I would think someone else would have pointed out an op-ed piece from the NY Times that is actually positive for the war in Iraq. Did I miss a posting? Link:
A War We Just Might Win
One paragraph from the link:
Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.
It's been discussed.
Boutons posted the full artcile (http://www.spurstalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=74993), but every one ignored it since it was already being discussed via snippets posted by Yoni (http://www.spurstalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=74955).
Better never than late.
The US military is now really pissing off the Shiites by recruiting Sunni warlords and their militia, the same Sunnis who have accounted for 90% of the US casualties.
Why?
1. Because original fundamental ing fault dubya made of invading Iraq with 200+K too few troops.
2. the Iraqi army and police still don't "stand up"
But the overwhelming points are the US military success in the article is a tiny glimmer of light in a black hole of failure, as the authors make clear, and the Shiite/Sunni slaughter and political non-reconciliation continue (a big Sunni block pulled out of govt just before the Iraqi parliament went on August vacation and abandoned the US military to die for ??? ).
I've never seen anyone claim "200+k troops too few before". Most people think 200k troops would have been more than enough to establish stability and security from the beginning. The most I've seen is someone claiming that 75k more troops were needed at invasion for it. I think the standard claim is 175k invasion troops (instead of 120k we used) would have been enough.
As for 2, the bigger problem is the complete dismantling of the Iraqi army and police to begin with. That's the only reason we're having problems with that, and it was a horrendous mistake.
The Sunni block is still negotiating and may return to the government coalition (and their ministerial posts). They have no intention of resigning from any of their parliament seats. Strangely, they are asking Maliki to do the same things the US is (disarm Shiite militias, share oil revenues fairly across the nation, etc). and they feel he's been ignoring them. I don't blame them, since he certainly has been.
In other good news:
Water Taps Run Dry in Baghdad
By Steven R. Hurst
The Associated Press
Thursday 02 August 2007
Baghdad - Much of the Iraqi capital was without running water Thursday and had been for at least 24 hours, compounding the urban misery in a war zone and the blistering heat at the height of the Baghdad summer.
Residents and city officials said large sections in the west of the capital had been virtually dry for six days because the already strained electricity grid cannot provide sufficient power to run water purification and pumping stations.
Baghdad routinely suffers from periodic water outages, but this one is described by residents as one of the most extended and widespread in recent memory. The problem highlights the larger difficulties in a capital beset by violence, crumbling infrastructure, rampant crime and too little electricity to keep cool in the sweltering weather more than four years after the U.S.-led invasion.
Jamil Hussein, a 52-year-old retired army officer who lives in northeast Baghdad, said his house has been without water for two weeks, except for two hours at night. He says the water that does flow smells and is unclean.
Two of his children have severe diarrhea that the doctor attributed to drinking what tap water was available, even after it was boiled.
"We'll have to continue drinking it, because we don't have money to buy bottled water," he said.
Adel al-Ardawi, a spokesman for the Baghdad city government, said that even with sufficient electricity "it would take 24 hours for the water mains to refill so we can begin pumping to residents. And even then the water won't be clean for a time. We just don't have the electricity or fuel for our generators to keep the system flowing."
Noah Miller, spokesman for the U.S. reconstruction program in Baghdad, said that water treatment plants were working "as far as we know."
"It could be a host of issues.... And one of those may be leaky trunk lines. If there's not enough pressure to cancel out that leakage, that's when the water could fail to reach the household," Miller said.
He said that there had been a nationwide power blackout for a few hours Wednesday night that might be causing problems for all systems that depend on Iraq's already creaking electricity grid.
He blamed the outages on provinces north of Baghdad and in Basra in the far south where officials failed to cutback as required when they had taken their daily ration of electricity.
"It takes a long time to bring the power back up (to the grid's capacity and demand)," Miller said.
In the meantime, Iraqis suffer in brutal heat. It was 117 degrees in the capital Thursday, down from 120 the day before. With the power out or crackling through the decrepit system just a few hours each day, even those who can afford air conditioning do not have the power to run it.
Many Baghdad residents have banded together to use power from neighborhood generators, but the cost of fuel and therefore electricity is skyrocketing. Diesel fuel was going for nearly $4 a gallon on Thursday.
