Category Archives: Iraq

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We surrender

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Posted on February 1, 2007 in Iraq, Scribbles, The War

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Has Bush shot himself in the foot?

Posted on January 29, 2007 | Comments Off on Has Bush shot himself in the foot?

One of Lyndon Johnson’s big mistakes in the Vietnam war was insisting on personally clearing every bombing mission and target beforehand. But even LBJ didn’t turn his troops over to the command of the South Vietnamese government. President Bush appears to have given the Iraqi government control of our troops in his new struggle for Baghdad, which may have doomed it from the start. The story, picked up by the likes of conservative blogger Hyscience, is in Salon, the Lefty digital newsmagazine that is not my favorite source of information. Maybe it’s bull. Sure hope so. But it fits right in with various tactical stupidities of the past four years, such as allowing the Shia thug Mookie Sadr to live, and playing catch-and-release with Iranian agents whose explosives were killing American troops. But, so far, the dumbest thing of all has been the continuation of two sanctuaries for the enemy’s recruitment and re-supply, in neighborhing Syria and Iran, almost exactly what happened in South Vietnam with North Vietnam and Cambodia. If somebody doesn’t wise up pretty soon we’re going to lose this thing.

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Posted in Iraq, The War, Troops

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Garry Owen

Posted on January 29, 2007 | Comments Off on Garry Owen

Michael Yon’s latest dispatch from Custer’s old 7th Cavalry patrolling in Mosul, Iraq, with photos:

"If Americans really wanted to know their Army, American kids would be swapping trading cards of the battalion commanders and command sergeant majors, company commanders and 1st sergeants, and those legions of unknown squad-leaders who earn three Purple Hearts and decorations for valor before they are old enough to rent cars back home."

And unlike Lurch, the braggart soldier, these 3-purple heart squad leaders don’t go home after 4 months. 

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Posted in Iraq, The War, Troops

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Sectarian cooperation

Posted on January 29, 2007 | Comments Off on Sectarian cooperation

In the debates over Iraq, we often hear the canard that Sunni and Shia Muslims are irrevocable enemies who would never cooperate with each other. Yet the evidence that they have and still do is pretty solid, as Iraq freelance embed Bill Roggio says in his latest dispatch on fighting near Najaf which, once again, combined the Sunni Al Queda with the Shia militia:

"Cooperation between Shia and Sunni insurgent groups is not a new development in Iraq, as Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and al_Qaeda cooperated during the Fallujah/Najaf uprisings in the spring and summer of 2004. Shia Iran has been supplying the Sunni insurgency, al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Sunnah with weapons and bomb making materials, and is currently sheltering senior al-Qaeda leaders within its borders."

UPDATE  The defeated militia in question apparently is linked to Mookie, the black-turbaned little thug that Bush has allowed to live lo these many years, and their aim was to kill the moderate Shia Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. 

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Posted in Iraq, The War

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More on Karbala

Posted on January 28, 2007 | Comments Off on More on Karbala

Omar at Iraq the Model isn’t the only one who thinks the Karbala attack, which killed Army CPT Brian Freeman and abducted four others who were later murdered, was an Iranian operation. Freelance embed Bill Roggio lines up and knocks over the dominoes:

"This raid required specific intelligence, in depth training for the agents to pass as American troops, resources to provide for weapons, vehicles, uniforms, identification, radios and other items needed to successfully carry out the mission."

Jimbo at Black Five agrees: "The location of the target, the sophistication of the operation, the lack of beheading, all point to a precision raid by highly-trained regular military forces. Iran did this."

So, are we finally going to strike back at the principal supporters of terrorism in the world or are we going to continue to play pattycake with the toothless dictator’s club of the UN? If Bush doesn’t mind thumbing his nose at the anti-war Democrat Congress over Iraq, surely he won’t quail at finally doing what he should have done back in 2003–hitting Iran and its crony-in-evil Syria?

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Posted in Iraq, The War, Troops

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Top myths of the Iraq campaign

Posted on January 28, 2007 | Comments Off on Top myths of the Iraq campaign

At the very top of the top 10 list, of course, is the constant refrain that no WMD were found:

"Several hundred chemical weapons were found, and Saddam had all his WMD scientists and technicians ready. Just end the sanctions and add money, and the weapons would be back in production within a year. At the time of the invasion, all intelligence agencies, world-wide, believed Saddam still had a functioning WMD program."

This should include Saddam’s nuclear weapons program, which Christopher Hitchens recalls, if no one else does: "Saddam Hussein had built an enormous secret nuclear reactor at Tuwaitha, and had acquired most of the elements of a nuclear weapon." 

Via Strategy Page and The Claremont Review of Books

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Posted in Iraq, The War

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Senator, it’s nuts over here

Posted on January 27, 2007 | Comments Off on Senator, it’s nuts over here

Connecticut Democrat Sen. Chris Dodd is using Army reserve CPT Brian Freeman’s death as an argument for withdrawal from Iraq. Dodd says Freeman, killed last weekend in an assault some say was engineered by Iran, passionately complained to Dodd when the senator visited Iraq that Freeman was having to do State Department instead of Army work:

“’Senator, it’s nuts over here,’ Dodd quoted Freeman in the Senate on Friday. ‘Soldiers are being asked to do work we’re not trained to do.  I’m doing work that the State Department people are far more prepared to do in fostering democracy, but they’re not allowed to come off the bases because it’s too dangerous here.  It doesn’t make any sense.’”

This fits in with previous reporting that the State Department and other agencies are leaving the work in Iraq to the Pentagon. President Bush mentioned in his State of the Union speech that the rest of government needed to do more. Even Gen. Petraeus, the new coalition commander in Baghdad recently complained about it in his Senate confirmation hearings. Sometimes it looks like the whole American government has become unhinged and incompetent: place-holders and buck-passers with their own private political agendas. The Jihadis must be loving it.

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