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Post by phil on Nov 1, 2007 14:01:27 GMT -5
Look at this on the bright side ...
One day, sooner than later according to some,
there will be no more oil to be pumped there
and the troops will come home !
US troops will be in the Middle East for next 50 years, says Abazaid
Associated Press
Thursday November 1, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
US troops could be in the Middle East for another 50 years, according to the longest serving commander of the Qatar-based US Central Command.
General John Abazaid, who retired in May, said the "strategic situation" in the region - the rise of extremism and the global dependence on oil - would necessitate a long-term presence.
"Over time, we will have to shift the burden of the military fight from our forces directly to regional forces, and we will have to play an indirect role.
"But we shouldn't assume for even a minute that in the next 25 to 50 years the American military might be able to come home, relax and take it easy."
Gen Abazaid, who delivered the comments yesterday at Carnegie Mellon University, said the US would also need to reduced its dependence on imported energy.
"I'm not saying this is a war for oil, but I am saying that oil fuels an awful lot of geopolitical moves that political powers may have there.
"And it is absolutely essential that we in the United States of America figure out how, in the long run, to lessen our dependency on foreign energy."
He reiterated comments made in September that the US needs to do a better job of coordinating economic, political and diplomatic means so the conflict can move from a military to a political issue.
"I would characterise what we're doing now as 80% military, 20% diplomatic, economic, political, educational, informational, intelligence, etc.
"You've got to take that equation and change it. Make it 80% those other things."
Whatever it takes to keep those SUVs rolling !
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Post by chrisfan on Nov 1, 2007 14:40:12 GMT -5
Well if American troops are out in 50 years, they'll have been in the Middle East for less time than they've been in Korea! How's the oil flow in South Korea?
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Post by phil on Nov 1, 2007 14:57:11 GMT -5
By Jove! You are right !
There was no oil in Vietnam either ...
Or Germany and Japan back in the "Good Old Days" ...
Must be something else then !
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Post by phil on Nov 1, 2007 15:05:34 GMT -5
HÉ! What about the Spanish-American war of 1898 ... ? Not about the flow of oil either ? Silly me for thinking that there could be different reasons for different eras and different "wars" ...  |
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Post by chrisfan on Nov 1, 2007 15:51:11 GMT -5
I mentioned the oil for no reason other than to go along with you. The larger point of my response was the fact that if we're in the middle east for another 50 years and then out, it'll be less time than we've been in Korea.
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Post by phil on Nov 14, 2007 8:52:14 GMT -5
Must be nice to shoot up the neighborhood at will with the knowledge that nobody can touch you ... A private army ... Don't go to war without one ! Or two ... F.B.I. Says Guards Killed 14 Iraqis Without Cause By DAVID JOHNSTON and JOHN M. BRODER Published: November 14, 2007 WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 — Federal agents investigating the Sept. 16 episode in which Blackwater security personnel shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians have found that at least 14 of the shootings were unjustified and violated deadly-force rules in effect for security contractors in Iraq, according to civilian and military officials briefed on the case. The F.B.I. investigation into the shootings in Baghdad is still under way, but the findings, which indicate that the company’s employees recklessly used lethal force, are already under review by the Justice Department. Prosecutors have yet to decide whether to seek indictments, and some officials have expressed pessimism that adequate criminal laws exist to enable them to charge any Blackwater employee with criminal wrongdoing. Spokesmen for the Justice Department and the F.B.I. declined to discuss the matter. The case could be one of the first thorny issues to be decided by Michael B. Mukasey, who was sworn in as attorney general last week. He may be faced with a decision to turn down a prosecution on legal grounds at a time when a furor has erupted in Congress about the administration’s failure to hold security contractors accountable for their misdeeds. Representative David E. Price, a North Carolina Democrat who has sponsored legislation to extend American criminal law to contractors serving overseas, said the Justice Department must hold someone accountable for the shootings. “Just because there are deficiencies in the law, and there certainly are,” Mr. Price said, “that can’t serve as an excuse for criminal actions like this to be unpunished. I hope the new attorney general makes this case a top priority. He needs to announce to the American people and the world that we uphold the rule of law and we intend to pursue this.” Read more ... www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/world/middleeast/14blackwater.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin |
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Post by phil on Jan 20, 2008 20:13:27 GMT -5
