Iraq insurgency in 'last throes,' Cheney says

[John Galt]

Originally Posted by gstelmack

That's an absurd claim, given that Al-Qaeda hasn't attacked here successfully since we went into Afghanistan and then Iraq. The war is now being fought on their soil instead of ours.

That's an absurd claim, given that Iraq was NEVER "their"/Al-Qaeda's turf before the war.

[BrianD]

Originally Posted by gstelmack

That's an absurd claim, given that Al-Qaeda hasn't attacked here successfully since we went into Afghanistan and then Iraq. The war is now being fought on their soil instead of ours.

How many Al-Qaeda attacks were there before 9/11? How many failed attacks have there been since? It is hard to know if national security is better if nobody was testing it before or is testing it now.

[sterlingice]

Originally Posted by gstelmack

That's an absurd claim, given that Al-Qaeda hasn't attacked here successfully since we went into Afghanistan and then Iraq. The war is now being fought on their soil instead of ours.

Homer: Not a bear in sight. The "Bear Patrol" must be working like a charm!

Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.

Homer: Thank you, dear.

Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.

Homer: Oh, how does it work?

Lisa: It doesn't work.

Homer: Uh-huh.

Lisa: It's just a stupid rock. But I don't see any tigers around, do you?

Homer: (pause) Lisa, I want to buy your rock.

SI

[Glengoyne]

Originally Posted by sterlingice

Homer: Not a bear in sight. The "Bear Patrol" must be working like a charm!

Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.

Homer: Thank you, dear.

Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.

Homer: Oh, how does it work?

Lisa: It doesn't work.

Homer: Uh-huh.

Lisa: It's just a stupid rock. But I don't see any tigers around, do you?

Homer: (pause) Lisa, I want to buy your rock.

SI

Very nicely played.

[st.cronin]

The absence of or a reduction in attempted crimes is a valid metric in evaluating police departments. I think an absence of attempted terrorist attempts should be a valid metric, although certainly not the last word, in evaluating homeland security.

[John Galt]

Originally Posted by st.cronin

The absence of or a reduction in attempted crimes is a valid metric in evaluating police departments. I think an absence of attempted terrorist attempts should be a valid metric, although certainly not the last word, in evaluating homeland security.

There is a substantial problem of sample size with terrorism.

[st.cronin]

Originally Posted by John Galt

There is a substantial problem of sample size with terrorism.

Of course; but whether the lack of attempts (that we know of) is due to the diligence of our homeland security or some other factor, it is still something for the people in charge of homeland security to take credit for.

[John Galt]

Originally Posted by st.cronin

Of course; but whether the lack of attempts (that we know of) is due to the diligence of our homeland security or some other factor, it is still something for the people in charge of homeland security to take credit for.

I don't know about that. When you have a sample size of 1 attack every few years, you can't take credit for anything. If there was an attack tomorrow, does that mean homeland security has been a complete failure? When you are dealing with small sample sizes, you can't assume correlation is causation.

[Klinglerware]

Originally Posted by st.cronin

The absence of or a reduction in attempted crimes is a valid metric in evaluating police departments.

Possibly, but economic factors such as unemployment rate and average wage are also very highly correlated with crime rate. I wouldn't be surprised if economics has more explanatory power than police performance, since economic forces are much more overarching, while police activity is more micro/tactical.

New York is an example of how changes in the crime rate cannot be explained by changes in police tactics alone. Mayor Giuliani and his famed "zero-tolerance" and "quality-of-life" crime-fighting policies coincided with a yearly drops in NYC's crime rate. However, the crime rate started falling in the early 90s, before Giuliani was elected. Not coincidentally, NYC's economic recovery started at that time, and economic growth continued through the 90s. By 2002, NYC's crime rate started to go back up slightly, coinciding with the downturn in the economy. Yet, "Zero tolerance" was still the official crime policy in NYC, so there is evidence that the police may not be as important to the crime rate as general economic conditions (though I wouldn't doubt that police tactics have some impact).

[flere-imsaho]

Good Read:

Coming Home
By JOHN CRAWFORD
Tallahassee, Fla.

IT was raining when I stepped off the plane and into a chilly Georgia morning. The line of soldiers, heads down, struggled underneath the weight of their gear across the tarmac and into a long, low building full of Red Cross coffee and doughnuts. Along the way a general stood shaking hands and exchanging salutes with the returning soldiers. Next to him, a young lieutenant shivered as he held an umbrella out at arm's length over the general. Neither had combat patches on their uniforms, and I splashed by without saluting or shaking hands. It gave little satisfaction.

It had been just over a year since I had last been at that airport; that first time there had been banners and flags, family members waving fervently at the departing plane. This time the weather, I guess, had kept them home and the gray sky was the only real witness to our return. Clouds or no, the "freedom bird" had landed and our war was over, we were home.

