***Dave Does the Blog

As I continue to read various bits and pieces off the blogosphere regarding impending war on Iraq, I am struck by something fundamentally different between the “hawks” and the “doves.”

By and large, the “doves” don’t trust the Bush Administration, and the “hawks” do.

Read some anti-war posts, editorials, essays, or rants, and they basically boil down to, “Bush and his cronies are a pack of lying thieves. Bush stole the election. It’s all about accessing oil for their oil industry buddies, and about distracting folks from economic troubles at home. You can’t trust anything the administration says about Iraq.”

There’s not quite as homogeneous a message from the hawks — there are still plenty of them willing to hold the administration’s feet to the fire on various issues, including domestic policy, homeland security, and the like — but there is, to some degree, a basic trust regarding what is being said about Iraq. It’s backed up by any number of analysts, private and governmental, who have spoken to the danger that Iraq presents. But it’s still fundamentally about trusting the Bushies regarding what intelligence they claim to have about Iraq, as well as a certain measure of trust (“trust but verify”) as to how the administration plans to handle a post-war Iraq.

Is there any rational basis for either position? I don’t know. I’m certainly not in favor of military intervention in Iraq solely because of what the Bush administration says, but I also find that I do believe them when they say they have sufficient additional evidence beyond what is public. That is, perhaps, naive of me, but I’m also at this point unwilling to believe that the Bushies would actually trump up a war merely for purposes of avarice, or political gain. I’d need a lot more evidence of that than simply the allegations thrown around on the dove side. I may not agree with the current administration on a number of things, but I don’t think they are that evil.

Anyway, no profound answer here, just an observation — and one that points out a difficulty in intelligent discourse about this subject. If you’re starting from the premise that the current administration (or any administration) is that evil, then trying to convince you otherwise is futile. The converse is also true, which goes to explain why so much flaming vitriol is being expended out there on the Net.

While doing shopping today, I caught a bit of the NPR game show, “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!” One of the questions poked a bit of fun at various administration officials intoning, “Time is running out.”

In the transition at that point to the next part of the show, they played a bit from Louis Armstrong singing, “We Have All the Time in the World.” Ha, ha, ha.

Of course, that song is from the ’69 Bond flick, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. And, of course, it’s particularly ironic, since it’s the musical theme behind the love affair and marriage between Bond (George Lazenby) to crime princess Tracy Draco (Diana Rigg) — which is abruptly cut short when Tracy’s killed in a closing-scene drive-by shooting.

Sometimes, time really does run out.

Heh. Heh heh heh. France Surrenders to Texas High School.

(via Randy)

A remarkable column (in the Guardian!) by an avowed internationalist/socialist and anti-American, about why she’s in favor of war. And the way she addresses the anti-war arguments is … very interesting.

“Saddam Hussein may have killed hundreds of thousands of his own people – but he hasn’t done anything to us! We shouldn’t invade any country unless it attacks us!” I love this one, it’s so mind-bogglingly selfish – and it’s always wheeled out by people who call themselves “internationalists”, too. These were the people who thought that a population living in terror under the Taliban was preferable to a bit of liberating foreign fire power, even fighting side by side with an Afghani resistance. On this principle, if we’d known about Hitler gassing the Jews all through the 1930s, we still shouldn’t have invaded Germany; the Jews were, after all, German citizens and not our business. If you really think it’s better for more people to die over decades under a tyrannical regime than for fewer people to die during a brief attack by an outside power, you’re really weird and nationalistic and not any sort of socialist that I recognise. And that’s where you link up with all those nasty rightwing columnists who are so opposed to fighting Iraq; they, too, believe that the lives of a thousand coloured chappies aren’t worth the death of one British soldier. Military inaction, unless in the defence of one’s own country, is the most extreme form of narcissism and nationalism; people who preach it are the exact opposite of the International Brigade, and that’s so not a good look.

(via InstaPundit)

An interesting artile here on Saddam Hussein’s palaces. He has about a hundred of them, varying in size from a villa to complexes tens of kilometers in area, but all of them are opulent to the max. Most were built during times when Iraq has complained about how UN sanctions were starving their people, over half have been built since the Gulf War (and those damaged in that conflict have been rebuilt), and the cost for them has been in the billions of dollars, furnishings extra.

