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host · 07-21-2005, 03:41 AM

I am saddened and frustrated to say that it is nonsensical to continue to support a U.S. "regime" that has consistantly misled U.S. residents about the reasons, justifications, mission, goals, and results for and of the invasion of Iraq. Since April 2004, the one year "anniversary" of the invasion, U.S. combat zone deaths are 1165, and 10119 wounded.<b>(1)</b>

In that time, all signifigant stated measures of announced goals are down....progressing backwards. How is it possible to continue to believe what political and military leaders tell Americans about the "progress" or the lack thereof, especially in the face of the losses of real family members in American households:

Daily Electrical production in Iraq in June, 2005, is lower than in April, 2004.<b>(2)</b>

Daily Oil production in Iraq is 5 percent lower that it was one year ago.<b>(2a)</b>

President Bush dramatically misled Americans last September as to the progress in training Iraqi security forces to replace the security duties of U.S. troops. President Bush <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,133299,00.html">claimed....twice,</a> September 23, 2004 on that there already were "Nearly 100,000 fully trained and equipped Iraqi soldiers, police officers and other security personnel are working today and that total will rise to 125,000 by the end of this year. The Iraqi government is on track to build a force of over 200,000 security personnel by the end of next year."
(Bush seemed confused, when he also said, It's important that we train Iraqi troops. There are nearly 100,000 troops trained. The Afghan national army is a part of the army.

By the way, it's the Afghan national army that went into Najaf and did the work there.

There's a regular army being trained, a border guard being trained, their police being trained. That's a key part of our mission")<b>(3)</b>

Now, our generals tell us, ten months later, that the bulk of the Iraqi security forces are still not capable of assuming duties now performed by American troops, but, by October, an 18,000 member force will be capable of "taking the lead in securing baghdad".<b>(3a)</b>

Iraq appears to be headed in the direction of a political, religious, and an economic alliance with Iran.<b>(4)</b>

The new Iraqi constitution appears to result in at least an even chance that Iraqi women will lose the rights and unique secular autonomy that they have enjoyed since 1959, in favor of Muslim doctrine and law.....<b>(5)</b>

<h4>(1)</h4>The "price" in dead and wounded U.S./Coalition/Iraqi Forces:

Quote:

http://icasualties.org/oif/

Military Fatalities: By Month
Period US UK Other* Total Avg Days
7-2005 25 3 1 29 1.38 21
6-2005 78 1 4 83 2.77 30
5-2005 80 2 6 88 2.84 31
4-2005 52 0 0 52 1.73 30
3-2005 36 1 3 40 1.29 31
2-2005 58 0 2 60 2.14 28
1-2005 107 10 10 127 4.1 31
12-2004 72 2 3 77 2.48 31
11-2004 137 4 0 141 4.7 30
10-2004 63 2 2 67 2.16 31
9-2004 80 3 4 87 2.9 30
8-2004 66 4 5 75 2.42 31
7-2004 54 1 3 58 1.87 31
6-2004 42 1 7 50 1.67 30
5-2004 80 0 4 84 2.71 31
4-2004 135 0 5 140 4.67 30
Total 1165

Wounded In Action According to The DoD
Period Wounded
Jun-2005 367
May-2005 560
Apr-2005 591
Mar-2005 370
Feb-2005 410
Jan-2005 497
Dec-2004 540
Nov-2004 1424
Oct-2004 648
Sep-2004 706
Aug-2004 895
Jul-2004 552
Jun-2004 589
May-2004 757
Apr-2004 1213
Total 10119

http://icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx
Period iraqi Police/Mil
Jan-05 109
Feb-05 103
Mar-05 200
Apr-05 199
May-05 259
Jun-05 296
Jul-05 178
2005 Total 1344
Total Prior to 2005 1300
Total 2644

Quote:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwo...-iraq-complete
July 21, 2005 latimes.com : Iraq Single page Print E-mail story
THE WORLD
Sunni Arabs Halt Work on Constitution After Killings
# The decision, following the assassination of a colleague and two others, puts the Iraqi National Assembly's timeline in jeopardy.

By Alissa J. Rubin, Times Staff Writer

BAGHDAD — The Iraqi National Assembly's rush to finish a new constitution by mid-August ran into more trouble Wednesday when the drafting committee's Sunni Muslims halted their work after the assassination of a colleague.

The suspension of Sunni Arab participation came on top of continuing deep divisions among committee members over such key issues as the independence of the governorates, control of the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk and the status of women......

......Meanwhile, pressure began to build on the committee to reverse several moves that would make fundamental changes in the legal rights of Iraqi women.

