Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes - From MSNBC's story on the resignations of Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and White House economic advisor Larry Lindsey, we learn:
1. Media bias lives! Compare this actual sentence that appeared in the MSNBC story
to this possible alternateO’Neill also tilted against administration dogma - initially questioning the short-term benefits of the Bush tax cut and advocating an aggressive battle to combat global warming.
and this oneO'Neill also tilted against administration positions - initially questioning the short-term benefits of the Bush tax cut and advocating an aggressive battle to combat global warming.
2. We may actually see a serious upgrade at the Treasury post, with both Phil Gramm and Bill Archer currently mentioned as strong candidates. (Why not Dick Armey? - UO.) Coming out of the boardroom rather than the classroom, O'Neill struck me as a bit too cozy with "state capitalism" as opposed to free enterprise. The least appealing things about Gramm, Archer (and Armey) are their stands on social issues (abortion, drugs etc.). A purely economic portfolio plays to their strengths.O'Neill also tilted toward Democratic Party dogma - initially questioning the short-term benefits of the Bush tax cut and advocating an aggressive battle to combat global warming.
3. MSNBC says Lindsey's downfall was, among other things, telling something approaching the truth about the financial consequences of a military conquest of Iraq. Alan Bock pointed out in September just how distant an approach this was. But it was still, apparently, too close for official comfort.
4. Mr. Most Influential Vice President Ever, Dick Cheney, recommended O'Neill for Treasury. In a just world, the experience would limit his influence on other issues.
Mint-y Fresh - Aziz Poonawalla seems to have a gift for coining apt terms. First it was the scripturally correct and pleasantly insulting "Harabist," for those who claim Islamic sanction for their perverted campaigns of terror and murder. Now he gives us "Clash-ist." This is not someone who still digs London Calling (and who does not?), but someone who wants to sign up for Samuel Huntington's famous "Clash of Civilizations" between Islam and "the West."
Actually, rereading his second piece, the term he uses is "Clash-ian," to resemble - and Unqualified Offerings apologizes for the using a word you may well come to this blog to avoid - "anti-idiotarian." UO is not sure whether it likes Clash-ist or Clash-ian better. But Aziz sure can come up with them.
The Barber of Beirut - Here's the really important part of yesterday's Christian-Science Monitor story, "Anti-US anger grows among Arab moderates":
Now your typical neo will find Mr. Nawfal's statement purely infuriating. Weren't our occasional postwar forays into Lebanon undertaken with the best of intentions? In 1982 the US came in essentially throwing the bodies of its troops in front of the Palestinian refugee community to save them from - why, that would be Ariel Sharon! The US sought to mediate a bloody civil war and get Lebanon back on the path of (wait for it, Iraq hawks!) multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian democracy. Before that, US troops intervened in 1958 at the request of Lebanon's elected government to stabilize the country through its election of that fall. At the time, Lebanon was threatened by Syrian (United Arab Republic) troops that had crossed the border and was suffering riots in several major cities."Of course, our hatred of the United States will increase if America attacks Iraq," says Mohammed Nawfal, a barber. "The Lebanese have experienced much bloodshed and there is a history of bloody American involvement in Lebanon. So we feel more sympathy for Iraq than other countries because we have been there."
Who could dislike the US after that?
What the barber would tell you, most likely, is that after arriving to save the Palestinians, the US ended up choosing de facto sides to prop up a government few Lebanese wanted. And he would likely construe the 1958 intervention as bolstering the minority Christian government at the expense of Lebanon's muslims and Druze, that US support was a cold war power play suppressing arab nationalism by design.
Do not mistake Unqualified Offerings' point here. UO is not saying Mr. Nawfal is right and we're terrible people. Unqualified Offerings is saying that what matters is that Mr. Nawfal thinks he's right and we're terrible people. The fact that we launched our interventions in the name of Good Things counts for nothing with people like Mr. Nawfal. That the interventions may have accomplished at least some good things doesn't either. (I am convinced that mitigating the humanitarian catastrophes of Sabra and Shatila really was the immediate motive for the Reagan Administration intervention, which I was old enough to follow at the time.)
