inamerrata

The inimitable White Glenn received one of those obnoxious confirmation-bounces anti-spam software occassionally does these days. As a man of good taste and high ideals, he didn’t like it. How to avoid this problem with our hypothetical $MTP protocol? The only possibility I can see is over analysing all our email — if you get a reply with an In-Response-To: header matching an email you sent, or one whose From: and Subject: match a To:/Subject: you’ve sent.

UPDATE 2003/08/26:

TMDA does some of this sort of stuff, apparently. Alone, though, it’s just increasing the arms race.

UPDATE 2003/08/26:

Some more on why email challenges suck. A promising comment from that:

Any effective spam remedy must attack one or the other side (or both) of this equation: raise the costs or reduce the technological effectiveness, on the one side, or reduce revenues on the other.

There’s certainly something wrong here.

UPDATE 2003/08/22:

John Howard’s reaction to Pauline Hanson’s sentence:

“Like many other Australians, on the face of it, it does seem [to me] a very long unconditional sentence for what she’s alleged to have done,” [Howard] said.

Peter Beattie’s response to that:

Mr Beattie says politicians should stop commenting on the sentence.

“I have never seen so many gutless wimps in my life, running around like scalded cats trying to position themselves for political gain,” he said.

“I just simply say to everybody, and I’ve noticed it at a federal level and I see it at a state level, I just say to all of them, have some respect for the courts.”

How dare politicians launch personal attacks and silence debate like that? I blame John Ashcroft.

There’s an interesting dichotomy of opinions on opinions: half the time people are intensely interested in what everyone else’s opinions on things are, and half the time everyone’s nodding in wry agreement to comments such as “opinions are like assholes, everybody’s got one”. This difference is also found in the reaction to government polling: sure, it’s great to be in a democracy and get to vote in your leaders, and it’s great to be able to get a rough take on what everyone thinks about an issue via professional pollsters, but as well as being responsive to the electorate, we want our leaders to have their own principles and provide, well, leadership to match.

What’s the difference here? It’s not simply a matter of getting annoyed when people have opinions that are diametrically opposed to yours; at the best of times, those can be the most fun, and conversely, having everyone be mindlessly agreeable can be pretty obnoxious too. I’m inclined to think it’s one of opinion versus insight.

Everyone has an opinion on most issues: they’ve got whatever facts they’ve picked up on the topic, their life’s experience, and common sense, and if they’ve got the time and the inclination, they’ll happily put all that together for you, stir, simmer, and serve up as the canonical take on events. Such are the standard dishes of talk radio, and taxi cab conversations.

By contrast, depending on how well informed you are already, it might be difficult to find someone that has any additional insight to offer. On most topics, most people are about equally well (or poorly) informed. On most topics, most people’s backgrounds aren’t relevant. And common sense is called that because, mostly, it is pretty common. Certainly, if you’re poorly informed on an issue, or you’re talking to someone who’s in a position to be much better informed than you are, you can gain some insight rather than just another opinion, and similarly if you’re talking to someone who’s older and wiser, or better at putting two and two together.

Unfortunately, if you just poll for opinions, it’s very easy for the insight to get lost amongst the assholes.

Some analysis on release delays, that’s not incredibly empirical or rigorous but seems interesting to me, at any rate.

A day or so in, and as well as the pre-announcement addition of LSB compliance, the sarge release criteria have had two additions: python policy (5.q) and some remarks about logrotate (5.j). I wonder how much is too much.

