Monk

“Which brings me to the last part of my confession. I want Lava to stay alive. No matter how bad things get it's still better to be alive. I want to know he's breathing and leaping after dust balls and chasing imaginary enemies in his sleep. I want him to be alive, because then there's still hope that he'll make it here to California and get to be an American dog who runs on the beach and chases the mailman instead of strangers with guns.”

-- From Baghdad, with Love by Lieutenant Colonel Jay Kopelman

Pop came home from his shopping rounds last week, and said that he came across Mr. Kopelman at the BX, apparently doing a book tour, and he picked up an autographed copy of his book. I hadn't heard of it, and I probably wouldn't have come across this book on my own, and I'm happily surprised to have loved it as much as I did.

As much as I have been interested in the news and the Iraq war, and as much as I may be possessed of a certain testosterone-fueled imagination, I'm not one to seek out a book that gives an inside account of the military action, which I think is a bit intense in a technical sort of way. Now, the beauty of Kopelman's narrative is that, through the sweetener of a dog story, he actually affords one some vital, realist looks of the Iraq war from inside. Fallujah is the center of this man-meets-dog story, when Fallujah was the center of the action of the war. And it's hard to come away from this book without being impressed by these soldiers, to think that this is somehow just another job, and for rather modest pay. Sure, there's a darker side, but let's leave that for another story.

Below is an extended excerpt. The main concern here is that he is hoping to circumvent orders that require all dogs and cats to be killed, which is an elaboration of the standing order that soldiers are not allowed to keep pets. They are cracking down because stray dogs have been eating the corpses lying on the streets, and they want to maintain a better showing of order than this.

( excerpt )

The prevailing verdict on the Petraeus-Crocker show is that it accomplished little beyond certifying President Bush’s intention to kick the can to January 2009 so that the helicopters will vacate the Green Zone on the next president’s watch. That’s true, but by week’s end, I became more convinced than ever that in January we’ll have a new policy that includes serious withdrawals and serious conversations with Mr. Maliki’s pals in Iran, even if John McCain becomes president.

. . .

This war has lasted so long that Americans, even the bad apples of Abu Ghraib interviewed by Mr. Morris, have had the time to pass through all five of the Kübler-Ross stages of grief over its implosion. Though dead-enders like Mr. McCain may have only gone from denial to anger to bargaining, most others have moved on to depression and acceptance. Unable to even look at the fiasco anymore, the nation is now just waiting for someone to administer the last rites.

-- Frank Rich for The New York Times

On an amusing note:

You know you’re in trouble when Barbara Boxer is the voice of reason.

“Why is it,” she asked, “after all we have given — 4,024 American lives, gone; more than half-a-billion dollars spent; all this for the Iraqi people, but it’s the Iranian president who is greeted with kisses and flowers?”

-- Maureen Dowd for The New York Times

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This is an entry I would have preferred not to have published, but there are limits to what we can control in life, and apparently I have passed one of those limits....

What I don't want this to be is a chance for me, or anyone else, to be maudlin. I'm dead. That sucks, at least for me and my family and friends. But all the tears in the world aren't going to bring me back, so I would prefer that people remember the good things about me rather than mourning my loss. (If it turns out a specific number of tears will, in fact, bring me back to life, then by all means, break out the onions.) I had a pretty good life, as I noted above. Sure, all things being equal I would have preferred to have more time, but I have no business complaining with all the good fortune I've enjoyed in my life. So if you're up for that, put on a little 80s music (preferably vintage 1980-1984), grab a Coke and have a drink with me. If you have it, throw 'Freedom Isn't Free' from the Team America soundtrack in; if you can't laugh at that song, I think you need to lighten up a little. I'm dead, but if you're reading this, you're not, so take a moment to enjoy that happy fact.

-- Andrew Olmstead

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George Will writes about a new book titled "Curveball", which is also the code name of the Iraqi defector that played such a critical role in making the Bush Administration's case that Iraq was well-advanced in weapons of mass destruction. And what an absurd tale it is. Will brings out the point that this debacle only complicates the developing situation with Iran.

( George Will )

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War profiteering happens even in “good” wars. Arthur Miller made his name in 1947 with “All My Sons,” which ends with the suicide of a corrupt World War II contractor whose defective airplane parts cost 21 pilots their lives. But in the case of Iraq, this corruption has been at the center of the entire mission, from war-waging to nation-building. As the investigative reporters Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele observed in the October Vanity Fair, America has to date “spent twice as much in inflation-adjusted dollars to rebuild Iraq as it did to rebuild Japan — an industrialized country three times Iraq’s size, two of whose cities had been incinerated by atomic bombs.” (And still Iraq lacks reliable electric power.)

