I will be talking about Iran. Given how mercurial television producers are, this might get canceled. If so, I will let you know.

We were defeated in Vietnam by the television news; in Iraq, it will be the lawyers.

Jon over at Laconic Blog has an interesting post on the rules of engagement, which govern our troops in Iraq. Known as “ROE” in milspeak, these rules determine when you can shoot and we you cannot. He finds the ROE confusing and restrictive.

He’s not the only one. One U.S. Marine Corps officer complained to me that it was hard to get his men to fire on a car that had burst through the barricades and was rushing toward them. It could be a car bomber or simply a drunk Iraqi. The Marines, he said, were afraid to fire for a few seconds. Finally, they did. A carload of insurgents were killed. Later, he asked his men why they had hesitated. After non-answers, one said that he didn’t want some JAG to come by a few weeks from now and say they shot the wrong guys. Immediately, the others agreed with this view.

What disturbed the officer was the bigger picture. Marines in their early 20s don’t think that they are going to die or at least discount the net present value of that risk. But their hesitation in battle–created by a lawyerly ROE–could kill them.

Other combat officers that I have talked to have said that the terrorists have learned the loopholes in the ROE. They will shoot at U.S. forces and then drop their guns. In one version of the ROE, you cannot a enemy who has put aside his weapon. Of course, the terrorists wait until the humvee has passed, pick up their guns, and spray its rear with automatic fire.

If the Democrat-led Congress is serious about oversight, it could start with hearings that drag in the lawyers that wrote the ROE. The opening question: Do you know that your rules are killing our men?

Since reprinting a piece I wrote for the American Legion magazine, I received a number of thoughtful yet critical questions. While I have responded individually, I thought the rest of my readers might also be interested.

Is this true? Got proof? Yup. I visited a number of camps at the American base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a guest of the Defense Department in September 2006. They did not put any restrictions on the questions that I could ask or the places I could go. Photographs were off limits in order to protect the privacy rights of detainees. All of the quotes in the article are drawn from interviews and conversations I had with camp personnel, including the admiral in command. I was accompanied by my friend, James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal and a number of radio hosts, all of whom filed reports similar to mine. What’s more, everything here can be found in government reports and congressional testimony. Truth is stranger than fiction…

Aren’t these people innocent? They haven’t been convicted or even charged with any crimes, right? Actually, charging them with crimes would be a violation of the Geneva Conventions, if the detainees were actually prisoners of war. The idea of that provision was to prevent downed American airmen from being charged with murder after bombing German cities.

And, under what law, could these detainees be charged? If they are not U.S. citizens (and they are not) and the offenses occurred outside U.S. territory, what is the legal basis for charging them?

Roughly two dozen of the detainees had direct, personal knowledge of the 9-11 attacks. They can be charged, because the attacks happened on American soil.

As for the roughly 550 other detainees, under the charge-them-or-release-them rationale, we would have to let them go. Maybe you’re fine with that. But the doctor that gives them lifesaving medical care is afraid that the people you want to release will learn his name and hometown and track him down… And that doctor has spent a lot more time with them than you have. Add to that, virtually all of the prisoners have made violent attacks on the guards, cheer the 9-11 attacks, and support “martyrdom operations” to kill Americans.

As for the idea that some are just random farmers scooped up in some American dragnet, forget it. These guys were captured on the battlefield, gun in hand. Many were captured with bomb making manuals, al Qaeda record books, large sums of cash (one had over $1 million in his backpack), and other tell-tale items. Remember, Gitmo is the last place they go. Prisoners go through interrogation and evaluation for release at several different stops in Afghanistan before being shipped to Cuba. No Iraqi prisoners have ever been shipped to Cuba, U.S. military officials say.

Finally, in what war did the U.S. military release enemy combatants prior to end of the conflict? Hundreds of thousands of Germans were made involuntary residents of Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arizona until 1946 (more than six months after the war ended in Europe).

If that seems harsh, the jihadis of the Earth have a simple out: Don’t take up arms against the United States.

On Cavuto today at 4 p.m. EST to discuss Lebanon and on Hannity & Colmes at 9:15 p.m. EST to preview Hannity’s America exclusive clips from the ABC Clinton docudrama.

Al Qaeda was planning a major attack on several American cities in the “summer or September of 2007,” according to one intelligence official.

The attacks were approved by al Qaeda’s Shura Council (its executive board) and the cell of 19 “students” had Google Earth images of potential targets. The terrorists planned to use conventional explosives, according to the New York Sun’s star reporter Eli Lake.

Now for the kicker: the attack was disrupted in Iraq, following a raid on a safe house last summer.

So yes Iraq is part of the war on terror and fighting them there makes us safer here. Case closed?

Really the 70-year old senator from the retirement state of Arizona was not dozing, nodding off, catching 40 winks, getting a bit of kip, sawing logs, counting sheep, in the land of Nod or parked with his blinkers off.

No, he was reading the president’s speech, following along in the hymnal like a good GOP choir boy.

Or so insists Mr. J.Mark English, a blogger whose site has been down all morning. Otherwise I would share the link.

Patrick Hynes, the founder of Ankle Biting Pundits and a paid blogger for McCain, has been blasting out a blog entry that also defends the aging presidential aspirant from Arizona:

“I hope no one will be bamboozled by the ten second video on Drudge of Sen. John McCain reading a copy of the president’s speech last night, in which Drudge claims Sen. McCain was asleep. Please notice the person in front of him, also with down-turned eyes, reading along.”

