At Wednesday’s Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Board meeting, chairman H.R. Crawford – a former District Council member and Marion Barry confidante – told fellow Board members that he has heard talk on Capitol Hill about yanking former President Ronald Reagan’s name off the local airport and returning it to its previous generic moniker: National Airport.

“It was just a discussion. We’re not aware of anything specific,” MWAA spokeswoman Tara Hamilton later told The Examiner.

The right-wing nutcases keep saying we’ve been saddled with a socialist government. But I dunno, that’s more Soviet.  

The Memeorandum aggregator seems worried. The above Sovietism is meme’d along with the following about socialists and socialism: 

Apt-monikered lefty blogger Crooks and Liars approvingly channels a Senate socialist who thinks, with Franken on board, the time is right to brush aside the kulaks and other reactionary elements, and advance the socialist agenda.

The White House blog exults about the triumphs of social engineering through energy policy. It’s got a quaint Soviet Realist, five-year planny kind of feel to it.

Meanwhile, Jammie Wearing Fool suggests the Dems quit pussyfooting around and just name it after Obama. Red State: “But citizen, it has always been known as Obama National Airport.” 

G’day Instapundit, etal, always good to see you. You know about Obama’s Whiskey Tango Foxtrot strategy, right? That’s the one where commanders in the field say, “We need more troops,” and POTUS says “WTF?” … We’re also mulling whether the time is right to Whack Now, plus Rule Of Law By Military Coup. And please feel free to browse around Crittenden’s Right-Wing Warmonger Bookshop and General Store.

Tegucigalpa, Honduras - Sometimes, the whole world prefers a lie to the truth. The White House, the United Nations, the Organization of American States, and much of the media have condemned the ouster of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya this past weekend as a coup d’état.

That is nonsense.

In fact, what happened here is nothing short of the triumph of the rule of law.

…

Continuismo – the tendency of heads of state to extend their rule indefinitely – has been the lifeblood of Latin America’s authoritarian tradition. The Constitution’s provision of instant sanction might sound draconian, but every Latin American democrat knows how much of a threat to our fragile democracies continuismo presents. In Latin America, chiefs of state have often been above the law. The instant sanction of the supreme law has successfully prevented the possibility of a new Honduran continuismo.

The Supreme Court and the attorney general ordered Zelaya’s arrest for disobeying several court orders compelling him to obey the Constitution. He was detained and taken to Costa Rica. Why? Congress needed time to convene and remove him from office. With him inside the country that would have been impossible. This decision was taken by the 123 (of the 128) members of Congress present that day.

Don’t believe the coup myth. The Honduran military acted entirely within the bounds of the Constitution. The military gained nothing but the respect of the nation by its actions.

I am extremely proud of my compatriots. Finally, we have decided to stand up and become a country of laws, not men. From now on, here in Honduras, no one will be above the law.

Whole thing here.

A Washington Post op-ed, meanwhile, offers a Zelaya backgrounder and posits he has no one to blame for himself. Here’s another at the NYPost: “Obama ‘meddles’ in Honduras, choose wrong side.” Not to be confused with backing off in support of the wrong side.

Legal Insurrection wonders, but not much, which side the United States is going to be on when it comes to tyrants.

Gateway on the other big pro-democracy protests the Obama admin is ignoring … the ones in Honduras in favor of rule of law by coup.

Big Fausta news and commentary roundup.

* Which, to clarify, looks like a good thing and constitutionally mandated, if ironic given the region’s history.

A U.S. soldier missing from his base in eastern Afghanistan since Tuesday is believed to have been captured by Taliban militants, the military said Thursday.

In a statement issued from U.S. military headquarters in Kabul, officials said “we are exhausting all available resources to ascertain his whereabouts and provide for his safe return.”

…

Military officials … said the missing soldier appears to have walked off his base into an unsecured area.

…

A member of the Taliban linked to insurgent leader Sirajuddin Haqqani in Pakistan said that the soldier is in the custody of militants from the Haqqani network who are operating on the Afghan side of the border.

The Taliban fighter, interviewed by telephone, said the kidnapping was carried out by Maulvi Sangeen, an Afghan commander linked to Haqqani. The source did not provide any information about where the soldier may be being held.

Agence-France Press quoted a Haqqani commander as saying his militia had captured the soldier in the Yousuf Khail district of Paktika province, along the porous border with Pakistan.

“Our leaders have not decided on the fate of this soldier.” the AFP quoted the Haqqani commander, identified only as Bahram, as saying. “They will decide on his fate and soon we will present video tapes of the coalition soldier and our demand to media.”

