Friday, February 28, 2003
[posted by jaed at 7:39 PM]The Rush to War - Day 4699:
Paxety Pages provides a useful, handy list of the eighteen previous Chapter 7 UNSC resolutions pertaining to Iraqi disarmament.
Resolution 687 called for Iraq, within 15 days, to declare all its exotic weapons and long-distance missiles, as well as research and production facilities for same.
It was passed April 3, 1990. So I figure the headlong rush to war started on April 18th.
[posted by jaed at 6:10 PM]
A Small Victory reveals the Awful Truth:
It�s true. You heard of the Tupperware Lady? Well I am the TupperWAR Lady, and I rule a vast organization of pearl-wearing, pot roast cooking women who go door to door in hopes of charming other women into becoming warmongers.
If you see me standing on your doorstep with a nice jello mold in hand, you may not want to open the door.
[posted by jaed at 12:57 PM]
Bargarz pulls together some information on European maneuvers to control third-world water supplies.
Tuesday, February 25, 2003
[posted by jaed at 9:54 PM]As the world turns...
WildMonk makes a comment to a week-old Samizdata thread that I just have to put here for its pithiness and precision:
Will it still be "blowback" when a new Iranian revolution occurs? Or does the world revolve around America only when things go wrong?
[posted by jaed at 8:37 PM]
CAABU, the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding, has this to say to Tony Blair:
Today, in the face of so much opposition, we look to you to remain steadfast for all that is decent and honourable. The anti-war coalition ignores the terror we have lived under for so long. Their demonstration can only bring comfort to Saddam Hussein.
And in the face of his brutality the protesters offer nothing in comfort to the suffering of Iraqi people; nor indeed do they say how they would seek to disarm a dictator whose weapons of mass destruction threaten not only his own people with his use of chemical weapons, but also that of his neighbours and beyond.
The last thing we wish to see is war. We do not want war. No civilised person would wish for such a terrible event when lives of people we hold dear could be lost. But we do want Saddam Hussein and his regime removed. You and the UN must persevere in using diplomatic pressure, but if all fails, and as an absolute last resort, then we accept that force must be used to remove him.
Sunday, February 23, 2003
[posted by jaed at 9:51 AM]Echoes:
Alistair Cookie is old enough to remember the long leadup to WWII. On the BBC this week, he recalled some of his experience:
[..] for two years before the outbreak of the Second War you could read the debates in the House of Commons and now shiver at the famous Labour men - Major Attlee was one of them - who voted against rearmament and still went on pointing to the League of Nations as the saviour.
Now, this memory of mine may be totally irrelevant to the present crisis. It haunts me.
I have to say I have written elsewhere with much conviction that most historical analogies are false because, however strikingly similar a new situation may be to an old one, there's usually one element that is different and it turns out to be the crucial one.
It may well be so here. All I know is that all the voices of the 30s are echoing through 2003.
shudder
Friday, February 21, 2003
[posted by jaed at 2:02 PM]"We are the world":
The Prime Minister of Belgium, Guy Verhofstadt, writes in the Financial Times:
As long as we Europeans feel threatened, the use of war and weapons can more or less be justified. However, without this sentiment, a transatlantic gulf has opened up. I fear this rift will only grow. As long as Soviet divisions could reach the Rhine in 48 hours, we obviously had a blood brotherhood with our cousins overseas. But now that the cold war is over, we can express more freely our differences of opinion. And one of those differences of opinion concerns the fundamental question about the use of war as an extension of politics.
This is an admirably direct way of framing what has lurked around the edges of the Axis of Weasel's pronouncements: America may only go to war if Europe is threatened. If America is threatened, but not Europe, it follows that war is unacceptable and must be blocked, by the means we have seen Belgium, France, and Germany use. (I will accept arguendo that Europe is not in fact threatened by Arab war against the dar al-Harb.)
It is a strikingly solipsistic view: only threats to Europe count. Europe is the world; America's existence, apparently, has meaning only insofar as it is the defender of Europe. (Given the attitude recently shown toward the defense of Turkey, I suspect as well that parts of Europe are more equal than others in this regard.)
As with much of what I read in the papers, that this feeling exists isn't news. But it is both clarifying and oddly depressing to read it so openly stated, in a tone of such reasoned forbearance. Surely you understand, the PM says, that we cannot permit war. We do not feel threatened, after all.
