I liked “Hunting for Hippies”, from the same collection as “Phred”.

I don’t remember the characters, but it was a father and son out in a wheat field…dad in plaid jacket carrying a double barrel shotgun. I paraphrase:

“O.K. boy, call ‘em in, just like I showed you.”

Son cradles hands around mouth – “Socialized Healthcare! Food Stamps Here, Today Only! We have cheese!”

I believe that was from an early “Bloom County” strip. I think it’s in the first Bloom County collection, “Loose Tails.” Milo and the Major are out huntin’ liberals …

“Winged one!” “Socialized medicine! Socialized medicine!”

Really? I don’t think I’ve ever said that Afghanistan was a disaster. In fact, I basically regard it as an overwhelming success (apart from the screw-up in Tora Bora) the benefit of which is now being pissed away through inattention.

Likewise, you can’t have been reading me too long on Iraq, because I supported the war before it started, and for some time after. But when the facts change, so do my opinions.

The opposition is neither widespread nor popular. It is isolated to a small set of areas, as any close look at the facts will confirm. As for popularity, consider that Iraqis have been the target of the majority of the violence. Committing violence against your own fellows tends to make you less, not more, popular–or is that truly a difficult concept?

The people of Iraq understand what is happening. And THEY KNOW WHO THE BAD GUYS ARE!

There are millions of talented, hard-working, peace-loving people in Iraq who are motivated to defeating the terrorists, getting their government going, and getting on with life. These are normal, sane desires that very nearly everyone shares.

You give the Iraqis absolutely no credit.

Please check out Instapundit’s 0804 post.

2005 is going to be a good year for freedom. It’s going to be noisy and truncated for Syria, and possibly even Iran. New Year’s Day for them comes on November 3d this year. And they know it.

Using a big armored raid, there is no occupation, no guerilla campaign. What the mission profile looks like is a tradition mafia hit job. As far as how to defense it, you’re assuming a much higher skill level than the Syrians have ever shown. And if we want to really screw them over, we support & arm the Syrian Kurds.

Medium who channels stillborn children says Chimpy McHalliburton laughs at American deaths in Iraq” (registration required. see last paragraph of story.)

28 Days was certainly prophetic, wasn’t it? Moore’s Disease is spreading like wildfire.

Come on, you think the Syrians have been sleeping for the last two years? Don’t you think that they’ve worked out that the way to beat an American incursion is to disperse and wait for the occupation and then fight a guerilla campaign?

The US military could do anything to Syria that needs doing with a heavy division+ launching out of Iraq, given adequate air support. This would be a huge armoured raid – think Thunder Run writ large, with maybe a diversionary landing by the Marines in the Med. It wouldn’t be an occupation – rather an old-style punitive raid designed to bring the Syrian forces out into the open where they can be dealt with appropriately. If the place becomes even more of a cesspool afterwards, who cares? It’s not like Iraq – not heavily industrilized, not a historical center of Middle East/Arab power, no oil for Dick Cheney, not central and now essentially surrounded by Iraq, Turkey and Israel.

Iran – the worst thing that America could do there would be to put large numbers of boots on the ground. Spec Ops, money and propoganda are the best weapons in that theatre – accompanied by precision air strikes if absolutely necessary. The most important thing in the near term is to bribe, bully, whatever Russia into cutting off their nuke supplies. Sadly, Beslan may help with this.

Such an analyst you are:

“but the immediate issue is not that there is internicine warfare that we can’t control, but that two of these three groups actively and violently resist the American presence.”

It should read some members of two of these three groups. At least be responsible in your supposed statements of fact. You also conveniently leave out the fact that Iraqi’s are still signing up to fight with us even after the multitude of attacks against them.