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-- Study shows Iraqis are insane, demented, schizophrenic, or just don't know reality
Study shows Iraqis are insane, demented, schizophrenic, or just don't know reality
Because how else could one conclude what those crazy Iraqis are saying?:
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| All Iraqi Groups Blame U.S. Invasion for Discord, Study Shows By Karen DeYoung Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, December 19, 2007; A14 Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of "occupying forces" as the key to national reconciliation, according to focus groups conducted for the U.S. military last month. That is good news, according to a military analysis of the results. At the very least, analysts optimistically concluded, the findings indicate that Iraqis hold some "shared beliefs" that may eventually allow them to surmount the divisions that have led to a civil war. |
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| Conducting the focus groups, in 19 separate sessions organized by outside contractors in five cities, is among the ways in which Multi-National Force-Iraq assesses conditions in the country beyond counting insurgent attacks, casualties and weapons caches. The command, led by Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, devotes more time and resources than any other government or independent entity to measuring various matters, including electricity, satisfaction with trash collection and what Iraqis think it will take for them to get along. The results are analyzed and presented to Petraeus as part of the daily Battle Update Assessment or BUA (pronounced boo-ah). Some of the news has been unarguably good, including the sharply reduced number of roadside bombings and attacks on civilians. But bad news is often presented with a bright side, such as the focus-group results and a November poll, which found that 25 percent of Baghdad residents were satisfied with their local government and that 15 percent said they had enough fuel for heating and cooking. The good news? Those numbers were higher than the figures of the previous month (18 percent and 9 percent, respectively). |
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| And Iraqi complaints about matters other than security are seen as progress. Early this year, Maj. Fred Garcia, an MNF-I analyst, said that "a very large percentage of people would answer questions about security by saying 'I don't know.' Now, we get more griping because people feel freer." Iraqi political reconciliation, quality-of-life issues and the economy are largely the responsibility of the State Department. But the military, to the occasional consternation of U.S. diplomats who feel vastly outnumbered, has its own "mirror agencies" in many areas. Officers in charge of civil-military operations, said senior Petraeus adviser Army Col. William E. Rapp, "can tell you how many markets are open in Baghdad, how many shops, how many banks are open. . . . We have a lot more people" on the ground. On Iraqi politics, "we have four to six slides almost every morning on 'Where does the Iraqi government stand on de-Baathification legislation?' All these things are embassy things," Rapp said. But Petraeus is interested in "his 'feel' for a situation, and he gets that from a bunch of different data points," he added. Even though members of the military "understand the limitations" of polling data, Rapp said, "subjective measures" are an important part of the mix. In July, the military signed a contract with Gallup for four public opinion polls a month in Iraq: three nationwide and one in Baghdad. Lincoln Group, which has conducted surveys for the military since shortly after the invasion, received a year-long contract in January to conduct focus groups. Outside of the military, some of the most widespread polling in Iraq has been done by D3 Systems, a Virginia-based company that maintains offices in each of Iraq's 18 provinces. Its most recent publicly released surveys, conducted in September for several news media organizations, showed the same widespread Iraqi belief voiced by the military's focus groups: that a U.S. departure will make things better. A State Department poll in September 2006 reported a similar finding. Matthew Warshaw, a senior research manager at D3, said that despite security improvements, polling in Iraq remains difficult. "While violence has gone down, one of the ways it has been achieved is by effectively separating people. That means mobility is limited, with roadblocks by the U.S. and Iraqi military or local militias," Warshaw said in an interview. Most of the recent survey results he has seen about political reconciliation, Warshaw said, are "more about [Iraqis] reconciling with the United States within their own particular territory, like in Anbar. . . . But it doesn't say anything about how Sunni groups feel about Shiite groups in Baghdad." |
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| Warshaw added: "In Iraq, I just don't hear statements that come from any of the Sunni, Shiite or Kurdish groups that say 'We recognize that we need to share power with the others, that we can't truly dominate.' " According to a summary report of the focus-group findings obtained by The Washington Post, Iraqis have a number of "shared beliefs" about the current situation that cut across sectarian lines. Participants, in separate groups of men and women, were interviewed in Ramadi, Najaf, Irbil, Abu Ghraib and in Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad. The report does not mention how the participants were selected. |
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| Dated December 2007, the report notes that "the Iraqi government has still made no significant progress toward its fundamental goal of national reconciliation." Asked to describe "the current situation in Iraq to a foreign visitor," some groups focused on positive aspects of the recent security improvements. But "most would describe the negative elements of life in Iraq beginning with the 'U.S. occupation' in March 2003," the report says. |
