iraq

Here's an old Herblock cartoon from 1970 when tricky Dick Nixon was escalating the Vietnam war despite campaign promises to end it.

Déjà vu?

So what would the caption be now? How about:

"You see the reason we’re dying in vain here in Iraq is so dying in Iraq will have some purpose."

Any other suggestions?

After Republicans blocked money for food stamps and unemployment benefits, it's worthwhile to think of the billions of dollars that they have spent, and continue to spend on the Iraq War.

Here's a video illustrating what all the hemorrhaging war money instead could buy:

tick, tick, tick....

Imagine what just a small fraction of all those wads of taxpayer cash dropped on Iraq could have done to fix local city, county and school funding woes. Maybe we need an insurgency in this country?

Calendar editor-Chuck gets notices of all the happening in town (and apparently insults that rhyme with his name), Molly gets books and music, the Teditor gets EVERYTHING and me, well my inbox fills up with . . . well, a lot of stuff that’s not really related to environmental reporting. Like yesterday, when I got a promo from a company called “Darf.” Darf is selling “Funagle: a board game people play with their dogs.”

The goal of the game, I kid you not, is to get points for getting your dog to “do an activity.” Like the Moonwalk. That’s their example. Right. My dog can give me five, play dead and do basic math problems, but I can guarantee you, she can’t Moonwalk. And she especially can’t do the Moonwalk when trapped in a room with four other idiot dog owners forcing their dogs to play board games.

But the point is less that this game is silly, and more that I get silly things in my inbox.

Before I proceed with my kvetching, don’t let this discourage you, by the way, from sending me story ideas. I love story ideas. I met a guy last week at a party in Seattle, who mentioned his recent grand jury subpoena. When I was clearly intrigued, he asked “if that interesting for a news story?”

Yup. Grand juries often make a good news story.

Lately my email account seems to have been added to a list that promotes Christian books. Now, I find the Bible fascinating. But I draw the line at Christian pop-fiction. Maybe I’m a snob, but poorly written pop-culture books with Christian themes don’t do it for me. And more importantly, pop-culture Christian books do not make environmental news. Not unless you’re printing on some kind of ultra-cool recycled paper or creating toxic residues with your printing. . .

At any rate, I’m not really sure why someone out there thinks the enviro reporter for the Eugene Weekly wants to report on: When The Wedding Ring Comes Off by Percy D. Gorham, which lifts, “the reader's faith as he points each mind to the sublime Holy Spirit in such a way people may not have known was possible.”

Huh. You’d think a book about infidelity would be less about the holy and more about the bodily. . .

Well, anyway, I’m all for people finding the sublime. But the scariest press release I got this week was this one: Iraq in My Eye: Memoirs of a Navy SEAL in which Chuck Bravedy of Canton, Ohio proposes a new way to deal with prisoners in Iraq: “I see substantial ground being made if we pull all Korans out of the cells and replace them with Bibles,” he writes.

Bravedy was apparently disturbed by the way troops provided prisoners with the Koran (his spelling, I tend to go with Qur’an) when they could be “indoctrinating” (his word choice) them by providing Bibles. Silly troops giving those darn Muslims freedom of religion. What are they thinking?

To quote directly from his press release: “Bravedy's dream is to assemble a team and return to Iraq for a year to minister in military
prisons teaching the men there that there is more to life than killing Americans and eradicating western influence.”

What was that old bumper sticker about the Army?

That’s right: Join the Army: Travel to distant lands; meet exciting, unusual people and kill them.

Military bludgeoning with the Bible. Well, maybe there's a story in there after all.

No, seriously, this is a short and unfunny one. Because sometimes the news ain't funny. OK, except for one.

1. Bombs kill. Death toll still rising after attacks. Oh, and although some (*cough*Britain*cough*) sort of want to get out of Iraq, France wants to become an "honest broker" in the country. Someone has to do something that doesn't involve killing, I guess. Because soldiers are psychologically conditioned to kill.

2. Republicans revel in making others grovel. I don't think that's just a Cali thing either.

3. Leaders like to be deciders. This means they sometimes rebel when their puppetmasters try to tell them what to do or how (or when) to do it.

4. Deciders don't like journalists. Especially after pro-democracy demonstrations.

5. Deciders don't like protesters. And have manuals on how not to see them.
Not that they're worried or anything. But the White House evidently leaves little to chance when it comes to protests within eyesight of the president. As in, it doesn't want any.

6. The funny one: Crocs are ugly! But popular! In case you hadn't noticed them, or all of those little things you can put in their holes, the Christian Science Monitor tells you all about the shoes and their devotees. (And their detractors.)

BONUS: "Dwarf's penis gets stuck to vacuum cleaner"

"It seems strange that a pro-Western government, supported by the U.S. Army and other NATO countries on its own territory, would seek Russian or Chinese weapons through questionable channels," the anti-Mafia prosecutor wrote in seeking the arrest warrant that short-circuited the complex deal.

And so another shady arms deal is opened up for the world to see, all thanks to those "anti-Mafia prosecutors" in Italy, where they still take shady international business deals with dead seriousness.

Is it 1987 all over again? Not quite. The proceeds from the sale (a mere $6.6 million profit) would line the Italian conspirators' pockets, not fund U.S.-supported militias in another corner of the world. But the deal is of such questionable, unbelievable proportions that it's sure to reach wider than just a few Italian-Iraqi connections. The U.S. command in Iraq denies involvement, despite this:

Investigators say the prospect of an Iraq deal was raised last November, when an Iraqi-owned trading firm e-mailed Massimo Bettinotti, 39, owner of the Malta-based MIR Ltd., about whether MIR could supply 100,000 AK-47 assault rifles and 10,000 machine guns "to the Iraqi Interior Ministry," adding that "this deal is approved by America and Iraq."

The results of a few sinister Iraqi politicos or a wider scandal involving Russia (the Iraqis insisted on Russian-made, as opposed to Chinese-made, assault rifles) and other countries? The question is: Where did the $40 million come from to make the purchase? U.S. taxpayers? Oil revenue? It sort of makes the Oil-for-Food scandal relatively toothless.

Stay tuned.