I left for Iraq on Feb. 12, 2003. The war hadn't started yet. The Florida National Guard in which I was serving as a specialist was partly made up of former active-service infantrymen from the Rangers, the 82nd Airborne, the 10th Mountain and (in my case) the 101st Airborne. The rest were "straight Guard," as we called them: college students, small-business owners, police officers, contractors, painters or unemployed. They had signed up for the fabled "one weekend a month, two weeks a year" and gotten very much more than they bargained for.

Still, things started fairly well. There were no complaints as March waned and we crossed from Kuwait into Iraq; only thinly veiled excitement. As the weeks turned to months, however, and we watched active-duty units return to their families, our stoicism was replaced with mounting frustration. Our Vietnam-era flak vests, retooled M-16's more than two decades old and a general absence of supplies added to an irrefutable feeling that we had been abandoned in the lion's den.

When the tour ended a year later, our uniforms were in tatters, night vision goggles had been packed away seven months earlier when all our replacement parts ran out, and the ragged men who stepped off the plane in Hinesville, Ga., scarcely resembled the "shock-and-awe" troops seen on television. Nevertheless, we were soldiers returned home ... victorious, at least in a sense.

That night, in the same dilapidated World War II barracks that we had deployed from an eternity before, I didn't sleep. I thought it was because of the Christmas-morning-like tremble in the air. In reality, I had become addicted to Valium in Baghdad and was going through withdrawal. Sitting alone on my bunk in the darkness, I felt a wave of nausea approaching. That sick feeling hasn't entirely gone away yet.

A week later someone gave a speech, and bags full of coupons for free double cheeseburgers and oil changes were handed out. (Most of the good freebies had already been plundered by 17-year-old trainees who hadn't yet been to basic training.) And with a wave goodbye and a pat on the back, we were civilians again. I heard there was a parade a few months later, but I was too drunk to go and it wasn't on television.

Even the best laid plans go awry, and that is what happened with me. While many in my platoon had relatively easy transitions, I found myself within days kept from homelessness only by the hospitality of a friend with a sofa. It was like being at a party and going to the restroom for 15 months and then trying to rejoin the conversation. Everyone and everything had changed without asking me first.

I took solace in becoming the kind of self-deprecating drunk who shows up at parties naked and wonders why everyone reacts the way they do. The sequence of events that followed culminated in my waking up on the dingy bathroom floor of an even dingier one-bedroom apartment devoid of furniture, except for a couch pulled from a dumpster early one rainy morning before the garbage man could claim it. In that bathroom, fighting off sickness from the year's excess, I did some soul-searching.

I didn't find a whole lot. I don't have nightmares, or see faces. When there is a flash outside my window at night I know it's just lightning and not a flare or explosion. I can even drive without cringing at the slightest pile of rubble along the roadside in anticipation of an ear-rending explosion and shrapnel tearing through my flesh. I rarely get into fights with people who I imagined are "eyeballing me." I actually adjusted quite well.

It certainly could have been worse. One of my buddies got locked up in an institution by the police for being a danger to himself. Another woke up in the hospital with no memory of the beating he received from those same police - not for being a danger to himself, but to everyone else. One guy got a brain infection and wakes up every morning expecting to be in Iraq. Two more are in Afghanistan, having re-upped rather than deal with being home. Five more went back to Baghdad as private security guards. Their consensus on how it is a second time around: still hot and nasty.

The ones who are still around here I don't see as much as I used to; that doesn't come as much of a surprise. Too many things have happened since we got back a little over a year ago. Busy schedules and girls have gotten in the way. Classes have to be attended, jobs worked; life goes on.

War stories end when the battle is over or when the soldier comes home. That's one way to tell it's a story. In real life, there are no moments amid smoldering hilltops for tranquil introspection. When the war is over, you pick up your gear, walk down the hill and back into the world, where people smile, congratulate you, and secretly hope you won't be a burden on society now that you've done the dirty work they shun.

Lying there on that bathroom floor, with my dog eyeing me and wondering if a coup d'état would be necessary to ensure his continued food supply, I did figure out one thing: My problem was, I had the wrong definition of home. All my life I learned it was "where the heart is." Things are much easier now that I've figured out that home is just a place where you receive mail.

John Crawford is the author of "The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier's Account of the War in Iraq."

[flere-imsaho]

Iraqi Constitution Delayed

Supposed to be finished on 8/15, but a compromise couldn't be reached. It's unclear if this will put the December elections behind schedule.

[flere-imsaho]

I know the usual suspects (Dutch, Cam, JiMG) will roll their eyes at this, but there was an excellent segment about the Iraqi Constitutional process on Tuesday's Jim Lehrer Newshour on PBS.

What I think made this segment very good was that they spent the bulk of the time talking with Paul Williams, who was, until a month ago, assigned by the U.S. as a legal advisor to the process. Thus he's got a real insider view, and a lot of what he said about the process, and the personalities involved, I hadn't really heard before.

Here's a link to the transcript: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middl...tion_8-16.html

There are also audio & video downloads, if you'd prefer that.

This isn't the usual network/cable "talk about it for 1 minute then yell opposing viewpoints until the commercial break" stuff. I think the interview with Williams itself is over 5 minutes long.