Last night was about as uneventful as I expected: some shopping, then home for homework, cooking up lunch food, organizing, and some financial planning. We just started the 13-week Financial Peace University series at our church, so we thought we had better get our stuff organized. We have gotten very sloppy in the last couple of years and it's time to get back on track. There are several homework assignments we are supposed to get done by next week, so we sat down last night and made a list of things we spend money on. It was scary to see how much we were spending on gas for the generator and propane. Those two alone are nearly $800 a month. No wonder we don't have any money. I wish I had a vacation day available to get some help and get the power shed completed. We are very close and that one thing will cut the generator run-time from essentially 24 hours a day to 6-8 hours a day. I don't know what we can do about the propane, but we will be looking hard at that as well. We only have two debts; my truck and the house, so we aren't looking too shabby right now. We just need to start paying attention.

Politics:

Iraq is lost. The neo-cons were wrong; the Iraqi people failed to leap at a chance to be a Western democracy. Many said they were wrong from the start, but no one in the Bush White House was listening. After all, if God be for us, who can be against us? In any case, any chance we had of salvaging the situation was lost when the photos of American soldiers abusing prisoners were released. This abuse served no purpose other than the entertainment of American GI's. If you are trying to extract information quickly, you may resort to taping electrical wires to a prisoner and threatening to zap them or put a gun to their head and demand answers. If the POW proves to have nerves of steel, you may even be forced to follow through your threats with actual violence, if the situation is dire enough (such as finding a bomb planted in a populated area). A careful reading of military history will reveal that these things have always been done by everyone, including the U.S. What you don't do is take pictures as trophies. That implies pride in your work. No one worthy the designation "human" could be proud of causing physical or even psychological pain to another human. Forcing the POW's to perform sex acts on each other was pure sadism. It cannot be justified by any need for intelligence because gathering intelligence had nothing to do with it. It is obvious from the photos that the GI's looking on, including the women, were enjoying the show. All of Iraq hates us now, and they are fully justified in doing so.

Our options now seem to be reduced to two: Cut and run. We can declare victory, but no one else will see it that way. We will become like Russia; a loud drunk declaring our self-importance while the rest of the world laughs. Or we stay and become something other that what we are now. We abandon any notion of being a Republic, admit we are Empire and start acting the part. That means treating places like Saudi Arabia as client states ("Pump oil until the price is under $20 a barrel, or we will do it for you."), and bringing Iraq to heel by any means necessary, which will include creating several graves of a hundred head, or something similar.

I'm not sure I want to live in either place, but it seems I have no choice.

Back to work.