The Washington Post has a rundown of what might happen when we go to war with Iraq. They mention (as they have previously) that special operations troops are already in Iraq, and that one of their roles will be making sure that chemical and biological weapons will not be used. That brings up an obvious question — how will they do that? Either they know where the chemical and biological weapons are, which leads me to wonder whether the US government is sandbagging the UN inspectors in a big way, or they don’t, and the special operations troops have no way of preventing such attacks.

Another disturbing hypothetical that occurred to me as I read the article is what happens if the Iraqis gas our advancing troops. There will be extreme pressure for us to use nuclear weapons. I can only imagine that our popularity around the world will increase mightily if we nuke Iraq after we started what most deem to be an unnecessary war with them.

I hear a lot of people trying to figure out what France’s real motives are for staunchly opposing war with Iraq. Ironically, one of the ones I hear most often is the possibility that France is holding out due to its oil deals. These are usually the same people who say with absolute conviction that oil has nothing to do with the United States’ reason for wanting war.

What bothers me is the consistent assumption that France has base motives. Maybe they do, but let’s just step away from the situation and think about this logically. Could it be that France feels that avoiding (or postponing) a war is as much a moral issue as Bush thinks going to war is? Chirac has the support of a huge majority of his people and, in fact, a huge majority of the people worldwide. Most other governments in the world agree with Chirac as well — that the inspections are working, even though we have to keep Iraq under duress to make them work. But here in America, it’s played as though France’s behavior is outrageous.

I don’t agree with the French position, but their efforts at thwarting war have been no more outlandish than ours in promoting it. Just as France is obliquely threatening the potential EU membership of Eastern European countries that support war, we’re threatening countries that oppose war. Just as France is dismissing new UN resolutions that put the rubber stamp on a war without any consideration, so too are we dismissing new compromise deals that would give the inspections more time.

My point here is that we need to be a little less sanctimonious about France. Not only are their views in line with most of the rest of the world, but their behavior is no more strident than our own. I just think we need to be more honest with ourselves.

It seems pretty clear that war is coming really soon, or at least that the Iraqis think so. The Iraqi army seems to have moved into Kirkuk, and is fortifying the city and rounding up Kurds. They’ve been ethnically cleansing Kirkuk (an oil rich town near Iraqi Kurdistan) for years, removing the native Kurds and Turkmen, and bringing in Arab settlers. It looks like they’re trying to get rid of the remaining Kurds before the war starts, thus making it less likely that the Kurds will be able to overthrow the Iraqis and take over the town as they did in the uprising that followed Gulf War I. The fact that Iraq is moving into the town in force seems to indicate that they expect the invasion real soon now. It also exposes yet again the brutality of Saddam Hussein’s regime, not that we need any more examples.

Oh, and if the Kurds get the opportunity to take over Kirkuk in the case of war, I imagine things will not go well for the Arabs that settled there …

Michael Lind wrote a very short article that explains the nature of the road to hell that President Bush is leading us down, despite his doubtlessly good intentions.

Has Bush 43 had his “read my lips” moment? In his national press conference last week, he said unequivocally that he would call for a vote on the new UN resolution this week, regardless of how the votes are going to fall out. Now the administration is delaying the vote. Josh Marshall has the details. Compared to the constant string of lies and misrepresentations of Iraq’s misdeeds and capabilities, this isn’t a big deal, but it should illustrate to fence sitters just how out of control things are right now.

One thing I’ve never exactly figured out how to handle is my relationship with other webloggers. I read lots of other weblogs, and I know lots of webloggers read my site as well. That said, I’ve never had a blogroll. I used to not link to other weblogs at all, unless I had gotten a link from them, because I figured my readers were more interested in news from outside the cloistered world of weblogging. As the world of weblogging has grown, and more and more domain experts have started weblogs, often the best and most informed commentary you can get on any issue is from a weblog. That’s always been the case in the world of Web design, but now it’s true in the world of law, politics, economics, and in plenty of other areas as well.

Anyway, I’m trying to formulate how to give some recognition to the weblogs that I read, because they help shape my opinions, but I’m still not comfortable with the idea of a blogroll, because it becomes a tad too political. When you give recognition to a certain group of people, it makes the people not in the group feel slighted, and perhaps gives too much of an endorsement to the members of your blogroll. Besides, it might put pressure on the people in the blogroll to link to my site (if they don’t already), and I’m not sure how comfortable I am with that, either.

What would be nice is to have a system that basically lets you ping someone and say “I read your site.” Wait a minute, that system exists, and it’s called email. Maybe I’ll go on an emailing spree today and let some people know that I enjoy their writing …

I’m also considering posting some notes on sites that I’m adding to my aggregator just to give them the minimal amount of publicity that I can provide.

Salon has an article today about the grim job market for “tech jobs.” The article points out (correctly, I think) that the job market is worst for “tech generalists” or what I’ve heard referred to as dot com jobs. People with expertise in a particular area seem to be doing better than those who had these sort of ephemeral jobs doing Web stuff. I pretty much keep my eyes on the job listings for Java developers in my area constantly, and I’m just not very impressed with what I see.

Mozilla 1.3 is out. I’ve been using the beta for a couple of weeks and recommend it highly.

I’m beginning to get the feeling that working in IT (as opposed to, say, product development) actually puts a stain on your résumé, at least if you want to work in product development. Before this year, I had never worked in IT. I had done tech writing, QA, some sysadmin stuff on the side, consulting, Web design, Web application development as a consultant, software development on a product team, and other stuff. This past year, I’ve been working in the IT department, but still doing nothing other than designing and implementing applications. However, when I talk to people about moving into a product-related position, I seem to be getting some resistance because I’m “in IT.” Needless to say, I find this rather frustrating. Is this IT ghetto a universal phenomenon in the software industry? If so, why wasn’t I told about it?

Despite the fact that I usually talk about heavy stuff here, one of my big passions is computer games, and I’ve watched with interest the debate between Greg Costikyan, who has a game-design blog, and Warren Spector, uber game designer. The debate started after Costikyan commented on the state of the industry following Spector’s keynot at GCD. Spector replied, and now Costikyan has closed the loop. It’s an interesting debate, and diversion from everything else going on in the world.