Michael Ledeen offers a timely lesson on terrorism and Iran’s role, in terror, and in Iraq, in his latest NRO piece.

Ledeen’s thoughts on Iranian proxies in Iraq:

Al-Reuters speaks of “Iranian fighters” mixed in with “Shi’ite militiamen.” But lots of Shiite militiamen entered Iraq from Iran around the time of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and many of those had originally fled Iraq in the early 1980s to join Iranian forces in the war against Saddam. We’re talking big numbers here. Millions of Iraqi Shiites went to Iran, and tens of thousands of them (and, later, their children) were trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. They are ideal for infiltration — into Shiite or Sunni militias — since they speak Arabic with an Iraqi accent.
I have been saying for years now that those who have been insisting that the “insurrection” is primarily an internal, Iraqi phenomenon, have missed this basic analytical conundrum: are those people Iraqis or Iranians? Should we call them “Iranian agents” (or as al-Reuters prefers, “Iranian fighters”)? Or should we call them Iraqis who spent time in Iran? Who are they?
The important thing is that they are working for Iran; their ultimate national allegiance is irrelevant in terms of understanding the nature of the terror war. They respond to the terror masters in Tehran.

In contrast, Ledeen’s observations about Iraqi Shia, and why many of our analysts and decision-makers get it wrong:

The single greatest distortion of reality in the war is that old chestnut about the profound hatred and total incompatibility between Sunnis and Shiites. The truth is that Sunnis and Shiites happily cooperate when it comes to killing Americans, Europeans, Jews, Christians, Suffis, Bahais, and anyone else who can be defined as an infidel and/or crusader. This has been going on for a very long time. In the early Seventies, for example, the (Shiite) Revolutionary Guards were trained in Lebanon by the (Sunni) Fatah of Yasser Arafat.
Obsessed by this great distortion, our analysts have lost sight of the profound internal war under way within Shiite Islam, the two contending forces being the Najaf (Iraqi, traditional) and the Qom (Iranian, heretical, theocratic) versions. Tehran fears ideological enemies inspired either by democracy or by Ayatollah Sistani’s (Najaf) view of the world, which is that civil society should be governed by politicians, not mullahs.
Thus it is a mistake to assume–as it is so often—that Shiites in Iraq are automatically pro-Iranian. No matter how many times smart people such as Reuel Gerecht detail the intra-Shiite civil war, it just goes in one ear and out the other of the intelligence community and the policymakers.

Ledeen makes the critical argument here that:

We are wrongly focused on the Iranian nuclear threat, which is obviously worth worrying about, but this excessively narrow focus has distracted us from the main threat, which is terrorism.

It always helps to know who your real enemies are. In the case of radical Islamic terrorism, there is a primary state sponsor for such activities, who for too long has acted through various proxies to fight against the US and drive us out of the Middle East, by whatever means they can make that happen.

Aided and abetted, of course, by our own natural reluctance to sustain a long term war, and those political forces that constantly squeeze out partisan advantage with every negative event or operational setback.

The New York Times introduces their latest defense of the indefensible with a warning, that prior attempts to prosecute the press for disclosing national security secrets did not “turn out well.” In reminiscing about the Pentagon Papers, the editors of the Times reveal the template they’ve used all along in fighting the Bush Administration in their proxy war-against-the-war.

It’s just like Vietnam. That’s why they had to blow the whistle on this whole spying thing. “That damned Johnson,” as Jenny’s irresponsible peacenik squeeze in Forrest Gump said, in excusing his own tawdry and reprehensible behavior.

Whether the war in Iraq, or the broader Global War on Terror, the Times can’t seem to make up its mind. They’re one and the same, so let’s fight against both as a “war based on lies.” Or they’re not the same, so why is the Bush Administration getting distracted from Bin Laden and Al Qaeda with this nation building in Iraq?

“As most of our readers know, there is a large wall between the news and opinion operations of this paper.” Close readers of the last decade of Times reporting must find this claim the most outrageous at all.

Is this meant to harken back to Jamie Gorelick’s infamous “wall of separation,” or is it just high irony? Isn’t this the editorial (and all too often, news section A) version of “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” game the Times has been playing throughout the global war on terror?

When doing post mortems on 9/11 and the response of our Intelligence and terror fighting services, it’s “why didn’t they connect the dots?” “By God, they had seven scraps of intercept that allude to the big attack!” (Out of millions.) “Here, a disgruntled and underappreciated CIA analyst warned them Bin Laden wanted to attack the US, how come nobody was looking for it?”

There were few commentators as shrill with 20/20 hindsight as the editors of the Times.

Then comes evidence of a muscular and proactive assault on terror making organizations and individuals, using multiple avenues and methods, and the Times is screaming about violations of civil liberties, attacks on privacy (although usually more speculative or postulated than actually in evidence), and extreme violations of “long established” checks and balances of powers of the three branches of government.

Which has translated thus, for the Times of the past 15 years: when in Democratic hands, a strengthened Executive is preferred; when GOP, maintain that the Executive has become Imperial. This, despite evidence that both Clinton and Bush administrations argued for and in many cases, attempted to draw the lines, in exactly the same spots.

If it weren’t revelatory of a grave threat to public support for what will be a multi-Administration (and likely multi-generational) fight against radical Islamic terrorism, watching the Times Editorial Board spin in logical circles might be amusing.

So the Times remains ever vigilant to reveal those state secrets, which Bill Keller in his exalted wisdom as non-elected and self-appointed arbiter of all things trustworthy, deems worthy of public (and therefore the Jihadis Hirabah) scrutiny.

Even that would be tolerable in an Open Society, were it not for the fact that, so far, the New York Times has never met a secret that wouldn’t benefit from full public disclosure. Because, you see, this most recent story looks to the Times “like part of an alarming pattern.”

Forgive us skeptics, Mr. Keller, if we think the continued disclosures of national security secrets by James Risen and his Times fellow conspirators look “like part of an alarming pattern.” Something closer to treason than public service.

Those lingering supporters of the Rosenbergs not dissuaded by revelations tied to VENONA, depict them as well-intentioned if misguided idealists, who felt the immense power of the atomic bomb needed to be shared among super powers, rather than the sole property of one.

The Times wants to make the case that the Bush Administration operates in the throes of hysteria, notably reminiscent of the Cold War:

Ever since Sept. 11, the Bush administration has taken the necessity of heightened vigilance against terrorism and turned it into a rationale for an extraordinarily powerful executive branch, exempt from the normal checks and balances of our system of government. It has created powerful new tools of surveillance and refused, almost as a matter of principle, to use normal procedures that would acknowledge that either Congress or the courts have an oversight role.

Forget being stuck on Vietnam, the Editors at the Times are still stuck on the Cold War. Thus all the Cold War rhetoric and allusions. Can it be that the Times retains the illusion that there was no real Cold War threat or justification for rooting out domestic spies, or aggressively countering Soviet hegemony abroad?

You think I exaggerate? How else to interpret the cryptic reference that concludes the Times latest argument for self-defense, emphasis mine:

The United States will soon be marking the fifth anniversary of the war on terror. The country is in this for the long haul, and the fight has to be coupled with a commitment to individual liberties that define America's side in the battle. A half-century ago, the country endured a long period of amorphous, global vigilance against an enemy who was suspected of boring from within, and history suggests that under those conditions, it is easy to err on the side of security and secrecy. The free press has a central place in the Constitution because it can provide information the public needs to make things right again. Even if it runs the risk of being labeled unpatriotic in the process.

“Easy to err on the side of security and secrecy.” Easy? Not if the Editors at the Times have anything to say about it, and you can bet they do.

One might have made another observation about the Cold War, and the necessity to maintain both security and secrecy. Not just the easiest ting to do, but the safest and wisest, as well.

Cross-posted at Milblogs, with other commentary at The American Thinker, RantingProfs, Newsbusters, Patterico's Pontifications, Junkyard Blog. More commentary at The Q & O Blog, Sweetness and Light, Professor Bainbridge, The Glittering Eye, Jeff Jarvis, American Future.)

Gaius Arbo of Blue Crab Boulevard passed along a link to his moving tribute to a fallen hero (and, indirectly, the proud Nation he served).

Here’s how he Gaius starts his tribute:

The first thing that hits you are the flags.

SPC Benjamin James Slaven died serving his country. His mother tells us:

He was very proud to serve his Country, and so dedicated. I am very proud to be his mother, and proud of his service to our Country.

One Gold Star Mother who knows at her core what it means to be a part of that vibrant fabric that is America. Her son was a thread, she is a thread, her family and friends are threads, all woven together in love of country. How vibrant and strong the fabric, in places such as the Midwestern home of SPC Slaven.

His family honors his memory. His town honors his sacrifice. Gaius honors the Nation and community that produce such heroes.

Gaius reports that his piece will be published in the American Legion Magazine, with an honorarium donated to a Ben Slaven Memorial Fund.

Victor Davis Hanson notes a little noted but remarkable change in world attitudes towards those who for too long have condoned radical Islamic terrorism:

The Middle Easterner is also starting to realize that his once romantic jihadist has turned even approving bystanders into international pariahs. You doubt that? Try getting on an international flight with a Saudi or Egyptian and watch the passengers’ reaction; or wear a veil in Paris or Rome, and see how many smiles you receive. That radical change in attitudes toward radical Islam and its appeasers, the jihadist — and those in the Middle East who tolerated him — begot. How they finally wore down the Western therapeutic mind from Amsterdam to Copenhagen, I don’t know, but somehow they have nearly accomplished that once impossible feat.

More excellent analysis from VDH, read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Sorry that I don’t just update my earlier post, but this is easier.

Gad, now I’m angrier still, if that’s possible, thanks to Andrew C. McCarthy’s dissection of the legal issues involved (make that, not involved) in the classified program the New York Times illegally exposed.

McCarthy makes the very clear case that nothing in this program reflected any kin dof extrajudicial or remotely questionable behavior on the part of the Bush Administration. Extra steps were taken to bend over backwards to ensure legality and oversight. So what have we learned, what news, from the Times’ willful violation of national security, aiding and abetting leakers, who have committed a felony offense in releasing classified information? (Can we yank their clearances and throw them in jail, please?)

McCarthy says the only thing we learned was that, yet again, the Bush Administration was able to gather highly valuable intelligence in confronting the terrorist threat:

No, the most salient thing we learn from today’s compromise of the TFTP is that the program has been highly effective at keeping us safe. According to the government, it has helped identify and locate terrorists and their financial backers; it has been instrumental in charting terrorist networks; and it has been essential in starving these savage organizations of their lifeblood: funding.

Not so effective from here on out, I should think. Matters of public record, Bill Keller, are you flippin’ insane? I’m one of those John Q. Public types, Keller, and I’ll tell you this: It is supremely in my interest that my Government and Military be afforded every reasonable opportunity and means, allowed by law and the Constitution, to fight these brutal enemies anywhere and everywhere.

Without you destroying those means, jeopardizing operations, revealing classified information to the enemy, or placing partisan objectives above national security. Try for once to prove yourselves worthy of the liberties and freedoms you make so much noise saying you defend, rather than demonstrating so clearly to the rest of us what bloomin’ a$$hats you are.

McCarthy laments on why you folks don’t get it:

Appealing to the patriotism of these newspapers proved about as promising as appealing to the humanity of the terrorists they so insouciantly edify — the same monsters who, as we saw again only a few days ago with the torture murder of two American soldiers, continue to define depravity down.
The newspapers, of course, said no. Why? What could outweigh the need to protect a valid effort to shield Americans from additional, barbarous attacks? Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, smugly decreed that the Bush administration’s “access to this vast repository of international financial data” was, in his singularly impeccable judgment, “a matter of public interest.”
And you probably thought George Bush was the imperious one. And that the public’s principal interest was in remaining alive. Wrong again.
The blunt reality here is that there is a war against the war. It is the jihad of privacy fetishists whose self-absorption knows no bounds. Pleas rooted in the well-being of our community hold no sway.

It’s time to fight this war against the war. We need to shun, ostracize, and exact a high civil, commercial, political and moral price for this new kind of enemy. Those so driven by hatred and partisan agenda, that they’re “not just against the war, but on the other side.” (I can’t remember who used to say that, anybody remind me, and I’ll attribute.)

Austin Bay posts on a change in focus from Iraq to Iran, and references Wretchard at The Belmont Club. Bay and Wretchard both remark on recent talk of amnesty as “a new peace feeler” from the Iraqi government to Sunni holdouts. Bay quotes Wretchard’s three conclusions, with which he agrees:

The internally organized insurgency (al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni insurgency) is decline. Al-Qaeda in Iraq is hurt and perhaps dying; the Sunnis are looking to throw in the towel.

Criminal gangs and ethnic militias are the rising threat. But Casey does not appear all that worried. “And if you look at where the sectarian violence is occurring, it’s occurring within about a 30-mile — 90 percent of it is occurring in about a 30- mile radius around Baghdad”

Something happened “since the December elections and in the aftermath of the Samarra bombing” that made the security situation “more complex”. And that something appears to be the increasing role of Iran using the Lebanese Hezbollah and Qods to direct and support “a wide variety of groups across southern Iraq”.

Not linked by Bay, Wretchard in his post goes on to remark on the possibility of a shifting US strategic focus:

The recently announced Iraqi government peace proposal to the Sunnis was in all probability already known to both Rumsfeld and Casey when they gave this briefing. If I were to guess, and I emphasize guess, it means that the US is now in the process of shifting its strategic focus from al-Qaeda and Sunni threats to Iran.

Here’s Bay’s conclusion:

Maliki’s amnesty looks very similar to the program Allawi wanted to implement. The difference is Maliki has the political power of a democratically-elected national unity government behind him. The Sunnis holdouts have also suffered another two years of defeat. The old Sunni line in Iraq was “the Shia are sheep.” The Saddamists running the Sunni insurgency thought they could terrorize the Shia into submission. They also banked on “the Vietnam syndrome” to get the US to leave– set off bombs, rely on the global media to magnify the bombs, and slowly erode US national will.

I can only thank God our President and our Military leadership don’t make strategic, national security decisions based on polls, public opinion, or media reporting.

Bay accurately gauges the Sunni insurgency, what they were counting on as a central tenet of their strategy. Note how completely it’s failed on all fronts. The Shia reacted not with fear, or violence and reprisals, but steadiness, restraint, and no small amount of courage. So the current American Administration and its military have . The only effect that Sunni holdouts and their erstwhile Al Qaeda in Iraq terrorist conspirators was the last, that of global media eroding US national will, at least as can be surmised from the recent bottoming out of the President’s poll numbers, Democratic caterwauling, or polls showing US public increasingly demoralized over the course of the war, which US and Iraqi security forces are winning handily.

Also linked by Instapundit, Blue Crab Boulevard.

Please, please, please, please.

If you currently subscribe to the New York Times, cancel your subscription. Don’t buy it, discourage anyone you know from buying it. It is the primary mouthpiece of sworn enemies of the United States, and happy to be so.

If you care about the national security of the United States, cancel your subscription.

If you think Americans need to be Americans first before we start yielding our freedoms to those in the world who hate and despise us, cancel your subscription.

