Murtha’s At It Again

According to John (”the troops are murderers”) Murtha, the surge worked because we just ‘broke down doors and inadvertantly killed people’:
Transcript:

Murtha: I think they have 17 or so guidelines and they’ve solved 4 or 5 of them.
(Actually they’ve completed 15 of the 18 benchmarks.)

Murtha: I think the short term it (the surge) has reduced incidents. I’m not sure if it’s because the Iraqis are just worn out but certainly the way they are doing it today it makes a big difference. It used to be we broke down doors. We went in and we killed people inadvertantly. Now they’re much more careful about it.

Link to video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3rO7qb4OvI

Hat tip to Gateway Pundit: Link: http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2008/07/murtha-surge-is-working-because.html

Previous post on Murtha: http://sfcmac.wordpress.com/2007/10/02/murtha-sued-for-defamation/

Murtha needs a big, fat clue shoved up his ass.

Only in the Democratic Party…..

Al Qaeda Remnants Driven From Mosul

The hunt began just after dawn. Iraqi armoured personnel carriers surrounded the turbulent Zanjali district in the northern city of Mosul, blocking off roads as police acting on an urgent tip-off swept in and searched from house to house.

They were looking for an Al-Qaeda bomb – a big one. Their intelligence suggested it could be detonated as early as today.

As the search intensified, I accompanied Colonel Tawfeeq Abdullah on a tense drive through Mosul to check on the operation’s progress.

A gunner loomed out of the open hatch in the roof of our Iraqi army Humvee, swivelling a heavy machinegun and scouring the bullet-pocked streets for enemy.

A soldier in the front passenger seat scanned the roads for improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the roadside bombs that have wreaked havoc on Iraqis and American forces.

……Everyone in our vehicle knew it was a prime target for Al-Qaeda in Iraq, formerly an awesome force that struck fear into the hearts of cities across the west and centre of Iraq but now reduced to a rump in the north in one of the most sweeping victories of America’s war on terror.

……Yet despite Zanjali’s reputation as a hotbed of the insurgency, we were able to climb down from the vehicle and walk safely along a road covered in hard-packed dirt from a spate of recent sandstorms.

……Ambulances were positioned every few hundred yards along the road in case of fighting. It never materialised. A search of hundreds of houses met no resistance and yielded no bomb, just 60kg of TNT and some bomb-making equipment.

All that the soldiers found otherwise was a solitary Kalashnikov assault rifle.

“We let him keep the gun because every Iraqi family is allowed to have a personal weapon,” said Major Awad al-Juburi, 39, standing in the road in full battle gear. “The families have been okay with us so far. They are not objecting. They offered us tea and water.”

In Mosul, Al-Qaeda’s last redoubt, the group still held sway as recently as Easter. Now it lacks the strength to fight the army face to face and has lost the sympathy of most of the ordinary citizens who once admired its stand against the occupying forces and their allies in the Iraqi army.

Yesterday two off-duty policemen were shot dead in a market in the east of the city. Hit-and-run attacks such as this have replaced more organised resistance as Al-Qaeda’s strength has been sapped.

……Brigadier-General Abdullah Abdul, a senior Iraqi commander, said: “Al-Qaeda in Mosul is pretty much not able to do the attacks that they could do previously. They are doing small attacks and trying to do big ones but they are mostly not succeeding.”

The Iraqis and Americans have got Al-Qaeda on the run. How have they come so far, so fast?
On the night of May 9, 87 “target packets” landed on the walnut desk of Abdul, the commander of the Iraqi army’s 2nd Division.

The details of each named target were specific. One read: “Action: capture. Characteristics: white hair, hazel eyes, sunburnt skin. Alias: Abu Mohamed. Car: drives a station wagon. Residence: a two-storey house painted black (with map attached showing location). Credibility of source: reliable.”

By early the next morning – the launch day for Operation Lion’s Roar to recapture Mosul – hundreds of police and army checkpoints had been set up across the city.

Iraqi security forces began conducting raids to round up the targets in the packets on Abdul’s desk. Many of them were detained in the first two days. Two weapons caches were found and cleared.

It quickly became clear that the Iraqi army and the (U.S. Army’s) 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment were combining their forces effectively. American tanks formed cordons while Iraqi soldiers went from house to house.

An outer cordon was established to ring the city with a huge bank to keep out bombers and the small number of fighters still arriving in Iraq from Syria to reinforce Al-Qaeda.

Meanwhile, an inner cordon of security checkpoints was set up within the city, cutting off districts from one another to curtail insurgents’ movements.

The Americans built small forts known as command operating posts in areas where control was established to increase the flow of intelligence and ensure that no ground was ceded. The impact of the operation was instant.

