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THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ, ELEVENTH THREAD

 
 
cicerone imposter
 
  1  
Reply Wed 11 Jul, 2007 12:41 pm
GOP senators call for Iraq change now

By ANNE FLAHERTY, Associated Press Writer
46 minutes ago



WASHINGTON - Several Republican senators on Wednesday told President Bush's top national security aide privately Wednesday that they did not want Bush to wait until September to change course in Iraq.

The meeting that lawmakers had with national security adviser Stephen Hadley came as GOP Sens. Olympia Snowe and Chuck Hagel announced they would back Democratic legislation ordering combat to end next spring.

Republican support for the war has steadily eroded in recent weeks as the White House prepares an interim progress report that finds the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad has made little progress in meeting major targets of reform.

Of the GOP lawmakers who say the U.S. should reduce its military role in Iraq, nearly all are up for re-election in 2008.

It's interesting to see that politicians have a tendency to listen to the American Public only when their jobs in Washington is at stake.
0 Replies
 
xingu
 
  1  
Reply Wed 11 Jul, 2007 01:07 pm
How we make terrorist. This is a lengthy article in The Nation. I will present excerpts.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070730/hedges/2


Quote:
The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness
by CHRIS HEDGES & LAILA AL-ARIAN

[from the July 30, 2007 issue]

Over the past several months The Nation has interviewed fifty combat veterans of the Iraq War from around the United States in an effort to investigate the effects of the four-year-old occupation on average Iraqi civilians. These combat veterans, some of whom bear deep emotional and physical scars, and many of whom have come to oppose the occupation, gave vivid, on-the-record accounts. They described a brutal side of the war rarely seen on television screens or chronicled in newspaper accounts.



Quote:
We heard a few reports, in one case corroborated by photo­graphs, that some soldiers had so lost their moral compass that they'd mocked or desecrated Iraqi corpses. One photo, among dozens turned over to The Nation during the investigation, shows an American soldier acting as if he is about to eat the spilled brains of a dead Iraqi man with his brown plastic Army-issue spoon.

"Take a picture of me and this ************," a soldier who had been in Sergeant Mejía's squad said as he put his arm around the corpse. Sergeant Mejía recalls that the shroud covering the body fell away, revealing that the young man was wearing only his pants. There was a bullet hole in his chest.

"Damn, they really fucked you up, didn't they?" the soldier laughed.

The scene, Sergeant Mejía said, was witnessed by the dead man's brothers and cousins.


Quote:
Those few veterans who said they did try to reach out to Iraqis encountered fierce hostility from those in their units.

"I had the night shift one night at the aid station," said Specialist Resta, recounting one such incident. "We were told from the first second that we arrived there, and this was in writing on the wall in our aid station, that we were not to treat Iraqi civilians unless they were about to die.... So these guys in the guard tower radio in, and they say they've got an Iraqi out there that's asking for a doctor.

"So it's really late at night, and I walk out there to the gate and I don't even see the guy at first, and they point out to him and he's standing there. Well, I mean he's sitting, leaned up against this concrete barrier--like the median of the highway--we had as you approached the gate. And he's sitting there leaned up against it and, uh, he's out there, if you want to go and check on him, he's out there. So I'm sitting there waiting for an interpreter, and the interpreter comes and I just walk out there in the open. And this guy, he has the **** kicked out of him. He was missing two teeth. He has a huge laceration on his head, he looked like he had broken his eye orbit and had some kind of injury to his knee."

The Iraqi, Specialist Resta said, pleaded with him in broken English for help. He told Specialist Resta that there were men near the base who were waiting to kill him.

"I open a bag and I'm trying to get bandages out and the guys in the guard tower are yelling at me, 'Get that ******* haji out of here,'" Specialist Resta said. "And I just look back at them and ignored them, and then they were saying, you know, 'He doesn't look like he's about to die to me,' 'Tell him to go cry back to the fuckin' IP [Iraqi police],' and, you know, a whole bunch of stuff like that. So, you know, I'm kind of ignoring them and trying to get the story from this guy, and our doctor rolls up in an ambulance and from thirty to forty meters away looks out and says, shakes his head and says, 'You know, he looks fine, he's gonna be all right,' and walks back to the passenger side of the ambulance, you know, kind of like, Get your ass over here and drive me back up to the clinic. So I'm standing there, and the whole time both this doctor and the guards are yelling at me, you know, to get rid of this guy, and at one point they're yelling at me, when I'm saying, 'No, let's at least keep this guy here overnight, until it's light out,' because they wanted me to send him back out into the city, where he told me that people were waiting for him to kill him.

"When I asked if he'd be allowed to stay there, at least until it was light out, the response was, 'Are you hearing this ****? I think Doc is part ******* haji,'" Specialist Resta said.

Specialist Resta gave in to the pressure and denied the man aid. The interpreter, he recalled, was furious, telling him that he had effectively condemned the man to death.

