THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ, TENTH THREAD.

ican wrote :
"On the contrary, we did successfully force democracy by the barrel of the gun after WWII thanks to MacArthur's and Eisenhower's leadership" .



ican : you might be interested to learn that AFTER WW II the germans were not "forced by the barrel of a gun" to accept democracy .
the germans were ready for democracy again and no guns were pointed at germans to accept democracy once the war had ended - if memory serves me right .
have you read any reliable historical accounts that claim "the barrel of a gun" had to be used to force germans to accept democracy after the war had ended ?
just wondering .
hvg

I did not say democracy spread because of WWII. I said:


You wrote:

Have you forgotten the East German, Hungarian and Polish revolts after WWII. The communists fired lots of shots to stop East Germany, Hungary and Poland from becoming democracies. The communists did not succeed. Granted the USSR dissolved without a shot being fired--not counting Chenobyl's nuclear accident.

Yes, I saw many newsreels showing US, British, and French troops carrying rifles while they patrolled West Germany during their occupation of West Germany after WWII. Were those rifles necessary for restoring order and forming a democracy after WWII? I think so, else why would those troops carry those heavy things around wherever they went.

"we did successfully force democracy by the barrel of the gun after WWII thanks to MacArthur's and Eisenhower's [post war] leadership."



i seem to recall that the black market transactions being carried on between allied soldiers and german citizens did much to further the cause of democracy .
the germans realized that clever trading worked much better than "barrel of the gun" - which the germans had tried unseccessfully during WW II -and eagerly embraced "free trade" .
hbg

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The death of a Texas soldier, announced Sunday by the Pentagon, raised the number of U.S. military deaths in Iraq to at least 3,000 since the war began, according to an Associated Press count.

The grim milestone was crossed on the final day of 2006 and at the end of the deadliest month for the American military in Iraq in the past 12 months. At least 111 U.S. service members were reported to have died in December.

Spc. Dustin R. Donica, 22, of Spring, Texas, was killed Thursday by small arms fire in Baghdad, the Defense Department said. Donica was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 509th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 4th Airborne Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division.

His death was not announced by U.S. military authorities in Baghdad.

NEW YORK With the toll of U.S. deaths in Iraq likely to pass 3,000 before the new year, The Washington Post on Sunday explored the surprisingly obscure subject of female casualties in that war.

The number so far, 62, not only shatters previous marks, but unlike previous conflicts, where most women died as nurses or in other support roles, many of those who had been killed in Iraq were in combat roles.

A Pentagon report on Iraq said in December that the conflict now is more a struggle between Sunni and Shiite armed groups "fighting for religious, political and economic influence," with the insurgency and foreign terrorist campaigns "a backdrop." Sounds to me like the definition of civil war

From mid-August to mid-November, the weekly average number of attacks in the country increased 22 percent from the previous three months. The worst violence was in Baghdad and in the western province of Anbar, long the focus of activity by Sunni insurgents, said a December report.

Though U.S.-led coalition forces remained the target of the majority of attacks, the overwhelming majority of casualties were suffered by Iraqis, the report said.

CONTINUED

5

KNOWING THE ENEMY
by GEORGE PACKER
Can social scientists redefine the "war on terror"?
New Yorker
Issue of 2006-12-18
Posted 2006-12-11

By 2004, the military desperately needed coöperation. McFate saw Americans in Iraq make one strategic mistake after another because they didn't understand the nature of Iraqi society. In an article in Joint Force Quarterly, she wrote, "Once the Sunni Ba'thists lost their prestigious jobs, were humiliated in the conflict, and got frozen out through de-Ba'thification, the tribal network became the backbone of the insurgency. The tribal insurgency is a direct result of our misunderstanding the Iraqi culture." In the course of eighteen months of interviews with returning soldiers, she was told by one Marine Corps officer, "My marines were almost wholly uninterested in interacting with the local population. Our primary mission was the security of Camp Falluja. We relieved soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division, and their assessment was that every local was participating or complicit with the enemy. This view was quickly adopted by my unit and framed all of our actions (and reactions)." Another marine told McFate that his unit had lost the battle to influence public opinion because it used the wrong approach to communication: "We were focussed on broadcast media and metrics. But this had no impact because Iraqis spread information through rumor. We should have been visiting their coffee shops."

