Bloggering!

This should be interesting! My webmaster Donn Ha has moved my News page onto Blogger.com. This means you can finally leave comments when I'm especially brilliant (or when I'm not). I won't have to check the calendar to put dates on my posts. Also, I don't have to use Dreamweaver to add posts: I can logon to blogger from anywhere and start ranting.

Today's rant? Using the military as police. There's a new proposal to use the stretched thin National Guard (soldiers) to police the Mexican border. This follows last year's idea of using the NG to replace FEMA. And the continuing police duties assigned to the regular miltary in Iraq.

Being a soldier or a cop is a tough job. But they're very different jobs, and in the US they get very different training. Put simply, in the military they train you to kill people. Police are trained to not kill people.

Soldiers aren't mindless killers. But they're there to quickly destroy an enemy force with minimal friendly and civilian casualties. In the words of our great military philosopher William Tecumseh Sherman, "War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over." So it's okay to fire tank rounds at an apartment building machine gun nest if it will take out the enemy army sooner. And we can send our own troops back to the US and leave them foreigners alive and in peace.

Cop training is very different. They are ALWAYS supposed to use minimum force. Cops are discouraged from using their guns (and not just because of the paperwork!). And even a justified killing is seen as a failure. Cops are never supposed to kill someone because it's quicker. Cops never fire tank rounds or call in air strikes.

This division of labor isn't true in all countries. In Britain the military spent decades policing Northern Ireland and their training shows it. Canada has a peacekeeping training academy that works closely with their military.

In the US the Pentagon has always tried to avoid mixing these jobs, and wise statesmen listened. But today's politicians are too cheap to hire more border patrol police and want to send in soldiers. Hopefully this idea will be killed quickly and leave us in peace.

Mea Culpa

Way back in March I read a blog by a girl in Iraq. In fluent English, 'River' writes a cynical and often funny diary about life in Baghdad. She now believes the the US wants Iraq divided and warring. I wrote a polite and supportive email to her saying that we in the US are horrified by the chaos there. I dismissed the idea that Bush wanted a civil war.

So you can imagine my dismay when I read this in the Wall Street Journal:

"A behind-the-scenes battle among legislators has made a crucial distinction between the new reconstruction money and that already spent: The new funds won't be overseen by the government watchdog charged with curbing the mismanagement that has overshadowed the reconstruction.

The administration's main vehicle for rebuilding Iraq has, in the past, been designated "Relief and Reconstruction" funds, which by law are overseen by a special inspector general, Stuart Bowen. The new money going toward similar reconstruction goals will be classified as coming from "Foreign Operations" accounts....By law, Mr. Bowen can oversee only relief and reconstruction funds. Because the new money technically comes from a different source, Mr. Bowen, who has 55 auditors on the ground in Iraq, will be barred from overseeing how the new money is spent. Instead, the funds will be overseen by the State Department's inspector general office, which has a much smaller staff in Iraq and warned in testimony to Congress in the fall that it lacked the resources to continue oversight activities in Iraq...

Mr. Bowen's criticism of how the rebuilding funds have been managed has put him at odds with some administration officials, who have waged several behind-the-scenes attempts to close down his office."

Mr. Bowen was named to this position by Bush in January 2004.

It's now more important to efficiently funnel money and projects to political donors than to rebuild Iraq. The price of this corruption will be more war in Iraq, and the lives of innocent Iraqis and US soldiers. Sorry to have doubted you, River. Mea culpa.