We sent our troops to Iraq to do away with Saddam Hussein’s regime — and you got the job done. We kept our troops in Iraq to help establish a sovereign government — and you got the job done. And we will leave the Iraqi people with a hard-earned opportunity to live a better life — that is your achievement; that is the prospect that you have made possible.

He opposed the first two, and if it were up to him the third would not have been possible. I haven’t read the text, but I’m going to presume he didn’t note as much in the speech. Perhaps, when the best selling Speeches of President Obama is published, it will have a footnote: “Personally, I’d rather have Hans Blix still playing cat and mouse with Saddam, and the Iraqi people suffering under severe sanctions.” Perhaps.

When the actual history of this war is written – not the myopic journalism that has passed for history thus far, but real history written with the perspective of knowing how things turned out – it will be noted that a leader of great foresight and courage led this country to war, freed a nation from oppression, and created an ally in a hostile region, and that he did so over the opposition of villains and clowns. That his success was so overwhelming that even the election of one of those clowns – running on an anti-war platform – to succeed him could not reverse it, will add more to our former president’s reputation than to his successor’s.

A quick search, however, shows that General Mattis was an important figure in the two battles of Fallujah in 2004. Wikipedia then reports this:

On February 1, 2005, Lieutenant General Mattis, speaking Ad libitum at a forum in San Diego, said “You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. Actually, it’s a lot of fun to fight. You know, it’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right upfront with you, I like brawling.” Mattis’s remarks sparked controversy and General Michael W. Hagee, Commandant of the Marine Corps, issued a statement suggesting that Mattis should have chosen his words more carefully, but would not be disciplined.

More carefully? You mean he shouldn’t have used contractions? I’ve been critical of American generalship in the past, but to learn that these words were publicly uttered by a man who made it all the way to the top of a military branch makes me giddy. Our generals and soldiers should revel in the destruction that they bring to our honorless enemy.

Perhaps best on the Wikipedia page, I learn this:

Lieutenant General James N. Mattis will be played by Harrison Ford in the upcoming film No True Glory: The Battle for Fallujah, based on the book by Bing West.

Seriously? Harrison Ford? A movie about American soldiers in Iraq that doesn’t seem to be anti-war on its face? Sweet Pete, man, there must be a Democrat in the White House.

But…but…but ticking timebombs…but…but…but Jack Bauer.

Of course, there’s a very obvious reply here. Gaging by how many times it was referenced at the DNC, I think it can legitimately be said that most Democrats haven’t heard of the surge at all. Both Obama and Biden heard about the surge while they were senatoring around, and neither had the wisdom to support it.

So lets have a discussion of the candidates’ knowledge of the surge. On one side, we have the leading proponent of sending more soldiers to Iraq in an effort to bring victory; on the other, we have someone who has been wanting to run away and surrender for years, and who opposed the policy that is now making victory possible.

Democrats will do very, very well not to mention the surge ever again, for any reason. But if they want another round of “party of victory” versus “party of cut and run,” I’m sure McCain and Palin are game.

If I were to base my opinion of the Iraqis off of stories like this, I’d say that they were about 3. And if I were to base my opinion of the whole Iraq endeavor off of a couple of paragraphs from the story, I’d think we were best off bombing the place to oblivion and leaving these people to their just desserts.

“I come before you here seeking your forgiveness,” Maj. Gen. Jeffery Hammond was quoted as saying. “In the most humble manner I look in your eyes today and I say please forgive me and my soldiers.”

The commander also read a letter of apology by the shooter, and another military official kissed a Quran and presented it to the tribal leaders, according to CNN.

So 19 Arab Muslims hijack planes and kill thousands of Americans, and I’m subjected to endless lectures from Arab groups on the evils of racial profiling; one American shoots holes in a Koran and an American soldier has to kiss a damned Koran? Bull Shiite.

Perhaps, ultimately, this is all worth it. But I often think that Victor Hanson is correct that the Arab world has much more to fear from the American street than we do from the Arab street. More temper tantrums like this, and we might end up spanking the little babies.

Money quote:

“I hate Islam and all the clerics because they limit our freedom every day and their instruction became heavy over us,” said Sara, a high school student in Basra. “Most of the girls in my high school hate that Islamic people control the authority because they don’t deserve to be rulers.”

Is this young generation of Iraqi’s our hope for the future? Are the radical clerics and Al Queda murders achieving exactly the opposite of their intentions?

Its almost like someone once told us that this would happen. I guess sometimes things have to get worse before they get better.

