THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ, ELEVENTH THREAD

Quote:

Al-Qaeda has repeatedly declared their plans for achieving a worldwide caliphate. Based on their behavior to date, I see no evidence that they do not mean what they say they intend to achieve. The fact that they are fighting so hard to re-establish a sanctuary in Iraq, convinces me that they are convinced that they must chase us out of Iraq for them to achieve their goals.

What evidences leads you to think otherwise?

I haven't seen any evidence that AQ has the ability to run anything. How would they establish such a world-wide caliphate? You might as well be as afraid of aliens taking over the world; it's about as likely.

Yes, you have seen such evidence. I posted it here several times. I'll post it here again "if you ask me nicely."

Your opinion is not evidence.

I tell you again: the US is in no serious danger from AQ or any other terrorist organization. They have no ability to force us to do anything that we don't decide to do ourselves, at all. They never have, and never will.

Yes, you told me your opinion on that again.

Your opinion is not evidence.

You just don't understand the nature of terrorism, and perceive them in the same way as you would a traditional opposing military force. They are not traditional in any way, they lack the capabilities of a traditional force in every way. To fear the 'worldwide caliphate' is ridiculous. If we pull out of Iraq, it will bring AQ no closer to achieving that goal - which, by the way, is not their actual goal, and you're a moron if you think it is. AQ stating that they want a 'worldwide caliphate' is akin to the US calling for Democracies in every country. A dream mixed with a PR push.

I think you do not understand the nature of terrorism. It is the nature of terroism to mass murder non-murderers. It is the nature of terrorism that only a relatively few terrorists can mass murder thousands of non-murderers. It is the nature of terrorists to not wear uniforms that identify them as terrorists before they mass murder non-murderers. It is the nature of terrorists to cripple infrastructure. It is the nature of terrorsts for only a few terrorists at a time to often infiltrate without detection the communities they seek to destroy.

I have presented evidence here that the AQ confederation has declared their goal to be the establishment of a worldwide caliphate. I'll post it again, "if you ask me nicely." You are a moron if you think otherwise.

I have presented evidence here that the AQ confederation has declared that re-establishing sanctuary in Iraq is one of several necessary steps toward establishing their worldwide caliphate. I'll post it again, "if you ask me nicely."

Your opinion is not evidence.
Cycloptichorn

The Men of MiTT
A U.S. military transition team stands up Iraqi troops.
by Matt Sanchez
Daily Standard
08/15/2007 12:00:00 AM

The Rogues of the 3-5/6.
Iraq
BRIEFING BEGINS at 0800 at FOB Prosperity, and I was ready for the typical "SIGACTS." Small push pins on a magnified satellite image map on the wall showed where each significant act occurred: SAF, IED, EFP, a morse-code of letters that usually meant danger, explosions, and possibly a dead body. But these were the Rogues, the 3rd Battalion, 5th Brigade, 6th Iraqi Army Division Military Transitional Team (MiTT), and they had a different mission than most stationed here in Baghdad. First Sergeant Joseph McFarlane, a career Army man whose father served in Vietnam and whose grandfathers both served in WWII, read the latest news from the place the soldiers cared about most--back home.

He read stories about broken bridges, baseball scores, and which movie earned the most at the box office that weekend. Sergeant Arturo Guerra, of El Paso Texas, described a video game where border agents arrested illegal immigrants. Whittingham, a young soldier, had to get up and tell a joke. Many laughed, mostly because the joke wasn't funny, so they made him promise to stand up the next morning and try it again.

But the mission that day was serious, and each member of the 3-5/6 had the dangers of Baghdad in the back of his mind. Jamia was once a majority Sunni neighborhood where professors, bureaucrats, and other favorites of the former regime had lived, until Saddam was overthrown and vengeful Shia drove the residents out. The neighborhood's attractive and centrally located multi-level homes, with high ceilings and spacious roof patios, would be worth a fortune in Manhattan, but here, in Baghdad, there â s a 70 percent vacancy rate. The majority of the inhabitants have fled to areas where they are less threatened, and the new occupants are often not so neighborly. Al Qaeda has been known to use abandoned homes as â safe houses â in order to carry out the order of the day--terrorizing the populace. These operations used to target American forces, but AQI now seems to prefer attacking Iraqi soldiers.

