Sang's blog

The Problem

2011-04-07T16:37:00.001-06:00

What is happening is this. The government has been overinflating the money supply through a combination of excessive and continuous deficit spending and policies that allow financial vehicles like those packaging subprime mortgages into higher rated investment vehicles to exist.
At the same time, the government has been selling the debt to foreign countries which has an artificial depressing effect on the inflation rate which would normally rise when the money supply is too high.
To the government, this seemed like an infinite money maker which allows them to spend money like it was air even during the worst of times. We like to blame Wall Street for being richer than us, but this overinflation of the money supply is the fuel that pumps up Wall Street wallets no matter where the government spends the money because it all gravitates to those who attract it the best.
The overinflating money supply is also the reason for the increasing gap between the rich and the poor as the excessive money doesn't have enough economy to be reinvested in to find its way back down the chain. This is why our paychecks aren't getting bigger relatively.
But what is worst of all is that the overinflated money supply is too high to be stably supported by the economy resulting in bigger and bigger bubbles and corrections. Our current economic crisis is just the latest repercussion of this economic death spiral.
There is no short term solution to this. We are beyond the point of getting out of this mess without some serious pain, but if we don't tell the government to stop using this infinite money machine, even to pay for the best of intentions like health care, the long term repercussion will be far worse. In our current trajectory, the next economic correction is expected to surpass the devastation of the Great Depression in both absolute and relative measures.

We don't have capitalism

2011-04-01T19:04:00.002-06:00

We don't have capitalism if the government bails out and subsidizes big companies.
We don't have capitalism when the government gives monopolies out to companies who only survive from patent to patent.
We don't have capitalism when the government pays farmers to not grow food.
We don't have capitalism when the government heavily subsidizes the health care industry on the demand side.
We don't have capitalism when the government makes contracts to form regional monopolies.
We don't have capitalism when the government subsidizes defense companies so that they can get a piece of the contracts redirected to their home states.
We don't have capitalism when the government protects and coddles industries like the auto industry until they don't know how to survive on their own in the world.
We don't have capitalism when the government subsidizes green industries like ethanol and require quotas on usage which only puts them in line to be the next disaster like the auto industry.
We don't have capitalism when the government raises corporate taxes so high that companies keep their money out of the USA.
We don't have capitalism when the money supply is so overinflated by the government above the ability of the economy to support it that we are stuck in an increasing cycle of bubbles and busts.
We don't have capitalism when the government fails to address the upcoming economic armageddon when the bulk of the baby boomers retire driving Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, at least, through the roof.
We don't have capitalism when the bureaucratic nightmare that is our legal immigration system pulls limits out of politicians' heads, not set limits based on the economic needs of the country, and basically tells most good immigrants that you'll have better luck if you try to sneak into the country illegally.
We don't have capitalism when the government thinks they can keep pumping up the money supply and keep a lid on it with their feeble regulatory system which can't keep up with the permutations of financial manipulations that the best and brightest attracted to the financial industry are constantly thinking up.
We don't have capitalism when we only talk about how much the government should be spending on us when real money to pay for all that has long disappeared.
People demonize the capitalism that the USA has, but I don't see it because we don't have capitalism.

Medicare and Social Security

2011-04-01T02:17:00.000-06:00

Here are the brutal facts for you knee-jerk populists. The reason why health care costs are skyrocketing way beyond the inflation rate is because the government is subsidizing the health care industry on the demand side by huge amounts year after year, and Medicare is the biggest source of this demand side subsidization. As a result of this, affordable health care is being pushed away for more people than those that are being helped. There are two ways to fix this that anyone who didn't sleep through econ 101 can tell you. The first is to gradually, but significantly, decrease the demand side subsidization. This would bring the supply-demand balance closer to normal. The second, but the worse of the two options, is to shift the subsidization from the demand side to the supply side like how the agriculture industry is being subsidized. This has its own problems shown by the agriculture industry, but it does result in lower prices for the consumers.
As for Social Security, since it was never fully funded from conception, it was never designed to handle huge demographic shifts like the upcoming retirement of the bulk of the baby boomers. There will be far more people getting distributions than those paying into the pool, and it will last for decades. You aren't even beginning to imagine the impact if you think that Social Security can be tweaked to handle this. Again, there are two solutions. The first is to gradually phase Social Security out. Those who rely on it now need to still receive money from the those unfortunately won't receive any Social Security benefits until they die off. The second is to make Social Security truly fully funded. This means the government will have to infuse the social security fund with all the actual money people have paid in Social Security taxes. This will make the fund independent of demographic shifts because the money you pay into it is actually yours. This is the least desirable of the two because the amount required to fully fund the Social Security fund is phenomenal, and do you honestly trust the politicians to not touch such a fund?

BREAKING [APRIL 1, 2011 01:30EST]: President Obama and Congress balance the federal budget

2011-03-31T23:59:00.002-06:00

Washington D.C. - It was only yesterday that we heard from the White House spokesman that President Obama had sufferred a minor heart attack after which the president appeared at the podium confirming his good health. Despite some rumours from the fringes like Oliver Stone claiming that the president didn't look like himself, the president took off like a new man unburdened by the problems of the last two years. In an unprecedented move, President Obama and congressional leaders worked all night in the White House to balance the federal budget. When Obama was asked how he was able to bring both parties together so quickly, he half joked that he enticed them with bratwurst. Meanwhile, Vice President Biden was on a goodwill tour in Africa. Although the details are forthcoming on how such a historic agreement was reached, the president outlined the basis of bringing the country back from the economic edge by stating "We've got so many problems, we don't even want to look at them anymore. They just blend together into this great big noise, and pretty soon we can't hear ourselves think. But that's not even the worst part. The worst part is that we think we can't do anything about it, and that's a tragedy because we can. We don't know where to start maybe. Maybe that's what it is, but I have an idea about where we can start. From today, I'm going to make it the responsibility of this government to find a job for every American who wants one."

Breakdown of Texas State Budget

2011-03-27T06:01:00.001-06:00

Just a note to myself where the important breakdown of the Texas State Budget is located:
http://www.texasbudgetsource.com/state/where-the-money-is-spent/budget-by-area/

You will see education takes the largest chunk of the state budget, health care takes second, and effectively transportation takes third. The reason why education operating costs are so high is because of the dramatic increase in operating costs from the 2006-2007 to the 2008-2009 budget of over $15 billion attributed mainly to higher education. The reason why health care is so large is because it's operating cost has been increasing at an alarming rate of $5 to $7 billion per budget cycle far higher than the inflation rate. The reason why transportation costs are so high was because of a spike in operating costs of about $3 to $4 billion between the 2004-2005 and 2006-2007 budgets.

Pet health care industry - what our health care would look like if Congress mostly stayed out

2010-07-22T11:12:00.001-06:00

Health insurance for pets has never really gotten off the ground, although it has been tried, because of the relatively lack of congressional interference with pet health care compared to human health care. Market forces unskewed by congressional attempts to "help" have made pet health care relatively affordable and quick to get. You will always have the extremes, but because congress isn't forcing broad strokes over all pets to address the extremes, even the cost at the extremes is on average significantly less comparably to us humans. So what we see in general is greater affordability and availability overall with pet heath care whereas with us humans, congress' injection of increasing amounts of money through health insurance to subsidize the health industry has only pushed prices and affordable health care farther away and has abnormally affected market forces so that supply isn't where the demand needs it to be. This isn't even addressing the incredible amount of complexity all the laws have introduced which are the main reason for high overhead to manage health insurance.

The 100,000 year climate cycle

2010-07-17T21:06:00.001-06:00

For all those global warming alarmists, one thing you probably should check out is the long term ice core data from Vostok Research Station in Antarctica: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vostok_420ky_4curves_insolation.jpg

While global warming data has been concentrating on the relatively recent time period, what the ice core data shows is a repeated cycle approximately every 100,000 years where temperature rapidly rises and then gradually falls. We are near the peak of one such cycle. What does this mean? It means that we may be attributing human influence as having far more effect on global temperature than it actually does, and there are factors like the eccentricity, axial tilt and precession of the earth orbit which overshadow anything humans could do to either change global temperature or attempt to keep the same. Because we are near the peak of a cycle, global temperature trend will either continue to rise for a couple thousand years on average no matter what we do or it could start the gradual cooling down for the next 100,000 years. What this means is that we need to put our egos in check and instead of wasting time and resources trying to keep the climate from changing, we need to prepare for when it changes, and it will change.

Foreign purchase of US debt hid the money supply increase

2010-07-15T15:37:00.000-06:00

What is missed is the reason why the current economic crisis was hidden from us until it was on top of us. This is because foreign purchase of the US debt masked the normal increase in inflation that usually indicates that the money supply was too high. This fooled the market into complacency instead of panic until it was too late. The continued purchase of US debt by foreign countries is continuing to mask the warning signs that would normally indicate that the deficit is too high. This also dangerously keeps inflation down giving a false sense that deflation is more a concern than inflation. As soon as foreign countries run out of money to purchase US debt, inflation will snap back like a rubber band from hell.

Calorie density

2010-07-15T15:34:00.000-06:00

It is the calories which are the issue. We tend to eat calorie dense foods, and we tend to get more calories than we need eating calorie dense foods before we feel full. Controlling calories is what is needed, but is often hard to do. What may be more successful is doing the things which make us feel full longer. There is a huge list of things that can make you feel less hungry. Exercise is probably at the top of the list. Making your body burn calories causes the body to compensate by filling your bloodstream with glycogen which in turn tells your brain that you are less hungry. There are other measures like drinking more water, eating more foods that are calorie sparse (e.g., vegetables, etc.), etc. For some people, eating fat or certain nuts can actually make them feel more full than the actual calories ingested would normally make them feel otherwise.

How much the president and congress should be paid

2010-07-15T15:33:00.000-06:00

I advocate that the president, vice president, and every member of congress should be paid the mean salary of the country of the previous year. This way the only way they would get a raise is if they improved the economy of the country, and they would understand what the average American feels financially.

Abortion

2010-07-15T15:32:00.002-06:00

Abortion is functionally is a waste of potential and a significant impact on the female body. The female body performs significant changes initiated by the fertilization of the egg in preparation to make the body an idea place as possible for the growth of the baby. Any deviation from this normal course does impact the woman physically and psychologically. Not only is all the energy and effort to grow a baby wasted, but the potential of the baby to become a human being of significant impact to society for the better is lost, and although the news concentrates on the negatively of humanity, most people are beneficial. What this means is that abortion should be a matter of last resort rather than treated as a casual choice. If no pregnancy is wanted, the best option is to avoid the situations would cause it to occur. The levels of effort ranging from abstinence to contraceptive devices/procedures to acts during sex which will try to avoid conception should be in accordance to how important it is to avoid conception to the couple.

Graduation rates of students by state

2010-07-15T15:27:00.002-06:00

http://www.edweek.org/media/ew/dc/2010/DC10_PressKit_FINAL.pdf

The first thing that comes to mind is that if it wasn't for Asians, this country would truly be in a sorry state. What makes Asians more successful in general is a greater dedication by the parents towards their children's education success and ensuring distractions like drugs and sex affect their children as little possible. The second thing that comes to mind is that California has a significantly higher spending per student compared to a state like Texas and definitely more liberal policies with comparable Hispanic population percentage, and yet it is doing worse. You can only conclude that throwing money at government education and liberal education policies don't work.

For those who say it is the blacks and hispanics causing California to be worse, the facts are at http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/

It isn't because of the rate of blacks and hispanics. 6.7% and 36.6% of Californians are black and hispanic or latino respectively. By comparison, 11.9% and 36.5% of Texans are black and hispanic or latino by comparison. However, Texas is doing significantly better.

Number of homeless are decreasing

2010-07-15T15:24:00.000-06:00

Number of homeless:

2006 - 759,101
2007 - 671,888
2008 - 664,414
2009 - 643,067

During a period in time when you would assume the number of homeless people in total would skyrocket, it has been steadily decreasing. Nobody seems to know why this is happening, but the latest report says "All of the decrease occurred among unsheltered chronically homeless people." This seems to indicate a decrease in the number of street people and people living under bridges. This also seems to correlate with the decrease in funding for programs which support the chronic unsheltered homeless. Is it possible that the lack of support that allows homeless people to survive on the streets is driving them to seek alternatives off the streets?

Sources:
http://www.hudhre.info/documents/2ndHomelessAssessmentReport.pdf
http://www.hudhre.info/documents/3rdHomelessAssessmentReport.pdf
http://www.hudhre.info/documents/4thHomelessAssessmentReport.pdf
http://www.hudhre.info/documents/5thHomelessAssessmentReport.pdf

Fortunate for Republicans that Democrats took power

2010-07-15T15:21:00.000-06:00

The Democrats winning both the executive branch and both sides of congress at a time when hard decisions had to be made about controlling spending, a weaker point for the Democrats than the Republicans in general although not by much, was the best thing that could happen to the Republicans. The Democrats, in their attempt to push their left leaning agenda, angered the bulk of the people by putting the economy and jobs in lesser priority than most people wanted. With only the shadow of Bush to blame which people didn't buy, the Democrats continued pushing their demands against the will of the people. This had the effect of galvanizing the eclectic conservatives who didn't identify themselves with the Republicans into supporting Republicans as the lesser of two evils. By trying to compromise to allay this growing force, the Democrats disillusioned their core supporters. The Democrats had an opportunity to push their main goals, but their control of power happened at the wrong time during the economic cycle, and they will pay the price for it.

Jobs not priority one for Obama

2010-07-15T15:17:00.003-06:00

At a time when jobs should be priority number 1, the Obama administration has shown over and over again that this isn't true. This is why the Democrats will lose at least the House of Representatives in November. A recent example is the effective death knell of the Constellation program by forcing it to decrease cost by $1 billion. This will cost tens of thousands of jobs. Another example is the moratorium on offshore drilling which will cost tens of thousands of jobs as well as other economic impacts as the oil rigs move out of the Gulf of Mexico. This doesn't even account for all the executive mandates made early in his presidency which made the left wing happy but put negative pressure on the economy.

Pandora box

2010-07-15T15:14:00.001-06:00

The complexity created by the laws that created and supported Fannie Mae is the root of our current economic crisis. If we followed Canada's example and eliminated all the exceptions which allowed people to get home loans and rates that they normally wouldn't qualify for, we wouldn't have the crisis we are having now. Instead of tackling the root of our financial problems, our government continues to increase the complexity because "helping" us garners them more votes. This in turn creates permutations ripe for abuse which the government can never hope to regulate, but the government continues blindly down the wrong course of trying to keep a lid on this pandora box from the top with their butterfingers. The current financial bill does nothing to prevent further abuse nor a bigger economic crisis in the future. Only by tackling the root of the problem by decreasing the complexity by decreasing the laws to "help" us will we not only decrease opportunities of abuse but also the buildup of unseen money supply problems which will come crashing down on us. This will also decrease the need for regulation which the government has proven over and over of being incompetent at.

To increase real wages

2010-07-15T15:11:00.000-06:00

From a widespread perspective, real wages are impacted by multiple factors. the major ones usually are: money supply, inflation, labor pool size, and jobs available. During the last four decades, it is undeniable that the labor pool size has been increasing, and it had been meeting or exceeding the jobs available which would be a down pressure on real wage. However, the money supply has been increasing, often artificially, which allowed employers to pay more unadjusted for inflation, but it has been empirically proven that rising wages leads to rising inflation which often keeps real wages down and devastatingly so if inflation is too high. However, since Reagan's big government spending, foreign purchase of US debt has been counterbalancing the downward pressure on wages by keeping inflation relatively low. It is easy to blame the "rich", but wealth disparity is the symptom of all these factors. There are two way to drive real wages up in this environment and decrease wealth disparity. The first would be to decrease the labor pool and the second would be to increase the number of jobs. This is all done while keeping the money supply from increasing rapidly to drive inflation.

Cost worth trying to address fallable long term global warming predictions?

2010-07-15T15:07:00.000-06:00

The thing people overlook is that global warming scientists have been showing off data from the past, but it has been inaccurate in terms of predicting the future. Relatively, the long term global temperature predictions have so far been as accurate as trying to predict the weather one month from now. Popular speakers on the left basically have said it would take destroying our economy to decrease the carbon emissions to prevent a most likely inaccurate projection of what the global temperature will be in the future, and the current economic crisis has supported them by being able to bring carbon emissions below Kyoto Protocol limits when everything else has failed. So the main question everybody should be asking is if the cost of the destruction of our economy worth trying to address fallible long term predictions? If you are perfectly happy with the economy now and don't mind it getting worse, you should pursue the suggestions of the left full force.

Why the recession is lasting so long

2010-07-15T15:01:00.000-06:00

The thing that people don't realize is that in order to buffer the effects of the economic crisis, the government spending has spread out the negative impact over a longer period. So instead of a major pain and a relatively quick recovery, we are getting a long drawn out pulling of a big nail embedded in our muscle. This has been shown the case in every past attempt of the government to spend its way out of a depression or recession regardless of which party is in power. By spreading out the pain, it also accumulates overhead and interest. It is like the difference in total cost of a house by either buying it outright or getting a mortgage and paying a huge amount of interest in the long run. Those who concentrate on the bottom line prefer to get it over quickly. Politicians, of course, prefer the long drawn out period because it gets them more voters in the short term especially when they are campaigning. Nothing seems to garner votes than the promise of giving away money. If this was all there was to it, even fiscal conservatives could tolerate taking the long drawn out pain plan. The trouble is that government doesn't stop spending. It mistakenly takes the periods of positive direction as excuses to increase spending even though the recovery from the previous downturn hasn't been truly addressed. Our current economic crisis has many factors, but one that really hasn't been discussed is that it was built on the downturns that resulted in the savings & loans bailout and other government attempts to alleviate past major economic downturns. Until we bite the nail and vote for people who will control government spending instead of promising to give us money, we are only heading for an even bigger economic crisis in the future.

When will Americans become wiser?

2009-03-12T03:44:00.000-06:00

We are in our current economic crisis because many politicians, almost all on the left, believed and still believe that giving subprime loans to those who normally aren't credit-worthy is a great way to help the poor who normally wouldn't own a home. As with all such short-sighted attempts by the left at compassion, the long term impact has been far worse to the entire country than if they just did nothing. When will we have intelligent compassion from our political leaders where the long term cost is measured against the short term gain? We have many examples to use as yardsticks (Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, Freddie Mac, etc.) of what the long term costs are and yet when the Democrats take over government, they keep ignoring history and keep repeating it over and over again making each successive bad decision bigger than the previous one. As for the Republicans, they are not much better when they take power. The best they can say is that they increase government spending at not much of a lower rate than the Democrats. But these idiots wouldn't be in power if we didn't vote for them which comes the crux of the problem: most Americans are idiots. The leaders' financial irresponsibility only reflect our own. How can we expect our leaders to choose the right financial course when most of us can't live within our means? How can we expect our leaders to care about the long term costs and real issues when we vote for leaders based mainly on historical significance and how much they promise to give us? I can only hope that in the future, wisdom will come as Americans age and that with longevity increasing, the wiser voters will become a lasting majority.

