“The violence remains high, but the current level is a vast improvement, one that turned government spokesman Ali Dabbagh nearly giddy as he spoke on Al Arabiya TV on Monday. Dabbagh said Baghdad had “defeated the forces of darkness” and returned to its glory as “the beautiful city of the ‘One Thousand and One Arabian Nights.’”

This guy would make a great copy writer for Fixed News.

…
Anything can be bought for a price its the perfect Milton Friedmen economy, and like all Milton Friedmen ideas its supported by tax payers because thats the only way his ideas work.

Can we buy back the lives of all the American soldiers or Iraqi civilians killed in that evil war?

Friedman’s idea was that the Roaring 20s were so wonderful we should revisit them in all their glory. He wasn’t a forward-looking uplifting person.

“What are Bush’s goals exactly?”

Freedom and democracy.
C. Rice

Just a couple of words those idjits saw written somewhere.

If you can find anything other than $$$$$$ let us know.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20…..restshiite

Anything to get ‘em home, and let the Iraqis decide the future of what used to be Iraq.

BUT! (There’s always a but…:o) ) Let’s not fool ourselves; the reason the violence in Basra has dropped is because Sadr’s Mahdi’s have either worked out truces with the Badr gand and Fadhila, or they have run them out of town.

Which is OK, because that, or something very close to it was pretty much ordained when that first Abrams rolled across the Kuwait border.

The midlands and Baghdad, with their MUCH more balanced population, and with it being the home of the most aggressive and pissed-off Sunnis, will be a horse of a different color.

When our troops leave, they MAY decide to sit down and start some heavy negotiating, or they may not.

My point is, assuming a Kumbayah chorus for central Iraq is a pretty dicey proposition.

Understand, I still think we should get the hell out; with a 90 day timetable for COMPLETE withdrawal, being my time-window-of-choice, for the getting out.

But when we’re getting out (and it NEEDS to be on bush’s watch, of course, so that all the “credit” for Operation Iraqi Clusterfuck goes to the wizards who created it) someone had better be acknowledging that bushCo’s control of the situation is going, going, gone…

Likewise, anyone that wants to get all or even most of the troops out better explain that when the numbers get down substantially, if ANY vestige of american presence in the green zone remains, it is going to morph into the world’s largest and most expensive mortar training range.

In fact, if the Iraqi “government” decides to try to root in there, without tens of thousands of american troops to try to keep the lid on the insurgents and the militias, I’d bet they will have approximately the life-span of Ahmed Chalabi if he takes an afternoon stroll around Baghdad without his Green Bay Packers-sized praetorian guard.

The relative stability of Basra province and it’s environs is due to the fact that most of the people there are Shia. They tire of killing each other fairly readily.

Not so, SUNNIS and Shia. Extrapolating down-south reduction-in-violence to Baghdad and Ramadi and Mosul, etc., is not something that we should do assuming that it will all work out.
We should do it telling the american people that we’re doing it because it’s the least-worst option, and staying will not make things better, but will almost certainly make them worse; especially if we take half-measures and try to keep a substantial military presence there.

By all means, let’s bring the troops home now, or very close to “now”, but let’s not do it claiming that doing it will have all the factions making kissy-face. I think the evidence points, in large measure, the other way.

selise @ 140

maybe i need to upgrade to the latest version of stuffit? i’ve got all kinds of files archived with stuffit that i don’t want to lose.

i dunno TBH, I guess i’d keep stuffit around for the achieves you have. I quite using stuffit when osx came out.

I usually use tar and gzip or bzip2

well, my ignorance is showing – once again. i got stuffit deluxe a couple of years ago because i had to archive a bunch of stuff – many big files… and i was space limited. sitx did a good job of compressing the files, and the function to see all the files within an archive and select just one to expand is very useful… but, maybe there are lots of other programs that do that?

however, i thought that the archives i created would be universally accessible…. or maybe it requires the free download of expander?

tw3k @ 137

I noticed that that first one was trying to overwrite /usr/bin/ditto
Kinda weird error.

maybe i need to upgrade to the latest version of stuffit? i’ve got all kinds of files archived with stuffit that i don’t want to lose.

i dunno TBH, I guess i’d keep stuffit around for the achieves you have. I quite using stuffit when osx came out.

I usually use tar and gzip or bzip2

‘I’m not doubting you Jackie but when things this big appear in my life I get paranoid and wonder about the fine print. But I am taking you seriously which is a compliment :)’

I do take that as a compliment, Thank-you :)
I’d forgotten the tie-in with A. B. “Buzzy” Krongard and 9/11.
Maybe we are getting closer to the bastards after all..I’ll go see what else I’d forgotten…

Things Come Undone @ 123

Imagine what would happen if we withdrawl, the causality rate would go way, way down. After all no offense to the Brits but we Americans are the focus for a lot more hate than they were so if we leave the focus of the hate goes away.
Victory over Bush parties will spring up all over Iraq. Mosques will be filled with happy , smiling, people praying.
Sure their will be a civil war,…well maybe Bush has been WRONG about EVERYTHING so far so I’m thinking why would he be right on this point?

I think a great deal of the ethnic cleansing has already been done under our watch, but I could be wrong about that.

The Sunnis still want to control the country and they’ve been cut out. So they might make a fight for it.

But will it be worse than what is happening now?