T

he U.S. holds 19,000 detainees in Iraq, down from 26,000 less than a year ago – and we won’t be able to hold onto them much longer.

Should they be transferred to the Iraqis as part of the inevitable untangling of our involvement in Iraq?  Or is there a different, possibly better, alternative?

Gen. David Petraeus thinks so, reports the WSJ today.

The U.S. focus in Iraq is fast shifting from fighting a war to preparing for its aftermath. The cornerstone of the transition is an effort to rehabilitate and release thousands of Iraqi detainees, including many former insurgents. …

Few in the military question the need for the rehabilitation effort, but some wonder whether troops should be leading it. Some officers privately complain the program is turning them into social workers who coddle violent extremists. But few are willing to voice those criticisms because the effort is a favored project of Gen. David Petraeus, the former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. Gen. Petraeus believes the country’s stability will be shaped by how well former insurgents are integrated back into Iraqi society. He sees the rehabilitation push as a powerful weapon in that fight.

Under the program, detainees are taught literacy, mathematics and moderate Islamic thought.  The US military teaching moderate Islamic thought, and hoping these guys won’t once again fall under the spell of some fire-snorting imam at the corner mosque?

“I’m hopeful that what the detainees learned in the program will moderate their religious extremism,” said Maj. Gen. Mark Hertling, who commands U.S. forces in northern Iraq. “Will some go back to their old habits? Probably.”

Probably?  Definitely.  And some of those who go back to their old habits of murder and terror may return to kill our soldiers.  But which ones of the 19,000 will they be? There’s no way of knowing, so minimization is not a bad strategy.  Each detainee who leaves detention and uses his new skills to get a job is likely to leave violence behind, and that’s one less terrorist we and Iraq will have to deal with.

The problem with the program really is that the military has to enforce it.  Troops shouldn’t be teaching language skills and math. As WSJ put it:

Few in the military question the need for the rehabilitation effort, but some wonder whether troops should be leading it. Some officers privately complain the program is turning them into social workers who coddle violent extremists.

Thomas Barnett of The Pentagon’s New Map fame agrees, envisioning a future in which we field two armies:  One a swift, strong fighting force capable of regime change anytime, anywhere, and the second an army of engineers, teachers and social workers tasked with nation building.  He realizes that fighting men are not suited to the latter task, and it takes the military’s eye off its mission, and that Iraq has taught us that nation-building is a much more difficult task than regime changing.

Imagine if we had had these two armies in place in 2003.  The entire war could very well have turned out differently, and we wouldn’t be looking at 19,000 detainees today, just beginning to worry about what to do with them.

Photos: NY Times (top), DayLife.com (bottom)

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Will there be no “General Betray Us” this time around, as Gen. David Petraeus faces Senate confirmation for his appointment to U.S. Central Command? One might think so, reading this:

WASHINGTON (AP)- A top Democrat has indicated he supports President Bush’s decision to promote Gen. David Petraeus to head U.S. Central Command and Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno as the next commander of troops in Iraq.

Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, who leads the Senate Armed Services Committee, said confirmation of the nominations would enable unprecedented continuity of leadership in Iraq by officers whose knowledge of the war effort is unparalleled.

Smooth sailing, then? I think not, and so does CNS:

“I don’t think there is any anticipation of trying to block the confirmation of Petraeus,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told Cybercast News Service at a Capitol press conference.

“But the three of us [Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.; Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.; and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.] have talked about questions we think ought to be asked Petreaus,” said Reid. “I think there are a lot of questions members of that [Armed Services] committee have and that senators who are not in that committee have.”

Reid seems to be having some trouble counting … I get to four on that calculation. Be that as it may, Petraeus should brace himself for some tough questions because the Dems will be using him as a proxy to question Pres. Bush:

“I don’t anticipate [an effort to block the nomination],” said Levin. “You have to remember this Iraq strategy is a Bush strategy. I want to hold Bush accountable. He is the guy who is responsible. The buck stops with him. I want to hold the president, who is the civilian leader, accountable for the strategy and not act as if the military people have the final say, because they don’t.”

