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Iraq: What would happen if the U.S. won war?


Karlis

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Do the "back-room powers" control the USA media to such an extent as implied below?

Or, is there another explanation?

Karlis

-=-=-=-

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, July 07, 2008 4:20 PM PT

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.a...300324023809577

Iraq: What would happen if the U.S. won a war but the media didn't tell the American public? Apparently, we have to rely on a British newspaper for the news that we've defeated the last remnants of al-Qaida in Iraq.

London's Sunday Times called it "the culmination of one of the most spectacular victories of the war on terror." A terrorist force that once numbered more than 12,000, with strongholds in the west and central regions of Iraq, has over two years been reduced to a mere 1,200 fighters, backed against the wall in the northern city of Mosul.

The destruction of al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI) is one of the most unlikely and unforeseen events in the long history of American warfare. We can thank President Bush's surge strategy, in which he bucked both Republican and Democratic leaders in Washington by increasing our forces there instead of surrendering.

We can also thank the leadership of the new general he placed in charge there, David Petraeus, who may be the foremost expert in the world on counter-insurgency warfare. And we can thank those serving in our military in Iraq who engaged local Iraqi tribal leaders and convinced them America was their friend and AQI their enemy.

Al-Qaida's loss of the hearts and minds of ordinary Iraqis began in Anbar Province, which had been written off as a basket case, and spread out from there.

Now, in Operation Lion's Roar the Iraqi army and the U.S. 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment is destroying the fraction of terrorists who are left. More than 1,000 AQI operatives have already been apprehended.

Sunday Times reporter Marie Colvin, traveling with Iraqi forces in Mosul, found little AQI presence even in bullet-ridden residential areas that were once insurgency strongholds, and reported that the terrorists have lost control of its Mosul urban base, with what is left of the organization having fled south into the countryside.

Meanwhile, the State Department reports that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government has achieved "satisfactory" progress on 15 of the 18 political benchmarks — a big change for the better from a year ago.

Things are going so well that Maliki has even for the first time floated the idea of a timetable for withdrawal of American forces. He did so while visiting the United Arab Emirates, which over the weekend announced that it was forgiving almost $7 billion of debt owed by Baghdad — an impressive vote of confidence from a fellow Arab state in the future of a free Iraq.

But where are the headlines and the front-page stories about all this good news? As the Media Research Center pointed out last week, "the CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News and CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 were silent Tuesday night about the benchmarks" that signaled political progress.

The war in Iraq has been turned around 180 degrees both militarily and politically because the president stuck to his guns. Yet apart from IBD, Fox News Channel and parts of the foreign press, the media don't seem to consider this historic event a big story.

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It's because many people, ( including much news media ), would like to see the war in Iraq fail. They actually hate the Bush administration that much.

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Perhaps they haven't reported it because of all the times "we've won" or "the tide has turned" before. That article, besides having an incredibly clear bias in favor of the Bush administration, was also posted over a month ago (July 7th). The media's bias is not so bad as to simply ignore an event for weeks that would draw in thousands of viewers. My guess why this isn't (or should I say wasn't) bigger news: the report jumped the gun again and things really aren't getting better, or at least not to the degree that article wants us to think.

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You can't trust the media because it is controlled especially in regards to TV.

People are only hear what they want you to hear.

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The US will NEVER win that war. They're not fighting an army, they're fighting the entire population of a country.

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The US will NEVER win that war. They're not fighting an army, they're fighting the entire population of a country.

So, why is the entire population then boming itself in public market??? :blink:

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So, why is the entire population then boming itself in public market??? :blink:

Because of religious differences and centuries of bad blood between the different sects in the area.

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All it takes really is one bomb and then the media will jump on it.

Then they will break their silence and say that we are not makign any progress and the insurgents are close to victory.

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Because of religious differences and centuries of bad blood between the different sects in the area.

They do have an elected government, so what do you call those who bomb othesr? It's nothing like the entire Iraqi population are just throwing grenades at each other daily, you seem to be listening and giving in to those who uses bomb on public markets.

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you know -- the best advice given to the Iraq war was given by Cheney himself-

Dick Cheney, DoveMore on why Bush père's defense secretary didn't want to go to Baghdad.

By Timothy Noah

Posted Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2002, at 7:53 PM ET

Violating a core precept of journalism, Chatterbox put the most interesting part of yesterday's item at the bottom. It was a Dick Cheney quote that Patrick Tyler included in a New York Times story published April 13, 1991, a little more than a month after the shooting stopped in the Gulf war. The quote was interesting because it examined hard questions about overthrowing Saddam Hussein that James Fallows addresses in the November Atlantic Monthly—questions that Cheney (then defense secretary, now vice president) no longer shows the slightest interest in as the nation prepares to go to war with Iraq once again. Violating another core precept of journalism, Chatterbox will repeat the Cheney quote in full:

If you're going to go in and try to topple Saddam Hussein, you have to go to Baghdad. Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with it. It's not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that's currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility is that government going to have if it's set up by the United States military when it's there? How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?

