Rhinocrisy

UN High Commissioner for Refugees says Iraq war created few refugees.

The war in Iraq caused no massive displacement… But despite the many difficulties facing Iraq’s 25 million residents in the immediate aftermath of the war, most people appear ready to wait out this phase and look towards a new, vibrant post-war Iraq.

Washington Post says Syrian officials disagree:

Syrian officials say 700,000 Iraqis from various ethnic, religious and economic backgrounds have arrived since the U.S.-led invasion, far more than in any other country in the region. The flow has spiked in the past four months.

If any readers happen to be in Syria, could you please explain this discrepancy?

By the time you read this, every blog on earth will be quoting this story. But anyway: LA Times says the war is over. Bush is “cutting and running,” to paraphrase Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio). The timing was almost precisely predictable. Actually he’s a month late.

In July, the generals briefed Congress on the military’s status in Iraq. While no members would tell me what the generals said in closed session I had multiple conversations with them and I listened carefully to their questions in open session. It was clear that the generals had warned them that “the wheels will start coming off” of the effort in October, as the number of American troops available to serve and amount of materiel in working order in the battlefield dropped below the numbers that the Executive Branch had ordered. They saw that enough troops were retiring, getting injured, dying, and at least taking time back home with the kids, that there wouldn’t be enough to keep 160,000 in the field. Sure enough:

President Bush will give a major speech Wednesday at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., in which aides say he is expected to herald the improved readiness of Iraqi troops, which he has identified as the key condition for pulling out U.S. forces…

The developments seemed to lay the groundwork for potentially large withdrawals in 2006 and 2007, consistent with scenarios outlined by Pentagon planners…

Some analysts say the emerging consensus might have less to do with conditions in Iraq than the deployment’s long-term strain on the U.S. military…”

The midterm elections are apparently a worry, as well.

A former top Pentagon official who served during Bush’s first term said he believed there was a “growing consensus” on withdrawing about 40,000 troops before next year’s congressional election. That would be followed by further substantial pullouts in 2007 if it became clear that Iraqi forces could contain the insurgency.

If this is true, it will be the first time since at least 1990 that midterms serve as an excuse to end a war, rather than starting one. Then again, the withdrawal could be tactical — maybe they just need the manpower for another invasion.

Machines are useful. Political machines can make you money.

During that same period of Dick Cheney’s reign at Halliburton, Donald Rumsfeld served as chairman of Gilead Sciences Inc. Coming onboard in 1997, a year after this California biotech firm developed and patented the Tamiflu vaccine, the former salesman of nuclear reactors to North Korea remained at his lucrative post until joining the Bush coup in 2001.

Today, Tamiflu is the most sought-after drug on the planet. Said to protect against a flu bug that annihilates chickens, along with a handful of Asian handlers sharing foul, windowless warehouses even worse than Abu Ghraib, the unproven vaccine has made America’s Secretary of Permanent War and Torture even richer. Still holding Gilead shares valued in Fortune magazine as high as $25 million, Rumsfeld’s dividends have reportedly made him more than a million dollars over the past six months of White House flumongering. 2005 sales for Tamiflu are forecast at $1 billion—up from $258 million in 2004.

And editing machines can make you giggle. (Always good to see a linguistics education getting used for something more than programming humanoid voices to say, “Hmm, I didn’t get that.”)

The truth lies at the Uncyclopedia.

Evolution is a process that allows dinosaurs to lay chicken eggs and monkeys to give birth to humans. Usually evolution is seen to be a sign of progress, but this doesn’t explain George W. Bush. Evolution was a popular pseudoscience in the late twentieth century, before scientists finally proved the truth of Creationism.

Don’t worry, it doesn’t end there.

In other speciation news, Pharyngula was featured in the City Pages and some Aussie at Cal documented high-speed frog speciation, caught in midstream. A new species, yours in just 8,000 years. In the middle of the ID “debate,” this might be big enough news to make the papers, but so far that pleasure has not been its.

And most importantly of all, some clever jerks have remembered the most basic response to the Intelligent Design folks. Point out such pleasures as the human appendix, which serves no purpose except to kill off otherwise healthy kids. Or my frickin back, which has left me for three days in the kind of pain that drives me to addle my mind with intelligently designed distillates of the opium poppy. If God designed us in His image, He must have a few seriously herniated discs. Or maybe just a sick sense of humor. Which can not be said for these guys.