Inflation Bill

2009-02-13T10:17:00.000-06:00

The current downturn is actually the fix to an abnormal increase in the money supply. Previous bailouts actually fueled the increase in the money supply to "fix" past economic downturns, but the bailouts were ill-timed and only caused the following upturn in the economy to be higher than it should be. This bailout and, to a smaller degree, the Inflation Bill (I refuse to call it the stimulus bill) are repeating the same mistake of applying economic pressure at the wrong time. Instead of slowing the pendulum when it is swinging down, it is just applying pressure instead to make the pendulum swing higher again in the next upturn. However, unlike previous bailouts, the entire world is far worse off than in the past and the scale of the bailout dwarfs previous ones. We won't have enough foreign sugar daddies to buy the debt and offset the effects of inflation. We will experience inflation in the double digits, and triple digits is a non-zero probability. As inflation heads into double digits, the Fed will clamp down on lending rates to cut the money supply, but because of the scale of this cash infusion, there will be a prolonged period where inflation will continue to rise while the economy declines. Remember stagflation? We are going to have a reunion. Let us not forget that the bulk of the baby boomers are beginning to retire now. Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, which already take up half of our federal tax dollars, are going to skyrocket government spending through the roof. With this additional infusion into the money supply, it may be that the Fed's efforts to clamp down on inflation will be virtually useless for a couple of years. All of this is madness, and it seems Obama's celebrity economic staff left their knowledge of basic economics behind at some point. Maybe they aren't really smart and just have long resumes and skills at skirting tax laws. The USA will survive all this idiocy, but it may not survive it in one piece after the next major downturn. As for what we can do personally, it is obvious that we ride the initial rush then diversify a significant portion of our investments to gold ETFs and non-perishable goods before the bulk of the traders get a clue.

Obama: Jimmy Carter part II

2008-11-04T22:12:00.002-06:00

People are asking what Obama's presidency will be like. I predict it will be similar to Jimmy Carter's presidency where government spending increased overall but spending on military suffered to fund increased welfare and entitlement programs. Taxes will be increased which will slow down the economy. Like Carter, Obama faces an energy crisis as oil production is on a downward trend as a result of decreased demand, and like Carter, Obama will respond by adding more layers of government bureaucracy. Obama will also begin facing the greatest danger to the USA as the bulk of the baby boomers begin to retire during his watch driving government spending drastically upwards through Social Security and Medicaid/Medicare, but like Carter, his presidency will be marked by how he is unable to deal with fundamental economic problems. What was interpreted as patience during the bailout bill fiasco will be seen as indecision as was during Carter's presidency. Obama will thrill the world, but as he is unable to make things better in the USA, the honeymoon will be over domestically as it appears that he cares more about the rest of the world than his own country.

Why the government intervened

2008-09-20T22:40:00.002-06:00

I really don't like what the government has done by taking over Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, AIG, and funding various other major transactions because what they are doing is setting the stage for another similar problem just as the savings and loan bailout set the stage for later problems, but I understand why they intervened. Almost all of our major companies borrow money for day-to-day operations. This is because even if they make tons of money, they don't make it in a steady flow throughout the year to guarantee that they can pay for any specific day's cost of business. What the government saw was a run by investors away from banks which would eliminate enough money from being available for companies to pay for their day-to-day operations which would effectively stop the economy. Our economy runs on the trust of investors in the banks, and when too many investors flee to cash, the banks don't have the money to lend to the companies. What the government saw was another depression occurring. This wasn't because the economy wasn't fundamentally sound from a short term perspective but because the dip in available money for lending was far too low causing too much of a shock for the economy to ride out without significant damage which would take a long time to recoup. However, the root of the current problems causing investors to flee is because the government intervened in previous problems and causing investors to ignore valid risks in the future which eventually build up causing yet another big mess. What the government needs to do is extricate itself from this death cycle by interfering as little as possible even to the point where the economy may go down slightly because removing short term fear by investors shouldn't lead to them ignoring the riskiness of their investments too much as happened when bad mortgages were repackaged as investment vehicles leading to the sub-prime mortgage mess.

Ignoring financial risk comes home

2008-09-15T13:19:00.002-06:00

The savings and loans debacle, the sub-prime loan mess, and the current collapse of brokerage firms have their root in one thing - the attempt to mask investment risk. By allowing investment companies to mask the riskiness of their investments either by repackaging bad loans or relying on the backing of the government have only replaced short term risks and smaller downturns with big ones that come less frequently. It is time to remove the abstraction and let the riskiness of investments become naked for all to see without any significant assurance of the government bailing them out. Let each bad loan and investment fail and hurt those who made them directly. Forget all this layer of bureaucracy that tries to hide or push back the bad news.

Choosing Palin shows balls

2008-08-30T14:23:00.003-06:00

Mind you, I still believe McCain won't be a good president. His saving grace is that I believe Obama would be a significantly worse president. However, I have to say that McCain has balls and brains to choose Palin as his VP choice. While Obama decided to temper his basic message of change by choosing Biden, an integral part of the political machine, McCain increased his ownership of the message of change by choosing somebody who was far from his image as being a part of the Washington political machine. I am resigned to having a president that will not address the real fundamental economic issues of the country, but McCain made me a little more interested in the race for the White House.

Russia's expansionism

2008-08-20T04:14:00.003-06:00

It is evident now that Russia is moving into a state of expansionism. In bordering areas, Russia is using both the carrot and stick to either ensure neighbors are friendly or are gradually diminished. For neighbors like Georgia or Ukraine, this means that Russia will offer Russian citizenship and subsequently military "protection" in problem bordering areas gradually subsuming them into Russia itself. If you ever played a boardgame called Diplomacy, you would recognize what is happening. Russia is making its move to increase its control of the world. What its goal is to become the next sole superpower. This is why Russia finds missile defense in Eastern Europe directed at Iran threatening to its own interests since those interceptors could also be used against Russia and would decrease the threat and influence that Russia's military has in its quest for world domination. With the USA the current king of the mountain, Russia's ultimate goal is to topple the king and take his place on top of the mountain. So what should the USA do? If we really were playing this game like the Diplomacy boardgame, we would use our current geopolitical dominance to crush Russia's confidence and aspirations. Probably the best way to do this without a direct confrontation is to have Russia get sucked into another resource depriving conflict like the Soviet Union's attempt at quelling Afghanistan. With Russia virtually bulging at its borders, another conflict like that with Georgia is guaranteed. What we have to have our CIA and military do is gradually increase the military capability of possible future conflict areas so that Russia can no longer do what it did to Georgia quickly or cleanly. However, in the real world what we have are too many people in the USA who aren't willing to take such decisive actions considering them to be too self-serving. The trouble is that in the real world if the USA isn't willing to preserve its dominance, it will lose it to those who want dominance more.

Choice between bad and worse

2008-07-12T07:22:00.002-06:00

I will be voting for John McCain, but it isn't because I believe John McCain would be a good president. I will be voting for McCain because I believe Obama would be a significantly worse president. If Hillary Clinton had won the Democratic nomination, I would be voting for neither Clinton nor McCain. There is less than 5% difference between their voting records. The main factor which I judge a president is if they would be good for the economy independent of the cyclical ups and downs. Just from listening to Obama's campaign ads, I know that he will be far worse for the economy because he would impose higher cost to business to fund his entitlement and welfare programs which France has shown is a death spiral. Frankly, McCain isn't much better. He has shown that he is more than willing to vote to spend with the rest of pack. Neither of them will address the number one threat to the USA which is the coming economic armageddon as the bulk of the baby boomers retire and blow government spending in Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security through the roof. One day we will have economically conservative leaders, but I fear that day won't come until we experience the worst of our follies.

The left realizes that terror must be faced

2008-06-03T04:55:00.003-06:00

I just saw pigs flying. The left has admitted grudgingly what I have been saying for years that support for terrorism in the Muslim world has been declining after they saw that Al Quaida were worshippers of death rather than Islam. All the past presidencies that just threw bombs and cruise missiles from afar only stoked terrorism, but after Bush faced it head on in Afghanistan and Iraq and showed the Muslim world Al Quaida's savagery in a way that they couldn't romanticize, terrorism lost its popular support similarly to the way the KKK lost its popular support in the USA after its savagery was revealed by those brave enough to face it:

From June 2, 2008 Newsweek magazine (http://www.newsweek.com/id/138508) in article titled "The Only Thing We Have to Fear..." by Fareed Zakaria:

'Including Iraq massively skews the analysis. In the NCTC and MIPT data, Iraq accounts for 80 percent of all deaths counted. But if you set aside the war there, terrorism has in fact gone way down over the past five years. In both the START and MIPT data, non-Iraq deaths from terrorism have declined by more than 40 percent since 2001. (The NCTC says the number has stayed roughly the same, but that too is because of a peculiar method of counting.) In the only other independent analysis of terrorism data, the U.S.-based IntelCenter published a study in mid-2007 that examined "significant" attacks launched by Al Qaeda over the past 10 years. It came to the conclusion that the number of Islamist attacks had declined 65 percent from a high point in 2004, and fatalities from such attacks had declined by 90 percent.

The Simon Fraser study notes that the decline in terrorism appears to be caused by many factors, among them successful counterterrorism operations in dozens of countries and infighting among terror groups. But the most significant, in the study's view, is the "extraordinary drop in support for Islamist terror organizations in the Muslim world over the past five years." These are largely self-inflicted wounds. The more people are exposed to the jihadists' tactics and world view, the less they support them. An ABC/BBC poll in Afghanistan in 2007 showed support for the jihadist militants in the country to be 1 percent. In Pakistan's North-West Frontier province, where Al Qaeda has bases, support for Osama bin Laden plummeted from 70 percent in August 2007 to 4 percent in January 2008. That dramatic drop was probably a reaction to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, but it points to a general trend in Pakistan over the past five years. With every new terrorist attack, public support for jihad falls. "This pattern is repeated in country after country in the Muslim world," writes Mack. "Its strategic implications are critically important because historical evidence suggests that terrorist campaigns that lose public support will sooner or later be abandoned or defeated."'

"This world has serious problems and it’s time for America to start addressing them."

2008-03-25T12:09:00.001-06:00

From http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/us/25dead.web.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5087&em&en=5f66d02b29e6258b&ex=1206590400 :

Six of the Fallen, in Words They Sent Home

...

'WHAT THE HELL AMERICA??

“What the hell happened?” any intelligent American might ask themselves throughout their day. While the ignorant, dragging themselves to thier closed off cubicle, contemplate the simple things in life such as “fast food tonight?” or “I wonder what motivated Brittany Spears to shave her unsightly, mishaped domepiece?”

To the simpleton, this news might appear “devastating.” I assume not everyone thinks this way, but from my little corner of the earth, Iraq, a spot in the world a majority of Americans could’nt point out on the map, it certainly appears so. This little piece of truly, heart-breaking news captured headlines and apparently American imaginations as FOX news did a two hour, truly enlightening piece of breaking news history. American veiwers watched intently, and impatiently as the pretty colors flashed and the media exposed the inner workings of Brittany’s obviously, deep character. I was amazed, truly dumbfounded wondering how we as Americans have sank so low. To all Americans I have but one phrase that helps me throughout my day of constant dangers and ever present death around the corner, “WHO THE [expletive] CARES!” Wow America, we have truly become a nation of self-absorbed retards. ... This world has serious problems and it’s time for America to start addressing them.

Ryan Wood, Myspace blog, May 26, 2007'

Wounded Warrior March

2008-03-14T15:47:00.002-06:00

From http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120534358726230727.html :

'Wounded Soldiers
See the Pentagon
In Private Parade
Little-Known Event
Is Emotional Salute;
Cpl. Lyon Pays a Visit
By YOCHI J. DREAZEN
March 13, 2008; Page A1

Cpl. Kenny Lyon's mother pushed his wheelchair down a narrow Pentagon hallway, crying as she listened to the applause.

Hundreds of Defense Department employees lined the corridor, cheering for Cpl. Lyon and the other wounded military personnel who walked or rolled past. Some of them patted Cpl. Lyon on the shoulder, while others shook his hand or leaned in to hug his mother, Gigi Windsor.

"I was really humbled by it because I didn't do anything special," says Cpl. Lyon, a 22-year-old Marine who lost a leg in a mortar attack near Fallujah. "I went to Iraq to do a job, and I got injured and actually couldn't do it. So why was I getting honored?"

Cpl. Lyon was taking part in a little-known event called the Wounded Warrior March, which brings military personnel who suffer serious injuries in Iraq or Afghanistan to the Pentagon for a parade unlike any other.

The events, held roughly every six weeks, are notable for their simplicity. No speeches are given, no dignitaries march alongside the veterans and cameras are banned. The parades are closed to the public, except for friends and relatives of the injured soldiers and Marines taking part. Military officials don't tout the program to the press.

It's an example of the ways the military has chosen to honor its own out of public view. The Pentagon has until recently refused to release any photos of the flag-draped caskets of fallen U.S. troops being brought off planes back at home. President Bush doesn't attend military funerals and meets with bereaved family members only in private settings. Journalists embedded with American forces, meanwhile, must sign a contract limiting their use of photos of dead or wounded service personnel.

The parades also show the evolution of military honors for the dead and wounded. In the Vietnam War, soldiers and Marines wrote the names of fallen colleagues on their helmets and uniforms. Today, some wear bracelets engraved with the names and nicknames of colleagues killed in the two war zones, while others have the information tattooed on their arms and chests.

Far from the front lines, the Wounded Warrior events give employees at the Pentagon an opportunity to pay their respects to soldiers and Marines they have never met.

"When these boys came back, they went straight into hospitals, so they missed out on the homecoming ceremonies we all came back to," says Maj. Zachary Miller, an operations officer for the Army. "This is a way of giving that back to them."

Chance Meeting

They began in 2004 after a chance meeting between a young amputee and an Army general. The soldier told the officer that he would like to visit the Pentagon, and the general said he would try to make it happen.

The proposal made its way to Diane Bodman, the wife of Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman. She volunteers at the Red Cross office at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Ms. Bodman had experience planning and coordinating trips, and offered to take the project on.

The first group of Walter Reed patients visited the Pentagon in the summer of 2004 and the event struck a chord with many of the military personnel and civilians working in the sprawling facility.

"You're just holding back from breaking down," says Maj. Lyndon Marshall, whose office is on the parade route. He says he hasn't missed a single event. "There's pride, and camaraderie, and even a little guilt. You think, 'I've been there. I've done that. And nothing happened to me.'"

Cpl. Lyon's journey began at a small U.S. outpost near Fallujah. He enlisted in the Marines in fall 2003 looking for adventure. His unit deployed to Iraq in August 2004, but the tour was uneventful. In his seven months in al-Qaim, a region near the Syrian border, Cpl. Lyon says he didn't once fire his rifle.

His second tour was different. On May 1, 2006, Cpl. Lyon was sitting outside working on an armored vehicle when he heard a whistling sound.

"I looked at my friend and said, 'Is that incoming?" he recalls. "My ears began ringing and it felt like someone hit me in the back of the head with a frying pan."

Cpl. Lyon was conscious when fellow Marines raced him to a medical facility in Fallujah. Then, he says, everything went black. When he woke up two weeks later, he was lying in a bed at Walter Reed.

Shrapnel from the mortar had destroyed his jaw, knocked out many of his teeth and torn a small hole in his skull. It also damaged nerves in one of his arms so he couldn't raise his wrist or open his fingers. His left leg had to be amputated just above the knee.

When Ms. Windsor first saw her son, she thought there was no way he'd survive. "There was no piece of skin that didn't have a scar or wound," she says.

But military doctors put Cpl. Lyon back together. They rebuilt his jaw and performed plastic surgery to hide the scars on his face. They transferred tendons from elsewhere in his body into his arm. And they gave him a state-of-the-art prosthetic leg. Cpl. Lyon says he underwent more than 50 operations.

Cpl. Lyon learned about the Wounded Warrior program from a Red Cross volunteer. His mother was eager to take part, but Cpl. Lyon wanted to hold off until he was able to walk into the Pentagon under his own power. One evening close to the ceremony he fell out of bed, leaving him unable to use the prosthetic. With his mother coming to Washington from Marion, Md., he decided to take part anyway.

On a cool day last fall, a fleet of buses and vans made the short trip to the Pentagon. Cpl. Lyon and the other wounded veterans gathered in a narrow hallway and waited for their cue. When a military band began playing, they slowly made their way through the crowd.

Surprise Appearances

"It reminded me of that scene in 'The Wizard of Oz' when all of the people step in to say goodbye to Dorothy," Ms. Windsor recalls. "The more you walked, the more people you saw."

After the parade, the military personnel and their families were taken to the spot where a hijacked plane crashed into the building on Sept. 11, 2001, and then to a small dining room for lunch. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, made surprise appearances.

On his way back to Walter Reed, Cpl. Lyon said he spent a lot of time marveling at the number of Pentagon employees organizing and attending the events. It was, he believes, their way of trying to forge a connection to a war that otherwise seemed distant and abstract.

"Some of them make important decisions but never get to see their decisions being carried out," he says. "When they applaud us, it gives them a little bit of closure for what they do every day. It makes things real for them."'

The dollar declines and it is good

2008-03-14T14:04:00.003-06:00

Almost all of the cries that the decline of the dollar is bad are made by economic morons. The decline in the relative value of the dollar against foreign currency isn't a sign that the USA is declining as much as that the rest of the world is growing. The world is in such good economic shape that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is running out of countries who needs its help. Africa, long the economic ghetto of the world, is doing better, although its dictatorships are still slowing its growth. Ironically for those who hate Bush, Bush's infusion to stem AIDS in Africa has a lot to do with Africa's relative stability compared to the past which shows that throwing money in general at Africa does nothing, but targeted and monitored aid actually works. The benefits for the USA will be a decrease in the trade deficit as exports become more price competitive, decreased outsourcing of jobs as it becomes more and more expensive to do so, increased tourism as the USA becomes cheaper to visit, and the rebirth of domestic industries like domestic oil. However, there can be too much of a good thing. The dollar has been artificially kept high by foreign countries for so long in fear of losing exports to the USA, that when those crutches aren't enough, the dollar's rate of decline might be like an avalanche rather than the gradual walk down a hill it should have been. This may cause critical imports like oil to increase in price too fast to adjust smoothly causing a roller coaster effect on our economy. Right now, nobody knows if the dollar will decline too fast or not, but our economy has already absorbed a drastic increase in oil prices without really batting an eye and is only starting to feel the strain only when the additional weight of the subprime bubble popping came into play. So what should the government do about it? The best thing the government could do is cut government spending and eliminate taxes permanently (no temporary tax "breaks" where the government thinks it knows best how to redistribute the money back to us) for the long term benefit of the economy. The history of government economic interference shows that it is notoriously bad at timing its infusions to actually properly buffer the dips in our economic cycle and just make subsequent peaks and valleys greater than they should be. Since the government is the worst allocator of resources, its best role would be to do nothing during times like this. Unfortunately, congress is almost entirely run by economic liberals and/or morons on both sides of the fence who couldn't cut government spending to save the country and couldn't resist political pressure to "do something" about natural dips in the economy. The greatest danger to the USA is a result of one of the biggest misguided attempts to "help" the people. When the bulk of the baby boomers retire, they will increase government spending in Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security so fast and so high that the debt to GDP ratio will skyrocket past the all time high right after WWII, and it will bring our country to its knees like nothing since the Depression. We and our leaders don't have the courage to do so, but if we are to avoid this economic armageddon, we must bite the bullet and cut down these programs.

