Daily Telegraph
Will Barack Obama admit extent of Iran's role in Iraq, laid bare by WikiLeaks?
The documents reveal Iran's continuing influence in Iraq
Some of the reporting of the documents is distinctly tendentious. Take for instance this from the Guardian. The headline states as fact that “Apache helicopters kill 14 civilians”. The source for this? A single Iraq informant, speaking to an interpreter for the US military. In addition, an Iraqi colonel said the number was 12.
Any journalist who has worked in Iraq (and I spent much of 2004 and 2005 there) knows that casualty figures from Iraqis were extremely unreliable and often based on rumour, exaggeration or personal/political agendas and prejudices. In the US report, the figures are rightly described as “unconfirmed”.
The files show there were occasions recorded when morally courageous US troops did intervene and the blind-eye policy was eventually and rightly changed.
Before I continue, a pet peeve. Can we stop calling them WikiLeaks “the whistle-blowing website”? A whistle-blower is “an informant who exposes wrongdoing within an organisation in the hope of stopping it”. First, WikiLeaks does not operate within an organisation. Second, to presuppose they are exposing wrongdoing by leaking classified documents is buying their propaganda. But I digress.
It seems to me that the most significant revelations from the massive WikiLeaks document dump is the apparent extent of Iran’s nefarious role in Iraq. Remember how we were always being told that the Bush administration was exaggerating the extent of Iranian influence with the Shia militia groups in order to push along a neocon plot to attack Iran? Well, an initial reading of the documents conducted by the New York Times indicates there wasn’t much exaggeration at all.
Come to think of it, None other than Vice President Joe Biden said as recently as August:
Iranian influence in Iraq is minimal. It’s been greatly exaggerated.
So exactly how does that statement square with this from the NYT?
The reports make it clear that the lethal contest between Iranian-backed militias and American forces continued after President Obama sought to open a diplomatic dialogue with Iran’s leaders and reaffirmed the agreement between the United States and Iraq to withdraw American troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.Read the rest here.
Comments:
clearyj
5 minutes ago
Recommended by
1 person
1 person
Toby - you might want to watch your back since we now have a crystal clear template about how tolerant liberals are with respect to people whose opinions they don't much like (think Juan Williams and NPR).
The Messiah is the Messiah PRECISELY because he can do no wrong. He is the smartest, most spiritual, most intellectual, most female-swooning-causing sensitive, inventive, honest, brave, and hip person to walk, not just on God's Green Earth, but in the entirety of creation - since its beginning to the time of the onset of entropy. Why, legend has it that even in the time, some trillions of years from now, that entropy has wiped out the electrons and protons themselves, some trace of The Messiah will remain so as to impinge on any Universe that emerges from the next Big Bang.
Didn't you get the memo?
The Messiah is the Messiah PRECISELY because he can do no wrong. He is the smartest, most spiritual, most intellectual, most female-swooning-causing sensitive, inventive, honest, brave, and hip person to walk, not just on God's Green Earth, but in the entirety of creation - since its beginning to the time of the onset of entropy. Why, legend has it that even in the time, some trillions of years from now, that entropy has wiped out the electrons and protons themselves, some trace of The Messiah will remain so as to impinge on any Universe that emerges from the next Big Bang.
Didn't you get the memo?
placitas
Today 12:00 AM
Recommended by
8 people
8 people
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/10/wikileaks-show-wmd-hunt-continued-in-iraq-with-surprising-results/
Foreign troop deaths in Afghanistan near 600 for 2010
By Jonathon Burch
KABUL (Reuters) - Total foreign military deaths in Afghanistan in 2010 neared 600 with the death of another service member on Sunday, an unwelcome figure that will likely weigh heavily on Western leaders amid declining support for the war.
The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said on Sunday one of its service members was killed by a homemade bomb in the south of country, bringing the total to 599 since the beginning of 2010.
No other details of the incident were available. Crude but effective homemade bombs account for well over half of the casualties suffered by foreign troops in Afghanistan this year.
With more than two months to go, 2010 is already the bloodiest for Afghan and foreign troops and civilians since the overthrow of the Taliban in late 2001. In all of 2009, a total of 521 foreign troops were killed.
The rising casualties offer little encouragement for U.S. President Barack Obama, who has promised a strategy review in December after mid-term elections a month earlier in which his Democrats face a backlash from an increasingly skeptical public.
The economic policies of President Obama are failing. And just as predictable as the failure is the response from the hallelujah chorus of the left. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who now joins the Janeane Garafalo School of Lefty Loonies, opines in Saturday’s addition of the Oregonian:
There we are. It’s not that more massive deficit spending in an economy already crippled by massive deficits was ill conceived, it is simply that we didn’t spend enough. What a moron.
The fact of the matter is that most economists agree that similar massive government programs initiated by President Franklin Roosevelt effectively delayed recovery from the Great Depression by years. And we know that government attempts to manipulate the financial markets in the wake of Japan’s economic downturn led to the so-called Lost Decade for what was once the second largest economy in the world.
Obama Is Failing Because We Just Didn’t Spend Enough 
The economic policies of President Obama are failing. And just as predictable as the failure is the response from the hallelujah chorus of the left. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who now joins the Janeane Garafalo School of Lefty Loonies, opines in Saturday’s addition of the Oregonian:
“One group – the group that got almost all of the attention – declared that the stimulus was much too large, and would lead to disaster. If you were, say, reading the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages in early 2009, you would have been repeatedly informed that the Obama plan would lead to skyrocketing interest rates and soaring inflation.
“The other group, which included yours truly [Krugman], warned that the plan was much too small given the economic forecast then available.”
The fact of the matter is that most economists agree that similar massive government programs initiated by President Franklin Roosevelt effectively delayed recovery from the Great Depression by years. And we know that government attempts to manipulate the financial markets in the wake of Japan’s economic downturn led to the so-called Lost Decade for what was once the second largest economy in the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment