I'm still hearing the same myths over and over again. A couple in this story:

- The Looting Myth: Somehow we "tolerated" the looting, or failed to stop it.

The looting was being done by a wide variety of hundreds of Iraqis, some released criminals, many ordinary civilians. Halting it would have required violence. Shoot the looters? We'd never have heard the end of it. Arrest them? All of them? And if you don't use your guns, having an extra thousand men standing around holding them isn't going to make a lot of difference.

- The Securing the Borders Myth: If only we had thousands of more troops at the borders, the creeps wouldn't be getting in.

This works only if you don't let ANYBODY in. Most of the foreign fighters come in as civilians, often during these massive pilgrimages either to sites in Iraq, or through Iraq to Mecca. Stop that if you can.

Or maybe you think you can search tens of thousands of streaming pilgrims from Iran, their vehicles, their clothes, and their carts.

In point of fact, we are doing our best to stop the inflow, particularly from Syria, which is why so much fighting is going on in western Iraq.

It's interesting to see the call for an offensive by some of the same people who waved bloody shirts around when we actually were attacking Fallujah. Oh, the civilian casualties!