How fabulastic then to have an unbiased source like “The American Thinker” to enlighten us.
Which however is only half as good as that other source you recently blessed us with: Jack Wheeler
Have a good day on their side of reality. The most loyal followers of the emperor believed he had cloths to begin with after all.
Personally though, I think I will continue to be stupid and attribute left-wing drivel like The American Conservative (a bunch of liberal terror-loving traitors if there ever was one) with more credibility than any of your two balanced sources.
It comes of no surprise of course that such a socialist pamphlet like TAC is devoid of any good news from Iraq and instead dwells on how the new right now finally followed the old left down the road in the popular game of: “ideology trumps reality”.
I stand corrected, TainanCowboy, there is progress in Iraq.
[quote=“BBC”] Scores killed in Baghdad blasts
A wave of car bomb and mortar blasts in the Shia Sadr City area of the Iraqi capital has caused heavy loss of life.
Officials said at least 115 people had been killed, while some reports put the number of dead at more than 140. A curfew is now being imposed on Baghdad.
The attacks, among the bloodiest since the US-led invasion in 2003, hit crowded markets in Sadr City which are regular targets for Sunni insurgents.
Elsewhere, gunmen attacked the health ministry, sparking battles with guards.
[…]
The blasts destroyed whole streets, leaving bodies strewn among mangled wreckage.
[…]
In an immediate response, the Iraqi authorities announced that Baghdad was being put under an indefinite curfew beginning at 2000 local time (1700 GMT).
The daily attacks in Baghdad are now more brazen and more sectarian, says the BBC’s Middle East analyst Roger Hardy.
On Wednesday, the United Nations said violent deaths among civilians hit a record high in October, with more than 3,700 people losing their lives - the majority in sectarian attacks. [/quote]
Things are becoming progressively more bloody, uncontrollable, vicious…
What’s the score in the game now? And where are my rose coloured glasses?
Oh, and screw the beer. If we’re going to keep watching this, I’m going to tap a vein and start mainlining Mezcal. What do ya say, TC? How do we chalk up these events on the Iraq Progress score card?
Maybe, being that so much progress is being made, we can do away with photos of specific Iraqis on the deck of cards, and just run through an ordinary deck.
(Decks? How many decks in the shoe for days like this?).
Ace of spades.
3 of diamonds.
10 of hearts…
New deck! We’re making a lot of progress here.
One-eyed jack… lucky kid.
8 of clubs…
[quote=“cfimages”][quote] 6.4: Average number of hours per day that Baghdad homes have electricity, September 2006.
11.0: Average number of hours per day that Iraqi homes have electricity, September 2006.
16-24: Average number of hours per day that Baghdad homes have electricity, 2002.
2,000: The number of physicians in Iraq murdered since 2003 invasion.
12,000: The number of physicians who have left Iraq since 2003 invasion.
34,000: The number of physicians in Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion.[/quote]
If the rebuilding work were carried out by Iraqi companies and Iraqi contractors, instead of US companies, there’d probably be a lot more rebuilt by now, and it would have cost a lot less.[/quote]
What is a democracy again? We did bring democracy, right? The contracts must have been put out to tender, right?
[quote=“cfimages”][quote] 6.4: Average number of hours per day that Baghdad homes have electricity, September 2006.
11.0: Average number of hours per day that Iraqi homes have electricity, September 2006.
16-24: Average number of hours per day that Baghdad homes have electricity, 2002.
[snip…][/quote]
If the rebuilding work were carried out by Iraqi companies and Iraqi contractors, instead of US companies, there’d probably be a lot more rebuilt by now, and it would have cost a lot less.[/quote]
A very good article published in Feb '06 on the difficulty in restoring electrical power to Iraq can be found in an article titled “Re-engineering Iraq” published by the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), which professes to be a politically neutral organization, in their flagship magazine, Spectrum. Warning: The article is quite long.
Baghdad used to have nearly round the clock electrical supply, but that was at the expense of other parts of Iraq.
[quote=“IEEE Spectrum ‘Re-engineering Iraq’”] For many years, the mainstays of Iraq’s electrical capacity were steam generating plants near the huge oil fields in the south and hydroelectric plants in the Kurdish regions in the north [see map, “Power Corridors”]. Relatively few plants were concentrated around Baghdad, where most of the demand was. So to keep parts of the city energized close to 24 hours a day, as Saddam wished them to be, operators had to black out different parts of the Shiite south and Kurdish north on a rotating schedule.
Rotating blackouts are still a way of life in Iraq’s electrical sector, but now they’re not done for Baghdad’s benefit. The city still gets about half of its power from the north and south, but these days city residents get anywhere from 6 to 9 hours of electricity a day, compared with about 15 hours for people living in Basra. [/quote]
Iraqis see the lack of electrical power as their number one concern.
