Weekend Rambler

Needless to say 2006 was a year for the history books and so many far more erudite minds than mine will pen plenty of editorials circumspecting the year. The favorites of the Barnyard so far go to Jed Babbin and James Lilecs.
Jed's can be found at The Americam Spectator, an excerpt:

All right, all right. Calm down. Yes, it's New Year's Eve again. So what's the big deal? Read the calendar, pilgrim. No matter how fervently Maureen Dowd and Keith Olbermann might wish it to be, next year isn't 2008. I almost wish it were. The Christmas Eve edition of the Washington Post gave us two headlines that I wish could reappear same time next year. One was Vichy John Kerry's op-ed entitled, "The case for flip-flopping." The second was, "Monica Lewinsky flashes her intellect." Those will be mighty hard to beat.

Well, maybe not. If last week's presidential wannabe polls could repeat themselves in, say, late December 2007, we'd be laughing so hard we'd probably not be able to breathe. Last week's polls showed Hillary running fourth to Baby Obama in Iowa and in a dead heat with him in New Hampshire (and only a few points ahead of the Breck Girl, John Edwards). Who among us wouldn't have paid big money to have been in the room when she found out?

Few say it better than Jed, read the whole thing, a conservative mount up call.


The American Thinker has a couple excellent editorials on the war and I like the way Col. Tom Snodgrass puts it, some good ideas, a couple lead in graphs:

What are the basic factors in war?


With appropriate deference to Clausewitz, war reduced to the most fundamental equation is WAR = MOTIVATION(S) + CAPABILITY. Historical war motivations have been religious, political, geo-strategic, economic, and revenge. Capability is composed of firepower and re-supplying that firepower (logistics). Remove one or both of these motivation-capability factors in war, and the war is over in short order.


What are the motivations driving the warring combatants in Iraq?


The motivations driving the battle for Iraq and the larger GWOT on the part of the Muslims are "all of the above," that is, religious, political, geo-strategic, economic, and revenge. Although it is probably fair to say, if we take what they say and do seriously, that economic reasons factor least in the equation. The bottom line motive of the Muslims (Sunni and Shi'ite) in Iraq and GWOT is religious conquest together with attendant political and geo-strategic domination.

And from Douglas Hanson on the differences between today's Generals and two of history's favorites "Ike" and Patton.:

CENTCOM Commander General John Abizaid's planned retirement in the middle of a war reflects a business as usual mentality on the part of our senior leaders, who seemingly find it impossible to fight and kill the enemy all the way to victory. There were no such inhibitions on the part of Ike and Patton in WW II. Comparing the current leadership with the way Ike held together a complex coalition, while getting the most out of his brash and colorful general, shows how far we have slipped into military-academic skullduggery, meant to excuse incomplete victories behind a veneer of professional elitism.

My uncle followed "Ole Blood and Guts" on his entire European campaign,"Our blood, his guts" and earned Bronze and Silver Stars enroute along with a couple Purple Hearts. We need a Patton in Iraq or as head of Centcom, preferrably in Iraq and readt and determined to exit via Syria and Iran as Patton wanted to leave through Russia, in hindsight we should have followed his wisdom.

"The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish by that test the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive." - Carl von Clausewitz, ON WAR (Howard/Paret trans.), p.88.