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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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“He’s played a historic role, there’s just no two ways about it. Gen. Petraeus is clearly the hero of the hour.” – Defense Secretary Robert Gates

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avid Petraeus’ 20-month tour of duty in Iraq is over, and his four-star comrade in re-casting the war, Ray Odierno, is stepping in. Odierno will still report to Petraeus, who moves on to the more hospitable climes of Tampa and U.S. Central Command.

Petraeus is a twice-in-a-century kind of soldier. Korea and Vietnam didn’t produce one; we have to go all the way back to Eisenhower and McArthur in WWII to find a military hero who played a transformational role in a major war while serving as an example of valor and virtue to the people of the nation.

The enemy marked his departure by sending a bomb-laden woman into a group of police officers, killing 22. So let’s take his admonition seriously and not pull out a couple brigades quite yet.

Here’s AP’s report, if you’d like to read more.

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“[Obama] asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington.” – Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari

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ohn McCain took a lot of heat for implying that Barack Obama was willing to lose the war in order to win the election. Now it turns out that wasn’t just political rhetoric but historical truth.

Read more on Amir Taheri’s NY Post interview with Zebari here. Ed Morrissey quibbles with some of Taheri’s conclusions on Zebari’s statements about timing, but other than that, the report stands up to Capt. Ed’s scrutiny.

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he Washington Post editorial page is not where you’d expect to see an essay that condemns the Dem prez nominee as hopelessly confused and wrong-footed, but there it is, Mr. Obama in Iraq.

The editorial stands out on a day that finds much of the media trying valiantly, but not too effectively, to cover their O-swoon – see Mo Doud’s Cocky or Commander-in-Chiefly? in today’s NYT for an example – or are focused on McCain’s criticism of Obama on the surge (that “he’d rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign”), like this from Joe Klein:

I can’t remember a more scurrilous statement by a major party candidate. It smacks of desperation. It renews questions about whether McCain has the right temperament for the presidency. How sad.

What do you say we measure Klein’s criticism of McCain against WaPo’s criticism of Obama? The editorial winds up for several paragraphs before delivering this closer:

Yet Mr. Obama’s account of his strategic vision remains eccentric. He insists that Afghanistan is “the central front” for the United States, along with the border areas of Pakistan. But there are no known al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, and any additional U.S. forces sent there would not be able to operate in the Pakistani territories where Osama bin Laden is headquartered. While the United States has an interest in preventing the resurgence of the Afghan Taliban, the country’s strategic importance pales beside that of Iraq, which lies at the geopolitical center of the Middle East and contains some of the world’s largest oil reserves. If Mr. Obama’s antiwar stance has blinded him to those realities, that could prove far more debilitating to him as president than any particular timetable.

Other than choosing the word “eccentric” when so many other words would have worked better (thick-headed, flabbergasting, laughable, cro-zo), that pretty much nails it. You have in Obama a candidate who is clueless regarding the threats we face and the best means to face them, who wants so much to not be Bush that he refuses to acknowledge reality.

I for one would rather have a president who makes the mistake of calling out a fool all by himself instead of assigning the task to a surrogate, than one who tramples over Pakistan – a nuclear-armed nation that’s just barely holding off an Islamist uprising – to hunt for Osama bin Laden, who latelyhas done nothing more threatening than issuing tapes that are, to borrow a word from above, cro-zo.

Photo: AP

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Update: Bloomberg reports:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki hasn’t endorsed any specific plan for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, a government spokesman said, a day after a magazine report that he backed Barack Obama’s proposal.

Al-Maliki supports a “general vision” of U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq and has not backed a plan by Obama, the presumptive U.S. Democratic presidential candidate, for a 16- month withdrawal window, government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in an e-mailed statement in Baghdad today.

This has certainly set off a swirl of controversy, but it hasn’t changed the core of this post.

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he blogosphere is a very, very prejudiced place because we surround ourselves with like-minded sorts and shun those who hold another view. The stories we bloggers select to write about suffer the same way; we ignore stories that trouble us, and pounce on those that confirm our beliefs, either that we’re right or others are wrong.

Case in point: Spiegel’s interview with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, in which Maliki says that Barack Obama’s 16-month timeframe for a withdrawal from Iraq is the right one, and appeared to encourage people not to vote for candidate with an Iraq plan like … oh … John McCain’s:

“Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic. Artificially prolonging the tenure of US troops in Iraq would cause problems.”

