Good LORD! The U.S. Lost Anbar Province; Handing Over to Al Queda?

[The Cleaner]

Heard this on NBC Nightly News. They said we basically lost Anbar Province cities such as Fallujah, Hit, etc. Said U.S. has come to the realization they've lost, we don't have enough troops there, and there's no way we can win the insurgency in the region. Said no governments at all in the region; just instability. Said Al Queda seems to be picking up the slack and will probably institutionalize in the area and will likely take over.

Can anyone cooberate this? If so, WHOA. The implications are graver than we thought. Unless of course Bush's intended goal was to LITERALLY enlarge Al Queda, give them credibility, and allow them to create a new terror state in Iraq.

HOLY MOLEY.

Link to Full Article: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14805515

[stepnw1f]

1. Sure... Al Queda

So they found another way of bogging us down in Iraq.... sick. Ready to enlist?

[3waygeek]

2. We didn't lose it;

we know exactly where it is...

[JuniperLea]

3. Hello Neighbor... can you say... miserable failure?

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14805515/

[TomInTib]

4. Check this out

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/12/world/middleeast/12anbar.html?ref=world

[AwakeAtLast]

5. Anybody got a link?

I recommended this thread, but feel it would be better to have it on the greatest page w/ a link.

Edited to add that people post while reading my mind, thanks!!!

:hi:

[TomInTib]

6. Here

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/12/world/middleeast/12anbar.html?ref=world

[bananas]

32. reuters and washington post

discussed in these threads
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2506255
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2506237

[napi21]

7. I heard a similar statement on Tweety;s show about 15 mins. ago.

Not quite as elaborate as the one you described, but a statement that "Everybody seems to agree we've lost the Anbar Province and turned it over to al Qaeda.

I know when I heard it, I was surprised. I hadn't heard that before.

[peacebird]

8. msnbc offers a grim outlook

WASHINGTON - A new military intelligence report offers up the most pessimistic assessment yet of military prospects for al-Anbar province, the vast no-man's land in western Iraq that has seen some of the fiercest fighting of the war — from hard-hit Fallujah to the provincial capital Ramadi, which the U.S. military has never controlled.

A top secret report by a Marine Corps intelligence officer says there's no chance the U.S. military can end insurgent violence in al-Anbar, and no viable government institutions or chance for political progress anytime soon.

Even more ominous, military officials say al-Qaida in Iraq has rushed to fill that political vacuum. Military officials tell NBC News al-Qaida's also recruiting increasing numbers of Iraqi Sunnis into the terrorist group.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14805515/

[durrrty libby]

9. Michael Ware correspondent on CNN talking about this

He seems upset and disgusted.

The American Military have to put on a fake happy face and pretend

that everything is peachy, and he said all this pretending has been going on for

more than a year

[Subdivisions]

10. Ware was very agitated. eom

[leftchick]

55. He quoted commanders: "These are the people who brought the towers down!"

can you even believe that shit? ey yi yi.... I heard it this morning on CNN. :puke:

[panader0]

11. Why oh why did they not learn from Vietnam?

Our army can defeat an army, but not a country where everyone is against us. The MSM likes to call them insurgents, but it's basically every man woman and child in their country that rightly hates us. Rummy's idea was that they would welcome us with flowers. They all know that it's about oil, and they all know that in spite of Saddam being a despot, that they had electricity 24 hours a day instead of 4. They had water, sanitation and stability, all things that bushco took away. No amount of troops will "win" this conflict. If bushco wants to win, they will have to kill them all.

[hvn_nbr_2]

20. You must not have learned the lessons of Vietnam :sarcasm:

Lessons of Vietnam:
1. We're number 1.
2. We're always in the right whenever we invade a country.
3. The only reason we can lose is if lily-livered cowards at home oppose our war.
4. Anyone who opposes a war is a lily-livered coward.
:sarcasm:

[Arkham House]

12. There are times when you literally have no words...

...this is one of them. What a fiasco. God damn these MFers all to hell...

[magellan]

13. Perhaps someone can tell me

I asked this on another thread on the same subject. Is this really al Qaeda or is it Iraqi extremists who've earned the sobriquet "al Qaeda" from our side for political purposes?

[shadowknows69]

14. This will open them up to genocide

evryone in Anbar province is now regarded as Al-Qaida. Cue the carpet bombing. Women and children terrorists included.

[Straight Shooter]

15. You just nailed it.

Brilliant.

:thumbsup:

[Jacobin]

27. No doubt there are both

If al qaeda fights with Iraqi nationals to run the U.S. invaders out, I'm sure they would welcome there help. Once that's done,, who knows

[magellan]

41. True. And "al Qaeda in Iraq" is based there.

The thing is, just as Zarqawi wasn't part of al Qaeda before Bush** invaded Iraq, there was no 'al Qaeda in Iraq' previously either. Now it appears that al Anbar province is controlled by this group.

