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India's Bargain Supercomputer
MaximusTheGreat writes "India beat U.S. supercomputer sanctions by building a teraflop $5 million PARAM Padma supercomputer, which is half the price of similar computers being sold in the international market. It can be scaled upto 16 teraflops, on a build-to-order basis For comparison, the fastest supercomputer in the U.S. is about 10 Teraflops. Some techical details and more info on CDAC , ITworld, Economic times and Asia Times. Also, India has been exporting older model PARAM 10000s to other countries like Russia, Canada, Germany etc. for some time, and expects to increase exports significantly with the new model PARAM Padma."
The article says it was built with ibm power4 chips operating at 1ghz. What I am wondering is this - if the US gov't decides to get upset about this will they prohibit IBM from selling power4 chips to the company that makes these supercomputers?
And of those of you interested in the power 4 check out this page. A pretty cool chip from what I can tell...
America has sanctions against supercomputers? Why?
THey have export restrictions against supercomputers yes. Unless the sale is approved by (department of commerce?) some government agency. The reason is that supercomputers can (potentially) be used for all sorts of nefarious acts like biological warfare, nuclear weapons, rocketry, decryption, etc, etc. They have similar restrictions on all sorts of technology that could be used by another country (unfriendly) to develop weapons.
What would happen if someone brought one from India to the US and then sold it back to India? Would that person get arrested?
So those fiendish Indians won't be able to simulate nuclear warhead tests, that's why. If they could do that, they could BUILD a working one...errr....no, wait...If they can't simulate, the only way to test improvements in warhead yield is by detonating a warhead for real, and that's better because....hmmmm...
Ya got me. Why don't we want India to have a supercomputer?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
It's amazing what pressure can do for you. Until a few years, we were denied technology for building supercomputers by the west. This forced CDAC to work on such technology from scratch.
Likewise for most of India's rocket programme (albeit with the occasional help from Russia) and other technology. When pushed to the limits, you outperform yourself.
I'm sorry, but I have to insist that you can't add a bunch of PC's together, and end up with the equivalent of a general purpose supercomputer.
These so-called "supercomputers" only have the performance of a supercomputer on the class of problems which are inherently parallelizable. For problems which require serialization, by needing results in hand to go onto the next step in the calculation, these things slow down to the speed of one of the component PC's.
I guess now that Seymore Cray has died, no one else can build real supercomputers. 8-(.
-- Terry
And India IS nuclear and has a fairly stable government. The U.S. or U.N. will be hard pressed to tell them "bad". Plus I really wouldn't mind their nuclear program going digital, a little less radiation in the morning breeze. They're going to do nuke research no matter what, might as well encourage them to not blow shit up in the process.
To top it off, why is it exactly we, as THE U.S. feel we can be top dawg and keep everyone else down. India, like the U.S., has quite a bit of poverty and it really wouldn't hurt to encourage them to look towards bettering themselves and their people. (nuclear research can actually be used for things other than building bombs ...)
In the tech world there are no borders, and this really pisses the old schoolers off. We're not going to do anything except identify they broke a sanction trust me we've picked enough fights to last us a while ... plus just think about the benchmarks they'll get on that baby ... it will just kick the shit outta everyone else at the U.N. LAN parties ...
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Oh, really. And at the same time US exports lots of weapons to all over the world, including Iraq and Taliban.
I wonder, have such sanctions really peaceful reasons or they are just a political instrument to protect economical interests of US weapon corporations?
Less is more !
Since a lot of people are asking about the sanctions on India, here is some info froma superc omp/
http://www.itworld.com/Comp/1437/021217indi
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India is included in the Tier 3 of the U.S. HPC Export Control Policy of the U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC). Although the U.S. government relaxed in March this year the upper performance limit of computers that could be exported to India from 85,000 MTOPS (millions of theoretical operations per second) to 190,000 MTOPS, imports of supercomputers comparable to the new 1 TFLOP computer designed by C-DAC are still restricted, according to Arora. "The performance of the PARAM Padma in terms of MTOPS is in the vicinity of 500,000 MTOPS," Arora added.
__________
Its better because its really hard to hide a detonation, for obvious reasons. While this is certainly not an ideal situation, at least it is supposed to ensure that the world knows who the nuclear powers are. Using computer modeling, a country could develop and test a nuclear weapon without anyone knowing. I think the idea is that its better to blow up some desert scrub land, than a major city as the first indication that the country or group has nuclear weapons.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
The Indian government prohibits exporting this supercomputer to the US because it can be used by terrorists.