The result of efforts like McFate's is a new project with the quintessential Pentagon name Cultural Operations Research Human Terrain. It began in the form of a "ruggedized" laptop computer, loaded with data from social-science research conducted in Iraq--such as, McFate said, "an analysis of the eighty-eight tribes and subtribes in a particular province." Now the project is recruiting social scientists around the country to join five-person "human terrain" teams that would go to Iraq and Afghanistan with combat brigades and serve as cultural advisers on six-to-nine-month tours. Pilot teams are planning to leave next spring.

Steve Fondacaro, a retired Army colonel who for a year commanded the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Task Force in Iraq, is in charge of the Human Terrain project. Fondacaro sees the war in the same terms as Kilcullen. "The new element of power that has emerged in the last thirty to forty years and has subsumed the rest is information," he said. "A revolution happened without us knowing or paying attention. Perception truly now is reality, and our enemies know it. We have to fight on the information battlefield." I asked him what the government should have done, say, in the case of revelations of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison. "You're talking to a radical here," Fondacaro said. "Immediately be the first one to tell the story. Don't let anyone else do it. That carries so much strategic weight." He added, "Iraqis are not shocked by torture. It would have impressed them if we had exposed it, punished it, rectified it." But senior military leadership, he said, remains closed to this kind of thinking. He is turning for help to academics--to "social scientists who want to educate me," he said. So far, though, Fondacaro has hired just one anthropologist. When I spoke to her by telephone, she admitted that the assignment comes with huge ethical risks. "I do not want to get anybody killed," she said. Some of her colleagues are curious, she said; others are critical. "I end up getting shunned at cocktail parties," she said. "I see there could be misuse. But I just can't stand to sit back and watch these mistakes happen over and over as people get killed, and do nothing."

At the counterinsurgency conference in Washington, the tone among the uniformed officers, civilian officials, and various experts was urgent, almost desperate. James Kunder, a former marine and the acting deputy of the U.S. Agency for International Development, pointed out that in Iraq and Afghanistan "the civilian agencies have received 1.4 per cent of the total money," whereas classical counterinsurgency doctrine says that eighty per cent of the effort should be nonmilitary. During Vietnam, his agency had fifteen thousand employees; it now has two thousand. After the end of the Cold War, foreign-service and aid budgets were sharply cut. "Size matters," Kunder said, noting that throughout the civilian agencies there are shortages of money and personnel. To staff the embassy in Baghdad, the State Department has had to steal officers from other embassies, and the government can't even fill the provincial reconstruction teams it has tried to set up in Iraq and Afghanistan. While correcting these shortages could not have prevented the deepening disaster in Iraq, they betray the government's priorities.

In early 2004, as Iraq was beginning to unravel, Senator Richard Lugar, the Indiana Republican who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Senator Joseph Biden, the Delaware Democrat, introduced legislation for a nation-building office, under the aegis of the State Department. The office would be able to tap into contingency funds and would allow cabinet-department officials, along with congressional staff people and civilian experts, to carry out overseas operations to help stabilize and rebuild failed states and societies shattered by war--to do it deliberately and well rather than in the ad-hoc fashion that has characterized interventions from Somalia and Kosovo to Iraq. Lugar envisioned both an active-duty contingent and a reserve corps.

The bill's biggest supporter was the military, which frequently finds itself forced to do tasks overseas for which civilians are better prepared, such as training police or rebuilding sewers. But Colin Powell, then the Secretary of State, and other Administration officials refused to give it strong backing. Then, in the summer of 2004, the Administration reversed course by announcing the creation, in the State Department, of the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization; the office was given the imprimatur of National Security Presidential Directive 44. At the September conference in Washington, Kilcullen held up the office as a model for how to bring civilians into counterinsurgency: "True enough, the words 'insurgency,' 'insurgent,' and 'counterinsurgency' do not appear in N.S.P.D. 44, but it clearly envisages the need to deploy integrated whole-of-government capabilities in hostile environments."

But the new office was virtually orphaned at birth. Congress provided only seven million of the hundred million dollars requested by the Administration, which never made the office a top Presidential priority. The State Department has contributed fifteen officials who can manage overseas operations, but other agencies have offered nothing. The office thus has no ability to coördinate operations, such as mobilizing police trainers, even as Iraq and Afghanistan deteriorate and new emergencies loom in places like Darfur and Pakistan. It has become insiders' favorite example of bureaucratic inertia in the face of glaring need.

