...was the salute of the gladiators to the Emperor immediately before they began combat. (Though, in many more cases than the average Joe, influenced by Hollywood's version of life in the arena, thinks, the fights were not to the death)

I wonder how it tranlates into Arabic? It seems that the phrase could come in handy for some diehard denizens of Baghdad.

"Those Who Are About To Die Salute You!"

This isn't news to me, as I wrote the same damn thing a few weeks ago, and have thought that for months. While I'd like to beat on my chest and claim clairvoyance, it's a fairly obvious predidction for anyone the least bit familiar with matters martial to make.

There is a more important, and difficult question. What are we going to do about it? I've been thinking quite a bit about this, and here's what I would say to Bush43 if I could get his ear for five minutes:

"We need to start the psyops now. Yesterday, two weeks ago, in fact, and for a few reasons.

One, is to get the civilians out. If they start now, some at least will be able to pack up and go before Saddam catches on. It'll be too late once our divisions are massed on the border. By then, Saddam will have the city locked up tight, and it will mean death for any Iraqi civilian to try and escape. Saddam needs his human shields, and he needs his citizens to die wholesale for the TV cameras, so he can try and drum up world opinion to stop the US Army tearing Baghdad apart brick by brick until we put his head on a pike.

The first combat air missions over Baghdad need to be dropping leaflets, not bombs. And they need to say exactly the opposite of what your dad told the world. He took pains to point out that GWI was not about Saddam. You need to say that's exactly who and what it's about. Let them know that you're willing to let him surrender peacefully, and go live out his life on Diego Garcia in comfortable exile. Make sure Saddam knows that offer ends after the first US serviceman dies in the war.

Saddam can bluster all he wants to the people about how he'll win this war, but when the Iraqi people see that he can't even stop the paper from raining down, they'll start wondering how he's gonna stop the shrapnel.

Oh, and forget all this idiotic surgical attack on Baghdad stuff. You try that and all you're going to have is a bunch of good men cut off. It'll make Mogadishu look like a paintball game. Bring 250,000 to this party, more if you can, and make sure the Iraqi street knows it.

Second, we need to start, in the minds of his troops, the process of delinking Saddam's survival from their own. His rank and file have already decided to fold as soon as they can. It's the hard-core troops, the Guards, that we need to work on, hopefully until only those few hundred of his fanatics are left to fight for him.

So, George, start beating the drum. Beat it so loud and hard that they cannot help but hear you on the streets of Baghdad. I don't care if the first airborne assault is on the HQ of Al-Jazeera news network - take control of the airwaves, radio and TV. Hack into his networks - you've only got the best geeks on the planet at hand. Start treating his people to the preview GWII vidclips, coming soon to a city near you. I'm sure we've got lots of footage from your dad's combat interruptus to use, and maybe you can get some of those Hollywood FX wizards to gin you up some more modern-looking stuff, with the latest weapons. Hollywood doesn't like you, but it's been proven they'll do anything for money.

Make sure you tell them that Saddam is going to gas them. You can bet he's not going to warn them. Reinforce the lesson with some of those pics of the casualties from the war with Iran, and from when he gassed the Kurds. Show them clips of the Iraqis surrendering in masse in GWI. Promise humane treatment if they surrender, and lots of aid for the country afterwards. The carrot and the stick.

Lie, fake 'em out. Make 'em think you've gotten pissed off, gone crazy. They're used to that in the Middle East. Chew on some carpet if you have to. If you're not that good an actor, find an actor that looks like you, and have him do it. Threaten to nuke the city if Saddam uses his WMD.

The world will go nuts, but what the hell are they gonna do about it? The press will jump you like Slick Willie on an intern when Hilary's not lookin', but it's tough to be the leader of the free world, and you have to have a thick skin. That flak you'll catch ain't harder than dyin'. You can always write in your memoirs later you never really meant it. The only people that won't believe you are the ones that hate you already anyway.

I really don't care if you do use a nuke, and I don't think most of the people in the US do, either. Use it to scare the hell out of them. Consider popping a little bitty one outside Baghdad, in the desert, far enough away not to hurt them, but close enough for them to see it. An airburst at the right altitude will mean little or no fallout.

Or maybe the bright boys at Aberdeen can help you rig up the world's largest fuel air bomb. Get it big enough, drop it a little closer, and it'll look like a small nuke. That one you can let the fireball touch the ground for that good ol' mushroom cloud look. Hell, forget the dropping. You can wheel it in if you need to, and build it in place.

Don't waste any more time trying to make the case against Saddam. There's no one anywhere, in any country, that has not already made up his mind, and nothing you can do will change them. Just go to Congress, and ask for a flat out declaration of total war. They'll give it to you. They've read the polls, and know that We The People will have their asses for a ham sandwhich if they don't.

But all this may not work, so you better get the American people ready for a tough one. Tell them before we go any farther that it might mean a whole damn bunch of sons and fathers coming home in body bags before it's all over. You owe it to them.

Because if all this bluster and intimidation don't work, if the Guards don't rout, and it comes down to a house-to-house, brick-by-brick knifefight, we're gonna lose about ten thousand troops, maybe more, and the Iraqis are gonna lose about ten time that many, with an awful lot of those being civilians.

That's an awful lot of people dying just because you don't like the taste of carpet."

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The New Face of Terror

Since 9/11, airports here in the US have gone through any number of changes, supposedly to enhance our security. I'll not run down the list, as I think we're all aware of the changes.

I will point out, that in spite of their added costs, both in direct security expenditures, and indirect social costs in delays, increased time spent waiting in the airport, etc., that we are no safer in the air or at the terminals than we were this time last year.

