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 Greetings! You are reading an article from The Mudville Gazette. To reach the front page, with all the latest news and views, click the logo above or "main" below. Thanks for stopping by! March 3, 2006 Open PostBy GreyhawkA long cold day - the snow that began here has never stopped. There might be nearly a foot of it now. (Read this too.) Here we'll welcome the weekend with a warm fire. Hope your weather's fine. That's weather and sports. What's news? Posted by Greyhawk / March 3, 2006 8:35 PM | Permalink 27 TrackBacksFrom Part I, the "Bottom Line": The F-14 Tomcat was a superior piece of technology that would counter the threat posed by the Soviet Union and her client states. All things have their purpose. Read More Given that, in the latest tape, Gov. Blanco conflates both the “overtopping” and “breaching” of levees, I guess it should not be surprising that the AP reporters don’t realize these don’t mean the same thing, and the hydro-engineering implications of b... Read More Overland High School geography teacher Jay Bennish was put on administrative leave Wednesday while Cherry Creek Schools decide whether or not he crossed the line regarding a district policy that mandates balanced viewpoints in the classroom. During a l... Read More Ahmed: "Muhammed, look! We have so frightened the Americans that they have left this strange box by the roadside!" Muhammed: "It says 'treasure chest'. And what a treasure to get my wife that paperweight she has been asking for, Allah willing!" Ahmed... Read More So, this world geography teacher in Colorado, Jay Bennish, thinks it’s his job to tell his students how shitty of a job the Bush administration is doing and how America is inherently evil. A 16-year-old student named Sean Allen recorded one... Read More I don’t understand what all the fuss is about over this UAE ports thing. Read More Young troops entertaining themselves. Yea, they’re dancing around and just plain acting silly. I’d like to know where they got the thong underwear! ... Read More I'm going to have to settle for another one-post, newer things at the bottom, roundup like I did last night. I'll try to get back to 'normal blogging (as normal as I ever get) sometime soon. Uncle Jimbo Hanson: Will Read More The Minneapolis Star Tribune is looking for soldiers who are willing to be contacted and interviewed for an upcoming story. Specifically, the journalist I spoke with is looking for soldiers who have done more than one tour, or those who are considering... Read More Many should be familiar with the concept of lawyers "dumping" large quantities of paperwork on their opposition in response to requests for documents. The goal is to overwhelm their opponents and delay the discovery of damaging information. Read More Over the past few years since 9/11 there have been many arguments for and against war. There have been even more arguments about how best to honor the service of our troops... Read More
I defy anyone, left right or center, to read this and then ever again compare the US military to Saddam's sadistic regime. Some rooms in the museum don’t have pictures at all. Instead they show the instruments and the methods of torture. ... Read MoreTen years ago, Monica Lewinsky was an unknown. Hillary Clinton made 100K from a $1000.00 bet. Vince Foster was alive. So was Ron Brown. Muslims were being slaughtered in Serbia. Osama Bin Laden was in Sudan. Gasoline cost almost Read More We've all heard of Cindy Sheehan. For a while there, if she sneezed, it was reported everywhere you looked. Maureen Dowd famously claimed that grieving mothers of fallen soldiers have absolute moral authority when they protest the war. So, Maureen, Read More And when they’re done, the transcripts of this “court case” should be published in their entirety. Every statement, every allegation, every argument every refutation, and every single scrap of evidence offered either for or against should be released... Read More Not that this was a surprise, but this was a surprise. I thought that the President might treat India and Pakistan the way my in-laws treat my wife and sister-in-law. They are close enough in age and have basically the same weaponry, so my in-laws ma... Read More Did this appear in the NYTimes or The Davis Enterprise? Nope. DOD reports that the good, and well-heeled, folks of Vail Colorado have opened their very expensive doors to those who have made the ultimate sacrifice in the name of freedom. Read More Those up on World War II history may know about the German Enigma machine. This was a typewriter like machine used to generate encrypted messages. The folks at Britain's Bletchley Park had worked on breaking many of these encrypted messages.There Read More Bill and Hillary Clinton are at odds with one another over the UEA Ports deal. They are becoming the Ma & Pa Kettle of the Democrat Party.This