THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ, ELEVENTH THREAD

ican711nm wrote:

revel wrote:

Quote:

During this afternoon's Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) forced Ambassador Ryan Crocker to acknowledge that al Qaeda in the Afghanistan/Pakistan region poses a larger threat than al Qaeda in Iraq:

SEN. BIDEN: Mr. Ambassador, is Al Qaeda a greater threat to US interests in Iraq, or in the Afghan-Pakistan border region? … Which would you pick, Mr. Ambassador?

AMB. CROCKER: I would therefore pick Al Qaeda in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area.

Watch it:

Of course, the al-Qaeda suicidal mass murderers in the Afghanistan-Pakistaan area are now the greater threat, since the surge has driven so many of them out of Iraq, or killed so many of them in Iraq.

It was ALWAYS the greater threat. Always. There's no evidence that the 'surge' has contributed to this status at all - only empty assertions.

Cycloptichorn

Of course, the al-Qaeda suicidal mass murderers in the Afghanistan-Pakistaan area are now the greater threat, since the surge has driven so many of them out of Iraq, or killed so many of them in Iraq.

Is Petraeus Quote the Most Revealing of Entire War?

In 2003, Gen. David Petraeus, then little-known, asked Rick Atkinson of The Washington Post in Iraq: "Tell me how this ends." It soon became his "mantra." But as his testimony this week in Washington showed, he still does not know the answer.

By Greg Mitchell

NEW YORK (April 09, 2008) -- What will end up being the most famous quote of the Iraq war? Remember, President Bush did not actually say "Mission Accomplished." Perhaps Vice President Cheney's "final throes" will take the prize. But increasingly, as the significance of Gen. David Petraeus grows (seemingly by the minute), it seems possible that it might end up being his once-obscure 2003 remark to a well-known newspaper reporter: "Tell me how this ends." It was cited again on Tuesday by Andrew Bacevich in his New York Times Op-Ed contribution.

Petraeus said that line when he was a Major General directing the 101st Airborne during the U.S. invasion but, for some, his testimony today before Congress suggested that he still did not have an answer to it.

Who did he say the five words to? The lucky recipient was Rick Atkinson, the Pulitzer Prize- winning reporter for The Washington Post and military historian. It shows up in in Atkinson's book about the attack on Iraq, "In the Company of Soldiers." which featured Maj. Gen. Petraeus as a key character.


When I interviewed Atkinson about it in 2004, he said he considered the Petraeus quote a "private joke" at the time, but it soon became the general's "mantra."

In the post-invasion epilogue for his book, Atkinson wrote frankly. Petraeus and his soldiers had performed well, taking relatively few casualties, and showing both restraint and courage in battle. But they "were better than the cause they served." It was "vital not to conflate the warriors with the war." The casus belli for the war, that Iraq posed an imminent threat to America, "was inflated and perhaps fraudulent." And if "the war's predicate was phony, it cheapened the sacrifices of the dead and living alike."

So I asked Atkinson whether he felt the book was somewhat hollow, documenting the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. Did he have mixed feelings about his own effort? "There's nothing mixed about it at all," he fired back. "I was against the war before, during, and after it. I have no mixed feelings about the hundreds of dead soldiers--it was a poor use of their lives. I was certain last March that we as a nation had not done all we could to make sure lives were not lost, but I'm dogmatic about it now."

As a scholar of World War II, with popular books on that to his credit, the lesson he drew is "that if you're going to fight a global war, whether it's against the Axis in the 1940s or against terrorism today, nothing is more vital than nurturing a powerful, righteous coalition." Failing to do this has placed a tragically unfair burden on our military. "They took down a country the size of California in three weeks," he pointed out, "but there was not much thought devoted to the question of what happens next. It's astonishing how little thought was given."

But what about the argument that leaving Iraq now would dishonor the soldiers who have died so far? "It's not George Bush's military," he replied, "but the country's as a whole, and the collective proprietorship means we collectively decide if it is used properly and the cause is worth their sacrifice--and whether that cause should be truncated or we stay there forever."

On Dec. 11, in the village of Upper Pachir - located a few miles northeast of the main complex of caves where Al Qaeda fighters were holed up - a Saudi financier and Al Qaeda operative, Abu Jaffar, was interviewed by the Monitor. Fleeing the Tora Bora redoubt, Mr. Jaffar said that bin Laden had left the cave complexes roughly 10 days earlier, heading for the Parachinar area of Pakistan.

Jaffar, whose foot was blown off by a cluster bomb, was traveling with his Egyptian wife. He stayed in Upper Pachir one night, before fleeing north, then east toward the famed Khyber Pass.