The Dirty Little Secret that they don't want you to know is that the new procedures put in place are meant to actually increase only your sense of security, and not the reality. The biggest problem after 9/11 the airlines faced was to get folks back flying again. This has been approached not as a problem of security, but one of marketing. So, the procedures put into place were the ones that were the most visible to the flying public, not the ones that keep us the safest.

For example, there are no plans, even today, to put into effect two measures that would keep us safer from the greatest danger we now face - not more 9/11 style hijackers, but a bomb loaded into the cargo department of the plane.

The Israeli airline, El Al, puts every single piece of loaded cargo in an airtight chamber. The air is pumped out of it, to simulate the air pressure decrease of the plane reaching it's normal cruising altitude. This will safely detonate any bomb rigged with a fuse designed to go off at altitude, the most common and effective way to rig such a device.

Cargo loaded onto passenger airplanes goes into large, somewhat flimsy, metal containers. The ones used here in the US have been designed to be as strong and light as possible, for reasons of economy. As a consequence, they offer little protection from any explosion that occurs inside them, being, in fact, little more than a convenient source of additional shrapnel. There are manufacturers of these containers that make a much stronger version, using materials such as Kevlar, that can contain or greatly diminish the blast of any reasonably sized bomb a terrorist might smuggle aboard. In nothing else, they would force the terrorists to use much larger bombs, making the task of detecting them much easier. As it is, a bomb of less than a pound can easily take down a passenger plane.

The airlines have repeated rejected the use of these blast-resistant containers, on the grounds of increased cost.

Neither of these proposals would seem as needed, were the airlines going to meet the requirement laid upon them to have each piece of baggage examined before being loaded onto the plane. Of course, they are not going to meet this deadline, again citing the lack of time, equipment, and resources.

So, as they're confiscating your tweezers and fingernail clippers, making you check-in two and three hours before your takeoff time, and asking you if you packed your own luggage (surely the most foolproof security precaution known to man) keep in mind that there are no procedures in place to keep a terrorist from blithely stuffing a bomb into his suitcase, and having it placed unexamined into the cargo hold of the plane. We do intend to take great pains to use, at considerable expense, a baggage matching system, designed to make sure that the terrorist has to get on the plane with that bomb, so the terrorist would have to be suicidal to do such a thing, but, oh, yeah, there seem to be a few of those around.

Compound this with the fact that those in charge of airport security seem to have been recruited from the dullest of those swimming in the shallow end of the gene pool. I've an embarrassment of riches to chose from as examples here, so I'll just pick one that happened to be in my inbox this morning.

The BBC reports that security officials at LAX took exception to a Britsh woman's GI Joe doll. It seems that Joe was carrying a two-inch long plastic battle rifle, which, I presume, the suck-urity dullards there though could be used to intimidate the crew and hijack the plane.

One of these newly-federalized intellectual giants is quoted as saying ""We have instructions to confiscate anything that looks like a weapon or a replica. If GI Joe was carrying a replica then it had to be taken from him."

I feel so much safer now. Until such time as these idiots can somehow stumble across a clue, this is one American that will be driving on his vacations.

[Addenddum - Aug 7, 2002: A friend of mine was going to Mexico on vacation today, and flying out of IAH. (Houston Intercontinental) As she was having to cool her heels there for a few hours, I offered to meet her for a drink. (She's purty easy on the eyes)

I happened to be riding the little underground shuttle that takes you between terminals with a pilot. He flew for Continental. I told him of the LAX GI Joe fiasco. He looked around at the other passengers in the car, and said, "I can't really tell you my opinions about that when I'm in uniform."

At the next stop the other passengers got off, and he went to ranting. He said that I would not believe what he saw the security morons do every single day. He then proceeded to tell me of them searching a law enforcement officer, one who was allowed to carry a weapon on board, who was in fact wearing his pistol, and watching them, get this, confiscate his tweezers!

I swear to fucking dog I am not making this up, though I don't blame anyone of you that doesn't believe me. I don't think I would in your (hopefully not stuffed with Semtex) shoes.]

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I just finished reading a thought-provoking essay on Jacksonian influences on American culture and politics, via a link found on Steven Den Beste's site. The entire article is rather long, but worth it, to me anyway. Of course, I've always thought that Jackson was one of the greatest presidents, and not given his props these days. :-)

A sample quote to pique your interest: "Jacksonians are instinctively democratic and populist. Hamiltonians mistrust democracy; Wilsonians don’t approve of the political rough and tumble. And while Jeffersonians support democracy in principle, they remain concerned that tyrannical majorities can overrule minority rights. Jacksonians believe that the political and moral instincts of the American people are sound and can be trusted, and that the simpler and more direct the process of government is, the better will be the results. In general, while the other schools welcome the representative character of our democracy, Jacksonians tend to see representative rather than direct institutions as necessary evils, and to believe that governments breed corruption and inefficiency the way picnics breed ants. Every administration will be corrupt; every Congress and legislature will be, to some extent, the plaything of lobbyists. Career politicians are inherently untrustworthy; if it spends its life buzzing around the outhouse, it’s probably a fly. Jacksonians see corruption as human nature and, within certain ill-defined boundaries of reason and moderation, an inevitable by-product of government.

Disclaimer: once again, it's long, and prolly of more interest to political science junkies more than anyone else. But if you're a European that doesn't quite understand why things like the ICC smell bad to the citizenry here, or why we seem to be marching unilaterally off to war in the streets of Baghdad, this article will go a long way towards helping you understand these positions, even though it may not persuade you of their ultimate validity.

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