Unqualified Offerings is saying, once again, that military intervention buys a country almost nothing in terms of lasting gratitude (and you can ask Mr. DeGaulle if you don't believe UO). Our coming Glorious Liberation of Iraq will simply produce legions of Iraqi Mr. Nawfals, and smaller legions of Iraqi Mr. Attas. Do not be fooled by any short-term kite-flying or parades. The real issue is not the immediate post-conquest reaction, but the mood a year from then, and five years from then, and ten.
A few weeks ago, Unqualified Offerings snarkily asserted that "The problem with neoconservatives is everybody has them." Let's be less snarky:
It's a conservative world. Sorry, liberals among you, but it's true. From continent to continent and country to country, most people prefer the familiar to the strange, whether in terms of people or folkways or governance. The West did not invent ethnocentrism, we just named it. I pluck you down anywhere in the world, outside of a major metropolis, and I will be plucking you down among people who like their own tribe better than the next tribe and the next tribe better than, well, you. What bothers Mr. Nawaf about the history of US intervention in Lebanon is less that the interventions were "bloody" - Lebanon's neighbors and its own factions far excel us there - than that we weren't Lebanese.
The essential conservatism of the entire planet is the reef on which virtually every universalist "progressive" movement has foundered. Oh, you can find factions and individuals that warm to "foreign" causes. A certain number of Ukrainians will fight for Hitler, a certain number of Nicaraguans for Lenin.
A certain number of Afghans for Brezhnev.
When it's all over, these are the folks that get strung up on the lampposts.
Right now the United States government is busy putting itself in military opposition to this one known immovable object. I do not argue that democracy, free economies and individual liberty are not "universal goods," or that certain foreigners somehow don't deserve them. I love two out of the three and find no acceptable substitute for the other (democracy). Every human alive deserves to live in these conditions. But these universal goods are very, very hard to foist on someone at gunpoint. They take root when the people in question come to want them for themselves, to insist on it by themselves and to take them, as much as possible, with their own hands. Eastern Europe was the great lesson of the 1990s. Iran looks like it might prove the point for the Noughts.
Liberty, self rule and free enterprise are anti-paternalism. Intervention in the name of "liberation" is paternalism itself. We foul our own gift when we give it by force.
Morning Murder Minute - The ATF and IRS have launched a criminal investigation of Bull's Eye Shooter Supply in Tacoma. It was Bull's Eye's Bushmaster XM-15 that ended up in the car of John Muhammad and Lee Malvo back in October. According to the Tacoma News Tribune:
The owner of Bull's Eye is cooperating, but told the press his store is being made a "scapegoat."According to the [Seattle Times], the Bull’s Eye probe covers the possibility that the store failed to file federal tax forms for several years, that gun sales records were not properly maintained and that an employee may have stolen firearms or sold them improperly.
Investigators turned to those issues about 10 days ago after the completion of an ATF compliance audit, a process in which agents attempt to trace each weapon from manufacturer to store to retail buyer.
Early in the audit agents were unable to match about 340 weapons with sales records, but that number has been reduced to 90 through examination of other documents and receipts, The Times reported.
Paperwork shows that the rifle arrived at Bull's Eye on July 2, so it was always, as Unqualified Offerings noted somewhere, impossible that it would turn out to be the rifle used to kill Jerry Taylor on a Tucson golf course back in March.
On the win some-lose some front
That's from the Daily Oklahoman. You still love us, America, and that means a lot. Sunspot.com adds thatA juvenile court judge on Wednesday rejected efforts from the court- appointed guardian of sniper suspect John Lee Malvo to obtain criminal investigative records in the case.
Judge Charles Maxfield also denied a request by prosecutors to have the guardian removed from the case. Prosecutors had argued that state law does not require a court-appointed guardian for a juvenile who already has court-appointed lawyers.