If you think America is just about the most free place in the world, if you value our freedoms, cancel your subscription.

If you are afraid of what the US would become if we fell under the control of the UN, Europe, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, CAIR, or others who think we are the biggest security problem in the world, cancel your subscription.

Because the Editorial Board of the New York Times thinks only the Editors at the Times can decide what are national security secrets, and what aren’t.

It isn’t about legal or illegal, separation of powers, checks and balances, it’s what a few, unelected, self-appointed Protectors of the Public Interest think the way things should be.

They don’t care about laws, they don’t care about America, they don’t believe we are a good people in a good nation, which is the beacon of liberty and freedom in the world.

They believe only their own misguided philosophy and deranged delusions, in which the US is run as a Fascist State by an Evil Religious Extremist, supported by an entire Political Party of Nazi Sympathizers and Racist Corporate Barons, and therefore should be fought against with every means at their disposal.

Al Qaeda and the terrorists are their friends, they sympathize with their hatred of America and our American President. They want to help them, and they do.

Anything that hurts our efforts in the Global War on Terror, that they will do.

If you currently subscribe to the New York Times, cancel your subscription.

Other conservative (as in sane) commentary, courtesy of Memeorandum:

AJStrata / The Strata-Sphere: Liberal Media Helps Terrorists Again

Hugh Hewitt: The New York Times' Encore: "[A] matter of public interest"

Curt / Flopping Aces: We Are The Keeper Of All Secrets

Uncle Jimbo / BLACKFIVE: WH PRESS BRIEFING- NY TIMES BACK ON THE CHOPPING BLOCK

PoliPundit.com: Here we go again! More Classified Info Leaks to the NYTimes

C.S. Scott / Security Watchtower: NY Times reveals another classified U.S. program

Clay Waters / NewsBusters.org: NYT Wrecks Another Terrorist-Surveillance Program

Jay / Expose the Left: New York Times Leaks Again

Scott Ott / ScrappleFace: New York Times Secretly Sifting CIA Data

PoliticalCP / The Politics of CP: Sources & Methods Compromised

Layla Gonzalez / Freedom Watch: NYTIMES DOESN'T KNOW WHEN TO SHUT UP - AGAIN

Michelle Malkin: BACKLASH AGAINST THE BLABBERMOUTHS

Gaius / Blue Crab Boulevard: The Media Is The Decider

Bryan / Hot Air: Whose side are they on? — The boss is vexed, and not because …

Michael Tanji / GroupIntel: Journalistic Success — That's what we can call subsequent terrorist attacks.

Greg Tinti / Outside The Beltway OTB: Bill Keller: No, I'm The Decider

Kevin / Pundit Review: MSM: research wing of Jihad

Patterico / Patterico's Pontifications:

New York Times Publishes Classified Details of Legal and (Formerly) Effective Anti-Terrorism Program

Jeff Goldstein / protein wisdom:
Just keep telling yourself: It's because they care about YOUR CIVIL LIBERTIES!

James Lileks is in rare form today, even for Lileks. Just a little into today’s Bleat, he references an utterly oafish quote from Ang Lee, “The world’s least free place for making movies is the US, because it has a fixed model.”

Lileks of course takes Lee’s premise, force marches it up Hollywood Hills, runs it down the streets of Carmel, and does a personal trainer punishment trek out to Pasadena. By the time he’s done, whatever Lee was trying to say looks pretty ragged. That’s worth reading, of course.

But what really caught my attention was his next bit of calisthenics. The meager stamina of Lee’s foolishness exhausted, Lileks makes passing reference to the political myopia and fancy that underlies those, like Lee, who can think so strangely, that these kinds of idiocies seem only too true:

What’s unique – and maybe I’m wrong; happens daily – is that the entire America experience past and present is now irredeemable. For a while the present was okay, because the right people were in charge, and there was a change we could attain Utopia with the right pieces of legislation. When that was the case, it was understandable to unload on the old benighted past, because that led up to this, and this would absolve the land.

(I never understood why 18th century America was castigated for not manifesting the values of the 20th, even though 18th century America held forth ideas that would be radical to 20th century Africa, and paved the way for those 20th century American values to exist and flourish. We’re always held up to the most peculiar standards. Our motives are base, our freedoms illusory or rationed or insufficient. It matters less that a freedom was granted in 1920; what’s truly illustrative of this rotten house is the fact that it wasn’t granted in 1871. As thought the world has always been free, kings died when the first Caesar was stabbed, Papal bulls since 500 AD have boiled down to “oh, whatev” and the entire world was a grand placid Sweden, where civilized people nibbled on crackers and tried to ignore the rude Yank on the lawn firing off his blunderbuss for no particular reason. You can site a hundred stories about French racism all you like, but it won’t matter because they applauded Josephine Baker’s nightclub routines in Paris in the 20s.)

And best of all? Lileks sums it up with this:

We enter our fourth century taking for granted freedoms that were unimagined in our first… For those who want Utopia today, yesterday is always a villain. Regardless of how it made tomorrow possible.

Completely unnecessary to remark, but go read the whole thing. This is just the frosting.

I earlier noted Peggy Noonan’s fine critique in a nutshell; I should have paired it with a companion piece for James Lileks’ latest Pig-in-a-Screedblog.

Lileks describes the acute desperation of Democrats in finding a slogan that won’t blow up in their faces. He notes how “The Dem’s manifesto goes on. My, it does go on.”

Without, of course, any attempt at seriousness, traveling over-trod ground with such perennial losers such as minimum wage, college costs, fiscal responsibility, while assiduously avoiding anything that might require a bold stand, really any stand at all.

A New Direction, indeed. Lileks:

The minimum wage was indeed a New Direction – last century, anyway. Compared to the unofficial GOP slogan – “Fight and win the War on Terror by blowing up more bad guys real good” – it’s like running against FDR in ’42 with a pledge to reduce postal rates.

I like Lilek’s slogan for the GOP: “Fight and win the War on Terror by blowing up more bad guys real good.” The Republican Candidate for President in 2008 would do well to have it put on party worker T-shirts.

Not the Democrats. They don’t want to fight today’s wars. They lost in 2004 by fighting the Vietnam war redux. They don’t object to wars per se, but they have to be small, tidy, sound-bite compatible and not at all involving anything that requires a political price of admission, as noted by their disgraceful clamoring for retreat, then voting in large numbers against the cut and run they say we need.

Lileks thinks he’s found where they’ll find their mettle:

Anything on the war? No. the Dems slam Bush for not adjusting Pell Grants for inflation, but the manifesto says nothing about Terror, the War On. We’re supposed to intuit that they’d redeploy to Camp Murtha, from which we can strike Iraq with only a fortnight’s delay. Let no one mistake their position: they have risen to the challenge of these perilous times, and come out against excess CEO compensation. No doubt this means they’ll be hard on Iran.

Those mullahs are pulling down millions.

Sooner or later the Democrats will acknowledge that we’re in a war, a global war, fought by radical Islamic terrorists, aided and abetted by sworn enemies of the US under all manner of proxy arrangements.

They won’t do it under any scenario that requires them to admit that President Bush, and the Republicans, had it largely right, and they had it largely wrong: Saddam’s links to terror, the threat he posed, the threat in general, the failure of diplomacy and other fancy forms of appeasement, the urgency for military action, and how muscular that response needed to be.

So not now. Certainly not before many regional decisions in 2006. Perhaps not before a critical national decision in 2008. But eventually, Democrats will find their voice.

It would have been better if they had found it in concert with a serious minded GOP in 2002 and 2003. Better still if they got it in the difficult days of 2004 and 2005 or even now. Think about how different public perceptions would be about the war and our progress if they had.

I’m afraid they won’t find that voice, that ability to clearly denounce the methods and aims of the whole of our enemies, not just corporate ones, until two certain events take place.

The first event? George W. Bush leaves office. Presidents come and go. Not many incur the amount of hysteria or deranged fury that this one has. That’s a great misfortune, moreso for America than for him. Because it was grand distraction to the storm, more than imminent, already raging around us.

Some BDS sufferers will wake up soon after, and resume logical thinking and discourse about matters of urgent National Security.

The second event? When terrorists achieve their greatest hope of all, and detonate a nuclear weapon as an act on terrorist Jihad.

We will all be warmongers then. And I doubt many of us will have the heart, or time, or patience to even bother with the “I Told You So.” Because in that moment, the possibly avoidable deaths of millions of people and the necessarily militarization that follows, will make political point-making far more offensive than the partisan posturing we see today.

And there will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Fellow Milblogger Eagle1 links to a thought-provoking article by Tom Bethel in The American Spectator with this introduction, which I can’t top:

Simple Simon meets a pieman and asks, "Why Isn't the Whole World Developed?" Which is, in fact, the title of this piece from The American Spectator. For those of you who think that the answer is a complicated economic package of mathematical complexity, let me reveal the much less complicated answer: Property law.

The article, taken from the May 2006 issue of The American Spectator, reports on a recent meeting facilitated by famed conservative Grover Norquist, in which Peruvian researcher Hernando de Soto spoke. Who’s de Soto,and what’s his connection to the significance of Property Law and economic development? Bethel explains:

Twenty-five years ago, he founded the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Lima, Peru. He wrote a book called The Other Path, drawing attention to the failures of economic development. Then he published a second, The Mystery of Capital, elaborating on the first.
De Soto illustrates the point that only outsiders are capable of original ideas in fields dominated by credentialed experts. He addresses a profound failure of conventional economic theory. The problem can be put this way (and once was, by the president of the Economic History Association): Why isn't the whole world developed? According to economic theory it should be. The three "factors of production," according to classical economics, are labor, capital, and natural resources ("land" in some versions). They are all readily available. If capital is in short supply, it can always be transported -- now more easily than ever. The problem is that these factors make no claims about political or legal institutions. Property in particular is overlooked. This missing ingredient accounts for the widespread failure of economic development in most countries in the world.
The legal infrastructure in developed countries is "the hidden architecture of capitalism," de Soto says. It is hard to see because it is buried in thousands of pieces of ancient legislation, legal interpretation, and working institutions. No single person would know enough to explain it fully. Western nations take these institutional arrangements for granted and don't understand how fruitful they have been.
They do not exist in most countries and never have.

Read the whole thing. Bethel goes on to explain how de Soto’s organization was invited to Mexico, and offers thoughts directly relevant to our Immigration problem (and Mexico’s emigration problem).

I found the perfect expression of contempt and anger for the brutality we’ve recently (and repeatedly) witnessed from our enemies in Iraq, and elsewhere, courtesy of an absolute moral authority.

Go read the whole thing, as only Some Soldier's Mom could write it.

Afterwards, if you’re looking for a way to honor and offer condolences for the families of the soldiers PFC Tucker, PFC Menchaca, and SPC Babineau, do as Blackfive suggests:

Soldiers' Angels are collecting cards and letters for the families of Thomas Tucker, Kristian Menchaca, and David Babineau.

You can send your condolences and notes of encouragement to:

Soldiers' Angels
1792 E. Washington Blvd
Pasadena Ca 91104

Soldiers' Angels also will provide a living tree to honor each of them.

Count on Peggy Noonan to find the nut, crack it open, hollow out the nutshell, then catch the pea of the thing safe inside.

So reads her assessment in the Journal Online today.

Cliff notes version? Republican leaders think their base is stupid, that they know better on all manner of issues such as immigration and earmark (pork barrel) reform.

The Democrats think their base is stupid, but something more, too, stark barking, raving mad.

That’s her read on party leadership, especially in light of the Senate’s rejection of Democrats’ calls for cut and run by June 2007 (86 to 13), or cut and run (date unspecified, 60-39), or just cut and run (ala Murtha, still fermenting over in the House).

Here are the Democrats, in that nutshell I mentioned:

You can see their problem in their inability to get a slogan. Which, believe me, is how they think of it: a slogan. "Together for a Better Future." "A Future With Better Togetherness." Today for a better tomorrow, tomorrow for a better today.

A party has a hard time saying what it stands for only when it doesn't know what it stands for. It has trouble getting a compelling slogan only when it has no idea what compels its base. Or when it fears what compels it.

And the Republican, shell-encased I fear:

They know the higher wisdom on such issues as immigration. They feel less fealty to the insights of the base. They know more than the base, are more experienced than the base, have a more nuanced sense of reality. And as for conservative social issues groups, the politicians resent those nagging, whining pushers-for-the-impossible who are always threatening to stay home or go elsewhere. (Where?)

Some Washington Republicans have been in leadership so long they've learned--they've learned too well!--that politics is the art of the possible. It is. But this is not an excuse to be weak, or ambivalent, or passive, or superior.

Hard to know which is more offensive. To be thought stupid, or to be thought not so stupid, but only because you’re crazy.

The other two legs of the Axis of Evil eagerly await the results of the impending nuclear-capable, intercontinental ballistic missile test.

Watch it unfold, and ask yourself. Will the same sniggering critiques that thought President Bush some wild eyed, Strangelovian cowboy, acknowledge how precisely President Bush identified the threats we face, back in 2003?

It might have been Saddam, too, eagerly watching that test, waiting to get into serious negotiations to get him some. But we took care of that threat, didn’t we?

And now the world seems only too eager  to have the US take on the other two psychopathic regimes who consider terrorism a legitimate form of international behavior as official foreign policy. And would likely consider nuclear terrorism (or at least extortion) all the more desirable and effective?

I posted yesterday about the remarkable subtext of the European Union (EU) meeting in Vienna tangentially (and only temporarily) reported by the AP.

Today we have David Warren from the Ottawa Citizen (posted at Real Clear Politics) saying North Korea is threatening “An Act of War, Not a Test,” for that is what the North Koreans provoke:

By any standard of international law, the launch will be an act of war. The Americans, or anyone else with anti-missile capabilities, would thus be entirely within their rights to shoot it down. Nor would it be provocative to do so. The provocation consists in sending up the missile in the first place. (Though alas, a mind addled by "liberalism" will refuse such a logical distinction.)

The question whether it would be prudent to shoot it down -- or even obliterate the launch facility before the launch can happen -- is another matter. It is a question without a reasonable answer, because the Western intelligence agencies upon which we depend for accurate information about North Korean capabilities are utterly incompetent, and morally confused about whose interests they serve. (Look at what the CIA has been revealing about itself, recently, for confirmation of this dire view.)

Let that sink in: a question without a reasonable answer. Warren hits the nail on the head. Precisely because Western Intelligence agencies and analysts have been cowed into questioning all manner of pre-Iraqi-war assessments, because our CIA has elevated political, bureaucratic aims over intelligence (but in a way contrary to what war opponents think), they stand motionless now. We have so often underestimated the aims and capabilities of our enemies, and misjudged those who posture as friends but want those enemies to achieve great things against us.

Our Intelligence services display this inability and perhaps unwillingness to “connect the dots” for no target more than North Korea, where decades of misbegotten diplomacy have lead us straightaway to these dire straights. Call it another peace dividend resulting from the collapse of the old Soviet Union and our strenuous efforts to make friends with the Russians. With eyes wide open we decided not to see the evidence of all those proxy wars fought against us, in few places more heatedly than through willing Pyongyang.