Seems to have been in the news lately. From Bill Gates to hand held computers - it seems to have seen a lot lately. A short summary -
(1) Bill Gates and India
The AIDS donations, and yah, maybe source code sharing and Windows for a bargain.
(2) The Simputer A handheld pc that runs on Linux and is available for a bargain.
(3) Reliance and CDMA
Reliance has launched a WLL based mobile phone system which promises high bandwidth, JAVA enabled advanced telephony. AT pathetically low prices !!!!
(4) The Param Padma
A 16 teraflop supercomputer, faster than many others available.
Coming to think of it, a developing nation seems to have more to look forward to than a developed nation!! That also reminds me that the brain behind many Intel chips is Indian. India lacks infrastructure/proper governance/organization. But it looks like Nostradamus's prophecy of India becoming a superpower may come true... within the next few years.
|/________
|\A|ALYS|
This perfectly illustrates how bad things have gotten technology wise in the U.S. People stick their heads in the sand and say over and over like a mantra: "The U.S. leads the world in technology". Well, bucko, it hasn't been so for quite a while!....AND let me clue you into something: Unless the education system and the corporate structures change here in the U.S. of A, it's gonna get worse. Much worse. Right now, Americans have one of the worst education systems in the world. Even Canada, who we like to put down as being scrawny, kicks our ass in terms of the numbers of literate people coming out of schools today. The same is true in most European countries and Japan, and yes even in places like India. Add to this the corporate attitude here that the next quarter's 'guidance' is all the matters, and you have the recipe for failure. And failure is what's happening. Look at the examples. The U.S. developed the Internet, yet who has more computers per capita and a better infrascructure? South Korea. What country has had computers and the net in all their schools for years? Canada. Yet here we pat each other on the back because we might have half the schools wired by 2005. We're pathetic. Another big problem here is the politics here. We truly believe that we're the world's Police Department, so we spend large fortunes on military hardware instead of food and health care and education for our kids. All the Patriot missles and bombs in the world won't help us in the future. Our future is our children and we'd better well start worrying about feeding, clothing, keeping them healthy and educating them well then making more bombs.
"I Wonder if some of the Indian exports assisted in DPRK weapons systems development?"
;) Sometimes the American ignorance about India appalls me.
This is such a naive statement that shows you really know very little about India! First of all India is a responsible sensible democratic nation that unlike much of the sillyness of the cold war never aligned itself with either side and was a leader of the Non Aligned Movement (NAM) (Which was an organization that thumbed its nose at NATO and Warsaw pact). India has a history of never sharing sensitive technology with rogue nations. India has been doing space/nuclear/computer technology for a long time now (many decades) never mind that most common westerners are getting to hear about it now only (e.g. Did you know we first exploded a nuclear bomb in 1974?) On top of all this DPRK is an ally of Pakistan having supplied the Paki's rockets in return for Nuclear bomb tech. The Paki's can't make a thing on their own. They stole most of nuclear tech from Europe on the sly and got all their missile tech from DPRK. India would never even have decent relations with countries so much in bed with undemocratic islamic radicalists and terrorist infested Pakistan. Please read a bit more of a background research about India and South Asia before wondering such silly things. Is that too much to expect from a Pullitzer Prize winning professor?
Still no evidence of weapons export to Iraq.
The US exported chemical and biological agents, machine tools and ammo to Iraq in the mid- to late-1980s. See, for example here, here, and here. The third link is especially relevant to this topic because it claims that supercomputers were given to Iraq.
Incidentally, this is all in the public record in the States. You shouldn't even need to FOIA for the information.
These so-called "supercomputers" only have the performance of a supercomputer on the class of problems which are inherently parallelizable.
:-)
Sure, but that was also true in Seymore Cray's day. Admittedly his machines provided substantially better scalar performance than normal mainframes did at the time, but their rated "supercomputer" performance was only obtainable by operating on multiple datasets simultaneously using vector operations. If your problem wasn't parallelizable, your investment was largely wasted. Fortunately, there is no lack of real-world problems that are inherently parallel.
It's worth noting also that conventional single-machine performance is inherently limited by a number of very strong physical constraints, primarily the speed of light and device leakage currents as transistor geometries become ever smaller. This really leaves us nowhere to go for pure sequential computation speedup. Quantum computers will probably live in a single box to reduce decoherence, but even they require problem breakdown into parallel solutions.
