Iraq and Afghanistan Escalating

Wonderful thesis, John. Not all pro-war bloggers ignore the bad news though that is a misperception.

Hell, if you read one thing today...

Got my blood boiling Noons nice job.

What bad news. The only people dying in big numbers are the locals.

In all seriousness, Iraq is too hot for AQ. They have moved focus to Afghanistan. The antagnonists in Iraq are the Sunnis (ansar al_Sunna) and the Shiites (Mahdi Militia). We, the US can eliminate them if unleashed. But the Iraqi government calls the shots now.

The Iraqi government acts like a force governor on US Forces. We cannot attack any longer. We can only react. As long as this policy is in place, things will get worse.

Uh, where in the article did it say 62 "INNOCENT" Iraqis? How do you know that 10 or 15 or 20 or more weren't Muqtada al-Sadr men, or SCIRI Badr Brigade, or Sunni insurgents, or Baathists?

Lt. Fishman - It doesn't matter that they were innocent or not. For the project of creating an Iraq that is free and stable, the death of a guilty guy by freelancers who dump the body is objectively a loss. There ought to be a mechanism at this point for someone to say "I killed a bad guy" get run through an objective investigation, and get a small reward for helping out (doesn't have to be monetary). We recognize the difference here between citizen defense which goes through that process and vigilantism that doesn't. It's no different in Iraq.

Instapundit linked.

Civilian here - When Yon says "we must get serious", who is he referencing that lacks seriousness? Civilian leaders? Military leaders?

We can't blame the press forever, especially when the only good news out of Iraq and Afghanistan is from mil blogs and is about new weapons and heroic deaths.

Anonymous Civilian, why the focus on "leaders"?

I read Yon's "we" as "we, the country, the citzenry, the polity".

It's very difficult for a leader to be elected in America - sychophants-to-polls have a much easier time of it. If anyone expects our so-called leaders to get serious about anything, first the public has to get serious about it.

that's Clausowitz, right Sizer?

I agree with SeeMonk; This is appears to be the locals killing locals in Iraq, and frankly, that's for the Iraqis to work out. A lot more people are going to die there before it settles down. Period. There's decades of pay-back that is simply going to occur.

In AF, the taliban are pretty obviously trying a new tack, since NATO took over the ground war in the south. All the fighting so far this year has been a disaster for the Taliban, and I posit that the suicide bombings are symptomatic of them getting desperate.

The capitulation of the Pakis obviously hasn't helped, but again, frankly, more people are going to have to be killed there as well before it settles down.

"Until recently suicide bombings were unknown in Afghanistan."

Why? Maybe its because it works so well. The strategy is violence for headlines. The principle is to attack a nation's resolve through its media. And our media has bent over backwards to help this transparent strategy succeed. Ever hear of a war where every single casualty generates a headline? Or every single act of violence? Of course if the whole point was to get a headline, then this phenomenon becomes a reinforcement for more violence. Using Iraq as a model, the terrorists figured out (how could they miss it) that all they need is to remain in being, and to cause a few bombings and violent acts, and maybe get real lucky and cause a casualty, and our media and its ancillaries will send up the white flag. Its a war. People die. A hard point, but better than going into crisis mode everytime our enemies try to exploit our weakness so crudely. There is a fine line between ignoring bad news and allowing our enemies, through a media-centered strategy, to too easily distort our perception of events. I would be more comfortable dealing with so-called bad news if our media hadn't spent these years so enthusiastically reporting "bad news" that our enemies began to see our own media as an asset and ally.

Um, let me get this straight. Success is measured by US soldiers preventing our competing enemies from killing each other, so that we can then redouble US efforts to fight these same enemies ourselves independently?

Hey, Sun Tzu, maybe the problem is with your definition of success?

Excellent point, ian... In what other war, even with international communications possible as they have been since at least the early 1900s, would I have heard about a "battle" in which one person (much less the instigator himself!) was killed? And if it were on an actual battlefield, is there any likelihood that I'd hear about it today, even with a 24-hour news cycle to fill?

The idea that suicide bombing is more newsworthy than other tactics arises, I presume, because the willingness to die-by-design suggests a greater commitment on the part of the dead terrorist than we demonstrate by trying not to die but to win. Why? Is it the whole "asymmetric warfare" thing? Our desire to root for the "underdog"?

