THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ, ELEVENTH THREAD

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We are wasting money in Iraq that can be spent at home to help the people living in the Gulf Coast of the US of A. They are being ignored while we waste billions in Iraq.

You're simply wrong about a few points.

First, we aren't really fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq. The troops that we are fighting there don't represent AQ in any meaningful fashion. They are the equivalent of expendables. We could kill each and every AQ-affiliated fighter in Iraq, and we wouldn't be denting the actual AQ organization. The whole 'we're fighting them in Iraq so we don't fight them here' story is a complete farce, one that mis-understands the nature of AQ and asymmetrical warfare. You should realize that our fighting them in Iraq does not impair their ability to fight us here if they wish!

You are misinformed about our fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq. We are fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq in addition to the others according to multiple news sources including ABC, CBS, and NBS.

Second, your prognostications of doom if we don't succeed in Iraq are mere hyperbole. You have no special knowledge or insight that allows you to predict what will happen if we leave. I am constantly reminded of the exact same sorts of prognostications which came from your side of the fence during the end of the whole Vietnam fiasco; those who said that we'd be speaking Russian, that the whole region would collapse, were completely wrong.

Yes, I do have special knowledge or insight that allows me to predict what will happen if we leave. I lived through WWII and observed directly the terrible consequences of refusing to accept the reality of what tyrants were capable of doing and intending to do until the tyrants actually did it. In brief, that delay in accepting that reality cost millions of lives.

In the case of Vietnam, our refusal to accept reality cost 3 million lives after we fled.

On one hand, we have things that we know are true - if we leave Iraq, our soldiers won't be getting killed there. We won't be spending money there. On the other, we have guesses about what will happen if we leave, presented by those who are too proud to admit that we were in error. I find facts to be more compelling than guesses when forming arguments, but apparently that isn't true in your case.

Facts about the present are not by themselves sufficiently compelling to guide me in my judgments about what will in fact probably happen, if we choose a certain course of action. I allow my experience and knowledge of historical as well as current trends and sequences of events to influence my judgment. One idea is that one can successfully predict the future from what is currently true and ignore what has influenced the future in similar cases in the past. I think that a simpleton idea, because it encourages those who believe it to keep repeating the mistakes of the past in the naive hope that repeating the mistakes of the past will accomplish different results in the future.

Cycloptichorn

BAGHDAD -- Alarmed by rising tensions between the United States and Iran, Iraqi government officials fear their country is in danger of being dragged into the middle of a new conflict between its two main allies.

In the past week, the Bush administration has ratcheted up pressure on Iran, saying it has evidence that Tehran is arming Iraqi insurgents and pledging to hunt down Iranian agents operating in Iraq. That has fueled concerns in Baghdad that Iraq will become the battleground in a showdown between Iran and the U.S., Iraqi officials say.

Iraq's Shiite-led government has warm relations with neighboring Iran, and it does not want that relationship compromised by an increasingly strident posture by Washington toward Tehran, Iraqi officials say.

"We want to maintain good relations with our neighbors, especially Iran," Iraqi government spokesman Ali al- Dabbagh told a news conference Thursday in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone. "We have long borders with them, we have local interests with [them] and we would like to have this relationship not in the shadow of the others."

Iraq also wants to maintain good relations with the U.S., he added, stressing that Iraq does not condone attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq. "We want good relations with everyone, whether Iran or the U.S.," he said. "The problems between the U.S. and Iran must not get solved in Iraq."

Tensions between the U.S. and Iran have escalated sharply in recent weeks, with the dispatch of additional U.S. warships to the Persian Gulf and the deployment of upgraded Patriot missiles to Gulf Arab countries, fueling speculation across the region that the U.S. is gearing up for a war with Iran.

Bush administration officials insist they do not intend to go to war with Iran. They have defended the targetting of Iranians in Iraq and other moves in the region as necessary to counter Tehran's backing of Iraqi insurgents, which coincides with U.S. efforts to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

"We've been very clear we don't intend to strike into Iran, in terms of what we're doing in Iraq," Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns told National Public Radio Thursday.

