Day: February 5, 2003

The U.N. approach to the Iraq inspections?
No! Saletan’s approach to covering the Iraq inspections.
The Saddameter was bad enough — a half-baked, semi-daily feature in which Saletan makes an art of over-interpreting the day’s events to produce a cute “score” supposedly showing how likely war is on any given day. But now, Slate’s resident numerologist has created an impressive-looking chart of Security Council reaction to Powell’s presentation.
Memo to Will: Those speeches were all written before anybody had heard what Powell had to say. Relying on them to gauge how good a job Powell did is a bit pointless. Using them to try to pseudo-scientifically “score” Powell’s performance is doubly so. (In Saddameter-like terms: if 0 was totally pointful, and 100 is utterly pointless, Saletan gets a 97 today.)
Fellow Slatester Fred Kaplan grokked this rather obvious truth (“…[diplomats] were reading boilerplate that had been written before Powell’s briefing… “). What’s Will’s excuse?
But hey: It is a spiffy looking chart…
Update: Eric Umansky, aka Today’s Papers, gets it too: “USA Today goes highest with foreign feedback, running above-the-fold excerpts from the Security Council responses of Britain, France, China, and Russia. The only problem with that is, as most of the papers mention, that the speeches were all written before Powell gave his talk, so what are they a reaction to?”
Good question, Eric. Ask Will!

If you are looking for a live internet stream to listen to and watch Powell’s presentation (since he’s expected to show video and imaging evidence), the best I have found is NBC’s local New York affiliate, WNBC. They seem to have a nice Windows Media stream here.
I also found a RealVideo stream here, from WBUR in Boston.
Heck, I’m not going to be able to do anything else, it looks like it’s another TTLB live blogging event! I’ll post my thoughts here as they occur to me.
First Impression: Good start. Emphasis on the Councils own actions; reminders of past resolutions and 1441 in particular, and on the burden being on Iraq to prove compliance. Heh, and he’s invoking Blix’s comments as well. nice.
A tape! Starting with good stuff! First audio tape: Not quite a smoking gun, but not a bad start.
Holy crap, audio intercepts from January 30th? They are pulling out the stops. Doesn’t that short turnaround time reveal something important about our intelligence capabilities?
I particularly liked Powell’s challenge to the Council: are the inspectors to search every house of every government official?
The before/after satellite photo of the biological weapon site is nice as well.
Nice: “This body places itself in danger of irrelevance.”
I’m having trouble keeping up (and getting distracted by other stuff), so go read Stephen’s commentary, I’ll probably have summary thoughts later…