Yet more exchanges between Stewart and I…
(Mike) His administration has even acknowledged it couldn’t focus on Al Qaeda earlier because there were too many resources tied up in Iraq.
(Stewart) Again a Q w/o a flip answer. Focus on what? Do what? Go after what? The whole point and effectiveness of an org like this is to be a ghost. Safety and a force multiplier in being omni-present and nowhere.
(Mike) To be fair, the answer to the question about the Al Qaeda hunt in Afghanistan and Pakistan is a fairly complex one. But I disagree that they are too shadowy to be found - the numerous firefights along the Pakistan border over the past few weeks is plenty of evidence that Al Qaeda is there. There are a couple factors in the timing of Operation Mountain Storm that have to do strictly with internal factors in Pakistan: one was the recent assassination attempt on Musharraf, which convinced him to take the risks entailed with taking the fight to Al Qaeda, rather than just waiting for the next assassination attempt; and it took the recent improvement in relations with India to give him the option of redeploying forces away from the India border. I’ll also hang on to my cynicism and say that there are US-specific factors in the timing of this joint operation: the increased availability of special forces units, as not quite so many are essential in Iraq now; and the fantastic pre-election press Bush will get if bin Laden is captured this summer. See this USA Today article for more: Shifts from bin Laden hunt evoke questions.
More email exchanges between Stewart and I…
(Mike) I also think the claims about a Saddam-Al Qaeda link were nonsense, and if anything Iraq is a much more fertile breeding ground for terrorists now than it ever was under Saddam.
(Stewart) Disagree with the first, agree with the second parts of this. I’m a ‘real-politk’ sort of guy and I think that part of Iraq was to foment this exact sit. Get the terrorists focused on the free-fire zone of Iraq and thus distract them from other targets. This is not single solution, but it is a spreading effect. Just a hunch…
(Mike) In regard to the Al-Qaeda-Saddam connection, below is an extended excerpt from page 48 of the Carnegie Endowment’s report WMD IN IRAQ: Evidence and Implications. In regard to the argument that Iraq is now serving as a “sponge,” absorbing terrorist activity that otherwise might happen elsewhere: I find fault in that argument for a number of reasons. First, it presumes some relatively fixed number of terrorists, all with a single-minded approach. Second, if you’re actually arguing that the US wants foreign terrorists to pour into Iraq, then why has there been so much concern about protecting the border? Third, don’t you worry that all this in-the-field training for terrorists in Iraq, rather than having a concentrating effect, might instead facilitate the spread of battle-hardened terrorist cells to neighboring countries? And fourth, urban environments are the preferred environment for terrorists, as it provides maximum cover for them and maximizes civilian casualties. Saying that your solution for terrorism is to deliberately seek out battles in this environment hardly seems like a kind thing to do for the innocent Iraqis we say we’re liberating. In my opinion, this sponge/flypaper theory makes simplistic and unrealistic assumptions about the goals and sophistication of the multi-faceted terrorist elements now in Iraq and neighboring countries.
Was there reason to believe that Saddam Hussein would turn over unconventional weapons or WMD capability to Al Qaeda or other terrorists?
The president presented this possibility as the ultimate danger and the centerpiece of his case for war. The most strongly worded of many such warnings came in the 2003 State of the Union speech: “Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans—this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.” In fact, however, there was no positive evidence to support the claim that Iraq would have transferred WMD or agents to terrorist groups and much evidence to counter it.
Bin Laden and Saddam were known to detest and fear each other, the one for his radical religious beliefs and the other for his aggressively secular rule and persecution of Islamists. Bin Laden labeled the Iraqi ruler an infi del and an apostate, had offered to go to battle against him after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and had frequently called for his overthrow.119 The fact that they were strategic adversaries does not rule out a tactical alliance based on a common antagonism to the United States. However, although there have been periodic meetings between Iraqi and Al Qaeda agents, and visits by Al Qaeda agents to Baghdad, the most intensive searching over the last two years has produced no solid evidence of a cooperative relationship between
Saddam’s government and Al Qaeda.
There were more than words for guidance. Terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna has pointed out that the Iraqi regime had a long history of sponsoring terrorism against Israel, Kuwait, and Iran, providing money and weapons to these groups. Yet over many
years Saddam did not transfer chemical, biological, or radiological materials or weapons to any of them “probably because he knew that they could one day be used against his secular regime.”
