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Obama Tried To Stall Gis' Iraq Withdrawal
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| LatinLover |
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WHILE campaigning in public for a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Sen. Barack Obama has tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a draw-down of the American military presence.
According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July.
"He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington," Zebari said in an interview.
Obama insisted that Congress should be involved in negotiations on the status of US troops - and that it was in the interests of both sides not to have an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration in its "state of weakness and political confusion."
"However, as an Iraqi, I prefer to have a security agreement that regulates the activities of foreign troops, rather than keeping the matter open." Zebari says.
Though Obama claims the US presence is "illegal," he suddenly remembered that Americans troops were in Iraq within the legal framework of a UN mandate. His advice was that, rather than reach an accord with the "weakened Bush administration," Iraq should seek an extension of the UN mandate.
While in Iraq, Obama also tried to persuade the US commanders, including Gen. David Petraeus, to suggest a "realistic withdrawal date." They declined.
Obama has made many contradictory statements with regard to Iraq. His latest position is that US combat troops should be out by 2010. Yet his effort to delay an agreement would make that withdrawal deadline impossible to meet.
Supposing he wins, Obama's administration wouldn't be fully operational before February - and naming a new ambassador to Baghdad and forming a new negotiation team might take longer still.
By then, Iraq will be in the throes of its own campaign season. Judging by the past two elections, forming a new coalition government may then take three months. So the Iraqi negotiating team might not be in place until next June.
Then, judging by how long the current talks have taken, restarting the process from scratch would leave the two sides needing at least six months to come up with a draft accord. That puts us at May 2010 for when the draft might be submitted to the Iraqi parliament - which might well need another six months to pass it into law.
Thus, the 2010 deadline fixed by Obama is a meaningless concept, thrown in as a sop to his anti-war base.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the Bush administration have a more flexible timetable in mind.
According to Zebari, the envisaged time span is two or three years - departure in 2011 or 2012. That would let Iraq hold its next general election, the third since liberation, and resolve a number of domestic political issues.
Even then, the dates mentioned are only "notional," making the timing and the cadence of withdrawal conditional on realities on the ground as appreciated by both sides.
Iraqi leaders are divided over the US election. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani (whose party is a member of the Socialist International) sees Obama as "a man of the Left" - who, once elected, might change his opposition to Iraq's liberation. Indeed, say Talabani's advisers, a President Obama might be tempted to appropriate the victory that America has already won in Iraq by claiming that his intervention transformed failure into success.
Maliki's advisers have persuaded him that Obama will win - but the prime minister worries about the senator's "political debt to the anti-war lobby" - which is determined to transform Iraq into a disaster to prove that toppling Saddam Hussein was "the biggest strategic blunder in US history."
Other prominent Iraqi leaders, such as Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi and Kurdish regional President Massoud Barzani, believe that Sen. John McCain would show "a more realistic approach to Iraqi issues."
Obama has given Iraqis the impression that he doesn't want Iraq to appear anything like a success, let alone a victory, for America. The reason? He fears that the perception of US victory there might revive the Bush Doctrine of "pre-emptive" war - that is, removing a threat before it strikes at America.
Despite some usual equivocations on the subject, Obama rejects pre-emption as a legitimate form of self -defense. To be credible, his foreign-policy philosophy requires Iraq to be seen as a failure, a disaster, a quagmire, a pig with lipstick or any of the other apocalyptic adjectives used by the American defeat industry in the past five years.
Yet Iraq is doing much better than its friends hoped and its enemies feared. The UN mandate will be extended in December, and we may yet get an agreement on the status of forces before President Bush leaves the White House in January.
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| cmay119 |
| Copy > paste without Source link? C'mon Latin, this might as well have been written by you now, which obviously wouldn't be very unbiased. |
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| LatinLover |
| quote: | Originally posted by cmay119
Copy > paste without Source link? C'mon Latin, this might as well have been written by you now, which obviously wouldn't be very unbiased. |
How dare you question my intellectual integrity. I mean, I'm one of the few intellectual honest members in this board, with all due respect. It's very sad that this forum has been turned into the chill out section for the far left.
Here is your link SOURCE |
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| Krypton |
| quote: | Originally posted by LatinLover
How dare you question my intellectual integrity. I mean, I'm one of the few intellectual honest members in this board, with all due respect. It's very sad that this forum has been turned into the chill out section for the far left.
Here is your link SOURCE |
LOL...an OP-Ed from the New York Post huh? Gee, isn't that owned by the same guy who owns Fox News...I believe his name is...Rupert Murdoch of News Corp...and an opinion column of all things? Sorry, but I don't buy this for 1 second. |
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| Lebezniatnikov |
| quote: | Originally posted by Krypton
LOL...an OP-Ed from the New York Post huh? Gee, isn't that owned by the same guy who owns Fox News...I believe his name is...Rupert Murdoch of News Corp...and an opinion column of all things? Sorry, but I don't buy this for 1 second. |
Beat me to the punch.
