If you wanted perfection

Missed one: kerrywrongforevangelicals.com. Identical to wrong for Catholics, which is identical to wrong for Mormons.

See if this sounds familiar: Secretary of War Donald “What, me worry?” Rumsfeldis quoted in a WaPo article on Star Wars, explaining why the US will deploy a system that won’t work: “Did we have perfection with our first airplane, our first rifle, our first ship? I mean, they’d still be testing at Kitty Hawk, for God’s sake, if you wanted perfection.’” Yes, that’s just what he said about Iraqi elections. The article mentions that he used to be a pharmaceuticals exec: be afraid.

Followup on handshakes: the Guardian, in an article on the subject, says that Prince Charles refused to shake Idi Amin’s hand in 1978, that Helmut Kohl refused to shake PW Botha’s in 1984, and Fidel Castro believed that the CIA intended to poison him through a handshake, which isn’t sillier than anything else they tried, and so kept a cigar in his hand as an excuse.

Bumper sticker: Osama still has his job. Do you still have yours?

Russia is dealing with the danger of Beslan-type incidents in schools: all schoolchildren will now wear dog tags, “designed to withstand a fire or bomb blast.” I suppose it’s still better than “duck and cover.”

No American pressure behind the handshake

I have a theory. Colin Powell said Sunday about the Iraqi insurgency: “Yes, it’s getting worse, and the reason it’s getting worse is that they’re determined to disrupt the election.” My theory: what if the reason the Bushies are insisting on a totally unrealistic deadline for sham elections is to provide just this excuse for their failure to get the insurgency under control?

Allawi is now under pressure to apologize for shaking the Israeli foreign minister’s hand. “Allawi said there was no American pressure behind the handshake.” Sounds like my mother reminding me to write thank-you notes. Yesterday I commented about political handshakes. I think that in the secret religion shared by all politicians, a handshake can steal your soul, like cameras for some Native American tribes.

Google has set up a news.google in Chinese, but searches won’t display the sites the Chinese government doesn’t like. Google says it’s just efficient not to show a lot of links that will just be blocked to Chinese internet users anyway.

No concern for the Iraqi people

The Department of Homeland Security is buying a town, Playas, New Mexico, a former mining town with only 50 residents remaining, from its owner, Phelps Dodge, to use for practicing responses to suicide bombings, anthrax attacks, poisonings of water supplies, etc. Try not to think of this as a metaphor.

Life should be interesting for the 50 residents.

When the US government, after first trying to pretend that Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam was some sort of terrorist-symp, changed excuses to claim that the problem was a misspelling, I was going to make a joke about the government not being able to handle C-A-T, but decided it was too obvious. But there’s a real issue here.

It was the Yusuf bit they had problems with, of course. Three years after 9/11, when several men who weren’t supposed to have been allowed into the country got onto planes they also shouldn’t have been allowed on because the gov didn’t have a standard for transliterating from Arabic, they still haven’t fixed the problem. Now we hear that there’s a huge and growing backlog of tapes not being translated from what the NYT calls “languages commonly associated with terrorism” by the FBI (motto: Terrorist Not Spoken Here). The reason they don’t learn from their hideous mistakes is that there are no consequences for their major intelligence failures (other than 2,900 dead on 9/11/01, I mean). Also: stop recording every conversation spoken in Arabic anywhere in the world. They’re not all terrorists. Really.

Colin Powell says the “major thrust” of US military efforts in Iraq in the near future (i.e., after the US election) will be to go into “no go” areas. You know who might have an opinion on this? A guy whose entire mission in another war was to take a boat up a river for no other reason than to show that there were no areas the US military couldn’t go?

Uh, Kerry. We were all clear on that, right?

The LA Times article that provided the Powell quote contains several instances of US military assholery related to aerial bombardment of Sadr City. The US talks about a “precision strike”...that lasted for hours. Army spokesmodel Lt. Col. Jim Hutton blamed casualties on insurgent mortars, saying “The enemy shows no concern for the Iraqi people.” Did I mention we just bombed a crowded suburb of Baghdad for several hours? Another spokesmodel called reports of civilians killed by bombing in Fallujah “propaganda,” and “suggested that local hospitals had been infiltrated by insurgent forces.” Please, just fucking spare me.

But is he good for the Zoroastrians?

