The enemy of my country is my friend:

Kengor focuses on a KGB letter written at the height of the Cold War that shows that Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) offered to assist Soviet leaders in formulating a public relations strategy to counter President Reagan's foreign policy and to complicate his re-election efforts. "

Jawa, only somewhat hyperbolically, wants to know the statute of limitations on treason.

JunkYardBlog cautions going out to far on a limb regarding a report from the "exuberant" CNS news service.

Still: We need some answers.

Fortunately, we have a mainstream media that's anxious to get to the truth of important public controversies, no matter which political party that truth might harm.

So, like, we've got that covered.

Posted by: Ace at 02:42 PM | Comments (84)
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Yeah, I hear its old.
New to me, though.

And funny.

Note: This post has been dropped below Ace's top post on purpose, because that one is such a bombshell.

Thanks to Geoff, who got you covered like a jimmy hat.

Posted by: LauraW. at 02:00 PM | Comments (7)
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Sure, he's been saying this forever, but now I agree with him.

We're either going to try to win this thing or we should, yes, pull up sticks and redeploy to Okinawa, which commands the critical Middle Eastern sealanes in the Sea of Japan.

I resisted the call for "more troops" as being too glib, too obvious. Better a "light footprint" than a heavy metal crushing of Iraq.

That now seems misguided to me. More troops -- and these can be on a timetable, if the Democrats and public demand it (which, of course, they will). A timetable for the additional troops may also help with the internal politics of Iraq, as many Iraqis will be resistant to the idea of a 100,000 fresh "infidels" in their country.

Six or nine months or so. If a near doubling of the American force in Iraq can't do the job in six or nine months, then there's no point keeping them there anyway. Either the situation can be stabliized by a bigger and more aggressive American presence, able to both take and then hold key insurgent hotspots, or it can't.

But it's time to try.

And if it takes a lot more money to recruit and field them, well then, fine. We may be being penny-wise and pound-foolish here. An actual stabilization of Iraq, and a righteous slaughter of the jihadis, will save us a lot of money down the road.

Bush Considering Changing "Tactics:" Maybe that includes changing the "light footprint" tactic as well.

This thing either needs to be won or lost. The current situation just seems like losing in slow motion. Something dramatic needs to be done to change the trajectory of this war.

It might help if we got more brutal, quite frankly. We seem determined to win the "hearts and minds" of those whose hearts are black and whose minds are fixated on murder.

Ralph Peters wrote of this recently-- well worth reading.

The politically correct atmosphere in Washington deems any discussion of religion as a strategic factor indelicate: Let our troops die, just don't hurt anyone's feelings.

So the doctrine writers faked it, treating all insurgencies as political. As a result, they prescribed an excellent head-cold treatment - for a cancer patient. The text is a mush of pop-zen mantras such as "Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction," "The best weapons do not shoot," or "The more force used, the less effective it is."

That's just nutty. Should we have done nothing in the wake of 9/11? Would everything have been OK if we'd just been nicer? What non-lethal "best weapons" might have snagged Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, where the problem was too little military force, not too much violence?

Should we have sent fewer troops to Iraq, where inadequate numbers crippled everything we attempted? Will polite chats with tribal chiefs stop the sectarian violence drenching Iraq in blood?

On the surface, the doctrine appears sober and serious. But it's morally frivolous and intellectually inert, a pathetic rehashing of yesteryear's discredited "wisdom" on counterinsurgencies and, worst of all, driven by a stalker-quality infatuation with T.E. Lawrence, "Lawrence of Arabia," who not only was a huckster of the first order, but whose "revolt in the desert" was a near-meaningless sideshow of a sideshow.

Lawrence is quoted repeatedly, with reverence. We might as well cite the British generals of the Great War who sent men over the top in waves to face German machine guns.

You can trust two kinds of officers: Those who read a great deal and those who don't read at all. But beware the officer who reads just a little and falls in love with one book. A little education really is a dangerous thing.

A more aggressive and destructive military -- willing, yes, to destroy the village in order to save the country -- may backfire. But at this point gambles are worth it.

We can either win or we can't, and we might as well know earlier rather than later.

If they react only to force -- then let us give them force, and plenty of it.

Rebuilding should stop completely in all terrorist-controlled or terrorist-friendly areas. It's time for punitive actions, not attempts to win over those supporting the jihadis killling our troops. If they make their neighborhoods and towns battlegrounds, then let them be battlegrounds, and stop trying to build schools and hospitals there.

