Fred writes:

> On Friday, February 14, 2003, at 07:31  AM, Tom Brandt wrote:
>
>  > The validity of on-line polls using self-selected responders: 0%
>
>  I agree with the idea that they're validity is suspect. One doesn't
>  need to toss the results into the trash. One can accept them without
>  believing that they are (even close to) perfect. The 0% you assigned
>  implies that they're absolutely false. Is that the result of a 1-person
>  poll? :-)

Beyond the case that robots are responding to the polls, which I'm sure is
not the case, asking about the cross-section of people who are responding to
the poll is to miss the point of the comparison. How polling is conducted is
an obviously legitimate question when only one group is polled, but it
becomes much less important when multiple groups are polled, so long as the
same methods are applied universally.

All sampling methods are flawed in one respect or another, but those flaws
can be compensated for by using comparative methods. The same questions were
asked of the European national users on February 12th as they were of the US
users on February 13th. Even if we presume that the respondents were the
oddest members of society, presumably they would be equally so on each side
of the Atlantic, and that likely demographic equality only serves to
emphasize the stark contrast between the various national responses.

In that regard however, another segment of European society is planning to
mass for anti-war, anti-US protests this weekend throughout Europe. Hundreds
of thousands of protestors are expected to rally in all of the major capitals
of Europe.


Gavin is exactly right when he writes:

> If the US fails to achieve a consensus that allows it to attack Iraq, and is
>  forced to recall its forces from the gulf (or even if it then unilaterally
>  attacks Iraq), it is likely to find that the rest of the world will view
>  this as a weakness in the former de-facto world leader, and the ability of
>  the US to dictate policy to the rest of the planet could be severely
>  damaged.

But of course the situation is much worse than that. If the US engages in
unilateral cross-border excursions into another sovereign country without the
legitimacy explicit to the consent of the United Nations, then I would
suggest that such action is a criminal act under international law. If it
comes to that, I believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell should be
arrested and put on trial before the Hague. Quite obviously, the United
States cannot claim that it is unilaterally enforcing UN resolutions without
the consent of the UN itself.

We enact laws, establish courts and enter into treaties to prevent exactly
such action by the most powerful members of society, and they must be held
accountable to those laws or the laws mean nothing at all.

Wirt Atmar

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