Now, It Gets Interesting
Published by Pokerwolf on Tuesday, July 08, 2008 at 10:36 AM.BAGHDAD - Iraq's national security adviser said Tuesday his country will not accept any security deal with the United States unless it contains specific dates for the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces.
The comments by Mouwaffak al-Rubaie were the strongest yet by an Iraqi official about the deal now under negotiation with U.S. officials. It came a day after Iraq's prime minister first said publicly that he expects the pending troop deal with the United States to have some type of timetable for withdrawal.
Here's the zinger:
Some type of agreement between the United States and Iraq is needed to keep U.S. troops in Iraq after a U.N. mandate expires at year's end.
So, the Iraqi government says they want a timetable and the current U.S. government says that it doesn't want a time table. Add in that the U.N mandate expires on December 31st of this year plus the U.S. Presidential election in November and the sum of all those parts is a result with a hell of a lot of ramifications.
I'll state for the record that if the U.S. Military pulls out of Iraq, that will just mean that people will be assigned to Afghanistan. But, I haven't heard many people bitching about the U.S. military being there. Whether or not soldiers get to come home is another matter.
Remember that war they said we were losing?
Published by StB on Monday, July 07, 2008 at 10:54 AM.A huge operation to crush the 1,200 fighters who remained from a terrorist force once estimated at more than 12,000 began on May 10.
Operation Lion’s Roar, in which the Iraqi army combined forces with the Americans’ 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment, has already resulted in the death of Abu Khalaf, the Al-Qaeda leader, and the capture of more than 1,000 suspects.
Funny, I haven't seen this on TV here in the US.
Ed Morrissey at Hot Air sums it up:
Maliki has declared that the terrorist siege of Baghdad and Iraq has collapsed. He blamed unnamed foreign nations for funding the terrorist wave against his nation, and hailed the new Iraqi Army for its tenacity against the radicals of all stripes. While he kept his praise to the Iraqis, the unspoken truth is that the IA could never have survived it without the Bush administration’s shift in strategy and tactics in January 2007, and without George Bush’s tenacity in insisting that we stay and finish the job in Iraq.
And what have we won? AQ has sustained an unmitigated defeat in Iraq. They have lost tens of thousands of recruits and fighters, men that would have otherwise volunteered for other missions in which they didn’t have to face the American military. They have lost their supposedly divine endorsement; why would Allah have called them to action, just to see them destroyed by the infidels? The sheer bloodthirstiness of their actions in Iraq have exposed them as drug-driven demons, not righteous jihadists.
But you wouldn't know about here. People are too busy thinking men and women are being held against their will and tortured. Too busy wanting to believe an inevitable attack on Iran is coming- yeah the same inevitable attack that has been talked about over the past year. These same guilty Americans want to vote in the most unqualified candidate to the top office this fall as well.
They are too busy to face reality. A good thing has been done in Iraq. Time to carry it forward.
