Hey he-ey, goodbye.

This week's photo showed Sen. John Kerry meeting troops in Iraq:


FIRST PLACE: Chad (blog)

Yes sir, I am the highest ranking soldier willing to meet with you in theater.

SECOND PLACE: LarryHeart

Private Edwards shakes hands with a roadside Bomb.

THIRD PLACE: Gridlock

SOLDIER IN BACKGROUND: "I hope Jon Carry will come halp me figger out how two werk dis camra..."

HONORABLE MENTION: RFTR (blog)

"You should have worked harder in school."

WHAT I CAME UP WITH:

"Wow, that's quite a handshake you've got there, soldier! Um, all right now, you don't have to squeeze that hard. Hey, I mean it! Enough! Ow! AAAAIIIEEE!!!"

"You know, if I were in your position, I would have had four hundred and eighty-three Purple Hearts by now."

"Pardon me, but would you have any Grey Poupon?"

"Hey, guys, has anybody seen my hat?"

And that's it for this week's contest. Report for duty on the next one Tuesday.

This week's contest looks at Iraq:

U.S. Senator John Kerry (L) is greeted by Private First Class Derrick Edwards (R) at the Basrah Air Station in southern Iraq in this undated handout photograph released by the Ministry of Defence on December 16, 2006. REUTERS/Cpl Russ Nolan RLC/MoD

Submit your best caption, but don't get stuck. I'll post the winners on Friday, as usual.

Sen. Barack Obama's middle name is Hussein.

Breaking news. The Associated Press reports:

Saddam Hussein was convicted and sentenced Sunday to hang for crimes against humanity in the 1982 killings of 148 people in a single town, as the ousted leader, trembling and defiant, shouted "God is great!"

As he, his half brother and another senior official in his regime were convicted and sentenced to death, Saddam yelled out, "Long live the people and death to their enemies. Long live the glorious nation, and death to its enemies!"

Um, well, yes, that's the general idea.

Plenty of people are saying the verdict was timed to help the Republicans in the midterm elections. So what if it was? Others will ask if sentencing Saddam was "worth it", implying that it wasn't. Still others will blame America for "creating" Saddam in the first place, as if he were some product of a secret neo-con bioengineering lab.

What these people cannot deny, however — indeed, what no one can — is that holding Saddam accountable for his crimes is a good thing, and a major accomplishment that would not have happened without the U.S. invasion.

Via the unpermalinkable Steven Den Beste, LGF commenter jwbaumann is having second thoughts about the wisdom of American military intervention:

Lizard.1: Lizard 2: Lizard 3: Lizard 1: Lizard 2: Lizard 1: Lizard 2: Lizard 3: Lizard 2: Lizard 1: Lizard 2: Lizard 1: Lizard 3: Lizard 1: Lizard 2: Lizard 1: Lizard 2: Lizard 3:

It's terrible. The horrible loss of American soldiers freeing that country from tyranny... ...only to have it devolve into Civil War. Car fires, buses burning, security forces being attacked... ...and the native population seeming to be helpless to stop it. Unemployment sky high... ...no vision for the future... ...a leader at odds with the U.S. No-go zones with anti-government gangs in control. Terrible. We never should have "liberated" them. It was a mistake. And I was so hopeful.. They voted in a constitution... The economy was doing well — exports were increasing... But now, just thousands of dead and wounded Americans. Billions of dollars squandered. And for what? Muslim radical-driven civil war. Yeah. Sad. What a waste. But enough about France. Now what should we do about Iraq?

You can read more about radical Islam's war on France here, here, and here. Those stories are relatively recent, but the same stuff has been going on for over a year. And of course, the French are already starting to surrender.

The U.S. military is holding a detainee in extreme solitary confinement, despite the fact that he hasn't been convicted of any crime.

Of course, since he's a U.S. Marine and not an enemy combatant, no one seems to care much. The L.A. Times reports:

Lance Cpl. Robert Pennington's mental condition is deteriorating because he is confined to a tiny cell 22 hours a day while awaiting court-martial in the April 26 slaying of a 52-year-old unarmed, disabled man in Hamandiya, said his parents, Deanna and Terry Pennington. Pennington, 22, has developed nervous tics and may not be able to assist in his own defense, his father said.

Attorneys for several of the Marines facing charges in connection with the killing have tried unsuccessfully to have their clients released pending court-martial.

