Sorry for more political crap, but this latest Rumsfeld thing just pisses me off.

I don't care whether the question was planted by a reporter. The enthusiastic applause from the audience of soldiers was genuine. It was quite clever of him, though, to ask teh soldier to repeat his question, thus giving the complacent media a convenient way to edit out the applause, as I've read The O'Reilly Factor did. Besides, however the question got there, it is a valid one and I wish I'd stop hearing about the question and people would start discussing the answer.

First of all is the most obvious thing — Rumsfeld's patronizing claim, You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have. Aside from the fact that he just told his soldiers to their faces that they're inadequate but they'll have to do (this was a morale-building trip, right?), there's the simple fact that it's egregiously false. This wasn't Pearl Harbor. Iraq didn't bring this war to our doorstep. We carefully and deliberately chose to attack. If our army was inadequately equipped or manned, we had the perfectly viable option of not going to war.

Here's a great quote from a veteran named Kirth Gerson who posts on MetaFilter. It provides great insight from someone who is in a position to speak authoritatively on the subject:

As someone who's been to one, please let me point out that war is, almost without exception, a Very Bad Idea.

Any leader who initiates a war should be considered a failure. I would support a Constitutional amendment prohibiting any President who goes to war from running for re-election, or from holding any other public office.

War is always a huge expense of resources of various kinds (including the most potentially productive members of all the groups involved), almost never achieves its stated goals, and is usually launched in service of goals very different from the stated ones.

Case in point: our current idiotic adventure. Those who think our invasion of another sovereign nation is justified should sign up with the armed forces immediately. They can replace the soldiers who have the sense to want to come home.

The other flagrant lie is Rumsfeld's claim that we can't produce up-armored Humvees any faster, when the manufacturers say they could double production right now if the Pentagon asked them to. God damn, so much pisses me off about this war.

One encouraging note is that the Information & Privacy Commissioner for the Province of British Columbia, Canada, has just published an extensive report titled "Privacy and the USA Patriot Act - Implications for British Columbia Public Sector Outsourcing." It gives me hope; all the complaints about our overreaching counterterrorism measures (and the alarmingly decreasing privacy and liberties they entail) are apparently largely ignored, but when countries start to limit their commercial activities with us, maybe someone up there will start to take note.

It feels oddly appropriate to reference Yeats's poem, The Second Coming, right about now.