The activist liberal group MoveOn.org has released a commercial entitled “Not Alex.”  The video features a lady holding a baby and making the following plea to John McCain:

Hi John McCain. This is Alex. And he’s my first. So far his talents include trying any new food and chasing after our dog. That, and making my heart pound every time I look at him. And so, John McCain, when you say you would stay in Iraq for 100 years, were you counting on Alex? Because if you were, you can’t have him.

Here’s the video:

Let’s just set aside from the standard liberal trope about the 100 years war.  What really irks me is the “you can’t have him” finish.  First of all, if McCain won and served two full terms her son would still be under ten years old and, unless that sinister McCain drops the enlistment age dramatically, would not be eligible to serve.  But that is beside the point.

The young woman apparently doesn’t grasp the concepts of an all volunteer army and individual free will.  Once her son is an 18 year old adult he will be able to make the choice for himself about whether or not he wants to serve, regardless of who the president might be at the time.  Unless a future President and Congress reintroduce involuntary conscription in this country her son will never be taken away, as she implies.  If he does choose to serve his nation in a military uniform the choice will be his alone.  We can only hope that if he does make that choice that his mother will have the decency to respect his choice and support his efforts.

Here’s Rep. Paul Kanjorski’s (D-PA) take on Democrat’s campaign promises to end the Iraq War.

Full text:

I’ll tell you my impression. We really in this last election, when I say we…the Democrats, I think pushed it as far as we can to the end of the fleet, didn’t say it, but we implied it. That if we won the Congressional elections, we could stop the war. Now anybody was a good student of Government would know that wasn’t true. But you know, the temptation to want to win back the Congress, we sort of stretched the facts…and people ate it up.

“Stretched the facts” is a euphemism for a three letter word that begins with “L” and ends with “IE”.

Kudos to Say Anything Blog.

The Iraq War is not a topic I approach with great relish.  I’ll be the first to say that I supported the decision to invade at the time.  To me it was clear that Saddam left us with little alternative.  I’ll also be the first to say that the government’s policy makers screwed up the subsequent execution, placing our soldiers in an extremely difficult situation - and I have frequently been critical of the decisions made in D.C.

Should we spread our goodness at the barrel of a gun?  No.  Should we be the policemen of the world?  No.  Would I have supported the initial invasion if I knew then what I know now?  No.  Unfortunately we do not live in a world where we have the luxury of making decisions today based on hindsight or regret for previous choices.  We have to make decisions based on current circumstances and anticipated consequences.

I’ve heard a certain local speaker that some readers might recognize a couple of times who talks about military history and Islamic extremism.  One of the points that he hammers across is that in the modern era our government has a history of not finishing off military conflicts (Korea, Vietnam, Mogadishu, etc.) and that our adversaries, many of whom have a governing structure that affords them a longer term view, have taken notice.  As such it is to our countries strategic disadvantage to leave any current (or future) conflict prematurely.  It shows weakness and emboldens the enemy.

Now that particular speech, that viewpoint, is just one of many that I’ve heard.  It could easily get lost in the recesses of my mind, but I constantly think back to an article that I read earlier this year.  It was a think tank type study of open source Chinese military documents.  One particular passage from the article became lodged in my head:

Because the American public is “abnormally sensitive” about military casualties, according to an article in China’s Liberation Army Daily, killing U.S. airmen or other personnel would spark a “domestic anti-war cry” on the home front and possibly force early withdrawal of U.S. forces. (“The U.S. experience in Somalia is usually cited in support of this assertion,” according to the Rand report.)

The report concluded that China has no illusion that they could defeat us in an all out war.  One high ranking officer said that would be like “throwing an egg against a rock.”  However they think that they can psychologically defeat us by turning off the public and using our responsive, representative form of government as a means of ending hostilities - even if it results in a defeat for us.

That resonated with me.  Whatever my personal thoughts on the appropriateness of the war or the flaws of its execution can we afford to again signal our potential adversaries that we don’t have the stomach as a country to see through something we started?  Would that lower the threshold for future hostilities?  Potential adversaries, possibly including China, might elect to engage us militarily when they normally would not because they can envision an eventual win due to our lack of fortitude.

