Again, We Are At War With Iran

Like it, or not.

U.S. officials say they have found smoking-gun evidence of Iranian support for terrorists in Iraq: brand-new weapons fresh from Iranian factories. According to a senior defense official, coalition forces have recently seized Iranian-made weapons and munitions that bear manufacturing dates in 2006.

This suggests, say the sources, that the material is going directly from Iranian factories to Shia militias, rather than taking a roundabout path through the black market. "There is no way this could be done without (Iranian) government approval," says a senior official.

What say you now, James Baker?

Kathleen Carroll, Pretend I'm From Missouri: Show Me Jamil Hussein

In response to the Iraqi Interior Ministry (MOI) confirming today that no man by the name of Jamil Hussein is employed in any capacity by the MOI or the Iraqi Police, the Associated Press has issued it own release.

Read both statements, press conference transcript where the story originated at Flopping Aces, where Curt has his own thoughts on the matter. I'll wait till you get back.

* * *

Frankly, I'm stunned at the outright arrogance of Kathleen Carroll, Executive Editor of the Associated Press, and statements that she made in her release that—in my opinion—are willful, skillful, and purposeful subterfuge.

Carroll completely glosses over the fact that her news organization originally reported that four mosques had been burned according to their original story, an error for which she does not account for here, not one the Associated Press has ever printed a retraction for.

Carroll stands by the AP's reporting that states that six people were burned alive.

The AP is curiously unable to name five of the six alleged victims, even though they were reportedly killed in their own neighborhood. In this tightly-knit, often-interrelated communal neighborhoods, especially in what the AP itself describes as an "enclave," I find the inability of the AP's reporters to find witnesses who could name those who were reputably killed a most unlikely claim.

Carroll goes on to insist, though not by name, that Captain Jamil Hussein is too an Iraqi policeman, just not one approved to speak to the media.

That is also a deliberate deception, coming directly on the heels of MOI Brigadier General Abdul Kareem Khalaf Al-Kenani's statement that no Iraqi policemen by that name existed, in any capacity.

If Kathleen Carroll wants me to believe that the Associated Press knows better than the MOI who MOI employees are, she had better produce a (live) Iraqi Police Captain claiming to be Jamil Hussein to back her story. While she's at it, she can provide evidence that six people were burned alive, starting with their names, their graves, and any proof that these events were something other than an insurgent propaganda. No one else has evidence that these people ever existed or that they were burned alive, other than the two anonymous AP reporters.

The Associated Press is clearly attempting to duck the issue.

I want to see Jamil Hussein.

A Terminally Flawed Methodology

I've been very fortunate to establish cordial email relationships with what I regard as some of the most "real" reporters of the Iraq war, men who go out and join up with combat units, staying with them, and chronicling their movements. They have been termed "embeds," short for "embedded reporters."

Michael Yon spent nine months with the "Deuce Four" Striker Brigade. Read through his site when you have the time (Get a brief taste here), and you'll have a much better understanding of the American experience in this war.

Pat Dollard spent seven months, and survived two IED blasts, while embedded with the Marines. He's just finished up a documentary series that promises to be raw, and brutal, and if I don't miss my guess, historically important.

I'm presently reading a review copy of We Were One by embedded historian Patrick K. O'Donnell, who was with 1st Platoon of Lima Company, 1st Marine Regiment, when they took on the worst of the fighting in Fallujah.

I've recently talked to USAF airmen just back from their fourth and sixth tours, Army soldiers back from their first and second deployments in Mosul and Ramadi, and via Central Command, interviewed two soldiers (MPs) working with the Iraqi police in Baghdad.

Because of all this contact with folks who actually know firsthand what is going on, I know the media is frequently inaccurate. The single word I've commonly heard from those who have been in Iraq as part of the military regarding MSM reporting is "lies."

Find someone on your own who has been to Iraq. As them if the media is reporting the truth. They'll likely tell you the same thing.

Iraq sucks. All wars suck. But in many respects things are not as bad as the media reports, just as in some cases things are actually worse. Better or worse, the majority of reporting is inaccurate.

The problem with the general manner of Iraq war reporting was summed up quite well by another embed, Michael Fumento:

Would you trust a Hurricane Katrina report datelined "direct from Detroit"? Or coverage of the World Trade Center attack from Chicago? Why then should we believe a Time Magazine investigation of the Haditha killings that was reported not from Haditha but from Baghdad? Or a Los Angeles Times article on a purported Fallujah-like attack on Ramadi reported by four journalists in Baghdad and one in Washington? Yet we do, essentially because we have no choice. A war in a country the size of California is essentially covered from a single city. Plug the name of Iraqi cities other than Baghdad into Google News and you'll find that time and again the reporters are in Iraq’s capital, nowhere near the scene. Capt. David Gramling, public affairs officer for the unit I'm currently embedded with, puts it nicely: "I think it would be pretty hard to report on Baghdad from out here." Welcome to the not-so-brave new world of Iraq war correspondence.

Vietnam was the first war to give us reporting in virtually real time. Iraq is the first to give us virtual reporting. That doesn’t necessarily make it biased against the war; it does make it biased against the truth.

The overwhelming majority of international journalists "reporting" from Iraq have never ventured out of their hotels in the Green Zone, a small area in Baghdad, and yet try to convince us they are reporting facts from around the entire nation. Based upon what, precisely? They are only reporting what stringers—local Iraqi and other Arab reporters, with sectarian, regional, and in some cases suspected insurgency-related biases—tell them.

These Baghdad reporters have no way of knowing if these stringers are reporting facts or are relaying propaganda, if the witnesses quoted are reliable or coached, or if the photos submitted to them are an accurate visual account of the events discussed in a story.

As Fumento notes elsewhere:

The London Independent's Robert Fisk has written of "hotel journalism," while former Washington Post Bureau Chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran has called it "journalism by remote control." More damningly, Maggie O’Kane of the British newspaper The Guardian said: "We no longer know what is going on, but we are pretending we do." Ultimately, they can’t even cover Baghdad yet they pretend they can cover Ramadi.

In short, we aren't questioning all of AP's stories based upon a single story, we are questioning a broken methodology that lead to such a story. There exists in the media’s reporting in Iraq no effective editorial checks at the very root level of reporting, to verify that the most basic elements of the story are indeed factual, much less biased.

This is not just about one questionable story, or even one questionable source.

It's about one often-used and verified questionable source, among many verified questionable sources, including just this partial list for starters:

Lt. Ali Abbas; police Capt. Mohammed Abdel-Ghani; police Brigadier Sarhat Abdul-Qadir; Mosul police Director Gen. Wathiq al-Hamdani; police Lt. Bilal Ali; Ali al-Obaidi, a medic at Ramadi Hospital; police Maj. Firas Gaiti; police Captain Mohammed Ismail; Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, the Interior Ministry spokesman (a.k.a. Police Brigadier Abd al-Karim Khalaf, Brig. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, Brig. Abdel-Karim Khalaf); Mohammed Khayon, a Baghdad police lieutenant; police spokesman Mohammed Kheyoun (a.k.a. Police Lieutenant Mohammed Khayoun); Lt. Thaer Mahmoud, head of a police section responsible for releasing daily death tolls; police Lt. Bilal Ali Majid; police Lt. Ali Muhsin; police 1st Lt. Mutaz Salahhidine (a.k.a. Lieutenant Mutaz Salaheddin); Col. Abbas Mohammed Salman; and policeman Haider Satar.

Again, these men are just a partial list of questionable and potentially false witnesses used to lend an air of credibility to hundreds or thousands of news articles... and these are just from those sources claimed to be within the Iraqi Police and Ministry of Interior.

This is not to mention the dozens or hundreds of other witnesses in thousands of other stories that could have been either influenced in some way, or may be entirely fictitious, and far more difficult to prove false.

The flawed methodology that weakens the essential credibility of the news-gatherig process effects the overwhelming majority of stories printed and broadcast about Iraq each week. This weakness, this inherent and unchecked instability and inability to verify the core facts and actors in the most basic of stories, points out a methodological flaw in the news gathering efforts common to every major news organization reporting in Iraq.

After what was initially a spirited defense, the Associated Press has gone silent about the supposed existence of Police Capt. Jamil Hussein.

No one else seems to be able to find him.

Back to Iraq

Bill Roggio is heading back to Iraq as an embed, an act I've come to respect as day-in, day-out the most dangerous assignment a journalist can undertake in Iraq.

He's also getting new gear, and incorporated as his own media company.

Check it out.

ISG Weighs In

The recommendations of the Iraqi Study Group have finally gone public... through a leak, of course:

Following an intense assessment of U.S. policies in the war in Iraq, the Iraq Study Group will recommend that a "gradual but meaningful" reduction of U.S. troops begin "relatively early in the New Year," a source familiar with the group's deliberations told CNN.

The language in the report -- which was compiled at the urging of Congress -- is being fine-tuned before it is presented to President Bush next week, but according to the source the work on the findings is basically done.

In the bipartisan panel's view, Bush needs to insist on implementing strict timetables for Iraqi improvements and communicate to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki that there will be substantial troop reductions beginning in January.

While not providing a specific timetable for withdrawal -- which Bush opposes -- the group suggests major combat units be deployed "over time" to what the source described as "out of the bull's eye."

Cut and crawl.

Nuance, kids. Impose impotence as foreign policy.

It's worked so well so far.

Oh Captain, My Captain

The resolution of this evolving story is going to be very interesting, and I think we can all agree that the one bit of evidence that matters is the material proof of the existence of one Iraqi Police Captain.

The Associated Press and U.S. Central Command are gambling, to different extents, their reputations on the existence of IP (Iraqi Police) Captain Jamil Hussein, with the Associated Press being much more at risk.

The AP has relied upon Captain Hussein as a primary source of information on many stories for months, and the news organization has effectively doubled-down by insisting he exists, and that their reporters have visited him in his office.

Central Command has reported that according to Iraqi Police and Ministry of Interior records, they do not employ a Jamil Hussein as any sort of police officer (much less a captain), nor as a MoI employee in any capacity.

If CentCom is wrong, their reputation will be tarnished, but only as much as relying on bad Iraqi record-keeping can be blamed.

If the Associated Press is wrong, then all the stories (including this one) that relied upon this expert witness—and potentially the dozens or hundreds of stories that relied upon 16 other IP/MOI "witnesses" that may not be legitimate—could go up in smoke.

The task for the Associated Press here is clear, immediate, and pressing: they must show, and prove beyond a reasonable doubt that their Captain Jamil Hussein is a living, breathing, legitimate member of the Iraqi Police.

I'd suggest a simple test: have the AP reporters that vouch for Captain Hussein drive with him to the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior, where they can watch officials verify his paperwork and employment status. Central Command, of course, can have representatives on hand to witness the verification of Captain Hussein's credentials.

Captain Jamil Hussein must materialize, and quickly, or the credibility of Associated Press reporting in Iraq will suffer a tremendous blow.

Treacherous Sands

Got any idea how many times the balance of power has shifted in the Middle East over the past 5000 years, or how many empires have risen, rules, and fallen over the region?

See 5,000 years of history in 90 seconds, courtesy of Maps of War:

One War, Not Yet Fully Engaged

Please tell me that this means he gets it:

President Bush said Tuesday he is not ready to abandon the battlefield in Iraq to sectarian insurgents whose violent attacks on innocent Iraqis are part of a broad goal to overthrow governments and send coalition forces running.

"Extremists are using terror to stop the spread of freedom. Some are Shiite extremists, others are Sunni extremists, but they represent different faces of the same threat. And if they succeed in undermining fragile democracies and drive the forces of freedom out of the region, they will have an open field to pursue their goals," Bush said in a speech at the NATO summit in Riga, Latvia.

Insurgents "seek to convince America and our allies that we cannot defeat them and that our only hope is to withdraw and abandon an entire region to their domination," he said. "If we allow the extremists to do this, then 50 years from now history will look back on our time with unforgiving clarity and demand to know why we did not act."

I can hope that President Bush means what he says here. It would mean that he does, in fact, still understand the stakes of the larger conflict beyond the borders of Iraq, but what troubles me is his reluctance to publicly admit what he already knows, which is that those most responsible for the continued support and spread of violence in Iraq is not al Qaeda, but Iran and Syria.

As I've mentioned previously, a state of war exists between the United States and the governments of Iran and Syria, and that the question before us now is whether or not we chose to acknowledge this state of war that our adversaries have instigated, and if we will take the steps needed end this state of conflict with a minimal loss of life on all sides.

Bob Woodward's book, State of Denial, states that Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards have been urging Hezbollah to train Iraqi insurgents on how to build and use shaped-charge IEDs to target American armored vehicles.

Woodward states (via NRO):

Pages 414-415: "Some evidence indicated that the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah was training insurgents to build and use the shaped IED's, at the urging of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. That kind of action was arguably an act of war by Iran against the United States. If we start putting out everything we know about these things, Zelikow felt, the administration might well start a fire it couldn't put out..."

Page 449: "The components and the training for (the IEDs) had more and more clearly been traced to Iran, one of the most troubling turns in the war."

Page 474ß: "The radical Revolutionary Guards Corps had asked Hizbollah, the terrorist organization, to conduct some of the training of Iraqis to use the EFPs, according to U.S. Intelligence. If all this were put out publicly, it might start a fire that no one could put out...Second, if it were true, it meant that Iranians were killing American soldiers — an act of war..."

This same theme was picked up by today's New York Times, which reports:

A senior American intelligence official said Monday that the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah had been training members of the Mahdi Army, the Iraqi Shiite militia led by Moktada al-Sadr.

The official said that 1,000 to 2,000 fighters from the Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias had been trained by Hezbollah in Lebanon. A small number of Hezbollah operatives have also visited Iraq to help with training, the official said.

Iran has facilitated the link between Hezbollah and the Shiite militias in Iraq, the official said. Syrian officials have also cooperated, though there is debate about whether it has the blessing of the senior leaders in Syria.

While they would never dare to characterize it as such, the Times article verifies what Woodward and former FBI Director Louis Freeh has already told us: we are at War with Iran.

Iran builds shaped-charge IEDS, delivers those shaped-charge IEDS to terrorists that they have created and/or trained, for use against American soldiers. Iran is quite seriously at war with the United States. Why do we refuse to acknowledge that?

Michael Ledeen notes (my bold):

Thanks to Cliff, and to Dexter Filkins for getting someone to admit, once again, that Iran and Syria are all over Iraq. Victor says we should first stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan, but that's skipping a step. It is impossible so long as the mullahs rule in Tehran and Assad commands in Damascus. It is a regional war. If we continue to misunderstand it, if we remain locked in this fundamental error of strategic vision, we will endlessly respond to our enemies' initiatives, playing defense in one place after another. Today in Iraq and Afghanistan, tomorrow in Lebanon, Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopea and Eritrea (that is the mullahs' game plan), then in Israel and Europe, and finally here at home. We do not need intelligence agencies to know this, all we need to do is listen to our enemies, who announce it at the top of their lungs.

There is no escape from this war, and we haven't even begun to wage it. Once we do, we will find that we've got many political and economic weapons, most of them inside our enemies' lands. I entirely agree with Victor that Iran and Syria are fragile, brittle, and anxious. They know their people hate them, and they know that revolution could erupt if we supported it.

Of course, as Victor says, our leaders may be so demoralized that we could just surrender in Iraq and Afghanistan, as the realists and the antisemites desire. But that would only delay the reckoning, and ensure that the war will be far bloodier.

I stated in Kneecapping Snakes and other posts that the one sure way to end the state sponsorship of terrorism is to make that sponsorship extremely counterproductive for the nation/states involved. Assad in Syria and the Mullah's in Iran support terrorism in Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and elsewhere, because this support is a cost-effective way for them to project their foreign policy goals.

Their goals--the humiliating defeat of the United States in Iraq, the destruction of Israel, their push of nuclear weapons and increasing regional control and influence--are quite clear, but then, so is the remedy to this problem; if President Bush and allied nations admit to and treat this as a regional war.

If we limit out goals in Iran and Syria to knocking them out of the terror game and don't try to rebuild their societies from the ground up, we can do so relatively easily by crushing the ability of Iran to threaten Persian Gulf shipping and by taking out its refineries. Ironically, Iran is oil-rich, but gas-poor.

Coalition air strikes targeting the Iranian Navy, refineries, and other key targets could bring the mullacracy to it's knees within weeks, without the significant use of U.S. ground forces, and only a (relatively minor) projection of air power. A U.S. Navy blockade of Oman would keep Iran from importing the gasoline it needs to survive.

Syria, minus Iranian support, would be even easier to destabilize.

Take Syria and Iran out of the terror game, and Hezbollah begins to falter in Lebanon, giving Lebanese democracy a chance. Take Syria and Iran out of the terror game, and Israeli citizens wouldn't have to worry about Hezbollah's ability to so quickly rearm and instigate another war.

Take Syria and Iran out of the terror game, and manpower, weaponry, and funding for al Qaeda in Iraq begins to abate, as the growing number of Sunni tribes embracing the Sahawa movement hunt down and kill foreign fighters. Take Syria and Iran our out of the terror game, and Muqtada al-Sadr, the thug-leader of Shiites in the Baghdad slums, suddenly finds his Medhi Army militia without new munitions, or training, or financial support, and as his capability as a military threat fades, so does his political power.

The greatest "secret" in the War on Terror is that we have the capability of turning the strategic war around on a dime, if only our leaders will lead.

WaPo: Selective Reporting on al-Anbar?

I can't say that this morning's Dafna Linzer/Thomas Ricks article Anbar Picture Grows Clearer, and Bleaker in the Washington Post comes as a surprise considering the overall tone of their reporting on the War in Iraq, but this article, based on an update of selectively-released elements of a previous classified report that many feel was taken out of context, seems to run counter to what many others are seeing in the same area of Iraq.

What appears to be the most easily refutable charge brought forth in the WaPo article occurs in the lede:

The U.S. military is no longer able to defeat a bloody insurgency in western Iraq or counter al-Qaeda's rising popularity there, according to newly disclosed details from a classified Marine Corps intelligence report that set off debate in recent months about the military's mission in Anbar province.

This contention, of course, seems directly challenged by the emergence of the Sahawa, or the Awakening, a movement among the major Sunni tribes of al Anbar against al Qaeda. Sunni tribes are increasingly leading the fight against al Qaeda and Sunni insurgents.

Fumento, who is on the ground in Ramadi and is reporting first-hand accounts, is buttressed by others who have or who are about to have first-hand experience in that province in Iraq.

Linzer and Ricks based their article on selectively-leaked excerpts for a classified Marine report and the words of anonymous "experts" in Washington, D.C.

Michael Fumento is there, on the ground in al-Anbar's capital of Ramadi, reporting the words of real people, by name, who are actively engaged in operations on the ground.

Given his proximity and many supporting accounts, I tend to think the Linzer/Ricks article is a fine example of reporters cherry-picking evidence to support a pre-determined outcome.

American Legion Vs. Charles Rangel

Via The Corner:

WASHINGTON Nov. 27 /Standard Newswire/ — The National Commander of The American Legion called on Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) to apologize for suggesting that American troops would not choose to fight in Iraq if they had other employment options.

"Our military is the most skilled, best-trained all- volunteer force on the planet," said National Commander Paul A. Morin. "Like that recently espoused by Sen. John Kerry, Congressman Rangel's view of our troops couldn't be further from the truth and is possibly skewed by his political opposition to the war in Iraq."

According to Rangel, "If a young fellow has an option of having a decent career, or joining the Army to fight in Iraq, you can bet your life that he would not be in Iraq. If there's anyone who believes these youngsters want to fight, as the Pentagon and some generals have said, you can just forget about it. No bright young individual wants to fight just because of a bonus and just because of some educational benefits," Rangel said.

Rangel was responding to a question during an interview yesterday on Fox News Sunday about a recent study by the Heritage Foundation which found that those enlisting in the military tend to be better educated than the general public and that military recruiting seems to be more successful in middle- class and wealthy neighborhoods than in poor ones.

According to the study, 97 percent of military enlistees were high school graduates versus 80 percent of Americans in general. The study also concludes that the average reading level of military personnel is a full grade level higher than that of the general population.

"I'm not sure I understand what is unfair about letting adults make their own career choices," Morin said as he visited troops in Korea this week. "Troops serving today have a higher education level than the overall population. Why another member of Congress is insulting our troops' commitment and education level is beyond me."

Morin said the American Legion applauds and appreciates the great sacrifices of those who serve - - many of whom have put civilian careers aside, college on hold or given up high paying jobs to enlist.

More and more troops say it's duty and honor before college fund that motivated them to join. Recruiting numbers have been met this year, but more importantly, servicemembers are reenlisting so retention within the armed forces is great, Morin explained. Not everyone holds the view that we should wait to be attacked again as a nation.

"These brave men and women lay it on the line every day for each and every one of us, for which I am very grateful," Morin said. "Their selfless commitment for the betterment of our world from radical extremists is beyond commendable. It's time for members of Congress to stop insulting our troops.

"While the American Legion shares the congressman's appreciation for education, the troops in Iraq represent the most sophisticated, technologically superior military that the world has ever seen," Morin said. "I call on Congressman Rangel to not only apologize to our troops but to also fight for pay increases and make significant improvements to the current GI Bill — reserves and guard included, as he prepares for a party chairmanship in the 110th Congress."

Odds are that Rangle will either ignore the American Legion (as he has always consistently avoided the facts that those in the military are not overwhelmingly poor inner city minorities, but quite the opposite) or issue a John Kerry-esque "I'm sorry that you aren't smart enough to understand me" non-apology apology.

Drugs are Bad...

Apparently, even nominal quantities of over-the-counter cold medications can cause you to see the most interesting things.

I know this, because this Reuters picture has all the earmarks of a crudely-edited PhotoShop, from the rather odd smudges and apparent artifacts around the heads of the two women on the left when the photo is enlarged, to the rather uncanny resemblance that one person in the picture has to someone I feel I should know.

After Adnan Hajj, Reuters wouldn't fall for this sort of stuff again, would they?

It’s a good thing I can chalk this up to cough syrup. If not, I might have to start questioning the media’s accuracy.

Update:Jeez. Take a little cough syrup, disappear for a few hours, and the world goes nuts. FWIW, some credible experts have said that the artifacts that I thought may be evidence of photoshopping may have been the result of JPG compression, and that any resemblence to the President was purely coincidental. I can live with that.

What I do have a harder time living with is the foul language of our left wing guests. As a result, comments are closed, and the most offensive comments have been removed.

The Media's Absolute Immoral Authority

It turns out that "Iraqi police sources" that that have provided the Associated Press with so many of their Shia on Sunni violence stories since April are not, in fact Iraqi police, and that at least some of the stories they're reported are more than likely false.

This is hot on the heels of an investigation by Patterico that revealed that the L.A. Times may have relied on sources that may be (to be charitable) unreliable.

