Richard Fernandez states the unpalatable truth.

Responsible redeployment… That’s just a dishonest word for the process of just giving the Iraqis notice, providing some funding and security support and getting the hell out of Dodge. Like we did in Vietnam. That lasted nearly three whole years after responsible redeployment. In many ways its more honest to leave some money on the night table, slip on your pants and push the car down the road before starting it so she doesn’t wake up. Let her dream a little longer.

A rejoinder from me to gloating democrats:

Bush was incompetent at PR. The GOP got infiltrated by garden variety pols posing as conservatives.

You guys control the MSM, and when that hurricane provided impressive visual images to hang the media’s propaganda on, they finally sucessfully nailed Bush, convincing the general public that the President had failed to employ his god/king powers to still the fury of the winds, make the waters recede, overcome spectacular local incompetence and corruption, and cause vehicles and airplanes to travel successfully instantly over flooded roads and through hurricane winds to the disaster site.

There was far too much Congressional inertia and scandal. The MSM lovingly counted up every US casualty day after day, and Al Qaeda agreeably timed a Fall offensive to capture Congress. The Republican Congress deserved to lose. But your side only won by filling up your candidate team with conservatives. This Congress lost. Conservatism did not lose. You guys elected a lot of abortion and gun control opponents. I’m not sure we don’t have a better chance of killing the death tax, and confirming right wing judges now than we did before.

True, Bush is now certainly a lame duck, and we have to fear a degringolade in Iraq, if the House moonbats kill military funding. But after that happens, the terrorist bombs will go off in cities, and then there will be fewer liberals. C’est la vie.

Douglas Ross thanks the Times for (implicitly, at least) changing its position on Saddam and WMDs yesterday.

Starting in 1994 — and lasting at least until 1997, but probably longer — Saddam Hussein’s Intelligence Services had multiple, direct contacts with Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda.

And, just four days after 9/11, Hussein’s Intelligence personnel issued written warnings that their connections to Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda might be discovered by the U.S.!

In 2003, an Iraqi government memo testified that a convoy of fifty (50) tractor-trailers entered Syria just before the invasion. What cargo would have been shipped into Iraq just before the invasion (for which each driver was paid $200, a very generous sum in 2003 Iraqi terms)?

Also in 2003, another official memo describes where chemical weapons and delivery systems (missiles) were hidden to prevent their destruction in the invasion.

In 2002, Hussein’s government was actively manufacturing the bioweapon ricin.

Also in 2002, Iraqi Intelligence Forces were actively engaged in the design of bioweapon delivery schemes, including the use of airplanes to spread toxic materials.

In 2001, Hussein ordered mass grave sites to be tested for radiation. What exactly about these graves would require testing for radiation?

In 2001, Hussein’s government actively recruited suicide bombers to attack American interests either in the U.S. or abroad.

In 1999, Uday Hussein ordered a series of assassinations in London, Iran, and Iraq.

* * *

And – there’s more where those documents came from. The net result, though, is that the Times has confirmed several critical facts regarding Iraq:

1. Saddam’s government had mature WMD programs just prior to the invasion (bioweapons, chemical, and nuclear).

2. Saddam was only months away from building an atomic weapon.

3. Saddam’s government had multiple, operational ties to global terror groups, including Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda.

Thank you, New York Times!

From the Friday New York Times, we learn that some of the captured Iraqi documents, recently made available for public scrutiny on the Internet, contained technical details of atomic weapons production whose availability on-line alarmed arms control officials.

The Times published all this as an indictment of the public release of captured Iraqi documents.

The director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, had resisted setting up the Web site, which some intelligence officials felt implicitly raised questions about the competence and judgment of government analysts. But President Bush approved the site’s creation after Congressional Republicans proposed legislation to force the documents’ release…

Some intelligence officials feared that individual documents, translated and interpreted by amateurs, would be used out of context to second-guess the intelligence agencies’ view that Mr. Hussein did not have unconventional weapons or substantive ties to Al Qaeda. Reviewing the documents for release would add an unnecessary burden on busy intelligence analysts, they argued.

