<i.As David Brin puts it, the worst case scenario is that the simulation argument is true, and we're living in an egocentric simulation that exists solely for the amusement of whatever entity is playing the role of George W. Bush.</i>

Well, hell, Charlie, now I'm really worried. The world has just about reached the point where I'd simply start again if this was Civ3 or Civ4.

It surely is...the only good news about the Star Fraction
future is that you don't have to go very far for an
alternative government...

-- Andrew

Reality imitates "The Star Fraction": now that's a terrifying thought!

In 1979 I was> a Trotskyist living on lentils in a squat. Well, near enough. That wasn't a big year for defections, real or pretended. And if there were any ex-Trots among the British libertarians or young conservatives I think I might have spotted them. The Brit pro-war left are all journailsts, professors or blogging stock-brokers, not crafty political activists.

The US ex-Shachtmanite neocons started out as Cold Warriors of the Left, a very easy move from Shachtmanism in my opinion. The whole of international Social Democracy were Cold Warriors of the Left.

The no-longer-Living-Marxism lot are a bit hard to figure out. My current theory is that they are still Marxists but are trying to save capitalism for the revolution rather than fuck it up. Post-1989 people are wimps. They are neither capable of sustaining a dynamic economy (if they're capitalists) or taking it over (if they're proles). Instead they cower before imaginary terrors, whether WMD in Iraq or holes in the sky. Hence there is no class struggle and no progress until the Western bourgeoisie gets its act together, whereupon normal service will be resumed. Or not, in which case we're all fucked anyway and Green barbarians will caper on our ruins.

In case you're wondering, yes that was the story in my Fall Revo books.

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow proposes a similar conspiracy, but pins it on crypto-hippies.

As a card carrying member of the CofE - at least, I would be if we had cards - I have serious problems understanding anyone who claims to be a fellow believer and thinks that - somehow - 'it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven' doesn't apply to them. Sorry, all this 'riches are the reward for the devout' palavar is heresy and should be viewed as such.

The problem with the American fundamentalists is that they have bought the Francis Fukayama thesis wholesale - after all, it strokes them the way they like to be stroked - and don't begin to realise that it is - like so much populist American 'academic' theory - so much crap. History hasn't ended developing (how can it? If it had, it would be dead, like any other organism. Maybe it is, but I don't think that's what Francis meant) The Texan wing of the GOP is not the Krown of Kreation (to borrow a phrase from my flowerchild youth). In fact, they resemble none so much as the Bourbons (no, not the biscuits)

As for the fundamentalists of Riyadh, well, at last somebody has displaced Lord Home. If you looked at every trouble spot in the world from Munich to Zimbabwe you would have seen the grinning skull of Sir Alec, stirring it as though his name was Palmerstone. Since 1967, however, he has been usurped by some anonymous Wahabi cleric paid for by that friend of freedom and democracy everywhere, the theocratic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. With friends like Fahd and his children, nobody has any need of enemies, but they'll be getting them.

As for your conspiracy theory, Charles, it is entertaining but - like all conspiracy theories, ultimately diverting (speaking of which, it look as though the IRA wasn't involved in the Bank of Ireland raid - at least, not the political wing (let's not get into that divide just now) - any more than there was an IRA spy ring at Stormont - all charges dropped.

The Ayn Rand Institute are of course atheists - so what meaning but commercialism does Christmas have to them?

A truly warped conspiracy theory, very nice. The bottom line, tho, is that were're dealing with zealots/fanatics. With regard to the final outcome, Trotskyite or Neocon doesn't make much difference.
Re Pat Robertson, I think the final word is
here.

"Jesus wants people to spend money."

And Jesus Said, Give Only to Those Who Are Worthy

"... This attitude is exemplified by Kathy Shaidle, who writes that 'If poor people could be trusted with money, they wouldn't be poor in the first place...' I guess that's the new Catholic social consciousness: Blessed are the trustworthy poor, for they won't spend our charity irresponsibly... Blessed are the skeptically merciful, for they won't bestow mercy on those who don't deserve it...
Shaidle is Canadian, not American, but it appears that she has been infected with some pernicious thinking from south of the border...."

Down south here, I see the attitude as something like "I gave some poor person some money, in His name. Can I help it if the poor person gave me an iPod Nano and asked me if I wanted it gift-wrapped?"

Mr. Stross, I mentioned your position on the "War on Christmas" at a party Saturday night, and a JPL scientist suggested that we sneakily convince some smarmy televangelists to launch a "War on Xmas" and hope that they don't examine the 2K-year-old pun on the X.

See also the Ayn Rand Institute position:
Why Christmas Should Be More Commercial
Wednesday, December 24, 2003
By: Leonard Peikoff

Edited by author 12-05-2005 03:09 PM
Well, if you wanted to make it a sequel to "The Da Vinci Code", you'd have to put your satanists in the Vatican... at which point, someone might tell you that an erstwhile Jesuit named Malachi Martin already wrote that novel, and claimed while alive that there was a basis for it in fact. There have also been fictional U.S.-based treatments of the theme of "immanentizing the eschaton" in Illuminatus! (of course), and Carrion Comfort by Dan Simmons, at least.

As to America in "real life", or the simulation thereof we may be inhabiting... well, I'm no expert on either christian or satanist doctrine, but the teachings of "The Family", as described in Jesus plus Nothing, strike me as having more in common with what little satanic writing I've read than they have with, say, the Sermon on the Mount.

Two more pieces of food for thought, btw:

*) The minister saying on national TV that we need to defend Christmas (whatever that means) because "Jesus wants people to spend money".

*) The hints of ritual aspects to torture of Iraqi prisoners.

Your hypothesis is hard to test, but I'm not aware of any evidence convincingly refuting it...

Late edit: One more note: one of the creepier bits about "the family" is how they actually shy away from the label "Christian". What they say about that, at least to low-level initiates, is that it's just not inclusive enough...

Hypothesis: when Pat Robertson and Jack Chick et al rail against "Satanists" and "satanic cults", what if they know whereof they speak?

Any such cult would of course be (a) biblical fundamentalists (they just believe the other side is going to win), (b) very secretive and therefore -- presumably -- tightly disciplined, and (c) due to their small size (implicit, or we'd know about them by now) working to achieve their goals through infiltration and subversion rather than evangelism.

If you're already a biblical fundamentalist (of the wrong type) what would be a better target than to take over the leadership of the opposition and preach a perverted version of their creed that has more in common with your satanic master's desires than with the guy who was into turning the other cheek and helping out lepers and prostitutes? Killing homosexuals, dissidents, uppity women, and anyone who doesn't adhere to your particularly nasty dualist world-view: that's a cap that fits. Making out like a bandit anywhere you can get away with it in private: that fits, too.

Oh, and much as closeted homosexuals in homophobic cultures tend to go after their own (J. Edgar Hoover springs to mind), so might such a covert satanist-fundamentalist group go after other satanists who aren't part of their organization.

Yeesh, there's probably a sequel to "The Da Vinci Code" here.

No. I've been reading something a great deal more otherworldly and frightening: American newspapers. Though if you're considering fiction with that as a theme, I'd recommend a few other articles from Harpers, like this one to help trying to get the atmosphere right.

(FWIW, for self-professed christians, they are remarkably shy of moral scruples --- witness, among other things, Pat Robertson's pecuniary ties to the demi-genocidal Liberian government. Frankly, for this crowd, associating with Lovecraftian ancient horrors might be a step up...)

CD: "think, perhaps, of a Christian-tinged Aum Shin-Rikyo seeking to do the lord's work by bringing about the apocalypse". You haven't been reading my notes towards the third Laundry novel, have you?

wkwillis: The major foreign holders of American debt aren't rich foreign individuals; they're (central banks of) foreign governments, most notably China. And they keep buying more, even knowing that the value of those holdings, in Chinese currency, is foredoomed to drop. As long as we're talking conspiracy theories, is it all that far-fetched to argue that the Chinese know all this, and are explicitly gambling that a calamitous decline in the value of the dollar, at a time which they can effectively choose themselves, can be arranged to hurt us more than the decline in the value of their American bond holdings will hurt them?

All: as long as we're looking for a conspiracy behind the behavior of the folks currently in power in America, don't overlook straight-up religious fanaticism --- think, perhaps, of a Christian-tinged Aum Shin-Rikyo seeking to do the lord's work by bringing about the apocalypse. Or of the group described in Jesus plus Nothing, who see Hitler and Stalin as role models, and one of whose leaders says at one point, in effect, that raping little girls is just peachy so long as you're doing it with Jesus in your heart. (This is non-fiction, names several real U.S. Senators and Congressmen as being tied to the group, and did not lead to a libel suit; fictional variations on the theme are probably too numerous to easily list).

Of course, it's entirely likely that these guys and Charlie's Trots could each see the other as useful idiots...

Michael, what makes you think I believe the Neoconservatives run the US government, as opposed to being one element of a multi-way coalition that mostly marches under the banner of the Republican party?

Gary: if I was going to get political in this blog you could expect daily diatribes calling for a ban on Christmas, re-education camps for proponents of "intelligent design", and a progressive capital gains tax. (Not to mention the abolition of civil rights normally associated with real human beings -- such as the ability to sue for libel -- for publicly listed companies, and really far-reaching changes to intellectual property law.) I'd also be calling for Tony Blair's head onna stick, every other Tuesday. However, I do not see myself as The Daily Kos.UK, and I've got a job to do, namely entertaining people (rather than crawling up their sinuses and jabbing at them with a pointy stick).

Jack: my understanding is that M3 includes all sorts of interesting overseas deposits and large investments. Eurodollars, that sort of thing. If the presses are rolling to pay for certain current expensive ventures (like, cutting taxes and simultaneously running a hugely expensive war) then that's the first place the inflationary effects are going to show up. In other words, if they expect the bottom to drop out of the dollar over the next year, ceasing to publish M3 maybe buys them a few weeks or even months. Noticed how high the price of Gold has gone lately?

Rumsfeld isn't a neoconservative, though. And if he were, he wouldn't have been important in Nixon's administration. After all, Nixon (advised by Henry Kissinger) shaped his foreign policy by the rules of Realpolitik. Benjamin Disraeli was one of his models. The genuine neocons then (Henry "Scoop" Jackson was the most important) Nixon viewed as ignorant, moralizing blunderers who impeded his work.

"British reporting on US politics is much more comprehensive than the other way round" -- no doubt, but if the reporting isn't accurate, being comprehensive doesn't help you any. The picture circulated in the British press of neocons as a new Illuminati, bending the US government to their nefarious will, is just plain wrong, on both their origins and their methods. Better to be uninformed and know it, than to be confidently mistaken ...

I note with interest that the Fed is to stop issuing updates on the M3 money supply next March...

Charile, what's your take on why this is significant? IIRC, the M3 measure covers things like the number of outstanding mutual money-market shares; is the implication that something big is going to happen on the second derivative of the US money supply?

"I generally try to avoid getting political in this blog, because (being a mercenary sort) I'm not inclined to piss off one sector or another of my audience and potential customer base."

Wow. Well, that's an interesting theory.

All I can advise is not acting as if this described reality.

Not that I tend to disagree with your views (and I've not read the rest of your entry beyond this). I'm just wowing at the notion that this might resemble reality as I know it. (To be sure, I 97% know Charlie Stross from the web and fandom, and have actually read, sorry, relatively little of his fiction; but the above asserts a notion about the Charlie blog, not the Charlie fiction.)

You generally avoid getting political? Um, interesting notion. Also, I am a Klingon. Named "Marie." And I rool.

The US Libertarians are the last of the pre-Gladstonite abolish-the-corn-laws Liberals. (Go on, pick a Libertarian and call them a Liberal, I dare you!)

As for the neocons being active early, I know damn well that Don Rumsfeld is SecDef for the second time, having debuted in the job under Nixon (or was it Ford?). Their grubby little fingerprints have been visible for a long time, although as a dominant strain in US foreign policy they only came under the full glare of public scrutiny in early 2000.

British reporting on US politics is much more comprehensive than the other way round.

It's a fine conspiracy theory, Charlie, but I'm afraid you're not the first one to have thought of it. Here's Tom Tomorrow's take on it from a few months ago: http://www.workingforchange.com/comic.cfm?itemid=19635

Actually I'd have read the bomb-throwing anarchists of Rochard's World in _Singularity Sky_ as the neocons; theoreticians and academics sure of what is good for the little people sitting around plotting to get their hands on the levers of power and use the State for its true purpose, to spread the Revolution. ... In the UK our political world was immunised from that sort of idiocy ...

Well, speaking as an American who's been studying the US political debate for 15 years, I assure you the neocons are not that sort of idiots. (The Libertarian Party, now, they are that sort. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Mr. Stross modeled the anarchists of Rochard's World directly on them.) And, as I said before, they're not Straussians or Trotskyites either.

The fact is, you and Mr. Stross, relying on UK political reporting, can't get any accurate idea of US political factions. For instance, the neocons were already influential in US politics all the way back in Reagan's presidency, and there was nothing secret or furtive about it. When did you Brits first hear of them -- 2002?

Charles, as usual, you're right on all counts. I am carefully avoiding an ad hominem attack on Bostrom, but there are Extropians who refuse to deal with him now, and people who have withdrawn their writing from his forthcoming anthology. You're right about Dyson. My article in Quantum was explicitly a commentary on Dyson, with careful quotations and full citation, based on his publications and several long face-to-face conversations. When Heinlein carefully cited me by name for a quote in his Antimatter chapter of "Expanded Universe," I wrote him a 20-page thank you letter. In the scademic/scientific world there is a protocol for citation. Heinlein showed that a gentleman meets the higher standard of doing so outside the formal literature, i.e. Science Fiction. Problem is, with brilliant authors on the cutting edge (Greg Egan, Charles Stross, Bruce Sterling, etc.) the boundary between science and fiction is fuzzy, fractal, and misunderstood by many.

Edited by author 12-03-2005 10:44 AM
Let's assume that George Bush, Jr. actually knows what he is doing, watches events change, and changes his behaviour in accordance.
No, seriously. And I'm not saying he's a deep cover agent for the Weather Underground either, though maybe he is. Could be. The Weather Underground was patriotic, too.
Anyway, what has George Bush Jr. accomplished in the last five years to make America a better place?
1. He has very thoroughly bankrupted us by spending lots and lots of borrowed money. That is, he didn't spend all our money. Fifty years of the cold war spent all of our money calculated as the replacement value of all the physical assets of America. What he has done isn't even spending more borrowed money than all the rich people in America have in their (tax free) Swiss bank accounts. That was already gone when he took office.
What he did was spend money borrowed from overseas. When we default (because no one's going to give us any free money any more) the people who aren't going to get paid are the people who had money in a Cayman islands account that they can't claim from the Group of Paris or whoever does America's workout process. These people are the Eurotrash tax evaders, the WaBenzi corruption specialists, the Narcotraficantes, the Oil Sheikhs, etc. Ie the most dangerous people in the world.
Defunding these people was a good idea. Worth every penny of their money that we borrowed and spent.
2. What else did he do? Well, he took all the people in the National Guard and Reserves and demonstrated to them that miltary service wasn't an opportunity to get paid while you run around and pretend to be a soldier, you might have to actually be a soldier now and again. And in the case of Iraq, again, and again, and again. This is transforming the US armed forces from a red county redneck, black, and Hispanic organisation dedicated to learning job skills into a blue county containing armed forces that look a lot more like America and are full of people who are joing up while an actual war is going on. This is a very good idea from my point of view.
3. He is replacing military budgets full of aircraft and other boondoggles with budgets full of UAVs that are much more usefull in a real war. Granted, for every billion dollars he spends before it can get to the military budget he's spending only a few million in UAV funding, but it's a start.
4. Also he is destroying the Republican party. My boss was one of the few black people who voted for Bush in the last two elections. He made unsolicited antiBush remarks to me last month. He isn't the only guy who has made that kind of remark to me. Bush is a drag on the Republicans, big time. Good. Every time some Republican gets perp walked because they think that if Bush is in office they can steal anything not nailed down and not go to jail, I wiggle with joy.
So what's not to like?
In addition, he gave us a live ammo test of what worked and didn't work. We are cancelling a huge boondoggle fighter and attack aircraft program to increase UAV, mineclearing, CCC, body armor, night vision, etc, capability. All very usefull. Good work, Junior!
He also managed to so thoroughly botch the recovery of New Orleans that most of the people flooded out are not going to return because they have put down roots elsewhere. Which means that at least one downtown (and a culturally important one) is evacuated to the rest of America. So it won't be destroyed in case of nuclear attack when Iran finally does get the bomb. Score on for civil defense.

Michael Brazier: I understand the New Republic in _Singularity Sky_ was meant for a satire on neoconservatives.

 Actually I'd have read the bomb-throwing anarchists of Rochard's World in _Singularity Sky_ as the neocons; theoreticians and academics sure of what is good for the little people sitting around plotting to get their hands on the levers of power and use the State for its true purpose, to spread the Revolution. I've seen at least one right-wing commentator decry this book because of Charlie's obvious attempts to make them the heroes of the story. The fact the revolutionaries are manifestly incompetent and stupid seemed to have slipped under his radar.

 In the UK our political world was immunised from that sort of idiocy by the university student unions of the 70s which gave anyone with a room-temperature IQ (measured in Rankin) a bellyfull of mindless rhetoric and agitprop before they got kicked out with or without a degree. After that a political movement of the sort Strauss engendered would be laughed at. In the US it got elected to power. Weird.

Dan: With the Soviet Union no longer around, there is only one superpower. Therefore, the remaining superpower can easily run the world. (The Russian Federation's government seems not to have noticed that Russia is no longer a superpower.)

It generally takes at least one generation for an ex-superpower to realize that it is no longer a superpower. Look at Spain, France, or the UK as object lessons in this.

First corollary: after the USA ceases to be a superpower it will take a generation for the message to sink in.

(NB: I'm not sure that isn't happening right now. I note with interest that the Fed is to stop issuing updates on the M3 money supply next March -- that's probably far more significant than any day-to-day death toll in Iraq.)

Jonathan: IIRC, Nick Bostom was a regular on the Extropians mailing list more than a decade ago, back when it was still an interesting place to be. He pre-dated my arrival there, I think. And if you want to trace the ambiplasma idea back all the way, why not acknowledge Freeman Dyson?

Michael Brazier: I understand the New Republic in _Singularity Sky_ was meant for a satire on neoconservatives. Dunno where you got that idea from, but it's wrong. (Back in the mid nineties when I was writing that book I'd never heard of the neocons -- neither had most people.) They're a satire on the Austro-Hungarian Empire with Big Spaceships, or -- less obviously -- on the type of personality that feels nostalgic for such a milieu. Backfilling after the event, the way the New Republic is run is a dead ringer for a Straussian state, aristocrats who follow the dictum that war is the health of the nation being manipulated behind the scenes by the Curator's Office. I suspect I may make this explicit in any forthcoming sequels ...

Mr. Stross, ideas of Trotsky and Strauss have had some influence on the neoconservatives in America, but that's not the central defining thing about them. "Neoconservative" means, quite simply, a former social democrat who started voting Republican. These people began from a political point very much like the place you stand, only they stood there forty years ago. They watched Lyndon Johnson enact a host of social-democrat reforms, and saw them mostly fail, and then tried to work out why. The only name you were right to connect with them is Gladstone's.
<p>I understand the New Republic in _Singularity Sky_ was meant for a satire on neoconservatives. You may have hit off Leo Strauss to perfection, but the neoconservatives are far closer to Rachel Mansour -- from her job of covert agent for liberty, through her past careers of peace activist and SWAT officer specializing in WMD attacks, to her indignant fury at the structural injustices of the New Republic.

Edging slightly away from the politics into the wackier metaphysical speculation... Bostrom's "simulation argument" paper of 2003 got good press. But it was not original, compared to earlier treatment in the Science Fiction literature. For example (he said self-servingly) a decade earlier there was: "Human Destiny and the End of Time" [Quantum, No.39, Winter 1991/1992, Thrust Publications, 8217 Langport Terrace, Gaithersburg, MD 20877; ISSN 0198-6686]. It specifically and quantitatively suggested the overwhelming likelihood that we were simulated by electron-positron ambiplasma beings after the universe had all tunnelled into black holes and those black holes had all evaporated by Hawking radiation. Greg Benford acknowledges this as the source of his electron-positron ambiplasma beings detected near the center of our galaxy, radiating gamma rays by annihilation, his his Tides of Light / Galactic Center series of novels. As usual, scientists and science fiction authors publish first, and then some academic philosopher rediscovers a watered-down version. Any day now some professor will deconstruct "Accelerando" and think he invented the singularity. Not to knock Bostrom's Transhumanist credentials, mind you, I'd guess the odds are that he simply forgot that he got the idea by reading Benford, and never knew that Benford started writing that wonderful fiction before my nonfictional article gave him a neat way to resolve some plots in the later novels of the series. Anyone out there have a copy to confirm my otherwise odd assertion?

On origins: I think you also need to take into account the history of American intervention in South America, Central America, and associated islands. Note: If American intervention was as certain a force for good as Us imperialists seem to think, Haiti would be a paradise.

Another factor: There were two superpowers. With the Soviet Union no longer around, there is only one superpower. Therefore, the remaining superpower can easily run the world. (The Russian Federation's government seems not to have noticed that Russia is no longer a superpower.)

There's a joke about the lone lawyer in a small town who was in bad financial shape because he didn't have enough business. Then another lawyer came to town, and there was more than enough business for both. I suspect there can't be a lone superpower; two are needed, so that each can offer to defend lesser powers against the other.

Yes, I have to acknowledge that my Jade Theory came to me worryingly soon after reading Brin's analysis of this situation. Morphic resonance, for sure.

OTOH, people just cock things up sometimes. Look, for example, at the political career and legacy of Napoleon III, for example. Top conspirator: shite emperor.

But GWB is a man who has been raised never having to clean up his own mess in any sense whatsoever. He is the anti-Eleanor Roosevelt. Add that to a dash of Haliburton's FailedState-Industrial Complex, and a future composed of the least attractive bits of Baxter, Stephenson and Brunner seems increasingly likely.

Bastards. Let's build the the elevator and leave them to it. Some days I feel like I'd pedal up it if necessary.

Edited by author 12-02-2005 06:44 PM
Hi Chris!

You are familiar with the Simulation Argument -- that we are in fact software entities living in a history sim being run by a vastly transcendent descended intelligence? Nick Bostrom has a fascinating paper in which he argues that if you might be living in a simulation then all else equal you should care less about others, live more for today, make your world look more likely to become rich, expect to and try more to participate in pivotal events ... who do we know of who isn't particularly bright but who seems to be at the centre of a pattern of this sort?

As David Brin puts it, the worst case scenario is that the simulation argument is true, and we're living in an egocentric simulation that exists solely for the amusement of whatever entity is playing the role of George W. Bush.

A pedant writes - for Turkey, it was the Treaty of Sevres, not Versailles.

Oddly enough, when I was trying to analyse what the British state was up to in 1998, I called the resulting pamphlet 'Back to the Future', and epigrammed it "We're not going forwards to the twenty-first century, we're going backwards to the nineteenth century." And I had something to say about 'liberal interventionists' which has, tragically, stood the test of time. It's here: http://www.red-star-research.org.uk/rpm/maxingun.html

As for GWB, I was pondering the other day that in fact he's some kind of alien, taking part in an alien reality TV show. "We took Yggswggl4447, the thickest YgstYupgl we could find, gave him a body makeover, and put him in charge of a type 4 planet's most powerful nation! With hilarious consequences! Updates each day!"

Yup - he's Jade off Big Brother. Let's hope that the Interstellar version of the Broadcasting Complaints Commission, or possibly the Galactic Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to the Semi-Sentient, get here soon.

Edited by author 12-02-2005 03:42 PM
Del, what kind of "Liberal" do you think I'm talking about? Read for context: the term "Liberal" has meant different things in different decades, and I think the capitalization of "Democracy" in the mouth of a purported Trot (and a Straussian one at that!) ought to have clued you in ...

Update: And the "God bless America" bit at the end, come to think of it. Come on, you know I'm an honest atheist, right?

Disappointing to see you falling for the story that the Iraq invasion, or even the Afghanistan invasion before it, had anything whatsoever to do with liberal intervention. The twits who cheered for it because they though it did were irrelevant, and would have been just as irrelevant if they'd opposed it as I did. The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.

This was a very amusing microessay, somewhat in the style of Ken MacLeod, partly because of how it touches base with truth often enough to maintain willing suspension of disbelief. As someone who doesn't know enough History, I suspect that the Cheney-Rumsfield-Wolfowitz-Feith etcetera cabal chose to make the USA an empire without deciding WHICH empire. Bablyonian, Hittite, Egyptian, Roman, Holy Roman, Spanish, British, Swedish, Portuguese, Russian, whatever. We'll cross that Rubicon when we come to it. The role of Halliburton makes me suspect a fondness for Leopold's Belgian empire. Pity that they didn't read Gibbons. Or, for that matter, Asimov. George W. Bush as one of the more feeble emperors at Trantor. Or maybe as Denethor, blaming his secret Palantir for bad intelligence.

Oh, and the next time you see someone mentioning that the Iraqi resistance is winding down, point them towards this.

Well, it looks like I might owe an apology to the wingnut I was arguing against before.

Iraq *is* showing signs of independence...

An Iran-Iraq military alliance. Well done, America.

Edited by author 07-04-2005 03:07 PM
Charlie -- I do think it's important to hammer on these morons occasionally, and I do have a blood pressure problem. I've distanced myself all the way to Europe, and it still gets my goat occasionally.

I know it's noise in the wires in the larger sense; I've been flaming happily since I first got involved in online fraud exposure back in the mid-90's; a good troll is good for a week of entertainment or more!

Baiting the chicken-boner set was fun when it was make-money-fast and 419ers. But then our day-in-the-life-of happened. Suddenly the flaming went deadly serious for me. Suddenly there was this great polarization among people I thought I knew -- some were really as normal as I thought, while others morphed into fascists overnight. Eric Raymond was a case in point. The writer of the Cathedral versus the Bazaar obviously understood democracy. Right? Then I realized the bugger was using the phrase "anti-idiotarian" and meaning it. Jeez! My world crumbled. Obviously people really were stupider than I had thought.

(An amusing aside on 9-11; I had taken our kids (homeschooling that year) to the university greenhouse for a little field trip and heard the wildest War-of-the-Worlds narration on the radio there... Walked over to the student union and saw the most freaking amazing video I'd ever seen. What a day! And I checked very quickly that our passports were in order. I can recognize a Reichstag fire when I see one.)

So yeah, I hammer the soi-disant anti-idiotarian with deadly seriousness whenever one pops up and I happen to notice. Since this thread's devoted to it, I figured the bandwidth usage was OK.

I'm currently living in Hungary (wife's homeland) and, as always, I love being the expat. Hungarians don't really care about the whole damn thing; their attitudes towards America haven't changed. But then they always did have an unerring tendency to back the losing side in any war... Ever since they fought the Turk to a halt, anyway. So when I step outside, America and the recent unpleasantness fades into a relieving abeyance. Very healthy, from the standpoint of your distance criterion.

I can't, however, cultivate a sense of irony. The nation I grew up loving turns out to have been a sham. Because if the American ideals I learned as a child were really taken seriously by more than a vanishing fraction of Americans, none of this could possibly have happened. We're torturing random people off the street and buying captives to keep in cages to show the bread-and-circuses crowd how successfully we're finding those terrorists, and nobody gives a shit. (For certain values, of course, of "nobody" -- there's a vocal minority online, but that rarely penetrates the public consciousness.)

Yeah, I know the State Department isn't reading this, and I don't really care about Downing Street because I figure that's your watch, not mine. But Dave will read it. And I want Dave to know, in no uncertain terms, that at least one American -- a real live red-state Hoosier who grew up Baptist and playing softball -- thinks that he is a goddamned idiot for falling for the lies of a bunch of slick Washington con-men. He's a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders, and he has the unmitigated gall to think I am his intellectual inferior because I can open my eyes.

Nothing to do with you, Charlie (it's obvious you're OK with Americans-as-opposed-to-American-government, like the majority of people anywhere) and everything to do with this pathetic loser who is dirtying the meaning of what it is to be American. There's no room on the Internet for stupidity (well, obviously this is rhetoric), and there's no room in America for people who don't get American values. And it's very important to me that Dave understands that. He needs remedial civics, bad. Starting with reading the Declaration of Independence.

The blood pressure is more of a literary crutch, actually. Last time I measured it, it was way down. Living in Europe makes me lose weight, and that, combined with my delightful distance from all that crap, makes me a low-pressure version of my former self. Before that, I was in Puerto Rico for eight months -- the same kind of distance pertained to that situation, plus the weather was great, although the utter automotive dependence of PR made me gain weight there.

So thanks for the kind note, Charlie, and if you like, I'll tone it down. But in point of fact I'm not actually likely to succumb any time soon.