And put the oil weapon into play. Allow the Iraqi government to begin adjusting oil profit distributions according to provinces' and cities' compliance with the government. If they reject the government, the government has no reason to share with them its money.

It's time to get tough, and get serious, and get brutal, or get the fuck out.

One Vietnam analogy is clear -- we're trying to fight a war by half-measures. Either a war is important enough to fight as ruthlessly and as destructively as necessary, or it ought not be fought in the first place.

And Put Moqtada Al Sadr on Fuckin' Notice: We can't take him out because we fear the country would devolve further into chaos and violence as a reaction.

But 100,000 more troops may enough to control such an outbreak.

Making taking al-Sadr out finally feasible.

Posted by: Ace at 01:29 PM | Comments (70)
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Still in a fantastic mood.

Posted by: LauraW. at 12:33 PM | Comments (15)
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I swear, your Honor, I thought she was 18:

Investigators said 26-year-old, Michael Patrick McPhail may be the first person to face prosecution in Washington State under a new law protecting animals from sexual abuse.

According to charging documents, McPhailÂ’s wife told Pierce County sheriffÂ’s investigators she saw him engage in a sex act with the family pet.

SherriffÂ’s investigators said she took two photographs with a cell phone camera, then contacted police.

“There's pretty clear proof what happened to this dog and it something that's against the law, and we arrested him and the prosecutor's office charged him, so we'll see how this law stands up,” Ed Troyer with the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department said.

Investigators said McPhail was arrested. When police arrived he began to cry and slammed his head into a glass coffee table.

Prosecutors told KIRO 7 Eyewitness News this is the first time the new felony animal cruelty law to protect animals from sexual abuse has been tested in the courtroom.

Flashback:

The law was written following a highly publicized incident in Enumclaw in which a man died in a similar incident involving a horse.

Some people just aren't hooked up right.

Thanks to JackStraw.

Posted by: Ace at 12:06 PM | Comments (49)
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I disagree with him on the mistake part, but I can't build up much heat for him abandoning the cause.

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.

I think the most important objection to the war is that it's had the opposite effect of what was intended. And I don't mean that it's stirred up jihadists and "created more terrorists;" that's an absurdity. Of course you're going to provoke more of a response when you go to war against global jihadism than when you sit back and just keep on taking it. By the math of the Democratic talking points, we should never have invaded Afghanistan, either -- because that has "created more Pakistani terrorists" than we had before 2001.

They never quite explain how on earth terrorists are "created" by invading the supposedly secular, Muslim-apostate regime of Iraq, and yet weren't created by invading the Unholy Capital of bin Ladinism, Afghanistan.

No, the main problem is what we intended was that Iraq would serve as a cautionary tale to the rest of the Islamic world -- Iran first and foremost -- and a demonstration of American might, and military skill, and determination. And also, that by creating a decent Middle Eastern state, it would show other Muslims a way forward besides senseless, murderous jihad.

The war has, as of yet, done the opposite -- Iran feels less threatened now than it would otherwise be, as our military is still dealing with Iraq and could not possibly go to war with Iran within even 3 or so years. And thusfar we have failed to create an Iraqi democracy capable of functioning without our help, and emboldended them by thinking they can win.

And American determination is shown to be precisely what we'd hoped it to prove otherwise -- a shaky thing, with a country ready to abandon a war at the first sign of difficulty.

But all of that is due to the jihadists' determination to win Iraq, because they know the crucial stakes involved. Iran is funding the insurgency precisely because it knows that, absent an insurgency in Iraq, the American fist may begin drawing back to strike it. Jihadists are determined to prevent a democracy in Iraq because they know it will destroy their power. And they're determined to break the American will because they know that, without an America willing to fight them, they have a free hand in the next thirty years to kill as they please.

Rather than cede their power country by country, they've decided to put almost everything they have into Iraq. So we're not just fighting the War in Iraq; we're fighting several of the wars we'd hoped to avoid by fighting in Iraq. But even though we'd hoped to avoid them, we have to fight them, if the enemy is determined to fight them.

Had we not invaded Iraq, Iranian funding and jihadis from around the world might have poured into Afghanistan instead. I'm not sure we could have avoided this fight by simply not going to war in Iraq -- we just would have had a different battlefield.

