Should We Win the War on Terror

[AFTiger 282]

The Moveon Party's (Democrats) quest for defeat is in jeprody.

Discuss

Thousands Return to Safer Iraqi Capital

Nov 3 02:39 PM US/Eastern

By STEVEN R. HURST

Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD (AP) - In a dramatic turnaround, more than 3,000 Iraqi families driven out of their Baghdad neighborhoods have returned to their homes in the past three months as sectarian violence has dropped, the government said Saturday.

Saad al-Azawi, his wife and four children are among them. They fled to Syria six months ago, leaving behind what had become one of the capital's more dangerous districts—west Baghdad's largely Sunni Khadra region.

The family had been living inside a vicious and bloody turf battle between al-Qaida in Iraq and Mahdi Army militiamen. But Azawi said things began changing, becoming more peaceful, in August when radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his Mahdi Army fighters to stand down nationwide.

About the same time, the Khadra neighborhood Awakening Council rose up against brutal al-Qaida control—the imposition of its austere interpretation of Islam, along with the murder and torture of those who would not comply.

The uprising originated in Iraq's west and flowed into the capital. Earlier this year, the Sunni tribes and clans in the vast Anbar province began their own revolt and have successfully rid the largely desert region of al-Qaida control.

At one point the terrorist group virtually controlled Anbar, often with the complicity of the vast Sunni majority who welcomed the outsiders in their fight against American forces.

But, U.S. officials say, al-Qaida overplayed its hand with Iraq's Sunnis, who practice a moderate version of Islam. American forces were quick to capitalize on the upheaval, welcoming former Sunni enemies as colleagues in securing what was once the most dangerous region of the country.

And as 30,000 additional U.S. forces arrived for the crackdown in Baghdad and central Iraq, the American commander, Gen. David Petraeus, began stationing many of them in neighborhood outposts. The mission was not only to take back control but to foster neighborhood groups like the one in Khadra to shake off al-Qaida's grip.

The 40-year-old al-Azawi, who has gone back to work managing a car service, said relatives and friends persuaded him to bring his family home.

"Six months ago, I wouldn't dare be outside, not even to stand near the garden gate by the street. Killings had become routine. I stopped going to work, I was so afraid," he said, chatting with friends on a street in the neighborhood.

When he and his family joined the flood of Iraqi refugees to Syria the streets were empty by early afternoon, when all shops were tightly shuttered. Now the stores stay open until 10 p.m. and the U.S. military working with the neighborhood council is handing out $2,000 grants to shop owners who had closed their business. The money goes to those who agree to reopen or first-time businessmen.

Al-Azawi said he's trying to get one of the grants to open a poultry and egg shop that his brother would run.

"In Khadra, about 15 families have returned from Syria. I've called friends and family still there and told them it's safe to come home," he said.

Sattar Nawrous, a spokesman for the Ministry of Displacement and Migration, said the al-Azawi family was among 3,100 that have returned to their homes in Baghdad in the past 90 days.

"In the past three months, the ministry did not register any forced displacement in the whole of Iraq," said Nawrous, who is a Kurd.

The claim could not be independently verified, but, if true, it would represent a dramatic end to the sectarian cleansing that has shredded the fabric of Baghdad's once mixed society.

The head of the ministry is Abdul-Samad Rahman, a Shiite appointed to his job by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who is accused of promoting the Shiite cause to the detriment of Sunnis. Under Saddam Hussein, the Sunni minority ruled and heavily oppressed many in the Shiite majority.

Part of the inflow can be attributed to stiffening of visa and residency procedures for Iraqis by the Syrian government.

Mahmoud al-Zubaidi, who runs the Iraqi Airways office in Damascus, the Syrian capital, the flow of Iraqis has almost reversed.

What were once full flights arriving from Baghdad now touch down virtually empty, he told Al-Sabah, the government funded Iraqi daily newspaper. Now the flights are leaving Damascus with more passengers but the volume of travel is off considerably.

On average, 56 Iraqis—civilians and security forces—have died each day so far in this very bloody year. Last month, however, the toll fell to just under 30 Iraqis killed daily in sectarian violence.

More than four months after U.S. forces completed a 30,000-strong force buildup, the death toll for both Iraqis and Americans has fallen dramatically for two months running.

Across Iraq Saturday, 18 people were killed or found dead in sectarian violence, well below the year's daily average.

AP correspondent Sameer N. Yacoub contributed to this report.

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[AFTiger 282]

Should we surrender?

A Muslim man had invited the American soldiers from “Chosen” Company 2-12 Infantry to the church, where I videotaped as Muslims and Christians worked and rejoiced at the reopening of St John’s, an occasion all viewed as a sign of hope.

