The War in Iraq [Archive] - Page 4 - Wired New York Forum

lofter1

August 22nd, 2007, 07:51 AM

Words Unspoken Are Rendered on War’s Faces

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/08/22/arts/bermanspan.jpg
Nina Berman
A photograph of Sgt. Joseph Mosner from Nina Berman's photographs of
Iraq veterans at Jen Bekman Gallery.

NY TIMES (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/22/arts/design/22berm.html?ref=arts)
By HOLLAND COTTER
August 22, 2007

Art Review - Nina Berman

Words Unspoken Are Rendered on War’s Faces

One of the more shocking photographs to emerge from the current Iraq war was taken last year in a rural farm town in the American Midwest. It’s a studio portrait by the New York photographer Nina Berman of a young Illinois couple on their wedding day.

The bride, Renee Kline, 21, is dressed in a traditional white gown and holds a bouquet of scarlet flowers. The groom, Ty Ziegel, 24, a former Marine sergeant, wears his dress uniform, decorated with combat medals, including a Purple Heart. Her expression is unsmiling, maybe grave. His, as he looks toward her, is hard to read: his dead-white face is all but featureless, with no nose and no chin, as blank as a pullover mask.

Two years earlier, while in Iraq as a Marine Corps reservist, Mr. Ziegel had been trapped in a burning truck after a suicide bomber’s attack. The heat melted the flesh from his face. At Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas he underwent 19 rounds of surgery. His shattered skull was replaced by a plastic dome, and a face was constructed more or less from scratch with salvaged tissue, holes left where his ears and nose had been.

Ms. Berman took this picture, which is in the solo show at Jen Bekman Gallery, on assignment for People magazine. It was meant to accompany an article that documented Mr. Ziegel’s recovery, culminating in his marriage to his childhood sweetheart. But the published portrait was a convivial shot of the whole wedding party. Maybe the image of the couple alone was judged to be too stark, the emotional interchange too ambiguous. Maybe they looked, separately and together, too alone.

“Marine Wedding,” the portrait’s title, was not Ms. Berman’s first encounter with wounded Iraq war veterans. She photographed several others beginning in 2003, and 20 of her portraits were published as a book, “Purple Hearts: Back From Iraq” (Trolley Books, 2004), with an introduction by Verlyn Klinkenborg, a member of the editorial board of The New York Times. These pictures, accompanied by printed interviews with the sitters, have been traveling the country, and 10 are now at Bekman.

None are as startling as “Marine Wedding,” even when the disability recorded is more extensive. Former Spc. Luis Calderon, 22, of Puerto Rico, had his spinal cord severed when a concrete wall he was ordered to pull down — it was painted with a mural of Saddam Hussein — fell on him. He is now a quadriplegic, though this is not immediately evident from his portrait. Nor can we see from the photograph of Spc. Sam Ross, 20, of Pennsylvania, that he lost a leg in a bomb blast, which also caused permanent brain damage.

Almost all the veterans in Ms. Berman’s pictures look isolated, even if someone else is present. And a sense of loneliness comes through in their brief interviews. Mr. Ross, separated from his family, lives by himself in a trailer. Mr. Calderon, who waited months for veterans’ benefits, says he feels abandoned by the military; because he was not wounded in combat, he has not been awarded a Purple Heart.

Spc. Robert Acosta, 20, a Californian who lost a hand in a grenade attack, says he is psychologically unable to resume his former social life: “I don’t like dealing with the questions. Like, ‘Was it hot?’ ‘Did you shoot anybody?’ They want me to glorify the war and say it was so cool.”

Mr. Acosta’s interview has the only overt anti-war sentiment in the Bekman show, and there are few words of bitterness or recrimination. Mr. Ross calls combat in Iraq the best time of his life. Randall Clunen of Ohio remembers the excitement of search missions in Iraqi homes as a peak experience. Sgt. Joseph Mosner, at 35 the oldest in this group, was 19 when he enlisted. “There was no good jobs,” he said, “so I figured this would have been a good thing.” He still thinks so, despite his severe facial scarring from a bomb explosion.

Sgt. Jeremy Feldbusch, left brain-damaged and blind by an artillery attack, once had plans for medical school. but says: “I don’t have any regrets. I had some fun over there. I don’t want to talk about the military anymore.” He claims, as do others, that he has no political opinions.

Ms. Berman adds no direct editorial comment to the presentation. She has said in interviews that she started photographing disabled veterans soon after the war began mainly because she didn’t see anyone else doing so. In what may be the most intensively photographed war in history, the visual documentation has been selective. The fate of the injured veterans was not a public issue until news reports about substandard treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

This background provides the context for Ms. Berman’s photographs, which are themselves tip-of-the-iceberg images. No matter what the viewer’s political position, the images add up to a complex and desolating anti-war statement. Mr. Acosta makes that statement outright: “Yeah, I got a Purple Heart. I don’t care. I don’t need anything to prove I was there. I know I was there. I got a constant reminder. I mean like all the reasons we went to war, it just seems like they’re not legit enough for people to lose their lives for and for me to lose my hand and use of my legs and for my buddies to lose their limbs.”

And “Marine Wedding” speaks, as powerfully as a picture can, for itself.

“Nina Berman: Purple Hearts” continues through Aug. 30 at Jen Bekman Gallery, 6 Spring Street, between the Bowery and Elizabeth Street; (212) 219-0166, jenbekman.com .

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

***

Purple Hearts

Photos by Nina Berman

Adam Zaremba, 20, was wounded in Baghdad when a mine blew off his leg.
This photograph by Nina Berman is from the book "Purple Hearts" and
is part of an exhibit at the Jan Bekman Gallery in SoHo, New York.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/08/21/arts/bermanslide1.jpg

Pfc. Alan Jermaine Lewis, 23, lost his legs in Baghdad when a mine exploded.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/08/21/arts/bermanslide2.jpg

Sgt. Jeremy Feldbush, 24, was left brain damaged and blind in a mortar attack in Haditha.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/08/21/arts/bermanslide3.jpg

Luis Calderon, another subject from the book "Purple Hearts."

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/08/21/arts/bermanslide5.jpg

A studio portrait of a young Illinois couple on their wedding day, titled, "Marine Wedding."

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/08/21/arts/bermanslide6.jpg

Pfc. Randall Clunen, 19, was wounded in Tal Afar by a suicide car bomber.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/08/21/arts/bermanslide7.jpg

Spc. Robert Acosta, 20, lost his hand and use of his leg in an ambush outside Baghdad.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/08/21/arts/bermanslide8.jpg

Spc. Sam Ross, 21, was left blind and without a leg from an explosion in Baghdad.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/08/21/arts/bermanslide9.jpg

Spc. Tyson Johnson, 22, wounded in a mortar attack on Abu Ghraib prison.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/08/21/arts/22Bermanslide11.jpg

***

GVNY

August 22nd, 2007, 06:38 PM

Atrocious.

milleniumcab

August 23rd, 2007, 12:59 AM

ATROCIOUS...

That's a pretty good word to describe this ADMINISTRATION.....Not to worry, the history will do the same.....

milleniumcab

August 23rd, 2007, 03:11 AM

They're coming home, and look at them...

I feel like I'm reliving the Vietnam era.

http://i71.photobucket.com/albums/i130/Rapunzel61/Smileys/Sad-Mad/cryingeagle.gif

As bad as Vietnam was, trust me; this is 100 times worse.. You might think I am crazy but this one isn't about Iraq, Iran and the US... It is about the whole region in the Middle East...Once we left Vietnam, it was somewhat over.. It will not be over, at all, if and when we leave Iraq...And we will, soon...
The shit has not hit the fan yet.. The real question is; DO WE WANT TO BE THERE WHEN IT DOES?.....

JCMAN320

August 28th, 2007, 04:42 PM

This is sickening I have a friend of mine from the neighborhood who is over there and was already injured in a road side bomb and he wasn't even over there for a month.

Bush should be tried for war crimes. This war has got to end look at these poor men and women. My mother says it all the time "It is Vietnam, or even worse, all over again."

The other thing that bothers me is why isn't anybody protesting like they did during the Vietnam War. I 'am fully aware that they are two different eras and generations, but why do we seem to be so damm complacient. This war is an outrage.

I have protested in many times in the city and down in D.C., but for the most part the population at large would rather watch Jon Stewart, Bill Mahr and their contemporaries poke fun at these jokes of the administraion and watch someone else rant on and on instead of actually taking a stand and make a change. You cannot just yell and shout everytime and election roles around, you have to do it when you feel an injustice and people this war and administration as an injustice to the Amercian people.

Bush should be impeached, but does anybody stand up and try and get it done, no, but godforbid Clinton gets a bj in the oval office by an intern all of the sudden thats grounds for impeachment, but commiting war crimes and starting a war based on nothing isn't.

Compare the two; BJ vs. incompitant administration, out of control war, scandal, more people jumping off Bush's administration than the rats that jumped off during the sinking of the Titanic, people leaving and coming into his party like a revolving door, dropping the ball on Katrina by having the Canadian Mounted Police show up before the US Gov't, etc....

The facts speak for themselves!

Ninjahedge

August 28th, 2007, 08:06 PM

JC, a few things.

The powers that be know that there is not enough SOLID stuff to do anything if they tried to impeach Bush now. The other thing seems to be that they do not want a Scooter incident where he gets a partial pardon from his bosses and gets let off the hook with a fine.

The real seperator for this war is the lack of a draft. If there was a draft, and Joe Schmoe stood a chance of being blown to bits holding a country that is only good for the few with direct oil interests (for now), you would see HUGE protests.

But if the worst that happens is a bunch of "volunteers" get shot, well we will get a magnetic ribbon and put it on our SUV for them.

I think the only thing that can be done that would have any real impact or message to teh powers that be would be to see WHO pushed our leaders towards these decisions. Who convinced them, whether through political proxie or by actual financial "incentive" to go there.

Then find out how these people, and the presidents men, make their money. Find the companies whose stocks they own. What interests they have, and boycot the products that would hurt them the most.

Oil? Buy hybrids. Pitch in for cooking oil processing in your neighborhood. Convert your local municipalities infrastructure away from oil heat and the like.

What OTHER things make these men money, and are any of them connected to Iraq? Make them hurt for teh suffering they are causing the only way we can. Through their wallets.

BrooklynRider

September 11th, 2007, 09:45 PM

Iraqi Civilian Casualties: 2007 More Deadly Than 2006
By Spencer Ackerman - September 10, 2007, 11:49 AM

It took some time and effort, but, with the aid of TPM readers, we've obtained two complete lists of monthly Iraqi civilian casualties from January 2006 forward. Taking these numbers on their own terms, they do not bear out the claims made by the Bush administration and U.S. military that the surge has reduced Iraqi civilian casualties. Comparing each month's death toll in 2007 to the death toll from that same month in 2006, the numbers show that surge has not made Iraq safer for the civilian population. By some measurements, Iraqis are in greater danger than a year ago.

It's a sign of how skewed the debate over the Iraq War is that these numbers are not readily available. Different Iraqi government agencies present different casualty figures. The U.S. military's own casualty total is said to rely on the Iraqis, but it's unclear which Iraqi agency it uses or what adjustments are made to the Iraqi figures. Even as today's testimony from General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker is considered a possible make-or-break moment for U.S. policy on Iraq, with the Bush Administration and the Pentagon touting the success of the surge in reducing civilian casualties, there is no general agreement on what civilian casualties have been or on what the most accurate methodology for tallying casualties is.

The two lists presented here rely on statistics gathered by the Associated Press and by Iraq Body Count, a reputable British organization that has done Herculean work in compiling civilian-casualty data. It's important to note that these lists aren't comprehensive. Tallying Iraqi civilian casualties is an incomplete and arduous task, made extremely difficult by the situation on the ground. Both surveys readily acknowledge that their figures are undercounts of the true Iraqi civilian casualty rate. But the significance of these two charts is that each study employs its own internally consistent methodology for determining Iraqi casualties and has done so over a significant period of time, allowing an independent assessment -- albeit imprecise -- to measure against what we'll hear from Petraeus and Crocker.

Since April 2005, the AP has tracked Iraqi casualty data by relying on hospital, police and military officials and morgue workers, as well as reporters and photographers at the scenes and verifiable, two-source witness accounts. I tracked down the data that the AP had already reported, compiled it month by month, and the AP reconfirmed it for me to ensure that I didn't neglect or misunderstand something. Comparing AP's figures for each month in 2007 to those for its 2006 antecedent -- see the first chart -- 2007 is more deadly for Iraqis than 2006 was. Looking just at the post-February 2007 surge, the numbers for Iraqi casualties fluctuate month by month, and show no clear decline in civilian casualties.

The second list we obtained is from Iraq Body Count, whose methodology centers on "cross-checked media reports, hospital, morgue, NGO and official figures." Its numbers tell a more complicated story. Unlike with the AP's figures, the IBC's reflect a minimum-maximum range owing to questions about the exact numbers of civilians killed, for instance, in a particular bombing, or the civilian status of others. (See the second chart.) But they generally find that the surge hasn't resulted in significantly lower civilian casualties for Iraqis this year. So far, the first four months following the surge are deadlier overall than their 2006 counterparts, with May 2007 being about as bad as May 2006, and June 2007 being better than June 2006.

IBC's Hamit Dardagan, to whom I am indebted for breaking these numbers down by month and explaining IBC's methodology, caveats the organization's assessment by saying that the more recent data are incomplete. The figures after March 2007, a month into the surge, are "probably lacking hundreds (though never into the thousands) of deaths each month, which it would contain if these months were as 'finished' as the earlier periods." IBC is continually revising earlier months' figures as new data becomes available. So expect the numbers to be revised upward in the coming months.

If you chart the month-to-month civilian casualty statistics just in 2007 then the post-surge monthlies in the AP's count toggle a bit, but they hit a high in May, drop significantly in June, and creep back upward afterward. In the IBC's count, since the surge begins, the numbers drop in April, tick up slightly in May and then drop in June. That pattern roughly tracks with the AP's findings, giving confidence in the methodology of each. (However, the post-April 2007 figures are probably going to be revised upward.)

What the figures do show, however, is that 2007 remains more deadly for Iraqis, month for month, than did 2006. The two exceptions, May and June 2007 in IBC's count, may not stay exceptions for long, but they count as less deadly months for Iraqis than the previous year. In neither count did Iraq experience fewer than 1000 civilian casualties each month in 2007.

Neither of these counts include other important metrics, such as population displacement or sectarian killings; nor killings by Shiite death squads vs. Sunni insurgents; or incidences of car bombings or other mass-casualty events.

Finally, let me extend my personal thanks to the literally dozens of readers who wrote in with invaluable research help. You're what sets this medium apart. From what I've read over the last several days, I know I can trust you to correct me with any mistakes.

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004116.php

milleniumcab

September 12th, 2007, 02:04 AM

Unfortuanetly, I don't think this administration cares much about civilian casualties..

lofter1

September 12th, 2007, 01:08 PM

Two Of Seven Soldiers Who Wrote
New York Times Op-Ed Die In Iraq

Think Progress (http://thinkprogress.org/2007/09/12/82nd-soldiers/)
Septmeber 12, 2007

http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/omora.gif

On Aug. 19, seven active duty soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division wrote an op-ed in The New York Times called “The War As We Saw It (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/opinion/19jayamaha.html).” The piece expressed skepticism about “recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable”:The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. […]In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal. […]We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.On Monday, two of these soldiers — Sgt. Omar Mora and Sgt. Yance Gray — died in a vehicle accident (http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003638726) in Western Baghdad. The news of their deaths came as Gen. David Petraeus wrapped up his testimony to Congress about the Bush administration’s progress in Iraq.

The soldiers’ courage to speak out has helped change the debate. In yesterday’s Senate hearing, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) read from the soldiers’ op-ed. Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) also referenced the op-ed, challenging Petraeus’s rosy assessments:HAGEL: By the way, I assume you read the New York Times piece two weeks ago — seven NCOs in Iraq, today, finishing up 15 month commitments. Are we going to dismiss those seven NCOs? Are they ignorant? They laid out a pretty different scenario, General, Ambassador, from what you’re laying out today.Mora’s stepfather said that Mora believed the “situation in Iraq was desperate (http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/5127764.html)” and was sad that children in Iraq were “having to live” with the war going on. His mother said that Mora, who was on his second tour of duty, was supposed to be coming home in November (http://www.khou.com/news/local/stories/khou070911_tj_tcsoldier.c4dda8ba.html).

Mora is survived by his wife, Christa, and 5-year-old daughter, Jordan (http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/5127764.html). Gray is survived by his wife, Jessica, and infant daughter, Ava (http://billingsgazette.net/articles/2007/09/12/news/state/18-rollover.txt).

One of the other five authors, Staff Sgt. Jeremy Murphy, was shot in the head (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/opinion/19jayamaha.html) while the article was being written. He is expected to recover.

UPDATE: Houston’s KHOU aired this report on Mora. Watch it (http://thinkprogress.org/2007/09/12/82nd-soldiers/)

Capn_Birdseye

September 19th, 2007, 01:37 PM

Quote, George W Bush:

"It is never too late to hit Al-Qa'idah. It is never too late to defend freedom and to support our troops in a struggle that they can win. The key is to link progress in the provinces to progress in Baghdad. As local policy changes, the same will happen with national policy."

Ten days ago Bush paid a surprise visit to Iraq and clasped his hands as a symbol of the US's hopes in Iraq, praising Sheikh Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, the leader of Anbar province,for his work and commitment to bringing peace to the province.

General David Petraeus in his testimony to Congress said:

"The most significant development in the past six months likely has been the emergence of tribes and local citizens rejecting Al-Qa'ida and other extremists. This has, of course, been most visible in Anbar. A year ago the province was assessed as "lost" politically. Today, it is a model of what happens when local leaders and citizens decide to oppose Al-Qa'ida and reject its Taliban-like ideology."

Last week Shiekh Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha was assasinated by bombers in Anbar and it is now under a state of emergency.

The nightmare continues .....

WebErr

October 23rd, 2007, 12:53 PM

This thread will be about Iran too... very soon... :(

cysthead30

October 23rd, 2007, 04:51 PM

This thread will be about Iran too... very soon... :(

I ****ing hope not. I'm sick of this shit.

milleniumcab

October 23rd, 2007, 10:28 PM

This thread will be about Iran too... very soon... :(

There already is an "Iran Plan" thread....

lofter1

December 16th, 2007, 11:33 PM

Amazing that the War in Iraq continues -- but no one has posted on this thread for almost two months :cool: .

Lest we forget ...

Behold the endgame that will befall Iraq once the US finishes our so-called business of "liberting" Iraq -- whether that be in 10 days or 10 years:

UK has left behind murder and chaos,
says Basra police chief

Blunt assessment delivered as British hand over security to Iraqis

The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/)
Mona Mahmoud, Maggie O'Kane and Ian Black
Monday December 17, 2007

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2007/12/16/basra372.jpg
Photograph: MoD/Getty Images
British troops parade as the control of Basra province
is handed back to the Iraqis.

The full scale of the chaos left behind by British forces in Basra was revealed yesterday as the city's police chief described a province in the grip of well-armed militias strong enough to overpower security forces and brutal enough to behead women considered not sufficiently Islamic.

As British forces finally handed over security in Basra province, marking the end of 4½ years of control in southern Iraq, Major General Jalil Khalaf, the new police commander, said the occupation had left him with a situation close to mayhem. "They left me militia, they left me gangsters, and they left me all the troubles in the world," he said in an in an interview for Guardian Films and ITV.

Khalaf painted a very different picture from that of British officials who, while acknowledging problems in southern Iraq, said yesterday's handover at Basra airbase was timely and appropriate.

Major General Graham Binns, who led British troops into the city in 2003, said the province had "begun to regain its strength". He added: "I came to rid Basra of its enemies and I now formally hand Basra back to its friends."

But in the film, to be broadcast on the Guardian Unlimited website and ITV News, Khalaf lists a catalogue of failings, saying:
· Basra has become so lawless that in the last three months 45 women have been killed for being "immoral" because they were not fully covered or because they may have given birth outside wedlock; · The British unintentionally rearmed Shia militias by failing to recognise that Iraqi troops were loyal to more than one authority; · Shia militia are better armed than his men and control Iraq's main port. In the interview he said the main problem the Iraqi security forces now faced was the struggle to wrest control back from the militia. He appealed for the British to help him do that: "We need the British to help us to watch our borders - both sea and land and we need their intelligence and air support and to keep training the Iraqi police."

David Miliband, the foreign secretary, who attended the handover ceremony, acknowledged that the territory was not "a land of milk and honey" and promised Britain would remain a "committed friend" of Iraq.

But he insisted it was the right time to hand back control. "The key conditions for the transfer of security responsibility to the Iraqi security forces are whether they are up to it: do they have the numbers? Do they have the leadership and training to provide leadership for this province? And the answer to those three questions is yes," he said.

After the handover Des Browne, the defence secretary, praised British forces - 174 of whom have died since the start of the war in March 2003. "Their contribution has been outstanding and their courage inspiring," he said. A scaled-down UK force will remain in a single base at Basra airport, with a small training mission and a rapid reaction team on "overwatch".

Britain now has 4,500 troops in Iraq. The prime minister, Gordon Brown, has said numbers would shrink to 2,500 by mid-2008 though those released may be redeployed to Afghanistan.

Khalaf, who has survived 20 assassination attempts since he became police chief six months ago, said Britain's intentions had been good but misguided. "I don't think the British meant for this mess to happen. When they disbanded the Iraqi police and military after Saddam fell the people they put in their place were not loyal to the Iraqi government. The British trained and armed these people in the extremist groups and now we are faced with a situation where these police are loyal to their parties not their country."

He said the most shocking aspect of the breakdown of law and order in Basra was the murder of women for being unIslamic. "They are being killed because they are accused of behaving in an immoral way. When they kill them they put underwear and indecent clothes on them."

In his office Khalaf showed the Guardian a computer holding the files of 48 unidentified women. "Some of them have even been killed with their children because their killer says that they come out of an adulterous relationship," he said. Vince Cable, the acting Lib Dem leader, called for a timetable to bring all British troops home from Iraq, adding: "If we are handing power back to the Iraqis, why are 4,500 British troops needed for what is essentially a training mission?"

© Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

BrooklynRider

January 20th, 2008, 03:54 AM

At least 68 dead in clashes across Iraq. (http://thinkprogress.org/2008/01/19/at-least-68-dead-in-clashes-across-iraq/)

As “members of a messianic cult and Iraqi troops” continued fighting for a second day, the death toll “in two predominantly Shiite southern cities rose from 50 to at least 68 (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22728491/)“:
Iraqi authorities said at least 36 people were reported killed in Basra, Iraq’s second largest city, and at least 32 in Nasiriyah, including Iraqi security forces, civilians and gunmen. At least 10 people were reported slain in Nasiriyah Friday.
There was also “a deadly bombing in northern Iraq.” The AP describes the violence of the past two days as part of “a series of recent high-profile attacks” that are “eroding the security gains of the previous six months.”

January 19, 2008 8:44 pm

www.thinkprogress.org (http://www.thinkprogress.org)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22728491/

lofter1

January 24th, 2008, 11:49 AM

US War Costs Increased By Nearly 50% In 2007

Reauters / Yahoo (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080123/ts_nm/iraq_usa_spending_dc)
By Richard Cowan
Jan 23, 2008

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Iraq war may not dominate U.S. news reports as the carnage drops, but a new report underscores the financial burden of persistent combat that is helping run up the government's credit card.

"Funding for U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and other activities in the war on terrorism expanded significantly in 2007," the Congressional Budget Office said in a report released on Wednesday.

War funding, which averaged about $93 billion a year from 2003 through 2005, rose to $120 billion in 2006 and $171 billion in 2007 and President George W. Bush has asked for $193 billion in 2008, the nonpartisan office wrote.

"It keeps going up, up and away," Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad said of the money spent in Iraq since U.S. troops invaded in 2003.
"We're seeing the war costs continue to spiral upward. It is the additional troops plus additional costs per troop plus the over-reliance on private contractors, which also explodes the costs," said Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat who opposed the war.

Since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, Congress has written checks for $691 billion to pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and such related activities as Iraq reconstruction, the CBO said.

There are around 158,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and 27,000 in Afghanistan.

$11 BILLION A MONTH

Of the total, the CBO estimated that $440 billion had been spent on fighting in Iraq launched with the goal of ousting President Saddam Hussein from power and securing weapons of mass destruction that were never found.

All of the Iraq and Afghanistan war money -- about $11 billion a month -- is effectively being put on a government credit card at a time when U.S. government debt has skyrocketed to more than $9 trillion, up from around $5.6 trillion when Bush took office in January 2001.

Bush has opposed paying the cost of waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan with tax increases or other specific offsets.

That means that nearly every penny spent gets added to the U.S. debt. The CBO estimated that just the interest payments on the debt would total $234 billion this year, more than the likely $250 billion budget deficit for the year.

These annual deficits and steep interest payments on borrowing all get rolled into the running tally that is the government's debt -- the more-than-$9-trillion figure.

The debt problem snowballs long-term, especially if the escalating costs of government-run health care and retirement programs are not reined in and if the United States maintains a large long-term military presence in Iraq.

