Author: Scott

VoIP – Plan A vs Plan B

Article by Clay Shirky on possible outcomes in the voice-over IP market. He includes a service I’d been completely unaware of named Skype that is offering free peer-to-peer voice communication.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, I’m not a Howard Stern fan. But if he didn’t break the law or violate his contract, I’m not sure how they can get away with this. Beyond all that, it seems hypocritical to me for Howard Stern to be suspended for a particular remark. Part of his act is skirting the thin line between taste and trash. The Clear Channel stations that carry him have high ratings (and probably a lot of ad revenue) as a result. But I guess there’s a lot more hypocrisy going around after the infamous “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl.

This can’t be good news. Even with the expanded powers they’ve received due to the Patriot Act, the government isn’t playing by its own rules. Also troubling is the “investigate and smear all our critics” tactic being employed against a federal employee. I wonder if this is just the tip of a very large iceberg.

Financial Times scoop on a secret report indicating fears of Iraq dividing into multiple regions (most likely a Kurdish north, Shia south, and Sunni center). So in addition to not finding nukes, biological weapons, or chemical weapons, and creating a convenient target for anti-American sentiment with the troop presence, the occupation could spark a civil war. I don’t think we need any other information to say conclusively that going into Iraq was a really bad idea.

Fantastic analysis and rebuttal to President Bush’s statements on “Meet the Press” this Sunday. Definitely worth reading, and forwarding to anyone interested in the US presence in Iraq.

Ok column by David Brooks in the NY Times today about the problems with the way the CIA analyzes threats against the US. In general, the points he makes about the use of “scientism” to predict these threats to the exclusion of all else is correct. He doesn’t specify the lists of errors that the intelligence community has made, but the general point that they’ve missed threats by non-rational actors is perhaps the most important he makes in the entire column.

If there’s any problem I have with the column, it’s the idea that “scientism” has no use whatsoever. Implicit in that argument is a defense of the creation of a new intelligence unit within the Pentagon. They operated on the sort of intuition that Brooks advocates. But without the sort of processes and actual intelligence know-how that exists in the CIA and elsewhere, intelligence information of dubious credibility was put forward as fact.

While relying solely on “scientism” to predict and stop threats isn’t the best idea, neither is turning to the other extreme (going exclusively with your gut, or instinct).

I heard him this morning on C-SPAN with Brian Lamb. It’s very interesting that he was perhaps the only one before the war who consistently stated that Iraq didn’t pose an imminent threat to the US and that they didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. Before the war, and prior to hearing him say it in another interview, it didn’t even occur to me that biological and chemical weapons have a “shelf life”. They can expire, like over-the-counter drugs. The man suffered all manner of abuse and harassment, allegations of being “un-American” and a traitor to his country.

Now that David Kay’s report has stated that they’ve found no weapons, and likely never will, Scott Ritter has been completely vindicated. Though their motives may not have been the best, one could say that the French were right as well.

Especially interesting in the Brian Lamb interview was Ritter’s response to a caller who suggested the idea of impeachment. He said the right things about having all the facts, and due process. In addition, he laid out a pretty strong case that Dick Cheney might be guilty of fraud, if he knew some statements he made prior the war to a VFW gathering regarding an Iraqi defector were false.

I especially appreciated the way Ritter placed blame at the feet of Congress for giving the president a free hand to go to war. I’ve always believed that Congress abdicated its responsibility in doing so.

The other valid point he made was that the United States needs to be a fully active member of the UN in order to prevent Iraq from descending fully into chaos. To him, bringing the UN into Iraq did not mean the US completely exiting Iraq.

Overall, a number of the points Ritter made about the war sounded like things Howard Dean has said on the election trail, most importantly that the US isn’t safer as a result of the war in Iraq. Interestingly enough, despite being a self-described “moderate conservative”, Ritter said he was going to devote all of his efforts to getting Bush defeated, despite voting for him in 2000. Hearing more from Ritter in the press about Iraq would be a good thing, especially as the election gets closer.

Excellent commentary by Fareed Zakaria on what’s happening in Iraq. The point that he makes at the end about the transition plan being accelerated to coincide with the US elections does a good job of highlighting one of the key drivers of Bush administration policy–whether or not it helps them politically.

It’s quite fitting the organizations Bush and company heaped such scorn on earlier are precisely the ones they must ask to help them out of the mess.

The troublesome, vote-loving ayatollah

This story from The Economist covers a lot of ground on America’s adventure in Iraq. They do a good job of touching on the political implications for Bush’s re-election plans if things go poorly. On the positive side, it looks like a significant number of our troops will get to come home soon. As misguided as I think the policy was, the men & women of our armed forces have done a great job of bringing it this close to success. I think it would be both ironic and unfortunate if after all this effort to bring democracy to the Middle East, the result was an Islamic republic in Iraq.