"So I walk inside the gate and the interpreter helps him up and the guy turns around to walk away and the guys in the guard tower go, say, 'Tell him that if he comes back tonight he's going to get ******* shot,'" Specialist Resta said. "And the interpreter just stared at them and looked at me and then looked back at them, and they nod their head, like, Yeah, we mean it. So he yells it to the Iraqi and the guy just flinches and turns back over his shoulder, and the interpreter says it again and he starts walking away again, you know, crying like a little kid. And that was that."


Quote:
The killing of unarmed Iraqis was so common many of the troops said it became an accepted part of the daily landscape. "The ground forces were put in that position," said First Lieut. Wade Zirkle of Shenandoah County, Virginia, who fought in Nasiriya and Falluja with the Second Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion from March to May 2003. "You got a guy trying to kill me but he's firing from houses...with civilians around him, women and children. You know, what do you do? You don't want to risk shooting at him and shooting children at the same time. But at the same time, you don't want to die either."

Sergeant Dougherty recounted an incident north of Nasiriya in December 2003, when her squad leader shot an Iraqi civilian in the back. The shooting was described to her by a woman in her unit who treated the injury. "It was just, like, the mentality of my squad leader was like, Oh, we have to kill them over here so I don't have to kill them back in Colorado," she said. "He just, like, seemed to view every Iraqi as like a potential terrorist."


Quote:
Several interviewees said that, on occasion, these killings were justified by framing innocents as terrorists, typically following incidents when American troops fired on crowds of unarmed Iraqis. The troops would detain those who survived, accusing them of being insurgents, and plant AK-47s next to the bodies of those they had killed to make it seem as if the civilian dead were combatants. "It would always be an AK because they have so many of these weapons lying around," said Specialist Aoun. Cavalry scout Joe Hatcher, 26, of San Diego, said 9-millimeter handguns and even shovels--to make it look like the noncombatant was digging a hole to plant an IED--were used as well.

"Every good cop carries a throwaway," said Hatcher, who served with the Fourth Cavalry Regiment, First Squadron, in Ad Dawar, halfway between Tikrit and Samarra, from February 2004 to March 2005. "If you kill someone and they're unarmed, you just drop one on 'em." Those who survived such shootings then found themselves imprisoned as accused insurgents.

In the winter of 2004, Sergeant Campbell was driving near a particularly dangerous road in Abu Gharth, a town west of Baghdad, when he heard gunshots. Sergeant Campbell, who served as a medic in Abu Gharth with the 256th Infantry Brigade from November 2004 to October 2005, was told that Army snipers had fired fifty to sixty rounds at two insurgents who'd gotten out of their car to plant IEDs. One alleged insurgent was shot in the knees three or four times, treated and evacuated on a military helicopter, while the other man, who was treated for glass shards, was arrested and detained.

"I come to find out later that, while I was treating him, the snipers had planted--after they had searched and found nothing--they had planted bomb-making materials on the guy because they didn't want to be investigated for the shoot," Sergeant Campbell said. (He showed The Nation a photograph of one sniper with a radio in his pocket that he later planted as evidence.) "And to this day, I mean, I remember taking that guy to Abu Ghraib prison--the guy who didn't get shot--and just saying 'I'm sorry' because there was not a damn thing I could do about it.... I mean, I guess I have a moral obligation to say something, but I would have been kicked out of the unit in a heartbeat. I would've been a traitor."


Quote:
During the summer of 2005, Sergeant Millard, who served as an assistant to a general in Tikrit, attended a briefing on a checkpoint shooting, at which his role was to flip PowerPoint slides.

"This unit sets up this traffic control point, and this 18-year-old kid is on top of an armored Humvee with a .50-caliber machine gun," he said. "This car speeds at him pretty quick and he makes a split-second decision that that's a suicide bomber, and he presses the butterfly trigger and puts 200 rounds in less than a minute into this vehicle. It killed the mother, a father and two kids. The boy was aged 4 and the daughter was aged 3. And they briefed this to the general. And they briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it to him. And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says, 'If these ******* hajis learned to drive, this **** wouldn't happen.'"

Whether or not commanding officers shared this attitude, interviewees said, troops were rarely held accountable for shooting civilians at checkpoints. Eight veterans described the prevailing attitude among them as "Better to be tried by twelve men than carried by six." Since the number of troops tried for killing civilians is so scant, interviewees said, they would risk court-martial over the possibility of injury or death.



And you wonder why they hate us when we're trying so hard to help them.
0 Replies
 
ican711nm
 
  1  
Reply Wed 11 Jul, 2007 01:14 pm
Cycloptichorn wrote:

...
Sorry, but I don't agree with your assessment that we should adopt a Reactionary position, basing our strategies off of threats from OBL.

There you go again distorting the meaning of what I post. I say we should base our strategy on what Osama said and did, and on what Osama says and does.