Michael: speaking personally, none of this shit is worth a stroke. If you've got a blood pressure problem, stay away from this particular discussion -- or distance yourself, cultivate a sense of irony, and don't take it too seriously. It is, after all, just random noise in the wires. You aren't going to cause a major change in state department policy or Downing Street's affairs by posting here.

(I have quite a number of American friends and I once considered moving there -- over a decade ago -- so you don't need to worry about me buying the idea that Dave is particularly representative of anything other than his own particular political sector.)

Edited by author 07-04-2005 02:22 AM
Newspaper article:

Many Iraqis interviewed said they believe U.S. officials have too much influence in the nation's important decisions and the government is far too dependent on the Americans for Iraqis to place much stock in their sovereignty.

"This is not a democracy," said Sarah Abdul Kareem, 21, a Shiite. "This is chaos."

And there's an interesting set of graphs here - note that despite the rhetoric about terrorism, about 75% of the attacks in Iraq are directed at the occupying army, and many of the rest at Iraqi forces supporting them.

Sorry, post below forgot to mention the three words "Downing Street Memos".

Dave, fact-based time.

If necessary, I can dig out a newspaper article showing that Blair confirmed their accuracy (but disputing the implications).

Assume they are real. What is your position on (a) Bush deciding to attack Iraq straight after Sept. 11th, (b) Bush lying to the US and the rest of the world about why such an attack was taking place and (c) Blair having to push Bush into going into Afghanistan first?

You've asked for a fact-based dialogue - the latest and most interesting facts are those raised by the Memos. Your comment?

Oh, and (Euro time) let me take this opportunity to wish you all a happy Independence Day.

Ew. I made the mistake of following the link to his blog.

Dave actually thinks he's supporting freedom. What a ... well, "useful idiot" really is a descriptive term, it appears.

And one more point:

Well, let me clarify as well then, though I fear this discussion may have already sadly and irrevocably devolved into unproductive and acrimonious meta-discussion rather than the frank exchange of views and facts such a forum should ideally embody. I had hoped for better from you.

If you were presenting new information, or if you were coming out of the position that your opponents are rational, you would have been treated as such. You take a polemic stance, and you'll get heaps of acrimony -- not because we hate you, but because we hate the ideas you are presenting because we've heard them for years from people who are patently lying to us. And you fricking know it. So again I ask, what is the matter with you? Why do you persist in thinking that this crap is good for America? $200 billion dollars down the tubes -- for what? A better Iraq? Even if it were true, what was the cost-benefit analysis on that? Can you honestly say we'd solved all other problems that those $200 billion could have helped, and tweaking the governments of random desert nations halfway around the world was all we could think of to do with all that money?

You, Dave, are stupid. Or you think I am. And I know which is more likely.

Now excuse me, I have to go do some fricking deep breathing before I get a stroke from the mere knowledge that you share citizenship with me. Oy.

A second note: I find it difficult to read Dave's posts because I have a blood pressure problem, but I have seen this tidbit: 80% of Europe believes one way, and 80% of America the other.

Dave, if you can find any source saying that 80% of America thinks any of the following, you'll get an apology from me:

1. "It was a good idea to attack Iraq."
2. "Saddam was dangerous."
3. "An American empire is the safest course for both America and the world."
4. "Dead Iraqis are OK as long as there is freedom in Iraq someday."
5. "Bombing Baghdad is equivalent to the American War of Independence."

You think 80% of America agrees with you on those points? I think you're wrong. Most of America just hasn't been paying attention. If we had -- if our media were doing their jobs instead of being the adequately documented corporate shills they are -- then Smirky the Chimp would have been impeached already, and Rumsfeld would be in Den Haag standing trial next to Slobodan Milosevic.

Maybe you think this is polemic, that it's just another stupid liberal venting irrationality. Maybe you're right, and the steamroller of American greatness will flatten me. Go ahead and shut your eyes to the dangerous truth. If America doesn't stay America, it's nothing more than one more empire on the garbage heap of history. It's just a matter of staying out of the way during the death throes.

AAGGGH. Charlie, I am American and I can safely say that having people like Dave be our default face to the world is really and truly distressing.

What's good for Dave (or what Dave seems, utterly illogically, to believe is good for Dave -- maybe he's an oil baron?) isn't good for America. None of this crap is good for America. America, by fricking definition (read the questions for citizenship application sometime) is based on the notion that people are equal and that we all have the same rights -- self-evidently -- to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Says so in our defining document.

When Dave comes in here and says it's just fine to carpet-bomb a major city because the president of its country has become an inconvenience for our wealthy, that is deeply and utterly unAmerican. I'm ashamed to have him around here. He certainly thinks he knows how the world works, and it's an attitude all too common in the United States. (In the US we typically see all foreigners as oddly accented extras on our television screens; it's a weird thing, as an American, to spend time overseas for the first time and realize, for instance, that people really do grow up speaking other languages.)

My point is, it's not just being non-American that allows you a perspective on reality. It's being interested in reality in the first place. Dave clearly isn't.

If it's any comfort to you, I think decisions such as basing human rights on citizenship are indications that America has jumped the shark. I know I'm keeping assets in Euros nowadays.

I dearly hope that America (the real America, not the hijacked fascist shell of its former greatness) will recover from the recent unpleasantness. I'm not holding my breath, but I still hope. Dave, of course, says there's nothing to see, move along. Quotes fascists to show he's perfectly justified in his rose-colored picture. I mean, it's not like we meant to support Uzbekistan. Not like we intended for Afghanistan's warlords to get power back, or opium production to skyrocket. Not like we knew that aerial application of defoliants in Colombia would kill villager's crops while leaving coca production untouched. I mean, CNN tells us things are great in Iraq, so that's all hunky-dory. Not like we meant for young blue-jeaned students to be beaten on the streets of Najaf for being insufficiently fundamentalist. Lalala, my fingers in my ears, I can still manage to believe that this is the course of rational people who believe in liberty!

Dave, I can't believe any thinking human being would mention that we're in Iraq to create a shining beacon of freedom and a democratic Middle East, let alone the rest of the tripe you're dishing up. That one point was absurd on the face of it in 2003. In 2005 it's just a sign on your back: "Hello, I'm a useful idiot." Please just shut the hell up. If you want an empire, please take it the fuck out of my America, and move to China or someplace, where you'll fit in fine, with your lapdog belief in godly leadership.

Edited by author 07-02-2005 09:18 AM
Dave, you seem to be hung up on the assumption that what's good for America is good for the rest of the world.

I'm not American. Neither is Tony Quirke. And we simply don't see facts the same way as you, because our experience of America is very different from yours.

You might want to meditate on Nial Fergusson's latest book, and on the PNAC's report, and consider what they'd look like from the point of view of someone outside the charmed circle of "American freedom" staring up the gun barrels of a hostile superpower that's out of control. Because that's what it looks like from where I'm standing. (Clue: your courts have ruled that your government has no obligation to recognize civil rights of non-citizens outside your borders. From my point of view, that means your legal system has asserted the right of your government to kidnap and torture or execute me without any justification, should it so desire. Not that this is likely, in my case, but if my government took that stance you'd raise an eyebrow, I think. And given that your government has done this, I think I've got more than sufficient grounds to be angry.)

Edited by author 07-01-2005 04:52 PM
Well, let me clarify as well then, though I fear this discussion may have already sadly and irrevocably devolved into unproductive and acrimonious meta-discussion rather than the frank exchange of views and facts such a forum should ideally embody. I had hoped for better from you.

Michael, at least, seemed to be genuinely curious how I could believe what I did (going so far as to ask "What's wrong with you?"), and so I tried to enlighten him as best I could.

Why was I here? Socratic, fact-based debate is one of the most important foundations of democracy. It’s greatly disturbing to me that 80% of Europe thinks one way and 80% of America has a diametrically opposite opinion. They can’t both be right, and the fact such a divide exists at all tends to indicate the two sides are not only operating with either vastly different heuristics or greatly different datasets but are also failing to discuss and compare these bases for their opposing beliefs with each other: a debate leading towards consensus is not occurring.

Since this dichotomy obviously raises a very significant possibility that America's policy is wrong and Europe is right, I am genuinely interested in knowing what facts or beliefs that I and other Americans might be ignorant of that underlie the opposing viewpoint, and comparing them to those that underlie the arguments I currently agree with (pending contradictory new results from reality or persuasive arguments in the other direction).

I'm not trying to drown anyone out (most of my posts have been responses to questions or claims in other posts, and have referenced them) and I'm hardly simply reiterating the war platform or parroting press releases; I'm offering the numerous facts underlying it about which there seems to be a real lack of awareness (such as your statements claiming "this was never about democratizing Iraq" or that the US is “stripping” Iraqi assets). Far from wanting to drown them out, I would be extremely happy if proponents of the other view would be as prolific and fact-based with their defense, since that’s the Socratic method by which issues must be discussed for democratic societies to arrive at consensus truths.

I was hoping this would be a mostly-opposed forum in which I could hear such arguments. It's quite annoying to me that instead of giving fact-based counter-arguments people tend, as you just did, to get upset and stifle the presentation of any facts and opinions they don’t agree with and use absurd tactics like labeling anything remotely resembling defense of the Bush Doctrine as "parrot[ing] the latest press releases from the Pentagon or the White House or the State Department." Not one of my posts references any of those; they tend to reference Iraqis, Wikipedia, historian Victor Hanson, and people like liberal Dean Esmay. (I don't even read press releases except where they happen to appear in the news. And, I don't agree with most of Bush's policies anyway, so I don't think I would enjoy them if I did read them.)

And by refusing to engage with the fundamental reasons for our dissent you are beginning to annoy me

I think "engag[ing] with the fundamental reasons for our dissent" is exactly what I did, and I think that's what really annoys you.

So: I urge you to take a day or two out for quiet reflection. Then either come back and start coming up with ideas of your own, or drop the topic. But if you come back and just parrot the latest press releases from the Pentagon or the White House or the State Department, I will either ban you from posting, or terminate all postings on this topic (probably the latter).

That is ridiculous, insulting, untrue, and so ironic I am laughing out loud right now as I write this. You claim I’m not interested in real discussion in the very post in which you tell me that you already know everything I have to say, I don’t have any original ideas, and that therefore I’m not allowed to discuss these things. I suppose it’s easier than defending your position, which apparently you are incapable of doing since you find the facts so threatening that you must ban them.

Well, I had a lot more respect for you before that post, though I think I’ll still read and enjoy your books. I do have my own blog (http://www.semirandomramblings.blogspot.com/), which I believe I’ll retire to rather than waste my time here. I’ve already cached and will be posting this entire thread there, so go ahead and delete anything you like. Freedom always wins out over oppression in the end, be it the terrible Soviet or Saddam variety or the small petty sort you’ve demonstrated here.

Sorry, I thought people might be interested. The thread didn't have much going on for quite awhile, and there seems to be a lot of misconceptions re the war out there that I thought should be cleared up. Since it's being interpreted as "axe-grinding," I guess there's not much point in continuing.

Best to all, I hope I gave you some things to think about.

Edited by author 07-01-2005 12:25 PM
Dave, your political axe-grinding is beginning to annoy me.

I note that you've been outposting everyone else on this thread two-to-one lately.

Kindly take a break.

UPDATE: I want to clarify that.

Dave, you're basically reiterating a political platform with which most everyone else here – definitely myself, and as far as I know, Tony Quirke – are extremely familiar: the Bush doctrine that freedom and democracy need to be promoted by any means necessary, including military force.

Now, if you want to discuss what this means, or what the likely consequences of applying this doctrine in Iraq are, or where things are going, feel free to do so here.

But the overwhelming sense I'm getting from your postings lately is that you want to drown out all alternate viewpoints and you're not interested in actually discussing anything. You know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the current course of action in Iraq is both justifiable and right, and you're annoyed that otherwise seemingly intelligent folks disagree with you, so you instinctively want to raise your voice to make sure they've got the message.

As it happens, we've already got the message. Megaphone diplomacy is unnecessary. If you want to shout it from the rooftops, by all means start your own weblog. But the fact is, we don't agree with your premises for various reasons. And by refusing to engage with the fundamental reasons for our dissent you are beginning to annoy me.

So: I urge you to take a day or two out for quiet reflection. Then either come back and start coming up with ideas of your own, or drop the topic. But if you come back and just parrot the latest press releases from the Pentagon or the White House or the State Department, I will either ban you from posting, or terminate all postings on this topic (probably the latter).

Edited by author 07-01-2005 10:49 AM
Dean Esmay puts the UN-vs.-war issue in perspective better than I could ever hope to:

"Inherent in that is the notion war is the worst of all possible outcomes. This needs to be challenged wherever and whenever possible, because it is a lie. Despotic regimes murdered more than four times as many people in the last 100 years as all the wars on the planet combined. Furthermore, wars are often fought for good reason, whereas despotic regimes never exist for any good reason. They exist only because of the willingness of good people to stand by and do nothing.
...
The old thinking on the UN boils down to is this: "War is bad, the worst thing imaginable. So, you can butcher as many children as you want, torture as many people as you like, crush as many minorities as you please, treat your women like chattel, lobotomize and execute your homosexuals, grind every religious minority into the dirt, break as many bones and chop off as many limbs as you see fit, and obliterate every human freedom that annoys you: just don't bother your neigbors."

We need to stop this. It is simply unacceptable. If we are concerned with world security, then it is a fact that the only thing which has ever been shown to increase the security of everyday people is freedom and democracy."

(emphasis in original)

http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1120195543.shtml

Edited by author 07-01-2005 09:47 AM
It's nice to see that former Baathists like Riverbend are enjoying the freedom to criticize the gov't that they deprived the rest of the country of (on pain of death, torture, rape, and mutilation) for so long.

I love the smell of irony in the morning.

<ahref="http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2005_07_...#112017374927547660">New entry from Riverbend</a>.

Meanwhile, free Iraqis continue to build a democratic society...

"Baha' Al-'Araji, a member of the constitution drafting committee told Al-Mada paper yesterday that there are going to be 5 spots in each Iraqi province where citizens can find designated boxes where they can put their opinions and suggestion as to the process of writing the constitution.
Only Baghdad will be an exception due to its high population so there will be 5 spots in each main quarter in the capital.

One million "suggestion forms" are planned to be distributed nationwide soon and there will be specialized teams to read, sort the received forms and prepare summaries that will eventually be submitted periodically to the main committee.
He also mentioned-according to the paper-that the committee has already purchased air time on satellite channels and columns space on papers (ten in total) to publish/broadcast materials of value to constitutional education to help people get a better understanding of the process.

The same paper also has published (exclusively as paper said) a big part of the draft of bill of rights (pdf Arabic).
These 23 clauses that were drafted by "committee of rights, freedoms and basic duties" are scheduled to be submitted to the rest of the members to be discussed and modified within a couple of days."

http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/2005/06/c...tion-update_30.html

Or Saddam, for that matter, if you want to get nasty about it?

No need to consider that "nasty." Russia supplied about 53% of their military arms, France also supplied Iraq with 13% or so of total arms shipments, and the US and UK barely register on the chart [listed as 0%]. I haven't been able to find the chart since seeing it a month or two ago, or I'd post the direct link, but here's a PBS link.

"At least half of Iraq's conventional weapons were purchased from its ally, the Soviet Union, but France was also a major source, providing its sophisticated Mirage fighters and deadly Exocet missiles. And there were many others -- China, South Africa, Czechoslovakia, Egypt and Brazil. At one point, in the 1980s, Iraq was the biggest importer of arms in the world."

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sh...oad/etc/arming.html

The US is not entiraly blameless --

"Officially, most Western nations participated in a total arms embargo against Iraq during the 1980s, but as we shall see in this broadcast, Western companies, primarily in Germany and Great Britain, but also in the United States, sold Iraq the key technology for its chemical, missile, and nuclear programs."

but doesn't seem to be the key player.

Here too is a nice pre-OIF thesis on "THE TOTALITARIAN ORIGINS OF IRAQI BA`THISM."

http://www.joric.com/Saddam/Thesis.htm#5.

Heh, we were just discussing Uzbekistan the other day. Seems the US has been slowly terminating that reationship since the Taliban fell.

I agree, this is an area where policy needs to match rhetoric, though I assume you're not advocating war to remove Karimov.

http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?F=915861&C=asiapac
http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/000852.html

It was clear from the outset that Iraq was no threat, and it was clear from the outset that removal of bad guys from governments is not something the United States does as a matter of course (jeez, who do you think sets up the bad guys, post-Cold War? Or Saddam, for that matter, if you want to get nasty about it?)

*cough* *cough* *cough* Uzbekistan *cough*

The UK and France had declared war on Germany on September 1st, 1939 -- but in accordance with defensive obligations owed to Poland
It's interesting you would mention that. WW II gets rather hagiographic treatment compared to other wars, mostly I think because reporters and academics are overwhelmingly left-leaning and it was fought against right-wing fascists (it's interesting that leftists in the U.S. vehemently opposed entry to the war right up intil the abrogation of the Nazi treaty with Stalin). It's usually carefully omitted that the spirit of the commitments to defend Polish sovereignty were not honored in the end -- they merely traded Nazi oppressors for Soviet ones who were little better. So it's a bit problematic to cite that "commitment" as forcing Allies to declare war when they so cavalierly abandoned that commitment when it became inconvenient, consigning Poles to Soviet brutality and standing idly by as tens of thousands of Polish POWs were murdered in cold blood. Tragically, Poland lost the highest percentage of its citizens of any country in WW II, even more than Germany.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland

But really, my overall point in all this is just that nations go to war or don't when they feel it's in their interest, regardless of any treaty obligations or lack thereof, and every military action should be judged on its merits rather than subject to some arcane, morally indifferent, usually unenforceable notion of international law.

Michael,

How charmingly paranoid you are, Michael. We don't see through the propaganda because there is no propaganda to see through. Sorry, there is no secret all-powerful Hallburton-Amoco-Exxon cabal that runs America; the idea is just silly. (For the record, Halliburton lost money, its stock price fell during the war, and it was fined for overcharging the U.S. for gasoline through a subsidiary; not very omnipotent of them) If there were, believe me, the press would be screaming about it. They live for that stuff, esp when it involves Republicans (look what they did with a fake National Guard memo). There are all kinds of oversight committees and disclosure requirements to keep tabs on that sort of thing. Money leaves tracks.

This is what I mean when I talk about bad datasets. But since I believe rational people can be led to the truth, I hope you'll keep an open mind and allow me to try to help you:

There are billions upon billions of dollars which are mysteriously unaccounted for.
It's not the least bit mysterious. Soldiers are not very good accountants, and they didn't make a nice neat double-entry in their Funds Disbursed journals with signatures in triplicate every time they paid cash to 100 Iraqis to repair a sewage line.

An aside: what has happened to the oil money from Iraq? You think the Iraqis are getting that? Shit, they don't even have potable water in their capital city anymore, since Uncle Sam took over from previous management.

 Ahhh, where do I begin? OK first off, they didn't have enough water under Saddam because he wasn't big on consenual gov't ("Complaining about the water shortage, are you? Let's cut that tongue out! Problem solved."), we've completed lots of projects (while dodging suicide-bomber terrorists) to help the situation since taking over and the elected Iraqi gov't is doing so as well, and the Iraqi budget was published by the Iraq gov't so everyone can see where the oil money is going.

Obviously not in my self-interest or yours.
Allow me to quote an apropos Chrenkoff piece here: 'There is an old Polish motto that says “For your freedom and ours.” Many who live in advanced Western societies take their security and prosperity for granted. Poles, who’ve experienced so little of either over the past two centuries, are much more aware of how precious and precarious freedom is. They also understand that freedom is indivisible; that increasing it even in the remotest corner of the world enriches the whole of humanity. And so, for the past 250 years, Polish émigrés and exiles have been involved in many a struggle for independence and liberty around the world – fighting for “your freedom” if they weren’t always able to fight for theirs.'
That's besides Hussein's well-documented penchants for supporting terrorists, invading his neighbors, and refusing to explain what he did with his WMD, each a threatening behavior in its own special way which it was in everyone's interest to deal with.
What shocks me, again and again, is the ability of otherwise intelligent Americans to believe this obvious propaganda.
I am equally shocked at the ability of any people to believe wild conspiracy theories (sometimes backed with deliberately misleading video edits such as those Michael Moore puts together) on the basis of no evidence, and call honest statements lies and propaganda in direct contradiction to the known facts. You see, it's not democratic "propaganda" when Iraq really does hold elections, but do we hear a mea cupla from all the people like Chomsky who said it was a lie and it would never happen? We do not.
and it was clear from the outset that removal of bad guys from governments is not something the United States does as a matter of course
Well, not as a matter of course; that's a serious business, removing a gov't. But before Iraq there was Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, the failed Cuba attempt, etc.
(jeez, who do you think sets up the bad guys, post-Cold War?
I would say our flawed human nature (specfically lust for power). I hope you're not thinking of another theory involving Halliburton.
So why did you think we were sending our boys to die there?
To eliminate the threats I mentioned above, and also to (as I stated below) to help create a free and democratic Mideast to drain the fever swamps of oppression that created the 9/11 terrorists.
I just don't get it.
Well, I hope I've been helpful on that count. Here's Victor's thoughts on the Halliburton conspiracy theories as well:

"Myth #4: Profit-making led to this war.
Then there is the strange idea that American administration officials profited from the war. Companies like Bechtel and Halliburton are supposedly "cashing in," either on oil contracts or rebuilding projects — as if any company is lining up to lure thousands of workers to the Iraqi oasis to lounge and cheat in such a paradise.
This idea is absurd for a variety of other reasons, too. Iraqi oil is for the first time under Iraqi, rather than a dictator's, control. And the Iraqi people most certainly will not sign over their future oil reserves to greedy companies in the manner that Saddam gave French consortia almost criminally profitable contracts. Indeed, no Iraqi politician is going to demand to pump more oil to lower gas prices in the country that freed him. Some imperialism.
All U.S. construction is subject to open audit and assessment. A zealous media has not yet found any signs of endemic or secret corruption. There really is a giant scandal surrounding Iraq, but it involves (1) the United Nations Oil-for-Food program, in which U.N. officials and Saddam Hussein, hand-in-glove with European and Russian oil companies, robbed revenues from the Iraqi people; and (2) French petroleum interests that strong-armed a tottering dictator to sign over his country's national treasure to Parisian profiteers under conditions that no consensual government would ever agree to. The only legitimate accusation of Iraqi profiteering does not involve Dick Cheney or Halliburton, but rather Kofi Annan's negligence and his son Kojo's probable malfeasance."
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson042304.html
I should note that since Victor wrote that, Cotecna memos have surfaced alleging Kofi Annan not only steered money their way but met with Cotecna officials to confirm it, which directly contradicts Kofi's earlier claims he had never met with his son's erstwhile employer and had no involvement in th awarding of their contract.

Charlie,

Wrong. In the case of the USA, the USA participated in the invasion of Germany because Germany formally declared war on the USA on December 11th, 1941.

As I pointed out below, if declaration of war is the standard, Saddam committed numerous pre-defined acts of war against the US, in violation of the cease-fire. Legally, that case is airtight.

The USSR participated in the invasion of Germany because, whatever Stalin might or might not have been planning, Hitler sucker-punched him first.

Now, I know you're pulling my leg when you say that. You can't possibly be that naive, given what happened afterward. Stalin invaded Germany for exactly the same reason the USSR invaded the dozens of other countries they conquered and made vassal states of. And if the US and UK hadn't invaded from the west, there would probably have been no free Western Europe during the Cold War.

General Patton, it should be noted, after winning some decisive battles that established him as one of the great military geniuses in history, wanted to drive all the way through to Poland. The East German and Polish people paid a terrible 50-year price in oppression for his superiors' gullibility and fecklessness. (German soldiers in Poland also fled westward into the arms of the advancing Allies, knowing what Russian troops would do to them).

And the allies did so under the aegis of an organization called the United Nations which has, since about 1943, arrogated to itself the right to authorize formal acts of war between states and which (as part of its charter) forbids the waging of aggressive war, seeing as how that's what it was established to oppose.

Well, it's certainly a bit inaccurate to say the UN organizaion existed in 1942. The UN was chartered in 1946 under Sec'y General and Communist Soviet spy Alger Hiss (deeply flawed at the inception, the UN hasn't gotten much better since).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alger_Hiss
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Charter

The 1942 "United Nations" is actually just the name of the joint declaration the Allies made (as in "we the united nations of Britain, Russia, etc."), and was built on the Attantic Charter, which outlined the following:

no territorial gains sought by the United States or the United Kingdom,
territorial adjustments must conform to the people involved,
the right to self determination of peoples,
trade barriers lowered,
there must be disarmament,
there must be freedom from want and fear,
there must be freedom of the seas,
there must be an association of nations

By not obtaining a proper UN mandate for the invasion of Iraq I've got little doubt that George Bush committed a war crime (the same one for which numerous Nazi top brass were hanged); more importantly, the Attorney General to the British government happens to agree on this little point (about the need for a UN resolution).

Well, if liberating 25 million people from Saddam's brutal reign and giving them freedom and democracy is a "war crime," then the law is wrong (and so is the Attorney General), and again you're going to have to round up Clinton and NATO for Kosovo while you're at it.

It's demonstrably useless as well. Was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan illegal as well as morally indefensible? Of course. Did the UN do anything about it? Still waiting for that war crimes tribunal.

Dave: So far, America's naked self-interest has been served how, exactly, by the Iraq war? We don’t lay claim to an inch more territory, oil has tripled in price and we don't own any more of it than we did before, we've spent $200 billion, we were already the sole military superpower so I don't think our military situation has improved, and most tragically we've sacrificed 1700 of our servicepeople (and counting). From the perspective of a war of aggressive self-interest, it's a pretty miserable failure.

How charmingly näive you are, Dave. The war was never in America's self-interest. It is clearly in the self-interest of America's owners. Look at the profit-and-loss statements of the oil industry, or those of Halliburton or the half-dozen other private contracting companies. Granted, those of the private contractors are largely hidden. There are billions upon billions of dollars which are mysteriously unaccounted for. [An aside: what has happened to the oil money from Iraq? That's a few hundred million a day. You think the Iraqis are getting that? Shit, they don't even have potable water in their capital city anymore, since Uncle Sam took over from previous management.]

So back to the point: no. Obviously not in my self-interest or yours. We're just the people footing the bill in the biggest and most blatant scam in centuries. But you go along and maintain you're in control of America, and our wise and benevolent leaders surely know what they're doing, and it's all for the greater good. I'm sure it makes you feel better.

What shocks me, again and again, is the ability of otherwise intelligent Americans to believe this obvious propaganda. Dave, you're clearly not stupid. Why do you believe this? It was clear from the outset that Iraq was no threat, and it was clear from the outset that removal of bad guys from governments is not something the United States does as a matter of course (jeez, who do you think sets up the bad guys, post-Cold War? Or Saddam, for that matter, if you want to get nasty about it?) So why did you think we were sending our boys to die there? Were you one of the ones saying to "support the troops" and send them off to die for ... what, exactly?

I just don't get it. What is the matter with you?

Dave: It's a nice general notion that I would agree with in general, but in certain specific cases it tends not to work out that way because reality is messy and complicated. For instance, Germany didn't invade America in WW II any more than Saddam did America before Gulf War I, but we invaded Germany because it had invaded its neighbors

Wrong. In the case of the USA, the USA participated in the invasion of Germany because Germany formally declared war on the USA on December 11th, 1941. The UK and France had declared war on Germany on September 1st, 1939 -- but in accordance with defensive obligations owed to Poland. The USSR participated in the invasion of Germany because, whatever Stalin might or might not have been planning, Hitler sucker-punched him first. And the allies did so under the aegis of an organization called the United Nations which has, since about 1943, arrogated to itself the right to authorize formal acts of war between states and which (as part of its charter) forbids the waging of aggressive war, seeing as how that's what it was established to oppose.

By not obtaining a proper UN mandate for the invasion of Iraq I've got little doubt that George Bush committed a war crime (the same one for which numerous Nazi top brass were hanged); more importantly, the Attorney General to the British government happens to agree on this little point (about the need for a UN resolution).

A formal declaration of war? Would you care to share with us when this occured, post-1991?

There were at least a dozen formal acts of war, as defined by the Gulf War cease-fire that Saddam signed.

Correct. However, in the course of your illegal invasion, you have murdered over 100,000 Iraqis.

Not true, the Lancet number you refer to is an estimate of excess deaths, not of those killed. For instance, if you died of a cold, totally unrelated to the invasion, that's in the Lancet estimate. Also, the estimate is unreliable by the authors' own admission; the 95% confidence level starts at only 8,000 deaths.

The number killed by Coalition action by most estimates is about 10,000 to 20,000 -- far fewer than the number killed by Saddam's regime. How much blood are you willing to accept on your hands for arguing to leaving Saddam's gov't, which had already murdered (really murdered, not just a measure of excess deaths) millions, in power? By that measure the war is more than justified.

