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How about the dem controlled congress that has historically low approval ratings???
Just imagine the heads exploding on the left if a rep is elected this year??
They are so sure that the right is dead and that socialism is right around the corner.
It was the same in 2004- they were so sure that Bush could never win.
This country is still center/right. The dems recent control has only reinforced that fact that most members of congress are crooks. They have done absolutely nothing to show they are more worthy of greater power
There was nothing stupid or even inaccurate in my statement.
Ever notice how many African American fans there are at sawx games????
Until recently many black athletes tried to avoid playing in boston
So, somehow in your twisted world it's OK for bigoted scum like Soxfan to trash southerners inaccurately, but no OK for someone else to bring up the real fact of boston's racial intolerance?
The point I was making- that you are too dense to see was that his type of bigotry is subhuman. It's called exaggeration for effect Calling him sully and assuming he has a drinking problem is exactly the same as his anti southern prejudice.
But I guess it's not prejudice when the subject of abuse is in a red state, huh
Get a clue
PS, you'll have to deal with me being a life long Yankee fan. Good thin you're a bot, not human , or we'd have to disclaim you're low level of insight
I/m sure Ronald will be happy to hear that.....
Yeah, I'll take fries with that
From Bahstan, huh, that explains your intolerance
The sawx were the last team to integrate
Drink much, Sully??
Data Bomb
By Neil Munro and Carl M. Cannon, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Jan. 4, 2008
Three weeks before the 2006 midterm elections gave Democrats control of Congress, a shocking study reported on the number of Iraqis who had died in the ongoing war. It bolstered criticism of President Bush and heightened the waves of dread -- here and around the world -- about the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
Published by The Lancet, a venerable British medical journal, the study [PDF] used previously accepted methods for calculating death rates to estimate the number of "excess" Iraqi deaths after the 2003 invasion at 426,369 to 793,663; the study said the most likely figure was near the middle of that range: 654,965. Almost 92 percent of the dead, the study asserted, were killed by bullets, bombs, or U.S. air strikes. This stunning toll was more than 10 times the number of deaths estimated by the Iraqi or U.S. governments, or by any human-rights group.
In December 2005, Bush had used a figure of 30,000 civilian deaths in Iraq. Iraq's health ministry calculated that, based on death certificates, 50,000 Iraqis had died in the war through June 2006. A cautiously compiled database of media reports by a London-based anti-war group called Iraq Body Count confirmed at least 45,000 war dead during the same time period. These were all horrific numbers -- but the death count in The Lancet's study differed by an order of magnitude.
Queried in the Rose Garden on October 11, the day the Lancet article came out, Bush dismissed it. "I don't consider it a credible report," he replied. The Pentagon and top British government officials also rejected the study's findings.
Such skepticism would not prove to be the rule.
CBS News called the report a "new and stunning measure of the havoc the American invasion unleashed in Iraq." CNN began its report this way: "War has wiped out about 655,000 Iraqis, or more than 500 people a day, since the U.S.-led invasion, a new study reports." Within a week, the study had been featured in 25 news shows and 188 articles in U.S. newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.
Editorials in many major newspapers cited the Lancet article as further evidence that the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea, and the liberal blogosphere ridiculed Bush for his response. Prominent mainstream media outlets quoted various academics who vouched for the study's methodology, including some who said they had reviewed the data before publication.
Within a few weeks a backlash rose, although the contrarian view of the study generated far less press attention than the Lancet article. In the ensuing year, numerous skeptics have identified various weaknesses with the study's methodology and conclusions. Political blogs and academic journals have registered and responded to the objections in a debate that has been simultaneously arcane and predictable. The arguments are arcane because that is the nature of statistical analysis. They are predictable because that is the nature of today's polarized political discourse, with liberals defending the Lancet study and conservatives contesting it.
How to explain the enormous discrepancy between The Lancet's estimation of Iraqi war deaths and those from studies that used other methodologies? For starters, the authors of the Lancet study followed a model that ensured that even minor components of the data, when extrapolated over the whole population, would yield huge differences in the death toll. Skeptical commentators have highlighted questionable assumptions, implausible data, and ideological leanings among the authors, Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, and Les Roberts.
Some critics go so far as to suggest that the field research on which the study is based may have been performed improperly -- or not at all. The key person involved in collecting the data -- Lafta, the researcher who assembled the survey teams, deployed them throughout Iraq, and assembled the results -- has refused to answer questions about his methods.
Some of these questions could be resolved if other researchers had access to the surveyors' original field reports and response forms. The authors have released files of collated survey results but not the original survey reports, citing security concerns and the fact that some information was not recorded or preserved in the first place. This was a legitimate problem, and it underscored the difficulty of conducting research in a war zone.
Each death recorded by the Hopkins surveyors in 2006 extrapolated to 2,000 deaths in the Iraqi population.
Over the past several months, National Journal has examined the 2006 Lancet article, and another [PDF] that some of the same authors published in 2004; probed the problems of estimating wartime mortality rates; and interviewed the authors and their critics. NJ has identified potential problems with the research that fall under three broad headings: 1) possible flaws in the design and execution of the study; 2) a lack of transparency in the data, which has raised suspicions of fraud; and 3) political preferences held by the authors and the funders, which include George Soros's Open Society Institute.
Origins Of The Survey
Since the beginning of the war, the media have meticulously tracked and documented the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq -- which reached 3,904 on January 1 -- particularly as the total approached and then surpassed (in December 2006) the 2,973 people killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But determining the number of Iraqis who have died is much more difficult, as is determining how many of the dead were insurgents and how many were innocent civilians. With Iraq's central government barely functioning, health services overwhelmed, and political agendas coloring all agencies, no reliable statistics exist so far.
The Lancet study was based on techniques developed by public health experts to determine rates of illness and death from epidemics and famines in large populations. This "cluster" sampling is a relatively new methodology that attempts to replicate the logic of public opinion polling in Third World locales that lack a telecommunications infrastructure.
Following this method, questioners undertake a house-to-house survey in certain areas and then extrapolate the results from that statistical sample to the entire national population. According to this study's design, teams of Iraqi questioners would visit approximately 47 randomly chosen clusters of homes throughout the country and ask a series of census-style questions at 40 contiguous households in each cluster: How many people live in your household? How many lived here on January 1, 2002? In that time, how many were born -- and how many died?
In 2004, several of the same authors had done a preliminary Iraq study using this method. Also published in The Lancet (and also deliberately timed, by the authors' admission, to appear just before a U.S. election), that article reported at least 98,000 "excess" Iraqi deaths. Perhaps because that estimate contrasted sharply with the observations of embedded reporters, human-rights activists, and others on the ground in Iraq, the media gave it limited coverage.
The Authors
The origins of the Lancet studies can be traced to 1993, when two officials from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention traveled to Bosnia-Herzegovina to view the devastation caused by the Balkan war. Only nine years after Sarajevo had triumphantly hosted the Winter Olympics, the once-lovely city was making the tragic transition from a cosmopolitan regional oasis to a hellhole identified by a chilling new phrase: "ethnic cleansing." The terrorized Bosnian populace related tales of brutality so appalling that the visiting Americans dismissed them as absurd rumors: Croatian guerrillas were buying castration devices from the Germans to use on Bosnian men; Serbian snipers were shooting children in the legs and using them as "bait" to bring their parents within range.
In pursuit of an accurate picture, the U.S. health officials toured a hospital in Sarajevo. In the surgical ward, they saw many children in post-operative recovery -- from bullet wounds in their legs. The "absurd" urban myths, apparently, had some truth to them. In the face of such exceptional horror, one of the Americans -- Les Roberts -- experienced an epiphany. First, he realized that in a sectarian civil war, the unthinkable is not only possible, it is commonplace. Second, the tribulations of children trapped in war zones are especially horrifying. Third, a public official who has seen such suffering has a moral duty to try to stop it.
"I think that's when I fully understood the need to step beyond peer-review journals and statistical analyses if you are going to do effective public health work in times of war," Roberts explained in a recent interview with a Belgian-based publication. This determination to become an advocate would lead him to Rwanda and the Congo, where in 2001 he was involved in studies that produced jaw-dropping estimates of more than 3 million dead in that nation's civil war. Roberts also went back to the Balkans -- this time to Kosovo -- and ultimately, when war came to Iraq in 2003, he traveled to Baghdad.
By then, Roberts was a researcher at the Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. He broached the idea of a postwar mortality study in Iraq with Gilbert Burnham, co-director of the school's Center for Refugee and Disaster Response. The two men approached Richard Garfield, a Columbia University epidemiologist who signed on and put them in touch with an Iraqi scientist he knew, Riyadh Lafta, to recruit and oversee researchers who could conduct field surveys in Iraq.
A car bomb attack in Sadr City that killed at least 60 people appears to have been counted by the researchers, even though it happened a day after the survey was to end, critics say.
Lafta had been a child-health official in Saddam Hussein's ministry of health when the ministry was trying to end the international sanctions against Iraq by asserting that many Iraqis were dying from hunger, disease, or cancer caused by spent U.S. depleted-uranium shells remaining from the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In 2000, Lafta authored at least two brief articles contending that U.N. sanctions had caused many deaths by starvation among Iraqi children. In one article, he identified malnutrition as the main contributor to 53 percent of deaths among hospitalized children younger than 2, during a 1997 survey carried out at Saddam Central Teaching Hospital. The article cited no health data from before the sanctions, yet it asserted, "We can conclude from results that the most important and widespread underlying cause of the deterioration of child-health standards in Iraq is the long-term impact of the nonhumanized economic sanction imposed through United Nations resolutions." The article was published in 2000 by the Iraqi Journal of Community Medicine. Roberts told National Journal he had not read Lafta's articles, and Burnham said he did not have a copy of the articles.