[posted by jaed at 1:47 PM]
Kenneth Pollack summarizes the problem with waiting Iraq out in today's NYT:
Observers have a very poor track record in predicting the progress of the Iraqi nuclear weapons program. In the late 1980's, the nuclear experts of the American intelligence services were convinced that the Iraqis were at least 5 and probably 10 years away from having a nuclear weapon. For its part, the International Atomic Energy Agency did not even believe that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program. After the 1991 Persian Gulf war, United Nations inspectors found that not only did Iraq have a program far more extensive than anyone had realized, but it was also less than two years away from producing a weapon.
Four years later, the international agency was so certain that it had eradicated the Iraqi nuclear program that it wanted to end aggressive inspections in favor of passive "monitoring." Then a slew of defectors came out of Iraq � including Hussein Kamel al-Majid, the son-in-law of Saddam Hussein who led the Iraqi program to build weapons of mass destruction; Wafiq al-Samarrai, one of Saddam Hussein's intelligence chiefs; and Khidhir Hamza, a leading scientist with the nuclear weapons program. These defectors reported that outside pressure had not only failed to eradicate the nuclear program, it was bigger and more cleverly spread out and concealed than anyone had imagined it to be.
In the late 1990's, American and international nuclear experts again concluded that the Iraqi nuclear program was dormant: yes, the scientists were still working in teams; yes, they still had all of the plans; and yes, they probably were hiding some machinery � but they were not making any progress. Then another batch of important defectors escaped to Europe and told Western intelligence services that after the inspectors left Iraq in 1998, Saddam Hussein had started a crash program to build a nuclear weapon and that the Iraqis had devised methods to hide the effort.
Update: Talking Points Memo has an extensive interview with Pollack, going into more detail on the points raised in the NYT oped.
Thursday, February 20, 2003
[posted by jaed at 7:35 PM]Blood for oil?
According to the CIA World Factbook entry on Iraq:
[...] implementation of the UN's oil-for-food program in December 1996 [...] Oil exports are now more than three-quarters prewar level. However, 28% of Iraq's export revenues under the program are deducted to meet UN Compensation Fund and UN administrative expenses.
The UN takes 28% of Iraq's oil revenues?
A little later on, that page says:
Exports: $15.8 billion (f.o.b., 2001 est.)
Exports - commodities: crude oil
28% of $15.8 billion is over four billion dollars. That's more than the current UN budget. All of it.
Did everyone else know this already, and have I just been sleeping through it? Does it seem to anyone else that this might raise just a little bit of a question about the UN's impartiality in the matter of Iraq, given that they stand to lose this much money from any change to the status quo?
Wednesday, February 19, 2003
[posted by jaed at 4:21 PM]One of the last heroes:
A profile of Vaclav Havel, as he leaves office, in the New Yorker:
Within a few months of Havel's ascension, the euphoria of the Velvet Revolution began to fade. The poetry of those winter weeks, the theatrical press conferences and the street rallies, yielded to the prose of governing a ruined state. No more scooters, no more sneaking out of the Castle for a drink at a local pub. Havel allowed that he felt "strangely paralyzed, empty inside," fearful that dissent and governing were hardly the same. "At the very deepest core of this feeling there was, ultimately, a sensation of the absurd: what Sisyphus might have felt if one fine day his boulder stopped, rested on the hilltop, and failed to roll back down," he told an audience in Salzburg. "It was the sensation of a Sisyphus mentally unprepared for the possibility that his efforts might succeed, a Sisyphus whose life had lost its old purpose and hadn't yet developed a new one."
So many people I used to admire have said stupid and hateful things lately that I find myself tensing up when I see this man's name in the news. Has he, too, turned into an angry mushhead? So far, he hasn't disappointed me....
[posted by jaed at 2:32 PM]
Reaction to Chirac's scolding of pro-American EU accession countries (via Instapundit):
Diplomats and commentators likened Mr Chirac's comments to Soviet-era edicts to Warsaw Pact countries and warned they would have a lasting impact on France's standing and authority in Europe.
We have quotes, too:
Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, Foreign Minister of Poland: "In the European family there are no mummies, no daddies and no kids - it is a family of equals."
