The Opinionated Bastard

To the Left: Capitalism is not universally bad.
To the Right: Capitalism is not universally good.

We don't have a capitalist society in this country, we have a "democratic capitalist" society. Marx might have been right in that unfettered capitalism can lead inevitably to fascism, but not in a democratic society. In a democratic society, capitalism has lead to more wealth for everyone, and has proved its self superior to any other system.

So capitalism must exist in a system of checks and balances. The market always wins though, so those checks and balances must be carefully defined. You have to make tradeoffs. While the minimum wage raised the standard of living for some people, it also increased unemployment.

To the Left: Unions are not always right
To the Right: Businesses are not always right

Personal note: My mother was the shop steward in her union, but she hated their politics. My grandfather was imprisoned in Leavenworth for running a labor union, but though Communism was evil.

While workers are the means of production, that production is in competition with other workers. The market always wins. The union leadership is not always reasonable, neither is management. Don't shortchange your workers, don't strike yourself out of a job.

To the Left: Left wing totalitarian regimes are evil
To the Right: Right wing totalitarian regimes are evil

While the US did a certain amount of support for right wing regimes during the Cold War, its substantially backing off from that now. What both sides have yet to realize is that ALL totalitarian regimes are evil, and the US should now work to eliminate them. Both the right and the left should applaud whenever one of these regimes falls, not selectively applaud based on the stated politics of the regime.

To the Left: We are not all going to become slaves to a conspiracy of multi-national corporations. Even in cases where actions by someone can be traced back to the profit motive, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Capitalism works. It makes good movies, but the world is a lot more complex then Noam Chomsky thinks.

To the Right: Individual power is a precious and fragile thing. Freedom of choice is important. Its too easy for corporations to break the law with minimal consequences.

To the Left: The death penalty is appropriate in certain cases
To the Right: The death penalty as applied in this country is rarely appropriate.

To the Left: Being a Christian is not a bad thing, its a good thing.
To the Right: The first lesson of Christianity: Watch out for the church elders.

Being a Christian used to imply the virtues of tolerance, charity and compassion. While I think that's still true, that's not the Christians who show up on television, they are always judgmental, greedy and uncompassionate. Ironically, this is the same thing Christ told us to watch out for. Its the church elders who nailed him to the cross. For an extreme example of this, see Iran.

To the Left: Family Values Work
To the Right: That doesn't make them the law.

Children who can grow up in whole, stable homes in general will do better then others. That doesn't mean that should become the law. We all have to make our own way in the world, and its not clear that growing up in a whole but unstable home would be better.

To the Left: Abortion is bad
To the Right: Choice is good

Its shameful the number of abortions that are performed in this country. That doesn't mean it should be illegal, instead we should promote alternatives like emergency contraception. Ultimately, people have to have the freedom to live their lives, but we should work together to try to reduce the abortion rate by 75% (the effectiveness of emergency contraception).

Something that no one quite seems to get in this whole WMD thing.

Also Titled:

Even Saddam thought Iraq had WMD

After having dozens of Bush-hating friends tell me "Bush lied", and after reading pages and pages of everything Bush said (gotta love the internet), I have to say that Bush never lied. Nor did he say that we knew for sure that Iraq had WMD. Instead, Bush and his spokesmen were very explicit about we knew for sure and what we didn't know. The best you can approximate really is that Bush said:

"We think Iraq has WMD, and that's a bad thing".

Note that Bush's statements were summarized differently by the media, but you can't blame Bush for how the media edits his words. Of course, we know now that we were wrong, but the most interesting thing about all this is that what David Kay found Iraq was that while Iraq had plenty of programs _trying_ to make WMD. However, in general, the scientists were lying to Saddam. Specifically Jafar Jafar, the head of weapons research was lying to Saddam. This makes some of the statements by Saddam about "unleashing a rain of fire upon US troops if they invaded" make a little more sense. Saddam thought he had weapons he didn't have.

The irony of all this is incredible to me. Currently, I keep fantasizing about having Tommy Chong play Hussien, with Cheech Marin as Jafar in a Saturday Night Live skit.

Saddam (played by Chong): Dude, I need to score some killer weapons to keep these Americans off my back, man.

Jafar: (played by Cheech): No can do, dude.

Saddam: Well, then I'm going to have to kill you then, dude.

Jafar: No, wait dude, I know how to build some killer weapons, but its going to be expensive. I just thought you wouldn't want to spend the money.

Saddam: Cool, Man, here's $1B.

Jafar: (bugs eyes) Bitchin' Man, I can get...uh...make some killer powder with this man...

(...Time Passes...)

Jafar: (snorting from bag of white powder, his "digs" are much nicer now...) This is some killer stuff man.

(Saddam Enters)

Saddam: Hey, dude, how's it hanging? Got any cool weapons for me.

Jafar: (looks nervous, looks around wildly, sees white powder, looks back at Saddam) Uh.... Yeah man! I got this killer powder, its, uh, Anthrax. Yeah, it will really fuck you up man...it'll totally waste 'em.

Saddam: Great! Give me that (takes bag of white powder) I'm going to load it into my Scuds right now!

(leaves)

Jafar: (dials phone) Hello, Travelocity? I need a ticket to Kuwait...

Because I refuse to be spoon fed by the media, I subscribe to the DOD, State Department, and White House mailing lists that send out transcripts of briefings and interviews by administration officials. Recently, I received this, which has to be one of the best descriptions of the administrations strategy in the War on Terror I’ve read.

The key insight President Bush seems to have had is what I would call the Vince Lombardi strategy: The best defense is a good offense. If we react defensively to terrorism, gradually our civil liberties will erode, because the only way to prevent terrorism in America would be to implement all the things we’ve fought against for years in America.

While some politicians (Kerry for instance) have argued that terrorism should be handled as a police activity, that’s exactly the wrong tactic. It gives the terrorists all the initiative and us none. Given the strong sense of liberty in this nation, a defensive strategy against terrorism is the same thing as doing nothing, because too many Americans would be to resistant.

Once you realize how much more sense it makes to take an offensive strategy in the war on terror then a defensive strategy, then the invasion of Iraq makes a lot more sense. Its merely one battle in a wider war.

Anyways, here’s the original text:

Transcript of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith’s Speech to the Political Union, University of Chicago, April 14, 2004

I’ll be writing for awhile about why I’m supporting Bush in this election, and trying to talk about both his good and bad points. This first part is about Iraq, because I consider that the most important issue this election. I probably won’t be talking about Kerry much, because he seems to be running on the I’m not Bush platform. That doesn’t impress me, Joseph Stalin isn’t Bush either, that doesn’t mean I’d vote for him if I was upset at Bush (which I’m not).

To me, the number one issue this election is the war in Iraq. To me, this issue breaks down into four parts:

• The decision to enter Iraq in the first place. Grade: A
• Building Worldwide Support. Grade: C-
• Winning the War. Grade: A+
• Planning for the Peace. Grade: A
• Winning the Peace. Grade: B
• Going the distance. Grade: A

I’ll cover each of these in detail.

Come to think of it, that’s most days.

So Bush announced that we’ve figured out that Russia isn’t going to invade West Germany any more, probably because:

1. The Cold War ended 13 years ago.
2. West Germany doesn’t even exist any more.

That is, he announced he’s going to move about 70,000 troops from where they are in Europe back to the US. Basically, it costs us a lot of money to have bases in Europe that make less and less sense every year.

So this should be a no-brainer, right? Clinton or Bush Sr. should have done this years ago. Instead, we have these political flacks talking about how its a bad idea. And by political flack, I mean Retired General Wesley Clark.

One of the things that bugs me the most about the Kerry campaign is that they just don’t seem to know how to pick their battles. Why are they arguing about this? All Bush has to say is “Well, none of the people at the Pentagon seem to be worried about Russia invading Germany anytime soon, so it was time to reduce our presence in Europe.” If he does that, or more likely, if his proxy does that, it will just be yet another time I’ve seen the Kerry campaign make an issue of something Bush does that is obviously the right thing.

Plus, to be perfectly honest, its time the EU nations started providing for more of their own defense instead of mooching off us so much. Bush probably can’t say that publicly, but the line about us not being worried about the Soviet Union, since it no longer exists, is just too obvious.

Here are some sites that have much better military analysis then the news media. One of the reasons I’m supporting GWB in this election is that I’ve found that the people who do that sort of analysis on TV are terrible. These guys aren’t. They’re not a pretty boy given a briefing on terrorism, they’re guys who have been doing this for real for a long time.

GlobalSecurity.org This is the place to go if you want the sort of no-nonsense analysis you’d expect a cigar-chomping Tom Clancy character to provide.

Strategy Page These guys know their stuff when it comes to military strategy.

Kerry calls for Rumsfeld to resign:

“Yesterday, the Schlesinger panel released their report which found that much of the responsibility for setting the conditions for the abuse at Abu Ghraib can be attributed to failures at highest levels of our government. Today the Fay report will be released and will recommend punitive action for those in our military who were directly involved.

Er, actually, the report said that most of the responsibility was the fault of the guard and supervisors of the prison, but that the Pentagon should have done a better job of managing in the first place.

“But what is missing from all these reports is accountability from the senior civilian leaders in the Pentagon and in the White House. From the bottom of the chain of command all the way to the top, there needs to be accountability. The Schlesinger report makes clear that Secretary Rumsfeld was responsible for setting a climate where these types of abuses could occur.

Er, no, it actually didn’t go all the way to Rumsfeld. As the civilian head, he’s not supposed to be messing with operational details. ScrappleFace has the funny version of this.

“By failing to plan to win the peace, by failing to make sure our troops received the proper training, equipment, reinforcement and command guidance, and by failing to take corrective actions once all of this became apparent, Secretary Rumsfeld did not demonstrate the leadership required from a Secretary of Defense.

Well, he fired the person in charge the prison, and started the investigation that brought up all these charges.

“That is why today I am calling on Secretary Rumsfeld to resign effective immediately. In addition, I call on the President to appoint an independent investigation to review the entire decision making process that led to these abuses and provide a comprehensive set of reforms so that we can ensure that this never happens again.

Did anyone here read “Plan of Attack”?

One of the things I like about Rumsfeld is that he is constantly questioning himself and the Pentagon. While Woodward’s thesis was that Rumsfeld made it “too easy” to go to war, I didn’t see that. What I saw was the ideal Secretary of War (we haven’t had a Secretary of Defense since 9/11): Someone who brought the military around to the diplomatic and political realities. He pushed the Pentagon to give the President real options. The original plan which read like a 1950 invasion plan: bomb the shit out of the Iraqis until they surrender. There would have been 100,000 civilian casualties, easy.

So while 150 prisoners may have been abused, its also true that it was the Pentagon that independently found out it was going on and shut it down. Meanwhile, because Rumsfeld pushed the Pentagon out of their comfort zone, thousands of Iraqi lives were saved vs. the original battle plan.

If you fired everyone who made a mistake, there would be no one working. Rumsfeld’s job is to be the bad cop to Powell’s good cop. That is, don’t mess with the US or we’ll sick Rumsfeld on you!

One of the reasons I started blogging was because I signed up for email transcripts of press conferences by the State Department and Military a year before the Iraq war, and I was stunned by the distortions of the media.

So while I’m not taking any position on whether Rumsfeld is right or wrong in this case, I think that its worth reading what he actually said, instead of having it spoon fed to you by the media. So here is a transcript as emailed to me by the DOD.

From Here:

While I’m (sort of) on this topic, why doesn’t the United States address the Afghan opium trade by just buying the stuff up? Presumably, farmers would be just as happy to sell their poppies to us, and that would keep them off the market, as well as depriving bad guys of a revenue source. Am I missing something here?

Yes Glenn, you are. In a capitalist society, you have to watch out what you reward. If we started buying the poppies, that would just drive up the price, but the poppies are cheap. If the price rose more farmers would start growing poppies instead of say, food. In other words, in a capitalist society, if you start rewarding something, you get more of it.

You’re obviously not a professor of economics. :-)

I wish the Democrats would learn this simple fact. Paying money to single moms leads to more single moms.

Read about it here:

Endorses him for fighting terrorism.

Wow.

Isreal. Kerry didn’t.

It’s audio

This is by the guy who wrote Losing Bin Laden. He makes the point that most of the guys on Kerry’s team are the same guys from the Clinton administration who dropped the ball for 8 years.

It's official, the terrorists are morons

The Russians are now going to ally with Israel. First they pissed off the French:

only now they want money

Now they've pissed of the Russians, who are going to get advised by Israel.

You know, it didn't really matter that Bush left the Europeans behind, it looks like they're going to catch up.

Here's Kerry on Foreign Policy: If I Were President—Addressing the Democratic Deficit

Americans’ security depends on helping the people of the Middle East see and act on a legitimate vision of peace.

Yeah, we should have democracy in the middle east so that can happen! Oh, wait, that's Bush.

I often fantasize about what would happen if I was the questioner at the Presidential Debates…

Not even a soldier, but some working for an NGO: Inside View From Iraq

Hat tip: pawigo

Weather you support the war or not, all our soldiers lives should be precious.

Here’s a great site with the actual numbers. icasualties.org

It interesting that non-hostile deaths are still about 1/4th of all fatalities in Iraq.

There’s some weird stuff if you look at cause of death by detail. 12 soldiers drowned in Iraq.

September 11, 2001

Madrid, 2003

Beslan, 2004

I admit it, I lost heart today when I heard about the 700 Iraqi police candidates being killed by a car bomb.

Then I read this from The Strategy Page. Yes, we're winning the war on terror. The War in Iraq has helped, but its tough, just like President Bush said it would be.

A while ago I subscribed to the DOD newsbriefs. Rumsfeld is constantly holding Town Hall meetings with soldiers, who universally are better informed, and ask better, tougher questions then the news media. Through that I've learned that Rumsfeld gives our soldiers straightforward, honest answers to some tough questions about what we're doing.

Here's one from yesterday: [go to dod]

First, Read This Article.

One of the things that has bugged me as a righty about the lefty criticism of Iraq is that what we need in Iraq is less bureaucracy, not more oversight.

I think this cartoon says it all:

We need to reform the state department. For decades, they've been the completely useless, filled with rich kids who have never had a real job. One of the main reasons that the rest of the world sees us as so militaristic is because the government ends up relying on our military to do much of our diplomacy because the State Department is such a joke.

How bad is it? We had to put a General in charge of the State Department...

Atrios asks:

When Bush keeps giving speeches saying that “we’re making progress” in Iraq, just what the hell is he talking about?

Here you go Atrios:

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10

From Centcom:

Iraqi National Guard troops patrolling in the Wasit Province area of the Polish-led Multi-National Division Central South, reported that anti-Iraqi forces blew themselves up as they prepared an Improvised Explosive Device in Suwayra Sept. 19.

The explosion occurred just after midnight killing several anti-Iraqi force personnel as they prepared the IED for Iraqi forces, Iraqi citizens or Multi-National Forces to come upon.

Here is a link to a 90 page FBI document showing a variety of concealable weapons.

Ever since 9/11, I've thought that most of the airport security nonsense was just a placebo, meant to reassure the populace that it was "safe" to travel. That PDF showing me knife after knife that could be slipped past security convinces me even more. Remember that the 9/11 hijackers used boxcutters, not guns.

Perhaps the "Arizona" solution is correct, in that the real way to prevent hijacking is not through more airport security but through arming the pilots, and perhaps the passengers.

Either way, I'd rather we spent the billions of the TSA budget elsewhere, perhaps even Iraq.

Juan Cole wrote this great piece called If America were Iraq, What would it be Like?

Until the end:

What if the leader of the European Union maintained that the citizens of the United States are, under these conditions, refuting pessimism and that freedom and democracy are just around the corner?

The problem is, in order to make that comparison you also need to talk about what Iraq was like under Saddam. So I've taken Juan's article and interleaved it with a Before and After so you can understand where the Iraqi people are coming from, and why in all these opinion polls they are so positive towards the US. If you look at where they're at now, yeah, its pretty bad. But if you look at where they've been, you can see why they feel they're making progress.

