US AND THEM: US, UN & Iraq, version 8.0

I wondered how long it would take before revisionists longed for "the good old days"...

...I hope.

I read that article McTag
The situation in Iraq is intolerable. Every other day a car bomb kills 20 30 60.
I dont think Blair or Bush has a clue what to do.

August 10, 2005 New York Times
All Cultures Are Not Equal
By DAVID BROOKS <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/davidbrooks/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

Let's say you are an 18-year-old kid with a really big brain. You're trying to figure out which field of study you should devote your life to, so you can understand the forces that will be shaping history for decades to come.

Go into the field that barely exists: cultural geography. Study why and how people cluster, why certain national traits endure over centuries, why certain cultures embrace technology and economic growth and others resist them.

This is the line of inquiry that is now impolite to pursue. The gospel of multiculturalism preaches that all groups and cultures are equally wonderful. There are a certain number of close-minded thugs, especially on university campuses, who accuse anybody who asks intelligent questions about groups and enduring traits of being racist or sexist. The economists and scientists tend to assume that material factors drive history - resources and brain chemistry - because that's what they can measure and count.

But none of this helps explain a crucial feature of our time: while global economies are converging, cultures are diverging, and the widening cultural differences are leading us into a period of conflict, inequality and segmentation.

Not long ago, people said that globalization and the revolution in communications technology would bring us all together. But the opposite is true. People are taking advantage of freedom and technology to create new groups and cultural zones. Old national identities and behavior patterns are proving surprisingly durable. People are moving into self-segregating communities with people like themselves, and building invisible and sometimes visible barriers to keep strangers out.

If you look just around the United States you find amazing cultural segmentation. We in America have been "globalized" (meaning economically integrated) for centuries, and yet far from converging into some homogeneous culture, we are actually diverging into lifestyle segments. The music, news, magazine and television markets have all segmented, so there are fewer cultural unifiers like Life magazine or Walter Cronkite.

Forty-million Americans move every year, and they generally move in with people like themselves, so as the late James Chapin used to say, every place becomes more like itself. Crunchy places like Boulder attract crunchy types and become crunchier. Conservative places like suburban Georgia attract conservatives and become more so.

Not long ago, many people worked on farms or in factories, so they had similar lifestyles. But now the economy rewards specialization, so workplaces and lifestyles diverge. The military and civilian cultures diverge. In the political world, Democrats and Republicans seem to live on different planets.

Meanwhile, if you look around the world you see how often events are driven by groups that reject the globalized culture. Islamic extremists reject the modern cultures of Europe, and have created a hyperaggressive fantasy version of traditional Islamic purity. In a much different and less violent way, some American Jews have moved to Hebron and become hyper-Zionists.

>From Africa to Seattle, religiously orthodox students reject what they see as the amoral mainstream culture, and carve out defiant revival movements. From Rome to Oregon, antiglobalization types create their own subcultures.

The members of these and many other groups didn't inherit their identities. They took advantage of modernity, affluence and freedom to become practitioners of a do-it-yourself tribalism. They are part of a great reshuffling of identities, and the creation of new, often more rigid groupings. They have the zeal of converts.

Meanwhile, transnational dreams like European unification and Arab unity falter, and behavior patterns across nations diverge. For example, fertility rates between countries like the U.S. and Canada are diverging. Work habits between the U.S. and Europe are diverging. Global inequality widens as some nations with certain cultural traits prosper and others with other traits don't.

People like Max Weber, Edward Banfield, Samuel Huntington, Lawrence Harrison and Thomas Sowell have given us an inkling of how to think about this stuff, but for the most part, this is open ground.

If you are 18 and you've got that big brain, the whole field of cultural geography is waiting for you.

Iraqi Chemical Stash Uncovered
Post-Invasion Cache Could Have Been For Use in Weapons

By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 14, 2005; A18

BAGHDAD, Aug. 13 -- U.S. troops raiding a warehouse in the northern city of Mosul uncovered a suspected chemical weapons factory containing 1,500 gallons of chemicals believed destined for attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces and civilians, military officials said Saturday.

Monday's early morning raid found 11 precursor agents, "some of them quite dangerous by themselves," a military spokesman, Lt. Col. Steven A. Boylan, said in Baghdad.

Combined, the chemicals would yield an agent capable of "lingering hazards" for those exposed to it, Boylan said. The likely targets would have been "coalition and Iraqi security forces, and Iraqi civilians," partly because the chemicals would be difficult to keep from spreading over a wide area, he said.

Boylan said the suspected lab was new, dating from some time after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Bush administration cited evidence that Saddam Hussein's government was manufacturing weapons of mass destruction as the main justification for the invasion. No such weapons or factories were found.

