"Phenomenal," Indeed
By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in Iraq | The Surge | War — Comments (4) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Events like the Anbar Awakening appear to have helped lead to a larger geopolitical awakening concerning the significant and dramatic improvements in Iraq:
Violence in Iraq has fallen at a rate that has surprised military commanders and even one of the architects of the "surge" that boosted US troop numbers in the country this year, according to figures gathered by the US.
The figures show the numbers of suicide attacks, roadside bombings, mortar and other attacks on US forces and on the Iraqi population have more than halved since 30,000 extra troops in June.
The military attributes the decline to the surge, the spread of local ceasefire deals across Iraq, a ceasefire by radical Shia militias and an improvement in the Iraqi security forces.
Jack Keane, the former army general who helped persuade George W. Bush, US president, to increase troop numbers in Iraq, said the decrease in violence was "phenomenal" and had occurred far faster than he had expected.
"When you understand you are dealing with the complexity of a counter-insurgency operation which can take years to resolve, to have this dramatic a success in a short period of time, it's unprecedented," he said.
One certainly hopes that this truly phenomenal development leads the news broadcasts as often as the less-phenomenal setbacks did. Again, no one says that all challenges have been resolved in Iraq--the article itself is careful not to claim that. But the signs of success and improvement can no longer be ignored.
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"Phenomenal," Indeed 4 Comments (0 topical, 4 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
...too much preening just yet. These Al Qaeda guys are smart, too smart, perhaps. They are certainly smarter than Harry Reid, San Fran Nan, or the Massachussetts version of the Bobsey Twins, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry.
There's an old phrase we used to hear at the age of three or four, way back when, about catching more flies with honey than with vinegar, and I'm sure Ahmadinejad has heard a Persian version of the same verse. Right now, he and the rest of his infidel murdering brethren have decided to let things cool down in the hope that the American people, in their overwhelming desire to avoid war at any cost, will elect a new Democratic Party controlled government that will bring the World Wide Caliphate leagues closer to fruition.
If Mahmoud had ever had the opportunity to peruse a historical record of the airwar over Europe, 1939 to 1945, he could have skipped the childhood verses and still learned the same facts, facts that Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris and Hermann Goering had to learn the hard way. Random, uncoordinated attacks on a nation's heartland only stiffen that nations resistance against an aggressor. British resistance stiffened markedly after the bombings of Coventry and London. Germany experienced the same increase in its people's resistance to the allies, despite around the clock bombing by both the Brits and the Americans. The Japanese experienced the same affect. Only when the Americans persisted in their efforts against the Japanese, in some accounts a nation of only some twenty nine million at the time, and did some serious annihilation, did that nation succumb. 4,000 at Tarawa, 20,000 on Saipan, 17,000 on Guam, 10,000 on Pelieliu, 100,000 in the Phillipines, 20,000 on Iwo Jima, 100,000 on Okinawa, 100,000 in Tokyo, March 1945, 78,000 in Hiroshima, 38,000 in Nagasaki. Omitted are the Japanese Naval and air losses, the Merchant Marine losses and the losses at home from starvation and exposure, and the numerous other American assaults on other military bastions and the air raids on Japanese cities and industries. The Japanese were short of food and fuel at home. Shelter from the elements in the homeland was at a premium. Hirohito, unaware that those last bombs were the two and only two American bombs of that type, thought he was staring at the imminent extinction of the Japanese people. The newly opened Russian offensive against Japan was an additional impetus to surrender.
With Al Qaeda, you have a movement composed of members willing to strap an explosive belt onto thir own one year old infant in order to kill just one single individual. How much more would they do to kill an entire American City.
No, what you have in Iraq today, is just a mid east, Islamic version of the 'Sitzkrieg' or the "phony war' in Europe that occurred between the fall of Poland in the autumn of 1939 and Rommel's and Guderian's combined dash through the Ardennes in the spring of 1940 that resulted in the capitulation of the rest of the western European Continent, except Spain, Portugal and England.
Back in my Vietnam incarnation, US S-2 in Disneyland West would hear of deals made between VC and ARVN concerning various "safe-zones" or neutral targets such as dams or electricity stations---clandestine deals that got so pervasive that finally the North V's got angry and, when the US Dem Congress pulled funding in '74-75, decided on an outright invasion---knowing that their Fifth Column in the USA would keep American funding or other aid from overturning the takeover plans. They were right and after the conquest, VC senior operatives had little or nothing to say about the post-war situation. They had compromised too much for the tough-guy Northerners.
Not that this fits Iraq exactly, but my hunch is that the interior insurgency has been whittled back by such secret deals and that what is left are crime rings and AQ dead-enders. Not enough to sustain the level of mayhem necessary to get us out.
Though they are depending on Dingy Harry, San Fran Nan and the two treasonous Bobbsey boys from MA to pull their chestnuts out of the fire---plus the ultra-left and their Dem candidate succubuses [succubi?] who will sell or at least rent out their souls for a nickel.
Too bad we don't have real men with stones in the Repub party to call the Dem left what it is---another Fifth Column.
...exactly that, a WWII style fifth column. The last America first Democrats were JFK, HST, and FDR. As Zell Miller put it "I didn't leave my party, my party left me." His party sold out and succumbed to the followers of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin in the 1960's. Some members just noticed it earlier than others.
Hillary's remarks in San Francisco during the summer of the 2004 campaign, when queried by an sycophant reporter as to what her financial plan would be if she were running, "We're going to take what you have away from you and put it where it will do some good!" would have caused enormous angst among traditional Democratic voters fifty years ago. Today not a flutter. "To each according to his need" is the apparent game plan.
The days of the game going to the best and the brightest in America have past. Mediocrity is now the norm, political correctness is the language.
Dwight D Eisenhower resisted enormous pressure to sack General George S Patton during the course of WWII. Eisenhower knew, despite Patton's reputation as a very loose cannon, that Patton was the best field commander he had, that the war was still not won, and that there was still a good chance he, Eisenhower, could end up swinging by the neck at the end of a piece of German hemp. That was the US that was, the US that knew how to win a war.
It's been a long, dark passage down from the heights of greatness through the bowels of the McNamaras, the McGoverns, the Carters, the Kerrys, the Clintons, the Deans, and the would-bes, Obama, Biden, Kucinich and Dodd, since then. Much of the keys to America's greatness has been lost in transit.
nt