. . . Private media does not get up in the morning and say what can we do to promote the values and ideas that the free Western nations believe in? It gets up in the morning and says they're going to try to make money by selling whatever they sell... The way they decided to do that is to be dramatic and if it bleeds it leads is the common statement in the media today. They've got their job, and they have to do that, and that's what they do.

We need someone in the United States government, some entity, not like the old USIA . . . I think this agency, a new agency has to be something that would take advantage of the wonderful opportunities that exist today. There are multiple channels for information . . . The Internet is there, blogs are there, talk radio is there, e-mails are there. There are all kinds of opportunities. We do not with any systematic organized way attempt to engage the battle of ideas and talk about the idea of beheading, and what it's about and what it means. And talk about the fact that people are killing more Muslims than they are non-Muslims, these extremists. They're doing it with suicide bombs and the like. We need to engage and not simply be passive and allow that battle of competition of ideas.

BEAUFORT, S.C. -- Veteran issues were front and center for Barack Obama on Wednesday at a rally in Beaufort High School home of the Blue Dolphins. Stirring introductions by Kent Fletcher, a recent Marine combat veteran from Iraq and a powerful endorsement by retired Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps John Estrada raised the need for strong leadership in national security, demanded that the country stand behind our wounded and called for an orderly and responsible end to the war in Iraq.

When Senator Obama took the stage, he asked all veterans present to stand and be recognized. Veterans from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, among others, rose to thunderous applause as he thanked them for their service.

Obama returned to veterans themes several times during his forty minute stump speech that involved a well crafted call-and-response: “Are you ready for change?” as the crowd roared back “We’re ready!” His main message came across to vets: his gratitude for their service; his recognition for their sacrifice; and his desire to support the services required to make that support real.

Obama said: “Our veterans should not have to beg for the services owed to them.” He spoke against the year-long backlogs and labyrinthine applications processes at the Veterans Administration. He called top-quality service for our vets: “A sacred trust between the nation and its wounded warriors”.

With South Carolina nearing its January 26 primary, Obama’s character and values were on display in an unfailingly positive and respectful tone that warned of last minute attempts to mislead voters. He took a few minutes to identify and rebut negative attacks. He described a 20 year career of grass roots organizing, law and politics; recounted the gift of love, education and hope given to him by his family; and, talked about the importance of acting for change and not accepting the old formulations and the unsuccessful approaches of the past.

Reactions in the audience were overwhelmingly positive. Bill Dooling, a Vietnam veteran, union organizer and retired teacher of 30 years said: “I saw Bobby Kennedy in the 1960’s. Obama has the same ability to motivate and inspire young and old. We need a President who can relate to all generations.” John Hurley, a Vietnam veteran said: “Obama has a deep and sincere desire to take care of vets. He has the intelligence, candor and judgment that we need in a Commander in Chief.”

Later that evening, in a more intimate round table with voters and veterans from the Obama campaign, an Iraq war veteran exchanged views with Sergeant Major Estrada on the proper balance between politics and the military. The Sergeant Major affirmed his belief that no one on active duty should be engaged in the political process. But, he added that everyone on active duty had the responsibility as a citizen to make up their own mind and vote. And those who have retired have a duty to contribute their judgment to the public debate.

As the primary campaign draws to a close, the veterans at the event were clearly enthusiastic about Obama. They appreciated his concrete record of support on veterans issues as a member of the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs. They responded to the honor, commitment and courage that have brought him this far in the campaign. But more importantly, they shared a powerful experience as Barack Obama talked passionately about a vision for our country that touched on the core ideals every veteran has sacrificed to preserve and sparked a desire to serve anew.

-- CAPT W. Scott Gould, USNR (Ret)
Co-Chair, National Veterans Policy Committee for Obama

WASHINGTON — With its international mandate in Iraq set to expire in 11 months, the Bush administration will insist that the government in Baghdad give the United States broad authority to conduct combat operations and guarantee civilian contractors immunity from Iraqi law, according to administration and military officials.

This emerging American negotiating position faces a potential buzz saw of opposition from Iraq, with its fragmented Parliament, weak central government and deep sensitivities about being seen as a dependent state, according to these officials.

