Unqualified Offerings

The BBC on the question of the hour. Lots and lots of speculation and inference, such as
It is likely that some US policymakers did initially think it would be useful to have a military foothold in Iraq when they were planning the invasion, says the BBC’s Adam Brookes at the Pentagon.
But he says the difficulties […]

From a comment I put on Belgravia Dispatch:
This “insurgency is waning!” meme interests me, since it seems to have grown from nothing in the space of days like shower mold.
I’m a war critic, but nothing bores me more than obsessively detailing every single violent incident in Iraq as if any given one of them meant […]

Step 1. Achieve actual hegemony. One way you’ll know this has happened is that people bother to open and read mail from you.

Link.
I just wanted to use that headline, in honor of Ralph Peters.

A confession: I stopped reading Riverbend long ago because she annoys the crap out of me. But via Drum, I learn that she saw a jaw-dropping crawl across her TV screen the other day:
The translation:
“The Ministry of Defense requests that civilians do not comply with the orders of the army or police on nightly patrols […]

The current administration plan (if you can call it that) is a train wreck in the making. It is the worst of all worlds – a combination of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, where military action to suppress the insurgency creates more new terrorists and an endless cycle of violence; the Soviet occupation […]

Not for me, for the razor industry. Downblog, amid a lot of spoofing about infinite-bladed razors, Jaybird pipes up:
As a head (but not face) shaver, allow me to say that I eagerly await the next big thing.
The Mach 3 was a boon for headshaving. It was a quantum leap, if you will. The Fusion is […]

A bit more on Sunday’s husseiniya raid that has caused so much trouble.
An early Juan Cole report suggests that the US-Iraqi Army strike force got lost and hit the wrong neighborhood.
Meanwhile the US insists that what happened at the husseiniya, which did contain a mosque, was a battle rather than a massacre.
These two accounts would […]

For once, US military spokesmen make a decent case that an alleged massacre is not what it seems. The Oberlin Times, working from wire reports, states that
Chiarelli stood by the U.S. account, disputed by Sadr aides and other Shi‘ite leaders but which is broadly in line with police reports and some local witnesses who spoke […]

Avram Grumer finds the Singularity in multibladed razors. A commenter, “Anonymous,” either provides the ultimate deadpan response or just isn’t getting the joke:
More than likely if the curve continues, it will eventually level off asymtotically. Just google “s curve” and you can see what I’m talking about. Examples of problems that Gillete and company might […]

I highly recommend the pseudonymous Prof. Strauss’s “Incoherent Hegemon: US Strategy At The Crossroads,” about the Bush Administration’s determination to work strenuously toward no fewer than five mutually incompatible goals simultaneously, without prioritization. Hard as I’ve been on the Administration for its decisions surrounding the “War on Terror,” their least explicable (and forgivable) offensive may […]