The military commander President Bush is counting on to rescue Iraq from chaos, Lieutenant General David Petraeus, once came to the defense of an American reporter caught up in one of Washington’s most intense legal battles.

In 2005, when Judith Miller of the New York Times was facing the possibility of jail for refusing to name one of her sources in front of a grand jury, General Petraeus wrote to a federal judge to discourage him from imprisoning her.
http://www.nysun.com/article/46518

- Silver bullet
- Wooden stake in the chest (no heart)
- Cut off the head
- Stuff garlic in the mouth cavity (that’s a lot of garlic)
- Bury the head at the opposite end of the earth
- Burn the body and spread the ashes

For starters.

TRex — thanks for letting me in on the joke. Here and I thought it was rather ironic that Ledeen died so soon after the Ayatollah dead/dying/so-sick/sick/sniffle crap…joke’s on me.

But unfortunately, Iraq and Iran and Ledeen’s contribution are not jokes. [sigh]

TRex — you are very generous with Ledeen, more kind than I can been even with his announced passing.

Oh, Rayne, that’s actually a joke. Last week Ledeen announced his BREAKING PJ MEDIA SCOOP! That the Ayetollah Khemenei was dead. Then a day passed and another day and Mr. Khemenei was rude enough to disoblige Mr. Ledeen by not actually dying.

Ledeen reappeared, “Well, he’s VERY VERY near death!”

Still nothing.

72 hours later, Ledeen, “Well, I know he’s been VERY VERY sick! I know THAT for sure! He could be AS GOOD AS DEAD!”

So, that piece I linked to is satirist Jonathan Swift writing Ledeen’s obit. Tomorrow, I am sure he will update it. And then again the next day.

He isn’t dead til we get that wooden stake aimed just right.

snip..

It’s a mess in IRAQ, but they’d never be stupid enough to invade IRAQ….

Assume this is invade IRAN.

Speaking of which…have you noticed how the Bush administration is using the phrase, “ending the cycle of violence” to describe what they’re trying to accomplish in Iraq? It’s as though Iraq is a big dysfunctional family where abused children become wifebeaters, and we’re the social workers trying to provide advice and therapy.

By breaking the door down and shooting the family. Haditha anyone?

The prospect of war against Iran is so horrible I can hardly breathe.

What Senator Webb [I just love saying that] has to say about Iraq, military service, and going to war against Iran without consulting Congress.

He calls Iraq “invasion and occupation.”

What a world.

Suzanne asked, “WHY did you decide to write this book? Was it because of one thing or the sum of many things?”

Two things: First, personal outrage at the disparity between the way the public discourse about Iraq focused on Americans and ignored the experience of Iraqis. With some notable exceptions (such as Anthony Shadid’s excellent Night Draws Near), American journalists treated the war as a stage upon which American soldiers acted and the Iraqis were just a backdrop. Even groups on the left, like Iraq Body Count, used a double standard in the way they talked about U.S. vs. Iraqi deaths. With regard to the U.S., every soldier’s death is counted and mourned. With Iraq, only CIVILIAN deaths get counted, and even those don’t get counted with any precision or seriousness.

I think there’s a serious problem here that goes deeper than the Bush administration: a long-standing tradition of American cultural isolationism, which combines in contradictory and harmful ways with our recent history of economic and military interventionism. The two trends have come together under Bush in the form of unilateralism — the idea that we can and should intervene aggressively in the rest of the world, and that simultaneously we don’t need to even consider the opinions or interests or desires even of our allies such as nations in Europe.

The result is that we’re writing heroic narratives about ourselves in our heads, while the rest of the world sees our behavior as anything but heroic. And we’re sending soldiers who never learned to speak even languages like French or German — let alone a word of Arabic — to try to control populations in cultures that they don’t begin to understand or care about. This is what leads to Abu Ghraib and all of the other disasters in this war, and although I see people now saying that the war was a mistake, I don’t see many people grappling with the underlying cultural attitudes that made the war possible.

Wow, you expressed this so beautifully and succinctly. I have long been troubled by this national phenomenon. The obvious potential for it to repeat itself to the detriment of all nations, including our own, is fed by these wrong attitudes not being challenged by the msm. If we spent a small fraction of what we spend on the “war on terror” instead on cultural enlightenment (not only about other cultures, but with an emphasis on our own as well), we’d be much better off and perhaps learn to play well with others.

Thank you for your insight.