from the NY Post: (Hillary) ADMITS SHE DIDN'T KNOW HE ADVISED PORT... Read More Every so often an elite asshat manages to utter a statement so far removed from reality I almost have to pinch myself in disbelief. When this happens we have a phrase we like to employ around here. Read More WND The American Legion, with 2.7-million members the largest veterans organization in the world, has launched a nationwide grass-roots campaign to support a bill in Congress that would stop the ACLU from receiving taxpayer-paid attorney fees in the ... Read More What are we supposed to do when we hear Daily Kos sullying Tony Blair when completing the distortion begun in this article published by The Independent today, which reports that: "Tony Blair has proclaimed that God will judge whether he was right to se... Read More According to a the New Zealand Herald, Gen Casey has stated he will continue the pay for press operation in Iraq despite Congressional questions. Of course, in our own Country that is how it works as well as you remember Read More Dick Morris in an interview on The O'Reilly Factor about Ex President Bill Clinton's involvement with Dubai via NewsMax: Former President Bill Clinton is up to his eyeballs in dealings with Dubai, his former top political adviser has reveal... Read More Kit & Heidi from Euphoric Reality are hoping to attend the Milbloggers conference In DC this April. Being normal folks they lack what we around here like to call the crazy pimp money. They put a call out on their blog for some blogger donations, so t... Read More Over the past week, many sides have chimed in on the recent talks between Putin's govenment and Hamas. Read More 4 Comments |
November 26, 2010America@war [Greyhawk]
I think anyone who's ever pondered the "comment" option - once only available on blogs and bulletin boards, now ubiquitous on almost any web site - will appreciate this:
The so-called faculty of writing is not so much a faculty of writing as it is a faculty of thinking. When a man says, "I have an idea but I can't express it"; that man hasn't an idea but merely a vague feeling. If a man has a feeling of that kind, and will sit down for a half an hour and persistently try to put into writing what he feels, the probabilities are at least 90 percent that he will either be able to record it, or else realize that he has no idea at all. In either case, he will do himself a benefit. That's wisdom from the past, captured for posterity at the US Naval Institute, shared via the web on the institute's 137th anniversary. From their about page:
"The Naval Institute has three core activities," among them, History and Preservation: The Naval Institute also has recently introduced Americans at War, a living history of Americans at war in their own words and from their own experiences. These 90-second vignettes convey powerful stories of inspiration, pride, and patriotism. Take a look at the collection, and you'll see it's not limited to accounts from those who served on ships at sea, members of the other branches are well-represented. I'm fortunate to have met USNI's Mary Ripley, she's responsible for the institute's oral history program (and she's the daughter of the late John Ripley, whose story is told here). She also deserves much credit for their blog. ("We're not the Navy nor any government agency. Blog and comment freely.") We met at a milblog conference - Mary knew (and I would come to realize) that milbloggers are the 21st-century version of exactly what the US Naval Institute is all about. Once that light bulb came on in my head, I mentioned a vague idea for a project to her - milblogs as the 21st century oral history that they are. "Put that in writing," she said (of course - see first paragraph above!) - and here's part of the result. Shortly after the first tent was pitched by the American military in Iraq a wire was connected to a computer therein, and the internet was available to a generation of Americans at war - many of whom had grown up online. From that point on, at any given moment, somewhere in Iraq a Soldier, Sailor, Airman or Marine was at a keyboard sharing the events of his or her day with the folks back home. While most would simply fire off an email, others took advantage of the (then) relatively new online blogging platforms to post their thoughts and experiences for the entire world to see. The milblog was born - and from that moment to this stories detailing everything from the most mundane aspects of camp life to intense combat action (often described within hours of the event) have been available on the web... And et cetera - but since you're reading this on a milblog, you probably knew that. And you know that milblogs aren't just blogs written by troops at war, that many friends, family members, and supporters likewise documented their story of America at war online in near-real time, as those stories developed. The diversity in membership of that group is broad, the one thing we all have in common is the impulse to make sense of the seemingly senseless, and communicate the tale - for each of us that impulse was strong enough to overcome whatever barriers prevent the vast majority of people from doing the same. Everyone at some point has some vague idea they believe should be shared - we were the people who, from some combination of internal and external urging, found and spent those many half hours persistently trying to write it down. But where will all that be in another 137 years? Or five or ten, for that matter. That's something I've asked myself since at least 2004 - when I wrote this:
Membership in the ghost battalion has grown in the years since, and an ever growing majority of those abandoned-but-still-standing sites are vanishing. Have you checked out Lt Smash's site lately? How about Sgt Hook's? If you're a long-time milblog reader you know the first widely-read milblog from Operation Iraq Freedom and the first widely-read milblog from Afghanistan are both gone from the web. If you're a relative newcomer to this world you may never even have heard of them - or the dozens upon dozens of others who carried forth the standard they set down. If you have a vague notion that something should be done about that, (a notion I've heard expressed more than once...) then you and I and the good folks at the US Naval Institute are in agreement. Preserving the history documented by the milbloggers is just one of the goals of the milblog project, the once-vague idea that we're now making real. And it's a big idea, if I say so myself - too big to explain in one simple blog post, so stand by for more. Likewise, it's too big a task to be accomplished by just one person. So if you're a milblogger (and exactly what is a milblogger? is a topic for much further discussion on its own) I'm asking for your help. All I'll really need is just a little bit (maybe just one or two of those half hours...) of your time, and your willingness to tell the tale. We've already made history, it's time to save it. (More to follow...) Posted 4:02 PM | Permalink |
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The Mudville Gazette is the on-line voice of an American warrior and his wife who stands by him. They prefer to see peaceful change render force of arms unnecessary. Until that day they stand fast with those who struggle for freedom, strike for reason, and pray for a better tomorrow.
 
 
 Furthermore, I will occasionally use satire or parody herein. The bottom line: it's my house. I like having visitors to my house. I hope you are entertained. I fight for your right to free speech, and am thrilled when you exercise said rights here. Comments and e-mails are welcome, but all such communication is to be assumed to be 1)the original work of any who initiate said communication and 2)the property of the Mudville Gazette, with free use granted thereto for publication in electronic or written form. If you do NOT wish to have your message posted, write "CONFIDENTIAL" in the subject line of your email. Original content copyright © 2003 - 2011 by Greyhawk. Fair, not-for-profit use of said material by others is encouraged, as long as acknowledgement and credit is given, to include the url of the original source post. Other arrangements can be made as needed. Contact: greyhawk at mudvillegazette dot com  Tending Distant Far from hearth and home, watching What tales we'll tell When things grim Some distant sunset, vision fading Saluting fallen friends whose names - Greyhawk, Baghdad, December 2004 |
Nothing like a warm fire on a cold day... almost better in some ways than a warm day with no fire ;-)
Blog ON...
Woke up to 18 inches of the white crap this morning. Street not plowed and driveway impassable so getting to observe the first formation was not going to happen today. Was hoping that our luck would continue with the really mild winter to date. Nadda. Just a week ago the snow was all gone and walking the dogs in the woods was reminescent of mid April. Six more VT winters and we are outta here! Keep the fireplace. Ugh.
Send some south... please!
Hey, guys: thought I'd see what your thoughts are on this...
http://presidentaristotle.blogspot.com/2006/03/good-news-from-iraq-hard-facts-for_05.html
Good news from Iraq: hard facts for pessimists
The historic elections of January 2005 can be seen to have produced a fundamental shift in the war in Iraq.
The following statistics are taken mostly from the invaluable monthly Brookings Institute reports.
The Bad News:
1. Daily attacks are up: from 19 in December 2003 to 52 in December 2004 to 75 in December 2005.
2. US military deaths overall have not declined: 486 in 2003; 848 in 2004; 846 in 2005.
3. Multiple fatality bombings are up: from 29 in winter 2004 to 56 in winter 2005 to 92 in winter 2006 (winter calculated as Nov/Dec/Jan).