The Indian Statistical Institute in New Delhi, which is a serious center of learning in economics & stats, really, suspended classes because students were complaining about a ghost.

Yesterday I posted a link to www.kerrywrongforcatholics.com. Guess what I found today: www.kerrywrongformormons.com. They’re word-for-word identical because, Mormons, Catholics, pretty much the same thing, right? Those are evidently the only religions Kerry’s bad for, because there’s no kerrywrongformuslims.com, or kerrywrongforjews.com, or kerrywrongforsatanworshippers.com. Yet. Consider that a hint to anyone with the inclination to write a parody.

From the Daily Telegraph: “Poland’s state railway is claiming £320 compensation from a man who delayed services by being run over by a train. But the company said yesterday it may relent after learning that his house had burned down. ‘We are acting in accordance with article 415,’ said a spokesman. Pawel Banaszek, 19, who was paralysed in the incident, said he was beaten by a gang and left on the track. He would pay the compensation from disability allowance.”

The British foreign minister accidentally shook the hand of Zimbabwean dictator at a reception in NY last week, to his embarrassment (there’s a long description in Clinton’s memoirs of the lengths he went to to avoid being filmed shaking Arafat’s hand)(and the rules for the Bush-Kerry debates make a handshake mandatory). Still, let’s not bring race into it (Indy headline: “Straw Shook Mugabe’s Hand ‘Because It Was Dark’”). Oh, wait, they meant the room was dark.

Free at last, free at last, to practice naked yoga in public

San Francisco prosecutors have dropped public nuisance charges against “Naked Yoga Guy,” having decided that naked yoga is not illegal in the city. Plan your vacations accordingly.

Time magazine claims that the Bushies dropped a plan for the CIA to “aid candidates favored by Washington” in the Iraqi elections, after getting negative reactions from several congresscritters (the article condescendingly refers to Nancy Pelosi, who come to think of it is Naked Yoga Guy’s representative, as coming “unglued” over it). I know I’m reassured.

I’m also reassured by the US ambassador to Afghanistan’s denial that he pressured rival candidates to Karzai to quit the race.

In the Iraq story, Time says the Bushies considered that intervention in the elections was justified as a counter-balance to Iranian resources. Because an election that was unfair when one foreign nation is trying to influence it becomes completely fair when two foreign nations are doing so. And by the way, the reason I put “aid candidates favored by Washington” in quotes is that Iraqis will be voting for parties, not for candidates. The Time piece shows a total ignorance of the electoral system the US foisted on Iraq.
(Update: Juan Cole has made all those points about the Time story at greater length and with greater expertise, although a day later.)

Everybody reports on Turkey’s revision of its criminal justice code, which were largely in a liberal direction in the hopes of getting EU membership. Since that isn’t gonna happen, I worry about what will happen when the day finally comes that Turkey realizes it isn’t gonna happen. Will they re-criminalize adultery? Reinstitute lesser penalties for rape if the man marries his victim and greater ones for rape of a virgin? Probably not, but it would have better had they come to this on their own. Only the Daily Telegraph, that I can find, mentions, in rather vague terms, something about restricting discussion of issues such as the 1915 Armenian genocide.

Mickey Mouse President

Wrong for Catholics

Take a quick look at this website:
www.kerrywrongforcatholics.com
Did you notice who paid for it? It’s at the very bottom of the page.

I am nothing to you

In Britain, much of whatever support remaining for the Iraq war dissipated this week because of the videotape from hostage Ken Bigley (pictured), a civil engineer, pleading with Tony Blair for his life. Bigley is the man threatened with execution (the two Americans captured with him have been killed) unless the two women prisoners are released.

I am Ken Bigley from Liverpool in the Walton district. I am here in Iraq and I think this is possibly my last chance to speak to someone who will listen from Europe. ... Mr Blair, I am nothing to you, it’s just one person in the whole of the United Kingdom that’s all. With a family like you’ve got a family, with children, like your children, your boys, your wife. Please you can help, I know you can. These people are not asking for the world, they’re asking for their wives and the mothers of their children.

Full transcript.
He also has an 86-year old mother who collapsed a few days ago.





