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Senator Alleges White House Wrote Allawi's Speech
Jeremiah Cornelius writes "In a letter to the White House, a leading US Senate Democrat, Diane Feinstein, expressed 'profound dismay' that the White House allegedly wrote a large portion of Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's speech to Congress last week. 'His speech gave me hope that reconstruction efforts were proceeding in most of the country and that elections could be held on schedule. To learn that this was not an independent view, but one that was massaged by your campaign operatives, jaundices the speech and reduces the credibility of his remarks.'"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Is this really news to anyone? I watched only a small clip of the speech and said "Bush's speechwriters wrote that speech.
Writing the speeches of your conquered enemies. You know this is the exact same tactic Julius Caesar used against the nations he conquered, and he was one of Rome's greatest leaders.
To sum up, worked-for-caesar.
nobody writes their own speeches all the time any more. There are spin doctors and there are teams of spin doctors. Under Clinton the model was to use competing teams of writers, similar to the model used by TV show Friends I'm told, to come up with the best speech possible.
Having said that, I would have thought his own spin doctors would have written it, not White House staff, but really this idea that Iraq is somehow sovereign and no longer merely existing at the whim of the US is bollocks. The White House is the final authority in Iraq today and will be for many years to come.
Flame away...
I am a leaf on the wind
Why should we be surprised by this? The entire Iraq war has been managed more as a political event than a military action. That this administration, which is profoundly unwilling to consider any views than those expressed in its own talking points, would spoon feed self-serving rhetoric to its hand picked Iraqi puppet shouldn't come as a shock to anyone.
I suspect Senator Finestein's shock is strictly rhetorical. I certainly hope it is.
Hey, I watched the debate... Bush praised Allawi very much... sure ... because he really is a puppet ... he was a CIA agent for christ's sake ... but Kerry surely won it ...
Because I distinctly saw President Bush take a drink of water while he was speaking.
Unknown host pong.
Stuff that matters?
Where are my Star Wars action figures?
Where are my Natalie Portman pics?
Where are my eye-burning lasers?
Where are my new programming languages?
I want my Slashdot back!
BUSH:
You know, I think about Missy Johnson. She's a fantastic lady I met in Charlotte, North Carolina....
You know, it's hard work to try to love her as best as I can...
This kinda news, whether true or not, doesn't help Bush kill the rumors that Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi isn't some kind of a puppet. But, hey, we wrote the Japanese constitution and made the Empiror publicly declare he wasn't a god, and that all worked out.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
Incidentally, Al Lorentz is under the threat of serious jail time for speaking out.
Then why doesn't the USGOV release unedited video of all the good things that are happening in Iraq?
Well, it is nice to see that someone in Washington watches the Daily Show, I guess. The night after the speech they did a segment showing that several of the phrases in the speech were exactly the same as the president uses.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Isn't this the Bush admininstration in a nutshell? If you disagree with us, you are un-American, disloyal, unpatriotic.
That's what America is all about: blindly following our commander-in-chief, not questioning their policies, always agreeing.
Just give me my 12 hours of TV, and my low-carb 2000 calorie retired dairy cow hamburgers, and my gas-guzzling SUVs, and I WILL BE HAPPY.
It's interesting that Bush tonight stated that calling the new Iraqi Prime Minister a "puppet" is preposterous.
But Kerry didn't call him a puppet in the debate.. Bush broght it up. Bush's subcouncious seems to have gotten in his way a few times tonight.
.. is how the President of any other soverign country would behave if he / she was handed a speech to be read while the invited guest of a foreign country.
Imagine the outcry if Bush or Kerry went to China to address the National People's Congress and was handed a speech and told to read it.
Iraq is not a US, EU or UN state; it is a soverign country.
A dream is good. A plan is better.
I'm glad President Bush has set upon this crusade at taking out our foes one by one, and remaking it in our image. Their dictators fall, and their citizens live in freedom, meanwhile we gain a foothold in another part of the world.
The sad thing is that America's image in the rest of the world is so bad right now, that as a foreigner, I am not entirely sure that this guy is trolling.
You can permanently disable individual slashdot sections, such as politics.slashdot.org, from appearing on the slashdot front page by going to your user preferences.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
And that makes it all the more repugnant that Bush and Co. have been complaining about Kerry criticizing the speech. Bush has his puppet prime minister give a campaign speech and Kerry isn't allowed to criticize it? Puh-leeze.
