The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Too much to read today

I've had a bunch of tasks and a mid-afternoon meeting, so I didn't get a chance to read all of these yet:

Finally, close to me, after the lovely Grafton Pub closed last August, the Old Town School of Folk Music stepped in to buy the space. But that plan has hit a snag after a higher bidder emerged.

We broke it and didn't buy it

Twenty years ago today, the United States invaded a neutral country that hadn't taken a shot at us for over a decade. This had predictable results for the region, including making our long-time adversary Iran a major player:

The invasion “was the original sin,” said Emile Hokayem, a senior fellow for Middle East security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a British think tank. “It helped Iran bolster its position by being a predator in Iraq. It’s where Iran perfected the use of violence and militias to obtain its goals. It eroded the U.S.’s image. It led to fragmentation in the region.”

All of that was enabled by the political changes that the American invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, set in motion. Later on, the 2014 takeover of a large swathe of northern Iraq by the Islamic State terrorist group prompted Iraq to turn to Iran as well as the United States for help, cementing Iran’s grip.

Under the Iraqi dictatorship, the Sunni minority had formed the base of Mr. Hussein’s power; once he was killed, Iran set up loyal militias inside Iraq. It also went on to dismay Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf monarchies and Israel by supporting proxies and partners, such as the Houthi militia in Yemen, that brought violence right to their doorsteps.

People on my side of things in 2003 felt incandescent rage at President Bush and Secretary of State Powell lying through their teeth about Iraq's supposed cache of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Robert Wright points out that the invasion's premises were already dishonest, since the United Nations was already there doing what we claimed our invasion would do:

The fog of time makes it easy to lose sight of one of the most amazing facts about that war: In order to invade Iraq and start looking for weapons of mass destruction, the US had to first kick out UN inspectors who were in Iraq looking for weapons of mass destruction.

And they’d been looking intensively! Over the previous four months they had inspected more than 500 sites and found no WMDs and no signs of a WMD program.

Given that those inspected sites included the sites US intelligence agencies had deemed most likely to yield paydirt, this result—zero-for-500—suggested to the attentive observer that information coming from the US government about Saddam Hussein’s activities was not to be trusted.

But let’s leave that aside. Suppose the US government hadn’t been thus discredited—suppose that on the eve of the invasion there was still good reason to think that WMDs were out there somewhere. Why not let the UN inspectors—who had been allowed by the Iraqi government to inspect every site they had asked to inspect—keep looking? There just isn’t an answer to this question that holds water. 

By dividing our attention between Iraq and Afghanistan, we failed to accomplish any of our claimed long-term goals in either country—and made the world a much more dangerous place in the process.

Happy anniversary.

Following up on a few things

Perhaps the first day of spring brings encourages some spring cleaning? Or at least, revisiting stories of the recent and more distant past:

  • The Navy has revisited how it names ships, deciding that naming United States vessels after events or people from a failed rebellion doesn't quite work. As a consequence, the guided missile cruiser USS Chancellorsville (CG-62, named after a Confederate victory) will become the USS Robert Smalls, named after the former slave who stole the CSS Planter right from Charleston Harbor in 1862.
  • Author John Scalzi revisited whether to stay on Twitter, given its "hot racist right-wing trash" owner, and decides why not? It's not like Musk will ever benefit financially from the app.
  • Charles Blow revisited the (long overdue) defenestration of cartoonist Scott Adams, deciding it doesn't matter whether Adams was lazy or stupid, throwing him out the window was appropriate.
  • Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul revisited the Equal Rights Amendment, but the DC Circuit Court of Appeals decided yesterday not to.
  • WBEZ revisited the only other two Chicago Mayors who lost their re-election bids in the past century, Michael Bilandic and Jane Byrne.
  • A group of US intelligence agencies revisited Havana Syndrome, without finding sufficient evidence to blame either an adversary government or an energy weapon.

