Benazir Bhutto assassination leaves U.S. plan "in tatters"

By Diane Silver

As I said before, I think we have to be careful about which narrative of today's events we embrace when it comes to looking at the meaning of Benazir Bhutto's death.

Informed Consent, University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole's blog, is one of the first places I always go for perspective on that region of the world. Cole's post does a good job of saying why Pakistan and Bhutto are so important for the United States.

Pakistan is important to US security. It is a nuclear power. Its military fostered, then partially turned on the Taliban and al-Qaeda, which have bases in the lawless tribal areas of the northern part of the country. And Pakistan is key to the future of its neighbor, Afghanistan. Pakistan is also a key transit route for any energy pipelines built between Iran or Central Asia and India, and so central to the energy security of the United States....

With Benazir's assassination, the Rice Plan is in tatters and Bush administration policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan is tottering.

Cole's entire post is well worth reading.

Here are photos from the rally that Bhutto addressed just before she was killed.

PHOTO: Benazir Bhutto spoke to a crowd on Nov. 9, 2007.

More evidence of the importance of science fiction

By Nancy Jane Moore

Every year the In This Moment staff decamps to WisCon to look at the world from a science fiction point of view. We are strong believers in the relevance of science fiction to understanding how things actually operate, as I've said before.

I note with pride that we are not alone: Juan Cole has an excellent article on Salon on the relevance of a science fiction TV show: "Heroes."

According to Cole, the show "functions as a thoughtful critique of Vice President Dick Cheney's doctrine on counterterrorism." He goes on to observe:

The powers of the heroes and their unpredictable consequences function as an allegory for the asymmetric threats generated by contemporary technology. They reflect the anxieties of an era when Timothy McVeigh can use some farm fertilizer to blow up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, when Internet hackers threaten to open the sluices of the Hoover Dam, when the cultists of Aum Shinrikyo can poison hundreds on the Tokyo subway with homemade sarin gas, and when a handful of expatriate Arab engineers based in Germany can turn jetliners into flying bombs. Technology is advancing with such rapidity that it is making each individual far more powerful than in the past and bestowing on each individual new capacities that surely not all will deal with responsibly. This passing of a technological threshold, in which a handful of terrorists with a suitcase bomb could potentially destroy a city, will be a particular burden for younger Americans, the kind who prefer "Heroes" to "24," since it will help define the future.

Warning to "Heroes" fans who haven't yet watched the season finale, which aired last week: Cole's article contains some spoilers.

Support our private contractors

By Nancy Jane Moore

Juan Cole included a bit of information I didn't know today on Informed Comment: 800 civilian contractors performing military-related jobs in Iraq have been killed and more than 3,300 have been injured.

The news comes from an AP report (published in Time online among other places) that also points out the U.S. has almost as many contractors as soldiers in Iraq -- 120,000 contractors and 135,000 soldiers. (Our government seems to be outsourcing everything.) Noting that insurgents make no distinction between contractors and soldiers when attacking U.S. personnel, the AP went out to say:

But when contractors are killed or wounded, the casualties are off the books, in a sense. While the Defense Department issues a press release whenever a soldier or Marine dies, the AP had to file a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain figures on pre-2006 civilian deaths and injuries from the Labor Department, which tracks workers' compensation claims.

If the contractor deaths and injuries are included in the statistics from Iraq, it increases the overall casualty rate by about 25 percent.

Of course, the contractors are paid much better than soldiers for putting their lives on the line: The AP says they can make $100,000 a year, most of it tax free. (Somebody please explain to me exactly how it saves taxpayers' money to contract out military services to private companies who pay their workers six times what soldiers are paid -- especially when one assumes the private firms are also earning a tidy profit.)

The AP doesn't say if the private companies also provide high level workers' compensation and disability coverage for their workers -- even with high pay that's not a given -- but I wouldn't be surprised to find that contractors who've suffered traumatic brain injuries and multiple amputations are getting better care than the wounded soldiers being treated at Walter Reed.

Speaking of Walter Reed, I heard Defense Secretary Robert Gates on the radio this morning sounding like Captain Renault from the movie Casablanca: He was "shocked, shocked" to find that wounded soldiers were being treated so badly.

I find it hard to believe that problems of this magnitude -- particularly the difficulties in getting decent disability ratings -- were so well covered up that the only way higher ups in the Pentagon found out about them was by reading The Washington Post. In the first place, The Post isn't even the first publication to cover the way wounded soldiers are being treated -- Mark Benjamin on Salon.com reported specifically on the problems of those with brain injuries more than a year ago.

And I doubt that these problems were any big secret among staff at Walter Reed. In fact, I suspect there were dedicated workers who tried to do their best by the wounded and to report problems -- and I also suspect no one paid any attention to them.

It's a shame that embarrassing coverage in The Washington Post is about the only thing that makes some people do their jobs properly.

When the Bush Administration talks about Iran, remember what they said about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq

By Nancy Jane Moore

U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns is running around giving interviews suggesting that Iran has something to do with killing Americans in Iraq. I heard him on NPR's Morning Edition this morning and there are press reports as well.

Before you get the idea that maybe Iran really is the problem, remember the lies Bush and his posse told that sucked Congress and a large percentage of the US population into supporting the Iraq War.

And then read Juan Cole. Today Cole calls Burns's comments "vague and unsubstantiated." On Tuesday, his article on the dangers posed by Bush's current Iran policies appeared in on Salon. He also discussed it on Informed Comment on Tuesday.

The real danger here is that Bush will lead us into another unnecessary war. And the irony is that sane solutions to the incredible mess he made in Iraq involve working with Iran.

For an amusing take on Bush's policy that he will take military action against any country he thinks is destabilizing Iraq, I recommend this week's panels of Darrin Bell's comic strip Candorville.