[...] Unrecognizable Iraq [...]

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Why am I not surprised that Doug finds some bad news to highlight?

I imagine he’s still worried that the NAZIS are on the comeback in Germany too!

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[...] McCain has supported the war in Iraq but has been heavily critical of its management. Who had the superior judgment [...]

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Doug makes a great point. American forces should stop withdrawing until the lights are on longer in all of Baghdad.

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Craig accidently posted in the wrong thread… see his video posts on the economy here.

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“Being a NYT’s writer he just has to add the caveat that this could, just might, be a fleeting scene of peace because it all could fall to hell in a handbasket.”

Oh, I could see that happening. Of course, only if Obama gets in the White House.

“What a team these two losers!”

Those debates should be something special, huh? Given Obama’s recently yelling at that old woman for asking him a question, I almost expect him to have a meltdown at the podium the second McCain criticizes him. As for Biden, I really can’t be sure anymore if he’s really as stupid as he comes off, or if he’s trying to lure Palin into a false sense of security.

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What a team these two losers! Obama lying and flip flopping all the time and not knowing how many states the USA have… and Biden putting his foot in his mouth once every two days. How can somebody vote for this ticket without being completely insane?

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You can’t expect a leftist to understand or believe anything. They are so brainwashed they may as well be dead. I live to love life, democrats live to complain about life.

By the way, did you know Slow Joe Biden was once a coal miner. He told the story in 1988 and had to drop out of the campaign, yesterday he told the same story (lie) to the UMWA in Southwest Va. The same story he stole from someone and claimed as his own. Lots of PO’d miners after his scalp.

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Doug,

Nobody said it was perfect, but it his sure a hell of a lot better than it was recently and even before the war. Why are you such a damn leftie pessimist?

“A new and better nation is growing legs. What’s left is messy politics that likely will be punctuated by low-level violence and the occasional spectacular attack. Yet, the will of the Iraqi people has changed, and the Iraqi military has dramatically improved. Now it’s time to rebuild the country, and create a pluralistic, stable and peaceful Iraq. That will be long, hard work. But by my estimation, the Iraq War is over. We won. Which means the Iraqi people won”. (Michael Yon, on July 4th, 2008)

N.B.: Michael Yon is the author of: Moment Of Thruth in Iraq

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Yes, the place truly is unrecognizable:

By tracking the amount of light emitted by Baghdad neighborhoods at night, a team of UCLA geographers has uncovered fresh evidence that last year’s U.S. troop surge in Iraq may not have been as effective at improving security as some U.S. officials have maintained.

Night light in neighborhoods populated primarily by embattled Sunni residents declined dramatically just before the February 2007 surge and never returned, suggesting that ethnic cleansing by rival Shiites may have been largely responsible for the decrease in violence for which the U.S. military has claimed credit, the team reports in a new study based on publicly available satellite imagery.

“Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning,” said lead author John Agnew, a UCLA professor of geography and authority on ethnic conflict. “By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left.”

The night-light signature in four other large Iraqi cities — Kirkuk, Mosul, Tikrit and Karbala — held steady or increased between the spring of 2006 and the winter of 2007, the UCLA team found. None of these cities were targets of the surge.

Baghdad’s decreases were centered in the southwestern Sunni strongholds of East and West Rashid, where the light signature dropped 57 percent and 80 percent, respectively, during the same period.

By contrast, the night-light signature in the notoriously impoverished, Shiite-dominated Sadr City remained constant, as it did in the American-dominated Green Zone. Light actually increased in Shiite-dominated New Baghdad, the researchers found.

Until just before the surge, the night-light signature of Baghdad had been steadily increasing overall, they report in “Baghdad Nights: Evaluating the U.S. Military ‘Surge’ Using Night Light Signatures.”

“If the surge had truly ‘worked,’ we would expect to see a steady increase in night-light output over time, as electrical infrastructure continued to be repaired and restored, with little discrimination across neighborhoods,” said co-author Thomas Gillespie, an associate professor of geography at UCLA. “Instead, we found that the night-light signature diminished in only in certain neighborhoods, and the pattern appears to be associated with ethno-sectarian violence and neighborhood ethnic cleansing.”
…

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080919074830.htm

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