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EXEMPLARS OF LEAPS OF LOGIC OF THE EMBERS OF FIRES OF IRAQ
Mark Bahnisch, academic:
The battle lines are relatively clear, with the right wing commentariat being the exemplars of tortured non sequiturs and ludicrous leaps of logic in the face of the collapse of the Iraq War. In any event, such voices are usually very muted (and fewer) now as reality has finally caught up with the faith based community. The probable election of a Rudd government will see the last embers of the fires of the Iraq War in Australian political debate die away very quickly, and hopefully we will have learned some lessons.
Yes; some writing lessons, in Mark’s case. Meanwhile, Peter Beaumont observes progress in Iraq:
In Mosul, which once hosted 21,000 US soldiers in the city, now only a single battalion, in the mid-hundreds, remains inside the city, matched by an equivalent drop in attacks. And it is not only in Mosul that security is improving. The sense that things are getting better is reflected in Nineveh Province. In two years US troop levels around Tal Afar, once the heartland of al-Qaeda, have been reduced from 6,000 to 1,200.
The general trend for acts of violence - despite some spikes - also has been steadily decreasing.
The Times has good news from Baghdad:
Fed up with being part of a group that cuts off a person’s face with piano wire to teach others a lesson, dozens of low-level members of al-Qaeda in Iraq are daring to become informants for the US military in a hostile Baghdad neighbourhood ...
“They are turning. We are talking to people who we believe have worked for al-Qaeda in Iraq and want to reconcile and have peace,” said Colonel Ricky Gibbs, commander of the 4th Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, which oversees the area.
And Iraq’s national security advisor Mowaffak Rubaie is also upbeat:
For those of us who actually live here, progress is visible to all but the most irreconcilable skeptics.
(Via Instapundit)
Iraq was never going to be easy. We knew that when we went in. And it was the right thing to do.
Those who write and circulate these stories are not only doing themselves a great disservice, but are also doing an incredible disservice to the people of Iraq. Those people did need help, they still need help, and they certainly don’t need to be told that those who are there to help them are just going to hurt them. It’s just not true.
Those who write this tripe should be publicised and mocked and ridiculed. That was a badly composed sentence. I should have written “Those who write this tripe should be publicised, as well as mocked and ridiculed”.
But that would be pedantic.
I’m glad that Mr. Bahnisch is around to keep on reminding us of what the reality really is. I wouldn’t want to live in a fantasy world, after all.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2007 07 25 at 10:52 AM • permalinkSoberHT—That’s possible because the US Killitary is forcing them to breed like rabbits so they can hunt the babies to inflate their kill counts.
Like, OMG, don’t you read the Daily Kos?
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2007 07 25 at 10:56 AM • permalinkAre we still torturing non sequiturs? I thought the President said we couldn’t do that. Can we at least water-board non sequiturs, or is that considered torture, too?
Professor Bahnisch is just full of good things, for example: “We have no need of a ‘pro-war Left’”. A plainer admission of leftist blindness toward militant Islamic expansionism I have yet to see or hear.
Grrr.
There’s never going to be a good story from Iraq because no luvvies in in the West want to read one. People want American troops and British troops and Ozzies to die. That’s the only story that will make the front page, unless a silly dope shoots himself in the head and his family drags the government through the court system and still comes up cold.
The real heroes are having a Vietnam experience. Medals awarded in silence for major deeds of valour, they’re being shat on and spat on, and once they’re out of the forces, on your own, fellas.
The Australian left couldn’t give a stuff about these people, any more than they did about Vietnam vets. The more Australian soldiers dead, the better for their cause. But there aren’t any dead boys from Iraq, thank the gods. How regrettable that must be.
Slightly O/T but still relevant to the GWoT:
Theo Sparks has been hit with the Good Idea Fairy and has a tactic for eliminating local jihadi that can be used as a “distributed ops” program to eliminate jihadi on a global scale.
Forgot to add, I found the above by Theo Sparks during a visit to The Dissident Frogman.
I don’t want to be accused of being a pagerist or plaguerist or whatever it’s called.
...the right wing commentariat being the exemplars of tortured non sequiturs…
My posting rights at LP were suspended when I observed that Mark seemed to positively welcome deaths in Iraq. He’d written something sarcastic like “Iraqification is going well” when a story first appeared about six Sunnis being dragged out of a mosque and burnt alive as clueless Iraqi soldiers “stood by”. Of course, no such incident ever happened - speaking of tortured non sequiturs.
Bahnisch and Co will always be ideological drones playing academics.
Posted by armageddon on 2007 07 25 at 02:10 PM • permalinkI know what victory in Iraq will look like.
The Iraqi government will, with reason and plausibility, announce the insurgency defeated. The US President would follow suit.
The number of attacks will have been radically reduced to a minor problem.
American troops will leave in large numbers and orderly fashion.
The Iraqi government will hold it’s second round of elections, and be shown to be stable and democratic, an absolute first for the entire Arab world.
All of this is attainable, within our grasp, and I think will in fact happen.
That will be EXACTLY what Mr.‘s Bush, Blair, Howard, and the coalition will have set out to achieve, and they will have suceeded. They will get their victory, even if it is after they leave office. They will have won.
And Mr. Bahnisch, and his assorted allies in the media and left… will NEVER acknowledge it. They’ll mumble a few of the facts if they are forced to do a newscast or the like, and move right on to warming or health care or what all, and they will NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER acknowledge victory when it is attained. NEVER. And because of their power, millions of Westerners will not notice the victory, care about it, honor the sacrifice requried for it, or will genuinely believe that all of the above in fact represents some catastrophic defeat because…“how could it be otherwise??”
Truly it is scary, for scary times. But we have answered on longstanding philosophical question.
“If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?”
“If a tyranny falls to democracy, and no one (in the media) acknowledges it, did it really happen?”
Answer: Categorically, utterly… NO. Truth is what people believe is true, not necessarily what actually is. The Left was totally correct to long march through the media, arts, and culture.
We can hope for, and achieve miracles in Iraq. But it’s gonna take some serious sledgehammer blows here at home to make that sacrifice worth a damn thing.
Andrew X - I think there is still some outside chance the media will go into a sort of “Super Petraeus” mode because he straight up and down deserves it and two it enables them to run a line of “Petraeus saves Bush’s butt” “Bush got lucky if it wasn’t for Petraeus etc.”
What we need to do over here in OZ is make LTC Kilcullen’s contribution far more widely known.
Posted by the nailgun on 2007 07 25 at 08:21 PM • permalinkLeftoids may need to agree on a common strategy; John Quiggin argues that those that leave friends in the lurch are reprehensible, which is a total turnaround to his previous position of a total pullout.
If we desert those who have helped us now, who will be foolish enough to do so in future
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Yes, but at what cost? By now the Lancet probably has determined that George Bush’s war has killed 28 million Iraqis…half a million more than actually live there! The humanity!