perfidy

Talk of a draft grows despite denials by White House.

If we reframe the Iraq situation and have the possibility of a draft, what happens to American support for this war? It disappears.

It's one thing to have a son drafted into the Army to defend the nation. It's another thing when it's a war in another country, for obscure reasons, started with less than half truths...

Our generations may yet understand Viet Nam, in fear...

Tacitus gives his current opinion on Iraq, and mentions the draft, as a terrible but possibly necessary choice.

Via Daily KOS, this chilling comment from Paul Wolfowitz:

Q: Hi, Mr. Wolfowitz. My name is Ruthy Coffman. I think I speak for many of us here when I say that your policies are deplorable. They're responsible for the deaths of innocents and the disintegration of American civil liberties. [Applause]

We are tired, Secretary Wolfowitz, of being feared and hated by the world. We are tired of watching Americans and Iraqis die, and international institutions cry out in anger against us. We are simply tired of your policies. We hate them, and we will never stop opposing them. We will never tire or falter in our search for justice. And in the name of this ideal and the ideal of freedom, we assembled a message for you that was taken away from us and that message says that the killing of innocents is not the solution, but rather the problem. Thank you. [Applause and jeers]

Wolfowitz: I have to infer from that that you would be happier if Saddam Hussein were still in power. [Applause]

***snip***

Q: I'd just like to say that people like Ruthy and myself have always opposed Saddam Hussein, especially when Saddam Hussein was being funded by the United States throughout the '80s. And -- [Applause] And after the killings of the Kurds when the United States increased aid to Iraq. We were there opposing him as well. People like us were there. We are for democracy. And I have a question.

What do you plan to do when Bush is defeated in 2004 and you will no longer have the power to push forward the project for New American Century's policy of American military and economic dominance over the people of the world? [Applause]

Wolfowitz: I don't know if it was just Freudian or you intended to say it that way, but you said you opposed Saddam Hussein especially when the United States supported him.

It seems to me that the north star of your comment is that you dislike this country and its policies. [Applause]

And it seems to me a time to have supported the United States and to push the United States harder was in 1991 when Saddam Hussein was slaughtering those innocents so viciously.

So opposing policies is Unamerican. It's good to know that. Especially when we're being told that by one of the most powerful men in the current Administration.

From the weird department...when there's nothing better to do...

So the police went in, guns ready, commando-style, and took down...a high school. Awesome!

A few thoughts spring to mind.

It's hard to second guess police in a situation like this...but the fact that they found nothing in their raid is pretty telling...sounds like an over-reaction to me.

Sometimes you can suspect that, well, the school is full of drugs, and when you actually send the men with guns in, you find nothing. But, the dogs smelled something on some of the kids. At least they had that! I am sure the kids had a drug program of some kind. Maybe they were cultivating.

Plus kids get to see what guns look like close-up, and from different angles, like pointing right at you! Cool! It's a learning experience for them.

I am pretty sure these kids are going to realize that we are doing the right thing. If a few of them get killed by mistake, at some point, we really have to think of the greater good.

Don't we?

I wonder if the Patriot Act was helpful in opening up the lockers of those nasty kids.

Yes, yes....there really was a drug problem in this school. I know that. I'm just not sure I'd be all that happy to be a parent of a kid being sent to this particular school, at this time.

Dan Drezner's Brother is a pretty rich guy (investment banker). He wrote there on how most people pay nothing in taxes, except for rich people, and how the heck can we expect rich people to do anything more?

The giant holes in this argument are easy to spot.

Social security is a tax on the poor and middle class ONLY, to the tune of 15.8% of income. Sales tax is usually another 5% or more.

So our "zero tax payer" pays, in fact, around 20% tax right out of the starting gate, even if he's not paying anything in federal income tax because his income is low. He's also paying property taxes, "license fees" (taxes in disguise), and a myriad of other little taxes that really add up.

We need to stop pretending that the social security deductions are any different from our normal taxes. They're not. They're used in the general fund. If we just think of the whole thing (fed, state, SS, etc) as the tax burden, suddenly it doesn't seem like such a great deal to be poor any more. So if we're just going to push them into the general fund, we might as well make it the "flat rate tax" that conservatives have always pushed for so vigorously. Here's your chance! Prove it's what you really want.

