Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staf, said today that the campaign in western Iraq would be slow going and said that patience is called for. In another piece, Wretchard writes of reports that the enemy knew ahead of time the attack would be launched (almost certainly true, IMO) and that therefore, “the Marines have hit an empty sack and that the insurgents had escaped prior to the assault, leaving only those who chose martyrdom to stand and fight.” Wretchard thinks not and explains why.

Michael Yon reports on the wounding and capture of a known terrorist bomber in Iraq.

We’d barely made it inside the garage when we saw the man laying face down, barefoot, in filthy, oily mud, human excrement all around him. His 9mm pistol on the ground. He had fallen in an open air toilet, where he lay, belly-shot. He looked at me, blinking but making no sound.

The soldiers quickly caught and detained the four other men; all five were known terrorists. Soldiers were flex-cuffing the injured man when they saw his massive wounds, and Kurilla ordered the men to cut him free then yelled for a medic.

While the medic tried to stop the bleeding, SFC Robert Bowman began questioning the man through a translator. “You are going to die,” Bowman said, “I want you to answer some questions.”

The man brought his hand to his head, and touched his forehead with his index finger, pointing right between his eyes. “Shoot me, shoot me,” he said, “I want to die.”

LTC Kurilla ordered the medic to try to save him. So they took him to same hospital where Sgt Davis died last week; the same one that little Farah never made it to, and there he is, still alive, his bombing days are over.

Little Farah was this little girl, killed by a terrorist bomb.

Nature.com - “the best in science journalism” - reports,

Reductions in industrial emissions in many countries, along with the use of particulate filters for car exhausts and smoke stacks, seem to have reduced the amount of dirt in the atmosphere and made the sky more transparent.

That sounds like very good news. But the researchers say that more solar energy arriving on the ground will also make the surface warmer, and this may add to the problems of global warming.

Well, I am so intent on ending global warming that I think I’ll go buy a new SUV and rip out the catalytic converter.

As Chesty Puller’s landing boat churned toward the Inchon shore in 1950, he turned to a reporter near him and motioned to the F4U aircraft overhead firing rockets at North Korean positions.

“See that?” Chesty yelled over the noise. “Every plane here flew off the decks of the carriers out in deeper water. So much for the experts who said after the last war that carriers are finished.”

One notes that 55 years later, the US has the largest carrier fleet in the world. But Chesty need not have referred to aircraft carriers to find spectacularly wrong predictions:

“I predict that large-scale amphibious operations will never occur again.” — General Omar N. Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, October 1949

“We’ll never have any more amphibious operations. That does away with the Marine Corps. And the Air Force can do anything the Navy can do nowadays, so that does away with the Navy.” — Truman’s Secretary of Defense Louis A. Johnson, to Admiral Richard L. Connally in 1949

The “end of this or that” crowd is still practicing, only this time the predicted death concerns tanks. Writes Austin Bay,

In the original Rumsfeld program, heavy armor, like the M1 tank, was a “legacy system” — an archaic technology. Rumsfeld’s Whiz Kids weren’t the only ones who thought the tank passe. An Army buddy tells the story of a could-be Democratic appointee he escorted through DOD briefings. The pipe-smoking pontificator kept saying, “The tank’s dead.” My infantry pal finally turned to him and said: “Yes sir, the tank’s a dinosaur, but it’s the baddest dinosaur on the battlefield. You face one.”

In November’s battle in Fallujah the Army provided most of the tanks and the Marines most of the infantry. One Marine battalion commander wrote that everyone wanted more tanks. When the Marines came up against an enemy strongpoint in the city, they waited until a tank or two came up. Within five minutes, the commander said, that little firefight was over. But sometimes they couldn’t get tanks in time, so they had to go in the old-fashioned way. That’s when the Marines suffered almost all their casualties.

I explained here that while I really liked my new Kodak digital cameras, I could not get the included Easyshare software to install on my XP computer. I was one of many, acccording to the Kodak forums I read.

It turns out that according to Microsoft, “Windows Installer fails silently after you upgrade to Windows Installer 3.1.” There’s a technical explanation on the page, but the solution to the problem - and Kodak’s software is not the only software affected - is “to remove Windows Installer 3.1, and then revert Windows Installer to an earlier version.” The page explains how to do that.

Kodak’s image-management software is free and can be downloaded here. You don’t have to have a Kodak camera to use it.

This could ruin your whole morning.

Strategy page also has some dope on a new Air Force bomb called HardSTOP,

… designed to destroy the inside of target buildings, without damaging adjacent buildings. HardSTOP is a GPS guided half ton cluster bomb. The GPS and computer in the bomb control the dispersal of 54 smaller bomblets, that are designed to penetrate the roof of a building and explode inside. The bomb software can be programmed to distribute the bomblets in an area as small as 20 feet in diameter, or up to 110 feet. When the bomblets go through the roof, they explode. Some of the bomblets can be programmed to go through one or more floors before exploding. With HardSTOP, the risk of damage to nearby buildings is minimal. Actually, the building the bomblets hit won’t be damaged much, as the small explosive charge in each bomblet is designed to kill people, not destroy a building. In effect, HARDStop puts 54 large hand grenades inside a building, allowing nearby friendly troops to quickly move in and take possession.

Sort of the conventional equivalent of the “neutron bomb,” I guess.

Joseph D’Hippolito writes in the Jerusalem Post, “How will Pope Benedict deal with Islam? The era of de-facto appeasement under pope John Paul II is over. The era of subtle, discreet, yet firm confrontation has begun.”

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Arthur Chrenkoff continues his series, “More Good News from Iraq.”

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German reporters working in the US have decided that unless the blogosphere is beating up on them, they’re not doing their job!

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John Hawkins writes “25 Pieces Of Advice For Bloggers.” See a similar but more detailed series on Nykola.com called, “How to Blog Like Rockstar.”

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If you want to stop global warming, Jump!

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The Mesopotamian, an Iraqi blogger, survived a nearby bombing recently and experienced “horror of finding a human brain on our roof.” He goes on to explain, “The problem in Iraq is not so much a sectarian issue, but rather more to do with the nature of our peasant problem.”