Well, he's quoting Peter Raven – director of the Missouri Botanical Garden and Engelmann Professor of Botany at Washington University in St Louis – who was
delivering the Darwin lecture in London on Wednesday, the eve of the UN-designated International Biodiversity Day. His lecture was entitled 'Our Choice: How Many Species Will Survive The 21st Century?'
So how many species are going, Peter?
According to Kirby's report, Raven says
the rich world in particular is not confronting the extinction crisis.
(Huh! That rich world again!) And
He believes we know scarcely 15% of animal and plant species alive today.
And
most of those we are driving to extinction will vanish without us ever having known they were here.
But obviously Peter must know they're here, because he knows we're driving them to extinction. How many species, Peter?
... perhaps 10 million species alive today, of which only 1.5 million had been recognised and named scientifically.
... In the tropical rainforests, only one species in 20 had so far been catalogued, scientists estimated.
... We are likely never to have seen or to be aware of the existence of most of the species we are driving to extinction.
So all of this reinforces the hugeness of the difficulty of knowing how many species are vanishing. And, indeed, whether any particular species actually has disappeared. (If it stops showing up in place A, how are we to know it isn't present in place B, hidden among all those uncatalogued species?) So – how many species?
In fact you can read the whole piece and not find out how many.
Perhaps Raven's lecture gave some well supported figures for numbers of extinctions. After all, it was the very theme of his talk, according to its title. My point here is that the BBC's correspondent thought it was his professional duty to retail the tale of woe, yet had no problem with leaving out the central claim that supported it. That was dispensable. 'Everybody knows' that species are being wiped out en masse – don't bore people with the numbers, which might be a bit too equivocal.
UK scientists have issued a clarion call to the world to recognise the galloping rate of species extinction
... The group which produced the Royal Society report was chaired by Professor Peter Crane, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
He said: "The living world is disappearing before our eyes. Around one in 10 of all the world's bird species and a quarter of its mammals are officially listed as threatened with extinction, while up to two-thirds of other animal species are also endangered.
'Threatened'? 'Endangered'? What do these weasel words mean? The very next paragraph begins:
These losses have accelerated over the last 200 years …
So threats and endangerments in one paragraph turn into losses in the next.
But how many species have gone?
Answer comes there none – in Kirby's report. But the impression conveyed by the above is that somehow a quarter of all mammals – and a tenth of all birds, and then even two-thirds of all animals – might disappear before our eyes. Of course, that's not what Crane said - but he didn't actually say anything in this report of a press release about a report.
Thus our priesthood piles on its prophecies of doom, and prepares the minds of the faithful for the sacrifices that are going to be needed. Back to Kirby's report of Raven's Darwin Lecture:
His prescription was simple and demanding: a stable population, a globally sustainable consumption level, and acceptance of social justice as the norm for development.
I've just tried working out a route by rail (the car is off-road at present) between Bedford and Pinner for a Monday night. Why the hell should anyone want to be in Pinner (it's a far-flung bit of London, in case you don't know) on a Monday night? Don't ask. But that was my mission, and finding the route illustrated the promise and frustrations of the Net as we know it today.
First, I wanted to find the nearest railway station. National Rail Enquiries Online was prompt, smooth, confident: Pinner didn't exist as far as it was concerned.
I went to Multimap and found out where Pinner is. The nearest well-known place seemed to be Harrow. Rail enquiries responded brilliantly to the query: it told me I wanted Harrow and Wealdstone station, and gave me two serious alternatives for getting there – one into central London and out again, the other via obscure local routes, which I preferred. It also gave me a weird option, beginning with a bus run by Virgin Trains to Milton Keynes. (This sort of corporate cross-dressing is becoming familiar nowadays. I honestly can't tell you whether our gas is supplied by the electricity company or our electricity by the gas company. I think it says on the bills, but it's a long time since I had to look at them – whoever they are just help themselves to the cash without any action being needed on my part.)
So I fired off emails to persons in Pinner and elsewhere, telling them I'd be at H & W station about 6:30 pm. Then I started wondering about the price. The rail enquiries site wasn't so brilliant about this. It seems to want to tell you prices only if you specify a given train company first, and my trip involved two. And not all of those – and not all categories of travel. And, in the end, not the fare for the particular trip I was taking. A helpful link gave me a list of possible reasons for this failure. Unfortunately, the list was a little too long and comprehensive to illuminate me.
