Category: Politics

“Unlike South Africa, which decided on its own to eliminate its nuclear weapons and welcomed the inspection as a means of creating confidence in its disarmament, Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and to live in peace.”

“For nearly three years, Iraq refused to accept any inspections by UNMOVIC. It was only after appeals by the secretary-general and Arab states and pressure by the United States and other member states that Iraq declared on 16 September last year that it would again accept inspections without conditions.”

“Resolution 1441 was adopted on 8 November last year and emphatically reaffirmed the demand on Iraq to cooperate. It required this cooperation to be immediate, unconditional and active. The resolution contained many provisions which we welcome as enhancing and strengthening the inspection regime. The unanimity by which it was adopted sent a powerful signal that the council was of one mind in creating a last opportunity for peaceful disarmament in Iraq through inspection.”

“Paragraph 9 of Resolution 1441 states that this cooperation shall be ‘active.’ It is not enough to open doors. Inspection is not a game of catch as catch can. Rather, as I noted, it is a process of verification for the purpose of creating confidence. It is not built upon the premise of trust. Rather, it is designed to lead to trust, if there is both openness to the inspectors and action to present them with items to destroy or credible evidence about the absence of any such items.”

“Regrettably, the 12,000-page declaration, most of which is a reprint of earlier documents, does not seem to contain any new evidence that will eliminate the questions or reduce their number.”

“The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve, but rather points to the issue of several thousand of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for. The finding of the rockets shows that Iraq needs to make more effort to ensure that its declaration is currently accurate.”

“Iraq did not declare a significant quantity, some 650 kilos, of bacterial growth media, which was acknowledged as reported in Iraq’s submission to the Amorim panel in February 1999. As a part of its 7 December 2002 declaration Iraq resubmitted the Amorim panel document but the table showing this particular import of media was not included. The absence of this table would appear to be deliberate, as the pages of the resubmitted document were renumbered.”

Preliminary notes from Bush’s State of the Union speech? Drum beating to prepare the United States for a war in Iraq? Warbloggers propagandizing?

Nah, that’s Hans Blix delivering an honest, fair, unbiased report to the Security Council. Can we stop accusing him of being an apologist for Iraq now?

Some commenters below were pretty skeptical about the viability of non-state sponsored terrorism. (By the way, I appreciate the time all of you took to post, especially the ones I disagree with. Thank you.) Strikes me as a good time, therefore, to talk a little more about the likely progression of terror technology. This is gonna tie into some of the stuff I’ve said about NGOs, by the by.

Here’s how I see it. One of the constants of progress over the last few centuries has been an ever-increasing demand for power. We need coal, we need oil, we need nuclear power to feed the engines of progress. Efforts to decrease power use certainly work against this trend, but the environmental motive also works towards smaller and smaller power sources. Speaking of which, there’s the trend towards minaturization, which means that we want to stuff more and more energy into smaller and smaller packages.

What it all adds up to is easier access to bigger power sources, and that’s as much an enabler of terrorism as it is an enabler of a better lifestyle.

This is central to Bush’s rationale for his foreign policy. Where once it required a full scale invasion to kill 3,000 American citizens, now it’s depressingly simple. Bush argues that we must therefore stamp out rogue nations in order to protect ourselves from the terrorists. I argue that he’s not learning from the lessons of history: why should we expect the trend to stop here? The same tools once available only to nation states are now available to state backed terrorists. Soon enough, they’ll be available to the likes of the Shining Path, Aum Shinryu, and Tim McVeigh.

Any policy which is intended to minimize the terrorist threat must take this trend into account. Bush’s policy fails to do so. I have some ideas of my own, and that will be the next post I make along these lines.

Says Mr. Reynolds: “This is also why I prefer a Mussolini-style ending in which Saddam is lynched by his own people to exile, or even a trial. I think that would provide a valuable lesson.”

Yes, that’s what I always think about lynchings. They’ll provide a valuable lesson. Precisely. People get uppity, you know?

But you know, I think Den Beste is right when he says the world political order is about to change. He’s wrong about a bunch of other things; he clearly doesn’t understand the concept that international legitimacy may be important for any other reason than the immediately practical. I’ve written before about the sheer folly of assuming that the United States will always be in the privileged power position we currently enjoy, and I’ve discussed why enlightened self-interest leads us to the conclusion that we must not encourage a world in preemptively securing one’s own position by invading other countries is wise. Ah well.