Lafta is now at Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, where he briefly served as dean of the medical college in 2003.
Lafta and his surveyors often worked under brutal political pressure. In January 2007, a Sunni suicide bomber killed more than 70 students at the university, partly because it is perceived as being under the control of Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite religious leader whose Mahdi Army militia crippled Sunni insurgent groups in Baghdad during 2006. Until this fall, Sadr's party and his Mahdi Army also controlled the health ministry, which employed some of Lafta's researchers.
Dramatic Findings
In his first study of Iraqi war deaths, in September 2004, Lafta sent six Iraqi questioners to 33 clusters of homes throughout the country to ask how many people in each household had died since January 1, 2002. The researchers reported that 808 of the 998 identified households participated in the survey, and then extrapolated the number of deaths reported to the entire population of 24.4 million Iraqis. "Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000 excess deaths or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq," concluded the authors -- Roberts, Lafta, Garfield, Jamal Khudhairi, and Burnham. That was when the war was just 19 months old.
"Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths, and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths," the report said. According to subsequent explanations by the authors, the total included 57,600 dead from violence, 24,000 dead from wartime accidents, and 13,600 dead from disease. The accidental deaths included 15,000 Iraqis killed by U.S. vehicles in road incidents -- extrapolated from five death reports.
Little is known about Lafta's decision-making in amassing the data for the Lancet surveys. Roberts provided some information, however, about Lafta's 2004 survey of casualties in Falluja. At the time, al-Sadr was publicly supporting the anti-American Sunni radicals who controlled the city. In September, Roberts said, he pleaded with "his Muslim friend Lafta not to go" into Falluja, according to an interview with a magazine published by Johns Hopkins. Roberts told the interviewer that Lafta replied, "God has picked these clusters. If God wants me, he will take me. I must go." Roberts also said of Lafta, "I know no one [who] perceives themselves so humbly to be a tool of God's destiny.... He sees his science as synonymous with service to God."
In Falluja, Lafta recorded 52 deaths in 29 households, which amounted to 71 percent of the violent deaths recorded by the first Lancet survey. If representative, Lafta's sample translated into 50,000 to 70,000 dead in Falluja by September 2004 -- two months before the start of the second major American military operation to restore order. Falluja's prewar population was estimated to be 250,000, although U.S. officials said that the vast majority of residents had fled before the battles began. Lafta's Falluja death estimate was so far off the chart that his colleagues dropped it from the study, the authors said.
The 2006 study, known as Lancet II, was somewhat larger, involving 47 clusters and using similar survey techniques. In all, 302 violent deaths reported in those 1,849 households became the basis for estimating that 601,000 Iraqis had died violently from the start of the war through June 2006.
Even though the second study was even further out of line with other sources' estimates than the first, it got tremendous attention -- probably because its findings fit an emerging narrative: Iraq was a horrific mess. The February 2006 bombing of Samarra's Golden Mosque, in particular, had sent the country spiraling toward sectarian warfare.
Democrats who had opposed Bush's Iraq campaign embraced the report. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., for example, issued a statement saying that the "new study is a chilling and somber reminder of the unacceptably high human cost of this war.... We must not stay on the same failed course any longer." Such remarks, amplified by myriad articles, broadcasts, and blogs, helped to cement Americans' increasingly negative perceptions of the war. "For those who wanted to believe it, it gave them a new number to circulate, [and] it was a defining moment" in attitudes toward the war, said pollster John Zogby, who commended the report in a CNN interview.
The Lancet II article was also publicized widely overseas, especially in the Middle East. One Al Jazeera pundit said that the study revealed "what is surely the greatest crime in human history." A Pakistani columnist declared, "According to [the] highly reputed Lancet, an English science and medical journal, 650,000 Iraqis have been killed since the American invasion ... to fulfill the imperial lust of Washington and its cohorts."
Muslim commentators in the United States have been only slightly more restrained. "The Arab masses and the Muslims understand what's at stake here; they know what the U.S. is doing; they can see the casualties and suffering," Osama Siblani, the publisher of the Michigan-based Arab American News, said in an interview. The United States' destructive policies in the Middle East "are creating a fertile ground for Osama [bin Laden] to come in and recruit," he said, describing the elected Iraqi government as a "puppet" that should be removed from power.
In the Middle East, both Sunni and Shiite Islamist groups have used the study to bolster their claims that the West is waging a war against Islam. In an October 30, 2007, debate on Al Jazeera, for example, an Egyptian cleric, Sheik Ibrahim al-Khouli, slammed a Syrian author's criticism of fundamentalist Islam. The United States and Europe had "fought in Iraq and destroyed it," he said. They "killed one and a half million people ... [and] killed a million Iraqi children during the [1990s sanctions] siege; left traces of enriched uranium from the weapons that were used [in 1991]; and destroyed the environment for the next 35 billion years, according to American estimates."
The John Hopkins researcher, Les Roberts, began the studies by smuggling himself into Iraq with $20,000 stuffed in his money belt and shoes.
The study had such a significant impact partly because of where it appeared. The Lancet, founded in 1823, is one of the world's most-cited medical journals, credited with publishing articles that established the principles of antiseptics in 1867 and documented the dangers of thalidomide in 1961. Although few mainstream journalists ever plow through the journal's articles, news outlets typically refer to it as "the respected Lancet." In recent years, however, the journal's reputation has suffered from charges of politicization and a few prominent instances of scientific fraud.
Also driving the press attention was the study's association with Johns Hopkins University, whose School of Public Health was the first and is now the largest such institution in the world. Faculty members participated in the study, and the school's review board conducted an ethical review of the research plan. The Arab American's Siblani said that the university connection was one reason he put the study on the front page of his newspaper.
Potential Problems
Both Lancet studies of Iraqi war deaths rest on the data provided by Lafta, who operated with little American supervision and has rarely appeared in public or been interviewed about his role. In May, Lafta and Roberts presented their study to an off-the-record meeting of experts in Geneva, but other attendees declined to describe Lafta's remarks. Despite multiple requests sent via e-mails and through Burnham and Roberts, Lafta declined to communicate with National Journal or to send copies of his articles about Iraqi deaths during Saddam's regime.
When asked questions about the reliability of their Iraqi partner, the studies' American authors defend Lafta as a nice guy and a good researcher.
"I've known him for years," Garfield told NJ. "I used to work with his boss in 2003, studying how Saddam had pilfered cash [intended] for the health care system. He's thoughtful, careful, and we became friends."
John Tirman, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, described Lafta as "a medical doctor, a professor of medicine. Those factors were a sufficient level of credibility. I never asked [Lafta] about his political views." Tirman commissioned the Lancet II survey with $46,000 from George Soros's Open Society Institute and additional support from other funders.
Lancet Editor Richard Horton shares this fundamental faith in scientists. He told NJ that scientists, including Lafta, can be trusted because "science is a global culture that operates by a set of norms and standards that are truly international, that do not vary by culture or religion. That's one of the beautiful aspects of science -- it unifies cultures, not divides them."
Still, the authors have declined to provide the surveyors' reports and forms that might bolster confidence in their findings. Customary scientific practice holds that an experiment must be transparent -- and repeatable -- to win credence. Submitting to that scientific method, the authors would make the unvarnished data available for inspection by other researchers. Because they did not do this, citing concerns about the security of the questioners and respondents, critics have raised the most basic question about this research: Was it verifiably undertaken as described in the two Lancet articles?
"The authors refuse to provide anyone with the underlying data," said David Kane, a statistician and a fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Statistics at Harvard University. Some critics have wondered whether the Iraqi researchers engaged in a practice known as "curb-stoning," sitting on a curb and filling out the forms to reach a desired result. Another possibility is that the teams went primarily into neighborhoods controlled by anti-American militias and were steered to homes that would provide information about the "crimes" committed by the Americans.
Fritz Scheuren, vice president for statistics at the National Opinion Research Center and a past president of the American Statistical Association, said, "They failed to do any of the [routine] things to prevent fabrication." The weakest part of the Lancet surveys is their reliance on an unsupervised Iraqi survey team, contended Scheuren, who has recently trained survey workers in Iraq.
When the study came out in October 2006, President Bush said it wasn't credible.
The research is "a field study in unstable conditions," Columbia University's Garfield, one of the authors of the preliminary 2004 study, told National Journal in October. "You know that it's imperfect, but ... I'll say this: It's much easier to discredit than to go into a place like this and try and find answers. None of these harpies are dodging bullets."
Perhaps. But overall, the possible shortcomings of the Lancet studies persist, in three broad categories.
Design And Implementation
Critics say that the surveys used too few clusters, and too few people, to do the job properly.
# Sample size. The design for Lancet II committed eight surveyors to visit 50 regional clusters (the number ended up being 47) with each cluster consisting of 40 households. By contrast, in a 2004 survey, the United Nations Development Program used many more questioners to visit 2,200 clusters of 10 houses each. This gave the U.N. investigators greater geographical variety and 10 times as many interviews, and produced a figure of about 24,000 excess deaths -- one-quarter the number in the first Lancet study. The Lancet II sample is so small that each violent death recorded translated to 2,000 dead Iraqis overall. The question arises whether the chosen clusters were enough to be truly representative of the entire Iraqi population and therefore a valid data set for extrapolating to nationwide totals.
