Apr 09 2007
Sadr Panics
Moqtoda al-Sadr has panicked in what must be the the pending destruction of his quasi-military power base. He has ordered his militia to fight back against the US – basically declaring war on us and the Iraqi government. Which is really all we needed to eliminate the Shiia death squads and Iranian backed fanatics.
Calling the United States the “great evil,” powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr on Sunday ordered his militiamen to redouble their effort to oppose American troops and argued that Iraq’s army and police force should join him in defeating “your archenemy.”
Interestingly this report does not address whether Sadr is still hold up in Iran – where he ran to when the US started shifting forces towards Baghdad and Anbar for the Surge. Sadr’s people have been uncovered running death squads at the top levels of the Iraqi government. So there is no love lost for the man who possibly ordered other Iraqis killed. Sadr is clearly seeing his one true strength being dismantled, and is now panicking. A good sign the Surge is working.
Sadr Attempts to Reemerge…
Muqtada al-Sadr, having yet to crawl out from whatever Iranian hole he is hiding in, is still attempting to stir up the masses inside Iraq. As US and Iraqi troops are engaging with elements of his militia south of the Baghdad, Sadr has issued a proclam…
The Surge is working.
If the goal of President Bush’s Surge (in spite of the fact that neither the Iraq Study Group nor Gen. Petraeus think there can be a military solution in Iraq) is to raise casualty levels for US troops, then his Surge is working fine:
While the overall death rates for all of Iraq have not dropped significantly, largely because of devastating suicide bombings, a few parts of the capital have become calmer as some death squads have decided to lie low.
For American troops, Baghdad has become a deadlier battleground as they have poured into the capital to confront Sunni and Shiite militias on their home streets. The rate of American deaths in the city over the first seven weeks of the security plan has nearly doubled from the previous period,
Another bright idea from Dubbya. Oh – and George – has that crooked Attorney General resigned yet? Daylights burnin’.
Is Al-Sadr Throwing a Hail Mary?…
Looks like radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr isn’t a big fan of the surge:The renegade cleric Muqtada al-Sadr urged Iraqi forces to stop cooperating with the United States and told his guerrilla fighters to concentrate their attacks on American troops ra…
The goal of the surge is to provide enough stability, reduce sectarian and other violence enough..to give the current gov of Iraq a chance to succeed in providing security and services to those areas. In that regard, even though the “surge” is only about 1/2 way been implimented, it’s been a success.
Further, had you actually read the full ISG report, you would have noted in a later chapter outlining the details of their recommended plan..included an initial “surge” of troops with the understanding that somekind of stabilizing operation would be needed that would obviously require more manpower and commitment in the short term.
Being that you, and many in the DNC, are fully vested in your “loss”…it’s understandable that you would be concerned about any good news, or success coming from IRaq on behalf of our nation or soliders.
Sooth, I understand that article might tend to validate your point of view, but in many ways it is obsolete. As of today, Iraqi civilian deaths are down across the country, not just in Baghdad, for the month of April.
Save two or three mass casualty attacks (which are very easy to pull off), March would have been lower too. Don’t look at just pure numbers. Anyone can set off a bomb outside a crowd of people. It takes only one or two people to do that. Car bombings and suicide bombings don’t reflect the size or support of the insurgency inside Iraq. Heck, Israel has been trying to stop suicide bombings for decades.
What you are attempting to do here is to somehow equate civilian dead bodies with the size of the insurgency. Looked at from that angle one would have to come to the conclusion that there must have been a massive al Qaida insurgency in the US in September of 2001 because we had over 3000 civilian casualties that month. Actually there were only 20 people in a country of 300,000.
A group of only 100 people would be able to blow up hundreds per month and might be nearly impossible to find quickly. Expecting anyone, us, the Iraqis, anyone to simply make them disappear is unreasonable.
Instead why not focus on the business sector. Inflation was down in Iraq in February and the Dinar rose against the Dollar. Oil exports are again nearing record levels and Iraq is now taking super tanker traffic for the first time in decades. Iraq is nearing 1.7 million barrels a day in exports … compare that with 2.5 million from Iran. A pipeline to Syria is in the works and an export agreement with Jordan is nearing completion. A major power line is under construction by a Turkish firm which will ease a distribution bottleneck through Nasiriyah. Power production has now reached pre-war levels and continues to increase.
The insurgents are going after “softer” targets such as crowds of shoppers. Intelligence from the population is increasing in both quality and volume. Weapons cache discoveries are up considerably.
