Originally posted by Krypton
Are you two too stupid to notice it???
oh they are far beyond that.:p
MisterOpus1
Wonderful news. Strange, however, that we haven't heard anyone higher up mention this. One would think that Gen. Petraeus, or even Bush of all people would have made this gigantic announcement the moment it was reported.
Sooo, umm, why didn't we all hear it?
And let's take this wonderful news at face value for a moment - you have any thoughts (of your own) about what to do with the remaining 90% or so of the Sunni and Shiite militia insurgency that's causing the REAL havoc in Iraq?
Because they kinda are the real problem here, and they do make up the majority of issues involving the civil war we're caught in the middle of. So why haven't you, Latin, discussed or copy/pasted articles on how to effectively deal with them, especially AFTER the SURGE! troops will soon start to redeploy and our military numbers will be back to pre-SURGE! levels?
Lebezniatnikov
LL, I am extraordinarily skeptical of your source. I've never heard of it, which doesn't necessarily mean it is not legit, but I am very surprised that one of the "leading defense and intelligence" analysis sites has thusfar avoided my radar so to speak.
Anyway, perusing their site a little bit, I found their third most read article, lovingly entitled (in a neat analytical kind of way) "Screw the Bastards." The text follows.
quote:
Screw the Bastards
November 1, 2007: It's all about trends. In Iraq, the trends are going against the terrorists. Take IEDs (roadside bombs). There are fewer of them, and more of them are being detected before they can hurt anyone. Thus U.S. casualties from IEDs are down 80 percent compared to last Spring. Overall American casualties have not been this low since May, 2003, right after the fall of Saddam's government. Iraqi military and civilian casualties are also down over 70 percent, compared to last Spring. Most of this was due to so many Iraqis finally taking control of their own security. Iraqis, particularly Sunni Arabs, have basically said "enough!" Over 60,000 Iraqis have volunteered to help with security. This generally consists of manning checkpoints, and knowing who is who. Many more Iraqis are passing on information about terrorists. That has crippled terrorist operations, as can be seen in the sharp decline in IED and suicide bomb attacks.
But now the threat has shifted from the Sunni Arab minority to the Shia Arab majority. The Shia Arabs hate the Sunni Arabs. Shia Arab political parties and militias compete with each other in coming up with new ways to stick it to the Sunni Arabs. The depth of this hatred doesn't really get communicated accurately in the West. It is a "we will kill you all" level hatred that is restrained mainly by U.S. troops, and an Iraqi leadership that wants to avoid international condemnation for presiding over mass murder and large scale ethnic cleansing.
The hatred is most intense in Baghdad and its suburbs, where Saddam's thugs were at their worst. Many of those secret police operatives, and their extended families, still live in the area. But probably not for long. But as you get farther away from Baghdad, the rural communities are more likely to contain Sunni and Shia that have always gotten along, and been equally screwed by the central government in Baghdad.
Up north, there is still hostility between Kurds, and Sunni Arabs Saddam had imported for over a decade, to water down the Kurdish majority around the northern oil fields. The Kurds are reversing this, and many Sunni Arabs don't want to be moved. The central government doesn't want to mess with the Kurds, mainly because the Kurds are better fighters and many of the best units in the army are Kurdish, or largely Kurdish. With the Kurds, the government is willing to negotiate. With the Sunni Arabs, less so.
But the Kurds have problems of their own. A radical Turkish-Kurd separatist organization, the PKK, has largely been driven out of Turkey and has set up camp inside Iraq, along the Turkish border. The other Kurds up there admire the PKK, and leave them be. But the several thousand PKK fighters have been crossing the border to kill Turks, and now the Turkish army is camped out on the border, threatening to come across in force before the end of the year, unless the Kurdish government, or someone else in charge, eliminates the PKK. The Kurds in northern Iraq have a real problem here, because no one, not even the Americans, can stop the Turks if they decide to cross the border. Memories of the Turks run long and scary in this part of the world. While the Turks have been out of the empire business for over 80 years, they are still fearsome soldiers. The Turkish troops have a reputation, and they live up to it. No Kurdish government wants to be responsible for killing or arresting PKK "freedom fighters." But letting the Turks do it is worse. Or is it? The Kurds have to decide before the end of the year.