# "Main street" bias? According to the Lancet II article, surveyors randomly selected a main street within a randomly picked district; "a residential street was then randomly selected from a list of residential streets crossing the main street." This method pulled the survey teams away from side streets and toward main streets, where car bombs can kill the most people, thus boosting the apparent death rate, according to a critique of the study by Michael Spagat, an economics professor at the Royal Holloway, University of London, and Sean Gourley and Neil Johnson of the physics department at Oxford University.
Burnham responds that The Lancet's description of how the researchers picked sites was an editing error, and that the method used eliminated main-street bias.
# Oversight. To undertake the first Lancet study, Roberts went into Iraq concealed on the floor of an SUV with $20,000 in cash stuffed into his money belt and shoes. Daring stuff, to be sure, but just eight days after arriving, Roberts witnessed the police detaining two surveyors who had questioned the governor's household in a Sadr-dominated town. Roberts subsequently remained in a hotel until the survey was completed. Thus, most of the oversight for Lancet I -- and all of it for Lancet II -- was done long-distance. For this reason, although he defends the methodology, Garfield took his name off Lancet II. "The study in 2006 suffered because Les was running for Congress and wasn't directly supervising the work as he had done in 2004," Garfield told NJ.
Black-Box Data
With the original data unavailable, other scholars cannot verify the findings, a key test of scientific rigor.
# Response rate. The surveyors said that 1.7 percent of households -- fewer than one in 50 -- were unoccupied or uncooperative, even though questioners visited each house only once on one day; that answers were taken only from the household's husband or wife, not from in-laws or adult children; and that householders had reason to fear that their participation would expose them to threats from armed groups.
To Kane, the study's reported response rate of more than 98 percent "makes no sense," if only because many male heads of households would be at work or elsewhere during the day and Iraqi women would likely refuse to participate. On the other hand, Kieran J. Healy, a sociologist at the University of Arizona, found that in four previous unrelated surveys, the polling response in Iraq was typically in the 90 percent range.
The Lancet II questioners had enough time to accomplish the surveys properly, Burnham said.
# Lack of supporting data. The survey teams failed to collect the fraud-preventing demographic data that pollsters routinely gather. For example, D3 Systems, a polling firm based in Vienna, Va., that has begun working in Iraq, tries to prevent chicanery among its 100-plus Iraqi surveyors by requiring them to ask respondents for such basic demographic data as ages and birthdates. This anti-fraud measure works because particular numbers tend to appear more often in surveys based on fake interviews and data -- or "curb-stoning -- than they would in truly random surveys, said Matthew Warshaw, the Iraq director for D3. Curb-stoning surveyors might report the ages of many people to be 30 or 40, for example, rather than 32 or 38. This type of fabrication is called "data-heaping," Warshaw said, because once the data are transferred to spreadsheets, managers can easily see the heaps of faked numbers.
# Death certificates. The survey teams said they confirmed most deaths by examining government-issued death certificates, but they took no photographs of those certificates. "Confirmation of deaths through death certificates is a linchpin for their story," Spagat told NJ. "But they didn't record (or won't provide) information about these death certificates that would make them traceable."
Under pressure from critics, the authors did release a disk of the surveyors' collated data, including tables showing how often the survey teams said they requested to see, and saw, the death certificates. But those tables are suspicious, in part, because they show data-heaping, critics said. For example, the database reveals that 22 death certificates for victims of violence and 23 certificates for other deaths were declared by surveyors and households to be missing or lost. That similarity looks reasonable, but Spagat noticed that the 23 missing certificates for nonviolent deaths were distributed throughout eight of the 16 surveyed provinces, while all 22 missing certificates for violent deaths were inexplicably heaped in the single province of Nineveh. That means the surveyors reported zero missing or lost certificates for 180 violent deaths in 15 provinces outside Nineveh. The odds against such perfection are at least 10,000 to 1, Spagat told NJ. Also, surveyors recorded another 70 violent deaths and 13 nonviolent deaths without explaining the presence or absence of certificates in the database. In a subsequent MIT lecture, Burnham said that the surveyors sometimes forgot to ask for the certificates.
# Suspicious cluster. Lafta's team reported 24 car bomb deaths in early July, as well as one nonviolent death, in "Cluster 33" in Baghdad. The authors do not say where the cluster was, but the only major car bomb in the city during that period, according to Iraq Body Count's database, was in Sadr City. It was detonated in a marketplace on July 1, likely by Al Qaeda, and killed at least 60 people, according to press reports.
The authors should not have included the July data in their report because the survey was scheduled to end on June 30, according to Debarati Guha-Sapir, director of the World Health Organization's Collaborating Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at the University of Louvain in Belgium. Because of the study's methodology, those 24 deaths ultimately added 48,000 to the national death toll and tripled the authors' estimate for total car bomb deaths to 76,000. That figure is 15 times the 5,046 car bomb killings that Iraq Body Count recorded up to August 2006.
According to a data table reviewed by Spagat and Kane, the team recorded the violent deaths as taking place in early July and did not explain why they failed to see death certificates for any of the 24 victims. The surveyors did remember, however, to ask for the death certificate of the one person who had died peacefully in that cluster.
The Cluster 33 data is curious for other reasons as well. The 24 Iraqis who died violently were neatly divided among 18 houses -- 12 houses reported one death, and six houses reported two deaths, according to the authors' data. This means, Spagat said, that the survey team found a line of 40 households that neatly shared almost half of the deaths suffered when a marketplace bomb exploded among a crowd of people drawn from throughout the broader neighborhood.
The data also bolster Spagat's criticism that the surveyors selected too many clusters in places where bomb explosions and gunfights were most common.
Ideological Bias
Virtually everyone connected with the study has been an outspoken opponent of U.S. actions in Iraq. (So are several of the study's biggest critics, such as Iraq Body Count.) Whether this affected the authors' scientific judgments and led them to turn a blind eye to flaws is up for debate.
# Follow the money. Lancet II was commissioned and financed by Tirman, the executive director of the Center for International Studies at MIT. (His most recent book is 100 Ways America Is Screwing Up the World.) After Lancet I was published, Tirman commissioned Burnham to do the second study, and sent him $50,000. When asked where Tirman got the money, Burnham told NJ: "I have no idea."
In fact, the funding came from the Open Society Institute created by Soros, a top Democratic donor, and from three other foundations, according to Tirman. The money was channeled through Tirman's Persian Gulf Initiative. Soros's group gave $46,000, and the Samuel Rubin Foundation gave $5,000. An anonymous donor, and another donor whose identity he does not know, provided the balance, Tirman said. The Lancet II study cost about $100,000, according to Tirman, including about $45,000 for publicity and travel. That means that nearly half of the study's funding came from an outspoken billionaire who has repeatedly criticized the Iraq campaign and who spent $30 million trying to defeat Bush in 2004.
# Partisan considerations. Soros is not the only person associated with the Lancet studies who had one eye on the data and the other on the U.S. political calendar. In 2004, Roberts conceded that he opposed the Iraq invasion from the outset, and -- in a much more troubling admission -- said that he had e-mailed the first study to The Lancet on September 30, 2004, "under the condition that it come out before the election." Burnham admitted that he set the same condition for Lancet II. "We wanted to get the survey out before the election, if at all possible," he said.
"Les and Gil put themselves in position to be criticized on the basis of their views," Garfield concedes, before adding, "But you can have an opinion and still do good science." Perhaps, but the Lancet editor who agreed to rush their study into print, with an expedited peer-review process and without seeing the surveyors' original data, also makes no secret of his leftist politics. At a September 2006 rally in Manchester, England, Horton declared, "This axis of Anglo-American imperialism extends its influence through war and conflict, gathering power and wealth as it goes, so millions of people are left to die in poverty and disease." His speech can be viewed on YouTube.
# Mr. Roberts tries to go to Washington. Roberts, who opposed removing Saddam from power, is the most politically outspoken of the authors. He initiated the first Lancet study and repeatedly used its conclusions to criticize Bush. "I consider myself an advocate," Roberts told an interviewer in early 2007. "When you start working documenting events in war, the public health response -- the most important public health response -- is ending the war."
In 2006, he acted on this belief, seeking the Democratic nomination for New York's 24th Congressional District before dropping out in favor of the eventual winner, Democrat Michael Arcuri. Asked why he ran for office, Roberts told NJ: "It was a combination of Iraq and [Hurricane] Katrina that just put me over the top. I thought the country was going in the desperately wrong direction, particularly with regard to public health and science."
Politics At Work
Roberts was hardly the only American to lose confidence in Bush. The question is whether he and his team lost their objectivity as scientists as well. Unanimously, the authors insist that the answer is no.
Roberts concedes that the only certain way to collect information for a study of Iraqi war casualties would be through a full census, something he says is impossible in the midst of sectarian civil war. His study's method "has limitations," he told NJ. "It works less well when bombs are killing people in clusters -- and they are killing people in clusters in Iraq -- but it remains a fundamentally robust way of determining changes in mortality rates." Asked if he remains certain that Lafta's Iraqi teams truly collected the data they turned in, Roberts answered, "I'm just absolutely confident this data is not fabricated."
"Dr. Burnham and his colleagues are confident that the data presented in the 2004 and 2006 are accurate, and they fully stand by the conclusions of their research," according to a November 27 statement from the Bloomberg School of Public Health. "The findings of independent surveys of Iraqis conducted by the United Nations in March 2005, by the BBC in March 2007, and by the British polling firm ORB in September 2007 support the conclusions of the Hopkins mortality studies."
Critics say, however, that the other national reports cited in the Johns Hopkins statement, particularly the ORB poll, have methodological flaws and political overtones similar to those in the Lancet studies.