These situations have not ended well. It’s a dirty war and it is likely to get ugly, as the enemy uses it to its fullest propaganda effect. Don’t want to get political about it, but it inevitably will become another political problem for our president. Too bad we don’t have a wartime one.

Iran’s nuclear threat was never in doubt during its presidential campaign, but the post-election resistance raised the possibility of some sort of regime change. That prospect seems lost for the near future or for at least as long as it will take Iran to finalize a deliverable nuclear weapons capability.

Accordingly, with no other timely option, the already compelling logic for an Israeli strike is nearly inexorable. Israel is undoubtedly ratcheting forward its decision-making process. President Obama is almost certainly not.

He still wants “engagement” (a particularly evocative term now) with Iran’s current regime. Last Thursday, the State Department confirmed that Secretary Hillary Clinton spoke to her Russian and Chinese counterparts about “getting Iran back to negotiating on some of these concerns that the international community has.” This is precisely the view of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, reflected in the Group of Eight communique the next day. Sen. John Kerry thinks the recent election unpleasantness in Tehran will delay negotiations for only a few weeks.

Obama administration sources have opined (anonymously) that Iran will be more eager to negotiate than it was before its election in order to find “acceptance” by the “international community.” Some leaks indicated that negotiations had to produce results by the U.N. General Assembly’s opening in late September, while others projected that they had until the end of 2009 to show progress. These gauzy scenarios assume that the Tehran regime cares about “acceptance” or is somehow embarrassed by eliminating its enemies. Both propositions are dubious.

Bolton goes on to explain that talks and sanctions … ideas Obama seems to think he invented … were aggressively pursued to no effect by the Bush administration, with the help of our European allies. Including the French and Germans, who I’d add have been more open to the military option than Obama has ever shown himself to be.

It’s too bad. Because the mullahs in Tehran have just given the president of the United States the biggest opening forthright action of any kind, military or diplomatic, since the Iranian hostage crisis. The mullahs, by overtly attacking their own people, managed to do what none of the outrages of the past 30 years have done. They outraged the world.

But never mind the naked oppression and the history of deception, ill-will and criminality. Bolton explains that Obama has a Plan B that lets him to take defeat and declare it victory. The mullahs get to have “peaceful” nukes if they promise they’ll never build bombs. Same deal Kim got. Sure.

So here’s Bolton’s Plan C:

With regime change off the table for the coming critical period in Iran’s nuclear program, Israel’s decision on using force is both easier and more urgent. Since there is no likelihood that diplomacy will start or finish in time, or even progress far enough to make any real difference, there is no point waiting for negotiations to play out. In fact, given the near certainty of Obama changing his definition of “success,” negotiations represent an even more dangerous trap for Israel.

Those who oppose Iran acquiring nuclear weapons are left in the near term with only the option of targeted military force against its weapons facilities. Significantly, the uprising in Iran also makes it more likely that an effective public diplomacy campaign could be waged in the country to explain to Iranians that such an attack is directed against the regime, not against the Iranian people.

Want to make it look good? Keep Israel out of it. Get a coalition task force of NATO and regional players do it. U.S. assets with allies along for the ride. But that isn’t going to happen. That would require diplomacy, and them liking us better. A Bush-level skill set. Barring that, if would be better to have the United States do it alone. But that isn’t going to happen. That would require fortitude and vision. I’d be stunned if there was even enough of that in the O admin to greenlight Israel.

Otherwise, be prepared for an Iran with nuclear weapons, which some, including Obama advisers, believe could be contained and deterred. That is not a hypothesis we should seek to test in the real world. The cost of error could be fatal.

OK, let’s look at how that works. It’s a lot like the Saddam WMD problem. Will Iran launch a nuke at New York City or Tel Aviv next week or next year? Not likely. What Iran will do with nukes is an enhanced version of what it already has been doing in the Middle East. Whatever the hell it wants to. Killing people, running local militias and terrorist organizations, sowing chaos and controlling governments, as it attempts to establish a greater Iranosphere. Only with nukes, Iran will do so with greater impunity and effect, finally achieving the regional dominance it has long sought, with an assist from a United States president whose priority in the region is getting the heck out.

Then there is the prospect that a country in the region might find itself directly threatened with attack, or indirectly held hostage by a nuke-toting proxy. And down the road, that will become easier, as Iranian scientists and their associates in the Axis of Evil development ever smaller, more sophisticated weapons, and better delivery systems. At which point you need to start worrying about New York and Tel Aviv.

