bush implements some clinton recommendations
But not until after 9/11.
Read Jesse’s piece Misplaced Priorities: Why We’re Not As Safe As We Could Be.
Via Matt at Not Geniuses.
US Foreign Policy
11 Lessons from the Vietnam War
Bilmon posts these from Robert McNamara’s memoirs:
But for the most part, McNamara’s eleven points are a pretty good capsule summary of the lessons that should have been learned from Vietnam, but which weren’t — in large part because the people now running the foreign policy of the U.S. government have never even been able to face up to the fact that we lost the Vietnam War, much less understand why we lost it.
Go read them.
Questions to be Answered
Mark Kleiman asks a couple questions that I’d also like to see some good answers to. First:
I don’t really want to see Rush Limbaugh spend the next twenty-five years of his life in prison, which is what would happen if the laws of the State of Florida were enforced. But I really do want to see the politicians and pundits who support both Limbaugh and the drug war explain why that particular law shouldn’t be enforced in this case, and why it shouldn’t be repealed.
Now that George W. Bush has expressed his support for democracy in the Middle East, can we expect some indication of concern on his part about the evident intention of his friend Pooty-Poot to put an end to it in Russia?
There is more context for both questions in Mark’s posts.
Death in Iraq
Tbogg has a new hot link called the Nether-Count which takes you to Antiwar.coms Casualties in Iraq page.
The hot link is named after US Senate aspirant George Nethercutt of Washington who recently said, well, you can go read it at Tbogg’s place.
Iraq Troop Count
Do you visualize the 133,000 troops in Iraq as mostly combat soldiers? Think again. According to this piece from today’s New York Times the number is much lower:
Such is the arithmetic of an ultra-modern army. The support echelon is so large that out of the 133,000 American men and women in Iraq, no more than 56,000 are combat-trained troops available for security duties…..And even the finest soldiers must sleep and eat. Thus the number of troops on patrol at any one time is no more than 28,000 � to oversee frontiers terrorists are trying to cross, to patrol rural terrain including vast oil fields, to control inter-city roads, and to protect American and coalition facilities.
No wonder the troops are having problems.