These distinctions are important, which is why BushCo constantly conflates and misrepresents them. They don't want people to know that Iraq wasn't home to al Qaeda before the invasion. They don't want people to know that the al Qaeda ideology has now spread throughout Iraq as a direct consequence of their invasion and bungling of the occupation.

It was BushCo's own lies which led to the dire situation today. They were (and are) so busy trying to convince people of falsehoods that their eye has never been on the ball.

And I have serious doubts about whether that wasn't their actual intent all along.

[Warren Stupidity]

33. why is it extreme to reject submission to a foreign occupying army?

Not only are the insurgents not 'al qaeda', they are not extremists. They are people, people just like you and me, who have refused to submit to an authority imposed on them by force. Our killing of these people is made possible by our acceptance of the labelling of them as 'the other' so that we may comfortably accept the slaughter that is being done, day in and day out, in our name.

[truth2power]

44. I agree...

They're not extremists and they're not terrorists. If a foreign army invaded this country, I'd pick up a firearm and do what I could for the cause. I'm not a pacifist.

[magellan]

53. But would you kill your neighbors simply because

...they didn't share your religious belief (say you had one if you don't)? Because that too is part of what's happening in Iraq. And it is extremism.

[Warren Stupidity]

57. I think that is a very incomplete explanation.

Iraq as a nation was a fiction created by the British as they carved up the Ottoman Empire after WWI. In typical British colonial fashion they deliberately mixed ethnic groups and put a minority group (the ethnic Sunnis) in charge of the territory of Iraq. That invented state persisted through a bloody colonial era, which ended after WWII, and through the Baathist era and the Hussein dictatorship. Our invasion ended the fiction of Iraq. The divisions are partly religious but are primarily ethnic. For example Kurds are Sunni muslims but are certainly not aligned with the Sunni Arab population. They civil war is primarily about the partition of Iraq into more natural ethnic regions. We like to characterize it as religious extremists killing each other because that fits more neatly into our narrative of a mission in Iraq that is civilixing rather than merely conquering for resource plundering purposes. If we instead viewed the reality of the civil war as the natural breakup of an unviable state into its ethnic components, we might simply ask 'well why not?' and move towards a peaceful resolution of the crisis. As it is, because we insist on seeing this as some sort of good vs evil struggle that we 'cannot allow to fail', as part of the War On Terror, or as an effort to supress religous extremists hell bent on slaughter, we have condemned ourselves and the people of the region to war without end.

[magellan]

64. It wasn't meant as an explanation

It was meant as an example of one of the very same Iraqi cultural divisions you outline above. I posed the question in hopes of prodding the poster to think about the holes in their analogy. Sadly, not every armed Iraqi is a freedom fighter with the sole intent of ousting foreign forces so they can return to the life they knew before the US invaded.

I don't understand the desire to avoid calling those who use terrorism to achieve their goals 'terrorists'. Admittedly it's a term that even the international community is having difficulty defining. But when armed militias of various persuasions are running around threatening and murdering civilians whose only crime is to be deemed 'undesireable' by dint of ethnicity or religion or tribe, I don't know what else you'd call it but terrorism. "Civil war" implies two armed forces going at each other for control of the government, and there is that going on too in Iraq. But the religious and ethnic cleansing of whole population areas is something else. Maybe it's a form of genocide.

Was Hitler a terrorist?

How about the KKK?

My original post to this thread was a simple query about why the group in al Anbar province is being called 'al Qaeda'. They are not al Qaeda. They are 'al Qaeda in Iraq', a group that didn't exist prior to the invasion; allegedly it was founded by Zarqawi in 2004. They seem to be an amalgamation of Sunni Islamists who are indigenous to that area, militias, a handful of foreign mujahideen, and former Ba'athists who were all fighting each other but have now joined forces against the US to control the province. Apparently they target Iraqi civilians with suicide attacks to make their point.

They aren't al Qaeda, but they are extremists and terrorists as I define those words. And as I've already said, they exist as a direct result of Bush** invading Iraq. That's a key point that's being muddied by the corporate media.

I've said nothing about what should or shouldn't be done about them. I don't pretend to know those answers.

[magellan]

46. That's not all they're doing

They become extremists when they terrorize and kill innocent people for not sharing the same beliefs. 'al Qaeda in Iraq' is made up of Sunni Islamists whose home is al Anbar province, joined by insurgents and militias. No matter how you slice it these people are a threat to innocent Iraqis who don't share their beliefs.

But there's no forgetting who allowed this situation to develop in the first place: Bush**.

al Qaeda was not in Iraq before the invasion, and there was no 'al Qaeda in Iraq' before then either. The conflation of terms by BushCo is calculated to gloss over these facts to distract from the failures that allowed extremist Islamists to take power, and to make it "okay" to wipe out huge populations of people.