Under a draft version of the constitution, women's rights would be reduced by taking responsibility for domestic matters such as marriage, divorce, and inheritance away from civil courts and handing them back to religious courts.

Iraq placed domestic matters under the purview of civil courts in 1959, and unlike a number of other Arab countries, its legal and educational systems have promoted the status of women. A substantial number of Iraqi women work as engineers, college professors and doctors, as well as government managers.

Another proposal for the new constitution would in eight years eliminate a provision in the Temporary Administrative Law — under which the country is now governed — that requires that at least 25% of National Assembly members be women. Currently, women hold 31% of the seats in the assembly.

Maysoon Damluji, a women's activist and the deputy culture minister, said that a coalition of women's groups was organizing a lobbying campaign against the proposed changes. She said a forum on women's rights in the constitution would be held Saturday. "We're going to try to lobby the men of the National Assembly to vote against this provision and to go for the civil law," she said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwo...-iraq-complete
Page 2 of 2 << back 1 2

One of her worries is that because there are several schools of thought on family law within each religious sect, handing domestic matters back to religious courts could further fracture Iraqi society, creating different rules for different subgroups.

"This would divide the society into sects and smaller sects as well as reducing women's rights. We had come a long way since 1959, when the law was first enacted," she said.

In the National Assembly, the Kurdish faction has been the one most supportive of women's rights, but it has been largely absent from this latest debate. "They are preoccupied with the federalism issue," said Damluji, referring to the Kurds' top priority of ensuring that the constitution maintain their existing status as a semi-independent state in the north.

The Shiite plurality in the assembly, which includes several influential clerics, is pushing hard for the move back to religious law.

Not all women in the assembly object to giving at least some deference to Islamic teachings.

"It is a fact that we are an Islamic country, and we have to borrow our laws and legislation from that," said Aida Obeidi, an assembly member from the United Iraqi Alliance.

She added that there was no better model than Islam, "and it does not only serve Muslims in this country, but it also serves all sects and segments of the Iraqi community. Who are the seculars after all? Aren't they the Muslims of this country?"

U.S. officials are beginning to send signals that Iraqis should refrain from rolling back women's rights. Iraqis would make "a terrible mistake" in adopting any constitution that sharply curbs women's rights, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Wednesday.

"[This] is a matter the Department of State and the White House are worrying through with the Iraqi people," he said.

Quote:

http://www.sltrib.com/portlet/articl...rticle=2878179
Article Last Updated: 7/20/2005 11:32 PM
Scheer: Iraq has a dangerous and powerful new pal - Iran
By Robert Scheer
Special to the Los Angeles Times
Salt Lake Tribune
On Sunday, George W. Bush's war against terror was turned upside down - and this time the president might even notice. That's because when ''our guys'' in Iraq start firmly allying with an ''axis of evil'' nation, its got to ring some warning bells, no?
I am referring to the joint declaration issued in Tehran, the Iranian capital, by the leaders of Iraq and Iran: ''Today, we need a double and common effort to confront terrorism that may spread in the region and the world,'' said Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, visiting Iran along with 10 of his ministers, following a similar visit from his defense minister. The statement he and his Iranian counterparts produced heralds mutual cooperation between the two neighbors, which will include a cross-border oil pipeline, joint security proposals and shared intelligence information.
Suddenly everyone's against terror!
I wish it were so. But it's not. Consider that while in Tehran, Jafari also paid tribute to the father of the Iranian theocracy, visiting the shrine of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. That the fanaticism of Khomeini is very much alive in today's Iran was clear from the election last month of one of his original Revolutionary Guards to be the country's new president.
In making a pilgrimage to Shiite Iran, the Shiite Iraqi government was also paying homage to the longtime refuge and supporter of Iraqi Shiite revolutionaries, including Jafari himself, who spent 10 years in exile there. Jafari also reiterated an earlier statement in which his government apologized for Iraq's role in the long war with Iran. (How awkward for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. envoy who carried a message of support to Saddam Hussein 20 years ago, when that war was considered by President Reagan's government as a convenient, if terribly bloody, way to distract and weaken Iran.)
Now, thanks to the U.S. invasion, a new alliance is being formed between Iran and Iraq that threatens to further destabilize the politics of the Middle East. It wasn't supposed to work out this way.
Forced democratization of Iraq, according to its neocon architects, was supposed to secure oil for the United States, protect Israel, open markets to Western corporations and, oh yeah, maybe even decrease terrorism. After the invasion, however, the United States, faced with decidedly more hostility and fewer flowers than expected, was loath to allow elections, because their outcome would probably not produce a pliant government.
Then Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the Shiite religious leader, threatened to take his followers into the streets against the foreign occupation if one-person-one-vote elections were not allowed. And when it became clear the ''wrong'' guys might win the elections the United States was forced to hold, the Bush White House, according to an investigative article by Seymour Hersh in the current New Yorker, tried to buy the vote for former CIA asset Ayad Allawi.
When Allawi's slate was soundly defeated, what was Bush to do? With absolutely nothing having gone right in Iraq between the successful military invasion and the inspiring election nearly two years later, he had no choice but to embrace the winners - mostly Shiite, mostly fundamentalists - as the saviors of a free and democratic Iraq.
Sadly, they are nothing of the sort. In Basra, where they have been in power since the U.S. invasion, religious thugs are in de facto control, applying more oppressive theocratic rules over women's behavior and other basic human rights than neighboring Iran.
Even worse, their victory has fueled fierce Sunni resentment, and the accompanying insurgency has begun targeting Shiite civilians with the clear goal of fomenting ethnic war. Over the weekend, more than 100 people were killed by suicide bombers. Sistani himself denounced what he ominously said was now a ''genocidal war.''
Facing that hideous possibility, is it surprising to find the Iraqi government looking for help from powerful Iran? No, but it certainly poses a problem for the White House, which finds itself putting American soldiers' lives on the line every day to prop up an active ally of the country that we claim, with some plausibility, funds anti-Israeli and other terror groups and is bent on making its own nuclear bomb.
Somewhere a guy named Osama bin Laden must be laughing.

Quote:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,114684,00.html
Raw Data: U.S. Lists War Accomplishments
Friday, March 19, 2004

On the anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, the United State Central Command in Tampa, Fla., listed these accomplishments of Operation Iraqi Freedom (search):

<h4>(3c)</h4>
Security.........
........More than 230,000 Iraqis now provide security for their fellow citizens, and Iraqi security forces now account for the majority of all forces in Iraq. These forces include Iraqi Police, Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, Iraqi Border Police, Iraqi Facility Protection Service and the New Iraqi Army.

<h4>(2)</h4>
Power:

4400 megawatts per day is the current seven-day average, this is up from 300 megawatts per day in 2003.

USAID will spend more than $250 million infrastructure repair funds on power rehabilitation and an additional $75 million allocated to power reconstruction.

Quote:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/21/in...gewanted=print
July 21, 2005
Iraqis Not Ready to Fight Rebels on Own, U.S. Says
By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, July 20 - About half of Iraq's new police battalions are still being established and cannot conduct operations, while the other half of the police units and two-thirds of the new army battalions are only "partially capable" of carrying out counterinsurgency missions, and only with American help, according to a newly declassified Pentagon assessment.

Only "a small number" of Iraqi security forces are capable of fighting the insurgency without American assistance, while about one-third of the army is capable of "planning, executing and sustaining counterinsurgency operations" with allied support, the analysis said.

The assessment, which has not been publicly released, is the most precise analysis of the Iraqis' readiness levels that the military has provided. Bush administration officials have repeatedly said the 160,000 American-led allied troops cannot begin to withdraw until Iraqi troops are ready to take over security.

The assessment is described in a brief written response that Gen. Peter Pace, the incoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, provided last week to the Senate Armed Services Committee. It was provided to The Times by a Senate staff aide. At General Pace's confirmation hearing on June 29, Republicans and Democrats directed him to provide an unclassified accounting of the Iraqis' abilities to allow a fuller public debate. The military had already provided classified assessments to lawmakers.

"We need to know, the American people need to know the status of readiness of the Iraqi military, which is improving, so that we can not only understand but appreciate better the roles and missions that they are capable of carrying out," Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said at the hearing.

General Pace's statement comes as the Pentagon prepares to deliver to Congress as early as Thursday a comprehensive report that establishes performance standards and goals on a variety of political and economic matters, as well as the training of Iraqi security forces, and a timetable for achieving those aims. The report was due on July 11, but the Pentagon missed the deadline.

The Defense Department is required to update the assessment every 90 days. From a single American-trained Iraqi battalion a year ago, the Pentagon says there are now more than 100 battalions of Iraqi troops and paramilitary police units, totaling just under 173,000 personnel. Of that total, about 78,800 are military troops and 94,100 are police and paramilitary police officers. The total is to rise to 270,000 by next summer, when 10 fully equipped, 14,000-member Iraqi Army divisions are to be operational.

American commanders have until now resisted quantifying the abilities of Iraqi units, especially their shortcomings, to avoid giving the insurgents any advantage.