As expected in the midst of a water shortage, the cost of purified bottled water has shot up 33 percent. A 10-liter bottle now costs $1.60.
"For us, we can buy bottled water. But I'm thinking about the poor who cannot afford to buy clean water," said Um Zainab, a 44-year-old homemaker in eastern Baghdad. "This shows the weakness and the inefficiency of government officials who are good at only one thing - blaming each other for the problems we are face."
The pace of the mayhem that saw 142 killed or found dead nationwide on Wednesday tapered off Thursday, but a suicide car bomber slammed into an Iraqi police station northeast of Baghdad and killed at least 13 people, police said.
Most of the dead were policemen and recruits lining up outside the station in Hibhib, the same small Sunni town near Baqouba where al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. airstrike more than a year ago. The area is considered a stronghold of both al-Qaida-linked militants and Saddam Hussein loyalists.
Fifteen were wounded in the attack, a police officer said on condition of anonymity out of security concerns.
A total of 58 people were killed or found dead across the country Thursday, according to police and hospital and morgue officials.
The U.S. military announced three more soldier deaths: two killed in a mortar or rocket attack Tuesday, and another killed in a roadside bombing Wednesday. At least 3,659 U.S. military personnel have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes seven military civilians.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday he is more optimistic about improvements in Iraqi security than he is about getting legislation passed by the bitterly divided government.
"In some ways we probably all underestimated the depth of the mistrust and how difficult it would be for these guys to come together on legislation," Gates said.
( no ! underestimate? how about NO estimation at all! )
His remarks came as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Dawa Party asked the country's largest Sunni Arab bloc to reconsider its withdrawal from government to save Iraq's national unity government.
All six Cabinet ministers from the Iraqi Accordance Front quit al-Maliki's Cabinet a day earlier to protest what they called the prime minister's failure to respond to a set of demands.
Among them were the release of security detainees not charged with specific crimes, the disbanding of militias and the participation of all groups represented in the government in dealing with security issues.
Washington has been pushing al-Maliki's government to pass key laws, including measures to share national oil revenues and incorporate some ousted Baathists into mainstream politics. But the Sunni ministers' resignation from the Cabinet - not the parliament - foreshadows even greater difficulty in building consensus when lawmakers return after a monthlong summer recess on Sept. 4.
( the US/UK oilcos want their oil! )
AP writers Kim Gamel and Sameer N. Yacoub contributed to this report.
======================
You're doing a heckuva job, dubya
Shinsheki estimated 400K and was fired.
400K sounds about right since dubya is at about 170K now, plus well over 100K super-expensive, uncontrolled, unaccountable US mercenaries/security contractors, and Iraq is still FAR from pacified.
I've seen numbers anywhere from 250K to 400k. Clearly there weren't enough troops in the initial invasion. As combat forces moved forward there weren't enough rear-troops to guard critical infra-structure, historical sites, and weapons depots....I've never seen anyone claim "200+k troops too few before". Most people think 200k troops would have been more than enough to establish stability and security from the beginning. The most I've seen is someone claiming that 75k more troops were needed at invasion for it. I think the standard claim is 175k invasion troops (instead of 120k we used) would have been enough.
...anyway, the whole idea behind 'the surge' is to pacify as much of Baghdad as quickly as possible, because that's as far as our journalists will venture in Iraq.....and any thing that doesn't get reported didn't happen, right?
what is victory in Iraq anymore? Water supplies depleating, less hours of electricity on avg. than before the war, middle-class vanishing....Christians and Jews who once used to live aside Muslims fleeing or already fled...100,000's dead...Iraq is a broken nation...and as much as we are made to feel that it is our responsibility to clean up the mess we made in Iraq, we cannot fix Iraq with one hand while holding a whip with the other....
O'Hanlon and Pollock's puff-piece, after being guided around the very best situations the US military could find, under heavy millitary guard (like McCain strolling "freely" down an Iraqi street in the middle of a US military cohort), can be seen as them still trying to justify the war they so strongly supported before the war AND after it went rapdily to and remains in the .
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...ostid-updateS6
http://salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2...lon/index.html
The essential facts:
The Iraq situation remains overhwelmingly negative, essentially, irretrievably a failed project.
