Category: Networks

Gordon Brown has leaked a sequel to the Downing St. memo questioning post-war planning:

A briefing paper prepared for British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers eight months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq concluded that the U.S. military was not preparing adequately for what the British memo predicted would be a “protracted and costly” postwar occupation of that country.

The eight-page memo, written in advance of a July 23, 2002, Downing Street meeting on Iraq, provides new insights into how senior British officials saw a Bush administration decision to go to war as inevitable, and realized more clearly than their American counterparts the potential for the post-invasion instability that continues to plague Iraq.

In its introduction, the memo “Iraq: Conditions for Military Action” notes that U.S. “military planning for action against Iraq is proceeding apace,” but adds that “little thought” has been given to, among other things, “the aftermath and how to shape it.”

Fair enough, the post-war planning sucked, and it sucked big-time. All in all, however, things will probably work out well in Iraq, and things are already improving in the neighborhood.

But you have to wonder whether Bush would have committed to the invasion if he had any idea who hard the nation-building was going to be, and why Blair went along with a plan with so many obvious warts. Is it just his compassionate nature?

Incidentally, this memo contradicts the Downing St. memo I on the question of the decision to invade. This one said it hadn’t been made yet:

WASHINGTON, June 12 – A memorandum written by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s cabinet office in late July 2002 explicitly states that the Bush administration had made “no political decisions” to invade Iraq, but that American military planning for the possibility was advanced. The memo also said American planning, in the eyes of Mr. Blair’s aides, was “virtually silent” on the problems of a postwar occupation.

Oops.

H/T John Cole

The economic battle of the 21st century is between India and China, with the US and Europe on the sidelines and South America and Africa outside the stadium. Mark Steyn, among others, thinks India will win because China is still too embroiled in the fascist/communist mindset:

Mao, though he gets a better press than Hitler and Stalin, was the biggest mass murderer of all time, with a body count ten times’ higher than the Nazis (as Jung Chang’s new biography reminds us). The standard line of Sinologists is that, while still perfunctorily genuflecting to his embalmed corpse in Tiananmen Square, his successors have moved on – just as, in Austin Powers, while Dr Evil is in suspended animation, his Number Two diversifies the consortium’s core business away from evildoing and reorients it toward a portfolio of investments including a chain of premium coffee stores. But Maoists with stock options are still Maoists – especially when they owe their robust portfolios to a privileged position within the state apparatus.

The internal contradictions of Commie-capitalism will, in the end, scupper the present arrangements in Beijing. China manufactures the products for some of the biggest brands in the world, but it’s also the biggest thief of copyrights and patents of those same brands. It makes almost all Disney’s official merchandising, yet it’s also the country that defrauds Disney and pirates its movies. The new China’s contempt for the concept of intellectual property arises from the old China’s contempt for the concept of all private property: because most big Chinese businesses are (in one form or another) government-controlled, they’ve failed to understand the link between property rights and economic development.

China hasn’t invented or discovered anything of significance in half a millennium, but the careless assumption that intellectual property is something to be stolen rather than protected shows why. If you’re a resource-poor nation (as China is), long-term prosperity comes from liberating the creative energies of your people – and Beijing still has no interest in that. If a blogger attempts to use the words “freedom” or “democracy” or “Taiwan independence” on Microsoft’s new Chinese internet portal, he gets the message: “This item contains forbidden speech. Please delete the forbidden speech.” How pathetic is that? Not just for the Microsoft-spined Corporation, which should be ashamed of itself, but for the Chinese government, which pretends to be a world power but is terrified of words.

Does “Commie wimps” count as forbidden speech, too? And what is the likelihood of China advancing to a functioning modern stand-alone business culture if it’s unable to discuss anything except within its feudal political straitjackets? Its speech code is a sign not of control but of weakness; its internet protective blocks are not the armour but the, er, chink.

India, by contrast, with much less ballyhoo, is advancing faster than China toward a fully-developed economy – one that creates its own ideas. Small example: there are low-fare airlines that sell £40 one-way cross-country air tickets from computer screens at Indian petrol stations. No one would develop such a system for China, where internal travel is still tightly controlled by the state. But, because they respect their own people as a market, Indian businesses are already proving nimbler at serving other markets. The return on investment capital is already much better in India than in China.

Roger Simon, who’s been brilliant lately, takes Microsoft to task for playing along with China’s new speech code, forbidding the use of such terms as “democracy” and “demonstration” on blogs:

How pathetic is Bill Gates – what a moral weakling. I didn’t realize he was such a coward.

BTW, I can’t imagine any self-respecting blogger would even consider using MSN Spaces while this policy continues. That would be cooperating with totalitarianism, obviously the antithesis of what we are trying to do. (hat tip: Wichita Boy)

Here’s your Financial Times account of the censorship:

Microsoft’s new Chinese internet portal has banned the words “democracy” and “freedom” from parts of its website in an apparent effort to avoid offending Beijing’s political censors.

Users of the joint-venture portal, formally launched last month, have been blocked from using a range of potentially sensitive words to label personal websites they create using its free online blog service, MSN Spaces.

Attempts to input words in Chinese such as “democracy” prompted an error message from the site: “This item contains forbidden speech. Please delete the forbidden speech from this item.” Other phrases banned included the Chinese for “demonstration”, “democratic movement” and “Taiwan independence”.

China: unrepentant worship of the world’s worst mass-murderer; perpetrator of genocide in Tibet and mass murder of protesters at Tiananmen Square; thief of intellectual property and suppressor of political speech.

Who can defend this mess?

