The Australian today reports that Defence Minister Brendan Nelson has admitted Australia's motivation for keeping troops in Iraq is securing future oil supplies:

The defence update we're releasing today sets out many priorities for Australia's defence and security, and resource security is one of them. The entire (Middle East) region is an important supplier of energy, oil in particular, to the rest of the world. Australians and all of us need to think, well, what would happen if there were a premature withdrawal from Iraq? ... For all of those reasons, one of which is energy security, it's extremely important that Australia take the view that it's in our interests ... to make sure we leave the Middle East and leave Iraq in particular in a position of sustainable security.

Washington Post
Friday, February 9, 2007; A19

By Eric Fair

A man with no face stares at me from the corner of a room. He pleads for help, but I'm afraid to move. He begins to cry. It is a pitiful sound, and it sickens me. He screams, but as I awaken, I realize the screams are mine.

That dream, along with a host of other nightmares, has plagued me since my return from Iraq in the summer of 2004. Though the man in this particular nightmare has no face, I know who he is. I assisted in his interrogation at a detention facility in Fallujah. I was one of two civilian interrogators assigned to the division interrogation facility (DIF) of the 82nd Airborne Division. The man, whose name I've long since forgotten, was a suspected associate of Khamis Sirhan al-Muhammad, the Baath Party leader in Anbar province who had been captured two months earlier.

The US has bombed a village on the Somali / Kenyan border where, allegedly, a lot of al Qaida folk were. They used an AC130 gunship, so there's probably not much left of the village. Some civilians are dead, too, of course.

The Guardian (destroying morale and undermining the nation's will to win the war on towelheads, as always) reports the words of one father:

My four-year-old boy was killed in the strike. The plane was firing at other areas in Ras Kamboni. We could see smoke from the area. We also heard 14 massive explosions.

Aw, bleeding heart me. Can't make an omelette without, etc.

But what if that boy was a US citizen? Or from any European country? The bombing wouldn't have happened. Why not? Two possible explanations.

The principal reason we are having a problem in Iraq is because people are deliberately giving us a problem. There's sometimes a sense in which, it's as if, if only we sort of had a different post-conflict strategy, somehow we could have avoided this problem. This problem hasn't originated naturally. It's originated as a result of the deliberate outside interference linking up with internal extremism.

From the BBC.

Gosh. Not the kind of thing we'd ever do. Certainly not the Americans. Gosh, no.

Jesus fucking Christ, I never knew this. Right now I'm holding on to the desk for dear life. Jesus fucking H bastard in a bun on a bike Christ.

From Wikipedia, though originally read about in this excellent Edge article.

Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov was a Soviet naval officer. On October 27, 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a group of 11 United States Navy destroyers headed by the aircraft carrier USS Randolph entrapped a nuclear-armed Soviet Foxtrot class submarine B-59 near Cuba and started dropping depth charges. Allegedly, the captain of the submarine, Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, believing that a war might already have started, prepared to launch a retaliatory nuclear-tipped torpedo.

Three officers on board the submarine — Savitsky, Political Officer Ivan Semonovich Maslennikov, and Commander Arkhipov — were entitled to launch the torpedo if they agreed unanimously in favour of doing so. An argument broke out among the three, in which only Arkhipov was against making the attack, eventually persuading Savitsky to surface the submarine and await orders from Moscow. The nuclear war which presumably would have ensued was thus averted.

At the conference commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis held in Havana on October 13, 2002, Robert McNamara admitted that nuclear war had come much closer than people had thought. Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, said that "a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world."

And from this 2002 Boston Globe article

Participants emphasized that any new knowledge should be used to help avoid future conflict, in particular a potential US war with Iraq. ''God willing, someone will be sitting down in Baghdad and talking about this moment in 40 years'' if a war is averted, said Christopher Kennedy Lawford, President Kennedy's nephew. Lawford, who played a US pilot in a film about the crisis, ''13 Days,'' was among several members of the film's team attending the conference.

Diane McWhorter in Slate:

We have become such "good Americans" that we no longer have the moral imagination to picture what it might be like to be in a bureaucratic category that voids our human rights, be it "enemy combatant" or "illegal immigrant." Thus, in the week before the election, hardly a ripple answered the latest decree from the Bush administration: Detainees held in CIA prisons were forbidden from telling their lawyers what methods of interrogation were used on them, presumably so they wouldn't give away any of the top-secret torture methods that we don't use. Cautiously, I look back on that as the crystallizing moment of Bushworld: tautological as a Gilbert and Sullivan libretto, absurd as a Marx Brothers movie, and scary as a Kafka novel.

So, is there a new, post-election normal? A recent Google search turned up some impressive, learned commentary comparing the Military Commissions Act of 2006 to the Enabling Act of 1933. A reader congratulated one of the legal scholars, human rights lawyer Scott Horton, for daring to defy Godwin's Law. Perhaps (to switch totalitarian metaphors) we are in the midst of a little intellectual Prague Spring.

Of course, that democratic interlude met a swift and terrible end. If the midterm election was a referendum on nothing more than Bush's competence, then the message the Republicans have gotten is: Next time, make it work.

Some of my favourites bits from Roosevelt's inaugural address as president, March 4 1933.Though anyone who humbly 'assumes unhesitatingly' the job of leading his people to moral victory might attract a dollop of healthy suspicion, it's a reminder that some politicians have, in the past, tried to quell panic and terror, rather than fuelling it for their own political gain.

Also note how the sentiments about profit and money-lenders you would never, ever hear from a New Labour politician's mouth.

I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our people impel. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.

Some scary robot stuff for Tuesday.

Slashdot reports that Israel would like to have tiny little hornet-size droids to film and/or kill terrorists. Perez mentioned something similar in a recent Guardian article, post-Lebanon-flattening. It started quite promising: there's too much death, too much risk. Yay! Therefore, we need tiny flying robots to do the dirty work for us. Doh.

Quite Perez believes this is a realistic goal, I don't know. Though we didn't know we could build atom bombs or fly to the moon but, my Jove, we all pulled together, showed a bit of spirit and jolly well did it.

This is, one might speculate, not unconnected to the US Manhattan-project push for a new robotics era in the military. Notwithstanding that the people who write about it in docs like this are angling for Congressional money, it's still scary. They even have a little diagram showing how they'd like to get from people operating robots, to an autonomous robot force able to deploy and communicate over land, sea and air and into cities and buildings, under strategic control.

We already have unmanned aerial drones killing via US-based CIA operative control; such drones were also used by Israel this summer. The gap here between the 'thousands of [unmanned] flight hours' and military strikes is already almost instant:

Other air force investments of recent years intended to shorten the sensor-to-shooter time during joint operations between its UAVs and attack helicopters also proved their worth during missions in southern Lebanon, the service says. Tadiran Spectralink's Givolit datalink system allowed the service to react quickly against targets such as rocket launchers by relaying images from a UAV directly into the cockpit of a Boeing AH-64 Apache, enabling its pilots to immediately launch missiles.

Not sure what to say about the US mid-term elections, but the past 24 hours couldn't go unblogged. This is Planet Earth's magic hour light moment. We get to feel the weight of Satan's cock lifted off our shoulder, step photogenically out into a perfectly timed sunset, and grin like loons. We get to know that many, many others around the world are doing the same.

From TruthDig.com:

Kevin Tillman joined the Army with his brother Pat (the all-American hero who turned down a $2m dollar sports contract to sign up) in 2002, and they served together in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pat was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. The article above is written by Kevin, who was discharged in 2005.

(Note also a serving Marine has started this site too...)

Some quotes...

Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.

Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.