Brad DeLong points us to a 1986 story by Robert X. Cringley that illustrates why the odds are against us when it comes to reshaping the Milddle East in our own image. It’s scary reading.

PBS | I, Cringely . Archived Column: I eventually finished the piece and decided to go see the war since I had been in Beirut and Angola, but had never seen trench warfare, which is what I was told they had going in Iran. So I took a taxi to the front, introduced myself to the local commander, who had gone, as I recall, to Iowa State, and spent a couple days waiting for the impending human wave attack. That attack was to be conducted primarily with 11-and 12-year-old boys as troops, nearly all of them unarmed. There were several thousand kids and their job was to rise out of the trench, praising Allah, run across No Man’s Land, be killed by the Iraqi machine gunners, then go directly to Paradise, do not pass GO, do not collect 200 dinars. And that’s exactly what happened in a battle lasting less than 10 minutes. None of the kids fired a shot or made it all the way to the other side. And when I asked the purpose of this exercise, I was told it was to demoralize the cowardly Iraqi soldiers.

It was the most horrific event I have ever seen, and I once covered a cholera epidemic in Bangladesh that killed 40,000 people.

Waiting those two nights for the attack was surreal. Some kids acted as though nothing was wrong while others cried and puked. But when the time came to praise Allah and enter Paradise, not a single boy tried to stay behind.

Now put this in a current context. What effective limit is there to the number of Islamic kids willing to blow themselves to bits? There is no limit, which means that a Bush Doctrine can’t really stand in that part of the world. But of course President Bush, who may think he pulled the switch on a couple hundred Death Row inmates in Texas, has probably never seen a combat death. He doesn’t get it and he’ll proudly NEVER get it.

Welcome to the New Morality.

What is our plan to win over there, in the face of a mentality that we can never fathom? Is it just to keep fighting until we wipe them all out? Is that what liberation’s all about? Bring ’em on, bush taunted, and he got what he asked for. And now our young soldiers get to pay for our president’s hubris.

Maureen Dowd has written what is quite simply her best column ever. Her passion pervades every phrase, every comma, yet her logic is cold, dispassionate and precise.

Like the president, vice president and defense secretary, General Karl wanted to wipe out the gray, if-it-feels-good-do-it, blame-America-first, doused-in-Vietnam-guilt 60’s and turn the clock back to the black-and-white Manichaean values of the 50’s.

W. and Karl played up western movie stereotypes. After 9/11, the rugged frontier myth, the hunter/Indian-fighter hero in a war of civilization against savagery worked better than ever. But this White House’s frontier is not a place of infinite progress and expansion, stretching society’s boundaries. It doesn’t battle primitivism; it courts primitivism.

Instead of the New Frontier, Karl and W. offer the New Backtier.

Even as a child, I could feel the rush of J.F.K.’s presidency racing forward, opening up a thrilling world of possibilities and modernity. We were going to the moon. We were confronting racial intolerance. We were paying any price and bearing any burden for freedom. We were respecting faith but keeping it out of politics. Our president was inspiring much of the world. Our first lady was setting the pace in style and culture.

W.’s presidency rushes backward, stifling possibilities, stirring intolerance, confusing church with state, blowing off the world, replacing science with religion, and facts with faith. We’re entering another dark age, more creationist than cutting edge, more premodern than postmodern. Instead of leading America to an exciting new reality, the Bushies cocoon in a scary, paranoid, regressive reality. Their new health care plan will probably be a return to leeches.

America has always had strains of isolationism, nativism, chauvinism, puritanism and religious fanaticism. But most of our leaders, even our devout presidents, have tried to keep these impulses under control. Not this crew. They don’t call to our better angels; they summon our nasty devils.

For a while I stopped reading Dowd, I thought she was so determined to place cutesiness over depth. Not anymore. She’s been spectacular lately, and here she’s at her very zenith.

George W. Bush had a plan to get out of the war in Vietnam.

Lots of great jokes like that on Garrison Keillor today. I missed that show more than any other when I was in Asia.

It’s nice to know that the beacon of democracy we set up in Iraq has spread its sweet light throughout the Middle East.

Prominent Saudi religious scholars urged Iraqis to support militants waging holy war against the U.S.-led coalition forces as American troops prepared Saturday for a major assault on the insurgent hotbed of Fallujah.

The 26 Saudi scholars and preachers said in an open letter to the Iraqi people that their appeal was prompted by “the extraordinary situation through which the Iraqis are passing which calls for unity and exchange of views.” The letter was posted on the Internet.

“At no time in history has a whole people been violated … by propaganda that’s been proved false,” Sheik Awad al-Qarni, one of the scholars, told Al-Arabiya TV.

