and when you become a retired terrorist, do they have a pension plan? do they have dental?
No, Al Qaeda isn't up on that "Western" type of labor-management relationship stuff.
And again, quit being lazy. I said their names. Go look on the internet. Here's an article "Study Cites Seed of Terror in Iraq" Boston Globe 7/17/05. If I keep on doing all your work for you I'm going to star asking for a pension and dental plan from you!
Holy crap....you're teaching our kids this shit!!!
Yeah, I know a couple kids from Yemen and a girl from Lebanon. All of them are Muslims. Maybe I should ask them whether they or anyone in their family has killed anyone and whether they know any suicide bombers because according to you, that's what Muslim society is all about.
Has there ever been a Muslim based society that hasn't had war, assasinations and massive killings within itself??
Holy crap....you're teaching our kids this shit!!!
Yeah, I know a couple kids from Yemen and a girl from Lebanon. All of them are Muslims. Maybe I should ask them whether they or anyone in their family has killed anyone and whether they know any suicide bombers because according to you, that's what Muslim society is all about.
Has there ever been a Muslim based society that hasn't had war, assasinations and massive killings within itself??
Do you scold your students for asking questions too??
Holy crap....you're teaching our kids this shit!!!
Yeah, I know a couple kids from Yemen and a girl from Lebanon. All of them are Muslims. Maybe I should ask them whether they or anyone in their family has killed anyone and whether they know any suicide bombers because according to you, that's what Muslim society is all about.
Has there ever been a Muslim based society that hasn't had war, assasinations and massive killings within itself??
Do you scold your students for asking questions too??
according to them, the "moderates" aren't very vocal about their dissaproval of such things
Holy crap....you're teaching our kids this shit!!!
Yeah, I know a couple kids from Yemen and a girl from Lebanon. All of them are Muslims. Maybe I should ask them whether they or anyone in their family has killed anyone and whether they know any suicide bombers because according to you, that's what Muslim society is all about.
Has there ever been a Muslim based society that hasn't had war, assasinations and massive killings within itself??
Do you scold your students for asking questions too??
I've really been scolding you haven't I? I've given a ton of info and facts. Given some of my own analysis. Gave some suggestions. Where's the scolding?
Holy crap....you're teaching our kids this shit!!!
Yeah, I know a couple kids from Yemen and a girl from Lebanon. All of them are Muslims. Maybe I should ask them whether they or anyone in their family has killed anyone and whether they know any suicide bombers because according to you, that's what Muslim society is all about.
Has there ever been a Muslim based society that hasn't had war, assasinations and massive killings within itself??
Do you scold your students for asking questions too??
I've really been scolding you haven't I? I've given a ton of info and facts. Given some of my own analysis. Gave some suggestions. Where's the scolding?
No...but twice you claimed that my obvious questions, that were ended with a ?, were "statements"....are you an English teacher??
Holy crap....you're teaching our kids this shit!!!
Yeah, I know a couple kids from Yemen and a girl from Lebanon. All of them are Muslims. Maybe I should ask them whether they or anyone in their family has killed anyone and whether they know any suicide bombers because according to you, that's what Muslim society is all about.
Has there ever been a Muslim based society that hasn't had war, assasinations and massive killings within itself??
Do you scold your students for asking questions too??
I've really been scolding you haven't I? I've given a ton of info and facts. Given some of my own analysis. Gave some suggestions. Where's the scolding?
No...but twice you claimed that my obvious questions, that were ended with a ?, were "statements"....are you an English teacher??
Yes, that's obviously scolding on my part. I need to watch my punctuation more closely.
Mo, I gotta say....the fact that within 24 hours, you've taken two quotes from my posts and called them statements when they were clearly questions makes me wonder about all that info you compile!!
Mo, I gotta say....the fact that within 24 hours, you've taken two quotes from my posts and called them statements when they were clearly questions makes me wonder about all that info you compile!!
Do I have to put smiley faces next to things that I'm not serious about or what????
U.S. Officers In Iraq Put Priority on Extremists Hussein Loyalists Not Seen as Greatest Threat
By Bradley Graham Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, May 9, 2005
Previously, U.S. authorities have depicted the insurgency as being dominated largely by what the Pentagon has dubbed "former regime elements" -- a combination of onetime Baath Party loyalists and Iraqi military and security service officers intent on restoring Sunni rule. But since the Jan. 30 elections, this segment of the insurgency has appeared to pull back from the fight, at least for a while, reassessing strategies and exploring a possible political deal with the new government, senior U.S. officers here say.
Acting on the assumption that foreign fighters and Iraqi extremists may now pose the greater and more immediate threat to security in Iraq, U.S. commanders have given orders in recent days to reposition some U.S. ground forces and intelligence assets in northwestern Iraq to further fortify the border with Syria and block suspected infiltration routes. They are also stepping up efforts to go after leading bomb-makers and key organizers of the suicide attacks.
In interviews, several commanders and intelligence officers cautioned that their shift was still tentative and based more on fragmentary information and intuition than on solid, specific evidence. They said assessments differed among U.S. intelligence specialists.
But supporting the impression that a harder-core insurgent element has become more important, the officers say, is the fact that suicide missions have become more frequent and more ruthless -- many have been positioned and timed to kill civilians as well as Iraqi security forces. U.S. and Iraqi authorities say suicide drivers are invariably foreign fighters. Officers here said they knew of no documented case in which a suicide attacker turned out to have been an Iraqi.