You know, the "lucky duckies".

Remember: Take the taxation rate on person X who isn't crazy rich, add 16%, and you know what they're really paying in taxes. Better yet, add another 5% for state taxes, and another two or three for the various "licenses" we need to have. Pretty soon you're talking real money.

According to the Washington Post, the White House has decided that it will no longer respond to questions about government finances from members of Congress who aren't Republicans. Of course, what they say is that they'll only respond to committee chairs, but since all the chairs are Republican, it's the same thing, right?

Last time I checked, the chairs of committees didn't carry any more legal authority into Congress (voting support) than any other member of Congress. This whole committee business is something that has to change. When you have half the Senate controlled by one party and half by the other, the chairmanships ought to be split equally.

Why does this Administration fight releasing information at every turn? Why are Cheney's conversations about energy still secret? Are there truly so many necessary secrets?

There aren't. Just as we've seen the Patriot Act being abused to prosecute crimes unrelated to terrorism, we're now seeing executive powers abused. These people aren't interested in what's right. They're interested in what they're legally able to get away with. And truly, that is why they emphasize the rule of law at every opportunity. You see, what they're doing is legal.

It's extremely useful to place all this in context. We had a tempest in a teapot last week, with RepubliFoxNews shouting to all who would listen (in other words, the people that already agree with them) that the democrats were "politicizing the intelligence process". This was continuously repeated all around the blogosphere as well. Doesn't it make sense to go to the memo itself, read it ourselves, and judge?

Look at the opener on that story: "Following is the text of a memo written by a Democrat on the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that suggests how to make the greatest gain off of intelligence data leading to the war against Iraq. The memo was obtained by Fox News".

Talk about leading the reader around by the nose. Don't bother reading it, they're telling you. We've already done that for you!

This memo is a tactical one. It's trying to figure out how to get an investigation of intelligence matter started, because they're being stonewalled in every other way. And, as I pointed out earlier, the White House is becoming substantially less cooperative vis-a-vis elected representatives. These committees are fundamentally political entities. If they weren't, the chairmen would listen to requests made by all committee members, rather than only those made by his party.

All in all this points to the following: The White House views our elected representatives as nothing more than speed bumps on the road to "getting it done", whatever it is. We sure as hell can't count on anything they've said so far to understand what they're doing.

It's just another pile of steaming crap, fresh out of the GOP's "The Earth is Flat" Playbook. Yeah -- the earth is being flattened. And by the time they're through with it, it'll be scorched too. But it won't matter to Bush and Corporation -- they'll be safe in their gated communities, paying less in taxes than the workers whose jobs they are vigorously sending overseas, in the name of "productivity", or shareholder value, or whatever BS line they're delivering this week.

Get this straight: Increasing shareholder value only helps if you're a shareholder. With the massive decline in the economy overall, I suspect that the average citizen in this country will be returning to historical investment positions. Most of the time that means he really won't have any. And that's just fine with the ruling majority, who'll continue to suck the lifeblood out of that guy's family and finances with regressive taxes needed to give the very richest among us a massive tax cut, use his money to pay for a war he doesn't give a shit about, and hand the bill to his children, while shielding their own children by eliminating the estate tax.

I love a good conspiracy theory.

Great reading here...the FTC is releasing findings about the patent system. Reading this, it's just common sense to do so, and everything in here squares with what I've experienced.

A must-read editorial in the Washington Post.

Gerrymandering has produced districts that where, due to strategic reallocation of funds to contested areas, one side or the other has essentially ceded all ground. It represents the destruction of local politics, and the reduction of discourse to the lowest common denominator. Why? Because at the national level of politics, only the lowest common denominator applies.

Good article from The Economist; well worth reading. Not being as entirely aware of history as I should be, it's interesting to learn that Reagan's tax reform was, on the whole, pretty much revenue neutral. He was able to drop rates, but close loopholes at the same time, and I guess we can presume that he did us all a big favor by doing so.

Bush's tax cuts are far from revenue neutral. Yes, it seems like the economy is starting to turn a corner, and that is a very good thing. It's been a really tough environment out there. The thing is, there is an ever-widening gap between the sales pitches the administration uses to get its policies passed, and the reality on the ground afterwards.

