We know now that we can pull off a successful counterinsurgency in Iraq. We know that we are working with an increasingly willing citizenry. But counterinsurgency, like community policing, requires lots of boots on the ground. You can't do it from inside a jet or a tank.
Read the whole thing. And buy his book! Get a second copy to send your congressman.
AN ARMY REENLISTMENT GOAL, exceeded. "In case that wasn't clear, I'll explain: the 3ID - the Division that took Baghdad in 2003, did a second tour in Iraq in 2005, and then bore the brunt of the surge in 2007, exceeded it's re-enlistment goal for FY2008 half way through the year."Someone please explain to me why the vast majority of those serving in Iraq or Afghanistan are in favor of us staying there, while the vast majority of those who are here at home are not.....
The First Casualty:It’s been said by many that antiwar films are secretly complicit in war because they can’t help showing it off in all its messy glory. Stanley Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory,” a First World War drama from 1957, at Film Forum March 30-31, is an exception.This was, and is, a great movie. Very "unKubrick-like" in many ways, but it was his first and, in many ways, his most understandable (shall we say "linear"?)
"Anyway, I believe it is essential, in a free society that finds itself threatened by a ruthless enemy, to distinguish between torture and something pretty irritating. Otherwise, what’s next? Are we going to ask the President to ban the act of singing to oneself in a high, tuneless quaver from the next cubicle over? (Hi, Maureen!) Are we going to prohibit people from screaming such things into their cell phones as “WE JUST LANDED! IN THE PLANE! ON THE RUNWAY!” or “PRESS DOWN HARD ON THE VEIN AND SEE IF HIS EYE POPS OUT!” or “I CAN GET IT ABOUT HALFWAY UP THERE AND THEN I USUALLY JUST COMPLETELY LOSE CONSCIOUSNESS!”"
Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna has a post regarding a counter-protest by Gathering of Eagles, an “organization that has dedicated itself to guarding America’s war memorials against desecration by anti-war activists and countering the smears against our military by traitors on the Left.”
At the Gathering of Eagles site I found this post, entitled Pittsburgh: Antiwar Leftists Plan to Confine Recruiters in a “Movable Cage”. A Leftist Pittsburgh-area group, which I won’t link, to stated that it plans for a protest at local military recruiting station on March 19, 2008:
If the station remains open, we intend to evict it and everything inside of it, occupy the location, and transform it into something useful for the community. We’ll also be bringing a movable cage in which to confine military recruiters until they no longer pose a danger to our friends and neighbors.
These people intend to place our military personnel in a “moveable cage”. Our military personnel are not in a position to respond to this illegal, degrading and abusive treatment with gunfire. This is occurring here and now in the United States. It is 1968 again in the minds of the Left and our military personnel are being treated like dirt by the Left due to an unpopular war.
Here is my suggestion. It is the practice of leftist community activists to loudly and stridently demand yes or no answer to simple questions from the victims of their protests, and to shout down any answer but a yes or no. This method is effective.
The American public needs to know.
Senator Clinton? Senator Obama? Do you condemn this protest in Pittsburgh? Do you condemn all protests which attack and degrade and insult our military personnel who are recruiting for our all-volunteer armed forces? Yes or No?
No speeches. No flatulence. No blather. You want to be Commander in Chief.
Yes or No.
Tell us.
For ten weeks, the press kept Harry’s deployment a secret. But now Harry’s being sent home, after photos of him in Afghanistan were published on the internet and in the press. The ‘journalists’ who broke the story got their scoop, and in doing so, needlessly endangered the lives of patriotic soldiers. There was no compelling reason to report on Harry’s service in Afghanistan. No public good was served. Shame on those who risked British lives.
Iraq Is Not the Worry
It is surrender and self-destruction at home.
The new multicultural and relativist British elite in just a decade or so has managed to make in comparison the 12th-century England of Thomas Becket seem humane. In the last analysis, the real worries about the survival of the West in this war are not with America and its courageous twenty-something suburban kids in Anbar trying to offer something better than the sharia morality of the seventh century, but with the likes of sanctimonious and cowardly churchmen in England trying to spread it.
Academics at West Point have analyzed captured documents which provide an in-depth glimpse into the origins and personnel management of 'foreign fighters' bound for Iraq.
Among the more interesting findings are that ninety percent of all suicide bombers were 'foreign fighters'. The great majority had entered Iraq via Syria, "a greater proportion than previously believed", altering their point of entry as Anbar became more difficult to cross. The captured records also went a long way toward de-mythologizing the Jihadi phenomenon. One analyst said, "I think we made a mistake in assuming that al-Qaeda, because it's a terrorist organization, doesn't need to organize itself the way other large organizations do. They have a human resources problem; they have to manage people." Many of those human resource management tools would be familiar to anyone. Al-Qaeda had employment contracts, it provided 3 weeks of vacation each year and additional pay for married members.The records are "one of the deepest reservoirs of information we've ever obtained of the network going into Iraq," according to a U.S. official closely familiar with intelligence on the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq. ... Al-Qaeda has a track record of good documentation, he said, adding that "Osama bin Laden was a businessman before he was a terrorist."
I had to laugh at this one, though:
Like most bloggers, Mr. Yon has an agenda...
Look who’s talking.
"THE NEW YORK TIMES SAYS RETURNING TROOPS ARE MURDERERS, but Marc Danziger checks the math."
