I've got to wonder if that's a typo. The last time I read something about OLED lifetime it was lamenting that blue only had a 10,000 hour half-life as opposed to 20,000 hours for red -- and that claim was probably from a pdf found on some university's faculty home pages.
I'm not clear enough on plasma tech to be sure of what you're referring to, but it sounds like plasma sub-pixels work just like LCDs -- colored filters stand between a white light and the viewer. That isn't the case with OLEDs. The material itself emits light at a specific frequency. They've managed to find a wide variety of colors too -- even orange and pink IIRC. There's nothing that can prevent an OLED from displaying a true black while the panel is turned on so long as it displays a true black while it's unplugged.
I can see your other respondant's point about the effect of capacitance on the display but I don't see how it's possible to finger contrast and black level as sticking points in OLED technology. Everything I've read about this stuff indicates that it's already up to snuff for light output. Given the "quantum efficiency" the chemists talk about they've got plenty of headroom to make these materials even brighter. As for black level... that can't be anything more than crappy transistors used in a display designed to be cheap. The most uncharitable assesment of OLEDs in this respect would have to center on anodes (or cathodes) that are too reflective of external light. That bullet can be dodged by a surface coating that makes incoming light interfere with itself. As far as "overall performance" goes, I don't know what they could be referring to. I would submit, as a counter example of superior performance (at least theoretically) the potential for OLED displays to express a larger color gamut. In short, I too call "bullshit".
Jaguar, Panther, Tiger... They've "Lynx" and "Cougar" to rely on, but how can they utilize "Mountain Lion" without dulling the impact of "Lion"? And where can they go after that?
That's possible, but why not simply do what needed to be done internally to make the project healthy? If that wasn't possible then why not simply pull the plug? And if he couldn't do that then why would he feel the need to alienate 2nd tier developers before enacting Operation Self-Destruct. If he really wanted XFree86 to be supplanted by a fork he had options that would have allowed him to walk away without having to stick around and paste "We're still here (for a while, at least)." messages on the website. This "self-sacrifice" interpretation has got to account for a lot of gratuitous cultivation of a bad rep -- whether it's justified or not.
You have a point in as much as X.org is still just a snapshot pragmatically speaking, but I don't think we should be concerned about a lack of future development. The political support surrounding X.org from commercial distros sounds rock solid. Do you think Redhat and the rest are going to sit by and let X.org languish? XFree86 hasn't been dropped just because of the license change and the somewhat malignant internal politics. They had a reputation for ignoring downstream integrators. In any event, some interesting X11 developments were taking place outside of XFree86 before X.org became the center of libre X11 software. Check out the stuff at freedesktop.org. Keith Packard has sketched out some new extensions that will be good for window management and there's an effort underway to autotoolize the build system. Myself, I'd rather wait for an autotool'd 4.4-rc2 managed by people unafraid of granting CVS commit access to a maintainer than have XFree86-5.0 next month.
This seems like a good point in the thread to ask what Torvalds develops on. I'm certain I read a post here on/. claiming he used a dual 970. IIRC, he used to work on a quad Xeon. I'm presuming that if he isn't using x86 anymore then he's got something from IBM. Anyone have a link handy about this? Google isn't doing for me tonight.
Could you explain how God could have a kid and why killing it restored an apparantly broken relationship between us regular folk and the Big Guy/Superman/whathaveyou? This whole deal you've outlined sounds no non-sensical or even kinda sick (like, should I chop off a finger to get back with an ex-girlfriend?) that the Tooth Fairy makes more sense to me.
I caught a documentary recently that convincing argued against the overt domestication of wolves as the origin of dogs. The theory was that as Man dropped his nomadic ways and became (relatively for the time) "urban" he created trash for the scavanging. These garbage dumps could reward only the most docile, submissive wolves, who lacked the aggression and skittishness needed to hover near a village's cast offs. Symbiosis separated dogs from wolves as the former adapted to a lucrative environment.
Dude, back off. Some guy named "Dark Paladin" has predicted we'll have fusion reactors in 2050. Bow down and listen.