A recent U.S. intelligence estimate also shows an increase last month in the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq, according to several officers familiar with it.
"There seems to be an increasing foreign element to the insurgency," said Army Gen. George Casey, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq.[/b]
Here, I can cunt-paste too, and right out of your own source.
Dr. Reuven Paz was born in Israel, and received his Masters and Doctorate degrees from Haifa University, in the History of the Middle East. His fields of expertise include: Palestinian society and politics; the Arab minority in Israel; Islam and Islamic movements in the Arab and Muslim world; Islamic Fundamentalism; Islamist international terrorist networks; and Communist parties in the Arab world. Paz has worked for the Israel General Security Service as head of the research department, lectured at Haifa University, and been the Academic Director of The International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT), a part of the Interdisciplinary center (IDC) Herzliya in Israel. Currently he is Senior research fellow at ICT and Director of The Project for the Research of Islamist Movements at the GLORIA Center, IDC Herzliya.
Paz' publications include 21 academic articles in the fields of Palestinian society and politics, the Israeli Arabs and Palestinian and Arab Islamic movements, Islamic movements and anti-Semitism, and Islamist international networks; 20 articles on various issues in the field of terrorist groups and Islamist terrorism, to be found on the ICT website ??? www.ict.org.il, and 10 short articles on various issues on the Middle East published by The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Washington, D.C.
His books include one in Hebrew on the religious legitimacy of the suicide operations in Islam, October 1998, by Dayan Center, Tel-Aviv University; another entitled "The Anti-Judaism of Radical Islamic Movements" (forthcoming); and a third in press entitled Tangled Web: International Islamist Networking (The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2002)
He's an academic, probably a lefty then and cannot be trusted.
NAWAF OBAID is a Saudi National Security and Intelligence consultant based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He is currently the Director of the Saudi National Security Assessment Project. He is a former senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP).
He's a Saudi. Didn't Bin Laden come from Saudi Arabia?
His report was "Saudi Militants in Iraq: Assessment and Kingdom's Response"was co-written by Anthony Cordelsman.
Dr. Cordesman is a senior fellow in strategic assessment and the Arleigh Burke chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., as well as a military analyst for ABC. He has held senior posts in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Departments of State and Energy, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and he has been the assistant for national security to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.). He has served in the Middle East, Great Britain, and in Nato headquarters and has been international editor of Armed Forces Journal and U.S. editor of Armed Forces. His most recent books are Peace and War: The Arab-Israeli Military Balance Enters the 21st Century, The Lessons and Non-Lessons of the Air and Missile Campaign in Kosovo, and A Tragedy of Arms: Military and Security Developments in the Maghreb (all published in 2001).
Nawaf Obaid is a Saudi national security and intelligence consultant based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He is currently the managing director of the Saudi National Security Assessment Project. He is also an adjunct fellow in the Office of the Arleigh Burke Chair in Strategy at CSIS. Previously, he was a research fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He was also the project director for a major study on Sino-Saudi energy rapprochement and its implications for U.S. national security, conducted for the director of net assessments in the Office of U.S. Secretary of Defense. His articles and opinion pieces have appeared in newspapers such as the Washington Post, New York Times, Financial Times, and International Herald Tribune. He is the author of The Oil Kingdom at 100: Petroleum Policymaking in Saudi Arabia (Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2000) and coauthor, with Anthony H. Cordesman, of National Security in Saudi Arabia: Threats, Responses, and Challenges (Praeger/CSIS, forthcoming). Mr. Obaid received a B.S. from Georgetown University???s School of Foreign Service, an M.A. from Harvard University???s Kennedy School of Government, and completed doctoral courses at MIT???s Security Studies Program.
He went to all those elite Eastern schools. Most be a softy.
I would be happy to start from whatever date you want to throw in (even though Islamicized terrorism, as opposed to Arab/Palenstinian nationalist terror, in the West really begins in earnest with the revolution in Iran).
Either Munich Olympics or the 79 Iranian Revolution.
So you are saying that the increase in deadliness and frequency of the attacks is just part of the normal progression of terrorism since some point in time which we have not yet established?
yes. in large part, coupled with the lack of a resolute American response.
Oh and just a point of reference the Spain and Britain attacks were not made by some goat herders from the Negev but rather by city dwellers some of whom were citizens of the countries they attacked.
We can talk about how fucked Europe is going to be in the next 25 years in another post.
you would make a good lawyer because you're always trying to get me to commit to your paraphrasing what I say, only a little differently.
Hey Sababaloo where the hell is your homework? I told you to get cracking on the that pre-war intelligence. Plus, I'd like a full report on the neo-Con's exile era writings on Iraq and the spread of democracy through war. Oh wait you don't do research. Time for more...........
BTW I have been told many times to that I should have been a lawyer including by my lawyer father-in-law, who, while a very nice person, doesn't really do his research either. Anyway, I am too busy enjoying building a real estate development business to be sitting at some coroporate desk 100 hours a week, kissing some partner's ass so I can make 150k and live in a building with a doorman. Fuck that nonsense.
Oh shit, I forgot to respond to your response. You second statement about "a lack of resolute American response". Should Bush be doing more? Or has he upped the ante enough for you yet? Oh and let me remind you that there are plenty of Americans who were pissed off enough by what is happening in the Middle East that they got involved with the jihadists nutsos too. We're just lucky they weren't too organized or bright. So don't think that Europe is the only place facing internal problems.
