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Strong opinions, weakly held

Month: March 2003 (page 4 of 12)

Echoes of the past

Take this for what you will, but the eerie similaries between Hitler’s speech that started World War II and Bush’s speech from Monday night bug me. Am I saying that Bush is Hitler, or anything like it? Of course not. Certainly Saddam Hussein’s Iraq is not comparable to Poland in 1939. What I am saying is that we need to closely monitor the ambitions of those members of the administration who were eager to abandon peace and who see this war as a beginning rather than as an end.

Send Back the Statue of Liberty – Satire

Send Back the Statue of Liberty does in fact turn out to be satirical in nature. Never mind my earlier fulmination.

The coalition of the whipped

The White House released the list of members of the coalition of the willing. I see that Afghanistan is on the list, I guess that means that we can count on Iraq’s support for our next overseas adventure as well.

I hear Bahrain is nice this time of year

At this point I really wish that Saddam Hussein would take up Bahrain’s offer and go into exile. It’s better than he deserves, but it would save a lot of lives.

A small victory in the war on spam

I have trained SpamAssassin’s Bayesian filter to correctly identify spam from some art dealer and trash it. The only other spam that consistently gets through promotes various nightclubs in Las Vegas. Hopefully I’ve conquered that as well.

Hoping for the best

At this point, the damage has been done. Now that the die is cast and war is coming, I hope we remove Saddam quickly, that there’s as little loss of life as is possible, and that the people of Iraq wind up with something better in the aftermath than they’ve had in the past few decades. At the same time, I’m not thrilled with our larger prospects. The Bush administration’s attacks on the credibility of the UN and NATO were not accidental, they’re part of the plan. These are the security structures that the US created in part to serve its own national interests in the aftermath of World War II. The current administration sees them as our oppressors. I don’t see how we can restore the value of these alliances when we completely discount them.

I also fear the aftermath of the war if it goes well. Will it give us the confidence to attack other countries? Will we follow through with our promises to the people of Iraq? I hope for the best, but expect the worst. I just have no faith in our leaders.

On a side note, I apologize for my war obsession, but I feel like it’s the most important issue that we’re confronting right now, and indeed, the most important we’ve confronted in my lifetime. The current administration is trying to change the very character of this nation and the way it relates to every other country in the world. I can’t turn away from that, much as I might like to spend more time discussing pleasant topics.

The real reason for war

Nick Denton says these are the real reasons for war:

The real reasons occasionally seep out. The West needs Iraq, and its oil supplies, to put pressure on the real enemy, Saudi Arabia, and change the balance of power in the Middle East. Saddam’s aggression, though not a direct threat to the US, is a danger to Israel, a country dear to many Americans. And fundamentalist Muslims, who hate the West whatever we do, might as well learn to fear it: the war in Iraq will demonstrate the price of defiance.

You might be surprised to learn that he considers these to be good and valid reasons. Conquering a country to get at its resources for strategic reasons is nothing to be proud of, and making an example of a country just because we can is barbaric. The reasons we’ve been given are mostly hogwash, but these reasons are worse.

If you want to list good reasons for war with Iraq, they are that Iraq intends to eventually become a nuclear power, and would probably use that nuclear power as cover for invading and oppressing its neighbors. There’s also the fact that Saddam Hussein is brutal and vicious, and has subjected his people to decades of oppression and deprivation. I fear what Iraq might do if it gains nuclear capability — not that they’ll give the source of their power to some Islamist yahoos to destroy a city, but that they’ll leverage that power to do the sorts of things that they’ve done since Saddam Hussein took over. Iraq has threatened Syria, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, and has actually invaded Kuwait and Iran.

All this garbage about using Iraq as the cornerstone for some sort of new world order makes me sick. It shocks me that anyone actually expects this inane domino theory to work. I don’t think it can even if we use our armored divisons to knock them over.

I respect the UK

This morning on the BBC World Service, I was listening to Tony Blair address the House of Commons, and I was once again surprised by what a great speaker he is. If the world thought he were in charge of the effort to disarm Iraq, I guarantee that the UN, NATO, and the European Union would be behind us. I was also impressed at the range of the debate, and at Blair’s fairness in addressing the arguments of those who are against the war. We don’t see any of that from the Bush administration — they’d prefer to pretend that anyone who’s against the war is acting out of some venal impulse or fear. Tony Blair is a great leader for Britain. He’s in an ugly position, but he still argues well from that position. I hope he remains as Prime Minister despite the fact that he hitched his wagon to President Bush and has not been well rewarded for it.

We’re also seeing Labour cabinet members in the UK resign to the back bench in protest against the war. Robin Cook’s resignation speech, delivered yesterday, was a masterpiece. As an American, I find the utter apathy of Congress toward the war to be galling and pathetic. The Republicans are willing to line up behind Bush on just about anything, and the Democrats are too scared and pathetic to step up to the plate and make themselves heard. I’m not sure why the UK’s political status quo seems so obviously superior to ours, but listening to any chunk of the debate going on today in the House of Commons will clearly illustrate just what a dreadful state we’re in.

Update: A transcript of Tony Blair’s speech is available. In reading it, I realize what a bad speaker, and a bad leader, President Bush really is. Tony Blair, despite being stuck with the bag of crap that America’s bad faith has created, makes a compelling argument for taking action against Iraq. President Bush has never come close to doing anything of the sort.

War in the Ruins of Diplomacy

The New York Times: War in the Ruins of Diplomacy

I don’t know Python

I don’t know Python but I did see a couple of referrers yesterday that offered the Python version of my little example. Here it is:

if depth: depth = depth + datadir.count('/') - 1

Now I know why Python programmers seem so smug.

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