Now, you might argue that Cheney was just being a loyal Cabinet member, advancing arguments of his commander in chief that he didn't particularly agree with. The trouble with this interpretation is that Cheney expressed similar sentiments five years later in a Gulf War documentary produced for PBS's Frontline. Describing the decision to end the war on Feb. 27, 1991—a cease-fire took effect the next day, and for the most part the United States stuck with it—Cheney said:

A: [T]here was no sense, I don't believe on the part of any of us who were there that day that there was any disagreement with this approach. There might have been some different views down further in the ranks—General McCaffrey and the guys in the 24th fought a major engagement the day after the cease-fire obviously against a brigade of Iraqi Republican Guard. But there was no sense at that time that there was any different point of view that we ought to keep the conflict going much longer. …

Q: You were comfortable personally with this?

A: I was.

[…]

[A few weeks later, when the uprisings occurred among the Shi'a in the South and the Kurds in the North,] I was not an enthusiast about getting U.S. forces and going into Iraq. We were there in the southern part of Iraq to the extent we needed to be there to defeat his forces and to get him out of Kuwait, but the idea of going into Baghdad, for example, or trying to topple the regime wasn't anything I was enthusiastic about. I felt there was a real danger here that you would get bogged down in a long drawn-out conflict, that this was a dangerous, difficult part of the world; if you recall we were all worried about the possibility of Iraq coming apart, the Iranians restarting the conflict that they'd had in the eight-year bloody war with the Iranians and the Iraqis over eastern Iraq. We had concerns about the Kurds in the north, the Turks get very nervous every time we start to talk about an independent Kurdistan.

Plus there was the notion that you were going to set yourself a new war aim that we hadn't talked to anybody about. That you hadn't gotten Congress to approve, hadn't talked to the American people about. You're going to find yourself in a situation where you've redefined your war aims and now set up a new war aim that in effect would detract from the enormous success you just had. What we set out to do was to liberate Kuwait and to destroy his offensive capability, that's what I said repeatedly in my public statements. That was the mission I was given by the President. That's what we did. Now you can say, well, you should have gone to Baghdad and gotten Saddam. I don't think so. [italics Chatterbox's.] I think if we had done that we would have been bogged down there for a very long period of time with the real possibility we might not have succeeded.

In the 1996 interview, Cheney actually managed to out-dove today's liberals who oppose going to war (by now, you should remember, Cheney was chairman of Halliburton, an oil-drilling company that did extensive business in the Islamic world) by suggesting that Saddam's ouster would have little beneficial effect:

f Saddam wasn't there, his successor probably wouldn't be notably friendlier to the United States than he is. I also look at that part of the world as of vital interest to the United States; for the next hundred years it's going to be the world's supply of oil. We've got a lot of friends in the region. We're always going to have to be involved there. Maybe it's part of our national character, you know, we like to have these problems nice and neatly wrapped up, put a ribbon around it. You deploy a force, you win the war, and the problem goes away, and it doesn't work that way in the Middle East; it never has and isn't likely to in my lifetime [italics Chatterbox's].

Now, Chatterbox won't dispute that life has changed in many ways since 1991. Back then, it seemed reasonable to assume that Saddam had no future in Iraq. By 1996, though, it was clear that Saddam had consolidated his power. He hadn't yet expelled the U.N. weapons inspectors—that occurred two years later—but he wasn't being especially cooperative, either. Why was invading Iraq at the bottom of Cheney's agenda back then, but at the top of it now?

http://www.slate.com/id/2072609/

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Its hard to win an occupation. If you mean they complteley wipe out all terrorists groups that are working in the country... well, that could only be measured by how far the country, infastructure and security have gone. Things have improved greatly, but as long as some people are still afriad to walk their streets, the job ain't dun.

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They do have an elected government, so what do you call those who bomb othesr? It's nothing like the entire Iraqi population are just throwing grenades at each other daily, you seem to be listening and giving in to those who uses bomb on public markets.

Most of the Iraqi population has been ethnically cleansed and segregated to Shiite and Sunni neighborhoods.

Just because a nation has an elected government doesn't mean people can't hate one another... All attacks on the civilian populace by other civilians are due to religious fundamentalism.

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Most of the Iraqi population has been ethnically cleansed and segregated to Shiite and Sunni neighborhoods.

Just because a nation has an elected government doesn't mean people can't hate one another... All attacks on the civilian populace by other civilians are due to religious fundamentalism.