"Just stating, 'We have no biases of that type' isn't very convincing," says Oxford University's Johnson. "Using 'I am an expert' arguments sounds to me like 'Trust me, I am a doctor.' " Johnson and two of his colleagues have called on the scientific community to conduct an in-depth re-evaluation of both Lancet studies. "It's almost a crime to let it go unchallenged," Johnson said.
Even Garfield, a co-author of the first Lancet article, is backing away from his previous defense of his fellow authors. In December, Garfield told National Journal that he guesses that 250,000 Iraqis had died by late 2007. That total requires an underlying casualty rate only one-quarter of that offered by Lancet II.
The authors -- Lafta excepted -- have been willing to engage their critics in debate, returning journalists' calls and, for the most part, avoiding ad hominem arguments. Yet, sometimes their defenses raise new questions. Burnham says, for instance, that Lafta offered to take reporters to visit some of the neighborhoods used in the clusters, although he declined to say whether the reporters would be allowed to visit the surveyed households or to pick the clusters to see.
Roberts and his defenders emphasize that when their cluster method produced shockingly high mortality rates in the Congo, no one questioned them -- not seeming to understand that journalists looking at the Iraq study are now indeed wondering if the Congo results are valid.
Roberts, when asked if he timed the release of his Lancet studies to hurt the Republicans on Election Day, contends that his biggest concern was ensuring the safety of his researchers. "If this study was finished in September and not published until after the November elections -- and it was perceived that we were sitting on the results -- my Iraqi colleagues would have been killed," he told National Journal. Even if true, this assertion undermines his expressions of confidence in the integrity and skill of the Iraqi researchers. How can their data be trusted if their very lives depended on the results?
No matter whether a latent desire to feed the American public's opposition to the war might have shaped these studies, another audience was paying close attention: jihadists who used this research as a justification for killing Americans. Roberts already believed that jihadi attacks were, in part, driven by the international image of the United States. "The greatest threat to U.S. national security [is] the image that the United States is a violator of international laws and order and that there is no means other than violence to curb it," Roberts wrote in a July 2005 article for Tirman's center. When NJ asked Roberts about the risk that his estimate would incite more violence, his confidence seemed to waver for the only time during the interview. "This area of study is a minefield," he said. "The people you are talking about are the same kind of people who deny the Holocaust." Does it give him qualms that some of those people use his study to recruit suicide bombers? "It does," he replied after a pause. "My guess is that I've provided data that can be narrowly cited to incite hatred. On the other hand, I think it's worse to have our leaders downplaying the level of violence."
Burnham also paused when asked whether Iraqi factions manipulated him and his colleagues and then replied, "We're reasonably confident that we were not manipulated."
Professional Responsibilities
Officials at Iraq Body Count strongly opposed the Iraq war yet issued a detailed critique of the Lancet II study. Researchers wading into a field that is this fraught with danger have a responsibility not to be reckless with statistics, the group said. The numbers claimed by the Lancet study would, under the normal ratios of warfare, result in more than a million Iraqis wounded seriously enough to require medical treatment, according to this critique. Yet official sources in Iraq have not reported any such phenomenon. An Iraq Body Count analysis showed that the Lancet II numbers would have meant that 1,000 Iraqis were dying every day during the first half of 2006, "with less than a tenth of them being noticed by any public surveillance mechanisms." The February 2006 bombing of the Golden Mosque is widely credited with plunging Iraq into civil war, yet the Lancet II report posits the equivalent of five to 10 bombings of this magnitude in Iraq every day for three years.
"In the light of such extreme and improbable implications," the Iraq Body Count report stated, "a rational alternative conclusion to be considered is that the authors have drawn conclusions from unrepresentative data."
Against these criticisms, the authors maintain that they were using methods of study unfamiliar to human-rights groups and that the scientific community widely accepted the Lancet studies. "There have been 56 studies using this retrospective household survey method," Garfield said. "The estimation of crude mortality in a population does work.... It doesn't mean you can't do it wrong. It is the best method we have. The question is, 'Did they do it right?' "
When it comes to the question of peer review, the study's defenders sometimes seem to want it both ways. On the one hand, Roberts talks about the need "to step beyond peer review." Yet the authors insist that their study was peer-reviewed extensively (if rapidly, in order to be published before the election). The authors also maintain that one of the reasons they went to The Lancet with these studies is its quick turnaround time.
Surprisingly, not one of the peer reviewers seems to have thought to ask a basic question: Are the data in the two studies even true? The possibility of fakery, editor Horton told NJ, "did not come up in peer review." Medical journals can't afford to repeat every scientific study, he said, because "if for every paper we published we had to think, 'Is this fraud?' ... honestly, we would fold tomorrow."
In Belgium, Guha-Sapir's team is completing a paper outlining numerous mathematical and procedural errors in the Lancet II article, and its corrections will likely lower the estimate of dead Iraqis to 450,000, even without consideration of possible fraud during the surveying, a source said.
Perhaps medical journals, like respected news organizations, will learn that they have to factor the possibility of wartime fraud into their fact-checking. Horton knows the peacetime risks only too well: In a Lancet article in October 2005, exactly halfway between the two Iraq mortality studies, a Norwegian physician named Jon Sudbo wrote that a review of 454 patients showed that such common painkillers as ibuprofen and naproxen reduced smokers' risk of contracting oral cancer while increasing their risk for heart disease; it later turned out that Sudbo had faked his research.
Today, the journal's editor tacitly concedes discomfort with the Iraqi death estimates. "Anything [the authors] can do to strengthen the credibility of the Lancet paper," Horton told NJ, "would be very welcome." If clear evidence of misconduct is presented to The Lancet, "we would be happy to go ask the authors and the institution for an official inquiry, and we would then abide by the conclusion of that inquiry."
Give it up pegbot, Bush isn't running in 2008, you're gonna need to reprogram
Did Gore have Clinton on the campaign trail w/ him in 2000???
I don't think she's dead either- just couldn't resist
I just think the result is a personal repudiation. She's had a huge machine behind her and still failed. She has done a terrible job of reading the political tea leaves and has positioned herself based on (questionable) experience when people are really clamoring for change
I'm hoping for Thompson to gain some traction
Ding dong the witch is dead, the wicked witch is dead
Substitute African American for southerner and you'd be screaming your bigoted arrogant intolerant head off.
Typical liberal hypocrisy
Where Have All The Dead Americans Gone?
January 3, 2008: U.S. forces suffered 107 casualties (dead and wounded) for the month of December in Iraq. Twelve months previously (December, 2006), there were 817. In between there was a bloody campaign, called "the surge," which caused most of the 6,801 casualties American troops suffered that year. In 2006 there were 7,221 casualties.
The U.S. always put a premium on keeping American casualties down. This led to tactics, equipment and weapons designed to get the job done, with the fewest American dead and wounded. As a result, the casualty rate in Iraq was less than half what it was in Vietnam. There was also an emphasis on keeping civilian casualties down. It was difficult for most Americans to realize this, given the media's fixation on real or imagined atrocities. In Iraq, over 90 percent of civilian casualties were inflicted by other Iraqis. The military encouraged the media to not cover the many procedures ("rules of engagement" or ROE) U.S. troops follow to avoid civilian losses. This was because the enemy would exploit those ROEs as much as possible.
In hindsight, U.S. troops will get credit for keeping their own casualties down to historically low levels (compared to any other 20th century conflict). Professional soldiers have already recognized this feat, and are studying American techniques intensively. Less well appreciated are the efforts the Americans made to keep civilian losses down. But foreign military experts are coming to appreciate that this aspect of the war paid long term benefits. Iraqis saw, day by day, the efforts by American troops to avoid hurting civilians. Initially, Iraqis saw that as an American weakness, but in the long run they recognized it as a sensibility rarely seen in the Middle East. This will have long term consequences for relations between the United States and Iraq.
botbotbotbotbotbot
Iraq casualty numbers
US deaths in Iraq are at the lowest 3 month total ever (hat tip: Free Republic). The three month total for October, November and December 2007 is 93. It's also the first time a 3 month total has dropped below 3 digits. The table is given after the "Read More".
3 Month Total
Mar-03 65 N/A
Apr-03 73 N/A
May 37 175
June 30 140
July 47 114
August 35 112
September 30 112
October 43 108
November 82 155
December 40 165
Jan-04 47 169
February 19 106
March 52 118
April 135 206
May 80 267
June 42 257
July 54 176
August 66 162
September 81 201
October 63 210
November 137 281
December 72 272
Jan-05 107 316
February 58 237
March 36 201
April 52 146
May 79 167
June 77 208
July 54 210
August 84 215
September 48 186
October 96 228
November 83 227
December 66 245
Jan-06 61 210
February 53 180
March 30 144
April 74 157
May 69 173
June 59 202
July 42 170
August 65 166
September 70 177
October 100 235
November 63 233
December 105 268
Jan-07 82 250
February 81 268
March 75 238
April 102 258
May 121 298
June 98 321
July 75 294
August 77 250
September 62 214
October 37 176
November 35 134
December 21 93
Biden highlights Clinton Pakistan gaffe
Posted: 12:50 PM ET
Biden got tough on Clinton over her recent comments on Pakistan.
Biden got tough on Clinton over her recent comments on Pakistan.
(CNN) — Democrat Joe Biden suggested Tuesday that presidential rival Hillary Clinton doesn't adequately understand recent events in Pakistan.
The Delaware senator was responding to news that Clinton suggested in two recent interviews that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is up for reelection this month.
Musharraf was actually reelected in October, and the upcoming Pakistani elections are parliamentary, not presidential.
