In the documents, Razzi describes it as "strange" that the U.S.-supported Iraqi government would seek such weapons via the black market.
Afghans await weapons
TheStar.com - News - Afghans await weapons
August 12, 2007
Martin Ouellet
Canadian Press
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan-Toting obsolete equipment and an arsenal dating back to the Soviet era, the Afghan National Army says it's waiting for modern weapons promised by Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor.
The Afghan army, which Canada is counting on to take over fighting against the Taliban in coming months, still has yet to receive C-7 assault rifles and ammunition the Canadian government pledged to deliver, said Lt.-Col. Sherinshaw Khobandi.
In Ottawa, a defence department spokesperson confirmed that supplies for the Afghan National Army are planned, but declined to specify a date when they will be delivered.
Khobandi said O'Connor should have replenished the arsenal, at least in part, during his last visit. O'Connor's last public trip to Afghanistan was in March.
"We had a good talk with him," he said through an interpreter during a visit to the Kandahar multinational base yesterday.
"I suggested that he could help us with some weapons and some ammunition. His recommendation was that within the next few months, he'll supply us with brand new equipment from (the) Canadian Forces."
The C-7 delivery delay has slowed the preparation of Afghan recruits and stalled their takeover of combat operations against the Taliban.
For now, Afghan soldiers must rely on outdated Soviet-era weapons.
(must be thankful to the former soviets !)
Sunni leader appeals for help against what he calls Iranian-supported death squads and militias
The Associated Press
Sunday, August 12, 2007
BAGHDAD: An influential Sunni leader issued an impassioned appeal Sunday for help from Arab countries against what he called Iranian-supported death squads and militias in the latest blow to the Iraqi government's reconciliation efforts.
Adnan al-Dulaimi, the leader of the largest Sunni bloc in parliament, the Iraqi Accordance Front, warned that Baghdad was in danger of falling into the hands of the "Persians" and "Safawis," using terms referring to Iran.
"Arabs, your brothers in the land of the two rivers and in Baghdad in particular are exposed to an unprecedented genocide campaign by the militias and death squads that are directed, armed and supported by Iran," al-Dulaimi said in a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press by his office.
Most of Iraq's neighboring countries are majority Sunni, while Iran and Iraq have mostly Shiite populations, raising regional concern about Tehran's influence over the Iraq Shiite-dominated government and security forces.
Al-Dulaimi's words reflected growing frustration among Sunnis with al-Maliki's government, which is widely accused of having a Shiite bias and has failed to stop the execution-style killings believed carried out mainly by Shiite-led death squads. Bombings usually blamed on Sunni extremists also have persisted.
The U.S. military also has stepped up claims that Tehran is fueling violence in Iraq by supplying Shiite militias with training and powerful weapons. The Iranians have denied the claims.
Al-Maliki last week made his second trip to Iran since taking office in what many critics claimed was proof of Iran's influence over his government.
The Shiite leader defended the trip and said he would continue traveling to other countries to seek help in stemming the violence.
"Our trip to Turkey and Iran was very positive and we got support and promises of continuous support and of providing services," he said at a separate news conference. "Iraq has turned into the center of terrorism. Iraq will only succeed through reconciliation."
Al-Maliki said he planned a meeting of political leaders to discuss demands for political reform made by various factions, including the Accordance Front, which has withdrawn its ministers from Cabinet meetings.
"We will see if these demands are legitimate or not and we will apologize if it is not possible to implement them," he said.
But al-Dulaimi's remarks made no mention of reconciliation efforts.
He said urgent action was needed against what he described as an organized campaign by Shiite militias to drive Sunnis from the capital.
"Areas such as Azamiyah, Sulaikh, Fadhil, Dora, Adil, Jami'a, Ghazaliyah, Amiriyah and Yarmouk are attacked daily by Iranian-made mortars that were given to militias to eradicate the Sunnis," the statement said, referring to neighborhoods in Baghdad.
He also made the point during a press conference at his house in Adil, a Sunni-dominated neighborhood in western Baghdad.
"I call on all Arabs, Muslims, presidents and kings and people to intervene and urge the Iraqi government to get out from this crisis and I call on them to stand beside Iraqis against violence and the oppression that come to us from Iran and its agents," Al Dulaimi said.
Al-Dulaimi accused Arab nations of ignoring the plight of Sunnis in Iraq and warned it would have regionwide implications, saying more than 2 million Sunnis already have fled Iraq to Syria, Jordan and Egypt.
"Four years have passed with violations against our land, occupying our mosques, killing us, displacing us and marginalizing us while you Arabs were unaware and did not make any move," he said. "You did not even bother to denounce what is taking place against your brothers at the hands of Iranian militias and death squads."