U.S. Officers In Iraq Put Priority on Extremists Hussein Loyalists Not Seen as Greatest Threat
By Bradley Graham Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, May 9, 2005
"There seems to be an increasing foreign element to the insurgency," said Army Gen. George Casey, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq.[/b]
Here, I can cunt-paste too, and right out of your own source.
Rockadelic, the war in Iraq IS creating a new generation of Americans. Fucking defensive idiots by the look of things. Isn't the Washington Post is a Republican microphone? Sabablababber, your computer might block porn, but your brain is blocking infomation.
Motown, it's all up hill work. Glad some of America seems to give a shit about the wider consequences of invasion, sorry to see that explaining the situation is being interpretted as apologising for terrorism.
U.S. Officers In Iraq Put Priority on Extremists Hussein Loyalists Not Seen as Greatest Threat
By Bradley Graham Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, May 9, 2005
Previously, U.S. authorities have depicted the insurgency as being dominated largely by what the Pentagon has dubbed "former regime elements" -- a combination of onetime Baath Party loyalists and Iraqi military and security service officers intent on restoring Sunni rule. But since the Jan. 30 elections, this segment of the insurgency has appeared to pull back from the fight, at least for a while, reassessing strategies and exploring a possible political deal with the new government, senior U.S. officers here say.
Acting on the assumption that foreign fighters and Iraqi extremists may now pose the greater and more immediate threat to security in Iraq,[/b] U.S. commanders have given orders in recent days to reposition some U.S. ground forces and intelligence assets in northwestern Iraq to further fortify the border with Syria and block suspected infiltration routes. They are also stepping up efforts to go after leading bomb-makers and key organizers of the suicide attacks.
In interviews, several commanders and intelligence officers cautioned that their shift was still tentative and based more on fragmentary information and intuition than on solid, specific evidence. They said assessments differed among U.S. intelligence specialists.[/b]
But supporting the impression that a harder-core insurgent element has become more important, the officers say, is the fact that suicide missions have become more frequent and more ruthless -- many have been positioned and timed to kill civilians as well as Iraqi security forces. U.S. and Iraqi authorities say suicide drivers are invariably foreign fighters. Officers here said they knew of no documented case in which a suicide attacker turned out to have been an Iraqi.
A recent U.S. intelligence estimate also shows an increase last month in the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq, according to several officers familiar with it.
"There seems to be an increasing foreign element to the insurgency," said Army Gen. George Casey, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq.[/b]
Here, I can cunt-paste too, and right out of your own source.
Now, see if someone else had posted an article, Sabada would point out these kinds of things. But since he found it himself he probably didn't read it, or perhaps just scanned it. "Acting on the assumption," "Still tentative and based more on fragmentary information and intuition than on solid, specific evidence." But hey it comes from the Washington Post. Everything in the media is liberal biased unless its the Weekly Standard or the Washington Times. Oh wait, those are magazines and newspaper, Sabada probably doesn't read those either.
i only read the parts where assumptions can be attributed to an actual individual with a name, not "several military commanders". Which allows me to discount about 90% of the WP.
i only read the parts where assumptions can be attributed to an actual individual with a name, not "several military commanders". Which allows me to discount about 90% of the WP.
Well that would mean you're discounting almost everything in your OWN article that you posted except for the last statement by Gen. Casey. I like how you undermine yourself. That's good work. Should probably stay away from the Washington Post and just about everything other newspaper, magazine, internet reporting out there because most of them just refer to groups or individuals without names. Now I see how you've become so knowledgely and wordly.
Holy crap....you're teaching our kids this shit!!!
Yeah, I know a couple kids from Yemen and a girl from Lebanon. All of them are Muslims. Maybe I should ask them whether they or anyone in their family has killed anyone and whether they know any suicide bombers because according to you, that's what Muslim society is all about.
Has there ever been a Muslim based society that hasn't had war, assasinations and massive killings within itself??
Do you scold your students for asking questions too??
I've really been scolding you haven't I? I've given a ton of info and facts. Given some of my own analysis. Gave some suggestions. Where's the scolding?
No...but twice you claimed that my obvious questions, that were ended with a ?, were "statements"....are you an English teacher??
A culture that breeds suicide bombers, kills based on religious beliefs and use a holy book as a guidebook for war is certainly difficult to co-exist with in 2005. And asking them nicely to stop, putting them into "time out" or even spanking them is not a viable solution.
Oh wait, I thought you only asked questions. My bad.
On a number of the points, I think Motown is wrong, particularly on the intelligence. For example you say that January 2003 the CIA produced a report saying that there was no connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. But the briefing Powell gave that month to the UN Security Council--prepared by the CIA and vetted of any intelligence from the neocons--included numerous connections between Iraq intel and al Qaeda. Analysts disagreed as to what all of that meant, but the meetings, movements etc. of al qaeda fighters and iraqi intel were approved by the director for central intelligence, he was sitting besides powell when he made his presentation. And on the WMD, it's one thing to say that the energy department did not think the aluminum tubes were intended for the making of a centrifuge, quite another to claim that the intelligence community doubted Saddam was building a nuclear program. Finally the Silberman Robb commission looked into the claim that the white house pressured the CIA to make judgments on the pre war intelligence and found this was completely false, after interviewing hundreds of people.
Motown is absulotely correct on the debacle of the IRaqi armed forces. These units and brigades are basically confessional militias with different uniforms, and it will take years to build a cohesive national military. I think some of the comments on the Kurds lack the proper context that under Saddam hundreds of thousands if not over a million Kurds were depopulated from the north and Kirkuk in particular, and many Kurds have legitimate claims to houses stolen from them in Kirkuk. Indeed a stronger case can be made for their "right of return" than many palestinians.