Eduard Kukan, Foreign Minister of Slovakia: "I do not comprehend why Mr Chirac is not criticizing Italy, Spain or Portugal. After all, they said exactly the same ... I do not like it, and I do not think this way of marking us out is justified."
Ion Iliescu, President of Romania: "Such reproaches are totally unjustified, unwise and undemocratic."
Cyril Svoboda, Foreign Minister of the Czech Republic: "We are not joining the EU so we can sit and shut up."
I'm heartened to see Eastern Europe standing up to Chirac's (really shameless) bullying, all the more so that their doing so is over the issue of anti-American policy. But I also worry that all this is sowing the seeds for future trouble. The EU (apart from the easily-mocked antics of Brussels bureaucrats in serious need of lives) has the potential to be enormously beneficial to members. I have a hard time seeing Eastern European countries backing out now. They want a common market, they want freedom of movement and trade with Western Europe, and these things will likely overcome an argument about a war neither France nor Eastern Europe is on the front lines of.
But what happens in ten or twenty years? This rebellion by the "lesser nations" may well cause France and Germany to take steps to ensure their control of EU foreign policy is ironclad (and it's already clear that that policy will be explicitly anti-American). The new EU constitution proposes to take foreign policy out of the hands of member states entirely. When a crisis comes around, and the security of one or more of the member states is thrown overboard by French and German interests*, those members are going to want to go their own way - at best a constitutional crisis, at worst a civil war.
I don't like the idea of yet another European war. I truly don't.
*Think that will never happen? Tell it to the Turks.
Update: USS Clueless explains the ramifications much more clearly than I do, though he's not pessimistic about the longterm possibilities.
Tuesday, February 18, 2003
[posted by jaed at 8:08 PM]The tree of the left continues to bear clue-fruit:
David Aaronovitch, in the Guardian, has
some questions for Britons who demonstrated this weekend:
Finally, what are you going to do when you are told - as one day you will be - that while you were demonstrating against an allied invasion, and being applauded by friends and Iraqi officials, many of the people of Iraq were hoping, hope against hope, that no one was listening to you?
The same thing the same people said when they marched against Eeevil American Cowboy Aggression
Monday, February 17, 2003
[posted by jaed at 10:29 PM]Me me meeeeee!
Isntapundit comments on the blog of a "human shield":
Ben's not a doctor, or a rescue worker, or even a soldier who might be of some use in a war zone. A strange heroism he aspires to, that does nobody any good. Look for this all-important story that Ben wants to tell, and you find The Story Of Ben, his every feeling and experience preserved in an aspic of first-person pronouns. It's the diary of a damn fool kid on a pilgrimage to danger, just so he can feel good about himself. His addiction to his own self-righteousness is stronger than his powers of reasoning and his love of life put together.
We're not supposed to laugh or cry; we're supposed to fall to our knees and worship.
Sigh.
Andrea Harris proposes an apt fate for these people:
I just hope that after all this is over one of these "activists" (if they all haven't been blown into hemp-scented meat chunks) meets up with an Iraqi mother of a tortured child or wife of an imprisoned, executed dissident, and gets the sock in the jaw he or she will so richly deserve.
[posted by jaed at 9:02 PM]
It's low of me to find this sort of thing so amusing:
Yesterday, as Mr Blair faced the most difficult two weeks of his political life, it had been expected he would be the one suffering from pre - and post - summit indigestion and indignation. Last night, however, it looked as though it was Mr Chirac who, following the osso buco and carpaccio d'ananas, was the one looking a bad mix of green and red.
(Via Instapundit. I think.)
[posted by jaed at 12:02 PM]
Porphyrgenitus analyzes the recent demonstrations as theater, bouncing off an email from Nelson Asher:
Thus the banners, slogans, and speeches at demonstrations often seem very disconnected from reality to outsiders ([...] little but religious pilgrimages and which content and form does not vary regardless of the issue at hand. This could be an anti-globalization demonstration or a Earth Day demonstration just as easily as an anti-war demonstration). That is because, for the spokesman and many of the participants, it's more important to maintain a connection to "The Movement's" legacy from decades past than to make arguments fitted to the present issue-at-hand. That issue must be shoehorned into the dialectic of "The Movement", regardless of whether it fits (thus the emphasis on neo-Marxist materialist explanations such as "it's about oil", for example).
