captured = intel. We and the IA both want to roll up the whole network. Every one of these guys who tells the IA where the weapons are, the bosses are, or the hideouts are, helps the IA clean house faster. This is still happening down here in the South. The JAM want to come back, and the IA have been capturing them…

I’m not suggesting war crimes here, I’m just saying that the Iraqis need to be extremely aggressive in how they engage these animals.

The only thing holding us back is YOU!

If you don’t think they know that, and are proud of it, you are mistaken. The leftist loves a different America than you or I, and if America is not like that, he wants ours to fail, and fail tragically, so that it is discredited and he and his friends can get on with the project of making it what they want.

The other mistake is thinking they care what we want, or what our values are. They do not. The mask that slipped from Obama’s smiling face in SF was the mask of “caring”. The leftist is innately a contradiction: he lectures unceasingly about caring, but in secret is utterly uninterested and uncaring about anyone or anything that does not further his agenda.

If we left this infection alone we may lose more than a limb.

Sonosam

That has to be the smartest thing ever heard! Just look at Somalia and Lebanon. Lossons learned. Why can’t libs see this? But yet they want us to get involved in Darfur, just like Mogadishu. Let us finish the fight, for the love of God! Or for the love of your mom if you’re an atheist. Or for the love of Gov’t if you’re a liberal. Let us win! The only thing holding us back is YOU!

Steve, I fully understand what you feel, but I feel strongly that the sacrifices that many have suffered are so that our future generation wont. Or at least not to this degree.

If we left this infection alone we may lose more than a limb.

Every time – ever damned time – I see photos of the Iraqi children running to our soldiers for candy or to have their pictures taken, I think of an American child who lost their father over there. Or mother.

It kills me.

Michael Totten always has a bunch of photos of Iraqi children laughing.

Talk about giving someone mixed feelings.

SteveMG on May 17, 2008 at 9:21 PM

Are kids not supposed to laugh or are they not supposed to like candy?

Also, how many of the kids in Iraq lost their fathers or mothers to terrorist bombings?

Shame on those elected officials and my own fellow citizens who ever doubted (and sometimes even rooted for a defeat) our fine military forces and our Iraqi allies. Yeah, it was rough for a while. We f’ed up quite a bit between 2004-2006 but as Michael Yon writes about in his book, we got a second chance and we have made quite a bit of progress with that chance though we still need more troops according to Yon but it seems the Iraqis stepped up to fill that bill.

Same Army, different day.

Limerick on May 17, 2008 at 10:44 PM

“Guys like Yingling, Nagl and McMaster are the canaries in the coal mine of Army reform,” the retired two-star general I spoke with told me. “Will they get promoted to general? If they do, that’s a sign that real change is happening. If they don’t, that’s a sign that the traditional culture still rules.”

MB4 on May 17, 2008 at 9:19 PM

Thanks for the link. I sent it up the line (although I know Bandit Troop/Dragon Squadron already are aware of it).

Same crap that the U.S. military has been dealing with for 233 years. They always reach for the same solution after the boni screw up the command positions. From Civil War generals, to WWII sub skippers, to fly too high squadron commanders…..the doers finally get permission to pass over the creme for the grit.

All I can add is that I know the men in Bandit well and all that served with McMaster would walk across Olaf’s Lake of Fire for the man.

Same Army, different day.

Hopefully Petraeus will straighten out the Army’s promotion board.

MB4 on May 17, 2008 at 9:19 PM

I have faith that he will MB4. If I recall there are about 100 names on Petraeus’s list for promotion.

i don’t care how much ware has cavorted with our troops he is filth.

Hopefully soon US troops can come home because the Job is Done!

Amen.

Drinks for everyone on me in favor of this.

Every time – ever damned time – I see photos of the Iraqi children running to our soldiers for candy or to have their pictures taken, I think of an American child who lost their father over there. Or mother.

It kills me.

Michael Totten always has a bunch of photos of Iraqi children laughing.

Talk about giving someone mixed feelings.

McMaster and the 3rd ACR

Yep, Limerick, as I recall he is on Petraeus’ list for promotion.

Texas Gal on May 17, 2008 at 7:42 PM

Challenging the Generals

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.”

Hopefully Petraeus will straighten out the Army’s promotion board.

What do you suppose Pelosi was doing over there? She’s trying to see how see can help THE TERRORISTS!

Pelosi, “come al Quida please hang on just a few more months. Blow up a few hundred more innocent Iraqis, a few more children and when Obama wins he will pull the troops out and give you your hard earned reward. Iraq and all its’ riches”

If there is progress being made, we pull out, and then what we all know will happen happens, whomever ordered the pullout will be blamed.

A victory here could spell the end of AQI and deliver a bitter defeat to Osama bin Laden.

No, it won’t be a bitter defeat. Iraq is a mere abstraction to bin Laden. Bin Laden needs a real bitter defeat of the historical sort, like when you execute his favorite child in front of him.

I haven’t read Bellavia’s book, but with your write up it will be on my nightstand tomorrow.

Limerick on May 17, 2008 at 7:35 PM

Even apart from the odd cameo by Mr. Ware, HOUSE TO HOUSE is a great but very gritty read, as I recall even harsher than the Marine’s view of Fallujah that you can get in WE WERE ONE.

Thanks, by the way, to both you and your son.

McMaster and the 3rd ACR

Yep, Limerick, as I recall he is on Petraeus’ list for promotion.

So much for freedom of the press!

We are responsible for the screw up there.

Oh really now. You’re supposed to blame the British. Toe the line whydoncha.

CK MacLeod on May 17, 2008 at 7:25 PM

I haven’t read Bellavia’s book, but with your write up it will be on my nightstand tomorrow.

My post, I admit, violates the ‘best practices’ rule (although I am no journalist obviously). Ware tailed my son around for several days during the Tal Afar operation. My son’s op-ed on Michael Ware would be a bit harsher then my own. Ancedotal, I know, but I have to weigh my boy’s opinion pretty heavily.

Time magazine reporter Michael Ware stabbed the 3rd ACR in the back during his imbed in the operation. After living with the 3rd ACR for three weeks, giving them a well done and a promise to provide a fair write up, he went back to Time Magazine and wrote his piece on the futility of war.

Michael Ware is a very strange case. In HOUSE TO HOUSE, David Bellavia’s first person account of the fighting in Fallujah, Ware plays a prominent role – literally a few steps behind Bellavia during the climactic, most dangerous actions. Ware clearly seems to be a danger junkie, very skilled at earning the trust and respect of soldiers, apparently on both sides. I’ve also seen and heard various stories about Ware’s eccentricities – his drinking, his other violation of “best practices” for a journalist. Still, when you read how someone like Bellavia – a true hero in my opinion – describes Ware, it’s hard to despise him. Though a lot of his reporting has come across as defeatist and mouth-droppingly opinionated, I’ve come to think of it in the same way you’d react to a soldier’s grousing, while also excusing the tendency among many fighters to identify with their immediate counterparts, the enemy, sometimes even while at the same time hating them.

Over the last year or so when I’ve happened to catch Ware’s reports, he’s still been pushing an Iran-as-puppetmaster theme, but he’s also witheringly derided the positions of those who supported a quick withdrawal in seeming full denial of the likely disastrous effects.