Now the parties that won in the election last month are sectarian and largely religious parties determined to assert a narrow definition of ethnic interests over the broader goal of national unity. So there is a great potential for the current dirty war to degenerate into a full blown civil war. This possibility seems even more likely in recent days with the reign of terror on Shiite communities. That said, it's very significant that Zarqawi and al Qaeda again warned Iraqis not to vote, but they voted anyway and in largest numbers from Sunni neighborhoods. And finally, just because the parties empowered by the December 15 confessional referendum/election campaigned for the supremacy of the sect they represent--it does not mean that as they are all meeting together in northern iraq and baghdad, the seeds of national government cannot be planted.
Incidentally, if some people want to argue that the failure to get oil production up to pre war levels is another reason the war sucks, that's fine. But it makes it much harder to say this war was only about siezing oil, a stupid and absurd argument anyway. As i have said from the beginning of this debate, anyone who thinks America was not intertwined in Saddam's occupation of Iraq since at least the 1980s and did not have a basic moral obligation in removing its former client from power, falls prey to the kind of reactionary amnesia so many leftists bemoan when they lose national elections.
On a number of the points, I think Motown is wrong, particularly on the intelligence. For example you say that January 2003 the CIA produced a report saying that there was no connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. But the briefing Powell gave that month to the UN Security Council--prepared by the CIA and vetted of any intelligence from the neocons--included numerous connections between Iraq intel and al Qaeda. Analysts disagreed as to what all of that meant, but the meetings, movements etc. of al qaeda fighters and iraqi intel were approved by the director for central intelligence, he was sitting besides powell when he made his presentation. And on the WMD, it's one thing to say that the energy department did not think the aluminum tubes were intended for the making of a centrifuge, quite another to claim that the intelligence community doubted Saddam was building a nuclear program. Finally the Silberman Robb commission looked into the claim that the white house pressured the CIA to make judgments on the pre war intelligence and found this was completely false, after interviewing hundreds of people.
Motown is absulotely correct on the debacle of the IRaqi armed forces. These units and brigades are basically confessional militias with different uniforms, and it will take years to build a cohesive national military. I think some of the comments on the Kurds lack the proper context that under Saddam hundreds of thousands if not over a million Kurds were depopulated from the north and Kirkuk in particular, and many Kurds have legitimate claims to houses stolen from them in Kirkuk. Indeed a stronger case can be made for their "right of return" than many palestinians.
Now the parties that won in the election last month are sectarian and largely religious parties determined to assert a narrow definition of ethnic interests over the broader goal of national unity. So there is a great potential for the current dirty war to degenerate into a full blown civil war. This possibility seems even more likely in recent days with the reign of terror on Shiite communities. That said, it's very significant that Zarqawi and al Qaeda again warned Iraqis not to vote, but they voted anyway and in largest numbers from Sunni neighborhoods. And finally, just because the parties empowered by the December 15 confessional referendum/election campaigned for the supremacy of the sect they represent--it does not mean that as they are all meeting together in northern iraq and baghdad, the seeds of national government cannot be planted.
Incidentally, if some people want to argue that the failure to get oil production up to pre war levels is another reason the war sucks, that's fine. But it makes it much harder to say this war was only about siezing oil, a stupid and absurd argument anyway. As i have said from the beginning of this debate, anyone who thinks America was not intertwined in Saddam's occupation of Iraq since at least the 1980s and did not have a basic moral obligation in removing its former client from power, falls prey to the kind of reactionary amnesia so many leftists bemoan when they lose national elections.
As to the information that was vetted by the CIA let's not forget that they were extrememly unhappy about Cheney's hijacking of the information process. Mostly, because they knew that national security interests were being overidden by neo-imperial political interests. Accordingly they handed Sy Hersh of the New Yorker tons of information about the stovepiping process and how it was clouded an already difficult assessment of Iraq's current state of affairs. The CIA voted on their confidence in the Bush team case with its leaks. As to the CIA diretor sitting next to Powell at the UN, the director, like Powell, did not really have a choice where he would be sitting. Remember that Powell, who begged for more time to use diplomatic means to resolve the problem, has since disavowed his testimony in front of the UN as a blight on his very distinguished career.
I still have not seen anything that outlines tangible evidence Saddam was in business with Qaeda or any other serious threat to our security. The cold war has shown that containment is always the best option when you are facing a dangerous enemy who has not shown the ability/willingness to strike immediately. That's exactly what is going to happen in Iran and North Korea. We are not about to invade either place even though you can credibly make the case that either could do great harm to us and our allies (certainly more than Saddam ever could). Why take this route? Because war is serious shit, invading countries means running countries afterwards. Patient, thoughtful and decisive action to limit an enemy is always the first step. Military confrontation is always reserved for immediate threat.
I think that is interesting that Sabadabaloo and Rock have not signed up to fight in Iraq. Both believe it is a just and worhtwhile war against a dangerous opponent who will stop at nothing to destroy us. Why not help with the struggle to protect the homeland? The armed services could use some dedicated souls such as yourselves. Plus, international digging opportunities abound.
It remains to be seen whether the various warring parties in Iraq can pull together a national unity gov't. With thousands of Iraqi dead last year, sectarian attacks increasing again, Kurdish chest thumping and seeming sh'ite ambivalence, I wouldn't bet on it happening any time soon.