So, I write:

As stronger medicine, we’re going to spend the next few weeks — in particular, the period between Saturday 23rd August and Sunday 14th September — […]

On the other hand, as a maintainer, while you’re certainly encouraged to spend the next few days fixing any outstanding issues that you think might be targetted come the 23rd, […]

        * August 19th (now)

                0-day NMUs (as of the 23rd)

Naturally then, we have someone assuming that that policy has already started. Yet more fuel for Lessig’s fire re: regulation by laws versus regulation by code.

 changes_valid = check_changes();
+
+if changes["fingerprint"] in ["D691BB89887AF7A0BAE427FD7A6AFEDA",
+       "86AADB04D2F5CC553A4D940FB1A9DD82DC814B09"]:
+    if not changes["architecture"].has_key("source") or changes["source"] not in string.split("bass bastille bow cal cheops chntpw chrootuid clips clips-doc compartment debrecipes-es dns-browse doc-es-misc dpkg-iasearch e2undel easyfw euro-support farpd firewall-easy fortunes-es gliese honeyd httpush i2e iisemulator jailer ldp-es libnasl libpam-chroot linux-tutorial-es lmbench log-analysis lskb lucas makejail manpages-es manpages-es-extra mozilla-locale-es nat nessus-core nessus-libraries nessus-plugins net-telnet-cisco psad remem roleplaying router-audit-tool sac samhain satan spacechart spellcast spellcast-doc spkproxy starplot tcltutor tiger user-es vrrpd yale"):
+         reject("NMU privileges for jfs revoked until 2003-09-15");

Meh.

This will suffice for blogging today.

I’m pondering trying to do more release-manager blogging, not quite sure how or if it’ll work out.

So, since it still seems like a cool idea, I decided to write a plugin for blosxom to let me do after-the-fact updates to blog entries in the instapundit style.

You can download the code if you like. It supports most of the features thought up in the molelog comments: you can call the updates blah-1.txt so that if the plugin isn’t present they’ll still show up, and if the plugin is present, have them optionally show up as blog entries of their own as well as updates. Or you can set it up to call them blah-1.upd and have them never appear as blog entries of their own (which is how I’m setup now).

Sweet.

Ben Fowler recently opined on blogging. Unfortunately he did a pretty poor job of it, and doesn’t seem inclined to provide corrections on his own; and given it was probably in response to something I wrote, I’m inclined to offer some rebuttals.

Ben’s first mistake, is that he neglected to offer any external links in his entire discussion. While that’s common in professional journalism, it’s very poor form in blogging. It’s also one of the wins of blogging: it makes it very easy for the reader to refer to sources and form his or her own opinion. So let’s provide the context Ben didn’t: here are some of the posts that Ben’s presumably refering to.

Ben is attempting to refute the promise of blogging for bypassing conventional media and giving the unwashed masses a hope of getting news unfiltered by an elite agenda. His first tack is this:

It is the job of the professional journalist to gather news, interpret it and present it. They operate in a highly-evolved (but nonetheless imperfect) environment of standards of fairness, even-handedness and integrity. […]

It does not appear to me that bloggers feel the need to do as much fact-checking or be as honest or fair as conventional media, nor would they expect to be, since blogs tend to be, by their very nature, highly subjective.

This is an exceedingly odd time to be proclaiming the fairness, even-handedness and integrity of professional journalism. We have the Jason Blair scandal at the New York Times, the News We Kept to Ourselves scandal at CNN, the sexed up reporting scandal currently unfolding at the BBC, and biassed coverage by the ABC. Or, without quite the same currency, perhaps the review of Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize for covering up the death of millions for access to a dictator might raise an eyebrow. On the other hand, if you’re looking for bias in big media that’s paraded proudly instead of cowering in shame, surely you don’t need to look any further than Fox News?

It’s probably impossible to reliably get an unbiassed newsfeed: at the very least as soon as you get an audience, you have to strongly resist random folks trying to use your influence to spread their personal views, whether they be reporters, anchors, or management. And on the other hand, most people tend to prefer getting news that matches their own prejudices, so that news reporters have an incentive to add at least some bias; whether that be to always mentions the costs of activities in Iraq (“this boy lost his arm in today’s targetted bombing”), or to evaluate events primarily in their larger-scale impact (“today’s targetted bombing is aimed at reducing the effectiveness of Saddam’s command and control capabilities in Southern Iraq”). (Both example quotes are purely hypothetical)

Ben continues:

To attempt to assimilate and understand the news in an objective way, a reader would have to read a vast amount of material and then draw his own conclusions. This is unlikely, because most of us have lives and jobs, we tend to read material that we agree with, and bloggers tend to move in packs (the war-bloggers being a decent example).

