Has al Qaeda been defeated in Iraq?

Hutch seems to think so. Zarkman and his crew are still wasting oxygen. The jihadis calling themselves Al Qaeda in Iraq are in a world of hurt right now, for sure. There are other jihadis, some loosely affiliated with the al Qaeda franchise and others who have been around longer. Few Americans differentiate between AQII and all the other bad guys, like Iranian special forces, Syrian special forces, former regime elements, Shiite militias, Sunni tribal gunmen and plain old regular mobsters.  I want Zarkman’s head. On a pike. In front of the flag pole at MNF-I headquarters.

Anyway, hutch says:

In 2006, bloggers are now an acknowledged player on the media battlefield. These efforts were dismissed by al Qaeda, and as a result, while al Qaeda hit its target, the effect was grossly minimized due to the fact that the “silent majority” now had tools by which they could be heard. The media created a false picture after the 1968 Tet Offensive, but was unable to do the same in Iraq.

I like that. A sergeant from CENTCOM sent me an email the other day wanting me to blog Zarkman’s video. Now to me, that is offical recognition that I, little old me, who just started this blog and barely knows what he is doing, is a player on the media battlefield.  The good guys  need more players on the media battlefield.  And on the media battlefield, you can be old and fat and used up but still useful.  If you can write, write.  If you can comment, comment.  And if all you can do is lurk, lurk on hostile media sites and acquire targets for blog storming.  A lot of people can get involved in the Civilian Irregular Information Defense Group, or the Civilian Information Militia, or the Cyber Minutemen, or the 101st Fighting Keyboardists, or whatever we end up calling ourselves.  What are you waiting for?

Is the honorable patriotism of Edward R. Murrow truly dead in American journalism?

Ralph Peters asks. Sadly, if not extinct, patriotism among main stream journalists is as rarely seen as Nessie.  The vast majority of people writing for the MSM are left-lib socialist, citizen of the world, anti-war, anti-military, anti-Bush Cronkite and Woodward wannabes.  Thirty years ago they were friends of them long haired, hippy-type, pinko fags, as Charlie Daniels so eloquently described them.  The schism that developed in America over the Vietnam War has only deepened and widened since.  How does somebody claim to be a patriot when they are ashamed of their country’s history, vitriolically opposed to their country’s leadership to the point of derangement, and contemptuous of most of their fellow citizens? 

Countering the Cyber Jihad

The war got personal for many bloggers and readers of blogs today.  Not only is there a war of ideas going on in cyber space, there is a kinetic war of electrons being waged.  While trying to educate my knuckle-dragging, computer illiterate self on cyber war, I ran up on this from The Jawa Report.  

The military lacks the tools to fight the internet jihad.

The solution?  There is no government solution.  The only people really equipped to counter the online threat are hackers themselves.  These cyber pirates have the necessary knowlege, tools, and experience in infiltrating and taking down websites.  With minimum investment in equipment, with the assurance that they will not be prosecuted for activities which are normally considered illegal, and with the promise of a reward for each website taken down, these cyber pirates would be turned into cyber privateers.  There skills which are normally deemed socially unacceptable, can be used to the advantage of winning the long war against militant Islam.

I wish I was smart enough to hack.  If you are reading this, be aware that the enemy has the capability to prevent you from reading this.  They can reach out and touch everyone with a computer.  The armed forces can’t protect you from this.  They can’t protect you from  sedition and psychological operations designed to demoralize you.  Like the Militia of Flight 93, the Civilian Information Militia will have to rise to the occasion.

BLOGS DOWN: HACK ATTACK

Craig Martelle left this comment over at Threatswatch:

The Denial of Service attack is reported to have originated out of Saudi Arabia. The clash of civilizations is on, and we’re losing. The first bastion of truth in the war of ideologies – the conservative bloggers – is taken off line by what appears to be the Islamist threat. The MSM has conceded through self-censorship – no bad words are printed about extremist Islam and the threat it poses. We are in a war – a big war. And few people seem to notice. I’m sorry it’s an election year, but “ineffectual” is a term that applies to Republicans and Democrats. No politician can see further than the polling stations.

This DoS attack against us directly in the blogosphere only confirms our assessment. We are indeed at war – in the clash of civilizations, which right now is mostly an information war. Let’s see if the MSM, the legacy media as they may be called, picks up on this DoS attack and identifies it for what it is – a demonstration of superior firepower in the information battle of the larger campaign against the free world. Although this sounds sensationalist, if you look at current events through these goggles, many things become much clearer and the inexplicable disappears. Take a a look with an open mind and you’ll see.