The Iraqis asked me to convey a message of thanks to the American people. ” Thank you, thank you,” the people were saying. One man said, “Thank you for peace.” Another man, a Muslim, said “All the people, all the people in Iraq, Muslim and Christian, is brother.” The men and women were holding bells, and for the first time in memory freedom rang over the ravaged land between two rivers.

Link

[Tigermike 3,055]

Don't you know they don't call it surrender? And they do support the troops!

[AFTiger 282]

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Lieberman Lashes Out at Democrats

BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun

November 9, 2007

WASHINGTON — The Senate's only "independent Democrat" is lashing out at the party whose vice presidential nominee he once was, accusing its leaders of betraying the tradition of presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy.

At a speech before Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, Senator Lieberman of Connecticut said, "Since retaking Congress in November 2006, the top foreign policy priority of the Democratic Party has not been to expand the size of our military for the war on terror or to strengthen our democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East or to prevail in Afghanistan. It has been to pull our troops out of Iraq, to abandon the democratically elected government there, and to hand a defeat to President Bush."

Those words were part of a speech that traced Mr. Lieberman's own position on the war in the tradition of not only the great Democratic presidents of the 20th century, but also the interventionism of President Clinton and his vice president, Albert Gore, a man who has played to the net roots base that tried and failed to unseat Mr. Lieberman in 2006.

Mr. Lieberman was particularly critical of his 22 Democratic colleagues in the Senate who voted against the senator's resolution to label Iran's revolutionary guard corps and elite Quds Force a foreign terrorist entity. He accused liberal Web logs of peddling a "conspiracy theory," namely that the legislation was a back door authorization for war. Also, without naming names, he said some of his colleagues who had voted against it said they agreed with its substance, but told the senator, "We don't trust Bush. He'll use this resolution as an excuse for war against Iran."

Mr. Lieberman concluded, "There is something profoundly wrong-something that should trouble all of us — when we have elected Democratic officials who seem more worried about how the Bush administration might respond to Iran's murder of our troops, than about the fact that Iran is murdering our troops." He added, "There is likewise something profoundly wrong when we see candidates who are willing to pander to this politically paranoid, hyper-partisan sentiment in the Democratic base — even if it sends a message of weakness and division to the Iranian regime."

A senior aide to Mr. Lieberman said the senator was attempting to draw out the long arc of the modern Democratic Party's approach to foreign affairs and persuade fellow Democrats that now was the time to embrace the Truman-Kennedy tradition again.

"We wanted to put our positions in the context of a national tradition," he said. "Maybe some Democrats will be open to listening to this. It was an appeal for the Democratic Party to return to its tradition."

A spokesman for the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada said, "Senator Reid and Senator Lieberman agree on many issues, but when it comes to the war in Iraq they have a deep and significant difference of opinion. Senator Reid, along with a majority of the American people, supports the idea that we need to start bringing our troops home. That is what he believes in, and that is what he is going to continue to fight for."

Recently however, other Democratic leaders have credited the military surge they sought to stop earlier this year with the decrease in violence in Iraq. On Tuesday, the House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, a Democrat of Maryland, told the Cybercast News Service that he credits the surge with the military success. The Christian Science Monitor, however, quoted Mr. Hoyer as saying he still believed the Iraq war was "perhaps the most seriously flawed implementation of a foreign policy in my lifetime and maybe in our history."

A former foreign policy adviser to Vice President Gore, Andrei Cherny, said he is predicting Democrats to tack to the center as soon as the presidential nomination process wraps up.

"There is a large grain of truth that Lieberman is very much overstating," said Mr. Cherny, who is also editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. "He is absolutely right that so far we have not heard in the presidential primaries, candidates speaking to the Democratic tradition of expanding democracy around the world and using force to advance American values, and that is in large part because of the sense that America is in a dire situation in Iraq. I think we will see the Democratic nominee return to these kinds of values."

Mr. Cherny just finished writing a book exploring President Truman's political campaign against his first secretary of commerce, Henry Wallace. Mr. Wallace campaigned for the presidency in 1948 on a platform that called for a soft line on Stalin's Soviet Union.

Mr. Cherny said he did not think the Democrats were in danger of embracing the kind of appeasement associated with Wallace or later the party's 1972 nominee, George McGovern.

"I don't think we are on the cliff of Henry Wallace. It is a party that is at sea, it is a party that is not in the same way advancing its historic mission. We have not wandered into the wooly headed appeasement of Henry Wallace," Mr. Cherny said. "That being said, we do need a strong figure to return us to the kind of approach that Harry Truman represented."

