Nothing But Words

I just finished upgrading my blog to Movable Type 3.0. So far everything is working fine. But I haven’t upgraded the templates, so nothing looks different yet. My main motivation for doing the upgrade is to get control over the spam comments that are getting posted here every day (for online casinos, penis enlargement pills, etc). If you post a comment, it will now be sent to me for approval before appearing on the site. With any luck the spammers will leave me alone once they notice the change. There are a number of other features that have been added for control of comments, but from what I’ve been reading they’re not totally stable yet, and the TypeKey system is generating some controversy.

Last week I made a grumpy post, containing a litany of complaints about a bunch of stuff that all went wrong in a short span of time. Now it appears that some cosmic balance is being achieved, at least in my corner of the universe.

The data recovery for my broken hard drive was going to cost $1500. Too rich for my blood! I got the impression they’re used to dealing with large companies (as opposed to sorry individuals like me), who don’t even blink at that kind of number. So I got my broken hard drive back, and in the box were two DVDs with all my data. I went online and checked my credit card balance, and they haven’t charged me (I had given them my credit card number for the initial $100 evaluation fee, which they haven’t charged me for either). So it looks like the rep I was working with took pity on me. So he gets a very big THANK YOU! I will preserve his job security by not mentioning his name or his company’s name.

Soon the new hard drive will arrive for my laptop, and I can start getting things back in order. One thing that will be different is this: I will back up my data. I will back up my data. I will back up my data.

This means I can finish my Japan travelogue, complete with pictures. For now I won’t backdate the entries, so they won’t get buried in the blog history. I’ll put the original date in the text. I just posted one new entry, and next week I’ll make the entries for the last few days of the trip.

This past Sunday we returned from our trip to Newport, where we were visiting my family. Maria and Kai were there for 9 days, and I was there just for the weekends, as I had no vacation time available after our Japan trip (the flight only takes and hour, and Southwest has airfares for $60 round-trip, so it wasn’t impractical for me to make a couple short visits). Kai and Maria spent most of their time at the beach, and Kai got in a lot of play-time with his cousins. Read the captions in the pictures for more details:

Two months ago I wrote a piece entitled Nation Building on the Cheap. Last week the CS Monitor ran the article Rebuilding Iraq on the cheap?. It focuses on historical parallels: the occupation of Japan lasted 7 years and involved half a million troops. The rebuilding of Germany amounted to 3% of US GDP for several years (roughly the equivalent of the entire current defense budget). And in neither country did we have to contend with an active resistance. We do not have the political will to make anything like that kind of commitment in Iraq, but that’s something we should have thought about before going in. Anyway, I’ve become interested enough in all this that I’ve started reading Partners for Democracy: Crafting the New Japanese State Under MacArthur.

It’s par for the course to see Democrats and Republicans employing hyperbole and selective use of facts to buttress their own positions and attack each other. However, the reaction of Bush and his supporters to the Senate Panel report on the failures of our intelligence community is just so bizarre, it is truly a wonder to behold. The scathing, bipartisan Senate report paints only a portion of the large canvass that portrays the overall picture of the Iraq war, so let’s consider it within a larger context:

• After 9/11, the Bush administration made public its new, highly controversial policy of pre-emptive strikes against enemies that pose an imminent threat to the United States. One would presume that underlying such a policy would be a reliance on top-notch, rock-solid intelligence work. Assuming our enemies aren’t going to pubicly announce their plans, how else could we justify pre-emptive assaults?
• The Bush administration offered three justifications for the Iraq invasion: 1. first and foremost, it argued that Saddam possessed – or would very soon possess – WMD, and would attack us or our allies with them; 2. that he had strong ties to Al Qaeda and was likely to give it WMD; 3. Saddam was a really nasty guy who did terrible things to his own people.
• Were these things true? 1. The bipartisan Senate report states “Most of the major key judgements [of the CIA, concerning Iraq's WMD, were] either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting.” 2. The report states “there was no evidence proving Iraqi complicity or assistance in an Al Qaeda attack,” and it found the CIA was correct in discounting theories about close ties between the two; 3. I think everyone agrees Saddam was a bad man.
• Was it reasonable, before the invasion, for the Bush administration to believe these things were true? An important thing to point out about the Senate report is that it did not find that the intelligence gathering was bungled. (Although it does point out how little actual intelligence we had – most of what we knew in 2002 about Iraq’s weapons programs was just extrapolated from information gathered in 1991, and after 1998 we had no human intelligence sources in Iraq.) Instead, the panel was scorchingly critical of the analyses. Why were they so botched? The panel’s next investigation – on the role of the Bush administration itself – will wait until after the election, but the 7/10 New York Times reported the following:

