(POL) More horrible news from Iraq
 

hxxp://news.yahoo.com/fc/world/iraq

Explosions in Iraq Kill 160, Injure 570
AP - 53 minutes ago



BAGHDAD, Iraq - More than a dozen explosions ripped through the Iraqi capital in rapid succession Wednesday, killing at least 160 people and wounding 570 in a series of attacks that began with a suicide car bombing that targeted laborers assembled to find work for the day. Al-Qaida in Iraq claimed responsibility. The death toll at hands of insurgents in the capital Wednesday far exceeds the carnage inflicted in any one day since the war began.

Oh yeah, this too: hxxp://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9332851/

Al-Qaida in Iraq declares all-out war
Following attacks that killed over 150, al-Zarqawi announces war intentions

Asaad Muhsin / AP
Iraqi soldiers secure the site where a suicide bomber killed dozens of day laborers looking for work in Baghdad on Wednesday.
Updated: 2:43 p.m. ET Sept. 14, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq - After a dozen explosions ripped through the Iraqi capital Wednesday, al-Qaida's leader in Iraq purportedly declared all out war on Shiite Muslims, Iraqi troops and the country's government in an audio tape released on Internet.

Take the frikken kids gloves off already US. We are still at war.

Where was that Exit Strategy binder again?

Over there next to the Flood Preparedness binder. Yeah, that's it, in the box labled 'Not needed - Trash'.

Time to go back on the offensive. This digging our heels in approach is not be effective in the slightest in curbing insurgent attacks. This war has been handled very badly since we took Baghdad.

Let's just nuke 'em and get it over with.

Duckman: We don't have the troops to effectively go on the offensive. I've read at least a dozen stories over the past year of taking a city/town/border area only to have the troops pulled when another area flared up and then later they are sent to the first hotspot. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Hrmmm...

Didn't Al-Qaida and its leaders ever see this?



Don't they know that major combat operations ended well over 2 years ago?

I think the neutron bomb would leave a more desirable outcome in this scenario.




No. I'm not serious.

The neutron dance on the other hand...

Yeah, I knew about the fact we lack troops to effectively fight. My squadron was stretched thin while conducting operations in Iraq in 2002. The bad news was that we have more than enough aircraft for us to work on while most of our experienced technicans were overseas.

We can thank Bush I and Clinton for that.

What exactly do you mean by this?

"...last throes..."

How about the Safety dance?

Get the jets, tanks and other war type hardware more involved. Run more missions. Don't sit back and be worried about our image. This hang around our humvee and look tough crap is not paying off.

They keep that in Louisiana?

I don't think any of it would work, to be honest. "Democracy" and "Freedom" cannot be force-fed.

This is/was a bad idea that's going south before our very eyes.

I do.

The War is Over.

The operation to bring security and law and order to Iraq is ongoing.

yeah but how much of the population is fighting us still? 1 or 2%?

No but LAW and ORDER and EDUCATION can and should be force fed. Very forcefully fed, if you ask me.

Where we are now is different than where we were when we invaded. I agree with your sentiment pre-invasion(what am I saying, it was about the WMDs right?). But now we need to finish the job, if we just pull out things will be much worse in the long run, that's not an option.

We need to crush the insurgency(who are the vast minority) with military force and validate the new goverment to the people, somehow.

I think that's been the case for a year now, and it doesn't seem to be dropping. That small minority can still do a lot to de-stabilize things.

I wish you were joking, because what you said is really hilarious, you just don't know it.

Guns and butter. You can have one, you can have the other. But you cannot have both...

How is it hilarious? The reputation of the US for the next generation is pretty much on whether we can nation-build. That's Law, Order, Education. If we can provide those three things, Iraq will be a win.

This neo-con jargon makes me want to puke. "Nation-build"?

Sorry, but you cannot force those things on people. That sort of change needs to come from within.

PS - The "reputation of the US" is already sullied and ugly. It takes a special kind of cretin to take all of the goodwill that came our way after 9/11 and turn it into this.

Establishing a puppet government is the first step towards changing from within.

Because we all know that those work great.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, odds are it's a duck.

The war is clearly not over. There have been several major combat offenses since the "war" has been over. The operation to bring security and law and order is all part of the war. In fact, wasn't it one of the main purposes of the war? (To secure and stabilize the region in order to make it ripe for the seeds of democracy?)

Capitalizing the word "War" and trying to differentiate between "war" and "War" and "operation" is disingenious bull crap. It's the propaganda the administration tried to serve up and failed (I've read that speech, it is the very epitome bullshit propaganda).

When I say the war is not over I am not talking semantics, I am talking reality.

Oh yeah, rexalllsc, you may want to put one of those "POL" or "POLITICAL" warnings in the title of this thread.

