The General thinks this is doable. I think he is probably the best man in the Army to try to tackle this but if he fails, I suspect Iraq is done. He is what we call the last man standing on our side at least. Lets hope he helps the rest of us up off the floor.

He said he would not have accepted the nomination to take command in Baghdad if he did not believe Bush's plan could achieve its goals.

In his opening statement, Petraeus, 54, painted a grim picture of conditions in Iraq.

"The situation in Iraq is dire. The stakes are high. There are no easy choices. The way ahead will be very hard. ... But hard is not hopeless," he said.

Petraeus is a former division commander and once the head of the Iraqi training mission. Devoted early in the war to trying to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis, Petraeus later wrote the Pentagon manual on how to tackle insurgencies. He also previously supported expanding U.S. forces in the region.

 

Michael Totten has the updates.

Up until today Hezbollah has modeled its "resistance" to the elected government after the March 14 demonstations to oust the occupying Syrian army. The March 14 movement, though, never did anything remotely like this. That's because they are, for the most part, liberal and democratic while Hezbollah is a Syrian-Iranian terrorist army. Today should be a moment of clarity for the willfully obtuse.

Notice, also, that the violent clashes in the streets are mostly between Sunnis and Shia, not between Christians and Shia. This is, and was, entirely predictable. Those who think Hezbollah is a popular movement with the support of Lebanon's Muslims as a whole should think again.

People write these for the President every year. It is their version of what they think the President should say:

The State of the Union is a disaster. I did my best, but I made mistakes, and my best wasn’t good enough.

We went to war without building up our army, and now, I am trying to make up for that.

But that is not the disaster.

The disaster is that you, Congress and the American people, do not care to fight.

Though I doubt it will be popular, my two cents is that this would not be at all helpful. You see our political system works like this. People listen to a President's speech and draw a conclusion. They take that conclusion and draft letters to their newspapers and Congressmen. Newspapers help further shape public opinion and Congressmen help shape policy. Now exactly what policy or opinion is the public going to demand if the President calls them cowards or a disaster? Hmmm I don't think I would like either.

I happen to think it is abhorrent. I mean 43 Bill Gates... The man has given billions to charity. They say:

Charges: Became the richest man in the world through intellectual thievery, stealing Windows and every other software package he ever made a billion on. Microsoft’s internal slogan with regard to competitors is "embrace, extend, and exterminate." As founder and co-chair of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he’s fighting global poverty and disease by investing in corporations that are the source of global poverty and disease. According to the L.A. Times, The BMGF has over $9 billion invested in companies whose activities contradict the foundation’s stated mission.

Joe stood for what he believed and the votes liked it. He gets:

Charges: For a brief, shining moment in ‘06, it looked like the nation might finally be rid of this sniveling sitzpinkler, but Joe Lieberman just keeps coming back, like herpes. Now Lieberman is an unknown quantity and subsequently the most powerful vote in the Senate. Routinely scolds Democrats for "undermining" the president, whose balls have resided in Lieberman’s mouth since 9/11.

At 27 is little Suri Cruise not even a year old and this idiot says:

Charges: Terrible motor control. Deficient, tiny neck can’t even support the weight of her own head. Unable to fathom the causal nature of the universe, or any other remedial concepts for that matter, beyond vague urges of biology. Doesn’t speak English, as her brain is physically incapable of constructing the compound ideas that are prerequisite to language. Can’t even manage her own bowel movements. Relies on Scientologists to handle nearly all of her affairs. Snubbed Katie Holmes’ pert nipples, preferring L. Ron Hubbard’s newborn barely formula and the subsequent risk of botulism. Not what we’d have done—for health reasons, of course. Airbrushed to look like human Yoda on the cover of Vanity Fair. Inexplicably "spits up" without warning or apology. But don’t be fooled: it’s not "spit;" it’s actually puke.

Sorry I have zero tolerance of idiots pushing sub 34 IQ nonsense.

