Exponential happiness: McCain, Obama, Chekhov & my 93-year-old aunt

"Oh, I could never vote for Obama," said my 93-year-old aunt.

"Why not?"

"Because he's too inexperienced."

"But what about Biden? He's had experience."

"Oh, I can't stand Biden."

"But," I argued, "McCain doesn't appear to be able to control his temper. Do you really want someone like that in charge of the Red Button? And Palin has zero experience either."

"Actually," said my aunt, "I'm not planning to vote for anyone this year. Why should I? I'm 93 years old. What do I care about what happens next?"

I was shocked. "But what about the next generations? What about them?"

"Our generation lived through the hell of the Great Depression and World War II -- and we survived. They'll figure out some way to deal with it. We did. Whatever happens next just isn't my problem."

Then I watched a video (http://www.fearofflying.com/) about how to get over fear of flying. "First," said the video, "you need to realize that everything on an airplane is always completely and continually checked and double-checked for safety. And every system and all equipment also have backup mechanisms in case of failure, and then there are three more backup mechanisms built into every system after that." Or words to that effect. I wasn't taking word-for-word notes.

But if they can build airplanes that way, why can't they build voting machines like that too? Not to mention governments.

"Second," continued the man in the video, "when you realize how the human mind works, you can see that people get anxious exponentially and that their anxieties build up after the fact. During a real crisis, one doesn't get anxious. One just acts." But after the crisis is over -- like with PTSD -- only then does one build up anxiety in one's mind, in retrospect, piece by piece -- until the accumulated anxieties get out of control.

Well. If we humans can get anxious exponentially, then why can't we get happy exponentially too?

What would make me happy? Living in a world where we have leaders who are smart enough to avoid spending over half of the planet's wealth on weapons!

How can I reach that level of happiness exponentially? Good question.

At the housing co-op where I live now, I've spent the last 15 years watching our Board of Directors serve their own financial self-interests instead of the co-op's best interests. So I sued the bastards. And lost. So I sued them again. And won. And yet when it came time to vote to fix our leaking roofs at the last Board meeting, the Board was actually going to vote to NOT fix the roofs -- apparently to save themselves having their rents raised.

What?

But then apparently someone on the Board actually seemed to remember my lawsuits -- and the Board then actually voted to fix the roofs! Boy, was I happy. Happiness begins small and then expands.

The women of Afghanistan organized locally against the Taliban. The Continental Congress organized locally against the British. And Jesus organized locally against hypocritical religious leaders. The moral? One by one, if we work at it really hard, us "meek" people of the world can exponentially organize to inherit the earth.

That would make me VERY happy.

Or else, like my 93-year-old aunt, we can just leave our messes for the next generation to deal with.

PS: Speaking of organizing the world locally, I just went to a lecture on Anton Chekhov. The man was born into brutal poverty in pre-revolutionary Russia, became a doctor despite his hardships, wrote some of the world's greatest literature, set up over a hundred free clinics during a cholera epidemic while making over 500 house calls simultaneously, did all of this with a bad case of tuberculosis and died before he reached age 50.

If Chekhov can accomplish that many good deeds even during his short lifetime on earth, surely we who now have the opportunity to live to age 100 and beyond can try to do at least half as much.

The $2,685 sweater: When did it become cool in America to pay $2,685 for a SWEATER?

I got bad knees. So I decided to do something about it and go have my knees checked out by a specialist. Finding a specialist who would see me and convincing my health insurance to cover the cost took me over a year but it finally happened.

"Jane, you have a lack of cartledge in your knees and you need to have physical therapy," my specialist told me. Great. More healthcare paperwork to endure. It then took me another three months to get the costs of my PT approved -- but I'm tenacious. So today I went in for my first session. And forgot to put a book in my purse. I never go anywhere without a book in my purse. Grocery lines, waiting rooms, taking public transportation? You gotta have a book in your purse!

So in the waiting room of my physical therapist, I had nothing to read. What about "People Magazine"? Nope, they didn't even have that. But I'm a reading junkie. Other people may only have to eat and breathe, but I gotta read too. Moving my eyes back and forth across a page full of words has a hypnotic effect on me and always calms me right down. It's better than Valium. Or even Ambien.

Then I spotted something hidden over in a corner of the waiting room -- a copy of "Town and Country" magazine. Good grief! The people who inhabit the pages of "Town and Country" live in a whole different world, a whole different UNIVERSE from you and me.

Can you imagine paying $2,685 for a SWEATER? Or $3,491 for a pair of SHOES? Or a $15,000 outfit? That you only wear once? They even had a freaking TENT for sale to put in your back yard -- for $25,000. A TENT?

Is this what our brave soldiers in Iraq are fighting for? So that some rich war-merchant's wife will be able to buy a $1,273 scarf?

I wouldn't even know what to do with a $2,685 sweater. Perhaps one could sell it for enough money to feed an African village for a year? Feed an average American family for several months? Hang it in a museum?

Or use it to pay for 25 sessions of physical therapy...or even to make a down payment on a new set of knees!

Horny old man: Could Sarah Palin actually be THAT desperate?

I just got an e-mail from my friend Joe Thompson. Joe used to work in the Louisiana oil patch back in the day and has apparently seen it all. "Jane," wrote Joe, "You aren't the only one shaking your head over John McCain's choice of a running mate. From my point of view he is a horny old man, who selected a horny young woman and intends to screw America all the way to the White House and beyond."

Whoa, Joe! You gotta stop thinking like that! You're a Democrat. Democrats fight fair. Making nasty innuendos and spreading disgusting rumors is Karl Rove's job. You're out of your league.

Then I got an e-mail from my friend Hanna. "C'mon, guys," she wrote me and Joe. "Nobody would actually voluntarily touch that repulsive old geriatric case John McCain .... not even Palin... for a Vice Presidency ... would she?"

Perhaps Palin might not eagerly jump at the chance to become John McCain's next Cindy -- and I bet that even Cindy herself is currently letting said opportunity slide (perhaps she's too busy right now mourning the fact that Austin Kutcher is married?) -- but I imagine that there are whole bunches of desperate octogenarian ladies living in rest homes in Florida who still think that John McCain is a BABE.

PS: I myself, while still only a sexagenarian, am not especially attracted to the Republican presumptive candidate for President -- but give me 20 more years and maybe even he will start to look good. In the meantime, I'm leaving on Wednesday to spend a week in some unnamed Asian country that is currently totally out of favor with McCain's neo-con clique, so if John wants to name ME as his vice president and offer some hanky-panky on the side too, he's gonna have to track me down there.

Ah the life of a Reporter: McCain tried to kill me & Obama doesn't want me backstage!

[Photos are of the Alegio chocolate shop in Berkeley (the place where I get my best flu medications), some of the hundreds of the private jets lined up in Aspen while their owners went off to hear John McCain speak -- photo courtesy of Karen Day -- and proof that I'm not wealthy enough to get credentialed for the Republican convention -- sorry, I don't have a maid.]

It's hard being a reporter. You always gotta be coming up with hot stories.

The highlight of my life as a journalist so far -- aside from the time I missed getting blown up in the Iraqi parliament by mere minutes, the time the Red Army tried to arrest me in the middle of the Yalu River, the time I almost got trampled to death in Mecca and the time in Hebron when irate Israeli settlers threatened me with Kalashnikovs, etc -- was when John McCain lied to a bunch of us reporters at a press conference in the Green Zone, telling us that it was safe to walk around the streets of Baghdad. I keep telling that story again and again. It's become my granddaughter's favorite bedtime story. "If I had listened to John McCain," I always tell baby Mena, "and followed his example and gone into Baghdad myself, your poor sweet grandma would probably be dead right now!"

That's a heck of a story -- that America's current Republican presidential candidate actually tried to kill me? What could I possibly write about to top that!

Of course, I could always write about how I am now suffering from a horrible case of the flu after returning from my fourth-and-a-half trip to Iraq -- but no one wants to hear about that. Eckhart Tolle is always telling us to "live in the Now". Yeah, right. YOU try living in the Now when you're down with the flu. I hurt too much to live in the Now. At this point in time, all I wanna do is go off and live in the Past -- preferably the pre-George W. Bush past. (Does that make me a Conservative?)

I had hoped to find something to write about at the two national political conventions, but that idea fell through. I applied to get credentialed to cover the Republican convention in Minneapolis in September but, honestly, why would the Republicans want ME at their convention? I hate George Bush. He's a liar and a crook. And John McCain? That man tried to KILL me. Why would I want to write anything nice about him?

Not only that, but most of the really juicy McCain stories have apparently already been written. For instance, there's that one about him using Ambien to help get to sleep at night -- yeah but. If our John becomes the President and is off in pharmaceutical dreamland at 3:00 am, will he still be able to wake up in time if he needs to press the Red Button? Yawn.

Then there's the story about McCain having PTSD, left over from his POW days -- that would have the opposite effect. What if he got hit with another one of those flashback nightmares at 3:00 am, walked in his sleep and pushed the Red Button while thinking it was the call-button for room service at the Hanoi Hilton!

And several people have already written up that story about how the Veterans Administration has certified McCain as being 100% totally disabled, opening up the distinct possibility that he might croak at any minute, which would leave America with only his vice president in charge -- probably still Dick Cheney.

And of course there's the seven-houses story and the one about him cheating on his loyal and faithful first wife, but those have already pretty much been done to death.

What could possibly be the big story that the Republicans in charge of credentialing me for Minneapolis might be afraid that I would scoop? I bet it's the one I could score if I was actually allowed to get a good look at McCain up close. Then I could write an article about their presidential candidate's many face-lifts. Hey, no worries there! I got nothing against face-lifts. I want a face-lift! But of course my big question there would be, "Will the Israel lobby or the weapons manufacturing lobby or the pharmaceutical lobby pay for mine too?" Not hardly.

According to Sterling Greenwood of the Aspen Free Press, McCain's backers are so wealthy that when they came to Aspen to hear him speak, their Lear-jets caused a traffic jam out at the airport! "One limo driver told the Aspen Free Press that there were 200 private jets parked at the Aspen airport, but officials only would say that the figure was less than 150." Sorry. I don't own a Lear-jet. So my idea for getting a hot story out of the Republican convention is toast.

Then I got all hopeful that I could get a story out of the Denver convention and so actually paid $25 to enter that contest to go "Backstage with Obama". But that didn't happen either. Sigh.

Maybe I could convince some members of the RNC and DNC's billionaire base -- all those obscenely wealthy weapons manufacturers who seem to LOVE the war in Iraq and appear to be gleefully looking forward to the next wars in Afghanistan, Georgia, North Korea and Cleveland -- to donate funds to my PayPal account (go to http://paypal.com and type in jpstillwater@yahoo.com) so that I can hire a blimp and report the news while flying over Obama's acceptance event at Invesco Field in Denver or over the convention center in St. Paul-Minneapolis, while a huge sign saying "Goodyear" flashes on and off over my head. But that's probably not going to happen either. Why would billionaires want to donate to ME? I don't even have a seat in Congress.

So. Where in the world am I going to get my next big story from? Who knows.

As I was bicycling through Berkeley the other day, I passed a newspaper stand with a headline photo of a group of middle-class Americans trying to break into a bank to get their money out before it was too late. I was so shocked that I almost fell off my bike. Good grief! "Bank run!" screamed the headlines. I could write a story about that....

According to ABC News, "The worst of the global financial crisis is yet to come and a large U.S. bank will fail in the next few months as the world's biggest economy hits further troubles, former IMF chief economist Kenneth Rogoff said on Tuesday. 'The U.S. is not out of the woods. I think the financial crisis is at the halfway point, perhaps. I would even go further to say the worst is to come, he told a financial conference. 'We're not just going to see mid-sized banks go...'"

Can you believe that major banks in America are actually in danger of failing? Maybe there's a hot story there.