Bob Woodward on the ground at Camp Leatherneck reported this morning in an article ridiculously headlined, Preventing Another Iraq/US Says Key to Success in Afghanistan: Economic, Not Military, that the Obama admin considers it a “new era.” 

The headline is not Woodward’s fault, except to the extent he buried and obfuscated his lede. He reports after the jump that National Security Advisor James L. Jones briefed commanders on the ground that there won’t be more troops, that requests for more troops will prompt a “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” response in the Oval Office.

That’s your lede, Bob. There’s your hed, Washington Post copy desk. Obama to Troops: “WTF?” 

We can dicker if you like about whether he actually said that or not. But the president’s national security advisor only voiced in military slang what the president himself more formally enunciated with the unveiling of his Afghan strategy some months ago, when he indicated he didn’t want to be a wartime president. He liked the idea of running some counterterrorism ops and buying his way out of this one instead. Put another way, ”WTF?”

Here’s the exchange. Every time I read it, it’s more astonishing, as Woodward describes a briefing in Camp Leatherneck:

During the briefing, (Brig. Gen. Lawrence) Nicholson had told Jones that he was “a little light,” more than hinting that he could use more forces, probably thousands more. “We don’t have enough force to go everywhere,” Nicholson said.

But Jones recalled how Obama had initially decided to deploy additional forces this year. “At a table much like this,” Jones said, referring to the polished wood table in the White House Situation Room, “the president’s principals met and agreed to recommend 17,000 more troops for Afghanistan.” The principals — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; Gates; Mullen; and the director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair — made this recommendation in February during the first full month of the Obama administration. The president approved the deployments, which included Nicholson’s Marines.

Soon after that, Jones said, the principals told the president, “oops,” we need an additional 4,000 to help train the Afghan army.

“They then said, ‘If you do all that, we think we can turn this around,’ ” Jones said, reminding the Marines here that the president had quickly approved and publicly announced the additional 4,000.

Now suppose you’re the president, Jones told them, and the requests come into the White House for yet more force. How do you think Obama might look at this? Jones asked, casting his eyes around the colonels. How do you think he might feel?

Jones let the question hang in the air-conditioned, fluorescent-lighted room. Nicholson and the colonels said nothing.

Well, Jones went on, after all those additional troops, 17,000 plus 4,000 more, if there were new requests for force now, the president would quite likely have “a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment.” Everyone in the room caught the phonetic reference to WTF — which in the military and elsewhere means “What the [expletive]?”

Nicholson and his colonels — all or nearly all veterans of Iraq — seemed to blanch at the unambiguous message that this might be all the troops they were going to get.

Woodward goes on to repeat the strategic mantra, ”security, economic development and reconstruction.” The mission statement: ”Killing the enemy is secondary.” The generals may think they need up to 32,000 more troops in addition to the 68,000 already authorized, but … WTF? Jones tells jarhead commanders in Afghanistan: “The piece of the strategy that has to work in the next year is economic development.”

That may be… none of that is actually news … but before any of it happens, the United States Marine Corps has its own business to conduct. Just a few hours after most people read that article, as it happens, a day or so after that briefing.

WPost’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran, also at Camp Leatherneck, was put in a position of making Jones, Woodward and the president look like assholes, as we say in the business, with his big uneconomic-sounding major military operation news that bumped Woodward’s story like a big fat non-sequitor late yesterday afternoon:

Thousands of U.S. Marines descended upon the volatile Helmand River valley in helicopters and armored convoys early Thursday morning, mounting an operation that represents the first large-scale test of the U.S. military’s new counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

The operation will involve about 4,000 troops from the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, which was dispatched to Afghanistan earlier this year by President Obama to combat a growing Taliban insurgency in Helmand and other southern provinces. The Marines, along with an Army brigade that is scheduled to arrive later this summer, plan to push into pockets of the country where NATO forces have not had a presence. In many of those areas, the Taliban have evicted local police and government officials, and taken power.

Once Marine units arrive in their designated towns and villages, they have been instructed to build and live in small outposts among the local population. The brigade’s commander, Brig. Gen. Lawrence D. Nicholson, said his Marines will focus their efforts on protecting civilians from the Taliban, and on restoring Afghan government services, instead of a series of hunt-and-kill missions against the insurgents.

“We’re doing this very differently,” Nicholson said to his senior officers a few hours before the mission began. “We’re going to be with the people. We’re not going to drive to work. We’re going to walk to work.”