Al Qaeda in Iraq isn't the same group of people as the 'Al Qaeda' that attacked us, as you well know, but continually ignore. They don't take operational direction from them and there's not much evidence that they have anything other than a friendly relationship.

Malarkey! Al-Qaeda is a confederation of groups that perpetrate the suicidal mass murder of non-murderers with the expectation that such murders will earn them a place in paradise. Al-Qaeda in Iraq is one such group that is a member of that confederation. The common element among all these groups is the primary evidence of their cooperative relationship. All al-Qaeda members of the al-Qaeda confederation have one thing in common. They perpetrate suicidal mass murder of non-murderers believing that such murders will earn them a place in paradise.

Cycloptichorn
0 Replies
 
cicerone imposter
 
  1  
Reply Wed 11 Jul, 2007 01:15 pm
xingu, I heard some vets from Vietnam who told me similar stories as this one you posted during the Vietnam war.

We heard a few reports, in one case corroborated by photo­graphs, that some soldiers had so lost their moral compass that they'd mocked or desecrated Iraqi corpses. One photo, among dozens turned over to The Nation during the investigation, shows an American soldier acting as if he is about to eat the spilled brains of a dead Iraqi man with his brown plastic Army-issue spoon.
0 Replies
 
ican711nm
 
  1  
Reply Wed 11 Jul, 2007 01:30 pm
xingu wrote:
Actually we should listen to what he says. His religious preaching we can ignore. That's for the benefit of the believers. But the reasons he gives for attacking us we had better not ignore.

The interview with Robert Pape spells out very clearly how Bush and the Iraq invasion has and is still helping Al Qaeda. As long as our soldiers are in the Middle East Al Qaeda will be a viable force to be reckoned with.

Know thy enemy.

Al-Qaeda ridicules any actual or apparent withdrawal of the USA from confrontation with them. And they will do the same if we withdraw from Iraq before exterminating them.

If al-Qaeda really objected only to the USA presence in the Middle East, they would applaud not ridicule our withdrawals from there.

[quote="Osama Bin Laden in Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places"-1996,"]
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/terrorism/international/fatwa_1996.html
I say to you ... These youths [love] death as you love life.
…Those youths know that their rewards in fighting you, the USA, is double than their rewards in fighting some one else not from the people of the book. They have no intention except to enter paradise by killing you. An infidel, and enemy of God like you, cannot be in the same hell with his righteous executioner.
...
Few days ago the news agencies had reported that the Defence Secretary of the Crusading Americans had said that "the explosion at Riyadh and Al-Khobar had taught him one lesson: that is not to withdraw when attacked by coward terrorists".

We say to the Defence Secretary that his talk can induce a grieving mother to laughter! and shows the fears that had enshrined you all. Where was this false courage of yours when the explosion in Beirut took place on 1983 AD (1403 A.H). You were turned into scattered pits and pieces at that time; 241 mainly marines solders were killed. And where was this courage of yours when two explosions made you to leave Aden in lees than twenty four hours!

But your most disgraceful case was in Somalia; where- after vigorous propaganda about the power of the USA and its post cold war leadership of the new world order- you moved tens of thousands of international force, including twenty eight thousands American solders into Somalia. However, when tens of your solders were killed in minor battles and one American Pilot was dragged in the streets of Mogadishu you left the area carrying disappointment, humiliation, defeat and your dead with you. Clinton appeared in front of the whole world threatening and promising revenge , but these threats were merely a preparation for withdrawal. You have been disgraced by Allah and you withdrew; the extent of your impotence and weaknesses became very clear. It was a pleasure for the "heart" of every Muslim and a remedy to the "chests" of believing nations to see you defeated in the three Islamic cities of Beirut , Aden and Mogadishu.[/quote]
0 Replies
 
Cycloptichorn
 
  1  
Reply Wed 11 Jul, 2007 01:32 pm
Well gosh, we can't have them making fun of us, now can we?

It's nice to see your real motives for wanting to stay shining through, Ican: so that we won't get ridiculed by the enemy.

Cycloptichorn
0 Replies
 
cicerone imposter
 
  1  
Reply Wed 11 Jul, 2007 03:05 pm
Some people just don't "get it." Al Qaeda will use our staying or leaving with ridicule. Some people also never learn why once you f.... up the works, there's no winning by staying or leaving; except leaving saves our people and treasure.
0 Replies
 
cicerone imposter
 
  1  
Reply Wed 11 Jul, 2007 10:26 pm
U.S. intel warns al-Qaida has rebuilt



By KATHERINE SHRADER and MATTHEW LEE, Associated Press Writers
53 minutes ago



WASHINGTON - U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded al-Qaida has rebuilt its operating capability to a level not seen since just before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, The Associated Press has learned.

The conclusion suggests that the network that launched the most devastating terror attack on the United States has been able to regroup along the Afghan-Pakistani border despite nearly six years of bombings, war and other tactics aimed at crippling it.