Kerry has been saying that Bush will reinstate the Draft. That's a damn lie.

The short and sweet answer:

We have 140,000 soldiers in Iraq.

Hypothetically, say we want to bring that up to 200,000. That's 60,000 more people.

We have 1.4 million soldiers on active duty. Why would we need to draft anyone?

The long answer:

What we need in Iraq is not soldiers, we need policemen. Most of our soldiers are trained to be soldiers against the Soviet Union (which doesn't exist anymore). Its even worse for NATO soldiers because the Europeans have been much slower to adapt to the end of the Cold War then we have (and we adapted too slowly as it was). So the reality is that while it might be nice to have more soldiers, of a certain type, those people don't exist. A draft wouldn't help that.

We need policemen who speak Arabic, and who understand the Iraqi culture. It turns out there's a whole country full of people willing to be policemen in Iraq. It's called...Iraq! President Bush's plan isn't to send more soldiers to Iraq, President Bush's plan is to train more Iraqis to be policemen.

This has some advantages beyond the obvious ones of language and culture. If an American soldier loses his temper and hits an Iraqi with a nightstick, its a war crime that reflects badly on America. If an Iraqi does it, its a personal crime that reflects badly on that policeman.

Bringing back the draft is just a damn lie by a damn fool.

Check my Stats

Kevin Drum is complaining, but as usual, the left is criticizing a Bush that doesn't exist except in their own imagination.

According to this:

9 Million

New math and science textbooks printed and distributed with pro-Saddam propaganda extracted

Through extensive research, I've been able to recover and translate one of those pro-Saddam textbooks. Here's a quote:

In the late 1600's, our glorious leader, Saddam Hussien, traveled back in time to Poland, and, posing as a man named Leibniz, invented Calculus and then traveled forward to lead our glorious nation to victory defeat against the evil Iranian Kuwati American menace.

When I read the media, I hear things are going to hell.

When I read the soldiers viewpoint, I hear things are going great.

Here's an entry from the WaPo:

The writer, an Army lieutenant general, commands the Multinational Security Transition Command in Iraq. He previously commanded the 101st Airborne Division, which was deployed in Iraq from March 2003 until February 2004. [read]

The best thing about Monday's is Chrenkoff's "Good News from Iraq" which is also reprinted by the Wall Street Journal:

Good News From Iraq

Here's news on Iraq straight from Iraqi's websites:

Carnival of the Liberated

Nope, you're not reading ScrappleFace. Here's a quote from the Bill O' Reilly Interview from last night:

PRESIDENT BUSH: That’s when you’re supposed to vote. You’ve got to stand tough with these terrorists. You cannot allow the terrorists to dictate whether or not a society can be free or not. Do you remember what happened in Afghanistan when the Taliban pulled the four women off the bus and killed them because they had voter registration cards? I think there had been about three million Afghan citizens who had registered at this point in time. A lot of people said, well, the elections look like they’ve got to be over in Afghanistan, because the Taliban is, too violent to allow the elections to go forward. Today ten million citizens in that country have registered to vote, forty percent of whom are women, which is a powerful statistic.


O’REILLY: The South Vietnamese didn’t fight for their freedom, which is why they don’t have it today.


PRESIDENT BUSH: Yeah.

See, we didn't lose the Vietnam war, the Vietnamese were just pussies.

(Yeah, Yeah, I know, I'm a pro Bush website, but this is just politics don't take live so seriously. Besides, its not President Bush who said it really, its Bill O'Reilly.)

In reality, President Bush has learned a lot from the Vietnam war. and one of the biggest lessons is that we've turned over as much as possible to the Iraqis as soon as possible, if not earlier. I think the benefits have been obvious.

More evil:

34 Children Massacred by Multiple Car Bombs

As I said before, I'm voting for Bush because I believe in evil.

An American Soldier who's actually fought in Iraq describes what bugs me about Kerry and his war criticism better then I ever could.

Read it here.

Afghanistan successfully concluded their elections on Saturday.

Now in the WaPo, An Opening For Arab Democrats.

It’s a given that President Bush has made mistakes.

It’s a given that a “President Kerry” would make mistakes.

My issue with Kerry is that he seems in many ways to be dead set on repeating President Bush’s mistakes, and making new, possibly worse ones.

Our fundamental problem in Iraq seems to be too much top-down imposition of “big projects” with “big goals”. In other words, all the things that bug me about the US government at home. America in civilian accomplishes most tasks with a sort of “positive chaos”. That is, you have millions of people every day making decisions that move us forward at a breathtaking clip. Mistakes get fixed quickly, and things move well. This even applies in our military: We run our military in such a way that we have more sergeants per soldier then any other army. That’s because we expect our sergeants to make decisions that normally only officers in other armies make.

The government on the other hand, being huge and unwieldy, tries to accomplish everything from the top down with huge, overly structured “positive order” campaigns. Its slow, and mistakes drag out for months, years, or decades.

from the New York Times

Well, I saw the latest from the South Park guys. It was funny. I won’t get it on DVD, because I probably couldn’t watch it over and over, unlike South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut.

After 9/11, I read this great essay on the web that talked about how the terrorists shouldn’t have messed with America, because we were crazy. It was called, Only a Crazy Person Picks a Fight with Someone Who’s Nuts . It then went on to document all the wild and silly things found in this land of ours. While watching this movie, I was reminded of that essay, because I kept wondering, what will the rest of the world think of this movie? Will they realize that America does get “it”, that we know that violence can be a dead end, that life isn’t like a Bruckheimer movie? Will they also realize that in turn, you can’t always fight evil with sternly worded memos?

I managed to dig up the original link to the essay, but it seems the original site was eaten by the dot-com-bomb. However, through diligent searching, I found the author’s new blog, and found his most recent posting of it. Which you can read here

Here’s a taste:

To those extremists that perpetrated this crime against our nation, I have a warning for you. There are those of us who look at your actions as irrational, twisted, and completely inhuman. By all measures, what you have done can only be seen as insane.

I have news for you. We’re more fucking nuts than you, and it should scare you shitless.

We eat whole pizzas with a single diet Coke and think we’re eating healthy. Taking a single pill from GNC that can cause heart attacks, psychosis, strokes, and even death just so we can metabolize that pizza faster makes it even healthier. And then, despite countless numbers of starving people throughout the world that could have used the food besides us, we go to the bathroom and puke it all up just to stay thin.

We made a sequel to Police Academy 5.

Wizbang pointed out this section from the New Republic:

The Security Council has authorized only three wars in its history: the Korean War (while the Soviet Union was boycotting the Council), a 1960s intervention in Congo, and the first Gulf war. That there have been numerous wars since 1945 would suggest that the U.N. Charter has been violated repeatedly. But while one could argue that all those wars were technically illegal, most legal experts concede the legitimacy of customary, not just statutory, law—meaning widely accepted actual practices can, over time, become as legitimate as written rules.

I would like to point out that it was the US in all 3 instances, that only the US has ever asked for permission to use military force.

It was a Russian General who pointed that out before Gulf War, Part 2.

I’d also like to point out that if you use the simple test that we’re at “war” when we send people to other countries to try to kill them, and vice versa, we’ve been at war with Iraq since 1991, that this is all just a new battle in an old war, one with UN approval.

Fuck France.

Germany, on the other hand, has been supporting us behind the scenes…

Or, why its good to have a tank (quicktime movie)

Hat tip to Back to Iraq who used the footage for some whiny point about how fierce the fighting is, even though it was shot in Mosul in August, and its now October.

Iraq is both good and bad, but of course, we never hear the good…

Here’s some Good News From Iraq

Alternative Energy has a long way to go, that’s why its “alternative”. When it works, it will just be “energy”. But here’s a good roundup.

Is reading expert opinion from experts unfiltered by the media “conflict bias”.

Here’s an interview with the Army Chief of Staff. Its interesting that there weren’t that many armored humvees in Iraq because the Army didn’t think of Humvees as a combat-related vehicle.

Hat Tip: Intel Dump

From this article in the NYT:

All of these stories would be getting more play right now if it weren’t for the Al Qaqaa mess. Still, one can understand why the right is so upset.

After all, Al Qaqaa illustrates in a particularly graphic way the failures of Mr. Bush’s national security leadership. U.S. soldiers passed through Al Qaqaa, a crucial munitions dump, but were never told that it was important to secure the site. If administration officials object that they couldn’t have spared enough troops to guard the site, they’re admitting that they went in without enough troops. And the fact that these explosives fell into unknown hands is a perfect example of how the Iraq war has worsened the terrorist threat.

To which I wrote this idiot back:

You need to read something beyond your own newspaper:

1. Al Qaqaa wasn’t marked “critical” there were other more critical dumps. It was on the “medium” list if I remember correctly.

2. Out of 1,000,000 tons of explosives, you’re talking about 377? No, wait, 143, no wait, 3 tons?

3. All we really know is that there were IAEA seals, we don’t know if there was anything there for sure…

Contrast that with some actual physical facts:

380 tons would take 76 5 ton truckloads to “loot”. That would have been somewhat obvious seeing as how the road to the facility went through the 3rd ID. There’s no way the explosives were there when we invaded.

So if you consider these explosives truly important rather then just something to beat up President Bush about, then this really argues President Bush’s case. The US had asked the IAEA to destroy the explosives: no go. Then we stalled the invasion to try to get more world support. Meanwhile, the explosives get moved.

What’s your argument exactly? That Kerry would have dicked around with the UN longer before he got a no from the coalition of the bribed so that even more explosives would be missing?

From MSNBC:

U.S. officials told NBC News that in parts of the tape not aired by Al-Jazeera, bin Laden acknowledges that the recent Afghan elections were not a success for him because “they came off with minimal violence.” And he admits that “aggressive Pakistani operations” in South Waziristan, where he is believed to be hiding, have hurt his operations.

Showing voters waiting in line in Afghanistan. View it Here

Its not that I think that we shouldn’t criticize the President during wartime.

Far from it.

Rather I think that when we do criticize a wartime President, the media has to drop the typical sort of “he said”, “she said” conflict journalism and start really digging into issues. Report the good, the bad and the ugly, and let Americans make up our own minds.

Instead, this election I had to listen to hours of mindless drivel from both parties as they each slavishly repeated talking points crafted by nameless staffers. Somehow, this passed for journalism in the media.

The media complains about the candidates not covering the issues, but when they do, they don’t cover the candidates.

It would have been trivial for each of the major media websites to provide a section where they collected each candidates statements on a number of issues, along with in-depth analysis by different factions.

Did they do so? No. Because they don’t care. Conflict journalism pays the bills.

But in wartime, it also kills.

Bottom line, criticize the President all you want, but know what you’re talking about. That’s the only standard I think we need set. In peacetime, we can afford the constant partisan blather. In wartime, the partisans need to take the time to turn their blather into constructive criticism.

Otherwise, shut the hell up. I have a remote control, and I know how to use it.

Who is a conservative mole inside our own State Department:

Most State types, deep inside, believe that the primary purpose of American diplomacy is not to advance our country’s geo-strategic interests, but to provide for them a prestigious career in which their unusual talents (e.g. foreign languages) and interests (foreign lands) are properly valued and appreciated (Note: there’s precious little demand in the real world for experts on the history of Venezuelan political parties). This is a mindset that makes too many diplomats contemptuous of most ordinary Americans, who, in their view, are narrow-minded and boorish. You see the looks of bemused disbelief around the conference table - especially an AID one - whenever anyone suggests that a policy decision should be governed by the interest of the American taxpayer.

So, we were all minding our business one fine day, when one of these very boors - from Texas, no less - turned our little world upside down. It’s not that Bush is a Republican, or conservative, or overly aggressive. It’s that he’s NOT a member of the club of Those of Us Who Understand These Things. As such, he had no right to redefine our foreign policy and security doctrine overnight. Certainly not without first commissioning many feasibility studies and blue-ribbon panels informed, of course, by Us. As a result “all our allies” hate us, and our international relations have been set back years

Read the Whole Thing

Voter Registration began in Iraq on Monday. That’s pretty cool.

Hat tip: Mudville Gazette

The annual Punkin’ Chunkin’ contest was over the weekend.

Now see, if I was a terrorist, stuff like that would scare me. I mean, this is what American’s do for fun, we compete to see how far we can shoot a pumpkin with a cannon.

Imagine what we could do if we were serious?

Hat Tip: Eduwonk, who says ” It’s a great way for students to learn about physics, engineering, sportsmanship, and c’mon, it’s a whole lot of fun… Eduwonk thinks this that in addition to their obvious sagaciousness; this school won the youth trebuchet division!”

The “Youth Trebuchet division”. The mind boggles. A Trebuchet is a type of catapult for those unfamiliar with medieval siege engines. So basically, we’re teaching our youth how to storm castles. For fun.

In other news, it seems we invaded Fallujah today. Maybe we can load any foreign-born insurgents into a trebuchet and send them back to their homeland…

From Winds of Change

It’s a long post, especially if you read all the other posts by other bloggers that it refers to, but its worth the read.

If only it were true:

The curse of Chrenkoff strikes - I write about the guy and about an hounr later he dies.

Now if only he would write something about Bin Laden…

Because all but one of them are glad Arafat is dead.

Now, I am too, I was just too polite to say it.

Since every one else is saying though, fine:

Ding Dong the Witch is dead, the witch is dead…

Seriously. Turning down Clinton was the last bonehead move in a history of bonehead moves. I’ve always called him AraTheif because he kept getting richer and fatter the more the Palestinians starved.

Just go read

You know, I really should give a hat tip to Instapundit, but he never links to me, so why should I link to him?

When Saving Private Ryan came out, it was momentarily controversial, because a couple of times in the movie, Axis soldiers trying to surrender got shot.

All the WWII veterans said, “Yeah, that happened. It was a war. Deal with it. The movie was great.”

So in Iraq, an enemy soldier/insurgent/terrorist/dude playing dead got shot.

Yeah, that happens. Was the the soldier who shot him justified? Yes. Was the other guy justified in playing possum? Yes. Was it a “regrettable incident”? Yes.

It’s war guys. Get over it. Yes, we are trying to make Iraq a democracy. But soldiers are soldiers and from the cheap seats here, I think the enemy soldier was justified in trying to be tricky, and our guy was justified in shooting him. I think that’s one of the reasons that the military holds its own trials. Civilians just don’t understand.

If this is the worse thing that happens in Fallujah, its a good thing! In fact, I think that this proves the value of embedding. While its true this one guy will get some flack, the whole embedding thing has prevented any unfounded allegations from being published. The last time there was heavy action in Iraq and we didn’t have embeds, there were lots of “shooting at ambulances” stories. Now I see that the embeds are showing footage of people shooting from mosques.

The whole tone of the press coverage is 1000 times better with the embeds. Hooray for the embeds!

I’ve mostly stayed out of this issue, but I felt that Kevin Sites (the embedded journalist) was getting a bad deal. I didn’t particularly find him anti-military, just a civilian a bit out of his element.

He posted his account in his own words today, its worth reading.

It’s not only soldiers who can get a raw deal, so can journalists.

Selected Paragraphs:

Making sure you know the basis for my choices after the incident is as important to me as knowing how the incident went down. I did not in any way feel like I had captured some kind of “prize” video. In fact, I was heartsick. Immediately after the mosque incident, I told the unit’s commanding officer what had happened. I shared the video with him, and its impact rippled all the way up the chain of command. Marine commanders immediately pledged their cooperation.

We all knew it was a complicated story, and if not handled responsibly, could have the potential to further inflame the volatile region. I offered to hold the tape until they had time to look into incident and begin an investigation — providing me with information that would fill in some of the blanks.

I knew NBC would be responsible with the footage. But there were complications. We were part of a video “pool” in Falluja, and that obligated us to share all of our footage with other networks. I had no idea how our other “pool” partners might use the footage. I considered not feeding the tape to the pool — or even, for a moment, destroying it. But that thought created the same pit in my stomach that witnessing the shooting had. It felt wrong. Hiding this wouldn’t make it go away. There were other people in that room. What happened in that mosque would eventually come out. I would be faced with the fact that I had betrayed truth as well as a life supposedly spent in pursuit of it.

