<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>July 14, 2008 Op-Ed Contributor My Plan for Iraq By BARACK OBAMA CHICAGO — The call by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki for a timetable for the removal of American troops from Iraq presents an enormous opportunity. We should seize this moment to begin the phased redeployment of combat troops that I have long advocated, and that is needed for long-term success in Iraq and the security interests of the United States. The differences on Iraq in this campaign are deep. Unlike Senator John McCain, I opposed the war in Iraq before it began, and would end it as president. I believed it was a grave mistake to allow ourselves to be distracted from the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban by invading a country that posed no imminent threat and had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Since then, more than 4,000 Americans have died and we have spent nearly $1 trillion. Our military is overstretched. Nearly every threat we face — from Afghanistan to Al Qaeda to Iran — has grown. In the 18 months since President Bush announced the surge, our troops have performed heroically in bringing down the level of violence. New tactics have protected the Iraqi population, and the Sunni tribes have rejected Al Qaeda — greatly weakening its effectiveness. But the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true. The strain on our military has grown, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated and we’ve spent nearly $200 billion more in Iraq than we had budgeted. Iraq’s leaders have failed to invest tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues in rebuilding their own country, and they have not reached the political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge. The good news is that Iraq’s leaders want to take responsibility for their country by negotiating a timetable for the removal of American troops. Meanwhile, Lt. Gen. James Dubik, the American officer in charge of training Iraq’s security forces, estimates that the Iraqi Army and police will be ready to assume responsibility for security in 2009. Only by redeploying our troops can we press the Iraqis to reach comprehensive political accommodation and achieve a successful transition to Iraqis’ taking responsibility for the security and stability of their country. Instead of seizing the moment and encouraging Iraqis to step up, the Bush administration and Senator McCain are refusing to embrace this transition — despite their previous commitments to respect the will of Iraq’s sovereign government. They call any timetable for the removal of American troops “surrender,” even though we would be turning Iraq over to a sovereign Iraqi government. But this is not a strategy for success — it is a strategy for staying that runs contrary to the will of the Iraqi people, the American people and the security interests of the United States. That is why, on my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: ending this war. As I’ve said many times, we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 — two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, a residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces. That would not be a precipitous withdrawal. In carrying out this strategy, we would inevitably need to make tactical adjustments. As I have often said, I would consult with commanders on the ground and the Iraqi government to ensure that our troops were redeployed safely, and our interests protected. We would move them from secure areas first and volatile areas later. We would pursue a diplomatic offensive with every nation in the region on behalf of Iraq’s stability, and commit $2 billion to a new international effort to support Iraq’s refugees. Ending the war is essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and Al Qaeda has a safe haven. Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been. As Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently pointed out, we won’t have sufficient resources to finish the job in Afghanistan until we reduce our commitment to Iraq. As president, I would pursue a new strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan. We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more nonmilitary assistance to accomplish the mission there. I would not hold our military, our resources and our foreign policy hostage to a misguided desire to maintain permanent bases in Iraq. In this campaign, there are honest differences over Iraq, and we should discuss them with the thoroughness they deserve. Unlike Senator McCain, I would make it absolutely clear that we seek no presence in Iraq similar to our permanent bases in South Korea, and would redeploy our troops out of Iraq and focus on the broader security challenges that we face. But for far too long, those responsible for the greatest strategic blunder in the recent history of American foreign policy have ignored useful debate in favor of making false charges about flip-flops and surrender. It’s not going to work this time. It’s time to end this war. Barack Obama, a United States senator from Illinois, is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.</div> Link
Yay vague references to Pakistan. How about telling us, Mr. Obama, how you plan on dealing with Pakistan in regards to Al-Qaeda.
I prefer reading this to hearing speeches most of the time as far as politics is concerned. Though nothing beats the drama of a good on-air debate.
"Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been. As Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently pointed out, we won’t have sufficient resources to finish the job in Afghanistan until we reduce our commitment to Iraq." As Johnny Carson once said, "wrongo, bison breath." Iraq didn't start out as the central front in the war on terrorism, but it turned into a key component of breaking Al Qaeda. See this: http://www.thenational.ae/article/20080614...emplate=opinion <div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>Is Al Qaeda Irrelevant or Broken? Submitted by FrenchDoc on Sun, 2008-06-22 03:12. * Iraq Clusterfuck * Media Meltdown * Middle East Clusterfuck * Theocracy Rising * Department of Eerie Historical Parallels * Al Qaeda * globalization * Nationalism * terrorism Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. Two good pieces on Al Qaeda landed in my Newsreader this week and they both point in the same direction, albeit in different terms. The first one is from Tony Karon who questions the current relevance of Al Qaeda as the big post-9/11 bogeyman. For Karon, Al Qaeda is irrelevant and always was. In this respect, Al Qaeda is comparable to Trotsky… Huh? How does the comparison apply? "Al-Qaeda is irrelevant, and yet U.S. hegemony in the Middle East is facing an unprecedented challenge from Islamist-nationalist groups. To understand the link between al-Qaeda’s weakness and the greatly expanded strength of groups such as Hamas, Hizballah, the Muslim Brotherhood and, of course, Iran, over the past seven years, it’s worth turning to the 20th century precedent: Leon Trotsky and his followers vs. the larger, nationally-focused parties of the left in the mid 20th century. Trotsky rejected pragmatism and compromise by nationally-based leftist movements and insisted, instead, that they subordinate their specific national interests and objectives to the fantasy of “world revolution.” And as a result, long before his murder by Stalin, he found himself holed up in Mexico City, manically firing off communiques denouncing all compromise, and being largely ignored by the more substantial parties of the left world-wide. He had become an irrelevant chatterbox, caught up in a frenzy of his own rhetoric while world events simply passed him by. The same can be said of Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri — it is not al-Qaeda, but the likes of Iran, Hamas, Hizballah, and the Muslim Brotherhood that represent the future of the nationalist-Islamist challenge to Western power in the Middle East." What makes Al Qaeda seemingly powerful are two factors: the one mentioned by Karon, that is, the fact that the United States treats Al Qaeda as this omnipresent threat of global proportion and reacts to every action as if it were the beginnings of a terrorist apocalypse. The second one, which I think is relevant here and contributes to the first, is that fact that Al Qaeda, being a non-state group, articulates itself opportunistically to nation-based movements (Algeria, Philippines, Indonesia, or Iraq). As a result, it seems to be everywhere. From this standpoint, any terrorist activity from any group that can be defined as more or less loosely affiliated with Al Qaeda becomes an "Al Qaeda terrorist act." And if, just as opportunistically, Bin Laden or Al Zawahiri use the opportunity to issue a statement, then the filiation is definitely established and solidified in the collective American mind, with the domestic and foreign political consequences that we have witnessed in the past 7 years. Or if some militant somewhere seems to be doing, explicitly or not, what we think Al Qaeda is doing, then, he becomes an Al Qaeda militant: his killing becomes a victory against Al Qaeda. In his latest op-ed in Abu Dhabi’s The National, Tony Karon expands on the first factor and his Trotsky comparison. "Curiously, the growing realisation that far more has been made of al Qa’eda in US foreign policy than is wise coincides with a moment in which the US strategic position in the Middle East is weaker than at any point in the past half century in the face of nationalist-Islamist challenges. That, of course, may be the point. Al Qa’eda was an ideological flight of fancy by a group of exiled Egyptian Islamic Jihad members who dreamed of folding dozens of regionally based Islamist insurgencies fighting specific grievances into a global command centre to fight the “far” enemy – the US, whose defeat al Qa’eda ideologues insisted was the key to local victories." There are several points embedded in that quote that are worth disentangling here. The first one is the end of American hegemony that had lasted since the end of the Cold War. This is something that sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein has been discussing for a while now. The United States is slowly losing its hegemon status and many foreign policy decision have to be analyzed in the context of the perceived competition from new potential would-be rival hegemons: China, of course, or India or the European Union bloc. The other point embedded in the quote is that of the prospects of political Islam. Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy, both French islamologists have argued that the high point of political Islam came with the success of the Iranian revolution. Since then, it’s been downhill and the temporary successes of Al Qaeda have not altered that dynamic. What such successes like 9/11 did was to put together these two dynamics and elevate the status of Al Qaeda as threats behind everything. "Al Qa’eda is a latter-day Fourth International, a marginal force even where Islamist nationalist forces are in their most intense confrontations with the West. Those forces, in contrast to al Qa’eda, are nationally based, with clearly defined objectives, and with a strong, political base to complement their armed activities. If Trotsky had managed to blow up a few stock exchanges and provoked Western powers into launching a “war” against him, he too might have enjoyed more of the limelight, although probably not for long. Al Qa’eda’s significance has always derived almost exclusively from the reaction its violent provocations have elicited, starting with the cruise missiles President Bill Clinton launched in response to the East Africa embassy bombings in 1998. That reaction only boosted the legend bin Laden was trying to build for himself among radical Muslim activists everywhere. And if 9/11 created a frisson of excitement among jihadists everywhere, the US response, which included invading and occupying Muslim countries, simply played into his branding strategy." Branding? Paging Naomi Klein. What Bin Laden has been very successful at is understanding a certain number of global dynamics, political, social, economic and cultural and capitalize on them (which is easier when you’re very wealthy to start with). Strategically though, we know now that Al Qaeda was non-existent in Iraq before the invasion, and still is a marginal force now, which is why the killing of Al Zarkawi did not alter the dynamics of the conflict there. And in Afghanistan, NATO forces are having problems against the Taliban, not Al Qaeda, in combination with strictly national factors ( the strength and political authority - or lack thereof - of the central government versus the former warlords and ethnic chieftains). The globalizing brand of political Islam where every group could be unified under one banner against the "Far Enemy" (that would be the US) has failed. As Karon summarizes it, "most jihad is local." As a result then, there is no point in negotiating with Al Qaeda, "Negotiating with al Qaeda is pointless – it represents no specific set of national interests or demands that can be engaged. Bin Laden’s problem is that he represents nothing substantial in the field of politics, unlike the nationally based movements. And with those movements, of course, there is plenty to negotiate. President George Bush, of course, like Zawahiri, takes a dim view of such negotiations. But then Bush, like bin Laden and Zawahiri, has become increasingly irrelevant to the unfolding events in the Middle East." Indeed. The different points made by Karon are confirmed by a recent report by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank in the British Independent. For instance, "Bin Laden was trying to win over other militant groups to the global jihad he had announced against the West in 1998. Over the next five days, Bin Laden and his top aides, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, met with a dozen or so jihadist leaders. They sat on the floor in a circle with large cushions arrayed around them to discuss the future of their movement. "This was a big strategy meeting," Benotman told one of us late last year, in his first account of the meeting to a reporter. "We talked about everything, where are we going, what are the lessons of the past 20 years." Despite the warm welcome, Benotman surprised his hosts with a bleak assessment of their prospects. "I told them that the jihadist movement had failed. That we had gone from one disaster to another, like in Algeria, because we had not mobilised the people," recalls Benotman, referring to the Algerian civil war launched by jihadists in the 1990s that left more than 100,000 dead and destroyed whatever local support the militants had once enjoyed. Benotman also told Bin Laden that the al-Qa’ida leader’s decision to target the West would only sabotage attempts by groups such as Benotman’s to overthrow the secular dictatorships in the Arab world. "We made a clear-cut request for him to stop his campaign against the United States because it was going to lead to nowhere," Benotman recalls, "but they laughed when I told them that America would attack the whole region if they launched another attack against it." Benotman says that Bin Laden tried to placate him with a promise: "I have one more operation, and after that I will quit" – an apparent reference to 11 September. "I can’t call this one back because that would demoralise the whole organisation," Benotman remembers Bin Laden saying. After the attacks, Benotman, now living in London, resigned from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, realising that the United States, in its war on terrorism, would differentiate little between al-Qa’ida and his organisation. Benotman, however, did more than just retire. In January 2007, under a veil of secrecy, he flew to Tripoli in a private jet chartered by the Libyan government to try to persuade the imprisoned senior leadership of his former group to enter into peace negotiations with the regime. He was successful. This May, Benotman told us that the two parties could be as little as three months away from an agreement that would see the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group formally end its operations in Libya and denounce al-Qa’ida’s global jihad." Unfortunately, these events went unnoticed in the United States largely because, sadly, the "Arabs are all the same" view still prevails and also because many foreign policy analysts still invoke the clash of civilizations as best explanatory model to account for the dynamics between the West and the Middle East (a view taken to strident levels after 