The National Enquirer has a better track record (thanks to John Edwards) with the truth than the New York Post does. |
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| Groundhog Boy |
| quote: | Originally posted by LatinLover
How dare you question my intellectual integrity. I mean, I'm one of the few intellectual honest members in this board, with all due respect. |
:stongue: :stongue: :stongue: :stongue: |
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| Q5echo |
| if what the Iraqi Foreign Minister is saying is true, this would be the end of Obama. he would be finished. |
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| Fir3start3r |
Besides, if the NY Post has the Iraqi minister 'on record' who the hell cares about 'the source'. :rolleyes:
Obama should stick to his teleprompter instead of talking out of both sides of his mouth...some gaul his has |
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| Lebezniatnikov |
| It should also be noted that this was a NYPost OPINION piece... which means it's about as reliable a source as TMZ. |
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| MisterOpus1 |
Time for another intervention.......
| quote: | Originally posted by LatinLover
How dare you question my intellectual integrity. |
It really isn't that difficult, considering you have none.
| quote: | | I mean, I'm one of the few intellectual honest members in this board, with all due respect. |
Respect is earned, and you've done anything but that on this board and this forum, Arnold. A coward like yourself who's been banned and suspended multiple times, changed his name multiple times, and calls someone out to debate him and runs away from his own challenge demonstrates little intellectual honesty, and certainly deserves no respect.
Therefore, his statement was very much warranted.
| quote: | | It's very sad that this forum has been turned into the chill out section for the far left. |
If that's how you feel, you know where the door is. Don't let it hit your booty on the way out.
But I tell you what's even more sad - your presence even after you've been kicked out multiple times.
But I guess every forum has their little jester troll, so this one really can't be much different.
Oh, about your article - the "secret" talk was actually reported back in June by MSNBC:
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/arch...16/1146329.aspx
As you can read, there was nothing sneaky about it at all. What Obama was doing was showing his lack of trust of the Bush Administration negotiating the Iraqi Agreement that consists of:
a Status of Forces agreement -- providing the legal basis for the continued presence and
operation of U.S. armed forces in Iraq once the U.N. Security Council mandate expires on December 31, 2008.
a Strategic Framework Agreement -- covering the overall bilateral relationship between the two countries. -- http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/RL34568_20080711.pdf
As Obama stated rather clearly:
| quote: | | "My concern is that the Bush administration, in a weakened state politically, ends up trying to rush an agreement that in some ways might be binding to the next administration, whether it was my administration or Sen. McCain's administration." |
So just to be clear, the Status of Forces Agreement is NOT a timetable of withdrawal for our troops. The concern here is entirely about making sure there is no binding agreement to the next president (including if it's McCain, as Obama clearly stated) made by the dipstick current lame duck we have in office now. Obama wanted to make sure Bush didn't make such an agreement without the review of Congress. His response to this garbage is quite clear:
| quote: | But Obama's national security spokeswoman Wendy Morigi said Taheri's article bore "as much resemblance to the truth as a McCain campaign commercial."
In fact, Obama had told the Iraqis that they should not rush through a "Strategic Framework Agreement" governing the future of US forces until after President George W. Bush leaves office, she said.
In the face of resistance from Bush, the Democrat has long said that any such agreement must be reviewed by the US Congress as it would tie a future administration's hands on Iraq.
"Barack Obama has never urged a delay in negotiations, nor has he urged a delay in immediately beginning a responsible drawdown of our combat brigades," Morigi said.
"These outright distortions will not changes the facts -- Senator Obama is the only candidate who will safely and responsibly end the war in Iraq and refocus our attention on the real threat: a resurgent Al-Qaeda and Taliban along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border."
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM...sO8ZbiFYsnbIl3A |
As well as this response:
| quote: | An Obama aide accused Taheri of confusing the Status of Forces agreement with a Strategic Framework Agreement, for which Obama has pushed for congressional review.
"This article bears as much resemblance to the truth as a McCain campaign commercial. Barack Obama has consistently called for any Strategic Framework Agreement to be submitted to the U.S. Congress so that the American people have the same opportunity for review as the Iraqi Parliament," said Obama spokeswoman Wendy Morigi. "Unlike John McCain, he supports a clear timetable to redeploy our troops that has the support of the Iraqi government. Barack Obama has never urged a delay in negotiations, nor has he urged a delay in immediately beginning a responsible drawdown of our combat brigades."
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensm...n.html#comments |
And for the McCain campaign to make some sort of attempt to seize on this looks just a wee bit desperate to me.
