process, or a foreign policy with no articulated grand strategy but a superior policy process?

In real life, it turns out that there are quite a few workable strategies, and any one of them has the potential to work out OK. Very few of them are brilliant, whether they are clearly articulated or not.

However, one aspect of minimally competent execution is that it takes into account facts on the ground: people who are obsessed with their strategy to the exclusion of all else are almost 100% likely to fail. These are the kind of people who end up haranguing crowds at Speakers Corner on Sunday mornings.

Bush and Kerry both have defensible foreign policy strategies. Bush, however, is so convinced of the righteousness of his strategy that he considers it a positive virtue not to judge it against reality. When the tide comes in despite his entreaties not to, he's then forced into panicky and ill-considered action.

It's unlikely that Kerry will be a brilliant foreign policy president. But since Bush's clearly articulated strategy is exactly that — clearly articulated and nothing else — it's hard to see how anyone would find it preferable.

THE OLYMPICS....There's some world class complaining about the Olympics going on over at Crooked Timber. Join in!

I can't say that I really sympathize much with Brian Weatherson's inability to figure out when Australians will be on the air — dammit, Brian, this is America! — but I have to say that the galactically slick TV packaging of the Olympics we get these days has pretty much turned me off from watching it at all. There's really no sense of genuine sport anymore; it's like watching a highlight reel. What's worse, since they often only show heats in which Americans have done well, it's a highlight reel where you frequently have a pretty good idea how it's going to turn out.

Part of the essential ambience of watching a sporting event, I think, is seeing the whole thing, even the boring bits where nothing much is happening. When you edit a 4-hour event down to 30 minutes of pure action, it may be exciting but it just isn't sports anymore. It's a video game.

Alternatively, of course, you could be like Max Boot and decide the Olympics are no fun because it's not us vs. the commies anymore. Those neocons really miss the Cold War, don't they?

OG-BLAY IZ-QUAY....What's the most popular blogging language? English, of course. But here's a mini quiz that tests your knowledge of other blogging languages:

1. Scandinavian languages: Are there more Swedish blogs or Danish blogs?
   

2. Dead languages: Are there more Esperanto blogs or Latin blogs?
   

3. Romance languages: Are there more Spanish blogs or Portuguese blogs?
   

4. Obscure micro-languages: Are there more Breton blogs or Catalan blogs?
   

5. What's the #2 blog language?
   

6. Why isn't Russian in the top 25?
   

Answers here. Or below the fold.

(Via Crooked Timber.)

—Kevin Drum 8:23 PM Permalink | TrackBack (1) | Comments (52)

YET MORE WEIRDNESS FROM GOOGLE....Are Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page idiots? It's hard to come to any other conclusion after reading today that they gave an interview to Playboy for their September issue — hitting the stands just when the auction for Google's IPO gets underway.

There's nothing wrong with Playboy, mind you, but there is a firm rule against hyping a company's prospects during the "quiet period" prior to an IPO. This is not some obscure technicality, either: I went through an IPO in 1997 and the bankers who handled it hammered this into us. As VP of Marketing, there were times when I almost felt like I couldn't even do my job for fear that some routine activity would be construed as hype.

Brin and Page know this perfectly well, and they also knew it in April when they gave the interview, even if that was just before their official filing. Everyone in the tech business knows this. So why did they do it? Why did they open up themselves, their company, and their shareholders to enormous risk just to satisfy their own vanity?

THE WORLD OF PORTER GOSS....Via Tapped, Michael Levi of the Brookings Institution says that George Bush isn't the only politician who gets into trouble when he speaks off the cuff. Apparently, future CIA director Porter Goss had a conference call with the press a couple of months in which he made a couple of rather odd pronouncements:

Rep. Goss began the call inauspiciously with the declaration that chemical and biological weapons are "more dangerous" than nuclear arms. In fact, nuclear arms are far more lethal than chemical arms, and in most if not all cases would be more lethal than biological arms as well.

....The congressman's more disturbing remarks in that half-hour June call with the press addressed North Korea's nuclear weapons program. Goss said, "Clearly not making the progress at Yongbyon and other places because we've called their bluff successfully."....But according to American intelligence, since 2002, North Korea has restarted every key facility at Yongbyon, and has produced enough plutonium for at least six additional nuclear weapons.

