The president made a number of points in his speech last week:
We have to invade and occupy Iraq lest we be subjected to another attack like 9/11. An attack which by every shred of information yet uncovered was caused by nothing whatsoever but the desire of 14 severely disenchanted Saudis and 5 equally disenchanted Egyptians to compel US disentanglement from the Arab world, principally Saudi Arabia, with box cutters. So the president's solution for this is to use massive military force to make the US sole debtor in possession and great white infidel hope of a soon to be war ravaged but otherwise completely uninvolved entire Arab country. Oh yeah, that'll calm everybody right the **** down.
Bush would very much like to see the UN security counsel listened to and respected and he is certainly not going to do this himself, and I would have to see the tape on this but he may literally have said both of these things in the same breath.
Korea is different from Iraq because it's a "regional" problem. Korea is actually closer to the US than Iraq is, but fortunately it's a "regional" problem. And when the Korean president threatens to hit the US with missiles he actually has which actually will, armed with nuclear warheads he's actually got, not to worry because Korea is, after all, you guessed it, a "regional" problem. Whew, that's a relief.
Bush says it's "hard to envision more terror than 9/11", which was an "unprovoked attack". If he can imagine democratizing the Middle East by force then his imagination is bigger than mine, but I can envision way more terror than 9/11 and I would prefer to keep using my imagination. And is there a government study somewhere on the plausibility of a completely unprovoked mass suicide attack?
And Bush points fingers about electronic surveillance. Just wanted to mention that particular knee slapper.
And the Iraqis are moving substantial stockpiles of banned weapons every 6-12 hours. With hundreds of weapons inspectors roaming their country. And satellites photographing them. And U-2 spy planes flying overhead. Bull****.
"I believe when we see totalitarianism we must deal with it." I'll grant him this one. Bush deals with totalitarians all the time.
And just to drag him into this the malicious cavity searching weasel senator Graham says "Saddam is an imminent threat because he has the ability to empower terrorists beyond their own capabilities", "imminent" actually meaning in Graham's context "possible eventual". Saddam is, in drug parlance, a "gateway dictator". Lacking an actual crime we now openly prosecute for means and opportunity, accommodatingly universal, while we will in fact go to some lengths to provide motive. This is the sort of mindless screeching that too often passes for reasoning- abstractions are simply piled one upon another until the threshold of violence and control has been lowered to the prevailing conditions.
Bush has in this instance committed himself to being a global policeman with something between a few and several percent global mandate, "policing" a far away country surrounded by at best ambivalent neighbors. Perhaps if Bush had cleared his plans for Turkey with, for instance, the Turks before his troop ships arrived there, perhaps if he had taken an informal poll to see if fewer than 3 of the other 4 permanent security council members would veto his plans, perhaps if he had exercised some modicum of common sense diplomatic caution then he wouldn't be in his current situation, but he seems to have done for presidential recklessness in the international sphere what Clinton did for it in the private sphere. Curiously, the significance of this doesn't appear to be widely perceived. But in case anybody hasn't noticed it yet, this thing is a foreign policy debacle of unprecedented scale. In fact, I'd like to take this opportunity to coin the term "New World Chaos". Maybe "New World Disorder". I don't know. I'll think about it.
And on the wildly unlikely chance I'll be held to it at some future date I just want to go on record and say that when and if the UN or perhaps some credible successor organization decides to implement a global ban on weapons of mass destruction I will personally go to Iraq and bitchslap Saddam myself if necessary, but until then for the US to be casting the first stone over weapons of mass destruction is in the current circumstances just plain unsustainable Bull****.
~ The Analytical Part ~
But never mind all that. The president says Iraq's weapons are a "direct threat" to the US. OK this happens to fall within an area in which, at least compared to all of you, I actually have some expertise. You, lucky reader, happen to know, are blessed to be within the literary circle of, have for whatever reason been chosen by fate to have fall upon you the shining illumination caste by someone who can provide you with a bona fide technical analysis of this question. To proceed ...
The great circle distance from Baghdad to Washington is 6207 statute miles,
presumably geometric center to geometric center, and we will for purposes
of simplicity assume Saddam launches from the center of Baghdad targeting
an aim point at the center of Washington. This simplification should not introduce
an unacceptable error in our analysis. According to UN experts, Iraq's al-Samoud
(literally, *****'* *****) missile has a maximum range without warhead of
118 miles. We will assume for purposes of analysis that the Iraqis would put
warheads on their missiles before they launched them, as launching an unarmed
missile at an adversary is rather like attacking them with a foam bat. Anyway,
with a warhead the nominal operational range of the al-Samoud II missile is
estimated at 93 statute miles. Don't want to "shock and awe" anybody
with the math, but let me just see here .....x minus y ....... carry the 6
....... inverse natural logarithm ........ assuming supersonic flow with strong
trailing shocks ........ ok, by my calculation I'm coming up with an estimated
target range deficit of 6114 miles, so let me just do this again. X ......
y ..... exponent ...... integrate over the interval ........ Dang. Still getting
the same thing, a 6114 range deficit. Hm. This could be a problem. Oh wait.
What about New York? New York is only 5986 miles from Baghdad. Let me "crunch"
some numbers on that ......y = mx + b ......... F = ma ........ dv/dt .........
Well howdydo and call me Edna, I'm still getting a range deficit, though just
a little smaller- 5893 miles to be exact.
What if the Iraqis launched from the back of a moving truck? Maybe that would
help. Let's see ...... add the velocities ....... initial delta V ..... earth
centered inertial ...... take the square root ... hm. Well, maybe not. Perhaps
they could .... perhaps they could couple the stages to extend the range.
But then what about the aerodynamic bending load at max q, and the cg dispersion?
I guess that wouldn't work. Perhaps a tailwind ... like on Jupiter. I guess
that's not going to happen. ..... This is a puzzler.
And now that I think about it we're talking high suborbital trajectories and
the given range to target numbers require a retrograde launch, so it would
probably require less delta V to launch posigrade on a trajectory three times
as long, though that's obviously going to disperse the impact point without
terminal guidance. Seems to me, anyway. I mean it doesn't take a .... oh wait.
Never mind.
Well, I know the president says Iraqi weapons pose a direct threat to the
US, so I must be missing something somewhere.
It's instructive that these little dip**** missiles which might fly from one end of George's ranch to the other are the focus of so much of our attention, especially as the Iraqis actually had considerably longer range missiles years ago. But that's what we got on what they got. It's fairly pathetic. But the truth, kids, is that if you can build a missile that will fly 93 miles it's not that big a leap to 9300 miles. The truth is that the basic technology was demonstrated decades before most of us were born. The truth is that technology cannot be stopped, and thus insofar as one might hope to solve the problem the ultimate danger lies not in the weapons but in the paradigm itself. The truth, whether or not George and the boys know it, is that they are trying to keep the genie in a bottle it has never really been in. And war just accelerates the inevitable. Pakistan the day before yesterday, Korea yesterday, Iraq today, Iran tomorrow, Argentina the day after that, someday Germany and Japan, eventually we get to Monaco and the Turks and Caicos Islands. You might as well try ..... and stop ....... the wind ....... oh yeah.