Frederick Barton, an expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, considers failures like these to be a prime cause of American setbacks in fighting global jihadism. "Hard power is not the way we're going to make an impression," he told me, and he cited Pakistan, where a huge population, rising militancy, nuclear weapons, and the remnants of Al Qaeda's leadership create a combustible mix. According to Barton's figures, since 2002 America has spent more than six billion dollars on buttressing the Pakistani military, and probably a similar amount on intelligence (the number is kept secret). Yet it has spent less than a billion dollars on aid for education and economic development, in a country where Islamist madrassas and joblessness contribute to the radicalization of young people. On a recent visit to Nigeria, Barton heard that American propaganda efforts are being outclassed by those of the Iranians and the Saudis. "What would Pepsi-Cola or Disney do?" he asked. "We're not thinking creatively, expansively. We are sclerotic, bureaucratic, lumbering--you can see the U.S. coming from miles away."

If, as Kilcullen says, the global counterinsurgency is primarily an information war, one place where American strategy should be executed is the State Department office of Karen Hughes, the Under-Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Hughes is a longtime Bush adviser from Texas. One of her first missions, in September, 2005, took her to the Middle East, where her efforts to speak with Muslim women as fellow-"moms" and religious believers received poor reviews. Last year, she sent out a memo to American embassies urging diplomats to make themselves widely available to the local press, but she also warned them against saying anything that might seem to deviate from Administration policy. The choice of a high-level political operative to run the government's global-outreach effort suggests that the Bush Administration sees public diplomacy the way it sees campaigning, with the same emphasis on top-down message discipline. "It has this fixation with strategic communications--whatever that is," an expert in public diplomacy with close ties to the State Department told me. "It's just hokum. When you do strategic communications, it fails, because nothing gets out." She cited a news report that the Voice of America wanted to produce on American-funded AIDS programs in Africa. The V.O.A. was told by a government official that the Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coördinator would have to give its approval before anything could be broadcast. (The decision was later overruled.) "We're spending billions of dollars on AIDS," the expert said--an effort that could generate considerable gratitude in African countries with substantial Muslim populations, such as Somalia and Nigeria. "But no one in Africa has a clue."


MORE TO COME

CONTINUED

6

KNOWING THE ENEMY
by GEORGE PACKER
Can social scientists redefine the "war on terror"?
New Yorker
Issue of 2006-12-18
Posted 2006-12-11

After the Cold War, the government closed down the United States Information Service and, with it, a number of libraries and cultural centers around the world. Since September 11th, there has been an attempt to revive such public diplomacy, but, with American embassies now barricaded or built far from city centers, only the most dedicated local people will use their resources. To circumvent this problem, the State Department has established what it calls American Corners--rooms or shelves in foreign libraries dedicated to American books and culture. "It's a good idea, but they're small and marginal," the expert said. She recently visited the American Corner in the main library in Kano, Nigeria, a center of Islamic learning. "I had to laugh," she said. "A few Africans asleep at the switch, a couple of computers that weren't working, a video series on George Washington that no one was using." She mentioned one encouraging new example of public diplomacy, funded partly by Henry Crumpton's office: Voice of America news broadcasts will begin airing next February in the language of Somalia, a country of increasing worry to counterterrorism officials. In general, though, there is little organized American effort to rebut the jihadist conspiracy theories that circulate daily among the Muslims living in populous countries such as Indonesia, Pakistan, and Nigeria.

According to the expert, an American diplomat with years of experience identified another obstacle to American outreach. "Let's face it," he told her. "All public diplomacy is on hold till George Bush is out of office."

I once asked David Kilcullen if he thought that America was fundamentally able to deal with the global jihad. Is a society in which few people spend much time overseas or learn a second language, which is impatient with chronic problems, whose vision of war is of huge air and armor battles ended by the signing of articles of surrender, and which tends to assume that everyone is basically alike cut out for this new "long war?

Kilcullen reminded me that there was a precedent for American success in a sustained struggle with a formidable enemy. "If this is the Cold War--if that analogy holds--then right now we're in, like, 1953. This is a long way to go here. It didn't all happen overnight--but it happened." The Cold War, he emphasized, was many wars, constructed in many different models, fought in many different ways: a nuclear standoff between the superpowers, insurgencies in developing countries, a struggle of ideas in Europe. "Our current battle is a new Cold War," Kilcullen said, "but it's not monolithic. You've got to define the enemy as narrowly as you can get away with."

President Bush has used the Cold War as an inspirational analogy almost from the beginning of the war on terror. Last month, in Riga, Latvia, he reminded an audience of the early years of the Cold War, "when freedom's victory was not so obvious or assured." Six decades later, he went on, "freedom in Europe has brought peace to Europe, and freedom has brought the power to bring peace to the broader Middle East." Bush's die-hard supporters compare him to Harry S. Truman, who was reviled in his last years in office but has been vindicated by history as a plainspoken visionary.