But the Times overlooks the fact that this kind of detailed technical information about an Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction Program specifically confirms the Bush Administration’s causus belli, against which elite media (like the Times), and the most influential sectors of the Intelligence Community have so successfully waged a campaign of denial.

Does not the very existence of documents providing factual information of the highest relevance to the most vital public debate of the last three years, concealed by powerful elements of the Intelligence Community, perhaps prejudiced on policy issues, or possibly motivated (as some suspect) by partisanship, demand “second-guessing?”

Hat tip to Matt Drudge.

Back in April, Victor Davis Hansen published an editorial titled Eye of the Beholder which really puts the MSM’s reporting on the level of disaster in Iraq into perspective. With the Fall election approaching, I think more potential voters need to read it.

War-torn Iraq has about 26 million residents, a peaceful California perhaps now 35 million. The former is a violent and impoverished landscape, the latter said to be paradise on Earth. But how you envision either place to some degree depends on the eye of the beholder and is predicated on what the daily media appear to make of each.

As a fifth-generation Californian, I deeply love this state, but still imagine what the reaction would be if the world awoke each morning to be told that once again there were six more murders, 27 rapes, 38 arsons, 180 robberies, and 360 instances of assault in California — yesterday, today, tomorrow, and every day. I wonder if the headlines would scream about “Nearly 200 poor Californians butchered again this month!”

How about a monthly media dose of “600 women raped in February alone!” Or try, “Over 600 violent robberies and assaults in March, with no end in sight!” Those do not even make up all of the state’s yearly 200,000 violent acts that law enforcement knows about.

Iraq’s judicial system seems a mess. On the eve of the war, Saddam let out 100,000 inmates from his vast prison archipelago. He himself still sits in the dock months after his trial began. But imagine an Iraq with a penal system like California’s with 170,000 criminals — an inmate population larger than those of Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Singapore combined.

Just to house such a shadow population costs our state nearly $7 billion a year — or about the same price of keeping 40,000 Army personnel per year in Iraq. What would be the image of our Golden State if we were reminded each morning, “Another $20 million spent today on housing our criminals”?

Some of California’s most recent prison scandals would be easy to sensationalize: “Guards watch as inmates are raped!” Or “Correction officer accused of having sex with underaged detainee!” And apropos of Saddam’s sluggish trial, remember that our home state multiple murderer, Tookie Williams, was finally executed in December 2005 — 26 years after he was originally sentenced.

Much is made of the inability to patrol Iraq’s borders with Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey. But California has only a single border with a foreign nation, not six. Yet over 3 million foreigners who snuck in illegally now live in our state. Worse, there are about 15,000 convicted alien felons incarcerated in our penal system, costing about $500 million a year. Imagine the potential tabloid headlines: “Illegal aliens in state comprise population larger than San Francisco!” or “Drugs, criminals, and smugglers given free pass into California!”

Every year, over 4,000 Californians die in car crashes — nearly twice the number of Americans lost so far in three years of combat operations in Iraq. In some sense, then, our badly maintained roads, and often poorly trained and sometimes intoxicated drivers, are even more lethal than Improvised Explosive Devices. Perhaps tomorrow’s headline might scream out at us: “300 Californians to perish this month on state highways! Hundreds more will be maimed and crippled!”

In 2001, California had 32 days of power outages, despite paying nearly the highest rates for electricity in the United States. Before complaining about the smoke in Baghdad rising from private generators, think back to the run on generators in California when they were contemplated as a future part of every household’s line of defense.

We’re told that Iraq’s finances are a mess. Yet until recently, so were California’s. Two years ago, Governor Schwarzenegger inherited a $38 billion annual budget shortfall. That could have made for strong morning newscast teasers: “Another $100 million borrowed today — $3 billion more in red ink to pile up by month’s end!”

