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Population: One

The drums of war

“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?

Inevitability

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.

Transgressive retro

The following has some spoilers.

The weekend’s movies were Far From Heaven and Catch Me If You Can. Definitely a retro weekend, not even counting the incredibly hip Soma FM Secret Agent streaming radio station I’ve had tuned in since Thursday. I feel like a martini, and you’re just the sort of woman to drink me…

Ah, sorry. The mood took me for a moment. More a Catch Me If You Can mood, I think; that’s the lighter of the two films. It has that jazzy sixties bliss to it, up to and including invoking James Bond with a short Goldfinger clip. That makes the contrast between the two all the more interesting, though, since they’re both about transgressions against the natural order.

Frank Abagnale Jr. breaks free of social restrictions and demonstrates exactly how much we rely on social convention to fend off the intruder. In Far From Heaven, the Whitakers both transgress, with varying degrees of success. But in Catch Me If You Can, the final dynamic is very different. We’re encouraged to cheer for the young con man — and in the end we’re reassured that it was OK to cheer, because he got caught and his pursuer was his very best friend. His real father (played by Christopher Walken, in a really brilliant turn) taught him that it was OK to lie, and wound up a sad sorry corpse. His surrogate father, the FBI agent, brought him back to the straight and narrow and in the end everyone’s happy.

Far From Heaven doesn’t offer the easy out. Cathy Whitaker’s life is ruined by the combination of her transgression and that of her husband, Frank. Oddly, Frank’s life doesn’t seem to be so bad, which got me thinking about the exact relationship between her love for a black gardener and his love for another man.

Homosexuality is so far outside the comprehension of the time that the couple can barely even talk about what’s going on. Their first scene together after she catches him kissing a man is particularly well filmed; it’s an atonal song of confusion and barely spoken thoughts and stammers. Lovely stuff. As a result, Frank’s infidelities are ignored by the world around him. Cathy’s potential infidelities are not.

Did Cathy step outside her life only because she had no other reaction to Frank’s actions? I think so, to a degree. Raymond (her gardener) is a symbol, and she’s willing to reject him when it’s the necessary thing to do. She doesn’t go back to him until Frank rejects her, at which point she needs another anchor in her life. Then again, when faced with the fact that going with Raymond will only hurt his daughter, she steps back. The safest analysis is that she really does love him, and that Far From Heaven follows the line of Douglas Sirk’s melodramas all the way through, but I wonder.

Anyhow, meanderings through theory aside, I recommend both of ‘em. Far From Heaven is by far the better movie, but Catch Me If You Can is a fun little romp if you don’t get hung up on obsessing about the end. It’s hardly Spielberg’s fault that the real Frank Abagnale turned to the side of the law, after all. They’re both excellent evocations of times past, lovingly and skillfully filmed. Good weekend for movies.

Scratch one rule of law

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.

SQL is a virus

The Internet was hit by this attack last night. Parties unknown exploited the MS SQL vulnerability to launch a distributed denial of service attack which took down much of the Internet, as per this post. Meanwhile, I’d been mulling over a recent security alert that discusses a vulnerability close to the heart of the HTTP protocol. Once again, Vernor Vinge got it pretty much right. His future computer nets weren’t something you jacked into, they were a vast network full of legacy code and unexpected consequences. Sounds about right.

Bachelor chow

Warning: this may be disturbing to real cooks. Or not. I really have no idea.

My aunt, blessed be her name, gave me a rice cooker for Christmas. It has a no-stick pot so it’s super easy to wash. You don’t have to pay attention to it while you’re cooking something. It rocks. I made rice and put some beans in and it was great.

So then I decided to try something else. There’s a rumor floating around out there that you can cook meat in it. Mmm, steamed chicken! So I cut up some chicken and some sausage, and put some olive oil into the bottom of the pot, and turned it on. When the oil heated up, I threw in the chicken and sausage and stir fried it a little till I got bored. Then I dumped in a bunch of rice and some water and a can of black beans and a few random spices that were probably past their expiration date, and closed the lid, and made myself go into the living room to read comics.

When I came back, it was done cooking and had switched over to “keep the stuff warm until Bryant wants to eat it” mode. I opened it up, kind of assuming that the meat would be undercooked. Not so! Perfect! Nice moist tender chicken, tasty bits of sausage, all around goodness.

And cleanup was just rinsing out a non-stick bowl. Aw yeah.

More of that sauce stuff

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.