February 2005 Archives

Sometimes I scare myself by reading articles like this:

http://smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=20032&mode=nested&order=0

don't read if easily persuaded or frightened....

West Point grad. US Army Colonel. PhD at Princeton. Prof at Boston
University. New book out.

"...we see that it is not fair to say that the Republican Party is the
party of militarists, or hawks, and the Democratic Party is the party of
doves. On the contrary, certainly by the time you get to Operation
Desert Storm and its apparent... success, a consensus has been formed in
mainstream politics — by Republicans and Democrats that force works, at
least force wielded by our high-tech professional military. Look at the
two terms of Bill Clinton in the 1990s. He employed U.S. military power
really promiscuously, in all kinds of circumstances for all kinds of
purposes, not necessarily effectively. He was very much an
interventionist president, in a military sense. The criticism from the
Republicans for the most part was not that Clinton was intervening too
frequently, but that he needed to do so with greater verve."

...again, the Republicans and Democrats and the establishment media,
which very quickly embraced this — almost immediately concluded that the
necessary response was a global war, which by common consent is going to
last decades, generations. They all think there are no plausible
alternatives. Let me be clear: it could be that other alternatives were
defective in some way, but my point is, we never really looked for them."


Interview: http://www.bu.edu/alumni/bostonia/2004/winter/war/

Soldiers who got hit bad in Vietnam had a 30% chance of dying; in Iraq
it's less than 13%. (another viewpoint : consider that for every death
in Iraq there are another 8 soldiers with an amputation or severe wound
coming home). But it's ironic that with all the medical advances
allowing soldiers to live through their wounds, the pain management is
still pretty much simply morphine. But the Army's chief
aanesthesiologist is working on adding nerve blocks to the arsenal.
More : http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/pain.html

I don't know anything about what's it like to get shot. But I can
certainly tell you from breaking my leg that the difference between
morphine and a nerve block is like night and day. You can get a LOT of
morphine and still be totally miserable. Combat nerve blocks might even
increase survivability even more (preventing deaths from shock) and
possibly alleviate future chronic pain in the survivors as well.

http://slate.com/id/2113055/

"Sounds terrific. Except what Bush proposed is actually the exact
opposite: His plan would allow the current generation of retirees and
near-retirees to keep the current system, the one where they receive far
more money than they put in during their lifetimes, while requiring the
next generation to subsist on their own earnings for retirement. This
isn't the equivalent of parents saving for Johnny's 529 plan. This is
Mom and Dad asking Johnny to invest part of his allowance so that they
won't have to bother with paying for college. You could call Bush's idea
the Screw Your Grandchildren Act."