I would give the following paper by Amichai Cohen, International Law professor at Ono Academic College, Israel, a gentlemanly C.

Excerpt

Armed conflicts of this type have sometimes been termed “asymmetrical” –- an adjective used principally with reference to the fact that the protagonists are a state, with all its might and force, and an organization with few heavy arms and a limited number of fighters. But such conflicts are also asymmetrical in a more complicated sense: they are fought between a state, in possession of sound reasons for following the laws of armed conflicts (LOAC) or international humanitarian law (IHL), and a high incentive and organizational obligation to do so, on the one hand, and on the other hand, an organization that almost never follows these rules and has very little incentive to do so.

States involved in these conflicts mostly attempt to follow, or are expected by the international community to follow, IHL as detailed in customary international law, in the Geneva Conventions, and in other sources of applicable international law. However, it has become increasingly difficult to abide by these laws, mainly because of the novel nature of the problems that constantly arise. This brief review will only deal with two of the most prominent of such problems:

The first is how to apply the rule forbidding indiscriminate attacks on a civilian population when the enemy deliberately operates from within that environment. Direct attacks against civilians are of course always forbidden. However, what are
the appropriate norms that a state should apply when the only possible way of fighting the enemy involves risking the lives of civilians whom the enemy is using for its own protection?

A second problem arises from the fact that non-state actors are not susceptible to the range of formal and informal sanction which may be used against states. Since international law is not policed effectively, non-state actors may readily assume
that their violations of the laws of war, including those mentioned above, will not be punished by law. For example, they may target civilians of the state actor in the knowledge that there exists very small chance that they will be punished for
doing so by any international judicial body. Consequently, while one side to the conflict behaves in accordance with IHL, the other considers itself to be free of the limitations imposed by these rules.

Read the whole thing.

My criticism is that, although Professor Cohen does a workmanlike academic job of dividing alternative perspectives into models, his fundamental approach is fundamentally far too abstract, unempiric, and ahistoric.

Restricting consideration of the practical responses to terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and violations of the laws and customs of war to a small number of very recent, poorly handled examples which occurred under the leadership of democratic governments, which obviously failed satisfactorily to implement or articulate clear policies, was a fundamental mistake.

The world did not suddenly spring into existence in 1993. “Assymetrical warfare” and the cynical exploitation of the chivalrous instincts and humanitarian values of honorable and civilized armies by outlaws and barbarians has always been part of the human experience. Military commanders from Classical Antiquity down to WWII frequently dealt with decisive effect with the same problems without scandalizing posterity by cruelty and excesses.

Professor Cohen is too satisfied with the classification of perspectives into “models,” and too cautious and timid about identifying explicitly the major and important role played in the fraudulent framing of the issue as presented to the public by dishonest and ideologically biased humanitarian organizations and the media.

“Please, oh, please, don’t build nuclear weapons and sponsor terrorist attacks against us. You can have the guys who were killing US troops with IEDs back. See? we are kneeling and grovelling.”

New York Times:

The American military unexpectedly released five Iranians on Thursday after holding them for two and a half years on charges they had orchestrated deadly attacks in Iraq. Iraqi officials promptly promised to turn them over to the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad.

The Iranians, whom the Americans accused of being senior operatives of Iran’s Quds force, an elite unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, have been a point of contention between the United States, Iran and Iraq ever since they were seized in a predawn raid in the northern Kurdish city of Erbil in January 2007. An adviser to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, Yassein Majid, confirmed the men’s release but provided no additional details. American military and diplomatic officials did not immediately comment.

The reasoning behind the timing of the release was unclear.

George W. Bush confronting the bureaucracies

In the National Interest, Richard Perle describes the fatal disconnect between George W. Bush’s professed policies and the entrenched State Department and National Security bureaucracies’ failure to implement them. Not only were Bush’s policies not faithfully pursued, in many cases, they were openly attacked and covertly undermined by leaks and disinformation operations.

