George Soros has written an op-ed that’s appearing in Asian papers. This quote says it all:

The Bush administration believes that international relations are relations of power; legality and legitimacy are mere decorations.

They carry the same attitude toward the American people and toward Congress.

Update: it’s worth mentioning that you should read the entire article. His thesis is that America is creating a “supremacy bubble” where our expectations of what we’re capable of have been inflated beyond our actual capability. This thesis gets at what I think scares a lot of people both overseas and here in America about this war and the larger Bush agenda. I realized that my excerpt does absolutely nothing to illustrate what the piece actually says, it’s just an interesting point found within.

Looking at the membership list for the UN Security Council, I’m having trouble figuring out where we’ll get 9 votes for going to war with Iraq. There are 15 members, and 7 “no” votes or abstentions scuttles things. Here’s my list of people who aren’t going to vote “yes”: France, Germany, Pakistan, Russia, Syria, and China. That means if one of Guinea, Mexico, Angola, Cameroon, or Chile just abstains, it’s all over. I’m counting Spain, the US, the UK, and Bulgaria as sure “yes” votes. Certainly the odds are not stacked in our favor, although obviously we’re doing everything we can to induce, cajole, or bully the fence sitters to take our side.

The Washington Post has a quick rundown of what the media is saying in each of the Security Council countries.

Update: I saw on the news tonight that Pakistan is expected to vote in favor of the US/UK resolution and that it’s down to the US to land either Mexico or Chile, which seems doable.

Am I the only person who’s a bit bothered about the obsession with drone aircraft in the pro-war camp and in the media? After the war in Afghanistan and our assassination of people assumed to be al-Qaeda members in Yemen using Predator unmanned aircraft, they seem ominous, but what are we really talking about with regard to Iraq? Building unmanned aircraft seems like a challenge from next year’s Junkyard Wars to me. If Iraq wants to blow things up that are far away, can’t they just use guided (or unguided) missiles?

As I’ve said before, SpamAssassin 2.50 is quite an improvement over the 2.4x versions in terms of successfully catching spam, even without using the Bayesian filter. I finally felt like I had built up enough “ham,” mail I didn’t want to be treated as spam, spam that SpamAssassin caught automatically, and most importantly, spam that slipped past SpamAssassin, to train the Bayesian filters, so I did so yesterday. I have to say that SpamAssassin is working even better than before now that the Bayesian filtering has kicked in. Specifically, I was getting one or two pieces of spam every day from some kind of art dealer, and now the Bayesian filter is insuring that those messages are being routed into my spam folder. This morning, there was absolutely no spam in my inbox, and no false positives in my spam mailbox either. I haven’t had any problems with false positives in a long time, but I was getting some spam that was slipping through, much to my chagrin. The Bayesian filtering does not seem to have induced more false positives, and is reducing the misses, so I’m more pleased than ever. If things continue along these lines, then I will be pretty darn close to eradicating spam from my life.

I am linking to the New York Times article on the freedom fries stupidity today for one reason, and that is to capture the words of the perpetually hateful and clueless Tom DeLay for posterity:

“They have isolated themselves pretty well,” said Representative Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas and the majority leader.

Yeah, only about 90% of the world agrees with them.

Tim Bray lists 15 things that are scarier than Saddam. Number 12 is the one that keeps me up at night.

This month’s Mother Jones has one of the most thought provoking articles I’ve read in some time, concerning refugees (primarily from Iraq and Afghanistan) who are making their way to Australia only to find themselves imprisoned or deported. The stories of the refugees are completely heartbreaking, and for most of the article you think of the Australian policy on handling refugees as cruel and callous. But if Australia accepted every refugee that wants to resettle in the country, they would soon outstrip the meager resources of the continent, because literally millions of people around the world would prefer to live there over the hellhole where they were born (or fled to at some point).

People aren’t stupid. They know that if they immigrate to a western country, whether it’s the US, Canada, Australia, or any of a number of European countries, they’re going to live a better life than they would in their country of origin. If every country in the world opened its borders to free immigration, there would be an incredible mass exodus to these countries. The only way for us to get around this problem is to build up the countries that are losing population. Iraq is certainly blessed with more natural resources (not just oil, either) than Australia, but Iraqis are desperate to leave. Everyone knows why. That’s why if I really thought this administration could get rid of Saddam Hussein and rebuild Iraq as a successful state, I’d be all for giving it a shot. That’s why Thomas Friedman is in favor of war (or was).

