FORMATTING CHANGE
I decided to change to a cleaner blog format, so the site isn't as messy and ill-constructed. If I left the link of your blog off my list, please be sure either post your blog's URL in comments or email it to me!

tack!

REAL NO BRAINERS

The Third Geneva Convention’s Article 3

Principled public officials—not valedictorians of “The de Sade School of Martial Debriefing.”

“Patriotism [not torture] being the last refuge of scoundrels.” --Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson’s reincarnation to provide the much-needed public service of witty, succinct and razor-sharp political opprobrium.

The only “waterboard” employed by any agency being a surfboard.

Soldiers’ memoirs of the “Hanoi Hilton” as mandatory reading for the Executive Branch and Congress.

Senator John McCain’s X-ray’s, taken immediately after returning from Vietnam, to accompany the above.

All the notorious pictures of Abu Ghraib to accompany the above.

A mandatory viewing of the Nuremberg trials for both branches for good measure.

The Third Geneva Convention’s Article 4.

THE WAR DEAD AND COLLEGE MATH III


1100 Iraqis have died since Oct. 15th. (The official estimate that 100 Iraqis are dying a day--the "official estimate" is usally a low estimate). If these Iraqis were students, this number would

•fill 36 classrooms, which is nearly my entire three storey building.

•would represent nearly 1/3 of the Freshman class

•would be 1 in 11 of every student who attended the last football game.

All of these people died within the last 11 days. They had families, shops and hopes. They were doctors, lawyers, and carpenters. They had dreams and were loved.

96 American soldiers have died this month. This is 26 more than in my last post, on October 18th. If these soldiers were my students

•All my students in my composition class would be casualties.

•All but 8 of my students in my literature class would be casualties: essentially I would have only 8 students left out of all my classes.

•The twenty-six soldiers that died in the last 8 days would represent an entire composition course.

•96 soldiers would fill three classrooms.

They all had families, hobbies and hopes. They were professional soliders, and they were also reservists who had farms, businesses and jobs. They left behind everyone their lives touched, and that could literally be thousands of people.

WHAT RABBIT HOLE HAVE I FALLEN DOWN?


It turns out, as I secretly thought but couldn't bring myself to believe, that many officials involved in counter-intelligence have no clue whom they are actually fighting: they don't know basic information that the majority of my students who wrote a paper on this last semester know. Essentially, they don't know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. This passage an op-ed article in the NY Times on 10/17/2006. (I tried to post the link, but the site wouldn't let me--but if you go to http://www.nytimes.com and search the archives, you can find the article titled "Can You Tell a Sunni From A Shiite?")

As the author pointedly notes in the preface of his article,

British counterterrorism officials responsible for Northern Ireland know the difference between the Catholics [IRA] and the Protestants [UDA] [both the battling parties' respective paramilitary groups].

In the following section, the interviewer and author is Jeff Stein,the national security editor at Congressional Quarterly. The official being interviewed is Willie Hulon, chief of the FBI's new national security branch.

At the end of a long interview, I asked Willie Hulon, chief of the bureau's new national security branch, whether he thought that it was important for a man in his position to know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. "Yes, sure, it's right to know the difference," he said. "It's important to know who your targets are."

That was a big advance over 2005. So next I asked him if he could tell me the difference. He was flummoxed. "The basics goes back to their beliefs and who they were following," he said. "And the conflicts between the Sunnis and the Shia and the difference between who they were following."

O.K., I asked, trying to help, what about today? Which one is Iran -- Sunni or Shiite? He thought for a second. "Iran and Hezbollah," I prompted. "Which are they?"

He took a stab: "Sunni."

Wrong.

Al Qaeda? "Sunni."

Right.

Thank god he got the second one right, although it's of little consolation.

In the 15th century, Machiavelli wrote that as important as it is for a leader to train his troops to fight, it is as equally important that he read histories. How can anyone conduct intelligence without knowing whom he is fighting? And more importantly, whom he is NOT fighting?

It seems that six centuries ago, the thinking was a little more aligned with reality.

Double Yikes.

WAR DEAD AND COLLEGE MATH II

Since I last posted on the 15th, the death count for American soldiers has reached 70 for this month, and 400 hundred have been wounded.


• Seventy soldiers is three shy of the total of my composition students. So if these soldiers were my students, and since I have three classes of composition, only one student in each class would have survived the first half of October, and thirteen classrooms of students (which is one floor in my building) would have been wounded--and some would not survive their wounds.