Perle additionally debunks the left’s favorite bogey: the sinister imperialist “neocon” conpiracy. In recent years, neocon came to be used as a leftwing pejorative for someone supposedly guilty of responsibility for a new, more virulent and objectionable form of conservatism, inclined to unilateral militarism overseas and supportive of hypersecurity measures at homes. The left entirely managed to forget that a neocon is really a (typically Jewish intellectual) former liberal who has been “mugged by reality” and become a foreign policy and law enforcement hawk in response to the excesses of the radical left post the late 1960s. Dick Cheney, who has always been a conservative, for instance, cannot possibly be classified as a neocon.

For eight years George W. Bush pulled the levers of government—sometimes frantically—never realizing that they were disconnected from the machinery and the exertion was largely futile. As a result, the foreign and security policies declared by the president in speeches, in public and private meetings, in backgrounders and memoranda often had little or no effect on the activities of the sprawling bureaucracies charged with carrying out the president’s policies. They didn’t need his directives: they had their own. ...

The responsibility for an ill-advised occupation and an inadequate regional strategy ultimately lies with President Bush himself. He failed to oversee the post-Saddam strategy, intervening only sporadically when things had deteriorated to the point where confidence in cabinet-level management could no longer be sustained. He did finally assert presidential authority when he rejected the defeatist advice of the Baker-Hamilton commission and Condi Rice’s State Department, ordering instead the “surge,” a decision that he surely hopes will eclipse the dismal period from 2004 to January 2007. But that is but one victory for the White House among many failures at Langley, at the Pentagon and in Foggy Bottom. ...

Understanding Bush’s foreign and defense policy requires clarity about its origins and the thinking behind the administration’s key decisions. That means rejecting the false claim that the decision to remove Saddam, and Bush policies generally, were made or significantly influenced by a few neoconservative “ideologues” who are most often described as having hidden their agenda of imperial ambition or the imposition of democracy by force or the promotion of Israeli interests at the expense of American ones or the reshaping of the Middle East for oil—or all of the above. Despite its seemingly endless repetition by politicians, academics, journalists and bloggers, that is not a serious argument. ...

I believe that Bush went to war for the reasons—and only the reasons—he gave at the time: because he believed Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the United States that was far greater than the likely cost of removing him from power. ...

[T]he salient issue was not whether Saddam had stockpiles of WMD but whether he could produce them and place them in the hands of terrorists. The administration’s appalling inability to explain that this is what it was thinking and doing allowed the unearthing of stockpiles to become the test of whether it had correctly assessed the risk that Saddam might provide WMD to terrorists. When none were found, the administration appeared to have failed the test even though considerable evidence of Saddam’s capability to produce WMD was found in postwar inspections by the Iraq Survey Group chaired by Charles Duelfer.

I am not alone in having been asked, “If you knew that Saddam did not have WMD, would you still have supported invading Iraq?” But what appears to some to be a “gotcha” question actually misses the point. The decision to remove Saddam stands or falls on one’s judgment at the time the decision was made, and with the information then available, about how to manage the risk that he would facilitate a catastrophic attack on the United States. To say the decision to remove him was mistaken because stockpiles of WMD were never found is akin to saying that it was a mistake to buy fire insurance last year because your house didn’t burn down or health insurance because you didn’t become ill. ...

I believe the cost of removing Saddam and achieving a stable future for Iraq has turned out to be very much higher than it should have been, and certainly higher than it was reasonable to expect.

But about the many mistakes made in Iraq, one thing is certain: they had nothing to do with ideology. They did not draw inspiration from or reflect neoconservative ideas and they were not the product of philosophical or ideological influences outside the government. ...

If ever there were a security policy that lacked philosophical underpinnings, it was that of the Bush administration. Whenever the president attempted to lay out a philosophy, as in his argument for encouraging the freedom of expression and dissent that might advance democratic institutions abroad, it was throttled in its infancy by opponents within and outside the administration.

I believe Bush ultimately failed to grasp the demands of the American presidency. He saw himself (MBA that he was) as a chief executive whose job was to give broad direction that would then be automatically translated into specific policies and faithfully implemented by the departments of the executive branch. I doubt that such an approach could be made to work. But without a team that shared his ideas and a determination to see them realized, there was no chance he could succeed. His carefully drafted, often eloquent speeches, intended as marching orders, were seldom developed into concrete policies. And when his ideas ran counter to the conventional wisdom of the executive departments, as they often did, debilitating compromise was the result: the president spoke the words and the departments pronounced the policies.

