Redstate

The United Nations said Wednesday that 3,709 Iraqi civilians were killed in October, the highest monthly toll since the March 2003 U.S. invasion and another sign of the severity of Iraq's sectarian bloodbath.

That compares to an estimated 3,500 killed in July. If 3,709 people were murdered in October, that translates to a rate of 171 per 100,000. That is a high rate of violent death. But, for purposes of comparison, the murder rate in Washington, D.C. in 1991 was 80 per 100,000. So the rate of violence in Iraq today is just over double the rate in the District during the first Bush administration. I don't recall anyone describing conditions in Washington in the early 90s as a "bloodbath."

I wrote in June that based on the data at that time, the murder rate in Iraq outside of Baghdad is about the same as American cities like Chicago, Philadelphia and Milwaukee. With the current numbers, it looks like that would still be true.

A consensus seems to have developed that Iraq is a disaster because of out-of-control sectarian violence. That consensus is driving proposals to change our policy in Iraq, perhaps in the direction of a pull-out that could lead to truly cataclysmic violence. So I think it makes sense to step back and get a more realistic picture of the level of what is happening in Iraq: violent? Yes. A disaster comparable to a civil war? No.

http://powerlineblog.com/archives/015994.php

We are war ignorant people looking at what the MSM wants us to look at to further their agenda, rather than looking at Iraq thru the prism of history and the long term threat we face from millions of potential enemies in a world where wmd is becoming increasingly available and a region that vital to our economic viability potentially coming under the control of jihadists who veiw their deaths as victory. They cannot be deterred. We need to settle in to the new world we live in. There is no going back. he violence in the streets of Baghdad is akin to the bleeding during surgery. No surgery and blood, no future.

www.race42008.com
"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson
http://gamecock.townhall.com

you play into the stereotype that conservatives aren't compassionate.

You don't have headlines coming out of American cities that read:

Six Boston Catholics burned alive after leaving church.

Or anything like that. The point to make is that if we leave, instead of six Sunnis being burned alive, it is going to be six hundred. We are there keeping the numbers down and restricting the reprisals. Clinton got involved in the civil war in the Balkins and we are involved in a civil war in Iraq and it is our Christian duty to stay and help keep the violence under control.

Your comment about my comment plays into some sterotypes as well.

Seeking the truth surrounded by believers in false sterotypes...

www.race42008.com
"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson
http://gamecock.townhall.com

n/t

www.race42008.com
"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson
http://gamecock.townhall.com

the victims of 911 as you are attempting to do with the Iraqi civilian deaths. What's next, quoting Stalin?

quote expectation as logical progression have to do with my posts?

www.race42008.com
"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson
http://gamecock.townhall.com

Do I have to go dig up the litany of stories detailing the brutal violence in American cities, children starved to death in closets or scolded in hot water, gang-bangers turf wars and babies violated? There are acts ever bit as violent in urban America as Sunnis being burnt alive.

Or did you miss them because the MSM doesn’t play them up like they do the Iraqi stories? “Violence to Boston Children Continues at Spiraling Rate” It happens every day out there.

in fact, there is an article in the MSN about it this weekend.

only when it's perpetrated by Catholic priests. For violence perpetrated by others, the MSM is silent--they can't destroy the illusion of Kumbaya in Kerryland.

The bad news: Conservatism is hard to sell. The good news is that it works.

It seems that the unsubstantiated reports of "Six Sunni's Burned Alive" is nothing more than enemy propaganda propagated by the partisan press.

Contrary to recent media reporting that four mosques were burned in Hurriya, an Iraqi Army patrol investigating the area found only one mosque had been burned in the neighborhood.

Soldiers from the 6th Iraqi Army Division conducted a patrol in Hurriya Friday afternoon in response to media reports that four mosques were being burned as retaliation for the VBIED attacks in Sadr City on Thursday.

The Soldiers set up a checkpoint near the Al Muhaimen mosque at approximately 2 p.m. and found the mosque intact with no evidence of any fire at the location.

While investigating the Al Meshaheda mosque, the patrol received small arms fire from unknown insurgents. The patrol returned fire, and the insurgents broke contact and fled the area. A subsequent check of the mosque found the mosque intact with no evidence of a fire.

At approximately 3:50 p.m., a local civilian reported to the patrol that armed insurgents had set the Al-Nidaa mosque on fire by throwing a gas container into the mosque. The patrol pursued the insurgents but lost contact with them.