P.S. Fusion doesn't spare you the hassle of dealing with radioactive waste. It can be made safer because reactors can be turned off completely -- there's no meltdown line to avoid crossing.
I don't think Kuwait would have minded a bigger American base and since our invasion of Afghanistan Al Qaeda at best has been able to cut off an American head and maybe bomb a Spanish train. They have had quite an after life as a bogey-man though. Now that we've managed to sodomize naked Arab prisoners with flashlights that might change.
...to discourage further disobediance of standing orders.
We haven't been able to establish yet that Granier et al weren't acting under standing orders. We've already established that Bush's policies in Guantanamo and Afghanistan were crafted with highly semantic tip-toeing around the principals of the Geneva convention. Indeed, at the time he signed off on them one of the lawyers assigned to vet what they could and could not get away with submitted a pro and con list of criticisms for his edification. Of note in the "con" section was the possiblity that the "standard of conduct for millitary personel could be degraded." IIRC, that's a verbatim quote. It's possible that the effects of trickle down "telephone" turned a mandate from Rumsfeld to "find out what you can" into "torture them with sexual humiliation", but the consistancy of the themes these guards employed makes me wonder just how far up the chain of command we can go to to register accountability. Your point about the delegation of authority is worth noting. I don't think that should have stopped Rumsfeld from noticing what was going on four months ago.
Lied? Or believed the reports of the intelligence community that Sadam had NOT destroyed his weapons and was making more
Bush didn't just "believe" reports about Iraq. He began soliciting them on 9/12 even after being told that we already knew what was going on. Intelligence agents went on record long ago claiming that the administration "cherry picked" the reports for the sake of their agenda. Powell himself is reported to have exclaimed, "I'm not reading this bullshit." when presented with yet another spun document. The terrorism link has never surfaced either. Perle organized a special two man intelligence team who ostensibly were directed to trace linkages among terrorist cells and other organizations (a kind of follow the money analysis) that concluded -- as if it weren't Perle's desired outcome -- there were ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda even though no one has been able to show the public their evidence. In similar fashion Wolfowitz embraced Chalabi. The latter had an associate's nephew invent reports from within Iraq that Wolfowitz could mobilize politically. The most solid lead we've heard concerned an alleged meeting in Prague that Mueller publicly dismissed in the spring of 2001 after it had been thoroughly vetted. The difference between the intelligence community's take on Iraq and the administration's has been consistent. The only thing out of place (and it's glaring by comparison) is Tennant's "slam dunk".
It wasn't just GFingWB who thought the Tyrant of Bagdhad was still well armed with CBW devices and close to having nukes.
Actually, I think he might have been! That Cheney would continue to raise the nuclear spectre a year after the Niger-Iraq uranium deal was proven a hoax perpetrated by a scam artist, and that the President would repeat this claim indicates either grotesque negligence or dishonesty. If you recall, Bush's invocation of a (non-existant) nuclear threat was attributed to either an editorial slip on the part of a speech writer (with the President unaware or unable to tell that he would be repeating a falsehood off the teleprompter) or that the charge wasn't meant the way it was taken. We were to believe the President was only claiming that Iraq could have nukes the way you or I could.
Now whether that was because he WAS hiding something, was trying to convince his neighbors that he was still to dangerous to attack, was trying to salvage his pride, was trying to avoid further exposure of his mass-torture and mass-murder operations, or was just a loon, doesn't really matter.
Yes it does.
The point is that he could have avoided this whole thing by NOT letting his people play games with the UN inspectors.
And we could have avoided this whole thing by either letting the inspectors do their job instead of telling them to get out of the way so we could swat a hornets nest, or continuing to contain the Iraq we had already enervated in '91 until it's 65 year old dictator was dead. As an ordinary citizen I've been able to find more concrete information about the Soviet ICMBs that were pointed at my home town for decades than I can about the threat I've been reading about every week for three years.
By the way: Now that the remaining anti-western forces in Iraq have ACCIDENTALLY set off a nerve-gas shell randomly drawn from an Iraqui arms cache, thinking it was an explosive shell, do you STILL believe that all the WMDs were really gone?
