Another Success Story

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Banned
I am so tired of this three card monte game this administration has been playing with Iraq, and by extension, with lives. But what I'm even more tired of, is you idiots who buy all of these stories. Just like the one last week where a couple of right wing, war supporting schills wrote a piece for the liberal NY Times (Even the liberal NY Times says) claiming that the surge is beginning to work. No, it's not. It's the same horseshit you've been fed for four years now, how old are you people, two?


As British leave, Basra deteriorates
Violence rises in Shiite city once called a success story
By Karen DeYoung and Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Updated: 1:33 a.m. ET Aug 7, 2007
As British forces pull back from Basra in southern Iraq, Shiite militias there have escalated a violent battle against each other for political supremacy and control over oil resources, deepening concerns among some U.S. officials in Baghdad that elements of Iraq's Shiite-dominated national government will turn on one another once U.S. troops begin to draw down.

Three major Shiite political groups are locked in a bloody conflict that has left the city in the hands of militias and criminal gangs, whose control extends to municipal offices and neighborhood streets. The city is plagued by "the systematic misuse of official institutions, political assassinations, tribal vendettas, neighborhood vigilantism and enforcement of social mores, together with the rise of criminal mafias that increasingly intermingle with political actors," a recent report by the International Crisis Group said.

After Saddam Hussein was overthrown in April 2003, British forces took control of the region, and the cosmopolitan port city of Basra thrived with trade, arts and universities. As recently as February, Vice President Cheney hailed Basra as a part of Iraq "where things are going pretty well."

But "it's hard now to paint Basra as a success story," said a senior U.S. official in Baghdad with long experience in the south. Instead, it has become a different model, one that U.S. officials with experience in the region are concerned will be replicated throughout the Iraqi Shiite homeland from Baghdad to the Persian Gulf. A recent series of war games commissioned by the Pentagon also warned of civil war among Shiites after a reduction in U.S. forces.

For the past four years, the administration's narrative of the Iraq war has centered on al-Qaeda, Iran and the sectarian violence they have promoted. But in the homogenous south -- where there are virtually no U.S. troops or al-Qaeda fighters, few Sunnis, and by most accounts limited influence by Iran -- Shiite militias fight one another as well as British troops. A British strategy launched last fall to reclaim Basra neighborhoods from violent actors -- similar to the current U.S. strategy in Baghdad -- brought no lasting success.

‘Surrounded like cowboys and Indians’
"The British have basically been defeated in the south," a senior U.S. intelligence official said recently in Baghdad. They are abandoning their former headquarters at Basra Palace, where a recent official visitor from London described them as "surrounded like cowboys and Indians" by militia fighters. An airport base outside the city, where a regional U.S. Embassy office and Britain's remaining 5,500 troops are barricaded behind building-high sandbags, has been attacked with mortars or rockets nearly 600 times over the past four months.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20137025/
 
Get ready for the "See! This is what happens when you withdraw!" crowd.

They'll keep us in Iraq for decades if they can. They don't get it; there won't ever be a point at which we can leave & say with certainty that we're leaving a stable, secure country.
 
I think the statement - "The British have basically been defeated in the south" is a little strong, what?

As we've not actually been fighting a war but attempting to keep a peace, which has never truly existed from the outset, "outright failure" would be a better description. Then again, when you're attempting the impossible that's hardly a surprising outcome.
 
I think the statement - "The British have basically been defeated in the south" is a little strong, what?

As we've not actually been fighting a war but attempting to keep a peace, which has never truly existed from the outset, "outright failure" would be a better description. Then again, when you're attempting the impossible that's hardly a surprising outcome.

Well, it was said by a US official... you don't think they're going to blame themselves?
 
Just give us 6 more months to see if the surge works! Six more months! That's all we ask!

Maybe we could have "won" if we'd flown the entire British Army reserve into Basra a few months ago, but both of them were on holiday at the time and no-one had filled up the spare tank.

I suppose we should be grateful that so many Iraqis have actually fled Iraq altogether. Imagine the hubbub if the 7 million, or so, refugees came back and we had to deal with them as well.

Still, let's look on the bright side, Operation Give an Iraqi Militiaman a Free Weapon seems to be going much better than expected. So, if the deathtoll keeps rising at present rates we can look forward to bringing that troublesome population down to a, much more manageable, double figure level.
 
the only way to "win" was not to invade, but fight the real terrorist threats in other more specific ways.
This has always been my opinion.
 
Get ready for the "See! This is what happens when you withdraw!" crowd.

They'll keep us in Iraq for decades if they can. They don't get it; there won't ever be a point at which we can leave & say with certainty that we're leaving a stable, secure country.
Agreed Emphaticly
 
Let's see ... according to today's news, 19 US soldiers have died during the first week of August, '07. Sure, the surge is working!
 
Just another 6 months, we are just getting started.

Does anyone still believe this garbage ?
Wolf, wolf, wolf,
 
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