Vietnam was fighting for (Communist) reunification/independence. The 'Tonkin Incident' which caused the US to take a more active role seems to have been staged without participation by the N Vietnamese. The US warship allegedly thought the sonar echoes of it's own rudder (while swerving around to avoid torpedoes) were from the imaginary torpedoes it was swerving to avoid.
Slightly different context - slightly different everything, but one of the CSA Generals (Joe Johnstone ?) had a phrase for armchair warriors who claimed that the South had not really been defeated or 'knew' how the South could have won.
The submarines were undirected, unfueled, and helpless. The kamikazes left in the "air force" were Tsurugi, a kind of wooden plane built after running out of steel. They were never known to hit a single target- they rarely had enough petrol to take off. uh, I thought they were gliders with no engine at all. They were pulled up to altitude by another aircraft and then released.
The Japanese Army still occupied a large chunk of SE Asia. The Japanese surrender meant a hell of a lot to those occupied territories - they were in no condition to kick the Japanese army out themselves. Leaving the Japanese to their empire was not an acceptable option.
The only issue I have with that is that I think you overestimate the Kamikaze threat by implication. When they first appeared on the scene, they were effective as a surprise weapon. After that they were ineffective in a military sense but acted as a symbol for both sides, they will have been a contributory factor in the US decision to drop nukes.
If you want something to complain at, look at the US role in Chile 30 years ago. The Pinochet coup on the 11th of September was instigated, coordinated and paid for by the US. even to the extent that a Chilean general who would have opposed it was killed (in a botched kidnapping organised by the CIA) a while earlier.
Two years ago, one or two Slashdotters from Chile commented on the irony of it all, and that the Chileans were a lot less sympathetic on this date than most of the rest of the world. I did not know why then, the 30-years rule mean that I do now. Yep, most other countries do not release that sort of document. Respect.
I can argue a case for Hiroshima, although I can argue a case against it as well. Justifying the attack on the WTC requires mental processes I have no intention of acquiring.
The Japanese still occupied a large part of SE Asia when those two bombs were dropped. Just as in Germany, the Allies were not going to stop until Japan was under occupation. WW1 was terminated by an armistice. The Germans accepted humiliating conditions because they were in no condition to fight (in addition, the war-making parties were totally discredited and the opposition had come to power). The Germans knew they were in no condition to fight because Generals like Ludendorff were telling them so. Ludendorff then became a leading member of a fascist group and spread the tale that the efforts of the valiant soldiers at the front had been undermined by the civilians at home. Hitler added the message that it was the Jews who had sapped the will to fight because their profits were suffering.
The allies had learnt three lessons from WW1:
Throwing men at machine-guns is an insane way to fight a war
The conditions imposed on Germany/Austria at the end of WW1 were totally unjust and a prime cause of WW2. The more so because the government consisted of the anti-war parties who were subsequently rejected for making such a mess of the peace.
No way were the Allies going to allow elements in Japan to pull the same trick as Ludendorff and - on his coat-tails - Hitler. Japan had to be beaten and know it had been beaten.
Dropping the 'big one' was pretty unpleasant, but it had exactly the effect it was intended to. Just leaving Japan to stew over SE Asia was not even remotely an option.
Hamburg suffered a similar 'hit' earlier in the war, the stated aim was to kill the workers manning the factories producing war material. I am not sure if Hamburg could have been considered a legitimate target, but it is possible. I can't remember the exact details, but the RAF attacked Hamburg 3 nights in a row (something like that) aiming for 3 areas. They screwed up to the extent that one of the areas was hit twice so another got off.
Darmstadt was also fire-bombed. There were two areas here which were attacked on two evenings. The flares dropped as targets on the second evening were blown off-target into some nearby woods. Almost 60 years later, those woods are still a mass of bomb-craters. Darmstadt was a minor administrative centre. When the Allies got to the area, they moved the administration to Wiesbaden because Darmstadt was such a mess.