Interest payments on the debt will total an estimated $2.7 trillion over the next decade, the CBO said.

Congress is expected to pass another round of money for the war in May or June, despite repeated attempts by Democrats to bring the fighting in Iraq to an end.

Republicans have defended the costs of the Iraq war, saying it has helped to stave off new attacks on the United States.

But Conrad said the deficit spending on the war was "another negative trend among many negative trends" in the budget.

(Editing by Howard Goller and Doina Chiacu)

Copyright © 2008 Reuters Limited.

MidtownGuy

January 27th, 2008, 04:43 PM

claudian

January 30th, 2008, 04:48 AM

hey, u could vote here and let people know/know other people's opinion on Iraq wars.
http://www.select2008.com/whatshot

Capn_Birdseye

January 30th, 2008, 07:00 AM

2.7 trillion. For a war that was 100% unnecessary. It is insanity.
When I see those numbers, and then consider the people who don't think the US can/should afford better schools and national health care, it makes me want to scream.
:mad:
Totally agree MTG - ditto the UK where hospital wards are being closed, doctors and nurses sacked ..... all for a lie-based war nobody, (or most sensible people), didn't and don't support!

milleniumcab

January 30th, 2008, 10:59 AM

An Europian passenger of mine told me that Whole World should be able to vote on US Presidential election since US foreign policy affects the whole world...He made a lot of sense..

Alonzo-ny

February 2nd, 2008, 01:25 PM

How much money has the Uk spend in comparison?

lofter1

February 2nd, 2008, 07:53 PM

MC: Then US citizens should get to vote in the Chinese elections.

Oh, wait ... do they have elections in China?

milleniumcab

February 2nd, 2008, 09:28 PM

MC: Then US citizens should get to vote in the Chinese elections.

Oh, wait ... do they have elections in China?

The passenger was Europian..:D.. I don't think Chinese have any elections, not in the same category as ours anyway...

lofter1

February 2nd, 2008, 09:51 PM

If your passenger was Italian then maybe he'd be more than glad to let some foreigners vote in their election.

But not sure where we'd find the time -- in Italy they seem to need to have another one every couple of weeks.

milleniumcab

February 3rd, 2008, 01:58 AM

^^^:))))))))

lofter1

February 4th, 2008, 01:53 AM

Cross-Border Chases From Iraq O.K., Document Says

NY TIMES (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/04/washington/04rules.html?hp)
By ERIC SCHMITT and MICHAEL R. GORDON
February 4, 2008

WASHINGTON — American military forces in Iraq were authorized to pursue former members of Saddam Hussein’s government and terrorists across Iraq’s borders into Iran and Syria, according to a classified 2005 document that has been made public by an independent Web site.

The document, which was disclosed by the organization Wikileaks and which American officials said appeared authentic, outlined the rules of engagement for the American division that was based in Baghdad and central Iraq that year.

It also provided instructions for how to deal with the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr: his status as a hostile foe was “suspended,” and he and his key associates were not to be attacked except in self-defense.

Wikileaks, a Web site that encourages posting of leaked materials, says its goal in disclosing secret documents is to reveal “unethical behavior” by governments and corporations. It has previously posted the United States military’s manual for operating its prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; a military assessment of a 2004 attack in Falluja; and lists of American military equipment in Iraq.

The American military command in Baghdad on Sunday sharply criticized the group’s decision to post the document.

“While we will not comment on whether this is, in fact, an official document, we do consider the deliberate release of what Wikileaks believes to be a classified document is irresponsible and, if valid, could put U.S. military personnel at risk,” said Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith, a spokesman for the command.

Rules of engagement in Iraq, which cover the procedures for using force on a battlefield in which insurgents and terrorists mix with civilians, have long been considered highly classified. The American military’s concern is that adversaries will be able to adjust their tactics if they know the rules that describe the specific circumstances in which force may and may not be used.

The 2005 document covers the procedures used by Multi-National Division Baghdad, the American unit that operated in the Iraqi capital and central Iraq. At a time when sectarian divisions had brought Iraq to a low-level civil war, the document suggests that capturing and killing former members of Mr. Hussein’s government was still a concern.

In a section on crossing international borders, the document said the permission of the American defense secretary was required before American forces could cross into or fly over Iranian or Syrian territory. Such actions, the document suggested, would probably also require the approval of President Bush.

But the document said that there were cases in which such approval was not required: when American forces were in hot pursuit of former members of Mr. Hussein’s government or terrorists.

Approval by the defense secretary “is not required to conduct uninterrupted pursuit and engagement of positively identified former regime military aircraft, terrorist and senior [former] military leadership and senior nonmilitary elements of former Iraqi regime command and control across international borders,” the document said.

It stated that the American commander engaged in the pursuit, however, should consult with top commanders in Baghdad, “time permitting.”

It is not known if the authority to conduct hot pursuits across the Iranian and Syrian borders was ever used or what authority exists today. In October 2005, The New York Times reported that there had been a series of clashes between Army Rangers and Syrian troops along the border with Iraq. According to the 2005 document, American forces were also authorized to respond to a “hostile force” that used Syrian or Iranian territory to attack American troops in Iraq or that posed an “imminent threat” to American operations there. They were instructed to consult with a senior American commander if there was time.

Apparently in a carryover from the intelligence failures of the Iraq invasion in early 2003, the document says the United States Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle East, gave American commanders in Iraq the authority to attack mobile “W.M.D. labs”; such labs for making germ weapons were later determined not to exist.

The 2005 document also referred to a Central Command list of the “hostile forces” that may be “engaged and destroyed.” It focused heavily on Mr. Hussein’s former security forces, like the Special Republican Guard and members of the Baath Party militia that were said to have shifted from “overt conventional resistance to insurgent methods of resistance.”

Reflecting the clash the year before between American forces and Mr. Sadr’s militia, the document said the militia and other armed supporters of the cleric had also been on the list of paramilitary forces deemed to be “hostile.” L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the American occupation authority in Iraq until June 2004, had branded Mr. Sadr an outlaw, and an Iraqi judge had issued a secret warrant for his arrest.

But a truce was later worked out with Mr. Sadr, and Iraqi politicians sought to bring him into the political process. Apparently as a result of those developments, the rules of engagement were modified. Referring to Mr. Sadr and the Mahdi Army, the document says: “Their status as a declared hostile force, however, is suspended and such individuals will not be engaged except in self-defense.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Jasonik

February 5th, 2008, 03:57 PM

Iraq’s Tragic Future

Posted on Feb 5, 2008 (http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080205_iraqs_tragic_future/)
By Scott Ritter (http://www.truthdig.com/about/staff/108)

Any analysis of the current state of the ongoing U.S. occupation of Iraq that relied solely on the U.S. government, the major candidates for president or the major media outlets in the United States for information would be hard pressed to find any bad news. In a State of the Union address which had everything except a “Mission Accomplished” banner flying in the background, President Bush all but declared victory over the insurgency in Iraq. His recertification of the success of the so-called surge has prompted the Republican candidates to assume a cocky swagger when discussing Iraq. They embrace the occupation and speak, without shame or apparent fear of retribution, of an ongoing presence in that war-torn nation. Their Democratic counterparts have been less than enthusiastic in their criticism of the escalation. And the media, for the most part, continue their macabre role as cheerleaders of death, hiding the reality of Iraq deep inside stories that build upon approving headlines derived from nothing more than political rhetoric. The war in Iraq, we’re told, is virtually over. We only need “stay the course” for 10 more years.

This situation is troublesome in the extreme. The collective refusal of any constituent in this complicated mix of political players to confront Bush on Iraq virtually guarantees that it will be the Bush administration, and not its successor, that will dictate the first year (or more) of policy in Iraq for the next president. It also ensures that the debacle that is the Bush administration’s overarching Middle East policy of regional transformation and regime change in not only Iraq but Iran and Syria will continue to go unchallenged. If the president is free to pursue his policies, it could lead to direct military intervention in Iran by the United States prior to President Bush’s departure from office or, failing that, place his successor on the path toward military confrontation. At a time when every data point available certifies (and recertifies) the administration’s actions in Iraq, Iran and elsewhere (including Afghanistan) as an abject failure, America collectively has fallen into a hypnotic trance, distracted by domestic economic problems and incapable, due to our collective ignorance of the world we live in, of deciphering the reality on the ground in the Middle East.

Rather than offering a word-for-word renouncement of the president’s rosy assertions concerning Iraq, I will instead initiate a process of debunking the myth of American success by doing that which no politician, current or aspiring, would dare do: predict the failure of American policy in Iraq. With the ink on the newspapers parroting the president’s words barely dry, evidence of his misrepresentation of reality begins to build with the announcement by the Pentagon that troop levels in Iraq will not be dropping, as had been projected in view of the “success” of the “surge,” but rather holding at current levels with the possibility of increasing in the future. This reversal of course concerning troop deployments into Iraq highlights the reality that the statistical justification of “surge success,” namely the reduction in the level of violence, was illusory, a temporary lull brought about more by smoke and mirrors than any genuine change of fortune on the ground. Even the word surge is inappropriate for what is now undeniably an escalation. Iraq, far from being a nation on the rebound, remains a mortally wounded shell, the equivalent of a human suffering from a sucking chest wound, its lungs collapsed and its life blood spilling unchecked onto the ground. The “surge” never addressed the underlying reasons for Iraq’s post-Saddam suffering, and as such never sought to heal that which was killing Iraq. Instead, the “surge” offered little more than a cosmetic gesture, covering the wounds of Iraq with a bandage which shielded the true extent of the damage from outside view while doing nothing to save the victim.

Iraq is dying; soon Iraq will be dead. True, there will be a plot of land in the Middle East which people will refer to as Iraq. But any hope of a resurrected homogeneous Iraqi nation populated by a diverse people capable of coexisting in peace and harmony is soon to be swept away forever. Any hope of a way out for the people of Iraq and their neighbors is about to become a victim of the “successes” of the “surge” and the denial of reality. The destruction of Iraq has already begun. The myth of Kurdish stability—born artificially out of the U.S.-enforced “no-fly zones” of the 1990s, sustained through the largess of the Oil-for-Food (http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hW29ilQLmxjTWAf35k8erh7qqomgD8UJQC2G1) program (and U.S.-approved sanctions sidestepped by the various Kurdish groups in Iraq) and given a Frankenstein-like lease on life in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion and occupation—is rapidly unraveling. Like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, present-day Iraqi Kurdistan has been exposed as an amalgam of parts incompatible not only with each other but the region as a whole.

Ongoing Kurdish disdain for the central authority in Baghdad has led to the Kurds declaring their independence from Iraqi law (especially any law pertaining to oil present on lands they control). The reality of the Kurds’ quest for independence can be seen in their support of the Kurdish groups, in particular the PKK, that desire independence from Turkey. The sentiment has not been lost on their Turkish neighbors to the north, resulting in an escalation of cross-border military incursions which will only expand over time, further destabilizing Kurdish Iraq. Lying dormant, and unmentioned, is the age-old animosity between the two principle Kurdish factions in Iraq, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP). As recently as 1997, these two factions were engaged in a virtual civil war against one another. The strains brought on by the present unraveling have these two factions once again vying for position inside Iraq, making internecine conflict all but inevitable. The year 2008 will bring with it a major escalation of Turkish military operations against northern Iraq, a strategic break between the Kurdish factions there and with the central government of Baghdad, and the beginnings of an all-out civil war between the KDP and PUK.

The next unraveling of the “surge” myth will be in western Iraq, where the much applauded “awakening” was falling apart even as Bush spoke. I continue to maintain that there is a hidden hand behind the Sunni resistance that operates unseen and uncommented on by the United States and its erstwhile Iraqi allies operating out of the Green Zone in Baghdad. The government of Saddam Hussein never formally capitulated, and indeed had in place plans for ongoing active resistance against any occupation of Iraq. In October 2007 the Iraqi Baath Party held its 13th conference, in which it formally certified one of Saddam’s vice presidents, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izzat_Ibrahim_ad-Douri), as the supreme leader of the Sunni resistance.

The United States’ embrace of the “awakening” will go down in the history of the Iraq conflict as one of the gravest strategic errors made in a field of grave errors. The U.S. military in Iraq has never fully understood the complex interplay between the Sunni resistance, al-Qaida in Iraq, and the former government of Saddam Hussein. Saddam may be dead, but not so his plans for resistance. The massive security organizations which held sway over Iraq during his rule were never defeated, and never formally disbanded. The organs of security which once operated as formal ministries now operate as covert cells, functioning along internal lines of communication which are virtually impenetrable by outside forces. These security organs gave birth to al-Qaida in Iraq, fostered its growth as a proxy, and used it as a means of sowing chaos and fear among the Iraqi population.

The violence perpetrated by al-Qaida in Iraq is largely responsible for the inability of the central government in Baghdad to gain any traction in the form of unified governance. The inability of the United States to defeat al-Qaida has destroyed any hope of generating confidence among the Iraqi population in the possibility of stability emerging from an ongoing American occupation. But al-Qaida in Iraq is not a physical entity which the United States can get its hands around, but rather a giant con game being run by Izzat al-Douri and the Sunni resistance. Because al-Qaida in Iraq is derived from the Sunni resistance, it can be defeated only when the Sunni resistance is defeated. And the greatest con game of them all occurred when the Sunni resistance manipulated the United States into arming it, training it and turning it against the forces of al-Qaida, which it controls. Far from subduing the Sunni resistance by Washington’s political and military support of the “awakening,” the United States has further empowered it. It is almost as if we were arming and training the Viet Cong on the eve of the Tet offensive during the Vietnam War.

Keeping in mind the fact that the Sunni resistance, led by al-Douri, operates from the shadows, and that its influence is exerted more indirectly than directly, there are actual al-Qaida elements in Iraq which operate independently of central Sunni control, just as there are Sunni tribal elements which freely joined the “awakening” in an effort to quash the forces of al-Qaida in Iraq. The diabolical beauty of the Sunni resistance isn’t its ability to exert direct control over all aspects of the anti-American activity in Sunni Iraq, but rather to manipulate the overall direction of activity through indirect means in a manner which achieves its overall strategic aims. The Sunni resistance continues to use al-Qaida in Iraq as a useful tool for seizing the strategic focus of the American military occupiers (and their Iraqi proxies in the Green Zone), as well as controlling Sunni tribal elements which stray too far off the strategic course (witness the recent suicide bomb assassination of senior Sunni tribal leaders). 2008 will see the collapse of the Sunni “awakening” movement, and a return to large-scale anti-American insurgency in western Iraq. It will also see the continued viability of al-Qaida in Iraq in terms of being an organization capable of wreaking violence and dictating the pace of American military involvement in directions beneficial to the Sunni resistance and detrimental to the United States.

One of the spinoffs of the continued success of the Sunni resistance is the focus it places on the inability of the Shiite (http://hnn.us/articles/934.html)-dominated government in Baghdad to actually govern. The U.S. decision to arm, train and facilitate the various Sunni militias in Iraq is a de facto acknowledgement that the American occupiers have lost confidence in the high-profile byproduct of the “purple finger revolution” (http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/01/31/opinion/edbull.php) of January 2005. The sham that was that election has produced a government trusted by no one, even the Shiites. The ongoing unilateral cease-fire imposed by the Muqtada al-Sadr on his Mahdi Army prevented the outbreak of civil war between his movement and that of the Iranian-backed Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and its militia, the Badr Brigade.

When Saddam’s security forces dissolved on the eve of the fall of Baghdad in March 2003, the security organs which had been tasked with infiltrating the Shiite community for the purpose of spying on Shiites were instead instructed to embed themselves deep within the structures of that community. Both the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade are heavily infiltrated with such sleeper elements, which conspire to create and exploit fractures between these two organizations under the age-old adage of divide and conquer. A strategic pause in the conflict between the Mahdi Army and the U.S. military on the one hand and the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade on the other has served to strengthen the hand of the Mahdi Army by allowing time for it to rearm and reorganize, increasing its efficiency as a military organization all the while its political opposite, the SCIRI-dominated central Iraqi government, continues to falter.

Further exacerbating the situation for the American occupiers of Iraq is the ongoing tension created by the war of wills between the United States and Iran. The Sunni resistance has no love for the Shiite theocracy in Tehran, or its proxies in Iraq, and views creating a rift between the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade as a strategic imperative on the road to a Sunni resurgence. Any U.S. military strike against Iran will bring with it the inevitable Shiite backlash in Iraq. The Shiite forces that emerge as the most independent of the American occupier will be, in the minds of the Sunni resistance, the most capable of winning the support of the Shiites of Iraq. Given the past record of cooperation between the Mahdi Army and the Sunni resistance, and the ongoing antipathy between Sunnis and SCIRI, there can be little doubt which Shiite entity the Sunnis will side with when it comes time for a decisive conflict between the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade, and 2008 will be the year which witnesses such a conflict.

The big loser in all of this, besides the people of Iraq, is of course the men and women of the armed forces of the United States. Betrayed by the Bush administration, abandoned by Congress and all but forgotten by a complacent American population and those who are positioning themselves for national leadership in the next administration, the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who so proudly wear the uniform of the United States continue to fight and die, kill and be maimed in a war which was never justified and long ago lost its luster. Played as pawns in a giant game of three-dimensional chess, these brave Americans find themselves being needlessly sacrificed in a game where there can be no winner, only losers.

The continued ambivalence of the American population as a whole toward the war in Iraq, perhaps best manifested by the superficiality of the slogan “Support the Troops,” all the while remaining ignorant of what the troops are actually doing, has led to a similar amnesia among politicians all too willing to allow themselves to seek political advantage at the expense of American life and treasure. January 2008 cost the United States nearly 40 lives (http://www.mcclatchydc.com/244/story/26030.html) in Iraq. The current military budget is unprecedented in its size, and doesn’t even come close to paying for ongoing military operations in Iraq. The war in Iraq has bankrupted Americans morally and fiscally, and yet the American public continues to shake the hands of aspiring politicians who ignore Iraq, pretending that the blood which soaks the hands of these political aspirants hasn’t stained their own. In the sick kabuki dance that is American politics, this refusal to call a spade a spade is deserving of little more than disdain and sorrow.

While the American people, politicians and media may remain mute on the reality of Iraq, I won’t. There is no such thing as a crystal ball which enables one to see clearly into the future, and I am normally averse to making sweeping long-term predictions involving a topic as fluid as the ongoing situation in Iraq. At the risk of being wrong (and, indeed, I hope very much that I am), I will contradict the rosy statements of the president in his State of the Union address and will throw down a gauntlet in the face of ongoing public and media ambivalence by predicting that 2008 will be the year the “surge” in Iraq is exposed as a grand debacle. The cosmetic bandage placed over the gravely wounded Iraq will fall off, and the damaged body that is Iraq will continue its painful decline toward death.

If there is any winner in all of this it will be the Sunni resistance, or at least its leadership hiding in the shadow of the American occupation, as it continues to exploit the chaotic death spiral of post-Saddam Iraq for its own long-term plan of a Sunni resurgence in Iraq. That the Sunni resistance will continue to fight an American occupation is a guarantee. That it will continue to persevere is highly probable. That the United States will be able to stop it is unlikely. And so, the reality that the only policy direction worthy of consideration here in the United States concerning Iraq is the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of American forces continues to hold true. And the fact that this option is given short shrift by all capable of making or influencing such a decision guarantees that this bloody war will go on, inconclusively and incomprehensibly, for many more years. That is the one image in my crystal ball that emerges in full focus, and which will serve as the basis of defining a national nightmare for generations to come.

Jasonik

February 13th, 2008, 11:30 AM

The Chicken Doves
Elected to end the war, Democrats have surrendered to Bush on Iraq and betrayed the peace movement for their own political ends
http://i.realone.com/assets/rn/img/7/7/7/9/18329777-18329780-slarge.jpgVictor Juhasz

MATT TAIBBI
Posted Feb 21, 2008 12:00 AM (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/18349197/the_chicken_doves)

Quietly, while Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been inspiring Democrats everywhere with their rolling bitchfest, congressional superduo Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have completed one of the most awesome political collapses since Neville Chamberlain. At long last, the Democratic leaders of Congress have publicly surrendered on the Iraq War, just one year after being swept into power with a firm mandate to end it.

Solidifying his reputation as one of the biggest pussies in U.S. political history, Reid explained his decision to refocus his party's energies on topics other than ending the war by saying he just couldn't fit Iraq into his busy schedule. "We have the presidential election," Reid said recently. "Our time is really squeezed."

There was much public shedding of tears among the Democratic leadership, as Reid, Pelosi and other congressional heavyweights expressed deep sadness that their valiant charge up the hill of change had been thwarted by circumstances beyond their control — that, as much as they would love to continue trying to end the catastrophic Iraq deal, they would now have to wait until, oh, 2009 to try again. "We'll have a new president," said Pelosi. "And I do think at that time we'll take a fresh look at it."

Pelosi seemed especially broken up about having to surrender on Iraq, sounding like an NFL coach in a postgame presser, trying with a straight face to explain why he punted on first-and-goal. "We just didn't have any plays we liked down there," said the coach of the 0-15 Dems. "Sometimes you just have to play the field-position game...."

In reality, though, Pelosi and the Democrats were actually engaged in some serious point-shaving. Working behind the scenes, the Democrats have systematically taken over the anti-war movement, packing the nation's leading group with party consultants more interested in attacking the GOP than ending the war. "Our focus is on the Republicans," one Democratic apparatchik in charge of the anti-war coalition declared. "How can we juice up attacks on them?"

The story of how the Democrats finally betrayed the voters who handed them both houses of Congress a year ago is a depressing preview of what's to come if they win the White House. And if we don't pay attention to this sorry tale now, while there's still time to change our minds about whom to nominate, we might be stuck with this same bunch of spineless creeps for four more years. With no one but ourselves to blame.

The controversy over the Democratic "strategy" to end the war basically comes down to whom you believe. According to the Reid-Pelosi version of history, the Democrats tried hard to force President Bush's hand by repeatedly attempting to tie funding for the war to a scheduled withdrawal. Last spring they tried to get him to eat a timeline and failed to get the votes to override a presidential veto. Then they retreated and gave Bush his money, with the aim of trying again after the summer to convince a sufficient number of Republicans to cross the aisle in support of a timeline.

But in September, Gen. David Petraeus reported that Bush's "surge" in Iraq was working, giving Republicans who might otherwise have flipped sufficient cover to continue supporting the war. The Democrats had no choice, the legend goes, but to wait until 2009, in the hopes that things would be different under a Democratic president.

Democrats insist that the reason they can't cut off the money for the war, despite their majority in both houses, is purely political. "George Bush would be on TV every five minutes saying that the Democrats betrayed the troops," says Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an Independent who voted against the war but caucuses with the Democrats. Then he glumly adds another reason. "Also, it just wasn't going to happen."

Why it "just wasn't going to happen" is the controversy. In and around the halls of Congress, the notion that the Democrats made a sincere effort to end the war meets with, at best, derisive laughter. Though few congressional aides would think of saying so on the record, in private many dismiss their party's lame anti-war effort as an absurd dog-and-pony show, a calculated attempt to score political points without ever being serious about bringing the troops home.

"Yeah, the amount of expletives that flew in our office alone was unbelievable," says an aide to one staunchly anti-war House member. "It was all about the public show. Reid and Pelosi would say they were taking this tough stand against Bush, but if you actually looked at what they were sending to a vote, it was like Swiss cheese. Full of holes."

In the House, some seventy Democrats joined the Out of Iraq caucus and repeatedly butted heads with Reid and Pelosi, arguing passionately for tougher measures to end the war. The fight left some caucus members bitter about the party's failure. Rep. Barbara Lee of California was one of the first to submit an amendment to cut off funding unless it was tied to an immediate withdrawal. "I couldn't even get it through the Rules Committee in the spring," Lee says.

Rep. Lynn Woolsey, a fellow caucus member, says Democrats should have refused from the beginning to approve any funding that wasn't tied to a withdrawal. "If we'd been bold the minute we got control of the House — and that's why we got the majority, because the people of this country wanted us out of Iraq — if we'd been bold, even if we lost the votes, we would have gained our voice."

An honest attempt to end the war, say Democrats like Woolsey and Lee, would have involved forcing Bush to execute his veto and allowing the Republicans to filibuster all they wanted. Force a showdown, in other words, and use any means necessary to get the bloodshed ended.

"Can you imagine Tom DeLay and Denny Hastert taking no for an answer the way Reid and Pelosi did on Iraq?" asks the House aide in the expletive-filled office. "They'd find a way to get the votes. They'd get it done somehow."

But any suggestion that the Democrats had an obligation to fight this good fight infuriates the bund of hedging careerists in charge of the party. In fact, nothing sums up the current Democratic leadership better than its vitriolic criticisms of those recalcitrant party members who insist on interpreting their 2006 mandate as a command to actually end the war. Rep. David Obey, chair of the House Appropriations Committee and a key Pelosi-Reid ally, lambasted anti-war Democrats who "didn't want to get specks on those white robes of theirs." Obey even berated a soldier's mother who begged him to cut off funds for the war, accusing her and her friends of "smoking something illegal."

