Background to Petraeus' report.

[boutons_]

Some asshole moderator deleted my thread of similar le.

===================

Iraq Far From U.S. Goals for Energy

$50 Billion Needed To Meet Demand
By Dana Hedgpeth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 2, 2007; A01


Iraq's crucial oil and electricity sectors still need roughly $50 billion to meet demand, analysts and officials say, even after the United States has poured more than $6 billion into them over more than four years.

Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Bush administration has focused much of its $44.5 billion reconstruction plan on oil and electricity. Now, with the U.S.-led reconstruction phase nearing its close, Iraq will need to spend $27 billion more for its electrical system and $20 billion to $30 billion for oil infrastructure, according to estimates the Government Accountability Office collected from Iraqi and U.S. officials.

Even with the funding, the GAO notes that it could take until 2015 for Iraq to produce 6 million barrels of oil a day and have enough electricity to meet demand. A commanding general of the Army Corps of Engineers says it could have enough electricity sooner -- 2010 to 2013.

"The U.S. money was intended to get those industries started on recovery," said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the U.S. special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, who is charged with finding waste, fraud and abuse in the multibillion-dollar effort. "We were working with a dilapidated, run-down system. It still has a long, long way to go."

A former top-level Pentagon official who was involved in rebuilding the oil and electricity sectors put it more bluntly. "People said the money was to rebuild the country, but it was just a down payment," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he still works for the government. "The money was never enough to handle all that was there. It was merely a Band-Aid."

If the problems aren't fixed, it will be difficult to establish a strong economy and improve the standards of living, and could cause people to lose confidence in the government.

Oil and electricity are two of Iraq's most important industries, each depending heavily on the other. Iraq imports about $2.6 billion worth of petroleum products a year. Oil exports account for 90 percent of the Iraqi government's revenue, but oil production is crippled without enough electricity for refineries and pipelines. Electricity, in turn, cannot be generated without the fuel that powers most of Iraq's power plants.

U.S. officials say they found the country's infrastructure in worse shape than they expected, hit hard by the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91 and a decade of economic sanctions. Oil wells hadn't been cleaned. Power plants had antiquated equipment and no parts available for repairs. One U.S. auditor said he spent a day with 22 Iraqi electrical engineers who proudly showed him how they jury-rigged a generator using the sawed-off bottom of a Pepsi can.

The Americans put $4.6 billion into more than 2,600 projects to repair electricity-generation facilities, transmission lines and distribution networks. They put $1.75 billion into improving the country's oil infrastructure.

Another huge problem: Armed groups regularly attack oil and electricity facilities.

Analysts say Iraq needs to invest money to improve its infrastructure for pumping and processing oil, upgrade and maintain equipment, and train workers at power plants and refineries. One U.S. adviser said, "They need more of everything."

"Our piece was to jump-start the infrastructure here," Brig. Gen. Michael J. Walsh, commanding general of the Army Corps of Engineers' Gulf Region Division, said in a telephone interview from Baghdad. "Everything we've been doing in the last four years was just enough to start it. Now the Iraqi government needs to continue."

Distribution of Power
Iraq does not have enough electricity partly because Iraqis now consume more of it.

After the fall of Saddam Hussein, electricity demand soared 70 percent, as more Iraqis bought computers, televisions, refrigerators and air conditioners. Officials say the country now needs about 10,000 megawatts per day but it is producing only 4,110 megawatts -- although some days in August it has reached nearly 5,000 megawatts.

Although Hussein supplied Baghdad with nearly 24 hours of electricity a day and starved the provinces, the U.S.-led reconstruction has aimed to spread power more evenly throughout the country. Baghdad has six to eight hours of electricity, while the rest of Iraq gets about 13 hours a day.

Electricity Ministry officials control the flow of electricity from huge power plants in the north and south, often using cellphones to call regional officials and order them to manually flip switches. Local officials often refuse to follow orders because their lives have been threatened by armed groups, Electricity Minister Karim Wahid said at a recent news briefing in Baghdad. At night, he said, when power stations in rural areas are empty, armed groups take over the switches.

Nor is everyone sharing power. "Some provinces only supply the power to their citizens and isolate Baghdad," he said. "This greatly affected the equal distribution of power throughout Iraq."

Another problem is that insurgents regularly blow up the towers that support transmission lines. On one major line between Kirkuk and Diyala, U.S. officials say, damaged towers have been down for more than a year.

Attacks have taken a huge toll on people as well as infrastructure. Wahid said he lost more than 1,000 Electricity Ministry employees this year, mostly engineers working on repair teams. Four hundred were kidnapped and killed; 300 were injured and 300 were kidnapped, he said.

The lack of security has pushed many U.S. contractors off the job. Bechtel, a California contractor that was paid $1.5 billion to take on electricity projects, said it pulled its workers off jobs repairing electrical substations near Baghdad last year.

"The risk was just too high," said Bill Shoaf, program director of Bechtel's work in Iraq. "The insurgents and militia activity there just didn't allow us to do it."

Infrastructure Obstacles
Even if security improved enough to make infrastructure advances possible, Wahid says another big problem is that Iraq's oil refineries don't make enough fuel to run the country's power plants. Imported fuel has not been enough because power plants are competing with average Iraqis trying to run at-home generators.

U.S. officials say about 1,500 megawatts of power -- enough for well over a half-million homes and businesses -- are down at power plants across the country simply because they don't have enough fuel.

That problem stems partly from the unintended consequences of a U.S. reconstruction policy aimed at updating Iraq's aging infrastructure.

