I don't think the other Arab's give a rats ass. This is mostly about him
being able to sell oil again. If he re-enters the market he is going to
drive prices down by selling his oil at cut rate prices to get people to
buy. The other oil producing nations aren't in too much of a hurry to see
that. As long as we keep this to ourselves and keep Israel out of it they
don't care if we pop in a few cruise missiles. I predict a Saturday night
strike. (Well Sun morning)
I wasn't in much of position to respond to this at the time --- BBC
radio had been reporting for the entire week that the Arab states
generally were opposed to military action, but I don't have a URL for
text of their reports.
However, after this weekend's round of diplomatic (not military)
activity, even the *American* media was reporting that the
U.S. administration could not find a single Arab state that was
willing to condone military action --- not even Kuwait.
Anyone who's curious about the reasons for this might want to look
today's (Wednesday, Nov. 19) Salon Newsreal column (www.salon1999.com)
which has an article on the subject by Jonathan Broder.
BTW, I feel like any ForkPost of mine these days is incomplete without
some reference to the f00f bug, so what the hey: the latest on the
Linux mailing list is that Linus has identified a fix for the bug
which is actually better than Intel's, in that no performance penalty
at all is incurred for *any* traps except those (f00fc7cX illegal
instruction traps) that would otherwise hang the processor. It's also
a whole lot less messy to implement. He's discussed it with Intel,
who have told him it ought to work, and posted a patch against 2.1.65;
results from early testers are positive.
rst