Or maybe I should just give up trying to scoop the world's next catastrophe. Maybe I've got it all wrong. Maybe America doesn't NEED any more hot stories.

Maybe America just needs to bring all her troops home, elect honest men and women to our government, enforce our Constitution, throw all Constitution violators and self-interested lobbyists in jail, concentrate on rebuilding our decayed infrastructure, use our creativity to invent new ways to stop global warming, buy products at home instead of buying everything from abroad, stop handing out corporate welfare to the rich hand-over-fist, and start taking care of business in our own back yard right now -- while we still can.

Nah, that wouldn't be a big story. No one would want to read about that.

The new Spartans: Dealing with the results of a militarized America

• (Photos are of me returning from Iraq -- and the first thing I noticed after arriving in SFO was the Starbucks and how LARGE Americans have become while I was gone. Also, I now actually have roses in bloom at my new apartment after my daughter Ashley took care of them for me while I was gone. Wow!)

****
Here I am -- once again stating the obvious. I keep going over this same PowerPoint presentation again and again and again -- but nobody seems to be getting it.

"America can't afford any more war."

So what has got my knickers in a twist this time? Well. Recently, the Taliban (yes, that Taliban) attacked an American military base in Afghanistan and apparently kept our guys under siege from 4:00 am in the morning through most of the rest of the day. Nine US soldiers were killed.

"But, Jane," you might say, "war is like that. And the Taliban were repulsed eventually. So what's the big deal?"

The big deal is that the Taliban are still trying! Don't these guys ever give up? Apparently not. So the US military has just sent a whole bunch of Marines and stuff off to Afghanistan and is currently training whole battalions of them here at home to follow those later. And in addition, during The Surge we sent a whole [boat] load of soldiers and Marines off to Iraq to augment the ones who were already there. That's enough money and troops to keep America's military over-stretched and bogged down for years and years to come.

But our vast military commitments don't just end there. Now we've also got that whole mess in Georgia, where our troops and financial resources are currently engaged up to their eyebrows in bringing in "humanitarian" relief -- causing Russia to get totally pissed off at us because Washington is flaunting military posturing within miles of its borders and Putin is threatening to start up the Cold War again -- which gives Washington an excuse for committing to the added expense of money and troops necessary to build a huge anti-missile defense system in Poland.

Plus we have to be prepared for other long-range financial and troop commitments as well. China is currently battling us in a surrogate situation in Darfur. And we have all those troops in South Korea just in case North Korea decides to get uppity. And our military is currently spending many billions of dollars to equip and train soldiers to be ready for attacks here at home. And then we have Israel, America's mini-me, who is always threatening to bomb the heck out of Lebanon, Syria and Iran -- so multiple billions of our tax dollars have to go toward propping up that ally, so it can afford to maintain its current "bantam rooster" cock-of-the-walk posture in the Middle East, a posture that would deflate like a balloon if US taxpayers ever stopped supporting its strut.

And then there's South America, which is now in total revolution against multiple generations of American economic domination -- except for Columbia, a country where Washington spends billions each year bailing them out. And then there's....

You do the math.

Our soldiers are supposed to be holding down the fort here in America, fighting insurgents in Iraq, dealing with the Taliban in Afghanistan AND also be taking on Russia, China, South America and Iran? Yep. That's the plan. And not only that but we American taxpayers are supposed to pay for all this too. And we ARE paying for it -- at the expense of healthcare and education and infrastructure repair. Which causes Jim Grant of the Wall Street Journal to ask why Americans continue to put up with this unbalanced and unstable situation. "Why no outrage?" he asks.

Paul B. Farrell at MarketWatch has the answer to that one. "America's economy is a war economy. Not a 'manufacturing' economy. Not an 'agricultural' economy. Nor a 'service' economy. Not even a 'consumer' economy. Seriously, I looked into your eyes, America, saw deep into your soul. So let's get honest and officially call it 'America's Outrageous War Economy.' Admit it: we secretly love our war economy. And that's the answer to Jim Grant's thought-provoking question last month in the Wall Street Journal -- 'Why No Outrage?' There really is only one answer: Deep inside we love war..... Why else are Americans so eager and willing to surrender 54% of their tax dollars to a war machine, which consumes 47% of the world's total military budgets?"

The current economy, culture and philosophy of America today, following a pattern once set by the ancient Greek state of Sparta, now appears to completely revolve around "war" -- and Americans seem to like it that way too.

But at the rate that things are going with regard to America's current love affair with war, this passionate relationship is both unstable and doomed. It cannot last forever. And we are going to be in big trouble really soon if we just continue to sit back, go along for the ride, and watch America's economic and physical resources continue to melt away right before our very eyes -- like some military-industrial complex Wicked Witch of the West.

At this rate, I'm thinking that if John McCain wins the presidency in November, he's better be ready to go back into uniform -- because America is going to need every soldier it can get! And Obama? "Barak, you'd better start packing for Boot Camp." Every man-jack in this country is gonna have to strap one on and lock and load at the rate things are going now.

"But Jane," argued a journalist friend of mine, "you've got it all wrong. The corporations that control the decision-making process in Washington make their money by selling weapons and provisioning wars. They just want to make money off the military. They don't want to actually go out and conquer countries and stuff. That would force them to deal with the HUMAN factor. I think they would prefer it if we just gave them money to spend on manufacturing missile systems that don't work, dreaming up Star Wars-type fantasy projects and creating fabulous new sci-fi secret weapons that no one will use -- and letting the messy stuff slide."

But the journalist also brought up another interesting point. "Right now, nearly the entire US military is either in Afghanistan and Iraq or going to or coming from those two mouse-sized countries. And, according to some, nearly the entire military machine is stretched as tight as a rubber band ready to snap. And we are going to need a lot more rubber if the powers-that-be plan to keep stretching the machine. We will need to either re-start the draft -- or to leave Afghanistan and Iraq."

I agree.

For these reasons alone (not to mention that war is also morally wrong), whoever is running the show in Washington needs to chill out regarding the wars that they have already started and also to stop starting new wars -- wars that will involve using US troops. Can't we just GIVE our money to weapons manufacturers, packing it up in neat little bundles and sending it off to the military-industrial complex straight from the mint? Cut out the middle man? Because if we don't, America is gonna end up becoming the new Sparta -- brave warriors to a man, but with no backup plan for anything else.

PS: Paul B. Farrell's article continues to list examples of our "War Economy" situation and, judging from what he says, it looks like we are ALREADY giving weapons manufacturers tons of money -- directly from our treasury to them:

"America's war economy has no idea where its money goes. Read Portfolio magazine's special report, "The Pentagon's $1 Trillion Problem.' The Pentagon's 2007 budget of $440 billion included $16 billion to operate and upgrade its financial system. Unfortunately 'the defense department has spent billions to fix its antiquated financial systems [but] still has no idea where its money goes. And it gets worse: Back 'in 2000, Defense's inspector general told Congress that his auditors stopped counting after finding $2.3 trillion in unsupported entries.' Yikes, our war machine has no records for $2.3 trillion!"

Report from Iraq # 11: Wherein 25 Iraqi journalists invade my bedroom & I meet an admiral

(Photos are of Admiral Jawad, the naval press conference at CPIC, and some sand and McMansions in Kuwait)

After getting only three hours sleep the night before because I had to take the Rhino armored bus convoy in from Camp Stryker in the middle of the night, I woke up the next morning in the Green Zone in a bunk bed in the press room at the Combined Press Information Center, tired and hungry. "Got any breakfast?" I asked the sergeant on desk duty.

"Would you like some Cocoa Puffs?" she replied. Er, no thanks. "But lunch will be ready in about an hour." So I went back to the media room where I had set up a bedroom behind a blanket hung over the top of my bunk bed, and crawled into bed to wait for said lunch. But then suddenly the entire media room began filling up with Iraqi journalists.

"There's going to be a press conference here at 2:00 pm today," said one of the reporters. "An Iraqi admiral will speak." Cool. You learn something new every day. I didn't even know that Iraq had a navy.

Then another Iraqi journalist helped me get my thumb-drive's USB port to upload my photos and we got to talking. At first I completely hogged our conversation, telling him all about my family and stuff and how my middle daughter had just e-mailed me that I was a bad mother. Huh? It's not like she's still in diapers or nothing. She's practically middle-aged herself. She needs to get over it. It's not like she needs me to be back home to be reading her bedtime stories or watching Libra get evicted from Big Brother 10.

But then it suddenly hit me. "Here I am in Iraq, sitting right next to an actual real live Iraqi journalist! This guy must have seen it all. I should be interviewing him!" So I did.

"I'm currently working on an article about the Baghdad electrical system," he told me. "In some areas of the city they only receive electricity for one hour a day." I imagine that it's hard to keep ice cream cold in the refrigerator that way -- to say nothing about running the A/C. Then we talked for a while about the problems of getting the local power stations up and running. But what I really wanted to grill this guy about was how he felt about Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq's current prime minster.

"What about Maliki?" I asked. "What can you tell me about him?"

"He pretty much has to do what the Americans tell him to do," said the journalist. "Plus there are Iraqis who he respects who come to him and ask him to do things that he doesn't want to do -- and he has to do them anyway because he respects the requesters, if not the requests." And apparently Maliki, like Karzai in Afghanistan, is more powerful in the capital than he is in the provinces.

Then I tried to take a nap before the press conference started but it was no use. "We have you signed up for the Rhino again tonight," said one of the CPIC press coordinators. Not ANOTHER night without sleep, I groaned to myself. But I was still glad that I had come to the Green Zone -- if for no other reason than to meet 25-plus Iraqi journalists, right here in my own, er, bedroom. Theirs is an extremely risky occupation and I admire them a lot. They do everything else that all the rest of us do -- plus they do it all in Arabic as well!

Then the press conference began.

"This day commemorates the 72nd anniversary of the Iraqi Navy, founded in 1937," said the moderator. Then an Iraqi admiral was introduced and a British navy dude too. The Brit was wearing tan camos. Hmmm. How come Navy camos are tan? If they were truly meant to camouflage anything out on the ocean, shouldn't they be done up in blue? Or green at the least.

"90% of the oil exported from Iraq goes through its ports, so the Navy is obviously important," said the admiral. And the British captain said that the Iraqi navy is being totally renovated and that the renovation is being financed by the nation's oil wealth. "The British are in charge of training young Iraqi naval officers." And apparently the US navy is involved in the training as well.

One journalist asked about the current state of the navy's vessels and also about its conflicts with Iranian vessels. "We have a small number of boats now," replied the admiral, "but we are planning to increase equipment and crews in phases. International companies will receive contracts for our new boats. But we must also have trained crews. As for the trespassing issue, we have had no assaults; only trespassing fishermen who are respectfully returned to their own waters."

I wish I could have asked a hot-spit question myself, but even though my father had been the head of the fleet post office in Occupied Japan after World War II and thus, theoretically, I should have salt water running through my veins, I just couldn't think of any -- except of course for the one about the navy's choice of designer colors for their camos -- so I kept my mouth shut.

"The Iraqi navy deals with smuggling and terrorism," said the British captain, "but the British navy is responsible for protecting oil interests." Did he really just say that or did I misunderstand?

Apparently the Iraqi navy recruited their crews from non-Baathists at first but now they recruit from everybody. There are 1,900 personnel now -- aiming for 2,000 by the year 2010. "But we are aiming for quality rather than numbers," said the admiral. Then the moderator told us about an Iraqi naval lieutenant who had just been presented with the prestigious "Queen's Binoculars Award" -- and that was the end of the press conference.

Now let's talk about sleep. A three-hour nap is totally priceless at this point and that's what I got this evening, before popping back on the Rhino to Camp Stryker sometime after midnight. It seems all of a sudden that three hours of sleep will keep me going for days.

While camping out in the CPIC media room, I also met an American journalist who was working for a well-known conservative magazine, and he kept arguing about the glories of capitalism and the Surge. "Hey, I like capitalism fine," I replied. "Too bad it hasn't been practiced in America for the last 40 to 60 years."

