Hoo-ah!

When I quoted Rummy in my last post warning Iraqi leaders about being “attentive to the competence of the people in the ministries,” I should have made it clear that he was telling them not to purge Baathists. He said a purge would make it difficult to “defeat a doggone insurgency.”

The Emperor Chimpy inspects the troops at Fort Hood. From the transcript:

Many of you have recently returned from Iraq. (Hoo-ah!) Welcome home -- and thank you for a job well-done. (Hoo-ah!) Others are preparing to head out this fall -- (Hoo-ah!) -- some for a second tour of duty. (Hoo-ah!)

I think that’s the soldiers doing the hoo-ah’ing, unless Shrub has come down with Tourette’s. He went on:

Whether you’re coming or going, you are making an enormous difference for the security of our nation and for the peace of the world.

It’s official: he doesn’t know whether we’re coming or going in Iraq.

When Ironhorse soldiers left for Iraq, Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator sitting in a palace, and by the time you came home, he was sitting in a prison cell.

What I’m saying is, he sits down a lot. Not a lot of standing.

In Baghdad, soldiers of the 1st Cavalry Division launched Operation Adam Smith, and the new generation of Iraqi entrepreneurs you helped nurture will create jobs and opportunities for millions of their fellow citizens.

Operation Adam Smith? Does the military enforce the division of labor in pin manufacture by force of arms? Somehow I think the 1st Cavalry Division is a rather more visible hand than the Scottish philosopher envisioned.