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H&I Fires* 30 July 07

Open post for those with something to share, updated through the day. New, complete posts come in below this one. Note: If trackbacking, please acknowledge this post in your post. That's only polite.

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Fuzzybear Lioness here, stepping up while John cares for one of my relatives...

Cdr. Salamander points us to an amazing article in NYT by members of the Brookings Institution who have been visiting Iraq: apparently the tide has turned in Iraq and this might just work. Somebody go check the ledges outside certain politicians' offices... UPDATE: Cassandra delivers some blistering commentary.

In more Iraq news, they have other reasons to celebrate. Be sure to listen to the second video; joy is pan-linguistic (if you listen carefully enough, you'll hear the announcer list the various Iraqi cities and sects that form the backgrounds of the team members).

Powerline points us to a survey of global opinion that contains very good news and kinda bad news. Bad being that Americans are apparently rather gloomy. The surprising thing is how partisan that gloom is--not only do political parties have different "facts," they now apparently have different realities entirely. - FbL

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Heh, Chief Justice Roberts takes a spill, and there's joy in the DU - or, in some cases, sadness that the fall wasn't severe enough. One sub-thread was deleted... one wonders, was it not bloodthirsty enough... or was it *worse*? Double-heh. The scariest part of this thread? These are the people most motivated to vote in the primaries. The right-wing equivalents, too (and c'mon, you know they're out there... though if the Left's characterization of them is to be believed, they're too stupid to manage the voting process...). Anyway - that's the state of Democracy on the Fringe. -the Armorer

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*A term of art from the artillery. Harassment and Interdiction Fires.

Back in the day, when you could just kill people and break things without a note from a lawyer, they were pre-planned, but to the enemy, random, fires at known gathering points, road junctions, Main Supply Routes, assembly areas, etc - to keep the bad guy nervous that the world around him might start exploding at any minute.

*Not really relevant to today's operating environment, right? But, it *is*

The UAVs (oops, can't call 'em UAVs anymore - they're now Unmanned Aerial Systems... some Colonel got his Legion of Merit for that change...), er, um UAS's we fly over Afghanistan and Pakistan looking for targets of opportunity are a form of H&I fires, if you really want to parse it finely. We just have better sensors and fire control now.

I call the post that because it's random things posted by me and people I've given posting privileges to. It's also an open trackback, so if someone has a post they're proud of, but it really isn't either Castle kind of stuff, or topical to a particular post, I've basically given blanket permission to use that post for that purpose. Another term of art that might be appropriate is "Free Fire Zone"

5 Comments

Reading some of the 'progressive' reactions, I see that several have overlooked Keynes' advice: "When the facts change, I change my mind – what do you do, sir?" Cheers
 
"... Anyway - that's the state of Democracy on the Fringe. -the Armorer ..." And why the Founders, in their infinite wisdom, created a republic - not a democracy.
 
A walloping Dose of Reality definitely changes folks' opinions. My guess is that the fairly huge downshift in the percentage of Pakistanis who view suicide bombings as justifiable is due to the fact that thirteen boomers have set themselves off locally in the last three weeks.
 
" ... A walloping Dose of Reality definitely changes folks' opinions. ... " Indeed. My own personal belief is that we will find in retrospect - and very unfortunately - that it was necessary for Iraqi Sunnis in places like Fallujah, Ramadi, Diyala, and elsewhere to live and suffer under the brutality and horror of AQI and other foreign insurgents, to completely dispel the Muslim fantasy that many have held regarding the "benefits" of living under Sharia, and to pursuade them that WE are the good guys and that our system is preferable. And only by observing the experiences of their Iraqi brethren, and others who've suffered through Islamist barbarity, are the rest of the Arab and Muslim world coming to the same conclusion. We're trying to change a culture that regards time in terms of decades, centuries, and even millenia. Yet too many in the West - especially Western liberals who constantly preach to us about respecting the differences in our cultures - believe that we should have already achieved this great change in just 4 short years .... and as if real life can be as perfectly scripted as a Hollywood movie.
 
...a culture that regards time in terms of decades, centuries, and even millenia. Especially when you're waiting for an aircraft and/or student assignment. Or a cup of coffee, for that matter. The owner of an "I want what I want and I want it now" attitude would go off the deep end after three days. For what it's worth, the word for "tomorrow" in Urdu is "kal" and the word for "yesterday" is -- ummmmm -- "kal"... As (I think) Heartless Libertarian mentioned a while back, "It's like mañana, but without the note of underlying urgency."