Yon to Wretchard to Grim

The most famous piece of baseball poetry is, of course, Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s Casey at the Bat, but a good candidate for the second most famous baseball poem is Franklin Pierce Adams’s, Baseball’s Saddest Lexicon:

These are the saddest of possible words:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double–
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

immortalizing the Cubs’ 1910 double-play team.

That’s what I thought of when I read Michael Yon’s post dramatic post on IED’s, Wretchard’s analysis of the evolution of warfare, and Grim of The Fourth Rail’s marvelous post on the tactics, strategy, and grand strategy in Iraq.

On Wednesday I read Michael Yon’s dispatch from Iraq on the reality of IED’s:

A couple minutes later, we leave the base and begin the drive downtown, passing spots where so many car bombs and IEDs have exploded. Within a few blocks, we are 15 seconds from rolling over a large bomb buried under the road.

15 Seconds…

At least two terrorists are watching our approach, pretending to talk to a taxi driver. One holds a Motorola radio transmitter in his pants pocket.

14 Seconds…

13 Seconds…

The bombs are buried under the road ahead of us, on a route to the police station.

12 Seconds…

11 Seconds…

We are in a big Stryker. Usually the IEDs just make the ears ring–I wear earplugs–or maybe knock an air-guard or two unconscious, filling the cabin with so much fine dust that it looks like smoke. I’ve often wondered if this fine dust sometimes ignites when the armor ruptures, adding to the flashover that burns so many soldiers inside.

10 Seconds…

9 Seconds…

Sometimes IEDs blow through the Stryker, launching it into the air, and critically or fatally injuring the people inside. Odd body parts will often be left unscathed, such as a severed hand in a black glove on the road. About 43 Americans have died here during the past ten days.

8 Seconds…

7 Seconds…

The men are cautiously watching us, still talking among themselves. The transmitter is armed. A push of the button might make the final dispatch.

6 Seconds…

A terrorist is preparing to push the button, but the timing’s got to be just right . . . not yet . . . not yet . . . we are almost there. . . .

5 Seconds…

One of the terrorists does a double take at the lead Stryker, blowing his cover. The call instantly goes out to “Block left! Lock ’em down! Two pax!”

If you haven’t read this great post, you owe it to yourself to do so. If Pulitzer prizes were awarded for actual merit, Yon would be a shoo-in.

This afternoon I read Wretchard of Belmont Club’s reaction to Yon’s post, a musing on paradigm shifts in warfare:

Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) are more than physical objects, they are symbols of asymmetrical warfare, along with the suicide bomb and the sniper. They are exemplars of ‘insoluble’ threats against which resistance is supposedly futile and to which surrender is the only viable response. In times past, the submarine and bombing aircraft occupied the same psychological space. In the late 19th century, Alfred Thayer Mahan theorized that sea control, exercised through battlefleets, would be the arbiters of maritime power. But rival theorists believed weaker nations using motor torpedo boats and above all, the submarine, could neutralize battlefleets. The way to checkmate global superpower Britain, so the theory went, was through asymmetrical naval warfare.

Then this evening I read Grim of The Fourth Rail’s contribution, a mixing of military history and contemporary warning:

Those who are antiwar by sentiment are often of good heart, and it can be hard to get someone who is essentially kind to consider an awful truth. But here it is: we cannot lose this global war, and therefore we shall win it.

The war in Iraq is the last hope for winning it while still remaining the kind of people we want to be. It is the last chance to win this war by building cultures up, instead of laying them waste. It is the last hope for kindness. It is the last candle before the dark.

If we fail there — if we find that we cannot confront the guerrilla in his home, and must either leave or shatter the world behind us — we will have no further options. We will not lose, when it comes to nuclear terror. But we will not like what it means to win.

Yon to Wretchard to Grim. Read all of them.