Protecting the Population

This morning I was wondering where that "hard reportin' " Scott Simon was that I had been hearing about. He was chatting with another counter-insurgency soldier/intellectual, Col. H. R. McMaster, who had his genius on display way back in Feb. 2003, when he wrote that, "It seems as if the George W. Bush administration has kicked the Vietnam syndrome. Maybe it is time for the rest of us to do the same." See, that's the kind of sharp thinking that gets you gigs at the big think tanks like the Hoover Institution and the International Institute For Strategic Studies - and NPR air time, of course!

I just loved when the Colonel stated that "as the natures of the conflict in both Afghanistan and Iraq evolved from more conventional campaigns...they shifted to a...counter-insurgency campaign that placed a premium on protecting the population." Man, that takes some serious chutzpah to put that one out there - I do believe a trained-monkey-of-a-reporter might have a few questions about those 1,000,000 plus souls who somehow slipped through the population protection safety-net there in Iraq (not to mention the 4 million plus who opted for their own population security plan by fleeing). But let's listen to Scott Simon's challenge to this utter Pentagon hogwash:

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That's right - nothing.

The Colonel's not done, though. He surges on with this gem, "What we endeavored to do over the past year is to help move the various communities in Iraq to stop this very destructive cycle of sectarian violence." Well yes, the US surge did help "move" the various communities all right, but what about the context of the US policy of creating sectarian division and using sectarian death squads? Let's give Hard Hittin' Simon another listen:

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There it is again. Hello darkness my old friend.