[Auburn85 432]

is it just me or is the Iraq War coverage not as intense?...i guess it's just me.

besides the economy and health care have become as big a issue as Iraq. Used to be JUST Iraq.

[AFTiger 282]

is it just me or is the Iraq War coverage not as intense?...i guess it's just me.

besides the economy and health care have become as big a issue as Iraq. Used to be JUST Iraq.

As you can tell by the response to my question, you are right. I guess it is because it is going well for us. So it is not news anymore and would give credit to Bush, a huge NO NO!

[Bottomfeeder 244]

Who cares anymore? I know could care less. Especially with all of the new found riches for companies like Halibruton. Halibruton headquarters moving to Dubai to avoid paying taxes on their ill-gotten gains? Hmmm. Blackwater and the rest of those private contractors who so willfully deceive the people of the USA with their lies and murder, can go you know where. I hope they all rot in he!!. War on Terra? No, it's a war on the American people by their own government.

[AFTiger 282]

Who cares anymore? I know could care less. Especially with all of the new found riches for companies like Halibruton. Halibruton headquarters moving to Dubai to avoid paying taxes on their ill-gotten gains? Hmmm. Blackwater and the rest of those private contractors who so willfully deceive the people of the USA with their lies and murder, can go you know where. I hope they all rot in he!!. War on Terra? No, it's a war on the American people by their own government.

Well I am glad you don't care anymore. May we win it now?

[Bottomfeeder 244]

Who cares anymore? I know could care less. Especially with all of the new found riches for companies like Halibruton. Halibruton headquarters moving to Dubai to avoid paying taxes on their ill-gotten gains? Hmmm. Blackwater and the rest of those private contractors who so willfully deceive the people of the USA with their lies and murder, can go you know where. I hope they all rot in he!!. War on Terra? No, it's a war on the American people by their own government.

Well I am glad you don't care anymore. May we win it now?

[AFTiger 282]

How They Did It

Executing the winning strategy in Iraq.

by Kimberly Kagan

The surge of operations that American and Iraqi forces began on June 15 has dramatically improved security in Baghdad and throughout Iraq. U.S. commanders and soldiers have reversed the negative trends of 2006, some of which date back to 2005. The total number of enemy attacks has fallen for four consecutive months, and has now reached levels last seen before the February 2006 Samarra mosque bombing. IED explosions have plummeted to late 2004 levels. Iraqi civilian casualties, which peaked at 3,000 in the month of December 2006, are now below 1,000 for the second straight month. The number of coalition soldiers killed in action has fallen for five straight months and is now at the lowest level since February 2004. These trends persisted through Ramadan, when violence had typically spiked. "I believe we have achieved some momentum," General Raymond T. Odierno, commander of coalition combat forces in Iraq, said modestly in his November 1 press briefing. Since security was deteriorating dramatically in Iraq a year ago, how U.S. commanders and soldiers and their Iraqi partners achieved this positive momentum deserves explanation, even though hard fighting continues and the war is not yet won.

This is the first paragraph in a long article

The Article

[Bottomfeeder 244]

How They Did It

Executing the winning strategy in Iraq.

by Kimberly Kagan

The surge of operations that American and Iraqi forces began on June 15 has dramatically improved security in Baghdad and throughout Iraq. U.S. commanders and soldiers have reversed the negative trends of 2006, some of which date back to 2005. The total number of enemy attacks has fallen for four consecutive months, and has now reached levels last seen before the February 2006 Samarra mosque bombing. IED explosions have plummeted to late 2004 levels. Iraqi civilian casualties, which peaked at 3,000 in the month of December 2006, are now below 1,000 for the second straight month. The number of coalition soldiers killed in action has fallen for five straight months and is now at the lowest level since February 2004. These trends persisted through Ramadan, when violence had typically spiked. "I believe we have achieved some momentum," General Raymond T. Odierno, commander of coalition combat forces in Iraq, said modestly in his November 1 press briefing. Since security was deteriorating dramatically in Iraq a year ago, how U.S. commanders and soldiers and their Iraqi partners achieved this positive momentum deserves explanation, even though hard fighting continues and the war is not yet won.

This is the first paragraph in a long article

The Article

I think they're lying. Secondly, if they aren't lying, they've secured the Baghdad, Wow. That's real good. So what happens when we leave? That is if we leave.

[AFTiger 282]

And Bottomfeeder finds the cloud in the silver lining.

[AFTiger 282]

I think they're lying. Secondly, if they aren't lying, they've secured the Baghdad, Wow. That's real good. So what happens when we leave? That is if we leave.