For example, Brad DeLong notes that the President's "Council of Economic Advisors" projected, last February, that passing the "Jobs And Growth" package would result in an overall increase of 300,000 new jobs. Actual figure: A loss of 2.3 million jobs. That's a pretty big gap.

So what we're learning is this: If there's some vague effect on the job market that the tax cuts have, it's very weak at best, and in no way, shape or manner does it even begin to resemble the sales pitch provided to America beforehand.

We've provided massively for the Rich in this country so jobs would be created, so we were told. The trickle-down effect would help us all. What we've found is that Bush tax policy has had little effect on anything, other than effecting a massive inter-generational wealth transfer, as the current generation in power spends like mad, running up the national deficit, financing their own retirements.

You can bet they'll all be voting as a block in the years to come, forcing the younger generation into ever-more extreme taxation and deficit positions, whining and bitching that "they paid into social security all their lives".

We'll see about that.

Here in the DC area there's a story getting some buzz: Glitches Prompt GOP Suit Over Fairfax Tabulations. The GOP is absolutely right to protest this vote; it's not about anything other than the validity of the process.

The machines in question are the WinVote model, from Advanced Voting Systems. Just listen to their pitch: The functionality linchpin of the WINvoteTM system is its wireless LAN (IEEE 802.11b) system - called the Wireless Information Network (WIN) -- that enables the user to communicate remotely with the major components of the voting system.

Does anybody else see a problem with enabling wireless communications to voting machines? This is just f'ing stupid, beyond belief. Encryption can help ameliorate the situation, but what I see is the possibility of ne'er-do-wells attempting to disrupt elections with laptops. All they have to do is hang around the building within a few hundred feet, and they can screw with the election machines to their heart's content.

Who wrote the IP stack on the machines in question? We can't tell from the web site, which means in all probability it isn't open source. That means we have no idea what stack is running in there and what its vulnerabilities are. Even encrypted stacks can be vulnerable to certain kinds of attacks.

Voting companies have been pretty underfunded. Why are we trusting our democracy to these stupid machines? The only function of a computer in the democratic process should be to help print a legible vote.

Count me, as a computer guy, concerned.

You can't resist reading something entitled "Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass", can you?

Standard but faltering Republican rhetoric on the drug issue is twofold: First, safety is compromised by using those nasty Canadian pharmacies; everybody knows millions of people die every year in Canada from taking bad drugs (right). Second, it's really about the research dollars; the rest of the world is mooching off of the US.

I heard an interview this morning on NPR with the Republican governor of Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty. His plan is a state-sponsored mail-order program that will import drugs from Canada. Citizens (I refuse to call them consumers) order their drugs from a web site maintained by the state, which selects the Canadian pharmacies that are eligible to participate. The state is then able to maintain a significant amount of control over the quality of the pipeline.

Much of the free-for-all that exists in the American drug distribution system simply does not exist in Canada. If you've been following the Washington Post article on the subject, you realize by now that the American drug system is full of tiny suppliers who keep medicines in the back of their Honda Civics, and sell them to whoever will ask. The "chain of custody" for medications is something that the pharmacy distribution system has been fighting for years. Why? They want to preserve their ability to get gray-market drugs, and enhance their bottom lines.

Tamoxifen is one of the most widely prescribe drugs for treating breast cancer. In Germany, in that country's national health care system, the drug costs around $60 US for a month's supply. In Canada, a month's supply costs about $50 US. Here in America, that exact same drug costs about $350 for a month's supply. How many thousands of women are dead because they could not get the medicine? A very large number. And as the number of uninsured increases, the number of deaths increases.

But why does this happen? How can the drug cost seven times as much here as it does elsewhere? The reason is that there is no global cost-benefit analysis within the American system.

If a drug, like Tamoxifen, is the best course of action for a given health situation, the doctor must prescribe it. The cost is simply not a part of the equation. If the doctor doesn't prescribe it, he/she will be sued. The insurance company must pay the bill; if they don't pay, there can be severe consequences. What we effectively do is prevent any form of cost-monitoring, in the system. The drug companies love this, and know this...and they know that they are able to raise their prices almost at will; insurance companies will be forced to pay, because doctors are forced to prescribe. Perhaps it is incorrect to say that doctors are forced to prescribe; they are prescribing what they believe to be the best available medication.