And of course he asked what I thought that we WERE practicing. "Welfare for corporations. American corporations receive all kinds of welfare. That's not very conservative, is it now? Plus according to a recent GAO report, 80% of them don't even pay taxes." If I had been home in Berkeley, I coulda whipped out my 1996 Intel clone, googled Wikipedia and hit him with the facts:

"The label of corporate welfare," says Wikipedia, "is often used to decry projects advertised as benefiting the general welfare that spend a disproportionate amount of funds on large corporations. For instance, in the United States, agricultural subsidies are usually portrayed as helping honest, hardworking independent farmers stay afloat. However, the majority of income gained from commodity support programs actually goes to large agribusiness corporations such as Archer Daniels Midland, as they own a considerably larger percentage of production. According to the Cato Institute, the U.S. federal government spent $92 billion on corporate welfare during fiscal year 2006. Recipients included Boeing, Xerox, IBM, Motorola, Dow Chemical, and General Electric."

Then me and the conservative journalist started arguing about Georgia. "Bush and them rigged the so-called Rose Revolution elections back in 2004 and Georgians were then stuck with some weird loose cannon president who loved to bait Russia."

"Did not!"

"Did so!"

But other than his Fantasyland belief that neo-cons are actually conservatives and not just crooks, the guy was really nice and we bonded a lot over having to endure the Rhino ordeal-by-sleep-deprivation together, arriving back at Camp Stryker by 2:00 am. By 3:00 am, I was busy plotting how to get out to the Baghdad airport and get on Space-A for a C-130 flight to Kuwait. Then I would have 24 hours at the US airbase there in order to do laundry and get bug-bite medication before taking a bus to KWI and flying to Frankfurt the following night.

In the meantime, I kept complaining about my bug bites. "Oh, I bet you have Leishmaniasis," said the conservative journalist.

"What's that?"

"It's a disease spread by sand flies. You'd better get it treated over here because no one back in the states knows how to deal with it so you will end up itching for the rest of your life." Now there's a grim thought.

The conservative journalist also told me that he had been to Haifa Street in 2003 and 2004. "It's really different here now. The whole way soldiers operate is different." Yeah. That's my point too. Now they use carrots instead of sticks. Carrots work better. Too bad Rumsfeld and Brenner didn't figure that one out back in 2003. We could have saved hundreds of billions of dollars, approximately a million lives and a whole bunch of grief.

"But you can't say that the Surge isn't working!" said the conservative journalist. So I won't. But mostly what is happening here in Iraq today seems to be the result of the Iraqis themselves saying, "Enough killing!" Or maybe it was because I came over here back in 2007 and gave them all a good talking to. Could be. I gots the motherly touch, even despite what my middle daughter thinks.

But the way I see it about the Surge is that it did help somewhat -- but the bottom line is that 30,000 more US soldiers aren't going to make that big of a difference in a country full of 25 million Iraqis if said Iraqis don't want a difference to be made -- and if the US militray's policies hadn't changed. And even I have to give General Petraeus snaps for that. He took our policies here out of the Washington salons -- where it is all too easy to just give orders to drop more and more bombs -- and started working the streets instead.

It's 5:00 am now (again). Everyone else in the entire world is asleep. Where the freak is my bus to the airport!

Leaving with honor: My 12th and final report from Iraq

After waiting around for most of the night at a bus stop at Camp Stryker, I finally made it out to BIAP (the so-called Baghdad International Airport -- consisting of a whole bunch of porta-potties, lots of blast walls, a few Quonset huts and a handful of tents). By the time I arrived, it was five in the morning and everyone there was dog-tired so I huddled down next to a small airborne Army unit that was waiting to go home on R&R and we all tried to catch some sleep. Have you ever tried to sleep on a hard-as-a-rock cement apron next to some blast walls without pillows or blankets and surrounded by soldiers, backpacks and Kevlar? Forget it. I read a book.

The guy next to me also gave up trying to sleep and squatted over a drain grill to shave himself, using bottled water and no mirror.

"So that's how this man's army manages to stay clean-shaven," I joked.

"Hey, this is better than in the wintertime," the soldier replied. "At least the water is warm." Which reminded us that the sun was about to come up and cause us all to be very hot once again. And then the guy on the other side of me pulled an electric shaver out of his gear.

I'm too tired to come up with an analogy between men and women getting up and getting ready for work in America and men and women getting up and getting ready for work in Iraq.

"You know that there's a DFAC right down the road," said the shaver. A dining facility! I'm there. And the sign at the DFAC read. "Dear guests: Upon hearing unannounced explosions or rocket whistling, drop to the ground. DO NOT wait for giant voice announcement to react!"

By 11:00 am, I was lucky enough to get a C-130 flying Space-Available back to Kuwait, and of course once I arrived at the American airbase there, I went straight to their DFAC too. I love DFACs. You don't have to cook. Or do dishes.

While I was happily eating my pot roast, mashed potatoes and salad at the DFAC, John McCain came on the wide-screen TV and started talking about solving our energy crisis by building "45 nuclear reactors". What? Does McCain even realize how crazy that sounds? 45 more nuclear reactors would create enough radioactively-contaminated waste water to kill every man, woman and child on the planet approximately ten times over. That's a rough estimate but still....

On the other hand, maybe McCain is on to something here. If we're all dead, then we won't be making all that many energy demands, the amount of oil we have now will last us forever and we will never again have to be afraid of the words "Peak Oil". We'd be dead.

Then I went off to find a tent to stay in while waiting for my visa to come back from the Kuwaiti government -- you need to get a visa in order to enter Kuwait when you fly in from Iraq -- and took a short nap on a real bed with real sheets. Then I popped off to the medical clinic here on the airbase to have my bug bites checked out. This is the third time that I've staggered back from Iraq all broken and they've patched me back up. "I may have caught Leishmaniasis," I whined.

"Leishmaniasis is a very serious infection and we don't treat it without extensive tests first. But if it migrates to your liver, you could die." Yeah. but then I'd get to write a heck of an article about it first!

"Here's some Calamine lotion. Give that a try." So now I'm all bright pink and look like I just got back from Girl Scout camp with a case of poison oak.

At one of the soldiers' recreation and welfare centers back in Iraq, I had picked up a copy of Eckhart Tolle's book, "A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose," which is highly recommended by Oprah's book club. I thought it looked a bit New Age to be reading on Army bases because of its numerous anti-war quotes -- such as, "These days you frequently hear the expression 'the war against' this or that, and whenever I hear it, I know that it is condemned to failure.... War is a mind-set, and all action that comes of of such a mind-set will either strengthen the enemy, the perceived evil, or if the war is won, will create a new enemy, a new evil equal to and often worse than the one that was defeated.... Beware of making it your mission to 'eradicate evil' as you are likely to turn into the very thing you are fighting against."

However, much to my surprise, several different soldiers came up to me and said, "Hey, I see that you are reading Tolle too," and "I've got all of his books," and "He really knows what he's talking about." Good. Maybe Eckhart and Oprah will finally be the ones to succeed in putting an end to war. I'm down with that.

I also talked with a reservist about what will happen next for him, after he gets out of the service. "The new GI bill is a step in the right direction," he said. "It gives vets a $1,200 living allowance to go back to school with. That's good. But to qualify for it 100%, you need to have been on active duty for five years AFTER September 11, 2001. Which means that the time that I served in the Gulf War doesn't count and I have to stay over here one more year in order to qualify."

One of the main reasons that this reservist is over here is economic. "If this job disappears, I don't know if I can find another one."

"Yeah, but..." I said, as we stood chatting in the chow hall of a military camp that must have cost ten billion dollars to build, "all that military money could have been used to employ people to stop global warming or build hospitals and schools. You guys are intelligent and well-trained. You could have done that instead. You guys could do anything." Plus all that money spent on the last five years of constant warfare hasn't bought America any more safety at all. In fact, it is the general consensus that America is far less safe now than it was even right after 9-11. Heck, even as we speak, those [leaders] in Washington are hinting around about starting a nuclear war with Russia! How safe is that?

Plus when the spit really hits the fan ecologically and our planet turns into deserts, we are all gonna be smacking our foreheads and saying "Doh!" just like we were all Homer Simpsons. "Doh! Why did we spend all those resources on war! We shoulda spent them on soil conservation and alternative energy." Not that those would be Homer's words exactly -- but even he would get the drift.

Getting back to the reality of what Tolle describes as living in the NOW, here's my plan: Tomorrow I will take a bus into Kuwait City, board United Airlines flight 8743 to Frankfurt and then spend the next 24 hours watching inflight movies and waiting between flights. So. Before my brain goes on strike again, let me summarize what I have learned in Iraq. "If our troops pull out now, we will be leaving with honor...."

Another thing to consider regarding having our troops leave Iraq now is that those [leaders] in Washington have just gone out of their way to make an enemy of Russia and Russia has a lot of oil and Iran doesn't like us either and Iran has a lot of oil. Plus China and Europe are looking to buy oil from Russia and Iran -- and Iraq -- and because they too have been antagonized by the threatening and bellicose attitude of those [leaders] in Washington, they are pretty much going to jump at a chance to use euros and rubles instead of dollars to buy oil. And if this happens, America's economy will probably eat dirt and we won't even be able to AFFORD Iraq any more. In this case, then our ability to "Leave with honor" right now might be a good thing.

And as for myself? Right now, I feel like I've lost something important over here, but I don't quite know what. I gave this trip to Iraq everything I had, put every ounce of my entire heart and soul into learning as much as I could about the situation here and trying to write about it in a manner that would allow people back in America who have never been here to actually get an idea of what it is like -- and now that I've got no heart and soul left, I still have to endure yet another 24 hours of fear of flying. Again. Was this trip worth it? Who knows. If I can in any small way effect America's ability to see that both the foreign and domestic policies of those [leaders] in Washington are hurtful, expensive, scary and wrong, then this trip will have been a success.

And let us also hope that I can still somehow manage to not get bitten by any more bugs or get lost in the next 24 hours, make it to the Kuwait City airport in one piece, get myself and my luggage onto Flight 8743 tomorrow night and "Leave with honor" myself.

The scariest thing that I've seen in Iraq so far? CNN!

(Photos are of me trying to fall asleep across the road from the Rhino bus stop, trying to fall asleep at the Baghdad airport, Baghdad and a section of the Great Wall of Baghdad from the air, and the inside of an MRAP)

After getting all lost in Baghdad, I finally made it to the Green Zone around 5:00 am. Someone came out from the Combined Press Information Center, picked me up, drove me back to CPIC and gave me a place to sleep -- a bottom bunk in the media room.

I am so completely fouled up and drained and exhausted from lack of sleep that I have no confidence left. "Everything you have ever written is trash!" proclaims my brain. "Nothing you've ever written or done matters." So what if I think that the Army is composed of good guys? The fact remains that I am now staying in a country that has been mercilessly and needlessly invaded, bombed and destroyed at the will of America's so-called commander-in-chief. And yet on CNN last night as I was watching TV while waiting for a Rhino up-armored bus convoy to take me to the Green Zone, Bush had the audacity to accuse RUSSIA of the crime of invading a sovereign nation. Apparently George Orwell was spot-on when he wrote, "Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth." Does no one on CNN have any memory of what went on here in Iraq -- just five short years ago?

In low, hushed tones like carnival hypnotists talking to their shills, the newscasters at CNN spun us an elaborate web of deceit -- about how John McCain was a great war leader -- yeah right. The man has proved again and again that he has NO judgment when it comes to deciding when and when not to release the dread Dogs of War. "But I supported The Surge," he cries. Yeah but. If you'd done your homework in the first place, John, we wouldn't have NEEDED a surge.

