http://www.twincities.com/national/ci_6155324?nclick_check=1U.S. launches new offensive in Baghdad
BAGHDAD—The U.S. military, which just days ago completed its latest troop buildup in Iraq, has launched a large offensive operation in several al-Qaida strongholds around Baghdad, the top U.S. commander said Saturday.
Gen. David Petraeus said the operation began in the last 24 hours and will put forces into key areas surrounding Baghdad that, according to intelligence, al-Qaida is using to base some of its car bomb operations.
Petraeus, who met with Defense Secretary Robert Gates at a morning breakfast, also said that he doesn't have all the American troops he might want, but he knows he's got all he's going to get.
"There's never been a military commander in history who wouldn't like to have more of something or other—that characterizes all of us here," he told reporters traveling with Gates. "The fact is frankly that we have all that our country is going to provide us in terms of combat forces. That is really it right now."
He said the buildup of nearly 30,000 additional forces that has just been completed allowed him to launch the latest assault. The move, he said, is allowing him to send operations for the first time into "a number of areas around Baghdad, in particular to go into areas that were sanctuaries in the past of al-Qaida."
He said: "Our job now, frankly, along with the job of our Iraqi counterparts ... is to do everything that we can with the additional forces that we have."
Underscoring the challenges ahead, all but shut down by a security lockdown. Iraqi leaders imposed a strict curfew this week after a bombing of an important shrine north of the city.
It is Gates' fourth trip to Iraq since he took over the Defense Department last December. He was meeting with military and political leaders to assess progress, and to continue to urge the Iraqi government to move more quickly toward reconciliation and stabilizing their country.
Petraeus provided few details of the new offensive, but said he believes it will help the military make some progress in Iraq, where the war is in its fifth year and U.S. casualties have surpassed 3,500.
Gates and his military leaders are under intense pressure from Congress and the American public to begin to show real progress in Iraq so that troop withdrawals can start.
There are currently about 155,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.
At the same time, Gates and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker expressed continuing frustration with the lack of political progress by the Iraqis to meet a number of benchmarks set by the U.S., including oil revenue-sharing legislation and political reconciliation.
"We are pressing hard on those," said Crocker. "The Iraqi government is pressing itself. Progress has ben frustratingly slow. We will see where we are by September."
Gates also visited the al-Madain Joint Security Station Saturday morning in southeast Baghdad, traveling under tight security, and wearing body armor. His helicopter sent up a cloud of dust as it set down in the rectangular, walled station in the largely Shiite enclave of Karada, a relatively stable area of the city.
Gates heard from both Iraqi and U.S. military officials, who talked about the effort to put as many as 60 of the security outposts in the Baghdad region. There are about 27 joint security stations, which are staffed by Iraqi police and army soldiers as well as U.S. troops. And there are about the same number of smaller combat outposts.
Col. Jeffrey Bannister, commander of the 2nd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division which has forces at the station, said the facility was a model for Baghdad and "has a very good fusion effect amongst the Iraqis."
He added, however, that his troops have faced a lot of newer armor-piercing roadside bombs. "We are at the tip of the spear for that," he told reporters who traveled to the station with Gates.
Gates thanked the Iraqi forces there for their service and expressed sympathy for those who have been wounded and killed. "They are serving the interests of the Iraqi people," Gates said.
Gates is the third top U.S. official to travel to Baghdad this week to press the Iraqi government to move more quickly toward political reconciliation and other vital reforms that many see as critical to putting a cap on the violence.
The top U.S. commander in the Middle East, Adm. William Fallon carried that message to the Iraqis last weekend, and John Negroponte, the No. 2 State Department official, reinforced it in a visit midweek.
Gates also was cautious in his assessment of the progress in the war. He's to give Congress an update next month, and a full review in September, of how well the buildup ordered by President Bush has worked.
"It remains to be seen how much progress will be made over the course of the next two or three months," Gates said, adding "There are some positive trends, there are some negative trends."
Posted on: June 16, 2007, 09:26:37 am
http://thenews.jang.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=61147US-occupied Iraq is now ranked second among the world’s failed states
By By Kaleem Omar
Last year US-occupied Iraq was ranked fourth in the Failed States Index produced by America’s Foreign Policy magazine and the Fund for Peace. Now, in the 2007 Failed States Index released on Monday, Iraq has emerged as the world’s second most unstable country, behind Sudan, giving the lie to the Bush administration’s oft-repeated assertion that conditions in Iraq are improving.
In fact, conditions in US-occupied Iraq continue to worsen and the country is now in a state of chaos, with the death toll from bomb explosions and other attacks averaging running about 100 people a day. According to the respected British medical journal The Lancet, more than 600,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of US bombing and missile strikes since March 2003.
The index said Iraq suffered a third straight year of deterioration in 2006 with diminished results across a range of social, political and military indicators.
The annual Failed States Index ranked 177 countries according to 12 social, economic, political and military indicators based on data from thousands of publicly available sources.
The authors of the index said one of the leading benchmarks for failed state status is the loss of physical control of territory or a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, the erosion of legitimate authority, an inability to provide reasonable public services and the inability to interact with other states as a full member of the international community.
Foreign Policy magazine is published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think tank. The Fund for Peace is an independent research group devoted to preventing and resolving conflicts.
US- and NATO-occupied Afghanistan was in eighth place in the 2007 Failed States Index.
Iraq and Afghanistan, the two main fronts in the Bush administration’s so-called war on terror, “both suffered over the past year,” said a report that accompanied the index.
“Their experiences show that billions of dollars in development and security aid may be futile unless accompanied by a functioning government, trustworthy leaders, and realistic plans to keep the peace and develop the economy,” the report said.
US Vice-President Dick Cheney recently charged that today’s Democrats in the American Congress don’t appreciate the terrorist danger when they move to end US involvement in the Iraq war.
