Too much choice
 

If your hangover's still this bad on the 28th, you might want to reconsider your plans for New Year's Eve.

S_A_M

8 Americans dead
 

I'd say that the headline, and, I suspect, the article convey some of that horror. Stop yelling.

It is indeed a horrible tragedy. The pictures and video are horrifying, as you watch people (most of whom will die) getting torn away into huge waves. I will not soon forget the picture of the grandmother in her red sari wailing over the bodies of several grandchildren lying in a row.

But your outrage is misplaced. I'm not sure why you would find it strange or inappropriate that Americans would be interested in knowing how many of their countrymen died in the tragedy. (Or, as Bilmore said, might even want to check for specific names.) I don't think that such an interest is unusual or inappropriate - - or in any way diminishes the value of the dead foreigners.

P.S. The news media does indeed exist to cater to the concerns and interests of its predominant readership. If you look at most news sources, you will see loads more space devoted to local, regional, and national news than to international news. They know what pays the bills.

S_A_M

8 Americans dead
 

Are you suggesting that American readership could only possibly be interested in the lives of the Americans? I'll bet there are loads of people in the United States who have friends and relatives who actually live in the area.

8 Americans dead
 

Was Enrique Iglesias anywhere near the Indian Ocean?

8 Americans dead
 

Thanks, Hank. That's exactly the kind of thing I was talking about. At least you understand.

Don't forget fellas -- where Enrique goes, Anna and her extraordinary behind follow.

8 Americans dead
 

No, that's not what I said. I'm sure you're right.

To the extent that those folks live in concentrated communities (geographic or otherwise) of recent immigrants, I'd bet they also have community and/or X-language newspapers that are providing plenty of coverage.

[I'd also bet that those papers concentrate mostly on the devastation in their particular country, which sort of reinforces our point about regional and/or parochial interests.]

S_A_M

Too much choice
 

I find her, at times, horribly bitchy, and, at times, bitingly (and insightfully) funny. She's the right's Dowd.

Actually, from reading the various blogging soldiers in Iraq, as well as the military-family group blogs and sites, my impression is that the group you purport to protect here is mostly just pissed that the anti-war, anti-Rummy groups love to jump on this kind of blather in the hopes of turning people against what they themselves hold dear. Go read all the blogs connected in Warbloggers. The auto-pen was a non-issue, but the gleeful way people who really couldn't care less jumped on it for agenda purposes was more important, and more infuriating. As one blogger said, who gives a f*** how that letter gets signed when they overwhelmingly respect and support Rumsfeld?

He should have signed the letters. Big deal. Why is this primarily important to people who are always looking for a slam on Rumsfeld, and (seemingly, from what I've seen) unimportant to the supposed victims?

Incredibly sharp and focused, with aims and goals that match up well with mine, a no-nonsense way of dealing with things, and an unwillingness to allow form to triumph over substance. How many people would have even tried to give an honest answer to the soldier's question about armor? I can think of several in his position in the past who would have stammered a quick "we'll look into it" non-answer.

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

If the tooth fairy stops the ongoing civil war and leaves a fully functioning parliamentary democracy under the collective pillow of the Kurds, Shi'ites and Sunnis, that will not be a bad thing.

The differences between Ukraine and Iraq are massive, and do not suggest that our enterprise in Iraq is likely to end well. For example, the forces of democracy in Ukraine appear to have drawn considerable strength from nationalism, and from the desire to have a meddling outside power play less of a role in the country's domestic affairs. We've managed to get those forces working against us in Iraq. Ukraine finds itself in a situation where the use of violence to subvert democracy is so unaccepted that it can only be used minimally (e.g., covert dioxin poisoning). In Iraq, there is much less agreement on the ground rules, if you will.

Not that we're likely to get there anytime soon, but it takes a lot more than a well-run election to find yourself in a durable democracy.

Too much choice
 

You're right. Fuck 'em if they can't take an honest "(a) it's a problem of physics (even though our vendors have offered to increase production), and (b) look, you might get blown up in a tank anyway, so back to the landfill!"

