Posted on 10/30/2006 10:47:42 AM PST by TexKat
Enquuiring minds want to know.
The liars in the MSM refuse to tell us.
You missed my point..
And nationwide, Democrat leaders smile....
A noble sentiment. Of course, it would be even more noble if the war in Iraq had anything to do with the survival of our Republic.
Members of the Iraqi National Reconciliation delegation (L-R) Iraqi Member of Parliament Yonnadam Yussef Kanna, head of the delegation Faleh Fayyad, Iraqi ambassador to Jordan Saad Jassem al-Hayani, and Naseer Alaani from the Islamic Party, hold talks at the Iraqi Embassy in Amman. An Iraqi government delegation held reconciliation talks in Jordan today with exiled Iraqi politicians and community leaders.(AFP/Khalil Mazraawi)
A LIE!!!
Notice how the headline says DIE and then in the story it says KILLED......all done so they can continue to report THE LARGER number of deaths as though it is the number KILLED IN ACTION!!!
This misinformation is propagated by every NEWS outlet in the United States....I am convinced it is done on purpose!!
Eye on Iraq; Alienating Maliki
By MARTIN SIEFF
UPI Senior News Analyst
WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 (UPI) -- Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is biting the hand that feeds him -- but he knows what he's doing.
On Wednesday, an angry Maliki outspokenly rejected comments made only the day before by top U.S. diplomatic and military officials in Iraq that he had to come up with a timetable or time-line setting dates to disarm Iraq's powerful and ferociously warring militias. The calls to do so came from Zalmay Khalizad, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad and from Gen. George Casey, commander of U.S. military forces in Iraq.
Maliki ironically used the very democratic process that Bush policymakers took such pride in as the source of his legitimacy and authority to reject the U.S. calls. "I affirm that this government represents the will of the people, and no one has the right to impose a timetable on it," he said.
In the six months since becoming prime minister of Iraq, Maliki has been forced to preside over a relentless deterioration of the security situation in the country. It did not happen as the result of decisions he took, and it was well under way before he became prime minister, but despite having supposedly 300,000 troops, police and other security forces at his command -- more than twice the manpower of U.S. military forces in his country -- he and his government have been unable to prevent the escalation of random killings, mass ethnic cleansing and the other horrific characteristics of full-scale civil war.
However, Maliki has worked hard to try and gain and retain a degree of personal credibility with the Shiite majority community that constitutes 60 percent of the population of the California-sized nation of 28 million people. The main military pillars of support for him and his own Dawa party in fact are not the national army created at breakneck speed and with much fanfare by the U.S. military and the Bush administration. They are his own political Dawa Party, the Shiite Supreme Council for the Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI, and the Mahdi Army of charismatic anti-American firebrand Moqtada al-Sadr.
As we have noted in previous analyses, real power in Baghdad and in much of Shiite-dominated southern Iraq rests not with the police or the national army, but with these Shiite militias and their local allies.
The Shiite-dominated and predominately officered new Iraqi army has tried to avoid outright clashes with these militias whenever possible and in many areas its local units have tacitly cooperated with them.
U.S. military spokesmen have downplayed the degree to which these militias have successfully infiltrated the new security forces, but Maliki was forced a few weeks ago to fire the head of a national special police unit because sectarian Shiite murder squads had been operating with members within the police.
Therefore, by pressuring Maliki to use his fragile new armed forces to try and crush Shiite militias as well as the Sunni insurgents operating in Baghdad, U.S. leaders have only weakened their own ties with the Iraqi government, with Maliki personally and with the Shiite majority community in general.
The potential dangers of this development are far more dangerous than any atrocity or strategy the Sunni insurgents have come up with over the past three and a half years. For the Sunni insurgents have been able to derail ambitious U.S. political and strategic objectives for Iraq while operating as a relatively small minority within a community of only 5 million Sunni Muslim Iraqis, less than 20 percent of the total population.
But the 16-17 million Shiites of Iraq comprise at least 60 percent of the nation's population, and they are far better organized and armed thanks precisely to consistent U.S. policies over the past three and a half years than the Sunnis are.
The Shiites effectively control the new police, army and other major security forces, and Shiite militias, also supported to differing degrees by neighboring Iran have proven able to get far more weapons than the Sunni insurgents have managed to do.
Therefore, since the Shiite militias cut loose with a wave of reprisal attacks following the bombing of their sacred al-Askariya, or Golden Mosque, in Samara on Feb.22, they have been killing Sunnis at an estimated rate of four times the number of Shiites killed by Sunni insurgents.
The more U.S. policymakers have pressured the Maliki government to crack down on the Shiite militias, therefore, the greater has been the distrust and hostility it has inspired among the very Shiite forces they worked so hard to organize, arm and empower.
The ultimate outcome of this process may well be that one day in the none too distant future, U.S. troops in Iraq will find themselves fighting not merely the paramilitary Shiite militias but also the Shiite-dominated armed forces they trained and armed.
This dark irony is far from unprecedented in Iraqi history. The last time Iraq was a parliamentary democracy from 1932 to 1958, the Iraqi army rebelled three times against the occupying British forces that were supposedly there as allies, to protect British interests and to guarantee the stability of the country.