"Life in the brig is total hell for these guys," Deanna Pennington said. "They've not been convicted of anything, and they're being treated like serial killers."

My advice to Lance Cpl. Pennington? Convert to Islam. It probably won't get you out of jail any faster, but it might get you better food.

Via Apostropher, the lefty blogosphere is abuzz with adulation for the makers of this video about conservative bloggers who supported the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq without fighting in either one — i.e., "chickenhawks".

The video is a well-done parody of a Ken Burns-style documentary, but at its core is the tired and invalid notion (which I parodied here) that no one is entitled to support a war unless he's fighting in it himself. Indeed, if that's the case, one might wonder why the makers left out any criticism of left-wing and centrist bloggers who supported the invasion of Afghanistan, despite not fighting in it themselves.

If you're tired of seeing Bush get criticized for attacking Iraq based on military intelligence at the time, well, it looks like that trend has finally gotten old and tired. The new hotness: criticizing him for not attacking Iraq soon enough, based on military intelligence at the time. Via BoingBoing, Salon digs up an NBC News report from March 2004:

In June 2002, U.S. officials say intelligence had revealed that Zarqawi and members of al-Qaida had set up a weapons lab at Kirma, in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin and cyanide.

The Pentagon quickly drafted plans to attack the camp with cruise missiles and airstrikes and sent it to the White House, where, according to U.S. government sources, the plan was debated to death in the National Security Council.

...Four months later, intelligence showed Zarqawi was planning to use ricin in terrorist attacks in Europe.

The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White House again killed it. By then the administration had set its course for war with Iraq.

...In January 2003, the threat turned real. Police in London arrested six terror suspects and discovered a ricin lab connected to the camp in Iraq.

The Pentagon drew up still another attack plan, and for the third time, the National Security Council killed it.

Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi’s operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.

Sure, taking out Zarqawi earlier would have helped. But if you think the very people criticizing Bush now for not killing Zarqawi earlier would have applauded a missile strike on Iraq before Zarqawi had racked up his grisly death toll, I've got a bridge to sell you. As I've said before, when it comes to the MSM (and the liberal blogosphere), Bush just can't win.

At least this article establishes that al Qaeda had terrorist camps in Iraq producing chemical weapons —that represented a real threat to the West — before the U.S. invasion. I wonder if the same people who will use this article to fault Bush will also stop asserting that there was no connection between Saddam and al Qaeda, or that there was no reason to invade Iraq. I'm not betting on it.

The New York Times reports:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 8 - Al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in an American airstrike on an isolated safe house north of Baghdad at 6.15 p.m. local time on Wednesday, top U.S. and Iraqi officials said on Thursday.

At a joint news conference with Iraq's prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the top American military commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., said Zarqawi's body had been positively identified by fingerprints, "facial recognition" and other indicators. He said seven of Zarqawi's associates had also been killed in the strike.

The announcement of Zarqawi's death, shortly before noon on Thursday in Baghdad, appeared to mark a major watershed in the war. With a $25 million U.S. bounty on his head, the Jordan-born Zarqawi has been the most wanted man in Iraq for his leadership of Islamic terrorist groups that have carried out many of the most brutal attacks of the war, including scores of suicide bombings, kidnappings and beheadings.

"Today, we have managed to put an end to Zarqawi," said a beaming Mr. Maliki, who took office three weeks ago at the head of Iraq's first full-term government since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. He said the death should be a warning to other insurgent leaders. "They should stop now," he said. "They should review their situation and resort to logic while there is still time."

Oh, we'll hear from the anti-war left soon enough, about how this doesn't excuse Abu Ghraib or Haditha, and where are the WMD, and Iraq is still dangerous, and the war is costing us too much, and so on. You can already sense the dismissive liberal snark in the Times' description of Mr. Maliki as "beaming". (How dare he beam! Doesn't he know we're fighting an illegal war of convenience?) That's unavoidable, I suspect. But for now, I'm just going to appreciate this accomplishment.

FOLLOW-UP:
Aaaand, right on schedule, we have a roundup of liberal-left reactions, via Instapundit. And here's one more, via LGF.

Via Instapundit, Pierce T. Wetter takes a closer look at the Iraq war statistics (pdf) I blogged about here, here, and here. Apparently, he does this every month.

"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory."