The point isn't that "people dont write their own speeches" the point is that a foreign government's party (the Republicans) wrote a speech for an Iraqi national AND Prime Minister (Allawi) to deliver to the US congress.
That's not "spin" or "status quo" thats outright imperialism.
I just assumed it would be obvious from the fact that Allawi repeated not one, but almost every catchphrase that Bush throws into all of his speeches on the "war on terror". Anyway, read the speech for yourself and see if it sounds like chunks of it came from the same speechwriters Bush uses. Mind you, I'd expect Allawi to be thankful and congratulatory, since he needs the US's continued commitment right now, but I wouldn't expect his own speechwriters to parrot back Bush's campaign slogans word-for-word.
Anyway, this doesn't come as a surprise to me, it was just much more blatant and obvious than I would have thought possible. Another poster brought up Julius Caesar, who wrote his conquered enemies speeches for them. His long lived and immensely successful successor, Caesar Augustus, was the master of running an authoritarian regime while maintaining all the dressings of the Republic, practically the inventor of political spin and authoritarianism cloaked in democracy.
Unfortunately, the analogies don't end there. Trading freedom for security under authoritarian regimes was practically pioneered by the Romans. If our schoolchildren were forced to read some of the classics, I wonder how different things might be in America today.
The puppet prime minister of the puppet government of a half-conquered nation is saying what his puppet boss' bosses tell him.
I for one welcome our puppet overlords.
Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
Seeing how the comments so far have been moderated, it's quite clear that the moderators are either unaware, or unwilling to be aware of a serious problem in America.
-1 mod for overrated? For posting two editorials critical of the war?
This is a prime example of why America is headed for disaster.
If you're genuinely interested in knowing what's really happening in the world, I would suggest looking beyond CNN, FOX, Wall Street journal and the New York Times. All of America's big media is owned by a very small group with very strong political leanings. When you look to them, you only get one side of the story.
If you want the other side, places like www.cursor.org are a good place to start.
Oh My God, The PTA has disbanded!!
*jumps thru window*
A morning without coffee is like something without something else.
...allegedly wrote...
Is this the part where I get to assume it's already fact?
Off topic, yes, but how many people here think the Daily Show will have infinite material after tonight's debates? The Puppet comments alone could be used to make a miniseries.
He was talking about the statements made by other people. From the transcript:
Please read the transcript (hell, skim it) before coming to any conclusions about Kerry's actions in '72. The 'media' sure ain't going to clarify any of this. We need to do it ourselves.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
I dunno -- I would like to think the basic qualifications for "President of the United States of America" would be slightly higher than those for "random Slashdot poster".
It is just me or is slashdot politics sounding awful similar to Democratic Underground.
The shrill nature of the allegations and insinuations are just laughable against President Bush.
My Weblog
Just look at Africa -- after Britain and France pulled out, everything went to straight to hell.
No, depending on where you're talking about, many countries in Africa did fine and dandy for a couple of decades.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
and buy him a shot, a beer and a lap dance. It would be the most well spent fifty bucks in history.
I recommend a new book, The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. Don't expect any author to be perfect. However, this book is an excellent overview of the Bush family, and the best book by this author. Here is a quote which shows just one more fact about the chronic lying of George Herbert Walker Bush and his son George W. Bush:
"The official family tree provided by the Bush archivists does not include the two mentally retarded daughters of John M. Walker, and lists only two of James Smith Bush's wives, not all four of them; one of Ray Walker's two wives is omitted, and George Herbert Walker III is listed with only two, instead of three, wives."
Note that the author of that book has never lost a lawsuit, for any of her writings. As you would expect from a major publishing house like Doubleday: "Before publication, each book is vetted by several sets of lawyers; facts and sources are checked and rechecked and sources documented."
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Before, Saddam was killing. Now, the U.S. Gov. is killing and destabilizing, and you pay. Improvement?
"Seeing how the comments so far have been moderated, it's quite clear that the moderators are either unaware, or unwilling to be aware of a serious problem in America."
MOD PARENT UP!!!! Exactly right.
