Ready . . . Aim . . . Mop

As I said to my good friend Paul last week, the solution is simply to give everyone a gun. It's nice to see my position validated by this story out of Montgomery, Alabama:

After a robber cleaned out a Montgomery couple's home, the couple made him clean up—at gunpoint.

When Adrian and Tiffany McKinnon returned to their Centennial Hill home, the husband and wife discovered that thieves had broke into the Ross Street residence and cleaned the house out of almost everything the family of five owned. . . . Reassuring her that every­thing would be all right, her husband sent her to her sister's home a block away while he inspected the piles of ransacked items.

It was while he was doing this, making his way back into the sunroom, when she said a man walked in the back door, straight into her husband. . . . Adrian McKinnon held the suspect—Tajuan Bullock, 33, of 2963 University Drive—at gunpoint and told him to sit on the floor until he decided what he was going to do, she said.

"We made this man clean up all the mess he made, piles of stuff, he had thrown out of my drawers and cabinets onto the floor," she said.

Once police arrived, Bul­lock complained to them about being forced at gun­point to clean up the home.

Full story from the Montgomery Advertiser

The AP gave this story the lighthearted "news of the weird" treatment, but it actually is quite sad. The burglars not only took every piece of furniture, electronics, and clothing but even the pots and pans from the kitchen and the children's clothes and toys.

But good Americans will go to great lengths to defend their Second Amendment right to force people to clean their homes at gunpoint. Let me simply point out that Google returns:

Results 1 - 10 of about 1,890,000 for clean my house or I'll blow your head off. (0.30 seconds)

This weekend you can have the ball when you pry it from my red-hot shooting hand. Let me know if you aim to play at St. John's tomorrow. We tip off at 8:00 a.m., as usual.

Snake oil

I know. You don't subscribe (however passively) to the SJH e-mail for its renowned coverage of politics and national security. But as much as I'd like to write about the fall TV season—let's just say I like my bionics more dependent on pneumatics and na-na-na-na-na sound effects—other conversations seem to keep taking precedence.

So: When you hear the pundits and presidential candidates talking about an Iraq "exit strategy," muzzle your laughter and think about this.

Two years ago, the U.S. military had 106 "forward operating bases" in Iraq. Fourteen of those were what the Pentagon called "enduring" bases. (The term "permanent" had become politically inexpedient.) The plan—since signed into law, in case you missed it—was to consolidate those 14 into a handful of "mega-bases."

Indeed, five large, self-sufficient bases that will accommodate 50,000 to 100,000 troops are now in various stages of development. How does that fit our exit strategy? Writer Jim Holt clarifies matters in the October 18 issue of the London Review of Books:

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world's oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, U.S. forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world's oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today's prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the U.S. invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

Who will get Iraq's oil? One of the Bush administration's "benchmarks" for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the U.S. has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq's 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest—including all yet to be discovered oil—under foreign corporate control for 30 years.

Until recently, I was skeptical about the idea Alan Greenspan expressed in his new book: "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." Maybe it wasn't always, but it sure seems to be now. And it's hard to see how any future president is going to change course. (Sorry, Ron Paul.)

How about a little troop movement to St. John's this weekend? Our weekly basketball exercise kicks off at 8:00 a.m. Saturday, as usual. Please let me know if you will or will not be playing this week.