Iraq: Are We Still There????

Badmutha · #1 (**permalink**) 06-03-2008, 12:38 AM

I have been reading the papers---waching the news on TV--and its hard to tell whats going on in Iraq.....as its hard to find any stories or reports as of late....did the US leave or something???

Where has the daily and nightly gloom and doom gone?? Katie Couric(D)....Keith Olberman(D)....Barrack Obama(D)......Harry Reid(D)....Nancy Pelosi(D)...Hitlary(D)........WHERE ARE YOUR USUAL OUTSPOKEN ANTI-USA VOICES AT???

So considering how QUIET the liberal media and the democrat party have been in regards to Iraq as of late........I knew I would eventually find something like this:

U.S. troop deaths in Iraq at wartime low - Yahoo! News

Quote:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Nineteen U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq in May, the U.S. military said on Sunday, the lowest monthly death toll since U.S. forces invaded to topple Saddam Hussein in 2003.

The number of Iraqi civilians killed in the same month plunged to 505 after reaching a seven-month high of 968 in April, figures obtained by Reuters from Iraq's interior, defense and health ministries showed.

The U.S. military says violence in Iraq is at a four-year low following crackdowns by U.S. and Iraqi forces on Shi'ite militias in southern Basra and Baghdad and on al Qaeda in the northern city of Mosul, its last major urban stronghold

....isnt this news???....isnt this noteworthy??...HEADLINES??...then why has the majority of the liberal media and the usually outspoken democrat party remained so quiet...THE SILENCE IS DEAFENING!!!

Now one would assume....when the number of attacks have decreased...when troop casualties are at a WARTIME-LOW......victory may looming closer than ever. The successful end and victorious return of America's finest could be approaching rather quickly.......and I wonder........WILL THE MEDIA COVER THAT???? WILL DEMOCRATS BE CHEERING A VICTORIOUS RETURN OF OUR MEN AND WOMEN??..........or will they go hide in their holes like the scum that they are.

Fewer U.S. Dead = Less TV Coverage of Iraq -- 02/28/2008 - Media Research Center - Media Reality Check

Quote:

Networks Minimize Good News From Iraq, Don’t Press Democrats on “Wrong-Headed” Predictions

Fewer U.S. Dead = Less
TV Coverage of Iraq

One year ago, liberal journalists depicted the surge of U.S. troops to Iraq as a certain failure. “A lot of people are going to go to bed tonight terrified,” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews opined just minutes after President Bush announced the policy on January 10, 2007. Other journalists were only slightly more subtle. “Many experts warn, it’s too little, too late,” NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski argued on the January 8, 2007 Nightly News. The next morning on NBC’s Today, the network’s graphic describing Iraq was “Lost Cause?”

At the same time, leading Democrats left themselves no wiggle room as they, too, denounced the surge. Senator Barack Obama called it “wrong-headed” and countered with a proposal to pull nearly all U.S. troops out of Iraq by March 2008. Senator Hillary Clinton came back from a quick trip to Iraq to declare: “I am opposed to this escalation,” while another Democratic candidate, Senator Joe Biden, blasted the troop surge as “a tragic mistake.”

One year later, the President’s surge strategy is well on its way to succeeding. The Iraqi parliament has passed several laws meeting required political reconciliation benchmarks. Attacks in Baghdad have fallen up to 80 percent in the past twelve months, Reuters reported February 16. Deaths among Iraqi military forces and civilians have dropped by more than two-thirds, from more than 2,000 per month in early 2007 to fewer than 600 per month since November.

And U.S. military deaths have also declined, falling from 126 in May 2007 to 40 in January 2008 and just 29 so far in February, with two days left in the month. Yet this good news seems to have diminished the media elite’s interest in broadcasting any news from Iraq.

MRC intern Lyndsi Thomas helped tabulate all ABC, CBS and NBC evening news stories about Iraq since the beginning of 2007, just as the surge strategy was being implemented. After heavy coverage of the shift to a new Iraq policy in January and February 2007, the TV coverage began to closely track the rising and falling death rates for U.S. soldiers in Iraq. When the number of U.S. fatalities jumped in May, TV coverage jumped, too. When U.S. casualties began to steadily decline, TV coverage of Iraq dramatically decreased. (See chart.)

While the amount of coverage has shriveled, the tone remains more negative than positive. So far this month, the three evening newscasts have aired just 41 items on Iraq, most (23) just brief items read by the anchor. A mere seven stories were field reports from Iraq. Only ABC’s World News (February 13) noted the passage of key legislation by the Iraqi parliament, followed by a unique story the next evening on the success of the surge. The CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News offered no such stories in February, but NBC did find time to report a visit to Iraq by actress Angelina Jolie.

Back in December, NBC’s Tim Russert conceded that the media were less interested in covering a successful U.S. mission in Iraq, telling anchor Brian Williams that “with the surge in Iraq and the level of American deaths declining, it is off the front pages.”

This is not neutral news judgment, but a great favor to anti-surge Democrats, since TV’s lack of interest in Iraq spares them the chore of defending their now-discredited opposition to the surge. Does anyone think the media would have let John McCain off the hook had the surge failed as spectacularly as it has succeeded?

As U.S. Troops Succeed, Network News Retreats from Iraq War Story | NewsBusters.org

As U.S. Troops Succeed, Network News Retreats from Iraq War Story
By Rich Noyes | February 1, 2008 - 13:24 ET

Quote:

After months of improving security in Iraq, the big network morning shows on Friday cited one horrific suicide bombing as proof that “mayhem and misery are back in Baghdad,” as CBS correspondent Mark Strassmann put it. But over the last five months, the broadcast networks have consistently reduced their coverage of Iraq, as if the story of American success in Iraq is less worthy of attention than their old mantra of American failure in Iraq.

Media Research Center analysts tracked all coverage of the Iraq war on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts from September 1 through January 31, and we documented a steady decline in TV coverage of Iraq that has coincided with the improving situation in Iraq. Back in September, the three evening newscasts together broadcast 178 stories about the war in Iraq; in January, that number fell to just 47, a nearly fourfold decrease. (See chart.)

From the DEFEAT INVESTED democrats in Washington that are suddenly silent.....to those in the media that quit reporting on Iraq.....to the liberal Anti-War scum here at AWE--who crawl out of their holes to pronounce and promote every bit of bad news they can find........

WHERE HAVE YOU GONE??????

To protect this country from enemies foreign and DOMESTIC--and DEMOCRATIC!!!

How many more wars will the US have to fight on two fronts---the enemy on the battlefield and the Benedict Arnold press and democrat party here at home??

The very same democrats that claim to support our troops...but yet demean them and their mission whenever possible......the very same democrats that become "energized" and enthusiastic with BAD news out of Iraq.....and yet become very silent when there is nothing but GOOD news.

Has the surge still failed???....is General Patraeus still lying??....Is the war still lost??....

IS THE DEMOCRAT INVESTMENT IN DEFEAT STILL GOING TO PAY OFF??

It has become more blatant and evident...now more than ever....there are those that support the troops...and then there are those that vote democrat.

Chef · #2 (**permalink**) 06-03-2008, 08:01 AM

The libs on here are still going to come back and say that we lost and deserve to die and ect, ect....................................

The fact is The dems are losing and if they bring up anything good it goes against what they believe and have preached.

libs suck

A. Crowley · #3 (**permalink**) 06-03-2008, 08:17 AM

YouTube - Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) Chastises Bill Clinton

Stupid fucking retard bitches.

Chef · #4 (**permalink**) 06-03-2008, 11:44 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by A. Crowley

YouTube - Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) Chastises Bill Clinton

Stupid fucking retard bitches.

Thanks for admitting that you are crowley.

steve k · #5 (**permalink**) 06-04-2008, 08:06 AM

OPINION
Why We Went to Iraq
By FOUAD AJAMI
June 4, 2008

Of all that has been written about the play of things in Iraq, nothing that I have seen approximates the truth of what our ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, recently said of this war: "In the end, how we leave and what we leave behind will be more important than how we came."

It is odd, then, that critics have launched a new attack on the origins of the war at precisely the time a new order in Iraq is taking hold. But American liberal opinion is obsessive today. Scott McClellan can't be accused of strategic thinking, but he has been anointed a peer of Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft. A witness and a presumed insider – a "Texas loyalist" – has "flipped."

Mr. McClellan wades into the deep question of whether this war was a war of "necessity" or a war of "choice." He does so in the sixth year of the war, at a time when many have forgotten what was thought and said before its onset. The nation was gripped by legitimate concern over gathering dangers in the aftermath of 9/11. Kabul and the war against the Taliban had not sufficed, for those were Arabs who struck America on 9/11. A war of deterrence had to be waged against Arab radicalism, and Saddam Hussein had drawn the short straw. He had not ducked, he had not scurried for cover. He openly mocked America's grief, taunted its power.

We don't need to overwork the stereotype that Arabs understand and respond to the logic of force, but this is a region sensitive to the wind, and to the will of outside powers. Before America struck into Iraq, a mere 18 months after 9/11, there had been glee in the Arab world, a sense that America had gotten its comeuppance. There were regimes hunkering down, feigning friendship with America while aiding and abetting the forces of terror.

Liberal opinion in America and Europe may have scoffed when President Bush drew a strict moral line between order and radicalism – he even inserted into the political vocabulary the unfashionable notion of evil – but this sort of clarity is in the nature of things in that Greater Middle East. It is in categories of good and evil that men and women in those lands describe their world. The unyielding campaign waged by this president made a deep impression on them.

