tid bits

De La Rue named as co-sponsor of Iraq Procurement 2004 Doesn't sound very interesting but De La Rue was the company who printed the new Iraqi currency. Now they are co-sponsors on a conference.

De La Rue, the commercial security printer and papermaker, has announced its sponsorship of Iraq Procurement 2004, an event organised by Windrush Communications, official media partners for the Arab-British Chamber of Commerce, scheduled to take place in London early next year.

The CPA is pushing back one of their regular get together thingies tothe 19th of December. Other info on their site, all of it as useful as a fork for soup. Visit http://www.rebuilding-iraq.net/

James Dobbins is not impressed with current efforts at nation building in Iraq. Nation-Building in Iraq: Lessons From the Past in the New York Times.

Mr. Dobbins's basic argument is this: The Bush administration would have been better prepared for its Iraq mission if it had heeded the lessons of the United States' ongoing peacekeeping missions in the Balkans and other recent nation-building efforts. Those are cases, he argues, in which the United States had to contend with a security vacuum and the potential for ethnic strife, and designed a force to maintain order.

We were surprised to read that the Humvee doors in Iraq are canvas. They are being replaced with armored door kits. An article in The Dispatch Arsenal granted Humvee armor contract by Beverley Lindburg provides details of the contracts.

Joe Shoemaker, a spokesman for Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, said a contract for 1,000 armored door kits was split between the Rock Island Arsenal and the Anniston Army Depot in Alabama, and orders for an additional 8,500 kits are anticipated.

The information was provided by Fred Smith, deputy director of Ground Systems Industrial Enterprise Headquarters for the two companies. No numbers.