Ah... for a quiet life! Other than the fact that I'm buried in paper, things are bumping along with no surprises.

It's interesting that our Stateside consumption of information concerning the Iraq war seems so schizophrenic. On one hand you have the mainstream reporting of outfits like CNN et al... these guys seem to be so far behind the curve and so amateurish that you'd think that they had never heard a gun fired in anger. And on the other side you have technical professionals characterized by Wretchard at The Belmont Club... that mysterious character must be some sort of history soaked specialist out at Quantico with his own USMC sandbox. I mean that there is a fairly steady stream of information coming out of the theater from professional soldiers directed at a professional class of intel specialists with no particular desire to enlighten the masses. And if you didn't know better you'd think that they were talking about two totally distinct and separate conflicts.

Is it possible that the media types are so far out of the loop and so completely unprofessional that they aren't even a factor in the equation? Well... yes. I'm thinking that the strategists in the military have learned over and over that the resident media types are always gonna be their enemies and they automatically put them on the bottom of their need-to-know lists... and as a consequence, the public has no way of being informed about what is going on except from the shadowy image provided by the hindsight provided by the reflection in the Aristotelian cave. Reality is as you perceive it in vague reflections in a mirror of the past. Is this the military's fault? Nope. It's just a shame, that's all.

In the meanwhile, the forces on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan are just going ahead and doing the job with no connection to reportage. Of course, this is the general strategy in dealing with the bad guys over there too, right? Break them up, wear them out, push when you can and run when you have to... and leave the bodies behind. Classic Black Jack Pershing, right? Lovely.

The simple message is... we're winning by taking no prisoners and ignoring the whiners on the sidelines. I love it.