By treaty, which the US has signed, however, the UN Security Council is the only organisatin that can legitimately sanction a war which is not in self- or collective defense. And starting wars of aggression is a war-crime.

The UN did not authorize the Kosovo action either, so I imagine you'll be wanting to try Clinton and NATO for war crimes as well.

The idea the UN has any moral authority to say what is a legitimate or not legitimate is frankly ridiculous to the point of being offensive. Gov'ts that do not derive their power from the consent of the governed have no right to negotiate on behalf of the very people they oppress. It's like saying kidnappers are the legitimate representatives of their hostages.

You can call Bush and Blair liars if you want; that's the only basis on which you can claim Iraq is not free to ask Coalition troops to leave, since by all accounts they are begging them to stay until free and democratic Iraqis can defend themselves from wannabe tyrants. Trying to de-legitimize the choice of 8 million Iraqis who braved suicide bombers to vote on Jan 30th by calling the elected gov't "puppets" just shows how little respect you have for democracy, freedom, and human rights. It's an interesting reflection of morality that antiwar types can viciously malign the freely elected gov't of New Iraq while ardently defending Saddam's right to continue his brutal reign. Sad, really.

06-28-2005 07:14 PM ET (US)
 
<i>If that's the standard, Saddam declared war on the US as well, numerous times.

A formal declaration of war? Would you care to share with us when this occured, post-1991?

Your other arguments re WW II all seem to rest on the idea legality = morality. Legality serves morality; it does not define it.

Correct. However, in the course of your illegal invasion, you have murdered over 100,000 Iraqis. Your government lied to the world and its people about the reasons for doing so. You have engaged in collective punishment, hostage taking and torture.

If I were you, I'd give up "morality" as a lost cause.

The UN is a collection made up largely of tyrants and thus can lay claim to little moral authority.

By treaty, which the US has signed, however, the UN Security Council is the only organisatin that can legitimately sanction a war which is not in self- or collective defense. And starting wars of aggression is a war-crime.

Iraq is free and democratic by any reasonable definition; as in Germany, the foreign troops can be asked to leave at any time by the elected leaders.

It's interesting to note this article then - read the quotes.

Bush and Powell are now saying they would leave - but they're known liars. And, gosh, their remarks seem to indicate a certain foreknowledge of the puppet government's intentions. Any attempt to leave while the country is still in a state of civil war will be lauded and seen as defeat - but the country isn't getting any more stable.

If that's the standard, Saddam declared war on the US as well, numerous times.

Your other arguments re WW II all seem to rest on the idea legality = morality. Legality serves morality; it does not define it. The UN is a collection made up largely of tyrants and thus can lay claim to little moral authority.

Iraq is free and democratic by any reasonable definition; as in Germany, the foreign troops can be asked to leave at any time by the elected leaders. They're working on a constitution, which I agree will confer additional legitimacy, but you have to start somewhere.

Tony,

You're not reading my post correctly. I was pointing out Europe opposed the war more vehemently than Americans despite the fact their troops were not involved, not arguing that they therefore had no right to opppose it. The point was that the dichotomy between American and European opinion on the war is even more pronounced than the polls would indicate.

For instance, Germany didn't invade America in WW II any more than Saddam did America before Gulf War I, but we invaded Germany because it had invaded its neighbors – we didn't stop at the German border and sanction Hitler after defeating his army as was foolishly done with Saddam in Gulf War I.

i, Hitler declared war on the US.

ii, England et al declared war on Germany as part of mutual defense treaties - the British Commonwealth had guaranteed the independence of Poland. These are acceptable under the UN treaty.

iii, The UN treaty was signed after WWII.

iv, The German leaders were still charged with wars of aggression under earlier agreements.

v, Saddam, like it or not, was the acknowledged leader of Iraq. If you wanted him removed, you should have either got explicit UN Security Council approval for this as a "direct threat to the peace", or supported an internal rebellion or coup. Otherwise it's a war of aggression.

vi, Iraq isn't free or democratic, at least as far as those words are used in the English language. It's occupied by a foreign army which the government can't control, and the current government is not operating under a ratified constitution nor was it elected under such a constitution. When the US is unable to veto Iraqi political parties, then maybe a free election can occur.

Hitler may have claimed to be saving German minorities or opposing terrorists other such self-serving lies, but in reality he murdered millions and seized total dictatorial control.

How many Iraqis have died due to sanction or bombing since 1991, Dave? You can't fob those off on Saddam completely, much as you enjoy making him out to be the devil incarnate.

But the dichotomy was actually even larger than that: much of the American opposition was based on the fact that American lives would be lost in the war; since Europe wasn’t being asked to carry much of that burden, they didn’t have that argument against (the UK did, but they were pretty set against the war anyway, unlike the U.S.).

Oh, for Christ's sake. This is like claiming that Western Europe had no business objecting to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on teh grounds that that Europe wasn't being asked to carry the burden.

It was an invasion. It wasn't sanctioned by the Security Council. It was an illegal invasion, and as such a war of aggression. This is why Blair is in hot water; the UK has signed up to the ICC and this little problem is directly relevant.

Dave, my opposition to the war is based on the simple principle that waging aggressive war and invading other countries that have not attacked your own is generally a bad thing. Excuses like "we're going to make them free and democractic afterwards" don't wash.

It's a nice general notion that I would agree with in general, but in certain specific cases it tends not to work out that way because reality is messy and complicated. For instance, Germany didn't invade America in WW II any more than Saddam did America before Gulf War I, but we invaded Germany because it had invaded its neighbors – we didn't stop at the German border and sanction Hitler after defeating his army as was foolishly done with Saddam in Gulf War I. I wonder, too, how long you or others would cling to the view that such liberation is wrong if a thug like Saddam took over your country in a bloody coup and began raping your sisters and daughters and torturing anyone who complained about it. Making Iraq free and democratic afterward is more than an excuse in this case; besides morally validating the war, it's a primary reason for it (more on this below)

If you're going to quote historians, I'd like to suggest you re-read William Shirer's account of the rhetoric coming out of Goebbel's propaganda ministry in the direction of Poland in Summer 1939, and suggest you compare it to the rhetoric coming out of the White House in 2002-2003. It was, frankly, stomach-churningly similar ... and concealed similar motives:

Well, as always, reality helps us differentiate false rhetoric from earnest. Hitler may have claimed to be saving German minorities or opposing terrorists other such self-serving lies, but in reality he murdered millions and seized total dictatorial control. Nothing remotely like that is happening in America, which remains one of the freest countries on the world (notwithstanding some alarmist claims regarding the Patriot Act). Stalin claimed he was helping people too, even as he brutally murdered millions of Ukrainians in forced famines in the 1930s (and hid his acts from the West with help from Walter Duranty); you can compare some of his rhetoric favorably with some modern European socialists, who are doing nothing like what Stalin did. The truth lies in actions. As for similar motives, all I can say is that America has fought in a dozen wars this past century, mostly on behalf of other people's liberty, and the only territory we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those of us who did not return home.

Bush is hardly contemplating conquering and annexing a single democratic country, let alone military conquest of the world. Comparisons to Hitler strike me as hysterical, hyperbolic excess. Or Victor puts it: “There is also an asymmetry in these slurs. Few mention that there really are monsters and mass killers living among us - the North Koreans who have starved 1 million of their own, Saddam's reign of terror that may have killed as many, and, of course, the Islamicist murderers who behead, blow up and torture. "Mein Kampf" still is selling well in some Arab capitals, not in Washington or New York.”
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson062805.html

or are you going to assert that oil and military bases in the Middle East had nothing to do with the Bush administration's rush to war? Probably not nothing, but certainly not nearly as much as people have claimed. Yes, oil is important if we want to have cars and trucks and planes; no, the U.S. did not seize ownership of the Iraqi oil fields or demand any percentage in tribute. As for military bases, we already have Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel... how many more do we supposedly need?

So far, America's naked self-interest has been served how, exactly, by the Iraq war? We don’t lay claim to an inch more territory, oil has tripled in price and we don't own any more of it than we did before, we've spent $200 billion, we were already the sole military superpower so I don't think our military situation has improved, and most tragically we've sacrificed 1700 of our servicepeople (and counting). From the perspective of a war of aggressive self-interest, it's a pretty miserable failure.

<I>The war wasn't about imposing democracy at gunpoint. It was about geopolitical advantage, asset-stripping, and revenge. Pretty much par for the course for an imperial power, and better than some -- the current American imperium is indeed a beacon of shining hope and liberty compared to, say, the Belgian Congo -- but given all the bullshit about liberty, I hope you can excuse us for holding you collectively to a higher standard ..<I>

It was always about imposing democracy at gunpoint, just as was done very successfully in Japan and Germany, and for a very good reason beyond altruism. This was a focus of Bush speeches throughout 2002 (and an idea espoused by Paul Wolfowitz long before), though few seem to have been listening. It's the real 9/11-Iraq connection - not that Saddam was behind 9/11, but that by bringing freedom to the brutalized people of the Mideast we can drain the fever swamp that produces terrorists and prevent another 9/11 or worse attack.

Maybe the liberty talk is just "bullshit" to you, living in a free country as you do, but it isn't to Iraqis operating the first free press they've ever known, having the first political discussions they've every been able to have without fear of vicious gov't reprisals (ranging from maiming to torture with dripping acid), writing their own constitution, and choosing their own leaders - all thanks to the U.S. invasion.

I do agree, certainly, that the U.S. and its policy should be held to the highest standard, but I think we've lived up to it in freeing Iraq (in contrast to some of the moral quandaries we fell into embracing ugly regimes in the name of realpolitik).

Dave, my opposition to the war is based on the simple principle that waging aggressive war and invading other countries that have not attacked your own is generally a bad thing. Excuses like "we're going to make them free and democractic afterwards" don't wash.

If you're going to quote historians, I'd like to suggest you re-read William Shirer's account of the rhetoric coming out of Goebbel's propaganda ministry in the direction of Poland in Summer 1939, and suggest you compare it to the rhetoric coming out of the White House in 2002-2003. It was, frankly, stomach-churningly similar ... and concealed similar motives: or are you going to assert that oil and military bases in the Middle East had nothing to do with the Bush administration's rush to war?

The war wasn't about imposing democracy at gunpoint. It was about geopolitical advantage, asset-stripping, and revenge. Pretty much par for the course for an imperial power, and better than some -- the current American imperium is indeed a beacon of shining hope and liberty compared to, say, the Belgian Congo -- but given all the bullshit about liberty, I hope you can excuse us for holding you collectively to a higher standard ...

Charlie,

Well, of course not all antiwar people are demonizing or funding the killing of American soldiers, and for the most part I think the antiwar crowd are moral and principled people, if perhaps misguided. But it's not unreasonable for the poster below to say a significant portion of the antiwar crowd are demonizing U.S. soldiers; as I pointed out below there are plenty of examples. Historian Victor Hanson notes some here: http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson062805.html

The split on public opinion you noted is to me one of the most interesting aspects of the war debate. While the European disapproval of the war has remained relatively constant, the number in the U.S. who believe the war was a mistake has risen with the unexpectedly difficult transition to Iraqi self-governance, and now stands at about 50%. Ironically, the country now most supportive of the war is the country that was invaded: Iraqis still say in large majorities that the war was worth it.

 At the time of the war, public opinion for the war in the U.S. was about 67%, and as you point out was the mirror opposite in the Europe. But the dichotomy was actually even larger than that: much of the American opposition was based on the fact that American lives would be lost in the war; since Europe wasn’t being asked to carry much of that burden, they didn’t have that argument against (the UK did, but they were pretty set against the war anyway, unlike the U.S.). So all things being equal, the dichotomy was probably closer to 80/20 vs 20/80.

We all carry around our own sets of heuristics that we apply in making all our decisions large and small, and it bothers me that rational people can be led by those heuristics to such extreme opposite consensus conclusions. This leads me to believe one set of heuristics are either flawed (i.e. irrational) or, more likely, operating on a skewed dataset and thus giving skewed results.

So the question becomes: where does most of our data come from? Historical data for most people comes from school textbooks, and current data from news media. We know from repeated polling and studies that the US media skews leftist, and I know from experience the skew is even further left in Europe. US schools, too, consistently skew left, and though I don’t know much about Europe’s educational system I suspect the same holds true as for the media there. Now of course the obvious counter-argument is that the US media is the one that’s skewed, and to the right, but the polling tends not to support that, and neither does reality. Iraq did become free and democratic as George Bush predicted to much mockery (we were treated to the oh-so-ironic spectacle of German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder intoning that “democracy cannot be imposed from without.” Really, Gerhard? It seemed to work pretty well when we did it to you), just as the Berlin Wall did come down as Reagan predicted to similar ridicule, and the Iraqis, who are in the best position to judge things, continue to believe the benefits of the war outweighed the costs.

Victor Hanson, again, makes a similar argument re skewed perceptions from the media: “Quite literally, the Islamicists proved to be more adept in the public relations of winning liberal exemption from criticism than did the administration itself, as one nude Iraqi on film or a crumpled Koran was always deemed far worse than daily beheadings and executions. Indeed, the terrorists were able to morph into downtrodden victims of a bullying, imperialistic America faster than George Bush was able to appear a reluctant progressive warrior at war with the Dark-Age values of fascism.”
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson062405.html

Another of the biggest differences between the American and European/UK views, I think, is the relative value placed on the possibility of making Iraq free and democratic. Those in the US place a large positive value on these principles, and placed a relatively large probability on democracy being a possible outcome. Europeans tended to be more invested in avoiding the ravages of war they know so well, and tended not to place as great a value on a free and democratic outcome for Iraq, and it assigned it a low likelihood as well.

Why do Americans have a different view of these things? The idea America should promote democracy goes back to the Founders:

“May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man.”

---Thomas Jefferson

This was his last letter, written shortly before he died. In regards to spreading freedom and democracy, I think he would be very proud of America today.

http://www.americanshareholders.com/commentary/children.php

In the last three congressional elections in 1994, 1996 and 1998 Republican candidates won 53, 50 and 51 percent of the vote respectively. In 1980,1982 and 1984, Republican congressional candidates won 48,43 and then 49 percent of the vote. In the last twenty years the average Republican vote for congress rose from 46.6 percent to 5l.3 percent, a gain of 4.6 percent. (And this trend is visible even though 1980 and 1984 were Reagan victories that should have increased Republican vote in congressional elections and 1996 was a Clinton victory that should have increased democrat percentages of the congressional vote.)

Why are there more Republican votes in congressional races?

And of course the Coalition is not governing them.

Uh huh
U.S. officials encourage lots of elected gov’ts to do lots of things in lots of countries, many of which have significant U.S. troop deployments (like Germany, for instance). Sometimes they go along, sometimes they don’t. Ultimately, it’s up to them.


More Americans vote for Democrats than vote for Republicans in Congress each election.
No, they don’t. Bush won the popular vote. The House is allocated by population. Really, that’s just silly.

rort the system.
Gerrymandering is unfortunate, but both sides do it.

Radical extremists
Yes, radical antiwar extremists. From the mainstream we have antiwar Amnesty Int'l claiming our soldiers are running the "gulag of our times" (a grave insult not only to U.S. servicepeople but also the millions killed in the real gulags), and my own Democratic Senator Durbin comparing them to Nazis. It’s not unreasonable for the poster below to claim U.S. soldiers are being demonized by a significant portion of the antiwar crowd.

So, David, do you mind if I characterise the "pro-war right" by referring to the Klu Klux Klan?
The KKK is the antiwar right (they're isolationists). See “aging, old-school fascists.” They want America to let the "impure" nonwhites rot in their own hell, not spend American lives and treasure democratizing them.

We'll see when the new constitution is drawn up - and ratified by plebiscate, won't we?
Yes, that will be exciting.

Dave, you probably want to note that I'm one of those European anti-war leftists.

Just sayin'.

A group which, in this country (the UK, your most gung-ho ally in the Iraq invasion) amounts to only, oh, about 66% of the population.

He's probably thinking of the antiwar leftists in Europe funding the killing of American soldiers in Iraq.

Let's see:

Radical extremists

"The groups are an odd collection, made up largely of Marxists and Maoists, sprinkled with an array of Arab emigres and aging, old-school fascists,"

as opposed to:

antiwar leftists

"Millions of people protested, in approximately 800 cities around the world, and it was listed by the 2004 Guinness Book of Records as the largest mass protest movement in history."

So, David, do you mind if I characterise the "pro-war right" by referring to the Klu Klux Klan?

And of course the Coalition is not governing them.

Uh-huh.

The Iraqi gov't does derive its just powers from the consent of the governed,

We'll see when the new constitution is drawn up - and ratified by plebiscate, won't we?

and if Iraqis don't like the way things are going, they can vote a new party into power in the next elections just like you or I.

Interesting you should say that. More Americans vote for Democrats than vote for Republicans in Congress each election. Amazing how useful a well designed Constitution can be, isn't it? Not to mention other ways to rort the system.

Tony,

He's probably thinking of the antiwar leftists in Europe funding the killing of American soldiers in Iraq.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/050623/23euroleft.htm

The American Antiwar Community dehumanizes the American Soldier just as surely as we soldiers are trained to dehumanize our enemies.

Interesting. This would be the American Antiwar Community that dehumanizes American soldiers by linking to blogs created by them?

And of course the Coalition is not governing them. The Iraqi gov't does derive its just powers from the consent of the governed, and if Iraqis don't like the way things are going, they can vote a new party into power in the next elections just like you or I. Quite a change from a regime that would torture or maim you and rape your sisters and daughters for any disloyalty, real or imagined.

When exactly did they consent to be ruled by Saddam?

I think the ex post facto polling stamps their approval on the invasion pretty firmly. It's not like we could have asked them beforehand if we wanted to, but they've said in large majorities that the war was worth it. It's pretty unique in history to have an "invasion" be approved of by a majority of the country being "invaded." That sounds more like a "liberation."

Lose the scare quotes, Iraq is a democracy. Elected Iraqis decided to put Chalabi and everyone else wherever they ended up.

If you believe as I do that a government’s just powers derive from the consent of the governed, little to none. Thus, the “invading” Coalition military was actually engaged in defending Iraqis from a gang of ruthless thugs, no better than common criminals, that had taken over the country, depriving the vast majority of their rights.

And when exactly, David, did the inhabitants of Iraq consent to be invaded (lose the scare quotes, it was an invasion) by the Americans (and their figleaf allies)?

I'm not even going to bother addressing the rest of your comments, save to ask why, since Iraq is a "democracy", Chalabi was appointed oil minister at the instructions of the Americans?

I think Charles raises one of the real moral questions here: what price in blood is freedom worth? Some of us, if we lived in Iraq, might have been happier to live with Saddam, despite the mass graves, rape rooms, lack of freedom to assemble, publish, or speak publicly without risk of being consigned to one of the above, and the other Orwellian paraphernalia of a police state, rather than risk war. Others might have welcomed foreign liberation despite the risks and costs. But of course we don’t live in Iraq, so for us it’s merely an intellectual exercise; none of have been raped by Udai Hussein or killed by a stray U.S. cruise missile. So, what do the Iraqis think? In every poll I’ve seen, a majority says the war was worth it to be rid of Saddam. So, postbellum, that answers that moral dilemma.

But another way to look at this moral debate is to ask: what right did Saddam have to rule “his” people? If you believe as I do that a government’s just powers derive from the consent of the governed, little to none. Thus, the “invading” Coalition military was actually engaged in defending Iraqis from a gang of ruthless thugs, no better than common criminals, that had taken over the country, depriving the vast majority of their rights. Therefore, while in a strictly practical sense the invasion caused casualties, the moral blame for those casualties lies not with the Coalition liberators but exclusively on the oppressors of the Hussein regime. When rescuing hostages, one generally does not assign blame for casualties incurred in the course of rescue to the rescuers. Likewise, today the Coalition and Iraqi forces are defending Iraqis from crazy Islamofascist murderers in car bombs and insurgents who want to re-establish the police state tyranny, and those terrorists bear sole responsibility for the casualties they inflict.

(One counter-argument to the above I hear a lot is “Yes, but there are other countries with leaders equally as bad,” but this is irrelevant. The fact that one rescues Country A while Countries X, Y, and Z languish in tyranny does not constitute an argument that liberating Country A is any less moral. Logically, this equates to saying “Yes, you saved that girl from being raped, but you shouldn’t have because thousands of others girls are raped every day.” )

Of course, we did not go to Iraq strictly to free Iraqis, though contrary to some claims that case was in fact repeatedly made in pre-war speeches by Bush. We also democratized Iraq for the same reason we democratized Japan and Germany: leaving the regime in power was unacceptable given its past actions. Like Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, Baathist Iraq had invaded its neighbors, triggering an international response; like Hitler, Hussein used poison gas to mass murder undesirable minorities and buried them in mass graves. The main difference between WW II and Gulf Wars I and II is that in the 1940s, after defeating their militaries, we didn’t stop at the borders of Japan and Germany and try to “contain” them with sanctions for 12 years while endlessly moralizing about the cost of (and questioning the need for) removing those heinous regimes. Maybe our grandfathers just weren’t as “enlightened” as we are today.

The Japanese and Germany democracies, now 50 years a fait accompli, are too often ignored or dismissed, as though they were inevitable consequences of history rather than the pivotal successes they were, successes widely viewed as extremely unlikely outcomes at the time. The effort to democratize both was roundly mocked by contemporaries; one joke of the time went like this:

1st Japanese Man: Have you read the new Constitution?
2nd Japanese Man: No, has it been translated into Japanese yet?

Like Iraq, both occupations were repeatedly called “failures” in the press. But the end result was hugely successful, because the process of democratization rested on a bedrock truth, one that many people still don’t recognize or refuse to accept: there is a fundamental, universal human desire for freedom. Democracy is merely the natural extension of that freedom, both because undemocratic regimes by definition deprive people of the freedom to choose their governance, and because only democracies, with rare exceptions, can be trusted to guarantee the citizenry other rights such as freedom of press, speech, religion, and assembly. Democracy and freedom has never been “imposed” on anyone; even in Germany and Japan, where in contrast to Iraq the people did not even write their own constitution but had it forced on them by foreigners, the populace was merely freed to embrace what they already wanted.

Interesting about the alternate histories idea. I'm a happy neocon since Bush won, and I rather think we are doing very well in Iraq so if you're looking for people with political viewpoints far away, well I'm that.

Also, I wrote up a series of seven world settings for an RPG based on the concept of "Grim Futures". They take us from where we are, and imagine a number of different ways things could go to pot.

I tried to have a little balance since I'm an enthusiastic neocon, but my balancer, a transnational progressive believed my settings made no sense, according to him. And he could not work in that environment. So I'm supposed to agree with my political opposite on a political project before we can work together?? Typical lefty seems to be "if you don't agree with me you're stupid."

BTW, your Marxism in the Middle East idea is cute, but what happens in the short range? Its the 1960's, and the Russians control the world oil supply, and a good bit larger chunk of the planet. And America very possibly folds, and Russia takes the planet, and finds it can't feed itself, and its off to another Dark Ages as civilization collapses.

But if you can get past the short and mid-range problems, then yeah, it might work.

Realpolitik did not work so well. It seemed necessary in the Cold War, but afterwards its a shameful thing, and very probably it was not so needed in the Cold War. We probably should have invaded Iran after the Hostage Crisis. And if we'd done that, then the ME would probably be a whole lot better now. Terrorism sponsored by rogue states would have been shown to be unviable, and so they would have had to pick another path, and with Iran relatively normal that would have infected the others.

I think it could be worse than that. It's safe to assume that the British Army's tactics are based on the lessons learnt in Northern Ireland. You would therefore expect the death rate to be lower if the level of violence was as bad as NI in 69-72.

The other thing I would be interested in knowing is if there was a difference in civilian casualties in the US and British areas. One thing the British Army learnt in NI was that going after military targets without regard for civilians comes back and bites you on the ass, something the Americans may not appreciate to the same degree. An example would be at the start of the war when there were a lot of civilian deaths at US roadblocks while there were much fewer at British ones. The reason? The British experience in NI taught them how to set up roadblocks in hostile areas, an experience the Americans didn't have.

That's interesting. So it sounds like the British experience in Iraq -- mostly around Basra, which is reputedly relatively quiet -- is comparable with the very worst that the Northern Ireland troubles threw at them. Which suggests that the rest of Iraq is way worse than NI ever got ...

Since the outbreak of war - ie including the invasion itself - there have been 74 British servicemen killed in Iraq. Of these, 36 were combat casualties, including friendly fire. The rest have been mainly accident - road traffic accidents and helicopter crashes - and a few disease.
This is roughly the same as the death rate of British soldiers in NI in the 1969-72 period.
Troop numbers in NI went from 3,000 in 1969 to 20,000 in 1972. There are currently around 9,200 British troops in the Gulf.
Bottom line: in terms of British military deaths, the two situations are much the same.
Note that the security situation is similar: in the 1990s there were still areas of NI where the army could not move by road at all, not even in armoured vehicles, for fear of culvert bombs. Everything had to move by helicopter. Bessbrook army base was, for some time, the busiest helicopter base in the world.

It would be interesting to know what the equivalent figure for the British Army is given its more recent experience with urban guerilla warfare in Norn Iron. - David

Charlie,

The peacetime manuver accident rate is about the same. If you go over to sff.net and look at the military newsgroup (where they are having the same discussion) a poster named Bart tells about accident rates in the 82nd Airborne during peacetime.

Move a lot of heavy equipment around at high speed over rotten terrain and roads over the course of twelve hour days on two hours sleep or less and you're going to have accidents.

Further, some of the casualties are people who should never have been deployed at all. In the Army we call them "The Sick, the Lame, and The Lazy." People who suffer from one chronic illness or another, or worse, won't maintain their physical training to a level that would prevent them from getting injured or into an accident in the first place.

Besides, I'd take these stats a bit more seriously if they:

A. Actually discussed what it will cost to care for these soldiers over the course of the next sixty years.

B. Included pregnancies that occured in theater.

Why it is they don't courts martial both the mother and father, then castrate the father for not keeping his pants up I'll never know. A preggo is just as surely out of action as a gutshot.

Worse, more than a few deliberately get pregnant to get out of a combat zone, which not only makes things harder on the Army as a whole, but harder on the women who are doing their best.

If one wanted to look at "The Costs of War" they might look at the Department of Veterans Affairs budget over the course of the last fifty years and do a projection of what it is going to cost in the future (yet both parties cheerfully slash that budget every chance they get and blame each other for it).

Or they could look at broken homes where the spouse goes out with "Jodie" while the soldier is away, gets knocked up, raids the bank account and divorces the soldier when he gets home.

Providing he doesn't blow her brains across the back of the apartment they are living in (four Special Forces soldiers did that after they got back from Afghanistan).

If I were an American Antiwar Activist, I might start looking at some of the points I've made above (not saying you should, Charlie).

But the problem/difference between the American and British Antiwar communities is that the British do not see their soldiers as knuckle dragging, subhuman depraved monsters. The American Antiwar Community dehumanizes the American Soldier just as surely as we soldiers are trained to dehumanize our enemies.

No one has a corner on how much this war is going to cost, from any point of view.

No one.

Respects,
Steve
From Flyover Country, U.S.

I didn't mean to imply that these were your reasons to oppose the war. It doesn't even apply to everyone who opposed the Berlin Airlift or FDR's support for Britain in 1940. In both of those events there were horrible memories of wars in Europe.

But it's a fact that communists were inside the Wallace presidential campaign of 1948. Wallace (who opposed the airlift) wasn't a communist but just about everyone around him was. And to whatever degree the 1940 protests were due to communist organizations, they did stop immediately after Hitler gave Stalin his rude awakening.

It's not just here though. It was (allegedly) part of last year's anti-war demonstrations in Europe too. You may not think much of that piece but I thought you'd at least enjoy reading how the other side sees things. And it's partial payback for doing me the favor of sending me to Juan Cole's blog, which I visit regularly.

As for casualties in the Berlin Airlift, I don't know if we'd have tolerated losing so many if the alternative was to surrender that city or let people starve. That was the best that could be done with the technology of the day. It was a miracle that they managed to carry as much as they did with those planes. Reciprocating engines require more maintenance, and I'd guess they weren't getting as much care as they should.

I don't think you seriously believe that the opposition to the Berlin Airlift was based on safety issues ... you miss the point: I'm saying that the 80 death figure shouldn't be tolerated in an equivalent operation today.

I am not involved with and know nothing much about the US anti war movement and the degree to which it may have been connected with the CPUSA. Not my country, dude, not my concern, not my interest.

You shouldn't confuse my anti-war motives with those of other people from another culture.

Charlie,

I don't doubt that my side used the point of anti-American sentiment to hold loyalty but I don't think you seriously believe that the opposition to the Berlin Airlift was based on safety issues. The anti-war movements have always had other interests among them. Note that death wasn't the primary function of the Berlin Airlift.