"If you think that what is taking place in Baghdad will end there, you are wrong and if you think it is in Iraq only, you are mistaken. It is a war that has started in Baghdad and they will not stop there but will expand it to all Arab lands," he said.
"Your Sunni brothers in the land of two rivers are calling upon you and appeal to you to help them," he said. "You have to move strongly using all authorities, potentials and relations with the international community to defend Iraq's identity and to keep Baghdad an Arab fortress."
Iraqi PM calls for crisis summit
Iraq's Prime Minister, Nouri Maliki, has called for a summit of the nation's main political factions in an attempt to break Iraq's political paralysis.
In recent weeks almost all Sunni members of the cabinet have quit. Others are boycotting meetings, leaving at least 17 cabinet seats empty.
Many of them have accused Mr Maliki, a Shia Muslim, of ignoring their demands.
A BBC correspondent says the crisis is worrying for the US, which wants to see progress before withdrawing troops.
"I have called the political leaders for a meeting to discuss the main issues in the political process. The first meeting may happen tomorrow or the day after tomorrow," Mr Maliki announced on Sunday.
A senior Kurdish leader, Massoud Barzani, has already arrived in Baghdad for the talks.
It is expected he will play a key role in the negotiations, says the BBC's Richard Galpin in Baghdad.
In particular he will try to get the Sunni parties to decide whether to rejoin the government or go into opposition.
Coalition weakened
Many Iraqi MPs are not in the Iraqi capital at present because parliament is in its summer recess, which does not end until next month.
Mr Maliki has been unable to push forward with his plans for national reconciliation without the support of the country's various factions.
The so-called national unity government has effectively disintegrated, says our correspondent.
The main Sunni bloc, the Iraq Accord Front, pulled out on 1 August.
Last week, another five ministers, loyal to former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, began a boycott.
And the Shia followers of cleric Moqtada Sadr withdrew months ago.
But despite summoning leaders from all sides for talks, there is no indication that Mr Maliki is willing to make any concessions towards them, Richard Galpin says.
Mr Maliki said he wanted Sunni Arabs to play a role, but warned that if the Accord Front was not ready to rejoin, he would bring in others.
"There are people who have come forward and offered to be an alternative," the prime minister said.
There was speculation he could be referring to tribal sheikhs in western Iraq who have allied with the government and led a Sunni backlash against al-Qaeda insurgents.
Outburst at Iran
Saleem Jubouri, a senior member of the Accord Front, told Reuters the group had no plans to return to government but remained committed to dialogue.
However, the leader of the Accord Front, Adnan al-Dulaimi, launched a broadside against Shia links with Iran in an email to the Associated Press.
He alleged there was "an unprecedented genocide campaign by the militias and death squads that are directed, armed and supported by Iran".
Countless murders have been carried out against Sunnis by Shia death squads, forcing Sunnis to flee whole districts of Baghdad.
Iran has denied similar accusations from the US that it has armed or trained the militias.
Iraqi Sunni parties have complained that Mr Maliki is too close to Iran, and Mr Dulaimi's email arrived only a day after Mr Maliki returned from a visit there.
Sunnis are not the only victims of Iraq's sectarian violence. Thousands of Shia have been killed and wounded in Sunni militant bomb attacks.
#48 ... California ....... 31.44 ..... ... 3,082 ........ #7
There is no tax "surplus" in California. Based on the chart, if one state is wrong, I can presume all of them are wrong. It's up to you to prove which ones are right. That chart is garbage in, garbage out.
The California state senate is in a gridlock to pass the budget, because of 'DEFICIT' spending; spending more than revenue. Yes, it's still called deficit spending, and they're trying to cut some services to "balance the budget." They were supposed to have passed the budget before June 30, but it's now August. That means many community colleges and retirement homes won't be getting their payments for July and August. It's called gridlock. There is no "surplus" in California. Who made up that chart? Santa claus?
PEGGY NOONAN
'Get It Done'
Gen. Petraeus is a man of "straightforward decisiveness" who values "action with results."
OpinionJournal
Friday, August 10, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
In the lives of interesting people, there are bound to be interesting events. This is about one in the life of Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq.
Gen. Petraeus of course will be all over television in September, reporting to Congress on the war, and America will be getting used to him. He is not in an easy position. The left and most Democrats are invested in the idea of Iraq as disaster. The right and most Republicans placed their bets on the president and the decision to invade.
Normal Americans just want Iraq handled. They want America to succeed: for the war to end in a way and time that prove if possible that the Iraq endeavor helped the world, or us, or didn't make things worse for the world, or us. My hunch: The American people have concluded the war was a mistake, but know from their own lives that mistakes can be salvaged, and sometimes turned to good.
Whatever Gen. Petraeus says, it will be used politically, by politicians. "They'll be trying to fit his round facts into their square holes," as the novelist Tom Clancy, who has followed Gen. Petraeus's career, put it.