The United States spent millions of dollars on 35 turbines built to run on natural gas, replacing older thermal units that burned heavy fuel oil. Turbines are used to help generate electricity. Natural gas is cleaner and the gas-powered were easier to get and could be installed faster.

But while natural gas is an abundant by-product of Iraqi oil drilling, very little of it is captured. Instead, at Iraq's 52 gas-oil separation plants, the valuable gas is treated as a waste product -- ignited and allowed to burn off. ( dubya's incompence is reliable! )

"The Americans came in and looked at their 1970s power plants and said, 'Throw it all out. Let's start over,' " said Joseph A. Christoff, director of the GAO's international affairs and trade teams who spent time recently with a group of two-dozen Iraqi engineers who talked about their experiences. "The Iraqi engineers were just shocked. . . . They felt they had no input in dealing with the electricity problems."

With little access to natural gas, Iraqis turned to running some of the newly installed gas turbines on diesel, crude or heavy fuel, causing them to break down faster and need more maintenance.

"It's like putting regular gas in a car that needs high-test," said Walsh, the commanding general for the Army Corps. "It's still going to run, but not as efficiently."

These days, inspectors say, 16 of the gas turbines the United States put in are running on crude oil or diesel, which could reduce their output by half. At the Qudas power plant, four of the eight gas turbines are down because they haven't been well-maintained and there's a lack of fuel to run them.

The electricity minister said he is developing a long-term plan to improve the electricity situation -- the first time in 30 years there has been any strategic planning for the sector. Wahid said the Planning Ministry has agreed to spend $40 million a year over the next four years to increase the electricity generated at major power plants, including crucial ones in the northern town of Baiji and Baghdad's Dora district -- where the United States has already spent millions.

But U.S. officials say there needs to be more coordination between the electricity and oil ministries and that the oil ministry lacks clear plans. Without a long-term program for turning around the oil industry and legislation that determines how Iraq's oil revenue would be divided, overseas companies won't invest in Iraq, and that could cost it substantial investment dollars.

"We've tried to help them, but we didn't," said Robert E. Ebel, energy expert and senior adviser at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. "We thought they'd quickly take over and get production back up, but it hasn't happened."



what a hole

you're doing a heckuva job, dubya

[boutons_]

Fresh UK attack on US Iraq policy

A second key British general has criticised US post-war policy in Iraq.

Maj Gen Tim Cross, who was the most senior UK officer involved in post-war planning, told the Sunday Mirror US policy was "fatally flawed".

His comments came after Gen Sir Mike Jackson, head of the Army during the invasion, told the Daily Telegraph US policy was "intellectually bankrupt".

John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN, dismissed Sir Mike's criticism as "way off the mark".

The Ministry of Defence played down the comments by Sir Mike, now retired, saying he was en led to express his opinion on his former job.

'Lack of detail'

Maj Gen Cross, also retired, said he had raised serious concerns about potential post-war problems in Iraq with the then US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

But he said Mr Rumsfeld "dismissed" or "ignored" the warnings.

"Right from the very beginning we were all very concerned about the lack of detail that had gone into the post-war plan and there is no doubt that Rumsfeld was at the heart of that process," he said.

"I had lunch with Rumsfeld in February in Washington - before the invasion in March 2003 - and raised concerns about the need to internationalise the reconstruction of Iraq and work closely with the United Nations."

Maj Gen Cross, 59, who was deputy head of the coalition's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, said he also raised concerns over the number of troops available to maintain security in Iraq.

"He didn't want to hear that message," he said. "The US had already convinced themselves that following the invasion Iraq would emerge reasonably quickly as a stable democracy."

He added: "There is no doubt that with hindsight the US post-war plan was fatally flawed and many of us sensed that at the time."

'Short-sighted'

In an interview published on Saturday, Sir Mike told the Telegraph that a claim by Mr Rumsfeld's that US forces "don't do nation-building" was "nonsensical".

He criticised the decision to hand control of planning the administration of Iraq after the war to the Pentagon.


He also described the disbanding of the Iraqi army and security forces after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as "very short-sighted".

"We should have kept the Iraqi security services in being and put them under the command of the coalition," he said.

Politicians from across the spectrum have come out in support of Sir Mike's comments, made ahead of the serialisation of his autobiography in the Telegraph.

Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Conservative former foreign secretary and defence secretary, told the BBC that Mr Rumsfeld was "incompetent".

'Extraordinary decision'

However, Mr Bolton told BBC Radio 4's PM programme that Sir Mike had "read into a version of history that simply is not supported by the evidence".

"And I can see where he'd have a parochial view from the military perspective. I don't think he saw some of the larger political debates.

"I'm not saying that we got it right in Washington because I've made my own criticisms. His just happen to be way off the mark, very simplistic, I think in a sense limited by the role that he had."

He said it was important to know whether Sir Mike had raised his concerns when he first had them.

The Telegraph also reports that, in his autobiography, Sir Mike says the US approach to fighting global terrorism was "inadequate" as it focused on military power rather than diplomacy and nation-building.

The US Department of Defence said: "Divergent viewpoints are a hallmark of open, democratic societies."

A spokeswoman for the US State Department said she would not comment on Sir Mike's views.

His comments follow a series of critical remarks from US officials about the British at ude towards Iraq.

BBC defence correspondent Paul Wood said Sir Mike's comments may put further strain on the British-US operation in Iraq.


Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ws/6974611.stm

Published: 2007/09/01 23:45:09 GMT

© BBC MMVII

[PixelPusher]

Is there "political thread" mod anymore?

[boutons_]

"ethnic cleansing" of Bagdad is effectively completed.