  In one committee interview, the agency’s ombudsman…described what he called a “hammering” in the form of repeated questions by administration officials on…Mr Hussein’s possible links to Al Qaeda. The intensity of the questioning was “harder than he had previously witnessed in his 32-year career with the agency” …[the resulting analysis] was accompanied by a note that said it was prepared using a “purposefully aggressive” approach…

  Given this stories and others like it (such as those in Richard Clarke’s book), there’s persuasive evidence that the Bush administration was quite keen to have the analyses reach certain conclusions. Hopefully more light will be shed on this, but for now it’s safe to say that some combination of groupthink, political mechinations, and shoddy work led the Bush administration to its conclusions about the nature and urgency of the Iraqi threat.

• Where does the Bush administration stand now? It stands in a slightly different spot than Tony Blair. In his reaction to the Butler report (on the failures of British intelligence), Blair still stood by the decision to go into Iraq, but he said “I take full responsibility for the mistakes [in the intelligence work]“, even though he had been cleared of any personal culpability. So we know where the buck stops in England, but Bush and Cheney are still selling the same old arguments, but with newer, craftier language, so you have to listen carefully. Earlier this week Bush said “[Saddam Hussein] had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder, and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them.” Note the use of the ambiguous terms capability and could have. It’s a far cry from the forceful language that was used in the run-up to the war, and it’s still an overstatement, given the actual, tattered state of Saddam’s weapons programs (see this interview with David Kay if you don’t already know the story). Furthermore, recently Cheney said the “evidence is overwhelming” that “there’s clearly been a relationship” between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The panel found no evidence of a significant collaborative relationship; the Czech intelligence report Cheney cited has been discredited; Osama Bin Laden once offered to go to war with Saddam Hussein (remember Saddam was a secular ruler who persecuted Islamists, making him anathema to the likes of Bin Laden). Relationship is a murky word – there is evidence of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda, but it’s not clear that they amounted to anything like a partnership.

So the only rationale that really had legs was the “Saddam is a bad guy” argument, which – under Bush’s published pre-emption policy – is not compelling enough to justify pre-emptive action. Nonetheless, the one argument Bush and his supporters are now making more forcefully than ever is this: “would you prefer having Saddam still in power?” Given that everyone agrees Saddam was a bad guy, the question is a superb rhetorical device. But I actually have a response. I even have two: 1. If Bush tried to sell the war on that basis alone, do you think there’s any chance at all he could have convinced the nation to go to war? I think brushing off the intelligence debacle that got us into Iraq with this ends-justifies-the-very-questionable-means argument is deplorable. 2. We have traded Saddam, a known – and fairly well contained – evil, for an Iraq fraught with risks for civil war, and for becoming a breeding ground for terrorism. It’s very unclear what the ultimate fate of Iraq will be, and at this point we must do what we can to steer it towards peace and stability. And I sincerely hope we succeed. But it is far, far from guaranteed that the long-term effect of Saddam’s removal will be an Iraq that causes less trouble for the world.

