If you had told me this was happening two years ago I would not have believed you: Insurgent fighters and militias from all over Iraq are now increasingly allying themselves with coalition forces in their war against Al Qaeda. Through their heinous actions and barbaric tactics, AQ has worn out their welcome and turned the very country that supported them for so long against themselves. Among these unlikely allies are the fighters of the 1920s Revolution Brigades who were easily among the fiercest, best organized, and lethal groups we’ve fought this war.

Michael Yon has the story (Al Qaeda on the Run: Feasting on the Moveable Beast) and even a video interview he shot in the streets of Baqubah with Abu Ali, the leader of the 1920s Revolution Brigades. (Good stuff! )

This should be cause for celebration, for the sooner AQ gets ejected from the country, the sooner order will be restored and the sooner we can get out of there.

——————–
PS. Hopefully this will be one of my last war posts for a while, since I will soon be getting internet at home and won’t be limited to time at work for my blogging (yeah, yeah, I know… bad use of company time). Once that happens I’ll be able to write more about the random stuff I think about during the day that takes more than 15 minutes to write-up. Stay posted!

About two weeks ago Operation: Arrowhead Ripper was launched by American and Iraqi forces to route Al Queda militants from Baqubah, Iraq. The operation has been very successful so far as is related in Michael Yon’s latest update where he discusses the changes he has noticed in this city over the course of the past two weeks. He also offers some clarification from the Iraqi perspective regarding the massacre I discussed in an earlier post, and shares some rather adorable pictures of “camera happy” Iraqi children. It is well worth the read.

In my personal opinion, if the children are smiling there is more than just hope.

[Update: The New York Times is running another excellent article: G.I.'s Forge Sunni Tie in Bid to Squeeze Militants ]

Happy Belated Birthday, America!

Yeah, I know… I’m one day late. Though to be fair, I was out boating all day yesterday and didn’t have access to a computer to post a timely “Happy Birthday.”

Even though not all of us are happy with where our country is at today, we still have the most freedoms and liberty out of any country in the world. I challenge anyone else to tell me where you can live this freely anywhere else in the world. God bless America, the land of the free, the home of the brave.

Have a great Second-Monday everyone!

Iwo Jima Evening (c) 2006 Michael Burdett

Last week while much of the American public was gossiping about Paris Hilton’s latest release from prison and Lindsay Lohan’s continued downward spiral, America sat completely ignorant of an Iraqi village’s slaughter by the hand of Al Queda (Warning: Link contains graphic and disturbing imagery). This ignorance is completely inexcusable. Did this get even the slightest bit of major media coverage? No. Should it have? Absolutely. We’re all up in arms over the massacre’s in other parts of the world but are completely ignorant of others–especially those in a region that has been in the forefront of everyone’s mind since 2003. Why aren’t we? Because either the news media doesn’t know about it or (in my cynical opinion) they don’t want to publish anything that might sway the public towards staying in Iraq until the job is done. It’s no secret that the majority of the media is against Iraq and is willing to push forward with their agenda to get us out of there at any cost, even that of creating deliberately misleading headlines and extremely poorly constructed stories. This whole situation could be remedied with more honest journalists in Iraq and a media with a desire to report the truth. Things really aren’t as bad over there as we all think. They aren’t great, but they aren’t awful either. So where does one go when one wants to stay informed?

We are forced to rely upon amazing independent journalists like Michael Yon (author of the linked article above) to give us the no-bull assessment of what is going on over there. Michael is currently embedded with Coalition forces in Iraq. Why is this guy special you may ask? For one, his embeds last several months, much longer than the week or less that most journalists call an “embed.” For two, he is a former member of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces whose experience lends itself to unique military and tactical insights in his reporting. He gets to know the uniquenesses of each battle-space and the men involved, which means that he isn’t blinded by the fluff–calling it like it is (Link to a February 2005 post) long before any other media outlet is willing to say the same thing. Michael believes in the Iraqi people and our mission there.

I’m no pro-war “lookie what we can do with our bombs” junkie, though like Michael, I believe in the Iraqi people and their future. I believe that they have the ability, the heart, the desire, and the right to become a great nation once again.

Helloooooo WordPress!!!!

I’ve moved my oh-so-popular blogger blog over here in favor of the rad visuals, readership statistical tools, and all sorts of other awesome stuff. Frankly, wordpress is just that much cooler. All of you on wordpress should feel privileged to be here. Do you? Do you, huh? hehehe. Okay, it’s a sunny day and my pre-lunch procrastination is over. Toodles!

[This post was imported from my old blog at “flyboyfiles.blogspot.com”]

Lord,

Save me from myself. Save me from my brokenness. Remind me why I want to be your man, your warrior, your peacemaker, your teacher. Remind me why I want to remain pure.

Father, I love you with all my heart, but I’m just struggling to stay motivated right now. Rejuvenate my spirit and pour into me so that I may continue to pour out. You are my God, my King, and my Savior. I am nothing without you. You are my Lord and you give me worth. You love me and nothing else matters. Cleanse my heart, oh God. Make it pure as snow.

Thank you, Lord for saving me. Thank you, Lord for your grace, love, and forgiveness. Thank you Father for making me complete. I love you and I always will. Dad, there is so much more that my heart wants to say but that my mind can’t express through words, though this worship song comes close:

Refiner’s Fire
by Brian Doerksen
©1990 Vineyard Songs Canada

Purify my heart
Let me be as gold and precious silver
Purify my heart
Let me be as gold, pure gold

Chorus:
Refiner’s fire
My heart’s one desire
Is to be holy
Set apart for You Lord
I choose to be holy
Set apart for You my master
Ready to do your will.

