Iraq and the politics of defeat

On another forum, poster “frd” writes, regarding Iraq:
“Today during his press conference President Bush, defending his troop surge in Iraq, insisted that the insurgents attacking US troops in Iraq “are the same ones who attacked us on Sept. 11.”

Frd, like nearly all Dems and members of the political left (and yes, including some mis-quided or politically-panicked Republicans) for selfish electoral purposes are heavily invested in a strategy of failure, defeat, and retreat as the only option in Iraq, and are thus reduced to cheerleading and providing comfort to those declared enemies of their own country, and of the liberties that they themselves enjoy in being able to do so.

Frd also hears only what he want to hear. President Bush in his press conference was also very clear in pointing out in his response to the question, that the direct perpetrators of the attacks are dead, a large number of the planning leadership is dead or captured, and bin Laden himself and his lieutenants – none of whom are in any apparent hurry to commit martyrdom and themselves go meet Allah with the 72 black-eyed beauties – while still a threat, are less of a threat than they would have been had they not been pursued.

Iraq – libs sing “We gotta get out of this place … “

In another forum, poster “Bylinepjw” writes on July 10, regarding Iraq:
“John McCain is either in or just returning from Iraq. As has been reported, his presidential campaign is dead in the water, perhaps because he has supported the “surge.” … I sort of expect McCain to return from Iraq having seen the light. I think he might say his visit made it clear to him that the escalation is only yielding more American deaths and that Iraq’s leaders aren’t toting their fair share of the load.”

“We gotta get out. How we get out without harming our already shattered reputation around the globe, or turning the country into more of a black morass than it already is, or leading to even more death and suffering, is beyond me. We’re in a no-win here, so far as I can see. I don’t know how to fix it. I only know who is responsible for putting us here.”  — Bylinepjw, http://forums.wausaudailyherald.com/viewtopic.php?t=5605

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Like the old protest ballad:

“We gotta get out …” (of this place … if it’s the last thing we ever do ….)

Certainly a quite human reaction to any situation one feels personally in the middle of, doesn’t understand, and doesn’t know how to deal with.

Like the claustrophobe in a confined space, the human tendency is to scream and pound away ineffectually at the walls, working oneself into an even greater panic and frenzy.

Iraq’s “do-nothing” congress … progress from the people …

On another forum, a poster wrote (regarding the Iraqi parliament):
“Today, many of those parliamentarians simply don’t show up to work. There are rarely enough to reach a quorum to debate any of the key issues facing the country. They squabble over who the speaker should be, and debate how much they should get paid, while 74 members currently boycott the sessions entirely.”

This individual was,  I believe, attempting to make the point that we should immediately “beat feet” and effect a total, unequivocal pullout of troops from Iraq, on the basis that the central political establishment in Iraq still has it’s collective head up it’s fourth-point-of-contact, and is unable to accomplish anything other than to engage in petty internal partisan bickering.

Strangely, his quote from ABC News also quite accurately describes “business as usual” in the United States Congress – a Congress, I believe, who will be themselves joining the Iraqi parliament in taking off the month of August, in spite of a host of pending legislative matters of “imperative national significance” still facing it, and troops in harms way actively waging a shooting war against a clear and declared enemy of the United States.

And not that the early US Congresses were all that unified or productive either, from 1776 onward. It took us quite some time to get our collective “stuff” together, and we didn’t have a neighboring Islamist state deliberately stirring things up.

Just a few redcoats – and the French.

Getting better in Iraq … not always so good in Washington

Headlines on Sunday screamed “Bomber Kills More Than 100 In Iraq” (AP) and “Bombings Leave 162 Dead In Iraq” (CNN), reminicent of the ongoing media coverage that continues to focus on the successes of the insurgent jihadists and Iranian proxies, rather than on the persistent, if often uneven and painfully slow, progress being made by Coalition forces and the new Iraqi government.

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/bomber-kills-more-than-100-in-iraq/20070707132809990001

Buried in the story however are these interesting bits of information:

The attack’s location, a small Shiite and Kurdish town north of Baghdad, suggests to analysts and officials that the attack may have been “carried out by Sunni extremists fleeing the three-week old US offensive [currently] centered at the city of Baqouba, 60 miles to the south [of Baghdad],” according to the article.

Professor of forecasting principles blasts IPCC climate models as “flawed” … Gore AWOL

A recent posting on Matt’s Global Warming Skeptics blog http://glowarmers.blogspot.com makes an excellent point regarding the uncertain nature of the “science” being used to tell us that the world is doomed, it’s all our fault, and that we simply must alter our ways and turn over the keys to our lives to omniscient technocrats and central planners.

Professor J. Scott Armstrong teaches at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and is the author of a widely used forecasting textbook, Forecasting Principles.

According to a recent paper by Professor Armstrong and Kersten Green cited by Matt in his post, the “recent IPCC climate models are flawed becasue the methodology used violates [no less than] 89 of the 140 principles of forecasting, 72 of which significantly alter the outcome of the forecast.”

Of the recent IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Matt reports Armstrong as responding, “We have been unable to identify any scientific forecasts to support global warming. Claims that the Earth will get warmer have no more credence than saying that it will get colder.”

Iraqi volunteers step up …

One of the most startling and under-reported success stories from the Iraq front continues to be the recent dramatic turnaround in al-Anbar and now Diyala provinces, where Sunni tribes and clans, once opposed to Coalition forces and the new Iraq government, are now joining with them to fight the al-Qaeda threat.

In a recent June 29 article from the PAO of Multi-National Forces Iraq stationed in Baghdad, officers report that hundreds of volunteers from area tribes showed up for a screening to become Iraqi Police candidates.

http://www.defendamerica.mil/articles/jun2007/a062907ej3.html

The recruitment events were held in Baghdad’s Nasir Wa Salam and Abu Ghraib neighborhoods. Abu Ghraib is best known as the location of one of Saddam’s most notorious torture prisons, and was the focus of scandalous accusations of prisoner abuse by American troops who were guarding insurgent and militant prisoners there after the invasion that toppled the Saddam regime.

Iraq, Fairness, and the new “Battle of Britain”

The recent bombings – and bombing attempts – in London and Glasgow apparently make it clear that the “Battle of Britain” is over, defeat is inevitable, and that the Brits need to unilaterally withdraw from England, immediately seat an Islamic Courts in Parliament, and replace the British judicial code with Shari’ah Law.

In spite of the almost-hourly body counts put forth by the “despair and defeat” crowd as incontrovertable “proof” that “we are losing”, “the war is lost”, and “we can’t win” – culmulative death and injury to American forces are at the lowest rates ever experienced in a military conflict.

To put it bluntly, the Islamists – although determined and pernacious – are simply not very good at conventional soldiering – and they know it.

In a straight-up, head-to-head fight, they lose every time.

Relatively few US and Coalition troops have been lost to conventional small arms, mortar, or missile attacks. The Islamists presently have no real air power, very little sea power (pirates notwithstanding), no nuclear missles (yet), and their armies outside Iran are mostly loosely-connected terror cells and militias.

IPCC scientist now says that global warming forecasts are not predictions …

According to a recent report aired by Fox News reporter and analyst Brit Hume, a leading “climate scientist who is part of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), now says computer models cannot predict future climate – and he says the IPCC is not in the climate prediction business.”

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,287437,00.html

The report quotes Dr Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Reserch, a prominent leader in many of the IPCC’s published climate assessments, and a vocal proponent of theories assigning responsiblity for the global warming to human-based carbon emissions.

The report states that in a recent posting to a nature magazine blog, Dr. Trenberth now asserts that “the UN’s dire forcasts about the dangers of global warming are NOT climate predictions” [emphasis added].

Islamists on Iraq: “Resistance is futile” …

A forum poster elsewhere writes: “ Senator R. Lugar, the ranking Republican member on the Foreign Relations Committee yesterday said we have to get out of Iraq.  Senator Warner will be next. Put a fork in the Iraq war, it is done. Get our troops out of harms way, rather making them sitting ducks in a shooting gallery.   Pick up your military toys and go home. This is not a game, many innocents are getting killed for a war that never should have happened.”

I certainly agree that Senator Lugar’s recent statement and ongoing lack of support for the efforts underway in Iraq (if not downright undermining them) are very sad and unfortunate.

However, the entire point of the current operation is that our troops, and certainly WE, are not simply “sitting ducks”, waiting for the next jihadic attack by those driven with an ideology of Islamist domination.

Scientists predict global warming to reverse

Far from being the runaway non-stop human-caused global warming trend being hysterically prognosticated by devotees to Al Gore and “An Inconvenient Truth”, a growing number of scientists soberly studying the effects of the sun on earth climate are predicting that the sun may in fact be on the verge of delivering a climate cooling cycle to the planet.

“Climate stability has never been a feature of planet earth,” says R. Timothy Patterson, a professor and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre, Department of Earth Sciences at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.

In an article in the Financial Post, Patterson writes, “The only constant about climate is change; it changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly. Many times in the past, [global] temperatures were far higher than today, and occasionally, temperatures were colder.”