This is what happens when you divert resources to Iraq:
U.S. troops pulled out of a remote outpost in northeastern Afghanistan, three days after Taliban militants briefly breached the defences and killed nine U.S. soldiers, the biggest single loss of life for American forces in Afghanistan since 2005.
This is not winning, and it wasn’t the military men who took their eye off the ball to go after Saddam Hussein.
So, the Washington Post conducted a poll on the war, and talked to some so-called experts.
One of them was the wanktacular Michael O’Hanlon:
To say you’re going to get out on a certain schedule — regardless of what the Iraqis do, regardless of what our enemies do, regardless of what is happening on the ground — is the height of absurdity,’ said O’Hanlon, who described himself as ‘livid.’ ‘I’m not going to go to the next level of invective and say he shouldn’t be president. I’ll leave that to someone else.’
(emphasis mine)
His “expertise” is in military budgeting, and he has gotten a lot of face time on the air because he’s from the so called “center left” think tank, the Brookings Institution, and he loves the war in Iraq.
I understand that when the war in Iraq is over, he won’t be quoted 2-4 times a month by the national press, but that is no reason for him want Americans and Iraqis to keep dying.
Not also that the poll is wanktacular too, it says it’s about the candidates positions, but the question is, “Obama has proposed a timetable to withdraw most U.S. forces from Iraq within 16 months of his taking office. McCain has opposed a specific timetable and said events should dictate when troops are withdrawn. Which approach do you prefer – a timetable or no timetable?“
That is a question designed to get a higher number (it’s 50%-49% in favor of the time table) than any other question, but it allows the Post to claim that people are evenly split, when “not worth fighting” wins 63% to 36%, and that success in the war is not necessary to win the war on terror (60% to 34%).
VetVoice notes that there have been 556 Americans killed in Afghanistan since 2001, and that 64 of these deaths , or about 1 out of 8 Afghanistan deaths over the past 6½ years have been in the past 6 weeks.
Well….I’m sure that the Pakistani intelligence services will pick up the slack….not.
This was not a lucky shot or roadside bomb…this was a deliberate can extensively planned assault that killed 9 US troops.
They assaulted this base base with a large number of insurgents over a period of hours (see also here).
This sort of large and well organized operation shows a capability that the Taliban has not demonstrated before, and I can’t help but think that this is a prelude to a more ambitious operation.
There are now reports that the negotiators have given up on a long term status of forces agreement in Iraq.
It appears that the Iraqis want a time table, and Bush and His Evil Minions™ are unwilling to do that, so they will patch something together short term, and the next president will handle what happens next.
He is saying that there are no supplies or reserves that can replace the loss of Iranian production.
Abdalla Salem El-Badri presents the price spikes as potentially “unlimited”, which is obviously hyperbole, but when one considers that there is no spare capacity, losing about 5% of oil production doesn’t just produce price spikes, it produces a real shortage, where one may not be able to find oil at any price.
If there were an interruption of this nature, I would expect oil to spike past $200/bbl within a few weeks.
I know nothing of the accuracy of the source, but if Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has made this statement publicly, we need to pack our bags and be out in the next few months.
I will note that Juan Cole has reported that Sistani has made similar statements in private to Iraqi leaders in private, so there is some confirmation on his position.
If John Sidney McCain, III is president, we’ll just ignore them.
Seeing as some in the administration *cough* Dick Cheney *cough* they see this as a win, win, I find the idea that they are funding military and terrorist actions in Iran to be credible.
My guess would be is that if an American special ops soldier were captured by Iran, they would consider it to be a lucky break for them, because it would allow them to strike.
It reinforces their view that American military might is the only way to conduct foreign policy, and they believe that it would benefit Republicans in November.
The most prominent supporter of this is nepotism beneficiary Bill Kristol, but nutjob Daniel Pipes is saying this too.
They couch it by saying that this “might” happen, but they really lobbying the Bush Administration to bomb Iran.
What’s more, I think that they are specifically lobbying for bombing Iran just before the general election.
