Iraq

Weapons of mass distraction.

Verehrtes Publikum, jetzt kein Verdruß;
Wir wissen wohl, das ist kein rechter Schluß.
Vorschwebte uns: die goldene Legende.
Unter der Hand nahm sie ein bitteres Ende.

Wir stehen selbst enttäuscht und sehn betroffen

Den Vorhang zu und alle Fragen offen.


Thus ends Bertolt Brecht’s “Der gute Mensch von Sezuan” (Engl. “The Good Woman of Setzuan”). It’s always hard to translate poetry, but as I haven’t found any English translation on the web, I’ll have to do it myself. Brecht’s words roughly translate as follows –


Gentle audience, don’t be appalled
We know as well, the end is stalled
Imagine we did the golden legend.
When in truth there was a bitter end.
Ourselves, dismayed we stand, concerned in vain,
the curtain’s drawn, all questions remain.”


I can’t think of a more fitting way to begin an entry about the WMD-related post-Iraq war hangover the US and British governments have to deal with these days.


Yesterday, Thomas Friedman tried to summarize this debate – “the war over the war” – in the NY Times. He explained that there were strategic and other – possibly also humanitarian – reasons to oust Saddam Hussein, but those in charge did not want to make that case in public, because they very likely would have lost it. Just remember Donald Rumsfeld’s performance during Joschka Fischer’s speech at the Munich security conference in February. So they settled for a WMD based strategy of exaggeration (to avoid the nasty L-word for the moment).


But the story doesn’t end here in my opinion. If you think about it, all comes once again down to the question of “inability of willful wreckage” by the current US administration. By now safely assuming that there weren’t too many imminently threatening WMDs in Iraq, one can’t avoid wondering how this argument can have led to a war. I see two fundamental possibilities.

First, intelligence was bad. They really did not know what Iraq had but decided that changing the geo-strategic map of the middle east was worth using this argument to go to war despite the possible embarrassment of not finding WMDs in the aftermath.

Second, intelligence was good enough so they knew Iraq did not have the propagated amount of WMDs but decided that changing the geo-strategic map of the middle east was worth using this argument to go to war despite the embarrassment of not finding WMDs in the aftermath.

The second scenario, of course, begs the question of why the American government and their British allies went through all the diplomatic haggling earlier this year lying straight to the world’s face – knowing they wouldn’t find anything presentable once they chased Saddam out of his palace – why stop lying now? Why not plant some buckets of poison in the desert. Does it take longer? Are they still digging right now? Or would that be too complicated, would too many people find out? I am not a weapons inspector, so I don’t know, but – I have doubts. If some villain dictator from Baghdad is supposed to be able to buy dangerous stuff from rogue laboratories all over the world, one would assume the CIA can do the same. And if exaggerating/lying about the reasons for war was a strategic necessity, why not going “all the way” to placate a world who wants to see the American hand.


The reason for this is also the answer to the first scenario and in my understanding the same that led to the American intervention in first place: The American administration does not care about the world or even Americans demanding to see its hand because it has accomplished its mission and successfully established large-scale American presence in the Middle East. The Weapons of Mass Destruction worked largely the way they were supposed to – as Weapons of Mass Distraction from the real causes for the war (and, no, it’s not just Iraqi oil).


At the moment I can’t see important electoral consequences for the current administration. In fact they’re already planning their second term without even a facade of international cooperation – according to the Washington Post Colin Powell and Richard Armitage are going to leave the State Department.


Of course, the WMD-story is not finished yet, and not unlikely, some heads will roll. But not the important ones – remember when Michael J. Fox’ character in “The American President” says that he would not participate in anything illegal because it’s always the guy in his position who goes to jail for 18 months? I wonder if that is a dialogue people in such positions are remembering these days.


And I wonder if people in Washington believe Tony Blair belongs in that category ;-).

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almost a diary

Happy Birthday! We’re moving!

My gentle readers, let me tell you that today, this blog is celebrating its first birthday. While you might or might not have been disappointed that I have been rather silent lately, the reason for this has been the preparation of a movable type installation over on www.almostadiary.de (no need to link, the auto-forward to blogspot is still working). The “tschwarz.blogspot.com” installation is going to stay in place for the moment.

Of course, MT offers a better functionality and having control over my archives is certainly worth a lot. But if you’re not happy with the MT templates, getting an MT installation (with a few bells and whistles) to work across just the most common browsers does take a lot of time and determination. If it had not been for my annual coding adventure, I likely wouldn’t have done it.

