Target Centermass

Day: June 21, 2005

  • General: No Drawdown in Iraq Likely Soon

    Do we want the troops to be brought back from Iraq? Of course, everybody does. Some just know that there’s work yet to be done, and reductions aren’t wise now.

    The top U.S. combat commander in Iraq says American troop levels likely will remain steady through early next year and that drawdowns likely will not depend on political developments in the nascent Iraqi government.

    Army Lt. Gen. John Vines told Pentagon reporters Tuesday that the violent insurgency likely will continue through this autumn’s constitutional referendum.

    “We don’t see the insurgency contracting or expanding right now,” Vines said.

    Vines also said he would prefer not to have a timeline for troop withdrawals imposed by Congress and that there is a possibility the insurgency will evaporate following successful national elections this December.

    Feel free to peruse my thoughts on the cowardice of timelines and “exit strategies.”

    About 135,000 U.S. troops now serve in Iraq, with tens of thousands more in supporting roles outside that nation’s borders.

    Earlier this year, during the relative calm that followed the January election, senior commanders told Congress they expected to be prepared to recommend troop cuts by this summer. However, following a post-election lull, deadly attacks aimed at both Iraqis and U.S. troops have again become commonplace.

    “We’re not at that point yet,” Vines told reporters when asked whether he would recommend U.S. troop cuts soon.

    Troop levels are “conditions-based,” Vines said. “Currently we know that insurgents will do everything they can do disrupt ratification of a constitution. To them, that’s a terrifying event.”

    Iraq’s interim government is drafting a new constitution, scheduled to be ratified by national election in October. If that happens, national elections for a permanent government would take place in December.

    “At this point, I would not be prepared to recommend a drawdown prior to the election — certainly not in any significant numbers,” Vines said.

    I deem this a rational assessment based on pending political events and the shape of things on the ground. Vines does not rule out flexibility in the matter, though.

    He held out the possibility that he might not ask for replacements for some units currently deployed.

    “We continue to assess that,” he said. “We’re not at the point where we make that decision yet.”

    Is this another Viet Nam? Is history repeating itself? Are we tied to years of expanding deployment numbers and constant calls from the military for yet more troops?

    Conversely, Vines said he also does not expect to recommend a troop increase for the autumn referendum and winter elections. This past January, U.S. troop levels in Iraq were temporarily beefed up to nearly 160,000 — the peak for this mission — to help protect polls from insurgent attacks.

    “I would not be in a position to recommend any spike” in U.S. troop levels this autumn, Vines said. “I don’t see that. Is it possible? Yes, if we think he conditions have changed. But right now I don’t foresee a spike to support that referendum.”

    Well, how long until we can put the Viet Nam analogies to bed? My guess is a long, long while, as the left in America has absolutely tied itself to its skewed view of the American military, its Hollywood-taught-me-about-Nam mentality. So much of their worldview is built on those slanted foundations. Unfortunately, the same is true for the bulk of the “American” media.

  • Just When the News Gets Ya Down

    Here’s a couple of feel-good type stories.

    Missing Utah Scout found alive

    Water, granola bars, and a cell phone video game. That’s what a Utah boy wanted after spending four days lost in Utah without food and water.

    Brennan Hawkins was found Tuesday near a lake, about five miles from the Boy Scout camp where he was last seen on Friday. Sheriff Dave Edmunds says Brennan was “a little dehydrated” and “a little weak” but is otherwise in good health. Edmunds says the boy was “extremely hungry.” But he says after he’d eaten, and after he drank a lot of water, he wanted to play a video game on the cell-phone of one of the rescuers.

    Lions save girl from kidnappers

    Three lions rescued a girl of 12 kidnapped by men who wanted to force her into marriage, chasing off her abductors and protecting her until she was rescued by Ethiopian police.

    The men had held the girl for a week in the remote south-west, repeatedly beating her, before the lions chased them away.

    “They stood guard [for half a day] until [police and family] found her and then they just left her like a gift,” said Sergeant Wondimu Wendaju inKefa province.

    Now, back to the regularly-scheduled doom-and-gloom.

  • A Music Meme

    I’ve been tagged with another meme, this time by Phil at Shades of Gray (Umbrae Canarum). Luckily, this one’s a snap.

    Okay, new meme: what are your top three songs to listen to whilst running? And if you have the server space, will you post one or all of them for the rest of us to download? (If running is not your preferred method of exercise — which more or less guarantees your intelligence — well, songs that you would listen to are just fine.)

