Turkish President Abdullah Gul reaffirmed Sunday that Turkey has the right to make incursions into Iraq to retaliate against attacks on Turks by the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) guerrilla group. In eastern Anatolia near Iraq on Sunday, Turkish troops killed two PKK fighters. Turkey says that it made an incursion into Iraq on Saturday, deploying helicopter gunships and special operations forces.
Senator Jim Webb, back from Iraq, doesn’t think the effect of the troop surge will be all that positive if Bush doesn’t take advantage of it to do regional diplomacy.
Sunni Arab MPs ended their boycott of parliament on Sunday after their leader, Adnan Dulaim was brought to the Al Rashid hotel in the Green Zone, allegedly for his own safety. His body guards are accused of being bomb makers and terrorists.
British parliamentarians say that statistics show that violence against civilians in Basra is “undiminished” since British troops moved out to the airport from downtown. Attacks on British troops have fallen off dramatically. The report adds:
‘ Violence against civilians was undiminished as the city remained in the grip of the militias and criminal gangs, with “serious questions” over the true allegiances of many police officers. While the Iraqi army had made “significant progress”, the committee said it still needed back-up support from the British – particularly logistics and intelligence – to operate effectively.
At the same time, the committee questioned the continued viability of the remaining British force, based outside the city itself at Basra Air Station, once its numbers are halved to 2,500 from next spring.
“If there is still a role for UK forces in Iraq, those forces must be capable of doing more than just protecting themselves at Basra Air Station,” the report said. ‘
Those mysterious ‘non-combat’ deaths of US combat troops in Iraq. Editor and Publisher writes, “Although the U.S. death toll is down in Iraq, many troops continue to perish in what the military officially announces as “noncombat” or “nonhostile” incidents. An investigation is launched but the press rarely learns the result.”
Ann Applebaum says you can’t undo the vast Iraq disaster for US foreign policy with yet another round of unwarranted optimism based on death statistics. She points to the weakened US clout on the Iran issue with European allies. Bush is the boy that cried wolf as far as they are concerned.
If Karl Rove’s lips are moving, he is lying. He’s been peddling this falsehood that Bush wasn’t pushing for an Iraq War authorization before the 2002 elections, and that the Dems of the time wanted it early, two. In fact, most people thought it would be better to postpone it so that it was not used (as Rove did use it) for political purposes. So first he played politics with a war vote, now he is rewriting history to say that he didn’t. I mean, does he keep a copy of 1984 on his bedstand for daily readings?
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