Especially importing your comments from reblogger to MT was a hazzle that involved creating a caif standard xml file from html through word’s search and replace functionality. Not a recommended method, but one that can work. However, while all comments have been atributed to the right posts in MT, Phil Ringnalda’s Yaccs comment import script wasn’t able to work with Reblogger’s timestamp, so don’t be surprised when comments seem to have been posted in 2005…

Also, many older posts still have headlines that are compiled from the first 5 words of the entry given the lack of a title tag in blogger’s free version, and I haven’t assigned categories yet. Neither have I installed the trackback feature.

So there are still things to do, especially as I just decided against using the prepared autumn design for the moment for reasons of recognition and weather. This means I have to do some table adjustments which will take another half-an-hour or so. Despite almost complete reliance on CSS, I am still using tables for the main columns for the moment. With just CSS I couldn’t motivate Netscape to do what I wanted. As for 4th-generation browsers, I have decided against trying to support them.

But anyway, “almost a diary on MT” is going online tonight. Let’s celebrate!

But now I’m off to celebrate something else first.

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self-referential

“­”

in preparation of this blog’s move to a movable type installation and into autumn clothes, I am modifying the code a bit and have also tried soft-hyphenation with the “­Â­” entity in the last post. The justified paragraphs look better this way – on my Internet Explorer 6.

Netscape 7 and Opera 7.11 just ignore the soft-hyphenation, so using it doesn’t hurt. That covers roughly 86% of people reading this page. In Netscape 4.x the text looks like shot in a Chicago mob gang drive by, but only a handful of my readers are using 4.x. So what about the rest? Especially Mac users? Please tell me.

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almost a diary, Iraq, media

Quality Journalism?

At least for the mo­ment, I am not real­ly com­men­ting the quar­rel bet­ween the Labour go­vern­ment and the BBC that very like­ly led to the tra­gic sui­cide of Dr. Da­vid Kel­ly, who was the ori­gi­nal sour­ce be­hind the BBC Radio 4’s de­fen­ce cor­res­pon­dent An­drew Gil­li­gan’s claim that the British go­vern­ment, most pro­mi­nent­ly Alas­tair Camp­bell, Tony Blair’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions ad­vi­sor, ‘sexed up’ the Bri­tish Iraq dos­sier to make a more con­vin­cing case for war.

But wha­tever you think of the go­vern­ment’s, or the BBC’s, or Dr. Kelly’s, or any indi­vidual jour­na­list’s res­ponsi­bili­ty for the tra­gedy, some peop­le in go­vern­ment ob­vious­ly for­got some ba­sic rules of po­li­ti­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion. When some­one says “liar”, you don’t fuel that dis­cus­sion by sul­king­ly re­ply­ing “no, you are” when the only result will be that bad situ­ation be­comes an even wor­se one.

I just don’t un­der­stand why Mr Camp­bell felt the need to re­live Shell’s 1995 Brent Spar com­mu­ni­ca­tions disaster when there was no need what­so­ever?

Whatever the truth to his or An­drew Gil­ligan’s po­si­tion, tal­king about it cer­tain­ly made things worse at a time when the pub­lic dis­cour­se was “shame on you if you fool me once, shame on me if you fool me twice”. What­ever the truth to either side’s alligations, with­out fi­nal­ly fin­ding some buckets of poi­son some­where in the Iraqi de­sert, the only way for the British go­vern­ment to deal with the si­tu­ation would have been to shut up, not to hunt down an al­le­ged trai­tor or char­ging the BBC with jour­na­lis­tic mis­con­duct to ma­ke every­one be­lieve that there must be really some­thing to the story.

That’s all I’m going to say.

My for­mer em­plo­yer Ben Brad­shaw on the other hand, for­mer BBC jour­nalist and now Par­lia­men­tary Se­cre­tary in the Bri­tish Depart­ment for Envi­ron­ment, Food and Ru­ral Affairs, is very invol­ved in this row.

And, again, what­ever your opinion of all this: his re­cent de­plo­ring the lack of qua­lity jour­na­lism and sour­ce veri­fi­ca­tion seems to have some point when even “The Guar­dian“, even in a time­line of the affair publi­shed on July 19th, makes him a “For­eign Of­fice Mini­ster”, a po­si­tion he left in June 2002 when he was appoin­ted “De­puty Lea­der of the Hou­se of Com­mons”.

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German Politics, oddly enough, Political Theory

A New Kind Of Democracy.

