TOUGH. You always expect a little degeneration when an indie (or Insta) fave graduates to the bigtime. But even by the low intellectual standards set by his flagship, the most recent Glenn Reynolds column at msnbc disappoints. A nine-one-one pre-anniversary column consisting mainly of quotes from the malignant Wolfowitz and one of the young men sent to labor on behalf of his delusions! Has the man no shame? Has msnbc no editors?

Of course the combatant is surly toward "those of you who question the righteousness of this conflict." Put in his unfortunate place, any of us might be pleased at the service he was doing the wretches among whom he'd been placed, and take it to mean that the cause was therefore just. You might obtain a similar effect in Bosnia, Liberia, the Ivory Coast, Ghana, et alia ad nauseum. Which implies that the U.S. Army is now the Peace Corps with bullets and authority for house-to-house searches. It is, as Ward Bond told Jeffrey Hunter in The Searchers, a bitter thing to say, but does this kindness by itself authorize our great and continuing investment of blood, treasure, and national prestige?

We're constantly asked to excuse (and that's the right word) this mad adventure because of the collateral anti-damage. This is portrayed as the "tough" approach. Bullshit. It's the usual domestic "What About the Children?" nonsense applied to foreign policy issues. It would be comical to see the usually hard-eyed Bush Administration, whose "No Child Left Behind" is a notorious dodge stateside, inviting sympathy for the children of Iraq, were this last-ditch pretext for occupation other than pathetic.

I grow weary of humanitarian pretexts and posttexts for foreign interventions. Clinton's Haitian and Bosnian adventures, similarly tricked-up as they were, had more believeable geopolitical rationales -- and if their outcomes, in one or the other case, have proved less than satisfying, at least those failures have been less expensive, and marginally more useful, than the current Iraqi albatross.

Speaking of geopolitics, what's the news from our pals in Saudi Arabia? What? F-15s in Tabuk? Shall we ignore them? What about the children?