Now that the National Guard has been sent home and the search for Dru Sjodin has been called off, her family must sit through the winter with the grim reality that it’s not often a body dug out of the ground turns out to be alive. Saddam Hussein, however, is no ordinary fellow. The President said in a televised address to the nation that the arrest of Saddam marked the end of “a dark and painful era,” adding, “The capture of this man was crucial to the rise of a free Iraq.” Yet has anything on the ground really changed? Only hours after the former dictator was taken into custody, a car bomb ripped through a Khaldiyah police station, killing 17 people. The following day two explosions in Baghdad claimed nine more lives. Regrettably, nothing has obviated the massive power vacuum that rival Iraqis are trying, justifiably, to fill at any cost.

Whoever manages to seize control of the country will command vast opportunities for participating in the graft and corruption now practiced exclusively by the US military-industrial complex. Why just this week, Halliburton was caught overcharging the Pentagon $61 million. President Bush put on a straight face and stated that, “If there’s an overcharge, like we think there is, we expect that money to be repaid.” White House Spokesman Scott McClellan subsequently announced that Dick Cheney would hold a press conference on Friday where he will remove the illicit funds from his coat pocket and place them in his trousers.

Meanwhile, chaos still reigns across Iraq and irreconcilable differences linger among the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds as to who gets to kill all the Baath loyalists. So what have we achieved? Besides, wasn’t the stated objective of this war on terror to get Osama Bin Laden? Wasn’t he the one responsible for killing 2,500 Americans on 9/11? I guess if at first you don’t succeed, set your sights a bit lower.

Like, for example, the White House’s current initiative to put a man on the moon. From the Hubble telescope to Columbia and Challenger, NASA has become the poster child for abject failure. But not without some heady competition. After five years of travel, Japan’s Mars explorer ran out of gas only a week short of its target. Formally scrapping the mission, Japan bowed out of the space race, leaving us to focus squarely on the Chinese. The administration was clearly rankled when astronaut Yang Liwei orbited the Earth 14 times in October and when Beijing unveiled plans to land on the moon by the end of the decade, the administration went into a full panic. NASA, severely crippled by budget constraints and exploding space shuttles, has now been given top priority – the White House even dispatched the Vice President to sway members of Congress. Senator Sam Brownback for one got the message, saying of China’s efforts, “we don’t want them to beat us to the moon.” The Senator, according to his staff, is also concerned about reaching the New World before Columbus.

Unless NASA uses balloons, Boeing won’t be part of any lunar mission; they are barred from any rocket deals as penance for stealing secret documents from Lockheed Martin. As a matter of fact, the airline manufacturer-cum-defense contractor won’t be selling much of anything to the feds now that fresh allegations have brought the departure of CEO Phil Condit. Over the past eight years, Condit had orchestrated a significant migration from commercial aviation to military systems, highlighted by the 1997 acquisition of McDonnell Douglas. But only last year the company had to cough up $98 million to shareholders who claimed the deal was predicated on faulty valuations. While critics say this shift in focus explains why Boeing has finally fallen behind its European competitor Airbus, management claims that leeching the Pentagon enables them to diversify out of a vicious and highly cyclical industry. Either way, the defense effort has been handled so poorly that the company faces double secret probation now that Congressional hearings are gearing up to investigate Boeing’s business practices. The nitwits on Capitol Hill have plenty of other transgressions to examine, including the satellite division’s improper transfer of technology to China during the time of Condit’s ascension. Then there’s the recent episode where CFO Michael Sears offered a lucrative position to a Defense Department procurement official in order to cinch an aerial tanker contract worth $18 billion. Darleen Druyun eventually took a job at Boeing only to be fired along with Sears. While the Pentagon says the tanker contract is under review, not much can be done since the President already signed the $400 billion defense authorization bill. A government contractor with two fists in the public till… Dick Cheney must be proud.