The truth of the matter, however, is that President George W. Bush, and Cheney deliberately misled the American public when they implied that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In fact, Saddam Hussein’s regime had no connection whatsoever with the events of 9/11 – as even US intelligence officials admitted as far back as November 2001, sixteen months before the American invasion of Iraq.
Bush sent US forces into Iraq in violation of every canon of international law and in defiance of world public opinion, using the trumped up excuse that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that, in Bush’s words, “posed an imminent threat to the national security of the United States.”
In fact, Iraq possessed no WMD and posed no threat to the mighty United States. No WMD were found in Iraq, despite a 16-month-long search by a 1,400-member team of US weapons inspectors sent to Iraq by Bush after the invasion. That’s why the WMD are now known as “weapons of mass disappearance.”
According to former US senator George McGovern, who ran for president of the United States in 1972 as the Democratic Party’s nominee, Bush sent US forces into Iraq “against the advice and experience of such knowledgeable men as former President George H. W. Bush, his Secretary of State, James A. Baker III, and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft.”
When former US ambassador Joseph Wilson exploded the myth that Iraq had attempted to obtain yellow cake uranium from the West African country of Niger to make nuclear weapons, Cheney’s top aide, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and other Bush officials tried to discredit Wilson by leaking to the media that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent and that it was she who had sent her husband to Niger to check out the claim about the yellow cake uranium. Under US law, knowingly revealing the identity of a covert agent is illegal. Libby was later charged with the crime of revealing Plame’s identity and had to resign from his job as Cheney’s top aide.
The 2007 Failed State Index report said that few encouraging signs emerged in 2006 to suggest that the world is on a path to greater peace and stability.
February 2006 brought the destruction of Samara’s golden-domed mosque, one of the Shia sect’s holiest shrines, unleashing a convulsion of violence across Iraq that continues unabated. After Hezbollah fighters captured two Israeli soldiers in a raid on an Israeli army post in southern Lebanon, Israel unleashed a savage, month-long bombardment on Lebanon, killing several thousand Lebanese civilians and sending hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing to neighbouring countries. And in October, North Korea joined the ranks of the world’s nuclear club by carrying out a nuclear test.
The Failed States Index report said, “The complex phenomenon of state failure may be much discussed but it remains little understood. The problems that plague failing states are generally all too similar: rampant corruption, predatory elites who have long monopolised power, an absence of the rule of law, and severe ethnic or religious divisions. But that does not mean that the responses to their problems should be cut from the same cloth. Failing states are a diverse lot. Burma and Haiti are two of the most corrupt countries in the world, according to Transparency International, and yet Burma’s repressive junta persecutes ethnic minorities and subjects its population to forced resettlement, while Haiti is wracked by extreme poverty, lawlessness, and urban violence. For a decade, Equatorial Guinea has posted some of the highest economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa, yet its riches have padded the bank accounts of an elite few. And in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the inability of the government to police its borders effectively or manage its vast mineral wealth has left the country dependent on foreign aid.”
The 2007 Failed States Index scores are based on data from more than 12,000 publicly available sources collected from May to December 2006. The 60 most vulnerable states are listed in the rankings.
For the second year in a row, Sudan tops the rankings as the state most at risk of failure. The primary cause of its instability, violence on the country’s western region of Darfur, is as well known as it is tragic. At least 200,000 people – and perhaps as many as 400,000 – have been killed in the past four years by janjaweed militias armed by the government, and 2 to 3 million people have fled their villages for squalid camps as the violence has spilled into the Central African Republic and Chad.
These countries were hardly pictures of stability prior to the influx of refugees across their borders; the Central African Republic plays host to a modern-day slave trade, and rebels attacked Chad’s capital in April 2006 in a failed coup attempt. But the spillover effects from Sudan have a great deal to do with the countries’ tumble in the Failed State Index rankings, demonstrating that the dangers of failing states often bleed across borders. This year, eight of the world’s 10 most vulnerable states are in sub-Saharan Africa, up from six last year and seven in 2005.
The vast majority of the states listed in the index have not yet failed, but they exhibit severe weaknesses that leave them vulnerable, especially to shocks such as natural disasters, war, and economic deprivation.
“The power of such events should not be underestimated,” said the Failed States Index report. “The war in Lebanon last summer helped undo nearly two decades of economic and political progress. But Lebanon was vulnerable because it’s political and security structures lacked integrity and remained tensely divided by factionalised elites. Those vulnerabilities not only helped turn the clock back on the country’s development, but they reverberated across the region – into Israel, Jordan, and Syria.”
The report argues that: “This shows again that a country’s problems are never simply its own.”
Intriguingly, however, the report authored by the Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine – both Washington-based outfits – makes no mention of the fact that the blame for the war in Lebanon last summer lies squarely at Israel’s door and its massive over-reaction to the capture of two of its soldiers by Hezbollah fighters. The report’s failure to mention this fact shows just how strong is the influence of the Jewish lobby in Washington.
Posted on: June 20, 2007, 06:45:48 am
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_IRAQ?SITE=WIMIL&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULTRepublican support for Iraq war slips WASHINGTON (AP) -- Republican support for the Iraq war is slipping by the day. After four years of combat and more than 3,560 U.S. deaths, two Republican senators previously reluctant to challenge President Bush on the war announced they could no longer support the deployment of 157,000 troops and asked the president to begin bringing them home.
"We must not abandon our mission, but we must begin a transition where the Iraqi government and its neighbors play a larger role in stabilizing Iraq," Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, wrote in a letter to Bush.
Voinovich, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, released his letter Tuesday - one day after Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the panel's top Republican, said in a floor speech that Bush's strategy was not working.
"The longer we delay the planning for a redeployment, the less likely it is to be successful," said Lugar, who plans to meet later this week with Stephen Hadley, Bush's national security adviser.
Lugar and Voinovich are not the first GOP members to call for U.S. troops to leave Iraq. Sens. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Olympia Snowe of Maine and Gordon Smith of Oregon made similar remarks earlier this year. But their public break is significant because it raises the possibility that Senate Democrats could muster the 60 votes needed to pass legislation that would call for Bush to bring troops home.