Meanwhile, in Baghdad the decision has already been made to screw the Sunni Arabs, in as many ways as possible. No oil for those bastards, and not many government jobs either. It they are lucky, maybe we'll let them live.
So maybe you can see why I take that article with a grain of salt.
DJ Shibby
quote:
Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov
LL, I am extraordinarily skeptical of your source. I've never heard of it, which doesn't necessarily mean it is not legit, but I am very surprised that one of the "leading defense and intelligence" analysis sites has thusfar avoided my radar so to speak.
Anyway, perusing their site a little bit, I found their third most read article, lovingly entitled (in a neat analytical kind of way) "Screw the Bastards." The text follows.
So maybe you can see why I take that article with a grain of salt.
pwned
Q5echo
aired today. watch it all.
LatinLover
quote:
Originally posted by Q5echo
aired today. watch it all.
hallelujah! For the first time I see a coverage of the mainstream media reporting progress our troops are making on the ground. havent anyone noticed that in the past week the media has been so quiet on Iraq? :conf: oh well!
I mostly take news of our current situation on the ground from our troops. last time I spoke with a friend that is in the Marines he says that indeed there has been a change of course in iraq. its caught my attention in the video that they are trying to establish local economical development my friend also mentioned to me that they are trying to get the iraqi youth back to schools and to work so they can be busy in their life and that would help them from being subject to recruitment by these terrorist
Zild
This is moot. Victory was declared in 2003.
atbell
I'm also sceptical of the first source. LL - Can you tell us a bit more about who these people are and how you found them.
Regardless, the article didn't strike me as all that surprising. I've read in a few other places that there have been positive developments recently (in the past month or so.)
My only concern is that I seem to remember that the Al-Q forces opperate seasonally. They tend to go into hidding for the winter for what ever reason only to strike again in the spring. I wouldn't be surprised if the recent advancements are simply the begining of the winter re-armament. It would be a real shame if the US troops were with drawn only to get hit by a spring offensive.
Q5echo
an outstanding article destroying the hippie/liberal myopia that passes as responsible intelligent thought written by the preeminent atheist of our time.
quote:
Isolationism Isn't the Answer Jihadists aren't in Afghanistan—or Iraq—because we are there.
By Christopher Hitchens Posted Monday, Nov. 5, 2007, at 1:11 PM ET
I call your attention to the front-page report in the Oct. 30 New York Times in which David Rohde, writing from the Afghan town of Gardez, tells of a new influx of especially vicious foreign fighters. Describing it as the largest such infiltration since 2001, Rohde goes on to say, "The foreign fighters are not only bolstering the ranks of the insurgency. They are more violent, uncontrollable and extreme than even their locally bred allies." They also, it seems, favor those Taliban elements who are more explicitly allied with al-Qaida, and bring with them cash and resources with which to sabotage, for example, the opening of schools in the southern provinces around Kandahar.
Now, if this were a report from Iraq, we would be hearing that it was all our own fault and that the Bin Ladenists would not be in that country at all if it were not for the coalition presence. It's practically an article of faith among liberals that only the folly of the intervention made Iraq into a magnet and a training or recruiting ground for our foes. One of the difficulties with this shallow and glib analysis is that it fails to explain Afghanistan and, in fact, fails to explain it twice.
We have fairly convincing evidence that a majority of Afghans do not, at the very least, oppose the presence of NATO forces on their soil. The signs of progress are slight but definite, having mainly to do with the return of millions of refugees and an improvement in the lives of women. There are some outstanding stupidities, such as the attempt to spray the opium poppies, but in general the West has behaved decently, and a huge number of Afghans resent the Taliban and its allies if only on the purely nationalist ground that it represents a renewed attempt to turn Afghanistan into a Pakistani colony, as it was before 2001.