I was watching The West Wing when the first plane struck the World Trade Centre on 2001-9-11, and flicked to the news on another channel during an ad break when no one yet had any good idea what was happening. I spent the next few hours switching between various news channels (CNN, Fox, BBC, Sky and rebroadcasts of the same on the free-to-air stations) and swearing and speculating on IRC. Over the next week or so I started watching TV news a little more regularly, and got addicted to reading the ABC website and the CNN website. I maintained at least the ABC habit up until discovering the wonders of blogs; and at this point I tend to get my news from Tim Blair’s blog and InstaPundit. I’m also inclined to believe I’m much better informed, and I’m definitely able to form much more coherent opinions about current events than before, probably because both those sites have a much broader range of news sources than I did, and appear to be much better at selecting interesting news and opinion than both ABC and CNN.

Naturally, your mileage may vary.

This leads into Ben’s next claim:

Of course, a typical example would be Tim Blair, a washed up journalist reject who was once hired by the Australian ABC, laughably, as a ‘right-wing Phillip Adams’. It turned out that Tim Blair didn’t make the cut and had his contract not renewed. The poor sod now runs a very popular blog (where he gets to bash Aunty and sneer at Arabs and little-L liberals), which of course suits everybody right down to the ground, because he is no longer restricted by journalistic rules of fair play, fact-checking, intellectual honesty and the like, and most normal people can safely ignore him.

Failing to link to Tim Blair’s site here is a pretty egregious sin — surely we want to encourage our readers to be able to check our facts, to ensure we’re not going to get away with just making shit up, right?

Anyway, way back in the day (June 2002), Tim wrote the following entry:

RUN FOR your lives! Genetically-modified seeds are coming! They’ll destroy us all!

That was the tone of The 7.30 Report’s piece last week on GM seeds and their unholy menace. Reporter Sarah Clarke located a GM victim:

PERCY SCHEMEISER, CANADIAN CANOLA FARMER: It has destroyed our market of canola in many countries of the world.

All of the European common market will not buy one bushel of canola from us. That means 30 per cent of our exports have been lost just to Europe alone.

SARAH CLARKE: Canadian farmer, Percy Schmeiser became a GM canola producer by accident.

His crop was contaminated by pollen from a neighbouring genetically modified crop.

Any complaints he may have had were steamrolled by Monsanto, which successfully sued to seize his crop.

PERCY SCHEMEISER: I lost it all to a contamination because a judge ruled in my case it doesn’t matter how Monsanto’s genetically modified canola gets on my land or any farmers land.

SARAH CLARKE: Australian farmers are now being warned by Percy Schmeiser that they too could become victims of genetic contamination.

Did The 7.30 Report research Mr. Schmeister’s claims? Far from being a tragic target of the genetically-modified seed bullies, a court in Canada found that he’d used GM seed without payment. The claim that his crop had been accidentally contaminated was convincingly refuted. Schmeister is a common seed fraud.

Fair play? Intellectual honesty? Fact checking? It’s a common saying in the computer security industry that the illusion of security is worse than no security. Is the illusion of integrity so much better in news reporting?

For reference, the court’s determinations on the facts contradict Schmeiser’s claims. This particular example is of interest to me since I’d read about it a number of times from a number of sources (slashdot and The Register particularly) and was reasonably incensed about it, which I would not have been had my sources not been either incompetent or dishonest.

Ben continues, rather incoherently:

[…] Any dickhead with an agenda can set up a blog, and they often do.

This probably explains the very large right-wing pundit and blogger community: it’s an extension of Alan Jones or John Laws (Rush Limbaugh for the Americans).