He’s still right. Germany’s a bigger US trade partner than England. Germany and France together are a bigger trade partner than China. To say, as Den Beste does, that the US needs nobody by its side other than the UK and Australia (poor Canadians; they’ve been altogether left out) is blind arrogance.

It saddens me that so many have lost track of the meaning of the word “ally.” On a mailing list I’m on, someone recently said “why are they allies if they aren’t supporting us?” Apparently he confused the word “ally” with the word “subordinate.” It’s easier to assume that Europe has gone mad than it is to consider why they’re objecting. And you know, thinking about why they’re objecting doesn’t even mean you have to agree with them. It just means it might be useful to think about it, in case there’s something you can do about it. But no; easier to write them off as insane.

It’s not the defeat of Saddam that bugs people. It’s the US occupation of Iraq, and the use of Iraq as a base to force regime change throughout the region.

Anyway. Yes, the world is going to change, and here’s one important way it’s changing:

For the first time, the United States will invade another country not because that country attacked it, or because it attacked one of our allies, but because we think it might pose a threat in the future.

If you don’t think that’s a big deal, even if you think the attack is a good idea, you’re nuts. And your children will have no right to complain if, in a hundred years, Brazil invades the United States “because we just don’t know what they might do with those old nukes.” That’s the precedent we’re about to set.

This article is about the funniest parody I’ve read in some time, and makes it mercilessly clear why you can’t just invert protest numbers to determine the number of people who support the status quo.

It’s pretty obvious, by the by, that the numbers of people protesting are important. You can tell, because people who support whatever’s being protested generally aim for the low end of the possible range. Nathan Newman makes an interesting argument against mass protests (link via Electrolite), but I don’t think the math is as simple as he does. A really sizable protest makes it psychologically easier for those who might support the cause but be uncertain of themselves to come out the next time; humans have a lot of herd animal in them. It’d be nice if it were otherwise, and perhaps someday, but right now? Perceptions of numbers matter.

Thus, protestors will always estimate high, and anti-protestors will always estimate low.

OK, I think I figured this one out. And you thought I’d forgotten all about it…

Without further ado, the Population: One two axis predictive political graph.

Axis one is still freedom vs. safety. Which matters more in your personal calculus? Will you give up safety for freedom, or vice versa?

Axis two is privileged position vs. one among many. Do you think that your club/state/nation/special interest group has a privileged position vis a vis the rest of the world, for whatever reason? If so, perhaps you think God granted said status; perhaps you think it’s been earned by means of a sterling diplomatic record. The question is whether or not you think it exists, not why it exists.

The inspiration for the fine-tuning of axis two was Glenn Reynolds, who with a straight face recently commented on the resentments California arrogance engenders elsewhere. I think the parallel he’s making works in both directions, though.

Turns out the Sharpton fire was just an overloaded extension cord. My cynicism was unwarranted, too. I’m glad.

It occurs to me that one of the large obstacles in the way of invading Iraq is the Security Council veto. It further occurs to me that the rationale behind the veto, that being the great power status of the Allied nations after World War II, is somewhat antiquated.

I don’t think any pro-war pundit can deny that the veto is tremendously frustrating. As so many have pointed out, it seems ridiculous that France can effectively stand in the way of UN action. That ability — the ability of one nation to unfairly stop debate in its tracks — prevents the UN from being effective. Again, many argue that the UN’s inability to press the issue of Iraq is ruining the UN as we watch.

OK. Let’s get rid of the veto. I won’t go so far as to recommend that the permanent members of the Security Council lose that status, but let’s get rid of the vetos and enable the UN to respond in a timely fashion without fear of being blackmailed by any single nation.

Nota bene: Russia has vetoed over 60% more resolutions than the next most frequent vetoer. Someone on NPR tonight was claiming that the US held the record. Incorrect; the link above has the real numbers.

Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld.

“And the idea that inspectors can go in there and discover things, and find things, if they were be that, they would have been named ‘finders’ or ‘discoverers’ instead of ‘inspectors.’”