Nowadays, we hear many who have never had a kind word to say about the Iraq War pronounce on the retreat of the jihadists. It is as though the Islamists had gone back to their texts and returned with second thoughts about their violent utopia. It is as though the financiers and the "charities" that aided the terror had reconsidered their loyalties and opted out of that sly, cynical trade. Nothing could be further from the truth. If Islamism is on the ropes, if the regimes in the saddle in key Arab states now show greater resolve in taking on the forces of radicalism, no small credit ought to be given to this American project in Iraq.

We should give the "theorists" of terror their due and read them with some discernment. To a man, they have told us that they have been bloodied in Iraq, that they have been surprised by the stoicism of the Americans, by the staying power of the Bush administration.

There is no way of convincing a certain segment of opinion that there are indeed wars of "necessity." A case can always be made that an aggressor ought to be given what he seeks, that the costs of war are prohibitively high when measured against the murky ways of peace and of daily life.

"Wars are not self-starting," the noted philosopher Michael Walzer wrote in his seminal book, "Just and Unjust Wars." "They may 'break out,' like an accidental fire, under conditions difficult to analyze and where the attribution of responsibility seems impossible. But usually they are more like arson than accident: war has human agents as well as human victims."

Fair enough. In the narrow sense of command and power, this war in Iraq is Mr. Bush's war. But it is an evasion of responsibility to leave this war at his doorstep. This was a war fought with congressional authorization, with the warrant of popular acceptance, and the sanction of United Nations resolutions which called for Iraq's disarmament. It is the political good fortune (in the world of Democratic Party activists) that Sen. Barack Obama was spared the burden of a vote in the United States Senate to authorize the war. By his telling, he would have us believe that he would have cast a vote against it. But there is no sure way of knowing whether he would have stood up to the wind.

With the luxury of hindsight, the critics of the war now depict the arguments made for it as a case of manipulation and deceit. This is odd and misplaced: The claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were to prove incorrect, but they were made in good faith.

It is also obtuse and willful to depict in dark colors the effort made to "sell" the war. Wars can't be waged in stealth, and making the moral case for them is an obligation incumbent on the leaders who launch them. If anything, there were stretches of time, and critical turning points, when the administration abdicated the fight for public opinion.

Nor is there anything unprecedented, or particularly dishonest, about the way the rationale for the war shifted when the hunt for weapons of mass destruction had run aground. True, the goal of a democratic Iraq – and the broader agenda of the war as a spearhead of "reform" in Arab and Muslim lands – emerged a year or so after the onset of the war. But the aims of practically every war always shift with the course of combat, and with historical circumstances. Need we recall that the abolition of slavery had not been an "original" war aim, and that the Emancipation Proclamation was, by Lincoln's own admission, a product of circumstances? A war for the Union had become a victory for abolitionism.

America had not been prepared for nation-building in Iraq; we had not known Iraq and Iraqis or understood the depth of Iraq's breakdown. But there was nothing so startling or unusual about the connection George W. Bush made between American security and the "reform" of the Arab condition. As America's pact with the Arab autocrats had hatched a monster, it was logical and prudent to look for a new way.

"When a calf falls, a thousand knives flash," goes an Arabic proverb. The authority of this administration is ebbing away, the war in Iraq is unloved, and even the "loyalists" now see these years of panic and peril as a time of exaggerated fear.

It is not easy to tell people of threats and dangers they have been spared. The war put on notice regimes and conspirators who had harbored dark thoughts about America and who, in the course of the 1990s, were led to believe that terrible deeds against America would go unpunished. A different lesson was taught in Iraq. Nowadays, the burden of the war, in blood and treasure, is easy to see, while the gains, subtle and real, are harder to demonstrate. Last month, American casualties in Iraq were at their lowest since 2003. The Sunnis also have broken with al Qaeda, and the Shiite-led government has taken the war to the Mahdi Army: Is it any wonder that the critics have returned to the origins of the war?

Five months from now, the American public will vote on this war, in the most dramatic and definitive of ways. There will be people who heed Ambassador Crocker's admonition. And there will be others keen on retelling how we made our way to Iraq.

Mr. Ajami, a Bradley Prize recipient, teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of "The Foreigner's Gift" (Free Press, 2006).

Heckler · #6 (**permalink**) 06-04-2008, 08:13 AM

Really? Didn't pay much attention again Big Moth?

There were reports from Iraq that I saw last night.

Another Pyrrhic Victory for the right eh?

