Category: War

… and some oil.

Have a look at the following photos from the Iraqi oil fields: http://menzelphoto.com/recent/iraq20031.htm.  They come from my Canon D60 digital camera.  Because I was too busy exploring the wonders of linear differential equations and the impedance method with MIT EE students, I couldn’t accompany Peter Menzel (he and Faith D’Aluisio did the Material World books and Robo Sapiens) to Kuwait and Iraq.  When Peter returned the D60 he included a small vial of Iraqi crude, fresh from the wells!  I’m thus one of the very few Americans who can truly say that he got what the U.S. Army went to Iraq for 🙂

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… than with a kind word alone.  This will presumably be the lesson drawn by the U.S. government from the last couple of years of hand-wringing regarding Iraq.  When the invasion of Iraq started on March 19 (see daily summary from CNN) some friends started a betting pool concerning the date on which the last Iraqi military unit would surrender. My guess was April 15. Note that this does not count lone snipers or terrorists. It appears that yesterday was the big day and that the person who bet on April 14 will be the winner.  The only comparably quick surrender that comes to mind is France’s 1940 surrender to Germany after about 1.5 months.  George W. might well be asking himself “Why did we waste all of that time with diplomacy if all it took was a modest military effort that did not even last one month?”

We Americans are thus faced with the question “Iraq is done; what’s next in the Middle East?”  Some friends asked for an opinion of background issues, especially why the U.S. would want to support Israel (a very unpopular policy here in Cambridge, Massachusetts), so I wrote http://philip.greenspun.com/politics/israel/

Let me know if you think it provides any interesting answers.

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