Terrorism Unveiled is written by this American female exchange student living in the Middle East. I like reading it because its interesting reading an American perspective abroad.

She has a great posting today about “Honor Killings”, the practice of killing girls because they’ve had sex.

Read the Whole Thing

One interesting thing I’ve observed in Athena over the last few months is that when she originally went over she was kind of a liberal Democrat.

As she’s lived in the Middle East, she’s started becoming a neo-conservative. As she says today:

These people are living lies.  All the women here are veiled, whether the physical fabric is covering them or not.

And the men are just as blind.

He was an evil thieving putz.

Even though I think he’s a whiny little media bitch, I have more ten times more respect for people on the ground doing the actual reporting then I do for the pretty boy anchors who steal all the glory.

Anyways Here’s his latest:

I returned to Baghdad on Monday. The city is as chaotic and choked as ever, but the level of violence in the last few days has been less than I expected. I’ve only heard two explosions near my house in eastern Baghdad, and they were far away. I get the impression that the Green Zone is not attacked as much. Perhaps I was wrong to pooh-pooh the Fallujah offensive… Or perhaps the insurgency has just gone to ground for a while.

Read the whole thing if you’d like some ground truth. His description of going along in a “protected convoy” for the Minister of something or other is pretty funny…

He one of the mainstream media in Iraq, and he gets something I’ve been saying for a while:

1. The war in Iraq sucks.
2. The alternatives suck worse.

Read it Here

I wish all the media understood that if they really want to inform us, they need to cover not just what is happening, but what our alternatives our.

If you read my blog, go over there and comment on Chris’ article. The current batch of commenters from both the right and left are idiots. The lefties I find most amusing, because Chris tends to be a bit lefty, and its always funny when the lefties turn on their own…

Here’s some tips:

1. First, you need the name/address of an actual soldier to send stuff to, because the DOD is a little bit cautious about “any soldier” packages. There’s a website that can help with that. In my case, I had a soldier who was on the way back to the states talk to someone at a unit that had just entered. Being me, they did that in July, and I didn’t send the stuff until Monday…

2. Use the USPS. Go to their website and get a flat rate Priority Mail box sent to you (they’re free). Its the best deal at $7.70 for up to 80 pounds, and they know how to ship to APO/NPO/MPO post offices. Its kind of pointless to use FexEx or UPS, because it ends up going to a DOD post office for redistribution anyways.

3. You might want to have them send you some priority mail stamps too while you’re at it. You can’t send anything thick in those boxes, so keep that in mind (I had to send a water bottle and some baby wipes separately, which ended up costing me $19 to send $15 worth of stuff…)

4. Put the stuff in those boxes. They aren’t that big, and that’s a good thing. They move through the system faster that way, and whoever you send stuff to will have to deal with the box. Its a lot easier to carry 5 twenty pound boxes then 1 hundred pound box. So lots of small boxes get there faster, and its easier on the troops.

5. Think about getting some of the even cheaper flat rate boxes from the USPS while you’re at it, and send something small once/week. Most soldiers I’ve talked too just like getting the mail. I like to send mix CDs.

6. Sending letters is important too, and only $.37.

Is stories like these

I find it very hard to believe that a man who takes the time to visit with each family of a fallen soldier would have entered into Iraq if he had any other alternative.

Subtitle: Yet another reason to be glad Arafat is dead.

It sort of sums up the whole Israel/Palestine thing:

The Palestinian security forces have killed more Palestinians then the Israelis.

(That would be as if the NAACP had killed more black people then the KKK, except that the PLO was more like the KKK then the NAACP, so the analogy is flawed, but you get the idea. )

He’s sending a retired 4-star general to review things in Iraq:

The Pentagon is sending a retired four-star Army general to Iraq next week to conduct an unusual “open-ended” review of the military’s entire Iraq policy, including troop levels, training programs for Iraqi security forces and the strategy for fighting the insurgency, senior Defense Department officials said Thursday.

Hat tip: Captain’s Quarters

I’ve never thought things were perfect in Iraq, and I think its great that Rumsfeld has always been man enough to question his assumptions. I remember when Rumsfeld’s “how are we doing?” memo leaked. The press jumped on him for possibly admitting things weren’t going perfectly. I thought it was great that he constantly questioned himself and the DOD.

Yeah, Rumsfeld is a lame Secretary of Defense, but he’s an awesome Secretary of War.

While the movie A Bug’s Life was really a remake of The Magnificent SevenMagnificent Seven, it occurred to me yesterday that it represents America’s hopes for Iraq.

The Grasshoppers are the Baathists or Islamists who are preying upon the regular Iraqi people who represent the Ants.

The Circus bugs would be the US. While we can distract and scare the Grasshoppers away, it will ultimately be the Ants themselves who will have to band together against those who would take away their freedom.

Granted, its not the deepest metaphor in the world (The Ants have a queen, not a democracy), I still found it amusing.

It talks about how a couple of captains in the Army started some public web sites that are now an invaluable part of officer training and the war in Iraq. Read it Here

Hat Tip: Mudville Gazette

I already knew that most of the “torture” allegations were bullshit (no actual evidence, the Red Cross report on Gitmo was just silly), but here’s an interesting article to back that up:

Interrogation

Hat Tip: Volokh Conspiracy

Which also linked to this counter-argument here.

The argument that Abu Ghraib stemmed from possible torture proceedings in order to gather intelligence doesn’t hold water. I’d be more willing to consider it if any of the supposed abuses happened to intelligence-related prisoners. Since they happened only to the worst of the criminal prisoners, I’m much more inclined to believe the “bad apples” theory, especially since its well known that prisons in the US aren’t much better…

Friend of mine was beaten up and nearly raped in a holding cell in LA county jail…for a parking ticket…

Iraq has been a big gamble for President Bush, and by extension, the United States.

This week, it looked like that gamble had paid off, and paid off well.

But I ask you, was it every really a gamble to bet on Democracy? Are there any people in the world, who given a choice, would choose not to be in charge of their own life? Betting on Democracy is a pretty safe bet.

You know the pundits were surprised in El Salvador in ‘89, in Afghanistan in ‘04, and in Iraq in ‘05. I wasn’t. I was worried that there might be lots of attacks in Iraq, so I worried about people being being hurt. On balance though, the election on Sunday, while more dangerous then in Afghanistan, was safer then the El Salvador election.

President Bush has transformed the Middle East. It took balls, but as the head of the Arab League said yesterday on NPR: “The time for Dictators and Fools is past”.

Democracy, Sexy, Whiskey!

What if the true culprits of 9/11 was Iran?

Would our foreign policy be any different? We weren’t in a position to attack Iran then, but now:

• Iraq is a Democracy, and a US Ally
• Afghanistan is a Democracy, and a US Ally
• Turkey is a Democracy, and a US Ally
• Armenia is a Democracy, and a US Ally
• Turkmenistan is a Democracy, and if not a US Ally, pretty cordial
• Azerbaijan is a Democracy, and cordial like Turkmenistant
• Pakistan is NOT a Democracy, but is a US Ally

Look at the following image, and tell me who’s left?

So my wife was telling me this story last night as we were watching this PBS Documentary I got from Netflix called the 50-year war that was basically about Israel.

During the Cold War, the Russians ripped off one of America’s Jet fighter designs.

Except for these valves that they didn’t think were important. Well, it turns out they were critical. So the Russians were buying these valves in America, and then smuggling them out through Canada. So the Pentagon, being pretty sly, contracted with a company to make copies of the valve. Except these valves would fail at 20,000 feet causing the plane to crash. Not even the company knew they were making faulty valves, since they were just following the spec the Pentagon gave them. The Pentagon would then slip these valves to the Russians…

The problem was somehow there was some mixup, and the bad valves started showing up with good parts as well. So my wife’s father, who was a jet mechanic at Edwards Air Force Base at the time, figured out some way to tell the good parts from the bad parts.

He got in trouble since it was supposed to be this big secret that there were bad parts. Now he didn’t know the whole story about the Russian part, he just thought a vendor was messing up so he came up with the test. One of the pilots had to bail him out of trouble, since he was actually doing a really good job and had no idea why he was getting yelled at for testing parts.

Which brings us to the 6 day war.

From Patrick Ruffini.

You’ll want to download the larger version instead of squinting at the tiny version in the blog, but his analysis is interesting as well. I didn’t know that the Kurdish coalition was made up of two factions that had been fighting against each other. Seems to me that people, given these huge coalitions, either were voting for specific people they knew, or were voting for people of their own ethnicity who they expected to represent their interests.

I predict that the individual coalitions will be smart, that they’ll realize that the best way to protect their own interests is to guarantee freedom for everyone. Let’s hope I’m right.

You know, I first heard about Scott Ritter when he was criticizing the weapons inspection regime because he thought Iraq had weapons and we weren’t finding them because it would embarrass the French.

Then he showed up saying Iraq didn’t have weapons I went huh? Is this the same guy?

Now he’s on Al Jazeera? link

Weird.

One of the ironies of the Cold War was that the Soviets were more colonial and imperialist then the Americans were (most of the time, we can’t be bothered), yet accused America of the reverse.

Now it seems that one of the last bits of colonialism, dating back to end of the WWI, the Middle East is beginning to move forward.

• The Lebanese are protesting against Syria.
• Iraq is a democracy
• Afghanistan is a democracy
• Saudi Arabia had some elections.

If you want to understand the current US foreign policy, and why in a large sense, Bush is one of the most liberal presidents when it comes to foreign policy, you need to understand the cold war and the colonial period prior to WWII. Here’s my favorite book on the subject:

The Cold War: A History

This book is also great; it really shows how the colonialism of England and France got us into this mess in the first place. Finding out that Israel exists because the nuts in the English Foreign Office thought that Jews secretly ran the Ottoman empire was hysterical in a “you’d have to laugh or you’d cry” kind of way:

A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

I wish I was Mark Steyn

From Der Speigel:

But history has shown that it wasn’t Reagan who was the dreamer as he voiced his demand. Rather, it was German politicians who were lacking in imagination — a group who in 1987 couldn’t imagine that there might be an alternative to a divided Germany. Those who spoke of reunification were labelled as nationalists and the entire German left was completely uninterested in a unified Germany…

Bush’s idea of a Middle Eastern democracy imported at the tip of a bayonet is, for Schroeder’s Social Democratic Party and his coalition partner the Green Party, the hysterical offspring off the American neo-cons. Even German conservatives find the idea that Arabic countries could transform themselves into enlightened democracies somewhat absurd.

This, in fact, is likely the largest point of disagreement between Europe and the United States — and one that a President John Kerry likely would not have made smaller: Europeans today — just like the Europeans of 1987 — cannot imagine that the world might change. Maybe we don’t want the world to change, because change can, of course, be dangerous. But in a country of immigrants like the United States, one actually pushes for change. In Mainz today, the stagnant Europeans came face to face with the dynamic Americans. We Europeans always want to have the world from yesterday, whereas the Americans strive for the world of tomorrow.

Hat tip: Chrenkoff

Ok, so Syria is going to pull out of Lebanon, and Egypt is going to have real elections?

Wow.

I’ve been having this thought for awhile, I decided to write it down:

The anti-War people are fundamentally certain they have the moral high ground.

I’m not so sure that’s true. The reality is that Saddam killed 2.5 million people in Iraq over the last 10 years, which works out to 20,000 people a month.

Yes its bad that because we’ve gone into Iraq, some people have died, and every death in Iraq counts against our involvement.

But that doesn’t mean that we should have stood by either, that’s just as morally reprehensible. Its been 2 years now since we invaded Iraq. Does that mean that 480,000 people are alive in Iraq that wouldn’t have been otherwise?

I dunno. I’m uncomfortable with “body count” morality. We can’t use Saddam’s body count as a justification for our own. Each and every death in Iraq since April 2003 is a stain upon our nation’s conscience. Yet those 2.5 million Iraqis that Saddam killed were a stain upon the worlds conscience.

Since we’re talking about morality, I think the concept of sin is appropriate here: Which is the greater sin? To try to perform a good work, but do it imperfectly, or to stand idly by while another performs evil?

I don’t know the answer, though personally, I’d lean towards trying instead of doing nothing. If you try, even a partial success means the situation improves.

If you really want the moral high ground, you have to provide an real alternative.

In the usual ranting on SlashDot

First:

every project final report had to mention possible military applications

That’s kind of depressing… why didn’t they require that every final report had to mention applications that could improve life in underdeveloped areas or something?

Then students would pursue projects with this in mind, instead of developing with military applications in mind. Highly reliable and easy-to-repair water pumps, improved farming tools constructable from local materials, simple and effective water filtration devices, etc.?

You say that like those aren’t military applications, I think perhaps your out of touch with what modern military actualy does. Demonizing anything military is easy, and the people who do it the most are the people who don’t realize that it’s the military’s infrastructure that make most humanitarian relief operations possible. Next time you think somebody needs 10,000 tons of relief supplies ask FedEx what the going rate is, and if they drop it off in a hostile fire zone.

I like that last bit about FedEx. After the Tsunami, there was some ex-military blogger who was at this trade show where some Frenchman made a crack about Bush sending an aircraft carrier to aid the tsunami victims. The blogger in question pointed out that aircraft carriers can generate electricity and produce fresh water, as well as airlift supplies. At the time our US Military was delivering aid while the UN guys were sitting around with their thumb up their ass.

I can’t find the original article, but Michelle Malkin has some stats about the U.S.S. Lincoln.

It’s this Necklace

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

The hippies are going to love this book. Me? I want my money back. The book rambles, has few facts, and frankly reads like the paranoid ravings of someone whose smoked too much pot while watching Crossfire. Everything after 1981 is pure speculation on his part given that’s when he quit and that’s about 25% of the book. So 75% of the book is memoirs of a period before the Cold War was over, and 25% is just speculation after the fact.

This book purports to tell the story of John Perkins who claims he used to be the Chief Economist for Chas T. Main, some sort of consulting company. Which leads us to what bothers me most about this book. This book does not read like it was written by someone who was an econometrician. It reads like the paranoid ramblings of a Berkeley street person.

According to this book, basically, all of the USAID and World Bank aid programs were shams designed to bring countries into the US fold.

This is supposed to be news? It was called the Cold War, baby, and long time readers of this blog know that I don’t think the US should apologize for winning it. Communism was the worst idea in the history of bad ideas, and its responsible for 20 times the deaths of a pansy-ass lunatic like Adolf. To quote Stalin: “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”

We should apologize for getting rid of people who said stuff like that? I’m not exactly proud of the Cold War, but at least the right always seemed to realize that their evil dictators were evil, the left seems to have blinders.

Anyways, according to John, the “corpratocracy” that secretly runs the world arranges for Third World countries to accept enormous loans for infrastructure development, and then to make sure that the lucrative projects are contracted to U.S. Corporations. Saddled with uge debts, these countries come under the control of the US government, World Bank, and other US dominated aid agencies that act like loan sharks-dictating repayment terms and bullying foreign governments into submission.

(That’s a paraphrase off the back of the book jacket.)

After reading the book this is what I think happened: When he went to work for MAIN, he was basically told to create overly optimistic economic forecasts so that various third world countries could get World Bank loans. Those loans would then be used to build various infrastructure projects, which would be overseen by MAIN. These sorts of giant infrastructure projects would end up being overseen by the sort of giant construction companies that specialize in that sort of thing: Bechtel, Schlumberger, Halliburton, etc.

In other words, he was a salesman. His job was basically to write up an overly optimistic economic forecast which could be used with the World Bank to justify the enormous loan. Said loan would then be administered by MAIN.

As a long time reader of the magazine run by the actual people who run the world, Foreign Affairs all the other stuff is just paranoid rambling.