You cannot develop an accurate opinion by listening to the innuendo from media employees who would lose their jobs if they seemed to indicate a preference for one candidate over another. Remember, the media exists to make money. Unfortunately, we don't have directly supported media, only ad supported media, and advertisers, understandably, are careful not to alienate anyone.
Please don't be intimidated by someone with unspecified objections, or objections that merely try to draw attention away from the major issues. Consider everything in the light of your own experiences and your own extensive investigation.
If you have never read the books about the Bush family and Bush administration, I suggest you do so. If you read the books, you will see that the corruption is far worse than you are being told.
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Bush: Borrowing money to try to make his administration look good.
Just re-emphasises the fact that the US thinks that it should place it's influence on everything and everybody.
Yeah, because we should be influencing other people to stand for equality, democracy, and civil liberties. Just like we influenced the Afghanis to depose the Taliban, put girls back in school, and allow women to participate in society as something more than property.
Like the way we influenced Japanese to throw away tyrannical rule by despots and adopt a democracy. Just like we convinced the Germans that having a nutjob whacko for a dictator is not a good idea. Just like we influenced the British, Indians, Chinese, and pretty much every other world out there that maybe, just maybe, freedom is a viable alternative to oh, say, injustice, hatred, violence, and tyranny.
Yeah, I think you have a great point here. So many people want to influence the world to do evil, to trade in slaves and blood, to sell out their own countries for a little profit, while the US is standing up for the individuality and freedom and humanity, at the cost of instant gratification.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
As if ANY politician these days (including Diane Feinstein) writes their own speeches, instead of having them "massaged by their campaign operatives"...
No one is complaining that Allawi didn't write his own speech. What they are complaining about is that it was written by Bush's campaign operatives.
Don't you see a difference between Allawi having his speech written by his own, independent speech writers and having it written by Bush campaign operatives? Allawi is supposed to be the leader of a sovereign nation, not a member of the Republican party giving stump speeches to promote Bush's reelection.
Sadly, he's probably not. A sizable portion of the country say such things in all seriousness.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
You make an interesting point, but I believe you're wrong about Germany. The last time Germany was a world leader in science and engineering? Um, how about right now? "Getting lots of attention" was never of much importance to most mature nations, except, oh, maybe the US. Germany makes the best cars in the world, which is a highly visible aspect to their engineering prowess. Also Airbus is whupping Boeing's ass with high tech engineering. In science they have some of the most heavily funded university research programs that exist. Much of this isn't very visible, but maybe it's because they do real science rather than the publicity seeking Studies Of Blinding Obviousness (SOBO(TM)) which is what sadly passes for much of US funded research. Germans also have forward thinking ideas about the environment and equality, etc, which the rest of the world would be a better place for adopting. Your stereotyped view of the country is just that, a stereotype, and unjustified at that. Your view is just as silly as the "you lost the war" and "world cup '66 forever" attitude of some of my countrymen. And they don't have a chimp for president.
The record seems to show that George W. Bush became a cheerleader because he wanted to be close to the campus leaders, who were, at the time, athletes. Since he did not excel at athletics, being a cheerleader was the only way he could be one of the student leaders. The captain of the cheerleaders was part of the social group that included the captains of the teams.
George W. Bush was an obnoxious alcoholic then. The culture of alcoholics is very different from the male gay culture. There is no hint George W. Bush was gay. He was interested in partying, and being close to the student leaders was a way to be involved in the parties. Two of his arrests came from stunts that seem like something a drunk person would do. The third arrest was for drunk driving.
I can cite numerous authorities for this. For example, see George W. Bush: Living the Bush Legacy.
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24 wars since WW2: Creating fear so rich people can profit.
The U.S. government is building 16 permanent bases in Iraq. This was mentioned in the debate tonight. They apparently want control over the oil. They apparently care about nothing else. A democratic country is one that has control over its own resources.
Men elect to become cheerleaders in the hopes of being able to hold a female cheerleader aloft by her crotch. Sometimes they try to sneak a peek up there, too. That hardly seems homosexual to me.
Mod me down if you like, but you know it's true.
http://harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html
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Dear mum,
our flatulant, pompus general lost another battle. This is hopeless. We've lost every battle so far, and General Washington keeps retreating. Will we retreat all the way to the territories? How am I to get back to this fall's harvest if the British burn our fields?
