"What if 9/11 Never Happened?"

Asks New York Magazine.

I haven't had a chance to look through very much of it, but Andrew Sullivan's alternative history is pretty damn dumb. Thomas Friedman talks about China. Bernard-Henri Levy is downright ridiculous. And Tom Wolfe says this:

A local music genre called hip-hop, created by black homeboys in the South Bronx, would have swept the country, topping the charts and creating a hip-hop look featuring baggy jeans with the crotch hanging down to the knees that would have spread far and wide among white teenagers—awed, stunned, as they were, by the hip-hop musicians’ new form of competition: assassinating each other periodically. How cool would that have been?

I hate these counterhistory things.

Also, if you're interested in the Lebanon conflict, you might want to read this, Seymour Hersh's latest article, alleging that the Bush administration's reticence about a ceasefire is due to the opportunity it affords us of watching what amounts to a trial run for our bombing campaign of Iran's nuclear bunkers. A very cheery article.