In the judgment of U.S. intelligence, a transfer of WMD by Saddam to terrorists was likely only if he were “sufficiently desperate” in the face of an impending invasion. Even then, the NIE concluded, he would likely use his own operatives before terrorists.
Even without the particular relationship between Saddam and bin Laden, the notion that any government would turn over its principal security assets to people it could not control is highly dubious. States have multiple interests and land, people, and resources to protect. They have a future. Governments that made such a transfer would put themselves at the mercy of groups that have none of these. Terrorists would not even have to use the weapons but merely allow the transfer to become known to U.S. intelligence to call down the full wrath of the United States on the donor state, thereby opening opportunities for themselves. Moreover, governments with the wherewithal to have acquired such weapons and the ambition to want them used are likely to have their own means of delivering them—through people who take orders. In the 1993 assassination attempt on former president George H. W. Bush, for example, Saddam relied on his own intelligence operatives. All in all, governments
would have little to gain and perhaps everything to lose by giving their WMD to terrorists.
From an email exchange with my friend Stewart…
(Stewart) Here’s a question I can’t answer. If there were no WMDs found, the invasion was unjustified? If there was no invasion, how would we know if there were any WMDs? Bad-news circular argument.
(Mike) I have a couple points to make here:
1. Calling it a circular argument is, I think, missing the larger point: if you’re going to base your military strategy on a policy of pre-emption, you absolutely need to have rock-solid intelligence if you expect to maintain any credibility in the world community (and, for that matter, actually accomplish your stated goals - in this case, lessening the threat from WMD proliferation). It’s evident at this point that there were fairly thick layers of deception and self-deception (how much of each is still not fully known) that were used to filter our actual intelligence information. As the backstory is slowly becoming public, what I’m seeing is that the Bush admin was working hard to take even the vaguest scraps of WMD-in-Iraq intelligence and trumpet them as incontrovertible facts. (This isn’t an exact quote, but as Hans Blix said, “they turned all the question marks in my reports into exclamation points”). You’ve got to admit the evidence Powell presented to the UN wasn’t exactly compelling. The Bush administration’s followup was, essentially - “trust us, we’ve got more but we can’t disclose it.” It seems pretty clear now that they didn’t have more, and the policy of pre-emption has lost whatever credibility it had.
2. I was just reading that the CIA provided the Bush administration with a report in June 2002 about the WMD bazaar in Pakistan, detailing their sales to North Korea, Libya, and Iran (and the missile technology North Korea provided in return). The Bush administration sat on it until October, after the debate about whether to invade Iraq was over (we actually confronted the North Koreans with this intelligence privately a few days prior to the Iraq vote in Congress, but none of it was shared with the Congress or the public until after the vote). When Powell testified before the Senate prior to the war, he specifically ruled out any justification for the war other than WMD. So it seems clear to me that the Bush administration was concerned about the WMD justification for the war being undercut by news about less ambiguous WMD proliferation occurring elsewhere. Why else would they sit on the Pakistan news for months? Which leads to the conclusion that they had other motivations, which is a topic for another post…
Tonight Kai got his hands on an old phone battery and - putting on his best mock-angry face - waved it in my face and said “I’m gonna batter you up.” Then he poked me in the arm with it, said “zzzt” and “there, you’re all charged up.”
Not long after that, he went upstairs with Maria, and she saw something that made her say “oh my goodness,” to which Kai replied “oh my badness.” Clever monkey.
Daniel Schorr recently wrote this column for the CS Monitor: Was Bush fixated on ‘getting Saddam’? It’s a second-source story, so take it with a grain of salt. He recounts how, in the final meeting between Bush and Clinton before Bush took office, Clinton put Iraq 5th on the list of security threats faced by the US (behind Al Qaeda and North Korea), and Bush responded that he thought Iraq really should be 1st. If this is a true account, it’s just another of many pointers of the tunnel-vision that seems to have been driving the Bush administration’s foreign policy. It’s also an indication that Bush’s team interpreted the Iraq WMD intelligence information differently than Clinton’s team.