==================


As Sunnis Flee, Shiites Now Dominate Baghdad

By Babak Dehghanpisheh and Larry Kaplow
Newsweek

10 September 2007 Issue

Shiites now dominate the once mixed capital, and there is little chance of reversing the process.

It was their last stand. Kamal and a handful of his neighbors were hunkered down on the roof of a dun-colored house in southwest Baghdad two weeks ago as bullets zinged overhead. In the streets below, fighters from Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army fanned out and blasted away with AK-47s and PKC heavy machine guns. Kamal is a chubby 44-year-old with two young sons, and he and his friends, all Sunnis, had been fighting similar battles against Shiite militiamen in the Amel neighborhood for months. They jumped awkwardly from rooftop to rooftop, returning fire. Within minutes, however, dozens of uniformed Iraqi policemen poured into the street to support the militiamen. Kamal ditched his AK on a rooftop and snuck away through nearby alleys. He left Amel the next day. "I lost my house, my do ents and my future," says Kamal, whose name and that of other Iraqis in this story have been changed for their safety. "I'm never going back."

Thousands of other Sunnis like Kamal have been cleared out of the western half of Baghdad, which they once dominated, in recent months. The surge of U.S. troops - meant in part to halt the sectarian cleansing of the Iraqi capital - has hardly stemmed the problem.

The number of Iraqi civilians killed in July was slightly higher than in February, when the surge began.

According to the Iraqi Red Crescent, the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) has more than doubled to 1.1 million since the beginning of the year, nearly 200,000 of those in Baghdad governorate alone.

Rafiq Tschannen, chief of the Iraq mission for the International Organization for Migration, says that the fighting that accompanied the influx of U.S. troops actually "has increased the IDPs to some extent."

When Gen. David Petraeus goes before Congress next week to report on the progress of the surge, he may cite a decline in insurgent attacks in Baghdad as one marker of success. In fact, part of the reason behind the decline is how far the Shiite militias' cleansing of Baghdad has progressed: they've essentially won. "If you look at pre-February 2006, there were only a couple of areas in the city that were unambiguously Shia," says a U.S. official in Baghdad who is familiar with the issue but is not authorized to speak on the record. "That's definitely not the case anymore." The official says that "the majority, more than half" of Baghdad's neighborhoods are now Shiite-dominated, a judgment echoed in the most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq: "And very few are mixed." In places like Amel, pockets of Sunnis live in fear, surrounded by a sea of Shiites. In most of the remaining Sunni neighborhoods, residents are trapped behind great concrete barricades for their own protection.

Amel's transformation is one of the most dramatic in the city. Under Saddam Hussein the area was a bedroom community for regime apparatchiks - generals and officers like Kamal, who worked for one of Saddam's secret services. Spacious houses were arranged in grids around schools and recreation centers, fronted by palm trees and wide sidewalks. Saddam trusted the community: houses nestle up against the strategic highway that leads to the airport, and are only a short distance away from the Republican Palace complex that dominates the Green Zone. Now Amel's Sunnis are crowded into a strip that's less than a quarter-mile square, surrounded on all sides by concertina wire and scrap-metal barricades. City power cables have been cut, and the streets are strewn with trash and broken glass. There is only one access road not under Shiite control, leading to the airport highway. The enclave houses perhaps 5,000 Sunnis; nearly all the rest of Amel's estimated 100,000 population is now Shiite. With the agreement of locals, U.S. troops plan to replace the Sunnis' makeshift roadblocks with concrete barriers.

The Americans increased their presence in the neighborhood in March, when they set up Combat Outpost Attack in a large local sports club. At that point the sectarian cleansing of Amel was already well advanced. Kamal says the process began after the bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra in February 2006, when the Mahdi Army and Sunni fighters clashed openly in the streets. Soon envelopes were spread along Kamal's block; each had a bullet inside. Threatening graffiti appeared on nearby houses: LEAVE or WANTED, or sometimes just a red "X." (Shiite residents in west Amel say they were equally threatened.) Thanks in part to the support of the Iraqi police, Shiites gained the upper hand. By this March, Amel's Sunnis had been pushed back to the other side of 7th of Nissan Street, a large commercial thoroughfare known to locals as the "street of death."

COP Attack is surrounded by rings of blast barriers. Troops are shot at regularly when they leave, so there are no frivolous supply runs or token patrols to show the flag - only targeted daily missions like raids to detain suspects or meetings with informants. Despite their presence, the violence has continued to rage. In May, after Sunni insurgents hit a Shiite mosque with a car bomb, Shiite militants executed 24 young Sunni men and dumped their bodies in the bomb crater. According to an official at the Ministry of Interior, who isn't authorized to speak on the record, 103 bodies were found in Amel in July, the highest body count of any Baghdad neighborhood.

Citywide, Sunnis complain that in the early phases of the surge, as Shiite militias refrained from attacks on U.S. troops, the Americans focused their firepower on Sunni insurgents. The implicit trade-off - pushed by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and others - was that the Shiites would scale back their sectarian attacks once they felt safer. Instead militias like the Mahdi Army have become emboldened. Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the top ground commander in Iraq, recently noted that 73 percent of American fatalities and injuries in Baghdad in July were caused by Shiite fighters. That same month, for the first time since 2003, Shiite militants carried out as many attacks on Coalition forces as Sunni insurgents did nationwide.