The Rogues were sent to this troubled zone as a result of the troop surge. Before, they had been on Haifa Street, where, in January of 2007, they were ambushed and had to hold their ground for nearly six hours. "Everyone survived," said Major Chris Norrie, an armor officer cross-trained to supervise the mentorship of the 5th Brigade Iraqi Army. During the firefight, the Rogues tried to rally their fellow Iraqi soldiers, some fought, and some disappeared.

The surge sent more troops into Haifa--by the time I got there in July, the 4-9 Cavalry remarked how much calmer one of Baghdad premiere boulevards had become. So, the 3-5/6 was sent to another tough neighborhood where they were to make another go at mentoring the Iraqi military.

The Killing Fields

The "Killing Fields" are at the center of the Jamia neighborhood violence. "We think they dump bodies here because it's a lot easier to get on and off the main road," remarked Major Norrie. The field was nothing more than an open dirt plot of Baghdadi weeds with trash mixed in that often covered IEDs. In the center, there was a television antenna, but no one was sure if it worked.

Signals from cellphones did, however, activate Improvised Explosive Devices. The month before, a deeply buried IED (the most effective type) had killed five Iraqi soldiers. "This Humvee was thrown 150 feet from the explosion," said operations adviser Captain Pete Kilpatrick when he motioned to a vehicle that had been literally torn in half. He kept saying "we," even when he spoke of the Iraqi Army, and I didn't always know who the Captain was talking about, but soon realized that to the Captain it didn't matter. The 3-5/6 works hand in hand with Iraqi soldiers--their deaths were a loss, just like any other. The vehicle was dragged back to the Green Zone where it lay, in waiting, on the Camp Honor parking lot.

In the hallway of the Iraqi Army base, the photos of young slain soldiers who have died in the line of duty smile at visitors. I accompanied intelligence adviser Lieutenant Morton Ellison to observe the interrogation of a man arrested on suspicion of terrorist activities. The suspect confessed before I saw him. "It's the strangest thing," said the young Ellison who was roughly the same age as the blindfolded man sitting Indian-style on the carpet, "a lot of these guys are really proud of what they do, so they brag about it."

In an effort to get the Iraqi equivalent of "street cred'", the detainee confessed to several murders and to planting IEDs. I've witnessed a couple of interrogations that have gone the same way, men like this one casually discussing the people they had murdered.

Clear, Hold, Control

Some neighborhoods, like Jamia, are tired of the violence and residents are tipping off the Iraqi Army. Under the supervision of the 3-5/6, the Iraqi soldiers have set up Entry Control Points to observe who comes in and out of the area. Neighbors have brought the soldiers water, one even lent Iraqi soldiers a precious air-conditioner. The violence has gone down, noticeably. During a recent complex attack, insurgents detonated two car bombs and employed small arms fire and RPGs against the Iraqi soldiers, but the Iraqis held their ground. "A couple of months ago, these guys had no confidence, now they know they're needed and they're willing to fight," said Major Norrie.

Matt Sanchez, a recipient of the Jeane Kirkpatrick Award for Academic Freedom, is a student at Columbia University and holds the rank of Corporal in the United States Marine Corps. He is currently embedded as a civilian journalist in Iraq.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0510/p01s04-wome.html
The Caliphate: One nation, under Allah, with 1.5 billion Muslims

By James Brandon | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
AMMAN, JORDAN - The three middle-aged men sitting in an Indian restaurant in Jordan's capital scarcely look like Islamic revolutionaries. They are smartly dressed in Western-style suits and sip thoughtfully from cans of Pepsi as they share their plan to reshape the Muslim world.

"[President] Bush says that we want to enslave people and oppress their freedom of speech," says Abu Abdullah, a senior member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Party of Liberation. "But we want to free all people from being slaves of men and make them slaves of Allah."