Pforzheim's Industry was working with Gold and Jewelry. Pforzheim is a rather hilly area - like Dresden - and the effect of the RAF's fire-bombing was similar to the one on Dresden.
I am not sure how much the US were involved in those three. Air Vice Marshal Arthur Harris was in charge of the RAF for the duration of the war. Back in the 1920's, he used to fly bombing atacks on Kurdish villages in Iraq. Preferably on market day. His rank was high enough for him not to be on flying duties but he liked dropping bombs on civilians. It has to be said that this strategy did help Britain in the early days of the war: the Germans had been attacking airfields with some success, but after a raid on Germany (possibly Berlin), Hitler personally ordered the Luftwaffe to go for civilian targets instead. This allowed the RAF time to build up their strength and inflict enough damage on the Luftwaffe to tip the balance in the air.
There was a Bloom County (or was it Outland?) in the early days of the 'net dealing with life on the Information Highway. Bill the Cat was 'Road Kill'.
I am English and live in the Euro-Zone, the situation is not as simple as you think. On the one hand, currency instability between the two currencies is hurting Britain; On the other hand, the Euro-Zone has been in a slump since the Euro became legal tender and some of that is directly due to the switch itself - things were perceived to be getting more expensive (especially restaurants) and people started hanging on to their cash. Some of that perception was wrong, but some was real and the end effect of the reduced spending has been a financial mess. Of course it did not help that the US was having it's own unrelated problems, that just made things worse.
You could possibly make a case for that in WW1, but are you seriously suggesting that the US should have turned the other cheek after Pearl Harbor?
Likewise with Afghanistan. Everyone understood and backed the necessity of looking for Osama bin Laden with extreme prejudice. It was what came afterwards which stirred things up, 'if you are not for us then you are against us'.
In the article, he met some kid who annoyed him in a low key way. When he got to know the kid better, he realised that he had known his brother around 10 years earlier. It was the brother who had been raped. This makes that sort of behaviour sound very rare, although in another article, it turned out that a young and pretty crazy prisoner had been abused in the orphanige he grew up in.
In some european countries, in particular - as you say - the Nordic ones. Germany is not 'Nordic' in that sense, although a lot better than the UK which is itself better than the US.
An excellent account of life in English prisons is in a recent book by Erwin James (a pseudonym). The author is now 17 years into a life sentence for (I believe) murder and will be released soon, he does not go into any details but simply makes it clear that the sentence was a logical conclusion to the way his life was leading. Apparently his book is required reading for inmates and staff at one young offenders prison in the UK. According to him, prison in the UK nowadays is about 'warehousing' with rehabilitation a very distant second, a change introduced by Michael Howard when he was Home Secretary in the early to mid 90's. In one of the chapters (each one a published article in a British paper), he mentions that someone he knew was raped in prison so it happens there as well. Here are a couple of his more recentarticles which are not in the book.
Don't read too much into that. The US HQ did not give the German subsiduary permission (or the details) to substantiate their claims. Given the way they have been behaving up to now (disclosure only to non-specialists and only under NDAs), that was to be expected.
LinuxTag and Tarent did a good job exploiting the mess that this strategy caused the German operation, but that is all this is worth for the time being.
I could not agree more on that one, C had some appalling design decisions from day one.
An interesting alternative way that was tried a few years back was by a company called Prime. They wrote their OS (Primos) in Fortran. I used to program on their machines back then and it worked surprisingly well. The company lasted around 15 years but then foundered for various reasons:
They sold minicomputers and the market died a horrible death when mass-market PCs became available which offered somewhat less performance (back then) for 1/1000 of the price. The economies of scale.
Just when they were having to tackle this threat (the mid 80's), another company launched a very hostile takeover bid. The measures that Prime took to fight this company off sucked away so many resources that they were doomed.
Pity, they made good machines. I know very little about BEos. Was in *nix compatable? (not necessarily a plus, *nix's design is not perfect) and was it written in C? (probably yes).
