BAGHDAD AT DAWN

Baghdad at dawn. This photo was taken in October as I walked to work. It seems appropriate since the early indications (not from the MSM, of course) are that the 'surge' just may be beginning to work. Let's hope so -- God knows the Iraqis deserve more from the U.S. than cut-and-run.

AND HE WRITES ON NATIONAL SECURITY?

William Arkin writes on "national and homeland security" for the Washington Post. He is also the regular military affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times and a commentator for MSNBC.
On Tuesday morning, Arkin wrote essay titled Early Warning on the Post's website that has to be read to be believed. Subtitled "The Troops Also Need to Support the American People," the post comments on an NBC program in which soldiers expressed dismay at the lack of support for their mission manifested by some people back home.

I've been mulling over an NBC Nightly News report from Iraq last Friday in which a number of soldiers expressed frustration with opposition to war in the United States .... I'm all for everyone expressing their opinion, even those who wear the uniform of the United States Army. But I also hope that military commanders took the soldiers aside after the story and explained to them why it wasn't for them to disapprove of the American people.

That’s only the beginning; it rapidly degenerated into what can only be described as foaming-at-the-mouth insanity. I won’t comment on most of Arkin’s rant; others who write much better that I have already commented. PowerLine’s reaction is here. Instapundit wrote this. Michelle Malkin had this to say. Mudville Gazette comments. Blackfive’s reaction is here. And Don Surber wrote this.

I’m only going to comment on this one small part of Arkin’s descent into insanity (emphasis added).

So, we pay the soldiers a decent wage, take care of their families, provide them with housing and medical care and vast social support systems and ship obscene amenities into the war zone for them, we support them in every possible way, and their attitude is that we should in addition roll over and play dead, defer to the military and the generals and let them fight their war, and give up our rights and responsibilities to speak up because they are above society?

Obscene amenities? Whatever could Arkin mean by that? Posh quarters? Well, this is the trailer I shared.

And I was lucky -- the trailer I shared is top-of-the line by local standards. The Commanding Officer (an O-6, or Navy Captain) of the unit I was attached to shared a shipping container. Yes, you read that right - a 12x20 foot shipping container! And it was posh by comparison with those assigned to his command. These are 40-person tents, by the way.

Did he mean expensive shopping malls? Uh, huh. This is the main base exchange -- a Wal Mart it isn't.

Perhaps he meant fancy recreational facilities? Yep, here’s the picnic area and volleyball court. The MWR (Morale, Welfare, Recreation) facility is a tent. So are the gyms.

Maybe Arkin was thinking of fancy dining facilities ....

Or perhaps a fancy restaurant when we’re tired of the chow hall and want to eat out? Sure, not a problem.

Maybe he was thinking of all those fancy “amenities” our families send us -- like photos of support from home? Or Girl Scout cookies? Or Starbucks coffee?

Well, the first thing I did when I returned was to send coffee to the Command Master Chief at my squadron. His response: “[Y]ou didn't have to send any coffee but I appreciate that more than you can know (it's the little things as you're well aware).” Five pounds of coffee -- an "obscene amenity"?

William Arkin owes the servicemembers he slimed an apology. But he won’t, so I will.

To all of you who wear our nations uniform: I deeply regret that by an accident of birth, William Arkin can claim membership in the human race. His foaming at the mouth does not represent my opinion, nor does it represent the opinion of any sentient being of whom I am aware.

REAL JOURNALISM FROM IRAQ

Michelle Malkin, recently returned from Iraq, has been posting regularly on her embed at FOB Justice. I mention this partly because she's wearing my body armor, but mostly because she's a fine journalist and her reporting is worthy of further distribution.

Malkin posted pictures from her embed here. Her first report following her return is here, and she has posted videos here, here, and here. Scroll around, as I have not linked to everything in her archives.

While I never was allowed "outside the wire," my experience mirrored that reported by Malkin. I was privileged to be there, and have never worked with a finer group of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines than I did at Camp Victory.

Other journalists who have reported from the mid-East (Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon) include Bill Roggio, Michael Yon, Michael Totten, and Bill Ardilino. Please visit their web sites and scroll around. You will not see their reports in newspapers or on television.

