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EducateWorthington.org

The 912 Project - Glenn Beck

912 Group of Central Ohio

Please let me know if you'd like your link added

[“Facing eroding support for his Iraq policy, even among Republicans, President Bush on Thursday called al Qaida "the main enemy" in Iraq, an assertion rejected by his administration's senior intelligence analysts.“The reference, in a major speech at the Naval War College that referred to al Qaida at least 27 times, seemed calculated to use lingering outrage over the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to bolster support for the current buildup of U.S. troops in Iraq, despite evidence that sending more troops hasn't reduced the violence or sped Iraqi government action on key issues.”Read More: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/17471.html]

New White House Strategy to Avoid Responsibility of Iraq War Emerges

Al Qaeda blamed for the violence


From now until the next election al Qaeda and bin Laden will be the center of blame for Iraq.


Remember Jonathan Landay?   He’s the reporter at the McClatchy newspapers who caught on to the administration's manipulation of W.M.D. intelligence before the invasion of Iraq. Now he’s exposing the White House campaign to exaggerate the role of al Qaida in Iraq:

“Facing eroding support for his Iraq policy, even among Republicans, President Bush on Thursday called al Qaida "the main enemy" in Iraq, an assertion rejected by his administration's senior intelligence analysts.

“The reference, in a major speech at the Naval War College that referred to al Qaida at least 27 times, seemed calculated to use lingering outrage over the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to bolster support for the current buildup of U.S. troops in Iraq, despite evidence that sending more troops hasn't reduced the violence or sped Iraqi government action on key issues.”
Read More: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/17471.html

Whipping up public support:

“Bush's use of al Qaida in his speech had strong echoes of the strategy the administration had used to whip up public support for the Iraq invasion by accusing the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein of cooperating with bin Laden and implying that he'd played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks.”

And politicized military information officers follow the White House talking points:

“A similar pattern has developed in Iraq, where the U.S. military has cited al Qaida 33 times in a barrage of news releases in the last seven days, and some news organizations have echoed the drumbeat. Last month, al Qaida was mentioned only nine times in U.S. military news releases.”

Best estimates from CIA are that al Qaida is responsible for 15%-20% of attacks in Iraq.

 

[Is that what Iraqi’s want? --NO]

If You Don’t Know Who Timothy Carney Is
Then You Don’t Know Squat About Iraq

Freedom?

Is that what Iraqi’s want? --NO

Not according to Zainab Salbi (Founder and CEO, Women for Women International) guest Monday on WOSU’s Open Line Program.

Iraqi’s want WATER and ELECTRICITY. They want a functioning infrastructure and jobs – not just jobs in the military and police –the only jobs available to them now.

Timothy Carney was in charge of rebuilding the infrastructure of Iraq under L. Paul Bremer’s miserable tenure as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority. The C.P.A. was dominated by political loyalists whose only qualification was that they were Republicans and anti-abortion zealots.

Carney violated orders by actually spending time outside the Green Zone trying to put things back together. He quit in disgust. In desperation the Bushies have brought him back. All hopes of success depend on his success.
 

The Surge

Winning the Battles  --  Losing the War

“The insurgency … has a psychological component. Increased levels of U.S. troops might produce tactical victories against insurgents -- but might also paradoxically provide the strategic fuel that grows the insurgency.”

The surge of “troops in Iraq, … will win the United States a lot of battles with insurgents but also make it more likely that Americans will lose the war.”


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...ml?hpid=topnews
 

IS, at the risk of sounding repetitive, I am *still*, months later, waiting for someone who is opposed to the surge to tell me what the alternative is. We either surge, keep the number of troops level or pull out completely. If we keep the number of troops level, they get slaughtered and if we pull out, Iran or Syria comes in and has a base to attack Israel and we have to go back. This article seems typical:

http://www.aina.org/news/20070902222731.htm

 

I am *still*, months later, waiting for someone who is opposed to the surge to tell me what the alternative is.

Here are the alternatives as I see them:

Alt. 1: We stay, keeping troop levels as high as possible.
Result: We continue to win local battles, we continue to lose more troops and continue to destroy the American Army. In the end we lose the war.

Alt 2: We begin an orderly pull out.
Result: We lose the war.

Alt 3: Anything else.
Result: We lose the war.

It seems to me that no matter what we do the result is the same: We lose the war.