According to analyst Brent Budowsky, "The Bush and McCain obsession with Iraq and Iran has not only done grave damage to our military force structures and deterrent, they have warped our international policy, endangered our national security and created a crisis of inattention from Pakistan to Russia that makes the world a far more dangerous place."

Further, according to Think Progress, "...a new analysis by Open Secrets finds that the U.S. military is increasingly rejecting McCain as its spokesman. Obama has received nearly six times as much money from soldiers deployed overseas. Even anti-war libertarian Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), who has suspended his campaign, has received more than four times as much [from deployed soldiers] as McCain."

Then the hypnotists at CNN went on and on about John Edwards' affair, not even mentioning that McCain had apparently been committing adultery with young Cindy-the-beer-heiress long before he filed for divorce from his wife who had stayed faithful to him for the entire time he had been a prisoner of war. Is that affair ever going to be discussed on TV too? Or is history being ignored here as well.

At 3:00 am, stranded at the military equivalent of a Greyhound bus depot and in a depressingly sleepless state of mind after watching CNN verbally pat Bush and McCain on the back again and again, the only thought running through my brain again and again was, "America is screwed."

And this thought was followed in quick succession by, "Jane, stop pretending that there is anything you can do about it."

No matter how many times I pop off to Iraq to see what is actually going on over here and no matter how much I proclaim how efficient and honorable our military is, our soldiers are still following a leader in Washington with blood on his hands. And they will soon follow yet another leader with blood on his hands -- be it McCain or even Obama -- into a grim future that appears to be offering Americans nothing more than an endless stream of unnecessary wars which in turn will lead to economic devastation as well. And is there ANYTHING I can do to stop this horror movie from unfolding? No.

Further, while our American military now has the awesome and incredible battle capability to be able to attack almost the entire world on both land and on sea, our military can do nothing to prevent America from being defeated in our most vulnerable place -- our bank vaults. According to news analyst Mike Whitney, "...will [Medvedev and Putin launch a military attack on Georgia or will they] launch an asymmetrical attack on the fragile US financial system by selling all $50 billion of their Fannie Mae mortgage-backed bonds and all of their US dollar-backed assets while refusing to sell oil or natural gas in any currencies other than rubles and euros. Such an announcement could send the dollar crashing and the Dow Jones into a death-spiral. Why would Putin use a blunderbuss when a flyswatter will do just fine."

As I see it, bin Ladin himself hadn't been a big enough military threat to justify the expense of corporatists in Washington shelling out billions of dollars in taxpayers' money on buying every weaponry gadget ever invented. So the guys inside Washington's beltway upped the ante and the war on Al Qaeda upgraded into the "War on Terror". Still not scary enough? Apparently not. So they added weapons of mass destruction and the war on Iraq to the list.

But as our armed forces continue to do their work well in Iraq and this "war" continues to wind down, what will the corporatists do to justify their next $100 billion allocation from Congress? Hmmm. There's the war on Iran waiting in the wings. Whew. But now Russia is offering America's corporatist weapons manufacturers what amounts to their ultimate nirvana short of resurrecting the Third Reich -- the grand possibility of starting the Second Cold War.

And with enemies as daunting as Russia (and possibly combined with Iran and China if the corporatists get lucky), the sky's the limit for America's military budget. Plus here comes the end of any hopes we might have harbored in our bosom of stopping global warming and starting the evolution of human kindness and the re-birth of the human soul.

The bottom line here is that the corporatist weapons manufacturers and their main Bush/McCain supporters seem to want a military solution to EVERYTHING. And so, judging from what I had watched on television at the Rhino bus stop somewhere south of Baghdad at 3:00 am in the morning, does CNN. Now THAT'S scary!

With that thought, I finally fell asleep.

Then some people started talking in the media room and woke me up. I peeked at my watch and groaned. 8:00 am. Three hours sleep. Again. And what's ahead of me now? Four grueling days of transit -- first to the Baghdad airport, followed by a C-130 flight to Kuwait and a trans-Atlantic flight to California that will last forever. And all for what? All for nothing. Nothing that I can possibly write about my experiences over here will ever be able to stop the avalanche of war happening back in Washington.

Sure, I made a few deep and lasting friendships over here, witnessed pain and recovery, saw mankind at its best as lotuses once again started to grow out of the mud (or in this case out of sewage ponds) and rode around in MRAPs with soldiers of honor. But what good is all this new hopefulness really going to do us if Americans continue to be hypnotized by the evening news into continuing to support politicians who willingly allow us to continue to fall off the cliff again and again -- into even more Iraqs, even more Vietnams, even more Rwandas, Mogadishus and failed states?

I've got nothing.

My children and grandchildren are screwed.

I need more sleep. Or at least to eat breakfast.

Ready & Forward: Going on patrol with 10 Cav and getting lost again (My report from Iraq, Pt 9)

(Photos are of an abandoned photograph of an unnamed graduating class, some places we visited on patrol, Admiral Jawad, the Great Wall of Baghdad, my room with the 10 Cav Buffalo Soldiers whose motto is "Ready and Forward," Alex the gunner and some chai.)

It's showtime again. Today me and a 10 Cav platoon from JSS Karbdegla are going out to a COP (combat outpost) in Saha to join up with another platoon and then we're going to hang out on the main market street in Abu D'Shir.

"How can you spend time with those murderers and then actually write nice things about them?" someone e-mailed me today, referring to American soldiers.

"As far as I can tell after actually being here," I replied, "the situation now just isn't like that. But that's why I'm over here -- to find out what it's really like in Iraq. And what I have discovered so far is that most Army guys have honor, have character, are idealists like us. Honest. They really are." But the US military is being used and abused by the corporatists in Washington -- just like most of the rest of America is. But. The big test lie ahead for the US military (and of course for the American people as well.) If the Bush/McCain/corporatists once again send our "cavalry" off to fight in yet another unjust war -- one of a long series of unjust wars that have been stirred up by those who ahave discovered that their profits sky-rocket in time of war -- and then the "cavalry" goes along with the plan....

The main test of our soldiers' idealism, character and honor will be if our military once again blindly follows the corporatists' orders with out doing their research. If Bush or Cheney or McCain orders our military to attack Iran...or Venezuela...or Russia...or San Francisco, where will these honorable men and women draw the line?

Now we're driving past miles and miles of blast walls again. There must be a million blast walls in Baghdad. It's like visiting the Great Wall of Iraq. Where the freak do they get all that cement?

Then we arrived at the COP, constructed out of three or four former McMansions that used to belong to mid-level bureaucrats in Saddam's government. It is the usual combination of Army kitch and Iraqi-ness. And the person in charge of first aid here checked out my bug bite and gave me some hydrocortizone cream. "Come back if it starts abscessing," he said.

"Do you think it was a spider bite?" I asked. A tarantula? A scorpion? A three-horned alien? Hey, this is Iraq. Anything's possible.

While we were waiting around the COP for the patrol to begin, I checked my e-mail. "Mom, I'm having a mini-breakdown," wrote my daughter Ashley. "I miss you! Plus I have a bug." What kind of a bug? A scorpion? A tarantula?

Now it's time to hurry up and wait. We're supposed to go out to the markets but today nobody seems to be in any hurry. Me neither -- except that I need to catch a helicopter to the Green Zone at 3:00 pm. So we sat around and talked about the Olympic games -- they are on every TV screen all of the time here -- and where soldiers would go during their leave. Mostly they would be doing family stuff like taking the kids to Disneyland. A lot of these guys are family men. Rats. I can't find any recruits to come home and marry my daughter.

Then we popped into an MRAP. "Hi. I'm Alex. I'll be your gunner for today."

Alex used to be a punk with a Mohawk. Now he is a family man. He showed me a photo of his daughter. Total cuteness! "She'll be one year old pretty soon. I've only seen her for a total of 25 days." Again and again I keep hearing about how hard it is to be separated from family for at least six months at a time. Another guy I talked with had five children. Another one had three. Someone else told me that his divorce papers had just come through.

I just realized that for the past four days, I'm one of the only women I've talked to. There was a physicians' assistant at the JSS and that's about it. She was a Stanford graduate but don't tell no one form Berkeley that I wore my red Stanford T-shirt today just for her. But the strange thing about living without women is that one doesn't miss them. Don't tell nobody I said that either.

"You hungry?" asked the gunner. I'm always hungry. So the MRAP went over to the drive-through at Camp Falcon and we got chicken, french fries and Gatorade.

Then we rolled over to Abu D'Shir -- Shia territory. "How can you tell?"

"See those images of the Prophet's grandson Ali painted on the walls? That's how."

First we stopped by a doctor's home to give him a mini-grant. "I need some new stethoscopes and a blood pressure machine."

"How is healthcare in Iraq?"

"Expensive." Apparently, the private hospitals here are good but cost a lot more than the state-sponsored ones. This doctor volunteers in a clinic every morning and then sees five to ten private patients in the afternoons. His wife served us chai. I love Iraqi chai!

"Did you go to the university?" we asked the doctor's oldest son.

"No. I couldn't afford to. I had to drop out and work. None of my family will be able to afford to go to university." I wish we could give scholarships and mini-grants out to students as well as to small businesses.

What do I mean "we"? It turns out I was wrong about this money coming from America. The mini-grant money we give out comes from the Iraqi government. "Why is that?"

"I think it's because Iraqis trust us to be impartial," a soldier replied.

After the doctor's wife served us chai, we met the rest of the family and then went on to the next task -- giving a mini-grant to a man who ran a carpentry shop.

Then someone from COP Comanche came to pick me up from downtown Abu D'shir and haul me off to meet my helicopter ride up to the Green Zone.

"I want to tell you why I'm here," said the officer from COP Comanche. "We were out on patrol in our battle area back at the height of the violence when a smiling young girl came over and stood next to me. 'Why are you smiling,' I asked her and she answered, 'Because I know that for the next 20 minutes I will be safe.' That really got to me. And also around that time we were looking through an abandoned home and found an old-fashioned family portrait lying in the dust. And later that day we found a mass grave for that entire family, buried in their own front yard."

I sort of shivered. While prowling through an abandoned house the other day, I too had found a photograph of what looked like a class photo from some university graduation ceremony. I wonder how many people in that photo are now dead, killed in this war.

Back at the 10 Cav JSS, everyone came to say goodbye to me at the landing zone and I left on the chopper. "I miss you guys already," I cried. Then we flew off to the Green Zone but guess what? I swear that, while totally strapped into a freaking helicopter driven by experienced pilots, I STILL managed to get lost!

When the helicopter landed, I got out, waved to the pilot and mouthed "Thanks!" over the rotor-blade noise. Then I walked off to the terminal. "Welcome to Camp Liberty," said the flagman. Camp Liberty? What?

And this is the reason that I'm now sitting at Camp Stryker at 2:00 in the freaking morning waiting for the freaking Rhino to drive me across Baghdad in an armed convoy in the dead of night instead of being happily tucked into my soft little bed in the Green Zone right now. Am I pissed off? You cannot even begin to imagine. The freaking helicopter guy put me off at the wrong stop.

So here I am, red-eyed and freaked out, sitting around the Army equivalent of a Greyhound bus station, trying to stay awake by playing about a hundred games of solitaire.

I'm too old for this.

Jane Stillwater, Cache Raider? (My embed report from Iraq, Part 8)


I arrived at the Karbdegla joint security station yesterday night and had trouble sleeping due to multiple insect bites, so by the time I got to meet with the colonel in charge, I was still beau-coup sleep-deprived. But the colonel was an eye-opener and well worth paying attention to as he described his area of control here in the West Tigris section of Baghdad and his future hopes for that area. I wish that people in America could hear men like him talk. They would get an entirely different -- and happier -- picture of how our troops in Iraq are trying as hard as they can to build up Iraq's economy, security and infrastructure right now. They are not just all trying to play at being Chuck Norris and kick down a bunch of doors.

"Our immediate goal is to implement security and to help the local people in as many way as we can," said the colonel. "We're looking to create durable security -- security that will last even after our troops leave."

