Stardate 20030216.1851

(Captain's log): I used to play Go rather heavily. It's an interesting and very complex game, one famous for the fact that the rules of the game are easy to learn but tell you nothing about how you should play.

Without going into too much detail, groups of pieces form on the board, and some of them will be alive and some of them will be dead. But sometimes you can have a situation where two groups each require killing an enemy to live. In the most extreme case the situation can't be resolved; this is called seki and both groups are treated as alive. But in the more common case what you have is that each side works to kill off the other guy's unit while defending his own. The situation can be extremely closely balanced, and during a struggle like that each side may suffer setbacks. Ultimately one side will prevail, but it's not at all obvious going in which it will be. That can be very tense.

The current political situation between The Good Guys and The Weasels (and, in fact, a bunch of other players e.g. Saddam, Russia, the Arabs, the Muslims) feels like that. In the last couple of weeks there have been triumphs for all sides and others taking shots, and it's still happening. There's a fair amount of zero-sum-gaming going on right now, and damned little "win-win".

Friday was a triumph for France, for instance, at our expense: the US and UK went into the UNSC meeting expecting that the reports from Blix and el Baradei would be less ambiguous and would more clearly state that Iraq was not in compliance. It isn't, either, but neither Blix nor el Baradei want to come out and flatly say so because neither wants to feel directly responsible for war. Blix did put a money-quote to that effect in his last speech to the UNSC and it was heavily quoted and cited; he seems to have learned from that and made sure not to do the same this time. It was expected that there would be no agreement on Friday, but the degree to which various nations in the UNSC either stayed neutral or openly sided with France set our people back a bit. I, myself, was shocked to see Mexico stay neutral. (And though Canada is not on the UNSC, the most recent statement by them straddled the fence. More or less, "Time is running out, but not very rapidly. Iraq must comply, but no one is going to attack it soon." Marvelous.)

Everyone has vulnerable pieces. Today France took a shot (in our favor) when NATO moved the decision about defending Turkey out of regular council to the Defense Planning Committee. France has a seat in the former but not in the latter. And though Belgium and Germany are represented in the Planning Committee, a compromise was worked out permitting all 18 members to vote in favor of deploying AWACS and Patriot missiles to Turkey.

On the other hand, we took a shot (in France and Saddam's favor) when Turkey went wobbly, or rather, when it went mercenary. It's temporarily in a good bargaining position and is trying to milk it for all it can, and is trying to negotiate for a particularly sweet aid package. Having visited the US over the weekend and not having gotten what it thought it was entitled to, the Turkish Foreign Minister now says that the vote in the Turkish Parliament to authorize foreign troops would be delayed. One reason why is that the Foreign Minister will be attending the EU Summit on Monday and Tuesday and he's going to shop around to see if there are any other buyers, and find out what kind of price they're offering.

We took a shot (in favor of Saddam) when it turned out that yesterday's peace demonstrations around the world involved far more people than had been expected. It's likely that the majority of those who showed up for those demonstrations are actually genuinely concerned about the prospect of war, but those who organized the demonstrations have a much larger agenda and are taking advantage of this situation in hopes of recruiting for their other causes.

Tony Blair is vulnerable. He just met with top people in his party, and his cabinet rallied around him, and for the moment he appears to be safe. But if his situation doesn't improve soon, he's probably gone. A quick and successful war, and revelations out of Iraq afterwards, will almost certainly be enough – if he lasts long enough. It's reported that quite a while ago he promised the members of his party that he would not send British troops to war without either a formal UNSC resolution authorizing conflict, or an "unreasonable veto" of same; it's likely that this is the reason we're still playing the UN game at all. As a result of Friday's setback and, perhaps, the surprising strength of yesterday's demonstrations, it's reported that they are writing a new resolution which will be watered down. If they water it down too far, it will amount to giving Saddam another "last chance" (after Res 1441's "last chance") and be yet another demand for compliance without actually containing language clearly stating that if he doesn't then he gets attacked. In such a case, all it would do is to delay the diplomatic reckoning since it would then require yet another UNSC resolution after that to satisfy Blair's promise.

