[Previous entry: "Oil For Bronx Poor is a Foreign Gift"] [Next entry: "Try Bringing Democracy to Folks on Capitol Hill"]

11/24/2005:

"Iraq war may go for decades: report"

11/23/05 "The Australian" -- -- THE war in Iraq could last for decades with British troops unlikely to withdraw without a "highly unlikely" split with Washington, a report says today.

The Oxford Research Group non-governmental organisation, which assesses constructive approaches to dealing with international terrorism and the "war on terror", says the war in Iraq is only in its early stages.

"Given that the al-Qaeda movement and its affiliates are seeking to achieve their aims over a period of decades rather than years, the probability is that, short of major political changes in the USA, the Iraq war might well be measured over a similar time span," the report concludes.

It says the presence of coalition troops in Iraq since the March 2003 US-led invasion has been a "gift" to Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda.

The terror network has gained recruits by portraying their presence as a neo-Christian occupation of a main Muslim country, the report says.

The group says an American pullout would be "a foreign policy disaster greater than the retreat from Vietnam".
informationclearinghouse.info

The pullout was not a 'disaster' for Vietnam, however.

Afghanistan: How Ragtag Insurgents Beat the World's Sole Superpower
...f Afghanistan was a dry run, I observed at the time, there was little reason to expect that Iraq would turn out less disastrously. But no one, especially not the newspaper editors who'd been conned into supporting the Fourth Afghan War, wanted to hear that argument.

Four years later, little has improved. Most Afghans, Peter Baker wrote recently in The Washington Post, "still grind out the subsistence lives they did under the Taliban." Women still wear the burqa. "Corruption is widespread," The Week reports. "Outside Kabul, the country functions like a group of independent fiefdoms from the Middle Ages." Ordinary Afghans "are angry at the continuing war, the widespread malnutrition, and the snail's pace of progress."