The GAO has just issued a report on the surge, and it has determined that, “The American plan for a stable Iraq lacks a strategic framework that meshes with the administration’s goals, is falling out of touch with the realities on the ground and contains serious flaws in its operational guidelines.”
You mean Bush and His Evil Minions™ screwed it up???? I’m shocked.
Once again, I am compelled to make the repeat the wisest thing that I’ve read this century:
But it does inspire in me the desire for a competition; can anyone, particularly the rather more Bush-friendly recent arrivals to the board, give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:
- It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration
- It was significant enough in scale that I’d have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
- It wasn’t in some important way completely f#$@ed up during the execution.
Seriously. I’ve yet to see anything wiser yet, and I’m using the loose definition of the 21st century which includes the year 2000.
Following the massive Taliban prison break, we are seeing intense combat through the south of the country.
If half the troops in Iraq were there, we’d be doing much better.
Well, we now have the definitive word on when Bush knew that there was no Iraq-al Queida link, and that he continued to claim such a link
In October 2002, a few weeks before Congress voted to authorize the Iraq invasion, Bush told a crowd in Cincinnati: “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gasses.”
Problem is, it wasn’t true. More importantly, a lot of people at the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency knew it probably wasn’t true. That’s one of the interesting revelations inside the Senate’s recent 171-page Phase II report on whether White House statements were backed up by prewar intelligence.
He knew. He knew since February 2002.
It turns out that their source was one guy, who had most of the information tortured out of him, and none of whose claims ever panned out.
Impeach Dick Cheney today. Impeach George W. Bush tomorrow.
This is a very canny move for him.
The overwhelming majority of Iraqis want the US out, and with US demands for the status of forces agreement, they know that the US does not intend to leave.
Faiz at Think Progress notes the following troubling detail in the proposed agreement, which a Dawa MP has objected to:
The Americans insist so far that is they who define what is an aggression on Iraq and what is democracy inside Iraq…if we come under aggression we should define it and ask for help.
This means that the US could use the status of forces agreement to justify an attack on Iran.
As Faiz puts it, “Since the administration is unlikely to get an Iran war authorized through Congress, it’s instead trying to sneak it through the Iraqi parliament.”
At least that’s what unnamed sources are saying. They are expecting a short term extension of the UN mandate.
Considering the fact that they are asking for immunity for mercenary thugs like Black Water, the right to engage in attacks without consulting the Iraqi government, near complete control of their airspace, and 58 bases in Iraq, it’s nor surprising that Maliki is not happy about this deal.
That’s what the report translates to, “Policymakers’ statements did not accurately convey the intelligence assessments”.
Impeach Dick Cheney today. Impeach George W. Bush tomorrow.
Muckraked has a review of the book War Journal, My Five Years in Iraq, and we find this quote:
“This is the great war of our times. It is going to take forty years,’” [Bush told Engel]. “Bush said in forty years the world would know if the war on terrorism, and conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, had reduced extremism, helped moderates, and promoted democracy.
And he doesn’t care if it works or not, because then he’ll be dead.
If there is any justice in the world, he will die in a prison cell.
It turns out that almost every political party in Iraq hates it, including the largest party in parliament, the ISCI, the Iranian stooges party, oppose it too, “Officials from the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, an important Maliki ally, said several parts of the proposal violated Iraq’s sovereignty.”
This is not surprising:
The Americans want to continue to have “a free hand” to arrest Iraqis and carry out military operations, and they want authority for more than 50 long-term military bases, Mr. Adeeb said. He said that he doubted that a security pact along the lines sought by the Americans would pass in the Iraqi Parliament.
Mr. Abadi, another senior member of Dawa, said Americans were insisting on keeping control of Iraqi airspace and retaining legal immunity for American troops, contractors and private security guards.
The US is claiming that this is “Iranian disinformation”, and ambassador Crocker is saying that, “the agreement will not establish permanent bases in Iraq, and we anticipate that it will expressly forswear them”, but Bush already said that no agreement is permanent, in a thousand years of so something might change.
It’s also noted that Iraqi leaders are dubious about negotiating with a lame duck president, so come January 1, 2009, when the UN authorizations expire, both mercenaries contractors and US troops will be subject to Iraqi courts.