Blair finally responded publicly, with his own plea to the British public (he evidently had nothing to say to the kidnappers), against compassion (Bigley’s family must have known they were fucked when Blair praised their stoicism): “What these terrorists understand is that they can use and manipulate the modern media to gain enormous publicity for themselves and put democratic politics and politicians in a very difficult position.” Poor baby. Really, modern media and technology have made it so difficult to ignore suffering. So unfair.

Except that the mirror image (if I may mention older representational technology) of that is that, as Mary Riddell writes in the Observer, “When history is a string of macabre Kodak moments, those slaughtered off-camera evaporate as if they had never lived. ... On the day Ken Bigley’s video played in millions of British living rooms, 22 people were murdered in Baghdad.”

Similarly, on the day in April when those 4 mercenaries were killed in Fallujah, and their bodies burned and hung from a bridge, with pictures, several US soldiers were also killed, with little fuss. But the crispy critters pictures caused the US to mount another invasion attempt, evidently against the advice of the Marine general in charge of the area. And Rumsfeld ignored the torture at Abu Ghraib, explaining that he didn’t consider it important enough to inform Bush because “The problem at that point was one-dimensional. It wasn’t three-dimensional. It wasn’t photographs and video.” The “problem,” of course, was very much three-dimensional to the people involved.

Back in May I wrote about the Bushite obsession with images, “like the flight deck landing, the statue toppling and all the other carefully stage-managed moments, as if they’re constantly auditioning for a postage stamp. ... Bush, who is less fixated on words, for obvious reasons, thinks that once he has the right visual, he’s fixed in place the meaning of an event. Ironically, it was the two words Mission Accomplished that really turned Flight Suit Boy’s million-dollar photo op into a sick joke, and it was the photos of the prisoners that made torture into a live issue.”

Strong

In the last couple of days, Bush has several times referred to both Tony Blair and Wowie Allawi as “strong” prime ministers. What does that actually mean? In terms of ability to control events, both are Bush’s sock pockets, so that’s not it. They have strong handshakes? Strong convictions, I suppose is what he intends, although it could just be another of those phrases with no particular meaning he uses because he thinks it sounds good. The verbal equivalent of a Rorschach test.

Maureen Dowd on the Bill Maher show: “Kerry gives nuance a bad name.”

3 years ago, the Italian supreme court, a collection of elderly men which exists, as far as this blog is concerned (see here, here, here, here, here and here) to issue stupid rulings about sex, issued one which said that patting a woman’s bottom did not constitute sexual harassment. It has now reversed this in the case of a magistrate who patted the butts of three...supreme court employees.

In the few days since Putin announced his plan to appoint all 89 governors himself, at least 10 have joined his “United Party.” Can you say one-party state?

Speaking of democracy at work, the elders of an Afghan Pashtun tribe, the Terezays, rule that if anyone votes for someone other than Karzai, their houses will be burned down. This ruling was broadcast on radio.

After stone-walling for several days, the Republican Party fesses up to mailing out those leaflets in Arkansas & W. Virginia saying that the D’s would ban the Bible and promote gay marriage. Next question: how many were sent out?

In which my presidential ambitions are quashed

Bush complains that Kerry “chose to criticize the Prime Minister of Iraq. ... You can’t lead this country if your ally in Iraq feels like you question his credibility.” I didn’t realize that America’s choice of its own president was subject to veto by the guy Bush picked to pretend to run Iraq (oops, I just questioned Comical Allawi’s credibility, I guess that means I can’t be president now either).

Matthew Yglesias of American Prospect suggests that Bush’s postponing of the military push in Iraq we all know is coming until after the US and before the Iraqi elections will make that campaign all the bloodier. “The Marines and soldiers serving in Iraq volunteered for the military, but they’ve been conscripted into the Bush campaign. Decisions, as Lieutenant General James Conway recently stated, are being made on the basis of narrow political considerations rather than military ones. It’s appropriate for generals to be subordinate to civilian politicians, but not to civilian campaign strategists.”

I may have been unduly alarmist about the security legislation before the Duma. Yesterday it rejected a bill banning reporting on hostage-taking incidents until they are over. We’ll see.

Unambiguous

There are 2 initiatives on the Cal. ballot relating to casinos. California being California, the commercials against one of them attack it for threatening to make our morals worse. Did I say morals? I meant traffic.