Read the whole thing.

Shiite Iraqi policemen (and their officers) receive a solid dose of the effective kind of motivational instruction that Western soldiers have been receiving from non-commissioned officers since back when Christ was a corporal. One can picture some Roman centurian delivering the same address at Hadrian’s Wall, also via translator, to his blue-painted Brithonic auxiliaries.

5:35 video

Richard Perle evaluates the Bush record in foreign policy (to the limited degree that Bush was allowed by the federal bureaucracy to have a say in the matter) and attacks the left’s false narrative of the reasons for bringing about regime change in Iraq.

[T]he salient issue was not whether Saddam had stockpiles of WMD but whether he could produce them and place them in the hands of terrorists. The administration’s appalling inability to explain that this is what it was thinking and doing allowed the unearthing of stockpiles to become the test of whether it had correctly assessed the risk that Saddam might provide WMD to terrorists. When none were found, the administration appeared to have failed the test even though considerable evidence of Saddam’s capability to produce WMD was found in postwar inspections by the Iraq Survey Group chaired by Charles Duelfer.

I am not alone in having been asked, “If you knew that Saddam did not have WMD, would you still have supported invading Iraq?” But what appears to some to be a “gotcha” question actually misses the point. The decision to remove Saddam stands or falls on one’s judgment at the time the decision was made, and with the information then available, about how to manage the risk that he would facilitate a catastrophic attack on the United States. To say the decision to remove him was mistaken because stockpiles of WMD were never found is akin to saying that it was a mistake to buy fire insurance last year because your house didn’t burn down or health insurance because you didn’t become ill. No one would take seriously the question, “Would you have bought Enron stock if you had known it would go down?” and no one should take seriously the facile conclusion that invading Iraq was mistaken because we now know Saddam did not possess stockpiles of WMD.

Bush might have decided differently: that the safer course was to leave Saddam in place and hope he would not cause or enable the use of WMD against the United States. How would we now assess his presidency if, say, Iraqi anthrax had later been used to kill thousands of Americans? He would have been accused—rightly in my view—of having taken a foolish risk by not acting against a regime we had good reason to consider extremely dangerous. (And no one would be so stupid as to ask: Would you have left Saddam in place if you had known he was going to supply anthrax to terrorists?)

Read the whole thing.

Let’s see, Bush’s war policy was wrong, because sophisticated people knew that al Qaeda is a Sunni organization, and neither secular Ba’athists, like Saddam Hussein, nor Shiites, like the mullahs controlling Iran, would ever under any circumstance cooperate with or assist al Qaeda.

The Telegraph:

Fresh links between Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and al-Qaeda have been uncovered following interception of a letter from the terrorist leadership that hails Tehran’s support for a recent attack on the American embassy in Yemen, which killed 16 people.

Delivery of the letter exposed the rising role of Saad bin Laden, son of the al-Qaeda leader, Osama as an intermediary between the organisation and Iran. Saad bin Laden has been living in Iran since the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, apparently under house arrest.

The letter, which was signed by Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s second in command, was written after the American embassy in Yemen was attacked by simultaneous suicide car bombs in September.

Western security officials said the missive thanked the leadership of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards for providing assistance to al-Qaeda to set up its terrorist network in Yemen, which has suffered ten al-Qaeda-related terror attacks in the past year, including two bomb attacks against the American embassy.

In the letter al-Qaeda’s leadership pays tribute to Iran’s generosity, stating that without its “monetary and infrastructure assistance” it would have not been possible for the group to carry out the terror attacks. It also thanked Iran for having the “vision” to help the terror organisation establish new bases in Yemen after al-Qaeda was forced to abandon much of its terrorist infrastructure in Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

There has been intense speculation about the level of Iranian support for al-Qaeda since the 9/11 Commission report into al-Qaeda’s terror attacks against the U.S. in 2001 concluded that Iran had provided safe passage for many of the 9/11 hijackers travelling between Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia prior to the attacks.

