Just happened to notice this:
I don’t think I’m allowed to mention my Google Adsense ads at all, and I’m certainly not allowed to point out that clicking on that ad (if it’s even still there) not only generates a bit of income for MO, but that Massey’s site would be paying for it. So I won’t.
Transferring Control: A Quiet Ceremony on the Border
Bill Roggio accompanied the Marines to a search for an IED off a tip. Nothing found.
The squad returned to Battle Position Beirut to pick up the rest of the company. They were heading to Battle Position Hue City to provide security for a ceremony to turn over control of the western border to the Iraqi Security Forces . On the way to Hue, 1st Platoon encountered a possible IED. Buried in the ground, tail up, was a mortar round. An Explosive Ordnance Disposal team was called in to destroy the device. The round was not rigged to explode. “Lots of times the locals find rounds and bury them in clear view so we can find them”, said Corporal Gauls.
More pics at Threats Watch. Go read the whole thing.
Using the Feed2JS server, I’ve added the AFIS RSS feed to the left sidebar righ below the main links list.
So what you need to do is keep an eye on the green box to get the latest news from American Forces Information Services. Maybe this will help the administration and the military “get the word out” a bit.
Please note that as I’m currently using the script on the Feed2JS server, the list may be up to an hour old. They cache feeds for an hour to avoid being swamped. If I decide to keep feeding you guys RSS, I might consider hosting the script on my own server and making it update more often. We’ll see.
Let me know what you think.
Iraqi 2nd Army Brigade Ready to Take Over Babil Province
The new Iraqi army is about to assume responsibility for security in the Babil Province (red):
From now on, 2nd Brigade will plan and conduct independent operations within its area of responsibility, officials said. Multinational division support will be given only in emergencies by a quick-reaction force, medical evacuation or air support. Multinational division military advisers and trainers will still monitor 2nd Brigade activities, officials said.The 2nd Brigade consists of two battalions located in different places within the province. It numbers about 1,800 soldiers equipped in light armored vehicles with a variety of weapons. The brigade has taken part in five combat operations so far in cooperation with coalition forces.
This is the second governorate to be turned over to Iraqi forces. The first, Diyala (yellow) was turned over in early August.
Staying the course.
Last night I posted extensive excerpts of and commented on a briefing transcript regarding operations in Iraq. The thing that’s been galling me of late has been all the talk about the Bush administration not getting the word out. I, too, have been critical of this at times, but I think that the largest part of the problem (maybe) is not that the word isn’t “gotten” out, but that it’s not passed on.
Shortly after I posted my entry, I also posted a link to a news item by the American Forces Press Services covering the briefing. I noted at the time that, while I thought it was good, they skipped some items I felt should have been included.
Today, two three additional releases have been made. All three four of these stories seem to be based almost entirely on the briefing. Each focuses on a separate segment of the discussion. Here they are:
All three of these short items include some of the original quotes and a paraphrased summary/interpretation of what was said in the briefing about the three subjects.
I haven’t paid as much attention to the AFPS as I should have. Neither, I think, has anyone else.
Sure, some will dismiss it as mere propaganda. But where else is information about military operations going to come from? AFPS makes both these stories and the briefing that they’re based on available to the public. I would recommend that they provide links within each item back to the original source, but beyond that I guess I’m not sure what else we should expect from the government.
Yet the press so often plays games with the issues covered in these briefings and people cry about not having enough information available to base their opinions on. I guess I’ll have to watch AFPS more closely for a while to try to determine just how good the info coming out of it is.
What if I figure out how to list the most recent releases (there are many per day) in the sidebar somehow? maybe via their XML feed? Would that be useful to MO readers? It would be along the lines of the old “Space Daily Headlines” that I used to run. I’ve been thinking of bringing those back, as I don’t cover space nearly enough these days. Would that be valuable?
I must admit that I’d like to see something along the lines of the “fireside chat” scenario from the President, though.
UPDATE: A fourth AFIS article based on the briefing has been issued. I added it to the list.
Worse things could happen, I guess.
I still don’t really get Open Source Media / Pajamas Media, but here I am linking to them for the second time in less than a week: Reid: Osama bin Dead
It’s a collection of links and quotes by those wondering if maybe Reid’s lips are a bit loose. Since we don’t know for sure whether we know for sure, it’s hard to know for sure. My guess is that I favor far more government/military secret-keeping than nearly all of my non-military readers, but I hope that even those who want more visibility of what’s going on can understand why, if the government and the military wanted this kept a secret, that it should have stayed a secret.
Yes, maybe the Bush administration was saving it for a special politics-based reason. That’s really pretty crappy. Of course, maybe there was a tactical or strategic reason with measurable value (i.e., lives saved) behind the decision to not announce it.
Or maybe the whole thing is a total crock.
Red State points out that tomorrow’s speech at the Naval Academy is already being lambasted by, well, pretty much everyone.
Tomorrow night Bush will either announce the conditions are being met that will allow a withdrawal of some American forces from Iraq in which case he will finally have bowed to the realism of Biden and Murtha… or he will not announce anything that can be roughly attributed as laying the groundwork for a US withdrawal in which case Bush is still in the thrall of the neo-cons and is too stubborn to see that his party is deserting him over Iraq… or he will announce something that can be interpreted as portending US troops withdrawals but he will not pose the answer to a raft of thorny issues associated with the withdrawal in which case Bush is succumbing to plans of arch-puppetmeister Karl Rove and just making a hollow political gesture aimed at salvaging 2006 for the Republicans.Never mind that for over a year Bush has been saying “As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.”
