Condi Flaps Her Gums

BAGHDAD, April 20 (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Sunday she did not know how seriously to take a threat of all-out war by Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, and rebuked him for threatening violence while living abroad.

Sadr, whose Mehdi Army militia have battled U.S. and Iraqi government forces, threatened on Saturday to launch an "open war until liberation" against the U.S.-backed government if it continued a month-old crackdown on his followers.

The threat from the Shi'ite cleric was followed by what the U.S. military called the heaviest fighting for weeks in his east Baghdad stronghold of Sadr City.

"He is still living in Iran. I guess it's all out war for anybody but him," Rice said of Sadr, who has not appeared in public in Iraq in nearly a year.

"His followers can go to their death and he will still be in Iran," she told reporters travelling with her on a trip to Baghdad.

The U.S. military has said Sadr has spent most of the past year in neighbouring Shi'ite Iran.

Said Condi from the safety of a bunker in the Green Zone. Wow, taunting the defacto leader of Iraq. How high school. This is why our foreign policy is in the state it is in. This clown Rice wants to sound like her "Bring 'em On" boss. Maybe next she can "Double Dog Dare" him to come out of hiding.

Oh and Condi he isn't in Iran. Nice try, you don't know where he or Bin Laden are. Just go buy some more shoes, leave the counter insurgency to the experts.

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Counter Insurgency vs. The Surge

Phillip Carter's blog "Intel Dump" over that the Wapo (go figure!). Has a post about how this current tightening of the belt for the military in Iraq. By having to keep up the levels of the surge, Bush in another pointless presser about how he is working hard on Iraq told the press corp he was authorizing reducing the combat tour lengths to 7 months. Short tours are against COIN doctrine and the short tours in 'Nam were well known problem. Here is some of what Phil had to say:

Counterinsurgency requires detailed knowledge of the human, geographic, political and social terrain, and it takes time to acquire that knowledge. I'd say it became effective around the fifth or sixth month of my tour as a police adviser in Iraq. Arguably, advisers, commanders and troops operating outside the wire should serve longer tours in order to develop and cement their relationships, and capitalize on them.

But they can't -- there's a finite limit to the amount of combat that men and women can endure. So we must balance combat effectiveness, and the needs of an all-volunteer force (and its families), against the steep learning curve of counterinsurgency, which demands longer deployments. -- Intel Dump

Even when these guys eak out some minor, miniscule, tiny advantage they immediately think up some way to screw things up.

It's a real dilemma, and I'm not sure how to solve it without drastically increasing the size of the military or sharply curtailing the deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. -- Phil Carter, Intel Dump.

Keep dreaming Phil you crazy diamond!

Oh, and the body count is back up to almost 2 a day again. Booyah!

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Calm In Basra

McClatchy News asks a question:

With calm restored in Basra, Iraqis ask 'Who won?'

BAGHDAD — Relative calm settled over Basra, neighboring provinces and Baghdad on Monday as a ceasefire took hold after nearly a week of pitched fighting between the Mahdi Army militia of Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr and Iraqi government forces.

This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.

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Gen. Petraeus, Plagarist?

Danger Room is reporting that Prof. David Price has looked a little more closely at Dave Petraeus's COIN manual and found a lot of theft cribbing has been going on:

While some in this group are producing interesting quality studies of the military and intelligence community, the Manual shows the sort of low quality work that can pass as "innovative" uses of anthropology for the military. Chapter three reads like the work of lazy C students, taking phrases and sentences promiscuously from various sources, cobbling them together into a sort of Cliffs Notes version of anthropology, which the University of Chicago Press has now laundered into a book posing as an object of academic respectability.

It seems the General "Integrity" Petraeus copied a whole bunch of other peoples' work and printed it up. Like I said before, I wondered who the hell asked him to rewrite the thing anything. Its not like he was an expert. Hell, now its clear he didn't know enough about it to actually come up with anything original in the first place!