But Iraq's concern is that the U.S. is taking advantage of its presence in Iraqi territory to rein in Iran's rising influence in the region, Iraqi officials say. Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Times reported that the U.S. Air Force is preparing to undertake more aggressive patrols along the Iraq-Iran border to disrupt insurgent supply lines.

"Any escalation between Iran and the U.S. will be negative for us," said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish legislator. "If you exclude the Sunnis, the majority of Iraqis think of Iran as a friend."

Many members of Iraq's Shiite-led government sought refuge in Iran from persecution during the Saddam Hussein era and Iraqi officials regularly visit Tehran. Iran's ambassador to Iraq told The New York Times earlier this week that Iran is preparing a major new military and economic assistance package for Iraq?-paralleling the Bush administration's strategy to stabilize Iraq by building up the Iraqi army and police while re-energizing its reconstruction effort.

In many ways, Iraq is already serving as a proxy front in the rivalry for regional influence between Tehran and Washington. The U.S. military raided a diplomatic compound in Erbil last month, detaining five Iranians they accused of being Iranian agents aiding insurgents in Iraq. The Bush administration says it is examining a "mountain of evidence" that Iran is arming Shiite militias to attack U.S. forces.

"To the extent that anybody, including Iranians, are smuggling weapons, bringing in fighters, killing Americans, trying to destabilize the democracy in Iraq, we will take appropriate measures to defend our troops and also to defend the mission," White House spokesman Tony Snow warned this week.

Bush first announced a more aggressive stance toward Iran and also Syria when he unveiled his new strategy for Iraq last month, accusing the two countries of aiding Iraq's insurgency and implicitly rejecting recommendations by the Iraq Study Group that the U.S. open a dialogue with Iran.

Plans to announce further evidence of Iran's support for Iraqi insurgents this week have been postponed, amid reports of disputes among U.S. officials over the quality of the evidence.

The Iraqi government has also tried to make it clear that it does not support Iranian meddling in Iraq. When Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki visited Tehran last fall, he urged his hosts not to intervene in Iraqi affairs.

In an interview with CNN Wednesday, al-Maliki said he had asked both Tehran and Washington to resolve their differences elsewhere.

"We have told the Iranians and the Americans, 'We know that you have a problem with each other, but we are asking you: Please solve your problems outside Iraq,'" said al-Maliki. "We don't want the American forces to take Iraq as a field to attack Iran or Syria."

Any conflict between Iran and the U.S. would put Iraq's government in a difficult position, forced to choose between its two main benefactors, said Othman.

"There's a contradiction because America sees Iran as an enemy, whereas the Iraqi government sees Iran as a friend," he said. "The most important country with influence in Iraq right now is Iran, and these issues should be well and thoroughly discussed between America and Iraq."

The increasingly tough rhetoric from Washington has strained Iraq's relationship with the U.S. at the very moment when the two countries are supposed to be working together to implement Bush's new strategy to stabilize Iraq.

An additional 21,500 U.S. troops are headed for Baghdad and western Anbar province to bolster a new security plan aimed at quelling the steadily escalating sectarian conflict between the city's Shiites and Sunnis and combating the anti-U.S. insurgency.

Support for al-Maliki's government lies at the core of Bush's new strategy, but Washington does not consult with the Iraqi government on its threats to pursue Iranians in Iraq, complained Akram Hakim, State Minister of National Reconciliation, who belongs to the ruling Shiite coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance.

"President Bush says he supports the Iraqi government and he says he supports Prime Minister al-Maliki, but I think that going over the head of the Iraqi government on issues like this is not compatible with those statements," he said.

"When there's a contradiction between what he's doing and what he's saying, it will weaken the Iraqi government and weaken the position of the U.S. administration as well."

"For some time, we in the Iraqi government have been warning about turning Iraq into a battlefield between the U.S. and Iran," he added. "There are many problems between the U.S. and Iran, the U.S. and Syria and the U.S. and Al Qaeda, and we don't want them to make Iraq the battlefield for these problems."