Furthermore, I think that reading about these refugees provides a lot of insight into al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups that are not pursuing a specific political agenda but are rather basically just anti-us. It’s already well known that terrorists are not just recruited from the ranks of the destitute and hopeless, but rather from the disaffected. The success of western culture, not just in providing us with lots of stuff, but in exporting our popular culture to the rest of the world, attracts some people to do everything in their power to live here. For other people, it offends their certainty that it is they who should be on top.

If you’re already angry that an inferior culture seems to be getting all the breaks, the next logical step is believing it when an Osama bin Laden tells you that the “crusaders and Jews” are intentionally keeping you down because they hate you. Next thing you know, you’re in Afghanistan at a terrorist training camp, looking for a way toget even.

In this sense, I very much agree with conservatives. It’s not our foreign policy that motivates people who join al-Qaeda, it’s cognitive dissonance. They know that they’re better than we are, but by most modern measures that doesn’t seem to be the case. Nothing makes that more clear to me than seeing the other side of the coin, the refugees who yearn to live among us.

Joi Ito wonders today about the value of linking to thinks that seem to have already made the rounds. I’ve given some thought to this myself. On one hand, your readers aren’t going to appreciate coming to your site and seeing a bunch of links to stoires that they’ve already seen links to everywhere else. On the other hand, you can’t assume your readers read all the same sites you do. That’s a mistake that I’m prone to. Oftentimes readers send me links to things that I’ve seen a number of places, and which I didn’t link to simply because they already did seem overexposed. My general rule is to not link to stuff that’s really making the rounds unless I can say something original about it, or I can find background info about it that’s not getting any play elsewhere. If I do just want to link to something because I think that its overexposure does not outweigh its important, I try to make the item extremely short so those who have already seen it can blow past it quickly.

Awhile back, I noted that some stupid restaurant owners in North Carolina had replaced the french fries on their menus with a new item, “freedom fries.” Now, at the urging of a Republican congressman from North Carolina, the cafeterias at House office buildings have done the same. Can you imagine the government taking a more petty or childish official action? Will we next be sending some envoys to Paris to say “neener neener” to Jacques Chirac as he leaves his house? I realize that this is utterly and completely trivial in light of all of the other awful crap going on in the world, but it’s indicative of something larger. This sort of thing pretty clearly illustrates that we have government by and for idiots.

Gary Kamiya’s NYRB-esque anti-war piece in Salon yesterday is worth the read. He kind of digs at the heart of the thing that has made me angriest about the Bush administration’s push for war in Iraq since its inception right after 9/11. I would hope that readers of this site already know that my goal is to come at all issues with a spirit of inquiry. My goal is to figure out which questions to ask, find the answers to the degree possible, and then make a judgement. My judgement often changes when more facts come to light (as it has many times in trying to ascertain how we should handle our ongoing problems with Iraq).

With the Bush administration, I have never seen that spirit if inquiry at work. They started with a conclusion: we must invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein. From there, they’ve tried on any number of arguments which mysteriously melt away when attacked only to be replaced by others. I have no respect for someone who searches for facts to support an argument instead of making an argument based on the known facts. I won’t hash out all of the arguments from the pro-war camp yet again, but they all tend to fall along two axes: Iraq is a present threat to us, and allowing Saddam Hussein’s regime to stand would be immoral. Whenever you talk about the fact that we face greater threats (imminent nuclear proliferation in North Korea), you get hit with the moral argument. Whenever you talk about other immoral regimes (a list too long for this space), you get hit with the threat argument.

In literally every other country in the world, people have seen just how transparent the manipulation is. Americans see it, too, but they’re torn between fear (pushed hard by the Bush administration), loyalty to our soldiers, who will do as they’re ordered no matter what, and the general American impulse to give our government the benefit of the doubt. I can see scenarios where invading Iraq makes sense, but we’ve blown it. It’s too late. We’re going to do it anyway.