I think that is interesting that Sabadabaloo and Rock have not signed up to fight in Iraq. Both believe it is a just and worhtwhile war against a dangerous opponent who will stop at nothing to destroy us. Why not help with the struggle to protect the homeland?
First of all I'm 48 years old.....not only can I NOT sign up, they don't want my old ass...believe me.
I'm doing my part by paying $35K+ a year in taxes, some of which I'm sure, goes to the war effort.
On a number of the points, I think Motown is wrong, particularly on the intelligence. For example you say that January 2003 the CIA produced a report saying that there was no connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. But the briefing Powell gave that month to the UN Security Council--prepared by the CIA and vetted of any intelligence from the neocons--included numerous connections between Iraq intel and al Qaeda. Analysts disagreed as to what all of that meant, but the meetings, movements etc. of al qaeda fighters and iraqi intel were approved by the director for central intelligence, he was sitting besides powell when he made his presentation. And on the WMD, it's one thing to say that the energy department did not think the aluminum tubes were intended for the making of a centrifuge, quite another to claim that the intelligence community doubted Saddam was building a nuclear program. Finally the Silberman Robb commission looked into the claim that the white house pressured the CIA to make judgments on the pre war intelligence and found this was completely false, after interviewing hundreds of people.
Motown is absulotely correct on the debacle of the IRaqi armed forces. These units and brigades are basically confessional militias with different uniforms, and it will take years to build a cohesive national military. I think some of the comments on the Kurds lack the proper context that under Saddam hundreds of thousands if not over a million Kurds were depopulated from the north and Kirkuk in particular, and many Kurds have legitimate claims to houses stolen from them in Kirkuk. Indeed a stronger case can be made for their "right of return" than many palestinians.
Now the parties that won in the election last month are sectarian and largely religious parties determined to assert a narrow definition of ethnic interests over the broader goal of national unity. So there is a great potential for the current dirty war to degenerate into a full blown civil war. This possibility seems even more likely in recent days with the reign of terror on Shiite communities. That said, it's very significant that Zarqawi and al Qaeda again warned Iraqis not to vote, but they voted anyway and in largest numbers from Sunni neighborhoods. And finally, just because the parties empowered by the December 15 confessional referendum/election campaigned for the supremacy of the sect they represent--it does not mean that as they are all meeting together in northern iraq and baghdad, the seeds of national government cannot be planted.
Incidentally, if some people want to argue that the failure to get oil production up to pre war levels is another reason the war sucks, that's fine. But it makes it much harder to say this war was only about siezing oil, a stupid and absurd argument anyway. As i have said from the beginning of this debate, anyone who thinks America was not intertwined in Saddam's occupation of Iraq since at least the 1980s and did not have a basic moral obligation in removing its former client from power, falls prey to the kind of reactionary amnesia so many leftists bemoan when they lose national elections.
Vitamin,
Great to have you back. I was going to send you a PM about how Egypt is.
Anyway, to make a couple responses.
1) The intelligence report.
The CIA made a revised report on Iraq-Al Qaeda connections in January 2003. They went over all the old claims of meetings in the 1990s, 9/11, etc. and couldn't find any connections. That was the old stuff. The new stuff they talked about was about Zarqawi's activities in Iraq and Ansar Al-Islam in Kurdish northern Iraq. In a lot of public statemnts, just like Powell's speech to the U.N. the Bush administration started calling Zarqawi and Ansar Al Qaeda.
They said that Zarqawi had been in Iraq for a while and that the government knew about it, but there were still disputes about whether he was Al Qaeda or not, but they also said that bin Laden woudn't have agreed to an alliance with Saddam.
The other new development they had intelligence on was that about 100-200 Al Qaeda fighters from Afghanistan had gone to northern Iraq and joined Ansar after the Afghan invasion. The CIA said that Baghdad probably knew about it and allowed it to happen.
Overall, their conclusion was that there wasn't an alliance with Al Qaeda though.
When Powell gave his speech to the U.N. in February the next month he included some of these claims in his speech like Zarqawi, Ansar Al-Islam, the early contacts, plus that Al Qaeda had been trained by Iraqi operatives, which I think proved out to be false later on.
Anyway, Powell said this was all proof that Iraq was connected with Al Qaeda, while the CIA report had said that they weren't.
2) The aluminum tubes.
Most of the U.S. intelligence community claimed that Iraq had renewed its nuclear program based upon some real crap intelligence work, but there were others that questioned it. So I don't think I wrote that U.S. intelligence thought he didn't have one.
3) The Iraqi security forces.
I really don't know how the U.S. thinks they're going to make that work. In Central and Southern Iraq the forces are majority Sunni and in the North they're mostly Kurds. I dont' think any training is going to get them to given up their sectarian loyalties, especially when Zarqawi is trying to start a civil war with the Shiites. The police are even worse. The U.S. still doesn't even have enough trainers for the army.
4) The new government.
The good news is that some Sunnis actually showed up at the meetings to try to get involved. At the same time some leading Shiites and especially the Kurds are talking more and more about just going their own way with their own autonomous regions. We'll see. The government that's being replaced did a pretty horrible job with security, torture, reconstruction, etc.
5) The Kurds and Kirkuk.
I don't question the fact that Kurds have a right to return to Kirkuk. I've always talked about Saddam's Arabization program. What's more problemetic to me, is the reports of them trying to get theirs now that they have more power such as focing Arabs out, arresting Sunnis, running secret detention centers, etc. Not only that, but there are news reports about the Kurds trying to lay claim to Mosul, Ibril and some other areas in northern Iraq, that will increase the Kurds vs non-Kurd disputes.
