“Sterile Irrelevance”

From Mackubin Thomas Owens, an associate dean of academics and a professor of national-security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I.:

On Monday, I had an article in the New York Post arguing that the press was not adequately placing the recent spike in U.S. casualties into strategic context. As usual, reporters have focused on the loss of life without any apparent effort to understand the context of the fighting that led to these casualties. I suggested that the casualties stem from Coalition forces having stepped up their campaign in Al Anbar province to destroy the insurgency by depriving it of its base in the Sunni Triangle and its "rat lines" — the infiltration routes that run from the Syrian border into the heart of Iraq.