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An article in Slate provides a quick history lesson on American anti-war protests, that have occurred in every conflict, including the Revolutionary War.

In American history in particular, wartime dissent has a venerable lineage. Even during that most mythic of causes, the Revolution, fully one third of Americans opposed independence, in John Adams’ famous estimate, while an equal third favored it. Only in retrospect did the Revolution become an unambiguously glorious endeavor.

New England states considered seceding during the War of 1812. Congress censured Polk for the Mexican-American War. Andrew Carnegie and Mark Twain objected to the Spanish-American War. Wilson was deeply unpopular for bringing America into World War I. The only conflict in which there was no organized anti-war dissent was World War II, though people were isolationist prior to Pearl Harbor. Still, there were pacifists who refused to fight (Howard Zinn mentions meeting with one in the preface to his
People’s History of the United States. (As an aside, you can read both Zinn and, say, Paul Johnson’s
Modern Times, and wind up with a perhaps balanced but incoherent view of the world. Either that, or schizophrenic.)

Dissent is a good thing. It’s fundamentally American. And even wartime dissent is a net positive:

Critics of war—even when they’ve been wrong, or their comments distasteful—have done far more good than harm. Although enemy leaders may take heart from knowing that Americans are divided, the mere expression of opposition has never materially hurt any U.S. military campaign.

Fundamentally, this sort of dissent is one of the necessary ways that constrains American action, and keeps us closer to our ideals than not.

There’s also an article up at the New Republic on Saddam gets bad advice. Fundamentally, it’s the nature of a regime built and operated on fear. People with important, though bad news are reluctant to bring it to the attention of their superiors, for fear of dying; it’s possible Saddam believes his own news reports. Democracies, where dissent is practiced and hopefully encouraged, on the other hand, put a high value on quality information and open discussion and debate. Silencing all voices would not only have moral reprecussions but practical ones.

I signed the contract for the apartment this evening. It’s on its way to be signed by the owner, when it becomes official, and then comes the race to file documents:

A couple of notes, mostly. The main thrust of these pieces is that setbacks in war are obviously to be expected, though we may forget that fact. Sentiments may cycle between wild optimism and dark despair daily, because the US hasn’t fought a particularly long war in a generation, because our news cycle grows shorter and shorter, and because there are now numerous forums in which to vent opinion.

Gregg Easterbrook’s blog-like series of articles talks about how expectactions for a swift victory had been built both by the Administration and by the media’s experience with the first few days of the invasion. Further, the Iraqi military has clearly learned from the last Gulf War, and is not opposing the initial entry into Iraq. The Iraqi military apparently believes they will prevail in the end — by inflicting sufficiently many casualties on American forces and Iraqi civilians — to become the first Arab army to do so since Saladin. But it’s hard to judge how things are going so soon: France in 1940 resisted fiercely until their morale suddenly broke. Easterbrook also takes a swipe at the notion still held by the unreconstructed left about how business loves war. The ups and downs of the stock market in the past few days should be sufficient proof demonstrating otherwise.

NPR mentioned this morning that one of the causes of the absence of a Shia revolt in southern Iraq is the lack of trust the Shia have towards Americans in this war. In the last war, the Shia rose up to fight Saddam, and were crushed while the Americans stood by, having brokered a cease-fire that would lead to their betrayal. If you were a Shia, would you be so quick to rise up, given what happened the last time? We will have to wait and see how the Iraqis react once Saddam is clearly defeated, and the shadow of his security forces are expelled from the country.

It should also be pointed out that an American foreign policy that so clearly betrays a people’s aspirations for freedom for the sake of power balances among despots in the last war will have problems in the next war. America should promote freedom, though that may sometimes require force.