What will result from losing the war?

There will be continued sectarian violence at more or less the same levels as today. Eventually, the country will form a loose confederation of the three basic ethnic groups and the violence will rapidly abate.

The balance of power between Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran will insure that none of these countries will dominate Iraq.
 

There will be continued sectarian violence at more or less the same levels as today. Eventually, the country will form a loose confederation of the three basic ethnic groups and the violence will rapidly abate.

The balance of power between Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran will insure that none of these countries will dominate Iraq.

And what is the basis for these last two statements. I'm not arguing (yet), however, why would you believe that the three basic ethnic groups would find peace, and why would you believe that the mideast, specifically, Syria and Iran, would not find a more-or-less defenseless Iraq irresisitible given, at least in Iran's case, that the destruction of Israel is a stated objective?

 

In general, there's a bunch of scholars, former diplomats, and former military leaders -- people with lots of experience in Iraq, Iran, and the Middle -East in general who say this.

These are people with a proven track record -- these are people who warned us of the fiasco the invasion would turn into and have been right just about every step of the way about Iraq.  

These are people who were sceptical of the attacks on Fallujah, sceptical of the tactics used by the army the first few years of the way, sceptical about the efforts to rebuild the Iraqi infrastructure, and sceptical of the PR surrounding free elections.

There is no guarantee they are right again on this.

But I prefer to go with the judgment of these people than with the judgment of those who have been wrong about everything so far in Iraq and the Middle-East.

I tend to find it hard to agree with those who are wrong all the time.

[WE]

Have WE lost the war?  Well, I guess you would have to ask, was it winnable?  If so, could the U.S. have won?

I say yes and no.  The war was winnable, but the Iraqis are left in the position of deciding this and what have they done?  There's a reason why Iraq wasn't invaded during Desert Storm.  They were afraid that the fall of Saddam would severely destabilize the country.  They were right.  More than a decade of planning for the toppling of Saddam produced the result that was clear from the beginning.  The "Iron Fist" of Saddam that stifled any and all opposition made it unclear as to who would lead a unified Iraq if it were possible.

So now what?  Everyone is power hungry and wants their own "piece of the pie."  No agreements can be made, no one can lead.  We are screwed in any case now.  If we leave now, all hell will break loose eventually and the nation of Iraq may fall to another entity, Al Qaeda, Iran...anything is possible.  If we split the country up, these are just more little pieces we need to watch over.  If we stay, we further demoralize our military and leave ourselves weak when it comes to defending against unforeseen threats.

Hindsight 20/20...we shouldn't have gone.  We can't be responsible for peacekeeping across the world.  Not that it isn't just, but we lack the ability to be the watchdog for the whole world.  The homeland is number one.  If people wish to be free, let them demonstrate it.  It sounds selfish, but it's logical.

["We're kicking ass,"]

"We're kicking ass," he told Mark Vaile on the tarmac after the Deputy Prime Minister inquired politely of the President's stopover in Iraq en route to Sydney.

Despite his unpopularity in this country, Bush used yesterday's media conference with Howard to try to bolster the Prime Minister's electoral prospects in the next poll. Labor was quite happy at the spectre of one unpopular leader backing another but should not underestimate the defiance and polished performance Bush is able to muster. On Iraq, climate change, Kyoto and nuclear power, he backed Howard to the hilt. He claimed diplomatically he did not want to interfere in the Australian election and said he looked forward to today's meeting with Kevin Rudd.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/by-geo...8783320123.html

A most interesting perspective:

  Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
                                The New York Times

                             November 14, 2004 Sunday
                               Late Edition - Final Barren Ground for
 Democracy

Robert D. Kaplan.

Robert D. Kaplan, a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, is the
 author of ''Balkan Ghosts'' and ''The Arabists.''


   Whether one views the war in Iraq as a noble effort in
 democratization or a brutal exercise in imperialism, there can be little doubt
 that it has proved the proverbial ''bridge too far'' for those who
 planned and, like myself, supported it. While much has been made of the
 strategic missteps the Bush administration has made since the Saddam Hussein
 regime was toppled, it seems likely that even the best-executed
 occupation would have been a daunting prospect.