Epilogue

The title for this entry is derived from the tortured logic in the assertions put forth by Bush’s supporters in the aftermath of the Senate panel’s report and the Butler report. For the most part they’ve ignored the main thrust of the report and instead have focused their energy on berating Ambassador Wilson. To see what I’m talking about, see this entry on blogsforbush.com and this Sun Times editorial. If you look beyond the name calling and put the whole story together, the silliness of the argument becomes clear:

• You’ll recall Bush included a statement in his 2003 State of the Union speech about Iraq trying to get uranium from Niger. When it was later revealed how this statement was sourced, Ambassador Wilson stated he found no credible evidence for this claim when the Bush administration sent him to Niger to investigate almost a year earlier.
• In an incredibly rare display, the Bush administration admitted it was wrong to include that statement in the speech, and recanted the assertion. Then, in a more typical display, it sought revenge against Wilson. The Sept. 28 Washington Post reported: “a senior administration official said that before Novak’s column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson’s wife.” Apparently the other reporters knew this was radioactive and didn’t touch it (she was an active CIA agent, and revealing her identity is potentially a criminal action), but Novak went ahead and published it.
• Fast-forward a full year: the Senate panel’s report roundly criticized the CIA’s analysis failures in regard to Iraq’s WMD, with a notable exception: the panel found there may have been something to the Iraq-Niger connection after all. If you read the New York Times summary of the panel’s findings on this topic, you’ll find it’s a very complicated story, fraught with contradictory opinions from various intelligence analysts.
• This Washington Post article casts serious doubt on Wilson’s credibility.

Tell me again how all this makes Bush look good? Just thumbing your nose at Wilson isn’t enough. It’s highly unusual for Bush to ever admit a mistake, so all the information available to him after Wilson first went public must have indicated the intelligence was unreliable. Hence the recantation. Further information that comes out a year later that happens to lend some support to his original assertion doesn’t justify the original misjudgement behind it. If you’re careful to not mix the past with the present, you’ll find the Sun-Times editorial is just silly: it argues that Bush knew the CIA was doing a lousy job, and that he had the ability to divine that this one piece of intelligence (which came from the British) was good, so he was right to use it in the speech. If that were true (which it isn’t), it would leave you wondering why Bush then felt comfortable trumpeting all the other intelligence analyses from a CIA he thought was incompetent.

I just had to delete 119 spam comments for a blackjack site. It’s time to invest in upgrading to the new version of Movable Type, which will give me greater control over who can post comments and who can’t.

After work yesterday, I spent most of the day struggling with reviving Maria’s old laptop (I need something, since my computer has died). Installing the network card required access to the CD drive and the floppy drive at the same time, but it has swappable drives, and you can only have one in at a time. I ended up with a corrupted installation that I couldn’t uninstall, and it corrupted all of Microsoft Networking as well. I eventually straightened it all out, but it took hours. Time to buy a Mac.

The grass I’ve been diligently trying to grow in my front yard got washed out in the “1,000 year” rain storm we had Monday.

When I got on the plane to RI, I had to “surrender” my cool Leatherman mini-pocketknife to airport security (I completely forgot I had it on me). It was a gift from Jay when I was best man at his wedding.

Sunday night I flew back by myself, as Maria and Kai are staying in Newport for the week. I ended up being stuck in the airport for hours, as the car battery was dead (the lights weren’t on or anything – I think it’s just reached the end of its lifespan). No one was willing to engage with a single white male trolling the airport parking garage late at night, looking for a “jump.” So I went to the Information desk for help and was given the number for Parking Assistance. I had no change for the pay phone, and all the shops were closed, so I bought a $20 phone card from a vending machine (at $.50/minute – apparently airport phone cards are priced just like airport food). I called only to find the number was disconnected. I went back to the Information desk and this time got the right number, and help arrived…eventually.

Today I mail out my broken hard drive. The rep I spoke with told me the data will either be unrecoverable, or it will be recoverable at a price between $400 – $1800. Basically, ouch, or ouch.

My new answering machine has suddenly decided that from now on it will hang up on callers after 5 seconds.

And I have a painful sunburn, but at least that’s something I can blame myself for.

With the death of my computer’s hard drive, my blog updates probably will be sporadic for a while. I should find out today whether the local technician I gave it to was able to recover any data from it. If he couldn’t, I’ll find out what it’ll cost to send it off to a company that specializes in recovering data from totally hosed hard drives. The Ontrack web site boasts they were able to recover data from a burned and mangled hard drive from the space shuttle Columbia, so I’m sure my problem is solvable. The question is, how many $$$?

