update

for once I have a good reason for falling off the face of the earth. Really. Unfor­tu­nately since it deals with some­one close to me, I’m not going to post it. Hope­fully after today things will get better and I’ll be back on a normal schedule.

mid east, look­ing west

This busi­ness with Syria is dis­con­cert­ing. Any idea what the going odds are as to if they’ll be “upgraded” into the Axis of Evil (to replace Iraq of course). What’s scary is the ques­tion of whether or not the admin­is­tra­tion could ride the wave of Pro Iraqi War sup­port and con­vert it into a drive to attack Syria. Or per­haps this is just a case of the news net­works trying to play up hos­til­i­ties in hopes of not losing the audi­ences that have been glued to them. These days it’s impos­si­ble to tell how the mes­sage is being manip­u­lated or who’s even doing it.

And it the mean time every­thing is fine and dandy in, Afghanistan, good thing the press is giving that so much attention.

hello michelle, it’s grandma

In other news, I have been receiv­ing phone mes­sages at work from a woman that only iden­ti­fies her­self as “Grandma.” Appar­ently she’s trying to reach some­one named “Michelle.” Strangely, the fact that my voice­mail mes­sage clearly states “You’ve reached Matt Bernius’ voicemail” doesn’t seem to phase her. I’ve been get­ting at least one mes­sage a day from this mys­te­ri­ous voice. Today she called to see if “Mom and Dad got home OK.” Per­haps, one day, I’ll get the chance to talk directly to her. But until then I always look for­ward to my daily communiqué.

top­pling

I do need to men­tion that it was awe inspir­ing to watch the footage from Iraq yes­ter­day. The top­pling of the statue of Saddam and the mass cel­e­bra­tions in the street. And for all of my cur­mudg­ing yes­ter­day, good can come of the sit­u­a­tion. But it’s impor­tant for every­one to under­stand that there is a long road ahead and a lot of work that needs to be done.

thoughts on war and peace

I guess I should begin with “please take my opin­ions with a grain of salt.” I’m no expert on this, but I think that we’ve been lulled into a false sense of secu­rity about this entire war. While there have been casu­al­ties, I don’t think anyone with any sense of real­ity doubted the out­come of this. The world’s most advanced mil­i­tary versus a third world nation (well armed, but still third world with every­thing that goes along with that). The bigger ques­tion is what comes next. That’s some­thing I just don’t hear enough dis­cus­sion of.

We’re going to occupy Iraq for a while. Take note that unlike in Afghanistan there is no “Iraqi Gov­ern­ment in Exile.” In fact there have been no public dis­cus­sions of what a new Iraqi gov­ern­ment would be com­prised of. There is no Hamid Karzai wait­ing in the wings. This isn’t an over­sight. The fact is, like it or not, we’re going to be run­ning the coun­try for a while. Which in some ways might bode well. In the case of Japan we were able to do a lot of good in help­ing the nation rebuild. How­ever, in the case of Japan, we installed a demo­c­ra­tic gov­ern­ment. But with no gov­ern­ment wait­ing in the wings and no post war plans men­tioned, it has to be assumed that we are going to be the run­ning Iraq with an occu­pa­tional force. And that is some­thing that is going to take some get­ting used to.

Even in a best case sce­nario, where an intern gov­ern­ment is quickly estab­lished, there will need to be a strong US pres­ence (read US Mil­i­tary), as I don’t expect that an Iraqi Mil­i­tary will be imme­di­ately estab­lished (think about how long it took for Japan to reestab­lish an Army… and we still have a Mil­i­tary pres­ence there). After all this work, there is no desire to have the next gov­ern­ment be as hos­tile to us as the past regime. Addi­tion­ally, only the most myopic indi­vid­u­als don’t see that one of the Bush Admin­is­tra­tions long-​term goals is to estab­lish a cen­tral­ized US mil­i­tary pres­ence in the Middle East (in the hopes of having a sta­bi­liz­ing effect in the region).

In the past our occu­pa­tions have come with a cost. While an oppressed people may be thank­ful for being lib­er­ated, there will always be ele­ments that per­ceive that they have traded one set of mas­ters for another. During our occu­pa­tion of the Philip­pine Islands sig­nif­i­cant num­bers of US Marines were assas­si­nated under­ground sol­diers who opposed the occu­pa­tion. In fact the term “Leatherneck” came from the thick leather straps that Marines even­tu­ally began to wear around their necks in the Philip­pines to pre­vent get­ting stabbed while in urban areas. That is a sce­nario that has played out time and time again in Colo­nial occupations.

His­tor­i­cally, Westerner’s have had a very hard time hold­ing onto any areas of the Middle East (see The Roman Empire, The Cru­sades, Colo­nial Occu­pa­tion). We should be pre­pared for a second, “unof­fi­cial war” to begin after the first ends. It will be inter­est­ing to see how much cov­er­age the occu­pa­tion will receive (the US Media already seems to have for­got­ten about the sig­nif­i­cant num­bers of US troops still sta­tioned in Afghanistan. Also it’s inter­est­ing that no one is talk­ing about all the Afgha­nis still being held in Cuba). Will it be enough to drive us out of the coun­try? Prob­a­bly not. But his­tor­i­cally speak­ing, there is a good chance that a lot of Amer­i­can Troops are going to be hurt and killed in the weeks and months to come. That’s not con­sid­er­ing what effect our pres­ence will have in the Region in the months and years to come. Per­haps the Administration’s plans will go like clock work. How­ever, it’s impor­tant to note that past Amer­i­can involve­ments in regime change have often had unfore­seen con­se­quences (most recently see both post Soviet Afghanistan [even Rambo wasn’t able to help that] and the pre­vi­ous Iraqi Government… Sadam has a great pair of Gold Spurs given to him by Ronald Regan for his sup­port of the US at the time) For better or for worse, we should get used to Iraq, because we’re going to be there for at least a generation.

SUCK!

Is what blog­ger does. It lost my last post and it wasn’t avail­able when ever I tried to post yes­ter­day! Grrr!

Rochester has been hit by an ice storm. This morn­ing I needed to break through a layer of ice to get into my car. There are downed trees and pow­er­lines all over the place. How­ever, this doesn’t even com­pare to the Great Ice Storm of 1991. That one appar­ently dec­i­mated the region. Folks were with­out power for over a week in most places as Julia can attest to. So this really isn’t any­thing to com­plain about.

In other news, men from the future are here and investing!

lists

I have no right to be any where near as tired as I’ve been for the last few days. I just don’t seem to have any energy. Or focus for that matter. One the plus side, I’ve been get­ting a lot of things accom­plished at work. And out­side of work for that matter. I attribute both of those suc­cesses to main­tain­ing lists. I’ve gotten to the point where I carry two small spiral bound note­books with me at all times. One’s for work “to-do’s”, the other for per­sonal ones. And I’ve man­aged to knock a lot of stuff off those lists.

Unfor­tu­nately, this accom­plish­ing of goals has led to rather dry blog posts. In fact my brother Glenn has heck­led me about this recently. So I do promise that I’m going to try to be more inter­est­ing in the days and weeks to come. On the other hand I’ve con­sis­tantly updated both blogs on time and one sched­ule, so that has to be worth something.