Update:  11/20/08

The Iraqi thought to be responsible for Staff Sgt. Maupin’s abduction and murder of an Army reservist from Ohio and other deadly attacks over several years was killed in an American raid in Baghdad, the U.S. military said Thursday.

U.S. forces acting on a tip carried out the raid Nov. 11 in Baghdad’s Mansour neighborhood, killing Hajji Hammadi and another armed insurgent, the military statement.

His father, Keith Maupin, said he got a call from the Pentagon on Wednesday telling him that Hammadi had been killed.

“They told me they killed him on Veterans Day,” Maupin said. “Ain’t that appropriate.”

He said the Army knew that Hammadi was in the videotape.

“They told me he was the tall guy standing behind Matt,” Maupin said. “He was the only tall guy there.”

“The removal of Hajji Hammadi from the AQI (Al Qaeda in Iraq) network is yet another significant blow to the terrorist organization,” Brig. Gen. David Perkins said.

Source

Matt Maupin was captured April 9, 2004 when the convoy he was in was attacked by Iraqi insurgents in Baghdad. Later video showed Matt being held by his captors and later another blurred video indicated that he had been executed. His body, however, was not recovered until recently.

He is only one of 4,000 but the tragedy was extended for three years as his family and friends waited for the final closure to come. That happened Sunday when an Army general came to the Maupin’s home to deliver the news that his body had been located and would be coming home.

The Glen Este High School graduate was the only U.S. military member still listed as missing-captured in Iraq. Military officials identified the remains through DNA, Keith Maupin said. He said he wasn’t told where the remains had been found.

Read Michelle Maulkins’ blog here

The Maupin family adopted a saying during their vigil waiting for the final news to come about their loved one.

Odo Nnyew Fie Kwan Frame (”Love Never Loses Its Way Home”), a West African proverb, is used in Iraq among the troops to describe the search for Staff Sergeant Maupin. The Maupin family also used the phrase as a cornerstone for their hope that Matt would one day return home.

Condolences can be left for the Maupin family at the Yellow Ribbon Website.

The tragedy of Matt’s death will only be multiplied if his sacrifice is lost to the politicians who would use the war in Iraq as a tool to advance their own agendas.

Originally published March 31, 2008

While it would be hard to know based on the reporting of the mainstream media, positive signs have been coming from Iraq over the past few months.  With President Bush’s announcement last week that a Marine battalion scheduled to go to Iraq in November will instead be deployed to Afghanistan, while around 8,000 American troops will be withdrawn from Iraq, the obvious can no longer be overlooked: the surge has brought successes where many had declared defeat.

In Sunday’s Washington Post, Ret. Lt. Col. John Nagl, who was the operations officer in Anbar Province in 2003-2004, examines the mistakes made early on in Iraq and how the war has been put back on track.

I’ve played the history over and over in my mind. Early mistakes by U.S. officials — disbanding the Iraqi army and firing almost all the civil servants needed to run a society — provided tinder for the Sunni insurgency. Things worsened as U.S. commanders withdrew our forces from the cities to large, comfortable bases from which they commuted to war. By the time my unit left, the Sunni insurgency that had erupted in Fallujah in the summer of 2003 had spread to the heart of Baghdad. Sunni and Shiite militias were pushing Iraq to the brink of full-scale civil war. And the pages of Army Times magazine were filled with the faces of fallen friends.

But studding this bleak narrative were signs of hope. As early as 2003, some of Iraq’s minority Sunnis came to understand that their future lay not in resisting U.S. forces but in working with them. After neglecting Sunni tribes for years, our military began paying some to break ranks with the radicals of al-Qaeda in Iraq, leading to the Anbar Awakening of late 2006.

Enter the “surge” and a new U.S. strategy: to protect Iraqis by living among them. Military units left the comfort of their bases and, with counterparts from the maturing Iraqi army and police, manned the smaller encampments that dotted the country’s cities and provinces. U.S. casualties also surged as we cleared Baghdad and surrounding communities in the summer of 2007.

Then Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki moved against Shiite militias — first in Basra in March 2008, then in the massive Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad known as Sadr City. Operations continue in Mosul and Diyala, and so far the success is undeniable.

Source

Nagl is a military man and therefore a realist who recognizes the insubstantiality of the advancements made in Iraq.  However, as he has observed, there are more things going right in Iraq at the present time then there has been since the earliest days of the invasion.

A hat-tip to TexasFred for bringing this story to light.

Iraq bond National Guard couple penalized for breaking apartment lease.

MCKINNEY – A North Texas couple is getting ready for their second deployment overseas.

They’re leaving to serve their country but instead they’ve been served with fees from their landlord.

“It’s a job, we have to do it,” said Chris Horvath.

But they’re leaving with added stress, since they’ve been in a fight with their apartment complex – McKinney’s El Lago development.

The couple, both of whom are sergeants in the Texas National Guard, are soon headed to Iraq.

