Word: iraq
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...report declares that "all major violence indicators" have fallen between 40% and 80% "from pre-surge levels," the GAO sees some of that progress as based on the cooperation of Iraqis who remain sharply at odds with one another. The congressional watchdog office cites the so-called "Sons of Iraq" program, a largely Sunni group of militiamen now paid by U.S. taxpayers to keep the peace in their neighborhoods. More than 100,000 strong, the group has yet to reconcile its long-standing differences with the Shi'ite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. U.S. efforts to integrate...
...along the way, the competing reports measure progress in Iraq by yardsticks of differing lengths. While the GAO said electrical production was lagging, the Pentagon asserted that this was a function of escalating demand for power. Electrical output, it said, now tops what the country was generating before the invasion. The Pentagon also zinged the GAO for using, as an oil-production benchmark, the "arbitrary goal" of 3 million bbl. a day set by the U.S.-run occupation authority immediately following the invasion. More importantly, the Pentagon said, is that petroleum exports are at their highest level since the fall...
...conflict between the two reports was reflected in the press coverage they generated. Both the New York Times and Washington Post led with the bleak assessment contained in the GAO study, while the Wall Street Journal highlighted what it called a "generally upbeat assessment" of Iraq's current security and political situation. It relegated the GAO's findings to the final three paragraphs of a 17-paragraph story. But it did lead with bad news from the Pentagon report: claims that Iran continues to funnel money to militias inside Iraq, and that Tehran "may well pose the greatest long-term...
Indeed, according to a new Pentagon report, Iraq's violence has hit a four-year low, and the country has made significant progress in establishing stability. But will it last? Or does the situation conform more to a report out of the Government Accountability Office? That one suggests that this period of calm, like others before it, is just a momentary blip...
...same neighborhood where tonight the boys played soccer. The young men drinking beer on the Jadriya bridge were targeted in 2004 by religious extremists. Now they're back, but their presence is less an indication of improved safety than it is of the fatalistic attitudes now so prevalent among Iraq's youth, says one resident...