I love this interview with a nun who blogs. Check it out:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/10/29/findrelig.DTL
The cover of The Economist this week is: Brains, not Bullets. How to fight future wars.
I find it fascinating in light of a president who is trying to drum up another war because Iran might be thinking of something. Wow, scary stuff, and surely we remember the lies that brought us into Iraq.
The article in The Economist says, "Western armies are good at destroying things. Can they be made better at building them?"
"A new manual on counter-insurgency co-authored by the man now in charge of the war in Iraq, General David Petraeus, overturns the notion that America doesn't "do nation-building." Counter-insurgency, it says, is "armed social work." It requires more brain than brawn, more patience than aggression. The model soldier should be less science-fiction Terminator and more intellectual for "the graduate level of war", preferably a linguist, with a sense of history and anthropology."
Imagine that. Our troops have to be better trained and educated than our president.
The article also points out that, "If the West wants to build a smarter army of the future, it will have to pay for it."
Bush's idea that we can fight wars and not raise taxes makes no sense, as we, who pay our own bills, all know. Maybe sanity and rationality can return when we get our "regime change" next November.
