Corner turned in Iraq?

[Harlan Huckleby]

Seymour Hirsch has been predicting an invasion of Iran for 4 years.

I'm made very nervous by Obama's statements on Iraq:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/04/us/politics/04policy.html

It sounds like he is going to precede with his troop withdrawal schedule regardless of conditions or implications.

I find this terribly stupid, lacking in wisdom or leadership. Maybe it's just campaign fodder.

It's possible that Iraq is capable of holding itself together if the U.S. withdraws on Obama's schedule. But it would be tragic if things reverse, in fact the damage to our interests will be greater than all the harm the invasion has already done!

WE need a clear, non-ideological approach to Iraq. There is so much positive that appears within reach. Maybe Obama is REALLY thinking pragmatically and can't say it. I'm concerned.

[texaspackerbacker]

There hasn't been much worth commenting on in here lately. Welcome back Politics/Issues of substance and significance.

It doesn't just sound like that, Harlan. It is Obama's oft-repeated firm position--firmly WRONGHEADED and ANTI-AMERICAN position.

The campaign is in kind of a lull right now. McCain is saying the right things on this and other issues, but predictably, the leftist mainstream media is giving him minimal coverage. That is problematic in the short term, but Obama can't run and hide from his extremist positions forever. As we get closer to the election, there will be ads and debates where Obama will be drawn out and forced to justify his horrendously anti-American attitude and views. When that happens, 2008 should procede just like 2000 and 2004 when similarly extreme leftists led in the polls about this time of the year, but were exposed for what they really were and went down to defeat.

For the sake of America's future, it has to happen again.

[mraynrand]

Obama can't run and hide from his extremist positions forever. As we get closer to the election, there will be ads and debates where Obama will be drawn out and forced to justify his horrendously anti-American attitude and views.

That's the key to his success. How long can he hide his extreme views? Will he actually get challenged and exposed on any of his absurd positions. That's the key. If the electorate knows he wants punitive capital gains taxes EVEN IF REVENUE GOES DOWN, he's in trouble. If he's asked the question "What if the Iraqi govt. ASKS US TO STAY IN IRAQ?" Then he's in trouble. Obama's ace in the hole is that he can appear to move to the center, because his base knows it's a smoke screen and will vote for him anyway. The hard lefties have herd mentality that way - they'll never move off their guy no matter what. The far right has some core principles that McCain doesn't care about, so they might let him twist in the wind. But don't underestimate Obama - he's extremely clever. His embracing of faith based initiatives was UberClintonian - chip away from the other guy by embracing one of his positions. Obama just freshened it up by masking the fact that he's all for faith based initiatives, so long as no faith is really involved. But that was hidden in his comments and didn't make the headlines. Meanwhile, Madame Defarge continues knitting....

[Freak Out]

Obama can't run and hide from his extremist positions forever. As we get closer to the election, there will be ads and debates where Obama will be drawn out and forced to justify his horrendously anti-American attitude and views.

That's the key to his success. How long can he hide his extreme views? Will he actually get challenged and exposed on any of his absurd positions. That's the key. If the electorate knows he wants punitive capital gains taxes EVEN IF REVENUE GOES DOWN, he's in trouble. If he's asked the question "What if the Iraqi govt. ASKS US TO STAY IN IRAQ?" Then he's in trouble. Obama's ace in the hole is that he can appear to move to the center, because his base knows it's a smoke screen and will vote for him anyway. The hard lefties have herd mentality that way - they'll never move off their guy no matter what. The far right has some core principles that McCain doesn't care about, so they might let him twist in the wind. But don't underestimate Obama - he's extremely clever. His embracing of faith based initiatives was UberClintonian - chip away from the other guy by embracing one of his positions. Obama just freshened it up by masking the fact that he's all for faith based initiatives, so long as no faith is really involved. But that was hidden in his comments and didn't make the headlines. Meanwhile, Madame Defarge continues knitting....

Hussein is moving to the center now at warp 8....damn the engines.

[Harlan Huckleby]

my main objection to Obama is I don't know who he is. I'm more bothered by his lack of track record than I am by his lack of experience.

