13 December 2006, a Wednesday
...on which the weather pattern has apparently finally shifted. Yesterday morning continued overcast and dull, although mid-70s in temperature, but the sun finally came out around noon. Much like I remember mornings in Santa Monica, as a young man. This morning we have a lot of clouds, still, but they are the white fluffy kinds with lots of blue sky in between, not the low gray ones.
For all of you who take medications sold in blister-packs, what's wrong with those manufacturers, anyhow? The aluminum backing on most of them is so tough that it's harder than the dickens to push some of the pills through at all, especially for someone who had arthritis, and in some cases you can't get the pill through without breaking or even crushing it.
Why make the aluminum layer so thick? It not only isn't necessary, and additionally a reason for complaint, but it's also a waste of money for the manufacturer. Maybe drug prices are so high they don't worry about little details like that any more?
I went to my Yahoo address site to find that not only have no new readers discovered me yet but that 1107 spammers have.
NYTimes headline:
Saudi Arabia’s warning reflects fears among America’s Sunni Arab allies about Iran’s rising influence in Iraq.
What a dilemma for the antiBush, who want him to hold talks with Iran begging them to use their influence. Meanwhile, speaking of the antiBush:
House Democrats are seriously exploring the creation of an independent ethics arm to enforce new rules on travel, lobbying, gifts and other issues that Democrats intend to put in place on taking power next month.
An independent Congressional watchdog, if approved, would be a major break with tradition. Some lawmakers say House and Senate members have sole responsibility for policing themselves when it comes to internal rules.
Some lawmakers have said an independent entity could be unconstitutional.
One thing we know for sure about lawmakers, they think that when ANYBODY else has any power, including the president, that it could be unconstitutional. Remember when some of their offices were searched by justice department officials last year and they switched from screaming "nobody is above the law" at Bush to "you can't do that to us!"?
Self-styled Congressional watchdogs have long clamored for independent review of the conduct of members of Congress, saying lawmakers have shown an inability to hold their colleagues accountable in all but the most egregious cases.
For example, the ethics committee report last week on the conduct of former Representative Mark Foley of Florida was attacked. Critics said it documented negligence by the Republican leadership in monitoring Mr. Foley’s contacts with teenage pages yet failed to recommend punishment for any of those involved.
Interestingly enough, Democrats are insisting that Cold Cash Jefferson shouldn't have any action taken against him (he's petitioning to get his committee seat back) because, well, he hasn't been indicted yet.
It is unclear what indictment they refer to when they complain about "no action" taken with respect to Foley...partly because it is unclear what crime, if any, he could be charged with. If the page was, as I have read, above the legal age of consent in this matter, then what will they charge Foley with? Flirting while gay? I don't suppose they'll consider any charge about him doing it on government property, not after the Oval Office flirting while non-gay business...
Henry Hudson says he was ahead of his time, dang it!
New studies project that the Arctic Ocean could be mostly open water in summer by 2040 — several decades earlier than previously expected — partly as a result of global warming caused by emissions of greenhouse gases.
The study involved seven fresh simulations on supercomputers at the atmospheric center, as well as an analysis of simulations developed by independent groups. In simulations where emissions continue to rise, sea ice persists for long periods but then abruptly gives way to open water, Dr. Holland said.
In the simulations, the shift seems to occur when a pulse of warm Atlantic Ocean water combines with the thinning and retreat of ice under the influence of the global warming trend. Scientists ascribe most of that planet-scale warming, including a warming of the shallow layers of the oceans, to the buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases in the atmosphere.
Interesting quibble...now they are saying "most" with respect to carbon dioxide and planet-scale warming. Apparently some are still interested in being scientists who have studied other specialties even though as humans they know the money and the grants are all for people willing to "prove" that carbon dioxide is the cause of everything bad and the US is the cause of carbon dioxide problems...
However, here's another interest admission I was somewhat surprised to see:
Several experts not involved with the studies said they were significant for human affairs, as well as biology.
Polar bears will struggle, these scientists said, and so will Arctic people who still go out on sea ice to hunt seals. By contrast, countries and businesses pursuing new shipping lanes, energy supplies and fishing grounds could profit.
The melting is likely to shift weather patterns, too. More sea ice means colder winters, because frigid winds blowing over ice pick up little heat from the warmer waters below.
