Category Archives: Iraq

I am the true cost of freedom

Posted on January 26, 2007 | Comments Off on I am the true cost of freedom

More dispatches from Walter Reed by J.R. Salzman in his recovery from losing his right arm and ring finger of his left hand in an IED explosion in Iraq last fall. His wife is doing the typing in this amazing and poignant kind of blogging:

"I realize there are a lot of other people out there who are worse off than me. I am not asking for sympathy here. All I am trying to do is let you know what it is like to experience this. I have constant phantom pain in my arm where it feels like my hand is still there, and someone is sawing on it with a knife."

My Confederate great grandfather lost the lower part of one leg to a cannon ball in the Wilderness battle, May 6, 1864, went home and spent much of the rest of his life wearing a wooden peg while plowing behind a mule. I always wondered what that was like. J.R. brings that and many other things into clear focus.

Via Black Five 

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Posted in Iraq, The War, Troops

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Unflattering comparison

Posted on January 26, 2007 | Comments Off on Unflattering comparison

Don Suber, in his Charleston (WVA) Daily Mail column today, makes a good point: Bush is a poor wartime leader. Just about everyone who supports the Iraq campaign has compared the war on terror to World War II, but Bush apparently can’t see or feel the parallels. Elsewise he might have devoted his entire State of the Union speech to the campaigns, as FDR did to his war:

"President Roosevelt delivered a 4,588-word State of the Union on Jan. 7, 1943, that was on one topic alone: World War II. The war was that serious to FDR. He went through the battles. He went over the war production. He did not mention a single domestic program. He offered hope instead…In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Bush didn’t get around to the war until after 2,317 words in his 5,667-word speech. The people can hardly be expected to stay the course when the captain is not at the helm 24 hours a day."

Bush, whose approval rate average is hovering just two degrees above freezing, has kept most of the war’s details to himself, instead of sharing them with us, and we’re all paying the price for his shortsightedness.

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Posted in Afghanistan, Iraq, The War

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The plan behind the “no plan”

Posted on January 26, 2007 | Comments Off on The plan behind the “no plan”

Bush’s Democrat and Republican critics have repeated the same canard now over and over again for years: Bush has no plan, no coherent strategy for Iraq. It’s all hit or miss, etc.

Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan even quotes Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel reiterating the notion and praises him for having the guts to speak out–even if a quick stroll through the Small Wars Journal could have shown her that his supposedly gutsy move was based on a false assumption.

Some of the journal’s counterinsurgeny strategists, at least, have done their homework and concluded that there not only is a plan, and a coherent strategy, in Bush’s "surge," with its focus on securing the population of Bahgdad and al-Anbar, but that it has a track record of success:

"The new strategy reflects counterinsurgency best practice as demonstrated over dozens of campaigns in the last several decades: enemy-centric approaches that focus on the enemy, assuming that killing insurgents is the key task, rarely succeed. Population-centric approaches, that center on protecting local people and gaining their support, succeed more often…in the new strategy what matters is providing security and order for the population, rather than directly targeting the enemy – though this strategy will effectively marginalize them."

It’s also significant that the Army’s guru of counterinsurgency, Gen. David Petreaus, will be the one to implement the new approach. Read it all here. 

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CPT Sean Edward Lyerly, R.I.P.

Posted on January 25, 2007 | Comments Off on CPT Sean Edward Lyerly, R.I.P.

"A graduate of Stratford High School in Houston and Texas A&M University, Lyerly, 31, of Pflugerville [northeast of Austin] is the first Texas Guard aviator killed in Iraq…A father of a 3-year-old boy, Zackary, Lyerly was a fly fishing and motorcycle enthusiast. In eight years as a couple, [his wife Csilla] said, they never argued: ‘Our marriage was a fairy tale. I woke up every day thinking my life was too good to be true.’"

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Michael Yon: We need to kill Mookie

Posted on January 24, 2007 | Comments Off on Michael Yon: We need to kill Mookie

Army veteran and freelance Iraq embed Michael Yon emails Op-For with this surprising conclusion:

"At this point I would say we are probably actually losing the war, but I really think this can be turned around. Petraeus is just the man who can do it. He’s brilliant and is ready to slam those militias. We need to kill Sadr. We will lose a lot of people taking on the militias, but we should either take them on or pack up and go home. I vote for killing them."

Yon emailed me this on Christmas Day: "I hope we finally kill al Sadr," but asked me not to post it. Now that he’s lifted the embargo, so to speak, I no longer feel constrained. And certainly agree.

Yon’s latest dispatch from Mosul is, as always, worth a read. 

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President Bush unfiltered

Posted on January 23, 2007 | Comments Off on President Bush unfiltered

Some conservative and libertarian bloggers, Bush supporters all though they wish he would fight harder, are calling it his best State of the Union message yet. While I agree that it’s doubtfull it will do him much good politically, it at least had the virtue of reinvigorating those of us who have supported him all along.

"Americans are a resolute people who have risen to every test of our time. Adversity has revealed the character of our country, to the world and to ourselves. America is a strong nation, and honorable in the use of our strength. We exercise power without conquest, and we sacrifice for the liberty of strangers."

New Virginia Sen. Jim Webb’s rebuttal got less praise, particularly his claim that a majority of the military doesn’t support the "way this war is being fought." That’s a narrow enough claim that it might have some truth to it, since I suspect from all the milblogs that I’ve read that the military would, if anything, like to fight harder, eradicate Mookie and his gang, and hit Iran and Syria, as well as Iraq and Afghanistan. But not, as Webb implied, that they’d sooner abandon Iraq.

Steve Green, the Vodkapundit who is struggling with what might be Graves Disease, concluded after live-blogging Bush’s effort that about all that seventh-year presidents have left to accomplish is foreigh policy. That would be a lot for Bush who staked his all on it after 9/11. Hopefully he will follow through on his words this time, and we’ll finally have a resolution to the trouble Iran and Syria are fomenting in Iraq and Lebanon, possibly through military action, or whatever it takes. We can hope so, anyway.

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Posted in Afghanistan, Iraq, The War, Troops

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An inside job

Posted on January 23, 2007 | Comments Off on An inside job

Omar at Iraq the Model thinks the killings of those five American troops in Karbala last Saturday was not the usual insurgent or sectarian violence but more likely an inside job engineered by Iran with the cooperation of the local Iraqi police.

"…this was not just a brazen attack by some militia or terrorists; behind this is a message and a threat from Iran and its surrogates…"

If that proves to be true–and American troops are interrogating everyone involved–there might soon be some use for the strike fighters of those two carrier groups soon to be in the Persian Gulf.

Ben of Mesopotamia turns out to have known one of the slain and adds a bit of intel that backs Omar: "…my friend Captain Brian Freeman was killed in Karbala. (I don’t know if his family has been briefed on the details, so for now it suffices to say that Brian and four other members of his Civil Affairs team were killed by militia members, likely Jaish al Mahdi trained in Iran)."

UPDATE  This Jan. 26 AP story, more careful than much of their Iraq reporting, is about the latest the military knows and is willing to disclose about the incident, in which Freeman died first and four others were abducted before being slain. Includes the unconfirmed idea that one of the attackers was a blonde. 

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