In both instances, facts and ethically-sound journalistic practices were in very short supply, as "journalists" apparently holed up at the bar in the al Rasheed Hotel breathlessly and uncritically reported what anonymous Iraqi stringers provided to them as news. That this practice of blind reporting is apparently widespread and accepted by the professional media should be very troubling to those who read major news site and make the (apparently erroneous) assumption that the stories being reported are based on objective, verified facts, not the whims of stringers citing sources that do not, in fact, exist.

It is increasingly apparent that the guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas may know about what is actually going on in Iraq than does his professional counterpart hunkered down in the Green Zone in Baghdad, due in no small part to the fact that the reporters in the Green Zone seem to swallow the uncorroborated reporting of Iraqi stringers of dubious allegiances and influences readily, and uncritically.

The media isn't necessarily willfully reporting false stories, they are simply too lazy to verify what they are reporting is comprised of actual facts instead of fantasy. They seem to have adopted a worldview that whatever act is the most depraved, must be the most infallible.

Call it "absolute immoral authority."

On Non-Civilians

The Chicago Tribune carries an article today by Joel Greenberg on the increasing frequency with which Palestinian militants are being shielded from Israeli strikes by the interference of Palestinian non-combatants:

On a rooftop in a crowded neighborhood here, about 30 Palestinian women sat on chairs and mattresses on a recent afternoon, serving as human shields against a possible Israeli air strike on the family home of a prominent Hamas militant.

As an Israeli drone buzzed overhead, the women were defiant.

Our technology is faith in God," said Itaf al-Masri, 47.

The scene was an example of the kind of struggle waged here in recent months between the Israeli military and the Palestinians, a battle between a high-tech army and the simpler arms and tactics of militants and their civilian supporters. The confrontation, halted by a tenuous cease-fire Sunday, was reminiscent of the challenges faced by the U.S. military in Iraq and in the past during the Vietnam War.

Gaza militants fired crude but deadly homemade rockets at Israel and dug tunnels under the border with Egypt to smuggle in arms. In one standoff with Israeli troops, Palestinian women marched to a mosque where militants were holed up and enabled them to escape. The Israelis used sophisticated surveillance technology and aircraft to hunt down rocket squads and kill militant leaders, often also hitting civilians.

Greenberg refuses to ask the question that his article begs, namely, at what point do ideologically-aligned non-combants shielding militants cease occupying the protected status of "civilian?"

In asymmetrical warfare, does the status of civilian always exist for non-militants, or should there be a new classification to account for those somewhere between active militancy and those that are truly non-participatory?

I'd opine that the Palestinian women in the Greenberg story above, by voluntarily interjecting themselves into a projected conflict area as human shields as partisans acting on behalf of Hamas militants, have surrendered their rights to be defined as "civilians." They are ideologically-aligned with terrorist organizations, but that alone does not make them loose their protected status as civilians. Nor does the fact that they are human shields remove their protected status, as human shields can be involuntary.

No, what should remove their status as "civilians" is that they have willfully interjected themselves into a conflict with the express intent of providing immediate tactical support for a terrorist group. Their purposeful decision to run interference for terrorists should not in any way prevent an Israeli military response.

Historically, Muslims have rarely recognized the existence of any civilians (thereby justifying everything from 9/11 to Israeli market bombings to the murder of Indonesian schoolgirls), and the the creation of a "targetable non-militant participant" status would help level the playing field against those dehumanists that preach on-going jihad.

Is Patriotism Dead?

To listen to John Kerry or Charles Rangel, you would think so. These Democrat veterans—who speak for so many other Democrats, veteran and not—seem to think military service is something that an American citizen engages in only as a last resort measure. Kerry's infamous pre-election "stuck in Iraq" comment (for which he has un-apologized), along with Rangel's new pronouncement that people will only join the military if they don’t have "an option of having a decent career," reflect a liberal mindset that views voluntary military service as something only for those who are nearly destitute, and who have few other options.

It seems to them and many other liberals that joining the military is a last chance option that is a step or two above going homeless, and little more.

Of course, this flies in the face of the facts that those who join the military tend to be more suburban, educated and affluent than their contemporaries. But neither Charlie nor John nor the rest of their liberal "truther" movement are dissuaded by anything as inconsequential as facts.

Duty. Honor. Country.

Honor. Courage. Commitment.

Upon these and similar principles the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, NY and the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, MD were founded, as were their fellow service academies for the U.S. Air Force and Coast Guard. Men and women seeking to develop these character traits often seek to go to service academies or walk into military local recruiting offices.

Almost all (98%) voluntary enlistees are high school graduates. 92% of officers have bachelor's degrees, and many have advanced degrees. Do liberals honestly think these people joined the military because they didn’t have "an option of having a decent career" otherwise?

Joining the military because of a feeling of patriotism—a love of one’s country and willingness to sacrifice for it—seems to be an increasingly remote concept for those on the left. No, they’d rather do what they do best, and attempt to define those who would serve as another stupid, oppressed childish minority that need to be saved from themselves.

Thanksgiving "Humor"

Allowing this bile to be published on her site tells me a bit about the character of Arianna Huffington.

To be fair, though, I'm fairly sure she'd allow the same comments to be uttered about Joe Lieberman.

That's bipartisanship.

Russia Delivers U.S. Missile Targets To Iran

How thoughtful:

Russia has begun deliveries of the Tor-M1 air defence rocket system to Iran, Russian news agencies quoted military industry sources as saying, in the latest sign of a Russian-US rift over Iran.

"Deliveries of the Tor-M1 have begun. The first systems have already been delivered to Tehran," ITAR-TASS quoted an unnamed, high-ranking source as saying Friday.

The United States has pressed Russia to halt military sales to Iran, which Washington accuses of harbouring secret plans to build a nuclear weapon.

Moscow has consistently defended its weapons trade with Iran. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said the contract for 29 rocket systems, signed in December last year, was legitimate because the Tor-M1 has a purely defensive role.

ITAR-TASS reported that the rockets were to be deployed around Iran's nuclear sites, including the still incomplete, Russian-built atomic power station at Bushehr.

Isn't that nice of the Russians to deliver a short-range missile system designed to take on low to mid-level targets, knowing that we have long-range anti-radar missiles to counter them?

Gun Day, Bloody Gun Day

Black Friday... what a wonderful day to pull a nine-hour shift behind the gun counter at my local sporting goods store!

Just remember kids, I have the right to refuse service to anyone, at any time, for any reason, so be nice. I will not sell any of my merchandise to anyone who appears they may be of a mindset to use to expedite their shopping elsewhere.

Form a line to the right, smile, and have a nice day.

Happy Thanksgiving

Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever. Let the redeemed of the LORD say this—those he redeemed from the hand of the foe, those he gathered from the lands, from east and west, from north and south. Some wandered in desert wastelands, finding no way to a city where they could settle. They were hungry and thirsty, and their lives ebbed away. Then they cried out to the LORD in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress. He led them by a straight way to a city where they could settle. Let them give thanks to the LORD for his unfailing love and his wonderful deeds for men, for he satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things.

Psalm 107: 1-9

From me and mine, a Happy Thanksgiving to all, especially our servicemen and women overseas. You are in our prayers.

Is the BBC Reporting the Right Press Releases?

The BCC published an article today on the Israeli use of cluster munitions during the recent war with Hezbollah in Lebanon:

The Israeli army is to investigate the way cluster bombs were used during the recent conflict with Hezbollah. The chief of the defence staff has said he prohibited the wide use of the munitions during the conflict.

But human rights observers in southern Lebanon say up to a million "bomblets" were left in the country after the war.

No one will dispute that the aerial bombing conducted during Desert Storm was far more intense than the bombing raids conducted by Israel against Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, and in Desert Storm, the U.S. Air Force dropped 10,035 CBU-87 cluster bombs on military targets. The CBU-87 a 950-pound bomb has 202 submunitions. Doing a little quick math, and we can determine that 10,035 bombs times 202 submunitions per bomb means that a total of 2,027,070 submunitions were dropped during Desert Storm.

But these cluster munitions have a reported dud rate of up to 16%, meaning that in this much larger conflict, 324,332 submunitions would have failed to explode.

Much larger war, many fewer duds. Do you detect an odor yet? Read on.

In the recent war between Hezbollah and Israel, most of not all of the cluster munitions fired were delivered not by aircraft, but by artillery. Human Rights Watch notes that the Israelis used 155mm artillery to deliver DPICM projectiles. Each 155mm DPICM shell contains 88 submunitions.

To get to a figure of the million unexploded "bomblets" claimed by the BBC, Israel would have had to have fired 7,142,858 155mm DPICM shells submunitions (1,000,000 dud submunitions is 14% of 7,142,857.143, according to this handy little tool).

To say that Israel did not have the number of weapons, stockpiles of a minimum of 7,142,858 DPICM shells submunitions (7,142,858 submunitions is 81,169 shells), or time to deliver them in a conflict less than a month long, would be a gross understatement.

So where did the Beeb get it's figures? I have a suspicion:

MAG has sent a special team from Iraq into Lebanon to help get rid of the thousands of cluster bombs and other unexploded munitions from the villages and towns in the south of the country.

MAG's technical field manager, Salaam Mohammed Amin, leading the 19 highly-trained Iraqi-Kurd technicians, said: "Our staff cleared more than a million unexploded items in just one year in Iraq. It meant we helped reduce civilian victim rates after the conflict from a devastating high of around 500 per month to nearer three per month today - we hope to help the people of Lebanon in the same way."

It appears that the Beeb may have botched the Mine Advisory Group press release, somehow getting it into their heads that million of rounds of unexploded munitions in Iraq (munitions dispersed over decades of fighting) translated to a million submunitions in Lebanon.

Or at least that is what I hope happened, because if that isn't the case, that would suggest that the BBC published someone else's press release without checking the validity—or even the statistical possibility—of what they are reporting.

And the BBC wouldn't do that... would they?

Update:Via Matthew Sheffield - Heh.

Update: Updated a screw-up above. A million dud submunitions would be the result of more than 7,142,858 submunitions fired, not shells. 7,142,858 submunitions is (at 88 submunitions per shell) 81,168 DPICM shells, still averaging an extraordinary rate of fire of 2,459 DPICM shells per day (33 days between 12 July and 14 Sept) on top of the more conventional ordinance fired inside the narrow swath of Lebanon that Israeli M109 155 mm SP artillery fire can reach, which is just 14.6 miles.

Regarding the Harriet Miers of Defense...

Yet another well-stated reason that Robert Gates should not be Secretary of Defense, from Hugh Hewitt's interview with Victor David Hanson (my bold):

HH: ...Does the President have the ability to wage aggressive war with a pacifist Congress?

VDH: I think he does, but let's be candid, Hugh. The problem right now isn't...it may be the left wing Congress, but he's got another problem, and that is he's bringing in Robert Gates, and he's bringing in the Baker realism, and that doesn't have a good record. That's the people who said don't talk to Yeltsin. Let's stick with Gorbacev. Let's not go to Baghdad. Let the Shia and Kurds die. Let's arm the Islamisists to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan and then leave. It's not a good record. It's short-term expediency at the expense of long-term morality. And it's not in the interest of the United States to do that, to cut a deal with these countries.

To put it bluntly, "realists" like Robert Gates and James Baker did much to create the situation in the Middle East with which we are now faced.

There is a place in the world for Robert Gates, and that place is, and should remain, Texas A&M.

Kneecapping Snakes

Jules Crittenden, Boston Herald city editor and columnist blogs this morning:

It will be interesting after the assassination of Pierre Gemayel in Lebanon ... not to mention last summer's hijacking of the nation by Hezbollah ... not to mention last year's assassination of Rafik Hariri ... not to mention the last 25 years of Syrian and Iranian interference in Lebanon and now in Iraq ... it will be interesting to see if anyone will still counsel talks with Syria and Iran under any terms that do not include a very real threat of force.

The assassination of Pierre Gemayel was the fifth assassination of an anti-Syrian politician in Lebanon, and was meant to be the sixth--Michel Pharaon, a Greek Catholic member of the ruling coalition and minister for parliamentary affairs--was meant to be the fifth, but the hit at his office in Lebanon just hours before the Gemayel assassination failed. The goal of targeting Gemayel and Pharon is clear. If both assassinations were successful, less than two-thirds of the 24-member Lebanese cabinet would remain following the now suspicious resignations of six pro-Syrian/pro-Iranian (five Shiite, 1 Christian) ministers last week.

The combination of the Gemayel assassination and the earlier resignations means that the government is effectively frozen, unable to enact any new legislation. If the attempted assassination of Pharaon had been successful, a future assassination attempt against any other minister is successful, or another minister resigns, Article 69 of the Lebanese constitution stipulates that the government is automatically resigned. It is likely a fair assumption that the assassination attempts on Gemayel (successful) and Pharaon (unsuccessful) were conducted with the express intent of toppling the pro-western Fuad Sinora government, which is then quite likely to be replaced by a pro-Syrian, Hezbollah-controlled regime. It is, as Michael Totten noted yesterday, nothing less than a coup d'etat in progress.

President Bush condemned the Gemayel murder as an act of terrorism and accused Syria and Iran of attempting to undermine Lebanon's government, but stopped short of accusing them of Gemayel's murder, presumably because of the current lack of evidence of direct Syrian and/or Iranian involvement.

But, considering the facts that we already know about Iranian and Syrian involvement in supporting terrorism in Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere, do we really need any more proof to justify taking action against both nations?

As I've been noting with increased sense of urgency over the past week or so, Syria and Iran must be made accountable in some way for their continued state sponsorship of terrorism. Currently, that support is most precipitous in Lebanon where they are supporting what appears to be a coup attempt, and with their support of terrorists operating directly against U.S. and Iraqi government forces inside Iraq.

Obviously, political pressure would be the preferred manner of dealing with both nations, but thus far, both nations have shown themselves to be adamantly unmoved by U.S. entreaties to stay out of affairs in Lebanon, and Iraq.

Syria and Iran were both warned weeks ago to avoid involving themselves in an attempt to topple the government in Lebanon; Gamayel's murder and the attempt on Pharaon's life were their answer.

Iran and Syria have played a direct role in supporting the terrorist group Hezbollah with $300 million in cash and their rearming, providing up to 30,000 rockets to levels even greater than Hezbollah had before the recent conflict they instigated against Israel by kidnapping Israeli soldiers.

In addition to attempting to topple the government of Lebanon, Iran and Syria have been behind efforts to cause instability in Iraq, permitting terrorists to use their borders to infiltrate in with pre-rigged IEDs that are used to target U.S. and British servicemen.

According to Bob Woodward's new book, State of Denial, Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards was urging Hezbollah to train Iraqi insurgents on how to build and use shaped-charge IEDs to target American armored vehicles. Woodward states (via NRO):

Pages 414-415: "Some evidence indicated that the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah was training insurgents to build and use the shaped IED's, at the urging of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. That kind of action was arguably an act of war by Iran against the United States. If we start putting out everything we know about these things, Zelikow felt, the administration might well start a fire it couldn't put out..."

Page 449: "The components and the training for (the IEDs) had more and more clearly been traced to Iran, one of the most troubling turns in the war."

Page 474ß: "The radical Revolutionary Guards Corps had asked Hizbollah, the terrorist organization, to conduct some of the training of Iraqis to use the EFPs, according to U.S. Intelligence. If all this were put out publicly, it might start a fire that no one could put out...Second, if it were true, it meant that Iranians were killing American soldiers — an act of war..."

And from the same National Review column:

It's not the first time we have had information about Iran's murder of Americans. Louis Freeh tells us that the same thing happened following the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia. On page 18 of Freeh's My FBI he reports that Saudi Ambassador Bandar told Freeh "we have the goods," pointing "ineluctably towad Iran." The culprits were the same as in Iraq: Hezbollah, under direction from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence. And then there was a confession from outgoing Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani to Crown Prince Abdullah (at the time, effectively the Saudi king): page 19: "the Khobar attack had been planned and carried out with the knowledge of the Iranian supreme ruler, Ayatollah Khamenei."

As Freeh puts it, "this had been an act of war against the United States of America."

Whether or not the President acknowledges it, a state of war exists between the United States and the governments of Iran and Syria. The question before us now is whether or not we chose to acknowledge this state of war that our adversaries have instigated, and if we will take the steps needed end this state of conflict with a minimal loss of life on all sides.

Any response we make—political, economic or military—may trigger a renewed rocket assault on Israel by Hezbollah, and a dramatic surge in violence against U.S. and Iraqi government forces in Iraq by Shia militias loyal to Iran. This is in addition to direct counterstrikes that the Syrian and Iranian military may have preplanned against U.S. forces and allied nations throughout the Middle East. Such actions would likely include Iranian attempts to target and destroy refineries, oil pumping stations, ports, and pipelines and oil rigs in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and other Persian Gulf Nations, in addition to an attempt to close the Straits of Hormuz to shipping, thereby paralyzing many of the world's economies dependent on the free flow of Persian Gulf oil.

Therefore, the best and only option available to the United States and allied nations threatened by Iran and Syria is an overwhelming series of air strikes that will cripple these ability of these two nations to project military power both directly and indirectly, along with the explicit message that further measures taken by Iran and Syria to effect changes through the use of terrorism or through conventional warfare will result in far more debilitating attacks that would wreck the economies of these nations and threaten the very existence of their regimes.

The "biggest sticks" in the Iranian arsenal are two-fold; their ability to influence terrorists in Iraq and in Lebanon, and their purported ability to close the Persian Gulf to shipping via military means. Syria has much more limited capabilities.

Very little can be done to directly stop Syrian and Iranian contributions to terrorism, but as Syria is something of a client state of Iran, our best opportunity may be to take on the "head of the snake;" where Iran leads, Syria will likely follow, and Iran is in a far more precipitous position than they would have us believe.

As Global Security notes, Iran's primary means of affecting Persian Gulf Shipping is their smallest and most obsolete branch of service, the Iranian Navy:

Iran's three destroyers are over 50 years old and are not operational. The readiness of the three 25-year-old frigates is almost non-existent, and the two 30-year-old corvettes do not have sophisticated weapons. Ten of 20 missile-equipped fast attack craft have limited operational readiness, and four of them are not seaworthy as of 2001. Only 10 Chinese-made Thodor-class craft are operationally reliable. The four 30-year-old minesweepers are obsolete, lack seaworthiness, and do not have a mine-sweeping capability. Iran has many amphibious and auxiliary ships, but these are superfluous to requirements and are used purely for training personnel. Iran's ten hovercraft are old and used sparingly.

Iran's greatest naval threats are Chinese-made high-speed C-14 and similar missile gunboats, three Russian-designed Kilo-class submarines, and island and platform-mounted anti-ship missile batteries.

It would take comparatively little effort or tactical risk for American Air Force and Naval aircraft to send the ships, small craft and submarines of the Iranian Navy to the bottom of the Persian Gulf, with Iranian forces on platforms and on small Iranian-controlled islands being slightly more difficult.

The destruction of Iran's nominal Persian Gulf fleet would be a crushing psychological blow to both Iran and Syria, and it would greatly reduce Iran's capability to threaten Persian Gulf shipping, a factor that to date has let Iran support terrorism as the rest of the world has turned a blind eye.

What would possibly keep Iran or their proxies from retaliating is a threat issued concurrent to U.S. air strikes on the Iranian navy:

You've seen what we have done to your navy. How long with your government last if we decide to target your refineries and blockade any ship attempting to deliver refined petroleum products to Iran? Stop supporting terrorism in Iraq and Lebanon, or these further steps will be taken.

One of Iran's dirty little secrets is this: for a nation rich in oil, they are very poor in their ability to convert this oil into usable fuel.

The threat issued would state that if Iran attempts to retaliate, either directly or indirectly to the reduction of their Navy, further air strikes could decimate their very limited refinery capability, while a blockade in the Gulf of Oman of Iran-bound tankers carrying refined fuels would cause Iran to "dry up" within weeks. Iran’s military and their economy would be crippled with comparatively little effort on the part of the United States Navy, which could enforce a blockade well outside the range of Iranian countermeasures.

Iran has already begun a war with the United States and seeks to wage it via proxies in Iraq and Lebanon. It is time that we reduce the threat of Hezbollah and Shiite militias to ourselves and our allies by cutting them off at the knees.

What Do Muslims Have in Common With Democrats?

Even death does not stop people from converting:

Shahin of the Tucson Islamic Center said more than 1,200 Muslims died in the World Trade Center catastrophe, and no genuine member of Islam would do such a thing.

So, almost half of those killed in New York on 9/11 were Muslims? Neat trick, since Muslims are just 0.6% of the U.S. population.

Oh, and Omar Shahin, the idiot that uttered this? He was one of the six imams booted from a flight at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport last night.

Praise be to Allah.

Crude Messages

As you probably already know by now, the political story of the day is that another Lebanese politician has been assassinated.

Lebanon’s industry minister Pierre Gemayel was driving in Jdeideh when he was boxed in by two cars. the first slammed on its brakes causing Gemayel to crash into it, while the second car pinned Gemayla's vehicle from behind. Gunmen fired a minimum of 14 shots.

Like Rafik Hariri who was assassinated in a car bombing on February 14, 2005, Pierre Gemayel was anti-Syrian.

Reaction:

Wael Abu Faour, an anti-Syrian lawmaker, told Al-Jazeera, "We directly accuse the Syrian regime of assassinating Gemayel and hold (Syrian) President Bashar Assad responsible for this assassination ... aimed at sending Lebanon into a civil war."

In an interview with CNN, Saad Hariri, Rafik's son and leader of the anti-Syrian parliamentary majority, implicitly blamed Damascus, saying, "We believe the hand of Syria is all over the place." He said Gemayel was "a friend, a brother to all of us" and appeared to break down after saying: "we will bring justice to all those who killed him."

Gemayel's death came hours before a deadline for the U.N. Security Council to approve a letter endorsing an agreement with Lebanon to create a tribunal to prosecute Rafik Hariri's suspected killers.

It is suspected that top officials in the Syrian government, perhaps even Syrian dictator Bashar Assad himself, may be implicated in ordering Hariri's 2005 murder.

While any assassination of an anti-Syrian politician in Lebanon is suspicious, the timing of the Gemayel murder is incredibly explosive, and perhaps that was the intention.

In addition to the implicit warning the assassination sends to those who would endorse the U.N. tribunal, the murder comes just days before planned Hezbollah protests aimed at toppling the Lebanese government. The government could also be toppled with the death or resignation of one more minister of the Lebanese cabinet. As Michael Totten notes, "Looks like the coup d'etat is in progress." Indeed, an attempt was made on the life of Michel Pharaon, the minister of state from parliamentary affairs just hours before Gemayel's murder.

The U.S government had only recently accused Syria and Iran of plotting to overthrow the Lebanese government, and a U.S. State Department official, Nicholas Burns, stated, "We will give full support to the Saniora government in the days and weeks ahead."

This begs the question: what kind of support does the United States have to offer a Lebanese government on the brink of collapse?

Note: As always, Allahpundit provides the roundup.