Good counter-insurgency quote, we’ve heard it before. Folksy, and about as benign-sounding as 4,000 heavily armed Marines heading into notoriously hostile territory could possibly be made to sound. Still doesn’t sound very economic, though. The operation’s codename, Khanjar, “Strike of the Sword,” doesn’t sound like something a committee of number-crunching accountants or widget-hawking marketing whizzes came up with, either.

(I know the president probably doesn’t think Rajiv just made him look like an asshole. And Jones knew when he took the job it would involve smiling through a lot of shit sandwiches. Shit sandwiches like telling other Marines, going into combat, “Sorry boys, you don’t get what you need. Not because we can’t give it to you. But because President Nancypants won’t give it to you. Doesn’t like the way war looks on him and he’ll go all Whiskey Tango Foxtrot if you try to foist it on him. So suck it up.” But do you think Woodward, who also must have known the op was coming, in retrospect feels like maybe he shouldn’t have buried his lede? His article seems to want to say the president and the national security advisor are full of it, and certainly indicates that the warfighters think so. But Woodward’s article never quite gets there. It wanders around the Afghan countryside a bit instead, and goes out the way it came in. With high-level Beltway platitudes from Jones.)

As Gen. David Petraeus has predicted, much like in Iraq, this operation and others to come in Afghanistan will result in an increase in American casualties. It gets worse before it gets better. That walk to work for some time to come is very likely going to be challenged, no matter how unhappy the military hopes the locals may be about the Taliban.

Of course economic development, co-opting the Taliban’s fighting force, and creating a functioning somewhat modern society with jobs, is key. It is also, in mountainous, aggressively backward Afghanistan, a very tall order. The notion, the misconception, that anything happens without a significant military component … possibly significantly more than President Obama would currently care to commit … is as ridiculous as it was in Iraq when the pols and the reporters kept trying to get the generals to say all that war needed was a political solution. As if political or economic solutions simply require the right degree of earnestness and an attitude adjustment.

Chandrasekaran’s article describes an operation that will in fact require a lot of earnestness and a new attitude. No one knows that better than the military men who have been tasked with it, because it has been the world most of them have lived in for several years before Obama had any say in the matter. Chandrasekaran quotes Brig. Gen. Lawrence Nicholson, addressing officer of 2/8 Marines:

“We’re not going to measure your success by the number of times your ammunition is resupplied. . . . Our success in this environment will be very much predicated on restraint,” he told a group of officers from the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines on Sunday. “You’re going to drink lots of tea. You’re going to eat lots of goat. Get to know the people. That’s the reason why we’re here.”

It will be a demanding, delicate and quite likely a bloody job. It may also require a great deal more flexibility with regard to combat forces than the administration apparently cares to contemplate. Woodward quoted Nicholson earlier say he doesn’t need from American troops, he needs more Afghan troops, which while perhaps true and the right thing to say, sounds like a subtle, diplomatic general’s way of acknowledging that he’s screwed. No one wants to give him the former, nor can he expect the latter any time soon. So he and his 4,000 Marines in Helmand, and the thousands of combat troops deployed in other tough territory, will make do with what they have.

Too bad. It’s something American troops have dealt with before and will most earnestly endeavor to deal with now. Maybe they can pull it off. The United States military, after all, has proven remarkably resourceful, resilient and adaptive not just in these wars but in all the wars it has fought. It would be helpful this time, going into this difficult task, if the Commander in Chief’s attitude toward the expertise of the men who will to the heavy lifting was something other than “What the fuck?”

Big roundup at Small Wars Journal, your go-to place if you want to know WTF is going on.

Captain’s Journal with more on Khanjar.

More from Maguire on the “Walk to work” program.

Ed at HotAir re WTFism with a little more on the nature of the enemy: Taliban buying children for suicide bombings.

Gateway on a soldier seized in eastern Afghanistan.

http://www.julescrittenden.com/2009/07/02/obama-to-troops-wtf/

Thank you for your patience.

The actual 4.6 billion-year old planet, survivor of multitudes of asteroid hits, Milankovitch cycle changes, magnetic pole reversals, solar and cosmic radiation, myriad volcanic caldera collapses, mantle plume eruptions, etc., etc. doesn’t give a rat’s ass about a few degrees Celsius or what idiots like Krugman think.

Krugman can’t be an idiot. They wouldn’t give him a Nobel Prize if he was, would they? No matter. I’m guessing Gaia not only doesn’t give a rat’s ass what Krugman thinks, she doesn’t even know what the Royal Swedish Academy and the Karolinska Institutet are, she didn’t see Al Gore’s movie and she didn’t vote for Obama. But I’m guessing, if she knew what they were, she’d think carbon offsets are dumb.