Last week, after clashes at a religious festival in Karbala between Sadr loyalists and local police dominated by another Shiite faction, Sadr ordered his forces to refrain from all military activities for six months. In Baghdad, U.S. commanders aren't expecting to see much change on the ground. "Who knows what that means?" says Lt. Col. Steve Miska, a commander in northwest Baghdad who frequently deals with the Mahdi Army. The militia's sectarian-cleansing campaign is far too lucrative to be given up easily. When Sunni homeowners flee, say U.S. soldiers, their furniture is often locked up and their houses listed at local Sadr offices. Shiite families - many of them displaced earlier from Sunni neighborhoods - can peruse the listings, sometimes even photos of the property. For around 110,000 Iraqi dinars (about $88) per month, they can rent a furnished home and receive deliveries of cooking oil from the Mahdi Army. The militiamen earn even more money by controlling the gas stations in various neighborhoods, and by carjacking the nicest vehicles - usually, but not always, driven by Sunnis - at the checkpoints they set up.

Shiites present their creeping takeover of Baghdad as part of a narrative of liberation - American officers have dubbed it Shiite "Manifest Destiny." "This area represents everything [Shiites] hated before - Sunni generals, security officers, Baathists, some of them who probably personally knew Saddam Hussein," says Capt. Brian Ducote, who tries to intercept Shiite militants based in Amel who raid his neighboring Jihad neighborhood. "They say, 'You have self-defense in America. My brother was killed; my father was killed. I have a right to do this'."

The west side of Amel, which is now almost entirely Shiite, is thriving by Baghdad standards. Shops are open and taxis ferry passengers around. Residents can move in and out of the area through several access points. It's clear who wants to take credit for their security: Mahdi Army fighters have set up checkpoints throughout the neighborhood to screen vehicles. In return, the militiamen brook little criticism. When one Shiite family recently refused to allow a Mahdi sniper up onto their roof, the man went to their neighbor's house and jumped across to use their house anyway. They didn't protest. Abbas, a clerk who lives in west Amel, says he doesn't approve of the Mahdi Army's activities but he's not entirely ungrateful for their protection. "This is not a game," he says.

A few blocks away, COP Attack's commander, Capt. Sean Lyons of the First Infantry Division, estimates that his men spend about three quarters of their time defending the small Sunni enclave in east Amel. "It's a desert," says Mahmoud, a 37-year-old with a slight build and small mustache. Mortars frequently fall around his house. Mahmoud occasionally lets his young son ride his bike in their small yard or in the garage, but worries about snipers constantly. What should be an ordinary stroll to buy meat or ice, he says, is a nerve-racking ordeal. "It makes you crazy," he says with a nervous giggle. "I bend and hide when I walk. I stay close to the high walls and never walk in the open street." He shakes his head for a few seconds and adds, "This is not life."

The Shiite campaign has pushed the Americans closer to the Sunni population. Nightly, local Sunnis come sit with Lyons near the wall-size aerial photo of the neighborhood pinned up in his outpost. "We cyclically plan our operations off the intelligence they give us," he says. As in other Baghdad neighborhoods, the Americans have formed Amel's Sunnis into a "neighborhood watch" group whose members are allowed to carry their own weapons. Although they're given ID cards and rules of engagement, they have wide la ude on the ground. "We have a kind of relationship with the Sunnis around here - they don't mess with us and we don't mess with them," says Staff Sgt. Michael Green, 32.

Much of the information that Sunni informants pass along to the Americans originates in calls from Shiite friends who secretly oppose the young Mahdi toughs, many of whom have arrived from other parts of Baghdad. They'll pass on the locations of wanted men or, when they see a Shiite mortar team set up in a nearby schoolyard, call Sunni friends and tell them to take cover. Even some militiamen are ashamed of their compatriots: "Many people joined [the Mahdi Army] because they are running after money," says Ibrahim Ali, a Mahdi fighter based in Amel. "These are gangs of young, uneducated, emotional and armed men who are carrying out kidnappings, extortion and a variety of other violent actions in an effort to gain money, basically, and then also a degree of power," General Petraeus said on a recent trip to west Baghdad. Sadr aides claim their internal purge is meant to clear the ranks of such opportunists.

Neither American support nor Shiite disillusionment, however, is likely to reverse the dwindling position of Baghdad's Sunnis. Officially, the Iraqi government is asking residents to return to their old neighborhoods as the massive troop presence enforces a degree of calm; those who do are offered a million-dinar reward (approximately $800). But, says the U.S. official familiar with refugee issues, "Sunnis are reluctant to go back to areas when it's only Iraqi security forces there managing their safety. In a lot of cases security forces participated in their displacement." A humanitarian worker focused on IDPs and a U.S. military official both say that often families only return to their houses long enough to grab a suitcase and pocket the reward money before leaving again.

Of course, with Sunnis cleaned out of many Baghdad neighborhoods, Shiites may turn on each other. The fighting in Karbala was only an extension of battles that have been raging in the south for months now. (In the past two weeks, two provincial governors from a rival faction were assassinated, possibly by Sadr loyalists.) Could this be the start of a civil war within Iraq's civil war? Kamal isn't waiting around to find out. He's moving to Syria.

==================

The spin that Petraeus and Crocker spew in a few days will be amusing.

dubya is now show-boating in Bagdad, the mother er.

[xrayzebra]

Is there "political thread" mod anymore?

Nope! Just have ethnic cleansing now.

You know anyone with the name boutons or his associates.
They are next in line.

[boutons_]

Second Retired British General Slams US

By Tariq Panja
The Associated Press

Sunday 02 September 2007

London - A second retired British general slammed the United States over its Iraq policy, saying in a newspaper interview published Sunday that it had been "fatally flawed."

Maj. Gen. Tim Cross, the most senior British officer involved in the postwar planning, said he had raised serious concerns about the possibility of Iraq falling into chaos but said former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed the warnings.

