■ If people read the transcript of Secretary Rumsfeld’s now famous Q&A about armored Humvees rather than the “Press Pile-On”, the incident would be utterly noncontroversial. New vehicles, fully protected, and upgrade kits for old ones are being produced and moved to the theater as rapidly as possible, and the Secretary clearly regards the matter as urgent.
I wonder what would have happened if, back before 9/11, the Bush Administration had submitted a Defense budget asking that all new Humvees be armored and the existing pool retrofitted. Wouldn’t there have been a chorus of complaint about the unwarranted expense? Critics would have pointed out, quite accurately, that there are many Humvee missions that don’t risk attacks by anti-armor ordnance and where additional weight would be a hindrance to maneuverability. Moreover, in the latest big U.S. deployment, in the Balkans, land mines were far more numerous than hostile RPG’s. Shouldn’t greater attention be paid to that threat, which requires quite different countermeasures? We would have wound up with (i) unarmored vehicles, just as happened in real life, or (ii) a smaller number of expensive pseudo-AFV’s designed to counter the menace of land mines, trivial in Iraq. Getting exactly what turned out to be needed would have been miraculous.
The moral is that half of all military spending is wasted. Unfortunately, until war breaks out, we don’t know which half.
■ I don’t wish to make light of the appalling news that laboratory tests have confirmed suspicions that Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned during the campaign, but there is one reassuring sidelight.
“There is no doubt about the fact that Mr. Yushchenko’s disease has been caused by a case of poisoning by dioxin,” said Dr. Michael Zimpfer, director of Vienna’s private Rudolfinerhaus clinic.
Zimpfer said Yushchenko’s blood and tissue registered concentrations of dioxin – one of the most toxic chemicals – that were 1,000 times above normal levels. [emphasis added].
For years and years plantiffs’ lawyers have been telling juries that dioxin is such a danger to human health that modest concentrations demand exemplary damages against polluters. Yet Mr. Yushchenko survived a larger dose than chemical processes ever emit. The facial disfigurement that he suffered is horrifying but not life threatening.
Perhaps the would-be assassins had read scare tracts about dioxin and concluded that it was as lethal as a gunshot, in which case the candidate may owe his life to environmentalist propaganda.
■ As a public service announcement (I own no stock in the company) for men who fear that “Laptop Computers May Affect Male Fertility”, there is a preventive: the Lapinator. No, it doesn’t make your lap cybernetic. It’s a thin cushion that conducts almost no heat, on which the laptop can safely rest. It seems to have been put onto the market only a week or two before the scare stories began to appear, so the inventors are either very fortunate or blessed with a devilishly clever PR guy. The introductory price is $24.95 (plus shipping, and sales tax for Illinois residents).
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