Potential, Possible Progress
I’m watching Georgia squeak by Georgia Tech in the annual battle, Tennessee having beaten Kentucky in something like the fourth overtime to gain the title game against LSU in the SEC.
I know that matters little to most of you, other than Fermi and Rick and Tennessee Tony; and, it should not, given the exciting developments happening now in the sovereign nation of Iraq. We should be very, very happy about what the Iraqis potentially, possibly, given a strong headwind, might well do. Unnamed sources from the Bush Administration in an article today in The New York Times said some important, anonymous things:
“With American military successes outpacing political gains in Iraq, the Bush administration has lowered its expectation of quickly achieving major steps toward unifying the country, including passage of a long-stymied plan to share oil revenues and holding regional elections.
”Instead, administration officials say they are focusing their immediate efforts on several more limited but achievable goals in the hope of convincing Iraqis, foreign governments and Americans that progress is being made toward the political breakthroughs that the military campaign of the past 10 months was supposed to promote.
"The short-term American targets include passage of a $48 billion Iraqi budget….”
That’s right folks, goals, surges, and all the other nouns we’ve had for the past few years have boiled down to a couple of “targets,” one of which is to get the boys in Baghdad to pass a budget. Imagine that, years and trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives and we may be able to get the boys to pass a budget, only a target, but maybe, maybe if we wish real hard, they’ll pass a budget.
That’s it. Return to shopping and football.
5 comments:
Well... I enjoyed the first half.
AAAaaaarrrrrrgggggg!!!!
LSU got beat out in triple overtime!!
The travesty ... the absolute horror of it all.
[football--unlike war--has clear, achievable objectives. And the body count is more than palatable.]
If you'd have told me three months ago that Missouri would be playing for a shot at the national championship, I never would have believed you.
$48 billion budget? This in a country with a GDP of about $88 billion? Coupled with lots of free market reforms we don't even hear about because news about them has been drowned out by the carnage. How do they get these numbers? Where does the money come from? Why is the dollar falling in value? Shopping and football do, indeed, sound good. The college season that'll be remembered as the one in which being rated No. 1 is just a prediction of a loss.
There are clear objectives in a war. There simply weren't and aren't any in "this" war. If a clear end state had been declared, things might have been a bit different. But...
Post a Comment