How do you prove that you have destroyed something like anthrax? Anthrax can be duplicated more or less infinitely so there is no way that proof can ever be delivered
The Clinton Administration hammered out a deal with the N Koreans involving various transfers (money, oil, food, whatever). Part of that deal was stopped by Congress, I personally don't like the idea of paying a bunch of crooks like that Danegeld anyway - it teaches them that intimidation works. What I do find very very stupid was to place Iraq as public enemy Nr. 1 when it was obvious that N Korea had far more potential and was making use of it. The US demonstrated bad faith by invading Iraq the way it did, the carrot and stick approach was working but it was only applied to the wrong one of the 2 countries (forget Iran, they behave sensibly if you treat them right) and the carrot was thrown away.
You say you don't understand me and think that means my brain is 'miswired'. That you don't understand is obvious. We are all creatures of our environments, and our news sources. You place too much trust in yours. I try and avoid that trap but you can never be completely sure.
The US do not seem to be afraid to blame Saddam for any mayhem going on there, I have to disagree with you on that one, but agree substantially with the rest.
Taking a step back from the situation, there have been 3 recent bombings following a similar pattern.
The Jordanian Embassy. This came on the heels of the Jordanian government offering a refuge to two of Saddam's daughters. Al Qaida should not care about this, Saddam should actually approve so I am unsure who would benefit.
The UN bombing. The blame for this one weakens your contention that the US do not want to blame Saddam - they did. Al Qaida could also have been considered prime candidates.
The Mosque bombing 2 days ago. To me as an outsider, it would have made little sense for Al Qaida to have carried this one out, even though the cleric involved was urging people to work together to build a 'new Iraq'. Baath 'resistance fighters' are much more obvious candidates.
This assumes that all three bombings were carried out by the same group, and it certainly looks like it.
The sender pays for SMS messages in Europe - not the recipient, although I think the recipient also has to pay something if (s)he is in a different (foreign) network. Most of the spam SMS I get here is from foreign networks telling me their wonderful service numbers when I dock into their networks, although they would have a tough time charging for those.
I was slightly misquoting (substitute 'exaggerate' for 'overestimate') Paul Bremer himself. Here is a quote from this article, it is from yesterday: On Wednesday, President Bush acknowledged guiding Iraq toward democracy would "require a substantial commitment of time and resources." Just how substantial was revealed by Paul Bremer, U.S. occupation coordinator. He told Washington Post reporters the cost to cover all the expenses was "almost impossible to exaggerate."
Now quoting you: This is the nonsense rhetoric I and him were referring to, and it is absolutely ridiculous. nuff said on that.
All information we get on Iraq tends to be coloured by the political viewpoint of the person reporting it. One source I check up a lot is someone in the country who has no special axe to grind and was very happy when Saddam was kicked out. You probably know the source (not to would be unforgiveable if you claim to know anything about that country). Here is his newest report. Some of the older stuff further down is also very interesting. What worries me there is that the old structures are starting to recover and regroup. Their new tactics are obviously not designed to win them any friends, but they were not expecting to anyway.
The problem with the Appeasement in the 1930's (which had no financial payments to Hitler, just reparation relief) was that it simply did not work. Hitler saw it as weakness and made new plans. If $95,000,000 stops a war and allows a new situation to develop where the N Koreans are not developing Nukes, then it is money well spent. If it is not going to stop them, then it is worse than just money down the drain.
Previous administrations understood this and made their messages to the N Korean leadership very clear and unambiguous. I personally do not trust this one to even recognise it's own best interests, let alone convey them to PyongYang or even Tehran. The Axis of Evil speech and the subsequent invasion of Iraq mean that the N Koreans can assume that they are next. That is not the way to get them to cooperate. Money is a side-issue, it is trust that is missing.
That was a call do 'do something', where the 'something' was rather ill-defined. I don't see anything there that I'd define as socialism. FDR took over with the country in a far worse mess than this and turned things around to the extent that the US could take on two of the largest military powers on the planet and emerge as bigger than either. I have heard that described as socialism (which is probably crap) but it set the US up economically for decades. Would that sort of solution work now? No idea. Globalism has changed the rules.
