When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men’s weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength. Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain.

Now, when your weapons are dulled, your ardor damped, your strength exhausted and your treasure spent, other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue. Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays. There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.

- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The one (and probably only) thing that will promote a shift away from oil is an excise tax to ensure that the price of oil remains at or above $65 a barrel. If oil falls below that figure, the tax kicks in: $1 at $64 a barrel, $2 at $63, and so on all the way down.

It makes sense on many fronts – it would discourage the use of oil, encourage development of other technologies, and provide additional revenue to throw at the national debt. Now is a good time for it, since the current price of fuel actually seems like a relief due to the bloated prices we experienced at the end of the summer.

Of course, from a personal point of view I’d love for the price of gas to keep dropping as low as possible. At the same time, I realize that allowing that to happen is only going to postpone any meaningful steps away from oil, which will just lead us right back into more painful situations.

However, his article seems to be a bit misleading. According to Kincaid, passage of the bill would commit us to providing 0.7 percent of our GNP towards eradicating global poverty, netting out to around $845 billion over 13 years:

The legislation itself requires the President “to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to further the United States foreign policy objective of promoting the reduction of global poverty, the elimination of extreme global poverty, and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people worldwide, between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than $1 per day.”

The bill defines the term “Millennium Development Goals” as the goals set out in the United Nations Millennium Declaration, General Assembly Resolution 55/2 (2000).

The U.N. says that “The commitment to provide 0.7% of gross national product (GNP) as official development assistance was first made 35 years ago in a General Assembly resolution, but it has been reaffirmed repeatedly over the years, including at the 2002 global Financing for Development conference in Monterrey, Mexico. However, in 2004, total aid from the industrialized countries totaled just $78.6 billion-or about 0.25% of their collective GNP.”

Did you catch that? If you actually look at the links Kincaid provides, you’ll notice he engages in some slight-of-hand there. He accurately sums up the bill in question in those first two paragraphs and then smoothly segues into the bit about the 0.7 percent GNP. The problem is, the agreement to commit 0.7 percent GNP towards fighting poverty comes from a U.N. General Assembly Resolution from 1970 – not from the Millennium Declaration or from the Global Poverty Act.

In fact, the United Nations Millennium Declaration makes no mention of any percentage or dollar amount that is to be committed towards anything. The Global Poverty Act likewise makes no mention of a dollar amount or percentage, and does not reference the 1970s resolution where the 0.7 percent figure originated.

Furthermore, if you look at the discussion in the House that preceded the passing of the bill there, an amendment was added making it clear that the bill does not necessarily require foreign aid to work towards the goals – other methods such as promoting trade and investment may be used:

The bill, in the amended text before us today, Mr. Speaker, will allow the greater flexibility in deciding what might work best at a given time, in the particular circumstances, rather than insisting that he devise a strategy that assumes that more foreign aid and debt relief are always required.

For yet another indication that Kincaid may be misleading us about the bill, notice that he states that:

In addition to seeking to eradicate poverty, that declaration commits nations to banning “small arms and light weapons”

Again, if you read the text of the declaration, you’ll find that his statement is a little less than accurate. The declaration actually says (emphasis added):

To take concerted action to end illicit traffic in small arms and light weapons

Interesting that Kincaid would quote the words “small arms and light weapons” and leave out the “illicit traffic” part.

Finally, I’ll note that the bill simply requires the President to lay out a plan to meet goals that his administration already agreed to. It’s interesting that there was no outcry when we reaffirmed our commitment to the Millennium Declaration in 2005, but now that Obama actually wants the president to come up with some benchmarks for a goal he already agreed to, suddenly the U.N. supposedly has a choke collar on us.

The only thing the Global Poverty Act does is to require the President to come up with a plan and benchmarks to work towards meeting the agreed-upon goals of the Millennium Declaration, and to report to Congress on his plan and progress. Will it cost us some extra money? It may. But no set amount of money is required by the bill, or by the Millennium Declaration. The details are up to us and our President – not jackbooted, black-helicopter-flying U.N. despots.