Then it occurred to me that I should really try harder to find out the nearest station to Pinner. I tried Google. Strange and obscure sites popped up that made it clear to me that Pinner is a key site in the history of railways. And strongly hinted that it's on the London Underground.
So, off to thetube.com – and there is Pinner, direct via the Metropolitan line from King's Cross.
Well, how the hell was I supposed to know that? I only lived in London for 15 years all told, not nearly long enough to take me to places like Pinner. And why didn't National Rail Enquiries Online own up to the fact? The route via London that they gave me involved a short Tube journey, so why didn't they tell me the whole truth?
I've just stumbled across openDemocracy – following a trail that led me to Roger Scruton's articles therein.
Believing that it is important not to condemn a publication out of hand on the basis of its blurb, I was ready to close my eyes to sentences like
With enough readers and members it will be a true arena for democratic change, for closing the distance between people and power, influencing global policy and will also be an enjoyable experience that shares knowledge across borders and differences.
and to
The new website, launched on the 4th November is a rich resource of content with a great variety of views on these central issues, ranging from American Power in the World, Globalisation and The Environment. [Sic – the sentence ends there.]
and
It brings together in a level handed way thought leaders, policy makers and you, the public to find new, creative ways of building a better World.
But this paragraph killed off any idea of joining the mailing-list:
The label ‘anti capitalist’ has been draped over a movement for global justice that encompasses a huge range of grievances from the influence of multi-national business to the infringement of civil liberties under the slogan ‘another world is possible’. However ‘confused’ this movement seems to be, it is united by a single theme: the desire for change. And this desire isn’t confined to the movement for change from below. Many in established positions want to reverse the widening gap between rich and poor, counter the irrationalities of the financial markets, check the imbalance associated with American power, head off the growth of violent fundamentalisms and develop better forms of accountability and global regulation.
However ‘confused’ this paragraph seems to be, it is united by a single theme, and I'm not buying it.
By the way, a sentiment such as 'heading off the growth of violent fundamentalisms' is usually only expressed in order to follow it with '... and of course, the most violent of all fundamentalisms is that of the United States'. I heard exactly this non-thought expressed by John Gray on Radio 4's Start the Week this morning.
I've just listened to as much of the ineffably self-satisfied Broadcasting House as I could bear this morning. Among other subjects on which it cast darkness was the 'referendums'-versus-'referenda' split. Now, I don't do 'referendums'. Obviously, it's a perfectly legitimate usage: anybody who opposed it as 'incorrect' should be required henceforth to use 'agenda' as a plural. But I find 'referendums' an ugly and needless novelty. You have to be colour-blind to past English usage to like it – to want to regularize usage at the cost of idiom and diversity, to whitewash over the outward and visible signs of the word's history. It's the favoured usage of those who view and listen but don't read a printed page.
And why should people who are not so inclined have to do anything so old-fashioned as read a printed page? There's not an argument that would persuade them. But don't ask me to enjoy their linguistic company.
What bothers me most about 'referendums' is not the usage itself but the supernatural speed with which, having been adopted in government publications, it was taken up as the preference of newspapers, radio and TV. It's as if everyone thought usage were determined from the centre and no-one had the confidence to look to any other authority.
... it's both instructive and eerie to re-read Richard Hofstadter's classic essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Conservatives have never been fond of the essay, since its chief target is "the Goldwater movement." But Hofstadter was careful to note that the conspiratorial bent has infected disparate ideological movements over the course of American history. And today, though Hofstadter's description fits some aspects of neoconservative discourse, it applies with far greater force to neoconservatism's wild-eyed critics.
>>>
Pilot of an antique future
An email I've just received says:
… I have created this whole site just for fun, not to make money. I hope you all visit and enjoy it. I will ensure it stays on the net for many, many years to come.
If any of you are feeling generous, I would greatly appreciate it if you would add a link to my site from any sites you run, if you haven't already.
I'm delighted to do so. The site in question is Dan-Dare.net, dedicated to the pipe-smoking all-Brit hero who was Pilot of the Future in my long-gone past.
