The June 14, 2007 Informed Comment "Samarra Fallout - Surge not working" at http://www.juancole.com/ explains that al-Sadr might pull his members out of the Iraq parliament as a protest against the US occupiers and al-Sadr might be the only one to gain from the recent Samarra shrine destruction as "The Iraqi parliament, many of whose members live abroad, cannot get a quorum without the Sadrists (32 seats), who are more likely to be in Baghdad for votes. The Sadrists are blaming "the hidden hand of the Occupation" for the bombing (i.e. it is Bush's fault.)
If they really do suspend participation in parliament, it would probably mean that no benchmark legislation will be passed any time soon-not the petroleum law, not revision of the laws on de-Baathification, not constitutional amendments."
Since "Sadrists are blaming "the hidden hand of the Occupation" for the bombing" why are we there? Sadr is in charge of the extremist, Shiite, jihadist Death Squads operating in Iraq. He is capable of derailing the political reconciliation of Iraq as when he tells his bloc to stay away from the Iraqi parliament they can't even get a quorum. No quorum-no political reconciliation.
The article "Big Boost In Iraqi Forces Is Urged" at click here "A senior U.S. military commander said yesterday that Iraq's army must expand its rolls by at least 20,000 more soldiers than Washington had anticipated, to help free U.S. troops from conducting daily patrols, checkpoints and other critical yet dangerous missions.
Even then, Iraq will remain incapable of taking full responsibility for its security for many years-five years in the case of protecting its airspace-and will require a long-term military relationship with the United States, said Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, who until recently led the U.S. military's training effort in Iraq."
What is the number of Iraqis helping in the security of their country? Whatever it is it is fewer than what they agreed to provide. W is doing "fuzzy math" as our soldiers die as "That number does not include tens of thousands more Iraqi soldiers who will be required to fill vacant slots in the country's army, which has an annual attrition rate of 15 to 18 percent. The extra manpower is partly needed because roughly 25 percent of Iraqi soldiers are on leave at any given time. The requirement is particularly acute for Iraqi army battalions rotating into Baghdad, because roughly a quarter of their troops stay behind in their home provinces to guard bases and towns. "A deployable army for the entire nation is somewhat of a new concept for them," Dempsey said.
He pointed out that when units showed up in Baghdad at 50 percent strength for their 90-day rotations, the American officers were upset, but "senior military leaders of the Iraqi government were kind of pleased that they had gotten 50 percent to come."
I thought algebra was the language of science. With Rove words and numbers have the meaning that his propaganda peddlers attribute to them.
An example of this is "Dempsey said Iraqi army rolls are inflated by soldiers who are severely wounded but are still paid because the government lacks retirement money for them. An Iraqi army commander might also corruptly over-report the number of troops he has, Dempsey said, "so that he gets a payroll share more than he deserves and thereby pocket it." Sectarian agendas also afflict the hiring and firing process."
Some of the security forces we have trained could be killing us as "Of the 32,000 Iraqi police lost from the U.S.-and-foreign-trained force of 188,000 in the 18 months before January, more than 14,000 were killed or severely wounded, 5,000 deserted, and the rest are "unaccounted for," he said. Asked whether the absent police could be fighting U.S. troops, Dempsey replied, "We just don't know," adding that he is trying to track how many of the U.S.-trained forces end up in U.S. custody "down the road."
People we train to kill are showing up in the group of those who are killing us! The 13,000 of the Iraqi police lost might be double-dippers-as they might be still getting paid by us, through our funding of the Iraqi security apparatus and also being paid by insurgents to kill us. We're giving Sunni insurgents money and material to fight Al-Qaeda. When they tire of fighting Al-Qaeda they'll have our money and material to fight us. Not only does Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, who led the U.S. military's training in Iraq think we are paying the Sunni insurgents to kill our soldiers but the article "Tribal Coalition in Anbar Said to Be Crumbling" at click here also and puts it thusly "But the divisions within the coalition underscore what many see as a central dilemma: Should the United States be sponsoring profit-oriented tribal groups that involve themselves in sometimes fragile alliances and that could turn against U.S. troops? "The question with a group like this always is, does it stay bought?" said Anthony H. Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, referring to suggestions that the United States is paying for loyalty from the tribes.Although backing the tribal coalition looks like "the least bad option" under the current circumstances, he said, "The key is, what can the Iraqi government offer them over time, and is it enough for them to stay with the bargain?"