To use dubya's simple-minded slogan (but sophisticated for him), the Iraqis aren't anywhere near standing up, so dubya won't stand down. dubya broke Iraq, and he doesn't have a clue how to re-build it. It certainly, 100% owns what he broke.
Anybody get a postcard yet from the vacationing, broken, still-born Iraqi parliament? My guess is they all left the country for the month, all expenses paid by the govt.
Last edited by boutons_; 08-05-2007 at 12:24 PM.
Iraq's National Power Grid Nearing Collapse
By Ryan Lenz
The Associated Press
Sunday 05 August 2007
Baghdad - Iraq's power grid is on the brink of collapse because of insurgent sabotage, rising demand, fuel shortages and provinces that are unplugging local power stations from the national grid, officials said Saturday.
Electricity Ministry spokesman Aziz al-Shimari said power generation nationally is only meeting half the demand, and there had been four nationwide blackouts over the past two days.
Power supplies in Baghdad have been sporadic all summer - when average daily temperatures reach between 110 and 120 degrees - and now are down to just a few hours a day, if that. The water supply in the capital has also been severely curtailed by power blackouts and cuts that have affected pumping and filtration stations.
Karbala province south of Baghdad has been without power for three days, causing water mains to go dry in the provincial capital, the Shiite holy city of Karbala.
Electricity shortages are a perennial problem in Iraq, even though it sits atop one of the world's largest crude-oil reserves. The national power grid became decrepit under Saddam Hussein because his regime was under U.N. sanctions after the Gulf War and had trouble buying spare parts or equipment to upgrade the system.
( so, Yoni, were sanctions working for electrical equipment but not working for WMD? )
One of the biggest problems facing the national grid is the move by provinces to disconnect their power plants from the system, reducing the overall amount of electricity being generated for the entire country. Provinces say they have no choice because they are not getting as much electricity in return for what they produce, mainly because the capital requires so much power.
"Many southern provinces such as Basra, Diwaniyah, Nassiriyah, Babil have disconnected their power plants from the national grid. Northern provinces, including Kurdistan, are doing the same," al-Shimari said. "We have absolutely no control over some areas in the south," he added.
"The national grid will collapse if the provinces do not abide by rules regarding their share of electricity. Everybody will lose and there will be no electricity winner," al-Shimari said.
He complained that the central government was unable to do anything about provincial power stations pulling out of the national system, or the fact some provinces were failing to take themselves off the supply grid once they had consumed their daily ration of electricity.
Najaf provincial spokesman Ahmed Deibel confirmed today that the gas turbine generator there had been removed from the national grid. He said the plant produced 50 megawatts while the province needed at least 200 megawatts.
Compounding the problem, al-Shimari said, there are 17 high-tension lines running into Baghdad but only two were operational. The rest had been sabotaged.
"When we fix a line, the insurgents attack it the next day," he said.
Fuel shortages are also a major problem. In Karbala, provincial spokesman Ghalib al-Daami said a 50-megawatt power station had been shut down because of a lack of fuel, causing the entire province to be without water and electricity for the past three days.
He said sewage was seeping above ground in nearly half the provincial capital because pump trucks used to clean septic tanks have been unable to operate due to gasoline shortages. The sewage was causing a health threat and contaminating local crops.
Many people who normally would rely on small home generators for electricity can't afford to buy fuel. Gasoline prices have shot up to nearly $5 a gallon, Karbala residents say, a price that puts the fuel out of range for all but the wealthy.
Iraq has the world's third-largest proven oil reserves, behind Saudi Arabia and Iran. But oil production has been hampered by insurgent and saboteur attacks, ranging from bombing pipelines to siphoning off oil. Dilapidated infrastructure has also hindered refining, forcing Iraq to import large amounts of kerosene and other oil products.
The electricity problems come as leaders are trying to deal with a political crisis that erupted when the country's largest bloc of Sunni political parties withdrew from the government.
============
O'Hanlon and Pollack, virulent dubya and Iraq war/surge supporters, cherry picked the good news as presented by the US military, and failed to report the worsening, widespread and catastrophes for which there are no solutions or even attempted solutions, in spite of the US military kicking ass.
you're doing a heckuva job, dubya.
August 5, 2007
Top G.O.P. Candidates See Signs of Progress in Iraq
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and MICHAEL COOPER
The leading Republican presidential candidates said today that the military escalation in Iraq appeared to be restoring stability in that country and they berated their Democratic counterparts for advocating an end to American involvement there.
