If You Can't Join 'Em...

And we're off. Falluja is rocked by Marines full of that old-time religion. After a "surgical" strike on one of the city's hospitals, which effectively humiliated an array of doctors there and rendered the place unlikely to receive anymore wounded, the US moved in and began pacifying the town yesterday.

"Sami al-Jumaili, a doctor at the main Falluja hospital who escaped arrest when it was taken, said the city was running out of medical supplies and only a few clinics remained open.

"There is not a single surgeon in Falluja. We had one ambulance hit by US fire and a doctor wounded. There are scores of injured civilians in their homes whom we can't move. "A 13-year-old child just died in my hands," he told Reuters by telephone from a house where he had gone to help the wounded."

Last night , known war criminal and stand-up comedian Donald Rumsfeld remarked that

""Innocent civilians in that city have all the guidance they need as to how they can avoid getting into trouble," Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news conference Monday. He referred to a round-the-clock curfew and other emergency measures announced by interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.

"There aren't going to be large numbers of civilians killed and certainly not by U.S. forces," Rumsfeld said."

Oh, how we laughed!

Meanwhile, over at the increasingly irrelevant NYTimes op-ed page, Ken "The Coming Storm" Pollack, that kidder, suggests that we should "beware the siren song of easy regime change"in Iran. Because you know how, in Iraq, it was so like falling off a log that the temptation is almost too great to go rushing in and fucking up yet another mideast powderkeg.

If people like this can keep getting a public forum and tons of baksheesh, why can't I, who am nearly as clueless?

I plan on adding to the growing cacophony of perspective on this whole red-state v. blue state argument in the next couple days, but till then, here's some serious historical perspective to chew on from historian Stephen Z. Starr, written in 1965. I am much beholden to the eloquent Digby at Hullabaloo for the link to this fascinating overview of the long-term effects of Civil War motive dynamics on the social evolution of our country.