In General Pace's seven-sentence response, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, he stressed, "The majority of Iraqi security forces are engaged in operations against the insurgency with varying degrees of cooperation and support from coalition forces." He added that many units had "performed superbly."

At a Pentagon news conference on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld defended this approach of describing the Iraqi units' abilities in general terms only.

"It's not for us to tell the other side, the enemy, the terrorists, that this Iraqi unit has this capability, and that Iraqi unit has this capability," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "The idea of discussing weaknesses, if you will, strengths and weaknesses of 'this unit has a poor chain of command,' or 'these forces are not as effective because their morale's down' - I mean, that would be mindless to put that kind of information out."

Iraqi and American commanders have set up a system that grades Iraqi military and special police units in six categories: personnel, command and control, training, equipping, ability to sustain forces, and leadership. Using these measurements, Iraqi battalions are graded on a scale of one (strongest) to four (weakest). The military is still devising measurements for regular police units.

Level 1 units are able to plan, execute and sustain independent counterinsurgency operations. By late last month, American commanders said, only 3 of the 107 military and paramilitary battalions had achieved that standard. At the lower end, Level 4 units are just forming and cannot conduct operations. Units graded at levels in between need some form of allied support, often supplies, communications and intelligence.

Mr. Rumsfeld said such measurements were just part of the calculus in judging individual units or their parent organizations.

"One way is to look at it numerically," he said. "How many are there? How many have the right equipment? The other way to look at it is the softer things. How is the experience? Are they battle-hardened? How's the morale? What kind of noncommissioned officers and middle-level officers do they have? How's the chain of command functioning? What's the relationship between the Ministry of Defense forces and the Ministry of Interior forces?"

American commanders have said for months that training Iraqis in Western-style policing tactics and techniques would be one of the most challenging tasks, in large part because of the lack of a law-enforcement tradition among the Iraqi police.

About a half of their police battalions are still being formed and are "not yet capable of conducting operations," General Pace wrote.

Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the Armed Services Committee's ranking Democrat, visited Iraq this month and praised the military for devising a system for rating Iraqi units akin to what the American military uses to judge the combat readiness of its own forces.

But in a report issued July 11, Mr. Levin said American and Iraqi officials needed to develop measurable benchmarks for when Iraqi units are deemed capable enough of dealing with insurgents to allow American forces to begin to withdraw. "Without such a plan, Iraqis may never assume the responsibility for taking back their country," he said.

Senior American commanders maintain that the Iraqis are making progress. In the past few months, more than 1,500 American troops have joined Iraqi units as advisers, in most cases living and working with individual units. In addition, dozens of American Army and Marine units are working with Iraqi in counterinsurgency missions.

Maj. Gen. William G. Webster Jr., commander of the Third Infantry Division, which is responsible for Baghdad and the surrounding area, predicted earlier this month that by October there should be a full, 18,000-member division of Iraqi soldiers sufficiently trained to take the lead in securing the Iraqi capital.

Quote:

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8459874/
........According to figures compiled by the Brookings Institute, Iraqi power plants generated an average of 4,293 megawatts of electricity in June 2004. Last month, that figure dropped to 4,035 megawatts, the Washington-based institute said.

Both figures are well below the target of 6,000 megawatts a month that officials set for July 2004.

Officials blame insurgents for much of the problem.

Rebels have targeted oil lines, electricity plants and other infrastructure projects vital to Iraq’s reconstruction, delaying the rebuilding, raising costs and discouraging skilled foreign workers from coming to a war-ravaged country where they could be kidnapped and killed.

Some experts say while Iraq needs to attract foreign investors to help rebuild the electricity sector, power companies are loath to do business here because power costs are so low and the risk to engineers and workers is high.

Before the U.S.-led invasion, Baghdad residents enjoyed about 20 hours of electricity a day, although U.S. officials say supplies in provincial cities were much lower.

Today, residents of the capital receive power for about 10 hours a day, usually broken into two-hour chunks...........

Quote:

http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/pro...706&ID=4944878
July 06, 2005 11:42 PM ET
Iraqi economy source of friction with US

.......Baghdad's then-provisional government committed itself to limit its budget deficit to $6.7bn (£3.8bn, €5.6bn) or 28 per cent of gross domestic product which it said would be fully financed externally. Iraq has fallen well short of its 2005 target of producing 2.4m barrels a day of crude oil. Oil production in June was 2.17m b/d about 5 per cent down on a year earlier while exports were 1.38m b/d, less than the 2004 monthly average. However, higher-than-planned world oil prices have helped fill the gap........