Petit, perhaps we haven't mentioned, is not just Malvo's guardian. He is a lawyer.Describing his reduced role as leaving him "toothless" and "frustrated," [guardian] Petit said after the hearing that prosecutors have not given him information he sought weeks ago and are guaranteeing an incomplete report to the court. "It seems like they are trying to hide something," he said.
Meanwhile the NYT reported late last month that all sorts of trouble surrounds giving out the reward money.
Meanwhile, to the surprise of few Unqualified Offerings readers, there is nothing new in the way of evidence of a connection between the snipers and the Jamaat al-Fuqra group. This story rested on a single third-hand statement by a sheriff in southwestern Virginia to a Washington Times reporter that the FBI had told him "there was a connection" to an al-Fuqra community in Georgia. The story has appeared only in Washington Times family publications or in opinion organs referring back to the Washington Times piece. Even the WashTimes itself appears to have printed no follow-ups. Since that paper clearly has a motive to break any terrorism connection story, and since they haven't, two obvious conclusions suggest themselves:
1) They tried mightily to independently confirm an al-Fuqra link and couldn't; or
2) They didn't try because they were afraid it wouldn't pan out; or
3) They always knew it was a mirage and didn't want to waste resources on it.
This Is Sports Center with Unqualified Offerings - David Aldridge on certain sportswriters in Chicago and New York who won't stop obsessing over what Michael Jordan's decision to play two years with the Wizards means for his "legacy":
Meanwhile, Chad Orzel has your Maryland basketball report.What amazing fortitude these men have, to be parents both to their own children and to a 39-year-old man who lives hundreds of miles away. How do they find the time to tell the world both what's wrong with their teams in their towns and to be curators of the "I Know What's Best for Michael Jordan" museum?
Reading Around - Coolest passage from the latest issue of Virginia Postrel Magazine, from the an item called "Inquiry and Ideology":
Meanwhile, how many times has this happened to you? You read something you admire so much you intend to write an extensive appreciation of it. You don't get around to the extensive appreciation, which means you end up forgetting to even mention the article in the first place.No political stance has a monopoly on either good or bad research.
In fact, some of the most interesting research I've read (as well as some of the most tendentious and horribly written) comes from leftist, postmodern scholars of "material culture." If you want to know about the history of shopping, about women's beauty culture, about what ready-made clothes meant to turn-of-the-century immigrants, or about the relation between modernist ideology and domestic ideals, you have to find scholars who think those questions are worthy of study. If the work is good, it doesn't matter what political leanings may have originally inspired their inquiry. Curiosity about reality is incompatible with political litmus tests.
Which is a lead-up to saying that Gene Callahan's essay, "The Lessons of History," may be the best political essay I've read in 2002. It's a thorough dismantling of the politicized history of Victor Davis Hanson, among others. It is something close to the last word on sloppy "Munich" analogies. Viz:
Simply put, this essay puts Callahan on the inside track for UO's coveted "Dove of the Year" when this year's Unqualified Successes awards are handed out.Another technique for getting the "lessons of history" to favor your ideological view is to cherry-pick your examples. If you are a hawk, find every example where someone acted "boldly" and won. Ignore little events like Napoleon's invasion of Russia, or the fact that Athens lost the Peloponnesian War, to a great extent, because it did act boldly in attacking Sicily. Be especially sure, in these perilous times, never to mention the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which acted boldly against a terrorist threat, attacked a country, Serbia, it believed was harboring terrorists… and ceased to exist four years later.
UPDATE: Doh! Reader Dave Lull notes the original version of this item lacked a link to Gene Callahan's essay. Fixed!
New Moon - Just when Unqualified Offerings had gotten out of the habit of forlornly clicking through to the dormant Letter from Gotham, selenously-pseudonymous Diana Moon reasumed blogging months ahead of schedule. And she has quickly returned to her criminal ways (being interesting).
Unqualified Offerings just thought you should know.
Pre-War is not an adjective but a noun, writes Jim of Objectionable Content, continuing his documentation of the disunction between our stated and real Iraq policies. Another must-read.
