“U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement officials say that after six months of intensifying guerrilla warfare, Iraqi insurgents know more about the U.S. and allied forces — their style of operations, convoy routes and vulnerable targets — than the coalition forces know about them. Indeed, U.S. intelligence has had trouble simply identifying the enemy and figuring out how many are Iraqis and how many are foreign fighters.

With local knowledge and the element of surprise on their side, the guerrillas are exploiting their intelligence edge to overcome the coalition’s overwhelming military superiority. Insurgents routinely use inexpensive explosives to destroy multimillion-dollar assets, including tanks and helicopters. Using surveillance and inside information, the guerrillas have assassinated many Iraqis helping the coalition, gunned down a member of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council, killed the top United Nations official in Iraq and blasted the heavily guarded hotel in Baghdad where Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying.” —USAToday

Here is another sense in which this is Vietnam all over again — and a sense in which we have not learned. The insurgents evade detection by blending into the general populace; the conspicuousness and unwieldiness of the lumbering U.S. military beast makes it an easy target; and superior firepower and military technology and prowess confer no advantage over simple weapons craftily used. Of course, the ‘simple weapons’ here include RPGs and portable SAMs that can take out tanks and helicopters, rather than the carbines and sharpened bamboo sticks that defeated the U.S. in Indochina. Moreover, US vulnerability may be due as much to our remarkable cultural insensitivity and bigotry as our reliance on high-tech warfare. And, as if that analogy isn’t telling enough, there’s the Battle of Algiers depiction of the post-conquest Algerian insurgency against the French. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz should rent it and weep — before they pursue their potentially disastrous ‘Iraqification’ strategy.

In a Washington Post op-ed piece, a Democrat and self-professed opponent of the invasion of Iraq, Steven Kelman, from 1993 to 1997 the administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, says “anyone with a working knowledge of how federal contracts are awarded” would find allegations from public watchdog agencies and Democratic critics that political favoritism underlies the decisions about awarding reconstruction contracts for Iraq and Afghanistan to be “somewhere between highly improbable and utterly absurd”. Such decisions, his major point is, are made by career civil servants rather than political appointees. True, heavy campaign contributions from the Halliburtons and the Bechtels do curry favor, but in areas far from contract awards whose outcomes depend on the favor of elected officials, such as “tax, trade and regulatory and economic policy” (as well as appropriations to pay for awarded contracts). He is trying to counter this “whiff of scandal” because it undermines the public trust in public institutions and civil servants and could add needless regulatory complications to an efficient procurement system.

I think blinking to this piece is important to provoke thoughtful opposition and dialogue rather than kneejerkism (kneejerkiness??). However, I have my doubts about Kelman’s thesis on several grounds. First, as a civil servant himself who probably believed in and took pride in his job, the fact that he takes umbrage at the accusations suggests that his counterattack may be too defensive. He points out that in his career, and those of the colleagues he has queried, no one ever tried to lean on him to influence his decisions, and that if they did they would lose rather than gain favor with him. Further influence of his integrity, indeed, but can we take that as evidence of the integrity of the entire process?

Then there is his protestation about the public impression that the government is taken to the cleaners by its contractors. This complaint is rather tangential to his argument about favoritism. Its gratuitousness surely stands as further evidence of his defensiveness.

A blanket assertion that there is a firm distinction between career civil servants and political appointees, and that there is a wall between the two such that the latter’s interests cannot under any circumstances influence the former, is difficult to believe, especially in a conniving and self-serving dysadministration such as Bush’s. There is an increasingly prevalent genre of op-ed analysis of the Bush White House by officials of prior administrations based upon their experiences of how government worked in the past; I find this increasingly irrelevant given the neo-cons’ profound reinvention of government in their own image. Am I being too conspiratorial? Recall the accumulating evidence that senior Bush officials have crafted a shadow civil service in the foreign policy and intelligence-analysis sphere which bypasses the constraints on their agenda that the usual channels confer.

In addition, he focuses too narrowly on what may be a semantic distinction only, that of awarding contracts vs. funding them, etc. He lets us know that the ‘structuring and management’ of contracts are potentially rife with abuse. He concedes that political contributions curry favor in plenty of other aspects of government decision-making, just not his.

