* “Gated communities” for Baghdad
* Afghan surge, too?
* Carter: “As an Army captain, I learned to take risks, not gambles. And this really looks like a gamble. One where the odds are really long.“
* Ricks: Surge “could put U.S. military commanders in exactly the sort of tough urban fight that war planners strove to avoid during the spring 2003 invasion.“
* Kaplan: If Bush had delivered the speech “two years ago, he would have deserved praise for candor, equanimity, and breadth of vision. But given its actual timing, one can only wonder about his grip on reality.“
* More speech reacts, rounded up
* “Hallucinogenic weapons” Doc speaks
* Canuck coins bugged?
* Privacy showdown looming in Congress
* Gitmo detainee’s YouTube defense
* Israeli arms sales: $4.4B
(Big ups: BB)
Re: the Canuck coins
I swear some of these intel agencies are getting ideas from TV shows. There was an episode of CBS’s “The Agency” (about the CIA) back in 2002 called “The Gauntlet” in which two agents travel to Belarus to meet up with an asset. In the episode, the KGB uses coins embedded with tracking devices to follow the agents.
Oh, and remember the story a while back about the listening sensors that looked like rocks? That was on “The Agency” too. I bet the intel services will all be tuning in to the premier of “24” next week.
Check out this AP story on a raid against the Iranian consulate in Irbil:
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
At the bottom are a bunch of reacts from Iraqi politicians, mostly Sunni and Kurdish, in addition to the usual stuff from al-Maliki’s advisors. Their responses to the idea of more US troops are a testament to the reputation our forces have aquired in Iraq over the last 3+ years, but also highlight some realities that our government is patently not responsive to. Namely, that this seems to be more of an inter-sectarian, armed political struggle (note the comment by the Kurdish MP Mahmoud Othman). It seems highly unlikely that 17,000 or so troops added to Baghdad will be able to pry residents’ support from the armed factions, by convincing them that the US and the Iraqi Army are providing their security now. I fear that we need to start picking allies in Iraq and jockeying for position in the political battle for who will control Iraq.