straight from the horse's ass
i'm pretty well convinced that it's my short attention span that's responsible for the current state of american politics. i try to stay focused but, my god, who can listen to this stuff without wanting to jump off a bridge? and these people, they do things while we're not looking, like, you know, move into the white house and start playing with guns.
first, colin powell's presentation at the united nations. i am convinced, and have been for quite some time, that saddam hussein does not play well with others. i remain unconvinced, though, that he needs to removed now and at the toddler-like behest of the u.s. absent a deliberate act of provocation. (does violating u.n. resolutions constitute sufficient provocation? don't know; ask israel.)
now we can argue till the cows come home about whether iraq poses an imminent threat to u.s. security and needs to be ground under our boot heel without delay. my gut says no. of course, my gut is occasionally quite ill-informed due to the little attention problem i mentioned above -- i haven't received the full briefing on iraq. apparently i'm not alone in that. jonathan tucker, a former u.n. biological weapons inspector in iraq, wrote in salon:
Another troubling subtext of the presentation was that the U.S. government possessed intelligence -- for example, the satellite images of decontamination trucks carting away prohibited materials from weapons sites -- that would have been of great value to the inspectors had it been made available. I noticed that Hans Blix often appeared extremely angry and I think that might have been the reason -- not only that Iraq was pulling the wool over his eyes, but that the U.S. had actionable intelligence while the inspectors were in the country and did not make it available. I think this was because there was resistance from the intelligence community to declassify information and strong elements of the administration that did not want inspections to succeed -- the hawks who saw the inspections as a sideshow.
(you can read the full article here if you don't mind a few ads.)
moving on to superficial concerns, which are, alas, my specialty, what about covering guernica outside the security council? i am hugely amused to read the various interpretations of this. i like this one best:
"It's only temporary. We're only doing this until the cameras leave," said Abdellatif Kabbaj, the organization's media liaison.[...]Mr. Kabbaj amplified thus: "We had a problem with, you know, the horse." It was, of course, a camera crew that noticed that anyone who stood at the U.N. microphone would be photographed next to the backside of a rearing horse.