There were protesters camped out on the White House lawn (and strikes at defense plants) back in 1940/41 because of our support for Britain in that war. It was ostensibly a "peace" protest but it all ended after Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The American Left went from anti-war to pro-war overnight. Peace was never their objective.

As for our objectives, I recognize that this is costing us dearly. I also fear the price of delay and compromise.

Oddly enough, one of the best ways I've seen this expressed was by Mickey Kaus in his support for Kerry: "I'm continually amazed that bloggers, of all people, don't appreciate the way intensely motivated individuals, operating without centralized state (or any other) control, can be empowered by new technology to do us tremendous harm. To put it in mundane current blogospheric terms, when it comes to preventing future attacks, the terrorists will more and more come to resemble bloggers in their pajamas and America will come to resemble CBS. That's not a position we should be comfortable in."

Randy: ...alliances with anti-American movements had been a big mistake for the anti-war movement. Au contraire: rather, it was a propaganda master-stroke for the neocons to paint the anti-war movement as anti-American because, by implication, it made the pro-war faction pro-American.

SFM: we know that 300,000 US personnel have been rotated through Iraq over the past roughly 18-month period. The accident rate was reported as 15,000, of which 20% were unable to subsequently return to their units, i.e. 3,000 disabling or otherwise very serious. That gives us a crude figure of 1 disabling or very serious accident per hundred people per 12 months. Somehow I think we'd have noticed if the peacetime accident rate was anywhere near that ...

Back to Randy: the attitude that accidents and deaths are "part of the job" is one that prevailed historically, but it's not necessarily true and -- for very good reasons -- it's one that health and safety organizations world-wide are trying to stamp out. Death isn't the object of the exercise when putting up buildings or flying transport planes, and being fatalistic about casualties is likely to lead to a failure to take preventative measures. I note that the Canary Wharf development in London, finished in 2002, including the tallest skyscraper in the UK (and with office floorspace in the same order of magnitude as the WTC) was completed with a much lower death toll -- and a modern transport company would take great exception to the idea of losing 80 aircrew in the process of transporting a mere 2.3 million tons of air freight.

There likely are a lot more accidents now than there would be in peacetime, but the press is paying more attention now too. Nobody hears about accidents when they happen in training over here, but they do happen. They're part of the job.

They're part of most jobs. 62 workers were killed during the construction of the World Trade Center.

About 80 pilots and aircrew were killed during the Berlin Airlift. And we should never forget, many (of the same groups if not the same people) were vehemently opposed to that too.

I wish it was going better but, frankly, I had expected far worse. I'm grateful that it hasn't been.

As for the civilian casualties, I wish that were going better. Those stats might be better regarded if the issue hadn't been clouded with its politics. That's another situation where alliances with anti-American movements had been a big mistake for the anti-war movement. The first being its influence on the election, although some of us are thankful for that one.

You're correct that some of those non-combat casualties are the sort of things which could happen anywhere.

But the rate at which they happen, and why they happen, is important.

It's likely that there are more road accidents, more of the routine casualties simply because they're in a war zone. Conside the potential for mishaps when you have to walk across a camp to the latrines, and it it's after dark, showing a light risks being shot at. That's the sort of difference which accounts from troops in Iraq mention.

Combat casualties? No, but they're a result of the war.

I just got through explaining the casuality thing elsewhere. Okay, I'll try here.

A soldier driving a Hummer down the road ends up in a ten hummer pile up and looses his arm. He is definitely in bad shape. His convoy is in Baghdad. His unit is fully loaded in battle rattle ready to go.

But the accident happens because someone up front stomped on their brakes to avoid hitting a kid and the follow on vehicles weren't paying attention.

Is that soldier a combat casualty, or is that soldier the same kind of casualty we have stateside, in Europe, or in Korea?

If he didn't take any fire, didn't suffer from any IED's, didn't run into any roadblocks (I suppose you could REALLY stretch things and say an Insurgent tossed the kid into the road to cause the wreck) then the soldier isn't a combat casualty.

And so they don't count him. He doesn't get a Purple Heart. Jesus, if the Army handed out Purple Hearts for every accident, I'd have five of my own by now.

If one wants to start counting everyone who stubbs their toe in uniform as a "casualty" then maybe we should count everyone, in theater or out, who gets sick, gets pregnant, gets into a maiming accident, etc.

Or to take a different tack, look at the First Gulf War.

U.S. KIA count was 148. If you tossed in everyone who died in accidents before, during and after the war, I bet I could triple that number.

As for the failure of the Antiwar movement, well, I don't know that the European movement failed. It has kept France and Germany out of the war, kept troop deployments from most other EU nations to nil, and pressed for the removal of those forces that are deployed.

If an antiwar movement failed, it was the one based here in the United States. Unlike the European movement, the U.S. movement is tainted with anti-military/anti-soldier sentiments that make is extremely difficult even for people who agree with their assessment to listen or support them.

For example, my father, a Vietnam Vet, is definitely against this war in Iraq (I hear about it daily).

But my father is the same one who once said, "The only mistake the National Guard made at Kent State was not using hand grenades."

Pretty big hurdle to get over, Charlie. I've tried talking to some of those antiwar types here in the States and it is like trying to argue with a Baptist about gay marriage.

A lost cause.

Respects,
Steve
From Flyover Country

Gary, I wish there was something to be smug about, I really do. But I failed. So did the rest of the anti-war movement. We counted for naught. And as I've said elsewhere, history is not commutative: The west fucked up Iraq by going in. The fucking-up is on-going. But it would be a mistake to believe that the west can un-fuck Iraq by pulling out. It is not the privilege of the rapist to lament, "I changed my mind!"

I would very much doubt that there will be a full withdrawel of British troops in Iraq and I'd suspect that any cutting of troop numbers would be more due to overstretch than as a prelude to pulling out entirely.

Personally I don't think a pull out would be a good idea unless their is a credible Iraqi security force to take over, but until that happens (which could be some time) I can't really see things getting any better. But I think a pull out is bad both in terms of the physical loss of security and in sending the wrong message - Iraqis would never trust us again (but then maybe it wouldn't anyway).

Edited by author 09-29-2004 02:26 PM
I don't think it's glee at the misfortune of the Iraqis, or even schadenfreude for the U.S. troops who'd then have to fight harder knowing the Iraqi people would be more reluctant to help against suddenly-energized Islamists. It's more like smug satisfaction that the "anti-war" activists might have won some sort of moral victory. It would be their I-told-you-so moment, and that's something liberals have been waiting for for many many years.

But it doesn't look like it's going to happen. Andrew Sullivan has been reading Blair's recent speech, and he excerpted a few relevant parts:
http://andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_i...#109642370606237931

The gist is, Britain isn't pulling out.

Sullivan provides a direct link if you want to see the whole thing.

Tangential: you seem rather gleeful at this announcment. Do I have that wrong? If so, how? If not, why?

"According to this month's Guardian/ICM poll the British electorate is overwhelmingly in favour of pulling all UK forces out of Iraq immediately -- a 71% majority, split along gender lines 77/63."

Cutting to the chase, is this what you see as best for the Iraqi people? How do you see it playing out for them?

I see your point, Charlie. Especially concerning the British Zone. Which is a bit odd, as the Brits are supposed to be better at this nation building/peacekeeping thing than we are. I might add, that last is not a snarky comment or a jab on my part. Just wondering.

Selling off industries was not bright. Disbanding the Army wasn't bright either. Not having enough of the right kind of troops (military police, civil affairs, translators) was definitely not bright.

Putting people out of work was not bright. For my own two cents, it isn't how I would have done it but then I never got any further than Specialist in the U.S. Army (equivalent of a Corporal without the NCO status) so what do I know. I was telling my barber this morning that the decisions that American political leaders often make concerning foreign policy (regardless of their party) more often elude any sort of common sense or logic that I might be inclined to follow.

I'm not inclined to believe that either choice for the American Presidency is capable of improving on the current overall state of foreign affairs. It would be really nice to have a credible third solution (and no, not that nutjob Nader).

In the end, regardless of which one we get, it is all going to boil down to the standard things that end wars.

1. One side destroys the others ability to wage war.
2. One side loses the will to wage war (I see the U.S. falling under this one).
3. One side exterminates the other (unlikely).
4. Both sides get tired of grinding it out and talk (unlikely, as there is no one to talk to).

I think number 2 will happen first.

On a different note, you lucky man to have to turn down writing offers! Throw me in that briar patch.

Respects,
Steve
From Flyover Country, U.S.

I should add: the British zone around Basra is generally considered to be relatively calm, right? Which is why the British commander in the field reported that last month British troops fired off 100,000 rounds of live ammunition and the level of combat is the highest a British force has been involved in since the Korean War.

If that's quiet, I don't even want to think about the hot spots ...

Steven: I know, the Iranian idea was just daydreaming aloud. (I remember 1979, too.)

As an aside, though, it's worth reading Naomi Klein's take in Baghdad: Year Zero. She recently spent a few months in Iraq and her explanation of where the resistance is coming from makes a chilling amount of sense. Then go and read Juan Cole's 1 September posting and pay particular attention to the map of provinces where the insurgency is under way. It's not just a few troublesome Sunni provinces, or a couple of strongholds like Fallujah; it's the whole goddamn country.

Basically, Klein's explanation of what went wrong gels with most of the other stuff I've read; it's not just Ba'athist revenants or Islamicist fanatics, it's the small matter of millions of very angry men with families to feed who've been told their jobs are being sold down the river for ideological reasons and that they can starve for all the occupiers care. The Bremer decrees on selling off state-owned industries and ditching economic supports sent a simple message to the Iraqi population: we're not here to help you, we're here to loot you. And turned it into a personal grudge. Then, every time a guerilla is killed, their entire extended family acquire an additional grievance -- in a culture where the blood feud is a normal way of doing business.

Downsize a factory, create a hundred potential guerillas. Then kill their relatives and watch them take up arms because they've got nothing to lose.

The problem is that most of the violence seems to be localized. The Sunni Triangle, Sadr sympathetic locations insofar as the Iraqi based Insurgents go with foreigners ranging near and far across the country.

I read a recent Wall Street Journal article (no, the title escapes me but they were following an Army Company Commander around). Here is what he was doing.

1. Any time he had trouble with a town, he'd talk to the local Sheik in charge. His unit actually conducted a survey when they first arrived asking everyone who they thought had the most prestige (since no one can really agree). He had pretty good luck working through the local Sheiks.

2. After sending sniper teams with night vision gear out to try and interdict roadside bombers (something I would have done) and not finding anything (I would have been baffled) he concluded that they were dropping the bombs off in broad daylight. He put the stop to this by posting checkpoints on highway overpasses (which also tend to be insurgent ambush sites).

Roadside bombings and overpass ambushes dropped to nothing inside of a week.

The big problem is that insurgents are now targeting Iraqis who are working with U.S. forces (something the Vietcong used to do, at least the insurgents haven't started lopping off arms of Iraqis yet).

The problem with U.S. Strategy is a bit more systemic than merely a Presidential occupant (though I'd be happy to see Rumsfeld go, he was the idiot who thought we should go in with what little we did and he ought to be pistol whipped for it).

While lower grade officers and soldiers are learning how to deal with both the active threat and winning over the population (when they can) the senior officers are still very much locked in a World War II style management style.

Which is the same problem we had in Vietnam. Some of these guys are Vietnam vets so you'd think they'd pull their head out of their ass and get with the program.

But the last problem is simple.

The insurgents have sanctuaries because, whether we like it or not, U.S. forces/U.S. political leaders, do not have the political will to do whatever it takes to deprive them of those sanctuaries.

By that I mean leveling an insurgent stronghold like Fallujah.

So long as they can retreat, hide, recoup, resupply and plan in a secure location, U.S. forces will have problems.

And Charlie, no President (not even Kerry) is going to let the Iranians into Southern Iraq. Americans are still bitter over 1979.

Respects,
Steve
From Flyover Country, U.S.A.

I suspect Iraq's too broken to fix at this point; the most likely future is civil war (with or without a sizeable US ground force stuck in the middle). I wouldn't like to guess at the outcome of the civil war, but I suspect many years of fighting until one strong man or another crawls to the top of the wreckage is inevitable.

One possible solution I've toyed with -- which just won't happen, but it's interesting to speculate about -- would be for the US to let the UN mandate an immediate US withdrawl from the shi'ite areas of the country and Baghdad, and invite the Iranians in under UN auspices. The Iranian conservative mullahs would be hoist on their own petard, given a very nasty choice between (a) taking all the shit from the Sadrists (who, despite being Shi'ites too, are Iraqi Shi'ites) and (b) admitting that their long term goal of making a Shi'ite regional power is basically unworkable without a huge dose of liberalisation and regional autonomy (to reduce the likelihood of an Iraqi rebellion). The idea would be to use a withdrawl from Iraq to spike Iranian hard liner ambitions by feeding them more territory than they can digest.

(But the chances of the Bush administration handing most of Iraq to the Iranians is, um, marginally higher than the probability of the Bush administration handing responsibility for administering Iraq over to me.)

It depends on what kind of stability you're looking for. If you want it to split into three states, where one of them is allied with Iran, and one is allied with al Qaeda, then that might be stability but I'd have a hard time calling it peace.

If the people of Iraq truly wanted us out of there then the fastest and easiest way would be for them to hold elections. The terrorists are trying to prevent that.

Sounds good to me Mr Murphy - I'll be getting one soon I think (of each).

Gods in a couple of months I might be able to even manage intelligent conversatin. Uhm, maybe after my course this year.

(I was not pressured into that last comment by my wife who was giving me one of "those" looks at all. Nonono.)

Back to Iraq though; What are the chances that once military 'support' is pulled out, that the country will begin stablise? A report I saw (not sure how accurate) suggests that about a third of the country is still in a 'violent state'. Which I take to mean near open warfare.

Multiwinged one, the book I suggested on the Arab-Israeli conflict is a good one.

But if by politics you mean the "current events" type stuff like Michael Moore, the Cable Shouting Heads types, Limbaugh, and all of that, I will freely admit that I don't read any of it.

I very nearly picked up a copy of Unfit for Command when it looked like they were going to try and censor it and found myself asking the question, "Am I part of the problem, or part of the solution?"

I don't know that such books help political discourse. In fact, I think they are a symptom/cause of polarization.

If you are looking for a book to read, I'd recommend the 09-11 Commission report.

Or if you want some good Marxist Historical analysis, you can't go far wrong with E. P. Thompson, who is first class and accessible to boot. His treatment of England's Industrial Revolution is interesting and frightening at the same time.

Maybe that helps, maybe not.

Randy, a political anthology of short stories from all specturms, especially an alternate history one, would be interesting.

Thing is, can you get stories from across the political spectrum? I'm not so sure.

Respects,
Steve
From Flyover Country, U.S.

Allright - not quite related. Its a request.

See Serraphin+Politics = crap.

Can someone give me some good reading material pointers - please keep in mind that I believe all politicians are damn liars. So fear not over influencing me towards one political vein or another.

Ta

I like the alternate history idea, but here's a twist: I'd love to see it as an anthology by writers across the political spectrum.

The time it takes for editing and getting it out the door may make such an effort risky, but it's a thought.

We should hand the Juan Cole article on what America would be like over to that guy at Soldiers for the Truth who did a statistical analysis of life before and after Saddam on the Civilian Body Count side. See what kind of numbers that cranks out.

That said, I tend to agree with Twain's sentiment about stats. "Lies, damned lies, and statistics."

I do think Charlie's got a good idea for an interesting alternate history premise. Perhaps we will see it pursued and I'd be more than happy to read it. I may not be a Marxist (well, there is a very small part of me that might be) but I do like reading Marxist based stuff.

Finally, I can't seem to locate my second edition. I may have given it to someone for some long forgotten reason. I contacted the History Department yesterday (but didn't talk to Klausner) and it is my understanding that a fifth edition of that book is due soon or is already out. I'm supposed to get a free copy for writing a review/interview for the University News (which I won't bother to recount as it was a terrible interview on my part).

Respects,
Steve
From Flyover Country, U.S.

Charlie,

I try to imagine your scenario of a communist middle east, but I can't see it necessarily better than what they've got now. As good as secularization is, it isn't the key to peace IMHO. I don't see the Islam of the islamists as anything more than fancy window dressing. It's not much different than the way the promises of communism have been used by tyrants to control the masses with little regard for its principles.

I've read Juan Cole before, and looked in again on your recommendation. His piece on "If America were Iraq, What would it be Like?" was an interesting premise, but it fails to portray an al-Zarqawi figure. That's a serious omission. And I am left to assume that Cole would have preferred keeping Saddam Hussein and his sons running Washington. Peace doesn't sound like such a good thing under those circumstances.



And Murph,

Don't throw that second edition away. While it may not be valuable, it'll probably be fascinating to review in future years and look for points of naivety and/or foresight.

Charlie,

Your assessment of the roots of Islamist trouble stretching back to World War I matches what the historians I've encountered have said on the topic.

A Concise History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict.

http://iml.umkc.edu/history/faculty/KlausnerC/pub.html

This was the text used in an undergrad Middle Eastern History course at Park University here in Kansas City(and one of the few courses that was worth taking at that diploma mill). Dr. Klausner teaches Middle Eastern History at UMKC (where I got my Masters) and is top flight in her academic efforts.

She is partisan toward the Israelis personally, but it does not manifest itself in her work. I'd recommend this for anyone who wants to get a grip on what is going on over in the Middle East.

Sadly, my Second Edition Text is now ten years out of date. I don't have any idea what edition they are on now.

Respects,
Steve
From Flyover Country, U.S.

Let me add parenthetically that communist governments -- excluding barking lunatic ones such as the Khmer Rouge, I'm talking about your run-of-the-mill Leninist vanguard party here -- tended to be good at three things: basic industrialization, literacy and education, and (deplorably) breaking heads of people who didn't agree with them. The first two traits should be obvious: you can't build utopia without infrastructure, and you can't propagandize the masses effectively if they can't read. Which is why, 15 years after the crumbling of the iron curtain, much of the former Warsaw Pact is in the EU and China is industrializing at an eye-watering rate. Communism, despite all its other failings, is one way of giving a backwards society a crash-course in modernism, and has the advantage of being difficult to sustain in the long term; I'd argue that it tends to decay into capitalism with a benign despotism on top, and in the current world climate eventually succumbs to electoral democracy. If the middle east had received a dose of it in the 1960's the world we live in today would be a very different one ...

Randy: I commend to you Juan Cole's weblog (if you don't already read it). Imposing change from outside generally doesn't work well; just imagine your own country being invaded and how you'd react to it if you want to know why.

(Nor was the Provisional IRA a catspaw for the USSR -- the end of that particular conflict was an entirely different matter.)

I suspect the roots of islamicism go back to the Sykes-Picot Treaty and the way the west carved up the former Ottoman Empire after WW1; there's a lot of resentment there, much of it justified, and as the Ba'ath program failed in the 1980's and 1990's it left a power vacuum which the islamicists are now filling. The Ba'ath in turn ascended partly because the western response to communist parties in the middle east was generally to throw guns and money at anyone who wanted to kill them; I could speculate that if that hadn't happened, we'd have seen a largely communist middle east in the 1960's, higher oil prices sooner, much more development and secularization, and by now perhaps a large-scale liberalization setting in. But we (or rather, our grandparents) backed the wrong horse.

Charlie,

Oddly, I see elements that your recipe shares with Bush's. We do need to address the grievances held by typical al Qaeda sympathizers.

They include such things as our former bases in Saudi Arabia; the former sanctions on Iraq; and our continued support for Israel. Well, those bases were needed to patrol the no-fly zones over Iraq; the sanctions were supposed to force Saddam's compliance; and the problem of Palestine isn't going to be solved until its so-called friends (which included Saddam) stopped getting propaganda points by continuing the conflict for another fifty years.

(I'm as cynical of the Israel-Palestine conflict as you are about this.)

I could draw a comparison to those old extremist groups and how they wilted after the fall of the Soviet Union. I don't know if that was the catalyst but that was a regime change of a sort, and I'm sure it had an influence. Further regime change in the middle east could bring similar results in the Arab world. That's not to say I think we need to invade Syria, Iran or Saudi Arabia, but a new Iraq could get the ball rolling.

Randy: I believe the "War on Terror" does not exist. It's a mirage, an hallucination. Terrorism has always been with us, and in my more pessimistic moments I suspect it always will be. The real questions are who is using terror tactics against us, and why, and how can we make the people using terror tactics against us stop.

There are -- you may not like this -- several ways to make terror campaigns stop, and surrendering is only one of them (and not the most effective, at that). The "cheese eating surrender monkeys" managed to stop Action Directe in the 1980's; the "cowardly Germans" bottled up the Red Army Factions aka Baader-Meinhoff, and the UK has just this week got the Provisional IRA to officially say "game over, we disarm". None of them did this by invading and occupying a foreign country with an at-best tenuous connection to the insurgency in question. Indeed, none of them succeeded in suppressing their terrorist insurgencies by a policy of pure and simple force. Rather, the best recipe seems to be a pragmatic mixture of carrot-and-stick -- you clamp down hard on the violent cases while systematically addressing the greivances of the base from which they draw their strength, thus depriving the movement of a supply of fresh recruits.

Bluntly: the Iraq invasion is not, and never has been, about terrorism -- except insofar as the Iraq occupation now appears to be generating terrorism (a term which, incidentally, the Gestapo applied to the French resistance with some justification: the resistance employed tactics against the Nazis which are in many cases identical to those of the Iraqi combatants today, including assassinations, bombings, and kidnappings).

Wherever he is, Osama bin Laden is probably laughing his rocks off at the mess Bush has gotten the USA entangled in.

The term "losing ground" is relative. If we were to leave Iraq, we'd have lost ground from where we are now, and we'd lose ground compared to where we want to be.

If you think victory in the War on Terror could ever be achieved while Saddam Hussein remained in power then you'd have a point. Some of us don't believe that.

Saddam's Iraq was at times hostile to al Qaeda, but they were also very willing to make deals. The same could be said about Saddam's relationship with Iran, and you know how much they hated each other.

Randy, we *have* lost ground. Iraq went from being an Al Qaida-hostile place to their new happy hunting ground. Public support throughout the Middle East has dropped like a rock (except in Israel, of course). Fundraising and recruiting has got to be a lot easier. US forces are stretched thin, with no relief in sight. And losing ground, so far. Not encouraging.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the Taliban/Al Qaida guys are taking ground back, turning our government there into the city government of Kabul. So long as the US-paid mercenaries don't leave, in which case it'd be the deceased former city government of Kabul.

Meanwhile, back in the US, the Bush administration has had a policy of pushing all useless or counterproductive security measures, and blocking useful ones.

I'm with Murph. The electorate would be angered, and we'd start new boycotts, but I also think it's hard to imagine this scenario.

If Bush holds a grudge then this is one that more than half the nation would share with him.

But I don't think it'll happen for a bigger reason: Blair knows he's going to leave office one day anyway. He's got his ideals to consider. And he certainly doesn't want to go down in history as the one PM willing to surrender.

It was much easier for us to give up in Vietnam. Some of the South Vietnamese suffered, and some died trying to flee, but that was far away and the world wasn't connected the way it is now. Our losses were intangibles at the time, only to be felt later. Giving up now would mean we've lost some hard fought ground. It would energize the Islamists and their fundraising. Their resources could only increase. We might not have time to hold a grudge.

95% of the American public simply wouldn't even notice.

Edited by author 09-21-2004 06:08 PM
I understand the reasoning of the tactic of drawing down UK troops. I even understand the desire, but as to the effect it would have on the U.S. electorate, well, this I am pretty sure of.

Those that are for an American Regime change will use it as evidence that all is not well with the Coalition.

Those that are for the current administration will use it as evidence, "See, not only are the French and the Germans backstabbers, but the bloody limeys are too!"

And so, would it affect the election? All it would do is piss off two rival groups split fifty-fifty and the Conservatives would cheerfully turn and claim it was a Liberal conspiracy.

Not the kind of thing that will play well in American Flyover Country. Most of which are Red States and leaning harder and harder toward the incumbent.

Most Midwesterners hold grudges far longer than any politician ever dreamed of doing.

Just my assessment.

Liked the blog article, Charlie. I can always count on something rational and well reasoned from you, even if I don't always agree.

Respects,
Steve
From Flyover Country, U.S.A.

Looking at some of the blogs I've been reading, since the business over the Killian memo started some people have become totally insane in their support of Bush.

I think they'll just lump us in with the cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

But every party has supporters who will just not change their minds. The people who matter are those who can change their minds, and are persuadable.

I'd worry far more about electoral fraud in the US. After all, it worked last time.

I think Gary's dead right. Some of us already know we're in a mess and don't need the pointer. The rest aren't going to consider Britain's actions to be relevant. If it made a blip, the Bush regime would interpret being abandoned on all sides as the rest of the world being lily-livered cowards, and claim that they're the only ones brave enough to stand up to the Evildoers(tm). And it would play with their followers, because they seem to see the world as "You're with us or you're against us," with no middle ground.

I wonder if Blair is planning to deliver an October Surprise that will swing the US presidential election against Bush?

It would be *lovely* if he was, and if it worked. But I don't think there's enough wiggle room in the minds of Bush's staunch supporters to make much difference.

"Would this be enough to get through to the American public the fact that they are in this mess on their own?"

No. Definitely not. It would be barely noticed by those who prefer Bush. Either you're someone who's already noticed the facts on the ground, or you're not. Britain doesn't, I'm afraid, otherwise loom large in the equation.

Edited by author 09-21-2004 12:07 PM
That and possibly to relieve some of the dent that the current "Cutbacks" in the UK forces will be seeing. With app 4500 jobs in the RAF alone going, I think the uk will need a few more hands here.

But pulling back forced gentley might move the UK back towards the "Neutrality" line as far as the non-coalition supporters are concerned, TonyB might be hedging his bets.

Re: October Surprise.

Charlie,

I don't see this as a possibility. Blair has too much political capital invested in GWII to pull out now. To do so would be to admit he was wrong all along and effectively surrender the next election. All the signs are that he will win that as things stand now.

Trying to tilt the US election is such an obvious way would likely backfire badly. It might even play into the Shrub's hands and do we really want him back in the White House and pissed with us? Even if Kerry won I doubt that the Democrats would take kindly to interference in domestic politics from a supposed ally. The potential fallout in US/UK relations is too great for this to be a viable startegy.

What I thiink we're seeing is an attempt to mitigate some of the overstretch within the army.

Tony,

Better to fart than to get the shits.

Especially if you are on the detail burning the shit in the buckets the next morning.

Besides, they don't call sleeping bags "fart sacks" for nothing. Keeps you warm at night. A good thing in the Gulf Region between November to April. You wouldn't believe how damned cold it gets in the Arabian Desert (up past Safwan in Iraq, I couldn't speak for since I attended the first party in the Gulf, not the second one).

Respects,
Steve
Northtown, Missouri

Ginmar's (http://www.livejournal.com/users/ginmar/) answer: I don't care why the chicken crossed the road; all I know is that it made those pigs in my unit fart all night long after they ate it.

SAS Answer: That was no chicken, that was Corporal Orpington.

As Larry the Cable Guy would say: "I don't care who you are, that's funny."

[Murphy seen stirring a boiling pot while another soldier drops a plate of potatoes, carrots, and onions into it]

The chicken crossed the road because I bought it at the supermarket for dinner. If you've ever had messhall food, you'd understand.

Respects,
S. F. Murphy
From Flyover Country, U.S.

P.S. I'm surprised those 1st Cav boys and girls didn't barbecue the chicken.

It should also be mentioned that what France has banned is *any* religious dress or symbols in their school system. So you can't wear a hijab, a turban, a yarmulke, a crucifix or a pentagram.

It's also important to note that aome of the strongest support for this the law has come from French Muslim women, who have been under incredible pressure from their fundies to wear the hijab when they don't want to.

France isn't considering it -- it was passed and is now a subject of controversy. (NB: best discussed in light of the French tradition of anti-clericalism, which makes the US's constitutional separation of church and state look flimsy.) Don't know about Germany or Belgium, but some education authorities in the UK have banned the hijab -- lawsuits in progress. And I wouldn't be surprised at anything happening in the US -- it's a very big country and sufficiently diverse that some district almost certainly has banned it.

Isn't it ironic that France, Germany and Belgium, which opposed the Iraq war, are considering anti-hijab legislation, while the UK and US, the countries which invaded Iraq, are not?

Regarding the kill ratio in Black Hawk Down, the book gave the impression that many Somalis were risk takers during the combat. An example I recall is a Somalian using no cover and firing at US troops who are behind cover. As might be expected, the Somalian dies. Then further Somalis would attempt to collect the gun even though there would be no cover, and a high probability of being killed.

This doesn't explain the full ratio, since US firepower was very large. I recall a description of the humvees moving through the town and one machine gunner pretty much opening up on anything that moved.

I think the book is the best description I've ever come across of the nature of combat, though I don't really read many such books and I have no personal experience to compare against.

