Iain Coleman is a candidate for the city council in Cambridge, England.

That more than makes up for the occassional encounters which go more like this:



ME: "Hi, my name's Iain Coleman and I'm the Liberal Democrat candidate in the City Council elections. I'm just coming round to ask you if you'll vote for me."

HIM: "I don't vote, 'cos politicians are all a bunch of liars."

ME: "I've never lied to you."

HIM: "Well, I don't mean you personally, but politicians are all the same."



Even there, there's a positive aspect of self-discovery: I've discovered this amazing ability to not tell people to fuck off.

Now if I were a politician and people were telling me they considered all politicians corrupt, but responded to this not by examining the honesty of the politicians they voted for more rigorously but by voting for whoever had the prettiest campaign commercials, I would become slightly bitter.

It sounds like Iain is a better man than I am, so even though he has this quote from Rosseau on his sidebar:

I was born a citizen of a free state and a member of its sovereign body, and however weak may be the influence of my voice in public affairs, my right to vote on them suffices to impose on me the duty of studying them.

he probably won't decide that since the voters are corrupt they don't really deserve good govermnent. Somehow we always worry about corrupt politicians, but never the corrupt voters who elect them. Sort of like blaming the CEO of a company but not the board of directors who selected and were supposed to watch him.

Awhile ago I read an interesting article in the April 2003 issue of discover magazine by Steven Johnson, who also writes the blog stevenberlinjohnson. New social network software called InFlow is being used to analyze relationships between individuals in groups. Valdis Krebs also used the software to analyze patterns in Amazon.com data used to offer people books they might like based on books they've already read. He found a large group of books read only by conservatives and a large group of books read only by liberals. The only book he found to be widely read by both groups was What Went Wrong? by Bernard Lewis. This interested me enough to get the book and write a review essay of it on epinions.com.

Cheered by the news I've heard, today I'll let Armed Liberal of Winds of Change start out for me.

Romantic? Perhaps. But I believe that cynics -- and I'll include myself here -- owe it to our ideas, and our hopes, to pay fresh respect to that part of the American character. Not that optimism is always the avenue to political success. But sometimes it is; and at those moments, it's hard to convince Americans of anything except their exceptionalism.

Let us try to imagine a world where this occupation will end joyously. It is too much for me even to imagine that Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim and Sayed Hassan Nasrallah will lead their people into cooperation with United States efforts to build a democracy and rebuilt the country under American leadership. I can't say it's impossible, but I can't imagine it even as a hypothetical case. So let's assume they follow popular sentiment grudgingly if at all, but the people of Iraq sweep along in a groundswell.

Of course fellow Anglospheric member Great Britain has tried to occupy and rebuild Iraq for their own good already, but the current occupation which includes them has at least two advantages. First, our both perceived and real near omnipotence. I think the army there now is the first one not only capable of defeating the Iraqi military while taking few casualties, but even of doing so while inflicting the minimum possible number of deaths on the enemy population. Second, our prosperity. We can afford what must be done, while Britain had already been bled by her attempts to hold onto her empire for quite some time when she acquired the Iraqi mandate.

This being a day for optimism, I'm also trying to imagine our using Iraqi oil to pay for rebuilding Iraqi infrastructure, give the Iraqi people what they need to survive on, and pay for the occupation at the same time. This doesn't make it easy. It's something else I can't swear is impossible but I can't describe a scenario where it might happen. One thing will help though.

Although the debt write-offs would be spread far and wide, some of the biggest hits would be taken by countries such as Russia and France, which supplied Saddam Hussain with military gear and other goods before the 1991 Gulf War and have been staunch opponents of the current conflict.

Although some friendly parties will suffer, we'll certainly have political cover for letting Iraq start with a clean slate. It's possible that they never would have invaded Kuwait if it wasn't for the crushing load of debt already present after the Iran-Iraq war. It's a pity there wasn't some other way to deal with that, but recent diplomatic friction with Russia and France could actually contribute. Oddly enough, they might be able to accept this. They have to already be aware that all the Iraqi money and contracts owed them on paper are worth very little. Iraq will never pay anything to anybody unless they are heavily discounted so that they can rebuild.