So is California comparable to Iraq? Hardly. Yet it could easily be sketched by a reporter intent on doing so as a bank rupt, crime-ridden den with murderous highways, tens of thousands of inmates, with wide-open borders.

I myself recently returned home to California, without incident, from a visit to Iraq’s notorious Sunni Triangle. While I was gone, a drug-addicted criminal with a long list of convictions broke into our kitchen at 4 a.m., was surprised by my wife and daughter, and fled with our credit cards, cash, keys, and cell phones.

Sometimes I wonder who really was safer that week.

Frederick Turner, at TCS Daily, takes the optimistic view that much of the killing going on in Iraq these days is the product of informal justice, of necessary and prophylactic vigilantism.

It is something with which we have become quite familiar in Latin America: vigilanteism on a massive scale—murder squads and desaparacidos—the force of civil society itself in extremis.

When there is a significant fraction of the population that will not join in political compromise, whether because of ideological idealism, addiction to supernatural power, or the passion for revenge, civil society is faced with a diabolical paradox.

It wishes to form legal and political institutions that are transparent, correctable by debate, and under the control of the people (with protections for minorities), where people can make good money in the marketplace and raise families in peace. But the reality is that even after all possible compromises have been offered to the refuseniks, civil society is faced with a small but absolutely hostile minority that will be content with nothing but total victory.

What can civil society do? The only solution is the disappearance of that implacable moiety. Civil society cannot use the instruments of government to stamp out its mortal enemy—for that would be to invalidate and destroy the very principles and legitimacy of that government, and set in place a precedent by which normal political squabbles could in future be settled by genocide or the Gulag…

There are, from the point of view of Iraq’s nascent civil society, some thousands of people who, in the Texas phrase, need killing. Who is going to do it?

In the absence of government intervention, the answer is: ordinary people. Basically the killers are posses of self-organized vigilantes, who know their local area, who know who the bombers are, and who the bombers’ relatives are. The posses are expert in distinguishing those people who might be fair political enemies from those who will go on striking, like a snake, even when cut in two…

Death squads are distinctly better than suicide bombers.

Hat tip to John Brewer.

John Hinderaker, at Power Line, notes that the democrat choice of withdrawal and defeat is likely to prove more sanguinary than staying the course.

How many millions were slain in Indochina in the late 1970s after US withdrawal, after all?

The death rate in Baghdad these days, with the rival militias and insugents in full operation, isn’t really terrribly different, after all, from the death rate produced by gang warfare in such democrat strongholds as Oakland and the District of Columbia.

We haven’t lost in Iraq, and we probably won’t if we remain determined to prevail. The situation today is not good in some parts of Iraq, but the implicit suggestion that it can’t get worse is absurd. As I wrote here, the current murder rate in Baghdad is around four times the murder rate in Washington, D.C. in 1991. The murder rate for Iraq as a whole is not quite double the 1991 Washington D.C. rate. This is a high level of violence, to be sure. But it is nothing compared to an actual civil war. It is nothing compared to genocide. If the Democrats win in November, they are likely to have, before long, a great deal of blood on their hands.

It may seem a little strange that Yale 1970 classmate Garretson Beekman Trudeau, graduate of St. Paul’s (the alma mater of John Kerry) ’66, successful cartoonist, veteran only of the 1960’s Vietnam Peace Movement, and currently a vigorous opponent of the Bush Administration, has started his own milblog, open to postings from members of the armed forces currently serving in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But conspicuous public support of the troops is a consistent and studied policy on the part of the more sophisticated elements of the anti-war left. That particular maneuver allows them, when criticized for their antiwar activities, to say: “I’m patriotic. I’m not disloyal. I support our troops.” They’re only in favor of assuring the futility of all our troop’s efforts and sacrifices, the defeat of the United States, and the triumph of her adversaries.

The new military blog is part of Trudeau’s Slate site, which includes his well-known, currently humor-free and utterly tendentious leftwing cartoon, news, a debate forum, and a “Get Involved” bolshevik agitation site.

