Nevow

Nevow is very cool. People keep doing such neat things with Python. Their Stan DOM utility class is one of the nicest uses of operator overloading I've seen, and it's something that would be impossible in most other languages.

Great quote from Den Beste

Steven Den Beste: Sophisticated, Nuanced Moral Cowardice

There comes a time in every man's life when he has to choose sides. I have chosen my side. I am comfortable with my decision. I do not think everyone on my side is a saint, but I know that those on the other side are much, much worse.

Sometimes a man with too broad a perspective reveals himself as having no real perspective at all. A man who tries too hard to see every side may be a man who is trying to avoid choosing any side. A man who tries too hard to seek a deeper truth may be trying to hide from the truth he already knows.

That is not a sign of intellectual sophistication and "great thinking". It is a demonstration of moral degeneracy and cowardice.

WMD

I've been meaning to write about Iraq's WMD's. Given the knowledge that Saddam did have them at some point, I see only three possibilities:

1. They were moved before the war, most probably to Syria
2. They're still in Iraq but we haven't found them yet
3. They were destroyed by Saddam but he didn't tell anybody or keep any documentation of their destruction

Option three, I believe, contradicts good sense, for many reasons I think it would be tedious to enumerate. Option 1 seems most likely, given that we know there was activity over the Syrian border around the start of the war, and seems extra-likely given the recently thwarted chemical mega-attack in Jordan for which there is reason to believe some of the chemicals involved came from Iraq. (I still wonder, however, why they would be transferred to Syria rather than used in the war, though it seems easier to think of more plausible explanations for this than it is for option 3.) It may still be a combination of 1+2.

What it comes down to, as I see it, is that the only reasonable course to take is to withhold judgement and be patient to see what is revealed over time. It seems that to hold the opinion that there were no WMDs in Iraq before the war requires that you hold to number 3, but again, that doesn't seem reasonable. By modus tollens, it has to be one or a combination of the first two. It may take a long time to discover what actually happened to Saddam's WMDs. I hope we find out before they're actually successfully used somewhere (as they might have been in Jordan), and I'm still waiting for more information about the planned attack in Jordan, which I've heard essentially nothing about recently. What the heck do reporters do all day?

Update: Ned Batchelder responded on his site:

Look at it this way: our side was announcing every chance they got that Saddam was a mad man, he was crazy, etc. So why rule out option 3 just because it doesn't make sense? Madmen do things that don't make sense.

That's exactly my point. Saying "oh, he's crazy, his actions must not have made sense" is itself a cop out, at least at this point. While option 3 is still a possibility, you have to go with the rational explanations before you jump to the irrational ones.

Ned also presents an option four:

option 4: the Iraqis were basically incompetent at keeping their weapons programs going, and they all fell into disuse or were used up.

That seems like a possibility. Part of the reason options 3 and 4 don't seem plausible to me is that they don't serve to explain the actions of the other side. If Saddam had nothing to hide, why was he still being obstructionist until the very end? Why during the war did we find a whole cache of chemical protective equiment ready to be used by Iraqi soldiers? In addition, that they were all used up doesn't seem plausible on the face of it, and even less so given that we've now had mustard-gas and sarin nerve agent shells used against us. There's probably more where they came from.

While I was typing this Ian left a comment with his own option four, which I'll rename option 5:

[5.] The UN program to dismantle WMDs in Iraq worked.

I don't think that's an opinion anyone at the U.N. would even hold. Certainly in 1998 they didn't think their job was done when the inspectors were forced to leave Iraq. Then, before the war, everyone in the security council voted to continue the inspections to give Saddam a final chance to prove that he disarmed, yet he was obstructionist then too.

For reference, here's Hans Blix report to the U.N. on January 27, 2003.

My whole point in this is that it's more reasonable to believe that options 1 or 2 or a combination are true, and that options 3, 4, and 5 require that there ultimately is no rational explanation that explains A. what happened to the weapons, and B. Iraq's behavior over the past 12 years or so before the war. One of the irrational explanations may be true, and they may start to seem more likely to me over time if the more reasonable explanations don't pan out, but I think it's still too soon to think we've exhausted the possibility of those explanations. To argue that there were no weapons there, I think, is premature.

Ned also wrote:

What amazes me is how far people like Keith will stretch their logic to continue to follow the party line that Saddam was a threat because of WMD.

Like I wrote above, I think it's a stretch of logic to conclude differently. I don't appreciate being accused of following the "party line" (I take that to mean that I'm being intellectually dishonest, which I don't think I am), and in addition, my reasons for supporting the war were only partially based on the WMD argument.

However, I still think that's an important consideration. Given the recent knowledge we've acquired of the extensive weapons proliferation among North Korea, Libya, Pakistan, Syria, and Iran, (completely thanks to Libya's capitulation because of what happened in Iraq), I'm glad that two or three of those five or six rogue nations are no longer a threat to us. I'm not sure what to say about Pakistan, given that they were a large proliferator going back years, but are now ostensibly an ally. They have a lot of internal problems, but Musharraf seems to be on our side, though I'm really not sure how much of a threat to consider Pakistan. That's part of the reason I'm glad I'm not in Bush's place. It's a hard job.