Hence the move away from scalar performance and towards multiprocessor, cluster, and distributed computing. With SETI@home delivering around 15 Teraflops on their specific problem at the distributed end of the spectrum, and with the PARAM Padma's IBM Power4 providing 2 processors per chip and 8 processors per module directly out of the IBM fabs even before assembly of multiprocessors and clusters commences, clearly computation is heading towards a future of high parallelism. And about time.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Islamic fundamentalism is one good reason. Other then that, we have history: It is Pakistan that has always attacked India. Three times, methinks, although I'll let other supply the years.
There current "ruler" himself attacked even when their PM was holding peace talks.
Pakistan is a military/Islamic dictatorship, one religion; India a democracy, cultural meltpot.
Successive Pakistani regimes have shown they have no qualms about speaking lies and twisting the truth as long as it serves the purpose of fueling the hate against India. The Art of War: In an extremist enviornment, the more extreme or radical your position, the more powerful you become. Same happened in the Talibanesque Islam. Many other examples too.
Pakistan is a nation which, IMHO, has it's identity derived from one fact alone : enemy of India. They have hardly any progress to cheer about, even when you compare to India, and that is saying something.
Large parts of Pakistan's NWFP are actually not exactly under administrative control of the government. Fundamentalism/tribals rule.
Pakistan is the haven for criminal activities. Daewood Ebrahim, belived to be one of the richest persons in the world, operates from Pakistan, through ISI support. Islamic terrorists, in NWFP, who hijacked Indian Airline aircraft were recently discharged from house arrest!
Pakistan's armed forces can't be trusted. Their generals keep popping off democratically elected governments. They also eliminate their own Generals. Figures. Large section of Army commanders and ISI are sympathetic to the "Islamic cause". Imagine, in such a situation, what a commander with nuke trigger might do. He'll launch the "Islamic bomb" against India to ensure martyrdom for himself and his "religion".
And fuck up millions of people. That's why Pakistan is more likely to "lose it" than India.
If the USA hasn't attacked Pakistan like Afghanistan, it is because of some reasons:
1. We need(ed) a base to carry out operation in Afghanistan against Taliban & Co.
2. Fear of Nuclear holocaust.
3. The fact that Pakistan is the centre of Islamic terrorism. Smartly enough, the Bush administration is actually using the military dictator/self appointed president to track down and destroy Al-Qaeda network.
Or that, atleast, is the public line.
Certainly, we have managed to nab a few top Al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan. Reports keep coming how Osama is only a grasp away. In Feburary, he was almost nabbed; ran away just an hour before a joint raid by US intelligence and ISI. Go figure.
Of course, we are not pressuring Pakistan to dismantle the Islamic terrorist organizations that operate in India. Not unless this business of Al-Qaeda is done with. There are disturbing reports that Al-Qaeda is regrouping in Karachi (the crime capital of the World) and planning to "utilize" the emotions once US attacks Iraq to launch more attacks against US/India/Israeli targets. Let's see.
Most technology really only requires a bit of drive and a few smart people to develop. Hell, that's where it came from in the first place.
Most of America's restrictions on exporting tech overtly rely on the concept that America is just better and smarter than anyone else.
Bull puckies.
If America wants to maintain any sort of commercial lead in technology it has to distribute it in such a way that it's just plain easier and cheaper to *buy* it than develop it yourself.
As Goethe noted, everything has been thought of, the trick is to think of it again. The historical evidence is clear that anything America can think of so can China, Russia, England, Germany, etc.
Oh. Wait, as often as not these countries think of things *first* and America has to play catch-up.
The idea that you can 'restrict' technology is just plain doofey. If you can figure something out so can hundreds of thousands of others.
So go for it India. Think of stuff, build stuff, develop 'home grown' free software, put the screws to American 'tech' companies and make its government sweat bullets.
Maybe it'll get the country off its ass again, like Russia did when it launched a satellite years before anyone thought it would be possible.
Anything but this damned brand name pushing, marketroid driven 'economy' we've got now.
KFG
High on the Bush administration's list of justifications for war against Iraq are President Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons, nuclear and biological programs, and his contacts with international terrorists. What U.S. officials rarely acknowledge is that these offenses date back to a period when Hussein was seen in Washington as a valued ally.
Among the people instrumental in tilting U.S. policy toward Baghdad during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war was Donald H. Rumsfeld, now defense secretary, whose December 1983 meeting with Hussein as a special presidential envoy paved the way for normalization of U.S.-Iraqi relations. Declassified documents show that Rumsfeld traveled to Baghdad at a time when Iraq was using chemical weapons on an "almost daily" basis in defiance of international conventions.