So expect the usual Dem “blindsight” — you know, the inability to see what’s in front of them.

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Good generals know how to prepare for attacks, so I imagine David Petraeus enters the Capitol Hill combat zone today well armed in anticipation of some serious grandstanding by two junior senators with very senior ambitions.

Basra and Iran are sure to come up, so thank you Mah- I’m in the moud to goose-step Ahmadinejad (rhymes with “Mohammed makes me loony-mad!”) for giving us this little news item this morning:

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) – Iran has begun installing 6,000 new centrifuges at its uranium enrichment plant in Natanz, state television quoted President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as saying Tuesday.

Iran already has about 3,000 centrifuges operating in Natanz, and the new announcement is seen as a show of defiance of international demands to halt a nuclear program the United States and its allies say is aimed at building nuclear weapons.

Nice of AP to concede that the US still has allies …. 9,000 centrifuges — seems like an awfully big investment in electrical generation for a country that literally has oil to burn. Whatever can they be up to?

As Clinton and Obama do their best to ignore realities like this and appease the hard Left by bashing a perfectly fine general, it’s interesting to muse about their direct involvement in the recent surge of violence in Iraq. Reuters almost gets it, but characteristically doesn’t see the forest for the trees:

In testimony over two days, Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker will assess the uneven progress made in a year-long “surge” of force meant to create the calm for Iraqi politicians to advance legislation and factions to reconcile.

The upturn in violence has thrust Iraq back to the forefront of campaigns for the November presidential election.

Put another way, the upturn in violence is part of a concerted effort by al Qaeda in Iraq, Shi’ite militia, Iran and others to ensure the election of a Democrat in November, because they know that will make their dreams of chaos and conquest much more realizable if John McCain is not in the White House.

Update: Here’s what he said this morning in his opening statement to Congress:

Gen. Petraeus also said the recent flare-up of violence in Basra, in Baghdad and elsewhere points up the importance of the cease-fire declared last year by anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and highlighted the role Iran allegedly plays in funding and training Shiite militias through cells the U.S. military calls “special groups.”

“Unchecked, the special groups pose the greatest long-term threat to the viability of a democratic Iraq,” Gen. Petraeus said. (WSJ)

(end of update)

So our enemy, monitoring proceedings over CNN and al-Jaz, will grin with every insulting probe from Clinton, Obama and the other Dems today, and listen very attentively to everything said by McCain.

Like I said, Petraeus is entering an important combat zone today, and I for one am hoping he emerges victorious, leaving a couple junior senators with senior headaches.

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Osama, from your hovel in whatever bleak, flea-bitten corner of nowhere it is, take note:

WASHINGTON (AP) – A missile launched from a Navy ship successfully struck a dying U.S. spy satellite passing 130 miles over the Pacific on Wednesday, a defense official said. Full details were not immediately available.

It happened just after 10:30 p.m. EST.

Two officials said the missile was launched successfully. One official, who is close to the process, said it hit the target. He said details on the results were not immediately known.

A satellite flying at who knows what blinding speed 130 miles overhead nailed with pinpoint accuracy by a missile fired from the middle of the ocean.

Got a missile cruiser, Islamist dog? A spy satellite? Technology more advanced than a satellite phone (which, by the way, we invented). If Islam is so hot, what does it have to show for itself, save box-cutters, four guys who could pass flight school, and the highly advanced technology of strapping someone else’s C4 around the bellies of suicidal psychopaths?

And you want the world to come to where you’re at. Speaking for all the billions of us, no thank you.

hat-tip: memeorandum

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Researchers have created a paper-thin material that absorbs 99.955 percent of all light that reaches it — described in a fascinating WaPo story as “A Roach Motel for photons — they check in but they don’t check out.”

Think of the possibilities! Having trouble? Let’s prime the pump

Known as transformation optics, the phenomenon compels some wavelengths of light to flow around an object like water around a stone. As a result, things behind the object become visible while the object itself disappears from view.