Turkmenistan’s president-for-life-or-until-the-men-with-the-butterfly-nets-catch-up-to-him-whichever-comes-first Saparmurat Niyazov preempted programming on all tv channels so that he could read his poetry to the nation for an hour and a half. When was the last time Bush did that?

The Russian foreign minister reassured the UN yesterday: “President Vladimir Putin has stated unambiguously that Russia will remain a democratic state.” See, and you were worried about Russia not being democratic, but Putin has decreed that it is and Putin’s word is law in Russia, to be followed absolutely. Aren’t you reassured? If not, Putin will crush you like an ant.

Nothing’s perfect in life

The first episode of the new radio series of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is available now on the BBC website. NOTE: that episode will disappear from the site a week from today, replaced by episode 2, and so on, so don’t procrastinate.

Rummy on the possibility of holding Iraqi elections in only part of the country: “Well, so be it. Nothing’s perfect in life, so you have an election that’s not quite perfect. Is it better than not having an election? You bet.” National elections that cover only part of the, you know, nation aren’t “not quite perfect”--they’re not real elections. And, as I said a day or two ago, the electoral system we’ve imposed on Iraq means there won’t even be vacant seats under those circumstances, but seats will be distributed just as if the election were truly national.

Yesterday Bush asked the UN to set up a fund to foster democracy--however and by whoever that might be defined. Today, in a sort of mirror-image of that, Russia proposed the creation of a UN list of terrorism suspects--however and by whoever that might be defined--who every nation would be required to extradite. I thought it was incredible that no one noticed the revolutionary nature of the UN vote last year to demote Iraq from the status of a sovereign nation and hand control of it over to the US, a power to judge the legitimacy of its member states that I really don’t think the UN has. Now it’s supposed to decide which of its members are legitimate democracies under Bush’s plan, and eliminate political asylum under Putin’s, deferring to the labeling by member states of its internal opponents as terrorists. New world order, indeed.

We’re not going to allow the suiciders to drive us out of Iraq

I read the transcript of Bush’s press conference with “Comical Allawi”, so you don’t have to.

Addressing Zowie Allawi: “Mr. Prime Minister, America will stand with you until freedom and justice have prevailed.” Man, are his legs gonna be tired. “the vast majority of Iraqis remain committed to democracy.” Of course since there is no democracy in Iraq, it’s just guesswork what “the vast majority of Iraqis” are committed to.

Asked “Why haven’t U.S. forces been able to capture or kill al Zarqawi, who’s blamed for much of the violence?”, Bush responded: “We’re looking for him. He hides.” That explains that.

“Anybody who says that we are safer with Saddam Hussein in power is wrong.” I quote that because it bugs me that the man has less grasp of verb tenses than the average 5 year old (but then, whoever did the transcript for the White House doesn’t quite get the it’s/its distinction).

GeeDubya, naturally, flounders badly in response to several of the questions, including my second favorite question: “If General Abizaid says he needs more troops and the Prime Minister says he does not want more troops, who wins?” Bush: “Obviously, we can work this out. It’s in the -- if our commanders on the ground feels it’s in the interest of the Iraq citizens to provide more troops, we’ll talk about it. That’s -- that’s why -- they’re friends; that’s what we do about friends.”

He takes back the comment of a few days ago that the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq produced in July by the CGA (Central Guessing Agency) was just a “guess.” “I should have used ‘estimate.’” Yeah, it’s a three-syllable word, we all understand that’s beyond your comfort level. “But what’s important for the American people to hear is reality. And the reality is right here in the form of the Prime Minister.” Later, he added, “One reason I’m optimistic about our ability to get the job done is because I talk to the Iraqi Prime Minister.” Reminds me of his comment a while back that he never reads newspapers because he gets the real facts from Condi and Andy Card.

A reporter asked Bush about his comment that there was only a “handful” of people trying to disrupt the Iraqi elections. He said, “Well, it’s a handful if you happen to have several thousand fingers.” OK, he didn’t say that.

Somebody asked a really good, important question, which I’ll paraphrase: When you talk about mixed messages being bad, do you mean if Kerry is elected, or do you mean right now. Bush filibustered for a really long time and didn’t come within a mile of answering.

And there’s the quote the blogosphere likes so much: “we’re not going to allow the suiciders to drive us out of Iraq.” Yeah, you definitely don’t want suiciders driving. Remember that scene in Annie Hall with Christopher Walken driving Woody Allen?