Damn! Do my local health inspectors know about this? Do home inspectors know about this? Does Inspector Clouseau — well, OK, that last is a bad example. But geeze, guy, inspector does include the concept of finding out when someone’s lying. Hm; I think the word he’s looking for as an alternative is “investigator,” which definitely has more connotations of someone uncovering hidden truths. Still, inspector carries some of that weight as well.

Mind you, as — someone, damn it, I can’t find the link. Anyhow, as someone pointed out, the UN inspectors have in fact discovered and found things, so it seems pretty churlish to claim that they’re incapable of said actions at this stage in the game.

The Libertarian Party has broken new ground; they’ve successfully petitioned the FEC for the right to sell their mailing lists. By “sell their mailing lists,” I mean “sell them to any random bulk mailer who wants to send me more junk mail.” This allows the LP to work around some of the unfortunate side effects of the BCRA, which prohibits political parties from accepting money from corporations.

I pretty much approve of the Libertarian Party being permitted to enter into business transactions, but I gotta quibble at the particular one they chose to defend. They should recognize that as a political party, they are an organization with closer ties to the government than other types of organization, and as a result certain activities should come under greater scrutiny. Selling personal information is one of them.

Orin Kerr nails it over at the Volokh Conspiracy, which is as good a time as any to launch into a discussion of my own anti-war feelings.

This post summarizes my opinion on a lot of the arguments we’ve seen on both sides. I believe that Bush wants to invade Iraq in order to expand American presence in the region. I think he also believes, quite accurately, that Saddam is a very bad leader and that regime change in Iraq will be a net good for the world — but that’s not the primary reason, it’s a nice side effect.

I don’t think the United States should be imperialistic. Despite my anarchistic leanings, there are things about this country I’m very happy about. Lots of ‘em, in fact. I think those things are worth defending. One of them is that we don’t go to war for the sake of improving our own lot. We defend ourselves, but we do not go out and preemptively invade other countries.

Why’s that so important? Because any rational moral calculus must make sense no matter which sense you’re on. In other words, moral arguments that rest on the privileged place of America among other nations are doomed to fail. This isn’t just a philosophical point. It’s a practical necessity, because there is absolutely no guarantee that we will always occupy the practical privileged place. It’s in our best interests to construct an international consensus that doesn’t depend on our superior military position. I don’t want my children to be facing a world in which China is the preeminent military power, and in which the US established the precedent that the preeminent military power can do whatever the hell it wants.

Therefore, while I think Saddam’s overthrow will be a net good for the world, I think it would be intensely stupid for the United States to go too far in the direction of unilateralism.

Now, I also think that in the end it won’t be unilateral. So far, while Bush has talked a good game, he hasn’t done anything without UN approval. This isn’t really a surprise. He can’t wage war on Iraq without support, and in particular Turkish support, and he’s not going to get that without another United Nations resolution. (Yes, another one.)

While his tactics in the UN will, in the long run, work, they’re also burning good will among our fellow nations. That’s a bad idea not because of fear of retribution, but because sometime in the next ten years we’re going to have to deal with the serious problem of India and Pakistan. I don’t worry much about Iraq’s nuclear weapons, or even North Korea’s. I worry about what the admitted nuclear states of the Indian subcontinent are gonna do. That really sorely needs attention, and it’s not going to be solved with force of arms. Brinksmanship works, but the price is diplomatic flexibility later, and we should be concerned about that.

Consider that everyone in the UN is aware that, as Bush says, failure to follow through with the resolutions concerning Iraq will be severely damaging to UN credibility. But Bush is deliberately ignoring the other half of the equation: giving in too easily to US demands will also damage UN credibility. He knows perfectly well that the UN can’t appear to be simply an arm of US policy. The UN knows that Bush wants war on Iraq in order to strengthen the US position in the Middle East. When you get right down to it, Bush has the UN between a rock and a hard place — which, again, will get him his short term ends but may cause problems in the long term.

OK. So, I am personally in favor of overturning Saddam’s regime. I am not in favor of doing so in order that the United States might extend its influence in the Middle East. We do not gain any safety from this; the long-term threat to the United States is not from any state or army, but from in-country terrorism which does not rely on long range missiles or the backing of nations. It’s a war of conquest, and up until now, that hasn’t been part of United States policy.