"So what's Iraq about? In the end, it's not about that nasty man or the nasty things he's collecting. It's about what the policy wonks call "destabilization." It's about taking the next step into a regional and a global chaos that could wreck this planet.

So what do we do when the government's careening toward disaster, the anti-war movement's comatose, and the media keep us on perpetual spin? For starters, we dare to risk unilateral rationality. Which tells us that we've yet to begin to develop an effective strategy for coping with terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, let alone the imminent fracturing of dozens of nations. "

A very insightful article by a former Marine intelligence officer on the mess we are in.  It pretty effectively summarizes my feelings on the current situation as well.  He has a book too, which is now on my wish list.

An interesting thread on Plastic about Oil's influence over US foreign policy.

Internet infrastructure experts yesterday lent their support to White House adviser Richard Clarke's recommendations that companies should make securing ubiquitous internet protocols a priority, but said cost and red tape is slowing down deployment, writes Kevin Murphy.

Article which touches on some of the good points of Bush's Cybersecurity strategy:

• Securing BGP
• Securing DNS
  

James Lewis was one of the two CSISers I quoted in that article as wanting more laws. He had said: "Cybersecurity is too tough a problem for a solely voluntary approach to fix. Companies will only change their behavior when there are both market forces and legislation that cover security failures. Until the U.S. has more than just voluntary solutions, we'll continue to see slow progress in improving cybersecurity."

Good analysis of Bush's Cybersecurity strategy from the Center for Strategic & International Studies.

Microsoft’s XML extensions form the basis for the Passport single sign-on service but are fundamentally inconsistent with SGML principles. In contrast, Plan 9’s factotum authentication management offers an elegant and effective open source alternative

Good article from LinuxWorld on the battle over the future of Single Sign On.

"On Friday, the Bush administration will publish its first comprehensive rationale for shifting American military strategy toward pre-emptive action against hostile states and terrorist groups developing weapons of mass destruction. The strategy document will also state, for the first time, that the United States will never allow its military supremacy to be challenged the way it was during the cold war."

Analysis from the NY Times.

Bush's "National Security Strategy" was released today.  It advocates pre-emptive strikes against "emerging threats before they are fully formed".  I haven't read it closely, and have yet to see any serious analysis of it, but as I do I will update.

These texts spring from the Dominators' quasi-religious cult of "American exceptionalism," the belief in the unique and utter goodness of the American soul -- embodied chiefly by the nation's moneyed elite, of course -- and the irredeemable, metaphysical evil of all those who would oppose or criticize the elite's righteous (and conveniently self-serving) policies.

Anyone still "puzzled" over the Bush Regime's behavior need only look to these documents for enlightenment. They have long been available to the media -- which accepted Bush's transparent campaign lies about a "more humble foreign policy" at face value -- but have only now started attracting wider notice, in the New Yorker magazine this spring, and this week in the Glasgow Sunday Herald.

An article from the Moscow Times about the PNAC document and its predecessor, the 1992 "Defense Policy Guidence" document.  The article lays out how these documents are the guiding forces behind Bush's foreign policy.

I've already linked to the Glasgow Sunday Herald article here before.  And here's the New Yorker article mentioned above. 

The New Yorker article mainly focuses on the opportunity 9/11 presented to the Bush administration to put these ideas into action:

"Inside government, the reason September 11th appears to have been "a transformative moment," as the senior official I had lunch with put it, is not so much that it revealed the existence of a threat of which officials had previously been unaware as that it drastically reduced the American public's usual resistance to American military involvement overseas, at least for a while. The Clinton Administration, beginning with the "Black Hawk Down" operation in Mogadishu, during its first year, operated on the conviction that Americans were highly averse to casualties; the all-bombing Kosovo operation, in Clinton's next-to-last year, was the ideal foreign military adventure. Now that the United States has been attacked, the options are much broader. The senior official approvingly mentioned a 1999 study of casualty aversion by the Triangle Institute for Security Studies, which argued that the "mass public" is much less casualty-averse than the military or the civilian élite believes; for example, the study showed that the public would tolerate thirty thousand deaths in a military operation to prevent Iraq from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. (The American death total in the Vietnam War was about fifty-eight thousand.) September 11th presumably reduced casualty aversion even further."

The New Yorker article also mentions a book, "From Containment to Global Leadership" by Zalmay Khalilzad, our current special envoy to Afghanistan, which presents clearly the ideas initially introduced in the 1992 "Defense Policy Guidence" document.  I plan on picking it up to get a bit more insight on what goes on in President Cheney^H^H^H^H^H^HBush's head. 

"WHITE HOUSE GAME SHOW: MURDOCH NET PLANS 'AMERICAN CANDIDATE'; WINNER TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT '04 Move over American Idol. Here comes American President: A Rupert Murdoch game show that may choose the outcome of the next White House race!

Cable channel FX is set to mount an ambitious two-year endeavor that will culminate in the American public choosing -- a "people's candidate" to run for president of the United States in 2004! "

I'm not sure if this is terrifying, inspired, or just plain idiotic.