Politics Blog

Don Rumsfeld on the Iraq naysayers: “Never have so many been so wrong about so much.”

Now that Tim Robbins, the Dixie Chicks, etc. are grumbling about their “loss” of free speech (on national TV. The irony!), I wish they’d read this article. Saddam’s opponents didn’t just lose their right to free speech. They lost their right to all speech.

There were no reporters “embedded” with the Iraqi Republican Guard; but, if there had been, this is what they would have seen:

“We were surprised when they [the U.S. pilots] discovered this place,” said Khalidi, 28, a Republican Guard captain from a military family. It was late at night, a strong sandstorm was blowing, the vehicles were hidden under the trees, and the soldiers thought they were safe, he said. But two enormous bombs and a load of cluster bombs hit their targets on a tract of agricultural land in the Sabaa Abkar (”Seven Virgins”) area of northern Baghdad, killing six members of Khalidi’s unit and destroying much of their equipment.

“This affected the morale of the soldiers, because they were hiding and thought nobody could find them,” he said. “Some soldiers left their positions and ran away. When the big bombs hit their target, some of the vehicles just melted. And the effect of the cluster bombs was even greater, because they covered a larger area.”

…

One of those Republican Guard divisions, the Medina al Munawara, or Medina the Luminous, had been targeted for destruction by the 3rd Infantry. U.S. commanders planned to send the division’s M1 Abrams tanks and M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles sweeping west of Karbala, then east across the Euphrates River to engage the Medina Division from behind as it braced for an attack from the south.

The annihilation of the division that was supposedly Hussein’s pride and joy, U.S. commanders thought, could trigger his downfall without the need for U.S. ground forces to fight their way into Baghdad.

But before elements of the 3rd Infantry got into position to launch their main assault, the Medina Division had disintegrated. Repeated heavy airstrikes, rocket barrages and an attack across the Euphrates by the 3rd Infantry’s 1st Brigade had rendered it “combat ineffective.”

…

[Khalidi’s] unit’s spirits soared once more when U.S. troops attacked Baghdad’s international airport and ran into resistance. Khalidi said the Iraqi military’s official report of the battle, which he believed, described a glorious victory. The Iraqi counterattack had destroyed about 80 tanks and other vehicles, killed 400 U.S. soldiers and taken 200 prisoners, the report said.

So it came as a shock when, the next day, the 3rd Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade staged its “thunder run” of tanks through southern Baghdad.

“It was just as if that last battle had no effect,” Khalidi said. “It was a very big shock. Everyone was surprised that a military force could pass through all the Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard forces surrounding the [presidential palaces], and everyone became afraid.” With the forays into Baghdad came “unimaginably heavy bombing,” including the use of low-flying A-10 Thunderbolt II tank-killer planes, Khalidi said.

“After it was all over, we knew [the airport counterattack report] was an exaggeration,” he said.

In fact, according to [US 3rd Infantry Division, 1st Brigade commander] Grimsley, the 1st Brigade lost 14 killed and 38 wounded in the entire campaign.

“In the end, when [U.S. troops] entered Baghdad, everything was messed up,” Khalidi said. “There were no orders. We didn’t know where the commanders went. We didn’t know what to do. So everyone just went home.”

As I’ve mentioned, Lieutenant-General Michael “Buzz” Moseley ran the air war over Iraq agressively and very successfully. The Washington Post now has details on the air war that we couldn’t see on TV.

Democrats are still “fighting the last war.” They haven’t gotten over the 2000 elections yet. Here’s presidential candidate Bob Graham of Florida today on ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you think President Bush won the 2000 campaign fair and square?

GRAHAM: No. I think there were so many errors made in my state, and maybe elsewhere, that could have shifted just one state from his column to Al Gore’s column and Al Gore would have won. Florida was just one particular place. What distressed me most was that the US Supreme Court suddenly became situational federalists.

More proof that Democrats loathe the president and will end up paying for it. Hatred for political opponents is a useful emotion in a grass-roots activist, but not in a politician. It clouds one’s judgement and causes one to make ill-considered decisions.

Another scoop from the Daily Telegraph. The French government colluded with Iraqi intelligence to undermine a humanrights group’s conference in Paris. Another document shows that Saddam sent his thanks to Jacques Chirac for trying to lift sanctions in 1998. Here’s the Telegraph editorial on all this chicanery.

Not content to oppose the liberation of Iraq, International ANSWER, the Communist group that organized most “anti-war” demonstrations, is now supporting Fidel Castro’s recent jailing of dozens of political dissidents. From the ANSWER web site:

The trial of the 75 Cuban individuals arrested in March uncovered the directing role of the U.S. Interests Section in guiding, financing, and organizing subversive actions against the Cuban government.

In other words, Castro is right to jail these people for 25 years because they’d like to vote for someone other than him.

Will the “mainstream” media have anything to say about this? Will “anti-war” protesters?

Now that the focus is shifting from Iraq to North Korea, you’ll often hear in the press about statements made by North Korean spokesmen. I prefer to go straight to the source and read the official North Korean news agency’s web site (click on the Past News link on the web site for previous updates.)

You can see the revised version of the “reprocessing” statement (changed from “We are successfully reprocessing more than 8,000 spent fuel rods” to “We are successfully going forward to reprocess work more than 8,000 spent fuel rods”) here.

Personally, I think diplomacy has no chance of working against this regime. Much more than Saddam, Kim Jong Il and his evil minions live in an alternate universe created by incessant propaganda. They really think they’re heroes. They genuinely believe they can indefinitely threaten the world and starve their people in the name of “socialism.”

We’re going to have to bomb the bastards, kill Kim Jong Il, liberate the country, and let the South Koreans feed the 20 million starving people of North Korea.

(Via InstaPundit) With the seeds of US-backed democracy being planted in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, the unpopular mullahcracy in Iran is very worried, says Le Monde:

Iranian officials are worried. Worried of the American presence next to their doors, on the East as well as to the West, worried of the invasion of Iraq “with so little popular resistance”, worried of the fast fall of the Baghdad regime, worried of the sidelining of the UN, worried of the total disillusion of the Iranian people that, since the beginning of the Iraqi crisis, has resulted in a fierce pro-Americanism of the population… but, especially, worried of the vox populi, that asks for “a change of the regime with the help of the American marines”, the daily “Le Monde” wrote.

They darn well should be worried. Iranian dissidents are only going to get even louder. They’ve planned a massive general strike on July 9 that just might be the final nail in the coffin of the Iranian regime.

The Saddam-Osama connection! How come the Daily Telegraph keeps finding these scoops in Iraqi documents? Shouldn’t someone from US intelligence be getting to these documents first? All the Telegraph reporter had to do was sweet-talk his way past some 3rd ID soldiers guarding the Mukhabarat building.