Cuba's not a dead issue in the nutty debate over health care for poor kids.

Americans owe thanks this morning to Wyoming senator Mike Enzi for clarifying how different our health-care system is from Cuba's.

During heated debate in the Senate yesterday, Enzi zoomed in on a crucial point of George W. Bush's threatened veto of funding for the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), a federal-state partnership that provides coverage to about 6 million poor children.

The Senate passed a pretty good compromise to help out those kids. Bush, while asking for an increase of more than $40 billion for the Iraq war, has said he won't spend more than $30 billion on this children's health program. The Senate disagreed — even some of its rock-hard conservatives, such as Orrin Hatch and Pat Roberts — and passed a bill. Roberts, a hardline Kansas conservative, pointed out that Bush is misinformed. You think?

But Mike Enzi is tagging right along with Bush, telling his fellow senators:

Our kids should be so lucky — rather, our babies should live so long. Enzi and the other senators didn't bring this up, so I will:

Cuba's infant-mortality rate is lower than the U.S.'s, according to widely accepted stats from the UN's World Population Prospects: The 2006 Revision.

The number of infant deaths per thousand live births in the period 2000 to 2005 was 6.1 in Cuba. It was 6.8 in the U.S. In deaths under the age of 5, Cuba's rate is 7.7, and the U.S.'s rate is 8.4

When it comes to overall death rates, Americans have it even worse.

The CIA's World Factbook reveals that the estimated overall death rate in the U.S. in 2007, per thousand people, is 8.26. Cuba's death rate is 7.14.

African kids have it worse than anyone else on the planet. But the U.S. is an anomaly among other developed nations. It has a higher overall death rate than the rates of most of those countries, like France, Sweden, and Japan. In addition, the U.S. overall death rate is higher than the rates in the following countries (this is a partial list):

Cambodia, Bangladesh, Kiribati, Yemen, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, Uzbekistan, Bolivia, North Korea, Papua New Guinea, Thailand, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Tuvalu, Mauritius, Maldives, Paulu, Nauru, Grenada, Jamaica, India, Indonesia, Mongolia, Peru, Brazil, Vietnam, Timor-Leste, Turkmenistan, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Columbia, Syria, Egypt, Gaza, the West Bank, Iraq, and Iran.

Yes, according to the CIA, the U.S. death rate is higher than the death rates in Iran, Iraq, the West Bank, and Gaza.

If you really want to understand this current problem of health care for poor kids in the U.S., go to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, where you can read a readable analysis of the bill and a breakdown of Bush's wrong analysis of the issue.

As for Enzi, a 63-year-old former Eagle Scout, shoe salesman and accountant, let's just say that his personal financial disclosure for 2006 shows that he ranks only 82nd in the Senate in net worth: His is $190,039 to $853,000. But 94 percent of his investments are in oil and gas, plus he does have at least $50,000 in his Senate credit union account — and the time to spend that cash: His tardiness rate is twice as high as the average senator's.

More to the point, he got no campaign money from Cuba, but the health-care industry poured $259,591 into Enzi's campaign coffers last year, second only to the support he got from big finance. And the health-care industry hates federal health care programs unless the money goes directly to the industry.

Enzi's PAC, Making Business Excel — get it? Michael B. Enzi, Making Business Excel? MBE, MBE? — raked in an additional $646,567 last year.

And no surprise here: Enzi gets more campaign money from D.C.-area operatives than he gets from the home folks in Wyoming.

Who cares about death rates when our political system is running so smoothly?

Kids of all religions learning a lot about rocketry.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that the Israeli-Palestinian death dance marathon staged by adults is more than annoying to children on both sides.

In schools themselves, the ones that are open, it's like the science fair from hell: The kids are learning immediate lessons in rocket-building and rocket avoidance. After school, the favorite music is rock — the pop of the ones being thrown by Palestinian kids, the house rock of walls inside Gaza homes being pummeled into rubble by Israeli soldiers.