....A perplexed reporter followed up, asking Goss how he qualified six new North Korean weapons as American "progress." The congressman's response was startling: "What they've been doing behind the curtain for a long time may be far greater than what you know—that you've just quoted to me now."

To suggest that the intelligence community knows about a massive parallel North Korean program that hasn't been publicly disclosed strongly strains credulity.

We already know that Goss is a partisan hack, but now it turns out that he is either misinformed (charitable interpretation) or delusional (more likely interpretation) about both the relative danger of nuclear proliferation and the state of North Korea's bomb making program.

From a guy who's been overseeing the CIA for nearly a decade, this is fairly disturbing stuff. Maybe Republicans ought to rethink this appointment. After all, loyalty isn't everything.

KERRY AND BUSH....Dick Cheney is mocking John Kerry for supposedly believing we need to be more sensitive in our war against terror. Perhaps he needs to take this up with his boss:

The Progress Report has more, including entertaining quotes about sensitivity from Don Rumsfeld, Richard Myers, Tommy Franks, John Ashcroft, Paul Wolfowitz, and others.

Needless to say, Kerry's full quote indicates plainly that he's not talking about a touchy-feely war, he's talking about conducting the war in a way that works better. But Dick Cheney, who still claims that Saddam had both WMD and deep connections to al-Qaeda, apparently intends to treat Kerry's speeches with the same cavalier disregard for facts on the ground that he does national intelligence. Why am I not surprised?

KERRY IN CAMBODIA....Instapundit links today to a piece in the Telegraph that quotes John Kerry biographer Douglas Brinkley about the "Christmas in Cambodia" kerfuffle:

"On Christmas Eve he was near Cambodia; he was around 50 miles from the Cambodian border. There's no indictment of Kerry to be made, but he was mistaken about Christmas in Cambodia," said Douglas Brinkley, who has unique access to the candidate's wartime journals.

....He said: "Kerry went into Cambodian waters three or four times in January and February 1969 on clandestine missions. He had a run dropping off US Navy Seals, Green Berets and CIA guys." The missions were not armed attacks on Cambodia, said Mr Brinkley, who did not include the clandestine missions in his wartime biography of Mr Kerry, Tour of Duty.

"He was a ferry master, a drop-off guy, but it was dangerous as hell. Kerry carries a hat he was given by one CIA operative. In a part of his journals which I didn't use he writes about discussions with CIA guys he was dropping off."

So let me get this straight. Kerry did go to Cambodia — even though that was supposedly impossible, he did take CIA guys in — even though that was supposedly absurd, and he did get a hat from one of them — even though that was supposedly a sign of mental instability. The extent of Kerry's malfeasance is that instead of doing it in December, he actually did it in January and February.

Considering that he's mentioned this story only twice, most recently 18 years ago, and it turns out that his only crime is to have tarted it up with a bit of holiday pathos, I think I'll pass on following it any further down the Swift Vets rabbit hole. But thanks to everyone who displayed their deep unseriousness about this election by participating in this smear. It will be remembered.

TAX CUTS FOR THE RICH....Stop the presses!

Report Finds Tax Cuts Heavily Favor the Wealthy

Quite a shocker, eh? Still, snark aside, I guess it's nice to have the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office make it official.

UPDATE: Or there's the Washington Post's version: "Tax Burden Shifts to the Middle."

That stands to reason, doesn't it?

TERRORIST DRUGS FROM CANADA....George Bush's Medicare bill prohibits the importation of cheap drugs from Canada. This has proven to be an unpopular rule, and Bush spokesmen have struggled to come up with persuasive reasons for their stand.

Today they finally did:

"Cues from chatter" gathered around the world are raising concerns that terrorists might try to attack the domestic food and drug supply, particularly illegally imported prescription drugs, acting Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Lester M. Crawford says.

....Crawford said the possibility of such an attack was the most serious of his concerns about the increase in states and municipalities trying to import drugs from Canada to save money.

Are there any depths to which these guys won't sink? What's next? Alleged al-Qaeda infiltration of labor unions? Email from Osama to the NAACP?

Every time I think the Bush administration can't get any worse, they get worse. Every. Single. Time.