Hizb ut-Tahrir says that Muslims should abolish national boundaries within the Islamic world and return to a single Islamic state, known as "the Caliphate," that would stretch from Indonesia to Morocco and contain more than 1.5 billion people.

It's a simple and seductive idea that analysts believe may someday allow the group to rival existing Islamic movements, topple the rulers of Middle Eastern nations, and undermine those seeking to reconcile democracy and Islam and build bridges between East and West.

"A few years ago people laughed at them," says Zeyno Baran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the leading expert on Hizb ut-Tahrir. "But now that [Osama] bin Laden, [Abu Musab al-] Zarqawi, and other Islamic groups are saying they want to recreate the Caliphate, people are taking them seriously."

Even more moderate Muslim groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt pay lip-service to the ideal of reestablishing the Caliphate, leaving less ideological space for Muslims who want to move toward Western models of democracy.

"The Caliphate is a rallying point between the radicals and the more moderate Islamists," says Stephen Ulph, a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation. "The idea of a government based on the Caliphate has a historical pedigree and Islamic legitimacy that Western systems of government by their very nature do not have."

But unlike Al Qaeda, Hizb ut-Tahrir believes it can recreate the Caliphate peacefully. Its activists aim to pursuade Muslim political and military leaders that reestablishing the Caliphate is their Islamic duty. Once these leaders invite Hizb ut-Tahrir to take power - effectively staging a military coup - the party would then repeat the process in other countries before linking them up to form a revived Caliphate.

"We spread our ideas by addressing people directly," says Abdullah Shakr, a fluent English-speaker, who, like all three men, spent time in Jordanian jails for membership in the party. "We don't care if the government knows about us, but ... we try not to catch their attention."
The party was founded in Jerusalem in 1953 by a Palestinian judge, Sheikh Taqiuddin Al-Nabhani. He taught that the Muslim world had grown poor and weak ever since the Caliphate was abolished by Turkish leader Kemal Ataturk in 1924.

The Caliphate was created after the death of Islam's founder Muhammad in 632 AD. During the following centuries the Caliphate expanded Islam's territories by conquest and treaty to cover most of the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa. As the Ottoman Turks lost ground to the West, they increasingly donned the cloak of the Caliphate. In the 1920s, Muslims throughout the British empire, particularly in India, used the restoration of the Caliphate as an anti-colonial rallying point. "People look back on the Caliphate and see its success as a poor reflection on the condition of the Muslim world today," says Mr. Ulph.

Hizb ut-Tahrir promises that a revived Caliphate will end corruption and bring prosperity - though the group doesn't say how. It will let Muslims challenge, and ultimately conquer, the West, its followers say.

"The Muslim world has resources like oil but it lacks the leadership that will rule us by Islamic law and make this jihad that the whole world is afraid of," says Shakr, a Jordanian member of the group, who says the success of the Caliphate will also encourage more converts to Islam - eventually making the whole world Islamic.

Hizb ut-Tahrir's modern leader is a Jordanian known as Emir Atta Abu Rashta. He lives in a secret location in the Middle East and communicates mainly through the Internet. The party is illegal in all Arab countries as well as Germany. Britain mooted banning the group after last year's London bombings. Ms. Baran wrote in the November issue of Foreign Affairs that the attacks were carried out by members of a Hizb ut-Tahrir splinter group. The British government has not formally accused Hizb ut-Tahrir or Hizb ut-Tahrir splinter groups of involvement. Hizb ut-Tahrir's British branch has condemned both the 7/7 and 9/11 attacks. [ Editor's note: Due to an editing error, the original version did not cite Baran or include Hizb ut-Tahrir's condemnation.]

Hizb ut-Tahrir's critics rarely see the organization as a direct threat, however.

"Many people see Hizb ut-Tahrir's aims as utterly unrealistic," says Nadim Shehadi, a Middle East analyst at Chatham House. "Even their understanding of the Caliphate as a strong, powerful state is questionable. Historically the Caliphate only worked because it was very loose and extremely decentralized."

