Plan 9 for Victory! … Ridgy-didge country … I blame my cold on the French 5th of April, 2006 POST·MERIDIEM 06:02

The first thing that turned up in my RSS reader this morning was this, and I haven’t read anything better since, nor had I for several days beforehand: http://​www.​thepoorman.​net/​2006/​04/​05/​plan-9-for-victory/​ . The whole thing is perfect writing—here’s just a short extract to whet your appetite:

“[…] Amen to that. The absurdity of a situation in which the military might of modern industrial hyperpower is unable, after three full years of battle, to crush a fractious insurgency of foreign terrorists, rag-tag ethnic militias, and Baathist dead-enders is almost too much to bear.”

“Professor Christmas feels that, in order to win the war, Bush should take the bold [and] decisive step of impressing Canadian theater critic Mark Steyn into service as his new speechwriter. (And damn the torpedoes!) You may be forgiven for feeling that this is a rather timid definition of “whatever it takes”. Can nothing, then, be done? Perhaps history can provide an answer: […]”

The piece effectively and powerfully makes a point that wasn’t clear to me before reading it; the US (and the UK, and Australia, and whoever exactly it is that’s still there) in Iraq neither want to win decisively nor behave humanely, if we are to judge their motivations on their actions. That leaves “massive public-relations exercise” as the plausible motivation for continuing the occupation, which makes me throw up a little in my mouth. Anyone know an antonym to “artisan of government?”

What makes the Amazon recommendation to my right particularly funny is that Jespersen is famed for his intemperate, batty male chauvinism (in the limited circles where people know who he is); the pure randomness of it is distracting, too, I can’t imagine Amazon meant to do it. Or, of course, maybe they did, to get this sort of mention in low-readership blogs and drive their mighty corporate stock price more stratospheric still ... Nah.

Ach, und; endlich habe ich meinen Flug für die Hochzeit gebucht; drei Tage in Australien, das genügt schon für mich, man hat keinen Mangel von Gelegenheiten in Europa Australier kennen zu lernen, und Brisbane ist doch nicht Ayer’s Rock Uluru. (Oder vielleicht will ich Zombie werden; 27 Stunden für jede Richtung, und das ohne die Bahnfahrt zu FRA!)

Word of the day: Грипп is Tajik for a cold; die Grippe is German for the same thing, la gripa the Spanish.