Tuesday, June 03, 2003

[Colin Glassey] The Proposed European Constitution is a Recipe for a Totalitarian State Porphyrogenitus has a pair of long posts on the newly released draft E.U. constitution. To put it bluntly: the proposed document removes the power of the member states. The natitional governments are unable to take any independent actions. The power of the E.U. Central Government has no limits. The people of Europe will not be able to choose their leaders. There seem to be no no checks and balances in the E.U. constitution. This looks to me to be a disaster for Europe. If this consitution is passed (which I think is likely given how nothing has stopped the E.U. so far), then I predict we will have to fight to free Europe sometime in the next 100 years. The document, as Porphyrogenitus points out, is most similar to the U.S.S.R. constitution. All power to the state, ordinary people can just shut up and live with the rules issued by their wise leadership. Why did the European Commission come up with such a stupid, wrong-headed design? OK, I'm an American I support our system of government, but really, is it that hard to figure out that our system of government really does WORK! The E.U. constitution should be: no longer than 20 pages long. It should spell out clear limits to the power of the goverment. It should say very clearly how the people control their government. Frankly, they should have started with the U.S. Constitution and then made some European-specific tinkering. This 200 page monster is a recipie for concentration-camps and war in the future. We in the U.S. should actively try to prevent Europe from adopting this model. 2:22:16 PM     [Colin Glassey] And What if Iraq Had No Nuclear Program? Well, I do think that Colin Powell put his personal reputation on the line when he asserted that Saddam was concealing weapons of mass distruction. If that proves to be wrong, then Powell's reputation will suffer. However, that fact is that Saddam could not be trusted. Perhaps his weapons programs were all halted by 1996. Perhaps Saddam really didn't order a secret resumption of the nuclear program after the inspectors all withdrew in 1998. I don't think it matters much. Saddam should NOT have been left in power in Iraq after his defeat in 1991. The choice then, to leave Saddam in power, to avoid the possible break-up of Iraq, was wrong. He was an international criminal by virtue of his unprovoked conquest of Kuwait and he should have been replaced when we beat him in the First Gulf War. The fact that we didn't was a mistake then and we finally corrected that mistake in 2003. The blood of ten's of thousands of Shias who rose up against Saddam in 1991 and were then killed by his forces is, to some degree, on the hands of the first Bush administration. At the time I agreed with the decision not to send our forces to Badhdad in 1991 but I hoped that Saddam would be overthrown and I hoped that we (the U.S.) would provide support to Iraqis seeking to overthrow Saddam. In retrospect, I was wrong. We should have recognized that after throwing Saddam out of Kuwait, we couldn't live with him in power in Iraq and continued military operations into the rest of Iraq. It would have been easy and it would have avoided most, if not all, of the subsequent problems that resulted: the massive flight of the Kurds and the resulting deaths of many who tried to flee Iraq the deaths of 20+ thousand Shias in southern Iraq the destruction of the land of the Marsh Arabs the cost of establishing and maintaining the northern and southern "no fly zones" the continued large-scale deployment of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia Hopefully we will learn from the mistake of 1991. The next time we intervene militarily, we will NOT leave the cause of intervention in power. 1:06:55 PM     [Colin Glassey] The Beagle 2 is on its way The Beagle 2 is a very nice science robotic lander developed by British scientists. You can read all about it at its own web site. Basically, this lander and the equipment on it is a direct attempt to assess the claim, made by NASA some years earlier, that a Martian meteorite contained fosilzed life. The equipment on it is great and should provide great data, if only it arrives safely. About 60% of all expiditions to Mars have been near or total failures. Good luck Beagle 2! 12:51:48 PM

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