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Wednesday,
April 28, 2004
Yesterday's record heat wave has broken, and it was pleasant out this
morning on our walk. My head is still stuffed, and I still have the sore
throat and deep cough, but it's all somewhat better than yesterday so I
think recovery is at hand.
I ordered the Allergy Control Products pump and nose thingy with their
flushing solution. I suspect it's overpriced compared to what I could manage
scrounging around but the laborer is worthy of his hire: if their gizmo can
accomplish the results I need, I don't care about the price. After all, a
few years ago I resorted to Chinese Snake Bile Oil "made from the freshest
of snake biles"...
I do find that flushing out the system by snorting saline solution (a lot
of it) followed by putting my head in various prone and supine positions
seems to help a bit, although at first everything seems dried out after the
saline is expelled. I expect it takes a bit of time to get a new
self-secreted coating in there. All in all I seem to be in better shape than
other people my age, and certainly so compared to people who were my age
when I was younger. Except for Col. Rhodes Dawson, one-time associate
Scoutmaster of Troop 139 (I was Hikemaster); Rhodes only slowed down a bit
after falling off his roof at age 93, and managed to look pretty spry until
he died at 102. But there aren't many like him.
=======================
What To Do About Iraq Tomorrow
The LA Times this morning has an article about a former exiled Ayatollah
who went back after the US intervention in Iraq, and is now disillusioned
with the American occupation. I have been studying it to see what evidence
there is for what he thinks as opposed to what the editor thinks the
reporter thinks the man thinks, but I haven't come to any conclusions yet.
He ought to be happy, but he's not. The occupation is taking too long and
there have been few visible beneficial results.
What bothers me is that well before the US went in, I said, here on this
site, about the same thing that Secretary Powell said to the President: you
break it, you own it. So you had better think hard about ownership.
We should, at the least, have opened the US Army Language School again
and done some intensive classes in Arabic; and set up the Military
Government schools again, and begun recruiting young Community College grads
to be military government enlisted troops, and College grads to be officers.
We started military government schools in 1943 with a view to what we would
have to do in Germany and Japan given our Unconditional Surrender policy; we
very much needed to do the same here. If we had started those language and
government schools the day the decision to invade was made, we'd have the
first group of such people over there now.
But in fact so far as I know we have not yet begun to train military
police and military government troops nor have we an intensive Arabic and
other Middle East languages school. The Army well knows how to teach
languages, and the immersive technique works well. Not all those who go into
it will come out fluent. Some will have to be dropped, and some take longer
than others do, but in general we were turning out people to speak various
languages at a pretty good clip when the language schools were running. If
there's any such effort now, I am not aware of it; I am sure if one of you
knows what's going on I'll learn in hours.
Recriminations about the past are pointless unless one learns lessons and
doesn't make the same mistakes again. Given the President's doctrine of
Preemptive War, and given Mr. Kerry's assurance that he will not cut and run
from Iraq, isn't it about time we started building the structure for
intervention in Middle East affairs? At the least we need people who can
speak the languages of the region, and others with some training in military
government in such cultures. We need those now; and since it takes months to
years to produce such people, we need to get those schools opening now.
Tomorrow morning won't be too early.
=========================
About those weapons of Mass Destruction:
When former weapons
inspector Kay reported to Congress in January that the United States had
found "no stockpiles" of forbidden weapons in Iraq, his conclusions made
front-page news. But when he detailed what the ISG had found in testimony
before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence last October,
few took notice.
Among Kay's
revelations, which officials tell Insight have been amplified in subsequent
inspections in recent weeks:
-
A prison laboratory complex that may have been
used for human testing of BW agents and "that Iraqi officials working to
prepare the U.N. inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the
U.N." Why was Saddam interested in testing biological-warfare agents on
humans if he didn't have a biological-weapons program?
-
"Reference strains" of a wide variety of
biological-weapons agents were found beneath the sink in the home of a
prominent Iraqi BW scientist. "We thought it was a big deal," a senior
administration official said. "But it has been written off [by the press]
as a sort of 'starter set.'"
-
New research on BW-applicable agents, brucella
and Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever, and continuing work on ricin and
aflatoxin that were not declared to the United Nations.
- A line of
unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, or drones, "not fully declared at an
undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one
of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500
There is considerably more, but surely the point is made?
Wednesday TOP
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