Personally, I came to believe Iraq never had WMDs once our troops made it all the way to Bahgdad without a single sign of them. It helped that the administration never proffered anything that could pass skeptical muster. David Kay's report and the subsequent congressional hearnings made it clear that the best a sympathetic servant of the administration could come up with is a polite, soft-pedaled, let-me-down-easy declaration that Hussein didn't have squat. He's already publicly described the shell in question as "no big deal".
Just to add my 2 cents to the criticism, I'll quote the AC you've responded to:
Chomsky is a friggin genius, your attempt to discredit him only exposes your lack thereof. Give me one example where Chomsky was wrong.
My problem with Chomsky isn't that he lacks brains or that his political activism comes from the left. It's that he is a crank -- nothing more, nothing less.
His intellectual career has taken an arc previously travelled by Bertrand Russell with a twist. When Russell had done all that he could do as a Philosopher and Mathematician he invested his energy in political activism. That his Leftist Secular Humanist advocacy took a soundly "common sense" tone was only fitting. He spoke out against Racism, destructive religious dogmas, and a whole host of other topics that we take for granted today. (Imagine fearing social censure for moving in with your girlfriend.) I think Chomsky turned to politics for personal reasons similar to Russell's (to put it negatively, he ran out of innovation), but lost his head about it. I recall watching a clip of an old interview with him once where a student in the audience asked him what he thought of his scientific work in relation to his political thought. His response was that "science changes all the time" and that "we know how society works". With that, Comrade, we witness the birth of a true politician in the pejorative sense. He wanted his audience to believe that he places more stock in his political opinions than in his linguistic work. What a liar. He knows perfectly well that Science has been as much (if not all) process as end result. He knows that Einstein didn't discredit Newton. He wants us to believe we know what can make one species behave like the Etruscans or the Third Reich with more clarity than we can understand the link between radio waves and rainbows. Russell simply wanted to do some good. Chomsky wants college sophmores to read his pamphlets.
Check out slide 7 in "Graphics On The Windows Desktop" (filename TW04013_WINHEC2004.ppt). It contains a sample screenshot of (I presume) an associative file browser. Look at the sample documents. There is a civil suit entitled "Sam vs The Bike Messenger" with none other than Kenneth Starr representing Sam. Zoinks! Talk about being in with The Man. These Microsoft cats can't just daydream about suing slackers, they've got to fantasize about having Mr. Seventy-Million Dollar Blow Job pull out the big guns on the poor squirt. Are you going to tell me these guys aren't seriouslyuncool?
All kidding aside, what little I've gleaned so far while skimming these slides sounds very impressive. The attention given to text is very respectable. The notion of pushing GPU hardware as far as it will go is as it should be. Longhorn looks extremely ambitious.
However, you can't really have a meaningful debate over the motivation of an individual, i.e. Bush or Kerry, only of the actions and consequences of those actions which either might take.
Agreed to a point. Belief in a cause certainly helps, but it is no substitute for competence.
Given that, I'd consider that if Bush or Kerry or Kermit the frog really wanted stabilization in Iraq, they'd send in an assload more troops and put the place under lockdown until elections.
It was Rumsfeld who decided that less is more when it came to the invasion. I can't claim to know the reasoning behind this dictate. I can't even make a supposition. IIRC, the Pentagon brass wanted 400 to 500 thousand troops.
I just don't see Bush as having the belief in the cause or the will to abandon it either, hence the half assed governmental "hand over" in july or june or whenever.
I think half of that has got to be: "Fuck it. We're going nowhere. Let's hold some sort of election to get the ball rolling even though the place is still fucked." The other half might be a simple desire to put some weight on Iraqi shoulders before Bush comes up for reelection.
they should have had small scale local elections, e.g. in the vilage or city block level, immediately after Hussein had fallen; these people would have been given some form of responsibility and the people could have had a better appreciation for the effects of democracy (for better and worse).
This, like the other things you mentioned might have happened if the administration had followed the advice of the State Department -- advice for post war planning it had specifically requested long before American boots hit the sand. Instead, for reasons I can't fathom, the entire blueprint for reconstruction was scrapped. They even continued to ignore it while every problem predicted by the State Deparment became a fact on the ground.
