| Tuesday, November
26, 2002
The following is
in response to my View for
Monday:
Dr. Pournelle,
First, a disclaimer: These opinions are MINE, not
those of my employer or the US Government.
In Monday's view you mention that the Military seems
more than willing to go in and pound on Iraq. This is based on a solid
knowledge of, and first hand experience with, the weapons that Iraq is
creating. We have a very long memory of who has used what weapons in the
past, and our instruction tells us that Iraq is one of only a few
countries who have used anti-personnel chemical weapons in recent history.
We would then (naturally) rather fight that particular battle on OUR terms
and on OUR timeline at a location of OUR choosing, because unlike our
ability to respond to a conventional attack, responding to even a poorly
orchestrated NBC (Nuclear/Biological/Chemical) attack carries an enormous
price in lost lives.
Those of us on the front lines also don't want to
even consider what we'd do if we actually got nuked... Not a single person
who deals with our nuclear weapons has ANY desire to use them, but it's
not unreasonable to think that if we or one of our allies were hurt badly
enough, we might respond in kind. The modern warrior would rather snip
that entire chain of events before it gets a chance to start. That is why
we're ready and more than willing to put the hurt on Saddam. Unlike the
general public, we see on a daily basis what he has done, and we train
against his past actions and current/future capabilities in mind. What he
has done in the past is plenty bad enough, so we would prefer we do not
have to wait for him to strike first with even more nasty weapons.
There is no thirst for blood, just a desire to do
the dirty work on OUR terms before we have to deal with a stronger enemy
who has delivered a nasty first blow. Flying and fighting in an NBC
environment is difficult and hazardous, yet that's what we'd have to deal
with if we let him take the first shot.
Again, these opinions are MINE, not those of my
employer or the US Government.
Sean [Last name withheld]
The question is whether, left alone,
Saddam Hussein is a menace to anyone, and if so, to whom; and whether
preventing this menace is the proper task of the American people. If
he's a threat to us or those we hold dear, then best we wring his neck and
have done with him; as indeed I wanted to do after the First Gulf
War. I was no fan of going into that maelstrom to begin with. I
doubt that the Kuwaiti people are better off under their cowardly royals
than they would have been under Saddam Hussein, nor did I think Saddam
Hussein a worse threat to the people of the United States than many others
in that region. He didn't seek to export militant Islam. He is, or was, a
nationalist, and every Iraqi leader without exception has considered
Kuwait a breakaway province of Iraq. But
having decided to go to war in Iraq, we ought to have finished the job by
holding war crimes trials against those who did harm to our prisoners of
war: this for the encouragement of the others, and the message it would
send. We could then leave Mesopotamia to the intrigues of the British and
French and the others who have always enjoyed playing their great games in
that region. We didn't do
that. I doubt that we thereby made Saddam Hussein a dangerous enemy, and I
have seen no shred of evidence that he was involved in the 911 attack on
the people of the United States. That was carried out by an organization
that seeks the purification of Saudi Arabia as the sacred homeland of
Islam, mostly by Saudi citizens with money derived from Saudi Arabia, and
the involvement of Iraq was small to non-existent. I am prepared to
believe that Saddam's intelligence people did supply small quantities of
anthrax to Al Queda, but I have no proof, only strong suspicions. But the
911 attacks were not the work of Baghdad, and Saddam Hussein has been no
great friend of Al Queda. Since
911 we have worked hard to make Saddam Hussein believe we are his mortal
enemy, and that we will depose him when we can do so. That is a strong
incentive for him to collect terror weapons to use as a deterrent against
us: whether he is a selfish dictator or he truly believes he is the
indispensible Ba'athist hero defender of his people is immaterial, since
either gives him the same incentives. We
may have done our work of making him our enemy well enough that we now
have no choice but to wring his neck before he has better means of
deterrence than he has now. And certainly I agree with the troops, if it
were to be done, it were best it were done quickly. To
that extent I agree with my correspondent. Moreover,
I am now fairly certain that we have gone too far down the road to war
ever to turn back. We're going in, and my only surprise is that we didn't
do it last Spring. If I believe that, it is certain that Saddam believes
it; in which case he will be working to accumulate a deterrent we really
don't want him to have, and once again, since we're going to have to
disarm him, best we do it now while the outcomes are as certain as
anything in war can be certain (which is not very: no battle plan survives
contact with the enemy. Still the odds are good that we will win big with
few American casualties, and those odds will not improve over time.) To
that extent I agree with my correspondent. And
since a false statement implies the universe, it's not much good
