iraq is a disaster

* "One billion dollars has been plundered from Iraq's defence ministry in one of the largest thefts in history, The Independent can reveal, leaving the country's army to fight a savage insurgency with museum-piece weapons." (link)
go read. really.

* billmon: "The death toll over the past week in Iraq has been more than 250; over the past three weeks, more than a thousand, including the horrible crowd control disaster on the Tigris bridge two days after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. That's a third of a 9/11 in less than a month. That flypaper for terrorists the hawks are always talking about is getting awfully clogged with the dead bodies of innocent civilians." (link)

* " as was the case in Tal Afar -- sending Kurdish militiamen to kill ethnic Turks. It's hard to imagine a better way to fuel sectarian hatreds and push Iraq closer to civil war (and/or trigger a Turkish intervention in Kurdistan.) You read about stuff like this and you have to wonder: Is FEMA secretly running the war in Iraq?" (link)