Blair's "naive, all-consuming self-belief"

Paul Routledge has an excellent opinion piece in today’s Daily Mirror. (Things have come to a pretty pass when the Daily Mirror is a more reliable source than the New York Times.) The question: why is Tony Blair so consistent in shooting himself in the foot?

Just when it had become possible to be optimistic after the terrible events of 7/7, the Prime Minister… picked a needless argument, not just with his own security services, but with the British people – claiming that the London bombings have nothing to do with Iraq. This attitude is so manifestly absurd that it was immediately repudiated by two thirds of voters in an opinion poll. The Joint Terrorist Analysis Centre also gave the lie, reporting: ‘Events in Iraq are continuing to act as a motivation and a focus of a range of terrorist-related activity in the UK.’ These are Blair’s own spooks, whose findings presumably go across his desk in Number Ten….

Nobody, certainly not me, says that the war in Iraq is the sole, direct and immediate cause of 7/7. It wasn’t. Nor is it any form of justification. But it is pointless to pretend that this conflict has not helped to create a climate in which it is easier for hard-line Muslim clerics to corrupt young minds and for terrorist godfathers to recruit suicide bombers.

So why does Blair do this, squandering good-will and stirring up trouble for himself? Routledge argues that the cause is his “naive, all-consuming self-belief”, and cites the damning verdict of Lord Roy Hattersley, the former deputy Labour leader

‘The ultimate justification for the war in Iraq – when it was no longer possible to pretend that weapons of mass destruction were only 45 minutes away – was that Blair’s conscience allowed no other course of action.”

(Driving in to work this morning, I heard John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister repeating Blair’s absurd “nothing to do with Iraq” claims. Maybe it’s a virus – Howard is visiting Blair, and had just visited Bush.)

Deja vu, or a tape loop

‘Twas spooky: I was driving to work, and at 9am EDT I turned on WBUR to listen to the BBC World Service News, and heard them talking about “incidents at three tube stations and on a bus”. For a minute (probably less) it sounded as if they were replaying a tape of the news from 7/7… until someone made a reference to “the events of two weeks ago”.

All of this is unfolding right now, and it seems likely that the final account will bear little relation to the initial reports, speculation, and contradictions. Right now the BBC is reporting that: “A number of Tube stations have been evacuated and lines closed after three blasts in what Met Police chief Sir Ian Blair says is a ‘serious incident’.” However further down in the same report we see that “Police in London say they are not treating the situation as ‘a major incident yet'”. Serious but not major. Let’s hope that it’ll turn out to be neither.

Iraq and Iran… "irony" doesn't even begin to capture this.

Juan Cole has a piece in Salon entitled The Iraq war is over, and the winner is… Iran, in which he discusses the implications of this week’s love-in between Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari (accompanied by eight cabinet ministers) and the Iranian leadership, including Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei. I wonder how the neocons felt about al-Jaafari laying a wreath on the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini in Tehran, not to mention all of the elaborate plans for joint oil projects, food shipments, electricity supply, and so forth. And how would the American voters feel about the fact that Iran will be providing a billion dollars in foreign aid to Iraq, to go along with the gazillions that the US taxpayer is contributing. (Of course the Iranian aid is unlikely to be recycled through American contractors.)

Money quote:

More than two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, it is difficult to see what real benefits have accrued to the United States from the Iraq war, though a handful of corporations have benefited marginally. In contrast, Iran is the big winner. The Shiites of Iraq increasingly realize they need Iranian backing to defeat the Sunni guerrillas and put the Iraqi economy right, a task the Americans have proved unable to accomplish. And Iran will still be Iraq’s neighbor long after the fickle American political class has switched its focus to some other global hot spot.

Getting ahead of the system

In his blog today, Jonathan responds to a frustrated developer who wanted to take advantage of the advertised deal on our new workstations:

an Ultra 20, fully loaded with Solaris, and the entirety of our Java developer platform and runtime infrastructure for $29.95/mos – and get the hardware for FREE”

…only to find that when he tried to order it, the actual price was $360/yr. (Not a big deal for most people, but it would be for some – and more to the point, it wasn’t what had been promised.) Jonathan’s mea culpa explanation: it was…

because our internal ERP systems were implemented at a point in time where no one could imagine a Sun product with a monthly price vs. an annual price

And even though it would be nice if this kind of thing didn’t happen, the alternative is worse. People at the cutting edge – with products, developer initiatives, solutions – should always be pushing the envelope, challenging what the traditional corporate processes and infrastructure can handle. Personal case in point: when I joined Sun back in 1985, all of our products were hardware boxes. I don’t think we even had a software product on the price list (except perhaps a 3270 terminal emulator – different world, eh?). My team created PC-NFS, the first NFS client solution for DOS-based PCs. (This was before Windows; back then Bill Gates was hot for Xenix!) In June 1986 we shipped our first revenue units, and within a few days the first customer service call came in.

