Author: Gunner

Tonight I just have a little link dump for y’all of the blogging and articles that caught my eye.

Ace: Time Magazine Deliberately Distorted Lebanon Reportage To Bash Israel [emphasis in original]

They didn’t just have the photographer’s word on this — they had the photographic proof! And yet they refused to run the picture at all!

And re-wrote the photo caption — the man-at-the-scene report by the photographer — to triply propagandize for Hezbollah and Lebanon, knowing their caption was 100% false.

If heads don’t roll over this, I don’t know what to say.

Go and read — it’s pretty damning. It’s bad enough that the supposed gatekeepers of information are so biased in what they report and how they report. I agree with Ace that it’s borderline criminal when they outright and intentionally lie to their readers.

Is Heroism ‘Unfit to Print’? [again, emphasis in original]

The nation’s highest honor for combat valor was awarded posthumously to a U.S. Marine from upstate New York on Friday – and The New York Times didn’t notice.

It was a shameful act of neglect, though not surprising in the least.

[…]

It was only the second MOH awarded in the Iraq war, and it was major news everywhere – especially in New York.

But . . . not a word in the Times.

[…]

The Times wasn’t talking yesterday, so let us hazard a guess.

Perhaps, to the Times, Jason Dunham was just another dead Marine – a victim, a statistic, another young life “wasted” in the battle for Iraq.

Or perhaps a heroic Marine doesn’t fit in with the paper’s notion of U.S. soldiers in Iraq?

Hat tip to Cold Fury‘s Sithmonkey, who chimes in with some very good thoughts on the matter. As I stated before, the info gatekeepers in the mainstream media have been absolutely despicable in their coverage of our military and its efforts. I’ll again quote Power Line‘s Paul Mirengoff, who blogged the following:

Have you ever read a history of war that focused almost entirely on casualty figures (with an occasional torture story and grieving parent thrown in), to the exclusion of any real discussion of tactics, operations, and actual battles? I haven’t. But that’s what our self-proclaimed “rough drafters” of history are serving up with respect to Iraq.

Little or no in-depth coverage of tactics, operations, and battles. Sadly, add heroes to Paul’s listing.

Watching the beginning of the end

Over the last year, I have left little hints to regular readers of something that has been bouncing around my head – the coming nuclear war in the Muslim world. I’m not the only one that has been thinking of it over the last year, Charles Krauthammer has as well. Before you go, “Yea, let them nuke it out…” remember that they have the balance of the world’s supply of energy.

With the NORKs making their little nuke go boom, as sure as the sun is a fusion reactor, know that at best the core of Shia Islam (Iran) is at best 2-5 years behind. The Sunni powers will not let this stand. I would hope that many of you understand the 30-years war and what that was all about. Now picture if the Catholic and Protestant powers had nukes. Well, they were progressive minded people compared to the Jim Jones like cult that is running Iran right now. Though they really want to go Persian Empire on everyone, the Iranian issues is more religious than political. That is where the danger lies. Politicians understand negotiation and compromise. They understand give and take. Religious fundamentalists don’t. They were binary before binary existed.

I won’t say that this is CDR Salamander‘s most rose-colored effort, but it certainly is worth your time. Some things possibly just over the horizon ain’t all that pretty. To ignore the tremblings of the volcano is a mistake made by too many in the past.

“Let the bloody wogs sort themselves out” [yet again, emphasis in original]

That might’ve been an unexceptional sentiment in the corridors of Whitehall a century ago, but it’s hardly the sentiment that has traditionally been that of the Democratic party. The times, I guess, are a’changin’.

The current Democratic party line is that they will push for troop reductions in Iraq “as a way of prodding along the paralyzed Iraqi government”. Considering that the Democrats have spent the last two years telling us that iraq was a total write-off anyway, that we never should’ve invaded in the first place, and our policy there was doomed from the start, forgive me if I harbor some reservations about the truth of that reasoning.

In point of fact, the Democratic Party’s leadership simply wants out of Iraq. That’s what they repeatedly told us every day prior to last Tuesday, so I presume that, rather than post-election pontifications, constitutes the Democrat’s real policy, and the reasons for implementing it.

