Three important news stories.

This is probably one of the most important stories that has shown up in the news in the past year or so. It’s important for two reasons: (1) It’s systematically documented, and I’d be willing to give 90% or better odds that the underlying claims are factually true; and (2) the victim in this case was a German citizen. (Why is this important? Because, not to put too fine a point on it, most of America doesn’t really care if this is done to an Afghan or a Pakistani. Doing it to a West European citizen is important because it means that the people responsible feel that they can do this somewhere where it will be noticed, and without punishment or compunction. The significance – apart from the usual issues of torture, kidnapping, holding of people incommunicado, and complete suspension of any pretense of legal legitimacy – is that it was brazen.)

In other news, Mahmoud Abbas has claimed a fairly sound victory in the Palestinian elections. This is good in that he seems like (along with more or less everyone living in that area outside of Hamas and their moral kin) he is genuinely interested in solving the problems of the area and building peace. The one issue is that voter turnout was low in areas, indicating that the Hamas boycott had an impact and they’ll be able to claim that Abbas has a weak mandate, and thus continue to kill people in the streets. But hopefully he’ll be able to assert control fairly quickly, and hopefully (and I’m sincerely hopeful on this!) Sharon will realize that there’s the chance for a real negotiating partner here.

Finallly, this one was pointed out by : The Pentagon is considering a strategy which it calls the Salvador option for dealing with insurgency in Iraq. It’s good to know that things are going so well that we can safely copy a strategy which has already failed disastrously elsewhere. Much less important than the other students, but I foresee this leading to no end of trouble in coming years…

Published in: on January 9, 2005 at 16:11  Comments (2)  
Tags:

Where is Islam now?

An interesting op-ed piece by Peter Bergen raises a good question: For all that the various Arab leagues spend time decrying the way in which the West oppresses Muslims and so on, why are they – both as a community and as individual countries – so conspicuously absent when it comes time to help fellow Muslims? The recent disaster in Asia is just an example – even though the hardest-hit area is one of the most predominantly Muslim parts of Indonesia, the Muslim country that gave the most – Saudi Arabia – gave only $30 million, as much as the Netherlands, and the other countries gave even less. But this is hardly a unique incident; these countries are always the loudest when it’s time to claim victimization, and the quietest when it comes time to doing anything about it, especially if it may have a cost to them.

Published in: on January 8, 2005 at 15:46  Comments (4)  
Tags: ,

Questioning war: Ethics, the Military and Civilians

In the past two years, I’ve heard several soldiers say that they dislike civilians questioning the course of the war, since if the soldiers aren’t allowed to do so, why should someone who isn’t even involved?

This is part of a broader question: Can civilians legitimately question the war? Or is it just armchair generalling, and somewhat hypocritical?

This is a very important question, and it’s worth answering. My short answer is, that’s the civilians’ job.

The long answer is:

In our military, we have a rather unusual division between the officers and the enlisted. (Most other militaries – those that didn’t derive from England – do this differently) The officers’ responsibility is to keep the “big picture” in mind, and among other things to question orders and refuse them if they’re not legitimate or moral. The enlisted soldiers’ responsibility is to follow these orders to the best of their ability. However, we are living in an age of small-group operations rather than giant infantry movements across the countryside. In most cases in the field, an E6 may be far and away the most senior person present – since we insist on commissioning people right out of college. An NCO in a position like this can’t rely solely on the judgement of a junior officer; he or she needs training in how to interpret orders and decide when to refuse them at least as thorough as an O1 or an O2.

So my answer to the original question is, the soldiers do and should question the course of the war, especially on the scales for which they are responsible. An officer or an NCO is responsible for the moral conduct of himself (or herself – I’m just going to use one pronoun, bear with me. You know what I mean.) and everyone under his command. And what is a civilian’s job? Well, a civilian needs to keep well-informed about the course of the war as a whole, and offer counsel to the President when something is wrong. And yes, sometimes this can mean saying that something is a bad idea and we should stop doing it – not as an allegation of incompetence (although those are fair game too! Someone has got to watch for it.) but as a simple question of policy.

That’s a basic point in our system of government: A citizen’s responsibility isn’t just to vote for someone and then not pay attention to what they do, but rather to stay part of the process, to keep informed of the progress of everything – especially a war! – and apply pressure to make sure that the people they elected stay on track, and know what the public wants.

So if the public shows serious opposition to a war, it’s the President’s responsibility (and every other elected official’s) to take a good, hard look at why the public is so opposed. If the President really believes that, despite opposition, the war is still a good idea, it’s his responsibility to communicate to the public why he thinks so and convince them that he’s right. If the President can’t convince the public, then something is seriously wrong. At this point, it’s the people’s responsibility to make sure the President pays attention – and that’s not necessarily something that can wait until the next election.

(And if all this isn’t enough, consider that the average president has less experience doing his job than the average junior officer – at least the JO’s went through officers’ training. Would you like a random midshipman to run the country for a while without supervision? Or maybe a 2nd lieutenant, all bright-eyed and excited about Making a Difference?)

Published in: on January 2, 2005 at 23:37  Comments (8)  
Tags: , ,

Powell Says…

Iran is trying to build and weaponize a bomb.