Many analysts say that real danger is that the group radicalizes its followers who may subsequently graduate into militancy.
"People who join won't necessarily end up as violent jihadists," says Shiv Malik, a journalist. "But Hizb ut-Tahrir can provide [them with an] ideological backbone."

Hizb ut-Tahrir is not a mass movement yet, but analysts warn the group has a growing prominence among educated professionals in Europe and the Middle East.

"In Europe they tell Muslims that they have to create parallel societies and that they should not follow European laws," says Ms. Baran. "If this happens it will impossible for people like me to argue that Islam can be democratic."

Baran estimates the group has tens of thousands of followers in Central Asia. "They're stronger in places where people know less about Islam and can't read the Koran in Arabic," she says. "They're not as popular in the Middle East because they don't get involved in the Palestinian cause."
Hizb ut-Tahrir takes a more gradual, long-term strategy for spreading the territory under Muslim rule.

"Islam obliges Muslims to possess power so that they can intimidate - I would not say terrorize - the enemies of Islam," says Abu Mohammed, a Hizb ut-Tahrir activist. "In the beginning, the Caliphate would strengthen itself internally and it wouldn't initiate jihad."

"But after that we would carry Islam as an intellectual call to all the world," says Abu Mohammed, a pseudonym. "And we will make people bordering the Caliphate believe in Islam. Or if they refuse then we'll ask them to be ruled by Islam."

And after that? Abu Mohammed pauses and fiddles with his Pepsi before replying.

"And if after all discussions and negotiations they still refuse, then the last resort will be a jihad to spread the spirit of Islam and the rule of Islam," he says, smiling. "This is done in the interests of all people to get them out of darkness and into light."

i was just looking at the history channel to refresh my memory re. CRUSADES .
apparently there were NINE of them during which christians were trying to defeat and subjugate the muslims .
i assume that many muslims are perhaps more acutely aware of those crusades than we are in europe and north-america since the battles took place in their lands .
perhaps it's not too surprising that some muslims think they ought to have their CRUSADES - particularly after being invaded over and over again !
hbg
...

0135 BC: Maccabaen Maximum Expansion Ends.
...
0040 BC: Romans conquer part of Palestine.
0073 AD: Jerusalem conquered by Romans and all resistance ends.
...
0638 AD: Arabs conquer Jerusalem.
1099 AD: Crusaders conquer Palestine.
1187 AD: Saladin conquers Palestine.
1229 AD: Saladin/Crusader Treaty.
1244 AD: Turks conquer Palestine.
1516 AD: Ottoman Empire Begins Governing Palestine.
1831 AD: Egypt conquers Palestine.
1841 AD: Ottoman Empire Again conquers Palestine.
...
1918 AD: Ottoman Empire Ends Control of Palestine, and British Protectorate of Palestine Begins.
1947 AD: The British relinquish their protectorate to the UN

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070817/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_iraq_12;_ylt=AvQt3FkwRC1kGaHQjOgfIJFX6GMA

General: Quick strikes planned in Iraq
By PAULINE JELINEK, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 50 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - The U.S. military is planning a series of "quick-strike" attacks all around Iraq to go after militants who evaded the big military operation of recent weeks, a top commander said Friday. Army Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno also said commanders right now are planning to withdraw by August next year all troops sent as part of President Bush's buildup this year.

Military operations launched since America's troop buildup have helped coalition forces retake some territory in main population centers from extremists, he said, adding that militants have now moved to remote areas. He noted this week's devastating bomb attack in two remote northern villages that officials say killed at least 500 people.

"Due to the constant pressure and depletion of their leadership, extremists have been pushed out of many population centers and are on the move, seeking other places to operate within the country," Odierno told a Pentagon press conference by video from Baghdad.

"As a result, we are now in pursuit of al-Qaida and other extremist elements, and we'll continue to aggressively target their shrinking areas of influence," he said.

"Over the coming weeks, we plan to conduct quick-strike raids against remaining extremist sanctuaries and staging areas," Odierno said.
He also said that planning right now is for the five extra brigades of soldiers sent early this year to begin going home when their 15-month tours of duty end. The brigades arrived roughly one a month from January to June.