Interesting points, particularly about the seeming interchangeability of mass demonstrations. It's occurred to me as well that you'd only have to change a few details - swap the anti-Israel posters for anti-corporate ones - to change an "anti-war" demonstration into an "anti-globalization" one. Not only is the mood the same, much of the message is the same.
Sunday, February 16, 2003
[posted by jaed at 9:25 PM]"My goodness, Mabel! The wogs are restless!"
It seems the anti-war movement (or at least the British movement) is belatedly noticing that the Iraqis don't love their Glorious Leader so much that they're eager to keep him. They're even willing to disagree (the nerve!) with the said movement's assertion that Bush - indeed, America - is far, far worse than Saddam Hussein. The Guardian has
Nick Cohen:
The conclusion the Iraqi opposition has reluctantly reached is that there is no way other than war to remove a tyrant whose five secret police forces make a palace coup or popular uprising impossible. As the only military force on offer is provided by America, they will accept an American invasion.
This is their first mistake. American and British power is always bad in the eyes of muddle-headed Left, the recent liberations of East Timor, Sierra Leone and Kosovo notwithstanding.
Then the uppity wogs compound their offence and tell their European betters to think about the political complexities....
and the Telegraph has a news article quoting Iraqis, of whom there are a fair number in Britain:
The people on the anti-war march, they don't seem to realise, they don't have any idea what Saddam Hussein is like, the massacres, the genocides he has committed.
I am supporting a war against Saddam Hussein. It's not a war against Iraq - it is a war against Saddam. It doesn't seem to be a point that many people on the anti-war march are making.
Now, I do not favor fighting this particular battle because it will free the Iraqi people - I regard it, instead, as a good side effect of acting to protect ourselves. What these people say is not something that leaves me unmoved, exactly, but it's not why I take the position I do.
But the antiwar movement advertises itself as the voice of caring for the innocent Iraqis. Our safety is of less moral importance than theirs. Fine.
Do you think they're safe under Saddam Hussein?
[posted by jaed at 11:23 AM]
Disagreement, Inc. offers a brief morality tale:
IDL: Why would you do that?!
GGC: Because I'm tired of it! I don't know how many times I have to warn them...
IDL: Exactly!
GGC: Huh?
IDL: You said that they always do this. Why call the police now? Perhaps you should try to reason with them...
GGC: Reason with them? They said after the last three times I've warned them that they wouldn't do it again.
IDL: Yes, and you still haven't called the police. This is quite suspicious.
GGC: That's because I didn't want to call the police. Unfortunately, I don't have much of a choice.
IDL: But why these boys? Why now?
GGC: Cause these boys are wrapping my damn house!
IDL: And I can understand your agitation with that, but it's not like these are the only boys wrapping houses anywhere. Why don't you call the police on the people that are housewrapping across town?
Saturday, February 15, 2003
[posted by jaed at 10:49 PM]Good lord:
This has to be a ringer. I know I've thought about showing up with similar sarcastic signs at one of these rallies, just to see whether anyone would question it - you know, "Kill Kurds, Not Mumia" - and it looks like someone had a similar idea and followed through. Magnificent!
God, I hope that's the explanation. The alternative just doesn't bear thinking about.
[posted by jaed at 2:50 PM]
(Not really.) One of the commentators on a Chicago Boyz has found an article in the Belgian newspaper De Standaard:
the unofficial foreign policy guru of Belgium Rik Coolsaet, a professor at the University of Ghent, brags about the genius of the Franco-Belgian policy. It is primarily aimed at derailing NATO, which he describes as toolbox for American imperialism on the European dime. The second objective (and Coolsaet is very straightforward about it) is to thwart American influence by humiliating it in front of the Arabs (who have a very keen sense of honor and prestige, and who can be trusted to attack America relentlessly once it is humiliated).
I haven't confirmed this - De Standaard has a website, but of course it's in Flemish, which I don't read.