I'm going to PM you about Egypt now so check your inbox.
I should also say that there were 1 or 2 CIA reports that said that while Ansar was operating in Northern Iraq and Baghdad knew what they were doing fighting the Kurds and working with Al Qaeda, they didn't think that Baghdad was supporting them.
To me, it seems like Saddam knew that Ansar was aligned with Al Qaeda but as long as they were fighting the Kurds, he didn't care, because fighting the Kurds was all good by him. He obviously wasn't going to stop it, but I don't think that means he was actively supporting them either.
P.P.S. - None of the CIA reports included in the Senate Intelligence Committee Report from July 2003 say that Iraq had a connection with Iraq. In fact, they said they didn't. Bush and company went on and on about it however. So just because Tenet was sitting behind Powell when he gave his U.N. speech, to me means he supported everything in it. If Tenet wanted to get fired he could go and say, yeah, the president and the administration is full of shit about all this Al Qaeda stuff, but we're behind him 100% on the WMD claims. I don't think he had political suicide on his mind however.
I think that is interesting that Sabadabaloo and Rock have not signed up to fight in Iraq. Both believe it is a just and worhtwhile war against a dangerous opponent who will stop at nothing to destroy us. Why not help with the struggle to protect the homeland?
First of all I'm 48 years old.....not only can I NOT sign up, they don't want my old ass...believe me.
I'm doing my part by paying $35K+ a year in taxes, some of which I'm sure, goes to the war effort.
this is by far the stupidest argument ever. If you believe in health care for everyone then you should go to med-school, if you believe in housing for everyone, then you should be joining habitat for humanity, if you believe in lower carbon emissions then you should walk everywhere. Should I keep going?
Comments
Boston Globe? My computer blocks porn.
I gotta say....the fact that within 24 hours, you've taken two quotes from my posts and called them statements when they were clearly questions makes me wonder about all that info you compile!!
Do I have to put smiley faces next to things that I'm not serious about or what????
Hussein Loyalists Not Seen as Greatest Threat
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 9, 2005
Previously, U.S. authorities have depicted the insurgency as being dominated largely by what the Pentagon has dubbed "former regime elements" -- a combination of onetime Baath Party loyalists and Iraqi military and security service officers intent on restoring Sunni rule. But since the Jan. 30 elections, this segment of the insurgency has appeared to pull back from the fight, at least for a while, reassessing strategies and exploring a possible political deal with the new government, senior U.S. officers here say.
Acting on the assumption that foreign fighters and Iraqi extremists may now pose the greater and more immediate threat to security in Iraq, U.S. commanders have given orders in recent days to reposition some U.S. ground forces and intelligence assets in northwestern Iraq to further fortify the border with Syria and block suspected infiltration routes. They are also stepping up efforts to go after leading bomb-makers and key organizers of the suicide attacks.
In interviews, several commanders and intelligence officers cautioned that their shift was still tentative and based more on fragmentary information and intuition than on solid, specific evidence. They said assessments differed among U.S. intelligence specialists.
But supporting the impression that a harder-core insurgent element has become more important, the officers say, is the fact that suicide missions have become more frequent and more ruthless -- many have been positioned and timed to kill civilians as well as Iraqi security forces. U.S. and Iraqi authorities say suicide drivers are invariably foreign fighters. Officers here said they knew of no documented case in which a suicide attacker turned out to have been an Iraqi.
A recent U.S. intelligence estimate also shows an increase last month in the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq, according to several officers familiar with it.
"There seems to be an increasing foreign element to the insurgency," said Army Gen. George Casey, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq.[/b]
Here, I can cunt-paste too, and right out of your own source.
S'cool
Dr. Reuven Paz was born in Israel, and received his Masters and Doctorate degrees from Haifa University, in the History of the Middle East. His fields of expertise include: Palestinian society and politics; the Arab minority in Israel; Islam and Islamic movements in the Arab and Muslim world; Islamic Fundamentalism; Islamist international terrorist networks; and Communist parties in the Arab world. Paz has worked for the Israel General Security Service as head of the research department, lectured at Haifa University, and been the Academic Director of The International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT), a part of the Interdisciplinary center (IDC) Herzliya in Israel. Currently he is Senior research fellow at ICT and Director of The Project for the Research of Islamist Movements at the GLORIA Center, IDC Herzliya.
Paz' publications include 21 academic articles in the fields of Palestinian society and politics, the Israeli Arabs and Palestinian and Arab Islamic movements, Islamic movements and anti-Semitism, and Islamist international networks; 20 articles on various issues in the field of terrorist groups and Islamist terrorism, to be found on the ICT website ??? www.ict.org.il, and 10 short articles on various issues on the Middle East published by The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Washington, D.C.
His books include one in Hebrew on the religious legitimacy of the suicide operations in Islam, October 1998, by Dayan Center, Tel-Aviv University; another entitled "The Anti-Judaism of Radical Islamic Movements" (forthcoming); and a third in press entitled Tangled Web: International Islamist Networking (The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2002)
He's an academic, probably a lefty then and cannot be trusted.
NAWAF OBAID is a Saudi National Security and Intelligence consultant based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He is currently the Director of the Saudi National Security Assessment Project. He is a former senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP).
He's a Saudi. Didn't Bin Laden come from Saudi Arabia?
