In his St. Paul victory speech, Barack Obama pledged again to pull out of Iraq. Rather than “continue a policy in Iraq that asks everything of our brave men and women in uniform and nothing of Iraqi politicians, . . . [i]t’s time for Iraqis to take responsibility for their future.”

We know Obama hasn’t been to Iraq in more than two years, but does he not read the papers? Does he not know anything about developments on the ground? Here is the “nothing” that Iraqis have been doing in the past few months:

1. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki sent the Iraqi army into Basra. It achieved in a few weeks what the British had failed to do in four years: take the city, drive out the Mahdi Army and seize the ports from Iranian-backed militias.

2. When Mahdi fighters rose up in support of their Basra brethren, the Iraqi army at Maliki’s direction confronted them and prevailed in every town — Najaf, Karbala, Hilla, Kut, Nasiriyah and Diwaniyah — from Basra to Baghdad.

3. Without any American ground forces, the Iraqi army entered and occupied Sadr City, the Mahdi Army stronghold.

4. Maliki flew to Mosul, directing a joint Iraqi-U.S. offensive against the last redoubt of al-Qaeda, which had already been driven out of Anbar, Baghdad and Diyala provinces.

5. The Iraqi parliament enacted a de-Baathification law, a major Democratic benchmark for political reconciliation.

6. Parliament also passed the other reconciliation benchmarks — a pension law, an amnesty law, and a provincial elections and powers law. Oil revenue is being distributed to the provinces through the annual budget.

7. With Maliki having demonstrated that he would fight not just Sunni insurgents (e.g., in Mosul) but Shiite militias (e.g., the Mahdi Army), the Sunni parliamentary bloc began negotiations to join the Shiite-led government. (The final sticking point is a squabble over a sixth cabinet position.)

The disconnect between what Democrats are saying about Iraq and what is actually happening there has reached grotesque proportions. Democrats won an exhilarating electoral victory in 2006 pledging withdrawal at a time when conditions in Iraq were dire and we were indeed losing the war. Two years later, when everything is changed, they continue to reflexively repeat their “narrative of defeat and retreat” (as Joe Lieberman so memorably called it) as if nothing has changed.

It is a position so utterly untenable that John McCain must seize the opportunity and, contrary to conventional wisdom, make the Iraq war the central winning plank of his campaign. Yes, Americans are war-weary. Yes, most think we should not have engaged in the first place. Yes, Obama will keep pulling out his 2002 speech opposing the war.

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I was first introduced to the work of Steven Pressfield when I was teaching at the Naval Academy a few years ago.  Upon the urging of Prof. Shannon French, an Ethics Department colleague, I read Gates of Fire, which since that time has grown into an influencial work of fiction in both official and unofficial military circles.

Steve’s latest book, Killing Rommel, shows more of the genius he demonstrated in previous works.  To wit (in the voice of the book’s storyteller, British Army officer R. Lawrence “Chap” Chapman):

Tales of heroes, the nobility of sacrifice and so forth have always left me cold. They run counter to my experience. From what I’ve seen, the operations of war are constituted less of glorious attacks and valiant defences and more of an ongoing succession of mundane and often excruciating balls-ups. The patrol of which I write, typical of so many, achieved little heroic beyond its own survival, save at the very end. and then less by military or tactical brilliance than by luck and its protagonists’ stubborn, even mulish refusal to quit. Those actions of its men which may legitimately claim the name of gallantry came about largely from attempts at self-extrication from peril, most of which trouble we got into ourselves by our own overzealousness, and the main of which were performed wither in the heat of instinct or the frenzy and terror of blood madness.

Steve’s work is full of these sorts of insights. And it’s this nuance, this sage humanity, that makes his books amazing.

Here’s a video about Rommel hosted by Steve himself:

. . . that Peter Frampton is, first and foremost, a great guitarist.

Michael Yon obtained his “rockstar” status in milblogging circles the old fashioned way:  He earned it.  He was among the first milbloggers to embed with the American military early in the Iraq War, and he basically hasn’t left the country since.  As a result, his take on the situation over there is worth noting, if not ground truth, IMO.  Here’s an except from an interview Mike recently did with Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review Online:

LOPEZ: How has the Internet changed war reporting?

YON: It means that instead of getting paid to go to Iraq and get shot, I can do it for free. It also means the sky is the limit on reaching readers worldwide. People from approximately 100 countries come to my site each day. 

LOPEZ: What is al-Qaeda’s view of masculinity and how does it differ from the American military’s?

YON:  Al-Qaeda models a street gang notion of masculinity in which the cruelest, most destructive and bullying are seen as the toughest and most admired. Raping children and murdering their parents is a gang-banger’s way of asserting his masculinity. And a lot of al-Qaeda recruits are young gang members who join up for the money, the drugs, and the guns.

For the American soldier the ideal of masculinity is “protect and serve,” especially the weak, and women and kids. It means killing the bad guys.  When al-Qaeda murderers detonate a bomb in the middle of a crowd of school children, our guys rush the kids to the medics. Then they go kill the terrorists. They are really good at both. They may enjoy hanging out with kids more than killing terrorists, but it’s a close call. Our guys really like killing terrorists. 

LOPEZ: My impression is you did not go over as a Bush/McCain foot-solider saying “No surrender,” now I’ll slant the story to make sure we don’t. You went there wanting to tell what was going on. What brought you to “no surrender” mode?

