Afghanistan Phooey. We Have Stuart Little and Arizona.

Sure we need places like Iraq.  For their oil and, of course, Iranian democracy.  Afghanistan?  Not so much.

But what about opium products?  That's where controlling Afghanistan is an economic and social necessary.

Or so we all thought.  No longer.

A new paper has declared that mice can manufacture morphine.  And not the Globe or Enquirer, either.  The paper in question was published in something we'll call Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, because, well, that's its name.

How do mice do cook up all this... medication?  Do they grab poppy seeds and crush them with their sharp little teeth?  Do they stomp on them like so many grapes?  No, they just make it from scratch inside their furry, undersized brains.

The test required researchers, led by Meinhart Zenk, to stick thin stainless steel tubes into the little critters heads.   And using techniques awfully closed to those discarded as cruel by Josef Mengele during WW II.  Anyway, these genteel scientists pumped a gallon or two THP, a chemical that flora use to build morphine, into mousey brains, over four exruciating days.

By the way, mice do show pain on their pointy little faces, and must have been expressing up a storm during those 96 hours of needle work.  Just think of the orbital tightening, nose and cheek bulging, ear and wisker flattening going on.  Mind you, this mouse expression study came out in Nature Methods, the animal acting journal, well after the pin-cushioning of the mice noggins, so who knew?

Not surprisingly, mice don't make morphine the same way plants do, the scientist determined.  They--the scientists, not the mice--extracted brain chemicals, using God knows what methods, and ran them through a really expensive What-Chemical-Is-That machine.  This allowed them to track the chemical pathway used by mice being prodded by scientists.  Perhaps, it is no surprise that mice with pins in their heads use a different technique to make morphine than plants that just sit there expressionless.

Let Chuck E Cheese-huggers whine their high-pitched squeals 'til bedtime, but the upshot of this study is important. In a world where Americans don't have all the raw materials we need for the future, like oil, neodymium, lanthanum, geranium and formerly poppies, one thing we got.  Mice, them we got. And we can grow more really fast whenever we need them.

It is not clear from the study how to process all those little pink noses in order to produce the morphine we want.  But how hard can it be. Stick needles in their brains until those pink noses bulge fire engine red and the whiskers receed all the way into their equally bulging cheeks and you know you've got morphine synthesis underway.  When the faces relax and get all dreamy, despite an extra twang on the pins, you know the morphine is ready.

The next step requires complete automation or more researchers like Meinhart, since you'll have to grind the tiny cuties into a thin paste or, even better, boil the morphine out of them.  Perhaps, you could just eat one whole, like it was sushi.  That's the way the thin-skinned aliens on "V" do it.

And you know, pretty soon, our ambitious scientists can tweak American mice to make cocaine, nicotine, caffeine, maybe semi-sweet chocolate.

So, let Stretch bin Laden and Left-Eye Omar have Afghanistan and all those now-useless poppies and ladies in black wrappers.  Let those geniuses try to convince Afghans to change their names to Lindsay and Bruce and start up call-centers or to farm tomatoes and corn on the cob for roadside stands.  We're done.

America can, once again and forever, pursue happiness, bliss even, on its own.

Oh and the scientists say we don't have to stop at mice.  This is where Arizona comes in.

It's Messy or Here We Stay

Remember Iraq?  We helped the Iraqis install an election-based government a few years ago.  Famously, the Iraqis voted with their fingers, turning Na'vi-blue in full 3D for their first sojourn to the polls, sidestepping IED and Ba'athist homeless.  Democracy was in Iraq to stay.

Until now.

Perhaps that is unduly harsh.  Iraq has elections coming up again and you'd think everyone would be celebrating their freedom and slandering their candidates.  Well, not quite.  The Shi'ite Elections Overlordship has found that a whole slew of candidates won't even get to the slandering stage; they just banned the candidates as not up to snuff.  Coincidentally, most of the banned were labeled Bat'thists and no further explanation seemed necessary.

So, now the Sunnis are upset.  Seems every Bat'thist is a Sunni and most are ex-Ba'athists anyway.  There is no Ba'ath party and hasn't since Saddam came out of  his spider hole back in 2003 as an early Christmas present for George III. Most outrageous, Saleh al-Mutlaq, the leader of the party known as the National Some Dialog Front, has been banned as a candidate by the Shi'ites.  Apparently, Saleh was a Ba'athist when Chevy Chase was playing Jerry Ford.  But he was such a lousy Ba'athist, that hateful party actually kicked him out in 1977, when an expulsion really meant something.

Often that something was a bullet to the temple.

Saleh may not have merited a bullet in 1977, but he is getting the shaft now, according to some ticked off Sunnis.  They want to boycott this election just as they did back in 2005.  That boycott worked out so well, the Sunnis kept themselves pretty much out of parliament; hence, not every Sunni is going all out for the boycott. 

Naturally, the US is staying above the fray.  Our Gen. Ray Odierno, and our ambassador, Chris Hill have kind of said that the top Shi'ite Election Overlords are buddies of Iran's President Ejad.  As if that were a bad thing.

As you regular readers will, no doubt, not recall, I favored the democratization of Iraq because I was assured it would result in lower gas prices for my '99 Lexus, which I could drive at a steady 15 mph in a school zone with or without floor mats.  We were assured by no less than George III that democracy, however hard and  messy, would be good for Iraq and even better for America.

Maybe the sub-dollar gasoline hasn't materialized yet, but that hard-won democracy, in all its messiness, is in full bloom in Iraq and the Iranians find they love the mess in Iraq a lot.