Really, this is nothing different then what happens with home loans. You have to get your house appraised to get the loan approved. If the appraisal comes in too low, the loan gets turned down. However, appraisers who come in too low soon stop getting business. Soon enough, only appraisers who can come in at the right number end up with business, because both banks and real estate agents will stop using them.

Is that a conspiracy? No.

There’s another review of the book here on a Peace Corp related site which I found interesting, because like Perkins, he was in the Peace Corp and now works in banking:

But the implication that there is a grand cabal of construction and consulting firms, donor agencies and recipient country leaders with EHM’s wielding their ways through boardrooms and bedchambers, tests the reader’s credulity. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man might have worked as an investigative analysis of foreign aid/loan practices and their shortcomings, with recommendations on how to improve the system. It also might have worked as a piece of fiction, as was suggested by one publisher who saw an earlier draft of the work. “We could market you in the mold of John Le Carre …” the publisher states in Perkins’ preface. In the end, however, the book reads more like a screenplay, with Perkins as the bad-guy-turns-good-guy financial action hero.

That’s the high level view. If you want to know more about some of my specific issues with the book, you can follow the link below.

In my review of EHM, I talked about how removing the locks wouldn’t work so that stuff Perkins was spouting about in Panama about having a lock-free canal was nonsense. Here’s the answer from the Straight Dope if anyone is interested.

Here’s the short answer:

Scientists studying the feasibility of a sea-level canal (not a mile deep, but deep enough) have found that the Pacific at Panama is about eight inches higher than the Atlantic on average due to currents and such. In addition, tidal variation on the Pacific side of Panama is much greater than on the Atlantic side—20 feet vs. 1 foot.

That means the Pacific would flow into the Atlantic through the sea-level canal, producing currents that could reach nearly 6 MPH. While that wouldn’t cause flooding, it would definitely complicate navigation.

But that’s the least of the problems a sea-level canal would present. It would also allow Pacific and Atlantic marine species to mingle, with unpredictable but probably bad consequences for the environment. Worse, constructing it would require either (1) tens of billions of dollars or (2) nuclear explosives. So don’t expect it any time soon.

If you want to watch ships go through the canal, here’s a webcam

From Airbornehogsociety:

I have worked in the civilian world in rural, suburban, and urban areas. I have gone to college in Alabama - in the buckle of the Bible belt - and in the heart of Boston, which is just about the exact opposite. I have lived in small towns, suburbs, and cities. There are no better people to live with, talk with, befriend or work with than infantrymen. It is difficult to explain why and I lack the eloquence, time, and a sufficiently well-rested brain to explain why. So, I will just sum it up by saying this. Here is a conversation that you will never hear in an infantry unit:

Sergeant: “Gee, I’m sorry for yelling at you. I got a little upset and said some things that I shouldn’t have.”

Soldier: “I understand. We all get stressed out sometimes.”

Sergeant: “Thanks for understanding. Hey, how about a hug?”

Instead, you are more likely to hear this:

Sergeant: “All right, I’m done yelling at you. Dust yourself off and get back to work. If you ever pull some stupid crap like that again, I will smoke you into a coma.”

Soldier: “Hooah, Sergeant.”

Sergeant: “Shut up.”

I get tired of being nice to my coworkers.

Why? Because they've earned it.

The wars of the 21st century will need women soldiers.

Which makes John McHugh a threat to our national security...

Speaking of hippies...

I now tell the Bush-haters (in my most sarcastic voice):

Yeah, sure, Bush 2 is the reason we're in Iraq. It couldn't have had anything to do with the foreign policy of Carter, Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, the twin disasters of World War One and the Treaty of Versailles, or the Iranian hostage crisis. Nope, Iraq and the rest of the Middle East were all chocolate and daisies before Bush came into office.

Bush is a gnat being ground between the gears of history, as are all of us. He was dealt a lousy hand at the beginning of his term; we need to give him credit for having the balls to trade in a pair of Jacks for two wild-card democracies. He said the US would no longer choose dictators over democracies, and he's pretty much followed through with that. 5 wild-cards beats 4 Aces any day of the week, even if one of those wild-cards is France.

Bush hasn't been 100% with the new democracy theme in our foreign policy, and like others, I deplore the violence in Uzbekistan. I can live with the dictatorship in Pakistan, its a complex country given that the government really only controls the big cities, but I wish our foreign policy was 100%, not 75%.

Then again, 75% is about as consistent as our foreign policy ever gets.

Over at Eject, Eject, Eject

Unlike me, who seems to be posting small tiny ravings multiple times a day, Bill posts rarely, but its always worth the read.

This one is on the concept of Sanctuary and how terrorists violate that.

Here are some great lines:

If producing humiliation and fear is now to be defined as “torture,” what international human rights organization will be appointed to help the surviving readers of _The New York Times)?

armies of useful idiots with television cameras and microphones and Expensive Hair

Civilizations fall because they become so successful that their citizens become, over many generations of increasing security and prosperity, further and further away from the reality of the human condition.

Reality has not been kind to far leftists, historically, as we shall soon see. Like many in the deepest, most pleasant and safe confines of our Sanctuary, they have never had a chance to see – or have chosen not to see -- the reality of human nature up close and personal. Reality told them it was just going to the bathroom, when in point of fact Reality left these Leftists alone at the table without paying the check, and it hasn’t returned their phone calls, either.

Longtime readers know I'm fairly Wilsonian, even if I blame him for most of the current problems in the Middle East for not having a plan during the Treaty of Versailles (though he had probably just had a stroke). One of the reasons I support the Iraq war is because it was time for some reverse dominos in the Middle East. Bush isn't a fanatical Christian, but he's definitely a fanatical believer in democracy. For me that's a good thing.

Via Chrenkoff comes this article from a Lebanese newspaper about how Bush's War is almost a breath of fresh air in the middle east.

Some Quotes:

The weight of American power, historically on the side of the dominant order, now drives this new quest among the Arabs. For decades, the intellectual classes in the Arab world bemoaned the indifference of American power to the cause of their liberty. Now a conservative American president had come bearing the gift of Wilsonian redemption.

Unmistakably, there is in the air of the Arab world a new contest about the possibility and the meaning of freedom. This world had been given over to a dark nationalism, and to the atavisms of a terrible history. For decades, it was divided between rulers who monopolized political power and intellectual classes shut out of genuine power, forever prey to the temptations of radicalism. Americans may not have cared for those rulers, but we judged them as better than the alternative. We feared the “Shiite bogeyman” in Iraq and the Islamists in Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia; we bought the legend that Syria's dominion in Lebanon kept the lid on anarchy. We feared tinkering with the Saudi realm; it was terra incognita to us, and the House of Saud seemed a surer bet than the “wrath and virtue” of the zealots. Even Yasser Arafat, a retailer of terror, made it into our good graces as a man who would tame the furies of the masked men of Hamas. That bargain with authoritarianism did not work, and begot us the terrors of Sept. 11, 2001.

Pick up the Arabic papers today: They are curiously, and suddenly, readable. They describe the objective world; they give voice to recognition that the world has bypassed the Arabs. The doors have been thrown wide open, and the truth of that world laid bare. Grant Bush his due: The revolutionary message he brought forth was the simple belief that there was no Arab and Muslim “exceptionalism” to the appeal of liberty. For a people mired in historical pessimism, the message of this outsider was a powerful antidote to the culture of tyranny. Hitherto, no one had bothered to tell the Palestinians that they can't have terror and statehood at the same time, that the patronage of the world is contingent on a renunciation of old ways.

By a twist of fate, the one Arab country that had seemed ever marked for brutality and sorrow now stands poised on the frontier of a new political world. No Iraqis I met look to neighboring Arab lands for political inspiration: They are scorched by the terror and the insurgency, but a better political culture is tantalizingly close.

Women want the vote in Kuwait, the Lebanese clamor for the truth about the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, and about the dark Syrian interlude in their history. Egyptians don't seem frightened of the scarecrows with which the Mubarak regime secured their submission. Everywhere, the order is under attack, and men and women are willing to question the prevailing truths.

From a guy working in Afghanistan

Hint, his RSS feed is this. In fact, any blogspot blog can be subscribed to via /atom.xml at the end of their blog home page URL.

Update: Er, her blog. I was so impressed by the first article I read that I immediately wanted to share, before I'd read enough to realize he's a she.

But it is about the desecration of the Quran:

Yet, some people have no respect for others' culture as they would not hesitate to use a Quran to smuggle drugs into Bahrain.

This probably is the ultimate desecration. Using a Muslim's inherent respect for the Holy Book to try to smuggle drugs. Hoping of course that the customs officer will not bother checking it thoroughly.

That's kind of interesting...

Read the original here:

May the fleas of a thousand desert dogs infest your arse.
May the syphilis of 72 infected whores wilt your shriveled genitalia.
May the bugs of a hundred leprous camels flay your skin.
May the curse of eternal damnation land on your and your supporters' doorsteps.
May the cancerous cells of a million lab-rats invade your body.
May the annals of history forget your existence.
May the terror you have inflicted on Islam be your eternal companion in Purgatory.

Nice to seem some Muslim anger against these buttheads.

So I said the other day:

The Arab world proves that no matter how poor and downtrodden you are, some guy in a turban can make it worse.

My wife claimed that was terribly racist. I countered back that I heard Arab guys use that all the time to refer to their religious leaders. She said it was ok for them to say that, but not for me to say that. It was ok to say:

The Arab world proves that no matter how poor and downtrodden you are, some guy in a funny hat can make it worse.

Personally, I don't think it has the same punch.

But the article on Mahmood was still pretty funny, even if he did refer to one of their religious leader as “a turbanned guy”.

Newly inspired by the various liberals who have been commenting on my blog lately, and my recent labeling as a “moderate” by that political test, I've decided to debunk some Iraq Myths by both the right and the left. For those of you who've been reading blogs for awhile, you might find my take on the history leading up to the Iraq war interesting.

If you're new to blogs, this will cover many of the standard issues that have been discussed to death in the blogosphere. This is actually a blatant attempt by me to add a little more nuance to the comments section: I'm getting sick of arguing with all the people who have been fed distortions by the mainstream media about the Iraq war. I'm hoping that with some more context, perhaps we can all come to a more reasonable level of discussion.

It's long, so you'll have to follow the link below.

Ok, so after writing my post debunking some of the cherished myths about Iraq of both the right and the left, I found out about a new moonbat theory floating around. This theory is that the US invasion of Iraq was in order to prop up the dollar, because in November 2000, Saddam insisted he was going to only sell his oil in Euros.

The theory goes something like this: US dollars function as an interchange currency for the world. In addition, there is a large amount of US currency floating around called Eurodollars or “Petrodollars”. If the world suddenly shifted to Euros, no one would want dollars anymore and this would suddenly be a terrible catastrophe for the US both economically and politically because only the US has the ability to “print” dollars. Therefore, we needed to invade Iraq.

Since I work in the financial industry, I suppose I should comment on this. Its just that this is just so wrong on so many levels I hardly know where to begin.

First off, a strong dollar is NOT good for the US economically. It makes imports cheap and our exports expensive. After World War II, the US agreed to go on the gold standard as part of the Bretton Woods agreement specifically in order to subsidize the rebuilding of Europe. That single agreement provided more aid to Europe then all other acts of Congress combined. So the idea that somehow a strong dollar is “good” for the US economically is silly. This argument was best refuted by Adam Smith in 1776, so I refer people who stubbornly want to cling to this belief to The Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith was a giant, most lefties associate him too much with laissez-faire capitalism to realize that he was one of the first liberals: It was Adam Smith who said 'everyone can be rich' and that the wealth of nations was not tied up in gold, but in the labour of its people. So if you're one of those people whose proud to call themselves a moonbat, go read Adam Smith.

Now its not all doom and gloom for the US. The strong dollar does make it easier for us to borrow money (things are rarely just bad or good in economics, they just cost more). So to some extent, a strong dollar supports the overly large Federal government we've all grown accustomed to. If the dollar weakened quite a bit, perhaps all those social programs the lefties like so much would face the chopping block.

Pretty much though the economic argument is just bunk and more bunk. Even the part about our ability to borrow versus our savings rate and such is nonsense. There was a good debunking of the whole deficit thing in Foreign Affairs a couple of months back, I refer you to that for the details. One tidbit though:

Quote: Capital gains on equities, 401(k) plans, and home values are excluded from measurements of personal saving; when they are added, total U.S. domestic saving is around 20 percent of GDP--about the same rate as in other developed economies.

So again, the moonbats have twisted the facts to suit their theories, or they didn't understand what the statistics they're citing were measuring.

The other problem with the argument is that the dollar somehow became the exchange currency because OPEC chose it as such. The reality is that OPEC chose it because it was already the exchange currency. Though two of the letters are correct, its not OPEC that makes the dollar “stable” is the SEC, that is our well-regulated financial markets are what make the dollar stable.

The political power argument is based on several mistaken assumptions. What bankers call “Eurodollars” have very little to do with oil. Interest rates are more powerful then oil.

What exactly are Eurodollars? Well, because the dollar functions as an “exchange” currency many banks in Europe started keeping some percentage of their deposits in dollars, and paying interest in dollars. This started in 1966 with a London bank. After awhile they noticed a curious thing: Bank loans made in dollars weren't regulated by their home countries, only loans made in their native currency. Economists started calling this money “Eurodollars” because neither the US or any other government's central bank really had any control over that money.

Which brings me to the second misconception that only the US government has the ability to “print” dollars. That's just not true. In reality, most dollars in the United States are actually electrons these days. One of the methods that the Federal Reserve has to control the US economy is by controlling the M1 money supply, which is really a multiplier. Banks are allowed to lend out more money then they actually have in assets, and the Federal Reserve controls the ratio of lent out money to actual money.

In essence, its not the government that prints money, its the banks that print money (or rather electrons), the government just gets to control how fast they can run them. By changing that number, the government changes the amount of money in the US Economy. They can also affect the amount of money by adjusting the interest rate, which is the number you always see on the news. Here's a brief intro.

But the Federal Reserve only controls the US Economy, they don't control Eurodollars, but those banks aren't going to move to the Euro. The “Eurodollar” is attractive to those countries precisely because it is unregulated. If it was held in euros, it would become regulated, and the banks could no longer play those shenanigans. The only thing that prevents the European banks from “overprinting” US dollars is pretty much the threat of bankruptcy, and the fact that if they abuse the “Eurodollar loophole” too much, the various governments of the world will quickly close it.

So again, if you understand what “Eurodollars” really are, you can see how ridiculous this argument is.

One last thing to clean up. The articles talking about the Euro versus the dollar love to quote the exchange rate of the moment, somehow showing Saddam to be this big genius. That's nonsense. Currency traders are the Evil Knivels of the investment world. Here's a chart to look at. Here's another one showing the Euro vs. the Dollar and versus the stock market over the last two years. If you cherry pick the right point on that graph, you can make Saddam look like an idiot too...

Update: The Europeans are wondering if the Euro will even survive

The American Expatriate has a cool post debunking some anti US rhetoric he sees in the London newspapers.

I found the fact that Americans give $34 billion in foreign aid privately to be pretty interesting. That means that about 2/3rds of all our foreign aid doesn't show up on official statistics.

So not only are we the largest donor in terms of raw dollar amount, but if you look at it as a percentage of GNP, we go from next to last to about the top third of the pack.

So if you live in France, Belgium, Ireland, Switzerland, the UK, Finland, Germany, Canada, Spain, Australia, Austria, Greece, New Zealand, Japan or Italy, you can't complain that the “US is stingy”. Though private giving doesn't show up on their official statistics either, its a well known quirk of Americans that we don't trust the government with foreign aid dollars.

Of course, this whole aid issue is very complex, some people argue that aid money hurts more then it helps.

Saw a halfway decent lefty bumper sticker:

When are we going to stop killing people that kill people in order to teach them not to kill people?

While I disagree with where they're going (we generally kill people that kill people in order to make them stop killing people), at least that particular lefty realizes that the people we've been killing lately aren't innocent flowers in the meadow...

