Sign The Petition

Senator Bernie Sanders (Independent, VT) has a proposal to force taxpayer protections in the bailout that has gathered 100,000+ signatures. Add yours:

Dear Secretary Paulson:

As a representative of the Bush Administration, you have proposed a financial bailout program of $700 billion – over $2,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country. We are appalled that your proposal puts the cost of this bailout on average Americans; that it contains no provisions reversing failed deregulatory policies; that it allows executives at these failed institutions to continue to make exorbitant salaries and bonuses, and that your proposal contains no help for average Americans who themselves are facing severe economic hardships.

While the Administration has quickly rallied to help Wall Street, it has ignored the needs of the declining middle class. Since President Bush has been in office the wealthiest people in this country have made out like bandits and have not had it so good since the 1920s. The top one-tenth of one percent now earn more income than the bottom 50 percent of Americans and the top one percent own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. Incredibly, the richest 400 people in our country saw their wealth increase by $670 billion during the Bush presidency.

Having mismanaged the economy for 8 years while continually insisting that, “The fundamentals of our economy are strong,” the Bush Administration, six weeks before an election, wants the middle class of this country to bail out Wall Street to the tune of one trillion dollars. Meanwhile the wealthiest people, those who have benefited most from Bush’s policies and are in the best position to pay, are being asked for no sacrifice at all. This is absurd.

Any plan to clean up the mess on Wall Street must:

1. Ensure that middle income and working families are not the ones who are paying for this bailout by
Imposing a five-year, 10 percent surtax on income over $1 million a year for couples and over $500,000 for single taxpayers. That would raise more than $300 billion in revenue over five years;

Ensuring that assets purchased from banks are realistically discounted so companies are not rewarded for their risky behavior and taxpayers can recover the amount they paid for them; and

Requiring that taxpayers receive equity stakes in the bailed-out companies so that the taxpayers’ assumption of risk is rewarded when companies’ stock goes up.

Taken together these three provisions will substantially reduce the likelihood that this bailout will end up on the backs of average American taxpayers.

2. Include a major economic recovery package which puts Americans to work at decent wages. Among many other areas, we can create millions of jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and moving our country from fossil fuels to energy efficiency and sustainable energy. Further, we must protect our must vulnerable families from the very difficult times they are experiencing.

3. Repeal the disastrous de-regulatory legislation that facilitated this crisis.

4. End the danger posed by companies that are “too big too fail,” that is, companies whose failure would cause systemic harm to the U.S. economy. If a company is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. We need to determine which companies fall in this category and then break them up.
In closing, we believe it is appropriate to act quickly to address any systemic danger to our economy. But that does not mean that we need to give a blank check to the financial sector.

Sincerely,

Senator Bernie Sanders

Citizen Co-Signers

(from Bruce at the River Blog)

Rudyard Kipling, Back In Fashion

Now it is not good for the Christian's health to hustle the Aryan brown,
For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles and he weareth the Christian down;
At the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph clear: "A Fool lies here, who tried to hustle the East."

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, and Hindu was his first language. He uses "Aryan" in its correct sense above, meaning someone of Indo-Iranian ethnicity. Kipling had direct experience in the Eastern mind, and considered himself an Anglo-Indian. Along with his poetry, verse, and his fore-shadowings of science fiction, much of his writing concerned the East, including many of its fairly tales. Kipling lived a sort of dissident life in Brattleboro, Vermont until 1896. Able to see colonialism from a number of angles, he both disturbed and mollified his contemporaries with his knowing, somewhat veiled satirical stilettos, and his prophetic publications on that subject.

For example, many in England were heartened by "The White Man's Burden," and widely used it for decades as justification for continuing occupations. The phrase entered common parlance as a real duty, to improve the lot of the benighted heathens with the application of Christian faith, military discipline, and economic reforms. In reality, Kipling's 1899 poem was written in a voice of purely caustic satire. Its subtitle is The United States and the Philippine Islands, and it can only be read as a warning to America upon its invasion of the Phillipines, as it can be seen embarking on a road of difficulties and disillusions, traveled by Britain long before. The poem is worth reading in full, but here are two selected verses:

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.