Two Clinton era appointees, Assistant Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter and Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, wrote an editorial today in the Washington Post. Carter and Perry argue that we should act with force:

Therefore, if North Korea persists in its launch preparations, the United States should immediately make clear its intention to strike and destroy the North Korean Taepodong missile before it can be launched.

While arguing for force, Carter and Perry nevertheless couch their argument in willfully self-exonerating and Bush-bashing arguments:

Creative diplomacy might have avoided the need to choose between these two unattractive alternatives. Indeed, in earlier years the two of us were directly involved in negotiations with North Korea, coupled with military planning, to prevent just such an outcome. We believe diplomacy might have precluded the current situation.

As I recall recent history, the US continuously tried to meet the North Koreans more than halfway, and the North Koreans repeatedly have been proven to be deceitful, taking every opportunity to advance their nuclear ambitions under cloak of thoroughly negotiations that are thoroughly cuckolded by North Korean violations of every aspect of those agreements. All while diverting food aid to military purposes and keeping their people in starvation, to boot.

Still, however much they misrepresent what brought us to this critical moment, Carter and Perry correctly identify what the US needs to do, as demanded by the situation. And the consequences if we don’t:

But diplomacy has failed, and we cannot sit by and let this deadly threat mature. A successful Taepodong launch, unopposed by the United States, its intended victim, would only embolden North Korea even further. The result would be more nuclear warheads atop more and more missiles.

Two must reads at NRO:

Hue Again (and Again), by James S. Robbins. Excerpt:

By rights these incidents should demonstrate that we are better than our enemies. We are civilized, they are barbarians. What we are fighting for is objectively superior to what they are fighting for. Our struggle is legitimate, theirs is not. There is no room for moral relativism in this war. Certainly those who view torture and beheading as acts of piety have no problem seeing it as a black and white conflict. And when faced with extremism of this sort, we should take it at face value.
Those who say that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter should be asked how they define freedom. Those who compare terrorist or guerrilla leaders to George Washington or other Founding Fathers should explain when it was exactly that they ordered the killing of innocents as a method, or even as a matter of expediency. And especially when they ever sought to invoke God’s approval for inflicting agonizing deaths on helpless captives.

Geneva and Savagery, by Andrew C. McCarthy. Excerpt:

So exactly how are Islamic terrorists faring on Geneva’s “Do unto others” scorecard?
Well, the treaty’s provisions call for protecting civilians and civilian infrastructure. Al Qaeda targets civilians for mass murder and intentionally destroys civilian infrastructure.
The provisions call for membership in a regular military force which carries its arms openly. Al Qaeda’s idea of a weapon in open view is a hijacked jumbo jet in the seconds before it crashes into a building. Otherwise, it favors roadside bombs or high explosives concealed in vans burrowed in underground garages beneath bustling civilian skyscrapers.
The provisions call for wearing uniforms in order to distinguish members as authentic soldiers. Al Qaeda’s jihadists dress and conduct themselves ostensibly as civilians — the better to hide from real armies and lull actual civilians to their deaths.
The provisions call for treating captured enemy soldiers with the dignity and respect accorded to honorable prisoners of war: accounting for them, keeping them safe, allowing the International Committee of the Red Cross access to ensure their proper treatment.
Al Qaeda tortures and slaughters them.

War critics who use any form of moral equivalency to suggest the US “asked” for Al Qaeda or its brutal and monstrous behavior, I’m sorry, are imbeciles. Morons. Or morally bankrupt themselves. Take your pick.

Moral equivalency is as oxymoronic a term as I can identify. It would be bad enough if critics who think this way actually tried to perform two way comparisons, suggesting “AQ did this because the US did this, the US did this because AQ did that.”

But they don’t even try to do so, because they are all about the US being bad and wrong, and our enemies being poor unfortunates who can’t help themselves in reacting the way they do. Rather than evil men who are lower than scum, who deserve neither sympathy nor quarter.

(Cross-posted at Milblogs)

The Associated Press today notes the “robust endorsement from European leaders for his tough approach to nuclear standoffs with Iran and North Korea.” Tough talk and intimations of touch action to follow from the US towards Iran and North Korea, and the Europeans are on board. That’s of interest.

Europeans have not shown much spine in recent years. We haven’t seen them standing up to brutal dictators, voracious kleptocrats, aspiring terror states, or internal religious militias imposing Sharia law on citizens and non-citizens alike.

Commentators like Christopher Hitchens and Mark Steyn have been warning of the signs of Europe’s imminent cultural and political demise. Yet, there are recent polls that suggest European populations are beginning to develop very negative opinions about (sometimes violent and often demanding) Muslims in their midst. There are suggestions that these same populations are beginning to rethink their infatuation with the Palestinian Authority (or at least when run by Hamas rather than Arafat’s Fatah). And there are increasing indications that the good people of Europe, if not their Governments, are beginning to view radical Islamic terrorism and its adherents as the brutally evil people the Bush Administration has consistently described them to be.

Look, the Europeans -- even the French – have been comparatively rock steady when it comes to Iran seeking to enter nuclear puberty, if they have been somewhat less the worried adult when it comes to North Korea. Still, like the Democrats here in the US, European Leaders continue to watch polls for guidance on how their foreign policy stands will play with their publics. I don’t have any empirical evidence, but merely suggest by way of hypothesis that these “robust endorsements” of our European partners seems a bit 11^th hour posturing. And I wouldn’t think there’s much evidence to suggest that they do so to curry favor with the US.

I think the potential palates of their curried attentions are much closer to home. Maybe they’re seeing something of an internal backlash against spineless policies, impotence in the face of direct threats, and even cultural blackmail and social intimidation. All well and good, whether Europe has the time to heal what ails it of all things militant Islamic, remains to be seen.

The political situation in the US, however, is symptomatic of somewhat different forces, where a predilection towards avoiding difficult decisions, and knee-jerk turns toward appeasement generate diverse political responses. What goes around, though, comes around, and it will be fascinating to watch the Democrats as we spin around to the beginning of our National Security dance, this time with Iran and North Korea.

(Funny that we are seeing a heating up of rhetoric and urgency –on both sides of the political divide – over the latter two legs of the supposedly mythic Axis of Evil. You’d think President Bush might have been prognostic of something when he coined the phrase for our most worrisome threats in his 2002 State of the Union Address to the Nation.)

As we walk down this road all over again, and the politics, foreign and domestic, runs its course, I can’t help but wonder.

Will the President’s political opponents say he lied about the threat? Will they say he exaggerated the threat? Will they say he acted unilaterally, without world consensus or support of a meaningful or real coalition?

Will they say they were misled into voting to approve tough action?

Michael Ledeen posting at The Corner compiles some news from Iraq otherwise unreported by mainstream news media.

I am sure we can expect a veritable news tornado over these shocking details:

Several women and children were present at the raid sites, officials said. None was harmed, and all were returned to their homes once the troops ensured the area was secure, they added.

All of us I'm sure can understand how major news media might hesitate to report these other details out of the report from the Multinational Force Iraq news releases:

Coalition forces in Iraq killed 15 terrorists and detained six other suspects and a senior terrorist leader during raids yesterday and today near Baqubah, military officials reported today.

Arriving to a planned raid today, coalition forces came under immediate small-arms fire from a rooftop, officials said. The ground force returned fire, killing nine armed terrorists on the rooftop, and supporting fire from coalition aircraft killed two more armed terrorists firing on coalition forces from beside the building.

Following this initial contact, officials said, coalition forces found 10 AK-47 assault rifles, a shotgun, a pistol and a crate of explosives.

One supporting aircraft was damaged when it hit utility wires during the engagement, and was forced to make a controlled landing. There were no injuries to the crew and the ground force immediately secured the site, officials said. Supporting fire from another coalition aircraft killed three armed suspects as they attempted to attack the downed aircraft.

After securing the aircraft, coalition forces moved to assault the building that several terrorists had fled to following the first contact. A coalition sniper killed one terrorist as he attempted to engage the troops from the nearby rooftop.

The force cleared the buildings, detaining three terrorists who were found hiding among nine women. None of the women was injured. One detained terrorist was wounded at the initial target building after he engaged coalition forces, officials said.

Officials said the suspected senior al Qaeda in Iraq member captured in yesterday's raid is known to be involved in facilitating foreign terrorists throughout central Iraq, and is suspected of having ties to previous attacks on coalition and Iraqi forces. Troops found an AK-47 with several magazines of ammunition and destroyed them all on site.

Sure, we all can see how <em><strong>none of that is news</strong></em>.

But when there's a completely gratuitous reference to US military deferential and protective treatment of women and children, why that's not only NOT part of "all the news that's fit to print," that's "all the news that's fit to suppress."

As only our objective, non-biased, and citizen of the world media can provide...

(Cross-posted at Milblogs.)

Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice recently visited the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) Annual Meeting and there delivered an excellent speech, If Not America, Who?

Secretary Rice is a highly intelligent, charismatic, and articulate spokesperson for America, and American principles and traditions of liberty and democracy. That she’s one of the primary architects of National Security policies and programs, and a leading defender of our efforts in Iraq and the Middle East, makes her’s an important voice in Washington.

Full disclosure: I signed on early to the “Draft Condi in ’08” campaign.

In her speech, Secretary Rice perfectly articulates the principle behind President Bush’s muscular advancement of Democracy in the Middle East:

America will lead...America will lead the cause of freedom in our world, not because we think ourselves perfect. To the contrary, we cherish democracy and champion its ideals because we know ourselves to be imperfect.

Read the whole thing.

Interestingly, the occasion of Secretary Rice’s visit to the SBC Annual Meeting coincided with what has been described as an upset election of a new SBC President, Pastor Frank Page of Taylors, South Carolina.

As reported here, President Page won election in an upset over several, power-broker preferred candidates:

In a major upset, outsider Frank Page of South Carolina was elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention over two candidates closely tied to the SBC's conservative power structure.

Page, who described his election as a victory for grassroots Baptists, was elected with 50.48 percent of the vote on a first ballot against Arkansas pastor Ronnie Floyd and Tennessee pastor Jerry Sutton, both high-profile leaders in the conservative-dominated SBC.

Sutton, pastor of Two Rivers Baptist Church in Nashville, Tenn., received 2,168 votes, or 24.08 percent. Floyd, pastor of First Baptist Church of Springdale, Ark., received 2,247 votes, or 24.95 percent. Page, pastor of First Baptist Church in Taylors, S.C., received 4,546 votes -- a mere 65 more than necessary for a first-ballot victory.

Page's election signaled a defeat for the SBC's conservative powerbrokers, who have hand-picked all but one president since 1979. Only Orlando pastor Jim Henry, elected in 1994 and 1995, lacked the endorsement of the SBC's conservative leaders.

More full disclosure: Mrs. Dadmanly and I attend a local Southern Baptist church, although we maintain that we are ostensibly non-denominational, and believe that, in Jesus, as He himself said, there is but one church. But we believe we benefit by going to church somewhere, so…

The linked article quotes Page:

After his election, Page, 53, said he would seek to create a more open Southern Baptist Convention, but added: "I'm not trying to undo a conservative movement that I have supported all these years." He said he would continue the trend of appointing leaders who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible but who also have "a sweet spirit."

"I'm an inerrantist -- I believe in the word of God -- I'm just not mad about it," Page said in a post-election news conference.

Close enough to what I’d like to see myself amongst Christian Communities – more adherence to the timeless truths of God’s word (as reflected in the Bible), and a “sweetness of spirit” in dealing with strongly held convictions on the part of people, who disagree, sometimes strongly and with great passion, but should be able to accept some shared vision for common purposes, for His Kingdom.

Interesting that Secretary Rice stops by. She’s one of those people with a sweetness of spirit that comes to mind, despite however else she can be tough as nails when representing US Foreign Policy.

Victor Davis Hanson today in NRO suggests that Betting on Defeat in Iraq is far from a safe bet, however many war opponents make the wager.

Here are the problems with those who want to recant earlier support of the more – or take less ambiguously negative positions vice earlier, less definable stances:

1. The argument, notably from Senator Kerry, that “We were misled.”

Hanson knows his history, of which Kerry either knows not, or as he’s famously practiced in the past, selectively aware not. This has always been the definable characteristic about Kerry’s position on Iraq: that he cannot be held to account for any of his votes or public statements, because he’s either a complete fool, or a complete dupe, or some combination of both. Heck, if you were junior in your state to Ted Kennedy, and owed your political career to him, my guess is, if you weren’t that stupid to begin with, you’d get that way quick. Misled, yes, I try to be. Thanks for asking.

(Hanson has more of a principled, reasoned rejoinder than I. Me, I find the repetitive trotting out of fact and history for people who know truth from fiction only too well, boring and a waste of time.)

2. Shifting positions in a war that shifts positions.

Hanson makes the excellent observation that wars and battle spaces evolve. This is beyond the grasp of partisan opportunists and politicos, who know no principle or ethic save, “what gets me and mine ahead?” One risks much who plans public appearances and media campaigns based on combat status that is old before the cameras roll. (This evokes Kerry again, who has quite the reputation for staling just long enough to take a stand that appears ridiculous and two weeks old by the time he takes it.)

3. Legitimate Criticism of the War is different than slander.

Milblogs have highly attuned senses in this regard. If you are uncertain whether a criticism is legitimate, or slanderous, ask a Milblogger. (Or consider who criticizes, it’s usually pretty obvious.)

As Hanson says,

…Much of the Left’s rhetoric was not merely anti-Bush, but in its pessimism devolved into de facto anti-Americanism.
Senator Durbin compared Guantanamo Bay to the worst excesses of the Nazis. Senator Kennedy suggested that Abu Ghraib, where thousands perished under Saddam Hussein, had simply “reopened under new management: U.S. management.” Democratic-party chairman Howard Dean confidently asserted that the Iraq war was not winnable. John Kerry in his youth alleged that Americans were like Genghis Khan in their savagery; in his golden years, he once again insists that we are “terrorizing” Iraqi civilians. With friends like these, what war critic needs enemies? Americans can take disapproval that we are not fighting “smart,” but they resent the notion that we are somehow downright evil.

You don’t have to react to this kind of hysteria with fury or wrath to see it for slander. Most of us who support the war don’t dehumanize our opponents or brand them as evil. Stupid? Misguided? Ignorant? Partisan? Crazed? Sure, those and more, but outside of a few really sick individuals, I don’t think they’re Satan’s minions or anything. At least I don’t think so…

4. The mainstream media can’t be trusted on Iraq.

There had to be one of Hanson’s points so obvious, what’s there to discuss?

5. How Iraq turns out in the end hasn’t happened yet.

Let’s get this straight: The war to remove Saddam Hussein, along with the war to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan, were stunningly successful efforts to free 50 million people from brutal thug-ocracies. It’s nation building that has been more problematic, which even the war’s critics acknowledged in their opposition to our efforts, before they began.

You don’t hear anything from critics about our stunning success in the prior, only our failures in the latter. Hmmmm.