[texaspackerbacker]

The guy is TRYING to sound centrist, and you just know the God damned left-saturated mainstream media will make every effort to allow him to carry out that deception.

On some levels, Obama is every bit as slick a politician as Bill Clinton. That is part of what makes him more dangerous than Algore and Kerry. The other thing that makes Obama even more dangerous is the fact that as extreme as the positions taken by Gore and Kerry were/are, Obama is infinitely MORE extreme. That last fact, however, I predict, will be his undoing. When it comes right down to the choice of his sick anti-American socialist ideology and being a Clinton-esque liar and distorter of his positions, I think Obama will have a hard time matching Clinton in disingenuousness.

The other key is the American people. They/we saw through the media blitz of support for Gore and Kerry and realized how extremely harmful to the country their policies would have been. Hopefully, as we get closer to the election and more and more of the unfiltered words of the candidates come through with ads, debates, etc., THE PEOPLE will come through again and save the country from the horrors and possibly destruction that an Obama Administration would bring.

[HarveyWallbangers]

Harlan was ahead of the curve on this one. Like anything, we'll see. Time will bring clarity.

Analysis: US now winning Iraq war that seemed lost

BAGHDAD - The United States is now winning the war that two years ago seemed lost. Limited, sometimes sharp fighting and periodic terrorist bombings in Iraq are likely to continue, possibly for years. But the Iraqi government and the U.S. now are able to shift focus from mainly combat to mainly building the fragile beginnings of peace — a transition that many found almost unthinkable as recently as one year ago.

Despite the occasional bursts of violence, Iraq has reached the point where the insurgents, who once controlled whole cities, no longer have the clout to threaten the viability of the central government.

That does not mean the war has ended or that U.S. troops have no role in Iraq. It means the combat phase finally is ending, years past the time when President Bush optimistically declared it had. The new phase focuses on training the Iraqi army and police, restraining the flow of illicit weaponry from Iran, supporting closer links between Baghdad and local governments, pushing the integration of former insurgents into legitimate government jobs and assisting in rebuilding the economy.

Scattered battles go on, especially against al-Qaida holdouts north of Baghdad. But organized resistance, with the steady drumbeat of bombings, kidnappings, assassinations and ambushes that once rocked the capital daily, has all but ceased.

This amounts to more than a lull in the violence. It reflects a fundamental shift in the outlook for the Sunni minority, which held power under Saddam Hussein. They launched the insurgency five years ago. They now are either sidelined or have switched sides to cooperate with the Americans in return for money and political support.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told The Associated Press this past week there are early indications that senior leaders of al-Qaida may be considering shifting their main focus from Iraq to the war in Afghanistan.

Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told the AP on Thursday that the insurgency as a whole has withered to the point where it is no longer a threat to Iraq's future.

"Very clearly, the insurgency is in no position to overthrow the government or, really, even to challenge it," Crocker said. "It's actually almost in no position to try to confront it. By and large, what's left of the insurgency is just trying to hang on."

Shiite militias, notably the Mahdi Army of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, have lost their power bases in Baghdad, Basra and other major cities. An important step was the routing of Shiite extremists in the Sadr City slums of eastern Baghdad this spring — now a quiet though not fully secure district.

Al-Sadr and top lieutenants are now in Iran. Still talking of a comeback, they are facing major obstacles, including a loss of support among a Shiite population weary of war and no longer as terrified of Sunni extremists as they were two years ago.

Despite the favorable signs, U.S. commanders are leery of proclaiming victory or promising that the calm will last.

The premature declaration by the Bush administration of "Mission Accomplished" in May 2003 convinced commanders that the best public relations strategy is to promise little, and couple all good news with the warning that "security is fragile" and that the improvements, while encouraging, are "not irreversible."

Iraq still faces a mountain of problems: sectarian rivalries, power struggles within the Sunni and Shiite communities, Kurdish-Arab tensions, corruption. Any one of those could rekindle widespread fighting.

But the underlying dynamics in Iraqi society that blew up the U.S. military's hopes for an early exit, shortly after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, have changed in important ways in recent months.