Rather than use the vast power they had to end the war, Democrats devoted their energy to making sure that "anti-war activism" became synonymous with "electing Democrats." Capitalizing on America's desire to end the war, they hijacked the anti-war movement itself, filling the ranks of peace groups with loyal party hacks. Anti-war organizations essentially became a political tool for the Democrats — one operated from inside the Beltway and devoted primarily to targeting Republicans.

This supposedly grass-roots "anti-war coalition" met regularly on K Street, the very capital of top-down Beltway politics. At the forefront of the groups are Thomas Matzzie and Brad Woodhouse of Americans Against the Escalation in Iraq, the leader of the anti-war lobby. Along with other K Street crusaders, the two have received iconic treatment from The Washington Post and The New York Times, both of which depicted the anti-war warriors as young idealist-progressives in shirtsleeves, riding a mirthful spirit into political combat — changing the world is fun!

But what exactly are these young idealists campaigning for? At its most recent meeting, the group eerily echoed the Reid-Pelosi "squeezed for time" mantra: Retreat from any attempt to end the war and focus on electing Democrats. "There was a lot of agreement that we can draw distinctions between anti-war Democrats and pro-war Republicans," a spokeswoman for Americans Against the Escalation in Iraq announced.

What the Post and the Times failed to note is that much of the anti-war group's leadership hails from a consulting firm called Hildebrand Tewes — whose partners, Steve Hildebrand and Paul Tewes, served as staffers for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). In addition, these anti-war leaders continue to consult for many of the same U.S. senators whom they need to pressure in order to end the war. This is the kind of conflict of interest that would normally be an embarrassment in the activist community.

Worst of all is the case of Woodhouse, who came to Hildebrand Tewes after years of working as the chief mouthpiece for the DSCC, where he campaigned actively to re-elect Democratic senators who supported the Iraq War in the first place. Anyone bothering to look — and clearly the Post and the Times did not before penning their ardent bios of Woodhouse — would have found the youthful idealist bragging to newspapers before the Iraq invasion about the pro-war credentials of North Carolina candidate Erskine Bowles. "No one has been stronger in this race in supporting President Bush in the War on Terror and his efforts to effect a regime change in Iraq," boasted the future "anti-war" activist Woodhouse.

With guys like this in charge of the anti-war movement, much of what has passed for peace activism in the past year was little more than a thinly veiled scheme to use popular discontent over the war to unseat vulnerable Republicans up for re-election in 2008. David Sirota, a former congressional staffer whose new book, The Uprising, excoriates the Democrats for their failure to end the war, expresses disgust at the strategy of targeting only Republicans. "The whole idea is based on this insane fiction that there is no such thing as a pro-war Democrat," he says. "Their strategy allows Democrats to take credit for being against the war without doing anything to stop it. It's crazy."

Justin Raimondo, the uncompromising editorial director of Antiwar.com, regrets contributing twenty dollars to Americans Against the Escalation in Iraq. "Not only did they use it to target Republicans," he says, "they went after the ones who were on the fence about Iraq." The most notorious case involved Lincoln Chafee, a moderate from Rhode Island who lost his Senate seat in 2006. Since then, Chafee has taken shots at Democrats like Reid, Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, all of whom campaigned against him despite having voted for the war themselves.

"Look, I understand partisan politics," says Chafee, who now concedes that voters were correct to punish him for his war vote. "I just find it amusing that those who helped get us into this mess now say we need to change the Senate — because we're in a mess."

The really tragic thing about the Democratic surrender on Iraq is that it's now all but guaranteed that the war will be off the table during the presidential campaign. Once again — it happened in 2002, 2004 and 2006 — the Democrats have essentially decided to rely on the voters to give them credit for being anti-war, despite the fact that, for all the noise they've made to the contrary, in the end they've done nothing but vote for war and cough up every dime they've been asked to give, every step of the way.

Even beyond the war, the Democrats have repeatedly gone limp-dick every time the Bush administration so much as raises its voice. Most recently, twelve Democrats crossed the aisle to grant immunity to phone companies who participated in Bush's notorious wiretapping program. Before that, Democrats caved in and confirmed Mike Mukasey as attorney general after he kept his middle finger extended and refused to condemn waterboarding as torture. Democrats fattened by Wall Street also got cold feet about upsetting the country's gazillionaires, refusing to close a tax loophole that rewarded hedge-fund managers with a tax rate less than half that paid by ordinary citizens.

But the war is where they showed their real mettle. Before the 2006 elections, Democrats told us we could expect more specifics on their war plans after Election Day. Nearly two years have passed since then, and now they are once again telling us to wait until after an election to see real action to stop the war. In the meantime, of course, we're to remember that they're the good guys, the Republicans are the real enemy, and, well, go Hillary! Semper fi! Yay, team!

How much of this bullshit are we going to take? How long are we supposed to give the Reids and Pelosis and Hillarys of the world credit for wanting, deep down in their moldy hearts, to do the right thing?

Look, f*** your hearts, OK? Just get it done. Because if you don't, sooner or later this con is going to run dry. It may not be in '08, but it'll be soon. Even Americans can't be fooled forever.

ZippyTheChimp

March 24th, 2008, 08:35 PM

The U.S. death toll in the Iraq War now stands at 4,000

Only 1/3 of Americans polled were aware the number is that high.

Number killed before Bush declared victory: 120

After: 3,880

Alonzo-ny

March 24th, 2008, 08:50 PM

The BBC reported this with more significance than any american agency it seems.

milleniumcab

March 24th, 2008, 11:45 PM

Also, close to million Iraqis lost their lives.. Bush brags about being a Christian.. If so, what happened to " THY SHALL NOT KILL "...

ZippyTheChimp

March 25th, 2008, 01:11 AM

It's not exactly like the Iraqis aren't killing each other - and with gusto.

lofter1

March 25th, 2008, 02:00 AM

The Big Dick (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SypeZjeOrY4) at Year 5 ...

lofter1

March 25th, 2008, 02:40 AM

Death Toll at 4,000
Six of the Fallen, in Words They Sent Home

NY TIMES (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/us/25dead.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all)
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ and ANDREW W. LEHREN
March 25, 2008

By the time Specialist Jerry Ryen King decided to write about his experiences in Iraq, the teenage paratrooper had more to share than most other soldiers.

In two operations to clear the outskirts of the village of Turki in the deadly Diyala Province, Specialist King and the rest of the Fifth Squadron faced days of firefights, grenade attacks and land mines. Well-trained insurgents had burrowed deep into muddy canals, a throwback to the trenches of World War I. As the fighting wore on, B-1 bombers and F-16s were called in to drop a series of powerful bombs.

Once the area was clear of insurgents, the squadron, part of the 82nd Airborne Division, uncovered hidden caches of weapons.

Two months later, Specialist King, a handsome former honors student and double-sport athlete from Georgia, sat down at his computer. In informal but powerful prose, he began a journal.

After 232 long, desolate, morose, but somewhat days of tranquility into deployment, I’ve decided that I should start writing some of the things I experienced here in Iraq. I have to say that the events that I have encountered here have changed my outlook on life ...

The most recent mission started out as a 24-36 hour air-assault sniper mission in a known al-Qaida stronghold just north of Baghdad. We landed a few hours before daybreak and as soon as I got off the helicopter my night vision broke, I was surrounded by the sound of artillery rounds, people screaming in Arabic, automatic weapons, and the terrain didn’t look anything like what we were briefed. I knew it was going to be a bad day and a half.

Jerry Ryen King, journal entry, March 7, 2007

A month later, Specialist King was sitting inside his combat outpost, an abandoned school in Sadah, when suicide bombers exploded two dump trucks just outside the building. The school partly collapsed, killing Specialist King on April 23, 2007, along with eight other soldiers, and making the blast one of the most lethal for Americans fighting in Iraq.

In that instant, Specialist King became one of 4,000 service members and Defense Department civilians to die in the Iraq war — a milestone that was reached late Sunday, five years since the war began in March 2003. The last four members of that group, like the majority of the most recent 1,000 to die, were killed by an improvised explosive device, known as an I.E.D. They died at 10 p.m. Sunday on a patrol in Baghdad, military officials said; their names have not yet been released.

The next day we cleared an area that made me feel as if I were in Vietnam. Honestly, it was one of the scariest times of my life. At one point I was in water up to my waist and heard an AK fire in my direction. But all in all the day was going pretty good, no one was hurt, I got to shoot a few rounds, toss a grenade, and we were walking to where the helicopter was supposed to pick us up.

Jerry Ryen King, journal entry, March 7, 2007

The year 2007 would prove to be especially hard on American service members; more of them died last year than in any other since the war began. Many of those deaths came in the midst of the 30,000-troop buildup known as “the surge,” the linchpin of President Bush’s strategy to tamp down widespread violence between Islamic Sunnis and Shiites, much of it in Baghdad. In April, May and June alone, 331 American service members died, making it the war’s deadliest three-month period.

But by fall, the strategy, bolstered by new alliances with Sunni tribal chiefs and a decision by the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr to order his militia to stop fighting, appeared to be paying off as the country entered a period of relative calm. Military casualties and Iraqi civilian deaths fell, and the October-December period produced the fewest casualties of any three months of the war. The past month, though, has seen an uptick in killings and explosions, particularly suicide bombings. The violence has traveled north to Mosul, where the group calling itself Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia remains strong.

Everything changed in a matter of 15 minutes... About the time I was opening my MRE (meal ready to eat) I heard an explosion. Everyone started running towards the sound of the explosion. Apparently a suicide bomber had blown himself up killing four soldiers from my squadron and injuring another. Our 36 hour mission turned into another air-assault into a totally different city, the clearing of it, and 5 more days. We did find over 100 RPG’s, IED making materials, insurgents implacing IED’s, artillery rounds, a sniper rifle, and sort of like a terrorist training book and cd’s.

Jerry Ryen King, journal entry, March 7, 2007

Unlike the soldiers of some previous wars, who were only occasionally able to send letters back home to loved ones, many of those who died left behind an extraordinary electronic testimony describing in detail the labor, the fears and the banality of serving in Iraq.

In excerpts published here from journals, blogs and e-mail, six soldiers who died in the most recent group of 1,000 mostly skim the alarming particulars of combat, a kindness shown their relatives and close friends. Instead, they plunge readily into the mundane, but no less important rhythms of home. They fire off comments about holiday celebrations, impending weddings, credit card bills, school antics and the creeping anxiety of family members who are coping with one deployment too many.

At other moments, the service members describe the humor of daily life down range, as they call it. Hurriedly, with little time to worry about spelling or grammar, they riff on the chaos around them and reveal moments of fear. As casualties climb and the violence intensifies, so does their urge to share their grief and foreboding.

A Last Goodbye

Hey beautiful well we were on blackout again, we lost yet some more soldiers. I cant wait to get out of this place and return to you where i belong. I dont know how much more of this place i can take. i try to be hard and brave for my guys but i dont know how long i can keep that up you know. its like everytime we go out, any little bump or sounds freaks me out. maybe im jus stressin is all. hopefully ill get over it ....

you know, you never think that anything is or can happen to you, at first you feel invincible, but then little by little things start to wear on you ...

well im sure well be able to save a couple of bucks if you stay with your mom .... and at the same time you can help her with some of the bills for the time being. it doesnt bother me. as long as you guys are content is all that matters. I love and miss you guys like crazy. I know i miss both of you too. at times id like to even just spend 1 minute out of this nightmare just to hold and kiss you guys to make it seem a little bit easier. im sure he will like whatever you get him for xmas, and i know that as he gets older he’ll understand how things work. well things here always seem to be ...... uhm whats the word ..... interesting i guess you can say. you never know whats gonna happen and thats the worst part. do me a favor though, when you go to my sisters or moms or wherever you see my family let them know that i love them very much..ok? well i better get going, i have a lot of stuff to do. but hopefully ill get to hear from you pretty soon.*muah* and hugs. tell mijo im proud of him too!

love always,
your other half

Juan Campos, e-mail message to his wife,
Dec. 12, 2006

When Staff Sgt. Juan Campos, 27, flew from Baghdad to Texas for two weeks last year, there was more on his mind than rest and relaxation. He visited his father’s grave, which he had never seen. He spent time with his grandparents and touched base with the rest of his rambling, extended family.

The day he was scheduled to return to war, Sergeant Campos and his wife went out dancing and drinking all evening with friends. Calm and reserved by nature, Sergeant Campos could out-salsa and out-hip-hop most anyone on the dance floor. At the airport, his wife, Jamie Campos, who had grown used to the upheaval of deployment, surprised herself.

“I cried and I have never ever cried before,” said Mrs. Campos, 26, who has a 9-year-old son, Andre. “It was just really, really weird. He knew, and I kind of knew. It felt different.”

“We both felt that it was the last goodbye,” she said.

Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2006
Mood: gloomy

The life of an infantryman is never safe..how do I know, well I live it every day.

I lost a good friend of mine just two days ago to an enemy sniper. The worst feeling in the world is having lost one of your own and not being able to fight back. The more I go on patrol, the more alert I tend to be, but regardless of the situation here in Iraq is that we are never safe. No matter the countermeasures we take to prevent any attacks. They seem to seep through the cracks. Every day a soldier is lost or wounded by enemy attacks. I for one would like to make it home to my family one day. Pray for us and keep us in your thoughts...for an infantryman’s life is never safe.

Juan Campos, Myspace blog

Sergeant Campos, a member of the First Battalion, 26th Infantry, Charlie Company out of Germany, was one of thousands of infantrymen assigned to stabilize Baghdad and the surrounding areas last year during the troop buildup. Troops were sent deep into insurgent neighborhoods, where they lived in small outposts, patrolled on foot, cleared houses, mingled with Iraqis and rebuilt the infrastructure.

The extra 30,000 service members — 160,000 in all — were deployed to Iraq to help quell the runaway violence that threatened large-scale civil war. Most soldiers spent 15 months in Iraq, a length of time that military commanders have said is unsustainable. Many had fought in the war at least once. A few had been in Iraq multiple times.

My only goals are to make it out of this place alive and return you guys and make you as happy as I can.

Juan Campos, e-mail message to his wife
Dec. 15, 2006

But to Sergeant Campos and the rest of Charlie Company in Adhamiya, a north Baghdad stronghold for Sunni insurgents, the buildup seemed oddly invisible. The men patrolled almost every day, sometimes 16 to 18 hours a day for months, often in 120-degree weather. Exhaustion was too kind a word for their fatigue.

More than 150 soldiers lived in a two-story house with portable toilets, no air-conditioning and temperamental showers. Sleep came only a few hours at a time. The fighting was vicious. Adhamiya was such a magnet for sectarian bloodletting that the military built a wall around it to contain the violence.

“They walled us in and left us there,” Staff Sgt. Robin Johnson, 28, said of the 110 men in Charlie Company. “We were a family. I would die for these guys before I die for my own blood brother.”

On patrol, sniper fire rang out so routinely that soldiers in Sergeant Campos’s platoon seldom stood still for more than four seconds. They scoured rooftops for Iraqi children who lobbed grenades at American soldiers for a handful of cash. Roadside bombs burst from inside drainage pipes, impossible to detect from the street. The bombs grew larger by the month.

Last year, these powerful improvised explosive devices were responsible for a majority of American fatalities, a new milestone. The bombs also killed multiple soldiers more often than in the past, a testament to their potency.

“It was the most horrible thing you could possibly imagine,” Sergeant Johnson said. “As soon as you left the gate, you could die at any second. If you went out for a day and you weren’t attacked, it was confusing.”

Charlie Company soldiers found a steady stream of Iraqis killed by insurgents for money or revenge. Some had their faces wiped clean by acid. Others were missing their heads or limbs.

‘It Could Have Been Me’

to tell the story of iraq is a hard one.

Ryan Wood, Myspace blog

Sgt. Ryan M. Wood, 22, a gifted artist, prolific writer and a sly romantic from Oklahoma, was also one of the bluntest soldiers inside Charlie Company.

it is fighting extreme boredom with the lingering thought in the forefront of your mind that any minute on this patrol could be my last endeavour, only highlighted by times of such extreme terror and an adrenaline rush that no drug can touch. what [expletive] circumstances thinking “that should’ve been me” or “it could’ve been me”. wondering it that pile of trash will suddenly explode killing you or worse one of your beloved comrads..only backed by the past thoughts and experiences of really losing friends of yours and not feeling completely hopeless that it was all for nothing because all in all, you know the final outcome of this war. it is walking on that thin line between sanity and insanity. that feeling of total abandonment by a government and a country you used to love because politics are fighting this war......and its a losing battle....and we’re the ones ultimently paying the price.

Ryan Wood, Myspace blog, Adhamiya

For the soldiers in Iraq, reconciling Adhamiya with America was not always easy. One place was buried in garbage and gore and hopelessness. The other seemed unmoored from the war, fixated on the minutia of daily life and the hiccups of the famous. The media was content to indulge.

What the Hell America??

“What the hell happened?” any intelligent American might ask themselves throughout their day. While the ignorant, dragging themselves to thier closed off cubicle, contemplate the simple things in life such as “fast food tonight?” or “I wonder what motivated Brittany Spears to shave her unsightly, mishaped domepiece?”

To the simpleton, this news might appear “devastating.” I assume not everyone thinks this way, but from my little corner of the earth, Iraq, a spot in the world a majority of Americans could’nt point out on the map, it certainly appears so. ... To all Americans I have but one phrase that helps me throughout my day of constant dangers and ever present death around the corner, “WHO THE [expletive] CARES!” Wow America, we have truly become a nation of self-absorbed retards. ... This world has serious problems and it’s time for America to start addressing them.

Ryan Wood, Myspace blog, May 26, 2007

The somberness of the job was hard to shake off. But, day to day, there was no more reliable antidote than Pfc. Daniel J. Agami, a South Floridian with biceps the size of cantaloupes, and Pfc. Ryan J. Hill, a self-described hellion who loved his “momma” and hailed from what he called the “felony flats” of Oregon. Funny men in the best sense of the word, the two provided a valuable and essential commodity in a war zone.

Their mother jokes — the kind that begin, “your mother is so...” — were legendary, culminating in a Myspace joke-off. It ended abruptly after an enough-is-enough phone call from Private Hill’s mother, who ranked No. 1 on his list of heroes in Myspace. Private Agami proclaimed victory.

About a month later...I went to my room and my mattress was missing and all my close were being worn by other people. I couldn’t figure it out so I knew right off the bat to go to Hill. I saw him walking down the hall wearing five of my winter jackets. He sold half my wardrobe right off his back to people in our company and my mattress was in someone else’s room. So then I had go to around and buy all my stuff back. (Now I think he won).

Daniel J. Agami, Charlie Company. Eulogy sent via e-mail message to his mother, Jan. 29, 2007

To keep their spirits up, combat soldiers learned to appreciate the incongruities of war in Iraq. Jokes scrawled inside a Port-o-Potty quickly made the rounds. Situational humor, from goofy to macabre, proved plentiful.

A really girly guy who was a cheerleader in high school, got knocked down and nearly hurt by the wind of the helicopter. Listening to Dickson recite what was in every single MRE was pretty funny. A cow charged and nearly trampled one of my friends when we were raiding a compound. And lastly, I thought that it was pretty comical that I shot at a guy a long ways out but missed and later after taking his house and using it as a patrol base he offered me Chai and rice.

Jerry Ryen King, Diyala Province

Even a trip to the dentist, with its fringe benefits, is cause for amusement in a war zone.

Last Sat. I had two of my wisdom teeth pulled. After taking double the prescribe percocot and morphine pills that the doctor gave me for the pain I decided to catch a flight back to my FOB (forward operation base). It was the coolest Blackhawk ride I’ve had, I was absolutely ripped and I talked the pilots into leaving the doors open. We had four more guys die a couple days ago. They hit an IED, it killed everyone in the humvee.. It’s starting to get a little scary. We made it our first six months with just two deaths and that was plenty. But now just in the past two and a half weeks we’ve had nine more guys get killed, and over 50 wounded. I’m just hoping that I can make it the 75 more days or so that we have left of combat operations before we start packing.

Jerry Ryen King, journal entry, April 11, 2007

Among the guys in Charlie Company, Private Agami, 25, was one of the boldest and most resilient. He was the kind of guy who joined an endurance ski contest on a whim. He came in fourth. He had never skied in his life.

Private Agami had time for everyone, and everyone had time for him. Affectionately called G.I. Jew, he held his religion up to the light. He used it to build tolerance among the troops and shatter stereotypes; few in his unit had ever met a Jew. He flew the Israeli flag over his cot in Adhamiya. He painted the words Hebrew Hammer onto his rifle. He even managed to keep kosher, a feat that required a steady diet of protein shakes and cereal.

Commander Mom, I cant wait to come home and when I do, dont worry ill have allot to say to the congregation. Dont worry about my mental stage either, we all receive counseling and help from doctors when something like this happens. I am a strong individual physically and mentally and if there is one thing the army teaches you, it is how to deal with death. Everyday that passes it gets easier and easier. I miss you guys very much and I love you!

Daniel Agami, e-mail message to his mother,
Oct. 28, 2006

It did not get easier.

I try not to cry. I have never cried this much my entire life. two great men got taken from us way too soon. i wonder why it was them in not me. I sit here right now wondering why did they go to the gates of heaven n not me. I try everynight count my blessing that I made it another day but why are we in this hell over here? why? i cant stop askin why?

Ryan Hill, Myspace blog, Nov. 1, 2006.

Private Hill was riding in a Humvee on Jan. 20, 2007, when an I.E.D. buried in the middle of the road detonated under his seat, killing him instantly.

Sergeant Campos was riding in a Humvee on May 14, 2007, two weeks after returning from Texas, when it hit an I.E.D. The bomb lifted the Humvee five feet off the ground and engulfed it in flames. “That’s when we just left hope at the door,” Sergeant Johnson said. Severely burned over 80 percent of his body, Sergeant Campos lived two weeks. He died June 1. Another soldier, Pfc. Nicholas S. Hartge, 20, of Indiana, died in the same attack.

Private Agami was driving a Bradley fighting vehicle on June 21, 2007, when it hit an I.E.D. The explosion flipped the 30-ton vehicle, which also carried Sergeant Wood. Both men were killed, along with three other soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter.

“Obviously, it came to a point, you didn’t care anymore if it got better,” said Staff Sgt. Jeremy S. Rausch, 31, one of Sergeant Campos’s best friends in Charlie Company. “You didn’t care about the people because they didn’t care about themselves. We had already lost enough people that we just thought, you know, ‘why?’ ”

During their time in Adhamiya, the soldiers of Charlie Company caught more than two dozen high-value targets, found nearly 50 weapons caches, detained innumerable insurgents and won countless combat awards. They lost 14 men. Their mission was hailed a success.

Just in Case

Texan to the core, enamored of the military, Specialist Daniel E. Gomez, 21, an Army combat medic in the division’s Alpha Company, relied on his books, his iPod and an Xbox to distract him from the swirl.

strange but this place where we are at is unreal almost. I hope I come back mentally in shape. lol.

Daniel Gomez, Myspace blog, Sept. 9, 2006

He took pride in being the guy who tended to wounded soldiers under fire, patching them up to help them survive.

As the violence intensified, Specialist Gomez set aside thoughts of a free Iraq or a safer America and, like generations of soldiers before him, simply started fighting for the soldier next to him.

A few days ago I realized why I am here in Baghdad dealing with all the gunfire, the rocket attacks, the IEDs, the car bombs, the death. I have only been here going on a month and a half. Already I have seen what war really is... but officially its called “full spectrum operations.” No I don’t down Bush, he is my CinC, and I think he is doing an good job with what Clinton left him. I don’t debate why we are involved in Iraq. I just know why I am here. It is not for the smiling Iraqi kids, or the even the feeling of wearing the uniform ( it feels damn good though :) . I am here for the soldier on patrol with me.
But why are you there in the states. Why are you having that nice dinner, watching TV, going out on dates...

Daniel Gomez, e-mail to friends and family.
Sept. 27, 2006

And then Specialist Gomez fell in love. An e-mail flirtation with Katy Broom, his sister’s close friend, gradually led to a cyberexchange of guarded promises about the future. Headed home for a rest break in May, the tentativeness lifted and they began to rely on each other to get through the day. The two joked about “the best sex we never had.”

...this R&R there is someone new in my life. Exactly what she is too me, and what I am to her is uncertain, but its not really important at the moment. Just the thought that I could spent a second of my life with her, before I have to come back here makes everything worth it.

Daniel Gomez, Myspace blog, May 9, 2007

Rest and relaxation in Georgia went better than expected. He fell in love with the love of his life all over again, this time in person. The couple shared one kiss during his leave.

“He was everything I expected and more,” said Ms. Broom, 20, who spent one week and two days with him. “It was kind of surreal when we met. It’s almost like a perfect love and war story.”

Not many soldiers leave behind a just-in-case letter. Specialist Gomez did. He handed Ms. Broom an envelope at the airport with the words, “Don’t read unless something happens to me.”

On July 18, 2007, two months after his leave, Specialist Gomez died in Adhamiya when the Bradley fighting vehicle he was in struck a roadside bomb. The explosion and flames also killed three other soldiers.

Ms. Broom waited three days after she got word to open the letter. She sat alone in the couple’s favorite spot, her apartment balcony.

“I was very thankful that he wrote it,” she said of the letter. “I have opened and closed it so many times, I’m surprised it hasn’t fallen apart.”