It’s really too bad that Powell had to waste so much of his international credibility on justifying the administration’s WMD red herring; that should give Europe the perfect excuse to ignore this statement. (Which, thanks to what I’ll politely call a combination of pusillanimity and financial considerations, they would very much like to do)

But the best I can say for this is “no shit?” I mean, did someone not get the hint from their (a) developing longer-range missiles, (b) developing more advanced missile guidance systems, and (c) pushing their isotope enrichment program into high gear? Does the rest of the world need an engraved invitation to an A-test?

What galls me most about this is that we encouraged it so strongly. The run-up to the Iraq war and our subsequent dealing with North Korea made it very clear to everyone in the world that someone who’s about to get major weapons is likely to get invaded by the US, but someone who already has them is permanently sacrosanct. Then we left them to their own devices and stopped all engagement with even the moderates, and turned a blind eye to their programs and their deals with NK for several years. I really do not want to have to deal with even a regional nuclear war because of high-level official fuck-ups…

Published in: on November 17, 2004 at 21:32  Comments Off on Powell Says…  
Tags: ,

R.I.P., Yassir Arafat

The funeral arrangements having been made, Yassir Arafat died early this morning.

In memoriam

Published in: on November 10, 2004 at 21:54  Comments (3)  
Tags: ,

Checking to see if the stars are still moving…

In the past 24 hours, Arafat has gone from “sick” to “hospitalized in what is aides deny is critical condition;” the Red Sox may be on the verge of winning the World Series; and I can’t talk about today’s events at work, but there were at least two major and unexpected turns.

Oh yes, and there’s a lunar eclipse tonight.

Has someone been fscking with the laws of nature again?

Edit: The Red Sox just won the series!

Published in: on October 27, 2004 at 20:23  Comments (16)  
Tags: ,

More fun with explosives…

Nice column by Paul Krugman on the issue of cover-ups and Porter Goss’ performance in his first few months at the CIA.

Meanwhile, our president is informing everyone that the missing explosives disappeared a while ago (which is somehow supposed to be better?) and reminding everyone that we’ve already destroyed over 243,000 munitions.

If someone is coming at you with an axe, the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of axes in the world that they’re not carrying is not really germane to the problem.

But the President’s unofficial flaks are trying to move attention elsewhere. (NB this article’s focus is on Bush’s campaigning, not the charges against him) I suggest that we don’t let him change the subject quite so quickly. Just what has this led to as far as force protection? How many of the roadside bombs that have been killing American soldiers in the past few months have come directly out of this stockpile? How many more are to come? As pointed out recently, that’s a whole lot of explosives.

Published in: on October 26, 2004 at 11:55  Comments Off on More fun with explosives…  
Tags: , ,

You lost /what/?

About 380 tons of high-density chemical explosives, mostly HMX and RDX, have gone missing from a munitions dump in Iraq.

I’ll just say that a fist-sized lump of either of these is enough to make a fairly impressive crater, one in which you could easily park your car.

So, anyone want to play “guess where the explosives are now, and what kinds of uses they’ll find?”

Edit: Some side computations, just for amusement. The legal max GVW of a semi in California is 40 tons, which translates to about 30 tons of cargo space, so this is maybe 12 semis’ worth. In a Trauzl block test, RDX is about 186% the explosive power of TNT, (it’s the active ingredient in most plastic explosives) so if you set this all off at once it would be about 0.7kT equivalent explosive force. This should be enough to level unreinforced buildings at a distance of about 0.9km, and which should be audible (~1Pa overpressure) at a distance of about 550 miles. (Using Sublette’s formula that the radius (in km) as a function of blast overpressure is about Y1/3(P/P0)-0.7, where Y is the equivalent blast power in kT, P is the overpressure of interest and P0 is 3psi) So if that blast were to go off in New York City, you would hear a quiet little “thump” (well, 60dB, but down at 90Hz, far in the bass where human hearing isn’t very good. Elephants would hear it from about 10 times farther away) in Lansing, MI. Or from Salt Lake City to San Francisco, your choice. That’s really a lot of high explosives.

Published in: on October 24, 2004 at 20:30  Comments (20)  
Tags:

The situation in Israel

The NY Times has an interesting summary of the fighting in Israel after four years. Interesting for the statistics it provides, including the sidebar with a partial breakdown of casualties and the numbers on suicide bombings.

It’s bloody depressing. What’s more depressing is that there’s no obvious way out of this.

Published in: on October 3, 2004 at 11:18  Comments Off on The situation in Israel  
Tags:

Another story of interest:

The Washington Post has an interesting article (free reg required, yadda yadda) about handling of information about Iraq. Notable remarks include that USAID has decided to restrict circulation of memoranda with bad news about the number of attacks, and perhaps more importantly, that Iraqi president Allawi’s speech to the US Congress a few weeks ago was written in part by White House and Bush campaign officials.

A (displeased) response from Senator Feinstein (D-CA) can be found in this story.

Published in: on September 30, 2004 at 20:42  Comments Off on Another story of interest:  
Tags: ,
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »