CIA says growing numbers of Iraqis are concluding that the US can be beat

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/news/politics/7238786.htm

More Iraqis supporting resistance, CIA report says

BY JONATHAN S. LANDAY
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - A new, top-secret CIA report from Iraq warns that growing numbers of Iraqis are concluding that the U.S.-led coalition can be defeated and are supporting the resistance.

The report paints a bleak picture of the political and security situation in Iraq and cautions that the U.S.-led drive to rebuild the country as a democracy could collapse unless corrective actions are taken immediately.

L. Paul Bremer, head of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, who arrived unexpectedly in Washington for strategy sessions on Tuesday, essentially endorsed the CIA's findings, said a senior administration official.

The report's bleak tone and Bremer's private endorsement differ sharply with the upbeat public assessments that President Bush, his chief aides and Bremer are giving as part of an aggressive publicity campaign aimed at countering rising anxieties at home over increasing U.S. casualties in Iraq.

more

[jenk]

1. of course, we only have 130,000 troops there!

think about it, that's like the capacity of the rose bowl plus a hockey arena.

a drop in the bucket in iraq!

[alfredo]

16. Most of those soldiers are in support roles.

Few if any are trained for combat, even less for policing.

[NNN0LHI]

2. This story proves that we are winning and the Iraqis are getting desperate

[9215]

23. Yep, that's what our pResident said.

I guess we'll find out who's telling the truth someday.

[msmcghee]

3. We are being beat.

There are several hundred thousand Saddam loyalists - who have military or police or intelligence training - and who also have access to unlimited supplies of weapons and explosives. They are scattered all over a place in the desert as big as California, with mountainous terrain that they know and we don't.

They'd all have to be Chickenhawks and afraid to fight the Americans in order to lose. They've already shown that not to be the case.

[Scott Lee]

35. Correct. Bremer doesn't get yanked back to DC for nothing.

Look at the signs. Head of the provisional authority suddenly yanked back to Washington in time with a conveniently leaked CIA memo saying that the government is looking for a real quick way out of Iraq.

Leaking a memo is a time honored government tactic for preparing the public for something. Keep an eye on it.

If Vietnam proved anything, it's that a determined and growing group of resistance fighters can outlast the most enormous and well equipped occupying force. They do this by doing what Kissinger said - "Not losing, while the occupier loses by not winning".

Contrary to the daily propaganda by BushCo, time is NOT on our side. It is the other way around. Every day that more of our soldiers die, the American public gets that more restless for a way out of this mess. This has no possible good outcome for Bush unless he produces the October surprise - a "captured" Osama, Hussein or some large cache of WMD miraculously located before the presidential election.

[Alpharetta]

4. Bush would announce a "major offensive" to track down the resistance

but he ran out of major offensives when he said "Mission Accomplished"

[John_Shadows_1]

5. Good Morning, Vietnam!

Can you believe that this isn't all over the headlines - this is the biggest news since those choppers went down.

"Winning the hearts and minds" ain't going so well. God forgive us for sending George W. Bush to the White House.

[John_Shadows_1]

6. and check out this line:

"In Baghdad, the U.S. military announced Tuesday that it will wage a more aggressive offensive against the loose confederation of former Saddam Hussein loyalists, foreign and Iraqi Islamic extremists and Iraqi nationalists.

"The most important message is that we are all going to get pretty tough, and that's what is needed to defeat the enemy, and we are definitely not shy of doing that when it is required," Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. general in Iraq, told journalists."

That means that they're going go kill civilians.

[grasswire]

10. amazing, just amazing

So the CIA leaked info on this top-secret memo. Look at the reason why:

"The report landed on the desks of senior U.S. officials on Monday. The speed of the leak suggested that senior policymakers want to make sure the assessment reaches Bush.

Some senior policymakers have complained of being frustrated in their efforts to provide Bush with analyses of the situation in Iraq that are more somber than the optimistic views of Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and other hardliners."

Look at that.

And today, Bremer flew back from Iraq and met with Cheney but NOT with Bush.

Holy cow.

[Jacobin]

18. But, he doesn't read the papers!!

HAH.

What a clusterfuck.

[maggrwaggr]

7. we didn't send him to the white house

his brother Jeb did.

[beanball]

12. GOD help us we didn't send that

evil man to the whitehouse our evil court sent him,please forgive us.

[beanball]

13. Oh my GOD forgive the court

and instill in their hearts some understanding of you commandants.

[BringEmOn]

27. Baghdad billboard

[maggrwaggr]

8. they have nothing to lose

and we do.

Gee, no wonder I had such a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach when I realized they were gonna go to war more than a year ago.

[John_Shadows_1]

9. George W. Bush is a fuck-up ...

... you can't trade your essence for another one. I think we're really going to leave Iraq worse than we found it.

and What's that line in Apocalypse Now - there were only two ways home for Charlie. Death, or victory.

[alcuno]

11. "a new, top-secret report"

It's no secret that the country is being led by ideologues that gave no thought to what the consequences of their actions might be.

I recall Rummy referring to the looting and chaos after we entered Baghdad as Iraqis rejoicing in their newfound freedom. Can someone, anyone, tell me why that man still has a job?

[BrotherBuzz]

14. So, the question that need to be asked...

Is Bush* and company going to use the CIA report or conjure up some OSP fiction?

[nomaco-10]

15. Yep, Armageddon is getting ready to...

rear it's ugly head in Iraq. 40,000 troops have been called up from the Army and the Marines for this go around. My local news just reported that six groups across my state, five Army and one Marine unit have been called up and made note, they are all "combat" units.

[Julien Sorel]

17. Smart short-run Bush play:

create some kind of puppet Iraqi government, declare victory, and start getting out before the election. This is bad news for the Iraqis, of course, as they will return to a dictatorship or worse, civil war, and have nothing to show for the whole invasion except a shattered country and tens of thousands of dead. But the whole thing was an exercise in cynical politics anyway, so with such a clod in office it is unreasonable to expect more.

Long-term problem:

You want an utterly crushed Republican Party? Saddam Hussein returns to power in Iraq, and gives a speech that is televised around the world. It would be devastating to the Republicans, the ultimate symbol of failure. As long as Hussein is alive, they are trapped between the election and the threat to their credibility.
So they will hang on, and leak these negative reports as a means of reducing expectations. And eventually, Americans are going to be presented a choice along the lines of Vietnam, as this thing drags on: stay, and continue to bleed, or cut and run, and watch what unfolds.

Third way: go humbly to the U.N. and give the whole thing up to them, after toughing it out through the election and a decent interval afterwards.

[HighNoonMeetUp]

19. A new, top-secret CIA report from Iraq

How did we get it if it was "top-secret"?

[Jacobin]

20. Read the article. It was leaked to get around Cheney

in hopes that AWOL would read it.

Unfortunately, Smirky doesn't read the newspapers, so he will blunder on in his usual dunder-headed idiocy.

[9215]

21. More Liberal naddering nabobs of

negativism.

From "cakewalk" to collapse because the liberal Press has contaminated American minds with their treason.

It is the Press's fault, just like in Vietnam.


An excerpt from a book I'm working on:


" Propogandists Alexander Haig and Admiral Elmo Zumwalt also blamed the Press for our loss in Vietnam(Gulf War Did not Happen, pp11) as did the Trilateral Commission's Samuel Huntington who claimed that press coverage turned the U.S. public against the war. In a Trilateral Commission report from 1975 Huntington say's:

...politics suffered from imbalance in the Vietnam War between the President and the media... crises like those of the 1960's came from a hostility to authority deeply entrenched in American political culture. (Hallen, Daniel, C. (1986). The Uncensored War. Oxford U. Press N.Y. &Oxford pp.4-5)"

[durutti]

22. Good

I want to see the U.S. leave Iraq with its tail between its legs.

[0007]

24. 'Tis now a hot bed.....

Whatcha gonna do now 'top gun?' yeah, I'm talking to YOU!

[Jacobin]

25. Kick. This is important.

:kick:

CIA trying to tell Smirky that his Great Adventure has come unraveled.

[cliss]

26. Hard to believe, isn't it?

The notion of US military invincibility is a notion that has been portrayed for a long time, especially after WWII. Everyone knew that the US moving in to subjugate a small country which had been crippled by UN sanctions for a decade, would be an easy match. Or was it?

The analysts at Stratfor.com reported that the resistance fighters in Iraq were a force to be reckoned with. "This is a war they just might win".

Stan Goff said the same thing in July of this year:

<snip> "Aside from that sort of macro-analysis, one thing that stands out in my mind is how badly many of the operations went, and how important it is for the US military to spend huge sums of money on arms and high technology. Grenada and Somalia are examples. Real emblems of stupidity in planning and execution. That's why I tell people not to buy into the hype about US military invincibility. Person for person, and dollar for dollar, the US military is the most inefficient in the world. And the most fragile. They are fragile because of their overwhelming dependence on high technology, and fragile because the troops come out of a pampered consumer culture where real physical hardship is anecdotal. Sustained hardship, as we are seeing in Iraq now, devastates morale".

[alfredo]

28. this has made the top story on cnn.com

Looks like bush is losing control. It is also another signal to the Bush Junta that it is not nice to mess with spooks.

[NNN0LHI]

30. MSNBC is reporting it too this morning n/t

[Buns_of_Fire]

29. ...and where's Chimpy during all this?

(from the article)

Bremer and top Bush officials, including Secretary of State Colin Powell and Rumsfeld, met at the White House on Tuesday to examine ways to speed up the restoration of Iraqi self-government. Bush did not attend.

Swaggering around the AEI? Fundraising? Emergency brush-clearing project at the Pig Farm? :puke:

[Jacobin]

31. Bwaahahahaha

Bush did not attend.

That just takes the cake.

[NNN0LHI]

32. BUSH WAS OUT FUNDRAISING n/t

[LibDemAlways]

34. Bush did not only not attend, he was

probably not invited. They only sober him up and drag his sorry ass out for repuke fundraisers and carefully scripted appearances before carefully screened audiences such as military bases where soldiers are ordered not to jeer.

When it comes to the evil plotting and behind-the-scenes dirtywork, junior's presence isn't necessary - like an annoying kid at a dinner party, he'd only get in the way.

[NashVegas]

33. The Administration's Biggest Screw-Up - A War Gamer's Perspective

First, the mantra: "Everything I understand about global politics, I learned in Utopia."

When you are going to war on someone, the war is not over until both sides agree to it. I think we can all agree on that.

By allowing Saddam to light out/killing Saddam off and not making it public (whichever is correct), the US has left Iraq with no one in a position of authority and leadership ability to negotiate terms, and tell their countrymen to lay down their arms. That was probably the administration's hugest mistake when the * touched down on the "Mission Accomplished" USS Lincoln.

This is something I saw in 4 years of playing Utopia (http://games.swirve.com/utopia/), a web-based interactive with tens of thousands of players divided into kindgoms of 25 players each. It doesn't matter if you smack someone silly, until the other side cries "uncle," the war ain't over.