Attack of the terrorist cats

The Moscow police have arrested more than 10,000 of the usual suspects in response to Beslan, according to the Link, but I think it'll expire tomorrow.) The “Great Terror” of 2004 begins. Proposals include: Soviet-type resident registration (which was supposedly abolished by Yeltsin, but local governments just ignored it), restrictions on media coverage of terrorist actions, restrictions on cars, the ability of the Kremlin to declare a state of war in event of a terrorist attack, thereby suspending civil rights, etc. The Duma rejected proposals to discuss the government’s Chechen policy and to ask Putin and the security chiefs to explain their actions.

In other words, just like the US, where the Republicans are planning to tighten up on identification cards, border controls, etc. Next step, no doubt: internal passports.

The Iraqi terrorist-types are just making up demands at random now. When they demanded the release of all women prisoners, did they even know there were just two? What I enjoyed, especially after the story in today’s WaPo asserting with a straight face that the Iraqis were in charge of pretty much everything now, was watching them prepare the way to meet the demands, claiming, also with a straight face, that by an amazing coincidence the two were just about to be released anyway, and then to have the Americans put their foot down.

The Telegraph’s News in Brief section today contains the following stories: “Woman Crushed by 6ft Crucifix” (in Italy); “Man Mistook Wife for a Monkey” (and shot her to death; Malaysia); “Wife Asks for Weekly Beating” (in an Iranian court; as opposed to daily: “‘I don’t want a divorce. My husband is violent. It is in his nature. I just want him to promise to beat me only once a week,’ she told the judge, who burst out laughing.”

From the Press Association, a wonderfully silly headline for an unwonderfully silly action by the FBI: “Cat Refused Entry for Hamas Support.”

Terrorist cats. Don’t tell the Duma.

The right to enrichment

President Khatami defends Iran’s uranium enrichment program: “We clearly demand that our right to enrichment be recognized by the international community”. Who says Iran’s government doesn’t believe in rights?

Kerry didn’t like Bush’s scolding speech to the UN yesterday: “The President of the United States stood before the stony-faced body and barely talked about the realities at all of Iraq.” Kerry, whose own face is less expressive than those on Mt Rushmore, then went on to accuse Al Gore of being boring, and Dukakis of being a crappy campaigner. Stony-faced, indeed.

Responding to Kerry’s comments, Scotty McClellan today, and Bush yesterday, referred to him as “continuing his pattern of twisting in the wind”--are we supposed not to notice when Bush and his henchmen use identical phrasing? Also, not to get all William Safire on y’all, but they’re not even using that expression correctly.

Details matter

We talk of “democracy” and “elections” as if there was one model, as if the terms were unproblematic, but the details matter.

Charles de Gaulle knew this. When he graciously accepted the offer to become dictator of France in 1958 to save it from a military coup (Pakistan’s Musharraf cited de Gaulle this week as his role model), one of his conditions was that the electoral law be rewritten. Rather than proportional representation in which parties were given seats in accordance with their share of the votes, there would be a run-off system, favoring the right, which could sink its differences in the second round. Result at the next election: the Gaullists, with 18% of the vote, got 40% of the seats, and the Communists, with 19% of the vote, got 2% of the seats. Both the pre- and post-1958 systems were forms of representative democracy, but geared towards generating different results.

The elections in Iraq will be based on a form of proportional representation based on party lists. Something like Putin wants in Russia, actually. PR is good for the representation of minorities, which is good for countries like the Netherlands where politics are based on ideas and ideology, but in a country like Iraq, divided by ethnicity and religion, it is good in that it ensures some representation of, for example, the Kurds, but bad in that it encourages politics to remain divided on the basis of ethnicity and religion. The real point of this form of election is that voters do not select individual candidates (which should cut down on the number of assassinations), and MPs will not represent geographic constituencies. There will be no representative of, say, Fallujah; votes will be counted on a national basis. So if participation is uneven across the country, if no one at all votes in Fallujah, if--oh fuck it--WHEN the election is a failure in real-world democratic terms, this electoral system will gloss that over. There won’t be any vacant seats; rather, the system will just give more political weight to areas not in rebellion, or where more fraudulent votes are created.