Scores of senior al Qaeda activists – including Saad bin Laden – sought sanctuary in Iran following the overthrow of the Taliban, and have remained in Tehran ever since. The activities of Saad bin Laden, 29, have been a source of Western concern despite Tehran’s assurances that he is under official confinement.

But Iran was a key transit route for al Qaeda loyalists moving between battlefields in the Middle East and Asia. Western security officials have also concluded Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have supported al-Qaeda terror cells, despite religious divisions between Iran’s Shia Muslim revolutionaries and the Sunni Muslim terrorists.

It’s sad that we had to lose this year, but conservatives and Republicans can console themselves with Barack Obama’s unhappy prospects based upon the irreconcilable dilemma facing his presidency.

If he takes a thoroughly “progressive” course, agreeable to the democrat party’s leftwing base, he will assuredly produce economic calamity domestically and US humiliation in foreign affairs à la Carter, and he will then have a snowball’s chance in Hell of being re-elected.

On the other hand, if he tacks to the center, he will bitterly disappoint that extremist and highly volatile leftist base, which will turn upon him like the Furies, ultimately over time bringing into active and hostile opposition both the media and the community of fashion. In that case, like Lyndon Johnson, he will become a discredited, failed, and reviled president, unable to defeat primary challenges from the left, and not even able to run for a second term.

Will it be Door 1 or Door 2, President Obama?

As the Telegraph reports, his appointments of supporters of the war in Iraq signal a centrist direction, and the natives at Daily Kos are already becoming restless.

Mr Obama has moved quickly in the last 48 hours to get his cabinet team in place, unveiling a raft of heavyweight appointments, in addition to Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State.

But his preference for General James Jones, a former Nato commander who backed John McCain, as his National Security Adviser and Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, a supporter of the war, to run the Homeland Security department has dismayed many of his earliest supporters.

The likelihood that Mr Obama will retain George W Bush’s Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, has reinforced the notion that he will not aggressively pursue the radical withdrawal of all combat troops from Iraq over the next 16 months and engagement with rogue states that he has pledged.

Chris Bowers of the influential OpenLeft.com blog complained: “That is, over all, a centre-right foreign policy team. I feel incredibly frustrated. Progressives are being entirely left out of Obama’s major appointments so far.”

Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos site, the in-house talking shop for the anti-war Left, warned that Democrats risk sounding “tone deaf” to the views of “the American electorate that voted in overwhelming numbers for change from the discredited Bush policies.”

A spokesman for the President-elect was forced to confirm that Mr Obama holds to his previous views. “His position on Iraq has not changed and will not change.”

But the growing disillusionment underlines the fine line Mr Obama must walk between appearing to reach out to former opponents and keeping his grassroot supporters happy.

James Lewis, at American Thinker, explains how the domestic and international left are responsible for Iran and North Korea becoming nuclear powers.

The single most suicidal action by the Left has been its years of assault on President George W. Bush after the overthrow of Saddam. It has often been pointed out that every intelligence agency in the world believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction before the invasion of Iraq. UN inspectors like David Kay repeatedly said so. Democrats and European socialists alike repeated warned about the danger of Saddam’s weapons programs, knowing full well that his first nuclear reactor was destroyed by an Israeli air raid as long ago as 1981. Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and even the UN’s El Baradei pointed out the danger.

As we now know, Saddam has had 500 metric tons of yellowcake uranium in storage since 1992. But George W. Bush was assaulted by the Left, in the person of Valerie Plame, Joe Wilson and the New York Times editorial page, allegedly because Bush peddled the lie that Saddam wanted to obtain yellowcake uranium. But there was no lie; the whole phony brouhaha was a PR assault to destroy the credibility of the Bush administration. The end result was to make us helpless in the face of more nuclear proliferation. To slake its lust for power the Left was more than willing to sabotage our safety.

Did Saddam pose a plausible threat of nuclear weaponization? Of course he did. Did he pose an actual threat? That is, did he actually possess WMD’s ready to mount on missiles in a matter of hours, to shoot off at his enemies? Today’s conventional wisdom is that he did not. But that is pure post-hockery.