In Canada, Germany, and other National Health Care systems, the system works a little differently. In these systems there is global cost monitoring. What the system does, in effect, is examine the cost-benefit ratio of a medication like Tamoxifen. At $350 for a month's supply, there is a measurable benefit to the administration of the drug. The health care system is going to look at what else it could have done with that much money. If it can gain better care elsewhere (save more lives, increase quality of life) with the same money, that's what it's going to do. In effect, the health care system itself becomes the consumer, allocating scarce resources where it can find the most benefit.

The price of Tamoxifen in Canada is $50 because that is the benefit it provides to the health system. It is not about price controls; the Canadian health care system will not pay more than $50, because at that point, the money is better spent elsewhere. The German health care system has set this boundary at $60.

I submit that the American health care system needs this kind of global control; or, at least, it can become statistically aware of the efficacy of the drugs it uses, and construct an index of the cost-benefit of medications. The lack of caps on spiralling medical costs in the current American system is due to the lack of global cost-benefit analysis.

Very cool Java applet demonstrating the wonders of the universe, from the very large, to the very small...hopefully you have installed Java! If so...

Powers Of Ten

The President is attending a fundraising event for Haley Barbour, who's running in Mississippi. Barbour, you will recall, was recently photographed smiling and enjoying himself at a CCC event. CCC is one of the more openly racist/freako organizations out there today; any google search will bring you information leaning in that direction. You will also recall that not so very long ago our good friend, the former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, was thoroughly raked over the coals for his association with the group.

Bush is "accepting" Barbour's explanation that "he didn't know who the group was", when he attended the event.

Let's summarize: The Republican President is accepting as an explanation that the Republican National Chairman was not aware of the political firestorm that erupted around the Republican Senate Majority Leader on racism issues; that he (the RNC chairman) didn't keep track of the "details".

The President knows full well that Haley Barbour knew exactly who he was meeting with.

Earth To Barbour: "Hey, Haley, Trent Lott is taking heat for being associated with the Coalition of Concerned Citizens. They're freaky and racist."

Barbour: "I have no idea who that political action group in Mississippi is. OK, we'll deal with it."

Earth to Barbour: "Why are you hanging out with the CCC? Didn't we cover this already?"

Barbour: "Who? I have no idea who you're talking about. But I can assure you that my intentions are honorable."

Earth to Barbour: "Stop doing fundraising events with the CCC and pandering to them to get their votes. It looks really bad."

Barbour: "Who? I have this funny blank spot in my mind. There's something that I just can't quite remember."

Bush: "I am the goddamn President, and if Haley says he can't remember, then he can't remember, alright? Haley won't be doing anything with the CCC any more."

Barbour: "Who? Everybody keeps talking about this like I should know who this racist group of my old friends is."

Bush: "Shut up, Haley. Didn't I give you and Allbaugh a totally cushy way to make millions funneling Iraq contracts? Aren't you supposed to be quietly making a killing? Stop making me look bad with this CCC business."

Barbour: "Who?"

I just read that there's another mass email worm on the loose. Yeah, denial of service is bad and all that, but this one apparently targets DarkProfits.com. They're the friendly folks who sent me (and my mother) a few dozen emails that loudly proclaim, in the subject line, "your credit card has been charged $247.35 for child porn", and provide a convenient HTML form where you can enter in your credit card details if you disagree with that charge.

It's an anti-spammer worm, which is an interesting development. It's sort of a stupid one, though...it makes no sense whatsoever to create a worm that only does one thing. You really want the bot army if you can get it, and it's a lot simpler to build something that morphs itself from one form to another, that is very general, that has little for scanners to get a hold of.

The bottom line is that Windows-based computation is in some pretty severe danger right now. Microsoft has absolutely insisted that the default state of the OS be that processes can do whatever they want, wherever they want. Unix takes the opposite view, that much of the system is protected from processes unless they can get rooted. Guess which one makes for a more secure system?

Of course all of that can be subverted, instantly, by one crappy program running setuid root. C may be a good language for writing bits and pieces of an OS, but it's lousy at security.