Why are we there? One of the reasons is that, according to Wolfowitz, is that Iraq is on a "sea of oil".
click here
shows that oil is still playing a big role. Why would a military commander be stressing it though as "In a Sunday afternoon discussion that mixed gentle coaxing with a sober appraisal of politics in Baghdad and Washington, the commander, Adm. William J. Fallon, told Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki that the Iraqi government should aim to complete a law on the division of oil proceeds by next month."
A politician, Bob Dole blurted out prior to Bush 41's attack of Iraq that it was for the oil also-not a response to an act of "naked aggression" as 41 duplicitously stated. Politicians can bluster about natural resources, but should an Admiral, such as Fallon? Why wasn't Fallon concerned more about de-Baathification or provincial elections, more natural military worries?
Remember blow-back? The article does as "The dangers of embracing tribal groups are perhaps most vividly illustrated by the U.S. experience in Afghanistan. There, the United States and its allies, particularly Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, armed Afghan mujaheddin groups, often organized along tribal lines, in their fight against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. After the Soviets withdrew in 1989, those weapons helped fuel a civil war and subsequently became part of the arsenal used by the Taliban, Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda and other groups in the current fight against U.S. forces and their allies in Afghanistan."
W has to realize that the people he is giving guns to now are currently killing al-Qaeda, but they also want to kill US infidels.
"We hate al-Qaeda, but at the same time we don't like the Americans," said Emad Jasem, 23, from the Soufiya district, north of Ramadi. Although they were cooperating with U.S. troops because of "overlapping interests," he said, "no one should jump to the conclusion that we are on the side of the Americans and support them. Our loyalty is to our community and our city."
The article "Permanent Bases in Iraq Will Be a Provocation" at click here the fact that even if Petraeus' September report is negative W won't consider the phased redeployment of US troops from Iraq as "It took the Bush administration more than four years from the time US forces invaded Iraq to formulate this thought - or, more precisely, to promulgate it. There's
substantial evidence that the administration has actually envisioned, and been building, permanent, large-scale US military bases in Iraq for two years. But until the past couple of weeks, it denied it had plans for permanent bases there. As reporter Spencer Ackerman noted in an American Prospect article last fall documenting the plans for permanent bases in Iraq, the official response of administration officials when
asked about a permanent US occupation was to deny any such desire. Early last year, Zalmay Khalilzad, then the US ambassador to Iraq, told Congress, "We have no goal of establishing permanent bases.'' But that was then. With public tolerance for the president's war in Iraq about at its end, the White House is compelled to come up with a less costly (in lives, limbs and dollars) way to keep our forces in Iraq. That way, apparently, is to concentrate our troops in a small number of vast, well-fortified, permanent installations. In 2005, Ackerman reported, planners designated four massive bases to which US forces could be deployed: Camp Victory in Baghdad; a second base near the city of Balad in Anbar province; a third in the town of Rawah, near the Syrian border, and the huge air base at Tallil, south of Baghdad. The entire pattern of this war has been to deploy first and create a theory later to justify the deployment. Now that support for the war is at an all-time low, it's plainly time for the theory to justify the long-term presence of US forces. Desperate times breed desperate analogies. Enter South Korea."
There are hypocritical reasons that GOP ghouls can spout off for keeping us bogged down in this age's old Iraqi sectarian violence, but they can't get themselves to speak truthfully about W's hidden agenda of permanent bases in the Middle East. The fact is that bin laden always lists US military in the Arabic world as the primary reason for jihad. Also-and most important to GOP goons who always have their eyes on the next election, US voters don't want our troops in the Middle East as we were told by big bro 43's team that the Iraq war would be quick and painless.
The article states "Permanent US bases in Iraq would also be a continual target for any number of Iraqis
not reconciled to a permanent US presence. They would be viewed, in the region and through much of the world, as a neocolonial provocation. They would by their very existence swell the ranks of jihadists. They would, in short, be the worst possible platform for fighting Al-Qaeda, particularly when we can deploy intelligence units within Iraq and station Special Forces troops outside but nearby. Iraq's not Korea. It's not Germany. It's a living hell, which we helped create, and redeploying our forces to bases there is more like selecting the level of the inferno to which we condemn them."
Remember what Rumsfeld said years ago in his "slog" speech. In it he wondered if we could kill enough jihadists to match the number of new recruits we are making by the very fact that we are killing jihadists?
We all remember W throwing out the report of the Iraq Study group to beg us to
give his "surge" until September. Well September has changed into whatever W wants it to mean.