The Manual's PR campaign has been extraordinary. In a Daily Show interview, John Nagl hammed it up in uniform with Jon Stewart, but amidst the banter Nagl stayed on mission and described how Gen. Petraeus collected a "team of writers [who] produced the [Manual] strategy that General Petraeus is implementing in Iraq now." When Jon Stewart commented on the speed at which the Manual was produced, Nagl remarked that this was "very fast for an Army field manual; the process usually takes a couple of years";
-- counterpunch.com

I saw Lt Col. "Tightass" Nagl on the daily show. Stiff doesn't begin to describe this guy. Now he is running around trying to defend Petraeus. I love how to big up Petraeus, the COIN manual was portrayed as Petraeus' work, but now that there are some questions they are saying, "oh, no, it was a bunch of guys who wrote it."

Price describes the failure to cite all sources used in the manual as evidence of “shoddy academic practices”, but in fact he is applying the standards of one society to those of a very different one—a violation of the anthropological norm of cultural relativism as I understand it. To paraphrase von Clausewitz, military Field Manuals have their own grammar and their own logic. They are not doctoral dissertations, designed to be read by few and judged largely for the quality of their sourcing; instead, they are intended for use by soldiers. Thus authors are not named.
-- DangerRoom

Their own grammar and logic, not somebody else's! These guys are unbelievable, "We stole other peoples work and didn't attribute them because its a military manual, not a book..." WTF? Then he has the balls to say that's why the authors are not named. They have been pimping that Petraeus re-wrote this thing for almost a year now! This tightass Nagl was on the fucking Daily Show!

I suppose we can expect Boylan to pop up and start attacking people now. Greenwald better start saving his emails again. Its no wonder Petraus gets along so well with the C-minus Augustus they are cut from the same cloth.

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Mr. Counterinsurgency, Dave Petraeus

Lets all pause and remember that it was the current commander in Iraq, General Petraeus who re-wrote the Counter Insurgency manual. Lets read a bit of it shall we?

F-8. The employment of air-power in the strike role should be done with exceptional care. Bombing, even with the most precise weapons, can cause unintended civilian casualties. The benefits of every air strike should be weighed against the risks, the primary danger being collateral damage that turns the population against the government and provides the insurgents with a major propaganda victory. Even when justified under the law of war, bombing a target that results in civilian casualties will bring media coverage that works to the benefit of the insurgents. A standard insurgent and terrorist tactic for decades against Israel has been to fire rockets or artillery from the vicinity of a school or village in the hope that the Israelis would carry out a retaliatory air strike that kills or wounds civilians-who are then displayed to the world media as victims of aggression. Insurgents and terrorists elsewhere have shown few qualms in provoking attacks that ensure civilian casualties if such attacks fuel anti-government and anti-U.S. propaganda. Indeed, insurgents today can be expected to use the civilian population as a cover for their activities.

F-9. Even in a clear case of taking out an insurgent headquarters or command center, care has to be taken to accomplish the mission while minimizing civilian casualties. New, precise munitions with smaller blast effects have been developed and employed to limit collateral damage. There are other means, as well. At the start of the campaign in Afghanistan in 2001, U.S. intelligence identified Taliban armored vehicles parked in built up areas. A miss, or even a direct hit, by a precision weapon would be likely to kill civilians and give the Taliban a propaganda advantage. The United States Air Force (USAF) came up with the idea of employing concrete-filled practice bombs with precision guidance against such Taliban weapons systems. If the bomb hit the target, the kinetic energy of 2,000-pounds of steel and concrete dropped from the air would assure destruction. If the bomb missed the target, it would bury itself deep in the ground with no explosion and little chance of major collateral damage. The destruction of the weapons systems was accomplished without any collateral damage that could have turned the population against the U.S. and multinational forces.

790%

Percentage increase to date of Bombing Sorties in Iraq over 2006. Jan-Sep 2006 = 125, Sorties to date - 2007, 995. Numbers do not include Marine Corp operations in al Anbar.

Now October looks like another very low casualties month, with 33 month to date. The lowest for all of 2007. Is General Petraeus having his men hunker down and having the Air Force take over counter insurgency duties in Iraq? If so, does he really think that he can keep that up until January 2009? Because Bush is not pulling out. No matter how 'good' it gets in Iraq Little Boots will not pull out. He is much too stupid. I looked and looked in the COIN manual and didn't find the 'hide and bomb the shit out of them' strategy anywhere. Maybe my kerning was off or something.

sources: Fred Kaplan at Slate.com and Noah Shachtman at Wired's Danger Room and of course Iraq Coalition Casualties

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