it is not all bad news

greetings. small ax is back after a two-month-long break. this blog began as an attempt to make sense of:

1. the case for the balkanization of iraq. british and usa policy towards the area for 3 years has cost billions of pounds, dollars, and dinars, and expended or damaged tens of thousands of lives in part on the untenable attempt to keep shias, sunnis, and kurds in a country which, as works like Christopher Catherwood, Churchill's Folly: How Winston Churchill Created Modern Iraq (2004) suggest, was a rather mistaken 20th-century european creation. the policy was a mistake, it appears to be changing, but it is worth considering why policy makers didn't see this problem at the outset, and what might happen now.
2. the dangers of outsourcing military and military intelligence. this is directly related to iraq and afghanistan as that is where the bulk of the outsourcing in the us government now occurs. is it always bad to outsource what the government should be controlling? is there a way to make outsourcing of state-power a good thing? how?
3. the fallacy of thinking the world outside the government--the world of business--is the free market. the military-industrial complex noted by eisenhower continues and thrives. the no-bid contracts threaten to dwarf both the free-market economy (if such a thing exists outside mom-and-pop stores) and "big" government. is there a way for such a thing to be good? what exactly is bad about it.

so, small ax continues in part as a way for its author to make sense of the world. it is less concerned to promote a conspiracy-theory-driven view of the world (though i am sure conspiracies abound; they just rarely work), than to understand what, in a clearly imperfect world, might be a "good" policy.

the following appears to be a "good thing":

• The Army will rebid the multibillion-dollar contract under which a Halliburton Co. subsidiary has been providing services to troops around the world after years of complaints over how the deal has worked in Iraq.
• Critics of the contract said the move was overdue and that hundreds of millions of dollars had probably been wasted. (Army won't extend Halliburton contract, by Pauline Jelinek, Associated Press Writer Thu Jul 13, 7:56 AM ET, WASHINGTON)

day late and a dollar short (well make that 2.5 years and several billion), but is there any other good news coming out of mesopotamia?