| Monday
April 10, 2006 The first segment of the April
Column is about Intel Mac, and it's up at
www.byte.com. There's already mail, but I'll wait to post that.
This week I have to finish the last segments of the column
-- these things seem to take longer every month -- and pay taxes in addition
to all kinds of administrative work and chores such as taking Sable on her
annual trip to the vet for checkup and shot renewal. There was a lot in both
view and
mail over the weekend, and I
recommend you start with all that. And don't miss dhimmitude .
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There is new
evidence that global warming has slowed down. There is other evidence that
it hasn't. The situation remains as it was: theorists are sure there is
warming because their models show there has to be. Data gatherers believe
that, but they are not finding it in careful measurements. And so it goes.
==============
http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2006/04/05/mac_security_the_evil_drm.htm
asserts that the evil DRM
chip is inside the Intel Mac. I am not quite sure what he is saying, but in
any event, it ain't so according to chip experts I have asked to comment. In
any event, fear not.
===========
Subject: There IS a problem with global warming...
it stopped in 1998.
Some contrary opinion to the prevailing "wisdom".
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/04/09/do0907.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/04/09/ixworld.html
Perhaps so. See above.
=============
Iran and Nuclear Weapons
First, anyone not blind will
see that the West has been teaching powerful lessons over the years:
The first lesson is: if you
are a dictator, or part of an unpopular government structure, get nukes, get
them quick, get them in any way you have to. Get nukes and get them now.
The second lesson is, don't
let go. Even if you are a reluctant dictator, even if you hate dictatorship
and wish peace and democracy to your country, do not relax your grip, and do
not contemplate retirement. That way lies persecution of yourself and your
family, and you will probably die in a foreign jail. If you are lucky you
may be put under house arrest or seek asylum in a foreign embassy.
If you are a dictator, your
only chance of survival is to hang on and get nukes. Nothing else works.
Those are the lessons we
teach, and anyone with sense has learned them well.
Certainly the mullahs have.
Whether they have always wanted nukes, or learned to want them from the
lessons the West has been teaching, is not important. They want nukes, they
want them soon, and objectively they have every reason to desire them. It's
a very rational desire.
That is the first thing we
must understand.
Next: the mullahs understand
that time is not really on their side: the West's cultural weapons of mass
destruction are gnawing away at the vitals of fundamentalist Shiite Islam.
The Shah opened the door, and his opening to the West and the White
Revolution, while partly shut down, was permanent: in Iran they know that
there is more to education than sitting on the floor and memorizing an
ancient book; that there is more to life than blowing yourself up.
While the mullahs may have
hopes for a different sort of society for Iran than is very likely to come,
they aren't entirely unrealistic. And one way to divert this seduction of
their young people is to stir the pot, make the confrontations important, go
as far as they can short of provoking the West to invade. The attractions of
blue jeans and rock music are great. Islam doesn't seem to be enough to
overcome them. Patriotism is needed. That may do the job. And if you can
convince the young people that jihad is necessary, that the West isn't going
to let you have blue jeans and iPods, that the West is going to nuke your
country and steal your oil and reduce you to peasantry, occupy your land but
give you no security from bandits and religious enemies: if you can convince
your young people that the West isn't going to let you have its goodies
because it wants to steal everything you have and give you nothing -- then
you are home free.
And that, I put it to you, is
the mullah strategy. Convince the youth of Iran that the West is their
implacable enemy; that the West is coming for them.
And if that takes provoking a
tactical "surgical" nuclear strike on some Iranian facilities, why, it's a
high price, but the stakes are very high.
And of course whatever we do
to Iran and Syria merely confirms everyone's desires to get nukes and get
them fast.
Contemplate this while trying to decide
what to do about Iran and Syria.
There were a number of advocates of
preventive war in the 1940's and 1950's. Patton's view, "We're going to have
to fight the Russian SOB's anyway, so why don't we do it while we have a GD
army over here to do it with?" was popular with many. Deterrence and
containment, the long term strategy that we adopted, was less spectacular
and didn't seem all that attractive. No sounding trumpets, no drums and
flag. No SAC missions and flying bombs. The force would be generated and
head out over the Arctic only to be called back. Plenty of drills. Men and
women sitting in isolation in deep bunkers as the klaxons went off. EWO. EWO.
Emergency War Orders. Emergency War Orders. I have a message in five parts.
Tango. Xray. And so forth. But it was all a drill.