Additionally, I wonder what will happen, and what the Democrats’ policy prescription will be if, in the wake of a pullout, the situation in Iraq goes completely down the toilet.

QandO‘s Dale Franks goes on to look at how another Democrat-supported early withdrawal — a combatus interruptus, if your will — played out a little over three decades ago. The Democrats have often tried to paint the Iraqi theater as another Viet Nam; now apparently may be their opportunity to turn it into such.

Abandoning Iraq [finally, emphasis added]

Regardless of its final composition, and regardless of other pressing issues or its mandate, the leading item of business for the new U.S. Congress will be Iraq.

It didn’t matter who won control of each house — the fix was already in. Look at the composition of the Baker-Hamilton commission, which the outgoing Congress had already appointed to “find a way out of Iraq” — a bipartisan commission, representing the foreign-policy opponents of President Bush in both the Republican and Democratic parties. Soon it will formally report.

James Baker, secretary of state under President Bush’s father, was the man who, in 1989, secured an American exit from Lebanon by effectively surrendering the country to Assad’s Syria. Lee Hamilton, former Democrat chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, joined him in stacking the Commission’s study groups with men and women representing the pre-9/11 foreign policy consensus, which could be summarized in the phrase, “stability through disengagement”. On the Baker-Hamilton plan, Congress will take the war in Iraq out of President Bush’s hands, as Congress took the Vietnam War out of President Nixon’s. Iraq will then be delivered into the hands of Iran’s ayatollahs.

But we can also expect Nancy Pelosi’s victorious Democrats in the new Congress to do everything in their power to recreate the Watergate environment, both for their own electoral prospects in 2008, and “to make an example of” the lame duck currently in the White House. The mainstream media will oblige them, with 24/7 coverage of whatever they allege.

In deposing the regime of Saddam Hussein — now sentenced to hang with the enthusiastic approval of the overwhelming majority of his countrymen, though Iraq itself is first sentenced to endure a ludicrous appeals process — the United States accomplished something well within her military means, in a few weeks of “shock and awe”.

But in trying to build a secular democracy over the ruin of Saddam’s regime, the Americans tried something they had not the stomach for. From the outset, they imposed upon themselves restrictions that would make that fight unwinnable. As in Vietnam, they adopted a purely defensive posture.

So far as President Bush can be blamed, it should be for showing insufficient ruthlessness in a task that could not be accomplished by half-measures. Alternatively, for failing to grasp that America was psychologically unprepared for real war, not only by the memory of Vietnam, but by the grim advance of “liberal” decadence in domestic life over the generation since.

To a degree, I agree with David Warren in this. I have often stated that our primary problem in Iraq since the invasion and overthrow has been that our success was too surgical in nature. Simply put, our enemies — and the Arab world as a whole — were not bloodily shown a great military might and strength of will but merely a technological and tactical wonder. Tactics can be countered and technology can be blunted, given time (and especially given the friendly propaganda machine our enemies have found in “our” media). To prevent this, the tactical and technological edge must be employed ruthlessly to achieve lasting effect. It was Alfred Thayer Mahan that put forth the following:

War, once declared, must be waged offensively, aggressively. The enemy must not be fended off, but smitten down.

Failure to do so allows the enemy to shift toward a war of attrition and will. In this case, Mr. Warren may be correct and I may have been tragically wrong — after the wake-up of 9/11 to the growing danger of our radical expansionist Islamist foes, I expected a little more of an iron nature from the American public. I did not anticipate the actual hostility of the media (see this great piece [part 1 and part 2] by Greyhawk at the Mudville Gazette for an example of some of the media’s venomous passion), nor did I expect so many would work to separate our efforts in Iraq from our efforts against the Islamists while at the same time ignoring the shifting of focus of our Islamist enemies to Iraq. If Warren is indeed correct, I pity the civilization — or lack thereof — that we in the West may be leaving our progeny.

Okay, maybe I should’ve cut out that last link for a post of it’s own. Hat tip to Wretchard at the Belmont Club, an unsurprising source for something so provacative.