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Month: January 2003

Horning in

January 11, 2003
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We have some interesting stuff from a DoD news briefing delivered yesterday by Major General John F. Sattler, USMC. He’s the commander of the Combined Joint Task Force Horn of Africa.

This task force is carrying out operations in support of the war on terrorism in, obviously, the Horn of Africa region — that’s Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti and Yemen. It’s about 1,500 people large, including command staff.

The excerpt that interested me is as follows:

Q: General, this is Jim Mannion of AFP. I was wondering if you could describe the scope of the al Qaeda presence in Yemen up in the port area along Saudi Arabia; andalso, whether al Qaeda has been using Saudi territory as a haven and whether the Saudis have been cooperative in pursuing them? Thank you.

Maj. Gen. Sattler: The countries that we have responsibility for, obviously Yemen borders Saudi Arabia, but we are in no — we are not — our specific Combined Joint Task Force is not working directly with the Saudi government. Now, we’ve received information and intelligence across the entire inter-agency process so that we do get intelligence from other parts of the world that we’re able to take and fuse with our analysts on board the ship here to help build that jigsaw puzzle that now indicates who’s moving where and when.

Not sure what to make of that; I’m not a professional DoD watcher or anything. One way to read it is the slightly paranoid “Yeah, they’re not getting jack from the Saudis.” Another way to read it is the slightly placid “OK, so the Saudis are cooperating and everyone’s following procedure and they get the info as needed.” Your guess is probably as good as mine as to which is accurate, if either.

Still, it bears watching. He didn’t say “We’re getting intelligence from the Saudis through the inter-agency process.”

More cloth

January 10, 2003
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Reasons and rationales

January 10, 2003
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You know, I’m getting a little weary of hearing people tell me what the war on Iraq is about.

It’s not about the oil. If this were all a big plot to ensure Bush’s friends get their hands on oil, there are better places to go. There’s a crisis in Venezuela at the moment (link subject to change with time), and that’s in our hemisphere. Venezuela produces as much oil as Iraq. If it were about oil, we’d be heading down to South America to clean up that issue.

It was at least partially about oil in the Gulf War; the United States needed to head off any possibility that Iraq would take the Saudi oil fields. That was then. This is now. Find a new anti-war slogan; “No blood for oil” misses the point.

It’s not about terrorism. There aren’t any visible links. Sure, maybe the Iraqis are clever enough to back Al Qaeda without any signs visible by anyone other than US intelligence, but it’s unlikely, particularly given the clashing objectives of bin Laden and Hussein. Look at it this way: it’s becoming increasingly clear that there’s still extensive Saudi money behind Al Qaeda. How come half the journalists in the free world can turn up evidence of that, but nobody can find proof that Hussein supports Al Qaeda?

It’s not about weapons of mass destruction. We are not attacking North Korea, despite the fact that they don’t have a nuclear program yet. They may have two nuclear weapons; that doesn’t mean that, given a strategy of preemptive nonproliferation, we shouldn’t keep them from getting the means to get more nuclear weapons. Two is bad; unlimited is very bad. There’s a qualitative difference between ‘em.

(By the by, the FAS reported the possibility of two North Korean nukes in 1999. This isn’t some random idea the Bush administration invented.)

But hey, forget about North Korea. What about Iran, which is quite possibly a nuclear power? Iran doesn’t even have UN inspectors; anything could be happening there.

Iraq is the best place for the US to exert influence in the Middle East. I’m not gonna get into the morality or lack thereof of this. I’d just like to see people stop pretending it’s anything else. There are going to be side benefits. Iraq sponsors terrorists other than Al Qaeda, of course. Iraq would love to get nuclear weapons, and it would be nice to keep that from happening, yes.

However, the important thing is that the US will wind up with its biggest presence ever in the Middle East. That, too, is something one can argue about for ages. Will it cause even greater resentment? Is it worth it in the long term? Lots of different opinions about that.

Regardless, though, it’s good to remember a couple of things. Bush isn’t doing this cause he’s nuts or bloodthirsty; he also isn’t doing it as an altruistic exercise for the good of the world. It is a calm, considered extension of American power into an important geopolitical area. It reduces the necessity to rely on Israel, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia when conducting policy in the region.

Argue about that, but geeze, enough of the “no blood for oil” and enough of the 9/11 rhetoric and enough of the weapons of mass destruction.

Swiss army knives

January 9, 2003
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I’m sort of fooling around with a side project, with the intent of using Movable Type as a general content management system, and I came up with something that I thought was kind of clever. I wanted a list of offsite links on the front page, and I thought it might be nice to allow other blog authors to add links, but I didn’t want to give full template modification access. Thought about it a while; came up with a solution.

I created a category named “Offsite Links” and added a bunch of entries in that category. Each entry had the name of the destination site as the title, and the URL for the site as the entry body.

Then I added the following MT template code to the front page template:

<MTEntries sort_by="title" sort_order="ascend" category="Offsite Links">
<a href="<$MTEntryBody convert_breaks="0"$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a><br/>
</MTEntries>

Boom. Quick and easy link list effect. Note that this would also be a way to maintain a blogroll if you didn’t want to use blogrolling.com.

New neighbors

January 9, 2003
1 Comment

I just added Sub Judice to my blogroll, cause I’m a lawyer junkie. It’s not so much a weblog as it is a dialogue: two lawyers, discussing issues of interest to them. They’ve been talking about the Grutter v. Bollinger case recently, which may well mark the end of affirmative action in college admissions.

I’ve also added Confessions of a Mozillan, which is written by Dave Hyatt, one of the main Safari developers. He’s commenting on issues reported with Safari, and letting us know about fixes. This is very impressive interactivity.

And, while I’m pointing, I recommend reading TPB’s latest.

Dendrites

January 9, 2003
2 Comments

So: why doesn’t my web browser detect unlinked URLs in a page and turn them into links for me? Sure, sure, it should be an option I can turn off. However, I want to stop cutting and pasting stuff like http://www.meyerweb.com. For that matter, I wouldn’t mind if it picked up any hostname beginning with www — let it catch www.meyerweb.com too.

Catching anything that registers as a domain name might be a bit much. On the other hand, perhaps it might be worth doing a DNS lookup and converting anything that returns. In a very optimistic world with sufficient computing power, you could do the DNS lookup, check port 80, and if there’s something responding then do the conversion.

Hell, humans are slow readers. Go ahead and fetch the page and cache it in case that’s where I want to go next. At this point you ought to be prefetching allll the links, though.

And they say there’s no reasonable use for more bandwidth. It is to snicker. You just keep precaching further and further out the more you get.

Award season so soon?

January 9, 2003
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The

Travelling personally

January 9, 2003
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Cloudtravel (via Ernie the Attorney) is exactly the sort of site I dig. It’s a one man show, written by Chris Cloud (and what a great name for a traveller), that serves as a travel guide to places he’s been. A real personal style, good information, and plenty of opinions. He says he needs more substance; I say he’s already given us quite a bit. I wish I’d been able to read this before my first trip to New Orleans.

Similar stuff here, from one of the canniest travellers I know.