IRAQ WAR ARCHIVES
"I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.   I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda.   I am not opposed to all wars.  I'm opposed to dumb wars."--Barack Obama, at a rally before several hundred war protestors in Chicago, October 2002
Howtotalkback: Obama understood six years ago what would happen in this obscene war. 

How Successful Is The Surge?
According to a report recently released by the Government Accountability Office, several crucial measures the Bush administration uses to demonstrate economic, political, and security progress are either incorrect or far more mixed than the administration admits.  According to this report, the relatively calm period rests mainly on the American troop increase, a shaky cease-fire declared by militants loyal to the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, and an American-led program to pay former insurgents to help keep the peace." 
Howtotalkback: The U.S. is paying the militants hundreds of millions of dollars.  We predict that the violence will increase dramatically if we ever stop participating in this high-level protection racket. 

In a recent article in USA Today,  Maj. General Rick Lynch stated that about 36,000 Iraqis--60% of whom had been insurgents and now are known as Sons of Iraq-- are providing on-the-ground intelligence for U.S. forces.  Lynch told USA Today that these 36,000 earn about $8 per day.

Howtotalkback wonders if anyone has done the math on the cost of this project.

Using the figures in the article, 365-day coverage with all 36,000 comes to roughly $2,016,000 per week or about $105,000,000 per year.

If these 36,000 Iraqis work 40-hour weeks, the total is less--roughly $1,440,000 per week, or about $74,000,000 per year.

And this is just to pay the foot soldiers!!

We probably will never know how much we are paying the elders and war lords and powerful clerics to participate in this protection racket.

Just to put these expenditures in perspective, the entire budget for the Peace Corps for the entire world is $330,000,000 per year.

This is yet another scheme of the Bush administration that vetoed a plan to expand health-care coverage to American children-- because it was too costly.

We wonder if any of the geniuses who devised this racket have thought about what will happen if we stop paying for protection.  Probably the same thing that happens to people who park in  dangerous neighborhoods and don't pay hoodlums to guard their cars. 

Americans don't like being lied to by their leaders, especially if there are casualties involved and especially if there's no accountability."
--Frank Rich

"On this Memorial Day, we should remember that the Iraq War has already cost 4,060 lives, less than 400 American lives short of the deaths in the Revolutionary War  (4,435)--with no end in sight. This tragic misadventure has claimed more lives than the War of 1812 (2,260), the Spanish-American War (2, 260) and the Persian Gulf War (382)."  --Will C. Justice

TORTURE
Waterboarding
The first secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, says waterboarding is torture.  According to an AP report Jan 19, 2008, Ridge stated: "I believe, unlike others in the administration, that waterboarding was, is--and will always be--torture.  That's a simple statement." 
Talkback: There's a very good chance that within the next decade members of the Bush administration, and perhaps the President himself, will be tried as war criminals.  Many Europeans are already making this prediction. 
Love Those Canadians!
According to an AP report (1-19-2008) a Canadian training manual for Canadian diplomats lists the US as a nation where prisoners risk torture and abuse.  Other nations listed:  Afghanistan, China, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.  Predictably, there were angry denials from the governments of the nations named. 
Talkback:  Where's there's smoke, there's usually fire.

AND THE BEAT GOES ON: BUSH FORCES OUT YET ANOTHER HIGH-RANKING MILITARY LEADER WHO DISAGREES WITH HIM.

Admiral J. Fallon, America's top commander in the Middle East, has just announced early retirement after only one year as head of the Joint Command.  According to one account, "Fanon had rankled senior officials of the Bush administration in recent months with comments that emphasized diplomacy over conflict in dealing with Iran, that endorsed further troop withdrawals from Iraq beyond those already under way and that suggested the United States had taken its eye off the military mission in Afghanistan."

A senior administration official said that, taken together, the comments 'left the perception he had a different foreign policy than the president.'

Talkback:  Pay absolutely no attention to Bush's silly claim that his policies in Iraq are guided by his top military commanders.  The truth is, Bush heeds their counsel only if they say what he wants to hear.  If not, they are gone.

THIS REPORT WON'T GET MUCH PLAY ON FOX NEWS:  "A PENTAGON-SPONSORED REPORT FINDS NO QUAEDA-HUSSEIN TIE."
The most definitive assessment to date by the US Government found no direct operational connection between Saddam Hussein's government and Al Qaeda before the war in Iraq.   March 12, 2008

Talkback: The Bush administration cited the existence of ties between Hussein and the terrorist network run by Osama bin Laden as a rationale for the invasion of Iraq.

MCCAIN ON IRAQ
Iranian agents are "taking al Qaeda into Iraq, training them, and sending them back."--Senator John McCain

Talkback:  When it was pointed out to Mr. McCain that Shiite Iran and Sunni Al Qaeda have no use for each other, the explanation was "John McCain misspoke."

