Same unit as Beauchamps? There must be a morale/leadership problem in there.

I suspect that a soldier has voiced that particular comment ("Fill in name of place" is not worth the life of a US soldier)about every US war. Read about the travails of the Ghost Mountain Division - talk about terrain nobody wants. Who wants to go to Guadacanal now yet we poured men and equipment into taking the place.

Yet it was necessary to take the place just as unhappily this war and Iraq are necessary.

The sargeant points out an sad paradox - soldiers' lives, our best, our future, are spent for a hunk of ground we wouldn't, if we had the choice, give two bits for.

The job they are doing in Iraq is necessary. It is vital. But I wish the soldiers were all home.

It's too late for the WaPo to censor the progress from Petraeus' bottom-up approach to anti-insurgency/anti-terror. All they can do is preach to the choir.

The WaPo/leftist/DNC approach to achieving defeat in Iraq may come to pass after the 2008 election. But in the meantime the defeat-seeking journos will have to twist themselves into increasingly unwieldy pretzel-knots to accomplish their glorious task.

"Lose, damn you! Lose!"

Must suck when you finally realize you've been betting on the wrong team all along.

In that first insert box, we might get a better sense of the unreality of the press report if they had replaced "sadiyah" with "Spandau", "Baghdad" with "Berlin", "Sunni officers" with "SS officers" and "Saddam's military" with 'Hitler's military". Wouldn't read so nice, but a lot more honest.

In that first insert box, we might get a better sense of the unreality of the press report if they had replaced "sadiyah" with "Spandau", "Baghdad" with "Berlin", "Sunni officers" with "SS officers" and "Saddam's military" with 'Hitler's military". Wouldn't read so nice, but a lot more honest.

A close reading of WWII battles will show that some battles were not worth the cost and were done in an incompetent manner. To confuse WWII with a civil war in Iraq is plain dumb. If things are improving in Iraq, then we can soon expect some 1430p thousand troops to come home, right? I doubt it. We still have Shia at war with Sunnis both physically and politically. Now we have the Kurds and the problem of Kurdish terrorists versus Turkey, intruding into Iraq.
If you must use the WWII analogy, then think of yourself as German at the time that the allies were advancing across all of Europe and Hitler still maintained that with will etc German could win. Iran has won.

"Iran has won."

It's really interesting to see so many people who believe that Iraq is simply a minor battle which has nothing to do with anything else in the world and we can just walk away from it and we will be back to the world of butterflies and rainbows - much like Saddam's Iraq was prior to 2003.

Iran has won. That's why it pulled the Qods Force from Iraq. That's why the Maliki government approves of us targeting Iranian-backed Shi'ite militias. That's why Maliki has turned against Iran's bitch, al Sadr.

That's why EFP attacks are down, as are attacks by the rogue JAM factions, and that's why the SAS is killing gun runners inside Iran itself.

That's why Sunni tribal chiefs meet with Ayatollah Sistani to receive his blessings, and why there is an Awakening Movement sweeping the Shi'ite areas, why Shi'ites are turning against the JAM, and why the Iraqi army is arresting Shi'ite police officials in the pay of Iran.

To win, all Iran had to do was lose.

Down is up, black is white, freedom is slavery.

Welcome to the Orwellian nightmare that is "progressive" thought.

Absolutely correct on the pice running Page 1 because it fits their narrative. There is another thing in play. This is from the third page.

"On Oct. 14, Washington Post special correspondent Salih Saif Aldin was killed while on assignment in Sadiyah."

They have to.

Cordially,

Uncle J

What's the difference between the MSM and Pete Rose? Well they're both scumbags but at least Rose never bet on the other team.

The media wants to do the usual thing: move the goalposts, and then pretend they've been at the new location the whole time.

Problem is, they're having increasing trouble remembering where they left the goalposts the last time.

If things continue to improve in Iraq, get use to hearing the term "pyrrhic victory".

david still:
"A close reading of WWII battles will show that some battles were not worth the cost and were done in an incompetent manner."

Sure, there were battles during WWII that shouldn't have been fought (or at least not the way they were). The bombing of Dresden was almost completely pointless and a horrible event to recall, for example. Does that mean that WWII was pointless? I certainly hope not.

"To confuse WWII with a civil war in Iraq is plain dumb. If things are improving in Iraq, then we can soon expect some 1430p thousand troops to come home, right? I doubt it."

