It seems like our military doesn't do anything for itself anymore: food, maintenance, laundry, and even entertainment is subcontracted to for-profit companies. One of these companies, a subsidiary of Haliburton, recently contracted to send a troupe of what used to be called go-go dancers to Iraq. These scantily-clad women, chosen for their physiques, perform sexually suggestive dance routines while singing, or lip-syncing to, popular music. They don't remove all their clothing as part of their act, but they do everything else strippers do.

What were they thinking? The US military has been having a BIG problem with US soldiers being accused of various kinds of sexual assault - both of Iraqi women and of female U.S. soldiers. They don't need sexually graphic incitement. And these "concerts" are deeply offensive to the Iraqi population at large. There are few entertainments you could provide that would be more tactless and hostile to local moral standards.

Military spokespeople are careful not to venture any kind of opinion, pointing out (off the record) that they didn't know about the show until it was too late. The firm sub-contracted to provide these sex shows is equally reticent to comment, but (off the record) claims that the shows are very popular. So is rape, apparently, but our military frowns on it. Soldiers get a mixed message: that it is OK to objectify women but that it is forbidden to actually have sex.

How can an administration that shouts to the rafters about family values and the civilizing effect of democracy upon the Iraqi people send sex shows to entertain the troops? It's a disconnect. The right hand doesn't know what the left is doing. It is a reflection of incompetence and indifference, of paranoia and of apathy. It is usually a symptom of some kind of graft. It usually is graft when governments do wildly improbable and contrary things.

Disconnects like this seldom occur innocently. They are shy creatures of the shadows - they don't like publicity. Of late, their perpetrators have gotten bold. They own most of the "legitimate" media, so they can squirrel away their billions with relative impunity, sure that their crimes will evade censure or repercussions, at least during their own lifetimes.

What we would need, unfortunately, to illuminate their crimes is another incident like 9/11, but this time a huge and ghastly crime that would be very, very difficult to spin or hide. It would have to focus people's attention on the source of the crime, rather than a scapegoat. It would have to call people to take arms against those people who are troubling them: the people who profit from their hardship, profit from the death of their children, profit from the destruction of this planet's ecology.

This idea is what turns good people into terrorists. They rationalize doing someting terrible by making themselves believe that this is the only way they can focus enough attention on an injustice to get it called a crime. Another disconnect: you can't make the world into a better place tomorrow by making it worse today.

People know what is going on really, in their hearts, but they're in denial. They don't want to believe in the cruelty perpetrated against them by people who only care for their own wealth. They want to believe that they are led by wise and good people whose interests are the same as their own. And the people in power are deluded in kind. While grabbing everything that they can with both hands, they pretend to themselves that they are working for the good of mankind.

It is a real pity that we need disasters to open our eyes and to stop us from pretending that what we want to be true is true.