In April of 2003 I posted a pic of a Marine and some graffiti and noted:

I think that’s a “V for Victory,” not a “Peace, bro’.” Just a hunch.

But recent events have convinced me to update the pic a bit:

Can you see what’s changed since April of 2003?

I realize that there’s an awful long way to go in Iraq. But if we stay the course, this day will be looked back at in awe.

I’m just sitting here, waiting for the first “Despite election, violence goes on in Iraq” news item to hit.

via Powerline

The world changed today. Do you think opponents of intervention in Iraq or of George Bush will even notice?

UPDATE: Noted just now on Cavuto by David Drier (R-CA): The 1981 inaugural speech by Ronald Reagan:

Above all we must realize that no arsenal or no weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today’s world do not have. It is a weapon that we as Americans do have. Let that be understood by those who practice terrorism and prey upon their neighbors.

I’ve realized that I don’t really have the words to say what isn’t already being said across the blogosphere. This was a great day.

Against violent backdrop, Iraqis turn out to vote

I’ve been away from television and the internet since yesterday afternoon. I just walked into the house five minutes ago and there’s a email from a reader that ends with:

And how are you not covering the elections?!?!?!?

Elections? What elections?

Elections in Iraq? Are you serious?

Didn’t those people hear that we didn’t find any WMDs? Why are they having elections?

[/sarcasm]

I’ll have to spend a little time gathering info, but things seem to have gone far more smoothly than I expected, as evidenced by the subheadline to the MSNBC.com story I linked to:

Attacks on polling stations kill 44, including 9 suicide bombers

Is it me, or does needing to include the suicide bombers in your total to reach 44 signify an apparent lack of success by said bombers to really disrupt things?

It will take days (or weeks) to really see how things went and to see if meaningful results have been attained, but I’m happy to turn on my PC and not see oceans of fire all across Iraq.

In the meantime, don’t forget about Friends of Democracy, the organization that is going to work hard to bring gound-level news and information about the elections that the biggies (and even Murdoc Online!) won’t give you.

UPDATE: Well, some things are going “as expected”:

Just received this email regarding yesterday’s post:

Murdoc, sorry but the gun pictured for that robbery really is an MP9.

It’s an Encom MP9 pistol which was available for sale in the early 90s until the AWB came into effect. It is very similar to the KG9/Tec9 series though I don’t know about internal similarities. The crude sites with the metal ears are actually intended for a very funky scope mount rail that was sold with the pistols. To my knowledge none were ever made before the 86 machinegun ban so if the gun the police have is full-auto it is an illegally converted gun. These pistols were only made in closed bolt form also, they came long after the open-bolt semiauto crackdown by ATF.

I have attached a picture from the California AWB ID guide and here is a link to one for sale at gunsamerica right now.

http://www.gunsamerica.com/guns/976385895.htm

And here’s the picture he included:

(Click for better look)

I had asked previously why the weapon in the news photo seemed to be sitting nearly level without its magazine in, since none of the ones in the page I linked to looked they would do so. This one appears to match the news photo.

I’m convinced. It’s almost certainly an MP9.

I had also been wondering about those goofy-lookin’ sights, but as my reader says they’re actually mounting tabs for an add-on scope rail. The weapon for sale that he links to shows the rail in place.

As he notes, if this weapon was truly fully atuo, it was illegally converted to be so.

Thanks big-time for the heads up! MO strives to be a straight shooter.

Police Investigate Use Of Submachine Gun In Robbery

Hell in a Handbasket notes a case where the media misidentifies a weapon. They call it an “MP9 9 mm. submachine gun” though it clearly isn’t. It appears to be either a DC-9 or a TEC KG-9 semi-automatic pistol. Though the fitting for the magazine appears longer in the news photo than it does for a DC9, a KG-9, or an MP-9, so maybe it’s something else entirely. Follow that link and you be the judge.

Come on, gun nuts. Help me out here.

But let’s say it IS a fully automatic submachinegun, just for the sake of argument. Was it legally purchased? Hmmm. I don’t think so. So which law needs to written to stop people from breaking laws? Or maybe it was stolen. So which law needs to be written to stop people from stealing things?

And is the misidentification of not only the weapon but the TYPE of weapon intentional or accidental?

IMPORTANT UPDATE: It probably really IS an MP9.

Tell me again why we fought this war

A co-worker forwarded me an article she clipped from a newspaper (remember those?) with the title “Tell me again why we fought this war”. I couldn’t find it under that title, but I did find it at the Miami Herald: Drop the ‘Bush Doctrine’.

Here’s what seems to be the main thrust:

Well, no WMDs were ever found. And now, the Bush team has given up the search.

This suggests one of two possibilities: Either Hussein is a true evil genius who managed to uproot, move and hide his nuclear, chemical and biological arsenal so efficiently that the entire investigative apparatus of Earth’s most technologically advanced nation could find no trace of them — or they didn’t exist when Bush’s people told us that they did.

And if they didn’t exist, the United States invaded a sovereign nation, trashed its infrastructure, toppled its government, caused the deaths of anywhere from 15,000 to 100,000 of its citizens, propelled the region to the precipice of civil war, likely reinvigorating terrorist recruitment in the process — and sent more than 1,300 of its own sons and daughters to their deaths — for nothing.

I won’t really go into the WMD argument yet again, mentioning neither the fact that I think many in the administration spent too much time talking about that one reason when they had brought up so many others already, or noting the fact that the media at the time harped the “imminent threat” and “al-Qaeda ties” stories although Bush and company very clearly stated that there was no evidence that either existed. And I certainly won’t point out that Bush detractors have been working overtime to rewrite the reasoning behind the decision to invade Iraq. I won’t discuss the fact that WMDs didn’t need to exist, only that Iraq needed to comply with UN resolutions and cease-fire agreements.