Unseasonably Cruel

And thus is the human cost of hatred.

A joint U.S. Iraqi raid into the Sadr City slums of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army led to a firefight between coalition forces and Mahdi Army militiamen. The fighting was intense enough that an air strike was called in on a building from which the militiamen were firing, leading to the deaths of this boy's younger brother and two others, the wounding of 15, and the capture of 7 militiamen, one of which is believed to have taken part in the kidnapping of a still-missing American soldier.

The Mahdi Army is one of the most active factions in the on-going sectarian violence in Baghdad, responsible for the kidnapping, torture, and murder of hundreds (if not thousands) of Iraqi Sunnis. The militiamen--likely his own relatives considering the fact that Iraqis tend to live in family compounds--attempted to use his home as a bunker. Of course, that doesn't matter to this child. He only knows that his baby brother is dead.

It's easy to sling blame around.

He and the rest of his family will likely grow up hating the United States and the Iraqi government troops that participated in this raid. It is highly unlikely that they will acknowledge their own far greater culpability.

Their neighborhood was raided because coalition forces were acting on intelligence that kidnappers and murderous thugs lived there, and these same thugs--perhaps his own father, brothers, uncles, or cousins--likely kidnapped, tortured and murdered fellow Iraqis, and then were daft enough to try to fight coalition forces from a home with children inside. While U.S. air support pulled the trigger on the munitions that killed his brother, the militiamen in their midst, firing at U.S. and Iraqi forces, caused that trigger to be pulled. They can add their own young relative to their body count. They will not stop for a second to think about the fact that they have likely caused the same trauma in loss in Sunni families just blocks or miles away.

Compounding the loss and magnifying the lessons unlearned are fellow Shiites like legislator Saleh Al-Ukailli.

"I am suspending my membership in parliament since it remains silent about crimes such as this against the Iraqi people," legislator Saleh Al-Ukailli told reporters outside the Imam Ali Hospital. "I will not return to parliament until the occupation troops leave the country."

Al-Ukailli is one of 30 legislators in Iraq's 275-member parliament who follow Muqtada al-Sadr, the anti-American Shiite cleric whose main offices are in Sadr City.

Al-Ukailli could care less about "crimes... against the Iraqi people."

Like far too many Sadr loyalists in the Iraqi government, he seems to harbor no concerns about the crimes his fellow Shia perpetrate, and only professes outrage once they are forced to account for their own depravity. Left to their own devices, such men would continue to turn a blind eye to the slaughter of Sunnis and Kurds, as long as it suits his purpose. I have little doubt that men such as Al-Ukailli turn a blind eye when Sunni children have their fathers and brothers slaughtered. They are democratically elected, but still do not understand democracy, nor freedom, nor compromise.

* * *

And so here in America, over broadband networks in climate-controlled comfort, in a far more stable environment, we still carp over why we went to war, and when we should leave, and whether or not the cost we are paying as a nation is too high. We see things all too often through our own warped prisms, playing politics as children die.

"We caused this! Out of Iraq NOW!"

This is the cry I hear from many, every day, from both the political left which feels we never should have been there, and from moderates and many of those on the right who now feel our continued presence is a mistake. Our costs--1.7 lives a day--are too much for our mercilessly civilized post-modern sensibilities.

And yet we know the ugly secret, don't we?

We know that for every tragic loss of an American soldier, sailor, airman or marine in Iraq, Iraqi soldiers, policemen, and civilians pay a far higher price. We know that comparatively, our costs are few.

In a nation under severe internal strife, brave men in Iraq still show up at recruiting stations to become policemen and soldiers. They have nowhere to return to, nowhere to run, and have a simple choice; become a victor, or become a victim. In Ramadi, the capital of the al-Anbar province and long a stronghold of Sunni insurgents and al Qaeda terrorists, the Sahawa, or the Awakening, has come. Sunni tribesmen formerly allied with the insurgency are swelling police ranks, capturing and killing foreign terrorists and native-born anti-Iraqi forces alike. In Ramadi, it appears the Iraqis have shed enough blood to appreciate and crave both stability and freedom. It is slow going, but progress is being made day by day.

Will we eventually see that same yearning for stability, freedom, and peace in a far more complex Baghdad? History tells us that all wars eventually end as a matter of will or a matter of eradication. One side must either be utterly destroyed, or its will to fight must be. This is equally true in both conventional and asymmetrical warfare, one of which the U.S. military has won convincingly in Iraq, and the other, which must eventually be won or lost by the Iraqi people themselves.

The purpose of U.S. forces in Iraq is not to conclusively defeat the various anti-Iraqi factions, but to provide training and material support to Iraqi government forces so that they can win the war. At the same time, we seek to destabilize anti-Iraqi forces and help to provide an environment where political and social change can take root, as we are now seeing in Ramadi and elsewhere.

Our military does not need to "go big" in Iraq, but it does need to "go long," one of the things the Bush Administration has called correctly. We do not need more troops, but we need to utilize the soldiers we do have to train Iraqi forces and provide support for them as necessary in "the long war" to stamp out the insurgency by breaking the enemy's will to fight over time.

Part of that support will be engaging in raids that will on occasion lead to civilian deaths, especially when these civilians harbor anti-Iraqi forces of various stripes. If we don't mature enough to accept the fact that some innocents die in war, then the abandonment policy favored by some will certainly lead to far more civilian deaths through a far more violent civil war and a potential genocide. You can pay a blood debt of comparatively few lives now by continuing the mission, or set the stage for an even bloodier Iraqi future by withdrawing.

This is a cold, hard fact that few on the left will address or even admit. War is cruel by nature, but to abandon an ally while the conflict rages would be the cruelest atrocity of all.

Final Destination

Deja vu, all over again:

Six passengers were removed from a departing flight Monday at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and were taken for questioning by police, an airport spokesman said.

The passengers were boarding US Airways Flight 300, bound for Phoenix, around 6:30 p.m. when crew members "saw suspicious activity" by the men and called airport police, said the spokesman, Pat Hogan. Police escorted the men off the plane and took them to be questioned, he said.

A passenger initially raised concerns about the group through a note passed to a flight attendant, said Andrea Rader, a spokeswoman for US Airways. Police were called after the men refused requests by the captain and airport security workers to leave the plane.

The crew described the men as Middle Eastern in appearance, Hogan said, though he didn't immediately know where they were from.

This came just days after Sisayehiticha Dinssa was arrested at Detroit Metropolitan Airport with $79,000 in cash and a computer containing information about nuclear materials and cyanide. He was also traveling to Phoenix.

What might all these suspicious characters be headed for Phoenix?

Old habits die hard.

Leftist Nut Declares Himself President

Interestingly enough, unemployed Latin American studies professors are a big part of the leftist base in this country, as well.

Charlie Rangel's Botched Joke

The furor and continued non-apology over John Kerry's "stuck in Iraq" comment have just subsided, and now New York Democrat Charles Rangel attempts to leverage an equally insulting draft recommendation in an attempt to raise an anti-war cry, using a call for compulsory service in the U.S. military as a wedge issue:

Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) has long advocated returning to the draft, but his efforts drew little attention during the 12 years that House Democrats were in the minority. Starting in January, however, he will chair the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. Yesterday he said "you bet your life" he will renew his drive for a draft.

"I will be introducing that bill as soon as we start the new session," Rangel said on CBS's "Face the Nation." He portrayed the draft, suspended since 1973, as a means of spreading military obligations more equitably and prompting political leaders to think twice before starting wars.

"There's no question in my mind that this president and this administration would never have invaded Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm's way," said Rangel, a Korean War veteran. "If we're going to challenge Iran and challenge North Korea and then, as some people have asked, to send more troops to Iraq, we can't do that without a draft."

Lets be very, very clear: Charles Rangel doesn't give a damn about the "equitably" of service in our nation's military, which to date, is over-represented by soldiers who are more rural, wealthy, and better educated than their peers. He instead clings to often disproven lies that the military is disproportionately made up of minorities and the poor.

Rangel willingly lies, but lies with a purpose.

What doubtlessly disappoints Mr. Rangel is that though Americans do not support the direction of the War in Iraq (as was evidenced in the recent election), they have refused to engage in the massive protests and demonstrations that were key to the anti-war campaign during the Vietnam era. Rangel's primary goal in his call to reinstate the draft is to gin up protests like those of 30 years ago.

Rangel's tactics are particularly loathsome in that he seeks to use our all-volunteer military as the whipping boy for his anti-war politics. He would attempt to pit draft-age Americans and their family members against those who honorably joined the military of their own volition.

I have nothing but contempt for Rangel's transparent demagoguery. He does not wish to strengthen America's proud all-volunteer military, but instead seeks to lessen its will, against its wishes, and against its needs.

Rangel's call to reinstate the draft is cynical, unwanted, and like Kerry's comments before, a back-handed slap at those who serve our nation of their own free will.

Advocating Assured Destruction

It appears Jules Crittenden agrees with the general theory I wrote about Friday in Another Direction , where I advocated making Iran and Syria "feel the pain" for being active state sponsors of terrorism. Crittenden writes:

An erroneous assumption has been made by the Iranians and by many in the west that because our ground forces are hyper-extended in Iraq, and Iranian nuke facilities are buried deep, there is nothing the United States can do about an Iranian nuclear program. This is not true. There is no need to invade or occupy Iran. We do not want to do that. We would prefer to see the Iranian people's desire for free elections honored, but that doesn't appear likely any time soon.

What we have to do to influence Iran is explain that if Iran does not begin to cooperate with the international community, we will substantially isolate Iran and destroy its means of supporting terrorism and pursuing nuclear weapons. This can be done incrementally, to give the Iranians an opportunity to reconsider their policy. Our Navy, not hyper-extended in Iraq, can blockade their ports. Our Air Force, also not hyper-extended in Iraq, can begin reducing their terrorist-support infrastructure. Things like oil fields, refineries and roads leading toward Syria and suspected nuclear sites. This can continue ... pretty much as long as the Iranians want it too.

While I didn't specify it, it was primarily U.S. Air Force and Naval air power I had in mind when I advocated the reduction of Iran's naval and marine forces. Single strikes with precision munitions could destroy their few corvettes and frigates (their three destroyers are so useless they aren't worth wasting bombs on), and their remaining fleet, which is composed of patrol boats and number small craft, would be easily destroyed with cluster munitions. Only their small marine outposts near the Straits of Hormuz may require SpecOps insertions, and that is purely speculative. Air power alone may suffice.

The other targets, the oil fields, refineries, roads, and nuclear sites, are clearly air power targets that Iran is nearly defenseless against, even with the purchase of the low-to-medium altitude TOR-1 SAMs from Russia.

I've said it before and I will say it again and again because it bears repeating: terrorism will only be supported by states for as long as they see it as a cost-effective way to achieve their foreign policy goals. When the cost of supporting terrorism becomes too high, the state support of terrorism will cease or be greatly curtailed, making it far more difficult for terrorist groups in Iraq, Lebanon, and Gaza to survive.

Update: I missed this earlier, but even the L.A. Times is getting on the bomb Iran bandwagon:

If Tehran establishes dominance in the region, then the battlefield might move to Southeast Asia or Africa or even parts of Europe, as the mullahs would try to extend their sway over other Muslim peoples. In the end, we would no doubt win, but how long this contest might last and what toll it might take are anyone's guess.

The only way to forestall these frightening developments is by the use of force. Not by invading Iran as we did Iraq, but by an air campaign against Tehran's nuclear facilities. We have considerable information about these facilities; by some estimates they comprise about 1,500 targets. If we hit a large fraction of them in a bombing campaign that might last from a few days to a couple of weeks, we would inflict severe damage. This would not end Iran's weapons program, but it would certainly delay it.

What should be the timing of such an attack? If we did it next year, that would give time for U.N. diplomacy to further reveal its bankruptcy yet would come before Iran will have a bomb in hand (and also before our own presidential campaign). In time, if Tehran persisted, we might have to do it again.

Can President Bush take such action after being humiliated in the congressional elections and with the Iraq war having grown so unpopular? Bush has said that history's judgment on his conduct of the war against terror is more important than the polls. If Ahmadinejad gets his finger on a nuclear trigger, everything Bush has done will be rendered hollow. We will be a lot less safe than we were when Bush took office.

Finally, wouldn't such a U.S. air attack on Iran inflame global anti-Americanism? Wouldn't Iran retaliate in Iraq or by terrorism? Yes, probably. That is the price we would pay. But the alternative is worse.

After the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in 1917, a single member of Britain's Cabinet, Winston Churchill, appealed for robust military intervention to crush the new regime. His colleagues weighed the costs — the loss of soldiers, international derision, revenge by Lenin — and rejected the idea.

The costs were avoided, and instead the world was subjected to the greatest man-made calamities ever. Communism itself was to claim perhaps 100 million lives, and it also gave rise to fascism and Nazism, leading to World War II. Ahmadinejad wants to be the new Lenin. Force is the only thing that can stop him.

Are we beginning to detect a theme, folks? Iran will not comply with economic or political pressure, and so the remaining option is military in nature, and that military option is best expresses in an air power war again key Iranian targets.

One thing that these men are leaving out, however, is what may happen as a result of air strikes targeting Iran's nuclear facilities and other infrastructure sites.

Critics of such an attack would point out that as a result, Hezbollah and Hamas would like begin another intense rocket campaign on Israel.

I think this is entirely correct, and entirely beside the point.

Despite all the bluster over Hezbollah's last war with Israel earlier this year, Israel suffered very few casualties. I think the figure was just 157 deaths, most of them soldiers, in Lebanon. In opposition, Hezbollah lost as many as half of their armed fighters in southern Lebanon, and their infrastructure was wrecked. Hamas and Hezbollah can indeed launch attacks, but the retaliatory strikes from Israel will certainly cause more damage.

More troubling is the thought that an attack on Iran may trigger and Iranian ground invasion of Iraq. Iran has a military of more than 300,000, most of then conscripts, and they have long-range rockets that may cause significant Iraqi civilian casualties.

That said, any Iranian ground invasion of Iraq would be suicidal for the Iranian troops involved. They have no air cover to speak of, and the invasion would result in a larger scale repeat of 1991's Highway of Death as they are decimated by U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy bombers. Such a crushing loss could hurt the mullahcracy, and so even as fanatical as they are, they would most likely not go this route. Iran wages asymmetrical terrorist campaign precisely to avoid the crushing losses their over-hyped military would take on a modern battlefield.

It increasingly appears that our best option for lasting peace in Iraq and the wider Middle East is a conventional air campaign to reduce Iran's asymmetrical warfare capabilities.

Another Direction

John Donovan at Argghhh! reposts an email from a Captain in Iraq that understands what it takes to win the war in Iraq (I highly suggest reading the post in its entirety):

Massive firepower brought down on any transgressor is the answer. Sometimes you need to use a sledgehammer to crack a walnut if you want people to pay attention and learn the correct lessons in life. If an IED blows up outside someones house and the homeowners tell you that they don't know anything about, bulldoze the house and salt the ground. After you do that two or three times, Iraqis will shoot the terrorists themselves to protect their homes. I realize that this may not be totally in keeping with some people's concept of "the American way of war", but if we are in it to win it, we need to take all the steps required to totally destroy the terrorists ability to make war on us and turn the population against them. Right now, because of our kid glove approach, there is no threat to the average Iraqi that helps the terrorists or turns a blind eye. We have to make it painful to the point that the Iraqi people say, "These Americans are serious about winning and they won't stop until they have won."

This comment indirectly highlights a current failure of the Bush Administration that I've heard elsewhere; the President has been trying to win in Iraq without committing to really fighting a war.

Let our soldiers use their massive advantages in firepower, training, and communications to take the fight to the enemy. Quit trying to fight a "nice" war. Such weakness does not result in a victory; to win a war the other side must realize that they cannot hope to win. It should go without saying, but if the other side doesn't feel defeated, then it isn't be defeated. Enable our soldiers to rely on their training and instincts and remove the overly cumbersome rules of engagement that restrict our soldiers to the point they are fighting a defensive war.

Towards that same end, and picking up where I left off in the previous post, Syria and Iran need to be made to feel the pain for their continued state support of terrorism.

Countries like Iran and Syria support terrorism because the see it as a cost-effective way of projecting foreign policy. We have the capability—economic, political, and military—to make this support extremely counter-productive.

In Syria's case, Assad's regime is particularly vulnerable to economic and political, particularly is Iran is dealt with first.

Iran, with much more strategic importance and a larger and more modern military, is a tough nut to crack, but indeed, one that can be cracked. Orson Scott Card makes a good suggestion when he mentions taking our Iran's capability to threaten Persian Gulf shipping.

The five ships operating in Iran's Navy—two corvettes and three frigates—are obsolete and barely functional, and are almost only symbolic in value. The 69 patrol craft making up the rest of their fleet stationed at six naval bases are highly vulnerable to air attack. Considering that the Persian Gulf is extremely shallow (averaging a depth of just 50 meters), their few submarines, which only have mine-laying (no torpedo or cruise missile) capability are also little more than targets.

Other Iranian facilities, including naval and marine forces stations at small Iranian-held islands and abandoned oil platforms along international sea lanes, could also be quickly overwhelmed or destroyed.

Break Iran's ability to influence or control the flow of shipping in the Persian Gulf, and you've essentially removed Iran's greatest political bargaining chip outside of their fledgling nuclear program.

Declare to Iran and the world that the destruction of their ersatz fleet was consistent with Article 51 of the U.N. Charter and in direct response to Iran's supplying the Medhi Army with Iranian-made munitions used to attack U.S forces in Iraq.

Remind Iran that continued support of Shia insurgencies in Iraq would be grounds for further attacks on more vulnerable targets, including Iran's nuclear program.

Iran is far more vulnerable and fragile than it's blustery rhetoric supposes, and it seems time to remind them that the continued support of terrorism does not come without an intolerably high price, and one that we are willing to make them pay.

What a Strange Way to Wage a War

Josh Manchester of The Adventures of Chester has a warning posted at TCS Daily:

Iraq is dangerous. Progress is measured in weeks and inches, not minutes and miles. It is weakly governed when governed at all. But to leave too early will be to compound these seemingly intractable attributes with the most deadly of sins: a failure of willpower. The world will know that when Iraq becomes the next Taliban-like state, or the next Rwanda, that it was only because the United States, the most able, powerful, and wealthy nation in the history of the world, gave up. If that disturbs you, imagine how much it delights our adversaries.

One can only hope that the moderate Democrats that panned Nancy Pelosi's choice of John Murtha yesterday in favor of Steny Hoyer are listening.

The Pelosi/Rangel/Levin/Kucinich wing of the Democratic Party has proven to be incredibly short-sighted, still thinking of the Iraq War as a tool to bludgeon President Bush and the Republican Party. They patently ignore the expected increased civilian deaths and possible genocide their short-sighted policy of withdrawal promise for the near-term, and the political damage that a retreat from Iraq would cause to the United States for decades to come.

Quite frankly, I'd opine that they care more about beating Bush than what is best for this nation, or for Iraq.

I challenge liberals, in all good faith, to explain how a near-term withdrawal from Iraq before the nation is stabilized will accomplish:

• Making Iraq safe for Iraqis;
• Anything other than convincing Islamists that terrorism is the best way to effect their will;
• Anything other than making all nations around the world consider the United States to be a fickle, unreliable ally

Please, step up and tell us how abandoning Iraq will be seen as anything other than "open season" to Sunni terrorist and insurgents, and Shiite militias and criminal gangs. Iraq is bad now, so what effect do you think that removing the 140,000 best trained and equipped soldiers in the country will have, other than an marked increase in chaos and bloodshed? For a liberal left that claims to care so much about the plight of people in third world regions, they seem all to willing to sell the Iraqi people down the river to genocide.

Please, tell us why the terrorists that overwhelming cheered for Democratic victories in the mid-terms should view a withdrawal from Iraq as anything other than a validation of their tactics and assumptions of how to best to conquer the world.

Iran is watching. Syria is watching. Hezbollah and Hamas are watching, as are dozens of other terrorists groups, as well as every nation in the world. What other message could they possibly receive from a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, other than that a fierce depravity is the best way to ensure they get what they desire?

No, now is not a time to withdraw. It is a time to explain the stakes of this war to the American people, and rededicate this nation to winning the War in Iraq as one part of the overall War on Terror.

There can be no lasting peace through withdrawal.

Update: Via Instapundit, Investor's Business Daily has similar thoughts.

Update: via Hot Air, Democrat Orson Scott Card lays it out on the line:

The only issue that matters is still the War on Terror. Everybody talks about changing direction in Iraq. I agree. But I doubt they mean the same thing I do.

The only ways to change direction in Iraq are to give up and go home – a militarily stupid and morally indefensible move – or to go to the source of the insurgents' supply and cut it off.

Throughout this election season I have been hoping that President Bush had a bold military move against Iran up his sleeve, and that the only reason he was holding off was that he didn't want it to be perceived as an attempt to influence the election – or because he feared it would influence the election negatively.

Well, the election is over. Will he take the necessary military action to wipe out Iran's capability to disrupt the flow of oil in the Gulf? This would remove any credible threat from Iran (for the moment, at least), making it clear to both Iran and Syria that the way is now open for the US to take whatever action is necessary to stop their support of both terrorism and the subset of terrorism called "the Iraq insurgency."

The way to save the lives of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians in Iraq is to get regime change in Iran and Syria.

Let's hope his fellow Democrats follow his advice.

Thank You Sir, May I Have Another?

SS/DD.

So much for Darwin's "survivial of the fittest."

Priceless

Despite my general dislike of CNN, I've got to hand it to them; they really got this perfect, both photo and headline.

Nancy's steaming, Murtha's pouting, and Hoyer's preening. Oh what a fun Congress this promises to be.

I somehow doubt that any of us outside the Beltway fully understand what kind of damage Nancy Pelosi has done to her credibility within the Democrat ranks over the past few days. She may find a way to earn that trust back, but I suspect it won't come easy.

As others have noted (h/t Hot Air), Pelosi's lobbying for Murtha against Hoyer seemed from the outset to be a very petty and personal vendetta that might alienate many of the moderate Democrats that just won power two weeks ago.

With the final vote for Majority Leader coming out 149-86 in Hoyer's favor, we seem to be witnessing a potential fragmentation of the Democratic Party. The liberal leadership which now firmly holds the Speaker's post and seems primed to take over the majority of the key committee assignments is ideologically at odds with an incoming group of Congressional freshman that on average, are far more moderate in their views.

Update: Denial:

And don't shed any tears for Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi. Even though her guy lost, this was still a big win for her. A victory for taking a stand -- and for her leadership. Because that's what real leaders do, they take stands. They listen to their hearts and follow their gut. If you only jump into the fights you're sure you can win -- notches in the W column that will look good on your political resume -- you're a hack, not someone who can move the party and the country forward. It's not about trying to have a spotless record; it's about knowing which battles are worth fighting, whatever the outcome.

