Although the statement was bolder than usual for Maliki, it fell short of directing that the illegal militias be disbanded, a move that American officials are increasingly urging as sectarian bloodletting and other violence soar.

Balad's Shiites had been living alongside Sunnis for hundreds of years, Ali said, staring bleakly at the road outside. He had a Sunni son-in-law and Sunni friends, he said. It took the American occupation, he said, to change all that.

"What do you want to know?" Ali demanded bitterly. "How we reached this level? How we started to kill people according to their identity? How this sectarian strife was brought to us?"

In the dumbed-down debate we’re having, there are only two sides: Pro-war and antiwar. This is silly. First, very few folks who favored the Iraq invasion are abstractly pro-war.

I've long been an admirer of, if not a full-fledged subscriber to, what I call the "Ledeen Doctrine." I'm not sure my friend Michael Ledeen will thank me for ascribing authorship to him and he may have only been semi-serious when he crafted it, but here is the bedrock tenet of the Ledeen Doctrine in more or less his own words: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."

Casey and the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, "are currently working with the Iraqi government to develop a set of projections as to when they think they can cast off various pieces of responsibility," [Rumsfeld] said.

"And there's no doubt in my mind but that some of those projections we won't make," he said. "It'll be later or even earlier in some instances. And in some cases, once we meet the projection, we may have to go back and do it again if it doesn't work."

But that does not amount to a "strategic error," Rumsfeld said. And it may not even be a "misjudgment," because the enemy may simply have focused on a particular place to make a point.

The American reaction to such talk is knee-jerk opposition. Like those imperial Japanese soldiers discovered holed up on some godforsaken Pacific island decades after World War II, we continue to act as if we, too, never received news of the Japanese surrender. We applaud the Japanese for continuing their adherence to the MacArthur constitution that forever denies Japan the status of Great Power replete with commensurate military force.

I would like to send a note of appreciation to the many friends and respected colleagues who work at the magazine. You have taught me very much, and I hope to live up to your high standards in my future work.

O'REILLY: But if the public doesn't know what torture is or is not, as defined by the Bush administration, how can the public make a decision on whether your policy is right or wrong?

BUSH: Well, one thing is that you can rest assured we're not going to talk about the techniques we use in a public forum. No matter how hard you try because I don't want the enemy to be able to adjust their tactics if we capture them on the battlefield.

But what the American people need to know is we've got a program in place that is able to get intelligence from these people. And we've used it to stop attacks.

The intelligence community believes strongly that the information we got from the detainee questioning program yielded information that made America safer, that we stopped attacks.

The 10,000 soldiers in the Army's five active and two National Guard Special Forces groups make up the largest component of the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCom) and are the U.S.' pre-eminent exponents of unconventional warfare (working with guerrilla groups to overthrow an enemy regime) and foreign internal defense (training friendly governments to defend themselves against insurgencies). But many SF officers feel that U.S. Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) has left them in the dark about how it plans to deliver on the QDR's promise to expand the number of SF battalions by a third over the next several years. They are deeply concerned that, despite the generals' protestations to the contrary, a rushed expansion of Army special operations forces will result in an SF contingent that, while bigger on paper, will contain half-filled units manned by troops who are less mature, less experienced and less skilled in languages and foreign cultures than SF soldiers traditionally have been.

Ultimately, active and retired Special Forces officers said, any attempt to expand Army special operations without a corresponding increase in the size of the regular Army from which the special ops units recruit is doomed to failure and risks pushing Special Forces away from its unconventional warfare and foreign internal defense missions toward the direct-action role that is already the specialty of the Rangers, Delta Force and Navy SEALs.

PARLIAMENT WANTS AL-SHARQIYA AND AZZAMAN SHUT
(Azzaman) The Iraqi parliament has called on the government to shut down the Al-Sharqiya satellite channel and the international issue of Azzaman newspaper for their coverage of the parliamentary session on decentralisation legislation last Wednesday. In its statement, parliament said that both outlets described the law as "dividing Iraq and dragging it into a civil war". Hamid al-Sa'idi, a lawmaker from the United Iraqi Alliance, said his party did not support the closure call and said there should be room for criticism. Sunni lawmaker Hussein al-Faluji called the parliamentary move a dictatorial step.
(London-based Azzaman is issued daily by Saad al-Bazaz.)

''Over the past few months, the debate over this bill has been heated and the questions raised can seem complex,'' he said. ''Yet, with the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few."

D’Souza shows that liberals—people like Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, Bill Moyers, and Michael Moore—are responsible for fostering a culture that angers and repulses not just Muslim countries but also traditional and religious societies around the world. Their outspoken opposition to American foreign policy—including the way the Bush administration is conducting the war on terror—contributes to the growing hostility, encouraging people both at home and abroad to blame America for the problems of the world. He argues that it is not our exercise of freedom that enrages our enemies, but our abuse of that freedom—from the sexual liberty of women to the support of gay marriage, birth control, and no-fault divorce, to the aggressive exportation of our vulgar, licentious popular culture.

Across the river,[Balad] police Maj. Hussein Alwan said, commandos believed to be members of the Shiite Badr Organization entered Duluiyah. The organization, also known as the Badr Brigade, is a militia of the other largest Shiite religious party in Iraq's government, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Alwan accused members of al-Qaeda in Iraq of setting off the violence and then standing by as Sunni civilians were killed in retaliatory attacks.

"When the commandos of the Badr Brigade entered the town, we did not see Qaeda fighting them. They were only spectators to see how the Sunnis are being slaughtered," he said.

In tiny Sunni towns throughout the area, Sunni men and boys as young as 10 took up arms to defend against any Shiite militias entering, said Khaled al-Jubouri, a Sunni sheik in Duluiyah. Jubouri said that he had declined a request for peace talks with the Shiite elders of Balad and that he wanted the Shiite militiamen surrendered to Sunni authorities and an apology.

[End blockquote, motherfucker! Blockquote now ends here!] Anyhow, the police chief is hardly an impartial source, but given that Balad is itself under siege it would stand to reason that he would at least skirt the issue of al-Q defending the city if that was what was happening. Additionally, the Mujahideen Shura of al-Q & accomplices have declared an Islamic Republic of Iraq stretching across the Sunni areas. The Iraqi-as-fuck Association of Muslim Scholars and Islamic Army promptly denounced the declaration. Evidence is mounting that even under the most dire conditions of sectarian rampage, al-Qaeda just isn't welcome in Sunni Iraq -- in which case, I vote we leave al-Qaeda to the tender mercies of Iraqi Sunnis and get the fuck out of their country.