Military officials did not immediately identify either the precursors or the agent they could have produced. "We don't want to speculate on any possibilities until our analysis is complete," Col. Henry Franke, a nuclear, biological and chemical defense officer, was quoted as saying in a military statement.

Investigators still were trying to determine who had assembled the alleged lab and whether the expertise came from foreign insurgents or former members of Hussein's security apparatus, the military said.

"They're looking into it," Boylan said. "They've got to go through it -- there's a lot of stuff there." He added that there was no indication that U.S. forces would be ordered to carry chemical warfare gear, such as gas masks and chemical suits, as they did during the invasion and the months immediately afterward.

U.S. military photos of the alleged lab showed a bare concrete-walled room scattered with stacks of plastic containers, coiled tubing, hoses and a stand holding a large metal device that looked like a distillery. Black rubber boots lay among the gear.

The suspected chemical weapons lab was the biggest found so far in Iraq, Boylan said. A lab discovered last year in the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah contained a how-to book on chemical weapons and an unspecified amount of chemicals.

Chemical weapons are divided into the categories of "persistent" agents, which wreak damage for hours, such as blistering agents or the oily VX nerve agent, and "nonpersistent" ones, which dissipate quickly, such as chlorine gas or sarin nerve gas.

Iraqi forces under Hussein used chemical agents both on enemy forces in the 1980s war with Iran and on Iraqi Kurdish villagers in 1988. Traces of a variety of killing agents -- mustard gas and the nerve agents sarin, tabun and VX -- were detected by investigators after the 1988 attack.

No chemical weapons are known to have been used so far in Iraq's insurgency. Al Qaeda announced after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States that it was looking into acquiring biological, radiological and chemical weapons. The next year, CNN obtained and aired al Qaeda videotapes showing the killings of three dogs with what were believed to be nerve agents.

Some comment here, that Japan was beaten anyway in 1945, and the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima to impress/deter the Russians from attempting territorial gains.

McTag wrote:

Some comment here, that Japan was beaten anyway in 1945, and the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima to impress/deter the Russians from attempting territorial gains.

Quote:

August 05, 2005
60 Years Later
Considering Hiroshima.
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

For the immediate future there were only two bombs available. Planners thought that using one for demonstration purposes (assuming that it would have worked) might have left the Americans without enough of the new arsenal to shock and awe the Japanese government should it have ridden out the first attack and then become emboldened by a hiatus, and our inability to follow up the attacks.

Wall Street Journal

Islam, Federalism and Oil

By BARTLE BREESE BULL
August 17, 2005

In early June last year, I sat with four members of the Iraqi Kurdish military high command in Baghdad, discussing their disappointment that the U.N. resolution endorsing the new American-led dispensation in Iraq had not mentioned Iraq's current constitution, the Transitional Administrative Law. Even in Iran and Syria the TAL, with its promises of federalism and thus its brief guarantee of Iraqi Kurdish hopes, had been greeted by Kurds with dancing in the streets.

Above the heads of Brushka Nouri Shaways and his lieutenants, tough veterans of the struggle against Sunni Arab aggression in their multi-ethnic state, I saw a pair of wooden-handled flails. Splayed against the white wall, the chains of the flails had a coating that looked eerily like dried blood. I thought maybe the implements were old torture weapons from Saddam's days, hung there by the Kurds to remind them of the aspirations of their people far to the north. "No, no," said the hard men. "Those are the things the Shiites use to whip themselves at their religious festivals." Blood, indeed. How, I wondered, could such a country stick together: an Arab sect, the Sunnis, divided mortally from the Arab majority, the Shiites, with a large, mountainous minority, the Kurds, recoiling against the lash of one and the flail of the other?

It might not be fashionable to admit that Iraq, 14 months later, still has not succumbed to civil war, communal violence, theocracy, or even a moderately popular uprising against the U.S.-led occupation, but nobody can say that the Iraqis have failed thus far to conduct a responsible constitutional process. Their leaders are still at the table, and for all the frankness with which the various sides, so unusually in the Middle East, are able to present their priorities, the rhetoric of their politicians continues to reflect a restraint that Americans would welcome from Howard Dean or Tom DeLay.

The remaining challenges at stake in the current constitutional negotiations in Baghdad deserve a closer look. Islam, federalism, and oil are the main issues.

While it might seem strange to some students of history and Middle Eastern culture that women's rights have been adopted as a principal litmus test for the success of the U.S. project in Iraq, the role of Islam in that country's future is, in fact, a very practical issue in the current debates. Coverage of the issue, however, has focused on a canard. Whether or not Islam is "a," or "the only," or "a principal," or "the principal" source of law in the proposed new constitution is not the point. Islam and Shariah have been interpreted in many ways over the last 14 centuries, and if there is one thing on which neocons and MoveOn.org can agree, it is that there is nothing scary about Islam per se. Meanwhile the new Iraqi document will certainly include, as do the constitutions of even the most repressive states, language guaranteeing the gamut of human and civil rights. What really matters as we assess the new Iraqi document is how it provides for the inevitable clash between these various promises.

