Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: [OT] the poetry of donald rumsfeld

[Pierce T . Wetter III]

On Mar 19, 2004, at 1:16 PM, Tom Lord wrote:

> > From: "Pierce T.Wetter III" <address@hidden>
>
> >   Actually, my interpretation is that even Saddam thought he had WMD.
>
> Wow.   I haven't heard that one before.
>
> I find it utterly implausible.  Totalitarianism is always built on a
> system of factionalized informants all intersecting with every aspect
> of life --- no such large-scale conspiracy could have worked.

 Having participated in "conspiracies" in my work life before, I 
believe it. When management tells you "do this or you'll get fired", 
and what they ask for is impossible, its in everyone's interest to let 
them hang themselves.
So you spend a lot of time looking busy without actually getting 
anything
done...

  "do this or you'll get shot" isn't much different, in fact, its 
probably worse.

Saddam had a lot of active programs to produce WMD, its just that none 
of
them were effective. There's a book "Saddam's Bombmaker" that's written
by the guy who defected in 1995 (which is what started to freak us out 
about
Iraq). In one episode in the book, he talks about how one guy was 
leading
this project to enrich uranium using "lasers". Everyone knew it wouldn't
work, but no one was going to rock the boat, because he himself was 
stalling in order to defect...

 Anyone who's been a software engineer for any length of time has run 
into a similar situation. All I'm really saying is that Saddam was 
being regularly lied to about progress in creating WMD, and that 
everyone knew better then to
rock the boat. Perhaps our intelligence was at TOO high a level.

 As far as whether you believe that's plausible or not, the fact is 
that this used to happen during the Cold War all the time. The Russians 
used to ask us what their wheat harvests would be like because by the 
time the forecasts reached the Kremlin, they always said what they 
wanted to hear.

So really, totalitarian regimes tend to have _less_ information not 
more, because
the information they get is only what they want to hear. One of the 
challenges in running a company for instance, is making sure you get 
the bad news.

 Bottom line, conspiracies of silence are pretty easy to maintain, and 
are strangely, even easier in totalitarian regimes. It takes freedom to 
speak up and say "the emperor has no clothes".

> A far more likely hypothesis has two parts (I'm cribbing-from and
> paraphrasing Blix and, of all people, Harry Shearer (the voice of
> Mr. Burns, on the Simpsons)):
>
> 1) Regionally, uncertainty about Saddam's military capabilities
>    was worth a lot to him.   If his basic weakness were transparent,
>    he'd have had trouble from neighbors and internally.

 Yeah, according to the head of the council on foreign relations, one 
of the reasons we went into Iraq is that every Arab leader privately 
asked us to do something.
> 2) He didn't believe that the UN efforts were in good faith.  He had
>    no credible positive incentive to come clean.
>
> He was between a rock and a hard place and so I'll add my own (3):
>
> 3) He was probably accustomed to back-channel diplomacy and squeaking
>    by with a wink and a nod.  He thought of himself as part of the
>    "balance of power" in the region and thought that gave him more
>    leverage than it really did.  Maybe he even _did_ come somewhat
>    clean behind the scenes but was rudely interrupted by a cessation
>    of those contacts.  That would explain how we had confidence that
>    an invasion would succeed and why we embarked on a power-play to
>    dispose of his regime.

  All of the above can be true, just add:

 4)  To back up his bluff, he had a number of WMD programs running in
various stages. Since building WMD is actually pretty difficult though,
few of them were as far along as we feared.

Pierce