No (Son)tag line today

I won't pretend to have an opinion on Susan Sontag.

Here's a link to someone who does. Here's another one.

PS. I riveted to the footage of mass natural destruction. Especially, since Nate Berkus, of Oprah fame, was among the people in Thailand.

Read My Lips: New taxes

Is it just me, or does this feel like a NY street con? A shell game.

While Bush is indeed cutting certain taxes, he's simply imposing new ones in other places. It's a joke.

Eliminating the deductability of state and local taxes is going to raise taxes on dozens of millions of people, most notably in the blue states of NY and CA. The good news is that the Republican mayors and governors of these states are going to get fucked.

Money quote:

"New York City is the economic engine of our country and we already send $11.5 billion more to Washington annually than we get back," Mr. Bloomberg said in a written statement. "This would amount to another federal tax on our citizens and I will fight it tooth and nail."

Something New To Talk About

I'm getting sick and tired of writing about foregin policy. It's really the same thing over and over. US policy sucks, our options are even worse, and inertia is setting in. On the positive side, Bush & Co. are set to take a nasty fall over the whole mess.

So I'm going to change subjects.

But before I do, here's James Dobbins, former U.S. Special Envoy in Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia, and Afghanistan, talking about how bad we suck, specifically in reference to Iraq.

Money quote: By losing the trust of the Iraqi people, the Bush administration has already lost the war in Iraq. Moderate Iraqis can still win it, but only if they wean themselves from Washington and get support from elsewhere. To help them, the United States should pull out its troops as soon as it can without jeopardizing the elections, train Iraqis to beat the insurgency on their own, and rally Iran and European allies to the cause.

Sounds easy right?

Quality, not Quantity, of Troops in Iraq

Here's a little armchair General-izing:
It's the quality of the troops that is deficient in the US occupation of Iraq.

Analysis, you say? Facts?
Riddle me this: why is it that the strongest army in the world, with the most advanced training and weapons systems, is incapable of quelling an insurgency 1/10 its size?
There's a trap built into the question. We are obviously mighty and well-armed, so that can't be it. Troop levels? Nah.

Could it be....our intelligence? We know our intelligence sucks from that time when those planes hit those towers. Is this seeping into the quality of the training of our troops? Could it be affecting the quality of our fight against the insurgency?

On top of all this, we are inadequately supplied, it seems. The Army National Guard revealed last Thursday that it had missed its recruiting goals for the past two months by 30 percent. According to the NY Times, nearly 900 troops have been evacuated from Iraq by the Army for psychiatric reasons, included attempts or threatened attempts at suicide. When the war in Afghanistan as well as Iraq is considered, some experts believe that the number of American troops needing mental health treatment could exceed 100,000.

I hate to say it, but I hope to God that Rumsfeld takes the fall for this.

Privatize the Army

Hey, it's not THAT crazy of an idea. Maureen Dowd suggested it today in the NY Times, seemingly tongue in cheek. But considering that it is being run about as well as the government has handled education, national security and social security, it's a pretty gread idea.

Money quote:

Why should it just be parents of kids in Iraq who send them compasses and Kevlar vests? Everybody wants to support our troops.

If the Olympics can attract top corporate sponsors, why can't Rummy's Global War on Terrorism? Bring it on, Bank One!

Picture this: a truck rumbling across the desert on the evening news, completely armored and emblazoned with golden arches. Or a fleet of Visa Humvees. You know Donald Trump would love to slap his name on a few Chinooks. The 82nd Trumpborne.

And what about product placement? When soldiers give their Christmas greetings on Fox News or MSNBC, they could be holding cans of Pepsi or calling home on Samsung phones. Why merely send their love when they could be writing love letters in the sand on Apple computers?

Like athletes or Nascar drivers, they could sell every inch of their body: STP helmets, Nike boots, Staples "Yeah, we got that" dog tags, Starbucks M.R.E.'s, CamelBak canteens by Camels, Sony laser target designators.

All those old, out-of-shape reservists being dragged back by Rummy would be great pitchmen for arthritis medication. And Celebrex night vision goggles.