• Twenty-three soldiers have died since my posting on October 15th. This is an average of seven soldiers a day over the past three days. Twenty-three soldiers would be 74% of my Literature course. And since the literature course has 5 groups of five and 1 group of six, totaling 31 students, if these soldiers were my students, this would mean that 4 of the six groups would be casualties, and one additional group would lose 3 of its members. And this in three days.

These were individuals with families, and dreams, loves and losses, favorite TV shows and iPod collections, cats and dogs, and they are gone in three short days.

• • •The death count for Iraqis since October 15th has not been posted. They are lost to us, and have not even earned a number. But their families know that a son or daughter, or mother or father, niece or nephew will not break fast with them this Ramadan. . . or any other.

THE WAR DEAD AND COLLEGE MATH

In the last forty eight hours, 83 people (that the media are reporting), Iraqi civilians, have died: to put that in some perspective for my university readers, this is

• Thirteen more individuals than the total number of students in my three composition courses.

• You would need three classrooms to contain this amount of people in our building (and not comfortably, I might add).

• To house this number of students in a dorm, it would take twenty-one dorm rooms--essentially an entire floor.

These were people with hopes, dreams and families. And this was a mere 48 hours in Baghdad.

Since August 11th, when I started this blog, 159 U.S. soldiers have died (official count). This is

• Forty-seven more soldiers than I noted in my October 1st entry

• This is an average of three soldiers being killed a day since the beginning of October

• The total number of soldiers killed in this war would not fit into any auditorium we have on campus, except the football stadium.

• The total number of soldiers killed in this war would almost entirely occupy the largest dorm complex we have (a total of eight buildings).

These were soldiers with hopes, dreams and families, and they died in foreign country serving their nation honorably, but to what purpose, no one seems to know.

THE DOG KING


In Scandinavian legend, after the death of the Danish king, the Swedish king, Hakun, sent the Danes a small dog and ordered them to appoint it as their new king. The Danes, at this time oppressed by the Swedes, did so without question. The small dog king ruled the former king's great hall, running up and down the tables until one day, when excited by the large hounds below, he jumped into a fray, and they tore him to bits.

I think this is a great cautionary tale--especially for the U.S. We might think ourselves the top dog, but in reality, we may be running up and down on the top of tables, never really taking into account, or acknowledging, the large hounds watching us intently from beneath the table.

CAN WE HAVE A PLAN, PLEASE?

As I was watching the usual suspects appear on Sunday morning "poli-talk" TV ("Meet the Press" et al), I was struck by two things: 1) politics, which has always been a full-contact sport, has turned into a Darwinian free-for-all, ala "Lord of the Flies." I saw a democrat and republican, who were running for the same senate seat, get into a verbal scrap that reminded me of two little boys quarreling over their Hot Wheels cars, only with louder voices and better vocabularies. 2) Plans for Iraq are vague at best. The republican basically said let the generals and the president handle it, and the democrat said we need an orderly withdrawal from what appears to be a civil war. In other words, put the Iraqis on notice that they must take over.

If you read "Where Date Palms Grow"'s last two entries, you will realize that the Iraqi government seems to be up to its neck in nasty militia business, which is no news to the U.S. military. These militias are responsible for the burgeoning practice of kidnapping entire groups citizens--who are most often found bound, tortured and dead.

So I think it is safe to say this war is not going well. The violence in Baghdad just surpassed a new high today, and we, the U.S. seem unable to control it in any significant fashion, and the Iraqi government seems unable or unwilling to rein in the militias, who are running Baghdad like their own personal abattoir.

So what do we do? Do we stay the course? Do we ship more troops to Iraq so we can attempt to control the violence? Or do we start a gradual pull-out, putting the Iraqi government on notice that we are leaving, and that they can't hide in the Green Zone forever? Or do we pull out now--in the next six months?

What do you think? What is a reasonable plan? And how can it be implemented? This question is for anyone to answer!

Just to note that since I started this blog on August 11, 2006 that 112 American soldiers (the officially released count) and over 7500 Iraqis have died. I think a few lines from Shakespeare are appropriate here.

And many of our bodies, shall no doubt
Find native graves; upon the which, I trust
Shall witness live in brass of this day's work.
And those that leave their valiant bones [here]
Dying like men, though buried in your dunghills,
They shall be famed; for there the sun shall greet them.

Henry V 4.3. ls 95-100