What’s particularly interesting to me is that Clinton put the Israel-Palestine conflict first. In retrospect he probably would change that to Al Qeada, but I can see why he put it first - it’s a conflict that provides a lot of fuel for other problems, especially given our unwavering support of Israel (both Saddam and Al Qaeda have used the conflict as a rallying cry). When the Bush administration first came into office, they almost completely halted all US efforts in this area. I can understand that they may have wanted to devise their own policies, but I think disengagement was an unfortunate choice. Some of the personnel in Clinton’s negotiating team were retained from the Bush I administration - Clinton kept them on since they knew all the players on the Israeli and Palestinian sides, as well as the history. So Bush II could have inherited a seasoned team, but he instead disbanded the group. It was only after pressure from both Israel and the Palestinians that Bush slowly got involved again. Of course it’s hard to say if things would have turned out differently if Bush had kept us engaged from the start of his administration, but it’s safe to say that those months of disengagement didn’t help.
Kai practicing his yoga stances
Kai practicing his yoga stances
[Update: I only have one of these videos still online - the yoga one]
I just added a menu of videos to the main Kai page - check it out! There are three new videos there. The first is the oldest video we have of him. It was shot in the old kitchen of our San Mateo house (the remodeling work was well underway at this point, but we hadn’t torn down the kitchen wall yet). The second is from last fall - it’s Kai jumping around in a pile of leaves with some of the neighborhood kids. The third we shot just the other day - it’s Kai practicing a couple of his yoga positions (they do yoga once a week at his preschool). He’s not quite at his best in this video, as he was doing yoga on the bed, and it’s hard to stand on one foot while on a soft mattress!
I just got a copy of this via email…I don’t know who created it, but it’s great.
Mars for Martians
Lavajet concert poster
A plug for Pat’s band’s upcoming show: LavaJet at Common Grounds in Clarendon, VA on March 27th. This is the poster - I must say it is totally cool. Click it for a larger version.
I haven’t been able to shake this cold. I’m still going to work, but it’s been slowing me down. But each day gets a little bit better.
Anyway, you may have noticed that - other than this blog - I’ve slowed down on my updates to toppa.com. That’s because I’ve been working on some other web projects:
VC~Angel Roundtable: I’ve been working on this site for my friend Stewart since last summer. I enjoy working with Stewart, and the work helped keep me afloat while I looked for a full-time job. We’re just now switching hosting providers, and I implemented a site redesign. I created some no-nonsense publishing tools for the site as well. The work on this site is now winding down.
phonatic.org: I’m in the early stages of setting this site up (it’s online, but not open to the public yet). It will be “your online pho knowledgebase.” Pho is a Vietnamese beef noodle soup dish, and it inspires fanaticism among its fans (I count myself among them). The site will be Wiki-based, and I hope to turn it into “the” online resource for pho, mainly for restaurant reviews (there are thousands of pho restaurants around the world). There’s nothing more delicious than a good bowl of pho, and nothing more disappointing than a bad one. So I’m hoping other phonatics will contribute to the site.
I’m also expecting to resume work soon on dracoconstruction.com (not currently online), which is for the contractor who managed most of the work on our San Mateo house.
I also want to build some user-friendly, real-estate specific publishing tools on my Dad’s real estate site - so he can make updates to it on his own.
For the first time in at least 7 years, I unpacked my Commodore 64 (from 1982!), hooked up all the components, and turned it on. It still works. I even have the original box (the title of this entry is the slogan on the box). My motivation for hauling it out of the basement came from these two web sites: Contiki and RR-Net. The former is an OS that’s been ported to the C64 that offers a TCP/IP stack, web browser, web server, telnet client, etc. The latter is a network card for the C64.
Screen capture of the Commodore 64 game Archon
I’m planning to get both so I can 1. get 10 years worth of data off my C64 before it finally does die, and onto my PC (I used my C64 from my pre-teens all the way through college, so I accumulated a lot of 5.25″ disks!), and 2. at least for a while, run a web server on it. It’s analogous to turning a toaster into a race car. Browsing the Contiki site, I found that someone actually built a streaming audio server on a C64. That’s just nuts. And 3. the C64 was quite a game machine in its day. Tonight Kai and I played Summer Olympics, Skyfox, and Archon. Archon is still a good game! It’s essentially the same as chess, but when you move a piece onto a square occupied by your opponent, the screen turns into a battlefield and you have to fight it out to see who gets to claim the square. There are power differentials between the different types of pieces , but it’s conceivable that a rook could beat a knight (if you have a lot of skill and luck). Kai enjoyed it as much as I did, which I guess means I’m still a little boy.
