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Why don't they consult with Saddam? Turns out he had some pretty good ideas about keeping the peace.
November 22, 2006
Bush, Maliki to Meet as Iraqi Deaths Hit New High
By REUTERS
Filed at 6:36 a.m. ET
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush will meet Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Jordan next week with grim new statistics showing record numbers of Iraqis were killed last month and many more fled the country.
A U.N. report said 3,709 civilians were killed in October -- 120 a day and up from 3,345 in September. In all, 418,392 moved to other parts of Iraq since the February bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra triggered a surge in sectarian violence.
It said as well as those displaced within Iraq, nearly 100,000 people were fleeing to Syria and Jordan every month -- proportionally equivalent to a million Americans emigrating each month, depriving the U.S. economy of a city the size of Detroit.
The meeting between Bush and Maliki in the Jordanian capital Amman, a much safer venue than Baghdad, will follow a weekend visit to Iran by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and this week's landmark visit to Iraq by Syria's foreign minister.
They will be the first lengthy talks between Bush and Maliki since Bush pledged a new approach on Iraq after his Democratic opponents took control of Congress.
A month ago the two spoke to ease mutual irritation about how much the other was doing to halt violence.
They agreed to draw up plans for accelerating the training of Iraqi forces and the transfer of responsibility. Maliki said Iraqis could take charge in six months, half the U.S. estimate.
A joint statement on the November 29-30 summit said: ``We will focus our discussions on current developments in Iraq, progress made to date in the deliberations of a high-level joint committee on transferring security responsibility and the role of the region in supporting Iraq.''
American politicians, notably Democrats pressing for troop withdrawal, are frustrated that, after six months in power, Maliki has failed to disband militias loyal to fellow Shi'ites.
With Bush's allies urging him to reach out on Iraq to U.S. adversaries in Tehran and Damascus, Washington reacted coolly to the flurry of regional diplomacy seen with Syria restoring full relations with Iraq and Talabani saying he would visit Iran.
FRESH IDEAS
According to the U.N. bimonthly human rights report, Baghdad was the epicenter of the violence, accounting for nearly 5,000 of all the 7,054 deaths in September and October, with most of the bodies bearing signs of torture and gunshot wounds.
Sectarian attacks were the main source of violence, fuelled by insurgent attacks and militias as well as criminal groups.
``Entire communities have been affected to various degrees and, in some areas, neighborhoods have been split up or inhabitants have been forced to flee to other areas or even to neighboring countries in search of safety,'' the report said.
The report said that ethnic and religious minorities, such as Christians, were being targeted along with professionals such as academics, lawyers, judges and journalists.
Confidence in the security forces was undermined because death squads are operating ``often in collusion with or the support of the Iraqi police,'' the report said. Militias were also reported to be forcibly evicting people from their homes.
Following the Republicans' defeat at Congressional elections this month, Bush has said he is looking for ``fresh perspectives'' on Iraq. Next month he is expected to receive recommendations on Iraq from a bipartisan Iraq Study Group, and the Pentagon is conducting its own review.
National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley said Maliki has ''obviously been developing his own ideas on the way forward.''
Some analysts say Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, accused by Washington of backing Shi'ite militias in Iraq, may have pushed Sunday's talks in Tehran to upstage Bush. Ahmadinejad also invited Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, although Iraqi officials said a three-way summit is unlikely.
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The above leaves out the problems of failed/failing infrastructure like electricity, water, sewage, etc.
you're doing a heckuva job, dubya
Impeach dubya & head.
Why don't they consult with Saddam? Turns out he had some pretty good ideas about keeping the peace.
Yeah, having one political party kill everyone who disagreed was a great way to run a country.
Do the Demos have a plan yet other than cut and run? I didn't think so...you're doing a heckuva job, dubya
Impeach dubya & head.
Saddam ran a tight ship. Bush runs tight .
The plan is not about "cut and run".
The plan is "how do we clean up after boy blunder"?
Why is it we only hear about the bad stuff over there? I know some people who were over there and some who still are and there is plenty good to report about as well, but we don't hear any of it. I guarantee now though with the Democrats in charge, the good news will start coming out.
Dubya's Iraq is MUCH worse than Saddam's Iraq?
Find a KURD that will agree with you.
After the Shiites win the civil war, they will go after the Kurds and their norther oil worse that Saddam ever did.
Iraq? These people have proven to respond to one thing: repression. It may not be a "great" way to run a country, but with Iraq, to keep it one country, it's the only way. It's also the reason that the "terrorism" problems are low grade in Egypt, Saudi, and Syria. You have isolated incidents, but their terrorists tend to go out of country, because if they don't, they get very dead.
That's a very unfortunate way to describe your argument and only gives credence to your opponents' charge of racism. Not that AHF's position is anything but foolishness on the most shallow level; consolidated government with an iron fist for separatists is a precondition for effective rule in any country.
Yes, the Iranian peoples of Iraq who long preferred conflict to assimilation, now have a stronger position. The changing fortunes of one isolationist minority group, however beloved by the American media, doesn't change the balance of the situation.
Yeah it is all about "cut and run" and the folks
over there do watch CNN and the Dimm-o-craps
and listen to their crap. They are just ramping up
things to get them to hurry their plan up.
Are you suggesting they prefer reports from CNN over Fox?
^^I am suggesting they watch all the news and read all
our news media and that of other nations. That is
exactly what I am suggesting.
Hey, you're the one that said CNN. Why haven't they put their faith in FOX?
Hmmmm... let's discuss that with the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens killed in the war and since regime change... oh, that's right, we can't because THEY'RE DEAD.
Life or freedom? I bet Iraqi citizens are glad they got to make that choice and not an Imperialist foreign power.
Saddam was a monster, no doubt. But has the greater good for Iraqis - the second main justification used for the invasion (after the sham of "imminent threat") - been served in this change? I'm not so sure.
And if that's what the war is all about, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians is justified if the end result is 'freedom' from despotism, why doesn't the US invade Sudan, Zimbabwe, Burma, Cuba, etc. and save their populations from their despots? Because despotism is incidental to the money and oil involved, mere rhetoric.
So, you call me a racist, and then basically agree with my argument? And how is it racism to say that these different factions are just NEVER going to live in peace of their own accord?That's a very unfortunate way to describe your argument and only gives credence to your opponents' charge of racism. Not that AHF's position is anything but foolishness on the most shallow level; consolidated government with an iron fist for separatists is a precondition for effective rule in any country.
I didn't call you a racist; I said that your phrasing was unfortunate. It gives the whottts of the world some ammunition unnecessarily.
These people have proven to respond to one thing: repression.
Actually, I should have said peoples, since there are three distinct types in Iraq and none of them get along. What most people don't know, including this Adminstration, apparently, is that Iraq was, and still is today, a creation, originally cut out of the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, post WWI. These peoples have nothing in common except that they all practice some (competing) form of Islam and they fell within Winston Churchill's doodlings on a map.
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