Looking at mindsets, what applies to China also applies to Taiwan - Taiwan was taken over by the losers in the civil war just over 50 years ago. Taiwan now has a real democracy, so does S Korea. Both of them went that way even in the face of powerful and inimical neighbours and without having it imposed on them like the Japanese.
Don't get me wrong, the Japanese are far better with what they have now than with the previous system which was half democracy and half military rule. Taiwan and S Korea both had some 'friendly' pressure from the US, and the result is looking healthier than that corrupt mess which is Japanese politics.
Given what the Allies have found there over the last 4 months (nothing), it remains to be proved that they actually had anything.
There were those short-range missiles which were designed to be within the permitted specs, but were capable of flying beyond their nominal range (nothing unusual, remember when the Ukranians shot down an aircraft at around twice the distance they thought their missiles were good for) and the Iraqis had started destroying those when the Allies invaded.
Exotic claims are easy to make, the US, UK and Australian Governments all made hysterical claims over Iraq before the war. They have had 4 months to provide proof. Are you still holding your breath?
It should be quite easy to avoid war with Iran - simply don't invade.
Saddam Hussein is a homicidal maniac, but he was bending over backwards to avoid war - doing all he could to comply with UN demands. The trouble was, the US and Britain were not prepared to consider any outcome other than war. A war which killed tens of thousands while doing damage which Paul Bremer indicated a couple of days ago, was almost impossible to overestimate. Now countries which see themselves as threatened by the US know that behaving rationally will get them nowhere. The way to go is to accumulate nukes and point them at an ally of the US. At the time, I thought the N Koreans were insane. It took time to work out what they were up to.
To go back on-topic, it is rather ironical that the US is against anonymous browsing at home (or have I got that one wrong?) but supportive when it can cause other people trouble.
So what is the next stage? Given a proxy web-server in Iran (is there one there?), surfers in other countries can also make use of this service. Iran is a semi-open country nowadays, there won't be a similar service available in N Korea any time soon for obvious reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
Vietnam was fighting for (Communist) reunification/independence. The 'Tonkin Incident' which caused the US to take a more active role seems to have been staged without participation by the N Vietnamese. The US warship allegedly thought the sonar echoes of it's own rudder (while swerving around to avoid torpedoes) were from the imaginary torpedoes it was swerving to avoid.
Slightly different context - slightly different everything, but one of the CSA Generals (Joe Johnstone ?) had a phrase for armchair warriors who claimed that the South had not really been defeated or 'knew' how the South could have won.
Invisible in war, invincible in defeat.
The submarines were undirected, unfueled, and helpless. The kamikazes left in the "air force" were Tsurugi, a kind of wooden plane built after running out of steel. They were never known to hit a single target- they rarely had enough petrol to take off.
uh, I thought they were gliders with no engine at all. They were pulled up to altitude by another aircraft and then released.
The Japanese Army still occupied a large chunk of SE Asia. The Japanese surrender meant a hell of a lot to those occupied territories - they were in no condition to kick the Japanese army out themselves. Leaving the Japanese to their empire was not an acceptable option.
The only issue I have with that is that I think you overestimate the Kamikaze threat by implication.
When they first appeared on the scene, they were effective as a surprise weapon. After that they were ineffective in a military sense but acted as a symbol for both sides, they will have been a contributory factor in the US decision to drop nukes.
If you want something to complain at, look at the US role in Chile 30 years ago. The Pinochet coup on the 11th of September was instigated, coordinated and paid for by the US. even to the extent that a Chilean general who would have opposed it was killed (in a botched kidnapping organised by the CIA) a while earlier.
Two years ago, one or two Slashdotters from Chile commented on the irony of it all, and that the Chileans were a lot less sympathetic on this date than most of the rest of the world. I did not know why then, the 30-years rule mean that I do now.
Yep, most other countries do not release that sort of document. Respect.
I can argue a case for Hiroshima, although I can argue a case against it as well.
