licentious radio

Sunday, January 26, 2003
[2:39:00 PM]

We -- infamously -- showed how to use your "user" stylesheet to undo zeldman.com's justification of body text.

A new wrinkle is to add a unique class or id to your web pages as a "hook" to allow frequent visitors to override your styles.

For example:

in my webpages would allow you to override my styles without affecting other websites:

body#licentious-radio p {text-align: justify; font-family: verdana; font-size: 11px}

(Don't try this quite yet. We haven't updated our templates.)

This is a fine cooperative-hack. But it just rubs your nose in the obvious design flaw: you should be able to specify user styles by domain and url, the way we can specify cookies.

I'm not, of course, suggesting that a large percentage of browser users will ever learn CSS syntax and memorize the jumble of features and property names. But browsers *could* give us an easy interface to tweak the display of sites we use frequently.

For example, many websites set font sizes that are uncomfortably small for many users. Some browsers let a user "zoom" a web page. I'm suggesting the browser let you easily add user styles for that website so that the user sees readably-sized text on every page on every visit, with only one command.

[12:09:05 PM]
Fisk on reality of war [independent.co.uk]

[12:02:22 PM]
Robert Fisk: "I remember once a wounded man in Iran, a piece of steel in his forehead, howling like an animal -- which is, of course, what we all are -- before he died; and the Palestinian boy who simply collapsed in front of me when an Israeli soldier shot him dead, quite deliberately, coldly, murderously, for throwing a stone; and the Israeli with a chair leg sticking out of her stomach outside the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem after a Palestinian bomber had decided to execute the families inside; and the heaps of Iraqi dead at the Battle of Dezful in the Iran-Iraq war -- the stench of their bodies wafted through our helicopter until the mullahs aboard were sickened; and the young man showing me the thick black trail of his daughter's blood outside Algiers where armed 'Islamists' had cut her throat."

Oh, my babies. Look up once at our lovely, romantic moon. It is cold, lifeless, dead. Earth *is* heaven, and *we* are all angels. And yet we do *this* to ourselves? No! My lovers, my Self: let us find another game to play.

[11:52:32 AM]
In the paper today.... "Old Europe" opposes Bush's war to "git Saddam, dead or alive", but Hungary is letting the US use an air base to train Iraqi PR agents. This display of international support for the war impresses us tremendously, and makes us wonder what drugs those lily-livered Frencho-s and Berlin-esques are taking.

More seriously, lawyers in US, England, and Canada have sent letters to their governments warning of prosecutions for any war crimes committed in the invasion of Iraq. Global consensus and good PR based on a quick victory exempted the perpetrators in the First Gulf War. With most of humanity adamently opposed to invasion of Iraq, perpetrators might not get off so easy this time.

licentious radio believes it is time for the US military to come clean, and abandon tactics and weapons systems that are clearly criminal. American military personnel at all levels should refuse to participate in war crimes, and should document any criminal orders they receive. American military leaders should insist that no war plans include war crimes.

Meanwhile Howard Dean raises the issue that could sink Kerry's chance of nomination: if you're so against war, why did you vote for Bush's license to kill? As bombs fall in Iraq -- today -- the blood unleashed is also on Kerry's hands. We're ready to see Kerry dance out of this one. We hope he can escape his mistake, but urging delay doesn't seem like a winning strategy. It *looks* like he was a coward in the face of polls supporting war. How will he answer questions like this in a presidential debate?

[1:03:59 AM]
New from Purina: Little Fristies Cat Food! Meow, meow, meow! Suitable for feeding to the homeless, elderly, former foodstamp and welfare recipients, and for the school lunch program. Also solves the problem of over-population of cats.

Remember, don't tax the rich; feed Little Fristies to the poor!

[12:57:12 AM]
Rumsfeld should resign. If the war minister of one of our allies insulted the US -- maybe by saying that Bush is a moron, for example -- there would be pressure for that person to resign. Rumsfeld has obviously cracked again -- maligning Vietnam veterans, our allies, and our own generals. If Americans die because of reduced cooperation with France, Germany, NATO, and the European Union, that blood will be on Rumsfeld's hands.

We all know a Democrat making these blunders would be hounded out of office by the Right-wing Corporate Media and political assassination squads.

It is true that this is a bad time to have to replace someone in such a key position. But he has obviously cracked, and it is likely to be more dangerous to leave him than to replace him.

[12:33:25 AM]
Actually, today I'm quite scared. For months I've been assuming that conquering Iraq would be like chasing Saddam out of Kuwait -- more than 1,000 Iraqis killed for every American, and no more than 200 Americans killed. And absolutely no victories for the Iraqi side.

Saddam might be smarter about the game this time. There's no guarantee that the United States will keep fighting indefinitely. If Saddam can get his Republican Guard to fight within Baghdad, it could be *very* ugly. And it could go on for longer than Americans are willing to let Bush play God of War. That is, Saddam has a good chance of keeping power if he fights. I believe that Saddam would *like* to defeat a US invasion. I suspect he would think that would be glorious, and that it would give him "street cred" with a billion or so Arabs/Muslims.