……Some of the discoveries revealed the brutality of Al-Qaeda’s reign. On May 19 in the district of Muthana, an alert Iraqi soldier spotted a manhole cover that should not have been there.

Beneath it they found a ceremonial knife in an apparent torture chamber, its walls spattered with blood. Videos recovered from the chamber showed Iraqi soldiers and police being executed.

……Al-Qaeda suffered perhaps its greatest blow on June 24 when American soldiers gunned down Abu Khalaf, the “emir of Mosul”. He had been a close associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the most notorious leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, who was killed in an airstrike two years ago.

Link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article4276323.ece

The success of the combat operations by U.S. Army and Iraqi forces, along with General Petraeus’ leadership, and the anger of the Iraqi people with Al Qaeda atrocities, has culminated in the defeat of terrorists in Iraq.

Most of the world’s mainstream media remains conspicuously silent….and disappointed.

Last of Saddam’s “Non-Existant” WMD Program Shut Down

Paging Joe Wilson:

The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program _ a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium _ reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans.

The removal of 550 metric tons of “yellowcake” _ the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment _ was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam’s nuclear legacy. It also brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions.

What’s now left is the final and complicated push to clean up the remaining radioactive debris at the former Tuwaitha nuclear complex about 12 miles south of Baghdad _ using teams that include Iraqi experts recently trained in the Chernobyl fallout zone in Ukraine.

“Everyone is very happy to have this safely out of Iraq,” said a senior U.S. official who outlined the nearly three-month operation to The Associated Press. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

No kidding….

……And, in a symbolic way, the mission linked the current attempts to stabilize Iraq with some of the high-profile claims about Saddam’s weapons capabilities in the buildup to the 2003 invasion.

Accusations that Saddam had tried to purchase more yellowcake from the African nation of Niger and an article by a former U.S. ambassador refuting the claims led to a wide-ranging probe into Washington leaks that reached high into the Bush administration.
Tuwaitha and an adjacent research facility were well known for decades as the centerpiece of Saddam’s nuclear efforts.

……The yellowcake wasn’t the only dangerous item removed from Tuwaitha.

Earlier this year, the military withdrew four devices for controlled radiation exposure from the former nuclear complex. The lead-enclosed irradiation units, used to decontaminate food and other items, contain elements of high radioactivity that could potentially be used in a weapon, according to the official. Their Ottawa-based manufacturer, MDS Nordion, took them back for free, the official said.

The yellowcake was the last major stockpile from Saddam’s nuclear efforts, but years of final cleanup is ahead for Tuwaitha and other smaller sites.

……A CIA officer, Valerie Plame, claimed her identity was leaked to journalists to retaliate against her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, who wrote that he had found no evidence to support assertions that Iraq tried to buy additional yellowcake from Niger.

A federal investigation led to the conviction of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.

Link: http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/jul/05/ap-exclusive-us-removes-uranium-from-iraq/

The Feds owe Libby an apology and should give Plame and her loser husband Joe a swift kick in the ass.

Mosul Al Qaeda Leader Waxed

Another raghead jihadist bites the dust.

The US military has identified al Qaeda’s leader of Mosul who was killed during a targeted raid in the northern city on June 24.

Multinational Forces Iraq named Abu Khalaf as al Qaeda’s emir, or leader, of Mosul who was killed during a raid by Task Force 88, the hunter-killer teams assigned to disrupt terrorist command networks in Iraq and elsewhere. Khalaf was killed by US forces as he reached for a gun and his associate attempted to detonate his vest.

Khalaf “rose through the ranks to become the overall emir of Mosul,” the US military stated. He served as al Qaeda’s military commander in Mosul during the rule of former al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi.

He would meet with senior al Qaeda leaders in Mosul and the Jazeera desert “coordinating and ordering dozens of attacks against Iraqi citizens, Iraqi forces and Coalition forces.”

Khalaf had close ties to foreign al Qaeda terrorists, according to his associates in custody. “Khalaf traveled much of the time with foreigners,” the US military said. Abu Khalud, his aide wearing the suicide vest at the time of his death, was a Syrian national.

The US military has decimated al Qaeda’s command network in Mosul since major operations kicked off early this year.

Link: http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2008/06/us_names_al_qaeda_em.php

Shucks, and he didn’t even get to blow himself to smithereens for allah.

At Least One (Foreign) News Outlet Gets It

From The (London) TimesOnline:

We’re winning this War on Terror
Al-Qaeda and the Taleban are in retreat, the surge has worked in Iraq and Islamism is discredited.
Not a bad haul.

