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POPSExperts warned Blair of Iraq mess Joffe got the impression of "someone with a very shallow mind, who's not interested in issues other than the personalities of the top people, no interest in social forces, political trends, etc".
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POPSIraqi Feel-Good Stories Prove Elusive Garrett Therolf, LAT reporter, talks about his efforts to report on good news in Iraq when he was there earlier this year. The military prevented Therolf from following-up on the army's efforts to establish a local bank branch in a Sunni Arab neighborhood. The neighborhood was too dangerous for him to enter without military guard. Therolf also pursued a story about a restaurant in Baghdad started by some Chinese nationals. They declined to be interviewed because they were scared, and they may even go back to China because of the danger. For those of you who criticize the media for focusing on the negative in Iraq, this is something you should consider.
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POPSThe Volunteer Army: Who Fights and Why? Michael Massing went to Ft. Drum in New York to interview soldiers about why they joined the army. ("these books" he refers to in this clip are recently-published soldier memoirs; "Bradley's" is a military supply store) Overall, the average bonus paid to Army enlistees jumped from $11,100 in 2005 to $16,500 in 2007. This is one of the main reasons why the Army has been able to meet its recruiting goals in spite of the ongoing specter of serving in Iraq. Another is the relaxation of admission standards. In 2007, 11 percent of all new recruits received "moral waivers" for being in trouble with the law—double the proportion in 2003. Over that same period, the proportion of enlistees who had finished high school fell from 90 to 71 percent—the lowest level in twenty-five years. Due largely to the Iraq war, the Army now includes far more recruits from the troubled, truant, tattooed ranks of the population.
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POPSUS made deal with devil to stabilize Iraq Chris Hedges is the author of this editorial. ...those who support the continuation of the war insist that "the surge" has been successful. But the surge...did little to thwart attacks. "The big news of the past year, the smashing up of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the stabilization of a lot of Sunni Arab areas, has virtually nothing to do with the surge," said Wayne White, former deputy director of the State Department's Middle East Intelligence unit. "What we have done, in effect, is we have made a deal with the devil in order to get rid of al-Qaeda. We have allowed nearly 100,000 tough Sunni Arab fighters to organize and arm themselves as they never could before when they had to operate underground. We have destroyed a nasty insurgency and replaced it with a more deeply rooted and broad-based potential insurgency."
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POPSU.S. Military and Iraqis Agree: Blackwater unprovoked, Fired on Fleeing Citizens and Cars
More: U.S. soldiers did not find any bullets that came from AK-47 assault rifles or BKC machine guns used by Iraqi policemen and soldiers. They found evidence of ammunition used in American-made weapons, including M4 rifle 5.56mm brass casings, M240B machine gun 7.62mm casings, M203 40mm grenade launcher casings, and stun-grenade dunnage, or packing. At least two cars, a black four-door taxi and a blue Volkswagen sedan, had their back windshields shot out, but their front windshields were intact, indicating they were shot while driving away from the square, according to the photos and soldiers An Iraqi colonel walked up to Tarsa and described the Blackwater shooters as men in "tan uniforms, black helmets, and that flag," pointing at the U.S. flag on Tarsa's sleeve. Their actions underscore the long-standing tensions between the U.S. military and private security companies -- and the military's concerns that such shootings could undermine U.S. efforts to stabilize Iraq.
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POPSTo be or not to be: Genocide & the Melancholy President Turkey is a lose lose situation for us. There's no way we'll pull them off of the Kurds through appeasement. Of all the times Bush stood strong, this is the time for a little bravado, where did it go? What kind of President caves in on issues like genocide? He just took away Pansy of the Week award from Gordon Brown!
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POPSIraq's Power Grid Nearing Collapse "We no longer need television documentaries about the Stone Age. We are actually living in it. We are in constant danger because of the filthy water and rotten food we are having," said Hazim Obeid, who sells clothing at a stall in the Karbala market.
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POPSA War We Just Might Win Can you believe this?? This article was published by the New York Times!! It is obvious the democrats have stuck their necks way out, predicted and often enabling our defeat. Now that we are winning, they are backed into a corner. If we do win, their lies will be exposed. Even the NYT, their propaganda arm, seems to be covering all the bases.
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POPSUS Drops Baghdad electricty reports The State Department's new method shows that the national electricity supply is 4% lower than a year ago, according to the July 11 report. If the Bush administration is not willing to level with us about progress in Iraq, why should we trust its ability to manage the occupation of that country? Via Matt Yglesias
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POPSAmericans can't trust General Petraeus Blogger Glenn Greenwald has compiled a list of Daivd Petraeus' optimistic portrayals of our progress in Iraq, spanning from late 2003 to, well, last Wednesday, when he was interviewed by Republican commentator Hugh Hewitt. Lawrence Korb also notes that Petraeus wrote an op-ed six weeks before the 2004 Presidential election talking about how great a job we were doing training Iraqis..
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POPSDaily Attacks in Iraq Hit New High But don't worry! Peter Pace, chairman of the JCS, says that Iraq has undergone a "sea change " in security, and David Petraeus told Hugh Hewitt that "(W)e have achieved what we believe is a reasonable degree of tactical momentum on the ground"
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POPSLieberman talks to frustrated troops Next to him, Spc. Will Hedin, 21, of Chester, Conn., thought about what he was going to say. "We're not making any progress," Hedin said, as he recalled a comrade who was shot by a sniper last week. "It just seems like we drive around and wait to get shot at." But as he waited two chairs down from where Lieberman would sit, Hedin said he'd never voice his true feelings to the senator. "I think I'd be a private if I did," he joked. "It's just more troops, more targets." The soldiers smiled and greeted , stood with him for pictures and sat down to a lunch of roast beef and turkey sandwiches. It was unclear if they ever asked their questions. ... It isn't clear whether Williams mentioned the last line on his note card, the one that had a star next to it. "We don't feel like we're making any progress," it said.
