It has been my experience Ken, that comments made at a distance tend to be more moderate when the commenter is standing at a distance of less than one metre from the person they were previously slating…. just sayin’.

I apologise to SATP.

I was clearly incorrect to assume that he is utterly without persuasive powers.

http://www.cryingwolf.deconstructingiraq.org.uk/...

&

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=home

&
an essential part of the War Machine:

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/03/spyagency200703

also here:

http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2007/03/28/donald-barlett-and-james-steele/

It’s not just simply about killing terrorists.

Do you have the back of a postage stamp on which to write your knowledge of the hotel trade? Or do you prefer something else, which won’t leave so much blank space after you have finished?

Steve at the pub behaves like the
Alpha Chimp at the water hole
in Kubrick’s 2001,
brandishing the tapir femur
in rage and triumph
before tossing it starwards.

Not that Stevie is a card-carrying Neanderthalis Queenslandis or anything of the sort. The bloke is a walking, talking, blogging quantum leap of simean enlightenment.

Wonder if he blows the froth off the top of the pots he pours before plonking them down on his “native fauna” public bar slops-towels.

However my door can be found. On two occassions an individual has turned up in person to take issue with something I have posted. I er… believe neither of them will be back for a second go.

It has been my experience Ken, that comments made at a distance tend to be more moderate when the commenter is standing at a distance of less than one metre from the person they were previously slating…. just sayin’.

A very effective way of mending manners.

My offer stands Katz, back up your words any time.

I can’t speak for Mark and Kim but it is very, very foolish to suggest that time is an irrelevancy in any war. In a democracy if people want something (say the end of a war) badly enough then sooner or later they will put in place a government to bring that end about.

Hence the amount of time between a) the beginning of a war and when the majority conclude that it is no longer worth it and b) the amount of time between then and the point when they put in place a government that will extricate them is always relevant.

And I don’t know as much as I should about Afghanistan but I do believe that NATO is fighting a much more conventional enemy that mounts offensives when the weather permits it then withdraws back to Wazirastan or wherever it is that they are hanging around these days.

It is not sitting on top of a civil war which is far to complicated to reduce down to any crude Manichean dichotomy of oppressed and oppressor

Any time you want to use the word “pathetic� about me in real life, come to my door & try it, please.

Pathetic: evoking pathos or sympathy.

I’m really sympathetic to SATP’s addiction to violence as a solution, whether in the Middle East, or at his door in Woop Woop.

OK Mark and Leinad the enemy is alive and still fighting. But that hardly means that the Baathists are going to return to power or that al Qaeda are not being attacked now by Sunni elements that once tolerated their existence.

Never said they were/weren’t. Oh, and it’s enemies. It ain’t just the Jihadist Group Formerly Known As Monotheism and Holy War blowing up US soldiers and bombing marketplaces.

The idea that the Iraqi masses who turned out to vote and have representatives are losing this war (Katz calls them clients) is strange. The war goes on and can at a low level like this for a long time but political resolutions are emerging and they do not include the re-establishment of the Baathist tyranny nor the acceptance of al Qaeda as any type of tolerated political player, nor is Sadr coming to power.

Quite right, the current political resolutions favour an autonomous Kurdish fiefdom which is eyeing Mosul and Kirkuk as well as staring down Turkey over a formal declaration of independence and support for the PKK in the north, and a fundamentalist Shia agglomeration in the south, though wether it’s a nationalist pro-Sadr or a pro-Iranian one remains to be seen. Lenin must be jerking off at the thought…

Face it Paddy: this thing is splintering badly. The Iraqi government is a thoroughly sectarian body that governs in the narrow, factional interests of its major players — the Supreme Command for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SCIRI (now rebranded SIIC), Al-Dawa Islamiya (linked to the Beirut truck-bombing of US Marines in 1983), the Kurdish Alliance (who recently passed a law making it an offence to criticise Jalal Talabani) and Al-Sadr (who’s still voting in their bloc despite recent tantrums, fleeing for his life etc). The secular parties lost out in 2005 and they’ve gotten weaker since. The major Sunni representatives are either neo-Baathist (NDC) or fundamentalist (IAF/AMS).

