… says a commenter on a Federal Computer Week story about the Department of Homeland Security gathering more personal information about employees, contractors, and volunteers accessing DHS facilities.

And well said indeed.

The 20th Century featured many examples of genocide, mass murder, brutality, and other forms of human horror at the hands of totalitarian governments. Perhaps none was worse — at least in terms of the proportion of the population slaughtered and resulting impact on the survivors — than Cambodia.

The commandant of the notorious S‑21, or Tuol Sleng, is currently on trial. The proceedings offer a stark reminder of what monstrosities cruel social engineers with guns can wreak. Reports Reuters:

A senior Khmer Rouge prison guard on Thursday told a war crimes tribunal he was forced to send thousands of detainees to an execution site, where they were brutally killed and their bodies thrown into mass graves.

Him Huy, 54, a guard at Phnom Penh’s notorious S‑21 prison, said he was ordered by Pol Pot’s chief jailor to transport prisoners to a rice field where they were stripped naked and beaten with clubs as they bled to death.

“All prisoners were blindfolded so they did not know where they were taken and their hands were tied up to prevent them from contesting us,” Huy told the joint United Nations-Cambodian tribunal.

“They were asked to sit on the edge of the pits and they were struck with stick on their necks,” he said, his voice breaking as he gave his harrowing account of the Choeung Ek executions.

“Their throats were slashed before we removed their handcuffs and clothes, and they were thrown into the pits.”

Huy was testifying against S‑21 chief Duch, whose real name is Kaing Guek Eav, the first of the five indicted former Khmer Rouge cadres to face trial.

I’ve visited both Tuol Sleng and the so-called Killing Fields. The experience is incredibly depressing and moving.  These sites should be mandatory viewing for anyone tempted to surrender his or her liberty, even to the most supposedly well-meaning politicians, bureaucrats, and activists.

(H/​t to Paul Chesser, who has been blogging regularly on the trial.)

The Bush administration has many legacies. One is the more than $700 million U.S. embassy, set on 104 acres, only slightly smaller than the Vatican’s land holdings, in Baghdad. It was an embassy designed for an imperial power intent on ruling a puppet state.

It turns out that Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki doesn’t plan on being anyone’s puppet. U.S. troops have come out of the cities and will be coming home in coming months. Provincial reconstruction teams also will be leaving. The Bush administration’s plan for maintaining scores of bases for use in attacking Iran or other troublesome Middle Eastern states is stillborn. And Prime Minister Maliki isn’t likely to ask for Washington’s advice on what kind of society U.S. officials want him to create.

So just what should the Obama administration do with this White Elephant on the Euphrates? Cut it down, says the State Department’s own Inspector General.

Reports the Washington Post:

The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad — the United States’ largest and most costly overseas diplomatic mission, with 1,873 employees — is overstaffed and must be reduced to a size more in keeping with the evolving U.S.-Iraq relationship and budget constraints, government auditors said in a report issued Wednesday.

divThe State Department’s inspector general said that although the U.S. presence in Iraq will become more civilian as the military withdraws over the next two years, the embassy “should be able to carry out all of its responsibilities with significantly fewer staff and in a much-reduced footprint.” The reduction “has to begin immediately,” the report said, before Foreign Service officers complete their next assignment bidding cycle and other employees are extended or hired.

The U.S. should be preparing to have a normal relationship with Iraq. That includes maintaining a normal embassy.

Europe has come into a lot of criticism lately. Much of it is justified. For instance, cutting military forces while expecting the U.S. to maintain security guarantees is more than little irritating for Americans facing trillions of dollars in deficits and tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities for various bail-outs and social programs.

However, predictions of a radical Islamic takeover of Europe look less realistic these days. Forecasting the future is always risky. Nevertheless, the feared growing population of Islamic extremists hasn’t appeared. Reports the Guardian:

A district of derelict warehouses, red-brick terraces, and vibrant street life on the canals near the centre of Brussels, Molenbeek was once known as Belgium’s “Little Manchester”. These days it is better known as “Little Morocco” since the population is overwhelmingly Muslim and of North African origin.

By day, the scene is one of children kicking balls on busy streets, of very fast, very small cars with very large sound systems. By night, the cafes and tea houses are no strangers to drug-dealers and mafia from the Maghreb.

For the politically active extreme right, and the anti-Islamic bloggers, Molenbeek is the nightmare shape of things to come: an incubator of tension and terrorism in Europe’s capital, part of a wave of “Islamisation” supposedly sweeping Europe, from the great North Sea cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam to Marseille and the Mediterranean.

The dire predictions of religious and identity-based mayhem reached their peak between 2004 and 2006, when bombs exploded in Madrid and London, a controversial film director was shot and stabbed to death in Amsterdam, and angry demonstrators marched against publication of satirical cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad.

For Bruce Bawer, author of While Europe Slept, the continent’s future was to “tamely resign itself to a gradual transition to absolute sharia law”. By the end of the century, warned Bernard Lewis, the famous American historian of Islam, “Europe will be Islamic”. The Daily Telegraph asked: “Is France on the way to becoming an Islamic state?” The Daily Mail described the riots that shook the nation in the autumn of 2005 as a “Muslim intifada”.

