Iraq: being wise before the event

Listening to the row about the Daily Telegraph‘s leaked Foreign Office pre-invasion paper warning about the lack of post-invasion planning, I was thinking “well, it wasn’t just the Foreign Office”. And then I remembered a wonderful piece James Fallows had written in The Atlantic way back in November 2002. It’s here (but you need to be a subscriber to the print edition to get the full text). The standfirst says it all, though. It reads:

“Going to war with Iraq would mean shouldering all the responsibilities of an occupying power the moment victory was achieved. These would include running the economy, keeping domestic peace, and protecting Iraq’s borders — and doing it all for years, or perhaps decades. Are we ready for this long-term relationship?”

CBS’s fake National Guard memos

CBS ran a 60 Minutes documentary about Dubya’s dodgy National Guard service records. The programme was based on some memos which turned out to be forgeries. So much is public knowledge. What is less well known is the role that Bloggers (mainly from the Conservative end of the political spectrum) played in exposing the forgeries. Here’s a fascinating analysis by Jonathan Last. He concludes:

“The questions about the authenticity of the 60 Minutes documents are settled. The evening of September 15, Dan Rather cluelessly told the Washington Post’s indefatigable media reporter Howard Kurtz, “If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I’d like to break that story.” Rather was a week late; Free Republic’s Buckhead had scooped him. And dozens of bloggers, whether in pajamas or three-piece suits, had subsequently filled in many of the details. (CBS could still break one big story–who gave them the forged memos?–but has so far hidden behind an invocation of “longstanding journalistic ethics” governing “confidential sources.” So forgers are now sources?) Bloggers, and Internet-savvy writers more generally, have now proven that they can ferret out journalistic malpractice and expose the guilty parties.

Part of what makes bloggers well-suited for the role of fact-checking is that there are so many of them. With millions of people blogging and reading blogs, you’re bound to find a handful of real experts on any given topic, and these experts can coalesce quite easily. When National Review Online’s blogger Jim Geraghty asked readers about James J. Pierce, a new document expert CBS trotted out on September 15, he was deluged with responses. Within an hour, Geraghty had been furnished with a link to a website showing the sort of low-level expert witness business Pierce usually does. As Little Green Footballs’s Charles Johnson noted, “It’s sort of an open-source intelligence gathering network that draws on expertise from around the world.”

This critical mass creates a buzzing marketplace of ideas. To be fair, many of these ideas are bogus, but they are also rapidly exposed as such, sometimes in mere seconds. For example, an exuberant commenter will note that one of CBS’s memos carries a Saturday date; another, dripping with condescension, will remind the first that Guard members are called “weekend warriors” for a reason–they drill (and keep office hours) on Saturdays. A number of the specific criticisms of the CBS documents on blogs were overstated, too categorical, or simply wrong. These provided aha! moments for CBS and its blogging partisans, but they were shot down just as quickly by commenters on the blogs criticizing CBS. It is not true, for instance, that typewriters couldn’t do superscripts, as some CBS critics too triumphantly generalized. It is true that typewriters couldn’t produce the particular superscripts seen in the memos, and that these same superscripts are automatically produced by Microsoft Word.

As a recent piece in Investor’s Business Daily noted, “In the same way the market sifts and analyzes information stocks better than any individual investor or institution ever could, the blogosphere weeds out the chaff.” Thus, a lone helpful comment at FreeRepublic.com gets quickly elevated into the spotlight, while the multitude of cranky grumblings disappear down the memory hole.

Aside from technological advantages, there seems to be an ideological divide at work, too. The political blog world is arguably more conservative than liberal, though there is a sizable contingent of liberal blogs. But these liberal blogs function more like the old media than do their conservative Internet brethren. While blogs such as Power Line and Little Green Footballs and Instapundit were chasing the CBS story, interviewing experts, posting material as they found it–whether or not it supported the case against CBS–many of the liberal blogs went into entrenched-partisan mode.”

The chaos in Iraq

In what publication did this sentence appear last Wednesday?

“Iraq’s once highly fragmented insurgent groups are increasingly cooperating to attack U.S. and Iraqi government targets,and steadily gaining control of more areas of the country.”

Some liberal or leftist rag? Not a bit of it — the Wall Street Journal, no less. Thanks to Scott Rosenberg for picking it up.

