The Real Ugly American.com

Fred Barnes was talking a lot about realignment before the 2006 elections. Michael Barone has a new take today at the Opinion Journal.

Ok this is just dumb.

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Congrats to John Hawkins of Right Wing News on his new gig consulting for GOP Presidential candidate Duncan Hunter. Here are some details from RWN:

On February 3, Nathan Tabor from TCV Media got in touch with me and asked if I’d be interested in consulting for the Duncan Hunter campaign. We bantered back and forth, came to a basic understanding that Saturday, and then finalized the deal the next day. Long story short, TCV Media brought me on board to be their point person in building up buzz for Duncan Hunter online.

Since I am a blogger who’s doing some consulting on the side, not a consultant doing blogging to get his name out there, I did attach a condition to my employment that Nathan was willing to go along with:

#1) I agreed to work a maximum of 3 months for the campaign — which should be, in my estimation anyway, plenty of time to give Hunter a huge boost in name recognition and prominence in the blogosphere.

Additionally, while I am working on the campaign, I’m not planning to blog about any of the 2008 Republican contenders on RWN unless a story too big to ignore hits the wires. That’s because I don’t want to come across like a shill for Duncan if I eviscerate one of his opponents or talk him up. Additionally, if I’m done by May of 2007, at the latest, it’s not as if it will be too late to get in on the serious 2008 discussions.

Being a San Diego native. I wish John and Congressman Hunter the very best.

Also cross posted at the BlogWorld Blog.

[tags] Duncan Hunter, 2008 elections, GOP, Primary[/tags]

Ok thats a really bad joke, particularly after you read this great post from KT Cat:

The skillet licking, namby-pamby mama’s boys across the pond are finally standing up to the Islamists in their midsts. Yes, those smelly, haughty wieners with the moist, limp handshakes have found their spines. “This far and no more!” they cry out.

What am I talking about? Well, the largest organized, non-Muslim religion with any kind of energy or self-confidence in Europe, the wacko animal rights activists, are protesting the ritual slaughter of sheep by Muslims. Here’s a bit from an article in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Living cheek by jowl in Brussels with the many bureaucrats who run the European Union, Muslims in the city turned an estimated 25,000 sheep toward Mecca this year and cut their throats to celebrate the story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son to God.

That is what Salim Lone concludes in his International Herald Tribune Piece today:

The best antidote to terrorism in Somalia is stability, which the Islamic Courts have provided. The Islamists have strong public support, which has grown in the face of U.S. and Ethiopian interventions. As in other Muslim-Western conflicts, the world needs to engage with the Islamists to secure peace.

Who is this guy?

The International Tribune offers these credentials:

Salim Lone, who was the spokesman for the UN mission in Iraq in 2003, is a columnist for The Daily Nation in Kenya.

Earlier in the article Mr. Lone writes:

The UN Security Council, however, did take up the issue, and in another craven act which will further cement its reputation as an anti-Muslim body, bowed to American and British pressure to authorize a regional peacekeeping force to enter Somalia to protect the transitional government, which is fighting the Islamic Courts.

Mr. Lone is what is wrong with the world Mr. Lone is either an appeaser of terrorists and islamofascists or a supporter of them. Either way his position is a deadly one and needs to be called for what it is. If he speaks for the UN then to apply his standards the UN should be viewed as an anti-freedom body.
Unfortunately this is what many in the world believe. This is what sets the United States apart from most of the world, at least most governments in the world. Islamofascists are not good for Somalia or anyone anywhere anytime. Women being forced to wear veils, burkas, hijabs, or anything else is wrong no matter what country you live in and no matter what religion you believe in.

Sharia is wrong no matter what country you live in and no matter what religion you believe in. If your Imam, priest, or cleric is telling you that you need to support Sharia law in your country, then you need to stand up and demand reformation in your mosque.
Some might say believing that makes me an Ugly American. I would answer unapologetically believing that is what makes America the greatest country on earth.

If you really want to know who we are fighting, if you haven’t tuned out the daily developments in the war against world wide Islamofascism (a term one of the main sources of this piece takes issue with) then you have to read Knowing The Enemy in the New Yorker. Warning this is a very very long piece and most likely no matter what your position is on Iraq, the greater war, lack thereof or domesitc American politics you are going to find several things to disagree with.

If you are like me you will also be encouraged to see some very smart people are putting serious effort into winning this war.

Here are a few excerpts which are also pretty long, but if you believe as I do this is the most important issue in the world today then it is well worth the time. First a little background on David Kilcullen who struck me as someone who should be briefing the president and the Sec Def, Secretary of State, and Joint Chiefs directly.

In 1993, a young captain in the Australian Army named David Kilcullen was living among villagers in West Java, as part of an immersion program in the Indonesian language. One day, he visited a local military museum that contained a display about Indonesia’s war, during the nineteen-fifties and sixties, against a separatist Muslim insurgency movement called Darul Islam. “I had never heard of this conflict,” Kilcullen told me recently. “It’s hardly known in the West. The Indonesian government won, hands down. And I was fascinated by how it managed to pull off such a successful counterinsurgency campaign.”

Kilcullen, the son of two left-leaning academics, had studied counterinsurgency as a cadet at Duntroon, the Australian West Point, and he decided to pursue a doctorate in political anthropology at the University of New South Wales. He chose as his dissertation subject the Darul Islam conflict, conducting research over tea with former guerrillas while continuing to serve in the Australian Army.  During the years that Kilcullen worked on his dissertation, two events in Indonesia deeply affected his thinking. The first was the rise—in the same region that had given birth to Darul Islam, and among some of the same families—of a more extreme Islamist movement called Jemaah Islamiya, which became a Southeast Asian affiliate of Al Qaeda. The second was East Timor’s successful struggle for independence from Indonesia.

