Go to Michelle Malkin's remembrance post. Scroll down and click on the "Kevin Cosgrove" youtube video and audio of his 911 call from the 105th floor of the north tower. Then prepare to weep.

There is no debate: Chuck is a Schmuck. Here is his latest revision of history: And let me be clear, the violence in Anbar has gone down despite the surge, not because of the surge. The inability of American soldiers to protect these tribes from al Qaeda said to these tribes we have to fight al Qaeda ourselves. It wasn't that the surge brought peace here. It was that the warlords took peace here, created a temporary peace here. And that is because there was no one else there protecting. J.D. Johannes, who has been there and has interviewed hundreds of eyewitnesses in Iraq, slaps Chuck down: There are ...

While "analysts" ponder what has caused it, American troop deaths have dropped by half since the surge began in June. Meanwhile, most fifth graders have figured out why troop deaths have gone down as we have taken the fight to the enemy. U.S. combat deaths in Iraq are down since troop buildup By NANCY A. YOUSSEF McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON--American combat deaths in Iraq have dropped by half in the three months since the buildup of troops reached full strength, surprising analysts. U.S. officials had predicted that the increase of 28,000 troops would lead to higher American casualties. That hasn't happened, even though U.S. forces have launched major offensives involving thousands of troops near Baghdad. Military officials and observers are wondering whether the lower U.S. casualties are a sign of success or an indication that insurgents and militiamen simply chose a different battlefield when the Americans mounted their offensive in Iraq's capital. What an inane statement. The next logical question would be: what would make the "insurgents or militiamen" choose a different battlefield? The only answer is that we are destroying them on the current ones.

William Shawcross writes in the Sunday Times of London: Abandon Iraq and see a Vietnam horror show A man who saw the hell Vietnam descended into after America left, warns against inflicting the same disaster on Iraq Not everybody would regard it as a badge of hon-our to be cited favourably by President Bush in a speech about Iraq, but it happened to me last week when Bush warned that the consequences of leaving Iraq precipitously could be a bloodbath even worse than happened in Indochina after the American defeat in 1975. Alas, I think he is right. Iraq has certainly not gone the way that I and other supporters of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein had hoped. Some British commentators argue for abandoning Iraq: the consequences, I believe, would be infinitely more horrible than the horrors we see today. The suggestion ignores the fact that for Islamic extremists, and especially Al-Qaeda, the war to subjugate the West is indivisible. Osama Bin Laden has said that Iraq is the front line. An Al-Qaeda victory in Iraq will strengthen the movement everywhere. In Bush’s long and rather literary speech – he also referred to Graham Greene’s famous novel, The Quiet American, which scorned America’s efforts in Vietnam – he said: “Recently, two men who were on the opposite sides of the debate over the Vietnam war came together to write an article. One was a member of President Nixon’s foreign policy team, and the other was a fierce critic of the Nixon administration’s policies. Together they wrote that the consequences of an American defeat in Iraq would be disastrous. “Here’s what they said, ‘Defeat would produce an explosion of eupho-ria among all the forces of Islamist extremism, throwing the entire Middle East into even greater upheaval. The likely human and strategic costs are appalling to contemplate.’ I believe these men are right.” The two men he was referring to were Peter Rodman, a former aide to Henry Kissinger and more recently assistant secretary of defence in the Bush administration, and me. When I covered the wars in Indochina for The Sunday Times, I was opposed to the US effort. After the communists won, appalling stories of brutality began to emerge.

What is good for the goose is supposed to be good for the gander--except when it comes to comparisons of Vietnam and Iraq. The Left has invoked Vietnam for years when speaking of why we should get out of Iraq. Now that the Leader of the Free World has used the spectre of Vietnam to cite reasons why we should stay, the Left is in an uproar. Over at Opinionjournal.com, prolific author and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations Max Boot says that President Bush's reference this week to Vietnam was not inaccurate, just terribly incomplete: Ever since the mid-1970s, critics of American military involvement have warned that any decision to deploy armed forces abroad--in Lebanon and El Salvador in the 1980s, in Kuwait, Somalia, and Kosovo in the 1990s, and more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan--would result in "another Vietnam." Conversely, supporters of those interventions have adamantly resisted any Vietnam comparisons. President George W. Bush boldly abandoned that template with his speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on Wednesday. In a skillful bit of political jujitsu, he cited Vietnam not as evidence that the Iraq War is unwinnable, but to argue that the costs of giving up the fight would be catastrophic--just as they were in Southeast Asia. This has met with predictable and angry denunciations from antiwar advocates who argue that the consequences of defeat in Vietnam weren't so grave. After all, isn't Vietnam today an emerging economic power that is cultivating friendly ties with the U.S.? True, but that's 30 years after the fact. In the short-term, the costs of defeat were indeed heavy. More than a million people perished in the killing fields of Cambodia, while in Vietnam, those who worked with American forces were consigned, as Mr. Bush noted, to prison camps "where tens of thousands perished." Many more fled as "boat people," he continued, "many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea." That assessment actually understates the terrible repercussions from the American defeat, whose ripples spread around the world. In the late 1970s, America's enemies seized power in countries from Mozambique to Iran to Nicaragua. American hostages were seized aboard the SS Mayaguez (off Cambodia) and in Tehran. The Red Army invaded Afghanistan. It is impossible to prove the connection with the Vietnam War, but there is little doubt that the enfeeblement of a superpower encouraged our enemies to undertake acts of aggression that they might otherwise have shied away from. Indeed, as Mr. Bush noted, jihadists still gain hope from what Ayman al Zawahiri accurately describes as "the aftermath of the collapse of the American power in Vietnam and how they ran and left their agents." The problem with Mr. Bush's Vietnam analogy is not that it is inaccurate, but that it is incomplete.

