Lots of news on the war on terror – good news actually. First off, when contemplating the Surrendercrats panic attacks over Iraq and their suicidal calls to retreat as fast as possible it is good to see what we are supposedly retreating from. At the moment the retreat would be in the face of scary school and medical facilities construction projects:

None of us has pretended that the enemy is gone. None of us is naive,” Major General Rick Lynch, who commands some 20,000 mostly US troops in central Iraq, told AFP on a recent tour of Adwaniyah town south of Baghdad. “The enemy is still out there, but it is reduced and suppressed.” Lynch is on his third tour of duty in Iraq with the army’s Third Infantry Division. His soldiers were the first to enter Iraq in March 2003 and also the first to reach Baghdad.

They returned in 2005, and again in 2007 when the “surge” of US forces was announced by US President George W. Bush.

How do things look after five years? “We’re making tremendous progress,” said Lynch.
US commanders say al-Qaeda in Iraq is on the run after being chased out of Baghdad by the US troop surge in mid-2007, and it has relocated to northern provinces, particularly Nineveh and its capital Mosul.

…

A convoy of armoured Humvees drives Lynch and a coterie of US officers past rows of palm trees and down Adwaniyah’s dusty, bumpy streets to visit the US-funded projects.

Iraqi men, some too young to grow beards, mount roadblocks and secure the area alongside US soldiers. They are members of a US-funded group called Sons of Iraq, though Iraqis prefer the Arabic name of Sahwa, or Awakening.

Two Iraqi men in dapper suits meet the Americans. Hazim Shakir al-Dulaimi is chairman of the Adwaniyah town council, and Riad Khader al-Dulaimi is the council’s military liaison, the man who gets the US money and is responsible for staffing the self-defence force and work projects.

Lynch and the officers inspect the schoolhouse and the town clinic. The structures seems sound, paint is still fresh, and workers are adding the final touches.

The school will educate some 350 pupils, and the clinic will serve the town’s 6,000 residents.

This is what the US forces do a lot of the time in Iraq, mundane security patrols and overseeing infrastructure and defense projects. This force sees around zero attacks now. And this is what the democrats demand is too tough for us to handle and why we must wihdrawal? Maybe if the US media reported on the mundane it would understand Iraq is not as scary as it used to be and right now is mostly quiet. Yes, the occasional terrorist can get a suicide bomb off. And here in the US the occasional murder can kill someone. The predominant effort is not fighting but rebuilding.

And regarding the hype over the Basra operation – which really was a police action – Jack Kelley has some interesting points about surrendermedia denial. Or could it be something worse, like deliberate misinformation? Folks can decide for themselves:

IN THE opening game of the baseball season between the Boston Red Sox and the Oakland Athletics in Japan, 11 runs were scored.

That lead would be unsatisfying to most sports fans because it doesn’t indicate which team won. But it is very like most of the reporting of battles in Iraq:

“The deadliest clashes were in Basra, where at least 47 people were killed and 223 wounded in the two days of fighting,” wrote the AP’s Kim Gamel.

…

Fighting subsided after al-Sadr called for a cease-fire last weekend.

The cease-fire “is seen as a serious blow” to Mr. al-Maliki because “he had vowed that he would see the Basra campaign through to a military victory,” wrote Erica Goode and James Glanz of the New York Times.

But Nibras Kazimi, an Iraqi who is a visiting scholar at the Hudson Institute, says his sources in Iraq tell him “the Mahdi Army is losing very badly.”

So who’s right? It is rare in the annals of war for the side that is winning to seek a cease-fire. “The Iraq army has cordoned off the city and is methodically advancing to allow residents to leave the city amidst the fighting, militants to turn over arms, while gradually isolating the factions they intend to uproot,” a Marine liaison officer to the Iraqi security forces said in an e-mail Tuesday to radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt.

Why might al-Sadr have sought a cease-fire? “Sources in Basra tell Time that there has been a large-scale retreat in the oil-rich port city because of low morale and because ammunition is low due to the closure of the Iranian border,” the magazine’s Web site reported.

“They were running short of ammunition, food, and water,” a U.S. military officer told Bill Roggio, editor of the Web-based Long War Journal. “In short, [the Mahdi Army] had no ability to sustain the effort.”

…

Mr. Roggio said his sources in the U.S. military tell him the Mahdi Army was getting pounded. “According to an unofficial tally … 571 Mahdi army fighters have been killed, 881 have been wounded, 490 have been captured, and 30 have surrendered over the course of seven days of fighting. … The U.S. and Iraqi military never came close to inflicting casualties at such a high rate during the height of major combat operations against al-Qaeda in Iraq during the summer and fall of 2007.”

Interesting – the mahdi militia had to sue for a cease fire because the border to Iran and its supplies had been closed off. Will the SurrenderMedia correct their ‘mistake’ or will they try and push their ‘misinformation’? Well, journalist would do the former and propagandists (a.k.a., liars) would do the latter.

