Have a look at the very moving final post of Major Andrew Olmsted, a post saved until he was no longer able to put it up. He was killed in Iraq on the 4th of January. He quotes Plato, Team America and Babylon 5, and writes a great farewell.
(via PJM)
I haven't been keeping up. Part II of Michael Yon's Men of Valor makes a very positive analysis of the British effort in Basra (more positive than most we are going to hear in the near future) and then describes a battle and some true heroics, especially from the mechanics.
A couple of well-turned phrases. The place is like a toilet used as an oven.
The centre piece of Part III is an account of the largest attack on the British since 2003, and yet was only the first of a month of attacks on a small Coordination Center. It includes this:
There is a clear battlefield conversion from ink to blood to ink to blood.As for recognition at home, the British soldiers say that it rarely happens, but they did tell me about one lady who gives them great moral support. They say she writes a handwritten letter to every wounded soldier in 4 Rifles. She writes a handwritten letter to every family of a soldier who is lost. She writes letters to the battalion often.
The lady is the Duchess of Cornwall.
If you haven't already read them, it's worth the time.
Newsweek reluctantly sees progress in Baghdad. The journalist sound positively chipper. The American military will not be drawn. Victory, he [Maj. Gen. Joseph F. Fil Jr] suggested, "is within sight, but not yet within reach."
Michael Yon embedded with British forces in May this year and saw quite a bit of action. He came away with an admiration for the British forces that may seem a little eccentric now that they are themselves embedded in an enclave at the airport. But it shouldn't. It is becoming increasingly clear that they were grossly undermanned by as much as two or three times in addition to being subject to Brown's political games and the gesture politics of a new Prime Minister.
Anyway, as always, Yon's piece is well worth the read. It is the first in a series of, he says, "about VIII".
LTC Michael told me today that when al Qaeda came to Dora, they began harassing Christians first, charging them “rent.” It was the local Muslims, according to LTC Michael, who first came to him for help to protect the Christians in his area. That’s right. LTC Michael told me more than once that the Muslims reached out to him to protect the Christians from al Qaeda...Most of the Christians are gone now; having fled to Syria, Jordan or Northern Iraq.This next is the most moving one. We can start talking about success in Iraq when the 1 (2?) million refugees start coming back.
The Muslims in this neighborhood worry that other people will take the homes of their Christian neighbors, and that the Christians will never come back. And so they came to St John’s today in force, and they showed their faces, and they said, “Come back to Iraq. Come home.” They wanted the cameras to catch it. They wanted to spread the word: Come home. Muslims keep telling me to get it on the news. “Tell the Christians to come home to their country Iraq.”
Bill Ardolino has an interview at Long War Journal with a Fallujan man now working for the Americans as an interpreter. Nothing earth-shaking, but worth looking at because it reinforces something I've been picking up a lot recently, a small but important part of the big narrative that so many wish to ignore. INDC: Right. And so when al Qaeda came in, and by “al Qaeda” I really mean all of the outside jihadists, the Fallujans welcomed them to help fight the Americans?
I like that "so you [wonder], what happened to the American mind". It fits in to the narrative that Petreaus has been recounting to the deaf. The Americans made mistakes early on because they didn't understand the people they were dealing with. Three years of mistakes. But they learned (much to the amazement of Leo, it seems). And that explains a lot.
Leo: Yes, because the first mission in Fallujah, Americans could not communicate with the Fallujans correctly, and they didn’t understand the nature of the people. [Fallujans] are good people, they work within the rules of their culture and they stick with them. So, Americans came from another culture overseas, they didn’t understand the people, they didn’t talk to them at the right time, so you [wonder], what happened to the American mind, [with] how they communicate with the people right now. Why didn’t they do the same thing before? So it is not all the Fallujans' fault, Americans [have responsibility].
In the spirit of Sun Tzu ("if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will win a hundred times in a hundred battles"), read this article by Frederick Kagan. I learnt something new and had reinforced a lot of latent knowledge.
Like Paul Berman, Kagan starts with Sayyid Qutb and his radical interpretation of the Koran as well as those elements of Marxism-Leninism that most suited his purpose. His fundamental premise is that all law (and he means all law) comes from God, and that a secular state is a blasphemy, is polytheistic.
Thus the importance of the concept "takfir", which designates the process of declaring a person to be an unbeliever because of the way he practices his faith. The takfiris insist that anyone who obeys a human government is a polytheist and therefore violates the first premise of Islam, the shahada (the assertion that "There is no god but God"), even though Muslims have lived in states with temporal rulers for most of their history. The chief reason al Qaeda has limited support in the Muslim world is that the global Muslim community overwhelmingly rejects the premise that anyone obeying a temporal ruler is ipso facto an unbeliever.