OK, here's what's going to happen in the long term, baring some unprecedented, sustained, and currently nowhere on the horizon global reasonableness attack. Weapons can be divided into two categories, conventional and mass destruction. Conventional weapons can be further divided into terminally guided or "smart" munitions and unguided "dumb" munitions. Guided munitions, which is to say missiles and bombs that are guided into a target, are far superior to unguided munitions because they hit the target very much more often and are thus pound for pound maybe 10 to 100 times as effective. The trend toward terminally guided conventional munitions began in earnest during WW II, reached a measure of operational maturity in the Vietnam war, and by 1973 such weapons were a decisive factor in the Arab/Israeli war of that year, and indeed led to Israeli strategic reliance upon nuclear weapons of mass destruction thereafter. The US currently has a dominant position in terminally guided conventional munitions, by virtue of both numbers and quality, and it is substantially because of this that the US military dominates a battlefield. This will not persist. It occurs to me as I type this that the attacks of 9/11 were staged with what amounted to terminally guided weapons, in this instance airliners terminally guided by suicidal Arabs. Anyway, terminal guidance used to be a big deal. Computers used to be a big deal too. The technology of terminally guided conventional munitions is probably past the inflection point of large scale mass production and operational deployment. Further gains in operational effectiveness will be increasingly limited by the fundamental constraints imposed by material properties and chemical energies, and the advantage the US currently enjoys by virtue of quality will be increasingly offset by simple numbers. An unavoidable consequence of this will be that military dominance will increasingly flow to those most willing to resort to weapons of mass destruction in order to counter the increasing parity in conventional terminally guided weapons. The arms race will continue to spiral, in the process leaving conventional weapons increasingly secondary. Whatever world order the US might have established on the basis of superiority in terminally guided conventional munitions will give way, as the emphasis increasingly shifts to weapons of mass destruction. There will presumably be an attempt to counter this dynamic by basing weapons in space, particularly directed energy weapons. The failure of this approach will be accelerated by deployment costs, the inherent offensive nature of such systems, and their inherent vulnerability in comparison to comparable systems based in more dirt rich environments. Efforts to develop and deploy a reliable defense against weapons of mass destruction will continue to prove as laughably foredoomed as every previous such undertaking. Eventually the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, most ominously engineered viral weapons, and the proliferation of terminally guided delivery systems will make planet wide cataclysm inevitable. Politicians and generals and the weapon manufacturers that love them don't talk much about this, but there it is.
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OK, fortunately I've let this sit until Friday and the headline today is "Bush Considers War Without UN Vote". So ...... yeah, I don't know who else remembers this far back but a few days ago Bush proclaimed smugly yet flatly, which was something of an achievement in itself, proclaimed with smug flatness on scheduled prime time national television before god the world and everybody that he absolutely would beyond any conceivable doubt I'm shocked you could even ask such a question read my lips proclaimed that he would as a matter of course bring his war to a UN vote so that everyone would be forced to "lay their cards on the table". Well, here we are a few days later and ........ not so much anymore. So my final point I want to make here, and everybody needs to understand this, to grasp it, to bond with it and incorporate it into their core belief system, my final point is that nothing means anything. Thank you, good night, you've been a great crowd! Tip your waitresses!
Later:
Back from the Friends of the Library Book Sale, which seems to grow steadily
more soylent greenish, and it occurred to me as I perused the shelves that
Bush, and the US along with him, is basically standing on a ledge. A crowd
has gathered, they're looking anxiously upward, the police are fumbling with
that stupid trampoline that any idiot could miss. Everyone is distracted and
more than a little put out, but irritation is for a time grimly eclipsed by
the sheer life or death spectacle of the thing ...... not jumping would almost
in some perverse sense seem a letdown. There is a morose yet undeniable pressure
building. Jump! Jump! the crowd taunts, or at least seems to. What to do?
During the book sale I began looking forward to writing sssssssplaaat!
in reference to the Bush presidency. Ssssssssplaaat! If he could
somehow manage to hit the pavement with somebody else's country I might taunt
him myself.
The stock market was up today, probably because Bush is going to be on an
island in the middle of the Atlantic over the weekend and I expect the conventional
wisdom holds he is unlikely to start a war while he is there. He's traveling
to this remote spot to attend an all hands power summit of his deftly crafted
global coalition, the UK and Spain. UK support for the war is not very much
wider than Blair and his immediate family, but Spain might be a bit firmer.
Perhaps the coalition will be referred to as "lean" or "streamlined".
It will in any event have the advantage that there will be no tie votes, unless
the UK pulls out, in which case it will then be possible to quickly decide
any disagreements with a simple scissors/paper/stone. And you know what's
really incredible about this? I'm not making it up!
