Leave a Comment

Iraq To Cut Awakening Loose - Maybe By Nov. 1st
Newshoggers.com — ... McClatchy's Leila Fadel in Baghdad writes that the Iraqi Shiite-controlled government have given up pretending to like the mostly Sunni Awakening movement which has been so crucial in ( it seems temporarily) reducing violence there. ...

Iraq To Cut Awakening Loose - Maybe By Nov. 1st
At-Largely — ... McClatchy's Leila Fadel in Baghdad writes that the Iraqi Shiite-controlled government have given up pretending to like the mostly Sunni Awakening movement which has been so crucial in ( it seems temporarily) reducing violence there. ...

Hullabaloo — ... ever has, and they did it by using the Administration's own tactics - getting close to the deadline and being stubborn - against them. Iraq has plenty of its own problems - the looming powderkeg in Kirkuk, a more assertive Nouri al-Maliki pushing around prominent Sunnis throughout the country and muscling out Shiite rivals before provincial elections, the very real threat of spasms of violence if the elections are seen as rigged, and most troubling, Maliki simply won't integrate the security forces. A key pillar of the ...

Bush Moves To Remove Iraq From The Campaign By... Adopting Obama's Position-- McCain Too Busy Counting His Homes To Realize
DownWithTyranny! — ... The problem for Petreus and his Republican masters is that they can't look like they're leaving while Iraq disintegrates into civil war... and that is not an unlikely scenario. "A key pillar of the U.S. strategy to pacify Iraq is in danger of collapsing because the Iraqi government is failing to absorb tens of thousands of former Sunni Muslim insurgents who'd joined U.S.-allied militia groups into the country's security forces." ...

People in Glass Houses shouldn’t throw stones
Martini Revolution — ... And McCain is even more willing to distort what may be temporary improvements in Iraqi security obtained by paying Sunni gunmen formerly employed as insurgents as real strategic progress rather than a simple expedient way to delay future warfare which will occur absent reconciliation and concessions by the Shiite central government with close ties to Iran and an unwillingness to integrate Sunni militias into its armed and security forces. ...

Bizarro Imperialism
Antiwar.com Original — ... administration, is that the Americans are no longer wanted by any of the Iraqi factions: not the Sunnis , who hated us from the beginning, ...

Key Iraq Strategy in Peril?
The Moderate Voice — ... ), there are disturbing allegations that a cornerstone of the surge—the success of the “awakening groups”—may be on the point of collapse (McClatchy). ...

Whoops! There Goes McCain’s Iraq Strategy
Crooks and Liars — ... for the reduction of violence in Iraq -now Maliki’s people say they’re ready to throw the Awakening under the reconcilliation bus and declare it illegal - perhaps as early as November 1st. You can bet the Awakening folks won’t be thrilled about it and the received wisdom is that they’ll express their displeasure by returning to violent insurgency. ...

Blowing Opportunities
Antiwar.com Original — ... much, so it's hardly surprising that they haven't been all that eager to incorporate a bunch of armed men experienced in guerrilla warfare and trained by the United States into "their" security forces. As one commander commented anonymously to Leila Fadel of McClatchy , "We cannot stand them, and we detained many of them recently. Many of them were part of al-Qaeda despite the fact that many of them are helping us to fight al-Qaeda." Sheik Jalaladeen al-Sagheer, a leading Shia member of parliament, didn't feel the need to go anonymous, and ...

Anbar General - "I'm only as confident as I look to Baghdad"
Newshoggers.com — ... They know what the reconstruction needs of the province are." ... Kelly said al Qaeda would struggle to regain a foothold, but keeping that depended on continued reconciliation with Baghdad. "In Anbar, they are no longer an insurgency. They're a loosely organised bunch of murderers," he said. "Could they come back? Sure, if the the Iraqi central government did something to enrage ... to alienate these people," he said. Oh, you mean something like this? A key pillar of the U.S. strategy to pacify Iraq is in ...