I mention all this because there is no way to argue that the Taliban, either local or imported, is the product of some grievance or injustice or root cause. Its gangs are, instead, primitive fanatics making war on a Muslim society. And they are not there only because "we" are there. We know this because, long before "we" got there, they were in effective control of large parts of the place and had turned a terrorized and stultified land into a springboard and incubator for transnational nihilism. Bad as things may be now, they were infinitely worse when we ourselves were being isolationist.
After all, if the usual peacenik logic were to be pursued, and it was to be assumed that "we" are chiefly responsible for magnetizing "them," then it would follow that if we were to leave, they would either give up or go elsewhere. Is there anybody who can be brought to believe anything so fatuous? Well, then, if this logic is self-evidently false in the case of Afghanistan, why should it be any more persuasive in the case of Iraq?
"No end in sight" is another favorite mantra of the anti-war mentality. And how true that melancholy reflection seems to be. The latest news is of a very nasty Islamic insurgency in southern Thailand, butchering Buddhist villages (remember the Taliban assault on the Buddha statues at Bamiyan?) and making demands for the imposition of sharia law. Perhaps someone will identify for me which Thai and Buddhist—or Western imperialist—crimes have led to this sudden development. Or perhaps it will be admitted, however grudgingly and belatedly, that there is something sui generis about Islamist fanaticism: something that is looking for a confrontation with every non-Muslim society in the world and is determined to pursue it with the utmost violence and cruelty. It is also seeking a confrontation with some Muslim states and societies.
I make the latter point with deliberation. Afghanistan has a constitution that reserves special privileges for Islam. Most Afghan women still cover at least their heads. Even those who fought long and hard against the Taliban and al-Qaida—the Northern Alliance forces, for instance, or the Shiite Hazara—are intensely Muslim by any non-Muslim standard. But that does not suffice to protect them from the attentions of suicide-murderers and throat-cutters, recruited from as far away as Chechnya or even the Muslim areas of China. So, can we hear a bit less about how the jihadists are responding only to those who "target" Muslims or who are "Islamophobic"?
The people of Pakistan are also discovering the cost of "blowback." Their entire state is consecrated to the idea of Islam: It is one of the first countries to have its very nationality defined by religion. But there are those for whom a mere state for Muslims is not enough and who insist on something quite different, which is a purely Muslim state. Gen. Pervez Musharraf used to flirt with these forces, as did Gen. Zia and as did (though she now prefers to forget this) Benazir Bhutto. The groups that used to be Pakistan's proxies in Afghanistan are now waging war on the streets of Pakistan's cities and in the mountains of Pakistan's frontier provinces. They are blowing up Shiite mosques, killing the doctors and nurses who try to administer polio vaccine in rural areas, and forcing women and girls back into the role of chattel. For them, nothing will do but the reimposition of seventh-century mores and the re-establishment of the caliphate. It is idle to think that "we" created this gruesome phenomenon and idler still to imagine that there is any possibility of our compromising with it.
Q5echo, it's bad enough that you are an open neocon with a soft spot for Chaney of all people but to quote someone like Christoper Hitchens , a belligerent drunk who celebrates every american invasion with particular goulishness is just too much. http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=2824
And what is your problem with liberals? I understand the hate toward Ron Paul because of his principles and even calling out neocons in public but liberals certainly follow neocon agenda to a tilt, in fact both Clintons are more neoconic than most neocons themselves.
LatinLover
quote:
Originally posted by erdega
Q5echo, it's bad enough that you are an open neocon with a soft spot for Chaney of all people but to quote someone like Christoper Hitchens , a belligerent drunk who celebrates every american invasion with particular goulishness is just too much. http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=2824
And what is your problem with liberals? I understand the hate toward Ron Paul because of his principles and even calling out neocons in public but liberals certainly follow neocon agenda to a tilt, in fact both Clintons are more neoconic than most neocons themselves.
Yeah we should all listen what antiwar.com says and take it as the mighty truth :rolleyes:
