Political/Political Humor
Saturday, August 30, 2003[10:47:16 AM]
Just in case you couldn't believe that the head of a voting machine company could really be a gung-ho Republican fund-raiser....
Port Clinton News Herald: "Wally O'Dell, CEO of Diebold Inc., this week sent out letters to central Ohio Republicans asking them to raise $10,000 in donations in time for a Sept. 26 Ohio Republican Party event at his home."
[10:34:13 AM]
"Have we gone too far with this First Amendment business?" --Bill O'Reilly, August 29
[10:33:02 AM]
Now General Sanchez says he doesn't need more troops in Iraq because he doesn't have "the intelligence" to give them anything to do.
We expect that is as good as a lie. If he had 500,000 troops re-building schools, guarding hospitals, and making streets safe, he would get intelligence. It's just that he knows he can't get enough American soldiers to make a difference.
More importantly, even his claim that he doesn't need more troops *now* shouldn't obscure the fact that we clearly needed more troops during and immediately after the conquest. We didn't have enough troops to guard Iraq's nuclear storage facility, and allowed it to be looted. Rumsfeld should have been fired in about a second for that. What a catastrophe. How do we know Al Qaeda didn't steal enough yellow cake to make a so-called 'dirty bomb'? We don't. Rumsfeld should be fired.
More important than the yellow-cake debacle, and the pillaging of Iraq's (so-called) WMD records, and the pillaging of Iraq's store of biological disease samples from the Iraqi equivalent of the CDC -- had we had enough troops in the immediate aftermath of the war, we could have provided reasonable security to the people of Iraq, and we would be getting plenty of intelligence now.
It is true that -- at this point -- the most important thing isn't so much to increase the number of American troops, as to turn civil administration over to the UN and bring in hundreds of thousands of soldiers from other countries.
There's another point about increasing the number of American soldiers.... There are a dozen or so attacks on our people every day. Is that because there are a dozen groups a day willing to attack us, or is it because there are only a dozen easy targets? That is, if more Americans were driving around, would there be even more attacks? The answer is *probably* 'yes'. I gather that American soldiers are in hiding, because when they ventured out onto the streets they were easy targets. Now we keep the soldiers locked away at bases, and the number of attacks went down. This seems like anecdotal evidence that a broad portion of Iraqi society is willing to take an easy shot at Americans. That was part of the story in Afghanistan, too, that just about every Afghan (adult male) has a rifle, and most of them were willing to take a shot at an American plane or helicopter flying by. Hearts and minds.
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Last update: 9/20/03; 2:48:28 PM.