Info Freako

This referrer log thing is bizarre. Following one entry, it turns out that I am top of the list in google if you search for ‘state slow tardy steed gadfly’. Now what do you think somebody was hoping to get to?

Enough self-referential crap. More ill-informed political crap later.

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Pick Up The Change

This was going to be a response to Andy’s comment for an earlier post, but got rather long…

I think the difference between Iraq and Afghanistan is important. Afghanistan harbored the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. This was A Bad Thing(tm). In fact to use the cliche, it was a clear and present danger. And that requires action today to deal with, and effort tomorrow to pick up the pieces. I think Bush did a good job with Afghanistan after Sept 11th – he took enough time to be sure where blame lay, and to decide tactically how to deal with it, but still took action quickly. That means you don’t get to work out whether there are risks inherent in the aftermath, or come up with a plan for dealing with those risks; you see the danger, you identify a response, and you enact that response. The problem is that once you’ve removed the present danger, you need to take careful steps to avoid its regrowth, and ideally to put something significantly better in place. That’s really hard, and requires a lot of attention. Which is why we invaded Iraq instead.

So let’s compare that to Iraq. Assuming for a moment that the situation required a war (I don’t see the need, but let’s play). It may have been a significantly risky situation, but it was nebulous and unthreatening enough that there was time to work out what might happen after, and weigh up the risks with the benefits given a range of mitigating actions. Instead we chose the ‘Ready, Fire, Aim’ approach, and more than a year later we’re still flailing around trying to fix it, and generating new terrorists all the while. In this case we should have looked at whether the admittedly undesirable situation in place with Saddam and his Ba’athists was really worse than what might fill the void.

So the Soviet question boils down to a choice; was it a clear and present danger (Afghanistan), or a threat that we ought to address (Iraq)? It’s a difficult choice to make even now. On one hand they had been a threat for 4 decades, so it’s legitimate to question how present the danger was. On the other hand they were critically dependent on a sovietized agricultural system that was one bad weather forecast away from collapse, which would have led to thousands of tanks with funny red logos sweeping across the Western European plains. At the time, however, I think the deck stacked much more clearly in favor of it being something that needed to be dealt with right now, even if that immediacy had to be tempered with realistic means (we couldn’t just declare war, that would be just MAD) So within those parameters Reagan and his team saw the danger, identified a response, and enacted that response.

I’ll restate something that may have got buried in all that. If you take global actions like these, I believe you have an obligation to take care of the consequences. The difference is that if the threat is low-grade, that obligation covers thinking things through first, and tailoring your actions accordingly. If the threat is imminent, the obligation is limited to tidying up after yourself as best you can. We’re not doing that particularly well in Afghanistan, but given the immensity of the task in the former USSR, I don’t think the US and the rest of the world did too badly. It was clear that almost anything could happen, but I don’t think it was clear that it would be worse than Sovietism (nor do I think it is). That doesn’t mean the US is blameless (the lax attitude toward all those warheads is just one example), but it’s orders of magnitude less than for the current Iraq adventure.

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Pourquoi Es Tu Devenue Si Raisonnable?

Snopes carries news of a dig at the President on a bag manufactured by Tom Bihn:

“…what was unusual was that the English and French statements on those tags didn’t quite match – while both versions included the usual admonitions not to use bleach, not to machine dry, and not to iron the bags, the French-language version included an extra phrase: “NOUS SOMMES DESOLES QUE NOTRE PRESIDENT SOIT UN IDIOT. NOUS N’AVONS PAS VOTE POUR LUI.” Roughly translated, this statement reads in English as: “We’re sorry our president is an idiot. We didn’t vote for him.”

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Androgyny

A small story from my past that turned up in my brain last night. My first job after leaving college in 1993 was as a graduate trainee at Solihull Council. The council was very traditionally organized; for example, all senior staff were referred to as Mr (there may have been one or two women in that group). It turned out that one of my fellow trainees unwittingly caused a revolution in the council by becoming the first woman in its history to wear trousers to work rather than a skirt. 1993.

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Serve The Servants

The hammering I got from my earlier post was not unexpected. My interest in politics is relatively recent, certainly after Reagan/Thatcher (though I did learn to dislike the Iron Lady on m’father’s knee, as it were). And I’m particularly bad at remembering the vast flood of background info that it takes to sound like somebody on The West Wing (or look here for the most nauseating website layout I’ve seen in a while.

I decided, therefore, to do some research. Lots of googling for “Reagan’s Legacy” and similar phrases later, and I’m impressed. The sites criticizing him outnumber fansites 10 to 1, which isn’t in itself surprising. But those sites that do talk about the good that he did (neutrally or from the right) are a real surprise. Here’s what I’ve distilled:

  • Revitalized the country (pretty fair)
  • Defeated Communism (there’s a lot of debate, but let’s give him credit for a significant role)
  • Did good things for the economy (these were always general assertions; any time a specific was given it was demonstrably wrong, or a coincidence)
  • Was nice (well, he had a mean streak, but who hasn’t)
  • Changed the face of Republicanism, and to some extent Democratism (what’s the right word?)

Now it’s hard to knock a guy for ending Communism (or at least the bastardized version in the USSR), even if what came next is badly flawed. And that alone would deserve respect, even given that some of the methods he used were distressing to say the least. But aside from that, and cheering the nation (I have no independent idea on that, I wasn’t here), his big achievement seems to have been to move the country to the right.

I think there are two scales of achievement; Good ones (e.g. curing cancer) and Impressive ones (e.g. felling a tree with your teeth). These two may overlap of course. It seems that moving the country to the right is definitely impressive, but I would guess the populace will split 50/50 over good.

So there we have it. I still think he’s worthy of respect, because he was a decent man who did what he thought was right for the country (which was my original point), but it’s educational to learn how little he really achieved. And I suspect a similar list for most Presidents would be not much longer. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

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