Just yesterday, we heard Senator McCain confuse Sunni and Shiite, Iran and al Qaeda. Maybe that is why he voted to go to war with a country that had no al Qaeda ties.

As for the first sentence, McCain misspoke yesterday and almost immediately corrected himself. Whoopty do. I do not, and no reasonable person can, believe that a small and quickly corrected verbal slip up should be the subject of a legitimate campaign attack. That Obama would lower himself to this seems to me a sign of complete desperation to distract people from Wright. Surely this is a new low for someone who has made elevating the tone such a big part of his campaign.

As for the second sentence, my jaw dropped. The Iraq-Al Qaeda connection wasn’t particularly strong, it wasn’t enough to go to war over per se (and since that wasn’t one of the major reasons we invaded, this is a red herring by Obama), but it cannot truthfully be said that they had no connection. For Obama to peddle misinformation is almost as galling as the lowness of his attack on McCain.

Meanwhile, in the wake of a suicide bombing on Sunday near Falluja in Anbar Province, local tribesmen burned the house of the young suicide bomber’s family and prevented a female cousin from collecting the bomber’s head for burial.

In the attack on Monday, a suicide bomber in the village of Hajaj near the northern oil refinery town of Baiji entered a communal hall where a feast was under way, observing the end of the seven-day mourning period for the uncle of a high-ranking security official in the Salahuddin provincial government. The bomber detonated his explosive vest, demolishing the hall.

Seventeen people were killed and 11 wounded, according to a senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media.

The level of anger on Monday in Albo Issa, the village where the Sunday bombing took place, laid bare the intensity of the blood feuds and vengeance killings that often characterize the violence in the provinces. As women keened in the courtyard and men sat somberly in a separate house, family members talked about those they had lost.

“After this crime, we will never allow any of those people to stay in our area,” said Mohammed Hadi Hassan, 20, whose father was killed. “Not even their women and children. We will not permit anyone with such an ideology to stay in our village.”

Blow yourself up with a bunch of other people and your family’s house gets burned down. Not the most perfect kind of justice, but it’s heartening to see that most Iraqis appear to have had it with al-Queda scum.

[While allowing terrorists to take control of large portions of Iraq] I saw firsthand the consequences of the administration’s failure to devise a strategy for victory in Iraq that employed, in a coordinated manner, the political, economic, diplomatic and military power of the United States.

Harry Truman had it right that the buck doesn’t stop until it gets to the president. If a Lieutenant General gets to pass the buck for the failure of American forces under his command, then no one short of the Oval Office is responsible for anything. Unbelievable.

Our Army and Marine Corps are struggling with changing deployment schedules that are disrupting combat readiness training and straining the patience and daily lives of military families. It will take the Army at least a decade to repair the damage done to its full-spectrum readiness, which is at its lowest level since the Vietnam War. In the meantime, the ability of our military to fully execute our national security strategy will be called into doubt, producing what is, in my judgment, unacceptable strategic risk.

I have seen this trope peddled by Democrats, and I called it “gobstoppingly jawdropping“, but to see a retired general say, in effect, “We must run away from this fight so that we’ll be prepared for an unforeseeable potential fight in the future” is…gobstoppingly jawdroppinger. I just don’t understand that sort of mindset. Perhaps if these people were saying “We’re going to have a war with China in five years,” then this would be warranted. But they’re not. What is the likelihood that there will be a more important use of military power in the next ten years?

Whatever the priority of the people who use this line of reasoning is, it is not American victory. It makes me presume that, wherever the next fight will be and whatever might be at stake, they’ll just use the same rationale for running away again. The purpose of the military is not “full-spectrum readiness”, whatever the hell that means, it’s killing America’s enemies. Judging by the fact that only one American general, Petraeus, was advocating a more aggressive use of American force in Iraq, I have a feeling that Sanchez’s ignorance regarding the military’s raison d’etre is widespread among those with stars on their collars.

Read that piece from Sanchez. At the very least, you will no longer be nagged by the question, “How did Iraq get this bad?”

Democrats say defense dollars should be used to bring troops home and repair the readiness of the armed forces…

Yes, that’s why we pay taxes. To fund retreats, and keep our military ready. So that the next time we deploy somewhere, they’ll be even more ready to retreat. Because that’s what the military is for. It’s not for killing terrorist and fighting until we win. It’s for retreating.

That the Democrat party has become the party of American defeat should be the crowning achievement on the Baby Boomers’ long list of shame.