I remember doing a nightsweep and when I got back on the base at Hurricane Point we got back really late and the guys on this platoon were bragging how they shot up innocent people and they bragged about it, how they just shot up, that night, innocent people and it was kinda like a joke. They were saying 'Look at that guy, I shot him in the stomach and he was running.'
This platoon used to have brain matter from people they had killed from .50 Cals. They used to grab brain matter and bring it on the base and put it into the refrigerator. They literally went crazy. I know this isn't an isolated incident, this happens everyday in Iraq. The news doesn't catch it. No one's going to confess to these things unless they get caught.

The Rules of Engagement got so bad in Iraq that if you did get engaged you just opened up on the city. The day I got wounded we went, in reaction to whiskey two platoon, they were in the marketplace, the souk, and they had one or two pop offs from an AK and they just completely opened up on the whole market. And I remember driving through in the humvees checking out the area and I remember seeing bodies on the sidewalks, broken glass and blood everywhere. At that, at...(he is trying to control his voice)...it's, it's difficult when you see things like that.

Cycloptichorn wrote:

Interesting non-sequitur there, Ican, seeing as Soros has nothing to do with the war in Iraq at all

Cycloptichon

Malarkey! Soros along with his fellow gangsters are doing whatever they can--investing millions in buying who and what they can--to cause the US to fail in Iraq.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/2/1/132416/1227

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I remember doing a nightsweep ... it's difficult when you see things like that.

Everything isn't sunny in Iraq; I don't want the war to end to gain motherf*cking political power or other such idiotic and insulting f*cking reasons, but to try and stop things like the above....

Cycloptichorn

They kept Iraqi brains in the fridge for trophies
by Pen
Thu Feb 01, 2007 at 10:40:10 AM PST
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Let America know what fu[c]cked up, unthinkable things are being done in our names. As Mr. Soros said, "Let the De-Nazification begin".

... Mr. [size=25]Soros said,[/size] "Let the De-Nazification begin".

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/2/1/132416/1227

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I remember doing a nightsweep ... it's difficult when you see things like that.

Everything isn't sunny in Iraq; I don't want the war to end to gain motherf*cking political power or other such idiotic and insulting f*cking reasons, but to try and stop things like the above....

Cycloptichorn

They kept Iraqi brains in the fridge for trophies
by Pen
Thu Feb 01, 2007 at 10:40:10 AM PST
...
Let America know what fu[c]cked up, unthinkable things are being done in our names. As Mr. Soros said, "Let the De-Nazification begin".

... Mr. [size=25]Soros said,[/size] "Let the De-Nazification begin".

So you are alledging that the soldier in question is saying that he saw things he didn't see, for money? I just want to be clear.

The soldier in question is alleged in the article to have said he saw those things." Was he bribed to say those things, or was the writer of the article bribed to falsely report what the soldier said, or was there in fact no such soldier?

As for Soros' comment; he said that nearly a week ago. I can't believe you haven't read it before now; it seems like something that's right up your alley.

The point is a Sorosism was quoted in the same article that alleged what the soldier said. For that reason I suspect the article is Soros funded and unreliable.

Cycloptichorn

Vanity Fair Exclusive: Now They Tell Us
Neo Culpa
As Iraq slips further into chaos, the war's neoconservative boosters have turned sharply on the Bush administration, charging that their grand designs have been undermined by White House incompetence. In a series of exclusive interviews, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, and others play the blame game with shocking frankness. Target No. 1: the president himself.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Gunmen wearing Iraqi army uniforms seized an Iranian diplomat as he drove through central Baghdad, officials said Tuesday. Tehran blamed the United States for the abduction, which threatened to raise already sharp tensions between the two rivals.

One Iraqi government official also said the Iranian diplomat was detained Sunday by a special Iraqi army unit that reports directly to the U.S. military. But a military spokesman denied any U.S. troops or Iraqis that report to them were involved.

"We've checked with our units and it was not an MNF-I (Multi-National Forces ?- Iraq) unit that participated in that event," military spokesman Lt. Col. Christopher Garver said.

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Right; what motive would Iraqis have to detain an Iranian envoy? We are violating international law.

The Iraqis suspect the Iranian envoy of aiding and abetting their enemy.

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The Iraqis suspect the Iranian envoy of aiding and abetting their enemy.

No, they don't. The Iraqi gov't knows who Iran is aiding and abetting, and it sure as hell isn't the Sunni insurgency.

Cycloptichorn