Retrospective

2008-02-25T02:43:00.003-06:00

Having a full life means that keeping up a blog often falls down the list of things to do. At this time, I'd like to just look back on Iraq. Why are we in Iraq? It is basically for two reasons:

1. Saddam. You can cloud the issue, but Saddam was basically a Hitler in waiting with a military to match his ambitions. He had to be taken out before he did far more harm to neighboring countries and his own people. His people were forced to breathe, eat and drink Saddam. Just look to North Koreans to see what having too long of this type of indoctrination does.

2. An unwillingness to repeat the past of colonial nations to just do what they want and leave. With all the complaints now about the USA staying in Iraq, the complaints would probably have been far worse if the USA just took out Saddam and left. The region is strife with actions of colonizing nations, including the USA, going in doing what they want and leaving the area far too soon. If the USA was truly going to repeat the history of colonizing nations, it would have never made elections a priority nor would it have cared about Iraq after taking out Saddam and his military. The USA truly wants to make Iraq a better place for its people because when it succeeds in doing this in the past (e.g., Japan, South Korea, Germany, etc.), it ends up being better for the USA. Unfortunately in Iraq, the level of infiltration of saboteurs against the USA (Iran, Al Quaida, radical Shiites, radical Sunnis) is far higher than in previous attempts.

So what's going to happen in the future? Iraq is gradually settling down and lower level priorities beyond damage control are starting to get attention. There are still hotspots like Mosul and relatively low level violence, but Iraq is still one country politically and even the worst critics of the Iraq occupation admit that things are getting better. There will be a point when the Iraqi security forces will be able to take over completely from the USA, and it looks like it will be sooner than later. The key to Iraq's future are in the hands of its leaders, chosen by its people. Despite what's in the news, the politicians are still talking to each other, and they are negotiating although it sometimes looks like fracturing in the headlines. As long as they keep talking, Iraq is on the road to recovery no matter what pressures outside countries put on it.

Taking personal responsibility

2007-04-20T02:44:00.000-06:00

There seems to be a core divide between people who believe they are responsible for their own choices, even bad ones, and those who blame others for the bad choices they made. This is the divide between me and the Virginia Tech killer. I have no sympathy for his sob story of discrimination because I lived it myself. He knew right from wrong, and he definitely knew what he was doing was wrong or he wouldn't have shot himself. He was a loser because he blamed others for the wrong choices he made and especially because he made the additional bad choices to take his blame out on innocent people. Those of you who sympathize with this loser should take a close look at yourself because there is only one choice that differentiates you from this mass murderer.

Wahhabism

2007-04-04T16:05:00.000-06:00

Wahhabism is a what Muslims derogatorily call an extreme version of Salafism, the most conservative and violent root of Islam. A good Christian comparison would be the fire and brimstone of the Old Testament. Although the Bible contains the Old and New Testaments, most Christians create their own view of God which excludes the violence and bloodiness of the God in the Old Testament. Unfortunately, Islam is currently in the state where Salafism holds the mainstream view. However, this doesn't mean Salafi of Saudi Arabia are the same as the Salafi of Al Quaida. The difference between the two would be similar to the equivalent difference between the strict Southern Baptists and the KKK. This is why Bin Laden issues fatwahs to kill while Saudi Arabia issues fatwahs that suicide bombing is against Islam. The trouble is that the advocacy of fire and brimstone tends to breed intolerance and that is what Islam has more than Christianity now. Islam is sorely in need of its version of Martin Luther to reform Islam and bring its moderate roots like Sufism into the fore. Until this occurs, Islamic equivalents of the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition (e.g., Al Quaida and the Taliban) will likely maintain permanence.

The two battlefields

2007-04-04T11:21:00.000-06:00

It amuses me when people talk about the US military being bent to the breaking point. Our military is a federal agency with all the bureaucracy and inefficiency that is inherent. When we talk about it reaching the breaking point today, we are talking about niceties like long periods of time away from combat, being fully equipped and trained, having sufficient support, etc. If we were in a real war like WWII, the US military would suddenly find incredible reserves of capability. That's the trouble with how we view the war in Iraq. We don't think of it or treat it like a real war like WWII. That is a complaint you will hear from many soldiers. Only a small percentage understand that this is a real war while the rest are really not affected by it and frankly don't really care except that the negative news makes them feel bad which is why there are so many people on the left who believe that they can support the troops and yet not support the mission and why there are so many people on the right who aren't providing the troops the resources and freedom they need to win.

On the other side of the coin, it amuses me when people talk up the efforts of Al Quaida, Sadr and their followers. Let's put it this way. If the US military is on the breaking point, their enemies have been broken even before they began to fight. Each successful attack is plastered all over the media, but what is ignored are the hundreds or thousands of attacks that failed and the disproportionate amount of casualties those who attack our soldiers have taken. If you had to choose a side to fight for that would ensure your greatest survival and military success, it would be definitely be the US military "on the breaking point" rather than the "triumphant" enemy.

The trouble is that battlefield of the hearts and minds of the American people became just as important as the battlefield on the ground from Vietnam and on. A loss on either battlefield means a loss on both. We are winning militarily on the ground, but we are losing the war with the American people's patience and commitment. Our enemy has the easy job because they can fail hundreds or thousands of times, but it only takes relatively few successful attacks to affect the fickle US public significantly. Not only that, we have those, mostly on the left, who use this for their own agenda as well which becomes a force multiplier for the enemy attacks on the American hearts and minds.

Congress couldn't disgust me more, but I could be wrong

2007-04-01T01:59:00.000-06:00

The blatant addition of billions of dollars of pork in front of the eyes of the whole country to the military spending bill has peaked my disgust at congress. I don't care what party you belong to. Everybody should be questioning the politicians, especially the Democrats who were supposed to be better than the Republicans after taking over but have ended adding the bulk of the pork. The Democrats have just reverted to their standard operating procedure of corruption which led to them being kicked out during Clinton's reign. Corruption was the main issue affecting local politics which led to the Democrats retaking congress. You would think they would get the message, but either they are too stupid or too corrupt.

The middle class

2007-04-01T01:54:00.001-06:00

The definition used in media of the American middle class is vague, at best. It isn't the statistical middle class, so comparisons over time are subjective to inaccuracies inherent to population changes, inflation and uncountable other factors. So the analysis I am doing here is the statistical middle class defined as the middle quintile (20%) of our population as defined by table HINC-05 of the census tables located at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/dinctabs.html. One key data that is given is the lower bound of the income for the middle class and the lower bound for the higher quintile which is basically the same as the upper bound for the middle class:

YEAR, INCOME RANGE, INCOME RANGE IN 2000 DOLLARS ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION
2008, $39,000-$62,750, $31,489-$50,665
2007, $39,100-$62,000, $32,770-$51,962
2006, $37,771-$60,000, $32,259-$51,244
2005, $36,000-$57,658, $31,791-$50,917
2004, $34,738-$55,331, $31,689-$50,475
2003, $34,000-$54,440, $31,606-$50,606
2002, $33,377-$53,151, $31,771-$50,593
2001, $33,312-$53,000, $32,217-$51,257
2000, $33,005-$52,265, $33,005-$52,265

What this shows is not as headline catching as the news outlets are willing to present. What it basically says is that the 2001 recession impacted the lower and upper bounds of income for the middle class until 2003 where the upper bound started to move up and starting with 2004, both the lower and upper bounds moved up. It's nothing earth shaking, but it brings to earth what headline news tries to make
political fodder.

11/13/2007 - added line for 2006
07/15/2010 - added lines for 2007 & 2008

Bureaucrats kill our soldiers

2007-03-29T09:59:00.000-06:00

Congress' defeatist bill to set a date for withdrawal from Iraq is just the latest of a long line of bureaucracy which has, at the minimum, been a source of irritant to our soldiers and, at worst, a threat to our soldiers' lives. This bill increases the morale and extends the willingness of our enemies to fight. Congress will directly cause more deaths than necessary by their stupid and useless action. It is useless because it won't change the course of the war on our side, but it does make them look good to their anti-war constituents who they believe represent the majority of their voters. So I guess it is useful for their political careers - at the cost of US and Iraqi lives.

300

2007-03-11T09:29:00.000-06:00

300 isn't a political movie and yet the left has poured politics into it. I can only assume that having the bravery and conviction to fight evil to one's death for others is threatening to them for some reason. This would explain why they ignore our soldiers' deaths as sacrifices for us. I have had several left wing posters tell me straight out that they don't see the soldiers as sacrificing for them:

http://www.alternet.org/movies/49029/

"What's your favourite movie?

Someday soon, you may ask a new acquaintance that question, and just maybe -- because it takes all kinds -- your new friend will reply, "My favourite movie is 300."

If this happens, back away slowly. Your new friend probably kills cats for fun. Worse -- your new friend may be George W. Bush. Director Zack Snyder's new dramatization of the epic Spartan stand at Thermopylae will probably go down real well at the White House, and wherever disturbed young people massacre hundreds in violent video games. Others should exercise discretion."

Missing in Baghdad: My Father

2007-02-20T10:17:00.000-06:00

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB117167192057511771-lMyQjAxMDE3NzExNzYxNzcxWj.html

"What happens when a call from Iraq
upends a reporter's life in New York
By SARMAD ALI
February 17, 2007; Page A1

About 5 o'clock on a mid-December morning, I was awakened by a call from my brother in Iraq. "Dad is missing," he said. He was upset and some of his anger spilled out at me: "You should be here," he shouted. "You don't seem to care."

My father had left home in Baghdad that morning to go to the auto-repair shop across town where he works. Fifteen minutes after he left, car bombs exploded on his route to work and he hasn't been seen since.

His disappearance set off a desperate search by my family through the netherworld of war-torn Baghdad. It also put me in the agonizing position of trying to help my family with the violent dislocations of civil war -- over the phone, from thousands of miles away. I'm the oldest son and have been studying and working in New York for more than two years. Since my father vanished, my three grown siblings and my mother have looked to me as the head of the family.

Every time I hear about a bomb going off, I brace myself for the worst possible news. Last February, my entire family went missing for two weeks, without a word. When my cellphone rings and an Iraqi number shows up on the display, I say a silent prayer before answering.

My life has always been marked by Saddam Hussein's wars. Born to Sunni parents -- my mother a homemaker, my father a mechanic -- I grew up in a brick house in a poor Baghdad neighborhood where Sunnis and Shias lived together. War with neighboring Iran dominated my early childhood. Many nights, Iranian jet fighters roared overhead. Most afternoons, we would watch "Sowar min Al-Marakah" ("Pictures from the Battle"), a propaganda show featuring battlefield footage and the mangled corpses of Iranian soldiers. My parents once gave me medication to fight a recurring nightmare of being squashed under an Iranian tank.

I was in primary school in 1991 when Operation Desert Storm kicked off after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. Once, a U.S. missile hit a spice factory near our home. We smelled the spices, thought it was a chemical attack and covered our mouths with wet towels. During most of my teens, we lived under U.N. sanctions on government-issued rations of staple foods.

There were happy times, too. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of the celebrations surrounding the Muslim religious holiday of Eid. During the festival, my father used to take me, my sisters and my brother to the park for amusement rides, to eat kebab and to walk at night by the Tigris River.

I always wanted to be a journalist. But under Saddam, studying journalism was pointless, since all newspapers were run and rigorously monitored by the government. In middle school, I started teaching myself English, practicing with translation texts and old American newsmagazines left in our basement by a relative. I used to spend hours memorizing vocabulary lists and looking up new words in an outdated dictionary. I dreamed of going to school in a Western country, of traveling the world and writing about it.

By 2003, at the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we were already used to war. My family evacuated to the countryside, with the exception of my father, who said that if he had to die, he would rather die at home.

We returned several weeks later, after Saddam was toppled. My father welcomed us back, but he appeared broken. A secular Sunni and fervent patriot, he had been against the American invasion and never thought it would happen. Now, he had become pessimistic about the future of his country: The looting in the aftermath of the invasion disgusted him. "They stole everything from the government buildings around us," he said, as we walked in the door. "TVs, computers, and even water pipes."

But life continued. My father went back to work; my younger sister and brother went to high school, and my older sister, who had graduated with a degree in English, helped my mother around the house. I found a job as a journalist for a new local English-language paper. I reported stories on bombings, reconstruction projects and other news from all over Iraq.

The violence increased. I had been on the job less than one year when the editor, an Iraqi-American, left the country, afraid that his life was in danger. Along with three other journalists, I kept the publication alive on the Web, posting news items from an Internet cafe in downtown Baghdad.

Before he left, the editor got me in touch with Columbia University in the U.S., which shortly afterward offered me a scholarship to study journalism. My parents said I should accept. I did, and four months later I took off. The morning I left, my brother insisted on carrying my big suitcase to the cab. My mother splashed a pitcher of water behind me, an Iraqi tradition wishing a traveler a safe return home.

With $300 in my pocket, I took a 15-hour cab ride to Jordan, and a plane to New York from there.

By August 2004, I settled in New York, enjoying the life of a newcomer in his 20s. I started to take classes and learned new things, from buckling my seat belt in a plane to working out in a gym; from using a washing machine to eating sushi and tandoori dishes. Later, I landed an internship, and then a reporting job with this newspaper.

But as I was getting used to my comfortable new life, I was also regularly pulled back into Iraq, where things were getting worse. A few months after my arrival in New York, I was chatting with a friend in Baghdad on my cellphone when he told me that an acquaintance had died in a roadside bomb attack. I became afraid of getting calls from Iraq, sometimes not answering them. I considered changing my phone number so no one could call me with bad news -- but I could still call people back home when I felt like it. Other times, I became obsessed with fear and would call to check on my family and friends, burning through a 400-minute calling card in a weekend.

When Al-Askari's famous gold-domed Shiite mosque was bombed last February, violence erupted throughout Iraq. Suddenly I couldn't get in touch with anyone back home. I didn't know whether my family members were dead or alive, whether they were taken by gunmen for ethnic reasons or if it was just that their phone line was down. I stopped eating, stopped going to work. I tried calling at three different times every day, to no avail. They surfaced two weeks later, safe and sound, after having fled to the countryside to stay with distant relatives, in an effort to escape violence or retaliation against Sunnis.

During an instant-message conversation with a friend in Iraq, the war dealt me its first massive blow: Haider Al-Maliki, a friend from university in Baghdad who had come to visit me in New York the year before, was found dead, his body riddled with 13 bullets. He was stopped by unknown gunmen while in a cab in the southern city of Amarah and shot on the spot. Other friends began going to their jobs at the government and in the Green Zone in disguise, trying to avoid Haider's fate. One friend poses as a student, while another takes a roundabout route to work for fear of being followed.

Meanwhile, my sister, seeing that ethnic violence was increasing near our neighborhood, asked me if the family should buy a gun. "Ask the neighbors what they are doing," I told her, not knowing what to do. When we talked a week later, my family had opted against it.

My father kept going to work every day, despite the rising violence. It was one way of staying sane. Then, in December, he went missing, and I got my brother's frantic call.

I told my brother to calm down and said that I was here to help -- that I left the country to help the family. "You are there, with air conditioning, entertaining yourself, while we are here in hell," he retorted.

I tried to ignore the comments -- I had heard them from him before -- and told him to focus on the matter at hand. He did. After dad left, he said, there was a huge bombing near the central station where he was supposed to transfer to another bus. Dad never showed up at work and never came back home.

I told him to go to the area of the bombing -- a busy marketplace in central Baghdad -- to see where the wounded were taken. I also called three of my old friends in Baghdad to ask them to accompany him. My brother had already asked some of our cousins to visit police stations to see if my father had been taken into custody.

A few hours later, we talked again. By that time, my brother had visited a local hospital, where most victims were taken. He said that my father wasn't on the hospital's official list of the dead, so he walked around to see if he could recognize him among the wounded. He described a scene of chaos and carnage: Blood was everywhere, people were weeping in the halls, hospital staff were running back and forth -- but my father was nowhere to be found.

Two days after the bombing, I called my friend Ala and asked him to go to the hospital morgue to see if my father might be among the unidentified dead, victims who weren't carrying IDs or were burned beyond recognition. Ala went and checked three charred bodies, but concluded they were not my father. One was too fat, he said. Another had hair, while my father is bald. And the last one was too young and short to be my father.

My cousin went to a nearby police station, a mini-fortress surrounded by barbed wire and sandbags, to see if my father was mistakenly being held. He told the lieutenant that he was looking for his uncle and gave him the name. He wasn't there.

A week passed and my father still hadn't been found. On the phone, my mother sounded faint and sick but kept saying she was all right. She told me to take care of myself and that my father would come back. She insisted that my father was fine. Her proof: He was not at the morgue.

My older sister couldn't keep up appearances. She stopped eating, stopped taking showers and descended into a depression, my younger sister said. She hadn't been well for more than a year, ever since several cars exploded near her on a market square. Back then, the sight of a child's charred body had sent her into shock. For days, all she could do was hug her knees and murmur over and over: "Poor girl, they killed her, animals." She recalled running through streets awash with blood and sewage, packed with civilians pushing flat wooden carts on which they piled the wounded and the dead. Her condition improved only after she got antidepressants. But after my father went missing, she spiraled back into a severe depression. Medical assistance proved elusive this time, with violence deterring nurses from visiting.

On my way to the gym one recent day, I got a call from my brother with more bad news. A mortar shell hit near my house and damaged the already-fragile bedroom walls. "Do you know that your mother and sisters are sleeping in the hallway shivering in this cold winter?" my brother said. I told him I would send money. Exasperated, he said that even with money they wouldn't be able to fix the room and that they would sleep in my old bedroom from now on.

I feel responsible for my family, but at the same time helpless. I am not a U.S. citizen, or a permanent resident. My guest status here prevents me from being able to bring my family to join me. I ask them to stay strong and take care and stay indoors. I try to give them hope, although I know it could be a false hope. Sometimes I stop calling them for a few weeks to avoid listening to all this.

I've considered going back many times, mostly because I miss my family and I haven't seen them for more than two years. But that is risky -- both because of the growing violence and because it's not certain that I could leave the U.S. and return. My mother says I should stay here. "Don't even think of coming back," she told me on the phone a few weeks ago. "People are leaving, not coming."

These days, my mother and sisters don't go outside the house at all. None of them have traveled before. They don't have passports. And they don't have the money it takes to buy tickets, taxi rides, hotel rooms. They say there are no guarantees of finding a way to make a living in neighboring countries like Jordan.

I seek consolation in small things that remind me of home. I keep three envelopes with my mother's recipes scribbled on them -- lentil soup, tomato sauce with beans and Iraqi-style biryani -- next to my bed. When bad things happen back home, I cook them. My laptop is stocked with songs about Baghdad. I search the Internet for pictures of Iraq before the U.S. invasion. Pictures of the Tigris River. Of bustling Baghdad streets. Of the past that is no longer.