COMING TO IRAQ

My first official act after arriving was to go to the MNC-I (Multi-National Corps - Iraq) headquarters to sign in. Coalition Force headquarters at Al Faw Palace, near Baghdad. Apparently used by Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay for their “romantic adventures,” it is commonly called the “Perfume Palace” by the soldiers stationed at Camp Victory.






The first floor “ballroom” is dominated by the chandelier seen in this picture. Expensively appointed, the workmanship is surprisingly shoddy.
















The obligatory “Kilroy was here” picture. Almost everyone who has business in the Palace has a picture taken on the couch just inside the ballroom. I was no exception.

A CONSPIRACY THEORY I CAN LIVE WITH

Many will recall that on July 8, 1947, witnesses claimed that an unidentified object with five aliens aboard crashed onto a sheep and cattle ranch just outside Roswell, New Mexico. This is a well-known incident that many say has long been covered up by the U.S. Air Force and the federal government.

However, what you may NOT know is that nine months after that historic day, the following people were born: Albert Arnold Gore Jr., Hillary Rodham, John F. Kerry, William Jefferson Clinton, Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Charles E. Schumer, Barbara Boxer .... all born in March, 1948.

Makes you wonder about that "aliens among us" stuff ....

MY WINDOW ON THE WORLD

Back from Iraq and posting again. From September through December, this was the view from my quarters at Camp Victory.

The concrete barriers are "T" walls; foot-thick concrete blast barriers about 12 feet high. At the bottom is a Hesco barrier, 4 feet in diameter, about 4 feet high, and filled with sandbags. There were 2 Hesco barriers on each side of my trailer door; the passageway between the barriers and the "T" wall was only about 2 feet wide. Claustrophobic? Yes. Comforting? Yes.

T-6 HOURS AND COUNTING ....

Packed and ready -- three bags full, and I could have gotten all my clothes into less than half of a single bag. What was I thinking about, bringing all the extra "stuff?"

I feel like a racehorse at the starting gate -- all ready to go, and the gate won't open.

THE LIBERAL CASE FOR BRIBERY AND CORRUPTION

In The liberal case for pork, Bradford Plumer argues that “without pork, activist government [emphasis added] would wither and die.” In my (admittedly conservative) view, that statement alone is sufficient to make the case against pork.

But wait, there’s more. Plumer again:

Any big-government program on the progressive wish list will likely prove even more difficult to pass [without pork] .... Single-payer health care? Card check for unions? Reductions in carbon emissions? It won't get done without an orgy of earmarks to entice the inevitable skeptics in Congress. That won't be pretty, but if the price of, say, universal insurance is a bit of borderline corruption here and there, it's a tradeoff worth making.

So just add bribery and corruption to the list of tools the Democrats are willing to use to advance their “progressive” agenda.

Read the whole thing – and weep for America.

THE NEW YORK TIMES WANTS ME

To subscribe, that is. They'd have a much better chance if they had my name correct on the solicitation.

THE PATH TO 9/11

After watching both segments of The Path to 9/11 (ABC), I’m left with mixed feelings. As a docudrama, it struck me as being neither good documentary nor good drama, yet it remained oddly compelling.

It was the “cowboy western” component that made it neither good documentary nor good drama: the main characters all wore either white hats (O’Neill, Massoud, Clark,the CIA agent, FBI agent Colleen Rowley) or black hats (Berger, Albright, the American Ambassador to Yemen, Rice) that destroyed the essential “grayness” of terrorism.

Two elements struck me as compelling. One was the linkage of all the terror acts that preceeded the 9/11 attacks; the other was the bureaucratic ineptness and sensitivity to “process.”

Oversensitivity to process is, to me, the key takeaway from The Path to 9/11. As someone who has worked in the defense industry for years, I’ve seen entirely too much “process” in lieu of progress. The bureaucratic need to not step on another’s turf, to check - and recheck - with everyone who might possibly have an interest, to never offend any agency’s sensibilities, and to cover one’s a--, uh six, at all times means that nothing ever gets done until it proves to be too late.

Best quotes -

Massoud: "Are there any men left in Washington, or are they all cowards?"

Clark: "War is about killing the enemy and destroying his property. It's not about sitting around in a conference room and covering your own asses."