But Gen. Petraeus is also in a good position. America is still open to good news that is also believable news. They will welcome hope that is grounded in data.
They have no faith in Republican boosterism or Democratic pandering. They're tired of blowhardism on all fronts. But if Gen. Petraeus comports himself like what he is, a professional soldier, if he seems to be giving it to you straight, if he sounds as if he didn't get rolled by the White House or pressured by the political atmosphere, if he seems to be thinking clearly, he can make a big and even decisive impression. And he will buy time.
I write as if we can guess what he will say, and to some degree we can, because he's already said it in interviews: The job is not done and won't be done for some time.
Gen. Petraeus graduated from West Point in 1974, 10th in his class, and his career has been the very model of the new Army: a master's in public administration, Ph.D. in the lessons of Vietnam, a fellowship in foreign affairs at Georgetown. Wrote the book, literally, on counterterrorism. Ten months in Bosnia. Time in Kuwait. Fought in Iraq, in Karbala, Hilla and Najaf, and became known and admired for rebuilding and administrating Mosul. Academically credentialed, bureaucratically knowing, historically well read. Also highly quotable. Of his use of discretionary funds for public works in Mosul, he said, "Money is ammunition." He is said to have asked embedded reporters after Baghdad fell, "Tell me where this ends." That was the right question.
He is decisive. Which gets us to the interesting story.
it happened on Sept. 21, 1991, when Gen. Petraeus was commanding the Third Battalion of the 101st Airborne in Fort Campbell, Ky. He was at a live-fire training exercise. A soldier tripped on his M-16, and it discharged. The bullet hit Gen. Petraeus in the chest.
He was taken to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. A local surgeon got beeped and called in. He was told there was a Life Flight helicopter coming in with a guy with a gunshot wound to the chest. He was hemorrhaging.
The surgeon rushed to Vanderbilt and arrived before the helicopter. It landed, the elevator doors opened, and the surgeon saw a soldier on a gurney with a tube in his chest. A uniformed man was next to the patient, along with a nurse carrying bottles of blood draining from the wound.
Doctors at busy Vanderbilt hospital were used to treating gunshot wounds, and the fact that the patient was military was "a nonissue," as the surgeon said the other day in a telephone interview.
What was an issue was that the patient had lost a lot of blood, was pale, and was losing more.
The surgeon had to decide whether to open Gen. Petraeus up right away or stabilize him. The general was conscious, so the surgeon said, "Listen, I gotta make a decision about whether to take you straight to surgery or stabilize you first, give you blood."
Gen. Petraeus looked up at the surgeon and said, "Don't waste any time. Get it done. Let's get on with it."
"That's unusual", the surgeon told me. "Usually patients want to stabilize, wait." This one wanted to move.
At this point I'll note that the surgeon that day 16 years ago was Dr. Bill Frist, who later became Sen. Frist, and then Majority Leader Frist. He had never met Gen. Petraeus before.
Dr. Frist got Gen. Petraeus to the third-floor operating room, opened his chest, removed a flattened bullet that had torn through the top of a lung, stopped the hemorrhaging, took out part of a lung.
The operation was successful, and within 24 hours Gen. Petraeus asked Dr. Frist if he could be transferred back to the base hospital so his soldiers wouldn't be too concerned. "As soon as he was stable, we got him over there. His soldiers were first and foremost in his mind. That's why they like him so much."
Gen. Petraeus, says Dr. Frist, now describes his wound to troops as damage done by a round "that went right through my right chest--happily over the 'A' in Petraeus rather than over the 'A' in U.S. Army, as the latter is over my heart."
Over the years, Dr. Frist and Gen. Petraeus became friends. They found they'd both done graduate work at the Woodrow Wilson school at Princeton, where Dr. Frist is about to return as a teacher. They ran the Army 10-miler in Washington together--"He left me in the dust!" exclaims the doctor--and the Frists spent time with Holly Petraeus when her husband was fighting in Baghdad.
The majority leader also visited Gen. Petraeus in Iraq, and wound up, three years ago, standing with him "on a hot, dusty compound" where the general was leading exercises training young Iraqi soldiers.
Mr. Frist says that after observing the young recruits carry out their exercises, Petraeus gathered them around and told them what happened on that fateful day in 1991. He introduced the senator and told them of the role he'd played. "He didn't say we got the majority leader of the Senate here, he said, 'This was my doctor.'" Why was he telling them the story? "The point was to tell them, 'Listen, if you're not perfect right now you can grow, you can make mistakes, people are forgiving, you'll grow.'" The point was also to thank the soldiers at Fort Campbell who cared for them in the minutes after he was shot.