[Warren Stupidity]

50. There is a civil war.

The ethnic fighting is almost exclusively in the regions where the large ethnic groups, shia sunni and kurd, live together. Yes there are terrorist organizations operating but I reject the characterization of the fighting in Iraq as primarily terrorist in nature. It is a civil war, the direct consequence of the destruction of the existing Iraqi national government by our invasion and occupation of Iraq.

[magellan]

52. I don't think the fighting is primarily terrorist in nature

I wish I could remember where I heard it recently, but someone knowledgeable said actual foreign terrorists account for only about 7% of those fighting. The rest are Iraqis against Iraqis (and coalition troops).

But I suppose it depends on your definition. In my book, intentionally persecuting and/or murdering unarmed civilians for political or religious gain makes a person a terrorist. Just because it's a civil war doesn't mean acts of terrorism aren't possible.

Some say that because Bush** used nuclear terror to get us into Iraq and tacitly condones torture and the murder of civilians, he's a terrorist. I agree with that.

[Bluebear]

16. "U.S. has lost the Anbar region of Iraq, a secret report says"

WASHINGTON - The chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq recently filed an unusual secret report concluding that the prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim and that there was almost nothing the U.S. military could do to improve the political and social situation there, said several military officers and intelligence officials familiar with its contents.

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/nation/15489911.htm?source=rss&channel=inquirer_nation


U.S. military plays down report on Anbar", of course.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14800970/

[Greeby]

17. Expect Anbar province to be declared a free-fire zone

:scared:

[Warren Stupidity]

18. I reject that meme.

First, this was not 'ours' to lose. Second 'the insurgents' are not 'al qaeda'. The framing of this as 'we lost anbar to al qaeda' catapults the lie that al qaeda is connected to Iraq and that our illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq is part of the war on terror. I reject the framing and the assumptions that underlie it. The people of Anbar Province have defeated our occupation force, again, however most likely we will punish them, again, with death and injury beyond our imagination.

Remember Fallujah.

[Benhurst]

22. ...

:thumbsup:

[tkmorris]

35. That is exactly right

It is disturbing to me how many people accept this whole "Al Qaeda in Iraq" thing at face value. It is nonsense designed to do just what you said, connect terrorism with the war in Iraq. It isn't, they aren't, and we ought to know better.

[girl gone mad]

38. I don't know.

It's my impression that al-qaeda has swooped in and is filling on the gap in social and humanitarian services that our failed occupation left behind. In other words, they weren't there when Saddam was in power, but since Bush's war destroyed the infrastructure they've managed to infiltrate and indoctrinate Iraqi citizens. This doesn't mean the insurgents are foreigners.

[Warren Stupidity]

49. "filling on the gap in social and humanitarian services"?

This has never been a feature of al qaeda. Once again you are (understandably as we are barraged with disinformation) confusing an exclusively terrorist organization, al qaeda, with the insurgency that developed to resist our occupation of Iraq. al qaeda has never been an organization like Hezbollah or Hamas that has political social and military wings all operating in coordination with each other, it has always been singly focused on attacks against 'the enemy'. The insurgents have indeed built their own alternative social structures but the insurgents are not 'al qaeda'.

[sandnsea]

43. It'll be used as an excuse to stay

This is stunning misrepresentation of what's happening in Iraq. Anbar province is Sunni and if we've lost it, we've lost it to the Sunni citizens, not al qaeda. Should have seen this spin coming, they just keep going lower and lower.

[Pachamama]

19. But, but, but....I thought they were in the last throes????

:eyes:

PS: This is really scary news....so how much longer is this administration going to pretend that they are "winning the war on terror"? How much longer is this administration going to pretend that things in Iraq are not so bad? How much longer is this administration going to pretend (ok, lets call it what it is, LIE) about Al Qaida being in Iraq and connected to Iraq BEFORE WE INVADED THEM???? (Sure, Al Qaida is there NOW, but that's BECAUSE WE INVADED THEM AND HAVE BEEN OCCUPYING THEM!!

How much longer is this administration going to pretend that there isn't a civil war going on in Iraq?

[hvn_nbr_2]

23. Due to popular demand, "Last Throes" has been extended. nt

[hootinholler]

45. They are in the last throes

At last they throws our asses out.

-Hoot

[Pachamama]

48. Or maybe Cheney meant "US" when he said "They"....

I would say that what you said is correct...The Insurgents are about to throws our asses out of Iraq and we are in our last throes....

300+ Billion dollar ass toss....

[alittlelark]

21. My cousins husband was sent to Fallujah last Tuesday.

He is an 18 yr Nat Guard veteran (Colorado). Second deployment to Iraq in 2 years.

We were in CO for a funeral a few days before he shipped out.