In short, a closer reading of his column would suggest that one can conclude, first, that contract awards decisions under Kelman were not corrupt; secondly, that the contract award process may be more impartial than commonly assumed (“When did you stop beating your wife?”). But it certainly should not stand as a blanket refutation of the ‘cronyism’ charge.<p

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Related: Halliburton Contract Extension “Likely” Cancelled Amid Allegations of Overcharging Taxpayers:

“The Army Corps of Engineers is “likely” to cancel the no-bid contract extension granted a week ago to Halliburton for delivery of oil-related services amid allegations that Halliburton is overcharging the federal government to import oil into Iraq. The decision to revisit the contract extension comes in part due to the assertions from inside the Pentagon that Halliburton’s price for imported gasoline was “at least double what it should be.” —The Daily Mislead

“As American soldiers massed on the Iraqi border in March and diplomats argued about war, an influential adviser to the Pentagon received a secret message from a Lebanese-American businessman: Saddam Hussein wanted to make a deal.

Iraqi officials, including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, had told the businessman that they wanted Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction, and they offered to allow American troops and experts to conduct a search. The businessman said in an interview that the Iraqis also offered to hand over a man accused of being involved in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 who was being held in Baghdad…” —New York Times

They also offered to help out in the Middle East peace process and offered the U.S. oil concessions. These clandestine 11th-hour approaches by Iraqi representatives including director of Iraqi intelligence (destined to be no. 16 on the U.S.’s Iraqi most wanted list), with the reported approval of Saddam Hussein and offering “unconditional terms”, prompted a London meeting between Richard Perle and the Lebanese-American intermediary, who conveyed desperate, “begging” Iraqi requests for a direct meeting with Perle or another American representative. In the face of U.S. intransigence about Saddam yielding power, they apparently offered to hold elections within two years.

…(T)he Iraqis appeared intimidated by the American military threat. “The Iraqis were finally taking it seriously,” he said, “and they wanted to talk, and they offered things they never would have offered if the build-up hadn’t occurred.”

Mr. Perle said he found it “puzzling” that the Iraqis would have used such complicated contacts to communicate “a quite astonishing proposal” to the administration.

But former American intelligence officers with extensive experience in the Middle East say many Arab leaders have traditionally placed a high value on secret communications, though such informal arrangements are sometimes considered suspect in Washington.

Perle says he relayed these messages through channels, asking whether he should in fact meet directly with Iraqi representatives, and was told that his superiors were not interested.

…or does it? 25 years after it left the earth, and 13.5 billion kilometres away from the sun (or 90 times farther away from the sun than the Earth), competing papers in this weeks Nature debate whether Voyager 1 has left the solar system and entered interstellar space.

“Voyager 1 was launched 26 years ago and has nearly reached – or has already penetrated – the edge of the bubble surrounding the solar system.

The bubble is formed when highly charged particles from the sun, called the solar wind, collide with particles emanating from other stars in the galaxy.

The edge of the bubble, called the heliopause, is an ever-shifting boundary and it’s unclear whether Voyager 1 has passed through it.Scientists theorize that a barrier, called a termination shock, exists where the hot solar wind hits the cold, thin gas of interstellar space.

As particles of solar wind pile up on the barrier, they get hotter and skip back and forth across the boundary. ” —CBC

Scientists race against the exhaustion of its onboard power source in hopes it will find something interesting in the endless expanse of interstellar space it now enters on ithe final (but interminable) leg of its voyage.

“A list of nearly 200 scientific researchers has been compiled and given to federal officials by the Traditional Values Coalition, a conservative group that goes wild over gay issues and federal funding of research related to human sexuality.

The list, which has sent a chill through some researchers, is being used by the coalition and its government allies in attempts to discredit the researchers and challenge or revoke their federal grants. It’s a sloppy, dangerous and wildly inaccurate list, put together by people who are freaked out by the content of the studies, and unconcerned about their value.

The targeted studies cover a wide range of topics related to health and sexuality, including H.I.V. and AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases and adolescent sexual behavior…

For a right-wing coalition to be hung up on these matters is one thing. But the coalition’s list, which includes some of the most respected scientists and institutions in the country, is circulating among members of Congress and was forwarded to the National Institutes of Health, which is responsible for awarding the crucially important grants.” —Bob Herbert, New York Times op-ed