An Administration official pointed out that the President's speeches on the war are like the last paragraph of every Churchill speech from the Second World War: a soaring peroration about freedom, civilization, and darkness. But in Churchill's case, the official went on, nineteen pages of analysis, contextualization, and persuasion preceded that final paragraph. A Bush speech gives only the uplift--which suggests that there is no strategy beyond it. Bush's notion of a titanic struggle between good and evil, between freedom and those who hate freedom, recalls the rigid anti-Communism of Whittaker Chambers, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Barry Goldwater. Montgomery McFate noted that the current avatars of right-wing Cold Warriors, the neoconservatives, have dismissed all Iraqi insurgents as "dead enders" and "bad people." Terms like "totalitarianism" and "Islamofascism," she said, which stir the American historical memory, mislead policymakers into greatly increasing the number of our enemies and coming up with wrongheaded strategies against them. "That's not what the insurgents call themselves," she said. "If you can't call something by its name--if you can't say, 'This is what this phenomenon is, it has structure, meaning, agency'--how can you ever fight it? In other words, even if we think that a jihadi in Yemen has ideas similar to those of an Islamist in Java, we have to approach them in discrete ways, both to prevent them from becoming a unified movement and because their particular political yearnings are different.

Kilcullen is attempting to revive a strain of Cold War thought that saw the confrontation with Communism not primarily as a blunt military struggle but as a subtle propaganda war that required deep knowledge of diverse enemies and civilian populations. By this standard, America's performance against radical Islamists thus far is dismal. Bruce Hoffman, of Georgetown University, a former RAND Corporation analyst who began to use the term "global counterinsurgency" around the same time as Kilcullen, pointed to two Cold War projects: RAND's study of the motivation and morale of the Vietcong in the mid-sixties, based on extensive interviews with prisoners and former insurgents, which led some analysts to conclude that the war was unwinnable; and a survey by Radio Free Europe of two hundred thousand émigrés from the East Bloc in the eighties, which used the findings to shape broadcasts. "We haven't done anything like that in this struggle," Hoffman said, and he cited the thousands of detainees in Iraq. "Instead of turning the prisons into insurgent universities, you could have a systematic process that would be based on scientific surveys designed to elicit certain information on how people joined, who their leaders were, how leadership was exercised, how group cohesion was maintained." In other words, America would get to know its enemy. Hoffman added, "Even though we say it's going to be the long war, we still have this enormous sense of impatience. Are we committed to doing the fundamental spadework that's necessary"



MORE TO COME

CONTINUED

7

KNOWING THE ENEMY
by GEORGE PACKER
Can social scientists redefine the "war on terror"?
New Yorker
Issue of 2006-12-18
Posted 2006-12-11

Kilcullen's thinking is informed by some of the key texts of Cold War social science, such as Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer" which analyzed the conversion of frustrated individuals into members of fanatical mass movements, and Philip Selznick's "The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics," which described how Communists subverted existing social groups and institutions like trade unions. To these older theoretical guides he adds two recent studies of radical Islam: "Globalized Islam," by the French scholar Olivier Roy, and "Understanding Terror Networks," by Marc Sageman, an American forensic psychiatrist and former covert operator with the mujahideen in Afghanistan. After September 11th, Sageman traced the paths of a hundred and seventy-two alienated young Muslims who joined the jihad, and found that the common ground lay not in personal pathology, poverty, or religious belief but in social bonds. Roy sees the rise of "neo-fundamentalism" among Western Muslims as a new identity movement shaped by its response to globalization. In the margin of a section of Roy's book called "Is Jihad Closer to Marx Than to the Koran?" Kilcullen noted, "If Islamism is the new leftism, then the strategies and techniques used to counter Marxist subversion during the Cold War may have direct or indirect relevance to combating Al Qaeda-sponsored subversion."

