Saddam Hussein has been executed! It is an important footnote in history but it will not change anything in Iraq right now. Nobody is joyous about this except his Shiite enemies. There was not the brief euphoria on the American side that happened with his capture. On the other hand I don't think things will get much worse with his death. Well, it can't get much worse anyways. The Sunnis may step up their attack for a while, but they were going to attack anyway. The Shiites will go on taking revenge on the Sunnis. Al qaeda and everybody else don't need any more reason to attack Americans. So it will be business as usual. The only chance for dramatic change in the Middle East is to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict and we are far from accomplishing this.

We have to learn from our mistakes with the rise and fall of Hussein. Originally we supported the rise of his Baath party's rise to power in Iraq because the previous regime was pro-communist. The enemy of my enemy is my friend theory. After Hussein became a tyrant, we continued to support him because he was out to get the Shiites who were supported by Iran. Again the enemy of my enemy is my friend. We helped Hussein even when he used chemical and biological weapons against Iran and Shiites and Kurds in his country. This coziness with the dictator caused him to believe the U.S. will not stop him from taking parts of Kuwait. Of course now we are talking about the free flow of oil and so we stopped him. We should have finished him off during the first Gulf war but we didn't because the first Bush felt that we may need him still as a counterweight against Iran.

This theory of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" has not serve us well. From South Vietnam to Chile to the Talibans, the support of dictators ultimately cause us more problems. If we don't learn these lessions we will get into more mess in the future. In the name of fighting terrorism, will we support human right suppression by the Chinese government against Muslims in northwest China?

The California Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that Indian tribes can be sued for violating campaign disclosure rules. This is a minor victory in trying to keep Indian casinos from buying off politicians to help them continue to expand. This is not about self reliance but about letting a small group of people, not a large percentage of Native Americans, profit from a vice that is a danger to our society. I am also against state sponsored gambling such as lotteries which hurt poor people. Las Vegas? I am also against it but not to such an extent because there is a lot of entertainment besides gambling there and unless you live nearby it would take a lot of efforts to get there. The Indian casinos, however, are all over the state with more on the way.

Just as dangerous, if not more so than the types of gambling mentioned above, is poker on the internet. Now people do not have to get up and go to a casino but can gamble in his pajamas. Poker is growing rapidly as demonstrated by the numbers of times it is on ESPN, FSN, Travel channel and the old Outdoor Living Network. What poker has to do with outdoor living is beyond me. But since the "sport" is popular among the young, various channels are broacasting it. In the past the game is played by ugly old men in dark glasses and long beard, the type you would run away from in a dark alley. Recently I surfed through one of the sport channels and noticed all the poker players in a tournament were young men. Several of them were Asians. Some of these young guys had quit their job to go on the poker tour full time. One Asian kid had dropped out of U. of Florida where he was a pre-med student with a 4.0 GPA. Even if these young men are successful on the tour, we are wasting a lot of talent in this gambling business that could have been used elsewhere.

Few years ago I wrote something tongue in cheek that said that UCLA should get rid of their football and basketball programs because they were hiring blacks who normally would not get into school to play for them. With the large number of Asians at the school, they should have scholarships for sports like ping pong, gymnastics, and field hockey so that the Wongs and the Patels can play. If enough Asians actually concentrate on sports, they will do less well and will actually lead to more opportunities for other ethnic groups to get into UCLA. Although it was tongue in cheek, I truly believe that having role models in sports and entertainment business actually hurt blacks in the long run. Very few blacks actually make it in sports and entertainment and they would be better off understanding that and try to make it in academics. If the sports opportunites existed for Asians, then less of them will do well in academics. This may become prophetic from what I see on the poker tour. If more Asian kids believe they can play poker for a living, whether on tour or on the internet, they will care less about school. Asian females already outnumber their male counterparts in colleges and the gap will only widen if poker and other forms of gambling become even more popular. On the other hand, I did see couple of Asian women the other day on the professional billiard tour.......

The Iraq Study Group came out with its long-awaited recommendations. There were no surprises, from the bleak outlook currently, to the need to withdraw combat troops by early 2008, and the call for the Iraqi government to do better. This is a repudiation of the Bush policies and I think with the results of the mid-term elections combining with this report, the Bush administration may finally be less arrogant in insisting we are going to win. Neverthless, I see Bush only making minor changes. He will announce some shift in strategies but I don't see us out of Iraq by 2008. Bush will finish his term with troops in Iraq and then it will be the new president's mess. Eventually we will leave Iraq and then Bush will claim that if we had stayed we would have prevailed. Of course history will not buy this and future historians will regard Bush as one of the worst president, if not the worst.

This report by the ISG has no influence at all on my opinion. While it recommends the troops be out by 2008, I believe we should just get out now. When Al Zarqawi was killed, I said we should get out now and save face. (June 10, 2006) People said back then that if get out now a civil war would break out. Well, civil war is here now, whether you admit it or not. Right now the Americans are caught in the middle and Shiites, Sunnis, Iran, and Syria all blame the U.S. for the instablity. Once we leave, there will be no "occupier" to blame and nobody who will keep the violence down for either the Sunnis or Shiites. Well, we should just leave and then all the clerics that are inciting the violence will have to figure what to do along with the Iranians and Syrians. The timetable for withdraw should be negative 3 years, in my humble opinion.

This brings to one of the more interesting recommendations by the ISG. This is the diplomacy with Iran and Syria. During the Hezbollah-Israel battles during the summer, I recommended that we talk to Syria. I still believe that Syria will more likely come around than Iran. But in any case, neither one wants to have instablity in Iraq without the Americans there. Right now they are friends because they have a common enemy in the Americans. Once we leave, Syria will have to support the Sunnis and Iran will support the Shiites and the conflict may spill into their territories. There will also be conflict between Shiite Arabs in Iraq versus Shiite Persians in Iran. So threaten them with American withdrawl now. They may not be helpful, as the Bush administration insists, but what have we got to lose? For decades we negotiated with the USSR and it was much more dangerous than Iran or Syria. This is not appeasement to our enemies like Chamberlain did with Hitler. If one decides to negotiate with us, the other will have to also or risk being isolated. Unfortunately, the Bush administration is too stubborn and refuses to talk to the Iranians and Syrians.

One recommendation that is lost in the report is the Israel-Palestinian issue. People are so focused on the Iraq war and terrorism that they forget that the Israel-Palestinian conflict is what begat all these mess in the first place. The report mentioned that we need to work more on this conflict. This actually is the most important thing in the long run. There is no chance for victory in the war on terrorism without first ending this conflict. Of course, this have been ignored by the Bush administration from the beginning and will continued to be ignored while it tries to salvage Iraq before the next election.