This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Terror War

  • Reid; The war is lost (Updated)

    I noticed on a couple of blogs and discussion boards last night that Harry Reid can’t wait for the new tactical plan and the new commander in Iraq to have their effect so he called it a defeat pre-emptively. The Washington Post buried the story on page 3 (it’s not on their front web page, either – I had to “search” “Reid+war+is+lost”);

    President Bush warned Thursday that pulling out of Iraq too soon would trigger a bloodbath akin to that of the Cambodian killing fields of the 1970s, while Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid declared that it is too late to stay because the war has already been lost.

    On a day that reverberated with echoes of the Vietnam War era, Bush and Reid (D-Nev.) engaged in a long-distance debate over the lessons of history and the fate of the latest overseas war as part of a struggle over $100 billion in funding for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Reid cast Iraq as another Vietnam and Bush as another Lyndon B. Johnson, while the president described dire consequences if the past repeats itself.

    And over at the Washington Times, Joseph Curl and S.A. Miller report that Reid was having a senior moment and can’t distinguish between things that only happen in his mind and things that happen with real people;

    “This war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday,” Mr. Reid, Nevada Democrat, said at a Capitol Hill press conference with anti-war state legislators.
        Mr. Reid said that both Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates agree with his position, though neither has ever declared defeat.
        “You have to make your own decisions as to what the president knows,” said Mr. Reid, who left the press conference without fielding follow-up questions.
        The White House said no one recalled Mr. Reid saying “the war is lost” at the meeting with the president.

    Surprisingly enough, when I called Reid’s office this morning just to be sure that the media didn’t quote him wrong or take him out context, my call got switched to a mail box which was full and then dumped. Hmmm-I wonder if Reid is taking any heat.

    The Washington Post story goes on to illustrate how dingy Harry really is;

    “I know that I was like the odd guy out yesterday at the White House,” Reid said. “But I, at least, told him what he needed to hear, not what he wants to hear. I did that, and my conscience is clear.”

    So even though no one in the White House, according to the Washington Times, remembers Harry saying the war is lost, Harry still thinks it happened. And the Washington Times tells us the troops aren’t even in theater while Reid is calling it a failure;

    Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, this week said a little over half of the 25,000-troop surge he requested has arrived in Baghdad.

    Crotchety Old Bastard emailed me last night (for those of you who don’t know, his son deployed to Iraq late last year on the speartip of the surge in the mighty 1/325th Airborne Infantry Regiment) and he’s asking for everyone to post comments that he can print out and dump on Reid’s desk when he visits here soon. Michele Malkin put COB’s letter to Reid on her front page.

    Curt at Flopping Aces has the best multi-media blog post I’ve seen on this latest crybaby Dingy Harry exercise in mental masturbation. Although, Crotchety Old Bastard is much angrier.

    UPDATE: OK, so I got through to Reid’s office this morning at about 8:30 and talked to his press office. The young man explained to me that Reid’s comments were taken out of context and that Senator Reid regrets that he’s been misquoted. Apparently, Reid said “As long as we continue to follow the president’s current strategy, the war is lost.”

    My original contention that Reid is ignoring the fact that the new strategy hasn’t even been fully implemented still stands. Reid’s office told me that the new strategy must include the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group – that the bulk of US troops need to be “redeployed” (his word not mine) out of Iraq.

    That’s just baffling. While Reid is calling the President a reincarnation of Lyndon Johnson, he’s also calling for implementing the Johnson policy of reaction forces to protect mobile training teams. So I guess we’re at the point where we just have to assume that Harry Reid is insane as well as being a lying political sack of camel dung.

  • Hussein/al Qaida links

    In this week’s Washington Times column “Inside the Ring”, Bill Gertz actually read the Pentagon’s IG report (unlike some other journalists) and relates parts of Eric Edelman’s rebuttal of the report in the report’s appendix;

    The rebuttal is contained in the appendix of the IG report that criticized the alternative, pre-Iraq war intelligence assessment done by a Pentagon policy group on ties between Iraq and al Qaeda as “inappropriate.”
        Mr. Edelman stated that the policy group’s work on the issue was not only appropriate and legal, but directed by both former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.
        “Apart from the numerous factual inaccuracies, omissions and mischaracterizations identified throughout these comments, the [IG] report suffers from a basic analytical flaw in attempting to paint the work under review as ‘inappropriate’ even though no laws were broken, no DoD directives were violated and no applicable policies were disregarded,” Mr. Edelman wrote in his counter to the February IG report made public April 5. 

