Haecceity

Well, if you are an atheist and you don’t believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to? Nothing. You are worm dirt.
Ah, Christian compassion is alive and well.

“The Project for the New American Century” has been reduced to a voice-mail box and a ghostly website. A single employee has been left to wrap things up.

A more glorious lead sentence has never been written about the Project, which basically created and nurtured the neo-con view of the world, and the policies of the current presidency - 8 signatories have been senior members of the administration.
The Project is apparently going the way of Republicans across America with some fantastic backstabbing…. Kenneth Adelman, one of the signatories of the Project (and considered to be a member of its pro-war faction - a pretty terrifying concept, given the hawkish tendencies of the Project in general) and a member of the Defense Policy Board, has gone from

“I believe demolishing Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk.”

to

“I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent.
They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional.”

in just four years.
Sadly, this isn’t the death knell sounding for neo-conservatism - but it’s always nice to see its edifices crumbling, even just a little.
Merry Christmas!

I feel obligated to blog this - I wish someone would pay me the best part of half a million US dollars of public money to investigate blogging…

John Robb asks a relatively obvious question that I’ve not seen elsewhere - was he hiding, or had he been stashed there by a third party in the hope of his being useful later in the game?
To me, it seems like it’s going to be an interesting question to answer, especially given how bad Saddam looks in the photos the Americans have released.
I wonder, however, how this capture will be seen by the iraqi-on-the-street - while I have no doubt that eventually their quality of life has to improve - they still have comparitively good natural resources which are in strong demand in the west - I also think that until the US stops treating them in the same way us Brits treated India and Africa in the 19th century, there will always be resistance and fighting. Because no nation likes being turned into a vassal state by a country with fundamentally alien cultural mores.