Despite its unwholesome associations, the new milblog has attracted some excellent contributions, and is definitely worth a read.

As today’s left screams its head off over the intolerable losses in Iraq, Gateway Pundit reminds us of the little-noticed fact that peace-time losses under Clinton were actually higher.

H/T to terrye.

No one not professionally involved ever reads any studies, as the left understands only too well. But leftists control a great many prestigious academic positions, institutes, and publications, and have all the allies they could possibly desire in the mainstream media. Consequently, we are continually, at decreasing intervals, subjected to the shabby and contemptible tactic of the appeal to the purported facticity of yet another carefully contrived research study.

Figures lie and liars figure. And today’s sophisters, calculators, and economists habitually design the methodologies, choose the selection basis of the data, project the extrapolations, massage the numbers, and juggle the math. Then, hey, presto! out pops the great Herr Professor authority figure, waving his formulae in our face in precisely the manner of the witch doctor menacing a tribe of gaping savages with his rattle, and we too are supposed to fall to the ground and bury our faces in the dust, grovel, and obey.

The moonbats are barking with joy over what is becoming an election year tradition: the Lancet-published, Johns Hopkins-produced, October-released study of Iraqi war casualties, currently headlining in all the MSM, including the New York Times.

It is particularly sad to see so famous a medical journal as Britain’s Lancet, reduced to serving as leftist propaganda organ, but no wonder. Just look at that journal’s editor, Richard Horton raving at a leftwing rally. Horton is manifestly an extremist opponent of the Iraq war, who has previously damaged that journal’s reputation by publishing sensationalist junk science.

The Iraqi casualty study pre-election press release was invented by Les Roberts in 2004. Roberts ran unsuccessfully in the democrat primary this year in the 24th Congressional District in New York (Utica and neighboring environs). Gilbert Burnham, the 2004 second chair, took the lead this year.

Some of the better responses to this nonsense come from:

Mark Coffey

Texas Rainmaker

and Gateway Pundit

But the definitive answer came from an Iraqi, Omar Fadil:

Among the things I cannot accept is exploiting the suffering of people to make gains that are not the least related to easing the suffering of those people. I’m talking here about those researchers who used the transparency and open doors of the new Iraq to come and count the drops of blood we shed.

Human flesh is abundant and all they have to do is call this hospital or that office to get the count of casualties, even more they can knock on doors and ask us one by one and we would answer because we’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.

We believe in what we’re struggling for and we are proud of our sacrifices.

I wonder if that research team was willing to go to North Korea or Libya and I think they wouldn’t have the guts to dare ask Saddam to let them in and investigate deaths under his regime.

No, they would’ve shit their pants the moment they set foot in Iraq and they would find themselves surrounded by the Mukhabarat men counting their breaths. However, maybe they would have the chance to receive a gift from the tyrant in exchange for painting a rosy picture about his rule.

They shamelessly made an auction of our blood, and it didn’t make a difference if the blood was shed by a bomb or a bullet or a heart attack because the bigger the count the more useful it becomes to attack this or that policy in a political race and the more useful it becomes in cheerleading for murderous tyrannical regimes.

When the statistics announced by hospitals and military here, or even by the UN, did not satisfy their lust for more deaths, they resorted to mathematics to get a fake number that satisfies their sadistic urges.

When I read the report I can only feel apathy and inhumanity from those who did the count towards the victims and towards our suffering as a whole. I can tell they were so pleased when the equations their twisted minds designed led to those numbers and nothing can convince me that they did their so called research out of compassion or care.

To me their motives are clear, all they want is to prove that our struggle for freedom was the wrong thing to do. And they shamelessly use lies to do this…when they did not find the death they wanted to see on the ground, they faked it on paper! They disgust me…

This fake research is an insult to every man, woman and child who lost their lives.

Behind every drop of blood is a noble story of sacrifice for a just cause that is struggling for living safe in freedom and prosperity.