I can't recommend the book enough. All war-mongering politicians should be made to read it.

To clarify: by "tacitly complicit" I mean that I feel guilty that I haven't been doing enough to protest in the general direction of my MP, or 10 Downing Street, or wherever, since the invasion, despite having had a strong feeling even beforehand that this was going to be a disaster and that the UK should get the hell out of it as fast as possible.

As the disaster unfolds, the people on the receiving end -- the Iraqis, but also the broader Islamic community that bears a sense of affront at the invasion -- are going to hold us responsible. Some of them will (probably already have) turn violent. And bombs on planes or trains don't discriminate between peace protestors and LGF fans. All of which will just go to energize the cycle of violence once more.

I'm still sticking my fingers in my ears and yelling LA-LA-LA-I-CANT-HEAR-YOU at the news, though. The latest from Gaza, for example; how on earth does George W. Bush think that roping his foreign policy to Ariel Sharon's charming idea of crowd control is going to bring about world peace? (I know, I know, that memo the Village Voice dug up, about the snake-fondlers and the rapture ...)

Sorry. If I follow the news too closely these days I feel like I need anti-depressants, because this sort of shit is inevitably going to come home to roost one way or another and we are tacitly complicit in it all. The post-invasion collapse of the British anti-war movement -- at least, the total loss of momentum from those large demonstrations -- is a case in point.

As an aside: I've neither read the book nor seen the movie (Blackhawk Down) but one statistic stuck with me over that incident -- that while most Americans recall it as having cost 18 lives, the actual total who were killed was closer to a thousand. Only they were mostly Somalian, so they don't count ...

I'll just say that the movie Blackhawk Down is biased, but in the same general eyewitness research class as The Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far, and Band of Brothers.

I think you could see it as a criticism of the US quitting in Somalia, but more from a soldier's point of view than a politician's. And one or two odd-seeming moments are apparently really how it was.

In particular, there were large parts of Mogadishu which were essentially peaceful and non-hostile, not something which got reported at the time. And there's something of that affecting the politics of the US in Iraq.

Dave, I think what I wrote was a wee bit unclear.I don't think it's at all reasonable to blame the Iraqis in this case, because they quite understandably thought the US army was happy with what they were doing.

I haven't seen that movie, though I might get it for that commentary track you mention. Your point about the role of ground troops is well taken.

Edited by author 05-20-2004 02:06 AM
Sure. Iain, the blame isn't entirely one-sided.

But the story implies that Iraq is a free-fire zone for close-air-support assets. If that helicopter had not been called in by troops on the ground, directly or indirectly...

You see, he saw a firefight going on. Maybe the pilot thought he was the target, maybe not, but he couldn't know which side was which. He could easily have been firing on US Troops.

If you've seen the movie Blackhawk Down you'll have seen the effort needed to guide in helicopter attacks at night. If you have the DVD, you might have the commentary track by people who were there, and they don't seem to think there were any significant foul-ups by the film makers in those details.

This is at least reckless incompetence. If it's the sign of some deeper change in behaviour by the US Army, maybe the squaddies should start putting up "US Go Home" signs in Basra.

Some way through the article, after the initial impact of the sheer bloody horror of the whole thing, I started thinking "Maybe they should have had the good sense to give the traditional celebratory gunfire a rest, given the facts of being under US occupation". Then I got to the last paragraph, which really is the killer:

Al-Ani said people at the wedding were firing weapons in the air, and that American troops came to investigate and then left. However, he said, helicopters attacked the area at about 3am.

So, they'd spoken to the local US squaddies, squared everything up with them, and thought it was all cool. Then some helicopter pilot decides to light the whole party up with his autocannon because standing off until he's found out what's going on is just a bit of a drag.

"American troops have sometimes mistaken celebratory gunfire for hostile fire".

No shit, Sherlock. You'd have thought somebody would have realised that by now.

How many civilian contractors are going to have their heads hacked off for this, I wonder?

Calling the Poor Law a social security system is a bit like describing a 1908 Wright Flyer as an airliner because it could carry a passenger. (Before our pet libertarian comes back with an "I told you so! Evil statism in action!" comment.)

I'm with Steven on the right balance thing; in my dogmatic opinion, the biggest problem with libertarianism is that its proponents tend to become so ideologically blinkered that they can't cope with the idea that a one-size-fits-all answer might not actually work in all circumstances.

Hell on Earth is probably the best way to describe what life was like for the lower classes in Victorian Era Great Britain. Not pleasant at all. I don't think returning to that economic model is a good idea. At least you did get some fresh air during the pre-industrial era and had a chance of maybe growing your own food.

Personally, I'd rather find the right balance between capitalism, socialism, and democracy (small "d" intentional).

Respects,
S. F. Murphy
Northtown, Missouri

I'm as much against the gospel of market fundamentalism as the next man. In fact, unless the next man is a Maoist, the chances are far better than even that I'm more against it than he is.

But 1860 England (hell, 1650 England. But not 1550) had something that might be described as a social security system: the poor law. It was cheap and nasty, but it was there. Very hard to starve to death in England after about 1700. The courts even ruled in the early C19th (on French asylum seekers, no less) that local authorities had a duty to stop people starving in their jurisdiction.

Now here's a thought: the industrial revolution was thought up and brought into being by small nation that had the best welfare state on the planet. That's the kind of generalisation that goes down very badly with Adam Smith fans who have yet to read Adam Smith.

Edited by author 05-12-2004 09:41 AM
Iain: David clearly thinks that the mid-Victorian laissez-faire state of Great Britain was, well, 'some kind of governmental project to "create the free market environment."'

At this point, I don't think it's worth arguing with him.

(Clue, David: I'm talking about a state with no income tax, at least in peacetime. No public healthcare, no social security system, no legislative framework to prevent monopolies, no government-owned industries, no nothing. About the only contractual arrangement between adults that was illegal was chattel slavery. They had people starving to death in the streets, cholera epidemics, and finally the Great Stink. You might want to ask why we moved away from that situation. And why that screaming pinko liberal, Prince Otto von Bismarck, introduced the first state pension and unemployment insurance scheme ...)

David:

You might find a reading list including, but not limited to, Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith of some considerable benefit.

Charlie,

Show me a case where "exploitative monopolies and company town systems" exist without government approval and facilitation. I don't believe it happens in nature. With very few exceptions, monopolies can be created only with force, which almost always means government action or at least local "war lords" willing to use deadly force.
 
Your hint (that "a free market environment has been tried") does not help your argument. Free markets weren't invented or tried by anyone. They just happen in the absense of government interference. The very fact that it was "tried" suggests that you refer to some kind of governmental project to "create the free market environment." It's an oxymoron. Such a failed project simply proves instead, and once again, that government action in the economic sphere is counter-productive. Private property and free exchange is a natural state. We lose that only when somebody establishes a coercive power monopoly and then imposes limitations on ownership or free exchange -- i.e. a government of one description or another.

Can things happen in a free market environment that seem imperfect, even "wrong"? Sure. But I believe most of the examples you are concerned about are ultimately caused by governmental market perversions. Patents on inventions, for example, can lead to temporary monopolies that could never happen without patent laws. There is no reason why the government should be granting even a temporary monopoly on an idea that might well be separately developed by different people. (Copy rights are a separate issue, and are justified in the Libertarian mind).

I don't expect to be able to convince you on any of this, especially if you are one of the many people who are bothered by market "unfairness." Moreover, it would seem that your mind is closed tight as a drum ("reject", "glibly", etc). But it doesn't matter; the conversation is good.

Charlie,

In the UK maybe they make the distinction between the individual and the institution. Here in the United States, especially among the hard left, they don't make the distinction. If you wore the uniform, you are a knuckle dragging neanderthal.

We're not all like that, even if by chance we do have some that actually are knuckle dragging, terminally stupid, neanderthals in our ranks. God knows I met enough of them during the six years I was on active and guard duty.

As a side note, it appears that the reason some of these photos was taking was to intimidate the prisoners into talking. "Give us the info we want or will send these photos to your family and friends," is more or less the message.

Respects,
S. F. Murphy

Damon: yeah, prison conditions in the developed world are not good. However, I should note that the US prison population per capita is an order of magnitude higher than the UK's, which in turn is the highest in Europe by a long way. And conditions seem to vary inversely with the degree to which incarceration is used by a country. Prison is indeed a brutalizing system, for the jailers as well as the jailed.

(Apropos "slopping out", though, I feel like adding that it's not there as punishment: it's basically a relic of the fact that much of the UK's prison stock was built in the 19th century, before indoor toilets were seen as necessary. It's actually being phased out as fast as they can install modern sanitation facilities, and indeed a prisoner recently sued the prison service in Scotland (and won) under the Human Rights Act over being forced to do it. What used to be business as usual is now seen as cruel and unusual.)

David: "rational economic behaviour" does not mean rational in the everyday sense. (Which is the rational choice, if you are starving to death: to sell yourself into eternal slavery for the promise of one square meal a day, or to hold out in the hope something better comes along before you die? It's not an obvious choice between good and bad options; it's a choice between a bad option and an uncertain one. And we're notoriously bad at reasoning under conditions of uncertainty.)

Moreover, we're also not playing in an economic level playing field; the market you glibly talk about in terms of giving us the freedom to exercise our choice is dominated by superorganisms with different goals and priorities from human beings. These superorganisms are also vastly more powerful than individual human beings (read: "they have more money"). And they can exert disproportionate, coercive, bargaining leverage in interactions with individual human beings. They are, of course, limited liability companies and corporations; and if you want to convince me of the rightness of unregulated markets you'll have to convince me that systemic abuses such as exploitative monopolies and company town systems are self-correcting.

(Here's a hint: a nearly unregulated libertarian economy has been tried, historically. It had big problems. Which is why, from about 1860 onwards, the UK moved away from it ...)

Steven: I think all of us here can tell the difference between an organization and the individuals it is composed of. Still, it's always horrible to see something you believed was a force for good exposed as having a corrupt underbelly.

Edited by author 05-10-2004 12:30 PM
What's disgusting is the fact that what is happening in Iraq's prisons is in line with the happenings in US prisons.

I've the pleasure of being part of a Texan family of which there is a large percentage of members who actually work as prison guards in the Texas Department of Corrections. One actually works as a member of the medical team which treats prisoners, essentially the ER of a north Texas prison. I've managed to escape the pleasure of serving in the TDC system, both as a prisoner and an employee.

When we get together as a family, damn near everything we talk about is the Evil of Texas Prisons. It is inescapable. When I hear of the abuses that have occurred in Iraq, it is par for the course, even light. I don't mean to sound callous, and I'm certainly not arguing that what is happening is acceptable. I find it amazing and tragic that Americans view their country as righteous. That soldier/MP/prison guard from West Virginia is an average employee of the TDC. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find handful of prison guards in the TDC which surpass the W. VA soldier in cultural awareness or moral aptitude.

You think stacking men genital to ass is bad? PEOPLE ARE DYING ON A DAILY BASIS IN TEXAS PRISONS. I get a small fraction, straight from the employees and guards of the TDC (which are members of my immediate and extended family), of the events which occur in Texas prisons, home of the big W. It makes me sick. We have to *force* ourselves to stop talking and thinking about it. Here a couple recent events of which I've learned of in the past four days. These are eye witness accounts from the mouths of guards and the writings of prisoners I know:

1. A female prisoner with asthma, is left in her cell, by herself, and experiences an asthma attack. She is heard from her cell, banging on the walls bars, and yelling as much as she can by both guards and prisoners. The guards ignore her on purpose. Even neighboring prisoners call out on her behalf. She eventually stops making noise. A prisoner in the next cell continues to hear her weezing and tapping on the floor FOR THE NEXT 24 HOURS UNTIL SHE FINALLY SUFFOCATES TO DEATH. The story goes, one of the guards didn't like her. No official investigation.

2. In an all female prison, a church prison outreach program was brought in (you know, minister and several members of the congregation). After the sermon, the guards were brought in and all prisoners where lined up in front of the congregation and systematically strip searched as the church members were forced to watch in horror. The prisoner who reported this said the sermon was "inspiring and wonderful."

This is just the tip of the iceburg. I hear of multiple deaths on a weekly basis. A tragically high percentage are due simply to voluntary neglect by prison guards with the same value system as that West Virginian soldier we all know and love. These guards are mostly people who can't get work any place else. It is a system of fear, intimidation, and humiliation, and that goes for both inmates *and* guards. If you are guard with any decent morals at all, you are shunned and quite often framed into either losing your job or life (i.e., put into the very unhealthy situation of being locked in a room full of prisoners with no other joy than dashing your brains out).

If we could get a camera in there, people would lose their minds.

Oh, wait a minute. But then, quite a few members of my family would lose their jobs. What was that you were saying Charlie? Stalinist dictatorships? Oh, yeah. We know what that means. They do what they are told (yes, many of my family are poor, and they honestly believe they have no choice, no matter how much I argue that point). But, I grew up with them. I see what the prisons have done to them. It has taken their lives and squeezed out any belief in the human race.

Naked prisoners? Dog bites? Jesus, have we forgotten what is going on here in the "Homeland?" Not to mention the "slopping out" that goes on near you, Charlie. What a strange world where a single event like the Iraq Prison Incident is used to cover the reality of what is happening, hundreds of times a day, in the US prison systems. It's a strange new twist of the Chewbacca Defense, on a global scale.

Charlie,

<"the lack of "rational" economic behavior on the part of most ordinary humans">

You really open a big topic with the assertion above. If you won't let people be their own best judge about what it is they want out of life, whose judgment will you substitute?

I recognize that the issues may be orthogonal, but I take issue with two ideas that seemed to be contained in your statements (in addition to one of tone): that the markets impose no discipline and that government regulation is a fix for that "problem." I consider both of those ideas to be tragically wrong; two of the most damaging ideas ever thought. They lead us directly toward the ever-expanding and suffocating state.

As for matter of 'tone'. You are a smart guy, Charlie, perhaps even smarter than anyone. But not everyone. Such too is the power of markets vs the power of the state.

The really sad thing about all of this is that U.S. soldiers, past, present and future, will get to answer for this incident for the next generation. I swear I never heard the end of complaints by college students about Vietnam and Operation Desert Storm during the 1990's. Hell, I got asked what it felt like to strafe people on the Highway of Death and I'm not even a damned pilot!

Now I'll get to answer for attacking naked prisoners with German Shepards.

I swear to God, we are not all like this, even those of us who supported this war. I'm definitely not like this and I resent those who did do this. I'm fit to be tied over the whole affair.

Now it is the end of my shift at work. I'm going to go home, have a brew for those who died today (on both sides, since my peers in the U.S. Army are forbidden from drinking on deployment and the Iraqis by and large don't drink from what I understand).

Worse yet, I have to figure out which idiot to vote for in the fall. I can't stand any of my choices.

Maybe I'll put a write in candidate in. Have to think about it.

Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
North Kansas City, Missouri

"I'm going to go away now and think happy thoughts about fluffy pretty things...."

Joss Whedon quotes work well for me here.

"... and try not to get any more depressed than I am already, before my head explodes.)"

It's not my head, Charlie, it's my heart.

Charlie, the corporate argument appeals to the unreformed Marxist in me (that I normally keep caged up in the back part of my mind under heavy guard next to the Anarchist) but it is really an issue of corporate mentality, or just the fact that people with a lot of power sometimes commit evil?

I'm more inclined to believe it is merely an issue of human nature, as opposed to some corporate cultural construct. Some people, regardless of ideology, education or experience, are just plain evil.

Say, I thought you were going to go think Happy Thoughts? :) Just kidding. I've not had any luck on the Happy Thoughts effort either.

Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
North Kansas City, Missouri

David: you appear to be unclear on the difference between democracy and capitalism. It's possible for a democracy to be non-capitalist, or a capitalist system to be non-democratic. The two issues are orthogonal, and I reject your assertion that "Everybody gets to vote their dollars as they see fit[.] Nobody's needs are given greater importance". It ignores completely the issues of the diminishing marginal utility of money, the lack of "rational" economic behaviour on the part of most ordinary humans, and phenomena like regulatory capture.

My comments below are getting off the main thrust of your observations, but it seems like an important topic to me.
 
Your comments about corporations are probably shared by the majority of people, but I think it is important to reflect on this stereotype. Many of the biggest corporations, the ones we love to hate, have morphed into something that is somewhat different from private property. The executives are not materially the owners, and the stock holders are probably best described by the Daily Reckonings' "lumpeninvestoriat" term. Far too many industries are now focussed on creating rewarding relationships with government, exaggerating their business opportunities and other perversions of the capitalistic structure. In general, however, I don't understand how you can make this statement: "There is an almost total lack of accountability from the employees, except where it may be imposed by external regulatory authorities. The corporate model is as profoundly anti-democratic a system as can be imagined, but we put up with it because it has the saving grace that it exists as a little island within a larger society."
 
If you think about it, the unperverted system of private property and free exchange forces continuous accountability. It also can be thought of as democratic in one important sense. Everybody gets to vote their dollars as they see fit. Nobody's needs are given greater importance, and the system responds much faster than any government agency. The truth is that even great fortunes can be lost quickly if corporate management misses a shift in consumer needs and demands. It is the consumer, through his buying or abstinance from buying, that determines consumer goods' prices and thereby the values of all higher production goods and the wages of all people working to create goods or services. There is no central authority deciding these things; it is about as "democratic" as a process can get. These simple facts are applicable even to Walmart. The only firms who escape this discipline are the ones working in the most heavily regulated industries -- where scale and government connections shut out even the possibility of effective competition.
 
Like businesses, government agencies always want to get bigger, but they don't do so by meeting consumer needs efficiently. They benefit directly from "regulatory disasters," always getting a bigger budget and more power after such an event. They also often find the way to perpetuate their agency is by working with industry insiders to set up barriers to entry. I maintain that the discipline of the market, even an imperfect market, is always more effective than government regulators.
 
Not everybody is always happy with the results produced by markets, of course. That's why so many smart people think they can improve on market results. Those people have called themselves many things, but it all boils down to someone thinking he is smart enough to allocate resources better than the markets -- if only he could gain the power to tell everyone else what to do.
 
Democracies, it turns out, do not prevent these schemes. A tyranny of the majority is still tyranny.

We have a saying in the U.S. Army, Charlie.

"The Effective Range of An Excuse is Zero."

Maybe they've changed the way the Army discusses issues concerning illegal orders (which all of these acts fall under and why I also thought you were being cynical about the war crimes concerns until two weeks ago). At any rate, I was taught that when you are given an order that you are almost certain is illegal (like what we've seen in the photos) you are to:

1. Respectfully but firmly disobey the order and explain why.
2. Document, document, document.
3. Report to the Chain of Command.
4. If the Chain is broken, report to the Inspector General.
5. If that fails, contact your Congressman (the Army hates it when you do this).
6. Barring that (I was not trained on this one) contact the media.

We do have one soldier, Specialist Darby (a guy who looks like a redneck hick, no less ) who did come forward, follow the above, and try to put a stop to this.

I'm also in agreement concerning the total lack of a postwar plan. I'm furious about that. I see that my main concern (inspite of my support of the war) that we didn't have enough troops in the Active Duty Army for the job has come true (again, I join the chorus of "No, No, No").

In fact, my concern about Army size was my one sole objection to invading.

At any rate, the soldiers we have right now are not the sole culprits. We need to track down the civilian and military higher ups who facilitated/ordered the treatment and insure that they are punished with something more severe than a mere "Letter of Reprimand."

Respects,
S. F. Murphy
North Kansas City, Missouri

As for the low-level soldiers who're being court martialled ...

Yes, they're culpable. But before throwing the first stone, it's probably a good idea to read up on the Stanford Prison Study and the Milgram Experiment.

If you put ordinary unprepared people into a situation structured to turn them into war criminals, 90% of the time you'll get war criminals. The real culprits are the higher-ups who established the parameters of the situation ...

All I can say is, I'm aghast.

Back on June 12th last year, I blogged, the US government is threatening
to withhold aid from countries that don't exempt US troops
from the International Criminal Court. (Why? Are they
planning to commit war crimes?)

I thought I was being a cynical SOB. Unfortunately it turns out I wasn't being cynical enough.

Remember those pictures and videos that haven't aired yet, that are supposedly "much, much worse" ...?

This isn't going to merely make life difficult for the US occupation of Iraq; it's going to shatter US foreign policy initiatives world wide for a generation. It has tagged any US concerns over human rights in foreign countries as rank hypocrisy. It has made torture the #1 word-association that springs to mind when a US president talks about freedom in the context of foreigners. It discredits any western claim of moral superiority.

About the only way to salvage the situation -- at a diplomatic level -- would be for Congress and Senate to impeach Bush and try Rumsfeld for war crimes. And I honestly don't think that's going to happen because from inside the diplomatic black hole that is Washington DC it doesn't look quite that bad. Yet.

Joining the chorus of "No, no, no" Other than the whole "speakable evil" angle what hurts the most the awe-inspiring stupidity of it all.

Upfront statement. I aproved of the war on the grounds that it was highly likely to be better than a status quo where sanctions killed 50.000+ iraqis, mainly children, per year. I was really pissed, and frankly pussled as hell when it became clear that the US didn't have an occupation plan.
Did they think they were going to lose the war ? WTF?

But this is actively evil rather than mere massive incompetence, and quite frankly it puts the US opposition to the ICC in a truely hellish light.
 
You want to know how the people involved got the idea this was somehow okay?
Well. The Bush admonostration has been detaining suspected terrorists left and right with nary a nod to due process or the laws of war, and have simultainously been adamant that no US citizen must ever be brought before an international court on crimes against humanity charges.

I'm not at all sure that every soldier noticed the "international" bit of why the administration opposed it, and the message sent by Guantanamo is loud and clear: "the normal rules don't apply to these people" Add the fact that the total lack of any plan for the post-war phase left the troops in a hellish situation.. =
Cluster-fuck.

Things I feel should be done now to salvage the situation:
Find the people responsible and make highly public examples of them. Start making visible preperations for elections. Emphasis on visible. Loose Bush. The incompetence is really getting quite unbearable.

In reference to wanting to put one's fingers in their ears and scream, "No, No, No," I do empathize. I've had the same feeling since the story broke.

Being a veteran of the U.S. Army and the Army National Guard myself, I can not, for the life of me, figure out what on God's Green Earth gave these soldiers the idea that what they were doing wasn't:

1. Illegal
2. Destructive to American Credibility
3. A blight on the honor of the U.S. Army
4. Endangering their fellow soldiers.

Hell, I'm sorry this happened. It wasn't supposed to be like this at all with the prisons.

Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
North Kansas City, Missouri

Charlie, may I recomment http://spontoon.rootoon.com/SPwHome1.html as a preventative for cerebral high-velocity disassembly events.

As worst, a Pineapple Krakatoa may be able to emulate the use of explosives by EOD techs.

(The whole business is getting me to the point of snarkiness)

Interestingly, see Series 2 of "Twenty-Four", the reality-high show about counter-terrorist actions. In Series 2, virtually all of the "good guys" were seen using torture at some point to extract information.

I'm a big fan of 24, and there's a good chance they were trying to explore the difficult moral questions involved here, but still, it's very interesting to see it painted as almost acceptable.

If Bush is the corporate CEO, doing everything to ensure corporate goals are achieved, then Blair can be categorized as the prosecuting attorney, using whatever evidence he has to make the case he wants (or is payed to make) and ignoring the rest. You can see this in the way that his government uses 'evidence based policy making'.

Good post, Charlie. I'm getting nightmares just from the news coverage. (That England woman appears as the babysitter, the other mother, the preschool teacher; I leave the kids with her and return to that blood spattered room.) I can't imagine what the torture victims are going through (and will continue to, via post-traumatic effects of their treatment).

That our cable modem service is down today seems almost a blessing in disguise.

s/choid/choir/

(I was copy-typing from a yellowing paperback in my lap.)

"One man is said to have heard and seen a choid conducted by the protesant leader, Ian Paisley...."

What does that mean?

Minor murmur that I was all over this days before either Kathryn or Rivka, but what the hell. It was only days, and a bit of work, and no matter that Kathryn got to it via me, as she said. My latest posts are more relevant, now. Y'know, the stuff said an hour ago? (Blog credit is trivial stuff, particularly so in the face of this horror, but it's the only thing bloggers are paid in, Charlie.)

I'm not referring to the British occupation of Iraq -- although maybe I should have; if only to point out that those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

a: on the subject of Najaf, my understanding is that it occupies a rather special position in Shi'ism -- about equivalent to the Vatican City in Catholicism. (How do you think sending tanks into the Vatican would be received?) Obviously it's an imperfect metaphor, but dicking around with the holiest sites of a religion is not a good way for military occupiers accused of torture and war crimes to endear themselves to the followers of said religion.

This is probably selective perception but Charlie are you obliquely referring to Britain in Iraq earlier this century?

Charlie, isn't it going too far to compare Bush to Hitler? I'd say Kaiser Wilhelm was a better comparison, with the neocons equivalent to the most fervent of German WWI imperialists.

A real American Hitler would not claim to be acting in the name of democracy, and would be openly hostile to Islam itself. "Ann Coulter: The Rise of Evil" anyone?

"Meanwhile, I see that US army forces have entered Najaf. Where do I go to hand back my "member of the human species" badge?"

Birth?

What does Najaf have to do with it?

Charlie, don't you know that the *real* important issue facing the United States today is that tonight is the series finale of "Friends"? Yes, how will we get along without our weekly dose of Chandler, Rachel, and the rest of the gang? It's big news, you know. Can't turn on the TV without hearing about it. Lead story and all that.

Wait, were you saying something about Iran or what?

"This must stop. There is no room in the new Iraq for the kind of lawless self-interested behaviour we have seen in the past few weeks." -- Paul Bremmer, US Administrator for Iraq 5/6/04

I couldn't have said it better myself, Paul.

or try the 'Nazi or Blogger' test

http://www.whataretheysaying.org/archives/000872.html

Edited by author 04-21-2004 08:06 AM
Have you read 'Little Green Footballs or Late German Fascists?' at http://www.drmenlo.com/lgfquiz/ ?

The link is now fixed, Gary.

Your link leads to the repeating of the same set of posts.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blosxom.cgi#wartime-14

As I recall, Tony was planning on the biggest outsourcing of British military procurement since the Crimean War (when it was in-sourced, due to certain, cough cough, defects in the procurement process -- does the conversion of the word "shoddy" from describing a type of wool to describing crap workmanship ring any bells?) as a cost-cutting measure.

Sigh.

You may have heard of the "ginmar" LiveJournal; produced by somebody we may both have acquaintances in common with, reporting from within the US Army "somewhere in Iraq".

In one of the recent pieces, also covering snoring, it reports that the US Army is being fed and watered by a private company, which has led to soldiers cleaning their teeth in water recycled from the showers, and the predictable outbreak of gastrointestinal upsets.

Military history suggests that armies in desert regions shouldn't expect showers. Flash-floods, maybe... A visit to Housesteads also will provide evidence that the Romans knew better than to put the bath's drains upstream of the water intake.

At least we still have the NAAFI. Or has Tony re-branded that?

That's about the sanest explanation for recent history that I've heard so far, SUV King.

The US have discovered an alien base underneath Iraq. The US is defending the world against these aliens, who have no solid bodies but instead manifest as a creeping black slime (See The X-Files). As the result of George Bushes heroic efforts the threat has been contained and the aliens can safely be pumped away and burned (for security reasons this is done at a number of "mobile burning units" throughout the US, which are so top secret you MAY EVEN OWN ONE WITHOUT KNOWING IT - if so god bless you and safe driving!)

If the West Germans hadn't needed the UK and USA to protect them from the Soviets, perhaps there would have been little statues of Goering in West German houses. That's the crucial difference between 2003 Iraq and 1945 Germany - who are the Americans protecting the Iraqis from? This is especially pressing now that the Saddamite regime is clearly finished and not coming back.

"And more importantly, what, twenty years later, might the German people have made of a leader who put up a spirited defense in a kangaroo court, rather than taking the coward's way out of the consequences of his actions by shooting himself?"

We have an answer to that question. What did the German people make of Hermann Goerring in 1966? What do they think today?

Well, I was in a hotel in Brussels recently and thus had access to a television set. I fell right in the middle of a (BBC?) television documentary about Tojo, the Japanese prime minister who was hanged for war crimes. The communis opinio among learned English and USA historians was that Tojo was really badly treated because he was an elected pm, and Nanjing was just a gaffe. Besides, compared to the Nurnberg Trials, the Tokyo trials were a shame and a miscarriage of justice. The one Japanese historian they aired was more circumspect about the issue -- he seemed to think that Tojo was to be blamed a little bit, after all, and maybe Hirohito, too.

Maybe it would have been a better idea to suicide Saddam Hussein before finding him, after all.

Many neocons seem to be in love with the idea of reconstructing the Arab world as Germany and Japan were reconstructed post-WWII. However, conquering and occupying a country does not mean you can completely reconstruct its society - note the failure of Radical Reconstruction after the American Civil War. As soon as the Feds left the South the Southern whites reverted to their old racist ways.

