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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (264597)	12/14/2005 3:52:51 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1574096

"That's ugly. And that explains why everyone is a afraid of him." And the problem is that people like DeLay are very hard to stop. That is, until they over reach and then wind up blowing their brains out in a bunker. Because they always over reach. I can never be sure whether they are overachieving bimbos or too-smart-for-their-good buttheads. Either way, I agree....they tend to overreach. ted

To: combjelly who wrote (264597)	12/14/2005 4:34:16 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574096

Each day we get a different version of the truth. Is it reverse psychology, or the onset of schizophrenia, or are they trying to confuse people again so the polls will go up? Bush accepts responsibility for starting Iraq war based on faulty intelligence 13:18:05 EST Dec 14, 2005 NEDRA PICKLER WASHINGTON (AP) - President George W. Bush accepted responsibility on Wednesday for going to war with faulty intelligence, but firmly defended a decision that has deeply divided the country. "We cannot and will not leave Iraq until victory is achieved," he said. The president said that Thursday's parliamentary elections in Iraq are a watershed moment that will inspire democracy across the Middle East. But with public opinion still running against his mission, Bush was left defending his decision to go to war nearly three years ago. "It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. As president, I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq," the president told a foreign policy forum on the eve of elections to establish Iraq's first permanent, democratically elected government. "And I'm also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities. And we're doing just that." "We are in Iraq today because our goal has always been more than the removal of brutal dictator," Bush said. "It is to leave a free and democratic Iraq in his place. "My decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision. Saddam was a threat and the American people and the world is better off because he is no longer in power," the president told the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Most Americans see progress on establishing democracy in Iraq, but they are less optimistic about efforts to prevent a civil war and reduce the number of civilian casualties, polling found. Almost six in 10 - 56 per cent - said they thought progress is being made in the establishment of democracy, but almost as many - 53 per cent - said they thought the United States was losing ground in reducing civilian casualties, according to the poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. As he usually does, Bush asserted that the Iraq of the future, with a functioning democracy and thriving economy, would be a model for other countries in the turbulent Middle East. But he added a specific reference to the inspiration that a free Iraq could provide to reformers in the region's two governments most hostile to the United States: Syria and Iran. The president is banking on a successful election to signal that his war plan is working. If the voting establishes a successful government, it eventually could lead to the withdrawal of U.S. forces. The president could use some more good news in Iraq. With the violence showing no sign of waning, most Americans are unhappy with his handling of the war and some legislators are questioning how long the troops should stay. cbc.ca

To: combjelly who wrote (264597)	12/14/2005 9:25:06 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574096

It seems Mr. Nir Rosen knew of what he was speaking. Kurdish Oil Deal Shocks Iraq's Political Leaders A Norwegian company begins drilling in the north without approval from Baghdad. By Borzou Daragahi, Times Staff Writer BAGHDAD — A controversial oil exploration deal between Iraq's autonomy-minded Kurds and a Norwegian company got underway this week without the approval of the central government here, raising a potentially explosive issue at a time of heightened ethnic and sectarian tensions. The Kurdistan Democratic Party, which controls a portion of the semiautonomous Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, last year quietly signed a deal with Norway's DNO to drill for oil near the border city of Zakho. Iraqi and company officials describe the agreement as the first involving new exploration in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Drilling began after a ceremony Tuesday, during which Nechirvan Barzani, prime minister of the Kurdish northern region, vowed "there is no way Kurdistan would accept that the central government will control our resources," according to news agency reports. In Baghdad, political leaders on Wednesday reacted to the deal with astonishment. "We need to figure out if this is allowed in the constitution," said Adnan Ali Kadhimi, an advisor to Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari. "Nobody has mentioned it. It has not come up among the government ministers' council. It has not been on their agenda." The start of drilling, called "spudding" in the oil business, is sure to be worrisome to Iraq's Sunni Arab minority. They fear a disintegration of Iraq into separate ethnic and religious cantons if regions begin to cut energy deals with foreign companies and governments. Sunnis are concentrated in Iraq's most oil-poor region. Iraq's neighbors also fear the possibility of Iraqi Kurds using revenue generated by oil wells to fund an independent state that might lead the roughly 20 million Kurds living in Turkey, Iran and Syria to revolt. Iraqi legal experts and international oil industry analysts have questioned the deal. Oil industry trade journals had expressed doubts that it would come to fruition. Iraq's draft constitution, approved in an Oct. 15 national referendum, stipulates that "the federal government with the producing regional and governorate governments shall together formulate" energy policy. However, it also makes ambiguous reference to providing compensation for "damaged regions that were unjustly deprived by the former regime." Iraq's Kurds have argued that the country's existing oil fields and infrastructure, such as those in the largely Kurdish cities of Kirkuk and Khanaqin, should be divvied up by the central government but that future oil discoveries should be controlled by each oil-producing region. In his speech Tuesday, Barzani, the nephew of Kurdish politician and former guerrilla leader Massoud Barzani, eschewed the language of the law and couched the deal in political terms. He invoked the Kurds' years of deprivation at the hands of the Sunni Arab-dominated government of Saddam Hussein. "The time has come that instead of suffering, the people of Kurdistan will benefit from the fortunes and resources of their country," he said during the ceremony in the western portion of Kurdish-controlled territory. The Kurds, who during the last several years of Hussein's rule maintained sovereignty in northern Iraq under the protection of U.S. warplanes, made millions in transit and customs fees as the Baghdad government smuggled oil to Turkey in violation of United Nations sanctions. Since the end of the sanctions, the Kurds have sought ways to make up for that lost income. The eastern administrative half of the Kurdish region also is rushing to sign energy deals with foreign companies without Baghdad's approval. The government of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, based in the city of Sulaymaniya, has signed an electricity agreement with a Turkish company and explored a possible oil deal with a foreign partnership near the city of Chamchamal, the site of several dormant oil wells. During months of painstaking constitutional negotiations, Kurds insisted on the authority to cut energy deals without Baghdad's approval. Under the draft charter, the task of determining how oil resources will be allocated is left to the National Assembly that will be elected Dec. 15. The language in the constitution regarding the power of regions to pen such contracts was a major reason that the vast majority of Sunnis voted against the charter in October. The announcement of the DNO drilling took many Iraqis by surprise Wednesday. "This is unprecedented," said Alaa Makki, a leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni Arab group. "It's like they are an independent country. This is Iraqi oil and should be shared with all the Iraqi partners". latimes.com