"We have a number of candidates who are well-intentioned but don't understand Pakistan," Biden said at a campaign event Tuesday. "One of the leading candidates — God love her."
IT wouldn't, and if you were capable of any type of analytical thought, you would remember that by the end of his term the country was in recession
YOu think the dot com bubble was going to go on forever??
If so, I've got some tulips I'd like to sell to you
What fueled that pretty graph?? Capital gains on the bubble profits
Clown
How to break the oil cartel
http://politicscentral.com/2008/01/02/the_glenn_helen_show_bob_zubri.php
botbotbotbotbotbot
It lead to the recession at the end of his term due to the bursting of the dot com bubble
Most of that surplus was due to increased tax revenues due to capital gains.
The bubble was funded by liquidity pumped by the Fed and was, of course, unsustainable
In fact, Musharraf was reelected to the presidency in October. The upcoming elections are for parliament, and while Musharraf's party will be facing off against opposition parties, the president himself is not a candidate.
"He will NOT be on the ballot," said a Pakistan scholar at Columbia University, Philip Oldenburg, in an e-mail. "These are parliamentary elections, where the contests are for a seat in the national assembly.
The prime ministerial candidate typically fights for victory in a local constituency, as well as lead[ing] the party in a national campaign."
A spokesman for Clinton, Howard Wolfson, said Clinton was referring to Musharraf's party, not the president himself.
And Oldenburg said that "how well the PML-Q, the so-called 'King's Party,' does would in effect be a referendum on Musharraf."
But Clinton's words appear unambiguously to describe Musharraf himself as a candidate.
"If President Musharraf wishes to stand for election, then he should abide by the same rules that every other candidate will have to follow," she told CNN's Wolf Blitzer (.pdf) Dec. 28.
"He could be the only person on the ballot. I don't think that's a real election," she told ABC's George Stephanopolous December 30.
Her error was first noted by a conservative American commentator, Thomas Houlahan.
Pegbot, wrong.....AGAIN
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0108/Clinton_errs_on_Pakistan_.html
A CLINTON HOWLER ON PAKISTAN:
Senator Hillary Clinton was praised in the wake of the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto for demonstrating her command of the players and the issues at stake in Pakistan, even as another candidate, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, was criticized for stumbling over details.
But in two confident television appearances, on CNN and ABC, Clinton made an elementary error about Pakistani politics: She described President Pervez Musharraf as a "candidate" who would be "on the ballot."
In fact, Musharraf was re-elected to the presidency in October.
Ouch.
Same to you and your family, Gidgie
Classic Pegbot- you've been given the answer 2 times now- just cause you don't like it doesn't mean it doesn't exist
New year, same Pegbot
Why in the world would he need an EXCUSE for the surge- something that has clearly been of great benefit?????????
THe plan was to bring stability to the streets that would allow the political process to make progress.
I guess you didn't read this psot that was directed towards you:
"Iraq - National Reconciliation: Slowly, but surely
Posted by: McQ
Ed Morrissey was on a teleconference with Rep. Michele Bachmann who relayed the following news:
[T]he National Assembly passed a pension bill, a critical step in reconciliation. That did not get much mention in the American media, but the Sunnis now have government pensions denied them after the fall of Saddam, which should alleviate much of the hostility.
Another step in the national reconciliation process is underway as well:
The Iraqi cabinet approved a draft law on Wednesday that will offer a general pardon to thousands of prisoners in U.S. military and Iraqi custody, a government spokesman said.
"The cabinet has passed the general pardon law, which will define who is eligible to be freed from all prisons, both Iraqi and American," spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh told Reuters.
The law still needs to be approved by parliament.
Iraq's national security adviser, Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, said earlier this month that the draft law was aimed at boosting reconciliation between majority Shi'ite and Sunni Arab Muslims, locked in a cycle of violence.
In addition, while the oil revenue law hasn't yet been passed, oil revenue is being shared among the various factions within Iraq. It is, in fact, directly responsible for much of the economic renewal that is happening there as well as many of the much needed infrastructure repairs.
Speaking of progress, another outspoken critic is seeing changes for the better in Iraq:
U.S. Rep. Nancy Boyda, D-Kan., who has been a vocal critic of President Bush's policy in the war in Iraq, on Monday visited troops in Iraq and said the situation appears to be improving.
"It's headed in a much better direction but everything is very tentative," Boyda said after receiving briefings from war commander Army Gen. David Petraeus, U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and others.
She said that violence has decreased significantly in the region but that U.S. military and civilian officials don't want to raise hopes yet.
"What is happening on the ground tactically is very good, and everyone is hopeful that it will continue, but no one is taking anything for granted and they don't want to overstate things," she said.
No, you don't want to overstate things yet, but progress has become so obvious now, that even the critics can't ignore it or deny it any longer ... well, except in our comment section.
"
Even Congress people opposed to the war are seeing political progress, but Peg just bots on
DIVERSITY SHUNNED
NYT opinion editor Andy Rosenthal’s hiring of conservative Bill Kristol causes leftoid anger:
Rosenthal told Politico shortly after the official announcement Saturday that he fails to understand “this weird fear of opposing views.”
“The idea that The New York Times is giving voice to a guy who is a serious, respected conservative intellectual — and somehow that’s a bad thing,” Rosenthal added. “How intolerant is that?”
Sounds like he’s just learned something about his readers.
So, you're frothing over the prospect of Paul possibly getting 10% of the vote???
LOL
Yep, after the surge's effect started to show. Thank you.
What'll you say when political progress is made- " sure they've made political progress, but it had nothing to do with the surge- and it wasn't worth the cost.
The libs are experts at rationalizing and denying ( except for the pegbot- she just repeats what she's programmed to )
2007 event of the year - The Surge
Posted by: McQ
Today the NY Times, via AP reports:
The second half of 2007 saw violence drop dramatically in Iraq, but the progress came at a high price: The year was the deadliest for the U.S. military since the 2003 invasion, with 899 troops killed.
Actually, that's misleading. The death toll was the highest prior to the major operation which has seen "violence drop dramatically". It was the result of the failed strategy which was being followed during those first months of the year. The last report I heard for this month was 19 US deaths, one of the lowest casualty figures for any month in years. It doesn't, however, surprise me that the Times and AP choose to characterize the situation in Iraq as they have.
Thinking back about the surge and the decision to change the strategy from counter-terrorism to counter-insurgency (COIN), I remember not being sure it was such a good idea. That's because I knew COIN would be much more "labor" intensive than counter-terrorism and would depend on an untried and not particularly reliable (at the time) ISF.
But I read the doctrine and did the math as laid out in the doctrine and figured out that if the Iraqis committed the forces they promised and we didn't try to do everything at once, it might just work.
I'd also add, as the surge began, it became obvious that the new leadership, i.e. GEN David Petraeus and LTG Ray Odierno, were also a much needed change.
Two other events coincided with the decision to change the military strategy that have helped the surge succeed as well. As most who study military history will tell you, luck is as much a part of the fight as anything. However, while it may present itself, it is up to the warrior as to whether he capitalizes on his luck or misses an opportunity.
As we were changing our mission, rumblings were coming out of Iraq, by independent reporters such as Michael Yon, that a movement, known as the "awakening" was taking place. It began in Anbar province, probably one of the most violent places in Iraq and was driven by a Sunni sheik. Essentially, the Iraqis there had grown tired of al Qaeda and the violence they had brought to the area. They had a choice to make - side with the Americans or continue to suffer under al Qaeda's vicious rule. They chose the Americans, and thus, former enemies allied with US forces to drive al Qaeda off. And while it was a shaky alliance at the time, it held long enough for progress - dramatic progress - to be made.
That decision was part of what I would characterize as "luck". However, the commanders there didn't turn their noses up at the locals who proposed the alliance. Instead they met with them, showed them the proper respect and helped them implement a program - Concerned Local Citizens - which gave them a hand in their own security and had them work hand-in-hand with both the US military and the ISF.
The CLC program has grown tremendously in the last 6 months to where there are about 70,000 CLCs in most of Iraq's provinces. They're local people manning check points with a knowledge of who does or doesn't belong there. Actionable intelligence has grown exponentially, and al Qaeda has found it has few if any safe-havens anymore. All the result of American commanders welcoming local help instead of turning it away. I remember Michael Yon saying that when the Iraqis figured out that we wanted to go home as badly as they wanted us to go home, suddenly the light went on and the alliance was made. Obviously they understand that helping stop the violence and drive al Qaeda out is the quickest way to have the Americans leave.
That brings me to another point that is rarely mentioned. Insurgencies attempt to dishearten and eventually drive conventional forces out of an area or a nation. They want to make the inconclusive battle too painful for a conventional force and its supporters to sustain. While it can't ever defeat the conventional force on the battlefield, it can, if persistent enough, defeat its will to continue the fight. And, early this year, that's exactly where we were as a nation - deciding if it was worth it to continue on in a fight that seemed to be getting worse, more violent and more deadly with every passing month.
But the other side of the Anbar Awakening, which few recognize, was the fact that it signaled the tipping point for the Iraqi people. While it began first in Anbar, it quickly spread in various forms, to most of the rest of Iraq. There's a very good reason for that - the Iraqis had grown very tired of the violence, but more importantly, they'd figured out we weren't going to quit. So they had to make a choice. And the choice, once they weighed the pros and cons, ended up to be fairly obvious to them. The fact that we wouldn't and didn't quit was critical to forcing that decision.