It bodes well for Pelosi that was willing to spend her political capital right off the bat -- especially on the issue that will define her time at the helm. Far too many modern politicians save their political capital until it's lost all its value.

Arianna? Pelosi's already running a deficit.

Not by the Hair of His Chinny-Chin-Chin

Rumors have long swirled that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was involved the 444-day Iran hostage crisis, with no less than five hostages coming forward to accuse him publicly of being one of the ringleaders. Other former hostages have said they were uncertain if Ahmadinejad was involved, while others deny his presence.

From time to time the story reemerges with a new twist, and this time that twist was provided by Russian online daily Kommersant, which ran an English-language article with accompanying pictures that seem to show a young Ahmadinejad leaning against the wall of the American embassy in Tehran the day it was stormed.

Texas Rainmaker is convinced that the man in the photo is Ahmadinejad, while Daniel Pipes isn't sure, and Allah flatly says it isn't the Iranian president.

Who's right?

I decided to see if I could get a professional to weigh in on the controversy, and so I sent a short email to several forensic photographers and biometrics experts asking their opinions, based upon the version of side-by-side comparison photo provided at Hot Air.

Certified Forensic Photographer Alexander Jason responded. His verdict?

With the one 1979 photo alone for comparison, it is not possible to make a strong conclusion about that man being the same man in the later photo. However, based upon an analysis of the 1979 photo and other, recent photos of Ahmadinejad, it is my preliminary conclusion that these are NOT the same person.

Some time ago, I was asked by a governmental group to perform an analysis of similar old and new photos. I still had a collection of the recent photos and I used some of them for my analysis.

While there are substantial similarities in the faces and hairlines, it is possible to have such similarities among different people, particularly when they are from a relatively homogenous racial population. The only significant difference I could detect was in the beard grown pattern: Specifically in the area beneath the lower lip. In the older photo, the man appears to have a dense, full beard in that area. In more recent photos of Ahmadinejad, he appears to have relatively sparse beard growth in that area. For that reason, based on the one old photo when compared against more recent photos, it is my opinion that they are two different people.

See the attached image.

Mr. Jason's well-trained eye caught what most of us would have missed. The armed man leaning against the embassy wall in November of 1979 has much more facial hair in the chin area than does Ahmadinejad in the present day photograph. And just in case anyone wants to speculate that Ahmadinejad could have suffered from male pattern chin baldness over time, Mr. Jason has that covered as well.

We may never know who the man with the battle rifle leaning against the U.S. embassy wall in 1979 was, but based upon the photo provided by Kommersant and Mr. Jason's analysis, that man is not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

* * *

On an unrelated note, Mr. Jason also has an interesting perspective on the JFK assassination.

Who says those working in forensics can't have a sense of humor?

Who Needs Jews, Anyway?

Ralph Peters penned a powerful editorial in this morning's New York Post advocating that the strongest measures be taken to impose order in Iraq, even if that order goes against the wishes of Iraq's elected government and comes at the barrel of a gun:

With the situation in Iraq deteriorating daily, sending more troops would simply offer our enemies more targets - unless we decided to use our soldiers and Marines for the primary purpose for which they exist: To fight.

Of course, we've made a decisive shift in our behavior difficult. After empowering a sectarian regime before imposing order in the streets, we would have to defy an elected government. Leading voices in the Baghdad regime - starting with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki - would demand that we halt any serious effort to defeat Shia militias and eliminate their death squads.

[snip]

From the Iraqi perspective, we're of less and less relevance. They're sure we'll leave. And every faction is determined to do as much damage as possible to the other before we go. Our troops have become human shields for our enemies.

To master Iraq now - if it could be done - we'd have to fight every faction except the Kurds. Are we willing to do that? Are we willing to kill mass murderers and cold-blooded executioners on the spot?

[snip]

Our "humanity" is cowardice masquerading as morality. We're protecting self-appointed religious executioners with our emphasis on a "universal code of behavior" that only exists in our fantasies. By letting the thugs run the streets, we've abandoned the millions of Iraqis who really would prefer peaceful lives and a modicum of progress.

We're blind to the fundamental moral travesty in Iraq (and elsewhere): Spare the killers in the name of human rights, and you deprive the overwhelming majority of the population of their human rights. Instead of being proud of ourselves for our "moral superiority," we should be ashamed to the depths of our souls.

We're not really the enemy of the terrorists, militiamen and insurgents. We're their enablers. In the end, the future of Iraq will be determined by its people. The question is, which people?

While Peters discusses Iraq specifically, much of what he says—particularly of our fantasy of a "universal code of behavior" and our enablement of terrorists—can be more or less directly applied to the budding nuclear terrorist state of Iran.

Iran has already developed long-range missiles that can reach Israel and most of Western Europe, and they are in the process of developing ICBMs capable of hitting the United States. Iran is also in the possession of MIRV warheads to sit atop these missiles designed to deliver a nuclear payload.

At the same time as they refine the technology to deliver nuclear warheads, the Iranian leadership has clearly and repeatedly threatened the existence of Israel, and has indeed stated that they are more than willing to accept a retaliatory nuclear strike if it means eliminating the Jewish state, as Ron Rosenbaum recounts this morning at Pajamas Media:

Back in 2002 I initiated a major controversy among Jewish writers by daring to mention the possibility of a “second Holocaust”—-the destruction of the State of Israel, most likely through a nuclear exchange. I quoted Iranian mullah Hashemi Rasfanjani declaring that Iran would not be particularly upset to lose 10 or 15 million people in a nuclear exchange with Israel if it resulted in the extermination of 5 million Jews there and left a billion or more Muslims alive. Basically he was saying that there was no deterrence. Many didn’t want to face this, think the unthinkable and whined that one shouldn’t say such things aloud, one shouldn’t think so pessimistically, foolishly boasting of the Israeli nuclear deterrent Rasfanjani’s stance made irrelevant. (You can read about this controversy in the anthology of essays on anti-semitism I edited, Those Who Forget the Past).

Alas a Second Holocaust is now virtually Iranian state policy.(although their leader denies the firs tone). Today Drudge links to a report that Iran’s nuclear program is nearly complete. And to a speech by Bibi Netanyahu in Los Angeles in which he says “It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany”. He then adds the despairing “No one cared then. No one cares now.”

The problem is that even if the world did care, it might not make a difference.

Despite repeated threats against Israel's very survival in specific and that of the rest of the world in general, Iran has been allowed to push through with their nation's nuclear program without any serious attempts by the world community to stop them.

Have we, as a world community, decided that the state of Israel and the more than 6 million Jews, Christians, and Arabs who live there and the almost 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are superfluous? Judging by the anemic actions of the world community, I think Rosenbuam's suggestion that the world—including the government of the United States—does not care that Iran seems to have every intention of attempting to "wipe Israel off the map" is entirely correct.

Certainly, we will all feel really bad when Iran carries through with it's threat, but that sentiment will do very little for the 15-20 million people that will have died in the coming nuclear exchange while we stood by watching, unbelieving that the Iranians would do precisely what they told us they would.

Have we chosen to abandon them to this fate? Have we already forgotten in such a few generations that we stood solemly amid the blood and ashes and swore "Never again?"

Let's rewrite one of the Peter's paragraphs above:

Our "humanity" is cowardice masquerading as morality. We're protecting self-appointed religious executioners with our emphasis on a "universal code of behavior" that only exists in our fantasies. By letting the thugs run the streets, we've abandoned the millions of Iraqis Israelis who really would prefer peaceful lives and a modicum of progress.

We're blind to the fundamental moral travesty in Iraq Iran (and elsewhere): Spare the killers in the name of human rights, and you deprive the overwhelming majority of the population of their human rights. Instead of being proud of ourselves for our "moral superiority," we should be ashamed to the depths of our souls.

We're not really the enemy of the terrorists, militiamen and insurgents. We're their enablers. In the end, the future of Iraq the world will be determined by its people. The question is, which people?

Which people, indeed.

Does a mullahcracy intent on exterminating more than six million people (along with 10-15 million of their own citizens as a result of Israel's dying retaliatory strike) get to choose the future of this world through nuclear genocide? Or do we make the difficult and deadly decision to end the mullacracy’s reign, crushing their nuclear aspirations and their leadership before they can carry out their intentions?

Our choice of genocides is amazingly simple: we either wipe out Iran's apocalyptic Hojjatieh mullacracy (perhaps thousands or tens of thousands of lives) and their budding nuclear weapons capability and delivery systems, or we will watch on as horror as our inaction leads to the fiery deaths of tens of millions, including 6 million Jews, 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and 10-15 million Iranians.

Rosenbaum is wrong when he says that we might not make a difference. We clearly can make a difference, but much to our shame, I fear that we will choose not to.

Note: More here.

Ouch

It's been barely a week since the 2006 midterms, and WaPo Ruth Marcus is wasting no time on judging Nancy Pelosi's leadership thus far.

Her grade for Pelosi for stating she would "lead the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history," and then backing John "Abscam" Murtha for House majority leader?

Not Good.

The Potomac's Not River In Egypt

Harold Meyerson has a particularly odd editorial posted this morning in the Washington Post, insisting conservatives are in denial:

On their journey through the stages of grief, conservatives don't yet seem to have gotten past denial.

Republicans may have lost, conservatives argue, but only because they misplaced their ideology. "[T]hey were punished not for pursuing but for forgetting conservatism," George F. Will, conservatism's most trenchant champion, wrote on this page last week.

Their mortal sin, in this gospel, was their abandonment of fiscal prudence.

They doffed their green eyeshades and gushed red ink. "The greatest scandal in Washington, D.C., is runaway federal spending," said Indiana Rep. Mike Pence, the true-blue conservative who is challenging Ohio's John Boehner for the post of House Republican leader.

Holding conservatism blameless for last week's Republican debacle may stiffen conservative spines, but the very idea is the product of mushy conservative brains unwilling to acknowledge the obvious: that conservatism has never been more ascendant than during George Bush's presidency; that the Republican Party over the past six years moved well to the right of the American people on social, economic and foreign policy; and that on Nov. 7 the American people chose a more pragmatic course.

I bed to differ with Mr. Meyerson, on several points. First, while there are doubtlessly some conservatives in denial about why Republicans lost, it seems most of those reside inside the Beltway. From the Rove-influenced push for an ineffectual Mel Martinez to be RNC Chair, to an all-but-rigged push to install the same failed leadership into power on Capital Hill, it is the Beltway drones that seem to be in denial over why Republicans lost, not the rank and file conservatives in the rest of the country.

Denial is a stage of grief that most conservatives that I have come in contact with (either online or in person) skipped right past. In fact, most conservatives seem to have been rather pragmatic and have avoided the grief process altogether.

If you want to see an acute application of political grief for comparison, I suggest you instead look to prominent liberal personalities after the 2000 and 2004 elections.

Michael Moore was so depressed by Bush's 2004 win that he couldn't get out of bed for three days. Actor Vincent "Private Pyle" D'Onofrio "Lost his ****" and had to be treated by paramedics because of Bush's 2004 win.

Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder, actor Alec Baldwin, former Kennedy Press Secretary Pierre Salinger and film director Robert Altman were just some of the liberal voices who were confirmed to have said they would leave the United States because of electoral results, though Salinger was the only one to follow through on his "threat."

Some liberal in past elections were so distraught over past elections that new psychological conditions were the result, with the serious Post Election Selection Trauma and satirical Bush Derangement Syndrome as a result.

No, Mr. Meyerson, most conservatives outside the Beltway were disappointed with the results of the election, but we understood why we lost.

The nation is unhappy with the way the War in Iraq is being fought. The nation is disgusted with greed in the form of pork-barrel politics symbolized by the Bridge to Nowhere, and runaway federal spending a Republican Congress and President supported. The nation was dismayed with how slowly and ineffectively the federal government reacted in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and by corruption both financial and sexual as personified by Jack Abramoff and Mark Foley. Immigration and stem cell controversies also alienated voters.

As for Meyerson's asinine statement, "that conservatism has never been more ascendant than during George Bush's presidency" I have but a simple two-word reply: Ronald Reagan.

But for all that Mr. Meyerson got wrong in his fundamental misunderstanding of the conservative mind, he did get something right when he concluded that Republicans ran a 2006 campaign "devoid of new ideas."

Hopefully, the conservative base will be able to reverse that course in elections to come.

Time Magazine Complicit In Fauxtography Scandal

Heads should roll.

Early on in the Lebanon war, there was a photograph published by both U.S. News and World Report and Time Magazine, which according to captions published with the picture was of a burning Israeli jet, shot down by Hezbullah missiles. The blogosphere was quick to call B.S. on the photo, and the widely-circulated story was that the photograph was actually that of a tire dump.

Well, it seems that the photographer responsible for taking the photograph, Bruno Stevens, has finally sounded off on Lightstalkers, explaining the photograph and telling the true story of how things ended up the way they did. He also notes that the site was not a tire dump, but was rather an old Lebanese Army base that had either been hit by an Israeli jet, or by a misfired Hezbullah rocket (both possibilites he appears to have recounted in his original captions). The key point that Bruno makes is that, while he sent in a fairly balanced caption to accompany the photograph, the wire services rewrote the caption completely, changing the pertinent facts surrounding the story. Where have we heard that before?

As Ace notes in his post on the subject:

That makes three representations thusfar by Time:

1) Hezbollah did not score a huge victory by shooting down an IAF jet.

2) The target was clearly legitimate.

3) Not only was this a legitimate Hezbollah target, it was parked on a Lebanese Army base, demonstrating cooperation between the Lebanese Government -- depicted as an innocent and abused third-party to this conflict by the media.

To compound the magazine's duplicity, Time refused to run a different picture that showed a Hezbollah rocket launcher disguised as a civilian truck on a Lebanese Army base.

To put it mildly, Time editors mislead their readers, and while I'm not a lawyer, this journalistic malpractice would certainly seem to meet at least a layman's understanding of fraud, if not something worse.

Why would Time do something so risky, so dishonest, so stupid?

As I wrote back in August, follow the money:

Story after story, photo after photo, dead and distraught Lebanese civilians clog the mediastream, building a false, grim montage of a war in which primarily Israeli soldiers and Lebanese civilians die.

This is not the whole truth of this war, but a partial truth developed through complacency and an apparent willful disregard to report the facts on the ground. Instead of seeking and publishing the entire truth, newsrooms have decided that they will publish the stories and images framed by foreign, mostly Arab Muslim reporters, even though their own cultural interests in these events are a clear and undeniable conflict of interest precluding even a pretense of unbiased reporting.

This is beyond bias, it is a reckless and willful disregard for reporting the whole truth in favor of reporting "news" that is easier to sell in a larger world media market. The casualty statistics are there, but the media sticks to the narrative they have helped create because while honest reporting is a goal, the business of the media business is business.

If it "bleeds it leads," but only if what leads sells advertising. News consumers around the world consume the news that more closely matches their perceptions of how reality should be, and stories critical of Hezbollah, stories that show their failures and deaths, don't sell in world population featuring 1.3 billion Muslims that hope for Israel's demise, or at the very best are indifferent to their fate. It is anti-Semitism by cashflow, a pocketbook jihad that buys the media's silence.

And yet, the photographer cannot be blamed here; it was the Time photo editors that made the willful decision to run a dishonest caption at odds with the description provided by the photographer, while suppressing another photo that shows apparent collusion between the Lebanese Army and Hezbollah.

This goes well beyond a mistake. Time has made the willful decision to slant, cover, and conceal news on behalf of a terrorist organization.

Murtha: Fellow Dems "Swift-Boating Me"

Yeah, not an exact quote, but pretty much on the mark:

The race to be the No. 2 House Democratic leader turned nasty Tuesday, with challenger Rep. John Murtha accusing opponents of "swift-boat style attacks" that hark back to his days being investigated in the FBI's 1980 Abscam sting.

Murtha won endorsement Monday from Nancy Pelosi, who is widely expected to be the House speaker. But Murtha is opposed by some liberals who say they are not happy with the Pennsylvania lawmaker's pro-gun and anti-abortion record. Others say Pelosi took a wrong turn in backing Murtha over her current deputy Rep. Steny Hoyer because Murtha's record is marred by ethics questions of the type Pelosi pledged to clean up in Congress.

"I am disconcerted that some are making headlines by resorting to unfounded allegations that occurred 26 years ago. I thought we were above this type of swift-boating attack. This is not how we restore integrity and civility to the United States Congress," Murtha said of the ample press coverage of his link to Abscam and more recent negotiations he made as ranking Democrat on the Defense Appropriations Committee.

To date, Murtha hasn't yet accused his fellow Democrats of torpedoing his nomination "in cold blood."

Yet.

Pu: Something Wicked...

Iran can quit lying about their intent to use their nuclear program for peaceful means:

International Atomic Energy experts have found unexplained plutonium and enriched uranium traces in a nuclear waste facility in Iran and have asked Tehran for an explanation, an IAEA report said Tuesday.

The report prepared for next week's meeting of the 35-nation IAEA also faulted Tehran for not cooperating with the agency's attempts to investigate suspicious aspects of Iran's nuclear program that have lead to fears it might be interested in developing nuclear arms. As well, the four-page paper made available to The Associated Press confirmed that Iran continues uranium enrichment experiments in defiance of the U.N. Security Council.

Plutonium is an important by-product of the fuel cycle in operating nuclear reactors, producing almost a third of a nuclear power plant's energy.

The problem? Plutonium (Pu) should not logically exist outside of nuclear power production, and Iran does not yet have that capability. Bushehr is to have Iran's first production reactor, but it is still under construction.

That would seem to indicate that either Iran is importing plutonium, or that it has an undeclared reactor, which is admittedly far less likely, but technically possible. In any event, both the plutonium and enriched uranium found at the waste site may serve to push Israel closer to mounting a pre-emptive strike against Iran, which would in turn likely re-ignite Hezbollah's rocket attacks against Israel from Lebanon, putting UNFIL's "peacekeeping" forces in the middle, precisely where Hezbollah would prefer them.

It looks like a wider war in the Middle East may be coming sooner rather than later, and I'm increasingly convinced there is very little that anyone can do to stop it.

Viva, Las Vegas

Hey, we've got our own show:

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The inaugural event will take place in Las Vegas November 8th and 9th at the Las Vegas Convention Center with an exclusive corporate only conference November 7th.

The show floor will feature an abundance of products and services designed to help bloggers and new media entrepreneurs improve the look and functionality of their blogs, increase their readership, and monetize their blog. Bloggers will find suppliers like Broadband ISP's, Web hosting companies, blog publishing software, podcasting services, RSS syndication services, new media advertising networks, news readers, aggregators, computer hardware and software, widgets, badges and plug-ins, Wi-Fi services, affiliate program partners, and much much more!

Thousands of bloggers and other geeks let loose on Sin City... what could go wrong?

Can't We All Just Get Along?

If you happen to be al Qaeda and Iran, the answer may be yes:

Iran is trying to form an unholy alliance with al-Qa'eda by grooming a new generation of leaders to take over from Osama bin Laden, The Daily Telegraph can reveal.

Western intelligence officials say the Iranians are determined to take advantage of bin Laden's declining health to promote senior officials who are known to be friendly to Teheran.

[snip]

The Iranians want Saif al-Adel, a 46-year-old former colonel in Egypt's special forces, to be the organisation's number three.

Al-Adel was formerly bin Laden's head of security, and was named on the FBI's 22 most wanted list after September 11 for his alleged involvement in terror attacks against US targets in Somalia and Africa in the 1990s. He has been living in a Revolutionary Guard guest house in Teheran since fleeing from Afghanistan in late 2001.

Alarm over al-Qa'eda deepened yesterday with a Foreign Office warning that the group was determined to acquire the technology to carry out a nuclear attack on the West.

A senior Foreign Office official said that the terrorists were trawling the world for the materials and know-how to mount an attack using nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

The Baker/SecDef nominee Gates Commission seems primed to tell us that they want to negotiate with Iran and Syria, currently the two leading state sponsors of Islamic terrorism, who in addition to supporting the insurgency in Iraq, are apparently also plotting a coup in Lebanon while rearming Hezbollah and Hamas. This new and as-yet unconfirmed report by the Telegraph now sees Iran trying to further engage al Qaeda to the point of hoping to influence its leadership.

Iran, a nation ruled by the apocalyptic Hojjatieh sect, is pursuing nuclear weapons, having already developed and/or purchased long-ranged missiles and MIRV warheads only used for delivering nuclear warheads.

al Qaeda, a major terrorist group that has already successfully struck inside the U.S once and failed on numerous other attempts, has been trying to acquire nuclear weapons since the 1990s. Is anyone on this smug commission watching where this is headed?

al Qaeda: "Hey, your nuclear weapons development got on my terrorism!"

Iran: "Your terrorism got on my nuclear weapons development!"

Both: "DEATH TO AMERICA!"

It's like a Reese's Peanutbutter Cup from Hell, and the Baker Commission is trying to tell the world that it is safe to swallow.

Sorry boys, but I'm not buying it.

Crusade Over: Jesus Surrenders

The blogger that styles himself "Gen. JC Christian, patriot," surrendered intellectually early this morning, collapsing under the unbearable weight of his own ponderous ad hominem argument.

Apparently his disaffected Finchiness is highly disturbed--perhaps even gob-smacked--at this post, where I replicated an email I sent to the President, asking him to commit fully to winning the war in Iraq.

The good General was apparently unable to logically explain why we should engage in the rapid retreat favored by so many on the far left. Trying to explain an anti-humanitarian position that would lead to a far wider civil war or even genocide is obviously too difficult a task for a cynical faux diety. Much better to trot out the "chickenhawk" meme again instead.

We all know that one by now, don't we?

Essentially, the argument is that anyone who favors military action should not be taken seriously unless they themselves are willing to go and join the military. But the messenger is not the message, dear General, and this tired dismissal falls apart miserably when poked with even the smallest twig of logic.

Do you really want to make the argument, General, that you cannot comment upon or have an opinion on any subject in which you aren't a paid professional?

That would certainly clear up much of the war-related controversy in the blogosphere and the media. Very few liberals have the professional background General Christian would require for commenting on war-related issues, including the good General himself. Only soldiers would be able to discuss the war, and they overwhelmingly support continuing the mission.

General Christian's post wasn't meant to be fair, just dismissive, and it should hardly be surprising that someone so intellectually lazy would be caught in his own poorly-constructed trap.

Update: As so many of my liberal "guests" can't seem to keep a civil tongue in their heads, comments are now closed.

2006 Weblog Awards

The 2006 Weblog Awards is open and looking for you to chose your favorites in 46 categories.

Go forth and nominate.

Another Chickenhawk Goes to War

Bill Arado-something-or-other has decided that he has to see the war for himself, and went and got embedded.

If you could, drop the guy a coin or two, and please tell him that this is not the kind of body armor he needs, no matter what Ace may say.