—

George Orwell

In this post (and again in this post), I looked at the declining level of monthly US troop deaths in Iraq, and noted that "a cynic might say that US troop deaths are down because Iraqis are attacking each other."

Well, it turns out that cynic would be wrong. Via Instapundit, MyElectionAnalysis looks at additional data (pdf) from the Brookings Institution and says:

But it must be that the insurgency is turning their assault on Iraqi military and police, who are increasingly taking up the slack, right?

215, 176, 193, 189, 158, 193 (and the three months before that were 304, 282, 233)

Okay, okay, so insurgents aren’t engaging us; they’re turning increasingly to car bombs then, right?

70, 70, 70, 68, 30, 30

Civilians then. They’re just garroting poor civilians.

527, 826, 532, 732, 950, 446 (upper bound, two months before that were 2489 and 1129).

Of course, we would like those numbers to be much, much lower. But it's clearly wrong to say that they're spiraling out of control.

FOLLOW-UP:
Demonstrating the uncanny political instincts and keen sense of timing that served him so well in his failed Presidential campaign, John F. Kerry recently claimed that U.S. troops are "in the middle of an escalating civil war." If current trends continue, brace yourself for the flip-flop.

ANOTHER FOLLOW-UP:
Page four of the Brookings report (pdf) has a graph of US troop deaths that's very similar to the one I posted here.

I went back and broke down the data behind this graph showing US military deaths in Iraq. Here's a new graph showing deaths classified by the Department of Defense as "hostile" (caused by enemy attacks, including IED's and other attacks outside of active combat) and "non-hostile" (caused by accidents, illness, etc.) in blue. Total deaths are in grey:


To see the data for yourself, go to Iraq Coaltion Casualty Count and click on the dates in the table titled "Military Fatalities: By Month". It turns out that of 2,332 confirmed deaths through March 2006, 555 were classified as "non-hostile". That's 23.8%, or almost 1 in four.

I don't mean in any way to trivialize those deaths. Those 555 men and women sacrificed their lives in serving our country. And we should repay their sacrifice by not turning their deaths into propaganda that makes our enemies seem deadlier than they are.

According to Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, which collects US Department of Defense data, US troop deaths in Iraq declined in March for the fifth month in a row — the first time that has happened since the war began:


Monthly US troop deaths have not been at such a low level since early 2004, before the insurgency really gathered momentum.

As I said in this comment on an earlier post:

In any war, mistakes are made, plans go astray, and strategies are changed and changed again. Incompetence in war has less to to with committing errors than with failing to respond to and recover from them.

Based on the above statistics (which, it should be noted, include accidental and other deaths not caused by enemy forces), it looks like the US is learning from its earlier mistakes quite well. As an earlier American president once said, "Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'press on' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."

Now, a cynic might say that US troop deaths are down because Iraqis are attacking each other. And an equally cynical person might respond that this is precisely what opponents of the invasion always claimed they wanted: for America to let people in other countries fight their own fights.

But it would be wrong for Americans, especially those of us who supported this invasion, to be so callous. Because we removed Saddam, we should aggressively support and protect the people of Iraq as they build a government in his absence. It hasn't been easy so far, and it probably won't be easy in the future. Creating democractic rule in the midst of centuries-old sectarian tensions is a difficult task, and success is by no means guaranteed. But as yet another American president once said, America chooses tasks "not because they are easy, but because they are hard".

Those two quotations from two presidents embody the American spirit. And calls for immediate or premature withdrawal from Iraq are its antithesis. I suspect that's why recent protests on the third anniversary of the invasion were so sparsely attended: Even with mistakes behind us and a rough road ahead, Americans don't like rallying for failure. We'd rather press on.

In a Guardian piece titled "Bombing civilians is not only immoral, it's ineffective", writer A.C. Grayling implies that the US has been indiscriminately, even intentionally, bombing civilian targets in Iraq. He leads off his condemnation of this supposed tactic with the following:

No one knows how many civilians have died violently in Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003. The most careful assessment, by the website Iraq Body Count, estimates at least 36,000. The true figure could be three times higher.

The implication is that these deaths were mainly caused by U.S. bombing. But Grayling offers no evidence that this is the case. He appears to have pulled his "three times higher" guess out of thin air. But even the source he does cite, Iraq Body Count, includes in its tally deaths caused by Saddam's forces, by insurgents, by terrorists, and even just by plain, ordinary "criminal action". The site's "Methodology" page explains:

The count includes civilian deaths caused by coalition military action and by military or paramilitary responses to the coalition presence (e.g. insurgent and terrorist attacks).