Things to Come - The Pontificator does some useful pointificating:
This has it exactly right. And it gets to the fatal flaw of the so-called Bush Doctrine of "preemption" and militant nonproliferation. The Bush Doctrine cannot make the answer to Question 1 "harder." Oh, with massive applications of force we can make it harder for Iraq, say, to acquire weapons of some destruction. And while we focus on that, other governments and dyspeptic NGOs quietly acquire their own. Meanwhile, the Bush Doctrine, seriously pursued, guarantees a "More" answer to Question 2.Let's throw out the conventional wisdom and ask some threshold questions:
1) In ten years, will it be easier, or harder, to obtain weapons of mass destruction?
2) In ten years, will people outside the U.S.A. hate the U.S.A. more, or less, than they do today?
These are the two questions which matter. Any foreign policy that we propound should be focused on obtaining a "harder" answer to question one, and a "less" answer to question two.
It is a recipe for catastrophe. (When the catastrophe comes, of course, the same people whose policies made it inevitable will assure us that the problem was that we didn't intervene enough.)
The Pontificator's solution to this is not the same as UO's solution. He casts the problem as a conflict between "multilateralism" and "unilateralism." Unqualified Offerings thinks that's wrong: the issue is one of interventionism versus non-interventionism. But read his item to get the full flavor of his argument. It's very much worth it. And he's spot on about the core questions.
You Got That Right - Avedon Carol points out, fondly, that Unqualified Offerings is an extremist. (See bottom of post.) That is so true! However, Unqualified Offerings is an extremist in the defense of liberty and extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.
Get Your Copy Today - Great news! The latest issue of Virginia Postrel Magazine is out! This internet periodical, sometimes called "The Scene," looks like a weblog, only instead of a bit of new material every day or two (or three), you get a whole ton of material every few weeks. Unqualified Offerings hasn't had a chance to read it all yet but it looks well worth your time.
(Actually, one of her new items is a vow to update her site more frequently. Unqualified Offerings wonders, Once a magazine editor always a magazine editor?)
How's That Again? - Gene Healy has a couple of questions about this "new barbarian" thing for fellow CATO-ite Brink Lindsay.
A Fanboy's Notes - Surprisingly nonclueless, nonsmirking "thirtieth anniversary of Dungeons and Dragons" item on NPR from October 26. (Maybe UO will change its name to TardyPundit. Link is to a RealAudio feed.) They don't mention other roleplaying games, but their hook is the D&D-specific anniversary, so they have an excuse. This time.
Mailbag III - You've heard of people who play period music on period instruments. Reader Terry Cobb offers period chili:
If you interested in trying real Texas chili as it was done long ago, you might be interested in this recipe:
Ingredients
Jim Henley, 09:34 PM
Spree Graphs can be found at Lonewacko's site, where he considers the question of whether and how John Muhammad and Lee Malvo, suspects in the vast majority of murders committed in the United States over the last year, could have been caught earlier. Master databases get mentioned. Worth reading.
Mailbag II - Reader/Gaming Buddy Greg Pearson e-mailed about UO's fantasia on the series "24," in an item called "A Pack, Not a TV Show":
Greg informs this website that the motto of "liberal/libertarian hybrids" is "We'd rather give the Democrats our money than give the Republicans our freedom." (Greg is younger than this website, and may have missed the Clinton Administration.)For the confused liberal/liberatarian hybrids in the audience:
What's the difference between 24: The Libertarian Version (see A Pack, Not A TV Show) and, for example, the TIPS program(see More In Sorrow Than In Anger Post)?
The great failure in the show is that people don't have the opportunity to rat out their neighbors to the government. But the government encouraging people to rat out their neighbors is otherwise a bad thing.
Now to the question at hand. One thing's for sure, if it were easy to answer, Unqualified Offerings wouldn't have sat on Greg's e-mail since November 15th! It's still not quite sure it can verbalize all the distinctions - UO has been somewhat conflicted on the "pack, not a herd" stuff since shortly after thinking it up in the first place.
