Monday Links

by CKR

Lots of stuff out there! And I've got a busy week coming up.

The State Department seems to be getting the Treasury Department on board for a settlement with North Korea. Treasury had seemed headed down the neocon road by ignoring the recent evidence that the Bank of Macao had not been doing the bad things earlier alleged (and used to break up the talks?), but a face-saving deal seems to have been worked out...between State and Treasury, that is.

The Washington Post begins to examine the role of mercenaries in United States war- and peace-making. Back when I was managing environmental cleanups, DynCorp was right there looking for those contracts. Far too many of these companies are mercenaries not only in Andrew Sullivan's sense, but in a broader sense: if the government pays for it, they'll do it. That means that they hire up a rather arbitrary pool of people with credible credentials in whatever is the funding fad of the day and write proposals. That pool of people scatters, often to other mercenaries, when the funding runs out. It's not a way to build a reliable pool of competence in any of these areas.

Howard Kurtz has a fairly incoherent column that starts out on the Gonzales business, interrupts itself, and then goes back to the first topic. Could be that the LA Times's discovery that the blogosphere does news has him befuddled - that subject constitutes most of the interruption, with an interruption on the interruption to convince himself that The Bloggers are still dangerous.

The Los Angeles Times reports on the 1987 chemical attack by Iraq on Iran. Warning: requires a strong stomach.