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POPSWhat Phase Two Senate Intelligence Report Says About Saddam's Hospitality Postwar information supports prewar assessments and statements that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was in Baghdad and that al Qaeda was present in northern Iraq. But now, even in a partisan report designed to attack the Bush administration's credibility, the Senate Intelligence Committee has admitted that Bush and his officials were right to argue that Saddam was harboring al Qaeda fugitives. Both prewar and postwar intelligence assessments confirm their view. And while the Senate Intelligence Committee got this issue right, it got many others wrong. The report is not even internally consistent and the committee simply ignored numerous pieces of information that got in the way of some of its conclusions. Iraq and al Qaeda did not have a cooperative relationship. ommittee ignored the best evidence-Iraqi intelligence documents discovered in postwar Iraq.
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POPSWhittling Away At Shia Cleric Moqtada al-Sadr
(continued) Al-Qaida in Iraq tried to ignite a sectarian war -- its now-dead emir, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, made that goal explicit in February 2004. Al-Qaida massacred en masse, to the point that U.S. Sen. Harry Reid (D for Defeatist) declared the war in Iraq lost. Then, the Sunni tribes in Anbar turned on al-Qaida. Sunni political integration is by no means complete, but al-Qaida has failed. In August 2004, Sadr's thugs grabbed the Grand Mosque in Najaf. Sadr was counting on Americans to bomb the mosque. The United States opted to follow the political lead of Shia Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Sistani's aides told coalition officers: "Let us deal with Sadr. We know how to handle him and will do so. However, the coalition must not make him a martyr." Think of the Iraqi anti-Sadr method as a form of suffocation, a political war waged with the blessing of Ayatollah Sistani that requires daily economic and political action, persistent police efforts and occasional military thrusts.
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POPSStrategic Insight Discovered In Zarqawi Baghdad Map The troop surge was announced Jan. 10 and began soon after that. Gens. David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno took a risky but calculated move to send U.S. troops out of main base camps and set up small patrol stations that were jointly manned with Iraqi forces, essentially living among Iraqis in Baghdad. It made it easier for intelligence to surface but made U.S. troops easier targets.
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POPSIraq Coalition Casualty Count This is the best compilation I've seen yet. It shows casualties - US UK, coalition forces. It also shows the number of wounded as well as the number of Iraqi civilian casualties.
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POPSHatred of U.S. drives al-Qaida recruiting From the article: "In Zarqa, Jordan — home of the late leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — one member of the group, a 19-year-old high school dropout, told NBC News earlier this year that he was ready to carry out suicide bombings in Iraq — or anywhere else he was ordered to. He, like many others in the Middle East, cannot look away from the powerful images of destruction to which many Americans have become desensitized. Indeed, they say they do not want to look away from what is happening to their neighbors, their fellow Arabs and Muslims."
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POPSCAIR and Hamas connections I'm not sure if I caught it here, but at LGF you can click on the graph to get a live version where you can drag the nodes around and manipulate it to see the links.
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POPSBush Declassifies al-Qaida's U.S. Attack Plans I am willing to bet that if the terrorists and the terror cells knew that no matter how or what they did (planning etc), that we would find out and hunt them down, that just maybe they might think twice before pulling stupid stunts. Its kind of like gun control, if you take the guns out of the hands of responsible citizens, then only the criminals would own guns giving them a defined advantage over anyone else. But if they (criminals) didn't know who was armed and who wasn't, it gives them a little bit more time to pause and reflect before they (bad guys) do something dumb...
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POPSOn the Baghdad Attacks that killed 200 If I say "everything we've done in Iraq is a failure," that isn't quite right - Fallujah out of all places has been pacified at various points, and more tribal leaders are working with the Coalition. The reawakening of Al-Qaeda on such a spectacular scale is severely problematic, though. One has to wonder if they are working closely with al-Sadr's people, as it was Sunni insurgents that left Zarqawi out to dry when he was no use, and it is the al-Sadr militia and its "representatives" that just withdrew from the government.
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POPSThere he goes again . . . If Cheney has access to something that is not reported by our intelligence community, then PRODUCE it. The American people deserve to know the truth.
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POPSRepublicans in Congress: don't mention the surge An internal strategy memo from Congressional Republicans lays it out with startling clarity: "Democrats want to force us to focus on defending the surge, making the case that it will work... If we let the Democrats force us into a debate on the surge, or the current situation in Iraq, we lose." As always, they advise, just keep repeating "9-11, 9-11, 9-11" until people agree with you.
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POPSMiddle East: So far so good for Iraq's Maliki By all accounts the war-weary US public welcomed the Casey initiative, meaning that more than half of the US troops in Iraq would soon be returning home. The US administration would be able to sell this retrenchment on the grounds that Iraq was ready to stand on its own, that Maliki's cabinet is in place, the insurgents are laying down their arms, and Zarqawi is dead. This after all, is what President George W Bush has been promising all along. As things stand, Maliki will have to make several strategic and highly important decisions in the weeks to come, if Casey's plan for partial and gradual withdrawal materializes. He will have to walk a tightrope between different political groups that seem to be united around him, at least for now. To do that, he needs to continue giving them what Churchill called for: Facts and Results. Sami Moubayed is a Syrian political analyst.
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