Mark Steyn nails the Gitmo issue:

 Where the anti-Gitmo crowd went wrong was in expanding its objections from the legal status of the prisoners to the treatment they're receiving.

Yeah, Gitmo worries me, but the protesters against it are trying too hard. If this blog stands against anything, its against Rhetorical Inflation. Anyways, read the whole thing if you want a laugh. Gitmo is a serious issue, but I wish sometimes the media would cover the serious objectors, not the nut jobs.

In other words, I realize that there are some very serious people who object to Gitmo on very serious grounds, but the people who are calling it a Gulag are over the top. The media covers the nutjobs of course, because they're saying more extreme things.

It's the “thin edge of the wedge”, and the “pointless thumbing of the nose at decency for little useful intelligence” arguments that sway me about Gitmo. On the other hand, putting some of these guys in a very deep hole is probably a good idea...if they were given a fair trial first.

Speaking of deep holes, I hope that guy who molested 36,000 kids gets put in one as well. Along with the judges on the 9th Circus who helped release him.

Un-spun reporting from Iraq. Always interesting, always real.

Phebe Marr reviews the Larry Diamond and David Phillips books and concludes:

The willingness of Diamond and Phillips to have the United States assume the burden of nation building indicates that even these keen observers have not yet learned the main lesson of the Iraq experience. Rebuilding a foreign nation is an extremely difficult and costly endeavor, likely to generate severe -- and often lethal -- reactions. Formulating a policy for the reconstruction of Iraq was never about choosing a good option over a bad one, but about selecting the least offensive of many unpalatable alternatives. Trying to mend a state as broken-and as culturally different from the United States -- as Iraq was doomed to be a tricky endeavor for Washington.

Given such daunting difficulties, the best advice to draw from these books may be this: if you cannot garner adequate resources -- and public opinion at home and abroad -- to rebuild a nation, do not start. Rather than ponder the dos and don'ts of nation building, as Diamond and Phillips do, perhaps it would be wiser to weigh the whys and why nots of engaging in it in the first place. If the U.S. experience in Iraq holds any lesson for the future, it may be that Washington should exercise extreme caution before launching another such operation. In the meantime, it should look harder for ways to shore up or bring change to failing states before they warrant intervention at all.

Which I find to be a perfectly reasonable conclusion. I don't think the Bush administration did a perfect job in Iraq, but that's not entirely their fault. They did plan, but many of the things they planned for never happened. So while they deserve some criticism, there's a lot of things they planned well. As occupying a foreign country and turning it into a democracy goes, they're not doing too bad.

You can follow these links to get the two books:

Squandered Victory : The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq

Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco

Meanwhile, here is an article by the President of the Council on Foreign Relations.

The reason I'm always pushing Foreign Affairs is because I find it the best antidote for both wingnuttery and moonbattery. Foreign Affairs is published by the Council on Foreign Relations, in other words, its published by the people who actually do secretly control the world. There's none of this handwringing about whether the US should control the world or not in Foreign Affairs, instead its all about how the US should control the world.

Which is why I find it such a good antidote. You only have to read about 3 issues to realize that the world is the way it is because even the people in charge aren't sure what to do. Any assumption that there is some vast conspiracy controlling the world assumes that someone somewhere knows exactly what needs to be done. After reading a couple of issues, you'll come to find out that no one knows what should be done. Richard Haass' article is very much in that vein, it clearly lays out our alternatives for dealing with Iran and North Korea.

It seems that the EU may be getting its head on straight:

One vision of Europe has been passing away. It is the politically united Europe with strong central institutions modeled on the French state, and with social guarantees which lie in the continental tradition. That Europe, which was to stand up against America as at least an equal, would have had its president, ambassadors, army, and tax regime. It will never happen.

The new vision of Europe which is replacing it is less of a political force, but with a stronger, more vibrant economy. It is a Europe which can prosper in a world which includes China and India among its economic drivers. It will do so by reducing its taxes, subsidies and regulations, and by trading more openly and honestly. It will recognize the part which incentives and motivation play in economic expansion. adamsmith.org

I was never worried about the EU before, because frankly, having the French and Germans run things via a bureaucracy located in Brussels wasn't something I would wish on my worst enemy. For all the newspaper nonsense about the EU being able to challenge the US, I thought to myself “they're putting the French in charge? Bwa Ha Ha Ha!”

But now? If they give up on having any sort of military (which frankly they've been doing for years, NATO troops have been a joke for the last 20 years), and they stop being socialist? That might be scary, because their economy wouldn't have to lug this big military around the world in order to keep everyone honest like we have to.

Then again, if we can fix the Middle East, that only leaves Africa, and they have less money, which strangely makes the problem easier. So maybe in 20 years we can stand down our military as well.

That would be cool. Maybe we can spend that money on space exploration instead!

Having the Saudi's as our allies in the Middle East is like making a deal with your cellmate Bruno that as long as he gets to anally rape you, he won't let the rest of the cell block rape you.

Here's an article from Jihad Watch that says the same thing, only more politely

This is my attempt to write like Bill Whittle, who you should go read if you never have.

It's long (took me about a week to write), so it has its own page.

In my frustration with the press coverage in Iraq, I read a certain amount of military blogs.

Now, so can you. Whether you support the war or not, its important to read what the soldiers who have been there are saying about it.

Hat Tip: Blackfive.

Michael Yon has posted an update (he's a freelance war reporter who doesn't hide in his hotel room, see my blogroll).

But he sent an email to Instapundit:

It's apparent that the insurgents are getting better and better at what they do. It's becoming a race between getting the ISF/government on its own steam faster than the insurgents are able to improve. It's imperative to keep people at home from running out and leaving unfinished business. Otherwise, we will simply be teaching terrorists that terrorism pays.

That's discouraging.

An aside to a frequent commenter: Yes ernie, I know, you've been telling me that we were going to lose the war for 3 weeks now. But you seem to get all your information from either the New York Times or liberal ranting, so forgive me if I don't consider you an expert on something going on 3,000 miles away. This guy is actually there observing, something the New York Times or the Associated Press don't seem to be able to do.

Plus you seem to want us to lose, which makes me discount what you say...

Michael Yon's latest report is here but if you haven't checked him out before, its worth the review.

Over on Winds of Change

Plenty of ammo for those of you who don't like Bush, but remember, hindsight is always 20/20.

I've leafed through this guy's book The Pentagon's New Map in an airport bookstore. I didn't buy it simply because I didn't want to carry it but he's a really good thinker. He has this funny rant about oil where he says that Middle Eastern countries are lucky they have oil. If they didn't, we wouldn't care about them the same way we don't really care about much of South America and Africa.

You can get a preview of his thoughts here. He also has a blog. The best part is this map:

Which shows that the troubled regions of the world are the ones whose countries are least integrated with the others. That is, people don't shit where they eat, and if you're doing business with a country, you don't want to threaten it.

Which is interesting because he was a radical trade unionist. (Put in Leavenworth for running a union, so there all you guys who complain about living in a fascist state.)

Normally, I would think guys like David Horowitz are just nuts. After reading this transcript I'm not so sure

Here's Foreign Affairs showing in 1998 why “exit strategy” is bad news. Topic: Bosnia!

Opposing exit strategies does not necessarily mean favoring the waste of American blood and money in endless futile attempts to impose order or create harmony in Bosnia or anywhere else. The main reason to jettison the concept is because it lumps together several important issues that are best handled separately. The first question is when open-ended military commitments might actually make sense, and the answer is that it depends on the American interests at stake and the policy options available. The second question is how interventions can be closed out smoothly, and the answer is that they should leave some kind of stable order behind. The third question is how overcommitment can be avoided, and the answer is through selective intervention rather than the imposition of time limits. Finally, the fourth question is how unexpected developments should be handled, and the answer is according to well-developed contingency plans.

The adults have spoken...seven years ago...

Fucking Terrorists.

I hate them. But unlike them, I only want to kill the killers, not innocents on their way to work.

You know I like numbers...

Here are international incidents of terrorism over the years:

For those of you who have never read his older statements

The American government, we think, is an agent that represents the Israel inside America. If we look at sensitive departments in the present government, like the Defense Department or the State Department, or sensitive security departments like the CIA and others, we find that Jews have the first word in the American government, which is how they use America to carry out their plans in the world.

The American government is throwing away the lives of Americans in Saudi Arabia for the interests of the Jews. The Jews are a people who Allah cited in his holy book the Quran as those who attacked prophets with lies and killings, and attacked Mary and accused her of a great sin. They are a people who killed Allah's prophets--would they not kill, rape and steal from humans?

I hate Illinois Arab Nazis...

Here's some more

The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies--civilians and military--is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God, “and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together,” and “fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in God.”

So lately, you're an ally of America if you're on your way to work?

There's a big difference between incidental targeting of civilians and specifically targeting them.

Sleeping with the viper

You’re mowing your grass, suddenly you saw an ugly poisonous viper right in front of you. You run to fetch an axe in order to kill it but your wife screams at your face and orders you to stop.

“Are you crazy? You want to kill a living soul! You are barbaric” she screams. “But its dangerous. It can kill us” you say. “No, it is not. And what options do you have. Do you want to kill it and commit murder? Do you want to throw it out of our house so that some viper hunter will take it and abuse it. PETA will not be happy with that. You should respect the Universal PETA Rules. Now I want to teach you a lesson you barbaric human being. I am going to sleep with the kids and you’re going to sleep with the viper” your wife says. “WHAT??” “You heard me honey. The viper is sleeping in our bed, right beside you so that you learn how to respect animal rights”

So, you pick up the viper and place it in your bed. The viper sleeps peacefully beside you for 3 days. On the fourth day, you wake up screaming. The viper bit you.

From Big Pharaoh.

Iraq is the first internet war, as Vietnam was the first television war. It's interesting to read blogs in other countries, some of them make our left wingers look rational, some make our right wingers look liberal. I urge all Americans to get some other perspectives instead of just regurgitating the things that the left or right say.

Big Pharaoh gives the Egyptian perspective, which has been especially interesting since they may soon have real elections.

Osama has always struck me as a spoiled rich kid, but I never had any confirmation for this. Today, reading Wikipedia I found this quote:

I was filming a group of mujaheddin in Afghanistan as they fired mortars at the nearby town of Jalalabad. An impressive-looking Arab in beard and white robes [bin Laden], one of the many fundamentalist volunteers fighting alongside the mujaheddin, suddenly appeared. Jumping up on a wall, he screamed that we were infidels and that the mujaheddin should kill us at once. They grinned and shrugged their shoulders, so he ran over to a truck driver and offered him $500 (£312) to run us down. The truck driver grinned, too. Then the tall Arab ran off to the mujaheddin's sleeping-quarters and threw himself onto one of the beds, beating his fists on the pillow in frustration. My colleagues and I stood and watched him with a mixture of embarrassment and relief.

Sounds like a 3 year old personally.

How bad were things under Saddam? Doctors couldn't get medical textbooks.

So Instapundit said about three times today that “democracy is a process”.

It's a process the US government has been actively working on, and I'd like to point out that everyone can track their progress on the state department website. It's one of the advantages of living in a democratic, open society: the government has to tell us what its doing, and how well its doing.

Realize that prior to September 2002, the State Department and the US in general were working for “stability”. In 2002, as part of the War on Terror, President Bush proposed a new direction. Basically he said, that whole stability thing wasn't working, it just made lots of resentful crazy people in the third world, some of whom flew planes into our buildings.

Well, it did win the Cold War, but we should have shifted tactics somewhere between 1989 and 1995. Anyways, the President proposed a new direction in foreign policy, detailed here.

Since then, every year, the State Department has to come up with goals, and report on those goals.

Why read predigested pap from the Mainstream Media about what the Iraqis think? Get it Directly from the Horse's mouth

Warning: May shatter preconceptions.

By a War supporter who son is going to Iraq

For many Brits, terrorism is nothing new. I grew up in the 70s and 80s when the threat of the IRA was always present, but never more than at the back of your mind (at least, in most people in England). Even then, the IRA would usually give a coded warning so that evacuations could be completed before the bomb went off. The threat lay in their ability to infiltrate society, destroy at will and get away with it -- not in taking life.

Whoever did this -- and that hasn't yet been properly established -- are just out to kill people. It's ugly, really ugly.

Hat Tip: Drunk Cyclist

The “patriotic resistance” struck another strategic target in Iraq today. They attacked Iraqi’s hope and Iraq’s reserves and future; they murdered Iraqi children again.

Those pathetic terrorists are afraid of the future and of the children that are going to grow up to build, plant, serve and protect their country. No words can describe the ugliness of the massacre, no words can wipe the tears of the mothers who lost their loved ones today and no words can describe the difference between those handing sweets to the children and those handing death and pain.

The insane murderous servants of the tyrants think they can defeat us and protect their evil masters this way but they’re wrong, the hand of justice will reach them just like it pulled their master from the rat hole. The blood that was spilled today shall not go in vain and terrorists will lose and that is not going to be far from now.

Before you comment on the above, realize that it was written by an Iraqi.

Today in Opinion Journal:

n the fifth book, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” something interesting happened. The author, J.K. Rowling, abandoned the mystery genre and gave her readers something more challenging: a historical allegory. Through sleight-of-hand, Ms. Rowling took a children’s book and transformed it into a parable about 1930s England. We’ve heard a lot recently about London and the Blitz. Ms. Rowling’s unfolding saga may illuminate that dark historical moment, not only the ordeals that led up to it but also—who knows?—the triumphs that followed.

The parallels between this volume and Britain’s prewar dithering are so great that the book is perhaps best read as a light companion to “Alone,” the second volume of William Manchester’s biography of Winston Churchill.

Sounds pretty similar to my posting: Harry Potter and the Butcher of Baghdad. Jonathan Last is using Chamberlain and WWII instead of the WOT, but I think we both noticed the same thing.

So awhile back I went through the Brooking’s Institute report looking for trends. At the time, we were conducting some operations, so it was hard to tell if the recent bumps were starts of a bad trend, or just because the troops had been more active.

I looked at it again today. Iraq may be getting dramatically better. I know that’s hard to believe, but 2 weeks into July, the number of US troop fatalities and Iraqi Police fatalities is much lower then you might expect.

The low for the month over the last year was 40 deaths. So far in July, 18 as of halfway through the month. If we double that, that’s 36 which is significantly under the previous minimum. But even more interesting, only 11 of those were from “hostile incidents”. Compare that to 82 deaths in June, 70 of which were from hostile attacks. That means if we continue the typical rates, the number of deaths will be something like 33 deaths, which would be the 4th lowest month overall.

Now wounding is 293 so far, which if we double it would be 586. That wouldn’t be especially low, but would be consistent with the slow down since the elections.

Iraqi military and police killed so far in July is 113, double that to 226 and we still have a much smaller number then June’s 296.

Meanwhile, the bombings on civilians might be slowing, only 11 in the first half of July, which led to 146 deaths. That doesn’t include the terrible bombings of the last few ways, but dare we hope? There were 30 bombings last month, causing 548 deaths.

Lets hope the trends of early July continue.

Because after you’ve blown your dick off, its all you can do really, is eat raisins. From this interview:

But Manji says recent research shows all that virgin stuff was based on an erroneous translation of the Koran: what awaits in heaven are 72 raisins. What? Could 54 people really have been blown up for a bag of raisins? “Well in 7th century Arabia raisins were so exalted as to be promoted to paradise.”

That’s just funny. 72 raisins await you in Paradise? Wow, puts a new twist on going grocery shopping then.

Though come to think of it, I don’t like raisins.

Ok, so last week, at the halfway mark through July, I noticed that the numbers for Iraq had dramatically improved.

Reviewing the numbers this week, things are still on track for a great month. 28 coalition deaths in Iraq so far, 20 of which were due to hostile action. I wonder if that capture of the large weapons cache in Mosul helped?

Injuries are at 369, so I suspect the injuries will be about typical for the post-Abu-Ghabib period probably ending up in the low 500's.