In the grander scheme of things, where we are supposed to think not of our own narrow national interests but also those of the little people, how can we even consider the benefits to the majority of the world's population in the northern hemisphere, particularly, of an open sea Northwest Passage versus polar bears and Arctic people hunting seals?
How about all of the fossil fuels which it will not be necessary to burn for heating once the winters aren't so dad-blamed cold?
Washington Post headline:
Army, Marines to Seek Personnel Increases
Good luck finding them in this worst economy since Herbert Hoover, not unless we are finally going to start paying our troops what they are really worth.
Rangel wants the draft back because if you can force people to serve then you can get away with paying them minimum wage, if you wish, but an all-volunteer service must of necessity compete with the private marketplace. To be sure, a significant fraction of people joining the military voluntarily do so because of their belief in the value and morality of public service, but in once sense they are almost being penalized for being patriots.
But will the public, the voters, support paying the troops a competitive wage?
I have a friend who is a telemarketer, also a supervisor, and he tells me that in today's job market he cannot get anyone to work for straight commission, they all want a salary. And the problem with sales jobs--no matter in which market they are, real estate or life insurance or advertising--is that they simply aren't something that just anyone can do successfully.
An employer simply cannot afford to spend money paying a salary to someone during the time while both of them are finding out the employee cannot do the job.
I spent nearly three decades as a real estate broker, "hiring" people to sell real estate. They worked on straight commission, so my "cost" consisted of my overhead...I had to pay for rent, heat, lights, phone, advertising, and so on, including the time I had to spend training them, while they took up one of my necessarily-limited number of desks during the time we learned whether or not they'd ever make enough money to cover my costs from my share in their commissions.
Paying someone during that period would be like adding injury to insult.
Oh the other hand, when you hire someone to do a job that most people can do to some degree or another, whether dig a ditch or type on a keyboard (I almost said typewriter...do they still have those things? Well, I mean outside of Costa Rica?) then you can afford to pay for their services. The amount you pay is based upon how skillfully they do the work as well as how difficult the work is to do. And how dangerous.
We should be paying our military, our police departments, and our fire departments, top dollar!
Washington Post stunner!
Emmy-winning actor Peter Boyle played the curmudgeonly father in the long-running sitcom "Everybody Loves Raymond".
Ouch. Not only one of the few tv shows I liked, but he was 71.
Or, as I like to put it, ONLY 71!
I've always described Richard Cohen as confused but likeable, only this time his apparent morality bothers me almost as much as some of his merely confused ideas:
James A. Baker III, the renowned foreign policy realist, looked realism in the eye -- and blinked. The Iraq report he co-authored with Lee Hamilton recommended many things, but shied from the most realistic one of all: Get the hell out as soon as possible.
I know, I know. That would not be realistic, you say. Iraq would implode, Shiites and Sunnis would kill one another with abandon, al-Qaeda would prosper, Iran would extend and enhance its influence, Syria would gloat, Israel would be even more threatened, and the United States would suffer the sort of humiliating defeat that would encourage fanatics all over the world to take a whack at us. This is not realism. This is madness.
And yet . . . and yet, none of these propositions are proved or, in some cases, very likely.
Now the best I can call that is confused, and his rationalizations which follow only emphasize my point, but you can read and argue those for yourselves. Here's what bothers me:
Maybes are not sufficient reason for Americans to continue to die. Baker, the realist, understood that back when he was George H.W. Bush's secretary of state. The United States ended the Persian Gulf War with Saddam Hussein still in power, the Republican Guard mostly intact and with enough helicopter gunships to massacre as many as 150,000 Shiite insurrectionists in the south. The United States encouraged the rebellion and then, shamefully, looked the other way. You could argue that we fight a war today because we refused to really fight one the first time around.
Be that as it may, Baker and others in the first Bush administration did not get all teary about Iraqis killing Iraqis back in 1991. Their paramount goal was to spare not Iraqi lives but American ones. Coldly -- realistically is the preferred word -- they took no real action as Saddam Hussein slaughtered his opponents. This cold, chilling, amoral strategy was favored by the senior Bush but eschewed by his son. In the short run, the father had it right.
Be that massacre of 150,000 human beings as it may, he says, cold, chilling and even amoral strategy is to be preferred to the loss of American lives, presumably since they are more valuable than Iraqi lives.