Still, numerous government officials say they know of no specific, credible threat of a new attack on U.S. soil.


We now have al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. Good show, Bush! Have you ever done anything right?
0 Replies
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  1  
Reply Thu 12 Jul, 2007 12:34 am
The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness, by Chris Hedges and Laila al-Arian, appears in the 30 July issue of The Nation:

Quote:
[...]
"It would always be an AK because they have so many of these lying around," said Joe Hatcher, 26, a scout with the 4th Calvary Regiment. He revealed the army also planted 9mm handguns and shovels to make it look like the civilians were shot while digging a hole for a roadside bomb.
[...]
Lieutenant Brady Van Engelen, 26, of Washington DC, 1st Armoured Division. Eight-month tour of Baghdad beginning Sept 2003

"I guess while I was there, the general attitude was, 'A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi... You know, so what?'... [Only when we got home] in... meeting other veterans, it seems like the guilt really takes place, takes root, then."
[...]
Sergeant Camilo Mejía, 31, from Miami, National Guardsman, 1-124 Infantry Battalion, 53rd Infantry Brigade. Six-month tour beginning April 2003

"I just remember thinking, 'I just brought terror to someone under the American flag'."

Sergeant Timothy John Westphal, 31, of Denver, 18th Infantry Brigade, 1st Infantry Division. In Tikrit on year-long tour beginning February 2004

"A lot of guys really supported that whole concept that if they don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're not as human as us, so we can do what we want."
[...]
Source
0 Replies
 
xingu
 
  1  
Reply Thu 12 Jul, 2007 08:36 am
Walter Hinteler wrote:
The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness, by Chris Hedges and Laila al-Arian, appears in the 30 July issue of The Nation:

Quote:
[...]
"It would always be an AK because they have so many of these lying around," said Joe Hatcher, 26, a scout with the 4th Calvary Regiment. He revealed the army also planted 9mm handguns and shovels to make it look like the civilians were shot while digging a hole for a roadside bomb.
[...]
Lieutenant Brady Van Engelen, 26, of Washington DC, 1st Armoured Division. Eight-month tour of Baghdad beginning Sept 2003

"I guess while I was there, the general attitude was, 'A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi... You know, so what?'... [Only when we got home] in... meeting other veterans, it seems like the guilt really takes place, takes root, then."
[...]
Sergeant Camilo Mejía, 31, from Miami, National Guardsman, 1-124 Infantry Battalion, 53rd Infantry Brigade. Six-month tour beginning April 2003

"I just remember thinking, 'I just brought terror to someone under the American flag'."

Sergeant Timothy John Westphal, 31, of Denver, 18th Infantry Brigade, 1st Infantry Division. In Tikrit on year-long tour beginning February 2004

"A lot of guys really supported that whole concept that if they don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're not as human as us, so we can do what we want."
[...]
Source


Ya, I read this earlier. How to make Muslims love us.

Invade their countries, kill their people and sit back and ask; "Why do they hate us?"

"Oh, I know why, they hate freedom."

What's a haji? Something less than human.
0 Replies
 
cicerone imposter
 
  1  
Reply Thu 12 Jul, 2007 09:04 am
Yeah, and Bush wants to "stay the course" to continue our occupation and the killing to make more friends and influence people - the wrong way. If we think al Qaeda is a problem today, watch out for tomorrow!
0 Replies
 
cicerone imposter
 
  1  
Reply Thu 12 Jul, 2007 09:11 am
Bush has a one-track brain.

Report on Iraq shows mixed results

By LOLITA C. BALDOR and ANNE FLAHERTY, Associated Press Writers
21 minutes ago



The Iraqi government has not yet fully met any of 18 goals for political, military and economic reform, the Bush administration said Thursday in an interim report certain to inflame debate in Congress over growing calls for a U.S. troop withdrawal.

In an assessment required by Congress, the administration accused Syria of fostering a network that supplies as many as 50 to 80 suicide bombers per month for al-Qaida in Iraq. It also said Iran continues to fund extremist groups.

The report said that despite progress on some fronts by the government of Nouri al-Maliki, "the security situation in Iraq remains complex and extremely challenging," the "economic picture is uneven" and political reconciliation is lagging.

At a news conference that coincided with the report's release, President Bush said, "I believe we should succeed in Iraq and I know we must."

The report warned of "tough fighting" during the summer, as U.S. and Iraqi forces "seek to seize the initiative from early gains and shape conditions of longer-term stabilization."

It's been "tough fighting" for the past four years; Bush can't remember the obvious.

