The first Congressional Medal of Honor for action in Afghanistan is to be awarded in the next few days. Read about it here.

Lieutenant Murphy will be the 3445th CMOH recipient since Lincoln created the decoration in 1861. Five have been awarded for actions in the last 34 years, all posthumous. Three have been awarded for actions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Always been a fan of Victor Davis Hanson. I like him even more now that I know he was once a professional farmer.

If you read his columns you’ll recognize many of the examples and arguments in this Hoover Institution address (and Q&A).

From Newsbusters:

On Monday evening, the State Department released its annual Country Reports on Terrorism showing a number of interesting findings, including steep declines in terrorist attacks and murders in many regions of the globe. That has not been the lede story in America’s liberal media, however. Instead, they’ve chosen to focus their attentions on how terrorism has increased in Iraq and in Afghanistan…

…Instead of saying that terrorism has increased markedly in Iraq (the truth), the media are extrapolating beyond that to claim that, as Reuters puts it, “U.S. sees sharp rise in global terrorism deaths.”

…Once you get past the lede of these Reuters and Associated Press pieces, you’ll discover the small detail that the increase in terrorism was almost entirely due to Iraq. Nowhere in either piece do you learn the fact that aside from the Middle East (which does not include Afghanistan according to State), the number of terrorist attacks worldwide is down from a year ago by over 300 incidents.

Digging into the State Department report’s statistical annex, we see that 7349 of the 14,337 reported attacks occured in Afghanistan or Iraq, just over half. About 70% of all terrorist-related fatalties were in those two countries. The report notes:

The number of reported incidents in 2006 fell for Europe and Eurasia by 15 percent from 2005, for South Asia by 10 percent, and for the Western Hemisphere by 5 percent. No high casualty attacks occurred in Western Europe, and only two occurred in Southeast Asia, in the southern Philippines. There were no high casualty attacks and 95 percent fewer victims of terror in 2006 in Indonesia that was attributable, at least in part, to enhanced Indonesian security measures.

And a couple of other tidbits:

Approximately 350 Mosques were targeted or struck during an attack in 2006, in most cases by Islamic extremists, representing over a three-fold increase from 2005. The attack against the Shia Golden Dome Mosque in Iraq, attributed to al-Qaida in Iraq, triggered a watershed of escalating sectarian violence in Iraq. Electoral polling stations saw over an 80 percent drop in attacks by terrorists in 2006.

So Islamic terrorists are diverting their attacks of polling places and airplanes to Mosques. As someone who regularly flys and votes, and does not frequent Mosques, sounds sort of like progress to me.

In 2006 3 American civilians were killed in terrorist attacks outside Iraq and Afghanistan. There were 6 in 2005 (in Israel, Jordan, UK, Egypt), and about 3200 in 2001.