( the Repug candidate are committing election suicide by supporting the lost Repug Iraq "project". I'll bury them with glee )
Gathered for a Sunday morning debate in Des Moines, the Republican field offered a clear contrast with Democrats who, in a debate the day before, declared the troop escalation a failure and advocated an American withdrawal from Iraq. By contrast, most of the Republicans pointed to some early evidence of success in Iraq in arguing that it would be a mistake to abandon the war.
( whatever evidence that is, most probably like VN "light at the end of the tunnel", it better start piling up quickly and be enough to offset the very much bigger pile of Iraq )
“They are making progress, and we are winning on the ground,” said Senator John McCain of Arizona, adding: “We must win. And we will not set a date for surrender, as the Democrats want us to do.”
The debate, on the ABC News program “This Week,” highlighted differences among the candidates on the issues of providing health care to Americans, abortion rights, and how aggressive the United States should be in spreading democracy around the world.
But in the course of 90 minutes, the Republicans were more apt to attack Democrats than each other (IOW, a totally content-free, bogus "debate" ) — and in particular, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois for saying that he was willing to negotiate with leaders of hostile nations without any preconditions and for saying that he would dispatch troops into Pakistan in search of terrorist camps if the Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, failed to take action.
“In one week he went from saying he’s going to sit down, you know, for tea, with our enemies, but then he’s going to bomb our allies,” said Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts. “I mean he’s gone from Jane Fonda to Dr. Strangelove in one week.”
On Iraq, only one candidate — Representative Ron Paul of Texas — advocated a withdrawal. “We’re losing this one,” he said. “We shouldn’t be there. We ought to just come home.”
But over all, the candidates were adamant about continuing the fight. “The reality is that you do not achieve peace through weakness and appeasement,” said Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York.
Mr. Romney said, “I think we’re pretty much in the same place. It is critical for us to win this conflict. It is essential, and that’s why we’re going to continue to pursue this effort.”
The debate took place in Iowa, which has been teeming with activity by Republicans this week, both in anticipation of today’s debate, but also in preparation for next Saturday’s Republican Party straw poll in Ames, which is an early test of organizational strength. Mr. McCain and Mr. Giuliani have both pulled out of that contest, but Mr. Romney has invested considerable resources there as he attempts to establish an early beachhead in a state whose caucuses begin the presidential nominating contest.
Hinting at the skirmishing in the run-up to the straw poll, Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas pressed Mr. Romney for having shifted his position on abortion as he moved from being governor of Massachusetts to running for president. Mr. Brownback’s campaign has been telephoning Iowa Republicans in recent days reminding them that Mr. Romney had once supported abortion rights.
“There’s one word that describes that ad, and it’s ‘truthful,’ ” Mr. Brownback said, referring to the telephone calls.
Mr. Romney looked sternly toward Mr. Brownback and denounced the telephone calls.
“I never said I was pro-choice, but my position was effectively pro-choice,” he said, referring to the policies he advocated as governor of Massachusetts. “I’ve said that time and time again. I changed my position.”
“I get tired of people that are holier than thou because they’ve been pro-life longer than I have,” he said.
For the most part, the candidates made little effort to distance themselves from President Bush and Republicans in Congress, reflecting how they are trying to appeal to a decidedly conservative electorate that will vote in the caucuses here. All said they did not support legislation sponsored by Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, that would expand insurance coverage for poor children by raising the tax on cigarettes — a measure that the White House said President Bush would veto.
But Mr. Romney took aim at Mr. Giuliani’s recent proposal to offer people $15,000 in tax deductions to help them buy their health insurance. “We have to have our citizens insured, and we’re not going to do that by tax exemptions, because the people that don’t have insurance aren’t paying taxes,” Mr. Romney said.
Mr. Giuliani countered, arguing that the best way to increase the number of people with private insurance was to give them the deduction to encourage them to buy their own policies. “They’ll have an incentive to own their own health insurance,” he said.
In response to questions, they said would not support raising the gasoline tax to finance spending on the nation’s roads and bridges in response to the collapse of the bridge in Minneapolis this week. Mr. Giuliani got into a terse exchange with his questioner, David Yepsen, a political columnist for The Des Moines Register, when Mr. Yepsen tried to ask him about such a tax.