So what’s the problem?
[quote=“IEEE Spectrum ‘Re-engineering Iraq’”]So, nearly three years after reconstruction began, why does Iraq’s electrical infrastructure still fall short by 4000 MW?
There are a lot of reasons. Here are the fundamental ones:
* A poor match between generating technologies and the kinds of fuels available in Iraq.
* A well-armed insurgency that has made destroying electrical infrastructure a centerpiece of its bid to destroy the country's fledgling democracy.
* Revenue levels coming into the Ministry of Electricity that are so low as to be insignificant, a function of a ruinously low rate structure and far too few electric meters actually recording how much power people are using.
* Management and personnel problems at all levels of the government, including the ministry, which is generally believed to have thousands of fictitious employees created for the sole purpose of getting a paycheck cashed by someone else.
* The erosion of operational and, particularly, maintenance skills among workers at the country's Ministry of Electricity.
[/quote]
From reading the article, I get the impression that the first two reasons listed above far outweigh all other factors. While one cannot control the actions of a “well-armed insurgency”, the first reason cited is entirely under the control of US gov’t/contractors and Iraqi ministries. More than 300 million dollars worth of generating turbines were installed around Baghdad before they realized there was an insufficient supply of the correct type of fuel.
So who’s to blame for this mess:
And why did these gov’t organizations make the choice that they did?
[quote=“IEEE Spectrum ‘Re-engineering Iraq’”]But other officials and engineers, not only Iraqis but a few Americans, too, say that the Iraqi Ministry’s engineers were never happy with the plan to exclude steam plants. “The Iraqis, from the beginning, wanted steam plants,” declares the U.S. power-generation engineer who was there at the time.
The perceived problem with steam plants, everyone agrees, was that they take three to five years to build. “Both the Iraqis and the U.S. wanted results in months (if not days) rather than years,” the former CPA official writes in an e-mail. Combustion turbines can be installed in as few as 18 months.
“The decisions were made based on expedience, not technical soundness,” the U.S. engineer concludes.[/quote]
Having electricity twenty-four hours a day is important but not that important. People need to conserve more energy these days and Baghdad may just be an energy conservation laboratory for the future.
One day we’ll probably look back at this period and realize that Baghdad’s so-called energy supply problem was actually the start of a good thing by paving the way to an energy conservation future where all of us learn to live on six hours of electrical power per day.
If we really want to solve all the problems in Iraq though we need to bomb Syria and Iran.
I’m also not convinced that all the so-called mass suicide bombings the MSM is reporting everyday are for real. I’ve heard credible reports that the same one-hundred bodies are actually being trucked from “bomb site” to “bomb site” in an attempt to make the U.S. look bad and influence domestic U.S. politics.
Anybody with half a brain would have to conclude that that tactic is working.
IN the past three monts I’ve had several conversations with three people that spent time in Iraq - a civilian contractor who was there for six months in 2005, a former officer with a British armoured unit who was based in Iraq for a year straddling 2005-06 and a former British SAS soldier that was there at the outset.
The contractor did his time and left and refuses to return, depsite the lure of considerable money, claiming it is too damned dangerous and that the contract allocation and checks and balances are seriously flawed, at best. He thinks Iraq is doomed. His voice shakes when he talks of the Iraqi civilians. One point stuck in my head - “these are by nature incredibly clean fucking people that have been reduced to living with the constant smell and presence of shit. They simply cannot get the water they need. They (the US) have destroyed the fucking infrastructure and are completely screwing the reconstruction. By the way, you never hear about the contractors getting killed, unless their beheaded on the telly, or like you do about the military and Iraqi civilians, but I know for a fact that one company has lost more than fifty people.”
The officer had intended to stay in the army for life but bailed out because he believes invading Iraq was an immoral political decision and lacked clear military objectives. He thinks it’s doomed to failure. He is mortified at prospects for the Iraqi people.
The SAS chap was naturally cagey about his involvement but said he thought the politicians had forced the military to act against its own better judgement and that, as a result, there is no hope of winning the fight.
Now I read this: [quote]Iraq a moral blunder, says war hero
Patrick Walters, National security editor
November 25, 2006
THE former SAS officer who devised and executed the Iraq war plan for Australia’s special forces says that the nation’s involvement has been a strategic and moral blunder.
Peter Tinley, who was decorated for his military service in Afghanistan and Iraq, has broken ranks to condemn the Howard Government over its handling of the war and has called for an immediate withdrawal of Australian troops.
“It was a cynical use of the Australian Defence Force by the Government,” the ex-SAS operations officer told The Weekend Australian yesterday.
“This war duped the Australian Defence Force and the Australian people in terms of thinking it was in some way legitimate.”