This isn't the first time that Mr. McCain has made this same statement.  By one count, it is the fifth.  How does one repeatedly "misspeak" five times? 

Here is Hendrik Hertzberg's response:  "McCain knows perfectly well that Shiites are not Sunnis...and that Iran's Shiite mullahs and Iraq's Sunni terrorists are not cohorts in the same legion.  But his rhetorical conflation of them, if one assumes that it is not done in bad faith, is of a piece with his apparent conviction that the Iraq war is very like the Second World War, the Korean War, or Vietnam: a war against a unified, tightly organized enemy--a war destined to end, if ever, in a clear-cut victory (or an equally clear-cut defeat)....That's not misspeaking.  It's misthinking--and, in both senses, it's misleading."   The New Yorker, April 21, 2008

SO, HOW'S THE SURGE WORKING? 
THIS WON'T GET MUCH ATTENTION ON FOX NEWS

US troop deaths in Iraq for April reached the highest total since September 2007--at least 50 died in April.  Now in its sixth year, the war in Iraq has claimed the lives of at least 4,062 members of the U.S. military. Around Iraq, at least 1080 Iraqi civilians and security forces were killed nationwide last month.

Iraqi Soldiers Flee Posts, Despite U.S. Officer's Pleas:  Two weeks ago, more than 1,000 Iraqi soldiers deserted their posts during the fight against militias in Basra.  More recently entire units have deserted in the fight against militias in Baghdad.    4-15-08

Talkback:  This is yet another reason why the Iraq war is unwinnable. Members of militias are often relatives and co-religionists of the Iraqi soldiers who are being ordered to kill them.  Iraqi soldiers who follow orders face the risk of revenge killings against themselves and members of their families. 
Perhaps the biggest reason for the drop in violence late in 2007 was due to the coalition's hiring 90,000 Sunnis--the so-called Sons of Iraq--to protect pipelines and take part in neighborhood watch programs.  These men, many armed with AK-47s that just a few months earlier had been aimed at American troops, received our money, our arms, and our training.

Talkback:  Will we ever know how much it cost us to hire 90,000 Sons of Iraq?  And who's to say if or when they will turn their weapons on us again?  Will this folly ever end?

"At all levels of Arab societies, one hears the mantra: 'We like the American people.   We do not like your government.'
Our sitting president is usually singled our as the prime culprit, but in truth, there are many who share the responsibility for our tarnished image.  We are in a struggle against terrorism and extreme fundamentalism.   We cannot win without the help of the Arab world and the larger Muslim world.  It is sheer madness to alienate them as we have done."  --Henry Clifford

"Iran, an anxious, divided country, is not some irrational, religious juggernaut that we must engage in a cold war.   Before we installed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in 1953, Iran was proof that democracy could rise in the Middle East."--Martin E. Bertocchi

Declaring war on terror is like declaring war on hand grenades.  Terror is a tactic used by countless groups, including American colonists against the British during the Revolutionary War.
--Will C. Justice

"To Western nations ... this speech is to understand the core reason of the war between our civilization and your civilizations. I mean the Palestinian cause....The Palestinian cause is the major issue for my (Islamic) nation. It was an important element in fueling me from the beginning and the 19 others with a great motive to fight for those subjected to injustice and the oppressed."
--Bin Laden, audio message, May 16, 2008
Talkback believes it is important to understand how one's enemy thinks.   Many of the explanations for the motivation behind 9/11 are absurd.  (Example:  Muslims hate the West because it is rich, etc.)

"By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom. The Iraq War has been won..." --Senator John McCain,  Columbus, Ohio, May 15, 2008
Talkback:  By January 2013, the Iraq War will have become the longest war in American history, longer that the Revolutionary War.   Notice that McCain said "most" of the servicemen and women.  He previously predicted that there will be U.S. servicemen and women in Iraq for 100 years.

Only the Vietnam War, the Afghanistan War, and the Revolutionary War have taken longer than the Iraq War.  This war is now in its 6th year.

"The Iraq War has cost an estimated $3 trillion.  If I were to give someone $3 trillion and tell him that he had to spend $100 million each and every day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, and then told him not to come back to me until he had spent every last penny, said person would not return for approximately 82 years."
letter to editor of Vanity Fair, June, 2008

The radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr has called a cease fire and created a fragile calm in Baghdad and Basra
Talkback:  What did we have to pay Moktada al-Sadr in order to get him to call the cease fire? 
How many billions of American taxpayer's dollars have found their way into the coffers of Al-Sadr's Mahdi Army?
We may never know how many of his militia have infiltrated the Iraqi army and been trained and armed by us.
Al-Sadr is shrewd enough to know that there's no reason to kill the American goose as long as it keeps laying those golden eggs.