The slow but growing exodus from Tora Bora now became a mad rush. Mohammed Akram, who had occasionally cooked for bin Laden, says he was fixing dinner in a cave at the end of November, when a huge bomb exploded at the base and blew him some 30 feet back into the mouth of the grotto. Two of his colleagues were killed, and he, along with another Saudi and a Kurdish fighter, decided to flee.

His flight, he stated in February, began about the same day at end of November as bin Laden escaped. "We received a lot of Iranian currency, and the commanders distributed it to the soldiers," he said, adding that he had received 700,000 ($1,400) rials for his own personal use. "Our own Chechens were killing people who tried to leave so we left at night and traveled into Paktia [the province to the south] near to Gardez and onto Zarmat."

As panic overtook the fighters inside the enclave, local villagers who had been regularly paid off by bin Laden's men were available to help.

Malik Habib Gul, who had attended bin Laden's Nov. 10 speech in Jalalabad, says he was happy to arrange mule trains. He says the Al Qaeda fighters paid between 5,000 and 50,000 Pakistani rupees for mules and Afghan guides, which moved stealthily along the base of the White Mountains, over a major highway, and into the remote tribal areas of Pakistan.

"This was a golden opportunity for our village," he said in Jalalabad last week. "The only problem for the Arabs was the first 5 to 10 kilometers northeast from Tora Bora to our village of Upper Pachir. The bombing was very heavy. But after arriving in our village, there were no problems. You could ride a mule or drive a car into Pakistan."

He and other villagers say that from about Nov. 28 to Dec. 12, they probably escorted some 600 people out, including entire families. "Our main responsibility was getting people across the Kabul River at Lalpur. To do this, we had to cross the main road, but there was no one guarding it. To the south [in the direction of Parachinar, Pakistan], only walkers, mostly young fight- ers crossed. The snow was deep and the climb was difficult."

ican wrote :

Quote:

Of course, the al-Qaeda suicidal mass murderers in the Afghanistan-Pakistaan area are now the greater threat, since the surge has driven so many of them out of Iraq, or killed so many of them in Iraq.

two thing i'm unclear about :

1) where have the iraqi al-qaede gone since they have been "driven out of iraq" ?

Those al-Qaeda not killed in Iraq and not imprisoned in Iraq and not driven out of Iraq, were driven out of Iraq into Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iran and Syria.

2) Where are the al-qaeda fighters now operating in the afghanistan/pakistan border area coming from ?

They are coming from Afghanistan Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Iran.

...
hbg

Real Change
Charlie Rose kept me up late last night against my will, but his interview of the NYT's John Burns and Dexter Filkins about Iraq was fascinating, largely because it shed new light, for me at least, on how much things have actually improved on the ground in Iraq.

Whether the reduction in violence changes the strategic equation remains to be seen -- and Burns and Filkins agree that the odds remain long. But coming from two men who were in Iraq during the worst of times, their astonishment at the turnaround there within a relatively short time is notable:

I certainly knew violence was down. But since the pronouncements of improvement in Iraq have come from such an unreliable messenger, the Bush Administration, they have been easy to discount. Perhaps too easy.

--David Kurtz

Ican, On the question of when AQ started to go to Pakistan. It was at the end of the fight in Tora Bora, Bin Laden and others got on some mules or walked to Pakistan.
...

Ican, your pretence that you know or understand anything about anything is well beyond a joke.

agreed McTag

Thursday, April 10, 2008 14:59 EDT
About that "significant progress"
This morning, speaking from the White House, the president boasted, "American and Iraqi forces have made significant progress" in Iraq. It got me thinking, haven't we heard that phrase before in relation to the war?


White House press secretary Scott McClellan on Oct. 27, 2003: "In the north and south [of Iraq], we have made significant progress."


President Bush on Nov. 13, 2004: "Fighting together, our forces [in Iraq] have made significant progress in the last several days."


President Bush on June 28, 2005: "In the past year, we have made significant progress [in Iraq]."


Vice President Cheney on Oct. 19, 2006: "We've made significant progress [in Iraq]."


President Bush on Feb. 23, 2007: "I think we have made significant progress in Iraq."

Indeed, it's a phrase the White House has used to describe events in Iraq several hundred times over the past five years. I can't imagine why anyone would be skeptical about the claim now.

Mctag wrote:

Ican, your pretence that you know or understand anything about anything is well beyond a joke.

revel wrote:

agreed McTag

The brilliance of both your responses is extraordinary!

Ican, your pretence that you know or understand anything about anything is well beyond a joke.