This is the government we don’t trust to send our mail properly, remember. What were we thinking getting them into the job of nation-building?

Nation-building? Is this an army or a focus group? Next, we’ll hear someone telling us they want to “address the issues” and “come together as a community.”

Yes. That’s what all those daisy-cutters are about. Nation-building.

Did you know that:

• Over 4 million Iraqis are refugees from their homes – according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees? That’s one-sixth of Iraq’s population.

• Did you know that there is deliberate ethnic cleansing – often by government-linked militias. Baghdad, say US military officials, has gone from 65% Sunni to 75% Shiite over the last four years (that includes Christians who used to live at peace with Muslims there before).

• Did you know that a 2006 Johns Hopkins University study estimated the death count at 655,000 .While the study is controversial, it used the same methodology to establish the death count at Darfur – which no one is questioning — and in the Congo. Several hundred thousand is what most experts agree on.

• Associated Press reports have documented almost twice as many Iraqi civilians on average dying daily this year – 62 per day in 2007, against 33 per day in 2006.

• Iraqi Ministry of the Interior may have begun to manipulate casualty figures to misrepresent the displacement of violence from the cities into the provinces.

• US ambassador Ryan Crocker reported in July 2007 that Baghdad residents have on average only an hour or two of electricity each day.

• Oxfam and the NGO Coordination Committee in Iraq report that 28% of Iraqi children are malnourished, four million people regularly cannot buy enough to eat, and 70% are without adequate water supplies. The World Health Organisation has been fighting a cholera outbreak in the supposedly safe north. Iraqi officals report that the food rationing system on which millions depend is breaking down.

• 79% of Iraqis oppose the continuing presence of Coalition forces in Iraq, and 47% are so desperate as to want an immediate departure. 67% of people around the world polled by the World Service want withdrawal within a year. There are currently 168,000 US troops in Iraq. General Petraeus has announced the possibility of 30,000 combat troops being withdrawn by summer 2008. This would only bring the US troop level back to the point it was at in January 2007 – and, indeed, in 2003.

Time to wake up from the bad dream, everyone. Your job is to get the attention of the next person who is planning on voting for our two-faced one-party system and get them to see the light. If rivers of blood don’t move them – and they probably won’t – tell them that nuclear war in the Middle East is really, really bad for the air quality in Israel too; the housing market is coming unstuck, which means no more home-equity ATM machine; and 2-3 billion Asians are not going to go away any time soon.

The thinking around here needs to make room for all of the above or it can be confidently certified delusional.

Oh, and do a little research and let them know the history of the Darby Bible, while you’re at it…..

From a letter to co-author Bill Bonner, at the Daily Reckoning, complaining about support for Ron Paul:

“We are spending as much now as we did during WWII for the exact same purpose. Like it or not, we are in WWIII, a war against men as evil as Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito. Fascist, unconscionable Muslim terrorist rats, determined (they’ve said so) to destroy you, me, our children and our way of life. “I’m a Korean Veteran. I know what I was fighting for. Do you? Ron Paul sure doesn’t. What in the world do core libertarian beliefs in limited economic and social constitutional government have to do with the war in Iraq? A great many libertarians want us to win this war because all Americans would then be safer. Defeat would greatly strengthen those who have declared war on us….”

If anyone needs to be answered, it is not the Bush administration, but men like these – brave, honorable, sincere.

So how does one answer them?

1. America was much more powerful in the world in economic terms in World War II than she is today. Her relative strength is much less now. She cannot succeed militarily without the close cooperation of allies and neutral parties. Her interests all over the world would be threatened in the most dire way, otherwise. One example — the Chinese hold US debt to an unparalleled degree; the Chinese are also negotiating with Iran over a number of issues. They would certainly take a strike against Iran negatively.

2. Muslims constitute over a billion of the world’s people, spread out not just in the Middle East, but in Asia, where American interests are at stake as well. Some of these countries, like Malaysia, are players in the Asian growth story and are close enough to China and India that destabilization or Islamicization there wouldl have a spill-over effect. Should things turn ugly, that would drive out US and European multinationals. The fall-out on the global economy would be completely unpredicatble but probably huge.

3. International cooperation – especially with Muslim countries – is absolutely central to the war on terror. That cannot be obtained simply by coddling or bribing unpopular Muslim governments. It has to result from a perception by moderate Muslims that the war on terror really is just that, and not a war on Islam.

3. Terrorism is a tactic, used by all sorts of aggrieved political interests, from the IRA to the Tamil Tigers to Al Qaeda. It is less expensive to talk and negotiate with terrorists than to throw billions of dollars down a black hole of strategic blundering and corruption. It also works better. That is not appeasement. Let’s not get bamboozled by words. There is a time to negotiate and a time to talk tough. Right now, the cards are not with the US at all — no matter how the White House spins it. The cards aren’t with any single person or country or institution. They’ve been shuffled, reshuffled, thrown around and hidden up so many sleeves that it’s any one’s guess where the joker is….or who holds it…..or how it will be played.

4. Military analysts actually consider the Cold War, World War III. They consider the War on Terror, WW IV. Isn’t it convenient that they’re able to keep track of the decades with wars? Doesn’t it make you wonder? If any of these wars were all that successful, they would have led to prolonged peace. They didn’t. Why is that?

More to come

“The American administration is now using the very Sunni tribes that Saddam had worked with, mainly by purchasing their loyalty. It is very significant that Bush during his visit to Iraq a few days ago went to Anbar province rather than Baghdad, reflecting the realization that Nouri al-Maliki’s government is no longer the chosen vehicle for attaining America’s goals.

SPIEGEL: How does Washington plan to go about the business of ending the war?

KOLKO: There is utter confusion in Washington about how to end this morass. Goals are similar but the means to attain them are increasingly changing, confused, and as victory becomes more elusive so too does this administration look pathetic. The ‘surge’ in the opinion of a majority of quite conservative Establishment foreign policy experts (80 percent of whom had once served in government) was failing; the administration’s handling of the war, in their view, was dismal. In fact, it is disastrous…”