Then I asked the colonel if the national postal service was functioning here yet. He laughed. "Everyone here uses e-mail, internet cafes and cell phones." He said. "But the big change in Iraq now was that the Iraqis had gone to the edge of the cliff, looked over the edge, seen themselves turning into another Rwanda or Mogadishu and pulled back. No one wants to go back to fighting."

"So what will happen next? Will the Iraqi government step up to the plate?"

"No one knows right now. A lot of people complain about the government. But at least they feel safe enough to complain."

Next I met with a captain who served as a liaison between the US Army and the local councils. "Of course some of the people we deal with here are not to be trusted," he said, "but many of them are true idealists who really care about their community and country." He too had hopes and dreams for the future of Iraq and was not only conscientious in working toward making his ideals into reality but he was extremely good at his job. Plus he was only 28 years old. I was impressed.

"I run two types of operations here -- kinetic and non-kinetic --and they are not mutually exclusive. We run them both at the same time." He uses both military and non-military solutions. "We work with educational institutions, local politics, infrastructure and various other people-focused operations. And at the same time we are also tracking down criminals, gathering intelligence and processing detentions. But we haven't kicked down one single door since I've been here."

The captain and I also talked about how many of the local professionals have fled the area. It would be as if the American hometown where you came from no longer had most of its doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc. because they had all suddenly left.

The rest of my talk with the captain was very interesting and productive. I'm ashamed to say, however, that I forgot to take notes.

Then me and everyone in the platoon I was assigned to ate some plastic pizza, jumped into some Strikers and went out on patrol.

At the first home we stopped at, the young mother who lived there asked us to help get her husband out of jail. Apparently his brother had been mixed up in some shady business and when the police came for the brother, they took the husband away instead. His wife was desperate. The dread Ministry of the Interior was mentioned several times. The wife had no idea what to do next. Neither did we.

Then we went to another house, which was abandoned. "What happened?" I asked a neighbor.

"The husband was a doctor and he was shot and killed by...." By who? I missed who. "We guard his home against squatters and terrorists now, but no one in his family is ever coming back."

As we walked through the abandoned home to make sure that no one was using it as a safe house or a cache dump, I saw a few remnants left lying around from the time that it had been somebody's home -- a stuffed child's toy, a flaming red Victoria's Secret-type female undergarment and an old group photograph stood out in the dust.

Then we went to another house to question someone who had seen a suspicious black Toyota lurking about. One of the soldiers, an ex-police officer, pulled out his notebook and went into his police-interrogator/CSI mode, taking down info for a police report. "When was it that you saw this car? Who was driving it? Have you seen him since?"

"I reported this because I'm afraid that something bad is going to happen in this neighborhood now," replied the witness. "I think the driver was AQI." That's Al Qaeda-Iraq, the local Al Qaeda franchise branch.

Then we went to another home and visited a very nice family. The grandmother was religious -- but in a good way. She practically glowed from the effects of being so wise and kind. And there was also a one-month-old baby who looked at us like she was the wisest person in the world.

Then we talked with another woman who refused to wear hijab -- a headscarf -- out in public. "One AQI man started to give me trouble about that, but I just yelled at him so much that he gave up."

The AQI's support system in this area is definitely threatened right now so the big question here is, "Will they strike back?" People are worried. But it hasn't happened so far.

Next house. "Did you hear about the guy who just got chopped up?" No! We gossiped about the Sons of Iraq, the AQI and various other good guys and law-breakers for the next hour. Then the soldiers in my platoon started planning a raid on a bad guy's house. If they did it tonight, I could come! "Jane Stillwater, Cache Raider".

"The problem here," said the head of our platoon, "s that people will turn other people in -- not because they are guilty of crimes but because someone doesn't like them or wants their job...." Or even is having a bad hair day.

"One thing that amazes me over here," commented the policeman, "is the small amount of evidence that the Iraqi police require in order to arrest people. You need to build a lot stronger case back in the States." I thought about that poor woman's husband and nodded. Then we headed back to the joint security station, a job well done -- for now. Would the bad guys be back? Sure. But they'd be weaker and fewer in number, thanks to my platoon.

Am I over-glorifying the work our troops do here in Iraq? I don't think so. GWB should never have started this "war" in the first place. But he did. And now our soldiers are doing a good job cleaning up his mess.

PS: The next big question here is whether or not our troops will be as willing (or even as able) to clean up after GWB once again -- if he tries to create another mess like this in Iran.

Dear Abby: I'm over here in Iraq.... Part 7 of my Iraq embed report

(Photos are of a weapons cache, the phone call center at COP Guerro, my suite at the Camp Falcon Hilton, an MRAP, the rural part of Karbdegla, the former meat-packing company where the Tenth Cav has their JSS and a little boy we met out on patrol)

As the sun set this evening, I left Camp Falcon in the company of my next embed unit and headed out to spend a few days at the Karbdegla joint security station in the West Tigris area. West Tigris is a combination of urban areas and farmland and of Sunnis and Shia. Our JSS is located right in the middle of the mix, in the administrative building of a former meat-packing plant.

After a 20-minute ride in an MRAP, I got settled in my room and sort of collapsed. It's been an intense seven days since I left SFO on August 2 and the jet-lag and lack of sleep has finally caught up with me. The soldiers here are all very nice and were giving me lots of helpful information about their mission, but my mind just kept drifting away. There's just been too much input to absorb since I've arrived here and it's gonna take me months to digest it all -- but I only have a few days left before it's time to go home and I still have so many unanswered questions left about Iraq that I think that my next article should be called "Dear Abby...."

[My apologies to the ghost of the real Abigail Van Buren for this satire. The real "Dear Abby" is not now in Iraq -- although maybe she should be!]

Dear Abby: What really happened at Camp Falcon back in 2004 when it allegedly blew up?

Dear Explosive: According to the official sources I talked with at Camp Falcon, you've got the dates wrong. It was 2006, not 2004. Wise up. And what apparently happened was that a stray mortar shell hit an ammunition dump inside the wire and then went ker-BOOM. Miraculously no one was hurt. And no, you may NOT have a mortar round to take home with you.

Dear Abby: I'm a journalist and I came to Iraq to report on weapons-cache discoveries in Baghdad. So far, I haven't seen any. Do you think I should try to make a fuss?

Dear Fussy: What are you THINKING? You want to go looking for mortar rounds? Why! Get a life.

Dear Abby: What is your opinion of the new MRAPs? They look top-heavy and unstable. Riding in them feels like you might be starring in "Tokyo Drift" at any minute. They look like someone crossed a freight train with that Swiss Family Robinson tree house at Disneyland. According to MNFI recent press releases, there's been several "non-combat-related" deaths recently -- possibly caused by MRAPs? And what if I'm in one and need to get out and the power has failed and I can't get the door open. What should I do?

Dear M-Rapper: My advice to you is to stay out of war zones and stick with your 1990 Toyota

Dear Abby: With this new war happening between Georgia and Russia, will the Georgian troops stationed in Iraq now go home? And does this mean that Bush, Cheney and them are trying to get us into another Cold War with Russia?

Dear Ray Charles: You got to much Georgia on your mind. Move back to Chechnya.

Dear Abby: I'm out here in the West Tigris section of Baghdad in a joint security station with the Tenth Cav Buffalo Soldiers, and there isn't any running water. How will I brush my teeth?

Dear Bad Mouth: If you went over to Iraq expecting the Hilton, you're expecting too much from a war-battered country. Give it time. Both the Americans and the Iraqis are working on establishing indoor plumbing and it will probably happen within the next year or so. But in the meantime, man up and use Perrier.

Dear Abby: Someone just e-mailed me that it was wrong to force the Iraqis to use their oil money on reconstruction. "You are making an occupied country pay for its own occupation." he said. What do you think?

Dear Occupied: I think we need to do whatever is necessary to help make the Iraqis self-sufficient so we can get out ASAP. We need to go home and start protecting our own country from those corporatist Beagle Boys who are occupying Washington DC. I just wish that Afghanistan, Palestine, etc. had oil money too so we could stop occupying them as well. Heck, I'd even like to see AMERICA become self-sufficient.

Dear Abby: When do you think the Iraqis should start paying for their own reconstruction?

Dear unReconstructed: They are already doing that. They give US troops money for mini-grants, schools, etc. and we distribute it. You got that one wrong. Pay attention!

Dear Abby: I hate to have to drink over a gallon of water a day over here. It seems like all I ever do is drink water. It's ruining my life.

Dear All Wet: In 120-degree heat, you gotta stay hydrated. When you are sweating so much that your entire color-coordinated camo ensemble is soaking wet down to your boots, just bite the bullet and suck it up. Otherwise you could get heat stroke, sunstroke, bladder infections, kidney infections, constipation, chapped lips and wrinkles. Admit it, All Wet. You just don't want to drink all that water because you don't want to have to get up in the middle of the night and stumble out to the porta-potty to pee.

Dear Abby: My girlfriend is starting to date other men while I'm over here in Iraq. Do you think that if I yell at her over the phone loud enough and long enough, it would help keep her faithful?

Dear Phone Guy: Yelling never helps anything. Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. And like the song says, "Try a little tenderness." And also talk glowingly about your future together, such as "When I get home we are gonna...." Help her to see what I can see about you -- that you are well worth waiting for.

Dear Abby: I have a lot of trouble sleeping at night over here. I try to fall asleep but my mind just keeps racing.

Dear Sleepless in Baghdad: There are so many urgent and important things a person can do these days to help the human race evolve -- or even just to keep the human race from driving its own-self to extinct. Spend your extra time doing some of those things. Forget about sleep. Sleep when you're dead.

Dear Abby: I keep losing my pens and have nothing to write with. What should I do?

Dear Pinhead: You suck eggs at writing. Take up gardening instead. It's harder to lose a shovel.

Dear Abby: How come John Edwards' affair made front page news but John McCain's didn't?

Dear Affairs-Seem-Stupid: How come the battle of Little Big Horn made Custer a hero? Wake up, ASS. Whoever owns the press wins.

Dear Abby: Now I gotta ask you the really hard question -- what is the time "horizon" for US troop withdrawal from Iraq?

Dear Really Hard: Troop withdrawal? Coming soon? Hardly. Rest assured that either this "war" or the next "war" or the one after that one will continue to go on ad infinitum as long as corporatists continue to make major profits off of ammunition sales. And I am glad to hear that you have already assumed the horizontal position, because, to paraphrase the words of the late Dwght D. Eisenhower, as long as war-profiteering is allowed to continue, American taxpayers will continue to get screwed.

Stuck in Baghdad freeway rush-hour traffic -- in a Bradley tank: My Iraq embed, Part 6

• (Photos are of the Al Rasheed district of Baghdad including the open space, places we visited, sacks of UN flour and lots of boys in soccer jerseys; inside a Bradley, dinner at the COP, my bunk at the COP and my daughter Ashley at work at Ciao Bella)

After spending a slow morning at COP Guerro -- playing solitaire, filing stories and sneaking around avoiding angry dogs -- we are now leaving to go out on patrol again in our Bradley tank.

"We'll be going to Cedar Street," said the COP commander. "That location used to be so violent that we tried to avoid it whenever possible. That's where a Bradley was attacked last year and four men burned to death. Special groups criminals," which is what the military calls the local mafia-type gangs, "used to hang out there because they knew that we were hesitant to go in. It's in the same area where you went the day before yesterday."

Really? That place where all the kids were so nice? Go figure.

So we all popped into the rattlely old Bradley and went off to give out some mini-grants again. Heat and dust. Heat and dust -- and camaraderie among the soldiers. The guys at this COP get along really well. And all the guys in our Bradley were dressed to the nines in combat gear and totally locked and loaded.

