Today isn't "A day without ILLEGAL immigrants"! It's the anniversary of an important date in American history.
Today is the anniversary of the day we defeated the nation of Iraq in a war that the nation of Iraq didn't start, didn't want to fight, couldn't win, and never did anything to deserve.
Today is "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED" Day!
All hail, king george, you fool.
Iraq future uncertain three years after Bush 'mission accomplished' speech
New report says US has failed to protect oil infrastructure, while Iraqi VP says 100,000 have fled homes in sectarian violence.
By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com
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Today is the anniversary of the day we defeated the nation of Iraq in a war that the nation of Iraq didn't start, didn't want to fight, couldn't win, and never did anything to deserve.
Today is "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED" Day!
All hail, king george, you fool.
Iraq future uncertain three years after Bush 'mission accomplished' speech
New report says US has failed to protect oil infrastructure, while Iraqi VP says 100,000 have fled homes in sectarian violence.
By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com
Three years to the day after President Bush stood on the carrier USS Lincoln in front of a huge banner that read "Mission Accomplished" and gave a major speech declaring major fighting in Iraq over, Iraq continues to struggle to find a secure future.
The Associated Press reports on how Iraqis view the third anniversary of 'Mission Accomplished.' Despite having a freely elected government, "billions spent on reconstruction projects and the best efforts of its own people and an international coalition, the battle for Iraq's future is far from over."\
Soon after Bush landed on the aircraft carrier on May 1, 2003, the US military was struggling to keep control in Iraq. The Bush administration dissolved the Iraqi army, but found it had too few coalition troops to secure a country with a history of violence. Saddam Hussein's capture in December 2003 provided a burst of optimism. But a brutal attack on US contract workers, burned in Fallujah in spring 2004, led to a US siege of that city. It became clear the insurgency would be tough to defeat.
The rest of 2004 and much of 2005 saw violence grow even as democratic institutions were being built. The US handed over sovereignty, Iraq held its first free election, a new constitution was approved and then, last December, a permanent parliament was elected. Schools were built, power stations repaired, dams improved. But Iraq's vital oil industry continues to struggle. Production fell to about 2 million barrels a day last year, down from 3.5 million a day in 1990.
Over the weekend, The New York Times reports that one of Iraq's new vice presidents gave the estimate of 100,000 families displaced by sectarian violence. That estimate, made by Adel Abdul Mahdi, a Shiite leader, was much higher than previous estimates, and goes far beyond figures US military leaders had been using when they said there was "no widespread movement of Iraqis fleeing."
Even if Mahdi's estimate proves high, it indicates how concerned Iraqi leaders have become about the entrenched and vicious sectarian fighting that has reshaped the lives of many Iraqi families, particularly since the Feb. 22 Askariya shrine bombing in Samarra.
Militias ? some inside the official Iraqi security forces and some outside ? have gained considerable influence as attacks against civilians have surged, and Iraqis increasingly say they have more faith in the militias than in the official Iraqi security forces.
But US Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a senior spokesman for the US military in Baghdad insisted that the numbers given by Mr. Mahdi are exaggerated and that "families are not moving in large numbers."
Meanwhile, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) released a major report that showed while some reconstruction projects had been successful, the US had failed in its effort to protect and rebuild Iraq's oil infrastructure, and that corruption in Iraq had become like "another insurgency."
The Washington Times reports that Special Inspector General Stuart Bowen's report shows that the plan to train troops to protect Iraq's oil infrastructure is "a failure."
The report said the Bush administration and Iraq government poured $147 million into trying to create an Iraqi Oil Protection Force of 14,400 and an Iraqi Electric Power Security Service of 6,000 guards. But today, the electric security service no longer exists, and the oil force has shown only sporadic success.
The finding, to be released today, is among a series of assessments in the latest quarterly report from [Bowen]. It describes work on virtually every part of Iraq's emerging democracy, from health care to education to energy production to the Iraqi security forces.
The Times also reported that the administration has sent a new group of experts to Baghdad to try and figure out a solution.
Reuters reports that SIGIR investigators say the "corruption in the oil and gas industry continues unchecked and could have devastating effects" on the country's attempts at stabilization.
USA Today reports that Bowen notes that teams working on reconstruction projects have been able to accomplish more in the past few months because of improved security, and that completed projects have had positive results. But there are many cases where projects are not finished, or almost no work has been done, despite the allocation of millions of dollars to the projects. The Guardian reports that in one case, a US contractor hired to build 150 health care centers in Iraq almost three years ago had only finished six, "in spite of 75 percent of the $186 million allocated for the project being spent."
The Washington Times story also noted that Bowen's report scolded the US-led multinational force for not co-operating in the investigation of the attempt to train Iraqis soldiers to protect oil. "The lack of records and equipment accountability raised significant concerns about possible fraud, waste and abuse ... by US and Iraqi officials," the report says. A fraud investigation is now under way.
Finally, May 1 also marks the one-year anniversary of the publication of the Downing Street Memo by the Sunday Times of London. The memo, whose authenticity has never been denied by the British government, was the first evidence that showed the US and Britain planned to attack Iraq regardless of the peace overtures that were taking place at the time in the United Nations Security Council, and that Mr. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair even considered trying to provoke then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein into a confrontation in order to justify the invasion.
In a column in The New York Times, Frank Rich writes that "each week brings new confirmation" that the memo was accurate.
"There was almost a concern we'd find something that would slow up the war," Tyler Drumheller, a 26-year CIA veteran and an on-camera source for "60 Minutes," said when I interviewed him last week. Since retiring from the CIA in the fall of 2004, Drumheller has played an important role in revealing White House chicanery, including its dire hawking of Saddam's mobile biological weapons labs, which turned out to be fictitious. Before Colin Powell's fateful UN presentation, Drumheller conveyed vociferous warnings that the sole human source on these nonexistent WMD labs, an Iraqi emigre known as Curveball, was mentally unstable and a fabricator. "The real tragedy of this," Drumheller says, "is if they had let the weapons inspectors play out, we could have had a Gulf War I-like coalition, which would have given us the ((300,000)) to 400,000 troops needed to secure the country after defeating the Iraqi army."
This point was also underscored by comments from former Secretary of State Colin Powell on Sunday, who said he told the Bush administration before the March 2003 invasion that more troops would be needed in Iraq. But the White House decided to go with a plan by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that used far fewer troops.
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