Quietly, as the United States presidential election and its aftermath have dominated the news, America’s three broadcast network news divisions have stopped sending full-time correspondents to Iraq.

Click here for entire article by Brian Stelter of the New York Times.

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BAGHDAD (AP) - The U.S. formally transferred control of the Green Zone to Iraqi authorities Thursday in a pair of ceremonies that also handed back Saddam Hussein's former palace. Iraq's prime minister said he will propose making Jan. 1 a holiday marking the restoration of sovereignty. Under the new security agreement between Washington and Baghdad to replace a U.N. mandate for foreign troops in Iraq, the Iraqi government also now has control of American troops' actions and of the country's airspace.

Click Here to read the entire article by Jim Heintz of the AP

Please support this mission by making a direct contribution. Without your support, the mission will end. Thank you for helping me tell the full story of the struggle for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Click Here for entire document.

Please support this mission by making a direct contribution. Without your support, the mission will end. Thank you for helping me tell the full story of the struggle for Iraq and Afghanistan.

MCT COLUMN 275
(12/23/2004)

By Joseph L. Galloway
McClatchy Newspapers

Even in hard times, this is the holiday season and a time when thoughts turn to home and family and dinner tables covered with food and gaily wrapped presents and bright lights.

Save a moment amid the celebrations to give thought to the hundreds of thousands of men and women in uniform in far-flung parts of this world who won't be sitting down to dinner with their families.

More than 170,000 men and women of our military will spend their Christmas and New Year's in Iraq and Afghanistan, where killing and dying never take a day off.

Oh, Uncle Sam will do his best to see that most of them sit down to a special dinner of hot turkey and dressing and all the trimmings, and even in the most remote outpost some soldier or Marine will jury-rig a tree of sorts with decorations of sorts.

But it's a hollow celebration for a lonely soldier so far from home and loved ones, and lonely, too, at that dinner table back home where a chair stands empty at the head of the table.

The holidays always bring the troops to mind for me. My earliest memories are of holidays during World War II when rationing of meat and sugar and all manner of things that we take for granted today made the feasting and gift-giving a lot more difficult.

My dad and six of his brothers were all gone to war, along with four of my mom's brothers. I grew up in houses full of frightened women who were doing their best to make do on shortened rations and small allotment checks. My mother got $17 a month from dad's $21 a month pay.

Times were hard, but every American, indeed everyone in the world, had a stake in a war that was ravaging much of Europe and Asia and would kill 60 million people before it was over.

I have my own memories of holidays spent with soldiers and Marines in combat zones from Vietnam to the Persian Gulf to Iraq.

The first was Christmas in An Khe with the 1st Cavalry Division in 1965. The newly arrived division and my friends in the 7th U.S. Cavalry had been blooded in the previous month's terrible battles in the Ia Drang Valley.

The memories of young men wounded and dying all around were fresh in our minds. The gaps in our ranks had been filled with green troops yanked out of replacement depots, and the new arrivals looked at the old, sad eyes of men no older than they were with awe, and we all wondered what fresh Hell we'd found ourselves inhabiting.

And along came the Bob Hope traveling troupe to take our minds off the war for a couple of hours. Everyone howled at Bob's corny jokes and Jerry Colona's slapstick antics. Everyone's eyes bulged at the sight of a scantily clad Joey Heatherton dancing wildly around the stage.

When it was over, most of us just sat there on the ground wishing it wasn't; wishing we weren't there; wishing that we were home in a crowded living room smelling the treats soon to emerge from a hot, busy kitchen.

Then everyone got up, brushed the red dirt off their jungle fatigues and drifted back to their green Army tents and cots.

Back to reality.

Another memory is of Thanksgiving in the Saudi Arabian desert in November of 1990. I'd signed up to go eat turkey and trimmings with some unit, somewhere out among the sand dunes, when I was called to board a bus with two dozen other reporters and photographers.

The bus would stop at an empty crossroads, and the guy with the clipboard would call off a name or two and drop them before moving on.

My turn came, and I stepped off literally in the middle of nowhere. A tall captain of artillery stepped up and saluted: "Mr. Galloway, we are C Battery, 1st  Battalion, 21st Field Artillery. We call ourselves The Falcons and you will understand why far better than anyone. We provided fire support for the 7th Cavalry at Landing Zone X-Ray in the Ia Drang."

I stood there unable to say a word, tears rolling down my cheeks. Then I knew that somewhere in that cold, forbidding institution that is an Army, there was both a memory and a heart, and that heart was as tender as my own.

I've never had so fine a Thanksgiving dinner as that one in an Army mess tent in a cold, windswept desert; never enjoyed the company and camaraderie so much as I did then and there.

Please support this mission by making a direct contribution. Without your support, the mission will end. Thank you for helping me tell the full story of the struggle for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Published: 04 December 2008

McClatchy Newspapers

This week, I'm writing in defense of an old friend, retired Army Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, who was dragged through the mud this week in a 5,000-word article by David Barstow in The New York Times.

Several months ago, Barstow wrote a story on a Pentagon program undertaken on orders of then-defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that offered hand-feeding and special treatment to a motley crew of television's military talking heads.

That was a largely successful effort to get the analysts, especially retired military brass, "on the team" cheerleading for the Bush administration's war in Iraq, and to keep them there with a mix of carrots and sticks.

The article noted that after the war got underway, McCaffrey, almost alone among the 50-plus analysts, was an unrelenting critic of Rumsfeld's misconduct of it and his gross interference in matters of strategy and tactics that are better left to professionals.

I found it curious, then, that Barstow chose McCaffrey, who didn't feed at Rumsfeld's trough, as the target of his allegations of conflict of interest and self-dealing, especially when he offered no proof that the general ever tailored his analysis of the war and other military matters to smooth the way into Rumsfeld's Pentagon for the defense companies for whom he was consulting.

Whether NBC News, for whom he worked as a military analyst, should have disclosed McCaffrey's business dealings is a different issue, but as a sometime target of Rumsfeld's ire, I can assure you that criticizing him was not the way to win friends, much less influence contracts, in a Pentagon that Rumsfeld ran like a banana republic.

In the interest of full disclosure, I've been a good friend of Barry McCaffrey ever since I rode to war beside him with the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized) in the Persian Gulf war. I also was a good friend of his father, retired Lt. Gen. William McCaffrey, and I consider myself a good friend of his son, Col. Sean McCaffrey, who's on active duty today.

In my dealings with Gen. McCaffrey, I've always found him to be a very intelligent, honorable soldier of impeccable character. I've never seen him shy away from telling the truth, even when it might be controversial or incur the wrath of a powerful dung beetle such as Rumsfeld.

We also should remember that McCaffrey is one of the most highly decorated combat soldiers ever to wear general's stars, with two awards of the Distinguished Service Cross and three Purple Hearts for wounds he suffered in the Vietnam War.

On his second combat tour in Vietnam, McCaffrey was the commander of B Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th U.S. Cavalry. During an assault on North Vietnamese bunkers in the jungle, he was so badly wounded by machine gun fire that the men who put him aboard a medical evacuation helicopter were certain that he'd soon be dead.

That wound and more than 20 surgeries left his left arm non-functional, and still he pleaded with the doctors at Walter Reed Army Hospital to be allowed to continue to serve in our Army. That was a great call by the doctors, and then-Capt. McCaffrey went on to four-star rank.

If he had a flaw as a commander, and everyone does, it would be a temper that could approach volcanic when he stumbled upon errors or inefficiency that might threaten the lives of his soldiers.

As we hopscotched around southern Iraq during the chaotic 100-hour war in 1991, I witnessed one such eruption when, as he maneuvered three heavily armored brigades, his communications links to both the front and the rear failed.

The roars emanating from the little tent hung on the side of his Blackhawk command helicopter bulged the walls and inspired me to walk 30 yards or so to a pile of rocks and take a seat out of the line of fire. The general, having thoroughly chewed every butt in the tent, stepped outside, spotted me on my rocky perch and commenced yelling at me.

I raised both hands in the time-out sign and shouted back: "You can't yell at me. I don't work for you!"

He shook his head and turned back inside his tent.

McCaffrey retired from the Army to serve as President Clinton's national drug czar, and after that he became an adjunct professor at his and his father's and his son's alma mater, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He continues to teach there today.

That's not the usual revolving door route to riches taken by the many retiring admirals and generals who sit on the boards of big defense companies or take executive positions with those companies.

Instead, he set up a small consulting firm, B.R. McCaffrey and Associates, and hired himself out to advise small defense contractors on how to negotiate the shoals and reefs of Washington, D.C.

In the last six years as a military analyst for NBC News, I've never once known him to trim his sails or duck a troublesome issue, no matter what company or companies he might be consulting for.

That's not the Barry McCaffrey I know and respect _ the one who's a true American hero with service to the nation bred into him and with the old West Point motto of Duty, Honor, Country still ringing in his ears.

I like the Barry McCaffrey I've come to know well. I don't recognize the one portrayed by Mr. Barstow and The New York Times.

Please support this mission by making a direct contribution. Without your support, the mission will end. Thank you for helping me tell the full story of the struggle for Iraq and Afghanistan.

By Tim Lynch

Printed with permission from:  http://blog.freerangeinternational.com/

Afghanistan

We had to make a run to Kabul last Friday to take some clients to the airport and to pick up new ones.  The Jalalabad to Kabul road is considered very dangerous by the military and US State Department, of medium risk by the UN, and very little risk by me and the hundreds of internationals who travel the route daily.  The Taliban or other Armed Opposition Group (AOG) have never ambushed internationals on this route with the sole exception of taking some pot shots at a UN convoy last week.  The reason this route remains open is that it is too important to all the players in Afghanistan to risk its closure – almost 80% of the Afghan GDP flows along it so the Taliban would have a real PR problem if they cut it causing a large scale humanitarian crisis.  The criminal gangs and drug lords who cooperate with the Taliban would also become very agitated if the road were closed and probably turn on any real Taliban groups foolish enough to be within their reach if that happened.   We don’t take this run lightly but we often choose to make it without body armor or long guns because we are afraid of being ambushed by the other villains – members of the Afghan security forces.  On Friday our long string of luck ran out and we became the latest victim of the Afghan security company game.  It cost us two sets of body armor which we cannot replace because you cannot import body armor into Afghanistan and we were lucky to get away with the weapons (which are also irreplaceable.)

“Russia can have at its borders only enemies or vassals.” – George F. Kennan, United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union

“You must draw a white-hot iron over this Georgian land!…You will have to break the wings of this Georgia! Let the blood of the petit bourgeois flow until they give up all their resistance! Impale them! Tear them apart!” – Vladimir Lenin

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — The Taliban say they know that an election campaign is underway in Canada and that's why they have stepped up attacks against Canadians in Afghanistan.

Taliban spokesman Qari Muhammad Yussef said Tuesday the insurgent movement wants Canada's next prime minister to pull Canadian troops out of Afghanistan.