Last, but certainly not least, and another part of "luck" was the al Sadr pledge to stand down his militias and work for a political solution. Of course what is commonly known as the "Special Groups", has continued its attacks on US and ISF forces (these are the rogue and criminal elements which ignored al Sadr's order and have been disavowed by his organization). Sadr's order is another part of the success of the surge.
But there is no denying now that the time and space is being provided for the central government, which has been mostly AWOL from the process of reconciliation, to address those problems of reconciliation on a national level.
GEN Petreaus, ever the realist, has said that all of this is "reversable". And that's obviously true. However, the more days of peace the average Iraqi enjoys (along with increased electricity and a return to normalcy) the less likely they are to return to the violence that was so rampant earlier this year. The bottom-up reconciliation and the surge are the principle vehicles of this new (and relative) peace. The longer it holds together and progress is seen, the less likely violence will return. My guess is the Iraqis will be loath to allow the violence of the past again gain a foothold in their nation and will do what is necessary to prevent that.
I look for 2008 to provide dramatic positive change in Iraq as I think, finally, the central government will begin to do what it must to make Iraq a peaceful and thriving nation again. Unfortunately we're going to lose more soldiers as that process continues, because while we have the enemy on the run, he isn't toothless and will at times demonstrate that violently. However, if the trend we see now continues, I'll make a bold prediction that at the end of 2008, we'll have begun a withdrawal of our troops which will, when complete, bring us down to about 10 combat brigades (which is very easily sustainable indefinitely) and 75,000 troops.
Sadly, the pegbot continues with her slanted views of reality
US Tracks Lowest Monthly Fatalities Since War Began
You'd have to go back to February 2004 to find a month with comparable numbers.
With 24 hours remaining...
The US military is on track to see the lowest number of monthly fatalities in Iraq since the war began in March, 2003.
In February 2004 the US lost 20 soldiers in the 29 day period.
This month the US has lost 21 soldiers in the 31 day period.
The Bush Surge continues to show amazing results.
This follows the news yesterday that 75% of the Al-Qaeda network has been eliminated in Iraq.
posted by Gateway Pundit at 12/30/2007 06:49:00 PM Trackback
The point is, duh, that our presence there is welcome now- countering z's ridiculous claim that leaving every country where we currently have troops would placate the islamofascists.
Apparently in his warped world, they are acting rationally- despite their habit of female circumcision and honor killings- and the US is totally at fault for all the worlds ills
And in how many of those countries is our military presence uninvited?
Germany?? South Korea??
Get a clue
Once we are out of Iraq, AlQueda will no longer have a reason to fight us..........
I guess you just choose to ignore the terrorist activities against the us dating back 30 years
What exactly is AQ's "business"
Iraq: 11 Special Groups operatives killed in Al Kut
By Bill RoggioDecember 27, 2007 4:22 PM
US and Iraq forces continue to target the Iranian-backed Special Groups in southern and central Iraq. The latest raid in Al Kut in Wasit province resulted in 11 Special Groups fighters killed, Multinational Forces Iraq reported. Al Kut, a logistical hub for the Special Groups and center of power for Muqtada al Sadr's Mahdi Army, has seen an uptick in activity over the past two weeks.
Today's raid in Al Kut targeted "a Special Groups criminal element member reportedly responsible for attacks against Coalition forces and supporters of Coalition forces" who "was also reportedly an associate of criminal element leaders involved in attacks on Coalition forces."
Coalition Special Forces teams, likely the hunter-killer teams of Task Force 88, took fire as they approached the objective, "returned fire, and called for supporting aircraft to engage." Multinational Forces Iraq estimated 11 Special Groups fighters were killed in the strike.
The Iraqi Army has been reported to have moved into Al Kut in force, according to Voices of Iraq. Muqtada al Sadr's office in Al Kut stated US forces fought the Mahdi Army in the city, and four Mahdi fighters were killed and three wounded.
The incident highlights the fractured nature of the Mahdi Army, and the interconnectedness of Mahdi Army forces and Iran's Qods Force that supports Sadr and elements of his Mahdi Army. The Special Groups are made up of elements of Sadr's Mahdi Army, which trains, arms, and funds the attacks inside Iraq. Sadr called for a cease-fire after fighting in Najaf resulted in more than 50 dead during a religious festival.
Multinational Forces Iraq has repeatedly offered Sadr and his Mahdi Army an outlet to end the fighting and joint the political process. In the Multinational Forces Iraq press release on the incident, Major Winfield Danielson pointed to Sadr's cease-fire while warning the "criminal elements" that they would be pursued. "We commend all those who honor al-Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr’s ceasefire pledge," said Danielson. "Significant progress has been made in the fight for a secure and stable Iraq, but dangerous criminal elements still exist." A similar warning follows every press release where Special Groups forces are targeted.
Flash Presentation on the Ramazan Corps and the Iranian Ratlines into Iraq. Click the map to view. A Flash Player is required to view, click to download.
Al Kut is known to be a strategic distribution hub for the Special Groups supply lines from Iran into Iraq. Weapons, such as the deadly explosively formed penetrator land mines, rockets, and mortars are stored by the Special Groups in Al Kut and other cities, to be pushed forward to tactical depots to be used in attacks in Baghdad and the Shia South.
US and Iraqi forces clearly have been targeting the Special Groups networks in Al Kut for the past two weeks. Today's engagement was the fourth such raid since December 18. On that date, elements of the 8th Iraqi Army Division captured an improvised explosive device cell leader during a raid in the city. "The suspect, reported to be a leader within the Office of the Martyr Sadr in An Nasiriyah, is allegedly linked to illegal armed groups in the area and conducts and facilitates IED attacks specifically targeting Iraqi Security Forces and Coalition Forces throughout Wasit Province," Multinational Forces Iraq reported in a press release.
Coalition forces captured three Special Groups fighters during an operation in Al Kut on December 23. The target of the raid was a "senior-level Special Groups criminal element leader" who planned explosively formed penetrator attacks in Wasit province, as well as a leader of a death squad. It is unknown if the Special Groups leader was captured in the raid.
The next day, Coalition forces killed two Special Groups operatives and captured two during a raid in Al Kut. Coalition forces sought to capture a "Special Groups leader responsible for attacks against Coalition forces and its supporters" who "received training on urban combat tactics and explosives, including Explosively Formed Penetrators (EFP) and Improvised Explosive Devices (IED)."
Stick It In Their Earmarks
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, December 27, 2007 4:20 PM PT
Spending: President Bush has proved his courage on Iraq, on SCHIP, and on refusing to accept a tax hike to fix the AMT. His is the sort of will that could squash pork-barrel earmarks — in the name of the Constitution.
Related Topics: Budget & Tax Policy
The late Leo "The Lip" Durocher, who managed the Dodgers, Giants and Cubs and was famous for warning that "nice guys finish last," used to tell his pitchers from the dugout to "stick it in his ear!" The onetime major league club owner in the White House now has an opportunity to stop playing nice and stick into the ears of members of Congress from both parties the bacon they think they'll be bringing home.
When the president signed the omnibus appropriations bill on Wednesday, he made a point of complaining that he was "disappointed in the way the Congress compiled this legislation, including abandoning the goal I set early this year to reduce the number and cost of earmarks by half."
Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle slipped into the bill close to 10,000 of the so-called earmarks (provisions to spend budget authorizations on pet projects, typically in the earmark author's home state or district). They totaled more than $10 billion.
"These projects are not funded through a merit-based process and provide a vehicle for wasteful government spending," the president pointed out, adding that "this legislation contains certain provisions similar to those found in prior appropriations bills passed by the Congress that might be construed to be inconsistent with my constitutional responsibilities."
The Congressional Research Service issued a report last week confirming that earmarks not included in the actual bill but written into accompanying reports — which is most of them — do not have force of law and can therefore be disregarded by the president.
That's a position the Supreme Court could be expected to support. Chief Justice John Roberts and fellow Bush appointee Justice Samuel Alito may not be as purely "textualist" as Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, but they usually seem to agree with Scalia's common-sense declaration that it's "the law that governs, not the intent of the lawgiver."
(One of the most notorious practices of left-leaning activist judges is to find lawmakers' speeches and other artifacts of "legislative history" that reveal the "true intent" of laws, then use that as the excuse for misinterpreting and distorting what the laws themselves actually say.)
If the president decided to get tough and issue an executive order instructing all agencies not to be guided by earmarks not actually included in the appropriations legislation, he would have on his side the Presentment Clause in Article 1 of the Constitution, which describes how a bill becomes law.
He would also make a few people mad, such as some Charleston, W.Va., residents who wouldn't be getting a $2.4 million retractable roof for the stands at their local park — courtesy of the hundreds of millions of taxpayers who will never see or use that park.
The multimillion-dollar roof is just a smidgen of the $430 million in earmarks dropped into the bill by longtime pork king Sen. Robert Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee.
But don't just blame Democrats. This out-of-control, unaccountable waste and abuse of the citizens' hard-earned money is a bipartisan disgrace. Byrd's Republican counterpart on the spending panel, Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, out-oinked even Byrd, with $774 million in earmarks. So did Alaska's Sen. Ted Stevens, infamous for the taxpayer-funded Bridge To Nowhere and responsible for $502 million in earmarks this time around.
Not only would the president have the Constitution on his side if he declared war on the earmark racket; he would have the vast majority of Americans with him. Most people are tired of finding out after the fact that they've paid for billions of dollars in projects that should have been locally financed — or maybe not built at all — due to the 11th-hour stratagems.
IBD
The Other Iraq Surge
New York Sun Editorial
December 27, 2007
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
It's no front-page news that Iraq is a dangerous place. But a capital magnet? The presses have stopped for less. According to the not-quite-closed record book for 2007, Iraqi sovereign bonds, the Iraqi currency, and the Iraqi stock market have each logged astounding, not to mention politically provocative, gains.
