Time Mag Dismisses Surge Gains As Insufficient
“The prognosis is grimly apparent”
Time:
The horrible discovery in Diyala province Monday was disturbing even by the standards of Iraq’s running sectarian violence. Iraqi police said they found 20 decapitated bodies dumped near a police station west of Baquba, the capital of Diyala province. That same day a suicide bomber on a bicycle careened into a Baquba police station, killing 29.
The violence was of course nothing new, especially for the Baquba area, which remains the most troubled region in Iraq outside Baghdad. But the bloodshed showed how the success of the surge of U.S. forces in Baghdad and Anbar Province nine months on has perhaps gone as far as it can toward controlling Iraq’s violence.
Last week Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the U.S. ground commander in Iraq, sat before reporters with his Iraqi counterpart, Lt. Gen. Abud Qanbar. The two tallied their gains in Baghdad against Sunni extremists and Shi’ite militia fighters over the last nine months. Qanbar ticked off statistics: Car bombs down 65%; civilian deaths from car bombs decreased by 80%; attacks against Iraqi security dropped by 62%. Also, the monthly death toll from sectarian violence nationwide for October is expected to be the lowest since February 2006, when sectarian killings spread rapidly after the bombing of a Shi’ite shrine in Samarra. Data offered by Iraq’s ministries for defense, interior and health show that 285 Iraqis died in sectarian violence in October. At its peak last year, the monthly death toll for sectarian violence in Iraq was nearly 2,000.
“The real indicator of improved security for me is how Iraqi people feel,” Odierno said. “And whenever I travel around Baghdad Iraqis tell me how much safer they feel in their neighborhoods.”
Odierno even went so far as to say that Baghdad could be entirely under the control of Iraqi security forces in a year. Meanwhile, U.S. forces officially handed the southern city of Karbala over to Iraqi control Monday, a move U.S. officials touted as another positive step. But Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, who appeared in Karbala for the handover ceremony, offered perhaps the most clear-eyed observation amid the spate of relatively good news. “Allow me to say that we are late, very late, to reconstruct, to rebuild our forces for reasons that I do not want to mention here,” Maliki said.
The unmentioned reasons behind the slow actions of Maliki’s government range from deeply ingrained sectarianism in Iraqi security forces to incompetence and graft among government officials. That has left a feeble Iraqi government clearly unable to maintain and further the gains in security made with the help of U.S. surge forces, which are set to dwindle in the months ahead according to the original surge plan.
The prognosis for Iraq, barring a dynamic transformation on the part of the Iraqi government very soon, is grimly apparent. As U.S. forces lessen their presence in the coming months, killings of the kind seen Monday in Diyala will persist there and most likely spread to areas calmed by the increase of U.S. forces. Rising Shi’ite militia unrest in southern Iraq will go on unchecked, leaving the fate of Iraq’s richest and most populous territory uncertain. Recently subdued Anbar Province will operate as a kind of Sunni semi-independent emirate, barring any meaningful administration from a central government, much as the northern Kurdish territory already does. And Baghdad will be on edge, watching for signs that the relative calm in the city may be giving way to another wave of violence.
“The government needs to spin up,” said U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker. “A single word at the time I got here that in my mind distilled modern Iraq was ‘fear.’ And to a significant degree, you know, fear is still very much part of the scene.”
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Doubtless, they were sitting on this story as long as they could until something like the incidents mentioned occurred, so that they would have something negative to say about the success of our troops in Iraq, and Bush. Shameful.
October 31st, 2007 at 3:26 amSo what? I dismiss Time Magazine as insufficient.
By the way, Strata posts that the twenty de-capitated bodies
story is more faux-news. Apparently it didn’t happen. According
to the bbc*
( http://strata-sphere.com/blog )
So if the Time story is based on that incident, then the whole
thing is just more dumbfakery.
What else can you expect from the media. I don’t read them
October 31st, 2007 at 4:43 amanymore unless I want to know what the Left is thinking.
According to LGF and Gateway Pundit the 20 headless bodies is a bogus report. Anyone surprised?
October 31st, 2007 at 4:50 amIsn’t this the same Time magazine that falsly reported
the “Haditha Massacre”?
All liberals should be ground up and used as some kind of bio-fuel.
October 31st, 2007 at 9:12 amPOD1:
Great comment, but I think ground shit is better used for fertilizer, than fuel
October 31st, 2007 at 9:54 amTime magazine is a dissembling propaganda organ of the left. Have you ever read some of its “columnists?” They are absolutely radical. But this is what passes for “normal” in the MSM. Has Time apologized for its ginned up “Haditha scandal,” where after several months it went to Iraq to “investigate and report” on a “massacre” that never occurred? And, apparently in this article, the 20 dead body claim hasn’t been verified and has been called false by at least one other news organization. The author of this article is the same guy that wrote a more or less sympathetic bio of John Walker Lynd.
October 31st, 2007 at 9:55 amHeh, the last bogus decap story had “20″ also. You’d think they’d be smart enough to vary the number. Maybe they just edited the previous news release to change the placenames around a bit.
October 31st, 2007 at 11:50 amThe progress in Iraq is stunning. We have come so far recently, I really hope we keep it going. It’s a shame we didn’t make more of a republic and less of a federal system in Iraq, in many ways it would have ran smoother. But we are where we are, I really hope the government starts getting some things accomplished. Then again how can we be critical of the Iraqi Government, look at our worthless congress, that is sectarianism at it’s finest.
October 31st, 2007 at 4:12 pmThere are some good points in the article. The south is a semi-independent emirate with the British withdrawal. The Iraqi government is toothless. We know as good a job as the US military is doing, there are limitations to an undermanned occupation. We cannot curb Iranian influence in the south if there are no US forces there.
October 31st, 2007 at 9:51 pm“There are some good points in the article….”
That’s how propaganda is properly written dumbass.
“…undermanned occupation.”
As compared to you who knows nothing about… well, anything.
October 31st, 2007 at 10:35 pmHow is the occupation going in the Shia south, Sullen? How are we doing keeping Iranian influence out down there? Why don’t you discuss how my points are wrong without insults. Are you capable of any intellect at all?
November 1st, 2007 at 10:24 amYou continually posit your views and “points” as though you do know something about the topics on which you choose to comment yet you reflect no standard of “intellect” on those subjects (and often the very definition of the words you choose), hence, your “points” are only worthy of insult.
November 1st, 2007 at 11:04 amK?
I was right. You are incapable of putting together an intelligent thought. Are you capable of challenging the post or only the one who posts? So far all you have shown is you can knee jerk with the best of them.
November 1st, 2007 at 5:53 pmAs my post states…. you’re an asshole incapable of a cogent thought let alone any kind of cogent theory.
November 1st, 2007 at 10:14 pm