Hanson wraps it up neatly in a paragraph:

The three-week effort to remove Saddam Hussein was a landmark success. The subsequent three-year occupation in his place has been messy, costly, and unpopular. But the result of the third and final stage that Iraq has evolved into — an existential fight between Iraqi democracy and al Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalism — is still uncertain. If we draw the terrorists out, defeat them in the heart of the ancient caliphate, and win the allegiance of enough democratic Iraqis to crush the Islamicists, then our military has won a far greater victory than the removal of Saddam Hussein.

6. What’s YOUR Plan?

Hanson notes the utter paucity of alternatives. Representative Nancy Pelosi defines the syndrome, weekly offering accusatory bromides that consist of little more than, “It’s a disaster! Give it over to us! Once we’re in charge, we’ll figure out how it NEEDS to be done. We should have a plan any day now! I mean, other than the Plan where you vote us into Congress and the Presidency!”

(As to no plan at all, opponents might consider how Military men and women would take to being in a dangerous place without a plan. Our Military and the Iraqi Security Forces have all kinds of PLAN, or you’d be hearing about it BIG TIME from GI Joes and Janes. Again, refer to Milblogs.)

Meanwhile, what’s the status of the current Plan that is continually derided by Opponents as No Plan At All? According to Hanson,

So we are nearing the denouement of the Iraq war, where we wanted to be all along: in support of a full-fledged and democratically elected government that will either win or lose its own struggle.

7. No Links! No WMD! No Ties to Terror! A Distraction from 9/11 Bad Guys!

Irrelevant or untrue, increasingly so as time passes and Iraqi and Al Qaeda documents surface, supporting Hussein’s ties to and support of terror and terror entities, his real WMD capabilities and desire for greater.

Hanson concludes:

Once a democratically elected Iraqi government emerged, and a national army was trained, the only way we could lose this war was to forfeit it at home, through the influence of an adroit, loud minority of critics that for either base or misguided reasons really does wish us to lose. They really do.

There’s little else to conclude.

James Lileks uncovers some transcripts, previously unreported, from key Al Qaeda leadership in Iraq (as they are identified).

Apparently Jihadis in the know have great fun at the expense of whoever is identified as the new “Al Qaeda’s #1 man in Iraq.” One of the recent office folders even made this complaint, and called for restraint on the part of his fellow Jihadists:

Making a whistling sound with a descending pitch in my presence was funny the first time. We all had a good laugh. It is hereby forbidden.

This made me smile especially:

Finally, patience is our ally. We need not defeat the Americans, only outlast them. Have they not abandoned every battlefield they ever entered? Besides Germany, Japan, Korea, Kosovo and Afghanistan, of course. But just as they left Somalia when their “Democrats” took power, so will they leave Iraq when the criminal Zionist Bush regime is replaced by a slightly less criminal, albeit equally Zionist, Democratic regime. The Democrats wish to quit the war and return to their important issues, such as permitting men to marry, have a child with the cloning of cells, and then abort it. Such a people cannot fight; they can only beseech the United Nations to send Danes to frown from great distances. And I need not remind you that no one was ever killed by a 226 kilogram laser-guided Dane.

Perhaps the Milbloggers can suggest an appropriate nomenclature for a “226 kilogram laser-guided Dane.”

Read the whole thing. It’s that good.

Rumors have circulated about what erstwhile Jihadi compatriots might have tipped off Jordanian Intelligence and US forces about Zarqawi’s whereabouts prior to the aristrike that killed him. Several have also suggested that Al Qaeda leadership – whoever is left in leadership roles, who direct Al Qaeda elements to do their bidding -- might have increasingly viewed Zarqawi as more liability than asset.

A BBC Report, covering comments by Iraq’s National Security Advisor, Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, may unintentionally have shed light on who might be those behind-the-scene Master of Al Qaeda.

Here’s the background of al-Rubaie’s statement as reported by the BBC, interestingly headlined, Al-Qaeda 'coming to end in Iraq':

The killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi marks the "beginning of the end" of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the country's national security adviser has said.

Mowaffaq al-Rubaie said the seizure of documents after the raid that killed Zarqawi provided key information about the militant group and its leaders.

"Now we have the upper hand," he told a news conference in Baghdad.

Zarqawi, the former al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, was killed last week by a US air strike near Baquba, north of Baghdad.

Mr Rubaie said a pocket hard drive, a laptop and documents were found in the debris after the strike.

The documents and records revealed the names and whereabouts of other al-Qaeda in Iraq leaders, he said, adding that more information has since been found in raids on other insurgent hideouts.

"We believe that this is the beginning of the end of al-Qaeda in Iraq," Mr Rubaie said.

"They did not anticipate how powerful the Iraqi security forces are and how the government is on the attack now."

Great news, likely true. But this last part caught my attention:

One of the documents showed Zarqawi planned to widen the rift between the US and Iran by carrying out attacks on US interests falsely attributed to Iran, the prime minister's office said.

Where have we seen anything like this reported previously? Intelligence and governmental sources have long acknowledged in one form or another that Al Qaeda in Iraq sought to foment sectarian violence by targeting the Sunni community, and portraying those attacks as perpetrated by Shia militia. Or targeting Shia, making it look like Sunni holdouts were involved.

But targeting US interests, and causing the US to blame Iran for these attacks? (Which we often do, for good reason, as Iran has been waging war against our interests for years, in one clandestine or proxy manner or another.)

I don’t know that analysts claim to understand the exact relationship between Al Qaeda and Iran. Iranian Intelligence and operatives have been busily at work in Iraq. Clearly, there share common interests and oibjectives, but how much do they coordinate their activities?

Could it be that Iran had been using Zarqawi, in an official capacity as the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, or in some manner of cooperation based on confluence of interests, all along? And it was Iran who reached the conclusion that Zarqawi was hurting their interests, more than helping?

If Rubaie’s statement is true, that Zarqawi planned to carry out attacks on the US and try to have these (falsely) attributed to Iran, and thus widen the rift between the US and Iran, that would have come at a time very critical to Iranian national interests. Would it be too coincidental that this occurs on the eve of what has widely been described as the US “backing down” on a more aggressive Iranian nuclear program? When Iran seems to be gaining the carrot without risk of a stick?

Maybe Zarqawi, as arguably the more doctrinaire among the Jihadi compared to Iran’s Mullah’s, viewed Iranian attempts to play their diplomatic brinksmanship as having too much traffic with the Great Satan, and wanted to keep pushing the US towards crossing that brink, against Iran’s desired objectives?

Could it be that Iran decided Zarqawi was more useful dead than alive? And decidedly easier to control that way.

Max Borders conducted a very enlightening interview with former Marine Sergeant and syndicated news reporter J.D. Johannes, with the results posted at Tech Central Station.

An excerpt:

Borders: Nobody is going to want to read the story about the soldiers who were in the dessert getting sunburned. But what other kinds of things will they want to read about and that the mainstream media is missing?

Johannes: The daily successes. The Marines would joke about this. Their MOS [military operation specialty] was in 0311 or 0352 is 0350 as in infantry police officer. You gather Intel. You set up ambush and bait-and-kill operations. You track down a bad guy when they were bringing in a bad guy every other day. Finding a weapons cache every other day in the area... But those weren't the things making the headlines.

Capturing a wanted, low-level terrorist in Amiriya is a big success in that area. Would there ever be a story on it? No. One reason is there wasn't a reporter there when the individual was captured. Even though there was a compelling story in how they gathered the Intel, tracked the person, conducted a raid on the suspect's home, captured them, etc. A big success not covered in the media. What is covered is a car bombing in Baghdad. What happens on aggregate is you get a distorted view of the war that shows only car bombings and few successes, when there are successes every day -- little successes that add up.

Borders: So it sounds to me like this phenonomenon is a mix of an urge to find "real" stories -- something that can actually get into print -- and reporters' ideological baggage. Do you believe that objectivity in journalism is even possible with those kinds of dual pressures on journalists?

Johannes: Journalists are human beings. I mean, we come into everything with our own personal views, which are formed by our experiences; how we're brought up, the way we view things. It's impossible to say that people can be blank slates.

One of the biggest flaws in the media -- and I wouldn't exactly always put it on individual reporters themselves -- the problem is in the structure of the overall media coverage. You just have a handful of reporters covering a major conflict in a large country. The pressure comes in the various complexities of covering Iraq.

Case in point: I get a call (about a month or two ago) from a TV news director who had known what I had done in Iraq. He was hoping I was still there so he could hire me to go out and do what I had done in the past because there was a reserve unit from their area being deployed. But the parent affiliate said: "nope, we don't leave the Fortified Hotel -- ever." So a lot of the employers aren't willing to bear the risk. And that is the structural program that really tilts the war.

Also, and this is probably the most disturbing part, many journalists have not figured out that they're being targeted by the enemy on purpose to help shape the coverage of the war. The insurgents don't want the reporters out and about running around. They're completely satisfied with the "balcony" report and some video shot by a stringer of the daily car bomb. That's the message that the insurgents want to get out. They don't realize that warfare is both the kinetic and non-kinetic. And, therefore, they miss how they're being played by the insurgents. I wish more reporters realized that.

Me too. Go read the whole thing.

(Via Instapundit)

John Noonan at Newsbusters follows up on an outrageous postscript to the New York Times awarding a terrorist gang family member a guest editorial (aka propaganda piece). I had covered this breaking story yesterday in an update to my piece on Guantanamo. I am glad to see Newsbusters jumping on the story.

I noted yesterday how the Benchellali Family’s attempt at gaining sympathy from the Times was successful, and that Jihadis get as good a reception at the Times as they likely receive from Al Jazeera.

This from the AP report, carried by CNN:

In handing down sentences, the court followed the prosecutor's office by giving the maximum 10-year term to the group's alleged chemicals expert, Menad Benchellali. However, Menad's father, Chellali Benchellali, an imam, or prayer leader, in the Lyon suburb of Venissieux, received only an 18-month suspended prison term -- far lower than the prosecution's demand for six years behind bars.

The court convicted 24 defendants of criminal association in relation with a terrorist enterprise, a broad charge used by France to sweep wide in bringing terror suspects to justice. One other was convicted of using false papers.

The Benchellali family was at the center of the case, with Menad's mother, Hafsa, and brother, Hafed, also on trial for roles in the plot to carry out an attack in France.

For those not already familiar with the French investigation, investigators uncovered gas canisters, fuses, chemicals, a chemical protective suit, and other chemical products such as ricin. For those as yet unfamiliar with the Benchellalis, they form the backbone of a France-based terror network, formed in Algeria and active in support of Islamic terror efforts in Chechnya.

As I stated yesterday:

It really can’t be possible that the New York Times doesn’t know that long-suffering, despairing MOURAD BENCHELLALI was a member of a reputed Jihadist family (make that gang), on the eve of the French conviction of large numbers of said “family.” A Terrorist propaganda press release, from a member of a family on the eve of their convictions for support for terrorism, and association with a busted terror plot against France.

Is their crusade against Guantanamo worth whatever shred of dignity or reputation the Gray Lady has left? Or do they really want to take sides?

(Via Milblogs)

Tom Bevan posts about The Assault on Our Troops today at the RCP Blog, and highlights two other must reads for today. His companion column at RCP, and a Guest Editorial in the Chicago Tribune by the Commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, Navy Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris, Jr.

Harris’ comments have been so widely vilified, by the New York Times and others, it’s a wonder that he withstands such unwarranted criticism with professionalism, at all. He submitted a very professional explanation of our efforts at Gunatanamo, describing how detainees are treated, and the numerous military safeguards, and international inspections that have been conducted by the International Red Cross, with favorable results.

One can credit the Chicago Tribune with giving him the space to rebut the Times dedicated campaign against Guantanamo with this essay. That’s more than many of their mainstream media (MSM) cohorts would do.

Why would the Times be resurrecting it’s overtly hostile and inflammatory campaign, just at this moment?

It couldn’t have anything to do with good news out of Iraq, a collapsing of politicized witch-hunts against Karl Rove, the “Culture of Corruption” that so far has only evidenced cash flowing into the hands (and freezer) of a Democrat. It couldn’t possibly be in response to other more aggressive efforts by President Bush and his administration to counteract incessant drumbeat of “Bush Bad” from the MSM. Or to attempt to revive the tattered “Republicans Looming Disaster in ’06,” which somehow doesn’t translate into any uptick for Democrats, either as a party or for particular candidates.

So for the Times, it’s time for another squirt of Gitmo Gas: Let’s see what THIS ignites. Just wait and see. Trouble is, if they keep up with the Jihadis in Despair tripe, they’re likely to be as successful as they (and the Democrats) have been with the “Please don’t spy on Terrorists” Campaign.

I’ve mentioned Admiral Harris and his Op Ed, and for those who haven’t read it yet, here are some excerpts of his comments (read the whole thing). Note the typical responses of these “despairing Jihadis,” which I’ve highlighted.

The Tribune's characterization of Guantanamo as a "detention camp" is precisely correct. Despite our persistent efforts to correct the record, many mainstream outlets--print, voice and electronic--persist in referring to this facility as a "prison camp." This is not mere parsing of words or semantic folderol. Prisons are about punishment and rehabilitation; Guantanamo is about neither. What we are about is the detention of unlawful enemy combatants--dangerous men associated with Al Qaeda or the Taliban captured on the battlefield waging war on America and our allies, running from that battlefield, or otherwise closely associated with Al Qaeda and the Taliban--and, as you correctly pointed out, preventing them from returning to the fight. We hold men who proudly admit membership at the leadership level in Al Qaeda and the Taliban, many with direct personal contact and knowledge of the Sept. 11, 2001, attackers. We are keeping terrorist recruiters, facilitators, explosives trainers, bombers and bombmakers, Osama bin Laden bodyguards and financiers from continuing their jihad against America.
(snip)

Today, a large number of detainees live in Camp 4, a communal-living facility where they are housed in a barracks setting with access to 12 hours of recreation and exercise per day.