R+R 2007

Hey baby. If you’re reading this, then something has happen to me and I am sorry. I promised you I would come back to you, but I guess it was a promise I could not keep. You know I never believe in writing “death letters.” I knew if I left one for my folks it would scare them. Then I met you. We were supposed to meet, darling. I needed someone to make me smile, someone that was an old romantic like I was. I was going through a very rough time in Iraq and I was startin to doubt my mental state. Then one day after a patrol, I go to my facebook and there you were...

I can’t stop crying while I writing this letter, but I have to talk to you one last time, because maybe the last time I heard your voice I did not know it would be the last time I heard your voice....

I Love You. Go be happy, go raise a family. Teach your kids right from wrong, and have faith, darling. I think I knew I loved you even before I met. I love you, Katy. * Kiss * Goodbye

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

JCMAN320

March 28th, 2008, 06:26 AM

^^^This war is more than the one can bare. I have several friends in the war one was injured by a roadside bomb and survived. The others have survived so far thank God. Reading that article tore at my hear and I fought back tears that entire time and the last letter by Specialist Gomez to his new love, just killed me, I just started crying so much that I couldn't control it.

To think that chance beautiful meeting between these two people who are in my age group, just makes me cry so hard. It's great that they had that short time together, but it just kills me that they never got to share their lives together, it is just so cruel. The atrocity of this war is too terrible to relate. It pains me so to see young lives cut short because of an agenda by a man of little stature and mental capcity that is our president.

I just don't know how much more of this our nation and us, the individual citizens of this once proud nation, can continue to bare without some kind of revolt. Have we become so apathic and slothly to just really not act or make any sort of statement? You would think that with all the connectivity and information that this Internet brings us, that we could stage a masive protest on D.C. with relative ease. I understand that the 60s were the 60s and nothing can touch that period of social upheavel and civil change, but it still pains me too see how lazy my generation has become and so self-absorbed at that.

The music of a generation has always reflected it's times and acted as a window into the events of that time. My generations music hardly relfects the war. With rock and country groups you see it the most and some jazz and r&b; but rap, pop, hip-hop just relfects how much money once can make or much liquor they can drink or how much women they can have and get drunk to have sex with them. Most of those songs are about sex, money, power, respect, drinking, and the like. The prioritys of my generation just to be seem completely out of whack and distant from the problems at hand that it makes me wonder if my generation has any sense at all to it's own future and even worse it's own present.

I hope and strive for a brighter future and protest the war, but I just feel that I am speaking and shouting till my voice breaks and my legs give out from under me with no result or resolve. We really have to make a smart choice with our next president and it cannot be based on race, popularity, rock star appeal, relgion, etc.., no it must be based on who is beat qualified to lead this nation and put an end to this atrocity known as the "War On Terrorism" and a lesser known war on the American people and it'd values and ideals.

OmegaNYC

March 28th, 2008, 03:37 PM

^^^ This is why this election is so important this year. We need to elect someone who has a clear, cut idea of how to either minimize, or pull the US military out of this mess in a timely and most importantly, well thought out and planned way. Rather than focus on what a certain canidate's preacher said about this country more than 6 years ago; rather then focus on what a canidate's middle name is, or even focus wheather or not one canidate has more "experience" over another, we need to elect the right person who is best suit for this job. We don't need the US, to become bogged down in this war for "100 years".

Ninjahedge

March 28th, 2008, 04:10 PM

OmegaNYC

March 28th, 2008, 04:12 PM

How did you know? ^^ :cool:

ZippyTheChimp

March 29th, 2008, 12:44 AM

Analysis: Iraqis' Basra fight not going well

From Barbara Starr
CNN Pentagon Correspondent

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Iraqi military push into the southern city of Basra is not going as well as American officials had hoped, despite President Bush's high praise for the operation, several U.S. officials said Friday.

A closely held U.S. military intelligence analysis of the fighting in Basra shows that Iraqi security forces control less than a quarter of the city, according to officials in both the United States and Iraq, and Basra's police units are deeply infiltrated by members of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army.

"This is going to go on for a while," one U.S. military official said.

Iraqi forces launched their offensive in Basra this week. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was personally overseeing operations in the southern city against what government officials called "rogue" or "outlaw" militia elements, most loyal to al-Sadr.

During a joint news conference Friday with Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, Bush called the operation "a defining moment in the history of a free Iraq," saying the government is fighting criminals there.

"It was just a matter of time before the government was going to have to deal with it," he said.

The president also hailed the operation as a sign of progress, emphasizing that the decision to mount the offensive was al-Maliki's.

"It was his military planning; it was his causing the troops to go from point A to point B," Bush said. "And it's exactly what a lot of folks here in America were wondering whether or not Iraq would even be able to do it in the first place. And it's happening."

But since the beginning of the government offensive four days ago, violence also has picked up in a wide area of southern Iraq, including in Baghdad's International Zone -- also known as the Green Zone -- which has been targeted by rocket and mortar attacks.

Coalition bombers have joined in the fight, hitting targets in Basra and Baghdad.

The Basra analysis also shows that militia forces control a wide swath of cities in Iraq's southeast, including areas near the airport, where British forces are located, the officials said.

More than 100 Iraqis have been killed in the fighting, including at least 14 in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood.

The fighting has sparked fears that a seven-month cease-fire by al-Sadr's Mehdi Army, regarded as a key factor in a dramatic drop in attacks in recent months, could collapse or that the U.S. military will have to bail out the Iraqis.

On Thursday, the Interior Ministry imposed a curfew through the weekend in Baghdad, Hilla, Kut, Diwaniya, Simawa and Basra. VideoWatch more on the curfew »

Officials banned pedestrian, motorcycle and vehicular traffic through 5 a.m. Sunday (10 p.m. ET Saturday).

Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/03/28/bush.basra

© 2008 Cable News Network

Are you writing all this down, Mr McCain?

Zephyr

March 29th, 2008, 05:47 AM

I doubt if worsening conditions surrounding the War in Iraq will diminish any of the rhetoric that has come out of the Republican Party's current leaders. With all that hugging and fawning going on between Senator John McCain and President George W. Bush (see below), methinks the torch has been passed, regarding both their support of the "rightness" of this war, as well as a commitment to a long-term presence beyond their lifetime.

Meanwhile, we see the massive amounts of monies being shelled out, expanding number of coffins, and lines of permanently maimed troops coming back from a war that was rationalised on false intelligence about vast inventories of WMDs. Senator McCain and President Bush continue to blur Afghanistan with Iraq, in order to continue this pointless endeavour. At minimum, the trickle down of this war has been the alienation of long-time allies, and a decided drag on a very sick domestic economy, certainly a major contributor to the devaluation of American money, but the real price may be greater than even that.

These are cynical tidings of a bankrupt foreign policy that will continue if Senator McCain becomes President McCain. As far as the War in Iraq is concerned, this would be tantamount to President Bush being replaced by President "McBush" - a terrifying thought indeed!

http://img100.imageshack.us/img100/473/bushmccainxt1.jpg
maruthecrankpot.blogspot.com

lofter1

March 29th, 2008, 11:00 AM

Over the past few days the idiots Bush & McCain continue to go on and on about the improvements & successes in Iraq, but meanwhile news to the contrary seems endless ...

UK admits rights breaches in Iraq (http://www.hindu.com/2008/03/29/stories/2008032961411400.htm)

Iraq: New Clashes in the South (http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iZLmefvzjenv5A6TsqDW2ZO06ONQD8VMAHTG0)

Iraq violence puts pull-out of 1500 UK troops in doubt (http://www.google.com/url?q=http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/latestnews/Iraq-violence-puts-pullout-of.3927197.jp&sa=X&oi=news_result&resnum=1&ct=result&cd=1&usg=AFQjCNGmRgPAR7SBK7b-sF9JO9rH7UBazA)

Iraqi Spokesman Kidnapped in Baghdad (http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jWsbzTsUVu564J475BvWiRhZPQcQD8VLQIMG1)

Austrian kidnapped in Iraq found dead: foreign minister (http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iAfe30xwd5mEkoCdQmTN3c91GDmg)

US Military Deaths in Iraq at 4005 (http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gqgQCcv26kB1dkgZRZNHmbn_1J8gD8VMOODG0)

milleniumcab

March 29th, 2008, 11:14 AM

I have a feeling, this is only the beginning........

lofter1

March 29th, 2008, 11:19 AM

Is it not inevitable that at some point Iraq will devolve into a full scale Civil War over the control of the oil industry?

It appears that as soon as occupying troop numbers fall much below the current levels (140,000 ?) the locals and their supporters will move to seize power.

It is a fools errand to try to maintain any sense of control by "western" governments / corporations without maintaining existing or similar troop numbers / war expenditures.

This ^ is the path we are on -- and the one supported by McCain. Yet such a track will bankrupt our country.

Is this the price we pay for turning a blind eye to our BS energy policy for the past 35+ years?

ZippyTheChimp

May 1st, 2008, 03:13 PM

May 01, 2003, aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.

http://blogs.usatoday.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/05/01/q1x00002_9.jpg

Iraq five years after 'Mission Accomplished'

J. Scott Applewhite of the Associated Press took this photo of President Bush after he declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq on May 1, 2003.

The White House used a banner that said "Mission Accomplished" as a backdrop on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.

"President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said 'mission accomplished' for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission,” White House spokesman Dana Perino told reporters yesteday. “And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner.[talk about spin] And I recognize that the media is going to play this up again tomorrow, as they do every single year."

Officials say White House aides created the banner at the Navy's request. "The banner was a Navy idea, the ship's idea," Navy Cmdr. Conrad Chun told CNN. "The banner signified the successful completion of the ship's deployment."

Here's how things have changed since Bush spoke off the coast of California:

DEATHS: There have been 4,064 U.S. military casualties in Iraq, according to the Pentagon. About 96% have occurred since May 1, 2003, a period that the government describes as "Post Combat Ops."

It's hard to find reliable numbers when it comes to the civilian death toll. Iraq Body Count, an online group that tracks casualties, says it has documented between 83,221 and 90,782 civilian deaths from violence in Iraq.

INJURIES: The Defense Department says nearly 30,000 troops have been wounded in action. About 96% of these men and women were injured after the period officials describe as "combat operations."

About 13,000 of the wounded were unable to return to duty within three days.

HUMANITARIAN UPHEAVAL: Earlier this week, the United Nations cited the following figures in a report on displaced Iraqis: A total of 4.7 million Iraqis have been uprooted as a result of the crisis in Iraq. Of these, more than 2 million are living as refugees in neighboring countries – mostly Syria and Jordan – while 2.7 million are displaced inside Iraq.

PUBLIC OPINION: In July 2003, 27% of Americans thought the invasion was a mistake, according to Gallup. In February 2008, 59% of respondents told pollsters that "the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq."

TROOP LEVELS: The size of the U.S. military presence has grown since 2003. The United States had 148,000 troops in Iraq after the fall of Baghdad. About 160,000 servicemen and women are now said to be serving in that country.

INTERNATIONAL COMMITMENT: In March 2003, the White House said 49 countries were "publicly committed to the coalition." In May 2007, the Multi-National Force in Iraq identified 25 countries as "partners in the Coalition."

COVERAGE: News organizations have been devoting less time and space to the conflict in Iraq, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism. The Committee to Protect Journalists says more than 100 reporters and photographers have been killed since 2003.

Posted by Mike Carney at 12:22 PM/ET, May 01, 2008 in Iraq

Copyright 2008 USA TODAY

On March 18th 2008, the USS Abraham Lincoln was redeployed to the Persian Gulf. If Clinton becomes the next president, the ship will come in handy should it become necessary to "obliterate" Iran.

Ninjahedge

May 1st, 2008, 05:17 PM

We have reached the finger pointing stage.

"It was not our intension to do this, our banner should have read: 'Mission Accomplished for the Crew of This Ship and the Tasks it was Sent Out To Do!' But we just could not find a bridge that was big enough!"

The navy made us say it.

Company! Applaud!

BrooklynRider

July 6th, 2008, 01:36 AM

FLASHBACK: Ten Years Ago, Bin Laden Demanded Barrel Of Oil Should Cost $144 (http://thinkprogress.org/2008/07/05/bin-laden-144-oil/)

Filed Under: Energy (http://thinkprogress.org/#)

By Faiz (http://thinkprogress.org/author/Faiz) on Jul 5th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
FLASHBACK: Ten Years Ago, Bin Laden Demanded Barrel Of Oil Should Cost $144 (http://thinkprogress.org/2008/07/05/bin-laden-144-oil/)

http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/obl1.jpgIn a 1998 interview, Osama bin Laden — the terrorist organizer of 9/11 who still roams free — listed as one of his many grievances against the U.S. that Americans “have stolen $36 trillion from Muslims” by purchasing oil from Persian Gulf countries at low prices. The real price of a barrel of oil should be $144 (http://www.plp.org/misc/exxonwtc100101.html), bin Laden demanded.
Ten years ago today, the price of a barrel of oil was just $11 (http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/wtotworldw.htm). Heading into this holiday weekend, the price of a barrel of oil rested at $144 (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12400801/) — a thirteen-fold increase.
One month after 9/11, the New York Times wrote of possible “nightmare” scenarios (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9401E2DC123FF937A25753C1A9679C8B 63) that would deliver bin Laden’s goal. Neela Banerjee warned that among the “misguided decisions” that would put oil supplies at risk would be “that the United States attacks Iraq (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9401E2DC123FF937A25753C1A9679C8B 63).” The Times included this quote in its story:
“If bin Laden takes over and becomes king of Saudi Arabia, he’d turn off the tap,” said Roger Diwan, a managing director of the Petroleum Finance Company, a consulting firm in Washington. “He said at one point that he wants oil to be $144 a barrel” — about six times what it sells for now.
Bin Laden didn’t have to become king of Saudi Arabia to achieve his goal; in fact, Bush’s policies delivered it for him. The Bush administration’s catastrophic decision to invade Iraq, sink the nation into debt to pay for that war, and consequently, weaken the dollar have all caused oil prices to soar (http://thinkprogress.org/wonkroom/2008/05/04/gas-magic-wand/) astronomically.

Testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee last May, Anne Korin, the co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, reminded Congress about bin Laden’s goal (http://foreignaffairs.house.gov/110/kor052208.htm):
[A]bout ten years ago, Osama bin Laden stated that his target price for oil is $144 a barrel and that the American people, who allegedly robbed the Muslim people of their oil, owe each Muslim man, woman, and child $30,000 in back payments. At the time, $144 a barrel seemed farfetched to most. […]

I would like to impress upon this Committee that $144 a barrel oil will be perceived as a victory for the Jihadist movement and a reaffirmation that the economic warfare component of its campaign against the West is a resounding success. There is no need to elaborate on the implications of such a victory in terms of loss of U.S. prestige and our ability to prevail in the Long War of the 21st century.
Indeed, ten years later, a mission accomplished for bin Laden.
(HT: Reddit user homeworld (http://www.reddit.com/user/homeworld/))

ZippyTheChimp

July 8th, 2008, 07:02 PM

We've been handed an exit strategy on a silver platter.

Iraqi Official Says Government Wants Timetable for Withdrawal

Statement Is Strongest Yet Regarding Negotiations Over U.S. Military Role

By Ernesto Londoño
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 8, 2008; 2:45 PM

BAGHDAD, July 8 -- Iraq's national security adviser said Tuesday that his government would not sign an agreement governing the future role of U.S. troops in Iraq unless it includes a timetable for their withdrawal.

The statement was the strongest yet by an Iraqi official regarding the politically controversial negotiations between Iraq and the United States over the U.S. military role in Iraq. A United Nations mandate that sanctions the presence of U.S. troops in the country expires in December.

Speaking to reporters in the holy Shiite city of Najaf, national security adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie declined to provide specific dates, but said his government is "impatiently waiting" for the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops.

"There should not be any permanent bases in Iraq unless these bases are under Iraqi control," Rubaie said. "We would not accept any memorandum of understanding with [the U.S.] side that has no obvious and specific dates for the foreign troops' withdrawal from Iraq."

On Monday Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki issued a statement saying his government was inclined to sign a memorandum of understanding with the United States that included a timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Rubaie spoke to reporters after briefing Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's top Shiite religious leader.

The Bush administration has long opposed a firm timetable for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, arguing that the American military should leave only when Iraq's security forces are capable of securing the country and that setting a pullout date would allow insurgents to lay low until after U.S. troops were gone.

A U.S. Embassy official, speaking on condition of anonymity, would not directly address Rubaie's comments. In an e-mail, the official said: "We all want to see security control handed over as quickly as possible and as conditions allow."

U.S. officials say the Iraqi army and police have made great strides in recent months. But the forces remain heavily dependent on the U.S. military, which has been providing training, air support and millions of dollars worth of weapons, vehicles and aircraft.

Shiite parliament member Ali al-Adeeb, a close Maliki ally, said the Iraqi government is proposing that the withdrawal of U.S. troops be linked to the handover of security responsibility for the provinces, the Associated Press reported.

Iraq has assumed primary responsibility for security in nine of Iraq's 18 provinces, but U.S. troops operate freely throughout the country.

Iraq is proposing that U.S. troops withdraw from all Iraqi cities once the United States has handed over responsibility for security in all provinces, Adeeb told the wire service.

© 2008 The Washington Post Company

PS. This somewhat undercuts McCain's campaign.

Jasonik

July 8th, 2008, 07:21 PM

This opportunity was foretold and analyzed here (http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?p=236910#post236910) in the Iraqi Self Rule thread.

NYC4Life

July 8th, 2008, 08:08 PM

Only if Obama gets elected president, will there be any timetable for a withdrawal.

Jasonik

July 8th, 2008, 08:32 PM

Not necessarily. 'McCain's surge' can be declared a winning strategy (in contrast to Obama's 'cut and run' preference for surrender).

Although U.S. commanders are cautious about predicting further withdrawals, interviews with military experts and recent official statements indicate growing optimism about the potential to pull out more forces.

"I believe the momentum we have is not reversible," said Jack Keane, a retired Army vice chief of staff who helped develop the Iraq strategy adopted by President Bush in January 2007.

There will be "significant reductions in 2009 whoever becomes president," said Keane, who regularly consults with Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki echoed Keane's optimism Saturday by declaring that "we defeated" the terrorists in Iraq. U.S. commanders remain cautious

Such encouraging reports could benefit both presidential candidates. Republican John McCain has been a major supporter of Bush's escalation of U.S. forces in Iraq. Democratic candidate Barack Obama said he wants to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq in 16 months, although he said any pullout would be determined by conditions there.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2008-07-06-surge_N.htm?csp=34

Jasonik

July 13th, 2008, 02:30 AM

Who Says Less Troops?

Michael Hirsh
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 1:21 PM ET Jul 12, 2008 (http://www.newsweek.com/id/145848)

Barack Obama is taking heat for hinting that he might refine his 16-month timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. But a forthcoming Pentagon-sponsored report will recommend an even steeper drawdown in less time, NEWSWEEK has learned. If adopted, the 300-page report by a defense analysis group at the Naval Postgraduate School (http://www.nps.edu/Aboutnps/NPSDistinctive/NPS%20COCOM-OSD%20Support.pdf) in Monterey, Calif., could transform the debate about Iraq in the presidential election.

Expected to be completed in about a month, it will recommend that U.S. forces be reduced to as few as 50,000 by the spring of 2009, down from about 150,000 now. The strategy is based on a major handoff to the increasingly successful Iraqi Army, with platoon-size U.S. detachments backing the Iraqis from small outposts, with air support. The large U.S. forward operating bases that house the bulk of U.S. troops would be mostly abandoned, and the role of Special Forces would increase.

The report's conclusions have been discussed inside Secretary Robert Gates's Defense Policy Board, a body of outside experts. And they've found favor with some former members of the Iraq Study Group, such as former White House chief of staff Leon Panetta. "That's basically the approach we thought made sense--embedding some of our forces at smaller outposts, transferring major combat to the Iraqis," says Panetta.

Like the Study Group, this report also calls for a regional diplomatic effort complementing negotiations with the Iraqi tribes, which echoes the previous recommendations of such analysts as John Arquilla, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. "Even with a small leavening of American troops the Iraqis perform quite well," he says.

The biggest problem: Iraq commander Gen. David Petraeus, who oversaw the surge, is said to oppose the recommendations, according to a Defense contractor who is privy to the discussions. Asked about the report, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told NEWSWEEK that Gates "feels the most important military advice he gets is from his commanders on the ground." As the next head of Central Command, Petraeus will soon have responsibility for Afghanistan and Pakistan too, which could change his views on troop deployments and the new report. Spokesman Col. Steve Boylan says Petraeus "is focused on Iraq at this point and will continue to be."

Zephyr

July 13th, 2008, 08:33 AM

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo153x23.gif

“I am there to listen, but there is no doubt that my core position, which is that we need a timetable for withdrawal, not only to relieve pressure on our military but also to deal with the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and to put more pressure on the Iraqi government, is now a position that is also held by the Iraqi government itself.”

Senator Barack Obama

July 13, 2008
Obama Picks Senators as Iraq Partners

By Jeff Zeleny

Taken from "The Caucus
The New York Times Politics Blog"

SAN DIEGO – When Senator Barack Obama travels to Iraq later this summer to get a firsthand look at conditions there, he said he would be accompanied by two colleagues who have “bipartisan wisdom when it comes to foreign policy.”

Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, and Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, will join Mr. Obama on his first trip to Iraq as a presidential candidate. All three senators share similar views — critical ones –- of the administration’s Iraq policy.

The details of Mr. Obama’s trip to Iraq are closely held, with aides citing security concerns, but Mr. Obama shared a few particulars as he spoke to reporters on Saturday evening aboard his campaign plane from Chicago to San Diego.

“Senator Hagel and Senator Reed may be coming with us. Look, they are both experts on foreign policy. They reflect, I think, a traditional bipartisan wisdom when it comes to foreign policy,” he said. “Neither of them are ideologues but try to get the facts right and make a determination about what’s best for U.S. interests -– and they’re good guys.”

The visit to Iraq and his findings from briefings with military commanders represent an important moment in Mr. Obama’s general-election candidacy. While he has said that he still supports the idea of removing American combat troops within 16 months, at a pace of one to two brigades a month, the conditions in the country also hold significant sway over his plan.

He said he was going to Iraq not to promote withdrawal but to gather facts.

“We have one president at a time, so I’m not going to be traveling to negotiate anything or make promises,” Mr. Obama said. “I am there to listen, but there is no doubt that my core position, which is that we need a timetable for withdrawal, not only to relieve pressure on our military but also to deal with the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and to put more pressure on the Iraqi government, is now a position that is also held by the Iraqi government itself.”

As the sun was setting across the horizon, Mr. Obama held a question-and-answer session with reporters during a portion of a four-hour flight. He addressed a variety of topics ...

So when he travels to Europe later this month, does he intend to deliver a speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin? The site has been the subject of much debate in Germany.

“We had been trying to coordinate with folks on the ground in terms of finding an appropriate site, but we didn’t have a particular site in mind,” Mr. Obama said. “I want to make sure that my message is heard as opposed to creating a controversy. Our goal is for me to lay out how I think about the next administration’s role in rebuilding a trans-Atlantic alliance. I don’t want the venue to be a distraction.” ...

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
(http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/obama-picks-senators-as-iraq-partners/)

zipburn

July 14th, 2008, 01:19 AM

milleniumcab

July 14th, 2008, 08:47 AM

The rise in the cost of oil is greatly contributed to the rise of the SUV in the USA
:confused:

Ninjahedge

July 14th, 2008, 02:35 PM

Zephyr

July 15th, 2008, 12:25 PM

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo153x23.gif

The Early Word: 2 Candidates, 2 Visions for Iraq

By Michael Falcone
The Caucus – NY Times Politics Blog

On opposite sides of the country today, the presumptive presidential nominees will once again sharpen their positions on how to manage the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan if elected.

At what his campaign is billing as a “major policy address,” Senator Barack Obama will say that the Bush administration’s “single-minded and open-ended focus on Iraq” has come at the expense of other foreign policy priorities, including stabilizing Afghanistan. Here are excerpts from his speech:

As President, I will pursue a tough, smart and principled national security strategy – one that recognizes that we have interests not just in Baghdad, but in Kandahar and Karachi, in Tokyo and London, in Beijing and Berlin. I will focus this strategy on five goals essential to making America safer: ending the war in Iraq responsibly; finishing the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban; securing all nuclear weapons and materials from terrorists and rogue states; achieving true energy security; and rebuilding our alliances to meet the challenges of the 21st century. …

It is unacceptable that almost seven years after nearly 3,000 Americans were killed on our soil, the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 are still at large. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahari are recording messages to their followers and plotting more terror. The Taliban controls parts of Afghanistan. Al Qaeda has an expanding base in Pakistan that is probably no farther from their old Afghan sanctuary than a train ride from Washington to Philadelphia. If another attack on our homeland comes, it will likely come from the same region where 9/11 was planned. And yet today, we have five times more troops in Iraq than Afghanistan.

Senator McCain said – just months ago – that "Afghanistan is not in trouble because of our diversion to Iraq." I could not disagree more. Our troops and our NATO allies are performing heroically in Afghanistan, but I have argued for years that we lack the resources to finish the job because of our commitment to Iraq. That’s what the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said earlier this month. And that’s why, as President, I will make the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban the top priority that it should be. This is a war that we have to win.

