Who Lost Iraq?

It's a respectable position Cyclo and quite admirable in some ways but I fear it leads to anarchy.

Politicians have to lie I'm afraid. It is necessary to stitch coalitions of two parties together. Many parties leads to weakness. Then anarchy if there are too many.

These coalitions are difficult enough to unify at the best of times and once the voters have learned how to keep them both on the edge all the time it gets fiendish. I don't know how they would manage without lies.

State of the parties at 20 October 2006

Labour
352


Conservative
196


Liberal Democrat
63


Scottish National Party/Plaid Cymru
9
(SNP 6/PC 3)

Democratic Unionist
9


Sinn Fein
5
(Have not taken their seats and cannot vote)

Social Democratic & Labour Party
3


Independent
2


Independent Labour
1


Ulster Unionist
1


Respect
1


Speaker & 3 Deputies
4
(Do not normally vote)


Total no of seats
646


Current working majority
67



(352 Labour MPs less 285 of all other parties excluding Speaker & Deputies

Lone Star Madam should stick to running the Lone Star Whorehouse (another Bushco enterprise, i would assume), and lay off the Constitution.

Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution delineates the powers of Congress, and reads, in part:

[Congress shall have the power:]

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

To provide and maintain a Navy;

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

Lone Star Madam claims that Congress ceded its war making power. If Lone Star Madam is so goddamned well-informed, it should be a simple matter for her to provide the evidence and a source to back it.

My source for that quote of Article I, Section 8, is The United States Constituion Online, and specifically, the page for Article I, Section 8. As incredible as it may seem to Lone Star Madam, many of us have read the Constitution, and more than once. That's how i knew where to look for the relevant passage.

Put up or shut up, LSM, where's your evidence that Congress "ceded" its war-making powers?

Saudis and Iran prepare to do battle over corpse of Iraq
By Philip Sherwell in New York, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 1:33am GMT 04/12/2006

The gulf's two military powers, Sunni-Muslim Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran, are lining up behind their warring religious brethren in Iraq in a potentially explosive showdown, as expectations grow in both countries that America is preparing a pull-out of its troops.

The Saudis, America's closest allies in the Arab World, were reported - in an article last week by Nawaf Obaid, a senior government security adviser- to be considering providing anti-US Sunni military leaders with funding, logistical support and even arms - as Iran already does for Shia militia in Iraq.

Riyadh is alarmed that Sunnis in Iraq could be abandoned to their fate - military and political - at the hands of the Shia majority.

Indeed, President George W Bush dispatched his vice-president Dick Cheney to Saudi last weekend after the kingdom demanded high-level consultations about their concerns.

They told him that Iran was trying to establish itself as the dominant regional power through its influence in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.

Although a Saudi government spokesman yesterday sought to play down Mr Obaid's view as personal, saying it "does not reflect in any way the kingdom's policy and positions, which invariably uphold the security, unity and stability of Iraq with all its sects", Riyadh has also expressed its fears about Iranian's regional power play to other Western states.

Alarm in the traditional homeland of the Sunni branch of Islam deepened last week as it emerged that some senior US intelligence officials and diplomats are urging the Bush administration to abandon stalled attempts to reach a compromise with Sunni dissidents in Iraq and adopt a controversial "pick a winner" strategy instead, giving priority to Shia and Kurd political factions.

The proposal is also known as the "80 per cent solution" since the Sunnis, who ruled the country under Saddam Hussein, comprise just 20 per cent of Iraq's 26 million population. It has been put forward as part of a crash White House review of Iraq strategy. Its backers claim that ambitious attempts to woo anti-US Sunni insurgents have failed, and now risk alienating Shia leaders as well, leaving the US without strong political allies in Iraq.

As the frenzy of diplomatic activity intensifies, the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan panel of foreign policy experts, this week plans to recommend the US withdraws nearly all of combat troops by early 2008.

Although President Bush continues to insist he will not tie US policy to timetables for withdrawal, the panel's recommendations will fuel the belief that a major US pull-out will be under way soon.

The issue was at the fore yesterday when 40 people were killed and more than 80 wounded after three car bombs exploded in Baghdad. The attacks came after US and Iraqi forces raided insurgent strongholds in the city of Baquba.