Join The 101st Fighting Keyboardists!

The Captain is recruiting.

Marcus Aurelius was recruiting, too.

I knew this guy

Retired Army Col. Robert L. Howard signs a copy of his citation of the Medal of Honor for a soldier at the Morale, Welfare and Recreation building at Al Asad, Iraq, April 20 speaks to U.S. Marines, Soldiers, and Sailors at the Chapel of Hope on Camp Fallujah, Iraq, April 21, 2006. Howard received the Medal of Honor March 12, 1968, for his gallant and intrepid actions in the Vietnam War. Leaving his helicopter landing zone and moving out to rescue a missing American soldier, his platoon came under attack by a two-company force. During the initial engagement, he was wounded and a grenade destroyed his weapon. Unable to walk, and seeing his platoon leader wounded, Howard crawled to his leader’s aid. After dragging the seriously wounded officer back to the platoon area, Howard was able to rally the disorganized platoon and direct their fire upon the encircling enemy with shouts of encouragement. For three and a half hours, his small force repulsed enemy attacks enough to give rescue helicopters a chance to land. He personally supervised the loading of his men and would not leave the bullet-swept landing zone until all of his soldiers were aboard the helicopters safely.

UPDATE 122409: He came to TQ a year later. I saw him in the Mainside DFAC. RIP, sir.

Staff Sgt. Jason C. Ramseyer, 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment

Six Generals Shot Down By The Internet

Strategy Page, April 25, 2006: The recent flap over six retired American generals publicly calling for the Secretary of Defense to resign, also brought out opinions, via the Internet, from lower ranking troops (active duty, reservists and retired.) The mass media ran with the six generals, but got shot down by the troops and their blogs, message board postings and emails. It wasn’t just a matter of the “troop media” being more powerful. No, what the troops had going for them was a more convincing reality. Unlike the six generals, many of the Internet troops were in Iraq, or had recently been there. Their opinions were not as eloquent as those of the generals, but they were also more convincing. Added to that was the complaint from many of the troops that, according to the American constitution, it’s the civilians (in the person of the Secretary of Defense) that can dismiss soldiers from service, not the other way around. While the six generals were only expressing their opinions (which only active duty troops are restricted from doing, because of the different military legal system they operate under), it rubbed a lot of people (military and civilian) the wrong way because of the constitutional angle. 

Naturally, the details of this media battle didn’t get a lot of coverage in the mass media. Makes sense. Who wants to discuss a defeat, by a bunch of amateurs no less. But the mass media has been missing an even larger story about the military and the Internet. 

Read the whole thing.

Update: The Generals and CDI

Gene LaRoque’s CDI.

Hutch sent me another link: Jed Babbin: Keep the Big Dog running about Rummy being a big dog with a pack of poodles yapping at him.

The PAO Conversation

Grim had some interesting discussions with active duty PAO guys at the Milblog Conference.

I posted this as a comment over there:

 We are losing the infowar. This “wall” between PA and IO is like Gorelick’s wall in the FBI. It is not realistic to differentiate between domestic and foreign audiences. Whatever is targeted at one will be seen by the other.

According to Joint Publication 3-13, psychological operations are planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign [AND DOMESTIC] audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign [AND OUR OWN] governments, organizations, groups and individuals. The purpose of psychological operations is to induce or reinforce foreign [AND DOMESTIC] attitudes and behavior favorable to the originator’s objectives.

Does anybody doubt that the enemy is running PSYOPS on us?

Who does domestic counter-PSYOPS? Hostile media are the enemy’s psywar operator’s, but the PA side won’t engage them as such. The center of gravity of this war is the will of the American people, half of whom are ready to quit right now.

A matter of life and death

Ann Hull is on my excrement list.  I had never heard of her.  I don’t read the Washington Post much.  I stumbled upon A matter of life and death while trolling for submissions for Maritime Monday.   linda_22003 tells me this article ran in the WAPO 4/9/06. Well, I missed it that time.  It was titled Call To Duty when it ran in the WAPO.  Hell, somebody has blogged this already, and identified it as agitprop, which it is.

So I start reading Ann’s article in this Chinese news site, and I get pissed.  This is my clan she is dissing.  I went to school in Mississippi.  Meridian is not very different from most of the towns in my stompin’ grounds.  

This boy doesn’t appear to be all that different from my boys, or all the other boys that have hung around my house for years.  The concerns of Blake’s mama are not unique to her, but the mother of my sons came to opposite conclusions.    Countering stuff like this is the mission of this blog. 

