Jack Kelly has a wonderful column in Sunday's edition of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette noting how things are improving for the US and its allies within Iraq and the overall Global War on Terrorism. Here's a sneak-peek:
Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-D.C. -based think tank, has been pessimistic about Iraq. He returned from a recent visit singing a different tune:I bet you won't find such info in the MSM.
"If current plans are successfully implemented, the total number of Iraqi military and police units that can honestly be described as trained and equipped should rise from 96,000 in September 2004, and 172,000 today to 230,000 by the end of December and 270,000 by mid-2006," he said.
Strategic Forecasting, a private American intelligence service, thinks al-Qaida is engaged in the terrorist equivalent of the Tet Offensive: "launching a series of attacks -- some significant, others mere psyops -- in an effort to turn the tide in a war it has been losing."
Clumsy mistakes made in the London bombings suggest to Strategic Forecasting that al-Qaida has suffered "a rather serious decline in the quality -- though not necessarily the quantity -- of its operational assets." A shortage of skilled labor would explain why al-Qaida is shifting assets from Iraq. But, in effect, conceding defeat in the principal theater rarely is the path to ultimate victory.
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