George W. Bush has been crucified for five long years in the media, by the feckless, hysterical and cowardly Europeans, by the United Nations, and of course by the Democratic Party, because he took the only sane action possible in the face of the apparent WMD threat from Saddam. Because presidents don’t have the luxury of Monday morning quarterbacking. They cannot wait for metaphysical certainty about threats to national survival and international peace. There is no such thing as metaphysical certainty in these matters; presidents must act on incomplete intelligence, knowing full well that their domestic enemies will try to destroy them for trying to save the peace.

But that is water under the bridge by now. What’s not past, but rather a clear and present threat to civilization are the consequences of the unbelievable recklessness of the International Left—- including the Democrats, the Europeans, the UN, and the former communist powers. Because of their screaming opposition to the Bush administration’s rational actions against Saddam, we are now rendered helpless against two even more dangerous challenges. With Saddam there was genuine doubt about his nuclear program; the notion that he had a viable program was just the safest guess to make in the face of his policy of deliberate ambiguity. In the case of Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong Il there’s no guessing any more. They have nukes and missiles, or will have within a year.

The entire anti-proliferation effort has therefore been sabotaged and probably ruined by the Left. For what reason? There can be only one rational reason: A lust for power, even at the expense of national and international safety and peace. But the Left has irrational reasons as well, including an unfathomable hatred for adulthood in the face of mortal danger. Like the Cold War, this is a battle between the adolescent rage of the Left and the realistic adult decision-making of the mainstream—- a mainstream which is now tenuously maintained only by conservatives in the West.

Newsbusters:

Barack Obama played the “me too” game during the Friday debates on September 26 after Senator John McCain mentioned that he was wearing a bracelet with the name of Cpl. Matthew Stanley, a resident of New Hampshire and a soldier that lost his life in Iraq in 2006. Obama said that he too had a bracelet. After fumbling and straining to remember the name, he revealed that his had the name of Sergeant Ryan David Jopek of Merrill, Wisconsin.

Shockingly, however, Madison resident Brian Jopek, the father of Ryan Jopek, the young soldier who tragically lost his life to a roadside bomb in 2006, recently said on a Wisconsin Public Radio show that his family had asked Barack Obama to stop wearing the bracelet with his son’s name on it. Yet Obama continues to do so despite the wishes of the family.

Not hard to understand why Obama had to fumble with the bracelet to come up with the soldier’s name, is it?

2:16 video

Original NY Post story.

Washington Prowler:

The Obama campaign spent more than five hours on Monday attempting to figure out the best refutation of the explosive New York Post report that quoted Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari as saying that Barack Obama during his July visit to Baghdad demanded that Iraq not negotiate with the Bush Administration on the withdrawal of American troops. Instead, he asked that they delay such negotiations until after the presidential handover at the end of January.

The three problems, according to campaign sources: The report was true, there were at least three other people in the room with Obama and Zebari to confirm the conversation, and there was concern that there were enough aggressive reporters based in Baghdad with the sources to confirm the conversation that to deny the comments would create a bigger problem.

Instead, Obama’s national security spokeswoman Wendy Morigi told reporters that Obama told the Iraqis that they should not rush through what she termed a “Strategic Framework Agreement” governing the future of U.S. forces until after President Bush left office. In other words, the Iraqis should not negotiate an American troop withdrawal.

According to a Senate staffer working for Sen. Joseph Biden, Biden himself got involved in the shaping of the statement. “The whole reason he’s on the ticket is the foreign policy insight,” explained the staffer.

A certain news agency has received a deliberate leak from a US military intelligence official, apparently intended to deter Iran from pursuing its nefarious plans by making a public announcement that the US knows all about them and is prepared to counter them.

The report states that Iran’s elite Quds Force, with the help of Hezbollah, has been training Iraqi Shiite assassination teams in four locations. Their targets are to be “specific Iraqi officials as well as U.S. and Iraqi troops.”

Thanks to commenter Pete-at-home who brought this to my attention.