Let those fools know that nothing will stop us from walking this road and nothing will stop our friends and allies from helping us reach safe shores. There’s simply no going back even if it cost us more and their fake statistics will not frighten us…our sacrifices, like I said, make us proud because our bloods are not digits in those ugly papers. Our sacrifices are paving the way for future generations to live the better life we couldn’t live.

The US Air Force reports a family story from Iraq.

Traditions run deep in the military, and for this father and daughter, traditions are what brought them together in Iraq.

Col. Steven Dreyer, 4th Expeditionary Air Support Operations Group commander, at Camp Victory, Iraq, reunited with his youngest daughter, 1st Lt. Kathrine Dreyer, 777th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron, Balad AB, Iraq.

The visit marked not only the end of Colonel Dreyer’s final deployment, but also the beginning of Lieutenant Dreyer’s first deployment. During the visit, the colonel presented his daughter with the family’s American flag.

“This flag symbolizes our family’s dedication to serving in the military,” said the colonel, who enlisted in the Marines in 1970. “I have carried this flag during my deployments over the years; my oldest daughter, SSgt. Kristine Dreyer, carried it to Iraq in 2003, and now my youngest daughter is stepping up to continue the tradition.”

The flag, originally flown in front of the home of Colonel Dreyer’s father, a retired Army WWII and Vietnam veteran, has accompanied the colonel on every deployment.

Maggie’s Farm has a recent letter from a Marine Intel Officer stationed in Iraq featuring good anecdotes.

Bravest Guy in al-Anbar Province – Any Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technician (EOD Tech). How’d you like a job that required you to defuse bombs in a hole in the middle of the road that very likely are booby-trapped or connected by wire to a bad guy who’s just waiting for you to get close to the bomb before he clicks the detonator? Every day. Sanitation workers in New York City get paid more than these guys. Talk about courage and commitment…

Best Piece of U.S. Gear – new, bullet-proof flak jackets. O.K., they weigh 40 lbs and aren’t exactly comfortable in 120 degree heat, but they’ve saved countless lives out here.
Best Piece of Bad Guy Gear – Armor Piercing ammunition that goes right through the new flak jackets and the Marines inside them…

Biggest Mystery – How some people can gain weight out here. I’m down to 165 lbs. Who has time to eat?…

Coolest Insurgent Act – Stealing almost $7 million from the main bank in Ramadi in broad daylight, then, upon exiting, waving to the Marines in the combat outpost right next to the bank, who had no clue of what was going on. The Marines waved back. Too cool…

Highest Unit Re-enlistment Rate – Any outfit that has been in Iraq recently. All the danger, all the hardship, all the time away from home, all the horror, all the frustrations with the fight here – all are outweighed by the desire for young men to be part of a ‘Band of Brothers ‘ who will die for one another. They found what they were looking for when they enlisted out of high school. Man for man, they now have more combat experience than any Marines in the history of our Corps.
Most Surprising Thing I Don’t Miss – Beer. Perhaps being half-stunned by lack of sleep makes up for it.
Worst Smell – Porta-johns in 120 degree heat – and that’s 120 degrees outside of the porta-john.

Highest Temperature – I don’t know exactly, but it was in the porta-johns. Needed to re-hydrate after each trip to the loo.

Biggest Hassle – High-ranking visitors. More disruptive to work than a rocket attack. VIPs demand briefs and “battlefield” tours (we take them to quiet sections of Fallujah, which is plenty scary for them). Our briefs and commentary seem to have no affect on their preconceived notions of what’s going on in Iraq. Their trips allow them to say that they’ve been to Fallujah, which gives them an unfortunate degree of credibility in perpetuating their fantasies about the insurgency here.

Biggest Outrage – Practically anything said by talking heads on TV about the war in Iraq, not that I get to watch much TV. Their thoughts are consistently both grossly simplistic and politically slanted. Biggest offender – Bill O’Reilly – what a buffoon.

Read the whole thing.

Last year’s Letter from a Marine in Iraq. (Different guy.)

Hat tip to Rick Ballard.