Change The Place? Mission Not Accomplished, In Any Way Whatsoever

Another disturbing report out of Afghanistan, where the watchdog for U.S spending in a $1.1 billion fuel program found lax or no accountability, missing records, and who knows how much fuel gone lost, stolen or re-sold. No real surprise: In a long, utterly damning piece, The New Yorker 's Dexter Filkins finds a morass of fiefdoms, militias, Taliban-ruled areas, ethnic tensions and oblivious American officials engaged in "strategic triage" who spend their free time tweeting about sports events in their heavily fortified little worlds. “The Americans have failed to build a single sustainable institution here. All they have done is make a small group of people very rich. And now they are getting ready to go.”

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Our Better Angels

Eleven years on, Sept. 11 still summons in roughly equal parts a speechless sorrow, and rage at the grievous, wholly senseless carnage that followed in its ill-begotten name - perhaps never more than today, with new revelations of not just the sins but the further, utter ineptitude of the Bush White House. It's so hard to look at this face. The only possible reason to do so is, hopefully, to learn. To be moved to say, like Jews regarding the Holocaust: Never again. "It is one thing for people to react with fear and rage after an outrageous act of violence. It is quite another for the leaders of those people to exploit that fear and rage for their own dark and greedy purposes."

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