US Marines – They Came Here to Die

Washington Post – Screaming “Allahu Akbar” to the end, the foreign fighters lay on their backs in a narrow crawl space under a house and blasted their machine guns up through the concrete floor with bullets designed to penetrate tanks. They fired at U.S. Marines, driving back wave after wave as the Americans tried to retrieve a fallen comrade. Through Sunday night and into Monday morning, the foreign fighters battled on, their screaming voices gradually fading to just one. In the end, it took five Marine assaults, grenades, a tank firing bunker-busting artillery rounds, 500-pound bombs unleashed by an F/A-18 attack plane and a point-blank attack by a rocket launcher to quell them. The Marines got their fallen man, suffering one more dead and at least five wounded in the process. And according to survivors of the battle, the foreign fighters near the Syrian border proved to be everything their reputation had suggested: fierce, determined and lethal to the last.
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US Marines – Marines Kill 100 Fighters In Sanctuary Near Syria

Washington Post – More than 1,000 Marines backed by Cobra helicopter gunships and F-18 jets attacked targets Monday in a region of northwestern Iraq that commanders called a sanctuary for foreign fighters. As many as 100 insurgents were killed and 10 captured in the assault near the Syrian border.

More from the Daily TelegraphUS in border battle to curb Iraq insurgency
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US Marines – Larger Special Operations Role Being Urged on Marines

Washington Post – With conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan tying up many U.S. Special Operations forces, the Pentagon has found itself short of the elite teams it typically deploys around the world for specialized combat missions and for training foreign militaries, defense officials say. To help fill the gap, the Marine Corps has stepped forward with a decision to establish a standing force of “foreign military training units” by this autumn.
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Geopolitics / Media – The Media as an Instrument of War

Parameters – The media, in the modern era, are indisputably an instrument of war. This is because winning modern wars is as much dependent on carrying domestic and international public opinion as it is on defeating the enemy on the battlefield. And it remains true regardless of the aspirations of many journalists to give an impartial and balanced assessment of conflict.

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Iraq – The Way of the Commandos

New York Times Magazine – Peter Maass on the “El-Salvadorization of Iraq:” The campaign against the insurgency in Iraq is increasingly being waged by an elite regiment of Sunni-led fighters. Their leader is a former general in Saddam Hussein’s army, their American adviser is a veteran of the Central American campaigns of the 1980’s and they sometimes play by the rules of the old Iraq. Is the war getting dirtier?

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Geopolitics / Iran – Taking on Tehran

Foreign Affairs – If Washington wants to derail Iran’s nuclear program, it must take advantage of a split in Tehran between hard-liners, who care mostly about security, and pragmatists, who want to fix Iran’s ailing economy. By promising strong rewards for compliance and severe penalties for defiance, Washington can strengthen the pragmatists’ case that Tehran should choose butter over bombs.

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