5 April 2008, a Saturday
Slow news day. We'll turn to the BBC for earth-shattering stuff. Excerpts:
Global temperatures will drop slightly this year as a result of the cooling effect of the La Nina current in the Pacific, UN meteorologists have said.
The World Meteorological Organization's secretary-general, Michel Jarraud, told the BBC it was likely that La Nina would continue into the summer.
This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory.
Researchers say the uncertainty in the observed value for any particular year is larger than these small temperature differences.
Since the beginning of the 20th Century, the global average surface temperature has risen by 0.74C.
La Nina and El Nino are two great natural Pacific currents whose effects are so huge they resonate round the world.
El Nino warms the planet when it happens; La Nina cools it. This year, the Pacific is in the grip of a powerful La Nina.
It has contributed to torrential rains in Australia and to some of the coldest temperatures in memory in snow-bound parts of China.
Do you get the impression that man's CO2 emissions are pretty puny stuff on the planetary climate scene? What about variations in radiation from that hot thing up there in the sky?
Here's a good one from Iraqi blogger Mohammed Fahdil:
The parliament as usual decided to form a committee to deal with the situation—a move to save face, no more; in Iraq we have a joke that says “if you want to not solve an issue, let a committee take care of it”.
Sounds like they understand democratic government in Iraq pretty well.
Ready for a beautiful display of Liberal Logic? I highlighted some of the key points:
The U.S. is not waging a war against a nation but countering multiple insurgencies. Our military must not only keep external powers out, it must also keep internal rivals to the government down. We saw this in the recent fighting in Basra, where the U.S. was called on by the Iraqi government not to save it from an external foe, but to put down a rival Iraqi militia. Far from passive deterrence, the U.S. will be called upon to take an active role in shaping Iraq's internal political development by providing security to elements of Iraqi society that we wish to see succeed.
All this, while simultaneously ensuring that Iraqi citizens do not return to killing each other in large-scale outbursts of tribal or sectarian violence.
The threats to Iraq's security are almost exclusively internal, not external, as they were in Kuwait and South Korea, or post-war Germany and Japan for that matter.
You get it? Except for a passing reference to an external foe (al-Qaeda and Iran aren't really significant problems by comparison, it seems), the author argues that the US is primarily engaged in preventing a civil war, an internal threat to overthrow the government, and one of our major tasks is preventing Iraqi citizens from returning to killing each other. Without us preventing them from doing this, the author indicates quite clearly, large-scale outbursts of tribal or sectarian violence would ensue.
Got that? We're there to preserve the peace and the government from internal attack. So what does the author conclude after this careful build-up?
In Iraq, we are fighting insurgencies that want to push us out. Whereas in Kuwait or South Korea, the U.S. presence served to deter attacks against our allies, our very presence in Iraq is a catalyst to further fighting.
Why, suddenly it's our fault merely by being there, and if we left the catalyst for further fighting would be removed.
In barely the space of a paragraph, we went from being mediators preventing sectarian violence and providing security for a democratically-elected Iraqi government under internal attack, while saving unknown numbers from large-scale outbursts of tribal or sectarian violence, to--pause for breath--to being the CAUSE of it all!
Now, all of a sudden, if we removed ourselves, the catalyst, everything would become calmer! The multiple insurgencies are no longer trying to overthrow the government, they're trying to push us out so they can go back to living in a less-violent fashion.
Yep, that's Liberal Logic at its finest!
Democrats are misleadingly suggesting that McCain wants the U.S. to wage a war in Iraq en-perpetuity. The real premise of McCain's "100 year" remark is that the forces battling to evict the U.S. and gain control of Iraq (or some portion of it) will learn to accommodate themselves to the American-backed central government and to a long-term U.S. military presence in their country. The fighting would effectively end, and the U.S. military would oversee the peaceful development of a democratic Middle East. That is certainly not impossible. No one would have guessed in 1940 that Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany would peacefully consent to a U.S. military occupation of their countries as they underwent a democratic transformation.
It just took two nuclear bombs, millions upon millions of dead and the complete devastation of both countries to get there.
You would think this would be a reason to cheer lustily for the McCain alternative. No nuclear bombs, no millions upon millions dead, yet a Middle East the equivalent of today's Germany and Japan? I'll take it!
A better question is: why would anyone think this wouldn't be a good thing for the entire world, taken as a whole?