Remember that, next time someone talks about how it’s the US starving Iraqi children.

So Colin Powell will be going to the UN this coming week to show them more intelligence in support of the US claims as to Iraq.

The problems faced in this revelation — and the touted reason for not having revealed some of this info earlier — are multiple.

First, will it make a difference? It’s unlikely that there are photos of Scud missles with little radiation trefoils. It’s unlikely there will be transcripts of Saddam Hussein saying, “We are developing nuclear weapons, and the French have paid us off to use them against the US first.” It’s unlikely that there will be a signed inventory of biological weaponry.

The evidence is likely to be more circumstantial, similar to what’s been uncovered in Iraq thus far — discrepencies in declared inventories, paperwork that indicates continued weapons research, patterns of equipment and material purchases. There will probably be evidence similar to what’s already been disclosed from dissidents, from Iraqi officials and scientists who have sought asylum, and so forth. There is likely a lot of this sort of thing, but …

… it’s unlikely, in sum, that there will be any one, single piece of evidence, a smoking gun if you will, that will be pointed at and force everyone to say, “Yup, he’s doing that Weapons of Mass Destruction thang.”

In other words, if it’s something you want to ignore, if it’s something you want to take piecemeal and say, “This isn’t sufficient, this isn’t sufficient, this isn’t sufficient,” you’ll be able to.

Secondly, the nature of the evidence itself can give the Iraqis information. As we saw during the Cold War, when you let someone know that a particular phone line has been tapped, the other side stops using that phone line (and may track down the person who put the tap on).

There is a precedent here. In the late 1970s, an anti-detente CIA analyst leaked to the columnist Jack Anderson some transcripts of phone conversations from Leonid Brezhnev’s car, suggesting (or so the analyst thought) that Soviet delegates to the SALT II arms control talks were manipulating the treaty to allow them to keep building certain types of ICBMs that the American negotiators thought would be banned. After Anderson published the leak, the tap on the car disappeared — as did the Soviet mechanic whom the CIA had hired to install it.

Revealing intelligence information can also let everyone else know your capabilities. Items may be hid, for example, from a satellite that can track detail to 1m. If you show you can see things to a 10cm level, other folks who are looking to hide things know how well they have to do so.

Those are just some of the dangers of revealing intelligence info to the public (because, face it — revealing it to the UNSC is going to be revealing it to the public). Against that has to be weighed the value. It’s unlikely that folks who are not yet convinced (or who are, but who find it to their political advantage to profess not to be) are going to come into line. It’s possible, on the other hand, that folks who are looking for an “out” from their stance will be able to use such information as an excuse. And folks who are wavering might actually be convinced, which, from a domestic standpoint, could be a positive thing.

We’ll see this coming week.

I’ve got to run later this morning for the airport, so not much time to flesh this out, but here’s an interesting interview that basically says the Administration has all the smoking guns it needs, based on the Blix report, to follow through on earlier UN resolutions regarding military action.

The UN resolutions required that [he] account for those chemicals and for twelve years Saddam has just been looking us in the eye and saying ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I refuse to answer the question.’ Imagine what that would look like if this were Law and Order and if this were Jack McCoy asking that question again and again. And after each presentation of the evidence and question to Saddam, ‘What have you done with those materials.’ And the Iraqi response is ‘We’re not answering that question.’ That’s a pretty damning indictment.

And while the EU is finding its own internal foreign policy torn apart by French unilateralism on Zimbabwe …

This week, an attempt by the EU’s foreign ministers to renew sanctions against Zimbabwe collapsed because France wanted an exemption from the travel ban to enable President Robert Mugabe to attend a Franco-African summit in Paris.
The EU’s whole relationship with Africa was thrown into confusion, with an EU-Africa summit to be hosted by Portugal in April under threat. If France was allowed to receive Mugabe, the Portuguese wanted the same right.
But the leaders of the UK, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and Spain are all likely to boycott a summit attended by Mugabe, which would transform the event into an embarrassing display of European disunity.

… the Bush Administration is getting some (ahem) multilateral support from the heads of Spain, Portugal, Italy, the U.K., Hungary, Poland and Denmark, and the Czech Republic over the Iraqi situation. (France and Germany were not asked to sign the statement.)

Inneresting.