We have been here before. History as a guide:

It's now forgotten that capitulation didn't work. Simply didn't work. The Barbary Pirates raised their demands until the Pashas were taking nearly 20 per cent of Federal Revenue. But in the beginning the policy of appeasement seemed perfectly. The initial extortion demand of $70,000 was far smaller than the astronomical $2 million dollars requested by Thomas Jefferson to build a Navy. In the end it proved cheaper to crush them.

Rather quickly, American ships bring the North Africans to heel, cementing the United States' role as a power broker in the Middle East. Before he revised it in the War of 1812, Francis Scott Key's "Star-Bangled Banner" - which would become the American national anthem - described "turbaned heads bowed" to the "brow of the brave." No longer weak, then, America invites no more insults. Strengthened, in fact, it begins to deliver a few of its own.

It is coming in fits and starts but it is still coming along. My congratulations to the Senator.

Before the final vote on S. 1, to my delight the Senate adopted another one of my amendments. This important amendment provides the means for reformers to eliminate new earmarks to a conference report that were not in either the House or Senate passed versions of the bill. This practice has been a boondoggle for pork-hungry lawmakers in the past because it allows pet projects to be quietly slipped into bills without debate or the accountability of the committee process. The means to stop these secretive earmarks is absolutely essential for the success of reform efforts in Congress.

But the adoption of these two amendments is not nearly enough. Congress still has plenty of work to do before we are out of the woods.

The way we spend the people’s money here in Washington needs to be completely changed. We are starting to change it by overhauling the earmarking process. On that front, we have another opportunity this week to take one more step in the right direction.

As the Iraqi Army grows stronger, its growing pains become more obvious. Bill Roggio embedded blogger, takes a look at them.

The shift from partnering with Iraqi battalions to the implementation of the transition teams in one year is dramatic, and there are both surprising developments and disappointing setbacks. Developing an Army from scratch is a difficult and time consuming process (building an Army from scratch a process and not an event, as Glenn Reynolds would say). The Army must first learn to crawl, then walk, then run. After viewing the Iraqi Army in Anbar over the past few months, I estimate they are somewhere between the crawling and walking phases, perhaps holding on to the coffee table while taking those first steps. 

Chris Hitchens reviews Mark Steyn's remarkable book  'America Alone'.  I like Hitchens, he is one of the few liberals that I think earn the right to say they live in a 'reality based community'. I don't always agree with him, but he always makes me think. He also has a habit of showing us a glimpse of the workings of the liberal mind. This was particularly insightful for me.

Two things, in my experience, disable many liberals at the onset of this conversation. First, they cannot shake their subliminal identification of the Muslim religion with the wretched of the earth: the black- and brown-skinned denizens of what we once called the “Third World.” You can see this identification in the way that the Palestinians (about 20 percent of whom were Christian until their numbers began to decline) have become an “Islamic” cause and in the amazing ignorance that most leftists display about India, a multiethnic secular democracy under attack from al-Qaida and its surrogates long before the United States was. And you can see it, too, in the stupid neologism “Islamophobia,” which aims to promote criticism of Islam to the gallery of special offenses associated with racism.

The second liberal disability concerns numbers. Any emphasis on the relative birthrates of Muslim and non-Muslim populations falls on the liberal ear like an echo of eugenics. It also upsets one of the most valued achievements of the liberal consensus: the right if not indeed the duty to limit family size to (at most) two children. It was all very well, from this fatuously self-satisfied perspective, for Paul Ehrlich to warn about the human “population bomb” as a whole, just as it is all very well for some “Green” forces to take a neo-Malthusian attitude toward human reproduction in general. But in the liberal mind, to concentrate on the fertility of any one group is to flirt with Nuremberg laws. The same goes for “racial profiling,” even when it’s directed at the adherents of an often ideological religion rather than an ethnic group. The Islamists, meanwhile, have staked everything on fecundity.

