A local girl was in the news yesterday when she managed to fly her badly shot up A-10 "Warthog" aircraft back to her base and land it safely.  Her dad is a San Jose City councilman, which was the local angle.  Military policy is to not identify combat pilots by their names, only by their call signs, but the Mercury News had no problem telling its readers that she's Air Force Capt. Kim Campbell.

There were no pix accompanying the on-line article, although pix appeared inthe newspaper, but I found them at a  web site dedicated to the "Warthog" as well as a link to the  original Air Force Times article from which the Merc's reporter had sourced her story.  Here's another link to a "Conservative" site with more pix and a slightly differnet takes on the story.  "KC" stand for "Killer Chick," and my guess is that Captain Kim is going to take Laura Croft's place in the hearts and loins of adolescent males - at least for a little while.

I can't imagine how it feels to be the Dad of a female fighter pilot.  Having a daughter of my own (and five sons), I can only say that I'd be praying for peace overtime if she were flying combat missions. 

12:05:20 PM    

I  Googled my blog's title for the hell of it a few minutes ago and came across another Craig who is cited multiple places so he must be good. and he certainly shares my viewpoint on the War.  Check out  Craig's BookNotes. Given his resume, I probbaly should hit him up to be a speaker at my conference,  Seybold San Francisco 2003.

 

10:15:34 AM    

From today's  Slate:

 

Slate

10:03:28 AM    

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foreigners Iraq INC? Don't expect postwar miracles from the Iraqi National Congress. By Gideon Rose Posted Wednesday, April 9, 2003, at 2:22 PM PT There they go again. For several years the civilian hawks now in and around the Pentagon sought to topple Saddam on the cheap, arguing that the job could be contracted out to the Iraqi opposition. Luckily for everyone but the Iraqi leader, they were overruled, and in the end the Bush administration fought the war with American and British troops instead. Rather than learn from this mistake, however, the Pentagon hawks are now trying to repeat it. The administration's postwar plans for Iraq are still being fought over internally, but three distinct themes appear to feature prominently: promoting democracy, limiting American involvement, and keeping the rest of the international community at arm's length. Many observers find this troika somewhat baffling, because they see no way of achieving all three objectives simultaneously. What they fail to appreciate are the magical powers attributed by administration hawks to the Iraqi opposition, and in particular to one opposition group known as the Iraqi National Congress. Just as before, people like Pentagon adviser Richard Perle think the INC can leap easily over the obstacles others worry about and will thus be able to transform Iraq in a flash. Unfortunately, the INC is as ill-prepared to pull off a postwar miracle as it would have been for a wartime wonder. It can boast some heroic individual members, such as the dissident intellectual Kanan Makiya, but it has negligible military power, administrative capacity, or local backing. Iraq experts joke that the group has fewer supporters on the Tigris than on the Potomac. The challenges of governing a post-Saddam Iraq will be huge and will include maintaining security across the country, reforming or establishing a new set of national political institutions, keeping intercommunal peace, and providing basic services to a large population while restarting a rundown and complicated economy. The notion that full responsibility for such matters can be quickly handed over to the INC without courting disaster is folly—and such obvious folly that it's likely the president will eventually step in to see that the hawks are overruled once again. George W. Bush might not care much for international institutions or the trans-Atlantic alliance, but he will care about how things go in Iraq, and sooner or later the INC's inability to handle matters there will become obvious. The real question is how much damage will be caused before the administration turns to non-INC options. (The smoke signals from inside the White House are hard to decipher: INC head Ahmed Chalabi has just been sent into Iraq, but his star inside the administration might already be waning.) What future, then, for the administration's three principles? It would be a shame to see the commitment to democracy compromised. After so many years of brutal tyranny, the Iraqi people deserve to live better, freer lives, and it would indeed be wonderful—just as the hawks say—to see liberty and representative government blossom in the heart of the Arab world. So, while the easiest path to stability might be to turn control of Iraq over to some competent pro-American strongman, this would be both a tragedy and a mistake. To avoid both authoritarianism and chaos, however, the other two principles—limiting American and other foreign involvement—will have to be jettisoned. The determination to cap America's role is already weakening (as it should), with administration officials now talking openly about staying in Iraq more than six months. Smart money is betting on a large U.S. presence lasting far longer than that—although look for this to be spun furiously to deflect grumbling at home and abroad. As Daniel Byman, a former CIA Iraq analyst who now teaches at Georgetown, puts it in a sobering study of the subject soon to be published in the journal International Security, "Most of the barriers to democracy in a post-Saddam Iraq are related directly or indirectly to security, and the United States and other occupying powers can provide this security [only] if they are willing to deploy considerable forces to Iraq for years." The determination to keep out the United Nations, Europe, and the rest of the world might also eventually fall by the wayside, because it is sustained more by ideology and petulance than by logic. Precisely because the United States did not fight the war to seize control of Iraqi oil or colonize the country, it will end up wanting to share with others the unenviable burdens of getting Iraq back on its feet, and it will have to give up some autonomy in return. The Bush administration may scorn those who didn't support the war, but it will regret not having their help and blessing for the task of reconstruction—to paraphrase Bogie, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of its life. Negotiating the details of how to bring in others without ceding too much control over Iraq's future will be tricky, but hardly impossible—this is what the much-maligned striped-pants set over at the State Department does for a living, after all. What the administration hawks seem not to realize yet is that toppling Saddam will not end the debate over the war's legitimacy. For many abroad, in fact, it will only confirm the belief that American power is dangerously unchecked. This is a problem. Scaring the bad guys is one thing; scaring the entire world is another, and something only a fool would laugh off. The Bush administration is full of Churchillians. It would do well to remember what the great man himself thought should come after resolution and defiance: "In Victory: Magnanimity. In Peace: Good Will." Despite being a Microsoft publication, I often find  Slate to publish provocative and non mainstream viewpoints that are good reads. You should check it out if you haven't