Documentaries on weblogs and the "Blogosphere"

This morning, John_Hinderaker of PowerLine brings us a fine review of the documentary, Blog_Wars , being shown on the Sundance Channel:

Blog Wars, a documentary on the blogosphere's role in Ned Lamont's Senate
campaign, will air on the Sundance Channel on Thursday evening, December 28.
(Check your local cable listings for times.) British filmmaker James Rogan
obtained remarkable access to both the leading liberal bloggers and (to the
extent there was a difference) the Lamont campaign. The result is a fascinating,
you-are-there look at contemporary politics, as lived on the web. Less-liberal
bloggers and pundits, including Michelle Malkin, Christopher Hitchens, Andrew
Sullivan, Charles Johnson and me, act as a sort of chorus, commenting on the
action in Connecticut and the political scene generally.

You all may want to check out these other documentaries on the blogging phenomenon, as well:

New York Public TV's: Welcome_to_the_Blogosphere

blogumentary by Minnesota's own Chuck Olsen

. . .and a bit silly, but, TheWeblogProject

. . .and, yes, happy day-after-Christmas!

Hitchens on the "Real Sunni Triangle"

Just came across this 3-day-old article by Christopher_Hitchens on Slate :

The Real Sunni Triangle
There are only three options in Iraq.

These two paragraphs include arguments that finally convinced me to support the Iraq War some two years ago:

Many people write as if the sectarian warfare in Iraq was caused by
coalition intervention. But it is surely obvious that the struggle for mastery
has been going on for some time and was only masked by the apparently iron unity
imposed under Baathist rule. That rule was itself the dictatorship of a tribal
Tikriti minority of the Sunni minority and constituted a veneer over the
divisions beneath, as well as an incitement to their perpetuation. The Kurds had
already withdrawn themselves from this divide-and-rule system by the time the
coalition forces arrived, while Shiite grievances against the state were decades
old and had been hugely intensified by Saddam's cruelty. Nothing was going to
stop their explosion, and if Saddam Hussein's regime had been permitted to run
its course and to devolve (if one can use such a mild expression) into the
successorship of Udai and Qusai, the resulting detonation would have been even
more vicious.

And into the power vacuum would have stepped not only Saudi Arabia and
Iran, each with its preferred confessional faction, but also Turkey, in pursuit
of hegemony in Kurdistan. In other words, the alternative was never between a
tranquil if despotic Iraq and a destabilizing foreign intervention, but it was,
rather, a race to see which kind of intervention there would be. The
international community in its wisdom decided to delay the issue until the
alternatives were even fewer, but it is idle to pretend that Iraq was going to
remain either unified or uninvaded after the destruction of its fabric as a
state by three decades of fascism and war, including 12 years of demoralizing
sanctions.

Though it was the genocide in Darfur, Sudan and the American Left's reaction to it that tipped me over the edge into the realm of right-wing neoconservatism some two and a half years ago, it is the arguments above that have convinced me to support America's intervention in Iraq.