Don't forget Afghanistan

This morning, I saw this sobering article on the New York Times website, about the ever rising death count in the war in Afghanistan (a lot of you probably did too because it was on the front page of the print version).
After this post last week, I ended with a dooms-day-esque downward spiral of possibilities in which Bush is able to resurrect his legacy and simultaneously change public opinion regarding McCain's thousand year war.

But, the liberal press is swooping in to save us from that fate.

The CNN article which inspired the original post only states that the tours of duty of men deployed to Iraq will be shortened. Bush makes no mention of those in Afghanistan whatsoever.
The NYTimes article, however, brings to the forefront the rising death toll in a war that is described as "forgotten" three separate times in the article (and a fourth in the accompanying video).
Even as Bush tries to make good press that things are "making progress" in Iraq, things are deteriorating in Afghanistan. And it looks like the NYTimes has written something of a call to arms, for the media to step up their coverage (" '...you never hear about Afghanistan.' "; "the public’s neglect of the war in Afghanistan"). Hopefully they will be able to meet this challenge.

Maybe if they do so, there will be fewer families ripped apart like those in the article. We can only hope.

Sunday Screening

OH MY GOD. Seems The Americanization of Emily, one of my favorite relatively-unknown classics, is available in full on YouTube (and in handy playlist form, at that). It's been up for over a month, which is a good sign that the YouTube Copyright Gestapo isn't on the hunt for it in particular, but these things often vanish suddenly so get it while you can. To whet your appetite, here is an appropriately bizarre and incoherent trailer:

Don't let the black & white fool you, this was 1964; the young James Garner plays opposite the younger Julie Andrews in a biting satire of war and war-politics. Almost unknown and criminally underrated, this is everything Dr. Strangelove should have been: calm, intelligent, and devastating. (I hold Dr. Strangelove, like all of Kubrick, to be criminally OVERrated, but that's for another day.) It's not a great film, to be sure -- the directing is lackluster, and Julie Andrews is not exactly known for her dramatic range -- but the writing alone makes it more than worthwhile. Paddy Chayefsky, who you probably know as the guy who wrote Network in 1976 and then died, is the force at work here; Americanization of Emily is one of a series of movies he did as he transitioned out of 1950s TV and radio. (I'm not qualified to comment on the rest of Chayefsky's work -- the only one I've seen is the absurd Paint Your Wagon from 1969, with Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood, singing. Let me tell you, the only worthwhile thing about seeing Paint Your Wagon is that you can subsequently say you sat through it -- a not insubstantial accomplishment, actually. ...I'm digressing.)

I imagine that some of you shiftless, MTV-addled teenagers will lack the patience to watch this whole movie (and you productive, career-building Harvard types certainly won't have the time); if so, I demand you at least watch this one scene. Here, James Garner devastates Julie Andrews' war-widow mother at a garden tea party, delivers a subversive speech about the virtues of cowardice, and in his grinning, clean-cut, all-American way, starts the 1960s. Skip to 3:27 and watch through into the next clip.

I'll leave you with that to ponder, and for heaven's sake, watch the entire movie. Meanwhile, enjoy the rest of your weekend; this is an open thread.

Food Fight!

Below is "an abridged history of American-centric warfare, from WWII to present day, told through the foods of the countries in conflict."
It's a really interesting and entertaining recreation, and for you historians out there I think you'll find that they did a good job with the little details.

Click here for a cheat-sheet on what country each type of food represents, and go to the bottom of this page for a list of the conflicts depicted (although they're getting so much traffic right now that the pages might be down).

Our Latest Enemy

"Armageddon is not a foreign policy."

--Madeleine Albright, on last night's Colbert Report

...SO you watch the news on these 15 British sailors taken captive by Iran, and I think the basic reaction everyone shares is essentially "oh, crap." Tensions being what they are, this is exactly the kind of Franz Ferdinand moment that winds up engulfing the entire world in a cataclysmic orgy of violence and turns most of the Middle East into sizzling glass. (Not that the United States would ever take part in such a thing, because our government is so wise and rational and restrained on military matters.)

But one thing keeps nagging at me. What does Iran possibly stand to gain from an action like this? Whether or not these Britons were actually in Iranian waters (and I'm inclined to think not -- the Royal Navy is not that incompetent, they had GPS for Chrissake), taking them captive is a surefire way to make yourselves look like aggressive hotheaded nutbars, and thus lose a lot of the semi-goodwill you've painstakingly built up with potential allies like China and Russia. If you're really going to start a war this is a stupid-ass way to do it; and if you're not going to, then it makes no sense at all.

How then do you explain the action? One deceptively simple answer comes to mind: Iran does not know what it's doing. Either their foreign policy is dreamed up by seventh-graders, or -- more likely IMO -- this was just an insane overreaction by a bunch of yokels who wanted to arrest somebody, and now the panicked government is afraid to admit it made a mistake. They're making up crap to save face. Did you see the remarks to BBC by Iran's Foreign Minister, Manouchehr Mottaki? His body language told you all you need to know. This dude--

--with a nervous fake smile, laughing and sweating, looking for all the world like a Persian Babbitt trying to sell us real estate. "We'll be releasing one of the hostages, uh, pretty soon, I think! Let's talk about something more pleasant, like trade policy!" Fucking Axis of Evil, these people, and this is the best they come up with?

No, I don't get a real vibe of aggression from Iran here. My impression: this is not a government with a malevolent plan to destroy the West; this is a government that can barely issue drivers' licenses. And yes, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be a vicious, destructive anti-Semitic dickweed, but I think he has about as much real power as that homeless guy who says he's "mayor of the park." Bureaucracy, specifically incompetent bureaucracy, rules Iran.

Which makes the rumblings about military action from the right wing ("yay! a shiny new war!") that much more disturbing. Crazy president or no crazy president, this is a country that obviously needs help. And as the international community works to get these poor brave Britons back, we should bear in mind just who it is we're dealing with here; not a scheming mastermind but a schoolyard bully. The absolute worst thing we could do is overreact.

Surge

No longer just a crazy-caffeinated tonic that my third-grade friends used to add sugar packets to just to prove their hardcoreness, the Surge in now official reality.

There's no jokes here. Just the terrifyingly depressing fact of how to fit more dots on the map.