The post-WWII case was unique - the West Germans and Japanese became loyal supporters of democracy because they feared that otherwise the Western Allies would throw them to the communist wolves. By contrast, in Iraq there is no "greater evil" to frighten Iraqis into supporting the Americans.

That's okay, Kirk -- we got off to a bad start.

The aftermath of 9/11 has been a real mess, whichever angle you look at it from. The event itself was catastrophic, but it also offered a priceless diplomatic opportunity if Bush had been willing to take the offered help and use it to build an alliance. Virtually every country in western Europe has had a history of terrorist incidents, and 9/11 struck a deep chord over here. But rather than taking up those offers of help and trying to do something serious about the root causes of middle-eastern political discontent that feeds terrorism, Bush hared off on a bizarre neoconservative-inspired quest to invade Iraq -- a country not connected with islamicism and fundamentally not a realistic threat to the west. And his first reaction to those European offers of help in dealing with terrorism that flowed in during October 2001 was to set up illegal tarriff barriers against his allies.

The way the current US administration squandered a vast international outpouring of empathy and goodwill beggars belief.

(Incidentally, I didn't lose anyone in 9/11. But a friend of mine had a ticket on Flight 93 that day. If her boss hadn't phoned her from San Francisco on 9/10 and said "can you shift your flight forward, I want you back in the office a day early" ...)

It is obvious that I have offended you in our discussion and that was not intended. Maybe the differences in our opinions can be boiled down to 9/11 happening in the US. I lost my agent that day, a lovely woman with over 25 years in the business whose love for books was rivaled only by her love for her children and granddaughter. I still think of Sue everytime I sit down to work on a manuscript.

Regardless, any slight was unintentional and was merely a poor attempt at an exchange of ideas. I wish you continued success with Singularity Sky and your other endeavors. The next time I go back home to Llanbrynmair in Montgomeryshire, I would be happy to pop over and discuss our differences the civilized way - over darts and a pint. Many blessings.

Kirk: what do you mean minority opinion?

Okay, it is a minority opinion -- in the sense that the number of supporters for "troops out -- right now!" is under 50% of the entire population. But back in March, the polls were showing 60% opposed to war -- and today, there's a good 40% who want to see the UK out, and 60% who think that Blair's relationship with Bush is damaging to the UK. That's a far cry from ignoring a 1-2% minority opinion.

I'm just back from an anti-war demo in Edinburgh. My estimate is somewhere in the 3000-6000 head count (from a city of 600,000) -- but a lot of folks are heading for London for the big demo tomorrow. I ended up at the pub afterwards with fellow demonstrators including Ken MacLeod, Iain Banks, and Ian Rankin -- in fact, a good slice of the literary community of Edinburgh. (Jenny Rowling and Chris Brookmyre were conspicuously absent ...)

The UK (and Scotland in particular) is not politically aligned with the Mid-West of the USA, and I'm not writing from a mainstream US perspective because I'm not an American.

Are they not listening or are they not responding to a minority opinion? I am sure that there are parts of the US where I could go and have 1-2% of the population turn out for a demonstration supporting the return of the Jim Crow laws. (I realize that is a horribly over-the-top comparison, please forgive me.)

I know that in my area of the US, war protests have been virtually non-existent. When there are reports on the news, most of the people I know just shrug thier shoulders and think of it as another East/West Coast thing. I have family in the military stationed in Iraq and we received a tape this weekend from one of them as a Thanksgiving present for his parents. On it, he says that citizens approach them daily to thank them for coming and, with the idiotic announcement about the June deadline for leaving, often beg them not to leave until they are sure it is safe. Remember, our foreign policy has left them hanging out to dry before.

My only point is that people of the same beliefs usually gravitate towards each other. I would concede that my views are affected in part by the fact that war support is so high in my area if you reciprocate that most of your circle is against the war.

Just to prove that we can agree on one thing, however - Do you suppose Chomsky would have ever included the words political control, repression, subtle, and John Ashcroft in the same sentence? ha, ha

Kirk: freedom of expression is useless if nobody's listening. In this case, 1-2% of the population turned out to yell no, probably representing 10-20 folks for everyone who went out on a demo ... and the government pretended it never even happened.

As Chomsky remarked, it's not that democracies don't have tools of political control and repression -- it's just that they're more subtle.

Hmmm. .5-1 Million for a rally to voice your displeasure with your government's policies. Sounds like a great vote for freedom of expression.

I wonder if Iraqi citizens would like to have been able to voice an opinion over the last few years (or Malaysia, or China, or choose your own freedom-loving government)

Yeah, well, with Arnold having been sworn in today my sense of humor is soon all I'll have left.

I'm so screwed.

Acute sense of humour failure alert:

It is not true that British cops are unarmed. Just an hour ago, I went to pick Feorag up from the airport and went past a patrol in flak jackets armed with MP-5's.

However, police shooting incidents are rare enough to still be headline news, whether or not there's good reason for it. Ordinary cops do not carry guns, they carry batons and pepper spray and a radio to call for specialist tactical firearms support if they run into a situation where lethal force may be needed.

Those MP-5's? They're not equipped for fully automatic fire -- they're carbines, not submachine guns. Indiscriminate fire is a nightmare for British police in general -- a mere whiff of enthusiasm for grapeshot was allegedly enough to get Chief Constable James Anderton forced into early retirement in the 80's, and that was under Thatcher (who was no shrinking violet when it came to massive use of force against her enemies).

Now, police or secret service marksmen are one thing, but a minigun is another, because a minigun is not a police weapon. It's a device that is designed specifically to lay down fire across a wide area. It's a fire hose for bullets. In the event that a bad guy in a crowd pulls a gun and starts plinking at the President, a police marksman might hope to take down the bad guy without hurting the people around him, or at least without hurting more than a couple of by-standers. A minigun, in contrast, is what you use when you don't give a shit what you're shooting at, you just want the gutters to run with blood. You don't use it for taking out a bad guy standing in a crowd, you use it to take down the entire crowd.

You know something? My bet for the demonstrations this week is that the turn-out is going to be way higher than anyone expects -- possibly as big as the huge anti-war demo back in March that was somewhere in the 0.5-1 million head range. And I think someone in the White House doesn't understand the difference between a huge but peaceful demonstration and a riot.

PS: Wait for the Republican convention in New York next autumn. They'll core the Big Apple -- and while Blunkett might have drawn the line at miniguns in the UK, I don't expect Ashcroft to show such a lack of enthusiasm for breaking skulls.

I don't understand the concern over miniguns. I saw my governor with a minigun just the other day.

http://www.montysminiguns.com/Untitled53.jpg

Re: your "new Japanese perversion" links: It isn't all that new. Remember Ann-Margaret and the baked beans in Ken Russell's film of Tommy?

"That 250 Secret Service agents, including snipers, who will be travelling with the President be granted diplomatic immunity from prosecution in the event they shoot and kill civilians (whether deliberately or by accident)."

Strictly speaking, shooting civilians is the Secret Service's job. Damn few on-duty soldiers or police try to kill the President, after all.

Do you suppose that those requests (diplomatic immunity for goons with miniguns, &c.) and their refusal were scripted in private by the Whitehouse and/or Downing St. to give the illusion of Downing St. asserting its sovereignty? It may make more sense than anyone in Washington thinking that they were remotely reasonable.

Lighten up, Charlie. These are entirely reasonable precautions when an emperor visits a recently-conquered province.

For pictures of what the war in Iraq really looks like, unlike the canned variety shown in the press, visit this web site.

http://www.thefourreasons.org/victimsofwar.htm

Please be warned that there are some really disturbing pictures.

David

It probably will embolden the left of Labour and calls for Britain to opt out of the Greater United States. Though that could also lead to the Tories making a comeback and winning the next election. Especially if a certain Mr. Murdoch disowns no-longer-New(tm) Labour and gives the Conservative Party the full benefit of the Sun's and Times' favour.

And the Tory Party's the one one of whose factions wants Britain to leave the EU and join the FTAA instead. If they win the next election, we can expect even more surrender of sovereignty to Washington than under Blair.

My e-mail has been hosed for weeks. Blessings to you both upon and after your wedding, Charlie.

I will, however, note that while it certainly is perfectly possible that they'll eventually do executions at Guantanamo -- I have no idea if they will or won't, but obviously there's no reason to think they definitely won't -- it also continues to be utterly unsubstantiated -- as yet -- that they will do executions. That last Guardian story you cited has no observable substantiated facts. Did you not notice that the reporter simply asserts that anonymous "military officials" are doing such and such?

"US military officials are making preparations for the trial and possible execution of captives held in Guantanamo Bay, including the construction of a 'death chamber'."

That's nice, and maybe it's true, but since there's no source for this assertion, it's not exactly news or substantiation, is it? It's just an assertion. Maybe it will turn out to be true. Maybe it won't. Who the hell knows, right now?

Let me apologize to you for that last message, Charlie. It was stupid and incredibly rude. It's no excuse that I wrote it in the middle of the night, and was shitfaced when I did. I apologize, and if there's any way you can delete it, I'd be grateful. If not, it's perfectly fair that my drunken stupidity be displayed forever.

Sorry about that.

I can't be arsed doing better, Gary, because I have a book to be writing and I'm behind schedule.

So all discussion threads are hereby cancelled.

This is a pretty incoherent discussion format and forum. I suppose I could declare that my reading says that everyone obvious delares I am completely right in all ways, but I suppose someone, somewhat later, might not find that right. Absent that, in view of the absolute chaos evident, I do declare game over and new rules needing to be stated. Helo, Charlie? Why are you using this piece of shite software that this softie American farted out as useless about two years ago? Exactly? Since you can, of course, do better?

luv,me

Let's see if this will go through.
On using the oil-for-Palaces UN oil sale program: the Iraqi medical establishment now admits that it could have gotten all the drugs it needed for Iraq's children, but all the money went to build Saddam's palaces.
And Wolfowitz may have over-estimated North Korea's dependency on foreign trade (such as selling heroin in SEA); after fifty years of communism they now have cannibalism, and have to bury the newly dead at night so that the bodies will have at least a full day to rot before they can be turned into food. There are millions of North Koreans Kim Jong Il can turn into bulkogi...

Edited by author 06-10-2003 08:32 AM
Yes, the URL I posted appears to point at the current-day column, and it acquires a different one when it goes into the archives. Annoying.

Dylan - I'm not sure if the Guardian are suddenly using temporary addresses for their "Corrections and Clarifications" column, but the Wolfowitz one is now at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/corrections/story/0,3604,971436,00.html - very odd.

I was going to post about this now infamous Guardian distortion/selective-quote, but I see others here already have. You might want to note that on your actual blog, perhaps?

And have now printed a correction: http://www.guardian.co.uk/corrections/0,6957,178183,00.html

Apparently some of the folks who believed the Guardian quoted "somewhat" selectively were the Guardian themselves. As far as I can tell, they've pulled the article.

Looks like the Guardian did quote somewhat selectively, according to some folks:
http://hobbsonline.blogspot.com/2003_06_01...chive.html#95297402 .

However, one point that needs emphasizing: Iraq was exporting oil right up until the bitter end, under the oil-for-food program. That was a lever the US could have used quite easily to by-pass the lack of economic leverage. I still believe Wolfowitz et al are being more than a little bit economical with the truth when they make excuses like this.

This could well undermine Blair, but whether it leads to a left-wing Labour government not committed to being the PNAC's loyal servants is debatable. Given that Murdoch (through the Sun, and possibly Channel 5 soon) more or less decides the outcome of general elections, the UK is likely to see the Tories win the next one, and thus to see another Blair-like administration only without the dissent in the backbenches. How soon the next election comes depends on whether the post-Blair Labour government is stable, and there'd be a lot of people wanting to give it a bit of a push.

Looking at the full text of the press conference (at http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/200...-depsecdef0246.html) Wolfowitz's full response to a question as to why force was used against Iraq but economic pressure was seen to suffice for N Korea was as follows:

"Look, the primarily difference -- to put it a little too simply -- between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq. The problems in both cases have some similarities but the solutions have got to be tailored to the circumstances which are very different."

The Guardian omitted everything after 'oil' and I have to say rather changed the context of the quote in doing so. As far as I can tell, Wolfowitz was claiming (agree with him or not) that N Korea is so poor that economic threats and promises can exert a lot of leverage, but that Iraq had enough oil wealth to ride out such measures. You might disagree with that view, or feel that the very likely presence of N Korean nukes has more to do with it, but it's hard to interpret the full text of Wolfowitz's remarks as "We invaded Iraq to nick its oil, so there!" as the Guardian seems to be hinting.

"Announcing the withdrawl of troops from Saudi Arabia (to Qatar) was badly timed, against the background of Al Qaida demands -- but more importantly, it neglects the key fact that it's US involvement in the Middle East. Withdrawl to Qatar is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic."

I disagree with your first point -- the Al Quaida demands are, after all, more than twelve years old now, and if US military withdrawal can't take place now, after both a military victory, so it is as clear as it ever will be that it is not a matter of being driven out, and since it is entirely obviously sound and wise policy for a wide list of reasons, then it would I would ask when your argument would be for when the US could or should ever militarily withdraw from Saudi Arabia: only after the last aged supporter of bin Laden is laid to rest? When there is provably never again to be a terrorist threat from an al Quaida remnant? Dubious argument in the extreme.

Your second point, however, arguing that continued use of Quatar (and implicitly other, arguably (and arguably not) less problematic Mideast lands) by the US military is unwise is, I would agree, at least arguable. Arguing for US isolationism (militarily or otherwise, in any number of possible senses), whether from an internal or external position, can entirely be an intellectually consistent, and respectable position, it seems to me at present.

I don't agree with it, as a rule (though I will on various specific points, to be sure), but I don't deny that there is a fair case to be made.

Broadly speaking, the main counter-case is that it is in US interests to internationally support democracy, more or less, and other cliche words which nonetheless retain meaning, however they may also be used as shibboleths (in both old and modern usage of the word). How that is entangled or might be disentangled from US military involvement around the world is a topic more fraught with need for specifics than I will engage in in this post.

:-)

Cheers.

Here's an opinion of mine, then. As I do have a weblog of mine own, readers of it know that I immensely recommend Paul Berman's writing in general. He is, incidentally, one of America's leading leftists, and last I looked, a socialist. There happen to be a not inconsiderable number of leftists and liberals who, however uncomfortably (cough), wrap their minds around certain anti-terrorist and, yea, verily, "pro-war," policies in support, even if -- unpleasant as it may be, and I don't disagree in the slightest that it often can be -- this means not always opposing all policies simply because the Bush Administration also happens to support them.

Better, I think, to rest on debating the merits or demerits of policy than to rely on guilt-by-association or guilt-by-proposing party. I say this not in disagreement with anyone -- certainly, Charlie, you assert your opinion of a policy per se, as a rule -- but to note that name-calling a policy isn't an argument. In any direction. Doubtless everyone knows this, but I hae (my Scottish accent attempting to come out in a typo) a wee button pushed whenever I see the terms "left-wing" and "right-wing" beyond a certain number of usages-per-'graph). Sorry about that.

Let me second Steve's sentiment.

David: you're welcome to post your own opinions. But if you want to post someone else's, please simply post a URL to their piece, and explain why you think it's relevant to my blog.

(I am beginning to become annoyed, because your repeated postings of large screeds by various conservative American pundits are drowning out the conversation here, and I'd prefer to run this as a conversational forum in a hands-off manner. I can live without having to post a refutation of A. N. Other right-wing sock puppet every day, and I'd thank you to stop trying to monopolise this topic as a propaganda forum.)

David M Gordon: No, but you soon will be. We come here to read the comments and conversation inspired by Charlie's stuff, not to read articles from elsenet that have been dropped in.

Perhaps you should consider getting a weblog of your own?

And yet...

Terrorism's family tree
George Walden reviews
Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman

This is the best book I have read on Muslim fundamentalism and what to do about it. Paul Berman writes in the excellent American weekly The New Republic. His self-description as a Social Democrat suggests a European approach to the Middle East, yet his intelligence, breadth of culture, honesty and courage are a world away from the moralistic grandstanding of slithy toves like Chris Patten, Dominique de Villepin and Joschka Fischer. The clarity of his thought cuts through their evasions like a knife through butter, as Berman looks the evil of totalitarian Islam in the face.

 

Left-Right thinking and national stereotypes have no place in his analysis. The terrorist menace has its roots not so much in a clash as in a blend of cultures: a sinister amalgam of 20th-century European anarchism and totalitarianism with pan-Arabism and atavistic Islam. Their common goal was the annihilation of liberal societies, and their doctrines overlap. That is why Nazi theorists in post-war Egypt influenced the Muslim Brotherhood, ancestors of al-Qa'eda, why Syrian and Iraqi Ba'athists leant towards the Soviet Union, and why German ultra-leftists allied themselves with Palestinians in the Seventies to murder Jews.

 

Whether the aim is racial purity, class purity, or a reversion to the doctrinal rigours of seventh-century Medina, all promised a new dawn and delivered little except death. "Shoot more professors!" said Lenin. "Viva la Muerte!" cried one of Franco's generals. "Faith is propagated by counting up deaths every day, by adding up massacres and charnel houses" declared Ali Benhadj, an Algerian Islamist leader. "Utopia and the morgue had blended", Berman comments.

 

His most instructive chapters are on the hugely influential 20th-century Egyptian scholar, Sayyid Qutb, a kind of anti-materialist Muslim Marx, if that can be imagined, and equally prolific. The fact that Qutb was a brilliant, soulful and occasionally subtle thinker did not prevent him becoming the ideological mentor of terrorism and the cult of death. Like bin Laden and his associates, Qutb liked to mock Jews and Westerners for their desire to live.

 

The reason the Christian West was, for him, an abomination lay in the divorce between its material and spiritual life. This schizoid mentality, as the secularisation of Turkey by Ataturk had shown, threatened to contaminate the Muslim faith. Jihad - once a defensive strategy to preserve Islam - became for Qutb a struggle against infidels everywhere. All this proved too much for Colonel Nasser, who hanged him.

 

But the core of his teaching is very much alive, and as terrorism goes global the 34 tomes of his commentary on the Koran are currently being re-published in many languages. This is not comforting news, and Berman is fully aware that we would prefer to think about something else. To the bon bourgeois liberal, whose heart is replete with warm sentiments and whose mind is on his dinner, the notion of apocalyptic, death-obsessed mass movements sounds somewhat overdone.

 

And if the victims of such doctrines to date have been largely Third World peoples, why worry? For two decades the West has averted its eyes while Muslim despots and fanatics have exterminated millions: in the Lebanon, in the Iran-Iraq war, in Sudan, in Algeria, in Afghanistan, in Iraq. Now the killings are coming closer, whether on September 11 or in terrorism's ultimate refinement - suicide bombings where teenage "martyrs" are psyched to slaughter Jews even younger than themselves. Why wait till the infidel is older?

 

The reaction of the democracies, Berman suggests, was to an extent natural. Violence mesmerises, the sinister excites, and - as with the Nazis and Communists - there is a reluctance to believe that whole societies have succumbed to pathological political tendencies.

 

Nervous of domestic Muslim opinion, the rationalist West wants to believe that radical Islam is not definitively lost to reason. There has to be an explanation for its fanaticism and delusions, and it can only be America. Noam Chomsky and his fellow-travellers are ultimately more concerned with American guilt than with the fate of the Palestinians, the Afghans, the Iraqis, or other Middle Eastern peoples whose misery and oppression spring wholly or in part from their own failed cultures. And of course those who commit suicide and murder get high marks for sincerity from the likes of Chomsky.

 

Though no admirer of Sharon, Berman questions the view that a shade more flexibility by the Israelis could spare us the inconvenience of a campaign of mass slaughter and destruction whose ideological origins antedate a Jewish state. Meanwhile (he could have added) our old friend Moral Equivalence has made a post-Cold War comeback: they have their fundamentalism, it is fashionable to say, we have ours. Switch on the television and you will hear someone influential suggesting that a bit of religiosity in the White House or Number 10 represents the same threat to the world as the semi-crazed believers in a death-obsessed culture.

 

Our American Social Democratic author admires the social achievements of Europe, but can sound as exasperated at its shirking of responsibility as Donald Rumsfeld. Just as the cosy societies of neutrals like the Swedes or the Swiss were underwritten by those who struggled against Hitler, he suggests, so pacifist Germans and posturing Frenchmen would prefer to let the US take the heat and the flak. Since this book was written, in Iraq so it has come to pass.

 

Paul Berman gives Bush his due on leadership but argues that the battle cannot be won by conservatives alone. If the West is to defend itself, and democratic progress in the Middle East is to be more than a pipe dream, socialists, trade unions and intellectuals must take a principled stand against Muslim radicalism, as some did against Communism in the Cold War. Reading this book, with its echoes of Koestler and Camus - both truth-tellers about totalitarian terror - would be a good beginning.

 

George Walden's books include 'The New Elites' (Penguin).

<http://www.arts.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main....5/04/bomain.html>;

Proffered without editorializations…

David M Gordon

(BTW: Am I the only person around here? ;-)


I loathe America, and what it has done to the rest of the world
By Margaret Drabble
<http://www.opinion.telegraph.co.uk/opinion...8/ixopinion.html>;
(Filed: 08/05/2003)

I knew that the wave of anti-Americanism that would swell up after the Iraq war would make me feel ill. And it has. It has made me much, much more ill than I had expected.

My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world.

I can hardly bear to see the faces of Bush and Rumsfeld, or to watch their posturing body language, or to hear their self-satisfied and incoherent platitudes. The liberal press here has done its best to make them appear ridiculous, but these two men are not funny.

I was tipped into uncontainable rage by a report on Channel 4 News about "friendly fire", which included footage of what must have been one of the most horrific bombardments ever filmed. But what struck home hardest was the subsequent image, of a row of American warplanes, with grinning cartoon faces painted on their noses. Cartoon faces, with big sharp teeth.

It is grotesque. It is hideous. This great and powerful nation bombs foreign cities and the people in those cities from Disneyland cartoon planes out of comic strips. This is simply not possible. And yet, there they were.

Others have written eloquently about the euphemistic and affectionate names that the Americans give to their weapons of mass destruction: Big Boy, Little Boy, Daisy Cutter, and so forth.

We are accustomed to these sobriquets; to phrases such as "collateral damage" and "friendly fire" and "pre-emptive strikes". We have almost ceased to notice when suicide bombers are described as "cowards". The abuse of language is part of warfare. Long ago, Voltaire told us that we invent words to conceal truths. More recently, Orwell pointed out to us the dangers of Newspeak.

But there was something about those playfully grinning warplane faces that went beyond deception and distortion into the land of madness. A nation that can allow those faces to be painted as an image on its national aeroplanes has regressed into unimaginable irresponsibility. A nation that can paint those faces on death machines must be insane.

There, I have said it. I have tried to control my anti-Americanism, remembering the many Americans that I know and respect, but I can't keep it down any longer. I detest Disneyfication, I detest Coca-Cola, I detest burgers, I detest sentimental and violent Hollywood movies that tell lies about history.

I detest American imperialism, American infantilism, and American triumphalism about victories it didn't even win.

On April 29, 2000, I switched on CNN in my hotel room and, by chance, saw an item designed to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam war. The camera showed us a street scene in which a shabby elderly Vietnamese man was seen speaking English and bartering in dollars in a city that I took to be Ho Chi Minh City, still familiarly known in America by its old French colonial name of Saigon.

"The language of Shakespeare," the commentator intoned, "has conquered Vietnam." I did not note down the dialogue, though I can vouch for that sentence about the language of Shakespeare. But the word "dollar" was certainly repeated several times, and the implications of what the camera showed were clear enough.

The elderly Vietnamese man was impoverished, and he wanted hard currency. The Vietnamese had won the war, but had lost the peace.

Just leave Shakespeare and Shakespeare's homeland out of this squalid bit of revisionism, I thought at the time. Little did I then think that now, three years on, Shakespeare's country would have been dragged by our leader into this illegal, unjustifiable, aggressive war. We are all contaminated by it. Not in my name, I want to keep repeating, though I don't suppose anybody will listen.

America uses the word "democracy" as its battle cry, and its nervous soldiers gun down Iraqi civilians when they try to hold street demonstrations to protest against the invasion of their country. So much for democracy. (At least the British Army is better trained.)

America is one of the few countries in the world that executes minors. Well, it doesn't really execute them - it just keeps them in jail for years and years until they are old enough to execute, and then it executes them. It administers drugs to mentally disturbed prisoners on Death Row until they are back in their right mind, and then it executes them, too.

They call this justice and the rule of law. America is holding more than 600 people in detention in Guantánamo Bay, indefinitely, and it may well hold them there for ever. Guantánamo Bay has become the Bastille of America. They call this serving the cause of democracy and freedom.

I keep writing to Jack Straw about the so-called "illegal combatants", including minors, who are detained there without charge or trial or access to lawyers, and I shall go on writing to him and his successors until something happens. This one-way correspondence may last my lifetime. I suppose the minors won't be minors for long, although the youngest of them is only 13, so in time I shall have to drop that part of my objection, but I shall continue to protest.

A great democratic nation cannot behave in this manner. But it does. I keep remembering those words from Nineteen Eighty-Four, on the dynamics of history at the end of history, when O'Brien tells Winston: "Always there will be the intoxication of power… Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever."

We have seen enough boots in the past few months to last us a lifetime. Iraqi boots, American boots, British boots. Enough of boots.

I hate feeling this hatred. I have to keep reminding myself that if Bush hadn't been (so narrowly) elected, we wouldn't be here, and none of this would have happened. There is another America. Long live the other America, and may this one pass away soon.

The U.S. Strategy for the Middle East
By R. James Woolsey

Former CIA director R. James Woolsey has never been shy to voice his support for the invasion of Iraq. He is also prepared to admit to prior mistakes in the U.S. dealings with the Middle East. Yet, as far as its democratization is concerned, Mr. Woolsey is convinced that the region has a reasonable chance. In this interview, Mr. Woolsey outlines his views.


Why has democracy advanced around the world during the last century?

"This move in the last eight decades from a handful of democracies to over 60 percent of the world’s governments being democracies happened as a result primarily of these three world wars — two hot and one cold."



What is the political situation in the Middle East today?

"The Middle East, outside Israel and Turkey, consists of two types of governments, pathological predators — and vulnerable autocracies."



Why do democracy and terrorism not go together?

"Bin Laden’s definition of democracy is this: Let’s have one vote once — and then he and God rule."



How do you reply to people who say Islam is inherently undemocratic?

"The majority of the world’s Muslims live in democracies, Indonesia, Bangladesh, India (which has the second-largest Muslim population in the world), Turkey, Mali."



How do you assess the situation for the ruling conservatives in Iran?

"If they will be honest at all with themselves, they should feel very much like the inhabitants of the Kremlin around 1988 — or Versailles around 1788."



Why is that?

"They’ve lost the students, they’ve lost the women, they’ve lost the brave reformers being tortured in prison — and one by one they are losing the grand ayatollahs."



Why did the United States in the past fail to promote better governance in the Middle East?

"We have regarded the bulk of the oil-producing countries in the Middle East for many years as our filling station — not as places where there are people whom we must help move toward decent government."



What is the future of democracy in the Middle East?

"Moving toward democracy in the Middle East will not all be done by force of arms. Much of it we hope will be done by influence of one kind or another, the way the Cold War was.”



Is al Qaeda just a recent phenomenon?

"Al Qaeda has been at war with us for the better part of a decade. What’s new is that we finally noticed."



Does it make sense to punish governments for the support for al Qaeda?

"Al Qaeda is too rich to be sponsored by anybody. In the two states where they have been present — both poor states, Sudan and Afghanistan — if anything, you had terrorist sponsored states, not state-sponsored terrorism."



Did the United States bring terrorist attacks on to itself by betting on the wrong people?

"We backed the Afghan Mujahadeen in Washington, but I don’t think we should apologize for that at all, just because some of the Mujahadeen went on and became Taliban. We were right to help the Soviets in WW II — we needed them against Hitler. People don’t always stay on your side once you help them."



Why did some governments to oppose the invasion of Iraq?

"Appeasement is popular. It's very popular to kick the can down the road — and promise people that something is going to work out, and that they don't have to make hard choices.”



In retrospect, how do you view the invasion of Iraq?

"In a sense, we're dealing with Saddam via arms control. The arms controllers are called the 3rd Infantry Division, the 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne, the First Marines."



What should the Europeans that were not part of the coalition do now?

Be more helpful on the road to democracy next time.



Does the democratization of Germany and Japan after 1945 provide an example for Iraq?

The Germans couldn't manage democracy, it was said. The same was said of the Japanese. These days, whether you're in Berlin or Tokyo, you get the sense that these nations have figured it out.



What if the end result of all this is the emergence of a radical Shiite Republic of Iraq?

