Austin Bay (Col, USAR, ret.) was at a military staff conference headed by a former corps commander in Iraq. The conference was in Corpus Christi, Texas, late last month.

[A] young officer walked into the hotel ballroom and announced that a US Marine Reserve company was returning to its home base in Corpus after a seven month-tour in Iraq. … They would pass right by the hotel.

I’m not sure that anybody actually said “Let’s go,” but BG Troy and LTG Tom Metz (III Corps commander) and the rest of the senior staff (brigadiers, colonels, lieutenant-colonels, sergeant-majors, and master sergeants) instantly emptied the seminar room. …

We joined the crowd on the corner of Water Street and Peoples. We may have waited three minutes, at the most. Here came the convoy— a police escort followed by two buses filled with young Marines. We cheered, saluted and clapped as the company rolled by.

My Marine son, Stephen, had a pass over Easter weekend. My wife and other two kids picked him up on Friday at Camp Lejeune and drove him to Durham, her hometown, where they stayed with her dad. After the Easter service they all went out for Sunday dinner with my wife’s brother and sister.

Stephen had just gotten his dress blue Marine uniform, tailored to fit, a few days before. (Needless to say, he was looking good.) At the restaurant about a dozen people approached him to shake his hand and thank him for his service. He really appreciated it.

I think this sort of thing happens more often than folks realize.

Quoth the Associated Press:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Influential Sunni Muslim clerics who once condemned Iraqi security force members as traitors made a surprise turnaround Friday and encouraged citizens to join the nascent police and army.

If heeded, the announcement could strengthen the image of the officers and soldiers trying to take over the fight against the Sunni-led insurgency.

Still, it wasn’t a full-fledged endorsement. The edict, endorsed by a group of 64 Sunni clerics and scholars, instructed enlistees to refrain from helping foreign troops against their own countrymen.

Ahmed Abdul Ghafour al-Samarrai, a cleric in the Association of Muslim Scholars, read the edict during a sermon at a major Sunni mosque in Baghdad. He said it was necessary for Sunnis to join the security forces to prevent Iraqi police and army from falling into “the hands of those who have caused chaos, destruction and violated the sanctities.”

This is good news for many reasons, not least of which it shows that , as BOTWT (whence the link) points out, “Iraq’s Sunnis get with the program.” Other reasons:

– Enlistees are told to “refrain from helping foreign troops against their own countrymen.” IMO, anything that indicates a solidifying of an Iraqi national identity is a good thing. The Iraqis have been more nationalistic than most other Arabs, but tribalism and ethnic identities are still strong.

– Who are the “foreign troops” referred to? Of course the clerics mean the Americans in one sense, but let’s decode the language here: Sunnis are called to join Iraqi security forces in order to resist “those who have caused chaos, destruction and violated the sanctities.” That would be the foreign jihadis,mainly from Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan. “Violated the sanctities” means bombed mosques - and only the insurgents have done that, being the deeds of al Qaeda.

So this is good news. The Iraqi Sunnis are realizing clearly that the native insurgency - die-hard Baathists and Saddamites - will not prevail. The Iraqi insurgents have already started looking for an exit strategy, and now the clerics are offering them an exit rationale and justification. Hard to see a down side here.

Well, there’s no way to predict how this will turn out. Not too good, I think, considering the giant egos involved, not to mention the demogoguery. But like they say, that’s show biz!

Won’t see these photos on the news or in your morning paper, no sir.

Sky Italia news agency prematurely and inadvertantly announced a few hours ago that Pope John Paul II had died. (A off-camera producer said so, apparently unaware there was a live mike nearby, and apparently misunderstanding what the Vatican had said.)

It is nearing 10 p.m. in Rome as I write this. As you can see from this TV grab, the square at St. Peter’s Basilica is filled with people who gathered to pray the rosary. The square holds about 50,000 people, and was said to be full.

The Vatican has just announced that John Paul’s condition is “very grave” and that the “door to Christ” has opened for him to pass through. It seems clear that his passing is quite imminent.

Already speculation has started on who might be the next pope (actually, speculation on this began years ago), Daniel Aronstein has published a list of likely candidates.

Sales of software purporting to help you write your own living will are rising.

At this hour my son Stephen is now a Lance Corporal, USMC, having been promoted today at 1300 EST. He is assigned to the 2d AAV Battalion, Camp Lejeune, NC. Congratulations, son!

If you want to get official Vatican news on the pope’s condition, this is the English web site for the Vatican: http://www.vatican.va/phome_en.htm

Good luck. I haven’t been able to get the page to load yet. I’m probably number 100,000,000 in queue.

According to this monsignor of the Catholic church, interviewed just before 11 a.m. CST on FoxNews, Pope John Paul II has refused to leave the papal apartments to enter a hospital. The monsignor also said that the pope continues to take food and nourishment but is declining further medical treatment.

He also said that if the pope was suffering from the terminal stages of cancer “it would be appropriate” to withhold food and water because “they would not be beneficial.” But, the monsignor added, that is not the case in the pope’s condition now.

Does this reflect how American Catholics should view the end of Terri Schiavos life?

The monsignor’s name is James Lisante.

In related news, a Vatican spokesman this morning described the pope’s condition as “grave.” As I said yesterday, that’s a code word, sad to say.

Shepherd Smith, on FNC, just said that John Paul had let it be known that he “did not want to be kept alive by artificial means.” That’s Shepherd’s quote, not the pope’s.

Update: I don’t know why the photo won’t display (at least it doesn’t on my browsers). But you can see it directly here. I had the img src field tagged as align=”right” but for some reason it prevented the photo from displaying. Now that I removed the tag the photo shows up. Beats me; there are still some Wordpress quirks I haven’t figured out yet.

Tom Bevan of RealClearPolitics fame has a piece in the Chicago Sun Times today in which he uses the rationale of those who wished to keep Terri Schiavo alive to ask this simple question:

If one is convinced of the moral strength of the argument for saving Terri Schiavo (which millions upon millions of Americans are), and if one further adheres to the proposition that every innocent life is worth protecting and that we as a society must not countenance a system that results in the death of a single innocent soul, are we not then obligated to reconsider support of the death penalty under all circumstances except those in which confessions have been given voluntarily?

The fact is, while it cannot be said for certain that we have yet executed an innocent person in the United States, it also cannot be said with certainty that we have not. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, since 1973, 119 people sentenced to Death Row have been exonerated before execution. That statistic should force any rational person to consider the very real possibility that out of the 956 persons executed in the United States since 1976 we have taken the life of at least one innocent person.

Whether one supports the death penalty under the moral justification that it deters crime or that our society must exact retribution against those who commit truly heinous acts, after the outcry over Terri Schiavo it seems extremely difficult to reconcile that support with the new standard established by Congress and the president to intervene in cases where any doubt exists to ensure that we always “err on the side of life.”

The large question of this and the Schiavo case is, says Tom,

At its core, the dilemma is this: At what point are we forced to live within the law even if we disagree morally with some of the outcomes resulting from its application?

As he says, it’s a tough question.