While President Bush announced last winter he was ordering thousands of additional troops to the war zone, the full complement has only arrived in recent weeks. "The full surge in this respect has only just begun," the report said.
0 Replies
 
cicerone imposter
 
  1  
Reply Thu 12 Jul, 2007 09:22 am
Maybe General Petraeus didn't know, but Bush said:

Bush Says We'll Be in Iraq for 50 Years, But Reporters Don't Bother to Ask Iraqis to Comment
By Joshua Holland and Raed Jarrar, AlterNet
Posted on June 8, 2007, Printed on July 12, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/53469/
On May 25, George Bush signed a defense bill that outlawed the construction of (new) permanent bases in Iraq. But only five days later, White House press flack Tony Snow told reporters that the president is now modeling the future of his bloody signature project on the half-century U.S. experience in South Korea, with troops in Iraq for the long haul to provide, in Snow's words, "a security presence" and to serve as a "force of stability."

Asked how long that commitment would last, Snow said, "A long time." Tens of thousands of U.S. troops have been stationed in South Korea since 1953 -- for 54 years.

In the days that followed Snow's revelation, senior Pentagon officials weighed in with their support for applying the Korea Model to Iraq: keeping a few divisions of U.S. troops in-country for the next five decades or so sounded just about right to them.

It was such a naked acknowledgement of America's long-term designs on carving out a strategic foothold in the region that even the milquetoast American press had to acknowledge it, and most of the major news outlets ran stories in the last week that at least touched on the Iraq hawks' shiny new analogy.

But we noticed something fascinating when reading those articles: In story after story, U.S. reporters were quick to seek comment from White House officials and to "balance" those comments with quotes from congressional Democrats and from analysts at various D.C. think tanks who are critical of the administration. They talked to foreign policy and military experts, historians and even Korea experts.

But here's the rub: None of the reporters we read bothered to pick up a phone and call Baghdad to get reactions from, well, actual Iraqis.
0 Replies
 
BumbleBeeBoogie
 
  1  
Reply Thu 12 Jul, 2007 10:47 am
Report on Iraq Sees Progress; Bush Rejects Troop Pullout
July 12, 2007
Report on Iraq Sees Progress; Bush Rejects Troop Pullout
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
New York Times

With the release this morning of a White House report finding some progress on political and security goals in Iraq, President Bush said today that it was premature and "not the real debate" to be talking now about a withdrawal of American troops.

The report said the Iraqi government had shown satisfactory performance so far on 8 of the 18 benchmarks, including modernizing its military forces. But more work was needed on eight others, it said, including preparations for local elections. And in two areas, it was not yet possible to judge how things are going.

The president held a news conference at 10:30 a.m. Eastern time, shortly after the report was released.

In his opening remarks, Mr. Bush sought to reiterate his policies in Iraq, and to deflect the discussion away from the question of when and how to start withdrawing troops. "This is not the real debate," he said.

He said that support for the Iraqi government and sustained military pressure must be increased at this "crucial moment," as troops work to defeat Al Qaeda and other extremists; and thereby create the conditions allowing American forces to return home. Asked at the news conference why he was resistant to the idea of a change of course in Iraq, which has found wide support among Americans in recent polls, Mr. Bush said he was not surprised that there was deep concern. "I believe we can succeed," he said, "and I believe we are making security progress that will enable the political track to succeed as well."

The report also forecast a rise in attacks by insurgents in the coming months.

It said that Al Qaeda in Iraq, a local insurgent group that has claimed a loose affiliation with the Al Qaeda of Osama bin Laden's network, would probably step up its attacks in the coming months.

"The surge of additional U.S. forces into these areas allows us to better combat AQI and other terrorists," the report said. "We should expect, however, that AQI will attempt to increase its tempo of attacks as September approaches, in an effort to influence U.S. domestic opinion about sustained U.S. engagement in Iraq."

On the political front, the report said that significant progress had been made on both substantive issues and technical details in the constitutional review process, and it gave a mixed assessment on several aspects of the elections commission.

There has been a lack of satisfactory progress on de-Ba'athification, it said.

"This is among the most divisive political issues for Iraq, and compromise will be extremely difficult," the report said. "Given the lack of satisfactory progress, we have not achieved the desired reconciliation effect that meaningful and broadly accepted de-Ba'athification reform might bring about."

There has also been unsatisfactory progress on equitable distribution of oil and gas revenue, the report said.

But it praised the Iraqi government's quick reactions to condemn major attacks, such as the recent one in Samara last month.

While the White House report noted progress in the military realm, with an overall decrease in the numbers of Iraqi civilians killed in sectarian violence and in casualties from car and truck bomb blasts, some of the benchmarks have not been met in that section, such as improvements in the ability and political neutrality of the Iraqi security forces and the Iraqi government.

It largely pinned any further gains on increased troop activity in the coming months, capitalizing on the troop surge.

"Tough fighting should be expected through the summer as Coalition and Iraqi Forces seek to seize the initiative from early gains and shape conditions for longer-term stabilization," the report said. "These combined operations, named Operation Phantom Thunder, were launched on June 15, 2007, after the total complement of surge forces arrived in Iraq. The full surge in this respect has only just begun."

