From the I-Told-Ya-So Department:

In a report a year ago, the Oxford Research Group (ORG) highlighted four areas that it said were contributing to world instability.

Climate change, competition for increasingly scarce resources, marginalisation of the majority of the world's population as socio-economic divisions widen, and the increasing use of military force and the further spread of military technologies were all threats.

Its latest report said these issues were still the greatest threats, but added that the ongoing war on terror and the war in Iraq were increasing the risk of future terrorist attacks on the scale of 9/11.

"Treating Iraq as part of the war on terror... created a combat training zone for jihadists," it says.
—BBC

Em-phas-is mine. If'n Ah recalls corricktly, this hyar phenomenon (do-doo-do-doo-dooo) was a main argument against going to war in Iraq all those years ago.

The next time The President accuses Congressional Democrats of playing politics with Iraq War funding and not "providing our troops what they need," perhaps they should ask him about Matthew Zeimer and Alan McPeek.

From Time Magazine:

For most Americans, the Iraq war is both distant and never-ending. For Private Matthew Zeimer, it was neither. Shortly after midnight on Feb. 2, Zeimer had his first taste of combat as he scrambled to the roof of the 3rd Infantry Division's Combat Outpost Grant in central Ramadi. Under cover of darkness, Sunni insurgents were attacking his new post from nearby buildings. Amid the smoke, noise and confusion, a blast suddenly ripped through the 3-ft. concrete wall shielding Zeimer and a fellow soldier, killing them both. Zeimer had been in Iraq for a week. He had been at his first combat post for two hours.

If Zeimer's combat career was brief, so was his training. He enlisted last June at age 17, three weeks after graduating from Dawson County High School in eastern Montana. After finishing nine weeks of basic training and additional preparation in infantry tactics in Oklahoma, he arrived at Fort Stewart, Ga., in early December. But Zeimer had missed the intense four-week pre-Iraq training — a taste of what troops will face in combat — that his 1st Brigade comrades got at their home post in October. Instead, Zeimer and about 140 other members of the 4,000-strong brigade got a cut-rate, 10-day course on weapon use, first aid and Iraqi culture. That's the same length as the course that teaches soldiers assigned to generals' household staffs the finer points of table service.

Editor & Publisher has more on the investigation into the inadequacy of training for Zeimer and the soldier who died with him, Alan McPeek, who was 20.

So it goes.

Surely I won't be the only one saying that in the next few days. But it had to be done. That said, I will miss the cranky bastard. I am better for having read him.