The story of U.S. involvement with Saddam Hussein in the years before his 1990 attack on Kuwait -- which included large-scale intelligence sharing, supply of cluster bombs through a Chilean front company, and facilitating Iraq's acquisition of chemical and biological precursors -- is a topical example of the underside of U.S. foreign policy. It is a world in which deals can be struck with dictators, human rights violations sometimes overlooked, and accommodations made with arms proliferators, all on the principle that the "enemy of my enemy is my friend."
Throughout the 1980s, Hussein's Iraq was the sworn enemy of Iran, then still in the throes of an Islamic revolution. U.S. officials saw Baghdad as a bulwark against militant Shiite extremism and the fall of pro-American states such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and even Jordan -- a Middle East version of the "domino theory" in Southeast Asia. That was enough to turn Hussein into a strategic partner and for U.S. diplomats in Baghdad to routinely refer to Iraqi forces as "the good guys," in contrast to the Iranians, who were depicted as "the bad guys."
A review of thousands of declassified government documents and interviews with former policymakers shows that U.S. intelligence and logistical support played a crucial role in shoring up Iraqi defenses against the "human wave" attacks by suicidal Iranian troops. The administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous items that had both military and civilian applications, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague.
Opinions differ among Middle East experts and former government officials about the pre-Iraqi tilt, and whether Washington could have done more to stop the flow to Baghdad of technology for building weapons of mass destruction.
"It was a horrible mistake then, but we have got it right now," says Kenneth M. Pollack, a former CIA military analyst and author of "The Threatening Storm," which makes the case for war with Iraq. "My fellow [CIA] analysts and I were warning at the time that Hussein was a very nasty character. We were constantly fighting the State Department."
"Fundamentally, the policy was justified," argues David Newton, a former U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, who runs an anti-Hussein radio station in Prague. "We were concerned that Iraq should not lose the war with Iran, because that would have threatened Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. Our long-term hope was that Hussein's government would become less repressive and more responsible."
What makes present-day Hussein different from the Hussein of the 1980s, say Middle East experts, is the mellowing of the Iranian revolution and the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait that transformed the Iraqi dictator, almost overnight, from awkward ally into mortal enemy. In addition, the United States itself has changed. As a result of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, U.S. policymakers take a much more alarmist view of the threat posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
U.S. Shifts in Iran-Iraq WarWhen the Iran-Iraq war began in September 1980, with an Iraqi attack across the Shatt al Arab waterway that leads to the Persian Gulf, the United States was a bystander. The United States did not have diplomatic relations with either Baghdad or Tehran. U.S. officials had almost as little sympathy for Hussein's dictatorial brand of Arab nationalism as for the Islamic fundamentalism espoused by Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. As long as the two countries fought their way to a stalemate, nobody in Washington was disposed to intervene.
By the summer of 1982, however, the strategic picture had changed dramatically. After its initial gains, Iraq was on the defensive, and Iranian troops had advanced to within a few miles of Basra, Iraq's second largest city. U.S. intelligence information suggested the Iranians might achieve a breakthrough on the Basra front, destabilizing Kuwait, the Gulf states, and even Saudi Arabia, thereby threatening U.S. oil supplies.
"You have to understand the geostrategic context, which was very different from where we are now," said Howard Teicher, a former National Security Council official, who worked on Iraqi policy during the Reagan administration. "Realpolitik dictated that we act to prevent the situation from getting worse."
To prevent an Iraqi collapse, the Reagan administration supplied battlefield intelligence on Iranian troop buildups to the Iraqis, sometimes through third parties such as Saudi Arabia. The U.S. tilt toward Iraq was enshrined in National Security Decision Directive 114 of Nov. 26, 1983, one of the few important Reagan era foreign policy decisions that still remains classified. According to former U.S. officials, the directive stated that the United States would do "whatever was necessary and legal" to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran.
The presidential directive was issued amid a flurry of reports that Iraqi forces were using chemical weapons in their attempts to hold back the Iranians. In principle, Washington was strongly opposed to chemical warfare, a practice outlawed by the 1925 Geneva Protocol. In practice, U.S. condemnation of Iraqi use of chemical weapons ranked relatively low on the scale of administration priorities, particularly compared with the all-important goal of preventing an Iranian victory.