And if so, how do we deceive ourselves that someone who blows himself up outside an orphanage is a worthy "underdog"? Good Lord.

"What is worth fighting for?" is not a question most Americans are practiced at answering. Most previously settled for clichés. "Society" is the answer. It lies underneath the multiplicity and diversity of true cultures.

The test of "friend or foe" is whether someone believes that peaceful process of change is the best way advance civilization and that reciprocity -- you don't do to others what you don't want done to you -- is important. Those two things are the underpinnings of society and worth fighting for.

I don't know one Democrat who can see it, explain it, or believe it.

misizer
okay fine, good answer.

I believe the public is still ready to be led and to be serious about victory, but the President, at least, needs to do some leading.

A week-long flurry of speeches every six months when his polls drop to 40%, and then back to the 25 mile bike rides and prayer meetings and 10:00pm bedtime is not good enough. He seems to just disappear for weeks on end.

He's the guy civilians look to, for better or worse, to convince us these wars should go on.

John says that the 62 bodies found are a reminder of the pure evil we are fighting. This begs a very important question: WHO are we fighting? SeeMonk points out that it is the Sunni and the Shiite militias who are the antagonists. They are at war with each other. Are we fighting them both and are they both fighting us, or are we trying to act as a peacemaker between the two? Can anyone define the enemy and the mission at this juncture?

By the way - Ian, the point of suicide bombings is to destabilize, and it has been a very successful tactic in Iraq because it is difficult to defend against, regardless of media coverage. Blaming the media for suicide bombings just isn't helpful.

John,
I assume you are a commissioned officer in the armed forces from reading your bio. Have you or are you willing to serve in Iraq/Afghanistan to take the fight to the enemy since things are taking a turn for the worst? Just curious since you were invoking the "greatest generation"...
Tim Bob

Wow, your delusion is Cheneyesque.

Stay the course until we win? What does that mean specifically? (I challenge every one of you to define in detail what that means!) Does it mean instilling in the tribal minds of the Iraqis a notion of republican democracy whereby decisions that affect peoples' lives are made by robed judges and not at the end of a gun barrel?
If so, just exactly do you obtuse and simple-minded war-proponents propose doing that? Using brainwashing techniques on the entirety of the Iraqi population? Labotomizing them?

You people are the ignorant Americans. Yes, you have the power now. You have the President, the Congress and the Supreme Court in your corner, and you've botched things horribly. That's what ignorant people do. You're like the stupid bully in the neighborhood who gets his dander up and decides he's gonna "make things right". Naturally, he makes things far worse. . . because he is ignorant and obtuse.

Iraq was better off under Saddam than under Bush. That's quite obvious. Saddam knew Iraq a whole lot better than Bush ever will. When we invaded Iraq, Bush didn't even know that there were Shia and Sunni groups in Iraq. The Iraqs were better off under Saddam than they are under Bush. There were fewer deaths. Fewer beheadings. More electricity. More jobs. More money. More food. More peace of mind. More potable water. Perhaps the few people who live in the 3 square miles of the Green Zone who are financed by American tax dollars have a decent life... but for 99% of Iraqis, they were clearly better off under Saddam, horrible as it was!

The fact is that we invaded Iraq for its oil. You morons have been convinced by the bloviators (Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Savage, etc)
that such a concept is laughable.
They don't explain why we haven't invaded places like N. Korea, Iran, Myanmar, Equitorial Guinea, Malawi, Burundi, Guyana, Cuba, etc. etc. where people live under equally detestable conditions and where their leaders are also attempting to build WMDs. Iraq has HUGE oil reserves. Bush is an oilman. Cheney is an oilman. Rice is an oilwoman (on the Board of Directors for Chevron for years and years), etc. Rumsfeld
begged Saddam to let his company build an oil pipeline in Iraq back in the 1980s.
But because you people don't pay attention of salient facts, none of this means anything to you. You love war. You love bullying (because you're so fearful and insecure). You are ignorant. So, naturally you love Bush.
You're sick and tired of the smart people running things (like Clinton) . . . so you exert yourselves in the voting booths and you elect people as dumb and as incapable as you are. This is cyclical. Ever 50 years or so, the ignorant assert themselves, make a basket-case out of everything, and then after done their inestimable damage, they fade off into oblivion so that the smart people can rebuild.