National Review Online , as usual, has great Iraq coverge today. (Read it all.) One of my favorite NRO contributors is Mackubin Thomas Owens, a professor of strategy and force planning at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. As a military professor, he is in a great position to assess the Left's criticism of President Bush's speech yeterday which referenced Vietnam.   He was there.  Not in Kansas City for the speech:  in Vietnam.  Mr. Owens led a Marine infantry platoon in Vietnam in 1968-1969. He says the President's leftie critics are, in the words of Bugs Bunny, nothing but a bunch of "maroons" full of chutzpah: Maroons Rush In Criticism of the president’s Vietnam analogy takes Chutzpah. By Mackubin Thomas Owens In his speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on Tuesday, President Bush argued that the consequences of an American withdrawal from Iraq would be similar to those that followed our abandonment of South Vietnam in 1975. * * * The reaction to Bush’s invocation of the Vietnam War’s aftermath was swift and critical. John Kerry called the comparison “ignorant.” Reporters interviewed several historians who were happy to agree with Kerry. Robert Dalleck called the comparison “a distortion”: “What is Bush suggesting? That we didn’t fight hard enough, stay long enough? That’s nonsense. It’s a distortion,” he continued. “We’ve been in Iraq longer than we fought in World War II. It’s a disaster, and this is a political attempt to lay the blame for the disaster on his opponents. But the disaster is the consequence of going in, not getting out. USA Today asked Stanley Karnow: “Vietnam was not a bunch of sectarian groups fighting each other, as in Iraq. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge toppled a U.S.-backed government. Does he think we should have stayed in Vietnam?” Bugs Bunny had a name for people like this: “maroons.”

The Leader of the Free World delivered an absolute stemwinder of a speech today at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City. The President stressed the lessons of history and how they apply to the fight for Iraq: I want to open today's speech with a story that begins on a sunny morning, when thousands of Americans were murdered in a surprise attack -- and our nation was propelled into a conflict that would take us to every corner of the globe. The enemy who attacked us despises freedom, and harbors resentment at the slights he believes America and Western nations have inflicted on his people. He fights to establish his rule over an entire region. And over time, he turns to a strategy of suicide attacks destined to create so much carnage that the American people will tire of the violence and give up the fight. If this story sounds familiar, it is -- except for one thing. The enemy I have just described is not al Qaeda, and the attack is not 9/11, and the empire is not the radical caliphate envisioned by Osama bin Laden. Instead, what I've described is the war machine of Imperial Japan in the 1940s, its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and its attempt to impose its empire throughout East Asia.

Military historian Victor Davis Hanson has a great piece in City Journal on why we should be spending less time on college campuses studying gender and more time studying war. Even for people who are dead set against war under any circumstances, knowing more about the history of war would help them formulate their positions. Instead, with the peace movement of the 1960's and '70's, the academy just gave up studying war nearly altogether. This, of course, is to our national detriment. After ticking off the reasons why we should understand the history of war, Hanson concludes: Finally, military history has the moral purpose of educating us about past sacrifices that have secured our present freedom ...

I look forward to the day when there will be odes and poems about the bravery of our troops in Iraq: "The Surge of the Light Brigade" and such. Dan Henninger at Opinionjournal.com writes today of a remarkable storyteller named Stephen Lang in "Faith and Fiber": The American people may have "Iraq fatigue," but that doesn't mean they've stopped paying attention. A few days ago, the Gallup/USA Today poll reported that, over the past four weeks, belief that the extra troops in Iraq were "making the situation better" rose to 31% from 22%. The percentage who say the new troops don't matter dropped to 41% from 51%. Somehow people have found their way to reports that Gen. Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy is ...

Thomas Sowell draws a powerful comparison between 1930's Europe and contemporary America in "Morally Paralyzed": "Moral paralysis" is a term that has been used to describe the inaction of France, England and other European democracies in the 1930s, as they watched Hitler build up the military forces that he later used to attack them. It is a term that may be painfully relevant to our own times. Back in the 1930s, the governments of the democratic countries knew what Hitler was doing — and they knew that they had enough military superiority at that point to stop his military buildup in its tracks. But they did nothing to stop him. Instead, they turned to what is still the magic mantra today — "negotiations." . ...