If Tony Blair was that clueless, imagine just how Junior knew about Iraq ... ! Guys, I'm afraid we haven't got a clue ...In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, experts warned Tony Blair that occupying the country and trying to impose a western-style democracy was doomed to failure. He dismissed their objections, convinced that victory was a formality. In the first of three extracts from his new book, Jonathan Steele looks at how Britain went to war unbriefed, unprepared and with no idea of the fallout that would ensue Monday January 21, 2008 The Guardian On November 19 2002, four months before the invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair made a rare attempt to seek out expert views beyond the circle of his official advisers. Six distinguished academics were invited to Downing Street: three specialists on Iraq, and three on international security. George Joffe, an Arabist from Cambridge University, and Charles Tripp and Toby Dodge, who had both written books on Iraq's history, made opening statements of about five minutes each. They decided not to alienate the prime minister by discussing whether an invasion was sensible or necessary, but only what its consequences might be."We all pretty much said the same thing," Joffe recalls. "Iraq is a very complicated country, there are tremendous intercommunal resentments, and don't imagine you'll be welcomed." He remembers how Blair reacted. "He looked at me and said, 'But the man's uniquely evil, isn't he?' I was a bit nonplussed. It didn't seem to be very relevant." Recovering, Joffe went on to argue that Saddam was constrained by various factors, to which Blair merely repeated his first point: "He can make choices, can't he?" As Joffe puts it, "He meant he can choose to be good or evil, I suppose." Joffe got the impression of "someone with a very shallow mind, who's not interested in issues other than the personalities of the top people, no interest in social forces, political trends, etc".Dodge also struggled to convince Blair of the obstacles that would face anyone who occupied Iraq. "Much of the rhetoric from Washington appeared to depict Saddam's regime as something separate from Iraqi society," he remembers. "All you had to do was remove him and the 60 bad men around him. What we wanted to get across was that over 35 years the regime had embedded itself into Iraqi society, broken it down and totally transformed it. We would be going into a vacuum, where there were no allies to be found, except possibly for the Kurds." The experts didn't seem to make much of an impression. Blair "wasn't focused", Tripp recalls. "I felt he wanted us to reinforce his gut instinct that Saddam was a monster. It was a weird mixture of total cynicism and moral fervour." The brief meeting was unique. "I can't remember participating in any meaningful seminar on Iraq with the Foreign Office," Tripp says. "We were not asked to brief officials in the Middle East department." Article continues ... www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2244183,00.html |
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Post by Galactus on Jan 20, 2008 21:33:19 GMT -5
It seems the problem is that everyone assumed simple military suppression would be all it took to turn it all around. If we could just hold the terrorist back long enough, give the country back to the people everything else would take care of itself. That line of thinking turned out to be wrong on every level. The surge isn't failing because violence isn't down it's failing because the things the surge was supposed to be buying time for aren't happing. All we're doing is finding new ways to tread water because real progress has yet to take place and doesn't look like it coming anytime soon. We aren't on the path to victory for one simple reason, we don't understand our enemy...or our allies it seems. It just isn't a problem we can fix with more power and the hawks just don't seem to understand that.
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Post by maarts on Jan 21, 2008 5:36:51 GMT -5
It's now a game of who blinks first...
The trenches are deep, stakes are high.
Is the USA gonna commit more time or withdraw?
Right now the insurrectionists are sucking the marrow out of the bones of the operation- strategically hitting targets, keeping Iraq unsafe.
Until the USA finally caves in and they can claim full victory.
You won't hear the end of it then.
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Post by phil on Jan 21, 2008 8:47:30 GMT -5
A failure to thinkDefeat in Iraq? By its own hubristic prospectus, the neocon project has been a cataclysm - caused by a total lack of analysis Jonathan Steele Five years after he launched it, George Bush's invasion of Iraq looks even more disastrous than it did at the end of the first year. Not only did it uncover no weapons of mass destruction. The invasion has led to a collapse in millions of ordinary Iraqis' personal security, producing a human rights nightmare and annual rates of killing that dwarf the atrocities of Saddam Hussein's three decades of power. The damage to the United States has been enormous. As well as the loss of around 4,000 soldiers' lives, America's image and reputation in the Middle East have been severely harmed. For Bush and the neocons, the invasion has brought political defeat. Their project for Iraq to become a secular, liberal, pro-western bastion of democracy lies in ruins. The country is run by a narrow-minded group of Shia Islamists with close control over a sectarian army and police force. Many of them are linked to Iran. As a result, Bush is now forced to run around the Arabian states along the Persian Gulf in an effort to build an anti-Iranian alliance and find a pretext for keeping a strategic presence in the region. Sunni Arab revulsion at the murderous tactics of al-Qaida in Iraq, as well as the current "surge" of extra American troops, have helped to produce a welcome drop in al-Qaida's murders of Iraqi civilians and American forces, but it has to remembered that al-Qaida was never in Iraq before the invasion. A successful reduction in al-Qaida's power cannot outweigh all the harm Bush's war has caused to Iraqis. Many critics blame the occupation's difficulties on a lack of planning, and a series of mistakes in the first few months, including the disbanding of the Iraqi army and failures to provide Iraqi with electricity and water. The line is summed up in the phrase "Winning the war but losing the peace". Article continues ... commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jonathan_steele/2008/01/a_failure_to_think.html
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Post by phil on Jan 24, 2008 17:33:07 GMT -5
ÔÔPS!