The fighting is now centralized around the Pakistan and Afghanistan border region. And here is where much of the news about ‘the war’ has been coming from. The most important new tactic in this area are intelligence centers that are being set up on the border between the two countries, which will be used to coordinate US, NATO, Afghan and Pakistani forces in targeting terrorists as they try to pass across the borders:

As a cold darkness enveloped the tiny US military camp just inside Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan, word spread that Taliban fighters were on the move nearby, planning an attack.

Capt Chris Hammonds expected it. In a mud-brick command centre, the 32-year-old Army Ranger pivoted between a radio and a map, tracking reports of approaching Taliban. Several explosions soon ripped through the night as US forces hit the suspected Taliban positions, including a cross-border guided-munitions strike on a compound about a mile inside Pakistan where senior associates of Siraj Haqqani — considered one of the most dangerous Taliban commanders — were thought to be meeting.

…

The March 12 incident highlights how, more than six years into the US-led war in Afghanistan, efforts to stabilise the country increasingly focus on the rugged frontier area straddling the border with Pakistan.

Recent high-level talks among the three countries have called for more intelligence-sharing and coordinated operations along the border. Last Saturday, the first of six new border coordination centres — with officers from the three nations — opened at Torkham at the Khyber Pass, a “giant step” forward, said Maj Gen. David Rodriguez, the top US commander in eastern Afghanistan.

Other interesting news from the region includes additional confirmation that those ‘missile’ hits inside pakistan over the past months were US strikes.

Bush has promised more troops for Afghanistan in 2009, which is when it is expected that Iraq will have been tamed to the point forces can be moved from Iraq to al-Qaeda’s final large refuge in the region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. He has also put the dems in a box because they cannot say they will not honor the fight against al-Qaeda in the region they claim we should have been all along. That will make their anti-war base rise up in anger.

And according to this Canadian paper the effort in Afghanistan is going well, though it is still taking the lives of our bravest:

The scourge of the Panjwaii claimed the life of another Canadian soldier Friday when an armoured vehicle struck an improvised explosive device in an impoverished district with a storied history as a Taliban battleground.

Pte. Terry John Street, 24, of Hull, Que., was redeploying after a full day’s work when his vehicle hit one of the many IEDs that litter the path of coalition forces in the Panjwaii district, 35 kilometres west of Kandahar city.

The death makes Street, from the 2nd Battalion of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, based in Shilo, Man., the 82nd Canadian soldier to die in Afghanistan since 2002.

…

With the Taliban effectively depleted as a fighting force, insurgents have taken to blending in with the local villagers who have been steadily returning to the region since the heaviest fighting began to subside late in 2006.

They have turned to terrorist tactics like suicide attacks and drive-by shootings, but their weapon of choice has clearly become the jerry-rigged roadside bombs they furtively bury deep in the roads, pathways and wadis that lace the Afghan countryside.

It is tragic that this death actually is a sign of major progress. Reducing a violent and broad based movement to a rag tag bunch of terrorists who cannot find sanctuary among the people unless they inflict vicious violence to control the locals is progress. It was once hoped the terrorists were more human than animal, and they would see the diminishing prospects of their efforts and halt the blood letting. Islamo Fascists are more animal than anything else. The revel in the bloodshed and could care less if it is Western or Muslim.

So we have to destroy the animals one-by-one. They have gone rabid. And like the rabid animals they are they have lost their minds and think of one thing – killing. And in the human the rabid mind can explore a frightening range of paths to mass killing. Including the use of nuclear weapons, which is still an al-Qaeda dream. It is not fear mongering or irrational to see the rabid nature of our enemy, or to realize they are human animals with enough of their minds intact to find a way to kill en masse. It is ludicrous denial to ignore these facts.

And it is just plain idiotic not to see the juxtaposition reflected between the rabid animals of Islamo Fascism and the soldiers of the West. There are stark differences which are becoming quite clear to the people of the regions where we have been fighting to destroy the rabid fascists. It is clear to anyone who opens their mind and eyes and sees beyond their own selfish expectations:

IF a picture paints a thousand words, then photographs released today of RAF Wittering personnel in Afghanistan, speak volumes about efforts to win hearts and minds.
In the midst of ever-present danger, the Peterborough troops are taking time to help communities that have lived under the shadow of conflict for generations.

In one picture, a soldier from the elite RAF Regiment can be seen tenderly treating a child who has clearly hurt himself. The picture also makes it clear that the child’s mother trusts this trooper from a land faraway to care for her precious little boy.

The conventional wars were over in 2001 and 2003. But the war on terror, to change the hearts and minds of the broad and diverse Muslim community in the regions where al-Qaeda and the Taliban and the other rabid and violent extremists where revered has taken years. Changing minds is much harder than killing someone. But it is working. “The Awakening” is a great name for what has happened in Islam. al-Qaeda was once its future. Now it is seen as the bloody enemy to many, if not most, Muslims. And it is losing support as it becomes more and more clear it is not a vision, but just a group of mad humans bent on mindless killing of other humans. It will take time to destroy all the rabid souls so that the rest of us can live in peace. But it is not the first time mankind has had to do this ugly work. Surrendercrats and the SurrenderMedia shy away and cannot stop their impulse to flee. Well, not everyone can face down a rabid animal and do what is necessary to protect everyone in the vicinity. Some just don’t have the spine for the work.