Whether the war is "a mistake" depends on its outcome. A victory will be a greivous blow for global bin Ladinism; a defeat their greatest triumph. The enemy has doubled-down in Iraq precisely because they know how important it is to their twisted cause.

If the bin Ladinists believe Iraq is vital to keep in reliably terrorist-friendly hands, it seems to me a pretty good indication that it's a war worth fighting. Even given what we know now.

Thanks to Larwyn.

More... One critic thinks the US is making a mistake by withdrawing into a small number of "superfortresses," and that, if the jihadists are to be defeated, we must go back to deployment all over the country, in Iraq's cities.

Whether that's true or not I don't know. At some point the Iraqis have to fight for themselves, don't they?

Posted by: Ace at 11:59 AM | Comments (40)
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This LandWarrior thing has seemed, until now, mostly in the business of producing footage for the History and Learning Channels.

Some of the wearable electronics developed by the program are now to be deployed, though:

These days, the vasy majority of dismounted soldiers don't even have radios -- let alone the electronic mapping and messaging tools that have become commonplace in most Humvees. That'll change, once the "Manchus" of the 4/9 Infantry don the Land Warrior ensemble.

Radios and GPS locators come standard. A helmet-mounted monocle lets the soldier know he and his buddies are on a satellite-powered map. That same monocle is connected to the weapon sight, so the infantryman can, in effect, shoot around corners.

By which they mean you can stand protected behind a corner and stick your gun around it, using the gun's electronic sight to aim it, via your helmet monocle.

That's pretty good-- shooting with some accuracy without exposing yourself to enemy fire.

The sight also serves as a long-range zoom, with twelve times amplification. "It makes every rifleman a marksman," Colonel Richard Hansen, Land Warrior's project manager, crows. Night vision, and laser targeting – which once required clunky binoculars, or attachments to the gun -- are now built in, too.

Posted by: Ace at 11:26 AM | Comments (18)
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So in Connecticut, a very liberal state, the pro-war candidates trounce the anti-war candidate, but in the rest of America, we're losing?

I guess that's possible, but it seems strange to me.

Posted by: Ace at 11:00 AM | Comments (18)
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I was ready to throw in the towel on Iraq. Until I read the "briefly" part.

he Shiite militia run by the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr briefly seized control of the southern Iraqi city of Amarah on Friday in one of the boldest acts of defiance yet by the country's powerful, unofficial armies.

The militiamen later withdrew from the streets after Iraqi soldiers and mediators arrived, lifting their siege of police headquarters under a temporary truce negotiated with an al-Sadr envoy. It was not clear whether the cleric knew about his militia's planned takeover in advance.

British military spokesman Maj. Charlie Burbridge said 600 Iraqi army soldiers had retaken control of the city, but not before the 25 gunmen and police were killed in violence that began Thursday night. The Iraqi army dispatched two companies to Amarah, a city of 750,000, from Basra, the south's largest city.

It's a wonderment to me we can't just kill al Sadr. There would be political fallout, of course. But is that worse than the current situation?

Posted by: Ace at 10:57 AM | Comments (9)
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Hypothetically, you understand.

In the book, “he describes how he grabbed a knife from a man who accompanied him to Nicole’s home — and moments later found himself covered in blood and looking down on the bodies of Nicole and Ron,” said the source…

“O.J. prefaces these key pages by almost half-heartedly claiming this part of the book is hypothetical,” said the source. “But I don’t think anyone is going to be convinced of that.”

...

The book’s working title is “If I Did It.” But Simpson’s account of the slayings is so chillingly realistic that it leaves no doubt it is a confession of what really happened.

He's said something like this before, if I remember right. Something like, "If I did kill her, it was because I loved her too much."

But now he's selling a book with the passage, probably on advice that the book wouldn't sell otherwise.

Seems to me he has a rather large outstanding judgment against him for the wrongful deaths of Niccole Brown and Ron Goldman. It doesn't seem that he should be able to protect his $3.5 million advance from being taken to satisfy that judgment -- but if he's writing this, there must be some legal loophole allowing him to profit from murder. Otherwise, why would he write it? Just to put money in the Goldman's pockets?

He hates them. After all, they said bad things about him after they murdered their son.

Posted by: Ace at 10:51 AM | Comments (22)
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