The administration's decision to qualify many of the political benchmarks will enable it to present a more optimistic assessment than if it had provided the pass-fail judgment sought by Congress when it approved funding for the war this spring.

The administration officials who provided details of the draft report, in advance of its official release, to The New York Times, insisted on anonymity, partly to rebut claims by members of Congress in recent days that almost no progress had been made in Iraq since President Bush altered course by ordering the deployment of about 30,000 additional troops earlier this year.
-------------------------------------------

John F. Burns contributed reporting from Baghdad and David S. Cloud contributed reporting from Washington, D.C.
0 Replies
 
BumbleBeeBoogie
 
  1  
Reply Thu 12 Jul, 2007 10:49 am
Which Iraq Benchmarks Are Being Met?
Which Iraq Benchmarks Are Being Met?
A Look Behind the Numbers: Are Important Goals Being Met?
July 12, 2007
ABC News

President Bush defended his decision to stay the course in Iraq today, while discussing a new report that says the Iraqi government has failed to make satisfactory progress in eight of 18 congressional mandates.

Bush said he would wait until September before making any decisions on changing his war policy.

"I believe we should succeed in Iraq and I know we must," Bush told reporters during a televised White House news conference.

During the news conference, Bush announced that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates would travel to the Middle East in August to "reassure our friends that the Middle East remains a vital strategic priority for the United States."

In response to congressional efforts to change the president's Iraq policy, Bush said that while he respected their efforts, "Congress should not be running the war, they should be funding our troops."

President Bush insisted that while he is "realistic about the consequences of failure," he believes that what happens in Iraq matters to U.S. security.

He also rejected a report saying that al Qaeda is stronger today than since 9/11, saying the terrorist organization "is still a threat."

Meanwhile Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called the Iraq report "discouraging" and further confirmation that the "war in Iraq is headed in a dangerous direction." He added that the United States needs to change "course now, not in September."

The Iraq Progress Report

In the security category, progress on three of eight benchmarks were marked satisfactory. The satisfactory categories were providing Iraqi brigades for the surge, setting up joint security stations with the Americans and reducing the level of sectarian violence.

In other categories considered key to success in Iraq, such as ensuring that Iraqi security forces are providing evenhanded enforcement and increasing the number of Iraqi forces capable of operating independently, the report determined progress had not been satisfactory.

The report concludes that the Iraqi forces, a major part of Bush's strategy, simply have "not made sufficient progress."

Of nine benchmarks on the political front, only four were found satisfactory, and those were hardly significant achievements.

For example, a "review committee" was formed and "legislation on procedures" was implemented.

Areas where there was not sufficient progress included political reconciliation and disarming militias  both areas vital to Iraq's future.

The one satisfactory economic benchmark involved the allocation of funds, but the money has yet to be spent so the Iraqi people have not seen the results.

The report cites one reason for the difficulties, saying, "The increasing concern among Iraqi political leaders that the U.S. may not have a long-term commitment to Iraq has served in recent months to reinforce hedging behaviors and made the hardest political bargains even more difficult."

The president stressed that the report released today was only an interim snapshot.
0 Replies
 
BumbleBeeBoogie
 
  1  
Reply Thu 12 Jul, 2007 10:53 am
0 Replies
 
ican711nm
 
  1  
Reply Thu 12 Jul, 2007 11:13 am
Cycloptichorn wrote:
Well gosh, we can't have them making fun of us, now can we?

It's nice to see your real motives for wanting to stay shining through, Ican: so that we won't get ridiculed by the enemy.

Cycloptichorn

That is really stupid malarkey!

I provided you evidence based on al-Qaeda's past performance that the USA pulling out of Iraq would cause al-Qaeda to accelerate its suicidal mass murder of non-murderers, and not decelerate it.

I cannot believe you are dumb enough to believe what you posted. However, I can only speculate on what led you to post such bunkum. You are however starting to resemble Joseph Paul Goebbels, 1897-1945, Nazis propagandist.

He was Adolf Hitler's propaganda servant. Are you George Soros's propaganda servant or are you merely campaigning for the job?
0 Replies
 
Cycloptichorn
 
  1  
Reply Thu 12 Jul, 2007 11:17 am
I invoke Godwin's law against you, ICan. You automatically have lost your part of the argument.

But, I'll go on anyways, just b/c it's fun.

Quote:


I provided you evidence based on al-Qaeda's past performance that the USA pulling out of Iraq would cause al-Qaeda to accelerate its suicidal mass murder of non-murderers, and not decelerate it.


Actually, you haven't shown evidence of this.

Also, you haven't shown evidence that AQ will be murdering US citizens and troops at a greater rate. I don't feel any particular need for the US to defend other countries from AQ, so that's not really a part of the current calculation, is it?