It comes as a surprise to me that literary authorities argued, and still maintain, that the poem should be read as a ringing endorsement of imperialism. Kipling's other works of the time, critical of imperialism and sympathetic to the poor soldiers sent to enforce it, do not support that supposition. Maybe the Main Stream Media has deeper roots than we know. The painting above, 'The Gallery of H.M.S. Calcutta (Portsmouth) is by James Tissot, an artist whose subject matter was often the leisure and grandeur of a prior country's Victorian Age.

Fort Apaches On The Tigris

Since its announcement, I've been harping on the disastrous end the "Surge" will come to in Iraq. Its strategy hinges on creating secure gated communities, and is a close facsimilie of the more torture-driven, less firepower-dependent French/German "quadrillage" methods of counterinsurgency which served as models for our good General Petraeus.

Here comes the harp again. Hard as it is to believe, the Pentagon's execution of strategy in Iraq is getting worse. First, Petraeus and others now see "the Surge" extending into '08. Next, the whole logic underlying quadrillage as a "pacification network" has already failed, because the US is being forced to construct heavier blast shields and to up-gun garrisons in order to keep them alive. If pacification were making the desired headway, taking that step probably wouldn't be necessary. Garrisons are under frequent attack, even in Baghdad; one fort was breached recently by a truck bomb which reportedly killed 9 and seriously wounded 20 soldiers:

"There's two threats to the combat outpost . . . a huge truck bomb, and indirect fire," Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, who handles day-to-day military operations in Iraq, said in an interview at his Baghdad headquarters last week. In response, he said, U.S. troops are building more walls to shield themselves from mortars and rockets, while trying to track down insurgents firing on them.

To counter truck bombs, military engineers are gauging the structural soundness of the outposts and making sure they are well removed from traffic, Odierno said. Antitank weapons such as the bazooka-like AT-4 are also now required for soldiers on guard.

The Iraq Command is botching the fortification job itself and, disturbingly, is missing the greatest threat they face. A third threat: direct ground assault. Pat Lang over at Sic Semper Tyrannis points the finger of experience at General Odierno, noting that as forts go, they're generally improvisational, poorly located, and insecure; if the insurgents used truck bombs to breach a fort wall or gate, they could mount a ground assault and overwhelm the garrison. If they did this to a number of forts at once, it would be a nightmare.

Pat's point about breaching the garrison walls is true, and it's sad the general in question seems to have missed that possibility, but ground assaults may not even be needed to reach disaster status. The garrisons could simply be harrassed to death, for a number of reasons.

First, installing mini-garrisons into hostile neighborhoods with so few pacification carrots serves to negate the overwhelming advantage in firepower, and the considerable advantage in manoevre, factors our ground forces and tactics are designed around. Their fields of fire are reduced to the same as that of their enemies, a few hundred yards at best. It's M-16s vs. AK-47s all over again. Not good.

Second, putting professional, highly trained career soldiers into these forts as cannon fodder is nothing short of criminal. They're not even useful for "bait-and-destroy" missions, rather they encourage dispersion and steady forms of nuisance resistance. They are static targets waiting to either run out the clock, get wasted, get rescued, or get extracted. Or, as will be common, to go twitching mad. Can you imagine what it's like being stuck in one of these forts for months on end?

As an insurgent, all you'd have to do to generate wasteful responses from the garrisons and their rescue/reinforcement/air cover elements would be to get a few friends with light weapons, some surgical tubing, a dog food bowl, and catapult some molotov cocktails at it most every night. Or mortars. Or pot-shots. A recreational RPG. Or the occasional suicide bomber. The populace will back these nuisances up in the daytime with unfriendly stares, and anybody who in the gated community who lifts a finger to help the Americans would very quickly be taught not to.

By pressuring this style of occupation steadily, just heavily enough to keep forcing responses out of it, an adversary can provoke the whole logistical structure to grind itself to bits while it runs around trying to defend all the damned forts. An insurgency could win with comparatively little cost in casualties or equipment, knowing that the position of the garrisons are untenable.

The Iraqi insurgency need not scale up into squad or platoon-level concentrations to win by overwhelming specific garrisons in ground assaults. While losing forts like that would be a tremendously visible loss of prestige, the insurgency can also win by keeping its operations on the micro-logistical scale. By focusing on territorial coordination rather than direct ground assaults, they can overwhelm the support structure for the entire fort system. Possibly in the same amount of time. I would guess the probing, steadily escalating approach is what they'll stick with. If necessary, when the support system has tired and there's been plenty of time to probe, map, and measure weaknesses in response, then will come the breaches and the assaults.