(snip)

All detainees at Guantanamo are provided with three meals a day that meet cultural (halal) dietary requirements--meals which, incidentally, cost three times what meals for our servicemen and -women here cost. We fully meet special dietary needs (e.g., Type 2 diabetics, vegetarians, fish-but-not-red-meat-eaters etc.) of many of our detainees. We provide safe shelter and living areas with beds, mattresses, sheets and running-water toilets. We also provide adequate clothing, including shoes and uniforms, and the normal range of hygiene items, such as a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap and shampoo. Even so, many detainees have taken advantage of this--crafting killing weapons from toothbrushes and garrotes from food wrappers, for example.
In good faith
Detainees enjoy broad opportunities to practice their Muslim faith, including the requisite calls to prayer five times per day, prayer beads, rugs and copies of the Koran in their native languages from some 40 countries. Directional arrows pointing to Mecca have been painted in every cell and camp. The American guard force is specifically prohibited from touching detainees' Korans. Some detainees have attempted to use this restriction to their advantage by secreting messages, contraband and the like within their Korans.
(snip)

We provide outstanding medical care to every detainee, the same quality as what our service members receive. We are improving the health and extending the life span of the detainee population in our charge. Last year, we completed building a $2.4 million camp hospital to treat detainees. To date, we have completed more than 300 surgeries, including an angioplasty, and more than 5,000 dental procedures. We provide eye care and issued almost 200 pairs of glasses last year. We have given nearly 3,000 voluntary vaccinations, including diphtheria, tetanus, mumps, measles and rubella--in many cases they are the first immunizations detainees have ever received--as well as treatment for hepatitis, influenza and latent tuberculosis. We offer complete colon cancer screenings to all of our detainees who are more than 50 years old, and a variety of medical specialists provide preventive and restorative care.
(snip)

That said, many detainees persist in mixing a blood-urine-feces-semen cocktail and throwing this deadly concoction into the faces of the American men and women who guard them, feed them and care for them.
(snip)
The International Committee of the Red Cross, which enjoys full diplomatic status, has unfettered access to the detainees. Their reports are useful, meaningful and confidential. They have helped us improve conditions here. I will note that, on April 25, Reuters reported that "detainees are enjoying better treatment at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, and the Red Cross is satisfied with its access to them ... Jakob Kellenberger, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said detention conditions at Guantanamo had `improved considerably' over the past four years ... He called it `extremely regrettable' that the intense media focus on Guantanamo seemed to distract from troubled sites in places like Chechnya and Myanmar, where the ICRC has suspended prison visits over disagreements with local authorities."
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe had positive remarks to say about us based on its visit here this past March. As reported by Reuters, Alain Grignard, deputy head of Brussels' federal police anti-terrorism unit, at a press conference following an OSCE visit, said, "At the level of the detention facilities, it is a model prison, where people are better treated than in Belgian prisons." Anne-Marie Lizin, chairwoman of the Belgian Senate, told reporters at this same press conference that she saw no point in calling for the immediate closure of Guantanamo.
(snip)

Despite articles written by defense attorneys and young translators arguing the contrary, these are, in fact, dangerous men in our custody. Make no mistake about it--we are keeping enemies of our nation off the battlefield. This is an enormous challenge. These terrorists are not represented by any nation or government. They do not adhere to the rules of war. That said, we treat them humanely, in full compliance with all laws and international obligations.
The young Americans serving here in Guantanamo are upholding the highest ideals of honor and duty in a remote location, face to face with some of the most dangerous men on the planet. Your readers should be proud of them. I am proud to be their commander.

It’s too bad the New York Times is so committed to parroting Al Qaeda propaganda about Guantanamo, that they wouldn’t even deign to print something like this, let alone bother to investigate and report US Military official response to what are, routinely and categorically, false and misleading allegations about treatment at Gitmo.

I guess it would cause them far too much “despair” if they admitted that maybe, they’re the ones who need to “learn the truth” about Guantanamo, not the American people. Judging by their reaction to this “poor Jihadi” nonsense, I think they’ve learned all they need to about our enemies.

UPDATE: I actually read this piece as I was preparing this post, and my immediate thought was, well, if truly described, this man’s circumstance is the exception that proves the rule. Now, based on events unfolding in France, it may be this was no exception, just a typical Jihadi attempt to evoke sympathy from an already receptive (and fuming) New York Times.

Note how that the attempt at sympathy from the Times was successful. Jihadis get as good a reception at the Times as they likely receive from Al Jazeera.

This from the AP report, carried by CNN:

In handing down sentences, the court followed the prosecutor's office by giving the maximum 10-year term to the group's alleged chemicals expert, Menad Benchellali. However, Menad's father, Chellali Benchellali, an imam, or prayer leader, in the Lyon suburb of Venissieux, received only an 18-month suspended prison term -- far lower than the prosecution's demand for six years behind bars.

The court convicted 24 defendants of criminal association in relation with a terrorist enterprise, a broad charge used by France to sweep wide in bringing terror suspects to justice. One other was convicted of using false papers.

The Benchellali family was at the center of the case, with Menad's mother, Hafsa, and brother, Hafed, also on trial for roles in the plot to carry out an attack in France.

The network was dismantled in two waves, the first in December 2002 as investigators stormed two houses in the Paris suburb of La Courneuve and the nearby town of Romainville. They found gas canisters, fuses, chemicals and a suit to protect against chemical attacks.

During a second wave of arrests, in January 2004 in Venissieux, in southeast France, investigators found chemical products, including ricin, and definitively broke up the network.

Prosecutor Anne Kostomaroff, profiling the network, put the origins of the group in Chlef, Algeria, in 1999, where eight members had refused an Algerian government amnesty plan for Islamic insurgents in the North African country. Various members then traveled to Spain, France, Italy and the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan, while a core group formed in the Paris region in late 2000 to create a support ring for Islamic militants in the war-ravaged Russian republic of Chechnya.

However, the Benchellali family has long been established in Lyon. Imam Benchellali is known to have occasionally used his makeshift mosque on the ground floor of a high-rise building to collect funds for Islamic fighters in Chechnya.

(Another in a continuing series of profiles of National Guard soldiers who deployed to Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. For a background on these profiles, and why I write them, go read An Introduction to Dadmanly's Profiles)

Three of our soldiers served in Vietnam, and were part of our National Guard unit when we were mobilized for deployment to Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). While I’ve written about these soldiers before, I have been negligent in not including them in my Profiles series.

These three soldiers couldn’t be more different, their temperaments, personalities, ways of thinking, habits or idiosyncrasies. They have known each other for years, serving together in what was originally a Military Police (MP) Company, but otherwise, while they were friendly enough, they didn’t socialize.

You might expect that service in Vietnam formed a unifying event, a common experience, but you’d never know it. It was rarely part of casual conversations, not with them, and they rarely mentioned their time in Vietnam. Each of them processed their time in Vietnam differently. I think what they each did with that experience made them who they are today. Usually, we benefited, though not always. Though at the times we suffered for it, we probably deserved the abuse, one way or the other.

New York State didn’t have a Military Intelligence (MI) Battalion (BN) until only recently. When the BN was formed, they offered military occupational specialty (MOS) reclassification in Intelligence fields to any interested MP soldiers who could qualify, ASVAB test score wise (the tests the Army uses to determine suitability for various job skills). Our MP Sergeant, for instance, was able to retrain as an Electronic Warfare (EW) Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) Analyst, MOS 98C. That’s in fact how I first met Harry, I was his trainer at the school for his 98C Class.

When most of us think about our former MP now Intel Sergeant, we think of some confrontation or another, often many of us who afterward fondly remember such encounters. “What part of stupid don’t you understand,” or his ability to remain stone faced and grim, except on those rarest of circumstances when he was among his few close friends. I am lucky to be among them. For the rest, “they can go to h***. They’re dirtbags anyway.”

“That’s COL Dirtbag.”

“Like I said. What are they gonna do, send me to Iraq?”

Harry and I have worked together now for years. About as long as the MI BN lasted, which is nine years. When he was my student, Harry had just recovered from a stroke. He’d had to relearn how to speak and walk, the whole nine yards. He seemed awfully calm to me, even when I knew him to be angry. He once told me something along the lines of, “What, I’m going to let some dirtbag kill me by getting me angry? He wouldn’t be worth it.”

He didn’t have much trouble learning the MOS, which is not at all easy, except for the simple act of sitting still for a couple of hours at a time. Taking his final exam for the MOS, I remember him taking a smoke break, and debating whether he wanted to spend even another 15 minutes working the last problem on the test.

(That’s another thing Harry can do, he can smoke a cigarette before or after running two miles without effort; heck, I think he can smoke while running the two miles.)

I almost had to convince him to finish it up, which he did, and passed. I think he was a big inspiration to the other MPs who were reclassifying, all but one made it too, and that one who didn’t quit out of the Guard, entirely.

He used to make his civilian living as a furniture finisher and restorer. I have a dear friend in Georgia, Bunk, a deadpan, lanky country boy who used to make the funniest joke whenever asked for the first time what he did for a living. “I’m a stripper,” he would say, with the rural Georgia vocal habit of accenting the second syllable by lifting it up. (It also retains the lilt of one of George Clooney’s on-screen daughters in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, when she says, “he’s a suitor.”) In answer to the shocked stares from the uninitiated, he’d follow-up with, “I strip furniture.”

If I ever mentioned that joke to Harry – and I don’t think I would have dared – I’d get one of his patented, stone faced glares that would say better than words, “what’s your problem?” Now that I think of it, that’s what Harry said most often, after the line about being sent to Iraq.

After he got his 98C and was promoted to Master Sergeant (MSG), Harry had an opportunity to go on fulltime orders as an NT Administrator at an MI secure compartmentalized intelligence facility (SCIF). He ended up running Intel missions for his customer, eventually running such missions, coordinating resources and work assignments for half a dozen guard units all over the country, ours included.

We would see him once on month, when we were doing our missions at the site. Harry always seemed genuinely glad to see us. I don’t think he had much social contact in the month between our visits. He lived in a Bachelor Officer Quarters (BOQ) within a nearly empty reserve enclave, in which he had an entire barracks type building to himself. We’d visit, there he’d be in a small concrete room, very sparely furnished.

He never really told us how that was for him, but I think of him sitting there, quietly staring at those concrete walls. I think it was his way of keeping things simple.

In Iraq, Harry actually continued oversight of his missions in addition to his S-3 duties. Our officers pretty much left him alone. I think they were afraid of getting him angry. It wasn’t as if he yelled, or even raised his voice. Call it the respect due his rank and service, or his prior combat vet status from Vietnam. Or maybe it was his ability to make anybody feel pretty stupid in a few short sentences. Or his glares. Whatever, everyone from the Battalion Commander (BC), the Command Sergeant Major (CSM), and certainly the rest of the staff gave him a wide berth, and let him do things his way.

Harry was the first person telling us we’d be going to Iraq. He told us a year out, before anybody was saying so, certainly way before anything was decided, that we’d be activated. It wasn’t that Harry knew something that was knowable, just not announced. He just knew. He would say, “what choice do they have, the Army’s tapped out,” but those were just words, that’s not really why he thought we were going.

I think he figured, he survived Vietnam, a crazed first marriage to some wild Turkish woman, his stroke, of course he’s get sent to Iraq, as a National Guardsman.

Of course, now he says the same thing about Iran. I’m not sure what to make of that.

Harry ended up taking a position in Washington upon our return, and now runs the Agency section to which he had been reporting. While still in the Guard. He’s that valuable to them, they made it happen, by whatever way those things are done. (Maybe nobody wanted to tell him it wasn’t possible, so they said “yes.”)

---

Some soldiers were able to fill non-Intelligence billets. We had both small mess and communications sections, which allowed our other two Vietnam Vets to take positions in the MI BN.

Our Senior Cook, also Harry, always had a story to tell. He’d recount some humorous escapade of his, an alcohol-enhanced story, or some aspect of unit social life. He was our Club representative. He organized all the promotion and retirement parties at the Armory. (For those not familiar, many of the Armories in our state have “Clubs.” That means very cheap alcohol, food and facilities for parties, and some associated behavior problems, occasionally, but designated drivers, no drinking and driving, etc. But I digress.)

Harry always had a story to tell, always had some peeve to talk over. I didn’t used to know that, until we spent all that good quality time in Iraq. Harry was supposed to be Senior Cook for the Dining Facility (DFAC) when we took over at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Danger, but he found a special way to recreate his “Hospitality” related special duty assignment in Iraq: he offered to run the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation (MWR) Operation for the Division. Until they started asking him to generate management and customer service type reports on a computer, when he abruptly quit that job to return to the DFAC.

“That was a perfect job for you! Like running the club back home, taking care of soldiers. Why’d you give it up?”

And off he went, with a seemingly endless list of ways that the MWR “just wasn’t taking care of soldiers.” I know he didn’t mean “they don’t serve alcohol,” because they don’t anywhere in US Military facilities in Iraq, not officially. (And darned little unofficially, if the absence of any incidents at FOB Danger were any indication.)

KBR contractors do all the cooking and cleaning and mess operations under Army Cook supervision for most DFACs in Iraq. That meant our cooks had little to do except watch the KBR contractors (and subcontractors) do what had always been their jobs. And Harry was never shy about telling you how much money and resources that wasted. “Portion control? Forget about it!” (For more details on DFAC operations, cooks and contractors, see my earlier profile Cooks & Contractors.)

One of the things we all remember from our Mobilization was when our Retention NCO did some research and managed to get Harry the correct combat patch for his unit in Vietnam. He hadn’t expected it at all. Harry had served in a Service and Support Company for a parent unit, MACV, nobody remembers what it stood for. Okie found what the parent unit insignia looked like, sent it off for a combat patch (opposite orientation) to be created.

Harry liked having that patch.

Harry kept a running battle up with the CSM about his hair. You’d think a man of his age, with the years of service he had in, would have made peace with military standards for haircuts, but you’d be wrong. It was his thing. The CSM’s thing was to make sure Harry got his hair cut short enough that there was NO WAY anyone could call him on it. This set up several classic confrontations, beginning at the Mobilization site and continuing through our entire tour.

Harry wasn’t going to give up without a fight. He once took scissors to his own hair. (That’ll show ‘em.) I remember him turning down a 4 day pass to Qatar because we had just asked him (again) to cut his hair. We used to joke that, if we got him really mad, he’d show us and turn down his 15 days of R&R back home, just for spite.

When we got home, Harry retired. I think the CSM would have preferred he’d done that before we went, but I knew that was the reason Harry turned down several opportunities to take a medical refrad and avoid deployment. He wouldn’t give the CSM the satisfaction.

Now? Harry is well on his way to looking like the inner Hippie. He says, if it gets just a little bit longer, he’s going to put it in a ponytail.

---

The third of our Vietnam Vets is a Commander. No, not the Company Commander as I profiled here, but the Commander of one of the local Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) Posts, who doubles as our Communications Master Sergeant.

MSG C didn’t make our deployment, not that he didn’t try. He had about three serious medical conditions, each of which I think should have prevented his deployment, but he resisted every step of the way. When our BC had us doing 6 mile road marches, with IBA and packs, MSG C was out there too. We were afraid the BC nearly killed him one day, and he ended up treated for a hernia to his navel. Apparently, as the BC was whipping a few lag behinds to “run and catch up,” MSG C had some kind of event where he nearly blew his belly button out the front of his gut. (At least that’s the way he describes it, anyway.)

I just about had to beg him to consider letting the medical screeners mark him as non-deployable. As it turned out, we might have saved his life, if only because he was able to get good medical attention he might not have otherwise received while we were on our way to Kuwait and on to Iraq.

Throughout our Mobilization, MSG C would come up to the Mob site on a moment’s notice. He knew our commo equipment completely, and the only other commo guy we had was a “Generation Z” film producer of Extreme Sports and Girls Gone Wild type videos. Pulled out of the Inactive Guard Reserve (the Guard equivalent of the IRR) at that. Who couldn’t even inventory the commo completely, let alone track or maintain it. He ended up in a Public Affairs Office (PAO) gig, despite the best efforts of our CSM to keep him under his thumb.

While we were gone, MSG C was our acting First Sergeant back home. He took care of things, he even stayed in contact about Commo equipment.

MSG C probably doesn’t know this, but he kept me from going crazy when it wasn’t anything near a sure thing that I could make it on this deployment. They say the First Sergeant can’t really have any friends in the ranks,  that the job can be lonely and thankless, and that’s for sure.