PLAME SUBPOENA UPDATE....Drudge is reporting that New York Times reporter Judith Miller has been subpoenaed by the grand jury investigating the Valerie Plame case. That means we now have a total of four known subpoenas of reporters:

• Matthew Cooper (Time magazine)
  

• Tim Russert (Meet the Press)
  

• Walter Pincus (Washington Post)
  

• Judith Miller (New York Times)
  

And two "interviews":

• Glenn Kessler (Washington Post)
  

• Knut Royce (Newsday) (although I don't have confirmation of this)
  

This is becoming very interesting.....

PEAK OIL....Jane Bryant Quinn warns this week that we may be running out of oil:

Princeton geology professor emeritus Kenneth Deffeyes, who's writing a book due in 2005 called "Beyond Oil," waggishly names an Armageddon date: "World oil production will reach its ultimate peak on Thanksgiving Day 2005," he says. Then the long, slow decline begins.

Deffeyes is talking not about the amount of oil in the ground, but about the maximum daily pumping capacity of oil. The problem is that even as we continue to find new fields, old fields start to decline. When the decline becomes greater than new discoveries, total oil production starts to fall. This has already happened in the continental United States, which reached its peak capacity in 1970 and has been declining ever since, an event famously predicted in 1956 by geophysicist M. King Hubbert.

This is not a controversial point. What is controversial is the date of the production peak. Deffeyes predicts the peak will come next year. Colin Campbell, perhaps the best known of the peak oil theorists, predicts a peak in 2008. The chart below shows Campbell's most recent calculations.

Unfortunately, Campbell has a problem: he's been making peak oil predictions for a long time, and his predictions are pretty much always the same: we will hit a peak in 3-4 years. So it's hard to know how seriously to take him.

My own guess, based on a fair amount of reading (but no independent expertise, of course) is that the world peak production rate of oil is about 100 million b/d (barrels per day). Our current consumption rate is around 80 million b/d, which means that if consumption increases at the rate it has in the past, we'll hit the world peak in about 10 years.

Except for one thing: that's a theoretical peak that assumes we're pumping everything we can. But in the real world, there are always problems. Today, for example, about 5 million b/d of potential production is unavailable because it's in Iraq. Political problems are inevitable in other places as well, and normal wear and tear also keeps a certain amount of production offline at any given time. The practical world peak is quite likely to be more in the neighborhood of 90 million b/d, a number we'll hit about five years from now.

In other words, Campbell may be right this time. And remember that this assumes that a fair amount of new production comes on line in the next few years from Iraq, Russia, Canada, and a few other places, and that recovery techniques improve as well. If this doesn't happen, Deffeyes might be closer to correct than Campbell.

But in a way, it doesn't matter: even five or ten years is a blink of an eye when you're talking about oil use. So while new drilling may be important to prevent the peak from arriving even sooner and declining even faster than it has to, the fact remains that we're going to hit a peak sometime soon regardless. And the only way to deal with that is to start using less oil.

That means conservation, it means more efficient cars and trucks, and it means new technologies. New transportation technologies, since that's where 70% of oil use goes. All of which takes time to develop. (There's an alternative, of course: an oil shock, like the one in 1979, which caused oil use to drop 15% in three years. That's a pretty painful remedy, though.)

Mideast oil independence is a mirage, at least for the forseeable future. Even with our noses to the grindstone, we'll be hard pressed to actually decrease world consumption of oil, and in any case Mideast oil will always be the cheapest oil around. But avoiding a painful peak and another oil shock isn't. The problem is that it would take serious policy leadership that treats oil use as a real problem, not a political football, and neither candidate this year has shown much willingness to do this. Call it Jimmy Carter Syndrome: nobody is eager to meet the fate of the last president who got serious about energy conservation and alternative fuels.

In the meantime, expect plenty of bumps, since when you're close to a peak even small production hiccups can cause big problems. So buy a Prius. Or better yet, a motorcycle. It won't help you avoid the economic shock that's likely to occur when everyone is suddenly surprised to learn that oil production can't increase any more, but at least you'll still have cheap wheels. You might think about calling your congressman too.

UPDATE: In comments, Max reminds me to link to a pretty interesting article about new ethanol technologies in the latest issue of the Monthly. It's not supposed to be available online, though, so don't tell anybody I linked to it....