Their remarks also are an early warning shot to a lame duck president that GOP support for the war is thinning. The administration is not expected until September to say whether a recent troop buildup in Iraq is working.
"Everyone should take note, especially the administration," said Snowe, R-Maine, noting Lugar's senior position within the GOP. "It certainly indicates the tide is turning."
Lugar told reporters Tuesday that he does not expect the fall assessment to be conclusive and would only fuel sentiment among lawmakers that Congress should intervene with legislation to end the war.
"The president has an opportunity now to bring about a bipartisan foreign policy," Lugar said. "I don't think he'll have that option very long."
The White House on Tuesday appealed to members for more patience on the war in Iraq.
"We hope that members of the House and Senate will give the Baghdad security plan a chance to unfold," said White House spokesman Tony Snow.
Snow also said Lugar was a thoughtful man and that his remarks came as no surprise.
"We've known that he's had reservations about the policy for some time," he said.
Republican support for the war has declined steadily since last year's elections, mirroring public poll numbers. In an AP-Ipsos poll earlier this month, 28 percent said they were satisfied with President Bush's handling of the war in Iraq, down 5 percentage points in a month.
Earlier this year, Voinovich and Lugar said they doubted the troop buildup in Iraq would work. But they declined to back a resolution expressing opposition to the troop increase because they said it would have no practical effect. The two senators also refused Democratic proposals to set a timetable for troop withdrawals.
Other Republicans, including Sens. Norm Coleman of Minnesota and Susan Collins of Maine, expressed similar concerns about Iraq but recently have said they will wait until the September assessment before calling for a change in course, including possible troop withdrawals.
Voinovich and Lugar said they still would not support a timetable for troop withdrawals and are unlikely to switch their vote. But softer alternative proposals are in the works that could possibly attract their support.
After the Fourth of July recess, "you'll be hearing a number of statements from other (Republican) colleagues," predicted Sen. John Warner, R-Va., a longtime skeptic of the war strategy.
Warner spokesman John Ullyot said the senator is drafting a legislative proposal on the war, but declined to discuss the details. The measure would likely be offered as an amendment to the 2008 defense authorization bill on the floor next month.
In the meantime, Democrats say they will try again to set an end date on the war and cut off funding for combat.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., called Lugar's speech "brilliant" and "courageous" and said it would later be noted in the history books as a turning point in the war.
"But that will depend on whether more Republicans take the stand that Sen. Lugar took," Reid added.
Also on Tuesday, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted in favor of confirming Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute as Bush's personal adviser on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Pete Geren as Army secretary. A full Senate vote on the nominations has not been scheduled.
Posted on: June 27, 2007, 08:14:18 am
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ?SITE=WIMIL&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULTTUZ KHORMATO, Iraq (AP) -- A string of suicide bombings killed at least 73 people and wounded dozens in Shiite villages north of Baghdad, including a large truck bombing Saturday that ripped through an outdoor market and buried victims in rubble, officials said.
The quick succession of blasts within hours of each other suggested that Sunni militants are regrouping to launch their deadliest form of attack - suicide explosions, often against Shiites - in regions further away from Baghdad, beyond the edges of a three-week old U.S. offensive on the capital's northern flank.
The U.S. military on Saturday also reported that six American service members were killed in fighting in Baghdad and western Anbar province over two days, reflecting the increased U.S. death toll that has come with the new offensives.
Saturday's blast, at around 8:30 a.m., destroyed several mud homes in the village of Armili, and victims had to be transported in farmers' pickup trucks to the nearest health facility, in Tuz Khormato, 27 miles to the north, said Capt. Soran Ali of the Tuz Khormato police. Police said one man fled the truck before it detonated with another man still inside.
Saleh Ali, a medic at Tuz Khormato hospital, said 25 dead and 100 wounded were brought to the facility. Residents of the village said more victims remained trapped under destroyed houses and shops, and doctors said many of the wounded were in critical condition, meaning the toll could rise.
"Some are still under the rubble with no one to help them. There are no ambulances to evacuate the victims," said Haitham Hadad, a resident who evacuated his wounded cousin in his car to Tuz Khormato hospital.
Dozens of weeping relatives of victims crowded the hospital, searching for loved ones.
"I saw destruction everywhere, dozens of cars destroyed, about 15 shops and many houses, even some more than 700 meters (yards) away," said Haitham Yalman, whose daughter and sister were wounded.
The village, 100 miles north of Baghdad is mainly made up of Shiite Turkomen, an ethnic minority that is spread across north-central Iraq, though most of its members are Sunni Muslim.
The night before, a suicide bomber detonated a boobytrapped car at around 9:30 pm outside a cafe near a market stocking Iranian goods in the Shiite Kurdish village of Ahmad Marif, killing 26 and wounding 33, said an official at the joint security coordination committee of Diyala province, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
The village - 85 miles northeast of Baghdad in a remote corner of Diyala province - is home to about 30 Kurdish families who had been expelled under Saddam Hussein's rule and returned after his fall. Many Kurds in the area are Shiite Muslims.
A half hour after that blast, a suicide bomber detonated an explosives belt in a funeral tent in another Shiite Kurdish village, Zargosh, west of Ahmad Marif. The blast killed 22 people and wounded 17 others, said the head of Diyala provincial council, Ibrahim Bajilan, and a police official in the provincial capital of Baqouba, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.
Since mid-June, U.S. forces have been waging an offensive in and around Baqouba, part of a stepped-up U.S. crackdown seeking to bring calm to the capital. It aims to uproot al-Qaida fighters and other Sunni insurgents who use the Baqouba region - and another part of Diyala province on Baghdad's southestern edges - as a staging ground for attacks in the capital.
American commanders acknowledge many insurgent leaders fled Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, just ahead of the U.S. assault there.
