I just had to post the headline.

Kurdistan is different - there are trees unlike much of the flat desert land in the south, the traffic lights work, the people speak an entirely different language. And they like going to the pub.

• The process starts at three main recruiting hubs in Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul. Now, that also represents, as you might predict, the spread of the country and the ethnic distribution. Each class that is recruited is ethnically balanced. This provides an atmosphere where tolerance is essential to mission accomplished. We are looking for those individuals who wish to defend Iraq and its newfound freedom, and are skilled in such professions as truck driver, heavy equipment operator, food service, first aid, and above all else, infantry. A majority of new recruits have prior military service, and nearly all of the non-commissioned officers and officer candidates do as well.
  
  
• Nearly 1,000 recruits are recruited in order to produce an active battalion of 757 soldiers.
  
  
• The first battalion graduated on 4 October and is currently based at Kirkuk, and employed by the 4th Infantry Division Mechanized.
  
  
• The second battalion has been employed by the 1st Armored Division, and they’re garrisoned at Taji since their graduation on 6 January, which is also Army Day and celebrated as such since 1921.
  
  
• And we look forward to the graduation this week of the 3rd Battalion and their subsequent deployment to the Mosul area. [ed.: January 24]
  
  
• In addition to the 27 infantry battalions in the army, we are building the Iraqi Coastal Defense Force and the Iraqi Army Air Corps. The Coastal Defense Force will be comprised of a patrol boat squadron of five 30-meter boats and a naval infantry regiment. The naval infantry is currently training with the Iraqi army for basic skills. This coastal defense force will then move down to the Umm Qasr/Basra area for boat training and where they will learn interdiction and boarding operations in order to protect the some 80 kilometers of Iraqi coastline.
  
  
• The Iraqi Army Air Corps will focus primarily on troop and logistics movements as well as air medevac for life-threatening and casualty-producing situations. We are currently training both helicopter and transport pilots, and we will field the first operational squadrons this summer. We’re also investigating the use of reconnaissance aircraft in order to effectively monitor the miles of Iraqi border, and infrastructure such as pipelines and electrical transmission facilities.
  
  
• We’re running about 60 percent with prior military service. What does "prior military service" mean? If you’re a private in the old army, not a whole lot from what we’re seeing. The Iraqi officer corps of the old army is a pretty good officer corps in a lot of respects, certainly from the perspective of military training. The non-commissioned officer corps we find deficient, and the soldiers and the training they received we found deficient. So if you say "prior service," it may mean that they know how to march and carry a rifle and employ it, but we have not had terrific results of the former army training base at the young soldier level.
  
  With respect to the officers, the military skill set of the officers, we are finding their education and their ability to learn is very high. And given initial poor experience with those above the rank of major, we have found that focusing on the younger officers, the lieutenants and captains, that these men are well educated, they’re talented, they are focused on the future of this country, and we have had very high success.
  
  
• The trainers that we have right now are a mix of the Vinnell contract, which is a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman, and they have other contract trainers with them; Vinnell is the umbrella organization; and in fact, talking to the program manager today, a terrific amount of combat experience, of training experience. The average time in service for those men who are working with the Vinnell contract is 19.8 years. And those are the men who started the program because they are the men who could react the fastest. They deployed within 25 days of contract signing into theater to establish a training environment. They provided the structure and the primary instructor and the initial drill sergeant contact. We added to that uniformed men from the coalition. Australia, Great Britain, the United States, and more recently Spain have contributed to that environment.
  
  Finally, after the graduation of the first battalion, Iraqi trainers -- men who -- that we saw high talent in, in training and particularly those who were multilingual -- we were able to bring Iraqi officers and non-commissioned officers from the first battalion and integrate them into the training pool for the second and third and fourth battalions. That has been particularly effective. We have also taken a lot of those Iraqi officers, and they have, like Major Ahmed (ph) here, have integrated into our training organization and are, in fact, part of the joint headquarters that will be the higher headquarters for Iraqi armed forces.
  
  Finally, I alluded to the Jordan Training Initiative. We have the -- a number of officers today training with Jordanian armed forces and will continue to do so into the middle of March.

--1995. Sudanese Al Qaeda defector Jamal al Fadl testifies that Osam bin Laden offered $1,500 per person (to be used for the purchase of Kalishnikov rifle and travel expenses) for jihad volunteers willing to travel to Chechnya to assist the Chechens in their struggle against the Russian ’infidels.’

--December 1996. Ayman al Zawahiri, leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and member of Al Qaeda’s ruling troika, travels to Dagestan in search of a new base of operations for his organization in response to its expulsion from Sudan. Zawahiri’s plans are foiled by Russian security services which arrest him and hold him in jail for several months.

--1999-2000. The US government claims that prior to 9/11, the Islamic Benevolence Foundation (a US-based charity that sent $700,000 to the Chechens) and Al Haramein (an international charity based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia which channeled funds to Khattab’s aide, Abu Duba, via its offices in Baku, Azerbaijan) also siphoned money to Al Qaeda. Another charity known to have sponsored the Chechen resistance was the Kifah refugee center which had close links to the Al Qaeda bombers in the 1993 WTC attack.

