Re: A Mistake?

[John Noonan]

Anyone who says that invading Iraq was a mistake is full of it. Conversely, anyone who says it was a fantastic idea is making an equally dubious claim.

If we accomplish what we set out to accomplish, Iraq will be remembered as the first controversial step in a long term, chess-match solution for winning the Long War.

If we fail and withdraw prematurely, and leave a breeding ground slash power vacuum...then -and only then- can Iraq be considered "a mistake."

Call me naive, but I'm still a believer.

A Mistake?

[Dadmanly]

Jonah Goldberg makes a big concession, but cautions that acting to somehow “reverse” the mistake might be an even bigger misstep.

His big concession? The war in Iraq was a mistake:

Truth is truth. And the Iraq war was a mistake by the most obvious criteria: If we had known then what we know now, we would never have gone to war with Iraq in 2003. I do think that Congress (including Democrats Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Jay Rockefeller and John Murtha) was right to vote for the war given what was known — or what was believed to have been known — in 2003. And the claims from Democrats who voted for the war that they were lied to strikes me as nothing more than cowardly buck-passing.

The failure to find weapons of mass destruction is a side issue. The WMD fiasco was a global intelligence failure, but calling Saddam Hussein's bluff after 9/11 was the right thing to do. Washington's more important intelligence failure lay in underestimating what would be required to rebuild and restore post-Hussein Iraq. The White House did not anticipate a low-intensity civil war in Iraq, never planned for it and would not have deemed it in the U.S. interest to pay this high a price in prestige, treasure and, of course, lives.

Mark at Decision ’08 objects to Goldberg’s premise:

Goldberg says if we knew then what we know now…but you never know then what you know now. That’s an absurd argument. Hindsight is not a policy.

For the White House to have completely anticipated all of the risks, costs, benefits, and other turns of events, the President and his military and international advisors would need to possess a precision of hindsight from a future vantage point that is, of course, impossible. It’s a kind of magical thinking.

(More commentary over at Dadmanly.)

Re: Invisible ship

[Eagle1]

Now comes word of a "cloaking device"---here.

Another bit of Star Trek science?

Bad News Thursday

[SMASH]

Ahmadinejad declares Israel a "counterfeit and illegitimate regime that cannot survive," while continuing his headlong pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, a North Korean general tells Diane Sawyer that unless Bush backs down on his rhetoric, "wawr wiwr be inevitabawr."

Ransom

[Greyhawk]

Kidnappers of an Italian freelance photographer in Afghanistan say they will release their hostage in exchange for Abdul Rahman, the Afghan who caused a brief firestorm when he was forced to flee the country or face the death penalty for converting to Christianity. Rahman was granted asylum in Italy.

Reporters without Borders:

"A journalist is neither a spy nor a bargaining chip," the media groups said. "We call on the Afghan and Italian authorities, and all those who might be able to contact his abductors, to do everything possible to help bring about his release."

They are hoping an internet petition drive will help.

Re: Threat To Milblogs

[Bubblehead]

I hope there aren't any mil-bloggers out there unscrupulous enough to try to artificially inflate their hit counts by intentionally putting in keywords that might attract the Army blogwatching team's attention...

Food For Thought

[Greyhawk]

If you had solid evidence that al-Qaeda supports your opinion on Iraq, and wants to use you to further their ends, would you go along with them?

Some people would...

(I suppose you could say you were being courageous, you know, in supporting the enemy because it's how you naturally feel, not because you support them per se, you see, because otherwise the terrorists will have won...)

Milblogger in NY Times

[Greyhawk]

MilBogger Phil Carter, just back from Iraq, has a must-read in the New York Times. (Sunday edition - almost missed that.)

I was deeply involved with moving, and didn't realize he had finished his tour. Welcome home, Phil. (His blog here.)

Re: Threat to Milblogs

[Greyhawk]

It should be pointed out that the stated purpose of the Guard unit is to review for OPSEC violations, and to notify webmasters when such violations are found. If that's all there is to it, I'm all for it. Dadman, you and I have both been to Iraq, and I'd bet we'd both respond in exactly the same way if we found a map of our FOBs on some idiot's web page. It would be criminal negligence on the part of the DoD to not set up some sort of watch dog unit for just that purpose*.

The problem is that "the military" doesn't understand the internet as communication medium - a symptom of the military's disadvantage in communication in general. There's fodder for a doctoral thesis there, so I won't go deep for a blog post. But consider this: it took the military, as an institution, several years to even realize there were milbloggers. By the time they had, blogs probably looked very big and very, very scary to them. Communication via the internet really can't be controlled, and something that can't be controlled is anathema to a well-trained military mind. (Anathema definition here for our Pentagon readers.**) So even though the military already had extensive guidelines and regulations governing OPSEC violations via any and all communications media, they felt compelled to create new rules restating that the all-encompassing old rules applied to all forms of communication including blogs. This of course pisses off non-military people (especially bloggers) who think the rules are something new and dangerous to free speech - and encourages some who know better to claim they are anyway in order to sell books*** or piss off people by convincing them that Republicans are Nazis and Iraq is a lost cause and adding comments about "Rumsfeld's penchant for secrecy" - on and on ad nauseum. (By the way, which SecDef was it that didn't have a penchant for secrecy?)

However, just as they were years too late discovering blogs, the military also seemingly haven't discovered that blogs represent about one tenth of one percent of the potential threat. MySpace pages, chatrooms, YouTube, and countless other personal and public web pages are used and read on orders of magnitude above and beyond what weblogs are. I suspect (actually I hope) that the real problem here is that "blogs" is now military shorthand for "anything anyone puts anywhere on the web". (In fact, if you read the sometimes-mentioned-in-this-discussion Army training on blogs****, you'll find that most - perhaps all - of the OPSEC violations cited didn't occur on blogs at all, but on other open web sites.)

In a nutshell, I want the military to ensure information that can get me killed isn't widely available via open sources on the web or elsewhere, but I've seen absolutely nothing to give me confidence that the military is capable of doing so. Over at his site Damanly says (in somewhat tongue-in-cheek fashion) that he'd "love to spend my drills scanning MILBLOGS…". But you see, he's one of the military's leading experts on weblogs, so that will never happen in a million years. What they're going to do is get some guys to sit at computers and respond whenever a bell rings because an automated process has detected too many instances of the initials "FOUO" in a web site.

Jeebus.

Notes:
*Oh, by the way, when milblogs are outlawed only outlaws will have milblogs. That's been my stated position on that topic for some time. With each new misguided action on the part of the DoD, a few hunded voices that should have been heard in the war on terror go silent, but this doesn't phase the criminally stupid.
**Sharp readers will recognize my insults to the Pentagon as a test to see if there's any negative response from the dwellers therein.
***Not a reference to The Blog of War, so support milbloggers and buy a copy, before Rumsfeld orders them burned..
****Sorry - that training is not in the public domain.