Liberal Talk Radio

Even though Gates turned it down, this seems sort of significant:
Senior Defense Department officials said Mr. Gates met at the Pentagon on Friday with Gen. James T. Conway, the Marine Corps commandant, and received a formal proposal that would shift Marine forces from Anbar Province and deploy them in Afghanistan.
The proposal was based on [...]

For all the talk about the success of the “surge” in tamping down violence in Iraq, surely Moqtada al-Sadr’s decision to declare a 6-month ceasefire and shut down the Mahdi Army is a big reason why we’re seeing relative calm in Baghdad and beyond.
But Sadr’s followers are running out of patience:
“There is an entity [...]

Continuing our Shachtman-mania here at BATP, another great article on the Army’s nascent efforts to recruit anthropologists to help understand local culture in Afghanistan and Iraq:
In western Afghanistan, the 4th Brigade of the 82nd Airborne had come under a steady stream of attacks, despite “a very aggressive outreach effort to village elders,” the report notes. [...]

Don’t miss Noah Shachtman’s piece in the December 2007 Wired. In their rush to create the next-generation network-centric warfare, U.S. military planners probably didn’t realize that they no longer have a monopoly on high-tech:
Meanwhile, insurgent forces cherry-pick the best US tech: disposable email addresses, anonymous Internet accounts, the latest radios. They do everything online: [...]

Read Matt Yglesias on the ridiculously shallow coverage of the “surge” in the media, and how “military success” without “political success” is not really success at all. It’s also worth noting that the “success” we’ve had in Iraq over the past year, in Anbar especially, has been about propping up the Sunnis in a [...]

From a Yahoo!-AP survey of 2,000 voters:
Take self-described die-hard Republican Donald Stokes. The 48-year-old steelworker from Waterbury, Conn., would pick Democrat John Edwards if he could take a candidate along on his family vacation. He likes Edwards’ personality and his family values. But he supports Giuliani for president, largely because of the former New [...]

It’s really hard to get good video of life on the streets of Baghdad. The major news networks have all but given up. This interactive feature over at the NYT web site is a real treat in that regard.
(via Danger Room )

Contrarian points me to this piece in Reason highlighting some good news in Iraq:
Al Qaedaesque insurgent action from Anbar to Basra is calming down. Sunni fighters are aiming not at U.S. troops, but at Al Qaeda troublemakers. From June to now, the military says, violence in and around Baghdad is down 59 percent; car bombs [...]

If you’re like me, you’ve been noting the recent decline in violence in Iraq with some cautious optimism. U.S. troop deaths are down, for example, and civilian deaths have dropped so much that it’s actually crippling the Iraqi cemetary industry. Things are still way worse than they were in 2004 and 2005, but [...]

Next to the MCAs, the next biggest “accomplishment” of the Bush Administration will be having shown by example just how incompetent government can be. This is a feature, not a bug, remember!
Apparently the State Department has thrown so much money into training Iraqis, and with so little results, that they had to give up [...]