It's a little different in Iraq's schools, where recess is going on and on — millions of people have fled their homes, and those who haven't find it too risky to venture outdoors. Want good grades? Forget the apple. Threaten to kill your teacher or kidnap his son.

Take a break from all the stories about nutcase Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaking at Columbia. Protest against him — that's your right — but who the hell cares? That's a circus. But the freaky sideshows are in the Middle East, where the age of rock is going to cause permanent damage to kids for generations to come, creating anger and fear on all sides that will be easily stirred up into religious fear. In effect, chapters of Future Terrorists of Arabia are popping up all over.

Here in Springfield, Mrs. Lovejoy would say, "Ohhh, won't somebody please think of the children!" (Listen to her here.)

She's right, and these are a few of the stories — underreported in the U.S. or not reported at all — that explain why:

• Shell shock: Seven Qassams, crude but effective Palestinian-made rockets, blast the Israeli town of Sderot in early September:

• Human shields: Israeli soldiers storm a West Bank refugee camp, blasting through the interior walls of homes and reportedly using Palestinians as shields:

• "Fighting Israel is Islamic duty": Palestinian kids are being taught that fighting Israel is a holy task, and Israeli kids are being taught that there is no West Bank, that Israel has dominion over all of ancient Israel. Palestinian maps and schoolbooks are nuts, and those in Israel border on the insane:

• Hostile entities: After years of Arab countries continually refusing to call Israel anything other than "the Zionist entity," Israel is now labeling Gaza a "hostile entity" and is further strangling its residents:

• Recess in Iraq: Iraqi parents are running on empty. School attendance is sharply down because of an outbreak of ditching — that's residents flinging themselves into ditches to avoid be killed by explosions or soldiers:

• "Either you give us good marks or you will die": If Iraqi kids do somehow manage to reach college, they're practically assured of high grades because professors are scared to death:

$15 billion of your money up in smoke for under-fire mercenary company, other defense contractors.

While Blackwater's mercenaries beg for mercy for killing a baby and 19 other people in Baghdad on Sunday, they're already working on another lucrative government contract on yet another foreign adventure: the "war on drugs."

In a major new outsourcing deal reported by only a few outlets, including the Army Times, Blackwater will divvy up a $15 billion pot of government gold, along with four huge defense contractors: Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Arinc.

Blackwater claims to be building remote-control spy airships. Purty darn good for an army based in a little North Carolina town — no, it's Currituck, not Mayberry.

Arinc, a Maryland-based major supplier of airplane surveillance and passenger-counting equipment, is particularly stoked about the deal, which it announced on the sixth anniversary of 9/11:

Hang on, Arinc, you're getting ahead of yourselves. Here's how GovExec.com's Katherine McIntire Peters describes this other privatized war, which apparently is necessary because, even with the privatized war in Iraq, we still don't have enough troops to conduct all these wars:

Blackwater clearly knows how to deal with foreigners. But how does a little ol' company get to share our wealth with such huge defense contractors? No doubt it's got low friends in high places.

It probably didn't hurt the mercenary army that, according to federal campaign records, its top execs gave $1,000 to Tom DeLay's campaign on December 14, 2004. Or that they contributed mostly to other openly God-fearing lawmakers, like Bono pal Rick Santorum, Kansas's Todd Tiahrt, and Indiana's Mike Pence — whose campaign-finance tool is the Principles Exalt a Nation PAC.

Praise the Lord and pass the ammo. Better make that a blunt.

U.S. officials already banned from travel in Baghdad.

Despite Sunday's gun battle in Baghdad in which 20 civilians were killed by Blackwater mercenaries, there are new reports that the Iraqi government may not cancel Blackwater's contract after all.

No surprise there, because Iraq's foundering government seems to have been canceled.

Radio Free Iraq reports that the Iraqi Parliament called off its September 18 session because a majority of its members didn't show up for work. The parent Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty news service says in today's roundup:

U.S. officials have already been forbidden to travel outside the Green Zone. Iraqi officials, targeted by insurgents, don't want to travel either.