    Mr Gertz goes on to relate Edelman’s recharacterization of the links between al Qaida and Hussein. So why would the IG report misrepresent the findings of the study? According to Mr. Gertz;

    The IG report was released by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, who defense officials say for years has quietly recruited agents within the Pentagon inspector general’s office to produce reports and audits sympathetic to the liberal Michigan Democrat’s views.

    Nice. We need people spying on our own defense establishment from Congress.

  • Biden vs. McCain

    Joseph Biden takes issue with John McCain’s “The War You’re Not Reading About” piece in the Washington Post last Sunday and writes a rebuttal in the Washington Post;

    McCain wrote that the president’s strategy is beginning to show results but that most Americans don’t know it because the media cover the bad news, not the good news. Of course, reporting any news in Iraq is an extraordinary act of bravery, given the dangers journalists must navigate every day. But the fact is, virtually every “welcome development” McCain cited has been reported, including the purported anti-al-Qaeda alliance with Sunni sheikhs in Anbar, the establishment of joint U.S.-Iraqi security stations in Baghdad and the decision by Moqtada al-Sadr to go to ground — for now.

    The problem is that for every welcome development, there is an equally or even more unwelcome development that gives lie to the claim that we are making progress. For example:

    So Biden begins by sucking up to the brave journalists who are apparently in greater danger than our troops. Those brave journalists who call reporting explosions from their hotels in the Green Zone journalism. But, see, that’s how Biden makes his point that Iraq is dangerous. Of course it’s dangerous, numbnuts – that’s why its a war.

    Old Hair Plugs calls the President’s strategy a “failing strategy”. How’s that possible? It hasn’t even reached fruition, yet. If you want to call the old strategy a failure, go ahead, have at it. But how can you call the current strategy a failure when it hasn’t even happened yet?

    The administration hopes that the surge will buy time for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government to broker the sustainable political settlement our military views as essential to lasting stability in Iraq.

    But there is no trust within the government, no trust of the government by the people it purports to serve and no capacity on the part of the government to deliver security or services. There is little prospect that the government will build that trust and capacity anytime soon.

    In short, the most basic premise of the president’s approach — that Iraqis will rally behind a strong central government that looks out for their interests equitably — is fundamentally and fatally flawed.

    So we should just quit, Joey? Just stop? Oh, no. He has a plan;

    I cannot guarantee that my plan for Iraq (detailed at http://www.planforiraq.com) will work. But I can guarantee that the course we’re on — the course that a man I admire, John McCain, urges us to continue — is a road to nowhere.

    The same old Joe Biden partitioning of Iraq. Is there a reason that Iraqis haven’t arrived at that solution by themselves? Afterall, it’s their government, their constitution. Now if we imposed that plan on the Iraqis, that would be a puppet government, it would be an occupation.

    And we don’t need more of your doom and gloom stories from Iraq, Joe, we get them everyday from the Washington Post. In fact, we can hardly call your opinion news at all – it’s more of a “dog bites man” story. It’s not news that you and your buddies have a problem with this particular while a Republican administration is fighting it. And it’s not news that you think a strategy that hasn’t happened yet is failing.

  • Sadr-ites back withdrawal timetable

    According to Washington Post’s Qassim Abdul-Zahra Sadr’s allies in the Iraqi legislature are threatening to leave the government if the Iraq government doesn’t support a withdrawal timetable for US troops;

    Iraqi Cabinet ministers allied to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr threatened Wednesday to quit the government to protest the prime minister’s lack of support for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal, according to a statement.

    Such a pullout by the very bloc that put Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in office could collapse his already perilously weak government. The threat comes two months into a U.S. effort to pacify Baghdad in order to give al-Maliki’s government room to function.

    Al-Sadr’s political committee issued the statement a day after al-Maliki rejected an immediate U.S. troop withdrawal.

    “We see no need for a withdrawal timetable. We are working as fast as we can,” al-Maliki told reporters during his four-day trip to Japan, where he signed loan agreements for redevelopment projects in Iraq.

    “To demand the departure of the troops is a democratic right and a right we respect. What governs the departure at the end of the day is how confident we are in the handover process,” he said, adding that “achievements on the ground” would dictate how long American troops remain.

    I guess that’s a bit treasonous because the Sadr-ists are just anxious to get the Americans out of their way so they can seize the government by force, since the electoral thing isn’t happening for them.

    It also indicates that Sadr is sweating the American destruction of his forces in Iraq. They’re in a hurry to get us out before there is no militia with which to take over the government. They at least want a timetable they can use to raise the morale of the militias instead of sending them into the US meatgrinder.

