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POPSWhat counts as 'success' in Iraq? Cont.... This was widely predicted before the war was started, and it is now apparent. All of Iraq's leaders, including the president, a Kurd, are friendly with Iran and regard it as an important ally. In Bush circles, this new prominence for Iran is never linked to the war, as if occurring by itself.
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POPSGeneral: Timeline is most secure Iraq strategy "Brigadier Gen. Sean McFarland…credited the ‘growing concern that the U.S. would leave Iraq and leave the Sunnis defenseless against Al-Qaeda and Iranian-supported militias …’ as the main reason for the turn around in Al Anbar"
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POPSThe surge is working? An insider returns home "A Guardian journalist returns home to Iraq to find that far from what we hear in the US, the surge has produced nothing approaching normalcy or peace, but rather ghettos seething with violence, with nothing but makeshift walls dividing the increasingly hostile warring factions"
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POPS Kosovo lives: Between two worlds An interesting story of an English teacher....it is very difficult for outsiders to fathom what (caste/religion notwithstanding) people in the region have been through...
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POPSHow General Petraeus Saved the U.S. Economy Actually, we don't have to imagine very hard at all. Hurricane Katrina took about 2.4 million barrels off the market (because of refining shutdown and a halt to foreign oil deliveries), and oil prices spiked.
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POPSU.S. Military Frees 10,000 Detainees in Iraq Detainees are sometimes released for political purposes. For instance, the recent amnesty law which released thousands of suspected insurgents in an effort to bring certain Sunni groups back into the government. They are also released when it is determined they held no intelligence value, or posed no threat. In Iraq, the average time of detention is just under one year. Of those now in detention, 12 are women, more than 300 are juveniles, 200 are third country nationals and about 200 are over the age of 60, the US military statement said.
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POPSSecret US-Iranian Dialogue Shakes Up Mid East Alliances and the Sunni guerrilla insurgents in Iraq, to allow President Bush to claim his Iraq campaign had ended successfully before leaving the White House. DEBKAfile’s military sources report that Tehran ordered Iranian intelligence officers working undercover in Iraq to halt attacks on US troops by pro-Iranian militias, including Moqtada Sadr’s Mehdi Army. This has left US and Iraqi government force with free hands for large-scale operations against al Qaeda. Read Full Article
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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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POPSIraqis wanted timed withdrawal in 2007; Bush refused Sunni, Kurd, Shi'ite joint effort quashed by US. Humiliation still lingers. Iraqi Nat'l Security advisor wrote: "While Iraq is trying to gain independence from the United States," he wrote, "some influential foreign figures" were still "trying to spoon-feed our government and take a very proactive role in many key decisions."
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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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POPSDefining “Victory” In Iraq Part of the problem here is that the war in Iraq is usually thought of as a single war in Iraq. But there have been at least three wars in Iraq since 2003 – the U.S.-led war against Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party regime, the civil war between Sunni and Shia militias, and the insurgencies against government and international forces waged by a constellation of guerrilla and terrorist groups. All three wars are distinct from each other, and two of the three are already over. The war against Saddam Hussein and his government ended when the regime was overthrown and what remained of its army was disbanded. You might say it didn’t officially end until he was captured in December of 2003, but he effectively lost when he was demoted from absolute dictator to fugitive. No matter what else might happen, Saddam Hussein will never be considered victorious.
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POPSEx-insurgents Want More Money, or Else To get a real idea of how this surge is not working. Read the rest of the story. Then read the comments. The comments are from real soldiers. You know. The troops we pretend to support.
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POPSBusting the Surge Myth Cont.... The Shiitization of Baghdad was thus a significant cause of falling casualty rates. But it is another war waiting to happen, when the Sunnis come back to find Shiite militiamen in their living rooms.
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POPSThe Democrats' Fairy Tale
And the improvements in Anbar could never have been sustained without aggressive American military efforts — efforts that were more effective in 2007 than they had been in 2006, due in part to the addition of the surge forces. Last year’s success, in Anbar and elsewhere, was made possible by confidence among Iraqis that U.S. troops would stay and help protect them, that the U.S. would not abandon them to their enemies. Because the U.S. sent more troops instead of withdrawing — because, in other words, President Bush won his battles in 2007 with the Democratic Congress — we have been able to turn around the situation in Iraq. And now Iraq’s Parliament has passed a de-Baathification law — one of the so-called benchmarks Congress established for political reconciliation. For much of 2007, Democrats were able to deprecate the military progress and political reconciliation taking place on the ground by harping on the failure of the Iraqi government to pass the benchmark legislation
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POPSMcCain: The Mistake Machine Poor John McCain is a gift that keeps on giving to the Democrats. Mistake after mistake after mistake. I'm beginning to worry about pointing out his mistakes. I'm afraid someone will accuse me of making fun of someone with a "challenge" and it will be true.
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POPSCBS covers up for McCain Since the American media has bought into the myth of the Surge, they can't very well show things like these and expose themselves. Ooops...too late!
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POPSJohn McCain is truly an angry and frustated egomaniac This pretender needs to chill out on one of his wife’s luxurious estates and tend the barbecue. It is very evident that he would turn over our government to the corporate powers who have been running it for the last eight years. Not this time. — Posted by Luke Wright
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POPSText of McCain Editorial rejected by the NY Times This editorial was a written response to Obama's editorial. It was rejected. continuing.. "Perhaps he is unaware that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has recently certified that, as one news article put it, “Iraq has met all but three of 18 original benchmarks set by Congress last year to measure security, political and economic progress.” Even more heartening has been progress that’s not measured by the benchmarks. More than 90,000 Iraqis, many of them Sunnis who once fought against the government, have signed up as Sons of Iraq to fight against the terrorists. Nor do they measure Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s new-found willingness to crack down on Shiite extremists in Basra and Sadr City—actions that have done much to dispel suspicions of sectarianism."
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