Actually Dan survived in various forms long after I'd given up reading the equally pipe-smoking all-Brit comic Eagle and even after that incomparable publication died. But I can't recognize reincarnations as the real thing. (Just as Dr Who fans get imprinted with the Doctor who was current when they were most impressionable and regard all others as inferior.) I find the Dan Dare animation presently running on Channel 5 on Saturday mornings quite unbearable. Not only does Dan have an impossibly wimpy voice, but his eyebrows are all wrong. And his eyebrows were a crucial part of Dan's charisma. Everything else is wrong, too …
Don't get me started. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then study and grow wise. Beginning at Dan-Dare.net. And savour the marvellous artworks of Frank Hampson.
A fascinating article in The New Republic by Sally Satel ("author of PC, M.D.--How Political Correctness is Corrupting Medicine") She reviews Remembering Trauma by Richard J. McNally.
Some snippets:
"Until the mid '90s, debates about trauma and memory were hampered by vitriolic accusations issuing from both sides and by the scarcity of clinically relevant scientific data," McNally writes. "Now, an outpouring of research has clarified many of the most contentious issues." Can survivors put trauma completely out of their minds? Do the workings of memory differ for traumatic events? How does emotional stress affect memory? How do shame and guilt magnify the traumatic potential of an event? These are just a handful of the important questions that McNally systematically tackles.
… The conclusion of McNally's research, and of the research of others, is that memories of horrible experiences are rarely, if ever, repressed—that is, exiled from consciousness without the victim knowing it and actively kept out of her awareness. On the contrary, those who endure shocking ordeals almost always remember them, even if they choose not to think about them or desperately wish to forget them.
… The cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has been vilified for publishing groundbreaking data on the malleability of memory. As a sought-after expert witness in repressed memory cases, she has been accused of sympathizing with child molesters.
… In July 1999, Congress unanimously passed House Resolution 107, which "condemns and denounces" three psychologists, Bruce Rind, Philip Tromovitch, and Robert Bauserman, for a "severely flawed" study, and the Senate then approved it unanimously. The psychologists' offense was publishing an empirical paper in the prestigious journal Psychological Bulletin concluding that child sex abuse does not inevitably lead to lasting psychological harm. McNally presents new evidence showing that the psychologists' conclusion—which was by no means an irresponsible reading of the data they examined—might not hold up, but he is fierce about protecting their scientific freedom.
Now McNally, too, risks excommunication from the Church of Traumatology, for the charge of blaming the victim. For he presents evidence showing that emotional breakdown after a tragedy is the exception, not the rule.
… The best evidence that MPD [multiple personality disorder] can be invented is the skyrocketing of its prevalence following the release in 1977 of the film Sybil, the true story of a woman who supposedly had sixteen discrete personalities. Prior to the movie, there were between 50 and 200 recorded cases of documented multiple personality disorder. By the 1990s, estimates climbed as high as 20,000 to 40,000.
… . Patients who are psychotic or profoundly depressed do not get better when the insurance money runs out, or when there is reason to evade responsibility—two circumstances that Spiegel has observed routinely in MPD cases. Nor are white women of North America disproportionately affected, as they are by MPD.
… In a second type of experiment, memories were injected outright. The best known of this genre is Loftus's lost-in-the-mall study. She told subjects that she had learned from relatives that when they were five years old, they were lost in a shopping mall, rescued by a shopper, and reunited with their family. Unknown to the subjects, Loftus contacted the relatives before relating the made-up vignette. Not only was Loftus able to convince one-quarter of the subjects that they had experienced the event, some even added embellishing details to the "memory."
… This mode of discourse [about 'post-Vietnam syndrome'] set the Vietnam veteran apart from soldiers that came before him. … Civil War soldiers also succumbed to mental breakdown, but because their war is portrayed as a righteous crusade to end slavery, it elicits images of heroes and prompts battle re-enactments. Only an unjust conflict such as Vietnam, [Eric T. Dean Jr.] argues, could prepare the cultural imagination to accept the idea of soldiers as psychiatric victims, tragic misfits, and tormented losers.
Could neutrinos destroy nuclear weapons? (May 13)
http://physicsweb.org/article/news/7/5/7
Physicists at the KEK laboratory in Japan and the University of Hawaii
have proposed a "futuristic but not necessarily impossible technology"
that would use an ultra-high energy neutrino beam to destroy nuclear
weapons. However, the researchers stress that the method is well beyond
the capabilities of current particle accelerators
So does this pie in the sky deserve to be hyped? Oh yes – it
… would require
substantial R&D and financial investment by many nations (H Sugawara et
al. 2003 arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0305062).