At the same time, the administration faces opposition from Democrats at home, who warn that the agreements the White House seeks would bind the next president by locking in Mr. Bush’s policies and a long-term military presence.

The American negotiating position for a formal military-to-military relationship, one that would replace the current United Nations mandate, is laid out in a draft proposal that was described by a range of White House, Pentagon, State Department and military officials on ground rules of anonymity. It also includes less-controversial demands that American troops be immune from Iraqi prosecution, and that they maintain the power to detain Iraqi prisoners.

* * *
Administration officials are describing their draft proposal in terms of a traditional status-of-forces agreement, an accord that has historically been negotiated by the executive branch and signed by the executive branch without a Senate vote.

“I think it’s pretty clear that such an agreement would not talk about force levels,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Thursday. “We have no interest in permanent bases. I think the way to think about the framework agreement is an approach to normalizing the relationship between the United States and Iraq.”

At least 100 predominantly Sunni militiamen, known as Awakening Council members or Concerned Local Citizens, have been killed in the past month, mostly around Baghdad and the provincial capital of Baquba, urban areas with mixed Sunni and Shiite populations, according to Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani. At least six of the victims were senior Awakening leaders, Iraqi officials said.

Violence is also shaking up the Awakening movement, many of whose members are former insurgents, in its birthplace in the Sunni heartland of Anbar Province. On Sunday, a teenage suicide bomber exploded at a gathering of Awakening leaders, killing Hadi Hussein al-Issawi, a midlevel sheik, and three other tribesmen.

Born nearly two years ago in Iraq’s western deserts, the Awakening movement has grown to an 80,000-member nationwide force, four-fifths of whose members are Sunnis. American military officials credit that force, along with the surge in United States troops, the Mahdi Army’s self-imposed cease-fire and an increase in Iraqi security forces, for a precipitous drop in civilian and military fatalities since July.

But the recent onslaught is jeopardizing that relative security and raising the prospect that the groups’ members might disperse, with many rejoining the insurgency, American officials said.

“There’s a recognition that sustained attacks cannot continue,” said a United States official who was not authorized to speak publicly. “We’ve got to break that.” The official said that American military and intelligence officials were taking the threat to the Awakening movement “very seriously.”

American and Iraqi officials blame Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia for most of the killings, which spiked after the Dec. 29 release of an audio recording in which Osama bin Laden called the volunteer tribesmen “traitors” and “infidels.” While the organization is overwhelmingly Iraqi and Sunni, American military officials say it has foreign leadership, though its links with Mr. bin Laden himself are unclear.

Officials say that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia has a two-pronged strategy: directing strikes against Awakening members to intimidate and punish them for cooperating with the Americans, and infiltrating the groups to glean intelligence and discredit the movement in the eyes of an already wary Shiite-led government. “Al Qaeda is trying to assassinate all the Awakening members that support the government, but I believe that criminal militias are also doing this,” Mr. Bolani said during a recent interview in Taji.

1) Standing up the Iraqi security forces to replace departing U.S. troops.
2) Enlisting "Concerned Local Citizens" (read: former insurgents and militias) to secure their neighborhoods.
3) Brokering local political deals with Sunni and Shiite leaders to preserve the peace, and national political deals with former militants like Moqtada al-Sadr.
4) Pouring resources into reconstruction to develop Iraq's civil society, economy, etc., to capitalize on the security gains thus far.

The study by the National Priorities Project concluded that slightly more than 70 percent of new recruits joining the active-duty Army last year had a high school diploma, nearly 20 percentage points lower than the Army's goal of at least 90 percent.

The National Priorities Project, a Massachusetts-based research group that examines the impact of federal budget policies and has been outspoken against the Iraq war, said the number of high school graduates among new recruits fell from 83.5 percent in 2005 to 70.7 percent last year.

"The trend is clear," said Anita Dancs, the project's research director, who based the report on Defense Department data released via the Freedom of Information Act. "They're missing their benchmarks, and I think it's strongly linked to the impact [of] the Iraq war."

