Military blogger Citizen Smash, aka the Indepundit, is one of TMV’s favorites because he just gets down to the issues with a minimum of political rhetoric and doesn’t personally go after people who write things with which he disagrees.
And on the controversy over calls for a withdrawal from Iraq Smash again displays why he is worth reading and his opinion worth considering. Read the post IN FULL but here are some highlights:
The U.S. military is achieving tremendous success in clearing insurgent and terrorist strongholds in Iraq. Michael Yon’s first-person reports on the Battle for Mosul illustrate such a success story in vivid detail…The U.S. military has taken the lessons learned from the success in Mosul, and has begun applying them to the rest of Iraq. The key to this effort is the growth and training of the ISF. A quick tour of the milblogs of soldiers deployed to Iraq reveals that tremendous progress is being made on this front….
…Finally, those who argue that an immediate withdrawal from Iraq is in America’s strategic interests ignore the lessons of history. One need only contrast the results of America’s long-term military and economic investments in Germany, Japan, and South Korea with the economic and humanitarian disasters that followed our too-hasty withdrawals from Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia.
Where would you rather live?
NOTE TO THE WHITE HOUSE AND SOME WEBLOG WRITERS: Note that he made intriguing points without calling anyone unpatriotic, questioning their motives or their sincerity. It CAN be done by those who are serious about policy.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.