Also clear from these past few days: air power doesn’t yet obviate the need to have “boots on the ground” as some of us may have naively hoped. Technological improvements will continue to come, and we will be able to hit specific targets with increasingly finer accuracy and increasingly smaller decision loops. However, air power alone cannot throw a skilled, resolute opponent out of complex terrain. Even in Afghanistan, this didn’t happen, as Stephen Biddle shows in this Foreign Affairs piece. Regular Taliban forces didn’t know how to fight properly, and were defeated quickly. Better trained and more determined Al Qaeda troops dug in, and had to be defeated by a classic combined arms approach, with infantry advancing under covering fire, and artillery blasting out the points of resistance they encounter. It appears the case that strategic air power doctrine a la Douhet can only still be achieved with nuclear weapons, which is something no one wants to do. Anyway, the strong resistance by Al Qaeda troops in the face of precision bombing will unfortunately mean heavy fighting against those in Saddam’s regime with nothing left to lose, especially in the cities.

The current project involves VBScript for the server-side scripting language. There may be some performance issues with the DB connections we’re using. Here’s a couple of articles on connection pooling for ASPs:

Our first brown belt test will be in April, probably around the second week. Time for wall work, more stick work, vocabularly memorization, and curling up into fetal position.

At least the web can help with the vocabulary. Here’s a good site for the name of judo throws: Judoinfo.com for the drawings and for the animations.

Somewhat unexpectedly, they have a video of Vladimir Putin throwing someone Okuri Ashi Harai (sliding foot sweep).

I watch the Simpsons, and I have no idea WTF you’re looking for and why I’m getting all these search engine referrals. The one instance of “slush” found on this site actually refers to New York City snow. If anyone cares to comment and let me know, please do. Note that I haven’t seen the past two episodes, but they’re on my Tivo.

William Saletan in his Slate blog on the war has a piece on the changing technology of war, specifically on the widespread adoption of precision munitions, and what that means for wars fought by liberal democracies.

Basically, the ability to put a bomb on a specific target has gotten so good, war can be waged very specifically on the pillars that support a repressive regime — the loyal military, the security services, other apparatuses of state control. Regimes can be “tipped” over; it may no longer be necessary to “crush” them, actions that may lead to many civilian deaths.

We don’t have to roll tanks into their towns to show them our firepower. They know about it from television, radio, or their neighbors. We can win by “tipping,” not crushing. We spent centuries developing the ability to kill people. Now we’re developing the ability not to. Regime change is no longer a euphemism.

Saletan notes that this works best with repressive regimes: “If the people support the regime, it’s much harder to separate the two.” Further, repressive regimes depend more on the tangible instruments of state power to remain in control: break their links with the military and secret police, and they cannot hold on.

This actually follows with Gregg Easterbrook’s article in The New Republic about the historic lack of success in using air power to “shock and awe” regimes into surrender. He observes that the instances in which this was tried, the regimes have been repressive ones which didn’t give a damn about the fates of their people: “In order for shock to prevail, there must be consciences capable of being shocked. Leaders must care about their followers.” But what if we can very specifically target the leaders itself, as we did on Wednesday in the openning volley of this war? And do so with relatively low chances of harming others?

(As a side note, Easterbrook’s blog-of-sorts (he posts almost with the frequency of those calling themselves bloggers, but these postings are close to essays, not off the cuff comments about current events) is an excellent run down of various topics somewhat tangential to the war, but interesting in themselves.)

Saletan sees the primary flaw with this new era of precision munitions and the expectations of accuracy. That is, the military is goddamn powerful: “Just because we have the ability to spare people’s lives doesn’t mean we have the will.” The US military can turn any small country into a slag heap in a matter of days. What prevents it from doing so?

Fundamentally, what constrains the US is the American people. In the early 21st Century, we have the expectation, built over the past decade, that our military will fight wars as cleanly as possible, with a conscious an attentive regard to civilian casualties. The deaths of bystanders is probably unavoidable, but we expect the military to do what it can to avoid it. This then would be a function of the antiwar movement: protests should be directed at keeping military action transparent — we should help the media and human rights groups monitor the battlefield. War protests that give a repressive regime hope that they can survive may in fact prolong the war, and compel the military to use “crushing” to achieve its objectives. War protesters, however, have not recognized this new reality, and, in part, operate under the assumption that the US can only carpet bomb cities.

