If only they'd....

So we come to the deadliest day since the active war ended.

Sunnis kill 200 odd Shias.

And what's the analysis? "They should stop doing that".

And we should assume they're going to stop doing that? Why? Because it's all we can do?

Doesn't make it likely to happen, and it's really irritating to hear politicians willing to spout such nonsense in public.

A clue: they ain't gonna stop.

There's more Shia than Sunni, and they have the oil. Unlike us, they know how to win a war. You kill enough of the enemy that the survivors feel lucky to remain alive. The Shia are going to do that. The Sunni will fight back until enough of them are dead. Then they lose.

This ending was visible to Bush Sr.

Start killing people or get out

More of the same is going to get more of the same result.

The problem with the whole plan was that it involved a "kind" war, a war without killing very many people. A war with the loser liking us. Like Japan in WWII.

What we forget is what it took to win that war: the death of millions of Japanese, and the threat to kill all of them if they didn't surrender.

We remember the peace, but we forget what got us there.

The Iraqi stratgey was doomed from the moment someone said "we can't just shoot looters". Totally doomed. It had nothing to do with troop count. It had to do with killing people.

We can still win the war in Iraq...if we want to. What would work is to exterminate every force working against our authority. By killing a hundred "innocents" as a side effect of killing each real bad guys. Once we started doing that, the bad guys would straighten up in a hurry, and the good guys would start cooperating, not wanting to be one of the side effects. If we really care about the ordinary Iraqis who just want a job in peace, this is exactly what we should do.

But we don't want to do that. Not our style of war. We'd rather lose than win, if that's what it takes to win.

So we should leave. Who cares what happens? Who cares if they kill each other? Not me. I care a bit that those ordinary Iraqi citizens will die because we disrupted the macabre stability which existed in Saddam's era, but five more years of the same followed by that result is even worse.

Traffic Ticketing Cameras

There are two different kinds of traffic ticketing cameras. Speed and red light.

They're widely despised, but I don't think the reason has been well analyzed. It's not that we have that much sympathy for either speeders or red light runners. Rather, it's because the cameras have been used to establish traps for good drivers.

Good drivers don't run red lights...but they can be induced to. Just put up a short yellow at a long intersection, and you'll get lots of good drivers running the red light. Once. They learn. But writing them a red light running ticket as part of this bogus education is unfair, and we all know it.

Good drivers don't speed...but they can be induced to. By setting the speed limit to something totally counter intuitive to the conditions, and then enforcing it strictly, you can trap a lot of good drivers. When you issue them tickets, that's unfair.

I support the use of both forms of cameras, but:
1. Red light ticketing cameras must never be used with a short yellow, and should only be used to ticket drivers who enter the intersection facing a red.
2. The speed limit must be intuitively fair.

The speed limit thing is contentious, because we've come to a strange dynamic: lots of places have unfairly low speed limits, but they enforce a more reasonable speed limit. Nevada has a 75MPH limit on rural interstates, but enforces something more like 91. CA has 70 in most places, and enforces more like 86.

What we should do is make all speed limits reasonbly high, and THEN enforce speed limit+5 using cameras. Nevada could have a speed limit of 85. CA could have 80. But no traps. That would get the support of those of us who enjoy seeing bad drivers picketed, but abhor seeing good drivers trapped.