Things in Iraq are certainly improving. I'm sorry that you are so partisan that you refuse to acknowledge any good news out of Iraq.
Here of course, we disagree. All of the news out of Iraq is not bad, but what's the bottom line? The bottom line is that it's not working and there's no end in sight. We can't afford 10 more years of this:
2 time Bush voter says our worst fears about Iraq have come true
"My Name Used to Be #200343"
By David Phinney, IPS News. Posted April 7, 2007.
An American former Navy soldier and private contractor imprisoned and tortured in Iraq by the U.S. military and falsely accused of "aiding terrorists" warns that our worst fears about Iraq have come true.
A year ago, Donald Vance learned what its like to be falsely accused by the U.S. military of aiding terrorists. He was held without charge for more than three months in a high-security prison in Iraq, and interrogated daily after sleepless nights without legal counsel or even a phone call to his family.
On Wednesday, the former private security contractor was honored for his ordeal in Washington and for speaking out against the incident. At a luncheon at the National Press Club, Vance received the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling, an award named in memory of Army helicopter gunner Ron Ridenhour who struggled to bring the horrific mass murders at My Lai to the attention of Congress and the Pentagon during the Vietnam War.
Vance was joined by former president Jimmy Carter, who won a lifetime achievement award, and journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran of The Washington Post who was recognised for his recent book, "Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone".
As hundreds at the luncheon finished their lobster salad, Vance, a two-time George W. Bush voter and Navy veteran, recounted the events of his imprisonment and the grief of his fiancé and family. They did not know if he was alive or dead, he said. They were already making inquiries to the U.S. State Department on how to ship his body home.
He then drew a wider circle around his ordeal to include the countless others who have been held falsely without charge and denied normal legal constitutional protections under law. "My name used to be 200343," Vance said recalling his prisoner ID. "If they can do this to a former Navy man and an American, what is happening to people in facilities all over the world run by the American government?"
Rest of article at:
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/50191
Iraqi Insider: Missteps soured Iraqis on U.S.
By CHARLES J. HANLEY
NEW YORK (AP) -- In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi government insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation's "shocking" mismanagement of his country - a performance so bad, he writes, that by 2007 Iraqis had "turned their backs on their would-be liberators."
"The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order," Ali A. Allawi concludes in "The Occupation of Iraq," newly published by Yale University Press.
Allawi writes with authority as a member of that "new order," having served as Iraq's trade, defense and finance minister at various times since 2003. As a former academic, at Oxford University before the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, he also writes with unusual detachment.
The U.S.- and British-educated engineer and financier is the first senior Iraqi official to look back at book length on his country's four-year ordeal. It's an unsparing look at failures both American and Iraqi, an account in which the word "ignorance" crops up repeatedly.
First came the "monumental ignorance" of those in Washington pushing for war in 2002 without "the faintest idea" of Iraq's realities. "More perceptive people knew instinctively that the invasion of Iraq would open up the great fissures in Iraqi society," he writes.
What followed was the "rank amateurism and swaggering arrogance" of the occupation, under L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which took big steps with little consultation with Iraqis, steps Allawi and many others see as blunders:
- The Americans disbanded Iraq's army, which Allawi said could have helped quell a rising insurgency in 2003. Instead, hundreds of thousands of demobilized, angry men became a recruiting pool for the resistance.
- Purging tens of thousands of members of toppled President Saddam Hussein's Baath party - from government, school faculties and elsewhere - left Iraq short on experienced hands at a crucial time.
- An order consolidating decentralized bank accounts at the Finance Ministry bogged down operations of Iraq's many state-owned enterprises.
- The CPA's focus on private enterprise allowed the "commercial gangs" of Saddam's day to monopolize business.
- Its free-trade policy allowed looted Iraqi capital equipment to be spirited away across borders.
- The CPA perpetuated Saddam's fuel subsidies, selling gasoline at giveaway prices and draining the budget.
Rest of article at:
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/storie...OUNT?SITE=WIMIL&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
Three Iraqi journalists killed in three days in Baghdad
Reporters Without Borders today condemned the murder of three Iraqi radio and TV journalists - two of them women - in separate incidents in the capital in the past three days.
“Journalists are no longer just collateral victims of the war,” the press freedom organisation said. “They are also often carefully chosen targets, and this has been so for some time, but three journalists killed in three days is too much. The total number killed since 2003 now stands at 158.”
Reporters Without Borders added: “We again call on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government to do everything possible to protect journalists and to prosecute those who persecute them. The work of the media in war-torn Iraq is vital, and everything possible must be done to protect it.”
Rest of article at:
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=21623
Gee, why didn't they just take along an armed contingent of helicopters, troops and tanks like McCain did?