With respect to any lasting political impact, I think I have to take my cue from Instapundit - the Democrats indulged “their instinct for the capillary” in protesting. For me, The Path to 9/11 is an indictment of both parties, and the Democrat protest serves only to remind the viewers of, for example, Sandy Berger’s theft and destruction of classified documents from the National Archives. Why they would want to remind viewers of the very events that tend to support the parts they are protesting is beyond me.

My view: if there is any lesson to be learned from The Path to 9/11, it can be found in this quotation from a Heinlein juvenile (Double Star) that I read 40-something years ago:

“Take sides! Always take sides! You will sometimes be wrong – but the man who refuses to take sides must always be wrong! Heaven save us from the poltroons who fear to make a choice. Let us stand up and be counted.”

SEPTEMBER 11, 2006

My flag is flying.

Is yours?

MINIMUM PERFORMANCE REQUIREMENTS (for Systems Engineers)

Since I’m now less than two weeks from my departure date, I thought I should spend a little time comparing my performance so far to the minimum standards to see how I shape up.

Able to slow down from a dead stop

If taking 2 steps back for every step forward counts, I’m doing fine.

Able to add 1 and 1 to get the required estimate

Easy - the proof is in my checkbook balance.

Is self-impacting

I love beating my head against a wall - it feels so good when I quit. And it burns 150 calories an hour!

Capable of justifying the irrational, unreasonable, or incorrect

Just look at my resume.

Is self-defeating

Hmm ... I may have to work on this one.

Able to pursue multi-random directions simultaneously

Easy, I can turn on a dime and leave 9 cents change.

Capable of coping with, and following, infinite misdirections

Not a problem - I can do this alone. No outside help needed.

Able to consistently overcome success

So far, so good, but accidents happen.

Able to build mountains of fantasy from molehills of non-viable facts

Trivial. Mt. Everest is small by comparison to the mountains of fantasy I create every day.

Looks like I’m mostly ready - a little more work on becoming fully self-defeating, but I’ve got some time to master that before I leave.

JAN’S VW DIDN’T CRASH

Day by Day by Chris Muir is a long-time favorite of mine. I hate to mess up a good story line (start here; then go forward three or four days), but Jan’s VW didn’t crash - I saw it on southbound I-395 as I left work yesterday. It had to have been Jan’s; there was the “we love the world” license plate holder, a PETA sticker, and a bumper sticker touting the anti-war Democratic candidate for Senate.

Sorry, Chris, the police must have picked up the cell phone somewhere else.

CATBLOGGING - GETTING READY FOR WORK

Shadow and Daisy prepare for another long day at work. So little time, so many things to do: move rugs, climb drapes, knock over pictures, annoy the dogs, guard the stairs, ....

NEWS YOU CAN USE

Heard on WTOP radio (FM 103.5 in Washington DC) yesterday: "Fat people eat more." Wow. What a blinding insight ....

The lead was apparently an intro to this bit of "interpreted" research, which is another thinly disguised attack on the fast food industry. Will the nanny-staters ever give up?

AFFORDABLE HOUSING AND KELO

Location, location, location – the mantra of the housing market. When I moved to the Washington DC metro area, the general rule of thumb was that the price of the same house would increase about $10,000 for each mile closer it was to the city center. A $100,000 house 60 miles away would be a $500,000 house at 20 miles, and so on.

Affordable housing – a big political football here in DC and its environs - in cities is a physical impossibility without subsidies, and location is the reason. It’s not the cost of the house that makes it unaffordable; it’s the cost of the location.

The solution to problem of creating affordable housing is obvious – Kelo. If, as the Supreme Court affirmed, a government entity can exercise eminent domain and provide the property to a private company in order to increase the local tax base, as the city of New London did in Kelo, then it follows that a government entity can also exercise eminent domain to reduce its tax base.

So all the city need do is to exercise it’s eminent domain rights in a section of the city, declare that area to be a no-development zone, and voila! – instant affordable housing.