After Tet, a lot more South Vietnamese came off the fence and decided that they really didn’t want the North to come down and take them over, enlistments in the Army went way up, training got a lot better, and the general quality of the South’s military began to improve noticeably in ‘69-’71 …

By ‘72, when we were gone, the number of subpar units in the ARVN had become a minority, and many units were excellent, their 1st Division for one.  And when the Easter Invasion hit from the North, 200,000 NVA regulars in several divisions, with 400 tanks, much better artillery than we’d left for the ARVN, and AA missiles and guns to shoot down the South’s planes, they wound up in a series of large pitched battles that were as intense but a lot longer lasting than any we ever fought.  The siege of An Loc was a kind of ARVN Alamo, went on for weeks and weeks, destroyed the city completely, but the cut off ARVN fought like tigers and refused to surrender.  They stopped NVA tanks by jumping on them under fire to stuff grenades in the view slits.  US Advisors were there to witness it all, and there are some good books about it.

But of course by then the media (both US and international) didn’t have that much interest in what went on … by the final invasion of ‘75, with NVA forces twice as big as in ‘72, superbly equipped and supplied from massive bases in Cambodia, the ARVN were on limited fuel and ammo, half their tanks were down for repairs that depended on spare parts they couldn’t get any more, and they started to fold under the blitzkrieg. Their President made a poor decision to start an unplanned retreat, and things when to hell in just a few days, leading to the panic scenes of soldiers running after planes and hanging onto chopper rails in Da Nang.  (What you didn’t hear about were the radio calls from VN Marine units in the hills, who never surrendered and fought to the death.)

Whole thing, including an RFK vs Marx quote throwdown for Obama to mull. Plus links and some great comments from vets who served with ARVN units. Speaking of Obama, how committed is he? Who knows, but there’s been some improvement. 

Wehner at Commentary looks at yesterday’s milestone, Powerline adds some thoughts, and RealClearWorld begs to differ.

Ralph Peters at NYPost is calling it a victory. Tigerhawk on why victory, declared, is important.

Strategy Page with some tactical advice: Girls with Guns Get It.

Woodward in Afghanistan with Obama’s plan: Economic, Not Military. I dunno, how about military, plus economic. (And heads up, Obama, they aren’t big government fans. I bet the local hacks will enjoy the pork if you call it something like “special beef,” though.)

Patrick Devenny at Foreign Policy digs deep into history, 1845, for a British officer’s observations on training up local defense force in Afghanistan. via Small Wars Journal, which has a daily war zone news roundup and also is offering Tony Corn, From War Manager to Soldier Diplomats and the Marine Corps looking at its future in a time of irregular warfare, .

Sounds like a good place to start building another section for the bookshop, on one small but critical corner of the Vietnam-Iraq nexus:

The Battle of An Loc, James H. Willbanks. Excerpt and a review:

“The [North Vietnamese] now held most of Binh Long province from Chon Thanh north to the Cambodian border with the exception of the town of An Loc. It was clear that An Loc would be the scene of the next major North Vietnamese effort. A lot was at stake. Not only were the lives of the South Vietnamese soldiers and their American advisers on the line, but so too was the prestige of the South Vietnamese government. The loss of a province so close to Saigon would be a disastrous loss of face for President Thieu and his administration. From the American perspective, the battle would be the supreme test of Vietnamization and President Nixon’s policies in Vietnam. More than that, however, was the fact that very little stood between the North Vietnamese and Saigon except the forces at An Loc.”

The Battle of An Loc is a fine book with rich, vibrant descriptions of combat, weapons, and command decisions. Willbanks writes from an insider’s perspective, but demonstrates the discipline of a historian who knows what questions to ask.

And this reader review:

As one who was “there”, I recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand what was at stake in the Spring Offensive in III Corps and how close a fight that it really was. Even most of us who were in it had no real idea of what was going on. After 33 years, it’s time that someone provided a complete, unvarnished accounting of what happened. I have access to some of the same documents as the author and was involved in one the events that he describes. He has remained faithfull to the truth, even though it may have had to be pieced together from fragmentary and disparate accounts. Thankfully the author has stuck to verifiable events and resisted the temptation to highlight the horror of battle. However, even his “toned down” accounts are troubling to read. Many participants are named, and like me, some may find it disconcerting to see your experience in print open to family, friends and others.

Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost Its War, James H. Willbanks

Vietnam’s Forgotten Army: Heroism and Betrayal in the ARVN Andrew Wiest

This sympathetic biography of Pham Van Dinh and Tran Ngoc Hue, mid-level officers in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), provides a unique perspective among American war histories. Built by American advisers in 1955 to repel a conventional invasion, the ARVN was a Western-style force that actually spent most of its 25-year life battling a lightly armed insurgency. Ironically, its destruction came at the hands of a traditional invading army from North Vietnam, but by this time U.S. forces (which it had relied on for heavy artillery and airpower) were gone. Vietnam’s army suffered a chronic lack of imaginative leadership at the top, yet historian Wiest (Haig) makes a good case that it often fought well, especially at the battalion and regimental level, when led by good officers such as Dinh and Hue. Wiest describes their energetic leadership as the war intensified during the 1960s, but it is not a story that ends happily. Hue spent 13 years in a North Vietnamese prison after his capture in 1970. Dinh surrendered his regiment in 1972, finishing his career in the NVA. Readers who persist through dense nuts-and-bolts battle descriptions will gain new respect for the mishandled South Vietnamese army

A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam Lewis Sorley

There was a moment when the United States had the Vietnam War wrapped up, writes military historian Lewis Sorley (biographer of two Vietnam-era U.S. Army generals, Creighton Abrams and Harold Johnson). “The fighting wasn’t over, but the war was won,” he says in this convention-shaking book. “This achievement can probably best be dated in late 1970.” South Vietnam was ready to carry on the battle without American ground troops and only logistical and financial support. Sorley says that replacing General Westmoreland with Abrams in 1968 was the key. “The tactics changed within fifteen minutes of Abrams’s taking command,” remarked one officer. Abrams switched the war aims from destruction to control; he was less interested in counting enemy body bags than in securing South Vietnam’s villages.

A Better War is unique among histories of the Vietnam War in that it focuses on the second half of the conflict, roughly from Abrams’s arrival to the fall of Saigon in 1975. Other volumes, such as Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam and Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie, tend to give short shrift to this period. Sorley shows how the often-overlooked Abrams strategy nearly succeeded–indeed, Sorley says it did succeed, at least until political leadership in the United States let victory slip away.

(One degree of separation, appropos of nothing: I was in the sixth grade with Abrams’ youngest kid in Bangkok. Good kid, bit of an air of a general himself, no shortage of confidence. I remember him showing some of us kids a picture of his old man as a tank commander in a book at Patton’s 3rd Army, which I think was more interesting to us than his Vietnam command. I believe he had an older brother serving in Vietnam, as well, and though there were a lot of kids in school whose dads were active duty with Vietnam combat experience, we rarely talked about that war.)

ARVN: Life And Death in the South Vietnamese Army Robert K. Bingham

Scorned by allies and enemies alike, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) was one of the most maligned fighting forces in modern history. Cobbled together by U.S. advisers from the remnants of the French-inspired Vietnamese National Army, it was effectively pushed aside by the Americans in 1965. When toward the end of the war the army was compelled to reassert itself, it was too little, too late for all concerned.

 

In this first in-depth history of the ARVN from 1955 to 1975, Robert Brigham takes readers into the barracks and training centers of the ARVN to plumb the hearts and souls of these forgotten soldiers. Through his masterly command of Vietnamese-language sources-diaries, memoirs, letters, oral interviews, and more-he explores the lives of ordinary men, focusing on troop morale and motivation within the context of traditional Vietnamese society and a regime that made impossible demands upon its soldiers.

 

Offering keen insights into ARVN veterans’ lives as both soldiers and devout kinsmen, Brigham reveals what they thought about their American allies, their Communist enemies, and their own government. He describes the conscription policy that forced these men into the army for indefinite periods with a shameful lack of training and battlefield preparation and examines how soldiers felt about barracks life in provinces far from their homes. He also explores the cultural causes of the ARVN’s estrangement from the government and describes key military engagements that defined the achievements, failures, and limitations of the ARVN as a fighting force. Along the way, he explodes some of the myths about ARVN soldiers’ cowardice, corruption, and lack of patriotism that have made the ARVN the scapegoat for America’s defeat.

 

Ultimately, as Brigham shows, without any real political commitment to a divided Vietnam or vision for the future, the ARVN retreated into a subnational culture that redefined the war’s meaning: saving their families.

Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam H.R.McMaster

For years the popular myth surrounding the Vietnam War was that the Joint Chiefs of Staff knew what it would take to win but were consistently thwarted or ignored by the politicians in power. Now H. R. McMaster shatters this and other misconceptions about the military and Vietnam in Dereliction of Duty. Himself a West Point graduate, McMaster painstakingly waded through every memo and report concerning Vietnam from every meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to build a comprehensive picture of a house divided against itself: a president and his coterie of advisors obsessed with keeping Vietnam from becoming a political issue versus the Joint Chiefs themselves, mired in interservice rivalries and unable to reach any unified goals or conclusions about the country’s conduct in the war.

Completing the historical circle with the present:

Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam John A. Nagl

Brutal in its criticism of the Vietnam-era Army as an organization that failed to learn from its mistakes and tried vainly to fight guerrilla insurgents the same way it fought World War II. In [Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife], Col. Nagl, who served a year in Iraq, contrasts the U.S. Army’’s failure with the British experience in Malaya in the 1950s. The difference: The British, who eventually prevailed, quickly saw the folly of using massive force to annihilate a shadowy communist enemy. . . . Col. Nagl’’s book is one of a half dozen Vietnam histories — most of them highly critical of the U.S. military in Vietnam — that are changing the military’’s views on how to fight guerrilla wars. . . .The tome has already had an influence on the ground in Iraq. Last winter, Gen. Casey opened a school for U.S. commanders in Iraq to help officers adjust to the demands of a guerrilla-style conflict in which the enemy hides among the people and tries to provoke an overreaction. The idea for the training center, says Gen. Casey, came in part from Col. Nagl’’s book, which chronicles how the British in Malaya used a similar school to educate British officers coming into the country. ”Pretty much everyone on Gen. Casey’’s staff had read Nagl’’s book,” says Lt. Col. Nathan Freier, who spent a year in Iraq as a strategist.

The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One David Kilcullen

Kilcullen, adviser on counterinsurgency to General Petraeus … uses Afghanistan and Iraq as primary case studies for a new kind of war that relies on an ability to provoke Western powers into protracted, exhausting, expensive interventions. Kilcullen presents two possible responses. Strategic disruption keeps existing terrorists off balance. Military assistance attacks the conditions producing accidental guerrillas. That may mean full-spectrum assistance, involving an entire society. Moving beyond a simplistic war on terror depends on rebalancing military and nonmilitary elements of power. It calls for a long view, a measured approach and a need to distinguish among various enemies.

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq and The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 by Tom Ricks. The essential histories on what went wrong and how it was turned around. 

The Forever War Dexter Filkins. The essential Iraq War mood piece/complexity backgrounder.

The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq Bing West. From a Nagl review:

West calls it like he sees it, and there is probably no American not wearing a uniform who has seen more of this war. A large number of senior (mostly Army) generals come in for scathing reviews in The Strongest Tribe, but West reserves his most critical assessments for politicians and journalists. Democratic Congressman and former Marine John Murtha of Pennsylvania was responsible, with the assistance of the media, for “distorting and deliberately exaggerating” the Marine killings of civilians at Haditha. In West’s opinion, President Bush failed at his primary responsibility, which was “to persuade the American people to support the war” … 

… the American exit strategy requires that the government of Iraq earn that appellation from its own people, and in this reviewer’s opinion the Iraqi government will become the strongest tribe in Iraq only if it enjoys the continued support of a U.S. advisory effort for a number of years. This was the course the United States adopted in Vietnam, but in the wake of Watergate, public support collapsed, advisers were withdrawn, and South Vietnam fell to the North.

The Village Bing West. Newt Gingrich review:

Anyone interested in understanding the challenges of security in Iraq and Afghanistan would do well to read Bing West’s “The Village.” This is the classic study of small unit anti-guerrilla activity in Vietnam.

Embedded: A Marine Corps Adviser Inside the Iraqi Army Wesley Gray

Marine Corps 2nd Lt. Gray recounts his eight-month tour as part of a Military Transition Team, working as an advisor to the Iraqi Army on location. Gray was fluent in Arabic prior to deployment, giving him enormous insight into the culture and worldview of Iraqis as citizens and soldiers and obvious advantages over colleagues (and competing memoirists) relying on translantors On many occasions, Gray encounters an Insh’ Allah philosophy, a mantra of “If God wills it” or “God willing” can strike Americans as lazy or unmotivated. Among other startling lessons, Gray discovered that loyalty to tribe supersedes duty to the state; the Iraqi Army soldiers he was training were spending their monthly leave in the ranks of local tribal militias. Gray details the cultural nuances and interpersonal relationships of occupied Iraq with such care and clarity, it’s a must-read for anyone interested in the the reconstruction, especially those set to deploy.