“Cloaking is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Vladimir Shalaev, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University and an expert in the fledgling field. “With transformation optics you can do many other tricks,” perhaps including making things appear to be located where they are not and focusing massive amounts of energy on microscopic spots.

For obvious reasons the Defense Department has been funding this research, but it may take a while for absolute invisibility in the field because technologies that block one light spectrum or energy type, don’t block others.

But who cares about defense? Imagine your big ‘ol electron sucking flat screen with a blacker-than-black case, so the image just floats in the air. Or a little black dress. Or the cover of the next (?) Harry Potter book. Or what a halfway decent SciFi writer could do with this trick!

Please note: This technology was not invented in a country under the fist of Islamic theocracy or Cuban socialism or even European social democracy. It was invented right here in the free market, GNP-butt-kickin’ republic, the USA … which brings up another six-word slogan for America:

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You all know this story already:

(02-13) 01:33 PST Berkeley — After a day of enraged confrontation outside Berkeley City Hall between anti-war and pro-military demonstrators, the City Council backed down early Wednesday from its controversial decision to tell the U.S. Marines they are “unwelcome intruders” for operating a downtown recruiting center. (SF Chron)

Well, whoopie-do. The Left has come out once again, proverbial guns (not actual guns, please!) blazing, all to make a Big Moral Point.

And as soon as they’re confronted with one whit of opposition, they back down, dropping their spines all over the City Council chambers.

Morality? Convenience? Guess which one the “if it feels good, do it” set will always run to.

Now imagine these lame, hard-left, anti-war pieces of human squishiness being president. How dangerous would that be? How dangerous would it be to have someone like, oh, Barack Obama as president of the United States?

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It’s just the typical, infuriating Berkeley stuff: The City Council decides freedom actually is free, and votes to kick the Marine recruiting station out of town, calling them “unwelcome intruders.”

I wonder if the citizens of Rome’s more “enlightened” quarters took the same sort of actions against the Roman Legions’ recruiting office … just before the Huns showed up.

The Council let Code Pink park in front of the recruiting station, broadcasting hate speech. And the city stood by for 7 1/2 hours as three aging war protesters chained themselves to the recruiting station door to block access to the building — something that is a Great Sin to the Left if done to a baby-killing emporium, but apparently is acceptable in this case.

Some on the sane side of the political spectrum blogged about this as it was occurring. For their efforts, the SF Chron — supposedly an objective newspaper, he noted wryly — led off its article:

As the right-wing blogosphere railed …

You have to be right-wing to see the US military as a force for stability and good in the world? You are railing if you criticize such foolishness? Aren’t the left-wing City Council and Code Pink the true railers? (The Chron did not, as you can guess, refer to the Council or the protesters as left-wing; does that mean they’re mainstream?)

Into all this, as those of you who followed this story as it unfolded know, waded the Republican senator from South Carolina (home of a gazillion military families), Jim DeMint:

DeMint began drafting legislation Friday to cut $2.1 million in federal funding to Berkeley in a current congressional budget bill and transfer the money to the Marine Corps. The funding would include $750,000 for prospective ferry service, $87,000 for the Berkeley Unified School District nutrition education fund and $243,000 for the Chez Panisse Foundation, which promotes nutritional awareness in school lunch programs.

“The First Amendment gives the city of Berkeley the right to be idiotic, but from now on they should do it with their own money,” DeMint said in a statement.

He called the council’s vote “a slap in the face to all brave servicemen and women and their families.”

Can you say “died in committee?” DeMint’s bill will never make it to the floor, but as symbolism goes, it’s better than a bunch of aging anti-Vietnam war protesters chaining themselves to a door.

I’d amend the bill to de-fund the Berkeley police department, because as public sidewalks were being illegally blocked, the commerce of the nation illegally halted, and individuals’ rights to enlist in military service trampled upon, here they were. Across the street. Hands in pockets. Doing nothing.