All arms of the security forces have been compromised from top down and bottom up, and horizontally as well, depending on the local powers that be. This isn’t post-war Europe, this isn’t Vietnam, this is Lebanon, times ten, fought on the world’s second largest oil reserves with the surplus munitions of two armies. Drop the black and white TV, honey — we’re in technicolour, high definition 16,000×12,4000.

The idea that the Iraqi masses who turned out to vote and have representatives are losing this war (Katz calls them clients) is strange. The war goes on and can at a low level like this for a long time but political resolutions are emerging and they do not include the re-establishment of the Baathist tyranny nor the acceptance of al Qaeda as any type of tolerated political player, nor is Sadr coming to power.

Meanwhile rapid progress is being made in the Kurdish region.

But Afghanistan is seeing an upsurge as well and the probability is for even more fighting yet why has that longer war not lost the support of Kim and Mark? Why this constant harping as if the Iraqi Government is making no progress. It would seem that it was only a few short years ago when the forces that make up both governments were far more week than they are now. It is not ‘we’ who will win the war it is the Iraqi people who will win it.

“Give them a date and it is amazing how people and political parties will stop fighting each other and start working towards a peaceful transfer of power,� he said. Transfer from who to who exactly? From those that win elections to those that lose them presumably. Why does it not surprise me that a reactionary Brit General could think like that?

THERE is “no way” the war in Iraq can be won by the United States and its allies, a former British Army commander said as he called for the troops to be withdrawn.

General Sir Michael Rose, who commanded the United Nations Protection Force in Bosnia-Hercegovina from 1994 to 1995, said coalition forces in Iraq were facing an impossible situation.

“There is no way we are going to win the war and (we should) withdraw and accept defeat because we are going to lose on a more important level if we don’t,” he said.

Though the coalition could not simply “cut and run,” Gen Rose said announcing a withdrawal date would help to dampen down the violence between Sunni, Shia and Kurdish factions.

“Give them a date and it is amazing how people and political parties will stop fighting each other and start working towards a peaceful transfer of power,” he said.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,21836084-5005961,00.html

BAGHDAD, June 2 — Bomb blasts severely damaged a bridge linking a highway from Baghdad with the northern city of Kirkuk on Saturday, the police and witnesses said, heightening tensions between Arabs and Kurds and forcing traffic to detour through some of the most dangerous areas of Diyala Province.

[link]

I am just glad that muslim terrorists are being killed.

Are you?

Any time you want to use the word “pathetic” about me in real life, come to my door & try it, please.

BAGHDAD, June 3 — Three months after the start of the Baghdad security plan that has added thousands of American and Iraqi troops to the capital, they control fewer than one-third of the city’s neighborhoods, far short of the initial goal for the operation, according to some commanders and an internal military assessment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/04/world/middleeast/04surge.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

This war is strategically well founded.

Quite. Killing the Americans over here so we don’t have to kill them over there.

In Iraq the week are growing stronger all the time. The trajectory is quite clear. This war is strategically well founded. If I was on the other side trying to either re-impose a Baathist dictatorship founded in the Sunni 20% or the even more bizarre al Qaeda goals of trying to provoke a regional war through the mass murder of Shia peoples I would despair. Al Qaeda policies have now provoked a Sunni backlash against al Qaeda.

So I doubt that this war will take 22years but if it did what choice would the Iraqi masses have but to fight? It was never going to be anything other than armed struggle that liberated the peoples of Iraq, so what is it with this constant complaint that the US has opened Pandora’s Box.

I had never imagined a left that could openly call for peace, with the fascists still left ruling, but that is what this ‘Oh how I wish they had left Saddam in place’ stuff is all about. Better not rock the boat of the tyranny. Leave the Middle East as a political swamp knowing that the mosquitoes that emerged on 9/11 had to be chased into Afghanistan and that war still not won and ended.

Why are Mark and Kym as supporters of the war in Afghanistan not trying to convince tigtog and others of the importance of that war and explaining that the time is an irrelevancy? Is it because they would then have to address the second stage of the war in Iraq from the same perspective?

Where is the left wing solidarity with the oppressed against the oppressor?