What the Heck was I Thinking!?

From the Washington Times of January 27th.

Pet market bomb kills 15 persons

BAGHDAD — A bomb hidden in a box of pigeons exploded yesterday as shoppers gathered around, tearing through a busy pet and livestock market and littering the blood-soaked pavement with human remains and animal carcasses.

While it is terrible that the bomb killed so many people in a Baghdad pet market, you have to stop for a second and think: People in Baghdad are buying pets.

This means several things:

1. People want to go to a public place to look for a “luxury” item, pigeons, snakes, other birds, dogs, cats, and exotic animals to read the article;
2. People have the time, money and energy to keep pets. These aren’t animals that could be used for food, they’re a luxury item;
3. 15 people were killed, 66 injured, some unknown number of others were left alive to describe the horrific situation. That means that many more than 80 people were at the market. This is not some 5 to 10 guys meeting to trade pigeons.

All of this says that life in Baghdad is a lot more normal and prosperous than the press accounts would have us believe.

Source: Pet market bomb kills 15 persons - World - The Washington Times, America’s Newspaper

A while back I posted about the need for veterans to support our current forces in this war against the propadandists on the home front.

The Wolf at Blackfive ends a long post about the nutroots rallying in DC this weekend with these words:

To all of you VN-era vets out there, I’m asking for your help here. Help us speak out and ensure this never happens. You’ve been there, you got the t-shirt- you’ve experienced the hatred. I don’t want to see us go that route again.

Source: BLACKFIVE: I hate to say I told you so..

Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of all the factions involved in Middle East politics. Winds of Change.net has an interesting post about the question of whether Iraq can become a democracy or not.

One part of the post quotes from a description of the Hama Massacre from Wikipedia. That entry includes references to a book “Pity the Nation” by Robert Fisk. This quote from within the book tells a lot about why “baby” Assad would support Akhmadenijad and the Iranian Mullahs, who are Shiite, over al Qaeda and the other Sunni factions

Government repression in Syria hardened considerably, as al-Assad had spent in Hama any goodwill he previously had left with the Sunni majority, and now was compelled to rely on pure force to stay in power.

With examples like these and the current day news about what passes for politics in Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza strip, Iraq starts to look fairly calm. It looks especially so when you take out all the outsiders - Sunni recruits to al Qaeda in Iraq and Iranian IRGC and Qods Force.

Source: Winds of Change.NET: Hama Complex

QandO posted an entry looking at Sen. Jim Webb’s recent statements about the alleged loss of support among the military for the war in Iraq.

He makes several good points about the weakness of the survey results in supporting what Webb contends.

One entry stuck out at me that I think mr. McQuaid missed:

Earlier in that day, while questioning LTG Petraeus, the newly confirmed commander in Iraq, he was a bit more specific on his point about military support:

“There was a poll in the Service Times fairly recently that showed a majority of the people in the military no longer support the approach of this administration in terms of how the war should be fought.” (emphasis mine)

Disagreeing with the approach one takes, and disagreeing with the results one wants are two different things. Webb claims it’s the latter, but the survey question as reported is about the approach.

One could also say that the President disagrees with the prior approach! He’s changing that as we speak!

This harks back to one of my earlierposts about strategy and goals

Source: http://www.qando.net/ - Fact checking Jim Webb

Bruce McQuain at QandO blog has a very interesting post up about the Karbala raid in which 5 US soldiers were killed, 4 after having been kidnapped.

The post contains extensive excerpts from The Fourth Rail by Bill Roggio. They both conclude that the Iranians were behind the sophisticated raid in an attempt to at least gain release of their own people take prisoner recently in northern Iraq.

Bill Roggio notes:

This raid required specific intelligence, in depth training for the agents to pass as American troops, resources to provide for weapons, vehicles, uniforms, identification, radios and other items needed to successfully carry out the mission. Hezbollah’s Imad Mugniyah executed a similar attack against Israeli forces on the Lebanese border, which initiated the Hezbollah-Israeli war during the summer of 2006. (emphasis mine)

Mr. McQuain notes at the conclusion of his post:

Excellent points, excellent analysis and I’d guess it’ll be proven to be spot on eventually. If so, a whole new front in this war has just been blown wide open. And you heard it from a blog first. (emphasis mine)

This isn’t about the war in Iraq. This is the Islamo-fascist war to control the Middle East and establish the new caliphate. Those aren’t my words for it, it’s what they’ve said time and http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16356again.

If politicians and opinion-spouters don’t wonder at the “coincidence” of these raid types and the implication that the radical IRGC and Qods Force are behind them, they should turn in their party membership cards.

This string of information about the involvement of the radical Iranian leadership’s continued involvement in terrorism and irregular warfare reminds me of the catalog of information about the Sunni brand of salafi jihadists that became al Qaeda. Read “The Looming Tower”, by Lawrence Wright. (see also the 2 hour interview of Mr. Wright by Hugh Hewitt)

Link to http://www.qando.net/ - The Karbala Raid (UPDATED)

I read a couple of blogs, including Captain’s Quarters, which have the Day by Day cartoon by Chris Muir under their masthead.

This one really got a chuckle out of me. It’s a great parody of the PC-Mac advertisement.

Now, if I can only figure out how to get my Blogsome main page to show the daily cartoons from Chris, it would be great. If you check out the site some day and it’s hosed, you’ll know I’ve worked up the nerve to try something - and failed.

Pray for me.