Well since you're making idiotic claims of leaving the country to Saddam and AQ I thought I'd throw in one myself. mc sadr? Again with the tired attacks on someone's patriotism. That's really all you have left isn't it? Anyway one would think that if the surge was working the administration would be crowing about it on every news channel they could find.
Apparently it's worth more if we are sending soldiers and billions of dollars over there. Nice try at making the US look bad, though.
I'd say something about crude oil being over $60 a barrel, but that'd be past my sarcasm limit. ...And its not that I don't like the States; I just don't like what they're doing in Iraq. There's a big distinction in that, one that should be noted.
How does a random blogger (who apparently is a residential contractor in Rhode Island) know so many people in Iraq? And, even if he has friends there, how has he "observed" anything? He must be a terrorist mole - his real name is Al-Paeda.
mc mark, basso has nothing. He has so much of his soul invested in George W. Bush that cheap attacks on the patriotism of folks like you, and me, are all he has left. All he can do is put himself in the backseat with Trader_J, holding hands while coming up with the latest slander off the dreck spewed by Rush and company, and to hell with the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans think that this is all one gigantic cluster****. D&D. Slander is Meat for the Weak.
You = no fun and you missed the point. He was just a small residential contractor in the teeniest tiniest state and now he is contracting in Iraq? He clearly is a terrorist. Nobody expects an Italian Democrat-hating blogster contractor Al-Quaeda operative in Rhode Island! Diabolical.
Yesterday was the deadliest day since the escalation strategy began, resulting in the deaths of over 200 people. A car bomb killed 140 in a single blast at the Sadriyah marketplace, making it the deadliest single such car bomb attack since the US-led invasion four years ago. Many Iraqis today are expressing their outrage over the impact that escalation is having on their lives: The increasing presence of the U.S. occupation is fueling a bloody cycle of violence: it motivates terrorists to carry out attacks; the locals blame the attacks on the U.S.; the terrorists then find a new recruiting pool willing to carry out new attacks. http://thinkprogress.org/
We're making great progress, it's there for all to see, but the dang liberal media just isn't reporting it... U.S. walls off Baghdad neighborhood http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070420/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_neighborhood_barrier BAGHDAD - U.S. soldiers are building a three-mile wall to protect a Sunni Arab enclave surrounded by Shiite neighborhoods in a Baghdad area "trapped in a spiral of sectarian violence and retaliation," the military said. ADVERTISEMENT When the wall is finished, the minority Sunni community of Azamiyah, on the eastern side of the Tigris River, will be gated, and traffic control points manned by Iraqi soldiers will be the only entries, the military said. "Shiites are coming in and hitting Sunnis, and Sunnis are retaliating across the street," said Capt. Scott McLearn, of the U.S. 407th Brigade Support Battalion, which began the project April 10 and is working "almost nightly until the wall is complete," the statement said. It said the concrete wall, including barriers as tall as 12 feet, "is one of the centerpieces of a new strategy by coalition and Iraqi forces to break the cycle of sectarian violence" in Baghdad. U.S. and Iraqi forces have long erected cement barriers around marketplaces and coalition bases and outposts in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities such as Ramadi in an effort to prevent attacks, including suicide car bombs. American forces also have constructed huge sand barriers around towns such as Tal Afar, an insurgent stronghold near the Syrian border. There has been little sign of the U.S. military using concrete barriers to divide Baghdad neighborhoods by sect, but at least one similar construction has been reported in the capital. Currently, the U.S. strategy for stabilizing Iraq involves getting Iraqis to reconcile and support the democratically elected Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad, and a security plan in the capital that calls for 28,000 additional American troops and thousands of Iraqi soldiers. U.S. Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the top spokesman for coalition forces in Iraq, was quoted as saying Wednesday that he was unaware of any effort to build a wall dividing Shiite and Sunni enclaves in Baghdad and that such a tactic was not a policy of the Baghdad security plan. "We have no intent to build gated communities in Baghdad," Stars and Stripes, the U.S. Department of Defense-authorized daily newspaper, quoted Caldwell as saying. "Our goal is to unify Baghdad, not subdivide it into separate (enclaves)." The Azamiyah barrier will allow authorities to screen people entering and leaving the area of northern Baghdad "while keeping death squads and militia groups out," the U.S. military statement said. Security in the three Shiite communities on the other side of the wall also will be stepped up, and the barrier is expected to make it harder for insurgents to plant roadside bombs in the area targeting coalition forces, the military said. The construction work by the U.S. military involves flatbed trucks carrying concrete barriers weighing 14,000 pounds. Operating under bright lights, the cranes lift the barriers into place while being protected by U.S. tanks. As work continued Friday, the day of worship in mostly Muslim Iraq, several Sunnis living in Azamiyah welcomed the effort to improve their security, but said the wall was another sign of the deep hostility between Sunnis and Shiites. "It is good from one hand to curb violence and have control of terrorists. But it's bad on the other hand to be separated from others. We should live in one area like brothers, not be separated from one another," said Bashar Abdul Latif, a 45-year-old teacher. "I don't think this wall will solve the city's serious security problems," said Ahmed Abdul-Sattar, 35, a government worker. "It will only increase the separation between our people, which has been made so much worse by the war."