Will you believe the New York Times. I usually don't, but they can't supress it any more.

New York Times

November 20, 2007

Baghdad’s Weary Start to Exhale as Security Improves

By DAMIEN CAVE and ALISSA J. RUBIN

BAGHDAD, Nov. 19 — Five months ago, Suhaila al-Aasan lived in an oxygen tank factory with her husband and two sons, convinced that they would never go back to their apartment in Dora, a middle-class neighborhood in southern Baghdad.

Today she is home again, cooking by a sunlit window, sleeping beneath her favorite wedding picture. And yet, she and her family are remarkably alone. The half-dozen other apartments in her building echo with emptiness and, on most days, Iraqi soldiers are the only neighbors she sees.

“I feel happy,” she said, standing in her bedroom, between a flowered bedspread and a bullet hole in the wall. “But my happiness is not complete. We need more people to come back. We need more people to feel safe.”

Mrs. Aasan, 45, a Shiite librarian with an easy laugh, is living at the far end of Baghdad’s tentative recovery. She is one of many Iraqis who in recent weeks have begun to test where they can go and what they can do when fear no longer controls their every move.

The security improvements in most neighborhoods are real. Days now pass without a car bomb, after a high of 44 in the city in February. The number of bodies appearing on Baghdad’s streets has plummeted to about 5 a day, from as many as 35 eight months ago, and suicide bombings across Iraq fell to 16 in October, half the number of last summer and down sharply from a recent peak of 59 in March, the American military says.

As a result, for the first time in nearly two years, people are moving with freedom around much of this city. In more than 50 interviews across Baghdad, it became clear that while there were still no-go zones, more Iraqis now drive between Sunni and Shiite areas for work, shopping or school, a few even after dark. In the most stable neighborhoods of Baghdad, some secular women are also dressing as they wish. Wedding bands are playing in public again, and at a handful of once shuttered liquor stores customers now line up outside in a collective rebuke to religious vigilantes from the Shiite Mahdi Army.

Iraqis are clearly surprised and relieved to see commerce and movement finally increase, five months after an extra 30,000 American troops arrived in the country. But the depth and sustainability of the changes remain open to question.

By one revealing measure of security — whether people who fled their home have returned — the gains are still limited. About 20,000 Iraqis have gone back to their Baghdad homes, a fraction of the more than 4 million who fled nationwide, and the 1.4 million people in Baghdad who are still internally displaced, according to a recent Iraqi Red Crescent Society survey.

Iraqis sound uncertain about the future, but defiantly optimistic. Many Baghdad residents seem to be willing themselves to normalcy, ignoring risks and suppressing fears to reclaim their lives. Pushing past boundaries of sect and neighborhood, they said they were often pleasantly surprised and kept going; in other instances, traumatic memories or a dark look from a stranger were enough to tug them back behind closed doors.

Mrs. Aasan’s experience, as a member of the brave minority of Iraqis who have returned home, shows both the extent of the improvements and their limits.

She works at an oasis of calm: a small library in eastern Baghdad, where on several recent afternoons, about a dozen children bounced through the rooms, reading, laughing, learning English and playing music on a Yamaha keyboard.

Brightly colored artwork hangs on the walls: images of gardens, green and lush; Iraqi soldiers smiling; and Arabs holding hands with Kurds.

It is all deliberately idyllic. Mrs. Aasan and the other two women at the library have banned violent images, guiding the children toward portraits of hope. The children are also not allowed to discuss the violence they have witnessed.

“Our aim is to fight terrorism,” Mrs. Aasan said. “We want them to overcome their personal experiences.”

The library closed last year because parents would not let their children out of sight. Now, most of the children walk on their own from homes nearby — another sign of the city’s improved ease of movement.

But there are scars in the voice of a ponytailed little girl who said she had less time for fun since her father was incapacitated by a bomb. (“We try to make him feel better and feel less pain,” she said.) And pain still lingers in the silence of Mrs. Aasan’s 10-year-old son, Abather, who accompanies her wherever she goes.

One day five months ago, when they still lived in Dora, Mrs. Aasan sent Abather to get water from a tank below their apartment. Delaying as boys will do, he followed his soccer ball into the street, where he discovered two dead bodies with their eyeballs torn out. It was not the first corpse he had seen, but for Mrs. Aasan that was enough. “I grabbed him, we got in the car and we drove away,” she said.

After they heard on an Iraqi news program that her section of Dora had improved, she and her husband explored a potential return. They visited and found little damage, except for a bullet hole in their microwave.