Sinking The Admiral

Matt Drudge has a typically bombastic headline running, CHINA SUB STALKS USS KITTY HAWK, which links to a Bill Gertz article in today's Washington Times that is only slightly less dramatic:

A Chinese submarine stalked a U.S. aircraft carrier battle group in the Pacific last month and surfaced within firing range of its torpedoes and missiles before being detected, The Washington Times has learned.

The surprise encounter highlights China's continuing efforts to prepare for a future conflict with the U.S., despite Pentagon efforts to try to boost relations with Beijing's communist-ruled military.

The submarine encounter with the USS Kitty Hawk and its accompanying warships also is an embarrassment to the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, Adm. William J. Fallon, who is engaged in an ambitious military exchange program with China aimed at improving relations between the two nations' militaries.

Disclosure of the incident comes as Adm. Gary Roughead, commander of the U.S. Navy's Pacific Fleet, is making his first visit to China. The four-star admiral was scheduled to meet senior Chinese military leaders during the weeklong visit, which began over the weekend.

According to the defense officials, the Chinese Song-class diesel-powered attack submarine shadowed the Kitty Hawk undetected and surfaced within five miles of the carrier Oct. 26.

The surfaced submarine was spotted by a routine surveillance flight by one of the carrier group's planes.

The Kitty Hawk battle group includes an attack submarine and anti-submarine helicopters that are charged with protecting the warships from submarine attack.

According to the officials, the submarine is equipped with Russian-made wake-homing torpedoes and anti-ship cruise missiles.

The Kitty Hawk and several other warships were deployed in ocean waters near Okinawa at the time, as part of a routine fall deployment program. The officials said Chinese submarines rarely have operated in deep water far from Chinese shores or shadowed U.S. vessels.

A Pacific Command spokesman declined to comment on the incident, saying details were classified. Pentagon spokesmen also declined to comment.

If you're looking for me to debunk this story I'm sorry to disappoint you. I simply can't, other than to quibble over the details.

A submarine that tops out at 22 knots cannot overtake or as Gertz states, "stalk" a carrier battle group that cruises somewhere between 27-32 knots. What the Chinese can do is plot a course for the battle group, and place a submarine in position in advance of it, and wait for the battle group to steam to that location, as did the German U-boat wolfpacks of World War II.

The Song was likely vectored into position by PLAN (the People's Liberation Army Navy... I know, don't ask), and waited under minimal electric power until the American battle group closed in on their position. It was an ambush, not a stalking, and considering the stealth of this breed of diesel/electrics, it is possible that if the battle group was unprepared, it could run into such an ambush, despite my earlier thoughts to the contrary left on Hot Air's post on the subject.

No, the story here is not necessarily the apparent Chinese success in a cat and mouse game that has been playing out between submarines and surface ships for decades, but the fact that this story was leaked to Gertz, and that it was leaked now. Gertz himself provides the reason for the leak:

The submarine encounter with the USS Kitty Hawk and its accompanying warships also is an embarrassment to the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, Adm. William J. Fallon, who is engaged in an ambitious military exchange program with China aimed at improving relations between the two nations' militaries.

Disclosure of the incident comes as Adm. Gary Roughead, commander of the U.S. Navy's Pacific Fleet, is making his first visit to China. The four-star admiral was scheduled to meet senior Chinese military leaders during the weeklong visit, which began over the weekend.

Move over New York Times. The Old Gray Lady may lead in publishing information that hurts U.S. interests, but the Department of Defense has been known to selectively leak on occasion, and this leak seems to have the military exchange program with the Chinese clearly in the crosshairs.

The exchange program, which dates to 2002 is said to be extremely one-sided. Chinese military officers and technicians have been invited to see U.S. military exercises and "sensitive" facilities, and China has refused to reciprocate. In addition, Admiral Fallon has restricted U.S efforts to conduct intelligence-gathering operations against China, leading us to be even more in the dark than we should be.

The Song-class submarine may have targeted Admiral Fallon's carrier group, but by leaking the story to Bill Gertz when they did, it is clearly the intention of the Department of Defense to sink Fallon and a program that they consider to be a risk to national security.

Damn the torpedoes. There's a dangerous admiral to be sunk.

Of Sterner Stuff

The following letter was emailed to President George W. Bush at the White House this morning, asking him to rededicate America to winning the War on Terror.

Send your own comments to the President via email comments@whitehouse.gov, over the telephone at 202-456-1111, or via fax at 202-456-2461.

Dear President Bush,

"These are the times that try men’s souls."

So Thomas Paine began a series of pamphlets in late 1776 called The American Crisis, and in which he continued, "The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot may, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."

All around you lies a nation demoralized, yet not yet defeated, waiting upon your steadying hand to find a solution to the problems of modern-day Mesopotamia.

Shia, Sunni, and Kurd slaughter each other along with our soldiers in what seems to be an unending campaign of bloodshed. This war is meant to sap the spirit and soul of not just one country, but legions of the faithful of many languages and creeds, across national and international borders.

Indeed, many in this land have lost hope in the noble ideas that founded this nation, and now clamor for a retreat to our own shores from those who would strike at us here as they have in the past. These well-meaning but misguided souls seek for no more blood to be spilled, for no more lives to be lost in a brutal, grinding war that sees our national will and our thirst for peace and justice challenged.

But we are made of sterner stuff, and what they do not understand is what you must know in your heart to be true, and that is simply this; there can be no peace in this war or this world without victory.

We live in a time where cynicism lords over self-sacrifice, where absent a call to rise above the mundane, the backbenchers and the critics are given voice by the simple absence of dedicated call to duty.

Early on in this great campaign you spoke to and for all of us when you said, "Great tragedy has come to us, and we are meeting it with the best that is in our country, with courage and concern for others because this is America. This is who we are."

Our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines have heard your call, and answered to it magnificently.

Yet it seems in this dark hour that many Americans have forgotten who we are and what God set us upon this Earth to do. I firmly believe that you, a man of great Christian faith and conviction, were elected not to serve just the United States, but God’s will in spreading to the dark corners of the world both hope and freedom. It is for these two things that American and Iraqi soldiers rise every morning in a struggle that sometimes seems insurmountable, against a foe both wicked and depraved.

We must succeed, Mr. President.

It is my heartfelt conviction that God put us upon this Earth to strike out against those who would subjugate, oppress and terrorize those who should be free into an uneasy silence. This silence that will only be broken by further explosions and cries from the wounded and dying if we chose this time and this date to retreat. A retreat from Iraq, however it is phrased, is a victory for the forces of Islamic terrorism.

We must draw that "line in the sand, " here, and now, from which will not retreat.

I ask you to do what only you can, and that is to commit American totally to victory in Iraq. History has shown us that wars are not won with half measures, but with an overwhelming commitment of both manpower and conviction.

I beseech you to commit our reserves to the fight in Iraq, as many tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of soldiers that the mission requires, in order to break the will and the bodies of those who fight for chaos and tyranny.

There have been many who have called Iraq "another Vietnam," but what they do not realize is that Iraq can be a Vietnam for the forces of terrorism for which they cannot withdraw without a resounding defeat. They have committed their all—their ideology, their material, and their manpower—to driving our alliance with the common man and woman in Iraq asunder. We must not fail them, or else, we will fail ourselves.

Should those who fight for freedom yield to those who fight for chaos, oppression, and tyranny? I say, emphatically, that the answer to all terrorists of every stripe must be "No."

Mr. President, I ask that you rededicate yourself and our nation to winning the war against terrorism currently being waged in Iraq. We fight not just for their freedoms, but our own.

Sincerely and Respectfully,

Bob Owens

Gates Nomination a Recipe for Disaster

Says the American Thinker (via Instapundit):

The Baker commission seems to be doing a lot more than just re-thinking Iraq. It appears to be copiously leaking a Vietnam-type cut-and-run plan that will leave the Gulf far more dangerous than it is now. The Vietnam model looks like a “face-saving” retreat by the United States—just like that one that left Vietnam a Stalinist prison state with tens of thousands of boat people fleeing and dying, and next door in Cambodia, two or three million dead at the hands of Pol Pot.

Baker’s press leaks seem designed to test public reaction to the cut-and-run plan.

President Bush's nominee to replace Don Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense is Robert Gates, a survivor of the Iran-Contra scandal who helped draft the Baker cut-and-run strategy.

Let's be very clear on who Robert Gates is; he is part of the problem, a leftover of the failed policies of realpolitik that helped create modern terrorism. His return to public service is a recipe for losing no just in Iraq, but in the larger War on Terror. He has as much business being Secretary of Defense as Harriet Miers had being on the Supreme Court.

Norman Podhoretz captured the failures of the Baker/Gates generation quite clearly as they led the run from terrorism in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations:

In April 1983, Hizbullah—an Islamic terrorist organization nourished by Iran and Syria—sent a suicide bomber to explode his truck in front of the American embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. Sixty-three employees, among them the Middle East CIA director, were killed and another 120 wounded. But Reagan sat still.

Six months later, in October 1983, another Hizbullah suicide bomber blew up an American barracks in the Beirut airport, killing 241 U.S. Marines in their sleep and wounding another 81. This time Reagan signed off on plans for a retaliatory blow, but he then allowed his Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, to cancel it (because it might damage our relations with the Arab world, of which Weinberger was always tenderly solicitous). Shortly thereafter, the President pulled the Marines out of Lebanon.

Having cut and run in Lebanon in October, Reagan again remained passive in December, when the American embassy in Kuwait was bombed. Nor did he hit back when, hard upon the withdrawal of the American Marines from Beirut, the CIA station chief there, William Buckley, was kidnapped by Hizbullah and then murdered. Buckley was the fourth American to be kidnapped in Beirut, and many more suffered the same fate between 1982 and 1992 (though not all died or were killed in captivity).

These kidnappings were apparently what led Reagan, who had sworn that he would never negotiate with terrorists, to make an unacknowledged deal with Iran, involving the trading of arms for hostages. But whereas the Iranians were paid off handsomely in the coin of nearly 1,500 antitank missiles (some of them sent at our request through Israel), all we got in exchange were three American hostages—not to mention the disruptive and damaging Iran-contra scandal.

In September 1984, six months after the murder of Buckley, the U.S. embassy annex near Beirut was hit by yet another truck bomb (also traced to Hizbullah). Again Reagan sat still.

What realpolitik accomplished under Reagan was to build the confidence of terrorists. This same "do nothing" approach was continued under the first Bush Administration, thanks once again to political strategies favored both then and now by men like James Baker and Secretary-designate Robert Gates.

Robert Gates had a hand--never firmly proven, but never really in doubt--in the disasterous plan to attempt to negotiate with terrorism in Iran-Contra.

He also was part of the brainrust, err, braintrust, that urged Iraqi Shia to rebel again Saddam Hussein, only to stand by and watch when as many as 100,000 Shia were killed when they failed to support the rebellion they instigated in 1991.

Robert Gates has no business being the Secretary of Defense during a war on terrorism. He did far too much to help create the current problem to be relied upon to fix it.

The First (Beheading?) Cut is the Deepest

The Jawa Report is breaking news:

The Jawa Report has obtained evidence that Yusuf Islam, the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens, was once connected to radical clerics Omar Bakri Mohammed & Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman. According to at least one credible source, he was also involved in terrorist financing.

If the Jawas are correct, the hippie that sang "Peace Train" was doing fundraisers for organizations linked to al Qaeda.

Yusuf Islam is supposed to release another albm this month called "An Other Cup," including a cover of a tune called "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood."

There's a joke in there somewhere.

Iran Fakes Drone Carrier Footage (Update: Or Not)

I just saw a short clip on Fox News where the Iranian government showed grainy, near-overhead footage of a U.S. aircraft carrier, and claimed this was evidence that an Iranian drone was able penetrate U.S. fleet radar and air cover, a story also covered by Breitbart.com.

Um... no.

Iran actually made this claim once before back in August (in the video clip above), going as far as say that their drone repeatedly circled the USS Ronald Reagan before it was even noticed, and that the U.S. attempted to shoot down the drone, but failed. Iran, or course, had zero evidence to support that claim.

But the apparent proof that Iran's latest "drone" video is fake may be contained in the footage itself.

The grainy footage shows what is undoubtably the angled deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier, but on that carrier deck are aircraft, including what appears to be a different fighter on the port waist of the deck than the F/A-18s, EA-6s, and E-2Cs one would currently expect on modern U.S. carriers. Could those planes be F-14 Tomcats?

The Iranian's imply their video was taken during military exercises in the past week. The F-14 Tomcat was retired in February. If Iran means to imply that this video was taken during their war games of the past week and the video released does indeed show retired aircraft, it would suggest that Iran was lying.

But Iran wouldn't lie, would they?

Update: Russian news sites are disputing the authenticy of the video.

They should. Expecting that a drone could penetrate the nine ship-mounted radars of a Nimitz-class supercarrier, plus the AWACS radar on the E-2C Hawkeyes it has aloft at all times, plus AEGIS-equipped ships in the carrier group, plus the radar of aircraft flying close air support, and be able to then circle directly above the carrier at an altitude of at least several thousand feet and return in one piece is something that, quite frankly, only an idiot would believe.

Mmmmm... Crow: Not F-14s on the port waist, but almost as large F/A-18Cs, ans clearly shown in this much better video. The angled rudders are a dead giveaway. In other words, the video is not necessarily old footage, though whether or not the U.S. knew of the drone is still up in the air.

Veteran's Day With Doolittle's Raiders

Michelle Malkin interviews some the surviving Doolittle Raiders and Hornet crewmen over at Hot Air.

Background on the Raiders here, and here.

A special thanks to these brave veterans, the other 25 million surviving veterans of past wars, and the millions of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines that served before them to to ensure our freedoms.

Roll-Your-Own Terrorists: Fish and Chips Edition

The British people may not have any interest in fighting Islamic terrorism, but Islamists certainly have an interest in fighting them:

British authorities are tracking almost 30 terrorist plots involving 1,600 individuals, the head of Britain's MI5 spy agency said, adding that many of the suspects are homegrown British terrorists plotting homicide attacks.

In a speech released by her agency Friday, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller said MI5 had foiled five major plots since the July 2005 transit bomb attacks in London.

Speaking to a small audience of academics in London on Thursday, Manningham-Buller said officials were "aware of numerous plots to kill people and to damage our economy."

"What do I mean by numerous? Five? Ten?" she said. "No, nearer 30 that we currently know of."

She said MI5 and the police were tackling 200 cells involving more than 1,600 individuals who were "actively engaged in plotting or facilitating terrorist acts here and overseas."

Bill Maher's Sex Slaves

It seems that liberal comedian pundit Bill Maher (if you've never heard of him don't feel bad; the comedian label is something of a misnomer) intends to play "the outing game" according to an interview he did with Larry King on CNN. His targets, as you may well expect, will be prominent Republicans he feels might be gay.

The liberals at the Huffington Post and always acrid John Aravosis of AmericaBlog are absolutely livid that Maher's naming of RNC Chair Ken Mehlman was edited out of later rebroadcasts of the King interview.

For those on the "tolerant" left, it seems that being gay and Republican--or for that matter, almost any minority and a Republican-- is a sin of the first order. Punishment for this "sin" is the practice of being "outed," whereby liberals that hate prominent Republicans for their policy differences also pronounce them gay in a public forum, whereby other liberals can join in and share in hating them for the compounded sin of being gay and Republican.

In this worldview practiced by too many liberals, one's views on social security reform, healthcare, taxes, defense matters, foreign policy, trade, the death penalty, abortion, religion, etc, are all superceded by which gender you are attracted to.

What this means for homosexuals according to liberals, is that even though you might favor small government, low taxes, a strong military, an aggressive foreign policy, closing the borders to illegal aliens, free trade and 90% of the planks on the Republican platform, you are a traitor if you aren't liberal. If you are gay, goes their logic, you must, by their decree, be liberal.

If not, you'll face such lovely, constructive, adult perspectives such as these culled from the HuffPo comment thread:

Out the gay bastards who undermine their own lives by working for the GOP....

Gay Republicans are guilty of self-loathing and by serving a party that's harmful them they feel relieved of their guilt. Maschochists.

The great sin, in their warped perspective, is that of hypocrisy.

But what people that hold to a slate of political ideas that are conservative across the board, and happen to be gay? Should they suborn the larger part of their belief system to their libido just to appease someone else's radical politics?

I'd say making someone a social and political slave to their sexual attractions is the greater hypocrisy, but what do I know.

I'm one of those intolerant conservatives.

Iraqi Health Minister Claims Insurgents Have Killed 150,000

Interesting.

Iraq's Health Minister Ali al-Shemari said about 150,000 Iraqis have been killed by insurgents since the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

For every person killed about three have been wounded in violence since the war started in March 2003, al-Shemari told reporters during a visit to Vienna. He did not explain how he arrived at the figure, which is three times most other estimates.

The health minister, a senior Shiite official linked to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, also said the United States should hand Iraqis full control of its army and police force. Doing so, he said, would allow the Iraqi government to bring the violence under control within six months.

The "most other estimates" comment likely refers to estimates compiled by iraqbodycount.org, the Los Angeles Times, and the Brookings Institute, which give figures between 48,000-62,000.

You know what this means, don't you?

Obviously, this means the evil neocon war machine must have slaughtered the other half million people reported killed since the 2003 election... probably by strangulation.

Hell of a job, Rummy.

Responsibilities and Sacrifices

A powerful sermon on the Iraq War as told through the analogy of a World War II soldier's sacrifice, via Josh Manchester's enlightening post on the sudden multitude of plans for Iraq.

The Dominos Fall

Via Fox News:

Among those expected to hand in resignation letters is the Pentagon's top intelligence official, Under Secretary of Defense Steve Cambone, a close Rumsfeld associate and a key architect in planning for the Iraq war and the War on Terror.

Cambone is the first person to hold the post, and in doing so helped the Pentagon step up its own intelligence gathering assets, a role traditionally overseen by the CIA. The new system led to turf battles between the two agencies in recent years.

This resignation is hardly unexpected, and as the article mentions, more are certainly on the way.

The article also mentions this, which makes me uneasy:

In announcing the secretary's resignation, President Bush said he was nominating Robert Gates, a veteran of the CIA under President George H.W. Bush, to lead the Pentagon. Though closely tied to the Bush family, Gates is considered by many to be an agent of change.

Rep. Jane Harman, the expected next chairwoman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Gates would be a good fit to run the Department of Defense because of his intelligence background.

"He will respect the role of civilian intelligence agencies, including the CIA," Harman, D-Calif., said.

Harmon is one of many Democrats that backs John Murtha's "over the horizon" movement of soldiers out of Iraq.

The more I hear about Bob Gates and who is supporting him, the more I come to think he's the "Harriet Miers" nominee for Secretary of Defense.

Sins of the Father

Robert Gates, the nominee to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of State was the Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser during the failed 1991 uprising against Saddam Hussein at the end of the Gulf War that may have led to the mass murder of 100,000 Shiite Iraqis:

On Feb. 15, 1991, President George H.W. Bush called on the Iraqi military and people to overthrow Saddam Hussein. On March 3, an Iraqi tank commander returning from Kuwait fired a shell through one of the portraits of Hussein in Basra's main square, igniting the southern uprising. A week later, Kurdish rebels ended Hussein's control over much of the north.

But although Bush had called for the rebellion, his administration was caught unprepared when it happened. The administration knew little about those in the Iraqi opposition because, as a matter of policy, it refused to talk to them. Policymakers tended to see Iraq's main ethnic groups in caricature: The Shiites were feared as pro-Iranian and the Kurds as anti-Turkish. Indeed, the U.S. administration seemed to prefer the continuation of the Baath regime (albeit without Hussein) to the success of the rebellion. As one National Security Council official told me at the time: "Our policy is to get rid of Saddam, not his regime."

The practical expression of this policy came in the decisions made by the military on the ground. U.S. commanders spurned the rebels' plea for help. The United States allowed Iraq to send Republican Guard units into southern cities and to fly helicopter gunships. (This in spite of a ban on flights, articulated by Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf with considerable swagger: "You fly, you die.") The consequences were devastating. Hussein's forces leveled the historical centers of the Shiite towns, bombarded sacred Shiite shrines and executed thousands on the spot. By some estimates, 100,000 people died in reprisal killings between March and September. Many of these atrocities were committed in proximity to American troops, who were under orders not to intervene.

In recent years Baghdad has shortchanged the south in the distribution of food and medicine, contributing to severe malnutrition among vulnerable populations. Some 100 Shiite clerics have been murdered, including four senior ayatollahs. Draining the marshes displaced 400,000 Marsh Arabs, destroying a culture that is one of the world's oldest, as well as causing immeasurable ecological damage.

The first Bush administration's decision to abandon the March uprising was a mistake of historic proportions. With U.S. help, or even neutrality, the March uprising could have succeeded, thus avoiding the need for a second costly war.

The obvious question is, "Did Bob Gates have a hand in shaping Bush's call for rebellion?"

If so, would he also partially responsible for failing to support the rebellion, leading to one of Saddam's greatest genocides? I do not know the answers to these questions, but they must be asked before he is confirmed as the next U.S. Secretary of Defense.

While I sincerely hope that the sentiment expressed on Austin Bay's blog that the Gates nomination may political prep for "prosecuting the war even more vociferously," I think that Mr. Gates and the present Bush Administration owe to it to us and the Iraqi people to explain in detail what role, if any, he played in an Administration that instigated, and then failed to support, the 1991 uprisings.

The administration of Bush '41 failed Iraq once when we cried for them to stand up for their freedom. The same personnel who failed Iraqis in 1991 should not be given the opportunity to do so again.

Update: It's up behind an annoying subscriber wall, But Allah says that the Wall Street Journal is on the same page.

One reason the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki has had such a hard time dismantling Shiite militias is because Shiites fear that it’s only a matter of time before the U.S. abandons them again and they will have to confront the Sunni Baathist insurgency on their own. If President Bush wants to reassure Shiites on this score and about Mr. Gates, he should announce that the recent efforts to appease the Sunni terrorist political fronts in Iraq have failed.

We presume Mr. Gates will be grilled about these and other issues during his confirmation hearings. He should be.

Official Enough: Democrats Take Senate

Stick a fork in George Allen. He's done, are are the GOP's slim hopes of holding on to the Senate:

A Democratic takeover of the Senate is appearing likely after an ongoing canvass of votes in Virginia produced no significant changes in the outcome of the hard-fought race led by Democratic challenger Jim Webb, sources told CNN Wednesday.

Wednesday night, with Webb leading Republican Sen. George Allen by about 7,200 votes and the canvass about half complete, The Associated Press declared Webb the winner.

CNN does not declare a winner when race results are less than 1 percent and the potential loser may request a recount vote.

A source close to Allen also told CNN that the senator "has no intention of dragging this out."

Meanwhile, a Webb aide told CNN that he plans a formal news conference Thursday morning to declare victory.

A victory by Webb would put the new Senate lineup at 49 Democrats, 49 Republicans and two independents -- Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut -- who have said they would caucus with the Democrats.

