So much for the “surrender” and “laying down their arms”.
'Shining' In Iraq (Murtha and the Dems are apopletic)
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, expecting the worst -- which for her means any good news out of Iraq -- has pre-warned Petraeus not to "put a shine" on events there.
"I hope we don't hear any glorification of what happened in Basra," Pelosi said Thursday, in reference to U.S. and Iraqi troops' recent successes there in rolling back extremist Shiite Cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's militias.
"Glorification?" Heaven forfend we should glorify "what happened in Basra." Our troops fought bravely, performing superbly the job assigned them by their own government -- including you, Madam Speaker. But we shouldn't "glorify" them.
We're not talking about a mere policy dispute here. There are lots of legitimate policy disputes, even about war. This is about the open contempt some members of one major party seem to hold for our men and women in uniform. It's one thing to oppose a war, another to more or less openly root for us to lose it.
Different crew. Those were Basra thugs; this is the belly of the beast, so to speak--Sadr City. The prep work they're talking about w/ JAM (arms caches, IEDs planted at all major in-roads, etc) is exactly the kind of thing my company feared would happen when we went into Sadr City. We were the first conventional forces in about 3 years into that place (SF has been doing missions in their constantly). It's actually remarkably clean (for an Iraqi urban area, anyway) and well-kept. They never really messed with us in there, probably because they didn't want to mess up their own home. They waited until we were in the mulhullahs just to the north, Shaab and Ur, to attack. Heavy EFP country, a lot of Jaysh al Mahdi presence, and a large, loyal following of Moqtada al Sadr. It's interesting that these guys fired rockets into the Jamilla marketplace. You don't tend to see Shi'ites attacking Shi'ites like that, especially in Sadr City. The fact that the enemy contact lasted long enough for even the M1s and M2s to get there is surprising.
There's a lot in this story that's interesting. I'm wondering if it's indicative of a sort of "last stand" that JAM wants to put up in their home base....