It is no accident that it is Muslims who have suffered the most by far from terrorism guilty as they are of not being "true Muslims, but unbelievers". This applies to Sunnis, and even more to Shia. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al-Queda in Iraq (originally called "Movement of Monotheism (as opposed to polytheism) and Jihad") saw the Shia as apostates and therefore worse even than Crusaders and Zionists. He attempted, with some success, to ignite their fury against the Sunnis so as to bring the Sunnis into the sectarian fight as well as the one against the invaders.
Kagan carefully maps the differences between al-Queda in Iraq and al-Queda in Afghanistan, which in turn illuminates the former's initial success and their subsequent failure. Finally, he looks at the successes in Anbar province and with the surge. (According to this site, he published a paper in December, 2006, outlining the tactics eventually adopted in the surge. A PowerPoint-type presentation of this paper is available here.)
My summary has been very lean. Read the whole thing. Like his brother, Robert, he writes without hysteria or platitude, but with conviction. If you want more about Paul Berman's book, Terror and Liberalism, and about Sayyid Qutb, look at the this summary I wrote a little while ago.
Read Michael Yon on General Petreus' message to his troops (Don't give way to the dark side). There was a soldier talking on PM this evening about how hard it is not to hate all Iraqis when a bomb planted in view of all the houses around kills a fellow soldier. He knew it was counter-productive and he didn't allow himself to indulge in it hard as it is. The BBC reporter included another interview with a 20-year-old who was not able to hold back the hate. However, the reporter did not quote, or even mention this letter from Petreus about this very point.
Michael Yon does and even provides a link to a pdf copy. Yon points out that the discipline to maintain any sort of standards in that situation must come from rock-solid leadership and be constantly on display. Petreus is an example. Yon has witnessed others in the field.
The interrogation methods that Petreus mentions are in use in this story from the Atlantic Monthly about the hunt for al-Zarqawi.
via Instapundit
This is the first paragraph of Bill Roggio's Daily Report from Baghdad on the 27th.
Iraqi and Coalition forces have been pressing hard to dismantle al Qaeda's suicide and car bomb infrastructure in and around Baghdad. Over the past week, some success has been made in attacking the leadership of these networks. Three senior commanders of al Qaeda bomb-making cells have been captured. Since Saturday, there have been no major bombings inside Baghdad.Further down he reports on the capture of 57 insurgents/al-Queda operatives and major arms caches, on the Anbar Salvation Council and the possible cease-fire being arranged with several factions in West Baghdad.
Obviously, if the allegations as initially reported are true, al Qaeda was very successful in causing the security forces backlash and the resultant negative effects. If the report is inaccurate – if this was a small element of the police, or perhaps from police assigned from outside Tal Afar, or the actions of a local militia - al Qaeda still received an incredible propaganda victory.I've listened to 2 or 3 hours of BBC Radio 4 today and have heard only one of these stories.
Michael Yon wonders why the American military can't understand what the terrorists understood years ago. I’m finally starting to understand what so many Vietnam veterans have told me. One overarching message from the front is that our combat forces are overwhelmingly good to the Iraqis and extremely accommodating to media, but there is a deeper substrate. We simply cannot beat the terrorists if we do not learn how to embrace media realities. With all the focus on training Iraqi Security Forces, it might be worth considering training our own team, too.
Michael Totten visits Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan and sees a huge transformation. It's not only physical, new buildings (in Dream City), shops, offices, roads, roadsigns (but not sewers), it's also civil. There seems to be a working democracy in place where only a few years ago there was desolation. And in its success, there may an omen for the future. Iraqi Kurdistan is de-facto independent already. The three northernmost provinces exist as a liberal-democratic state-within-a-state with their own parliament, their own laws, their own immigration policies, and their own military, border guards, and police. That much was already known. The region now, though, is even closer to formal sovereignty and actual independence than it recently was.
Read it all.
Robert Kagan says it's getting better and the figures bear him out. It's a good start, but I still say it's way too early, and Bill Roggio is cautious: One item to note: the four year anniversary of the U.S. invasion is coming up next week, and it may be possible al Qaeda in Iraq is conserving its forces for a show of force and the resulting media attention.
I like the last phrase. That's what it's about. Get your narrative on the 6 o'clock news.
