Friday, September 30, 2005
Juan Cole: Why we Have to get the Troops Out of Iraq
See the full text at Informed Comment.
A very short summary:
There rights or wrongs of the war are not a reason to get the ground troops out now. Nor is it a reason that the Baath Party and al-Qaeda were known to have no operational cooperation (or so the author claims). The number of US casualties is not a reason, either.
The reasons he sees are:
In his words, US ground troops being fatally brutalized by their own treatment of Iraqi prisoners. The author claims that the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the like are ongoing and “only the tip of the iceberg, and that the abusive practices were allowed and encouraged by Rumsfeld and high officers, and weren’t some aberration among a few corporals.”
The brutalization of the US military and of its prisoners is a brutalization of the entire American public. It is an undermining of the foundational values of the Republic. We cannot remain Americans and continue to behave this way routinely. The some 15,000 Iraqis in American custody are all by now undying enemies of the United States. Some proportion of them started out that way but perhaps could have been won over. Some of the detainees were probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time. After a time in US prison camps, they will hate us forever. And they know where thousands of tons of hidden munitions are.
The second reason: “ground troops are not accomplishing the mission given them, and are making things worse rather than better.”
Basically, if all the US military in Iraq is capable of is operations like Fallujah and Tal Afar, then they really need to get out of the country quick before they drive the whole country, and the region, into chaos.
Even as they are chasing after shadows in dusty border towns, the US military is allowing much of Baghdad to fall into the hands of the guerrillas.
And that is why we have to get the ground troops out. Counter-insurgency has to have both a military and a political track. Even as the enemy is being pressed, you have to reach out to the civilian leadership and try to draw them into a truce.
The US military has had no political successes in the Sunni Arab areas. Mosul and some parts of Baghdad could have been pointed to in summer of 2004. In summer of 2005, these earlier successes have evaporated like a desert mirage toward which thirsty soldiers race.
The situation in the Sunni Arab areas was worse in summer of 2004 than it had been in summer of 2003. It is worse in the summer of 2005 than it had been in 2004. Even the Iraqi political groupings that had earlier been willing to cooperate with the US boycotted the Jan. 30 elections and are now assiduously working to defeat the new constitution.
Things in the Sunni Arab areas are getting worse, not better.
I conclude that the presence of the US ground troops is making things worse, not better.
Let’s get them out, now, before they destroy any more cities, create any more hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons, provoke any more ethnic hatreds by installing Shiite police in Fallujah or Kurdish troops in Turkmen Tal Afar. They are sowing a vast whirlwind, a desert sandstorm of Martian proportions, which future generations of Americans and Iraqis will reap.
The ground troops must come out. Now. For the good of Iraq. For the good of America.
I would say that the author has a good point, although I still maintain that the US cannot go and it cannot stay.
The Times: Societies worse off ‘when they have God on their side’
A placeholder post for this article.
RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.
According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.
The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.
Here’s a link to PDF containing the original work.
I haven’t read either in depth - yet.
spontaneous muscle tears
The person across the hall from me has a perfectly good explanation for what happened to me the other day.
She overheard a fairly typical conversation from my office hours:
Click to read more...
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Slate: Mind the Gaps
Intelligent design as an answer to all life’s great conundrums.
Let’s face it: The problem with science has always been that each new discovery unleashes thousands of new questions and ambiguities. So really, the more we discover new stuff, the stupider we get. Clearly, that isn’t working. ID says we shouldn’t bother ourselves with resolving scientific inconsistencies or untangling puzzles. We should recognize that what God really wants is for us just to stop learning.
...
Think of the applications. Science is, after all, teeming with unresolved conundrums. What if we just recognized, for instance, that we can’t make the Standard Model of particle physics work? This theory, which purports to describe all known matterincluding subatomic particles, such as quarks and leptons, as well as the forces by which they interactחis plagued by scientists’ failure to observe something called “proton decay.” Now, if we apply the ID principle to particle physics, no one ever needs to put on a lab coat again. Quarks and leptons? They’re made of God.
...
There are many thorny medical mysteries doctors can’t explain: How can pluripotent stem cells give rise to any type of cell in the body? Why is the genetic marker for Huntington’s disease characterized by an excess of trinucleotide repeats? What accounts for the phenomenon of spontaneous remission in some cancers? With intelligent design, we don’t ever need to find out. Years from now, we’ll all lie in our hospital beds while ID-trained doctors hold our hands and assure us that we are merely dying of God.
...
My modest proposal would be that, instead of using intelligent design merely to fill in the gaps and inconsistencies of our most intractable scientific puzzles, we roll back what we’ve already learned about science and plug God into the equation at the outset. Kind of cut out those annoying scientific middlemen. That apple didn’t fall onto Sir Isaac Newton’s head because of gravity. It was God. God didn’t want Newton to study science, and he doesn’t want us to, either. And I, for one, am relieved. As Galileo famously said, and Teen Talk Barbie famously paraphrased: “Science is hard.”
