Yahoo! and TV 2.0

From my geekier side, this is an interesting article about how TV and the Internet are converging to make a new, better, kind of media (hopefully).

Michael Yon: firsthand combat reports

I read this post from Michael Yon a couple weeks ago and was awestruck by it. The post is about him witnessing a firefight between some terrorists and LTC Kurilla, commander of 1-24 Infantry (Striker). I know Michael is prior Special Forces and all, but going into that kind of situation armed only with a camera takes some serious cajones. While reading his post I thought about all the places I've been over here with my weapon(s) always close at hand. I wouldn't think of going the places he goes unarmed.
I don't know quite how he supports himself and his writing, but I"m impressed... Both with his writing and his bravery.

Phil and Becky: CBIED

For those of you who know what a VBIED is, you should enjoy this story about a suspected CBIED from Phil in Iraq.
hat tip: Greyhawk

September 11th

Today's the fourth anniversary of 9/11. Some people don't see the connection between what happened on 9/11 and where we are today with Iraq. For me, the connection couldn't be clearer. Before 9/11, we shrank from taking on our enemies on their soil. Before 9/11, Al-Qaeda blew up the US embassy in Kenya, attacked the USS Cole in Yemen. What did we do? We sent some cruise missiles their way, but not much more.
After 9/11, we took the battle to the enemy in Afghanistan, but that's like closing the barn door after all the horses have escaped. We'd already been attacked. Everyone was blasting Bush after 9/11 with questions like "Why didn't we know about this plot beforehand and move to stop it?" Well, when confronted with evidence of WMD in Iraq, Bush decided to move to stop the threat before it came to our shores.
Here's where the disconnect comes for most people. The cynical ones think that Bush manufactured evidence and skewed things in favor of invading Iraq in order to get revenge for Saddam trying to assassinate his father and/or to make a grab for Iraqi oil. I disagree. The intelligence presented to the president was flawed, yes, but the President has to rely on his people to feed him good info. I've been on exercises where the S2 (intelligence officer) predicted that the enemy would most certainly do X with equipment A and they ended up doing Y with equipment B.
What this all comes down to is that President Bush was presented with information of a credible threat from Iraq and he acted to eliminate that threat before it came to our shores again. I admire him for doing that. He took the hard right over the easy wrong choice.
The fact that we did not find WMDs in Iraq in any great quantity indicates a failure of actionable intelligence, not a failure of leadership from the top.
So here we are, four years later with over 2,000 servicemen and -women dead in the Global War on Terror. Make no mistake: the fight in Iraq is central to the War on Terror. No matter how we got there, we're there now and there are hundreds of wanna-be terrorists crossing into Iraq each day wanting to take a poke at Americans. Well these Americans in Iraq have body armor and weapons to fight the terrorists. That's more than the grandmothers on flight 93 had. So I say bring it on. If terrorists want a fight, there's 160,000 Americans in this theater (including me) and we all volunteered to serve.
Now if we bail out on this mission, there will be no free Iraq and things will go back to the isolationism of the late 90's.
Oh, and we will have lost another war because the public failed to understand that "supporting the troops" means supporting the mission that they are fighting and dying for.

Why we Must Stay in Iraq

From Victor Hanson, an article that appeared in the Washington Post about why we must stay in Iraq until the job is done. Mr. Hanson is a professor of military history at Stanford. An excerpt echoing my own analysis:

It is true that foreign terrorists are flocking into the country, the way they earlier crossed the Pakistani border into Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban, and that this makes the short-term task of securing the country far more difficult. But again, just as there were more Nazis and fascists out in the open in 1941 than before the war, so too there were almost none left by 1946. If we continue to defeat the jihadists in Iraq — and the untold story of this war is that the U.S. military has performed brilliantly in killing and jailing tens of thousands of them — their cause will be discredited by the stick of military defeat and the carrot of genuine political freedom.

Counterprotest article

More on the subject of protesters. The author of Conservative Propaganda has a great article about counter-protesting during the Code Pink Protest at Walter Reed Army Hospital that I mentioned yesterday. My favorite slice of this article was

Across the street from the main gate was another, larger band of counter-protestors with more and bigger signs. Code Pink takes a dim view of the counterprotestors in its website. It considers the counter-protests as "right-wing attacks." In the world of Code Pink, dissenting from their view is an attack. No disagreement with their position is legitimate. Nobody has the moral right to oppose their anti-war protests. In the lefty world, only lefties have free speech. To them, counter-protesting seems terribly unfair and wrong. They are uncomfortable with having their own tactics turned against them.

I agree wholeheartedly. These people think that the only free speech is that speech which agrees with their position. I wish that I had been to some of these counter protests when i was back stateside. Maybe I'll fly out and join Smash in San Diego.