But I shared a room with MSG C for the first few months at the Mobilization site, when we were all trying to figure out how to whip these weekend warriors into a combat ready unit. There was a lot of uncertainty about how we’d do, even if we’d end up certified to go.

A lot of our Guard soldiers resisted the heavy training, the physical demands, the pace, the total lockdown of the first 6 weeks. Our BC and the CSM took a very demanding tack, went from crawl to sprint in a lot of ways (no crawl-walk-run for them), and there were lots of Inspector General (IG) complaints. Morale was very low, people were scared, nobody knew how bad it would really be, and there were all the usual personal issues. Separations. Financial problems. A few alcohol related incidents. Some fraternization.

MSG C never wavered from complete support for me. He kept encouraging me to “bust balls,” take hard stands, never flinch, let the soldiers know who’s boss. I didn’t always do as he advised, but if I ended up an effective leader at all, it’s in large measure because he was there, teaching, building me up, there to let me blow off steam in the evenings.

He made sure I got time to myself, he looked after my back, he kept me posted on the goings on not otherwise visible or evident.

When we came home, MSG C in his capacity as Post Commander had his Post underwrite $100 worth of the lifetime membership in the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW). He hosted a welcome party for the unit and families at the VFW.

MSG C served, and served admirably. Both in Vietnam, and in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). In the ways that mattered most.

Other Profiles in the Series:

The CO

The Motor Sergeant

The CSM

The NCOIC

The LT

Cooks & Contractors

Supply Sergeants

The Analysts

The Chaplain’s Assistant

The First Sergeant

If you live in the DC Area, are concerned about the threat posed by Iran, you might find the following event very worthwhile.

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) is holding a briefing, Must See Iran TV II on Capitol Hill. You’ll need special passes to attend, but the extra effort will be worth it.

Press Release below, also a link online:

Also noted at A Soldier's Perspective

The Editors of the New York Times began a supremely dishonest and partisan editorial on the suicides at Guantanamo with this lead paragraph:

The news that three inmates at Guantánamo Bay hanged themselves should not have surprised anyone who has paid the slightest attention to the twisted history of the camp that President Bush built for selected prisoners from Afghanistan and antiterrorist operations. It was the inevitable result of creating a netherworld of despair beyond the laws of civilized nations, where men were to be held without any hope of decent treatment, impartial justice or, in so many cases, even eventual release.

In this rarest of cases, I’ll echo Michelle Malkin: Boo Freakin Hoo. Do the Editors of the Times really believe those three “poor unfortunate” dedicated Al Qaeda Terrorists were so despondent over their status as enemy non-combatants, their legal limbo, their continued confinement at the hand so such brutal American military captors, that they fervently desired death over confinement?

Do these fools have a clue?

I have no doubt that dedicated Jihadis are incensed, beside their Paradise-seeking selves that they are not being allowed to kill infidels (us, you, the editors of the NYT, anybody not sufficiently 7^th century Muslim), or at least, die trying.

I have no doubt it is just as the Times-slandered Commander at Guantanamo says:

"I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us," he said. The inmates, he said, "have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own."

They aren’t being allowed to kill infidels, so the next best thing they can do: commit suicide in captivity (special fatwa absolving them from Hell, since suicide was an act of Jihadi resistance), and allow the useful idiots and other sympathizers in the media carry out the press release.

That, and at least one of these guys was on his way to a Middle Eastern country where they don’t have a military that is so obsequious, that don’t bend over backward to make sure you are fed three square a day, clothed, allowed personal items, prayer objects, prayer time, etc. Not at all. Where they would have been likely subjected to torture or immediate execution.

Do the Editors at the Times have any idea how well these prisoners are treated compared to, let’s say, 95% of the world, including most of the countries in Europe?

But there is one thing you can say about the Editors of the New York Times.

They’re not afraid to tell you what side of the political divide they are on. Nor are the reluctant to identify to whom they pledge their allegiance, their sympathy, their concern and the support of their significant media resources.

Of course, NYT reporting on our detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay from the start has been anything but honest, complete. This is one-sided attack journalism in league with their political friends and fellow-partisans.

In times of war, it used to be that Americans believed that, for better or worse, you supported your government. You might criticize, you might advocate change, you might call for new leaders. But you wouldn’t promote and advance enemy propaganda while at the same time discrediting and dismissing official US Government positions and press releases.

In times of war, only the most wild-eyed progressives view pacifism as a no-surrender moral stance, applicable in all cases, no matter how evil or abhorrent the enemy.

In times of war, Americans would brook no slander against the men and women serving in the Armed Forces, as they are our brothers and sisters most in harm’s way.

Either the Editors of the New York Times think these former practices primitive or antiquated, or they don’t agree that we’re at war. One has to wonder: would their view be different if their offices had been in the World Trade Center?

In times of war with countries that retained at least of shred of humanity or respect for the Laws of War (even Nazis one might add), when you found un-uniformed combatants engaged in sabotage, terrorist attacks against non-combatants, people who hid their military affiliation, the Laws of War were pretty clear. Such could be summarily executed by military commanders, and often were.

That’s the whole conundrum of respect for humanity and civilized behavior even in war, that led to the US to create Guantanamo in the first place. These are terrorists who reject all aspects and common practices in “civilized warfare,” as codified in the Geneva Convention and acknowledged Laws of War. They deserve no part of the rights and privileges of prisoners of war because they reject those conventions and laws outright. They act contrary to the letter and spirit of such attempts at maintaining a shred of humanity, with intent. That is in fact their mode of operation.

No, Guantanamo and the designation of non-enemy combatants for these non-state, independent allies in terror war against anything Western, American, Zionist (read Infidel) is not a perfect solution. And if the Times would drop the attack stance against anything Bush related, maybe they could be part of suggesting something better.

Returning to a law enforcement paradigm, releasing those fighters who could not be “proven” to be terrorists only to have them kill innocents again, is not something better. But that’s all the Editors of the Times have got. And America needs to stop buying.

(Via Opinion Journal’s Best of the Web.)

(Cross-posted at Milblogs)

I’m with NRO’s Stephen Spruiell on this one.

He links to a political piece by Slate’s John Dickerson, in which Dickerson not only indulges a left wing myth, he promotes it: that the media, if anything, tilts right. Conservative want to eliminate the press. Liberals don’t want it gone, just balanced (leftward, away from it’s “rightward tilt.”) Read it yourself if you want, but that’s what it says. No nuance, pretty straight out.

Spruiell is rightly incredulous that Dickerson can make that claim:

Different conservatives advance different goals when they criticize the press. Some would like the major news organizations that dominate the media landscape to reflect their values, or at least to refrain from treating them with contempt. Others stick to the objectivity argument — they just want the media to treat all sides fairly, and they don't think conservative arguments are given equal time. Still others argue that journalists should just disclose their biases and write with a point of view, instead of presenting one version of a story — usually the liberal version — and calling it "objective."

No reasonable conservative wishes the press didn't exist. Like our liberal counterparts, we want the press to "get it right," so that people are well-informed and democracy prospers. The accusation that all conservatives who criticize the media actually want to eliminate the free press in this country is not just offensive, it is preposterous — the territory of the loony left. Does Dickerson really wish to inhabit such terrain?

Make that, no widely recognized, published, or employed in media on even a part-time basis wishes the press didn’t exist. They just want a chance to have their voices heard with something close to equal time, without that overwhelming bias squashing out any possible objectivity.

Waah, waah, waah. Our ideas don’t win people over from their stupid prejudices that don’t allow them to see what geniuses we all are, how good everything would be if we were in charge and could tell everybody how to think and what to do.

Dickerson makes this entirely truthful claim, “When the press gets it wrong, left-wing bloggers believe, the people are ill-informed and democracy suffers.”

That’s what I’m talkin’ ‘bout. Conservative bloggers and Milbloggers  think the same thing, and Democracy has suffered, immensely.

Too bad Dickerson doesn’t know who the rest of us are, you know, the bloggers who actually are conservative, rather than left wing and Democrat.

No doubt Armed Liberal at Winds of Change introduces some of his readers for the first time, to the term Chutzpah, “Chutzpah is the quality of audacity, for good or for bad. The word derives from the Yiddish khutspeh...”

Sometimes Yiddish captures that essence of a thought, event or object as well as any language can. With onomatopoeia to boot. “Chutzpah” always makes me think of someone hacking up a great big honking gob of… well, you catch my drift, which in turn seems a helpful metaphor for that AL was talking about. Ahem. \digression.

AL follows his Yiddish lesson with a discussion about RFK, Jr.’s now widely discredited assertions about the “stolen” 2004 Presidential elections. Tinfoil redux, one might suggest, but not AL. He thinks the election process -- its vulnerability to error, possible fraud, and even the mere fact of the public’s diminishing faith in its soundness – poses a serious issue for our Nation and its institutions.

I’m halfway there, but not entirely.

I give him a lot of credit. I got through Kennedy’s Rolling Stone piece (might I describe it as “fraudulent?”), but it was exhausting, and as AL likewise supposes, not a good use of our time. That he waded back through a flying re-buttress of a piece in Salon by Steven F. Freeman, even linked through to non-representative quotes from other sources, I find almost superhuman. How do you do it, AL.

I would find the issue of election process and its soundness more pressing, if those most vocal in denunciation of results showed any evidence in pressing for a fair and balanced set of solutions. (Not those designed specifically to favor one party or outcome.)

To the extent that the election process needs improvement, it will need to be a cooperative effort from well-intentioned people from all political perspectives. If one (minority but large) side continues to accuse the other of fraud and bad faith, the god faith essential to reform is destroyed.

No political party has a lock on ethics or morality, but both parties often use ethics and morals (or lack thereof) as blunt objects to beat their opponents about the head.

Election process is one such blunt object.

Since 2000, I observe that those most vocal in alleging election fraud are very selective in which results they want "done over," and which population segments they think are "under-represented" in results. Always.

Al Gore didn't want a state-wide recount of over and under votes. He wanted a recount of one type of vote in 4 Democratic stronghold counties to gain only one objective: more votes for Gore, not a more "accurate" result.

And so it goes. It must be a tactic being discussed in those "smoke-filled rooms."

I hate telephone surveys and hang up on them. Polls, at their best, rely on the feelings, opinions, and motivations of those polled towards who or what they perceive as either the polls subject, or its sponsors. People don’t always tell the truth. If they have reason to doubt you or your motives, they are even less likely to do so. That, and a fair number of people even make mistakes, get confused, aren’t sure what’s been asked, or for whatever reason, don’t want the questioner to know what they really think (or did).

Some husbands and wives wisely choose not to discuss politics when they differ, and I’ll bet no pollster is going to get them to start a fight that will last well beyond that night or the next morning.

If you asked those poor unfortunates (yes, perhaps more Gore supporters than otherwise) who couldn’t figure out the infamous Democratic-election-supervisor-designed butterfly ballot, they’d have told exit pollers they had voted for Gore, when in fact they voted for Buchanan. (Then again, maybe they voted for him on purpose, just for spite. He generates that in some people.)

This is no different than media reports about "perceptions" about fact. Facts are facts, polling about perception of fact only tells you how naive, ill-informed, biased, or ignorant are those polled. Provided, of course, you know what the facts are. Which until election results, tallied in as fair a manner as can reasonably be accomplished, are not known.

Polling in place of facts can be a very poor substitute. 1-6% deviation? I'm surprised it’s not higher.

Maybe the data on the deviation has been manipulated...

Greyhawk, posting at Milblogs, tipped us off to the Guest Op Ed at the Chicago Tribune, written by a Gregory Foster, former commander of the unit responsible for the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War.

You know the Op Ed is out for blood with the title, “The specter of command cowardice.” You can also likely anticipate the general tenor of the piece just knowing who wrote it, one of the commanders most immediately responsible for the local command indiscipline that allowed My Lai to occur.

Fortunately, one of our own Milbloggers, Cdr Salamander has had prior experience with the windy and over-intellectualized Foster. He linked to a Powerpoint presentation by Foster that includes a slide titled, Path to Perpetual Peace. I’d say anyone who even envisions such a concept, short of the Rapture, can safely be discounted as a non-credible military analyst. (Chicago Tribune, are you open to a rebuttal from a credible military analyst?)

Of course, someone so closely associated with the reality of command failure at My Lai, versus the legendary and completely inaccurate and mythic media and liberal orthodoxy of the event, would want to deflect criticism to superiors or to a pervasive command climate.

Foster describes a military that, if it ever really existed at all outside the minds of self-serving command failures, disappeared forever with drastic changes in doctrine and training beginning in the 1980’s.

I spent 4 ½ years active in the 80’s, Reserve and Guard time for the past 20 years, and an 18 month activation and deployment to Iraq. The Army and command environment Foster describes was more media hype than reality. And our Army has been bending over backwards to counter these largely false perceptions since the dark days of Vietnam.

Foster clearly recognizes the requirements of today’s soldier, often both war fighter and peace keeper within the same operational time slice. Here’s how Foster describes a standard of behavior some, including Foster, may think is impossible:

This is now--when knowing what to do, even under routine conditions, isn't always obvious; when formally prescribed rules of engagement leave ample room for confusion and interpretation; when it is frequently unclear who is friend or foe, combatant or non-combatant. Yet mistaking the one for the other, under the microscope of media-age transparency, all too often produces instantaneous, strategically deleterious consequences. Precisely for this reason, military troops today must be more disciplined, mature, emotionally stable, morally sound and intellectually astute than ever before.

And overwhelmingly, they are. They’ve been incented, recruited, trained, and empowered to be all these things, and more.

Foster doesn’t recognize these characteristics in today’s Military. I seriously doubt he knows today’s military, rather deriving his views from Hollywood stereotypes, or ancient Media concoctions from the “bad old days of Vietnam.”

Unfortunately, these are traits the military fails to nurture or reward adequately. Instead, an unsettlingly pervasive drumbeat of Pattonesque, chest-thumping, rabble-rousing rhetoric about the virtues of "warfighting," "warfighters" and "warriors" fosters a climate far more conducive to intolerant aggression than to the stoic self-discipline that urban warfare in hostile foreign lands demands. This testosterone-laced climate provides tacit, subliminal license for troops to choose the undisciplined moral low road in the face of stress, fear and fatigue.

I myself have to admit that certain “war fighter” terminology doesn’t resonate with me as well as Military planners might hope. But rhetorical flare in labeling in no way leads inexorably to psychological mindset, which seems to be Foster’s point. That trivializes the concept of the modern war fighter, makes the modern battlefield the equivalent of a child’s playground, and insults the very fine men and women who serve in today’s volunteer Military.

This is the finest Military the nation has ever produced. Technologically superior, all volunteer, focused by 9/11, motivated and ennobled by Democracy building in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Foster challenges us to evaluate our standards for moral courage. In this I agree with him. I too think that considering half a dozen retired Generals coming forward, late in the game, in a highly politicized manner, to try to influence decisions of the Commander in Chief, in exchange for political influence, opportunity, or financial gain, to be a “sadly diminished standard of moral courage.”