US troops kill nine Afghan policemen
Mark Tran and agencies
Thursday January 24, 2008
Guardian Unlimited
US-led troops today killed nine Afghan policemen after mistaking them for Taliban insurgents in Ghazni province, central Afghanistan.
A district police chief was among those who died during an operation that included US ground forces and air strikes, said a provincial official, Habeb-ul Rahman. Two civilians also died.
"This morning around 3.30am coalition forces launched an operation north of Ghazni," said Abdullah Nashir, spokesman for the province's governor. "Unfortunately we got reports that Second District Commander Kamyab along with eight other police were killed."
Afghan police officials in Ghazni said the officers appeared to have been killed by American troops, who mistook them for insurgents.
It was unclear whether the policemen were taking part in the raid or had gone to the area after the operation was launched. The US-led coalition denied it had killed the policemen and said its forces killed "several insurgents".
Nine others were detained during the operation, which targeted a Taliban commander associated with suicide bombings in Ghazni.
Hundreds of Afghans, chanting anti-American slogans, protested the killings in Ghazni city.
There have been frequent instances of friendly fire in Afghanistan, where US and Nato-led troops rely heavily on the use of airpower because of a shortage of troops.
The accidental killing of civilians has caused friction between coalition forces and the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, who has urged caution and coordination with Afghan authorities.
In a separate incident, a Canadian soldier was killed and two others were wounded when an explosion struck their patrol in southern Afghanistan, near the city of Kandahar.
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The canadian soldier was from the 22e Royal Regiment
stationed in Valcartier not far from Québec city ...
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Post by phil on Feb 1, 2008 11:11:15 GMT -5
He who wishes to fight must first count the cost. When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be dampened. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength. Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain. Now, when your weapons are dulled, your ardor dampened, your strength exhausted and your treasure spent, other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue... In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns.
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If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
- Sun Tzu : The Art Of War
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Post by phil on Mar 18, 2008 12:58:19 GMT -5
Whoever here who said that the surge was/is working better take a look at these films made by an Iraqis journalist ... Baghdad: City of wallsIn the first of Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's extraordinary series of films to mark the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, he investigates the claims that the US military surge is bringing stability to Iraq. By travelling through the heart of Baghdad he exposes how, by enclosing the Sunni and Shia populations behind 12ft walls, the surge has left the city more divided and desperate than ever. Baghdad's killing fieldsIn the second of Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's series of three films he visits Baghdad's killings fields on the edge of Sadr City. The scene of thousands of sectarian murders over the last three years, it is a desolate and evil place: 'Only the killers and the killed ever come here' says Abdul-Ahad. Here in the thousands of unmarked graves lie the victims of the Shia militia gangs. www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/baghdadNeighborhood murderous ethnic cleansings and 20 miles of 12' walls separating the two communities ... Yep! That should do the trick !! |
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Post by phil on Mar 19, 2008 12:15:37 GMT -5
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Post by shin on Mar 19, 2008 12:44:29 GMT -5
Bush says we're staying. As a liberal and a Democrat, I want to kill our troops and send this nation spiraling into a deep financial depression, so this is great news! I'm so happy!!  Yaaaaaaaaaaay! Five Ten A hundred more years! A hundred more years! Sadly, this also marks the 5th anniversary of the downfall of our beloved terrorist brother, Saddam Hussein. Removing him from power was a fatal blow against Al Queda's ability to strike America again, forever crippling them in a brilliant strategic use of blood and treasure not seen since the Battle of Iwo Jima. It was the day America truly and forever won the war on terror  |
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