The Good News:
1. Successful daily attacks are down sharply: from about 25-30% in December of 2004 to about 10% in December of 2005.
2. US wounded are down sharply: The Iraqi insurgency was relatively limited from March 2003 through March 2004. In April 2004 the insurgency gained dramatically in strength with casualties running 323 for that month and peaking at 1397 in November 2004 during the battle of Fallujah. They gone down steadily since then, and in the last four months casualties have dropped from 618 in October 2004 to 259 in January 2006. The casualty figures of 259 for January 2006 are the lowest for any month since the insurgency exploded in April 2004.
3. Iraqi police and military fatalities are down sharply: they ran 109 in January 2005, and the Iraqi armed forces saw their fatalities peak in July of that summer at 304. They have dropped steadily since then to 190 in January 2006.
4. Car bombings have been cut sharply: from 136 in May 2005 to 30 in December 2005.
5. Attacks on Iraqi oil and gas infrastructure are down sharply: from 60 in winter 2005 to 11 in winter 2006 (Nov/Dec/Jan).
6. Hostile fire deaths are down sharply: in the ten months from April 2004 through the elections of 2005, Americans suffered 458 deaths; or 45.8 deaths per month to mortar, rocket propelled grenades, snipers, and other hostile fire (apart from helicopters). In the twelve months since the elections (Feb 2005 to Jan 2006), Americans have suffered 196 deaths from hostile fire; or 16.3 deaths per month.
[Helicopter deaths are excluded in the above figures, although these are encouraging as well: Helicopter losses due to enemy fire were 5 per month during the liberation of Iraq; 4.5 per month under the CPA; 0.2 per month during the revolt; and 0.8 per month since the January 2005 elections. It's possible that the insurgency has gotten better at targeting our helicopters since the elections, but it hasn't produced a serious impact on fatality statistics.]
We can break the war into four phases based on hostile fire deaths:
Phase I: Liberation of Iraq--March/April 2003: 49 deaths per month.
Phase II: CPA occupation--May 2003/March 2004: 12.4 deaths per month.
Phase III: Revolt--April 2004/January 2005: 45.7 deaths per month.
Phase IV: Democracy--February 2005/Jan 2006: 16.3 deaths per month.
In sum, these figures imply a very different account of the field of battle than the nightly television reports. They suggest that since the elections of January 2005 things have not gone well for the insurgency. The insurgents appear increasingly to be getting swept out of their areas of operations, and seem to be having a very difficult time getting American soldiers in their gunsights. The basic thing that has kept them on the nightly news are the IEDs (the improvised explosive devices). Although fewer of these are going off, the ones that do go off have greater power, hence the rise in multiple fatality bombings coupled with the decline in car bombings overall.
The trendlines on this don't look good for the enemy at all. More Iraqi soldiers are in the field, and the enemy has had a decreasing ability to inflict its will on the new Iraqi army; hence the declining fatality figures for the Iraqis. The insurgency since the January 2005 elections has shown a declining capability to fight Iraqi soldiers or American soldiers or even to attack fixed installations.
In other words: they're losing.
The analysis above basically agrees with what regular readers of Strategy Page have been getting there.
Does this mean that the war will soon be over? No. The Democrats are running for Congress on a policy of immediate withdrawal; and enemies of democracies design their attacks for maximum political impact in election years (see the Madrid bombings of 2004 in Spain). The Democratic campaign platform guarantees a major summer/fall offensive in Iraq designed to convince Americans to quit in Iraq and give the terrorists the victory. They will be helped in this by the 85% Democratic networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC who will slant the coverage of the attacks in a way designed to convince the American people that the war in Iraq is hopeless.
Clausewitz pointed on in On War that winning a war is not ultimately about killing soldiers, but breaking the enemy's will to resist. Americans can lose if they choose to believe the reports from ABC, CBS & NBC rather than our soldiers in the field.
Or they can follow Tom Paine: These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.