    What we are witnessing is a legacy of history and geography --
 factors often denied by both liberal and conservative interventionists
 -- catching up with America. Had our political leaders considered such
 factors, I suspect, they might have avoided some of the disasters of the
 occupation.
These factors should also give President Bush pause as he plans to
 ''spread freedom'' in his second term. To see all this clearly, one must
 look at the campaign in the Persian Gulf region not as an isolated effort
 but as the culmination of a decade-long effort to bring the vast lands
 of the defunct Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and Asia into the modern
 world and the Western orbit.

    After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, communist satellites like
 Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary promptly evolved into successful
 Western democracies. This transition was relatively easy because the
 countries boasted high literacy rates, exposure to the Enlightenment under
 Prussian and Hapsburg emperors, and strong industrial bases and middle
 classes prior to World War II and the cold war. In retrospect, it seems
 clear that only the presence of the Red Army had kept them from
 developing free parliamentary systems on their own.

    But the idea that Western-style democracy could be imposed
 further east and south, in the Balkans, has proved more problematic. Beyond
 the Carpathian mountains one finds a different historical legacy: that
 of the poorer and more chaotic Ottoman Empire. Before World War II,
 this was a world of vast peasantries and feeble middle classes, which
 revealed itself in Communist governments that were for the most part more
 corrupt and despotic than those of Central Europe.

    Unsurprisingly, upon Communism's collapse, Romania, Bulgaria and
 Albania struggled for years on the brink of anarchy, although they at
 least avoided ethnic bloodshed. Of course, Yugoslavia was not so lucky.
Though democracy appears to have a reasonably bright future there
 thanks to repeated Western intervention, it is wise to recall that for 15
 years it has been a touch-and-go proposition.

    Undeterred, Wilsonian idealists in the United States next put
 Iraq on their list for gun-to-the-head democratization. But compared with
 Iraq, even the Balkans were historically blessed, by far the most
 culturally and politically advanced part of the old Turkish Empire.
 Mesopotamia, on the other hand, constituted the most anarchic and tribalistic
 region of the sultanate.

    In addition, the Balkans are affixed to Central Europe, and were
 thus a natural extension of it as NATO expanded eastward. Iraq is
 bordered by Iran and Syria, states with weakly policed borders and prone to
 radical politics, which themselves have suffered under absolutism for
 centuries.

    Western intellectuals on both the left and right underplayed
 such realities. In the 1990's, those supporting humanitarian intervention
 in Yugoslavia branded references to difficult history and geography as
 ''determinism'' and ' 'essentialism'' -- academic jargon for fatalism.
 In the views of liberal internationalists and neoconservatives, group
 characteristics based on a shared history and geography no longer
 mattered, for in a post-cold war world of globalization everyone was first
 and foremost an individual. Thus if Poland, say, was ready overnight for
 Western-style democracy, then so too were Bosnia, Russia, Iraq -- and
 Liberia, for that matter.

    That line of thinking provided the moral impetus for military
 actions in 1995 in Bosnia and in 1999 in Kosovo: interventions that
 reclaimed the former Yugoslavia into the Western orbit. But the people who
 ordered and carried out those interventions, liberal Democrats in
 general, were canny.
While they agreed with the idealists' moral claims, they realized that
 it was the feasibility of the military side of the equation that made
 the interventions ultimately worth doing. Yes, they also favored
 democracy in places like Liberia, but they were wise enough not to risk the
 lives of Americans in such endeavors. They intuited that a modest degree
 of fatalism was required in the conduct of international affairs, even
 if they were clever enough not to publish the fact.

    By invading Iraq, Republican neoconservatives -- the most
 fervent of Wilsonians -- simply took that liberal idealist argument of the
 1990's to its logical conclusion. Indeed, given that Saddam Hussein was
 ultimately responsible for the violent deaths of several times more
 people than the Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic, how could any liberal
 in favor of intervention in the Balkans not also favor it in the case
 of Iraq? And because the human rights abuses in Iraq showed no sign of
 abatement, much like those in the Balkans, our intervention was
 justified in order to stop an ongoing rape-and-killing machine.

    But rather than a replay of the Balkans in 1995 and 1999, Iraq
 has turned out like the Indian mutiny against the British in 1857 and
 1858, when the attempts of Evangelical and Utilitarian reformers in
 London to modernize and Christianize India -- to make it more like England
 -- were met with a violent revolt against imperial rule. Delhi, Lucknow
 and other cities were besieged and captured, before being retaken by
 colonial forces.

