World-News

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/09/13/3826/



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

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/09/13/3806/



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http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/20712196/site/newsweek/page/0/


Informant: Kev Hall



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The American Prospect
by Ezra Klein

09/12/07

It’s right there in the name: ‘The Petraeus Report.’ Not ‘The Petraeus Report on Iraq’ or the ‘Military Assessment of the Surge,’ but ‘The Petraeus Report.’ The testimonies, the white papers, the MoveOn ads, and the presidential affirmations — none of them are about Iraq. They are about David Petraeus. This is the White House’s political strategy: Make the continuation of the war a referendum on David Petraeus, and it will continue, because he’s really dreamy. Make it a referendum on the state of the country (blown up), and the status of the political reconciliation (unreconciled), and the war will inch closer to its end...

http://tinyurl.com/2tmlc8



Team Bush’s false optimism

Boston Globe
by H.D.S. Greenway

09/11/07

Nations find it infinitely more difficult to get out of wars and military occupations than to get into them. The British stayed in Palestine trying to bring political reconciliation for years after it was clear that nobody wanted to reconcile. The French clung on to Algeria long after it became hopeless. It took the Americans five years to clear their troops out of Vietnam after they had decided to throw in the towel. Today, President Bush clings to David Petraeus as if the general were the administration’s rabbit foot. ‘Buying time for Iraqis to reconcile,’ was the way Petraeus originally described his mission, and according to that measure there has been no progress at all...

http://tinyurl.com/2qauz8



More false optimism on Iraq

Human Events
by Steve Chapman

09/13/07

Petraeus is, by all accounts, an experienced, capable and intelligent commander. So when he says that ‘the security situation in Iraq is improving,’ the natural impulse is to trust his battle-seasoned judgment. The Bush administration encourages this notion by suggesting that the opinions of military commanders are the only sound guide to policy. But if high-ranking military officers are a good barometer of the future, I have a question: Where are the generals who told Americans when things were about to get worse in Iraq, as they have over and over? Which of them warned that insurgent attacks would steadily proliferate in 2005, after elections that were supposed to quell violence? What guy with stars on his shoulders forecast that Iraqi civilian deaths would double over the course of 2006?

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=22381



“The war as we saw it”

Salon
by Buddhika Jayamaha, Wesley D. Smith, Jeremy Roebuck, Omar Mora, Edward Sandmeier, Yance T. Gray and Jeremy A. Murphy

(09/12/07)

Viewed from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)...

http://www.salon.com/news/primary_sources/2007/09/12/times_soldiers/


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Petraeus
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=counterinsurgency
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Ezra+Klein
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=H.D.S.+Greenway
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Steve+Chapman

AntiWar.Com
by Jim Lobe

09/13/07

After two days of Congressional testimony by Washington’s top two officials in Iraq, prospects for a substantial withdrawal of US military forces there before the end of President George W. Bush’s tenure at the White House look as remote as ever. Bush himself is expected to take to the airwaves Thursday evening to endorse the recommendations made here this week by Gen. David Petraeus, Washington’s commander in Iraq, to reduce US troop levels by some 30,000 — or only about 20 percent — by August next year. That would leave at least 135,000 US soldiers and marines in place — roughly the same number of troops deployed to Iraq before Bush’s ’surge’ strategy was initiated last February — thus passing along to his successor, who will take office in January 2009, the problem of extricating the US from its bloodiest and most costly overseas adventure since the Vietnam War...

http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=11608


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Iraq+withdrawal
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http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=com/lobe
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Jim+Lobe

Reason
by Jacob Sullum

09/12/07

One problem with ‘you break it, you own it’ is the ambiguity of the pronoun. As Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) noted in his exchange with Huckabee during the debate, ‘you’ did not invade Iraq; neither did ‘we.’ The president and his men made that disastrous decision, based on a ridiculously broad understanding of self-defense and willful blindness to the inevitability of unintended consequences. Huckabee, who seems to agree the invasion was a mistake, urges us to save ‘the honor of this country’ by trusting the same people who made this mess to clean it up. ‘We can’t leave until we’ve left with honor,’ he insists. And what if that’s not possible? What if all that Bush has left us to choose from is different degrees of dishonor?

http://www.reason.com/news/show/122422.html


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Ron+Paul
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Huckabee
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Jacob+Sullum

Anne Flaherty of The Associated Press reports: "Senate Democratic leaders on Wednesday rejected the call by the top US general in Iraq for a reduction of up to 30,000 US troops in Iraq by next summer, saying it does not go far enough."

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/091207R.shtml



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

It may have been the military that invaded but, with Iraq completely dismantled, the reconstruction was to be the preserve of US corporations ... Thus was born 'disaster capitalism', where oil companies profit from a broken country and private security firms grow rich on political chaos.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/shockdoctrine/story/0,,2167229,00.html


From Information Clearing House



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=disaster+capitalism
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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/091207H.shtml



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