Politics Blog

As you’ve probably heard, 1,000 troops from the 173rd Airborne have been dropped off “somewhere in northern Iraq.” People wonder if this means a northern front, but I doubt it. 1,000 lightly armed troops wouldn’t be able to do much more than secure an air field and work with special forces and the Kurds to soften Iraqi units in the area. However, there’s another, more likely theory. A few days ago I noted:

Despite US entreaties, Turkey is planning to send 10,000 troops into northern Iraq. They’ve already sent in 1,500 commandos. This could turn into a major headache as Kurds and Turks kill each other in a futile fight.

I’m sure someone in the military is already considering the following option: slow down the Turks by bombing out bridges and roads. The area spanning northern Iraq and southern Turkey isn’t very easily navigable. A few bombing runs should make it virtually impossibly to cross. Then we can put boots on the ground (101st Airborne?) before the Turks can get there.

It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if the 173rd was placed in northern Iraq to discourage Turkey from doing anything rash.

We’ve bombed out the Iraqi column that seemed to be heading south a few hours ago:

U.S. military officials said the convoy leaving Baghdad consisted of 1,000 vehicles that were believed to contain fighters hoping to reinforce Iraqi forces engaging U.S. troops near Najaf. The movement was detected about 4 p.m. (8 a.m. EST). “Something big and metal is moving,” one radio operator reported.

About two hours later, U.S. jets began bombing the front of the convoy after receiving confirmation that the column carried militiamen. Eventually, B-52s flew over, dropping 500-pound bombs every 500 meters along the length of the convoy. The casualty total was not immediately known, but the attack appeared to add significantly to the Iraqi militia losses in recent days.

Not that I’m a military analyst or anything, but isn’t this precisely why we invented the MOAB? The American people need to hear that we’re trouncing the Iraqis. We would feel reassured if the following statement were to be made at a CentCom briefing: “Yesterday, Iraqi militiamen attempted to break out and head south in a 1,000 vehicle formation. We dropped ten Massive Ordnance Air Burst weapons on the convoy. There are no known survivors.”

Jack Schafer says that “embedding” reporters among the troops is a great idea. Other “mainstream” media observers have been saying the same thing.

I vehemently disagree. Most “mainstream” media reporters are minions of Satan. They’re a bunch of George McGovern-loving, ultra-liberal, wannabe-hippies, who’d rather be marching with the “anti-war” protesters. These reporters are elitists from places like Boston, New York and LA and have sheer contempt for the sort of people who abound in the US military, people from Omaha, Nebraska who eat red meat, fly a flag on their lawn and like Nascar. Placing these reporters amidst our troops is like placing Baath Party propagandists among our troops. They will dwell on every failure, report their own corner of the action as though it were everything and make it seem like the overall military strategy is in dire straits. Every time we take a hit, they’ll raise the prospect of a “Vietnam-like Quagmire.”

The “mainstream” media haven’t earned the trust necessary to be “embedded” amongst our troops.

You can watch Iraqi TV live on the web. If they’ve somehow managed to bring it back up (it was knocked out yesterday.)

The New York Times spinning a poll? It can’t be!

BTW, this poll analysis is by the same Adam Nagourney who spun a very significant 47-40 lead for the GOP on election eve 2002 into this headline: “In Poll, Americans Say Both Parties Lack Clear Vision.” Nagourney only mentioned the numbers, in passing, in the sixth paragraph.

And Mickey Kaus, Andrew Sullivan and countless others have previously ripped into other Times polls that were blatantly spun. Here’s an example.

Where is the 101st Airborne? We know they’re deploying somewhere because the reporters who’re “embedded” with them in Kuwait pause occasionally, between breathless recountings of the grenade-throwing incident, to say that the 101st is moving out to somewhere in Iraq. Something tells me their location could be important.

Could they be opening up a northern or western front on Baghdad? Or are they helping the Kurds in northern Iraq? Or are they serving as a buffer force in the north to prevent the Turks from complicating things?

One of the shrewdest Democratic strategists around, Donna Brazile, says that prominent Democrats have been catering too much to the “anti-war” movement. She says that she was “livid” when she saw those POW photos and wishes prominent Democrats had come forward to express support for the troops.

I couldn’t agree more. One of the consequences of this war will be a distrust of anyone who didn’t support it enough, much as after Gulf War I. Howard Dean’s position will prove to be an albatross around his neck if he wins the nomination. John Kerry’s Vietnam protester days will come back to haunt him. Kerry said some pretty intemperate things back then and they won’t do him much good if he wins the Democratic presidential nomination. He could have exorcised some of those doubts by showing up on TV these days to talk about his tour of duty in Vietnam, but he’s been MIA so far in the PR wars on Iraq.