Foster also holds that, in holding those soldiers and leaders most directly responsible for crimes such as My Lai and Abu Ghraib, the military practices “scapegoating.” One might surely expect the lowest level commander above LT Calley to think just that.

Of course, not all soldiers who served in Vietnam share the assessment of veterans such as Foster, Murtha, or for that matter a certain junior senator from Massachusetts, who continues to want to remind us of his glory days in Vietnam.

Their impressions of the US Military are not based on actual, real life, current first hand experiences with today’s Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen or Marines. The Vietnam vets I know, who served with us as we deployed to Iraq, do not share those views.

Foster, Murtha, Kerry et al are hopelessly stuck in some imagined place, days of shame and darkness, a world that was always more about slander, than fact. It is time for those old soldiers, not to die, but to go quietly away.

(A Dadmanly Profile of the Vietnam Vets that mobilized with us for deployment to Iraq is due out later today or tomorrow. I wanted to respond to this editorial as soon as possible.)

If you haven’t heard about Project Valour-IT, please consider donating to this very worthy cause.

As John of Castle Argghhh! describes it over at Milblogs:

Consider your young soldier of today. Wired. Connected. So used to using keyboards they can thumb-type faster than I can type in a regular way - and I'm pretty good, actually.

Then take away a hand, or the use of it. Or both. Or her eyes.

Captain Chuck Ziegenfuss was a deployed milblogger who nearly lost his hand in an IED attack. Project Valour-IT, brainchild of Chuck and Fuzzybear Lioness, let Chuck blog again.

Chuck's much better now, and can use a regular computer - but his voice-activated laptop helped him along the path to recovery.

My budget officer, Mrs. Dadmanly, is about to be informed of an accounts payable to these folks.

Go Here for more info:  http://www.soldiersangels.org/valour/

The Dayton Daily News over the weekend published a lugubrious hit piece about the US Military’s up-armored HUMVEE. (I reach for the million dollar word if only because you will rarely find a better example in print of what the word means.)

They center the product of their “six-month Dayton Daily News examination” on grieving military families that lost loved ones in HUMVEE roll-overs. More on the overall tone of the DDN piece later.

CNN clamors atop the HUMVEE story, publishing an Associated Press wire story, evidently based on the DDN report, and involving the same sources:

DAYTON, Ohio (AP) -- Thousands of pounds of armor added to military Humvees, intended to protect U.S. troops, have made the vehicles more likely to roll over, killing and injuring soldiers in Iraq, a newspaper reported.

"I believe the up-armoring has caused more deaths than it has saved," said Scott Badenoch, a former Delphi Corp. vehicle dynamics expert told the Dayton Daily News for Sunday editions.

Whatever kind of “vehicle dynamics expert” Badenoch might be, he’s no statistician – but then neither are the reporters at the DDN, AP, or CNN, who never attempt to offer any supporting data (about vehicle accident rates, or death or injury rates in Iraq). You know, to provide appropriate context.

Here’s the data that DDN hyped into a multi-page story:

An analysis of the Army's ground accident database, which includes records from March 2003 through November 2005, found that 60 of the 85 soldiers who died in Humvee accidents in Iraq -- or 70 percent -- were killed when the vehicle rolled, the newspaper reported. Of the 337 injuries, 149 occurred in rollovers.

"The whole thing is a formula for disaster," said Badenoch, who is working with the military to design a lighter-armored vehicle to replace the Humvee.

CNN omits what is the very next paragraph in the DDN piece. Give the Dayton Daily News credit for finding some “other side of the story” sources:

Ron Hoffman, senior research physicist at the Aerospace and Mechanics Division of the University of Dayton's Research Institute, believes the armor provides a necessary shield against roadside bombs, hand-propelled rockets, machine-gun fire and improvised explosive devices.

"These IEDs they're facing in Iraq are potent," he said. "If I was over there ... I would opt for the armor."

Still, Hoffman agreed that there have been consequences.

"You are shifting the center of gravity in the vehicle," he said. "With the threat they're facing over in Iraq, I can see the dilemma: We put more armor on to protect our soldiers and destabilize the vehicle."

The CNN is miniscule compared to the DDN piece, yet manages to include a response from an Army spokesperson, which was more than DDN was able to score:

Army spokesman John Boyce Jr. told The Associated Press on Sunday that the military takes the issue seriously and continues to provide soldiers with added training on the armored Humvee.

The Army also made safety upgrades to the vehicle, including improved seat restraint belts and a fire suppression system for the crew, he said.

There are more than 25,300 armored Humvees in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said.

The DDN reports, “Of the 177 Army Humvee accidents worldwide in all of 2003, 110 occurred in Iraq, including 24 of the 29 fatalities.”

I went to Iraq with a non-combat unit, which conducted only 150 or so convoys with up armored HUMVEES during our 10 month deployment out of the 1000 or more such convoys that had to take place daily in Iraq. How many more combat patrols took place, one can only guess, but if the Dayton Daily News really wanted to check out cumulative mileage posted by the 25,000 HUMVEES in Iraq, that figure would be in the millions of miles. I ask them: how many times has an up-armored HUMVEE been hit by an IED? How many soldiers were spared injury or death due to the armor?

We had about 200 soldiers, 20 or so on the road frequently, 10 attached to a scout unit that executed real combat missions. Our guys were hit three times in 10 months, a pretty low figure, sure, but here’s my point. Two of the three IEDs detonated in such a way that two truck crews could have been injured by shrapnel or hit by small arms fire or RPG. They weren’t, one vehicle sustained light damage.

We saw scores of HUMVEES subjected to IEDs, our mechanics were often called upon the fix vehicles for MPs or other soldiers whose trips outside the wire made them much more vulnerable to attack. We saw HUMVEE windows that withstood a direct hit from an RPG. Demolished M1114s were everybody was able to walk away.

We had opportunity, after the fact, to see the ones in which all occupants died. Those were usually IEDs with multiple 155 MM shells and fire accelerants like gasoline added for lethal effect. No protection is perfect, but not a one of us would have wanted to give up our M1114s.

Back to the Dayton Times piece, and the overall tone of it, and why it got me so fired up reading it. Here’s an example, multiply by 10 and you get the point:

"My fear for him was the roadside bombs and enemy fire," said Nancy Fontana, whose son, Spc. Anthony Cometa of Henderson, Nev., was killed after he was ejected from the gun turret as his up-armored Humvee rolled over. "I never thought this would happen, just some kind of accident."

Cometa, who joined the Nevada National Guard to earn money for college and volunteered to be a gunner while in training, died on June 15, 2005, one day after his 21st birthday.

"There needs to be some kind of prevention to protect the boys riding around in these Humvees," Fontana said.

In no way do I mean to minimize the suffering or insult the grief of these families who have lost loved ones. But to the press, who so helpfully gives them a soapbox from which to air their grief and anger, as long as it’s inwardly directed against the military, rather than the brutal enemy that makes risk inevitable.

Too bad the reporters of this propaganda piece couldn’t be bothered to squeeze any investigation into vehicle roll-over and accident rates more generally, or how accidents due to roll-overs could be compared to reasonable estimates of lives saved by the armor.

To get a sense of what kind of context one might more accurately assess the rollover and accident data, one need look no further than the comments of this piece online.

How are these for facts in context:

The additional armor of the HUMVEE has almost certainly saved great multitudes of soldiers injury or death, compared to accident injuries and fatalities. (Ask any soldier who relied on the armor in combat. I wouldn’t have wanted to go outside the wire without it.

All of our National Guard soldiers were not only advised of the roll-over threat, but we were required to pass a special driving test on the uparmored M1114 HUMVEEs. Our motor pool, those most heavily called upon to drive, command, or gun in these vehicles, made sure every driver of these vehicles were licensed and trained to avoid roll-over or minimize injury. Each of our convoys was preceded by a convoy briefing that included roll-over instructions and drill.

Accident rates for the HUMVEE in Iraq are substantially less than rates for civilian vehicle roll-overs in the US.

But if what you want to do is establish a narrative that can now damn the US military – the issue of lack of armor now being pretty much shot to pieces – than a hit piece on how all this armor is actually killing soldiers is made to order.

This report reminds me of the stupidity surrounding air bags – in which hysterical reports of a bare handful of deaths almost obliterated any sensible awareness that many, many thousands more were saved.

Again, ask a soldier. Do they want to ride in the fully armored HUMVEES, or something less?

(Via Mudville Gazette and and Real Clear Politics)

Rick Klein carries water for public broadcasting in a myopic, partisan, and spin-laden piece in yesterday’s Boston Globe.

Does that sound harsh? Try out his opening paragraph:

House Republicans yesterday revived their efforts to slash funding for public broadcasting, as a key committee approved a $115 million reduction in the budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that could force the elimination of some popular PBS and NPR programs.

Is it too much to ask that a newspaper of the stature of the Globe require it’s reporters to have a basic understanding of business or budgeting? Aside, of course, from asking them to try to maintain objectivity in their reporting?

News flash to Mr. Klein and the Globe: If the Federal Government reduces funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which in turn funds National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), then those two organizations may in fact need to review their budgets and make cuts. If they have any sense or business acumen in broadcasting, they will surely make the cuts in less popular PBS and NPR programs.

Heck, that’s what Alan Chartock’s been saying for years. If you don’t support programs to coincide with their airing during fund drives, NPR will have no choice but to cut them.

Sheesh. You have to wonder how PBS and NPR ever made their way in the soup kitchen days when they were supported only by listener contributions, and received no federal funding of any kind.

That lasted a couple of decades, before the then-in-control Democratic Party sought to reward one of their stalwart bases of support with some pork barrel spending. Justified, of course, with the argument that there were things that you could only see or hear on PBS or NPR; commercial broadcasting wouldn’t waste their time on things that couldn’t pay their own way with advertising revenue.

That situation has entirely changed, of course, with the advent of the Internet, cbale and satellite broadcasting. There are no broadcasting subjects or formats into which some entrepreneur will not find a niche. Profitable or not, there are no holes now “uniquely served” by NPR or PBS, if ever there were.

Hard to imagine that William Buckley was one of their early “stars.” Today, it’s Garrison Keilor or Bill Moyers. Neither of these guys need public funding anymore, to be sure, let alone the merchandising empire of Jim Henson, Sesame Street and the Muppets, or other formerly “educational television” enterprises.

But those are inconvenient facts, in contrast to the scare imagery that PBS wants to force feed the public, with Klein as willing accomplice:

Most of the savings would come by eliminating subsidies for educational programs and grants for a number of technological upgrades.

Jan McNamara , a PBS spokeswoman, said the digital upgrade would have to be funded with money that is now being used for other programs, forcing almost all areas of public broadcasting to feel a pinch.

Paula Kerger , PBS's president and chief executive, said in a statement that the cuts would force the network to “drastically reduce the programming and services public television and public radio can provide to local communities.”

This is the public broadcaster’s trick, alarmist demagoguery. Bush wants to kill Big Bird. The Republicans want to put to sleep Clifford the Big Red Dog. They want to “silence us forever.” You know who we’re talking about, those Nazis.

Pure, unadulterated bilge. Talk about a sacred cow of public spending. Maybe that should be a “Sacred Pig?”

As Alan Chartock would indeed be the first to tell us, that would only mean they’d ask their loyal listeners to make up the difference. Which they would, if they can’t get Congress to force the rest of America to pay for it for them. How is this any different from other pork barrel spending items? Partisan ones, at that?

Full disclosure. I am a regular listener to NPR during weekday commute times. I admire their news programs, to a degree, when they aren’t talking politics with a decidedly progressive agenda in play. Or during local fund drives, when the insufferable Chartock openly panders to the base he understands only too well, damning the President specifically and Republicans generally throughout his extemporaneous comments.

I have contributed a couple of times, but not recently, and the NPR bias in story selection, and other editorializing in news reporting has gotten too much for me to allow me to financially support it.

In recent months I’ve had to listen to hysterical reports on the grave threat posed to our civil liberties, despite no concrete examples that affect anyone in the listening area. I’ve had to endure fawning portraits of the robust and thriving Chinese communist experiments in third world economic development, with not a mention of Chinese dissidents and the very real human rights abuses (and crimes against humanity) perpetrated by the (communist) Chinese government.

If there’s an issue that might involve a socialist, internationalist, or other progressive point of view, NPR is all over it. If it involves the US Military, or National Security, or anything to do with Terrorism, you can count of NPR finding some point of view that argues that it’s all the fault of the US, or at least the current administration. That’s their idea of “don’t take sides,” “citizen of the world,” objective journalism.

I could almost stomach that tendency if they could muster a portion of that objectivity for things political, but alas, Chartock has me beat there as well, offering free airtime for fawning “Me and Mario” kinds of broadcasting, without even an attempt at political balance.

Want to know what NPR and PBS dream of? Someday establishing themselves as a full scale, taxpayer funded broadcasting monopoly like the BBC, which they so admire. Where they can attack administrations and policies they find objectionable, all funded without the need to worry about fund drives, ratings, or other obvious means of viewer support. That’s what led them to suck at the Federal teat in the first place.

Michael Ledeen decries the latest steps toward entering into “fruitful negotiations” with Iran in a piece up at National Review Online.

Ledeen rightfully observes that, in lieu of actually deploying former President Bill Clinton to stage a replay of our Nuclear Negotiating Strategy with North Korea, we’ve opted for running negotiations from Clinton’s playbook.

Ledeen captures the foolishness in a series of easy-to-grasp nutshells:

We have actually set a clever trap for ourselves. The carrots are precisely what negotiations were supposed to be all about, and here we’ve offered them in advance of talks. The Iranians are certainly smart enough to say “well, that’s interesting, and maybe if you make the pot a bit more caloric, we might even agree to suspend enrichment. Let’s talk about it.” The Europeans and our statesmen will declare a diplomatic triumph and they will say to Bush that we do indeed have to talk about it, and then we will have lost even this little gambit. We will have undertaken negotiations, and the Iranians will not have ceased enrichment. We will still not have an Iran policy, we will still have done nothing to support freedom in Iran, and we will still be pretending it is possible to win a regional war by playing defense in Iraq alone.

The political consequences of such foolishness are very hard to calculate, but it is certain that any Iranian contemplating risking his or her life on behalf of a free Iran will be discouraged at the spectacle. It is also certain that this demarche-to use a word much beloved by the diplomats—will reinforce the extremely dangerous conviction in Tehran that they are winning, and we will do nothing to threaten them. This is what makes the latest gambit so self-destructive. It will encourage the mullahs to intensify their attacks—real attacks, not merely verbal ones—on all fronts. They think we are headed out of Iraq, in abject humiliation, as a result of their terror war against us, and they will now redouble those efforts.

Would you not do the same in their position? Of course you would, and you would do it even if you were not a fanatic, you would do it if you were a student of Bismarck and Clausewitz and Sun Tzu.

It’s not a choice between a fight and surrender. As Ledeen observes, it’s a question of when and under what conditions we will fight. On our terms now, or under worse conditions later:

I do not believe we will surrender and give them a free hand, but our current behavior only makes the ultimate confrontation with Iran more difficult and likely more violent than it need be. No matter how unwilling Western leaders may be to respond to their 27-year war against us, we cannot escape it, because they will not permit us to escape. It is a conflict we can either win or lose, but we cannot opt out of it. Eventually we will be compelled to respond.