Drawing on these studies, Kilcullen has plotted out a "ladder of extremism" that shows the progress of a jihadist. At the bottom is the vast population of mainstream Muslims, who are potential allies against radical Islamism as well as potential targets of subversion, and whose grievances can be addressed by political reform. The next tier up is a smaller number of "alienated Muslims," who have given up on reform. Some of these join radical groups, like the young Muslims in North London who spend afternoons at the local community center watching jihadist videos. They require "ideological conversion"--that is, counter-subversion, which Kilcullen compares to helping young men leave gangs. (In a lecture that Kilcullen teaches on counterterrorism at Johns Hopkins, his students watch "Fight Club," the 1999 satire about anti-capitalist terrorists, to see a radical ideology without an Islamic face.) A smaller number of these individuals, already steeped in the atmosphere of radical mosques and extremist discussions, end up joining local and regional insurgent cells, usually as the result of a "biographical trigger--they will lose a friend in Iraq, or see something that shocks them on television." With these insurgents, the full range of counterinsurgency tools has to be used, including violence and persuasion. The very small number of fighters who are recruited to the top tier of Al Qaeda and its affiliated terrorist groups are beyond persuasion or conversion. "They're so committed you've got to destroy them," Kilcullen said. "But you've got to do it in such a way that you don't create new terrorists."

When I asked him to outline a counter-propaganda strategy, he described three basic methods. "We've got to create resistance to their message," he said. "We've got to co-opt or assist people who have a counter-message. And we might need to consider creating or supporting the creation of rival organizations." Bruce Hoffman told me that jihadists have posted five thousand Web sites that react quickly and imaginatively to events. In 2004, he said, a jihadist rap video called "Dirty Kuffar" became widely popular with young Muslims in Britain: "It's like Ali G wearing a balaclava and having a pistol in one hand and a Koran in the other." Hoffman believes that America must help foreign governments and civil-society groups flood the Internet with persuasively youthful Web sites presenting anti-jihadist messages--but not necessarily pro-American ones, and without leaving American fingerprints.

Kilcullen argues that Western governments should establish competing "trusted networks" in Muslim countries: friendly mosques, professional associations, and labor unions. (A favorite Kilcullen example from the Cold War is left-wing anti-Communist trade unions, which gave the working class in Western Europe an outlet for its grievances without driving it into the arms of the Soviet Union.) The U.S. should also support traditional authority figures--community leaders, father figures, moderate imams--in countries where the destabilizing transition to modernity has inspired Islamist violence. "You've got to be quiet about it," he cautioned. "You don't go in there like a missionary." The key is providing a social context for individuals to choose ways other than jihad.

Kilcullen's proposals will not be easy to implement at a moment when the government's resources and attention are being severely drained by the chaos in Iraq. And, if some of his ideas seem sketchy, it's because he and his colleagues have only just begun to think along these lines. The U.S. government, encumbered by habit and inertia, has not adapted as quickly to the changing terrain as the light-footed, mercurial jihadists. America's many failures in the war on terror have led a number of thinkers to conclude that the problem is institutional. Thomas Barnett, a military analyst, proposes dividing the Department of Defense into two sections: one to fight big wars and one for insurgencies and nation-building. Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and Colin Powell's former chief of staff, goes even further. He thinks that the entire national-security bureaucracy, which was essentially set in place at the start of the Cold War, is incapable of dealing with the new threats and should be overhauled, so that the government can work faster to prevent conflicts or to intervene early. "Especially in light of this Administration, but also other recent ones, do we really want to concentrate power so incredibly in the White House?" he asked. "And, if we do, why do we still have the departments, except as an appendage of bureaucracy that becomes an impediment?" In Wilkerson's vision, new legislation would create a "unified command," with leadership drawn from across the civilian agencies, which "could supplant the existing bureaucracy."

Since September 11th, the government's traditional approach to national security has proved inadequate in one area after another. The intelligence agencies habitually rely on satellites and spies, when most of the information that matters now, as Kilcullen pointed out, is "open source"--available to anyone with an Internet connection. Traditional diplomacy, with its emphasis on treaties and geopolitical debates, is less relevant than the ability to understand and influence foreign populations--not in their councils of state but in their villages and slums. And future enemies are unlikely to confront the world's overwhelming military power with conventional warfare; technology-assisted insurgency is proving far more effective. At the highest levels of Western governments, the failure of traditional approaches to counter the jihadist threat has had a paralyzing effect. "I sense we've lost the ability to think strategically," Field Marshal Sir Peter Inge, the former chief of the British armed forces, has said of his government. He could have been describing the White House and the Pentagon.