Overall, that article is designed to paint a picture of gloom. But that gloom is based on unreasonable expectation. The operation to secure Baghdad can’t even get fully underway until June. Only about 1/2 the troops are there yet. To complain of too little progress before it has even fully underway is silly. It is like complaining about the lack of progress of a rocket that has just started its engines but not yet left the pad. Using that logic, Apollo 11 would have been marked a failure 5 seconds after engine ignition because it was still on the pad.
Feel free to point to what you feel are validating news articles and I will feel free to invalidate them for you. We don’t know if General P’s plan is a success or not. It hasn’t left the pad yet.
Oh, and we need to consider the source of that article … the New York Times. They have a vested interest in defeat. Every single article they ever print about Iraq is going to be negative. I promise. Even if we were to win tomorrow and all the fighting stopped, they would still find something negative to print about it. It’s what they do.
Unless you’re planning on keeping 150,000 troops in Iraq forever . . . at some point they’re gonna be on their own . . . at which time the speciousness of Surge proponents will be promptly and amply revealed.
Knowing that to be the case – each day we keep troops in Iraq on Bush’s fool’s errand is an insult to our troops and to the preciousness of life.
Sooth, you are wrongheaded. The goal is to help the Iraqis help themselves. This cannot be done overnight. The Iraqi people have never had the opportunity to try self-government.
Think of it that way, and you will see the tremendous growth of the Iraqis in a relatively short time. They are now fighting because they know they are helping themselves. They are turning in the terrorists because they realize the sooner they are gone, the sooner the Iraqi people can have a safe country.
How long have we been in Germany, Japan, Bosnia? We must need to get ALL TROOPS HOME NOW as per the democrats. And the surge hasn’t even been launched fully…but leftists wouldn’t want the facts to get in their way.
Man, they really know how to keep us safe, don’t they.
NOT.
And as far as defining honesty, the leftists wouldn’t know an honest person if they fell on their heads. Afterall, they supported the chief law enforcement officer of the United States saying under oath that “it depends on what the meaning of is, is”….
Laughable. I doubt that was the intent of the law as in theory vs. intent.
Sooth:
Baker just wrote an Oped in the Washington Post attacking the Democrat’s plan to draw down troops, set up artificical timelines and in general surrender. So if you are going to continue to use the Study Group as a source you might keep in mind that its authors think you are wrong.
Ive:
Oh, but they don’t want to bring them all home. They want to leave a mystery amount to fight in Anbar. To hell with Baghdad I guess.
As for Sadr, the guy is hiding out and telling other people to fight and die, because he is losing his influence. He can get together a rent a mob for a demonstration, after all the Democrats love that kind of thing, helps with the propagnda effort, but their actual ability to gain support among the population is failing fast.
Here is what the Democrats did:
They knew they had some time to play with so they decided to take the public’s temperature. They floated this bill with the hard deadline, all the pork, the “benchmarks” etc, and when the President said he would veto the bill, started talking about cutting off funds completely. Then they took our temperature with a poll. They noticed that the public wasn’t on board. So now they will trot out some people who will say they won’t cut off the funding and take our temperature again to see if the polls go more positive. If they do, they will vote for the funding.
See, the Democrats are only about winning the next election, not about leadership. If you lead … if you set a goal and do what you think is best you risk failing. If you fail, you can get blamed. The game the Democrats are playing is to see what the polls say and so that way they don’t have to do risky things such as show leadership. If they fail they can say “but we were just doing what you wanted” . But they are going to be shocked when the majority of the people say “we don’t pay you to do what WE want … we could do that ourselves … we could settle every question by referendum … we don’t know enough about what is going on to make those decisions, that is what we have intelligence agencies who provide you information for and why we pay YOU to make the decisions and convince US that it was the right thing to do”.
People don’t respect jellyfish in leadership positions.
How about a little context back on subject: For starters, there are about 18 million shiahs in Iraq. The gathering that Sadr whipped up was by best estimates (from air recon photos), between 4-7 thousand people.
Will be so glad when somebody takes out Sadr but agree that he must sure be feeling the heat. Great news.
Just read a link over at
http://www.lucianne.com/threads2.asp?artnum=333613
So good it should have been a Must Read because of the way this Dennis Byrne treated all this Iraq news and the MSM all rolled into one. Sneaked it into the Chicago Tribune! Ha.