I can't guess the motivation of Bush in going to war.
You aren't the only one. Tim Russert claims the President was told by someone close to him, "Someday you'll have to take me out to dinner and explain why you did this."
I don't think the neo conservative movement is entirely to blame...
Should we then blame Chalabi for fabricating evidence? Wolfowitz, and the others listened to him because he told them just what they wanted to hear. They got in the Presidents ear and he listened for nearly the same reasons they did.
Some people think Bush did it for religious beliefs.
Long before 9/11 GW came to believe that, "God wants me to be President." That is an actual quote. He is a born-again Christian who sees the world absolute terms of Good and Evil. Given that psychology, the attacks of 9/11, the hawkishness of those in his cabinet excepting Powell (e.g. Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney), his familly history (Hussein bad for Dad), his nearly miraculous ascent to the White House (Gee, God really did want me to be President -- he must have special plans...), and maybe even an unslaked desire to kick some more Arab ass (Afghanistan: Was it really enough?), there's a recipe for grim decisions.
My guess is that he [Kerry], having spent time in combat, probably has a better idea of the realities regarding war than Bush does.
Collin Powell is the only member of the administration that's worn a uniform. He's also leaving at the end of this term whether Bush stays or not. My impression is that he's tired of having to go along with things he doesn't believe in.
Spare me the lunatic-left cheerleading for Saddam Hussein and the terrorists. Next thing, you will be calling a 14-month-old military conflict a "quagmire".
Me: Egads! (paraphrasing)
obviously you don't understand irony/sarcasm.
Mea Culpa. I've been rubbed a bit raw lately by the increasingly shrill tone of Abu Ghraib apologists. Your wit seems obvious to me now, but I no longer presume that such statements aren't meant in earnest.
I see your point now. It a Devil's bargain though. Now that we've made Iraq a desirable, if not hospitible home for Al Qaeda we can't leave until we've finished cleaning up the joint. The question to ask then might not be, "Who believes in this war?", but rather, "How can we stablize Iraq?".
I had a history teacher in High School who made a constant refrain of that analogy. She often compared the Cold War (this was during the Regan era) to ancient Greece.
What are you talking about? Kerry neither beat the drums of war like Alcibiades nor ran the invasion like Nicias. Surely his service record in Vietnam bars him from being labeled a pansy. I haven't heard him advocate a withdraw from Iraq (right now) because he probably believes it would leave the place in a worse condition (for us) than it was before we went in.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got to wonder if that's a typo. The last time I read something about OLED lifetime it was lamenting that blue only had a 10,000 hour half-life as opposed to 20,000 hours for red -- and that claim was probably from a pdf found on some university's faculty home pages.
I'm not clear enough on plasma tech to be sure of what you're referring to, but it sounds like plasma sub-pixels work just like LCDs -- colored filters stand between a white light and the viewer. That isn't the case with OLEDs. The material itself emits light at a specific frequency. They've managed to find a wide variety of colors too -- even orange and pink IIRC. There's nothing that can prevent an OLED from displaying a true black while the panel is turned on so long as it displays a true black while it's unplugged.
I can see your other respondant's point about the effect of capacitance on the display but I don't see how it's possible to finger contrast and black level as sticking points in OLED technology. Everything I've read about this stuff indicates that it's already up to snuff for light output. Given the "quantum efficiency" the chemists talk about they've got plenty of headroom to make these materials even brighter. As for black level... that can't be anything more than crappy transistors used in a display designed to be cheap. The most uncharitable assesment of OLEDs in this respect would have to center on anodes (or cathodes) that are too reflective of external light. That bullet can be dodged by a surface coating that makes incoming light interfere with itself. As far as "overall performance" goes, I don't know what they could be referring to. I would submit, as a counter example of superior performance (at least theoretically) the potential for OLED displays to express a larger color gamut. In short, I too call "bullshit".
Jaguar, Panther, Tiger... They've "Lynx" and "Cougar" to rely on, but how can they utilize "Mountain Lion" without dulling the impact of "Lion"? And where can they go after that?
