oil and feathers for whistleblowers

Much has been made of the mismanagement and corruption that cripples the Iraqi oil ministry. Before trying to clean up that house, perhaps we should look into cleaning up our own. The below from a NYTimes article on our government's attempt -- or non-attempt-- to get oil companies to pay royalties they owe for drilling on public lands.

Particularly striking were complaints by two auditors in Oklahoma City, Randall Little and Lanis Morris, who said that senior officials had refused to demand $1.5 million in back interest from oil companies caught underpaying, saying that requiring the companies to calculate their own bills would be a hardship. But the officials said the Interior Department could not get its own systems to do the calculations.

Mr. Little told investigators that the oil companies were getting a “free ride” and that “the taxpayers ought to be outraged.” After the auditors filed their lawsuits, Interior officials removed Mr. Little and Mr. Morris from their jobs at the Minerals Management Service and sent them to work below an entry-level technician at the Bureau of Land Management.

And the neocons wanted to hand over the Iraqi oil fields to Big Oil, expecting not a peep of protest from the Iraqi people?

Disgusting is Right

What larks, eh Pip? The Senate resolution to condemn MoveOn for exposing Petraeus as a mouthpiece for the Bush administration. Bush saying that he thought the ad "disgusting," thought the attack on Petraeus "an attack on the military itself." What a surprising response.

The Surge is working my arse. Working to what end? To temporarily displace some corner boys in Baghdad? At the cost of how many American lives, how many hundreds of millions of dollars?

I'm glad MoveOn has moved its focus back on the war. Was myself disgusted by how in the last presidential election the organization backed off criticism of the war, thinking that doing so would help Kerry win. Took the midterms to make them see what should have been obvious two years previously: It's the war, stupid!

There once was a General Petraeus
Who they said would never betray us
But the war that he pimped
Gave Uncle Sam a bad limp
And in general served to dismay us

blackwater blackguards

Apropos the presence of security contractors in Iraq, these two short poems from WWI. First, A. E. Housman's "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries":

These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.

Now, in response, Hugh MacDiarmid's "Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries":

It is a God-damned lie to say that these
Saved, or knew, anything worth any man's pride.
They were professional murderers and they took
Their blood money and impious risks and died.
In spite of all their kind some elements of worth
With difficulty persist here and there on earth.

What are we to make of the privatization of combat? The fact that our government is not sure how many hired guns are running around Iraq, "somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000," none of these subject to Iraqi justice (a tip o' the hat to Paul Bremer) or the Uniform Code of Military Justice. A law unto themselves.

long silence

My long silence in this forum due to depression and disgust. Re: the war, things stand no better today than in March. So much for the Democratic cavalry that came charging over the hill last November.

Could I grow any more weary of hearing politicians say that the problem with the war was mistakes made at its inception? Like saying a gang rape could have gone a lot better if not for the fuck ups at the start. This war has been criminal since its conception. Criminal and stupid.

We continue to fetishize our mighty military. What's the point in repeating that we have the most powerful military in the world if that military is impotent in the face of this kind of insurgency? How many more of our soldiers need to get blown to pieces by IEDs, how many more fall the victims of snipers -- and how many more innocent Iraqi families die at our checkpoints -- before we recognize this impotence?

Iraq is faced with giant problems, but these are obviously not problems the American military can solve. Let's get out of there.