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Iraq: The Real Story

Cal

Well-known member
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,340048,00.html

Iraq: The Real Story
Thursday , March 20, 2008

By Col. Oliver North


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Washington, D.C. – Five years ago this week 170,000 American and coalition soldiers, sailors, airmen, Guardsmen and Marines launched Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). When they commenced their attack they were outnumbered nearly three to one by Saddam Hussein's military, yet it took U.S. troops just three weeks to liberate Baghdad. No military force in history has ever gone further, faster or with fewer casualties.

Despite a lightning-fast victory over the dictator's Army, Republican Guards and Fedayeen, the challenge of leaving Iraq better than we found it proved to be daunting and dangerous. Unfortunately, few Americans know what their countrymen in uniform have accomplished in the Land Between the Rivers.

On the way to Baghdad, American and allied forces were accompanied by more than 700 print and broadcast reporters. Once the dictator's capital was liberated, most of the media elites either headed for home or sequestered themselves inside the "green zone." There, they bought photos, footage and "news" from cameramen and "reporters" traveling with our adversaries.

As coverage shifted from the warriors to Washington, political controversy, casualties, and missteps — inevitable in any war — became the focus of “war reporting.” Courageous Americans serving in the line of fire found themselves cast as bit-players in a partisan firestorm. Bright, brave young Americans in the line of fire — not our enemies — became the targets for the mainstream media and powerful politicians.

The New York Times described those serving in our military as nothing but “poor kids from Mississippi, Texas and Alabama who couldn't get a decent job.” A U.S. Senator likened them to those who served Hitler, Stalin and Cambodia's Pol Pot, and a presidential candidate claimed that those who don't do well in school will "get stuck in Iraq." In 2005, after the press had been beating Abu Ghraib like a rented mule for a year, Newsweek invented a fictitious story about U.S. military guards flushing a Quran down a toilet — and precipitated riots throughout the Muslim world.

The consistent "spin" for five years has been to "get out of Iraq" — and despite extraordinary gains in the last 12 months, it hasn't stopped. On Monday, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton described how she intends to get our troops out of "a war we cannot win." Two days later Senator Barack Obama claimed that, "our military is badly overstretched" and promised that, "I will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq," and to "remove all of them in 16 months."

Thankfully America's soldiers, sailors, airmen, Guardsmen and Marines have generally ignored the press and the politicians. Instead, they have been busy fighting a vicious adversary — and winning. Here are some inconvenient facts about why they believe they can — and must — finish the job in Iraq:

• Despite how they have been portrayed, today's all-volunteer U.S. military is the brightest, best educated, trained and equipped armed force ever fielded by any nation. More than 1.6 million American military personnel have served in Iraq. Notwithstanding the perception that our armed forces are stretched beyond the breaking point, reenlistments have never been higher and every service is exceeding its recruiting goals.

• Iraq's police, military and security forces, widely depicted as ineffective or worse, have grown by more than 100,000 in the past year and have assumed responsibility for 9 of 18 provinces.

• In the last 12 months the Interior Ministry has opened 13 new training facilities, the Iraqi military now has 134 active combat, infrastructure and Special Operations battalions with a total of nearly 647,000 Iraqis who have volunteered to serve in uniform.

• After we first reported on the “Al-Anbar Awakening” in December, 2006, the “Sons of Iraq” movement has crossed the Sunni-Shia sectarian divide and now has 91,000 members. In the same time-frame, attacks against Iraqi civilians and coalition forces have dropped by more than 70 percent.

• Since 2004, more than 4,000 civil reconstruction projects, including 325 for electrical distribution and 320 water treatment facilities have been completed. More than 3,000 schools and 75 hospitals, clinics and health care facilities have been renovated or built from the ground up while nearly 3,200 primary health care providers and physicians were being trained.

• There are now more than 100 privately owned radio stations, 31 television stations and 600 newspapers published in Iraq — a nation just slightly larger than California.

• In February, crude oil production exceeded 2.4 million barrels per day and this year the Iraqi economy is projected to grow by 7 percent.

In the half decade since OIF began, our FOX News War Stories team has made nine trips to Iraq, spending months in the field embedded with more than 30 U.S. combat units from "shock and awe," to the "thunder runs," to gunfights in "bloody Anbar," to "the surge." The brave Americans we have documented deserve better than what they have gotten from the mainstream media and far too many of our politicians.


Oliver North hosts "War Stories — Iraq: Five Years in the Fight For Freedom" a chronicle of courage, commitment and sacrifice on the FOX News Channel, Sunday, March 23 at 8:00 pm EDT.
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
In February, crude oil production exceeded 2.4 million barrels per day and this year the Iraqi economy is projected to grow by 7 percent.

At $100 a barrel thats $240 million a day- over $7 billion a month...

So why aren't they paying for their own security- and building of an infrastructure that US taxpayers are still funding at a cost of $12 billion a month.... :???:

Couldn't be because we're building up the infrastructure/economy/oil industry for the increased profiteering of the Halliburtons/etal could it :???:
 

Cal

Well-known member
Oldtimer said:
In February, crude oil production exceeded 2.4 million barrels per day and this year the Iraqi economy is projected to grow by 7 percent.

