Unfortunate unilateral action of the week: It's one thing to pursue a dangerous criminal; it's another to simply bomb a village where the criminal may or may not be. BBC NEWS | World | South Asia | 'Zawahiri' strike sparks protest (news.bbc.co.uk, 1/14/06) has a grim, Keystone Cops sort of flavor that is completely discouraging. This approach is consistent with the US military approach to threats within Iraq, but that isn't helping, either.

A sad anniversary. BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Guantanamo Bay's unhappy anniversary (news.bbc.co.uk, 1/11/06). The 'war on terror (and international law) has meant that the US' lawless, foreign military gulag, Guantanamo Bay, has existed publicly for 4 years. The system that it is supporting has produced no successful convictions, just a long string of embarrassments as the men who were so hastily rounded up and deprived of their liberty are quietly dumped in or near their home countries.

Whoever thought the US would sink so low as this.

U.S. Has End in Sight on Iraq Rebuilding: Documents Show Much of the Funding Diverted to Security, Justice System and Hussein Inquiry (washingtonpost.com, 1/2/06):

The Bush administration does not intend to seek any new funds for Iraq reconstruction in the budget request going before Congress in February, officials say. The decision signals the winding down of an $18.4 billion U.S. rebuilding effort in which roughly half of the money was eaten away by the insurgency, a buildup of Iraq's criminal justice system and the investigation and trial of Saddam Hussein.

An aside: the insurgency didn't actually get the money, despite the comment that the insurgency was eating money. It's just more polite to say that, rather than to point out the high overhead costs of an unpopular military occupation.

Photographs From Iraq: December 2005 : SF Indymedia (sf.indymedia.org)

The New Yorker: Fact: UP IN THE AIR - Where is the Iraq war headed next? by Seymour Hersh (12/5/05, newyorker.com).

The former senior official said that after the election he made a lengthy inspection visit to Iraq and reported his findings to Bush in the White House: "I said to the President, 'We are not winning the war.' And he asked, 'Are we losing?' I said, 'Not yet.' The President, he said, 'appeared displeased' with that answer.

Hersch has published a variety of very interesting articles about the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. Here's something I haven't thought much about, because it isn't often mentioned in the corporate media:

The military authorities in Baghdad and Washington do not provide the press with a daily accounting of missions that Air Force, Navy, and Marine units fly or of the tonnage they drop, as was routinely done during the Vietnam War. One insight into the scope of the bombing in Iraq was supplied by the Marine Corps during the height of the siege of Falluja in the fall of 2004.... Since the beginning of the war, the press release said, the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing alone had dropped more than five hundred thousand tons of ordnance.

(Bold emphasis mine.) There are several interesting items in this particular Hersch article - go give it a read.