"

Iran also watched with pleasure as America, Britain, France and Germany failed to persuade Russia and China to sign up to a package of sanctions against Iran in a draft United Nations Security Council resolution. The West wanted to punish Tehran for pushing ahead with banned uranium enrichment for its nuclear programme. The US is now drawing up plans for a diplomatic "coalition of the willing" to pursue sanctions outside UN auspices.

The Iraq Study Group is also expected to recommend opening dialogue with Iran and Syria over Iraq, a move being resisted by hardliners who rule out talks with two regimes that are fomenting violence. However, in a break with previous policy, Mr Bush will meet tomorrow in Washington with Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a party closely tied to Iran.

The talks are part of US efforts to strengthen links with Shia politicians and to undercut the influence of Moqtada al-Sadr, the firebrand cleric and militia leader on whose support the prime minister Nuri al-Maliki depends.

The meeting will fuel Sunni fears they are being sidelined even though the White House also announced plans for future talks with the country's Sunni deputy prime-minister.

Although the study group will present its plan as a much-needed course change in Iraq, many of its own advisers concluded during its deliberations that the war is essentially already lost, according to private correspondence obtained yesterday and interviews with participants. The best the commission could put forward would be the "least bad" of many bad options, as former ambassador Daniel C. Kurtzer wrote.

An early working draft from July stated that "there is even doubt that any level of resources could achieve the administration's stated goals, given the illiberal and undemocratic political forces, many of them Islamic fundamentalists, that will dominate large parts of the country for a long time."

It recommended the U.S. reduce "political, military or economic support" for Iraq if the government in Baghdad cannot make substantial progress toward providing for its own security

SPIEGEL ONLINE - December 5, 2006, 04:49 PM
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,452684,00.html

WAR AGAINST TERROR
"Bin Laden Will Be Back"
Former CIA agent Michael Scheuer on the prospects of finding bin Laden, the outlook for al Qaeda and the risk of new terror attacks in the United States.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Scheuer, five years have passed since the attacks of 9/11. Bin Laden is still free, al Qaeda alive and kicking. Venture a view of the future for us: How will things look five years down the road?



Martin H. Simon
From 1996 to 1999, Michael Scheuer (53) headed the U.S. counterterrorism unit charged with finding bin Laden. In November 2004, after 22 years of service, he resigned his CIA post.

Scheuer: Far worse than today. America is clearly losing the two wars it is fighting, and our political leadership has neither the will nor the popular support it needs to send more forces. So I would anticipate us having withdrawn from both Iraq and Afghanistan in five years' time, with the two countries largely run by people we aren't happy with: Islamists.

SPIEGEL: And how will al Qaeda be faring?

Scheuer: Much as it is today. There's a lot of whistling past the graveyard about bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri not being in control, about the organization being broken. We have confused tactical victory with strategic process. We have done a very good job of killing and arresting some leading figures, but all we can really point to is a body count. We have no means of judging our progress, and al Qaeda is very strongly oriented toward preparing for succession in its leadership. So we haven't really made much headway against al Qaeda.

SPIEGEL: But still, it's hard to imagine the United States having no idea where bin Laden is.

Scheuer: I think it's hard for the administration to believe, too. But to the best of my knowledge, we don't know where he is, and that doesn't surprise me. We have a mindset problem: We think bin Laden and al Qaeda are gangsters, that nobody could possibly like them because they flew aircraft into our buildings. But the truth of the matter is that people hate us much more than bin Laden. So how do you locate somebody in a country where the population hates you, but likes the individual you're looking for and even sees him as defending its faith?

SPIEGEL: Will the CIA get bin Laden one day?

Scheuer: I hope so, but realistically the drain of manpower, resources and overhead imagery from Afghanistan to Iraq has left severely depleted resources available. And the American-led coalition is having to spend more and more defending Hamid Karzai's government, leaving less and less for finding bin Laden.

SPIEGEL: You used to be the director of Alec Station, which was charged with capturing bin Laden. The CIA closed the unit at the end of last year. A mistake?

Scheuer: A disaster. I'd assume that the president wasn't aware of the decision. You can't nominate public enemy number one and then scrap the resources that were chasing him.

SPIEGEL: Is Pakistan really a loyal ally in the quest for bin Laden?

