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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

IS:

So, let's start from scratch.

What do you want to happen in Iraq over the next 24 months and does it matter who is in the White House?

I'll even go so far as to answer the question first myself: Let's try it like this, if I were President, now that we are there, I want the U.S. to train Iraqis to defend and police their own country. I want U.S. forces to come home as soon as possible and turn the country over to a stable Iraqi government so that Iraqis can rebuild their country with their own money. U.S. forces should be prepared to take out anyone who raises weapons against them until we leave.

Now that we are there, I can't imagine a responsible alternative. But I'm open to hearing one.



 

What do you want to happen in Iraq over the next 24 months and does it matter who is in the White House?

What's the old expression, "if pigs could fly..."

Sure, this was the intent from the beginning -- Buch/Cheney/Rumsfeld thought Iraq would do all this on their own.

Then, the plan was that they would do it with our help.

The starry-eyed idealist in me wants to think as you -- wants to think we could get it all done in another two years and we could go home knowing that Iraq would be a peaceful, stable, friend in the middle-east.

But what we want rarely equals what we get.

If it were rational -- or possible-- to base belief on dreams and wants then I could believe that it will happen.

I simply do not believe your dreams, unless we totally change strategy and tactics will happen.

But I can't imagine that peace and stability can be accomplished without the Iraqis taking the lead role -- Giving them a deadline -- we're leaving and we're starting the pull out now -- will cause them to get serious about rebuilding their own country.

If they don't get serious about it, there is literally nothing we can do.










 

A Thousand Iraqi Troops Deserted

al-Maliki Replaces Deserters with Badr Corps Terrorists Trained By Iran



This is from Juan Cole's blog

The New York Times  confirms that "over a thousand" officers and troops of the Iraqi army declined to fight the Mahdi Army in Basra or deserted their posts. It also reports that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki replaced them by inducting 10,000 Shiite "tribal" fighters into the Iraqi army. But the Iraqi press didn't call them "tribal," it called them Badr Corps, the paramilitary of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, headed by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and now al-Maliki's main political ally.

I'm not sure about the source of the discrepancy, but the NYT piece seems to be based on interviews with Iraqi and American government officials. It is possible that the need to strengthen the Iraqi army by turning to a Shiite militia trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (terrorists!) was just too embarrassing to admit. So the officials used the euphemism "tribal forces" with the foreign press.

Source: http://www.juancole.com/

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/04/world/mi...rld&oref=slogin

 

McCain Clueless or Just Hopelessly Confused

In an interview with CNN  Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) claimed that he has long understood the influence of Iraqi Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr:

    I said he was still major player and his influence is going to have to be reduced and gradually eliminated.

But in a report on The Situation Room the network noted that just two weeks ago McCain — trying to paint a rosy picture of Iraq — described Sadr very differently while speaking to CNN’s John King in Baghdad:

    His [Sadr’s] influence has been on the wane for a long time.

Video:

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/04/01/cnn-ca...nts-about-sadr/





 

Excerpt:

News reports of sharp fighting between the Iraqi Army and rogue militia elements are concerning. Yet what many news reports neglect to mention is that the largely Shiite Iraqi government is using the Iraqi Army to fight Shiite terrorists. Certain Shiite militant leaders have called for civil disobedience against the Iraqi Government in response, but this is not a re-ignition of Shiite-Sunni civil war.

I asked Colonel Steve Boylan, Public Affairs Officer for General Petraeus, for a comment on the violence. Colonel Boylan emailed back:


"The cease fire isn't over so we are continuing. The Prime Minister has taken about two brigades of ISF to Basra to support down there and to see for himself what the situation is. We are seeing some spike in indirect fire here in Baghdad, but not a trend. We will need to see where it goes.

The call for civil disobedience is one thing, as long as it is peaceful then it is their public voicing their views. We can have people yell at each other and that is okay...but we don't want them shooting at each other or us."

 
War is not perfect

Intel report shows security in Iraq improving

From that right wing rag USA Today.

 

Major NY Times Article on How the Pentagon Controlled TV News Military Analysts

 Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/washingt...enerals.html?hp




 

So did Stalin control the draft dodging New York Times reporter Walter Duranty when he wrote his articles denying the Ukraine famine? Which he won a Pulitzer Prize for.

Yet Gareth Jones of The Times and Malcolm Muggeridge of The Guardian defied Russian authorities to report the truth of what was happening? Muggeridge later became a legend in later life, was vilified for his truthful reports. He actually lost his job on the Manchester Guardian, and it took years to regain his reputation.

Yet Duranty would later be honored by Stalin and his editors at the New York Times.

Even after it was shown that Walter Duranty's reports to be unbalanced and uncritical, and that they far too often gave voice to Stalinist propaganda, the Pulitzer board said, there would have to be evidence of deliberate malpractice and disruption on Duranty's part in order for the award to be rescinded.

That's right believe the New York Times when they print bull sh* t like this.

By George Packer in the new yorker

July 18, 2008
One Star for McMaster, One Cheer for the Army

Colonel H. R. McMaster, whom I wrote about two years ago in “The Lesson of Tal Afar,” has been promoted to one-star general. For some reason, it took the Army three tries—maybe just to affirm that it remains a hidebound institution that doesn’t reward its most talented officers without making them sweat for a year or two. In 2005, McMaster put into practice the counterinsurgency strategy that became the basis for the surge and General David Petraeus’s 2007 campaign. After McMaster was passed over for general twice, Petraeus placed himself on the promotion board to make sure it didn’t happen again. And even now McMaster remains something of a dissident in the U.S. military. He criticized the blind faith in technology that was behind Rumsfeld’s war plan in 2003; and when Rumsfeld steadily refused to admit the existence of an insurgency in post-invasion Iraq, McMaster, who was then on General John Abizaid’s staff at Centcom, did everything in his power to force reality on the Pentagon.

McMaster is a humanist, with a doctorate in history, who is allergic to the military’s culture of PowerPoint presentations where the jargon and diagrams do the thinking for you. He once told me that if an idea couldn’t be put in paragraph form, it didn’t deserve consideration. He’s also a true believer that victory in Iraq is possible and essential. In all these ways, he reminds me and other journalists (though it’s a comparison that McMaster quickly rejects) of John Paul Vann, the Vietnam-era colonel who was killed, in 1972, still thinking victory was possible, and who became the central figure in Neil Sheehan’s “A Bright Shining Lie.” Vietnam and the moral cowardice of senior military officers was the subject of McMaster’s dissertation, published to wide acclaim as “Dereliction of Duty.” In Tal Afar I asked him if he was planning a sequel on Iraq. He laughed me off, but if the Army had persisted in refusing to acknowledge his gifts, I can’t think of a better use for them.
 

BOINK !!

 PGC