Things I’ve Seen

A new entry to my list of the greatest quotes of all time:

Investing in humanity is a smarter weapon than anything we have in our military arsenal.

If you look at that ticking thing over on the left of the blog, you’ll see that the war in Iraq has now cost somewhat over $120 billion, heading up towards the > $150 billion projected total cost. Dohiyi Mir (NTodd’s blog), quoting The Institute for Policy Studies and Foreign Policy In Focus, observes:

The $151.1 billion spent by the U.S. government on the war could have cut world hunger in half and covered HIV/AIDS medicine, childhood immunization and clean water and sanitation needs of the developing world for more than two years.

We spend so much money creating smart weapons to destroy a nation that we then have to spend even more money rebuilding. In the long run, fighting AIDS and hunger and poverty will do more for our “war” effort than all the bombs and bullets that we rain down on innocent civilians. Investing in humanity is a smarter weapon than anything we have in our military arsenal.

Like most of us, I guess, I was taken by suprise by the sudden early “handover” of “power” in Iraq. Juan Cole has a likely sounding, although not very generous, interpretation:

Paul Bremer suddenly left Iraq on Monday, having “transferred sovereignty” to the caretaker Iraqi government two days early.

It is hard to interpret this move as anything but a precipitous flight. It is just speculation on my part, but I suspect that the Americans must have developed intelligence that there might be a major strike on the Coalition Provisional Headquarters on Wednesday if a formal ceremony were held to mark a transfer of sovereignty.

So far, so likely. The recent upsurge in violence strongly suggests - even without any specific intelligence - that a major attack or coordinated set of attacks on handover day was likely. If so, changing the date seems to be a rational response. Juan’s target, however, seems not to be the change in date, but the whole widely trumpeted handover:

This entire exercise is a publicity stunt and has almost no substance to it. Gwen Ifill said on US television on Sunday that she had talked to Condaleeza Rice, and that her hope was that when something went wrong in Iraq, the journalists would now grill Allawi about it rather than the Bush administration. (Or words to that effect). Ifill seems to me to have given away the whole Bush show. That’s what this whole thing is about. It is Public Relations and manipulation of journalists. Let’s see if they fall for it.

Sigh. This would make more sense if the journalists had ever really grilled the Bush administration in the first place…

Michael at Discourse.net has all the latest developments, including the rapid collapse of a coverup:

Although the White House repudiated the memo Tuesday as the work of a small group of lawyers at the Justice Department, administration officials now confirm it was vetted by a larger number of officials, including lawyers at the National Security Council, the White House counsel’s office and Vice President Cheney’s office.

This was posted on a comment thread on Kos, about F9-11 (which appears to be breaking various records on its opening weekend…)

I saw the film on Friday with my 12 year old step son. He loved Bowling for Columbine and was excited to see F911. As we left the theater, he was incensed.

“Bush should have to see this. He should be forced to watch this movie in a room full of a hundred people and he should have to answer every question they have.”

This sort of thing is a good example of why so many top scientists are opposed to Bush:

The Health and Human Services department has decided to prohibit its scientists from participating in UN meetings unless they are approved by the secretary.

Diebold, the company making the voting machines with no verifiable record, a history of “errors” as long as your arm, and whose chairman is “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes for the president”, has now aquired one of the largest voter registration companies in the United States. As Jeanne, at Body and Soul puts it (quoting Teresa Nielsen Hayden)

When your local returns been tabulated on Election Day, what action can you take if you think the voting machines in your area have been rigged to give false results?

Just occasionally, I genuinely fear that America is about to cease to be a Democracy.

It’s not who votes that counts. It’s who counts the votes. — Joseph Stalin

Read Al Gore’s Speech, and reflect for a moment on how much better a place the world would be if he were President today.

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