There’s an Ask Slashdot article on LED flashlights, something I was looking at since my cheap EverReady rechargeable incandescent flashlight turned up dead a couple of months ago — crappy batteries. I’d also like to keep an emergency light in the car, in the remote chance that we wind up on a dark road without power. It’s a useful discussion, mainly because Google searches on such lights just brings up sellers, whose advertisements are hard to judge.

Anyway, there seems to be three interesting products mentioned. One is an LED drop-in replacement for standard incandescent bulbs for, say, Maglights. The second is a standard flashlight favored by emergency workers, the Streamlight. The last one would probably be the best as an emergency light for the car, the PALight, which has a 2-year “always on” mode that makes it easier to find.

No need to buy this soon, just something to file away someplace when I get around to picking these up. Maybe when the Maglight dies.

If you are sprayed with an unknown substance, stand and think about it instead of seeing a doctor.

Here is a funny take the Department of Homeland Security’s new civil defense signs. Slate has a good article on the history of civil defense, and how early Cold War enthusiasm/hysteria for bomb shelters and duck-and-cover drills fell into silly 1950s nostalgia. Post-Cold War, we can laugh at our or our parents’ credulity, both at the notion of caring about how our investments are doing after a full scale nuclear war, and at the notion that we can uncritically trust the government can be on national security.

While I’m not Heather Havrilesky, at least I caught a bit of PBS’s and the BBC’s war coverage while switching between the broadcast channels. This isn’t to diss Heather — I remember the old days of Filler — but it’s easy to mock the snazzy graphics of the bigger news organizations. This is a Salon article after all, and sometimes they verge on the trivial.

Aside from Fox’s really silly Humvee Cam — apparently hours of poor quality video of sand being kicked up the tank just ahead of the Humvee in the convoy, but it’s LIVE! — the graphics and the anchors were typically homogenous. CBS cleverly skipped the uniform war coverage and showed basketball until midnight; it’s March Madness after all. They did switch to typical war coverage afterwards. But by then I’d discovered the coverage on PBS.

Charlie Rose scored with Kenneth Pollack, and I only caught the tail end of his interview, and wish I had caught the beginning. The former CIA Iraq specialist was far more insightful than the standard retired military officer trotted out by {NBC|CNN|ABC|FOX}, and discussed possible end games plotted by Saddam Hussein, his possible miscalculations, the way his mind apparently works. I skipped Biden and Hart while flipping through the networks’ coverage, and found the BBC on other, poorer PBS channels. They were interesting, in looking so old school — just a talking head with the occassional outside expert, no weird news tickers that I recall, no crappy live video feeds. Beyond that, the BBC’s coverage was a bit broader, but not significantly different from the American networks.

I got back to PBS after midnight and found that they were showing a Frontline special on the background of the conflict. This was wonderful, with Frontline starting decades ago with Saddam’s origins, and looking at the reasons the war was halted in 1991 — the miscalculations of the Bush Administration, the terrible negotiations conducted by Schwarzkopf where the Iraqis got everything they wanted, the betrayal of the Shia and Kurdish uprisings by the United States, the unexpectedly complex, costly and difficlt policy of containment, the roots of current US national security policy in 1992. With the availability of instant news available on the web and the droning coverage on the main networks, it’s good to see something totally different, something with some depth.

Oh, just a note on the web meta-news services provided by Google News: for those interested in breaking news, keeping the browser pointed to CNN or MSNBC or the NY Times is probably better. The robots of Google just can’t keep up with pace of events: the crawlers will always be at least fifteen minutes behind, and won’t appear on the top of the page until the story propagates enough to affect scoring. Better meta coverage can be found on something like Slate’s Today’s Papers and International Papers, which webifies the old trick of giving a slightly snarky summary of everyone else’s print coverage.