Yet a few years on, though a steady drumbeat of apocalyptic forecasts continues, such fears are beginning to look misplaced. The warnings focus on three elements: the terrorist threat posed by radical Muslim European populations; a cultural “invasion” due to a failure of integration; and demographic “swamping” by Muslim communities with high fertility rates.

A new poll by Gallup, one of the most comprehensive to date, shows that the feared mass radicalisation of the EU’s 20-odd million Muslims has not taken place. Asked if violent attacks on civilians could be justified, 82% of French Muslims and 91% of German Muslims said no. The number who said violence could be used in a “noble cause” was broadly in line with the general population. Crucially, responses were not determined by religious practice — with no difference between devout worshippers and those for whom “religion [was] not important”.

“The numbers have been pretty steady over a number of years,” said Gallup’s Magali Rheault. “It is important to separate the mainstream views from the actions of the fringe groups, who often receive disproportionate attention. Mainstream Muslims do not appear to exhibit extremist behaviour.”

Obviously, the future is uncertain. Terrorism will remain a threat to both America and Europe. However, we must reduce the number of those hostile to the the U.S. and allied countries as well as stop those already determined to do us ill. So far, thankfully, the news from Europe in this regard appears to be good.

In relation to the story that prompted my moaning and wailing about abuse of PowerPoint, “Starbuck” at the Small Wars Journal has posted a follow on. In it, s/​he passes along the following story:

In January 2009, a military-oriented site, “Company Command”, asked current Army commanders and platoon leaders in Iraq what they spent most of their time doing. One officer, Lt. Sam Nuxoll, answered flat-out: “Making PowerPoint slides”.

When pressed, the lieutenant continued:

“I’m dead serious, guys. The one thing I spend more time on than anything else here in combat is making PowerPoint slides. I have to make a storyboard [a PowerPoint slide] complete with digital pictures, diagrams and text summaries on just about anything that happens. Recon a water pump? Make a storyboard. Conduct a key leader engagement? Make a storyboard. Award a microgrant? Make a storyboard.”

In addition, the PowerPoint slide that was to have conveyed the “Phase IV” (reconstruction and stabilization) plan in Iraq has been the topic of much discussion, but Starbuck actually posts the final slide:

With this much detail, how could we have gone wrong?

In fairness, before PowerPoint we had “flow charts,” the logic of which was best summed up here. (There is a much better version with some blue language, but this is a family blog.)

As I have written previously, President Obama and the members of Congress who voted to kill funding for the F‑22 did the right thing.

The Washington Post reports:

The Senate voted Tuesday to kill the nation’s premier fighter-jet program, embracing by a 58 to 40 margin the argument of President Obama and his top military advisers that more F‑22s are not needed for the nation’s defense and would be a costly drag on the Pentagon’s budget in an era of small wars and counterinsurgency efforts.

While this vote marks a step in the right direction, the fight isn’t over. The F‑22’s supporters in the House inserted additional monies in the defense authorization bill, and the differences will need to be reconciled in conference. But the vote for the Levin-McCain amendment signals that Congress will take seriously President Obama and Secretary Gates’ intent to bring some measure of rationality to defense budgeting.

The Raptor’s whopping price tag— nearly $350 million per aircraft counting costs over the life of the program— and its poor air-to-ground capabilities always undermined the case for building more than the 187 already programmed.

In the past week, Congress has learned more about the F‑22’s poor maintenance record, which has driven the operating costs well above those of any comparable fighter. And, of course, the plane hasn’t seen action over either Iraq or Afghanistan, and likely never will.

Beyond the F‑22 and the Joint Strike Fighter, we need a renewed emphasis in military procurement on cost containment. This can only occur within an environment of shrinking defense budgets. Defense contractors who are best able to meet stringent cost and quality standards will win the privilege of providing our military with the necessary tools, but at far less expense to the taxpayers. And those who cannot will have to find other business.

The Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb is particularly set off by the fact that the Senate has declined to continue funding the F‑22 program for which SecDef Gates and President Obama requested no more funds. He laments that Obama and Gates are representing their decision to expand the Army by 22,000 soldiers as being paid for by cuts in the F‑22 budget. Goldfarb remarks that this leaves us in a situation where

We may have more troops to patrol Afghanistan, but they’ll be patrolling on bicycles — because it’s a zero-sum game.

Is it impolitic to observe that “The F‑22 has never been flown over Iraq or Afghanistan”?

Moreover, it’s my understanding that the Weekly Standard folks, Goldfarb included, believe in the importance of fighting a series of labor-intensive counterinsurgency wars across the Islamic world. Based on Goldfarb’s remarks, he does not wish to support this objective by making cuts in capital to fund more labor. What would be good to know, then, just to set up the debate, is how much he thinks we ought to be spending on defense. We spend roughly (depending on how you count and whether you include the two wars we’re fighting) the same as the entire rest of the world combined. Based on my consumption of the Weekly Standard’s foreign-policy output over the past several years, you could easily convince me that the between $600,000,000,000 and $800,000,000,000 American taxpayers spend each year on defense is insufficient to support the Weekly Standard’s foreign-policy aims. But if there should not be a tradeoff like the one Gates pointed to in this discussion, how much is enough? Inquiring minds want to know.