The first distinction that jumps out between the "24" scenario in UO's fantasia and the TIPS program is specificity. The tipsters in the fantasia are responding on a volunteer basis with information related to a particular, imminent threat. TIPS, on the other hand, is forever. The next difference is that, in the fantasia, anyone might come forth with information. TIPS aimed to create a whole new class of citizens engaged in ongoing surveillance and reporting.
And yes, the government sponsorship makes a difference too. TIPS can metastasize and become more intrusive over time, growing from an "antiterrorism program" to an "antidrug" program and beyond until (likely at the behest of a Democratic President) TIPSters are reporting on everything from deadbeat dads to people who skip their auto emissions tests. TIPS reifies "busybody culture," while the "24" scenario relies on nothing more than the level of "busybodiness" we currently have.
Here's an early Offering on where busybody culture leads and what it has to do with tyranny.
Reader Peter Taylor offered a longish objection to "Acting Like Grownups," in which Unqualified Offerings took on the thesis that the United States has become "the designated driver of the planet." (UO averred that designated drivers encourage those with them to act irresponsibly. In this case, "those with them" = "the rest of the Earth.") Peter writes:
Necessary editorial interpolation: It was actually others who created the "designated driver metaphor." They are credited in the original Offering. UO simply took it in a direction the originators would no doubt abhor. It should be noted that Peter's objection is to UO's extension specifically.This is in regard to your suggestion that the the USA is the "designated driver" of the Western world, and that the other nations would quit being "shitfaced and obnoxious" if we quit enabling them by acting in this capacity.
Also: there were shitfaced and obnoxious people before there were designated drivers, and if designated drivers disappeared tomorrow, there would be shitfaced and obnoxious people on Tuesday. But in the absence of US "care," there would be a natural pressure on other countries to act more responsibly than they sometimes do. There would still be shitfaced and obnoxious countries to be sure, but over time, fewer. Peter again:
With all due respect to Peter, if there was ever a metaphor that has been pushed too far it's the fantasy that US military intervention somehow constitutes "draining the swamp" in which terror breeds. "Fanning the flames" is at least as plausible a figuration. As for the French government "weasel(ling) it's way to the bottom of Al Qaeda's target list," how does this not constitute defending the security of French citizens, which is theoretically the French government's top job? (The security of American, Australian, British and Israeli citizens, for example, coming further down France's list.)One problem I have with this metaphor is that there is a large element of public good in keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of megalomaniacs and in "draining the swamp" in which the international terrorists breed, especially for nations that are too small to make a large contribution to the effort or to be likely to be the principal target. This public good is expensive to produce both in terms of the cost of fielding a strong military and in making oneself a higher profile target (France seems to be trying very hard to weasel its way to the bottom of Al Qaida's list of targets). In contrast, being sober enough to drive home is mostly a private good, at least for the people who are in a position to negotiate about who will be the designated driver (a drunk driver is more likely to kill himself or a random stranger than he is any of his friends). A ride home is also a private good because the driver can threaten to give rides to some people but not others.
In contrast, it is hard to drain the swamp that breeds Australia-hating Al Qaida terrorists without also draining the swamp that breeds Al Qaida terrorists who hate France.A second problem with this metaphor is that the Western nations are not equally situated. France's contribution to an international swamp-draining coalition is unlikely to make the difference between success and failure. Furthermore, the largest and most successful countries are the most conspicuous targets. In terms of the drinking metaphor, the USA is the only person at the bar who can afford to own a car all by himself, and he is also the person who lives the farthest away, and who would thus be the most put out by having to walk home. Rather than blaming the USA for being a stupid negotiator or a psychologically naive enabler, I suggest that this is simply one of those perverse situations where the person who is physically the strongest is paradoxically the one who is in the weakest bargaining position.