Indeed, the times are grim, and I wonder what is to become of us. All we hear is how things are going well, but all I see is death and retreat.
-----
People on the ground rarely have any idea of what's going on.
THE SECURITY COUNCIL, 27 JANUARY 2003:
AN UPDATE ON INSPECTION
"The nerve agent VX is one of the most toxic ever developed.
Iraq has declared that it only produced VX on a pilot scale, just a few tonnes and that the quality was poor and the product unstable. Consequently, it was said, that the agent was never weaponised. Iraq said that the small quantity of agent remaining after the Gulf War was unilaterally destroyed in the summer of 1991.
(2003 report)
UNMOVIC, however, has information that conflicts with this account. There are indications that Iraq had worked on the problem of purity and stabilization and that more had been achieved than has been declared. Indeed, even one of the documents provided by Iraq indicates that the purity of the agent, at least in laboratory production, was higher than declared.
There are also indications that the agent was weaponised. In addition, there are questions to be answered concerning the fate of the VX precursor chemicals, which Iraq states were lost during bombing in the Gulf War or were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq.
I would now like to turn to the so-called "Air Force document" that I have discussed with the Council before. This document was originally found by an UNSCOM inspector in a safe in Iraqi Air Force Headquarters in 1998 and taken from her by Iraqi minders. It gives an account of the expenditure of bombs, including chemical bombs, by Iraq in the Iraq-Iran War. I am encouraged by the fact that Iraq has now provided this document to UNMOVIC.
The document indicates that 13,000 chemical bombs were dropped by the Iraqi Air Force between 1983 and 1988, while Iraq has declared that 19,500 bombs were consumed during this period. Thus, there is a discrepancy of 6,500 bombs. The amount of chemical agent in these bombs would be in the order of about 1,000 tonnes. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, we must assume that these quantities are now unaccounted for.
The discovery of a number of 122 mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions.
The investigation of these rockets is still proceeding. Iraq states that they were overlooked from 1991 from a batch of some 2,000 that were stored there during the Gulf War. This could be the case. They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather points to the issue of several thousands of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for.
The finding of the rockets shows that Iraq needs to make more effort to ensure that its declaration is currently accurate. During my recent discussions in Baghdad, Iraq declared that it would make new efforts in this regard and had set up a committee of investigation. Since then it has reported that it has found a further 4 chemical rockets at a storage depot in Al Taji.
I might further mention that inspectors have found at another site a laboratory quantity of thiodiglycol, a mustard gas precursor.
Whilst I am addressing chemical issues, I should mention a matter, which I reported on 19 December 2002, concerning equipment at a civilian chemical plant at Al Fallujah. Iraq has declared that it had repaired chemical processing equipment previously destroyed under UNSCOM supervision, and had installed it at Fallujah for the production of chlorine and phenols. We have inspected this equipment and are conducting a detailed technical evaluation of it. On completion, we will decide whether this and other equipment that has been recovered by Iraq should be destroyed.
Biological weapons
I have mentioned the issue of anthrax to the Council on previous occasions and I come back to it as it is an important one.
Iraq has declared that it produced about 8,500 litres of this biological warfare agent, which i
Al Lorentz is the former Chairman of the Constitution Party of Texas. He was against the war in Iraq, because Lorentz believes in isolationism (even after 9/11). So while he is not "some politically idealistic and naÃve young soldier", that's only true because he's not young. He is a political ideologue, with an anti-Bush paranoia.
That made my Bullshit Detector go off like a Claymore in a cattle drive.
Al Lorentz spent most of his career in the Reserves.
A noncomm in Civil Affairs doesn't have a "muds-eye view" of the war at all. He may as well be back in Texas, for all the fighting he'll see. This guy is an armchair General. Why isn't he an officer? Because he's incompetent for a commission, that's why.
Al Lorentz was a Bush basher before he went to Iraq, and he's a Bush basher now.
From another article by Lorentz:sigs, as if you care.
If the soldier's letter were written in Arabic (by an Iraqi), your letter might be a reasonable parallel. Or perhaps if it were written in 18th Century French, by a foreign liberator, as part of a doomed war where the colonists attacked their liberators in order to join a neighboring Puritan colony in Canada, which freed itself from the French 20 years prior, that they'd been sent to war against in the intervening decade.