Finally, here's a delightful clip of US Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) patiently explaining to Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and her banana-republican party the difference between an adjective and a noun:

Dreary Monday afternoon

The rain has stopped, and might even abate long enough for me to collect Cassie from day camp without getting soaked on my way home. I've completed a couple of cool sub-features for our sprint review tomorrow, so I have a few minutes to read the day's stories:

Finally, Friends of the Chicago Harbor Lighthouse hope to tap into National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act funds to turn their organization's namesake into a museum. That would be cool.

Quod erat iactum

An Illinois hobby group seems to have lost one of its hobbies recently:

The Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, a hobbyist group that launches hydrogen-filled, radio-equipped pico balloons and tracks them as they fly across the world, has declared one of its balloons “missing in action.”

The balloon stopped transmitting signals when it had been set to fly near the area in Canada where a military fighter jet shot down an unidentified object last week.

If the time-and-date fit is more than a coincidence, the balloon never stood a chance: The hobbyists use large, plastic party balloons that cost as little as $13 for their scientific fun; the military reportedly took the UFO out with heat-seeking missiles.

The balloon, identified by the hobbyist club as K9YO, had already circumnavigated the globe six times.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command did not immediately respond to calls and emails requesting asking about the downed object.

Poor little balloon. But hey, it's good to know that a $3m missile can take out a $13 balloon.

Neunundneunzing Luftballons

With everything else going on in the world, the Chinese balloon that the US shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Monday has gotten a lot of attention.

First, Spencer at Legal Eagle takes on the legalities of us shooting it down:

Julia Ioffe too:

The local photography buff raced to get his camera and used it to snap a photo that quickly went viral. “I had posted a couple of photos just to social media, just joking, like I thought I saw a UFO,” the photographer, Chase Doaktold the local news station. “It was just right here. I was literally just right here in the vicinity of my driveway.” 

Well, it seemed that Chase Doak and his camera forced the Biden administration to go public earlier than it wanted—if it wanted to at all. It also didn’t help that the Pentagon scrambled fighter jets to try to shoot the balloon down that afternoon while closing the civilian airport in Billings, only to determine that the debris radius—the undercarriage, the Pentagon later said, was the size of three buses—would be massive. Moreover, the Defense Department wondered, what if, in shooting at the balloon, it merely blew a hole in it, causing it to slowly drift down to the ground for hundreds of miles, landing god knows where? So the generals recommended against shooting at the thing while it was still over land and the jets were called back, but by this point the Chinese balloon was out of the proverbial bag, and held the entire nation in its thrall.

It was the perfect story for this nation of ours. Both parties now agree that China is a threat to U.S. interests and the balloon became a brilliant image and political foil. It allowed Republicans to paint Joe Biden as weak on China for not immediately blasting the thing out of the sky (though they would, I’m sure, have blasted him as reckless for any resulting damage on the ground). And when the Sidewinder did hit its target, shattering the spy balloon over the Carolina coast, it allowed Democrats to show their boss as cool and in control. 

For national security types in D.C., however, it was a deeply weird and somewhat frustrating event. “I really would like fewer news cycles about the balloon,” one Congressional aide who works on intelligence matters groaned. “It’s like this was a TV episode written by Hollywood,” added one former senior national security official. “It’s not the most significant intrusion by the Chinese. They got, like, 5 million Americans’ personal data when they hacked the Office of Personnel Management and they got the SF86’s of everyone who served in the Obama administration,” the official continued, referring to the form one has to fill out to get a security clearance.

Boy, was it. “It’s the length of a narrative arc that Americans can pay attention to,” the official said. “The Ukrainians are coming up on a year of fighting. That’s too long for Americans.” Sad but true.

Meanwhile, the US says the balloon was part of a larger surveillance program:

The surveillance balloon effort, which has operated for several years partly out of Hainan province off China’s south coast, has collected information on military assets in countries and areas of emerging strategic interest to China including Japan, India, Vietnam, Taiwan and the Philippines, according to several U.S. officials, who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

While most of China’s long-range surveillance efforts are conducted by its expanding military satellite array, PLA planners have identified what they consider to be an opportunity to conduct surveillance from the upper atmosphere at altitudes above where commercial jets fly, using balloons that fly between 60,000 and 80,000 feet or higher, officials said.