This outcome in Virginia is hardly unexpected at this point, but perhaps the most interesting aspect of this is that Joe Lieberman, the Senator that the liberal netroots derided as "Rape Gurney Joe", has potentially become a powerful swing vote in the Senate should he decide to act as such. All the bile and hatred directed at him may not easily be forgotten.

Rumsfeld Resigns

Catching it on Drudge and Rush, and will expect to hear confirmation in Bush's press conference momentarily.

Will update...

Confirmed. Rumfeld was on his way out prior to the election, and our new nominee for Secretary of Defense is Bob Gates, currenty the President of Texas A&M. Bush said that Gates had met with him in Crawford this past Sunday, where I understand he was offered the position. He is the only career officer in the CIA's history to rise from an entry-level employee to the directorship. Gates had previously declined the Director of National Intelligence position now filled by John Negroponte. I'm sure we'll hear more about him in the days ahead, but I simply don't know enoughabout him to know what kind of Secretary he may be at this point.

Mary Katharine has more.

Update: Austin Bay reports that an officer he knows thinks that Rumsfeld's resignation sets the stage for more aggressive action against the terrorists.

That is an interesting hypothesis. If the key issue of the mid-terms for voters was dissatisfaction with the prosecution of the war in Iraq, then a "new direction" could well come in the form of more aggressive, targeted, and tangible offensive operations.

It will be interesting to see if this is indeed the path taken.

What I will Not Be Doing Today

The following is a short list of things I will not be doing in the wake of the 2006 mid-terms:

• Blaming Diebold.
• Staying in bed with massive depression.


• Creating a new election-based psychological malady.
• Lamenting that America has down descended into a (fill in the blank) state.
• Checking out immigration laws to other countries.

The Morning After

Well I just suck at election prognosticating, don't I?

In a national mid-term election billed as a battle against the way the War in Iraq is being waged and against Republican scandals, Democrats waltzed to an easy reversal of power in the House of Representatives and what many expect to be a slim majority in the Senate.

The Democratic Party is to be commended for their victories, and their candidates are to be congratulated.

What remains to be seen, however, is what Democratic electoral success will mean to our domestic and foreign policy.

Domestically, the farthest reaching effect may be upon those that are not elected to office but appointed, as the Democratic majority will be able to shape who is appointed to federal judgeships, including any Supreme Court vacancies that may occur at least until the 2008 election cycle. There are of course some responsible moderate judges to choose from, but I feel that a strict, historically-grounded interpretation of the Constitution is needed on the federal level, and that is most often found in the kind of judges that Democrats are likely to filibuster.

Free trade is also going to be dead, and we can expect taxes to go up through a combination of new taxes and a refusal to renew the tax cuts made by the previous Congress.

We can also expect a "quagmire" as Democrats follow through on their promised "investigations" of the Bush Administration. Some of these are indeed warranted--I know for a concrete fact that the U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD) is as corrupt as it can be and engaged in illegal activity, as I have personally seen the evidence--and I feel that if the Administration did indeed break any laws they should of course be held accountable.

I fear, however, that honest investigations of deep-seated agency-level bureaucratic corruption I suspect exists will be ignored in favor of investigations of "brand name" targets. I fully expect Democrats to follow through on multiple investigations targeting the President and Vice President based not upon any actual criminality, but on the appearance of impropriety, with the goal of further weakening the Executive Branch and laying the groundwork for the 2008 campaigns.

But what concerns me far more than these domestic issues (at least for now) is what the election means internationally, specifically in the War on Terror.

I can respect the fact that a majority of American voters do not like the way the War on Terror is being conducted. I don't particularly like the way the War on Terror is being fought, particularly in the battleground of Iraq where al Qaeda and allied terrorist groups have joined with state sponsors of terrorism Syria and Iran in an effort to not only destroy any hopes of democracy taking root in the Arab world, but to rally the support of Islamists worldwide.

Fair or not, terrorist leaders around the world openly cheerleaded for Democratic victory. Leaders of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Islamic Jihad and Hamas were among those that publicly stated that they thought much talked about Democratic plans for withdrawal from Iraq would embolden and spread fundamentalist resistance against the United States. al Qaeda's curiously silent Osama bin Laden had pulled for a Democratic victory for the same reasons in the 2004 elections.

Will the new Democratic leadership take stock of these comments and attempt to understand why the terrorists cheered them on to victory? Recent history and breaking news alike suggests that they will not. Nancy Pelosi has already this to say about the War on Terror in Iraq:

"Nowhere did Americans make it more clear that a change is needed in Iraq ... we can't continue down that catastrophic path," she said. "Mr President, we need a new direction in Iraq."

Pelosi and other Democratic leaders such as Charles Rangel and John Murtha have made clear that their "new direction" is a vision of withdrawal, without apparently registering that such a plan would embolden and spread terrorism, as the terrorists themselves have clearly stated:

Many Democratic politicians and some from the Republican Party have stated a withdrawal from Iraq would end the insurgency there.

In a recent interview with CBS's "60 Minutes," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, stated, "The jihadists (are) in Iraq. But that doesn't mean we stay there. They'll stay there as long as we're there."

Pelosi would become House speaker if the Democrats win the majority of seats in next week's elections.

WND read Pelosi's remarks to the terror leaders, who unanimously rejected her contention an American withdrawal would end the insurgency.

Islamic Jihad's Saadi, laughing, stated, "There is no chance that the resistance will stop."

He said an American withdrawal from Iraq would "prove the resistance is the most important tool and that this tool works. The victory of the Iraqi revolution will mark an important step in the history of the region and in the attitude regarding the United States."

Jihad Jaara said an American withdrawal would "mark the beginning of the collapse of this tyrant empire (America)."

My greatest fear in Iraq is not for the American military, which overwhelmingly wants to stay engaged and finish the mission, but for the 26 million people of Iraq who face a dire future in the hands of a "cut and run" Congress.

If Democrats are able to force a retreat from Iraq, the existing sectarian violence will likely devolve into a full-fledged civil war that the still-weak Iraqi security forces will be unable to stop or perhaps even slow. The possibility exists for Iraq to fall into full-fledged tribalism, with widespread genocide a distinct possibility. If this comes to pass, the United States will have abandoned the Iraqi people twice in two wars after asking for their support, at the cost of tens of thousands of their lives. Neither they, nor any other nation on earth, will have any reason to trust commitments America for a long time to come.

Terrorism, instead of being defeated, will have proven to be an effective tactic.

That may be the ultimate legacy of Nancy Pelosi and Democratic control of the House of Representatives if the liberal leadership has its way. We can only hope that the Democratic moderates who won most of last night elections can steer their leaders from the rear.

If they cannot, our foreign policy will, quite simply, encourage further acts of terrorism, as the terrorists themselves have made abundantly clear.

Update: Well, that didn't take long.

Update: And it gets worse, quickly:

"America is offering political, financial and logistic cover for the Zionist occupation crimes, and it is responsible for the Beit Hanoun massacre. Therefore, the people and the nation all over the globe are required to teach the American enemy tough lessons," Hamas' military wing said in a statement faxed to news organizations in Gaza.

Follow the Bouncing Ballot

I'll be unavailable for several hours this evening as I'll be out suppressing the Democratic vote, but wanted to leave you with some good sites to follow the electoral action till I get home after the polls close.

My stablemates over at Pajamas Media are putting out a ton of good information, including early exit polling from Jeff Goldstein's breakfast table, as will the good folks at Powerline and Powerline News.

The Malkin Media Network will be firing on all cylinders at both Michelle's personal site and at Hot Air.

The Blogfather and Memeorandum.com should round all your needs as a political junkie until we have, you know, something actual to talk about.

You know, like the procession of torches and pitchforks to the Heinz-Kerry mansion if Waffles manages to torpedo this election for liberals like he did the last one...

A Belated Pre-Election Message From Osama bin Laden

Dammit.

Pardon my Farsi.

I tried to deliver my traditional pre-election fatwa message weeks ago, but Predators keep blasting missiles into every video-laden donkey that leaves the cave, and the jackass meat covering the mountainside is starting to smell like an ACORN voter drive. Or Michael Moore.

I'm even reduced to wearing last election's campaign buttons.

Nevertheless, as Allah (PBUH) wills it, I have been able to highjack an evil Jew-lover's neo-con blog (at least until the generator runs out of gas again) and I will use it to pronounce the glorious message of al Qaeda:

VOTE DEMOCRAT.

I and my fellow freedom fighters demand this of you, and you will comply.

The American people should bow to fate and accept the glorious defeat that Allah (PBUH) and the Democratic Party have planned for you.

If you do this thing, we shall promise to kill you last, after the Jews, the homosexuals, the uncovered women, the idiot america soldiers, the Christians, atheists, the cast of The View, and the French.

It is only after you do this thing that you will be at peace with al Qaeda... for now.

Well, that, and you must avoid tall buildings, crowded public areas like stories and malls and the stadiums where men in helmets slap each other's fannies after tackling one another (disgusting), the walmart, excetera.

Stay in your home or mosque, and all will be forgiven until the end.

Also, Thank you Senator Kennedy for the talking points.

We will behead you last of all of the infidels.

"Absolutely True:" Rather Continues to Defend 60 Minutes TANG Story

Just moments ago on North Carolina's Morning News with Jack Boston on Raleigh-based News-Talk 680 WPTF, former CBS anchor Dan Rather defended the infamous 60 Minutes story using forged documents to attack President Bush's service with the Texas Air National Guard as being, "absolutely true," a charge a testy Rather reiterated at least four or five times.

Rather not only defended the report, but the validity of the forged documentation that the report relied on, saying it had never been proven false (despite copious evidence to the contrary).

I've contacted the station, and hope to get audio of that portion of the interview posted later in the morning.

Note: While the show is North Carolina's Morning News with Jack Boston, Rick and Donna Martinez conducted the interview with Rather while Jack Boston is out fighting leukemia. Our prayers and best wishes go out to Jack and his family.

Update: The Raleigh News and Observer reports on the story.

Update: A reader taped an MP3 (3:34) during a re-airing of the Rather-Martinez interview this afternoon during WPTF's The Bill Lumaye Show. Enjoy!

Election Cut and Run

While some pollsters are still predicting massive Democratic gains in today's voting, Adam Nagourney of the New York Times is sounding a pre-emptive retreat:

For a combination of reasons — increasingly bullish prognostications by independent handicappers, galloping optimism by Democratic leaders and bloggers, and polls that promise a Democratic blowout — expectations for the party have soared into the stratosphere. Democrats are widely expected to take the House, and by a significant margin, and perhaps the Senate as well, while capturing a majority of governorships and legislatures.

These expectations may well be overheated. Polls over the weekend suggested that the contest was tightening, and some prognosticators on Monday were scaling back their predictions, if ever so slightly. (Charlie Cook, the analyst who is one of Washington’s chief setters of expectations, said in an e-mail message on Monday that he was dropping the words "possibly more" from his House prediction of "20-35, possibly more.")

Some Democrats worry that those forecasts, accurate or not, may be setting the stage for a demoralizing election night, and one with lasting ramifications, sapping the party’s spirit and energy heading into the 2008 presidential election cycle.

"Two years ago, winning 14 seats in the House would have been a pipe dream," said Matt Bennett, a founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic organization. Now, Mr. Bennett said, failure to win the House, even by one seat, would send Democrats diving under their beds (not to mention what it might do to all the pundits).

"It would be crushing," he said. "It would be extremely difficult."

Mr. Cook put it more succinctly. "I think you’d see a Jim Jones situation — it would be a mass suicide," he said.

Metaphorically, of course (h/t BCB).

Scott Elliott of Election Projection made an uncharacteristic disclaimer on his deadly accurate election formula that was so accurate in predicting the outcome in 2004:

For any election projection formula to be accurate, one of two conditions must be met. Either the data used in the calculations must be reasonably accurate, or the formula must correctly compensate for inaccurate data.

In Election Projection's case, I firmly believe neither condition was met this year, especially in the House. Polling data was very scarce, and the polls that were available were largely suspect in my view. Moreover, the political pundits on whom I relied heavily in my House projections see a much gloomier outlook than I believe is warranted. Combine those two factors and you have a some heavily skewed projections.

It seems like it's anybody's race to win, folks. Make sure you vote.

If you do, you could be rewarded tomorrow morning with thousands of liberal faces looking just like this one... and wouldn't that be worth it?

Crazy People: Netroots Plotting Revolution if Dems Lose

Insanity, right where you would expect it:

If they steal this again, there MUST be a response.

Our country is finished for good if Tuesday results in a Republican Majority or the absolute unthinkable, A Super Majority.

But if this occurs, even if it marks the End Of America, the ONLY response that should happen is the Beginning of the Revolution to take it back.

This MUST NOT STAND.

This CANNOT STAND.

And if we LET IT STAND, like Benjamin Franklin said, we deserve neither Freedom nor Safety.

At some point we must fight these people.

It might as well be now.

Let us hope that Tuesday will not make it necessary for us to take this country back by WHATEVER MEANS NECESSARY.

I think reasonable people would decode "by WHATEVER MEANS NECESSARY" as referring to acts of violence, and in this context, perhaps an armed revolt.

This alone is disturbing, but perhaps not unexpected for an isolated hothead.

But here is the thing.

This post was made more than 24 hours ago, and to date, not one of the 27 responses made since this call for revolt "by any means necessary" have disagreed. One person actually agreed. The moderators of this forum, which you would think would be the people to corral such a comment, deleted another comment made later, but let this stand.

Random accusations of massive voter fraud and calls for violent revoltion if they lose are okay here.

Around the bend? Welcome home.

Whittle Returns

Bill Whittle has returned.

For those of you not familiar with his name, Whittle is perhaps on of the best essayists on American politics today, and author of Silent America: Essays from a Democracy at War.

Grab a cup of coffee, take your time, and digest it all.

A Completely Unscientific Election Prediction

All across yonder 'sphere and throughout the mainstream media, pollsters, pundits, and prognosticators as making "informed" predictions of tomorrow's elections back with the best research they can muster.

Bah. Who needs them?

With so many polls seemingly at odds with one another, they seem almost worthless at making predictions. I think it is perhaps better to admit that the polls are only really decent at noting trends, and at this point, all of the major polls and many of the minor ones are trending away from a large number of pickups for Democrats in the House and Senate to a much closer barnburner finish.

Consider the historical fact that such polls tend to oversample Democrats and undersample Republicans, and I think we stand a pretty decent possibility of seeing Republicans being able to declare victory in both the House and Senate, if by narrower margins than what they currently hold.

Why?

You can't beat something with nothing.
While few American's think that the Republican dominated government is doing a great job, tehy are at least doing something. The Democrats have completely failed to come up with anything approaching a cohesive strategy or message.

Americans dislike losing, and hate surrendering.
We are not a nation of quitters. While few people agree with the current direction of the war in Iraq, we do not like to quit, and we do not like to abandon our soldiers nor our allies. Our allies in the Iraqi government don't want us to go until their country is stabilized. The overwhelming response form our soldiers is that they don't want to go until Iraq is stabilized. Leading terrorists are openly rooting for a Democratic victory, and the Democrats have built an unsteady "cut and run" coalition that their leadership has unwisely decided to run on. As Americans, we hate losing and hate quitting even more. The liberal Democratic views of Iraq are simply unpalatable to many who consider them defeatists.

Tax and Spend fears.
Democrats, this time led by Charles Rangel, have scared the American people with their promise to not extend the current Bush tax cuts and the probability that they will try to raise taxes. I don't personally know anyone who wants to pay more taxes. Do you?

Impeachment Screeching.
The can say otherwise all they want, but Thomas already has them on the record, damned with their own words. If Democrats take control of the House, we'll get two years of investigations targeting the President and Vice President for censure and impeachment. If, like Nixon or Clinton, a President clearly did something wrong in office, the American people can tolerate the mess of an impeachment, even if they don't actually like it. The Democrats, have ever, have done just enough prior to the elections so that many voters know it is on their mind, even as Democrats have failed to make a strong enough case that such investigations are anything other than sewer-level political maneuvers.

Turnover ratio.
Just like in sports, politicians can look at near-term gaffes to influence the final outcome, and most of the mistakes of the past few weeks have undoubtedly come from Democrats, from Rangel calling Vice President Cheney a "son of a bitch," to John Kerry's continuing swipe at the intelligence of the troops that never seems to end. These mistakes have overshadowed any Republican mistakes, and have stifled the Democratic momentum they seemed to have in past weeks, and may have even reversed it.

Weather Woes.
It seems that nobody ever talks about this variable (and so perhaps I'm off base), but weather would seem to have at least some effect on voter turnout, and with many races being very close, weather-suppressed turnouts could hurt some candidates and help others. According to weather.com, the Pacific Northwest is going to be wet and windy, while the South will be rained on all day, with rain hitting the Great Lakes states and parts of the Northeast in the afternoon. The west and Great Plains states appear dry and sunny all day long. My guess is that voters reliant on public transportation may stay home in foul weather, and it seems most of those public transportation voters are likely Democrats. If weather effects are enough to determine outcomes is anyone's guess, but it could be a factor.

Final Prediction.
I'll go out on a limb and predict that the Republicans hold the House by six seats and the Senate by three.

Update: Scott Elliott's much more scientific and time-tested Election Projection will be updating his final projections during the course of the evening.

Soldiers Say Democrat War Plans "An Extreme Betrayal"

In an article published in today's Washington Post, dozens of soldiers interviewed by Post reporter Josh White revealed that the precipitous withdrawal favored by many top Democratic leaders would have "disastrous consequences" for the nation of Iraq, potentially plunging the nation into a widespread civil war:

For the U.S. troops fighting in Iraq, the war is alternately violent and hopeful, sometimes very hot and sometimes very cold. It is dusty and muddy, calm and chaotic, deafeningly loud and eerily quiet.

The one thing the war is not, however, is finished, dozens of soldiers across the country said in interviews. And leaving Iraq now would have devastating consequences, they said.

With a potentially historic U.S. midterm election on Tuesday and the war in Iraq a major issue at the polls, many soldiers said the United States should not abandon its effort here. Such a move, enlisted soldiers and officers said, would set Iraq on a path to civil war, give new life to the insurgency and create the possibility of a failed state after nearly four years of fighting to implant democracy.

"Take us out of that vacuum -- and it's on the edge now -- and boom, it would become a free-for-all," said Lt. Col. Mark Suich, who commands the 1st Squadron, 89th Cavalry Regiment just south of Baghdad. "It would be a raw contention for power. That would be the bloodiest piece of this war."

The soldiers declined to discuss the political jousting back home, but they expressed support for the Bush administration's approach to the war, which they described as sticking with a tumultuous situation to give Iraq a chance to stand on its own.

As I stated previously, a civil war is one possible outcome of the calamitous withdrawal apparently favored by Charles Rangel, Lynn Woolsey and other Democrats that favor forcing the military to retreat by de-funding the war, while other approaches favor by Democrats such as John Murtha's plan to "redeploy" the soldiers to Pacific island bases thousands of miles away would lead to the same bloody disaster, and possible genocide.

Blackfive has been collecting from soldiers stationed in Iraq--the ones that John Kerry still thinks aren't intelligent according to his own web site--and their opinions, while varied, support the war effort even though it is their lives on the line.

A sample from a Marine Sergeant on his second tour in Iraq:

People in the US who want to support the troops, who believe we are engaged in a war, and who recognize the long term consequences of failure need to look past all other issues and vote Republican. Democrats have no policy and can not be trusted. But, even worse, they display no apparent understanding of the dangers to our western civilization presented by the enemy. Their actions since 2001 indicate they are willing to sacrifice the safety and integrity of the USA in the future for short term political gains today.

It is painfully clear that those soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines that put their lives on the line every day in Iraq overwhelmingly support staying in Iraq to finish the mission. This is borne out from the dozens of interviews collected by White in his Post article, by the more than 100 emails Blackfive has received from those serving in Iraq right now, and in conversation I've personally had with airmen and soldiers I've recently met who've just returned stateside from multiple tours in Iraq.

As Staff Sergeant Jason Oliver said from Baghdad in one of the interviews that I published this morning:

If your child takes their first steps while holding on to your hands are you just going to let go and hope they continue on their own? No. Most people would continue to support and encourage them until they can continue on their own without support. I feel the same applies here. The Iraqi government is very young and still needs assistance from outside sources so they can develop and grow. The US government has pledged to help build Iraq into a model for the region, and if we were to pull out to early, the Iraqi Government will stumble from its already young state and possibly fall, which would put US forces back into a situation that could possible be worse. We need to stay, maintain and support the Iraqi Government until it can handle all aspects without US assistance.

Tomorrow, we will go to vote all across this great nation and elect Congressmen and Senators to lead our nation. It is your right and your privilege to go cast your ballot without any expectations of violence because generations of brave soldiers like these have put on uniforms and picked up rifles to defend freedom for us and others around the world.

I ask you to consider what these brave men and women in our military are willing to sacrifice for the men, women, and children of Iraq, and what both this nation and 26 million Iraqis stand to lose if Democrats take control of Congress.

Essayist and blogger Bill Whittle wrote a brilliant essay called Tribes last year, exploring the characteristics of people from two similar but distinct perspectives.

One perspective is one he borrowed from a theory and seminar by Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman called The Bulletproof Mind. Grossman divides people into three categories: sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs, and explains those categories thusly.

One Vietnam veteran, an old retired colonel, once said this to me: "Most of the people in our society are sheep. They are kind, gentle, productive creatures who can only hurt one another by accident."

This is true. Remember, the murder rate is six per 100,000 per year, and the aggravated assault rate is four per 1,000 per year. What this means is that the vast majority of Americans are not inclined to hurt one another.

Some estimates say that two million Americans are victims of violent crimes every year, a tragic, staggering number, perhaps an all-time record rate of violent crime. But there are almost 300 million total Americans, which means that the odds of being a victim of violent crime is considerably less than one in a hundred on any given year. Furthermore, since many violent crimes are committed by repeat offenders, the actual number of violent citizens is considerably less than two million.

Thus there is a paradox, and we must grasp both ends of the situation: We may well be in the most violent times in history, but violence is still remarkably rare. This is because most citizens are kind, decent people who are not capable of hurting each other, except by accident or under extreme provocation. They are sheep.

I mean nothing negative by calling them sheep. To me it is like the pretty, blue robin's egg. Inside it is soft and gooey but someday it will grow into something wonderful. But the egg cannot survive without its hard blue shell. Police officers, soldiers and other warriors are like that shell, and someday the civilization they protect will grow into something wonderful. For now, though, they need warriors to protect them from the predators.

"Then there are the wolves," the old war veteran said, "and the wolves feed on the sheep without mercy." Do you believe there are wolves out there who will feed on the flock without mercy? You better believe it. There are evil men in this world and they are capable of evil deeds. The moment you forget that or pretend it is not so, you become a sheep. There is no safety in denial.

"Then there are sheepdogs," he went on, "and I'm a sheepdog. I live to protect the flock and confront the wolf." Or, as a sign in one California law enforcement agency put it, "We intimidate those who intimidate others."

