By John Solomon
How the government's punishing of the exposure of official wrongdoing can linger for years
Like fellow Medal of Honor winners Alvin York and Audie Murphy in World Wars I and II respectively, Sgt. Dakota Meyer is a Southern farm boy who always has been good with a rifle. Like them, he always has been something of a maverick as well. He has strong opinions and tends to be reckless and innovative. All this stood him well in the battle of Ganjigal in Afghanistan's deadly Kunar River Valley.
The Pentagon is staying mum on why combat assets were not immediately sent to Benghazi, Libya, to aid the U.S. Consulate under attack by militants for hours on Sept. 11.
When the United States invaded Iraq and toppled its government, it also made the tragic mistake of disbanding Iraq's army. The Iraqi army was a corrupt and largely ineffective force, but an army nonetheless. This meant that we had to rebuild the Iraqi armed forces from scratch.
U.S. Marines will march out of Afghanistan by the thousands next year, winding down combat in the Taliban heartland and testing the U.S. view that Afghan forces are capable of leading the fight against a battered but not yet beaten insurgency in the country's southwestern reaches, senior U.S. military officers say.
Bing West is on his way to becoming the Thucydides of the global War on Terror. Like the Athenian, he has frequently been in the front lines, but in the capacity of a special adviser he has also been in the halls of power when the strategies of the twin conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have been debated.
The WikiLeaks docu-dump has been heralded as a "breath of fresh air" and welcome transparency by some journalists, who seem to revel in the breach of classified material.
As my colleague Bing West argued in National Review, "This is not the behavior of a healthy organization.
"Fighter jets could have been at Benghazi in an hour; the commandos inside three hours," he wrote.