Who, in your opinion, *does* know what's going on in Iraq? Allawi, their new leader, whose speeches are written for him by the White House who chose him for his past CIA work? You?
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make install -not war
It could be filed two years before for all its importance. Not only this report is a lot of "maybe-coulda-woulda", it is also quite silly that otherwise intelligent people are so easilly fooled by all of this Iraq WMD talk. VX is known to be possessed by just about any two-bit country on the planet, including places like Serbia. Anthrax is produced from cow dung. A few nutcases were able to make it in a bathtub in England. Etc. Etc. If Saddam was truly bent on using this (rather awkward and unreliable weapon), he would have done so looong ago. Actually he did in 1980s on the Kurds and probably like every military before him, decided the thing was useless. Did you ever wonder why during WWII noone used chemical weapons on the battlefield? All sides had them. They are just extremely useless things in combat. Additionally, Iraq had no capability to produce nuclear technology in any meaningful way for a foreseeable future due to constant oversight.
Truly frightening bio-weapons are of genetic nature and at this point in time beyond reach of the terrorists. This will unforunately change in not so remote future and because of the nature of the technology they will become the primary, cheap and widely available weapon of unspeakable terror.
Maybe some of the insurgency is inspired by the feeling that the country shouldn't have a U.S./Israeli mole installed as chief executive, no?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The following text was located at BoingBoing, and is supposed to be from Wall Street Journalist, Farnaz Fassihi, located in Bagdhad. I Googled her name a bit, and Farnaz Fassihi is indeed on WSJ staff as a journalist. I do not know if this e-mail she sent is real so I asked her. A reply is pending. Anyway, it is good reading, and it is A LOT more like the AP and AFP newswire reports I see every day than the hard-ass edited Fox News and CNN stuff I see (Yes, we get Fox News in Norway. No, it is not "fair and balanced")
9/30/2004
Farnaz Fassihi, a Wall Street Journal correspondent in Iraq, confirmed that a widely-redistributed letter she emailed to friends about the nightmarish situation in Iraq was indeed written by her. Too bad the WSJ doesn't allow this reporter to write these kinds of stories for the paper.
=====
Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under virtual house arrest. Forget about the reasons that lured me to this job: a chance to see the world, explore the exotic, meet new people in far away lands, discover their ways and tell stories that could make a difference.
Little by little, day-by-day, being based in Iraq has defied all those reasons. I am house bound. I leave when I have a very good reason to and a scheduled interview. I avoid going to people's homes and never walk in the streets. I can't go grocery shopping any more, can't eat in restaurants, can't strike a conversation with strangers, can't look for stories, can't drive in any thing but a full armored car, can't go to scenes of breaking news stories, can't be stuck in traffic, can't speak English outside, can't take a road trip, can't say I'm an American, can't linger at checkpoints, can't be curious about what people are saying, doing, feeling. And can't and can't.
There has been one too many close calls, including a car bomb so near our house that it blew out all the windows. So now my most pressing concern every day is not to write a kick-ass story but to stay alive and make sure our Iraqi employees stay alive. In Baghdad I am a security personnel first, a reporter second.
It's hard to pinpoint when the turning point exactly began. Was it April when the Fallujah fell out of the grasp of the Americans? Was it when Moqtada and Jish Mahdi declared war on the U.S. military? Was it when Sadr City, home to ten percent of Iraq's population, became a nightly battlefield for the Americans? Or was it when the insurgency began spreading from isolated pockets in the Sunni triangle to include most of Iraq? Despite President Bush's rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a potential threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to imminent and active threat, a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.
Iraqis like to call this mess the situation. ÊWhen asked how are things? they reply: the situation is very bad.
What they mean by situation is this: the Iraqi government doesn't control most Iraqi cities, there are several car bombs going off each day around the country killing and injuring scores of innocent people, the country's roads are becoming impassable and littered by hundreds of landmines and explosive devices aimed to kill American soldiers, there are assassinations, kidnappings and beheadings. The situation, basically, means a raging barbaric guerilla war.
In four days, 110 people died and over 300 got injured in Baghdad alone. The numbers are so shocking that the ministry of health, which was attempting an exercise of public transparency by releasing the numbers-- has now stopped disclosing them.