I think from the beginning that American forces can dominate an area and keep down the violence there as long as they remain. The question is what happens to that area when they go to another one.
In today's WaPo, Petraeus' "public" assessment of the surge so far is mixed. And he is still not convinced that the surge will work. But these couple of graphs jumped out at me... Great!
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21604280-2703,00.html Iraqi PM orders halt to Baghdad wall * James Hider in Baghdad * April 23, 2007 IN a fresh clash with his American allies, the Iraqi Prime Minister has ordered the US military to halt the construction of concrete walls being built around some of the most violent neighbourhoods in Baghdad. * Shia death squads terrorise Baghdad Nouri al-Maliki, the Shia leader, stepped in as Sunni communities complained that their neighbourhoods were being turned into ghettoes that could choke off life in their areas. “I oppose the building of the wall, and its construction will stop,” he said during a visit to Egypt yesterday. “There are other methods to protect neighbourhoods.” The US military had started to build concrete walls around five Baghdad neighbourhoods, most of them Sunni, in an attempt to stop car bombers leaving them and death squads infiltrating them. Mr al-Maliki, who has often been at odds with his US backers over security policy in the capital, said that “this wall reminds us of other walls”, in an apparent reference to the Israeli wall running through the Palestinian West Bank. Sunnis living in the newly sealed-off enclaves had complained that the walls would cause severe traffic congestion and entrench the sectarian rift already dividing many Sunni from Shia areas. “This will make our life hell,” Ahmed Ghafur, 35, a mosque guard, said. “We will spend half the day leaving and the other half coming back in. They will put us in a big prison and the militias will get information on our movements from their informers at the checkpoints. This will allow them to choose who to assassinate.” However, the US miltary insisted that the walls had been started after consultation with local councils. Lieutenant-Colonel Scott Bleichwehl, a spokesman, said: “It makes it harder to bring in weapons and car bombs.” Abu Moamer, a Sunni professor of international relations, said that the wall plan “reflects the failure of the American and Iraqi Government and its inability to restore lost security and to establish the rule of law on the streets. Instead of one mixed Iraqi society, it will be two societies, Shia and Sunni.” However, the effective civil war that already exists between the two communities was underscored yet again yesterday when two suicide car bombers killed another 17 people in an attack on a west Baghdad police station. In Mosul, in the north, gunmen stopped a minibus full of textile workers and shot dead 23 passengers. Work had already started in many places, with heavily armed security forces protecting labourers as they erected endless six-tonne slabs of concrete, already a familiar sight in Baghdad where they entomb all government buildings, hotels and checkpoints. Sunni residents of Ghazaliya, one of the most violent areas of western Baghdad, said that the Iraqi Army had also announced the construction of another dividing wall between their mainly Sunni district and Shuala, to the north, a predominantly Shia area where the Mahdi Army militia is strong. They complained that the wall, running along a de facto green line between a Mahdi Army zone and a Sunni guerrilla-held area, enclosed a part of Ghazaliya that had been purged of Sunnis by the Shia militia, so reinforcing the ethnic cleansing. Mr al-Maliki did not say what alternative method he was considering to replace the “gated community” scheme. Walls have already been built around the Sunni town of Fallujah, with residents having to submit to fingerprint and retina scans before being given badges to return home. The Sunni towns of Rutba and Hit have also been fenced off by the US military. The wall-building has confirmed fears among Iraqis that their country is being carved up along sectarian lines. Ali Naim, an Adhamiya engineer, said: “The Government had a hand in the sectarian conflict from the start. I used to think the US was stupid, but now I see that it was a plan to divide first Baghdad, then Iraq.” Dividing lines — Israel began constructing the West Bank barrier in 2005. It has three gates, which are opened for 20 minutes each day — More than 20 walls, built in Belfast from the 1970s to divide the Catholic and Protestant communities, became renowned for their sectarian murals — Almost half a million people were isolated in the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw when it was walled in by the Nazis in November 1940 — The Berlin Wall, begun in 1961, separated the East and West of the city for 28 years — Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, is bisected by walls marking the Green Line drawn up at the 1974 truce
