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Anne at Peevish wonders if journalists are at extra risk in Iraq. The simple answer is: absolutely.

The insurgents will attack reporters as “collaborators with the occupation forces”, and coalition forces will attack them because they aren’t coalition forces. Being a “neutral observer” is not a viable option under these conditions. It’s not that they are reporters, it’s that they are bystanders.

This is a guerrilla war: an attack could come from any side. The insurgents are a collection of groups with individual goals. The goals of one group may be diametrically opposed to other groups, and they may shoot each other if they come in contact. The only thing they agree on is killing coalition and Iraqi government forces.

The coalition and Iraqi forces are so on edge that they react with violence to any change in their environment. For them the goal is staying alive until tomorrow. If you have never been in the situation it is hard to understand that prison looks like an acceptable alternative to their current situation. Three meals a day and a safe place to sleep looks good to someone who is getting shot at daily and eating MREs.

The failure to hold to rotation dates is a major problem. That exit date is what holds many people together; it a goal. When you lose that goal, when you don’t know how long you are going to be in the situation, you lose hope. Stop-Loss orders and tour extensions destroy morale.

Not even Johnson and McNarmara were that stupid and out of touch with the military.

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Jillian has a post at skippy about a male driver complaining about the advantage Danica Patrick has because she only weighs 100 pounds. If car owners thought that it was a real advantage, drivers would be on diets.

Ms. Patrick is under attack because she is good. She started in fourth position and ended the Indy 500 in the same position because she was running on fumes and couldn’t both drive aggressively and finish the race. She led for 19 laps but had to work through traffic after two rookie mistakes: she stalled the car in the pits, and she had an accident that damaged the front of the car. With a little more experience she is in line for the milk. [Indianapolis gives the winner milk instead of champagne.]

Ms. Patrick has a lot in common with Ellen MacArthur, another woman who does what she does very well indeed because she loves it.

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While the Lab Kat is in the process of moving in the physical world and the Vestal Vespa is contemplating the same, Michael of Musing’s musings has left Blogger behind and is now at musing85.typepad.com.

Patrick has rolled Electrolite into Teresa’s Making Light, which is nice as it saves a few clicks after adjusting the blogroll.

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Avedon Carol at The Sideshow pointed to Steve Gilliard’s item about the Democratic Party and security issues.

Folks, the only people who think the Republican Party has ever been a leader in security matters are those who have never bothered to study American history. The Republicans do a lot of blustering and send billions to military contractors, but they don’t have a consistent military or foreign policy.

People have been led to believe that the Republicans fought Communism. If you define fighting as calling people bad names, fine, but the Republicans forced President Wilson to withdraw an American division from Russia after World War I. The division was providing a safe corridor for people fleeing the civil war, and blocked the Bolshevik forces from southern ports on the Black Sea. These are the same people that blocked American entry into the League of Nations.

They didn’t want the US to support South Korea, and they halted the Korean War with a truce. The Korean War is still officially in progress, not settled, and we didn’t get all of our POWs back.

No need to go into Vietnam and Nixon’s withdrawal.

A couple of hundred Marines died upholding Reagan’s decision to intervene in the Lebanese civil war, and Ronnie tucked tail. The closest he came to combating Communism was the SWAT raid on Grenada.

George H.W. Bush made a decent recovery when his puppet, Saddam Hussein, got carried away, but he and his Secretary of Defense, Richard Cheney, began gutting the combat arms of the US military before the smoke had cleared. I was in San Diego for Gulf War I and read the letters in the San Diego Union Tribune from the combat pilots returning from the Gulf who had received their “Reduction In Force” letters.

Clinton slowed things down a bit from the Republican push to strip the military, but when Clinton wanted to move against Milosevic and bin Laden the Republicans started chanting “Wag The Dog” and made effective use of the American military nearly impossible.

Dubya broke with the Republicans’ generally isolationist attitude and has gone whole hog to swagger around the world. He has been in search of glory, not competence alarming other governments and the professional military who prefer accomplishing missions, not merely saying you did.

The Republicans don’t like treaties or international organizations. They prefer that people simply blindly trust the intentions of the United States. Unfortunately most countries do study history and don’t think much of the US record of abiding by treaties or agreements under Republicans.

The neo-cons and their media apologists will talk about the world being against the US, but a closer study shows that the rest of the world is fed up with self-serving reinterpretations of treaties and agreements. They also object to the US claiming others are violating provisions while the US is violating the same agreement in the same manner.

The good news is that a lot of students will be able to get doctorates by trying to explain what the hell caused Dubya to be re-elected.

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