“The U.S. forces are still destroying towns on the heads of their people and killing women and children. What’s going on in Iraq (news – web sites) is a result of the big crime of America’s occupation of Iraq.”

In their letter, the scholars stressed that armed attacks by militant Iraqi groups on U.S. troops and their allies in Iraq represent “legitimate” resistance.

The scholars were careful to direct their appeal to Iraqis only and stayed away from issuing a general, Muslim-wide call for holy war. They also identified the military as the target, one that is considered legitimate by many Arabs who view U.S. troops and their allies as occupiers.

We’re going to “win” in Fallujah, at least in the military sense. We’ll most likely raze it to the ground. But can we ultimately triumph over all this animosity, from within and outside of Iraq? After all, our winning formula from the very beginning was “hearts and minds.” At this point, no matter how good our original intentions — and I believe they were generally good — we have to face the fact that most of the people in the Middle East see us the way the Poles saw the Germans. Now, that isn’t fair; we’re doing many good things and trying to help in parts of Iraq. But it’s still how we are perceived by so many, and levelling Fallujah probably won’t help. Remember, the image of a naked prisoner wearing a hood is far more vivid and memorable than a photo of kids smiling by a newly built school.

From H.L. Mencken (it’s the legend on Corrente’s blog):

He likes money and knows how to amass property, but his cultural development is but little above that of the domestic animals. He is intensely and cocksurely moral, but his morality and his self-interest are crudely identical…He is a violent nationalist and patriot, but he admires rogues in office and always beats the tax-collector if he can. He has immovable opinions about all the great affairs of state, but nine-tenths of them are sheer imbecilities. He is violently jealous of what he conceives to be his rights, but brutally disregardful of the other fellow’s…This man, whether city or country bred, is the normal Americano – the 100 percent…He exists in all countries, but here alone he rules.

Truer now than ever before.

The latest photos and commentary from our lovely little war in iraq, courtesy of the great ESWN.

He also offers a fine summary of our depressing election.

A lot of it is personal stuff (“miss my girlfriend” and stuff like that) but there are a few posts that pop out at you.

If you voted for Bush, didn’t vote, or voted no on gay marriage, I hope you get drafted. I hope they stick you in my unit, and you go with me to Iraq when my unit goes back in September. I will laugh when you see what soldiers in that country face on a daily basis. I hope you work with gay soldiers too. I did. One of them saved my life. Think he shouldn’t have the right to get married? Fuck you. He fought just as hard as I did and on most days, did his job better than me. Don’t tell me gays don’t have the same rights you do. Think the war in Iraq is a good thing? I’ll donate my M-16 to you and you can go in my place.

It’s worth a look on this, the eve of Vietnam II.

This is vintage China:

The 2008 Beijing Olympics will begin at 8pm on 8 August, in keeping with one of the nation’s lucky numbers.

Eight is considered auspicious in China because its pronunciation in Cantonese sounds the same as the word for to make money.

The Games had originally been planned to commence in late August to avoid Beijing’s soaring summer temperatures.

But Beijing’s mayor said the sporting festival would begin in the luckiest manner possible – at eight on 8/8/08.

Mayor Wang Qishan conceded it would still be hot in early August, with the temperature often climbing above 40 degrees Celsius.

They sure take their lucky numbers seriously there, as I’ve noted before.

God bless them and their Christian values. These were culled from Free Republic by Oliver Willis.

Could explain her dimentia in talking about the Cheney’s daughter. Prayers..

Elizabutt has breast cancer

If I were a doctor, I’d be frightened to treat the wife of a guy who sues doctors for a living.

a pity for sure, but good luck finding a doctor to treat the wife of the most vicious medical malpractice attorney in the nation…what goes around comes around I guess.

she could always go to canada or cuber to get the very best treatment possible.

I want her well, but NOT treated here.

any doctor here who treats her should have his head examined.

It’s also a shame because, if it wasn’t for her bottom-feeding trial lawyer husband, doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies probably would have found a cure for breast cancer by now…

would you bet YOUR house, your kids college on Edwards wife?

Send her to cuber. Libs say their system is better than ours.

….revenge is mine sayeth the LORD!!!!!!!!!

God is not mocked, you reap what you sow. I’m sorry folks but we all have to learn that you cannot go around spewing hatred and leave the door wide open to satan.

sometimes boobs have problems….

“God dont like ugly” (behavior)

I’ll restrain myself from replying with obscenities. but it isn’t easy.

That seems to be the mentality among many Americans as they consider migrating to Canada. No, I’m not kidding.