If you have no capacity for violence then you are a healthy productive citizen: a sheep. If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath--a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? Then you are a sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero's path. Someone who can walk into the heart of darkness, into the universal human phobia, and walk out unscathed.

To this categorization, Whittle adds his own, regarding the pink and the grey:

let’s get past Republican and Democrat, Red and Blue, too. Let’s talk about these two Tribes: Pink, the color of bunny ears, and Grey, the color of a mechanical pencil lead.

I live in both worlds. In entertainment, everything is Pink, the color of Angelyne’s Stingray – it’s exciting and dynamic and glamorous. I’m also a pilot, and I know honest-to-God rocket scientists, and combat flight crews and Special Ops guys -- stone-cold Grey, all of them -- and am proud and deeply honored to call them my friends.

The Pink Tribe is all about feeling good: feeling good about yourself! Sexually, emotionally, artistically – nothing is off limits, nothing is forbidden, convention is fossilized insanity and everybody gets to do their own thing without regard to consequences, reality, or natural law. We all have our own reality – one small personal reality is called "science, " say – and we Make Our Own Luck and we Visualize Good Things and There Are No Coincidences and Everything Happens for a Reason and You Can Be Whatever You Want to Be and we all have Special Psychic Powers and if something Bad should happen it’s because Someone Bad Made It Happen. A Spell, perhaps.

The Pink Tribe motto, in fact, is the ultimate Zen Koan, the sound of one hand clapping: EVERYBODY IS SPECIAL.

Then, in the other corner, there is the Grey Tribe – the grey of reinforced concrete. This is a Tribe where emotion is repressed because Emotion Clouds Judgment. This is the world of Quadratic Equations and Stress Risers and Loads Torsional, Compressive and Tensile, a place where Reality Can Ruin Your Best Day, the place where Murphy mercilessly picks off the Weak and the Incompetent, where the Speed Limit is 186,282.36 miles per second, where every bridge has a Failure Load and levees come in 50 year, 100 year and 1000 Year Flood Flavors.

The Grey Tribe motto is, near as I can tell, THINGS BREAK SOMETIMES AND PLEASE DON’T LET IT BE MY BRIDGE.

Now, let’s do a little free associating, just to take the model for a test spin:

I’m going to throw out some names, and you tell me whether you think they are Pink or Grey? Okay? Ready?

Donald Rumsfield.
Al Sharpton.
Bill Clinton.
Ted Kennedy.
George W. Bush.
Condoleeza Rice.

Okay, my score is Grey, Pink, Pink, Pink, Grey and Grey. Easy, right? Dems = Pink, Repubs = Grey. Now how about these?

John Kennedy
Abraham Lincoln
Ronald Reagan
Franklin Roosevelt

These are more interesting, because there is something very Pink, something warm and emotional and comforting about them. Put all four of them at a dinner table (which I would trade the rest of my life to serve ice water for) and I think you would see four warm, gentle, bright and genuinely funny men.

Now, think:

Cuban Missile Crisis
Fredericksburg
Reykjavik
Pearl Harbor

I get solid Grey scores here. What about you? I get tough, hard-nosed, capable, competent, confident men facing evil straight in the eye and not backing down. (And anyone who even thinks about selling short Reykjavik as a symbol for those eight years of steadfast resolution should see my gun warning, above).

Also, I see two Democrats and two Republicans. Opposing parties. Same Tribe.

Now, when things are going swimmingly, when the End of History has arrived, as it did in the 90’s, having a Pink president (careful!) is no big deal. In fact, it’s a downright advantage. He can be a goodwill ambassador, and charm the pants (you heard me!) off of foreign dignitaries and have everyone cooing and gushing about how swell Americans are once the fascists are out of power.

Now, unfortunately for Pink Power, there remain in the world a few people not impressed by this attitude.

Not long ago, National Geographic ran a really first-rate, 4-hour documentary called INSIDE 9/11, as perfect an example as you could possibly want of the power of a real documentary to enlighten and inform without taking sides.

Watching it was horrible, especially for people like me, because we feel like if we had only known what was going on we could have done something about it.

By the time you've read through these you've probably recognized yourself as a sheep, wolf, or sheepdog, and also as either being pink or grey. You'll also be able to sort out which camps your fellow Americans fall into, and where our current leaders and would be leaders presently stand (the parties, at this moment in history are in stark contrast on which is pink and which is grey), and which paths they would lead us down.

You'll also recognize that we have a choice tomorrow between those that would also "do something," and those who would not only do nothing, but undo all that has been done.

Along with the vast majority of our soldiers, I say we continue the fight.

Surrendering only pleases the wolves.

Update

Powerful words from The Anchoress:

There is a vision in place. It’s difficult, and it is fraught with peril, pain, loss, doubt and heart-clutching fear. But it is the stark and single vision which can shift the Shari’a momentum. The vision is simply this: Help people find their liberty. I you can help them find that - and help them to learn to manage the messy business of freedom - they can begin to chart their own courses. Once they are free, they can enter the marketplace of ideas and industry and find means of movement that have nothing to do with a sword or martyrdom, and everything to do with creativity and human potential and hope.

That is a bold vision. It is a vision rooted in faith, both of the supernatural and natural sort. Faith in God. Faith in mankind.

And for some, particularly those who have long-since forgotten how to dream, who look at the world with grounded, earthbound eyes, it is a vision that seems utterly mad and impossible and futile.

How sad for those who can no longer dream - who can no longer look at America and imagine the greatness within, and how that greatness might be shared - how the visions of the founders might be spread. How sad it is to realize that some of the people currently in leadership positions in this nation would look at General Washington and Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and they would say…”this was a bad idea…it’s getting difficult. We should just quit.”

What would Bobby Kennedy say about these folks? At his funeral, his weakest brother, Ted, quoted George Bernard Shaw in words meant for the slain senator: “Some men see things as they are and say ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were and say, ‘Why not?’”

Bobby Kennedy would have understood the vision of George W. Bush. He might not have agreed with it 100%, but he would have understood the greatness and practicality of it, at its core. He would have supported the vision, if not always the method. Bobby Kennedy understood dreams. He understood that sometimes the warrior must have his day, or all the poems will be lost.

Talking with the BloodHounds

Along with a handful of other bloggers, I was given a chance by U.S. Central Command to interview U.S. soldiers currently serving in Baghdad, Iraq, specifically, MPs (military police) from the 615th Military Police Company MSC: 89th MP Bde, also known as the "Bloodhounds."

I was able to interview SSG Jason Oliver and SPC Kimberly McGuiness.

Josh Manchester also interviewed SSG Oliver and SPC McGuiness in a podcast at The Adventures of Chester.

SSG Jason Oliver from Cypress, Illinois, has been in the Army 7 years, and is currently the Team Chief for a Police Transition Team in Baghdad.

Q: A recent cluster study by Johns Hopkins University researchers published in the British medical journal The Lancet states that more than 600,000 Iraqis have died since the 2003 invasion by violent means. While you cannot expect to answer for the rest of the country, does this seem to be a reasonable figure based upon your experience in Baghdad?

SSG Oliver: It’s a tough question to answer. I only see a small portion of the big picture. As a Team Chief for the Police Transition Team it is something that I see and that I report, but I don’t keep count on everything, just report what I see. I do find it is hard to fathom that there have been that many Iraqis killed since 2003.

Q: Most media reports coming out of Baghdad paint a picture of a city under siege, with roving Shiite and Sunni death squads operating virtually at will, kidnapping people of the street, summarily executing them, and dumping their bodies in the street. Is this an accurate presentation of life in Baghdad?

SSG Oliver: First off, I think that siege is not the appropriate word to use. Yes it has a duel meaning, but when I think of a siege, I think back to Medieval Europe with royal courts placing rival castles under siege and cutting off all outside support, lasting from months to years. So is the city under siege, I don’t think it is. Beyond what the media portrays, there is more to this city that the so called “death squads”. You still see a continuous flow of commerce in and out of the city. I know that the locals live in fear and that many have duel identities, but this to the Iraqi people has become a sign of the times. They have learned to adapt to the ever changing political climate and try to live as normal a life as they can. I cannot count the times when my patrol has traveled through the city with the streets full of life, little street side venders selling the newest gadget in the area, bistros busy with hungry locals standing in line to grab the fresh “Falafel or Kebab” and the females musing about in search of the best cut of meat and freshest fruits and vegetables to serve the family. I read an article the other day about an increasing number of tattoo shops in the Baghdad area. In the article it stated that tattoos are forbidden in the Islamic culture, but some people feel that it is one way that, if they should be killed, they will be identified so the proper notification can be made and the family does not have to grieve more that they have to. The people adapt, they know when most bad things are going to happen, and they take precautionary steps to prevent them from being caught up in whatever may happen. As strange as it may sound, I have a lot of respect for a majority of the Iraqi people. While we are here to help control the chaos, they live in it.

Q: As a follow-up to that question, do you see any signs that the sectarian violence in Iraq may abate any time soon?

SSG Oliver: I would love to say yes, but it is up to the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people to come together and end the bloodshed.

Q: What has been your experience working with the Iraq police units you have been training? Do you find them to be reliable, motivated and properly equipped for their roles?

SSG Oliver: Good and Bad. All in all, the Iraqi Police try to perform their duties daily, but they do lack things that would make them more effective. Most of the police have minimal training and that is where our job comes into play. The Police Transition Team helps fill the gap by providing training and mentorship to the IP’s to better educate them on the basic police fundamentals. They do, however, need new and better equipment. They use unarmored vehicles to conduct their patrol which puts them at an even higher risk of injury and death. The now this and can sometimes use it to their advantage, but this is not always the case. Overall, the IP’s are as effective as their equipment allows them to be and if they should get the needed equipment, then the IP’s could assume a better role in their respective communities and perform in a more efficient manner.

Q: Are there any anti-Iraqi forces that seem to be behind the bulk of the attacks that are occurring in your area of operations, and are U.S. and Iraqi forces "on the same page" when it comes to going after those carrying out these attacks?

SSG Oliver: It has been my experience operating in the city that allows me to say that for the most part, both U.S and Iraqi forces are on the same sheet of music. They do work together well, but the Iraqi Security Forces do have advantages that Coalition Forces do not have. We are bound by our rules and regulations were as the Iraqis have more lenient laws which allow them some better opportunities.

Q: We have a national election coming up in one week, where it seems that the Democratic Party has a very good chance of capturing the House of Representatives from Republican control. I wrote a post a week ago explaining that if Democrats win control of the House, they might cut off funding for the war. Based upon your own experience in Baghdad, what effect do you think it would have if you and other U.S. forces were summarily pulled out of Iraq?

SSG Oliver: If your child takes their first steps while holding on to your hands are you just going to let go and hope they continue on their own? No. Most people would continue to support and encourage them until they can continue on their own without support. I feel the same applies here. The Iraqi government is very young and still needs assistance from outside sources so they can develop and grow. The US government has pledged to help build Iraq into a model for the region, and if we were to pull out to early, the Iraqi Government will stumble from its already young state and possibly fall, which would put US forces back into a situation that could possible be worse. We need to stay, maintain and support the Iraqi Government until it can handle all aspects without US assistance.

Q: This is completely up to you. Please use this opportunity to tell us anything and everything you would like readers to know about your experiences in Iraq. Unlike newspaper journalists, I have virtually unlimited space, so please take as much time to tell us what you think the American people should know.

SSG Oliver: First, I want to thank everyone that supports our troops. This is by far the most important thing. Second, I wish that people back home could see everything that happens here, not just the gruesome stories of a war torn country. There is so much more to everything that the Coalition is doing in this country that goes unnoticed. Things such as seeing Soldiers interacting with the local children, giving them school supplies, toys and even sharing their candy and whatever other things the Soldiers have. I cannot remember when the press ran a story about U.S Soldiers establishing an aid station out in a community that allowed many Iraqis to receive medical attention that they would have otherwise not received. The media needs to rethink the coverage and produce a balance of both the good and bad, and maybe then the world will not think that this is a completely war ravaged country.

SPC Kimberly MCGuiness from Fletcher, North Carolina, is a .50-caliber turrent gunner on a Humvee conducting Police Transition Team duties in Baghdad.

Q: A recent cluster study by Johns Hopkins University researchers published in the British medical journal The Lancet states that more than 600,000 Iraqis have died since the 2003 invasion by violent means. While you cannot expect to answer for the rest of the country, does this seem to be a reasonable figure based upon your experience in Baghdad?

SPC McGuiness: I don't know the answer to that question due to the fact that it is outside of my job to keep track of how many violent deaths there have been. I would say that their have been many but I don't know the exact number.

Q: Most media reports coming out of Baghdad paint a picture of a city under siege, with roving Shiite and Sunni death squads operating virtually at will, kidnapping people of the street, summarily executing them, and dumping their bodies in the street. Is this an accurate presentation of life in Baghdad?

SPC McGuiness: There are always two sides to every media report. People hear about the bad things because its news worthy. In my experience, it is true that locals are fearful of being kidnapped and executed but I can't tell you for a fact that it is Shiite vs Sunni. There are violent things that happen but you can't really pin point the source of the problem.

Q: As a follow-up to that question, do you see any signs that the sectarian violence in Iraq may abate any time soon?

SPC McGuiness: I can't tell you for sure if it will let up. You have people in this country that want all Shiite governments and those that want the Sunni's in power and you have that divide between the two. If an understanding can be reached then yes but until that divide closes, it could be sometime before the healing and rebuilding can happen.

Q: What has been your experience working with the Iraq police units you have been training? Do you find them to be reliable, motivated and properly equipped for their roles?

SPC McGuiness: I feel as if they had better vehicles, better equipment and more armor on their vehicles that they could perform more efficiently. Also they don't get paid that much and for the amount of danger there is out in Baghdad, the pay doesn't seem to quite add up. They are afraid to die just like everyone else and if they were better equipped it might make them more comfortable in their job.

Q: Are there any anti-Iraqi forces that seem to be behind the bulk of the attacks that are occurring in your area of operations, and are U.S. and Iraqi forces "on the same page" when it comes to going after those carrying out these attacks?

SPC McGuiness: In my experience, the Iraqi forces and the US forces quite often are on the same page but other times there are things that hinder movement. There are things that the Iraqi forces can do that US forces cannot do and we have to handle situations differently. With the Iraqi forces, Iraq is "their turf" whereas with the U.S we still have soon guidelines and rules that must be followed. There are always going to be some anti-Iraqi forces that think what we are trying to establish is wrong and that take matters into their own hands.

Q: We have a national election coming up in one week, where it seems that the Democratic Party has a very good chance of capturing the House of Representatives from Republican control. I wrote a post a week ago explaining that if Democrats win control of the House, they might cut off funding for the war. Based upon your own experience in Baghdad, what effect do you think it would have if you and other U.S. forces were summarily pulled out of Iraq?

SPC McGuiness: In my experience, what we are doing here is working. Rome wasn't built in a day and it is going to take time. If we were to be pulled out of Iraq too soon, we will find ourselves back here down the road trying to undo what we could have fixed if we would have stayed. We are working on training the IP's how to perform their job's better and better ways to do things so they can support themselves and not be afraid to police one another.

Q: This is completely up to you. Please use this opportunity to tell us anything and everything you would like readers to know about your experiences in Iraq. Unlike newspaper journalists, I have virtually unlimited space, so please take as much time to tell us what you think the American people should know.

SPC McGuiness: People only see the bad things that happen here. You hardly ever hear about soldiers interacting with the locals and building relationships with the children. Soldiers handing out book bags and school supplies or just a small gesture of giving them candy to show them that we do care and humanize ourselves to them. The future of Iraq is in the people. Yes there are some people that resent the US being here and that will not stop until we leave but there are those that thank us for being here and that they feel safer because we patrol their streets and the crime has been lessened do to our patrols. We are making a difference.

Cheney Hunting For Office.

Via Fox News:

U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney will spend Election Day Tuesday on his first hunting trip since he accidentally shot a companion last February while aiming at a covey of quail on a private Texas ranch.

The vice president, after working at the White House on Monday morning, will head to South Dakota to spend several days at a private hunting lodge near Pierre. Lea Anne McBride, his press secretary, said it was an annual hunting outing and said Cheney spent Election Day in 2002 at the same lodge.

You might think Cheney is attempting to get out of the limelight until the '06 election cycle is over by heading afield with his custom 28-gauge Perazzi shotgun, but it could be that he is instead laying the groundwork for his '08 Presidential campaign.

On Day of Saddam's Sentencing, Liberals Attack Republicans

You would think that on the day a brutal murderous dictator like Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death for crimes against humanity, that everyone but Baathist dead-enders would draw at least some satisfaction from the fact that at long last, the Butcher of Baghdad would pay for his decades of brutality, depravity, and bloodlust.

You don't know liberals very well, do you?

Blondesense's reaction was "ho-hum," after which she went on a multi-paragraph tirade blaming the United States in general and Republicans in specific. As always, we are responsible for Saddam's crimes.

Steve Clemon's at the Washington Note takes the same tack:

The Bush administration gets credit for taking down Hussein, real and in statue, but they too deserve every bit of the credit for unleashing the virulent currents of sectarian killing and convulsion in Iraq, all of the responsibility for removing the chief constraint on Iran's actions in the region, and all of the kudos for giving radical Islamism reward after reward in the region.

Saddam Hussein's head will be a prize that Shia extremists thank America for while they continue to do their best to eradicate Sunnis from Iraq.

Bush deserves all of the credit for the Hussein trial and conviction -- and all of the horrors unleashed around it.

Nice. Apparently they'd rather have Saddam still in power, because they've convinced themselves that would have saved Iraqi lives.

Uh, no (via Gateway Pundit).

Mahablog questions the timing and blames Karl Rove. It's knee-jerk, but instinctive for them at this point.

Georgia10 at Daily Kos asks, "Do the ends justify the means?" seems quite concerned that Saddam may not have gotten a fair trial, and cries yet again for us to abandon the people of Iraq, which she apparently considers a "blood-soaked path to nowhere."

It's never to late to blame America. It's never to late too run.

A "good morning to you" from the American liberal left.

Mission Accomplished: Saddam Sentenced to Death by Hanging

Via Fox News:

Saddam Hussein, the iron-fisted dictator who ruled Iraq for nearly a quarter of a century, was found guilty of crimes against humanity Sunday and sentenced to death by hanging.

The so-called Butcher of Baghdad, who was president of Iraq from 1979 until he was deposed by Coalition forces in April 2003, was convicted of the 1982 killings of 148 Shiites in the city of Dujail.

The visibly shaken former leader shouted "God is great!" as Iraq's High Tribunal announced his sentence.

Saddam's half brother and former intelligence chief Barzan Ibrahim, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, head of the former Revolutionary Court, were sentenced to join Saddam on the gallows for the Dujail killings after an unsuccessful assassination attempt during a Saddam visit to the city 35 miles north of Baghdad.

It seems fitting that an Iraqi gallows and not an American bullet will put an end to the reign of Saddam Hussein. The allied elite forces of Task Force 20 eliminated his sadistic sons, but I think that Iraqis will attain more closure by executing the Butcher of Baghdad themselves.

Fellow Pajamas Media bloggers Omar and Mohammed Fadhil report from Baghdad:

I was overwhelmed with joy and relief as I watched the criminals being read their verdicts. For the first time in our region tyrants are being punished for their crimes through a court of law.

Until this moment and while I’m typing these words I’m still receiving words of congratulations in emails, phone calls and text messages from friends inside and outside the country. These were our only means to share our happiness because of the curfew that limits our movement.

This is the day for Saddam’s lovers to weep and I expect their shock and grieve to be huge. They had always thought their master was immortal so let them live in their disappointment while we live for our future.

This is a day not only for Iraqis but a historic day for the whole region; today new basis for dealing between rulers and peoples are found.

No one is above the law anymore.

I was particularly pleased by the way Judge Raouf Rasheed handled the session; he was reading the court’s decision and at the same time chastising members of the current government for their misbehavior and threatened to throw them in custody regardless of their ranks!

We are living a new era where there’s much hope despite the difficulties…our sacrifices have a noble cause, that is to build a new model that obviously terrifies other tyrants.

AllahPundit notes a post written by Omar Fadhil in 2003 when he spoke with a young doctor who grew up in the town where the crimes took place. I'll suggest you read it, and agree with Allah's conclusion:

Thus always to tyrants.

Blogger Book Pimpin'

Arthur Chrenkoff's new novel Night Trains is out, and apparently getting some good reviews.

Check it out.

SRT

Doug Ross takes a look at some of the documents that the New York Times has authenticated, and a suggests how those revelations should affect your future plans.

I tend to agree with his conclusion.

Kerry's "Apology" Was All-Too Insincere

John Kerry's arrogance knows no bounds.

John Kerry has a 35-year history of slandering American soldiers, and when he disparaged the intelligence of the American military earlier this week, he deserved no benefit of the doubt. He'd referred to them as murderers, rapists, and terrorists too many times before.

When he swore he would "apologize to no one" for the comments assaulting their intelligence, he obviously meant it.

Now several days later and a "I'm sorry you aren't smart enough to understand what I meant to say" non-apology, he still has enough arrogance and contempt for the American soldier to feature on his page the headline, "Kerry's Remark: Right either way."

As Bryan notes:

Because even though he has “apologized” several times and in disingenuous ways, at heart he [Kerry] meant what he said. When he finds someone who supports his smear, he links right to them to justify himself. Someone who truly meant to apologize for a remark he doesn’t believe wouldn’t do that.

John Kerry is not the least bit sorry for slandering America's heroes.

He wasn't sorry in 1972, and he's certainly not sorry now.

NY Times Justifies 2003 Invasion of Iraq

This is a NY Times November bombshell as designed by the North Koreans.

The breaking article seems to be an attempt to attack the Bush Administration for releasing potentially classified information (yes, the ironymeter is pegged), but what they actually prove is that Saddam's nuclear weapons program was indeed a significant threat.

Not only were they close to developing their own nuclear bomb (at one point the Iraqis "were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away"), they also had that nucelar weapon building knowledge available to proliferate to other rogue states.

The Times may have set out to attack Bush, but instead, they have justified the rationale for the 2003 invasion.

Thanks, Pinch.

Update: Josh Manchester notes that this article seems to be an attempt by the NY Timesto pull an "Al-Qaqaa" once more before an national election.

Further Update: As Glenn Reynolds notes:

Judging from some of the delighted emails I'm getting, I need to warn people not to get too carried away -- this doesn't say that Saddam would have had a bomb in 2004. But it does say that he had all the knowledge needed to have a bomb in short order. And as we know he was looking to reconstitute his program once sanctions were ended -- and that sanctions were breaking down in 2003 -- that's pretty significant. However, perhaps even more significant, given that we knew most of the above already, is that the NYT apparently regards the documents that bloggers have been translating for months as reliable, which means that reports of Iraqi intelligence's relations with Osama bin Laden, and "friendly" Western press agencies, are presumably also reliable.

