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POPSObama: Start The Revolution Without Me So one of two things are going to happen. Either the demonstrators are going to succeed in overthrowing the current government which has already become destabilized, or the conservatives in Iran will unleash an unprecedented bloodbath against the protestors. Either way Obama's position of trying to stay in their good graces for the sake of negotiation has become obsolete, a situation that neither he nor his advisors have been able to recognize. But so far Obama has not seized the opportunity. He insists on giving legitimacy to the current government..The world seems ready to line up against the current Iranian government and their actions as the statements of condemnation from other European countries have shown. Obama could be the one to rally them. Instead he doesn't want to "meddle". People are taking their lives into their hands to stand up against a repressive government that poses a threat to the whole world . . . .
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POPSChristians and Muslims Celebrate Christmas Holidays In Baghdad Even before I can ask Interior Ministry spokesman Major-General Abdul Karim Khalaf a question, he greets me with a big smile. "All Iraqis are Christian today!" he says. Many of the people attending the Christmas celebration appear to be Muslims, with women wearing head scarves. Suad Mahmoud, holding her 16-month-old daughter, Sara, tells me she is indeed Muslim, but she's very happy to be here. "My mother's birthday also is this month, so we celebrate all occasions," she says, "especially in this lovely month of Christmas and New Year." Father Saad Sirop Hanna, a Chaldean Christian priest, is here too. He was kidnapped by militants in 2006 and held for 28 days. He knows firsthand how difficult the lot of Christians in Iraq is but, he tells me, "We are just attesting that things are changing in Baghdad, slowly, but we hope that this change actually is real. We will wait for the future to tell us the truth about this."
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POPSIraq on the brink of another Civil War
Whenever and wherever a despot has died and left a country in political limbo, that country has had problems. When Spain and Portugal went through their Nemesis in the 70's and 80's, they had stable European neighbours to call on. Of all the deaths that threatened stability, it was perhaps only Franco who had made provisions for his demise and reinstalled a King to give the population a focal point. Tito made no provisions at all and the result was the worst form of Civil War imaginable, with, one has to remember, the defining of Ethnic Cleansing. Those countries were safe for law abiding people. Armed policemen patrolled most streets and their form of rule and law prevailed. The soft minded liberals infested the emergent countries with wholly unattainable ideals. Ideals that do not even work in a stable democracy like Britain. Why does Liberalism not work? Because there are those out there who wish us harm and the Liberal Elite cannot conceive such a truth.
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POPSTurkish warplanes bomb Kurd bases in northern Iraq There goes the Northern Front: "But on the streets of Turkey, public anger has mounted with each funeral held for the slain soldiers. The anger has turned toward Turkish leaders as well. On Sunday, mourners booed Gul at a funeral in the western city of Eskisehir, and they booed Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan at another funeral in Armutlu village, near the capital."
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POPSStrip of Iraq 'on the Verge of Exploding' Cont.... The long-cherished dream of many of the world's 25 million ethnic Kurds is an independent state that encompasses parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. All but Iraq adamantly oppose Kurdish autonomy, much less a Kurdish state. Iraqi Kurds continue to insist they are not seeking independence, even as they unilaterally expand the territory they control in Iraq.
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POPSMan Dead, Large Amount Of Possible Cyanide Found "Our Joint Terrorism Task Force is involved in this simply because the victim here is from another country and it just kind of makes sense that our terrorism guys would take a look a look at this," FBI Special Agent in Charge James Davis said. Cyanide can be made from plants in very small amounts. It can be a gas, liquid or powder. It prevents the body from using oxygen and therefore is more harmful to the heart and brain than other organs. "It was used in concentration camps in World War II and by Saddam Hussein against the Kurds in the 1990s." Officials said cyanide can be used as a terrorist weapon if it is dumped in water put in food, sprayed as a gas, or many other methods. The investigation is continuing.
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POPSTurkey is Centre of the World Despite the fragile situation, if Turkey were to organise autonomy for Kurds in its own borders, northern Iraq, Syria and Iran it would be a heroic act of enormous historical import.
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POPSFrom Fallujah To Diyala, The Target Has Shifted As I have recently mentioned, many of the Sunni Awakening groups are holding out for more money, and threatening to rejoin the ranks of their previous insurgent groups, including AQI and the 1920's Revolutionary Brigade. Our own Alex Horton wrote an insightful post about this here. http://armyofdude.blogspot.com/2008/07/enemies-with-benefits.html It seems now that this unrest may be a sign of more to come in Diyala. The province is predominantly Arab Sunni but sizeable communities of Sunni Kurds and Arab and Kurdish Shiites live there.
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POPSDon't Look Now--but the Surge is About to Backfire as Iraq poised to Explode
The first is the brewing crisis over Kirkuk, where the pushy Kurds are demanding control and Iraq’s Arabs are resisting. The second is in the west, and Anbar, where the US-backed Sons of Iraq sahwa (”Awakening”) movement is moving to take power against the Iraqi Islamic Party, a fundamentalist Sunni bloc. And third is the restive Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, which is chafing at gains made by its Iranian-backed rival, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) The final crisis-to-be is the Sadr vs. Badr one. The Times today suggests that Sadr is weakening: The militia that was once the biggest defender of poor Shiites in Iraq, the Mahdi Army, has been profoundly weakened in a number of neighborhoods across Baghdad, in an important, if tentative, milestone for stability in Iraq. Don’t believe it. Sadr’s rivals, ISCI, don’t have anything like the popular base that Sadr has. And underneath Sadr is a volatile mix of neighborhood, local and regional militias, mosques, and econom
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POPSHow We'll Know When We've Won: Frederick W. Kagan Certainly, the American people have a right to insist that our government operate with a clear vision of success and that it develop a clear plan for evaluating whether we are moving in the right direction, even if no tidy numerical metrics can meaningfully size up so complex a human endeavor. As shown here, supporters of the current strategy do indeed have a clear definition of success, and those working to implement it are already evaluating American progress against that definition every day. It is on the basis of their evaluation that we say the surge is working. http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.,pubID.27890/pub_detail.asp
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