I'm not going to fisk, but I'm going to take issue with a number of points you raise. Your general tone is "path of righteousness".

We are having an effect on certain terrorists, but new recruits are banging on their doors, and overall I suspect terrorism is largely unabated. I think that there just aren't all that many people in the world willing to commit suicide for their beliefs. There are some, but not that many. The rarity of events lik 9/11 is statistical evidence for this.

America's Army is NOT exterminating terrorists at the moment. They are engaged in a low-intensity battle against resistance forces, after having exhausted the regular forces invading a teeny-tiny country. Yes, there are some terrorists in the mix, and we hear about the car bombs and so forth. 99% of the conflicts with American forces are run-of-the-mill insurgents. You can't call them all terrorists. Some of them are pissed-off natives who don't want the US in their country. Some of them are Baathists. It's a mixture.

The bottom line is that most of the strength of the military is engaged in nation-building at the moment. By most reports I've read, resources have generally been shifted away from pursuit of terrorism, and towards political change in Iraq.

This is single-issue, silver-bullet foreign policy. A very great number of eggs are in a single basket. There are so many eggs in the basket that, yes, in the absence of other fiscal responsibility, there are serious threats to the economic stability of the country.

Nobody thinks the 7% growth rate is anything more than a single exceptional quarter. Most predictions go for around a 4.5% quarter next time, which is still very good, but more in line with history.

Do you not see that the debate has everything with what the US may _legitimately_ do in the world? If a nuclear bomb had detonated in NY, and was traced to Saddam Hussein, the entire world would have been behind the US in removing him. They probably would have lead the way.

This is instead a forceful war of political change...cynical and expensive. It is by no means a "war of revenge". There is no direct connection between Hussein and 9/11. Are you arguing that you believe there to be a solid connection? One that was known BEFORE the war was initiated? You are certainly willing to trade on the idea, to make your political points. Do you or do you not believe it? What evidence do you have? You have no business using it as an underpinning to debate otherwise.

So what does $300 Billion buy us? Quite a lot. Our yearly medicare budget is around $250 Billion. The interest on the national debt is around $175 Billion (due to rise dramatically). $300 Billion is a rather incredible amount of money! Of course, prior to the war, Mitch Daniels (long since fired as White House budget director) explained that the war would cost around $50 Billion.

It is simple, and deceitful, to throw round numbers like "1% of GDP". The government doesn't have anywhere near a large percentage of GDP to work with; the federal budget is around 25% of GDP, I think.

With the huge deficits Bush has created just around the corner. we will be spending, on interest, enough money to do an Iraq every year in short order.

There are so many absolutes in what you write. "Terrorists are created not by our actions, but by the failure of their societies". So our actions have no effect? I think they do. I think our actions matter greatly. I think Bush's snubbing of the UN has had an effect. His abandonment of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process has had an effect. The trashing of Kyoto has had an effect (we can argue all day long about whether it would work or not, but symbolically it was a tremendous blow to multilateralism).

I'll retract the NASCAR remark, with regards to YOU. I stand by it as far as this Administration goes. And I stand by it for most people I've met in favor of the war. Their thinking hasn't gone much past, "punch me, and get punched".

"tit-for-tat" is one of the winningest strategies for the Prisoner's Dilemma, a well-studied game theory example. I gather, in your world, that there need be no foreign policy more sophisticated than tit-for-tat. tit-for-tat is a conservative position that attempts to engender cooperation, rewarding cooperation where it exists, and punishing it where it does not. There are strategies that can beat it, but it's pretty good all around.

We aren't playing tit-for-tat, because we just took the first punch. We chose the path of non-cooperation, of unilateralism.

Finally, you state that "It is sadly common for those who are protected to resent those who do the bloody work of protecting."

Do you believe that you are somehow identifying with more firmly, and are showing more solidarity with our armed forces? I do not recall you have been on any secret missions to Iraq.

Men with guns, you can't handle the truth, and all of that. You are not on the wall with a gun, and neither am I. There are men (and women) doing that. Do you imply that those who disagree with Bush policy resent our soldiers, who protect us, and who follow orders?

This Washington Post Editorial is very sobering. A key quote:

"It's war because our undefeated enemies say it is and behave accordingly.