I’ve got a question about this PC-NFS product I just received.

Certainly, sir. Can you tell me the serial number on the box?

Er… OK, there’s a license number printed on the label on the software box – is that what you want?

No, sir: I need you to tell me the system serial number of your Sun computer. It’ll be next to the power switch.

But I’m trying to install PC-NFS on a Compaq Deskpro.

I see. Well, perhaps you can give me the serial number of the file server.

That won’t help. The file server is a Pyramid system. We don’t have any Sun hardware at all.

I’m sorry, sir: without a system serial number I can’t log your call.

!@#?<>*&%$#!

The rest of the support network was in place: we just hadn’t got around to changing the front-line process. And nobody had envisaged the possibility of selling Sun software into an account without any Sun hardware. (Sounds familiar, Jonathan?) In any case, the support process was straightened out with commendable speed. Should we have held up product shipment until all the infrastructure glitches were worked out? No way.

Posted in Sun

Sun blogging

One problem with blogs is that for the most part you only get to see the words. Some people put up a picture of themselves, but that’s it. Now you can see what some of the Sun bloggers look – and sound – like. Sun marketing put together a little newscast-style six minute video clip on blogging, and a copy is now on the mediacast site. (4.3MB RealVideo format.) [Originally it was hidden behind a fancy dynamic interface; we had to teach the STN folks about the need for durable URLs.] Anyway pull down a copy and watch Claire, Tim, and Jonathan talking about blogging at Sun – why, what, and how. Good stuff.

Frustrated that I can't give blood

I first donated blood way back in 1969, shortly after I arrived at Essex University in Colchester. My memory is that it was an amazing feeling: doing something that felt really good that also helped people. Over the next 20+ years I gave blood regularly, twice a year. Then came the “Mad Cow” (vCJD) crisis, and the American Red Cross added “residence in the UK” to the list of proscribed categories for blood donors. Deeply frustrating.

The other day, I received the regular email announcing the next blood donor session here at Sun. I was talking to a colleague, and he said, “Oh, I think they’ve relaxed the rules. Why don’t you check?” So I did. Sadly, no. Here’s the relevant text

At this time, the American Red Cross donor eligibility rules related to vCJD are as follows:
You are not eligible to donate if:
From January 1, 1980, through December 31, 1996, you spent (visited or lived) a cumulative time of 3 months or more, in the United Kingdom (UK),

So I still can’t donate. And thinking about it, I know a number of US citizens whose UK vacations over that 16-year period would probably rule them out too.

Risking everything

A few days ago I picked up a copy of Roger Housden’s anthology Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation.riskingeverything.jpg Today I opened it at a random page, and suddenly felt compelled to start reading the poem out loud. It was D. H. Lawrence’s Deeper Than Love, and I found myself reading it slowly, lingering over the words, tasting them, feeling their weight on my tongue.

Love, like the flowers, is life, growing.
But underneath are the deep rocks, the living rock that lives alone
and deeper still the unknown fire, unknown and heavy, heavy and alone.

The noise of the air conditioner in the kitchen drowned my speech (it’s a miserable night, dew point around 75, no central air) which was good: I was only reading for myself. I finished the Lawrence, and opened again at random: Billy Collins’ This Much I Do Remember. Not a poem to read out loud, this one, but one to close your eyes and see what the poet had seen:

that I could feel it being painted within me
brushed on the wall of my skull

And of course all of Housden’s favourites are here, like old familiar friends: Rumi, Bly, and above all Mary Oliver. What a glorious collection.

Cause, effect, and response

Over the last few days we’ve had to endure repeated expressions of incredulity by politicians and pundits about Islamism and the motivations of the London suicide bombers. Politicians such as Blair and Straw, op-ed writers like Cathy Young in today’s Boston Globe, and countless others reject the notion that there is any connection between Western policy – especially recent military actions such as the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq – and the risk of terrorism.

Now on one level, such claims are trivially absurd. Simply consider the alternative: we are supposed to believe that terrorists who are clearly aligned with certain ideological groups such as al-Qaeda are entirely indifferent to the events that are held up by these groups as emblematic of their conflict. If there is no connection, why were New York, Madrid and London bombed, rather than, say, Paris, Beijing and Stockholm? Coincidence? A flip of the coin? A mere whim, unconnected to any historical reality? Of course not.