At $100 a barrel thats $240 million a day- over $7 billion a month...

So why aren't they paying for their own security- and building of an infrastructure that US taxpayers are still funding at a cost of $12 billion a month.... :???:

Couldn't be because we're building up the infrastructure/economy/oil industry for the increased profiteering of the Halliburtons/etal could it :???:
If you have a detailed link to where that gross of $7 billion a month is going please share. You're right, we're only building up Iraq for the good of Haliburton. :roll:
 

fff

Well-known member
No, here's the real truth about Iraq. Without even asking where that $billion in oil revenues is going.

Devastation on the ground and largely held Iraqi opinion contradicts claims by U.S. officials that the situation in Iraq has improved towards the fifth anniversary of the invasion Mar. 20.

U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney, during a surprise visit to Iraq on Monday declared the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq a "successful endeavour".

According to the group Just Foreign Policy, more than a million Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion and occupation, now entering its sixth year. A survey by British polling agency ORB estimates the number of dead at more than 1.2 million.

Nobel laureate and former chief World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz recently published a book with co-author Linda Bilmes of Harvard University titled 'The Three Trillion Dollar War', a figure it considers a "conservative estimate" of the long-range price tag of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The authors say the Bush administration has repeatedly "low-balled" the cost of the war, and has kept a set of records hidden from the U.S. public.

According to the U.S. Department of Defence, close to 4,000 U.S. soldiers have been killed. The number of British casualties is 175.

"The war in Iraq has been one of the most disastrous wars ever fought by Britain," journalist Patrick Cockburn of London's Independent Newspaper wrote Mar. 17. "It will stand with Crimea and the Boer War as conflicts which could have been avoided, and were demonstrations of incompetence from start to finish."

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than four million Iraqis are displaced from their homes, with roughly half of them outside of the country.

The Iraqi Red Crescent estimates that one in every four residents of Baghdad, a city of six million, is displaced from home.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said in a report Mar. 17 that millions are still deprived of clean water and medical care.

Iraq's infrastructure is worse on every measurable level compared to Iraq under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, and including 12 years of the harshest economic sanctions in history. During those sanctions more than a million Iraqis died from malnutrition, disease and lack of medical care.

The international aid group Oxfam International released a report last July that found that four million Iraqis were in need of emergency assistance. It found a 9 percent increase in childhood malnutrition, and that 70 percent of Iraqis lacked access to safe drinking water.

The average home in Iraq, even in Kurdish controlled northern Iraq that has been held up by the Bush administration as an example of success, has on average less than five hours of electricity a day.

Oil exports, from which Iraq has obtained over 80 percent of its income, have not for a single day of the occupation matched pre-war levels.

Unemployment, already 32 percent before the invasion, has vacillated during the occupation between 40-70 percent, according to the Iraqi government.

With more than a million dead, more than four million displaced, and another four million in need of emergency aid, a third of Iraqis are displaced, in need of emergency aid -- or dead.

All this Cheney calls a "successful endeavour".

Soon after he said that, a suicide bomber killed at least 32 and wounded 51 near a mosque in the holy Shia city Kerbala, south of Baghdad. Bombings in Baghdad near the Green Zone just after Cheney arrived killed another four, and wounded 13.

Baghdad has become the most dangerous city in the world, largely as a result of a U.S. policy of pitting various Iraqi ethnic and sectarian groups against one another. Today Baghdad is a city of walled-off Sunni and Shia ghettoes, divided by concrete walls erected by the U.S. military.

These areas even fly their own flags; Sunni areas fly the old Iraqi flag, Shias use the new version, and the Kurds have their own flag.

Ethnic and sectarian cleansing strategies, backed by occupation forces, have virtually eliminated all mixed areas of Baghdad.

Republican Party presidential candidate John McCain, also in Iraq, met with Iraqi leaders as part of a Senate Armed Services Committee fact-finding mission. He, like Cheney, said he would support the Iraqi government and maintain a long-term military commitment in Iraq.

"The surge is working," McCain told reporters, referring to the troop build-up in Baghdad.

With "enduring" U.S. military bases established in Iraq, and an embassy in Baghdad the size of the Vatican City, there appears to be no end in sight for the U.S. occupation of Iraq. (END/2008)

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41630

Awakening groups? There's a bunch you want protecting your back! They went on strike recently.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/iraq/story/27147.html

Iraq's main Sunni bloc boycotted a conference Tuesday aimed at reconciling the nation's sectarian groups, a sign of the deep schisms still facing this country.

Members of the Sunni Iraqi Accordance Front said they would not participate in the conference until Shiite lawmakers address their political demands. They say Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, has failed to release detainees not charged with specific crimes, has not disbanded Shiite militias and has not sufficiently included Sunni lawmakers in decision-making on security issues.

"How we can attend a reconciliation meeting?" said Saleem Abdullah, a spokesman for the Sunni front. "There are many points that are still not fulfilled."