speculating about what we ought to do in a better world or what might
happen if we decide to take the road back to the old republic rather than
go ahead on our imperial path. Which
leaves open the question of whether the republic can recover from this
experiment. It is
certainly possible. Republics are resilient. We were able to survive our
imperial experiments in the Philippines and China. We have paid the price
for Puerto Rico and will continue to pay it -- the damage there is not to
Puerto Rico, but to us -- but it is an endurable price. Do note that while
it is obvious to anyone who thinks about it that we have kept Puerto Rico
under our tutelage far longer than any need, and the island is at least as
capable of self government and nationhood as any down there, we aren't
about to let go of it, nor will we make it a state. I once said that the
proper solution to Puerto Rico would be to send the CIA to foment an
independence movement we could give the place to. I wasn't being
whimsical. The habit of governing others (as opposed to self government)
is hard to break. We were able
to reconstruct Germany and Japan into working nations not threats to the
West, and use them as allies in the Cold War. The
costs to the Republic of the Cold War were very high: we centralized a
great many functions that ought not have been centralized. It may well be
that we went so far down that path during the Cold War that we will never
return: will we, nil we, we may not be capable of restoring self
government. Certainly the trend is in the opposite direction. So:
perhaps it is time to let go, cease to hope for self government under a
republic, and look to how we can be the best empire we can be. In any
case, given the current president, we are likely to depose Saddam Hussein.
Few will mourn his passing. More
below.
Now back to computers, and a comment
on my current BYTE column:
Jerry,
I just read your latest Chaos Manor and I have a
much easier solution than disconnecting the internal Zip drive while
installing Windows XP (also affects Windows 2000). As you may be aware
most system BIOS' are set to auto detect IDE devices. This is where the
problem with WinXP/2000 lies. If your internal Zip drive is
Secondary/Master for instance, just tell the bios that there is no
secondary master device (set to NONE) Windows Plug & Play will still
detect the device and assign it a letter but this happens long after the
BIOS has done its thing. I've done this on hundreds of workstations
without ever having to open the case. Of course this means that if you
were to boot via floppy you couldn't use the Zip but I think it's a small
price to pay.
By the way, I have enjoyed your writings for many
years.
Gary Martin
Actually it's just as easy not to
plug in the data cable until you are finished installing Windows. XP finds
the new Zip drive easily, and you don't have to go into the BIOS at all. Thanks
for the kind words.
 Dr.
Phil Chapman on Solar Power:
Subject: Solar Power from the Moon
Reply to previous mail
From: Phil Chapman
Dear Jerry,
The total solar energy falling on the Earth is about
180 thousand terawatts (TW), not 140 million TW, as calculated by Jeff
Lackey (your letters, 11/20/02). Perhaps he is confusing a terawatt (10E12
watts) with a gigawatt (10E9 watts). He is thus wrong by three orders of
magnitude when he says the 100 TW figure given for a solar power station
on the Moon is only 0.0001% of terrestrial insolation.
On the other hand, while I haven’t talked to Dave
Criswell recently, I very much doubt that he is proposing a plant with
such an enormous output. Assuming a (generous) overall conversion
efficiency of 40%, generating 100 TW would require a belt of solar cells
50 km wide, stretching entirely around the lunar equator, with a total
area of 560,000 square km (!!). Building that would be a daunting task,
but it would be cheaper than putting all the photovoltaics in one place,
because then you would have to provide energy storage so that you could go
on delivering power during the long lunar night, and you would have to
size the array so that it could charge the storage system during the lunar
day, as well as providing power. A square array for this purpose would be
900 km (!!) on.a side, with an area of 820,000 km (!!).
These numbers are of course ridiculous. The total
world energy consumption is growing by about 2%/year, but at present it
amounts to 12 TW. The total world electric generating capacity is 3.5 TW,
but the plants are not fully utilized, so actual electricity consumption
is more like 2 TW. It does not seem likely that we will soon build a solar
power plant on the Moon that generates an order of magnitude more energy
than we now use worldwide, and 50 times more electric power than we use.
Note that insolation is 15,000 times greater than
all the energy used by the human race At the present rate of growth, the
heat we generate will approach the energy we receive from the sun in about
500 years. That growth rate depends in large part on population growth,
and if the number of people continues to increase at current rates there
will be 600 trillion people on the planet by then. Since the land area
totals 150 million sq. km, each person would have an area half a meter on
a side – i.e., there would be standing room only on Earth. It seems
probable that we will level off before then, if only because of the
difficulty of procreating while standing up in such an unimaginable press
of people.