Patriotism and bleak demographics make the young men of Mississippi ideal cannon fodder for the war in Iraq.  That’s how she starts out.  Cannon fodder.  Good Flanders Fields quagmire imagery.

Sticking out of the mailbox across the road from Johnson’s trailer were two recruiting letters, one from the Army and the other from the National Guard – the Guard offering a US$10,000 signing bonus.  Just about every anti-Southern canard you’ve ever heard is in Ann’s piece.

The men in his family operate cranes, install cable and lay telephone lines. His father was mostly absent from his childhood. His mother held the family together, going back to college for her degree. She now works as an IT specialist at Peavey Electronics. They live in a mobile home on about a hectare of cleared land that cost US$3,000.   More of the “trailer trash” meme.  I’ve lived in trailers.  I may end up living in a trailer again some day.  Lots of good people down on the coast are living in trailers right now. 

Johnson jokes about being a hick, but the powerful realities in his life are hunting, church, Confederate soldier memorials and American flags. Hunting and church, yep, but boys that age don’t pay much attention to statues in front of the court house, and American flags are so much in evidence as to not be particularly noteworthy except to urban liberal citizens of the world.

Two houses down from where we live there’s Glenn Pugh,” Diane says. “His son got the Silver Star on Saturday. Another mile down the road is a young man who died in Iraq, Chris Mabry. I used to give him a ride home from football practice. I don’t want a flag. I don’t want a star. I want my child.”  Pardon me ma’am, but boys grow up.  Many grow up to be men.  Not as many as I would like, possibly because of too many apron strings tying them down.

Free Republic thread here.

Rough Draft: The gross unfairness of an all-volunteer Army

More to follow.

More of Ann Hull’s stuff here:

U.S. military ousts gay linguists

Gay Youth

Young and Gay in Real America

Related story at Shrinkwrapped:  “The Military Scares Me”

If we sit by and do nothing, so will our young men. Their’s won’t.

Milblog conference

This was great.  Like a true pajamahadeen, I participated from my living room, barefoot.  The video feed and chat room set up made my participation possible.  Lots of people worked hard to pull this off.  In such an endeavor, where outstanding meritorious service was so abundantly displayed, comparisons are invidious, however Andi’s performance reflects great credit upon herself, her blog, and the military arc of the blogosphere.

Greyhawk and Mrs. Greyhawk ran the chat room, which added a whole ‘nother dimension to my experience of the event. Fox News needs to incorporate live chat on the TV screen while Brit Hume and the Fox All Stars are pontificating so viewers don’t have to scream at the TV. Interactive participation. The wave of the future. Many familiar names in that chat room: John the Armorer, SWWBO, Sgt Hook, Huntress, kat, Old Sarge,concretebob,EagleSpeak, Lex and a host of others my feeble memory fails to recall, to my shame.

Someone asked if negative press affects morale. Chuck says sometimes it does. Troops sometimes laugh about cable news sound bites because they know what’s really going on.  I’m someone now! That was my question, submitted to Greyhawk in the chat room and asked by Andi. CPT Z got pretty animated.

I hope this becomes an annual event.

UPDATE: Andi’s AAR Roundup

AARs: John, the Armorer and Master of Castle Argghhh!!!

One Marines View

Murdoc

Gunn Nutt

Blackfive, where Grim left this intriguing comment: My sense from several previous conversations is that we’ve got the guys in the field understanding what needs doing and how — some of them are on the leading edge of developing these solutions. We’ve got the top level leadership, mostly, coming around — Abazaid, Cartwright, Rumsfeld, and according to the PAO, Bush. We still have to move the hardest bunch, though, which is the middle level officers who are just removed enough from the war to be attached to regulations instead of effect, and just powerful enough to throw up bureaucratic walls that can stop things from happening even when the combatant commander wants it (e.g., “well, sir, the lawyers say…”). Once you can get that middle on board, you’ll see things start moving fast in the right directions. Our PAO also said the funding was finally coming on line, which I can believe. That will improve his capabilities — so, if he also knows what to do with his newly funded capabilities, we can make things happen. One of the complaints I heard voiced was the degree to which MilBloggers have been “carrying the weight” of responding to charges, and it’s true. If we can work together with PA, and especially if we can use their language resources to get these counterarguments pushed into the media space in the Muslim world (e.g., Malaysia, Indonesia, the Arabic world), we’ll really be doing something to change the dynamic of the war.

kat-missouri wrote this at Castle Argghhh!. I”ve edited it down some here.  The whole thing is in the comments section of this post here.

