It shouldn’t have surprised you that Hillary etal. aren’t interested in a hasty retreat. It’s all politics, they’re already pushing the anti war crowd out towards the margins if not the wilderness in anticipation of winning the White House. Their only purpose was to punish Bush.

It’s kind of sad when the most important issue in deciding how a country will advance is the religion of the Prime Minister.

The issue isn’t his religious denomination but the fact that he’s a genuine secularist which I presume you’d be in favour of.

“West Point cadets are obligated to stay in the Army for five years after graduating. In a typical year, about a quarter to a third of them decide not to sign on for another term. But last year, when the 905 officers from the class of 2001 had to make their choice to stay or leave, 44 percent quit the Army. It was the service’s highest loss rate in three decades.”

“An hour after General Cody’s talk at Fort Knox, several captains met to discuss the issue over beers. Capt. Garrett Cathcart, who has served in Iraq as a platoon leader, said: “The culture of the Army is to accomplish the mission, no matter what. That’s a good thing.” Matt Wignall, who was the first captain to ask General Cody about the Yingling article, agreed that a mission-oriented culture was “a good thing, but it can be dangerous.” He added: “It is so rare to hear someone in the Army say, ‘No, I can’t do that.’ But sometimes it takes courage to say, ‘I don’t have the capability.’ ” Before the Iraq war, when Rumsfeld overrode the initial plans of the senior officers, “somebody should have put his foot down,” Wignall said.”

“Yingling’s commander at Tal Afar, H. R. McMaster, documented a similar crisis in the case of the Vietnam War. Twenty years after the war, McMaster wrote a doctoral dissertation that he turned into a book called “Dereliction of Duty.” It concluded that the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the 1960s betrayed their professional obligations by failing to provide unvarnished military advice to President Lyndon B. Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as they plunged into the Southeast Asian quagmire. When McMaster’s book was published in 1997, Gen. Hugh Shelton, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs, ordered all commanders to read it — and to express disagreements to their superiors, even at personal risk. Since then, “Dereliction of Duty” has been recommended reading for Army officers.

Yet before the start of the Iraq war and during the early stages of the fighting, the Joint Chiefs once again fell silent. Justin Rosenbaum, the captain at Fort Knox who asked General Cody whether any generals would be held accountable for the failures in Iraq, said he was disturbed by this parallel between the two wars. “We’ve read the McMaster book,” he said. “It’s startling that we’re repeating the same mistakes.”

McMaster’s own fate has reinforced these apprehensions. President Bush has singled out McMaster’s campaign at Tal Afar as a model of successful strategy. Gen. David Petraeus, now commander of United States forces in Iraq, frequently consults with McMaster in planning his broader counterinsurgency campaign. Yet the Army’s promotion board — the panel of generals that selects which few dozen colonels advance to the rank of brigadier general — has passed over McMaster two years in a row.

McMaster’s nonpromotion has not been widely reported, yet every officer I spoke with knew about it and had pondered its implications. One colonel, who asked not to be identified because he didn’t want to risk his own ambitions, said: “Everyone studies the brigadier-general promotion list like tarot cards — who makes it, who doesn’t. It communicates what qualities are valued and not valued.”

Pure nonsense.

Allawi’s ship has sailed.

The best we can do is keep killing jihad-leaning troublemakers and pressuring the Iraqis to shape up.

Nothing much good has come out of Islam.

The “Arabic” numerals are from India, algebra is Greek and Hindu, their philosophical “advances” were just retreads of commentary on Aristotle’s texts, and their few good medical ideas – like vaccination- have been superceded for centuries now.

They bow well, beat their women efficiently, stone adulterers effectively, and blow things up daily, but as far as seeing how anything hopeful can be expected to rise from a pervasive, unable-to-be-criticized theocratic tyranny, I’m a skeptic.

Kill jihadis, weaken Islam, keep our military strong.

Anyone else hear him toss in that Insh Allah towards the end of the clip?

He was on the ballot, or his list was. They (he and his political allies) got 25 seats, out of 275 total, roughly proportional to their share of the popular vote.

That was before Iraq experienced Maliki

Now that the political differences in Iraq appear to be working themselves out will the Democrats flip-flop back to complaining about military progress? Iraq’s top Shi’ite, Sunni Arab and Kurdish political leaders announced on Sunday they had reached…

Didn’t Allawi get caught with his hands in the cookie jar?

You may be thinking of Chalabi – whose hands were said to have appeared in all manner of jar, though I sure don’t claim to know the truth…