Never overlook the research-grant possibilities of any idea.
Reform will take years, decades even, and it will mean different things in different countries. In Iraq, it meant force. In Syria, it means hostile prodding; in Saudi Arabia, friendly prodding. It means setting a subversive example for Iran, creating the region's second democracy in Palestine, building on change in Qatar and Kuwait, leading Egypt gently toward multiparty politics. Progress will be fitful, at best. But the direction will be right, for a change.
… Much of Europe is alarmed by the change, but then, it would be. American troops in Saudi Arabia guaranteed the flow of oil while turning the United States (along with Israel) into the scapegoat of choice for millions of angry Muslims, some of whom live in Europe. From Paris's or Amsterdam's or Bremen's point of view, what's not to like about that deal? Why must Washington go and stir everything up?
Just discovered Jan Freeman in the Boston Globe – a usage buff. She defines the theme of her latest column thus:
While this column has been preoccupied with topics like war, pestilence, and gluttony, the pronunciation complaints –Iraq-related and otherwise – have been piling up.
Topics include the pronunciations of 'Hopi', 'cache', 'jubilant' (they have trouble with that across the water, it seems) and many others. Did you know that Dick Cheney pronounces his name 'chee-nee'?
I shall be feeding on this stuff. I call her a 'maven', borrowing from the indispensable Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct:
William Safire, who writes the weekly column "On Language" for The New York Times Magazine, calls himself a "language maven," from the Yiddish word meaning expert, and this gives us a convenient label for the entire group. To whom I say: Maven, shmaven! Kibbitzers and nudniks is more like it.
I shall use 'maven' as a term of pride. Another time I'll have to do battle with what Pinker says next:
For here are the remarkable facts. Most of the prescriptive rules of the language mavens make no sense on any level. They are bits of folklore that originated for screwball reasons several hundred years ago and have perpetuated themselves ever since ... The rules conform neither to logic nor to tradition, and if they were ever followed they would force writers into fuzzy, clumsy, wordy, ambiguous, incomprehensible prose, in which certain thoughts are not expressible.
Folklore that's several hundred years old, yet doesn't conform to tradition? I suggest that a prescriptive rule that's been held in regard for several hundred years deserves to be regarded as a tradition.
Can't go into this now. But I note that Freeman, like all the language mavens I enjoy reading, doesn't make the crass error attributed to them by their opponents of thinking that the rules of received (notice I avoid saying 'correct') usage have been or should be unchanging. In fact, they're a remarkably tolerant, good-humoured and historically sensitive crowd.
Oh, and check out The Word Spy too, whence I took the Pinker quotes.
Yesterday I rashly suggested doing something that Sue had mentioned as an abstract necessity the day before: cleaning out the garden pond. How easy it is to speak without understanding the meaning of our words!
We dug our pond many years ago. In three dimensions it is the shape of an ice-cream cone, and not much bigger, and it is lined with thick black plastic sheeting. It had half vanished under a huge aquatic plant, and a surface layer of green vegetable objects, like tiny round green leaves. Strange, this is the first time I've wondered just what these are, botanically. But yesterday, essentially they were litter.
We knew the pond was home to frogs and small brown newts. The frogs had been imported as tadpoles by a kind neighbour, then not much bigger than a tadpole himself. The newts must have generated spontaneously in the Lilliputian depths. As we ladled out the inky black suspension of mud onto the nearby flower beds, some of the mud would start wriggling, and we knew we had a creature to net and store in a large plastic bin, before our dog decided to deal with it.
The time came when the level of the liquid was close to the bottom. Sue put on rubber gloves and hooked out a quoit, a tennis ball, a ball that had once been attacked to a stretchy cord for the entertainment of dogs, a few large stones for anchoring plants, a jam-jar long ago used by the neighbour's child to deliver the ancestors of the frogs. Then I had to lie prone and scoop out the last of the gunk. Bits of the noisome ooze were all over the place by now, so I could forget about keeping it off my clothes. It was appearing on my face and in my hair. When the water had gone, what I was lifting out was all mud. And the last hold-out frogs and newts.