John Howard seems to be beleaguered. In an interview broadcast in Australia today, he stated that the US alliance was more important to Australia than the United Nations was. I'm glad he feels that way and is willing to say so publicly, but I'm deeply disturbed that his statement was even considered noteworthy, let alone controversial. It's deeply disturbing that he even felt he needed to talk about it.

Kuwait and Qatar are under strong diplomatic pressure from the other Arab states. Arab foreign ministers are meeting in Cairo now, and as always it will be successful. (Diplomacy is always successful.) They will prepare a joint communiqué, and it appears that it's going to say that all the Arab nations agree to not give us any assistance or to permit us to use any of their facilities. This has happened before, and they ignored it last time too, and it may be that the real purpose of this is to let the other Arab nations take this back to their own people as a "See? We tried!" ass-covering measure once we attack. But it's another worry; what if Kuwait changes its mind? That seems highly unlikely, but stranger things have happened.

Schröder is in deep peril. (You won't find me mourning for him.) Having just gotten hammered in major local elections (where his party's showing was disastrously low) and with a razor-thin margin in his ruling coalition, reports are that he's managed to royally piss off Fischer in the last week, in particular when Fischer found out about the "alternate plan" through open news sources just before a meeting where he ended up facing an angry Donald Rumsfeld who had just heard the same reports. Rumors are that upon leaving the meeting he called Schröder on the phone and that voices were raised. In public everything is sweetness and light, but rumor is that he's getting fed up.

And Schröder is facing a vote of no-confidence. Sometimes those are just meaningless gestures by the opposition, but not in this case. If he loses it, he's an ex-weasel. I'm not sufficiently up on the German system to know if this would mean new elections (in which case everything grinds to a halt for several weeks, and Germany ceases to be an international factor), or simply a new caucus-race while someone tries to put together another majority coalition. If there's actually a new election, I'm told that SPD will damned near dissolve, with most of its voters going in one of three ways. Andrew, a friend of mine living in Berlin, says that the Conservatives are now starting to say that they may not agree with Schröder's strict pacifism. He writes that they are arguing that force is sometimes necessary and that a war is a tool and peace the result. Which is true, but more than a bit controversial in Germany.

[Update: Here is an explanation of the process and consequences of this vote in the German system.]

Chirac and Bush are not in peril. Both are elected for fixed terms and the next election is far enough out to not be a short-term factor. Both lead single parties which are in a majority in their own governments. And both of them are confusing the hell out of me.

Bush made his weekly radio address yesterday and what he talked about was the recent step to raise the "national terrorist threat level" to "high". There was no mention of foreign policy; no mention of the UN; no mention of peace marches; no mention of determination and a will to persevere and do what is needed.

And of all the bizarre things which happened today, easily the most bizarre was Chirac praising the American military buildup in the Gulf region. This could be good or bad. It may mean that he's trying to set up the idea that indefinitely long inspections could only succeed if the US left its forces rotting in the region for months or years to continue to stand as a threat against Iraq to force Saddam to continue to pretend to cooperate while not actually doing so, which would not only give Chirac the financial win of having the very-profitable-for-France status quo continue but also tie up a large part of America's military might and prevent us from using it anywhere else.

During the Cold War, the US had an even larger military capability (in absolute terms, though not in quality) than it does now, but most of it was tied up satisfying treaty obligations or sitting across borders from Soviet troops to balance them. Thus the amount of what could best be described as "discretionary" military power was vastly smaller. When the Cold War ended, most of those forces were freed up, and only part of that was then demobilized. As a result, the effective military ability of the US to intervene rose dramatically even though we actually cut the overall size of the military. If Chirac could somehow manage to create a stalemate in Iraq which included an obligation for the US to park the majority of its military power in the region doing nothing, it would once again lock up nearly all our military capability and reduce our practical discretionary power to levels not a lot greater than those of France itself. So that may be what he was trying to set up with this speech.