I can’t help thinking that the author is on to something. If you reject science because it contradicts religious dogma and perhaps personal sensibilities, why not go whole hog and roll back science completely? It’s better to be consistent than to be right, eh.
Funny Times: Least Competent People
Citing the high quality of the workforce in Ontario, Toyota decided recently to build a second plant in the province (this time in Woodstock) even though Ontario was offering only about half the subsidy offered by Mississippi and Alabama to build the plant in one of those states. A trade association executive said the industry had learned from Nissan and Honda, which had found the workforce in the U.S. South to be untrained and illiterate, and that, in Alabama, trainers had to use pictorials to teach some workers how to use the equipment.
Ouch.
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
maybe today will be the day!!!!
Just about every day for the past few weeks I’ve been getting e-mails at an account that I’ve only used for forum registration (at a couple of sites). The titles vary, but mostly they have something to do with ‘undeliverable mail’ ...and each has an attachment, and the attachment is always the same size.
What makes people think think that somebody is going to eventually think ... “yeah, today I’m going to open this piece of crap up and see what it does to my computer?”
Monday, September 26, 2005
Open Theism
It’s not new, but I only recently became aware of this theology. CARM seems to dislike it immensely, so I figure it must be a good thing 
Anyway, the way I read it is that they fly in the face of orthodox theologies by claiming that god is only the most powerful being, not an all-powerful one. Metaphysically, this makes a lot more sense to me and avoids quite a few paradoxes, at the expense of some uncomfortable adjustments to believers.
God: “Oops. Me bad.”
is probably not something that all believers can relate to…
Sunday, September 25, 2005
German overtakes French in EU popularity stakes
Expatica: German overtakes French in EU popularity stakes
The European Union’s eastward expansion has boosted the popularity of German which is now spoken by more people than French in the 25-nation bloc, a European Commission survey said Friday.
The Eurobarometer survey of young people (15 years and over), showed that English still reigned supreme as everyone’s favourite second language, with one-third of all E.U. citizens (34 per cent) saying they could speak it.
A total of 12 per cent of the interviewees said they could speak German as a second language, compared to 11 per cent who said their second language was French.
E.U.‘s eastern enlargement has also made Russian more popular. The language is now in
fourth place - tying with Spanish - in the Eurobarometer ranking of the E.U.‘s most widely spoken foreign languages.
I feel their pain 
I wonder how they count people that speak more than two languages, though.
(Rita) Evacuees going home too soon
Drivers find roads clogged, gas scarce.
About midday Saturday, state officials sent out a plan to let people who fled the coast in advance of Hurricane Rita know when to head home starting today, Monday and Tuesday.
But by that time, thousands of impatient evacuees were already clogging roads out of Austin and other refuges statewide in a slow trek toward home, despite repeated pleas from the president, Gov. Rick Perry and coastal officials to just stay put.
State officials said roads might not be safe for travel and coastal residents could reach home only to find the power out and food, water and gas supplies unavailable.
And that’s what some returning to Houston found.
...
“This whole thing has been the biggest mess,” she said. “It took me 20 hours, 20 hours, to get out. I’ll never do this again.”
With her tank nearly empty, Cummings said she passed station after station that was closed all along the way until finally hearing on a radio station that this Shell station off the Southwest Freeway along Westpark was open.
...
Chris Simonds, who lives in LaMarque in Galveston County, was parked along with three dozen other motorists at a closed Shell Station off the Katy Freeway in West Houston. Most said they ignored officials’ advice in hopes of beating the heavy traffic.
“All the way back from Austin and now I’m stuck ח no gas to get on home,” Simonds said. “I don’t even have anybody to come pick me up. They’re either not in town or they don’t have enough gas to come get me. So here I’ll sit until the station opens.”
It’s not as if they weren’t warned.
“If you return today, we cannot ensure safety or a fast return,” Steve McCraw, Texas’ homeland security director, told the public in one of many urgent pleas by officials Saturday.
Houston Mayor Bill White was more emphatic: “You are endangering people if you come back now.”
During the morning, officials said, at least one military convoy headed east through Houston for hurricane relief was slowed by traffic.
The state’s plan called for a phased return over three days, starting today. ...
Emphasis added.
Sad and predictable. If there was a gas shortage going out, why do these people think there’s fuel going back? Or groceries, or water, or power, or whatnot?
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Sad…
Our (older) daughter brought a sealed letter back home from school. Apparently three siblings attending the school lost both parents that day or the day before and the school wanted to inform parents and leave it up to them if and how to break it to their kids.
It turns out that there’s a fourth kid, a baby. It wasn’t an accident as I surmised, but a murder/suicide, and it happened literally across the street from the school. We looked at a house next door to it, too.
Oh my…
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