Scheuer: Every country has its national interests. I would have bet everything I own that Pervez Musharraf would not have done what he's done to date. He's given us overflight rights; he helped us arrest very, very important al Qaeda fighters. But it's not in Pakistan's national interest to find, arrest, and turn bin Laden over to the Americans. It simply isn't going to happen, and we're fools if we expect it to, because the country would probably implode. And Musharraf is not suicidal.

SPIEGEL: Do you believe the rumors that bin Laden is hiding - cut off from all communications - inside some cave?

Scheuer: There are a lot of fairy tales about Osama bin Laden's life. Politicians like George W. Bush and Tony Blair like to suggest that he's scurrying from one mountain to the next, one step ahead of the cops. That's not true. In that case, we would have caught him: all insurgents know they are at their most vulnerable when they're on the move. We see al Qaeda producing sophisticated videos: Ayman al-Zawahiri and bin Laden seem to be comfortable.

SPIEGEL: So they are satisfied with what they've achieved?

Scheuer: We tend to forget that bin Laden's main aim has never been military victory, but to inspire other Muslims. They can see that the global trend is in their favor. We are losing in Iraq. We are losing in Afghanistan. So I suspect they are quite happy. If, over the course of a decade, someone keeps announcing things, and then follows that up with action 80 or 90 percent of the time, then we should be believing him. If you ask me, al Qaeda is planning another attack in the United States.

SPIEGEL: Any idea where?

Scheuer: Can I pinpoint a city? No. But they are obviously waiting until they can do something even more spectacular than 9/11. In America, it would be simple to launch intifada-style attacks or the kind of bus and subway bombings we saw in London. Since 1996, bin Laden has maintained that every attack will be incrementally greater in the pain it causes.

SPIEGEL: Aren't you being overly pessimistic? After all, there's no actual evidence of an impending attack.

Scheuer: We Americans misunderstand the nature of terrorism. In our eyes, if someone doesn't attack us when we are expecting it, we assume that he lacks the means to do so, that we have won. But the patience of this foe is extraordinary. And don't fall into the trap of judging this war by the number of bombs or explosions. Forces aligned with al Qaeda have killed 2,500 Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have a gigantic budget deficit. In my view, the president is wrong to equate an absence of attacks with a successful war on terrorism.

SPIEGEL: Was London going to be another al Qaeda attack?

Scheuer: I doubt whether al Qaeda's leadership had planned and coordinated the operation. However, al Qaeda may have trained and funded one or two of those involved.

SPIEGEL: According to bin Laden, the war in Iraq represents a golden opportunity for al Qaeda. Has it aided the terrorists?

Scheuer: Yes. From a Muslim perspective, the invasion of Iraq is the ultimate justification for jihad. An infidel enemy attacking and occupying a Muslim country unprovoked. In my view, Iraq will remain a thorn in America's side for the foreseeable future.

SPIEGEL: Was killing Zarqawi important?

Scheuer: Zarqawi was clearly off of al Qaeda's reservation. But anyone can work under the umbrella of al Qaeda as long as they keep attacking Americans and their allies, and avoid fomenting a war with the Shia. Bin Laden hates the Shia, but he has different priorities: he wants to dislodge America from the Middle East first, then go after Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and finally deal with the Shia. Zarqawi was pushing too hard for an outright civil war in Iraq. So from al Qaeda's perspective, Zarqawi is now probably in a perfect state. A noble martyr, but dead.

SPIEGEL: Polls suggest that bin Laden's standing has fallen in the Muslim world, that many no longer hero-worship him.

Scheuer: Yes, and every time his popularity declines, the Americans stand up and say: "Thanks be to God! It's all over! Bin Laden's finished!" But the same polls ask a more pertinent question: "What do you think of American foreign policy?" And for more than 12 years now, 80 to 90 percent of respondents have agreed completely with bin Laden's view. They may not always approve of his methods, but they share his animosity and raw hatred. In the United States, we need to acknowledge that we have bitten off more than we can chew. We will have to kill the generation of people that have grown up around bin Laden. But it's also vital that we reduce al Qaeda's popular appeal.


Interview was conducted by Hans Hoyng and Georg Mascolo

InfraBlue wrote:
Might you elucidate the complexities, Spendi?


spendius wrote:
No chance.
What on earth makes you think I might have?

Doesn't sound too scholarly to me! LOL

Comparable to looking for a needle in a haystack.