Mia voĉo (My voice)

The Sins of Saddam

Is there anyone out there who will cry on the day when Saddam Hussein dances a jig six feet above the ground? I thought not. There may be some who will regret that he will be dancing alone -- certain other world leaders who shall remain nameless (I don't want the Secret Service paying a call on me) really ought to be up there with him (their body count from bombed wedding parties and the like is at least not negligible compared to his) ⁽¹⁾-- but take heart; the joint dance probably wouldn't have been all that well choreographed anyway.

Back when millions, here and elsewhere, were demonstrating against the war with Iraq, the regular accusation against the demonstrators was, "They're supporting Saddam Hussein!" Hmm. I suspect you would have had to look hard through any random collection of demonstrators to find anyone who didn't consider Saddam at best a mean-spirited thug. For myself -- and though I didn't demonstrate, being too lazy to get off my fundament and march for hours in the cold, I considered myself one of them, albeit a lazy one -- my own opinion of Saddam has always been best described using the expression "unhanged brigand", one that I was not hesitant about using back in the eighties when the father of the current president of the United States treated him as though he were a Middle Eastern Sir Galahad.

Of course, before we give Saddam his fair trial and then hang him, ⁽²⁾ perhaps it would be wise to look at what sins he has committed.

(1) Saddam was enthusiastically building up stocks of Weapons of Mass Destruction. (This widely bandied-about term seems to refer specifically to nukes, poison gas and anthrax.)

No question that once upon a time Iraq, like lots of other countries, had a nuclear program, probably with ambitions of developing something that would go BA-BOOM. Saddam once had lots of poison gas; we know, we used to tell him the best places for his conscripted grunts to use it (on the conscripted grunts of the Iranian army). At one time or another, the United States sold him stocks of anthrax germs to play with, so he pretty obviously had those.

Where are they now -- or, more correctly, where were they early in 2003? Well, his nuclear program came a cropper when the Israeli Air Force took it out in a single well-executed raid, back in the 1980s. There's no evidence that he has used poison gas since the mid-to-late 1980s, and no evidence that he's even had any to speak of since the Gulf War. And nobody knows where that anthrax is -- he never gave any indication that it was ever used for anything other than research purposes. (By contrast, about 1000 people in Sverdlovsk, nowadays known as Ekaterinburg, in Russia, died of anthrax infection back in the eighties when a secret military plant in the town suffered an "accident". Of course, the USSR was "Empire of Evil" of that era, a term now replaced by "Axis of Evil", in which Saddam seems to have been the chief ball bearing.)

It's been suggested (by Seymour Hersch, I believe) that, in fact, when Saddam realized that he was no longer playing just with his petty-brigand neighbors but with the Big Boys such as the United States, he lost his taste for the sort of weapons that could draw down their like-minded wrath on tiny Iraq. Unhanged brigands, after all, may be brigands, but they are not necessarily also idiots.

Whatever, no evidence of any recent WMDs in Iraq has been found. The British found two trailers which, as recently as a couple of weeks ago, US vice-president Dick Cheney insisted were bioweapons labs, even though the British who found them and other engineers who investigated them concluded that they were, in fact, used to produce hydrogen for weather balloons. The Danes found some rusting shells with evidence of blistering agents in them -- that made the front page -- but analysis showed that, while the rust was rust, the blistering agent ... wasn't -- which, of course, didn't make the front page.

(2) Saddam did not hesitate to use his WMDs on his own people.

Yes, back in the eighties Saddam did use poison gas on one or more Kurdish villages, emulating the actions (some years earlier) of one of his predecessors on the throne of Iraq -- Winston Churchill, who was later punished for this act by being made an honorary citizen of the United States. One doubts, however, that Saddam will be offered a similar option. More recently, Saddam (post-Gulf-War-I) used WMDs on nobody. Of course, this may be because he had no good way of getting at Kurdish villages in Iraq to do so.

(3) Saddam threatened the United States.

