This post is just a gloat. We got rid of Saddam. Democracy is now in place in Afghanistan, the Ukraine, and Iraq. The terrorists have suffered a MAJOR blow on their own terms.
From a human rights, war on terror, and general security perspective, removing Saddam has turned out to be a major success.
I'm looking for some mea culpa from Josh and Robert.
In the comments, Josh poins to Andrew Sullivan linking to this article by Fareed Zakaria in which both claim that the goal has always been freedom and the problem has always been implementation (with Sullivan making a snarky comment about Bush's implementation. They both miss that there has in fact been a change of policy.
Zakaria talks about Bush cozying up to Putin. He ignores that Bush screwed Putin in favor of Ukrainian democracy. Sullivan misses the fact that much of our problem in Iraq comes from Bush never resolving an internal debate within the administration between those who believe we should have taken out Saddam and then left Iraq to deal however and those who wanted to go there to build a democracy. That failure to choose left much post-war planning up in the air. This Administration has actually done amazing things for democracy, in Afghanistan, in the Ukraine, and soon in Iraq. And the choice has now been made and is abundantly clear. We will continue to work for democracy in other places as well (damn the torpedoes of whether or not the governments will be more or less friendly!).
Hmm. I just realized that the Cheney comments about Iran's nuclear threat that I discussed in mylast post came ahead of an inaugural speech in which Bush said:
Today, America speaks anew to the peoples of the world:All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.
Democratic reformers facing repression, prison, or exile can know: America sees you for who you are: the future leaders of your free country.
The rulers of outlaw regimes can know that we still believe as Abraham Lincoln did: "Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it."
The leaders of governments with long habits of control need to know: To serve your people you must learn to trust them. Start on this journey of progress and justice, and America will walk at your side.
Note: Yes, the speech is also addressed to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, etc. But Iran is obviously top of mind given Cheney's comments.
From the WaPost
Vice President Cheney said yesterday that Iran is a top threat to world peace and Middle East stability, accusing Tehran of sponsoring terrorism against Americans and building a "fairly robust new nuclear program."In an interview aired on MSNBC's "Imus in the Morning" show a few hours before President Bush's inaugural address, Cheney warned that Israel "might well decide to act first" militarily to eliminate Iran's nuclear capabilities if the United States and its allies fail to solve the standoff with Tehran diplomatically.
"Given the fact that Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards," Cheney said.
I filter my mail using spamassasin and have recenlyt started filtering my blog commentspam using MTBlacklist. MTBlacklist relies on putting a link in the email notifications of new comments. However, I miss lots of these comment spam notifications because spamassasin interprets them as email spam and filters them out! Doh!
Josh in comments before said:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/13/02658/9300
just a little reminder. please tell robert and me exactly how the administration was not lying through their teeth.also tell me why we have not had any terror alerts since the election.
We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud
Condoleeza Rice, US National Security Advisor
CNN Late Edition
9/8/2002
And the fact that Saddam was attempting to obtain uranium, places the Condi quote in context. Given that Saddam was evading the UN inspection regime, we didn't want to find out he was successful in obtaining nukes the hard way. This justification for war stands regardless of whether WMD are ever found. I would also remind Josh that WMD was one of many justifications for this war, including shutting down his funding of terroritsts, building liberal institutions in the Middle East, securing the oil supply, and enforcing UN resolutions that were imposed on Saddam as the result of his invasion of Kuwait.
As for the absence of terror alerts since the election, I don't know. Perhaps the terrorists decided that action immediately after an election is a lot less useful than action before an election. On the other hand, checking Google News...FBI Alerts Boston of Four Terror Suspects (from this morning!).
I would suspect that Josh does not actually believe there are terrorists out to get us and that they aren't networked with the governments of Syria and Iran and the former government of Iraq. Perhaps he is right, but there is a lot of evidence the other way. I wouldn't count on it and I'm glad that our President doesn't either.
I keep hearing great things about Getting Things Done. I recently saw a review of it on Slashdot. The key insight is that you pay much more than you think for multitasking and context switching. If you accept that you can only do one thing at a time then you can get a lot more done. If you are already in an interrupt state, do quick things. Then settle down to concentrate to get some specific block done, if you can't define a block that you can get done in the time you have available restructure. The review summarized his method as 3D. Do it. Delegate it. Delay it. The rest is a system of reminders so that you aren't maintaining state about stuff you aren't currently doing in your head. In the comments there was a link to a page summarizing the entire method that I found really useful. If you feel like you are thrashing rather than being productive, check this stuff out.
It appears Wisconsin's very liberal Moter Voter laws may have unfairly delivered the state to Kerry.
Josh and Robert both question whether we will engage in regime change in Iran or just do the special forces equivalent of Israel's 1981 air strike that took out the nuclear reactor at Osiraq in Iraq thereby preventing Saddam from obtaining Nukes. I'd like to believe that we could do a quiet destruction operation that would embarass Iran enough so they wouldn't talk about it, but I don't think such an operation is actually plausible. I think we don't have the on the ground intelligence to know everything we need to know to make such an operation a success. The only real defense here is regime change (which is why I suspect US governemnet officials are making such strong denials of Hersh's claims).
I suspect the operation is a combination of clandestine attacks and much more loud "tear down this wall" style rhetoric against the Iranian regime. As the regime starts to fall, I can imagine special forces disrupting its attempts to maintain order.