    Maybe Pelosi and Murtha can go over there to buck up the Sadr troops. Well, what’s left of them.

  • Syria’s martyrdom superhighways

    In today’s DC Examiner, Rowan Scarborough tells us that Syria is the entry-point for suicide bombers in Iraq;

    Al-Qaida in Iraq is operating three main entry routes for suicide bombers coming into Iraq from Syria, despite more than three years of U.S. efforts to control the border and convince Damascus to evict the jihadists, an American military officer said Tuesday.

    A bomber struck again in Iraq Tuesday, this time a woman who detonated a bomb under her black abaya, killing herself and 16 others at a police recruiting station. It could not be learned if she was an Iraqi or an imported terrorist. But the U.S. command says the vast majority of suicide bombers — al-Qaida’s principal means of attack — are foreigners.

    This should delight Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi who just last week announced to the world that Syria is the key to peace in the Middle East (if only the US and Israel would trust President Bashar Asad). Now she and Holocaust survivor Tom Lantos hinted that they’d be willing to go to visit Holocaust-denier Ahmadinejad and do for Iran what they did in Syria – lend legitimacy to rogue entities in the Middle East.

    This Op/Ed appeared in the Washington Times (h/t Dadmanly)on February 20th – well before Pelosi headed to Syria – I wonder if she confronted Assad about this intelligence;

      Regional intelligence services and inside sources from within Sunni officer corps opposed to the Assad regime have identified major foreign-fighter training camps in northern Syria and just outside Damascus overseen by Syrian Military Intelligence and run by former Iraqi Ba’athi Generals and senior Saddam Fedayeen commanders.
        One major foreign fighter camp exists in the Latakia province in northern Syria, a mountainous area replete with Syrian Military Intelligence facilities and wide swaths of ostensibly government property closed to the public. The Iraqi officer in charge there is one Maj. Gen. Majid Sulayman. Yet another such camp exists 40 kilometers to the west of the border town of Qamishli, which lies in the Kurdish area in the northeastern tip of Syria bordering Iraq and Turkey; it is run by Maj. Gen. Qays al-Adhami. The al-Shaybani camp lies 30 kilometers south of Damascus and also trains foreign fighters. The al-Ikhals camp lies in the heart of the Qaysun mountain range near Damascus.

    Please read the entire details of the Op/Ed piece.

    And AP reports that the Mahdi Army commanders admit they’ve trained their troops and receive material support in Iran;

    Iranian intelligence operatives have been training Iraqi fighters inside Iran on how to use and assemble deadly roadside bombs known as EFPs, the U.S. military spokesman said today.
        Commanders of a splinter group inside the Shi’ite Mahdi Army militia have said that as many as 4,000 members of their organization were trained in Iran and that they have stockpiles of EFPs, weapons that cause great uneasiness among U.S. forces here because they penetrate heavily armored vehicles.
        U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell would not say how many militia fighters had been trained in Iran but said that questioning of fighters captured as recently as this month confirmed many had been in Iranian training camps.
        “We know that they are being in fact manufactured and smuggled into this country, and we know that training does go on in Iran for people to learn how to assemble them and how to employ them. We know that training has gone on as recently as this past month from detainees? debriefs,” Gen. Caldwell said at a weekly briefing

    So Pelosi and Lantos are hinting at a trip to Iran while Iran is supplying the militias that are keeping us involved in Iraq. How much sense does that make?

    This why Americans don’t trust Democrats with our foreign policy. Their refusal to accept the realities of the world color their politics. They’re like children playing mock-UN in grade school.

    The reason the President called Hussein, Iran and Kim Jong IL the Axis of Evil is because you can’t trust them. They talk out of both sides of their mouths and make public statements that they have no intention of following through. I guess that’s why Democrats have such a kinship with them – Democrats do the same thing before elections. Which might explain why Pelosi’s approval numbers are plummeting.

  • Webb; we can’t call ourselves Americans

    Spoiled brat, Senator Jim Webb told a group of University of Virginia students that we should shut down the Guantanamo detention facility because it’s un-Americans according to the Washington Examiner and AP;

    Webb said he agreed early in the war on terrorism that such a facility was needed. “But there comes a point where people need to be dealt with through the legal system,” Webb said. “I think that time has come.”

    People? Sure, Jim, people should be dealt with through the legal system. But the only people at Guantanamo are our troops who are guarding a pack of rabid creatures who want to kill women and children.