And just sitting there doing nothing but chatting with the soldiers, I still managed to lose yet another pen. My friend Aprille had just e-mailed me, giving me good pen-retention advice. "Jane, always keep an extra pen in your bra." You mean the one that is completely inaccessible due to my flak jacket? Oh well. I like to think that, somewhere in Iraq, there are deserving souls out there using my pens.

Then me and the guys all took photos of ourselves jammed inside the Bradley with sweat on our faces. "After about three or four hours in this gear," said one guy, "I start to get a little bit hot." Three or four hours? I wouldn't last inside 100 pounds of gear in this weather for three or four minutes!

Then we stopped on Cedar Street, popped out of the Bradley, talked to one car-repair shop owner and then popped back into the tank. "Didn't he want the mini-grant?" I asked. The soldiers just shrugged.

Now I know why the women in the Middle East wear headscarves. It keeps the sweat out of their eyes.

When we arrived at that first shop, I had just leisurely strolled down the gangplank of the tank. Not so with the soldiers. The second the hatch swung down, they were on total alert -- like me with the dogs back at the COP. Our sharpshooter/lookout specialist instantly went down on one (padded) knee and set up shop with his M-16. The rest of the platoon fanned out.

Speaking of platoons, earlier today I watched a part of that old movie "Platoon" on TV in the storage room back at the COP -- the scene of the firefight in the jungle in Vietnam back before Charlie Sheen became an aging playboy on a popular sit-com. It was an ironic thing to be watching a movie about Vietnam here in Iraq.

"I just found out that the guy back at the last shop already had a grant."

"What are we doing now?"

"Just driving around." Then we got out again and this time I was more in high dog-alert mode. Those dogs had really educated me good.

"This is a bakery," I was told. Brick oven, open fire pit, hot bread, more paperwork. Then back into the Bradley. We cruised around some more in our sardine can. The warning sign next to me read, "Turret movement can crush you."

Actually, I had come to Iraq to see weapons caches. "Got any of those here?" I asked an officer.

"We haven't found any in at least a month," he replied. So it looks like I'm going to have to settle for just seeing lots of poverty-stricken bombed-out neighborhoods instead.

Next we stopped by a female doctor's office and a pastry shop. "See those big white sacks over there? Notice how they are all stamped with the UN logo?" That partially explains where the food is coming from in Baghdad. There were at least 50 sacks, weighing 50 pounds each.

We walked past an outdoor market bazaar and a huge empty space. "Soccer field," said the Iraqi man standing next to me. "Ask the Americans to build us a soccer field." Right now it looked like it was being used as the city dump. Everywhere we went the neighborhoods were shabby, the streets were littered and water that looked suspiciously like sewage pooled in the streets. And almost every single man and boy that we saw wore a soccer jersey.

One of the most incongruous things that has happened to me here in Iraq occurred on the drive from Al Rasheed back to Camp Falcon. Can you believe it? There we all were in our Bradley tank -- stuck on the freeway during rush-hour traffic.

PS: I got an e-mail from my daughter Ashley this evening. Everyone at her job is trying to marry her off. Me too! I wish I could pack up about ten of the really nice soldiers I've met here and bring them back with me so she could pick one out. Project Runway, military style -- or should I say "Batchelorette"? I should write an article about that. "Batchelorette Iraq".

And I just lost yet another pen. What's with these pens?

And I also just got e-mail from some woman named Virginia saying that my reporting about the Beagle Boys was "silly and embarrassing". Sigh. But you don't see many Beagle Boys out here in Iraq. Everyone here has a job to do and does it. The Beagle Boy types to stay back in Washington and spend their time hounding John Edwards and Paris Hilton.

Report from Iraq: If the Iraq Army wants to buy $10.9 billion in weapons, then let's have a fire sale!

(Photos are of the poverty-stricken neighborhood of Al Rasheed including the sewage ponds; a row of Bradley tanks, MRAPs etc. at my COP; my favorite shoes, me and baby Mena and the broken-down sprinkler system at my housing co-op where the board of directors keeps refusing to hold elections just like in Iraq, and the new DMZ for dogs that the soldiers built me to keep detente in the COP)

I'm over here in Iraq, getting a micro-cosmic view of the situation on the ground. But if you want to see the Big Picture, try reading the Iraq Slogger online. "During the last week of July," reported the Slogger, "the Department of Defense notified Congress about the proposed sale of $10.9 billion in U.S. military equipment and support to Iraq through the Foreign Military Sales program." Amazing! That's just amazing.

Here I am in Iraq, totally blown away by the vast numbers of Bradley tanks, Humvees, Strikers, MRAPs, etc. that I see everywhere every day. Thousands of them -- perhaps hundreds of thousands of them -- are over here. And each one of them costs approximately $500,000 each. What will happen to all this equipment when America once again declares "Mission Accomplished" and goes home? Middle East expert Juan Cole just stated that, "The Iraqi newspaper al-Sabah IS saying that there has been a breakthrough in the negotiations between the al-Maliki government and the Bush admin on a status of forces agreement. The US would commit to withdraw most troops by 2010-2011 assuming ground conditions permitted." 2010? That's not too far away.

I'd like to suggest that America might consider holding some sort of flea market, jumble sale, fire sale, yard sale or whatever over here -- and sell all these vehicles to the Iraq Army right now. Why wait until it's too late and the Iraq Army has already run off to Wal-Mart or wherever and bought all their vehicles new?

A friend of mine back in the States just said that he would have described the situation a bit more forcefully. "As for the yard sale, why not take the angle that because Iraq is now loaded -- thanks to us poor schmucks back home who are currently paying over four bucks a gallon for gas and the Iraqis now have so much money that they don't have the banks to hold it all -- they could easily buy up all our used equipment in Iraq. But then why should they? They know our military will leave it behind when they go. Another freebie."

According to the New York Times, "Soaring oil prices will leave the Iraqi government with a cumulative budget surplus of as much as $79 billion by year’s end, according to an American federal oversight agency. But Iraq has spent only a minute fraction of that on reconstruction costs, which are now largely borne by the United States.... Over all, a report from the Government Accountability Office estimates, Iraqi oil revenue from 2005 through the end of this year will amount to at least $156 billion. And in an odd financial twist, a large amount of the surplus money is sitting in an American bank in New York — nearly $10 billion at the end of 2007, with more expected this year, when the accountability office estimates a skyrocketing surplus."

And what else could the Iraqis do with all that money? They could give some of it to the uber-poor families struggling to exist here in the Al-Rasheed district for starters. It's embarrassing that young children should have to come asking ME for money when their very own government has all those bucks in the bank. Geez Louise. No wonder everyone around here is pissed off. First they had to watch Saddam live in splendor and now they gotta watch the people they elected themselves -- mostly Shiites like them -- play that game too.

And what about the Sunnis? The Shia-controlled government over here, according to the Slogger, is pulling the same slight of hand that my housing co-op board is doing back home in Berkeley -- stalling off elections so they can still stay in power. And with that much money at stake, why should the Sunnis be surprised that the Shia in power are stalling the elections? Pissed off, sure. But surprised? I don't think so.

The Shia leadership appears to keep putting off the elections because of their fear of the Sunnis. But it seems to me that the Shia leadership should be even more afraid of their base -- the poverty-stricken Shia such as the ones I saw in the Al Rasheed district. Sooner or later, one would think that this base will begin to put two and two together and start to realize that their Shia leaders are now doing to them the same thing that Saddam did -- not giving them a slice of the Big Oil pie.

But then again, maybe the working-poor Shia won't figure it out.

It sure didn't happen that way in America.

Just look at the way that the working poor and the former middle class in America have been continually and systematically robbed blind and screwed by the corporatists who run this country, including but not limited to Big Oil. It is a very high compliment to the US economy that it has even lasted as long as it has, after all the beatings it's taken from the Bushites, the McBush wannabes, the corporatists, etc. Yet these same American counterparts to the working-poor Shia in Rasheed still keep voting for the "hand that bites them." Go figure.

Here's yet another brilliant analogy on this subject offered up by yours truly, even if written under duress -- in really hot weather, with hardly any sleep, without clean unders or deodorant and while trying to avoid the dreaded squat toilet/bad knees combination and dog bites!

"Letting the corporatists govern America is like having Scrooge McDuck turn his money bin over to the Beagle Boys, and then rejoicing and feeling all grateful when he comes back to find that there are still a few ounces of gold actually left. 'OMG!' he tells himself. 'There's actually a little gold left in my money bin. Look what a good job they've done!' You just keep on thinking that, Scrooge, but the facts still remain. You've just put the Beagle Boys in charge of your vault."

PS: Me and the two dogs who live at the command outpost where I'm currently staying are still having our troubles -- except that now the Dogs of War have escalated their conflict. Now every time they see me, they start to bay like the Hounds of the Baskervilles, roll their flaming red eyes and lung for my shins. This is getting ridiculous. I'm beginning to think like a mailman. They've staged a full-out attack on me ten times already and have even actually bitten me once.

After the first few times that the dogs went after me, I started creeping around the COP like a burglar, sneaking in and out of doors, peeking around corners, tiptoeing here and making mad dashes across open spaces there. But I still couldn't avoid the attacks. So I finally started arming myself with rocks. Me! An animal lover! A freaking pacifist! The last time they came after me I had to throw my water bottle at them and threaten to hit them with my purse.

I gots my adrenalin pumping here, guys.

War is hell.

PPS: I've decided to look at this whole dog-fight thing as a learning experience. As I slink through the halls and cautiously poke my head around the corners of the COP, ever vigilant for the stealthy approach of the enemy, the analogy between what is happening to me here and what is happening to our troops out on the streets is pretty much clear to me -- the hunters and the hunted. I feel like I'm a soldier, being stalked by insurgents.

"No, you're the insurgent," commented one of the soldiers.

"Heck no!" I laughed. "I'm the occupier!"

PPPS: Listening to my hysterical shrieks echoing throughout the entire COP for the last two days has finally motivated someone to tie up the dogs. Aha! Here's my chance. Now we can negotiate. So I dug up some beef jerky out of the storeroom where the potato chips and Gatorade are kept and went out to make deals with the enemy. "If you promise not to bite me, I'll give you beef jerky?" I said, showing up with my own little mini-grant stimulus package in hand. What do you think? Isn't negotiating a lot less painful than "war"?

The two dogs seemed very interested.

There's a moral here someplace.

Children reflect their parents: Patrolling the streets of Baghdad's Al Rasheed district

(Photos are of baby Mena [the one in the white and pink snug-a-lugs] at the Berkeley Public Library, our patrol of the streets of Al Rasheed and some allegedly sexist dogs)

August 7, 2008: "Have you ever ridden in a Bradley before?" asked the sergeant. Heck no. We were getting ready to finally roll out into the streets of Baghdad and he was giving me a tour. "This here's the fire retardant release switch and there's the fire wall door to the gun turret and up here is the fire-resistant blanket." I'm guessing that one of the big dangers of riding in a Bradley tank is from fire?

"Does anyone want to say a prayer before we get in?" asked another member of the platoon I was with, as we prepared to drive off to the Al Rasheed district to visit a COP (command outpost).

"Sure. May mine enemies be in front of me so that I can roll over them." Soon we were speeding along a freeway at at least 50 miles an hour. These tanks can roll!

When I woke up this morning, I was thinking about my granddaughter -- sweet little baby Mena. She seemed so far away. I hope that she will always be safe. I miss my family after only five days away from Berkeley. Imagine how these guys must feel after six months over here. "How do you keep close?" I asked one soldier.

"Technology. Phone calls, e-mails, videos. Last time I was home, my five-year-old kept begging me not to go back."

Then our Bradley exited the freeway and sped past houses and markets and street stalls. We were actually out in Baghdad. Everything looked either bombed out or shabby. What the FREAK am I doing here?