Not many would have predicted that Iraq's long-dated, dollar-denominated debt would have proven a safe haven during a worldwide credit crisis. But the 5.8s of 2038 did just that. Since the subprime mortgage meltdown began in August, these evidences of indebtedness of the government in Baghdad have gained no less than 18.3%. With a salute to General Petraeus and the doughty GIs under his command, one might say they surged.
So has the dinar, up 10% against the dollar this year. Now the dollar, admittedly, is no monetary fortress, and the dinar is one of the few Middle Eastern currencies left free by its issuing government to float in value (the exchange rates of most of the region's scrip are lashed to the dollar). The price of a barrel of oil, of which Iraq is a leading producer, has had a pretty good year itself. Still, during the 2007 New Year prediction season, how many guessed that the dinar would outperform the communist Chinese renminbi (up 6.3%) or the Russian ruble (up 6.8%)? The name of no such monetary prophet jumps to mind.
As for the Iraqi stock market, it is as much a hope as an institution. Trading is spotty, financial information is scarce, and the state-of-the-art technology is a white board. Yet the prices scrawled in marking pen have been in a strong uptrend. At last report, they were ahead by 36.8% on the year. For the plucky foreigner who got in at the lows, the total return — stock-price gain augmented by currency appreciation — would have topped 50%.
Markets give, and markets take away. The financial future is forever a closed book. Yet, to quote a Wall Street proverb that we first read in Grant's Interest Rate Observer, which has been ahead of other publications in respect of what might be called the other Iraq surge, "Money may be mis-informed, but it is never insincere." Something bullish would appear to be afoot in a most improbable place.
LOL, the Pegbot needs to be reprogrammed yet again:
"Iraq - National Reconciliation: Slowly, but surely
Posted by: McQ
Ed Morrissey was on a teleconference with Rep. Michele Bachmann who relayed the following news:
[T]he National Assembly passed a pension bill, a critical step in reconciliation. That did not get much mention in the American media, but the Sunnis now have government pensions denied them after the fall of Saddam, which should alleviate much of the hostility.
Another step in the national reconciliation process is underway as well:
The Iraqi cabinet approved a draft law on Wednesday that will offer a general pardon to thousands of prisoners in U.S. military and Iraqi custody, a government spokesman said.
"The cabinet has passed the general pardon law, which will define who is eligible to be freed from all prisons, both Iraqi and American," spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh told Reuters.
The law still needs to be approved by parliament.
Iraq's national security adviser, Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, said earlier this month that the draft law was aimed at boosting reconciliation between majority Shi'ite and Sunni Arab Muslims, locked in a cycle of violence.
In addition, while the oil revenue law hasn't yet been passed, oil revenue is being shared among the various factions within Iraq. It is, in fact, directly responsible for much of the economic renewal that is happening there as well as many of the much needed infrastructure repairs.
Speaking of progress, another outspoken critic is seeing changes for the better in Iraq:
U.S. Rep. Nancy Boyda, D-Kan., who has been a vocal critic of President Bush's policy in the war in Iraq, on Monday visited troops in Iraq and said the situation appears to be improving.
"It's headed in a much better direction but everything is very tentative," Boyda said after receiving briefings from war commander Army Gen. David Petraeus, U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and others.
She said that violence has decreased significantly in the region but that U.S. military and civilian officials don't want to raise hopes yet.
"What is happening on the ground tactically is very good, and everyone is hopeful that it will continue, but no one is taking anything for granted and they don't want to overstate things," she said.
No, you don't want to overstate things yet, but progress has become so obvious now, that even the critics can't ignore it or deny it any longer ... well, except in our comment section.
"
Yep, I really noticed a big change in Aq when we removed our troops from Saudi Arabia, didn't you??
DO you consider this admirable???
"US must stop provoking Al-Qaida, says lawmaker
24 Dec 2007, 1001 hrs IST,PTI
Print Save EMail Write to Editor
WASHINGTON: A maverick Republican contender for the 2008 presidential polls has argued that the US must stop provoking Al-Qaida if Americans are not to be attacked and killed and that Washington's close ties with Israel and Pakistan are annoying the terrorist outfit.
"Read what Osama bin Laden said. We had a base in Saudi Arabia that was an affront to their religion, that was blasphemy, as far as they were concerned," Texas Congressman Ron Paul said.
He also said the US was bombing Iraq for 10 years. "We've interfered in Iran since 1953. Our CIA has been involved in the overthrow of their governments. We're, right now, in the process of overthrowing that nation," Paul said.
"We side more with Israel and Pakistan, and they get annoyed with this."
Paul, who has surprised many in the Republican Party and outside for his ability to collect campaign contributions was asked on a press meet whether the Al-Qaida would leave America alone if the US did not have troops in the Middle East.
"Not immediately, because they'd have to believe us. But what would happen is the incentive for Osama bin Laden to recruit suicide terrorists would disappear. Once we left Lebanon in the early 1980s, the French and the Americans and Israelis left Lebanon, suicide terrorism virtually stopped.
"So we have to understand that. We have to understand how we would react if some country did to us exactly what we do to them. And then we might have a better understanding of their motivation, why somebody would join the Al-Qaida," he said.
"...Why produce the incentive for these violent, vicious thugs (of Al-Qaida) to want to come here and kill us?"
"
What an assclown
Stop offending AQ????????
An Open Letter To President Bush: End the Era of Earmarks
December 21, 2007 10:46 AM
Porkbusters is proud to be a signatory to the open letter to President Bush below. If your organization or publication would like to be listed as supporting this effort, please email bear -at- truthlaidbear -dot- com.
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Mr. President:
This past week, Congress passed an omnibus spending bill that will soon be presented for your signature. While it is consistent with the total budget targets your administration has set, the 3,417 pages of the bill and associated reports are bloated by more than 9,000 earmarks which were subjected to little or no review during the scant 24 hours between the publishing of the bill text and the House voting to pass it. When combined with the more than 2,000 earmarks in the Defense Appropriations Bill this Congress has churned out over 11,000 earmarks this year. The vast majority of these earmarks do not even appear in the legislative text, but rather are buried in the committee reports that accompany the bill, further removing them from proper review and scrutiny. While the total number of earmarks is down compared to record highs and there is increased transparency, there are still far too many to be effectively vetted.
The rushed way in which Congress passed the omnibus - one of the largest pieces of legislation ever considered - made a mockery of our legislative process, and Congress itself bears the responsibility and shame for that. But you have the power to send a message both to Congress and the American people that the waste and corrupting influence of earmarks will not be tolerated. A December 18 legal analysis by the Congressional Research Service concluded that "because the language of committee reports do not meet the procedural requirements of Article I of the Constitution -- specifically, bicameralism and presentment - they are not laws and, therefore, are not legally binding on executive agencies... Given both the implied legal and constitutional authority as well as the long-standing accepted process of Presidents, it appears that a President can, if he so chooses, issue an executive order with respect to earmarks contained solely in committee reports and not in any way incorporated into the legislative text."
On December 20, you stated that you were "instructing the budget director to review options for dealing with the wasteful spending in the omnibus bill." We applaud you for this leadership, and ask that you follow through by issuing an executive order formally directing all Federal agencies to ignore non-legislative earmarks tucked into committee reports and statements of managers. Such an action is within your Constitutional powers, and would strike a blow for fiscal responsibility now while setting a valuable precedent for the future.
Tell Congress and the American public that the era of earmarks is over, and that the Congressional "favor factory" which mints earmarks is closed. The American taxpayer will applaud such an action, as will the many honest legislators in Congress who are trying to fight the broken and corrupt appropriations machine. We hope that you embrace this opportunity, and thank you for your leadership on this issue.
Sincerely,
Alabama Policy Institute
American Conservative Union
American Values
Americans for Prosperity
Americans for Tax Reform
Calvert Institute for Policy Research
Citizens Against Government Waste
Club for Growth
Commonwealth Foundation
Eagle Forum
Evergreen Freedom Foundation
Family Research Council
Freedom Works
Illinois Policy Institute
Larry Kudlow, Kudlow & Company, LLC
The National Tax Limitation Committee
National Taxpayers Union
Porkbusters.org
The GOP and Earmarks
December 24, 2007; Page A10
There's been quite a fuss over our Thursday editorial, "The End of Earmarks?", which recommended a way that President Bush could instruct federal agencies not to fund these special-interest projects sponsored by Members of Congress. No word yet about Senators leaping in protest from the Capitol Dome, but give it time.
Mr. Bush picked up the theme in his Thursday press conference by criticizing Congress for dropping 9,800 earmarks into its last-minute "omnibus" spending bill -- 11,900 if you include earmarks in the previously passed defense bill. "Congressional leaders ran in the last election on a promise that they would curb earmarks," Mr. Bush said. "And they made some progress and there's more transparency in the process, but they have not made enough progress." He added that he has asked his budget director, Jim Nussle, "to review options for dealing with the wasteful spending in the omnibus bill."
That's promising, and we're told there's a debate in the White House over what to do. Our suggestion is that Mr. Bush instruct his cabinet not to spend money on earmarks that aren't specifically mentioned in the language of the spending bill. Most are listed in accompanying Appropriations Committee reports that lack the force of law. The point of this Congressional ruse, in part, is to let Members "air-drop" earmarks at the last minute and thus escape scrutiny by other Members who might try to expose their "Bridges to Nowhere" on the House or Senate floor. Mr. Bush assailed this habit in this year's State of the Union address, and the Members cheered. So why not force Congress to live up to its applause?