Really? How? The only time Iraq has ever attacked the United States was in the mid-to-late eighties, when one or two Iraqi warplanes fired missiles at a US destroyer, the Fletcher, killing some 35 crewmen. At the time, our then-president, ideological grandfather of the current president, publicly deplored Iran for having caused this horrible attack by not rolling over and playing dead for Saddam, our most noble buddy. Saddam, of course, was suitably contrite, and quite willing to help us investigate the matter.

Even if, in 2003, Saddam had had nukes, gas or bugs, he had no delivery systems to get them to the United States; those who read the papers or scanned the internet were treated to pictures of UN inspectors breaking up his longest-range missiles (around 200 miles) a week before our attack on Iraq occurred.

(4) Saddam was hand-in-glove with Osama bin Laden.

Even before the war, it was pretty obvious -- as was pointed out on Face the Nation (I think) by no less a personage than General Brent Scowcroft, the National Security Adviser for the current president's daddy -- that there was no relationship between Saddam and bin Laden, except perhaps an adversarial one. Bin Laden is an Islamic fanatic; Saddam ran what was arguably the most religiously moderate government in the Middle East, bar none (I don't exclude Israel). ⁽³⁾ In Iraq, you didn't have to be a Moslem to be high in the government -- Saddam's right-hand man, that urbane-looking Tariq Aziz whom we regularly saw on television, was a Christian. In Iraq women didn't have to wear the burqa, and could learn to be engineers or drive trucks. Whether this latter situation will endure in the new, "democratic" Iraq remains to be seen.

What this means, of course, is that to bin Laden, Saddam was an apostate who had led his country in the wrong direction. It may be argued, and has been argued, that Saddam was even more intensely disliked by bin Laden than is the United States.

(Are there now al-Qaeda activists in Iraq battling against the U.S. occupying forces? Very likely. This does not automagically make them good buddies of Saddam -- with Saddam out of the picture, Iraq is a whole new playing field.)

Of course, Osama -- via his family -- may have been hand-in-glove with other important radical ruling families who provided him with at least tacit support, but probably not in Iraq. I don't want to name any names, but if you take the word "bullshit" and remove the "llit", you may get an idea of what American family has long had financial ties with the Saudi bin Ladens. (Note: were there any Iraqis or Afghans among the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center? I didn't think so. On the other hand, more than half were Saudis ... but, of course, nobody has yet accused the Saudi government of participating in that horrendous attack, and nobody has suggested that we launch an attack against Saudi Arabia to punish them for it.)

(5) Saddam had thousands of people murdered and buried in mass graves.

Probably quite true. I'm not sure how this makes Saddam much different from similar sinners whom we have supported in the past and will continue to support in future. (Chances are very good, in fact, that most of the mass graves found so far date from a period when we were giving Saddam the support necessary to fill those graves.) We might want to remember that our sometime noble ally and business partner General Suharto in Indonesia came to power, with the help of our CIA, over the corpses of three quarters of a million individuals whom he labelled Communist -- and perhaps they were; not one of those corpses ever arose from the grave to protest the label, and I guess that proves something. Then there was the Pol Pot-Angkar regime in Cambodia, which we once excoriated for mordering a million people or more -- but which, after the Vietnamese army marched in, ousted it, and replaced it with an ally of their own (the only time in history, I'm told, when the Cambodians cheered to see the Vietnamese invading their country), we supported for years in the UN as the only legitimate government of Cambodia.

Saddam remains a sinner, and, again, I at least will not be sad to see him hang. But perhaps it would be wise to hang him for the right reasons, and not keep harping on ones that don't hold water and make us look like shameless hypocrites, which, perhaps, we are.

