Month: October 2004

NYTimes.  Huddling in a drawing room with his top commanders, General Franks told them it was time to make plans to leave. Combat forces should be prepared to start pulling out within 60 days if all went as expected, he said. By September, the more than 140,000 troops in Iraq could be down to little more than a division, about 30,000 troops.
If the United States and its allies wanted to maintain the same ratio of peacekeepers to population as it had in Kosovo, the briefing said, they would have to station 480,000 troops in Iraq. If Bosnia was used as benchmark, 364,000 troops would be needed. If Afghanistan served as the model, only 13,900 would be needed in Iraq. [John Robb’s Weblog]

There are a couple of interesting things here. First, note Franks’ Orwellian definition of “leave.” If troops leave a country, they have to actually be gone. A division of troops (with four more divisions from other countries) is not gone, it’s just a reduced garrison.

Second, note how the Feds were holding up Afghanistan as their model for deciding how many troops to garrison Iraq with. However, there’s no mention of the differences in what those troops were expected to do. In Afghanistan Federal soldiers only occupy Kabul, protecting the puppet government there, and basically leave the rest of the country alone except for sporadic search-and-destroy missions. I’ve seen nothing to suggest that the Feds ever intended anything less than full control of the entirety of Iraq, not just Baghdad.

I watched Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars, and it was a fitting ending for my favorite sci-fi series of recent years. I’m glad the people behind Farscape had the chance to make a movie to bring the story to a close–while at the same time leaving themselves room to continue it in the future.

Exit Strategies. I would begin letting the Iraqis know now that we are planning on turning most of their country back over to them as soon as they have elected a “legitimate” government and that we arbitrarily accept the unlikelihood that the January elections will yield such a thing…. Of course the Iraqis, or more precisely, the Iraqi Arabs would be none too keen on it, but there is a good chance they will already be too involved in civil war by then to have much energy for re-taking a well-defended Kurdistan. [BarlowFriendz]

John Perry Barlow talks to the captain of a mercenary company (of course, they call them “CEOs” now) about the situation in Iraq, and how to get out of it. Incidentally, I have an even simpler exit strategy, which is: exit.

A summary of the Alvarez report on fraud. Tulio Alvarezrote trhe report on fraud based on dozens of individual reports on each topic. Here I do a summary of the findings, each one backed by facts, data and evidence:

I. – Abuse of power and the partiality of the Electoral Board

–Voting Machines and fingerprint machines were purchased directly, sidestepping the law

–The Electoral Board abused its power, allowing the use of private data for political extortion, without any public power defending the rights of the citizens.

–The Electoral board has sidestepped the laws and been partial to the Government

My Friend, the Kidnap Victim. He turned out of the front gate, took the first right — as most of us do — and a car stopped in front of him and a tailing car pulled in behind him. Four men with pistols jumped out and three of them managed to force their way into the car, putting guns to the heads of John, his driver and his translator…. We’re not sure what all happened during his captivity, but he was able to persuade his captors that he was an Australian and a friend to the resistance and not to the Americans.
[Back to Iraq 3.0]

An unusually detailed account of a kidnapping. The tactics used by the kidnappers in this case would have been fairly easy to defeat if the reporter and his team had been remotely concerned for security–and it sounds like the kidnappers know it, given their comment about looking for soft targets.

NY Times Magazine, quoting a senior White House official, in 2002: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” [Scripting News]

A must-read article. Towards the end the author writes:

bq. Bush grew into one of history’s most forceful leaders, his admirers will attest, by replacing hesitation and reasonable doubt with faith and clarity. Many more will surely tap this high-voltage connection of fervent faith and bold action. In politics, the saying goes, anything that works must be repeated until it is replaced by something better. The horizon seems clear of competitors.

Bush isn’t the first person to lead a major country this way. There were others seventy years ago–and they went down in flames, taking much of the world with them.

I eventually turned off the fingerprint reader on my new Micron laptop. It’s an interesting idea, but it doesn’t really work.

I received a ticket I’d purchased from Ticketmaster for an upcoming concert I intend to photograph. Strangely, there was nothing on the envelope to suggest where it was from–I almost threw it away, thinking it was junk mail. It’s strange that Ticketmaster would disguise legitimate mail as junk–usually it’s the other way around. I wonder if they somehow get more money for tickets that are purchased but not used?

Conscientious UK Ambassador Sacked. The British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, having survived all the smear tactics that could be thrown at him by his own superiors and the media, has finally been sacked by the UK’s Foreign Office for consistently protesting the appalling… By Richard Wall. [LewRockwell.com Blog]

I wonder if the English Crusaders who claimed to be so concerned for the welfare of the Iraqi people before the conquest of Iraq (and not at all afterwards) will bother to acknowledge this story? I expect if they do they will express their complete support for Karimov, as that particular bloodthirsty dictator is on their side at the moment.

A coincidence?. Heads up, with a grain of salt. Yesterday, as you know, I installed Google Desktop Search. It spent the whole day indexing my system, and when I retired for the day, it wasn’t done, so I let it run all night. Arriving at work this morning, it was still running.
Now, perhaps independently, my computer was almost totally unusable yesterday. It would disappear for a few moments, even the mouse wouldn’t work. Listen to the audio blog post I did for an idea of what it was like.
When it was just as bad this morning, I decided to exit Google Desktop Search. Now I’m sure it’s a total coincidence, but all of a sudden my machine is quite zippy. All of a sudden it’s as if it never lost its mind.
Anyway, being the superstitious sort that I am, I’m going to leave it uninstalled as long as I’m in crunch mode on various projects. [Scripting News]

When Sherlock first came out Apple made a big deal about its searching technology, which needed to index the hard drives. Unfortunately that indexing took an incredibly long time, rendered the computer basically useless while it happened, and invariably failed before the end anyway. I gave up on it pretty quickly, and I’ve noticed that it quietly disappeared eventually.

This experience leads me to look with considerable suspicion on any new “wonder search” technology. When I read about Google Desktop Search it sounded quite a bit like Sherlock with an inferior UI, and I’m not at all surprised that it performs like it too.