Random Memory

Plowing through the Harry Potters (1/3 of the way into book 4; I'll post thoughts soon-ish) I'm reminded of the page budget I used to set for myself in high school. Of course, it's sort of the opposite now - currently, I'm allowed 100 pages a day, just as an attempt to manage to accomplish one or two things on my To Do List. Then I had to read 50 pages a day. At the time I was doing gymnastics at a gym an hour away, so I'd split it up - 25 pages on the way to practice, 25 pages on the way home (Mom drove). That's how I got through all the AP books - Madame Bovary, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Grapes of Wrath, Of Human Bondage, all back and forth between Charleston and Huntington. Oh for the days when reading in the car didn't give me motion sickness!

Passports more important than dodging child-support

I'm glad that the new passport rules have helped to net at least $22.5 million over the past 8 months, but why are we so bad at enforcing child support rulings? I'm glad the government (whoa, there's a phrase I haven't used in a while...well, without being sarcastic) employs numerous different tactics to collect child support, but why is withholding a passport more effective than withholding actual dollars from a paycheck? I'll admit, I'm no expert, but my understanding of most child support laws is that courts and/or law enforcement have at least some access to the owing parent's financial records. So if that parent was able to come up with the money when his or her passport was withheld, doesn't it seem logical that he or she was therefore capable of paying the child support? And wouldn't that show up in the financial records? So couldn't law enforcement, you know, enforce the law (in a hopefully more speedy manner than just sitting around hoping someone wants to vacation in Europe sometime before the poor kid has to start paying college tuition)?

Child support is also my main argument against laws like this (thanks to Sid, who sends me such things because he likes to watch the steam come out of my ears). You see, these clever folks in Ohio think it's a grand idea to prevent a woman from having an abortion without the written consent of the father. Now, setting aside all the gross, offensive implications of this bill in terms of power and sovereignty over one's own body and abusive relationships and rape, let's think about what I hope, in my little fantasy world, was the actual, non-malicious, inspiration for such a law. A good guy, a stand up guy, who would do the 'right thing,' whatever that may be, is denied knowledge of his potential offspring, and that's unfair. Well, ok. But knowledge and responsibility are a two-way street, and you (and I mean the collective you) don't get to have a say in a process until we (collectively) figure out a way to make it impossible for men to walk away from the women they impregnate. As long as women like Jeannette Dean are dipping into retirement funds to cover basic necessities, because the state is unable to collect child support on her behalf, I'm not going to be losing any sleep over poor, mistreated men who don't get a say in what their significant other does to her body. You don't get to have it both ways. Either every man is held fully responsible for every child he produces, or you have no moral high ground from which to demand a more involved relationship with the ones that you happen to want.

Graduate School

Ug. This idea of graduate students really should not be encouraged (it's certainly not the way I was brought up to think of grad school nor, thankfully, does it reflect my experiences!). Thanks to Zuska for the reference.

"They're the cannon fodder of science. You throw them at problems that have no chance of being solved..."

Ouch. Way to encourage students to, you know, succeed and continue to pursue research in the field!

No End In Sight

I went to see this devastating documentary Friday night, and have been trying to figure out what I want to say about it since then. On the one hand, I want to urge everyone to see it, because it's incredibly well done. On the other hand, as today's Doonesbury points out, a majority of Americans seem to have already reached the conclusions outlined so clearly in the film (we have seriously screwed up nearly every decision regarding our occupation of Iraq). So who's left who needs to see the movie? Politicians. And although I am cynical enough to know it probably won't make a difference, I was heartened to read in today's AJC that the filmmaker, Charles Ferguson, has sent copies to military education institutions and members of the current administration. What Ferguson lays out, in compelling interviews with Ex-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Ambassador Barbara Bodine, Gen. Jay Garner, Bush national security adviser Walter Slocombe, and others, is not so much a polemic diatribe a la Michael Moore but a calm criticism of policy decisions made by the administration. His message, in my opinion, is that we need, we must, examine these mistakes and learn from them, and quit digging ourselves deeper and deeper into this hole.

In a nutshell, two months before the invasion of Iraq, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) was created with the following directive:

To prepare for all this (the coordinated, balanced progress of economic and security reconstruction in a post-conflict Iraq), the President (George Walker Bush) directed on January 20 the creation of a post-war planning office. Although located within the Policy organization in the Department of Defense, this office is staffed by officials detailed from departments and agencies throughout the government. Its job is detailed planning and implementation. The intention is not to theorize but to do practical work - to prepare for action on the ground, if and when the time comes for such work. In the event of war, most of the people in the office will deploy to Iraq. We have named it the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance and we describe it as an 'expeditionary' office.

Two months! We started planning for the occupation of Germany two years in advance! Nevertheless, the people staffing ORHA, many of whom are interviewed in the movie, had a lot of experience in and knowledge about the middle east and set about making very rational plans about post-war Iraq. (at least, what seem to me to have been very rational, common sense plans based on their collective work in Bosnia, Mogadishu, and the first Gulf War; Barbara Bodine was actually taken hostage for 40 days during the first Gulf War) These plans included ways to win civilian support, such as a list of important cultural sites to protect from looting (which was inevitably ignored) and ways to rapidly incorporate locals in rebuilding efforts (not only providing them with a sense of ownership but also providing jobs and a way of life for people who might otherwise turn to militias for their sense of identity). As the months and years dragged on, members of ORHA were one by one replaced by politicians with little or no military or Middle East experience or expertise. Eventually ORHA itself was replaced with the Coalition Provisional Authority. Things continued to go downhill from there. As Bodine says in the movie, she and her colleagues used to joke that there were 500 ways to do this thing wrong, and only about two or three ways to get it right. She just didn't realize we were going to go through all 500 before moving on to the two or three. And as one of the soldiers interviewed in the movie says, rather poignantly, don't tell me this is the best America can do. Because that will just piss me off. We are better than this. We have to do better than this.

Personally, if I were a presidential candidate, I would immediately begin reaching out to these former ORHA employees. They may be our best shot at redemption in Iraq.

So although the movie is mostly heartbreaking, there is a tiny silver lining in the knowledge that somewhere, sometime, there were members of this administration being thoughtful about the process of occupation in Iraq. The fact that those people have trouble sleeping at night, feeling guilty for not working harder to make themselves heard, makes me wonder how the people who ignored their advice can possibly sleep at night.