Some in the White House fear that such a move would sour relations with Congress, including GOP leaders who love their earmarks as much as Democrats do. We hear that senior Republicans, especially in the Senate, have told the White House that if Mr. Bush refuses to fund these earmarks, he will be courting retribution. There's a reason no Members will make this threat in public, however. They know how unpopular earmarking is with the voting public.
Meanwhile, 19 taxpayer groups and individuals have written an open letter to Mr. Bush picking up on our proposal. The letter asks the President to issue "an executive order formally directing all Federal agencies to ignore non-legislative earmarks tucked into committee reports and statements of managers. Such an action is within your Constitutional powers, and would strike a blow for fiscal responsibility now while setting a valuable precedent for the future."
Congress would be able to rewrite the budget to add earmarks in formal legislative language. But at least then earmarks would be challengeable on the floor. Asked by CNBC's Larry Kudlow last week about earmarks, GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell replied that, "Well, there certainly have been some bad earmarks in the past. But you've got to remember, you can knock out all the earmarks, and it wouldn't save any money."
Well, $7.4 billion is real money where we come from, and that misses the way in which earmarks have become opportunities for corruption (felon Duke Cunningham) and an incentive for logrolling that increases overall spending. Mr. Bush and the GOP can take one more step toward restoring their fiscal credentials by striking a blow against "nonlegislative" earmarks.
WSJ
What was she jailed for?
Moving On [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
On the NewsHour tonight, Sen. Reid allowed that the surge has “helped.”
“We sent other troops over there, and there are a lot of reasons the surge certainly hasn't hurt. It's helped. I recognize that.”
(The Newshour With Jim Lehrer, PBS, December 21, 2007)
But it wasn’t that long ago when Reid infamously said that the war was "lost" and the surge wasn’t “accomplishing anything.”
“Now, I believe, myself, that the secretary of state, the secretary of defense — and you have to make your own decision as to what the president knows — that this war is lost and that the surge is not accomplishing anything…”
(Sen. Harry Reid, Press Conference, April 19, 2007)
12/21 10:48 PM
"A surge of their own: Iraqis take back the streets
Attacks plummet as Shias join Sunnis in neighbourhood patrols to tackle militants and reunite communities
Michael Howard in Baghdad
Thursday December 20, 2007
The Guardian
Sunni Arab 'sahwa' volunteers on patrol in Baghdad
Sunni Arab 'sahwa' volunteers on patrol in Baghdad. Photograph: Ali Yusseff/AFP/Getty
Under the embers of the wintry evening sun the Tigris river, usually as brown as old boots, had turned almost blood red. Its waters were calm but its oily sheen was disturbed by the oars of a rower as he sculled his way through the city's fractured heart.
Alone and apparently indifferent to the threat of a sniper's bullet, Muhammad Rafiq eased up on his stroke rate and tacked over to the shore. He hauled his craft up the bank to a mosque - the temporary headquarters for his rowing club since US soldiers had commandeered its real boathouse in 2003. Inside the courtyard, his forehead beaded with sweat, Muhammad laid a few old blankets over his upturned boat and padlocked the oars to a railing.
"My friends said I was mad when I started rowing," said the 22-year-old former science student. "They said I would be sharing the river with dead bodies and that people would shoot at me. But it keeps me fit and it keeps me focused for my night work." As dusk fell, he checked the contents of his kit bag, slung it over his shoulder and jumped into a waiting taxi.
Fifteen minutes later, he had made it through checkpoints and concrete blast barriers en route to his home in al-Amil district of west Baghdad. At a makeshift barricade close to the street where he was born he greeted the sentries as friends. Then he unzipped his kit bag and pulled out a Kalashnikov. And for the next six uneventful hours he stood guard with his peers behind the straggles of barbed wire.
"I help to keep the peace so that I can row in peace, and that is my passion," said Muhammad, who asked that neither his real name nor that of his rowing club be used. "Now when I go out on the river, you can hear the birds and the hum of the generators. When I began it was only gunfire and bombs."
Muhammad is one of the thousands of young Baghdadi men to have joined neighbourhood security groups, which have mushroomed over the last year and are a crucial factor in the dramatic decline in civilian deaths. US soldiers call them "concerned local citizens"; Iraqis just call them sahwa (awakening) after the so-called Anbar awakening in western Iraq, which has seen Sunni tribal sheikhs take on foreign-led Islamists.
There are now an estimated 72,000 members in some 300 groups set up in 12 of Iraq's 18 provinces, and the numbers are growing. They are funded, but supposedly not armed, by the US military. "It is Iraq's own surge," said a western diplomat, "and it is certainly making a difference."
Major General Joseph Fil, the outgoing US commander for Baghdad, said this week that the number of attacks in the capital had fallen almost 80% since November 2006, while murders in Baghdad province were down by 90% over the same time period, and vehicle-borne bombs had declined by 70%.
The city's neighbourhood security groups vary greatly in form, content and function. But they all appear to have sprung from a shared desire to rise above the sectarian tensions tearing apart large areas of their city.
Though life in Baghdad is still far from normal, and the security situation still perilous, the capital's remarkably resilient population has begun to believe that the momentum for peace may be sustainable if it is left up to ordinary citizens. "They are filling a void left by Iraq's feuding and self-serving political elite, most of whom are hunkered down and out of touch in the Green Zone," said the western diplomat.
Though they are still dominated by Sunnis, the patrols' make-up increasingly reflects the ethnic and sectarian community they are guarding. An increasing number of Shia are now joining their ranks, some in a bid to counter the influence of Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army in their area.
In al-Amil, Muhammad started as a volunteer but now gets about $10 a day from the local US ranking officer. The same goes for his colleagues. The Americans also gave them combat boots and reflective vests as a kind of uniform.
"We grew tired and angry about the killing, and so decided to act," said Muhammad. He said his group, made up of friends and acquaintances mostly in their early 20s, began patrolling the streets of his neighbourhood six months ago. Sunni militants from a nearby area had driven into his district, which is still home to Shia and Sunni residents, and shot at a popular bakery. Three people were killed and four wounded as they queued for their morning bread.
"We learned we could not trust anyone who is not from our neighbourhood," said Muhammad. "This is our area, but it is for all people equally, no matter how or whether they pray."
A typical night sees them questioning strangers to the area or stopping cars. A couple of guards with rifles station themselves on rooftops to provide covering fire if necessary. They also work closely with the official Iraqi security forces and the US army, passing on, and sometimes acting on, local intelligence about the activities of militants.
Not so long ago Sunni and Shia gunmen were fighting for control of the suburb, near the road to Baghdad's airport. As a result, the once religiously mixed housing projects that lie either side of al-Amil's main street soon separated into Shia or Sunni enclaves.
But Muhammad, a Sunni Arab, and his Shia colleagues in the neighbourhood watch group are determined to reverse the ethnic cleansing. Last month, the group agreed to protect a Sunni mosque in his street from local Shia militias. They have also been mediating between the divided communities either side of the highway.
The result was an understanding: Sunni families would return to their former homes in the heavily Shia areas, while Shia families crossed back into the mainly Sunni streets. The two communities agreed to guarantee the safety of the returnees. Such was the popular backing for the deal that even the local Mahdi army commander had to acquiesce.
"We've been neighbours for 25 years and we feel like brothers," said Muhammad. "We will help them to guard and respect their mosques, and they won't harm me or my family."
The group has also helped organise local services such as rubbish collection. Meanwhile, in al-Amil, the improved security has prompted an upturn in the area's commercial life. In the still not-quite bustling main food market, Muhammad explained that "five months ago, a word out of place here could have meant a visit from one of the local militia".
Now the tensions are the subject of humorous exchanges. "You charged me five dinars more for my vegetables just because I'm a Sunni," one customer joked with a stallholder. "This sectarianism is good for your business."
But as the number and effectiveness of the neighbourhood groups increase, so too do attacks on patrol members. At the weekend, gunmen and bombers launched three attacks on patrols in Baghdad. In one incident bombers killed two patrol members and wounded 10 in the Adhamiya area of northern Baghdad, until recently a Sunni Arab militant stronghold. Gunmen also attacked a patrol in another northern area, killing one patrol member and wounding four. In the southern Doura neighbourhood, another former Sunni militant stronghold, gunmen wounded three patrol members manning a checkpoint.
There have also been numerous suicide attacks against "awakening" groups in the volatile Diyala province to the north-east.
There are worries too that the neighbourhood groups will, like the police force they are supposed to complement, be prone to infiltration and exploitation by insurgent, militia or criminal gangs. After all, the security groups are often made up of tribal militias and former insurgent forces that not so long ago fired on US and Iraqi forces. Now they have turned on al-Qaida in Iraq, the Mahdi army, and other extremist groups. "It is inevitable that in a force of 70,000 you get a few bad apples," said General David Petraeus, the senior US commander in Iraq, who has championed the need "to go local" with security. "But we are taking measures to ensure that they don't become everyone's worst nightmare."
Petraeus said he had persuaded a wary Iraqi government to take responsibility for the funding and future status of the local forces. About 20% will be integrated into the security forces while the remaining 80% will receive some civilian training and involve themselves in public works projects. A national civil service corps is being considered.
Major General Abdul-Kareem Khalaf of Iraq's interior ministry said the government recognised the work done by the sahwa groups but said: "It is important that there must never be armed groups outside the framework of the law."
Back at the barricade, Muhammad said he had no intention of joining the police or army. "All I want to do is row along the beautiful Tigris and live in peace," he said.
"