What does it all mean? Life is interesting, mysterious, and has an unseen circularity. You never know in any given day what's going to happen or who's going to have a big impact on you and on others. A future military commander got shot, and a future leader of the Senate stopped the bleeding.
What Mr. Frist, a supporter of more time for and renewed commitment to Iraq, gets from the story is this: What he saw and heard that day 16 years ago, is what he's seen from Gen. Petraeus in the years since: "straightforward decisiveness" and a "call for action with results."
Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father" (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Fridays on OpinionJournal.com.
Waiting for Petraeus
By Jim Hoagland
Washington Post
Sunday, August 12, 2007; Page B07
Estragon: Let's go.
Vladimir: We can't.
Estragon: Why not?
Vladimir: We're waiting for Godot.
Samuel Beckett sets " Waiting for Godot" on a country road where two tramps desperately await someone or something that never comes. I now wonder if Beckett was somehow foretelling this summer of inferno along the banks of the Potomac, where politicians wait in mixed dread and hope for an Army general to come and tell them whether the nation should continue the war in Iraq.
The general is David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq. President Bush says the report that Petraeus will deliver in mid-September will become the centerpiece of his Iraq strategy. Rarely has so much depended on one man and his assessment of what he has accomplished in just seven months.
This situation will not faze the extraordinarily self-confident and ambitious Petraeus. When he was awarded his fourth star in January at the relatively young age of 54, his peers joked among themselves that at last his rank had caught up with his ego. Among the traits the general shares with his president is a deficit of doubt in himself and his troops.
The promise of Petraeus's arrival has already helped Bush buy time and temporarily stanch the hemorrhaging of vital congressional Republican support for the war. "The Washington clock" that was said to be outracing the Baghdad clock only a few weeks ago -- as the Democratic majority moved to mandate U.S. withdrawals, then pulled back -- has come to a stop as the Capitol waits for Petraeus.
Much decorated and a brilliant articulator of war-fighting doctrine, Petraeus will be no easy target for war critics of either party. The preliminary signals are that he will report authentic -- if still fragile -- signs of progress in establishing security in Baghdad and Anbar province. He may even ask for patience and time to continue what he has begun. He will not say much about political reconciliation, because there is so little to say that is positive.
The difference between Petraeus and Godot, of course, is that the general will come. He will make his report, spark new debate and probably buy Bush another month or two in the bitter domestic debate over Iraq that is irrevocably intertwined with the 2008 presidential and congressional elections.
Moreover, Godot was almost certainly not a person but a larger force, one that an evangelical Christian such as Bush would recognize as salvation. Salvation is what Vladimir and Estragon await in Beckett's play and what Bush and the Democrats hope for in their different ways when they look at Iraq today. But just as salvation does not arrive on that country road, it is unlikely to arrive anytime soon in the enormous failure that the American occupation of Iraq has become.
Feedback in the past several weeks from military personnel serving in Iraq suggests to me that Petraeus can honestly report that his using more U.S. troops to pacify Baghdad neighborhoods and his arming and paying Sunni tribes to fight jihadists in Anbar have improved security.
But both of those efforts contradict and undermine Bush's avowed strategy of moving as quickly as possible to turn over responsibility for security to a national Iraqi army. U.S. troops are being pushed to produce short-term security gains that are likely to be temporary and perhaps ultimately self-defeating.
Similar contradictions mar the U.S. push for political reconciliation: The White House is pressuring Iraq's Kurds to vote for a national petroleum law that is not in Kurdish interests at exactly the same time that Bush representatives are suggesting to the Kurds that the United States does not support their constitutional right to a referendum on the status of Kirkuk this year. Likewise, the U.S. Embassy pushes Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to make politically damaging compromises with his foes as the CIA starts yet another version of its long-running effort to install its favorite Iraqi politician, Ayad Allawi, in Maliki's job. And so on.
The policy contradictions and conflicts within his own government that Bush has never been able or willing to resolve have created a Beckett-like hell of unfulfilled expectations and immobility for both Iraqis and Americans.
Beckett foretold this, too: As they realize that Godot is not coming, Vladimir says to Estragon, "I sometimes wonder if we wouldn't have been better off alone, each one for himself. We weren't made for the same road."
Estragon replies that it is not certain, and then asks: "Well, shall we go?"
Vladimir: "Yes, let's go."
They do not move.
[email protected]
I'm not sure how Petraeus can even come up with 9-10 years. Does he have god as a messenger? Exactly how does Petreaus come to that conclusion? It's pie in the sky.
...
imo in the end it comes down to one thing : MONEY (spelled : M O N E Y),
how much more money will the united states/canada have to sink into iraq/afghanistan ?
will there have to be higher taxes ?
where is the additional money going to come from : higher taxes - higher debt - cutback in other services to its citizens - inheritance from the rich uncle (not likely) .
hbg