In the middle of all this, it started to rain, making the experience perfect.
Not wanting to get to my feet every time I removed an amount of ooze that didn't quite fill the small beach bucket I was using, I dumped it at arm's length from the pond. My wife protested feebly at this, but I was not in a receptive mood for any suggestions that might mean my having to work harder than I was. Today I learned that the pile I formed is going to have to be moved. Personally, I'm in favour of letting it rot down in place.
Eventually we declared the job done. Or at least, that there wasn't much point in going on, since the roots of the giant plant were holding on to a great mass of silt just like the stuff we'd taken out. Since we could hardly do anything about that without actually committing herbicide on the plant, the pond would quickly return to its previous state once it was refilled.
Sue went to our bathroom, which is upstairs, attached our hose to a tap there because these are the only taps in the house that the hose will fit, chucked the hose out of the window and turned on the water. Coming downstairs she found that the hose had managed not just to snake in through the open kitchen door, but had nosed its way onto an open bag containing her school work. I commented that this was a pretty drastic application of Sod's Law.
The pond has been refilled. Sue lay the bin serving as our wildlife refuge on its side near the water and the inhabitants immediately made their way home. This morning we checked it. The water is clearer – we can see an inch or two into it. The snout and eyes of one frog were visible – a solitary lookout, though we know there are a score of its kin in there.
In the middle of the wet, cold, smelly labour, I had told Sue that this was great. And I meant it. Most things are better than the great enemy, routine. And no way would I want to spoil this experience by letting it become routine.
I was reading William James on the subject of habit yesterday, and became interested to know what he had to say about the position of blacks in America.
This is the Internet: no sooner asked than answered. I immediately found James's address on the dedication in 1897 of the Shaw Monument in Boston. Robert Gould Shaw was the commander (white, of course) of the black Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment. Shaw died in the 54th's attack on Fort Wagner. James's brother Wilkie, serving in the 54th, was wounded in the same battle. William James's prose in the speech is in bright purple, but I defy you to read it without being moved.
Here is his view of the Civil War:
The war for our Union, with all the constitutional questions which it settled, and all the military lessons which it gathered in, has throughout its dilatory length but one meaning in the eye of history. And nowhere was that meaning better symbolized and embodied than in the constitution of this first Northern negro regiment.
… Since the 'thirties the slavery question had been the only question, and by the end of the 'fifties our land lay sick and shaking with it like a traveller who has thrown himself down at night beside a pestilential swamp, and in the morning finds the fever through the marrow of his bones
… And when South Carolina took the final step in battering down Fort Sumter, it was the fanatics of slavery themselves who called upon their idolized institution ruin swift and complete. What law and reason were unable to accomplish, had now to be done by that uncertain and dreadful dispenser of God's judgments, War - War, with its abominably casual, inaccurate methods, destroying good and bad together, but at last able to hew a way out of intolerable situations, when through man's delusion of perversity every better way is blocked.
As it happens, he winds up with a reference to his pet subject, habit:
… the secret and the glory of our English speaking race, consists in nothing but two common habits, two inveterate habits carried into public life, … One of them is the habit of trained and disciplined good temper towards the opposite party when it fairly wins its innings. It was by breaking away from this habit that the Slave States nearly wrecked our Nation. The other is that of fierce and merciless resentment toward every man or set of men who break the public peace. By holding to this habit the free States saved her life.
I think you could call his view the official Northern, and now national, doctrine of the Civil War.
Somehow or other I found my way to the Website of the 37th Texas Cavalry, 'an historically accurate Confederate reenactment unit', where a Southern view is expressed. Apparently, '…this site remains the largest, most visited War for Southern Independence reenactor web site.' One or two snippets from the page 'On Black Confederates' :
It has been estimated that over 65,000 Southern blacks were in the Confederate ranks. Over 13,000 of these, "saw the elephant" also known as meeting the enemy in combat. These Black Confederates included both slave and free. The Confederate Congress did not approve blacks to be officially enlisted as soldiers (except as musicians), until late in the war. But in the ranks it was a different story. Many Confederate officers did not obey the mandates of politicians,…
As the war came to an end, the Confederacy took progressive measures to build back up its army. The creation of the Confederate States Colored Troops, copied after the segregated northern colored troops, came too late to be successful. Had the Confederacy been successful, it would have created the world's largest armies (at the time) consisting of black soldiers, even larger than that of the North. This would have given the future of the Confederacy a vastly different appearance than what modern day racist or anti-Confederate liberals conjecture. Not only did Jefferson Davis envision black Confederate veterans receiving bounty lands for their service, there would have been no future for slavery after the goal of 300,000 armed black CSA veterans came home after the war.