    After speaking to the students in professor Larry J. Sabato’s class on American politics, Webb told reporters that the detainees should either be declared prisoners of war or charged in the American judicial system if the U.S. continues to hold them captive.

    “We can’t just continue to hold people in limbo without charges for this period of time and still call ourselves Americans,” Webb said.

    Then what are we? Sitting ducks? In my opinion, as valueless at it might be, we’ve never been threatened by an enemy like this before, so our response calls for a unique response. Much like Bill Clinton’s unique solution to the haitian immigrant problem – he put Haitians escaping Haiti on Guantanamo in a tent city for an undetermined amount of time. Did Webb have a problem with that?

    Webb admits that he was in favor of the detention of the creatures at Guantanamo before he succumbed to Bush Derangement Syndrome, why has he suddenly lost his way? Maybe because it’s not politically expedient? Declaring these creatures POWs will only make their lives better – that’s not what they’d do for us if given an opportunity. Putting them in our legal system will only unneccessarily overburden untrained civilian personnel.

    Webb also went on to complain to the students that his job is hard because he has to vote on stuff and he’s tied down to his office. How can we treat a US Senator like that and still call ourselves Americans?

  • Levin finally admits Democrats are clueless on Iraq

    So I figure the folks over at HuffPo, et al. have smoke coming out of their ears after Carl Levin admitted that Congress won’t cut off funding for the Iraq war. From Bloomberg;

    “We’re not going to cut off funding for the troops,” the 72-year-old Michigan Democrat said on ABC’s “This Week” program. “But what we should do, and we’re going to do, is continue to press this president to put some pressure on the Iraqi leaders to reach a political settlement.”

    So why didn’t they just say that in the first place? If that’s what Levin admits that they “should” do, why all of the dust clouds about troop withdrawals and time schedules? Why’d ya’all spend so much time buying each other off with pork? Because the half-wits from Code Pink and the KosKids won’t stand for it, that’s why. And they still believe all that talk about a “mandate” for Democrats to end the war.

    If Democrats had a “mandate” they’d have a majority in Congress to match. As it is, when Lieberman votes with Republicans, Democrats are screwed in the Senate. In the House, in November 435 seats were up for a vote and only 286 (53%) went for Democrats. That’s a majority, but it ain’t no mandate, folks.

    Of course there are people in Congress that you can’t tell which side they’re on  – like Arlen Specter, who the Boston Globe quotes;

    Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said “there have not been sufficient efforts at discussions” between lawmakers and the White House.

    “We cannot leave the troops unfunded in the field,” Specter said on CNN’s “Late Edition.” “That just can’t be done. And Congress is not in a position to micromanage the war. But we do not have any good alternative. Right now, you can’t see the end of the tunnel, let alone a light at the end of the tunnel.”

    Specter said he was not prepared “to withdraw funding at this time. But my patience, like many others, is growing very thin.”

    My patience is growing thin, too, Arlen. Quit pandering to the extreme elements of THE OTHER PARTY and grow a fricken backbone. It’s guys like you that muddy the debate. Either mount that horse or go sit in the barn.

    And little Chuckie Schumer is still living in an alternate universe, according to the Washington Post;

    Although Democrats expect to have to negotiate with the White House, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) made clear on “Fox News Sunday” that they would portray a veto as Bush denying funds to the military.

    Schumer added that the president must change his Iraq strategy, because “70 percent of the American people feel it’s misguided. If a change in strategy means not supporting the troops, then 70 percent of the American people don’t support the troops.”

    Which strategy is Schumer talking about? The one in November or the most recent one? Or is he just yammering to keep people confused?

    In Washington Post’s The Talk, they quoted Schumer differently – in the context of a threat;

    Democrats also suggested their strategy would be to portray Bush as the one who is denying funds to the troops.

    “Should he veto this bill, which means he will be vetoing the money for the troops, we will try to come up with a way, … trying to compromise with the White House, that both supports the troops and yet changes the strategy in Iraq, which we feel is misguided,” Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on “Fox News Sunday.”

    So they’re trying the old strategy that worked for them in 1995 budget battle – blame their opponents with the help of their willing accomplices in the media. But, I think it’ll backfire this time – just because the nutroots have already shown us that their party, that MoveOn claims to have bought and paid for, is the party that can’t support the troops.

  • You can see Iraq from here

    The Washington Post’s Thomas Ricks correctly describes the two Iraq wars concurrently being fought;

    There are two Iraq wars being waged, according to military officers on the ground and defense experts: the one fought in the streets of Baghdad, and the war as it is perceived in Washington.

    Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, who took over as the top U.S. commander in Iraq in February, cited the disparity last week. “The Washington clock is moving more rapidly than the Baghdad clock,” he said in a television interview. “So we’re obviously trying to speed up the Baghdad clock a bit and to produce some progress on the ground that can, perhaps . . . put a little more time on the Washington clock.”

    One result of this disparity is the emergence of radically different views of the impact of the new strategy, which has been referred to as a “surge” because it sends more troops into Iraq but which is more noteworthy for moving U.S. troops off large, isolated bases and into smaller outposts across the capital.

    Initial reports indicate that his strategy is working well, in that al Qaida is being pushed into the smaller towns outside of Baghdad and exposing themselves to gunfire, as reported by the Washington Times (via AP);

    North of the capital, in the increasingly dangerous Diyala provincial capital of Baqouba, police reported 21 more bodies dumped in the streets, victims of the intense sectarian warfare. All were shot execution-style and many had been tortured. At least 62 bodies have been found in or near Baqouba since Tuesday.
        A total of 58 persons were killed or found dead across Iraq yesterday in the eighth week of the U.S.-Iraqi security crackdown on the capital and surrounding cities and towns.
        Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, meanwhile, said government officials from Iraq’s neighbors, the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and representatives of the Group of Eight industrialized nations would meet in Egypt early next month.

    With the release of the 15 British sailors and marines last week, we can get back to the business of killing malevolent influences in Iraq, even though Jalal Sharafi, a supposed Iranian diplomat claims that he wasn’t treated as well as the British by the CIA;

    At the time of his disappearance, Iran alleged Sharafi had been abducted by an Iraqi military unit commanded by American forces — a charge repeated by several Iraqi Shiite lawmakers. U.S. authorities denied any role in his disappearance.

    I guess the CIA is disguised as Iraqis these days.

    Speaking of Iran, nothing that the Iranian government does happens in a vacuum. I’m pretty sure that the Iranians kidnapped the British sailors and marines to disrupt their counter-smuggling operations for a few weeks. I expect more IED attacks with Iranian-manufactured shaped charges and perhaps some more sophisticated chlorine-gas dirty bombs to make an appearance in th next few weeks to make the “surge” appear ineffective and to electrify the Washington war on Iraq. I’m sure the Democrats will be eager to comply with the Iranians and ramp up the rhetoric when the time comes.

    AP reports that al Sadr bravely calls for his militiamen to fight the US invaders – but AP neglects to mention that Mookie al-Sadr is making this call to arms from the bar at the Tehran Holiday Inn Express;

    The powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his militiamen on Sunday to redouble their battle to oust American forces and argued that Iraq’s army and police should join him in defeating “your archenemy.”

    Yeah, powerful. He’s not even in the country and he doesn’t realize that most of his militia has been disarmed and rounded up. I guess he’s doing his best impression of Ray Nagin calling for New Orleans’ residents to be brave from his room at the Baton Rouge Ramada. But it does mean that Iran has made resupplies available for the Shi’ite militias. al-Sadr wouldn’t be making this call if he didn’t already know they had the means to attack – it wouldn’t make him look as “powerful” to AP if they weren’t. 

    All this yapping on the news channels by retired US officers second-guessing the British hostages is just blather, as far as I’m concerned. Firstly, the US Code of Conduct leaves enough wiggle room for American prisoners of war to do just what the British did in their TV interviews. All this false bravado about resistance to an enemy is real easy coming from people who’ve never spent time in foreign incarceration with no light at the end of the tunnel. Having been in a similar situation in my younger days, I sympathize with them.

    Yeah, they probably should have resisted capture. I would have – not because I’m brave, but because I’d rather get shot to death than beheaded – which seems to be popular in that part of the world. But, I’m glad neither were in store for these British warriors. I’d sure like to see them resist temptation of commercializing their ordeal, though.

    According to the Wall Street Journal, the Iranians denied Maliki access to it’s airpace while he was flying to other Arab countries this weekend. Yet Ahmadinejad thinks he should be able to fly to New York whenever he wants. Real mature, fella.

    Of course the New York Times think the most important thing happening in Iraq right now (by putting this story on the front page) is the confusion in Iraq over whether they should leave statues of Hussein standing or not. That’s probably a prett good indication that the troops are doing a good job killing Islamists if all the New York Times can write about is stupid statues.

    But Iraq the Model has the real news on how well the “surge” is working.