In Bush's daddy's Gulf War, Saddam's conscript army was entrenched along the borders, and the US "let's roll" war heros carpet bombed maybe 100,000 conscripts to death. And then our "let's shovel" war heroes quick buried the bodies in the sand so Cheney could pretend there were almost no Iraqi casualties.

Saddam's conscript army isn't digging in along the borders. A sane strategy for Saddam would be to keep the Republican Guard in the cities, and disperse the conscripts widely enough that there are no easy, large targets for bombers.

If Saddam followed this strategy, Rumsfeld's idea of *scaring* the Iraqi army would fail miserably. US tanks could roll up to the outskirts of Baghdad as fast as they want, but small groups of Iraqi soldiers with missiles would be hiding in holes all through the "occupied" territory.

Damaging an American ship would be a *huge* propaganda victory. The Persian Gulf is a small space. We presume the US navy is careful to keep small boats away from our ships. We hope the US navy keeps ships of all sizes out of missile range. We also hope the US Air Force keeps enough fighters in the air to shoot down *all* of Iraq's air force before it could get within missile range of US ships. Poppy let Iraq's entire air force escape in Gulf War I. This time around, Saddam is likely to be willing to trade the whole thing for the chance of one symbolic victory. People would think twice if they saw video of smoke billowing from an aircraft carrier. Would England stay in the war if it were the British carrier? The sinking of the big Argentine ship was the low-point of the Falklands war.

Iraq can't hope to fight the US in open desert with US air superiority. They surely learned their lesson in Gulf War I. They won't even try, this time. What can they do instead? Retreat to the cities, disperse in the countryside, leave big bombs buried in places that Americans might set up a camp or pass by.

I have this question: in what sense is Sarin gas less moral than carpet bombing by B52s? If the US invasion force has to operate in chemical weapons gear because they never know when a Sarin bomb will explode, that takes away a big chunk of the US advantage. (Who are you going to nuke?) Suppose Sarin detectors go off several times a day. Suppose no one dies from it. US troops are still forced to wear their chemical gear constantly. Iraqi troops don't have to, because *they* know when/if gas will be used.

Suppose Little George himself leads the tanks right to the outskirts of Baghdad, and we surround the city. What if Saddam makes it seem like he has 15,000 warheads full of gas with a twenty-mile range? "You attack the city, and we might start shooting gas." Little George says "You use gas, and we'll nuke your city." That's not necessarily a credible threat. Baghdad isn't Hiroshima. The whole city wouldn't be blown away. But we cannot nuke Baghdad. Anyone involved in nuking Baghdad would have to count on being executed for the crime. Even Junior doesn't seem to be *that* stupid. (Not to say Bush isn't stupider than he seems, but we assume *someone* in the military chain of command would refuse to incinerate several tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in the course of three seconds.)

Ask old Thomas F. Friedman how much more better democracy will thrive in the Arab/Islamic world after Junior nukes Baghdad.

In Poppy's Gulf War, Saddam lit up the Kuwaiti oil fields. The smoke didn't rise high enough to cause global climate effects. It didn't add any immediate military advantage. It apparently contributed significantly to long-term disease of 28% of US Gulf War participants. But we don't call it a 28% casualty rate, because that would be a *large* number of people for Chicken-hawk Cheney to have maimed.

The main thing about oil in Gulf War I was that it made life less good for the Kuwaitis. It took a long time to fix. Their water is still messed up.

But oil *could* be used for tactical advantage. Say we march up to Basra, but there's a lake of oil burning in our way. Or it's not burning, but waiting to be lit. Or say we start to advance into the city, and an oil fire erupts *behind* the US troops. Say a hundred or five hundred Americans are cut off by oil fire, stuck in a booby-trapped area, and outnumbered, under attack.

Is it plausible that a third-world country could invent tactics that would thwart the US military? Hmm. Vietnam went on for a while. We didn't leave Somalia or Lebanon in John Wayne style. NATO air tactics in Kosovo/Serbia were essentially a failure. Without the threat of invasion, Milosevic might have held out. Kosovo isn't a very good example, because we didn't want to kill many Serbs, and we didn't want to get *any* Americans killed. We know Little George won't mind killing 100,000 Iraqis, but how many Americans is he willing to let die? Seems to me, George might just be in trouble if more than twenty Americans die. That doesn't leave much room for house-to-house fighting.

But surely, you say, Rumsfeld is devising the most foolproof plan in the history of war -- gracefully over-riding the input of the know-nothing American generals.... Don't get me started again on that whacko, Rumsfeld.

What it looks like to me is that Rumsfeld not only has no exit strategy, he has no *victory* strategy. Americans are not likely to tolerate hundreds or thousands of American casualties so Bush can grab Iraq's oil, so Friedman can jolly on about flowering Arab democracies, or even to make sure Saddam has no chemical weapons (that he hasn't used since he was working for Poppy).

I'd *like* to think this means the whole war build-up is phony. But it seems more likely that a handful of absolute psychos are in control of the US government, and we're all too polite, up until now, to roll back the coup d'etat.

So here are the questions: How many dead Americans is it worth to you to regime-change Saddam? Do you care at all about how many Iraqis die? *If* you care how many Iraqis die, how many dead Iraqi conscripts and civilians is it worth to you to regime-change Saddam? And how many dead Americans (and Iraqis) are you willing to bet that Iraq will give up without a fight?