“Everybody knows” there was no connection between al Qaeda and Iraq before 9/11. The trouble with what “everybody knows” is that it’s usually wrong.
At Salman Pak, I was there in 2003. We [Marines] found high quality leather suicide vests, wrapped in plastic, ready for shipment. The SEALs were doing work there too. I wonder what the enemy was doing with those? We actually sent out press releases with pictures in and around April/May 2003, and it was ignored by the mainstream media.
I have to agree. Michelle Malkin has a great roundup of the Pentagon’s crackdown on milblogs.
It’s one thing to worry about OPSEC. It’s another to shoot yourself in the foot in the battlefront that a) matters most and b) we’re losing: the media.
Don’t miss Michael Yon’s latest dispatch from Iraq.
There is a side to this war that cannot be captured in any kind of statistics. The importance of personal relationships among the soldiers and their Iraqi counterparts cannot be captured in quick stories or numbers. A huge part of this war comes down to personal relationships and respect. It’s not about killing. That’s only a small part of it. It’s about building: building bonds that build societies. Giving Iraqi civilians a real alternative to those who create and then flee from civil havoc. Terrorists don’t pick up the trash on the way back from blowing up the electrical stations.
While Apalachia and parts of Europe rejoice, somewhere Rick Santorum is shaking his head and saying, “I told you so.”
Ready. Aim. Fire.
A highly irritating expression in Washington has it that “hindsight is always 20-20.” Would that it were so. History is not a matter of hindsight and is not, in fact, always written by the victors. In this case, a bogus history is being offered by a real loser whose hindsight is cockeyed and who had no foresight at all.
