Monday morning links:

* Buffy's Jane Espenson has the secret to selling sci-fi. (Thanks, Shankar)

Dorothy Gale, Buffy Summers, Harry Potter, Charlie Bucket, Luke Skywalker, even Peter Parker, they all fit a very specific pattern. They're living a life, sometimes a fine one, often a troubled one, but certainly one governed by ordinary rules, when suddenly the curtain is pulled back and a whole new world, or a new set of rules of this world, is revealed. And what's more - and this is the important part - in that new world, they are something special. They are The Chosen One.

* Newsweek exposes the global warming denial machine.

* The New York Times looks back on how the "good war" in Afghanistan went bad. Via Matt Yglesias, who says:

Just about the only place in the United States where you saw substantial opposition to the Afghanistan War back in the day was on college campuses. That, conveniently enough, is exactly where I was at the time, so I got to participate in a lot of arguments on this subject. One thing I'm fairly sure absolutely nobody ever pitched to me was "well, don't you see that if we invade Afghanistan we're just going to wind up failing to achieve any of our key strategic objectives because the administration will divert crucial resources and attention to invade Iraq instead?"

I think he's wrong about this. The people *I* got into arguments with, though they didn't mention Iraq specifically, did say that the Bush administration would half-ass the job—which they surely would have, even if they hadn't been planning to attack Iraq all along. Yet another thing my sensibly moderate self was wrong about.

In any event, the proper thing to conclude from the example of Afghanistan and Iraq is that military interventionism doesn't work, period, not that it would have worked if only, if only, if only. This is the lesson that the bulk of the Democratic party establishment still has yet to learn.

* Cheney, 1994:

Because if we’d gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn’t have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.

Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it — eastern Iraq — the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you’ve got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.

It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.

* Giant LEGO man found in Dutch sea. What's most amazing is the inscrutable message on his shirt: NO REAL THAN YOU ARE. If only we could understand the LEGO man, we could understand the world.