The study also found that the number of "high quality" recruits — those with both a high school diploma and a score in the upper half on the military's qualification test — has dropped more than 15 percent from 2004 to 2007. After linking the recruiting data to Zip codes and median incomes, it found that low- and middle-income families are supplying far more Army recruits than families with incomes greater than $60,000 a year.

"Once again, we're staring at the painful story of young people with fewer options bearing the greatest burden," said Greg Speeter, the project's executive director.

The Army previously acknowledged that it has not met the 90 percent mark since 2004, and yesterday officials at U.S. Army Recruiting Command disputed the group's numbers but not the trend. They said that 79.1 percent of its active-duty recruits in 2007 had a high school diploma, down from 87 percent in 2005.

"It's really an indication of the difficult recruiting environment we're in, both with the impact of the ongoing wars, an economy competing for high school graduates, and a decline in the percentage of students who graduate from high school," said Douglas Smith, a spokesman for the recruiting command. "But we're not putting anyone in the Army that we don't feel is qualified to serve as a soldier."

ARAB JABOUR, Iraq — From the blast and the high, thin plume of white smoke above the tree line, it looked and sounded like any other attack. The bare details were, sadly, routine enough: a gunner was killed and three crew members were wounded Saturday when their vehicle rolled over a homemade bomb buried beneath a road southeast of Baghdad.

Yet, it was anything but routine. Over a crackling field radio came reports of injuries and then, sometime later, official confirmation of the first fatality inflicted by a roadside bomb on an MRAP, the new Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected armored vehicle that the American military is counting on to reduce casualties from roadside bombs in Iraq.

The military has been careful to point out that the new vehicle is not impervious to attack, and that a sufficiently powerful bomb can destroy any vehicle. Still, a forensic team was flown in immediately to inspect the charred wreckage, from which wires and tangled metal protruded, to determine whether the bombing had revealed a design flaw.

“It’s a great vehicle, but there is no perfect vehicle,” said Lt. Col. Kenneth Adgie, commander of the battalion that lost the soldier.

* * *
Captain Newman said that his battalions had been using the new vehicles for about two months, and that this was the first time one had been hit with a bomb.

“Unfortunately we knew our time would probably come,” he said. “It was just a very, very big amount of explosives. You can break anything with a big enough hammer.”

That sentiment was echoed by other soldiers in the area.

“Before this, lots of soldiers thought the MRAP was indestructible, but nothing is indestructible,” Specialist Matthew Gregg, 24, an MRAP gunner, said after driving past the wreckage. “To drive past it three or four times now, it reminds you that everything is unpredictable out here.” [emphasis added]

. . .The American armed forces have been increasingly turning to these Mine Resistant, Ambush Protected MRAP vehicles, to keep themselves from getting killed by roadside bombs.  Last spring, Defense Secretary Robert Gates called the MRAPs the Defense Department's "highest priority. In Iraq, soldier after soldier told me stories about how the vehicles had saved their lives.

But the vehicles were never going to be a perfect defense, as we've said over and over and over and over again here.  There is no perfect defense — even with the MRAP's bomb-deflecting hull and explosive-resistant construction.  In fact, several MRAPs have been totaled before — it's just that troops walked away from the blasts.

In certain circles, this attack may be used as fodder to get the armed forces to tone down its massive MRAP orders. But the issue, it seems to me, is whether the vehicles are actually maneuverable enough for Iraq — not whether or not they're impervious.

That said, even in this big attack, the MRAP seems to have held up fairly well.

Brothers and sisters, we cannot walk alone.

In the struggle for peace and justice, we cannot walk alone.

In the struggle for opportunity and equality, we cannot walk alone

In the struggle to heal this nation and repair this world, we cannot walk alone.

So I ask you to walk with me, and march with me, and join your voice with mine, and together we will sing the song that tears down the walls that divide us, and lift up an America that is truly indivisible, with liberty, and justice, for all. May God bless the memory of the great pastor of this church, and may God bless the United States of America.

This is the grimmest, and surely the holiest, task we have faced since D-day. Here before us lie the bodies of comrades and friends. Men who until yesterday or last week laughed with us, joked with us, trained with us. Men who were on the same ships with us, and went over the side with us as we prepared to hit the beaches of this island. Men who fought with us and feared with us. Somewhere in this plot of ground there may lie the man who could have discovered the cure for cancer. Under one of these Christian crosses, or beneath a Jewish Star of David, there may rest now a man who was destined to be a great prophet to find the way, perhaps, for all to live in plenty, with poverty and hardship for none. Now they lie silently in this sacred soil, and we gather to consecrate this earth to their, memory.