For this reason, it is the new draft's language about Iraq's high courts that counts most as we assess Islam's proposed role in the country's legal affairs. Who appoints the judges on the highest court? Who fires them? What are the powers of the bench vis-à-vis the executive and judiciary branches? Constitutions, like holy books, are about interpretation, and Americans and Iranians alike know that their rights, or at any rate their freedoms, can hinge on the opinion of a handful of bewigged sages.

The matter of federalism is also not as simple, or as vexed, as it looks. Iraq is already a federal country, de facto and de jure. Iraqi Kurdistan is already autonomous, and the Shiite south, east and center represent 65% of the population. When push comes to shove and the time for rhetoric has passed, Iraq's Sunni leadership, such as it is, is unlikely to agree with Western critics of Iraqi democracy that a return to the centralized nightmare is practicable. For centuries under the Ottomans, Iraq existed relatively harmoniously in a federal form, with the three vilayets of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul (which was mostly composed of what is now Iraqi Kurdistan) under the loose administration of the Pashalik of Baghdad. That is how it is now, and it will not change between today and Monday, when the final document is due.

History and current realities aside, the federal question in Iraq is subject to two other truths that ultimately will deliver compromise from the Sunni Arabs. Both are overlooked in the current analysis. The first is the fact that if the current process fails to deliver a new constitution -- either because a new draft does not emerge, or because it is rejected in October -- then it is the current constitution, the TAL, that will be the law of the land. And the TAL, which in terms of representative genesis and U.N. approbation is probably the most legitimate constitution in the Middle East, explicitly states that Iraq is "republican, federal, democratic and pluralistic." It goes on to refer to the "federal" nature of the state 26 times and to say, "Any group of no more than three governorates . . . shall have the right to form regions from amongst themselves." So the Sunni Arabs or any other group that blocks the desires of Kurds and many Shiites for a federal system in the new constitution will instead get the same result from the current one.

The Sunnis know this. Their practical beef with federalism is about the last main unresolved issue: oil. Iraq's oil is in the Shiite south and the Kurdish north, and while the Sunni Arabs might yearn for a return to their old ascendancy in a centralized state, they know they won't get it. They know that the most they can play for is a fair cut of hydrocarbon wealth. When the new document is produced, look for a guarantee of this as the key that unlocks a Sunni acceptance of the federal reality. The robustness of this guarantee will be a major determinant of the success of the new arrangement.

On a broader level, the key subtext to these negotiations is about what has happened since I spent time with the Kurdish commanders 14 months ago. Back then, it was the supreme Shiite leader Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani who had, via a personal letter to Kofi Annan, very nearly driven the Kurds out the entire project of a unified Iraq by seeing to it that the TAL was not even mentioned in the Security Council Resolution that ratified the current incarnation of the Iraqi state. Since then, much has changed. For one thing, the TAL has emerged as a real document. Its schedule for Iraq's democratic process, initially considered by many to be a mere paper formality, has proved to be more real in terms of practical politics than the car bombs of the Baathists and Wahhabis.

Perhaps more important, the leadership of Iraq's Kurds and Shiites, who only a year ago were so at odds that the Kurds very nearly abandoned the entire enterprise, have come to agreement on the basic principle that there can be no Iraq if any major group is forced to give up its present freedoms. If the Sunnis don't sign up to this dispensation, with its long and successful precedent under the Ottomans, they will be stuck with the status quo or left in an oil-less, landlocked Sunnistan of their own making, with little succor to expect from an America that is as weary of war as it is of Sunni intransigence.

Mr. Bull is writing a book about Iraqi history.

...
The third bomb was about a week away from being dropped on Japan when they surrendered.

This is a fiction, according to contemporaneous reports after the war. A third atomic bomb was not 7 days but more like 7 months away.

We would have had another seven bombs by November 1st, 1945.

Would have ???

And in December of 1945 our bomb production rate would have increased to at least seven a month.

Would have ???

Section 8.1.5 here does a good job of explaining our bomb production rate had the war continued:

www.nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq8.html#nfaq8.1.5

8.1.5 Availability of Additional Bombs
The date that a third weapon could have been used against Japan was no later than August 20. The core was prepared by August 13, and Fat Man assemblies were already on Tinian Island. It would have required less than a week to ship the core and prepare a bomb for combat.

By mid 1945 the production of atomic weapons was a problem for industrial engineering rather than scientific research, although scientific work continued - primarily toward improving the bomb designs.