What does Jeff Garcia have to do with all of this? :D

I feel the need to include at least some reference to the currently undefeated, NFC North leading Detroit Lions in each and every thread I post. ;)

Thank you for noticing. ;)

Done. Thanks.

I think that everyone who reads these type threads gets your point. The more you do it, the less effective it becomes.

It's like that knock-knock joke you've heard a million times.

Can you not come up with something new?

I've got all sorts of material. I wouldn't worry about that. ;)

That said, so long as some folks don't get the punch line of this classic (and, as evidenced above, some don't), I reckon it's worth telling it until they do.

The goal is repetition. If the picture is posted 1,000 times and it's actual meaning is only defended 500 times they have just changed the meaning. It's pretty effective. Look how many people today slam Bush for that sign compared to when we overthrew Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party (it's actual meaning). Honolulu Blue doesn't even know what the hell it really was for. Hell, he thinks it was put up yesterday. :)

I think you're the one who doesn't know what the hell it really was for. You think you do, but you have no clue. That's the beauty of propaganda, makes you think like you know the score when you actually don't even know what game's being played. To paraphrase one of Raiders Army's phrases "You're the one drinking Bush's Kool-Aid."

I read the speech quite recently and quite closely and it's 10,000 times worse than that silly little picture we like to throw around here every now and again.

I really hate to threadjack this, but I don't believe I have ever said anything resembling "You're the one drinking Bush's Kool-Aid." I have talked about drinking the Kool-Aid, but I don't believe I've said anything about Bush's Kool-Aid.

I really hope "Bush's Kool Aid" isn't slang for a woman's period....because that would just be nasty.

In the fairness of honesty, care to post the important parts of that speech that incline you to believe Bush was suggesting the mission in post-Saddam Iraq was accomplished?

Let me start by saying that I am not a counter-insurgency expert, but I'll rattle off what I know and tell you why I disagree with most of your statement.

Tanks, jets and much of our hardware are pretty much ineffective when fighting an insurgent campaign. I believe these weapons are being used currently in as effective a method as possible, mostly in a support role.

Another problem with an insurgent conflict is that your must have an image that makes the native population (and perhaps the opinion of the world) sympathetic to your cause at best, or unsympathetic to the insurgant's cause at worse. That means you have to put up with the issues that you have been seeing. This type of war is ugly. You can't see the enemy lying in a field with a recognizable uniform on. Mostly, you just see bodies. So, it is a very fine line that must be walked, and we can't even be sure if that will be enough.

What I would like to see is a bit more of the winning of hearts and minds. My disadvantage is that I only have the media sources avaliable to me that everyone else does. I don't REALLY know what is going on in Iraq, but I like to think that someone is doing something right over there, even if it's painted as a huge clusterfuck by various news outlets.

Mostly, I don't want anymore of our boys to die, or innocent Iraqi women and children. My hope is that they use the attacks of the insurgents to galvanise a spirit of nationalism and pride that crosses racial/religious lines and kills the support system that the guerillas have.

At the very least, we need to remain in Iraq until the government is steady and the security forces can fend for themselves. I fear that means a long stay, but while we are there, we must maintain the "moral highground".

That's about as sensible a post as you're likely to see on this topic...

What is worst case scenario if we leave? That there will be a civil war? Well, right now there are the Sunni insurgents fighting the US-backed Shiite/Kurd alliance. We are in the middle of the civil war. Modern civil wars are not fought like the Ken Burns documentary, it is guerrilla warfare (Sri Lanka, Chechnya, etc).

The worst case scenario is that Middle East Reform will collapse before it even starts.

There are a number of scenarios, but the worst would be that the price we have paid so far would be in vain.

Should we have gone to Iraq? I personally don't think so, but we did, and we toppled the existing government. At the very least, we need to remain in Iraq until the elected government is stable and can defend itself.

I don't think that a general civil war has broken out yet. It can still be avoided, possibly, but it's a very delicate situation. Leaving now would leave the entire country in an every man for himself situation...a situation that the United States created. We have to make the attempt to make the lives of the Iraqi people better, or leave when we see that this is not possible. I think we can still save this country from tearing itself apart, but it will require our military to keep it's neck in the noose for quite some time.

Which is how this war should have been framed in the beginning.

I think I just threw-up in my mouth a little bit.

It was (if you listened to Powell and Rice on C-SPAN and the like), but I think it was too complicated to sell and was brushed aside for the easier ptich of "WMD, Terror, and Dictator" route, which were all valid concerns at the time, but the WMD's overshadowed everything in the end, especially when we found out we were punked/pwned/bitch slapped when the stockpiles the UN inventoried vanished.