Friday, February 14, 2003
[posted by jaed at 7:06 PM]Strategic advice for Germany and France:
Innocents Abroad writes at some length on the implications of the French and German strategy for those countries:
My point here is not to belittle Europeans, nor in particular the Germans and the French. Rather, I wish to alert these nations to the possibility that they and their leaders are comporting themselves in a manner lacking in long-term historical awareness, compounded by an insular vision constructed around the European project, and heading for imminent disaster, or at least irrelevance. I repeat that I do not believe any European nation is obligated to fight with the US, but there is little to be gained from challenging it directly. It may appear I have skirted the moral question involved, along with a whole host of other strategic and public relations issues. In fact, I have not. The moral question itself is deeply tied to the very fact that France and Germany are engaged in a dangerous betrayal of their national interest. Unlike many hard-headed political thinkers in Europe, or perhaps in spite of them, I do not believe that a powerful nation, even a powerful nation pursuing its interests, is simply bad. Rather, I think there can be a great deal of good in such a spectacle. Indeed, a great deal of good, an immense deal of good in fact, has come from the European nations and their impressive civilizations. However, by pursuing their current course, France and Germany are denying this history.
[posted by jaed at 6:39 PM]
In one of the NYT's ain't-America-awful articles, German writer Peter Schneider has this to say: "I would say that even in the Vietnam years, I've never seen so much anti-Americanism all over Europe as I see now. This is something America doesn't realize." This is the sort of statement that is deeply ignorant - so clueless - that it makes me laugh out loud.
Gosh. No, it's true. We had no idea. I mean, when the Guardian told us it was All Our Fault 36 hours after the WTC fell on three thousand people, we just brushed it off as a misunderstanding. And when the Germans held an anti-America protest a week and a half later. And when the French told us their purpose for the EU was to oppose the United States. And when Pilger announced that we're all Nazis. And during the whole spew of verbal filth aimed at us from across the Atlantic for the last seventeen months.
Aren't these people paying attention at all? Yes, we realize you think we're both evil and stupid. We've heard you use "cowboy" as a term of opprobrium, because the cowboy is the typical American folk hero, and we understand the implication you're trying to get across. We've seen you use the crudest of anti-Americanism to win an election. We've heard you say the 9/11 attack had its good side, because it might take us down a peg.
We realize you'll cheer the body count at the news of the next attack here.
And we understand that if there's an attack in Europe, we'll be expected to help out with rescue teams, with medical aid, with money. (We also understand that if that happens, French and German backstabbing will go into the memory hole, and we'll be vilified for not preventing it from happening.) We understand that you expect us to defend you, even while you attack us. We understand that if, in fracturing the EU in the way you've done, you fools have managed to sow the seeds for yet another bloody war among yourselves, ten or twenty years from now, we'll be the ones expected to put a stop to it and to leave more thousands of our dead buried in your ungrateful soil.
We know you better than you think. We certainly understand you better than you understand us. And we don't like you much these days. Do you realize that, Herr Schneider?
Tuesday, February 11, 2003
[posted by jaed at 3:44 PM]Just how naughty has the Axis of Weasel been?
Have Germany and France been violating the UN sanctions against Iraq? USS Clueless speculated last month and again the other day that such violations, and fear of their discovery, might explain the tenacity of these governments' willingness to maneuver against us, even at the potential cost of making the Security Council a laughingstock, making NATO a dead letter, and possible even throwing a monkey wrench into the EU.
This doesn't make much sense, and a lot of people have been agreeing with den Beste: public opinion and economic interests might well keep them out, but the degree and kind of the backstabbing they've engaged in isn't well explained by these factors. "They're hiding something" is speculation but it's gained some substance from the diplomatic behavior of these countries.
If we were to discover records and witnesses inside Iraq that indicate such violations, den Beste says,
Some will smile quietly about how they'd been shafting the Americans for years. But no one would trust them, and as a practical matter their international influence would be shattered. This would also have the effect of completing the destruction of the UN if it was shown that a veto power had been actively violating trade sanctions it had voted for.
However, there's a scenario that's much worse than that. Suppose that the governments of France and/or Germany have in fact been naughty. Perhaps they've only been a little naughty - maybe providing dual-use technology that they knew would be used for CBN weapons. Or maybe they've been naughtier - providing, say, long-range missile parts, or technical knowledge concerning chemical weapons. It's also possible, though unlikely, that someone has been very naughty indeed.
Now suppose that the discovery den Beste postulates does take place - but not in a vacuum.
Suppose the Iraqi army makes an attack with exotic weapons - shoots VX at US soldiers, perhaps, or fires a plague at Jerusalem, or even uses such weapons on Iraqi civilians.