It also includes excess civilian deaths caused by criminal action resulting from the breakdown in law and order which followed the coalition invasion.

But just including violent deaths wasn't getting the total high enough, so IBC changed the rules of its body count in midstream:

It has also been newly revised due to our growing awareness that we were too narrowly-focused on bombs and other conventional weapons, neglecting the deadly effects of disrupted food, water, electricity and medical supplies. These effects, though relatively small at the outset of a war, are likely to become much more significant as time passes, and we will monitor media reports accordingly.

So Grayling rounds up every suicide bomber attack and "criminal action", along with every death that could possibly be linked to the chaos insurgents have been spreading, and uses that total to imply, incorrectly, that the U.S. is carpet-bombing Iraqis into oblivion. Nice.

Of course, it's quite possible to make a moral argument against bombing civilian targets without resorting to such trickery, but then Grayling would lose out on a catchy, topical connection to his new book, Among the Dead Cities: Was the Allied Bombing of Civilians in WWII a Necessity or a Crime? No prizes for guessing his answer.

The third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq has triggered a deluge of doom-and-gloom, told-you-so pieces from antiwar pundits and bloggers. But in the midst of their spiteful sniping, reader Tokyo Tom emailed a link to this Newsweek article, in which Fareed Zakaria explains why he's optimistic on the situation in Iraq:

There is no doubt today that the costs of the invasion have far outweighed the benefits. But in the long view of history, will that always be true? If, after all this chaos, a new and different kind of Iraqi politics emerges, it will make a difference in the region. Even now, amid the violence, one can see that. The old order in Iraq was built on fear and terror. One group dominated the land, oppressing the others. Now representatives of all three communities — Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds — are sitting down at the table, trying to construct a workable bargain they can all live with.

These sectarian power struggles can get extremely messy, and violent parties have taken advantage of every crack and cleavage. But this might be inevitable in a country coming to terms with very real divisions and disagreements. Iraq might be stumbling toward nation-building by consent, not brutality. And that is a model for the Middle East.

Bear in mind that Zakaria is no Bush devotee; in fact, he was one of the contributors to Newsweek's infamous "America is Dead" issue. He didn't write the cover story, but his companion piece argued that Bush's second inaugural address, with its promises to support democracy around the world, invited charges of hypocrisy.

With so many on the left claiming that Iraq is a lost cause we should run away from as soon as possible, it's heartening to hear from someone willing to give America half a chance to make it work.

Last April, I blogged about Haj Ali, an Iraqi who claimed he was the man in the widely-circulated photo of an Abu Ghraib detainee wearing a black hood and holding wires in his hands.

Haj Ali certainly got a lot of mileage out of his story. He told it to Vanity Fair and PBS last year, and on March 11, he was featured in a New York Times story headlined, "Symbol of Abu Ghraib Seeks to Spare Others His Nightmare".

In that earlier post, while emphasizing that I didn't know for certain whether Haj Ali was the man in the photo, I noted that his story was quite possibly false. Aside from the fact that it's hard to prove you're the guy in a photo of someone with his face completely covered, two things made me suspicious:

U.S. Army Major General Antonio Taguba's 53-page report on Abu Ghraib, despite listing numerous specific examples of extreme inmate abuse, including beatings, sodomy, and dog bites, nevertheless found that the wires shown in the photo were used only "to simulate electric torture."

And Haj Ali's story has evolved over time. In an August 8, 2004 interview with ABC News, he never mentioned the hood photo, or being electrocuted. Then, in January 2005, he told Vanity Fair that he was the man in the hood, and was given electric shocks as well. As the Daily Mirror noted, that was the first time he had made such a claim.

Well, it turns out that Haj Ali (who's been calling himself Ali Shalal Qaissi these days) was not the man in the infamous hooded-prisoner photo. The Times has now reported that its earlier story, and Haj Ali's claim, were false:

This week, after the online magazine Salon raised questions about the identity of the man in the photograph, Mr. Qaissi and his lawyers insisted he was telling the truth.

Certainly, he was at Abu Ghraib, and appears with a hood over his head in some photographs that Army investigators seized from the computer belonging to Specialist Charles Graner, the soldier later convicted of being the ringleader of the abuse.