Purify my heart
Cleanse me from within and make me holy
Purify my heart
Cleanse me from my sin deep within

Chorus (x2)

I love you Daddy.

Praise be to your name,
Blake

[This post was imported from my old blog at "flyboyfiles.blogspot.com"]

Lately I’ve been following the sad story of Mary Smith, the southern baptist minister’s wife who disappeared from a Christian Women’s conference in Louisiana. This tale began as one about a woman who simply vanished (apparently into thin-air) when she left her seat to visit the concessions stand and never returned. The police have ruled out her husband the minister as a suspect and are still looking for her. However, today it seems that this story has taken a rather spiritually tragic turn: She may have left of her own accord to deal with some of her own demons.

According to the FoxNews story:.

Detectives learned that Mary Smith was about to lose her job for failing a drug test…

And:

Halphen also said that the woman had told colleagues that she was divorced and was a bad role model for her children, aged 7 and 10.

If that hypothosis is true and shed did run away to deal with her own demons, it may not seem so bad to the secular world. It may sound like a woman who wants her life together before she can continue being a mom and a wife. To me however, it just sounds tragic. Why? Because God’s love is so much bigger than all that stuff. His love is bigger than her drug test failure. His love is bigger than her view of herself as a bad roll model. His love washed all of that away a long time ago. The tragedy is that she hasn’t seen or accepted that cleansing and felt that the only way out was to run from it all.

This whole thing just breaks my heart into so many pieces. As I’ve been working through so much of my own depravity and brokenness lately, God has continued to impress upon me that “I’m His boy.” I’m His son, His warrior, His child. I’m His man. With Him, I’m literally whiter and more pure than snow. All too often when we sin and fall we feel like we have to start over again; or as a good friend of mine put it during our accountability group a few weeks ago:

It’s like we’re playing catch with God, throwing the baseball back and forth, counting each successful volley. We may even get as high as 300 catches. Inevitably though, we all occasionally drop the ball. When that happens, we all have a tendency to start counting all over again. The beauty of forgiveness and God’s love is that He doesn’t see it that way. After we say “1″ following the first throw He replies, “No. That’s 301.”

Isn’t that analogy awesome? When I first heard it I was just drilled with this incredible sense of freedom, humility and the truth of that statement. Mary Smith needs to hear it. She needs to know that no matter what, God never resets the catch-counter. Her depravity is covered over by grace and forgiveness is just waiting for her to come along and take it. She is God’s princess and valued more highly than all the Gold in the world.

Mary, let our Lord take your burden. Let Him heal you. Come back to your family and let Him make you whole. Godspeed sister.

[This post was imported from my old blog at "flyboyfiles.blogspot.com"]

Yeah, I know I shouldn’t be spending company time playing with my blog… but MAN!!! Now I’m getting really excited about this blogging stuff. I’ve had this one for a few years but as you can see, I haven’t really done anything with it until the past two days.

What got me so excited you may ask? GIMP. Why Gimp? Because this awesome open-source image-editing application allowed me to accidentally create the rad color-scheme in that image you see at the heading of my blog. How cool is that?

Here’s the original:

And here’s what I turned it into:

Isn’t that rad? Okay… enough of this kiddish excitement. I’ve got work to do and a presentation for our company all-customer conference to create. Toodles!

[This post was imported from my old blog at "flyboyfiles.blogspot.com"]

[Edit From 6/29/2007: Well, given that two months have passed and we haven't attacked Iran yet, I'd say that either the article I based this on was wrong or our government saw the intelligence leak and decided to pretend like they never had this plan in the first place. I'm kind of embarrassed about this post, actually. It makes me look like some conspiracy weirdo when I'm totally not, though my readers (all one and a half of you) don't know this because they haven't met me. I've decided to leave this post in place if for no other reason than to remind me of where I've been. Thanks for understanding that I'm no conspiracy weirdo. Have a pleasant weekend.]

Today a friend sent me a rather disturbing email as a follow-up to a conversation the two of us had back in January with regards to the potential for a war with Iran.

To give you some background, a friend of his is a former WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) adviser to President George W. Bush’s cabinet and was privy to the top secret information proving the existence of WMD’s in Iraq prior to the invasion (He insists that the weapons were there… maybe not in a complete weapons form, but they most definitely were in production within mobile truck-based labs… anyhow I digress). I say this because the dude is a genius and really knows what he’s talking about. Anyhow, that friend now lives down in the Louisiana bayou noticed a few months back that our military had begun to refill their tactical fuel reserves. These reserves give our military machine the capability to operate free from domestic fuel supply constraints for 6 months.

Given the global political climate at the time, and his deeper knowledge of the US.-Iran tensions, he was pretty confident that we’d be at war with Iran in 3 months. Well, that three months has come and frighteningly it appears that he was right. Our government has plans to launch a surprise attack on Iran this coming Friday with the end goal of crippling their military and setting their nuclear weapons research back by several years. Russian Intelligence got wind of the planned attack and has released some details to the public. Apparently this whole issue is really big news in Europe but has largely been ignored by media on our side of the water.

The problem with this is that an attack of this nature, without congressional approval, is illegal and unconstitutional. Iraq war comparisons and analogies aside, this is one war that we cannot afford to have happen. Very few countries (if any) have won a two-front war–and we’re about to open a third. If this does in fact go down, I for one, for the first time, will find myself among the war protesters downtown. We must not go to war with Iran without congressional approval–at least until we’re done in Iraq and Afghanistan. Stand up and resist this war. (Wow, I sound like a hippie… boy… we’ll have to fix that)