As a staunch fiscal conservative, I find it appropriate to debate whether we can financially afford this war.  Quite honestly, I don’t believe we can afford it (or much of what our government spends money on for that matter).  But at the same time we must factor in the cost, in more than just dollars, of once again signaling to our adversaries that we lack the will to achieve victory if it proves elusive.

What constitutes victory in Iraq? I’m not entirely sure.  Justice Potter Stewart infamously tried to define what constitutes obscenity by saying, “I know it when I see it.”  To somewhat paraphrase Stewart, I may not know what signifies victory in Iraq, but I know what does not when I see it.

Osama bin Laden has released another tape (transcript here), likely recorded within the last month or so.  The mere fact that the man at the top of the organization responsible for 9/11 is still alive is both depressing and embarrassing.  The fact that he is not only alive, but is releasing propaganda tapes that will doubtlessly fuel pro-jihadi sentiment is revolting.  The sole reason he is still alive can be described with one word: Iraq.

I backed Bush when he sold the Iraq war to the country.  He painted a compelling picture of imminent doom.  We’ve since learned that his portrayal of the threat was grossly over blown - intentionally or not.  As a result we’ve lost more men and women in uniform in Iraq than the number of civilians lost on 9/11.  And what do we have to show for it?  A war with no end in sight (i.e. more American casualties and money).  An enemy, Al-Qaeda, that is at or near 9/11 strength.  A weakened military as a result of seasoned soldiers - the defenders of our nation - killed in action as well as delayed or canceled acquisition, maintenance, and replenishment programs.  Oh, and we still have public enemy number one kicking sand in our face.

Personally, I don’t think there are any good options going forward in Iraq.  They are all varying shades of bad.  I want to say that we should stay and win, but I debate as to whether we can win or will like what we get if we did.  Militarily we can wipe the mat with anyone.  But we’re not in a military conflict.  Our soldiers are acting as glorified policemen; riding around waiting to be attacked by insurgents and only then responding appropriately.  This is not a position we should put our military in.  They are trained and equipped to win wars by killing or otherwise incapacitating the enemy - and they are very good at their job.

I only say I believe claiming victory will be difficult to impossible because we’re not facing an enemy that will just unequivocally surrender one day.  Maybe we can reach the subjective state where we believe violence has subsided to the point that we can leave, but even this is hardly victory in the traditional sense.  Nation building is not an endeavor that ends in a clearly demarcated victory even when it ends well.

But, what happens if we are victorious?  That day, which would be a great day indeed, will be the day we cede full control of Iraq to their elected, democratic government.  It is not exactly a remote possibility that they might elect a group of people like Hezbollah, similar to what happened in Lebanon.  So we could end up trading thousands of American lives and countless billions of dollars for an anti-American, anti-Israel (i.e. regionally destabilizing) government sympathetic to Iran.  That should make us safer.

But getting back to OBL, Newsweek had a good, lengthy description of what happened to the pursuit of OBL and his cohorts when the Iraq war began.  The “dead or alive” rhetoric - which I support 100% - morphed into a policy of putting the top talent and lion’s share of resources into a war with a country that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11.  The accounts in the article - assuming they are accurate - are disappointing.  There are tales of military officers hesitating at the moment of truth for fear of having a blemish on their records as well as imposing absurd bureaucratic requirements on special forces personnel.  It all points to a failure of leadership.  OBL would be taking a dirt nap right now if Bush had focused all of our efforts on eliminating him; simple as that.

In his tape OBL is critical of, one might even say he is mocking, Democrats - and for good reason.  While the Republicans continue to unconditionally back a war that we shouldn’t be engaged in the Democrats won control of Congress based in part (large part depending on who you’re asking) on Iraq.  Instead of vigorously pushing for the changes demanded of them by the electorate they have instead tried to use the war as a political football, complicitly keeping it going so that they can point to it and tell their supporters how badly the Republicans are screwing things up.  They have no real desire to end the war because they know that if the war is still raging next year it will likely gift wrap the White House for them.