Ben seems to have completely missed the large left-wing pundit and blogger community he participates in, advogato. Most techy blogs out there are pretty left-wing as far as I can see: slandering Howard or Bush, or decrying the “overarching greed” of corporations, hoping for government funding, or getting arrested at protests. Outside of Advogato there’re plenty of other lefty techy blogs, but I’m not in the mood to look for links.

And hey, there’s nothing wrong with any of that — one of the benefits of blogging is that it’s easy to find people writing about things you’re interested in from many perspectives, which is completely impossible in twenty second news clips, and far from usual in papers. The only thing that is wrong, is that Ben seems a touch blinded by his prejudices, which is always a mistake.

The Internet now gives any old joe too lazy to think for himself or consider the perspectives, feelings or rights of others the opportunity to sound off (and gullible people to believe their self-serving rhetoric) without being criticised by the hated shiny-arsed ‘elite’ academic types for being stupid, insensitive, wilfully ignorant and lazy.

Ben might be comfortable with being too lazy to think for himself, or consider the perspectives, but most people aren’t. Whether they do or not, and whether they’re successful when they do are other matters, but they generally seem to apply equally whether you’ve got a press pass or not.

Or, for that matter, whether you’re a member of the academy, who’re also quite capable of being ignorant, irrational or biassed. Towards the latter, from the book Australian Politics by Owen E. Hughes:

In Australia, the parties of the Right have received less academic attention than has the ALP. This may be because the majority of poltiical scientists and historians have been sympathetic to the ALP. As Henderson argues “what few books there are on the Liberal Party and its leaders tend to be written by those whose political sympathies are on the Left.” (37) He argues: (38)

The intellectual weakness of Australian conservatism is reflected in the Liberal Party. The consequences of the Liberal Party’s traditional indifference to ideas can be seen in the fact that is has had so few public supporters among the intelligentsia or chattering classes — except on the narrow matters of economics.

[…]

(37) Henderson, Menzies Child, p322.
(38) Henderson, p323.

This is, of course, assuming we’re going for “fairness, even-handedness and integrity”, rather than views filtered through an “elite agenda”. In any event, the opposition of the academy isn’t particularly interesting on any level. It’s certainly not able to impact any blogs, but whatever impact it already has on newspapers isn’t particularly effective either, given the ALP’s long years in the wilderness both before and after the Hawke government.

Like it or hate it, the conventional media, despite it’s flaws is probably here to stay, and like pet rocks and hula-hoops, the blog will die a quiet and lonely (if not slightly overdue) death, at least in it’s vain, hyped, hypertropied-ego form.

Ooo, look: a prediction. Ben thinks blogs will die. Presumably because regular news sources are better. But that’s not enough for blogs to die: for that, people not only have to not read them, but have to stop writing them. Ben’s already demonstrated that not being wildly popular isn’t enough reason for a blog to disappear: he’s maintained his own for three years, and well over two hundred entries already without any expectation of a high level of interest.

Anyway, Ben’s just reiterating Rush Limbaugh’s take on blogging.

Impressive.

<stockholm> aj: will you come?
<stockholm> aj: 12. -17 jul
<stockholm> aj: please? (*bamby eyes*)
<aj> stockholm: hey, if someone wants to wave free plane tickets in my face i could be easily convinced :)

Europeans are so generous. Well, at least with money they collect from Americans. Continuing the exciting saga of the travelblog, July saw me setting off to Norway, land of the midnight sun and Viking invaders, or, more accurately, Oslo, land of the midnight semi-twilight and hideously expensive food. The excuse this time was DebConf 3, also comprising the inaugural DebCamp.

(Warning, this one’s got lotsa piccies)

My itinerary for this escapade was to fly Cathay Pacific from Brisbane to London (via Cairns and Hong Kong), spend a couple of days in London, fly British Airways to Oslo, hack, confer and hopefully tour for a bit over a week, then fly back the way I’d come with a four hour stopover in London, and a six hour stopover in Hong Kong. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?