Suppose they succeed. America is grieving and outraged, any other targets are panicked and desperate, the world - no matter how it hates America or how little it cares if our people die - is freaking out because, my God, chemical weapons! Smallpox! Sarin! The world is coming to an end!
Suppose a week or two later, while all this is still fresh, hard evidence surfaces that we have Germany and/or France to thank for this atrocity.
Even if they've been only moderately naughty, I don't think anyone will be "smiling quietly" if that happens. I suspect we'd cut off diplomatic relations with the culprit at the very least. We might not be alone in that. And if they've been very, very naughty, we might well be at war. (Not diplomatic we-no-longer-consider-you-an-ally war, not we'll-pass-"regret-and-deplore"-resolutions war, not trade war. Real war.)
There are three possibilities, if anything like this has gone on in the last twelve years. It might never come out. It might be discovered in records - which would be extremely embarrassing. Or it might be discovered the hard way, which would be disastrous. But neither France nor Germany is in control. Saddam Hussein is. And with the stakes this high, that would be enough to make anyone desperate.
Anyway. That's my Wild Speculation du Jour. I really hope it is. I started writing this feeling fairly detached, but now I've scared myself.
Monday, February 10, 2003
[posted by jaed at 6:36 PM]McCain reams out the Axis of Weasel:
Here's his speech to the Munich security conference. I was going to say that at least he's more polite than Rumsfeld, when I came to this part:
The French and German objection, for reasons of calculated self-interest -- a very flawed calculation, I fear - to a routine American request to the North Atlantic Council to upgrade Turkey's defenses against the military threat from Iraq was a terrible injury to an Alliance that has served their broader interests well. For nearly three weeks, the United States, with fourteen of our eighteen European allies in the North Atlantic Council, has supported this necessary action, but has confronted a new unilateralism conceived in Paris and Berlin, a unilateralism that exposed the sneering in those capitals about the impulsive cowboy in the White House for the vacuous posturing and obvious misdirection it is.
Yikes.
Saturday, February 08, 2003
[posted by jaed at 7:32 PM]An Iraqi soldier's tale:
I'm a little amazed to find this in the Guardian:
"We are all very tired," Abbas said. "I haven't heard of Tony Blair. But if George Bush wants to give us freedom then we will welcome it."
To find such a thing in hallowed pages of the Guardian makes me think I should check it for fever. But apparently the lapse in anti-American sentiment was brief: the headline on this story is "The choice for Iraq's rag-tag army: be killed by the US or by Saddam".
The man quoted is a soldier who deserted and crossed the border into what we might as well call Kurdistan. He says, basically, a lot of soldiers and officers would surrender, but the Republican Guard won't and will try to prevent others from surrendering. He and his fellow soldiers don't want to get bombed (understandably), nor do they want to get shot by the Republican Guard (ditto). Morale is low, he says, and conditions for the soldiers suck.
(Digression: He also talks about trenches. When den Beste mentioned trenches a while back, I thought he was kidding! What do the Iraqi commanders think this is, 1914? Yikes.)
[posted by jaed at 1:14 AM]
Defining a back-formation is always tricky, but there's as good a definition of "idiotarian" as I've seen:
Idiotarians value justice and freedom and peace, and advocate policies that allow all of those things to be destroyed rather than face the truth about the world. Evil people don't value any of those things, and they advocate and enforce policies that actively destroy peace, justice, and freedom.
The application's another thing, obviously, but this points well to what people mean when they use the word.
Friday, February 07, 2003
[posted by jaed at 1:21 PM]"But there's no smoking gun!"
The National Post explains why this is a silly remark, in detail, with footnotes:
All told, by 1991 Iraq had produced -- again, by its own admission -- 19,000 litres of botulinum toxin, 8,500 litres of anthrax and 2,200 litres of aflatoxin, among other biological agents. In addition, it had produced 2,850 tonnes of mustard gas, 210 tonnes of tabun, 795 tonnes of sarin and cyclosarin, and 3.9 tonnes of VX, an especially deadly nerve agent.
But there is no "smoking gun."
None of which are news to anyone who's been paying attention, but this piece is well-organized and concise, putting all the main pieces in one place. There is even a chorus.