"Right from the very beginning we were all very concerned about the lack of detail that had gone into the postwar plan and there is no doubt that Rumsfeld was at the heart of that process," Cross said in the Sunday Mirror newspaper.

The comments come a day after the release of critical comments made by the general who led the British army during the Iraq invasion.

Retired Gen. Sir Mike Jackson also singled out Rumsfeld for criticism, saying his approach to the invasion was "intellectually bankrupt," according to quotes excerpted from his autobiography and published by The Daily Telegraph Saturday.

Rumsfeld stepped down as defense secretary in November, one day after midterm elections in which opposition to the war in Iraq contributed to heavy Republican losses.

In December, President Bush praised Rumsfeld for his service and made no mention of the often-harsh criticism of Rumsfeld.

"Every decision Don Rumsfeld made over the past six years, he always put the troops first, and the troops knew it," Bush said.

( Rummy put neo- fantasies and oil grabbing first, troop welfare nowhere )


The comments from the two retired British generals come in the wake of criticism of British military performance in Basra made by U.S. officials and Washington's fears that Prime Minister Gordon Brown is poised to sanction a British troop withdrawal.

Former U.S. Army Gen. Jack Keane, who was vice chief of staff at the time the Iraq war was launched in 2003, said in an interview last week that London had never deployed enough troops to properly stabilize the region around the southern city and allowed a bad security situation to deteriorate further.

But Cross said the current problems were predicted in 2003.

"Right from the very beginning we were all very concerned about the lack of detail that had gone into the postwar plan and there is no doubt that Rumsfeld was at the heart of that process," he said.

Gen. Cross, 59, who was deputy head of the coalition's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in 2003, said he had raised concerns about the number of troops on the ground in Iraq but was ignored.

"There is no doubt that with hindsight the U.S. postwar plan was fatally flawed and many of us sensed that at the time," Cross said.

[boutons_]

..

[boutons_]

Jones Report: Iraqi Security Forces Not Ready

Logistical Self-Sufficiency Is at Least Two Years Away

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 5, 2007; 1:56 PM

Iraq's Interior Ministry is "dysfunctional," filled with sectarianism and corruption, according to an independent assessment of the Iraqi security forces to be published tomorrow. The report said that Iraq's national police force, controlled by that ministry, is "operationally ineffective" and should be disbanded and reorganized.

The report, by a congressionally-named commission of retired senior military officers, cites progress in the operation and training of the Iraqi army. But it estimates that "they will not be ready to independently fulfill their security role within the next 12 to 18 months" without a substantial U.S. military presence. Logistical self-sufficiency, which it describes as key to independent Iraqi operations, is at least two years away, the report says.

Iraqi security forces "have the potential to help reduce sectarian violence," the report says. But the report, which emphasizes the failure of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government to achieve key political benchmarks, says that violence will not end without political reconciliation. In addition to the failings of the Interior Ministry and police, it says that Maliki is perceived as bypassing the Ministry of Defense and the chain of command to create "a second, and politically motivated" command structure in the army.

The Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq, headed by retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones, is the latest of a series of progress reports of the political and military situation in Iraq in advance of the Bush administration's own scorecard to be delivered next week. A report by the Government Accountability Office, released yesterday, said that Iraq had met only three of 18 congressional benchmarks for progress.

The 152-page do ent, obtained by The Washington Post, agrees with the administration's assessment that the security situation has improved dramatically in Anbar province and cites "signs of encouraging tactical successes in the Baghdad capital region."

It says those "cir stances of the moment" may provide an opportunity for beginning to transition U.S. forces to a "strategic overwatch posture" in early 2008, re-tasking them to concentrate on border defense and infrastructure defense.

Although it was required only to assess the condition of Iraq's security forces, the commission report also cites divergences between perceptions and reality in Iraq, particularly in the image of U.S. forces. The massive U.S. "footprint," it says, conveys the image of "an occupying force" when "what is needed is the opposite impression." It proposes significant consolidation and reduction of U.S. installations and the establishment of a U.S.-Iraqi "Transition Headquarters."

=========================

Petraeus and Crocker will have a huge job to convince anybody that Iraq is worth more dying and paying for, but I'm sure they are up to the spinning and lying job.

[xrayzebra]

Persistent little cuss aren't you boutons. Like posting to
yourself, do you?

[boutons_]

Experts Doubt Drop In Violence in Iraq

Military Statistics Called Into Question

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 6, 2007; A16

The U.S. military's claim that violence has decreased sharply in Iraq in recent months has come under scrutiny from many experts within and outside the government, who contend that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends.

( ah, come on, we know from VN that the military would NEVER lie to us to just to keep their career-padding war going and NEVER take spin dictates from the WH )

Reductions in violence form the centerpiece of the Bush administration's claim that its war strategy is working. In congressional testimony Monday, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, is expected to cite a 75 percent decrease in sectarian attacks. According to senior U.S. military officials in Baghdad, overall attacks in Iraq were down to 960 a week in August, compared with 1,700 a week in June, and civilian casualties had fallen 17 percent between December 2006 and last month. Unofficial Iraqi figures show a similar decrease.

Others who have looked at the full range of U.S. government statistics on violence, however, accuse the military of cherry-picking positive indicators and caution that the numbers -- most of which are classified -- are often confusing and contradictory. "Let's just say that there are several different sources within the administration on violence, and those sources do not agree," Comptroller General David Walker told Congress on Tuesday in releasing a new Government Accountability Office report on Iraq.