A more helpful description of this problem is that we face an asymmetric multiplayer prisoners' dilemma game. I get the language of the "multiplayer prisoners' dilemma" from a chapter in Richard Dawkins' book, _The Selfish Gene_, but the same basic problem is also described in different language by Garrett Hardin's 1968 Science article, "The Tragedy of the Commons", both of which I highly recommend. Hardin warns in the context of his overgrazing ranchers scenario that "natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial."
The deluxe description of this problem may be found in Mancur Olson's book, _The Logic of Collective Action_. Olson discusses how the ability of a group of people to successfully negotiate to produce a public good depends both on the size of the group (the number of independent players) and on how evenly or unevenly the need for the good is dispersed among the players.
In short, while I see a certain degree of justice in this "designated driver" metaphor, I think you push it too far.
In an e-mail titled, "I'm sleepless and I need a shot of NyQuil," Chris McHale writes:
That's right, loyal reader. Unqualified Offerings got linked by Antiwar.com again. (For you traffic gollums, a front-page Antiwar.com link is worth about a thousand extra visits the first day, then dribs and drabs once you get moved to the Viewpoints page.)Oh Lord, please stop the neocons relentless rant about the inevitably of war. Blahdeblahdeblahdeblah. Want a first class migraine? Let your ear wander to WABC Talk Radio, NYC, where, between an onslaught of depressing ads for cancer treatments and debt consolidation, you can treat yourself to 20 hours every day of fact contorting blather about liberals and borders and culture and evil ahabs armed to the teeth with WMD's ready to unleash hell on our very way of life.
The other 4 hours is devoted to alien abductions.
Reader Herman Yam has been wondering which dystopian comic book future we're heading for. He offers two candidates, APPLESEED and GIVE ME LIBERTY. He also writes
Herman happily writes UO's apologia for it, which is an awfully nice thing for a reader to do. It also asked Mrs. Offering, who did graduate work in Middle Eastern Affairs at GWU, if she had heard about the place. She recalled it as generally pro-Arab but not insane. Plus, UO performed it's standard test for pro-Arab/Palestinian/Islam/whatever websites - plug "Jews" into the site search engine and see if anything icky comes back.I see that you sourced MERIP in your recent post on the NOI five percenters. Not that I can suggest another source, but I am rather mistrustful of them, as I am when I see the former war-blog folk sourcing MEMRI or whatever Martin Kramer's shop (Washington Center for Middle East Policy?) is. It's the same "he makes a good point, but look who he backs it up with" feeling I get whenever Aziz Poonawalla writes one of his epics and then uses Counterpunch as a reference. Or the truly bizarro incident a month ago when Eric Alterman actually linked to a John Birch related site. That reminds me to go heckle him about that. I'll give you credit for noting that the denial was a stretch and that MERIP was being sympathetic to the 5%ers. It's just the crabby conservative in me wanting them to get slapped around I guess.
My other objection was that the article sounded like another academic trying to show that he knew hip hop was serious n' y'all don't get it. I'm just tired of hearing how important any genre is because of what it generally means in aggregate. Hip-hop is not great because of what it is trying to express; individual works of it are great only if they express themselves well. I love anime and its good forms reflect all kinds of pathologies in Japanese culture. I will not say it is a vital art form (too much of it is dreck) nor will I say that Americans should immerse themselves to better "help" the Japanese with some problem, because the artistic expression of it is but a stylized snapshot.
Mailbag - Unqualified Offerings has been spending the holiday weekend hanging out with the family, and really learning Movable Type. It turns out that amazing prodigies of presentation are possible once you really know the system, none of which will be evident in the appearance of this weblog. (UO is saving the fancy stuff for its gaming-related sites.)
Still, this website has three words for other MT-using bloggers: the MTInclude tag. It is your friend, particularly those of you who don't have your sidebars on your archive pages.
Anyway, let's take advantage of the news lull to get caught up on the (non-chili-related) mail.