I didn't really find Rumsfeld's response disarmingly honest, but OTOH, it's not what really bugs me about the man.

I think most of his critics focus more on things like the fact that he ignored Shinseki's Army planning office, the State Department, and pretty much everyone else with expertise in post-war nationbuilding, and as a result fucked up things pretty royally. In fact, Maj. Wilson now tells us that DoD never wrote down a Phase IV plan at all.

• The U.S. military invaded Iraq without a formal plan for occupying and stabilizing the country and this high-level failure continues to undercut what has been a "mediocre" Army effort there, an Army historian and strategist has concluded.
  
  "There was no Phase IV plan" for occupying Iraq after the combat phase, writes Maj. Isaiah Wilson III, who served as an official historian of the campaign and later as a war planner in Iraq. While a variety of government offices had considered the possible situations that would follow a U.S. victory, Wilson writes, no one produced an actual document laying out a strategy to consolidate the victory after major combat operations ended.
  
  "While there may have been 'plans' at the national level, and even within various agencies within the war zone, none of these 'plans' operationalized the problem beyond regime collapse" -- that is, laid out how U.S. forces would be moved and structured, Wilson writes in an essay that has been delivered at several academic conferences but not published. "There was no adequate operational plan for stability operations and support operations."

Armored Humvees and Autopens are nice theatre, but really they're only theatre in comparison to the man's larger problems.

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

How long has this "love of democracy" existed in the Ukraine? Give Iraq a chance Ty. People are still signing up to be cops despite the murders. They might really want to be in charge of their lives.

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

I think our difference lies in our view of the popularity of the anti-democratic forces native to Iraq.

I see an overwhelming Iraqi support for democracy. Because the tools of modern war are so powerful, I see a very small contingent wielding great disruptive power right now, but I think they start to wander away in the face of the failure to them that is expressed by a succesful election, and in the face of popular Iraqi support for a new government. Iraq is always going to be problematic, for the same reasons Israel is problematic - they're surrounded by hostile groups to whom democratic rule is anathema - and they are going to have to keep a powerful army, but it will be (if this works) an outward-looking one, not one (like the rest of the entire region) that guards against its own.

In the absence of SH's threats, and in the absence of his mass murdering, and in the presence of an Iraqi citizenry that seems to want this, I'm willing to call the glass half full.

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

Apologize if someone else made that point, but it took you very few posts indeed to move from a discussion of whether we're likely to see the birth of a functional democracy in Iraq to a discussion of our (lack of) sympathy for the Sunnis who are about to be on the outside of the "democracy" looking in. I agree -- screw the Sunnis -- but once we're having that conversation the important game is already over.

Of course, the Bush Administration, in its munificent wisdom, made this problem much worse by selecting a method of voting that awards representation in proportion to the number of voters who actually show up, unlike the way we do it in this country, in which the number of representives in the House, Senate or Electoral College has nothing to do with the level of voter turnout in a particular jurisdiction or election. If the Sunnis were guaranteed representation in proportion to their share of the population, they could boycott the election and still be represented. So now you have the Administration talking about monkeying with this formula, with a month (less?) to go before the vote. Not surprisingly, other Iraqis object to have the rules tampered with at this late stage. Not surprisingly, few Americans seem to be asking why we are messing in this way with the election procedures of a putatively sovereign country.

Too much choice
 

I agree with you to a certain extent - the projections that allowed for the skipping of the occupancy phase were way too rosy, and represented a huge mistake of prediction (in that no one seemed to think that the SH Iraqi army might just take a powder and then pop up as guerillas) but I don't remember any war that ever stuck to plan, evenin the broad strokes. I wish they had gotten that part right. So, obviously, do the generals who are now quite eager to say "I told him to listen to MEEEE".

And, I think you willingly mischaracterize his armor answer.

Too much choice
 

If, by the way, your goals included military transformation in the general sense, then perhaps you're actually a fan of General Shinseki. He believed in that concept writ large, but some nagging differences remained.

