Tag Archives: Iraq

Riding with America’s team

Michael Totten brings his unique eye to reporting from the center of the surge:

"The 82nd Airborne Division is famous for being ready to roll within 24 hours of call up, so they were sent first. The surge started with these guys. Its progress here is therefore more measurable than it is anywhere else."

I especially like these lines from an earlier report, the sort thing you would never see in the MSM because it diminishes the favored narrative, not to mention the club:

"You’d think explosions and gunfire define Iraq if you look at this country from far away on the news. They do not. The media is a total distortion machine. Certain areas are still extremely violent, but the country as a whole is defined by heat, not war, at least in the summer."

Start here, then click on Home Page and start from the top. Then find the link to give him some money, so this stuff keeps coming.

The damaged Iraq veteran

Sound familiar? Try "the damaged Vietnam veteran." Hollywood is so predictably awful these days. The Iraq version will be the theme of the newest Hollywood anti-war movie, "Stop Loss," according to the Drudge Report. Well, really, what can you expect from the land of a thousand cokeheads and Scientologists? Patriotism? Belief in the country? Not hardly. Though, as Drudge points out, their predecessors had the courtesy to wait until World War II and the Vietnam war were over before slandering their veterans. Some courtesy. Cretins.

Texas vs Iraq

I keep reading that Iraq, variously, is either as big as Texas, twice as big, or half again as big. That didn’t seem right, so I searched the Web. That didn’t help much as I kept running into similar comparisons–all to the effect that Iraq is bigger. Finally, I found the National Georgraphic’s site with a square mileage comparison: Iraq, with about 168,000 square miles, is 62 percent the size of Texas, with 268,000 square miles. That’s more like it. Of course, much of Iraq is desert. But, then, so is much of Texas.

Hey, no kidding

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A remark, said a Hillarity mouthpiece, which was "outrageous and dangerous." Dangerous? Sure, just ask Vince Foster. Oh, wait.  

Blog the war, folks

Teflon Don sums up why only chumps rely on the Associated Press these days:

"Michael Yon provides pictures, video, grid coordinates and interviews to verify a mass grave, and the most definite news byte that the Associated Press will print is that mass graves ‘reportably‘ exist in Baqouba? That isn’t even up to the level of the common complaint that the media fails to report good news. That’s failing to report the bad news correctly…Blog the war, folks. It’s the only way you’ll learn anything."

Conversely, if you don’t want to know what’s happening in the war, because it might interfere with your political prejudices, stick with the AP.

Banging on streetlamps

Iraqi women and children using plastic pipe to bang on streetlamps: another small sign the tide may be turning at last.

Democrats campaign for disgrace

Military historian and classicist Victor Davis Hanson, whose fascinating "Ripples of Battle," I’m reading of late, sums up the history-making the Dems in Congress, and their MSM buds, seem hellbent to accomplish:

"Leaving Iraq with the enemy in control of the battle space would be the first time in our nation’s history that a US military army group had abandoned an entire battlefield (a Somalia or Beirut were withdrawals of only a few hundred troops)…To do what the New York Times suggests—skedaddle from Iraq now—would destroy the reputation of the US military for a generation."

Not that they would care, apparently. What would they do, I wonder, after Syria takes over Lebanon, and Iran gets the bomb and buys the missiles to deliver it? Send Nancy and Harry over to chat?