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“Timers from washing machines and dryers, like these for sale at a parts store in Baghdad’s Rasheed Street district, are used by insurgents to detonate improvised explosive devices.”

Noah Shachtman, How Technology Almost Lost the War: In Iraq, the Critical Networks Are Social — Not Electronic:

“(…) The Defense Department wasn’t blind to the power of networks, of course — the Internet began as a military project, after all, and each branch of the armed services had ongoing “digitization” programs. But no one had ever crystallized what the information age might offer the Pentagon quite like Cebrowski and Garstka did. In an article for the January 1998 issue of the naval journal Proceedings, “Network-Centric Warfare: Its Origin and Future,” they not only named the philosophy but laid out a new direction for how the US would think about war.

Their model was Wal-Mart. Here was a sprawling, bureaucratic monster of an organization — sound familiar? — that still managed to automatically order a new lightbulb every time it sold one. Warehouses were networked, but so were individual cash registers. So were the guys who sold Wal-Mart the bulbs. If that company could wire everyone together and become more efficient, then US forces could, too. “Nations make war the same way they make wealth,” Cebrowski and Garstka wrote. Computer networks and the efficient flow of information would turn America’s chain saw of a war machine into a scalpel.”

Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker: Shifting Targets

“The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second development is that the White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.”

FP Passport:

“It’s often said that financial markets hold no values. They strive only for maximum efficiency—making the most money with the least exposure to risk. If this is true, the war in Iraq is far from over.”

AMEX Defense Index

Wikipedia:

“The setup involves an auctioneer who volunteers to auction off a dollar bill with the following rule: the dollar goes to the highest bidder, who pays the amount he bids. The second-highest bidder also must pay the highest amount that he bid, but gets nothing in return.”

Naar aanleiding van Lessons on the surge from economics 101.

Sgt. US Marine Corps Eddie Ryan, 22 – Alive Day 13 April 2005.
Documentaire Alive Day van James Gandolfini (Sopranos) is tot 16 september 2007 op HBO.com te zien. (via)

“In a war that has left more than 25,000 wounded, ALIVE DAY MEMORIES: HOME FROM IRAQ looks at a new generation of veterans. Executive Producer James Gandolfini interviews ten Soldiers and Marines who reveal their feelings on their future, their severe disabilities and their devotion to America. The documentary surveys the physical and emotional cost of war through memories of their “alive day,” the day they narrowly escaped death in Iraq.”

There are 48,000 ‘security contractors’ in Iraq, working for private companies growing rich on the back of US policy. But can it be a good thing to have so many mercenaries operating without any democratic control?

An extract from Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, by Jeremy Scahill.

A field study released Monday by the University of North Carolina School of Public Health suggests that Iraqi citizens experience sadness and a sense of loss when relatives, spouses, and even friends perish, emotions that have until recently been identified almost exclusively with Westerners.

The Onion: Study: Iraqis May Experience Sadness When Friends, Relatives Die

Terry Jones: “No hoods. No electric shocks. No beatings. These Iranians clearly are a very uncivilised bunch.”

&tSeymour Hersh;/a>: “In the past few months, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, the Bush Administration, in both its public diplomacy and its covert operations, has significantly shifted its Middle East strategy. The “redirection,” as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.”

• CAT – Calendar for TV.
  (tags: bittorrent calender tvgids)
• Dailymotion – La Linea 01 / La Linea 05
  (tags: la_linea video animation)
• Border Film Project
  “We distributed hundreds of disposable cameras to two groups on different sides of the U.S.-Mexico border: undocumented migrants crossing the desert into the United States and American Minutemen trying to stop them.”
  (tags: art photography)
• Listen to what the insurgents say – Editorials
  “Their methods continue to be brutal, but a notable evolution has been demonstrated.”
  (tags: iraq us)
• © Jeroen Bosch – zero content | turpis egestas inverted
  Hebben.
  (tags: art jb zerocontent)