Occasionally, I talk to the few Iraqis I know in the U.S. -- a friend in Michigan, another in Massachusetts. A small Iraqi-flag key chain hangs on a nail sticking out of my wall.

Bombings in the news send me scurrying to my computer for information about the exact time and location of the explosions. I lay curled under my green comforter, going over in my mind where my family members and friends might have been at the time.

New friends keep me company. While civil war raged in Iraq, I attended parties celebrating Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's. At Christmas break, I went to the home of a friend's aunt in Connecticut; I shopped for gifts -- books, a T-shirt, a scarf, a tie -- and we ate a big dinner.

I don't tell my friends in America too much about what is happening with my family in Iraq. I try to avoid talking about the war because it's so far removed from the world of restaurants, coffee shops, and polite conversations. I worry people won't understand or don't want to be bothered. During a recent dinner in New York's Chinatown, a friend asked, "How's your family?" When I told her about my father, she was shocked. She offered condolences and said I shouldn't hesitate to ask her for help. I felt grateful, but a little awkward because I knew that neither she nor anyone else who means well can really change things for my family.

Sometimes, my family becomes hopeless and says my father must be dead -- otherwise he would have returned by now. Other days, they are more optimistic, saying that he may have been taken by kidnappers and he will be released.

The last time we talked, my younger sister pleaded with me to help her find a way out of Baghdad. She said she would cook and clean for me, if I could just figure out a way to get her out of there. It made my heart sink.

Trying to check on the fate of my father, I called my brother on his cellphone -- the only phone in my family's possession -- late last month. That day, bombs had gone off on a Shiite market where he likes to shop for DVDs and CDs. Press reports said there were more than 80 dead. He did not pick up his phone. Not the next day either. I recently reached a friend in Iraq, who said he had seen my brother. But I'm still waiting for him to call back.

Write to Sarmad Ali at sarmad.ali@wsj.com"

North Korea's song and dance

2007-02-13T05:16:00.000-06:00

It looks like another agreement has been reached with North Korea. Expectations are low since the song and dance that North Korea has repeated in the past is to break their side of agreements. Not a drop of oil should go to North Korea until they have dismantled their nuclear weapons program, and more than just tape and cameras should be used to make sure North Korea doesn't just restart their program when they feel like it.

The negotitations went unusually quick this time. I suspect the thumbscrews of holding the cash in banks that North Korea uses for its counterfeiting operation has forced its hand, and the nuclear program is most likely draining the country's resources and not resulting in anything useful in the foreseeable future.

AMT: Democrat shortsightedness comes back to bite them

2007-02-10T12:36:00.000-06:00

The Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) was passed by Democrats and the fiscal liberal called Nixon in 1969 to "tax the rich". It was created because congress didn't want to fix the bureaucratic tax code which allowed so many loopholes especially for those who could afford competent CPAs and tax lawyers. Instead they added a whole bunch of extra rules for a parallel tax system which denied many ways that the rich were using to avoid paying taxes. Not that it really mattered because it only added to the complexity of the tax system and the rich just found other loopholes. The first major mistake that shortsighted fiscal liberals made was to make AMT rules to make it affect only high income earners not take inflation into account. As a result, those who are considered rich in 1969 are now increasingly those in the middle class, and because of the complexity of the AMT rules, it could actually affect anyone regardless of how much they make. What has come back to bite the Democrats in their own butt has been the AMT removal of deductions like state and local taxes. Guess which states have higher state and local taxes? Right. Democratic states with their greater ideas of income redistribution and greater welfare and entitlement provisions require far greater taxes, so they end up taking up the greater burden of the AMT than red states. This is just one example of how shortsighted liberals with their ideas of a socialist/communist state taking care of the people ends up hurting
the people far more in the long run.

Criminal gets justifiably shot and US agents go to jail

2007-02-10T12:27:00.000-06:00

Former Border Agent Ignacio Ramos was beaten severely in jail. What was his crime? He shot a drug smuggler at the Mexican border when he tried to flee. It has been revealed that those who have more sympathy for illegal aliens violating our laws than our defense people who enforce the laws have fabricated much of the testimony that put Ramos and fellow agent Jose Alonso Compean in jail. This boils my blood and should anger any true American. There are too many Americans that Bin Laden justifiably label as destructive to the USA and would cause the country to fold like house of cards given enough pressure.

My prediction of the current North Korean negotiations outcome

2007-02-09T11:19:00.000-06:00

Although I hope it will be different, I predict that the current negotiations over the North Korean buclear weapons program will repeat history. North Korea will come in with their laundry list of demands which they expect to have a greater ability to extort with their successful nuclear detonation. The USA will come in with, hopefully, the usual stance that we will no longer cave into North Korea's blackmail tactics like in the past and hold firm that North Korea has to disarm permanently before anything else is discussed. The end result will be a breakoff in the talks, and hopefully this time, it will allow UN sanctions with greater teeth like the crackdown on banks associated with North Korea's counterfeiting operations have taken.

Suicide rate of US soldiers in Iraq

2007-02-06T03:05:00.000-06:00

Osama Bin Laden and Al Quaida in Iraq make a big deal about the US soldier rate of suicide in Iraq which is about 10.5 per 100,000 in 2004, 19.9 per 100,000 in 2005 and probably higher in 2006. They claim it is their successes which is hurting the morale of US soldiers which is the cause. The trouble is that morale has been consistently high in the US military in Iraq, and Al Quaida's successes are laughable. Since 9/11, Al Quaida has lost their main sanctuary in Afghanistan, and they are clawing for survival even in Iraq and Pakistan. Stress is a recognized factor in suicide, but the stress leading to suicide may not be combat related. Tina Priest recently committed suicide after she was raped by a fellow soldier and placed on antidepressants. What may be an ignored significant source of suicide in Iraq is boredom. What people miss who use headline news as their window into soldiers' lives in Iraq is that the bulk of the time many soldiers spend in Iraq is in boredom. In many cases, the boredom is associated with being forced to stay in one place with no form or variation of mental diversion which then becomes akin to being stuck in a prison cell. With some people, this causes inner issues to come to the fore of their mind and can become consuming. It doesn't take war to drive people to suicide. Countries like Japan and Finland have higher rates of suicide which even leaves out a poor economy as a cause, and if you just count men, which the military still predominently consists of, far more countries have even higher rates of suicide. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate. Countries like South Korea whose high competition in education has been known to cause high rates of suicide among students whose greatest woe was a slump in grades or test scores. This doesn't mean that the increase in suicide rates in the US military in Iraq should be ignored, but no credence should be given to the reasons our enemies give for it.

Wafaa' Al-Natheema

2007-01-23T11:20:00.000-06:00

I have had arguments with people who don't share my views on their blogs and mine. I am argumentative, but I don't use profanity and attempt to back up everything I say. Every opponent I have encountered have been reasonable until I encountered Wafaa' Al-Natheema. Wafaa' Al-Natheema is a hypocrite. She speaks of freedom and supports liberals on her blog especially if they are anti-war. However, she doesn't tolerate dissent. She doesn't comprehend what freedom means especially freedom of speech. That is fine. She can run her blog the way she wants, but if she is going to retain my original comment and won't let me respond to responses to my comment, she should remove all my comments at my request. I won't have even my original comment on a blog run by a totalitarian. She should follow the methods of Saddam and totally delete all dissent.

Wafaa,
Unlike you, I welcome your comments and will not delete them or prevent your ownership of your own words.

The battleground of the will of the American people

2007-01-22T13:41:00.000-06:00

The will of the American people is a battleground, and the vast majority of Americans are open turf for the combatants. How many? Bush's approval rating was around 90% at it's high point and now it is around 30%:

http://www.hist.umn.edu/~ruggles...es/ Approval.htm

So about 60% of the American people are like a willow tree bending in the wind. The military has to start investing some significant resources into psyops on our own people. We have been underestimating the importance of the battle over the minds and hearts of the American people, but our enemies haven't. They have filled the vaccuum we have left.

This doesn't mean that we resort to lying propaganda because if you're in psyops, you know that lies will always end up hurting you more in the long run. What it means is that the military has to get the truth out about what is happening in Iraq and other theatres of operation and maintain credibility by admitting faults and problems but always making sure to show the whole picture which headline news misses by its nature.

One way to inprove psyops on the homefront is to combine secops and psyops. Limitations on soldiers' ability to tell stories from the front should be balanced with the benefits it has on the will of the American people. Again, it shouldn't be used to be biased to give more good news than bad but to give a better picture of the whole situation to maintain credibility.

I hope this isn't a new idea for the military. Because of the increase in media coverage, the battleground that is the will of the American people is as important as the physical battleground soldiers fight and build on. Losing either one means losing both.

Oil price plunge starting to hurt Chavez

2007-01-22T13:29:00.000-06:00

Chavez's pet project spending and piling on recurring costs haven't decreased, but Chavez is showing signs that he is starting to run out of money to fund them. He has announced he is increasing the price of domestic gasoline produced by the state owned oil company. When asked about the effect on the poor, his ignorant response was that the poor don't drive cars, so it won't really affect them. Transportation of goods affects the poor in every aspect, and increasing the cost to transport goods will hurt the poor. On top of the 17% inflation rate which Chavez is doing nothing to alleviate, it's not a good time to be a Venezuelan. If you are able to keep ahead of the curve economically, you will be labeled as one of the rich elite by Chavez and have your property confiscated. Communism is not yet dead, but Chavez is proving why it is dying.

About Iraq's "Last chance"

2007-01-19T16:47:00.000-06:00

You know the old saying: "How do you know when politicians are lying? When their lips are moving." After the "last chance", life goes on. After your side loses a game or an election, life goes on. If you lose, it's usually not as bad as you feared. If you win, it usually isn't as good as you hoped. People make predictions, but the factors that affect the actual result number at least as many as the number of people involved. There are things you control and things you don't. If you never try in fear that things you don't control will stop you, you will never accomplish anything.

I ran out of fortune cookies.

My two cents for today

2007-01-18T05:15:00.000-06:00

The key to decreasing the violence doesn't lie in the governments. It lies in the hands of the Iraqis who do the bulk of the killings and rebuilding. The main problem with the security forces in Baghdad, both the US and Iraqi, is that they are not good policemen. They are good at killing an obvious enemy, but they are not good at dealing with criminal elements like the kidnappers and their helpers, the "chewers". As a result of this policing vacuum, it has been filled by organized crime. Except for the high profile attacks usually by Al Quaida or one its extreme Sunni allies and the surge of Shiite revenge attacks afterwards, the everyday killings have become less personal and more businesslike with money and territory being the key motivators. Sadr's and SCIRI's militias are two competing gangs who unite only when facing the Sunni gangs. Ideologists like Al Quaida and its small number of Sunni extremist allies are becoming more and more marginalized although they continue to perform high profile attacks. It will take time for Iraqis to eventually tackle the gangs effectively, but unlike past US occupations before the Vietnam War, the US and Iraq doesn't have the luxury of having the US stay indefinitely in force. Although Al Quaida is losing ground in Iraq, Al Quaida's war on the battleground that is the American people's will is succeeding, and the American people will not have the US become Iraq's umbrella for a prolonged period because of this. What this means for Iraq most likely soon after the 2008 elections is that instead of one single umbrella maintaining some level of stability until they get their act together, Iraq will be pulled by multiple external forces: Iran and Saudi Arabia being the major opposing ones ones with Syria, Jordan and Turkey playing lesser roles. God help them.

Sectarian fighting just business, nothing personal

2007-01-16T14:25:00.000-06:00

Just an article about the Sunni insurgents attitude towards Al Quaida that I want to remember:

'The jihad now is against the Shias, not the Americans'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1989397,00.html

"As 20,000 more US troops head for Iraq, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, the only correspondent reporting regularly from behind the country's sectarian battle lines, reveals how the Sunni insurgency has changed

One morning a few weeks ago I sat in a car talking to Rami, a thick-necked former Republican Guard commando who now procures arms for his fellow Sunni insurgents.

Rami was explaining how the insurgency had changed since the first heady days after the US invasion. "I used to attack the Americans when that was the jihad. Now there is no jihad. Go around and see in Adhamiya [the notorious Sunni insurgent area] - all the commanders are sitting sipping coffee; it's only the young kids that are fighting now, and they are not fighting Americans any more, they are just killing Shia. There are kids carrying two guns each and they roam the streets looking for their prey. They will kill for anything, for a gun, for a car and all can be dressed up as jihad."

Rami was no longer involved in fighting, he said, but made a tidy profit selling weapons and ammunition to men in his north Baghdad neighbourhood. Until the last few months, the insurgency got by with weapons and ammunition looted from former Iraqi army depots. But now that Sunnis were besieged in their neighbourhoods and fighting daily clashes with the better-equipped Shia ministry of interior forces, they needed new sources of weapons and money.

He told me that one of his main suppliers had been an interpreter working for the US army in Baghdad. "He had a deal with an American officer. We bought brand new AKs and ammunition from them." He claimed the American officer, whom he had never met but he believed was a captain serving at Baghdad airport, had even helped to divert a truckload of weapons as soon as it was driven over the border from Jordan.

These days Rami gets most of his supplies from the new American-equipped Iraqi army. "We buy ammunition from officers in charge of warehouses, a small box of AK-47 bullets is $450 (£230). If the guy sells a thousand boxes he can become rich and leave the country." But as the security situation deteriorates, Rami finds it increasingly difficult to travel across Baghdad. "Now I have to pay a Shia taxi driver to bring the ammo to me. He gets $50 for each shipment."

The box of 700 bullets that Rami buys for $450 today would have cost between $150 and $175 a year ago. The price of a Kalashnikov has risen from $300 to $400 in the same period. The inflation in arms prices reflects Iraq's plunge toward civil war but, largely unnoticed by the outside world, the Sunni insurgency has also changed. The conflict into which 20,000 more American troops will be catapulted over the next few weeks is very different to the one their comrades experienced even a year ago.

In Baghdad in late October I called a Sunni insurgent I had known for more than a year. He was the mid-level commander of a small cell, active against the Americans in Sunni villages north of Baghdad. Sectarian frontlines had been hardening in the city for months - it took us 45 minutes of haggling to agree on a meeting place which we could both get to safely. We met in a rundown workers' cafe.

Kidnapped

"Its not a good time to be a Sunni in Baghdad," Abu Omar told me in a low voice. He had been on the Americans' wanted list for three years but I had never seen him so anxious; he had trimmed his beard in the close-cropped Shia style and kept looking towards the door. His brother had been kidnapped a few days before, he told me, and he believed he was next on a Shia militia's list. He had fled his home in the north of the city and was staying with relatives in a Sunni stronghold in west Baghdad.

He was more despondent than angry. "We Sunni are to blame," he said. "In my area some ignorant al-Qaida guys have been kidnapping poor Shia farmers, killing them and throwing their bodies in the river. I told them: 'This is not jihad. You can't kill all the Shia! This is wrong! The Shia militias are like rabid dogs - why provoke them?' "

Then he said: "I am trying to talk to the Americans. I want to give them assurances that no one will attack them in our area if they stop the Shia militias from coming."

This man who had spent the last three years fighting the Americans was now willing to talk to them, not because he wanted to make peace but because he saw the Americans as the lesser of two evils. He was wrestling with the same dilemma as many Sunni insurgent leaders, beginning to doubt the wisdom of their alliance with al-Qaida extremists.

Another insurgent commander told me: "At the beginning al-Qaida had the money and the organisation, and we had nothing." But this alliance soon dragged the insurgents and then the whole Sunni community into confrontation with the Shia militias as al-Qaida and other extremists massacred thousands of Shia civilians. Insurgent commanders such as Abu Omar soon found themselves outnumbered and outgunned, fighting organised militias backed by the Shia-dominated security forces.

A week after our conversation, Abu Omar invited me to a meeting with insurgent commanders. I was asked to wait in the reception room of a certain Sunni political party. A taxi driver took me to a house in a Sunni neighbourhood that had recently been abandoned by a Shia family. The driver came in with me - he was also a commander.

The house had been abandoned in a hurry, cardboard boxes were stacked by the door, some of the furniture was covered with white cloths and a few cheap paintings were piled against a wall. The property had been expropriated by the local Sunni mujahideen and we sat on sofas in a dusty reception room.

Abu Omar had been meeting commanders of groups with names like the Fury Brigade, the Battalions of the 1920 Revolution, the Islamic Army and the Mujahideen Army, to discuss options they had for fighting both an insurgency against the Americans and an escalating civil war with the Shia.

Abu Omar had proposed encouraging young Sunni men to enlist in the army and the police to redress the sectarian balance. He suggested giving the Americans a ceasefire, in an attempt to stop ministry of interior commandos' raids on his area. Al-Qaida had said no to all these measures; now he wanted other Iraqi insurgent commanders to support him.

'Do politics'

A heated discussion was raging. One of the men, with a very thin moustache, a huge belly and a red kuffiya wrapped around his shoulder, held a copy of the Qur'an in one hand and a mobile phone in the other. I asked him what his objectives were. "We are fighting to liberate our country from the occupations of the Americans and their Iranian-Shia stooges."

"My brother, I disagree," said Abu Omar. "Look, the Americans are trying to talk to us Sunnis and we need to show them that we can do politics. We need to use the Americans to fight the Shia."

He looked nervously at them: suggestions of talking to the Americans could easily have him labelled as traitor. "Where is the jihad and the mujahideen?" he continued. "Baghdad has become a Shia town. Our brothers are being slaughtered every day! Where are these al-Qaida heroes? One neighbourhood after another will be lost if we don't work on a strategy."

The taxi driver commander, who sat cross-legged on a sofa, joined in: "If the Americans leave we will be slaughtered." A big-bellied man waved his hands dismissively: "We will massacre the Shia and show them who are the Sunnis! They couldn't have done anything without the Americans' support."

When the meeting was over the taxi driver went out to check the road, then the rest followed. "Don't look up, we could be monitored, Shia spies are everywhere," said the big man. The next day the taxi driver was arrested.

By December Abu Omar's worst fears were being realised. The Sunnis had become squeezed into a corner fighting two sides at the same time. But by then he had disappeared; his body was never found.

Baghdad was now divided: frontlines partitioned neighbourhoods into Shia and Sunni, thousands of families had been forced out of their homes. After each large-scale bomb attack on Shia civilians, scores of mutilated bodies of Sunnis were found in the streets. Patrolling militias and checkpoints meant that men with Sunni names dared not venture far outside their neighbourhoods, while certain Sunni areas came under the complete control of insurgent groups the Shura Council of the Mujahideen and the Islamic Army. The Sunni vigilante self-defence groups took shape as reserve units under the control of these insurgent groups.

Like Abu Omar before him, Abu Aisha, a mid-level Sunni commander, had come to understand that the threat from the Shia was perhaps greater than his need to fight the occupying Americans. Abu Aisha fought in Baghdad's western Sunni suburbs, he was a former NCO in the Iraqi army and followed an extreme form of Islam known as Salafism.