( cherry-picking is BAAACK! Wonder whose idea that was? )

Senior U.S. officers in Baghdad disputed the accuracy and conclusions of the largely negative GAO report, which they said had adopted a flawed counting methodology used by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Many of those conclusions were also reflected in last month's pessimistic National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq.

The intelligence community has its own problems with military calculations. Intelligence analysts computing aggregate levels of violence against civilians for the NIE puzzled over how the military designated attacks as combat, sectarian or criminal, according to one senior intelligence official in Washington. "If a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian," the official said. "If it went through the front, it's criminal."

"Depending on which numbers you pick," he said, "you get a different outcome." Analysts found "trend lines . . . going in different directions" compared with previous years, when numbers in different categories varied widely but trended in the same direction. "It began to look like spaghetti."

Among the most worrisome trends cited by the NIE was escalating warfare between rival Shiite militias in southern Iraq that has consumed the port city of Basra and resulted last month in the assassination of two southern provincial governors. According to a spokesman for the Baghdad headquarters of the Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I), those attacks are not included in the military's statistics. "Given a lack of capability to accurately track Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni violence, except in certain instances," the spokesman said, "we do not track this data to any significant degree."

Attacks by U.S.-allied Sunni tribesmen -- recruited to battle Iraqis allied with al-Qaeda -- are also excluded from the U.S. military's calculation of violence levels.

The administration has not given up trying to demonstrate that Iraq is moving toward political reconciliation. Testifying with Petraeus next week, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan C. Crocker is expected to report that top Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish leaders agreed last month to work together on key legislation demanded by Congress. If all goes as U.S. officials hope, Crocker will also be able to point to a visit today to the Sunni stronghold of Anbar province by ministers in the Shiite-dominated government ( pure dog and pony show, part of the WH spin campaign )-- perhaps including Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, according to a senior U.S. official involved in Iraq policy. The ministers plan to hand Anbar's governor $70 million in new development funds, the official said.

But most of the administration's case will rest on security data, according to military, intelligence and diplomatic officials who would not speak on the record before the Petraeus-Crocker testimony. Several Republican and Democratic lawmakers who were offered military statistics during Baghdad visits in August said they had been convinced that Bush's new strategy, and the 162,000 troops carrying it out, has produced enough results to merit more time.

( produce more time for what? the political progress is totally absent so far )

Challenges to how military and intelligence statistics are tallied and used have been a staple of the Iraq war. In its December 2006 report, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group identified "significant underreporting of violence," noting that "a murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the sources of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the data base." The report concluded that "good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals."

Recent estimates by the media, outside groups and some government agencies have called the military's findings into question. The Associated Press last week counted 1,809 civilian deaths in August, making it the highest monthly total this year, with 27,564 civilians killed overall since the AP began collecting data in April 2005.

The GAO report found that "average number of daily attacks against civilians have remained unchanged from February to July 2007," a conclusion that the military said was skewed because it did not include dramatic, up-to-date information from August.

( as was noted earlier, the Shiite ethnic cleansing of Sunnis out of Bagdad is effectively complete, so that is a major reason Bagdad violence would be down, totally independent of the Bagdad surge )

Juan R.I. Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of Michigan who is critical of U.S. policy, said that most independent counts "do not agree with Pentagon estimates about drops in civilian deaths."

In a letter last week to the leadership of both parties, a group of influential academics and former Clinton administration officials called on Congress to examine "the exact nature and methodology that is being used to track the security situation in Iraq and specifically the assertions that sectarian violence is down."

The controversy centers as much on what is counted -- attacks on civilians vs. attacks on U.S. and Iraqi troops, numbers of attacks vs. numbers of casualties, sectarian vs. intra-sect battles, daily numbers vs. monthly averages -- as on the numbers themselves.

The military stopped releasing statistics on civilian deaths in late 2005, saying the news media were taking them out of context. In an e-mailed response to questions last weekend, an MNF-I spokesman said that while trends were favorable, "exact monthly figures cannot be provided" for attacks against civilians or other categories of violence in 2006 or 2007, either in Baghdad or for the country overall. "MNF-I makes every attempt to ensure it captures the most comprehensive, accurate, and valid data on civilian and sectarian deaths," the spokesman wrote. "However, there is not one central place for data or information. . . . This means there can be variations when different organizations examine this information."

In a follow-up message yesterday, the spokesman said that the non-release policy had been changed this week but that the numbers were still being put "in the right context."

Attacks labeled "sectarian" are among the few statistics the military has consistently published in recent years, although the totals are regularly recalculated. The number of monthly "sectarian murders and incidents" in the last six months of 2006, listed in the Pentagon's quarterly Iraq report published in June, was substantially higher each month than in the Pentagon's March report. MNF-I said that "reports from un-reported/not-yet-reported past incidences as well as clarification/corrections on reports already received" are "likely to contribute to changes."

When Petraeus told an Australian newspaper last week that sectarian attacks had decreased 75 percent "since last year," the statistic was quickly e-mailed to U.S. journalists in a White House fact sheet. Asked for detail, MNF-I said that "last year" referred to December 2006, when attacks ed to more than 1,600.

( Petraeus just LOVES them cherries!! )
By March, however -- before U.S. troop strength was increased under Bush's strategy -- the number had dropped to 600, only slightly less than in the same month last year. That is about where it has remained in 2007, with what MNF-I said was a slight increase in April and May "but trending back down in June-July."

Petraeus's spokesman, Col. Steven A. Boylan, said he was certain that Petraeus had made a comparison with December in the interview with the Australian paper, which did not publish a direct Petraeus quote. No qualifier appeared in the White House fact sheet.