-- Frank Rich for The New York Times

Mr. Rich gives us another piece on the war profiteering in Iraq, and how the Bush Administration has brought this to new heights, and how it can seem that this profiteering was at least as important as the mission of bringing democracy to Iraq. At least they were successful with the profiteering. Rich writes of the suicides and murders that have underwritten this corruption.

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With others working for The Times in Baghdad, I took solace in the battalion of cats that had found their way past the 12-foot-high concrete blast walls that guard our compound. With their survival instincts, the cats of our neighborhood learned in the first winter of the war that food and shelter and human kindness lay within the walls. Outside, among the garbage heaps and sinuous alleyways, human beings were struggling for their own survival, and a cat’s life was likely to be meager, embattled and short.

Cat populations in the wild expand arithmetically with the supply of food, and ours multiplied rapidly, with as many as two or three litters at a time out in the shrubbery of our gardens, or beneath our water tanks.

-- John F. Burns for The New York Times

Mr. Burns gives up a new and endearing angle on the Iraq war. Apparently, people are being overrun by cats even in Middle East wars. In light of our own recent experience with cats taking over some of our territory and playing on our affections, I bear a special appreciation for this story.

( cat story )

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I was going to put up a Gail Collins column on the Fred Thompson candidacy, since it has proven to be a slow news days for me, but after the president's speech tonight and the dour commentary on MSNBC, the Thompson candidacy seems like an irrelevant sideshow.

President Bush made official what we have known all along. He is carrying on the war full-tilt, leaving withdrawal to the next administration. It just feels tragic and sad.

Yet, it does give Iraqis a year to make it work, by coming together in a unified national government. But from today's vantage point, especially considering news this week that a big agreement on oil fell apart, who can believe that another decade will do them any good, much less another year.

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The Kurdish autonomous zone should be our model for Iraq. Does George Bush or Condi Rice have a better idea? Do they have any idea? Right now, we’re surging aimlessly. Iraq’s only hope is radical federalism — with Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds each running their own affairs, and Baghdad serving as an A.T.M., dispensing cash for all three. Let’s get that on the table — now.

Months after Saddam’s capture, a story made the rounds that he was asked, “If you were set free, could you stabilize Iraq again?” He supposedly said it would take him only “one hour and 10 minutes — one hour to go home and shower and 10 minutes to reunify Iraq.” Maybe an iron-fisted dictator could do that. America can’t.

“No one here accepts to be ruled ever again by the other,” Kosrat Ali, Kurdistan’s vice president, told me. “If you get all the American forces to occupy all of the towns and the cities of Iraq, you might be able to centralize Iraq again. That is the only way.” Otherwise, “centralized rule is finished in Iraq.”

-- Thomas L. Friedman for The New York Times

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What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureauc­racy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profit­eering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure -- American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.

... According to the most reliable ­estimates, we have doled out more than $500 billion for the war, as well as $44 billion for the Iraqi reconstruction effort. And what did America's contractors give us for that money? They built big steaming shit piles, set brand-new trucks on fire, drove back and forth across the desert for no reason at all and dumped bags of nails in ditches. For the most part, nobody at home cared, because war on some level is always a waste. But what happened in Iraq went beyond inefficiency, beyond fraud even. This was about the business of government being corrupted by the profit motive to such an extraordinary degree that now we all have to wonder how we will ever be able to depend on the state to do its job in the future. If catastrophic failure is worth billions, where's the incentive to deliver success? There's no profit in patriotism, no cost-plus angle on common decency. Sixty years after America liberated Europe, those are just words, and words don't pay the bills.

-- "The Great Iraq Swindle" at RollingStone.com

One hears bits and pieces of the corruption going on in Iraq over goverment contracts, but this article puts it all togethre in one molotov cocktail of criticism and indignation. I think the writer hurts his case by suggesting that the main purpose behind the Iraq war is the profiteering of private businesses, and one does sense a certain ideological axe to grind.

Still, if the anecdotes and claims he puts together are not bullshit, if you are not a hopeless cynic, this report can make you one. What really grabs you is the case that the Bush Administration is so complicit in the corruption, going out of its way to protect the bad guys. To think that this sort of abetted, callous thievery is what underlies the war effort, and that we are losing this war, it just leaves you shaking your head. It is too absurd, even evil.

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