Iraq

Iraq has reached a new level of stupidity for me on a personal level.

Sure, the handling of the execution of Saddam Hussein was typical of the handling of the entire Iraq expedition (or is it a foray?). Should he have been executed before being put on trial for all his other crimes? Is execution even an acceptable way in 2007 to deal with a war criminal?

While these are very interesting and valid points for discussion, one other thing happened in Iraq that crystallizes all these questions: my friend's son was shot by a sniper in Iraq. Now, I use the term "friend" loosely. He is more of a co-worker. A very nice guy who I work with and interact with on a daily basis. However, having heard that his 20-year-old son, a Marine, had been wounded and was being airlifted back to the US, I was devastated. I was angry. I was sad. I had a very strong reaction. Now, I make it a point to read the names of those who have died in Iraq as they are published in the newspaper. We have to realize that no matter what our feeling about the war in Iraq, people are dying and lives are being irreparably changes. And while I feel empathy for those killed and wounded and their families, there is no feeling as knowing someone who has felt it directly.

It put me into a funk for a good two days and whenever I thought about it I had strong emotions. The rest of us in the office made sure he got to meet his son at the hospital and his family flew there with him. We called friends and relatives in the area of the hospital to make sure that anything the family needed would be taken care of. But with great emotion comes some deep thinking.

What is our objective in Iraq? Why are these young people dying?

No one is sure. We have many platitudes about the frontlines in the war in terror, bringing democracy, stabilizing the Middle East, etc. None of these is an acceptable objective.

World War II was very clear cut. We were attacked by a definable enemy and we looked into the eye of evil. In Korea we were defending democracy and making a stand against China exporting its Communist revolution. We thought we were doing the same in Vietnam, but stepping back, we realized that we had gone in to save a colonial possession (of the French) and were not really containing Communism as much getting in the middle of a civil war. Even in the first Gulf War we had an objective: remove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait and protect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia that are essential to our economy. We did so with overwhelming force and stopped once the objective was achieved (we made other mistakes, but achieved the main objective and got out).

In Iraq we abandoned what was termed the "Powell Doctrine," the use of overwhelming force coupled with a clear military and political objective and the support of the American people and our allies. We have paid dearly for not listening to those who learned the hard lessons of Vietnam taught in the rice paddies and the jungle and instead paid heed to the political scientists who studied it without experiencing it.

The deaths of those soldiers in Iraq are not in vain if we redeploy to protect our allies and contain the current Iraqi civil war. We removed a dictator and a genocidal maniac, now it is up to the Iraqi's to sort out their differences. We should not spend our blood and treasure to try and stabilize a situation that is not of our making. It is not foreign fighters or elements of Al-Qaeda stirring up trouble. It is hundreds of years of religious animosity that is causing the violence along with the repression of the Sunni-dominated regime of Hussein that has let it explode into the streets. After repressing Shiites for years the Sunni's fear retribution. This is not our fight. Let's pull back and protect Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Let's protect the border with Iran so they don't dominate the now lawless Iraq and lets deploy our troops to Afghanistan to get the guys who attacked us.

Sarbanes-Oxley

First, we had the stupidly anti-constitutional "Thompson Memo" which stated that the Department of Justice would only consider a corporation to cooperative in an investigation if it waived attorney-client privilege. Just recently, the Department of Justice stopped the insanity and replaced the Thomposon Memo with the McNulty Memo which reverses that course of action stating that it was counter-productive. Gee, really?

Now, Sarbanes-Oxley strikes again. The ridiculous act which has caused the international financial community to abandon US IPO's for international companies, leading London to be the king of the financial hill, has now directly caused a cost on US consumers. The Act which was supposed to protect investors and make corporations more transparent has added so many layers of complexity to corporate accounting and reporting that the costs are now becoming apparent to consumers as it forces corporations to make decisions adverse to the general public so that they may contort themselves to fit within the absurd constrictures of the Act and its progeny, most importantly changes to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.

Without getting into why GAAP distorts the financial picture of public companies and makes it impossible for a normal human to comprehend the actual financial health of a company, let's just get to the example.

Apple, Inc. (formerly known as Apple Computer), has announced that due to changes in GAAP mandated by Sarbanes-Oxley it will have to charge for a software patch to update a chip in its new computers that will allow the computers to access 802.11n Wi-Fi devices, the newest high speed standard for wireless computing. Apple is charging $1.99 for the patch.

Is this just an excuse to charge people for something they already paid for? Apple says no and logic seems to bear this out. This fee will effect about 1 million Macs sold during the last quarter or so that contain the newest wireless chip. Thus Apple stands to make $2 million. Not a lot of money for a company that earned $1 Billion net profit in the last quarter. Apple claims that Sarbanes-Oxley's change to GAAP requires them to charge for a significant enhancement to a product they have already sold. Otherwise, they couldn't have recognized the full amount of the revenue earned from the previous sales.

So the end result is that everyone who bought a Mac in the last few months have to pay $1.99 to unlock the power of something they already bought or pay $179 for an Airport Extreme Base Station that includes the software patch in its price.

So, is Apple's accounting now more transparent or the consumers are just getting screwed, again?