Game 1 of the NBA championships was about what was expected. The Pistons started stronger, since the Spurs had a longer lay-about period and got rusty. But by the time the second quarter started, the Spurs were back on top of their game and never looked back. Rasheed is the key to Piston victories in the playoffs. When he does well, the team wins, and when he doesn’t they struggle. He played well tonight but Brown inexplicably sat him down way too early.

I think Pop generally out-coached Brown, keeping him off-balance with mass substitutions and a lot of timeouts to reconfigure the team. The real narrative of this series is the coaching battle between these two men, best friends who talk every day and who coached the Olympic team together last summer. Their teams are well-matched talentwise, so watching the game was like watching them play chess.

Here’s a question to test your knowledge of public affairs. What member of the United States Senate is the only person to vote against the confirmation of Justices Thurgood Marshall, Clarence Thomas, and Janice Rogers Brown? Is this senator a racist or just stupid?

Answer after the jump.
Continue reading “Quiz”

According to one of Sploid’s sources, Germany is planning for the expected overflow in one of their cherished industries during next year’s unruly World Cup:

Prostitution is legal in Germany in designated areas.

“In Dortmund we have an official red light district on the outskirts, but there is a problem. There is not enough space for everyone to park.”

Dortmund plans to arrange the Dutch-designed huts, which have been introduced in the city of Cologne, another World Cup venue, in an area with condom machines and snack bar.

The snack bar will only sell organic, low -carb, whole-grain treats.

Economist Keith Chen teaches monkeys to use money and sits back and watches what they do:

Chen next introduced a pair of gambling games and set out to determine which one the monkeys preferred. In the first game, the capuchin was given one grape and, dependent on a coin flip, either retained the original grape or won a bonus grape. In the second game, the capuchin started out owning the bonus grape and, once again dependent on a coin flip, either kept the two grapes or lost one. These two games are in fact the same gamble, with identical odds, but one is framed as a potential win and the other as a potential loss.

How did the capuchins react? They far preferred to take a gamble on the potential gain than the potential loss. This is not what an economics textbook would predict. The laws of economics state that these two gambles, because they represent such small stakes, should be treated equally.

So, does Chen’s gambling experiment simply reveal the cognitive limitations of his small-brained subjects? Perhaps not. In similar experiments, it turns out that humans tend to make the same type of irrational decision at a nearly identical rate. Documenting this phenomenon, known as loss aversion, is what helped the psychologist Daniel Kahneman win a Nobel Prize in economics. The data generated by the capuchin monkeys, Chen says, ”make them statistically indistinguishable from most stock-market investors.”

And then there’s the prostitution.

H/T Amy Alkon.

The Air America crowd is bleary-eyed with excitement over the minutes of a meeting of Tony Blair’s cabinet in 2002 where the pending liberation of Iraq was discussed. Their claim that the memo is some sort of “smoking gun” on secret plans to falsify intelligence is a testament to their illiteracy. Here’s the passage that gets their hearts pounding:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

The term “fixed” is understood by Franken’s minions as meaning “fabricated”, but it should be properly understood in its British sense as “placed”, this being a British document and all. The document is saying that Bush will furnish the evidence of Saddam’s misbehavior. There was, of course, general consensus around the world in the late 90s and early 00s that Saddam’s government would likely arm terrorist groups at some point with deadlier weapons than they could come up with on their own. This was the predicate for the Iraq Liberation Act the US Congress passed in 1998, and the basis of some vigorous anti-Saddam campaigning from Blair during the Clinton Administration. So there was no reason to believe that evidence supporting the liberation of Iraq would be anything but genuine.

The memo simply indicates that Bush and Blair had both decided that it was time to stop bullshitting and start walking the walk on Iraq. That we didn’t find a ready stockpile of weapons doesn’t really matter – they would have been manufactured as soon as the embargo was lifted, and by then it would have been too late to act.

I don’t expect this memo to bring down any governments; it was published in Britain before the recent elections that Blair won handily. Making Franken’s minions even more hungry for Ben and Jerry’s than usual is its only consequence.

Communist China has shown its brutal and oppressive character again:

A JOURNALIST considered the doyen of China correspondents has been held in Beijing and could be charged with stealing state secrets after he tried to obtain a copy of interviews with Zhao Ziyang, the Communist leader who was purged after the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

Ching Cheong, a Hong Kong national who works for The Straits Times, a Singaporean newspaper, would be the first reporter for a foreign publication to face charges in China.

His wife, Mary Lau, said: “He told me that he expected to be shut up for a long time. It seems they suspect him of stealing state secrets.” Mr Ching, 55, was detained in the southern city of Guangzhou on April 22. He had been trying to obtain a copy of interviews with the late Zhao, who opposed the use of military force to suppress the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Imprisoning foreign journalists is a step up from the Tibetan genocide, but countries that behave this way aren’t ready for full membership in the community of civilized nations. China is effectively a criminal enterprise, nearly as savage as its client state, North Korea.

Michael Totten is all riled-up over the Sufi massacre and Reuters:

A person who deliberately mass-murders his fellow citizens because they belong to the “wrong” religious sect is not an insurgent. The “insurgents” are not oppressed by a Sufi regime in Iraq, nor can Iraq’s government be considered even remotely dominated by Sufis. Those killed weren’t part of the government or police force in the first place.

“Insurgent” is a morally and ethically neutral term. There are good insurgents and bad in this world, just as there are good guerillas and bad. There are not, however, good mass-murdering terrorists.

At this week’s Portland liberal hawks drinking club meeting, Sufism was discussed in some detail in connection with Friedman’s claim that Islam needs a reformation. My recollection of history is that the Sufi Muslims were at the center of Islam’s Golden Age, so what they really need is to return to their roots. Apparently these murdering terrorists agree that the Sufis are way too civilized for current events in Iraq.

Tom Friedman should think this over.