“For every bad story ... there are 10 or 20 or 50 wonderful stories.”
-- Former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks
Iraq must just be bubbling with good news in light of the events of the last two days.
First, Defense Undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld’s right-hand man and one of the architects of our Iraq policy, was in the Rashid Hotel in Baghdad when it was hit by several rockets. An American colonel was killed and 18 people were injured. Wolfowitz’s presence in the hotel at the time of the attack is being portrayed as a coincidence. Blogger Juan Cole isn’t so sure. He argues that this attack may have been planned for some time and that when the perpetrators found out Wolfowitz was in town he became a target of opportunity.
Then there's this:
OK, they’re here
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on."
-- President Bush, July 2
A series of coordinated suicide bombings killed 42 and wounded 216 in Baghdad today. The U.S. command is blaming “foreign fighters” for the new round of attacks, which destroyed the Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad and three police stations.
Rumsfeld draws parallels between Beirut 1983 and Iraq 2003
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, argues that pulling most U.S. troops out of Lebanon after a catastrophic truck bombing of a Marines barracks left 240 Americans dead sent the wrong message to terrorists (i.e. that enough body bags would force the U.S. into retreat). The Bush administration is determined to avoid that outcome in Iraq, he says.
When bombings = progress
"The more progress we make on the ground, the more free the Iraqis become, the more electricity that's available, the more jobs are available, the more kids that are going to school, the more desperate these killers become."
-- President Bush, today
Iraq chat online
The Washington Post’s David Ignatius in Baghdad is taking reader questions about the latest round of violence online here.
Porsche 911
No, not the car. That phrase, apparently, was the Al-Qaida codename for the 9/11 attacks. The target of the fourth airliner, which crashed in Pennsylvania, was the Capitol, not the White House, according to this account.
Rumsfeld’s ‘Pentagon Paper’
Last week, I dismissed a "leaked" memo from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to a small group of staff members as no big deal. Slate’s Fred Kaplan, who has written a lot of on-target stuff about this war, reached a very different conclusion.
L.T. Smash blogs the San Diego fires
L.T. Smash, a U.S. soldier who wrote an excellent blog while he was in Iraq, is back home now – and blogging on the San Diego fires. Photos and all. (Link via Instapundit.)
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