inkbluesky

vista labor day leaf wallpaper 02

A little salute to the official end of summer even though it looks as though in the south anyway that we’ll have more fairly hot weather for at least another month. Indian summers used to come around every other year, now they’re just a regular occurence.

Widespread Elephant Slaughter Discovered In Chad

“Zakouma elephants are getting massacred right before our eyes,” Fay said. “We hadn’t been in the air more than two hours when we saw our first carcass. It was fresh, maybe just a few weeks old, not far from the park headquarters, and the animal’s face had been chopped off, the tusks removed.

“Two days later we were flying west of that area when we saw a poachers’ camp. The second time we passed over I saw a guy and a horse and an assault rifle in the poacher’s hands. The third time we flew over, this time only about 150 feet above the camp, I could see the man shooting at us.” No one was hurt.

Zakouma National Park in southeastern Chad makes up part of a Texas-sized region of central Africa that until the 1970s was one of the continent’s most intact wilderness areas, abundant in wildlife. The general region was home 30 years ago to some 300,000 elephants, a number that has dwindled to perhaps 10,000 today. Encompassing nearly 1,900 square miles, Zakouma is now one of the last bastions of wildlife in all of central Africa, thanks to funding from the EU.

Some people are just hard headed. The poachers poach to make money, yet by destroying the population of elephants they may soon wipe out the very thing they’re relying on for income. It is just staggering to think about losing nearly 10,000 elephants a year. Thats about 28 elephants a day. Tha is not subsistance poaching, that is greed combined with cruelty.

Bush Goes a Bridge Too Far

In his speech this morning before the American Legion’s national convention, President George W. Bush may have gone a bridge too far. It was the first of several speeches he plans to deliver in the coming days to rally support for the war in Iraq (and, not incidentally, for Republicans in November). But one passage in particular reveals that the campaign is getting desperate:

The security of the civilized world depends on victory in the war on terror, and that depends on victory in Iraq.

Here’s the question: Does anybody believe this? If you do, then you must ask the president why he hasn’t reactivated the draft, printed war bonds, doubled the military budget, and strenuously rallied allies to the cause.

If, as he said in this speech, the war in Iraq really is the front line in “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century”; if our foes there are the “successors to Fascists, to Nazis, to Communists”; if victory is “as important” as it was in Omaha Beach and Guadalcanal—then those are just some of the steps that a committed president would feel justified in demanding.

If, as he also said, terrorism takes hold in hotbeds of stagnation and despair, then you must also ask the president why he hasn’t requested tens or hundreds of billions of dollars for aid and investment in the Middle East to promote hope and livelihoods.

Yet the president hasn’t done any of those things, nor has anyone in his entourage encouraged him to do so. And that’s because, while the war on terror is important and keeping Iraq from disintegrating is important, they’re not that important. Osama Bin Laden is not Hitler or Stalin. Baghdad is not Berlin. Al-Qaida and its imitators don’t have the economic resources, the military power, or the vast nationalist base that Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union had.

So, the speech sends the head buzzing with cognitive dissonances. There’s the massively exaggerated historical analogy (which should have been obvious, if not insulting, to the World War II veterans in the audience). And there’s the glaring mismatch between the president’s gargantuan depiction of the threat and the relatively paltry resources he’s mustered to fight it.

I do wonder about the idea that a few thousand religious fanatics spread around the world are as big a threat as Hitler. That would certainly dictate that we revive the draft if nothing else. Also if that is the case why are Iraqis actually killing more of each other then Americans, the mission now is not to stop terrorism in Iraq , but to stop the sectarian devisions that got into high gear because Bush toppled a barbarian, but at least stable government. I guess we can’t hold Bush responsible for pushing over the dominos since he has a tendency to not be accountable for anything. Its always someone elses fault when Bush screws up, an attitude that would suggests that even at 60 he continues to think like a frat boy. Certainly if Iraq was supposed to be flypaper to attract all the terrorists in the world that isn’t working out - completely immoral plans to use American troops and Iraqi civilians as flypaper shouldn’t work out. So even after Bush leaves office we can all look forward to more body counts and speeches that place blame on anyone but the great infallible Dubya.