With all due respect to the Associated Press, its writers or editors sometimes fail to grasp the nuances of counterinsurgency. For example, take this piece on ‘Bush’s mounting Iraq woes‘ (a stock headline editors slap on most AP pieces?) that appeared earlier this afternoon. It quoted Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell discussing a recent Congressional report on the “problem of sectarian influence in the national police.” Here’s Morrell:
I don’t have much of a green thumb, but if the Pentagon is, in fact, ‘reblooming’ the Iraq national police, I wonder whether the problem was the soil, or a lack of water. Of course, it’s also possible that Morrell was speaking of ‘re-blueing’ the national police–as in removing the ‘red,’ a common military term for enemy forces, and replacing it with ‘blue,’ a common military term for friendly forces.