His report was "Saudi Militants in Iraq: Assessment and Kingdom's Response"was co-written by Anthony Cordelsman.
Dr. Cordesman is a senior fellow in strategic assessment and the Arleigh Burke chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., as well as a military analyst for ABC. He has held senior posts in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Departments of State and Energy, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and he has been the assistant for national security to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.). He has served in the Middle East, Great Britain, and in Nato headquarters and has been international editor of Armed Forces Journal and U.S. editor of Armed Forces. His most recent books are Peace and War: The Arab-Israeli Military Balance Enters the 21st Century, The Lessons and Non-Lessons of the Air and Missile Campaign in Kosovo, and A Tragedy of Arms: Military and Security Developments in the Maghreb (all published in 2001).
He works for ABC News. Cannot be trusted.
Nawaf Obaid is a Saudi national security and intelligence consultant based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He is currently the managing director of the Saudi National Security Assessment Project. He is also an adjunct fellow in the Office of the Arleigh Burke Chair in Strategy at CSIS. Previously, he was a research fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He was also the project director for a major study on Sino-Saudi energy rapprochement and its implications for U.S. national security, conducted for the director of net assessments in the Office of U.S. Secretary of Defense. His articles and opinion pieces have appeared in newspapers such as the Washington Post, New York Times, Financial Times, and International Herald Tribune. He is the author of The Oil Kingdom at 100: Petroleum Policymaking in Saudi Arabia (Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2000) and coauthor, with Anthony H. Cordesman, of National Security in Saudi Arabia: Threats, Responses, and Challenges (Praeger/CSIS, forthcoming). Mr. Obaid received a B.S. from Georgetown University???s School of Foreign Service, an M.A. from Harvard University???s Kennedy School of Government, and completed doctoral courses at MIT???s Security Studies Program.
He went to all those elite Eastern schools. Most be a softy.
Hey Sababaloo where the hell is your homework? I told you to get cracking on the that pre-war intelligence. Plus, I'd like a full report on the neo-Con's exile era writings on Iraq and the spread of democracy through war. Oh wait you don't do research. Time for more...........
BTW I have been told many times to that I should have been a lawyer including by my lawyer father-in-law, who, while a very nice person, doesn't really do his research either. Anyway, I am too busy enjoying building a real estate development business to be sitting at some coroporate desk 100 hours a week, kissing some partner's ass so I can make 150k and live in a building with a doorman. Fuck that nonsense.
Oh shit, I forgot to respond to your response. You second statement about "a lack of resolute American response". Should Bush be doing more? Or has he upped the ante enough for you yet? Oh and let me remind you that there are plenty of Americans who were pissed off enough by what is happening in the Middle East that they got involved with the jihadists nutsos too. We're just lucky they weren't too organized or bright. So don't think that Europe is the only place facing internal problems.
Rockadelic, the war in Iraq IS creating a new generation of Americans. Fucking defensive idiots by the look of things. Isn't the Washington Post is a Republican microphone? Sabablababber, your computer might block porn, but your brain is blocking infomation.
Motown, it's all up hill work. Glad some of America seems to give a shit about the wider consequences of invasion, sorry to see that explaining the situation is being interpretted as apologising for terrorism.
Hope those funds get through
Now, see if someone else had posted an article, Sabada would point out these kinds of things. But since he found it himself he probably didn't read it, or perhaps just scanned it. "Acting on the assumption," "Still tentative and based more on fragmentary information and intuition than on solid, specific evidence." But hey it comes from the Washington Post. Everything in the media is liberal biased unless its the Weekly Standard or the Washington Times. Oh wait, those are magazines and newspaper, Sabada probably doesn't read those either.
Well that would mean you're discounting almost everything in your OWN article that you posted except for the last statement by Gen. Casey. I like how you undermine yourself. That's good work. Should probably stay away from the Washington Post and just about everything other newspaper, magazine, internet reporting out there because most of them just refer to groups or individuals without names. Now I see how you've become so knowledgely and wordly.
Oh wait, I thought you only asked questions. My bad.
Motown is absulotely correct on the debacle of the IRaqi armed forces. These units and brigades are basically confessional militias with different uniforms, and it will take years to build a cohesive national military. I think some of the comments on the Kurds lack the proper context that under Saddam hundreds of thousands if not over a million Kurds were depopulated from the north and Kirkuk in particular, and many Kurds have legitimate claims to houses stolen from them in Kirkuk. Indeed a stronger case can be made for their "right of return" than many palestinians.
Now the parties that won in the election last month are sectarian and largely religious parties determined to assert a narrow definition of ethnic interests over the broader goal of national unity. So there is a great potential for the current dirty war to degenerate into a full blown civil war. This possibility seems even more likely in recent days with the reign of terror on Shiite communities. That said, it's very significant that Zarqawi and al Qaeda again warned Iraqis not to vote, but they voted anyway and in largest numbers from Sunni neighborhoods. And finally, just because the parties empowered by the December 15 confessional referendum/election campaigned for the supremacy of the sect they represent--it does not mean that as they are all meeting together in northern iraq and baghdad, the seeds of national government cannot be planted.
Incidentally, if some people want to argue that the failure to get oil production up to pre war levels is another reason the war sucks, that's fine. But it makes it much harder to say this war was only about siezing oil, a stupid and absurd argument anyway. As i have said from the beginning of this debate, anyone who thinks America was not intertwined in Saddam's occupation of Iraq since at least the 1980s and did not have a basic moral obligation in removing its former client from power, falls prey to the kind of reactionary amnesia so many leftists bemoan when they lose national elections.