Jamming

Deep lines criss-crossed his narrow forehead and his eyes half closed when he tried to answer a question He seemed to evaluate every answer before he spoke. He claimed involvement in dozens of attacks on US and Iraqi troops, mostly IEDs (bombs) but also ambushes and execution of alleged Shia spies. "We have stopped using remote controls to detonate IEDs," he volunteered halfway through our conversation. "Only wires work now because the Americans are jamming the signals."

On his mobile phone he proudly showed me grainy images of dead bodies lying in the street, their hands tied behind their backs . He claimed they were Shia agents and that he had killed them. "There is a new jihad now," he said, echoing Abu Omar's warning. "The jihad now is against the Shia, not the Americans."

In Ramadi there was still jihad against the Americans because there were no Shia to fight, but in Baghdad his group only attacked the Americans if they were with Shia army forces or were coming to arrest someone.

"We have been deceived by the jihadi Arabs," he admitted, in reference to al-Qaida and foreign fighters. "They had an international agenda and we implemented it. But now all the leadership of the jihad in Iraq are Iraqis."

Abu Aisha went on to describe how the Sunnis were reorganising. After Sunni families had been expelled from mixed areas throughout Baghdad, his area in the western suburbs was prepared to defend itself against any militia attack.

"Ameriya, Jihad, Ghazaliyah," he listed, "all these areas are becoming part of the new Islamic state of Iraq, each with an emir in charge." Increasingly the Iraqi insurgency is moving away from its cellular structure and becoming organised according to neighbourhood. Local defence committees have intertwined into the insurgent movement.

"Each group is in charge of a specific street," Abu Aisha said. "We have defence lines, trenches and booby traps. When the Americans arrive we let them go through, but if they show up with Iraqi troops, then it's a fight."

A few days later Rami was telling me about the Sunni insurgents in his north Baghdad area. A network of barricades and small berms blocked the streets around the car in which we sat talking. A convoy of two cars with four men inside whizzed past. "Ah, they are brothers on a mission," Rami said.

Like every man of fighting age, Rami was required to take part in his local vigilante group, guarding the neighbourhood at night or conducting raids or mortar attacks on neighbouring Shia areas.

But he paid $30 a week to a local commander and was exempted.

According to Rami and other commanders, funding for the insurgents comes from three sources. Each family in the street pays a levy, around $8, to the local group. "And when they go through lots of ammunition because of clashes," Rami said, "they pay an extra $5." Then there are donations from rich Sunni businessmen, financiers and wealthier insurgent groups. A third source of funding was "ghaniama", loot which is rapidly becoming the main fuel of the sectarian war

'A business'

"Every time they arrest a Shia, we take their car, we sell it and use the money to fund the fighters, and jihad," said Abu Aisha. The mosque sheik or the local commander collects the money and it is distributed among the fighters; some get fixed salaries, others are paid by "operations", and the money left is used for ammunition.

"It has become a business, they give you money to kill Shia, we take their houses and sell their cars," said Rami. "The Shia are doing the same.

"Last week on the main highway in our area, they killed a Shia army officer. He had a brand new Toyota sedan. The idiots burned the car. I offered them $40,000 for it, they said no. Imagine how many jihads they could have done with 40k."

· Names have been changed in this report."

Condoleezza Rice: A Remarkable Woman

2007-01-15T12:45:00.000-06:00

Nowadays, we don't even give it a thought that an African American woman (and single as Senator Boxer has pointed out) is our Secretary of State, the highest ranking cabinet secretary under the president. Many men and women paved the way for Rice, but before Rice, it wasn't even thought feasible to have an African American woman as our National Security Advisor let alone Secretary of State. Because of Rice, there are many boys and girls out there who see her as a role model and will make it even more insignificant what race, gender or even marital status people are in any position in our country. Those with little or no sympathy with Bush should at least recognize his willingness to give Rice the opportunity to break down barriers.

Immediate effects of the "surge"

2007-01-14T19:03:00.001-06:00

Ok. This is what is happening even as we speak. Sunni insurgents who aren't just protecting their neighborhood are moving to Diyala because it is out of the areas Bush mentioned the surge is going to affect. Shiite militias are taking off their uniforms and blending in with the civilians. Those who are doing the killings are taking a cautious approach of waiting to see what the effect of Bush's surge will be. An immediate effect will be a dip in killings as the killers take a thoughtful pause. Meanwhile, current US and Iraqi forces are trying to implement the "puddles spreading" strategy by spreading areas of security by creating sequential gated communities. That is why you see jet fighters flying over parts of Baghdad. By Gates' comments, this surge will last less than a year. During this time, the US and Iraqi security forces will attempt to create large swaths of area of denial in both Baghdad and the Anbar province. The two major obstacles to the short term success of the surge is Maliki's conflict of interest with Sadr and the US bureacracy. The major obstacles to the long term success of the surge is the ability of the forces hiding in Diyala to seep back and the ability to keep the Shiite militias disarmed. After the surge, it will be up to the Iraqi security forces to keep the security gained. God help Iraq if they aren't ready. As for the US, this is effectively Bush's last major action in Iraq. He has spent what is left of any political capital left on this. Any other major decision including a Vietnam-like withdrawal will most likely wait for the 2008 elections.

Three basic types

2007-01-14T01:42:00.000-06:00

"There are three basic types: the Wills, the Won'ts and the Can'ts. The Wills accomplish everything. The Won'ts oppose everything. The Can'ts won't try anything." -V.I.N.CENT.

In the slums of Baghdad

2007-01-12T19:37:00.000-06:00

Just pictures of Iraqis that embedded journalist Michelle Malkin has taken that I want to remember:

http://michellemalkin.com/archives/006675.htm

"My Hot Air colleague Bryan Preston and I have been in Iraq, embedded with an incredibly dedicated Army unit in Baghdad tasked with training Iraqi security forces (both Shia and Sunni) conducting counterinsurgency operations, and carrying out civil affairs work. Yes, there is danger and chaos and unspeakable bloodshed in parts of Baghdad. Sectarian violence--compounded by everyday street crime and tribal conflict--is rampant. Corruption, incompetence, and apathy infect the Iraqi government. You've gotten endless news coverage of all that. But there are also pockets of success and signs of hope amid utter despair. I'll give you more details of our embed unit after we get home. We have much to report and will be publishing a multi-part video and audio series, blog posts, and op-eds on security conditions, media malpractice, and the big picture on the war next week. Having met, watched, and interviewed a broad cross-section of our troops during our brief but fruitful travels, my faith in the U.S. military has never been stronger-- but I will not sugarcoat my skepticism and doubts about decisions being made in Washington. For now, I'm posting a few pictures I took from one of our recent trips on patrol through the slums of Baghdad."

The greatest enemy is the time

2007-01-12T19:33:00.000-06:00

Just wanted to remember this article by Bill Roggio:

http://billroggio.com/archives/2007/01/iraq_the_largest_ene.php

"Die Weltwoche pubilshed an article on my experiences and impressions on Iraq and Anbar province, titled The greatest enemy is the time. The article is published in German, so I have reproduced the text here:

The greatest enemy is the time

How do the American soldiers see the situation in the Iraq? Our reporter went in the heart of the Sunni resistance, Anbar province. A report from the front:

As President Bush unveiled his new vision to move forward on Iraq, the political debate in the United States has continuously degenerated into a simple, binary choice of withdrawal to prevent further American casualties, or surge more troops to attempt to restore order in Baghdad. After spending two months out of the last 12 in the land between the two rivers, one thing I've learned is nothing is simple about Iraq, and there are no easy solutions to the vast array of problems. But despite the constant media portrayal of Iraq as a hopelessly violent nation, Iraq is not a nation without hope.

The average life of an insurgency is about nine years. In Iraq, the insurgents and al-Qaeda hope to wear down the will of the American government and people, and precipitate a premature withdrawal. When I talk to American troops about Iraq, their greatest concern isn't for their safety, but they are worried the American public has given up on the war before they can complete their mission. They watch the news - CNN, MSNBC and FOX News are beamed into the mess halls, some even possess satellite dishes with access to BBC World, Al Jazeera and hundreds of programs at their fingertips. Internet is readily available in many areas. I surfed the web in the center of Fallujah on wireless Internet.

American troops watch the news and follow the debate in real time. They will tell you the war they see on television isn't the war they are fighting. To the troops, the war as portrayed on television is oversimplified and digested into sound bites. The soldiers are portrayed as victims and the violence is grossly exaggerated.

From my own experiences with two months in Iraq out of a year, I had not personally witnessed an ambush, a roadside bombing or other attack. The closest action I saw were some poorly aimed mortar attacks in Fallujah, or a near by patrol getting hit (the bullets and RPGs never made contact). And this is in Anbar province, the most dangerous region in Iraq. I make it a point to accompany the troops on foot and mounted patrols on daily basis. This is not to say attacks do not occur on a daily basis in Anbar – they do,and Anbar is a dangerous place, but just not to every soldier at every minute on every day in every city and town.

The nature of the insurgency in Iraq is complex, and cannot be simply framed as a sectarian war or a war against "U.S. occupation." The insurgency is designed to destroy any semblance of a democratically elected Iraqi government, and is directed at the developing Iraqi security forces, the Iraqi government and institutions, U.S. and Coalition forces, and against sectarian targets.

The real secret about Iraq is the nature of the conflict you will encounter really depends on where you are geographically. In the regions where Sunni, Shia and other ethnic groups live together, such as Baghdad and the surrounding areas, the violence is largely sectarian in nature. Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Ansar al-Sunnah, along with some other Sunni insurgent groups purposefully attack Shia civilians to stir the sectarian violence and foment a civil war. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the deceased leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, admitted a civil war was his goal in a letter to Osama bin Laden in late 2003. Muqtada al-Sadr's radical Shia Mahdi Army roams Sunni neighborhoods in and around Baghdad to execute Sunnis and incite Sunni reprisals, helping to stoke the fires of a Sunni-Shia war.

In the Shia dominated south, a power struggle is occurring between rival political organizations for control over government institutions and oil revenue. North of Baghdad, Ansar al-Sunnah, a violent terrorist organization that espouses the beliefs of Osama bin Laden, along with the Islamic Army in Iraq focus their attacks largely on U.S. forces and the Iraqi government.

In Anbar province, where I embedded in the city of Fallujah last December, sectarian violence is virtually non-existent. In fact, Sunni tribes have rallied to protect their Shia neighbors numerous times in the past and drove of al-Qaeda attempts to 'cleanse' the region of Shia. Al-Qaeda blood ran in the streets the few times they tried to purge the Shia from Ramadi.

In Fallujah, Ramadi and greater Anbar province, Al-Qaeda in Iraq the most dominant insurgent organization. Al-Qaeda focuses its attacks on Iraqi government security forces, government institutions, as well as U.S. Army and Marine units operating in the region. Their ability to fund the insurgency in the impoverished province is their greatest weapon. Unemployed Sunnis are a paid well (as much of $1,000 according to a military intelligence source) to attack Iraqi and Coalition forces. While there is a large volume of insurgent attacks, the large majority of attacks fail. The fact is an overwhelming majority of roadside bombs are discovered and detonated by Iraqi or Coalition forces.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq is attempting to unite the fractious insurgent groups in the western and northern Sunni majority provinces, and has created an umbrella political organization called the Islamic State of Iraq. Some smaller Sunni insurgent groups, along with some leaders of Iraqi tribes and have been rolled under the banner of the Islamic State of Iraq, along with al-Qaeda in Iraq's Mujahideen Shura Council.

To counter al-Qaeda's attempt to 'Iraqify' the jihad, the U.S. and Iraqi government are working to institute political, economic and military solutions. While I was in Fallujah, I witnessed two of the three pillars in action: the military and political efforts.

In the political sphere, I attended several meetings, including the Anbar province mayor's meeting, hosted by the governor of Fallujah, and the Fallujah city council meeting. Security dominates the discussions, as do reconstruction projects. The political leaders clashed with the Army representatives over certain security policies. The politicians were encouraged to assist with the recruitment of local police, and to work with the tribal leaders to meet the goals. In a recent police recruitment drive at the end of December, the city of Fallujah recruited 80 new candidates. The goal was 60. In Anbar province, 1,115 recruits joined the police.

In the military sphere, the Iraqi Army and Iraqi Police are beginning to work together to tamp down the insurgency in the city. The Iraqi Army has a brigade (about 2,000 soldiers) inside the city, and has completely taken ownership of the battle space. The Iraqi Police number about 700, and are beginning to assert themselves despite being targeted by al-Qaeda. The Iraqi Police in Fallujah have even developed a 30 man Special Missions Group force which trained to enter building and detain insurgents.

Inside Fallujah, there is no U.S. Marine or Army presence, save the members of the Police and Military Transition Teams – small, 15 to 20 man teams that are embedded within the police and Army units. I embedded as a reporter with both the Police and Military Transition Teams in Fallujah. The Marines in these teams take great risk in dong their daily job. They live, eat and sleep with their Iraqi counterparts, and are wholly dependent on them for security. Their American backup is stationed outside the city limits.

As brave as the American Marines are, their Iraqi counterparts outshine them. The police, who are local to the city, are specifically targeted by insurgents. Since the late sumer, 21 Iraqi police were murdered by insurgents. Their families are regularly threatened with violence. Several police officers told me how that while they were home they would sit with their backs to the door, AK-47 in hand, as they feared their homes would be stormed and their families would be killed.

The Iraqi Army lives inside the city in forward operating bases, without heavy weapons of their own. They depend on American air, artillery and mortars to bail them out when needed. The Iraqi soldiers, or jundi, patrol the streets on foot up to four times a day. Despite the fact that they, as Iraqis, are viewed as 'occupiers' by many residents of Fallujah, the soldiers have built their own intelligence networks. While on foot patrols in Fallujah, I watched as Iraqi soldiers were called into courtyards by residents who wanted to provide information on insurgent activity. The Fallujans, while terrified of the insurgents, are tired of the violence and wish to move on.

The police and soldiers do their jobs with very little resources. Some haven't been paid in a year. Supplies and equipment such as helmets, bullet proof vests, uniforms and batteries are in high demand demand, as the Iraqi Army logistical system is broken. The police just received armor Humvees to patrol the city, and have been up-armoring their pickup trucks with scrap armor kits. Despite these problems, morale and fighting spirit are not an issue. In fact, the police and Army believe that, if given the right equipment, they can defeat the insurgents without U.S. help.

While embedded with an Iraqi Army infantry unit in Fallujah, I watched a program called al-Zawraa. The jundi call this channel 'Muj TV' (for mujahideen television), as it broadcasts violent insurgent, al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Sunnah videos, as well as calls for violence against the Shia “Persians.” Al-Zawraa is run by a Mishan al-Jabouri, a former Sunni member of parliament who is now wanted by the government and living in Syria.

The Iraqi soldiers watch al-Zawraa to get to know their enemy, to motivate them to fight the insurgents and for amusement. The videos are replayed in a near loop, and the soldiers recognize the locations of the attacks as many of them served throughout Iraq. When asked if they feared al-Qaeda and the insurgents, the answer was emphatically “No, just give us guns like you have, tanks like you have and we'll take care of them.”

Nationwide, the Iraqi Army and Police clearly are not ready to fight the insurgents and militias on their own. Baghdad and Ramadi are clearly two cities where the police and Army would collapse without U.S. backing. But the police and soldiers in Fallujah believe they can. Pride, courage and fighting spirit are certainly traits these soldiers do not lack. They will need time to develop the capacity to fight on their own, and time is the one commodity the West seems to be short of."

Democrats: Stay the Course

2007-01-11T10:04:00.001-06:00

Pelosi says that the Democrats won't cut existing funding for the war in Iraq, but they will make it difficult to pass funding for the increase in soldiers. So, they just want to stay the course.

Mind you, Bush is not a micromanager. Bush, as he did when he was governor of Texas, hires the best people he can and delegates almost all his authority to them. It is obvious that the actual nuts and bolts of this new plan came from Gates and the new generals who specialize in counter-insurgency. The Democrats have shown no such source of qualified sources for their lack of a stance let alone a better plan.

After the surge

2007-01-10T16:05:00.000-06:00

Tonight Bush will make a speech of what has basically been already leaked in detail. He will state that he plans to send over 20,000 additional soldiers into Iraq temporarily to pacify the violence specifically in Baghdad and the Al Anbar province. I have no doubt our soldiers will succeed in the short term, but for it to have a long term success, it relies on the Iraqis to maintain the peace after our soldiers leave. The enemy tends to feel the edges of the area of denial and continuously look for weaknesses like an octopus with a shelled meal. This operation will make them withdraw, but it will take an effective Iraqi security force to keep them at bay.

What the Iraqis could do themselves to improve the situation would be to expand peaceful areas of Iraq. The main one is the Kurdish north. If the Kurds can overcome their anti-Arab prejudice and the Sunnis and Shiites can overcome the reverse prejudice, northern Iraq could be used as a base to spread the boundary of peace south.

In the end, no matter what the US does, peace can only come from the Iraqis.

Robbery occurred at hair salon my wife was at

2007-01-08T17:33:00.000-06:00

At about 11:15am today, my wife was at a hair salon sitting down with curlers in her hair and about to have chemical solution applied when a white male with a beard and fleece clothing smoking a cigarette entered the salon. He started making a commotion and had his hand inside his pocket and pointing as if he had a gun. My wife ran out the door with curlers in her hair and ran next door to an insurance store and told the business owner that the salon was being robbed next door. The store owner ducked behind her desk and promptly called her husband. My wife at that point called 911 on her cellphone. The 911 asked for the address, and since she didn't know, she asked the store owner who then threw a business card at my wife while still ducking behind her desk. The 911 operator was asking a series of other questions and at the same time the store owner threw the door key at my wife and told her to lock the door while still ducked behind her desk. So my wife was talking to the 911 operator while trying to lock the door which wasn't cooperating at the same time. The store owner was yelling at her at the same time presumably to try to make my wife lock the door faster. The police showed up a few minutes later, but the robber had left with not much money since it was still morning and most likely didn't stick around because he knew my wife had run out the store. The police took statements, and my wife wasn't able to leave the scene of the crime until around 4pm. My wife said she was glad that I wasn't there because I would have done the stupid thing and try to attack the robber. She knows me all too well. I would have chanced that he really didn't have a gun since he kept his hand in his pocket, and in close quarters with multiple people to keep an eye on, there would have been an opening for me to tackle him, pin his gun hand with one hand or knee and whale on his head with my elbow. That should at least incapacitate him then, I would use my belt to hogtie him. But this is just wishful thinking at this point.