Never mind that for over a year the increasing proficiency of the Iraqi security forces has made in from the accounts of pseudonymous milbloggers into the pages of the New York Times and Washington Post.
Never mind that quietly the security of 14 of 18 provinces as well as most of Baghdad and large swaths of the Sunni Triangle have been turned over to Iraqi forces in the past year.
This is just another in a long series of failures.
I was going to write about how Kaplan in Slate and others were already slamming the speech, but this is far better than what I was going to write.
And: What pseudonymous milbloggers have been covering the increasing proficiency of the Iraqi security forces for a year?
I haven’t been pointing out Bill Roggio’s posts at Threatswatch.org. His boots are on the ground in Iraq with Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children:
At night the streets of Husaybah often appear as series of mazes quite mean by American standards. The houses are surrounded by ramshackle walls; rubble, trash, abandoned cars and fifty gallon drums are strewn along the roadways. All are potential hiding places for IEDs. Since Steel Curtain, four IEDs have been uncovered, but its unknown if these are bombs missed in previous sweeps, or ones newly deployed. Staff Sergeant Strong believes insurgents are attempting to reenter the city and resume attacks on the Coalition.No IEDs or insurgents were encountered during the early morning’s patrol. The only takers were the myriad of Husaybah’s dogs, who howl loudly and seem ever present. The jihadis ceded the night to the hounds of Husaybah and the Jackals of 4th Platoon.
Keep an eye on him. No report on what sort of soap they’ve got in the Green Zone hotels, though.
Here’s a snippet from the briefing I posted about earlier that I thought deserved its own mention. Rumsfeld was asked about accusations that the US doesn’t have enough troops in Iraq. Here’s part of his response:
It is the Iraqis’ country, 28 million of them. They are perfectly capable of running that country. They’re not going to run it the way you would or I would or the way we do here in this country, but they’re going to run it. And to suggest that every single thing that needs to be done in this country — “Oh, the infrastructure’s imperfectly protected; the Americans should do that, you don’t have enough people to do that.” Nonsense. We shouldn’t have enough people to do that. It’s the Iraqis’ infrastructure. They’re the ones who are going to suffer if the infrastructure isn’t protected. “The borders can’t be protected.” Well, we can’t protect our own border. [emphasis mine]
A lot of people don’t like Rumsfeld because he sometimes talks without thinking his words through very carefully. In this day and age, I don’t think that’s a bug…it’s a feature.
Of course, maybe slipping that in there is a clever Rovian ploy designed to lay the groundwork for the GOP making border security a major political issue leading up to next year’s elections. We can always hope.
News Briefing with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace
I’ve long refrained from posting the transcripts of speeches, press conferences, and press releases for a variety of reasons. To do so, in many cases, will make me look like nothing more than a Kool-Aid drinking parrot, for one thing. And most of the time it’s pretty boring, for another. But I keep hearing about how the administration or the Pentagon isn’t getting the word out effectively.
I’ll agree that the word isn’t getting to typical Americans, for sure. But a large part of that has to do with the media, doesn’t it? So what I’m thinking of doing, when the mood strikes, is to post healthy chunks of releases and limit my remarks to a couple cents’ worth here and there. I’m not quite sure exactly how I’ll do this, or how often I’ll do this. But I’m just going to forge ahead. I may start a quote or question in the middle of the actual text, and I may cut off early. I will not alter the message or edit in any other way. All emphasis is mine.
SEC. RUMSFELD: On Wednesday, President Bush will outline in some detail the coalition strategy to help the Iraqi people increasingly take control of their country. It is their country to lead, and increasingly they are doing so. To date, U.S. forces have turned over control of some 29 military bases to the Iraqis. An Iraqi police battalion assumed control of the airport road last April, and the number of attacks has declined sharply. Baghdad’s well-known Haifa Street has been largely peaceful under the control of an Iraqi army battalion. The Shi’ite areas of Najaf, Karbala and Sadr City — the scene of a number of battles last year — are largely peaceful. And in Tal Afar, 5,000 Iraqi troops took the key role in liberating and securing what had been a base of operations for extremist networks and for terrorist networks.Consider the progress of the Iraqi security forces over the past year. In August 2004, five Iraqi army battalions were effectively in the fight. Today the number is 95.
That’s up from 80 at the end of September, if we’re talking the same thing here. It’s usually hard to tell, but the terminology is about the same, so I think it makes sense.
GEN. PACE: One trend that is really extremely encouraging is the number of tips that are being provided to Iraqi armed forces and coalition forces by Iraqi citizens. Last March, for example, they were just below 500 tips during that month. But this past month, there were some 4,700 tips by Iraqi citizens to Iraqi and coalition forces. That’s an enormous increase, and it has benefited us in many ways. One example was yesterday. As a result of a tip from a normal Iraqi citizen, Iraqi forces, along with U.S., uncovered an IED factory, some 4,000 pounds of explosives, some 11 to 12 500-pound bombs, many other ingredients for making both vehicle-borne and stand-alone explosive devices. These kinds of tips from the Iraqi populace indicate to me that they understand that the future is with their own armed forces. And with the help of the coalition, we’ll help them do that.
Who’s the freedom fighter, the minuteman, in today’s Iraq? The man with an IED factory whose handiwork kills far more Iraqi civilians than American soldiers, or the Iraqi citizen that turns the murderer in?
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