The flight to Hong Kong was pretty unremarkable. Cathay was reasonably nice, as far as cattle-class goes, and the leg from Cairns had the virtue of being largely empty. Hong Kong airport suffered first from being obsessive about SARS — they use a nifty little lasery temperature checker on every passenger as you enter the departure area to see if you’re running a fever, and run regular announcements telling you to not to sneeze on people and suchlike; and it also suffered from also being hot and humid thanks to summer, and dusty and poorly air-conditioned, presumably thanks to the renovations that were going on. As highly suggestable as I am, and with no thanks to the plane’s ineffectual air-conditioning while we were on the tarmac, I naturally left Hong Kong with my nose leaking like a faucet.

A little worrying were the copious Internet terminals around the place, all non-functional. When I eventually sat down and pulled my trusty laptop out, wireless didn’t work straight away, either. Finding some random employee and asking didn’t help any either. After wandering around, and realising that there really isn’t much thrilling stuff to do in an airport at 10pm, I had another go, and after fixing a broken, DHCP-assigned netmask, and providing credit card details got some net access. Yay! I downloaded my email. Yay! Oh, look, here’s one that begins “Anthony, I need to restore back to Tuesday’s back up – don’t know how!!!” and ends “I knew something bad would happen if you left the country… HELP!!!”. Yay. At this point it’s about midnight in Brisbane on the day I’d left. On the upside, I still had enough access to the appropriate computers, and there was enough information in the email, that I could fix the problem fairly easily. At midnight Brisbane time on a server in a dark and locked office, from an airport in Asia, via a server in the US with encrypted tunnels all the way. Pretty nifty, really.

In spite of my sniffling, I managed to get a fairly decent sleep on the flight to London, and while “refreshed” is probably far too strong a term, I was at least rested and awake when we landed at Heathrow at ridiculous o’clock in the morning. With some advice, and a helpful map, I managed to navigate the Tube and find my hotel, which let me freshen up and change (thank heaven), before wandering around London. The room was pretty pokey, but nice enough — it had a bed, a bathroom and a balcony, it was just down the road from Paddington Station, and an hour or so’s walk to the city center, and it was 25 quid a night.

Actually refreshed this time, I found a place that served breakfast, ate, and wandered back out to the street, at which point I was treated to the admonishing site of a guy lying unmoving on the road, in front of a stopped bus, with a small crowd gathered around looking concerned, and a police officer directing traffic. Mental note to self: cross at the pedestrian crossings only. I planned to basically head south to Victoria Park, then generally east towards the city, and whatever interesting sights I might see. I like walking around cities, for some reason.

Day one ended with a whimper — I managed to walk too far north trying to find Kings Cross, and got lost in some of the inner suburbs, with not a Tube stop in sight. High density housing everywhere, and the streets just kept turning into dead ends, completely ruining my nonchalant “Oh, why yes, I think I’ll take this turn now” attitude. Things like this happen, when you’re too cool to work out where you want to go in advance. On the upside, I discovered that the Tube stops tend to have useful maps of the immediate area, and occassionally incredibly helpful maps nominally to document bike routes, just sitting there ready to be taken for free. So I’m a cheapskate, bite me. At any rate, Arsenal Stadium, (or perhaps more particularly, Arsenal Station) was a definite site for sore feet by the end of that day.

Day two was more of the same, with slightly more planning up front, enabled by possession of a useful map. Touristy, touristy, touristy!

As a right-wing death beast in training (we’re provided with bibs to catch the foam and slobber until we learn more control), I was amused to spend my time watching for left-wing propaganda. This was, after all, Europe I was visiting. It was all there, and easy to find. I wandered through various bookstores trying to find a copy of Sowell’s Basic Economics, and while I failed miserably at that (the closest I came was Borders, which had had a copy previously but was currently out of stock), I did manage to get a nice view of what passes for balanced, informative resource material on political and cultural studies.