… . In 1864, President Jefferson Davis approved a plan that proposed the emancipation of slaves, in return for the official recognition of the Confederacy by Britain and France. France showed interest but Britain refused.
There are many fascinating anecdotes on the same page.
I often meet American libertarians still fighting the Civil War (or, as they'd more likely say, War for Southern Independence). The argument turns really interesting when black Americans like Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell join in.
I got out of bed just now and told Sue that it must be six months since I last wrote a blog entry. But it's not: it's less than three. Will I spoil my reputation if I rush in with an entry now?
A war has come and gone since the last entry. On 28 March I posted to the Libertarian Alliance forum a strongly pro-war essay on Islam, terrorism and the West, by an old college friend of mine. I preceded his piece with these responses of my own:
I'm in agreement with your sentiments almost up to the end – but I think finally that I mildly disapprove of this war. 'Mildly' might seem like a feeble reaction to a big event – one would think that where a cataclysm is concerned you ought to be strongly for, strongly against, or blockheadedly don't-know. But this is the reason why I can't get worked up against this war: although it's bad for us – because Iraq doesn't directly threaten us, and we should meddle much less than we do with other countries – this is mitigated by the fact that it will be good for Iraq. It's a form of foreign aid. In general I'm against (government-organized) foreign aid, but in this instance it's likely to do more good than harm – for Iraq.
I think Iraq is no danger to the West precisely because it's a visible, vulnerable state, and we have overwhelming nuclear weaponry (you see that I'm no peacenik!). Just rattling our atomic sabres would terrify Saddam into making sure he could never be linked with any terrorist action against us. (Perhaps this war could be justified on the grounds that it's the only way to convince the world that the Anglosphere really has abandoned its despicable pre-9/11 appeasement attitudes.)
That being so, I think actually invading Iraq on unconvincing pretexts is a peculiar venture, and I can't help thinking that it's meant as a distraction from the real war against terror, which by its nature is going to be long drawn out, tedious, and lacking dramatic, televisual victories.
But I would never march against the war. (Not even 'mildly' stroll.) I think a day's work is a better contribution to society than having a street party. And I have nothing in common with the pacifists, anti-capitalists, anti-Westerners, UN-fanatics, collectivists, and assorted world-government bullies ('anti-globalist', yet pro-global-government) who provide the footsoldiers on such events. They want to dominate the world in their own way.
No, I don't think Iraq is – was – the real threat. Al-Qaeda and all the other Moslem fanatics' clubs that will follow are the real danger, I believe. And to me, as a libertarian, among the biggest threats they pose are the shackles that our governments will pile on us with the pretext that they're saving us from the terrorists.
There's too much to say on all this – here's just one last thing: I feel the same way at the thought of an Islamic future for our countries as you do - it's too horrible to contemplate. Actually, it's inconceivable to me that our history could end in that way. I think that the example of our science, technology and individualism will erode Islam as surely as it's eroded Christianity (I don't know what it's done to Judaism). Eventually there will be a diluted Islam that will convince itself that it's holding to the old truths while in reality compromising with modernity. We just have to hold out till then, by being heavily armed in our own defence, and believing in ourselves.
I don't want to retract anything I said there. While the war was in progress, I was wholeheartedly on the coalition side. I rejoiced in its victories and was contemptuous of nearly everything I saw and heard that was against the war. And, being on the coalition's side, I was shamed and downcast when its bombs and bullets went astray, angered when it behaved ruthlessly, and contemptuous of much of the justification that came out of Downing Street and the White House.
Sometimes the state gets something halfway right. Brushing Saddam aside might prove to have been one of those things.
But what about those weapons of mass destruction? Were our leaders genuinely mistaken or recklessly lying? Or might they prove to have been right?
I genuinely want them to be found. But that's a perverse wish: such a discovery will be used to justify many more such interventions. And these won't always be against something as monstrous as the Saddam regime.