Cohen, I suppose, may be forgiven for not reading the New Testament words of St John, who said "greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13), or maybe he has read those words and just doesn't think of the Iraqis as friends, but I'm still more than a little taken aback to learn that he finds a cold, chilling and even amoral strategy more compelling than the beliefs of the men who showed that greater love.
Richard, a self-professed champion of reality, nevertheless fails to recognize it.
In 1991 we needed to stay out. In 2006 we need to get out.
That's not likely to happen. Instead we will follow a policy that can be called Son of Vietnamization. In Vietnam, we turned over the job of managing the defeat to the South Vietnamese; in Iraq, we will give it to the Iraqis. We will blame them for not fighting as well as they should, for giving their primary allegiance to their families, tribes or religious sects -- in short, for being Third World peoples. They are to blame for being who they are.
Perhaps he's not to be blamed for being who he is, uttering a semi-racist type of comment that eerily echoes those of Jimmy Carter, but the realism he ignores is that we did NOT turn over to the South Vietnamese the job of "managing the defeat"...unless, of course, Cohen considers signing any kind of peace treaty to be a sign of defeat. In the case of Vietnam I might even be tempted to agree with him, but in that instance we defeated ourselves by signing away any moral rights we had to the commitment.
South Vietnam, as at least readers of this blog should know, was left in stable possession of its territories under an internationally-approved peace treaty with North Vietnam, one wherein they agreed that all of their remaining differences would be peacefully negotiated.
As part of this agreement, the US removed its combat troops.
Richard, even though only an opinion-columnist rather than a journalist, and even though a child of his own anti-Vietnam War times, should most certainly know this.
Or does he? Remember I wrote here on the 10th about Martin Jacques writing in a recent issue of the Guardian that:
In 1975 the Americans suffered a spectacular military defeat at the hands of North Vietnam and the Vietcong, with US helicopters seeking to rescue leading US personnel from the tops of buildings as Vietnamese guerrillas closed in on the centre of Saigon.
I suppose it's quite possible that Cohen actually believes this as much as the Guardian editors must have, since they printed it, but nothing could be further from the truth. Or, perhaps a better term might be 'reality'...
In 1975 the Americans suffered no defeat at the hands of North Vietnam and the Vietcong, either spectacular or otherwise, because American combat troops had been gone from Vietnam a couple of years by that time. A peace treaty had been in place for even longer.
What Jacques "remembers" is the North Vietnamese coldly, chillingly and amorally violating their own signed word and inflicting a spectacular military defeat on ARVN defense troops, who were inadequate for the task in all probability because the Americans had been pulled out too soon.
As Richard would have us do now in Iraq.
After all, he says dismissively, they're only Third World peoples and not to blame for who they are or what they do. Even giving primary allegiance to their families, just imagine how primitive and uncivilized that must be...
The New York Observer doesn't find me observing their beliefs often, but Richard Brookhiser had me nodding enthusiastically this time about at least his conclusion:
We have played the Iraq War various ways. Gen. Tommy Franks drove to Baghdad and resigned. Paul Bremer fired the Iraqi Army and called a constitutional convention. A constitution got written, and most Iraqis rallied to it, but the men of blood continued their work. Lately we have been appealing to Sunni tribal leaders—with some success, though not enough. By this ass-backward route, we have arrived at the place we were in Afghanistan on Halloween of 2001, three and a half weeks into Operation Enduring Freedom, with everyone in a tizzy and the late R.W. Apple savoring the “the ominous word ‘quagmire.’” The solution then was to stop worrying about the effects of our actions on the long-term fate of the country and to kill as many Taliban as possible. Which we did, and which led to victory. (Yes, the Taliban are still out there; no one said freedom is easy.) The solution now is to put 30,000 troops into Baghdad, without stripping Anbar, and kill the enemies of order. If the generals say they don’t need 30,000 more troops, find new generals.
This is not international social work, or finishing a job. Since the violent in Iraq include Al Qaeda, and terrorist wannabes, killing them is a twofer. Let the end begin.
As I've said many times, we can win this war any time we really decide we want to fight it. Instead, as someone observed, we're rebuilding the country before the war is over with, putting in water purification plants and sewage treatment plants and building soccer fields and sixteen dozen other things instead of simply killing anyone we see holding a gun except for known Iraqi police and army troops. If there's any doubt at all, shoot the guy.