Either way, the sheer asymmetry of expenditure by the two sides and results obtained for them eventually guarantees total US force exhaustion. And it's bigger than just Iraq. When you declare war on everybody, you've got to worry about everybody, and this is the role calling for a "Global War on Terror" has trapped our armed forces into. As for Surges, gated communities, quadrillage or GWOT, once we get kicked out of one fort, of one region, or one country, we've demonstrated our own defeat. Either some of those insecure forts must be abandoned, or they'll fall.

How The Iraq Occupation Will End

Quadrillage. It means sectioning, quartering, setting up troops in fortified village posts and in neighborhoods to observe and direct counter-insurgency operations. The idea is to have Gary Cooper holed up in the sherrif's office, like he was in 'High Noon.' Only better armed. To keep the Sherriffs from being overwhelmed, it takes a heavy network of intelligence, firepower, quick-reaction cavalry, air and ground asset support. And to provoke its hair-trigger response doesn't take much.

As a way to quell insurgency, quadrillage's main disadvantage is that its outposts are static and in the very midst of the populations they aim to control. In Iraq, our soldiers lack the vital advantage of intelligence, so as sectioneurs they are constantly observed for weakness. Every coming and going is noted. Every order for food is seen. Near Baqubah yesterday, an outpost was rammed by a suicide bomber driving a truck packed with explosives. The entire garrison of US troops was blown up, with a reported 9 dead and 20 wounded. The same Baqubah which T.E. Lawrence stormed with a bunch of Arabs on camels to sound the death knell of the Ottoman Empire.

Iraq is like the movie 'Fort Apache, The Bronx,' only worse: unless there is a political path to a viable treaty, quadrillage does nothing but turn troopers into vulnerable targets. Meanwhile, the only path to treaty BushCo is pushing is "Stay the Course." This is not a course. It's an exercise in futility. It places our troops within reach of angry people who regrettably but understandably want to kill them. And until we pull back, that's what's going to happen. If our troops are exposed, they will be attacked, and by spreading them around into smaller, less defendable forts, quadrillage makes them more vulnerable.

Quadrillagerie a la Arabienne, Denouement a la Baghdad

Above is the medieval city of Cordoba, Spain, walled as it was when it still had Moslem rulers. They're building walls around and between various ethnic neighborhoods in Baghdad, and this is the final state of the execution of quadrillage, the historical counter-insurgency practice of walling the women who support the insurgents into camps and gain control over them, so as to strangle the insurgency. It's not looking good for the walls, first for their connotations to the Israeli wall erected in Gaza, but more importantly because Al-Sadr is strongly against them in concept. If Sadr City is walled, Iraq's Sadrist PM Maliki will lose his core support, and he and his lieutenants will be quickly removed from power.

Continued application of force does not work in the Mid-East. Never has. Diligent maintenance of a byzantine network of treaties and developing a stretchy fabric of stability is what has always worked there.

"The political divisions which prevail in the Near East today should not blind us to the underlying cultural and psychological unity of the region as a whole....the far-reaching interdependence of the local states and territories imposes on the interested foreign power the obligation to approach the entire region as a unit...any foreign policy in the Near East which is not a comprehensive regional policy is an invitation to bankruptcy...."
E.A. Speiser, The United States and the Near East (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1947), pp. 226-227.

Professor Efraim Speiser was professor of semitics at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously he served as Director of the American School of Oriental Research in Baghdad and was an authority on Mesopotamia, and was Head of the Near East Section of the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS during WWII. (Book quote courtesy of Professor Kiracofe.)

As Kiracofe points out, "Americans have been in the region since the early 19th century and there are no excuses at all for current US policy. Most certainly not the excuse 'If we had only known...' We did know, we do know."

"Et Tu, Reality?"