This is what the “nothing” we fought for is accomplishing:

This is part of what our “sons and daughters” are doing over there:

Even in America (Nashville, to be exact) this great “nothing” can be seen and felt:

It’s funny that this article came to me in the form of a newspaper clipping (remember those?), because I had a letter published in my local paper (remember those?) 10 months ago that included:

By working to stabilize and install a democracy in the heart of the Middle East, the Bush administration is directly attacking the root causes of international terrorism: poverty and oppressive, medieval governments that breed fear and hatred.

Critics are right when they say we can never kill all the terrorists. What we need to do is make the terrorists believe that there’s a better way to live life. With a decent life and hope for the future, suicide-bombing or fighting U.S. Marines doesn’t seem like such a good alternative. In the meantime, of course, we need to continue to kill terrorists, but Iraq is part of the bigger picture and al Qaida is only a symptom.

Will this plan work? I don’t know. We’ll have to look again in ten or twenty years.

But this weekend Iraqis are going to vote. The media coverage will undoubtedly be all over the violence that is sure to mar the event. They won’t be able to ignore successful elections like they did in Afghanistan, so most will probably work their hardest to portray the negative aspects of what’s going on and hope no one notices that the world is changing for the better.

Pictures from Hobbs Online and the CENTCOM Newsletter

Munched USS San Francisco

For more and bigger, follow the link to Strategy Page.

Bush revises history in Inaugural Address; latest example of delusion

When a paragraph about American efforts for freedom drives his critics STARK RAVING MAD.

The biggest complaint seems to be that Bush said

From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the maker of heaven and earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave.

Well, no wonder the Left is outraged. I mean, he’s trying to champion freedom, for pity’s sake. Freedom! And he comes right out and says it. In public!

I first noted this paragraph on MO a couple of days ago. It brought what I considered to be a curious reaction from a fellow blogger. The discussion on that site continued, though not very productively. I’m still trying to nail down exactly what the problem is.

Bush was called “a fool or an idiot” for uttering those dreadful words. Read the whole comments section on that post if you’ve got nothing better to do, but I think I’ve narrowed the problem down to:

1) Bush was wrong because America hasn’t “always followed” the ideals he brought up, or

2) Bush was wrong because the Founding Fathers “proclaimed” those ideals, or

3) Bush was wrong because “lauded” the proclamation of those ideals, or

4) Bush was wrong because he didn’t use the word “equal” when he said “rights”.

Now, I’m not trying to be obtuse (well, okay, I am–but only a little bit) but I’m just plain mystified by this.

Ivins also writes

Nor is democracy necessarily the cure for terrorism. As a British journalist pointed out, if Britain had been following the Bush plan, it would have nuked us years ago for being the largest single source of money for the Irish Republican Army. Reality is so often much more complicated than George W. Bush thinks it is.

And sometimes reality is often much more simple than Ms. Ivins thinks it is, I guess. Or did I miss the news when the Bush plan nuked terrorism supporters? What’s she talking about?

And she writes:

It is extremely difficult to convince people that you are killing them (and torturing them) for their own good. How would you feel? The British medical magazine Lancet estimates Americans have now killed over 100,000 Iraqis. We don’t know for sure, because America has several policies that prevent anyone from keeping an accurate count.

As for the “how would you feel?”, see my post from this afternoon.

The number in the Lancet study is weird. Yes, I know all about the thoroughly discredited study released last fall. First, I’m mystified that she’d use it when trying to make a point, as everyone knows it’s total bunk. But even more mystifying is the fact that my newspaper (The Grand Rapids Press), Democrats.us, MyrtleBeachOnline, The Buffalo News (the top three hits on Google for the article), and the Creators Syndicate site all say

Americans have now killed about 20,000 Iraqis

instead of

Americans have now killed over 100,000 Iraqis

An error in judgment soon changed but not changed before Working For Change posted it? Or a change by someone else down the line? Weird.

Why does the paragraph about the ideal of freedom drive Bush’s opponents so nuts? And why can’t they seem to explain the effect?

Steven Vincent on the Muslim Scholars Association noting that while many Sunnis will boycott the elections, they want to be part of the drafting of the Iraqi constitution:

And there you have it, coming on the heels of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s declaration of “fierce war” against democracy: the beginnings of an open split between the leaders of the Iraqi paramilitaries and the foreign jihadists. The first have suddenly awoke to the fact that the Shia-Kurdish Democracy Train is indeed leaving the station and that Sunnis will have to get on board at a later stop; the second want to destroy the engine, tracks and passengers just as surely as their allies slaughtered hundreds in the stations of Madrid. Both wings of Islamofascism realize they face a more potent threat than even the U.S. military: a democratic constitution. And one side is buckling.

and

Would the Viet Cong have so readily abandoned their struggle and leaped into constitutional talks with the Saigon regime? Would the FLN have stopped fighting the French colonialists and entered into a power-sharing agreement? Never–because their objectives were fundamentally at odds with their enemies’. But what do the Sunni “insurgents” stand for? What is their economic policy, their education plan, their vision for the future? What do they propose to replace the American-led liberation of their country? I was in Ramadi, Falluja, Tikrit; I asked people these questions. Their answer? “Saddam.”

By this time, Saddam was in custody, awaiting the war crimes tribunal that will most condemn him to death. The inhabitants of the Sunni Triangle knew this full well: for them “Saddam” was not a man, but a symbol of the patronage machine that rewarded their families, tribes and clans with jobs, money, prestige–even irrigation water from the Euphrates River.

There’s a lot more to it than that, of course. You really should go read the whole thing.

(And, yes, I’ve finished IN THE RED ZONE. Review coming soon.)