Category Archives: The War

Missing Mark

Posted on September 14, 2007 | Comments Off on Missing Mark

Mark in Mexico seems to have stopped blogging. Without any explanation, which is odd. We do hope he’s okay. Could certainly use his analysis of the Pemex bombings. It looks like homegrown terrorism is taking root in Old Mexico, in addition to the Narco wars. Great time to have a porous southern border, eh? If you root around at Mark’s link, don’t click on any of the highlighted spam links in the comments section, or you’ll catch a virus or three.

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Posted in South of the Border, The War

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The urge to surge

Posted on September 14, 2007 | Comments Off on The urge to surge

The full text of Bush’s speech, via Instapundit. I read it but I didn’t watch it. I still like his resolve, indeed, I’m grateful for it. But I long ago despaired of W as a communicator. Let’s hope and pray our next president is much better at it, whichever side wins. We need it, I think.

MORE: VDH on the speech: "So the country looks to Iraq and our maverick General Sherman outside Atlanta, where the battlefield, as it always does, will sort out the politics."

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Posted in The War, Troops

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The battle of the sources

Posted on September 14, 2007 | Comments Off on The battle of the sources

Anonymous ones, that is. I don’t know what to make of it when little media and big media square off with their anonymous sources, and new media picks up little media’s charges without scrutiny. Big media, of course, uses anonymous sources all the time. This time the small, conservative American Spectator magazine is claiming two unidentified sources to support its assertion that the NYTimes gave the leftist MoveOn group special treatment in its purchase of a full-page display ad calling Gen. Patraeus a "Betray Us" traitor. The newspaper denies it. The first anonymous AS source, characterized as "a MoveOn organizer," says the group got a $100,000 discount for the ad. The second unidentified source, called "a former NYTimes ad staffer," says a coalition of conservative Pro-Life groups were turned away for any ad, let alone a discounted one. The magazine also adds, without any attribution, that Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were similarly turned away before the 2004 presidential election. Instapundit and other conservative blogs have picked up the Spectator’s charges without qualification, though Instapundit did insert the word "apparently" in its item about it. The conservative NYPost picks up the story, but also relies on anonymous sources. What is the truth? Your guess is as good as mine. To me, the use of anonymous sources makes it hard to sort it out, whichever media claims to have it.

MORE: However much MoveOn paid, Fred says the ad was reprehensible. Of course it was.

UPDATE: Rudy raised a big enough stink about the ad that he’s getting the same rate to run his own defending Petraeus. 

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Posted in Iraq, Scribbles, The War, Troops

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The insurgent advantage

Posted on September 13, 2007 | Comments Off on The insurgent advantage

"It is often said that had the weeks in the hedgerows after D-Day (June to late July 1944) or the Battle of the Bulge (December 1944 to January 1945) been televised each hour on CNN or Fox—with real-time email and cell phone communications with beleaguered soldiers in the field—we would never have won either battle."

–Military historian and prolific military author Victor Davis Hanson on the new face of Western war.

MORE: Underscoring Hanson, there’s this bad news. Whatever the good Gen. Petraeus had to say, and what I saw sounded like realism to me (insurgencies, as he wrote in the Army’s new manual, take a decade or more to defeat), the Iraqis apparently aren’t impressed with the surge. Not that the campaign has ever been entirely for them, mind you. Or that I would trust a BBC poll in the first place, but it’s worth considering.

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Posted in The War, Troops

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The IDF gets its wings back

Posted on September 12, 2007 | Comments Off on The IDF gets its wings back

Just in time for the Jewish new year, a little reminder for Iran and Hezbollah that Syria might not be a safe transit point for North Korean or other weapons into Lebanon and Israel. More analysis from The Belmont Club, and Snoopy the Goon in Israel. At the very least, it demonstrates that Syria’s new Russian air defenses aren’t up to snuff.

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Posted in Israel, The War, Troops

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Stand and never yield

Posted on September 11, 2007 | Comments Off on Stand and never yield

When about thirty members of my OCS class returned to Fort Benning in 2003, for the first time since our graduation in 1968, there was an OCS Association ceremony in the new OCS complex dedicating a newly-planted tree to former Army colonel and Vietnam veteran Rick Rescorla. He had died saving 2,700 people at the World Trade Center on 9/11. The speaker, a friend of his, broke down in the middle of his talk. Then he wiped away his tears and continued. Today there’s a statue of Rescorla at Fort Benning, and a campaign to get him a posthumous Medal of Freedom. Story and petition here. Profile of Rescorla (and picture of the statue at the bottom) here.

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Posted in The War

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Image

Never forget

falling_man.jpg

3 Comments

Posted on September 11, 2007 in Blogosphere, The War

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