The U.S. is pressing the Iraqis to achieve national reconciliation, warning that progress toward that goal is necessary to guarantee long-term American support.

The conference comes after visits by Vice President Dick Cheney and Sen. John McCain to tout security gains and stress Washington's commitment to fighting insurgents in Iraq.

Cheney spent Monday night at the U.S. military base in Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad, before flying to Irbil in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq Tuesday. There, he was to meet with Massoud Barzani, head of the regional administration in the semiautonomous area. McCain traveled to Jordan on Tuesday.

Al-Maliki opened the reconciliation meeting a day after a suicide bomber struck Shiite worshippers in the holy city of Karbala, killing at least 50 people, according to an official and witness. The blast was the deadliest in a series of attacks that left at least 79 Iraqis dead on Monday.

In his opening statement, al-Maliki said reconciliation was not intended to harm the interests of any group but was "a boat that saves us and takes us to safety."

"From the first day, we said national reconciliation is not a political slogan, but a complete strategical vision to reconstruct Iraq," al-Maliki said.

In his address, al-Maliki noted many in the government continued to doubt the success of reconciliation. But he urged lawmakers to view differences in opinion as political progress, not disagreement that threatened to unravel national unity.

A heated debate over differences, al-Maliki said, also could open the door to foreign influence and compromise Iraq's constitutional principles.

He acknowledged in a later briefing for reporters that much work remains to bridge Iraq's sectarian divides.

In one case, Iraqi leaders have made little progress in resolving disagreements over the execution of three Saddam Hussein-era Sunni officials for their role in a campaign that left some 180,000 Iraqi Kurds dead in the 1980s.

Al-Maliki has been demanding that the death sentence against the three be carried out, but Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a Sunni Kurd, and one of his two deputies, Sunni Arab Tariq al-Hashemi, disagree. They say one of the three, former defense minister Sultan Hashim al-Taie, should not be sent to the gallows because he was a soldier carrying out orders.

Last month, the presidential council said it had ratified the death sentence on another one of the three, Saddam's henchman and cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, also known as "Chemical Ali."

Al-Maliki stood his ground on Tuesday. A statement by his office said all three, who are held in a U.S.-run detention facility, must be handed over to have their sentences carried out.

The bomber in Karbala struck after worshippers gathered at a sacred historical site about half a mile from the golden domed shrine of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad who was killed in a seventh-century battle.

A police officer, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to release the information, said the attacker was a woman — as did a witness. The Interior Ministry, in a statement on Tuesday, identified the attacker as a man.

Female suicide bombers have been involved in at least 20 attacks or attempted attacks since the war began in 2003, including the bombings of two pet markets in Baghdad that killed nearly 100 people last month.

The national conference coincides with the release of a United Nations report that says record numbers of Iraqis sought asylum in the European Union last year, despite a sharp reduction in violence that followed the surge of U.S. forces.

Asylum requests from Iraqis shot up to 38,286 in 2007, from 19,375 in 2006, according to the report, making Iraqis the single largest group seeking refuge in the EU.

Al-Maliki said Tuesday that Iraqi officials were working to return Iraqi refugees home.

In other violence Tuesday, a roadside bomb near a gas station in northern Baghdad killed three people, including two police officers, police officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the attack.

A suicide car bombing outside an electronics store in Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, killed four and wounded at least 40, the U.S. military said. Unknown gunmen also killed two Awakening Council members in Beiji, 90 miles south of Mosul, police said.

Awakening Councils are made up of mostly Sunni fighters who have accepted U.S. backing to switch allegiances and fight al-Qaida in Iraq.

In a separate statement, the U.S. military said it killed seven suspected members of a suicide bombing cell Tuesday and captured eight others in northern and central Iraq.

At least 10 bodies were discovered in Baghdad, Mosul and Kut, police and government officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080318/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_26
 

sw

Well-known member
just for you Frankie, I think you need to read something other than the directorates from DNC


Enjoy the latest edition of the Marne Focus from Iraq, Multi-National Division - Center's battlefield newspaper.

v/r
SGT Michael Connors
Editor, Marne Focus
MND-C Public Affairs

Visit our Web site:
www.TaskForceMarne.com
"Bridging the information gap from Iraq to home"
 

Cal

Well-known member
sw said:
just for you Frankie, I think you need to read something other than the directorates from DNC


Enjoy the latest edition of the Marne Focus from Iraq, Multi-National Division - Center's battlefield newspaper.

v/r
SGT Michael Connors
Editor, Marne Focus
MND-C Public Affairs

Visit our Web site:
www.TaskForceMarne.com
"Bridging the information gap from Iraq to home"
Thanks sw. Isn't it sickening when the libs long for the bygone "glory days" of a dangerous and saddistic dictator. Nothing like mass graves to organically fertilize the soil. :roll:
 

Silver

Well-known member
Here is an interesting documentary on the reasons for getting into Iraq for those with time and high speed internet. I would assume OT has watched it on television knowing what an avid fan of the CBC he is.. :wink:

http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/lies/video.html[/url]
 

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