Justifying the attack on the WTC requires mental processes I have no intention of acquiring.
WW1 was terminated by an armistice. The Germans accepted humiliating conditions because they were in no condition to fight (in addition, the war-making parties were totally discredited and the opposition had come to power). The Germans knew they were in no condition to fight because Generals like Ludendorff were telling them so. Ludendorff then became a leading member of a fascist group and spread the tale that the efforts of the valiant soldiers at the front had been undermined by the civilians at home. Hitler added the message that it was the Jews who had sapped the will to fight because their profits were suffering.
The allies had learnt three lessons from WW1:
- Throwing men at machine-guns is an insane way to fight a war
- The conditions imposed on Germany/Austria at the end of WW1 were totally unjust and a prime cause of WW2. The more so because the government consisted of the anti-war parties who were subsequently rejected for making such a mess of the peace.
- No way were the Allies going to allow elements in Japan to pull the same trick as Ludendorff and - on his coat-tails - Hitler. Japan had to be beaten and know it had been beaten.
Dropping the 'big one' was pretty unpleasant, but it had exactly the effect it was intended to. Just leaving Japan to stew over SE Asia was not even remotely an option.- Hamburg suffered a similar 'hit' earlier in the war, the stated aim was to kill the workers manning the factories producing war material. I am not sure if Hamburg could have been considered a legitimate target, but it is possible. I can't remember the exact details, but the RAF attacked Hamburg 3 nights in a row (something like that) aiming for 3 areas. They screwed up to the extent that one of the areas was hit twice so another got off.
- Darmstadt was also fire-bombed. There were two areas here which were attacked on two evenings. The flares dropped as targets on the second evening were blown off-target into some nearby woods. Almost 60 years later, those woods are still a mass of bomb-craters. Darmstadt was a minor administrative centre. When the Allies got to the area, they moved the administration to Wiesbaden because Darmstadt was such a mess.
- Pforzheim's Industry was working with Gold and Jewelry. Pforzheim is a rather hilly area - like Dresden - and the effect of the RAF's fire-bombing was similar to the one on Dresden.
I am not sure how much the US were involved in those three. Air Vice Marshal Arthur Harris was in charge of the RAF for the duration of the war. Back in the 1920's, he used to fly bombing atacks on Kurdish villages in Iraq. Preferably on market day. His rank was high enough for him not to be on flying duties but he liked dropping bombs on civilians.It has to be said that this strategy did help Britain in the early days of the war: the Germans had been attacking airfields with some success, but after a raid on Germany (possibly Berlin), Hitler personally ordered the Luftwaffe to go for civilian targets instead. This allowed the RAF time to build up their strength and inflict enough damage on the Luftwaffe to tip the balance in the air.
There was a Bloom County (or was it Outland?) in the early days of the 'net dealing with life on the Information Highway. Bill the Cat was 'Road Kill'.
I still have the one he did after Bush half choked on a Pretzel. One of the best ever.
I am English and live in the Euro-Zone, the situation is not as simple as you think.
On the one hand, currency instability between the two currencies is hurting Britain;
On the other hand, the Euro-Zone has been in a slump since the Euro became legal tender and some of that is directly due to the switch itself - things were perceived to be getting more expensive (especially restaurants) and people started hanging on to their cash. Some of that perception was wrong, but some was real and the end effect of the reduced spending has been a financial mess. Of course it did not help that the US was having it's own unrelated problems, that just made things worse.
You could possibly make a case for that in WW1, but are you seriously suggesting that the US should have turned the other cheek after Pearl Harbor?
Likewise with Afghanistan. Everyone understood and backed the necessity of looking for Osama bin Laden with extreme prejudice. It was what came afterwards which stirred things up, 'if you are not for us then you are against us'.
In the article, he met some kid who annoyed him in a low key way. When he got to know the kid better, he realised that he had known his brother around 10 years earlier. It was the brother who had been raped. This makes that sort of behaviour sound very rare, although in another article, it turned out that a young and pretty crazy prisoner had been abused in the orphanige he grew up in.
