It turns out that training soldiers isn’t very helpful unless you’re sure the trained soldiers aren’t going to turn around and shoot at you once the training’s done:

But now on his third deployment in Iraq, he is no longer a believer in the mission. The pivotal moment came, he says, this past February when soldiers killed a man setting a roadside bomb. When they searched the bomber’s body, they found identification showing him to be a sergeant in the Iraqi Army.

Of course the media refuses to report the good news — many of the people we’re training don’t attack us!

Oh man. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone make a serious effort to argue that ongoing school construction endeavors in Iraq outweigh the fact that we aren’t achieving any of our mission objectives, but apparently Chris Muir didn’t get the memo that these talking points are inoperative:

I’m pretty sure that these reconstruction projects have, in fact, largely been halted. And, of course, a lot of the refurbishing of public buildings is necessary precisely because the war has been so destructive. But all that aside, the level of bad faith here is really mind-boggling. If I proposed that the United States appropriate $87 billion to build 306 schools and refurbish 364 additional schools in Ecuador, would conservatives be applauding that? But that’s what congress appropriated in its 2003 supplemental for Iraq. The bill the president just signed appropriates $95 billion for just the next six months. Does Chris Muir intend to get behind a $95 billion disease eradication program? It only costs $1 to give someone a measles vaccine and “approximately 410,000 children under the age of five die globally of measles each year.”

But, of course not; take the value as a talking point away and conservatives don’t care about education in the developing world or global public health at all.

Did Dick Cheney really say this?

As Army officers on duty in the war on terror, you will now face enemies who oppose and despise everything you know to be right, every notion of upright conduct and character, and every belief you consider worth fighting for and living for. Capture one of these killers, and he’ll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States. Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away.

This, of course, is exactly the sort of thing one would point to as an example of the moral superiority enjoyed by a liberal democracy when fighting a group of murderous fanatics — we treat people in accordance with domestic and international law in a manner consistent with the basic principles of human rights and human dignity; they do not. But in Dick Cheney’s America our delicate sensibilities fall away too.