Unqualified Offerings

Remember back in March when I said the real blog retrospectives should have been Feb 2003 and June 2003? Cause I remembered. Jumping the gun a little bit, I wrote the following four years and two days ago:

We can be sure of the following: the men and women of 3ID, like the rest of us, were lied to on the way to war. They expected a quick victory, a hero’s welcome in Iraq and a quick rotation home. They sort of got one out of three.

Imagine how it must feel to be them now. You’re nowhere you would choose to be, you’re not going home after all, for the foreseeable future, your equipment needs time in the shop, the locals you thought you were helping are getting surly on you - more and more often, lethally surly. There are more and more stories of troops dying at the hands of seemingly innocuous people. You increasingly can’t trust anyone you meet. Prudence dictates that you stay hard and ready and keep the locals at the other end of your gun. Less and less do you feel like helping anybody except your own. This is the thanks you get? Nerves fray, trigger fingers itch. Each new “incident” breeds the next demonstration, the next riot, the next “incident.” All of this does nothing for the Iraqis’ mood either. And it just gets worse. And it will.

There followed an outburst of ill temper, part of which provides this post its title.

Let’s see. On that day, Glenn Reynolds was writing about something involving Times reporter Rick Bragg and the issue of whether stringers get credit for their contributions to the article. Also a piece debunking the myth that the Pentagon’s version of the Jessica Lynch rescue was a fairy tale. Wonder why nobody just asked Jessica Lynch!
Pejman Yousefzadeh, who was a big deal once (hey, I was too, sorta!), was wondering if what was not yet known as the Emm Ess Emm^{TM Justin Slotman} would give “any publicity whatsoever” to the confirmed discovery of Saddam’s mobile biological laboratories. No, really! And you know what’s even funnier? He was linking a New York Times article at the time. And it wasn’t even by Judith Miller!

Good times.

Powerline dared to ask, “What, exactly, do these people think? Are they seriously trying to argue that Saddam didn’t have any chemical or biological weapons?” The funniest thing of course, is that they weren’t. Yet.

Michael Ledeen!

Within the past two months, leaders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards were informed by the country’s National Security Council that the country would soon have nuclear weapons, and there are some well-informed people who believe that the regime is hoping to be able to test a device by the end of the summer.

I cheated. He wrote that on May 27. But Andrew Sullivan linked it on May 29, so I’m waving it in. NB, in the column Ledeen does not call for bombing Iran! Instead he says,
“For if the United States chooses to give real support to the regime’s opponents, there could well be a replay of the mass demonstrations that led to the fall of Milosevic in Yugoslavia and the Marcoses in the Philippines.”

Now, as I’ve said many times, Michael Ledeen may not be an Iranian spy. Sure he fits the profile of a traitor. But that’s not proof. But if he were an Iranian spy, why would he be demanding that the US government “give real support to the regime’s opponents?” My thinking: to make it easier for the Iranian government to arrest them.

You know, if.