I believe most of the Iraqis wants to live in peace and does not care much about their differences, and all the killings and damage is being done by a few extremist wackos.

So you either give into them or insist on coexisting.

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'The Sunday Times' isn't that owned by Rupert Murdoch (nuff said)

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I believe most of the Iraqis wants to live in peace and does not care much about their differences, and all the killings and damage is being done by a few extremist wackos.

So you either give into them or insist on coexisting.

Its probably those extremists that keep tensions high and keep each sect hating each other for what each sides' extremists do.

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I believe most of the Iraqis wants to live in peace and does not care much about their differences, and all the killings and damage is being done by a few extremist wackos.

So you either give into them or insist on coexisting.

You're right a majority of the Iraqi population want peace. All the killings in Iraq aren't just by only a few people, Islam is the type of religion that nurtures violent extremism.

In regards to co-existence however this is an impossibility in a place like Iraq.... The Muslim faith in all it's forms is different then other religions in this regard, they grow up and are taught to hate people from the other sects, this is why we have the problems today we do and why using military force alone cannot accomplish the task of unification.

You can occupy a nation and pay off sides to not kill one another off but in the end these tactics will fail.

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You're right a majority of the Iraqi population want peace. All the killings in Iraq aren't just by only a few people, Islam is the type of religion that nurtures violent extremism.

In regards to co-existence however this is an impossibility in a place like Iraq.... The Muslim faith in all it's forms is different then other religions in this regard, they grow up and are taught to hate people from the other sects, this is why we have the problems today we do and why using military force alone cannot accomplish the task of unification.

You can occupy a nation and pay off sides to not kill one another off but in the end these tactics will fail.

You've got that right at least.

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Baghdad used to be heavily Sunni . now it's mostly Shia . The Shia which makes up about 80% of the population expelled or killed the Sunni. Before the war Sunni and Sh'ia lived side by side . intermarried . ect.......... now it's civil war with a cease fire.

Shi'ites, Sunnis in Baghdad Swap Homes to Avoid Violence

By Deborah Block

Baghdad

15 February 2008

Thousands of people who fled Iraq because of sectarian violence, after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, have been returning in recent months. But the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees says 2.5 million people are still living outside Iraq and two million others are displaced within the country. VOA's Deborah Block spoke to displaced people in a Baghdad neighborhood who say Shi'ite and Sunni fighters have used sectarian differences to drive people from their homes and separate Shi'ites and Sunnis who once lived together.

http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/200...FTOKEN=49040079

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such a christian right thing to say.

No, its just common sense. Islam can be easily skewed, and people find it easy to justify violence with it. If big M were around he would have none of this crap (and mabey a few sects wouldn't exist eh)..

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'The Sunday Times' isn't that owned by Rupert Murdoch (nuff said)

Well, it's a UM item then, good for entertainment. :tu:

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The main stream media is DOMINATED by liberal partisan hacks who will bury any story that makes the US, Bush or the Republicans look good. Perhaps NBC is the worst, as they are clearly in the tank for Obama.

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Its probably those extremists that keep tensions high and keep each sect hating each other for what each sides' extremists do.

Oh definitely, they are the ones recruting those as young as possible and teach them how to hate.

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You're right a majority of the Iraqi population want peace. All the killings in Iraq aren't just by only a few people, Islam is the type of religion that nurtures violent extremism.

In regards to co-existence however this is an impossibility in a place like Iraq.... The Muslim faith in all it's forms is different then other religions in this regard, they grow up and are taught to hate people from the other sects, this is why we have the problems today we do and why using military force alone cannot accomplish the task of unification.

You can occupy a nation and pay off sides to not kill one another off but in the end these tactics will fail.

Oh no, if you root out the trouble makers and just let people live together those differences will fade eventually, there will be inter marriage, friendship established, trade and commerce eventually will erase those differences.

But you have to figth for it first.

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Oh no, if you root out the trouble makers and just let people live together those differences will fade eventually, there will be inter marriage, friendship established, trade and commerce eventually will erase those differences.

But you have to figth for it first.

It is a truism that children do what they are taught to do. In the case of these religious wars, they are taught to hate others. Remove the source of those teaching and children will learn other ways to deal with other religions. I personally like the live-and-let-live philosophy.

I'm all about victory through westernization. My personal plan of attack would have been to bombard the Middle East with easily hideable 1 inch T.V.s and set up a satellite to beam American T.V. at them 24/7. Within two years we would have seen the young rebel against those who want them to become fundamentalist. "You suck, dad! I'm going to live with mom! She never straps dynamite to my chest!" It is a truism that no two countries with McDonalds have ever gone to war with each other.

But we will always have troops there. Sooner or later it will decrease, but there will always be a military presence, just as one remains in Japan even today.

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