‘“David, there’s an assumption in your question that is not necessarily correct, sort of the Democratic, liberal assumption, ‘I need money; I raise taxes,’ ” Mr. Giuliani said.
“Then what are you going to cut, sir,” Mr. Yepsen responded. Mr. Giuliani said that as mayor of New York, he had increased revenue to pay for bridge and road repair by cutting taxes, thereby jolting the economy, and said he would do the same thing as president. The city’s coffers in that period were flush largely with revenues produced by the stock market boom of the late 1990s.
Both Mr. Romney and, to a lesser extent Mr. Giuliani, criticized Mr. Obama for a speech in which he threatened to send American troops into Pakistan with that nation’s approval. But later, under questioning, both said they would as president keep open that very option, although they thought that Mr. Obama had been imprudent to raise the prospect of invading an ally.
“That is an option that should remain open,” Mr. Giuliani said. “I believe the senator didn’t express it the right way. I think the senator, if he could just say it over again, might want to say that we would encourage Musharraf to allow us to do it if we thought he couldn’t accomplish it.”
A spokesman for Mr. Obama, Bill Burton, said: “The fact that the same Republican candidates who want to keep 160,000 American troops in the middle of a civil war couldn’t agree that we should take out Osama bin Laden if we had him in our sights, proves why Americans want to turn the page on the last seven years of Bush-Cheney foreign policy.”
Toward the end of the debate, the ABC moderator, George Stephanopoulos, reading a question that had been e-mailed in by a viewer, asked the candidates to name “mistake that have been defining moments” in their life.
Mr. Romney returned to the issue of his support for abortion rights as governor of Massachusetts. “That was just wrong,” he said.
Mr. McCain listed two — returning to duty in Vietnam, only to be captured, tortured, and imprisoned for five and a half years, and later, as a congressman, becoming embroiled in the Keating Five scandal. Mr. McCain met with federal regulators on behalf of a major campaign donor, Charles Keating, whose savings and loan later collapsed, costing taxpayers millions.
Mr. Giuliani’s eyes opened wide when the question turned to him . “To have a description of my mistakes in 30 seconds?” he said.
Mr. Stephanopoulos pressed him, but to no avail. “Your father is a priest,” he said. “I’m going to explain it to your father, not to you,
O.K.?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/us...gewanted=print
=========
Holy , RG is one ing, bullying, lying, hypocritical chicken asshole. Rather than answer the question, he chickens out and brings up GS's father-priest, as if RG had made NO mistakes in public life that he regrets. If the Repugs nominate RG, holy .
So there it is, a bunch of Captain Ahab's tying themselves to the White Whale of the Iraq fiasco. glub glub glub
Along with the 600 tons of munitions looted from a single Saddam muntions store after the made-for-TV shock-and-awe invasion, file under "Rummy: stuff happens", we now have a GAO report:
Weapons Given to Iraq Are Missing
GAO Estimates 30% of Arms Are Unaccounted For
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 6, 2007; A01
The Pentagon has lost track of about 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols given to Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005, according to a new government report, raising fears that some of those weapons have fallen into the hands of insurgents fighting U.S. forces in Iraq.
The report from the Government Accountability Office indicates that U.S. military officials do not know what happened to 30 percent of the weapons the United States distributed to Iraqi forces from 2004 through early this year as part of an effort to train and equip the troops. The highest previous estimate of unaccounted-for weapons was 14,000, in a report issued last year by the inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.
The United States has spent $19.2 billion trying to develop Iraqi security forces since 2003, the GAO said, including at least $2.8 billion to buy and deliver equipment. But the GAO said weapons distribution was haphazard and rushed and failed to follow established procedures, particularly from 2004 to 2005, when security training was led by Gen. David H. Petraeus, who now commands all U.S. forces in Iraq.
( Limbaugh might say: "GAO is pro-terrorist, anti-surge" )
The Pentagon did not dispute the GAO findings, saying it has launched its own investigation and indicating it is working to improve tracking. Although controls have been tightened since 2005, the inability of the United States to track weapons with tools such as serial numbers makes it nearly impossible for the U.S. military to know whether it is battling an enemy equipped by American taxpayers.