Kevin Baker responded to this site's Offering on getting out of jury duty as follows:
That'd do it. Improbably, Maryland has one of the more explicit recognitions of the right of jury nullification - or did last time Unqualified Offerings checked. (In Britain, they've pretty much decided on nullifying the juries instead.)Ask the judge if you can advise the other jury members on the concept of jury nullification.
Mr. Aziz Poonawalla of Unmedia e-mailed Max Sawicky and me about NoWarblog:
And here Unqualified Offerings thought the strongest argument was If we don't conquer Iraq, the hawks will run McCain against us in the primaries and hello one-term presidency. But UO supposes the Administration hasn't come right out and said that.I do have a request. The strongest pro-war argument from the Administration is this scenario:
"Saddam evades inspectors, still manages to develop one nuke, seals it into an underwater bubbble on an innocous and untraceable cargo freighter flying some private merchant flag from the S Pacific, then sends the ship one mile off LA port and detonates."
The strongest pro-war argument from warbloggers/neocons is that a large Arab country like Iraq needs to be smacked down to provide impetus for democratic reform in all of Arabia and destroy Islamic fundamentalism.
Can you make responding to these talking points a priority? because they are the cornerstones of the pro war argument, and if you can focus your fire on them I think the end result would be enormously more likely to have influence on the public sphere.
Briefly, there is a small but finite risk that Saddam would try to smuggle a single, untested nuclear weapon into the United States and set it off without warning. That risk is somewhat higher as long as the US and Britain continue what Jim of Objectionable Content has documented is an 11-year undeclared war for "regime change." That's a big reason that Unqualified Offerings has argued against our formal policy of bearbaiting trapped foreign leaders. But that's a small risk. You see people saying that if there's any chance whatsoever that Saddam would do this, we have to overthrow him. These people are on drugs. Because bigger nuke and germ risks get worse with the overthrow scenario. Those risks are: Nuclear Pakistan falls, or freelancing harabists in its military slip one of its bombs to a group like Al Qaeda; Al Qaeda picks up surplus Soviet nukes; the Chinese decide that the grand encirclement is proceeding too far, so they see to it that Al Qaeda gets the bomb; or, in the immediate postwar chaos of this much-desired conquest of Iraq, diehard elements of Saddam's armed forces slip some bioweapons into hostile hands.
Of these dire possibilities, only the Chinese angle seems less likely than a Saddam Bomb attack now, and all of them get worse in the aftermath of an Iraq conquest.
Without formally getting to it, this has partly constituted a response to the second argument Aziz has seen, that "a large Arab country like Iraq needs to be smacked down to provide impetus for democratic reform in all of Arabia nd destroy Islamic fundamentalism."
Riiight. From the perspective of the Arab world, they've been enduring a half century of smack downs. It doesn't seem to have improved their attitudes. "The beatings will continue until morale improves" makes a cute cubicle poster, but not an effective foreign policy.
There are two big problems with the "humiliation" thesis, and when Unqualified Offerings says two, it means a million, but let's keep it short. First, it assumes that the target demographic for Islamic Fundamentalism would ascribe our victory in Iraq to our democracy and secularism. There's no particular reason to believe that's how they would read the outcome, even if that's how the neos read it. (Our neos, I mean.) Nor need they believe that Iraq lost because of its excessive devotion to Islamist revolution or its lack of democracy. Your young harabist wannabe is as likely to say, "Iraq fell because
a) it was insufficiently devoted to the faith;
b) Saddam was too nice - he had nasty germs and gases that he could have used against the West but didn't until it was too late;
c) the US and Britain once again successfully employed "divide and conquer" techniques, proving more than ever the need for a unified, militant Ummah.
We need to smack down one of their lackey regimes - Pakistan? Jordan? Qatar? - to provide the impetus for Islamist reform elsewhere. And more than ever we need to demonstrate that the Jew-Crusaders are vincible by carrying out a spectacular attack on their territory, is a plausible response from the target audience.