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⁽¹⁾ Lest I be accused of partisanship, I will point out that current president Bush's body count is probably not worse than that of former president Clinton, who did not hesitate to unleash Tomahawk missiles on Iraq or bomb pharmaeceutical factories in Sudan, and who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds or even thousands of innocent Serbians and the destruction of Serbia's infrastructure. And Clinton's predecessor, the current president's daddy, was responsible, in his attempt to "bring a drug peddler to justice" (reference to Manuel Noriega), for a greater holocaust in Panama City than the one unleashed on New York by al-Qaeda almost twelve years later.

⁽²⁾ I've seen a number of articles and letters assuring the public that we, or our proxies in Iraq, will give Saddam a fair and impartial trial before hanging him. Perhaps this is the appropriate time to quote Lewis Carroll's famous poem from Alice in Wonderland (I will not try to reproduce the typographical idiosyncrasies of the original edition):

Fury said to a mouse
that he met in the house,
"Come, let's go to law,
I will prosecute you.
Come, I'll take no denial;
we must have a trial,
for really this morning
I've nothing to do."
Said the mouse to the cur:
"Such a trial, dear sir,
with no jury or judge,
would be wasting our breath."
"I'll be judge, I'll be jury,"
said cunning old Fury,
"I'll try the whole cause
and condemn you to death."

⁽³⁾ I'm not sure whether Syria, also under the socialist, and therefore areligious, Ba'ath Party, was comparable, at least under Hafez Assad. Hafez, known affectionately as the "Butcher of Hama" for the ten thousand devout and rebellious Moslems whom he had murdered during an insurrection in the area of that city, was probably also disliked by bin Laden. If you ever want to see a picture of Hafez, go back to records of the Gulf War era, and you'll find the nifty photo-op that the Butcher of Hama and our current president's daddy shared. (Party affiliations notwithstanding, Hafez allowed himself to be coopted to the purposes of the Coalition of that era.)

Voting on Marriage

Half a dozen or so years ago, someone created a website in which he carried out a poll: "What is to be the language of the internet?" You could vote for English, Russian, Danish, French ... or Esperanto. The poll was in English (at that time the majority, not just -- as now -- the plurality language of the net), and English should have won, hands down. But, in fact, Esperanto was the winner? Why? Because Esperanto was, thanks to facility of learning and social neutrality, a better language than English for this venue? It is ... but that was not the reason. It won because somebody announced, in soc.culture.esperanto, the existence of the poll, and Esperanto speakers turned out en masse (an expression one doesn't usually associate with Esperanto speakers) to vote for their language.

Along the same lines, a year or so later the BBC held a poll to determine the future language of Europe. The poll was held in English, by an English institution, and should only have been seen by English speakers. English should have been the victor by at least 90%, and perhaps by as much as 99%. But an English planned-language proponent (not of Esperanto) mentioned the poll in a general planned-language list, an Esperanto speaker who will modestly remain nameless disseminated the message elsewhere, and by the time the poll was done, English had won by 67% to 33% -- a victory for English but, to some extent, a Pyrrhic one, given the margins it should have racked up. Worse, among accompanying comments that the BBC found suitable to post, the margins were reversed -- perhaps 30 to 40% for English, the rest against. And, of course, among the "against" comments all but half a dozen mentioned Esperanto as a preferable alternative to English. ⁽¹⁾

Some people never get the idea.

The American Family Association, apparently an organization devoted to fighting for family values, decided recently to hold a poll, aimed primarily at its supporters, to gather support for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Choices open to participants were "I oppose legalization of homosexual marriage and 'civil unions'", "I favor legalization of homosexual marriage" and "I favor a 'civil union' with the full benefits of marriage except for the name". The results of the poll were apparently to be taken to Congress to show the overwhelming support of the American people for "traditional" marriage -- one man, one woman. This is a position that has lately been encouraged by President Bush, who recently reiterated his own support (though not as warm a support as some might wish) for such an amendment.

The AFA apparently does not yet understand the internet. There are no secrets; when you post a poll on-line, not only your supporters but also your opponents are, eventually, going to get into the act. "It just so happens," said organizational representative Buddy Smith, "that homosexual activist groups around the country got a hold of the poll -- it was forwarded to them -- and they decided to have a little fun, and turn their organizations around the country (onto) the poll to try to cause it to represent something other than what we wanted it to. And so far, they succeeded with that."