The Soldiers called the fire department and set up a cordon around the mosque. Local fire trucks responded to the scene and extinguished the fire at approximately 4:00 p.m. The mosque sustained smoke and fire damage in the entry way but was not destroyed.

An alleged attack on a fourth mosque remains unconfirmed. The patrol was also unable to confirm media reports that six Sunni civilians were allegedly dragged out of Friday prayers and burned to death. Neither Baghdad police nor Coalition forces have reports of any such incident.

Is the partisan press getting the "news" from the enemy?

H/T: Blackfive

***

"The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so." - Ronald Reagan

That compares to an estimated 3,500 killed in July. If 3,709 people were murdered in October, that translates to a rate of 171 per 100,000. That is a high rate of violent death. But, for purposes of comparison, the murder rate in Washington, D.C. in 1991 was 80 per 100,000. So the rate of violence in Iraq today is just over double the rate in the District during the first Bush administration. I don't recall anyone describing conditions in Washington in the early 90s as a "bloodbath."

Assuming your numbers are accurate the murder rate is DOUBLE one of the worst murders rates in our history. How is that comparable in any way?

How bout you tell the Israelis that suicide killings really are that big a deal?

200 Shia were killed this week. Show me a comparable event in Washington D.C.

"There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were and ask why not." George Bernard Shaw

they mean and that but for us their wouldn't be such a "mess". there are messes and there are messes. Some messes that aren't occurring in NY, DC and PA and in Saddam's mass graves are relevant as well. The strife in the streets on Iraq is the result of the mess Saddam and REALPOLITIC brought us. The mess produced 911 and the mess is still there.

Now, we are finally addressing it so we have less messes in the Lower 48.

For the mess to be only DOUBLE the worst murder rate in the Nation peopel die on rafts and in desserts to get to, makes the point.

This is war, and compared to those waged in the past, its closer to being comparable to Urban America not a war than war.

Good "form" costs lives when the truth is sacrificed.

www.race42008.com
"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson
http://gamecock.townhall.com

was that we had faulty intelligence that led us to believe that Saddam had WMDs and could potentially give them to terrorists. But per the Powell doctrine, you break it - you buy it.

The WMD thing that the moonbats keep harping on was just one part of the justification... and we don't know that the intelligence was faulty on that count. We gave him ample time (over a year) to remove those weapons from Iraq. If the cops gave a drug dealer an hours notice before breaking into his crib, would you be surprised that there weren't any drugs to be found there? I wouldn't be.
---
"I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more I have of it." -- Thomas Jefferson

it is a done deal.

www.race42008.com
"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson
http://gamecock.townhall.com

then, I guess so.

hiding it if notified UN inspectors were on the way. The tape was not discredited. But the MSM never headlined an article or a TV story about it.

The MSm did headline that we had not found "any" significant stockpiles of WMD before we found the 500+ stockpile last summer and after same changed the meme to we hadn't found "'the' stockpiles we expected to find."

tiring quickly zzzzzzz re wrrrrrr due to lack of challenging observations

www.race42008.com
"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson
http://gamecock.townhall.com

And I believe the "longer than WWII" pointed lapsed on Clinton's watch.

"I'm kind of old-fashioned. I like to engage my brain before my mouth." Donald Rumsfeld

hmmmmmmm..... Sounds good to me. But why just nuke Syria and Iran? Why not the rest of the country's where the Islamofascists are? Like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Lebenon, Eygpt, and Jordan, and Indonesia. Oh wait, that's right the MSM calls them "moderate" Arab countries. In my view the words moderate and Arab sounds like an oxy-moron. If there are true 'moderate' Arabs out there, then lets hear what they say in private and not just public.

In my view the G.W.O.T. is like WWII. Same fronts, same kind of idealogy that wants to conquer the world and in the process kill all the Jews and Christians. And in my view Iraq is a central battle front in this new world war.

than WWII.

In this war, civilians are targeted.

In this war, churches, schools, hospitals, and funerals are considered legitimate targets for our enemies to hit.

In this war, chemical weapons will be used by our enemies against civilians.

In this war, children are considered legitimate targets by our enemies.

In this war, enemy fighters use innocent women and children as shields.

Hitler targeted civilians in England (plus many other countries), we targeted civilians in Dresden and Tokyo (as well as Nagasaki and Hiroshima), and the Japanese targeted civilians everywhere...

--
It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones. -- Calvin Coolidge

hah

Here
---
"I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more I have of it." -- Thomas Jefferson

I put in an end tag (and then put in a < /em>) just so it could be seen).