In that stubborn resistance lies a fundamental truth that seems too often to have eluded American political leaders since World War II: It's not the winner who typically decides when victory in a war has been achieved. It's the loser. "

If that is true, and it does seem so to me, then the hearts and minds of everyday Iraqis are really the key to the mission. It also places in distinctly sharper relief the Administration's predictions before the war that Americans would be welcomed as liberators, and that the population would fall over themselves to greet the incoming troops.

That has happened in small ways, but the overall situation is poor, and the attacks are accelerating. Riverbend gives us a view from one Iraqi citizen; are we winning her heart and mind? How do we convince the people shooting at the troops, recruiting "resistance fighters", that the war simply doesn't need to go on?

It will go on as long as there are people willing to fight and die against perceived occupation. When it comes to the Arab world, it seems that the supply of such people is almost limitless...and with population growth there, as fast as they can be killed (to put it bluntly), they are being replaced.

Is war and aggression truly the best path? Is there another way?

According to Bill Moyers, it may be at hand. I haven't seen much lately that leads me to believe otherwise. There are still a few signs of life out there, where ethics haven't been bent and folded enough times to disappear entirely...It's a sobering interview.

Everything involving television is for sale. I wonder how long even NPR can last; its ad content has slowly been creeping upwards too.

It occurs to me that I have heard entirely too many times that we "shouldn't be spending public money on NPR". Here's the thing, for those of you on the right. There are things that you think government should spend money, and there are things that I think government should spend money on. On your side, we've got big guns and a military, invasions of other countries, huge jails for mostly black people who can't afford Rush Limbaugh's lawyers, corporate welfare, tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy, and government funding of religions. I think it's worth noting that we're actually spending money on all that stuff.

On my side there's an R+D budget, health care, serious funding for educational institutions, we keep our progressive taxation system progressive, taxes can certainly go higher, and we keep important programs like NPR and NASA and yes, even the NEA.

Here's the thing: The right's pet expenditures are an order of magnitude higher than the left's. The old canard about "free-spending liberals" just doesn't hold water any more. We all know exactly who the free spenders are now. So the next time you want to knock off the NEA, maybe I get to pick one out of your list.

You too can play amusing budget games! Try this budget simulator. I pretty much balanced the budget on the first try. It's not even hard to do. You just have to have your priorities straight...and get rid of the stupid tax cut that got us into this deficit mess in the first place. Plus nuke agricultural subsidies. I can't for the life of me figure out why a single mom struggling to make ends meet in the inner city should be forced to give part of her income to Archer Daniels Midland.

Old budget was $3274.734 billion
($2292.807 billion in spending, $981.927 billion in tax expenditures and cuts).

New budget is $2914.09 billion

($2253.16 billion in spending, $660.93 billion in tax expenditures and cuts).

You have cut the deficit by $360.64 billion.

Your new deficit is $-3.63 billion.

A little fodder:

• Private Health Care Through Your Employer.  There's nuthin' beddah.  God intended it to be this way.  Why, the personal care of unsurpassed excellence we all get is all that stands between us and hell.
• Guns are Great.  If I can't shoot it, I can't control it.
• American Democracy Is The Only Real Democracy.  You can just shut the hell up if you think anything else!
• The Founding Fathers BLAH BLah Blah blah blah.  They knew everything.  They even know about the magazines in the back of your closet, they invented light bulbs and boxed lunches, and they don't approve of what we're doing.  No sir they don't.  Follow the recipe.
• Rich People Are Because They Are Just Plain Better People.  Luck, hereditary factors, hundreds of years of bia and bullshit, have nothing to do with it.  Please ignore the current round of cheatin' and lyin' on Wall Street.  Nothing to see here.  These are not the crooks you are looking for.  Move along.
• Market Uber Alles!  All human function can be controlled by markets.  All human functions must be controlled by markets.  If all human bodily functions were controlled by markets, our toilets would be 3.7% more efficient.  This would lead to world peace. 

Ah.  I feel so much better!  Why do I still like it here so much?  I don't know!  Maybe it's the women.  Maybe it's the fact that with a little bending and twisting, this country could be so truly excellent.  I have a pipe wrench around here somewhere.

