In the Anbar document, the author describes an al-Qaida in crisis, with citizens growing weary of militants’ presence and foreign fighters too eager to participate in suicide missions rather than continuing to fight, said Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, a U.S. military spokesman.
“We lost cities and afterward, villages … We find ourselves in a wasteland desert,” Smith quoted the document as saying.
The memo cites militants’ increasing difficulty in moving around and transporting weapons and suicide belts because of better equipped Iraqi police and more watchful citizens, Smith said.
The author of the diary seized near Balad wrote that he was once in charge of 600 fighters, but only 20 were left “after the tribes changed course”_ a reference to how many Sunni tribesmen have switched sides to fight alongside the Americans, Smith said.
No thanks to Harry or Nancy. This is a real problem for the press. There may not be enough foreign fighters left to create the new Tet that they’re dying to report.
[Update early afternoon]
The WaPo has more detailed account. Apparently the diary was from the October time period.
George Bush says that John McCain is a true conservative. This, from the guy who said “when people hurt, the government has to move,” and who teamed up with (and got rolled by) Ted Kennedy to dramatically expand the federal government’s role in education.
It’s the end of an era. Polaroid is ceasing production of instant film. I hadn’t noticed, but they stopped manufacturing the cameras a couple years ago.
I remember back in the sixties when we got one. It seemed pretty cool at the time, but it’s not a technology that could survive the digital era. I’m actually a little surprised that it lasted as long as it did.
Edmund Burke in 1775, in what seems to be the first defense of partisanship in Western political thinking, argued that party loyalty and striving for victory over one’s opponents is a good thing, so long as loyalty to one’s own did not lead each party to attempt the “proscription” of the other. My second and last question prompted by Jonah’s Liberal Fascism is, how real is the prospect that one of our parties may try to proscribe the other. And which is more likely to try it?
It is a standard charge of left-wingers who claim to see “fascists” on the right that conservatives want to crack down on dissent and stifle freedom of political speech. But if, as Jonah powerfully argues, our fascists are liberals and many of our liberals are fascists–while fascism is much more weakly present (if at all) on the right–then it should not be surprising that we find the left to be the maker of speech codes, hate crimes laws, political correctness, indoctrination programs in all levels of education, campaign finance “reform,” and so on. Can anyone recall any similar campaigns by conservatives for the repression of dissent in the last several generations? (And no, efforts to revive now-lost prohibitions on obscenity and pornography don’t count.) Proscription of its opponents’ views–a classic great-party gambit by those who wish to unmake and remake regime-question settlements–seems to be the agenda of the American left, not of the right.
It’s not just fascism that is redefined by the book, but the words “left” and “right” as well.
A post that I just put up today is now in the top ten (number eight, right now) of a Google search for “Mike Griffin NASA.” And I didn’t even get an Instalink on it.
Alan Boyle has a roundup of links about Darwin’s birthday. I don’t have much to say right now, except that his theory is probably the most controversial, and most misunderstood (and most powerful as well, in many senses) in the history of science.
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