Category: Networks

London’s Daily Mirror is staunchly pro-Saddam, but they do publish Christopher Hitchens’ attempts to shock their readers back to their senses. The latest:

I feel disgust for those who blame this week’s deaths on the intervention and not on its sole target: Saddam Hussein.

A few days ago, a US Navy SEAL team allowed its whole attack to be watched live, as it went ashore and painlessly disarmed an Iraqi garrison with orders to blow up oil terminals.

Who would not approve the careful and humane pre-emptive strike that prevented such an atrocity with no loss of life? Who is going to report the numerous other unsung victories in a carefully calibrated conflict?

Is it too obvious to mention that Saddam’s side in this war threatens the use of indiscriminate tactics, puts civilians in harm’s way, and trashes the Geneva Convention the first chance it gets?

Link via Tim Blair.

Now the Iraqi government’s official website, http://www.uruklink.net is off the air, too. It was redirected to http://www.itshappening.com/index_three.html for a while, and now it’s just plain dead.

Hackers have found a good way to use their time, and my theory that engineers support the liberation of Iraq is further supported.

Meanwhile, scripter Mark Pilgrim publishes a Doonesbury cartoon sneering at the commander in chief, and then cuts off comments when they get too hot for his pacifist philosophy to handle:

This discussion has been closed. No more comments may be added.

It seems to me that the theory that you can resolve all conflicts by non-violent means implies a certain openness to dialog, something lacking in Mr. Pilgrim. There’s nothing like the arrogance of the morally superior.

I hadn’t read any Doonesbury for a while, and it’s pretty sad to see how far that once-funny and occasionally insightful strip has fallen; he’s still rehashing 60s themes, although the world has actually changed since the heyday of boomer adolescence.

Al-Jazeera Web Site Knocked Off-Line

The new English-language Web site of controversial Qatar-based satellite news channel Al-Jazeera was knocked off-line Tuesday by what may have been a denial-of-service attack.

Breaks your heart, doesn’t it?

Republicans in Sacramento want to pass a resolution supporting the troops and the commander in chief, but recalcitrant Democrats would rather score points:

The initial Democratic response to Plescia’s call for a resolution came from Lou Correa, D-Anaheim, and Nicole Parra, D-Hanford, whose alternative made no mention at all of the president, instead honoring the efforts of U.S. forces and calling for a swift return to peace.

Perhaps California democrats have a little bit of a death wish.

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.