It won’t be — if we help the vast majority of Shiites and the Iraqis defeat the Iranian, Syrian and Wahhabi-sponsored terrorists.



And finally, what holds the United States together as a multiracial nation?

"We are not a race, we are not a religion, we are not even really a single culture — we are children of Madison’s Constitution and his Bill of Rights. It is the limit on anyone getting too much power that is our Constitution’s great function — and our greatest asset."

Edited by author 05-06-2003 12:58 PM
I've got one simple policy recommendation: that it is not the United States' job to get involved in overseas adventures where US security is not at stake, and indeed the current Middle Eastern threat to US national security arises organically from previous involvement there. Announcing the withdrawl of troops from Saudi Arabia (to Qatar) was badly timed, against the background of Al Qaida demands -- but more importantly, it neglects the key fact that it's US involvement in the Middle East. Withdrawl to Qatar is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The real solution is to get the hell out of the Middle East -- not just in terms of troops, but economically and politically. Develop alternative sources of energy. The Israelis have more than enough nukes to defend themselves. This is one time when isolationism would be a good policy.

I don't see any way that the middle east isn't going to hell in a hand-basket for the short to medium term. I hope I'm wrong, but I think the occupation of Iraq is already shaping up to be a disaster, and any continued US presence in the middle east is only going to exacerbate the very problem it's supposedly there to deal with.

As this is utterly trivial, I chose to respond separately to your point/question: "(and there's an interesting slip -- whatever happened to diplomatic policy? I wasn't aware it was the military's job to have a policy!)"

This is perfectly silly, as any fule kno. One's military policy is the policy one's country's military should fulfill. Yes, it is set by civilians. This isn't news, nor much of a "gotcha!" The US presently has several large military bases in Saudi Arabia, with many troops, and the government has now announced its intentions to withdraw most or all of those troops. This is a policy decided upon by the civilian government, as to what the military should do, and is therefore a "military policy." As you are familiar with from Usenet: HTH!

Thanks for responding, Charlie.

However, while I agree that being nice, supporting democracies and not threatening or encouraging or causing coups, and so on, are nice long-term stances, I don't find your response terribly helpful, given our mutual lack of access to a time-travel machine.

I can accept that you have no useful short-term policy recommendations, but this does also tend to suggest some possible flaw in your analysis. Surely when one knows a policy is wrong, one has some clues as to what is less wrong, and more correct?

There are some obvious policy choices one might leap to from your analysis that don't seem useful: all Americans promptly kill ourselves; all Americans promptly apply for Swedish citizenship; all Americans promptly convert to Wahabi Islam; all Americans promptly form a proper Socialist party and devote our time to empowering the world with our wealth (I expect that that last might come closest to seeming sensible to you); all Americans henceforth devote our time to apologizing to the world and change the Constitution so that George Galloway can become President. Others abound, equally usefully.

I dunno. Since you don't have useful policy advice, it's not as useful to consider your criticism as it would be if you had some, even vague, recommendations as to what should be done differently. Regardless, as you are a brilliant and fine fellow, I will continue to study your criticism in any case. But if you could actually focus on what, specifically, we should *do*, this would be ever so much more useful to some of us, much as fulfilling that desire is likely not even a secondary goal of yours, to be sure.

We're gearing up for another Presidential race. I would, myself, strongly prefer to see George Bush defeated, in most likely situations. I believe you share this view. But to accomplish this, we need a candidate with clearly better, specific, policies. I'd welcome your input on what those should be. Condemnation of George Bush, justified or not, doesn't suffice. One needs be for things, not just against things. Specific things, not vague things.

And since you are so utterly convinced -- it appears, and perhaps I have you wrong on this -- that your policy views are entirely, even heatedly, correct, it does seem a bit odd to me that you can't make any specific recommendations as to, say, even such a lesser question as to whether US troops should pull out of Saudi Arabia (I say "yes, forthwith, indeed!" and have no hesitation or doubt; whenceforth comes yours?).

Tis a puzzlement.

Charlie S. writes: "You raise a broader question."

No, he asked a very specific one: What do you suggest our policy toward Saudi Arabia be?

You're criticizing us for pulling out our troops, as if it is an appeasement of Al Qaeda. And yet, somehow I get the feeling you don't think U.S. troops on Saudi soil is a good idea.

Which is it? If you're prepared to criticize us for being there in the first place and for pulling out, it's a "heads I win/tails you lose" situation.

Can you please answer Gary's actual question?

Gary: I'm not talking about US military policy towards Saudi Arabia (and there's an interesting slip -- whatever happened to diplomatic policy? I wasn't aware it was the military's job to have a policy!), but about the current US occupation of Iraq. If I was going to be uncharitable I'd say, "you've made your bed: now sleep in it".

However.

You raise a broader question. The real issue, as I see it, is that US foreign policy has been completely fucked for a very long time indeed, and especially in the middle east since about 1920 or so. The reason it's fucked is that it is inconsistent in application and direction, and the reason for the inconsistency is that back when the US constitution was being drafted the framers didn't think in terms of US foreign policy as being significant on the world stage and make any provisions for ensuring consistency, minimizing disruption, etc.

How to un-fuck it? The long-term answer is to play nice and demonstrate to the rest of the world that the US won't back coups against democratically elected governments for economic reasons or because the people elected the 'wrong' party, that human rights are seen as important, that US foreign policy isn't a captive of narrow mercantilist interests, and so on. Unfortunately it takes a generation for that message to sink in, just as it took fifty years for the opposite message to become so strongly established.

I don't have a short-term answer other than, "cutting wages and shooting at crowds of unarmed protestors in countries you find yourself occupying didn't work very well for the British Empire, either" (c.f. Amritsar Massacre).

This war has been carped about ad infinitum ad nauseum by too many, including me. (I never saw the linkage between UBL and Iraq; the White House engaged in poor advance PR.) Nonetheless, if current US policy has become to 'speak softly but carry a big stick'-- and to use it... then who, what, where, when, and how?

Is the policy the neocons brandish itself misguided? What should be done instead? Should the US be a *force* for good? Should the US remain engaged in and with the world? (There is always present our legendary preference for isolationism.) We are kin, and yet there sometimes seems a world of difference between our perspectives. Is it mere cultural differences, values? Perceptions at the level of the individual? Too many, too easily, conflate democracy and capitalism, as if they are the same thing; they are not.

My intent is neither to position myself as an apologist for White House policy nor to spark the embers of a libertarian dialectic. I genuinely appreciate the sentiments and informed perspectives you offer. I sometimes feel, however, that you lead with your heart. Nothing wrong with that! :-)

Best wishes,
David

Charlie? What would you suggest US military policy towards Saudi Arabia should be? Are you sincerely suggesting that pulling out is a bad thing? If so, why? If not, why do you appear to be saying so? Either way, why should anyone care how good or bad Osama bin Laden might feel about it?

What should they expect? After a corporate takeover, the existing staff is always laid off and the work outsourced to cheaper labor. That's Capitalism and Democracy at work.

Demonstrations are not a good thing if they result in soldiers with no training in crowd control firing on crowds with machine guns.

Talking about freedom and democracy while cutting wages by 50% and machine-gunning demonstrators sends a very explicit message ...

<<"So we should be surprised they're out on the streets demonstrating?">>

Many people make the error of confusing matters. To keep it straight, whether a person agrees or disagrees with the war in Iraq, we might ALL agree that the demonstrations you point out could not have happened mere weeks ago. This does point to some change, some measure of progress. The ends rarely, if ever, justify the means, but demonstrations are a GOOD thing.

David

Rokke was featured on Flashpoints a couple weeks ago. Funny that he was ordered to analyze the environmental and health effects of DU in the '91 gulf war, and then the military denied the detrimental health problems that it caused. A lot of people are seriously ill over this.Listen to it here. [real audio]. The guy is a very committed official.

On the subject of the Saddam Statue story, it was an Armoured Recovery Vehicle. The odd thing is that it was never suggested on any of the reports that I saw that the statue was pulled down by anyone else. The Iraqis had tried pulling the fucker down with a rope but it was too big. Even the ARV looked like it had its work cut out.

On the subject of the reaction of the bystanders I would suggest that there is no shortage of people in Iraq who would dance for joy without the threat of armed troops standing by. Just because the war was immoral and wrong doesn't mean that it can't have produce some positive results.

Small addition to the Saddam Statue story.

Strictly, it wasn't a tank, it looked like an Armoured Recovery Vehicle. Which has all the kit to do the pulling, and people who know how to use it. For instance, photos show that they were using a snatch block, which means that the vehicle definitely carried a winch.

What makes that interesting is that it isn't a vehicle you'd expect to see leading the way through a city, though it is something you'd want to have handy. But every tank carries a tow-rope; an ARV is on the way to being a mobile workshop.

DU emits less alpha radiation then natural uranium ore, and there have been a lot of studies of miners and other people who work with uranium that indicate the risk of cancer and other problems does not increase significantly for them. DU may be bad for people, but most scientists seem to think that if it is, it's a lot more likely to be due to its *chemical* toxicity than to its radioactivity.

Re DU. It's safe enough in big lumps, but wait til you get sub-micron particles lodged in your body, emitting alpha radiation into living tissue. Bad shit ensues. And when DU hits something - a tree will do - it deflagrates into, yes, you've guessed it, sub-micron particles.

A couple of years ago I met a guy called Doug Rokke, a conbat medic who was in charge of the clean-up team for the US army in 1991. The main job that his unit carried out was removing 'friendly fire' wrecks from Kuwait and Iraq: lots of DU armour was breached in this way. Much of his team is now dead or ill. He then got a contract from the Pentagon to write the book on DU's environmental impact.

Which was then immediately classified.

See:
http://sftimes.editthispage.com/stories/storyReader$61

States, eh? Fuck em.

He can leave the country easily enough - there's no need for a passport to go between the UK and the Irish Republic, and from there he can go freely to practically everywhere in the EU and the most he'll be asked for is photo ID (and I can't see him giving up his driving licence any time soon!). He can come back the same way, too. There are no proper borders between Sweden and Norway either.

Not being British will come soon enough if Labour go ahead with their plan to experiment on Scotland first with these stupid ID cards, or if they've already pissed off the electorate enough that the Scottish government post-May 1st is an SNP/LibDem coalition.

I think Iain has done the right thing. I've disagreed with many things that British governments have done over the years but this time I actually feel ashamed to be British.

Iain Banks writes eloquently about the difference between supporting our troops and wishing them in harm's way; but his form of active anti-war protest baffles me. How does destroying his passport help? How does it make him any less British? Now he can't leave the country; what message does he think that conveys?

Edited by author 03-25-2003 02:13 AM
I must say, I was ready to throw stuff at the TV when (American) anchors started going on about how showing images of the American POWs was against the Geneva convention. Then I did a little digging and found out that it was showing pictures of them being questioned/interrogated that was the issue, which meant that the reporters—and Rumsfeld and Gen. Franks—thought it would be easier to drum up more support if they didn't have to explain the finer points and instead just kept shouting "Iraqis bad!"

Then, a few hours later, I saw footage of an Iraqi POW face down in the dirt, hands bound, with a gun pressed against his head. The military has to okay the shots taken by embedded reporters. These images, it turns out (surprise surprise) are against the exact same clause. Of course, the US under shrub has made a habit of pulling out of international treaties (war crimes tribunal, Kyoto), and flat out ignoring others (rules of war), when it suits them, so how they manage to get into such a self-righteous snit when somebody else breaks one is beyond me. About the only thing that comes to mind is the term doublethink.

I also find it rather rich that Rumsfield is growling about war crimes and demanding that the Iraqis treat captured combatants in accordance with the Geneva conventions -- when Rumsfield himself gloated publicly about not needing to do that back when captured Taliban were first being shipped to camp X-Ray.

What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. More to the point -- if the other guys know you're going to play dirty, they've got no motivation to play clean.

I'm not sure what people expected the Iraqi foces to do vis-a-vi fake surrenders, running around in civilian clothes, generally fighting a low down dirty guerilla war.

It wouldn't be the first time a minor power has managed to bloody the nose of a superpower through such tactics. I'm almost shocked that people are surprised.

Ah, well, I'll settle for reading _Festival of Fools_ when it gets here.

American Science Fiction appears to be in a giant rut. All the exciting new authors seem to be non-Americans, with a great concentration in the U.K. It must be the beer.

Oops, I posted about SF in the Iraq Invasion topic. Uh... there were several incidents today where Iraqi soldiers pretended to surrender and then opened fire with small arms or artillery. That is double-plus-ungood for all kinds of reasons. Whew, on topic.

Last time I spoke to him he was taking some time off, David. Face it: authors run out of steam if they're trying to produce a book a year, on a treadmill. If he needs to recharge his creative batteries, I can grit my teeth and wait.

(I'm in the middle of reading proofs of some of my own stuff, written years ago, and am getting alarmed at how ideas I thought were new to me were actually implicit in the earlier work. The do-something-new urge demands some down time if you're going to do it right ...)

Does this mean Banks will travel less and thus have more time for writing? One book every two years is not enough.

Every cloud has a silver lining, I guess.

Charlie: Depends on which variant of Chobham armour (though the exact composition of most of them is still secret.) A high-density layer is important, but it often doesn't have to be maximally dense -- and the weight penalty is often extreme.

The magic of the laminate armors is really just two layers -- a "gel" layer that distorts (Polyethylene is a common choice) and a very hard surface layer. The round enters the PE, which shifts, twisting the roung, very slightly, off axis -- which makes it bounce off the very hard reflection layer. Other layers do other things -- disturb HEAT explosive jets, and just take punishment. But the Chobham armor's magic is that it was the first armor that culd reliably stop KE penetrators.

DU wouldn't work well at all as the reflection layer. It's dense, but it's nowhere near hard. The canonical reflector is tungsten carbide, which is both very dense and very hard, but needs to be backed by something, since it's very, very brittle.

And, once again. If the Challenger II's armour has DU in it's armor makeup, it's very unlikely to see eviromental exposure, so long as anoterh Challenger or M1A1/A2 takes a shot at it.

Any DU brought into the Iraqi enviroment is far more like to be fired into (well, through) Iraqi tanks.

Then again, compared to many substances the military uses on a regular basis, DU is pretty safe stuff. Don't eat it, of course -- but it's more dangerous as a heavy metal than an ionization source.

Erik: there's also a not-inconsiderable number of Challenger-II's in the area (although HMG are being a bit close-lipped about the absolute numbers it's the biggest UK army deployment since Suez in 1956, if not bigger). And they use Chobham armour which, IIRC, is DU/steel/polymer.

David: I'd thought the DU/Steel/Polymer armor was only in the M1E1, and was meant for a later mark of the M1 MBT. I was wrong, the M1A1 and A2 carry it in some spots.

But the chances of getting exposed to DU from the tank itself is incredibly minimal, esp. give the state of Iraqi anti-take munitions. They didn't do well at all in 1991, and they haven't gotten any newer MBTs to fight with. If anything kills an M1A1 and it's crew, it'll be fired by the US or UK forces.

As a side note, here's the incredibly impressive official state department list of coalition of the willing: Afghanistan, Albania, Australia, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Japan (post-conflict), South Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan.

I note that many of these countries, including Spain, have categorically refused to send troops.

It's interesting to compare/contrast with the list of colaition members who sent at least token military forces in 19913.

Edited by author 03-18-2003 11:11 PM
Actually, Charlie, Canada has said that we will take part in the rebuilding/aftermath, though we will not send troops for the conflict and the government doesn't support the war, as it doesn't have UN approval. Over the last few days, the minister of defense has said that the war will result in a vastly increased risk of terrorism in the West, and when asked why Bush & co. hadn't been informed in advance of the just-stated official Canadian government position he said, "I think their ambassador is capable of watching Canadian television."

As a side note, here's the incredibly impressive official state department list of coalition of the willing: Afghanistan, Albania, Australia, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Japan (post-conflict), South Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan.

Should I feel guilty that I hadn't heard of Eritrea until now? (south shore of the Red Sea, west of Sudan, north of, and part of until '91, Ethiopia. If I can thank Shrub for nothing else, at least I now know a bit about Eritrea.)

<img src="http://www.globeandmail.com/RTGAM_Archive/...ai0318/318BUSHo.jpg"/>

I didn't say "DU Rounds", I said "DU".

The armor on M1 tanks is depleted uranium encased in steel.

M1 tanks can certainly not use DU rounds. They have many munitions for the M1A1 120mm main gun, including HEAT (High Explosive, Anti-Tank) and MPAT rounds (Multi-Purpose Anti-Tank.) There are also designs for sabot rounds that don't used DU as the penetrator (Tungsten Carbide is a common choice), but the US doesn't carry those in the inventory. However, the Germans do, and the M1A1 and M1A2 use the M256 120mm smoothbore cannon, which is identical to the 120mm smoothbore on the German Leopard II MBT.

How identical? We buy the gun from the Germans. We buy lots of munitions from Germany and France, as a matter of fact. Guess we'll call them Freedom Bombs.

Isn't "Pentagon confirms use of DU!" along the lines of "Pentagon confirms use of artillery!"? M1 tanks use DU. They can't not use DU, so this is a non-story.

As to Charlie's post... it would be wonderful if there was a coup but I very much doubt anything significant is happening tonight. Actually, midnight Baghdad is in like 2 hours... I can't imagine something will happen this quickly.

Of course, that may be why I'm posting opinions to the internet instead of working in the Pentagon or Langley.

Pentagon confirms use of DU:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/2860759.stm

"They want it to go away because we kicked the crap out of them"

Edited by author 03-18-2003 07:18 AM
Robin Cook's resignation speech if you missed it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/cta/events03...l/hoc/cook17mar.ram (RealMedia) or http://www.pfir.org/cook-resigns.mp3 (MP3) or even in plain text at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2859431.stm

It strongly recommend having a listen. This is the first time I've seen a speech in the House of Commons circulated on the Internet on mailling lists and websites.

"'We certainly don't accept our policies are daft, damaging and demoralising,' a spokesman said."

I'm glad they cleared that up.

Interesting times in Westminster, sure. But what about the impact in
Scotland? Holyrood elections coming up on 1st May. I wrote a bit about
this last week, and would be interested to hear what you think:
http://shamrockshire.n3.net/2003/02/200302...e_Scottish_Question

"it's the biggest rebellion by a ruling party's back bench MPs since, well, ever."

1940, I believe ... is there a Leo Amery in the Labour Party?

I case you're interested, Nigel Griffiths (Edinburgh South) voted against the amendment. I'm disappointed, but not surprised.

(I tried to find voting records on the Parliament.uk web site, but no luck. Mr. Griffiths was very prompt with his reply to my email, though.)

David: as an afternote, it's the biggest rebellion by a ruling party's back bench MPs since, well, ever. And it happened after Jack Straw (foreign secretary) did a back-pedaling speech promising two more votes before anyone started talking about dropping bombs.

I suspect Blair will be able to hold on if Bush delivers a short, victorious war and Blair can point to minimal civilian casualties and some sort of improvements in Iraq, saying "we did it for their own good". But if things go wrong -- if Bush goes in without a UN resolution, for instance, and then there's a friendly fire incident, or a humanitarian disaster -- the current mood of parliament will probably have his head.

As it is, it looks like he'd have lost the vote without the support of most of the Conservative party. That, despite having the second-largest majority in parliament for a century! (And the conservatives are tearing their guts out -- some of their heavyweight former ministers, former members of Thatcher's cabinet, stood up and voted with the labour rebels, accusing their own leadership of being full of shit.)

Interesting times in Westminster ...

You may be right, Charlie, but it's worth noting that there was quite a lot of unrest in the United States before the first Gulf War. Once the shooting started it became 100% GRADE A USDA prime red-white-and-blue fever. It will likely be that way again in these parts.

But the UK could certainly possibly go the other direction as you say. It's a different culture.

Bush is giving a speech right now talking about the post-Saddam government. I don't know how he can keep a straight face when he says he hasn't decided on war yet. The guy is standing there talking about what he's going to do after Saddam is gone! But he hasn't decided yet. Nope nope nope.

-David

Jesse: "I think you're wrong there, according to the numbers posted earlier the "shock and awe" plan called for about 400 tons of explosives being dropped, whereas Hiroshima was about 10,000 - 15,000 tons, and about 4,000 tons of explosives were dropped on Dresden during the first night of a week's worth of firebombing."

Well, I was wrong. I read the prediction in a real print source; can't find it now, but even paper sources can be wrong... However, I crunched the #'s, and a standard cruise missile has a 1000 lb. warhead, and laser-guided bombs often run up to and beyond 3000 lb. So, that's 1,500 - 4,500 tons. Not Hiroshima numbers, though it could get close to Dresden; but it's still an awful lot of firepower, especially on Baghdad's infrastructure since power stations and major roads are targets (etc., etc.).

Jesse: "Well, I'm not a fan of Bush politically but for me that can't be a deciding factor in terms of whether to support the war or not. If war is deemed necessary, should we say "hold it off until there's a democratic president in office?""

Clinton had his share of foreign policy screw ups, as well as his share of lies, and I have never deified him the way many hawks suggest anti-war people do when the man in the office comes up, but Bush's modus operandi has been to lie every time he speaks regarding the coming war (ex. one of the "bio-weapons factories" in the spysat photos was investigated by the inspectors, and aside from the fact that they found no traces of anything insidious, the building had no access to running water). However, I would argue that whether or not the president is trustworthy is of primary importance, since if he does not follow through on any plan that might help the Iraqi people, the war will be a failure by even the standards you propose. If he does not make Iraq in particular, and the Middle East in general, a better place, those who die will die for no (so called) purpose.

And even if his intentions are genuine, the possibilities to fuck up are truly frightening, and when Bush calls allies idiots and transparently bribes countries on the fence, and throws North Korea into the axis of evil and tells them, "You're next," I refuse to believe he is capable of the finesse necessary to deal with the Balkan-like powder-keg that the region is. With the Saudi regime tottering and the Iranians looking for an excuse to crack down in a fundamentalist manner and Egypt close to open rebellion and Pakistan led by a regime that was in the US' bad books pre-9/11 and is looking less bought by the day, the region is in a bad way. And the plan quoted by the Washington Post suggested that a US civilian leader will be put in charge. Baghdad is one of the most historically important cities in Islam; this will not play well with the fundamentalists. This will play into the hands of terrorists (think Americans in Saudi Arabia and OBLs reasons). If this plan is followed through on, though it may make life better for some or even many Iraqis in the short-term, this will be another short-sighted breeds-resentment kind of thing. There is a very real possibility of guerrilla warfare if the Americans stay too long, and even if they don't, having an American control Baghdad and Iraq will make lots of little OBLs. That means that terrorism on American soil in the future is more, not less, likely.

While some Iraqis will be better off short-term, to me the deaths through war, and likely famine and disease, combined with further destabilization in the region, more fodder for terrorists, and all the deaths the long-term problems will cause, make this a case where I don't even have to worry about wondering whether some people "over there" would be better off if we just killed a few others.

Jesse: "[T]he possibility of Saddam getting nukes does scare me."

If that scares you: Russia lost 80 suitcase nukes over a year ago. They still haven't found them. And they keep surplus warheads in sheds (not some kind of fancy military shed—cheep aluminum and plywood kind of sheds). These sheds are often guarded by little more than a fence and a guard in a gatepost. Many of these sheds are also in the -stans, where they are not protected by even a token Russian soldier or two. Russian scientists who previously worked on chemical/biological/nuclear weapons are now unemployed and available to the highest bidder.

The US government had committed millions to help Russia deal with disposing their surplus nukes and similar problems. Bush has withdrawn the funding. That's how much the cowboy cares about WMDs.

Gary: you're wrong. U238 has a half-life of 4.5 billion years -- long, but not insignificant. (In contrast, almost all lead isotopes worth talking about have half lives that make mere gigayears look like an eyeblink.) You won't pick up a radiation dose from U238 that you'll notice directly, in the form of radiation burns or radiation sickness -- but it's an alpha emitter (clue: alpha particles are strongly absorbed in body tissues -- and they cause roughly ten times as much ionization damage as a beta emission). Furthermore, the decay chain from U238 leads to Thorium 234, which decays via beta and gamma release release (also likely to be absorbed within the body) over a half life of 24.1 days to Protactinium 234, another beta/gamma emitter, before a temporarily stable isotope, Uranium 234 (half-life: 245,000 years) is reached.

What this means is that yes, each U238 is on average pretty stable, but each U238 nucleus that decays releases one alpha, two beta, and two gamma emissions within an average of about 24 days. Which is horrendously worse than an isotope that just emits a gamma or a beta before dropping down the decay chain to something stable. The stuff has got a long half-life, sure, but the tissue damage resulting from a nucleus decaying within the body is more than an order of magnitude greater than you'd expect by naively looking at the half-life.

(Did I tell you that back during my pharmacist days I studied nuclear medicine and worked on occasion with radiopharmaceuticals?)

But more to the point: Pilger's speculation about U238 is interesting but not really the most important point -- that honour goes to something he let slip without understanding its significance, because he's not a medic. What's not in question here is the epidemiological picture. If prior to a datum point a region has a normal cancer profile and then suddenly a huge cancer cluster appears, then it's reasonable to suppose that the two events are connected. Something happened around the gulf war that doubled or tripled the cancer rate in the region. We have a correlation. Finding the cause is harder, but we know when it happened, and that's actually enough to know the general cause: Gulf War 1.0.

You may find it fun to look at the papers here: http://www.ccnr.org/index_uranium.html

"The post-Saddam situation is currently shaping up to look like a military dictatorship, selling the Kurds down the river to Turkey in return for oil."

This is uncanny prescience. Perhaps it will turn out that way. I don't know. What I know is that I don't for one second believe the propaganda that asserts this as nearly a sure thing any more than I believe the propaganda that asserts that a lovely democracy will assuredly spring into being in post-war Iraq.

People basing their statements on these sorts of declarations are swallowing assumptions and propaganda, either way. This says more about predisposition than about what will actually happen. (I also keep well in mind that the Taliban is still in power, since no foreign invader can possibly prevail in Afghanistan, as we were well informed only a few months ago, just as we were well informed that there was "no proof" that Osama bin Laden had any "involvement" in September 11th.)

""Most of my own family now have cancer, and we have no history of the disease. We don't know the precise source of the contamination, because we are not allowed to get the equipment to conduct a proper survey, or even test the excess level of radiation in our bodies. We strongly suspect depleted uranium, which was used by the Americans and British in the Gulf War right across the southern battlefields."

Charlie, I don't want to further arouse your anger on this issue, but doesn't the above seem rather unlikely, given that depleted uranium is less radioactive than normal, comparatively harmless-in-a-radioactive-sense U238? It is, after all, what is left over when you deplete it of more active isotope. I'll gladly give cites, if you like, though I've blogged on this before.

One reads this sort of Scare Stuff about DU all the time, and it's always remarkably nonsensical, since it talks about the "dangers of its radioactivity." Rather than the fact that it is, of course, a toxic chemical, just as lead is toxic chemically, but about an equivalent radioactive threat as lead.

What the heck does DU have to do with Hiroshima?

This is typical accuracy for John Pilger, whom I take you regard as a credible source. I ask you, have you looked into the details of the alleged terrible radiation effects of depleted uranium?

Noel Chomyn:
"Sorry if that came off as mean spirited, but earlier I wasn't arguing the "ridiculously precise" estimates, I was arguing that, with the state of the Iraqi infrastructure, a humanitarian tragedy is almost inevitable if the US goes the "shock and awe" route."

Well, when I made my point about not trusting sources that give over-precise estimates, I was responding to a CBC article you posted which did give some pretty precise predictions of the damage to infrastructure. See message #34 on this thread.

Noel Chomyn:
"The numbers weren't the thing, the fact that, even in best case scenarios, raining 3000 cruise missiles and guided bombs down on Baghdad over two days, more total firepower than the nukes dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki, is going to lead to much collateral damage, was."

I think you're wrong there, according to the numbers posted earlier the "shock and awe" plan called for about 400 tons of explosives being dropped, whereas Hiroshima was about 10,000 - 15,000 tons, and about 4,000 tons of explosives were dropped on Dresden during the first night of a week's worth of firebombing. Also, of course, there is the fact that the modern bombs would all be guided, hopefully towards sites that would minimize civilian casualties. I guess it depends what you define as "much" collateral damage, but my guess is that it would be light compared to any other past wars where cities were involved.

Jesse:
"If the plans [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...7949-2003Feb20.html ] were definite, would that affect your opinion about the war in any way?"

Noel Chomyn:
"It would sure make my feelings on war more conflicted. My problem is that Bush, Powell, and Rumsfeld have lied so often in their scramble to find any excuse to invade, that I refuse to take anything they say at face value. I'm arguing what you term worst-case scenarios re:rebuilding Iraq because the current American government's actions both in their rush to war in Iraq and previously in their mounting failure to properly rebuild Afghanistan have instilled in me deeply pessimistic feelings. I'm not willing to take the plan at face value in part because Bush keeps trotting out a new reason for war whenever the last one is revealed as a sham [ http://www.foreigncorrespondent.com/archive/case_dismissed.html ]. This hell-bent for war attitude makes me deeply suspicious that any apparent good intentions will survive when the next supposed justification gets trotted out, if indeed it is more than a sound-bite to play to skeptics. In short, talk is only talk, and I'll believe it when I see it."