Actually, it's kind of hilarious. Even if this situation wasn't completely taken right out of full context by a known serial liar who authored this story (I'll get to that next), I'm more than happy to dig old Reagan's bones out of the grave and charge him with violation of the Logan Act before we jump on Obama for it. Whadya say?
Now, on to your source, the author of this garbage - Amir Taheri, a hard core neocon who's a known liar and has been forced to retract his outright falsehoods in the past:
| quote: | 1. Taheri, who was once editor of a strongly pro-Shah Iranian newspaper during the seventies, left the country after the revolution. Strongly opposed to Iran's current government, he wrote a 1989 book called Nest of Spies: America's Journey to Disaster in Iran. Shaul Bakhash, a specialist in mideast history at George Mason University, reviewed the book for the New Republic and discovered important sections had been fabricated:
(http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog...mir_taheri.html)
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/000796.php |
More here on that story:
This one is my favorite, and perhaps best known by this turd:
More on that can be found here:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HE24Ak03.html
and here:
http://www.juancole.com/2006/05/ano...egislation.html
and here:
http://thejewishweek.com/news/newsc...hp3?artid=12511
More fun stuff from Wiki too on this wonderful nutbag:
| quote: | Dwight Simpson of San Francisco State University and Kaveh Afrasiabi accuse Taheri and his publisher Eleana Benador of fabricating false stories in the New York Post in 2005 where Taheri identified Iran's UN ambassador Javad Zarif as one of the students involved in the 1979 seizure of hostages at the US Embassy in Tehran. Zarif was Simpson's teaching assistant and a graduate student in the Department of International Relations of San Francisco State University at the time.[16]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amir_Taheri |
and
| quote: | In a 29 March 2008 opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, Taheri makes the statement that, "The truth is that Sunni and Shiite extremists have always been united in their hatred of the U.S.", and alleges that Iranian Government supports Sunni groups such as Al Qaeda. [17] Under Sunni groups, Taheri mentiones the Talysh nationalist movement in the republic of Azerbaijan the Rastakhiz party in Tajikistan.[17] However, the Talysh are predominantly Shia[18] with a Sunni minority in the mountainous regions.[19] Rastakhiz (Islamic Renaissance Party) was incorported into the United Tajik Opposition (UTO) was an amalgam of nationalist and Islamist parties and movements. The war's greatest destruction and toll in civilian deaths was in the south, where Kuliabis and their allies conducted campaigns of "ethnic cleansing" against local residents of Gharmi and Pamiri origin. The height of hostilities occurred between 1992 and 1993 and pitted Kulyabi militias against an array of groups, including militants from the Islamic Renaissance Party (IRP) and ethnic minority Pamiris from Gorno-Badakhshan. In large part due to the foreign support they received, the Kulyabi militias were able to soundly defeat opposition forces and went on what has been described by Human Rights Watch as an ethnic cleansing campaign against Pamiris and Garmis.[20] The Pamiri people are Ismaili Shiites. In fact Iran does not support the Sunni movement of Tajikistan and is instead betting on a stabilized country linked to it by Persian culture. Iran and Russia, the most important foreign powers in the country, had developed common interests and Iran needs to preserve its cooperative relationship with Russia. Especially after the rise to power in Afghanistan of the mainly Pashtun Islamic Movement of Taliban (Islamic students) with Pakistani and Saudi support, Russia, Iran, and Uzbekistan became even more alarmed about the situation there. All were in different ways aiding the non-Pashtun (Tajik, Uzbek, and Shia Hazara) forces resisting the Taliban in north Afghanistan. Iran and Russia also had similar interests in the Caspian Sea, in limiting Western involvement in Central Asia, and in increasing their leverage over Afghanistan.[21] Shi’ite Iran nearly went to war against the Taliban after the massacre of Afghan Shi’ites and nine Iranian diplomats in Mazar-e-Sharif in 1998. [22]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amir_Taheri |
Yep, you sure got yourself a winner there, Latin.
I'm just wondering, is it really too much to ask a full context for any nutbag neocon? Or will you continually purport authors who, in creationist-like fashion, create contexts to support their own version of events? It really is gosh-darn pathetic.
Edited to remove profane words per threat of the thread-starter who supposedly closes previous threads as a consequence to his ears bleeding from such words...... |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
| quote: | Originally posted by LatinLover
How dare you question my intellectual integrity. |
LOL. yeah, as soon as i finish questioning santa claus i'll get right on it. |
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| hardcore trancer |
| quote: | Originally posted by LatinLover
How dare you question my intellectual integrity. I mean, I'm one of the few intellectual honest members in this board, |
Take your head out of your ass kindly. |
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