This, I think, is a pretty accurate description of what happened -- shorn, of course, of Smith's implied suggestion that "homosexual activist groups" are somehow less legitimate and more covert than the AFA. The "what we wanted it to", of course, suggests that the AFA originally thought that this would be a nice, comfortable little exercise in collecting the numbers from AFA supporters and presenting these to Congress as the legitimate will of the American people. What the AFA got was (as of this moment) somewhat less than 32% of those polled favoring their position and more than 68% favoring the legalization of homosexual marriage (the vast majority) or at least some sort of recognized 'civil union' applicable to gays. The total number of those polled, incidentally, is currently more than three quarters of a million; this is not an exercise in small numbers. ⁽²⁾

End result: AFA will not be going to Congress with its figures. They are, after all, too embarassing.

Enjoy a full description of this debacle at Wired News.

My own opinion on the matter? A constitutional amendment defining (and thus limiting) marriage is well within the scope of the constitution; we've had such "social engineering" amendments before. The best known one is, of course, the Volstead Amendment ("Prohibition"), and we all know where that led. But the constitution, and particularly the amendment section, seems to work best when it guarantees our rights, not when it attempts to limit them.

Marriage in this country comes in two forms, not necessarily exclusive of each other. There is the traditional social (religious) marriage, which sanctifies the union of individuals into a, presumably permanent, working collective, generally consisting of two people, blessed by a deity. This lies in the jurisdiction of the churches. If a particular church finds that its god will not sanctify any marriage consisting of other than a single male and a single female (and, eventually, children), it is not only that church's right but, perhaps, even its duty to refuse to go through the charade of "sanctifying" any other sort of marriage. If its members find that they disagree with their church on this particular point of doctrine, well, there are always other churches.

Civil marriage, on the other hand, is a way of defining such partnerships in terms of what benefits they will receive from the state and society at large, not from a deity. The government, then, has no business deciding the nature of people -- or, perhaps, as in a case now pending in Utah, even the number of people -- who can be joined in a civil marriage. ⁽³⁾

This isn't a story that's over with; like everything else in our society, things are in a state of flux. Stay tuned.

---

⁽¹⁾ Of the half a dozen not mentioning Esperanto, there were two supporters of Interlingua and two or three individuals whose names I recognized as being active in the Esperanto movement.

⁽²⁾ Whether these figures are accurate or not, I don't know. It may well be, in its original confidence, that the AFA omitted to enable cookie checking or some similar means of ensuring that the same person didn't vote multiple times; after all, if AFA could count on 50,000 supporters voting against gay unions, it would certainly be nicer to turn in figures of 500,000 votes than of 50,000 votes.

⁽³⁾ On the question of numbers, I'm perhaps a bit more dubious. I can see no problems with the surviving spouse in a same-sex marriage getting the same benefits as the surviving spouse in a both-sex marriage; this is only fair. What do you do with a ten-person marriage? Give all surviving nine spouses equal benefits? Divide a single spouse's benefits between those nine spouses? What happens when, in the end, there's only one survivor? Tontine? Instant Bill Gates? In this case, there are problems to be addressed that have already been solved for a two-person marriage, even a gay one.

Keyboarding Your Vote

One of the really long-time arguments about Esperanto comes from those people who criticize its six supersigned letters as being difficult or impossible for print shops, typewriters, computers, take your pick, to handle. The most recent version claims that computers simply can't process those Esperanto characters. Take a look at your keyboard, if you don't believe me. Standrd QWERTYUIOP, and not a 'Ĉ' anywhere in sight.