The new back-to-back bombings could mean the militants have moved a step away from the capital, but still are able to unleash attacks in a region where Iraqi and American security forces are far lighter.
"Because of the recent American military operations, terrorists found a good hideout in Salahuddin province, especially in the outskirts areas in which there isn't enough number of military forces there," said Ahmed al-Jubouri, an aide of the province's governor.
Armili, the village hit Saturday morning, is on the edge of Salahuddin province, near the border with Diyala.
The U.S. military on Saturday announced the deaths of six U.S. service members in combat, most in the Baghdad area.
Two soldiers died Friday when a roadside bomb exploded near their patrol in east Baghdad, the military said. A U.S. soldier and an Iraqi interpreter were killed Friday when an explosively formed penetrator exploded near their patrol in southeastern Baghdad. Explosively formed penetrators are high-tech bombs that the U.S. believes are provided by Iran, a charge denied by Tehran.
On Thursday, two Marines were killed in western Anbar province and a soldier died in Baghdad, the latest military statement said.
Another soldier died Friday of a non-battle-related cause and his death is under investigation, the military said without giving further details. The deaths bring to 3,599 the number of members of the U.S. military who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
While violence has continued elsewhere, attacks on civilians - particularly car bombings - appear to have eased somewhat in Baghdad in recent weeks, and residents in some districts have felt safe enough to keep shops open later. By midafternoon Saturday, there had been no police reports of civilian deaths in the city.
In the far south of Iraq, British troops came under heavy attack by militants in Basra, killing one soldier and wounding three, the British military said Saturday.
The troops were hit by bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and small arms during an arrest operation in the city before dawn, the military said in a statement. Coalition aircraft destroyed roadside bombs as the British soldiers were extracted from the city, it said.
Britain has withdrawn hundreds of troops from Iraq, leaving a force of around 5,500 based mainly on the fringes of Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, 340 miles southeast of Baghdad. British bases come under frequent mortar attacks from Shiite militias. The U.S. currently has about 155,000 troops in Iraq.
Posted on: July 07, 2007, 07:31:11 am
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_IRAQ?SITE=WIMIL&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULTJune 10, 2007WASHINGTON (AP) -- A progress report on Iraq will conclude that the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad has not met any of its targets for political, economic and other reforms, speeding up the Bush administration's reckoning on what to do next, a U.S. official said Monday.
The "pivot point" for addressing the matter will no longer be Sept. 15, as initially envisioned, when a full report on Bush's so-called "surge" plan is due, but instead will come this week when the interim mid-July assessment is released, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the draft is still under discussion.
But another senior official said Bush's advisers, along with the president, decided last week there was not enough evidence from Iraq to justify a change now in current policy.
They had launched discussions about how to react to the erosion of support for the president's Iraq approach among prominent Republicans, that official said, and the debate was part of a broader search for a way out of a U.S. combat presence in Iraq by the end of Bush's presidency.
The second official said the decision was to wait for the September report - one originally proposed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other administration officials, and then enshrined into law by Congress - before deciding whether any course shift is warranted. The official spoke on condition of anonymity so he could talk more freely about internal deliberations.
The July report, required by law, is expected to be delivered to Capitol Hill by Thursday or Friday, as the Senate takes up a $649 billion defense policy bill and votes on a Democratic amendment ordering troop withdrawals to begin in 120 days.
The second administration official said the report "will present a picture of satisfactory progress on some benchmarks and not on others."
Also being drafted are several Republican-backed proposals that would force a new course in Iraq, including one by Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Ben Nelson, D-Neb., that would require U.S. troops to abandon combat missions. Collins and Nelson say their binding amendment would order the U.S. mission to focus on training the Iraqi security forces, targeting al-Qaida members and protecting Iraq's borders.
"My goal is to redefine the mission and set the stage for a significant but gradual drawdown of our troops next year," said Collins.
GOP support for the war has eroded steadily since Bush's decision in January to send some 30,000 additional troops to Iraq. At the time, Bush said the Iraqis agreed to meet certain benchmarks, such as enacting a law to divide the nation's oil reserves.
This spring, Congress agreed to continue funding the war through September but demanded that Bush certify on July 15 and again on Sept. 15 that the Iraqis were living up to their political promises or forgo U.S. aid dollars.
The official said it is highly unlikely that Bush will withhold or suspend aid to the Iraqis based on the report.
A draft version of the administration's progress report circulated among various government agencies in Washington on Monday.
White House Press Secretary Tony Snow on Monday tried to lower expectations on the report, contending that all of the additional troops had just gotten in place and it would be unrealistic to expect major progress by now.
"You are not going to expect all the benchmarks to be met at the beginning of something," Snow said. "I'm not sure everyone's going to get an `A' on the first report."
In recent weeks, the White House has tried to shore up eroding GOP support for the war.
Collins and five other GOP senators - Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, Robert Bennett of Utah, John Sununu of New Hampshire and Pete Domenici of New Mexico - support separate legislation calling on Bush to adopt as U.S. policy recommendations by the Iraq Study Group, which identified a potential redeployment date of spring 2008.
Other prominent Republican senators, including Richard Lugar of Indiana, George Voinovich of Ohio, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia Snowe of Maine, also say the U.S. should begin redeployments.
Several GOP stalwarts, including Sens. Ted Stevens of Alaska, Christopher Bond of Missouri, Jon Kyl of Arizona and James Inhofe of Oklahoma, said they still support Bush's Iraq strategy.
Kyl said he would try to focus this week's debate on preserving vital anti-terrorism programs, including the detention of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The defense bill is on track to expand the legal rights of those held at the military prison, and many Democrats want to propose legislation that would shut the facility.
"If Democrats use the defense authorization bill to pander to the far left at the expense of our national security, they should expect serious opposition from Republicans," Kyl said.
As the Senate debate began, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee arranged to run television commercials in four states, beginning Tuesday, to pressure Republicans on the war.