( the WH just LOVES them cherries! )

When a member of the National Intelligence Council visited Baghdad this summer to review a draft of the intelligence estimate on Iraq, Petraeus argued that its negative judgments did not reflect recent improvements. At least one new sentence was added to the final version, noting that "overall attack levels across Iraq have fallen during seven of the last nine weeks."

A senior military intelligence official in Baghdad deemed it "odd" that "marginal" security improvements were reflected in an estimate assessing the previous seven months and projecting the next six to 12 months. He attributed the change to a desire to provide Petraeus with ammunition for his congressional testimony.

The intelligence official in Washington, however, described the Baghdad consultation as standard in the NIE drafting process and said that the "new information" did not change the estimate's conclusions. The overall assessment was that the security situation in Iraq since January "was still getting worse," he said, "but not as fast."

Staff writer Ann Scott Tyson contributed to this report.

===================

Petraeus and Crocker and WH will spin like whirling dervishes, and the Dems won't have enough votes to do anything.

dubya and head will make absolutely sure their very own Iraqi hole drags on past 20 Jan 2009, so they will be able to claim "We were winning, absolutely" after they leave office.

[xrayzebra]

No sweat boutons, Chuckie baby Schumer is already putting out
your line for you. He is discrediting the report even before it is
put out. I love his little line, violence is down "despite" the surge.
God how stupid does he think people are.

[smeagol]

Does anybody read these threads with a zillion articles copy pasted by boutons?

[Yonivore]

Here's the only background you need.

Petraeus was unanimously confirmed for his current position by the Senate -- Democrats included.

Petraeus was highly respected on both sides of the aisle (up until it became apparent he was being successful in Iraq)

Petraeus is kicking ass in Iraq and that's scaring the living crap out of Democrats.

[Yonivore]

The Democrats have gone from Iraq being a hopelessly lost quagmire, to now entertaining a compromise on continuing our presence without a timeline.

President Bush has maintained his position and confidence in our success in Iraq throughout.

Who's the ing idiot?

[ChumpDumper]

Actually here's the only background you need.

Petraeus is the best commander we've had in Iraq, which could be damning him with faint praise since the others sucked to varying degrees. He could very well be "kicking ass in Iraq" but it doesn't matter since the political process remains stagnant.

Barring a political breakthrough, it looks like we're just keeping the ethnic cleansing on a slow burn. Eventually we'll have a de facto par ion and someone will come up with the bright idea to make it official.

[Yonivore]

After a month-long vacation, Democrats returned to the nation’s capital this week, an army in disarray. They left in August confident that Republicans would go home, get chewed out about the war, and raise the white flag. Instead, the Surge worked and the Democrats are losing it.

S.A. Miller at the Washington Times reported:

Rank-and-file Democrats in Congress are criticizing the party’s leaders for allowing the White House to sap momentum from the antiwar movement during the August recess.

“The White House is taking great advantage of the Democrats not pushing back,” said Rep. Lynn Woolsey, California Democrat and co-founder of the antiwar Out of Iraq Caucus.

“We need bolder steps from the Democrats,” she said. “The people of this country are waiting for some leadership — some bold leadership — from the people that they elected to be the majority of the House and the Senate.”

Yes, how dare Speaker Pelosi allow the American army to win the Surge while Congress was on vacation?

John Bresnahan and Martin Kady II at Politico reported:

In a strategic shift designed to win over Republican critics of the Iraq war, congressional Democrats are backing off demands for a firm withdrawal date for U.S. troops and instead are seeking a new bipartisan deal to end the military campaign.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) are calculating that it is futile to continue their months-long campaign to force an immediate end to the war, particularly after Republicans and a few Democrats returned from the summer recess intent on opposing legislation mandating a strict timetable for pulling out U.S. troops.

Even the more Democratic-friendly newspapers are noticing the wheels as they go off the bus.

Noam Levey at the LA Times reported:

WASHINGTON — – Frustrated with the fierce partisanship of the war debate, moderate lawmakers on Capitol Hill are intensifying their drive to craft compromise measures to break the congressional impasse over U.S. policy in Iraq.

Democrats and Republicans involved in the efforts say they want to pressure the White House to change course so American troops can start coming home. But their proposals stop short of setting a withdrawal deadline, the centerpiece of the Democratic legislative campaign to force an end to U.S. involvement in the war.

“There is a lot of frustration out there. People want us to end the war,” said Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.). “But what people also want in my state is they want Congress to do something.”

Not a lot of happy campers in the Democratic camp. And, the disarray is spilling over to other issues. In fact, if the Republican had planned to divide and conquer, they may be too late; Democrats seem to be splitting on their own.

Eric Pfeiffer at the Washington Times reported:

Congressional Democrats, who criticized Republicans for not fixing the alternative minimum tax when they were in power, have been unable to unify behind a plan to protect the growing number of middle-class families hit by the tax.

House Ways and Means Chairman Charles B. Rangel says he wants a permanent fix for the AMT, but the influential New York Democrat faces opposition from lawmakers in his own party and from Republicans as he convenes hearings on the issue today.

Several Democratic congressional sources say Mr. Rangel’s counterpart, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, Montana Democrat, who is up for re-election next year, does not want to be tagged as raising taxes to permanently fix the AMT. Analysts say eliminating it requires other taxes to replace the $100 billion AMT generates annually.

House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn, South Carolina Democrat, said this week fixing the AMT is not a priority and is unlikely to happen this year.

The bickering among House leaders continues.

