Iraq

The Small Wars Journal Hits The MSM Big Time

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For any readers interested in Iraq, military affairs, fourth generation warfare, the liberal media and counterinsurgency:

The publisher and the editor-in-chief of the highly regarded Small Wars Journal, respectively Bill Nagl and Dave Dilegge, are doing a public Q&A at noon on Tuesday with the powerhouse The Washington Post. I imagine that Bill Arkin will be involved somewhere as well – but we can hope otherwise. ;o)

Read about the details at the SWJ BLog.

Submit YOUR questions here.

Cross-posted at Zenpundit.

A Great Find

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Blogfriend Eddie (who credited Abu Muqawama) sent in a link to a Mother Jones issue that has a veritable roundtable of experts commenting on withdrawing from Iraq. I was very impressed with their selection; below are a few links to some of the experts who would be of the most interest to the readers here:

Colonel T.X. Hammes
Colonel H.R. McMaster
Lt. Colonel John Nagl
Dr. Andrew Bacevich
Dr. Bary Posen
Dr. John Pike
General Anthony Zinni
Dr. Anthony Cordesman
Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski

Give it a look.

Cross-posted at Zenpundit

Kilcullen on TV

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Kilcullen, the Australian adviser to Col. Petraeus, has been mentioned several times here. His television appearances lately include an interview with Charlie Rose and a panel discussion with Ali Allawi (former Iraqi Minister of Defense and author of “The Occupation of Iraq”), Jon Lee Anderson (“The Fall of Baghdad”), Phebe Marr (“The Modern History of Iraq”), and George Packer (“The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq”) at the New Yorker Festival. Played twice this weekend on C-Span, it will be repeated tomorrow morning at 6:00 EST. Packer’s profile of Kilcullen demonstrates the New Yorker‘s encouragement of a certain interesting style and its willingness to give a writer space. Earlier references from the extraordinarily knowledgeable Zenpundit: Cutting Edge Military Theory: A Primer (Part I.) and Colonel Kilcullen, the “Surge” and The Guardian

Iraq – How will we know if we’ve won?

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War opponents keep asking this question. One answer is that we will have won when we depose the Islamofascist governments of Syria and Iran, and perhaps some other countries, and Iraq is stable, and we no longer face a threat from Islamic radicalism and terror attacks because the Islamists are crushed and demoralized. But that’s perhaps too expansive and too vague an answer.

I was watching a TV news discussion on FOX tonight about positive recent developments in Iraq, and I realized that there’s an easy way to determine when we have won. We will know we have won when the leadership of the Democratic Party starts claiming credit for the war.