Ok, so you're using an example which applies to WWII to argue that the comparison is irrelevant? We still have a lot of troops in Germany. You're confusing "progress" with "success". The battle against Japan was marked with a lot of progress after Midway. That doesn't mean that the US troops were coming home anytime soon.

"We still have Shia at war with Sunnis both physically and politically. Now we have the Kurds and the problem of Kurdish terrorists versus Turkey, intruding into Iraq."

The Kurdish problem hasn't yet escalated into full-scale fighting, and the PKK were denounced by the Kurdish government. With both the Kurds and Turkey allied to the US, hopefully we can exert enough control on them to keep the situation under control.

Nobody denied that the situation was still problematic. We've got a long and crooked road ahead of us, and the end may still be defeat. But in the past months, we've made several strides down the road towards success, and just because there's still a lot of road left doesn't mean we should stop walking.

"If you must use the WWII analogy, then think of yourself as German at the time that the allies were advancing across all of Europe and Hitler still maintained that with will etc German could win. Iran has won."

That would only be relevant if the Iranians were, you know, advancing. Tom W. handled this.

More generally: I think it's too soon to claim that Iraq has chosen America. Individuals make different choices. Many are motivated by deaths of relatives at the hands of US troops (meaning relatives of insurgents), by sectarian hatred (in the extremist factions of each sect), by their subservience to Iran (in al-Sadr's case at least), and by general hatred of the US as occupiers.

But in the past months there's been a dramatic increase in the number of people who are choosing America, documented by people like Greyhawk, Michael Yon, Michael Totten, Jeff Emmanuel etc, who've seen their relatives blown apart by suicide bombs and IEDs and insurgents firing out of mosques, or have been affected by the soft side of the coalition troops, or have realized that the US is there to stay no matter how much the US media trumpets otherwise. It is with the help of these sort of people that Iraq is improving. Don't devalue their efforts by only seeing the people who join the insurgents, or by only seeing the hatred when there is much, much more to Iraq.

There is one other discomforting possibility, which is that AQI, Iran, and local insurgent organizations are laying low until the next elections, hoping an anti-war Democrat will win and they can fight unfettered by US interference. I don't know enough to comment on the likelihood (or unlikelihood) of this possibility. Would someone who knows more like to share their knowledge?

Oops:

"Many are motivated by the deaths of relatives at the hands of US troops (meaning their relatives were either insurgents OR VICTIMS OF COLLATERAL DAMAGE), etc"

tolkein- why is it that lefties only know about two wars? Vietnam and WWII. What about the Malay commie insurgency, successfully snuffed out by the British? What about the Rhodesian fight against Zanu and Zapu (never lost a battle)? What about the many successful punitive campaigns the British conducted in the NWFP of India?
Analogies are dangerous, especially when you don't know in detail either of your analogs. Given that the US was never in any danger of losing in Iraq, and that even the most teeth-grindingly anti-American sunni's have now largely accepted they can't defeat the US militarily and have reached a grudging accomodation with them, I would say that Iraq is akin to Gaul after the Roman invasion. The Gauls were split into many competitive factions, and because of that, were easier for the Romans to control overall. Only once did they threaten Roman hegemony, under Vercingetorix, but once he failed, there was never again a cohesive threat. Now that the momentum has been lost by the various insurgent players, it can never be regained, unless the US pulls out. And why would it do that, after succeeding?

The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the - Web Reconnaissance for 10/26/2007 A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day...so check back often.

Anytime I see headlines like this one it pains me. There's definitely a disconnect between what is happening in Iraq and what most major media outlets report, good thing we have the internet. The past 4 months I've seen first hand how the surge is working. In my AO there has been a marked decrease in IED and indirect fire attacks since we got here.

Greyhawk also makes a good point about soldiers who've been deployed to a war zone for 14 months being a bit...um, jaded. The troopers here when I arrived definitely had a different attitude compared to those that recently replaced them. Were the press to talk to most of the soldiers on their way home from the last rotation I'm sure they'd have produced plenty of quotes like the one used by the Washington Post in the headline. By comparison the guys that rotated in not too long ago are extremely positive and looking for ways to help the Iraqis and fight the bad guys. In my opinion, if you combine the attitude of the new guys in country with the improvements brought about by the surge/change in tactics it might just be that even after 15 months in country the old media might have a hard time finding somebody to produce such grim sounding pronouncements.