Insurgents now attack Americans 87 times a day.
A friend drove thru the Shiite slum of Sadr City yesterday. He said young men were openly placing improvised explosive devices into the ground. They melt a shallow hole into the asphalt, dig the explosive, cover it with dirt and put an old tire or plastic can over it to signal to the locals this is booby-trap
Isn't this the Bush admininstration in a nutshell? If you disagree with us, you are un-American, disloyal, unpatriotic.
I'm tired of linking the following quote : People don't want War by Herman Goering . That in a few sentences covers what you have saidQuidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
what goddamm difference does it make? vote for the man based on his policies, not on his private life. as al sharpton put it - the government should be able what's happening in the kitchen, not the bedroom. that could be generalised much more broadly to all of politics.
Launch War on Terrorism
Civilians reported killed by military intervention in Iraq 15033
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/
plus
Deaths due to kidnapping and beheading of citizens of countries [ some that have noting to do with war ] - Kenya,Egypt,India,Australia,Britain,France..etc etc.
plus death of military persona of USA,Britain and other countries whose soldiers are present in Iraq.
There are more than 16 U.S. Bases in Germany, but does that make it not free? What about Japan, or Kosovo, or Korea... most reasonable people would concider them to be free. Not having permanent bases there after such a large scale change in governments would be short sighted and extremely hurtful to any chance Iraq has of being free of brutal murdering dictators.
... we must give them great respect, and curry their favor.
Er, unless they actually help us in Iraq (UK, Australia, etc), or are trying at great personal risk to rebuild a country and hold elections (Allawi). Then we sneer at them and call them Bush puppets.
Who's doing exactly the wrong thing for political purposes, again?
There are 35 states with higher tax rates than Mass. Montana is one of them. When you have a bad employee (the President is our employee) you fire them. You don't look at his potential replacement and think, "What if he does a worse job than the current guy?".
I hardly know where to start with this. Ideally it would be "insightful" viewpoints which are modded up as "insightful" independent of their political background. But what makes your post totally silly is that, despite the fact that people say slashdot has liberal leanings, liberals are kept on the defensive. Liberal viewpoints are modded down just for being liberal.
And the rest of what you said is totally inane- it is conservatives, not liberals, who seek to (and frequently manage to) quench "opposing viewpoints".
The republican noise machine's ability to shout louder than anyone else is great for conservative politicians, but it's hurting our country. How is a democracy supposed to adjust to circumstances when the debate is brought to the level of an elementary school playground fight?
I met an informed, reasonable republican on slashdot the other day. I praised him for his character, but in fact I was shocked because usually I only meet people like you, who gloss over reality because they came up with a witty barb to toss at the other party.
You guys are really good at that, credit where credit is due; it's only to bad that you are fucking us all over by removing the substance of the conversation.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
(Copied from The American Thinker, the link in my sig)
Letter from Iraq
September 28th, 2004
[Editor's note: The letter which follows has reached mevia a number of American military officers. They tell me that it has privately circulated widely in military circles, and is generally regarded as credible by knowledgeable people. The version which appears below has had many corroborating details removed, to avoid compromising possibly sensitive military information.
The author must remain anonymous. Thus, no guarantee of its provenance can be made. Nevertheless, the argument made by The Major is compelling enough that American Thinker readers deserve to see it. Caveat lector.]
I'm a Major in the United States Military, in Iraq. The analysts and pundits, who don't see what I see on a daily basis, have no factual basis to talk about the situation - especially if they have yet to set foot in Iraq. The media filters out most events, through a sieve of their latent prejudices - personal, political, and professional.*
The US media recently buzzed with the news of an intelligence report that is very negative about the prospects for Iraq's future. CNN's website said, "[The]National Intelligence Estimate was sent to the White House in July with a classified warning predicting the best case for Iraq was 'tenuous stability' and the worst case was civil war."
That report, along with the car bombings and kidnappings in Baghdad in the past couple days, were portrayed in the media as more proof of absolute chaos and the intransigence of the insurgency. From where I sit, at the Operational Headquarters in Baghdad, that just isn't the case. The public is being misled about what is happening.
The media types who think this "National Intelligence Estimate" is the last word on the situation either don't know, or don't want to know the realities of the process behind it. It was delivered to the White House in July. That means that the information that was used to derive the intelligence in the immediate aftermath of the April battle for Fallujah, and other events was gathered in the Spring.