In recent years, at least four balloons have been spotted over Hawaii, Florida, Texas and Guam — in addition to the one tracked last week. Three of the four instances took place during the Trump administration but were only recently identified as Chinese surveillance airships. Other balloons have been spotted in Latin America and allied countries in the Pacific, officials have said.

And, of course, Weekend Update led with it:

 

More black smoke

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has lost his seventh bid for Speaker—nope, eighthwhile Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has amassed more cumulative votes for the office than anyone except Sam Rayburn. Things in the House have become surreal, even without a bad lip reading for levity. As Tom Nichols puts it,

What all of these GOP members do seem to have in common is a shared belief that they should be in Congress in order to make other people miserable. Usually, those “other people” are Democrats and various people on the generic right-wing enemies list, but lately, the targets include the few remaining Republicans who think their job in Washington is to legislate and pass bills and other boring twaddle that has nothing to do with keeping the hometown folks in a lather, getting on television, and getting reelected.

And yet, the XPOTUS remains absent from the proceedings, with both sides of the Republican Party basically ignoring him. His "wishes, feelings, threats, anger and really anything else about him are just completely absent from this entire drama. In a way that is the biggest story here."

Meanwhile, back in the real world:

Finally, the most recent defense authorization bill the outgoing Congress passed last week included a provision promoting Ulysses S Grant to General of the Armies. Only George Washington and John J Pershing have held that rank (O-11).

Probably the last warm day of the year

Cassie and I took a 33-minute walk at lunchtime and we'll take another half-hour or so before dinner as the temperature grazes 14°C this afternoon. Tomorrow and each day following will cool off a bit until Wednesday, the first official day of winter, which will return to normal.

Meanwhile...

Finally, Amazon's ads really have gotten to the point where it's "a tacky strip mall filled with neon signs pointing you in all the wrong directions."

And in just a few hours, I will tuck into this:

I may run out of mason jars though...

Complete pile-up in my "to be read" stack

I've had a busy day. I finally solved the token-authentication problem I've been working on all week for my day job (only to discover another flavor of it after deploying to Azure), while dealing with a plumber ($1600 repair!), an HVAC inspector ($170 inspection!) and my buyer's mortgage appraiser (not my problem!). That left some reading to do tonight:

Finally, despite the crashing temperatures outside my window right now (down 5.5°C in the past 2 hours), Illinois had a pretty dry and mild start to autumn.

If you won't buy my gas, you can't have it anyway

Someone—who, pray, could it be?—apparently blew up two parts of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline that brings gas from Russia to Europe:

European officials on Tuesday launched investigations into possible “sabotage” following three mysterious leaks in the Nord Stream pipelines, built to carry Russian natural gas to Europe, after the system operator reported “unprecedented” damage to the lines in the Baltic Sea.

The damage — which seismic authorities registered as two significant underwater explosions — drew immediate accusations from European leaders that Russia was to blame. They offered no immediate evidence. But some officials suggested it might be revenge for Europe’s efforts to find alternatives to Russian natural gas or a threat that other gas pipelines that crisscross the Baltic Sea were vulnerable — including one inaugurated on Tuesday.

The leaks had no immediate impact on energy supplies to the European Union, since Russia had already cut off gas flows. But gas had remained in the pipes, raising concerns about possible environmental harm from leaking methane — the main component of natural gas and, when in the atmosphere, a major contributor to climate change. Images supplied by the Danish military showed gas bubbles reaching the surface of the water.

A senior European defense official and a European environmental official said that the primary, most obvious suspect behind the leaks was Russia. Russian officials had a motivation: sending a message to Europeans about the consequences of getting gas via the new Baltic pipeline. They also have the capability: a robust submersible program.

“No one on the European side of the ocean is thinking this is anything other than Russian sabotage,” the environmental official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal thinking about the leak.

I expect that the US Navy knows exactly what happened, and the Russian Navy probably knows we know, but it'll take some time for declassified reports filter out to the public. That said, if our navy knows, then we would have shared that info with the UK and most of NATO by now. I'm going to watch what the diplomats say for the next week on this.