Charles just fixed LGF from that problem week ago, maybe he would share whatever it is he did with RS.

Evil prevails only when good men do nothing.

He was using <i> tags, not <em> tags... another (more common) way to italicize things.
---
"I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more I have of it." -- Thomas Jefferson

American civilians are targeted.

Innocent American civilians.

Indonesia, Malaysia, Philipines, Canada, Germany, and the UK!!....Let's nuke Michigan too while we're at it!

Troy Smith did that last Saturday. You must have missed it. Go Bucks!

we just wanted to save more American lives and actually test the bombs to see what they would do.

But the psychological effect of dropping an a-bomb was devastating.

War is not about killing enemies. It is about causing the enemy to lose hope of victory. The a-bomb did that.

And the a-bomb allowed us to hit the Japanese while exposing a minimum number of airmen to danger.

to Stalin.

--
It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones. -- Calvin Coolidge

look it up

Now you're citing a source that says whatever you want it to say. Unless CW has a website you can link us to...

Sorry.

---
"I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more I have of it." -- Thomas Jefferson

Taking Japan by force would've not been a small task and probably would've meant the death of more than one hundred thousand American troops and millions of Japanese troops and civilians. Using the bomb saved a whole lot of lives on both sides. This "we wanted to see what the bombs would do" line is ridiculous and offensive.
---
"I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more I have of it." -- Thomas Jefferson

The Target Committee at Los Alamos on May 10–11, 1945, recommended Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama, and the arsenal at Kokura as possible targets. The committee rejected the use of the weapon against a strictly military objective because of the chance of missing a small target not surrounded by a larger urban area. The psychological effects on Japan were of great importance to the committee members. They also agreed that the initial use of the weapon should be sufficiently spectacular for its importance to be internationally recognized. The committee felt Kyoto, as an intellectual center of Japan, had a population "better able to appreciate the significance of the weapon." Hiroshima was chosen because of its large size, its being "an important army depot" and the potential that the bomb would cause greater destruction because the city was surrounded by hills which would have a "focusing effect".[7]

One of the most notable individuals with this opinion was then-General Dwight D. Eisenhower. He wrote in his memoir The White House Years:

"In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives."[49][50]

Other U.S. military officers who disagreed with the necessity of the bombings include General Douglas MacArthur (the highest-ranking officer in the Pacific Theater), Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy (the Chief of Staff to the President), General Carl Spaatz (commander of the U.S. Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific), and Brigadier General Carter Clarke (the military intelligence officer who prepared intercepted Japanese cables for U.S. officials),[50] Major General Curtis LeMay,[51] and Admiral Ernest King, U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, Undersecretary of the Navy Ralph A. Bard,[52] and Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet.[53]

"The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan." Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.[54]

"The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender." Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman

Do you have an objective source on that?
--
It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones. -- Calvin Coolidge

though Wikipedia is starting to be considered a 'quality' source in colleges and universities.

on non-controversial topics like "cello" and "tapdancing".

On controversial topics, you are not getting an objective view.

You're getting a liberal view on some topics and a leftist view on other topics.

If colleges and universities consider wikipedia to be a "quality" source, that just shows how bad colleges have gotten. They no longer care about objectivity, they just want research to be convenient for students. God forbid a student should have to navigate his way through a library.

because on this site the MSN is 'leftist' and on sites like DailyKos it is 'rightist'. I think it dumb and incorrect most of the time but it's bias is all over the place.

if you want to see how objective it is.

Evil prevails only when good men do nothing.

I often find the discussion pages to be a better source of information than the main article on contraversial topics.

is not a credible academic source. Of course, neither is Powerline, Hugh Hewitt, or any other number of blogs/websites cited here as fact.

Who did that?
--
It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones. -- Calvin Coolidge

liberals have never accepted the fact that the bomb demoralized the Japanese in a way that firebombing Tokyo to the ground didn't.

If you think that the Japanese weren't prepared to fight for their homeland, you're crazy. Until we dropped the bomb, Hiro Hito thought that he might be able to attach conditions to the surrender. After two a-bombs dropped, Hito surrendered unconditionally.

And the reconstruction/occupation was a breeze compared to the occupation of Iraq.

