View 259 May 26 - June 1, 2003 (original) (raw)
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Friday, May 30, 2003
Long ago my dissertation in political science was on mapping the political spectrum. I get a fair amount of mail asking about this, but I've been harried and never got around to writing it up again.
However, at one time I worked that into an article for one of Jim Baen's publications. I find that it is now on line, and while a few of the examples are a bit out of date, it reads pretty good even today. You can find it at:
http://www.baen.com/chapters/axes.htm
Weapons of Mass Destruction
They haven't found Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and at least some of the military people are beginning to think they never will: either he didn't have any, or he managed to destroy them all, or they are very well hidden indeed.
With that realization comes condemnation. Were we deceived?
Well, no. No more than we wanted to be, anyway.
First, does anyone question that Saddam had the resources to make any kind of WMD (other than nuclear, anyway) he wanted in any reasonably short time? After all, he had nerve agents, and mustard, and other such stuff, and actually used them at one time; whether they were all gone or not isn't terribly important because it's very easy, if you're a government, to get more.
To an intelligence officer, a "threat capability" is just that. Saddam had the means and the will, and what difference did it make whether or not he had kept any around this time?
The puzzlement here is why, if he didn't have anything to hide, did he go to such great lengths to make it look as if he did? Why not cooperate, more than cooperate, with Hans Blix and his Merry Band? You want to interview my scientists in Geneva, or New York, or Cancun? I'll send them, along with their families, first class tickets round trip. You want to look in my palaces? Bring the camera crew, and a good travelogue narrator, and we'll do a Public Television Special on The President's Many Palaces, or It's Good to be the President. What else do you want to see? You don't have to send in the Marines, Mr. Bush. I may not be a good guy, but I am not entirely stupid, and I saw what you did to Afghanistan: come to Baghdad and have tea. Or send your inspectors. We welcome them, and when you are done, please lift those sanctions so I can buy some food for my people, now that I've got almost enough palaces...
Why didn't he DO that? It's still the question I ask, and my guess is that he really counted on Bush being like Clinton, someone who would be satisfied with dropping a few bombs and throwing in some cruise missiles, and he could be toyed with for months to years. After all the Democrats, many of them, were saying as much. And the French and the Germans and the Russians were dead against the invasion, not like the last time, so --
It's all I can think of.
I welcome better suggestions.
I didn't care for this war, and I don't care for it now. I think the morass comes now, a low level mess, with just enough sabotage to keep people miserable and without decencies of life, punctuated by a few successes and even a few spectacular ones. I would hope that without the UN bureaucrats we can do a better job than is happening in Kossovo, where there are areas that don't have electricity restored after years of UN administration. And if I had to be occupied, I'd rather be occupied by American GI's than anyone else I know of. And clearly I am in a distinct minority: most Americans continue to approve of the war, and I don't want to be in a fight with them over it.
It's going to be a long road, building liberal democracy in a place that has absolutely no democratic traditions, in a "nation" that was formed out of lines on a map with no thought to ethnic and religious divisions, among a people who may not have made the blood feud quite as high an art form as they have in the Balkans, but who still have traditions of the Avenger of Blood, particularly among the Shiite majority.
I make no doubt we'll do better at it than most would, and I'm prepared to cheer our successes and mourn our failures; but if it were left to me, I'd pump enough oil to break OPEC, get world oil down to a competitive price -- and get the heck out of there, leaving a stern warning that harboring our enemies will get you another visit.
And I really don't care if they find real WMD.
We have got Cable Modem at Chaos Manor and it works. The cable company had to come out an install an amplifier and remove some ancient line traps, but now that they have done so, I have plenty of signal, and it's very fast.
It will be a while before I figure out how to integrate it into the network, and what safety precautions I need. For the moment it operates on a single machine not networked to anything else. It will stay that way until I know better what I am doing. Getting it operating was, well, interesting, but that's a story for the column.
Suggestions welcomed including products I ought to be reviewing for Internet Security for small offices and home offices.