{"id":1156,"date":"2007-08-09T04:42:55","date_gmt":"2007-08-09T09:42:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1156"},"modified":"2007-08-05T14:43:38","modified_gmt":"2007-08-05T19:43:38","slug":"fighting-a-smaller-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1156","title":{"rendered":"Fighting A Smaller War"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve not written a lot about the war in Iraq lately.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mainly because I haven’t had much to say that many other commentators – Michael Yon, Bill Roggio, Bill Ardolino and many others – haven’t said much, much better.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Partly because I needed to learn a few things.\u00a0 Do some reading.\u00a0 Figure out what I thought about things.<\/p>\n

The Administration – largely the Pentagon, I think – screwed up mightily between 2004 and 2006.\u00a0 They lived down, I think, to the classic stereotype; they fought their previous war over again.<\/p>\n

Things have changed<\/a>, so far this year.\u00a0 The “Surge” – with its focus on the kind of classic counterinsurgency warfare, and its straying away from the mania for “Force Protection” that sprang up in the wake of the bombings at the Beirut Embassy, the Khobar Towers and the Mogadishu “Black Hawk Down” skirmish, seem to have fundamentally changed things on the ground in Iraq, and even in the theatre that reallly matters; in Washington, and even in the Fallujah of American life, the media.\u00a0 The chanting of the lefty droogs that “the war is un-winnable” and that “we’ve already lost” are starting to seem as quaint and naive as the Administration’s predictions that the occupation would be a cakewalk seemed two years ago.<\/p>\n

Suffice to say that while the Administration was wrong and made mistakes, the Democrats are farther-off-base, and want us to make vastly bigger ones.<\/p>\n

I was going to post those pieces this week – but the bridge collapse and its\u00a0aftermath are of more immediate impact, here and now; that, and events in the US and in Iraq keep overtaking what I write.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But I’ll be posting the articles next week, with an aim toward having a rational discussion about the issue.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

(A wag might jump to the conclusion that to have a “rational discussion”, I’ll need a new bunch of left-leaning commenters.\u00a0 But faith and hope spring eternal).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve not written a lot about the war in Iraq lately.\u00a0 Mainly because I haven’t had much to say that many other commentators – Michael Yon, Bill Roggio, Bill Ardolino and many others – haven’t said much, much better.\u00a0 Partly because I needed to learn a few things.\u00a0 Do some reading.\u00a0 Figure out what I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-war-on-terror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1156\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}