This is a great piece about How to support our troops but rue Bush's new global Darwinism . A lot of us need that. And he could be reading my thoughts when he says:

It seems likely -- and we should all hope, for humanity's sake and our country's -- that we'll win this war, that Saddam Hussein will be retired from active duty, that hard evidence of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in his Iraq will turn up (and hopefully be destroyed before they find their way to the black market), and that the Iraqi people will probably, to one degree or another, be better off under whatever comes next. Bush will benefit from these developments, a fact that brings me no joy. But we must admit that these are all very good things, and liberal opponents of the war need to acknowledge them--along with the fact that, let's face it, the United Nations was not enforcing its resolutions against Iraq, and only the pressure applied by this administration made it begin to do so.

I concede that last point, but it is hard for me to seperate the intention from the effect. I think that it is safe to say that the only reason that Iraq cooperated to the extent that they did with weapons inspectors is because the American military was massing on his borders. But I do not believe that Bush and his war engines ever intended to be satisfied by anything short of invading Iraq. And worse, some of them are motivated by a chance to display military might--after all these are guys who live on drills and drawing boards, rarely having a game day to reward all of that practice; others in the administration are relishing a mighty bombing campagin because it will allow them to grant generous contracts to their corporate buddies to rebuild the place. IF the "build-up to war" were part of a strategy to intimidate Saddam and not merely a pretense (a window dressing) for war, then I might spend time dwelling on the positive effects it had. But that wasn't the case and we were steered to war, as planned (albeit more slowly because of the UN route being invoked).

But the article is a good one. The author is Michael Tomasky and I got the link from Altercation (about my third favorite site these days, after Google News & TPM). I've now read a couple great pieces from Tomasky, who also writes for New York Magazine, and he also has guested on Altercation from Eric Alterman (of The Nation)

And how about Bechtel, huh? The pride of the Bay Area. Multi-national corporation responsible for horrors in the
privatization of Bolivian water rights, a crooked clusterfuck of a building project in Boston, the arming of Saddam, and now has applied for the spoils of his removal. Here's a quote from another article on this subject:

Five of the companies invited to bid on that contract - Fluor Corp., Bechtel Group Inc., Louis Berger Group Inc., Parsons Corp. and Halliburton Co. subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root - have contributed $2.8 million to candidates during the last two elections, 68 percent to Republicans, according Federal Elections Commission data.

Anyway, Bechtel got Real Shut Down today in San Francisco.