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Saturday:
Bush sez this morning ''The chemical attack on Halabja, just one of 40 targeted
at Iraq's own people, provided a glimpse of the crimes Saddam Hussein is willing
to commit, and the kind of threat he now presents to the entire world."
How something not worth a headline 15 years ago now justifies war remains
somewhat murky, as does the question of how much worse the threat could be
after a resounding military defeat, 12 years of sanctions, and months of unfettered
on the ground and in the air weapons inspections. The truth is that the US
Army, who you will have heard of, concluded years ago that the gas which killed
the civilians in Halabja was probably Iranian. It is in any event known that
the civilians killed in Halabja were killed in a military battle in which
both sides used gas, and the civilians in Halabja were apparently no more
"targeted" by Iraqi or Iranian forces than were the Libyan, Panamanian,
Yugoslavian, Granadan, Iraqi, Somali, Lebanese, or Haitian civilians killed
by American forces. Yet the picture painted is one of merciless Iraqi thugs
purposefully rolling into a city and unleashing inhuman clouds of death upon
its inhabitants. The truth is that military forces don't need gas to kill
unarmed civilians. The truth is that as the need arises Bush is just another
hate mongering politician, and his success at it, at least with his own people,
is indicative of just how easy it is.
"Bush went on to quote Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel
as saying: ''We have a moral obligation to intervene where evil is in control.
Today, that place is Iraq.''" The truth, kids, is that when a republican
lawyer starts talking about "moral obligation" you should start
backing toward the door with your hands in front of you. The truth is that
depending on what you think evil is, some shade of it will always be in control
somewhere, if not everywhere. The truth is that a gigantic military combined
with, let's face it, testosterone fogged zealotry results in perpetual war.
I myself am beginning to suspect this thing isn't as outlandish as it appears
to be, for the simple reason that it's starting to exceed my cynicism. My
expectation is that Bush will go ahead and leap, and a great many people other
than himself will suffer the immediate consequences. In the unlikely event
he has some chance of reelection there will be a sort of terror Tet beforehand
to cement his single term. Somebody crazy enough to pursue inheriting the
situation will win the election and proceed with a policy of "Arabiafication",
the core thrust of which will be that we just need to get the hell out of
a really messy, bloody, stupid situation that we never should have gotten
into in the first place, but we're certainly not getting out because we have
to or because we aren't prepared to lose and take life, and lots of it, for
some ill defined, abstract, or maybe even just plain stupid reason. This is
actually a somewhat optimistic scenario which assumes the US still has the
option of withdrawal. You might wonder how politicians can get into such situations,
and I'm going to share an insight with you the apparent subtlety of which
has always amazed me, but the reason they get into these situations is because
they're so ****ing stupid.
<< AOL- Any Day Now: As diplomats wrangle, US troops massed at Saddam's
door ready to fight while battling frustration, homesickness and fear. (picture
of a pensive navy grunt leaning against a bomb (etc.)). >>
....... does the Department of Homeland Security write these things? The guy
wasn't at "Saddam's door", he was miles out in the Persian Gulf
loading bombs to be dropped on a country hundreds of miles away. And speaking
of fear, has anybody out there read a word about how afraid Iraqi civilians
are? If Roger Ramjet is supposed to be afraid ****ing leaning on a bomb, how
afraid are Iraqi children supposed to be that bombs are actually going to
be dropped on them? The point seems to be that we would be letting the troops
down if we didn't let them get their (war on), and soon. I personally can
live with that. For all the tearful dockside photo ops, for all the stoic
taxiway smiles, for all the forced cheerfulness of all the emotion choked
sendoffs the grim reality is that Iraqi women and children are about to die
in much greater numbers than the US military, and they are going to die without
a clear reason, or at least one clear enough to be seen by more than a few
percent of the world's population. And yet, and yet many Americans will still
manage righteous, perhaps even mystified indignation at the blowback. Go figure.