autorave/iraq

After smothering efforts by war critics in Congress to drastically cut U.S. troop levels in Iraq, President Bush plans to ask lawmakers next week to approve another massive spending measure -- totaling nearly $200 billion -- to fund the war through next year, Pentagon officials said.

Terri Gurrola comes back from Iraq and meets her daughter. She served in Iraq for 7 months. The photo is really moving.

A man said to have been an interpreter for the British Army in Basra has been killed by militia gunmen on the very day that his wife learnt she was pregnant with their first child.

Nine or ten masked men went to the home of Moayed Ahmed Khalaf in the al-Hayaniah district of Basra and beat him in front of his wife and mother, four sources told The Times. They then dragged him away, telling the frantic women that they would bring him back shortly. Khalaf's body was found on Al Qa'ed Street later that night. He had been shot multiple times, according to Colonel Ali Manshed, commander of the Shatt-al-Arab police station.

"America is long past the possibility of some kind of profitable outcome in Iraq. Neo-con dreams of a quick, cheap victory, delivering democracy and peace and self-financed from Iraq's own oil revenue, got us started on this misadventure. Like the students, the early bidding seemed like a fun adventure to the boys in the Bush administration. "Bring 'em on," the chief boy said about the other bidders. And like the economics class, suddenly we were in the thing up to our necks, with only bad choices available at an ever-escalating cost."

An excellent read. A view of the war in Iraq, through a common sense economics perspective.

From the page: "Conspicuously absent from these important discussions are the millions of Iraqis whose lives are in jeopardy because of the violence. Americans do not need to hear lectures from President Bush about the fall of Saigon or the rise of Pol Pot to imagine the consequences for people abandoned by the powers that came to same them, or purged because of their association with the previous regime or foreign power. Such a crisis exists in Iraq today: nearly one in six Iraqis - as many as 4.2 million people, according to the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) - already pushed out of their homes, tens of thousands already killed, and scores of families singled out for retribution because of their association with the coalition."