James Gordon Meek, in the New York Daily News (7/25) reports that Army officials took steps to refute an email posted by the Blackfive blog on July 23, sourced to an unidentified “Air Force captain.”

The latest chain e-mail smear against Barack Obama: He “blew off” troops at an Afghan base to shoot hoops for a publicity photo.

The letter was apparently written by a Utah Army National Guard intelligence officer in a linguist unit at Bagram Airfield who claimed the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee was rude to G.I.s.

“As the soldiers where [sic] lined up to shake his hand he blew them off,” wrote the Task Force Wasatch “battle captain.”

But angry Army brass debunked the Obama-bashing soldier’s allegations, which went viral Thursday over the Web and on military blogs such as Blackfive.

The e-mail claims Obama repeatedly shunned soldiers on his way to the Clamshell – a recreation tent – to “take his publicity pictures playing basketball.”

“These comments are inappropriate and factually incorrect,” said Bagram spokeswoman Army Lt. Col. Rumi Nielson-Green, who added that such political commentary is barred for uniformed personnel.

Obama didn’t play basketball at Bagram or visit the Clamshell, she said. Home-state troops were invited to meet him, but his arrival was kept secret for security reasons.

“We were a bit delayed … as he took time to shake hands, speak to troops and pose for photographs,” Nielson-Green said.

On his Mouth of the Potomac blog, Meeks reports that the email’s author has issued a retraction.

Now the Bagram captain is dialing back, having signed the viral e-mail with his name, rank and unit – a possible violation of military regulations barring political statements. This morning, he sent The Mouth a new statement (punctuation corrected):

“I am writing this to ask that you delete my email and not forward it. After checking my sources, information that was put out in my email was wrong. This email was meant only for my family. Please respect my wishes and delete the email and if there are any blogs you have my email portrayed on I would ask if you would take it down too. Thanks for your understanding.”

An Army officer familiar with the incident told The Mouth today that the writer is “devastated that the letter was made public. It was never his intention that it go beyond members of his family.”

There is some confusion which needs to be cleared up. Blackfive deliberately identified the email’s author as an air force officer in order to protect his anonymity, which effort failed. Some reports claim that the army captain had mistakenly forwarded a hoax email of which he was not the author. Apparently, such reports are incorrect.
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Snopes likes to pretend to be a purely objective source, but political prejudice creeps in. Snopes was perhaps a little overly eager to debunk this particular account.
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Confederate Yankee (7/25) correctly notes that the official refutation only contradicts two minor details and notes that we haven’t seen any refutation of the second email posted by Blackfive one day later.

It is vitally important for us to know that Barack Obama didn’t play basketball in Afghanistan, nor did he visit a specific tent. We should be grateful that Meek ferreted out the truth and debunked those scurrilous allegations.

But LTC Nielson-Green’s refutation of these two rather minor specific points does not at all address the most important allegation made in the viral email, the author’s perception that soldiers on base were “blown off” by the junior Senator.

In fact, the PAO admits that Obama only met with selected soldiers. Only service-persons from Illinois were invited to meet him, and soldiers not from Illinois (the author of the email is from Utah) were indeed not met by the junior Senator. Though no doubt a touchy situation for the military, the key premise holds.

The same handful of faces are seen in all the pictures released to the media from Obama’s visit. If you were not a soldier from Illinois or otherwise selected serviceman, you were not allowed to meet Obama. The question then arises whether the decision to limit contact with the troops was a decision made by the military brass, if that was a decision made by the Obama campaign, or by joint agreement.

The second email published, from someone at an air base as Obama swung through Iraq stated in part that Obama’s visit was “A disgraceful PR stunt, using the troops as a platform for his ego and campaign.”

To date the second email has gone unchallenged and a senior officer I interviewed confirmed on background that Obama’s visit to Iraq was nothing more than a campaign stop masquerading congressional delegation visit.

Captain P’s retraction may very possibly have merely been a prudential response to pressure from command. It is hardly unlikely that he was threatened with prosecution for violating regulations by publishing political statements.