As for Josh's question about the draft, it makes little sense. People in favor of these sorts of military action believe that it is better to attack now than to attack later when more forces will be required and when more civilian lives would be at risk (e.g. from WMD). The draft question can go in either direction depending on what you believe the merits of the military action to be. As an aside, people in favor or high taxes and regulations are more likely to favor the draft than free marketers who believe people should be free to decide whether to join the military.
Josh and Robert both don't believe that the US will attack Iran this year. Perhaps they are right, but sources they find credible beleve it is preparing to do so.
The United States has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran to help identify potential nuclear, chemical and missile targets, The New Yorker magazine reported Sunday.The article, by award-winning reporter Seymour Hersh, said the secret missions have been going on at least since last summer with the goal of identifying target information for three dozen or more suspected sites.
Hersh quotes one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon as saying, "The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible."
[...]
The White House said Iran is a concern and a threat that needs to be taken seriously. But it disputed the report by Hersh, who last year exposed the extent of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The Japan Times says Japan is preparing for attack by China:
The Defense Agency has prepared a plan to defend the southern remote islands off Kyushu and Okinawa from possible invasion amid rising security concerns about China, according to documents obtained Saturday by Kyodo News.The agency compiled the plan in November on the assumption of an invasion of the islands located within a 1,000-km zone between the southern end of Kyushu and Taiwan.
Thousands of islands are scattered in the area. The Senkaku Islands, claimed by both Japan and China, are among them.
The plan calls for a dispatch of 55,000 troops from the Ground Self-Defense Force as well as planes, warships and submarines from the main islands in the event the remote islands are attacked.
[...]
"China has been expanding its scope of activities as seen in the case of an incursion of Japanese territorial waters (by a Chinese nuclear submarine) in November. We need to monitor its moves," the official said.
[...]
In September, the agency presented scenarios of Chinese invasions of Japan. A report listed possible attack scenarios by China, including a territorial dispute over the Senkaku Islands and illegal operations by Beijing over maritime resources in the East China Sea.The Ground Staff Office of the GSDF previously drafted a plan to cope with cross-strait military conflicts between China and Taiwan. But the new defense plan is the first penned by the agency on the assumption of an invasion of the southern remote islands.
Someone built a web server in Erlang. It scales really well on multiprocessor architectures because of its threading model. I believe that Haskell has a similar threading model and therefore could achieve similar performance.
Via John Udell, Patrick Logan makes this point in the contect of pointing to this register article is saying that multi-core computing is the future and this bodes well for the sorts of threading models found in Erlang and Haskell:
A single Erlang node on a single CPU today can comfortably get into the tens of thousands of dynamic processes. What would your system look like running hundreds of thousands or a million dynamic processes and lot of activity is spent collaborating with other systems also running at that scale?
On Dec 31, my friend Dan forwarded me a set of predictions from NRO. I replied with my own and have decided to post them publicly:
So is the Iraq/Syria prediction. (see Belmont Club)
So is the OverheadInNYC prediction (see NYPost)
Feeling pretty good.
The Sims world is under assault (from SecurityFocus:
Entire neighborhoods of Sims are being mysteriously graced with eternal youth, while some characters are finding all their needs fulfilled by a single shot of magic espresso. Others no longer need to empty the toilet after potty training their toddler. Some Sims are being abducted by aliens when they glance through their telescope -- every time, instead of just occasionally, which is normal.
[...]
What nobody had realized was that hacked objects or behaviors would be transferred with the house, and would supersede the game's original functionality for anyone who installed it. So if you download a house with a magic espresso machine in the kitchen, all of your espresso machines in all of your Sims houses and neighborhoods will become magic. If the house came from a game that has the "No Jealousy" patch installed, your game will henceforth be free of the green-eyed monster as well.
If you then export one of your houses and share it, anyone who installs it will also be gifted with special java and open relationships. And so on. As a user downloads and uploads more houses, the hacks accumulate in the game like spyware.
In the comments on my last Iran posts, Josh says "democracy forced is not democracy. it is, above all else, temporary." I've heard comments like this from a variety of anti-war folks and it always strikes me either as oxymoronic or very conservative. Is Josh saying that the people of Iraq don't want democracy? How would he know? Perhaps the Iraqis should vote on it! Polls indicate that elections are wildly popular with the people of Iraq, and turnout is expected to be higher than it was here in our last election. Perhaps Josh is saying that we are planning to force people to go to the polls and tell them for whom they must vote? I am not aware of any evidence for that. Or, perhaps Josh is saying that the terrorists in Iraq will intidiate too many people from going to the polls for him to consider the election legitimate. The question then is 1. how do you tell and 2. isn't it then incumbent on the elected government representing the portion or Iraq not occupied by terrorists to liberate the portion that is?
But, Josh says that "democracy forced is temporary." I'm not sure what he means here either except the claim that the terrorists and their foreign allies who want to keep the Iraqis from having democracy will eventually overpower the forces of democracy there. He might be right, but that sort of depends on the choices WE make. Among these choices are whether US forces help kill terrorists in places like Fallujah or Najaf. And, among those choices are what we do about the parts of the Syrian, Iranian, and Saudi governments that are helping them. And I suppose that Josh believes either that we did not "force democracy" in Germany, Japan, France, or S. Korea or that they are no democracies or that they are all temporary."
In the rest of his comment, Josh, effectively, is saying that the Iraqis now all hate us because they would have preferred to continue the life they had under Saddam and his sons to what they have gotten or will get as a result of liberation. Given that most Iraqis when polled indicate a preference for liberation and that elections are wildly popular and that in many ways conditions for most Iraqis are vastly superior to how they were beforehand, I would be curious to know his justification for such a claim.