Deterrence is long, unspectacular, and
often boring. Containment is frustrating. It worked, though. It contained
militant Communism, a philosophy so attractive that it still claims a number
of tenured professors. Communism was a lot more seductive to the West than
militant Islam ever could be. Yet, in a few generations, that light failed,
and Communism collapsed, not in nuclear fire but with a whimper and some
artillery shells fired at a parliament building. Yet at one time, the USSR
had 26,000 nuclear weapons, most of them deliverable and aimed at the USA.
How many can Iran acquire with their best efforts? How many deliverable? By
what means? We contained the USSR with 26,000. We deterred the USSR and
chiliastic Communism which at one time had as militant a desire to sweep the
world as ever did any jihadist.
Containment says: the enemy is expansive,
and one of his strengths is that he is convinced that his victory is
inevitable. God, or the flywheel of history, or the objective economic
factors, or the laws of history, make victory certain. March in step with
the flywheel of history. But if we show the enemy this is not true, that he
is not expanding, that he is stuck with his inefficient system to stew in
his own juices; when there is not enough to go around, then petty
temptations to corruption become irresistible. If you believe strongly
enough in the underlying religion, you will put up with hardships for the
cause; but if the worms of doubt set in, and there is a shortage of the good
things of life, human nature takes over. Corruption sets in. Inefficiencies
get worse.
If we nuke Iran to destroy their
capability for making nuclear weapons, we make it legitimate to use nuclear
weapons to achieve cultural goals; we make preventive war a legitimate thing
to do.
The result will be a change in strategy:
buy a nuke. Use terror, use bribes, use infiltration, use any means
necessary to get some nukes, and do nothing to provoke the west until you
have them; but get them. In the West most things are for sale. Find ways to
buy them.
Containment and deterrence work. Those are
not spectacular policies; but they are proven. They do work. Contain Iran,
and let our Cultural Weapons of Mass Destruction have time to do their work.
Syria and Iran have no counter weapons. Syria is already a defensive
dictatorship with no pretense of legitimacy whose sole goal is stay in
power. Iran is under the control of mullahs: will they prevail over the next
Iranian generation? If so, how? What are their arguments? What can we do to
make them lose control? And what can we do to convince the young Iranians
that they are better off following the mullahs?
Is anyone asking those questions?
=====================
On what
we are doing in Iraq
I wrote this in response to a private
letter from a serving officer. On reflection it belongs as a public
statement:
My point is that we are NOT building Jeffersonian democracy. We seem to
be building winner take all on the French model central government, with
proportional representation rather than single member fixed districts and
federalism with substantial local power.
Why the US thinks that those failed principles that have given democracy
a very bad name and which we never employed here are a good idea I do not
know. There are silly intellectuals who think the US needs to go to election by
tickets with PR rather than single member districts, and national unity
rather than federalism; and this is probably the key debate about our own
future. But why we want to install such systems in Iraq through using our
legions, I do not know. Probably because the intellectuals have more control
over the legions than they do over the US itself. Intellectuals in power:
one of the things the world cannot endure. A servant when he is master...
(Read Pareto, or Burnham on Pareto (The Machiavellians) for more.)
Apparently we do not know our own history or how our own government
works, but we are going to go tell others how to run their countries -- on
the French and Israeli models despite their lack of success in the places
those have been used.
England is adopting this madness. Winner take all is a HORRIBLE way to
run a democracy unless it is very decentralized, and proportional
representation and party tickets is an awful way to choose representatives.
Those who do not learn history...
=====================
A new discourse on one of the intellectual giants
of the last Century.
I consider C. Nothcote Parkinson, Stefan T. Possony, and Herman Kahn
(among others) to be in the same class, and those who want to understand the
world need to read them. (Add Pareto, and Burnham on Pareto and the
Machiavellians.)
Parkinson’s War.
http://americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=5403
- Roland Dobbins
Parkinson has his Iron Law of Bureaucracy. I have mine, but his came
first.
In one of Parkinson's books he examines
the War on Terror in Malaysia and how it was ended. I don't think we study
that campaign, and I doubt many in our military (and almost certainly none
in our administration) ever heard of Sir Gerald Templar. Which is a pity.
===================
From Slate:
Wowie Zahawie
Sorry everyone, but Iraq did go uranium shopping in Niger.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, April 10, 2006, at 4:43 PM ET
http://www.slate.com/id/2139609/
As, Indeed, the Agency concluded; and
Wilson's report was originally believed to confirm this. But everything has
become political.
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