In addition, given that there's going to be an EU summit starting tomorrow, maybe Chirac is trying to temporarily look a bit less anti-American.

But it's also possible that everyone in high places is starting to get nervous. The overall situation is getting out of hand; things have gotten too fluid, and the stakes for everyone are high. Maybe Chirac and Bush are trying to turn down the heat.

But I don't trust him worth a damn. And his arrogance showed through clearly. Not content to speak on behalf of Europe, he took it on himself in this interview to speak on behalf of the US.

He said Paris and Washington share the same goal of eliminating Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, "but we think this goal can be reached without starting a war."

Naturally, his "we" is France alone, but he's wrong about our (the US's) goal. We're not trying to eliminate Saddam's WMDs, we're trying to eliminate Saddam.

And as a gesture of condescending friendship, he decided to offer Bush some advice, sort of like cuing the hick in on which knife to use to eat the oysters and which wine to sip with it at the 11-course meal, so that the hick stops embarrassing himself. I mean, after all, These Are How These Things Are Done, and if Bush was more sophisticated, he'd know it himself.

The French president also offered Bush advice on how to pull back from the brink of war and allow inspections to run their course.

"If Iraq is stripped of its weapons of mass destruction and that's been verified by inspectors, then Mr. Bush can say two things: first, 'Thanks to my intervention, Iraq has been disarmed."

And second, Bush could tell the American people that he had "achieved all that without spilling any blood."

Gee, why didn't I think of that? Maybe it's because seven years of adversarial inspections in the 1990's didn't manage to fully disarm Saddam, and I don't believe that a new round of adversarial inspections will do so. As long as Saddam continues to believe he doesn't actually have to do more than pretend to cooperate, there won't be any "stripping" going on.

Thanks very much, Monsieur Chirac, but I prefer to eat my oysters with my fingers and to drink beer with them. But what I'd much rather eat is Tex-Mex chile or a good old Barbecue.

Chirac's advice amounts to telling Bush how to surrender to France. (I will resist the obvious comments.) I've got a better idea: it's time to stomp Chirac flat. (How does barbecued weasel taste?)

The whole situation is scary. There are a lot of things which could go wrong. Turkey could continue to dither, and if CENTCOM really believes that it cannot go to war without a northern thrust, that alone could kill us. Someone in CENTCOM had better be making contingency plans for a south-thrust-only war.

One of the myriad Saudi Princes has gone public with a statement saying that the Arab nations should move troops into Iraq. He does not hold a position of power in the government but it's worrying anyway; what if they actually do something like that? If Saudi Arabia and Syria both moved substantial forces in, the situation would become extremely complex.

The "no fly" zone fiction continues to serve us at least somewhat well; we continue to patrol those areas in the north and south, and the US and UK have actually been engaged in low-level air preparation for years, especially with regard to attacking air defenses. But last week we bombed a surface-to-surface missile battery near Basra. Its missiles were capable of hitting areas in Kuwait where our troops are massing, and it's likely they could have carried nerve gas. Are there any others like that, perhaps hidden in mosques or somewhere else unlikely? Or might they decide to drag out and fire the last Scuds that they don't have, carrying something immensely lethal? Or there have been attacks against our people in Kuwait; a couple of gun attacks, for instance. Might Saddam decide to try to smuggle a few kilos of VX into Kuwait and give it to dissidents there for use against us? Every day we wait, we roll the dice and hope they don't come up snake-eyes.

There are dozens of things which could happen to radically change the situation, and a lot of them are not good for us. The longer we wait, the more time we give those who hate us, or oppose us, to figure out ways to do us ill. Some of that is diplomatic; some military; some terrorist; or a combination. It could happen in the Gulf, or in the US, or in Europe, or anywhere in the world. The current situation remains strongly in our favor, but will it stay that way in the months to come? By the time CENTCOM finally has the troops in place that it thinks it needs, will it have become politically impossible to attack?

Are the risks of waiting greater than the risk of fighting with what we have in place now? Only President Bush can make that decision. I hope he decides wisely.