9/11). It is a misguided, simplistic and inaccurate view, but somehow, it must be intellectually satisfying to enough people in foreign policy circles to be immunized against debunking (and debunked it has been, quite a few times). One has to turn to the Middle Eastern independent press or specific analysts like Karon or Robert Fisk to get a much more nuanced and informed analysis of the Middle East. Moreover, and to refer again to Gilles Kepel, few American analysts have taken the time to examine the current fitna , that is, war at the heart of Islam going on in many countries where Al Qaeda was no so long ago seen as having a strong foothold. "Why have clerics and militants once considered allies by al-Qa’ida’s leaders turned against them? To a large extent, it is because al-Qa’ida and its affiliates have increasingly adopted the doctrine of takfir, by which they claim the right to decide who is a "true" Muslim. Al-Qa’ida’s Muslim critics know what results from this takfiri view: first, the radicals deem some Muslims apostates; after that, the radicals start killing them. This fatal progression happened in both Algeria and Egypt in the 1990s. It is now taking place even more dramatically in Iraq, where al-Qa’ida’s suicide bombers have killed more than 10,000 Iraqis, most of them targeted simply for being Shia. Recently, al-Qa’ida in Iraq has turned its fire on Sunnis who oppose its diktats, a fact not lost on the Islamic world’s Sunni majority. Additionally, al-Qa’ida and its affiliates have killed thousands of Muslim civilians elsewhere since 11 September: hundreds of Afghans killed every year by the Taliban, dozens of Saudis killed by terrorists since 2003, scores of Jordanians massacred at a wedding at a US hotel in Amman in November 2005. Even those sympathetic to al-Qa’ida have started to notice." There is no chance of unifying different movements in political Islam if one group decides to award itself the power to state who’s a true Muslim and who’s not and to kill the latter. So rather than continue to treat Al Qaeda as the big monster under the bed that we should all be afraid of, to the point of barely noticing when constitutional rights are taken away from us, we should demand a rational analysis of the actual extent of the threat facing us. That is, it would be nice to be treated as intelligent adults rather than fearful children. The problem is that here, in the United States, there are many obstacles to a rational view of political Islam and terrorism. The hysteria is beneficial to the current administration (and let’s have no illusion that it will be convenient to use to the next administration, whoever is elected president). It also fits into the apocalyptic designs of the Christian fundamentalist groups that have gain political ascendancy during the Bush administration. It also benefits the military-industrial complex that needs this country in a state of permanent war. Such militarization also fits into the worldview of the neo-conservative groups that see military interventionism as the only way to stop America’s decline from hegemon status. And let’s not even mention the cowardice of the corporate media. Rationality and critical analysis will have to come from Progressive Blogosphere 2.0 since we witnessed the massive failure of PB 1.0 during this primary and their assimilation into the corporate media.</div> Obama's message isn't resonating. In fact, this poll shows that there is a huge swing in voter sentiment about sticking in Iraq until the country can stand on its own. http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/07/15/Pol...24531216120247/ Poll: Candidates' Iraq plans split voters WASHINGTON, July 15 (UPI) -- Poll respondents are closely divided on the two likely major party presidential candidates' positions for withdrawing U.S. military from Iraq, a poll indicates. The Washington Post (NYSE:WPO)-ABC News poll released Tuesday indicated voters were split nearly evenly between the 50 percent supporting likely Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama's 16-month timetable to withdraw troops from Iraq and the 49 percent favoring presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain's stance that events should drive when troops are redeployed. Among independents, the poll indicated 53 percent oppose Obama's timeline, The Washington Post said. On Iraq policy in general, 47 percent of those polled said they trust McCain, a U.S. senator form Arizona, to handle the war in Iraq while 45 percent put their faith in Obama. Respondents were evenly divided on that question of whether Obama, a U.S. senator from Illinois, would be an effective military leader -- 48 percent saying he would and 48 saying he wouldn't. The Washington Post-ABC poll was conducted by telephone July 10-13 among a national sample of 1,119 adults. It has a margin of error of 3 percentage points.
That was the first thing I noticed too, Denny. Well, the second thing. Pakistan caught my eye first. I am curious on how he wants to "handle" that.... One could argue (or perhaps, more than argue) that Al-Qaeda's role in Iraq was limited (which, considering Iraq's secularism under Saddam and Al-Qaede and OBL not really liking that.....) and not really the central thesis to the war in Iraq. But it has become the central battleground. Of course, it can be said that we made it the central battleground...but that doesn't matter anymore. They are there. It is what it is. And we need to continue to fight Al-Qaeda where they are operating: and that's in Iraq. I didn't read all of your post, so if this is what you are saying, I apologize....trying to balance work/posting.