Once at the COP, however, I got briefed by one of the officers and got all enthusiastic again. "This is the Al Rasheed district," he told me, pointing to a satellite map. "It's basically a low-income Shia area now. Originally, under Saddam, it was a mixed area and the Sunni section on one end of the district interfaced with the Shia part on the other. And if you will notice, this COP is located right on the seam. When we first came here, this area used to be the battleground for intense fighting between the Shia and the Sunnis -- plus BOTH sides were fighting the Americans." Sounds like the place was a mess.

"But right now things are quiet." Not too quiet, however. When I first arrived at the COP, the unit's two pet dogs immediately took an intense dislike to me -- since I'm the only female here, I bet those are SEXIST dogs! -- and started barking like crazy and trying to bite me. Seriously. One even succeeded although luckily his fangs didn't penetrate my sturdy Mom jeans. But I gots a secret weapon now. Every time one of them charges me, I take its photo. They don't like the flash. Top gun! That's me. Don't mess with Jane.

"Our mission this afternoon," continued the officer, "is to go to some shops on one of the main streets and give out mini-grants to some of the shop owners -- small-scale economic stimulus packages. Want to come along?" Or else what? Miss a chance to walk on patrol through the streets of Al Rasheed? No way! Sign me up.

But I thought I'd only be at this COP for the afternoon and it turns out I'll be here for two days. Yikes! Lucky for me that I always carry an extra toothbrush in my messenger bag -- but what about clean unders, my nightie and deodorant? And I also don't have my hijab.

"I can't go out on the streets without a headscarf," I whined.

"Sure you can," said a soldier. "Lots of women in Baghdad don't wear headscarves."

"Not me. I'm not going out there without a hijab. It's not polite." So they got me a T-shirt which I tied under my chin. Here's me. Hajja Jane. However, nothing prepared me for the main street of Al Rachid. I'd seen a few bullet-pocked doors and houses back in Heet, in Anbar province, but this was different. Whole blocks of buildings were gone. Starkly razed vacant lots strewed every block. It was the Urban Redevelopment project from hell.

We started the patrol at a mom-and-pop-style car repair shop. The soldiers talked with the owner and I talked with the neighborhood kids. At first there was just me and this one little boy but then more and more children came and soon there were 30 of them. "American? Babies? Money? Michael Jackson?" they asked.

"I don't speak Arabic," I replied. "I only know three words. Salaam alekum, yala and shokran." Let's go, thank you and PEACE.

Then the the kids made up a song and we all danced to it. "No money, no chocolate." It was fun. They laughed and I laughed. "Disco!" they cried.

"If they are bothering you, Ma'am, just let me know," said one soldier.

"Nope, no problem," I replied. "I'm used to kids. Not only am I a mother of four and a grandmother, but also used to teach at juvenile hall." But then the glorious thing about teaching at juvie is that if the little darlings don't behave, you can always send them back to their cells.

The only incident that was even remotely worrisome on patrol was when the gunner of my Humvee spotted a gun in someone's hand. But it turned out to be a toy gun.

Most of the soldiers here like being soldiers and are good at it. I read somewhere recently that learning new things every day and continuously having a wide variety of experiences can actually raise one's IQ. And since all the soldiers I've met over here seem to be all pretty smart -- these guys are not even close to being society's dregs -- I can only assume that being in the military will actually raise one's IQ because of all that training and variety of experiences they get. Hmmm. When I get back from Iraq, will I qualify for Mensa? Yeah right.

Anyway, I did talk with one soldier who hated it here. "I just want to be back on my ranch in Colorado." He also talked about how the kids on the street today really pissed him off.

"Hey, it could be worse," I replied. "At least they weren't throwing rocks."

"They used to throw rocks at us."

"Children reflect what their parents think," I reminded him, "and if these children are chatting and laughing with us and not throwing rocks, this is probably the most hopeful indication one can see that the so-called "war" over here is starting to cool down. Finally!" But I refrained from mentioning to him how the US military has been risking its soldiers' lives daily for the past five years to pull GWB's irons out of the fire, because this rancher-soldier already knew where I stood. My "impeachbush.com" truckers hat said it all. Except for the part where Bush goes to jail. But I digress.

Then we all drove back to the COP, ate stew for dinner and gave the dogs another chance to demonstrate that they had stopped being sexists. But the dogs blew their chance.

****

August 8, 2008: Today started out in an extremely interesting way. At 4:30 am, I began screaming in my sleep and then I fell out of bed. I've NEVER rolled off the edge of a bed before, at least not since I was a baby. Maybe I've caught PTSD too?

And I just got an e-mail from my daughter Ashley who works at a gelato shop in north Berkeley. "Dear Mom: Ciao Bella just got in a tub of rice pudding gelato." I spent two years living on the Lower East Side of New York City in the 1960s. I know my rice pudding! Will Ciao Bella's measure up to B&H Dairy's? Maybe I should bring my platoon back with me and we could patrol through the streets of the Gourmet Ghetto section of Berkeley and they could give me a mini-grant to go and find out. Hey, American small businesses need mini-grant economic stimulus packages too!

Survivor Baghdad: I've finally made it to the Big City!

• (Photos are of me, all up-armored and standing in front of a Bradley tank at Camp Falcon, and a street scene in Al Racheed)

Once our C-130 actually flew into Baghdad and my feet were actually on the ground, I suddenly realized that I had left my book back on the plane! And it wasn't just any book, no. It was a special galley copy of "Exit Music" (Ian Rankin's latest murder mystery) which I had picked up at the 2008 Book Expo last June -- and the hard-bound edition wasn't gonna come out until September. Now I'll have to wait for months for the Berkeley Public Library to get a copy for me to read. Mr. Rankin, if you are out there somewhere and reading this now, PLEEZE send me another copy! I gotta find out who killed the Russian.

After landing in Baghdad, I then was faced with two alternatives. My first option was that I could take a bus to Camp Stryker, wait there until 3:00 am, get a ride into the Green Zone on an up-armored Rhino convoy, take a Humvee to LZ Washington and then get a helicopter out to Camp Falcon. Or I could chose my second option, which is what I actually did -- bum a ride from the head of an MRAP platoon who I accidentally ran into at BIAP and who was heading directly across town to Camp Falcon. Boy did I luck out!

So we zipped across Baghdad in our MRAP. And nobody shot at us. "We are actually starting to see indicators that we've reached a point of no return regarding violence reduction," said the MRAP guy. "Violence is down 67%. Our command outposts used to get attacked on an average of 18 times a day. Now it's down to less than once a day." That's amazing. "Plus we're getting tips constantly about weapons caches, insurgents and small group criminals."

Small group criminals?

"Initially it was a euphemism for rogue militias but now it's just a catch-all handle for small groups of thugs who are driven to violence by money as compared to ideology."

The soldiers who had rescued me from having to endure at least two days on the BART (Baghdad Area non-Rapid Transit) system all lived in a small command outpost in the Doura district, so going off to one of the larger FOBS was like a night in the Big City for them. So we stopped at Camp Stryker before they dropped me off at Falcon and we "did" its DFAC and the PX up in style. Stryker is HUGE.

At around 8:00 pm our MRAP drove into Camp Falcon, which had become an internet legend when it allegedly got blown up by insurgents back in 2004 -- but so far I've been hesitant to ask if that legend is actually true. I think it would be more tasteful of me to settle in a bit more before asking.

The public affairs officer gave me a quick base orientation -- but I still managed to get lost several times before bedtime -- and introduced me to my new roommate. She is one of the most interesting people I have ever met. She's a war correspondent, a mother of two pre-teens and looks like she might still be in high school (a sophomore at most).

"Have you ever been to Iraq before?" I naively asked. She had. And also to Somalia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, etc.

"I was working for a major metropolitan newspaper when, after 9-11, they suddenly became short of reporters -- so they sent me off to Afghanistan and I've been covering wars ever since." Awesome! I'm so jealous. I want to cover wars!

"And people actually pay you to do this?" Yes. "Who watches your kids?" Family.

Then we got to talking about shoes. "I've had these ones for years," I said, pointing to a pair of battered old formerly-red-patent-leather Espirit mary-janes. "They look like hell but they're stronger than combat boots." And to prove my point, I pulled on the strap -- and it broke. Not to worry. My new roommate pulled out a roll of masking tape, we patched the strap back on and I was once again good to go.

"That reminds me of an old pair of Doc Martins I used to wear everywhere for almost ten years," said the reporter. "But when I got to New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, they turned a strange shade of blue and started to stink. I still have them. But I can't wear them anywhere. They smell too bad." I felt her pain.

"Katrina? You were there for Katrina?"

"Yes." Wow. "The only thing wrong with this life," she added, "is the PTSD. Sometimes I'm just not in complete control of my behavior. That's why I'm not voting for John McCain. After seven years in a prison camp, he's bound to have PTSD -- and occasionally slip out of control." That's a sobering thought -- especially since McCain would be having his finger on the red button if he won.

What doesn't go on in Iraq -- stays in Afghanistan: My Iraq embed, part three

(Photos are from the inside of a C-130)

Crap. I just lost two more pens. At the rate I'm going now, pretty soon I'll be writing my articles on Iraq using only my fingernails and/or blood and bird poop.

Speaking of birds, I actually saw two of them today. I think they were finches. The Kuwaiti desert is a pretty harsh environment to sustain bird-life if you ask me. (I am currently staying at a US military base gateway staging area here in Kuwait).

Today is the day I'm going to fly up to Baghdad. Or not. At 6:30 am, I dragged all my luggage over to the staging tent and prepared to camp out until I was able to secure a flight assignment, flying Space A -- space available. "Come back at 8:30," they said. And then, "Come back at 10:00 am." And then "Come back at 11" But I guess they finally took pity on me or something because I got onto the 2:00 pm flight. Or else they just wanted to get rid of me.

This morning, while waiting at line in the DFAC (dining facility), a young non-com must have seen my press badge or something or else just wanted to talk to a grandmotherly-looking type. In any case, he came over to talk to me and tell me about how he was about to go off to Afghanistan and how hopeful he was regarding his unit's future role in that country. It was real human interest stuff. Great! At last I'd found something to report about here in Kuwait instead of just cooling my heels while waiting for flights.

"You are not allowed to interview anyone here without a public affairs officer present," I was then told. Scratch that story. But what they didn't tell me was where I could find said PAO. I would have grabbed him and dragged him off with me to chase down that Afghanistan-bound soldier.

So. Now I can't find any more news here in Kuwait. But what should I do? News reporting is merely a more sophisticated form of spreading hot gossip and I was totally out of any kind of news -- unless you want to hear about finches. So I e-mailed a friend of mine back in the States. "Got any hot tips for me?" I asked, fingers crossed.

"Not, really," he e-mailed me back. "Just the usual stuff. They're sending a whole bunch of troops over to Afghanistan right now."

Define "a whole bunch."

"Jane, just shut up and listen." Who, me? "Word around Washington is that they're also sending a lot of military civil-affairs personnel there to help get Afghan schools, hospitals, sewage, etc. up and working -- to find out what the locals want and then try and get it for them." But shouldn't they have been doing that five years ago when Bush and them first invaded?

"So what you are telling me here is that a lot of the US military operations in Iraq are now moving to Afghanistan?"

"Yes." And I had to e-mail back to the States to find all that out.

"What else have you got?"

"Well, I could tell you more but frankly this is embarrassing. You're the one who's in the Middle East right now. Not me." Oh, stop whining and spill! My journalistic career is at stake here. How much longer can I keep writing about soccer jerseys?

"The US military isn't the only group that is moving to Afghanistan. They also got every kind of foreign fighter in the entire Middle East moving there too. They got Saudis, Pakistanis, Iranians and Syrians -- plus all the central Asian "Stans" are sending their fighters down there to get combat training as well.

"So. What you are telling me is that what DOESN'T go on in Iraq -- stays in Afghanistan?"

"Pretty much. As things calm down in Iraq, they seem to be heating up in Afghanistan proportionately" You mean I could have stayed home, got all that news in my inbox in Berkeley and saved all that jet-lag?