Full Story Here:
Iraq-bound guards penalized for breaking apartment lease

chart from www.journalism.org

TV war coverage down, data show

From Baltimore Sun

June 23, 2008

Five years into the war in Iraq and nearly seven years into the war in Afghanistan, getting news of the conflicts onto television is harder than ever. According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been “massively scaled back this year.” Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007. CBS Evening News has devoted the fewest minutes to Iraq, 51, versus 55 minutes on ABC’s World News and 74 minutes on NBC Nightly News. (The average evening newscast is 22 minutes long.) CBS News no longer stations a single full-time correspondent in Iraq, where some 150,000 U.S. troops are deployed. Coverage of the war in Afghanistan has increased slightly this year, with 46 minutes of total coverage year-to-date compared with 83 minutes for all of 2007.

Those who have watched the MSM coverage of the Iraq war know too well that the above article is absolutely true.  When the casualty lists were high, every nightly news program led with the numbers and details of the daily bombings.  Now that the surge has proved effective, the coverage has evaporated.

The duty of journalists and media outlets to objectively present the news, good and bad, has gone the way of do-do bird.

Abu muqawama is always a great site for informative analysis regarding the Iraq War.  Yesterday’s post details what is going right in Iraq and what is still upcoming.

Check out the article:  Big Gains in Iraq here.

After making his points, both positive and negative, the author sums up his findings with:

Dr. iRack will leave it to readers to make up their own minds as to whether the Iraqi glass is, on balance, “half full” or “half empty.” Dr. iRack tends not to be a glass-half-full type of guy, but to switch metaphors for a moment, it is clear we’ve been on a hot streak. So let’s hope the good fortune continues. As we hope, however, we should remember that this is Iraq, after all, and hope is not a plan. Hard work, not victory dances (by us or Maliki), will be required to lock-in, and build upon, recent progress. And, in Dr. iRack’s not-so-humble opinion, that means figuring out ways to generate leverage over Maliki to get him to make the tough political compromises necessary for long-term stability.

While Dr. iRack maybe less optimistic than some regarding the situation in Iraq, at the same time he is also probably a  more reliable source than others as well.  However, even at his most pessimistic, his views show tremendous optimism in comparison to what is coming (or not coming) from the MSM.  The media seems to be content with letting any positive coverage of any gains made in the war go unspoken, unwritten, and unseen.

From Tuesday’s White House press conference with Dana Perino, long-time Washington reporter Helen Thomas, now a columnist with Hearst Newspapers, had a few pointed questions about the mission at hand in Iraq. From the official transcript:

THOMAS: Yesterday, according to The New York Times, we dropped a bomb on a home in Sadr City and burned alive a pregnant woman and her children. How long is the siege of Sadr — how long are we going to keep bombing Iraqis?

PERINO: Well, I’m not aware of that particular report. I have not — I’ve not seen it.

THOMAS: Well, it was pretty buried in the story.

PERINO: Okay. Well, the operation against the militias in Sadr City will continue until they root them out. And that is expressly in order to protect people like you just mentioned.

THOMAS: Root who out, Iraqis, in their own country?

PERINO: It is Prime Minister Maliki’s government which is going after the militia, which is appropriate.

THOMAS: Why are we bombing these people?

PERINO: Any time anyone that is an innocent civilian is hurt in a conflict, we obviously regret it, and we go out of our way to make sure it doesn’t happen.

THOMAS: Thank you.

Poor Helen Thomas, she is like the crazy aunt that everyone dreads inviting to the Christmas party but no one has the heart not to. No longer officially a “White House Correspondent,” when the press briefing room was recently remodeled, a chair was designated as her special domain. Not in the back of the room, of course, but front and center where she can continue to throw her liberal barbs directly at whatever unlucky spokesman stands behind the podium.

Despite President Bush’s obvious attempts to humor her, she continues to needle the current administration, seeming to hang on specifically to see her beloved Democrats return to dominance at the White House.

God Bless You, Helen. You presence continues to exemplify the bulldog tenacity that has kept you a thorn in the side of Republicans for over 50 years.

With the rancor and bitterness between the factions for and against the Iraq war, perhaps a look back to the inception of this great country is needed. The passage of generations softens our perception of the divisiveness between the Tories and the Whigs over the question of separation of the colonies from England. Men of great passion spoke their heart. None was greater or more effective than Thomas Paine who, in his pamphlet The American Crisis Number One, outlines his burning passion for the validity of the cause of his cause. In it is an anecdote that should even to this day be considered when evaluating whether the price of war is justified or should be avoided until a later time.

I once felt all that kind of anger, which a man ought to feel, against the mean principles that are held by the Tories: a noted one, who kept a tavern at Amboy, was standing at his door, with as pretty a child in his hand, about eight or nine years old, as I ever saw, and after speaking his mind as freely as he thought was prudent, finished with this unfatherly expression, “Well! give me peace in my day.” Not a man lives on the continent but fully believes that a separation must some time or other finally take place, and a generous parent should have said, “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace;” and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty.

So where is our country today? Are we summer soldiers and sunshine patriots who retreat from adversity and immolation? Or is this still a country that is willing to sacrifice for a cause greater than ourselves: the good of our children, grandchildren and our country itself. There seems no doubt where the military is in this question, the question is whether the the rest of the citizens are willing to pay their toll as well.