The left would like to believe that the US military is full of Obama supporters, involuntarily-closeted gays, and disgruntled pacifists all itching to vote democrat, but none of that is true. Common sense suggests that Obama would be wise to restrict access of military personnel to his campaign-oriented visits to the front. Most of those stationed in Afghanistan have probably already served in Iraq, and they just might not be the world’s biggest fans of someone publicly committed to reversing their efforts and throwing away their personal sacrifices. Obama doesn’t need to be photographed surrounded by hostile, booing troops.

Obama Playing Basketball

Ken Timmerman says that Obama didn’t win a lot of votes while visiting the troops (for benefit of media cameras) in Afghanistan.

Everything seemed planned for the future campaign commercials — at least, that’s how it seemed to a U.S. Air Force captain when Sen. Barack Obama and his entourage swooped into Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan for an hour-long visit last Saturday at the start of a week-long foreign tour.

“He got off the plane and got into a bullet proof vehicle” without pausing to acknowledge the U.S. troops who had been waiting all day just for the opportunity to meet him, the officer told the Blackfive (7/23 posting) pro-military blog.

As the soldiers lined up to shake his hand, the Illinois senator “blew them off and didn’t say a word,” ducking into the conference room to meet the general.

Then the armored vehicles took him to where “he could take his publicity pictures playing basketball. He again shunned the opportunity to talk to soldiers to thank them for their service,” the captain wrote.

“As you know, I am not a very political person. I just wanted to share with you what happened” during Obama’s visit, the captain related.

“I swear, we got more thanks from the NBA basketball players or the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders than from Senator Obama,” he added.

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Blackfive 7/24 has a second very similar account from a location in Iraq:

When his plane arrived (also containing Senators Reed and Hagel, but the news has hardly mentioned them), there was a “ramp freeze.” This means if you are on the flight line, and not directly involved with the event in question, you stay where you are and don’t move. For a combat flight arriving or departing, this takes about ten minutes, and involves the active runway and crossing taxiways only. For Obama’s flight, this took 90 minutes, during which time a variety of military missions came grinding to a halt. Obviously, this visit was important, right?

95% of base wanted nothing to do with him. I have met three troops who support him, and literally hundreds who regard him as a buffoon, a charlatan, a hindrance to their mission or a flat out enemy of progress. Even when the rumors were publicly admitted, almost no one left their duty sections to try to see him, unless they were officers whose presence was officially required.

Mister Obama’s motorcade drove up from the flight line and entered the dining hall toward the end of lunch time. Diners were chased out and told to make other arrangements for food, in the middle of the duty day.

Now, there are close to 8000 troops on the base and its nearby satellites. No one came up from the Army side (except perhaps a few ranking officers). The airbase resumed operation, once he cleared the flightline, as if nothing had happened. The dining hall holds about 300 people and was not full. The troops did not want to meet him and the feeling was apparently mutual. In attendance, besides the Official Entourage, were the base’s senior officers, some support personnel, and a very few carefully vetted supporters who’d made special arrangements. No photos were allowed. No question and answer with the troops. No real acknowledgment that the troops existed.

Obama left around 1530, during the Muslim Call to Prayer, so he’s not a practicing Muslim. He was in a convoy guarded by (so I’m told) both State Department and Secret Service Personnel.

Less than three hours…

Within 48 hours he was in Afghanistan. It takes most troops longer than that to in-process and get cleared on safety, threats, policies and such. Yet he somehow made a strategic summary by not talking to anyone and not seeing anything.

Twenty-four hours after that, he was in Kuwait, back here, and then home, so fast we didn’t even know he arrived the second time at this base.

I can’t imagine any officer of the few he met told him anything other than what they tell the troops, and what their own leadership at the Pentagon tell them—we’re winning. Our troops are stomping the guts out of the insurgency. The surge worked and is working. If the insurgents have to divert to Afghanistan, it means they can’t fight in Iraq anymore. We should not change the rules and retreat with the enemy on the ropes as we did in Vietnam. We should finish kicking their teeth in. The Iraqi government now controls 10 of 18 provinces, with US assistance in the rest. Let us win the war. 90% of the troops I know, even those opposed to the war, say that is the way to win. Victory comes from winning, not from “change.” In fact, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is on record as opposing Obama’s strategic theory.