But Senator John McCain, who will speak to New Mexico voters at a town hall meeting in Albuquerque this morning plans to take a swipe at Mr. Obama, according to his prepared remarks:

Senator Obama is departing soon on a trip abroad that will include a fact-finding mission to Iraq and Afghanistan. And I note that he is speaking today about his plans for Iraq and Afghanistan before he has even left, before he has talked to General Petraeus, before he has seen the progress in Iraq, and before he has set foot in Afghanistan for the first time. In my experience, fact-finding missions usually work best the other way around: first you assess the facts on the ground, then you present a new strategy.

In his remarks, Mr. McCain was referring to Senator Obama’s planned trip to the Middle East. According to the Times’s John M. Broder and Isabel Kershner, his travels will not only take him to Iraq and Afghanistan, but also to the West Bank where he will meet with Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas:

Mr. Obama may have some fence-mending to do with Mr. Abbas, who reacted angrily to comments on the status of Jerusalem that Mr. Obama made last month at a conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby. Mr. Obama endorsed a two-state settlement for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but said Jerusalem should remain, undivided, the capital of the Jewish nation.

In Israel, Mr. Obama is expected to meet with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, President Shimon Peres, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and the head of the political opposition, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud Party leader.

...
Campaign Trail Roundup:

Senator Barack Obama delivers a speech on foreign policy at the International Trade Center in Washington.

Senator John McCain holds a town hall meeting in Albuquerque, N.M. and then travels to Missouri for a fund-raiser in Creve Coeur.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company (http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/the-early-word-2-candidates-2-visions-for-iraq/)

zipburn

July 16th, 2008, 01:50 AM

Zip-B, you are posting fluff that has no grounds.

Left wingers have not controlled anything for a long time, and you know it. Democrats supposedly control the house and senate, but calling them radical left wingers is just plain ignorant.

Green-communism? Why don't you just call them Nazis? Looking for another unfair appelation of a previously derogatory political movement to a policy trend you disagree with?

Also, what the hell are you talking about with the Yellowcake? The article says nothing about it here.

Also, when someone tells the truth or is right about something, 9 times out of 10 they are doing their job.

But when they cherry pick evidence to try to get what THEY want from things and outright lie on others, sure as hell people are going to be outraged by it.

Your post is more than a bit weird man....

Sorry I haven't posted much on this forum... and frankly I don't believe in fluff, I post facts. I just throw alot at once sometimes when I had a few to drink. But to make clear not one thing I said is evenly remotely close to fluff.

Sorry what the democrats used to be and what they are now are two different things. Ever since Al Gore lost who I supported it has morphed into an anti-american organization that makes base-less attacks against the president of the us. How low have these people gone? They call our own troops Nazis, they believe people making money is a bad thing, and they believe this country should have no borders. They believe taking away freedom of the indvidual and emulating Europe is somehow a good thing. And the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, made comments during President Bush's State of the Union address. That just shows how low this new breed has stooped, It's way beyond classless. What's funny is Bush never responds to these half-wit responses by this anti-american party. Yet when he tells the truth in a speech in Isreal its politicizing? I mean really when Harry Reid says Oil and Gas make people sick, do normal americans think that? When infact someday Harry "oil makes us sick" Reid will be seeping out of the Earth's Crust as OIL himself.

I know more about the climate then 99% of the people in the "green" movement. It's beyond hypocritical that they say going green but try to eliminate C02 which makes plants green. Every time it rains the co2 is dissolved and settles in to the earths crust. Why don't they go out after the Hyrdrogen Cell Technology? Which will increase the number one GREEN OUSE GAS Water Vapor 10 fold. This will raise the ocean. Not the Volcanos erupting under the ice of the pole. This ICE that covers the pole is already accounted for in the water level. Just like you can make a concrete boat, same principal. This movement is beyond radicalism. It is the enemy to a free productive society. Which we live in now and will cease to live in if this super FLAKE, barrack obama gets elected.

What happens if you don't treat an infection? You either lose that limb or lose your life. Iraq was an infection. At least the current present had the balls to do what was right!

milleniumcab

July 16th, 2008, 02:47 AM

this anti-american party.

Since when is it "anti-american" to question the integrity of the policies of our president?

zipburn

July 16th, 2008, 02:53 AM

Since when is it "anti-american" to question the integrity of the policies of our president?

?

Since when is it is American to call our troops Nazi's, oh wait during the vietnam war with John Kerry how could I have forgot. Your post made no sense considering I haven't posted one thing about questioning policies as anti-american. Social Services is anti-american you can try to get me on that but you will lose.

milleniumcab

July 16th, 2008, 03:02 AM

?

Since when is it is American to call our troops Nazi's, oh wait during the vietnam war with John Kerry how could I have forgot. Your post made no sense considering I haven't posted one thing about questioning policies as anti-american. Social Services is anti-american you can try to get me on that but you will lose. The last paragraph on your previous post says a lot. Iraq policy did not need a president with BALLS. It needed one with smarts..

zipburn

July 16th, 2008, 03:14 AM

The last paragraph on your previous post says a lot. Iraq policy did not need a president with BALLS. It needed one with smarts..

Smarts? like the Smarts Turkey used in the 11th hour by not letting US Troops cross their Iraqi border? Which let the saddam loyalists flee back to the less protected north?

Or Smarts like the 16 month timetable?

Or smarts like the typical anti-war crowd to call GWB a liar and criminal for using intelligence that every other nation in NATO also had?

SMARTS W/ THE NEW YORK TIMES = STUPID

RandySavage

July 16th, 2008, 03:15 AM

^ Post 822, zipburn, was one of the most asinine posts I've read here. I'd love to know the qualifications that make you more knowledgeable than 99% of people in the "green" movement. In reality, virtually everything you've written is obtuse, simple-minded or false. For example, you make the straw man concrete boat argument when the real concern is the Greenland ice cap (which lies over land). Also, MBTE, a petroleum additive, that seeps into groundwater, is a proven carcinogen. Get your facts straight. You're embarrassing yourself.

zipburn

July 16th, 2008, 03:21 AM

^ That, zipburn, was one of the most asinine posts I've read here. I'd love to know the qualifications that make you more knowledgeable than 99% of people in the "green" movement. In reality, virtually everything you've written is obtuse, simple-minded or false. For example, you make the straw man concrete boat argument when the real concern is the Greenland ice cap (which lies over land). Also, MBTE, a petroleum additive, that seeps into groundwater, is a proven carcinogen. Get your facts straight. You're embarrassing yourself.

Too BAD for your arguement that MTBE isn't used anymore but it was created because of enviornmentalists............ too BAD for your arguement that a recent report found that MAGMA (the stuff that comes out of volcanoes) was found to be flowing at our near the surface of Greenland just after they found a 10,000 year old tree stump that was uncovered under the permafrost........ really who is embarssing themselves with TALKING POINTS?!?!?

zipburn

July 16th, 2008, 03:31 AM

Wow meterologists don't know what causes a tornado to pop down from the clouds but a bunch of hippies, democrats, and RINOs know what makes "global warming" even though the planet has cooled. Oh wait its "climate change" now. Sorry for the mess up, don't want to upset the people that believe breathing is a bad thing.

zipburn

July 16th, 2008, 03:40 AM

Qualifications? Well considering im a few classes from being a meterologist(weatherman if you didn't learn that yet from your green-commie friends yet) It is my job to know the weather. It's funny I don't hear many "green" (ignorant) activists complaining about all the wildfires in CA, or the three major eruptions from dormant volcanos around the world. Which will produce more greenhouse gases then the entire world population for 10 years.

RandySavage

July 16th, 2008, 03:44 AM

Or smarts like the typical anti-war crowd to call GWB a liar and criminal for using intelligence that every other nation in NATO also had?

Do you think that GWB, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al invaded Iraq because (i) they believed Iraq possessed an in-progress nuclear weapons program and intended to pass them on to terrorist organizations that could use them against the United States, and (ii) the Administration believed Iraq had a connection to 9/11 and was a haven for Al Queda?

If you think that, then you, sir, were duped. Don't worry, you're not alone. Most Americans and any Congress members with integrity were also duped.

The administration went to Iraq in an attempt to (i) show Islamic countries that we mean business, (ii) begin a western-friendly regime-change domino affect in the Middle East, and (iii), at the very least, establish a permanent US military presence in the region to effect our political will, control the strategic oil resources and safeguard Israel.

It's become clear that the Administration didn't think enough Americans or congressmen would accept that as a good enough reason to invade Iraq, so they cooked up their bullshit about WMDs, uranium, Al Queda, chemical depots, etc.

The thing is, as an open-minded moderate, I may have accepted the real reasons for going to Iraq, if only the Administration had been upfront about them. What makes me furious is the lying, the made-up reasons, the rush to invade, the retaliation against Plame/Wilson, the inept planning and carrying-out of the occupation (the warring sects, the disbanding of the Iraqi army, etc.), the waning of focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan, the failure to apprehend bin Laden.

milleniumcab

July 16th, 2008, 03:50 AM

Smarts? like the Smarts Turkey used in the 11th hour by not letting US Troops cross their Iraqi border? Which let the saddam loyalists flee back to the less protected north? I thought we were in Iraq to spread Democracy in the region...LMAO...
Turkey, one of the few democracies( if not only) in the Muslim world, put the decision before her parliament. As much as we did not like it at the time, we should respect their decision and ask ourselves why did they vote the way they did.. By the way, Turkish parliament's NO decision did not affect much the outcome of today, it only delayed Bush's idiotic declaration of " Mission Accomplished", by about a week..

Or Smarts like the 16 month timetable?
It may not be 16 months but we can't stay there forever, like some would like to think..

Or smarts like the typical anti-war crowd to call GWB a liar and criminal for using intelligence that every other nation in NATO also had? Now, especially this statement, proves to me that you are in the same category as BUSH, big balls but no smarts..

zipburn

July 16th, 2008, 04:26 AM

the only real job of the government is to protect the american people...tell me how Bush has failed at that?

Fabrizio

July 16th, 2008, 09:26 AM

He has not protected Americans. What is the price of oil? How's the economy doing? How many Americans have been killed in this war? The country and it's people are ever more vulnerable.

The US has been lured into a war against primitives and is still there after 6 years with over 4,00 dead and who knows how many wounded. Yet some clowns with box-cutters can bring a world power to it's knees. The terrorists were smart. Not Bush.

Smart is weapons inspections, surveillance, spying, assasinations, coups etc. That's the stuff of big-boys.

My gosh after 6 years and the US doesn't even have cheap oil out of the deal? Smart?

But Iraqi's do now have the right to vote: I am sooooo happy for them.
---

As for global warming: let's pretend it exists and try to circumvent it. The benefits to the economy would be enormous.

Here are the GENIUS' at GM giving global warming the finger:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=bQvXNrit9ns

---

the only real job of the government is to protect the american people...

If FoxNews says it enough times, "the folks" will begin to believe it.

---

ZippyTheChimp

July 16th, 2008, 09:40 AM

the only real job of the government is to protect the american people...tell me how Bush has failed at that?Well, we're not all dead.

Yeah, I guess you're right.

Zephyr

July 16th, 2008, 09:51 AM

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo153x23.gif

July 15, 2008, 8:33 pm
Times/CBS Poll: Iraq Still a Dividing Line

By Dalia Sussman
The Caucus: NY Times Politics Blog

As Senators Barack Obama and John McCain stress their differing positions on how to deal with the war in Iraq, most Americans continue to say the United States should never have taken military action against Iraq even as they are increasingly likely to say the situation there is now going well.

In the latest poll by The New York Times/CBS News, 45 percent of Americans say efforts to bring order and stability to Iraq are going well, up 20 points from a year ago. Still, six in 10 of the poll’s respondents say the United States should have stayed out of Iraq.

The issue poses a challenge for Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, as he details his plan for how to deal with the war. Nearly 8 in 10 in the poll say he would generally continue George W. Bush’s policies in Iraq. That’s not an association that works to his advantage – recent polls have shown a broad majority disapproves of how Mr. Bush is handling the situation there.

As has long been the case, views of the war in Iraq divide sharply along partisan lines. Seven in 10 Republicans say taking military action was the right thing to do, while 8 in 10 Democrats and 6 in 10 independents say the United States should have stayed out.

Republicans are also far more apt to say the situation there is going well: Seventy-five percent say so, while just 25 percent of Democrats agree. Independents fall in-between, with 47 percent of them saying things are going well in Iraq.

The nationwide telephone poll was conducted from July 7-14 with 1,796 adults. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points. Complete poll results and article are now available.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company (http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/timescbs-poll-iraq-still-a-dividing-line/)

ZippyTheChimp

July 16th, 2008, 10:19 AM

Sorry I haven't posted much on this forum... and frankly I don't believe in fluff, I post facts. I just throw alot at once sometimes when I had a few to drink. But to make clear not one thing I said is evenly remotely close to fluff.

Infact Saddam Hussein was found to be responsible for the 1988 Pan Am flight that blew up just before it was scheduled to land in Honolulu, HI. Care to expand on this?
They are both in the pocket of the green-communism movement.I've been trying to do some research on the Green-Communists, but can't locate any information. Do they have a webpage?

What happens if you don't treat an infection? You either lose that limb or lose your life. Iraq was an infection.When I start talking like this, the bartender calls a cab for me.

Ninjahedge

July 16th, 2008, 11:18 AM

I just throw alot at once sometimes when I had a few to drink. But to make clear not one thing I said is evenly remotely close to fluff.

1. You should not try to do a debate while drunk.

2. I was being nice when I said "fluff". It is crap, pure and simple.

As zip so lightly put it, you seem to be going off the deep end with your appelations (such as generalizing the Dems calling people Nazis. No quotes, no references, just pulling Godwin's Law out of nowhere and giving it a new direction?)

You site Bush only using evidence available to NATO, but ignore the fallibility of teh provider of the information he decided to use, and teh rejection of any contrary information.

If you look hard enough on the net, you can probably find something to back up almost any argument or position. If you ignore the stuff that doesn't, that does not make your position correct. Same goes for the WMD case.

Inspectors found nothing, the yellowcake "evidence" was provided by questionable sources, satelite photos were never proven. All very speculatory.

So please stop spewing and try to get back OT.

When 4000 Americans have died, and we have spent billions of dollars with an existing deficit DURING A RECESSION and you ask questions like this:

the only real job of the government is to protect the american people...tell me how Bush has failed at that?

It just removes all credibility from your position.

milleniumcab

July 16th, 2008, 11:50 AM

the only real job of the government is to protect the american people...tell me how Bush has failed at that?Simple!.. The real threats, Al-qaeda and Taliban are on the surge in Afganistan while Saddam who was a brutal but nevertheless a stabilizing force in Iraq and the region is dead.. Now you tell me if we are safer.

History will say, this administration's War against Terror policy is one of the biggest foreign policy blunders of our Nation. We should have gone to Afganistan full force and cleaned up the mess there.. There lies the real threat to American people..

milleniumcab

July 16th, 2008, 11:57 AM

When I start talking like this, the bartender calls a cab for me.

Most likely, I never took you home Zippy. :) I try not to work that late. I like to take people to drinking not from drinking.;)

Ninjahedge

July 16th, 2008, 12:10 PM

But MC?

What could we export from Afghanistan that would help us finance the invasion and occupation?

Opium?

I agree that is where we should have gone, but I can see where short-sighted military/political strategists saw Iraq as a self-sustaining, easily "liberated" foothold in the middle east.

If it had gone as they planned, with no insurgent force to speak of and people that were happy to be rid of a dictatorial oppressive force, we would have had a cooperative nation with substantial resources on our side that might have even been able to help US finance our troops in the region, rather than vice-versa.

I think that Bush and Company really were looking at this seriously, but when 9-11 came, they saw a political window to open. They convinced congress to jam a plank in the window and then jumped through it as fast as they could.

Unfortunately, the fire escape was on another window.

The board in the window has been exposed for what it was, something with little substance that splintered easily when poked hard enough (and long enough) leaving pieces in the fingers of all who first questioned it, but never the less still breaking once the true weight of the situation was uncovered.

Unfortunately, closing that window does nothing for the person already through it.

The thing that annoys me more than the lies, and the blundering that went on with this whole debacle, is the continued unwillingness to EVER admit that they did anything wrong!

I would have had a LOT more respect if they had simply admitted their blunders, asked for forgiveness (even though not really wanting or waiting for it) and proceeded to look for a solution rather than a way to just cover it up as if questioning it questioned your Patriotism.

It divided a nation.

Poor politics that pits one party or demographic AGAINST another. Bush did that in 2004 and barely squeaked by with the aid of questionable "support" from "independent" bashers.

The whole thing stinks. It is the automated attendant on tech support that pretends to be a real person ("I am sorry, I will try and help you with that." "We will help you as soon as we can!").

The thing taht gets me now are the slant and bias in the polls.

I would like to see a bit more hair splitting. How many people still believes it is bad over there? Better is only a relative term. Better in what way? Better in deaths? Stability? Is it better than what it was before the war?

I certainly hope it will get there, but forcing western values, culture and political systems on a muslim/shia/etc zone is not a very bright idea.

And anyone who still thinks that we are being "protected" by our actions there really needs to open their eyes and realize that we were never the ones being threatened. Not in any way that has cost us more, in money, lives, and international credibility, than what we have done has.

zipburn

July 16th, 2008, 08:53 PM

Infact Saddam Hussein was found to be responsible for the 1988 Pan Am flight that blew up just before it was scheduled to land in Honolulu, HI.
Care to expand on this?

1988 was a big year for these and I got the date mixed up. On August 11, 1982 Mohammed Rashed planted a bomb on PanAm FLT 830 which exploded a few minutes before it landed in Honolulu. The bombing investigation linked the the bombing to Saddam Hussein. Rashed was charged and stood trial under the terms of the Montreal Convention in Athens, Greece.
Rashed and his accomplices were given a safe haven in Iraq in the early 1980s by Saddam Hussein’s regime. They launched multiple bombing operations out of Baghdad throughout Europe and, in this case, on the American-owned passenger airplane bound for the United States.

ZippyTheChimp

July 16th, 2008, 10:06 PM

1988 was a big year for these and I got the date mixed up. On August 11, 19821982? That's a lot more than getting dates mixed up. 1982 was two years after the start of the Iraq-Iran War, at which time the United States was supporting Iraq. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._support_for_Iraq_during_the_Iran-Iraq_war) In light of this support, don't you think the US could have gotten their hands on one terrorist if they wanted two.

You lifted the statement Rashed and his accomplices were given a safe haven in Iraq in the early 1980s by Saddam Hussein’s regime. They launched multiple bombing operations out of Baghdad throughout Europe and, in this case, on the American-owned passenger airplane bound for the United States.verbatim from a March 2006 DOJ document. (http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2006/March/06_crm_172.html) Nowhere in that document is your other statement:The bombing investigation linked the the bombing to Saddam Hussein.Where did you get this info from?

I must also take issue with this statement:
There is no difference between him and Osama Bin Laden in terms of terrorism.Saddam Hussein was a despotic dictator, but he was nothing like Bin Laden. Unlike the Islamist Bin Laden, Hussein was a secularist, who regarded religious fundamentalists as a big threat to his regime. In the 1980s, Iraq was the only Gulf nation not governed by the Sharia (Islamic law).

Why is this always missed by the Bushies?

zipburn

July 16th, 2008, 11:30 PM

The begining part is paraphrased from Aviation and Airport Securtiy, Terrorism and Safety concerns by Kathleen M. Sweet. Yes I copied and pasted from the DOJ, I did a quick google search to see if I could get more information. In terms of terrorism 1988 was a BIG year. The Lockerbie bombing is second only to 9/11.

And really who cares what kind of style Saddam used he was nothing more then a murdering criminal who should have been removed in the Gulf War. Apples and Oranges look and taste different but they are both fruit.

ZippyTheChimp

July 17th, 2008, 12:18 AM

The begining part is paraphrased from Aviation and Airport Securtiy, Terrorism and Safety concerns by Kathleen M. Sweet.So what's the link? We want to see the evidence.

And really who cares what kind of style Saddam used he was nothing more then a murdering criminal who should have been removed in the Gulf War.I thought we went into Iraq to stop terrorism, not arrest a criminal

Apples and Oranges look and taste different but they are both fruit.Another one of those too-drunk remarks, but may be of some use:

Al Queda is Apples; we wanted Apples. We found Oranges in Iraq. Somebody brought Apples to Iraq; now we have Apples in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. But we have no money to buy Apples.

milleniumcab

July 17th, 2008, 02:11 AM

But MC?

What could we export from Afghanistan that would help us finance the invasion and occupation?

Opium?

You are right NH, there is nothing of value to export from Afganistan besides opium. But we could have imported a Talabanless and Al Quedaless friend from the region. At the least, we could have weakend those fanatics to a point where it could have taken them tens of years to recover..At that point, it would have been up to us how fast they would recover... I would have liked to see that than go into Iraq..

bobbiesox

July 17th, 2008, 02:56 AM

(NEWS)

Bush Says Iraq Pullout Would Leave U.S. at Risk

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/sheryl_gay_stolberg/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
The New York Times

Maybe, but was the US at any real risk before "regime change" and the fall of Saddam? I think not!!
It's surprising what the lure of huge reserves of oil will do!
Yeah, so why aren't we "taking" their oil now that we really need it!? Splain that one!

Zephyr

July 17th, 2008, 07:23 AM

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo153x23.gif

In Iraq, Affection for Obama ... but His Proposal?

By SABRINA TAVERNISE and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
Published: July 17, 2008

BAGHDAD — A tough Iraqi general, a former special operations officer with a baritone voice and a barrel chest, melted into smiles when asked about Senator Barack Obama.

“Everyone in Iraq likes him,” said the general, Nassir al-Hiti. “I like him. He’s young. Very active. We would be very happy if he was elected president.”

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/07/17/world/iraq600.jpg
Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times

Nassir al-Hiti, an Iraqi general, said Iraqis “would be very happy”
to see Barack Obama elected president, but called Mr. Obama’s
withdrawal plan “very difficult.”

But mention Mr. Obama’s plan for withdrawing American soldiers, and the general stiffens.

“Very difficult,” he said, shaking his head. “Any army would love to work without any help, but let me be honest: for now, we don’t have that ability.”

Thus in a few brisk sentences, the general summed up the conflicting emotions about Mr. Obama in Iraq, the place outside America with perhaps the most riding on its relationship with him.

There was, as Mr. Obama prepared to visit here, excitement over a man who is the anti-Bush in almost every way: a Democrat who opposed a war that many Iraqis feel devastated their nation. And many in the political elite recognize that Mr. Obama shares their hope for a more rapid withdrawal of American forces from Iraq.

But his support for troop withdrawal cuts both ways, reflecting a deep internal quandary in Iraq: for many middle-class Iraqis, affection for Mr. Obama is tempered by worry that his proposal could lead to chaos in a nation already devastated by war. Many Iraqis also acknowledge that security gains in recent months were achieved partly by the buildup of American troops, which Mr. Obama opposed and his presumptive Republican opponent, Senator John McCain, supported.

“In no way do I favor the occupation of my country,” said Abu Ibrahim, a Western-educated businessman in Baghdad, “but there is a moral obligation on the Americans at this point.”

Like many Iraqis, Mr. Ibrahim sees Mr. Obama favorably, describing him as “much more humane than Bush or McCain.”

“He seems like a nice guy,” Mr. Ibrahim said. But he hoped that Mr. Obama’s statements about a relatively fast pullout were mere campaign talk.

“It’s a very big assumption that just because he wants to pull troops out, he’ll be able to do it,” he said. “The American strategy in the region requires troops to remain in Iraq for a long time.”

It is not certain exactly when Mr. Obama will arrive here or whom he will meet. Such official trips are always shrouded in secrecy for security reasons.

But as word spread of the impending visit — Mr. Obama’s first as the presumed Democratic nominee for president — there were fresh reminders of the country’s vulnerability. In the past two days, around 70 Iraqis were killed in suicide bomb attacks, despite recent gains in safety that Mr. Obama uses as one argument for withdrawal.

And despite those improvements, street interviews remain risky in Iraq. For this article, 18 people were interviewed about their opinions of Mr. Obama, in Baghdad, in the northern city of Mosul, in the holy Shiite city of Najaf, and in the Sunni suburb of Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad.

Even as some Iraqis disagreed about Mr. Obama’s stance on withdrawal, they expressed broad approval for him personally as an improvement over Mr. Bush, who remains unpopular among broad portions of Iraqi society five years after the war began. No one interviewed expressed a strong dislike for Mr. Obama.

Saad Sultan, an official in an Iraqi government ministry, contended that Mr. Obama could give a fresh start to relations between the Arab world and the United States. Mr. Obama has never practiced Islam; his father, whom he barely knew, was born Muslim, but became a nonbeliever. Mr. Sultan, however, like many Iraqis, feels instinctively close to the senator because he heard that he had Muslim roots.

“Every time I see Obama I say: ‘He’s close to us. Maybe he’ll see us in a different way,’ ” Mr. Sultan said. “I find Obama very close to my heart.”