Two weeks ago, they moved back to the neighborhood where they had lived since 2003.

“It’s just a rental,” Mrs. Aasan said, as if embarrassed at her connection to such a humble place. “But after all, it’s home.”

In interviews, she and her husband said they felt emboldened by the decline in violence citywide and the visible presence of Iraqi soldiers at a checkpoint a few blocks away.

Still, it was a brave decision, one her immediate neighbors have not yet felt bold enough to make. Mrs. Aasan’s portion of Dora still looks as desolate as a condemned tenement. The trunk of a palm tree covers a section of road where Sunni gunmen once dumped a severed head, and about 200 yards to the right of her building concrete Jersey barriers block a section of homes believed to be booby-trapped with explosives.

“On this street,” she said, standing on her balcony, “many of my neighbors lost relatives.” Then she rushed inside.

Her husband, Fadhel A. Yassen, 49, explained that they had seen several friends killed while they sat outside in the past. He insisted that being back in the apartment was “a victory over fear, a victory over terrorism.”

Yet the achievement remains rare. Many Iraqis say they would still rather leave the country than go home. In Baghdad there are far more families like the Nidhals. The father, who would only identify himself as Abu Nebras (father of Nebras), is Sunni; Hanan, his wife, is a Shiite from Najaf, the center of Shiite religious learning in Iraq. They lived for 17 years in Ghazaliya in western Baghdad until four gunmen from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni extremist group that American intelligence agencies say is led by foreigners, showed up at his door last December.

“My sons were armed and they went away but after that, we knew we had only a few hours,” Abu Nebras said. “We were displaced because I was secular and Al Qaeda didn’t like that.”

They took refuge in the middle-class Palestine Street area in the northeastern part of Baghdad, a relatively stable enclave with an atmosphere of tolerance for their mixed marriage. Now with the situation improving across the city, the Nidhal family longs to return to their former home, but they have no idea when, or if, it will be possible.

Another family now lives in their house — the situation faced by about a third of all displaced Iraqis, according to the International Organization for Migration — and it is not clear whether the fragile peace will last. Abu Nebras tested the waters recently, going back to talk with neighbors on his old street for the first time.

He said the Shiites in the northern part of Ghazaliya had told him that the American military’s payments to local Sunni volunteers in the southern, Sunni part of the neighborhood amounted to arming one side.

The Americans describe the volunteers as heroes, part of a larger nationwide campaign known as the Sunni Awakening. But Abu Nebras said he did not trust them. “Some of the Awakening members are just Al Qaeda who have joined them,” he said. “I know them from before.”

With the additional American troops scheduled to depart, the Nidhal family said, Baghdad would be truly safe only when the Iraqi forces were mixed with Sunnis and Shiites operating checkpoints side by side — otherwise the city would remain a patchwork of Sunni and Shiite enclaves. “The police, the army, it has to be Sunni next to Shiite next to Sunni next to Shiite,” Abu Nebras said.

They and other Iraqis also said the government must aggressively help people return to their homes, perhaps by supervising returns block by block. The Nidhal family said they feared the displaced Sunnis in their neighborhood who were furious that Shiites chased them from their houses. “They are so angry, they will kill anyone,” Abu Nebras said.

For now, though, they are trying to enjoy what may be only a temporary respite from violence. One of their sons recently returned to his veterinary studies at a university in Baghdad, and their daughter will start college this winter.

Laughter is also more common now in the Nidhal household — even on once upsetting subjects. At midday, Hanan’s sister, who teaches in a local high school, came home and threw up her hands in exasperation. She had asked her Islamic studies class to bring in something that showed an aspect of Islamic culture. “Two boys told me, ‘I’m going to bring in a portrait of Moktada al-Sadr,’” she said.

She shook her head and chuckled. Mr. Sadr is an anti-American cleric whose militia, the Mahdi Army, has been accused of carrying out much of the displacement and killings of Sunnis in Baghdad. They can joke because they no longer fear that the violence will engulf them.

In longer interviews across Baghdad, the pattern was repeated. Iraqis acknowledged how far their country still needed to go before a return to normalcy, but they also expressed amazement at even the most embryonic signs of recovery.

Mrs. Aasan said she was thrilled and relieved just a few days ago, when her college-aged son got stuck at work after dark and his father managed to pick him up and drive home without being killed.

“Before, when we lived in Dora, after 4 p.m., I wouldn’t let anyone out of the house,” she said.

“They drove back to Dora at 8!” she added, glancing at her husband, who beamed, chest out, like a mountaineer who had scaled Mount Everest. “We really felt that it was a big difference.”