Minimum wage

2007-01-04T18:23:00.000-06:00

The imposition and subsequent increases of minimum wage hurts the economy and hurts the working poor who actually work at minimum wage the most. When the minimum wage was first imposed in 1933, it resulted in the loss of jobs of 500,000 blacks:

http://www.mackinac.org/archives/1998/sp1998-01.pdf

"For example, the minimum wage provisions passed as part of another act in 1933 threw an estimated 500,000 blacks out of work"

Proponents of minimum wage increases often show that increases in minimum wage have not resulted in increased unemployment or decreased economy or show states with higher minimum wage have higher employment, but they state numbers at times when the economy is expanding which would mask the negative effects of minimum wage, and different states with totally different economies can't be compared. What would be needed would be statistics of what the economy would be for the same location and economic history, but that is not possible. During economic rise, the negative effects of increasing the minimum wage are minimized because businesses can afford to pass the additional cost to their customers who then can afford it because they have the money, but the increased cost to consumers does have an impact on demand so that it is lower than it would have been without the higher cost. So the minimum wage acts as factor in pulling down the economy. Where the increase in minimum wage hurts most is long past the point at which the minimum wage is increased. When the economy enters its next cyclical downturn, that is when the additional cost hits the hardest and when unemployment is worse than it would have been without the minimum wage increase. The working poor are the worst hit because they tend to stay at minimum wage because they lack the skills for higher paying jobs. When the minimum wage squeeze is felt the most by businesses, it the same working poor that the politicians who say they are protecting are the ones hurt the worst. Instead of getting a living wage, these people end up with no wage at all. The government needs to be stopped from helping us shortsightedly to the point where they actually hurt us in the long run.

How Somalia applies to Iraq

2007-01-03T17:17:00.000-06:00

Before the Ethiopians intervened, it looked as if the Somali Islamic Council was unbeatable. Even people who weren't devout muslims flocked to support the Council. When the Ethiopians put lie to the invincibility of the Council, suddenly support evaporated. This applies to Iraq because Al Quaida, the insurgents and Sadr's militias also use the ruse of being more powerful than they truly are to gain the support of people. Every day, the deaths and intimidation makes it seem as if they can't be stopped, but in reality, they are an extremely small minority that is embarassingly ineffective in gaining any real control of the country. In order for the Iraqi central government to gain the support of the people to move forward, it needs to tear away the veil of strength these minority groups have. Nobody wants another Fallujah operation, but it looks like strong demonstrations of actual strength, like the Ethiopians performed, are necessary to show just how weak the opposition is and bring the majority of Iraqis under its wings.

Apologies to those who feel I talk down to them

2007-01-03T16:26:00.000-06:00

My wife often tells me that when I talk to people, I am polite and frank, but I tend to give an air of condescension when I give my point of view. I apologize to all I have argued on forums and blog comments if I seem to belittle them. It is just my style. It isn't your fault that your ability to argue is limited.

Democrats the dividers

2007-01-02T11:22:00.000-06:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/01/AR2007010100784.\
html

"House Democrats intend to pass a raft of popular measures as part of
their well-publicized plan for the first 100 hours. They include
tightening ethics rules for lawmakers, raising the minimum wage,
allowing more research on stem cells and cutting interest rates on
student loans.

But instead of allowing Republicans to fully participate in
deliberations, as promised after the Democratic victory in the Nov. 7
midterm elections, Democrats now say they will use House rules to
prevent the opposition from offering alternative measures, assuring
speedy passage of the bills and allowing their party to trumpet early
victories."

"The episode illustrates the dilemma facing the new party in power.
The Democrats must demonstrate that they can break legislative
gridlock and govern after 12 years in the minority, while honoring
their pledge to make the 110th Congress a civil era in which Democrats
and Republicans work together to solve the nation's problems. Yet in
attempting to pass laws key to their prospects for winning reelection
and expanding their majority, the Democrats may have to resort to some
of the same tough tactics Republicans used the past several years.

Democratic leaders say they are torn between giving Republicans a say
in legislation and shutting them out to prevent them from derailing
Democratic bills."

The funny thing is that tightening of ethic rules is getting the most
resistance from within Pelosi's own ranks with Murtha leading the
opposition. As for raising the minimum wage, it hurts the poor the
most because they are the ones who occupy the bulk of minimum wage
jobs due to lack of skills and lose jobs when small businesses are
squeezed by minimum wage increases. I guess the Democrats just want to
screw the poor so their college kids can get paid higher in their
waiter/waitress jobs. As for federal funding of stem cell research,
that's actually not a priority as private funding is taking off as
companies see the profit within reach. As for cutting interest rates
on student loans, students wouldn't need the student loans if the
school costs didn't outstrip inflation. The fact is that the
government's long term subsidization of colleges has removed the
market forces to keep costs down. It is the case where the government
causes more harm by trying to help as in the case with minimum wage,
social security, health care insurance, etc. etc. etc.

Anyway, the Democrats won't be able to get anywhere close to what they
want to get done. There is no guarantee that the slim majority in the
Senate means that all Democrats will toe the line making that side a
black hole for bills. As is always the case, the ones in majority will
now encounter the filibuster threat. And after that, there is the
president's veto, and for bills affecting the executive branch, there
is the presidential constitutional signing statement which could
effectively rewrite the bills. It will be the same gridlock until 2008
when it will come to a blaming contest of who is to blame for the lack
of progress. Unfortunately for the Democrats, gridlocks have been
unkind to them politically regardless of whether their party holds the
presidency or the legislature.

Halo Taliban Hunting

2006-12-31T11:06:00.000-06:00

http://www.blackfive.net/main/2006/12/halo_taliban_hu.html

This video is so politically incorrect, but it is funny.

futureme.org message from a year ago

2006-12-29T17:01:00.000-06:00

I just received an email I set to sent to myself a year ago using http://futureme.org . It reminds me how things were bad for me personally a year ago. Things are much better now but still bad. I guess I just learned to tolerate the attacks better. I'll send another message to myself set for a year from now. Hopefully things are even better by then. This website was a great idea.

Santa story, Iraqi style

2006-12-27T11:06:00.000-06:00

Just wanted to remember this Santa story with an Iraqi flavor from http://www.theiraqiroulette.blogspot.com/ :

"The night before Christmas

I dedicate this story to F... ; a very special kid.

Santa was sitting, as he usually does at this time of the year checking , and making sure for the last time that everything was in order. He was sitting before an enormous fire place with his red and green laptop on his knees, scrolling through his data base, cross referencing, trying to catch and correct as many mistakes as he could afford to. Rudolph the old reindeer, Santa's faithful companion was fooling around hanging all sorts of colored ornaments and light bulbs on his horns.
- 'I have finished! , I give up, I can’t find anything wrong'. said Santa looking through his golden rimmed spectacles at Rudolph, who was in a great mess with all the wires tangled around him.
- You say that every darn year, then somehow we always end up breaking someone's heart. By the way , are you going to Iraq this year? .

Santa's face instantaneously turned red, even redder than his red jumper , for this was a provocative question Rudolph always rubbed into his face, to tease him every now and then.

- Why Iraq ?. You know how I feel about that country. You Rudolph out of all the creatures on earth know my feelings .
- Get over it already, that incident has become a joke long ago.

Santa put his laptop on the floor , gazed at the fireplace gloomily and started…
- It was 1985 …
- Oh, boy here we go again , that story is printed in my head. It is an old Iraqi joke, people have heard it so often , they don't even find it funny any more.
- 'I was trying to deliver presents in Al Bataween area' Digressed Santa . 'The war was still raging with Iran. Back then they had this thing called the "people’s army" . All young men from 18 to 40 were drafted , and as if that was not enough the people’s army used to catch older men from 45 to 70 and up, from the streets and cafés and transport them to the front after a stupid inefficient training course.They caught me accidentally, they dressed me in khaki, gave me a rifle and it was of to the north Santa!. I was posted on a mountain for 6 months , six months of shooting and bombing …
- I know it was harsh, but..
- I have not finished yet!.When they let us go "the ones who remained alive that is", cause most of the brigade died, not by enemy fires as you may think , No, many died from diabetes , high blood pressure, heart attacks, Alzheimer … we were all so old you see. When we were finally released . I bought a white Dishdasha to wear, in order to blend with the locals, and as I was wandering in the streets of Baghdad, the security force arrested me . I did not have an ID, so I just played mad, but that was no good for them. They tortured me for about three months for being a conspiring member in an Islamic group, because of my beard you see .
- 'I understand.' nodded Rudolph sympathetically.
- The security transferred me to the secret intelligence, the latter transferred me to the "I don’t know who or what ", at the end they put me in a terrifying mad house, from which I escaped and fled the country through the north, which I knew well by then. I came all the way back here. I arrived as you recall at the beginning of December, thank God, just in time for the next season. So, the answer to your question ; is no Rudolph, I am not going to Iraq this year ! .
- Come on, what about all those children .
- What children?, you know that is another reason for me not to go. After I was released and was trying to make my way back home the children of Baghdad gave me hell of a time. They used to run after me, whenever they caught sight of me, throwing stones at me and cheering, thinking I was a mad man. Which made me move exclusively after the fall of dark. They do not believe in me, they do not need me and that is that!.
- Why should they? You were never there for them, and besides; they seized to be children long ago', said Rudolph pensively .
- Don’t you think I know that?. After the first war came another war, then the embargo, then another war and now all this hullabaloo. Children had to hit the roads and work for survival and get killed paying for the stupidity of adults . I watch them through my magic glass ball selling gas and oil, polishing shoes, begging, being beaten up to half death by street creeps. I know ! .
- 'Where are you Mr. Charles Dickens!' sighed Rudolph .
- No one believes in me there, Papa Noel is dead!, as far as Iraqi kids are concerned .
- Please, let us just give one present to one child of our choice, be adventurous for God's sake.
Then Rudolph took Santa’s laptop and typed a few letters and said :
- 'I don’t recommend Basrah, cause Shia's Militias are ruling over there totally. They may kidnap you and ask for a ransom and since no one answers for you there, and most of the Christians have left town … no, it won't be a good idea at all . All the south is much theirs too . The west , let me see… nop , with your red coat you would be kidnapped and killed in a second, they won't even bother to film you . The north is ok , but it would not be much of a challenge …
Baghdad , Baghdad …hmmm' Rudolph kept scrolling up and down for 5 minutes , then he went over to Santa showing him something on the screen of the laptop.

- There you are , In Al Dora district, in the poor market place lives a little boy. He polishes shoes for a living. Age 7. He attended school for a couple of months last year, then dropped out after his father was killed. His Mom works in a local Kuba factory.
- Fine , why not , get ready , Santa approved finally .

At 10 o’clock PM, the 24th of December, Santa and his reindeers were flying over Baghdad. Rather lower than usual, so that the radars will not be able to detect them. Rudolph checked that out thoroughly .
The land beneath them was completely black; no lights, no decorations, no fire works no sign of Christmas at all. Every now and then they would hear bullets sounds and explosions . Rudolph gave instructions to the others to go a little lower, when they reached the local church. The church was closed; no chanting or bells could be heard, just a well locked mute building. The next second a deafening blast ripped the sky and faster than Santa and his reindeers could realize , they plunged down into a filthy water puddle . They lay there in the dark too shocked to move for a while . The first voice was uttered by Rudolph :
- Santa are you alive ? answer me .
- Arghhhh, ohhhhh, I am ok I think, were we hit ?
- I think so . I read that mortar missiles are in fashion now in Baghdad .
- Ah Rudi, I think the others were hurt.

They helped each other up. Santa got out his torch light and inspected the site , His sleigh was wrecked and the reindeers were lying dead .
- Oh Good Lord, it is a bloody reindeer massacre ! Now what are we going to do? .
- We'll have to Bury them , and get the hell out of here as quick as we can .
- 'Aren’t we going to take them back with us?' wept Santa, pointing to the deceased reindeers .
- 'No, When things normalize we can demand their remains, but now it is to risky for us .' said Rudolph sensibly .

They looked around, it was an empty muddy from rain piece of land. They grabbed a piece of metal from the sleigh's wreckage, and started to dig . Before they managed to dig one square foot, bullets came raining down on them, helicopters were flying above their heads, loud speakers were roaring with all sorts of curses and threats . They were surrounded by men in blue and camouflage .

- 'Rudolph, if this is going to be 1985 all over again, I personally will kill you and stuff you with raisons and nuts and eat you for my last Christmas dinner' , whispered Santa furiously .
- What the hell .. replied Rudolph with his front limps held up in sign of surrender , standing on his hinds .
They were pushed around and kicked everywhere. They could not distinguish much of what was being said , but one word kept recurring; Irhabi .
- What are they saying oh wise deer?, you are the polyglot here, aren't you ? said Santa wiping the blood of his nose.
- Emm,.. they think that we are burying 50 men we kidnapped earlier this morning in Baghdad. And I think they are going to kill us, after they beat the hell out of us of course.
- 'And a very Merry Christmas to you, you ridiculous moose.' Said Santa with his voice shacking .
- 'I am not a moose' grumbled Rudolph.
The men in blue took them away after talking to the men in camouflage .
They put them in some dingy sell . Shortly a man in uniforn came and whispered to them :
- Which group are you from guys, are you with ****** or ****** or ******?
- 'Ah , yes as you say exactly' they replied puzzled .
- Good I’ll get you out in no time, just wait.
He opened the sell door and pushed them in front of him till they reached the road
He shook their hands violently and said:
- Go, you heroes you ! . And don't forget to put a good word in for me to ***** , and be careful the guys at the end of the street are not ours, although the wear the same uniform , if they catch you it is the end .
- Certainly.
- 'Now we really must get out of here' Said Santa .
- What about the boy? asked Rudolph
- What ? , how on earth are we going to get there?, and look at you! one of your horns is broken.
- We are in the same area , we just have to run a few blocks and then you can fly back on my back , and oh, your beard is burned .

They went off like crazy; limping, hopping, skipping and even crawling, when they had to avoid being seen .
They finally reached the broke poor area, where the boy lived. It was about twelve thirty Baghdad time. The whole lane was immersed in darkness. So was the house, except for one room, which was lit with a cheap kerosene lantern . Santa peeked from the window and saw a beautiful young woman praying alone. A statue of the virgin marry on a small table in front of her was illuminated by the orange light of a candle. The wooden table at one end of the room had dishes on it with remains of Kuba from the factory , bones of once a malnourished chicken, orange peels and candy paper . A small gaunt Christmas tree was standing at the center of the room with paper ornaments hanging helplessly from it's branches . Santa and Rudolph went to the other side of the house . They peeked from another window. There was a little boy sleeping with a small kerosene heater near his bed to keep him warm. Santa pushed the window open carefully, he and Rudolph managed to squeeze in . Santa lost his sack on the way of course , but he had a spider man toy stuffed in his pocket ,which he had grabbed the last minute before he left the north pole . Rudolph took off the cookie sack , which was hanging around his neck. They put the toy and the sack on the bed near the boy's feet. As they were sneaking out they nearly tripped on a box . Santa looked at it closely , it was the shoe polishing box . The boy must have cleaned it and left it there .
Santa and Rudolph watched the boy sleeping for a while from the window. His mother came in to turn off the heater and went out not noticing the presents on the bed .
- By the way Rudolph, what is the boy’s name? you never told me.
- 'Fadi' said Rudolph.
- Ah , a beautiful name it means "He who sacrifices himself for others ", it is another name of Jesus in Arabic isn’t it?
- Yes .
The mother actually saw them , she was standing paralyzed with fear, where they could not see her. She saw a reindeer with one horn, and a scruffy old man in a red shredded coat with a messy sooty beard, and white hair sticking out in all directions. She saw they did not harm her child . She watched them as they walked away not knowing what to make of all this. Next morning Fadi came screaming with joy into the front room. He kissed his Mom so hard she could hardly breathe, for getting him spider man, who was his hero .
- Mom I’ll go and polish a few shoes in the market, and I’ll come back as fast as I can, to play with him .

He polished shoes whistling, humming and singing for a few hours , and when his friend came with two cigarettes he nicked for them to smoke secretly, as they do everyday , Fadi refused. He just wanted to go home and play with his toy .

As for Santa and Rudolph, they decided to visit other kids in Baghdad next year. For they worked up an appetite for adventure .

IR"

Deployed Soldiers Family Foundation

2006-12-26T11:01:00.000-06:00

There are end on end of places to support our troops. Just thought I would mention the main one I contribute to is the Deployed Soldiers Family Foundation at http://www.dsffusa.org/ because if I was a soldier in wartime, I would find most peace and least distraction from my duties if my family was being taken care of in their need.

World's Smallest Political Quiz

2006-12-26T10:51:00.000-06:00

I just took the World's Smallest Political Quiz at:

http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html

It categorized me as a conservative leaning centrist which is surprising since I thought of myself as a centrist leaning conservative. However, the quiz is too simple. Some of the questions were worded so they didn't offer an answer I wanted to give.

Real improvements that would improve situation

2006-12-22T13:45:00.000-06:00

High level strategies are political footballs. What really would improve the situation in Iraq is far more fundamental. It means attacking the faceless bureaucracy. One of the major complaints is the slow processing of people being held in limbo. If the processing of such people could be sped up and access to the status of people held in custody could be accessible far more easily than now, it would instill far more confidence in the security and occupation forces. Laws need to be improved so that thugs who are caught aren't released the following day which is happening all too often now. The Iraqi security forces need internal affairs sections to perform continual oversight and improvement. Corruption and infiltration is too common in the Iraqi security forces, and it's going to take continual vigilance to gradually weed these elements out. Although attacks to kill or injure are a serious problem, kidnappings actually affect far more people. The military's specialty isn't in handling kidnappings. The police needs resources to concentrate on strategies to address kidnappings to handle the bulk of the security problem. As for the deaths and violence, there are enough people knocking their heads together to solve this problem, and it will eventually decrease. What must be considered is gradually increasing the priority of decreasing property damage. Many sources of information for raids turn out to misdirection on innocent people and unnecessary property damage only compounds the decrease in confidence of the security forces from such raids. Half of the battle for security is public relations. You could do everything else right, but if people don't have confidence in you, they will not think or treat you as part of the security solution. Increased efforts to communicate with the people is necessary. Easier access to information about suspects in custody is one major way to do this. Education of how the security forces work and its limitations and real acceptance and answer of input and questions from the people would bring people's expectations in line with what the security forces can realistically do. These and so many other improvements to break down the bureaucracy barrier are needed to move towards real improvement in security even if the death and violence by Sadr's militias and Al Quaida and its Sunni allies of convenience continue.

List of Iraq successes

2006-12-21T13:20:00.001-06:00

BDE3TACP on AOL posted this:

"Since President Bush declared an end to major combat on May 1...