Bring in more mercenaries! That seems to be the message. Tel Aviv-based Dominic Moran of Zurich's International Relations and Security Network (ISN) reports today:

Providing a good roundup of U.S. mercenary work, Moran also notes:

Here's a question, raised in 1979 by the mellifluous Mighty Diamonds:

Thirty years later, the answer's clear: The Pentagon, that's who. At best we'll get the "rogue security contractor" excuse from the Bush regime for Sunday's cacophonous killing of 11 Iraqis in Baghdad by the North Carolina mercenary army Blackwater.

That excuse has worked before. As I wrote in July 2004, it was used by the Pentagon after the Abu Ghraib tortures came to light. SecDef Don Rumsfeld blamed "rogue" soldiers.

Our memories are short when it comes to the mercenaries employed by the Bush regime. As I pointed out in August 2004, private "interrogators" from CACI were employed by the Pentagon at Abu Ghraib, where all that "fear up" went down.

After this latest incident of privatized violence, we have Blackwater saying its boys were ambushed. Blackwater has 1,000 "troops" in Iraq and guards Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Yes, they guard Crocker, and the administration guards them. Monday's Washington Post concisely captured the two versions of the latest Blackwater escapade. Here's the first:

Followed by the second version:

They wanted to shoot them some Ay-rabs, pal. The way I see it, the Mighty Diamonds sang about the possibility of dreadlocked Rastafarians someday making bodyguards pay the price:

But don't worry, Blackwater bodyguards, the Bush regime will shelter you. Iraq's citizens are the ones who can't hide. As of this morning, IBC's "documented civilian deaths from violence" totals somewhere between 72,596 and 79,187.

Yes, the Blackwater "incident" was notable. But as the IBC "recent events" list notes, on that same Sunday, many other Iraqis died, and not at the hands of American mercenaries, whom our press continues to euphemistically label "contractors" or "bodyguards."

One of the victims was a 12-year-old boy who was killed in Diwaniya during a raid by U.S. and Iraqi troops, according to news reports assembled by IBC. Wonder what happened there?

In any case, this particular bloody Sunday was predestined. IBC's list of 38 people who were killed just the day before includes this entry:

And this one:

Osama wants Americans to convert, but many of us are already religious fanatics.

Sounding like a presidential candidate, Osama bin Laden sympathized with our "insane taxes and real estate mortgages," according to Al Qaeda's tape, brilliantly dissected by Anne Applebaum in Slate.

Bin Laden's solution for beleaguered Americans? Convert to his brand of hardline Islam.

That wouldn't be much of a leap for many Americans, because 12.6 percent of us are "traditional evangelical" Christians, according to a 2004 survey by the political science prof John Green at the University of Akron's Bliss Institute of Applied Politics.

And what do traditional evangelical Christians believe in? Evangelizing, by definition, which is what bin Laden was doing on that tape.

And here's a reminder: Most evangelical Christians believe in the Rapture, as beliefnet.org's Deborah Caldwell noted in an excellent 2002 article. For you who are unaware, this is how religioustolerance.org explains the Rapture:

And Americans make fun of Islamic fanatics' beliefs about meeting virgins in Heaven?

Bin Laden's a violent creep, but his brand of religious fanaticism would be a pretty good fit for evangelical George W. Bush. Reporters for Frontline's The Jesus Factor (2004) talked with top Southern Baptist official Richard Land — whose denomination is the biggest in the U.S. — about Bush's inauguration for his second term as Texas governor:

OK, I'm convinced: God is vengeful.

(Land, by the way, wears presidential-seal cuff links; see my September 2004 item "The Christocrats.")

I guess that those of you who voted for Bush — Twice! For Christ's sake! — are off the hook, in both senses of the phrase.

Judging by the results of the 2004 religious survey, the turban of conservative Muslim bin Laden would wear well on quite a few other Americans, as much as they rightly detest him.