Kilcullen's strategic mind, by contrast, seems remarkably febrile. I could call him at the office or at home at any hour of the night and he'd be jotting down ideas in one of his little black notebooks, ready to think out loud. Kilcullen, Crumpton, and their colleagues are desperately trying to develop a lasting new strategy that, in Kilcullen's words, would be neither Republican nor Democratic. Bruce Hoffman said, "We're talking about a profound shift in mind-set and attitude"--not to mention a drastic change in budgetary and bureaucratic priorities. "And that may not be achievable until there's a change in Administration." Kilcullen is now in charge of writing a new counterinsurgency manual for the civilian government, and early this month he briefed Condoleezza Rice on his findings in Afghanistan. But his ideas have yet to penetrate the fortress that is the Bush White House. Hoffman said, "Isn't it ironic that an Australian is spearheading this shift, together with a former covert operator? It shows that it"s almost too revolutionary for the places where it should be discussed--the Pentagon, the National Security Council." At a moment when the Bush Administration has run out of ideas and lost control, it could turn away from its "war on terror" and follow a different path--one that is right under its nose.



END

Another month has passed and we are greeted with the news that the death toll of American troops has set a new record. It seems with every passing month we are greeted with the same statistic. Now the commander in thief wants to send additional troops to Iraq to afford more targets to the insurgents. This despite the military leaderships opinion that they were not needed or would serve no real purpose. Can congress stop this lunacy?

George Washington: "First in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen"

Jefferson's First Inaugural Adress

"The Shadow Party" by David Horowitz and Richard Poe


Supreme Court rules on Campaigne Finance

Has campaign finance reform succeeded?

Ican, I wish you lots more common sense in 2007.

Thank you. No one can ever have enough common sense.

I wish you to acquire basic common sense in 2007 and henceforth continue to gain more.

GOO GOO DOLLS

IBC's Count of Civilians Killed in Iraq since 1/1/2003
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/
UPDATE OF IRAQ'S VIOLENT NON-COMBATANT DEATHS BY MONTH

January 2006 .... = 1267; Total since January 1st 2003 = 1267 + 36,859 = 38126;
Feb 2006 .......... = 1287; Total since January 1st 2003 = 1287 + 38126 = 39413;
March 2006 ....... = 1538; Total since January 1st 2003 = 1538 + 39413 = 40951;
April 2006 ......... = 1287; Total since January 1st 2003 = 1287 + 40951 = 42238;
May 2006 .......... = 1417; Total since January 1st 2003 = 1417 + 42238 = 43655;
June 2006 ......... = 2089; Total since January 1st 2003 = 2089 + 43655 = 45744;
July 2006 ......... = 2336; Total since January 1st 2003 = 2336 + 45744 = 48080;
August 2006 .... = 1195; Total since January 1st 2003 = 1195 + 48080 = 49275;
September 2006 = 1407; Total since January 1st 2003 = 1407 + 49275 = 50682;
October 2006 .... = 2546; Total since January 1st 2003 = 2546 + 50682 = 53228;
November 2006 = 3894; Total since January 1st 2003 = 3894 + 53228 = 57122.

Estimates of Effects of Delayed Morgue Counts:
August = 1195 + 1000 = 2195 ......... 49275 + 1 x 1000 =
50275;
September = 1407 + 1000 = 2407 ... 50682 + 2 x 1000 =
52682;
October = 2546 + 0000 = 2546 ..... 53228 + 2 x 1000 =
55228;
November = 3894 + 1000 = 4894 .... 57122 + 3 x 1000 =
60122;

UPDATE OF VIOLENT NON-COMBATANT DEATHS IN IRAQ PER MONTH AND TOTALS

1,279 per month; .... 60,122 in 47 months 01/01/2003 to 11/30/2006;.

4,738 per month; .. 625,424 in 132 months 01/01/1992 to 12/31/2002;

4,738 / 1,279 > 3.70;

1,024 per month; ...... 36,859 in 36 months
01/01/2003 to 12/31/2005;

2,115 per month; ...... 60,122 - 36,859 = 23,263 in 11 months
01/01/2006 to 11/30/2006;

4,738 / 2,115 > 2.24.

I originally had added, but then deleted because I had no wish to be overly impolite or insulting (I don't know what came over me), "and enough foresight to see past the end of your nose."

You "had no wish to be overly impolite or insulting." Then originally, you had the wish to be merely impolite and insulting.

Apparently, not having heard from you since your last post and noting the time now is 18:13 in Texas and 00:13 in Scotland, you've successfully wasted the first day of the year in your acquisition of basic common sense. You only have 364 more days. I wish you not to waste any more of those days; you may need all remaining.

I also wish you a very Happy New Year!

And a happy new year to you; but I suspect you're always happy there, in your secure environment.

What do you think Mr Bush is going to tell us now? More troops?