In some european countries, in particular - as you say - the Nordic ones. Germany is not 'Nordic' in that sense, although a lot better than the UK which is itself better than the US.
An excellent account of life in English prisons is in a recent book by Erwin James (a pseudonym). The author is now 17 years into a life sentence for (I believe) murder and will be released soon, he does not go into any details but simply makes it clear that the sentence was a logical conclusion to the way his life was leading.
Apparently his book is required reading for inmates and staff at one young offenders prison in the UK. According to him, prison in the UK nowadays is about 'warehousing' with rehabilitation a very distant second, a change introduced by Michael Howard when he was Home Secretary in the early to mid 90's. In one of the chapters (each one a published article in a British paper), he mentions that someone he knew was raped in prison so it happens there as well. Here are a couple of his more recent articles which are not in the book.
Don't read too much into that. The US HQ did not give the German subsiduary permission (or the details) to substantiate their claims. Given the way they have been behaving up to now (disclosure only to non-specialists and only under NDAs), that was to be expected.
LinuxTag and Tarent did a good job exploiting the mess that this strategy caused the German operation, but that is all this is worth for the time being.
a loose translation is: like father, like son.
An interesting alternative way that was tried a few years back was by a company called Prime. They wrote their OS (Primos) in Fortran. I used to program on their machines back then and it worked surprisingly well.
The company lasted around 15 years but then foundered for various reasons:
- They sold minicomputers and the market died a horrible death when mass-market PCs became available which offered somewhat less performance (back then) for 1/1000 of the price. The economies of scale.
- Just when they were having to tackle this threat (the mid 80's), another company launched a very hostile takeover bid. The measures that Prime took to fight this company off sucked away so many resources that they were doomed.
Pity, they made good machines.I know very little about BEos. Was in *nix compatable? (not necessarily a plus, *nix's design is not perfect) and was it written in C? (probably yes).
- How do you prove that you have destroyed something like anthrax? Anthrax can be duplicated more or less infinitely so there is no way that proof can ever be delivered
- The Clinton Administration hammered out a deal with the N Koreans involving various transfers (money, oil, food, whatever). Part of that deal was stopped by Congress, I personally don't like the idea of paying a bunch of crooks like that Danegeld anyway - it teaches them that intimidation works.
You say you don't understand me and think that means my brain is 'miswired'. That you don't understand is obvious.What I do find very very stupid was to place Iraq as public enemy Nr. 1 when it was obvious that N Korea had far more potential and was making use of it. The US demonstrated bad faith by invading Iraq the way it did, the carrot and stick approach was working but it was only applied to the wrong one of the 2 countries (forget Iran, they behave sensibly if you treat them right) and the carrot was thrown away.
We are all creatures of our environments, and our news sources. You place too much trust in yours. I try and avoid that trap but you can never be completely sure.
Taking a step back from the situation, there have been 3 recent bombings following a similar pattern.
- The Jordanian Embassy. This came on the heels of the Jordanian government offering a refuge to two of Saddam's daughters. Al Qaida should not care about this, Saddam should actually approve so I am unsure who would benefit.
- The UN bombing. The blame for this one weakens your contention that the US do not want to blame Saddam - they did. Al Qaida could also have been considered prime candidates.
- The Mosque bombing 2 days ago. To me as an outsider, it would have made little sense for Al Qaida to have carried this one out, even though the cleric involved was urging people to work together to build a 'new Iraq'. Baath 'resistance fighters' are much more obvious candidates.
This assumes that all three bombings were carried out by the same group, and it certainly looks like it.The sender pays for SMS messages in Europe - not the recipient, although I think the recipient also has to pay something if (s)he is in a different (foreign) network.
Most of the spam SMS I get here is from foreign networks telling me their wonderful service numbers when I dock into their networks, although they would have a tough time charging for those.