Iraq Military and police deaths are still down, and they've been seeing more action lately.

As I suspected last week, while July started out slow, the number of Iraqis killed by car bombs and such jumped with the events of last week. The number of people killed is almost up to June's level. Still the number of bombings is lower.

Attack's on Iraqi Oil and Gas infrastructure is lower still.

Hmm... Electricity generation is up, the power has been on an average of 13 hours/day in July. That's really important given how hot it is...

Rice visited Lebanon

I've been thinking about how to define terrorism,lately.

The dictionary doesn't give a very useful definition: “the employment of methods of intimidation”.

Well, that's broad enough that the IRS qualifies...as does my credit card company.

Wikipedia basically throws up its hands and says “no one can agree”. Some wags have opined: “Terrorism is what someone else does to you”.

So Terrorism is one of those things no one knows how to define, but “You know it when you see it.”

I think the distinction between terrorism and regular military action boils down to honor. Honor in warfare has become somewhat of an old fashioned concept, but when I see an action that strikes me as being terrorist, its is invariably an action without honor.

It strikes me that thinking about things in terms of honor makes everything simpler.

Is it honorable to kill innocents with a car bomb? No.

Is it honorable to kill soldiers with a car bomb? Yes.

See, I need not reference terrorism at all. Turnabout is fair play:

Is it honorable to kill innocents as “collateral damage” when attacking a foe? No.

But I'm not talking about some sort of absolute honor which can be suddenly lost as if we're all Klingons in a bad Star Trek episode. I'm thinking of honor more as a balance sheet. Every action you take has varying degrees of honor and dishonor attached to it. If you make more honorable actions then dishonorable actions, you are honorable. In our turnabout case:

Is it honorable to purposefully hide behind innocents? No.

Is it honorable to minimize killing innocents who are being used as shields? Yes

Is it honorable to provide medical treatment for innocents harmed by either one's actions or another's actions? Yes

Were the incidents at Abu Ghabib honorable? No

Is prosecuting the soldiers responsible honorable? Yes

Is deposing a ruthless dictator honorable? Yes

Going back to the terrorists:

Is forcing/tricking an innocent to carry a suicide bomb honorable? No

Is hiding in a mosque honorable? No

Is violating a flag of truce honorable? No

Is flying a plane into a building full of civilians honorable? No

Is flying a plane into the Pentagon honorable? Yes

It seems to me that honor is the basic concept behind all of codes like the Geneva Convention that we run our wars by. For each action, the military elements involved must strive to be as honorable as possible. Of course, now we need to define honor, but that seems simple:

An honorable military action is one that attacks the enemy, or helps innocents.

A dishonorable military action is one that attacks or harms civilians.

If both sides strive to be honorable both sides gain honor. However, if one side is dishonorable, there are times when even an honorable warrior may need to commit dishonorable actions: In a hostage situation, it may be necessary to endanger an innocent hostage. So if a warrior is facing a dishonorable enemy, he will be forced to do a certain amount of dishonorable actions himself.

Perhaps then, we can now define terrorist and thus terrorism. A terrorist is a warrior whose primary military actions are always dishonorable ones. Terrorism we can then define as actions carried out by those warriors, whoever they may be. The key point here is that we've discarded any notion of perfection by either side. An honorable warrior is honorable defined by the majority of his actions, not by any one action.

By this measure, the activities of the insurgents in Iraq long ago passed the bar from honorable to dishonorable. They have become terrorists.

So that's what I've been thinking about lately.

So the Bush administration last week switched from calling it the Global War on Terror to the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism. Most pundits both made fun of the move, and pointed out that it was closer to the truth then before.

I propose my own change: The Global Struggle Against Violent Stupidity. I've read the writings of these guys first hand: Osama, Saddam, the mullahs, and I have to say:

All these guys are freaking morons.

One would think that these guys are upset because they suffer under unjust governments, and upset with us because the US has propped up these terrible regimes for years in the Middle East. To quote Rice, “we traded stability for Democracy”.

Nope, that's what you or I would complain about. That's because we have a freaking brain, and we realize that their real problem is their countries are run by inbred fools. Saudi Arabia has more doctors then nurses, because the guys who run their country had never actually been in a hospital.

That's not what these guys complain about, these guys actually think their governments aren't severe enough.

Really, I'm not kidding. Osama thinks that the path to a bright shining future for the Arabs to unite under a Islamic dictatorship. (Run by him of course.) When pointed to the counter example of Iran, Al Queda just answers that they would of course “do an Islamic government right”. I guess the Taliban was supposed to be Islamism done right? That's why anyone with any sense in Afghanistan left?

Its like Communism all over again, each country going communist and then saying “oh, well, all those previous guys who tried it didn't do it right.”

Saddam wasn't any different. All these guys talk about Saladin, the great Muslim dictator of a few hundred years ago. It's as if we started pining “Gee, if only Napoleon could come conquer Europe again. That would really help our governments be more effective.”

Their military planning doesn't exactly show incredible brains either. On 9/11, they killed 3,000 Americans plus some other people of various nationalities. What exactly did that action accomplish? What have any of their actions ever accomplished? They're just blind expressions of rage.

The terrorists are not the poor and downtrodden, but invariably men from middle or upper class families. They're the kind of young men that in America, end up living in their Mom's basement. I wonder if we couldn't defuse this whole GSAVS thing if we just sent the Middle East some porn and some blow up dolls.

We probably can't make them any smarter, but perhaps we can keep them busy.

This makes me laugh, but supposedly, the 72 virgins in paradise is a mistranslation of Syriac, its actually “raisins”.

Here's the link

Here's a photo:

The leftist trolls I get in my comments have finally convinced me. No longer will I try for middle-of-the-road moderate opinions, like perhaps the Iraqis don't like being occupied, but neither do they like crazy idiots blowing themselves up either.

Nope, you guys have convinced me. I was wrong, and you were right correct.

Technorati Tags: Britney Spears, Democrats, Howard Dean, Iraq, Star Trek, Terrorism

Here are some interesting bits:

Article (2):

Islam is the official religion of the state and is a basic source of legislation:

1. No law can be passed that contradicts the undisputed rules of Islam.

2. No law can be passed that contradicts the principles of democracy.

3. No law can be passed that contradicts the rights and basic freedoms outlined in this constitution.

Several people have focused on 1 above, but I think that 2 and 3 are just as important. Islam does talk about government being just, so this isn't necessarily a huge blow to women's rights. In practice, I think that it may not mean anything at all.

Entities or trends that advocate, instigate, justify or propagate racism, terrorism, “takfir” (declaring someone an infidel), sectarian cleansing, are banned, especially the Saddamist Baath Party in Iraq and its symbols, under any name. It will be not be allowed to be part of the multilateral political system in Iraq, which should be defined according to the law.

PART ONE: RIGHTS

FIRST: Civil and political rights.

Article (14): Iraqis are equal before the law without discrimination because of sex, ethnicity, nationality, origin, color, religion, sect, belief, opinion or social or economic status.

So this would imply that women's rights are secured.

Article (93): Establishing private or exceptional courts is forbidden.

So no sharia courts?

Personally, you got me. I've been trying to draft Volokh into commenting, perhaps he will.

Anyways, this is still only a draft anyways.

Here’s an Essay from 2003 in Foreign Affairs

That essay is a perfect example of why I subscribe to Foreign Affairs. Concrete things that should be in the constitution are listed and discussed in light of Iraq, but in May/June of 2003! Here’s a quote:

Restructuring Iraq’s political system will be laden with difficulties, but it will certainly be feasible. At the same time, the blueprint for Iraq’s democracy must reflect the unique features of Iraqi society. Once the system is in place, its benefits will quickly become evident to Iraq’s various communities; if it brings economic prosperity (hardly unlikely given the country’s wealth), the postwar structure will gradually, yet surely, acquire legitimacy. As is shown by the eastern European example, where ex-communist dictatorships have now lined up to join NATO and the European Union, putting in place democratic political institutions that function properly, meet the particular needs of a given society, and deliver the goods can rather quickly produce “habituation” — that is, inculcate democratic habits in the population that become well entrenched and resilient. A democratic federal system would turn Iraq into the standard against which other Arab governments are judged, and make the country a natural ally of the West. Such an outcome would benefit everyone — but especially the people of Iraq, who, after suffering for so long, deserve no less.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal weighing in:

So here’s a radical thought: How about letting Iraqis debate and vote on their new national charter before we Americans summarily denounce it as a failure?

By any existing Middle East standard, the new constitution is a great achievement. It promises to protect human rights, including free speech and the right to worship. It applies the very American principle of federalism, or decentralized power, to reassure multiethnic regions and various Muslim denominations and thus keep the country together.

Yeah, what he said.

This result would certainly be better if Sunni leaders, including some on the drafting committee, were not urging other Sunnis to defeat it. But consider this: For the Sunnis to defeat the constitution they will have to participate in the vote. That’s more than they did in January’s elections, and by itself represents a commitment to a democratic process that many Americans

It is also by no means clear that the constitution will be rejected by Iraq’s voters. The pact must be repudiated by a two-thirds vote in at least three of Iraq’s 18 provinces. A large Sunni turnout could mean “no” votes in two of Iraq’s three predominantly Sunni provinces—Anbar and Sulemaniyah—but is less likely in Nineveh, which has a large Kurdish population. Ratification in the other 15 predominantly Kurdish or Shiite provinces is all but assured.

I kind of think this too. I have lots of faith in the democratic process (even ours), and I’m not so sure that the Sunni voters will vote it down. These Sunni leaders were the same ones that were urging boycotting elections the first time…

The larger truth here is that Americans have no choice but to let Iraqis sort these basic questions out for themselves.

Yep. For all that the Bush Administration is sort of muddling through Iraq, I don’t see any credible alternatives to what they’ve been doing. To quote one of the generals in Iraq:

this insurgency is not going to be settled, the terrorists and the terrorism in Iraq is not going to be settled, through military options or military operations. It’s going to be settled in the political process.

Political processes suck. We know that from our own country. How can we expect Iraq to be any different?

Technorati Tags: Iraq

Just felt like a Rant. I’m in California on a business trip, and I’m in the worst part of California, the North Bay in San Francisco, so I’m surrounded by elitist-yuppie-scum who think they are so enlightened and liberal, when really they are the worst sort of snobs, Mercedes-driving-hippies. I got stuck behind this car on the freeway that was belching black smoke as it proudly proclaimed that it ran on “free used vegetable oil”. No doubt that was why it smelled like burnt french fries.

It’s only been 2 days of gritting my teeth while listening to this claptrap about how the US has killed 100,000 Iraqis (27,000, and that’s about 1/12th of what Saddam would have killed in a year), how our soldiers are nazis, how Iraq is Vietnam, how their free speech is being oppressed, all the same tired rhetoric I became a blogger to escape, and already I’m about to explode.

So here goes.

Technorati Tags: 2000 Election, 2004 Election, Bush, Gore, Iraq, Kerry, Vietnam

A speech from the President of Iraq, courtesy of the Brookings institute, where he gave the speech this morning.

Here's a quote:

Indeed, the good news from Iraq is that the new Iraqi constitution is not a perfect document. The equally good news is that nobody is wildly enthusiastic about the new Iraqi constitution and that no blood was spilled in the writing of the constitution. We talked, we sometimes disagreed, but we were, at least most of us, always committed to settling our differences through dialogue and compromise.

Here's another:

We are the heart of the Middle East. Win in Iraq, and the region will change for the better just as Iraq has advanced away from its appalling legacy. Lose in Iraq, and then all of the gains that democrats and dissidents have made across a vast swathe of the Islamic world, not just the Middle East, will be lost. Lose in Iraq, and a more perverted new dictatorship will emerge in the rump of that country, vengeful and uncompromising.

This is my weekly review of the report available here. It's a report compiled by the Brookings institute every week that attempts to try to see how things are going in Iraq. During the month I can just guess what the trend will be like, at the end of the month I can nail it down. I also read the weekly report from the State Department, but that's not usually as good.

So here goes.

Personally, I would have called the essay Why Cowboys Kick Ass and all you Liberals are Whiny Greenhorns but he works in Hollywood, where every movie has to have a single word title...

As always, reviewing the data from the Brookings Institution. I made the above graph to demonstrate some of the things I've been talking about in previous reports. (Note that “Car Crashes above is really 'non-hostile' deaths. About 90% of those are car crashes, so I named it that to put it in perspective.)

Now remember on that last month this is only through September 14th, still, that's halfway through the month.

1. IEDs have been between 30-40 deaths/month for most of the year.

2. Deaths from ”bullets“ (called other Hostile Fire in the Brookings report) have peaks when the military conducts operations.

So here's what I see: Everything but IED deaths and Bullet deaths have been trending down since May. This directly correlates with the soldiers reports that things have been settling down in Iraq. The bullet deaths are trending upwards, but that reflects the soldiers being more aggressive. IEDs have a slight trend upwards, but that also reflects that the insurgents have become much weaker. About the only thing they can do now is skulk around at night and plant bombs, they're too weak to mount much of a direct effort against the troops.

Now look at that last month, September. Its too early to say for sure given that we're halfway through the month, but look at the steep decline. Most of the numbers are zero! This almost seemed too good to be true, so I double checked on the Centcom site. Very few casualty reports.

Now of course, in the news we're reading about Al Queda killing all these innocent civilians, so it doesn't seem like Al Queda is ”losing“. But the reality is that Al Queda is flailing about. These last few attacks are doing nothing more then inflaming the populace against them. Attacking day laborers? Even fellow Sunnis thought that was beyond the pale, aiming at the poorest members of Iraq. There's going to be be a huge amount of blowback for Al Queda for that.

Here's the other interesting bit: There have been no US servicemen killed so far due to Tal Afar. That's partially because the Iraqis were leading the action on that one. No deaths and relatively few injuries means that Al Queda was exceptionally weak there; even the Iraqi military deaths are low so far this month for conducting such a big operation. As a result of that operation, 22 weapons caches have been found, which means fewer deaths going forward.

So I think these bombings may be one of Al Queda's last gasps. These attacks were ill-concieved, ill-planned and will have exactly the opposite effect. Much like the car bombing that purposefully killed children a couple of months ago, the populace is getting sick of these idiots and their tired philosophy of hate. One of the problems with suicide bombers from a military perspective is that they're like a gun with only one bullet. Even then, not all of these bombings are created equal: the bombs that have been going off have been less sophisticated and therefore less effective. The main reason the casualty count was so high with the first set of bombings was because that one guy killed so many day laborers.

Check out the Fourth Rail and keep scrolling.

Also, Security Watchtower has a cool map which I found via the Fourth Rail.

“There was a time not long ago when Al-Qaeda might have been analyzed or interpreted as a manifestation of Arab discontent, a violent quest for political reform or an aggressive statement against American or Zionist domination. But the most recent operations called for by Al-Qaeda's frontman in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, ought to finally disprove such theories. His declaration of war against Iraqi Shiites illustrates that Al-Qaeda has lost any and every possible claim it may have had to moral, noble or rational objectives. In declaring war against Iraqi Shiites, Al-Qaeda has proven itself to be nothing more than a ruthless, sectarian gang. It is not unlike many other sectarian militias that we have seen in the region; the only difference is that it is much more vicious and has a much wider reach.” - The Daily Star, Lebanon (15 Sept 2005)

Hat Tip: Security Watchtower

I'd forgotten, but Terrorism Unveiled reminded me.

Cool!

Cow-Borne-Improvised-Explosive-Device

Insurgents is anyone who attacks him, while terrorists are anyone who attacks civilians. From Phil and Becky's Blog:

I don't necessarily harbor any personal angst against insurgents. I don't take it personally if they want to attack soldiers. Terrorists, on the other hand, I have a problem with. Terrorists are cowards who kill innocent, defenseless civilians because they are too spineless to attack us. There is nothing honorable about preying upon the weak.

At first I was going to quibble, because often they are the same guys. But Phil is a soldier in Iraq, so he probably knows about a million times more about Iraq at this point then I do...