Race is also a consideration. Muhammad Ahmed Kareem, 49, an engineer from Mosul, said he had high expectations of Mr. Obama because his experience as a black man in America might give him more empathy for others who feel oppressed by a powerful West. “Blacks suffered a lot of discrimination, much like Arabs,” Mr. Kareem said. “That’s why we expect that his tenure will be much better.”

But Mr. Obama also frames the sometimes contradictory feelings Iraqis have about America as the withdrawal of troops has moved closer to the political mainstream in both countries. Already, the units brought in for the so-called surge last year have left, and the Bush administration has in recent days acknowledged the need both to transfer troops from Iraq to an ever-more-volatile Afghanistan and to recognize that a broader withdrawal is an “aspirational goal” for Iraqis.

Mr. Obama has advocated a withdrawal that would remove most combat troops from Iraq within 16 months of taking office. Despite some fears about such a departure, that stance is not unpopular here. Many Iraqis hate American forces because soldiers have killed their relatives and friends, and they say they want the troops out.

“Of course I want the American forces to leave Iraq,” said May Adnan Yunis, whose sister was killed, along with a female and a male co-worker, when they were gunned down by American soldiers while driving to work at Baghdad International Airport three weeks ago. “I want them to go to hell.”

After the killings, a statement by the American military describing the three employees as “criminals” who shot at the soldiers inflamed Iraqi officials even more. In a rare public rebuke of the American military, the Iraqi armed forces general command described the American soldiers’ actions as crimes “committed in cold blood.”

For General Hiti, who commands a swath of western Baghdad, the American military is a necessary, if vexing, presence. He ticks off the ways it helps: evacuating wounded Iraqi soldiers, bringing in helicopters when things go wrong, defusing bombs, getting detailed pictures of areas from drone planes.

But the issue of withdrawal is immensely complex, and some of the functions mentioned by General Hiti would not be affected under Mr. Obama’s plan. The senator is calling for the withdrawal of combat brigades, but has said a residual force would still pursue extremist militants, protect American troops and train Iraqi security forces.

In negotiations on the future troop presence, both sides were initially focused on concluding a long-term security agreement. But the Iraqi government is now rejecting that and has focused solely on a temporary agreement to begin next year after the United Nations mandate that serves as the legal basis for the American military presence expires.

For weeks American officials had insisted that widespread Iraqi objections to the long-term pact were merely overheated words from Iraqi politicians. Now, they acknowledge that they underestimated Iraqis’ fears of acquiescing to what the Iraqis see as a colonial relationship that would allow American forces to indefinitely operate permanent bases under special laws.

“The Iraqis have a real political issue here,” said one American official, who said the Iraqis viewed any deal that would replicate the broad powers Americans now have “as a scarlet letter.”

But for some Iraqis the American presence remains the backbone of security in the neighborhood. Saidiya, a southern Baghdad district, was so brutalized by violence a year ago that a young Iraqi television reporter who fled thought he would never come back. But a telephone call from his father in December persuaded him to return. An American unit had planted itself in the district, helping chase away radicals. The family could go out shopping. They could drive their car to the gas station.

“The Americans paved the way for the Iraqi Army there,” said the young man, who married this year. “If they weren’t there, the Iraqi forces could not have taken control.” Even so, he agreed with Mr. Obama’s plan for a faster withdrawal. American forces “helped the Iraqi Army to get back its dignity,” he said. “They are qualified now.”

But Iraq is now a complex landscape. Some areas are subdued, and others are still racked by violence and calibrating troop presence will be tricky.

Falah al-Alousy is the director of an organization that runs a school in an area south of Baghdad that was controlled by religious extremists two years ago. Former insurgents turned against the militant group, but local authorities still rely heavily on Americans to keep the peace; the Iraqi Army, largely Shiite, is not allowed to patrol in the area, Mr. Alousy said.

“Al Qaeda would rearrange itself and come back, if the Americans withdraw,” he said. As for Mr. Obama’s plan for withdrawal, “It’s just propaganda for an election.”

Most Iraqis dislike the fact that their country is occupied, but a few well-educated Iraqis who have traveled abroad say they would not oppose a permanent American military presence, something that Mr. Obama opposes. Saad Sultan, the Iraqi government official, said his travels in Germany, where there have been American bases since the end of World War II, softened his attitude toward a long-term presence. “I have no problem to have a camp here,” he said. “I find it in Germany and that’s a strong country. Why not in Iraq?”

Reporting was contributed by Alissa J. Rubin, Mohammed Hussein,
Riyadh Muhammad, Anwar J. Ali and Suadad al-Salhy from Baghdad,
and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Mosul.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/world/middleeast/17voices.html?ref=politics)

Ninjahedge

July 17th, 2008, 10:06 AM

You are right NH, there is nothing of value to export from Afganistan besides opium. But we could have imported a Talabanless and Al Quedaless friend from the region. At the least, we could have weakend those fanatics to a point where it could have taken them tens of years to recover..At that point, it would have been up to us how fast they would recover... I would have liked to see that than go into Iraq..

I am not disagreeing with you one bit MC.

I think that we should have stayed and finished our job THERE before taking on a much larger job w/o fully researching it. Our top guys in washington (political, not military) thout we had all we needed and that the switch would be fast and easy. They really did not know enough about their subject. Ego probably had the most to do with it. You get that far for that long, it takes a really strong person to accept the fact they may be wrong about something. Even stronger to admit it.

Anyway, the only thing I am saying is that Afghanistan would always be a burden. Even completely clean, we would probably still have to send aid or troops to keep it that way. Our leaders saw Iraq as not only self-sustaining, but as a potential asset.

Just like in a game (See "civilization" by Sid Meier), you try and take the territory that has the most assets to win.

SO I understand where they are coming from and what they were trying to do, I just think they did a colossal pluck-up and botched the whole thing.

Zephyr

July 18th, 2008, 11:27 AM

Evidently no action by Senator Obama regarding Iraq will satisfy the Senator from Arizona..

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo153x23.gif

July 17, 2008, 6:17 pm
McCain Now Criticizes Obama for Travels

By Larry Rohter
Derived from:
The Causus: The NY Times Politics Blog

For months now, Senator John McCain and other Republicans have been criticizing Senator Barack Obama for not having visited Iraq in a long time—even running a daily tally that is now well past 900 days.But now that Mr. Obama is about to actually travel there and elsewhere in the region, they seem unable to decide whether that is worthy of praise or an opportunity for payback for Mr. Obama’s unrelenting criticisms of their approach.

Mr. McCain, of course, has staked his candidacy on the success or failure of the surge in Iraq, reminding voters that he pushed for the troop increase when it was politically unpalatable. With conditions on the ground much improved, as even Mr. Obama has acknowledged, he is using that progress to bolster his claim to experience and good judgment and to cast Mr. Obama is untested and dangerously naïve.

“I’m pleased that he is going to Iraq for only the second time and Afghanistan for the first time,” Mr. McCain, who last visited the region in March, told reporters aboard his campaign bus in Kansas City, Mo. “If he was so concerned about Afghanistan and the threat there and the need to send troops, don’t you think he should have gone there?” Mr. McCain also asked.

Earlier in the day, Mr. McCain’s communications director, Jill Hazelbaker, dismissed Mr. Obama’s trip as nothing more than “the first of its kind campaign rally overseas.” But Mr. McCain initially rejected that “damned if you do, damned it you don’t” approach and sought a somewhat more nuanced position.

“I can only give you my opinion, and I will talk to her,” he said. “The fact is that I’m glad he is going to Iraq. I am glad he is going to Afghanistan. It’s long, long overdue if you want to lead this nation.”

It is not yet known exactly when Mr. Obama, with network anchors in tow, will be leaving on a foreign policy trip, meant to establish his foreign policy bona fides and sure to draw attention away from Mr. McCain. The trip is expected to begin in the next few days, with an itinerary that includes Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, a meeting with Palestinian leaders and a stopover in Europe.

Later in the day, in Grand Haven, Mich., Mr. McCain elaborated on his and Ms. Hazelbaker’s original remarks. He differentiated the Iraq and Afghanistan parts of the trip from its other legs, saying that Mr. Obama’s activities in those other countries could have “a political flavor, to say the least.”

Also today, the McCain campaign released a seven-and-half-minute long Web video called “The Obama Iraq Documentary: Whatever the Politics Demand,” criticizing Democratic candidate’s statements on Iraq.

http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:H_OBe6oy49oJ::symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/servlet/JiveServlet/download/21-2259-3539-1061/check%252520mark.gif On Monday, Mr. Obama said that, if elected, he planned to move at least two brigades of American troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, part of the draw-down he has promised for Iraq. A day later, Mr. McCain announced a plan to send three brigades to Afghanistan, but has been hazy on details such as whether the troops would be supplied by the United States or Nato or both, and where they would be transferred from.

http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:H_OBe6oy49oJ::symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/servlet/JiveServlet/download/21-2259-3539-1061/check%252520mark.gifIran has also sprung back in the news, in a way that may offer a political opportunity to Mr. Obama. This weekend, the No. 3 official in the State Department is scheduled to go to Geneva to join other members of the United Nations Security Council in discussions with Iranian officials about that country’s nuclear program.

Some conservatives have criticized that step as a capitulation by the Bush Administration, since the American envoy will be talking to Iranians without preconditions, a phrase associated with Mr. Obama. But Mr. McCain said the encounter was actually consistent with his approach.

“That’s in keeping with everything I said,” he told reporters in Kansas City. “That’s in keeping. Henry Kissinger went to China and met with Zhou Enlai, and he was the No. 1 guy at the State Department. Nixon didn’t go and meet with Chairman Mao, OK? So please have no doubt about it.”

In reality, Mr. Kissinger was Mr. Nixon’s National Security Adviser at the time, though he later became Secretary of State.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company (http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/mccain-now-criticizes-obama-for-travels/)

Jasonik

July 19th, 2008, 02:11 PM

07/19/2008
SPIEGEL INTERVIEW WITH IRAQ LEADER NOURI AL-MALIKI
The situation in Iraq seems to be improving. SPIEGEL spoke with Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki about his approval of Barack Obama's withdrawal plans and what he hopes from US President Bush in his last months in office.

http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,1246983,00.jpg

Excerpt:

SPIEGEL: Germany, after World War II, was also liberated from a tyrant by a US-led coalition. That was 63 years ago, and today there are still American military bases and soldiers in Germany. How do you feel about this model?

Maliki: Iraq can learn from Germany's experiences, but the situation is not truly comparable. Back then Germany waged a war that changed the world. Today, we in Iraq want to establish a timeframe for the withdrawal of international troops -- and it should be short. At the same time, we would like to see the establishment of a long-term strategic treaty with the United States, which would govern the basic aspects of our economic and cultural relations. However, I wish to re-emphasize that our security agreement should remain in effect in the short term.

SPIEGEL: How short-term? Are you hoping for a new agreement before the end of the Bush administration?

Maliki: So far the Americans have had trouble agreeing to a concrete timetable for withdrawal, because they feel it would appear tantamount to an admission of defeat. But that isn't the case at all. If we come to an agreement, it is not evidence of a defeat, but of a victory, of a severe blow we have inflicted on al-Qaida and the militias. The American lead negotiators realize this now, and that's why I expect to see an agreement taking shape even before the end of President Bush's term in office. With these negotiations, we will start the whole thing over again, on a clearer, better basis, because the first proposals were unacceptable to us.

SPIEGEL: Immunity for the US troops is apparently the central issue.

Maliki: It is a fundamental problem for us that it should not be possible, in my country, to prosecute offences or crimes committed by US soldiers against our population. But other issues are no less important: How much longer will these soldiers remain in our country? How much authority do they have? Who controls how many, soldiers enter and leave the country and where they do so?

SPIEGEL: Would you hazard a prediction as to when most of the US troops will finally leave Iraq?

Maliki: As soon as possible, as far as we're concerned. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.

SPIEGEL: Is this an endorsement for the US presidential election in November? Does Obama, who has no military background, ultimately have a better understanding of Iraq than war hero John McCain?

Maliki: Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic. Artificially prolonging the tenure of US troops in Iraq would cause problems. Of course, this is by no means an election endorsement. Who they choose as their president is the Americans' business. But it's the business of Iraqis to say what they want. And that's where the people and the government are in general agreement: The tenure of the coalition troops in Iraq should be limited.

Full interview here. (http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,566852,00.html)

Jasonik

July 19th, 2008, 03:43 PM

In a related LOL:

White House Accidentally E-Mails to Reporters Story That Maliki Supports Obama Iraq Withdrawal Plan (http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/07/white-house-acc.html)

lofter1

July 19th, 2008, 04:00 PM

Bush and his entire staff just don't have their hearts in it anymore.

Which is really scary.

All they're thinking about is getting the hell out of Dodge.

eddhead

July 19th, 2008, 07:30 PM

Actually, the price of oil started to go up in early 2000, when OPEC started to manipulate the price by controlling supply. Three years before the Iraq war. ?

Not to jump on the bandwagon or anything, but OPEC has ALWAYS controlled the supply of Oil, that is what cartles do (The operative part of the "C" in OPEC being cartel and all). Yet the price has always managed to stay significantly south of $100 gallon until war broke out.

Who was it that said "ALL HAIL BUSH!!!" again?? :)

eddhead

July 19th, 2008, 07:37 PM

1988 was a big year for these and I got the date mixed up. On August 11, 1982 Mohammed Rashed planted a bomb on PanAm FLT 830 which exploded a few minutes before it landed in Honolulu. The bombing investigation linked the the bombing to Saddam Hussein. Rashed was charged and stood trial under the terms of the Montreal Convention in Athens, Greece.
Rashed and his accomplices were given a safe haven in Iraq in the early 1980s by Saddam Hussein’s regime. They launched multiple bombing operations out of Baghdad throughout Europe and, in this case, on the American-owned passenger airplane bound for the United States.

The fact Iraq provided the 15 May group with safe haven BEFORE the flight 830 bombing would seem to exonerate him from any guilt of the bombing itself. It should be noted that following the bombing and his capture, Rashed spend 2 years in a Egyptian jail, 8 years in a Jordanian jail, and 8 more years in a US jail where he was ultimately released after turning state's evidence. It should also be noted that the 15 May group was disbanded shortly after the 830 attack although the exact date they were disbanded is not known.

Zephyr

July 21st, 2008, 04:51 AM

From the quotes I have pulled from the article and placed at the top, you can strongly speculate that President Bush has somehow gotten to Prime Minister Maliki and "persuaded" him that his convergence with Senator Obama over a time-table was ill-advised. The rest of the quote indicates that the translation, while being labeled as being in error, was likely not in error at all.

Obviously President Bush, and consequently Senator McBush, are trying to undercut Senator Obama BEFORE he is able to directly communicate with this Iraqi PM - hence, allowing them to spin it all in their favour and ensure no bounce will be had while he is there. How utterly expedient!

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo153x23.gif

Mr. Maliki's interview prompted immediate concern from the Bush administration, which called to seek clarification from Mr. Maliki’s office, American officials said.

Scott M. Stanzel, a White House spokesman with President Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., said that embassy officials explained to the Iraqis how the interview in Der Spiegel was being interpreted, given that it came just a day after the two governments announced an agreement over American troops.

“The Iraqis were not aware and wanted to correct it,” he said. …

The statement, which was distributed to media organizations by the American military early on Sunday, said Mr. Maliki’s words had been “misunderstood and mistranslated,” but it failed to cite specifics.

“Unfortunately, Der Spiegel was not accurate,” Mr. Dabbagh said Sunday by telephone. “I have the recording of the voice of Mr. Maliki. We even listened to the translation.”

But the interpreter for the interview works for Mr. Maliki’s office, not the magazine. And in an audio recording of Mr. Maliki’s interview that Der Spiegel provided to The New York Times, Mr. Maliki seemed to state a clear affinity for Mr. Obama’s position, bringing it up on his own in an answer to a general question on troop presence.

Comment Stings Maliki as Obama Arrives in Baghdad

By SABRINA TAVERNISE and JEFF ZELENY
Published: July 21, 2008

BAGHDAD — On the eve of Senator Barack Obama’s visit to Iraq, its prime minister tried to step back Sunday from comments in an interview in which he appeared to support Mr. Obama’s plan for troop withdrawal.

The interview with the prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, was published Saturday in the online version of Der Spiegel, a German magazine. It was widely picked up by American newspapers because it appeared to give an unexpected boost to Mr. Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, who has called for an expedited withdrawal.

Mr. Obama arrived in Baghdad on Monday, according to Reuters, for meetings with American military commanders and Iraqi officials. He had made an overnight stop in Kuwait, where he met with the emir, Sheik Sabah al-Ahmed al-Sabah, according to a Kuwait government news agency.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/07/20/us/20obamanew.span.jpg
Jarod Perkioniemi/U.S. Army

Senator Barack Obama greeted troops in Kuwait
before flying to Afghanistan, part of a tour that
includes Iraq, Israel and Western Europe.

Mr. Maliki's interview prompted immediate concern from the Bush administration, which called to seek clarification from Mr. Maliki’s office, American officials said.

Scott M. Stanzel, a White House spokesman with President Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., said that embassy officials explained to the Iraqis how the interview in Der Spiegel was being interpreted, given that it came just a day after the two governments announced an agreement over American troops.

“The Iraqis were not aware and wanted to correct it,” he said.

The back-and-forth between the governments came as Mr. Obama finished a one-day trip to Afghanistan, where he met with President Hamid Karzai for nearly two hours on Sunday. Mr. Obama said the United States, NATO and Afghanistan must step up their efforts to fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda and to encourage Pakistan to eliminate terrorist training camps.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/07/20/us/20cnd-obama2.500.jpg
Afghanistan Presidential Palace, via Associated Press

President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan
with Senator Barack Obama at the
presidential palace in Kabul on Sunday.

“Our message to the Afghan government is this: We want a strong partnership based on ‘more for more’ — more resources from the United States and NATO, and more action from the Afghan government to improve the lives of the Afghan people,” Mr. Obama said in a written statement, which was also signed by Senators Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, and Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, who are part of the traveling American delegation.

Mr. Obama, who is on the opening leg of a weeklong overseas trip, said in a television interview that the United States needed to send a stronger message to Pakistan about its efforts to fight terrorism along its border with Afghanistan.

“I think that the U.S. government provides an awful lot of aid to Pakistan, provides a lot of military support to Pakistan,” Mr. Obama said on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “And to send a clear message to Pakistan that this is important, to them as well as to us, I think that message has not been sent.”

In Iraq, controversy continued to reverberate between the United States and Iraqi governments over a weekend news report that Mr. Maliki had expressed support for Mr. Obama’s proposal to withdraw American combat troops within 16 months of January. The reported comments came after Mr. Bush agreed on Friday to a “general time horizon” for pulling out troops from Iraq without a specific timeline.

Diplomats from the United States Embassy in Baghdad spoke to Mr. Maliki’s advisers on Saturday, said an American official, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to discuss what he called diplomatic communications. After that, the government’s spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, issued a statement casting doubt on the magazine’s rendering of the interview.

The statement, which was distributed to media organizations by the American military early on Sunday, said Mr. Maliki’s words had been “misunderstood and mistranslated,” but it failed to cite specifics.

“Unfortunately, Der Spiegel was not accurate,” Mr. Dabbagh said Sunday by telephone. “I have the recording of the voice of Mr. Maliki. We even listened to the translation.”

But the interpreter for the interview works for Mr. Maliki’s office, not the magazine. And in an audio recording of Mr. Maliki’s interview that Der Spiegel provided to The New York Times, Mr. Maliki seemed to state a clear affinity for Mr. Obama’s position, bringing it up on his own in an answer to a general question on troop presence.

The following is a direct translation from the Arabic of Mr. Maliki’s comments by The Times: “Obama’s remarks that — if he takes office — in 16 months he would withdraw the forces, we think that this period could increase or decrease a little, but that it could be suitable to end the presence of the forces in Iraq.”

He continued: “Who wants to exit in a quicker way has a better assessment of the situation in Iraq.”

Mr. Maliki’s top political adviser, Sadiq al-Rikabi, declined to comment on the remarks, but spoke in general about the Iraqi position on Sunday. Part of that position, he said, comes from domestic political pressure to withdraw.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/07/19/world/20obama-650.jpg
U.S. Military, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Senator Barack Obama at Bagram air base in Afghanistan with,
from left: William B. Wood, the American ambassador to Afghanistan;
Senator Chuck Hagel; Sgt. Maj. Vincent Camacho; Senator Jack Reed;
and Maj. Gen. Jeffrey J. Schloesser.

“Foreign soldiers in the middle of the most populated areas are not without their side effects,” he said. “Shouldn’t we look to an end for this unhealthy situation?”

Administration officials expressed confidence on Sunday that Mr. Maliki did not intend to create a rift with Mr. Bush on the issue of withdrawals, saying that both leaders conditioned any troop pullout on improved security in Iraq and would not impose a rigid timetable.

But a senior military official in Iraq said top American commanders expressed surprise and confusion over Mr. Maliki’s published remarks. The official added, however, that no American officers spoke to the Iraqi prime minister or any of his top aides about them.

“This isn’t the first time this has happened with the prime minister,” said the senior military official, noting that Mr. Maliki or his top aides had had to issue clarifications previously of comments that Iraqi or foreign journalists reported the prime minister said. “All of us were going, ‘What? What did he say, why did he say it and was it accurate?’ ”

Mr. Obama’s movements remained shrouded in secrecy, but Iraqi officials said he was scheduled to meet with Mr. Maliki on Monday before the prime minister was to travel to Germany and also with President Jalal Talabani. Americans here strictly warned Iraqi officials not to give details about Mr. Obama’s visit.

Before leaving Afghanistan, Mr. Obama shared a traditional Afghan lunch of chicken, mutton and rice during a meeting with Mr. Karzai. An Afghan government spokesman, Homayun Hamidzada, said the meeting was conducted in a “very friendly environment.”

Mr. Hamidzada made light of Mr. Obama’s earlier criticism of Mr. Karzai as not getting out of his bunker enough to help Afghanistan develop, saying it was not so much a criticism as a statement of realism.

“While we are making progress, we are also facing the significant threat of terrorism that is imposed upon us and on the Afghan people,” he said.

“We are spending a lot of time and resources on fighting terrorism,” he said, adding that the government hoped in the future to spend more of those resources on the development of Afghanistan.

Carlotta Gall contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan,
Steven Lee Myers and Eric Schmitt from Washington, and
Ali Hameed contributed reporting and translation from Baghdad.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/us/politics/21obama.html)

Zephyr

July 21st, 2008, 07:32 PM

McBush - working both sides of the Bush divide ...

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo153x23.gif

July 21, 2008, 3:41 pm
McCain: Obama All Wrong on the War

By Elisabeth Bumiller
Derivation - The Caucus:
The New York Times Politics Blog

KENNEBUNKPORT, Me. — Senator John McCain hit back at Senator Barack Obama’s trip to Iraq on Monday when he scoffed at a news conference at the Maine vacation home of the first President Bush that Mr. Obama “had no military experience whatsoever'’ and that he was “completely wrong'’ on the war.

“The fact is, if we had done what Senator Obama wanted to do we would have lost,'’ Mr. McCain said as the 41st president stood at his side. “And we would have faced a wider war. And we would have had greater problems in Afghanistan and the entire region. And Iran would have increased their influence.'’

Mr. Bush, 84, did not veer into any political territory, although he did say against the craggy ocean backdrop that he was “a little jealous'’ of all the attention paid to Mr. Obama on his trip this week to the Middle East and Europe.

Mr. McCain was at the Bush vacation compound for a fund-raising brunch and also a 20-minute private meeting with the former president. Mr. Bush declined to tell reporters what the two had discussed, although he joked that “we talked about the vice presidential pick, and I gave him my views.'’

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company (http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/mccain-obama-all-wrong-on-the-war/)

bobbiesox

July 27th, 2008, 01:54 PM

I'm sure you all saw this in the Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/22/AR2008072202550.html?sub=AR) Wednesday:

There is some irony in the fact that Democrats, after years of deriding Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Nouri+al-Maliki?tid=informline) as a hopeless bungler and conniving Shiite sectarian, are now treating as sacrosanct his suggestion that Iraq will be ready to assume responsibility for its own security by 2010. Naturally this is because his position seems to support that of Barack Obama (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Barack+Obama?tid=informline).

A little skepticism is in order here. The prime minister has political motives for what he's saying -- whatever that is. An anonymous Iraqi official told the state-owned Al-Sabah newspaper, "Maliki thinks that Obama is most likely to win in the presidential election" and that "he's got to take preemptive steps before Obama gets to the White House (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/The+White+House?tid=informline)." By smoothing Obama's maiden voyage abroad as the Democratic nominee, Maliki may figure that he will collect chits that he can call in later.

Giving the Iraqi prime minister an added motive to posture about troop withdrawals, even while he explicitly eschews binding timelines, is that he is engaged in contentious status-of-forces negotiations with the United States. He may figure that threatening to boot us out gives him more leverage over our troops. Beyond the negotiations, there is the imperative of Iraq's provincial elections, supposed to take place this year. Maliki no doubt expects that his Dawa party will reap political benefits from appearing to stand up to the Americans.

