A Mind That Suits What doesn't kill me, makes me laugh... usually.



Monday, October 13, 2003 :::
 
North Carolina...new music...good news from Iraq

A Mind That Suits dilated on several subjects on Saturday, even though he has few weekend visitors. If you are interested, scroll down to the next post. Herewith, a few quick Monday items.


The brief vacation in Wilmington is about to come to an end, alas, as the charms of this coastal community continue to entice, except for the DC-in-training traffic. Spent yesterday at Shackleford Island, just off Beaufort, in the Outer Banks. It's a small island with scrub brush, lots of dunes, and about 120 wild horses, who were very good at avoiding tourists, and wouldn't you be, if you were a wild horse on a tiny island? Get there early, bring walking shoes and insect repellant and lunch. It's good for 4 or 5 hours of exploring, though we only gave it an hour.

When A Mind That Suits worked with American youngsters, he discovered that one of the key reasons kids and parents don't talk is that parents are obsessive about their own adolescence, at least as far as music is concerned. Worst are the babyboomers of A Mind That Suits's own generation. But everyone does it...The indispensible Wall Street Journal this morning has an article on websites that help you find new music. As soon as A Mind That Suits tries them out, he will let you know about them.

From Little Wars, Cosmic Lessons Grow

The Journal lead editorial this morning says that "by any reasonable standard Iraq is making notable progress despite the obvious security problems, and it is about time the Bush Administration has begun to go back on the political offensive in stating its case." Amen, and amen, but it should be noted that the Administration was completely paralyzed by its inability to admit that it needed more money and more people and that Iraq was not going the way that they had bragged. Now that everybody has slapped each other around behind closed doors, it is more than time that they took the field back from people who want Iraq to turn out badly.

And here is a place where A Mind That Suits disagrees with Administration critics. A new report has concluded that there was never any danger that Saddam was going to blow up his oil fields and bridges, and so the lightning fast advance, designed to protect them, was unnecessary. There was ample reason to be fearful: Saddam had famously done that very thing in Kuwait on his way out. As it was, his people blew up 9 of their own oil wells. That turned out to be a diversionary tactic, and that was smart planning. His troops had received no training, and so he deployed them effectively: they destroyed vital records of his tyranny while Americans worried about the oil wells. There was no way that the Administration could have known that, and it chose wisely to protect the fields.

The mistake was in launching a major war with too few troops, so that there was no way our boys could be redeployed to stop the looting when we realized Saddam, or somebody, had outsmarted us, or even before we realized it. An analyst from the Lexington Institute, a DC think tank, summed it up beautifully by saying "I worry that (the) Pentagon is drawing cosmic lessons from the defeat of a truly inept enemy (in direct battle.) That is a big, big mistake." Amen and amen to that as well.

The father of A Mind That Suits is cooling his heels at a mechanic's as this is being written, so A Mind That Suits must bid you farewell.

Until tomorrow...

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 8:11 AM


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