Iraq

Riverbend

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I sense I’m slow getting connected to Riverbend. She’s a 2 month blogger with 4-12,000 uniques a day. But that is not a reason to read her. Words like this are:

No running water all day today. Horrible. Usually there are at least a few hours of running water, today there�s none. E. went out and asked if there was perhaps a pipe broken? The neighbors have no idea. Everyone is annoyed beyond reason.
A word of advice: never take water for granted. Every time you wash your hands in cold, clean, clear water- say a prayer of thanks to whatever deity you revere. Every time you drink fresh, odorless water- say the same prayer. Never throw out the clean water remaining in your glass- water a plant, give it to the cat, throw it out into the garden� whatever. Never take it for granted.

Riverbend tells stories you may not want to hear yet should listen to closely. I recommend starting at the beginning and reading forward. It will be worth your time.
I have not made much of an effort to read the first hand accounts coming out of Iraq but it is clear that we should all spend some of our time doing so be it an Iraqi citizen or a US soldier.
Via Rob Schaap and Cast-Iron Balcony.

WMDs Long Gone

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Blix believes Iraq destroyed its WMDs 12 years ago:

“I’m certainly more and more to the conclusion that Iraq has, as they maintained, destroyed almost all of what they had in the summer of 1991,” Blix said.

If this is true just what will it take to reestablish the credibility of any intelligence agency that told a different story to the British, US or Australian administrations over the last decade?
Via the Daily Kos.

Late Night Reading

This entry was posted in Economics Intellectual Property Iraq Late Night Reads on by

Tim Dunlop analyzes the post-war situation in Iraq.
Kos likes the latest NY Times Bestseller standings.
D-squared reviews the fall out from Cancun:

When push came to shove, the rich nations were not prepared to give an inch to the poor ones on agriculture unless they got their quid pro quo in the form of progress toward an agenda which has nothing to do with trade and everything to do with massively undermining the ability of democratically elected governments to set the terms on which the ownership of the means of production is decided.

Apparently it is getting more difficult for the public to access academic journals. This is not a good thing: check out Scientific American, The Invisible Adjunct and Relevant History who notes:

But just what is it that publishers think they’re protecting? Do they think that members of the general public could constitute a potential new revenue stream that can be tapped if only free public access to journals is eliminated? Were they thinking, “Gee, I would spend $9,000 a year for a subscription to Letters in Neuroscience, but since I can read it for free, I won’t”? And now they will?

Good Night!

Where is the Foreign Aid

This entry was posted in bush Democracy Iraq US Foreign Policy War on Terrorism on by

Gwynn Dyer suggests the real reason many countries are responding slowly to bush’s ‘plea’ for help with Iraq:

Nobody talks openly about this, but many governments are also privately debating whether they want to help save the Bush administration from the consequences of its own folly.
Without a lot of military and financial help that can only come via the UN, Bush may be dragged down to defeat by the Iraq war in the November 2004 election. With the extra troops and money, he might contain the problem enough to survive. But, they ask themselves, do we really want that?

xymphora enumerates five additional reasons.