--September 2001. Ahmed al-Ghamidi, a Saudi jihadi who fought in Chechnya after studying engineering in Mecca, is one of the hijackers of United Airlines flight 175 which hit the south WTC tower. Another 9/11 hijacker on the flight that crashed into the Pentagon (Nawaq al Hamzi) also fought in Chechnya. Ahmed al-Haznawi, a hijacker on United Ailines flight 93 which crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11 is reported to have left his home in the al Baha region of Saudi Arabia in 2000 telling friends he was going to train in an Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan for jihad in Chechnya.

--September 2001. Several minutes after the September 11th attack on the USA, American intelligence registers a mobile phone call from Afghanistan to the Pankisi Gorge, an inaccessible valley in Georgia that was known as the home
base for ’Chechen-Arabs’ who trained new recruits for jihad in neighboring Chechnya.

--September 2001. Mounir El Motassadeq, a member of the 9/11 Al Qaeda support network arrested in Germany, claims that Mohammad Atta, the mission leader for the attack, "really wanted to got to Chechnya to fight because of the massacre the Russians were committing there."

--August 2002. Sweeps of the Chechen-inhabited Pankisi Gorge in Georgia by American-trained Georgian forces nab one Saif al-Islam al-Masry, a member of Al Qaeda’s shura (council) and disrupt a plot by Arab jihadis training there to bomb or use improvised chemical weapons against Western (not Russian) targets in Russia and Central Asia. Interpol and Western intelligence agencies also believe that Abu Khabab (Al Qaeda’s ’mad scientist’ seen experimenting with poison gases in an Al Qaeda video seized by coalition forces in Afghanistan) transferred his operations to the Pankisi after the destruction of the Taliban.

--January 2003. British authorities arrest six North African Arabs in London accusing them of attempting to produce ricin poison in their flat. Several of those arrested are later found to have trained in the Pankisi Gorge camps with the aim of eventually fighting jihad with the Chechen-Arabs in Chechnya.

--May 2003. The Saudi mastermind of the Al Qaeda bombings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (which galvanized the Saudis to move against domestic Al Qaeda influence) is found to have fought in Chechnya before later traveling to Afghanistan to fight the USA and coalition forces at Tora Bora.

--November 2003. Turkish authorities claim that a deadly wave of bombings in Istanbul of British and Jewish targets were carried out by domestic militants belonging to the Islamic Great Eastern Raiders Front who were trained by Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Several of this group’s members previously fought jihad in Chechnya.

--November 2003. Yemeni authorities arrest Mohammed Hamdi al-Ahdal, a 32-year old Saudi citizen responsible for the bombing of the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen in 2000. Al Ahdal, one of the top 20 Al Qaeda leaders, previously fought in Chechnya, where he lost a leg (currently he has a prosthetic leg).

via Sgt. Hook

Q. I know your son was married recently. If your son had been born gay, would you want him to have the same rights that he enjoys today?
A, I would want him to have the right to have a stable relationship. But whether you call it marriage or not is up to the church or the synagogue or the mosque. And it’s up to the state legislatures. I think marriage is a term of art. It’s a term of usage. But the legal side of it is not: It’s not negotiable.

Q. So you support Massachusetts’s calling it marriage?
A. Yeah, absolutely.

Iraq was not the most dangerous sponsor of terror — Syria and Iran were and are, and the most important target to go after would have been Syria. It would have been as surely a war of liberation as the war in Iraq, and it would have cut off the immediate support of the most virulent anti-Israel terror groups, thus bringing some hope of peace to Israel and Palestine. And Syria would have had the advantage of being easily accessible to our forces, unlike the nightmare of trying to campaign against Iran from the sea...

So in a sense Record was right. Iraq was the wrong war militarily, and while it looked like the right war politically, the delays made it less right with each delay in beginning the campaign.

But in another sense, Iraq was exactly the right war. No one could defend Saddam’s government, even in the Muslim world, without essentially admitting that they don’t care about the Iraqi people. So even in our present situation, we are not in a "quagmire" unless we choose to make it one.

Record’s most chilling warning is the one about our lack of depth compared to the war we have taken on. Clearly the war in Iraq cannot end — the country cannot be pacified — until we have neutralized the three adjacent nations across whose borders the terrorists and their funding flow: Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia...

That’s one reason why it was militarily wrong to attack Iraq first. Now we’re in the middle with tenuous supply lines, especially with Turkey as an unreliable ally and Saudi Arabia barely more reliable. If we had attacked Syria first, the benefit to the anti-terrorist world would have been more immediate, and as we then subsequently rolled across Iraq and, if necessary, into Iran, we would have had far more secure supply lines and a single, if very broad, battle front, with militarily subdued territory behind us. The borders of the occupied territory then would have been with Israel, Jordan, Turkey, not with Iran and Syria.