Posted on 05/03/2008 6:31:45 AM PDT by moderatewolverine
The recent offensive operations taken by the Iraqi government against the Mahdi Army (Jaish al-Mahdi - JAM) of Muqtada al-Sadr have received much analysis and commentary since the onset. Each of the ensuing analysis and commentary offerings have agreed that the Maliki governments military actions and the Mahdi Army response are revelatory in nature. But that is where the agreement seems to end, as there appears a divergence regarding precisely what has been revealed: Who has operated and enjoys the position of strength, Maliki and the Iraqi government and military forces, or the Mahdi Army forces of Muqtada al-Sadr, which operate at the behest of the Iranian Quds Force and General Qassem Suleimani?
We at the Center for Threat Awareness (CTA) believe the answers in the end are neither black nor white, but rather grey in nature. To engage the subject and make sense of the divergent analyses, ThreatsWatch has assembled a panel of experts.
Bill Roggio, Military Operations analyst of The Long War Journal, recently returned from another tour embedded with Coalition Forces in Iraq.
Ralph Peters, LTC (Ret.) US Army, Defense and National Security analyst and author who has reported from Iraq multiple times.
Dr. Michael Ledeen, Iran specialist and historian, Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who writes on Iran at Faster, Please!.
And Iraqi citizens Mohammed and Omar Fadhil of ITM Blog (Iraq The Model), editors at Pajamas Media.
Gentlemen, thank you for joining us.
Bill Roggio, please open the discussion by briefly laying out the scope of operations and counter-operations taken recently, and tell us where things stand operationally at current.
(Excerpt) Read more at threatswatch.org ...
Long read but worth it.
Iraq says to document Iran "interference"
with an update from the Washington Post:
**************************EXCERPT************************
Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh called reporters late Sunday night to clarify remarks he made at a news conference earlier in the day, when he appeared to say that there was no hard evidence that Iran was allowing weapons to come into Iraq. Dabbagh said his comments had been misinterpreted.
"There is an interference and evidence that they have interfered in Iraqi affairs," Dabbagh said in an interview arranged by a U.S. official. When asked how he would characterize the proof that Iranian weapons are flowing into Iraq, he said: "It is a concrete evidence."
Yes,...a Great read...more should see it.
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