That is what soldiers with boots on the ground have been asking… for years.

From DefenseNews.com:

[M]ilitary officials repeatedly balked at appeals — from commanders on the battlefield and from the Pentagon’s own staff — to provide the life-saving Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, or MRAP, for patrols and combat missions, USA TODAY found.

In a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates late last month, two U.S. senators said the delays cost the lives of an estimated “621 to 742 Americans” who would have survived explosions had they been in MRAPs, rather than Humvees. The letter, from Sens. Joseph Biden, D-Del., and Kit Bond, R-Mo., assumed the initial calls for MRAPs came in February 2005, when Marines in Iraq asked for almost 1,200 of the vehicles.

USA Today found that the first appeals for the MRAP came much earlier. As early as December 2003, Pentagon analysts sent detailed information about the superiority of MRAP vehicles to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, e-mails obtained by the newspaper show.

Later pleas came from Iraq, where commanders saw that the approach the Joint Chiefs embraced in the fall of 2003 — adding armor to the sides of Humvees, the standard vehicles in the war zone — did little to protect against blasts beneath their vehicles.

The best part of the article is an excerpt of an email from a Lt. Col. named Jim Hampton to his wife:

Hampton, opposed to up-armoring the Humvees, warned his superiors, he says. He even e-mailed his wife from Iraq. “Hey Babe,” his e-mail read. “Just a little aggravated with the bureaucracy. … I sure hope no one gets wasted before the powers-that-be get off their collective fat asses.”

Too late for that.

Freshman Virginia senator Jim Webb proposed an amendment to the defense authorization bill currently being debated that would have mandated that troops be granted home leave between deployments of at least as long as their previous combat tours.  Seems like a bill that anyone who supports our troops would like, right?  Well, both Alabama senators were among the 41 who blocked the amendment.  It’s kind of hard to argue that you “support the troops” when you vote to return them to harm’s way in a more expeditious manner.

Ouch.

A progress report on Iraq will conclude that the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad has not met any of its targets for political, economic and other reform, speeding up the Bush administration’s reckoning on what to do next, a U.S. official said Monday.

Ten to one that Bush calls for more patience.  He’ll also laud some obscure metric of progress.

On a related note, today Senator Olympia Snowe joined a growing list of Republicans who want the war to be drawn to a close.

Bud Cramer joined 13 other Representatives, mainly other Blue Dogs, in telling Bush to “[turn] down the political rhetoric” on Iraq.  Apparently 11 Republican Representatives were a bit more candid yesterday.  How much longer can Bush “stay the course?”

From the venerable AP:

In a survey of U.S. troops in combat in Iraq, fewer than half of Marines and a little more than half of Army soldiers said they would report a member of their unit for killing or wounding an innocent civilian.

More than 40 percent support the idea of torture in some cases, and 10 percent reported personally abusing Iraqi civilians, the Pentagon said Friday in what it called its first ethics study of troops at the war front. Units exposed to the most combat were chosen for the study, officials said.

From the Huntsville Times:

U.S. Marine Lance Cpl. Adam Loggins, son of new Huntsville Fire Chief Danny Loggins, was killed in Iraq on Thursday.

The family was notified during a city picnic.

I haven’t blogged much about Iraq.  It’s not that I don’t care; it’s just that it is hard to parse fact from fiction and politics from policy.  I see politicians in Washington on both sides of the isle using our military in some absurd game of chicken.  It’s difficult to tell when reporters, especially admitted pacifists who think war should be illegal, are giving us the straight story.  In that spirit, I have asked a friend who is about to begin another tour in Iraq to submit blog posts from the frontlines.  I want to hear about the real conditions from someone who I personally know.  His position in the command chain, job function, and/or physical location (he won’t be sitting around in the Green Zone) may preclude him from being able to contribute, but the offer has been extended.  This is my way of gently nudging him!