However, he now acknowledges he is not the man in the specific photograph he printed and held up in a portrait that accompanied the Times article. But he and his lawyers maintain that he was photographed in a similar position and shocked with wires and that he is the one on his business card. The Army says it believes only one prisoner was treated in that way.

"I know one thing," Mr. Qaissi said yesterday, breaking down in tears when reached by telephone. "I wore that blanket, I stood on that box, and I was wired up and electrocuted."

Really? Both the Army's account and Haj Ali's earlier version of his own story strongly suggest that these other claims are false, too.

At any rate, we do know this: If the Times had had an ounce of skepticism about Haj Ali's story — as a good newspaper should have about any story — it might have noticed the inconsistencies between his account and the Taguba report, or how he seemed to invent the story of being electrocuted while hooded after failing to mention it to other reporters. (And, via Instapundit and Mediacrity, the latest Times story reports that Haj Ali filed a lawsuit over his treatment at Abu Ghraib on July 27, 2004 — yet made no allegation that he was electrocuted at all. Call me a cynic, but if you're suing someone for abusing you, that's the kind of thing you don't leave out.)

No doubt there will be many who say that Haj Ali's false claim is irrelevant: Bad things happened at Abu Ghraib, and if they didn't happen exactly the way Haj Ali said they did, what's the difference?

Well, the difference is that we depend on the media to tell us the truth. A seemingly minor falsehood reported as fact undermines their credibility overall. And at a newspaper like the Times, these mistakes are almost certainly not made at random. Reporters and editors are more likely to accept dubious, unproven claims when those claims reinforce their own personal biases. Add up enough of these little slips, all pointing in the same direction, and you start to get a distorted view of the world — seen not as it is, but as the Times would like it to be.

So there's no substitute for getting all the facts right, all the time. If the news media can't be bothered to do this, they may as well fire their reporters and hire a stable of screenwriters and novelists. Those guys might embellish the truth a bit, but they'll tell you a good story.

Over on Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds links to this purportedly home-made video (in Quicktime format) of a woman praising a clothing retailer for replacing her sweatshirt free of charge when its zipper broke.

The Professor says:

Various companies are consulting PR agencies and marketing experts on how to get this kind of buzz. My advice: Treat all of your customers this well, and some of them will post video tributes to your great service, which other people will then link to.

Maybe, but the far easier approach would be for a company to simply make its own video of a happy "customer" singing its praises — or slamming its competitors.

The above video may well be a genuine, spontaneous expression of gratitude, but I predict it won't be long before this sort of "Wow, I love company X" viral video phenomenon is ruined by phony testimonials.

I'm a little late on this one, but via Blackfive, the Associated Press reported earlier this month on the new movie breaking box-office records in Turkey. It's called "Valley of the Wolves — Iraq":

In the most expensive Turkish movie ever made, American soldiers in Iraq crash a wedding and pump a little boy full of lead in front of his mother.

They kill dozens of innocent people with random machine gun fire, shoot the groom in the head, and drag those left alive to Abu Ghraib prison - where a Jewish doctor cuts out their organs, which he sells to rich people in New York, London and Tel Aviv.

"Valley of the Wolves Iraq" — set to open in Turkey on Friday — feeds off the increasingly negative feelings many Turks harbor toward their longtime NATO allies: Americans.

The movie, which reportedly cost some $10 million, is the latest in a new genre of popular culture that demonizes the United States.

I can see how such a film would be made in Turkey. But I can't see why American actors would gladly star in it. Yet, as the New York Times reports, they did:

Sam William Marshall, played by Billy Zane, is portrayed as a sociopath, killing people without a second thought and claiming that he is doing God's will, a thinly veiled reference to statements by President George W. Bush about America's "crusade" for democracy in Iraq and the Middle East.

...A Jewish-American doctor, played by Gary Busey, is shown as shipping inmates' organs to New York, London and Israel. All these, according to the screenwriter, Bahadir Ozdener, were inspired by real events.

Later in the article, Zane explains his decision:

"I acted in this movie because I'm a pacifist," he said in a televised interview. "I'm against all kinds of war."

Translation: "I haven't had a decent role since Titanic." You know, Billy, if you need money that badly, there's always infomercials.

FOLLOW-UP:
The movie's (slow-loading) website is here.