Even today it's still hard to imagine Iraq can rebuilt itself while also using oil money to pay for the American occupation. If it can't, we can still hope for a good outcome. For all the liberals who've been thinking we should spend more on foreign aid, here's our chance. As for the conservatives - when faced with the stark choice of a triumph turning into a public Iraqi disaster or going along, they might go along, at least to the extent of paying for our own occupation costs. How we will do that is a whole other question, but we are the richest country in the world.

Which still leaves us with the need to build a democracy. It's been tried before in Iraq, but never by an army that could defeat the enemy so handily. It would be easy to imagine a scenario where repeated suicidal attacks drain good will dry as in Isreal, but for today let's try to imagine something else. Iraq was actually doing rather well at modernizing for awhile, before the Iran Iraq war. This is actually one of the similarities to Japan prior to the Marshall plan - I've discussed the differences previously.

I've always listed 'just plain' liberal and conservative blogs near the bottom of my sidebar. Many of them I enjoy reading, but I've always felt I could find plenty of either in mainstream newspapers and magazines. Not that some of the blogs near the top of my sidebar aren't liberal and conservative, but that's not why they've earned places of honor. I've already written about some of them, and linked to them on my sidebar.

Recently though, I wrote a post about the problems with Iraq. It wasn't meant to be a generic anti-war post, I tried to do the kind of thinking that could help make a start on solving those problems - if they were solvable. Later I found a similar article in the Daily Kos. While it takes the form of an 'I told you so' rather than an attempt to solve the insolvable, overall it's better than the post I wrote - and about basically the same issue with a few more facts. Maybe I should have a couple each of the best mainstream press liberal and conservative blogs or columnists on my sidebar. No sense thinking along the same lines someone has already thought better on - if they've really done it better.

Soon we will be hearing from the Supremes. Not the musical group, but the court. Perhaps they will rule affirmative action as we know it illegal. Perhaps they will merely rule affirmative action as Michigan University knows it illegal. Perhaps they'll even uphold it. There's been plenty of speculation on that - and plenty of people asking if fairness to certain groups requires or forbids affirmative action. I won't add to either side of these questions. Instead I want to ask another question. Is affirmative action a compelling interest not just of individual universities but of the country as a whole? Of course a few benefit clearly and directly and a few are harmed clearly and directly, but what happens to the majority of us?

It's worth noting that nations often fragment along racial lines. Not that every civil war is primarily about ethnic loyalties, but many are. Of course the United States is nowhere near that point. Those who have spoken of a division do not truly seem to take themselves seriously in preparing to give up their jobs (and lives) for the cause. Yet I suggest there is a continuum. Historically organized crime usually seems to be, umm, organized on predominantly racial lines. The advantages of this - for the criminals - are not hard to see. If a criminal gang is dominated by an ethnic group of people who don't tend to do as well on the average in getting legitimate jobs, it's easy to detect recruits. There is a group loyalty that comes from an element of shared culture - and a feeling of having been screwed by the same enemy. The most intelligent and determined members of that ethnic group may feel the deck is stacked against them in the legitimate world, so that this criminal enterprise is the only place they have a hope of getting to the top. Even if a member wants to go to the police, they suspect they won't be trusted.

Of course, many people from every ethnic group have done very well in the United States. I am not speaking of wrongdoing - few with this difficulty have done better than the United States, a great many have done worse. Yet I don't think that since the world began you have had a country where citizens of one ethnic group were consistantly worse off than citizens of other ethnic groups, and there has not been violence in proportion to the difference. Let's be pragmatic. Even above and beyond the fact that the desperately poor are more prone to violent crime for gain than other groups, those who have reason to believe that an external factor they were born with and can never change contributing to the problem seem to have a special risk factor - and when groups of the band together, homeless cats and dogs can become wolves and lions. It is a compelling interest, not just for individual universities, but for the nation as a whole. Of course there are some who would turn to crime regardless, and some who will do right no matter how much it costs them, but for many in the middle a little bit of reverse discrimination to counter all the ordinary discrimination which nobody can ever prove in individual cases although scientific studies have shown it statistically might go a long way.

Of course there are other problems as well. What about those who succeed without any benefit of affirmative action - and then have people fail to respect their success because they erroneously assume it was helped by affirmative action? Yet somehow nobody discounts the children of the rich and priviledged because they believe their family names helped them get into good schools. Somehow people don't seem to resent that in the same way. If we as a nation can come to accept that this is for all of us, perhaps the anger and fear that provoke people to feel their jobs and scholarships are being given to 'them' will fade.

