NYTimes today.

The explosions also came only a few hours after Iraqi leaders met for lunch in advance of a “crisis summit” meeting to discuss how to solve their sectarian divisions and smooth out their knotted government.

The gathering, like many before it, produced no results. An aide to President Jalal Talabani called the lunch “an icebreaker,” but Adnan Dulaimi, leader of the largest Sunni bloc, said nothing political was discussed.

“It was only an invitation for lunch,” he said. “We didn’t engage in any negotiations.”

Contorted thinking, moi? Never been to Daily Kos, have you: “Shut up, sergeant! we’re not here to listen to the truth, we’re here to support the troops!”

“By July 31, 3,659 American soldiers had died in Iraq war; but none died on the day of my meeting with Petraeus. Early that evening, he walks around his desk, bends over a computer screen, scans graphs and columns of numbers, and says, “Still no casualties. It’s good news, outstanding news, we don’t get that a lot here”

Such optimism, if you want to support the troops get them out of this mess.

Perhaps you could try saying “good job” and “thank you”.

If war isn’t the answer here, let’s hear yours.

Those of you better in historical detail can check the article but all in all, it does show some of the deep changes that’ve occurred over the decades.

http://kamangir.net/2007/08/13/godfather-seeks-support-from-the-islamic-republic/

Or maybe Bush haters have the TV Hollywood schedule idea that 90 minutes should be about enough time to fix any problem.

On the Der Spiegel article, he often wrote that the Americans were the Iraqi enemies. I don’t think that’s ever been true — we were always the terrorist enemies, and have been the enemies of Baathists who fought against us. Since many of these are Iraqis, we were the enemies of anti-freedom Iraqis.
Most Iraqis want to avoid becoming a target, I think.

Not as dismissive as I am of the main sewer mind.

# shirley Says:
August 15th, 2007 at 2:20 am

To find the kind of contorted thinking that goes on here one usually has to go to a Creationism conference.

Try reading stormfront once in awhile.

shirley Says:
August 15th, 2007 at 2:12 am

190 dead in Kurdish Iraq today.

See, what did I say about the other shoe dropping?

Link

This all stems from last week’s Der SPIEGEL magazine cover feature article by Ullrich Fichtner: An enormous, fascinating and remarkably honest report on the complex situation in Iraq. (The first link above in bolded-italics leads to the English translation of that report.) SPIEGEL ONLINE is also publishing Fichtner’s report that US troops are in a remarkably good mood and have high morale. That also flies directly in the face of past SPIEGEL reporting that consistently depicted US troops as demoralized, depressed, defeated, prone to suicide and suffering from low morale.

Keep in mind that less than a year ago, Der SPIEGEL published a magazine cover (depicted below) declaring Iraq a “Lost War”.

I always must watch out for enemy propaganda operations designed to upset US or international morale. One method is to raise expectations and then gut us while we’re looking up.