The ads are to run in Kentucky, Maine, Minnesota and New Hampshire, according to knowledgeable officials, but the DSCC so far has committed to spending a relatively small amount of money, less than $100,000 in all. Barring a change in plans that means the ads would not be seen widely in any of the four states.
The targets include Sens. Norm Coleman of Minnesota, Collins of Maine, Sununu of New Hampshire and the Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. All face re-election next year.
The boost in troop levels in Iraq has increased the cost of war there and in Afghanistan to $12 billion a month, with the overall tally for Iraq alone nearing a half-trillion dollars, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, which provides research and analysis to lawmakers.
The figures call into question the Pentagon's estimate that the increase in troop strength and intensifying pace of operations in Baghdad and Anbar province would cost $5.6 billion through the end of September.
Posted on: July 10, 2007, 06:34:18 am
http://www.twincities.com/national/ci_6344446?nclick_check=17/10/07WASHINGTON - While President Bush on Tuesday defended his surge in Iraq and urged Congress to give it more time, Senate Democrats said time was up and floated a new plan to start withdrawing troops within four months.
The Democrats' new proposal would leave it up to Gen. David Petraeus, the military commander in Iraq, to decide how many American forces would remain. It would limit their mission after May 1, 2008, to fighting al-Qaida, protecting Americans and allies in Iraq and training and equipping Iraqi forces.
The bill could come up for a vote by next week, but it was unclear if it would pass. Senate Republicans insisted on a rule that requires a 60-vote supermajority in the 100-member Senate, where Democrats control only 51 votes.
Most Republicans still support the president's strategy, although dissension is rising within GOP ranks. Six Republican senators back a weaker alternative that calls for a new Iraq strategy but wouldn't have the force of law or a clear date for withdrawal to begin.
Republican leader Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said he would demand 60-vote majorities on all Iraq amendments to a pending Senate defense-policy bill. That delayed a vote expected Tuesday on a measure to ensure soldiers and Marines would get as much time back in the United States as they had served overseas. Under the measure, Reserve and National Guard members could not be sent back to Iraq or Afghanistan for three years.
A vote on that measure, offered by Sen. James Webb, D-Va., could come as early as today.
Growing numbers of Senate Republicans are voicing frustration with Iraq.
"The tide has turned," said Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. She opposed the surge but has voted in support of the president's policy. Snowe said she now favors binding legislation for a new strategy. What changed, she said, is that the Iraqi government has failed to meet any of its own benchmarks for a political compromise that might help end sectarian violence.
It's not clear that there would be 60 votes for any Iraq plan being discussed in the Senate. But, Snowe said, "I can assure you in September there will be."
Snowe and Senate Democrats said Tuesday it would be wrong to wait that long.
Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the surge had failed and that since it began six months ago, nearly 600 Americans have been killed. The war is costing $10 billion per month.
Bush wants to postpone debate on Iraq until after mid-September, when Petraeus, the commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador, will report on military and political developments. An interim report to Congress is expected Thursday.
In a speech in Cleveland, Bush acknowledged that this week's report would show little progress toward political reconciliation in Iraq.
"The Iraqis have got to do more," he said.
But Congress should wait for Petraeus' September report, he said.
"That's what the American people expect," Bush told the Greater Cleveland Partnership, an economic development organization. "That's the way I'm going to play it as the commander in chief."
When Bush outlined the surge plan in January, he offered a vision of the progress he expected: Iraq would take responsibility for its security in all provinces by November, pass a bill to share oil revenues, hold provincial elections this year and pass laws that empower minority Sunnis.
Six months later, none of the benchmarks Bush discussed has been accomplished. Administration officials concede that Iraqi security forces will not be ready to take over from U.S troops by November.
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has long argued that the pressure of an impending withdrawal of American forces would spur Iraqi politicians to act.
Meanwhile, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., speaking in Iowa, she said that if she wins the presidency, she'd demand a plan to start bringing troops home within the first two months of her administration.
Posted on: July 11, 2007, 07:35:04 am
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ_WHAT_NEXT?SITE=WIMIL&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT7/13/07WASHINGTON (AP) -- While many in Congress are pushing President Bush to alter course in Iraq by September if not sooner, his new status report on the war strongly implies that the administration believes its military strategy will take many more months to meet its goals.
The report cited no specific timeframe, but its language suggests what some U.S. commanders have hinted at recently: The troop reinforcements that Bush ordered in January may need to remain until spring 2008.
That's a military calculation at odds with an emerging political consensus in Washington on bringing the troops home soon.
The disconnect between the military and political views on the best way forward is a symptom of four-plus years of setbacks in Iraq - not only missteps by the U.S. government but also by Iraqi political leaders, who have fallen far short of their stated aim of creating a government of national unity.
In the view of some members of Congress - and not just Democrats - the time has long passed for the Iraqis to show that they can parlay U.S.-led military efforts into progress on the political front.
"That government is simply not providing leadership worthy of the considerable sacrifice of our forces, and this has to change immediately," Sen. John Warner, R-Va., said after the White House delivered its war report to Congress on Thursday. Warner was the author of legislation requiring the report.
Hours after the report's release, the House, on a 223-201 vote, approved a Democratic measure requiring U.S. troops to be withdrawn from Iraq by spring. House Democrats pursued the vote despite a veto threat from Bush.
The president apparently has made the calculation that he can ward off political pressure to change course before the next required progress report, set for mid-September. That's when Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, plans to lay out his assessment of whether the counterinsurgency strategy he launched in February is working and recommends to Bush whether to stick with it into the coming year.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice advanced that view Friday morning, telling Fox News' "Fox & Friends" that by waiting until September, "we can make a coherent judgment of where we are and we can chart a way forward."
"I understand people's concern. I understand people's impatience," she said, "but I would just hope that we could recognize that our men and women in the field, our ambassadors, our generals out there, our commanding general, are on a course that was laid out by the president in Jaunary. We ought to stick to that."