In an article for the May, 1999 issue of Commentary, Gabriel Schoenfeld reappraised Kissinger through a consideration of his memoirs The White House Years and Years of Upheaval. He follows Kissinger's account of the fall of Phnom Penh, which includes a letter that should be read and re-read. As the Khmer Rouge closed in on the capital city of Phnom Penh in early April 1975, the United States offered a number of Cambodian officials a chance to escape.
Following this passage, Schoenfeld rekindles Kissinger's bitterness against the media, in particular, The New York Times, whose correspondent, Sydney Schanberg painted a rosy picture of the Khmer Rouge, dismissed the prospect of further violence and whose headline at the fall of Phnom Penh went:
The reply addressed to the U.S. ambassador by Sirik Matak, a former Cambodian prime minister, and reprinted by Kissinger in full, is one of the more important documents of the entire Vietnam-war era.Dear Excellency and Friend:
Immediately after the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh, writes Kissinger, Sirik Matak was shot in the stomach and left to die over the course of three days from his untreated wounds.
I thank you very sincerely for your letter and for your offer to transport me towards freedom. I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion. As for you, and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection, and we can do nothing about it.
You leave, and my wish is that you and your country will find happiness under this sky. But, mark it well, that if I shall die here on the spot and in my country that I love, it is no matter, because we are all born and must die. I have only committed this mistake of believing in you [the Americans].
Please accept, Excellency and dear friend, my faithful and friendly sentiments.Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life.
He later won a Pulitzer Prize.
(via Ninme)
Have a look at this 'dispatch' by Michael Yon, not because there are any revelations but because it gives a taste of living inside a dirty war.
Omar Fadhil (from Iraq the Model) describes the relative 'peace' of Baghdad, where the Mehdi Army is not shooting back but using another tactic: rumour. The latest of these rumors was a ridiculous one I heard yesterday from a taxi driver from Sadr city. His story, quite similar to one told by a Sadr city council member, is that US soldiers are raiding Shia homes, arresting innocent civilians, and then dumping them at night near strongholds of Sunni insurgents, blindfolded and handcuffed so that the insurgents would find them defenseless and slaughter them!
Bill Roggio's daily report is here. He highlights some quality control issues for the insurgents. Four terrorists were killed in Sadr al-Yusufiyah while planting an IED. Two more insurgents were killed in Mosul and their bomb factory destroyed. One insurgent was killed and two wounded while they attempted to access their weapons cache in Tikrit.
From Bill Roggio's Daily Report. We present in our [sic] hand a green olive branch, and in the other hand we present the law.
There's a cabinet reshuffle coming within 2 weeks, a lot of examples of tribes turning against the insurgents and/or al-Queda and major operations in Sadr City going on.
Nouri al-Maliki
The Daily Reports are collected here.
William Shawcross But horror had engulfed all of Indo-China as a result of the US defeat in 1975. In Vietnam and Laos there was no vast mass murder but the communists created cruel gulags and, from Vietnam in particular, millions of people fled, mostly by boat and mostly to the US. Given the catastrophe of the communist victories, I have always thought that those like myself who were opposed to the American efforts in Indochina should be very humble. I also think it wrong to dismiss the US efforts there as sheer disaster. Lee Kuan Yew, the former longtime Prime Minister of Singapore, has a subtler view. He argues that, although America lost in IndoChina in 1975, the fact that it was there so long meant that other SouthEast Asian countries had time to build up their economies to relieve the poverty of their peasants and thus resist communist encroachment — which they probably could not have done had IndoChina gone communist in the 1960s.
David Kilcullen takes The Guardian to task for its assessment of the mood in Baghdad. He provides several corrections and fills in the details, but at one point he asks the most naive of questions. And yes, there is a risk that home-front political will might collapse just as we are getting things right on the ground. Given some commentators’ overall negativity, one suspects that their efforts may be directed to precisely that end. You may not like the President, you may be unhappy about the war. But whose side are you on?
Well, maybe not so naive.
Bill Roggio is writing a daily report from Baghdad for the Weekly Standard. There's always a link to it from his home page. Things in the battered city are quiet at the moment, but he's not silly enough to start talking about success.
Evidently, there's good reason to think that things are going to hot up soon anyway. U.S. and Iraqi forces will enter Sadr City in the next few days, establish at least one Joint Security Station, and begin clearing the neighborhoods.
Someone called Patrick Ruffini at Townhall says the Surge is working. It may well be, but no-one can know at this point. It's silly to make pronouncements about an operation as large and complex as this after such a short time. It's not news; it's propoganda.
(via Instapundit)
