Node Of Evil - Fair And Balanced Reporting

Thursday, March 20, 2003

 
Update: as I was scanning the entry for "world" on the factbook page, I noticed that under "Legal System" they state that "all members of the UN plus Switzerland are parties to the statute that established the International Court of Justice (ICJ) or World Court". The last update to this page was done on Feb. 13, 2003 which makes me wonder if the CIA has gotten word that the U.S. pulled out of the ICJ... Who knows, maybe they think we'll be pulling out of the U.N.?



Quick note: to put international support for our Iraq campaign into perspective, there are 268 "administrative" divisions of the world (according to the CIA World Fact Book entry titled "world"), which usually means countries but may also include small islands. Now, by our calculation the 45 or so states that have publicly or privately supported the war is about 17% of the total number of states. So, when claims are made as to how large our "coalition" is, we'll have some perspective. We'd hazard a guess that this percentage also applies to the percentage of the total population of the world that lives in those countries that support the war. Of course, not all of the citizens of those 45 countries support the war, and there are many citizens in other countries that may support it, so our calculations may be off a bit. Nevertheless, if one samples global opinion, based on the number of countries that support the war, we'd put it at about 17%, plus or minus 5% (which is a huge margin of error considering a current global population of about 6.2 billion people). How's that for informal polling?

Andrew 10:35 AM : |

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Along with various resignations of high-level government officials in the U.S. and Britian we have Rand Beers, who is in charge of the National Security Council's anti-terrorist operations. The article give conflicting reasons for his resignation, but it does quote several intelligence officials as saying that they feel cheated by the war with Iraq, as it has diverted resources away from the war on terrorism. A couple of interesting points; first, in the minds of the intelligence community the issue of Iraq and terrorism are _seperate_, thus conflicting with attempts by the Bush administration to characterize the war with Iraq as part of the war on terrorism. Second, there are a limited number of intelligence resources available, and it appears that the war on Iraq seems to be consuming alot of them to the detriment of the rest of the war on terrorism.

Andrew 9:11 AM : |

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Wednesday, March 19, 2003

 
As the bombs fall on Iraq in an attempt to get Saddam Hussein (who may or may not have survived to deliver a taped address to Iraqi citizens this morning), we're still interested in whether or not there are chemical/biological/nuclear weapons (herein called CBNs) in Iraq. The Financial Times is reporting that the U.S. military has a list of 300 sites that it'd like to check for these weapons. According to the story, however, this list of sites is based on a rather wide criteria -- it was assembled based on which areas looked like they might house CBNs from satellite photographs. The report cites an example of one building that's on the list because it looks like it might be big enough to house Scud missiles, even though its access roads aren't wide enough to offload or load Scuds. We're interested to see how many of these "sites" were on the U.N. inspector's lists and how many actually end up containing weapons. The U.S. is in a tough spot, however; if these sites have weapons and the U.S. knew about it but didn't tell the inspectors, then it stands accused of witholding information the inspectors could have used to do their jobs. However, since U.S. intelligence released to inspectors so far has been uniformly bad then that list may point out these weaknesses in U.S. intelligence gathering. Perhaps all the good human intel sources were being used to track down Hussein. Not that this isn't a worthy goal -- if he goes and his sons go, then we're a good way towards the end of the conflict. Nevertheless, the lack of a good-faith effort on the part of the United States to support the inspectors would add to the embarrasment of losing the diplomatic battle.

Andrew 11:15 PM : |

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Monday, March 17, 2003

 
We'd like to send our condolences to the family of Joseph Coors, despite all the fun things he's done around the world. Among other things, his organizations and various people on the right supported RENAMO in Mozambique. RENAMO was essentially a terrorist organization before peace talks (and a fair amount of cash) in 1990 convinced RENAMO that it'd be a good idea to go legit (a concise history can be found here). Coors' brother apparently isn't the conservative idealogue he was, stating that they got along fine as long as they didn't discuss politics. Here's to hoping that the age of these sorts of adventures is passing from us.

Andrew 1:29 PM : |

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A Tribute to Freedom

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the Freedom people and their Freedom President, Jacques Chirac, for showing us all what Freedom really stands for -- exercising the right to disagree with the big guys. If our memory serves us correctly, the people of Freedom came to our aid on several important occasions a bit over 225 years ago when we disagreed with the big guys. I don't know if we ever thanked them for that, but if not, we'd like to do so now -- thank you, Freedom. As Freedom has demonstrated, the international system (which has outlasted the Cold War and will continue on through this little bump in the road) has functioned well to limit the ability of the largest member in the international system to force its will upon the world. This largest member is now not going to pursue a second resolution in the Security Council, having been roundly condemned by the majority of states for its now all-too-imminent war against Iraq. As we've eaten Freedom food over the last few weeks, we've reflected on this state of affairs and realized that ultimately, the international system (embodied by the U.N.) is healtier than ever and the fact that said big member won't stand to be humiliated by losing the vote or being vetoed by the smaller states points to this system's importance and relevance.

It also points to the work that needs to be done; we need to come up with effective and peaceful ways to deal with people like Saddam Hussein. We need to have an international system that will _prevent_ these kinds of problems from developing in the first place. One idea we've heard recently would involve the formation of a preemptive peacekeeping mission to an area that's potentially in trouble. Now would be the time, for instance, to preemptively look at possible conflicts that may result from a war with Iraq and diffuse those situations. This would include an immediate focus on the fate of the Kurds in the north and the Shiite Muslims in the south. It would also include drawing out Bush administration plans for the rest of the region. Will there be an invasion of Iran? How can we peacefully prevent that from happening?

For those of us who appreciate Freedom and all it does for the world, we can take heart in the fact that the fear-based reaction in the U.S. to terrorism was less severe than the reaction to Communism. That in turn was less severe than the reaction to the Japanese and the Germans, which would suggest to our minds that that sort of intolerance is a fad fading quickly. Perhaps it will abate as we sink back into the domestic economy issues that will ultimately mean the demise of the Bush administration, to whom we'd like to be the first to say farewell. We recognize that predictions have a bad habit of not coming true, but as we throw our weight behind Howard Dean and do our best to support the establishment of a real political left in our country (R.I.P, Paul Wellstone) we put our hat into the ring and this particular Node may even become a Democrat to suppport our man in the primaries. After all, he has no problems with Freedom or with the rest of the world. Should this all fail, should the Bushes and Cheneys and the Ashcrofts win the day, then there is always Canada. We hear there's a little providence there called Quebec where they speak Freedom.

Note: Please excuse the essays. The Node will soon return to its regularly scheduled programming.

Andrew 9:10 AM : |

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