This is another reductio ad absurdum, which I hope
demonstrates that we need not worry that our energy consumption, whatever
the source, will have a significant direct influence on the climate.
Indirect effects (e.g., the greenhouse) are another story, although almost
equally far-fetched.
Phil
Indeed. Thanks And
sometimes close reading pays off:
re: Roland and too much time
Hi Jerry,
Regarding the url that Roland sent:
( http://www.local6.com/orlpn/news/stories/
news-178798320021115-081102.html ).
Did you read closely about the charges?
"Charges include aggravated assault,
terroristic threats, weapons offenses and criminal mischief."
Errrr indeed.
Joel
Rosenberg on the war:
I think your essay reflects the
situation accurately; as usual, and you ask the right questions, even
though, as usual, I disagree with some of your answers.
Where we differ is that I think that, in the world
as it is, it's not feasible to leave certain kinds of aggressive dictators
alone. I think it's a matter of the Bomb -- given the US's power, an
aggressive dictator without WMD can be left alone until and unless it
becomes necessary to do something, if ever; most burn themselves out
before it becomes necessary.
Assume -- purely for the sake of argument; I'm not
sure it's true -- that it was in the US's interest to do some combination
of restoring the Kuwaiti monarchy and/or kicking the Iraqis out of Kuwait.
Given the IDF having conveniently destroyed the Osirak complex ten years
before, it was a military inevitability, given even modest political will;
absent that, I think it would have been utterly undoable.
I think you're right, though -- there are worse
threats to the US in the region; the Saudi entity next door comes to mind,
and came to my mind, even before the recent revelations about financial
support for the Saudi 911 shaheeds. Were it not for the Bomb, I'd prefer
to see Saudi Arabia head the list in big black letters, rather than be
written in invisible ink under the Iraq entry, with the notation
"make them clean up their own mess" -- as I believe it is.
(Digression: loop back to a comment I made to you,
about a year ago, about the difference between a B52 carrying a
10-kiloton-equivalent load of fuel-air bombs [roughly twenty] and a plane
carrying one 10-kiloton nuclear warhead. What's the difference? That's not
a rhetorical question -- I think there's a difference, but the first is a
not-particularly-unlikely scenario, and the second is off the table, and
I'm not sure I know why other than, "well, everybody knows that
nuclear weapons are _different._", which doesn't satisfy me
particularly.)
It seems to me that the US can and will have much
more influence on the Saudi entity when there is an Iraqi occupation force
a short drive away from the border, protecting the Iraquisling
government's pumping of as much oil -- at market price -- as they can.
Eventually, the House of Saud is going to have to clean up their own mess,
if they can; Iraq may well be the encouragement needed.
I could go on, but I keep looping back to Solution
Unsatisfactory, which seems to be playing out less cleanly, and in slow
motion . . .
You will note that Saddam was
denucleated by the Israeli Air Force without the necessity of a large
ground invasion. If the republic determines that a regime is a threat,
there are ways to remove it other than by invasion and permanent
involvement. Recall my essays
on the war just after the September attacks. I proposed, not entirely
without whimsy but not entirely in jest either, that the US go build
monuments in all the places that rejoiced in the attack. If building the
monuments required a change of regime, so be it. My
objections are two fold: I think getting involved in the territorial
disputes of Europe -- and God knows the Balkan mess was no more than that
-- is a drastic mistake that does nothing but harm to the interest of the
US. I think entangling alliances absent a significant threat to the US
itself are a mistake. And I think that our mucking about in the Middle
East has made us a target. On
that latter score, it is done, and we can't stuff that genie back in the
bottle. Standing down now doesn't get us less hatred. And given that we
are now the targets, the list of people we can tolerate with The Bomb has
grown shorter, and the threshold for US action has got lower. But even
now, the best way to accomplish our goals, in my estimation, is to make it
clear to ruling classes everywhere that attacking the United States, or
allowing people to use your territory in aid of attacking the United
States, will get you removed from power and probably killed. We are not
responsible for giving your people good government. We
are the friends of liberty everywhere. We are the guardians only of our
own, but we will do what is required to guard our own. Don't Tread On Me. 
Iraq
seems determined to test our resolve in this matter. So be it. Saddam will
not be missed, and he may provide a lesson for others. The question is,
what will we do then? Will we become even more entangled, even more
determined to impose the New World Order all over the world? I fear so. 
Subject: Solar Power Calculation (Math 101)
Phil is of course right (dang!)
