which were held because the MANAGER needed to show that X number of meetings had been held in order solely in order fulfill PERFORMANCE EXPECTATIONS for the MANAGER POSITION.

Ionesco, indeed. The addition of language barriers and in adequate interpreters (and apparently no rules-of-order wrt entering items into an AGENDA) compounds the farce.

The clock on the wall determined when the meeting was over ....

I had one particularly clueless (versus passive aggressive) manager who held these pointless meeting "last thing" on Friday afternoons, which was generally the most frantic time of the week as we all desperately tried to clear our desks for the weekend ....

Sure as shit sounds like "going through the motions" with no hope, much less expectation of accomplishing much ... until the clock on the wall and the calendar on the wall says it's time to go home.

You say that like it's a bad thing. When has terrorism ever been a bad idea? It always achieves something. If we have to blow up some fat redneck soccermoms, it's all good. Because we're good we're the good people. They on the other hand are expendable.

if you treat every problem like the domestic poltical spoils system, you indeed can spend money like the proverbial drunken sailor, but who knows if you are going to get a democracy out of it.

You won't get an economy built, the money flowing in pushes out other economic options by pricing up the cost of inputs, like an oil economy.

You may get an political system, but, by definition, its "corrupt", in that the political system hands out cash to favored groups.

Now we do this because of the huge lobby in Washington supporting it; KBR, Halburton, all the usual suspects, giving position papers to their favored politicans in exchange for political contributions. Consequently, these foreign spoils systems are inherently corrupting to the domestic political system, as, for example, American politicans and their Arab contributors, and, similarly, French politicans and their African client nations. By flushing Iraq and Afganistan in cash, we put enough money in play to corrupt our own political system.

by no means definitive, is Black Rednecks and White Liberals

by Thomas Sowell, who attributes the white "cracker" feud/revenge/duel culture of 19th century South to emigrants from the violent Scot-English border.

To my self-educated ears, that sounds like Afganistan. The "economics" would be very short-term.

Your point raises a question for me...

Is the "blood feud" system of honor and revenge explicable through general laws of economics, or is it an aberration?

American taxpayers have seen their bill for the Iraqi occupation surge from $200 million to $400 million a day. The pervasive bribery described by Mr. Grunberg certainly accounts for much of this. We are paying for an exercise in dramatic acting by the Iraqis, much as poor relatives will put on a show when the rich uncle comes to visit. If the rich uncle isn't made to feel welcome anywhere in Iraq the neighborhood is rocketed with Hellfire missiles, with only the closest, and I suppose most culpable women, children, and old people incinerated in the blast. Even if America recouped every penny from the Iraqi oil exports it would not pay for the occupation.

We are are told we have to sit on top of the Iraqis lest they deploy al Qaeda to attack us. That is a racist argument, because it assumes the Iraqis are dumber and more vicious than the Vietnamese, who have not been toppling dominoes as predicted by the war mongers a half century ago.

A few days later, an Iraqi diplomat working for the Iraqi Foreign Ministry in Baghdad tells me: "First al-Qaida came in and said, 'We will give you $200 to place an IED.' Then the Americans came in and said, 'We will give you $200 not to place an IED.' You get some amount of money and you don't have to do anything for it.

Unfortunately, too many choose to take $200 to NOT plant the bomb yet plant it anyway.

The underlying assumption is that rebellion/conflict/guerrilla war is all about economics and welfare. Pure Marxism. Nothing about culture, language, history, religion, a system of violence between clans to settle disputes, which could be another name for Afganistan. It is also our domesitc political spoils system projected on foreign countries without question or analysis.

Thinking like this allows decision makers to put a few hundred thousand troops in the middle of the Mideast, sprinkle liberally with cash, and expecting a democracy to bloom. Might be right, might be wrong, but from the data you have no idea if its going to work, the real variables are left out of the discussion.

If the Americans left what would the insurgents do for money? What's propping this whole system up?

Let's see...

Invasion

no security, rioting

Bremer disbands army, adding armed, bitter unemployed men to the mix

insurgency takes hold

[then what?]

Who are those ieds intended for? If Americans left would insurgents kill each other for money?

I'm also noticing with bemusement the small number of comments posted for this article compared with the 50-or-so on every "war room" entry about the Clinton campaign.

Just build 'em a few Wal-Mart's. After all, the idea, as it was with Native Americans, is to make these indigenous ones to be just like us. Right? That really lifts them up. We have such superior social mores, after all. And we are such law-abiding, caring citizens of a world society, or at least a western corporatist one. We even stop for stop signs! (Try that; you'll have apoplexy going on in the SUV behind you). So, yes, shoot them, sway them, snow them, or when all else fails, bribe them. But for heaven's sake do not let them be themselves.

The real problem here is that the best way to win hearts and minds is via economic aid.

And yes, that's what we're doing, but we're doing it through the military. The U.S. Army is not exactly flush with economists, especially in the field. So handing out cash willy-nilly buys you some goodwill, yes. But it also makes you look like a stupid patsy.

Why the Bush administration is so adamant that we exclusively use the Army and Marines to rebuild Iraq? There are many other ways (and many other organizations) that are far better suited to the task. It's like using a hammer to drive in screws. Sure, it can be done, but why?