World-News

Faye Fiore reports for The Los Angeles Times, "Families with ties to the military, long a reliable source of support for wartime presidents, disapprove of President Bush and his handling of the war in Iraq, with a majority concluding the invasion was not worth it, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has found."

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/120707M.shtml

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Military Families Question Iraq War as Support for Bush Slips

"Saddam Hussein wasn't a threat and the culmination of my career was that war and it wasn't necessary,'' says Fletcher, 32, a financial analyst in Bluffton, South Carolina, who served almost 10 years as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps.

http://snipurl.com/1uxsp


From Information Clearing House

Report Shows Vehicles, Machine Guns And More Meant For Iraqi Forces Unaccounted For.

http://snipurl.com/1uvmc


From Information Clearing House

The cholera epidemic aggravates what is, under any measure, a most serious humanitarian and public health emergency, notes César Chelala.

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/opinion/?id=23336


From Information Clearing House



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=César+Chelala

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18841.htm



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Fallujah

Karen DeYoung reports for The Washington Post, "A new memorandum of understanding on private security contractors in Iraq, agreed to in Baghdad by Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the US military commander in Iraq, requires 'full coordination' between military and diplomatic officials on the ground but leaves State in control of its own contractors, US officials said."

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/120607O.shtml



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Ryan+C.+Crocker
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Petraeus
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=contractors
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Karen+DeYoung

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said on Wednesday the goal of a stable and democratic Iraq is within reach, during an unannounced visit to Iraq marked by a spate of car bombs that killed 22 people.

http://www.afp.com/english/news/stories/071205175719.5owsep4q.html


From Information Clearing House

Ann Wright, for Truthout, writes: "Last week Iraq's Maliki government 'asked' President Bush for an 'enduring' strategic security relationship with the United States that will have 50,000 US military and probably 50,000-75,000 US contractors/mercenaries in Iraq for decades. Reportedly these 100,000-plus Americans will be primarily confined to the fourteen permanent bases built by the US. Their role, according to Bush's point person on Iraq, retired US Army Gen. Douglas Lute, will be to backstop, perhaps for the next 50 years, newly trained Iraqi military and police forces. Iraq's new strategic security relationship also contains an agreement for preferential treatment from the Iraqi government to American corporations."

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/120507K.shtml



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=al-Maliki
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=contractors
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=mercenaries
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Ann+Wright

Salon
by Juan Cole

12/04/07

The current ‘good news’ campaign from the Bush administration regarding the troop surge is only the latest in a long history of whitewashing the war since the 2003 invasion. First, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld denied that there was massive looting following the fall of Baghdad. Then he denied that there was a rising guerrilla war. Then … the victory of Shiite fundamentalists close to Iran was obscured by the ‘purple thumb’ good news campaign. That is, the administration focused on the democratic process and relative success of the voting, diverting attention from the bad news that the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq had taken over. Later, it was good news when the Iraqi parliament produced a theocratic constitution …. The Bush administration has heralded any number of such ‘milestones’ reached, but not whether they led to worthwhile results. Obscured by these ‘milestones’ is that the orgy of violence in Iraq has displaced 2 million persons abroad and another 2 million internally, and left tens of thousands dead. But now the ‘good news’ is that the guerrillas appear not to have been able to keep up the pace of violence characteristic of 2006 and early 2007, even if the pace they maintain today is horrific...

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/12/04/iraq/


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

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New Reports Undercut Claims that Surge Is Working

New reporting from Baghdad and Washington has called into question the frequently asserted claim that the military surge in Iraq is working.

http://snipurl.com/1vsyp


From Information Clearing House



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=troop-surge
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Juan+Cole

Walter Cronkite and David Krieger, writing for CommonDreams.org, say: "The American people no longer support the war in Iraq. The war is being carried on by a stubborn president who, like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War, does not want to lose. But from the beginning this has been an ill-considered and poorly prosecuted war that, like the Vietnam War, has diminished respect for America."

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/120407B.shtml



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Walter+Cronkite

Bob Hebert writes for The New York Times: "Most of the time we pretend it’s not there: The staggering financial cost of the war in Iraq, which continues to soar, unchecked, like a rocket headed toward the moon and beyond. Early last year, the Nobel-Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz estimated that the "true" cost of the war would ultimately exceed $1 trillion, and maybe even $2 trillion. Incredibly, that estimate may have been low."

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/120407M.shtml

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Now and Forever

By Bob Herbert

Seriously. How long do we want this madness to last?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18846.htm



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Joseph+Stiglitz
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Bob+Herbert