You people don't understand the most elemental aspects of human nature. That's what makes you do obtuse and so incompetent when dealing with other people, other cultures unlike yourselves.

Killing the bad guys? You know, during the Revolutionary War the AMerican minutemen were considered the bad guys by the Brits.
(that's because American independence was seen as treasonous).

During WWII killing Americans was seen as killing the "bad guys" because the Americans were seen by GERMAN forces as interlopers in the political re-alignment of the European continent.

We invaded a sovereign country to gain control of their oil. Remember, all Iraqi oil was being pumped by Russian and French firms prior to the invasion. Since then, the AMerican stooge Al-Jaafari signed over all of Iraqi oil production to Condaleeza Rice's oil company (CHEVRON) and to Exxon-Mobil. We've been responsible for such destabilization in the country that more than 180,000 innocent Iraqis have been killed (many brutally). We've unleashed White Phosphorous on the Iraqi population --mostly in Fallujah where elderly incapacitated residents were left to die from the skin-melting chemical. We've murdered and raped innocent Iraqis. We're building 14 permanent army bases to secure the oil fields. We've destabilized the country to the point of civil war. Both we and the Brits had our soldiers captured dressed as Arabs and carrying bombs near mosques. Our leadership lied us into the war creating fake "evidence" that Saddam had WMDs! Why would our oilmen in the White House (Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld) want to invade Iraq? Hmmm.. even the ignorant people should be able to figure that one out. They intimated at every turn that Saddam was responsible for 9/11 --but when asked directly Bush said he had nothing to do with 9/11. They lied about Pat Tillman's death. They lied about Jessica Lynch. They lied about the insurgency being in the "last throes". They lied about the number of civilian casualties by not counting people killed in bomb blasts --the lie was in telling the public that the amount of violence had decreased when in fact it had increased substantially. And they especially lied about the deaths of journalists at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad and at the headquarters for AL-Arabya. Those deaths were unequivocal and obvious war crimes for which Rumsfeld should be tried. Tarek Ayoub was a cameraman standing on the top of the AL-Arabya offices in Baghdad when a air-to-surface missle fired from an American helicopter killed him. At the same time American tanks opened up on the Palestine Hotel --hitting the exact floors where journalists were staying. A Spaniard and a Ukranian journalist were killed.

But morons love to believe these inveterate liars.

Wouldn't life be better if Saddam was still around to keep all the his Muslim and the Iranian Muslim crazies in check?

Y'all told us Iraqis would welcome us with open arms. If y'all had been honest we would either have (1) anted up what it was going to take from the very outset as we did in The Big One, or (2) told y'all to go pound sand. So y'all either (1) lied or (2) were utter fools. I don't know which is worse.

Now we are there, it has all gone tits up. Iraq, a pismire country if there ever was one, has taken more time to subdue than the entire Nazi German freakin' empire because y'all have sent our soldiers out to kiss babies, weep-n-cuddle wounded children and, in general, playing liberal social worker instead of fighting war, kicking @ss and taking names.

And now you want us to "do more", to "recommit" to Iraq. Y'all sound for all the world like some damn liberal social worker who has no idea how to get ghetto dwellers to act right and stop killing each other but just can't help trotting out the same mindless government programs and spending more taxpayer money. Y'all want us to fund yet another round of "midnight basketball" with social worker soldiers in Iraq because it just HAS to work this time!

Boys, conservatives are reality-based. We don't give even more money to losers to p!ss away. We pushed for welfare reform in 1996. We can push for Iraq reform 2006.

So what is your new plan and how is it different than the last plan an the one before that, and are you willing to admit (just for STARTERS) that you f*cked up royally?

At a minimum, dropping the neocon denial and starry-eyed Wilsonian liberal save-the-world social worker attitude is the first step to recovering our respect and faith.

One more thing. That Southern Border? The one your boy Gorgeous George Jr. insists on keeping wide open? As long as you insist in your neocon one-worlder liberalism that it stay wide open IN WARTIME, don't EVEN expect sane Americans to believe there is some Titanic-War-Of-All-Humanity going on.

Selah.