I was slightly misquoting (substitute 'exaggerate' for 'overestimate') Paul Bremer himself. Here is a quote from this article, it is from yesterday:
On Wednesday, President Bush acknowledged guiding Iraq toward democracy would "require a substantial commitment of time and resources." Just how substantial was revealed by Paul Bremer, U.S. occupation coordinator. He told Washington Post reporters the cost to cover all the expenses was "almost impossible to exaggerate."
Now quoting you: This is the nonsense rhetoric I and him were referring to, and it is absolutely ridiculous.
nuff said on that.
All information we get on Iraq tends to be coloured by the political viewpoint of the person reporting it. One source I check up a lot is someone in the country who has no special axe to grind and was very happy when Saddam was kicked out. You probably know the source (not to would be unforgiveable if you claim to know anything about that country). Here is his newest report. Some of the older stuff further down is also very interesting. What worries me there is that the old structures are starting to recover and regroup. Their new tactics are obviously not designed to win them any friends, but they were not expecting to anyway.
The problem with the Appeasement in the 1930's (which had no financial payments to Hitler, just reparation relief) was that it simply did not work. Hitler saw it as weakness and made new plans.
If $95,000,000 stops a war and allows a new situation to develop where the N Koreans are not developing Nukes, then it is money well spent. If it is not going to stop them, then it is worse than just money down the drain.
Previous administrations understood this and made their messages to the N Korean leadership very clear and unambiguous. I personally do not trust this one to even recognise it's own best interests, let alone convey them to PyongYang or even Tehran. The Axis of Evil speech and the subsequent invasion of Iraq mean that the N Koreans can assume that they are next. That is not the way to get them to cooperate. Money is a side-issue, it is trust that is missing.
That was a call do 'do something', where the 'something' was rather ill-defined. I don't see anything there that I'd define as socialism.
FDR took over with the country in a far worse mess than this and turned things around to the extent that the US could take on two of the largest military powers on the planet and emerge as bigger than either. I have heard that described as socialism (which is probably crap) but it set the US up economically for decades.
Would that sort of solution work now?
No idea. Globalism has changed the rules.
Looking at mindsets, what applies to China also applies to Taiwan - Taiwan was taken over by the losers in the civil war just over 50 years ago.
Taiwan now has a real democracy, so does S Korea. Both of them went that way even in the face of powerful and inimical neighbours and without having it imposed on them like the Japanese.
Don't get me wrong, the Japanese are far better with what they have now than with the previous system which was half democracy and half military rule. Taiwan and S Korea both had some 'friendly' pressure from the US, and the result is looking healthier than that corrupt mess which is Japanese politics.
Given what the Allies have found there over the last 4 months (nothing), it remains to be proved that they actually had anything.
There were those short-range missiles which were designed to be within the permitted specs, but were capable of flying beyond their nominal range (nothing unusual, remember when the Ukranians shot down an aircraft at around twice the distance they thought their missiles were good for) and the Iraqis had started destroying those when the Allies invaded.
Exotic claims are easy to make, the US, UK and Australian Governments all made hysterical claims over Iraq before the war.
They have had 4 months to provide proof. Are you still holding your breath?
It should be quite easy to avoid war with Iran - simply don't invade.
Saddam Hussein is a homicidal maniac, but he was bending over backwards to avoid war - doing all he could to comply with UN demands. The trouble was, the US and Britain were not prepared to consider any outcome other than war. A war which killed tens of thousands while doing damage which Paul Bremer indicated a couple of days ago, was almost impossible to overestimate. Now countries which see themselves as threatened by the US know that behaving rationally will get them nowhere. The way to go is to accumulate nukes and point them at an ally of the US. At the time, I thought the N Koreans were insane. It took time to work out what they were up to.
To go back on-topic, it is rather ironical that the US is against anonymous browsing at home (or have I got that one wrong?) but supportive when it can cause other people trouble.
So what is the next stage? Given a proxy web-server in Iran (is there one there?), surfers in other countries can also make use of this service. Iran is a semi-open country nowadays, there won't be a similar service available in N Korea any time soon for obvious reasons.