... The first battalion of the new Iraqi Army has graduated and is on active duty.
... Over 60,000 Iraqis now provide security to their fellow citizens.
... Nearly all of Iraq's 400 courts are functioning.
... The Iraqi judiciary is fully independent.
.. On Monday, October 6, power generation hit 4,518 megawatts, exceeding the prewar average.
... All 22 universities and 43 technical institutes and colleges are open, as are nearly all primary and secondary schools.
... By October 1, Coalition forces had rehab-ed over 1,500 schools - 500 more than scheduled.
... Teachers earn from 12 to 25 times their former salaries.
... All 240 hospitals and more than 1200 clinics are open.
... Doctor's salaries are at least eight times what they were under Saddam.
... Pharmaceutical distribution has gone from essentially nothing to 700 tons in May to a current total of 12,000 tons.
... The Coalition has helped administer over 22 million vaccination doses to Iraq's children.
... A Coalition program has cleared over 14,000 kilometers of Iraq's 27,000 kilometers of weed-choked canals which now irrigate tens of thousands of farms. This project has created jobs for more than 100,000 Iraqi men and women.
... We have restored over three-quarters of prewar telephone services and over two-thirds of the potable water production.
... There are 4,900 full-service telephone connections. We expect 50,000 by year-end.
... The wheels of commerce are turning. From bicycles to satellite dishes to cars and trucks, businesses are coming to life in all major cities and towns.
... 95 percent of all prewar bank customers have service and first-time customers are opening accounts daily.
... Iraqi banks are making loans to finance businesses.
... The central bank is fully independent.
... Iraq has one of the world's most growth-oriented investment and banking laws.
... Iraq has a single, unified currency for the first time in 15 years.
... Satellite TV dishes are legal.
... Foreign journalists aren't on 10-day visas paying mandatory and extortionate fees to the Ministry of Information for minders and other government spies.
... There is no Ministry of Information.
... There are more than 170 newspapers.
... You can buy satellite dishes on what seems like every street corner.
... Foreign journalists (and everyone else) are free to come and go.
... A nation that had not one single element -- legislative, judicial or executive -- of a representative government now does.
... In Baghdad alone residents have selected 88 advisory councils. Baghdad's first democratic transfer of power in 35 years happened when the city council elected its new chairman.
... Today in Iraq chambers of commerce, business, school and professional organizations are electing their leaders all over the country.
... 25 ministers, selected by the most representative governing body in Iraq's history, run the day-to-day business of government.
... The Iraqi government regularly participates in international events. Since July the Iraqi government has been represented in over two dozen international meetings, including those of the UN General Assembly, the Arab League, the World Bank and IMF and, today, the Islamic Conference Summit. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs today announced that it is reopening over 30 Iraqi embassies around the world.
... Shiva religious festivals that were all but banned, aren't anymore.
... For the first time in 35 years, in Karbala thousands of Shiites celebrate the pilgrimage of the 12th Imam.
... The Coalition has completed over 13,000 reconstruction projects, large and small, as part of a strategic plan for the reconstruction of Iraq.
... Uday and Queasy are dead - and no longer feeding innocent Iraqis to the zoo lions, raping the young daughters of local leaders to force cooperation, torturing Iraq's soccer players for losing games, or murdering critics.
... Children aren't imprisoned or murdered when their parents disagree with the government.
... Political opponents aren't imprisoned, tortured, executed, maimed, or forced to watch their families die for disagreeing with Saddam.
... Millions of long-suffering Iraqis no longer live in perpetual terror.
... Saudis will hold municipal elections.
... Qatar is reforming education to give more choices to parents.
... Jordan is accelerating market economic reforms.
... The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded for the first time to an Iranian
-- A Muslim woman who speaks out with courage for human rights, for democracy and for peace.
.. Saddam is gone.
... Iraq is free.
….Terrorists are being drawn to an arena in which our military can kill or capture them
Sovereignty is restored to Iraq"

Large and Growing Numbers of Muslims Reject Terrorism, Bin Laden

2006-12-20T12:46:00.000-06:00

http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/international_security_bt/221.php?nid=&id=&pnt=221&lb=brme

"Strong opposition to terrorism was found among Muslims in seven out of ten countries polled by Pew. This is especially true in the Muslim populations of Indonesia, Pakistan and Turkey, where six in ten or more say that “suicide bombings and other forms of violence against civilian targets” are “never justified.” The TFT poll of Indonesia and Pakistan found even bigger numbers rejecting all attacks on civilians. Pew also found complete rejection of terrorism among very large majorities of Muslims living in Germany, Britain, Spain and France. Trend line data available for some countries also show a significant increase in those taking this position in Indonesia and a remarkable 23 point increase in Pakistan. Only Turkey showed a slight downward movement.

In two countries complete opposition to terrorism was just under half—Jordan and Egypt. However in Jordan—the country for which trend line data is available—there was a very large increase of 32 points among those saying terrorism is never justifiable. Only in Nigeria did less than a third fully reject terrorism, though an additional quarter said that it could rarely be justified.

On bin Laden, Pew found that majorities in eight of the ten countries said they had little or no confidence in the al Qaeda leader. In Jordan, the proportion of respondents saying they lack confidence in bin Laden has nearly doubled over the past year. The two exceptions are Nigeria and Pakistan, where only about a third say they lack confidence. In Europe, most Muslims say they have no confidence at all in bin Laden: eight out of ten in Germany and France; six out of ten in Great Britain and Spain."

The military after all is a federal agency

2006-12-20T10:57:00.000-06:00

Today's headline about the military needing to increase in size brings up a sore point I have which is that federal agencies are inherently inefficient and bureaucratic. I support the military, but to be honest, they aren't using all the people and resources they have anywhere close to optimal efficiency. If we really had a shooting war that threatened the mainland USA, the military would all of a sudden have resources available that were thought to be unavailable in times when personal empires and red tape were considered of higher priority. But that's the nature of federal agencies and until we get fiscal conservatives in congress or some crisis occurs similar to the effect of hurricane Andrew or Katrina, nothing is going to even begin to force federal agencies to get better.

Iraq's economy is booming

2006-12-19T14:55:00.000-06:00

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16241340/site/newsweek/page/2/

Blood and Money
In what might be called the mother of all surprises, Iraq's economy is growing strong, even booming in places.

By Silvia Spring
Newsweek International

Dec. 25, 2006 - Jan. 1, 2007 issue - It may sound unreal, given the daily images of carnage and chaos. But for a certain plucky breed of businessmen, there's good money to be made in Iraq. Consider Iraqna, the leading mobile-phone company. For sure, its quarterly reports seldom make for dull reading. Despite employees kidnapped, cell-phone towers bombed, storefronts shot up and a huge security budget—up to four guards for each employee—the company posted revenues of $333 million in 2005. This year, it's on track to take in $520 million. The U.S. State Department reports that there are now 7.1 million mobile-phone subscribers in Iraq, up from just 1.4 million two years ago. Says Wael Ziada, an analyst in Cairo who tracks Iraqna: "There will always be pockets of money and wealth, no matter how bad the situation gets."

Civil war or not, Iraq has an economy, and—mother of all surprises—it's doing remarkably well. Real estate is booming. Construction, retail and wholesale trade sectors are healthy, too, according to a report by Global Insight in London. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reports 34,000 registered companies in Iraq, up from 8,000 three years ago. Sales of secondhand cars, televisions and mobile phones have all risen sharply. Estimates vary, but one from Global Insight puts GDP growth at 17 percent last year and projects 13 percent for 2006. The World Bank has it lower: at 4 percent this year. But, given all the attention paid to deteriorating security, the startling fact is that Iraq is growing at all.

How? Iraq is a crippled nation growing on the financial equivalent of steroids, with money pouring in from abroad. National oil revenues and foreign grants look set to total $41 billion this year, according to the IMF. With security improving in one key spot—the southern oilfields—that figure could go up.

Not too shabby, all things considered. Yes, Iraq's problems are daunting, to say the least. Unemployment runs between 30 and 50 percent. Many former state industries have all but ceased to function. As for all that money flowing in, much of it has gone to things that do little to advance the country's future. Security, for instance, gobbles up as much as a third of most companies' operating budgets, whereas what Iraq really needs are hospitals, highways and power-generating plants.

Even so, there's a vibrancy at the grass roots that is invisible in most international coverage of Iraq. Partly it's the trickle-down effect. However it's spent, whether on security or something else, money circulates. Nor are ordinary Iraqis themselves short on cash. After so many years of living under sanctions, with little to consume, many built up considerable nest eggs—which they are now spending. That's boosted economic activity, particularly in retail. Imported goods have grown increasingly affordable, thanks to the elimination of tariffs and trade barriers. Salaries have gone up more than 100 percent since the fall of Saddam, and income-tax cuts (from 45 percent to just 15 percent) have put more cash in Iraqi pockets. "The U.S. wanted to create the conditions in which small-scale private enterprise could blossom," says Jan Randolph, head of sovereign risk at Global Insight. "In a sense, they've succeeded."

Consider some less formal indicators. Perhaps the most pervasive is the horrendous Iraqi traffic jams. Roadside bombs account for fewer backups than the sheer number of secondhand cars that have crowded onto the nation's roads—five times as many in Baghdad as before the war. Cheap Chinese goods overflow from shop shelves, and store owners report quick turnover. Real-estate prices have risen several hundred percent, suggesting that Iraqis are more optimistic about the future than most Americans are.

There's even a positive spin to be put on corruption. Money stolen from government coffers or siphoned from U.S. aid projects does not just disappear. Again, says Farid Abolfathi, a Global Insight analyst, it's the "trickledown" effect. Such "underground activity" is the most dynamic part of Iraq's economy, he says. "It might not be viewed as respectable. But in reality, that's what puts money in the hands of the little people."

Meanwhile, Iraq's official economic institutions are making progress, improbable as that might sound in the context of savage sectarian violence and a seemingly complete breakdown of leadership and law. Yet it's a fact. A government often accused of being no government at all has somehow managed to take its first steps to liberalize the highly centralized economy of the Saddam era. Iraq has a debt-relief deal with the IMF that requires Baghdad to end subsidies and open up its gas-import market. Earlier this year the government made the first hesitant steps, axing fuel subsidies—and sending prices from a few cents a liter to around 14. "This has become one important way of institutionally engaging with Iraq," says economist Colin Rowat at the University of Birmingham. "If you lose that engagement, then that means a lot more people have given up on Iraq."

It goes without saying: real progress won't be seen until the security situation clears up. Iraq still lacks a functioning banking system. Though there's an increasing awareness of Iraq as a potential emerging market, foreign investors won't make serious commitments until they are assured a measure of stability. Local moneymen are scarcely more bullish on the long term. In Iraq's nascent bond market, buyers have so far been willing to invest in local-currency Treasury bills with terms up to six months, max.

Iraqna isn't the only success story. There is also Nipal, a money-transfer service that is the backbone of Iraq's cash economy, as well as a slew of successful construction firms in Kurdistan. Such companies are not waiting for Iraq's political crisis to resolve itself. Yet imagine how they would prosper if it did, and how quickly they would be joined by others. As things stand, Iraqna faces extraordinary difficulties. It builds towers but lives in constant fear that they will be blown up. It has to be careful about whom it hires, or where it assigns people to work. Whether Sunni or Shia, it doesn't matter; criminal gangs and militias regularly try to kidnap employees to hold them hostage for ransom, regardless of ethnicity. As for long-range planning? Forget it, says Ziada, the Cairo analyst. "It's a terrible situation for any company."

But again, that's the remarkable thing. In a business climate that is inhospitable, to say the least, companies like Iraqna are thriving. The withdrawal of a certain great power could drastically reduce the foreign money flow, and knock the crippled economy flat.

With Michael Hastings in Baghdad
© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.

Why are so many black men in prison?

2006-12-19T12:42:00.000-06:00

Here is commentary straight from the black men:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/interactives/blackmen/blackmen.html

Fear and hope

2006-12-19T12:20:00.000-06:00

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_g2699/is_0001/ai_2699000131

Fear is one of the primary emotions, together with joy, anger, and grief. Fear generally refers to feelings elicited by tangible, realistic dangers, as opposed to anxiety, which often arises out of proportion to the actual threat or danger involved. Fear may be provoked by exposure to traumatic situations, observations of other people exhibiting fear, or the receipt of frightening information. Repeated or prolonged exposure to fear can lead to disorders such as combat fatigue, which is characterized by long-term anxiety and other emotional disturbances.

http://www.guidetopsychology.com/fear.htm

Hope

Before I started studying psychology, I worked as a woodcarver and cabinetmaker. One day I brought home a pile of dirty, moldy pieces of wood. My father looked at it and said if it were up to him he would throw it all in the garbage. But I patiently cleaned, sanded, filled, reglued, refinished, assembled, and polished the pieces. In the end I had a beautiful antique oak dining table.

So let that be a psychological lesson. No life, however dirty and broken, is beyond redemption. Or beyond hope.

Now, my father was a good man and he never abused me in any way. And he never told me that I was garbage. But imagine how it feels to be a child whose parents are abusive, critical, neglectful, and manipulative. These parents not only break down their child into a pile of sticks, but also, when the child stands there covered in guilt and shame, they tell the child, “Look at you! You’re just a piece of garbage.”

And why are there so many lives headed for the garbage dump? Fear. Fear of the hard work of going to psychotherapy to clean themselves off. Fear of letting go of the dirt, because it’s all they know, for, even if it’s dirt, at least it’s comfortable.

So you choose: a polished oak table, or a pile of broken sticks for the garbage. It’s your life.

In a sea of negatives, the most profound positive

2006-12-17T20:23:00.000-06:00

Headline news feeds on the negative events in Iraq, and it takes a large amount of effort to dig up the positives, but I believe the most profound positive is this:

http://baghdadtreasure.blogspot.com/

'There was one advantage I learned from this war, I told Omar. He looked at me and asked, “which war?” The latest one, I replied. I learned how to differentiate between the term “Zionist” and “Jew”.

He looked at me in daze! “Yes, it’s only in 2003 that I learned what the difference between these two words is.” There were so many questions in his mind. I didn’t wait for him to ask them. I explained why it’s just recently that I learned that difference.

At home, we never discussed politics, NEVER, period. My parents were so cautious about these things. Any mistake would take all of us, if not all of my tribe, to jail or execution by Saddam’s people. One of the things we did not discuss at home was who the Jews and the Zionists are. It was only once I recall my mother and grandmother talking about their Jewish Iraqi neighbors and friends whom they missed. I was 12 or 13 at that time. I asked both of them about it. My mother sighed and said that the Iraqi Jews were very nice and lovely people. That was it. She never mentioned anything after that neither did my grandmother.

I was like most teenagers whose main source of news was Saddam’s regime’s media outlets and school curricula. They all denounced the “Jews”. None of them clarified what the difference was. Like most of those in my age, I was brain washed. I was taught to hate the “Jews”, all of them, not only the “Zionists”.

I tried to know more about what is happening in Palestine but all of what I learned was how the “Jews” occupied Palestine and established their illegal state. I asked my parents a lot about it. I got nothing. They always told me not to be indulged in such conversation with anyone, even inside the house. My father’s attitude was if you say it here, you’d say it outside and that would lead to the execution of the family if not the whole tribe if Saddam’s men discover that we were questioning this issue. “Always be away from politics and such issues,” I remember him saying.

Before 2003, the term “Jews” among most Iraqis in my age meant the Zionists. I even recall how a rumor was spread in my undergrad school when one of my classmates said that a member of the “Backstreet Boys” band is Jewish. Most of the classmates told her that “this was untrue. It seems there was someone trying to distort the reputation of the band in Iraq”. She swore she read that in an American magazine smuggled through Jordan. No one believed her. Eventually, she stopped talking about it.

It is also ironic that one of the text books I had in my undergrad school was written by Noam Chomsky. It was about Linguistics. I recall my professor saying that Chomsky was a Jew who is against the State of Israel! He did not elaborate and none of the students asked him more about it. No one wanted to be in trouble. I kept wondering how come he is Jewish and he’s against the State of Israel which we called the “Zionist Entity” at the time. I found no answer till after the 2003 war.

Finally, the confusion I had and the decades of misinformation have come to end. After the invasion, I was able to start the investigation by myself. Saddam was gone. It was time to ask without being fearful.'

Two visions of Iraq

2006-12-15T13:25:00.000-06:00

http://thecsquare.blogspot.com/

'Two visions of Iraq

Charette reflected on two visions of war-torn Iraq: the violent one that left him bleeding on the deck of a boat, and another - one not often heard about.

His unit was stationed next to a large lake in the Al Anbar Province, Lake Qadisiyah. The lake made the news recently when a helicopter crashed into it.

"The lake was crystal clear. [There were] palm trees, yellow sand. In the early morning, you hear from the city ... the prayers. It comes out of nowhere. Sometimes they are singing, sometimes they are talking. But it's kind of peaceful, looking out over the water - the sun just coming up."

The soldier could see a kind of hope in the area's natural beauty. Since being home, he has stopped watching the news because of the constant barrage of negative images from Iraq.

"What I see on TV is not what I saw in Iraq. I saw a lot of positive stuff in Iraq." Schools are being built, he said, and police are being trained.

"There are so many people over there trying to make a difference, trying to help people out," he said. "Luckily, in Iraq, we didn't hear all the politics. We just do our thing.

"All the news shows is the body count."'

China's stupidity with pegging to the US dollar

2006-12-15T10:38:00.001-06:00

By tacking onto the dollar, China is keeping a competitive edge over other countries selling to the USA whose currencies are rising against the dollar. To the USA, it really is no significant deal except it does add an additional barrier to getting market share in China. However, it has passed the point where it is beneficial to China. Along with tacking onto the US dollar, China experiences the increased cost of external resources like oil as other currencies rise against the dollar. This is the main barrier to continued growth in China's economy which is starting to show signs of stuttering as the effects of the dramatic increase in fuel costs are having their effect. China is strong enough to be able to deal with freeing itself from the US dollar especially when offset by cheaper oil, but as an economy controlled by its government, it suffers from the inefficient and slow decisions that governments make compared to the private sector. The greatest barrier to China's growth is its government.

Intolerance downfall for Palestinians

2006-12-15T10:37:00.001-06:00

Intolerance is the downfall for Palestinians, and I'm not even talking about current events. When the area was still the British Mandate of Palestine, it was the fear and intolerance of Palestine arabs which caused them to be hostile to the jews who were driven there by Hitler. History would have been very different if they found a way to live together instead of choosing to side with external arabs who wanted to push the jews to the sea.

Why the Iranian vote for the Assembly of Experts is a farce

2006-12-15T10:21:00.000-06:00

The Assembly of Experts is considered the most powerful clerical body in Iran primarily because it elects and dismisses the Supreme Leader who is the true power over all branches of government in Iran. The president is just a facade to give the people a fake belief that they have some say in the government. What the news fails to mention is that the eligibility of candidates who can run for the Assembly of Experts is determined by the Council of Guardians whose members in turn are chosen by the Supreme Leader and the head of the judiciary who in turn is chosen by the Supreme Leader. Everything is controlled by the Supreme Leader, and there is nobody who is allowed into these powerful positions who the Supreme Leader doesn't want. Iran has nothing close to a democracy. It is an authoritarian theocracy pure and although not so simple.

