Bookworm Room

BUDS trainees during Hell Week Special troops are, by definition, small in number.  If everyone could do what they do, they would be special.  They are made up of men with unusual mental and physical strength.  Again, by definition this is a subset of all men.  (No disrespect meant to the majority of men who [...]

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My post caption is not a joke:  According to USA Today, the newest NATO tactic in Afghanistan is, in essence, to pretend there is no enemy: Military commanders in Afghanistan have stopped making public the number of allied troops killed by Afghan soldiers and police, a measure of the trustworthiness of a force that is [...]

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A friend sent me a link to an editorial bemoaning the fact that, by abruptly pulling out from Iraq and, soon, Afghanistan, the Obama administration is ensuring that we’re leaving a job undone — something that invariably means one has to do it again.  If history is going to keep repeating itself, why can’t we [...]

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Sadie played connect the dots for me: Dots begin here . . . . After 10 months of secret dialogue with Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents, senior U.S. officials say the talks have reached a critical juncture and they will soon know whether a breakthrough is possible, leading to peace talks whose ultimate goal is to end [...]

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I like Pete Wehner’s writing a lot.  I don’t always agree with him, but I often do, and I always enjoy the way in which he develops his ideas.  This column, about the post-Vietnamesque horrors that Obama is cheerily planning for Afghanistan (although I’d say the Taliban will be even more savage than the North [...]

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When I read about Obama’s drawing down troops so that he’d send tens of thousands home right before the election, I said that I didn’t think this would make the troops vote for him.  Barry Rubin kindly pointed out that the calculation wasn’t to get troop votes, but to get votes from his antiwar base.  [...]

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Peter Wehner writes about Obama’s decision to draw down troops in Afghanistan, something that (just coincidentally, of course) will take place right before Obama’s reelection bid.  Wehner is appalled, and he explains that this gross political calculation isn’t the way it needs to be: I have the advantage of having served a president during wartime. [...]

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Does the administration’s decision to arm the Libyan rebels remind you of anything?  It does me.  It reminds me of the Reagan administration’s decision to arm the rebels in Afghanistan. Back then, the rebels were not our enemy, and they were fighting a sworn enemy against whom we’d been engaged in myriad proxy wars for [...]

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Years ago, in another life, I dated a man who had worked for Rolling Stone and personally knew Jann Wenner.  (My ex-boyfriend claimed that a well-known Rolling Stone photographer was the one who introduced him to and got him hooked on cocaine.  I have no idea if he was telling the truth or not, but [...]

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Will Democrats once again snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Here’s a very encouraging report about the latest NATO (mostly American forces) offensive in Helmand province, one of the last redoubts of the Taliban. I don’t know how much play this will get in the Mass Media, as they generally don’t like to talk [...]

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Peter Wehner describes the conduct, but I think, when you behave as Obama as, the word “contemptible” can apply, with equal aptness, to the man himself (emphasis mine): I have praised President Obama in the past for his decision to send more troops to Afghanistan. New facts have come to light since then. And, arguably, [...]

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Phibian, who is one one of my oldest blog friends, explains at Big Peace how the President’s entirely artificial time line for withdrawing from Afghanistan not only emboldens the Taliban (and makes a negotiated peace impossible), but also destroys all good efforts at future planning in that theater. If you like Phibian’s writing (and who [...]

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My (conservative) book club read Victor Davis Hanson’s A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War. One of the points Hanson makes in the book is that Pericles embarked upon a new type of warfare: Periclean strategy . . . defined the new war as battle not between hoplites [...]

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I feel I should say something, so I will.  Being me, of course, what I say will be discursive. Re McChrystal:  An excellent general who didn’t hit it off with Obama from the git-go (blame lies, I believe, with Obama), and who failed utterly in the diplomatic discretion category — something that’s true whether you [...]

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[I'll keep this at the top through Memorial Day.  Scroll down for lots of new posts.] Several years ago, as part of a 9/11 commemoration, I wrote the following words as part of a post I did about Lt. Brian Ahearn, one of the New York fire fighters who perished on that day: My son, [...]

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As I’ve mentioned just a few times, I just read, and was very moved by, Marcus Luttrell’s Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10.  A liberal I know flipped through the book’s first few pages and had a very different reaction.  The following passages bugged the [...]

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I meant to post this yesterday, but time got away from me:  many, many, many congratulations to the Marines and their Afghan allies for the Marjah victory.  I never doubted that they would win, but I certainly understood that each Marine and Afghan soldier faced the risk that he would make the ultimate sacrifice for [...]

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A friend sent me this powerful (non-exclusive) image from Michael Yon: Yon describes it as follows: A crew from the United States Air Force spent Saturday night and Sunday morning airlifting different groups of wounded soldiers from Kandahar to Camp Bastion to Bagram, back to Kandahar, then back to Bagram, and back to Kandahar. These [...]

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I don’t have a comment here.  I just think this story is interesting: An unclassified study from a military research unit in southern Afghanistan details how homosexual behavior is unusually common among men in the large ethnic group known as Pashtuns — though they seem to be in complete denial about it. [snip] In one [...]

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Despite giving the generals almost 75% fewer troops than the 80,000 they really wanted (and even significantly less than the 40,000 they sort of wanted), and despite telling the Taliban and Al Qaeda exactly when the field is theirs, and despite dwelling morbidly on death in front of the men and women at West Point [...]

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As I write this, Obama hasn’t spoken yet, but he has released excerpts from his speech.  These are my first thoughts on his words: “The 30,000 additional troops that I am announcing tonight will deploy in the first part of 2010 – the fastest pace possible – so that they can target the insurgency and [...]

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One of the best things George Bush did during his presidency was to appoint the late, great Tony Snow as his press secretary.  Snow was a dream press secretary, straight out of central casting:  handsome, intelligent, erudite, informed, charming and witty.  Even the savagely anti-Bush press appeared to enjoy his statements and, once he was [...]

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Here’s our Commander in Chief speaking of the situation in Afghanistan while he was running for office:  “We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.” This post is not about [...]

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Obama has known for more than 12 months that he was going to become CIC, with responsibility for Afghanistan.  This means 12 months of presidential advisers able to give this neophyte help in figuring out the best strategy for the war that he declared, during the campaign, was the essential, central battlefield in the war [...]

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American Thinker is a site I check regularly, at least twice a day.  It’s not just that the editors are kind enough to publish my work occasionally.  It’s because the articles that appear there routinely range from really good to out-of-the-park stupendous. Today, there are two that fall in the latter category.  These are the [...]

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