I think its interesting that politicians and the media can't decide where the line is, but a soldier has no problem.

Someone asked a soldier in Iraq:

Do you think that what you are doing is worth the deaths of 25,000 Iraqis and 2,000 US soldiers, or, is this going to be like Vietnam - a completely pointless exercise? The reason I ask is that it seems that we are helping to install an Islamic government with strong ties to Iran, which will lead to the enslavement of women. Must make you wonder what you are fighting for!

He responded

Go read his answer, its interesting. I liked this bit:

Islam is a fact of life here. Moreover, Islam is a way of life. Islam is inextricably intertwined in the day to heppenings of the average citizen. When a religion carries so much precendence in a society, aspects and beliefs of the religion are bound to manifest themselves in law and government. Shari'a law is what these people have known for generations.

If Shari'a law is incorporated into the constitution, and the constitution is ratified by popular vote, then we have done our jobs. We have given them the opportunity to freely elect their leaders, and on 15 October, they will have to ability to adopt or discard the laws the leaders have created. Wether or not the constitution contains elements of Shari'a law is the choice of the people.

I don't see enslavement of women here.

He's got this good essay about the terrorists personnel problems with lots of quotes and links that underline what I've been saying lately about the insurgents becoming much less effective over the last few months. You can read it here.

Here's my favorite bit, because it quotes a statistic I been looking for and haven't been able to find:

The number of vehicle-borne improvised explosive device [VBIED] attacks in Iraq has declined dramatically in recent months. According to a source familar with the totals, there were rougly 125 VBIED attacks in Iraq in May; by August, that number had declined to 68. Another stat you won’t find in The New York Times: since the Iraq War began, at least 25% of all VBEIDs have been found and cleared before they detonated. That translates into hundreds—perhaps thousands—of lives saved.

With the decrease in VBIED attacks, there has been a corresponding increase in attacks using improvised explosive devices (IEDs). But (again) you won’t hear the reason for that shift in tactics. Using IEDs allows the jihadists to conserve strained personnel resources. Apparently, there are fewer suicide bombers willing to die for the cause, and fewer fighters available for direct attacks against coalition forces, prompting a shift to less risky IED attacks, which require fewer personnel.

So car bombs have been declining. I'd noticed that, but I hadn't considered the fat that VBIEDs are also suicide bombers. It's good to know the insurgents have a finite supply of complete idiots. Though come to think of it, I remember reading about how they used this one retarded guy as a suicide bomber. Or the guy they told to deliver the truck to such and such place, only to blow it up while he was inside it.

Here's an article talking about Shale oil. I've pointed out before that there is more oil in shale then anything else, its just been more expensive to extract it. The interesting thing about the new in-situ methods is that they could pay off at $30/barrel.

That's why development stopped before in the 70's, because at $15/barrel, it didn't make any sense. But I could envision a future where the US is one of the worlds largest suppliers of oil, and only Europe is dependent on Arab oil.

Think about that for a minute.

It's important to realize that our soldiers plan, execute, then attack. It's hard to see that with the day to day reports, so Bill Roggio and a couple of others have a Flash presentation showing our military's actions over the 20 days

The amazing thing to me is how effective they've been yet with very few KIAs on our side.

If I had one criticism of this presentation, it would be that it doesn't show the Haditha operation from the beginning of August. I think that would demonstrate more of the long term plan.

It's roundup time!

Fester's Place has done sort of a counter to my analysis that Al Queda has been kicked pretty hard in the nuts lately.

The thing I think he's missing is that the estimates I see of insurgency size from the Brooking's report are obviously completely made up. So doing any sort of analysis of the difference between a hard number like the number of insurgents reported “detained or killed” and the insurgency size is pretty meaningless. For that matter, I think the estimates of the number of insurgents “detained or killed” is too soft as well, because I doubt that 100% of all those those numbers are guilty.

That's the problem with “enemy body count” numbers, which is why I avoid those portions of the Brookings report.

The other issue is that the numbers have no way to reflect commitment to the “cause”. If we keep hitting the leadership as we've been doing, eventually the only people left will be as effective as well, the Howard Dean Presidential campaign...

So if the insurgency had a million members, but didn't hurt anybody and just were members of the “Saddam Hussien for President” party, that wouldn't bother me; that's probably even a win condition for the US.

At Princeton. Even if you don't agree with her, you should go read her speech so you know what exactly it is you disagree with...

That sounds funny I'm sure, but “liberalism” used to mean the spread of “liberty”. I'm not sure what it means any more, given that one of the most “conservative” Secretaries of State we've ever had is giving a speech at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

It is rare that I read something truly original in the realm of foreign policy. Every two months, I get a new Foreign Affairs, where the lefty academics will come out of their ivory towers to tell us the world is America's fault, the right will tell us that we're the biggest nation on earth we should take avantage of it, while others tell us in 20/20 hindsight what we should have done.

Thomas Barnett's first book was truly original, and pure genius. But its his second book I'm reviewing. The second book, while thought provoking, even world-view-realigning, is not the same thing as thought agreeing.

Yes, you read the title of this post right. The book I'm talking about is

Blueprint for Action : A Future Worth Creating

It simultaneously manages to be a work of great genius, and it makes me grit my teeth with his astounding naiveté. This book is a follow up to this previous book:

The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century

a book I've read in airport bookstores but didn't bother to actually purchase (I can read fast, and often have lots of time to kill in PHX).

Barnett's fundamental thesis from the first book is that all of the U.S. military actions have involved what he calls “the Gap”, even during the Cold War, and especially since the end of the Cold War in '89. The Gap is basically all the countries mostly untouched by globalization. Meanwhile, The Core which consists of Europe, and the New Core which consists of countries like China and India.

He's not the first to make this observation, as one wag put it:

No country with a McDonald's ever invaded another country with a McDonald's.

But Barnett ties it all neatly together. I find his arguments very convincing, because they are obviously historically true. We have intervened in more countries since the Cold War then during the Cold War, and most of those countries are the ones most disconnected from the rest of the world.

The interesting thing about Barnett's books is that you'll come to realize this: Everyone is right about our foreign policy to some extent, and wrong to some extent. The neo-cons are right that liberalism is a necessary thing to spread, but wrong about the cost (it will be expensive, messy). The left is right about needing world involvement, but wrong if they think we can keep our head in the sand about dictators and other “bad actors”. The right is right that America has enemies, but wrong if they think that enemy is China; China may be our best ally. The left is wrong about globalization being a bad thing, but right about it causing problems, the right is correct about the spread of liberalization being a good thing, but wrong about the utility of America's military might. I could go on, but the thing about Barnett's books is that his observations are so obviously true that just reading them first hand will shift your foreign policy perspective.

Of course, being right makes Barnett controversial. Lefties think he's a neo-con, neo-cons think he's an internationalist, righties think he's soft on communism. He's not, he's his own beast, which is what makes him interesting.

Additionally, as a Pentagon insider, Barnett gives interesting insight on what this means not just in a foreign policy sense, but in a practical military sense. Barnett argues that we need two military forces: A Leviathan force, which basically excels in killing people; and a SysAdmin force, which can occupy, rebuilt, reconstruct.

Barnett is critical of the administration, but fair as well. He criticizes Rumsfeld for not having enough troops in the occupying force, but also points out that Rumsfeld's work in transforming the Pentagon is exactly what is needed in the modern world and talks about how difficult it is to “move” the Pentagon. I learned from Barnett that the Army purposefully moved all of their “SysAdmin” forces into the reserves after Vietnam: Iraq is the bill we're all paying as a result of that “fuck you” to their civilian leadership.

All very interesting really.

There's a good review of Barnett's first book here.

This review is of Barnett's second book. This book purports to be a blueprint for how Barnett thinks we should accomplish the issues raised in the first book.

After reading his book, Barnett has absolutely convinced me of two things:

1. He's absolutely right about what we need to do. (Genius!)

2. He's absolutely wrong about how we need to do it. (Naiveté)

That is, Barnett has successfully convinced me that we need both a Leviathan and a SysAdmin force in the US military. He has convinced me that yes, the administration has made mistakes in conducting the Iraq war; though not the mistakes everyone thinks. He has also convinced me that we need to make overtures to the new Core (India, China, Brazil) to as he puts it:

Lock in China at Today's Prices

He's convinced me that the Old Core and New Core need to work together to shrink the Gap.

But where I find Barnett hopelessly naive is in his descriptions of how he sees the SysAdmin force working. At this point, Barnett starts to sound like John Kerry. (Though not quite so bad, he points out the UN is useless; that a G8 or G20 organization makes more sense). He argues that somehow, the US would only have to provide 20% of the SysAdmin cost, with the rest being made up by the rest of the world. Now granted, we've had problems for years with NATO with them shortchanging in the high-tech weapons department. Peacekeeping on the other hand is the kind of thing where people are more important then gadgets: I'm sure the Pentagon would trade 2,000 armored Humvees for 2,000 Arabic translators in a heartbeat. We need translators more then we need Humvees. So Turkey, for instance, could provide 2,000 badly needed peacekeeping troops to the US Military, and we could probably use them pretty easily.

But I'm truly skeptical of it actually working, because it never has in the past. Just as his Core/Gap map and Leviathan/SysAdmin metaphors are convincing to me because they obviously true historically, I find his Blueprint unconvincing because they are obviously untrue.

His examples of “successful” intervention by the international community were just awful. Kosovo? We still have troops in Kosovo 10 years later? This is success? They used to export electricity, now they import it?

Even ignoring that, let's say the US does form some sort of international SysAdmin force. Is France going to participate? If France makes up 20% of the force, what happens if they don't feel like joining in? Does that mean that every single country in the G8 has a veto? Even if it is put up to a vote, couldn't a single country pull their soldiers out anyways?

Barnett argues that this just means that the US needs to be better about convincing our allies when interventions are necessary. Uh, excuse me? The only thing that can convince the French of anything is when France itself gets invaded, and then they overreact. Getting unanimous consensus on anything with Europe is impossible. Come to think of it, unanimous consensus on anything is impossible.

So from a military perspective, Thomas' “Blueprint for Action” sounds like a “Blueprint for Inaction” to me. Fundamentally, I think Thomas is missing what I call the “Kosovo Lesson”. For an intervention to be successful, one country in particular will have to take responsibility for it succeeding. Otherwise, it just degenerates into a halfhearted feel-good circle jerk by the G8. “Look everyone, the people are starving, but they aren't killing each other any more”. So if we really want interventions to work, then the US will have to play a dominant role in coalitions of the willing; because nothing else has really worked in the past.

About the only way I could see his SysAdmin force plan working would be if the US started it out as a “disaster relief” force. There are multiple natural disasters every year, and its become the US Military's role to provide relief onsite during those disasters. Perhaps if we started small, where its easy to build consensus (earthquakes are bad), it would be easier to build consensus later (genocides are bad).

Now on the diplomatic front though, I think Barnett nails it. We should have a Pacific Treaty Organization in the same way we have NATO, or rather we should regularly dialogue with the Asian countries and work out some agreements that will bring this “New Core” into the fold. If China is buying oil from Iran, they'll probably have ten times the influence then we will; so if we can get China and Russia to help us suppress the crazy mullahs, that's a good thing. But anticipating that Norway will someday help us stabilize Iran when the mullahocracy collapses? I'm pretty skeptical of Norway doing that.

Now of course, I'm debating his message, which brings me to the moral of this book review. I heartily recommend both this book and especially Barnett's previous book. This is one of the most thought-provoking, and thought-realigning books on foreign policy I've read lately. You won't necessarily agree with it, but it will make you think down some unique paths.

Those unique paths are sadly needed in our foreign policy, we need some new ideas.

In the continuing theme of why I like people to disagree with me, but find people like Ernie pointless is this quote from Armed Liberal:

But the really sad thing is that people like me have no choice but to support the Administration, because the alternatives - as much as I've tried to look for them - look as doltish as John Kerry. I've got - we've all got - the choice between someone who is trying to do the right thing for what appears to be the right reasons, but is both feckless and mulishly stubborn; and those who neither convince me that they know what the right thing to do is, and certainly offer little evidence that they would do better.

You can read the whole piece here.

But with better coverage...

Bill Roggio is going to Iraq to check things out for himself. Why don't you stop on by and chip in about $25 to help?

Good to Know

For instance the Jim Jones/Jamestown suicide culture? That was bone-ass dumb.

Who comes up with this “all cultures are equal” stuff anyways? Its been obvious since the beginning of human history that some cultures just, well, suck.

Like say, the Icans/Mayans/Aztecs...

Further reading:

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Which is sitting in my “to read” pile.

From the C-Span Store you can buy a DVD of Thomas Barnett's “Pentagon's New Map” briefing. I don't agree with everything he says, but he's definitely on to something.

Anyone who's read both:

The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century

Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

And manages to tie them together! Deserves a link. It's kind of about how crack gangs are like the insurgency in Iraq.

Osama is the far right Geek. Notice how Osama doesn't have a girlfriend? Small wonder why he finds 72 virgins so attractive. Of course, his mother was a concubine Ho. Small wonder he has issues.

Source

Hat Tip: Zarqawi's Blog

Fun, quick web games here

It's kind of scary that I scored higher on this then I did on the US (88% vs 80% for the US). Though mostly that's because it was a lot easier to match up coastlines then it was to do those square midwestern states exactly. :-)

Being a female suicide bomber is like being a black KKK member.

Technorati Tags: Iraq

So if you see me recommending this article about the French Riots from a female point of view, you'll know its worth reading.

From Scott Adams of dilbert fame.

If you liked Zarqawi's Website you'll like this too.

This morning, an inspiring story in the Wall Street Journal about a 31 year old journalist who just joined the Marines.

Consistently, the Wall Street Journal coverage of the war has been much better then the New York Times or the Washington Post. I think that's because while the NYT and WP are after ratings, the WSJ is trying to make their customers money.

So distortions and hype don't fly. Kudos to the WSJ.

From over at Big Pharaoh, the Egyptian blogger:

I had a few minutes to spare during my working day today. I thought it would be a good idea to read Noam Chomsky's interview with Egyptian blogger Karim Elsahy who was interviewing the professor on behalf of Egypt Today magazine. I started reading and reached the sentence where Chomsky said:

I mean the level of religious fundamentalism in the United States is beyond any country I know.

That's when I laughed so hard, stopped reading, and went back to my boring excel sheet!

Yeah, me too Pharaoh, me too.

A friend of mine sent me a link to this piece of dreck:

film on Google

It's stuff like this that makes me hate the left.

sigh

In 1920, Woodrow Wilson became the first President to leave the US during his term of office when he got on a ship to travel to Yalta to negotiate with Lloyd George and Clemenceau to negotiate the end of WWI. When he arrived he was deathly ill. As a consequence, Lloyd George and Clemenceau were able to easily frustrate Wilson's attempt to implement his 14 points: they conducted most of the negotiations in French, which Wilson didn't speak.

Knowing what we know now, what probably what happened is that either Wilson had a stroke (there was some evidence of personality change), or some waiter didn't wash his hands before serving the President of the United States his tuna sandwich. Of the two, I prefer the latter theory, mostly because of the irony. “lávese las manos”

The end result of that “peace conference” was the breakup of the Ottoman empire, and the creation of what we now call “the Middle East”. That peace treaty was so awful that Congress refused to ratify it; presumably we are still at war with the Kaiser.

My story is true. This film is not. The idiot branch of the left wants to believe that there was this giant conspiracy between all these various factions of the US Political machine? That Clinton and Bush worked together somehow to create 9/11?

Give me a fucking break. How about if I just believe that the government is mostly incompetent? That's a much simpler theory, and I see evidence of that every day. Never put down to evil what you can put down to incompetence; incompetence is much more common.

Recently, I had to debunk similar nonsense. In that case, I'm supposed to trust the mechanical engineering expertise of a Professor of Theology over well, actual mechanical engineers.

It's like talking to Chomskyites. College students read Noam Chomsky, a professor of linguistics, and take his historical pronouncements as gospel.