The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq poses an uncomfortable problem for those of us who loathe and detest the political leaders who got us into it. At one level, there’s a grim satisfaction in seeing what an unholy mess Bush and the neo-cons and Tony Blair have created. But at a deeper level nobody in their right mind could take pleasure in the unfolding disaster. It’s destroying life for millions of innocent Iraqis. It will lead to the emergence of a failed state to end all failed states — with all the dangers that implies. It will destabilise the entire region, and in doing so affect all our lives. I’m not sure that these terrible outcomes can be prevented, but one thing is certain: if the Americans and the Brits were to pull out now, the result would be immediate chaos and either (a) the emergence of another Iraqi dictator (Saddam Mark 2), or (b) an anarchic, unstable cauldron of warring ethnic and religious groups. This is in nobody’s interest, with the possible exception of Al Qaeda. How those fanatics must love Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Co.

PlanetLab

My Observer column on Intel’s attempt to upgrade the Net is here.

Listening to Napster

I’ve long believed that the music industry was incapable of hearing what the success of the original Napster service was telling them — that there was a huge demand for online music, but it was a demand that the industry simply wasn’t willing to satisfy. (Lots of theories about the reasons for this incapacity.) In the event, it took half a decade for the record companies to get it — and even now most of them are half-hearted about online music. So hooray for a thoughtful study of why people go in for file-sharing — and what lessons it holds for the movie and music industries.

A day in the life of a spam detective

Interesting account of the work of an ISP employee whose job is to identify and disconnect spammers.

Iraq

So, finally the hunt for WMD is over. We will be officially told next week that there were no WMD. According to today’s Guardian:

“The comprehensive 15-month search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has concluded that the only chemical or biological agents that Saddam Hussein’s regime was working on before last year’s invasion were small quantities of poisons, most likely for use in assassinations.

A draft of the Iraq Survey Group’s final report circulating in Washington found no sign of the alleged illegal stockpiles that the US and Britain presented as the justification for going to war, nor did it find any evidence of efforts to reconstitute Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme.”

Secondly, there are strong indications that Blair was warned by the British Foreign Office of the likelihood of chaos following a military campaigh to oust Saddam.

And finally, we have discovered that Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, thinks that the war was illegal — and that he thought so all along. If this had been known in Britain at the time of the House of Commons debate about going to war, I’m absolutely certain that Blair would not have received the backing on Parliament for the adventure. So why the hell did Annan not speak out at the time? (We know the answer: the US would have withdrawn its financial support for the the UN.)

Garrison Keillor on the Republican party

“The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.”

This is a wonderful essay. I don’t know where it was published — it came to me in an email. [Update: Thanks to Richard Earney, who found it here.] It’s distilled moral fury. And it’s spot on. Listen to this:

“Our beloved land has been fogged with fear – fear, the greatest political strategy ever. An ominous silence, distant sirens, a drumbeat of whispered warnings and alarms to keep the public uneasy and silence the opposition. And in a time of vague fear, you can appoint bullet-brained judges, strip the bark off the Constitution, eviscerate federal regulatory agencies, bring public education to a standstill, stupefy the press, lavish gorgeous tax breaks on the rich. There is a stink drifting through this election year. It isn’t the Florida recount or the Supreme Court decision. No, it’s 9/11 that we keep coming back to. It wasn’t the “end of innocence,” or a turning point in our history, or a cosmic occurrence, it was an event, a lapse of security. And patriotism shouldn’t prevent people from asking hard questions of the man who was purportedly in charge of national security at the time.”

Are the American people so stupid that they will re-elect this crew? If the opinion polls are to be believed, they probably will. Stop the planet, I want to get off.

Fox-hunting men

Looking at the pro-hunting demonstraters in Parliament Square, one was reminded of Oscar Wilde’s wonderful description of hunting as “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable”.

Photo (c) Associated Press

Internet Explorer continues its slide

From Good Morning, Silicon Valley:

“Unblocked security problems in the ubiquitous Web browser have led IT professionals and even the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team to recommend that users toss IE in favor of a more secure browser, and it appears more and more of us are taking their advice. Web analytics vendor WebSideStory reports that IE lost another 1.8 percent of the browser market over the past three months, falling to 93.7 percent. This is the second time IE’s market share has declined in recent months. It fell a percentage point between June and July in the wake of a parade of high-profile security issues – the first such decline ever recorded (see “Maybe you should rename it AIEEEEEEE!!!!!!”). Admittedly, these drops are slight, but they appear to be sustained, and they’re not without their beneficiaries, among them the Mozilla Foundation, which just recorded a record number of downloads for the preview version of Firefox 1.0.”