Hardliners of one religion have more in common with hardliners of another religion than with the rest of us. They all believe in conservative, patriarchal "family values" and they give us the same fiery message: Convert, or burn in hell — and we'll light the match.

You still think there's no comparison between bin Laden's homicidal brand of Islam and the beliefs of America's Rock-of-Ages-rigid traditional Christian evangelicals? Here's the grim FAQ about the future of us unbelievers, according to the killer logic of raptureready.com:

Let this be a warning.

Obscuring the view of Iraq.

Great timing by the White House for the so-called Petraeus report, which Bush regime staffers are busily writing as we speak: Remembrance of the horrific day six years ago is clouding our view of the Iraq debacle, where more U.S. troops have been killed than the total number of civilians on 9-11.

The Petraeus report won't compete with 9/11 for news space. The report's being released just as rational mourning and irrational jingoism are at their highest, so it'll just be part of it. One person you're not likely to see on TV or in the mainstream press in the next two days is former Reagan DOD official Lawrence Korb, who actually has a plan for withdrawing troops from Iraq. Korb is reduced to peddling on op-ed pages his sane and detailed plan for realistically pulling troops out of Iraq within a year. Over at BTC News, Weldon Berger wonders: "Why isn't Lawrence Korb on CNN non-stop?" Good question. Berger describes Joe Biden's plan as "hallucinatory" and Salon's Glenn Greenwald already cut through the bullshit of Ken Pollack and others who the press now call "critics of the war." Good points.

God help us if there's another attack on this 9/11, and no offense to the people who lost relatives and friends in the infamous attack in 2001 or will lose them because of the toxic cloud, but we still have to step back from that event and look at the present and future. No peacenik, Korb talks rationally about the here and now.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, brilliant U.S. Navy Photographer's Mate 2nd Class Jim Watson captured Ground Zero as a cathedral. Six years later, 9/11 has become sacralized, a piece of state religion, more so in the rest of the country than here in New York City. And that religiosity is only natural after such an unnatural event.

As always, though, religious feeling becomes a power tool in the hands of schnooks, especially those craftsmen in the Bush-Cheney regime. The Petraeus report could have been prepared and released a month ago or two months ago. But the 9/11 anniversary, with ceremonies at all sporting events and speechifying by all elected or wannabe-elected officials throughout the country, will obscure the current tragedy of Iraq, where at least 80,000 people have been killed by our troops and now mostly by terror attacks.

Of course 9/11 should be remembered, and its victims mourned. Should it obscure everything else and should the ceremonies be used to justify the unwarranted invasion of Iraq and continue the "war on terror"? No and no.

While we're deluged with 9/11 stuff over here, this is what's going on over in Iraq, as portrayed in recent IRIN headlines:

• Iraq's food rationing system failing as Ramadan approaches, specialists warn

• Blood sellers find market niche in Baghdad

• Violence, poverty, unemployment fuel rising alcoholism

• Hospitals under pressure as doctors move abroad

• Hospitals in north struggle to contain cholera outbreak

• Translators forced to quit jobs after being targeted by insurgents

• People flee Baghdad district as gunmen impose Shariah law

• Power cuts getting worse, affecting lives

New reports on Iraq confirm previous reports. Further reports coming. The best report, by Larry Korb, goes unreported.

While we're waiting for the Petraeus report — which will be written by the White House, as previously buried in an L.A. Times story — the press is playing up a new report to Congress that says the Iraqi national police force (its army, kind of) won't be ready to handle the chaos until later this century.

But that's old news. The freshest report wasn't commissioned by Congress or the White House or the Pentagon. And it didn't have anything to do with the Senate Democrats trying to "reframe" the "Iraq debate," as the New York Times put it in a detailed story yesterday about that irrelevant bluster.

The most dynamic and relevant report comes from Larry Korb, a high-ranking Defense official under Ronald Reagan, and it's going unreported. Now a senior fellow at the progressive think tank Center for American Progress, Korb released on August 27 an actual plan for pulling out of Iraq. Read "How to Redeploy: Implementing a Responsible Drawdown of U.S. Forces from Iraq" or listen to Korb talk about it, or do both.