The anti-American bias amongst people, rather than literature, was at best subtextual — I spent my first day in London wandering around wearing my “Orlando Florida” shirt, and was accosted on the streets exactly once, by someone who appeared to be an evangelical mormon. With both “m”s, although after being accosted by dozens of people trying to hand out pamphlets for various goods and services, my tolerance was getting pretty low. Nevertheless, I’m fairly uncomfortable with a community that sees fit to fill shelves with fairly rabid propaganda uniformly against the war in Iraq, within mere months of the end of major hostilities. That’s not enough time for the facts about the situation in Iraq to become clear, even ignoring that governments and other organisations are still either unwilling to release, or actively concealing information about the lead up to the war, and the war itself. And even given full knowledge of the facts, a month or two simply isn’t enough time to form well-reasoned conclusions about it, or to write coherent articles about those conclusions, or to provide quality editorial input. All you’re getting is something that could as easily have been written a year ago, with extra heat and passion, neither of which are particularly useful additions to books whose purpose is to inform. Meh.

Naturally there were also protests. I’ve no idea why — given what’s already happened, there’s nothing in Iraq that actually makes sense to change in a significant manner. But hey, it’s not healthy to hold your rage in, right? And who doesn’t love to be walking down the street and look down to see a sign telling you that you’re dead? Naturally, political propaganda is a perfectly fine excuse to litter: after all, the ends always justify the means.

Equally naturally, the University precint was covered in tacky posters for communist events. Student socialism seems to be the standing wave of fashion: whereas most fads sweep through the population and fade away, student socialism seems to just sustain itself unendingly, as its medium comes and goes underneath it.

You know, it’s really hard writing enough stuff to get these pictures laid out nicely on the page. Photoblogging sucks.

Anyway. After two days wandering around London, I left for Oslo. Well, I tried to, but ended up getting completely screwed around by British Airways; evidently I was meant to be there two hours in advance, not the hour and a half listed on my flight coupon, and apparently it’s sensible to plan an extra half hour or so just to deal with the horribly disorganised check in. On the upside, having missed my scheduled flight, I was wait-listed for the next flight, on which the only spare seat ended up being in business class.

There’s less exciting travelbloggy stuff from Oslo, since there was an actual point to me being there. People were met, things were learnt, bugs were fixed, coding was done, stuff was, as it often is, discussed. The accommodations consisted of the floor of the local high school gym, the food was the civilian equivalent of MREs, or large portions of in-flight meals, drinks were jugs of tap water from the toilets. But hey, when the choice is spending a month’s wages on a hamburger and a coke, who’s complaining? Conferencing on the cheap is a pretty nice thing to be able to do, and this one was pretty much that: no registration fees, sponsorship in the low tens of thousands; and on the other hand, a full week’s worth of events, international speakers and attendees, and about a hundred people showing up. Oh, and pretty much everyone leaving happy with what they got out of it. Sweet.

(One thing you might have noticed is that I’ve found a cute little Gimp thingy to make my photos look a little bit prettier on the page. It’s called Photo-Stack, if you find yourself caring. I think it looks quite trendy, and it doesn’t matter even slightly what you think. Thankyou, come again.)

UPDATE 2003/08/21:

Interesting debcamp links: the debconf3 and debcamp homepage and the debcamp group photo — put your pointer over the face to see the name. Nifty.

As David would say, there’s always a Buffy connection.

This is sure a nice thing to say:

Ok, before I get blown out of the water too comprehensively, I must note that aj’s blog is a bit of a special case. There is just no way that I could write so fluently and fluidly as many words as he does each day. Well, maybe I could, if I found a dark, quiet room with running coffee and alcohol and made a rule that I couldn’t leave unless I’d written five thousand words. I’d have to quit my job, stop playing sport…

I’m also surprised by aj’s relatively strong command of political analysis. Anil, should you read this, would you do me a favour and read what he writes? I’d like to know if it’s complete waffle or whatever.