One more case for "nukes save lives".

n.t

I love how this whole tack you're taking combines both the appeal to authority and the non sequitur in one big ball of fallacy.
--
It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones. -- Calvin Coolidge

www.race42008.com
"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson
http://gamecock.townhall.com

Quotes out of context from people who weren't part of the decision making process, aren't useful for proving how the decision was made.
--
It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones. -- Calvin Coolidge

John
--------
Ethic humor is part of human nature. The Dutch tell Belgian jokes. The Belgians tell French jokes. The French tell English jokes. The English tell Irish jokes. The Irish tell Irish jokes.

I'm too lazy to try to track down where the Nimitz quote came from and what he based it upon but he is clearly incorrect.
It is known, and has been known for some decades, that the Japanese military attempted a coup upon hearing that the Emperor was planning to surrender. The problem for the military was that they couldn't figure out how to not follow the wishes of the Emperor without openly disobeying him. Though some people in the palace and in several military establishments did die the coup fizzled as it was clear Japan would be annihilated if it kept fighting (they did not know we were out of atom bombs).
It also needs to be understood that Japan had several 100,000 men under arms in China and they were trying to figure out how to get them onto the "Home" islands to defend against the American invasion.
Directly to Nimitz's point - the Japanese never "sued" for peace. They put out a handful a low-level peace feelers during 1945. All involving the Japanese keeping what they had conquered and us motoring back to Pearl Harbor.
Those were met with Anthony McAuliffe's "Nuts" response.
Wikipedia is fine for general stuff but it falls down when you get into the details.

www.race42008.com
"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson
http://gamecock.townhall.com

n/t

www.race42008.com
"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson
http://gamecock.townhall.com

Conquering Honshu with land forces would have been far more costly for all concerned.
--
It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones. -- Calvin Coolidge

My father was an ordnance officer with an 8th Airforce medium bomber wing in the UK with orders for the Pacific. Their unit planning was for 75% plus aircrew casualites in the invasion of Japan. The planners apparently didn't get the word that the Japanese were defeated and we just needed to test the bomb. There are a h*ll of a lot of Americans, Brits, Canadians, Anzacs and others who lived to see their kids grow up thanks that the bomb.

John
--------
Ethic humor is part of human nature. The Dutch tell Belgian jokes. The Belgians tell French jokes. The French tell English jokes. The English tell Irish jokes. The Irish tell Irish jokes.

If this is any indication, I don't think you'll be zapped--courteous and thoughtful are more important than toeing the party line.

I agree with you about the media--but its commercialization and vapidity is hardly new. Sadly, this has been the case from time immemoriam. What's exciting to me about new media is the increased ability to access primary documents and so form one's own opinion based on that kind of sourcing, rather than on what's being fed through a media filter.

"I'm kind of old-fashioned. I like to engage my brain before my mouth." Donald Rumsfeld

on the fingers of one hand the reporters I've known that weren't painfully ignorant and I've never known one that didn't live in an echo chamber inhabited by people just like him or her.

Few know enough about anything to actually inquire about it. Fewer still can frame a question in a manner to actually elicit an answer. The more famous ones try to make themselve look skillful by asking lawyer-style questions, but they learned their examination skills by watching Law and Order. They lead, they assume facts not in evidence; why would anyone answer the question the way it it framed, but foolish politicians rise to "when did you stop beating your wife" because they don't want to appear confrontational.

I really like the way Tony Snow handles this stuff by breaking the question down and answering the question he wants to answer. The Ds don't have to worry because the reporters play slow pitch softball with them, but I'd sure like to sit some Rs down and give them a crash course in how to deal with adversarial questioning.

In Vino Veritas

jobs almost guarantees ignorance given the total isolation in the bastions of liberalism and shelter from the outside world. Yes, they are ignorant. As you know, when I moved to ATL, I immediately stumbled into column writing gig as I was also doing corp legal work after 14 yrs in the courtroom. I must say that one can get pretty ignorant of a lot of things in trial law too. But the PC atmosphere at the newspaper office and that things they were totally unaware of plus, the main thing

they had never worked for a regular private sector business that had to dig the well

www.race42008.com
"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson
http://gamecock.townhall.com

about trial law; it would seem you'd have to become an "instant expert" on all sorts of things to put on the cases. I know the thing I like most about arbitration advocacy was having to learn more than anybody else knew about the environment and the facts; why a ferry hit a rock, why a piece of State equipment was in the touchdown area of an airport, how a CO could get away with partaking of a female inmate's favors, and on and on.

In Vino Veritas

Add to that, the usually inevitable God complex from holding people's lives in your hand and having the power to make things happen in a snap, plus the monopoly the license produces, and you can lose sight of the bigger economic picture and your relative importance as compared to to entrepreneurs that actually produce products and services in response to real demand as opposed to legal vissicitudes.