• When Donald H. Rumsfeld swooped down on the Pentagon in 2001 as President Bush's secretary of Defense, Gen. Eric Shinseki must have looked like a natural ally to him. Like Rumsfeld, Shinseki wanted to "transform" the armed services and had announced his plan for changing the Army when he became chief of staff in 1999.
  
  But Shinseki's notion of transformation differed substantially from Rumsfeld's. To the new Defense secretary, transformation meant greater reliance on technology, not troops, to achieve goals; to Shinseki, it meant more intensified training, featuring highly mobile medium-light brigades of mechanized infantry capable of a variety of missions.

In case you're interested in Shinseki's thoughts on what needed/needs to be done differently:

• Since his retirement in June 2003, Shinseki has restricted his public appearances to foreign policy and university audiences. Early this month at Pomona College, he outlined his policy for a post-Cold War Army equipped to deal with a multitude of duties.
  
  Here are some excerpts:
  
  • The Army's job: "During the 1990s, we used the Army for many nontraditional tasks — humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, wildfire control and peacekeeping, among others — but the Army's nonnegotiable contract with the American people is to fight and win wars. We grow our own leadership — thorough troop training is our most vital mission — but we need about 180,000 new people each year, so recruiting is a vital task. For a professional Army, it must not slip."
  
  • The limits of force: "In my time in uniform, the use of force was often not the preferred solution; neither was it necessarily the first option considered…. Once the use of force is sanctioned, there's almost no turning back…. Lethal force involves blunt trauma and surgical strikes, [which] better describe a military planner's range of options than they do the effects produced on the ground…. We can pinpoint targets with total accuracy … as long as they don't move."
  
  • Military occupation: "If your forces are in Baghdad, you own it. And that means you own the water, the electricity, the public buildings — and public order. If the task is to create a secure environment, troops on the ground are needed."
  
  • Multilateralism: "Unilateralism as a stated policy is bad. The U.N. and this country have had our differences, but we need its cooperation and support."
  
  • Crisis management: "I was personally involved … in dealing with explosive crises in East Timor and Bosnia. The U.S. needed to help get Indonesia right and to link whatever happened in Indonesia to a comprehensive long-term strategy for the region. In Bosnia, the effort at peacekeeping took a long time, but after nine years the forces needed there greatly diminished — from 20,000 to 8,500. How long would it take to stabilize Iraq?"
  
  • Threats and complicators: "In the Bush administration's first appraisal of defense needs, reference was made to 'asymmetric threats transcending geography.' Little was said about the kinds of 'complicators' that those of us who lived abroad in the 1990s were watching. These complicators — the best term we could find at the time — included transnational criminal organizations, international narco-trafficking, the surge in terrorist incidents involving Muslim extremists and the suspicion of ongoing proliferation of weapons-of-mass-destruction technology. The nagging question for which the Army had no answers was, 'What happens if the four complicators merge into a larger transnational threat? Whose responsibility will it be to deal with that kind of danger?' "
  
  • Force levels. "We need to have enough forces on the ground to deter and hold crises where they are. You can't fall into the trap of organizing for specific missions and then being unable to perform other missions when the conditions change very quickly — and in places like Kosovo, they can change in 20 minutes. You may find yourself having to go very quickly, intellectually and physically, from what was a peacekeeping mission to fighting a war — and preparing the troops for this [shift]. And with the missions multiplying, you cannot go on fighting a 12-division war with only 10 divisions available."

Were the opinions of the Army planners simply discounted as being unnecessary? No, they simply weren't consulted.

• What puzzled many of us who had listened to Shinseki was the contrast between his emphasis on careful military planning and how shortsighted the administration was in preparing for the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. Before the war, Shinseki's Army planners were not once consulted by Rumsfeld's office. The State Department's planning proposal for postwar Iraq was similarly ignored by the administration.

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

I'm sure many of them do. If only that were enough.