The National Guard came to the aid of Oakland, Berkeley’s neighbor, during the devastating fires in 1991, to the tune of $1.3 million in time and materials. Should something similar happen in Berkeley, let’s hold the Guard at the city boundary. Commanding officers can instruct the troops that saying “Neener! Neener!” is optional.

Update: Sign Move America Forward’s petition to the Berkeley City Council here.

Hat-tip: memeorandum

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8,000 sailors have nothing to thank China for this weekend:

China has unexpectedly denied the USS Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier and its accompanying ships entry to Hong Kong port for a long-planned Thanksgiving holiday visit, the U.S. State Department said on Wednesday.

“At present, it appears the USS Kitty Hawk strike group will not be making a port call in Hong Kong as previously planned as a result of a last minute denial by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” State Department spokeswoman Nicole Thompson said. (Reuters)

China gave no reason — just a terse, “No turkey dim sum for you, Yankee.”

Yeah, I know we might not be too hot to have a Chinese nuclear-powered blitzkrieg on water tie up at Long Beach (…San Francisco, maybe…) but, (1) they don’t have one anyway and (2) we wouldn’t extend an invitation to them to drop by for some big Chinese holiday like Mao Jacket Day, then pull out the rug.

Just another reminder that the Chinese Commies are not our friends.

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In Iraq, “You don’t go from bad to good. You go from bad to less bad,” Gen. David Petraeus is quoted today in a WSJ interview. Syria’s involvement in the Iraq war is one example of “less bad,” as the Syrians seem to be getting a message:

Another factor [in the improving situation in Iraq], he said, has been unexpected, “robust” measures by Syria to reduce the number of foreign militants crossing into Iraq to carry out suicide attacks. Gen. Petraeus estimated that the number of foreign fighters coming into Iraq through Syria has fallen by at least one-third.

“Unexpected” and “robust” seem not to go together. For Syria to robustly alter their policy on the Iraq border, there must have been some discussions that would make the unexpected more expected. There’s no further hints in the article.

Over on the other border, guarded hope was expressed by Petraeus:

Gen. Petraeus said the U.S. hasn’t found any large-scale caches of EFPs since the Iranian-Iraqi accord was announced several weeks ago. But he said it was too soon to tell how much credit, if any, Iran deserved for the recent falloff in EFP attacks.

Iran made “unequivocal pledges to stop the funding, training, arming and directing of militia extremists in Iraq,” he said. “It will be hugely significant if that’s the case.

“Having said that, there is very much a wait-and-see attitude by everyone involved to see if Iran will live up to those commitments,” Gen. Petraeus said.

I would have liked to see Petraeus’ reaction to this idea by Steve Forbes:

As a matter of fact, we should conduct in-and-out military strikes against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. These corrupt thugs are the praetorian guards of the fanatics running Iran these days. Iran is the biggest funder and trainer of terrorist organizations in the world. Now that we’re getting it right in Iraq–fighting the insurgents neighborhood by neighborhood and not allowing the rebels any internal sanctuary–a cross-border policy would bear rich military harvests.

If this were policy, the Iranian regime could be humiliated without our having to engage in a formal occupation or use air strikes against its atomic facilities. Such an approach might fatally weaken the regime by emboldening antiregime forces to forcefully act.

Currently the mullahs’ security police are too pervasive and too ruthless for peaceful insurgents to be able to oust the mullahs the way Solidarity ousted Poland’s communist government in the late 1980s. But strikes across the border would give the Iranian army a powerful incentive to strike at its hated government.

Seems like an idea worth trying. A little probe and punch here and there, circumspect, justifiable, intimidating. What do you think, General?

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This sickened my heart this morning. No, in fact my heart was sickened even as I typed dailykos into my browser, knowing something like this would be there:

We remember and we mourn
by wiscmass
Tue Sep 11, 2007 at 03:31:08 AM PDT

[Today], the sixth anniversary of the worst terrorist attack ever to occur on US soil, we will hear many platitudes about the fallen. Instead of buying into the hype, we choose to remember and mourn the actual people who are no longer with us. We remember and we mourn our friends and family and complete strangers who lost their lives on that terrible day.