If the leaders, command structures and minions of The Greatest Country Ever would look up to stop pleasuring themselves for a minute, they might realize the appealing little light bobbing and playing down in the dark trench we're is connected to a gaping, tooth-filled maw which is about to tear us in half. Not being a watcher of the Sunday Talking Head shows, I don't know what kind of coverage or treatement this story will get. But it's a Big One. After a long period of silence and official acquiescence, Iraq's leading Shia cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr has called for Iraqi unity, and for attacks, against US forces there. The Mahdi Army and various other groups Al-Sadr has influence over will attempt to de-escalate their reprisal and ethnic cleansing efforts against Sunni minorities and turn their considerable energies to making life harder for American troops. His clarion call includes the Iraqi Army and Police:

"You, the Iraqi army and police forces, don't walk alongside the occupiers, because they are your archenemy," the statement said. Its authenticity could not be verified.

In the statement, al-Sadr -- who commands an enormous following among Iraq's majority Shiites and has close allies in the Shiite-dominated government -- also encouraged his followers to attack only American forces, not fellow Iraqis.

"God has ordered you to be patient in front of your enemy, and unify your efforts against them -- not against the sons of Iraq," the statement said, in an apparent reference to clashes between al-Sadr's Mahdi Army fighters and Iraqi troops in Diwaniyah, south of Baghdad. "You have to protect and build Iraq."

Al-Sadr is the single most powerful man in Iraq, and the erstwhile Prime Minister (Al-Maliki) is his follower by blood, by loyalty, and by inclination. The deal they cut between themselves was to use American forces to perform the finishing touches on Sunni ethnic cleansing in and around selected areas of Baghdad. Al-Sadr agreed to stand down and shut up while it kicked into high gear, which he did. I've spared regular readers of this blog the first-person reports of what this project felt or looked like on the ground, but there was nothing clean and little ethnic about what went on. It was grisly, and the fact US troops were forced to participate in it is, mark my words, a disgrace which will come back to haunt the families, cities, and streets of this country all too soon. The other shoe of the unholy Shia deal engendered by an illegal, craven US occupation is now dropping. Moqtada Al-Sadr is stepping forward to make Nouri Al-Maliki his Pinnochio and take power through him.

The best thing that can be done about this statement is to get out some rose-colored beta-blockers and say "its authenticity could not be verified," which the article endeavors to do. Let the pink scales fall from your eyes, clean the wax out of your ears. The statement carries Al-Sadr's official seal, and really, this development is not exactly coming out of left field. Military analysts capable of preserving a little objectivity, including the amateur Yours Truly here (one thing in my favor, nobody's paying me nuthin'), have said from its outset that "the Surge" offensive would probably generate a few months of relative quiet by displacing insurgents into safe areas. It also coincided with Winter in Iraq, with cold weather naturally helping to keep Sunni guerilla activity levels down. Now Spring has arrived, and Al-Sadr has sprung an attack on the Surge's rear.

It doesn't take too much reading between the lines of the quotes above to figure out that Al-Sadr is saying the Iraqi Army should actively support Shia insurgents against US forces. In fact, it takes none at all. He's saying it loud and clear. He's telling them to take their guns and training and turn them on US troops. Who trained these troops? Who paid them? Who gave them guns? Money withheld from me and mine called "Social Security" did. Bonds issued in our names called "Treasuries" did. Collective delusions called "Katie Couric" did.

Monumental stupidity is easy to deal with, because, well, it's monumental. In one spot. You can go around it, if you choose. You can pull a monument down. The kind of stupidity America has erected and has now institutionalized is infinitely worse. It's everywhere. It's as pervasive as a cloud of roiling poison gas which stupefies everything in its toxic range, and tries to kill everything outside it. It makes wastelands, and calls them democracies. How long can the filters in our gasmasks last? How long before our despotic leaders are forced to turn and say, "Et tu, Reality?"

Predicting The Anti-Surge

Quadrillage, the counterinsurgency theory subscribed to by commanding General David Petraeus in Iraq and which puts the purge into "the Surge," relies on a system of outposts, each manned by a small core of US troops backed by a larger domestic garrison. If an outpost comes under attack in a vicinity which has been previously "purged" of insurgents, cavalry from the a Regional HQ will ride in to relieve the fort, the insurgents will be killed or driven off, and the inhabitants of the sector will be punished and re-pacified as appropriate.