That's possible, but why not simply do what needed to be done internally to make the project healthy? If that wasn't possible then why not simply pull the plug? And if he couldn't do that then why would he feel the need to alienate 2nd tier developers before enacting Operation Self-Destruct. If he really wanted XFree86 to be supplanted by a fork he had options that would have allowed him to walk away without having to stick around and paste "We're still here (for a while, at least)." messages on the website. This "self-sacrifice" interpretation has got to account for a lot of gratuitous cultivation of a bad rep -- whether it's justified or not.
You have a point in as much as X.org is still just a snapshot pragmatically speaking, but I don't think we should be concerned about a lack of future development. The political support surrounding X.org from commercial distros sounds rock solid. Do you think Redhat and the rest are going to sit by and let X.org languish? XFree86 hasn't been dropped just because of the license change and the somewhat malignant internal politics. They had a reputation for ignoring downstream integrators. In any event, some interesting X11 developments were taking place outside of XFree86 before X.org became the center of libre X11 software. Check out the stuff at freedesktop.org. Keith Packard has sketched out some new extensions that will be good for window management and there's an effort underway to autotoolize the build system. Myself, I'd rather wait for an autotool'd 4.4-rc2 managed by people unafraid of granting CVS commit access to a maintainer than have XFree86-5.0 next month.
This seems like a good point in the thread to ask what Torvalds develops on. I'm certain I read a post here on /. claiming he used a dual 970. IIRC, he used to work on a quad Xeon. I'm presuming that if he isn't using x86 anymore then he's got something from IBM. Anyone have a link handy about this? Google isn't doing for me tonight.
Could you explain how God could have a kid and why killing it restored an apparantly broken relationship between us regular folk and the Big Guy/Superman/whathaveyou? This whole deal you've outlined sounds no non-sensical or even kinda sick (like, should I chop off a finger to get back with an ex-girlfriend?) that the Tooth Fairy makes more sense to me.
I caught a documentary recently that convincing argued against the overt domestication of wolves as the origin of dogs. The theory was that as Man dropped his nomadic ways and became (relatively for the time) "urban" he created trash for the scavanging. These garbage dumps could reward only the most docile, submissive wolves, who lacked the aggression and skittishness needed to hover near a village's cast offs. Symbiosis separated dogs from wolves as the former adapted to a lucrative environment.
...much of a market...
P.S. Fusion doesn't spare you the hassle of dealing with radioactive waste. It can be made safer because reactors can be turned off completely -- there's no meltdown line to avoid crossing.
Isn't that just what the parent poster said in one sentence?
I don't think Kuwait would have minded a bigger American base and since our invasion of Afghanistan Al Qaeda at best has been able to cut off an American head and maybe bomb a Spanish train. They have had quite an after life as a bogey-man though. Now that we've managed to sodomize naked Arab prisoners with flashlights that might change.
We haven't been able to establish yet that Granier et al weren't acting under standing orders. We've already established that Bush's policies in Guantanamo and Afghanistan were crafted with highly semantic tip-toeing around the principals of the Geneva convention. Indeed, at the time he signed off on them one of the lawyers assigned to vet what they could and could not get away with submitted a pro and con list of criticisms for his edification. Of note in the "con" section was the possiblity that the "standard of conduct for millitary personel could be degraded." IIRC, that's a verbatim quote. It's possible that the effects of trickle down "telephone" turned a mandate from Rumsfeld to "find out what you can" into "torture them with sexual humiliation", but the consistancy of the themes these guards employed makes me wonder just how far up the chain of command we can go to to register accountability. Your point about the delegation of authority is worth noting. I don't think that should have stopped Rumsfeld from noticing what was going on four months ago.