As resident contrarian, please allow me to differ. Greatly.

What dumb-ass playground do you think we are still all on? Do you seriously believe that there are terrorists out there who give a crap about US strategy and actions? They don't. They know that the consequences of their actions are visited upon others -- the citizens of the countries we blow up, in the name of collective punishment. It's beautiful for them, really...they just have to sit back, drug up a 20 year old, shove him into a car, and tell him that 29 (or 63, or whatever the 'magic' number is) virgins are waiting for him on the other side of a 15mm red button. We toss ten thousand bombs into their countries, maim children, and create a whole new generation of recruits. "Wag the dog" usually refers to something else.

Do you think the rest of the world gives a shit about how the US looks when it mobs a country with its Army? Here is the lesson any intelligent planner has learned from this: No one country can stand against America, but America can easily bankrupt itself through the sheer idiocy of pursuing unbelievably expensive foreign policy. A bankrupt America becomes a corrupt American, and this will lead to its decline in the shorter time, rather than the long wait history teaches us is the norm.

What kind of flypaper do we have in Iraq, exactly? Is it the kind that attracts terrorists (you know, the really stupid ones)? Or is it the kind that gets stuck to a world power, sapping resources that are needed elsewhere, compounding domestic problems, and potentially setting off a domino effect that results in a cultural decline?

It's probably a bit of both. Your "can of whup ass" mentality was all fine and fun in the Wild West, and probably worked great in the 'hood. This ain't the hood. We have a lot more to lose than the momentary satisfaction we gain by killing a few idiots, and deposing a few standard despots.

The world isn't going to run out of despots any time soon. It also isn't going to run out of smart terrorists, who are gaining converts, created by our actions, at ten times the rate they were before. And I refuse to back that up with anything other than a gut feeling. You know it's true too.

Do I advocate we do nothing? Of course not. That would be stupid. WWF Smackdown Foreign Policy sounds kick-ass to the Nascar crowd. Woohoo! Now comes the hard part. Put it back together again. There are other ways.

We could have cured AIDS and raised living standards by half in a dozen countries, earning respect worldwide, for less money than two months of this war has cost. Politics and true leadership is about allocation of scarce resources, making hard choices, and going for the maximum effect. It's not about posturing, point-making, and throwing a $300 Billion Finger at the rest of the world, with a follow-on "fuck you if you don't like it. But will you please pay for it anyway?"

It's not that the rest of the world is anti-American. By and large it isn't. It just seems like such a huge waste of potential. So much human capital could have been created, for so much less. With these kinds of expenditures there could have been a third way...a way where the US leads by example, by education, by being reasoned, and right.

Amen, Brothers.

Strangely enough, one of my first entries is about terrorism in Iraq. I've long been against the war; it's pretty clear at this point that this Administration "fudged" (to put it gently) a lot of the information used to drive the war authorization process forward. I distinctly remember thinking, at the time that there must be some highly secret intelligence, in Bush's possession. That was the only explanation for his actions. News reports and whatever sources I could read at the time simply didn't support rushing the country into an incredibly expensive war.

If we set aside the WMD aspect, we are left with the continuous claims of the administration before the war that terrorists had taken root in Iraq, and were supported by that government. Iraq did support terror, by paying Palestinian families of martyrs, but that is not the connection that the Administration implied. They implied terror; they implied a direct connection to Al Quaeda (note the spelling of the week).

No significant evidence of such a connection has been found. And yet...over the last few days there has been a serious round of terrorism in Baghdad. There are at least 200 wounded, at least 34 dead. Virtually all of them are Iraqis. This is not, in any shape or form, "resistance" fighting. What resistance murders dozens of its own people to make a "point" against an occupier? If "collaboration" is given as a reason, it is a fiction. The vast majority of the dead are regular Iraqi civilians, not police or anyone else who could be termed a collaborator.

I find the events of the past four days to be one of the strongest indicators we have yet seen of Iraq's former government being involved in terrorism. That they have shifted to this tactic so quickly, and with deadly effects, speaks volumes about who they are, and what they were and are prepared to do.

If new elements in Iraq are responsible for these atrocities, we need to root them out. The Iraqi people don't need foreign elements blowing them up, while they're trying to rebuild a society.