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10. oktober 2004
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Saddam's fatal bluff
Johanna McGeary has an article in Time about some of the real conclusions of the Duelfer report. It also tries to answer the puzzling question as to why Saddam acted as if he had WMDs if he had really destroyed them.
The greatest mystery, though, was his long game of deception: if Saddam had destroyed his WMD to escape from sanctions, why did he work so hard from 1991 until he was overthrown in 2003 to perpetuate the belief he still had them? The reason, suggests Duelfer, lay in how he saw the "survival of himself, his regime and his legacy."
While the U.S. was fixated on Saddam's threat, he focused on his strategies for Iran and considered WMD essential to keeping his neighbor in check. So he was driven by what the report calls "a difficult balancing act": getting rid of his WMD to win relief from the sanctions while pretending he still had them to serve as a strategic deterrent. "The regime never resolved the contradiction inherent in this approach," says the report. Saddam privately told an aide the "better part of war was deceiving," but ironically he was telling the West the truth.
His bluff worked. I bet he's not laughing, though.
10:27:29 PM 
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Politician wants all Norwegians in police DNA register
Do John Ashcroft and the Patriot Act scare you? Here's a guy I think would scare John Ashcroft. Norway is in many ways a liberal society with a high emphasis on privacy (with some bizarre exceptions). Jan Arild Ellingsen of the populist right Progress Party (Fremskrittspartiet, Frp) and member of the Justice Committee in the Norwegian parliament, wants to put an end to this.
Inspired by the police recently finding an alleged murderer through DNA testing of volunteers, Ellingsen proposes that the DNA of every Norwegian is added to a police database, so biological samples from crime scenes can be matched to the perpetrator easily.
Ellingsen says to TV2 that privacy concerns must stand aside to more effective solving of murder cases. He also believes such a register will have support from the majority of the population because crime cases will be more easily solved with this register.
Next: Police cameras in all private homes. Hey, if you have nothing to hide, why should you fear it?
(From a Norwegian article in TV2 Nettavisen)
8:18:26 PM
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Afghan election boycott loses support
BBC is reporting that the support for the Afghan vote boycott is crumbling.
But many of their representatives have now told the BBC they will instead accept the findings of an official inquiry into alleged irregularities.
The UN has hailed the "massive" turnout in the elections.
More than 10 million people were registered to vote, many of them refugees living in Pakistan and Iran.
International bodies have endorsed the elections, with the largest monitor group there describing them as "fairly democratic".
Several of the candidates now seem to say that if the commissions report that the vote was fair, they will drop their objections.
PS: If this had been in the US, the press would be talking about "inkgate" for months. Shudder!
5:50:39 PM
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Polls: Tony Blair still the man
Last week's party conference for Britain's Tories was aimed at boosting the party's troubled image, but Tony Blair's Labour party is still solidly in the lead, according to opinion polls.
The ICM survey, the first to be carried out since the Conservative conference last week, gives Labour - who had the support of 39 per cent of those questioned - a nine- point lead over the Tories, who had 30 per cent.
The Liberal Democrats were on 23 per cent, while three per cent said that they would back the United Kingdom Independence Party.
With Britain's "winner takes it all" parliamentary election system, this lead would translate into another landslide victory for Blair's party. And while the Iraq war has hurt Blair's standing, the conservatives are unable to translate this into support for themselves.
Asked which of the two main party leaders they trusted more, 40 per cent said the Prime Minister while 29 per cent opted for the Opposition leader.
The next election in the UK is likely to happen in May.
11:10:44 AM
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Link to page in PDF
Neat. You can actually hyperlink directly to a page (and named bookmark) within a PDF file.
<a href="http://www.mydomain.com/myPDF.pdf#page=6">Link text</a>
That easy, eh.
I have to say I really hate people putting all sort of text documents into PDF, which are so much harder to open and read from a browser than pure HTML. But lots of important documents are in Acrobat format, so it's good to know you can actually link within them.
12:28:36 AM
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© Copyright 2004 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.11.2004; 14:35:26.
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