"You got anything else I should know?"

"Yes. Apparently there's a young Asian filmmaker over in Kuwait right now and she sounds like an interesting person to interview. She's been filming in Iraq since before Shock and Awe and has witnessed the whole thing -- from the days of Saddam until now. See if you can get a hold of her. I hear that she's got some amazing stories to tell." Okay. So now I have 45 minutes left before my C-130 leaves for Iraq in order to comb all of Kuwait for an Asian woman carrying a video camera. Great.

"She says that six years ago, all the Iraqis constantly told her how much they just LOVED Saddam Hussein. And now, using the exact same tone of voice and with the exact same glazed-over look in their eyes, Iraqis are now telling her how much they just LOVE the Americans."

My plane's about to leave. Gotta go.

Of course I don't have to tell you what a C-130 looks like -- or do I? When I was a little kid during World War II, we used to see these monster-sized prop planes flying low in the sky over our houses. Now those were REAL airplanes. That's what a C-130 looks like -- a REAL airplane. And they rattle and shake so badly that they aren't even scary. Everyone on board is too busy laughing.

My embed in Iraq, continued: Turning up the heat in Kuwait....

(Here's a photo of the soccer jersey that almost killed me and Karen Day's photo of Condi Rice being interviewed before playing the piano for the Aspen Free Press)

After arriving at the Kuwait International Airport last night, I grabbed my luggage and went down to the airport Starbucks to see if there was any military personnel there who would give me a ride out to the local US airbase. There was. Yes!

Have you ever figured out how to get to an airbase in the middle of the night, in a foreign country, out in the middle of a desert 40 miles away, after going without sleep for 48 hours, in a dust storm, and with no written orders to get you through the gate once you get there? No? Well neither have I. This is why seeing those guys coming up to me with their SUV keys in their hands was like seeing Aladdin suddenly arrive with a magic carpet under his arm.

"But I ALWAYS stay in the VIP tent," I whined to the clerk at the billeting office. What's the difference between VIP tents and normal personnel tents? Bunk beds. That's it. But I don't do bunk beds. I gots old-lady knees. "And throw in one of those pillow-sheet-blanket kits too?" I had forgotten to steal a pillow and blanket off the airplane. But that isn't larceny. I always make sure to return them to the airline on my return flight.

Then I went to sleep at 1:00 am. But apparently the military doesn't understand the culture of privacy. Apparently that's a civilian thing. So at 3:00 am, some lady officer felt perfectly free to come into our tent and turn on all of the lights. I'm awake! Really awake. By 6:00 am I was fantasizing, hallucinating and stoned out of my mind from lack of sleep.

"It's gonna be hot today," said the blond corporal brushing her teeth at the latrine sink next to me. "Really hot." At 6:00 am, it was hot already out here in the desert -- but bearable. And after spending the last five hours freezing my butt off in that air-conditioning wind-tunnel they call a VIP tent, I was ready for warmth.

I should never go to war. I complain too much.

By 1:00 pm, it was at least 120 degrees outside -- but I soldiered on. I had a mission! The Kuwaiti guy who worked the table outside the PX was selling soccer shirts and I had promised my daughter Ashley to bring her back one from this trip. They were $17 a shirt. I had $20. The guy and I looked through all the shirts and I picked out a royal blue one that read "Kuwait" on the front. Perfect.

"I'm sorry, Madam," said the salesman, "but that shirt comes with shorts. $25 please."

"But I only brought $20! And my tent is a half-mile away. Trudging there and back in this heat will kill me!"

The man truly looked sympathetic but.... "Sorry, Madam."

I hope you like that shirt, Ashley because it took my last ounce of strength to get it. You know what they used to say? "I'd walk a mile for a camel." I surely wish that I had a camel! I double-dog-dare any of you to walk a mile in the desert in 120-degree heat. Or -- like our troops -- do it while carrying 65 pounds of body armor.

So. According to the headlines in today's Stars & Stripes, Obama and McCain are getting closer and closer to agreeing on a date to withdraw our troops from Iraq. And I got an even better idea on how to get Obama, Bush and McCain to withdraw from Iraq! Have all three of them spend the duration of the "war" -- or even just one day! -- out here in the Middle Eastern desert while carrying 65 pounds of body armor, and I'll bet you the farm that even though the fact that this "war" has already bankrupted America still hasn't brought our leaders to their senses, then perhaps the "heat-body-armor-and-no-camel" combination just might.

And if it came down to a contest between Bush, Obama and McCain to see who would last the longest out on desert patrol -- or even save America from economic collapse for that matter -- I'd have to bet my money on Obama. Not that having silver hair would eliminate the other two -- or even having old-lady knees. But didn't Bush and McCain both grow up with silver spoons in their mouths? What do they know about making an eagle scream?

PS: Here's a note from a journalist friend of mine: "Jane, during the Vietnam war, John Kerry was the war hero and Bush was the war dodger -- yet during the 2004 election campaign, somehow Kerry ended up becoming the fake and Bush the great patriot. And now, in 2008, Bush and McCain are the common guys and Obama is being painted as the elitist. America's a great country, but it seems to be having hallucinations caused by a political fever running nearly as high as the desert heat in Kuwait."

PPS: Here's some hot gossip from Sterling Greenwood of the Aspen Free Press: "Jane, you mentioned photos once. Here is one. I covered Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice being interviewed on August 2 by Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Institute. When Isaacson steered Rice toward commenting on the upcoming presidential election, Rice said she had no interest in being John McCain's running mate or in any other high-level political post after secretary of state. 'I don't need another government job,' she said. 'There's something to be said for fresh blood.'

"Moments later, Rice emphasized it again. 'I'm quite serious about new blood.' After the interview, several in the audience discussed among themselves whether Rice's remarks might be construed as a tacit endorsement of Barack Obama." Yeah, but is Obama's blood actually new enough to be able to hump a whole bunch of body armor out of Iraq?

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From my journalist friend regarding that so-called US military "Rape Tape" going around the internet: There have been fake rape videos for some years on the Internet. The doctor needs to realize that. I have not heard of any genuine tapes -- not that it can't happen.

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And blogger.com actually sent me an apology for locking down my blog! It seems that a "bug in our data processing code" happened last Friday, and the heroic employees of Blogspot actually gave up their weekend to fix it for me!

Fear of flying: The scariest thing about going to Iraq is the turbulence over the Atlantic!

(Photos are of the luggage jam at SFO and the Midnight Sun over Greenland)

"What scares you most about going to Iraq?" someone just asked me. "The bombings? The firefights?" Nah. It's all that turbulence you get flying from San Francisco to Frankfurt! After that, everything else is a piece of cake.

For days before I left to embed in Iraq, I seemed to be living in a state of constant fear. What's with that? I knew that Baghdad was relatively peaceful these days and that I wouldn't be walking into a re-enactment of Iwo Jima or nothing -- so why the big fear? And then about two hours into my flight to Frankfurt, it hit me. Muscle memory. Both my mind and my body had been secretly preparing for the agony that I feel every time I get on a plane. I hate to fly. And when the wings on my plane felt like they were about to shake right off somewhere just south of Greenland and there was 35,000 feet of nothing but air between me and the ground? Forget it. I was terrified. That was it.

But then we made it to Frankfurt okay and the worst was over. Hopefully. but there was still the flight to Kuwait ahead of me.

While waiting around for my next flight, I struck up a conversation with a Muslim doctor from Montana who was flying to Cairo to see his mother -- and he was very upset about a YouTube war-porn video he had just seen, showing some US soldiers raping an Iraqi woman.

"But they don't do that no more," I reassured him. "Their officers won't let them." When was the video taken? Probably a few years ago when Rumsfeld was still in charge.

The doctor also told me that, yes, there was indeed hope for peace in the Middle East. "Muslims are basically very moral people," he said, "and sooner or later they will return to their sense of morality." Hopefully Christians and Jews will do the same. Hopefully the whole freaking human race will evolve. And hopefully they will also be serving dinner and have a decent inflight movie on my flight from Frankfurt to Kuwait.

After having thought about it for a while, I realized that what the Egyptian doctor might have been trying to tell me is that the rape video is being viewed widely on the "Arab Street" and that Arabs are probably thinking that this is the way -- the only way -- that American soldiers know how to behave. And I bet that the main emotion generated by this perception is rage -- out and out rage. And who could blame Arabs if this was indeed standard behavior for American troops? But I truly believe that it isn't -- any more than the way that some American shock jock talk-show hosts portray all Muslims as being blood-thirsty killers.

The flight from Germany to Kuwait was uneventful -- thank goodness! I'm too old for enduring sustained hours of heart-stopping terror. Although I did have an interesting conversation with an Iraqi-American Kurd who was returning to work as a contractor in Mosul. "Do you think Iraq should divide up into three separate nations," I asked.

"Definitely no. But a federal, three-state idea -- like, say, California, New York and Texas -- might be a good idea."

"And what about your family back home? Do they miss you unbearably while you are away? Can they live on what you make over in Iraq?"

"A friend of mine who worked with me in Mosul just got killed. That was so hard on his family."

"Will they be getting enough compensation money to live on from his company?"

"The widow got $50,000 from the company. But still. Who can put a price on losing the father of your children?"

Once we landed at KWI, I ran like a quarterback in a Superbowl game -- or at least as fast as I could on my old-lady knees, almost knocking down toddlers and guys on crutches in order to get to the visa-issuing counter first. Touchdown!

Now I'm back in the Middle East.

PS: I have gotten as far as an American airbase in Kuwait so far. Tomorrow I get on a C-130 and fly into BIAP (Baghdad International Airport).

Embedded in Iraq -- but not on Blogspot!

I'm leaving tomorrow for Iraq. I will be embedded at Camp Falcon, south of Baghdad. My story line of covering the weapons caches found in Baghdad was approved and I'm off to go look at bunches of weapons captured by the US military and the Iraqi army. "You'd better not bring any of that stuff back!" said my neighbor.

Okay. I have the credentials to get embedded in Iraq. It took some doing and the possession of a good reputation as a journalist and 600 article entries posted on my blog in the past eight years -- ever since GW Bush stole the 2000 election.

But apparently my credentials are not good enough to get me embedded at either the Democratic or Republican conventions. Sure, it's humiliating but I can live with it. Did I really think that inside-the-Beltway politicians were actually gonna clap their hands with glee while I write about what a wus that "maverick" John McCain has become ever since the Bushies put him in his place in South Carolina eight years ago or how the Dems have wimped out so much in the last eight years that they have practically been McCain's role model.

But what has really gotten my knickers in a twist is that my blog has just been locked down by Google/Blogspot! "Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog." Say what!

Was it my article on the failing economy that was spam? Or perhaps the review of Richard Engel's new book on Iraq? Or my essay on global warming? Or wanting to see GWB in jail....

Then Blogspot sent me a new warning. "This blog has been locked due to possible Blogger Terms of Service violations. You may not publish new posts until your blog is reviewed and unlocked." Now I've also violated the Terms of Service? So much for free speech.

I'm screwed.

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My blog article on global warming: http://www.opednews.com/articles/Thomas-Friedman-s--Hot--Fl-by-Jane-Stillwater-080612-492.html

My blog article on Richard Engel's new book: http://www.opednews.com/articles/Richard-Engel-s-book--War--by-Jane-Stillwater-080713-234.html

My blog article on getting credentialed for the conventions: http://www.opednews.com/articles/How-come-our-favorite-onli-by-Jane-Stillwater-080724-345.html

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Note: I'm leaving back to Iraq on Saturday, to explore downtown Baghdad and other fun things like that. I made a proposal to MNFI that I do a story on the bunches of weapons caches found in Baghdad recently and they accepted my idea. Now all I need is to pay off the airfare I charged. Please feel free to donate to my "Jane Tours Sadr City" fund! Just go to http://paypal.com/ and donate to jpstillwater@yahoo.com.