What Would We Do Without ExpertsLike
Jane Hamsher? Others might be a little intimidated about taking on the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on his assessment of the war. But not Jane, who's an expert on all things military and Iraqi:
Pace then takes a detour into Bizarroworld and declares that the militias "are not a long term problem," poo-poohs the notion of escalating violence and impending civil war and takes heart in the active participation of the Iraqi people in fighting the insurgency: MR. RUSSERT: General, many observers -- objective observers say that you cannot have an insurgency this robust without being enabled by the population. Now, Lawrence Kaplan in The New Republic, who'a supporter of the war, said that he wrote on a story of a young man that called emergency line 130 to report insurgents shooting mortars; no one answered the line. And then he said you don'?t do it again because if you call that emergency line, insurgents get a hold of your phone number and come kill you.
GEN. PACE: Think about the two things that you said. One -- one was that they'?re being supportive, and another is fear. I believe it's the fear factor, not the support factor. The tip line last March was getting about 400 tips per month. Now it'?s upwards of 4,000 tips per month that are coming in from Iraqi citizens telling their government and telling us where -- ?where problems are.
So the ten-fold increase in tips about insurgent violence is, you see, something to be encouraged by. It's not the result of an increase in the violence per se, it's because the Iraqi people have just become a lot more enthusiastic about helping out.
While others were happy to dunk their fingers in the purple ink, General Pace seems to have immersed his entire head. He's now Lizzie Grubman with oak-leaf clusters.Where does Hamsher get her miltary expertise? Well,
she was a producer on Natural Born Killers.