Asked if they would be able to leave that way starting next April, he said he was "not willing to quite say that yet" because top commander Gen. David Petraeus may decide to send replacements for some, depending on the security situation.

"Right now our plan is not to backfill (replace) those units," he said.
Odierno said there has been a shift in who is causing the most violence in Iraq. The military calculates that in July, 52 percent of the violence across the country was caused by al-Qaida and Sunni insurgents and 48 percent by Shiite extremists ?- compared to January when they say Sunnis and al-Qaida accounted for 70 percent.

He said that reflects both a decrease in al-Qaida's ability to conduct operations and a surge in Shia violence, with support from Iran.

The troop escalation and resulting new operations are buying time for Iraqis to try to make progress toward political reconciliation that might calm violence, but the gains can't be held indefinitely, he said.
"I do believe that it's sustainable for a period of time, but it's not a blank check, it's not for a long period of time," he said. "So there's going to have to be progress made by the Iraqi government over time."

Lawmakers have long said Iraqi officials are not taking advantage of U.S. efforts to make enough progress on reconciliation, and recent polls show the American public agrees.

Quck Strikes Planned in Iraq, but...

"The military has calmed areas of the country in the past, then moved on to other places only to find insurgents return to the just-calmed area. Commanders have said the extra troops from the buildup are helping them fight that problem now.

It also is not a new development that as coalition forces fight a problem in one area, militants rise up in another. Odierno did not answer the question of whether he has enough troops to go after regrouping insurgents in isolated locations."

I know the answer to that question; they don't have enough troops at 172,000. Why the general refused to answer that question is based on his fear that saying anything negative will get him fired.

ican, We've had surges in Iraq in the past, and it hasn't worked? Do you know why? Not enough troops. The insurgents know that our military surge is temporary. I'll give you one guess what they are doing, and planning for the future.

We can't win the war in Iraq with 160,000 troops.

So should we go ahead and send another 500,000 in now?

ican, We've had surges in Iraq in the past, and it hasn't worked? Do you know why? Not enough troops. The insurgents know that our military surge is temporary. I'll give you one guess what they are doing, and planning for the future.

We can't win the war in Iraq with 160,000 troops.

mm wrote :

Quote:

So should we go ahead and send another 500,000 in now?

if i understand ican correctly from his many posts , the united states should do whatever is necessary to win .
does that include sending 500,00 soldiers to iraq ?
i don't know , but if that is required to win the war ... ... ?
hbg

ican, We don't have 500,000 troops to put into Iraq; that leaves all our other responsibilities vacant.

As I posted previously, whether we have 500,000 troops or not, we don't need more than 160,000 in Iraq to win in Iraq.

It doesn't matter whether we "win" a military war without an effective Iraqi government.

Winning the military war is a prerequisite for us winning an effective government in Iraq.

We can't remain as occupiers of Iraq for another ten years. All that will do is increase the recruits for al Qaeda world-wide, increase the sectarian violence, and more children will be left without parents.

Of course we can remain in Iraq another ten years. What you said will happen if we stay until we win, will actually happen if we leave before we win.

Nothing is secure in Iraq; not even the Green Zone.

Nothing yet is secure in Iraq.

The US does not have the manpower or treasure to spend in Iraq for the next ten years. In case you haven't noticed, the world economy is now in a tizzy. We can't continue to spend money on bullets and bombs while our own infrastructure breaks down.

We've got the manpower and treasure to pay for both the required ordnance and the required maintenance of infrastructure. It's better that some of our infrastructure occassionally falls down while we are in Iraq, than frequently blows up after we leave Iraq before winning.

How many Iraqi troops can say 80,000 US troops train within ten years, while the other 80,000 are chasing al-Qaeda? I claim that within ten years, 80,000 of our troops can train well over a million Iraqi troops capable of adequately securing the Iraqi people against all the mass murderers of non-murderers in and outside Iraq, including al-Qaeda in and outside Iraq.