Private militias are not authorized to carry weapons; shoot those people, both Sunni and Shia, even if one of their leaders has a seat in the government. Would anyone dream of allowing Senator Byrd to have his own militia, for instance? Okay, poor choice, but didn't we get rid of them all, eventually, anyhow?
Enough of this prisoner-taking, already. We don't know what to do with them afterwards, we probably haven't gotten enough useful information out of them by water-boarding or any other technique (how do you threaten with death someone who thinks he'll start on his first virgin the instant that you do?), simply stop capturing them. If you see an enemy with a weapon then the odds are extremely high that he intends to try to kill you with it. Kill him first, instead. If he runs out of ammo and throws it down and holds up his hands in surrender, too late.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry about former general Barry McCaffrey, who is at it again with the advice. From my point of view he is occasionally right, often wrong, and unable to tell any difference. For instance:
A collapse of the Iraqi state would be catastrophic -- for the people of Iraq, for the Middle East and for America's strategic interests. We need a new political and military approach to head off this impending disaster -- one crafted with bipartisan congressional support. But Baker-Hamilton isn't it.
Our objective should be a large-scale U.S. military withdrawal within the next 36 months, leaving in place an Iraqi government in a stable and mostly peaceful country that does not threaten its six neighboring states and does not intend to possess weapons of mass destruction.
Poor Baker-Hamilton, the number of people who have signed up for it makes President Bush's approval rating look good by comparison. Even the two co-chairman, who first came out with the attitude that their recommendations must be accepted 100% or their plan wouldn't work perfectly (if you are as old as I am you will remember that's the same excuse the old Soviet Union gave every time one of their 5-year plans failed) have backed down on some of their ideas.
But look at McCaffrey's objective, leaving out the phrase "within the next 36 months", and tell me where that differs from the original Bush plan?
Go ahead, take your time, I can wait while you think about it.
And, as an Old General, he's still mad at Rumsfeld:
Lack of combat experience is not the central issue Iraqis face. Their problems are corrupt and incompetent ministries, poor equipment, an untrained and unreliable sectarian officer corps (a result of Rumsfeld's disbanding the Iraqi army), and a lack of political will caused by the failure of a legitimate Iraqi government to emerge.
One would almost get the impression McCaffrey thought that the original officer corps of the Iraqi army was non-sectarian.
Others know that Saddam ruled the country with a minority religious group, the Sunnis, dominated by his political party, the Baathists, exactly the way the tiny minority Communist Party ran the old Soviet Union.
The top army officers were Baathist Sunnis personally loyal to Saddam, and he purged his officer corps of anyone suspicious as often as Beria and Stalin and the other tyrants did theirs. Perhaps some were pretending, some were loyal only out of fear, but probably most stuck with Saddam for that most-basic of human reasons: because they thought he would be the winner and they wanted to be on the winning team.
If there is a difference in the sectarian character of the officer corps now it is because the majority of the new officers are now Shiites, as is the population of the country. And from what I hear, the actual disaffected insurgents (as distinguished from those engaged in merely sectarian violence and the al Qaeda foreigners) are composed mostly of Baathist Sunnis. Imagine if they were still in charge of the army!
What they need is a non-sectarian army, but that's about the same as saying what America needs is a non-partisan Congress rather than one sometimes composed of Republicans running the party of corruption and other times the Democrats doing it.
Oh, did I forget to mention McCaffrey said Iraqis had corrupt ministries?
Anyhow, any of you out there who think that the solution to a peaceful Iraq today would have been to have left the undefeated Iraqi army intact do not need to go soak your heads...they're wet enough now. Undefeated? Well, who actually surrendered?
And wouldn't the Iraqi people have felt just ducky, at least the majority Kurds and Shiites, with Saddam in jail and on trial and his generals still in command of the army?
In case you don't remember, McCaffrey was the armchair general of choice for the tv networks, and nightly he advised on how many tens of thousands of US troops were going to be killed on the way to Baghdad while fighting the elite Iraqi units, and on alternate nights either the army was racing too quickly to Baghdad, outrunning their supply lines, or waving his arms and shouting "quagmire!" any time they so much as paused.
Remember that old Cole Porter song? It was perfect for him: "they're either too young or too old, they're either too X or too Y..."