The answer, of course, is that you can handle just about any character with a computer keyboard. In the Good Old Days of the manual (or even electric) typewriter (I'm not necessarily referring here to the IBM Selectric), you could see the physical linkage between the key on the keyboard and the metal head that inked the character on the paper. You could press the key on which someone had painted '6' and be sure that a '6' would appear on the paper, because you could see the key's connection to the shaft that rose and slammed into the paper.

Computer keyboards are a whole different kettle of fish. What is written on the keyboard may or may not bear any relation to what will be displayed on the screen, or to what may or may not be ejected from the printer. You simply trust that someone has put in the right program to handle those keys in a way that you find convenient. But, for instance, if I were to install a little program called "SuperSigno" (made in Australia), and then press the '`' key followed by the 'c' key, I wouldn't see a '`c' on my screen, but an Esperanto 'ĉ'. This is because that little program takes the signals coming from the keyboard (which, incidentally, have nothing whatsoever to do with whatever is painted on the keys) and filters them to produce the kind of characters I want, not necessarily those that MicroSoft envisioned when they programmed the operating system. There's no longer an unbreakable link between the key you type and the character that's produced. Heck, nowadays you can program an English-language keyboard (the one with the standard 26 characters written on it) to display in Chinese, if you want.

In today's paper I read that the Pentagon has a pilot project to allow troops overseas to vote using the internet. This is in line with a growing enthusiasm, in some quarters, for electronic (and distant) voting. By 2008, some hope, we will be able to vote without leaving our living rooms -- just call up the ballot form on your screen, check off the candidates you want, and submit the form.

And how will that form be processed? Somewhere there will be a piece of software that receives that form, reads the values you submitted, and records them in a database, from which they will be counted later that evening. Could anything be simpler?

And -- oh, yes, I forgot -- there's also a little subroutine that the programmer put in that reads your presidential vote, and, when "Hillary Clinton" is submitted, generates a random number between one and ten, and when that number comes up '7', replaces "Hillary Clinton" with "Dick Cheney". A harmless little trick -- and who's going to notice? ⁽¹⁾

Think it's impossible? Stranger, and worse, things have happened in the past. Remember when Microsoft delivered one version of Windows to mainland China, and when it was installed, users' screens came up with the Chinese for "Death to Communists" and "Independent Taiwan"? A couple of Chinese programmers at Microsoft had simply programmed that into the operating system, and nobody noticed -- until it reached China.

As far as voting is concerned, the perils of electronic voting, some of them unintentional, some considerably more suspicious, seem to have avoided the notice of the traditional press. Those interested might want to take a look at Bev Harris's interesting Black Box Voting, at http://www.blackboxvoting.org/.

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⁽¹⁾ This is a variant on a trick traditionally used to finagle tallies in lever voting machines, as described in chapter 4 of Bev Harris's Black Box Voting.

Iowa, 'tis Iowa

Today's the day of the Iowa caucuses. Who will win?

The front of the field seems to be (alphabetically speaking) Dean, Edwards, Gephardt and Kerry, who are -- at least according to the news services, which are not always accurate on such matters -- in a dead heat. This is actually bad news for Dean, who, if I remember correctly, was well out in front of the pack when last seen.

Whom would I like to see win? Well, by and large I find Dean to be the candidate whose views are most in agreement with my own (a curious mix of the most radical form of liberalism with certain attitudes generally associated with social conservatism). But I don't think he could beat Bush, and, if the law won't let us hang Bush (it should!), it will at least let us send him back into the private life of a happily ignored "elder statesman". But for that to happen, he has to be beaten in the election.

Kerry, like Clark (now off bushwhacking his way through the wilds of New Hampshire), has some military credentials (a genuine war hero -- whatever that means!). Edwards, who was either in short pants or trying to figure out how to pay for his college education during the Vietnam War (could have been both -- that war lasted long enough), promises to deliver at least some of the southern states to the Democrats in the election if he is nominated; whether this is necessary or not is a question, but it would certainly be desirable. Gephardt has labor's support, but this is likely not a defining factor -- labor would, I think, support whichever of these four candidates came out ahead; they will, quite rightly, accept "anyone but Bush", even if Gephardt would be their first choice.