This is part of a pattern for Maliki, who, though he won office and has stayed alive (literally and politically) with American support, has hardly been an unwavering friend of the United States -- at least in public.Although he was an opponent of the Saddam Hussein (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Saddam+Hussein?tid=informline) regime, he was not a proponent of the U.S.-led invasion. Having spent long years of exile in Syria and Iran, he has had to overcome deeply ingrained suspicions of the United States.

Keep in mind also that Maliki has no military experience and that he has been trapped in the Green Zone (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Baghdad+Green+Zone?tid=informline), relatively isolated from day-to-day life. For these reasons, he has been a consistent font of misguided predictions about how quickly U.S. forces could leave.

In May 2006, shortly after becoming prime minister, he claimed, "Our forces are capable of taking over the security in all Iraqi provinces within a year and a half."

In October 2006, when violence was spinning out of control, Maliki declared that it would be "only a matter of months" before his security forces could "take over the security portfolio entirely and keep some multinational forces only in a supporting role."

President Bush wisely ignored Maliki. Instead of withdrawing U.S. troops, he sent more. The prime minister wasn't happy. On Dec. 15, 2006, the Wall Street Journal (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/The+Wall+Street+Journal?tid=informline) reported, "Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has flatly told Gen. George Casey (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/George+Casey?tid=informline), the top American military (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/U.S.+Armed+Forces?tid=informline) commander in Iraq, that he doesn't want more U.S. personnel deployed to the country, according to U.S. military officials." When the surge went ahead anyway, Maliki gave it an endorsement described in news accounts as "lukewarm."

In January 2007, with the surge just starting, Maliki predicted "that within three to six months our need for the American troops will dramatically go down." In April 2007, when most of Baghdad was still out of control, the prime minister said that Iraqi forces would assume control of security in every province by the end of the year.

Even now, when the success of the surge is undeniable, Maliki won't give U.S. troops their due. In the famous interview with Der Spiegel (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Der+Spiegel?tid=informline) last weekend, he was asked why Iraq has become more peaceful. He mentioned "many factors," including "the political rapprochement we have managed to achieve," "the progress being made by our security forces," "the deep sense of abhorrence with which the population has reacted to the atrocities of al-Qaida (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Al+Qaeda?tid=informline) and the militias," and "the economic recovery." No mention of the surge.

To his credit, although he has postured as a fierce nationalist in public, Maliki has often accommodated American concerns in private. And, despite saying that Iraq doesn't need many U.S. troops, he has acquiesced to their presence.

But Maliki's public utterances do not provide a reliable guide as to when it will be safe to pull out U.S. troops. Better to listen to the military professionals. The Post recently quoted Brig. Gen. Bilal al-Dayni, commander of Iraqi troops in Basra, as saying of the Americans, "We hope they will stay until 2020." That is similar to the expectation of Iraq's defense minister, Abdul Qadir, who says his forces cannot assume full responsibility for internal security until 2012 and for external security until 2018.

What would happen if we were to pull out much faster, on a 16-month timetable? Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Hammond, commander of coalition forces in Baghdad, says that would be "very dangerous" -- the same words used by Adm. Mike Mullen (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Michael+G.+Mullen?tid=informline), chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/U.S.+Joint+Chiefs+of+Staff?tid=informline).

Of course, if the Iraqi government tells us to leave, we will have to leave. But, the prime minister's ambiguous comments notwithstanding, the Iraqi government is saying no such thing, because most Iraqis realize that the gains of the surge are fragile and could be undone by a too-rapid departure of U.S. forces.

The writer is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a foreign policy adviser to Sen. John McCain's campaign.

bobbiesox

July 27th, 2008, 02:04 PM

What is going on with the liberal media?! Are things going so swimmingly in Iraq that they're actually forced under weight of the truth to finally admit it!??

This amazing article from the ASSOCIATED PRESS. Not exactly a Bush-supporting organization. Can you say "Helen Thomas"?

I'm sure you all - no matter which side of the partisan aisle you're on - will join me in welcoming this most excellent news.

Analysis: US now winning Iraq war that seemed lost

By ROBERT BURNS and ROBERT H. REID – 17 hours ago
BAGHDAD (AP) — The United States is now winning the war that two years ago seemed lost. Limited, sometimes sharp fighting and periodic terrorist bombings in Iraq are likely to continue, possibly for years. But the Iraqi government and the U.S. now are able to shift focus from mainly combat to mainly building the fragile beginnings of peace — a transition that many found almost unthinkable as recently as one year ago.

Despite the occasional bursts of violence, Iraq has reached the point where the insurgents, who once controlled whole cities, no longer have the clout to threaten the viability of the central government.

That does not mean the war has ended or that U.S. troops have no role in Iraq. It means the combat phase finally is ending, years past the time when President Bush optimistically declared it had. The new phase focuses on training the Iraqi army and police, restraining the flow of illicit weaponry from Iran, supporting closer links between Baghdad and local governments, pushing the integration of former insurgents into legitimate government jobs and assisting in rebuilding the economy.

Scattered battles go on, especially against al-Qaida holdouts north of Baghdad. But organized resistance, with the steady drumbeat of bombings, kidnappings, assassinations and ambushes that once rocked the capital daily, has all but ceased.

This amounts to more than a lull in the violence. It reflects a fundamental shift in the outlook for the Sunni minority, which held power under Saddam Hussein. They launched the insurgency five years ago. They now are either sidelined or have switched sides to cooperate with the Americans in return for money and political support.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told The Associated Press this past week there are early indications that senior leaders of al-Qaida may be considering shifting their main focus from Iraq to the war in Afghanistan.

Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told the AP on Thursday that the insurgency as a whole has withered to the point where it is no longer a threat to Iraq's future.

"Very clearly, the insurgency is in no position to overthrow the government or, really, even to challenge it," Crocker said. "It's actually almost in no position to try to confront it. By and large, what's left of the insurgency is just trying to hang on."

Shiite militias, notably the Mahdi Army of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, have lost their power bases in Baghdad, Basra and other major cities. An important step was the routing of Shiite extremists in the Sadr City slums of eastern Baghdad this spring — now a quiet though not fully secure district.

Al-Sadr and top lieutenants are now in Iran. Still talking of a comeback, they are facing major obstacles, including a loss of support among a Shiite population weary of war and no longer as terrified of Sunni extremists as they were two years ago. Despite the favorable signs, U.S. commanders are leery of proclaiming victory or promising that the calm will last.
The premature declaration by the Bush administration of "Mission Accomplished" in May 2003 convinced commanders that the best public relations strategy is to promise little, and couple all good news with the warning that "security is fragile" and that the improvements, while encouraging, are "not irreversible."

Iraq still faces a mountain of problems: sectarian rivalries, power struggles within the Sunni and Shiite communities, Kurdish-Arab tensions, corruption. Any one of those could rekindle widespread fighting.
But the underlying dynamics in Iraqi society that blew up the U.S. military's hopes for an early exit, shortly after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, have changed in important ways in recent months. Systematic sectarian killings have all but ended in the capital, in large part because of tight security and a strategy of walling off neighborhoods purged of minorities in 2006.

That has helped establish a sense of normalcy in the streets of the capital. People are expressing a new confidence in their own security forces, which in turn are exhibiting a newfound assertiveness with the insurgency largely in retreat. Statistics show violence at a four-year low. The monthly American death toll appears to be at its lowest of the war — four killed in action so far this month as of Friday, compared with 66 in July a year ago.

From a daily average of 160 insurgent attacks in July 2007, the average has plummeted to about two dozen a day this month. On Wednesday the nationwide total was 13.

Beyond that, there is something in the air in Iraq this summer.
In Baghdad, parks are filled every weekend with families playing and picnicking with their children. That was unthinkable only a year ago, when the first, barely visible signs of a turnaround emerged.

Now a moment has arrived for the Iraqis to try to take those positive threads and weave them into a lasting stability. The questions facing both Americans and Iraqis are: What kinds of help will the country need from the U.S. military, and for how long? The questions will take on greater importance as the U.S. presidential election nears, with one candidate pledging a troop withdrawal and the other insisting on staying.
Iraqi authorities have grown dependent on the U.S. military after more than five years of war. While they are aiming for full sovereignty with no foreign troops on their soil, they do not want to rush. In a similar sense, the Americans fear that after losing more than 4,100 troops, the sacrifice could be squandered.

U.S. commanders say a substantial American military presence will be needed beyond 2009. But judging from the security gains that have been sustained over the first half of this year — as the Pentagon withdrew five Army brigades sent as reinforcements in 2007 — the remaining troops could be used as peacekeepers more than combatants.

As a measure of the transitioning U.S. role, Maj. Gen. Jeffery Hammond says that when he took command of American forces in the Baghdad area about seven months ago he was spending 80 percent of his time working on combat-related matters and about 20 percent on what the military calls "nonkinetic" issues, such as supporting the development of Iraqi government institutions and humanitarian aid.

Now Hammond estimates those percentage have been almost reversed. For several hours one recent day, for example, Hammond consulted on water projects with a Sunni sheik in the Radwaniyah area of southwest Baghdad, then spent time with an Iraqi physician/entrepreneur in the Dora district of southern Baghdad — an area, now calm, that in early 2007 was one of the capital's most violent zones.

"We're getting close to something that looks like an end to mass violence in Iraq," says Stephen Biddle, an analyst at the Council of Foreign Relations who has advised Petraeus on war strategy. Biddle is not ready to say it's over, but he sees the U.S. mission shifting from fighting the insurgents to keeping the peace.

Although Sunni and Shiite extremists are still around, they have surrendered the initiative and have lost the support of many ordinary Iraqis. That can be traced to an altered U.S. approach to countering the insurgency — a Petraeus-driven move to take more U.S. troops off their big bases and put them in Baghdad neighborhoods where they mixed with ordinary Iraqis and built a new level of trust.

Army Col. Tom James, a brigade commander who is on his third combat tour in Iraq, explains the new calm this way:

"We've put out the forest fire. Now we're dealing with pop-up fires."
It's not the end of fighting. It looks like the beginning of a perilous peace.
Maj. Gen. Ali Hadi Hussein al-Yaseri, the chief of patrol police in the capital, sees the changes. "Even eight months ago, Baghdad was not today's Baghdad," he says.

EDITOR'S NOTE _ Robert Burns is AP's chief military reporter, and Robert Reid is AP's chief of bureau in Baghdad. Reid has covered the war from his post in Iraq since the U.S. invasion in March 2003. Burns, based in Washington, has made 21 reporting trips to Iraq; on his latest during July, Burns spent nearly three weeks in central and northern Iraq, observing military operations and interviewing both U.S. and Iraqi officers.

BrooklynRider

July 27th, 2008, 02:49 PM

For those unable to discern editorials and op-ed pieces from hard news, the poster above linked to the Washington Post op-ed piece. Why did the poster not include the title, which positions the article as a critique of Maliki and not any American political party?

Behind Maliki's Games

By Max Boot
Wednesday, July 23, 2008;
There is some irony in the fact that Democrats, after years of deriding Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Nouri+al-Maliki?tid=informline) as a hopeless bungler and conniving Shiite sectarian, are now treating as sacrosanct his suggestion that Iraq will be ready to assume responsibility for its own security by 2010. Naturally this is because his position seems to support that of Barack Obama (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Barack+Obama?tid=informline).

A little skepticism is in order here. The prime minister has political motives for what he's saying -- whatever that is. An anonymous Iraqi official told the state-owned Al-Sabah newspaper, "Maliki thinks that Obama is most likely to win in the presidential election" and that "he's got to take preemptive steps before Obama gets to the White House (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/The+White+House?tid=informline)." By smoothing Obama's maiden voyage abroad as the Democratic nominee, Maliki may figure that he will collect chits that he can call in later.

Giving the Iraqi prime minister an added motive to posture about troop withdrawals, even while he explicitly eschews binding timelines, is that he is engaged in contentious status-of-forces negotiations with the United States [i.e. Gorge W. Bush]. He may figure that threatening to boot us out gives him more leverage over our troops. Beyond the negotiations, there is the imperative of Iraq's provincial elections, supposed to take place this year. Maliki no doubt expects that his Dawa party will reap political benefits from appearing to stand up to the Americans.

This is part of a pattern for Maliki, who, though he won office and has stayed alive (literally and politically) with American support, has hardly been an unwavering friend of the United States -- at least in public. Although he was an opponent of the Saddam Hussein (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Saddam+Hussein?tid=informline) regime, he was not a proponent of the U.S.-led invasion. Having spent long years of exile in Syria and Iran, he has had to overcome deeply ingrained suspicions of the United States.

Keep in mind also that Maliki has no military experience and that he has been trapped in the Green Zone (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Baghdad+Green+Zone?tid=informline), relatively isolated from day-to-day life. For these reasons, he has been a consistent font of misguided predictions about how quickly U.S. forces could leave.

In May 2006, shortly after becoming prime minister, he claimed, "Our forces are capable of taking over the security in all Iraqi provinces within a year and a half."

In October 2006, when violence was spinning out of control, Maliki declared that it would be "only a matter of months" before his security forces could "take over the security portfolio entirely and keep some multinational forces only in a supporting role."

President Bush (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/George+W.+Bush?tid=informline) wisely ignored Maliki. Instead of withdrawing U.S. troops, he sent more. The prime minister wasn't happy. On Dec. 15, 2006, the Wall Street Journal (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/The+Wall+Street+Journal?tid=informline) reported, "Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has flatly told Gen. George Casey (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/George+Casey?tid=informline), the top American military (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/U.S.+Armed+Forces?tid=informline) commander in Iraq, that he doesn't want more U.S. personnel deployed to the country, according to U.S. military officials." When the surge went ahead anyway, Maliki gave it an endorsement described in news accounts as "lukewarm."

In January 2007, with the surge just starting, Maliki predicted "that within three to six months our need for the American troops will dramatically go down." In April 2007, when most of Baghdad was still out of control, the prime minister said that Iraqi forces would assume control of security in every province by the end of the year.

Even now, when the success of the surge is undeniable, Maliki won't give U.S. troops their due. In the famous interview with Der Spiegel (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Der+Spiegel?tid=informline) last weekend, he was asked why Iraq has become more peaceful. He mentioned "many factors," including "the political rapprochement we have managed to achieve," "the progress being made by our security forces," "the deep sense of abhorrence with which the population has reacted to the atrocities of al-Qaida (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Al+Qaeda?tid=informline) and the militias," and "the economic recovery."

No mention of the surge.

To his credit, although he has postured as a fierce nationalist in public, Maliki has often accommodated American concerns in private. And, despite saying that Iraq doesn't need many U.S. troops, he has acquiesced to their presence.

But Maliki's public utterances do not provide a reliable guide as to when it will be safe to pull out U.S. troops. Better to listen to the military professionals. The Post recently quoted Brig. Gen. Bilal al-Dayni, commander of Iraqi troops in Basra, as saying of the Americans, "We hope they will stay until 2020." That is similar to the expectation of Iraq's defense minister, Abdul Qadir, who says his forces cannot assume full responsibility for internal security until 2012 and for external security until 2018.

What would happen if we were to pull out much faster, on a 16-month timetable? Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Hammond, commander of coalition forces in Baghdad, says that would be "very dangerous" -- the same words used by Adm. Mike Mullen (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Michael+G.+Mullen?tid=informline), chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/U.S.+Joint+Chiefs+of+Staff?tid=informline).

Of course, if the Iraqi government tells us to leave, we will have to leave. But, the prime minister's ambiguous comments notwithstanding, the Iraqi government is saying no such thing, because most Iraqis realize that the gains of the surge are fragile and could be undone by a too-rapid departure of U.S. forces.

The writer is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a foreign policy adviser to Sen. John McCain's campaign.

(not exactly an objective observer with three months until the election)

lofter1

July 27th, 2008, 06:47 PM

We now have almost the highest number of troops in Iraq (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/31/us/politics/31campaign.html?_r=1&fta=y&oref=slogin) (~ 155,000) as at any time since the military first unleashed the Rumsfeld / Cheney / Bush version of fun & games called Shock & Awe. It's really no surprise that this increase in US forces in Iraq has controlled violence and insurgent activity to a greater degree than was possible prior to the advent of the military action referred to as "the surge".

But the lessening of violence which has come about due to the increase in forces -- while very welcome in the sense that it has reduced deaths / casualties for American troops and Iraqi civilians -- is not the way to measure the "success" of the surge.

The stated purpose of the surge was to get the war to a point where Iraqi military would take over from the US military. And that the Iraqis would be working together to run their own country. As of yet that transfer of power has not taken place.

Therefore anyone now claiming that the surge has succeeded is speaking out of turn -- we've not reached the point to make that judgment and the speaker would be making things up and reformulating what the surge was supposed to do.

BrooklynRider

July 27th, 2008, 07:14 PM

What is going on with the liberal media?! Are things going so swimmingly in Iraq that they're actually forced under weight of the truth to finally admit it!??

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-onthemedia27-2008jul27,0,6802141.story (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-onthemedia27-2008jul27,0,6802141.story)

From the Los Angeles Times
ON THE MEDIA

In study, evidence of liberal-bias bias

Cable talking heads accuse broadcast networks of liberal bias -- but a think tank finds that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Barack Obama than on John McCain in recent weeks.

By JAMES RAINEY
ON THE MEDIA

July 27, 2008

Haters of the mainstream media reheated a bit of conventional wisdom last week.

Barack Obama, they said, was getting a free ride from those insufferable liberals.

Such pronouncements, sorry to say, tend to be wrong since they describe a monolithic media that no longer exists. Information today cascades from countless outlets and channels, from the Huffington Post to Politico.com to CBS News and beyond.

But now there's additional evidence that casts doubt on the bias claims aimed -- with particular venom -- at three broadcast networks.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, where researchers have tracked network news content for two decades, found that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Obama than on Republican John McCain during the first six weeks of the general-election campaign.

You read it right: tougher on the Democrat.

During the evening news, the majority of statements from reporters and anchors on all three networks are neutral, the center found. And when network news people ventured opinions in recent weeks, 28% of the statements were positive for Obama and 72% negative.

Network reporting also tilted against McCain, but far less dramatically, with 43% of the statements positive and 57% negative, according to the Washington-based media center.

Conservatives have been snarling about the grotesque disparity revealed by another study, the online Tyndall Report, which showed Obama receiving more than twice as much network air time as McCain in the last month and a half. Obama got 166 minutes of coverage in the seven weeks after the end of the primary season, compared with 67 minutes for McCain, according to longtime network-news observer Andrew Tyndall (http://tyndallreport.com/comment/20/2966/).

I wrote last week that the networks should do more to better balance the air time. But I also suggested that much of the attention to Obama was far from glowing.

That earned a spasm of e-mails that described me as irrational, unpatriotic and . . . somehow . . . French.

But the center's director, RobertLichter, who has won conservative hearts with several of his previous studies, told me the facts were the facts.

"This information should blow away this silly assumption that more coverage is always better coverage," he said.

Here's a bit more on the research, so you'll understand how the communications professor and his researchers arrived at their conclusions.

The center reviews and "codes" statements on the evening news as positive or negative toward the candidates. For example, when NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell said in June that Obama "has problems" with white men and suburban women, the media center deemed that a negative.

The positive and negative remarks about each candidate are then totaled to calculate the percentages that cut for and against them.

Visual images and other more subjective cues are not assessed. But the tracking applies a measure of analytical rigor to a field rife with seat-of-the-pants fulminations.

The media center's most recent batch of data covers nightly newscasts beginning June 8, the day after Hillary Rodham Clinton conceded the Democratic nomination, ushering in the start of the general-election campaign. The data ran through Monday, as Obama began his overseas trip.

Most on-air statements during that time could not be classified as positive or negative, Lichter said. The study found, on average, less than two opinion statements per night on the candidates on all three networks combined -- not exactly embracing or pummeling Obama or McCain. But when a point of view did emerge, it tended to tilt against Obama.

That was a reversal of the trend during the primaries, when the same researchers found that 64% of statements about Obama -- new to the political spotlight -- were positive, but just 43% of statements about McCain were positive.

Such reversals are nothing new in national politics, as reporters tend to warm up to newcomers, then turn increasingly critical when such candidates emerge as front-runners.

It might be tempting to discount the latest findings by Lichter's researchers. But this guy is anything but a liberal toady.

In 2006, conservative cable showmen Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly had Lichter, a onetime Fox News contributor, on their programs. They heralded his findings in the congressional midterm election: that the networks were giving far more positive coverage to the Democrats.

More proof of the liberal domination of the media, Beck and O'Reilly declared.

Now the same researchers have found something less palatable to those conspiracy theorists.

But don't expect cable talking heads to end their trashing of the networks.

Repeated assertions that the networks are in the tank for Democrats represent not only an article of faith on Fox, but a crucial piece of branding. On Thursday night, O'Reilly and his trusty lieutenant Bernard Goldberg worked themselves into righteous indignation -- again -- about the liberal bias they knew was lurking.

Goldberg seemed gleeful beyond measure in saying that "they're fiddling while their ratings are burning."

O'Reilly assured viewers that "the folks" -- whom he claims to treasure far more than effete network executives do -- "understand what's happening."

By the way, Lichter's group also surveys the first half-hour of "Special Report With Brit Hume," Fox News' answer to the network evening news shows.

The review found that, since the start of the general-election campaign, "Special Report" offered more opinions on the two candidates than all three networks combined.

No surprise there. Previous research has shown Fox News to be opinion-heavy.

"Special Report" was tougher than the networks on Obama -- with 79% of the statements about the Democrat negative, compared with 61% negative on McCain.

There's plenty of room for questioning the networks' performance and watching closely for symptoms of Obamamania.

But could we at least remain focused on what ABC, NBC and CBS actually put on the air, rather than illusions that their critics create to puff themselves up?

james.rainey@latimes.com (james.rainey@latimes.com)

eddhead

July 27th, 2008, 07:53 PM

Ninjahedge

July 28th, 2008, 10:46 AM

Loft, so you are saying the only way to judge the "surge's" success is to reduce troop levels back to pre-surge levels and see what happens?

I think I agree on this. The Surge was SUPPOSED to be temporary. How long is Temporary?

And many MANY advisors on both sides, as well as the military, have ALWAYS said that they needed more ground troops to do this right. I think their numbers were somewhere near 250K, not even the paltry 150K we have in there now.

Not an easy topic.

lofter1

July 28th, 2008, 01:50 PM

Yes, Ninj ... How else ^ to judge the success of the surge, the purpose of which was to create the situation whereby Iraqis control / run their own country?

Sure, US troops could stand by and watch over the shoulder of Iraqi troops forever (hence the "100 year" occupation as advertised by John Sidney 3), but how does that achieve the goal of creating a sovereign Iraqi democracy -- another supposed goal of our little mid-east adventure, or so we were told by Mr. Bush et al.

Neo-Cons / McCainers seem to have re-written history and now claim that the purpose of the surge was merely to bring down US troop casualties. How convenient for them that so many Americans who aren't looking much past their next trip to the gas station think that's what this is all about.

Ninjahedge

July 28th, 2008, 02:42 PM

Well, oil prices went down by $20 a barrel, so it MUST be working!!

:crosseyed:

Zephyr

July 28th, 2008, 05:25 PM

Evidently, Senator McCain has tried so hard to find something in this ill-advised War in Iraq that he could proclaim an example of his good judgment, that he has inadvertently placed his entire campaign into a bind. We are saddled with the passive task of hearing an endless and tiresome loop about how "The Surge" has validated Mr. McCain's search for a way to supposedly win this War, while others - his storyline - questioned its advisability in reminding Americans about the high price paid. After all, there were safer, more amorphous positions in which he could have found cover, such as "protecting" National Security.

And Senator McCain has continued selling this rubbish almost to this very day, although he has begun to tail off it, thinking this was his Wonder Drug to carry him to the Presidency. This could be grounds for questioning his judgment from yet another direction: knowing when to hold off on rhetoric that is no longer useful, while having alternatives to immediately replace it, rather than glaming off your opponent by suddenly claiming that his ideas were incorporated in yours.

The last attempt to extend the merits of The Surge, got entangled in the so-called "Anwar Awakening" mistatement. But instead of admitting error, the intrepid Senator from Arizona tried to explain it away. He succeeded only in both recalling a past Senior Moment in a recent trip to Iraq, and reminding us that he shares a distinctly irritating trait of George W. Bush: fumbling and stumbling in an attempt to con the media into thinking no mistake was actually made.

The problem, Mr. McCain, is that even President Bush had the good sense of abandoning these positions after staking them out a month or two before, and you sir, Y-O-U, are left holding the bag!

http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/mccain%20bush%20hug%20twn.jpg http://punditkitchen.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/political-pictures-bush-mccain-mandate.jpg?w=300&h=384
http://brotherpeacemaker.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/mccain-bush.jpg
first row (l to r) - Washington Post; Courtesy Pundit Kitchen;
last row - Courtesy brotherpeacemaker

eddhead

July 28th, 2008, 07:25 PM

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the White House is predicting record budget deficits of $482 bn in 2008. According to the CRS report for Congress published in June, $198bn of this is to directly related to Dept of Defense Iraq War forecast expenditures.

Tell me again about how successful this surge has been.

