Three Marks on the Horizon

Yon’s latest dispatch has a lot of great stuff. Read his description of an ambush:

Their Command Sergeant Major, James Pippin, was shot just before Memorial Day. He and his soldiers were in a large ambush near Yarmook Traffic Circle. When the ambush kicked off, Pippin ordered his driver to head straight into the heart of the attack where there were enemy machine guns, rockets and so forth.

Pippin ran out and shot one enemy. The guy had an RPG aimed at the Humvee, but the Humvee came right at him, Pippin jumped out. Pippin told me it was a lucky shot, but he hit the man in the face. A big firefight ensued, and Pippin got some bullet holes, but made his people keep fighting that day until they broke the ambush. This kind of stuff freaks out the enemy: our guys didn’t get them with jets or fancy machines from a distance, but just rushed into them and outfought them. Despite an enemy with perfect surprise, our guys still killed four of them and CSM Pippin was the only American casualty. Countless acts like these around Iraq are a large part of what has given our guys moral authority with Iraqi Police and Army.

Got that? The guys who got ambushed scored four kills. The ambushers only wounded one.

Excellent batallion indeed.

Update:
Michael emails the Instapundit to say:

Alexandra Zavis is an excellent correspondent. She gets around Iraq and I always find her stories consistent with what I am seeing on the ground. Her recent story on Baqubah adds more context to my own dispatches, and I believe the inverse is also true.

Read her for yourself.

Hitch Doesn’t Suffer Fools

He pares them with a sharp pen.

To say that the attempt to Talibanize Iraq would not be happening at all if coalition forces were not present is to make two unsafe assumptions and one possibly suicidal one. The first assumption is that the vultures would never have gathered to feast on the decaying cadaver of the Saddamist state, a state that was in a process of implosion well before 2003. All our experience of countries like Somalia and Sudan, and indeed of Afghanistan, argues that such an assumption is idiotic. It is in the absence of international attention that such nightmarish abnormalities flourish. The second assumption is that the harder we fight them, the more such cancers metastasize. This appears to be contradicted by all the experience of Iraq. Fallujah or Baqubah might already have become the centers of an ultra-Taliban ministate, as they at one time threatened to do, whereas now not only have thousands of AQM goons been killed but local opinion appears to have shifted decisively against them and their methods.

The third assumption, deriving from the first two, would be that if coalition forces withdrew, the AQM gangsters would lose their raison d’être and have nothing left to fight for. I think I shall just leave that assumption lying where it belongs: on the damp floor of whatever asylum it is where foolish and wishful opinions find their eventual home.

Duck Stew

That Washington lawyer who tried to keep Robert Spencer from talking just picked on the wrong columnist.

Marine Poet

What color is he?

American.

I’d like to see him try this from inside the cage.

But that would probably be un-Islamic. Or something.

Yon on NRO

He’s posted a dispatch with links to his previous stuff.

Almost everyone (by now) has heard about the “lazy” Iraqi parliament members who, like so many Nero’s fiddling while Rome burns around them, are taking a month off. Yet comparatively few Americans will ever hear or read about IA Scorpion Company Commander, Captain Baker; or Iraqi entrepreneur and community catalyst, “Tonto;” or the mayor of Baqubah, who summoned the courage to step out of the shadow of al Qaeda and fight to get his constituents a warehouse-sized stockpile of food.

The mantra that “there is no political progress in Iraq” is rapidly becoming the “surge” equivalent of a green alligator: when enough people repeat something that sounds plausible, but also happens to be false, it becomes accepted as fact. The more often it is repeated, and the larger the number of people repeating it, the harder it is to convince any one of the truth: Alligators are not green, and Iraqis are making plenty of political progress.

Do Not Fear the Unitary

It’s become a scare word among the BDS set. Might as well know what the Unitary Executive really is.