Your Tax Dollars at Work

I got wrapped up trying to wrestle with a disk quota program over here--the program itself needed some tweaking, and a security agent installed on the server in question kept everything moving at a snails pace until I figured out how to shut it down...

Anyway, I noticed a couple of Billmon posts that look like an entire evening of solid reading--short version: Ibrahim Jaafari, who looks like he's got the inside track to become Iraqi prime minister, is no secularist. Da'wa, translated, might well mean "Doh!" Our soldiers have been getting killed for theocracy.

Of course, that assumes that ANY government can organize itself out of the chaos over there, which is still a great big IF. It will be interesting to see what sort of armed forces the interim government tries to organize, and how it will compete with/complement the US effort in that regard (which, as I noted yesterday, is, well, pathetic). If I was a betting person--I'm not--I'd put a substantial wager on civil war.

Civil war of course would keep the focus on the fertile crescent, but this interesting article is the flip side of the $300 Billion Dollar Policy (minus Lee Majors and Lindsay Wagner, and body armor):

The insurgency in Iraq is providing militants with training and international contacts, the head of America's CIA has warned.

In his first public appearance as CIA director, Porter Goss said the conflict had become a "cause for extremists"...

"Those jihadists who survive will leave Iraq experienced in and focused on acts of urban terrorism," he said.

"They represent a potential pool of contacts to build transnational terrorist cells, groups and networks."

No shit, Sherlock. I guess "fighting them over there" won't exactly turn out as planned, will it? Has there ever been a more ridiculous idea? Terrorists don't exactly load themselves onto LST's and storm shores. They operate in small cells, living inconspicuously, blending into the surroundings, before embarking on their murderous deeds--of course, it's a hell of a lot easier to do that kind of thing when you've got a government that apparently can't be bothered to read briefing material warning about terrorist threats. It's also a hell of a lot easier to avoid the spotlight when you've got a government that starts an overseas war without adequate planning or preparation, then gets eight divisions bogged down in the desert, barely able to communicate with locals because of a chronic shortage of translators. And it really helps when the war plays right into the hands of public enemy number one, a fundamentalist kook who's exploiting the violence we needlessly brought on in order to further his kook agenda...

Oyster and others noted today's rant from somebody who calls himself hindrocket at Powerline blog (Your Right Hand Thief has the link if you really want to look at it). Pocketrocket decrees that Jimmy Carter, who expressed skepticism about the Iraqi "election," is "on the other side."

Really? Because, when you actually stop and think about it, the present policies of the Bush adminstration have done more for fundamentalist Islamic kookism than almost anything else I've seen since, well, Ronald Reagan's insistance that the mujahadeen (i.e., the Taliban and Al Qaeda) were really "freedom fighters," and worth millions of dollars in aid a year...oh, and if I remember, Reagan was somewhat fond of a certain Iraqi dictator named...Saddam Hussein.

$300 billion and counting...ah, conservative means never having to say you're sorry about spending.