Cycloptichorn
0 Replies
 
cicerone imposter
 
  1  
Reply Thu 12 Jul, 2007 11:22 am
Cyclo, There is another side to the al Qaeda story; they have increased their members in Iraq - all thanks to Bush, so they probably do have an effect on our soldires. Now, Bushco is worried about other countries "might" get involved if we pull out of Iraq. How did this dummy graduate high school? College? You're kidding!
0 Replies
 
BumbleBeeBoogie
 
  1  
Reply Thu 12 Jul, 2007 11:22 am
Bob Woodward: CIA Said Instability Seemed Irreversible
CIA Said Instability Seemed 'Irreversible'
By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 12, 2007; A01

Early on the morning of Nov. 13, 2006, members of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group gathered around a dark wooden conference table in the windowless Roosevelt Room of the White House.

For more than an hour, they listened to President Bush give what one panel member called a "Churchillian" vision of "victory" in Iraq and defend the country's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. "A constitutional order is emerging," he said.

Later that morning, around the same conference table, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden painted a starkly different picture for members of the study group. Hayden said "the inability of the government to govern seems irreversible," adding that he could not "point to any milestone or checkpoint where we can turn this thing around," according to written records of his briefing and the recollections of six participants.

"The government is unable to govern," Hayden concluded. "We have spent a lot of energy and treasure creating a government that is balanced, and it cannot function."

Later in the interview, he qualified the statement somewhat: "A government that can govern, sustain and defend itself is not achievable," he said, "in the short term."

Hayden's bleak assessment, which came just a week after Republicans had lost control of Congress and Bush had dismissed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, was a pivotal moment in the study group's intensive examination of the Iraq war, and it helped shape its conclusion in its final report that the situation in Iraq was "grave and deteriorating."

In the eight months since the interview, neither Hayden nor any other high-ranking administration official has publicly described the Iraqi government in the uniformly negative terms that the CIA director used in his closed-door briefing.

Among the 79 specific recommendations the Iraq Study Group made to Bush was withdrawing support for the Maliki government unless it showed "substantial progress" on security and national reconciliation. And it recommended changing the primary mission of U.S. forces from combat to training Iraqis so that combat units could be withdrawn by early 2008.

In effect, the report from the bipartisan group -- co-chaired by former secretary of state James A. Baker III, a Republican, and former congressman Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.) -- was an urgent message from the old Washington establishment to the Bush administration to change the direction of its Iraq policy. But Bush did not initially embrace any of the key recommendations, although bipartisan groups in the House and Senate have recently introduced legislation that would make them official U.S. policy.

Instead, the president in January announced that he was sending more troops to Iraq as part of a "surge," which he said would lead to the victory that had so far eluded U.S. forces.

Both Bush and Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, have repeatedly said that there is no military solution to Iraq and that the sectarian strife and the insurgency can be resolved only by the Iraqi government.

Hayden's description of Iraq's dysfunctional government provides some insight into the intelligence community's analysis of Maliki and the situation on the ground. Five days before his testimony, national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley had written a memo to Bush raising doubts about Maliki's ability to curb violence in Iraq, but his assessment was not as bleak as Hayden's.

Bush's own optimistic statement to members of the study group did not reflect the viewpoint of his CIA director. But a statement from another administration official interviewed by the panel the same day -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice -- took it into account.

Asked by former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a member of the study group, if she was aware of the CIA's grim evaluation of Iraq, Rice replied, "We are aware of the dark assessment," but quickly added: "It is not without hope."

A spokesman for the CIA, Mark Mansfield, disputed this account of Hayden's testimony to members of the study group. "That is not an accurate reflection of what Director Hayden said at that meeting, nor does it reflect his view, then or now," Mansfield said.

A senior intelligence official familiar with Hayden's session with the Iraq Study Group said that Hayden told the panel his assessment was "somber" and acknowledged that Hayden had used the term "irreversible." But the official insisted that Hayden instead said, "The current situation, with regard to governance in Iraq, was probably irreversible in the short term, because of the world views of many of the [Iraqi] government leaders, which were shaped by a sectarian filter and a government that was organized for its ethnic and religious balance rather than competence or capacity."

But another senior intelligence official confirmed the thrust and detail of Hayden's assessment, saying that the intelligence out of Iraq this month shows that the ability of the Maliki government to execute decisions and govern Iraq remains "awful."

Hayden, 62, a four-star Air Force general and career intelligence officer, has a reputation as a candid briefer. Since 2003, the CIA, which has more than 500 personnel in Iraq to assist in providing intelligence and analysis, has offered the most pessimistic view of any intelligence agency of both the Iraqi government's performance and the situation on the ground there.

Testifying publicly before the Senate Armed Services Committee two days after meeting with the study group, Hayden was more cautious in his conclusions. He said that there were serious problems in Iraq but that the government was "functioning."

Former defense secretary William J. Perry, one of the five Democrats on the Iraq Study Group, confirmed that Hayden told them the Iraqi government seemed beyond repair.