The reason for such illogic and denial is not hard to see. People confuse causality with responsibility, and responsibility with blame. There is no time to explore the complicated, messy nature of the real world: everything must be brought down to a simply dichotomy. Thus for Cathy Young, quoting a New York resident:

When asked if he believed New York would be attacked again, he replied in the affirmative. Why? “Because the US is hated now more than ever. Even some of our allies sort of hate us.” And why is that? “We invaded Iraq, which has never attacked us or declared war on us.” In other words: If we’re attacked again, it will be our fault.

The non-sequitur is breathtaking: a reasonable contributing cause is instantly transformed by Young into responsibility; “our fault” (and, implicitly, nobody else’s). And since this conclusion is (correctly) rejected, the original causal connection must be wrong! And the final twist: rather than recognizing her own muddled thinking, Young treats this as an example of “A moral muddle on the left”. This is pretty pathetic stuff from an editor of Reason magazine….

So where can we turn to for reasonable analysis, with logic and historical context? Johann Hari has two excellent pieces in the Independent which deserve your attention. First, cause and effect:: it all goes back to the way the Western powers carved up the Middle East, from Versailles to Yalta.

The reasoning of the perpetrators is explained in the 2001 book Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the man Bin Laden describes as his ‘mentor’. Into the 1990s, the Islamists became frustrated that they could not rally the ‘Muslim masses’ to overthrow their local tyrants. So they decided to strike the ‘big enemy’ – Western states – to re-energise Wahhabi jihadism and precipitate revolutions throughout the Middle East.

So Islamism is more a response to the decisions of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt than of Bush and Blair. Last Thursday was not the price for Afghanistan and Iraq; it was the price of decades of trading oil for tyranny without any regard to the consequences. These recent wars may have been useful propaganda tools for the jihadists, but saying they were their primary motivations does not match the evidence.

So much for the origins of the conflict: what about the response? In the piece just quoted, Hari considers, and dismisses, the simple solution: to give Bin Laden what he wants: concede Wahhabi control over all of historical Islam. As he points out, where would that end? Turkey? Spain? Kosovo? Much of India? Simplistic thinking, whether of military victory or defeatism, must be rejected.

In a follow-up piece last Friday, Hari argues for an alternative approach: a slower, messier, more complicated strategy. It has two key elements: engaging Muslim women, and eliminating Western dependence on Middle Eastern oil. On Muslim women:

One of the central tenets of [Wahhabism] is the inherent inferiority and weakness of women. Every jihadist I have ever met – from Gaza to Finsbury Park – has been a fierce ball of misogyny and sexual repression…. The best way to undermine the confidence and beliefs of jihadists is to trigger a rebellion of Muslim women, their mothers and sisters and daughters. Where Muslim women are free to fight back against jihadists, they are already showing incredible tenacity and intellectual force.

And on dependency:

I have (reluctantly) begun to think that, until we are no longer dependent on Middle Eastern oil, no amount of pressure will make our governments support real democracy and women’s rights in the region. The risk of another 1973-style oil-price shock will mean they will always support the “stability” of control over the gamble of proper democracy, no matter how enthusiastically the methods of control are rebranded or relaxed. Until we stop being addicted to the petrol and the status quo in the Middle East, we are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Audioscrobbler

I’ve started using an interesting web service called Audioscrobbler to publish information on the music I’m listening to. It works like this. You install a software agent (plugin) that knows how to interrogate your preferred digital music player to find out what’s playing. In my case, that means running the plugin for iTunes on Mac OSX, but most popular software is supported. Periodically the plugin uploads the list of tracks you’ve played to the audioscrobbler server, which builds a page for each user (here’s mine) showing what they’ve listened to recently, plus a bunch of statistics. (If you’re off the net, the plugin caches the information until you reconnect.) The server also calculates affinity groups, and shows you recommendations based on what other people who like the same music you do are listening to.

But this is a security risk, isn’t it? After all, who knows what information the plugin might be sucking off your system? Well, actually, I know! All of the plugins are open source, and I was able to read through the source code for the plugin to verify its behaviour before I installed it. And although this isn’t proof of good intentions, the raw data is available under a Creative Commons license. In fact a colleague of mine is using the data in a research project.

So now you can see what I’m listening to, on my Mac or on my iPod. One warning: I’m having iTunes play through some of my favourite material each night, just to load a statistically meaningful dataset. So if it looks as if I’m listening to stuff when I ought to be sleeping, relax. Anyway, right now it’s working through my Captain Beefheart collection: it’s up to “Safe As Milk” on Strictly Personal. An awesome track….