Steven Den Beste of USS Clueless just wrote an essay on why the situation our troops around Bagdad are now in is different from what 'seige' usually means. Some around the blogosphere, including a few who write interesting and original material on good days, have taken to writing extremely short summaries of his long posts. By that logic, you could sum this one up as saying that usually in a seige the attackers can't get in because of the walls, but this time they can when they choose because those kinds of defenses are destroyed, so they just have to pick and choose entry times and places where they will do the most damage to the defenders with the least American and civilian casualties.

Representing such a summary as the whole post would be cheap. Without his introductory discussion of military history, it's unclear how the current situation is different, and any attempt to deduce the consequences of the current situation would come from thin air. It might be more than is needed for those purposes, but warfare is evolving now, and how it has changed in response to past technological and social changes gives us a clue as to what is happening. Of course you can skip a few paragraphs if you are learning more than you want about prehistoric or fifteenth century warfare, but some of it is interesting stuff. And all of it helps equip you to think about how a seige is different when the attackers can get into a city to raid when they choose, but defenders cannot sally fourth into the open to attack without being massacred.

In his last two paragraphs you get a hint of something that doesn't seem to have been fully addressed.

Most of what such people are expecting won't happen, because they have entirely the wrong idea of the goal. We don't care about taking territory. What we're going to be doing is to kill defenders. Once the defenders are gone, we can take as much territory as we want to.

We're not going to be fighting house-to-house because we don't have any interest in capturing houses.

Who are the defenders? If every Sunni in the city is a defender because they remember Shia killing Sunni wholesale during the previous revolt, we cannot capture the city without killing many civilians. Of course you can say that anyone who resists us is not a civilian, yet we have striven hard to avoid killing people not part of the official military, and to be forced to kill huge numbers of people would be a major setback to our plans to win the peace. If every Shia who respects Ayatollah Muhammed Bakr Al-Hakim decides to listen to his fatwa's against the American occupation, the same problem occurs.

There is are other differences between this war and most other wars of history. We are determined to occupy a nation WITHOUT killing large numbers of them either before or during the occupation. Previously occupied cities have known the cost of revolt. The threat of collective punishment has been at least implicit, so that even a potential suicide attacker knew he put his family and hometown in danger. Other occupied nations have not had support for rebels coming in from outside. Oddly enough, the government collapsing and losing control of the military is not all good. If there is no central government to surrender, the fighting continues until every individual hothead realizes the war is over on his or her own. Perhaps there is some precedent in Afghanistan, but the original base of the Taliban's power was in the rural regions, and we only occupy the capital.

Posts about why this war might not be a good idea are no longer relevant. We're in it. If I could solve these problems I might have been in favor of it in the first place. I've been thinking about them anyway, and I hope those who favored the war are doing the same.

New York Newsday had a good article today on the Shia leaders who are encouraging the Shia to 'stay neutral' in the current war in Iraq. One of them we already know.

Nasrallah has been in contact with Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, the leading Iraqi Shiite cleric who has lived in exile in Iran for more than 20 years. Al-Hakim has sent instructions to his supporters and secret cells in Basra, Najaf, Karbala and other southern Iraqi cities not to start an uprising or support the U.S.-led coalition in any way. Al-Hakim also issued a "message to the Iraqi people" last week urging them not to side either with the United States or the Iraqi regime.

As the heir to one of the most important dynasties in the Shiite world, al-Hakim is mindful that the actions of Iraqi Shiites could have an impact on the entire Shiite community. "He realizes that if Shiites in Iraq are perceived as cooperating with an invasion force, it could have repercussions throughout the Muslim world for years to come," said a senior al-Hakim adviser, who asked not to be named.

But who is this Nasrallah?

Sulaimaniyah, Iraq - The leader of the Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah and other non-Iraqi Shiite figures have played a part in discouraging an uprising in southern Iraq, according to Shiite sources.