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| Some participants also blamed Iranian meddling for Iraq's problems. While the United States was said to want to control Iraq's oil, Iran was seen as seeking to extend its political and religious agendas. |
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| Few mentioned Saddam Hussein as a cause of their problems, which the report described as an important finding implying that "the current strife in Iraq seems to have totally eclipsed any agonies or grievances many Iraqis would have incurred from the past regime, which lasted for nearly four decades -- as opposed to the current conflict, which has lasted for five years." |
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| Overall, the report said that "these findings may be expected to conclude that national reconciliation is neither anticipated nor possible. In reality, this survey provides very strong evidence that the opposite is true." A sense of "optimistic possibility permeated all focus groups . . . and far more commonalities than differences are found among these seemingly diverse groups of Iraqis." |
Oh great, now the Pentagon is chiming in with some major insanity of their own:
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| Pentagon Says Services in Iraq Are Stagnant By MICHAEL R. GORDON WASHINGTON � Despite a significant reduction in violence in Iraq over the past three months, the Iraqi government has made little headway in improving the delivery of electricity, health care and other essential services, a new Pentagon report said Tuesday. The report is the latest of the Pentagon�s quarterly assessments on progress in Iraq and offers the Bush administration�s most comprehensive assessment of security and economic trends there. As expected, the report chronicled a substantial decline in attacks on Iraqi civilians, Iraqi security forces and American troops � a reduction to numbers not seen since the summer of 2005, according to the Pentagon. But the assessment also indicated that the Iraqi government has been slow to take advantage of that downturn in violence by taking the political and economic steps to cement the security gains. The delivery of basic services is one area in which the United States has been urging the Iraq government to make progress. The hope is that improving the distribution of electricity, clean water and medical care would build public support for the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and ease sectarian tensions. But the sectarian agenda of the Shiite-dominated Iraq government has been a hindrance, the study said, noting that there have been only �minimal advances in the delivery of essential services to the people of Iraq, mainly due to sectarian bias in targeting and execution of remedial programs.� At the same time, according to the Pentagon, the increase in the price of oil has increased government revenues. The Iraqi economy is projected to grow by 6.3 percent in 2007. And Iraqi authorities have increased their spending on infrastructure, such as the electricity sector. But although electricity production has increased somewhat, supply still falls well short of demand, the report said. The shortfall in November 2007 was 42 percent of total demand compared with 53 percent in August 2007 and 47 percent in August 2006. The United States has built 85 of 142 planned health care centers, many of which have been turned over to the Ministry of Health, which has been dominated in recent years by followers of Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American Shiite cleric. The report noted, however, that some of the medical centers have not been opened �due to a shortage of trained medical staff� and a �sectarian agenda� within the Health Ministry that has led to the discrimination against Sunni areas. Sectarian politics has hampered progress in other areas, as well. The American military has recruited about 69,000 mostly Sunni volunteers to help secure Iraq. The United States would like the Iraqi government to institutionalize the arrangement by hiring many of the volunteers as policemen or soldiers. But the Pentagon report said that such efforts are �moving slowly� because of �fears by the Maliki government that those forces may return to violence or form new militias.� While political gains have been tenuous there has been much progress in lowering the level of violence, the report indicated. The number of attacks per week using bombs, mines, mortars, antiaircraft weapons and small arms was fewer than 600 during November 2007. When President Bush began to send additional reinforcements to Iraq in February, the weekly figure was about 1,400. The number of civilian deaths declined to about 600 in November from more than 2,500 in January, according to American and Iraqi government data cited in the report. The number of roadside bomb attacks, which are generally aimed at American and Iraqi forces, dropped drastically. There has also been a significant decline in car bomb attacks, which are often directed at civilians, since the start of the year. However, the number of suicide attacks involving car bombs and individuals wearing vests filled with explosives was up slightly from October to November. More than 3,600 members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia were killed or captured from February 2007 until mid-November, the report said, including 54 emirs or senior leaders. The military pressure on the homegrown Sunni Arab extremist group, which American intelligence agencies have concluded is foreign-led, has driven many of the insurgents north, according to the Pentagon. Regarding Iran, the report said that there has been �no identified decrease in Iranian training and funding� of Shiite militias in Iraq, but the Pentagon study did not specifically say whether Iranian arms shipments have declined. There has been a decrease of attacks involving a particularly lethal type of roadside bomb that American intelligence says is supplied by the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/19/w...agewanted=print |
And dammit, who the hell is nominee of Bush's for Assistant Secretary of Defense? The guy gives the Iraqi government an "F"?:
http://thegate.nationaljournal.com/...aliki_gover.php
Thank goodness the SURGE! worked so well.
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