So with that out of the way, maybe the folks who are up in arms about an alleged $845 billion expenditure can muster up some proportional outrage over the $3 trillion we’ll be spending in Iraq. Anyone?

Now I ask, why is the N.C. license plate office allowed to sell a plate with a flag of a foreign country but not a Confederate flag plate? … This is just another example of the increasing genocide of Southern culture and ultimately of the Southern people.

I think there may be a slight misunderstanding here as to the meaning of the word “genocide”.

The animation runs at ten frames per second – one frame for each day – and a single black dot indicates the geographic location that a coalition military fatality occurred … Accompanying the visual representation is a soft ‘tic’ sound for each fatality … More deaths in a smaller area produces visually deeper reds and audibly more pronounced ‘tic’s.

President Bush ordered nearly 30,000 additional troops to Iraq in January as part of a campaign to pacify Baghdad and its surrounding provinces. Petraeus said that campaign has largely met its military goals, reducing sectarian killings by more than 50 percent nationwide and by more than 80 percent in Baghdad.

So according to Petraeus, sending in more troops has helped, noticeably reducing casualties. Makes sense: More troops equals greater security and control. So where do we go from here?

The 30,000 additional troops deployed to Iraq in January could come home by next July

If more troops equals greater security and control, then it stands to reason that – all things being equal – removing those 30,000 additional troops is going to result in less security and control, putting us right back where we started. Something else in the equation needs to change, and it’s going to have to change within the next 10 months.

It’s true that there seems to be some localized political progress, with tribal leaders taking the reins. But is 10 months enough time to turn a patchwork of tribal initiatives and a feckless national government into something more cohesive?

German police were searching Thursday for 10 suspects believed to have belonged to a terror network that provided assistance to three men accused of plotting massive attacks against U.S. interests in the country, according to an interior ministry spokesman.

Prosecutors said the trio were members of an al Qaeda-linked Islamist group and planned “imminent” car bombings using explosives more powerful than those used in the deadly atrocities in Madrid and London in 2004 and 2005.

This of course, is excellent news – a very real, very tangible victory against terrorists. Once again, it seems the clear, undisputable victories against terror networks are occurring as a result of law enforcement action – not as a result of military action. The London bomb plot that was broken up in August of 2006 was a similar victory. What I said then still applies now:

1. The notion of “fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here� doesn’t seem to be working out too well.

2. This is a significant, tangible victory against terrorists, and it comes as a result not of military action, but of the work of law enforcement agencies. There are circumstances where the military will be needed to fight against terrorists (the action in Afghanistan after 9/11, for instance), but in my opinion the most notable, undisputable victories – such as this one – are more likely to come from law enforcement activities.

[These] terrorists are now out of action. There was no collateral damage. This is a solid gain – there’s virtually no chance that these arrests have caused any resentment among third parties who might want to now turn to terrorism themselves as a result. We haven’t made any new enemies by reducing someone’s home to rubble. Military action has its place, to be sure, but we may need to rethink the nature of its role in the fight against terrorists.

Nightmarish political realities in Baghdad are prompting American officials to curb their vision for democracy in Iraq. Instead, the officials now say they are willing to settle for a government that functions and can bring security.

A workable democratic and sovereign government in Iraq was one of the Bush administration’s stated goals of the war.

But for the first time, exasperated front-line U.S. generals talk openly of non-democratic governmental alternatives, and while the two top U.S. officials in Iraq still talk about preserving the country’s nascent democratic institutions, they say their ambitions aren’t as “lofty” as they once had been.

“Democratic institutions are not necessarily the way ahead in the long-term future,” said Brig. Gen. John “Mick” Bednarek, part of Task Force Lightning in Diyala province, one of the war’s major battlegrounds.

George W. Bush will be looking for a job soon. My suggestion? Send him to Iraq and install him as dictator for life. Then he can go hog wild with the whole “Unitary Executive” thing, plus he’ll have plenty of time to clean up his mess over there.