Look what I found on “ciao.com” while looking for credibilty ratings of an ebay pro-seller.

Now that’s what I call “political marketplace”. For those not literate in German, the image below is a screen capture from ciao.com, a website where people can leave their opinions on everything from white laces to, well, globalisation. The latter, of course, is only 68% recommended.

globalisation 68% recommended by commentators on ciao.com

I wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea to demographically profile the membership of these fora to see whether these opinions are anywhere close to “representative”. While I suppose that would be too hard to implement, especially because of privacy concerns I guess in ciao.com’s strategic business outlook they already see themselves as a real competitor in the traditional polling market.

Will be interesting to see.

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compulsory reading, US Politics, USA

Sex, Lies, And Dossiers.

Today, Salon.com’s Nicholas Thompson looks at recent examples of US-Presidential truth-tampering and decides that lying about war is worse than lying about sex. Many, certainly on this side of the pond, will agree with him that lying about the reasons for the sanctioned killing of human beings is actually lying in a league of its own.

But however much I believe that Mr. Thompson is theoretically right, I am not so sure about the political viability of his analysis.

After all, Mr Bush is President of a country, some states of which still criminalise ownership of sex toys and in which it is possible to seriously question the privacy of homosexuals – a case recently debated publicly following remarks of a US Senator and now settled by the US supreme court – in favour of their privacy.

Notwithstanding the annual San Franciscan group-masturbate-a-thon and Candice Bushnell’s “Sex and the City”, notwithstanding even unionised lap-dancers, in America, freedom of speech does NOT entail “obscenity” – but it does protect the depiction of violence.

It is certainly interesting to debate the cultural origins of this American particularity, but whatever the reasons – including the American media -, the fact remains that the American public has a special way of dealing with the sexuality of its public figures, above all the President.

A few weeks ago, I met Amber, a 20 year old Texan student currently pursuing an language study exchange programme in Bonn, the former West German capital. She adamantly defended the Bush administration’s policy on Iraq, and a lot of other things (excluding their tax and educational policies – because that’s where she is personally affected…). It wasn’t too long before we crossed the Clinton line – after all, it was the week of Hillary Clinton’s book release. Amber explained to me that she would always hate Bill Clinton for dishonoring the American Presidency by having sex with Monica Lewinsky – and also, because he lied about it. How could she, she wondered, trust such a politician?

Trust – the magic word when it comes to lying.

After hearing what she said about lying presidents, I couldn’t help but wonder if it were different for her if she was lied to about other things, say, the war on Iraq – if the President had decided he had to adjust the story to sell it to the public but if he *believed* he was doing the right thing for the country? [which is basically the story US Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, floated a few weeks ago].

And you know what, Amber said – yes, that would be less grave, as long as he believed he was doing *the right thing* for the country. She is right, of course. But this realisation has to be put differently to become useful in a political analysis- as long as most of his electorate trusts (or pretends to trust) that the President was *doing the right thing*, lying about the reasons will be forgiven and called leadership. And having sex with an intern can never be the right thing to do, however smart your PR people are. As Clinton realised, fighting this battle was pointless.

We might not like it, but in politics, sex, lies and dossiers are never judged by their factual truth, or by their moral gravity alone – these things matter if, and only if, they allude to electoral ramifications. This US administration knows that, however nervous some of their recent statements, however unpractical the unfolding drama around David Kelly’s death in the UK.

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oddly enough

Fly away, astray…

Papascott links to this worldmap on the homepage of AirIndia, wondering if their pilots will know where to go when on their way to European airports. Not too bad a question, I have to say…

But let’s face it, geography, particularly European geography, can be tricky sometimes, as the US edition of the National Geogrpahic found out last November in a poll regarding the geography knowledge of young people from several countries, including Germany and the US. And as this classic image from a geographically usually reliable news source indicates… (I could not find the one where they put Iraq instead of Poland ;))

CNN geography

By the way, I have been a bit quiet for some days, but I have some drafts in preparation.

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US Politics

“Made In Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics” by Michael Lind.

cover Interesting look behind the scenes of the culture that GWB grew up in. Lind makes a lot of interesting arguments about the seemingly fundamentalist basis of the Republican party and their pact with ivy-league educated neoconservatives. While his claims seem superficially credible to a non-expert reader like me, I would have preferred to get more data backing up his claim that 5% premillenial fundamentalists have hijacked the GOP because of their high turnout in Republican primaries.

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