Word: missioners
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...sitting in a room at the Embassy Suites Hotel in lower Manhattan, not far from where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center once stood. But Haji Bashar Noorzai, the burly, bearded leader of one of Afghanistan's largest and most troublesome tribes, was not on a mission to case New York City for a terrorist attack. On the contrary, Noorzai, a confidant of the fugitive Taliban overlord, who is a well-known ally of Osama bin Laden's, says he had been invited to Manhattan to prove that he could be of value in America...
...Shame on you," and leave it at that. But I had a conversation with two colonels last week--very smart guys, very much aware of the dire situation in Iraq--and their attitude was much the same as McCain's and Lieberman's: the politicians were undermining the mission...
...Mission is a sacred word in the military. When you are given a mission, you are trained to complete it, to keep on trying new tactics until the objective is achieved. It is a matter of duty and honor. And so, when politicians criticize a mission, the reflexive military reaction is to assume they are acting dishonorably, putting politics above duty. This is a common attitude in the uniformed military, and it deserves a serious response...
...response is that politicians have sacred missions too. Their duty is threefold: to be judicious about sending the troops off to war, to give the military everything it needs to complete the mission and, if it appears the mission is futile or compromised, to change it or end it. "You have to ask who is really undermining this mission?" says Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a West Point graduate. "Didn't the Bush Administration undermine it from the start by going to war without sufficient cause, without sufficient planning, without sufficient equipment for our troops? Even now, I would...
...facts on the ground are dismal. The near impossibility of the mission is already apparent. The Iraqis promised three additional brigades to help secure Baghdad, but military sources tell me that two of those brigades are Kurdish, and there is a question how many will actually show up. Even if they do arrive in numbers, Kurds a) don't speak Arabic and b) don't like Arabs very much, which may, well, undermine the mission. There was a coordinated series of seven bombs detonated in the northern city of Kirkuk last week, which may be a sign that the long...