The day when Iraq alone can defend its shores — and protect its critical offshore oil installations — seems remote.

Iraq’s navy now has five Chinese-made patrol boats and 26 fast-attack aluminum vessels — fewer than half of which are operational. Its personnel number about 1,350, including 350 Marines.

“They think they are an elite unit, but they are not,” said Capt. Jock Alexander of the British Royal Marines, who is in charge of training Iraqi Marines to guard the 1.8-mile exclusion zone around each of the country’s two oil platforms.

The struggle to build a credible Iraqi navy is mirrored — on larger scales — by the mounting delays and costs to form a new Iraqi army and air force after Washington disbanded Saddam Hussein’s military.

While Veterans Affairs officials appreciate the support of community groups like Bobrow's, they're careful about embracing them. Because of privacy regulations, the VA can't disclose who has used their services. Often, VA employees are reluctant to even hand out flyers from fledgling groups until thoroughly checking them out.

"The veterans and their families have suffered enough. So when they put up a public profile or say they need help, we want to make sure they don't get injured again," said Patricia Matthews, a spokeswoman for the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Center.

She was surprised at the men being upset at having women in their units. "I would get long responses about how useless women are in war ...; not sexist but how they don't belong there."

Men said they created sexual tension and diverted attention. They require involvement from male colleagues for their safety, for example, having to guard their showers or to calm them during a difficult time. "And I think they felt it was unfair that woman could get pregnant and go home," she says. "I was just listening, thinking this is amazing."

Donald H. Rumsfeld, who resigned as secretary of defense in late 2006, will write his memoirs for the Sentinel imprint of Penguin Group USA. Mr. Rumsfeld, 75, will cover not only his years in the Bush administration but also his experiences with Presidents Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford and Ronald Reagan; his work in the private sector; and his early life. In contrast to other recent political figures who have produced memoirs, Mr. Rumsfeld is forgoing an advance and will donate profits to a nonprofit foundation he recently established to make educational grants to young people interested in public service and establishing links between the United States and Central Asia.

The Marine Corps Times reports that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) is proposing new measures that would provide homes for severely injured veterans on VA property.  The proposal came during a Senate defense appropriations subcommittee hearing where issues of long-term veterans care were raised.  Sen. Feinstein cited VA property in West Los Angeles that includes 300 acres of undeveloped land:

Feinstein said she offered VA’s West LA campus as an example because she often visits the site, but she believes such housing also could be built at other VA facilities around the country.

Feinstein and other California lawmakers have been trying to block VA from leasing out the unused land for commercial purposes, but they have not agreed on what to do with the property. Some want the land to be public park land, some have proposed building housing for homeless veterans and others have talked about leaving it completely undeveloped so it can be used by future generations.

In mid 2007 oobgolf.com launched an advanced golf course finder for our users. We recently made the decision to use that same technology and development resources to map the hometowns of soldiers who have died in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. This was not done as a political statement. We simply felt that this tool provided a unique way for Americans to connect to these fallen soldiers in a new more personal way.

“They may be out there, but there’s not many of them out there. Okay? … If you know where there's a veteran sleeping under a bridge, you call me immediately, and we will make sure that man does not do it.”

DAVID LETTERMAN: Tell me a little bit about your feud with Bill O'Reilly. Now there's a tough guy. He's been on the show a couple of times. And he's a tough guy. What's going on there? What's at the core of the feud?

JOHN EDWARDS: Well, the core of the feud is I've been talking about homeless veterans and the fact that we have a couple hundred thousand homeless veterans who have no place to sleep at night. They're either in shelters...

LETTERMAN: It's embarrassing, isn't it?

EDWARDS: It's incredibly embarrassing for America. Huge moral issue facing the country. And he kind of went on his show and said that I was exaggerating, making it up. And I think he got a lot of correspondence, a lot of homeless veterans have been calling in.

LETTERMAN: Well, you know what I've noticed about Bill O'Reilly — and he's a marvelous communicator. But he's not — he doesn't really care much about telling the truth.

As Laura Ingraham might say, tedious. Edwards and Letterman could not care less about the truth unless it fits into their far-left vision of the world. Using homeless veterans to make a dishonest political point is wrong. That's one of the reasons Edwards is going nowhere in his campaign. The man simply cannot be trusted.

Recently the Associated Press reported on an interesting program giving wounded Marines and Navy Corpsmen job placement in the film industry.  Working with the Wounded Marine Careers Foundationgives these vets hands on training in the various aspects of filmmaking--even the camera equipment can be modified to suite any injuries the vets may have.  As the center's co-founder Kev Lombard tells the AP, the idea for the program came out of his own project:

Lombard came up with the idea for the foundation's Wounded Marine Training Center for Careers in Media program after being asked by a friend in the military nearly two years ago to document the stories of wounded veterans at military hospitals.

"It wasn't our story to tell. It was theirs," he said. "So I said how about we teach them to tell their own story."

Throughout the story we follow one young wounded Marine who's filming a mock scene of helmets atop inverted rifles set as battlefield memorials to those killed.  If movies about Iraq will continue to be made in the future, his lens offers an idea of just how valuable these aspiring filmmakers may be:

Frey focuses on the helmets, which sit near a box of blank ammunition. For a moment he considers taking pictures. But then he decides against it, saying later that the scene didn't look real.