I'm generally not a fan of the way people love to hate the Palin children as a way of hating their mother, but I'm afraid I have to give you this one. http://m.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/bristol-palin-earns-262000-as-abstinence-ambassador-201154

If you want to complain about post-war treatment of former enemies, I'd think you'd complain less about Nazis getting Social Security and more about our handling of Japan's Unit 731. None of that takes away from the valor of the men whose graves lie in these foreign lands described by the article, however.

You're probably right. It's pretty clear from the director they picked that they're aiming at a cult film. Some of their offers suggest this too -- especially the one where you can buy a savior role, and give a "poignant" speech while pulling their butts out of the fire. I'd say that they're intending to make something more like Stripes or Anchorman than a serious war movie. On the other hand, what do I care? I'm willing to support it just because a couple of MOH recipients want to make a movie. If the only thing it accomplishes is them getting to do something they'd really like to do, good enough. That's plenty of reason to kick in a few bucks. Looks like they've made their dough, by the way. So one way or another, we'll see what they come up with.

It'd be pretty embarrassing to try to say there was no civil war. The other points are accurate, however. I was there for the Surge, and it did work. We gave them a chance, and it might have held if a certain president had negotiated a bilateral security agreement that kept a stabilizing presence on the ground. Instead, the agreements between the factions we painstakingly crafted fell apart once Maliki was liberated from anything that could restrain him from following his worst impulses. Which impulses have gotten pretty bad, lately. The militia he's deploying are striving to prove themselves less legitimate than ISIS as representatives of a governing force. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ad6_1425405833 It was like that when I got there. It wasn't like that when I left. I'm pretty sure the reason it's like that again now is a complete failure by the administration that tracks right to the top.

Really? Doesn't show up on my machine. Try this direct download link.

The ability to hire career prison guards may in some sense be a proof of legitimacy, but I'm not convinced it's the best such proof. Nor do I think that prisons are a good for the health of a society -- our own over-reliance on them is already one of the things I think most worth criticizing in my own. The Pope doesn't care for executions either, though, so you're in good company.

I would have said that the sin deserving the cesspool was collaborating with Nazis, but I suppose we can differ on interpretations. Shooting the Nazis doesn't strike me as particularly bad, though they formally deserved a POW status that terrorists and guerrillas often do not: they had likely deserved from French hands what they got at French hands. In any case, pirates, brigands, enslavers of women and destroyers of historical treasures are not high on my list of people with whom I'd like to share the world. I see no reason to pay to house them forever. Once they've had the mandatory status hearing to demonstrate that they are in fact members of such a band they -- like the part of Blackbeard's crew that didn't die with him -- deserve the rope.

I mean, that may not be Mattis' concept -- he talks about holding them 'until the end of hostilities,' which may mean 'for life.' But I think it's a workable concept for members of these groups. Otherwise, you're introducing a radicalizing virus into whatever prisoner setup you do have.

That's right, prisons were very important to the formation of some of these groups. We provided them with a safe place to meet and develop relationships and plans: they couldn't trust each other enough to do it. (Likewise, now that they're back 'in the wild,' al Qaeda in Iraq and the Islamic State of Iraq have broken up again; they're fighting not just each other in Syria, now known as al Nusra Front and ISIS, but are also preying on erstwhile allies among the Syrian resistance). So I think the concept is summary execution -- which, by the way, was the standard the French Resistance preferred in WWII. My father used to convey a story from one of our uncles about some POWs he turned over to a French Resistance unit, only to be met with horror by his commanders when he reported it. Rushing back, he found that the prisoners were nowhere to be found. "They all got sick and died," the Resistance told him.

Remorse isn't my game. The wheel keeps turning.

That's roughly my view as well. A Kurdish free state, and a Sunni tribal state of some sort in eastern Syria and Western Iraq. Both of these would be plausible buffers against Iran, as well as potential allies (once we recover from this momentary lapse of sanity with regard to our Iran policy).

Turkey appears to be allowing ISIS to resupply from its territory mostly without interdiction. There have been a few exchanges of fire, but the Turks seem to favor a radical Sunni state on their border to an Iranian proxy. They've offered similar free passes to al Nusra Front, which is the group formerly known as al Qaeda in Iraq.