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Politics : The Next President 2008 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RMF who wrote (2515)	3/25/2008 10:39:08 AM
From: PROLIFE	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3215

where have you been for the last 10 or 15 years? Oh....I forgot...the fog of too many meds has you "mis-remembering" the past, does it? the whys and wherefores have been discussed and vetted to death on these threads...those of you with severe BDS just cannot accept it. Oh, BTW, I think MORE than a few million Iraqis know they are better off: Despite how they have been portrayed, today’s all-volunteer U.S. military is the brightest, best educated, trained and equipped armed force ever fielded by any nation. More than 1.6 million American military personnel have served in Iraq. Notwithstanding the perception that our armed forces are stretched beyond the breaking point, reenlistments have never been higher and every service is exceeding its recruiting goals. - Iraq’s police, military and security forces, widely depicted as ineffective or worse, have grown by more than 100,000 in the past year and have assumed responsibility for 9 of 18 provinces. - In the last 12 months the Interior Ministry has opened 13 new training facilities, the Iraqi military now has 134 active combat, infrastructure and Special Operations battalions with a total of nearly 647,000 Iraqis who have volunteered to serve in uniform. - After we first reported on the “Al-Anbar Awakening” in December, 2006, the “Sons of Iraq” movement has crossed the Sunni-Shia sectarian divide and now has 91,000 members. In the same time-frame, attacks against Iraqi civilians and coalition forces have dropped by more than 70 percent. - Since 2004, more than 4,000 civil reconstruction projects -- including 325 for electrical distribution and 320 water treatment facilities have been completed. More than 3,000 schools and 75 hospitals, clinics and health care facilities have been renovated or built from the ground up while nearly 3,200 primary health care providers and physicians were being trained. - There are now more than 100 privately owned radio stations, 31 television stations and 600 newspapers published in Iraq -- a nation just slightly larger than California. - In February, crude oil production exceeded 2.4 million barrels per day and this year the Iraqi economy is projected to grow by 7 percent. humanevents.com

To: RMF who wrote (2515)	3/25/2008 2:57:50 PM
From: longnshort	Respond to of 3215

Saddam tied to terrorists THE WASHINGTON TIMES EDITORIAL March 25, 2008 Newly declassified documents captured in Iraq show that Saddam Hussein's regime had extensive ties with a variety of Islamist and other terrorist groups, in some cases dating back to the early 1990s. Saddam's Iraqi Intelligence Service (or Mukhabarat) established a working relationship with Egyptian Islamic Jihad, whose leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, later merged the group with al Qaeda, according to a new report by the Institute for Defense Analyses. In addition, the Mukhabarat trained scores of non-Iraqi Arabs to attack Israel. The new report contains copies of captured Iraqi documents that provide what may be the most detailed picture ever of Baghdad's support for terrorism. Few stories in recent memory have been as badly misreported by the mainstream media. News outlets — including The Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN and ABC —all issued reports earlier this month declaring that the IDA report showed no link between Saddam and al Qaeda. While the report does say that there was no direct operational link between the two, its most significant new disclosure may be evidence of ties between Zawahri's EIJ and Saddam's regime. A 1993 memo from Iraqi intelligence to Saddam says that Iraq had aided the Egyptian group previously and was restarting contacts with the goal of overthrowing Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's government. Two other Iraqi memos included in the IDA report describe the EIJ's terrorist bona fides, including its assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981 and emphasize the importance of training and financing that group. Zawahri, who is believed to be in hiding with Osama bin Laden, is on the FBI's most-wanted-terrorism list for his role in the Sept. 11 attacks and the August 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In fact, the al Qaeda connection only scratches the surface of Saddam's terrorist ties. As Rowan Scarborough reported in this newspaper on Friday, the IDA report reveals that Saddam provided millions of dollars and arms to Palestinian terror groups and trained Palestinians in Iraqi terror camps. Saddam's security service maintained representatives in the West Bank and Gaza, who met with Hamas founder Ahmad Yassin and conveyed his military needs to Baghdad. Another terrorist who found refuge in Baghdad was Abu Abbas, a leader of the Palestine Liberation Front, who engineered the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro. The documents show that Abbas served as Saddam's conduit for meetings with Hamas. Coalition forces captured Abbas in 2003 as he attempted to flee to Syria. Abbas died of natural causes while in custody the following year. The IDA report also includes translations of Iraqi Intelligence Service documents that describe efforts to destabilize other Arab governments, including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and the regime's campaign to kill humanitarian aid workers operating in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. The study also reveals that on Sept. 17, 2001, Saddam gave orders to his military intelligence directorate to recruit Iraqi officers to conduct "suicide operations" against the United States.