And as these documents are "presumably also reliable," then much of the research into these documents done by a former Defense Intelligence Agency contractor by the name of Ray Robinson is certainly worth a second or even a third look. Robinson compiled some of his research for the Fox News Saddam Dossier, and has much more in the archives of his personal site.

Robinson thinks he may have even triggered this by contacting the IAEA two weeks ago.

Sinking the Timestanic

Icebergs everywhere.

Al-Taei Kidnapping Motive: Ransom?

According to Time:

A kidnapping ring has demanded a $250,000 ransom from the family of the U.S. soldier abducted in Iraq, a suspiciously low sum that his family worries could be a sign that he is no longer alive.

The Pentagon Thursday confirmed for the first time that Specialist Ahmed al-Taie, a Michigan National Guardsman assigned to the Provincial Reconstruction Team Baghdad, has been "unaccounted for" since Oct. 23 at 4:30pm; he is currently listed as "duty status whereabouts unknown." Family members of the 41-year-old Iraqi-American from Ann Arbor, Mich. say he was nabbed by a gang claiming to be from the Mahdi Army while he was on an unauthorized trip outside the fortified Green Zone to visit his wife in Baghdad.

The ransom demand for al-Taie was relayed earlier this week to al-Taie's uncle Entifad Qanbar, a former spokesman for the Iraqi National Congress and recently an official in the Iraqi Ministry of Defense. Qanbar described to TIME the complicated negotiations he has been engaged in on behalf of the family and in close coordination with the U.S.-led Hostage Working Group, a task force in the U.S. embassy in Baghdad made up of specialists from multiple U.S. agencies and the military.

Reading the Time story leave one with the impression that the kidnapping was done purely as a criminal exercise.

We have the option of accepting that at face value, but kidnapping an American serviceman would seem to be an extremely risky enterprise for a group merely interested in profit. Whereas the kidnapping of Iraqi civilians leads to only an Iraqi police response (if that), the kidnapping of al-Taei led to a massive military-led recovery effort that has at least 3,000 American and Iraqi soldiers conducting area sweeps and house-to-house searches, a response that most criminal kidnappers would understandably shy away from.

Kidnapping for ransom is a not uncommon practice throughout the developing world, and is increasingly common in regards to the kidnapping of Iraqis for political or criminal means, but it is comparatively rare for foreigners to be kidnapped for ransom, and the al-Taei kidnapping, if a criminal exercise, would be the first kidnapping of an American soldier in an attempt to turn a profit since the war began.

It simply seems doubtful that an experienced kidnapping gang would take such risks for such a comparatively small reward. Politics, hidden behind a veil of base criminal motivation, still seems to be the most likely reason to kidnap such a high-profile target.

...Not As They Do

"Tis the season for pre-election surprises, some of them well deserved.

Nationally, a powerful evangelical minister in Colorado Springs that was a vocal proponent of a statewide ballot initiative to ban on gay marriage was outed yesterday by a man who accused him of paying for sex from him over the past three years. As a result, Ted Haggard has stepped down from his post at his 14,000-member church and resigned as president from the National Association of Evangelicals.

Haggard claims he is innocent, but his accuser, Mike Jones, reportedly has both voicemails and a letter from Haggard that he says proves the trysts occurred. Haggard was also accused of using methamphetamine in his presence. Haggard has also admitted to another minister that some of the allegations may have some truth behind them.

Locally, the campaign of incumbent Republican Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison was rocked by allegations that he had an on-going affair with a local optometrist's wife. They are apparently still dating now that the couple has divorced.

Obviously, both of these long-running affairs are morally wrong, and I'm sure our friends on the left will enjoy mercilessly beating them up over their conduct as we run up to the elections on November 7. We will find out at that time whether or not Colorado's gay marriage ban and Harrison's bid to remain sheriff are torpedoed by these politically timed, but still apparently valid charges.

Nobody is perfect and we all have some sort of embarrassment or skeletons in our closets. Being human, we all make mistakes, and most of them are forgivable.

But there is a special kind of hypocrisy in publicly advocating one position while privately undercutting it with a contrary and continuing pattern of behavior, and that is what troubles me about both of these cases, Haggard's moreso than Harrison's.

Sheriff Harrison had just lost his wife of almost 36 years months before his affair began, and was probably emotionally vulnerable when his affair began. That doesn’t excuse it or justify his behavior in any way, but makes it at least something that most people can understand, if not condone.

Haggard, however, has apparently risen to a position of prominence based upon the deep-seated and long-running deception of many, advocating one position in public and practicing another in private.

God will forgive all of us who truly seek forgiveness, but among mortals, many will find Haggard's duplicity much harder to forgive.

Dear America: Vote Terrorist Democratic

Root, root, root for the home team:

"Of course Americans should vote Democrat," Jihad Jaara, a senior member of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group and the infamous leader of the 2002 siege of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, told WND.

"This is why American Muslims will support the Democrats, because there is an atmosphere in America that encourages those who want to withdraw from Iraq. It is time that the American people support those who want to take them out of this Iraqi mud," said Jaara, speaking to WND from exile in Ireland, where he was sent as part of an internationally brokered deal that ended the church siege.

And he's not alone.

Muhammad Saadi, a senior leader of Islamic Jihad in the northern West Bank town of Jenin, said the Democrats' talk of withdrawal from Iraq makes him feel "proud."

"As Arabs and Muslims we feel proud of this talk," he told WND. "Very proud from the great successes of the Iraqi resistance. This success that brought the big superpower of the world to discuss a possible withdrawal."

Abu Abdullah, a leader of Hamas' military wing in the Gaza Strip, said the policy of withdrawal "proves the strategy of the resistance is the right strategy against the occupation."

"We warned the Americans that this will be their end in Iraq," said Abu Abdullah, considered one of the most important operational members of Hamas' Izzedine al-Qassam Martyrs Brigades, Hamas' declared "resistance" department. "They did not succeed in stealing Iraq's oil, at least not at a level that covers their huge expenses. They did not bring stability. Their agents in the [Iraqi] regime seem to have no chance to survive if the Americans withdraw."

Abu Ayman, an Islamic Jihad leader in Jenin, said he is "emboldened" by those in America who compare the war in Iraq to Vietnam.

No further comment seems necessary.

Another "Botched Joke"

After the apparently unedited video of John Kerry's bashing of the intelligence of the American military was revealed to have mirrored comments that he made to an anti-war group in 1972, leading Democrats such as Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, New York Senator Charles Schumer, and Congressional Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi joined a growing chorus of prominent Democrats that called for the disgraced Massachusetts Democrat to resign his seat in the United States Senate.*

"Our brave men and women in Uniform deserve our unerring support, whatever their mission," said Dean. "By slandering the intelligence and commitment of our Armed Forces, John Kerry has besmirched the honor of all Americans that appreciate the honor, integrity and intelligence of our men and women in uniform."

Said Schumer, "We have all known for a long time that our nations' military consistently attracts our best and brightest. This latest slight by Kerry against our soldiers is not his first, but it should be his last as a public servant."

In an interview aired on CNN, Pelosi added, "I have always supported those brave souls who feel called to defend this great nation. Any attacks leveled against them, even in jest, are unacceptable."

"John Kerry, it seems, is the "botched joke" that is no longer needed in a patriotic and military friendly Democratic Party."

Grass roots Democratic activists have also voiced their displeasure with Senator Kerry, and have started a petition drive to demand his ouster.

* As if you couldn't tell this was satire...

Negotiations Underway to Release Captured U.S. Army Translator

As I said in response to Andrew Sullivan's willfully ignorant claim yesterday that "commander-in-chief has abandoned an American soldier to the tender mercies of a Shiite militia":

Andrew Sullivan disingenuously misrepresents a small (and increasingly irrelevant) part of the rescue effort as the entire rescue effort, discounting all active military and police searches, intelligence gathering efforts, and back-channel political maneuvering that we know from past experience is certainly taking place.

This morning, Fox News confirms that the back-channel political maneuvering I discussed is indeed occuring:

The U.S. military identified a kidnapped soldier for the first time on Thursday, saying the abducted Iraqi-American was 41-year-old Ahmed Qusai al-Taayie.

Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell also said that the reserve soldier was visiting his Iraqi wife when he was handcuffed and taken away by gunmen during a visit to the woman's family.

Caldwell said there was "an ongoing dialogue" in a bid to win the soldier's release, but he would not say with whom or at what level.

The fact that al-Taei (or as this article spells it "al-Taayie") did not turn up dead within the first 72 hours of his abduction, and the fact that he is believed to have been captured by the Mahdi Army instead of al Qaeda, leads me to believe that he was abducted not to become a victim of torture and murder, but to become a political pawn for one of the factions of Muqtada al-Sadr's militia.

What remains to be seen, and what we may never know, is whether al-Taei's capture is something that al-Sadr had a hand in, or if a faction within his loosely-organized Mahdi Army Militia conducted the kidnapping independently. If al-Taei's abduction was not conducted with al-Sadr's knowledge or blessing, there is the possibility that the kidnapping is evidence of a rift between factions of the Mahdi Army.

If so (and this is purely speculation), it could be that factions within the Mahdi Army are using the kidnapping to make a run on al-Sadr's control of the militia. The kidnapping places a microscope on al-Sadr (note the renewed calls to have him killed, which stem at least in part from the kidnapping), and depending on internal Iraqi politics, could rattle his standing with both other Mahdi Army factions and with the Iraqi government, which for now, seems to be doing the bidding of al-Sadr (on that, at least, Sullivan was correct).

If al-Sadr starts to lose (more) control of the Madhi Army, his importance to and influence within the Iraqi government may wane, and the possibility that Ralph Peters may eventually get his wish, perhaps courtesy of the apparently fragmenting Mahdi Army itself.

Update: Josh Manchester has further thoughts.

Last Word on the ''Botched Joke'' Update: Almost Last Word

I just watched what appears to be the uncut footage of the Kerry speech at Hot Air.

It doesn't make me feel any less irritated, for while Kerry did clearly deliver a "botched joke" (i.e., it wasn't close to being funny), it seems obvious to me that the dig at the intelligence of the troops was scripted and intentional and targeted specifically at them, if part of a larger comment directed at President Bush.

In the larger context of what he said in the first 3 minutes of the clip, I took it as something in the neighborhood of "Only morons would follow this idiot into war," but perhaps that is merely my perception.

Well, me, and these guys.

PowerPointless

A clandestine program to track terrorist communications into the United States splashes across the pages of the New York Times, and the government does nothing in response. A top secret program is leaked in the same paper revealing how terrorist funding is monitored, and again, the leaker goes free.

Today, the leak of a minor but still classified report, including a PowerPoint slide, has the Pentagon wanting to drop the hammer:

The Pentagon is looking into how classified information indicating Iraq is moving closer to chaos wound up on the front page of Wednesday's New York Times, and is not ruling out an investigation that could lead to criminal charges.

A spokesman for U.S. Central Command, which has responsibility for operations in Iraq, confirmed to FOX News that a chart published in The Times is a real reflection of the thinking of military intelligence on the situation in Iraq as of Oct. 18, adding that an effort is underway to find out who leaked the chart and if the breach of operational security constitutes a crime.

The published report includes a classified one-page slide show from an Oct. 18 military briefing. The slide show is titled: "Iraq: Indications and Warnings of Civil Conflict," and shows spiraling violence in Iraq and a worsening position for American efforts.

Based on the slide show, Iraq is moving sharply away from "peace," designated in green on the left side of the chart, to a point much closer to the red-zoned right side of the spectrum, marked "chaos."

News flash to the Pentagon: This is kinda like letting someone break into your house, steal your valuables and rough up your family, only to get pissed off when they trample on the grass while leaving.

If the government wants to start nailing those who leak classified information during a time of war, they should start with the most important cases, not much less important ones such as this.

Sullivan's Dim Bulb Flickers Once More

As seems to be his pattern lately, Andrew Sullivan suckles onto one fact and uses it to fatten up a dishonest charge he cannot support:

While the media is obsessed parsing the ad libs of someone on no ballot this fall, something truly ominous has just happened in Iraq. The commander-in-chief has abandoned an American soldier to the tender mercies of a Shiite militia. Yes, there are nuances here, and the NYT fleshes out the story today. But the essential fact is clear.

What Andrew Sullivan obtusely states as "fact" is nothing of the sort.

U.S. forces withdrew from checkpoints around the Sadr City slum at Prime Minster Maliki's request, but it is quite a leap to suggest that by turning over checkpoints to the Iraqi Army, that efforts to secure the release of captured U.S Army translator Ahmed Qusai al-Taei have been abandoned.

Does Sullivan honestly believe, and does he even have the basis to believe, that the cordons around Sadr City were the only measure being taken to secure al-Taei's release? If so, Sullivan betrays a stupefying naiveté. More likely, however, he just abandoned any pretense of honesty in favor of a cheap partisan shot that suits his increasingly fractured and incoherent ideology.

I'll state in advance that I do not know specifically what U.S. and Iraqi military, police and political forces are doing to retrieve al-Taei (nor would I reveal the details if I knew them), but what I can state with a fair degree of certainty is that those who kidnapped him at gunpoint:

• had planned the kidnapping in advance
• had a pre-planned and nearby location where they would take al-Taei, in what they consider a safe and sympathetic area from which they are very unlikely to move

It is almost certain that al-Taei was already in this pre-planned containment area before a cordon was ever established. They are now even less likely to move him because of the much greater risk of exposure that any move would entail.

We also know that a passive cordon would only be part of an overall plan to rescue this missing soldier, based upon all-too recent experience.

When Pfcs. Menchacha and Tucker were kidnapped by al Qaeda in June, more than 8,000 soldiers from the U.S. and Iraqi armies participated in the search. We know that forces have actively searched for al-Taei by foot and air, and that there is no sign that the active searches, those that are most likely to be effective at this late stage of the kidnapping, have abated in the least.

Sullivan, of course, does not mention this, perhaps purposefully.

He wouldn’t want to ruin his pre-determined narrative:

The U.S. military does not have a tradition of abandoning its own soldiers to foreign militias, or of taking orders from foreign governments. No commander-in-chief who actually walks the walk, rather than swaggering the swagger, would acquiesce to such a thing. The soldier appears to be of Iraqi descent who is married to an Iraqi woman. Who authorized abandoning him to the enemy? Who is really giving the orders to the U.S. military in Iraq? These are real questions about honor and sacrifice and a war that is now careening out of any control. They are not phony questions drummed up by a partisan media machine to appeal to emotions to maintain power.

Actually, these are "phony questions drummed up by a partisan media machine," and, that machine is an intellectual Trabant at that.

Andrew Sullivan disingenuously misrepresents a small (and increasingly irrelevant) part of the rescue effort as the entire rescue effort, discounting all active military and police searches, intelligence gathering efforts, and back-channel political maneuvering that we know from past experience is certainly taking place.

I don’t expect Sullivan to be nonpartisan or ideologically neutral, but a do expect him to approach the subject with at least a hint of intellectual honesty that he has not thus far shown.

11-02-06 Update: Fox News confirms this morning that the back channel negotiations I mentioned above are indeed occuring. More here.

A Word of Thanks

I've been a bad blogger.

John Hinderaker, Paul Mirengoff, and Scott Johnson over at Powerline graciously picked me to be their "Blog of the Week," and my RSS feed has been featured at the top of the page at Powerline News, sending me oddles of first-time readers that I hope will take this opportunity to bookmark Confederate Yankee and make this site a daily read.

While I haven't personally met John or Paul, I did get to spend Friday evening and part of the day Saturday with Scott (along with many other excellent bloggers) at Carolina FreedomNet 2006, and found him to be a delightful person I appreciate the opportunity they've given me to earn your trust and your readership.

Thanks.

A Pickshure Is Werth A Thousand Wurds

A written response to "Jon Carry" from the American soldier.

Hat tip: Michelle Malkin, who notes this picture has made it to Drudge as well.

Update: Retired Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney calls for Kerry’s resignation.

Not that it will happen. By insulting the military, Kerry's playing to his base.

Update: Kerry finally apologizes.

Going His Own Way

I haven't read John Cole's blog Balloon Juice in quite a while, but when his post This is No Fun popped up on memeorandum.com this morning, it piqued my interest enough for me to want to see what he had to say, especially as many of the more prominent liberal blogs seemed to be linking it.

Essentially, Cole provided his bona fides as a long-time Republican who feels that today's Republican Party no longer represented his views. I can respect that.

I don't think that any American should feel that they owe either political party, or even a larger ideology, a lifetime of dedication from the metaphorical cradle to grave. As we grow older and mature, our life experiences impact how we view the world and that affects our perspective, sometimes radically. In general, as people grow older they tend to grow more conservative, but there will always be those that started out as being more conservative who shift their viewpoints towards more liberal philosophies.

It is also quite normal for those who have made a radical shift from one philosophical point of view to another to find tremendous fault in their former stablemates. David Brock certainly did so going from conservative to liberal, just as has former 60s radical David Horowitz did going from liberal to conservative. Their is also an apparent need for those making such ideological transitions to prove themselves to those they now find themselves aligned with.

I don’t know when things went south with this party (literally and figuratively- and I am sure commenters here will tell me the party has always been this bad- I disagree with that, and so do others), but for me, Terri Schiavo was the real eye-opener. Sure, the Prescription Drug Plan was hideous and still gets my blood pressure pumping, and the awful bankruptcy bill was equally bad, and there were other things that should have clued me in, but really, it was Schiavo that made me realize this party was not as advertized.

[snip]

I am not really having any fun attacking my old friends- but I don’t know how else to respond when people call decent men like Jim Webb a pervert for no other reason than to win an election. I don’t know how to deal with people who think savaging a man with Parkinson’s for electoral gain is appropriate election-year discourse. I don’t know how to react to people who think that calling anyone who disagrees with them on Iraq a “terrorist-enabler” than to swing back. I don’t know how to react to people who think that media reports of party hacks in the administration overruling scientists on issues like global warming, endangered species, intelligent design, prescription drugs, etc., are signs of… liberal media bias...

And it makes me mad. I still think of myself as a Republican- but I think the whole party has been hijacked by frauds and religionists and crooks and liars and corporate shills, and it frustrates me to no end to see my former friends enabling them, and I wonder ‘Why can’t they see what I see?” I don’t think I am crazy, I don’t think my beliefs have changed radically, and I don’t think I have been (as suggested by others) brainwashed by my commentariat...

[snip]

I feel like I am betraying my friends in the party and the blogosphere when I attack them, even though I believe it is they who have betrayed what ‘we’ allegedly believe in. Bush has been a terrible President. The past Congresses have been horrible- spending excessively, engaging in widespread corruption, butting in to things they should have no say in (like end of life decisions), refusing to hold this administration accountable for ANYTHING, and using wedge issues to keep themselves in power at the expense of gays, etc. And I don’t know why my friends on the right still keep fighting for these guys to stay in power.

I disagree with Cole on many of the policy points in his post, but that does not make either of our opinions on these or other issues invalid, just different.

What I do find a bit perplexing is statements like this:

...the whole [Republican] party has been hijacked by frauds and religionists and crooks and liars and corporate shills...

I'm not quite sure what to make of this and related statements in his post.
Frauds and crooks and liars exist in both parties, far more than either side would like to admit. Criminal behavior is bi-partisan, and has been since this nation was founded, with the party in power at the time being more potentially corruptible simply because they are more powerful and therefore more attractive to those who would be corrupters.

As Republicans currently hold power across the board on the federal level, their influence makes them more of a target at this present time, just as even a cursory examination of history will reveal that when Democrats have held more power, they, in their own turn, have also proven to be quite corruptible to similar interests. Cole, I hope, won't be crushed yet again when the Democrats he has now apparently allied himself once more take power (which I hope will be later, rather than sooner) and prove that they are also far from pure.

I suspect that deep down, he is already aware of this truism, and that he is just using this temporary excuse as a cover for a deeper felt affront that seems to be tied more to an aversion for what he terms "religionists" (just a half-step from Andrew Sullivan's "Christianists").

By his own admission, the Terri Shiavo case which polarized many deeply affected Cole, and it seems fair based upon the comments in this post that Cole's version of what the Republican Party should be, is a party that should not embrace those people who are religious. If I misstate his views I apologize, but that is what he appears to say.

Cole, of course has other complaints: about fiscal responsibility, public policy, and the War on Terror under the Republicans, and most of these complains at least have debatable merit.

The sad thing, however, is that as Cole has rejected Republicans, he seems to have reflexively thrown in his lot with not the moderate middle where his stated interests would seem to reside, but with the most extreme elements of the political far left. From Oliver Willis to Daily Kos to Glenn Greenwald and others, Cole has apparently become the darling for those who hold political views that are also in apparent opposition to what Cole states he believes.

The Republican Prescription Plan may be bad, and yet his newest proponents support the boondoggle of socialized medicine. The Bankruptcy Bill was abhorrent, and yet his new allies support raising taxes, which also hurts those living on the financial edge. He disagrees with how the War in Iraq is being fought, and aligns himself with those who would prefer that we instead embrace defeat. What he states he believes and who he currently finds himself "in bed with" (metaphorically speaking) seem to be diametrically opposed.

He ends his post by saying that he doesn't know where it is going. It seems more likely that he knows his precise destination, but is unwilling or unable to realize how far past center to the other extreme he has gone.

All Those Right Wing Morons

"You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq."

Those were the words of Democratic Senator John Kerry on Monday night while campaigning for fellow Democrat Phil Angelides in California.

By midday Tuesday, outrage from the active duty military, veterans groups, online pundits, talk radio personalities and conservative politicians (and from conservative politicians that are veterans) had reached a crescendo, and Kerry, instead of apologizing, stated that he would not apologize, instead stating that the controversial line was targeted at the White House.

Funny, that.

I read the line, delivered at a Democratic campaign rally at a college campus, and cannot see how Kerry can claim how what he said could be construed as anything other than an insult to the intelligence of those Americans who chose to serve in the Armed Forces. Kerry's implication is clear:

"If you are smart and do well in school, you can be successful. If you don't do well in school, and you don't make an effort to be smart, you'll end up in the military... and shipped off to fight in a war I do not support."

How can any logical person construe this as an attack on President Bush or his leadership, as Kerry claimed? Clearly, neither the President, not the White House, nor even conservative politicians were referenced or even implied in what Kerry said. His statement, regardless of intent, directly challenges the intelligence of those who have and will join the Armed Forces of the United States.

This of course is not the first time that Kerry has slandered American servicemen and women. He has a long history of such behavior, dating back to the 1970s and his infamous and unsupported "Genghis Khan" testimony, to his more recent allegations in our current conflict in Iraq that U.S. military forces were "terrorizing" Iraqis. When given a chance to attack the enemy, Kerry consistently defines the "enemy" as those wearing camouflage and the flag of the United States on their sleeves.

Accidentally or not, John Kerry has offended those who serve this nation, and will not apologize to those he slandered.

To me, that speaks volumes both about the man, and the Democratic Party that he represents.