Systematic sectarian killings have all but ended in the capital, in large part because of tight security and a strategy of walling off neighborhoods purged of minorities in 2006.

That has helped establish a sense of normalcy in the streets of the capital. People are expressing a new confidence in their own security forces, which in turn are exhibiting a newfound assertiveness with the insurgency largely in retreat.

Statistics show violence at a four-year low. The monthly American death toll appears to be at its lowest of the war — four killed in action so far this month as of Friday, compared with 66 in July a year ago. From a daily average of 160 insurgent attacks in July 2007, the average has plummeted to about two dozen a day this month. On Wednesday the nationwide total was 13.

Beyond that, there is something in the air in Iraq this summer.

In Baghdad, parks are filled every weekend with families playing and picnicking with their children. That was unthinkable only a year ago, when the first, barely visible signs of a turnaround emerged.

Now a moment has arrived for the Iraqis to try to take those positive threads and weave them into a lasting stability.

The questions facing both Americans and Iraqis are: What kinds of help will the country need from the U.S. military, and for how long? The questions will take on greater importance as the U.S. presidential election nears, with one candidate pledging a troop withdrawal and the other insisting on staying.

Iraqi authorities have grown dependent on the U.S. military after more than five years of war. While they are aiming for full sovereignty with no foreign troops on their soil, they do not want to rush. In a similar sense, the Americans fear that after losing more than 4,100 troops, the sacrifice could be squandered.

U.S. commanders say a substantial American military presence will be needed beyond 2009. But judging from the security gains that have been sustained over the first half of this year — as the Pentagon withdrew five Army brigades sent as reinforcements in 2007 — the remaining troops could be used as peacekeepers more than combatants.

As a measure of the transitioning U.S. role, Maj. Gen. Jeffery Hammond says that when he took command of American forces in the Baghdad area about seven months ago he was spending 80 percent of his time working on combat-related matters and about 20 percent on what the military calls "nonkinetic" issues, such as supporting the development of Iraqi government institutions and humanitarian aid.

Now Hammond estimates those percentage have been almost reversed. For several hours one recent day, for example, Hammond consulted on water projects with a Sunni sheik in the Radwaniyah area of southwest Baghdad, then spent time with an Iraqi physician/entrepreneur in the Dora district of southern Baghdad — an area, now calm, that in early 2007 was one of the capital's most violent zones.

"We're getting close to something that looks like an end to mass violence in Iraq," says Stephen Biddle, an analyst at the Council of Foreign Relations who has advised Petraeus on war strategy. Biddle is not ready to say it's over, but he sees the U.S. mission shifting from fighting the insurgents to keeping the peace.

Although Sunni and Shiite extremists are still around, they have surrendered the initiative and have lost the support of many ordinary Iraqis. That can be traced to an altered U.S. approach to countering the insurgency — a Petraeus-driven move to take more U.S. troops off their big bases and put them in Baghdad neighborhoods where they mixed with ordinary Iraqis and built a new level of trust.

Army Col. Tom James, a brigade commander who is on his third combat tour in Iraq, explains the new calm this way:

"We've put out the forest fire. Now we're dealing with pop-up fires."

It's not the end of fighting. It looks like the beginning of a perilous peace.

Maj. Gen. Ali Hadi Hussein al-Yaseri, the chief of patrol police in the capital, sees the changes.

"Even eight months ago, Baghdad was not today's Baghdad," he says.

Robert Burns is AP's chief military reporter, and Robert Reid is AP's chief of bureau in Baghdad. Reid has covered the war from his post in Iraq since the U.S. invasion in March 2003. Burns, based in Washington, has made 21 reporting trips to Iraq; on his latest during July, Burns spent nearly three weeks in central and northern Iraq, observing military operations and interviewing both U.S. and Iraqi officers.

[texaspackerbacker]

The damn shame of it--actually an intentional situation on the part of the leftist mainstream media--is that the better things get, the less "newsworthy" it will be to those damn America-hating assholes.

Conversely, things take a mild turn for the worst as it seems in Afghanistan, and the same sick anti-American bastards--just like their God damned idol, Obama--then get all hopeful for a bad result, and start talking it up again.