YON: We made horrible mistakes in 2004 and 2005.  It is true that al-Qaeda funded and tried to control the Sunni insurgency and use it to start a civil war. But al-Qaeda never would have had such a big chance if we hadn’t given it to them.  Al-Qaeda exploited the insurgency, but we helped create it. The extent of the Sunni insurgency was not inevitable. Much of it was a reaction — and in some ways a rational reaction — to American policies approved by the Bush administration and enforced by Ambassador Bremer.

General Petraeus proved that the insurgency was not inevitable by what he achieved while in command of Nineveh province in 2003. He was able to restore civil order, rebuild security, even hold local elections and see the economy start coming back to life. He held local elections in Nineveh before Bremer was on the ground in Baghdad.

Part of the reason it worked was that Petraeus got temporary exemptions from the policies that excluded former Ba’ath party members from any role in post-Saddam Iraq. Nineveh for some reason happens to be a big retirement area for Iraqi army officers. Petraeus used to have tea once a week with dozens of former Generals, many of whom were helpful in restoring order. A year later, when Petraeus was gone and the Bremer policies were fully enforced many of those same men, or their protégés, were in the field against us.

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Just after five a.m. yesterday morning I was awakened in my San Francisco hotel room by the sound of a crowd cheering followed quickly by the short arrhythmic whoops of police sirens.  I looked down on the street from the 26th floor and saw a line of buses escorted by dozens of police motorcycles.  Next to the street was a relatively small group waving a couple of Chinese flags.  The buses stopped in front of an adjacent hotel (the Hilton), and a handful of people in track suits got out and made their way through the front door.

The Torch was in town.

Today we witnessed both a brilliant execution of force protection by Mayor Newsom and his staff and an example of how invalid the allusion of “sports as brotherhood” can be in the 21st Century.

Newsom has to consider the event a success in that the Torch made it around the city without being doused - or even jostled.  The plan was something from which the Pentagon could learn a thing or two.  First they socialized a route that wasn’t even close to the one they intended to travel.  Instead of starting at AT&T Park and working along the Embarcadero, the Torch started on Van Ness (the opposite side of town) and went past the Marina, the Presidio, and quickly caught a bus for SFO where the closing ceremonies were held.  As you can see from the CNN footage below, the procession, when the Torch wasn’t on the bus, was three or four layers deep:  cops on motorcycles, cops on foot, jogging cops in riot gear, jogging cops in track suits.  It was hard to even pick out the runners actually carrying the Torch.

But in (over)protecting the Torch, the city demonstrated to the world that in order to “succeed” (”mission accomplished,” anyone?) in these sorts of situations, you have to suck out any semblance of the raison d’etre in the process.  The feints, the defense-in-depth, the bus ride back to the airport all suggested an absolute disregard for the spirit of the Olympic games.  The city got it done, and for that they deserve some credit, but did any bystanders feel any joy?  Even the runners looked bummed out.  (They occasionally waved, but not with any real enthusiasm.)

This drill wasn’t about perseverance; this was about obduracy.

Remind you of anything else?

Check it out:

(Photo by Kelly Johnson, Military.com)

I spent two months (less four days) on Mars recently.  And I’ll admit quite readily, for all of the time I’ve logged hurtling through space, those were some of the best days of my life.

You see, life’s different on Mars.  Other planets I’ve landed on have less gravity than Earth, to be sure, but there’s something about the force of it on Mars that’s unique — and it’s more than just the pull of it.  It’s hard to describe, really, but I can say that as a result you amble about with a certainly lightness of being that makes you feel as if everything’s possible. 

And time has no meaning there.  For all of our research and technology, watches and clocks are of no use.  And better than that, you don’t care.  You while away the hours in complete harmony with the surroundings and nobody, not even the taskmasters in mission control, hassle you about it.  Your senses are heightened.  The music coming through the headset in your helmet is always the perfect soundtrack for the delights all around you.  Surfaces are smoother; things taste better.  And the red deserts and hills are punctuated by beautiful flowing rivers, bodies of slate blue water lit by adjacent moons that make them glisten like the eyes of so many Siamese cats, inspiring astronauts to greatness.

After a few days you forget you ever lived anywhere else.

But now I’m back on Earth without any schedule for a return trip.  The program engineers have mothballed the spacecraft that took me safely there and back, and - absent an associated timeline - the funding previously earmarked for follow-on missions has been funneled to other programs, like sprucing up the landscaping around the launch pad.

I miss Mars.  I can see it at night sometimes. I stare at it for hours, head tilted back as I gaze into the heavens. And I consider the distance and marvel that I was really there.

I want to go back to Mars.  (In fact, the urge to do so consumes me from time to time.)  I wonder if I ever will.

The number of deaths in the Iraq War just reached the 4,000 mark.  This from AP: 

Last year, the U.S. military deaths spiked as U.S. troops sought to regain control of Baghdad and surrounding areas.

The death toll has seesawed since, with 2007 ending as the deadliest year for American troops at 901 deaths. That was 51 more deaths than 2004, the second deadliest year for U.S. soldiers.

The 4,000 figure is according to an Associated Press count that includes eight civilians who worked for the Department of Defense.

Read the entire article at Military.com.

Where I feel anger I should feel calm.

Where I feel envy I should feel happiness for others.

Where I feel dispair I should feel optimism.

Where I feel the need to possess I should loosen my grip.

And so I’ll try . . .

The test of a band’s talent to some degree is whether they can bring it live.  Here’s A Perfect Circle performing “The Outsider,” a killer tune from their amazing “The Thirteenth Step” album.  They pretty much nail it . . .