The traditional view of the development of civilization held that cities first appeared in the Fertile Crescent in about 3000 BC. The early Sumerians were, judging from the record they left behind, a gentle people who waged war as needed, but who seemed more interested in less violent occupations. Evidence of a wealthy urban settlement about a thousand years earlier has gradually emerged in Syria, a thousand miles to the northwest of the Sumerian sites. And the Syrian site, Brak, also shows evidence of organized violence on a large scale.

The story of Brak and the twenty-five-year effort to unlock its secrets, makes fascinating reading. It speaks to the nature of civilization itself – the near-simultaneous appearance of urban settlements, writing, and war. Here’s a link to the article in Discovery Magazine.

There’s an old saying about investigating crime: “Follow the money.” Do you want to understand what’s happened, and is still happening, in Iraq? Follow the oil. In order to believe that this was not a war about oil, you have to ignore the clear historical record of Bush/Cheney administration energy plans which pre-dated the 9/11 attack, draft legislation prepared before the Iraqi invasion, and repeated initiatives by the US occupation authority aimed at “reforming” the Iraqi oil industry.

This isn’t just about getting the history right or placing blame for policies gone wrong. Iraq isn’t history yet. What happens in Iraq over the next decade is going to have a big affect on the world, and a lot of it’s still going to be about oil.

Here’s a link to a very good short but fact-filled history of Iraqi oil, its effect on our policy, and the effect of our policy on it, by Michael Schwartz, author of War Without End: The Iraq War in Context.

Back in December I applauded the decision to cut the F-22 Raptor funding and switch resources to increased production of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. I still think that was the right move, but it’s disappointing to see the F-35 hit bumps. The project manager, a USMC major general (two stars), was recently replaced by a Navy vice admiral (three stars). Perhaps the message is an extra star means we’re trying that much harder. I hope so; we need to try harder.

The F-22 Raptor was an exercise in conspicuous consumption and the triumph of wants over needs. The F-35 is a much more cost-effective aircraft, but costs are still escalating and everyone involved in the project seems to have a hard time not tinkering with design and specifications. Some pretty smart defense reformers have argued the problems encountered by the F-35 are the unavoidable results of a procurement system which has gone completely off the rails – and I have a hard time disagreeing.

But make up your own mind on that score. Here are some good links to articles on the project’s current status.

New York Times

Center For Defense Information

Reuters

The Hill

In one of my more whimsical moods, I imagine that there is a room somewhere deep beneath the pentagon in which are imprisoned about a dozen lieutenant colonels from the various armed services. They are not allowed to read newspapers, watch television news, or surf the internet, so their perspective on events will be completely untainted by reality. Their sole task is to write the Quadrennial Defense Review.

Every time they write a simple declarative sentence devoid of defense-speak buzzwords, they receive an electric shock.

The Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) is a Congressionally-mandated public statement of defense policy. Ideally, it will give some indication of overall defense spending goals for the following four years and, unless it is a complete exercise in pointless paperwork generation, it provides an insight into the thinking of the current administration on strategic goals.

The most recent QDR was released last Monday. It is a public document, so here’s a Link to it. Parts of it made interesting reading, but the more I read, the less encouraged I became.

The buzz on the street is that the QDR cuts us loose from our traditional commitment to fighting and winning two conventional wars at the same time, freeing us to concentrate on counterinsurgency capability. I think that’s a pretty charitable reading of the document. Here’s what it says, in part:

“In the mid- to long term, U.S. military forces must plan and prepare to prevail in a broad range of operations that may occur in multiple theaters in overlapping time frames. …

Ray Bradbury’s 1962 novel Something Wicked This Way Comes is a creepy, atmospheric novel of the struggle of a young boy, his best friend, and his aging father against the forces of evil, embodied by “Mr. Dark” and his traveling carnival. The growing sense of malevolence in the novel is oppressive, palpable, but in the end is defeated not by bolts of righteous lightning, but by simple laughter and joy.

Fast forward forty-five years.

The real-world Westboro Baptist Church is a notorious hate group masquerading as Christians. They gained international attention for boisterously picketing the funerals of US soldiers killed in action in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their screamed message: US soldiers deserve to die because God hates homosexuals, the US does not aggressively persecute homosexuals, and these combat deaths are his just retribution. Signs emblazoned with slogans like “God Hates Fags” were accompanied by screams and taunts directed at grieving family members.

Godhatesfags.com is the church’s official web address – honest.

While Westboro Baptist Church remains primarily a forum for anti-gay hatred, it has expanded its list of people God hates to include Jews, President Obama, President Obama’s daughters, Lady Gaga (I don’t make this stuff up, I just report it), and now apparently Twitter and the play Fiddler on the Roof. 

Two days ago Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, came out for dumping the military’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy and allowing gays to serve openly. I’m betting he’s a pretty good candidate for their hate list …

Send your mind back fifty years, to February 1, 1960.

The landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka Kansas had been decided in 1954, but while it had declared segregated schools unconstitutional, six years later less than one per cent of black students in the South attended an integrated public school.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott — organized by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. following the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to surrender her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama municipal bus to a white person – had ended in 1956 following another U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring segregated public transportation unconstitutional. But four years later the Civil Rights movement seemed stalled. Many wondered if any further substantive progress could be expected for a generation.

Then something remarkable happened. On February 1, 1960, four African-American college students — Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond — walked into an F.W. Woolworth in Greensboro, North Carolina, and sat down at the whites-only lunch counter. Television recorded the arrest of four polite, well-dressed young men whose crime was trying to order a burger and milk shake in a public restaurant. Television recorded, and America watched. Then America acted.

Over the next eight weeks, sit-ins exploded into a national movement, taking place in over seventy cities. By the end of June, over 50,000 people had taken part in a sit-in. It re-energized the civil rights movement, gave it a new tactic and a new urgency. It spawned the Student Non-Violent …

There is a land where the people believe magic wands can detect bombs and firearms. The magic wands require no batteries, nor do they ever need to be plugged into a power source; they run off the static electricity generated by the soldier or policeman using them. If there are explosives present, a small antenna on the end of the wand points toward them.

Just like a divining rod pointing toward water.

Over eight hundred of these magic wands are in service, at a price tag of as much as $60,000 each. They cost only $250 each to actually build, which is a pretty good profit margin, but hey, what’s the price of security? The problem is, they are about as useful in finding explosives and weapons as those black plastic eight-balls with answers on the bottom. “Prospects are doubtful.”

Where could you find a land where people are willing to shell out millions of dollars for magic beans? Iraq, of course. After all, it’s the land where magic really works, the land of flying carpets and enchanted lamps. More recently, it’s the place where we sent pallets of cash – literally shrink-wrapped pallets stacked high with banded bricks of currency – worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and which then vanished. Poof! It’s a trick which would make David Copperfield even more famous.

And a felon.

The only good news in this fiasco is that the U.S. didn’t actually buy any of these worthless gizmos – only the Iraqis government has. U.S. soldiers have …