Bush didn't just "believe" reports about Iraq. He began soliciting them on 9/12 even after being told that we already knew what was going on. Intelligence agents went on record long ago claiming that the administration "cherry picked" the reports for the sake of their agenda. Powell himself is reported to have exclaimed, "I'm not reading this bullshit." when presented with yet another spun document. The terrorism link has never surfaced either. Perle organized a special two man intelligence team who ostensibly were directed to trace linkages among terrorist cells and other organizations (a kind of follow the money analysis) that concluded -- as if it weren't Perle's desired outcome -- there were ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda even though no one has been able to show the public their evidence. In similar fashion Wolfowitz embraced Chalabi. The latter had an associate's nephew invent reports from within Iraq that Wolfowitz could mobilize politically. The most solid lead we've heard concerned an alleged meeting in Prague that Mueller publicly dismissed in the spring of 2001 after it had been thoroughly vetted. The difference between the intelligence community's take on Iraq and the administration's has been consistent. The only thing out of place (and it's glaring by comparison) is Tennant's "slam dunk".
It wasn't just GFingWB who thought the Tyrant of Bagdhad was still well armed with CBW devices and close to having nukes.
Actually, I think he might have been! That Cheney would continue to raise the nuclear spectre a year after the Niger-Iraq uranium deal was proven a hoax perpetrated by a scam artist, and that the President would repeat this claim indicates either grotesque negligence or dishonesty. If you recall, Bush's invocation of a (non-existant) nuclear threat was attributed to either an editorial slip on the part of a speech writer (with the President unaware or unable to tell that he would be repeating a falsehood off the teleprompter) or that the charge wasn't meant the way it was taken. We were to believe the President was only claiming that Iraq could have nukes the way you or I could.
Now whether that was because he WAS hiding something, was trying to convince his neighbors that he was still to dangerous to attack, was trying to salvage his pride, was trying to avoid further exposure of his mass-torture and mass-murder operations, or was just a loon, doesn't really matter.
Yes it does.
The point is that he could have avoided this whole thing by NOT letting his people play games with the UN inspectors.
And we could have avoided this whole thing by either letting the inspectors do their job instead of telling them to get out of the way so we could swat a hornets nest, or continuing to contain the Iraq we had already enervated in '91 until it's 65 year old dictator was dead. As an ordinary citizen I've been able to find more concrete information about the Soviet ICMBs that were pointed at my home town for decades than I can about the threat I've been reading about every week for three years.
By the way: Now that the remaining anti-western forces in Iraq have ACCIDENTALLY set off a nerve-gas shell randomly drawn from an Iraqui arms cache, thinking it was an explosive shell, do you STILL believe that all the WMDs were really gone?
Personally, I came to believe Iraq never had WMDs once our troops made it all the way to Bahgdad without a single sign of them. It helped that the administration never proffered anything that could pass skeptical muster. David Kay's report and the subsequent congressional hearnings made it clear that the best a sympathetic servant of the administration could come up with is a polite, soft-pedaled, let-me-down-easy declaration that Hussein didn't have squat. He's already publicly described the shell in question as "no big deal".
The world is now on notice t
Are you supposing then that the Aussie media portayed things differently? 'Cause I watched it here in the States I thought she was hella fat too.
My problem with Chomsky isn't that he lacks brains or that his political activism comes from the left. It's that he is a crank -- nothing more, nothing less.
His intellectual career has taken an arc previously travelled by Bertrand Russell with a twist. When Russell had done all that he could do as a Philosopher and Mathematician he invested his energy in political activism. That his Leftist Secular Humanist advocacy took a soundly "common sense" tone was only fitting. He spoke out against Racism, destructive religious dogmas, and a whole host of other topics that we take for granted today. (Imagine fearing social censure for moving in with your girlfriend.) I think Chomsky turned to politics for personal reasons similar to Russell's (to put it negatively, he ran out of innovation), but lost his head about it. I recall watching a clip of an old interview with him once where a student in the audience asked him what he thought of his scientific work in relation to his political thought. His response was that "science changes all the time" and that "we know how society works". With that, Comrade, we witness the birth of a true politician in the pejorative sense. He wanted his audience to believe that he places more stock in his political opinions than in his linguistic work. What a liar. He knows perfectly well that Science has been as much (if not all) process as end result. He knows that Einstein didn't discredit Newton. He wants us to believe we know what can make one species behave like the Etruscans or the Third Reich with more clarity than we can understand the link between radio waves and rainbows. Russell simply wanted to do some good. Chomsky wants college sophmores to read his pamphlets.
