Month: June 2006

Saddam WMDs, Support for Terrorism?

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Frontpage.com has an interview with Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney, described as “a retired Air Force Fighter Pilot who has been a Fox News Military Analyst”. Is this guy McInerney reliable? If so this is pretty remarkable stuff:

I just reviewed this additional release of documents. This release continues to confirm that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda were in contact with Iraq intelligence for sanctuary, training, and plans for acts of terrorism against the US and in the US.

McInerney describes videotapes of Saddam meeting with advisors:

…the most telling to me was the conversation between Tariq Aziz his foreign minister and Saddam in which they discussed having proxies implant nuclear and biological weapons in US cities. They concluded that Iraq would be blamed for an explosion but not biological as they could use deception and blame US facility ( Ft Dietrick) which makes me conclude that Iraq was responsible for the anthrax attack in US less than 30 days after 9/11.

And this:

Saddam’s stockpiles of WMDs were moved by a Russian Spetznatz team headed by Yevgeny Primakov, the former Russian Intelligence Chief, who came to Iraq in December 2002 to supervise the final cleanup.

Jim Miller, whom I have always found to be sensible, is taking him seriously.

McInerney is promoting a new book, so maybe is trying to be sensational.

Or maybe this stuff is plausible.

This is the kind of thing I believed before the war.

But can it really just be coming out now, in this level of detail, from this source?

UPDATE:

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Instapundit and the Medici Lesson

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[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

Instapundit has a post up on a book about the Medici and Italian banking:

SO I’VE BEEN READING TIM PARKS’ Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence. It’s a pretty interesting book, with a juxtaposition of prejudices against sodomy and usury (both seen as “against nature”) as a background for the Renaissance.

It’s mostly a history of the Medici banking empire, though, and it’s interesting to see how the bank declined. The problem was the passing of a generation of bankers who loved the work — Cosimo Medici said that he’d remain a banker even if he could make money by waving a wand — and its replacement by those who weren’t terribly interested in the actual work, but rather in the opportunity their jobs provided to hang around with kings, queens, and cardinals. Not surprisingly, things went downhill fast once that happened.

I think that’s a metaphor for politics and journalism today — and a cautionary example for the blogosphere.

Economic historian Joel Mokyr believes that these periods of innovation in technology (hard and soft) can be spotted repeatedly back to the Greeks (see his Gifts of Athena: Origins of the Knowledge Economy reviewed here, and the The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress). The distinction, finally, with the Scientific/Industrial Revolution was that the inevitable rent-seekers couldn’t get an adequate grip and the Malthusian caps were breached. The widening of the “epistemic base” (which Mokyr represents with the symbol omega) was creating usable knowledge (symbol lambda) faster than it could be controlled or stamped out by antagonistic parties. To quote Mokyr: “The broader the epistemic base, the more likely it is that technological progress can be sustained for extended periods before it starts to run into diminishing returns.” A virtuous cycle rather than a negative feedback loop gets established. He’s got a great article on Why was the Industrial Revolution A European Phenomena? available in .PDF format.

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Tribute to a Blogger

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From humble beginnings as an indentured child laborer carrying 100 Lb. sacks of dynamite through the coal mines of Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the heights of his current success as a mega-blogging celebrity lawyer, his story must be told.

“Inspirational.”
–Lexington Green

UPDATE: The awards ceremony!

The Right Advice

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David Foster had an interesting piece up a couple of weeks ago on organizations, using Moltke’s refusal in August 1914 to turn around the troops on the Western Front to attack the East as an example. Moltke was adamant that the plans in place were at the time irreversible, but the German military railway expert later claimed that he could have turned things around. Whether or not the post-hoc analysis was correct, the actual expert, of course, never got to speak with the Kaiser.

This points to one of the problems of organizations as they ossify – that information gets filtered by each layer in the hierarchy as it passes up a silo. Each layer of spin holds the possibility of not so much adding perspective as simply moving the information content further from reality, and in some organizations any resemblance between actual observations and the information contained in top management briefings is purely coincidental. CW’s NoSuchBlog had a nice post up about that same phenomenon at work in the CIA:

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