Month: March 2003

Does Silicon Valley have a split personality in the war? The Frisco Chronicle thinks we do, because we produce high-tech weaponry but harbor a boatload of anti-war sentiment. Wind River’s president Jerry Fiddler’s not confused:

“This war is a catalyst that is shining light on a military that is always strong and present and here for one reason — to keep us safe,” he said in an e-mail. “The world today is a safer place because of American military capabilities. We’ve seen those capabilities used to end conflict recently in Kosovo, Bosnia, Rwanda and elsewhere. We owe a debt to our soldiers.”

And neither was former deputy secretary of defense David Packard.

But others are: Bob Taylor, ex- of Xerox PARC, Lee Felsenstein, once a personal computer pioneer of sorts, and a number of the elf bloggers, like Marc Canter, David Weinberger, Howard Rheingold, Lisa Rein, Meg Hourihan, Steve Kirsch, Joi Ito, et. al. Generally, the techies who oppose the war — and implicitly support a status quo that leaves Saddam Hussein in power — are not engineers, but “social implications of technology” people, self-appointed visionaries, dot-commers, and marketeers. The reality-based thinking that engineers practice doesn’t leave room for coddling dictators and sanctioning torture, so we want regime change. Besides, many of us have worked for managers who remind us of the Butcher of Baghdad, so we naturally sympathize with the oppressed.

Hollywood’s a different story, of course, because it’s full of the fuzzy-minded, who tend to have the same tunnel-vision we find in the Valley’s paratechnicals.

This column by Walter Williams reminded me why the Soviet Union folded:

There were some highly classified equipment, operations and questions one of our hosts, Dr. Ace Summey, couldn’t show or discuss with us, but that which we saw convinced me that Saddam Hussein can only expect a zero to no chance of a successful battle engagement with our military. I was also convinced that CSS had given additional meaning to General George S. Patton’s admonition, “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.”

He discusses multi-spectral radar, Landing Craft Air Cushion and unmanned underwater vehicles, all nice arrows in the quiver in the war against terrorism.

Kanan Makiya’s war diary on The New Republic Online is a must-read:

The bombs have begun to fall on Baghdad. Iraqi soldiers have shot their officers and are giving themselves up to the Americans and the British in droves. Others, as in Nasiriyah and Umm Qasr, are fighting back, and civilians have already come under fire. Yet I find myself dismissing contemptuously all the e-mails and phone calls I get from antiwar friends who think they are commiserating with me because “their” country is bombing “mine.” To be sure, I am worried. Like every other Iraqi I know, I have friends and relatives in Baghdad. I am nauseous with anxiety for their safety. But still those bombs are music to my ears. They are like bells tolling for liberation in a country that has been turned into a gigantic concentration camp. One is not supposed to say such things in the kind of liberal, pacifist, and deeply anti-American circles of academia, in which I normally live and work. The truth is jarring even to my own ears.

Via Winds of Change, also a must-read.

Cathy Young’s latest Boston Globe column deals with feminism and Iraq. Here she quotes Tammy Bruce:

”The feminist establishment’s political game with women’s lives is particularly disgraceful as they, of all interest groups, have a special duty to support ridding the world of Saddam,” Bruce writes in a recent column. She recounts the horrific story, reported by Amnesty International, of a 25-year-old Iraqi woman known as ”Um Haydar.” The wife of a man suspected of illegal political activity, Um Haydar was beheaded in the street in front of her children and her mother-in-law (all of whom disappeared).

Addressing Gandy, Walker, and the other feminist antiwar protesters, Bruce writes, ”Think of Um’s children, her daughters, whom you have abandoned. . . . There are thousands of dead Iraqi women who know how you betray them, in the name of politics, in the name of hating George W. Bush, in the name of your own cynical political hypocrisy.”

There has been a lot of male-bashing coming from the pillars of the Old Feminist establishment over Iraq, which may signal the passing of the torch to a New Feminism based on love instead of hate.

The Frisco paper ran an interesting story on the role of networking in the execution of Operation Iraqi Freedom:

In network centric warfare, U.S. forces are held together by a global communications grid. Ships, aircraft and land vehicles are all plugged in and can exchange information with each other — just like PCs and servers on the Internet.