By extending troop deployments in Iraq from 12 months to 15 months, the Army has made it possible for Bush to maintain the troop buildup until about April 2008. But if he wanted to go beyond that it would require some even more painful moves by the Army, at the risk of reaching a breaking point.
Although the war is increasingly unpopular, Bush does have support in some prominent quarters for continuing his current military strategy, not only for the remainder of this year but into 2008. John Keane, a retired four-star Army general, said this week that security progress, though slow, is gaining momentum.
"The thought of pulling out now or in a couple of months makes no sense militarily," Keane said.
Between now and September the battle for Baghdad will intensify, likely costing hundreds of American troops' lives, and the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki will be pressured to do more to weed out sectarian influences in the Iraqi security forces and to pass legislation designed to promote reconciliation.
The U.S. casualty rate has increased in recent months, and total U.S. deaths in Iraq since the war began in March 2003 now exceed 3,600.
Petraeus hopes that by September the U.S.-led counteroffensive will have reduced the level of violence enough to create an atmosphere in which political progress can be made, while Iraqi security forces move measurably closer to the point where they can sustain the security gains made by U.S. forces.
"We should expect, however, that AQI will attempt to increase its tempo of attacks as September approaches in an effort to influence U.S domestic opinion about sustained U.S. engagement in Iraq," Bush's report said. AQI is an acronym for the al-Qaida affiliate in Iraq that U.S. officials say has a small number of fighters but an outsized ability to accelerate sectarian violence in Baghdad and elsewhere.
At a White House news conference, Bush pleaded for patience, saying that as difficult and painful as the war has become, the consequences of giving up and withdrawing the troops now would be even worse.
His report to Congress acknowledged shortcomings while asserting that the "overall trajectory" of the military and political effort in Iraq "has begun to stabilize, compared to the deteriorating trajectory" in 2006.
Sprinkled through the report are phrases that make clear the administration believes its military strategy is the right one, that it should be given more time and that positive results are at least months away.
Some examples:
- There are encouraging signs that should, "over time," point the way to lower U.S. troop levels in Iraq.
- Meaningful and lasting progress on national reconciliation may require a "sustained period" of reduced violence.
- Pushing "too fast" for reforms to allow former Sunni Baathists to participate more fully in the government could make it harder to achieve reconciliation. Likewise, it said the time is not right to establish amnesty for those insurgents who fought against the government since 2003, although amnesty is a key goal. At the moment, the report said, "a general amnesty program would be counterproductive" because no major armed group has said it is willing to renounce violence and join the government.
- The report listed eight "core objectives" that will be the main focus "over 2007 and into 2008." These included defeating al-Qaida and its supporters and helping Iraqis regain control of Baghdad.
Posted on: July 13, 2007, 06:41:58 am
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/27/world/middleeast/27saudi.html?pagewanted=17/26/07WASHINGTON, July 26 — During a high-level meeting in Riyadh in January, Saudi officials confronted a top American envoy with documents that seemed to suggest that Iraq’s prime minister could not be trusted.
One purported to be an early alert from the prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, to the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr warning him to lie low during the coming American troop increase, which was aimed in part at Mr. Sadr’s militia. Another document purported to offer proof that Mr. Maliki was an agent of Iran.
The American envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, immediately protested to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, contending that the documents were forged. But, said administration officials who provided an account of the exchange, the Saudis remained skeptical, adding to the deep rift between America’s most powerful Sunni Arab ally, Saudi Arabia, and its Shiite-run neighbor, Iraq.
Now, Bush administration officials are voicing increasing anger at what they say has been Saudi Arabia’s counterproductive role in the Iraq war. They say that beyond regarding Mr. Maliki as an Iranian agent, the Saudis have offered financial support to Sunni groups in Iraq. Of an estimated 60 to 80 foreign fighters who enter Iraq each month, American military and intelligence officials say that nearly half are coming from Saudi Arabia and that the Saudis have not done enough to stem the flow.
One senior administration official says he has seen evidence that Saudi Arabia is providing financial support to opponents of Mr. Maliki. He declined to say whether that support was going to Sunni insurgents because, he said, “That would get into disagreements over who is an insurgent and who is not.”
Senior Bush administration officials said the American concerns would be raised next week when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates make a rare joint visit to Jidda, Saudi Arabia.
Officials in Washington have long resisted blaming Saudi Arabia for the chaos and sectarian strife in Iraq, choosing instead to pin blame on Iran and Syria. Even now, military officials rarely talk publicly about the role of Saudi fighters among the insurgents in Iraq.
The accounts of American concerns came from interviews with several senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they believed that openly criticizing Saudi Arabia would further alienate the Saudi royal family at a time when the United States is still trying to enlist Saudi support for Mr. Maliki and the Iraqi government, and for other American foreign policy goals in the Middle East, including an Arab-Israeli peace plan.
In agreeing to interviews in advance of the joint trip to Saudi Arabia, the officials were nevertheless clearly intent on sending a pointed signal to a top American ally. They expressed deep frustration that more private American appeals to the Saudis had failed to produce a change in course.
The American officials said they had no doubt that the documents shown to Mr. Khalilzad were forgeries, though the Saudis said they had obtained them from sources in Iraq. “Maliki wouldn’t be stupid enough to put that on a piece of paper,” one senior Bush administration official said. He said Mr. Maliki later assured American officials that the documents were forgeries.
The Bush administration’s frustration with the Saudi government has increased in recent months because it appears that Saudi Arabia has stepped up efforts to undermine the Maliki government and to pursue a different course in Iraq from what the administration has charted. Saudi Arabia has also stymied a number of other American foreign policy initiatives, including a hoped-for Saudi embrace of Israel.
Of course, the Saudi government has hardly masked its intention to prop up Sunni groups in Iraq and has for the past two years explicitly told senior Bush administration officials of the need to counterbalance the influence Iran has there. Last fall, King Abdullah warned Vice President Dick Cheney that Saudi Arabia might provide financial backing to Iraqi Sunnis in any war against Iraq’s Shiites if the United States pulled its troops out of Iraq, American and Arab diplomats said.