God Willing: My Wild Ride with the New Iraqi Army Capt. Eric Navarro. 

Navarro is emphatic that on his first tour in Iraq the situation was dismal to beyond hope, partly because of the Iraqi soldiers’ fatalistic attitude (i.e., “if God wills it”) and their seeming refusal to take any responsibility for their own well being. However, he says that by the time he returned for a second tour, things had turned around more than he ever would have expected and that this improvement was largely a result of a change in U.S. policy. Where the U.S previously had been installing their own hand-picked leaders in Iraqi villages, they instead began working with the village chieftans, who already occupied positions of authority. This strategy produced much better results, and Navarro ended the book appearing optimistic about the future of the U.S. in Iraq. However, he was adamant that the U.S. must not leave Iraq, because to do so would create a power vacuum in the area that Iran would quickly exploit.

As always, your recommendations and reviews are welcome and will be added.

Politico with the news, roundup at Memeorandum.

Powerline with a local view. Ed at HotAir with another local view.

Reynolds notes a Gallup poll finds more Americans think the Democratic Party is “too liberal.”

No kidding? Just wait.

Being from a state that already has a clown in the Senate and another in Congress, and commands large parts of what Americans find too liberal about the Democratic Party, I’m don’t mind seeing some other state send a lib lightning rod to Washington. Maybe he’ll run for president some day …

Nah, too much to hope for.

* Sorry, not fair to Bozo or Bozokind, I know.

It’s a newly declared holiday in Iraq, and a new day as US troops pull out of the cities. Except to the extent they’ll need to be running around the cities training and advising Iraqi troops, and conducting hits on terrorists in the cities and out of them. Which sounds like a wide-open door you could fit a lot of troops through.

Noticed last night in the AP coverage a couple of things were missing. “George Bush” and “Surge,” which are directly responsible for the improvements in Iraq … no more Saddam and markedly better behavior among Iraq’s ethnic and political divisions. We’ll never know … or maybe we will yet find out … but I’d suggest the bloodshed, turmoil and interference by al Qaeda, Syria and Iran that Iraqis experienced have been considerably less than they would have experienced on the road to democracy and civil society without a U.S. presence.

No mention of “Saddam,” either, now that I think of it. One other phrase that I’ve noticed missing since about November or so from the AP coverage. “George Bush’s deeply unpopular war” and variations on the theme. Four American soldiers were killed in Iraq yesterday, but if no one could find a good excuse to bring up George Bush, Obama also gets a pass in every article I’ve read. Not his war, not his problem. I’m guessing they won’t be the last Americans to give their lives for Iraqi freedom, and the resulting gains in Middle East  democracy and the world’s security.

None of that in this NYT story or this Washington Post one, either. It’s almost like Saddam self-deposed, Iraqi democracy and security just kind of happened, and the pullout negotiated itself. For such a historic day, the scribblers seem to be ignoring a lot of history. It’s like no one wants to talk about it anymore.  Too bad. A great accomplishment, at tremendous sacrifice by both Americans, Iraqis and their British, Australian, European and Asian allies. Congratulations, Iraq. All yours now. Until and unless you need a little more help. Hopefully we’ll have an American president who is willing to help.

Omar at Iraq the Model, a Baghdadi who kept his faith through the darkest days, doesn’t have anything new up today, but here’s his June 1 post: “Iraq was a Just War.”

Nothing new from Days of My Life, where Sunshine’s latest is an update on her exams, June 9.

Poor media. Can’t get a break from anyone. It’s a Huffposter complaining that media failed to notice Obama hasn’t entirely abandoned Iraq.

Mudville, “Euphrates ain’t just a river in Baghdad,” notes 130,000 will still be there, notes the lefty complaints. Talk about denial. Euphrates ain’t a river in Baghdad at all. Tigris is. MG’s Dawn Patrol has a good on-the-ground roundup, as usual.

Blackfive questions the strategic soundness of a one-day-fits-all pullout. Outside The Beltway notes there’s pullouts and then ther’s pullouts. Danger Room notes “pullout from the cities” doesn’t mean “end to combat missions.”  

Allah at HotAir gives Obama props for being big about it. He’s more charitable than I am. I’m not even interested in watching vid of Obama, now in office, being forced by reality to praise everything he disparaged.

And here’s the best wishes and prayers of Acute Politics, the GI combat engineer poet laureate. Don’t know Gordon Alanko? In his time, he was the best American combat writer on the ground in Iraq. He gave a year, three friends, some innocence and, like everyone else who has lived through it, a lot of peace of mind to this.