Dean, on the other hand, can promise to deliver only the left wing of the Democratic Party (people like myself); many centrists and southerners will find him overly radical (not to mention his various faux pas and stumbles, which do not encourage a basic faith in his competence).

Ultimately, I think I'd like to see Kerry take Iowa -- he, after all, has paid his dues. A Kerry/Edwards ticket would, all things considered, be a nice idea, or so it seems to me.

Well, a few more hours now, and then back to New Hampshire, where Clark will weigh in.

(Let me take the opportunity to remind people of the sometime existence of my paternal grandfather, George Harlow, a native-born Iowan.)

Farewell, Hubble

A follow-up to yesterday's posting about Bush's new space vision ...

NASA, readjusting its sights to fit the current political winds, has now announced that it will no longer service the Hubble Space Telescope, and will, in fact, help destroy the telescope when it comes time for it to re-enter the atmosphere.

Launching of the Hubble telescope in 1990 initiated a revolution in our studies of the universe. Over the last decade, especially since the mirror was repaired (during a shuttle mission), Hubble has given us an unparalleled view of many phenomena invisible from the surface of the earth because of, among other things, turbulence in the atmosphere. It appears that this short-lived era of a growing understanding of an ever more complex universe is about to come to an end, as, in its time, did our exploration of the moon.

There is no reason why we can't afford both a manned space program and an unmanned research program including Hubble. But a government which seems to have no qualms about throwing a few hundred billion dollars away on foreign wars and tax cuts for the wealthy is considerably more parsimonious when it comes to knowledge. (And I don't want to hear anything about how that money could be better spent on earth feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless -- the current administration has no intention of spending one penny more than it absolutely has to on such trivial matters, space program or no space program.)

To Mars! To Mars? To Mars ...

Back when he was elected president, John F. Kennedy made a commitment to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. And we made it. At a cost of roughly 40 billion dollars (1965 dollars, let us say), we not only put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon in July, 1969, we managed to follow up with several more lunar expeditions before we shut down the program, retired the Saturn rockets, and broke up the development teams during the Nixon administration.

Now President Bush wants not only to go back to the moon but to put men on Mars. Is this a good idea? I think, yes. Will Bush's program permit this? Well, maybe -- but there are some troublesome aspects.

Bush is planning to get this underway by putting an extra one billion dollars into NASA's budget over the next five years. Will that get us there? Not bloody likely. Remember those 40 billion 1965 dollars and compare that with one billion 2005 dollars.

More money is available, says Bush; some ten to twelve billion dollars can be "reallocated" from funds already guaranteed for NASA. What does this mean? Who knows? Goodbye, outer-planet research? Goodbye, probe to Pluto? Goodbye, visits to comets and asteroids? Goodbye, Goddard Space Flight Center, Nasa Ames Research Laboratory, other "unnecessary frills"? I gather that everything is on the table here.

Why is Bush so anxious to get us on the road to Mars? There are various stories. Some people believe that it's an election gimmick. Some believe that it's aimed at getting us onto a unilateral track that won't involve the International Space Station. Some believe that his "managers" (Cheney, Rumsfeld & co.) are firm believers, and perhaps justifiably so, in the "high ground" military theory: the nation that controls space will rule the world. And some people believe that he was simply panicked by China's manned space flight in October, an act that demonstrated that our major potential rival in the world is quite serious about going into space, and has a genuine program, not just a temporary enthusiasm, for having a serious presence in space.

There's an old story about a diplomatic dinner in China in 1953 at which a Chinese official railed at a British diplomat about Sir Edmund Hillary's placing the British flag on the summit of Mt. Everest, which the Chinese considered their territory. "If you don't like it up there, old chap," the Englishman is reported to have said, "you have every right to go up and take it down." It would be the Chinese who had the last laugh if the flag that Apollo left on the moon were to end up in a Beijing museum ...

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