We remember and we mourn all the US soldiers who died in a war of retaliation against the wrong people. We remember and we mourn the Iraqi victims, the journalists, the coalition soldiers, and the US soldiers killed in Operation Enduring Freedom as well.

I sense wiscmass really mourns very little with this troubling mess of a list, this list designed to sound all right but really poke a finger at America for 9/11.

We don’t see President Bush’s name in this little entry, neither do we see jihad, bin Laden, al-Qaeda or Islam. It’s as if 9/11 just happened, then America responded with death. It’s as if all wiscmass and his/her fellow travelers mourn is that there is a war.

The nation that was united six years ago was a chimera; this is the nation we have today. A nation in which our leading general isn’t rightfully questioned about his policies, but instead is accused (thanks to a hefty ad discount from the NYT) of being a traitor. And a liar. Why? Because he’s doing what the Left has demanded be done: Changing administration policy in Iraq.

For a moment six years ago, America could look at itself proudly as the nation it is supposed to be. Unbent, committed, strong, we looked a vicious attack in the face and reacted with calm assurance. No mobs of Americans took to the street shouting, “Death to the Islamic devil!” No Muslims were torn from their homes and stoned or stomped to death. And no wings of aircraft took off, laden with weapons of war, to strike back viciously at some target, any target.

Instead we grieved, cried and prayed. The voices of dissent were quieter then. Maybe they were afraid to say anything; maybe they truly felt as we did for a moment. But that moment is gone now and it’s up to us who don’t play games with historic moments to remember and mourn correctly.

We remember and we mourn because the world changed for the worse on that day due to the acts of a few utterly intolerant, hateful men from Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

We remember and we mourn for the souls who were not a part of any war, who were not confronted with any choice regarding their fate, but were subjected to painful, fearful deaths at the hands of the most intolerant and hateful of extremists.

We remember and mourn the heroes from NYFD, NYPD and the just everyday folk who rose to the occasion and put others’ lives ahead of their own.

We remember and mourn the ribbons, flags and bumper stickers that for a while seemed to say we were united.

We remember and mourn those two great towers, and that massive heap of dust, twisted steel, blood and snuffed life.

Debra Burlingame also remembers. Her brother was on the airliner that was stolen by al-Qaeda and redirected into the west wall of the Pentagon. She writes this morning, six years later:

There is a disturbing phenomenon creeping into the public debate about all things 9/11. Increasingly, Sept. 11 is compared to hurricanes, bridge collapses and other mechanical disasters or criminal acts that result in loss of life, with “body count” being the primary factor that keeps it in the top spot of “worst in the nation’s history.”

Misremembering is as dangerous as forgetting. If we must know one thing, it is that the Sept. 11 attacks were neither a natural disaster, nor the unfortunate result of human error. 9/11 wasn’t the catastrophic equivalent of a 3,000-car pileup.

The attacks were not a random act of violence or insanity. They were a deliberate and brutal act of war committed by religious fanatics engaged in Islamic jihad against the United States, all non-Muslim people and any Muslim who wishes to live in a secular society. Worse, the people who perpetrated the attacks have explicitly told us that they are not done.

Sept. 11 is a date that comes and goes once a year, but “9/11″ is with us every day.

And that is why we remember and mourn the soldiers who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. They understand, unlike MoveOn.org, Code Pink, Daily Kos and the other defilers of the memory of 9/11, that the jihadists are not done and that making excuses and placing false blame is not going to stop them.

Some will mark today by trying to disrupt the Senate hearings for Gen. Petraeus and Amb. Crocker with anti-war, anti-American slogans. Fortunately, most of us will remember the day correctly, with a prayer of remembrance to those who died, a prayer of good will and protection for those who defend us, and a prayer for this world, and for a true and just peace.

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