Comments Posted By Bill Arnold
Displaying 111 To 118 Of 118 Comments
ALL THAT'S MISSING ARE THE POM-POMS
I just (re-)read all of Billmon's pieces on the current Israel/Hezbollah confict and do not see a hint of cheerleading for Hezbolla. There are even clear unequivocal statements about Hezbolla war crimes. I see a political argument, not a military argument. It's not an %100 convincing argument, but at least it's argued in a concise readable manner. The political argument is that the Israelis are headed for a serious net political loss in this conflict.
There is not much reason to project anti-semitic motives, either; the first paragraph of one of the postings in the series makes a clear statement, quote:
I've felt many emotions about the Israelis before. I've admired them for their accomplishments -- building a flourishing state out of almost nothing. I've hated them for their systematic dispossession of the Palestinians -- even as they smugly congratulated themselves for being the Middle East's only "democracy." I've pitied them for the cruel fate history inflicted on the Jewish diaspora, respected them for their boldness and daring, honored them for their cultural and intellectual achievements. But the one thing I've never felt, at least up until now, is contempt.You can read that as anti-semitic or not (I read not), but at least it's clear.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 30.07.2006 @ 15:09
Steve Morton,
Both sides of Congress are working on resolutions, the blogs on both sides have been fired up, and the Times itself has printed a series of CYA articles on the subject.
This is precisely my point. The program was largely under the radar, though certainly not secret. NY Times broadly spread word about the program. The administration completed the job of making sure people who missed the NYTimes story learned about it. (I buy the NY Times most days, but didn't read this story until the ruckus broke out.) A story almost never reaches full saturation, so extra publicity caused by adminstration denunciations of the press makes the story reach more people. Since they did so deliberately, one must presume that as thinking patriots (applying the "principle of least malice"), they must have calculated that the level damage due to a week or two's worth of additional saturation of the news was outweighed by something else. That something else would be (a) trying to scare/discourage the press from similar disclosures in the future (plausible) (b) a move to get out the base vote / grab up some swing voters (plausible) (c) a combination of a and b, (d) ?Re "responding to questions from the press", the following go far beyond response to questions IMO.
Quoting Dick Cheney (note: I can't find a date for the first quote but it seems in context):"Some in the press, in particular The New York Times, have made the job of defending against further terrorist attacks more difficult by insisting on publishing detailed information about vital national security programs," Vice President
Dick Cheney said in a speech at a political fundraising luncheon in Grand Island, Neb."The New York Times has now twice — two separate occasions — disclosed programs; both times they had been asked not to publish those stories by senior administration officials," Cheney said. "They went ahead anyway. The leaks to The New York Times and the publishing of those leaks is very damaging."
and
"What I find most disturbing about these stories is the fact that some of the news media take it upon themselves to disclose vital national security programs, thereby making it more difficult for us to prevent future attacks against the American people," Mr. Cheney said, in impromptu remarks at a fund-raising luncheon for a Republican Congressional candidate in Chicago. "That offends me."Peter King, a Republican congressman from New York:
"We're at war, and for the Times to release information about secret operations and methods is treasonous,"
GWBush:
"The disclosure of this program is disgraceful. We're at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America, and for people to leak that program, and for a newspaper to publish it does great harm to the United States of America. What we were doing was the right thing. Congress was aware of it, and we were within the law to do so. If you want to figure out what the terrorists are doing, you try to follow their money. And that's exactly what we're doing. And the fact that a newspaper disclosed it makes it harder to win this war on terror."Tony Snow rambled on at length along the same lines.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 4.07.2006 @ 17:08
Rick,
Some different spin. Why on earth do the president and VP et al feel justified using the pulpit of the Presidency to drag this disclosure out for a week or more, pretty much guaranteeing that 10s of millions of people worldwide who would otherwise not have heard of this program now know about it? As opposed to doing tight-lipped damage control, keeping their seething anger tightly controlled and hidden?Perhaps it's a failure of imagination, but the only plausible explanation I can come up with is that all the additional publicity about the SWIFT program isn't really a significant national security problem.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 3.07.2006 @ 22:54
FOR THE LEFT, IT'S A RACE TO SEE WHO SURRENDERS FIRST: US OR THEM
Srapiron, how is the rapid progress the Iraqi military forces and police are making measured? For example, rhetorical question: if these forces mostly join one side or the other in a low-grade civil war, are matters really improving?
The various metrics I've seen regarding the objective on-the-ground realities appear to indicate no progress in a lot of measures, minor negative progress in some others, minor positive progress in others. [Cell phone usage is way up though]
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 26.06.2006 @ 18:16
As Iraqi National Security Adviser Sherwan Alwaeli revealed, there is an unofficial withdrawal plan heavily dependent on not only the numbers of Iraqi troops trained but also their combat capabilities.
If there is a public formula, and not one created via ex-post-facto curve fitting on made-up numbers, this is not arguably a politically-timed withdrawal plan. Otherwise, it is arguably a politically-timed withdrawal plan, e.g. Operation Save The Republican Majority.Americans had a lot of practice spotting political timing with the multitude of alert-level changes. They might have been wrong much of the time, but people are good at seeing patterns (even if the apparent pattern is just an artifact).
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 26.06.2006 @ 17:03
MURTHA: OLD SOLDIERS SHOULD JUST FADE AWAY
What would make military sense would be a benchmark-driven withdrawal. For example, Iraqi military killing 2 times as many insurgents as non-Iraqi coalition forces for 3 months in a row would merit a 40K troop withdrawal, etc. (numbers completely made up). I don't know how many democrats have suggested something like this, and if they have, whether it's been dishonestly paraphrased as advocation of phased withdrawal.
As it stands, with no publically-known benchmarks for determining when the US can withdraw troops, withdrawals anywhere near (and prior to) election time in 2006/08 will be perceived by many as politically motivated, and it will be hard to argue the point with them.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 19.06.2006 @ 20:59
IRAN: HOW LONG DO WE REALLY HAVE?
Author, no, implosion devices can be done with either plutonium 239 or HEU-235.
From a nice simple intro on weapon design at american federation of scientists,
"Implosion systems can be built using either Pu-239 or U-235 but the gun assembly only works for uranium. Implosion weapons are more difficult to build than gun weapons, but they are also more efficient, requiring less SNM and producing larger yields." (I believe SNM here is "special nuclear material")Rick, I see the 65 kilogram figure all over the place on the web (the south african gun-design weapons were supposedly slightly more frugal (more highly enriched) at 50 kilograms) - "The device [hiroshima bomb] contained 64.1 kg of highly enriched uranium, with an average enrichment of 80%. The six bombs built by the Republic of South Africa were gun-assembled and used 50kg of uranium enriched to between 80 percent and 93 percent in the isotope U-235."
(I realize now I am woefully ignorant of weapon design.) The same article has a simple table:
Uranium-235 Plutonium-239Bare sphere: 56 kg 11 kg
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 24.01.2006 @ 22:05
Thick Tamper: 15 kg 5 kg
Where a tamper serves the dual purpose of neutron reflection and increasing the time the unit stays assembled before blowing apart.
Thanks for airing this.
A couple of further points:
1) I've never know whether to believe the 60 kilograms figure always cited for a hiroshima-style gun-bomb. Is it true or misinformation?2) Part 2 of the article aludes to the tradeoffs between a testing required and bomb design - a HEU implosion design is substantially more frugal with HEU but riskier (than gun style design) technically especially without testing. It's unclear to me how much use of an implosion design reduces the time-to-first-device in a crash program. At any rate the 3 year figure seems to cover this.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 22.01.2006 @ 14:52