Ledeen concludes with a warning from Churchill, applied once upon a time in the West, when Hitler and Nazism was the gathering threat, that so many in Europe and the US desired to wish away:

At the moment, most of our leaders are trying desperately to convince themselves that there is a way out, that we can make a grand bargain, that we do not have to confront the mullahs. It is the illogic of appeasement so well described by Churchill after Munich. Chamberlain, he said, had to choose between war and dishonor. Chamberlain chose dishonor, and he got war. This is the risk our leaders are running today.

Scott Ott at Scrappleface uses humor to capture the essence of the illogic. Of course the Iranians would be only to glad to avoid buying and developing their way to a nuclear weapons. But if we would be willing to give them everything they need, why, they will certainly be interested in sitting down and talking about that very thing.

Either way, they get their nukes.

I regret that I don’t take the time every day to check out Michael Yon and his excellent war reporting. The best I’ve yet read from Yon, one of the best written by anyone, involves some American heroes, the extreme restraint reflected in evolving US Military rules of engagement in Iraq, and the dangers of letting irresponsible media “hijack Haditha.”

In light of our ongoing debate on Haditha (and what are often irresponsible journalistic responses), Yon offers some great advice:

In the absence of clear facts, most people know that a rush to judgment serves no one. What word, then, properly characterizes the recent media coverage of Haditha, when analysis stretches beyond shotgun conclusions to actually attributing motive and assigning blame? No rational process supports a statement like: “We don’t know what happened, but we know why it happened and whose fault it is.”

Yon does as great a job with getting to the heart of our efforst in Iraq as anyone writing, and this piece is no exception. Yon quite movingly describes the context into which one might best consider any aberrations like Abu Ghraib or Haditha, if allegations are substantiated. Go read the whole thing.

But I can’t resist teasing you with this sign that Yon uses throughout his piece, to great effect. (Come on, go see.)

Gerard Baker, writing at Real Clear Politics, reports on moves by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to establish a 24 hour news channel in the American market.

Think American media is already partisan, left-leaning, and hopelessly arrogant in its perception of the American public? They have nothing on the BBC, according to Baker:

To the BBC's editors and reporters America is a country of backward, grass-chewing, Bible-toting religious fundamentalists, ignorant of almost everything that goes on beyond their shores. Americans are obese, gun-wielding fanatics devoted to despoiling the planet with their greed for ever larger cars and ever heavier hamburgers. The US is a country of grotesque inequalities of income and wealth in which the few rich laud it over the indigent many, fuelled by tax cuts and the hacking away of welfare programmes.

Its political coverage at least is balanced. This says Republicans are greedy, warmongering crooks but Democrats are no better - they're merely paler versions of ignorant nationalist capitalists.

BBC reporters travel the country in a state of bewilderment and bemusement at the pathos of it all. They approach their subjects like missionaries venturing into a leper colony - with an odd mixture of contempt and pity, the perfumed handkerchief stuck firmly under the nose to prevent contamination. Safely back in Washington and New York, of course, they all live high on the hog, fully enjoying the fruits of American economic success and low tax rates. Oddly enough they're nearly always reluctant to leave the imperialist superpower for the social democratic nirvana back home and many find ways to extend their tours.

In this trait, BBC idealists are not so very different from the American media counterparts. They probably reside in luxury suburbs, drive SUVs, and send their children to private schools as well.

There might be one bright spot. The folks at Public Radio International (PRI) or National Public Radio (NPR) might interpret this as muscling in on their “citizen of the world” turf and take after the Beeb. How disloyal of the BBC! There are no more fawning admirers than the folks at public radio, who consider the World Service as the ultimate in elevated, international news reporting. Unsullied with tawdry concerns for commerce or profit. Like the NPR and PRI folks themselves. (Except for their heavy dependence on government funding, paid sponsor support, and of course, fund drives.)

This might distract the public radio denizens (if not their regular listeners) from their “George Bush wants to destroy pubic radio and make us all watch Lawrence Welk re-runs” fund drives. (Alan Chartock, get the BBC on the line right now!)

The (Sunday) Times Online (UK) carries an excellent opinion piece, describing what is widely misperceived as The Wrong Target. As its subtitle states simply, “Terrorism, not America, is a real and present threat to our freedoms.”

Would that the rest of the world could display such sanity. (Okay, I’d settle for the adult population of the Opposition Party in the US.)

The Times bases its exceptional essay on the focus of today’s media frenzy, Haditha:

Al-Haditha, a town on the Euphrates northwest of Baghdad, is still a place where fighters blend into the populace and literally use civilians as cover. Coalition forces may shoot only when threatened, ground rules that call for exemplary discipline and courage in conditions where their observance increases the risk of injury or death.

That should be acknowledged in the context of what appears to have been an appalling collapse of US military discipline in al-Haditha, where 24 Iraqi civilians were allegedly murdered by a company of US Marines after a member of their patrol was killed and two were injured by a roadside bomb. America’s determination to demonstrate zero tolerance of such crimes should also be acknowledged; they in no way reflect US policy, or typify the conduct of American forces. Al-Haditha must not be made the subplot of a spurious morality play whose demon king is not terrorism, but the use and alleged abuse of US power.

America-bashing is in fashion as it has not been since Ronald Reagan accurately described the Soviet Union as an “evil empire”. Anti-Americanism is not confined to the usual radical chic suspects of the Left; in Britain, it infects the High Tory Establishment, “good Europeans” and little Englanders alike. So why are we all anti-Americans now?

American stumbling on the rough road since 2001 has played some part. Yet had there, inconceivably, been no wrong steps, had America been positively obsequious in courting international support (and it has done more on that score than its critics admit), anti-Americanism would still be on the rise. The US is never less popular than when it is aroused and determined in defence of democratic freedoms, never less trusted than when the world is most reliant on its unmatched ability to project power.

With allies like the Times and Tony Blair, one can almost imagine that we could yet win in the War of Ideas. And yet.

The Times echoes what Mark Steyn has been telling us in one form or another, “The strength of disdain is a measure of Europe’s weakness.” Americans would be foolish indeed to mistake disdain for reasoned opposition. Jealousy and resentment say more about the state of envy, than about its object.

We have been fighting the forces of our fanatic enemies in one form or another for over 20 years, out in the open for nearly 6, all against a backdrop of heightened European and Western opposition against any approach to terror that strays from diplomatic, appeasement, or pacifist centered orthodoxy. History might remind us what evil these same critics were allowed to achieve when last they held such positions of power militarily.

We are indeed the last best hope. We must remain vigilant to the real threats, no matter whether our erstwhile friends self-defeat themselves in paroxysms of Western guilt, Al Qaeda guile, or multicultural genuflection.

I received this press release of an impending event in New York.

I don’t know the documentary, but maybe one of our Milblog readers (or Milbloggers) have seen reference to it. I can’t recommend it or advise pro or con, except for two items I thought commended it for those interested.

Free beer from Brooklyn Brewery, and a debate involving Christopher Hitchens.

That’d be enough for me, if I was in NYC anyway on June 15th.

Comments or feedback welcome.

The Associated Press (AP) continues to carry water for al-Zarqawi and Al Qaeda, demonstrated in the way in which they frame today’s report of ongoing violence.

This time, it’s to juxtapose the killing of 21 Shiite students north of Baghdad, killed in the “name of Islam” according to a witness, with an earlier police raid and gun battle with insurgents in a Sunni mosque.

When is violence just violence, terror attacks, just acts of terror, and when do they represent “sectarian tensions?” When the AP has a storyline to reinforce, of course. Odd that it completely support media objectives of al-Zarqawi and Al Qaeda. You’d think it was…planned that way, or something.

Would it be possible for the AP to realize how they play right into the hands of the terrorists in Iraq? Not anytime soon, apparently. Sure, Al Qaeda doesn’t prepare press releases quite the way a Western democracy would. They use bombs and indiscriminate brutality as their means of tipping off the media to a story they’d like in print, and Western media eagerly complies.

It’s nice, too, how they make the direct reference to the most recent military communiqué from Zarqawi. Perhaps that’s to make sure they get credit for running the AQ “press release”:

Violence linked to Shiite and Sunni Arab animosity has grown increasingly worse since Feb. 22, when bombs ravaged the golden dome of a revered Shiite mosque in predominantly Sunni Arab Samarra.

Sectarian tensions have run particularly high in Baghdad, Basra and Diyala province, a mixed Sunni Arab-Shiite region. And Sunday's attacks came just days after terrorist mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi renewed his call for Sunni Arabs to take up arms against Shiites, whom he often vilifies as infidels.

In no way do I want to suggest that continued violence isn’t newsworthy, or worrisome. But to the extent that the AP, NY Times, and other Western media insist on describing this as sectarian violence, they aid and abet the Al Qaeda propaganda and Information Operations campaign.

For if violence against one ethnic or religious faction is all that is required to equate to sectarian violence, all AQ needs to do is keep killing Shia and Sunni in separate attacks.

I guess I expect too much nuance from mainstream media (MSM), but come on. Are religious or sectarian differences the real motivation behind these attacks? Or is that assessment somewhat disingenuous?

Think about all the much simpler, more direct motivations of those who mean us harm in Iraq.

Those out of power (Baathists) want the Iraqi experiment in Democracy to fail. Iran (through Intelligence Service and terrorist proxies) want the Americans out; for that matter, they don’t like Democracy either. Al Qaeda shares those objectives, and their image has been badly tattered in recent months, and need some operational successes (at least favorable press reporting that portrays their sporadic violence as “growing success.” Some disenfranchised Sunnis and disgruntled Shia no doubt think there are advantages to continued reluctance to fully engage in Democratic processes, and so sit on the sidelines at times when unity is most in need.

But “sectarian” violence? Just because one group is singled out for attack in any specific attack? That’s a far cry from the you killed some of us, we kill some of you, you respond, and we retaliate kind of sectarian warfare that is being ginned up -- ginned up by AQ and the unwitting proponents of the civil war theme in the media.

Peggy Noonan says America may be ready for a third party.

Mark Tapscott observes how fast the Republican Party rose to ascendancy between 1854 and Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, and suggests that, with the Internet and various electronic means of community building, today’s third party could grow even more quickly.

John Podhoretz at The Corner says, “beware the Siren Song” of a third party (at least as it applies to potential opponents of Hillary Clinton for the Presidency in 2008).

As a constituent who must suffer through the moderate and center leaning portrayal currently consuming New York’s Junior Senator, I certainly would rue this consequence expanded to punish all Americans in such dangerous times.

A President-elect Hillary Rodham with suitable “Warface” doesn’t make that possibility any more appealing. Contrary to the feverish imaginings of the anti-war left, war against terror – even terror as executed so incapably by Saddam Hussein – is not an “elective war,” unnecessary. Nor did we exist in a state of “non-war” with Saddam for the 12 years of UN sanctions and No Fly Zones.

My guess? Hillary starts a “little war” like Grenada, Panama, or even Bosnia (think Darfur?) in her first term, to burnish her bullish-on-national-security credentials. Bet the Democrats will find a way to contrast her actions with Bush’s pre-emptive, unilateral, “rush to war” in Iraq, and utter no synonyms for elective war. But I digress.

Podhoretz states that “The notion of a vital and successful third party is a pipe dream.”

I suppose he’s right about what a third party vote in ’08 for President would mean:

If people cannot stomach voting Republican and need to cast a protest vote, that is their right. But nobody should be under any illusions about what it means. It means Democratic rule.

I fear he’s right. And I for one don’t want to take the chance that we will end up with a Commander in Chief that thinks National Security the stuff of sound-bites and posturing. God knows we had enough of that with the first President Clinton.

Strange it would be indeed if Hillary would benefit from the same good fortune of a significant third party candidate, allowing her to assume the Presidency with a mere plurality (vice majority) of votes, as did her husband.

So I suggest a modest alternative, something on the order of an alternate approach for an alternative, politically.

The major source of disaffection on both sides is described, correctly in my view, as the complete disconnect of political elites from the citizenry. This reflects itself in runaway government spending, an absolute tone-deafness about immigration enforcement, and what continues to be an institutionalized, lobbyist-enforced corruption.

Why does the Republican Party in Congress so resemble the Democrats now in Opposition, or their departed stalwarts from their days in the Majority? They grew just as dependent on political contribution and cronyism as their predecessors (if they didn’t start out on that path intentionally). They were beguiled and then corrupted by entrenched incumbency.

So let that be the basis of the third party. If who sits atop the Executive is too important, work to break up and shatter the two party apparatus in the House or Senate. Use public outrage over immigration and pork barrel spending – even when it’s directed locally – fuel some upsets in Congress.

Look at what 14 Senators could do to change the discussion and sidelined the so called “nuclear option” of ending filibusters on Judicial appointments. How many third party Senators would we need? How much leverage in the House before neither party is guaranteed a majority of votes?

It has to start somewhere. Too many of us have learned that avoiding the threat of a third party is only a guarantee that two out-of-touch parties will retain power. And continue to elevate their personal gain, priorities, and privilege above the interests of the American public.

Would it hold? Would it grow or prosper? I don’t know that we need it to.

A couple of terms with a vibrant third party -- acting as a wedge between unresponsive main party candidates – might be able to bring our extra-legal immigration policy under control and eliminate years worth of pork barrel spending.

And maybe, just maybe, the hot breath of a surging third party might help bring the Elephant and the Donkey to their senses.

A Third PartyOther comments at Hot Air, Blue Crab Boulevard, and Right Wing News.

Trevor at A Will to Exist came into contact with detritus of lives extinguished. Trevor offers some solemn observations, and ends his remarkable reflection with what could be a Charter for those who will to fight terror in all its forms.

If anything their murder hardens my resolve to support the continuation of the imperfect process that is underway here in the Middle East. The beliefs of fundamentalist fanatics willing to kill anyone by any means to achieve their personal goals and visions cannot be tolerated. I am not responsible for the turmoil that is brewing in the minds of murderers like Osama bin Laden and Musab al-Zarqawi. I only truly began to pay attention to men like them on September 11, 2001. Prior to that day, fundamentalist religious fanatics had only touched on my life in theoretical, distant ways. They were people I despised from afar but had little interest in because in my naiveté I thought they could not touch my life. On September 11, 2001 my aloof interest in religiously motivated fanaticism became much more personal, and has only grown more so as time passes and atrocities continue to be carried out.

I would rather die than submit to the type of men who are willing to kill indiscriminately to wield power, especially in the name of a higher being. How dare they tell me who God is and what God demands from me! No matter who they are or what arguments they attempt to use to justify their evil, they are wrong and must be fought. A life lived without moral boundaries is a life that burns through the lives around it like acid. These barbarians must be held back, corralled and subdued, no matter the cost. The alternative will only mean more shattered detritus speckled with blood reminding us of faces that will smile and laugh no more on this Earth.

Sometimes the “will to fight” equates by necessity to the “will to exist,” don’t you think?

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(Hat tip: Milblogs)