If there any bobbleheads, they are at the White House, Ann, and they are losing control by the minute. Its time Bush/Cheney resign. Its the only decent thing to do.
Thanks, Ann, for voting for them twice. You helped put us into this mess!
Marines Want Out Of Iraq
Report: Top General Pushing To Redeploy Marines To Afghanistan, Leaving Iraq To Army
(CBS/AP) The Marine Corps is pushing to redeploy its forces from Iraq to Afghanistan to take the lead in combat operations there and essentially leave Iraq to the Army, The New York Times reported Thursday.
The commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. James T. Conway, raised the issue with Defense Secretary Robert Gates last week, the Times reported. Senior military and Pentagon officials said supporters of the proposal, including some in the Army, believe that such a realignment could allow both services to operate more efficiently in the face of strains on the separate forces.
No major Marine units are among the 26,000 U.S. forces in Afghanistan while 25,000 Marines are among the 160,000 U.S. troops there, the paper noted.
Army and Pentagon leaders have warned repeatedly that the long, deadly and repeated deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched and stressed the Army, its soldiers and its families nearly to the breaking point. And there has been ongoing debate about how the service should transform itself to better meet the challenges of future wars.
In a speech Wednesday, Gates said the U.S. Army of the future will need to concentrate more on training foreign militaries, mastering other languages and customs, and honing its ability to fight smaller forces of insurgents.
Speaking to the Association of the United States Army, Gates laid out a vision for transforming the Army to a force better able to fight the type of unconventional warfare it has seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, which he said will "remain the mainstay of the contemporary battlefield for some time."
In other developments:
A series of rockets or mortars barraged Camp Victory, killing two members of the U.S.-led coalition and wounding 40 other people on the sprawling base near Baghdad's airport that houses the headquarters of American forces in Iraq, the military said Thursday.
Police said clashes Thursday between suspected al Qaeda gunmen and police at checkpoints in Abbara left at least one officer dead and two others wounded. One gunman was killed and several others fled.
Just east of Baqouba, suspected al-Qaeda gunmen took control of five Sunni villages, killing six people, including two police officers and wounding five others, a police official said. The attacks, which began Wednesday evening and continued until Thursday morning, happened two days after locals, supported by U.S. forces, had cleared the village of insurgents, the official said.
Also Thursday, gunmen killed five Iraqi civilians and wounded four in a morning attack on a minibus making its way from Khalis to Kirkuk.
Six main Iraqi insurgent groups said Thursday they have come to a meeting of minds on the need to free Iraq from U.S. occupation. In a video aired today on the Arab TV station Al-Jazeera, the groups announced the formation of a "political council" aimed at ending the U.S. occupation.
U.N. officials in Iraq said Thursday they will be looking into whether war crimes and crimes against humanity were committed in recent shootings of Iraqi civilians by U.S.-hired contractors and urged U.S. authorities to hold private security firms accountable for unjustified killings of Iraqis.
On Wednesday, Iraqi officials demanded answers of Unity Resources Group, an Australian-owned security company blamed in the killing of two Iraqi Christian women laid to rest amid rising calls for a crackdown on private bodyguards used by the U.S. government.
The scrutiny of Unity Resources began a day after its guards allegedly gunned down the two women in their car, and less than a month after 17 Iraqis died in a hail of bullets fired by Blackwater USA contractors at a busy Baghdad intersection.
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