I have met Patrick once and found him to be great guy to talk to over a few drinks. But I think he has lost his judgment here. Why not admit that the old boy was asleep? Even Reagan dozed. The race will not be run or lost on McCain’s sleeping habits, but it could be lost on the public perception of his staff’s truth-telling habits.

Here are some random thoughts on the president’s State of the Union Address.

The president said that balancing the budget is important and then he pledged to do so sometime in the next five years. Pardon me but that sounds like a less than serious commitment to fiscal conservatism. A bolder president would have announced that he was submitting a balanced budget in the next few weeks and defied the congress to engage in reckless deficit spending.

It seems that the president stole my line about the Iran-backed terror group, Hezbollah:”In recent times, it has also become clear that we face an escalating danger from Shia extremists who are just as hostile to America, and are also determined to dominate the Middle East. Many are known to take direction from the regime in Iran, which is funding and arming terrorists like Hezbollah – a group second only to al Qaeda in the American lives it has taken.”

That last bit about Hezbollah being only second to al Qaeda in taking American lives is a line I’ve been using in radio and television interviews for the past year. Maybe someone in the White House was listening. Or maybe great minds think alike.

On immigration reform, the president’s line “…without animosity and without amnesty” is a real gem. And whether the congress knows it or not, the president has just drawn a red line.

Among the guilty pleasures of the telecast was the always active face of the non-plussed Nancy Pelosi. Like a superannuated cheerleader, she would stand to applaud democratic talking points and stare grimly ahead when the president said something conservative. Someone should post on YouTube the spectacle of the new Speaker struggling to her feet to applaud the troops. It is funny and gets funnier the more you watch it.

Other accidental delights: catching senators Kennedy and McCain dozing off. This old men might help run the country, but it’s not easy for them to stay up past nine.

Perhaps the greatest surprise of the speech was the president’s recognition of four genuine American heroes. Talking to two of the president’s senior speech writers last spring, I was told bluntly that the president “didn’t like anecdotes.” I’ve known each of these speech writers for a least a decade and I know that they know the power of real and vivid examples to carry a political point from the printed page to people’s hearts. It was a technique that Ronald Reagan used in every State of the Union address and hundreds of other speeches. I told them that the president was losing the communications war and that part of the reason was his failure to use anecdotes. Their loyalty kept them from fully agreeing at the time. But, I wonder, watching the president’s address tonight if an internal White House debate has been won — and that Bush is now lifting a few moves from the Gipper’s playbook?

Thanks for reader David Towle, I decided to reprint an article I published in this month’s American Legion magazine entitled “None Dare Call Them Prisoners.”

GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA — Military officers here are forbidden to use the word “prisoner,” when describing the 440 terrorists housed here. (The preferred term is “detainee.”) But they talk about them constantly.

A favorite story: A detainee, who lost a leg fighting American forces in Afghanistan, was given a prosthetic leg. Now he is back in Gitmo’s base hospital – he broke his good ankle playing soccer.

This detainee tale, usually told with a chuckle by uniformed officers, sums up America’s absurd and politically correct exercise in terrorist detention.
There is little doubt this strange tale is true. Rear Admiral Harry B. Harris, Jr., who commands the joint task force that guards and interrogates the Gitmo detainees, confirmed it to me.

The military seems to like this story because it thinks it shows its good side. Look, free medical care! Soccer fields! Fun in the sun for hardened terrorists! See how we care! Our critics couldn’t be more wrong!

(more…)

I was living in Brussels during the birth of euro and will never forget the competing reactions to the new currency. The euro-crats,many of whom I knew socially, were on cloud nine. A common currency to unite Europe! Lower prices, because the cost of goods could be easily compared across borders! And other marvels were promised. (As it happens, prices went up not down, because prices converge toward the mean in common currency zones, but they were too excited to listen to mere economics.)

Meanwhile, the man with the rain-stained hat who ran the news stand, the Arabs and Congolese who drove taxis as sideline to their main occupation of chain-smoking, the baker’s daughter, the barkeep at Cafe Havana, the waiter at Rendezvous Des Artistes, the old woman at the cheese shop and many other ordinary people, were depressed about the euro. They thought something important was vanishing, like the departure of the Latin Mass in 1965 or the habit of young men standing up on trams so that pregnant strangers could sit. They were not happy; they were grimly resigned to an inevitability. You see they weren’t asked to vote on it; they were simply told when their money would be worthless.

In my travels across the continent, I heard similar remarks from ordinary people. They wouldn’t generally volunteer them, but, when asked, a torrent burst.

Now, a little bit of people power is striking back, as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes in the Telegraph today.

Of course, this makes Britain’s reluctance to join the euro look more democratic by the day. As for the new currencies, they would make a smarter set of European overlords a little more cautious–but not the current crew.

A screaming, hitting, disobedient three-year old girl was put off a Air Tran flight yesterday, along with her two parents.

The two adults–from Boston, naturally–said they simply needed more time to calm and cajole the three-year old into taking her seat and putting on her seat belt.

Read this little news item and tell me that the real problem is the airline, as the press account suggests.

Right. The problem is the parents. Their inability to control their child is treated as natural (”oh, what can we do?”). This is not unlike President Carter’s policy toward the Iranian hostage-takers and about as effective.

Somewhere in Hell there is a 737 packed with these psuedo-parents listening to other people’s children cry for all eternity.

These Boston-based parents think they were humiliated for being politely deplaned. Wrong again. They humiliated themselves for failing to keep their kid in line.

As far as I know, no one has asked these careless parents what their opinion of spanking is. But surely we can guess.