The report doesn't cover what has happened in July or August, let alone September. The naysayers will point to the recent battles in Najaf and draw parallels between that and what happened in Fallujah in April. They aren't even close.
The bad guys did us a HUGE favor by gathering together in one place and trying to make a stand. It allowed us to focus on them and defeat them. Make no mistake, Al Sadr's troops were thoroughly smashed. The estimated enemy killed in action is huge. Before the battles, the residents of the city were afraid to walk the streets. Al Sadr's enforcers would seize people and bring them to his Islamic court where sentence was passed for religious or other violations. Long before the battles, people were looking for their lost loved ones who had been taken to "court" and never seen again.
Now Najafians can and do walk their streets in safety. Commerce has returned and the city is being rebuilt. Iraqi security forces and US troops are welcomed and smiled upon. That city was liberated again. It was not like Fallujah - the bad guys lost and are in hiding or dead.
You may not have even heard about the city of Samarra. Two weeks ago, that Sunni Triangle city was a "No-go" area for US troops. But guess what? The locals got sick of living in fear from the insurgents and foreign fighters that were there and let them know they weren't welcome. They stopped hosting them in their houses and the mayor of the town brokered a deal with the US commander to return Iraqi government sovereignty to the city without a fight. The people saw what was on the horizon and decided they didn't want their city looking like Fallujah in April or Najaf in August.
Boom, boom, just like that two major "hot spots" cool down in rapid succession. Does that mean that those towns are completely pacified? No. What it does mean is that we are lea
...come on - what did you expect?
No, I'm not just trying to be a tinfoil-hat-carrying left-wing anti-US conspiration theorist - but seriously, have you read a paper the past few years?
How this can be "news" is beyond me. How it ever became "news for nerds" that's a whole other story...
Please, can we go back to Xeon vs. Opteron bashing?
By reports, she of course meant newspaper reports. You know, the things most of us get our information from. From the Washington Post:
Later in the article:
So it seems that it is a bit more than mere suspicion, as you would characterize it. The article makes it pretty clear that Allawi was a mouthpiece for the Bush campaign while he was here in the US. So that's why Ms. Feinstein was dismayed. Frankly, so am I.
The article is here
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
The US can solve the problems in Iraq tomorrow. It would be the end of GW's presidency, and US foriegn policy would suffer for decades to come as a result, but I think it's time to cut our losses and gain the best possible outcome that we can.
1) Arrange to slack Mr. Allawi's protection just enough that he can be killed (I'm not suggesting that we do it, just that we let it happen). He knew the risks when he went in, and he will be dying for the cause he claims to advocate.
2) Have GW make an appearance on Al J the next day BEFORE he speaks to the US press (very important).
3) He says that the US mourns Allawi. Make it clear that he's one of "ours".
4) Admit that western forces cannot control Iraq's "strong spirit and determination." It's important to not be negative toward the Iraqi's. They need to feel like they have the power to make the next move or OUR next move won't work.
5) Point to the most anti-western, pro-Islam, fundamentalist we can find who has a large base of followers, but is generally not a terrorist so much as an honest freedom fighter for Iraq, the way I hope GW would be if the US were occupied by a foreign force. Someone who won't just bomb the crap out the Kurds and set up his own rape rooms, but everyone knows isn't going to be our friend.
6) Make the offer. US troops will withdraw, entirely with no conditions, in a two week period the moment he takes over the Iraqi government.
7) Walk away and never explain. If someone asks about Iraq, you have to look at your shoes and say, "it's a shame... it's just a shame."
If we do that, and do it soon, we win. Iraq will be no more anti-western than when we stared (that would be impossible). They will have no more or less love for Israel (that too would be impossible). The problems in the region will not have been solved. However, someone with the political clout to re-build Iraq without being attacked by guerilla bombings every day will be able to establish order. It will be slow and painful. There will be abuses, but it will work because he will appear to have "kicked out the Americans". In the end we will have removed the largest source of instability in the region (which we created) and accomplished our goal of removing S.H.
If our twin goals are to liberate the Iraqis and reduce the threat of terrorism world-wide, this is, IMHO, the strongest step we can make.