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POPSAn on-the-ground endictment of our Iraq strategey...
I don't want to abandon the Iraqi people. But I am a realist, not some day-dreaming jingoist who thinks this is all just one more rosy Rambo movie. The truth is that we have had a critical failure of leadership, and no one is stepping forward to fill that void. Right now we don't know who we're fighting, and we don't know why they are fighting us. Until we can understand these two questions, there is no way we can begin to answer the question of how to eventually end this war. Unfortunately, no presidential candidate is even asking these questions, which to me signifies that they do not have an Iraq strategy and are not interested in developing one. That's a shame. The Democrats who compare this war to Vietnam should remember another part of that analogy: Nixon took and held his office on promises to get us out of Vietnam, but with no new ideas about the conflict, he only got us in deeper. This could happen to the Democrats as well if they aren't careful.
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POPSHow Republican Senators broke their promise to investigate Iraq intelligence First Roberts said publicly that he'd "try" to have Phase II available to the public before the 2004 election. He didn't. Roberts then gave his word, in writing, that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee would have a draft report on controversial "public statements" from administration officials. That didn't happen either.Then Roberts indicated that he might just give up on the second part of the investigation altogether, because, he argued, there was nothing left to learn. Under pressure to release Phase II before the 2006 elections, Roberts agreed to release subparts of the report, which documented...nothing about the White House's mistakes. One reason why we should be skeptical of Republican reports from the Senate Intelligence Committee. In this instance, they were shamefully negligent in overseeing the executive branch.
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POPSSenate Report: Intelligence Predicted Iraq Problems in 2003 It's amazing what we're finding out now. The investigation reviewed assessments from a number of agencies but focused on two January 2003 papers from the National Intelligence Council: "Regional Consequences of Regime Change in Iraq" and "Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq." Those papers drew from expertise within a number spy agencies and were distributed to scores of White House, national security, diplomatic and congressional officials - most of whom were listed in 81 pages of the Senate report. The full report (PDF) .
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POPSPetraeus goes back on promise to assess surge in Sept. As late as April 26th David Petraeus promised that we would know whether things were working out by September: General Petraeus said he and the American ambassador to Iraq, Ryan C. Crocker, intended to stick by a vow to offer the White House and the Pentagon an assessment of the progress of the new strategy by early September. And he signaled that he hoped for political progress in Iraq, not just military improvements. ''We'll have seen whether in fact our efforts in these areas have helped produce the kind of progress that they are designed in fact to produce,'' he said. ''One would certainly hope that the Iraqi legislators would match that with their own hard work. That's our expectation.'' (from the New York Times, "US Commander Says Fall Pullback in Iraq Would Lead to More Sectarian Killings", by David S. Cloud and Michael R. Gordon, April 26th)
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POPSCivilian deaths in Iraq: causes and consequences Tucker argues that the Haditha debacle is symptomatic of an overstretched military that can no longer tell enemies from noncombatants, and points out, citing Petraeus's own work, that each civilian death makes counterinsurgency work harder and more dangerous by contributing to general mistrust and rage towards the U.S. and thus to insurgent recruitment.
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POPSSorry We Shot Your Kid, Here's $500 Then there's this example: "Claimant's son and a friend were fishing, in a small boat, 15 kilometers north of Tikrit on the Tigres river at 2200 hours on 31 March 2005. The claimant and his son had fished the Tigres many nights recently, but the father did not join his son this night. U.S. Forces helicopters were flying overhead, like they usually did and there were no problems. "A U.S. Forces HMMWV patrol pulled up to the beach near where they were fishing. The patrol had spotted and destroyed a boat earlier in the evening that had an RPG in it. They set off an illumination round and then opened fre. The claimant's only son was shot and killed. His friend was injured, but managed to get the boat to the other side of the river. At the small village across the river they received medical help and were taken to the hospital. But, it was too late for the claimant's son.
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POPSBush endangering troops by not planning for withdrawal Mark Thoma reproduces part of a National Journal article that points out that troop withdrawal can be very dangerous for the troops, and by failing to plan for it the Bush administration is increasing the odds for a chaotic, difficult, and dangerous withdrawal for the US troops when withdrawal does come.
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POPSUS officer: our generals are not worthy of our soldiers Lt. Col. Paul Yingling wrote an article in the Armed Forces Journal that says that lack of accountability has resulted in generals who are basically toadies of the civilian leadership, failed to confront the seriousness of the insurgency in Iraq, and misled the public about the situation there. Via Richard Adams at the Guardian News Blog .
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POPSFormer CIA Officers: Tenet is the Alberto Gonzales of the CIA The letter described Tenet as "one of the bullies." "You helped set the bar very low for reporting that supported favored White House positions, while raising the bar astronomically high when it came to raw intelligence that did not support the case for war being hawked by the president and vice president. "It now turns out that you were the Alberto Gonzales of the intelligence community -- a grotesque mixture of incompetence and sycophancy shielded by a genial personality." ... "You betrayed the CIA officers who collected the intelligence that made it clear that Saddam did not pose an imminent threat. You betrayed the analysts who tried to withstand the pressure applied by Cheney and Rumsfeld.
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