This is a big weekend in terms of the direction of the War on Terror. I have been reading so much these past two days that my head is spinning with all of the information whirling around and around. The bottom line is that this is the week that will determine the course of the war for perhaps the next decade. It is the Battle of the Bulge, It is Iwo Jima, it is Tet….right now…
What can you as a citizen do to help the cause of the war and our troops?
Here are a couple of activist things that are going on today:
Sign the Pledge
Read this post by Hugh Hewitt and then make some calls and send some emails to your congress person to help fight the Biden Resolution.
I can feel it in my heart, this is the turning point in the war. Please, do not let a group of thoughtless people in the Senate decide the fate of Democracy in the Middle East. They are the most selfish, short sighted, prideful group of windbags America has ever had in Congress.
Please email or call them TODAY and let them know how very wrong they are.
Jenny Hatch

I burned Time Magazine this morning to use the ashes as manure on my herb garden.
Pajamas Media Link
I guess I am too used to reading real analysis on the military blogs. Yesterday I happened to pick up a copy of Time Magazine at the rec center where I work out. Out of curiousity I read the title article from the Jan 15th, 2007 issue with the title “The Surge, Does sending more soldiers to Iraq make ANY sense?”
As I read the article by Michael Duffy titled “What a Surge Really Means” I was enraged by the tone, defeatism, use of unnamed sources, and overall chicken little assumptions of the author. If this is the leftist pap Time has been serving up its readership as evidence of a gourmet meal of analysis no wonder Time is laying off employees right and left.
In a 2004 Reason Online Article (F Bomb alert for the sensitive), author Glenn Garvin claimed that:
“Journalism, academia, policy wonkery: They all maintain well-oiled Orwellian memory holes, into which errors vanish without a trace. Stern pronouncements are hurled down like thunderbolts from Zeus, and, like Zeus, their authors are totally unaccountable to mere human beings.”
“Time’s Strobe Talbott decreed in 1982 that it was “wishful thinking to predict that international Communism some day will either self-destruct or so exhaust itself in internecine conflict that other nations will no longer be threatened.” A Wall Street analyst who misjudged a stock so badly would find himself living under a bridge, if not sharing a cell with Martha Stewart. But Talbott instead became Bill Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, where he could apply his perspicacious geopolitical perceptual powers to Osama bin Laden.”
and

“That’s especially true when the mistake is not a discrete, concrete fact like a misspelled name but a broader error of perspective or analysis. It took decades for the Times to admit that the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting of its Stalin-era Moscow bureau chief, Walter Duranty, was delusionary drivel. Even so, his Pulitzer stands. And the Times has yet to bite the bullet on its correspondent Herbert J. Matthews, the clueless Castro groupie who wrote that the comandante was winning his guerrilla war in Cuba at a time when he actually commanded fewer than 20 men.

Sometimes the refusal to confront errors is simple hubris. But often it masks a queasy reluctance to start down a path of self-examination, for fear of where it will lead.”

That being the case, I wonder why anyone at all would be inclined to read the Duffy piece in last weeks Time, and think that it was relevant to any sort of a debate being conducted right now about the surge of troops in Iraq.
Let’s review some of these quotes from Mr. Duffys piece:

“But seen in another light, the surge is the latest salvo in the 30-year tong war between the two big foreign policy factions in the Republican Party: the internationalists and the neoconservatives. The surge belongs to the neocons and in particular to Frederick Kagan, who taught military history at West Point for a decade and today works out of the American Enterprise Institute as a military analyst.

Kagan argued for a surge last fall in the pages of the Weekly Standard, the neocons’ house organ, after the military’s previous surge, Operation Forward Together, failed in late October. Kagan turned to former Army Vice Chief of Staff Jack Keane, a retired four-star general who still has street cred at the Pentagon, to help flesh out the plan and then sell it to the White House. The neocons don’t have the same juice they had at the start of the war, in part because so many of them have fled the government in shame. But they are a long way from dead.”

Fled the government in shame? Who has fled the government in shame?
Oh Yeah, I remember Vanity Fair did a piece on the regrets of the Neo Cons a while back, the article had so much credibility that it was used all over the nation right before the election as evidence that even those crazy Neo-Cons were abandoning the President and his Iraq Policy.

“A dismayed Administration official who has generally been an optimist about Iraq described the process as chaotic. “None of this,” he predicted of the surge and its coming rollout, “is going to work.”

Who said this? Come on dude….have some guts…if you don’t believe this is going to work, go on record and say it with your name attached, you defeatist coward.

“Kagan told TIME that U.S. troop force “should be down significantly” from what it is now–“enough to permit economic development, the recruiting and training of the Iraqi army, political development and reconciliation.” Under this scenario, U.S. forces can turn to eradicating the insurgents full time once Baghdad is “stabilized.”

Not everyone buys this happy talk. “Are we assuming the insurgents don’t get to vote on this?” asks a veteran of both the Iraqi and Vietnam wars. “I see more arrogance than ever, assuming once again that Western genius counts for more than Eastern resolve.” Already the sectarian militias so eager to kill civilians across Baghdad have been careful not to confront U.S. forces.

