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June 22, 2005
A Struggle for Power and Money
Winds of Change has a fine addition to their ongoing AAR/LL post.
Most immediately interesting to me is the bit about the media: this indicates to me that the military sees the non-embedded media as hostile-neutral at best, which fits with the behavior of the non-embedded media in Iraq in particular. This is a dangerous development, because the perception that the media embeds with the enemy will lead to us tracking the media to find the enemy, which will lead to a lot of journalists being caught in crossfire, or killed by enemy who think the journalists are leading the military to them.
Second most interesting to me is the involvement of non-Muslim terror groups in training. This is not entirely unexpected - criminals and terrorists and rogue regimes of all types work together all the time - but is the first time I've seen it explicitly reported. Also, note that some of the camps are over the border. As in Viet Nam, we are making the mistake of giving our enemy safe havens: this must end.
Third most interesting to me is the inefficiency of IEDs at killing American troops - 12000 attacks in one year did not net a large number of dead soldiers. An IED is a pretty safe attack to make, and has been a jihadi tool for a long time. (So has taping every attack. Before 9/11, I had seen some interesting footage of dozens of attacks in Chechnya using IEDs, sometimes followed up with small-unit assaults, on Russian troops.) Figuring out how to turn the tables on the enemy - that is, not just to avoid the IEDs or seal the area afterwards to prevent a full-scale ambush from developing, but to actually preempt the IED attacks by taking out the camera crews and trigger-pullers - would be a big win against the jihadis.
UPDATE: And Winds is on a roll today. Armed Liberal's The Cowboy War is a must-read. He nails exactly what's been bugging me about those who say they support the troops and the war while simultaneously denigrating everything done by the troops or in pursuit of the war as not good enough: compared to what. It's only in fantasy land that perfection is attainable, and yet for these guys, perfection is the norm, and any deviation from perfection is sufficient to make us as bad as the Nazis, Pol Pot, Stalin.
But the really sad part is that they think this way for purely partisan reasons. Look at Dick Durbin's words with President Bush in office:
I cannot and will not support President Bush's unilateralist, aggressive foreign policy of preemption. It is wrong. It was wrong when we voted on it in October of last year. It is wrong in November of this year.
as opposed to when Bill Clinton was President:
I call on those who question the motives of the president and his national security advisors to join with the rest of America in presenting a united front to our enemies abroad.The men and women who are risking their lives in defense of our national and global security deserve nothing less.
UPDATE: Callimachus notices the same thing, this time comparing praktike with Molly Ivins. And here is the killer question that I think should be posed to the anti-war types, and with slight modification to the pro-war types as well:
Let's say the devil popped up from a burning Texas sagebrush and made Molly Ivins an offer: not a single American dies in Iraq from this day forth, and democracy takes root there, and Condoleezza Rice wins the presidency in 2008 and the Democratic Party sinks further into irrelevance. "Or," Old Nick smiles, with a twinkle in his eye, "the butcher's bill continues to mount, the American public reaches its tipping point, and your chicken-fried prose pushes them over it. Bush, Rummy and Cheney go to the Hague in the 'war criminals' docket. And you never see another Republican in the White House or a GOP majority in either branch of Congress for the rest of your life."
Answer carefully. (hat tip: The Glittering Eye)
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