    The bloody debacle did not signal the end of the British Empire,
 which expanded for another century. But it did signal a transition:
 away from an ad hoc imperium fired by an intemperate lust to impose
 domestic values abroad, and toward a calmer, more pragmatic empire built on
 international trade and technology.

    In that vein, it seems inevitable that the coming four years
 will be a time of consolidation for America rather than of expansion; for
 it may take that long to bring Iraq to a level of stability equivalent
 to that of the post-conflict Balkans. Only after Iraq is secure will it
 be possible for our diplomats to work credibly on behalf of democracy
 throughout the Middle East.

    As for our overstretched military, increasingly it will have to
 work unobtrusively through native surrogates in the hunt for
 terrorists: for as the histories of Rome, France and Britain all reveal, the
 successful projection of power is less about direct action than about the
 training and subsequent use of indigenous troops.

    Moreover, in a world where every field operation is subject to
 intense scrutiny by global news media, the only empire that can be
 broadly acceptable is one consisting of behind-the-scenes relationships.
 That, in turn, will require an increased emphasis on what academics and
 diplomats call ''area expertise.'' A good model can be found in ''Wax and
 Gold,'' a classic work of area studies about the Amhara people of
 Ethiopia written by the sociologist Donald N. Levine of the University of
 Chicago in 1965.
Mr. Levine defined pragmatism as a respect for liberal progress not in
 a fixed, ideological sense, but in terms of ''the cultural context'' in
 which such progress takes place: each people and terrain according to
 its own pace of political development, in other words.

    While democracy can take root anywhere (look at Indonesia and
 Afghanistan), it cannot be imposed overnight anywhere. Keep in mind that
 in Afghanistan we dismantled only a regime and not an entire
 bureaucratic apparatus of control like in Iraq; for in Afghanistan no such
 apparatus had existed. Over sizable swaths of the country there had been only
 warlords and tribal militias, with whom we had to work for many months
 before we began to co-opt them into a new legitimate authority: or, as
 the situation demanded, help that new authority to gradually ease them
 out. In Afghanistan following 9/11, we did what we had to do, and
 otherwise accepted the place as it was. The result has been change for the
 better.

    Pragmatism is not about looking away, but it is about humility
 in the face of long-standing historical and cultural forces. In foreign
 policy, a modest acceptance of fate will lead to discipline rather than
 indifference.

The Shadow knows :ph34r:  

That's a great piece Shadow -- and it's from 2004.

George Will had a good piece today -- (I say that about him about once/year)

Today's officers lead an Army that was sent into Iraq in 2003, and by 2004 the operation became, as an officer here says, "a deployment in search of a mission." Since then, missions have multiplied. Today's is to make possible an exit strategy. Gen. David Petraeus's Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual says counterinsurgency's primary objective is to secure the civilian population rather than destroy the enemy. This inevitably involves the military in organizing civil society, a task that demands skill sets that are scarce throughout the government and have not hitherto been, and perhaps should not be, central to military training and doctrine. Nevertheless, the War College is coming to grips with the fact that what soldiers call "nonkinetic" -- meaning nonviolent -- facets of their profession are, in Iraq, perhaps 80 percent of their profession.

For the rest see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...7090702252.html



 

Mastermind of Iraq Yazidi attack killed: U.S. military
Sun Sep 9, 2007 12:50PM EDT

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A U.S. air strike killed a senior al Qaeda militant who masterminded truck bombings on Iraq's minority Yazidi community last month that killed more than 400 people, the military said on Sunday.

"On September 3, a coalition air strike killed the terrorist responsible for the planning and conducting of the horrific attack against the Yazidis in northern Iraq on August 14," military spokesman Rear Admiral Mark Fox told a news conference.

Link

We have to get out of Iraq NOW so the collapse and subsequent bloodbath will happen under the Bush administration.

It would be unseemly for President Hillary to have to deal with this.

It is only fair.


 

Screaming Protesters Disrupt Petraeus Testimony on Capitol Hill

http://www.breitbart.tv/html/5420.html

The biggest outburst by protesters in the crowd came at the end of Gen. Petraeus’s statement, with several women wearing pink, yelling slogans against him.

MoveOn.org's Attack Ad on Petraeus Strikes Republicans' Nerves
Monday, September 10, 2007

Link

Click Here to See the Full Sized Ad