It also won’t effect the system if candidates do get assassinated. Unlike Afghanistan, where if any of the presidential candidates get offed, the election would be postponed 3 months. The candidates, you’ll be surprised to hear, aren’t doing a lot of whistle-stop tours.

Made up to be seen from 30 feet away

Raymond Chandler described one of his characters this way: “From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.” George Bush’s pronouncements are increasingly just a collection of words he likes, formed into things that look like sentences from 30 feet away, but which dissolve into nonsense if you look even a little more closely at them: “Iraqi citizens are seeing a determined effort by responsible citizens to lead to a more hopeful tomorrow, and I am optimistic we’ll succeed.”

Kerry’s new position on Iraq (yeah, I know, I sound like Bush when I say that, but it really is a new position) is that if Bush hadn’t cut off the UN inspections process prematurely, it would have shown that Iraq had no WMDs, and that fact being made public, by itself, would somehow have caused Saddam Hussein to fall, because his regime was based on his having WMDs. Oh, I don’t think so.

Renaissance Man

So whatever happened to those French hostages, now that the ban on headscarves has gone into effect?

And whatever happened to Saddam’s doubles?

Musharraf says that he’ll renege on his promise to step down as army chief because that would end the national “renaissance” in Pakistan. ‘Cuz you know how the quality of Florence’s paintings and sculpture declined after Cesare Borgia stopped wearing camouflage uniforms.

The US will sell Israel 500 missiles which could be used to attack Iranian nuclear facilities (the story has mysteriously vanished from the Ha’aretz website).

Beware the ides of the march of democracy

A must-read in the Guardian suggests that the NATO war on Yugoslavia was in large part about opening the country to takeover by multinational corporations, states that the bombing campaign targeted state-owned industries while leaving privately owned ones alone, and that the UN administration in Kosovo is now selling off the provinces state-owned enterprises, which are surely not the UN’s to sell.

Bush keeps talking about the “march” of democracy. The evidence is against him:

• The leading opposition candidate for president in Ukraine’s elections next month is now in the hospital with a mysterious case of poisoning.

• In Kazakhstan’s elections, the dictator Nazarbayev’s party comes in first, and the not-exactly-opposition party led by his daughter comes in second.

• Indonesia’s presidential elections are won by (retired) general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (remember when Indonesian rulers only had one name? and not silly ones like Bambang), just 6 years after the end of more than 30 years of military rule.

Of course Bush, in his response to Kerry’s speech, seemed to define Iraq as a democracy, so his standards aren’t terribly high.

Kerrycaterwauling

Why don’t you all read the transcript of Kerry’s speech, so I don’t have to?

Oh, all right. Some of it, quoted below, constitutes the best rhetoric I’ve heard yet from Kerry (actually, I’ve only read it so far, I’m sure it won’t sound nearly as good when I hear it in Kerry’s own irritating voice).

On the one hand, it’s a strong indictment of Bush’s failures and misjudgements, but on the other hand he says that he’ll fight the same crusade, but do it better. “The terrorists are beyond reason. We must destroy them. As president, I will do whatever it takes, as long as it takes, to defeat our enemies.” You’ll note he never defines “the terrorists,” so it’s a little hard to tell who all these people are he plans to “destroy.”

“To win, America must be strong.” Check. “And America must be smart.” Uh oh.

“His two main rationales – weapons of mass destruction and the Al Qaeda/September 11 connection – have been proved false… Only Vice President Cheney still insists that the earth is flat.”

“The President now admits to ‘miscalculations’ in Iraq. That is one of the greatest understatements in recent American history. His were not the equivalent of accounting errors. They were colossal failures of judgment – and judgment is what we look for in a president.” This line is almost too clever, or needed a bridging sentence; it took me a second to realize that the bit about “accounting errors” was a criticism of Bush’s use of the word “miscalculations” to minimize his own incompetence.

He quotes the Republicans (McCain, Lugar, Hagel) now criticizing Bush’s Iraq policy in order to deflect the charge that his own criticisms are partisan, without adding that McCain (not sure about the other 2) wants a massive attack on Fallujah.

And Kerry’s own ideas for Iraq are anemic: get other countries to give aid, bribe them with shares in Iraq’s oil industry in exchange for sending troops. Turn the page. A fresh start. A lot about dealing with Europeans, not a lot about how to deal with the Iraqis, except training a lot more of them to be soldiers.