Other things:

• I think I’ll go ahead and write up my blog entries for the rest of the Japan trip, even without the pictures. I figure I better do it before I start forgetting everything. I’ve dusted off Maria’s old laptop, but it was so unstable it needed a full re-installation of the OS. I’m almost done doing that, and then I’ll have a place to write.
• We’ll be in Newport RI this weekend visiting my family. Maria and Kai will stay there the rest of the week, and I’ll come back to Philly since I have to work. Then I’ll go back again next weekend. Southwest just started flying out of Philly, and we got round-trip fares to Providence for $60, so it’s not too hard on the wallet.
• While they’re in Newport next week, I’ll start on our next house project: remodeling the 3rd floor guest room. The plan is to turn that into Kai’s room, and then make the other room up there our room. We discovered this past winter that the 3rd floor is much warmer than the rest of the house when it’s cold outside, so we want our bedrooms up there (the 3rd floor is the only floor that’s insulated, and heat rises). They’re also the only rooms with a southern exposure, so they get nice sunlight during the day.

A technician came to my house yesterday to check out my hard drive. In very general terms, there are two possible causes of this kind of failure: something in the hard drive fails, or something in the computer that interacts with the hard drive fails. Unfortunately, it looks like the former. He said there isn’t anything you can do if the drive is bad, but I did some Googling and found a number of companies that can recover data from bad drives. Iomega is probably the most well known among them. The downside is – with “prices starting at $300″ – it’s probably going to cost a pretty penny.

Just as I was putting the finishing touches on my Japan trip entry “Things You Don’t See in the US,” my hard drive failed amidst cringe-inducing whirrs, clicks, and even a few thuds. So I need to find a computer service center, but since it’s a holiday weekend, it’ll have to wait until Tuesday. I haven’t backed up my stuff since we moved to PA last June, so I desperately hope the data is recoverable. I had actually started making backups onto CDs just the night before (I started with some old pictures) – I guess I should have started sooner! Since all the Japan trip photos and my blog drafts are in there, finishing my travelogue will be delayed at least a few days

We arrived back in Philadelphia on the evening of the 28th (after leaving Japan on the evening of the 28th and spending 18 hours in transit – it’s a funny thing, that international date line). So we’ve spent the past few days readjusting to reality. It’s been taking me a few beats to remember even the most fundamental things: where’s my house? what’s my phone number? what is this “job” thing, which apparently involves sitting in front of a computer all day?

They say it’s a sign of a good vacation if you’re happy you went, and you’re happy you’re back. What does it mean if you feel like you could have stayed on your vacation, oh, another 6 months or so?

I’ve been back-filling posts about our trip. I’m about halfway through. Look for new blog entries behind this one as I work through finishing the tale. I’ve also created a new topic archive – Japan 2004 – so you can see all the entries there.

For me, the jet lag (on both ends of the trip) wasn’t as bad as it was when I went to Japan 5 years ago. I believe there are 3 explanatory factors, in ascending order of importance:

1. Last time I flew from California, which was a 9 hour time change. This time it was a 13 hour time change. I think the 13 hour change is actually easier on your body, as breakfast and dinner are almost symmetrically reversed (Circadian rhythms involve eating schedules too).

2. A 9 hour flight from California on cushy ANA airlines isn’t nearly as disruptive to your body as flying 16 hours cramped in unsleepable United coach, and having a plane change with a two hour layover in the middle. Even though it’s unpleasant, a massive disruption like that helps to reset your body clock.

3. Three years of parenting a kid who, until recently, had lousy sleep habits has conditioned my body so it’s happy to get sleep whenever it can. Who needs a body clock anyway?

Maria and Kai have had a more difficult time readjusting. Since I had to go back to work right away, Maria’s been kind enough to take care of Kai when he decides that he’s all done sleeping at 3am. Unfortunately, she came down with a flu because of it. But she’s on the mend already, and Kai managed to sleep until 5 this morning, so we’re slowly getting back to normal.