Mike Soraghan and Jackie Kucinich at the Hill reported:

The House Rules Committee, known as “the Speaker’s Committee,” is considered an arm of leadership. So when two panel members — including the chairwoman — balk at a Democratic bill, minority members are quick to chortle that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is losing control of her top lieutenants.

“It’s a rebuke of the Speaker,” a Republican leadership aide said. “The real question is, Will Pelosi fire or replace [Chairwoman Louise] Slaughter [D-N.Y.]?”

Wednesday afternoon, the Rules Committee took up an election reform bill by Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.). The bill would amend the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA) by requiring states to use voting machines that provide a “paper trail” or verifiable paper ballot.

Slaughter quickly indicated she didn’t like the bill, and raised questions about the quality of the new paper ballot machines.

“I am very much concerned that we are passing this law that you have to have it by a certain date,” Slaughter said during the hearing, “when experts tell us there is not a machine that will do this right.”

In an interview, Slaughter said New York election authorities would have trouble getting equipment to replace their lever-pull machines in time for the deadline mandated in the bill.

She wasn’t the only one to express concerns. Rep. Alcee Hastings, a Democrat from Florida, said the bill didn’t go far enough.

I won’t do the rats fleeing the sinking ship line. Why insult rats?

Democrats were swept into power by the election of Blue Dog conservatives. Rather than follow that up with reasonable legislation, Pelosi and Reid made opposing the Iraq War their sole issue going 24/7 on it. They misread the public, the military and their own members.

Which is why this may be a long September for the Democratic Congress.

Oh and yes, the No. 3 Democrat in the House, James Clyburn, was absolutely right when he said good news from Iraq would be “a very real problem for us.” Nice corner Pelosi and company painted the Democrats in.

[ChumpDumper]

Everybody will be able to declare victory in April when troop levels start coming down out of necessity. It's just a matter of spinning it until then.

[boutons_]

Petraeus is a Westmoreland-style career-coddling suckup, making inflated, misleading career-enhancing speeches about Iraq success a few weeks before the 2004 election.

dubya will dump Petraeus as soon as convenient, like all of dubya's other generals.

Military "victory" in Iraq means nothing. dubya broke the country.

After 100s of US taxpayer $Bs, it remains broken.

dubya's fraudulent invasion enabled the civil war, and sectarian ethnic cleansing.

No matter what the results of the surge (independent numbers show the surge has had little effect vs 2006), Iraqis are not going to fix their sectarian differences now, or ever.

iow, the surge may be militarily successful, but the (stated) objective of allowing the Iraqis to reconcile has not been achieved.

The REAL objective of the surge is dubya and head "playing" for time, stalling until 20 Jan 2009.

Any reductions in force will be because the Army, by its own admission, is also breaking and reductions are necessary to keep the Army somewhat in tact.

[Yonivore]

Yet another example of Democrat fraying on Iraq...

Yeah, I know it's a few days old but, I've been out killing rats...and, it's still worth linking just in case no one posted it here before today.

The violence in Anbar has gone down despite the surge, not because of the surge. The inability of American soldiers to protect these tribes from al Qaeda, said to these tribes: "We have to fight al Qaeda ourselves."

Liberals try, with varying degrees of success, to impugn the president and Pentagon and every single general and colonel while claiming to "support the troops" (the grunts, the people who didn't do well in school and ended up stuck in Iraq, as John Kerry says). Here Schumer lets the mask fall -- or perhaps just doesn't have the skill to play to both imperatives -- and simply "blames" the lessening of violence upon American fighters' incompetence.

This doesn't even make sense as a political complaint -- if Bush's "Failed Policies" have been so disastrous as to compel Sunnis to begin killing Al Qaeda and lower sectarian violence and cooperate more with the American military, isn't that incompetence disguising a great success?

In fact, it is that very cooperation Democrats vowed could never occur in Iraq.

Either way he's saying that what we've done in Iraq has caused this-- but he childishly decides to claim it was our failures that caused this success.

Here's the preening little ballsucker in action.

Schumer shooting himself in the foot

You ing truther Democrats on this board must be absolutely livid that your paid heroes in Congress can't keep on message.

[DarkReign]

Petraeus is kicking ass in Iraq and that's scaring the living crap out of Democrats.

WTF?!

Why would a general kicking-ass scare anyone but the people getting their ass kicked?

Or are you still convinced that the entire Democratic party is only interested in the ruin of America?

[Yonivore]

WTF?!

Why would a general kicking-ass scare anyone but the people getting their ass kicked?

I haven't the foggiest; you might want to ask James "good-news-in-Iraq-is-bad-for-Democrats" Clyburn.

Or are you still convinced that the entire Democratic party is only interested in the ruin of America?

Just the Democratic leadership that has painted themselves into a corner pandering to the nutroots "truthers."

I don't believe Joe Lieberman is interested in the ruin of America.

[DarkReign]

So, you seriously think the Demo leadership's goal is the failure of Iraqi policy?

Why? Because its Bush Co's plan, therefore it needs to fail?

[Yonivore]

So, you seriously think the Demo leadership's goal is the failure of Iraqi policy?

Yep.

Why? Because its Bush Co's plan, therefore it needs to fail?

Yep. Success in Iraq will ruin their chances in '08.

[xrayzebra]

Actually here's the only background you need.

......... but it doesn't matter since the political process remains stagnant.

Hey Chump, got to congratulate you. You got the
dimm-o-crap line down pat. Just keep attending those
on-line classes and remember what the dimms tell you.

[DarkReign]

Yep. Success in Iraq will ruin their chances in '08.

Why would it ruin their chances in 08?

The way the polls show (very early, I admit), the Repubs are lagging in every major....everything. Opinion, money, economy, etc.