“I saw extremely similar behavior and extremely similar problems in an Islamic insurgency in West Java and a Christian-separatist insurgency in East Timor,” he said. “After 9/11, when a lot of people were saying, ‘The problem is Islam,’ I was thinking, It’s something deeper than that. It’s about human social networks and the way that they operate.”

His thoughts on Osama Bin Laden’s propoganda campaign:

His thoughts on American war fighting, and Jihadist motivations:

“America is very, very good at big, short conventional wars? It’s not very good at small, long wars? But it’s even worse at big, long wars? And that’s what we’ve got.”

“If I were a Muslim, I’d probably be a jihadist,” Kilcullen said as we sat in his office. “The thing that drives these guys—a sense of adventure, wanting to be part of the moment, wanting to be in the big movement of history that’s happening now—that’s the same thing that drives me, you know?”

His definition of the war on terror and the strategy required to win it:

Kilcullen redefined the war on terror as a “global counterinsurgency.” The change in terminology has large implications. A terrorist is “a kook in a room,” Kilcullen told me, and beyond persuasion; an insurgent has a mass base whose support can be won or lost through politics. The notion of a “war on terror” has led the U.S. government to focus overwhelmingly on military responses. In a counterinsurgency, according to the classical doctrine, which was first laid out by the British general Sir Gerald Templar during the Malayan Emergency, armed force is only a quarter of the effort; political, economic, and informational operations are also required. A war on terror suggests an undifferentiated enemy. Kilcullen speaks of the need to “disaggregate” insurgencies: finding ways to address local grievances in Pakistan’s tribal areas or along the Thai-Malay border so that they aren’t mapped onto the ambitions of the global jihad. Kilcullen writes, “Just as the Containment strategy was central to the Cold War, likewise a Disaggregation strategy would provide a unifying strategic conception for the war—something that has been lacking to date.”

by speaking of Saddam Hussein, the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, the Taliban, the Iranian government, Hezbollah, and Al Qaeda in terms of one big war, Administration officials and ideologues have made Osama bin Laden’s job much easier. “You don’t play to the enemy’s global information strategy of making it all one fight,” Kbilcullen said. He pointedly avoided describing this as the Administration’s approach. “You say, ‘Actually, there are sixty different groups in sixty different countries who all have different objectives. Let’s not talk about bin Laden’s objectives—let’s talk about your objectives. How do we solve that problem?’ ” In other words, the global ambitions of the enemy don’t automatically demand a monolithic response.

On the Taliban:

Kilcullen doesn’t believe that an entirely “soft” counterinsurgency approach can work against such tactics. In his view, winning hearts and minds is not a matter of making local people like you—as some American initiates to counterinsurgency whom I met in Iraq seemed to believe—but of getting them to accept that supporting your side is in their interest, which requires an element of coercion. He told me, “In a counterinsurgency, the gratitude effect will last until the sun goes down and the insurgents show up and say, ‘You’re on our side, aren’t you? Otherwise, we’re going to kill you.’ If one side is willing to apply lethal force to bring the population to its side and the other side isn’t, ultimately you’re going to find yourself losing.”

On the length of this particular war:

Kilcullen reminded me that there was a precedent for American success in a sustained struggle with a formidable enemy. “If this is the Cold War—if that analogy holds—then right now we’re in, like, 1953. This is a long way to go here. It didn’t all happen overnight—but it happened.” The Cold War, he emphasized, was many wars, constructed in many different models, fought in many different ways: a nuclear standoff between the superpowers, insurgencies in developing countries, a struggle of ideas in Europe. “Our current battle is a new Cold War,” Kilcullen said.

If that isn’t enough to get you to read the whole thing most likely nothing will.

Kilcullen isn’t the only smart person interviewed for this story. Anthropologist and Pentagon consultant Montgomery McFate is extensively quoted as well as several others.  If you take the time to read this  story please let me know what you think.

At least it’s new to me. It looks like Badger 6 a commander of an Army Reserve Engineer Company started blogging this past July just before his unit was deployed to Iraq.

This is the post that brought his blog to my attention:

Right now I don’t even know how to feel. MAJ Megan McClung, USMC, Public Affairs Officer for the Ready First Combat Team was killed in downtown Ramadi yesterday.

I met MAJ McClung quite by accident when I first arrived here - we sat next to each other in the Dining Facility one day and happened to start talking. With her job and my interests in writing and telling the story, there was a natural conversation that took place.

Over the last two months I would see her quite often, the rather diminutive redhead in desert MARPAT was not someone you could miss. We spoke often and I liked her.

Yesterday she was out in town with a patrol trying to get the information to help shape our story when she was killed in an enemy attack.

I regret the last exchange we had was sharp; I was frustrated that we could not embed a journalist with my unit due to perceived security concerns. I think she was frustrated that she percieved me working around her.

I won’t exaggerate and pretend I knew her well, I don’t know her hometown, whether she was married or had kids. I do know she was an interesting and welcome addition to Camp Ramadi, Iraq - and I will miss her.

Please stop by and offer him your thoughts and prayers.

Patterico had a brief correspondence with Maj. McClung.

In working on my post on the L.A. Times report on the Ramadi airstrike, I exchanged several e-mails with Maj. Megan McClung, a press officer in Ramadi. She was at all times very cooperative and friendly with me. She never once gave me the impression that she thought my inquiries were unimportant because they were coming from a mere blogger.

BW

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

check out the Random Yak who is organizing this for the 2nd year in a row. If you have a Christmas post be sure to trackback to the Yak. If you just want to feel all warm and runny inside check out the Yak’s long list of links to some really god Christmas posts.