Final proof that Scott Ritter has lost it:

The United States does not have the military means to take over Baghdad and will lose the war against Iraq, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter said.

“The United States is going to leave Iraq with its tail between its legs, defeated. It is a war we can not win,” he told private radio TSF in an interview broadcast here Tuesday evening.

“We do not have the military means to take over Baghdad and for this reason I believe the defeat of the United States in this war is inevitable,” he said.

“Every time we confront Iraqi troops we may win some tactical battles, as we did for ten years in Vietnam but we will not be able to win this war, which in my opinion is already lost,” Ritter added.

Sorry to spoil your fantasy Scott, but we’ve gotten to within 50 miles of Baghdad in six days with about 20 dead. We may be losing the war in some alternate universe, but not in this one.

A couple of days ago I said that we’re thrashing the Iraqis in the real war; but they’re winning the PR war. Jonah Goldberg now says the same thing. After recounting the overwhelming military success we’re achieving, he says:

Or consider this snapshot, taken almost at random from the war coverage. MSNBC’s Bob Arnot, reporting from Iraq on Sunday:

“Forrest, of course it’s very, very hard to hear you. There’s a C-130 that just landed in the airstrip in Iraq. And it’s a wild, wild air show. We have Cobra and U.S. Army Apache attack helicopters. They have been at it all night long, hot refueling, coming in here, getting ordnance. Some have said [they feel] like they’re in a candy store with the number of targets that they’re [hitting].”

Meanwhile - except in Baathist propaganda, which makes it sound like the Republican Guard is on the outskirts of Minneapolis - few Iraqi soldiers are reporting any visits to an American “candy store.” America has lost 39 heroes. And we’ve got fewer than a dozen Americans being held as POWs. So, at the barest minimum the kill ratio is 1 American for every 100 of their troops. That’s obviously too high, but only in the sense that each American life is precious. Militarily speaking, it’s a picnic. And, this is against troops who’ve had a year to dig in and prepare their own home turf without any hindrance from civilians - this is a police state, after all. I’ve left out many interesting facts which only amplify the impressiveness of the Coalition’s accomplishments. We’re just getting warmed up.

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The reason I bring all this up is simple: Our morale matters too. And this is perhaps my only criticism of the Pentagon. While it’s obviously too soon to criticize the planning of Franks and Rumsfeld, it’s not too soon to object to the means by which they’ve been explaining how everything is going. Tommy Franks and his crew keep saying, “We will win.” Well, no kidding - we all know that, intellectually. But we want to know that we are winning. This is not a game, but sports can provide a useful analogy. It’s great to hear a coach say with confidence, “We will win!” But that doesn’t mean we don’t want to know the score at the end of the first quarter.

Obviously, the media’s preoccupation with POWs and their bizarre, almost childish shock at the news that the enemy is actually firing back from time to time is a problem. But the press sometimes needs to be led by the nose. It needs to be told - and shown - that we are winning by a huge margin. CENTCOM claims it doesn’t have solid numbers on casualties. Fair enough. But when you watch these briefings, you almost get the sense that they feel sheepish about admitting that the U.S. army is killing lots of Iraqi soldiers. And that strikes me as misguided. Wars involve the killing of soldiers. In any war involving Americans, Americans will want to hear that the other guy’s soldiers are dying. That may not be true of the diehard antiwar types. But these people don’t believe anything the Pentagon says anyway, and will never take any word of success as good news. So screw ‘em. The rest of America - liberals and conservatives alike - want to know that we are winning. They want to know the score.

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The Tet Offensive was a colossal military blunder for the enemy, but the press turned it into a victory for them. That’s what the press does. It looks for the negative. It obsesses about the “human angle” and it searches beyond all reason to prove that America’s doing wrong or botching things. During the “diplomatic war,” Don Rumsfeld was put in the bad-cop role. He offered plain truths which annoyed those who did not want to hear them. Now, in the real war, we need someone - preferably someone in uniform - to make it unfashionably clear that we are both killing the enemy and winning the war. That might make Katie Couric’s nose crinkle, but they don’t say war is hell for nothing.

Iraqi TV has finally been knocked off the air. The reason it stayed up so long was because its broadcasting facilities had been carefully positioned in civilian areas. Now the coalition seems to have found a way to take it offline without bombing it.

Looks like someone in the Pentagon has finally realized that the PR war is just as important as the real war.