The irony of this, of course, is that everything that Obama opposed – foremost the surge – is what’s made it possible. Without the policies endorsed by Bush and McCain, Maliki would not have so optimistic a view of his country’s future. But all that matters politically is that now he does have that view, and Obama will be able to strut about looking brilliant, as if his view on Iraq was always the right view on Iraq.

That makes this story bad, bad news for anyone who feels McCain is better (even marginally) for America’s future than Obama. Maliki’s comments could effectively end the war debate, with Obama’s “See, I told you so” much more resonant than McCain’s “Wait! It was me!” And that makes this story one the leftybloggers love and we conservatives have largely ignored.

Just check out memeorandum. It headlines about a half dozen different news articles and blog posts on the story, including the Spiegel story and a Reuters story that seems to have scooped Spiegel internationally, then links to about 40 news and blog posts on the story. Yes, there are some posts from the conservative side making points similar to those I’ve made above, like this, from The American Mind:

First, realize Maliki sees Obama as the Presidential front runner. It’s rational not to rock the boat. Second, Iraq and the U.S. wouldn’t be in this situation if it weren’t for the surge that quelled violence.

But many many more leftyblogs are listed, making comments like this:

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki found a pony and it’s name is Obama. While John McSame was busy questioning Obama’s foreign policy credentials the Iraqi Prime Minster was endorsing them.

Or this one from Polimom that cues off the post from The American Mind above:

That is absolutely the McCain campaign’s narrative on Iraq. It has to be, since it’s all they’ve got now. And you can bet your bottom dollar that many millions of Americans will recall — with or without the reminders that are surely coming — that the dire situation that led to the surge was predicated by an incredibly stupid invasion.

Hmmm. How is it that she’s forgotten that Maliki would not be speaking at all about the progress towards a secure democracy in Iraq, were it not for the invasion she still calls “incredibly stupid?” How is it that she’s conveniently dropped the Butcher of Baghdad from her memory? Here’s why: Because, like most of us, she primarily reads the posts and news items she wants to read and ignores the ones she doesn’t.

The blogosphere is not the great equalizer, in which we all graze widely on the field of ideas (oh wait – look, even the grazing sheep are bunched together); rather it is a cafeteria, where we’re free to move about, selecting only the items that appeal to us, and never tasting the ones that don’t. (There are also those strange beings who actively scout out opposing views and leave aggressive, obnoxious comments to irritate the inmates of that particular asylum. That’s a bizarre human dynamic since they are forever assigning themselves losing battles.)

I, too, am guilty of treating the blogosphere as a cafeteria, and it’s easy to understand, since opposing points of view irritate the gut, chafe the senses … and even, occasionally, challenge opinions that are too hard-set. That’s why I do spend a bit of time perusing the opposition, but I confess, I don’t do it often enough.

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The NY Times Vs. Health And Truth

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recent NYT expose on the horrors of CT scans included this paragraph:

Some medical experts say the American devotion to the newest, most expensive technology is an important reason that the United States spends much more on health care than other industrialized nations — more than $2.2 trillion in 2007, an estimated $7,500 a person, about twice the average in other countries — without providing better care.

Without providing better care? Says who? Name me a country with better medical care – better results – than the good ol’ US of A!

Fortunately, there’s the internet with places like Stats Blog that provide answers to back up my jingoistic enthusiasm:

Last year, the journal Lancet Oncology published a huge comparative study of cancer survival rates in European countries and contrasted them with United States. The results:

Colon and rectal cancer: 65.5 percent in the U.S. vs 56.2 percent in Europe.
Breast cancer: 90.1 percent in the U.S. vs 79 percent in Europe.
Prostate cancer: 99.3 percent in the U.S. vs 77.5 percent in Europe.

All cancers (age adjusted), Men: 66.3 percent in the U.S. vs 47.3 percent in Europe.
All cancers (age adjusted), women: 62.9 percent in the U.S. vs 55.8 percent for women.

No individual country surpassed the U.S. on any of these measures – and these percentage differences add up to lives saved. If that doesn’t amount to “better care,” what does?

Not only to the stats show the inherent anti-American bias that runs rampant and untreated like a staph infection throughout the NYT and the MSM that mock it, it also shows the inherent weakness of socialized medicine. Europe is dominated by Big Brother with a Band-Aid programs of the sort the Dems would ape, yet they ignore the truth for the feeling and continue pushing us down that hopeless road. Continue Reading »

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