Hezbollah's leader, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, has been working quietly for several months from his base in Beirut to create a unified Shiite response to the U.S.-led war on Iraq, according to a source close to the Hezbollah leadership. Nasrallah and others have tried to convince Iraqi Shiites to stay on the sidelines of the war and not to start an uprising or openly support coalition forces.

And further on:

In some Muslim countries, especially Pakistan, there have been bloody battles between the majority Sunnis and minority Shiites. "No one in the Shiite community wants to see another situation like that in Pakistan," said the source close to Hezbollah. "That's why the sectarian politics in Iraq has to be handled very carefully."

Nasrallah gained enormous popularity in the Arab and Muslim worlds after Hezbollah forced Israel to withdraw from southern Lebanon in May 2000 after an 18-year guerrilla war. In effect, his guerrilla force accomplished something that no Arab army had been able to do in more than 50 years of conflict: pressure Israel to cede Arab territory.

It seems those in Isreal who claimed withdrawal from Lebannon would encourage their enemies may have been right. The lesson here is not that the hawks are always right - remember how Lebannon was bleeding Isreal. Never capture anything that will bleed you as long as you hold it, then bleed you much more when you let it go. Grasp the nettle firmly, but leave the skunk alone.

We didn't want to believe they would really invade - but in retrospect the signs were all there. Some of us tried very hard to understand their thinking so as to communicate with them more effectively, but their continued resort to violence which could in no way lead to a more peaceful world convinced us that talking alone was not enough - and the talkers were sadly mistaken. To many it came to seem the talkers were almost traitors, conceding the enemy time to continue while pretending to resist. The sides became more and more polarized, and conflict within as well as without may well be permanent.

Are we and they the United States and Iraq, from the invasion of Kuwait, with the anti war movement as the talkers? Or are 'we' the opponents of the Iraqi war, with some protesters vandalizing 9/11 memorials? Not too long ago an (alleged) hacker visited my site with a plan to attack a CNN website. How could any reasonable person think this a step towards peace?

If you talk to the people around you, it is sometimes surprising who favors this war and who opposes it. Almost all of us seem to agree that one side is clearly right and another is clearly wrong - and yet the people on the wrong side often seem so normal. It is hard to avoid the feeling that our civilization is all of a peace in some sense. If the peace protesters are in some sense right, they must also in some sense be wrong - because resorting to force when it cannot possibly be effective in the long term is such a human trait. Yet if those who are convinced our civilization is so enlightened that we can be confident of remaking another nation by force under adverse circumstances are wrong, there is still something amazing about a nation allowing peace protesters while it is at war. There are not many nations in human history that would, certainly not Iraq.

As an opponent of this war, I say give non violent action a chance. The more we try and explain our reasons, the more they seem to sneer and discount us. It is only natural to become angry in such circumstances, to become more strident rather than try harder to understand 'them'. Since that very natural reaction is just what we think is inappropriate to an age of nuclear weapons and information that has almost escaped control, we must show we are serious about resisting it.

I just discovered you can reach Al Jazeerah in English here. I'm dissappointed. You can't tell how much of this is what is being broadcast on the Al Jazeerah television station in Arabic and how much is meant for English speaker consumption only. Anyone want to follow this link to the Al Jazeerah Information Center mission statement and see if they can do better than I did?

I'm 99 per cent sure the relationship to the television station is tenuous. Any Arabic speakers want to compare to the Arabic language web site?

This was originally supposed to be an English language translation of Al Jazeera. It was first taken down by hackers, then replaced by a 'you are not authorized to access this page' message, and now is an Arabic language version of Al Jazeera. Why the hackers took down the English language version but not the Arabic language version I don't know, but in my opinion the blogosphere is the poorer for it.

It seems there are many more Arabs fluent in English then there are non Arabs fluent in Arabic. This is the natural result of our economic success - many want to move here for economic reasons, while many more who don't still want or need to do business with them. In a propaganda war this can be a critical disadvantage. They can answer or distort what we say, we cannot do likewise to them.

Some might think this is trivial - that our enemies are so closed minded that it doesn't matter. Even the current Bush administration has sometimes taken the trouble to send someone to appear on Al Jazeera television. I have great confidence in our values - not that they will magically convert anyone who hears them, but that they will sow doubts and new ideas in the most surprising places. That's why I would like to see bloggers pointing out factual and other errors in Al Jazeera the way they do for English language news sites.