It is not easy to do so. Some of us have buried our closest friends here. We saw these men killed before our very eyes. Any one of us might have died in their places; Indeed, some of us are alive and breathing at this very moment only because the men who lie here beneath us had the courage and the strength to give their lives, for ours. To speak in memory of such men as these is not easy. Of them too it can be said with utter truth: The world will little note nor long remember what we say here. It can never forget what they did here.

No, our power of speech can add nothing more to what these men and the other dead of our Division have already done. All that we can even hope to do is follow their example. To show the same selfless courage in peace that they did in war. To swear that by the grace of God and the stubborn strength and power of human will, their sons and ours shall never suffer these pains again. These men have done their job well. They have paid the ghastly price for freedom. If that freedom be once again lost, as it was after the last war, the unforgivable blame will be ours, not theirs. So it is we the living who are to be dedicated and consecrated.

We dedicate ourselves, first, to live together in peace the way we fought and are buried in this war. Here lie men who loved America because their ancestors generations ago helped in her founding, and other men who loved her with equal passion because they themselves or their own fathers escaped from oppression to her blessed shores.

Here lie officers and men, Negroes and whites, rich and poor together. Here no man prefers another because of his faith or despises him because of his color. Here there are no quotas of how many men from each group are admitted or allowed. Among these men there is no discrimination, no prejudices, no hatred. Theirs is the highest and purest Democracy.

Any man among us the living who fails to understand that will thereby betray those who lie here dead. Whoever of us lifts his hand in hate against a brother, or thinks himself superior to those who happen to be in the minority, makes of this ceremony and of the bloody sacrifice it commemorates an empty, hollow mockery.

To this, then, as our solemn, sacred duty, do we the living now dedicate ourselves: to the right of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, of white men and Negroes alike, to enjoy the Democracy for which all of them here have paid the price.

TOOELE, Utah — Not long after Lance Cpl. Walter Rollo Smith returned from Iraq, the Marines dispatched him to Quantico, Va., for a marksmanship instructor course.

Mr. Smith, then a 21-year-old Marine Corps reservist from Utah, had been shaken to the core by the intensity of his experience during the invasion of Iraq. Once a squeaky-clean Mormon boy who aspired to serve a mission abroad, he had come home a smoker and drinker, unsure if he believed in God.

In Quantico, he reported to the firing range with a friend from Fox Company, the combined Salt Lake City-Las Vegas battalion nicknamed the Saints and Sinners. Raising his rifle, he stared through the scope and started shaking. What he saw were not the inanimate targets before him but vivid, hallucinatory images of Iraq: “the cars coming at us, the chaos, the dust, the women and children, the bodies we left behind,” he said.

Each time he squeezed the trigger, Mr. Smith cried, harder and harder until he was, in his own words, “bawling on the rifle range, which marines just do not do.” Mortified, he allowed himself to be pulled away. And not long afterward, the Marines began processing his medical discharge for post-traumatic stress disorder, severing his link to the Reserve unit that anchored him and sending him off to seek help from veterans hospitals.

The incident on the firing range was the first “red flag,” as the prosecutor in Tooele County, Utah, termed it, that Mr. Smith sent up as he gradually disintegrated psychologically. At his lowest point, in March 2006, he killed Nicole Marie Speirs, the 22-year-old mother of his twin children, drowning her in a bathtub without any evident provocation or reason.

“There was no intent,” said Gary K. Searle, the deputy Tooele County attorney. “It was almost like things kept ratcheting up, without any real intervention that I can see, until one day he snapped.”

Clearly, Mr. Smith’s descent into homicidal, and suicidal, behavior is not representative of returning veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. But among the homicide cases involving recent war veterans examined by The New York Times, Mr. Smith’s stands out because his identity as a psychologically injured veteran shaped the way that his crime was perceived locally and handled by local authorities. [emphasis added]