No, it isn't sarcasm. I genuinely appreciate being corrected when I make mistakes, genuinely don't appreciate being called stupid or a liar, and genuinely wanted to communicate both.
no prob. sometimes it is hard to tell, meant no disrespect.
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hawkeye10
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Tue 6 Jul, 2010 02:59 pm
Quote:
One More Mission
Gen. Stanley McChrystal should oversee the U.S. drawdown from Iraq.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, July 5, 2010, at 2:11 PM ET
I used to go to the occasional off-the-record briefing in Washington back then, and it was easy to see signs of exhaustion and bewilderment. Every now and then, though, there was a whisper of hope. The name was not supposed to be publicized, but a certain Gen. Stanley McChrystal was building a network of ruthless counter-al-Qaida fighters, both U.S. and local, who every night would fan out across Baghdad and give the enemy no rest. Not only did they break up cell after cell, but they must have become good at "turning" people as well, because Zarqawi's whereabouts was finally discovered and, though in the end he wasn't taken alive, he was still breathing when the soldiers entered his hut. He knew in his last minutes that he had been betrayed.
One understood by then that McChrystal had no great political talent. His dismal role in trying to muffle the story of Pat Tillman's death in Afghanistan was sufficient proof of that. But he was a dedicated killer of al-Qaida members. He passed the informal Churchill wartime test—"Is he any good at killing Germans?" He not only inflicted severe pain and damage on the enemy, but he unmasked them—in front of their own supposed Sunni constituency—as wreckers and braggarts. It was this that laid the groundwork for the principles of the surge. One day, military history will acknowledge McChrystal for his great feat of arms.