If the population isn't sufficiently pacified in the first place, however, pacified enough to deny tacit or active support to insurgents, and the insurgents manage to survive or elude the house-to-house sweeps, you've got trouble in Quadrillage. All available data indicate that's precisely what has happened. The number and intensity of Sunni/al-Qaeda attacks has started to increase again, and many of them have benefitted from either amazing luck or startlingly good intelligence. 9,000 unemployed Sunni males reach combat age in Iraq every month, and the insurgency does not suffer from a lack of fresh manpower, weapons, or funding. Even while the Mahdi army, SCIRI, and Dawa stand down to observe the surge, the violence has increased.

Here comes the denouement. The Sunni insurgency will scout Coalition outposts and catalogue how to attack each and in what sequence; they will previously ensure that, at the appropriate time, a domestic garrison either provides lackluster support or doesn't show up at all; they will then attack the squad in the outpost and either overwhelm them or melt away, and then focus on their primary objective: ambush the column sent to relieve the outpost. This will probably occur at night and the story will likely go unreported in the US media, which will only see one part of the operation, not the coordinated whole. Initially it'll just look like unconnected chaos. Then when garrisons are overrun, only the delusional die-hards will deny what's going on.

Over time, all the insurgents have to do to win militarily is to keep pressure upon the outposts and provoke relief responses over and over. The responses alone will grind the Coalition forces down through operational pressure (i.e., without heavy casualties) because 2 or 3 guys in a pickup truck can tie down a platoon-sized force, plus maybe a helicopter or two, for most of a night. They can use dispersion as a force multiplier and equalizer. Eventually, the sheer asymmetry of cost effects will exhaust the occupying force, and the insurgency will graduate into a guerilla status, able to win back sectors and return in daylight to dish out reprisals on collaborateurs. This is how Quadrillage failed in Vietnam and Algiers, and this is how it will fail in Iraq. If Native Americans had cell-phones, they probably could've defeated it, too. Just like before, the pros will keep saying, "Well, we were never defeated militarily."

The Achilles heel of Quadrillage is that armies truly stink at pacifying populations. In fact it's difficult to imagine a task armed fighting forces are less suited to; it's like asking child molesters to run a kindergarten. Meanwhile, each mini-fort is static and exposed, and unless the population it covers is truly pacified, they will betray it.

Who amongst us thinks it's not too late to pacify the Sunnis in Iraq?

Colonel Ted Westhusing's Suicide Note

Ted Westhusing graduated 3rd in the 1983 West Point class. As a senior, he served as honor captain for the Academy, and later taught at the school. He went to Iraq in 2005 and served under General David Petraeus, now Commanding General, Ground Forces, Iraq, whom he addresses in his suicide note. Westhusing, a deeply religious man known for his honor, ran counter-terrorism efforts and coordinated Army operations with US Investigation Services (USIS), a mercenary firm owned by the Carlyle Group. He became despondent over apparent USIS corruption and the refusal of his commanders to do anything about it:

Thanks for telling me it was a good day until I briefed you. [Redacted name] -- You are only interested in your career and provide no support to your staff -- no msn [mission] support and you don't care. I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human right abuses and liars. I am sullied -- no more. I didn't volunteer to support corrupt, money grubbing contractors, nor work for commanders only interested in themselves. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored. I trust no Iraqi. I cannot live this way. All my love to my family, my wife and my precious children. I love you and trust you only. Death before being dishonored any more. Trust is essential -- I don't know who trust anymore. [sic] Why serve when you cannot accomplish the mission, when you no longer believe in the cause, when your every effort and breath to succeed meets with lies, lack of support, and selfishness? No more. Reevaluate yourselves, cdrs [commanders]. You are not what you think you are and I know it.

COL Ted Westhusing

Life needs trust. Trust is no more for me here in Iraq.

A feature article containing the above note and referencing other files from the Army's investigation into Westhusing's death ran in the Texas Observer. He was an honor captain to the last, and it's difficult to imagine a more damning indictment.

Ann Coulter Visits Saigon

Bear in mind, I am not advocating that anyone kill or otherwise do violence to Ann Coulter, the kind of karma she has accumulated for herself does invite blowback. Jesus Del Norte had this pic up on Church and Empire, and the masterful juxtaposition of "ironography" appealed to me. Blowback of the media kind, art in the Photoshop Age.