"That was what we'd been hearing everywhere," Perry said. "He just said it a little more clearly and more explicitly than other people."

O'Connor, a Republican, also confirmed Hayden's assessment. She said she did not agree with his conclusion that it was irreversible, but she said she was pessimistic.

"It is a dire situation," she said. "I don't think it has gotten any better. It just breaks your heart. . . . Iraqi people are dying, American soldiers are dying. So far it does not seem we have achieved any kind of security there."

Arriving at the White House on the morning of Nov. 13, members of the study group spent the day interviewing almost every key figure involved in Iraq policy. In addition to Hayden, Bush and Rice, they also questioned Rumsfeld; Gen. Peter Pace, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Zalmay Khalilzad, then U.S. ambassador to Iraq; and, by videoconference from Baghdad, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., then the top U.S. commander in Iraq.

Bush was joined in the interview by Vice President Cheney, White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten and Hadley, but they did not speak. "We thought with that whole group there, we were going to get briefings, we were going to get discussions," said Perry. "Instead the president held forth on his views on how important the war was, and how it was tough."

In his meeting with members of the study group, Hayden described a situation in which the Iraqi government either would not or could not control the violence consuming the country and questioned whether it made sense to strengthen its security forces. He depicted the United States as facing mainly bad choices in the future.

"Our leaving Iraq would make the situation worse," Hayden said. "Our staying in Iraq may not make it better. Our current approach without modification will not make it better."

According to the written record and others in the room, Hayden at one point likened the situation in Iraq to a marathon. He said there comes a point in each race when the runner knows he can complete the challenge. But Hayden said he could see no such point in Iraq's future.

"The levers of power are not connected to anything," he said, adding: "We have placed all of our energies in creating the center, and the center cannot accomplish anything."

Numerous U.S. generals already had told the study group that success in Iraq could not come without national reconciliation between the Sunnis and Shiites. Hayden agreed, saying: "The Iraqi identity is muted. The Sunni or Shia identity is foremost."

But he clearly saw no end to sectarian killings. "Given the level of uncontrolled violence," Hayden said, "the most we can do is to contain its excesses and preserve the possibility of reconciliation in the future."

He compared the Iraq situation to the prolonged warfare in the Balkans. "In Bosnia, the parties fought themselves to exhaustion," Hayden said, suggesting that the same scenario could play out in Iraq. "They might just have to fight this out to exhaustion."

Hayden catalogued what he saw as the main sources of violence in this order: the insurgency, sectarian strife, criminality, general anarchy and, lastly, al-Qaeda. Though Hayden had listed al-Qaeda as the fifth most pressing threat in Iraq, Bush regularly lists al-Qaeda first.

Members of the study group said Hayden's stark assessment of the Iraqi government dovetailed with what they had heard in September during their visit to Iraq. There, they met with a senior CIA official who held an equally unenthusiastic view. "Maliki was nobody's pick," the CIA official had said, according to written notes from that meeting. "His name came up late. He has no real power base in the country or in parliament. We need not expect much from him."

Given the constant threats and persistent violence, the official had said, it was remarkable that Iraqi government employees showed up for work.

"We continue to be amazed that the Iraqis accept such high levels of violence," he told the study group. "Maliki thinks two car bombs a day, 100 dead a day, is okay. It's sustainable and his government is survivable."

But the government itself was responsible for some of that violence, the CIA official said. "The Ministry of Interior is uniformed death squads, overseers of jails and torture facilities," he said. "Their funds are constantly misappropriated."

In his testimony, Hayden said that the United States had fundamental disagreements with Maliki's Shiite-dominated government on some of the most basic issues facing Iraq.

"We and the Iraqi government do not agree on who the enemy is," Hayden said, according to the written record. "For all the senior leaders of the Iraqi government, Baathists are the source of evil. There is a Baathist behind every bush."

Several participants in the interview described Hayden as dismayed by the startling level of violence in the country but skeptical of the ability of Iraqi forces -- either the military or the police -- to do anything about it.

"It's a legitimate question whether strengthening the Iraqi security forces helps or hurts when they are viewed as a predatory element," he said. "Strengthening Iraqi security forces is not unalloyed good. Without qualification, this judgment applies to the police."

In one bit of qualified good news, he said that the training of the Iraqi army had produced better results than that of the police. "The army is uneven," he said, adding: "Uneven, in this case, is good."

Hayden's frustration with Maliki provides a context to the administration's continuing efforts to pressure the Iraqi leader into finding a political settlement between Sunni and Shiite factions in Iraq. During one week last month, three senior administration officials visited Baghdad to try to speed up the political process.

In her testimony Nov. 13, Rice recounted her discussions with Maliki in which she bluntly told him the importance of making progress on national unity and reconciliation. Rice said she had told the prime minister, "Pretty soon, you'll all be swinging from lampposts if you don't hang together."
------------------------------------------

Brady Dennis and Evelyn Duffy contributed to this report.
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