I was up ludicrously early this morning. Milo woke at 5:45 and tricked me into going and getting him because it was starting to get light. Oh well – sunrise was beautiful. The half moon all red and setting behind the trees in the mist and then the early sun.
Some passing thoughts:
Despite the fact that wars have traditionally involved casualties on both sides as well as accidents and what is now called “friendly fire” the media have decided that these things occurring indicate the war is going badly. There is no answer to this. We are going to win this war (or turkey shoot as Terry Jones described it). We have considerably more fire power and it would appear considerable will to do it. After all we have burnt diplomatic bridges with our allies and Tony Blair has alienated a lot of his supporters to wage this war. By the same token some of our soldiers will die and quite a lot of Iraqi’s will also. What the live tv coverate does is graphically show how unpleasent war is. This can only be a good thing.
Watching Tony Blair and George Bush talking on TV last night brought one thing home very clearly. Either George Bush is a very very poor public speaker and just comes across as clueless OR someone else is pulling the strings. I take back earlier comments about Tony Blair - I think that he is very sincere about this but because he is deeply entrenched in the American view he has had a very hard time communicating this to us. It may well be though that he has made the right decision. Part of me suspects that this war may indeed have been inevitable and that we are better (in terms of numbers of deaths on BOTH sides) having it sooner rather than later. The unfortunate thing from Tony Blairs point of view is that if he is right no one will ever know because the threat will have been removed - I can't imagine Saddam Hussein standing up at the end and saying - "its a fair cop".
If I was in Saddam’s position I would be:
a) blowing up “civilian targets” – houses, leisure centre’s etc. and making sure that these where the only sites that journalists got to see.
b) taking a lesson from the places where the West has had a hard time fighting wars and going in for Guerrilla warfare by abandoning all big military installations and going in for small portable weapons.
c) re-broadcasting western TV coverage as “proof” that things are going badly. For people used to state controlled television they will not have the perspective to see our media for what it is.
d) Perusing the route of asking the UN to stop the war. Given they where unable to support it would at the very least be amusing to put them in the position of having to actively stop it or come out and say – no, actually, we do agree after all.
The only way he is going to be able to save himself is to wage a media war – not the crude propaganda war he is trying via Al-Jazeera but a subtle one that plays on the wests sympathies.
On a more mundane note I seem to have cracked my spam problem with This piece of software. Having trained it for a week or so only the odd thing gets through and it hasn’t thrown away anything I wanted to keep for several days now. Highly recommended.
Posted by Mark at March 24, 2003 02:15 PMCool bit of free kit. Was using mailwasher, but that was too much like hard work. When it's up to speed, this could be very handy.
Posted by: Rick at March 25, 2003 09:57 PM