When I write about neo-con stuff, I should note that I’m (ab)using the term to mean “newly conservative”, since I’ve only been inclined in the small-government, capitalist, minimal state-assistance, etc viewpoint for a few months now. Almost everything I know about politics comes from the sources linked on the sidebar, and my own critical thought, neither of which are things you ought to be relying on too heavily, let alone exclusively.

Oh, I should also note that there’s no way I’m going to be updating this on a daily basis with any regularity.

A progress report on the investigation into weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Weve been very lucky. One set of these documents that we were happiest about – actually, the Iraqis had prepared them to be moved. They were put in two very large trailers outside the national monitoring directorate, and then something happened. They forgot to move them; the wheels were taken completely off the trailers. It was an Iraqi who pointed out to a group of Americans – I think those are the two trailers you want.

Also, here’s a link to some real intelligence failures, kindly saving me from having to make that argument.

Martin follows up to the previous entry, with an interesting question — is it ethical to lie to achieve a moral good, that is, (when) do the ends justify the means?

The only problem here is that it’s not apparent that anyone lied (ie, deliberately uttered things they knew were untrue, and that they knew would lead others to come to a conclusion that was known to be false); it’s merely alleged, and mostly by people who have a stated interest in attacking Mr Howard, Mr Bush, or Mr Blair. We have a fair degree of confidence that a number of the details were wrong, but it is far from immoral to merely be mistaken. I’m wrong quite frequently, and I don’t like it, but I’m not ashamed of it — saying wrong things and getting corrected is how you learn to be right.

And the other half of the problem is that while the details may have been wrong, the essence of the argument was entirely right. The only two acceptable options was to depose Hussein, or maintain heavy sanctions indefinitely. And while the stories of the sanctions killing babies have turned out to be fabricated propaganda (ie, actual lies, and rather revolting ones at that), leaving a dictator with the avowed desire to attack us who has a documented history of genocide and imperial ambitions in charge of a nation of twenty million is simply not a sane thing to do.

So what do you have? The various governments gave their best estimates of Iraq’s capabilities and intentions, which have turned out to not be particularly far off the truth — the weapons of mass destruction was overstated, the Al Qaeda connection appears to have been understated — and, probably more importantly, which no one was reasonably contradicting before the war (do you remember the arguments for the war? that inspections would successfully disarm Iraq?). They did the job that they believed was the best way of ensuring our continued security, and twenty million people no longer have to be worried about being abducted and tortured for sport. It’s difficult to find anything immoral that the coalition of the willing have done, in my opinion. It’s even hard to find things that have been done in a particularly suboptimal way: the initial intelligence gathering was obviously imperfect, and the diplomatic efforts were somewhat disappointing, but the real risks was in the effectiveness of the military attack (quagmire, vietnam, guerilla warfare, terrorist attacks, the Arab street rising up, gas attacks, etc) and that worked amazingly well, which demonstrates that in spite of the failures, both the initial intelligence (where should we bomb? who should we convince to defect?) and the diplomacy (do you mind if we base our troops here? would you assist us?) were effective anyway.

An interesting point is that the Hussein regime has exactly two things on which it can blame this war: its aggression, and its lack of transparency. If you know you have an enemy, and you don’t know what he is doing, you’re required to assume the worst — that he’s moving his troops and equipment to strike a crushing blow against you. Failing to cooperate fully with weapons inspectors really did make invasion necessary. (Rather than belabour the obvious, I’ll leave the rest of the explanation of this line of thought as an exercise for the interested reader)

Also interesting is the possibility that the Hussein regime had to simultaneously convince its Arab neighbours that it had weapons of mass destruction, and convince America that it didn’t, in both cases to deter possible attacks. Pity I’ve no idea where I read that argument.

(Martin also makes it impossible for me to fix the stupid inconsistent permalink I used for the last entry, dammit)