As to the information that was vetted by the CIA let's not forget that they were extrememly unhappy about Cheney's hijacking of the information process. Mostly, because they knew that national security interests were being overidden by neo-imperial political interests. Accordingly they handed Sy Hersh of the New Yorker tons of information about the stovepiping process and how it was clouded an already difficult assessment of Iraq's current state of affairs. The CIA voted on their confidence in the Bush team case with its leaks. As to the CIA diretor sitting next to Powell at the UN, the director, like Powell, did not really have a choice where he would be sitting. Remember that Powell, who begged for more time to use diplomatic means to resolve the problem, has since disavowed his testimony in front of the UN as a blight on his very distinguished career.
I still have not seen anything that outlines tangible evidence Saddam was in business with Qaeda or any other serious threat to our security. The cold war has shown that containment is always the best option when you are facing a dangerous enemy who has not shown the ability/willingness to strike immediately. That's exactly what is going to happen in Iran and North Korea. We are not about to invade either place even though you can credibly make the case that either could do great harm to us and our allies (certainly more than Saddam ever could). Why take this route? Because war is serious shit, invading countries means running countries afterwards. Patient, thoughtful and decisive action to limit an enemy is always the first step. Military confrontation is always reserved for immediate threat.
I think that is interesting that Sabadabaloo and Rock have not signed up to fight in Iraq. Both believe it is a just and worhtwhile war against a dangerous opponent who will stop at nothing to destroy us. Why not help with the struggle to protect the homeland? The armed services could use some dedicated souls such as yourselves. Plus, international digging opportunities abound.
It remains to be seen whether the various warring parties in Iraq can pull together a national unity gov't. With thousands of Iraqi dead last year, sectarian attacks increasing again, Kurdish chest thumping and seeming sh'ite ambivalence, I wouldn't bet on it happening any time soon.
Vitamin,
Great to have you back. I was going to send you a PM about how Egypt is.
Anyway, to make a couple responses.
1) The intelligence report.
The CIA made a revised report on Iraq-Al Qaeda connections in January 2003. They went over all the old claims of meetings in the 1990s, 9/11, etc. and couldn't find any connections. That was the old stuff. The new stuff they talked about was about Zarqawi's activities in Iraq and Ansar Al-Islam in Kurdish northern Iraq. In a lot of public statemnts, just like Powell's speech to the U.N. the Bush administration started calling Zarqawi and Ansar Al Qaeda.
They said that Zarqawi had been in Iraq for a while and that the government knew about it, but there were still disputes about whether he was Al Qaeda or not, but they also said that bin Laden woudn't have agreed to an alliance with Saddam.
The other new development they had intelligence on was that about 100-200 Al Qaeda fighters from Afghanistan had gone to northern Iraq and joined Ansar after the Afghan invasion. The CIA said that Baghdad probably knew about it and allowed it to happen.
Overall, their conclusion was that there wasn't an alliance with Al Qaeda though.
When Powell gave his speech to the U.N. in February the next month he included some of these claims in his speech like Zarqawi, Ansar Al-Islam, the early contacts, plus that Al Qaeda had been trained by Iraqi operatives, which I think proved out to be false later on.
Anyway, Powell said this was all proof that Iraq was connected with Al Qaeda, while the CIA report had said that they weren't.
2) The aluminum tubes.
Most of the U.S. intelligence community claimed that Iraq had renewed its nuclear program based upon some real crap intelligence work, but there were others that questioned it. So I don't think I wrote that U.S. intelligence thought he didn't have one.
3) The Iraqi security forces.
I really don't know how the U.S. thinks they're going to make that work. In Central and Southern Iraq the forces are majority Sunni and in the North they're mostly Kurds. I dont' think any training is going to get them to given up their sectarian loyalties, especially when Zarqawi is trying to start a civil war with the Shiites. The police are even worse. The U.S. still doesn't even have enough trainers for the army.
4) The new government.
The good news is that some Sunnis actually showed up at the meetings to try to get involved. At the same time some leading Shiites and especially the Kurds are talking more and more about just going their own way with their own autonomous regions. We'll see. The government that's being replaced did a pretty horrible job with security, torture, reconstruction, etc.
5) The Kurds and Kirkuk.
I don't question the fact that Kurds have a right to return to Kirkuk. I've always talked about Saddam's Arabization program. What's more problemetic to me, is the reports of them trying to get theirs now that they have more power such as focing Arabs out, arresting Sunnis, running secret detention centers, etc. Not only that, but there are news reports about the Kurds trying to lay claim to Mosul, Ibril and some other areas in northern Iraq, that will increase the Kurds vs non-Kurd disputes.
I'm going to PM you about Egypt now so check your inbox.
To me, it seems like Saddam knew that Ansar was aligned with Al Qaeda but as long as they were fighting the Kurds, he didn't care, because fighting the Kurds was all good by him. He obviously wasn't going to stop it, but I don't think that means he was actively supporting them either.
P.P.S. - None of the CIA reports included in the Senate Intelligence Committee Report from July 2003 say that Iraq had a connection with Iraq. In fact, they said they didn't. Bush and company went on and on about it however. So just because Tenet was sitting behind Powell when he gave his U.N. speech, to me means he supported everything in it. If Tenet wanted to get fired he could go and say, yeah, the president and the administration is full of shit about all this Al Qaeda stuff, but we're behind him 100% on the WMD claims. I don't think he had political suicide on his mind however.