The really big corporate sponsors might set up some hospitality yurts dispensing Wellbutrin in the desert. Sure, security's so bad that Rummy was afraid to go any farther than Kuwait last week, but Michael Eisner might want to visit with some Disney imagineers and check out a different kind of Fantasyland: the neocon variety. Mr. Eisner could use some good publicity.

In this day and age, when every sports arena has been hideously renamed for some corporate entity - like Minute Maid Park in Houston, Network Associates Coliseum in Oakland, Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego and FedEx Field in D.C. - Rummy could easily think big.

How about the American Express Green Zone? Instead of those four huge facsimiles of Saddam's head that adorned the Iraqi Republican Palace, why not put up big heads (and necks) of Geoffrey, the Toys "R" Us giraffe?

Whole units could begin shopping themselves on eBay and trolling for corporate sponsors, just as the Dartmouth swimming team did in 2002 with the pitch, "This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to own a piece of N.C.A.A. Division I collegiate memorabilia."

What's a measly swimming team compared with the thrill of ponying up for the Third Infantry Division of Fort Stewart, Ga., the Army unit that conducted the famous "thunder run" and took Baghdad - and is now about to be redeployed in Iraq?

Rummy's a little distracted trying to get his silly space shield, which fizzled yet again in a test yesterday, and fighting hard for his job, so it may take him awhile to focus on privatizing. Meanwhile, we still have that pesky armor shortage.

So how about Tommy "Stop Writing Books and Finish the War" Franks, Paul "You Disbanded the Iraqi Army, Dummy" Bremer and George "Slam-Dunk" Tenet taking off those preposterous
Medals of Freedom and contributing them. Just as Scarlett and Melanie took off their gold wedding rings for the Confederate cause, those medals can be melted down for a little Humvee armor.

With help like that and some corporate support - maybe Levitra could even sponsor his next trip to Iraq - Rummy could get the Army he wants and wishes to have sooner rather than later. Like, while we're actually fighting a war.

The sponsors could help a lot in keeping the Army in top shape. After all, our troops could be stuck there for years, perhaps decades. And could even wind up defending an Iraqi ayatollah.

With all the foreign companies investing, we could finally have a real coalition. The coalition of the shilling. No German troops, but why not a Passat partnership?

With allies like these....

One of the current administrations oft repeated distortions concerns the Coalition of the Willing, and the inclusion of Pakistan as an example of "how far we've come" in the GWOT.

I've always contended that Republicans have a very very poor understanding of the region, but their insistence that Pakistan is a friend represents a genuine miscalculation of dangerous proportions. While the elite segment of society, encompassing the wealthy and the powerful, may be outwardly friendly to the United States, it is the very same segment's unwillingness to engage the far more numerous and dangerously populated segment of Pakistani society that should be troubling to Americans.

James Risen and David Rohde of the New York Times write about how Pakistan has subtly foiled our quest to find Bin Laden, infiltrate his new core group of followers, or gather any sort of intelligence in Pakistan since the GWOT began. Money quote:

More than three years after the Sept. 11 attacks on the Pentagon and New York transformed Osama bin Laden into the most wanted man in the world, the search for him remains stalled, frustrated by the remote topography of his likely Pakistani sanctuary, stymied by a Qaeda network that remains well financed and disciplined, sidetracked by the distractions of the Iraq war, and, perhaps most significantly, limited by deep suspicion of the United States among Pakistanis.

If anyone believes that brute force alone can overcome this need only read the following:

On Sept. 9, for example, an air raid near the village of Dela in South Waziristan killed as many as 80 civilians. Young men from the Mehsud tribe, many of whose members died in the incident, began flocking to the militants. "That was a turning point," said Rahimullan Yusufzai, a Pakistani journalist. "Their friends, their relatives and people they knew were killed."

But the US is sitting on its laurels. There is apparently a secret plan to reinstate a dormant propaganda unit within the Pentagon aimed on winning over "Hearts & Minds" in foreign lands.

Pentagon and military officials directly involved in the debate say that such a secret propaganda program, for example, could include planting news stories in the foreign press or creating false documents and Web sites translated into Arabic as an effort to discredit and undermine the influence of mosques and religious schools that preach anti-American principles.

Does anyone there have a brain? Even if this were true, how could let something like this leek out.