4,000 dead Americans

[Big Ol' Smitty 0]

ABUL, Afghanistan —Coalition forces killed four Taliban fighters, including a targeted Taliban commander who was dressed as a woman, during an operation to disrupt the Taliban’s roadside bomb and foreign fighter networks in Ghanzni province, Friday...

 

While the force approached the targeted building they received small-arms fire from two armed militants. Coalition forces returned fire, killing both militants. The force then proceeded to instruct all individuals inside the compound to surrender and exit. Six women and 12 children responded to the command and exited the building peacefully. As the force questioned the women they discovered one woman was actually a male dressed in women’s clothing and wearing a burqa. The male, later identified as Yakub, attempted to engage the force and was killed.

[SuperJerk 0]

Dick Cheney justifies the Iraq War, as well as waterboarding and Guantanamo Bay.

 

[SuperJerk 0]

Former White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales misled Congress when he claimed the CIA in 2002 approved information that ended up in the 2003 State of the Union speech about Iraq's alleged effort to buy uranium for its nuclear weapons program, a House committee said Thursday. The committee also expressed skepticism about claims by then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that she was unaware of the CIA's doubts about the claim before President George W. Bush's speech....

...The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said in a memo that its investigation showed the CIA had warned at least four National Security Council officials not to allow Bush, in three speeches in 2002, to cite questionable intelligence that Iraq had attempted to obtain uranium. The sentences were stripped out of those speeches, but made it into the State of the Union address.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081219/ap_on_go_co/iraq_cia

 

[SuperJerk 0]

I finally got around to watching No End in Sight last night.

 

First of all...Holy fucking shit, Rumsfeld was a retard.

 

Second...it kind of changes some of my thinking on the war's initial winnability, and how massive failure wasn't inevitable. This was made before "The Surge" (of "is working, my friends" fame) and doesn't make Gates or Patraeus part of the narrative, but definitely leave the impression that the war might have worked had the DoD not been populated so heavily by idiots in March of 2003.

[SuperJerk 0]

Hey, did you know Iraq was haivng an election this weekend?

Good:

More than 14,000 candidates, including about 3,900 women, are running for 440 seats on the influential councils in all of Iraq's provinces except for the autonomous Kurdish region in the north and the province that includes oil-rich Kirkuk, where ethnic groups were unable to reach a power-sharing formula.

 

Not good:

Although the voting was generally peaceful, a shooting occurred in Baghdad's Sadr City district. Shiite lawmaker Ghufran al-Saidi said a military officer opened fire and injured two people after voters chanted slogans at a polling station.

 

But Iraq's military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, told Al-Arabiya television that the shooting occurred after some people tried to carry mobile phones through security cordons. One person was killed and one injured, he said.

 

The reason for the conflicting accounts was not immediately clear.

 

In Tikrit, about 80 miles north of Baghdad, three mortar shells exploded near a polling station, but caused no casualties, said police, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to media.

 

A bomb found near a Tikrit voting center was defused, police added.

 

Hundreds of Iraqi Kurds stormed an election office in the disputed northern city of Khanaqin after claiming many of them were not on voting lists. There were no reports of serious injuries. The incident was part of lingering disputes between Kurds and the Arab-run central government over control of the city near the Iranian border.

 

[Nightwing 0]

Here's an article from over a week ago about the Sadr, who has basically fallen apart ever since his big gamble a few years back against US-Iraqi forces. He's basically fallen off the political map ever since then, which is certainly a good thing.

 

As Iraqi Elections Loom, al-Sadr's Political Clout Fades

 

Right now, it looks like al-Mailiki's party is going to win biggest. The election itself went off with barely any violence. Hopefully this signals future improvements in the region.

[Guest Vitamin X]

That is actually really good news. Maybe that country won't be a total clusterfuck by the time Obama's out of office.

[Big Ol' Smitty 0]

Here's something I wrote on the Iraqi elections, for anyone interested:

 

Anbar Err...Going Back to Sleep

 

The dramatic security gains in Anbar province related to the so-called Anbar Awakening--which consisted of the US paying and arming former Sunni insurgents to root out Al-Qaeda--has been widely touted as one of the most significant successes of the Iraq War, evidence of the wisdom of the 2007 troop surge, and even held up as a model that, if properly replicated, can produce similar successes in the war in Afghanistan.

 

As Awakening triumphalists crowed about the success of the empowering Sunni tribesmen during the post-surge euphoria, some skeptics quietly pointed out that arming and empowering local tribal groups may not be the best way to move toward the US goal of a strong Iraqi central government. This threat seemed to metastasize as the Maliki government, ambivalent at best toward the Awakening movement, dragged its feet on properly incorporating the Sunni tribesmen into Iraq's formal security forces.

 

Today, the Washington Post reports that Awakening leaders, greatly displeased at the apparent outcome of the recent elections, are crying foul and pledging not to recognize the election results if they keep the rival Iraqi Islamic Party in power in the province.

 

Money quote:

 

"We will form the government of Anbar anyway," vowed [key Awakening leader] Ahmed Abu Risha, his voice dipping to a quiet growl. The tribesmen seated in his visiting room, where photos of U.S. generals and Sunni monarchs adorn the walls, nodded in approval. "An honest dictatorship is better than a democracy won through fraud," Abu Risha said.

 

 

 

This seems like a prime case of what the intelligence community refers to as blowback--although in this case the operation in question was not covert. As Spencer Ackerman suggests, it is unlikely that the Awakening members will return to their former life as insurgents, but intercommunal conflict in Anbar between the Awakening and Iraqi Islamic Party seems likely if the the former persist in refusing to accept the results of the election.

[Nightwing 0]

Speaking of Anbar, a pair of interesting articles. Interesting mostly because the second one is another independent reporter laying into the other for giving a "deceptive" view on the province and the efforts going on there.

[snuffbox 0]

50 fucking thousand? Awful.

[Art Sandusky 0]

It makes sense, even if it sucks. If you're rebuilding a country while occupying it, there are an asston of support/logistical soldiers there as well. Take the killing machines out and you're left with about a third of the total force that was there to do non-lethal stuff.

 

I've noticed that stories about troop levels never mention the "security contractor" (mercenary) numbers. Those are Americans too.