1) Military Culture and Attitude Towards the Media is Bad.

2) The Military (and civilian administration) has failed to recognize the media is their customer, they are not the customer of the media.

3) This attitude, from top to bottom, is preventing the military from delivering the appropriate service to the customer/media.

4) The military has failed to recognize and maximize the media. It is the middleman. This middleman’s distribution ability reaches the greater audience/customer base that it wishes to influence (I do not simply mean Americans, either). The Military on its own cannot hope to reach this audience, not even through maximizing its “niche market” of bloggers, military magazines and “friendly” media, though it is a place to start rebuilding.

5) The military needs to develop a business strategy that includes finding, developing, selling to and maximizing this customer base. It needs to include developing a customer service plan, identifying the customers’ needs, appropriate distribution.

6) Passive distribution methods are ineffective. Military distribution of information acts as if it was a warehouse and the customer must come and pick up their own product or come to the office for service.

7) If the military does not provide the service to the media, it will get it from somewhere else. Quality may be poor, but quantity is never an issue. (list methods of identifying “customer” business and how to deliver services – most important is developing the personal touch)

8 ) The enemy has stated that half the battle is in the media. It is a major part of their strategy, not an after effect. The military has failed to elevate their information operations to the same status. It must become on par with Combat Operations and Civil Affairs.

9)The military has alternately treated the media with commraderie and contempt. Severe change in military attitude is directly related to Vietnam. All other actions and relations after only re-enforces this problem.

10) The military failed to understand the changing global information world during Vietnam and continues to fall behind in this category. The enemy then, as now, has not failed in this. (List specific lessons during this change) One reason I thought about this is the PAO at the conference kept saying that he was putting this stuff out and the media was doing anything with it.

A tiny bit of comfort

A soldier sees and feels a wider variety of sights and emotions in a year than most people will experience in a lifetime. …

In my short time in the military I have experienced more suffering than I could have imagined before joining up. I have held the hand of a dying Marine who had only one last wish: that someone would be with him and hold his hand as he passed on. So I sat there with a strange man, holding his hand, not saying a word, until he died. …

I have watched grown men cry, and cried with them, as we stood in front of the traditional memorial of a rifle thrust bayonet-first into the ground with the fallen soldier’s helmet and dog tags draped on the weapon. His empty boots stand at attention in the fore of this tableau.

My heart broke when I gazed upon a little girl, no older than my own 5-year-old, crying and begging in broken English for food and water. I have awoken from sleep in shock as it finally dawned on me how close I came to death on a recent patrol. I have lived in fear that I would never see my family again, or that my daughter would grow up without her daddy. …

On one of those days in Iraq where I wasn’t sure if I’d see my daughter again, I was working at a checkpoint near a small camp in the desert. … The locals would gather around our checkpoints to try to sell us things, beg for food or water, or just hang around the soldiers.

On this particular day one of the locals had his little girl with him. She was shyly watching me from behind his legs. When I smiled and waved at her, she brazenly ran up to me with a big smile and held out her arms, expecting to be picked up. At first I was shocked at her sudden bravery, and it took me a second to reach down and pick her up. When I did, she immediately kissed me on my cheek and then nestled in as if she meant to stay a while.

I looked toward her father and he immediately began talking rapidly in Arabic and gesturing at me. Our translator quickly explained that he, the father, had been locked in a prison for most of the child’s life. He had been sentenced to death for being a Shiite dissident traitor. The man went on to say that soldiers wearing the same patch on the shoulder as I was (the 101st Airborne Division) had freed him shortly after we began the liberation of Iraq. His daughter from then on believed that the famous Screaming Eagle patch of the 101st meant that we were angels sent to protect her family.

I sat in a little folding chair with that girl in my arms for well over 30 minutes. She trusted me so completely that she had fallen asleep with her head on my shoulder. All of my fears and worries faded as I held that little miracle. It had been so long since I had held my own daughter that this episode was even more healing for me than it was for her.

I have often wondered if, on that day when I missed my family so much, it wasn’t a coincidence that she found me, of all soldiers. Maybe it was that innocent girl, and not me, that was the angel sent by God.