As the lead tactical planner for Australia’s special forces in the US in late 2002, Mr Tinley was in a unique position to observe intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program and the coalition’s military preparations in the lead-up to the war.
Mr Tinley, 44, who retired from the army last year after a distinguished 25-year career, said the US-led coalition had been naive in its thinking about what it could achieve after a quick military invasion of Iraq. [/quote]
I continue to think we need to be there and sort it out, but that we were all duped about getting involved in the first place, well. maybe not all of us - I was opposed at the outset.
[quote]US didn’t have enough troops in Baghdad: G-G
Kate Legge
November 25, 2006
AUSTRALIA’S Commander-in-Chief, Governor-General Michael Jeffery, believes a lack of troops on the ground in the weeks after the US-led coalition went into Iraq hampered efforts to secure Baghdad.
In an interview with The Weekend Australian Magazine, Major General Jeffery contrasted early tactics in Iraq with the counter-insurgency campaign he led in Phuoc Tuy province during the Vietnam War. “We were charged with winning the hearts and minds of local people and ensuring they were safe, which is the antithesis of what’s happening in Baghdad. People aren’t safe,” he said.
Major General Jeffery served in Borneo, Malaya, Papua New Guinea and Vietnam during a 40-year military career.
As Commander-in-Chief he receives regular briefings from the defence chiefs on troop deployments, not policy. [/quote]
I hope the Australian people eventually give John Howard the good fucking he deserves for betraying them with lies.
More excerpts from the interview with Major Tinley:
"During war planning with US and British special forces at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, in 2002, Mr Tinley says he never saw any hard intelligence that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction.
“When I pressed them (US intelligence) for more specific imagery or information regarding locations or likely locations of WMD they confessed, off the record, that there had not been any tangible sighting of any WMD or WMD enabling equipment for some years,” he said.
“It was all shadows and inferenced conversations between Iraqis. There was an overwhelming desire for all of the planning staff to simply believe that the Iraqis had learned how to conceal their WMD assets away from the US (surveillance) assets.” . . .
“The notion that pre-emption is a legitimate strategy in the face of such unconvincing intelligence is a betrayal of the Australian way,” he said.
Mr Tinley told The Weekend Australian he was now speaking out having expected people “far more capable and more senior than me” to have expressed serious reservations about Australia’s involvement in Iraq.
“During our preparations for this war I remember hearing (ex-defence chief) General Peter Gration’s misgivings and assumed he did not possess all the information that our Prime Minister did,” he said. “I now reflect on his commentary with a completely different view and am saddened that other prominent people in our society didn’t speak louder at the time and aren’t continuing to speak out in light of what we now know.”
He said the Government had broken a moral contract with its defence force in sending it to an “immoral war”. . . ."
Other Tinley statements:
“I co-ordinated the effort on the ground. I had conversations with young and old troopers about their concerns about going into Iraq. It wasn’t just the normal fear that grips young men going into harm’s way. Their concerns were, ‘What’s this all for?’ But any moral objection they had was outweighed by the oath they took when they joined the army.”
"You join the army. You suppress your opinion in good faith in the knowledge that the government will provide moral leadership in sending the defence force to war. They didn’t in this case.
“I was intimately involved in the preparations for the Iraq war. I believe that a voice such as mine - which I previously thought as inconsequential - should be heard. It’s about time I joined the debate.”
Didn’t we hear mumblings like this before? Like back in the 80s when socialist/communist dead enders, unhappy that their mumbo-jumbo just would not fly, would blame anyone BUT themselves and the failures of their tralala pet ideologies.
Back then it was also “the establishment” who programmed “the sheeple” to remain “ignorant” of “what was really going on”. Like how great the Cultural Revolution of Chairman Mao was or how socialism would have been just the thing to save us all “if people just were not kept in ignorance by the sinister establishment”.
Over the years their rationalizations became more shrill and the sources willing to back them up more obscure. Today one can still listen to mumblings of how all would have gone swell with Communism if not for foul play of “the system”, “the media” and “the establishment”.
I am equally sure that the good 'ol “stab in the back” mythology of how Iraq would have turned out just the huge success Bush & Rummy projected if it were not for “the media”, “the system” and “the establishment” who with foul play brought down these two Churchills of our time will be perpetuated over decades just the same.
Also there the rationalizations will become shriller and shriller over time and the sources willing to back them up more obscure. Jack Wheeler and The American Thinker are not a bad start though in this regard.
Not to give the mainstream infotainment media a charte blanche here. A grain of salt and critical scrunity never goes amiss there.
But heading to quacks like Jack Wheeler, the Amercian Thinker or Noam Chomsky as alternatives instead? That may require to dump scrunity even more so in favour of cheap validation (however unwarranted) validation.
let’s just say that the situation in Iraq is basically about as bad as it could be, and that the US invasion was actually a huge mistake that gets worse by the day.