Thus, on Nov. 1, 1983, a senior State Department official, Jonathan T. Howe, told Secretary of State George P. Shultz that intelligence reports showed that Iraqi troops were resorting to "almost daily use of CW" against the Iranians. But the Reagan administration had already committed itself to a large-scale diplomatic and political overture to Baghdad, culminating in several visits by the president's recently appointed special envoy to the Middle East, Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Secret talking points prepared for the first Rumsfeld visit to Baghdad enshrined some of the language from NSDD 114, including the statement that the United States would regard "any major reversal of Iraq's fortunes as a strategic defeat for the West." When Rumsfeld finally met with Hussein on Dec. 20, he told the Iraqi leader that Washington was ready for a resumption of full diplomatic relations, according to a State Department report of the conversation. Iraqi leaders later described themselves as "extremely pleased" with the Rumsfeld visit, which had "elevated U.S.-Iraqi relations to a new level."
In a September interview with CNN, Rumsfeld said he "cautioned" Hussein about the use of chemical weapons, a claim at odds with declassified State Department notes of his 90-minute meeting with the Iraqi leader. A Pentagon spokesman, Brian Whitman, now says that Rumsfeld raised the issue not with Hussein, but with Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz. The State Department notes show that he mentioned it largely in passing as one of several matters that "inhibited" U.S. efforts to assist Iraq.
Rumsfeld has also said he had "nothing to do" with helping Iraq in its war against Iran. Although former U.S. officials agree that Rumsfeld was not one of the architects of the Reagan administration's tilt toward Iraq -- he was a private citizen when he was appointed Middle East envoy -- the documents show that his visits to Baghdad led to closer U.S.-Iraqi cooperation on a wide variety of fronts. Washington was willing to resume diplomatic relations immediately, but Hussein insisted on delaying such a step until the following year.
As part of its opening to Baghdad, the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the State Department terrorism list in February 1982, despite heated objections from Congress. Without such a move, Teicher says, it would have been "impossible to take even the modest steps we were contemplating" to channel assistance to Baghdad. Iraq -- along with Syria, Libya and South Yemen -- was one of four original countries on the list, which was first drawn up in 1979.
Some former U.S. officials say that removing Iraq from the terrorism list provided an incentive to Hussein to expel the Palestinian guerrilla leader Abu Nidal from Baghdad in 1983. On the other hand, Iraq continued to play host to alleged terrorists throughout the '80s. The most notable was Abu Abbas, leader of the Palestine Liberation Front, who found refuge in Baghdad after being expelled from Tunis for masterminding the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro, which resulted in the killing of an elderly American tourist.
Iraq Lobbies for ArmsWhile Rumsfeld was talking to Hussein and Aziz in Baghdad, Iraqi diplomats and weapons merchants were fanning out across Western capitals for a diplomatic charm offensive-cum-arms buying spree. In Washington, the key figure was the Iraqi chargé d'affaires, Nizar Hamdoon, a fluent English speaker who impressed Reagan administration officials as one of the most skillful lobbyists in town.
"He arrived with a blue shirt and a white tie, straight out of the mafia," recalled Geoffrey Kemp, a Middle East specialist in the Reagan White House. "Within six months, he was hosting suave dinner parties at his residence, which he parlayed into a formidable lobbying effort. He was particularly effective with the American Jewish community."
One of Hamdoon's favorite props, says Kemp, was a green Islamic scarf allegedly found on the body of an Iranian soldier. The scarf was decorated with a map of the Middle East showing a series of arrows pointing toward Jerusalem. Hamdoon used to "parade the scarf" to conferences and congressional hearings as proof that an Iranian victory over Iraq would result in "Israel becoming a victim along with the Arabs."
According to a sworn court affidavit prepared by Teicher in 1995, the United States "actively supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure Iraq had the military weaponry required." Teicher said in the affidavit that former CIA director William Casey used a Chilean company, Cardoen, to supply Iraq with cluster bombs that could be used to disrupt the Iranian human wave attacks. Teicher refuses to discuss the affidavit.
At the same time the Reagan administration was facilitating the supply of weapons and military components to Baghdad, it was attempting to cut off supplies to Iran under "Operation Staunch." Those efforts were largely successful, despite the glaring anomaly of the 1986 Iran-contra scandal when the White House publicly admitted trading arms for hostages, in violation of the policy that the United States was trying to impose on the rest of the world.
Although U.S. arms manufacturers were not as deeply involved as German or British companies in selling weaponry to Iraq, the Reagan administration effectively turned a blind eye to the export of "dual use" items such as chemical precursors and steel tubes that can have military and civilian applications. According to several former officials, the State and Commerce departments promoted trade in such items as a way to boost U.S. exports and acquire political leverage over Hussein.