StormanNorman · #7 (**permalink**) 06-04-2008, 09:53 AM

The "Surge" in troops to Iraq has little if anything to do with the recent drop in violence. The violence has dropped for mainly three reasons...
1) A change in US tactics by General Patraeus where he dispersed and positioned (permanently) US forces throughout the troubled areas.
2) Iraq has become very segregated; the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds no longer live in the same neighborhoods; in fact, many of those neighborhoods are now walled off from one another inside Baghdad. And with that has come a drop in sectarian violence...."out of site, out of mind."
3) General Patraeus and US commanders made the bold step of sitting down and negotiating with the Sunni Sheiks and tribal leaders in Al Anbar and Western Iraq.....the very same individuals responsible for the majority or US troop fatalities in Iraq (very un-Bush like to negotiate with "terrorists" when you think about it). Instead of battling the Sunnis, we are now working with them to go after a common enemy....Al Qaeda.

All of these changes in tactics were absolutely necessary and long overdue; General Patraeus and the Bush Administration really had no choice. The violence was spiraling out of control in January 2007 and it had to be thwarted first and foremost.

However, I don't know if I buy Badmutha's simple partisan chants of "victory" and "winning", etc. This thing in Iraq is far more complicated than that....quite a bit more complicated than the simple black and white, victory/defeat cheerleading. Are we going to achieve are primary goals that we had when we invaded Iraq in March 2003, that is, the creation of a strong, unified, very pro-US, democratic Iraq? I have some serious doubts regarding all of these qualifiers. And I can't see any of them coming to fruition...at least, at the current time.

TwinkieGorilla · #8 (**permalink**) 06-04-2008, 09:57 AM

I can only hope we remain until the last man is dead. I mean, American AND Iraqi.

justme · #9 (**permalink**) 06-04-2008, 10:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by StormanNorman

The "Surge" in troops to Iraq has little if anything to do with the recent drop in violence. The violence has dropped for mainly three reasons...
1) A change in US tactics by General Patraeus where he dispersed and positioned (permanently) US forces throughout the troubled areas.
2) Iraq has become very segregated; the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds no longer live in the same neighborhoods; in fact, many of those neighborhoods are now walled off from one another inside Baghdad. And with that has come a drop in sectarian violence...."out of site, out of mind."
3) General Patraeus and US commanders made the bold step of sitting down and negotiating with the Sunni Sheiks and tribal leaders in Al Anbar and Western Iraq.....the very same individuals responsible for the majority or US troop fatalities in Iraq (very un-Bush like to negotiate with "terrorists" when you think about it). Instead of battling the Sunnis, we are now working with them to go after a common enemy....Al Qaeda.

All of these changes in tactics were absolutely necessary and long overdue; General Patraeus and the Bush Administration really had no choice. The violence was spiraling out of control in January 2007 and it had to be thwarted first and foremost.

However, I don't know if I buy Badmutha's simple partisan chants of "victory" and "winning", etc. This thing in Iraq is far more complicated than that....quite a bit more complicated than the simple black and white, victory/defeat cheerleading. Are we going to achieve are primary goals that we had when we invaded Iraq in March 2003, that is, the creation of a strong, unified, very pro-US, democratic Iraq? I have some serious doubts regarding all of these qualifiers. And I can't see any of them coming to fruition...at least, at the current time.

Mornin' norman...as usual, I respect your views on the military and Iraq as being your true thoughts and not those you copied from some website.
I'm not sure what "victory" is anymore and I don't see a pro-US democracy in Iraq anytime soon.
However, this statement..." 1) A change in US tactics by General Patraeus where he dispersed and positioned (permanently) US forces throughout the troubled areas."...seems to be a little partisan spin when used to downplay the surge effect.

The statement below was made describing the intent of the surge.

"...specifically called for a "large and sustained surge of U.S. forces to secure and protect critical areas of Baghdad" with "a surge of at least 30,000 combat troops..."

The other reasons you give no doubt have contributed. But it would seem all the measures complement each other. To say the surge has little to do with the drop in violence just doesn't ring true.

StormanNorman · #10 (**permalink**) 06-04-2008, 10:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by justme

Mornin' norman...as usual, I respect your views on the military and Iraq as being your true thoughts and not those you copied from some website.
I'm not sure what "victory" is anymore and I don't see a pro-US democracy in Iraq anytime soon.
However, this statement..." 1) A change in US tactics by General Patraeus where he dispersed and positioned (permanently) US forces throughout the troubled areas."...seems to be a little partisan spin when used to downplay the surge effect.

The statement below was made describing the intent of the surge.

"...specifically called for a "large and sustained surge of U.S. forces to secure and protect critical areas of Baghdad" with "a surge of at least 30,000 combat troops..."

The other reasons you give no doubt have contributed. But it would seem all the measures complement each other. To say the surge has little to do with the drop in violence just doesn't ring true.

Hi justme,

Maybe I'm downplaying the additional 30K troops too much. However, from a mathematical perspective, I can't see how going from 140K to 170K troops in a country of 20+ million people or a city of 6+ million can really make much of a difference...if any...at least, by itself. I think the three reasons I cited above (maybe combine #1 with the additional troops) have had a far bigger impact on the violence in Iraq.