"They really have no idea where they are," said Rachel Stohl, a senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information who has studied small-arms trade and received Pentagon briefings on the issue. "It likely means that the United States is unintentionally providing weapons to bad actors."
One senior Pentagon official acknowledged that some of the weapons probably were being used against U.S. forces. He cited the Iraqi brigade created at Fallujah that quickly dissolved in September 2004 and turned its weapons against the Americans.
Stohl said that insurgents frequently use small-arms fire to force military convoys to move in a particular direction -- often toward roadside bombs that target troops and vehicles. She noted that the Bush administration frequently complains that Iran and Syria are supplying insurgents but has paid little attention to whether U.S. military errors inadvertently play a role. "We know there is seepage and very little is being done to address the problem," she said.
Stohl noted that U.S. forces, focused on a fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction after Baghdad fell, failed to secure massive weapons caches. The failure to track small arms given to Iraqi forces repeats that pattern of neglect, she added.
(so, dubya/ head/PNAC/AEI/neo- s lied their way into Iraq, then assigned the too-samll US military to the wrong tasks, sent them on a snark hunt. If this were a fiction novel, it would be trashed as not plausible
The GAO is studying the financing and weapons sources of insurgent groups, but that report will not be made public. "All of that information is classified," said Joseph A. Christoff, the GAO's director of international affairs and trade.
In an unusual move, the train-and-equip program for Iraqi forces is being managed by the Pentagon. Normally, the traditional security assistance programs are operated by the State Department, the GAO reported. The Defense Department said this change permitted greater flexibility, but as of last month it was unable able to tell the GAO what accountability procedures, if any, apply to arms distributed to Iraqi forces, the report said.
Iraqi security forces were virtually nonexistent in early 2004, and in June of that year Petraeus was brought in to build them up. No central record of distributed equipment was kept for a year and a half, until December 2005, and even now the records are on a spreadsheet that requires three computer screens lined up side by side to view a single row, Christoff said.
The GAO found that the military was consistently unable to collect supporting do ents to "confirm when the equipment was received, the quan ies of equipment delivered, and the Iraqi units receiving the equipment." The agency also said there were "numerous mistakes due to incorrect manual entries" in the records that were maintained.
The GAO reached the estimate of 190,000 missing arms -- 110,000 AK-47s and 80,000 pistols -- by comparing the property records of the Multi-National Security Transition Command for Iraq against records Petraeus maintained of the arms and equipment he had ordered. Petraeus's figures were compared with classified data and other records to ensure that it was accurate enough to compare against the property books.
In all cases, the gaps between the two records were enormous. Petraeus reported that about 185,000 AK-47 rifles, 170,000 pistols, 215,000 pieces of body armor and 140,000 helmets were issued to Iraqi security forces from June 2004 through September 2005. But the property books contained records for 75,000 AK-47 rifles, 90,000 pistols, 80,000 pieces of body armor and 25,000 helmets.
A military commander involved in the program at the time, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the report, acknowledged in an e-mail, "We did issue some items, including weapons, body armor, etc. to new Iraqi units that were literally going into battle."
But, the commander argued, "there was, frankly, not much of a choice early on: We had very little staff and could have held the weapons until every piece of the logistical and property accountability system was in place, or we could issue them, in bulk on some occasions, to the U.S. elements supporting Iraqi units who were needed in the battles of Najaf, Fallujah, Mosul, Samarra, etc."
The GAO plans to look for similar problems in the training of Afghan security forces.
During the Bosnian conflict, the United States provided about $100 million in defense equipment to the Bosnian Federation Army, and the GAO found no problems in accounting for those weapons.
( conclusion: Clinton's military was run better than dubya's
Much of the equipment provided to Iraqi troops, including the AK-47s, originates from countries in the former Soviet bloc. In a report last year, Amnesty International said that in 2004 and 2005 more than 350,000 AK-47 rifles and similar weapons were taken out of Bosnia and Serbia, for use in Iraq, by private contractors working for the Pentagon and with the approval of NATO and European security forces in Bosnia.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?hpid=topnews
You're doing a heckuva job, dubya!
Do you have any USA feet left to shoot at?
Last edited by boutons_; 08-05-2007 at 07:46 PM.
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