Since he obviously knew in advance that’s what they’d tell him, and since he didn’t care to talk to the troops (we’re told by the Left that the troops are horrified, shocked, forced to commit atrocities with tears in their eyes, distraught, burned out, fed up with losing, etc) and find out how they feel, and was barely in country long enough to need a shower and a change of clothes, we can only call this for what it is.

A disgraceful PR stunt, using the troops as a platform for his ego and campaign.

Reuters:

In an interview with Der Spiegel released on Saturday, Maliki said he wanted U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible.

This kind of nonsense is George W. Bush’s fault. He fell into a liberal trance in which the narrative simply had to be that US was rescuing the yearning-for-freedom Iraqi people from Saddam’s dictatorship. The reality, that Iraq as a whole, the people and the regime, was the enemy was too unpleasant for a post-modern US president to face.

The post-modern US can only have enemy leaders. We cannot bear to imagine that an entire country’s population hates us and is happy to support violence directed against us.

By insisting on playing smiling liberator, and by going to absurd lengths to get the defeated and conquered barbarians to play along, the current administration has made a fool of itself, and arrived at the preposterous position of being obliged, in order to keep up the charade it insisted upon playing, to take orders from the enemy it defeated on the battlefield.

Iraq in 2003 was, just like Nazi Germany in 1945, a National Socialist state. Baathism was created as a conscious Arab attempt to emulate German fascism.

Would we install a non-de-Nazified German government in 1946, put the Wehrmacht back in uniform, and ask the current Reichschancellor how long we should stay and which US presidential candidate’s policies he is planning to support?

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Follow-up, 7/20:

A spokesman for Nuri-al-Maliki took issue with the Der Spiegel story saying his words “were misunderstood, mistranslated and not conveyed accurately.”

CNN

Dan Calabrese looks at the left’s good war/bad war distinction.

Democrats, as a general rule, don’t support American military action anywhere. But if political gamesmanship requires them to choose in a good-war-bad-war debate, it’s useful to see how they reveal, by their choice, what they really think about the use of American power.

Since no argument against the Iraq War is too disingenuous for them, Democrats have been arguing for some time that Iraq has distracted us from the “real” war on terror, which they insist is in Afghanistan. This theme has gotten some serious love from Barack Obama in recent days, particularly in a July 15 op-ed where he lays out this week’s Obama Global Vision, with heavy emphasis on the idea that we need to put more resources in Afghanistan to defeat Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

So how did Afghanistan become the Democrats’ Good War as opposed to the Bad War in Iraq? Much of it is political salability, but wrapped around that is the way Democrats view America’s strategic place in the world – and it’s not a good view.

Most fundamentally, Democrats embrace the action in Afghanistan because – although this is not precisely accurate – “that’s who attacked us on 9/11.” Of course, Afghan military forces under the command of the Taliban didn’t attack us at all. We were attacked by 19 terrorists under the command of an international terrorist network whose leaders were being harbored, financed and provided with training facilities by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

To the extent that Democrats accept this as justification for attacking Afghanistan, we can all thank George W. Bush, because it was he who declared in the days after 9/11 that the U.S. would make no distinction between terrorists and the regimes that harbor them. It’s good to see that the Bush Doctrine remains popular among Democrats.

But as a matter of core philosophy, Democrats believe the U.S. should not use its Armed Forces in any aggressive action unless against an enemy who attacked us first. This is the primary basis of the Afghanistan-Good-Iraq-Bad notion, going hand-in-hand with the oft-repeated mantra that “Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11!”

He’s right. The left’s viewpoint is that the US is only justified in taking military action in response to a direct attack, or for humanitarian goals, i.e. installing a socialist (Haiti) or stopping ethnic cleansing (Bosnia).

The left also incorporates in its foreign policy perspective an intrinsic animosity toward both the United States and Christian European Civilization, a point of view readily summarized as “no-enemies-to-the-left.” That perspective bars any effective preemptive action to prevent terrorist attacks or terrorist acquisition of WMD, since virtually all terrorists are on the left, and so are their state sponsors.