……these days timorous defeatism is on the march. In Britain setbacks in the Afghan war are greeted as harbingers of inevitable defeat. In America, large swaths of the political class continues to insist Iraq is a lost cause. The consensus in much of the West is that the War on Terror is unwinnable.

And yet the evidence is now overwhelming that on all fronts, despite inevitable losses from time to time, it is we who are advancing and the enemy who is in retreat. The current mood on both sides of the Atlantic, in fact, represents a kind of curious inversion of the great French soldier’s dictum: “Success against the Taleban. Enemy giving way in Iraq. Al-Qaeda on the run. Situation dire. Let’s retreat!”

That’s the Democrats to a “T”.

Since it is remarkable how pervasive this pessimism is, it’s worth recapping what has been achieved in the past few years.

Afghanistan has been a signal success. There has been much focus on the latest counter-offensive by the Taleban in the southeast of the country and it would be churlish to minimise the ferocity with which the terrorists are fighting, but it would be much more foolish to understate the scale of the continuing Nato achievement. Establishing a stable government for the whole nation is painstaking work, years in the making. It might never be completed. But that was not the principal objective of the war there.

Until the US-led invasion in 2001, Afghanistan was the cockpit of ascendant Islamist terrorism. Consider the bigger picture. Between 1998 and 2005 there were five big terrorist attacks against Western targets - the bombings of the US embassies in Africa in 1998, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, 9/11, and the Madrid and London bombings in 2004 and 2005. All owed their success either exclusively or largely to Afghanistan’s status as a training and planning base for al-Qaeda.

In the past three years there has been no attack on anything like that scale. Al-Qaeda has been driven into a state of permanent flight. Its ability to train jihadists has been severely compromised; its financial networks have been ripped apart. Thousands of its activists and enablers have been killed. It’s true that Osama bin Laden’s forces have been regrouping in the border areas of Pakistan but their ability to orchestrate mass terrorism there is severely attenuated. And there are encouraging signs that Pakistanis are starting to take to the offensive against them.

Next time you hear someone say that the war in Afghanistan is an exercise in futility ask them this: do they seriously think that if the US and its allies had not ousted the Taleban and sustained an offensive against them for six years that there would have been no more terrorist attacks in the West? What characterised Islamist terrorism before the Afghan war was increasing sophistication, boldness and terrifying efficiency. What has characterised the terrorist attacks in the past few years has been their crudeness, insignificance and a faintly comical ineptitude (remember Glasgow airport?)

The second great advance in the War on Terror has been in Iraq.
……The “surge”, despite all the doubts and derision at the time, has been a triumph of US military planning and execution. Political progress was slower in coming but is now evident too. The Iraqi leadership has shown great courage and dispatch in extirpating extremists and a growing willingness even to turn on Shia militias. Basra is more peaceful and safer than it has been since before the British moved in. Despite setbacks such as yesterday’s bombings, the streets of Iraq’s cities are calmer and safer than they have been in years. Seventy companies have bid for oil contracts from the Iraqi Government. There are signs of a real political reconciliation that may reach fruition in the election later this year.

The third and perhaps most significant advance of all in the War on Terror is the discrediting of the Islamist creed and its appeal.

This was first of all evident in Iraq, where the head-hacking frenzy of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his associates so alienated the majority of Muslims that it gave rise to the so-called Sunni Awakening that enabled the surge to be so effective.

……There ought to be no surprise here. It’s only their apologists in the Western media who really failed to see the intrinsic evil of Islamists. Those who have had to live with it have never been in much doubt about what it represents. Ask the people of Iran. Or those who fled the horrors of Afghanistan under the Taleban.

This is why we fight. Primarily, of course, to protect ourselves from the immediate threat of terrorist carnage, but also because we know that extending the embrace of a civilisation that liberates everyone makes us all safer.

Every death is an unspeakable tragedy. It’s right that each time a soldier is killed in action we ask why. Was it really worth it?

The right response to the loss of brave souls such as Corporal Sarah Bryant, the first British woman to die in Afghanistan, is not an immediate call for retreat. It is, first of all, pride; a great, deep conviction that it is on such sacrifice that our own freedoms have always rested. Then, defiance. How foolish is the enemy that it might think our grief is really some prelude to their victory?

Finally, confidence. We are prevailing in this struggle. We know it. And everywhere: in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and among Muslims around the world, the enemy knows it too.
Link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/gerard_baker/article4221376.ece

Very few media organizations in this country acknowledge the facts about Iraq and Afghanistan; the history of Islamic fanaticism, what led up to the war, why we are there, and that we have won.

Can you imagine if the current bunch of enemy collaborators at the New York Times, had been around in World War II?

The frightening possibilities are endless.