Those rebellions occurred in 1936, 1941 and 1958. In 1941, the Iraqi tried to stab Britain in the back when it was fighting Nazi Germany and tried to join the Nazis as their ally. In 1958,, they finally succeeded in forcing the British to abandon Iraq and give up their vast economic interests there.
Maliki's comments Wednesday therefore should not be disregarded as either unimportant political maneuvers or the ungrateful anger of someone fated always to be loyal to his American allies. They are, to use Thomas Jefferson's famous phrase, a fire bell in the night, warning of the dangers of a reckless and little understood policy.
http://www.upi.com/SecurityTerrorism/view.php?StoryID=20061030-104353-7223r
HRW: gov't protecting death squad members
Report, IRIN, 30 October 2006
BAGHDAD - The Iraqi government must move quickly to prosecute all Ministry of Interior personnel responsible for "death squad" killings in Baghdad and elsewhere, the New-York based NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Saturday.
"Evidence suggests that Iraqi security forces are involved in these horrific crimes, and thus far the government has not held them accountable," said Sarah Leah Whitson, director of HRW's Middle East division. "The Iraqi government must stop giving protection to security forces responsible for abduction, torture and murder."
Sectarian violence between the majority Shi'ite Muslims and Sunni Muslims in Iraq has been steadily escalating since a revered Shi'ite shrine was bombed in the northern city of Samarra in February.
Since then, local and international sources say thousands of ordinary Iraqis have been killed and the UN's refugee agency (UNHCR) says some 365,000 people have been forced to flee their homes.
Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, the Iraqi interior ministry's spokesman, said that the ministry and the Supreme Judicial Council have begun investigating all officers and employees suspected of collaborating in the ongoing sectarian violence.
"Those who committed crimes will be punished 100 percent and the ministry will not hesitate to punish anyone for any wrongdoing he did," Khalaf told IRIN.
Khalaf said that as part of the interior ministry's restructuring plan, which started in October, 3,000 policemen were fired on corruption or rights abuses charges. A total of 600 of the 3,000 personnel fired will face prosecution, according to Khalaf.
Khalaf added that the Shi'ite-dominated ministry also sacked two officers in charge of commando units that have been accused by Sunnis of running death squads that kill Sunnis.
On 15 October, Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shi'ite Muslim, pledged in a nationally televised address to crack down on militias. "The state and the militias cannot coexist. Arms can only be in the hands of the government and no one has the right to be above the law," al-Maliki said.
However, analysts say that government rhetoric is not being matched by action. "He [al-Maliki] has issued repeated statements against illegal armed groups, but he is not able to take any concerted action against these militias because of their political weight in his government," said Emad al-Janabi, a Baghdad-based political sciences professor at the University of Mosul.
"This increase in violence has put him at odds with the United States over his seeming unwillingness to crack down against the armed wings of his major political supporters," al-Janabi added.
Shi'ite militias - such as the al-Mahdi army and the Badr Brigade, the two most prominent - have links with religious members of the government, analysts say. As such, these militias are thought to have infiltrated the country's police force and are running death squads which roam Baghdad and nearby cities and towns snatching, torturing and killing Sunnis by the thousands.
In return, Sunni insurgent fighters have fought back viciously, as violence in the centre of Iraq has begun to resemble civil war.
http://electroniciraq.net/news/2577.shtml
I was too young to understand what was going on during the Vietnam War, but I can understand the argument that the Vietnamese were never an actual threat to the United States and the war was just about "posturing" against the Soviets. However, I cannot understand how you can arrive at the conclusion that our survival does not depend upon success in Iraq.
Okay, so how many died from; heart disease, prostate cancer, colon cancer, drunk driving, hunting accident?
Which ones are the bad guys?
How many new schools were opened? How much new electric generating capacity was brought on line? How many new businesses were opened?
No idea. But nobody is stopping the administration from providing that information, if there is any. Or are you suggesting that the administration is too incompetent to get this happy news out to the public?
Asso Press..... how many americans were killed in the United States the past month? I know in my small community alone, we have had at least 7-8
Aide says Iraqi prime minister using American displeasure over war to own advantage
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- After a hastily arranged video conference with George Bush, Iraq's prime minister said Saturday that the U.S. president promised to move swiftly to turn over full control of the Iraqi army to the Baghdad government.
A close aide to Nouri al-Maliki said later the prime minister was intentionally playing on U.S. voter displeasure with the war to strengthen his hand with Washington.
http://www.jacksonholestartrib.com/articles/2006/10/30/news/world/b6f59a64ad7123fb8725721500750a65.txt
Where those 7-8 in your community killed defending your freedom?
So US soldiers getting killed in Iraq is now just another "natural" cause of death, as non-newsworthy as a 70 year old having a heart attack? I wonder what the soldiers doing the actual dying would think of that?
101 brave souls who fought not only against a vicious foreign enemy but also against a treasonous domestic one.
Where should be Were
Death is a risk associated with a military career... honestly do you think they joined up without realising they could go to another country where people may actually be trying to end their lives?
There was a time when a holiday weekend was measured against prior year car_nage!
Where is the angst today? Since the Iraq incursion began over 150,000 US citizens have died on the road. Millions have starved to death in SubSaharn Africa.
And it's all bush'sfault too boot!
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