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12. mars 2006
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The work market in Norway is really good at the moment:
Norway's unemployment rate declined to 3.0 percent at the end of February, from 3.3 percent a month earlier and 3.8 percent at the same time in 2005.
"During the past year, there have been 20,000 fewer unemployed, and the pressure in the labor market remains high," said Labor Director Yngvar Aasholt.
He said the demand for labor is increasing sharply, with nearly 50 percent more vacancies announced in February than a year before.
New problem: If you're a business searching for qualified labour, you may well be out of luck. Long term, the problem is that we educate far too few students in math, engineering and science, and the demand is only going to increase.
9:31:28 PM 
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The Chicago Tribune manages to disclose under-cover CIA agents purely through online database searches:
She is 52 years old, married, grew up in the Kansas City suburbs and now lives in Virginia, in a new three-bedroom house.
Anyone who can qualify for a subscription to one of the online services that compile public information also can learn that she is a CIA employee who, over the past decade, has been assigned to several American embassies in Europe.
The CIA asked the Tribune not to publish her name because she is a covert operative, and the newspaper agreed. But unbeknown to the CIA, her affiliation and those of hundreds of men and women like her have somehow become a matter of public record, thanks to the Internet.
When the Tribune searched a commercial online data service, the result was a virtual directory of more than 2,600 CIA employees, 50 internal agency telephone numbers and the locations of some two dozen secret CIA facilities around the United States.
Even in the age where libraries and newspapers were the most important information centres, open source intelligence gathering was typically more useful than clandestine espionage, at least for those targeting the west. Now, this is true many times over. The security services are obviously not doing much to catch up.
9:20:49 PM
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The NYT carries a very interesting article on how Saddam Hussein ran the defence of Iraq that lead to the rapid coalition victory. Lt. Gen. Raad Majid al-Hamdani asked for permission to reinforce Baghdad and blow up the Euphrates bridges, but it was refused as Saddam feared his own people, and especially the Shias in the south, more than the American forces.
But Saddam Hussein and his small circle of aides had their own ideas of how to fight the war. Convinced that the main danger to his government came from within, Mr. Hussein had sought to keep Iraq's bridges intact so he could rush troops south if the Shiites got out of line.
General Hamdani got little in the way of additional soldiers, and the grudging permission to blow up the bridge came too late. The Iraqis damaged only one of the two spans, and American soldiers soon began to stream across.
The episode was just one of many incidents, described in a classified United States military report, other documents and in interviews, that demonstrate how Mr. Hussein was so preoccupied about the threat from within his country that he crippled his military in fighting the threat from without.
The Iraqi forces were refused to communicate between themselves, and the battle was micromanaged by Saddam Hussein and his very close circle of trusted, many of whom were totally incompetent. And Saddam was convinced the US would not attack, or at most, that the coalition would occupy the southern oilfields only and thus end the war (did he buy into leftist propaganda in the west?).
Saddam Hussein had kept even his top commanders believing Iraq possessed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons (if not nuclear) until just a few months before the war. Fearing his own people, and also considering Iran the most important threat even at this time, he retained strategical ambiguity until the end.
In December 2002, he told his top commanders that Iraq did not possess unconventional arms, like nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, according to the Iraq Survey Group, a task force established by the C.I.A. to investigate what happened to Iraq's weapons programs. Mr. Hussein wanted his officers to know they could not rely on poison gas or germ weapons if war broke out. The disclosure that the cupboard was bare, Mr. Aziz said, sent morale plummeting.
To ensure that Iraq would pass scrutiny by United Nations arms inspectors, Mr. Hussein ordered that they be given the access that they wanted. And he ordered a crash effort to scrub the country so the inspectors would not discover any vestiges of old unconventional weapons, no small concern in a nation that had once amassed an arsenal of chemical weapons, biological agents and Scud missiles, the Iraq survey group report said.
Mr. Hussein's compliance was not complete, though. Iraq's declarations to the United Nations covering what stocks of illicit weapons it had possessed and how it had disposed of them were old and had gaps. And Mr. Hussein would not allow his weapons scientists to leave the country, where United Nations officials could interview them outside the government's control.
Seeking to deter Iran and even enemies at home, the Iraqi dictator's goal was to cooperate with the inspectors while preserving some ambiguity about its unconventional weapons — a strategy General Hamdani, the Republican Guard commander, later dubbed in a television interview "deterrence by doubt."
That strategy led to mutual misperception. When Secretary of State Colin L. Powell addressed the Security Council in February 2003, he offered evidence from photographs and intercepted communications that the Iraqis were rushing to sanitize suspected weapons sites. Mr. Hussein's efforts to remove any residue from old unconventional weapons programs were viewed by the Americans as efforts to hide the weapons. The very steps the Iraqi government was taking to reduce the prospect of war were used against it, increasing the odds of a military confrontation.
I think we'd still have to call that non-compliance.
1:18:25 PM
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© Copyright 2006 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.04.2006; 13:22:14.
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