War

[prog]

Nothing like losing a major war to make me put away Civ for a while. Well, that, and getting a nice work-crunch to chew on for a while. Still, I always badly underestimate the amount of troops it takes to capture and hold a city, and I especially tend to underbudget defensive units, like infantry. So of course now I'm listening to an NPR show about how Turkey's surprsing decision means that the northern front of an Iraq war would be reduced or even eliminated since we couldn't base infantry units in Turkey to start with, and I'm thinking Oh, man....

I guess on that note I'll say "yay" in a cold and icy fashion about the placement of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed into our fine Ministry of Truth Extraction (but aren't there any more dignified photographs of the guy anywhere? Yipes). I read that US intelligence officers plan to insist that Pakistan hand the fellow over to us instead of to his native Kuwait, and to that I say right on. I wish that all the nasty bullying on our part was channelled into this sort of thing, a war on terror I can support wholeheartedly, and not the other stuff. [Waves hand at the outside & obvious world.]

Fear: that the military will come forward to declare that Sheikh Mohammed spilled his guts about the vast Iraq-Al Qaeda connection, and instantly there will come the worldwide backlash that they made it up, or forced him to say it, or whatever. I don't predict that this will happen, and I don't know what I'd personally think if it did, but I can imagine it happening, very clearly, and it's ugly.