Several officials interviewed for this article said they believed that Saudi Arabia’s direct support to Sunni tribesmen increased this year as the Saudis lost faith in the Maliki government and felt they must bolster Sunni groups in the eventuality of a widespread civil war.
Saudi Arabia months ago made a pitch to enlist other Persian Gulf countries to take a direct role in supporting Sunni tribal groups in Iraq, said one former American ambassador with close ties to officials in the Middle East. The former ambassador, Edward W. Gnehm, who has served in Kuwait and Jordan, said that during a recent trip to the region he was told that Saudi Arabia had pressed other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council — which includes Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman — to give financial support to Sunnis in Iraq. The Saudis made this effort last December, Mr. Gnehm said.
The closest the administration has come to public criticism was an Op-Ed page article about Iraq in The New York Times last week by Mr. Khalilzad, now the United States ambassador to the United Nations. “Several of Iraq’s neighbors — not only Syria and Iran but also some friends of the United States — are pursuing destabilizing policies,” Mr. Khalilzad wrote. Administration officials said Mr. Khalilzad was referring specifically to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Ms. Rice and Mr. Gates, as well as Mr. Cheney and Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, have in recent months pressed their Arab counterparts to do more to encourage Iraq’s Sunni leaders to support Mr. Maliki, senior administration officials said.
“This message certainly has been made very clear in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi,” a senior administration official said. “But there is a deep reserve directed both at the person of the Maliki government but more broadly at the concept” that Iraq’s Shiites are “surrogates of Iran.” Saudi Arabia has grown increasingly concerned about the rising influence of Iran in the region.
A spokesman at the Saudi Embassy in Washington did not return telephone calls on Thursday. But one adviser to the royal family said that Saudi officials were aware of the American accusations. “As you know by now, we in Saudi Arabia have been active in having a united Arab front to, first, avoid further inter-Arab conflict, and at the same time building consensus to move toward a peace settlement between the Arabs and Israel,” he said. “How others judge our motives is their problem.”
Even as American frustration at Saudi Arabia grows, American military officials are still cautious about publicly detailing the extent of the flow of foreign fighters going to Iraq from Saudi Arabia. Earlier this month, for instance, Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, the top American military spokesman in Iraq, detailed the odyssey of a foreign fighter recently captured in Ramadi.
In his public account, General Bergner told reporters that the man had arrived in Syria on a chartered bus, was smuggled into Iraq by a Syrian facilitator, and was given instructions to carry out a suicide truck bombing on a bridge in Ramadi. He did not identify the man’s nationality, but American officials in Iraq say he was a Saudi.
The American officials in Iraq also say that the majority of suicide bombers in Iraq are from Saudi Arabia and that about 40 percent of all foreign fighters are Saudi. Officials said that while most of the foreign fighters came to Iraq to become suicide bombers, others arrived as bomb makers, snipers, logisticians and financiers.
American military and intelligence officials have been critical of Saudi efforts to stanch the flow of fighters into Iraq, although they stress that the Saudi government does not endorse the idea of fighters from Saudi Arabia going to Iraq.
On the contrary, they said, Saudi Arabia is concerned that these young men could acquire insurgency training in Iraq and then return home to carry out attacks in Saudi Arabia — similar to the Saudis who turned against their homeland after fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
The Bush administration’s relationship with Saudi Arabia has deteriorated steadily since the United States invasion of Iraq, culminating in April when, bitingly, King Abdullah, during a speech before Arab heads of state in Riyadh, condemned the American invasion of Iraq as “an illegal foreign occupation.”
A month before that, King Abdullah effectively torpedoed a high-profile meeting between Israelis and Palestinians, planned by Ms. Rice, by brokering a power-sharing agreement between the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and the militant Islamist group Hamas that did not require Hamas to recognize Israel. While that agreement eventually fell apart, the Bush administration, on both occasions, was caught off guard and became infuriated.
But Saudi officials have not been too happy with President Bush, either, and the plummeting of America’s image in the Muslim world has led King Abdullah to strive to set a more independent course.
The administration “thinks the Saudis are no longer behaving the role of the good vassal,” said Steve Clemons, senior fellow and director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. The Saudis, in turn, “see weakness, they see a void, and they’re going to fill the void and call their own shots.”
Posted on: July 27, 2007, 05:05:16 am
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/04/world/middleeast/04iraq.html?_r=1&ref=middleeast&oref=slogin9/3/07President Bush made a surprise eight-hour visit to Iraq on Monday, emphasizing security gains, sectarian reconciliation and the possibility of a troop withdrawal, thus embracing and pre-empting this month’s crucial Congressional hearings on his Iraq strategy.
His visit, with his commanders and senior Iraqi officials, had a clear political goal: to try to head off opponents’ pressure for a withdrawal by hailing what he called recent successes in Iraq and by contending that only making Iraq stable would allow American forces to pull back.
Mr. Bush’s visit to Iraq — his third — was spent at this remote desert base in the restive Sunni province of Anbar, where he had summoned Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and others to demonstrate that reconciliation among Iraq’s warring sectarian factions was at least conceivable, if not yet a fact.
After talks with Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, and Ryan C. Crocker, the ambassador to Iraq, Mr. Bush said that they “tell me that if the kind of success we are now seeing here continues it will be possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces.”
Mr. Bush did not say how large a troop withdrawal was possible. Nor did he say whether he envisioned any forces being withdrawn sooner than next spring, when the first of the additional 30,000 troops Mr. Bush sent to Iraq this year are scheduled to come home anyway.
Still, his remarks were the clearest indication yet that a reduction would begin sometime in the months ahead, answering the growing opposition in Washington to an unpopular war while at the same time trying to argue that any change in strategy was not a failure.