But I overstate the problem due to my particular political life, in which i essentially kind of ignored political issues to concentrate on law content that i could trust Clinton to do right only to wake up one day and realize he lied every time he spoke and had betrayed the country. Then when I moved to ATL, after having owned computes for years that my Secretaries used, I finally got over my paranoia and learned the computer and internet while studying the Corp law and opening a branch law office. I got in a $5000 fee the first week and so that allowed me to go thru trial and error until I could do any and everything my secretaries had done

and I discovered the www and drudge and was like a kid in a candy store reading all the columnists and really got to focus on conservative theory. Then I read Bork and Reagan's War and Reagan's letters.

Voila!
Gamecock!

In law practice, you simply don't have time for the big picture and the kids and the law. And except for the one or two a year complex litigation in med malp or prod liab, I was a criminal trial lawyer and could try them in my sleep but still, all that plus marketing myself takes way the book reading, etc.

more later

www.race42008.com
"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson
http://gamecock.townhall.com

I'd lived my subordinates life a lot of it would have been sleepwalking through the same old discipline and pay cases. I got to cherry pick the good stuff almost from the beginning of my career since I'm a d****ed good advocate. In retrospect when I came back to the Executive Branch in '99 I had only one experienced advocate on staff and I had to pick up a routine caseload and nearly died of boredom. Biggest problem I had was getting up enough to actually get prepared. I'd pick up the case file, read it on the plane to ANC or FAI and go put it on. Good thing you had to call out the witnesses names because most of the time I just had a list with an examination outline and didn't have a clue who they were.

We never had much of a support staff; I don't believe in them. Made everybody do ALL their own research and writing. Of course that meant I had to read and evaluate it all. First year or so I turned over almost the whole staff a couple of times and put so much red ink on their stuff it looked like I was slitting my wrists over it.

In Vino Veritas

I agree about most of the MSM. I can't even watch FNC. I think it's horrible. Their prime-time lineup is unwatchable from start to finish. In their case, it isn't because of left-wing bias, because they don't have it. I do happen to think they are more centrist than center-right... it's just the fact that nearly everyone else in the MSM is either center-left or hard left that makes them appear to be center-right.

The only unfiltered MSM sources I really depend upon are the WSJ (every day) and occasionally other print sources like the FT. I got no decent source for local news, because the level of stupidity there, even in the print media, is worse than on the national stuff.
---
"I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more I have of it." -- Thomas Jefferson

But over on dailykos, Darksyde turned it into a front-page diary. Apparently the krazy kos kids think that the AP made a great point. Those kids never saw a show of force they didn't hate.

No national interest or Zionist conspiracies involved in that one, so it was OK. We can only go to war when there's nothing to lose and nothing to gain.
---
"I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more I have of it." -- Thomas Jefferson

it "corrected" the perception that Clinton was a lame duck.

I agree with you and hope to hear more from your left-of-center perspective, as you seem to have well, a sense of perspective.

I'd say FNC is clearly center-right with The Newshour homing in most closely on the center. Even though I can tell that all of the PBS/NH hosts are personally left-of-center, they have a fairly good discipline and sense of perspective, even if they do get caught up in the (dumb) atmospherics created by the MSM.
John E.

As I was perusing the morning fishwrapper, i.e., The Anchorage Daily News, I was reminded of this discussion. Following is an exerpt from an AP piece from Juneau in our friendly good-morning McClatchey paper:

"Juneau, population 31,193, can be reached only by water or air. It's in the heart of America's largest national forest, the Tongass.

Juneau's front yard is the Inside Passage, the protected Pacific waters off Alaska's Panhandle. Its backyard is the Juneau Icefield, a 1,500-square-mile blanket of ice that feeds 38 glaciers. Most residents hike, ski, fish, hunt or kayak.

"That's what makes it worth it," Milliron said of living in a temperate rain forest. "We certainly don't live here for the weather."

Sitka blacktail deer abound in the forest. Black bears often wander into the city during seasonal migrations, stopping to dine on garbage or bird seed if residents leave them unprotected. Grizzly bears are kings of the forest, especially on nearby islands.

"A lot of people who aren't hunters carry firearms for that reason," Milliron said."

