Archive for the 'Iraq' Category

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We’ve always been winning in Anbar

Published on May 28, 2007 in Humour, Iraq and Middle East. 0 Comments

A wonderful example of the shamelessness and delusion of the wingnut fraternity (aka Instapundit) care of Instaputz.

Putz added to his ludicrous “you’d think lefty bloggers would be happy if things were going badly in Iraq” post.

I’m starting to think that they don’t follow the news all that closely. It’s true — as Michael Yon noted in an earlier email — that Anbar isn’t perfectly peaceful. But it’s also true that it’s changed quite drastically since it was being written off last year. That’s news — if you care about reality, rather than just rooting for America Bush to lose.

What, no “nanny-nanny-boo-boo”?

Here’s the problem: Putz has been insisting we’ve been winning in Anbar for three years. Read these posts and decide who it is doesn’t follow the news or care about reality.

October 06, 2006

Don’t let the media convince you that things are going badly in Iraq. The Anbar tribes are now fighting al Qaeda on their own initiative, and the Shi’ite-dominated government is slowly dismantling al Sadr’s Mahdi Army…Our strategy in Iraq is sound. It’s keeping our own casualties down, and it’s forcing the Iraqis to defend themselves.

Don’t despair. We’re winning.

October 05, 2006

ED MORRISSEY looks at events in Anbar province, and observes: “The tribal backlash shows why the Zarqawi strategy was always a loser.”

October 02, 2006

A GROWING INSURGENCY in Iran?
UPDATE: Plus, a look at Anbar tribes vs. Al Qaeda from Bill Roggio.

September 22, 2006

STRATEGYPAGE OFFERS A RATHER POSITIVE TAKE on what’s going on in Anbar province.

September 21, 2006

Good work has been and continues to be done in Anbar. The military has a problem with public affairs, plain and simple, and fails to realize that the impact on remaining silent on this report far outweighs the need to keep the information classified.

January 27, 2006

IRAQ THE MODEL: “Iraqi tribes in Anbar arrest 270 Arab and foreign al-Qaeda members!”

September 18, 2004

If the pattern of American casualties shows that most fighting is happening in Al-Anbar it is not because Administration officials are manufacturing the results to camouflage a “widening insurgency”. It is because there is no power vacuum among Kurds and Shi’ias as complete as that in the Sunni triangle. Civil war, if it eventuates, will not be result of military failure but from a lack of commitment to create a replacement Iraqi State. If we build it, it will come.

As Glenn Reynolds demonstrates time and time again, the right wing wasn’t kidding when they say they are creating their own reality.

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Rumsfeld’s handling of Iraq almost criminal

Published on May 24, 2007 in Iraq, Middle East and US. 0 Comments

A growing problem for the Bush administration with regard to the history of their fiasco in Iraq is that they invited in so many eyewitnesses from among “the coalition of the willing.” They are beginning to talk. For instance, Col. Mike Kelly of Australia has started dishing the dirt about former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

CANBERRA, Australia: Former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s handling of the Iraq war verged on criminal negligence, a former Australian army lawyer turned political candidate said Tuesday.

Col. Mike Kelly, who ended a 20-year military career last week to run as an opposition candidate at federal elections later this year, gave his first television interview about his experiences in Iraq to Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Kelly, who was among the most senior Australian officers in Iraq during 2003 and 2004, was scathing of Rumsfeld’s role.

“If I look at people like Donald Rumsfeld, all I can say is, that verges on criminal negligence,” Kelly told the ABC of Rumsfeld’s failure to acknowledge problems in Iraq.

Kelly — an expert on the law of occupation and peacemaking operations with experience in Somalia, Bosnia and East Timor — said he offered a plan to stop looting and protect infrastructure soon after former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was toppled.

“We knew exactly what needed to be done,” Kelly told the ABC.

“Then Rumsfeld came in and overruled that concept and basically threw it out the window and that was where things really started to go wrong,” he said.

Kelly described disbanding the Iraqi army as “a tragic mistake” which turned thousands of former soldiers against the coalition.

He also said the United States and Australia — which along with Britain contributed troops to the U.S.-led invasion — of ignoring warnings of human rights abuses in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison.

Kelly, 47, has become a candidate for the center-left Labor Party, which has vowed to bring home Australian combat troops from Iraq if it wins elections late this year.

There are almost 1,600 Australian troops in and around Iraq.

Prime Minister John Howard, a close ally of U.S. President George W. Bush, has pledged to keep Australian troops in Iraq as long as they are needed.

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Protesters acquitted of sabotaging US bombers

Published on May 23, 2007 in Iraq, Middle East and UK. 1 Comment

From today’s Guardian, Protesters acquitted of sabotaging US bombers:

Two protesters who broke into an RAF base to sabotage US B-52 bombers by clogging their engines with nuts and bolts were acquitted yesterday after arguing that they were acting to prevent war crimes in Iraq.

Toby Olditch, 38, and Philip Pritchard, 36, both from Oxford, expressed delight and relief after a Bristol crown court jury unanimously found them not guilty of conspiring to cause criminal damage at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire on the eve of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

…The court heard that the pair entered the base on March 18 2003, the day before bombing commenced at the start of the Iraq war. They were armed with bottles of red and brown coloured liquid along with bags of nails and staples which would have been poured into the planes’ engine bays. The pair were arrested after being spotted by patrolling Ministry of Defence police.

On the Guardian’s Comment is Free site, the two aquitted protestors explain their successful defense:

On the face of it we were guilty; our intention to damage B-52 bombers on 18th March 2003 was explicit and not one we ever sought to deny. We knew that the information we were carrying with us when we went into the base gave the prosecution all the evidence necessary to pursue charges.

However the law makes provision for the fact that a person may do something that would otherwise be criminal while acting to prevent a greater crime or while trying to protect the property of another.

Therein lies the nub of it; the lawful excuse that allowed a jury to acquit having listened to a week of evidence on the consequences to Iraqis of “Shock and Awe” and the indiscriminate nature of cluster munitions and depleted uranium.

We should like to believe that in reaching their decision, the thoughts of the jury went far beyond the bounds of the court, to a country that has been laid waste by an unprovoked war and that in finding us not guilty they were also sending a message of sympathy and support to the millions of people who’ve been affected by the war in Iraq and in particular by the weapons used.

…Although the verdict is fantastic for us the feelings we come away with are bitter sweet for us as ordinary soldiers and the people of Iraq are still in a war zone due to the recklessness of our government. This might be the closest Britain ever gets to a ruling in a domestic court on the Iraq war.

We would far rather never have found ourselves in a position where taking non-violent direct action is necessary. We will always regret not having been able to stop the use of these weapons. However we hope that by communicating our motivation and the moral and legal justifications for this action we are able to provide some balance to unchecked executive power.

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