More than a week after its release by the mainstream and highly visible think tank, Korb's report hasn't even hit the news pages and has gotten only a little play on op-ed pages. But it's detailed and realistic, compared with all the other pullout plans — of which there are none, except for the Bush-Cheney regime's current strategy, pictured above.

Seriously, Korb's plan is pretty damn good reading, and it comes from someone who's no flaming liberal pinko. But, then, veteran Iraq watcher Tony Cordesman's reports have been consistently ignored since before the 2003 invasion.

Here's what Korb's report says:

That's nice, but how do we do it?

And not only maps. Korb and his collaborators lay out a detailed month-by-month schedule, division and brigade by division and brigade — which equipment to leave and which to take with us, and doing it all with the least danger to our troops and to the Iraqis who haven't already fled their country.

Now that's a report worth reading. Meanwhile, we're deluged in the press with old news and report upon report upon report that say the same things and don't offer solutions, except to "disband" or "start over." Too late for that talk. Stuck in a bad place, our big wheels are spinning and not getting us or our troops anywhere.

Treating the latest of such reports as fresh, the Washington Post puts it this way this morning.

Yes, but the New York Times broke that very report last week, saying:

The Times played the breakdown of the police as a scoop, and the rest of the media followed right along. But that, too, was mostly old news.

Yet another report, way back on June 7, made the same points, as was reported at the time — or, rather, underreported.

That June report was, and is, readily available from the Pentagon. Check it out yourself (PDF). Its details are devastating, especially for a document just sitting there on the Pentagon website. For instance:

Corruption? Oh, brother. The details reported three months ago were staggering:

And who knows how many instances have gone unreported and haven't been investigated? That's because even the investigators are deathly afraid:

But the Pentagon's June report went relatively unnoticed, maybe because of how it ended:

With such a bland summary of explosive facts, further fact-finding was clearly needed. You'd think enough facts have been found. But do we really need to point out that it's always safer for politicians to either "reframe debates" or commission their own studies and reports than to listen to people like Korb and Cordesman and then hammer out hard decisions?

The New York Times pulled out of Iraq coverage even before the war started when it sent in Judy Miller to beat the WMD war drums.

But five years later, it still hasn't re-entered the battle, judging by its inept handling of the Bush-Bremer dustup over who was responsible for disbanding the Iraq Army back in 2003.

Ignoring explosive material published a year ago in the British press and played up practically everywhere in the world but in the major American papers, the Times downplayed SecDef Donald Rumsfeld's role in the tragic blunder of dismantling the army and police, and the paper didn't even mention Dick Cheney.

Over the weekend, Robert Draper, peddling his book Dead Certain, said Bush had been taken aback by the tragic decision announced by Bush regime czar Jerry Bremer to disband Iraq's army in the spring of 2003.

That was in a September 2 Times story by Jim Rutenberg, who apparently hadn't talked to Bremer about Bush's comments. (Rutenberg's story was just a hack job titled "In Book, Bush Peeks Ahead to His Legacy.") Bremer rushed over to the Times and dropped off a bundle of letters that, he claims, show that Bush knew of the plan and liked what Bremer was doing.

Here's how Times reporter Edmund L. Andrews handled the gift from Bremer in the September 4 story:

The Andrews story makes it sound as if Bremer was briefing Rumsfeld about this plan, that the plan was something that Bush and Bremer were hammering out. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In October 2006, David Blunkett, Britain's Home Secretary during the crucial pre-invasion and immediate post-invasion period, told all in an interview with the Guardian (U.K.) and the serialization of his diaries from that time. Unlike Bremer's book published earlier this year, Blunkett was candid about his screw-ups and about what he did — and didn't do. More importantly, he reveals just who was making the big decisions for the U.S. Here's a hint: It wasn't Bremer and it wasn't Bush. From the Guardian story by Patrick Wintour and Julian Glover:

This 2006 story wasn't totally ignored in the U.S. press. The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum summed it up well on October 8, 2006:

Drum's right. It wasn't surprising in 2003 that the decision was being made by Rumsfeld and Cheney, not Bremer, and it certainly wasn't surprising in 2006. So why was the Times story so clueless?