Aric Catron, 25, a National Guardsman from Onalaska in Lewis County, wrote this letter from Baghdad, Iraq. Nadine Gulit of Operation Support Our Troops in Issaquah submitted Catron’s letter to the Seattle P-I with his permission. Catron is serving his second tour in Iraq.

h/t: Subsunk

CIA Fires Employee for Alleged Leak

fired for having unauthorized contacts with the media and disclosing classified information to reporters, including details about intelligence operations.

h/t nornsrevenge and Grandpa Dave

Spook86 says it’s A Step in the Right Direction

UPDATE: Chester has more on Mary McCarthy: The Left’s CIA Mole

Sometimes I just get so disgusted that treason and sedition and disloyalty can be so blatantly practiced without consequences. The political will to expend precious and scarce political capital on enforcing the law and prosecuting traitors does not exist. I fear for the Republic. Punishing traitors is definitely not a task we want citizen Army of David activists to take up.

Clinic Budget Shortfall in Iraq

The MSM /antique media’s Iraq failure mantra of  Americans have squandered reconstruction money by bad planning and incompetency  sounds a lot like Pelosi’s “dangerously incompetent” to me.  Coincidence? 

Sachi at Big Lizards explains how they struggle to put negative spin on what should be good news.

Punch that tube

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Pacific Ocean (April 18, 2006) – Gunner’s Mate 2nd Class Michael West cleans the barrel of an MK-45 5-inch/54-caliber gun on the foc’sle of the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Shoup (DDG 86). Shoup is currently underway in the Western Pacific operating area. U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate Airman James R. Evans

The Saudi Web Site Sting

One of the more successful counter-terrorism operations was pulled off in plain sight.   Saudi and Jordanian counter-terrorism officers apparently set up a number of pro-terrorist sites on the web, and went on to acquire a reputation of providing accurate and reliable information for fans, and practitioners, of Islamic terrorism. The operation was revealed when some of the site users accused the site operators of playing a role in the prompt round up of Islamic terrorists after the recent failed attempt to bomb Saudi oil facilities earlier this year. Apparently, the web sites were collecting useful information on their users, which allowed counter-terrorism agencies to track many active Islamic terrorists in Saudi Arabia. 

While several sites are now gone, more can be set up by counter-terrorism organizations. Moreover, many potential users of such sites are now reluctant to get involved. These pro-terror web sites have long been a powerful recruiting tool. Not so much any more.

CIA mines ‘rich’ content from blogs

The new Open Source Center (OSC) at CIA headquarters recently stepped up data collection and analysis based on bloggers worldwide and is developing new methods to gauge the reliability of the content, said OSC Director Douglas J. Naquin.      “A lot of blogs now have become very big on the Internet, and we’re getting a lot of rich information on blogs that are telling us a lot about social perspectives and everything from what the general feeling is to … people putting information on there that doesn’t exist anywhere else,”

DoD needs an element that monitors the blogosphere, getting good ideas from friendly bloggers, early warning from hostile bloggers, assessment of  communications effectiveness, early identification of potential PR flaps, and establishing relationships with pro-military bloggers.  The center of gravity in the Jihad is the will of the American people.  Psychological Operations are being conducted which are undermining that will.  The MSM is hostile.  Much of the blogosphere is not hostile.  The blogosphere is a virtual battlespace for the will of the American people.  Pro-military bloggers could be organized to function as auxiliaries, legally permitted to target domestic audiences in ways prohibited to active duty bloggers. 

Michael Yon: Of Words

The biggest threat to this mission, and by extension to the future stability of this region and the long term security of the United States and our allies, is and always has been the inability to see, hear and communicate the truth to the American people and our allies. In the final analysis, it is not going to matter if the French support our mission in Iraq, but once Americans turn away from their soldiers in the field, we’ve lost.

We have gotten our troops into combat and now we are ignoring them. It’s little wonder that Americans would be angry at me for calling a civil war a civil war. Most of them have no idea what is going on! But this is not the sole fault of the media: if there were great demand for information from the wars, they would dispatch legions of journalists. It is the people at home who are ignoring our people at war.

. . . in the absence of better reporting of the complex situation on the ground, good and bad, Americans are increasingly turning against this mission. They are not ignoring poor media but are rewarding it by paying attention to it. The people are not ignoring the poor media, but they are doing something far worse: they are ignoring our troops!

The truth is often painful.  This is a long read, much of which I am relunctant to accept.  But I’ve never been to Iraq and he has.  The will of the American people is cracking.  Who can shore it up, and how?

Science Board to Study Internet’s Impact on Military Ops

“‘Googling’ and ‘blogging’ are making their way into military operations at all levels,” Krieg wrote. “But the full implications of this revolution are as yet unknown, and we have no clear direction and defined doctrine.”