Well, I'm not a fan of Bush politically but for me that can't be a deciding factor in terms of whether to support the war or not. If war is deemed necessary, should we say "hold it off until there's a democratic president in office?" And I don't think Bush is significantly more guilty of lying or propogandizing than any other politician, especially in the context of war plans.

Jesse:
"I just wish more on the anti-war side would acknowledge this possibility, and the general complexity of the situation, rather than blithely assuming that no one who really cares about the Iraqi people could possibly favor a war."

Noel Chomyn:
"Well, I for one don't believe I've ever argued that ousting Saddam, even perhaps by war, was incompatible with increased happiness for the Iraqi people. I even think it likely that, if a pro-US dictator is propped up, it will probably be better for the various tribal/ethnic groups that Saddam liked to kill. My problem is with, "We're bombing you for your own good," which I see as just about the worst hubris imaginable, as well as my distrust in the Bush government."

Fair enough.

Noel Chomyn:
"My problem is that even the "we're doing this for your own good" part of the argument is one that has been tacked on after the fact, at a time when bumbling foreign policy on Iraq has put the US into a corner where Bush and his advisors see no realistic option but to attack, fearing how Muslim fundamentalists, states antagonistic to the US, and OBL will react if they back down (I can just imagine the tape that Al-Jezera (sp?) would get in such a situation). My problem is that we are here because of a bunch of lying fools who are trying to justify their war after they have given themselves no choice but to go to war."

I agree that helping the Iraqi people is not, and never has been, the primary motive for the war. Still, to me the effects are more important than the motives, and anyway a lot of the rhetoric from the antiwar side about how they're opposed to the war because they care so much about the Iraqi people strikes me as equally disengenuous.

As for the primary stated motive for going to war, the fear of "WMD's", I'm divided on that one. I think the danger from biological and chemical weapons has been greatly overblown, everything I've read suggests these types of weapons just aren't that effective and wouldn't pose much of a thread even if Saddam had them...see this NYTimes editorial from last Sunday, for example:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/weekinreview/16EASTE.html

On the other hand, the possibility of Saddam getting nukes does scare me. Inspectors may not have turned up any smoking guns here, but there have been quite a lot of high-level defectors who claim that Saddam's nuclear program is underway again (see http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/21/opinion/21POLL.html ) and I'm more inclined to trust these people than to think they're lying. Perhaps there's a chance that Iraq will cooperate more with things like demands for private interviews with nuclear scientists, but I'm not optimistic, and at a certain point this issue alone may make war necessary, with the issue of freedom for the Iraqi people being a side-benefit.

Edited by author 02-23-2003 02:54 AM
Jesse: "Now you're just being mean-spirited. If you reread my earlier posts where I criticized exact estimates of the death toll, nowhere did I say the possibility of famine, cholera etc. was "irrelevant", I was just arguing that self-assured statements that the war will be this fantastic humanitarian tragedy based on ridiculously precise worst-case estimates are a sign that the speaker is motivated more by ideology than by a desire to fairly weigh the costs and benefits of a war."

Sorry if that came off as mean spirited, but earlier I wasn't arguing the "ridiculously precise" estimates, I was arguing that, with the state of the Iraqi infrastructure, a humanitarian tragedy is almost inevitable if the US goes the "shock and awe" route. The numbers weren't the thing, the fact that, even in best case scenarios, raining 3000 cruise missiles and guided bombs down on Baghdad over two days, more total firepower than the nukes dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki, is going to lead to much collateral damage, was.

Jesse: "If the plans [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...7949-2003Feb20.html ] were definite, would that affect your opinion about the war in any way?"

It would sure make my feelings on war more conflicted. My problem is that Bush, Powell, and Rumsfeld have lied so often in their scramble to find any excuse to invade, that I refuse to take anything they say at face value. I'm arguing what you term worst-case scenarios re:rebuilding Iraq because the current American government's actions both in their rush to war in Iraq and previously in their mounting failure to properly rebuild Afghanistan have instilled in me deeply pessimistic feelings. I'm not willing to take the plan at face value in part because Bush keeps trotting out a new reason for war whenever the last one is revealed as a sham. This hell-bent for war attitude makes me deeply suspicious that any apparent good intentions will survive when the next supposed justification gets trotted out, if indeed it is more than a sound-bite to play to skeptics. In short, talk is only talk, and I'll believe it when I see it.

I would still have problems with bombing people for their own good, and particularly with the "shock and awe" method. But I would never argue that Saddam is a kind and gentle man or that his people like him. My problem is that Bush dropped the ball with the Afghanistan situation, and that there has been far too much obscuration regarding Iraq. The line, "Everything I tell you is a lie, except for this," comes to mind.

Jesse: "I just wish more on the anti-war side would acknowledge this possibility, and the general complexity of the situation, rather than blithely assuming that no one who really cares about the Iraqi people could possibly favor a war."

Well, I for one don't believe I've ever argued that ousting Saddam, even perhaps by war, was incompatible with increased happiness for the Iraqi people. I even think it likely that, if a pro-US dictator is propped up, it will probably be better for the various tribal/ethnic groups that Saddam liked to kill. My problem is with, "We're bombing you for your own good," which I see as just about the worst hubris imaginable, as well as my distrust in the Bush government.

My problem is that even the "we're doing this for your own good" part of the argument is one that has been tacked on after the fact, at a time when bumbling foreign policy on Iraq has put the US into a corner where Bush and his advisors see no realistic option but to attack, fearing how Muslim fundamentalists, states antagonistic to the US, and OBL will react if they back down (I can just imagine the tape that Al-Jezera (sp?) would get in such a situation). My problem is that we are here because of a bunch of lying fools who are trying to justify their war after they have given themselves no choice but to go to war.

Noel Chomyn:
"Would this hypothetical secret poll ignore the Kurds like Bush is planing on doing?"

Of course not, and if the Kurdish territories are handed over to Turkey that'd be very bad, and I'd oppose a war under such conditions. But the plans on this issue are not definite yet, so far as I know. You can add to the hypothetical the idea that the Kurds will remain independent, if you like.

Jesse:
"A lot of Afghani civilians lost their lives when the Taliban was deposed... [but] I think most people from these countries would have said it was worth it."
You mean Kabul and city, not Afghanistan and country, right?"

Noel Chomyn:
"And while we're being hypothetical (you know, like suggesting that people might actually die from bombs that hit the wrong target, or that when a water treatment system that is held together with gum gets disrupted by the bombing there might be some disease problems, or that when the system for getting civilians their monthly food basket stops functioning and the remaining roads are churned up there might be famine—all bits of speculation that you, Jesse, suggested in an earlier post were irrelevant because the exact numbers were unknowable)"

Now you're just being mean-spirited. If you reread my earlier posts where I criticized exact estimates of the death toll, nowhere did I say the possibility of famine, cholera etc. was "irrelevent", I was just arguing that self-assured statements that the war will be this fantastic humanitarian tragedy based on ridiculously precise worst-case estimates are a sign that the speaker is motivated more by ideology than by a desire to fairly weigh the costs and benefits of a war. The fact that worst-case scenarios do sometimes come true is something that has to be kept in mind, but people have to come to their own conclusions about what is actually most likely to happen in reality. I'm a lot more likely to listen to someone who actually seems to have thought about both sides in an open-minded way rather than someone who pushes all the worst-case scenarios in my face and tells me I'm a horrible person for even considering that war *might* be the best option.

Noel Chomyn:
"about we hypothetically make sure the people taking this poll know that the US will prop up another dictator, albeit a US friendly one, after the war."

Another worst-case scenario: how do you "know" that the US will do this, rather than trying to create a democracy? But again, if this is part of your hypothetical, then yes, I would definitely be opposed to the war in such a scenario.

Noel Chomyn:
"How will the Shiite's, or whichever other ethnic groups are left out in the cold, feel about this? We should also make it clear that Bush&co have already begun to make noises to the effect that Iraq can rebuild itself without US help"

Well, here's an article about the Bush administration's latest plans for Iraq, which calls for fairly long-term occupation and a major reconstruction effort:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...7949-2003Feb20.html

Noel Chomyn:
"Saddam idolizes Stalin, and from a per capita point of view he’s done his role model proud, and if the US government gave a damn about what happens to the Iraqi people after the war, many of them might be better off. Sadly, Bush doesn’t."

If the plans above were definite, would that affect your opinion about the war in any way?

Noel Chomyn:
"Then there’s another hypothetical question to ask: what will the long term effects of the Iraqi invasion have on regional stability? As brought up earlier on Charlie’s blog, there’s a good chance that this conflict, and the lead up to it, means the end for the current Saudi regime. "

What does a "good chance" mean? Is there also a "good chance" that Iraq will end up being some sort of beacon of freedom and democracy for the rest of the middle east, as some of the pro-war hawks imagine? Again, I'm more inclined to listen to the judgements of people who seem to be actually trying to weigh different scenarios against each other--worst-case, best-case, and everything in between--rather than those who focus entirely on the extremes that support their own unshakeable position.

Noel Chomyn:
"That means more deaths and a chance that down the road there’ll be another pin tacked onto the axis of evil map. Unless I can only bring hypothetical questions and arguments into the discussion if they support war, in which case, forget I said anything."

So the "Saudi government collapse and takeover by Islamicists" is *not* a hypothetical argument? The only part of my own scenario that was pure fantasy was the element of being able to take a top-secret poll of the Iraqi people, but I don't think it's so fantastic to imagine that a majority of Iraqis hate living under Saddam enough that they secretly favor a war, even though it might mean some civilian casualties. I just wish more on the anti-war side would aknowledge this possibility, and the general complexity of the situation, rather than blithely assuming that no one who really cares about the Iraqi people could possibly favor a war.

Jesse: "Would your position on the war change at all if we could somehow do a secret poll and find out that most Iraqi people do favor a war, knowing full well what the costs might be?"

Would this hypothetical secret poll ignore the Kurds like Bush is planing on doing? I'm sure they'll be better off under a Turkish government, anyway. And ethnic cleansing is just a silly little buzz word.

Jesse: "A lot of Afghani civilians lost their lives when the Taliban was deposed... [but] I think most people from these countries would have said it was worth it."

You mean Kabul and city, not Afghanistan and country, right?

And while we're being hypothetical (you know, like suggesting that people might actually die from bombs that hit the wrong target, or that when a water treatment system that is held together with gum gets disrupted by the bombing there might be some disease problems, or that when the system for getting civilians their monthly food basket stops functioning and the remaining roads are churned up there might be famine—all bits of speculation that you, Jesse, suggested in an earlier post were irrelevant because the exact numbers were unknowable), how about we hypothetically make sure the people taking this poll know that the US will prop up another dictator, albeit a US friendly one, after the war. How will the Shiite's, or whichever other ethnic groups are left out in the cold, feel about this? We should also make it clear that Bush&co have already begun to make noises to the effect that Iraq can rebuild itself without US help, sort of like the Afghans, who were given $0 in Bush's proposed budget (yes, congress later found $300 million, but that's far less than Afghanistan needs and was promised to help rebuild, and it shows just how much Bush cares about oppressed peoples). Throw in the likelihood of someone you know dying, or of loosing all your possessions, and suddenly the war looks to be rather less of a boon for the Iraqi people.

Saddam idolizes Stalin, and from a per capita point of view he’s done his role model proud, and if the US government gave a damn about what happens to the Iraqi people after the war, many of them might be better off. Sadly, Bush doesn’t. Then there’s another hypothetical question to ask: what will the long term effects of the Iraqi invasion have on regional stability? As brought up earlier on Charlie’s blog, there’s a good chance that this conflict, and the lead up to it, means the end for the current Saudi regime. That means more deaths and a chance that down the road there’ll be another pin tacked onto the axis of evil map. Unless I can only bring hypothetical questions and arguments into the discussion if they support war, in which case, forget I said anything.
Jesse: "A lot of Afghani civilians lost their lives when the Taliban was deposed... [but] I think most people from these countries would have said it was worth it."

You mean Kabul and citiy, not Afghanistan and country, right?

And while we're being hypothetical (you know, like suggesting that people might actually die from bombs that hit the wrong target, or that when a water treatment system that is held together with gum gets disrupted by the bombing there might be some desease problems, or that when the system for getting civilians their monthly food basket stops functioning and the remaining roads are churned up there might be famine—all bits of speculation that you, Jesse, sugested were irelevant in an earlier post), how about we hypothetically make sure the people taking this poll know that the US will prop up another dictator, albiet a US friendly one, after the war. How will the Shiite's, or whichever other ethnic groups are left out in the cold, feel about this? We should also make it clear that the Bush&co have already begun to make noises to the effect that Iraq can rebuild itself without US help, sort of like the Afghans, who were given $0 in Bush's proposed budget (yes, congress found $300 million, but that's far less than Afghanistan needs and was promised to help rebuild, and it shows just ho much Bush cares about people). Throw in the likelyhood of someone you know dying, or of loosing all your posessions, and suddenly the war looks to be rather less of a boon for the Iraqi people.

Charlie Stross writes:
"Sadam is an odious, evil man, but war is a far more ghastly business than most people who support it seem to realise, and while I'd like to see him gone and a democratic government in Baghdad with a remit to build the country, doing so at the expense of many lives (estimates vary between several thousand and several hundred thousand) is an abomination."

A lot of Afghani civilians lost their lives when the Taliban was deposed, and a lot of european civilians lost their lives when Nazi-occupied countries were liberated in WWII, but in both cases I think most people from these countries would have said it was worth it. Are you confident that the Iraqi people would feel differently? Would your position on the war change at all if we could somehow do a secret poll and find out that most Iraqi people do favor a war, knowing full well what the costs might be? I'd be very interested to hear answers to this hypothetical from any strongly anti-war people.

Interviews with Iraqi exiles that I have seen do suggest that most of them think a war would be "worth it", despite being none too fond of the united states...see this article, for example:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/weekinreview/16BURN.html

Exiles may not necessarily be a representative sample of the Iraqi population, but it still bothers me when people oppose the war claiming to have the best interests of the Iraqi people in mind, with no qualifications or admittances that it is possible that the suffering caused by a war *might* be outweighed by the suffering caused by living under Saddam Hussein.

David; my position on this has been consistent all along -- Sadam is an odious, evil man, but war is a far more ghastly business than most people who support it seem to realise, and while I'd like to see him gone and a democratic government in Baghdad with a remit to build the country, doing so at the expense of many lives (estimates vary between several thousand and several hundred thousand) is an abomination. Especially after the west spent a decade propping the bastard up, then another decade starving children in the hope that it would make him get the message that he wasn't wanted.

The post-Saddam situation is currently shaping up to look like a military dictatorship, selling the Kurds down the river to Turkey in return for oil. (And just why do you think the PKK turned to armed violence in the first place, hmm? Have you read up on the way the Turkish government, our erstwhile ally, treats the Kurds?) In fact, it's beginning to look as if the aftermath of a US-led invasion will entail (a) $BIGNUM of civilian deaths, (b) several million people in the north consigned to live under a brutal foreign occupation regime that wants to ethnically assimilate or exile them, (c) destabilization of Saudi Arabia (which I would argue was a good thing, except I suspect the post-revolutionary successor state will be much, much worse), and (d) going by the Afghan precedent, sod-all reconstruction help from the people who inflicted the damage.

The "Saddam is an evil man" argument is all very well, but it doesn't address the other side of the balance -- what action is justified in removing him. If I thought this was all realpolitik and brinksmanship, with the offer of a comfy dacha in Tripoli and a fat bribe to lure him into exile, I'd be a lot more comfortable with the whole thing. Alas, the precedent of how the US government treated Manuel Noriega is sufficient to ensure that any foreign leader who has the USA turn on him will fight to the end.

David, Charlie was pointing out the shortcoming of his own government as well. And another one of his points was that the European politicians who support the war do this without much support from their own citizens, while those who oppose it have support on at least that issue.

Don't you see any irony in that reply given the whole subject of this discussion is your weblog entry pointing out the shortcomings of other country's governments?

Anyway, I'm not trying to distract attention from anyone. Bush is a monkey and I'm happy to say so. But I'd rather my government do the right thing (remove Saddam) for the wrong reasons than the reverse.

That's right, David; distract attention from the shortcomings of your own government loudly enough by pointing at the shortcomings of everyone else's, and maybe you'll be able to slip away in a haze of moral relativism.

Exactly. France is opposed both because of their multi-billion dollar oil deals with Iraq and their desire to dominate (with Germany) a united Europe. Reports are surfacing that Germany covered up reports of Iraq's smallpox program to boost Schroder's chances of being elected on an anti-US plateform. I won't even bother to get started on China.

Just a bunch of idealists, yep.

Charlie writes: "So Rumsfeld's 'New Europe' boils down to a bunch of opportunist politicians hoping to land some foreign aid packages, plus Tony Blair. Go figure."

Yeah, and there's no opportunism on the other side of the fence, is there? France, Germany, Russia, and China are opposing military action out of pure nobility and concern for their fellow humans, right?

Boys and girls get ready to rumble. The Cheney/Bush regime is determined to have their war. I doesn't matter what many Americans or other citizens in Europe, Asia, South America think. The unelected ideologues who grabbed power in Nov. 2000 will not relent. They have the keys to daddys car, unfortunately they drive like drunken teenagers, and will likely drive us all off the cliff of unknown conquences.

Edited by author 02-20-2003 04:59 PM
I just watched Eric Margolis, probably my favorite pundit/foreign affairs correspondent (despite the fact that he writes for what is otherwise a largely useless daily that might be best described as tabloidesque), dub it "the coalition of the shilling" on a current affairs show.

Aside from Tony Blair, the leaders who are joining their countries up are doing so for selfish reasons (or for self-preservation). Australia's PM came right out and said they were joining to stay in the US' good books, and to hell with the UN and international law; Turkey is, since Shrub showed his war-at-all-costs hand, getting all the sweet, sweet foreign aid, oil, and post-war control over northern Iraqi oil that they can out of the situation; in Canada, our government has just committed to sending a few thousand more troops to Afghanistan to support the war on terrorism (remember that war?), which has the side effect of making any meaningful contribution to the Iraq invasion logistically impossible while keeping the US appeased. Hell, I wouldn't be shocked if it turns out Blair is dragging Britain along to assure best-buddy status with Bush&co.

Derek, I'm assuming four days, max.

It's something of a truism that a modern city is just 24 hours from anarchy. When the drinking water gives out, there is going to be bad, bad trouble. Likewise, even if the war is over in four days, it can easily take weeks or months to fix damaged water pumping or treatment plants. Have you any idea how fast cholera spreads, and how rapidly it kills? Typhus and malaria are trivial in comparison, but if there's any damage to the continuity of water supply I wouldn't be surprised to see people still dying of the after-effects weeks or months later.

Edited by author 02-07-2003 01:05 PM
Charlie--Again, you're making presumptions about the length of the campaign, tactics, and logistics...things that you can't possibly know. I'm not even sure what the specific objectives of such a campaign would be (targetting Hussein? punitive strikes of potential weapons sites? full-scale occupation?).

You're right that Iraq has more infrastructure to destroy, but along with that it has a much greater capacity to repair and restore that infrastructure. Their ability to do so, you're right, would be hindered during a prolonged campaign. If, however, that campaign is fairly short, Iraq would probably be in much better shape, with the ability to bounce back quickly, than a country like Afghanistan. Thing is, nobody knows how long such a campaign would take.

Apropos the ability to repair a power station using parts from storage -- I'm thinking the confusion of war will make this a lot harder than a straightforward peacetime operation. Consider that it won't just be power stations; it'll be substations, transport routes likely to be used by the enemy, runways, suspected armouries, suspected facilities useful to defending troops -- such as municipal vehicle parks -- and suspected troop concentrations. Between them, the degradation of facilities will make repairs virtually impossible.

Basically, there's about four to twelve million people in urban areas who are going to be deprived of electricity, water (pumped by electricity), sewage removal, food transport, and in some cases shelter. I don't see any signs of the west stockpiling food and drinking water supplies ready to move into occupied areas once they've finished bombing and shelling -- this is going to be much, much messier than Afghanistan (which is largely rural and not as susceptible to infrastructure damage).

Infrastructure destruction: the RAF has claimed that, with modern precision weapons, it's possible to disable a power station (this was the example they gave) for a predictable time, without destroying it.

It makes some sense, if the attacker knows enough about the target, but I'd expect the repair times to be a minimum. Some slow-to-make component might have a small stock at the manufacturer, but once that stock is gone...

War isn't the same as normal breakdowns. It will inevitably overload the repair capacity within Iraq, and has the potential to badly over-stretch the worldwide capacity.

What he said.

Er... I think that's a reference to the sort of discussion that goes on in random chatrooms, rather than his own opinion.

I've certainly seen that kind of talk from ill-informed hawks: they think the case for war is so obvious that they honestly can't imagine why Europeans should disagree. The consensus seems to be either that we're too afraid of our own Muslim communities or that the EU is experiencing an upsurge of anti-semitism. There's not much evidence for either, but that's because the Technocratic European Superstate suppresses anything that doesn't support it's Liberal Agenda.

Except that Europe is governed mostly by Democracies, so European opinions are relevant in as much as America is still interested in military support during its wars, and trade at other times. I'm not sure what Jews have to do with this, but overt anti-semitism is still pretty unhealthy in my neighbourhood, at least. We still haven't repaired all the bullet holes from the last time it got popular.

Yeah, but you forgot to mention the bit about the opinions of liberal jew-hating euro-weenies being irrelevant.

I've been listening to some US citizens in a random chatroom as they defended their country's rather, er, active stance.

As far as I understand it, the idea is that, as the most powerful nation on Earth, they owe it to everyone to keep all the other nations from doing 'destabilising' things by occasionally wiping out a small country and installing a US puppet government. This is necessary because of the ever increasing range of people and powers with access to nuclear explosives and weaponised viruses. Of course, many random civilians die hideously in the process, but this is perfectly acceptable because 'It's war and shit happens'.

You know, I'd really quite like to leave the planet around now.

Jesse:
"Finally, given the lopsidedness of any U.S./Iraq war it doesn’t seem likely to me that enough infrastructure would be damaged that society would be really devastated..."

Noel Chomyn:
http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2003/01/31/iraq_crisis030131
That sums it up so I don't have to.

Me again: Ok, but compare that article to this one:

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021220-27287747.htm

I think what Derek James said earlier about casualty estimates applies to the issue of damage to infrastructure too--there are so many variables here that precise predictions are impossible, and any source that makes detailed predictions with any high degree of certainty is probably not one you should trust.

Noel Chomyn:
"The Israel comment was in part intended for the irony of the fact that they are in part responsible for any WMD program Iraq has/had. Also, it was an illustration of American foreign policy in the area and the way its short-term mind-set has tended to go bad in the end."

But would Iraq not have tried to build WMD if Israel had not pursued a nuclear weapons program? I guess it's possible, but I doubt it would have made much difference.

Jesse: "I’m not optimistic about this possibility, although there are a few precedents for it, like Japan."

Noel Chomyn:
"Also, they poured billions into rebuilding Europe after WWII. So, I guess anything is possible, but since the post-WWII examples, cases where foreign policy has turned out well in the long run have been depressingly infrequent."

Well, I can't disagree there. I'm hoping they're serious when they talk about rebuilding Iraq as a free society, but history suggests I shouldn't be too optimistic; despite my arguing with you guys here I would probably vote against a war if I had a vote in the matter, unless there were some definite assurances on this score. But, given that the war will probably happen regardless of my opinion, I also don't think it's quite the sure-fire disaster that a lot of the anti-war people I know think it's going to be.

Tony Quirke:
"Um, Jesse, there's a Geneva Convention (well, a Protocol additional to the Conventions, but let's not quibble) on protecting civilians in time of war."

I didn't know about that article. All the more reason to hope they don't use this tactic then.

Edited by author 02-03-2003 01:55 PM
"Other articles say the plan calls for destroying water and power supplies to the city, but I haven’t seen anything suggesting that random buildings are going to be bombed."

Um, Jesse, there's a Geneva Convention (well, a Protocol additional to the Conventions, but let's not quibble) on protecting civilians in time of war. It includes civilian objects, and has this interesting article:

"Article 54: Protection of Objects Indispensable to the Survival of the Civilian Population

"1. Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited

"2. It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive.

"3. The prohibitions in paragraph 2 shall not apply to such of the objects covered by it as are used by an adverse Party:
(a) as sustenance solely for the members of its armed forces;
or
(b) if not as sustenance, then in direct support of military action, provided, however, that in no event shall actions against these objects be taken which may be expected to leave the civilian population with such inadequate food or water as to cause its starvation or force its movement.

"4. These objects shall not be made the object of reprisals.

"5. In recognition of the vital requirements of any Party to the conflict in the defense of its national territory against invasion, derogation from the prohibitions contained in paragraph 2 may be made by a Party to the conflict within such territory under its own control where required by imperative military necessity."

Jesse: "OK, but it’s not like the war plans include intentionally bombing civilians as punishment for failing to rebel against Saddam."

Charlie Stross:
"But they do! What the hell else do you call the "shock and awe" proposal to rain four hundred cruise missiles a day on their capital city? That's 400 tons of high explosives, or about the same payload as a world war two thousand bomber raid mounted by the RAF against Berlin in 1942! And precision guided, at that, rather than iron bombs dropped at night with a CEP of about five kilometres."

From what I have been able to tell based on reports of the "shock and awe" proposal, the idea here is *not* to target civilians, like the bombing of cities in WWII. Look at this article, for example:

http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/archive/31-1-19103-0-25-32.html

The article claims that the plan calls for "targeting Saddam Hussein, his ministers and the command element of his security services and Republican Guard divisions." Other articles say the plan calls for destroying water and power supplies to the city, but I haven’t seen anything suggesting that random buildings are going to be bombed. The risk for civilians in Baghdad would presumably be very small compared to the risk for civilians in Berlin in 1942; another discussion of this plan that I saw pointed out that 400 tons of explosives is actually quite small compared to the amount of explosives that were dropped on German cities in the war (4,000 tons were dropped on Dresden during the first day of bombing, although I’ll take your word for it that a lot less was dropped on Berlin), and again, it looks like they’ll be aimed at noncivilian targets.

You are right that targeting water and power would probably cause a fair amount of "hardship", including the possibility of fatal diseases (though I would think they’d try to get water and medicine to civilians) and there’s probably a good chance that some bombs would end up killing civilians. Unless the plan had a good chance of shortening the war and thus saving more lives than would be lost, I personally would be opposed to such a tactic. The fact is, though, if there’s any war at all, it would not be "bloodless"—people on both sides would die. But the same was true of Afghanistan when the Taliban were deposed. There’s always going to be a tradeoff, so unless you’re a total pacifist, the debate should be about whether the benefits outweight the losses, not about whether the war will be completely bloodless.

Jesse writes: "Finally, given the lopsidedness of any U.S./Iraq war it doesn’t seem likely to me that enough infrastructure would be damaged that society would be really devastated..."

http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2003/01/31/iraq_crisis030131

That sums it up so I don't have to.

Jesse writes: "I don’t think the Israel comparison is a valid one."

The Israel comment was in part intended for the irony of the fact that they are in part responsible for any WMD program Iraq has/had. Also, it was an illustration of American foreign policy in the area and the way its short-term mind-set has tended to go bad in the end.

Jesse writes: "Well, again, I don’t think going over the U.S.’s past mistakes is very important from a pragmatic point of view. Even if it is completely the U.S.’s fault that Iraq is in this mess to begin with, how does that affect our judgment of what the best course of action to take now should be?"

Using pragmatic in its "treating facts of history with reference to their practical lessons" way, I would say that looking at past mistakes is the single most important thing. At best it allows us to try to do things better the next time; at worst it allows me to be a miserable git who complains that the human race never seems to do things better the next time.

Jesse: "I’m not optimistic about this possibility, although there are a few precedents for it, like Japan."

Also, they poured billions into rebuilding Europe after WWII. So, I guess anything is possible, but since the post-WWII examples, cases where foreign policy has turned out well in the long run have been depressingly infrequent.

As to henotheistic, I checked to make sure I hadn't misused the word, and Oxford says "belief in god without asserting that he is the only God." I was lamenting the fact that, in the state of the union speech, there were the typical God (with capital) is on our side comments that are so common on both sides of this war on terrorism. In every war I know of, both/all sides have claimed God’s exclusive patronage, and God’s backing can be fickle over the years and wars. I see this as only clouding the issue and whipping up self-righteous war fever, though I suppose that this might be the whole point of it.

I’m not sure I’m explaining the intent of that final bit as well as I might like, but I’m rather distracted by other events at the moment.