The article "September Song and Dance" at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/14/AR2007061401740_ pf.html states "Here's a surprise: Remember how we were told that if we just waited until the fall, we'd see that George W. Bush's "surge" was working in Iraq? Well, now it turns out that we shouldn't expect answers in September after all. White House spokesman Tony Snow was purposeful on Wednesday in stomping, trampling, tap-dancing upon and otherwise giving a definitive beat-down to any expectations of a serious, fact-based reassessment of Iraq policy in the fall. Never mind that the White House raised those expectations in the first place. The September scenario has been a rhetorical mainstay for the administration and its supporters, a major argument for ignoring all the bad news from Iraq and giving Bush's troop escalation a chance to work. Let's wait for Gen. David H. Petraeus, the man who's now running the war, to submit his progress report. At that point, went the White House argument, the "way forward" would become clear."... Snow said he was emphasizing "metrics" because he knew that in September, "some people are going to try to make the argument, if the job is not done and if they haven't perfected it and if they haven't achieved all the-then it's a failure. I wanted to guard against that."
Precisely. In the world of retail, this is known as bait-and-switch."
This duplicity of W's administration has been persistent as "Every grudging concession, every ballyhooed initiative, every single announced change has been on the margins-dump Donald Rumsfeld, appoint Petraeus, order the "surge." Politicians, analysts and even generals can talk all they want about civil war, about redeployment, about phased withdrawal.
None of that is remotely on the president's agenda.
Will anything Petraeus says in his September report change Bush's determination to fight on in Iraq toward ill-defined "victory"-to "win" what has become a multifaceted mess of sectarian warfare that everyone is destined to lose? Almost certainly not. If there is a single encouraging paragraph in the entire document, Bush will seize on it as vindication."
Petraeus is already trying out propaganda as the article "Petraeus: Iraq 'Challenges' to Last for Years" at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/17/AR2007061700830.html
makes clear stating "Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, his diplomatic counterpart in Baghdad, said a key report they will deliver to Washington in September will include what Crocker called "an assessment of what the consequences might be if we pursue other directions." Noting the "unhelpful roles" being played by Iran and Syria in Iraq, Crocker said: "We've got to consider what could happen."
Comments by Petraeus on "Fox News Sunday" and Crocker on NBC's "Meet the Press" were an indication of the administration's evolving strategy for confronting rising congressional demands to begin planning troop withdrawals. In addition to warning about the possible regional consequences of withdrawal, both men emphasized a "mixed" picture on the ground, citing successes while acknowledging the difficulty of the task ahead."
Just a few days ago on June 14, 2007 the article "No Drop in Iraq Violence Seen Since Troop Buildup" at
click here summarized a Pentagon report as "Three months into the new U.S. military strategy that has sent tens of thousands of additional troops into Iraq, overall levels of violence in the country have not decreased, as attacks have shifted away from Baghdad and Anbar, where American forces are concentrated, only to rise in most other provinces."
Why can't the Pentagon report and Petraeus and Crocker agree that "After months of preparation, the Baghdad Security Operation is now fully underway less than one-third of Baghdad is secured".
They were given their talking points from Rove and "Petraeus and Crocker took issue with the portrayal of last week's Pentagon report as overwhelmingly negative."
W is trying to muddy the water. Originally we were supposed to be greeted as liberators and now September means whatever W says it means! We were looking for "WMD" that the Hussein's Sunni Baathists' allegedly possessed and now we are training and arming Sunni insurgents-conceivably all Baathist dead-enders, to kill us.
US soldiers are dying for what reason? Admiral Fallon is grilling Maliki about oil as we are building permanent bases to be near it. Our US soldiers can't trust a word from big bro 43 and Petraeus isn't agreeing with Pentagon reports.
Who can our soldiers have faith in when the goals and rationale for the war are constantly changing?
Related articles
"Samarra Fallout - Surge not working" at
The June 14, 2007 http://www.juancole.com/
"Big Boost In Iraqi Forces Is Urged" at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/12/AR2007061202179.html
"Tribal Coalition in Anbar Said to Be Crumbling" at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/10/AR2007061001453.html
"U.S. Warns Iraq That Progress Is Needed Soon" at
click here
"Permanent Bases in Iraq Will Be a Provocation" at
http://arabnews.com/?page=7 §ion=0&article=97409&d=12&m=6&y=2007&pix=opinion.
jpg&category=Opinion
"September Song and Dance" at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/14/AR2007061401740_pf.html
"Petraeus: Iraq 'Challenges' to Last for Years" at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/17/AR2007061700830.html
"No Drop in Iraq Violence Seen Since Troop Buildup" at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/13/AR2007061302357.html