Look, by all means read Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent as an analysis of the media and how the government manipulates it is brilliant. As a professor of linguistics, Chomsky is unparalleled. But take his history with a grain of salt. Go read his sources if you want the true history of what's going on, and read the historians that don't agree with his sources as well. If historians don't always agree about history, don't take Chomsky's word for anything: he's trying to prove a point, so he discards anything that conflicts with his thesis. Manufacturing Consent is itself a piece of the propaganda it purports to analyze.

Propaganda is not reality though. The great theme of America has not been the creation of an empire. We frankly don't want or need an empire. The great goal of American foreign policy has actually been the promotion of democracy worldwide. Sure, there have been moments where we've moved against that grain: in wartime, cold or hot, short-term tactics may triumph over long term strategy. The triumph of America on the world stage is not due to any particular magic other then the fact that Americans work pretty hard, and we stayed out of WWI and WWII until the last possible moment. It's really as simple as that; realistically before the end of WWII, America was a non-entity on the world stage. We didn't create colonialism. Perhaps we propped it up a bit after 1945 to prevent a complete power vacuum across most of the world, but only just.

But let's look back on the history since 1945 shall we?

1. We defeated Germany and Japan in WWII, neither of them easy tasks.
2. We defeated Communism in a long, “Cold” War.
3. We've been successfully bringing Eastern European countries over to democratic ideals. (Not completely done yet! Look at Belorussia)
4. We've been successfully bringing more and more countries over to democracy. (Check out Freedom House for details.

You know, that's not such a bad record. Even the Vietnamese now thank us for keeping the Chinese out of their country...

But according to the idiot left, we're all evil, warmongering greedy assholes bent on stealing the worlds resources. Well guys, that's called mechantilism, and it was debunked in 1776 (ironic date that) when Adam Smith founded modern economics, with the publication of the Wealth of Nations. If we want the oil of the Middle East, all we have to do is buy it. What we actually want is peace in the Middle East, and that's not such a bad goal is it?

Cool Article on the new sanctions regime. Sanctions that take advantage of our position as the leader of the global economy to “bar outlaw regimes from the global ATM”.

Wish we’d had them during, say, the Clinton administration…

One of my constant frustrations is that I’m a big picture guy. So I can see how Bush looked at the set of foreign policy issues on 9/12/2001 and said to himself: “Hmmm… We need to do something about Iraq”.

So I see that France and Russia are thereby as much to blame for the Iraq War as Bush2. For all the flak that Hillary is taking about the Iraq war from the left, I’m sure she’ll say at some point (once she’s cinched her parties nomination), “Hey, Iraq was poisoning the whole region. Remember, I was in the White House for 8 years.”

Then she’ll go on to rag on Bush for how he conducted the war instead of why. Which is fair, Bush is big picture (Can’t fix North Korea without the help of China.) but not enough little picture (need to actually spend those reconstruction dollars…).

Anyways, if we’d had this sanctions regime before, we wouldn’t have had to go into Iraq. So we probably won’t have to go into Iran.

Huzzah.

Hat Tip to Thomas Barnett, the “Pentagon’s New Map” guy.

Good news from the Surge-

The Opportunity In Sadr City:
The sorry state of Sadr City has increased the appreciation of the Mahdi Army’s role in the slums for American troops. What few services the residents received came from the Shi’ite militias — along with protection rackets, violence, and exploitation. These people want to see their situation change, and they will be willing to work with almost anyone who can improve their conditions and allow them to get off of the dole.

General David Petraeus understands this. His strategy of neighborhood-based security allows for close interaction with the residents. He has adjusted the tactics used in implementing security to allow for softer, more friendly approaches to Sadr City residents, who will appreciate the difference between professional American troops and the crime-lord approach of the Mahdis. At this level, it is a hearts-and-minds strategy that Petraeus hopes will pay short- and long-term dividends.

At the same time, the US needs to start getting trash, sewage, and electical services running. Instead of having the Army or American contractors do the work, though, the US should invest resources to help create Iraqi businesses for these tasks. It would help employ thousands who need jobs and jump-start the creation of a Sadr City middle class. Entrepeneurialism will accelerate the process of clearing the trash and cleaning the streets while the sewage and electrical systems get put back to working order.

Security comes first, but efforts such as these have to follow soon after, or security will soon disappear. The US has a chance to make an impact on sectarian animosity by allowing everyone the chance for some prosperity, and to give Iraqis ownership of their own progress. A kick start beats a kicked-in door in the long run, as Petraeus knows. Let’s hope Congress can figure this out as well.

One of the great things about America is that because anyone can grow up to become President, we all feel we have the right to jog the President’s elbow.

So here’s my list of 5 things I wish we were doing.

Own Goal is a soccer term for when you accidentally kick the ball through your own goal, earning a point for the other team.

The problem with funding Terrorism, or Biological Weapons, or Chemical Weapons, is that they end up being dangerous to your own people.

Seems like the Iranians are Blowing Themselves Up Now

The Airplane-liquid bombers were going to use a concoction of concentrated hydrogen peroxide and something else to make tricacetone triperoxide (TATP), which has accidentally killed more terrorists then anything the US has done. (Oops, Own Goal)

Meanwhile, the liquid-binary explosive that was really cool in that Die Hard movie, only exists in that movie.

So it should make anyone nervous that Petreus is leaving Iraq, even if its to accept more responsibility for the Mideast as a whole.

Here's his Wikipedia Bio.

Which gives him mixed reviews based on my reading:

Odierno's tenure as 4th ID commander in Iraq and his unit's actions there have subsequently come under criticism from several sources. Many officers from the 1st Marine Division were critical of 4th ID's belligerent stance during their initial entry into Iraq after the ground war had ceased and the unit's lack of a 'hearts and minds' approach to counter-insurgency. Several authors have echoed similar criticisms shared with them by other military personnel in the theater. In his unit's defense Odierno strenuously argued that the situation was that such an approach was required and subsequent insurgent activity justified the actions of 4th ID as former insurgents began to join the fight against Islamic extremist groups, such as al-Qaeda, in 2007.[4][5] As a general also stated in Rick's "Fiasco: the american military adventure in Iraq": "What the 4th ID did was criminal."

In his second Iraq deployment, Odierno served as the commander of Multi-National Corps-Iraq. During Operation Iraqi Freedom 06-08, he and General David Petraeus were the primary architects of the troop “surge” into Baghdad. Running counter to previous strategies that sought to draw down the American presence in Iraq, Petraeus and Odierno increased the U.S. presence in Iraq to 20 Brigade Combat Teams from the previous level of 15.[6] The “surge” deployed troops to many parts across Iraq, concentrating in and around Baghdad and culminating in the Iraqi led Operation Fardh al-Qanoon that began in March of 2007. In conjunction with his counterpart in the Iraqi Army, Lieutenant General Abud Qanbar, the push into Baghdad included the establishment of dozens of Combat Outposts and Joint Security Stations throughout the city. Capitalizing on the initial success of Fardh al-Qanoon,[7]Odierno then launched Operation Phantom Thunder just north of Baghdad in the Diyala, Babil, and Salah-ah-Din provinces as well as just to the west in the Al-Anbar province. Forcing many of Baghdad’s extremists from the capital, Odierno sought to root out extremist influences around the city and initiated Operation Phantom Thunder in June of 2007.

So bad thing is that his first tour he was too heavy handed. Second tour, he was partners with Petreus. Hmm...

The Weekly Standard says that Odierno is Patton to Petreus' Eisenhower:

As is well known, General Petraeus oversaw the writing of a new counterinsurgency doctrine before being sent to Iraq. But the doctrine did not provide a great deal of detail about how to plan and conduct such operations across a theater as large as Iraq. It was Odierno who creatively adapted sophisticated concepts from conventional fighting to the problems in Iraq, filling gaps in the counterinsurgency doctrine and making the overall effort successful.

So that goes along with the "learned better" theory. Here's a briefing he did back in January, though you'll want to download the slides first. For a real treat, alternate between slide 2 and slide 4. He says some things that indicate he "gets it":

By reversing and reducing the cycle of terror through tough fighting and immeasurable sacrifice, coalition and Iraqi security force were able to earn the trust and cooperation of Baghdad citizens. While acknowledging the risks, coalition force in Anbar seized upon Iraqi discontent with al Qaeda's brutality, and planted the seeds for what is now a burgeoning bottom-up reconciliation effort that is rejecting extremism. In June, with the full surge in place, we initiated Operation Phantom Thunder, a corps-level offensive operation focused on the Baghdad Belts to defeat al Qaeda and extremists, deny enemy sanctuary, and interdict their command and control and logistics capabilities. With Phantom Thunder's success at disrupting the enemy, we launched Operation Phantom Strike in August to intensify pursuit of al Qaeda and extremists.

Q Some of the proposals by some of the candidates for president have talked about removing all of combat brigades from Iraq by the end of next year. Would you say that, given the strategy of the need to reinforce Iraqi units in the future, that you would be opposed to removing all combat forces in two years time?

GEN. ODIERNO: Well again, it depends first on what the environment is like, and so it's hard to make a prediction of what the environment is like. And so what I would say is for us to continue to make progress and for the Iraqis to make sure that they -- the government is successful, that they become regional partners, that they become partners in transnational terrorism, we want to make sure they're successful. And so as the environment goes forward and we believe the conditions are set, then we can reduce our forces.

The timeline of that depends on many factors. The timeline depends on the threat, the capacity of the Iraqi security forces, the capacity -- the governance capacity that's established. And based on that, we'll make recommendations.

Obviously, it's a policy decision about how long we stay here. What I would do is make my best military recommendation.

It's hard for me, again, to look two years from now. I see us making progress. I see us being able to get down to 15 brigades by the summer. I'm very confident of that. If conditions continue along the way they are and the same they are, then I think we'll set the conditions for further reductions, but that will be based on all the factors I just laid out for you.

Q As General Austin comes in, could you just reflect a little bit about what you would tell him about the biggest challenges that you see ahead and any advice you'd give him on lessons that you've learned from your time here in Iraq?

GEN. ODIERNO: Well, I mean, I would just say -- is that the bottom line is that the number-one piece of advice that I've given him and he understands very fully -- he's a great officer who has great understanding of Iraq -- is -- it's about really protecting -- you know, the lesson we learned is, it's really about providing security for the people of Iraq, protecting the population. And what we have to do -- and the Iraqis understand that. And so his mission is to continue to do that as he turns more responsibility over to the Iraqis. And my advice to him would be to do that in a slow, deliberate manner, making sure that we don't make some of the mistakes we've made in the past -- turning it over too quickly, where we lose ground and give some of these extremist elements a chance. We don't want to give them another chance. We don't want to give them anything back. So I would say that's probably the biggest challenge.

It also is about developing jobs. We've got to help, work with the -- it's the government of Iraq's responsibility, ultimately, but here, in the next six to eight months, job development is going to become more critical, because security now is at a level where jobs become more important, economic development become(s) more important. So it's time for us to really focus on those areas, working with the government of Iraq to try to create as many -- and not -- I'm not talking about just jobs for jobs; I'm talking about sustainable jobs.

And we've been able to do that through micro grant programs, through establishing some vocational technical institutions. We are just beginning a program called the civil service corps. We've kind of modeled after the 1930s, when we were trying to put people to work in the United States after the Depression. And so we're trying to put some of those programs -- and we're working those with the government of Iraq, with their reconciliation cell.

So I would say those are the areas that are going to be hard to get started, and those will be -- those are the things that will be the most difficult for them to move forward with. But I believe they understand that, and they are ready to do that.

Here's a more recent briefing, where he answers my question directly, did you learn better? (March 3rd):

Q Sir, you were given credit for kind of changing your thinking about how to fight a counterinsurgency. And in effect, some people would say you got the memo when it comes to fighting a counterinsurgency. Could you talk a little bit about how your thinking changed and adapted through the past year? And also, as you kind of go into this next job, do you see the Army as well prepared to do what it needs to do in these kinds of fights?

GEN. ODIERNO: Yeah, well, I would just say, first, there's nothing like experience, being on the ground, getting to see it every day. The most important thing, though, is to try to take that and learn from it.

And who I learned from is a lot of my subordinate commanders, frankly, these great brigade commanders, battalion commanders, division commanders. We had a collaborative process and really had a chance to really talk about this very complex problem and try to come up with the best solutions to fix these problems. And that's what enabled us to really -- and in fact, that environment was what I credit with the change, the fact that we had an environment that we were able to have these discussions. No single person does any of this; it is a team effort, you know.

And so us working together as a group, us trying to come up with these right solutions, but it's also the -- you know, what I was most impressed about with our leaders is the time -- you know, everyone had been over there before. The time they spent back here, they used that to really do some introspective looks, as well as -- I did as well, continued to study the problem and what is the best solution as we move forward. And I think that helped us as we started to implement this counterinsurgency strategy. So I was very happy about that.

And you asked a second part.

Q What about the rest of the Army, as you kind of --

GEN. ODIERNO: Yeah. I would just say, first off, it's very important, as we move forward, we are full -- what I call full- spectrum. That requires us to operate across many different levels. We can't forget the lessons we've learned -- what I call irregular warfare. And we have to continue to make sure we emphasize that. And it's about adaptability in our thinking. It's about decentralizing, giving right and left limits, providing intent, decentralizing responsibility, and then allowing them to adapt to the problems and give them the resources to do that, whether it's a division, a brigade or battalion. We have to continue that thought -- it's about decentralized thinking, decentralized execution.

It's -- you know, our conventional forces are doing operations that our Special Operations Forces did in 2003. Our Special Operations Forces are moved higher up on their capacity to conduct their operations. And that's how -- we want to keep that, but still going back and being able to do some higher-intensity conventional operations if we can. I feel very comfortable that we can do that. But we can't ever completely go back to conventional. We've got to maintain this irregular warfare capacity that we have built into our Army.

Q Real quick, though. As you come back, do you see that there's a lot of pressure to kind of forget those lessons learned?

GEN. ODIERNO: No. No. In fact, I see us incorporating it every day. I mean, I see it incorporating in our schools -- both our officer, noncommissioned officer schools, in the academies I see it being incorporated. But there's still work -- more work in our training centers, national training centers, all being incorporated, Joint Readiness Training Center. We just have to make sure we don't stop, we continue moving forward, we continue thinking about it, we continue improving ourselves. That's the challenge I think we have.

Q How much does the retraining in counterinsurgency play into the increased dwell time? Because I know that the families are a big focus, but you have to retrain for these full spectrums. How large of a piece is that?

GEN. ODIERNO: Well, you know, it's one of the things we talk about all the time. You know – we’re deployed for a year, home for a year -- during that year you're not just sitting home every night. You're out training and doing a lot of other things and still spend some time away from home. That's why we want to extend that time. And also, you know, and we'd like to have a bit more time to reintegrate units, to spend more time on our equipment, to spend more time doing those kind of things.

So time does play a role in it. But we have been able to do it very well. Our equipment is continuing to perform very well under really tough conditions that we have to inside of Iraq. So I'm comfortable with what we're doing. More time would just give us a bit more -- reduce the risk, mitigate the risk a little bit more.

My nightmare scenario:

Someone bombs the pipeline in Georgia, causing oil prices to skyrocket even more. (It will be interesting to see what oil is selling at on Monday).

Russia is the #2 producer of oil in the world, after Saudi Arabia.

So oil shoots through the roof.

In 2 years, the fucking Middle East has enough money to buy controlling interest in every corporation in America. They do so. We'll have sold ourselves into slavery.

Welcome to the Caliphate.

We need to drill, build nuclear power plants, invest in Bussard's Fusion reactor, whatever.

Because the only difference between my nightmare scenario and the Georgian pipeline NOT getting bombed, is 6 years. The Middle East is already raking in 1.8 Trillion/year, they can buy America in 6 years.

Georgia has a blog.

over at the WSJ

Michael Totten is in Georgia

Nothing like non-mainstream-media eyewitness reporting.