FauxNEWS

Prose courtesy William Kristol

Poetry courtesy Buck Sargent.  If Micheal Yon is the Ernie Pyle of this war,  Buck Sargent is it’s Joyce Kilmer.

Prejudice courtesy Time Magazine,and the rest of the Left Wing Main Stream Media who pimped Defeat to the people of this country, and now deny them the enjoyment of their Victory.

Pride, mine—of the soldiers and Generals whose acheivements others choose to ignore.  David Petraeus performed a military miracle on the order of that performed by Patton when he turned the entire Third Army 90 degrees and headed to the relief of the 101st at Bastogne.  These young men and their Leaders have done something that makes me wish Democrats were in office—so that the main Stream media would report it the way that it should be reported.

 Enjoy

And thanks for not choosing the obvious alternative–Nancy Pelosi, who had led the Democratic takeover of Congress. That takeover, Time editors and many others hoped, heralded our withdrawal from Iraq. However much they may have desired that outcome, Time was lucky not to select Pelosi. In the subsequent 12 months, she and her colleagues failed to impose a defeat in Iraq. Instead, President Bush announced a new strategy and a new commander, General David Petraeus, in January 2007. And all the real achievements of this year belong to them.

As conditions on the ground shift as extra boots gained a step

Expect not to hear how indeed they’ve made a dent

When one can form their own opinions

Why not then their own sit-reps?

That’s the way it was

Hence, always has it went

We are now winning the war. To say this was not inevitable is an understatement. Even those of us who were early advocates and strong supporters of the surge, and who thought it could succeed, knew the situation had so deteriorated that success was by no means guaranteed. Two military experts told me early in 2007 that they thought the odds of success were, respectively, 1-in-3 and 1-in-4. They nonetheless supported the surge because, even at those odds, it was a gamble worth taking, so devastating would be the consequences of withdrawal and defeat. We at THE WEEKLY STANDARD thought the chances of success were better than 50-50–but that it remained a difficult proposition.

Petraeus pulled it off. The war is not over, of course. Too quick and deep a drawdown–which some in the Pentagon and elsewhere in the Bush administration are, appallingly, pushing for–could throw away the amazing success that has been achieved. Still: It is as clear as anything can be in this world, where we judge through a glass darkly, that General David H. Petraeus is, in fact, America’s man of the year.

Through a plethora of triple-starred, quadruple-holds-barred sissies

Did it take to finally unearth GW’s own present day Ulysses

A Patton cum Grant, no Westmoreland come lately

None of that tell us what we want to hear and we’ll reward you accordingly

The Surge’on General Surge Projector

Aka, Insurgency Home Wrecker

Dismantling AQI via PowerPoint and a cordless Black & Decker

His team of Ph.Ds in ass kickery deemed precisely the trick

The Petraeus ex machina of this overbudget war flick

The reality is also this: The counterinsurgency campaign that Petraeus and Odierno conceived and executed in 2007 was as comprehensive a counterinsurgency strategy as has ever been executed. The heart of the strategy was a brilliant series of coordinated military operations throughout the entire theater. Petraeus and Odierno used conventional U.S. forces, Iraqi military and police, and Iraqi and U.S. Special Operations forces to strike enemy strongholds throughout Iraq simultaneously, while also working to protect the local populations from enemy responses. Successive operations across the theater knocked the enemy–both al Qaeda and Sunni militias, and Shia extremists–off balance and then prevented them from recovering. U.S. and Iraqi forces, supported by local citizens, chased the enemy from area to area, never allowing them the breathing space to reestablish safe havens, much less new bases. It wasn’t “whack-a-mole” or “squeezing the water balloon” as some feared (and initially claimed)–it was the relentless pursuit of an increasingly defeated enemy

‘Troop, Civilian Casualties In Rapid Decline!’

And other such headlines, buried on page A10 you’ll find

Remember Lost: Al Anbar?

Well, then in you’re in plenty of bad company

Neither does Reuters, Time, AP, or McClatchy!

But whatever did happen to Wild West Ramadi?

File not found/404

Beam us up, Scotty

From rocket propelled grenades to unity parades

And nary a newsworthy MSM story?

I suppose calm & reconstruction is much too last season

Yawn, nothing to see here, bor-ring

Sure, it likely never will be mistaken for an idyllic arcadia

But all things considered I’d still rather not be in Philadelphia

That defeat has implications far beyond Iraq. In 2007, Iraq’s Sunni Arabs fought with us against al Qaeda, and Iraq’s Shia Arabs joined with us to fight Iranian-backed Shia militias. So much for the notion that Americans were doomed to fail in their efforts to mobilize moderate Muslims against jihadists. The progress in Iraq in 2007 represents a strategic breakthrough for the broader Middle East whose importance would be hard to overstate.

But four years of investment in defeatathon rhetoric

Can’t be undone with sardonic milblogger metrics

Employing logic and reason, albeit quite spherical

Legally blind to the nascent Iraqi quagmiracle

Shrill obsessed floggers of the choose-to-lose motif

Ye judge who sports the willing suspenders of disbelief

One additional point: Petraeus’s counterinsurgency stands out not just for its conceptual ambition and the skill of its execution but for its humanity. There were those who argued that the U.S. military could not succeed in counterinsurgency because Americans were not tough and bloodthirsty enough. They said that brutality was essential in subduing insurgents and our humanity would be our downfall.

They were wrong. The counterinsurgency campaign of 2007 was probably the most precise, discriminate, and humane military operation ever undertaken on such a scale. Our soldiers and Marines worked hard–and took risks and even casualties–to ensure, as much as possible, that they hurt only enemies. Compared with any previous military operations of this size, they were astonishingly successful. The measure of their success lies in the fact that so many Iraqis now see American troops as friends and protectors. Petraeus and his generals have shown that Americans can fight insurgencies and win–and still be Americans. For that and so much else, he is the man of the year.

True, ’tis likely I’m but a throwback to a romanticized age

When the country demanded surrender on the double and on the page

Of the enemy, that is, not of our very own military

To fight when called upon, to see through the battle’s end

Never leaving a single comrade, an alliance, or a friend

Against all enemies: foreign, imported, or domestic

A volunteer force, never in history more majestic

In defiance of anonymous t’rollicking colics

That’s what you call old school broke-the-mold warrior politics

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 22nd, 2007 at 7:54 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.