It’s not as outlandish an idea as it sounds. The city would condemn the property, buy it at its fair market value, and then resell it to the original owners at a drastically discounted price with the caveat that the property can only be maintained, never improved, and that the essential nature of the neighborhood be maintained. Two bedroom, 1 bath bungalows must remain two bedroom, one bath bungalows; apartment houses must remain apartment houses; commercial buildings with mom-and-pop stores must remain commercial buildings with mom-and-pop stores.

Is it a subsidy? Sure, but a one-time subsidy not to be repeated. Would it work? Ask Susette Kelo. She might still be living in her home.

UPDATE: Matthew J. Parlow, a law professor at Chapman University addresses Kelo - and affordable housing. Worth a read.

ANALYSIS ENGINES - A RANT

After attending a two-day Analysis IPR, or “in-process review” for those not familiar with the acronym, I’m annoyed and frustrated. The greatest analysis engine that has ever existed is the 3-lb lump of grey matter behind the eyes and between the ears, yet most attendees use it to drive their vocal chords instead.

I know I’m being over the top here; even a bit unfair, since the questions being asked aren’t easy to analyze, and the available data is chaotic, incomplete, and possibly even irrelevant. But polling (trend analysis in this case) doesn’t answer the questions being asked. It can’t; at its best, trend analysis can indicate correlation, but not causation.

What is needed is for the participants to quit using those analysis engines as vocal chord drivers and instead give some hard-headed thought to what effects can or should occur given the input changes being made. (That’s called hypothesis formulation, by the way.)

Then give an equal amount of thought to what measurements need to be made to either prove or disprove the hypothesis. That includes making sure that the measurements can in fact be made. I remember some years back a colleague of mine developed a brilliant analytic solution to a geolocation problem we had been working for years. His mathematical solution was complete, correct, and absolutely spot-on. But in order to do the mathematics, he had to structure the problem is such a way that the input estimation variables needed were not physically realizable. Meaning that the solution could never be tested, since the data needed to test his solution could never be measured. Back to the drawing board ....

Finally give another equal amount of thought about how to acquire the data. That means ignoring the mass of existing data until it can be shown to contain the relevant data. Then - and only then - begin to look at that mass of chaotic, incomplete, and possibly irrelevant data that’s been collected for every purpose except yours.

Here’s an analogy. The current analytic process is akin to taking three 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles, mixing them together, turning over every piece until only the backs show, putting them together, and only then turning the three completed puzzles over to see the pictures.

Did I mention that I’m annoyed and frustrated?

MISSILE DEFENSE SUCCESS?

Not good news for North Korea and Iran ....

Air Force Lieutenant General Henry “Trey” Obering III, Missile Defense Agency (MDA) director, announced today it has successfully completed an important exercise and flight test involving the launch of an improved ground-based interceptor missile designed to protect the United States against a limited long-range ballistic missile attack.

The interceptor missile was launched at 10:39 am PDT (1: 39 pm EDT) from the Ronald W. Reagan Missile Defense Site, located at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. For this exercise, a threat-representative target missile was launched from the Kodiak Launch Complex, Kodiak, Alaska.

Although not a primary objective for the data collection flight test, an intercept of the target warhead was achieved.

Since the intercept was not a primary objective of the test flight, we’ll have to wait and see if the test was really successful. Nevertheless, the fact that an intercept occurred indicates that the basic engineering problems are pretty well under control.

OPEN MOUTH, INSERT FOOT

In his Washington Times commentary “The Rumsfeld horripilation” R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. was doing just fine defending Mr. Rumsfeld until the ninth paragraph:

Is the thing possible? Do the likes of Mr. Reid and Mrs. Pelosi think we are no better than the Iranian Islamofascists who whoop it up for suicide bombers and are governed by a zany who looks like an eternal graduate student from one of our cow colleges?

As a graduate (BS, 1968; MS, 1973; PhD, 1978) of a “cow college,” I don’t know whether to demand an apology of Mr. Tyrrell or Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Reid, but I want to assure all three that an Iranian Islamofascist would have an easier time graduating with honors from Harvard or Yale than he would gaining admission to my alma mater).

LETTER FROM IRAQ

A soon-to-be co-worker currently in Iraq emails:

I think I've been here too long already, today was only 118 and I wasn't sweating. In fact tonight it felt chilly at 109.

Proves you can get used to anything.