I don't recognize the reporter's name, so she must be one of the fresh little journalism grads they cycle through here. She's reporting with typical Lefty Outsider fascination the gun safety program at the Middle School that my kids all attended. So let's parse it:

OK, the first pp is all true, though I assure you that living in an enclave in a National Forest isn't all it's cracked up to be and most would consider both the islands and the mainland to comprise the Alaska Panhandle.

Second pp is more or less true, but Leftiness begins to show; a whole bunch more fish and hunt than hike and ski, and most of those who fish and hunt use big gas guzzling boats, SUVS, and ATVs, wear camo, and are armed to the teeth.

Well, you'd only live here for the weather if you were stark, raving mad.

And here's where it gets good: the Sitka Blacktailed deer is fairly uncommon in the forests around Juneau, unheard of until the last decade or so, and they're only here because they can't be hunted in the city. There's lots of them on the islands, where you have to use big, gas guzzling boats to barbarously go shoot them. Black bears don't migrate; they're permanent residents who den up in the forests in winter and raid garbage cans all summer. There may be a few grizzlies within a hundred miles or so and you never say never about where wild animals may wander, but there are essentially NO grizzlies anywhere near Juneau. The bear the reporterette is talking about is the Alaskan Brown Bear, a cousin of the grizzlie, and she's right that they are the kings, but of the SE Alaska Islands, not the mainland where JNU is located.

And the last pp is true; you walk those islands unarmed, I mean really armed, in peril of your life.

Now I know this is minutia about a place that nobody thinks about very often, but this is the stuff of simple fact checking; something with which the reportette and her editor couldn't be bothered. The scary part is that next month she might be at the AP Bureau in DC and the month after that reporting from Iraq or Afghanistan. Do you think she'll be checking her facts any more carefully?

In Vino Veritas

Maybe "No Child Left Behind" needs to create standardized history tests and create quotas for kids who are planning to go into journalism. "No Journalist Left Behind"?

That was my thoughts on the difference. War then rebuilding stage. I wondered why AE did not push that forward. Is there a problem with seeing the comparison that way?
John E.

I agree 100%.

Unfortunately, I don't think "sense" has much to do with this sort of coverage.

"I'm kind of old-fashioned. I like to engage my brain before my mouth." Donald Rumsfeld

and that is not in our control. The Iraqis have to do that. The question is:

What do we do to achieve success when the Iraqis won't help?
Unfortunatly, I think public opinion will drive the Dems to cut and run and leave a true, full scale civil war there.

The Iraqi hardliners don't want our job to be completed to our satisfaction.

was just a continuation of WWI.

Envisioning when all that is Left is the Right.

Where do you get yours?

I'm not a historian, but I'm a political scientist and in IR courses have read enough military history to support this point. There are several reasons why some historians have judged the two conflicts to be two halves, but I remember them including the facts that Germany wasn't actually defeated on the battlefield, many of the main issues remained unresolved and points of contention during the inter-war period, etc. I don't remember the reasons exactly, but I do remember that a defensible historical position exists on the subject.

let Saddam continue to do. Weakness and appeasement invites aggression.

www.race42008.com
"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson
http://gamecock.townhall.com

I don't think there is any dispute that the situation at the end of WW I set the stage for WW II. But is a long way from there to saying that they are continuations of the same war. The environment of Europe pre- WW I was radically different than that of pre-WW II Europe. The "monarchial" alliances were gone, replaced with more "national interest" alliances. The argument for them being part one and part two of the same conflict is based on the fact they were both wars. And even then it leaves our the Pacific aspect, which unless I miss my guess was part of WW II.

John
--------
Ethic humor is part of human nature. The Dutch tell Belgian jokes. The Belgians tell French jokes. The French tell English jokes. The English tell Irish jokes. The Irish tell Irish jokes.

frikin' stupid. Idiots can conjure concepts for anything and, in this case this one doesn't even warrant a rebuttal. As such, I deem it another bull paddy in a string of bull paddies that this poster has deposited upthread. If you want to stick your nose in it and say it smells ok, so be it. You apparently have some expertise in these things being a political scientist and all. BTW, IR classes? You're killing me.

Envisioning when all that is Left is the Right.

My only point was that the school of thought does exist. The debate upthread seemed to be whether such a school of thought existed and I thought I could help the debate by saying that it did.

I never argued for or against the idea itself. Actually, I don't, though I'm by no means an expert on the subject.

Sorry about the use of lingo - should've revised more carefully than I did. IR stands for international relations.

My usual caveat: I'm a liberal who lurks and sometimes posts on RedState. Please be patient.

but it's for the war on Global Warming. Ask Al if you don't believe it. :>)