Entertaining Google search of the day: “i feel safer already”.

I think one of the reasons I’m so obsessed with missile defense is that I find that the program is emblematic of every initiative pursued by the Bush administration. Success is judged by intentions rather than by results. Fred Kaplan has the latest on the system. To save you some time, it doesn’t work and we’re deploying it anyway.

A few weeks ago, I subscribed to the RSS feed for cryptome.org. The site is best known for publishing documents that the government doesn’t want you to see. Here’s a partial list of RSS entries for the past 72 hours:

• Calendar of 1060 US Military Dead in Iraqi War
• Calendar of 1059 US Military Dead in Iraqi War
• Calendar of 1058 US Military Dead in Iraqi War
• Calendar of 1057 US Military Dead in Iraqi War
• Calendar of 1053 US Military Dead in Iraqi War
• Calendar of 1051 US Military Dead in Iraqi War
• Calendar of 1048 US Military Dead in Iraqi War
• Calendar of 1045 US Military Dead in Iraqi War
• Calendar of 1043 US Military Dead in Iraqi War
• Calendar of 1042 US Military Dead in Iraqi War

The grim realities of war really sink in when your RSS reader lets you know that a few more Americans have lost their lives several times a day. I don’t even want to think about what a similar list would look like for Iraqi dead.

How bad are things? This bad.

I downloaded the Mozilla Firefox 1.0 preview release earlier this week, and am troubled to find that the pop up blocker in it is horribly screwed up. The problem is that it wants to block pop ups that are loaded when you click on a link, and doesn’t seem to listen if you tell it not to do that on certain sites. So, for example, I can’t open links to items on Bloglines, or view Yahoo News slide shows. I’m sure there’s a bug that explains what’s going on in Bugzilla, but I’m having trouble finding it. I’ll just assume that it will be fixed prior to the next release.

Here’s a paragraph that should have been in John Kerry’s acceptance speech at the Democratic national convention. It’s from a campaign speech he delivered yesterday:

George Bush’s record speaks for itself. 1.6 million lost jobs. The first president in 72 years to actually lose jobs on his watch. 8 million Americans are now looking for work. 45 million have no health insurance — 5 million more than the day he took office. 4.3 million Americans have slipped into poverty over the last four years — 1.3 million are children. The average family saw their income fall $1,500, while they saw the cost of health care, child care, gasoline, and tuition rise faster than ever before. 220,000 more Americans did not attend college last year for the simple reason that they could not afford it. This President turned a $5.6 trillion surplus into trillions of debt for our children. George Bush accomplished all this in only four years. Imagine what he could do in another four. I want to be clear: I’m not saying that president wanted these consequences. But I am saying that by his judgments, by his priorities, he has caused these things to happen. And he can’t see the error of his ways.

I’m no campaign consultant, but I’ve thought that this was the winning message for Kerry from the beginning. He needs to find a similar message on Iraq, I think.

Kerry has an op-ed published in today’s Wall Street Journal that makes a similar argument. Usually I’m pretty wishy washy about Kerry, I’m going to vote for him, but my enthusiasm about him fluctuates. However, after reading the op-ed, I feel much better about him as a candidate. His plans for economic policy seem pretty clear and reasonable to me. My great fear is that he will try to impose protectionist trade policies, but I don’t get that sense from the op-ed. In fact, I’ve noticed that while he frequently decries companies shipping jobs overseas, the only thing he plans to do about it is to eliminate a tax loophole that rewards companies for doing so. That seems pretty reasonable to me.

Note to Denny Hastert: billionaires often have good lawyers.

The human urge to find things to which we can give our unqualified support never ceases to amaze me. In any dispute, the natural urge is to pick a side and assume that everything done by that side is ethical, just, and sensible. This compulsion is much on my mind lately as I ponder Iraq. One of the hardest things for me, a critic of our efforts in Iraq, has been my failing hope of finding some good guys I can root for, just so I can get to a somewhat comfortable psychological place.

When we invaded Iraq, my assumption was that the Sunni Arabs were the bad guys, and the Shiites, Kurds, and Marsh Arabs were the good guys. Saddam Hussein drew his power from the Sunni minority and spent a lot of his time suppressing and murdering Iraq’s other ethnic groups. As it turns out, I was right about the Sunnis, obviously they’re not all bad people, but Sunnis who lost out when their patron was deposed form the backbone of the insurgency.

As time has passed, however, my assumptions about the good guys have proven incorrect. Among the Shiites, there are many people (not just followers of Muqtada al-Sadr) who would prefer theocracy to democracy, and who are mostly interested in revenge on their former oppressors. Many of them don’t seem to respect women’s rights, and are downright Taliban-esque when it comes to respect for civil rights in general. I’m not saying they’re bad people, but I can’t give the Shiites my unqualified support.

Then there are the Kurds. Brutally oppressed and subjected to mass murder by Saddam’s regime, the Kurds have been sold out and screwed in every country where they reside. They were my early sympathetic favorite. They built a functioning state for themselves in the no fly zone that we enforced after the Gulf War, and there has been no Kurdish insurgency. However, Kurds have been running people out of every town that borders their lands in hopes that those towns will be placed under Kurdish control when Iraq’s federal system is put in place. Kurds are displacing Arabs, Turkmen, and members of Iraq’s Christian minorities and are all too glad to come in and play the toughs when the coalition forces need Iraqis to beat up on their fellow countrymen. The Kurdish leadership is acting out of self interest, and I’m sure Kurds are happy about it given their history of mistreatment, but again, not the good guys.

You don’t read much about Iraq’s Turkmen population, maybe they’re the good guys? They were treated badly before the invasion, and other ethnic groups are treating them badly now because they’re not really numerous enough to defend themselves. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to be the good guys either, because the US is fighting them right now in the town of Tal Afar.

Then there are the coalition forces. I sure wanted to believe that we’re the good guys, but clearly that’s a mixed bag at best as well. Between conducting counterinsurgency via airstrikes, a massive program of torture at various detention centers around Iraq, and a plan for the occupation that wound up sinking Iraq into constant violence, the coalition isn’t worthy of unqualified support, either. And I think that explains why Americans haven’t accepted just how bad things are in Iraq right now. I’ve had to force myself to accept this complex situation in which everyone is tainted. I think most other people have chosen not to.

The Washington Post has a terrifying story about the dire consequences of a major hurricane hitting New Orleans dead on. That, of course, very well may happen less than 24 hours from now. I’m from just down the road from New Orleans myself, and so I’ve watched hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico for most of my life. I also consider New Orleans to be something of a spiritual home, so those folks are much on my mind today. I hope we don’t wake up tomorrow morning to find the city washed away.

Here are some flickr tags to keep an eye on: nola hurricaneivan neworleans ivan hurricane.

People love to talk about John Kerry’s unspectacular Senate career, but stupid missile defense boondoggles are one thing he’s been staunchly against since he was originally elected 20 years ago. Today we learn that the final flight test for the missile defense system being deployed in Alaska has been delayed until after the election, and that the system is going to be activated anyway. I feel safer already.