I got the peak load, ~1000 W/m^2, from a solar power
website. (This is before conversion to electricity.)
In my earlier calculation I used a radius of 4000
miles and multiplied by 1000/.6 to get meters.
The correct radius is ~ 6.37 * 10E6 meters. PI*r^2
gives a projected area of 128 * 10E12 m^2
128 *10E12 m^2 * 1000 W/m^2 = 128 thousand TW which
is a bit closer to Phil's number.
Still, wouldn't a 0.1% increase in load be
reradiated into space without much increase in surface temperature? (Since
the global warming models don't account for clouds very well, I won't
either.)
I also agree that we are unlikely to get that much
power from the Moon. But the people will have their electricity. If not by
space solar power then by some other means, be it fusion or zero point
energy field or some other improbable thing. Or have I been reading
science fiction all these years in vain?
Jeff Lackey
No, we will have and need electric
power. No question about that...
Subject: Netscape et Mozilla
Jerry P.:
I am interested in your take on Mozilla as I tried
the latest version of Netscape as well as Mozilla separately. I had to
uninstall both as they kept adding a pdf extension on exe files that I was
downloading. I have always objected to the tedious process of setting up a
Netscape mail account and so have never used it. Of course, after seeing
the mess that Outlook Express caused a friend, who had an Outlook address
list in his computer and then was running Outlook Express and could not
figure out how to make them merge, I have never used Outlook.
OK, that is just my personal prejudice, but seeing
how Outlook is targeted by hackers, why take the risk? I started using
Mozilla way back in the days when you downloaded the latest alpha version
to see what would crash. Before that it was the BBS days and Browsers were
a refreshing change. I am sorry that Netscape has not kept up, and hope
that they will survive. For some reason Opera just doesn't strike my
fancy, but I want all the good features of IE and Netscape, and don't want
to be stuck in the ruts that MS creates. Like why do I have to have a
Documents and Settings folder as if there are going to be several users of
this computer?
I want to be able to set-up my computer so that the
folders (directories and sub-directories) are where I want them to be,
with programs not scattered all over the map. Is that too much to ask? It
is not like it is impossible, but I don't want to have to custom build the
Registry to have everything where I want them. How about building in a
good bookmark or favorites editor, one with some real power. I currently
use Powermarks but previously used Compass. I want to be able to clean out
the excess baggage on occasions, find what I want with not too much
trouble, and understand what is going to happen without constantly
learning new things. I on occasion help others with computer problems,
dealing with crashed computers or files that they can't open; stuff like
that. The level of difficulty in the average person being able to operate
a computer without training is still too high. That is why Palm worked so
well for people. It takes the average person a short time to be able to
use the Palm functions well.
I did subscribe to Byte just now as you suggested.
For the price, it is still a bargain. The print magazine was one that I
always bought just for Chaos Manor, but always found other articles of
interest. Kind of like Scientific American, there is always something of
interest.
I am looking forward to more pictures of Sable.
charles simkins
CBS
I find Outlook satisfactory, and if
you don't open mail attachments you don't get bit: at least that has been
my experience. And if you do, you can be infected no matter what mail
reader you are using.
I always configure Office to look
for documents where I want them: in my case that's a directory I have
created for myself. Outlook does go mildly mad sometimes trying to find
places to archive things properly when you don't have the Documents and
Settings madness: one of the more stupid ideas Microsoft has, but you can
get around it.
Jerry, are you serious
" The solution to
Mozilla existing on the same system with Internet Explorer is to keep
one instance of Mozilla open. If you don't, it gets unhappy and tries to
usurp Explorer's tasks. Not an unbearable price. And many don't have
Explorer at all, finding Mozilla preferable "
The concept of it being necessary to keep a third
party application open continuously in order to have another operate
normally is absurd. Yes it 'is' an unbearable price. Where could it lead ?
When an application is 'closed' it should be CLOSED. Mozilla, or any
application with this kind of behavior will never find a place on any of
my machines.
John
-rice@vx5.com Webmaster, Network Admin, Janitor
Well, I should have said not
unbearable to me, but I agree, it's pretty grim. It's also likely I did
something wrong, but since what I did was pretty natural and wasn't an
attempt to do anything silly, it will happen to others. My
experiences with Mozilla have not been pleasant. Internet Explorer ain't
wonderful either, and it may be I am just accustomed to its idiosyncrasies;
but I do prefer it to Mozilla. Now
I have to try Opera and see if it works with other browsers. But in fact I
find Internet Explorer satisfactory and the price is right...
g
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