At what point would you agree that things could have been done better? At what point will you agree that ironically, the average Iraqi was probably better off under Saddam rather that the chaotic shambles the US has forced…er, I mean liberated, on the Iraqi people?
It’s cringe worthy that you trumpet how wonderful things are in Iraq, and cringe worthy that there is a good chance you want to believe it. What disturbs me mostly, is there are millions like you back in the US who refuse to see it for the f&%k up that it is, and probably wouldn’t change a thing in hindsight.
[quote=“Truant”]TC,
let’s just say that the situation in Iraq is basically about as bad as it could be, and that the US invasion was actually a huge mistake that gets worse by the day.[/quote]NO…lets be honest and say that that is YOUR interpretation of the situation.
[quote=“Truant”]At what point would you agree that things could have been done better?[/quote]From the beginning. I posted from the out-set that I believed it was a mistake to dis-band the entire Iraqi Army.[quote=“Truant”] At what point will you agree that ironically, the average Iraqi was probably better off under Saddam rather that the chaotic shambles the US has forced…er, I mean liberated, on the Iraqi people?[/quote] I can not do that, it would be a lie. I refuse to post something that I know to be a lie.[quote=“Truant”]It’s cringe worthy that you trumpet how wonderful things are in Iraq, and cringe worthy that there is a good chance you want to believe it.[/quote]Cringe away…I think you are exaggerating my powers…but thank you.[quote=“Truant”] What disturbs me mostly, is there are millions like you back in the US who refuse to see it for the f&%k up that it is, and probably wouldn’t change a thing in hindsight.[/quote]And we/they find it equally disturbing that there are people like you. People who think that the regime of Saddam Hussein was preferable to the opportunity for the Iraqi people to to decide their own destiny.
That is cringe-worthy to the vast majority of the thinking world.
I also think TC is looking 20 years down the road. I am. I think any civil war in Iraq would be short lived, with the US protecting the oil fields and the side that has the new Iraqi Dinars they printed up.
What exactly is this opportunity the Iraqi People have? Oh the opportunity to think about what afterlife they need to believe in before they become one of the 3000 a month to die under the management of their country by the US?
[quote=“jdsmith”]I also think TC is looking 20 years down the road. I am. I think any civil war in Iraq would be short lived, with the US protecting the oil fields and the side that has the new Iraqi Dinars they printed up.[/quote]Well…patience and perspective is an indication of maturity.
Who has been saying that? I’ve seen few argument that Saddam’s regime was preferable to such an opportunity, if such an opprtunity had been presented to them. Probably not even preferable to the occupation and Iraqi civil war being waged now.
What? I thought the vast majority are against the US occupation – possibly even in America these days, the majority are against it, I thought. That’s how it appears to me from the newspapers I read, at least – except for The Sun, of course. They’re backing “our boys” all the way.
haha. Funny that is not part of the mission the US are supposedly there for. But then again, none of the pro war supporters can state what that mission is. Funny that. A war without a mission…well a stated mission anyway.
I’ve asked that simple question several times, but people either ignore it or fire back with some sarcastic response. It’s a serious question don’t you think?
Hard to predict. What convinces you it will be short lived?
If this Iraqi civil war is just the start of how the Middle East (violently) rectifies the artificial borders drawn after WWI then what makes you think it will run any more smooth that decolonization did in Africa? Or any faster?
As another similar situation ex Yugoslavia could be cited. Artificial state by Versailles too, Eastern Bloc authority dissolved after the cold war, ethnic antaginisms lead to a break up.
These situations looks comparable to me (artificial states, suppressing authority removed, comeback of ethnic antagonisms) only cultures may differ. Still, Africa and Yugoslavia look most akin to it of anything I can recall (sorry to the fans of the “Iraq is Third Reich” “Iraq is Red Menace” school of thought).
Given all that (and how best-case projections about Iraq have panned out so far) I am very curious what you base your prediction on.
What? I thought the vast majority are against the US occupation – possibly even in America these days, the majority are against it, I thought. That’s how it appears to me from the newspapers I read, at least – except for The Sun, of course. They’re backing “our boys” all the way.[/quote][quote]Truant wrote:
What disturbs me mostly, is there are millions like you back in the US who refuse to see it for the f&%k up that it is, and probably wouldn’t change a thing in hindsight.[/quote][quote=“tainancowboy”]And we/they find it equally disturbing that there are people like you. People who think that the regime of Saddam Hussein was preferable to the opportunity for the Iraqi people to to decide their own destiny.
That is cringe-worthy to the vast majority of the thinking world.[/quote]
Lets use the entire quote and keep things in context, ay?
