The basic problem with all the exclamations of "police state" and "facism", is that no one can actually point to an instance where their rights have been infringed. And I mean no one. It's real hard for the rest of us to get worked up about something intangible when car bombs are a daily occurence.

Excepting of course that car bombs are not a daily occurence here in the US (the odd bombing of pre-natal care clinics notwithstanding). Nor are they likely to be, if only because the US does a better job of integrating its ethnic populations than most other countries.

In any case, you're predicating concerns over the direction of current Federal policy upon 'concrete' demonstrations of infringment of civil liberties upon individuals is, at best, disingenuious if not outrightly naive. Its rather like the old "Pin In The Face" routine; in that it stops being funny when its you getting it.

I'd suggest you read up on what happened to the leadership of the Sturmabteilung, particularly what became of its leadership during Nacht der langen Messer between June 30 and July 2, 1934. I'm quite sure none of those 85+ SA leaders/members seriously thought the extra-legal measures they'd previously agitated for would ever be turned on them.

To put it simply, if you give someone the authority to arrest and imprison and torture your fellow citizens, you can be sure they're eventually going to do the same to you someday.

The idea that reality has a liberal bias is just not true.

When you actually get acquainted with reality, let us know.

For example, leaving Iraq would be terrific if no consequences ensued, but in real life that's not the case.

Very good. Maybe you have been paying attention.

Dems forcing a retreat would have to bear the labels of defeatists, surrenderists and genocidalists, with responsibility for all escalations in killing.

Or not. Given the sectarian violence is increasing anyway, I hardly see why US troops should remain there and continue to get killed.

That in itself is awkward because it leaves your hopes for promotion in the failure of current policy.

Do let us know when your side comes up with a policy that actually does work. Pardon the rest of us for declining to go over the cliff with you.

You sad little thing.

Why the evasive language for what is for all the world to know is an abortion clinic?

Perhaps because calling such clinics "Pre-Natal Care" is more technically accurate?

Perhaps because I prefer calling things what they actually are, as opposed to using lazier language?

Perhaps because you're vitrol so perfectly encapsulates why the right-wing crowd is so distained and deserving of mockery?

General Petraeus's team at Ft. Leavenworth wrote the new US Army/USMC doctrine on COIN which was published in December 2006 in Field Manual 3-24.

I've no argument with Colonel Lechliter's comment. He notes the French experience with Algeria and the UK's with North Ireland. There's also the successful operations the UK undertook in Malaya in the 1950s, relying on "Strategic Hamlets" as a method of denying the communist insurgents resources and recruitment, although such a strategy is of limited utility with Iraq.

My concern is the presumption that the current doctrine for COIN could even work if the prescribed troop levels could be met and adequate logistics could be put into place. 'Iraq' as it exists now is little more than what it was originally: a collection of tribes and ethnicities with centuries of antagonism between them. There is no shared identity amongst many of these tribes/ethnicities, and so to expect them to come together into as equal partners within a nation-state expressly because a foreign occupying power tells them to is, well, a tad naive.

If the US-led reconstruction had actually rebuilt the country after the invasion in quick order, there might have been a chance there. As it is, its become an environment of every Shia/Sunni/Kurd for themselves, making any discussion of COIN doctrine superfluous.

Yet for all that chest thumping, it's too bad the best and brightest (self-proclaimed) here, can't come up with a strategy any better than let's leave Iraq, let them kill each other, and God will sort them out. Tsk.

Your mess, shooter, so you sort it out. Or just shut it and accept there are no good options left.

Re: Cordesman's comment that "the US intervention in Iraq has driven more than 2 million people out of that country." Did it occur to anyone that the US intervention drove virtually no one out of that country, that the insurgency, our enemies, did.

The insurgency is the direct result of the US-led invasion. However you parse it, the current violence is the result of US intervention. Accept the consequences of your preferred policy, or be proven a coward.

Re: Institutions with failing public approval ratiings. Did anybody note where the 2007 Democrat-led Congress has gone in the ratings?

Given the Democratic Party is down just 8 points, as opposed to 12? And the question was about Congress as an institution, not the Democratic leadership.

Don't cherry-pick. That's how bad policies evolve.

Re: Rep. Jan Schakowsky's military advice. WTF? I say again, WTF? What the F does Jan Schakowsky know about military operations? Why didn't they send her neighbor to the north, Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL). At least Kirk can fly an F-15.

Two eyes and a functioning brain, which the Representative clearly has, is all that's needed to understand the magnitude of the disaster our military is caught in. And, unlike you, she's actually visited the conflict zone, so I'd trust her views over your cheerleading.

Keep this up and you'll end up alongside the likes the unlamented Ernst Julius Röhm. More's the pity.