Josh Manchester - What a Strange Way to Wage a War

Josh Manchester (The Adventures of Chester) interviews Bill Roggio (The Fourth Rail).

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It's the first episode ever of The Adventures of Chester Radio! Bill Roggio, author of The Fourth Rail, and a veteran of two embeds with coalition forces, discusses the war.

How is the US fighting Moqtada al-Sadr? Or are we?
What is up in Waziristan?
How long will Musharraf's regime last in Pakistan?

You can listen immediately by clicking here. Or you can subscribe here.

The show's about 18 minutes long.

Please, drop a comment below. This is the first Chester Radio podcast, so you can be the one who helps make it better! Or feel free to chime in about the Afghans and such...

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I found myself seated at a meeting the other day next to a correspondent for an influential national news outlet. The discussion turned to Iraq. Having spent several years covering the Balkans in the 1990s, my counterpart voiced his concern that he sees in Iraq now many of the same actions - forced migration, for example - that proved to be the incipient signs of ethnic cleansing and genocide in the Balkans then. Then he surprised me. He stated that his fear was that should the US leave precipitously, such atrocities would become headlines rather than speculation, and the world would have no one to blame but the United States.

Nevertheless, over the abyss we happily plunge, with sober heads nodding as Sen. Carl Levin appears on a Sunday morning talk show calling for a "phased redeployment" of US forces to begin in "four to six months."

Why not now? What does the distinguished gentleman from Michigan believe will be accomplished then that isn't already? If the entire enterprise is a miserable failure, why ask our military, whom Mr. Levin will no doubt be the first to vociferously support, to stay one day longer? What magical event will occur four months hence? An optimist might wonder whether Mr. Levin was attempting a clever bit of early April Fools' Day humor, but such levity coming from Levin seems unlikely.

Rather than concerning ourselves with April 1st, 2007, or January 1st, or July 10th, or August 4th, or Saint Swithins Day, there is but one day that should be foremost in our minds during these debates, and that is the 5th of October, 1938. On this day, Winston Churchill addressed the House of Commons, beginning "by saying the most unpopular and most unwelcome thing . . . that we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat." Churchill was the wet blanket at the parliamentary party to celebrate Neville Chamberlain's efforts at the Munich Conference, where the Sudetenland had been ceded to Hitler. About Czechoslovakia, Churchill said, "All is over. Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken, [she] recedes into the darkness."

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What a Strange Way to Wage a War by Josh Manchester, the author of http://www.theadventuresofchester.com/