One of the serious problems in planning the fight against American doctrine, is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine… From a Soviet Junior Lt’s Notebook

China’s Restless Hackers

From Strategy Page:

April 18, 2006: China has organized a civilian Cyber War force. It’s called the “Red Hackers Alliance” (RHA) and is officially a network security organization, composed of patriotic Chinese network security experts. China does have a major problem with network security, as the average Chinese PC user is much less well equipped, in terms of protective software, and expertise. Computer viruses and worms that are a minor nuisance in the West, are often major problems in China.

The RHA has a paid staff, including university trained network security experts. Officially, the RHA provides training and advice about network security. But the RHA is has also apparently absorbed the thousands of Chinese hackers who used to belong to informal hacker organizations. These groups often openly launched Cyber War attacks against foreign targets. One of the more notorious examples of this was in the Spring of 2001, when outraged Chinese hackers went after American targets in the wake of a Chinese fighter crashing, after colliding with an American P-3 patrol aircraft. American hackers fought back, and apparently there was more damage on the Chinese side. 

In the wake of the 2001 incident, the Chinese hacker organizations began to disband, even though they were the source of more serious, espionage related, hacking. The government apparently liked the talent of the Chinese hackers, but not their lack of discipline. Although the older hacker groups had liaison with the government, this was not enough to prevent “adventurism.” The RHA is apparently the solution to that problem, and is yet another addition to China’s growing Cyber War apparatus. 

China has over 20,000 people involved in monitoring people using the Internet in China, as well developing Cyber War weapons and defenses. This effort to organize Chinese hackers, for a network security effort, may be more successful than attempts to control their more playful activities. Hacking is all about spontaneity and, well, some misbehavior. 

China does not want to alienate it’s hacker community. Having the hackers on your side, in such an enthusiastic fashion, is rare, and a major advantage. But at the same time, ongoing government efforts to control Internet use angers many hackers. If the RHA officials lean on the hackers too much and too often, China may find that it has created a monster it has angered, and cannot control.

Civilian Information Operators.  Shutting down hostile web sites.  The cyber war version of going kinetic.  America needs a capability like this. 

SecDef Talks to Rush

RUSH: Let me ask you this question: [snip] You have to be aware of it anti-war opinion of those in the country who have it and you’re aware of the people who are trying to foment it and make it larger. How do you as a public servant square the attitude of the anti-war people if you think it’s a large group of people with what are your stated goals and what the president stated goals are? How do you put those two together and end up formulating a policy and sticking to it?

SECRETARY RUMSFELD: That’s a very important question, and I guess only someone who’s rooted in the history of our country, I think, could accept the kinds of comments that are being made — and if we recognize that the same kinds of criticism that occurred in the Revolutionary War and World War I and World War II and the Korean War, Vietnam War, it’s not new. There have always been people who have opposed wars. Wars are terrible things. On the other hand, if every time there were critics and opponents to war, we wouldn’t have won the Revolutionary War and we wouldn’t have been involved in World War I or II, and if we had we would have failed, and our country would be a totally different place if it existed at all, if every time there were some critics that we tossed in the towel. I think we just have to accept it, that people have a right to say what they want to say, and to have an acceptance of that and recognize that the terrorists, Zarqawi and bin Laden and Zawahiri, those people have media committees.

They are actively out there trying to manipulate the press in the United States. They are very good at it. They’re much better at (laughing) managing those kinds of things than we are, and we have to recognize that we’re not going to lose any battles out in the global war on terror out in Iraq or Afghanistan. The center of gravity of that war is right here, and in the capital of the United States of America and other Western capitals, in London, they’re trying. It’s a test of wills, and what’s at stake for our country is our way of life. They want to strike at the very essence what we are. We’re free people, and our task in government, by golly, is to help protect the American people from people who killed 3,000 people here on September 11th and killed people in London and Madrid and Bali, and country after country around the world who have no problems beheading people and murdering innocent men, women and children.

The center of gravity of this Counter-Jihad is the will of the American people, close to half of whom are already ready to throw in the towel.  Secretary Rumsfeld just confirms publicly what I already knew.  That’s why I started this blog.  The enemy is running psychological operations on us, right here in America, aided and abetted by the MSM and the anti-war movement.  Military Information Operations and Public Affairs Officers can’t really counter this.  They need help from the pajamahadeen.  Let’s roll. 

Rumsfeld’s Job Security — Firing Him Loses Iraq

Go read DEMIGODS AND GENERALS right now!