This computer age, it's enormous...
Now the question one must ask, is why on earth would an employee of the Veteran's Association take the personal details of 26 and a half million vet's home with him..
VA Secretary Jim Nicholson assures us that the medical or financial records of these vets were not among those statistics stolen.. Identity theft is not, at this point, a concern..
Now this is the government talking about a government screw-up...
But again, what were they doing outside a secure location?
Tony was gladhanding in Iraq today.. saying 'there is now no need for the bloodshed.. it is now time for the Iraqi's to take charge of their own destinies..'
So easy to say, and historically impossible to maintain without an occuptying force.
If we want Iraq to be pro-West, we must be there to prop up a pro-West government. Otherwise, the situation will almost immediately deteriorate into first, electoral chaos, second, factional divisions, third, armed conflict between those factions, and fourth, a military coup with yet another Saddam, under a different name.
It's like having faith in fairy tales to hold to the conviction that the peoples who occupy that particular area of the world, would detour from anything other than the tenets of a civilisation that has dominated for millennia.
Unless, of course, there are others to blame, those who occupy their land and keep them free, to whatever concept 'freedom' has to the locals.
The average Iraqi is more interested in where their next meal will come from, and whether or not their job will be there for them today.. and what the chances are they'll be blown to bits while sitting having their morning pipe and coffee, than they are in who is named as the next Minister of the Interior, or Minister of Defence..
They know, that whomever is named, they will be corrupt.
They know the bombings will continue, in spite of who's in charge.
It's to be expected, for as the Rubayat says.. " The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on. Nor all thy piety nor wit can call it back to cancel half a line.."
It's their culture.
Meanwhile, yet another dozen or so killed by a semtex-vested zealot..
They were, most of them, having lunch..