Videos from soldier and chaplain

2006-12-14T19:22:00.000-06:00

Just wanted to remember these videos from Badgers Forward showing what it's like clearing IEDs and from a chaplain showing a montage of his experience in Iraq:

http://s127.photobucket.com/albums/p154/Badger_6/?action=view&current=PathfinderRC.flv

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJhBrkedSAE&eurl=

Iraqi youth

2006-12-13T19:35:00.000-06:00

This is a journalist's documentary on the youth of Iraq today. It isn't objective, but it is good to look at to get a picture of the environment in Iraq for some people. For those fighting against the death dealers, it is good to look at for more important reasons like how IEDs are planned and planted and their motivations:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6277982867673096457&hl=en

Iraq united

2006-12-13T14:00:00.001-06:00

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IBO341651.htm

'Soccer-mad Iraqis, Shi'ites, Sunni Arabs and ethnic Kurds alike, are enjoying rare moments of joy as their team charges through to the final of the Asian Games. Moments after the final whistle saw Iraq knock out favourites South Korea on Tuesday to enter the final, jubilant crowds across Iraq took to the streets dancing to patriotic songs, waving their national flag, firing celebratory shots into the air and honking horns. State TV played music for hours. Iraqis struggling in their daily lives to survive bombs and sectarian death squads have been glued to television sets watching their team defying the difficulties crippling a country many fear is slipping into civil war or partition. "I'm extremely happy at this win. These victories give us a deep sense of pride and unity," said Ayad al-Saadi, a die-hard fan in Baghdad who followed the match on the edge of his seat. "I hope we will win the tournament because we deserve as many happy moments as we can get. The team is a thorn in the eye of the terrorists who want to ruin our country." The team's performance has captured the hearts of Iraqis, much as the soccer team of the 2004 Olympic Games did, which upset the odds to finish in fourth. Sunni and Shi'ite media unite in praise of a team straddling, in apparent harmony, the sectarian divides. "Iraq's heroes close to gold after great victory over Korea," read a headline in Al Sabah newspaper, controlled by the Shi'ite-led goverment. The Sunni-owned Al Mashriq daily proclaimed: "Our heroes in competition for gold medal." A U.S. military spokesman, by background possibly not a soccer fanatic himself, found time in a weekly news briefing usually focused on military operations to praise the team as "a true inspiration to all of us". "It shows what can be done when people put their differences aside."'

Improve legal immigration

2006-12-13T11:53:00.001-06:00

The talk from politicians have been to either stop the flow of illegal immigrants or to add another layer of bureaucracy to allow them to stay. These are actually symptoms of a more fundamental problem in our legal immigration system. It is a bureaucratic nightmare. The laws and processes for it need to be streamlined, and the limits need to be increased since it is obvious our country can handle 12 million illegal aliens without breaking a sweat. Legal immigration should be the desirable way to enter our country. Not only does it track who enters our country but also allows us to tax them.

Security vs privacy

2006-12-13T10:59:00.001-06:00

The line between security and privacy has always been a moving boundary. Privacy suffers in times of crisis, and security loses ground in times of peace. Unlike WWII, only 0.7% of Americans experience directly the commitment and cost of fighting the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. As a result, most Americans don't really know the effects of the wars like our predecessors did. 9/11 moved our nation similarly like the attack on Pearl Harbor did, but without the direct commitment of the general populace to the fight, the feelings of unity fell apart quickly. As a result, the line between security and privacy favors privacy as if we are in times of peace.

The real North Korea

2006-12-13T05:07:00.000-06:00

Here is the real North Korea that Kim Jong Il hides from reporters visiting his country:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=KA6livwPnGI

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ITBqRSMBWaM

If there are truly Iraqis who miss Saddam because of the security inherent in his authoritarianism due to lack of freedom, they are in luck. They can move to North Korea and experience it in its full glory.

Iraqi soccer win celebration shows Iraqis the way to success

2006-12-12T15:55:00.000-06:00

On December 9, 2006, Iraq beat Uzbekistan to make it to the Asian Games semifinals. In Iraq, there was at least an hour and a half of celebratory gun fire all across the country as people took to the streets in joy. The Iraqi soccer team is diverse in its makeup. It isn't a Shiite or Sunni team, so the Iraqis who were celebrating didn't care as well. If only these Iraqis would be just as willing to take to the streets to take them back from the minority of extremists. What is needed is a leader who can incite the same passion that the Iraqi soccer team can incite in the majority of Iraqis to move their country forward.

Animosities of his opponents

2006-12-07T17:39:00.001-06:00

"I have always felt that a politician is to be judged by the animosities he excites among his opponents."

"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."

"It is a mistake to try to look too far ahead. The chain of destiny can only be grasped one link at a time."

"One ought never to turn one's back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half."

"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm."

"The price of greatness is responsibility."

"When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber."

"We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire...Give us the tools and we will finish the job."

"Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."

"For myself I am an optimist - it does not seem to be much use being anything else."

Sir Winston Churchill

Corruption

2006-12-07T16:41:00.001-06:00

The main inhibitor in Iraq to security and prosperity in Iraq is the same inhibitor we have in the USA to even greater prosperity which is corruption. And unfortunately, corruption is only dealt with by the voters because politicians can't seem to do anything about it themselves. That is the problem with Maliki whose ties with Al Capone Sadr prevents him from cracking down on Sadr's militias who are causing the bulk of the deaths. It took the voters to clean the Republican's house in 2006, but they unfortunately left the Democrats with their trash (Jefferson, Waters, Murtha being the most blatent ones). That's another story. Short of the silent majority of Iraqis who believe in a single Iraq for all Iraqis actually taking to the streets in a mass that would put the million man march to a shame, it will take iterations of elections to clean up the Iraqi government enough to get one that does more good than harm.

New Diplomatic Offensive

2006-12-07T16:21:00.000-06:00

The first 15 recommendations made by the Iraq Study Group was what they call the "New Diplomatic Offensive" which basically is a fancy way of saying that Iraq's neighbors should be asked to help improve security in Iraq. It is obvious to everybody that they really mean Iran and Syria although they try to touch on other countries. There is one flaw in this train of thought, and that is the thought that Iran and Syria want a peaceful Iraq. Iran and Syria's primary goal is to take over Iraq. It is evident by Syria's action during the Lebanese Civil War and by Khomenei's attempt to spread his revolution when he beat back Saddam during their war. What these countries want is the removal of the US military, which is the only obstacle to their pursuit, so that they can expand their influence overtly in Iraq instead of behind the curtains as they are doing now.

Iraq Study Group Report

2006-12-07T10:28:00.000-06:00

I just read through up to the executive summary of the Iraq Study Group Report:

http://www.usip.org/isg/iraq_study_group_report/report/1206/index.html

It really doesn't say anything new. It basically says that US people should be united in a consensus that we are going to be in Iraq for the long haul. The details are ones that already have been considered are are being considered. In the end, it relies on the Iraqis to fix their own country.

Depleted uranium

2006-12-06T06:34:00.000-06:00

I am covering the topic of depleted uranium (DU) because you will see this brought up by those extremely against the US occupation of Iraq especially in Iraq because of the greater psychological impact it has on Iraqis who may be concerned about their exposure during the Iraqi invasion.

Major Doug Rokke will be quoted as an expert on DU, but frankly, Rokke has an agenda. His statements aren't backed up with any rigorous research. The symptoms he encountered anecdotally could have been caused by so many other factors. The WHO has a more comprehensive study at:

http://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/pub_meet/en/Report_WHO_depleted_uranium_Eng.pdf

"Aerosols route
Depleted uranium particles or aerosols formed following impact and ignition on a hard target will be dispersed and deposited on the ground. It is reported that most of the depleted uranium dust will be deposited within a distance of 100m from the target (US Army Corps of Engineers 1997). People, most likely soldiers, close to an impact could therefore be exposed to dust by inhalation. UNEP (2000) has estimated that the inhalation and ingestion of depleted uranium contaminated dust, even under extreme conditions, and shortly after the impact of projectiles, as determined by the amount of dust that can be inhaled, would be less than about 10 millisieverts (mSv). This represents about half the annual dose limit for radiation workers. The exposure of civilians to dust and smoke at the time of an attack is less likely. Deposited uranium dust might slowly be transformed through environmental weathering processes into more mobile and soluble forms (discussed elsewhere in this section) and dispersed in the environment by air currents.

Fragments
During the Gulf War, soldiers were exposed to depleted uranium by ‘friendly fire’. Fragments from penetrating depleted uranium rounds are embedded in the bodies of several soldiers and others inhaled depleted uranium aerosols generated by the impact of the depleted uranium munitions penetrating the target. Thirty-three US veterans seriously injured in friendly fire incidents have been monitored by the Baltimore Veteran Administration Medical Center since 1993. About half of them have depleted uranium fragments in their bodies. A subsequent study considered 29 veterans from the original 33. Though these veterans have higher concentrations of uranium in their urine, indicating that depleted uranium is being oxidized by body fluids, no adverse kidney effects have been observed (McDiarmid 1998 and 2000; US Department of Defense 2000).

External contact route
Picking up a penetrator and keeping it in a pocket is the only realistic way of a long period of exposure to external (beta) radiation from depleted uranium. Snihs & Åkerblom (2000) stated that by keeping it in the same position for several weeks, it might be possible that the dose administered to the skin would exceed the skin dose limit for the general population, though not that of radiation workers. The effect of such exposure would be localized and the delivered dose would not be sufficient to cause any deterministic effect.

Agricultural route
The possibility was mentioned to the mission that uranium dust might become incorporated in vegetables and crops. The mission was advised by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) that in the published literature there are no known plants that preferentially accumulate uranium and the normal amounts of uranium taken up in plants would not be expected to be dangerous to humans, birds or other animals (communications between the mission team and FAO in January and February 2001).

Drinking water route
The final plausible route of exposure of the population is through drinking water contaminated by migration of soluble depleted uranium compounds in ground or surface water. In particular, possible contamination of wells or spring protection tanks close to an attack site from pieces of depleted uranium might be an isolated occurrence and its relevance should be considered further.

Absorption of depleted uranium
If or when a person comes into contact with depleted uranium from a penetrator, there is no known immediate or acute risk to life. Furthermore, the radio-medicine literature provides no evidence to assume that a person having contact (either externally or internally) with depleted uranium will develop an illness. The onset of any illness argued to be due to depleted uranium has to be related to the amount of radiation dose or amount of toxic chemical to which a person has been exposed (US Department of Defense 2000). Absorption of depleted uranium in the body following inhalation or ingestion is very limited. Mean absorption following inhalation exposure is about 0.8 to 0.9%, with less soluble compounds as uranium oxides remaining in the lungs. Absorption following ingestion also depends on the solubility of the uranium compounds, but is also limited at between 1 to 2% of the ingested amount with the remainder passed out in faeces (UNEP/UNCHS Balkans Task Force 1999).
Most of the small amount of uranium that is absorbed in the body (about 70%) will be filtered out by the kidneys and excreted in urine within 24 hours. The remaining part will be distributed to the skeleton, liver and kidneys. The time to excrete half of this remaining uranium is in the range of six months to one year.

Health effects
The radiological toxicity of depleted uranium is primarily confined to body cells that are susceptible to the effects of alpha and beta radiation. It is therefore thought that inhaled depleted uranium particles may lead to damage of lung cells and might increase the possibility of lung cancer.
Epidemiological studies provide consistent and convincing evidence of excess lung cancer, but not of leukaemia, related to alpha particle exposure among uranium miners (IARC1988; US NAS 1999). However, this effect is attributed to be related to exposure to gaseous decay products (radon). The risk of lung cancer appears to be proportional to the radiation dose received. Indeed, among nuclear workers involved in uranium processing (whose exposures to alpha particles from uranium are less than those of miners), no consistent excess of lung cancer has been found (NCRP 1978; NRC 1988; NIH 1994; Cardis & Richardson 2000; IARC 2001). Kidney dysfunction is considered the main chemically induced toxic effect of depleted uranium in humans, though this is thought to be reversible (Priest 2001). Until now, a study of 29 Gulf War veterans with embedded fragments of depleted uranium in their bodies has not shown adverse kidney effects (McDiarmid et al. 1998 & 2000). The risk of kidney effects following ingestion of depleted uranium depends on the amount of soluble uranium compounds present (effects increase with higher solubility). Information on the presence of soluble uranium compounds following the use or degradation of depleted uranium penetrators is therefore essential to evaluate the potential risk of developing kidney dysfunction."

A followup was performed 2 years later to verify if leukemia or cancer was occurring at a higher rate:

http://enrin.grida.no/htmls/kosovo/SoE/dueffect.htm

"In 2001 WHO and the (then) Department of Health and Public Welfare have looked into the incidence of leukemia in Kosovo. Records at Pristina Hospital for the past four years were examined and doctors from district hospitals have been interviewed. The initial survey indicated that the incidence of leukemia in Kosovo has not increased. WHO and the Department of Health and Social Welfare point out that, although record are not perfect, any significant increase in cancers such as leukemia would have been noticed. Doctors state that it takes a minimum of two to three years for the symptoms of leukemia to be detected."

25% of 10% world's wealthiest are in USA

2006-12-05T16:31:00.000-06:00

http://www.wider.unu.edu/research/2006-2007/2006-2007-1/wider-wdhw-launch-5-12-2006/wider-wdhw-press-release-5-12-2006.pdf

Just want to remember this link to the United Nations study of distribution of household wealth in the world. It opens a whole bunch of questions, but I just wanted to get the basic data down for now.

Abu Deraa, driller of Baghdad, may he rot in hell

2006-12-05T10:12:00.000-06:00

http://baghdadtreasure.blogspot.com/

'The new Abu Tubar had unique and different nom de guerre, Abu Deraa, Father of the Armor, a reference to his penchant for attacking U.S. armored vehicles. He is known of having a big amusement in torturing his victims who most of them are Sunni civilians. One of his signature techniques is running a drill into the skull of his live victim, according to a recent Time article. His appetite for mayhem is so vast that some Iraqis call him the "Shiite Zarqawi"'

'After going far in his crimes, Abu Deraa became hated even by some of his cleric leaders. Iraq for All, an Iraqi local news website reported that Muqtada al-Sadr himself dismissed 60 members, including Abu Deraa, from the Mahdi Army militia. However, the man was still considered a hero, especially by Shiite members in the parliament.

Falah Shansal, a member of parliament from the al-Sadr bloc, told Time last week that Abu Deraa was still "a fighter in the Mahdi Army."

Like most of the “wanted” insurgents, Abu Deraa was hard to be caught. He managed to escape several times until he was killed few days ago by a Sunni insurgent group. Azzaman newspaper reported that the Islamic Army, one of the insurgent armed groups, killed Abu Deraa.'

What the US can do

2006-12-05T03:27:00.000-06:00

With the drive to get the US military out of Iraq as fast as possible, what the US military really should do to allay the violence may be the most unpopular option. US commanders on the ground have been the roadblock to handing over more of the trained Iraqi security forces to the Iraqi central government, and it is for good reason. Those few units turned over so far have had Sadr lackies assigned as the leading generals who then used the units to, at least, round up Sunnis, especially those known to be friendly which not only fuels the violence but also causes desertion of good men from those units. The tougher US action that is most likely needed is to hold onto the command and training of the Iraqi security forces until an Iraqi central government is formed which won't use the security forces as an enforcement arm of just one side.

John Bolton

2006-12-04T10:14:00.000-06:00

Bolton is given short shrift for his successful work in the UN. He actually made it more than a glorified chat room. Under Bolton, he was able to block Chavez from getting a security council seat proving that the US isn't as hated as some critics assume. Bolton was able to get China and Russia to agree on sanctions against North Korea which was thought impossible with or without a nuclear North Korea. He was able to have the UN agree on how to react to Hamas' takeover of the Palestinian government. Bolton was able to get the UN to agree to send in a real peacekeeping force into Lebanon after the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. These are all things that detractors of Bolton said would never happen if he was sent to the UN. Bolton deserves to stay because he has proven to make positive things happen in the UN, but he will be a casualty because his bluntness and his party affiliation has earned him political enemies in the USA.

He is scum, but he is their scum

2006-12-04T04:58:00.000-06:00

Many of us in the USA are wondering how William Jefferson of Louisiana could get the most votes against all other candidates in 2006 after being caught on video accepting a bribe and then having the bulk of that bribe found hidden in his freezer. Those same people are wondering how Venezuela can reelect Chavez whose socialist pet projects have done nothing to resolve the long term problems of crime and poverty and have piled onto the country's recurring costs which will come back to haunt them when the volatile oil commodity market fluctuates against them. This is because, although they are scum, the people who vote for them choose them because these leaders are their scum. To turn their backs on these scum now would mean that they are turning their backs on themselves and admitting the "man" is right. For people like this, it is harder to fight the counter culture against perceptions of authority and face reality than to go with the flow like lemmings.

Iraqi Civil War?

2006-12-03T00:20:00.000-06:00

There are opinions about whether the violence in Iraq can be called a civil war or not. From the Iraqi perspective on the street, it is moot. It is violence and death, pure and simple, that is happening on their streets and to people they know. From a geopolitical perspective, it is important to define whether it is truly civil war occurring in Iraq or not because if it is civil war, the USA will be pushed by the Democrats to assume the war is lost and a pullout will occur of US forces. If you are one of Al Quaida and its Shura council or Sadr's militias, this is what you want because it opens the greatest opportunity for you to take over Iraq not caring that all of you would turn Iraq into a smoldering cinder fighting among yourselves. For the bulk of the Iraqis, regardless of your sentiments about foreign occupation, this will be a change for the worse.

For comparison, the Lebanese Civil War, almost next door, can be used as a benchmark. In that war, about 150,000 people died, multiples of that injured, multiples of that displaced. Even without the ratio of less than 4 million compared to over 26 million in Iraq taken into account, the level of violence in Iraq still pales to what happens in a real civil war. You had Black Saturday in which 600 people died in a single day, and that wasn't the worst of the Lebanese War. You had two known massacres of 1,000 people each not to mention the 2,000 Palestinians dead when Syria decided to invade on the side of the Maronites. When civil war occurs in Iraq, you will have refugee displacement in the tens to hundreds of times of what is happening now. You will have armies fighting to take territory from each other with the USA being unable to stop them even in face-to-face combat. When a civil war truly occurs in Iraq, there will be no debate or doubt from anybody. So, from a geopolitical sense, there isn't a civil war yet in Iraq. The potential is there as Iran continues to supply Sadr's militias and Syria continues to supply Al Quaida and its Sunni allies of convenience. But in order to keep the far left seeking to dominate the Democrats at bay, we can't say that a civil war is truly occurring now.

What Iran could do to help and what it really means by "help"

2006-11-28T02:34:00.000-06:00

What Iran could do to help the situation in Iraq is to stop funneling supplies and money to Sadr's militias. The reason they most likely won't do this is because they don't want to lose the support of their most open backer in Iraq. What Iran most likely means by "help" can be seen by looking back at Syria's involvement in the Lebanese Civil War. Syria sent in their military to support their interests, and this is most likely Iran's plan as soon as they can get the USA to withdraw.

What history will say

2006-11-26T19:59:00.000-06:00

What history will see is 9/11 as being the catalyst for the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq as the USA faces the islamic radicalism it has been ignoring until 9/11. Realizing that past failed strategies of lobbing bombs from afar was only strengthening muslim popular support for the extremists and giving them the initiative to perform attacks like 9/11, the USA took the offensive to the middle east where their people became deeply entwined with the fate of the middle east unlike the past. As expected, there were significant setbacks as Iraq felt its way towards democracy and islamic extremists from neighboring countries did their best to defeat the USA. In the long run, the perseverence paid off and both Afghanistan and Iraq are shining examples of what is possible if the people are allowed to determine the fate of their country.