That old cliche gained some credibility today. The terrorists in Iraq have planned to hit us here. No big surprise. They will do it the moment they can get away with it.

The plot was discovered six months ago, roughly the same time that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, was killed by coalition forces. Sources tell ABC News that the suspects involved in the effort to launch the U.S. attack were closely associated with Zarqawi.

The plan also came only months after Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's No. 2, had requested that Zarqawi attempt an attack inside the United States.

"This appears to be the first hard evidence al Qaeda in Iraq was trying to attack us here at home," said ABC News consultant Richard Clarke, former chief counterterrorism adviser on the U.S. National Security Council.

No contest at all.

You bet their policies are different. Hillary Clinton favors paternalistic big government. As laid out by OnTheIssues.org, her education policy might as well have been drafted by the teachers unions: Testing only for new teachers. No vouchers. Limited parental choice. Opposes tort reform. Federalize health care. Rated 82% positive by the NEA and 85% by the AFL-CIO. Rated a "big spender" by NTU. Anyway, let's go to the record. When you compare key quotations side-by-side, it becomes clear that Lady Thatcher was all about liberty and prosperity, while Hillary is all about unions, big government, and high taxes and spending.

Did he really change his mind? Allahpundit calls it too optimistic, but I am hopeful.

But al-Maliki reportedly had a change of heart in late November while going into a meeting in Jordan with President Bush. It has since been disclosed that the Iraqi leader’s vision for a new security plan for Baghdad, to which Bush has committed 17,500 additional U.S. troops, was outlined in that meeting.

Al-Maliki is said by aides to have told Bush that he wants the Iraqi army and police to be in the lead, but he would no longer prevent U.S. attempts to stifle the Mahdi Army.

Lots of links and info over at Hotair... as usual ;)

Big Mo over at Hang Right Politics is beginning a series of posts analyzing all the Presidents starting with President Washington. As a history geek I absolutely love the idea. The verdict on Washington?

This should really come as no surprise, but Washington truly does deserve his reputation. In presidential rankings, he’s usually first or second, ahead or just behind Lincoln. And it’s usually his final act—declining to seek a third term and being made “president for life”—that clinches it for the rankers. But I found Washington to be an engaging president and commander in chief. He took the position seriously and treated it as a humbling honor, not a right to which he was due. He carefully weighed his options, and kept the Constitution, for which he had just labored, close at hand—and even vetoed two pieces of legislation because he believed that they violated that Constitution.

Superb job! There is lots of rich history goodness over at Hang Right Politics.

I can respect those that disagree about the war. I can respect those who are fighting ferociously to remove our guys and gals. I can not respect those who project our policy on to those who are fighting the war.

From: contact@discount-mats.com Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2007 9:44 PM Subject: Re: Feedback: from discount-mats.com

SGT Hess,
We do not ship to APO addresses, and even if we did, we would NEVER ship to Iraq. If you were sensible, you and your troops would pull out of Iraq.

Bargain Suppliers
Discount-Mats.com

This idiot need a knock upside their head. Sgt Hess doesn't decide when he leaves, the US Government does. I never have shopped there. I doubt I ever will now.

Addendum: Snopes is looking into it.

Addendum 2: Ms U is on it. She has a lot more info on the people behind the business and I love the cat graphic.

Addendum 3: A soldier's Mother addresses it.

Though I would have likely disagreed with the young lady on almost everything, she stepped forward and gave it her all. I can think of worse one can leave this life being able to claim. My prayers and tears are with Andrea and her family.

Parhamovich, 28, an activist with the Washington-based National Democratic Institute, died Wednesday in an ambush on her convoy as it traveled through one of Baghdad's most dangerous neighborhoods. An al-Qaida-linked coalition of Iraqi Sunni insurgents claimed responsibility for the attack. . . .

Sandra has an interesting post on her page.

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."

Where do you think we are and how do we turn it around? Is it a foregone conclusion?