Originally Posted by goober

No wonder you are such a strong Bush supporter, you are woefully misinformed about practically everything, I guess in your fantasy world Bush really is a great hero.
Iraq has money in it's accounts because it isn't spending very much, the US is footing the bill for practically everything there.

The money Iraq has wouldn't last more than a few days if they were actually paying the cost of what's going on there.

The oil is there, but it's not being exported in sufficient quantity, simply because the US military is no match for the insurgents in the real war, the US military is a joke, they can't actually achieve any real strategic objectives, which is why they resort to claiming "victory" over things like body counts, and the repainting of schools and tractor repair depots. It's not that they aren't a fearsome fighting force, they are simply the wrong tool for the job.
The real strategic objective of getting Iraq oil production up to a level of 5 million barrels a day, and exporting that oil, is not attainable by the US military force structure.
Something like 10% of Iraq oil exports are done by the insurgency to fund their operations, again, a major strategic objective would be to control all oil exports and channel all oil revenues away from the insurgents, and again this is a strategic objective that the US is unable to achieve.

So all this talk about the surge working is bullshit, because in the real strategic war that is going on, the insurgency is winning hands down.

Why do you think this is? It's because the majority of the Iraqi people believe that the puppet government installed by the US does not represent them, and the majority of the Iraqi people support the killing of US soldiers as a legitimate response to an occupation by a foreign power.

If you take the view that a small group of terrorists is resisting the will of the Iraqi people, even with the help of 150,000 US troops, and billions of US dollars a day, you'd have to be shocked that this conflict has dragged on for 5 years. If you look at the reality of the situation, that the US is going about the whole thing in exactly the wrong way, then the actual results make perfect sense.

Originally Posted by Anselme

Foreign Policy: Iraq By the Numbers

Oil production is stagnating, as electricity is far from goals

Deaths looks like there are decreasing in the last months...

little progress after 5 years?

Originally Posted by Si modo

Perhaps we should wait until the actual report comes out on Wednesday before jumping to conclusions. Your link bases their conclusion (thus, yours, too) on an anonymous source. I don't give too much credibility to those kinds of sources. I'll wait until Wednesday and see, if you don't mind.

Originally Posted by jviehe

Nope, as I said, its pointless to continue examining it. I have my opinion, others have theirs. Its moot. Iraq under Sadaam does not exist anymore. That threat has been eliminated.

Originally Posted by wooyarn

Another reason for war with Iraq down the drain.



Exhaustive review finds no link between Saddam, al Qaida - Yahoo! News

WASHINGTON — An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network.
The new study of the Iraqi regime's archives found no documents indicating a "direct operational link" between Hussein's Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion

Originally Posted by gem

And, as a result, it looks like a few more have been created.

Good job!!!

Gem

Originally Posted by gem

But you'd grant a ton of credibility to intelligence reports based on the ravings of a drunk like Curveball?

That, in part, is exactly what you did if you supported the invasion of Iraq.

Gem