If you can follow and/or stomach it, here’s the memo.
I would like the chance to ask Reid one question at a live press conference:
“Are you honest in all your dealings with your fellow man?”
Mormons, and Reid is one, are asked a series of questions by their Bishops once per year if they want a Temple Recommend, the document that allows temple attendance. The above is one of the questions. If Reid holds a recommend, he’s bribed his bishop.
Is the “surge” working? It’s just barely starting. And it’s a whole new ball game.
The enemy is fluid, but the population is fixed. (The enemy is fluid because he has no permanent installations he needs to defend, and can always run away to fight another day. But the population is fixed, because people are tied to their homes, businesses, farms, tribal areas, relatives etc). Therefore—and this is the major change in our strategy this year—protecting and controlling the population is do-able, but destroying the enemy is not. We can drive him off from the population, then introduce local security forces, population control, and economic and political development, and thereby “hard-wire” the enemy out of the environment, preventing his return. But chasing enemy cells around the countryside is not only a waste of time, it is precisely the sort of action he wants to provoke us into. That’s why AQ cells leaving an area are not the main game—they are a distraction. We played the enemy’s game for too long: not any more. Now it is time for him to play our game.
I can only hope that this bit if inadvertant honesty helps kill the bill.