When United Nations weapons inspectors were allowed into Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, they compiled long lists of chemicals, missile components, and computers from American suppliers, including such household names as Union Carbide and Honeywell, which were being used for military purposes.
A 1994 investigation by the Senate Banking Committee turned up dozens of biological agents shipped to Iraq during the mid-'80s under license from the Commerce Department, including various strains of anthrax, subsequently identified by the Pentagon as a key component of the Iraqi biological warfare program. The Commerce Department also approved the export of insecticides to Iraq, despite widespread suspicions that they were being used for chemical warfare.
The fact that Iraq was using chemical weapons was hardly a secret. In February 1984, an Iraqi military spokesman effectively acknowledged their use by issuing a chilling warning to Iran. "The invaders should know that for every harmful insect, there is an insecticide capable of annihilating it . . . and Iraq possesses this annihilation insecticide."
Chemicals Kill KurdsIn late 1987, the Iraqi air force began using chemical agents against Kurdish resistance forces in northern Iraq that had formed a loose alliance with Iran, according to State Department reports. The attacks, which were part of a "scorched earth" strategy to eliminate rebel-controlled villages, provoked outrage on Capitol Hill and renewed demands for sanctions against Iraq. The State Department and White House were also outraged -- but not to the point of doing anything that might seriously damage relations with Baghdad.
"The U.S.-Iraqi relationship is . . . important to our long-term political and economic objectives," Assistant Secretary of State Richard W. Murphy wrote in a September 1988 memorandum that addressed the chemical weapons question. "We believe that economic sanctions will be useless or counterproductive to influence the Iraqis."
Bush administration spokesmen have cited Hussein's use of chemical weapons "against his own people" -- and particularly the March 1988 attack on the Kurdish village of Halabjah -- to bolster their argument that his regime presents a "grave and gathering danger" to the United States.
The Iraqis continued to use chemical weapons against the Iranians until the end of the Iran-Iraq war. A U.S. air force intelligence officer, Rick Francona, reported finding widespread use of Iraqi nerve gas when he toured the Al Faw peninsula in southern Iraq in the summer of 1988, after its recapture by the Iraqi army. The battlefield was littered with atropine injectors used by panicky Iranian troops as an antidote against Iraqi nerve gas attacks.
Far from declining, the supply of U.S. military intelligence to Iraq actually expanded in 1988, according to a 1999 book by Francona, "Ally to Adversary: an Eyewitness Account of Iraq's Fall from Grace." Informed sources said much of the battlefield intelligence was channeled to the Iraqis by the CIA office in Baghdad.
Although U.S. export controls to Iraq were tightened up in the late 1980s, there were still many loopholes. In December 1988, Dow Chemical sold $1.5 million of pesticides to Iraq, despite U.S. government concerns that they could be used as chemical warfare agents. An Export-Import Bank official reported in a memorandum that he could find "no reason" to stop the sale, despite evidence that the pesticides were "highly toxic" to humans and would cause death "from asphyxiation."
The U.S. policy of cultivating Hussein as a moderate and reasonable Arab leader continued right up until he invaded Kuwait in August 1990, documents show. When the then-U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, April Glaspie, met with Hussein on July 25, 1990, a week before the Iraqi attack on Kuwait, she assured him that Bush "wanted better and deeper relations," according to an Iraqi transcript of the conversation. "President Bush is an intelligent man," the ambassador told Hussein, referring to the father of the current president. "He is not going to declare an economic war against Iraq."
"Everybody was wrong in their assessment of Saddam," said Joe Wilson, Glaspie's former deputy at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, and the last U.S. official to meet with Hussein. "Everybody in the Arab world told us that the best way to deal with Saddam was to develop a set of economic and commercial relationships that would have the effect of moderating his behavior. History will demonstrate that this was a miscalculation."
Less is more !
Yawn yawn. Yeah, fair competition always seems to be "stealing" when it's brown people doing it.Sure, that's a better solution than learning how to do better work! Let's subsidize overpaid incompetence! It worked for the air traffic controllers, right?I don't know anyone who lost their job because of NAFTA. I know dozens of people who lost their jobs in the Bush Economic Miracle, though.How dare those students perform valuable work when they should be drinking and sleeping around! I bet some of them are brown foreigners too. Who is we kemosabe?
Those who are willing to work, and have some skill, don't need the Federal Bureau of Foreigner Oppression to protect their jobs. All they need is an economy that's not totally hosed.