IRAQ WATCH: In the first of an occasional series, Patrick Smyth looks at some otheraspects of the gathering storm over Iraq
It's a bit more expensive than developing the holiday snaps, but having a satellite point its high-definition camera at the spots on the world map which particularly interest you is not altogether out of the question these days.
$6,000 will get you a good look at an Iraqi "missile factory" or the work being done by the US on a certain al-Udeid air base in Qatar, which is to be home to the US regional high command (new aircraft shelters, storage tanks and parking ramps . . .)
Or you can log on free to the folks at a five-person Washington military watch group (Globalsecurity.org), funded by charity, which has decided to put such interesting snapshots on the Internet in the interests of transparency.
The latest phase of the information revolution means the days of state monopolies on such sensitive intelligence data are over. Private US firms now face competition from an Israeli-owned satellite and shortly from others from France, Germany, Italy, Korea and India, who are planning to launch satellites as good as those offered by the US.
Foreign satellite companies are free to ignore US laws. "I wish we didn't have to live with it," the US Defence Secretary, Mr Donald Rumsfeld, complained to journalists, but it appears, after initial attempts to control such operations, there is nothing he can do.
Last month Globalsecurity posted pictures of the Tuwaitha nuclear complex, 25 miles south-east of Baghdad. The images revealed "unexplained construction" at a facility "known to be associated with a clandestine nuclear program".
Within days, the Iraqi foreign ministry had given reporters unprecedented access to the plant.
A top official, Saeed Hassan Al- Mousawi, insisted that Tuwaitha was now nothing more than a mushroom farm. He displayed a printout from the Globalsecurity site to "prove" the Americans and British were "lying" about the facility.
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THE ripples from the Iraq debate are being felt far afield. On Tuesday in Kiev, 20,000 demonstrators called for the resignation of Ukraine's deeply unpopular President Leonid Kuchma.
Among the charges against him are that he had an opposition journalist assassinated, his continued failure to make inroads on unemployment and claims that he sold military equipment to Iraq.
This week the Bush administration put on hold some $55 million of badly needed aid pending investigations of a July 2000 tape in which Mr Kuchma is alleged to discuss the sale of anti-aircraft radar equipment with Iraqi officials.
Ukraine denies that any sales took place.
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THE Los Angeles Times this week reports that, reversing a long-standing policy, the Bush administration is set to seek congressional approval to provide military training to up to 10,000 members of the Iraqi opposition. They will be drawn from all the major ethnic groups in Iraq and exiled factions, many of whom are still not speaking to each other.
The paper says the idea is to create an array of forces capable of providing back-up to US forces when they move in, not to create an army akin to Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, to take on Saddam Hussein.
The move is likely, however, to unsettle an already nervous Turkey which will not want to see any enhancement of Kurdish fighting capabilities. Others may recall wryly that US support and training of Afghan guerrillas during the day of Soviet occupation may well have equipped a certain Osama bin Laden for later escapades.
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THE petulant behaviour of President Bush in refusing to congratulate Gerhard Schröder on his re- election because of the chancellor's refusal to back US plans for Iraq won a worthy riposte from columnist Maureen Dowd in the New York Times on Tuesday.
"In their eagerness to apply adolescent torture methods," she wrote, "Bush hawks seem to have forgotten history: do we really want to punish the Germans for being pacifists? Once those guys get rolling in the other direction, they don't really know how to put the brakes on . . .
"Only the Saudis get away with disobliging the administration on Iraq without being frozen out," she observed. "They're like the spoiled foreign princesses in high school, dripping in Dolce & Gabbana and Asprey, who drive their Mercedes convertibles into the magic alpha circle.
"But then, Germans merely make Mercedes. Saudis control the oil."
As Mr Bush might say: "Pity the French don't have a word for touché."