    First, I’d like to point out that running is not my favorite form of exercise. I’d rather get my workout in some kind of sporting activity, be it lacrosse, tennis, racquetball or a handfull of others.

    As to my running songs, I’ll just list what’s on my mp3 player from when I was last running regularly:

    • (Warm-up) “Princes of the Universe” — Queen
    • “Bottom Line (Extended Mix)” — Big Audio Dynamite
    • “Me, Myself and I” — De La Soul
    • “It Wasn’t Me” — Shaggy
    • “American Soviets (Extended Mix)” — CCCP
    • “Big Pimpin” — Jay-Z
    • (Closing sprint) “In the End” — Linkin Park
    • (Cool-down) “Black Coffee in Bed” — Squeeze

    I think it’s an interesting mix.

    Now, which three bloggers to tag? Let’s go with two guys who have recently hit me with memes. Here you go, JohnL and Hammertime. For a third, I’ll pass it along to Eric as a means to celebrate his 30k hit.

  • Cedar Revolution Rolls to Lebanese Victory

    Anti-Syria alliance wins Lebanon poll

    Final results in Lebanon’s parliamentary election yesterday gave a clear victory to anti-Syrian candidates led by Saad Hariri, the 35-year-old son of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri who was assassinated in February.

    In the fourth and final phase of the month-long election, the opposition alliance won all the remaining 28 seats in northern Lebanon, bringing its total to 72 in the 128-member parliament.

    “The north has decided the character of the new parliament and given the absolute majority to the opposition,” Mr Hariri told a news conference.

    The result makes Mr Hariri, who entered politics as a result of his father’s death, an obvious candidate for prime minister, although he has so far refused to say whether he wants the job.

    Following the withdrawal of Syrian forces under international pressure in April, the elections were the first since the 1975-90 civil war to be free of extensive meddling from Damascus.

    Still, there were harsh lessons in democracy to be learned.

    Despite allegations of vote-buying and intimidation in some areas, an EU monitoring team said yesterday the elections “were well-managed and took place in a generally peaceful manner within the framework for elections”.

    Many voters were disappointed by the way rival factions struck pacts which guaranteed seats for themselves and made the results a foregone conclusion in large parts of the country.

    At least we’re not talking about a blatant screwing, such as that proven in the states of Wisconsin and Washington in a supposedly well-established election process.

    Sunday’s final stage was the more competitive, pitting the anti-Syrian list against an unlikely alliance of pro-Syrian candidates and supporters of the former general Michel Aoun, a Maronite who had previously been a vehement critic of Damascus.

    Mr Aoun, whose candidates won 21 seats a week ago in the Christian heartland of Mount Lebanon, accused Mr Hariri’s alliance of buying votes and playing on sectarian differences to secure victory and ruled out any possibility of teaming up with him in parliament.

    “We will be in the opposition. We can’t be with a majority that reached [parliament] through corruption,” Mr Aoun said.

    A further 54 seats in the new parliament are held by a pro-Syrian Shia alliance of Amal and Hizbullah.

    This leaves Mr Hariri’s alliance short of the two-thirds majority needed to amend the constitution and oust the Syrian-backed president, Emile Lahoud, who controls key parts of the security services.

    Last autumn, under Syrian pressure, the previous parliament gave Mr Lahoud an extra two years in office. There are also doubts about how long the alliances forged in the run-up to the election will last once parliament convenes.

    Obviously, there could be and quite probably will be tumultuous times ahead for Lebanon, perhaps even another civil war. Despite the amazing story of a free election, the chance of upheaval provides an ample doorway for the New York Times to waltz through with its negative spin.

    Anti-Syria Coalition’s Victory in Lebanon Raises New Tension

    Lebanon’s anti-Syrian movement swept the voting on Sunday in the country’s far north, official results released Monday night showed, giving it a firm parliamentary majority.

    But euphoric notions of a new era in national politics were mitigated by the fact that the election also revived religious hostilities that seemed buried when hundreds of thousands of Lebanese rallied last spring in revulsion over the assassination of the former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, and over Syria’s power.

    The Times seems to revel in the possibility of civil war, the chance of a failure of a democratic movement. I’ve acknowledged the possibility, but does it have to be trumpeted as the key aspect of today’s wondrous story? Would the Lebanese be better under the stability of Syrian occupation and repression? Would it be better that the former Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact satellite nations be kept under the boot of Moscow-led communism in the name of stability, rather than struggling their own ways to their own future? Oh, wait, I forgot for a moment I was discussing the New York Times.