“Those decisions will be based on a calm assessment by our military commanders on the conditions on the ground — not a nervous reaction by Washington politicians to poll results in the media,” Mr. Bush told a gathering of American troops, who responded with a rousing cheer. “In other words, when we begin to draw down troops from Iraq, it will be from a position of strength and success, not from a position of fear and failure. To do otherwise would embolden our enemies and make it more likely that they would attack us at home.”
To ensure security, the White House shrouded Mr. Bush’s visit in secrecy, issuing a misleading schedule that said he would leave the White House on Monday and Air Force One would refuel in Hawaii. Instead, the president left the White House on Sunday night, traveled to Andrews Air Force Base without the usual motorcade and after an overnight flight arrived in Iraq on a sweltering summer afternoon when temperatures reached 110 degrees.
Mr. Bush flew with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and his national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, an extraordinary gathering of top leaders in a war zone. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, flew to Iraq separately and joined them.
The Anbar region is a Sunni stronghold where in recent months there have been significant improvements in security. Administration officials have been touting the gains as evidence that the increase in American troops has proved a success — a word Mr. Bush used eight times in his public remarks on Monday.
Mr. Hadley, briefing reporters, recalled a military intelligence officer’s dire warning a year ago that Al Qaeda controlled the provincial capital, Ramadi, and other towns in the region. “Anbar Province is lost,” he quoted the analyst as saying then. Mr. Hadley was apparently referring to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni Arab extremist group that American intelligence agencies have concluded is foreign led. The extent of its links to Osama bin Laden’s network is not clear.
On Monday, after meeting with some of the local Sunni leaders who only months ago led the struggle against the American presence in the region, Mr. Bush held up Anbar as a model of the progress that was possible.
“When you stand on the ground here in Anbar and hear from the people who live here, you can see what the future of Iraq can look like,” he said, night having fallen at the base.
During his visit, Mr. Bush did not leave the base, a heavily fortified home to about 10,000 American troops about 120 miles west of Baghdad. Mr. Hadley said planning for the trip had started five or six weeks ago.
Administration officials rejected the notion that the trip was a publicity stunt. They said Mr. Bush wanted to meet face-to-face with General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker, who are to testify before Congress about progress in Iraq next week, and with Iraqi leaders he has been pressing from afar to take steps toward political reconciliation.
By summoning Mr. Maliki and other top officials to the Sunni heartland, a region the Shiite prime minister has rarely visited, Mr. Bush succeeded in forcing a public display of unity. Meeting with the Iraqi leaders in a buff-colored one-story building near the runway, Mr. Bush effusively greeted President Jalal Talabani, the last of the five officials to enter the small conference room. “Mr. President, Mr. President, the president of the whole Iraq,” Mr. Bush said, kissing Mr. Talabani three times on the cheeks.
The other Iraqi officials there were Vice President Adel Abdul-Mehdi, Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih and Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan region.
“The government they represent, of course, is based in Baghdad,” Mr. Bush said, appearing with Ms. Rice and Mr. Gates in front of two parked Humvees at the base, “but they’re here because they know the success of a free Iraq depends on the national government’s support from the bottom up.”
Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, who was visiting neighboring Iran when Mr. Bush and the other top administration officials arrived, was conspicuously absent. Mr. Zebari, a Kurd, said he had been aware that high-level visitors from the United States were coming but that his trip to Iran had been planned long in advance and that the timing was strictly a coincidence.
In Washington, a spokesman for Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, said the president’s visit and his assertions about progress would do little to persuade skeptics. “Despite this massive P.R. operation, the American people are still demanding a new strategy,” the spokesman, Jim Manley, said in a telephone interview.
Anthony H. Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the reversal in Anbar had less do with American strategy than with local frustration over the extremism of Al Qaeda fighters trying to impose their doctrine. Mr. Cordesman suggested it was more of an anomaly than a model that could be applied elsewhere in Iraq, where sectarian divisions and strife appear to be worsening.
“We are spinning events that don’t really reflect the reality on the ground,” he said.
While some administration officials have recently described the Sunni shift in Anbar as serendipitous, they portrayed the improvements as an outgrowth, at least in part, of the decision to send nearly 4,000 additional marines to the province as part of the White House strategy to increase troops. “This is not serendipity,” Mr. Hadley told reporters.
Distrust remains deep between Sunnis in Anbar and the Maliki government — and it is clear that Mr. Maliki sees effort by the American military to organize armed groups of Sunnis to assist American troops as a policy that amounts to assisting his enemies. Nor is it clear that the same model can be made to work in areas of Iraq where Sunnis and Shiites live together.
Sunnis, for their part, complain that the Maliki government has long failed to deliver services and to share oil revenue with Anbar. Describing the meeting Monday between the tribal sheiks and Iraqi officials from Baghdad, Mr. Gates said, “There was a sense of shared purpose among them and some good-natured jousting over resources.”
It remained unclear whether Mr. Bush planned to announce any specific troop withdrawals when he delivers the congressionally mandated report later this month.
Several administration officials say Mr. Bush and his commanders and military advisers have neared a consensus on beginning a reduction in American forces. Speaking to reporters traveling with him, Mr. Gates said Monday that he had formulated his opinion, though he declined to disclose it.
Asked about Mr. Bush’s comments on possible troop reductions, Mr. Gates added, “Clearly that is one of the central issues that everyone has been examining — what is the security situation, what do we expect the security situation to be in the months ahead?” He went on to say, “What opportunities does that provide in terms of maintaining the security situation while perhaps beginning to bring the troop level down?”
As he did in Washington late last week, Mr. Bush urged lawmakers to withhold judgment on the situation in Iraq until hearing first-hand reports next week from General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker. At the same time, though, he has used the White House’s considerable platform to assert his own views.
“The strategy we put into place earlier this year was designed to help the Iraqis improve their security so that political and economic progress could follow,” Mr. Bush said after meeting with Mr. Maliki and the other Iraqi leaders. “And that is exactly the effect it is having in places like Anbar.”