Of course, considering the etymology of "smoking gun", my own view is that what the people who talk about smoking guns are hoping for is a mushroom cloud over an American city. That would, indeed, constitute a smoking gun, though for such people the relevant fact would be not that it was proof that Iraq has a nuclear program, as well as chemical and biological, but that America had, once again, failed to understand "why they hate us", and had "provoked" a "desperate" world. There is no winning scenario with such people.
Bitter? Me? Take a look at the window title!
(via PejmanPundit)
[posted by jaed at 12:06 PM]
A series of posts at the Cardinal Collective on the limits of containment. The policy of deterrence toward Iraq depends on Saddam Hussein acting in certain ways. What if he does something else? Deterrence relies on the certainty of retaliation in case of attack. What if we can't retaliate, either because we can't fix responsibility or because it would cost us more to retaliate than not to? Deterrence fails.
Something not mentioned in this series, but which I'll bring up anyway, is that retaliation would be a sufficiently hideous act that for that reason alone I doubt it's credible. It was iffy enough with MAD, and with MAD there were some additional factors: a launch might prevent further attacks in progress by destroying launch centers, by the end it was highly automated and proceduralized such that there wouldn't have been that much time to consider consequences; and if you've just been attacked by the full might of the Soviet nuclear arsenal circa 1975, there's a certain "nothing left to lose" quality about the exercise.
None of which applies to the case where New York is gone. Would we turn Iraq into glass, just to retaliate? Kill 20 million people? With weeks to think about it and debate it? Be serious.
(Not to mention that it might not be just one bomb. Suppose New York is gone and we've been warned that there are bombs hidden in San Francisco, DC, LA, and Chicago that will go off unless we're very, very good to Saddam.)
(via Instapundit, the Blogger Who Never Sleeps.)
Thursday, February 06, 2003
[posted by jaed at 2:46 PM]The indispensable Jeffery Goldberg writes on al Qaeda and Iraq:
Woolsey, who served as President Clinton's first C.I.A. director, said that it is now illogical to doubt the notion that Saddam collaborates with Islamist terrorism, and that he would provide chemical or biological weapons to Al Qaeda. "At Salman Pak"�a training camp near Baghdad�"we know there were Islamist terrorists training to hijack airplanes in groups of four or five with short knives," Woolsey told me. "I mean, hello? If we had seen after December 7, 1941, a fake American battleship in a lake in northern Italy, and a group of Asian pilots training there, would we have said, 'Well, you can't prove that they were Japanese'?"
No really new facts in here - but the discussion of intelligence analysis, and speculation vs reciting only the facts, is interesting. So is the account at the beginning of the article of Bill Richardson's trip to see the Taliban in 1998.
[posted by jaed at 12:17 PM]
VodkaPundit lays the smack down. (And his comment thread tells us why Democrats, having waiting for years for a president who bases foreign policy on human rights and democracy, are so set against one when he finally appears. Hint: the letter R is involved.)
[posted by jaed at 11:14 AM]
Mark Steyn on the fetishization of the UN:
So I find myself in a position the pollsters don�t seem to have provided for: I support a US-led war against Saddam, but not a UN war. [...] Ninety per cent of the countries who made up Bush Sr's Stanley Gibbons collect-the-set coalition � Belgium, Senegal, Honduras � wouldn't have been involved in taking Baghdad and storming the presidential palace, but all claimed the right to act as a drag on those who would have. So the UN-ification of the first Gulf war is a big part of the reason it ended so unsatisfactorily. Those Republicans who think making Bush dance through the UN hoops this time round is merely a harmless interlude had better be confident that the same pressures won�t again undermine American purpose at a critical stage in the conflict.
Although I'm not sure it matters. After seeing what the delegate from France to the UNSC said yesterday (precis: "Since the inspections don't work, let's have even more inspectors!"), I realized that very likely I can tell my grandchildren I was there when the UN committed suicide by irrelevance.
Tuesday, February 04, 2003
[posted by jaed at 8:21 PM]Yikes
It seems Richard Perle told a seminar that France is not an ally of the US. That's been true for some time, of course, and both obvious and irritating for the last little while, but it startles me that someone actually said it in so many words. In a public talk, no less.
Saturday, February 01, 2003
[posted by jaed at 8:31 PM]