Again, WHO is this veteran of Nam and Iraq who claims Bush administration arrogance. The time for unnamed sources is over in Washington D.C. If you don’t have the courage of your convictions to spew your views to the public with your name attached, then shut your mouth.
At least, if you don’t want to put your quote with your face, name, and email address attached so that you can be held accountable for your words, please do not assume that anyone is going to be interested in what you have to say (Time Magazine journalists with an agenda to take down a presidency will forever be quoting you however).

“SO, IS THE SURGE BUSH’S LAST STAND?

PROBABLY YES, WHETHER BUSH INTENDS IT that way or not. There is always a chance that a surge might reduce the violence, if only for a while. But given that nothing in Iraq has gone according to plan, it seems more likely that it won’t. That’s why many in the military assume privately that a muscular-sounding surge now is chiefly designed to give Bush the political cover to execute a partial withdrawal on his terms later.”

Assumptions, assumptions, assumptions……NOTHING in Iraq has gone according to plan! What an idiot! I cannot believe the hubris of this writer. Again, his generalizations about the many in the military who have somehow telepathically sent their innermost thoughts to this Time Magazine propagandist who then claims to speak for them. Who are these many military people? Give us their names, faces, and let them speak for themselves. If they are not willing to go public, then don’t use them as sources.
and finally:

“A retired colonel who served in Baghdad put it more bluntly: “We don’t know whether this is a plan for victory or just to signal to Americans that we did our damnedest before pulling out.”

Who is this retired colonel, and why didn’t you use his name??? I don’t give any credence to anything you have written Mr. Duffy. Your whole piece stinks, it smells like the garbage, refuse, and filth that it is.
I will enjoy watching Time Magazine get its just dues for decades of coddling tyrants, being the soap box from which communist sympathizers and collectivist propagandists sent out their missives to an American public deluded about the intentions of those who would seek to deprive them of their liberty and national sovereignty.
Why should anyone at all take one word of what you write seriously Mr. Duffy?
I’m Going back to the Blogs…..and will never again pick up a copy of Time Magazine.
Jenny Hatch

My daughter Michelle bought me the paperback copy of Flags of our Fathers for Christmas and I read it last week.
This book was a great reminder of the sacrifices of those who fought in the pacific. I have studied quite a bit about the battles that took place in Europe, the Middle East, and the impact World War II had on American Home Life.
Although I have been in the play South Pacific twice, I have never really studied the detailed stories of the battles, particularly Iwo, and although I had seen the flag raising picture in a variety of settings (text books, museums, etc..) I had never been curious enough to read about it beyond a few paragraphs.
My own grandfather was a Marine in the South Pacific during world war II and my husbands Father served on Guam as a communications specialist. Reading the book made me want to do some more research about the events they were a part of during the war.
One of the most significant stories in the book was way after the war, when the author James Bradley was dissing America and sharing the conventional wisdom that prevailed during the 70’s at the supper table with his father on Thanksgiving day. He made a few disparaging remarks to his father about Americas treatment of the Japanese during the war. He said his father did not even respond, and just passed him some turkey.
In some ways I was angry that his father did not set the record straight to his loud mouthed son, but I could understand a Fathers desire to keep the peace at the supper table, if only as a tribute to his wife, who probably spent the whole day cooking and did not want a political fight to ruin a meal, but also perhaps because Mr. Bradley had a deep understanding that “a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still”.
Convincing a hot headed youth that he does not have all the facts of a story is a reality most parents have to face when attempting to educate and teach.
I read somewhere of a boy who felt that his father did not know anything when he was 18, and when he returned home at 22 he was surprised to discover how much his father had learned in four years.
I would highly recomend this book to anyone to read, and plan to purchase the movie when it comes out on DVD next month.
Jenny Hatch

What is America—and is it worth defending?

“I spoke on campuses recently and listened to a number of students discuss issues of immigration, national identify, and the old race/class/gender conundrum. What struck me were two things: the unwillingness of young Americans in the audience to define, much less in thought or speech to defend their civilization. And I noted the paradoxical criticism of the United States by those who have just arrived on our shores.

Why would any wish to come to a country that they almost immediately fault—that takes more legal immigrants alone than all other countries combined? Is it that such contrariness earns acceptance from our own cynical and nihilistic elite? As I pointed out to these audiences, rarely do Americans in turn define newcomers here by the sins of their homeland.

Imagine, I went on, if Chinese students were reminded that the antecedents of their current government since 1945 murdered or starved to death 70 million of their own?

Should the Indian immigrant be reminded of suttee and the caste system?

The students seemed a little stunned, but had picked up the current American campus trait of thinking that if the United States can be shown not to be perfect, it is therefore not good—and that no one would dare to question the moral principles, or consistency, by which they press their own moralistic attack on the United States.”

Jenny Hatch

I AM WOMAN, HEAR ME BORE

“It’s nice to have a president who is not so sleazy that not a single Supreme Court justice shows up for his State of the Union address (Bill Clinton, January 1999, when eight justices stayed away to protest Clinton’s disregard for the law and David Souter skipped the speech to watch “Sex and the City”).

Speaking of which, the horny hick’s wife finally ended the breathless anticipation by announcing that she is running for president. I studied tapes of Hillary feigning surprise at hearing about Monica to help me look surprised upon learning that she’s running.”

Coulter at her best…
Jenny Hatch