This isn't the first time Times reporter Andrews has mishandled a big story. Back in 2004, Andrews blew a vital news angle about corporate tax breaks. Read my October 12, 2004, post, in which I wrote:

If you want something beyond my immature screed, read this October 2004 measured analysis of the corporate tax cuts, courtesy of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' Joel Friedman.

Regarding the Bremer-Bush dustup and the blunder of dismantling the Iraq Army, the New Yorker's George Packer parses it and takes the long view. Packer also shrewdly notes that it's not wise to give the Bush regime too much credit for being orderly enough to make decisions. Bush's White House and Pentagon were, and are, a dysfunctional family. Writing about the blunder of dismantling the Iraq Army, Packer notes:

Troops still there.

George W. Bush's unannounced, but not surprising, visit to Iraq on Labor Day was the kiss of death to Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

If you're Maliki, it's one thing for Philip Zelikow to work behind the scenes to oust you; it's another thing altogether to have the word get out that Bush took you aside and told you, "You're my friend."

That little tale with which Bush regaled the press corps afterwards should make Maliki even more popular with his countrymen.

As Beirut's Daily Star opines this morning:

The only way Maliki can survive is if he's seen as strong, independent, decisive. A visit from Bush is not what he needs. U.S. papers fell right in line by treating this trip seriously. But as the Star notes:

By the way, you see that Bush landed in Anbar province, not in Baghdad. Those days of of surprise visits to Baghdad are over. Too dangerous.

But meeting officials and troops 100 miles of Baghdad works just as well. Newspaper headlines are blaring, "Bush Hails Anbar Gains."

Art is alive in Baghdad. And just in case you aren't . . .

Amid the sweltering heat, bomb blasts, curfews, fleeing aid workers, and lack of electricity in Baghdad, artistic expression flourishes. But it's for a practical reason: People are getting tattooed so that if they get killed their families will at least be able to identify their corpses.

The news service IRIN puts it another way: "Grim Tattoo Subculture Emerges Amid Daily Violence":

The designs are nice, as you can see from a right shoulder captured by IRIN photographer Abu Malik. But this isn't just your normal hipster fad:

People may have to get their etchings done while on the run. Tattoos aren't likely to stave off persecution not only during religious pilgrimages but by the fanatics roaming Baghdad's streets. Another IRIN report notes that Baghdad residents are fleeing not only from bombs and U.S. troops but also because gunmen are swooping into their neighborhoods to impose strict Islamic laws:

Tattoos may help you, but only after you're dead. And if Baghdad residents avoid getting blown up, they may just die a slower death. The story about crazed religious gunmen notes:

Idaho senator Larry Craig hasn't come out of the closet yet but this just in: He's now gone from three key committees — Veterans Affairs, the Appropriations Subcommittee on the Interior, and Energy's Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests.

All this because he temporarily served on a two-man public bathroom committee.

Craig's hometown TV station KTVB.com just reported Craig's ouster from the committees. Ouch. He won't be cruising around Boise anytime soon. And he didn't volunteer to leave those posts. In fact, Craig didn't even make the announcement, as the Boise TV channel reports:

An ethics inquiry? That's what I can't understand. If the police report from Minneapolis is true, Craig followed perfectly the ethics of cruising, according to yesterday's ABC News story "Secret Signals: How Gay Men Cruise for Sex". Take a look at the police report, and then read the "Secret Signals" story and tell me that Craig, with all that toe-tapping and hand-signalling, wasn't following the ethics of cruising.

We don't know what tune the formerly gay-bashing Craig will be singing as this saga unfolds, but he and the aforementioned Lott sure made some sweet music together at one point, especially when John Ashcroft was hanging around D.C. Those three and Jim Jeffords were once known as the barbershop quartet The Singing Senators (that's Craig, sandwiched between Lott and Ashcroft, forming a perfect "O" with his mouth).