One advantage of this approach is that forces can disperse, so they are less likely to be spotted and can maneuver with more agility. Because everyone on the net can share battle data with everyone else, each unit has a better picture of the battlefield.

Up to now the United States has had a clear edge in these kinds of military operations. Indeed, the British army may be the only other military force in the world that can operate with U.S. forces.

That last point underscores why the support of nations other than Britain is tactically irrelevant, even if it is politically desirable.

On the question of unilateralism, there’s an interesting exchange of e-mails between Andrew Sullivan and Tom Friedman on Sully’s blog.

The videotaped speech Saddam Hussein’s lackeys showed on Iraqi TV tonight was probably recorded before the invasion started. There was nothing in it specific to any actual event that’s occurred since the invasion, and some folks are saying some of the generals he praised for their courage surrendered without a fight. The analysis of Fox News and NBC correspond with mine, but ABC’s John McWethy thought it was genuine and contemporary. ABC has sunk mighty low.

Frisco police found two stashes of Molotov cocktail paraphernalia during Friday’s peace rally:

San Francisco police spokesman Dewayne Tully said Friday that police found a duffel bag containing glass bottles and incendiary fluids at 158 11th St. near Mission Street around 11 a.m.

Police then made a second find at 12:30 p.m. at 757 Market St. in front of the Four Seasons Hotel. Police there found a collection of rags, lighter fluid, and “other materials to make incendiary objects with,” Tully said.

Don’t they know “bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity”? Silly hippies.

Meanwhile, coalition forces are 100 miles from Baghdad, two-thirds of the way from the border.

U.S. in talks for peaceful surrender

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Iraqi expatriates have been facilitating negotiations among CIA operatives, U.S. military officials and senior members of the Iraq Republican Guard inside Iraq aimed at a achieving a peaceful surrender of Iraq, CNN has learned.

It shouldn’t be long now.

The Associated Press reports on the greeting received by coalition forces in the town of Safwan:

A man identifying himself only as Abdullah welcomed the arrival of the U.S. troops: “Saddam Hussein is no good. Saddam Hussein a butcher.”

An old woman shrouded in black — one of the very few women outside — knelt toward the feet of Americans, embracing an American woman. A younger man with her pulled her away, giving her a warning sign by sliding his finger across his throat.

In 1991, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died after prematurely celebrating what they believed was their liberation from Saddam after the Gulf War. Some even pulled down a few pictures of Saddam then — only to be killed by Iraqi forces.

Gurfein playfully traded pats with a disabled man and turned down a dinner invitation from townspeople.

“Friend, friend,” he told them in Arabic learned in the first Gulf War.

“We stopped in Kuwait that time,” he said. “We were all ready to come up there then, and we never did.”

The townspeople seemed grateful this time.
“No Saddam Hussein!” one young man in headscarf told Gurfein. “Bush!”

This comes pretty damn close to the “dancing in the streets” some of us predicted, and it’s happening all over Iraq. There’s more violence going on in San Francisco right now than in most of Iraq, actually, and that’s our “peace protesters” at work:

San Francisco — Sirens wailed through downtown San Francisco and helicopters whirred above it all day Thursday as anti-war protesters poured into the city by the thousands and seized streets, blocked buildings and left beleaguered police and commuters fuming.

Authorities described the day’s demonstrations, which began peacefully before dawn and grew increasingly antagonistic and occasionally violent as the day wore on, as the largest seen in years.

Up to 1,400 had been arrested before the protests finally began to wind down after 11 p.m., and about 1,000 remained in custody. Most face citations for blocking traffic and failing to follow police orders, but at least 18 face felony charges.

Strange war, this.

Vietnam was the first televised war, and this is the first fully-blogged war, since Iraqi citizens, coalition soldiers, in-country journalists (and) and the Usual Suspects (and and and) are blogging it, many in real time. Fortunately, there’s not that much to report when you net it all out – Saddam’s in hiding, possibly injured, coalition forces are racing to Baghdad with no opposition, the Iraqi army is in disarray, the people are celebrating, and Chirac’s still up to his old tricks.

Strange war, this.

UPDATE: The Washington Post’s war site is kick-ass, with video, and Rantburg is doing some fine stuff.