He said he was going to work out deals for reconstruction with the local officials in Fallujah and the Anbar Province. I questioned whether we were really giving them contracts - he said that's what he'd been told. He will be travelling throughout the area working out deals with the locals. His last deployment was w/in the 'Green Zone'. He is generally a paper pusher.

He dislikes b*sh and this war, but only has 22 months until he collects his pension.

I'm not going to send this link to my cousin - she'd freak out even more than she already is.

[Ilsa]

61. I hope he will be okay. Especially since he is getting short.

I hope they can accomplish something there, because I think accomplishment towards getting basic services there and stabilized would make a difference in any area. I hope it isn't too late for Fallujah, but according to the news, it might be.

Tell your cuz we are thinking peaceful, healthy, safe thoughts about her SO.

[cynatnite]

24. There is no winning this war...

I said so at the very beginning.

[Rex]

25. So much propaganda, so little time.

Wait till normal people find out we NEVER had control over Iraq or Afghanistan. That, all we really controlled was the capital cities. I blame the MSM and will continue to do so for generations to come.

[Wednesdays]

62. Correction...

Wait till normal people find out we NEVER had control over Iraq or Afghanistan. That, all we really controlled was the capital cities.

Well, that and the oil fields...which were the only things that mattered anyway.

[Benhurst]

26. Maybe someday our rulers will learn that even brown-skinned

people don't like to be bombed or have their husbands, brothers, fathers, mothers, sisters, friends and children killed, even if it is done by the best equipment The World's Only Superpower can buy

Oh, well. It's hard to be fascists. Nobody understands you.

[Selatius]

28. Al Anbar was NOT AN AL QAEDA LOCATION

It only became one after we invaded. Saddam hated Al Qaeda about as much as we did.

[oblivious]

29. At this point it seems the definition of Al-qaeda is "Our enemies"

Or "the bad guys". An all-encompassing tag.

[Bluebear]

30. Olbermann to discuss on MSNBC this hour nt

[Gregorian]

31. There was an in depth segment on LinkTV last night.

Their footage was very saddening. Guys running around just shooting machine guns.

And it's a HUGE section of Iraq.

The world needs to see this administration behind a thick Lexan barrier.

Words cannot describe what is going on over there. Think of growing up as a child in that terror. It's terror. Brought to them by the corporate administration in this country.

[FearofFutility]

51. When I first heard that we "lost" Anbar province

I had no idea how big it was. Then I heard it was 50,000 square miles. Then I saw a map showing the provinces in Iraq. It looks like about a third of the country! :wow:

[many a good man]

34. The minute US troops leave Iraq

Al Qaeda in Iraq is toast.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

36. No one could have possibly seen this coming.

[raccoon]

56. Did you forget the sarcasm emoticon? nt

[catmandu57]

37. It's just like arm wrestling

There comes a time when the losers arm is being forced down a little at a time, then a sudden collapse. Our arm is being forced down and slowly people will begin to realize we're going to lose this thing.
What do they do now withdraw the Marines to Baghdad?

[BattyDem]

39. * created a terrorist state where there was none

Al-Qaida now has a country.

Mission Accomplished! :grr:

[dweller]

40. uh...errr....umm...

hmmm.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2507150


dp

[tabasco]

42. There's no oil there, is there?

Then it was never a part of the plan to keep it.

[Imagevision]

47. The Oil Connection: Afghanistan and Caspian Sea oil pipeline routes

The US government informed other nations of it's plan
to invade Afghanistan months before the 9/11 attacks

9 September 2001: Bush given Afghanistan invasion plan

7 October 2001: Bush announces opening of Afghanistan attacks

13 June 2002: Hamid Karzai Elected as New Afghan Leader
(Former Unocal Consultant)

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/oil.html

As in Iraq the "terrorists" don't want Bush to end up with controlling the oil, surprise, it's the same song in Afgan and the Taliban won't give the land to the US.

[The Cleaner]

54. If only I could recommend your post! Thanks...good info.

n/t

[Nikki Stone 1]

58. I've often wondered if the goal was to insure chaos in the ME

Of course, we're told we're :tinfoilhat: to think that.

[roamer65]

59. Vietraq will turn out like Cambodia

Iran will eventually occupy the south and Turkey will occupy the north. Just after our helicopters leave the embassy in the Green Zone. Vietnam eventually had to occupy Cambodia to get stability.

[Ilsa]

60. Once it is lost politically, it is lost militarily. The rest of Iraq

is hoping times will get better (more electricity, jobs, fuel, food, etc), but if it doesn't, it won't matter how many troops we send if they all decide they'd be better off with someone else in charge who can get these jobs done.

Andother Gworge W. Bush failure.

[smalll]

63. Sounds like "Phase 2 - the Lulling Phase" is working really well! /nt

[Disturbed]

65. How does a secret report of the US Military

end up as Intl. News?