Now that Unqualified Offerings thinks about it for a minute, the notion that "a large Arab country like Iraq needs to be smacked down to provide impetus for democratic reform in all of Arabia nd destroy Islamic fundamentalism" just seems too stupid for words. We might define "too stupid for words" as the certainty that one's opponents will see the same virtues in your actions that you do.
Bill Dowling notes this appealing lesson in political economy he found on...ESPN.com:
That's from the November 5th Tuesday Morning Quarterback by Greg Easterbrook. Yes, November 5th. Once again, Unqualified Offerings reminds its readers that the prefix "Insta-" appears nowhere in this site's name, description or terms of use. It wouldn't even if Unqualified Offerings had terms of use.Klingons to Make Soft-Money Donations to Appropriations Committee Chairmen: Last week, Boeing disclosed that for three years it has been test-flying a strange-looking stealth-fighter prototype called the Bird of Prey. Bird of
Prey -- that's what Klingon battle cruisers are called! Boeing has been cooperating with the Klingons? Next the Klingons will want to bill their cost-overruns to the United States defense budget.Speaking of the defense budget, Boeing also said that it had funded the Bird of Prey program privately, at a cost of $67 million, so that any technology developed would be proprietary. Meanwhile the F22 fighter development program for the Air Force, run by Lockheed Martin, has burned through $26 billion of the taxpayers' money over a decade and is yet to field operational aircraft Number One. So when a contractor has to spend its own money, it can engineer, build and fly a radi cal new design for $67 million. When the taxpayer is footing the bill on a cost-plus basis, it takes 10 years and $26 billion to accomplish nothing but generating demands for more money. TMQ wonders if Klingon battle cruisers are developed on a cost-plus basis.
Simon Scott e-mailed an early response to the Iraqi "parliament's" "rejection" of UN Security Council Resolution 1441. It's interesting to see how well Simon's analysis held up. Some people did much worse, assuming that the "parliament's" "rejection" meant Saddam's rejection, meant immediate war, meant Saddam was irrational, etc. Simon said:
Of course, absence of drapes would not mean that drapes were absent. Or whatever.Jim: Saddam is going to probe away at the coalition that has formed around the UN resolution. The resolution itself is ambiguous enough to allow the US to attack at any time but Saddam wants to find out if Russia and France can be prized out of the coalition again. Saddam wants some political cover for going back to the UN to see if any of the resolution is negotiable. Saddam will probably want 'clarification' on the basis that he needs to convince his parliament to come round to allowing inspectors in. Saddam can ask for terms to be further defined with a straight face with 100 per cent of his 'mp's' standing behind him.
The vote is also aimed at Blix. Saddam is sending a signal via the proxy of his parliament that inspections are likely to be difficult given the legitimate opposition amongst his people. It's saying to Blix, 'look mate you're a creature of the UN you know how these things can get difficult once things get put to a vote don't expect a quick report when you get here people have legitimate concerns.' Blix is the focus of the next 60 days in this saga. Blix is the target. Mind you mate who knows maybe Saddam will reject the resolution. Maybe intel have got the timing question wrong and Saddam has a credible WMD and wants the same respect as North Korea.
BTW they like their drapes and curtains in Iraq or what? Every government office has tons of drapes yuk.
Treasure Planet II - Okay, Reader/Gaming Buddy Mike Jacobs asks what was so great about this movie. Here's a quick, personal view:
First off: There's no getting around the visuals - they're spectacular. But
what makes it truly special is:
The story is damn solid. That Robert Louis Stevenson guy sure could write 'em.
The movie is able to swoop from cataclysmic scale to the intimate scale very fluidly.
It has an intimate scale at all: the characters matter.
The animation on the intimate scale - frex, Young Jim Hawkins' mother's face when tucking him in - is splendid.
Emma Thompson just kills as the voice of the captain.
Everyone gets their measure of dignity, even David Hyde-Pierce's dogfaced astronomer.
There really is a controlling esthetic to it - it's surprisingly close to a coherent view of a transhuman far-future where a particular kind of style is valued over brute efficiency.
That spaceport. Wow.
God it's pretty. But I said that, didn't I?