Pentagon Announces New COIN Weapons Program

Having cancelled its two-decade old $29 Billion Comanche helicopter development program, the Army announced a revolutionary design shift in accord with its need for rapid-response, terrain-appropriate weapons systems optimized for counter-insurgency operations. One of the first weapons slated for prototyping and development is the LOADD-3, Light Operational Active Deployment Designate, better known as a "TransDonk," or weaponized donkey. Litton, General Dynamics, and Boeing are already involved in the development process and are expected to formally submit early prototypes for testing.

The potential for operational advantages provided by the new animals is high, as they are pre-armed with an intelligent avoidance system and a generally superior field profile over other options, as stated in the Counter-Insurgency Field Manual FM 3-05.213:

Mules are intelligent and possess a strong sense of self-preservation. A packer cannot make a mule do something if the mule thinks it will get hurt, no matter how much persuasion is used…. many people confuse this trait with stubbornness. ... Elephants are considered an endangered species and as such should not be used by U.S. military personnel… Elephants are not the easygoing, kind, loving creatures that people believe them to be. They are, of course, not evil either.

"With the proper genetic modifications and enhanced tractile prosthethics, we foresee a unit able to carry at least 175 lbs. over 20-25 miles of rough terrain per day, coming on line sometime before 2012," a Boeing spokesman said. While declining to discuss specific estimates or the new weapon's more classified performance capabilities, the Pentagon is hoping to keep procurement costs below $2.5 million per unit.

Mythbusting, Pt. VI: The Urge To Surge

Whom the Gods would destroy
They first make mad.
Euripides, ca. 440 BC

The White House is desperate enough to employ ignorant, pie-in-the-sky think tank pukes to go around the Pentagon in order to seek politically palatable options, and it is once again violating the very fundamentals of sound military operational planning by advocating a "surge" in occupation troop levels.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff apparently resent having their advice ignored, and are publicly NOT on board with the think-tankers' hare-brained scheme to pacify Baghdad. The Chiefs of Staff have stated the obvious points, i.e., the insurgents will simply go make trouble elsewhere, because that's what insurgents do, and that sending in another 30,000 combat personnel will definitively break the army. They didn't mention that the plan to disarm and disband the Mahdi Army (the 50,000-strong militia in Sadr City) might hit a few snags, such as heavy casualties in house-to-house fighting, a general uprising in Baghdad, a truce of co-belligerent convenience between the Sunni insurgency and the Shia Iraqi defense forces currently waging a civil war, and probably a direct assault on the Green Zone.

The Troop Surge Plan will make even more Coalition troops more vulnerable. It's downright crazy. Above left is the map of the US military bases along the Iraqi road networks as of 3-4 months ago. The 7 major supply depots are circled in black. Look at the base in the southeast just over the Kuwaiti border and the next depot just south of Baghdad. That's a long way between major bases, over 200 kilometers, and there are only two major routes connecting Baghdad to Kuwait. Most supplies are trucked in not by the military, but by private military contractors. Any significant action against Al Sadr's forces in Baghdad will result in those supply lines being cut, re-opened, and re-cut, and the battle will quickly devolve from "disarming terrorists to secure Baghdad" to a desperate fight to preserve the US army's carotid artories carrying its life's blood into the heart of Iraq. Oh, and disarming the Shia militias puts the permanent kibosh on the Death Squad Option (translation: attaching US advisors to Shia units which then seize and murder suspected Sunni insurgents) currently being followed as the path to Iraqi sovereignty.

Halliburton and KBR, the army's main suppliers, do not have significant facilities in Turkey; their supplies come by sea into Kuwait, and are carried north from there. Neither private companies nor the Army are ready to conduct supply from the opposite direction. Recently an entire convoy was lost when "men wearing Iraqi Defence Forces uniforms" put up a roadblock on the road northwest of Kuwait and seized drivers and trucks. It was that simple. If the Shia majority determines to get rid of US forces in Iraq, they have the ability to do so, and so far they have stopped short of active resistance, preferring to use our troops as tools to settle old grievances with the Sunnis. Far from securing anything, the urge to surge will precipitate a multi-level disaster and put an end to Shia cooperation. To put it mildly, control over the Southeast Shia rump of Iraq would be lost in short order. We'll see how incoming Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, an old Washington hand, referees this debate, or if he can bring some measure of sanity to the rats running this shit-house. Right now no one seems capable of dealing with a raging, delusional Rat King; at stake is the choice between a stinging defeat in Iraq and a decisive defeat in the world. Good luck, Bob.