All kidding aside, what little I've gleaned so far while skimming these slides sounds very impressive. The attention given to text is very respectable. The notion of pushing GPU hardware as far as it will go is as it should be. Longhorn looks extremely ambitious.
Agreed to a point. Belief in a cause certainly helps, but it is no substitute for competence.
Given that, I'd consider that if Bush or Kerry or Kermit the frog really wanted stabilization in Iraq, they'd send in an assload more troops and put the place under lockdown until elections.
It was Rumsfeld who decided that less is more when it came to the invasion. I can't claim to know the reasoning behind this dictate. I can't even make a supposition. IIRC, the Pentagon brass wanted 400 to 500 thousand troops.
I just don't see Bush as having the belief in the cause or the will to abandon it either, hence the half assed governmental "hand over" in july or june or whenever.
I think half of that has got to be: "Fuck it. We're going nowhere. Let's hold some sort of election to get the ball rolling even though the place is still fucked." The other half might be a simple desire to put some weight on Iraqi shoulders before Bush comes up for reelection.
they should have had small scale local elections, e.g. in the vilage or city block level, immediately after Hussein had fallen; these people would have been given some form of responsibility and the people could have had a better appreciation for the effects of democracy (for better and worse).
This, like the other things you mentioned might have happened if the administration had followed the advice of the State Department -- advice for post war planning it had specifically requested long before American boots hit the sand. Instead, for reasons I can't fathom, the entire blueprint for reconstruction was scrapped. They even continued to ignore it while every problem predicted by the State Deparment became a fact on the ground.
I can't guess the motivation of Bush in going to war.
You aren't the only one. Tim Russert claims the President was told by someone close to him, "Someday you'll have to take me out to dinner and explain why you did this."
I don't think the neo conservative movement is entirely to blame...
Should we then blame Chalabi for fabricating evidence? Wolfowitz, and the others listened to him because he told them just what they wanted to hear. They got in the Presidents ear and he listened for nearly the same reasons they did.
Some people think Bush did it for religious beliefs.
Long before 9/11 GW came to believe that, "God wants me to be President." That is an actual quote. He is a born-again Christian who sees the world absolute terms of Good and Evil. Given that psychology, the attacks of 9/11, the hawkishness of those in his cabinet excepting Powell (e.g. Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney), his familly history (Hussein bad for Dad), his nearly miraculous ascent to the White House (Gee, God really did want me to be President -- he must have special plans...), and maybe even an unslaked desire to kick some more Arab ass (Afghanistan: Was it really enough?), there's a recipe for grim decisions.
My guess is that he [Kerry], having spent time in combat, probably has a better idea of the realities regarding war than Bush does.
Collin Powell is the only member of the administration that's worn a uniform. He's also leaving at the end of this term whether Bush stays or not. My impression is that he's tired of having to go along with things he doesn't believe in.
Me: Egads! (paraphrasing)
obviously you don't understand irony/sarcasm.
Mea Culpa. I've been rubbed a bit raw lately by the increasingly shrill tone of Abu Ghraib apologists. Your wit seems obvious to me now, but I no longer presume that such statements aren't meant in earnest.
I see your point now. It a Devil's bargain though. Now that we've made Iraq a desirable, if not hospitible home for Al Qaeda we can't leave until we've finished cleaning up the joint. The question to ask then might not be, "Who believes in this war?", but rather, "How can we stablize Iraq?".
I had a history teacher in High School who made a constant refrain of that analogy. She often compared the Cold War (this was during the Regan era) to ancient Greece.
The parent poster said nothing complimentary about Hussein or terrorism. Claiming he did is touch pathetic.
What are you talking about? Kerry neither beat the drums of war like Alcibiades nor ran the invasion like Nicias. Surely his service record in Vietnam bars him from being labeled a pansy. I haven't heard him advocate a withdraw from Iraq (right now) because he probably believes it would leave the place in a worse condition (for us) than it was before we went in.
Bin Laden was running Al Qaeda from the Taliban's Afghanistan. What does 9/11 have to do with invading Iraq?