And for a little politicking...

Background: I'm Canadian but pro-American, I like George Bush even if I don't like all of his policies. I didn't like Clinton even thought I liked one or two of his policies. I'm a capital-C Conservative in Canada, which makes me a lowercase-r republican with a socialist streak in the US.

I subscribe to an eNewsletter called Shelf Awareness, which is always interesting. Today they had an interview with Malcolm MacPherson:

Longtime journalist, war reporter and book author Malcolm MacPherson says the topic of Iraq in 2003--in the first flush of the U.S. occupation--is "like talking about the Revolutionary War." Yet, other than the disastrous decision to invade, the roots of the current problem lie in that period, which was when Ambassador Paul Bremer disbanded the Iraqi Army, leaving "500,000 men out of work, all with weapons in their homes, each with 30 people to support," as a CIA operative put it to MacPherson at the time. How better to help an insurgency start?

Wow. I had actually never thought of it that way.