Here is the link to the CRS report
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf

What follows below is the link and article from the Times reporting on total White House budget projections fo 2008 which by the way do not include provisions for financial exposures associated with potential Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac losses. Nor do they include other economic stimulus packages or bailouts for homeowners

I have no idea why either Obama or McCain would even WANT to run for office. We are so effed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/29/washington/29budget.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

July 29, 2008
A Deficit Forecast of $482 Billion, a Record

By ROBERT PEAR and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON — The White House predicted on Monday that the Bush administration would bequeath a record deficit of $482 billion to the next president — a sobering turnabout in the nation’s fiscal condition from 2001 when President Bush took office and inherited three consecutive years of budget surpluses.

By most accounts, the worst seems yet to come. The deficit announced by Jim Nussle, the White House budget director, does not reflect the full cost of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the potential $50 billion cost of another economic stimulus package or the prospect of steeper losses in tax revenue or further declines in the housing market.

Mr. Nussle also predicted Monday that the deficit would more than double in the current 2008 fiscal year — to $389 billion, from $162 billion in 2007.

The deficit projected for 2009 would be the largest in absolute terms. The White House and many economists prefer to measure the deficit as a share of the economy. The White House said the 2009 deficit would be 3.3 percent of the economy. That is the largest share since 2004, but well below the percentages recorded in the mid-1980s and early 1990s.

The outlook for the budget will crimp the ability of the next president to carry out ambitious spending plans of any kind.

Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan fiscal policy group, said that a one-year record deficit would not necessarily be worrisome if not for the overall pessimistic economic atmosphere.

“I think that the fiscal year 2009 deficit could get a lot worse, if you add in war costs, there could well be a real drop-off in revenues from this year’s slowing economy and of course if there are further problems in the housing market, if the federal government does have to inject some money into Freddie and Fannie, that could get worse too,” Mr. Bixby said.

The new estimate of the 2009 deficit was $74 billion higher than Mr. Bush and Mr. Nussle had predicted in the president’s budget six months ago.

Mr. Nussle said the deterioration of the fiscal outlook resulted from “a softening of the economy.” And he attacked Democrats in Congress, saying they had allowed spending to grow out of control.

Representative John Spratt, Democrat of South Carolina and chairman of the House Budget Committee, said the deficit figures confirmed “the dismal legacy of the Bush administration.”

“Under its policies,” he said, “the largest surpluses in history have been converted into the largest deficits in history.”

The new White House report includes these highlights:

¶Total federal revenue would decline from 2007 to 2008.

¶In 2008 and in each of the next three years, corporate income tax collections would be lower than the amount collected in 2007.

¶Federal spending will shoot up nearly 8 percent this year and then another 6.5 percent in 2009. In 2009, federal spending would be equivalent to 21.1 percent of the economy, the largest share since 1993.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS First Look Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map

Zephyr

August 3rd, 2008, 11:07 AM

Just a drop in the ... abyss.

Zephyr

August 3rd, 2008, 12:26 PM

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo153x23.gif

Anthrax Case Renews Questions on Bioterror Effort

By ERIC LIPTON and SCOTT SHANE
Published: August 3, 2008

WASHINGTON — Until the anthrax attacks of 2001, Bruce E. Ivins was one of just a few dozen American bioterrorism researchers working with the most lethal biological pathogens, almost all at high-security military laboratories.

Today, there are hundreds of such researchers in scores of laboratories at universities and other institutions around the United States, preparing for the next bioattack.

But the revelation that F.B.I. investigators believe that the anthrax attacks were carried out by Dr. Ivins, an Army biodefense scientist who committed suicide last week after he learned that he was about to be indicted for murder, has already re-ignited a debate: Has the unprecedented boom in biodefense research made the country less secure by multiplying the places and people with access to dangerous germs?

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/08/01/us/24294788.JPG
Photo: Sam Yu/Frederick News Post, via Associated Press

By late 2006, investigators had conducted
9,100 interviews, sent out 6,000 grand jury subpoenas
and conducted 67 searches, the F.B.I. said.
The focus steadily narrowed:
first to the Army infectious diseases laboratories
at Fort Detrick, then to Dr. Hatfill and, most recently,
to Dr. Bruce E. Ivins … who apparently
committed suicide on Tuesday.

“We are putting America at more risk, not less risk,” said Representative Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of a House panel that has investigated recent safety lapses at biolabs.

F.B.I. investigators have long speculated that the motive for the attacks, if carried out by a biodefense insider like Dr. Ivins, might have been to draw public attention to a dire threat, attracting money and prestige to a once-obscure field.

If that was the motive, it succeeded. In the years since anthrax-laced letters were sent to members of Congress and news organizations in late 2001, killing five people, almost $50 billion in federal money has been spent to build new laboratories, develop vaccines and stockpile drugs.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/08/01/us/10228383.JPG
Photo: Reuters

On October 16, 2001, the F.B.I.
released a photo of letters sent to
then-NBC anchor Tom Brokaw's office
in New York and to Senator Tom Daschle's
office on Capitol Hill. Both letters
contained anthrax.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/08/01/us/10229542.JPG
Photo: Paul Hosefros/The New York Times

Confusion reigned after more than 30 workers on Capitol Hill had tested
positive for exposure to anthrax. Senator Daschle, the majority leader, told the media
that the Senate would remain open while Speaker J. Dennis Hastert announced
that the House would close.

After the attacks, for example, an experimental vaccine Dr. Ivins had spent years working on moved from the laboratory to a proposed $877 million federal contract, though the deal collapsed two years later. Federal documents suggest that Dr. Ivins, along with several colleagues, might have earned royalties had the contract gone forward, but the deal ultimately collapsed.

Dr. Ivins’s lawyer, Paul F. Kemp, and some of the scientist’s colleagues insist that he was innocent. Mr. Kemp said by e-mail on Saturday that news reports that his client had considered agreeing to a plea bargain were “entirely spurious.” And a senior law enforcement official said that discussions between investigators and Mr. Kemp were “preliminary” and routine and did not represent any active discussion of a plea bargain.

But officials at the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Saturday appeared confident that they had the right man. They said they were still weighing how and when to seek an end to the grand jury investigation.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/08/01/us/10241548.JPG
Photo: William Philpott/Reuters; Associated Press; Associated Press; Tom Wilbur; Associated Press

The 2001 anthrax mailings were baffling in several ways,
not least because the victims seemed to have nothing in common.
They were, from left, Joseph Curseen Jr. and Thomas Morris Jr., both
postal workers in Washington; Ottilie Lundgren of Oxford, Conn., the last person
to die of anthrax in 2001; Robert Stevens, a photo editor at a supermarket
tabloid based in Florida; and Kathy Nguyen, a New York hospital worker.

“That’s not a decision we’re going to make lightly,” said one Justice Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss internal deliberations. “There won’t be a rush to judgment.”

As prosecutors consider how to proceed in the wake of Dr. Ivins’s death, federal officials say they are convinced that the increase in biodefense spending has brought real gains.

“Across the spectrum of biothreats we have expanded our capacity significantly,” said Craig Vanderwagen, an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services who oversees the biodefense effort. Systems to detect an attack, investigate it and respond with drugs, vaccines and cleanup are all hugely improved, Dr. Vanderwagen said. “We can get pills in the mouth,” he said.

Supporters of the spending increase cite studies that project apocalyptic tolls from a large-scale biological attack. One 2003 study led by a Stanford scholar, for instance, found that just two pounds of anthrax spores dropped over an American city could kill more than 100,000 people, even if antibiotic distribution began quickly.

And there is ample evidence that Qaeda leaders have shown interest in using biological weapons. Yazid Sufaat, a Malaysian-born Qaeda biochemist who trained in the United States, spent several months in 2001 trying to cultivate anthrax in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/08/01/us/10228284.JPG
Photo: Ron Frehm/Associated Press

An emergency service police officer decontaminated a mailbox
along Fifth Avenue in New York in October 2001. City officials had taken 31 packages
in for investigation as the anthrax scare spread throughout the country.
On October 31, a 61-year-old hospital stockroom worker died from the
city's first case of inhalation anthrax.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/08/01/us/10227954.JPG
Photo: Gregg Newton/Reuters

In October 2001, members of a Washington hazardous materials team
were sprayed after handling a suspicious letter at ABC News
in Washington. Anthrax took the lives of two postal workers
in that city later that month.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/08/01/us/10254608.JPG
Photo: Keith Meyers/The New York Times

In November 2001, workers from Bergen County in New Jersey were sprayed down
after removing suspicious packages from a post office.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/08/01/us/24290038.JPG
Photo: Agence France-Presse -- Getty Images

In December 2001, a technician at Fort Detrick's biomedical research laboratory
in Maryland opened a letter addressed to Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont.
In October 2001, Senator Leahy was addressed an anthrax-laced letter,
post-marked in Trenton, N.J.

Yet nearly seven years have passed without another biological attack, which has reduced the sense of urgency about the bioterrorist threat, even among some specialists.

“I think it’s an important risk, but frankly I’m more concerned about bombs and guns, which are easily available and can be very destructive,” said Randall S. Murch, a former F.B.I. scientist who has studied ways to trace a bioterrorist attack to its source.

And Congressional investigators recently warned that the proliferation of biodefense research laboratories presents real threats, too.

More people in more places handling toxic agents create more opportunities for an accident or intentional misuse by an insider, Keith Rhodes, an investigator with the Government Accountability Office, said at a Congressional hearing in October.

Nationwide, an estimated 14,000 people work at about 400 laboratories and have permission to work with so-called select agents, which could be used in a bioterror attack, although not all are authorized to handle the most toxic substances, like anthrax. With so many people involved, there is insufficient federal oversight of biodefense facilities to make sure the laboratories follow security rules and report accidents that might threaten lab workers or lead to a release that might endanger the public, Mr. Rhodes testified.

In effect, the government may be providing the tools that a would-be terrorist could use, said Richard H. Ebright, a Rutgers University biochemist and vocal critic of the federal increase in biodefense spending.

“One well-placed student, technician or senior scientist — no cost, with the salary being provided courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer — and no risk, no difficulty,” Mr. Ebright said. “That is all it takes.”

Heightening the concern has been a string of accidents at certain new or expanded biodefense laboratories, several of which were not properly reported to the authorities when they took place.

One of the first accidents was in Dr. Ivins’s lab in late 2001, when he and his colleagues were aiding the federal investigation of the anthrax attacks and spores accidentally spilled outside the secure area. He failed to report the event to his superiors and instead tried to disinfect the contaminated areas, according to an Army report, which concluded, “Adherence to institute safety procedures by laboratory personnel is lax.”

In early 2006, at Texas A&M University, a worker was infected with Brucella bacteria, a pathogen common in livestock that can cause flulike symptoms like fever, fatigue and joint pain, although it is rarely fatal. Later, three researchers at the same lab were infected with Q fever, another cattle-borne disease that can cause serious but generally not fatal illness in humans.

After the two incidents belatedly became public, federal officials temporarily shut down the laboratory, citing a series of safety shortcomings, like unapproved experiments and staff members given access to the dangerous agents even though they had not been approved to handle them.

Apart from the insider threat, some public health experts believe money used to study obscure pathogens that are not a major disease problem could be better directed to study known killers like influenza or AIDS.

Partly in response to this criticism, government officials now often talk about how strengthening the systems necessary to respond to a terror attack would also prepare the country for a natural epidemic like avian flu.

As experts debate threats, nervous neighbors of expanding biodefense facilities have repeatedly rallied to try to defeat them. At Fort Detrick in Maryland, some residents have opposed the construction of a “national biodefense campus” slated to include a new building to house the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, where Dr. Ivins worked for many years before his suicide. Three other new laboratories on the campus will be operated by the Departments of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, and Agriculture.

Proponents say clustering the laboratories on a military base will encourage safe scientific collaboration and save money through sharing of some facilities.

The buildup, and the related increase in research, has brought some important advances, federal officials argue, like promising new experimental vaccines or therapies to treat smallpox or Ebola virus.

The country now also has an expanded stockpile of vaccines and drugs to treat anyone exposed in a future attack, including enough antibiotics to treat more than 40 million Americans who might be exposed to anthrax and nearly five million bottles of a special potassium iodide liquid that helps protect infants from harm caused by nuclear fallout.

The deal for the $877 million contract that included Dr. Ivins’s vaccine collapsed in 2006 after the contractor, VaxGen of Brisbane, Calif., missed deadlines. VaxGen, in a licensing agreement with the Army to produce the vaccine, listed two patents held by Dr. Ivins and his colleagues. The possibility that Dr. Ivins could earn royalties from the patents was first reported by The Los Angeles Times.

Arthur Friedlander, one of Dr. Ivins’s collaborators in the work that led to the anthrax vaccine patent in 2002, declined to comment when asked Saturday if he and others who had worked on the project stood to gain financially. He referred the question to an Army spokeswoman, who did not respond to a request for comment.

Dr. Ivins’s lawyer, Mr. Kemp, said he could not comment on the notion that Dr. Ivins stood to earn royalties from vaccine patents because of attorney-client privilege.

VaxGen had agreed to pay royalties to the Army in exchange for the license to produce the new anthrax vaccine, according to federal financial disclosure it filed. And Army policy would allow the inventor to receive up to $150,000 a year “of any royalties/payments resulting from commercial licensure.”

It is unclear what the deal in this case might have been, or how the royalties might have been split among the five researchers whose names were on the patent.

Addressing the issue of bioterrorism spending, Michael Greenberger, director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland, said he was convinced that the increase had left the nation better prepared for an attack, without creating significant new vulnerabilities.

“You can never say that the system is 100 percent secure,” Mr. Greenberger said. “But the research ethic today is one of much greater discipline and focus on security than was true prior to the anthrax attacks.”

Mr. Stupak, the congressman from Michigan, remains concerned.

“You have all these universities tripping over each other trying to be high-level biosecurity labs,” he said. “What the nation gets is a very expensive bill, less security and a greater risk to the surrounding communities.”

Eric Lichtblau and William J. Broad contributed reporting.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/us/03anthrax.html?pagewanted=1&hp)

Zephyr

August 6th, 2008, 11:57 AM

http://rawstory.com/images/rawsmall.gif

Bush allegedly ordered the CIA to forge a handwritten letter from the head of Iraq's intelligence service to Saddam Hussein that purported to link the Iraqi dictator to the ringleader of the hijackers who toppled the Twin Towers on 9/11, according to news accounts of Suskind's new book ...

The Way of the World is Suskind's third book on the inner workings of the Bush administration, joining The One Percent Doctrine, which outlined the often extreme anti-terror policies advanced by the likes of Vice President Dick Cheney, and The Price of Loyalty, which painted a picture of the early day's of Bush's presidency with the help of ousted former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill.

Suskind: Bush ordered fake letter linking Iraq to 9/11

David Edwards and Nick Juliano
Published: Tuesday August 5, 2008

Author: Only White House reaction is 'calling me names'

A blockbuster new book from investigative journalist Ron Suskind adds another revelation to the growing canon demonstrating the lengths to which President Bush and members of his administration lied, misled and deceived the American people to pursue its invasion of Iraq.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41qq7wPUXCL._SL500_AA240_.jpg

Bush allegedly ordered the CIA to forge a handwritten letter from the head of Iraq's intelligence service to Saddam Hussein that purported to link the Iraqi dictator to the ringleader of the hijackers who toppled the Twin Towers on 9/11, according to news accounts of Suskind's new book, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism (http://www.amazon.com/Way-World-Story-Truth-Extremism/dp/0061430625/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217528328&sr=8-1). Such use of an intelligence service to influence domestic political debate could be an impeachable offense, Suskind writes.

Politico's Mike Allen reports (http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=90E15887-3048-5C12-00F2EE5A4BEEF1B8):

According to Suskind, the administration had been in contact with the director of the Iraqi intelligence service in the last years of Hussein’s regime, Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti.

“The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” Suskind writes. “It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link.” [...]

The author claims that such an operation, part of “false pretenses” for war, would apparently constitute illegal White House use of the CIA to influence a domestic audience, an arguably impeachable offense.

The faked letter was first reported as genuine by the conservative London Sunday Telegraph in December 2003. Right-wing commentators and Bush defenders harped on that disclosure as evidence of Saddam Hussein's involvement in the 9/11 attacks. According to Suskind's book, the CIA had been protecting Habbush in the early months of the invasion; the agency persuaded the Iraqi intelligence chief to write the letter in his own handwriting and paid him $5 million.

CBS White House correspondent Bill Plante reported Tuesday that Suskind's sources had seen a draft of the letter written on White House stationary.

Suskind outlined his findings further in a Huffington Post diary (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ron-suskind/the-forged-iraqi-letter-w_b_117056.html) Tuesday:

The Iraq Intelligence Chief, Tahir Jalil Habbush -- a man still carrying with $1 million reward for capture, the Jack of Diamonds in Bush's famous deck of wanted men -- has been America's secret source on Iraq. Starting in January of 2003, with Blair and Bush watching, his secret reports began to flow to officials on both sides of the Atlantic, saying that there were no WMD and that Hussein was acting so odd because of fear that the Iranians would find out he was a toothless tiger). The U.S. deep-sixed the intelligence report in February, "resettled" Habbush to a safe house in Jordan during the invasion and then paid him $5 million in what could only be considered hush money.

In the fall of 2003, after the world learned there were no WMD -- as Habbush had foretold -- the White House ordered the CIA to carry out a deception. The mission: create a handwritten letter, dated July, 2001, from Habbush to Saddam saying that Atta trained in Iraq before the attacks and the Saddam was buying yellow cake for Niger with help from a "small team from the al Qaeda organization."

The mission was carried out, the letter was created, popped up in Baghdad, and roiled the global newcycles in December, 2003 (conning even venerable journalists with Tom Brokaw). The mission is a statutory violation of the charter of CIA, and amendments added in 1991, prohibiting CIA from conduction disinformation campaigns on U.S. soil.

The Way of the World is Suskind's third book on the inner workings of the Bush administration, joining The One Percent Doctrine, which outlined the often extreme anti-terror policies advanced by the likes of Vice President Dick Cheney, and The Price of Loyalty, which painted a picture of the early day's of Bush's presidency with the help of ousted former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill.

Predictably, the White House is unhappy with Suskind's latest offering and the Bush administration is relying on its trademark push-back of insulting the messenger. White House spokesman Tony Fratto insulted Suskind, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work with the Wall Street Journal, as a practitioner of "gutter journalism," and called the allegations "absurd."

Such a reaction is merely aimed at downplaying the impact of Suskind's explosive revelations, the author says.

"So, here we go again: the administration full attack mode, calling me names, George Tenet is claiming he doesn't remember any such thing -- just like he couldn't remember "slam dunk" -- and reporters are scratching their heads," Suskind writes at Huffington Post. "Everything in the book is on the record. Many sources. And so, we watch and wait...."

Suskind appeared Tuesday on NBC's Today Show for interviews about the latest book.

SOURCE: Raw Story Media / The Raw Story (http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Suskind_Bush_ordered_fake_letter_linking_0805.html )

Zephyr

August 6th, 2008, 01:07 PM

TODAY Show: Ron Suskind's new book
about Iraq and Bush

CLICK IMAGE COLLAGE BELOW
To Access YouTube Video

http://reusablebags.typepad.com/newsroom/images/2008/04/25/tv_nbc_today_logo.jpg http://www.ronsuskind.com/suskindtemplates/images/WayoftheWorld_thumb.jpghttp://msnbcmedia4.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Video/080805/tdy_vieira_suskind_080805.300w.jpg (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DVV6LLxrAI)

Image-Collage credits: Courtesy reuseablebags; © 2004 Ron Suskind; MSNBC
Video credit: YouTube / NLoog

Runtime – 07:23

eddhead

August 6th, 2008, 03:15 PM

^^

Boy, this just keeps getting better and better.

Ninjahedge

August 6th, 2008, 03:18 PM

They have to time it.

I was justthinking about this while listening to a recording of the Colbert Report.

What would be the point of enditing (sp) them now? Anyone that gets convicted too quickly would just be pardoned or have their sentence commuted....

Wait a few months. Keep piling wood on the stack, when the time comes, you want every piece of meat hung above it to roast completely.

Zephyr

August 7th, 2008, 10:16 AM

(BTW, congratulations eddhead, I see you have just passed a WNY threshold with that post. :))

eddhead

August 7th, 2008, 06:01 PM

^^

Thanks for noticing! Actually I had no idea until you mentioned it, but I am honored.

Zephyr

December 18th, 2008, 02:27 AM

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo153x23.gif

Generals Propose a Timetable for Iraq

By ELISABETH BUMILLER and THOM SHANKER
Published: December 17, 2008

WASHINGTON — A new military plan for troop withdrawals from Iraq that was described in broad terms this week to President-elect Barack Obama falls short of the 16-month timetable Mr. Obama outlined during his election campaign, United States military officials said Wednesday.

The plan was proposed by the top American commanders responsible for Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus and Gen. Ray Odierno, and it represents their first recommendation on troop withdrawals under an Obama presidency. While Mr. Obama has said he will seek advice from his commanders, their resistance to a faster drawdown could present the new president with a tough political choice between overruling his generals or backing away from his goal.

The plan, completed last week, envisions withdrawing two more brigades, or some 7,000 to 8,000 troops, from Iraq in the first six months of 2009, the military officials said. But that would leave 12 combat brigades in Iraq by June 2009, and while declining to be more specific, the officials made clear that the withdrawal of all combat forces under the generals’ recommendations would not come until some time after May 2010, Mr. Obama’s target.

Transition officials said the plan was described in only general terms to Mr. Obama by Robert M. Gates, who is staying on as defense secretary, and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, when Mr. Obama met for five and a half hours with his national security team on Monday in Chicago. They said all participants had sidestepped the details of how to reconcile Mr. Obama’s timetable for withdrawing combat forces with the more extended one recommended by the generals. A transition official said that in future meetings, “the military will get a chance to articulate their preferences.”

In the campaign, Mr. Obama said he would not hesitate to overrule his commanders. By early December, however, he signaled some flexibility when he said that he still wanted combat troops out of Iraq in 16 months but that he would also listen to the recommendations of his generals. Mr. Gates has expressed confidence that he and Mr. Obama might reach common ground. But in discussing the new plan, senior military officials nonetheless made clear that they were not comfortable with the time frame Mr. Obama articulated in the campaign. “Sixteen months is going to be tough,” said one senior military officer who was briefed on the plan. “We are not quite there yet.”

Those at the Chicago meeting included Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Obama’s choice for secretary of state; Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.; Gen. James L. Jones, who is to be Mr. Obama’s national security adviser; Susan E. Rice, who is to be ambassador to the United Nations; Rahm Emanuel, who will be White House chief of staff; Gregory B. Craig, who will be White House counsel; James B. Steinberg, who is expected to be deputy secretary of state; Thomas E. Donilon, who is expected to be General Jones’s deputy; and Anthony Blinken, a senior foreign policy adviser to Mr. Biden.

Mr. Obama apparently did not ask Mr. Gates or Admiral Mullen for specifics on withdrawals, according to people briefed on the discussions. “There was not challenging or questioning of any particular timetable,” a transition official said. “There wasn’t a point on which there was any pushback from either side.”

For his part, Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said that Mr. Gates had left the Chicago meeting feeling that “they had an excellent discussion, and excellent chemistry as well.”

The plan drafted by General Odierno and General Petraeus was drawn up to meet the so-called status of forces agreement between the United States and Iraqi governments that calls for all American forces to be out of Iraq by the end of 2011 and all combat troops out of Iraqi cities by June 2009. The agreement sets forth both a shorter and longer timetable than Mr. Obama’s campaign pledge, with some combat forces out sooner but all forces out later.

One way commanders say they will try to meet that first deadline is by effectively reassigning combat troops to training and support of the Iraqis, even though the difference would be in some cases semantic because armed American troops would still go on combat patrols with their Iraqi counterparts.

The participants at the Chicago meeting did discuss the deadline for all American combat troops to be withdrawn from Iraqi cities by June, as outlined in the agreement with the Iraqi government. A person familiar with the talks said those at the meeting discussed whether the Iraqis would allow “remissioned” combat forces to remain in Iraqi cities after June. Mr. Gates and Admiral Mullen did not rule out the idea that Iraqis might permit such troops, the person said.

In a briefing to reporters last week in Balad, Iraq, General Odierno said that some American forces would remain in a support role in Iraqi cities beyond the June deadline. He said that the troops would be deployed at numerous security outposts in urban areas to help support and train Iraqi forces. “We’ll maintain our very close partnership with the Iraqi security forces throughout Iraq even after the summer,” he said.

General Odierno said that it was particularly important for American troops to support Iraqis in 2009, when three elections, at the provincial, district and national levels, are scheduled. “It’s important that we maintain enough presence here that we can help them through this year of transition,” he said.

General Odierno also said that he was planning for all American forces to be out of Iraq by 2011, as called for in the agreement with the Iraqi government, but he said the agreement could be renegotiated. “Three years is a long time,” General Odierno said.

The new military plan allows for the fact that negotiations could eventually call for American troops in Iraq after 2011, but it does not put a number on that force, a person familiar with its details said.

Other topics discussed at the meeting in Chicago included Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Middle East, the detainees at Guantánamo Bay and how the national security policy-making process in the Obama administration will work.

Helene Cooper contributed reporting.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/18/us/politics/18military.html?_r=1&ref=politics)