Ashcroft's penchant for singing started to piss people off when he moved from the convivial old boys' club of the Senate to the halls of the Justice Department in his job as AG. As Glenn Weiser noted in Metroland in August 2002:

Ashcroft's now gone from D.C., and Craig's days as a "singing senator" are clearly over. The self-proclaimed God-fearing Craig had better devote himself to silent prayer, or whatever else he does on his knees.

This morning's New York Times story on the widening weapons scandal in Iraq is shocking — the biggest shock is that the Pentagon's special investigator has been saying this for a long time and we're just now sending teams of investigators from numerous agencies to check it out.

Still awaiting investigation is war profiteering related to weapons and armor. One of the people planning to profit from the continuing Iraq war is ex-czar and Medal of Freedom winner Jerry Bremer, and not just from his book tours.

Meanwhile, we never have found out what happened to the $9 billion in Iraqi oil revenue that Bremer's regime oversaw but which can't be exactly accounted for. Just one of many oil-for-slush scandals in Iraq, that story was broken by the British NGO Christian Aid in June 2004

Back to the present: The latest quarterly report by Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, revealed that numerous contracts for weapons and armor have gone unfulfilled.

An audit last October by Bowen's office revealed that we weren't even keeping track of — or prepared to maintain — the thousands of weapons we were handing out to Iraqi and U.S. soldiers.

Just about the same time, Bremer, the Bush regime's former head man in Iraq when the country started descending into civil war, joined the board of directors of BlastGard, which sells a reinforced wrap to protect Humvees from mines and homemade bombs. He's also a lobbyist for BlastGard. An enthusiastic article by Philip Siekman in April's Fortune Small Business accented Bremer's value to the company in one paragraph:

The article explains just what the company does and how its prospects are truly "explosive":

Meanwhile, inspector Bowen's report last October showed that of a $531,000 contract for reinforced armor for the Iraqi Army, $424,800 hadn't even been spent. The Pentagon has, however, completed a $76,955.50 contract to put decals on the Iraqi Army's Hummers.

Back when he took over in Iraq in the spring of 2003, Bremer obviously never foresaw that he would be joining a company like BlastGard that has such exciting and explosive prospects. As Deputy SecDef Paul Wolfowitz told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on May 22, 2003:

Now Bremer is working to make a profit off the chaos of Baghdad. BlastGard itself proudly points to a November 15, 2006, Wall Street Journal article saying that Bremer will be a "director and lobbyist with an eye on opportunities within the government and Defense Department."

You can't say exactly the same thing about Bremer's predecessor in Iraq, Lieutenant General Jay Garner.

Garner has also joined BlastGard, but only as a "military advisor," not a director.

Regarding "Off With Our Heads" (August 24, 2007), about the War on Terra making our soldiers nuts, Carmelita McQuillan of Sydenham, Ontario, writes:

Thanks for writing, Carmelita. Canada's Liberal Party is pushing Prime Minister Stephen Harper of the Conservative Party to get Canuck soldiers the hell back home. Before last week's "summit" of Harper, George W. Bush, and Mexico's Felipe Calderón, Opposition Leader Stephane Dion urged that Canadians end their combat role in Afghanistan by early 2009.

There's no doubt that Canadian troops will be home a lot sooner than U.S. troops. But as you say, one of the big questions, of course, is what kind of shape the troops from either country will be in to resume any kind of sane civilian life. If the U.S. veterans get another administrator like GOP hack Jim Nicholson, whose previous job was chairman of the national party and who says he's leaving his post as Secretary of Veteran Affairs in October, forget about much sane help for the soldiers we've driven insane.

Maybe it will be different in Canada, where at least the number of fried soldiers is smaller and the provincial governments have a few more internal watchdogs. But there's always collateral damage: Reader McQuillan pointed out this frightening CBC story from April 13 about military children up north: