I suppose I'd feel a little better about our progress in Iraq if we were actually solving the problems that Bush administration leaders said we went to Iraq to solve. Namely:

• Iraq's leaders no longer pursuing "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities".
  
• "...no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves in Iraq."
  
• Iraqis " ( Read more... )

My favorite brainless NeoCon just sent me this amusing statistic:

U.S. soldiers have a better chance of dying in a bar fight or accident in the U.S. then getting killed in Iraq.

Deaths of U.S. soldiers.

Non theater
876.3 deaths per 100K
In theater
774 deaths per 100K

It took me a few seconds to dig up this page at the DoD, where I extracted ( Read more... )

Let's say you're thinking of buying a car. At the dealership the salesman shows you another car ( Read more... )

Every so often (decreasingly so, fortunately) someone tells me "Iraq is less dangerous than California" or "Being a soldier in Iraq is safer than being a citizen of Washington DC". Both statements are false. I'm writing this to save myself time in the future.

According to the DC Metropolitan Police Department 187 people were killed with *all* ( Read more... )

A week or two ago I heard something on NPR/BBC that somehow escaped general interest. Saddam's lawyers wear small wireless microphones so that reporters, stenographers, and translators can hear what they say. A week or two ago one had forgotten that their microphone was on and someone overheard Saddam say something like "If our team has weak ( Read more... )

ponsdorf and I have been discussing the merits of our military involvement in Iraq, and he ended with a common cautionary note:

It's a bald fact [sic] that judging an event in mid-stream or apriori serves little purpose in the immediate sense."It doesn't look good now, but you'll see" is a common perspective, and although it's useful in some cases I don't ( Read more... )

Someone asked me this question on another list.
tongodeon, I have a question for you and all of the people here who continually post stories that point out how horribly the US is doing in Iraq or just general hate of everything USA. What's your solution ( Read more... )

As drieuxster pointed out yesterday, Iraq's Shiite, Kurd, and Sunni leaders met with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani in Cairo on Monday "at a preparatory reconciliation conference under the auspices of the Arab League". The declaration issued by the combined leaders we installed in Iraq called for "the withdrawal of foreign troops according to a timetable, ( Read more... )

Interesting comments from George Bush this Veterans' Day:

While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began. (Applause.)Apparently it's "deeply irresponsible" to argue that we invaded Iraq to find WMDs until no WMDs are found, then argue that ( Read more... )

Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7th, 1941. Allied forces pacified the island on V-J Day on 15 August 1945 and Japan officially surrendered on September 2, 1945, 1365 days later. The Japanese lived under a difficult but peaceful shikata ga nai period until the San Francisco Peace Treaty which ended the American occupation on September 8, ( Read more... )