Christmas break/Freedom's just another word for nothing left to loot
Wow! More time to do less stuff.
Playing Castlevania - Harmony of Dissonance for the Nintendo DS. Side scrolling fun in Dracula's Castle featuring skeletons and bats and magic spells and hidden rooms.
Spent most of yesterday morning patching up my 1996 Mac PowerPC. Hard drive nosedived. Lost all my e-mail messages and addresses. Otherwise OK.
I'm on The Well this morning, digesting the latest posts about Iraq. One of the long time contributors there is an American officer stationed in Baghdad. He consistently serves up a strong dose of on-the-ground reality, in contrast to President Bush's empty rhetoric.
(Paraphrased from a Well poster) -
One way to look at our troop investment there is to imagine one large football stadium filled with American soldiers, about 130,000 or so. This stadium-sized force is expected to manage a whole country. And only about 40 or 50 percent of them are the ones doing the door kicking and shooting things. The rest are fixing Humvees and making dinner.
Another poster broke it down this way... each individual grunt has to watch, provide security for, frisk, and maybe shoot at about 650 Iraqis, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, tour after tour after tour....
Now, think about the President's stated desire to "beef up" the occupation with another 30,000 or 40,000 soldiers. Imagine a second football stadium, but this time it's only one-fourth full.
(From It Can't Be Won Militarily; So, Send More Troops?
By W. Patrick Lang and Ray McGovern )
Senator Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) spoke for many of us last Thursday on the Senate floor:I, for one, am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up by the same bombs day after day. That is absurd. It may even be criminal. I cannot support that anymore.
Yesterday, when George Stephanopoulos asked Smith what he meant by "criminal," he replied:
I said it. You can use any adjective you want, George. But I have long believed in a military context - when you do the same thing over and over again, without a clear strategy for victory, at the expense of your young people in arms, that is dereliction. That is deeply immoral.
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