Dear Mr. Obama...

Obama Not Popular With Military and Veterans... gee I wonder why?

Thanks to Carl Kilo at Sparks It Up Blog...

300 Retired Generals & Admirals Endorse McCain For President

300 retired generals and admirals from around the country are endorsing John McCain for president. The retired generals and admirals announced their support with the following letter: "We have had the honor and privilege of serving as career officers in the United States Armed Forces, and of serving shoulder to shoulder with so many of the fine young men and women who are the backbone of America's Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Coast Guard. It is that experience that informs our judgment that John McCain is the presidential candidate best suited to serve as America's Commander-in Chief from the day of his inauguration.

Click here to see the full list of Retired Generals and Admirals

Huge endorsement for McCain.

Iraq: Then and Now, By the Numbers

So you still don't believe how well the war in Iraq is going and still don't believe there is any connection between Iraq and the war against Al Qaeda?

Please to enjoy...

Compliments of Engram at his BackTalk Blog:
Casualties in Iraq: September 2008

Although Barack Obama continues to campaign on the promise that he will "end this war," the American military has apparently beaten him to the punch.
They are, in fact, defeating our adversaries in Iraq in a way that was almost unimaginable back when Obama introduced a bill to begin withdrawing our troops -- thereby accepting defeat -- in January of 2007 (the very first month of the troop surge). Here in September of 2008, civilian casualties in Iraq remain near the lowest levels ever seen, as shown in this annotated chart (with the source of data and essential corrections described here):


As always, the dark purple bars represent the months associated with George Bush's troop surge, and the black bar represents the month in which al Qaeda finally succeeded in its quest to ignite out-of-control sectarian violence by bombing the Golden Mosque. Amazingly, al Qaeda remains the major cause of violence in Iraq today. Although only 268 civilian deaths were recorded by Iraq Coalition Casualty Count for the month of September, approximately 100 of those deaths were attributable to attacks that are typical of al Qaeda (e.g., suicide bombers, parked car bombs). In fact, as best I can tell, virtually all mass casualty attacks in Iraq these days are attributable to al Qaeda. Here is one example:

Iraq Bombings Leave 30 Dead

Blasts Target Policemen in Diyala, Military Personnel in Baghdad

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

BAGHDAD, Sept. 15 -- More than 30 people were killed in bombings in Iraq on Monday, including one in Diyala province in which a female suicide bomber attacked policemen gathered to celebrate the release of a fellow officer from a U.S. detention facility, Iraqi officials said.
...
In Baghdad, twin car bombings near the city's main passport office killed at least 12 people shortly before noon, officials said.
...
"We currently assess this heinous atrocity as an al-Qaeda in Iraq attack," Lt. Col. Steve Stover, a U.S. military spokesman, said in a statement, referring to the Sunni insurgent group.

Al Qaeda is no longer the extremely potent force it once was in Iraq (not by a long shot), but it is not quite dead yet. Here is what al Qaeda was previously capable of doing (this from back in August of 2007):

Iraqi officials: Truck bombings killed at least 500

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- The death toll in the suicide bombings Tuesday in northern Iraq has risen to at least 500, local officials in Nineveh province said Wednesday.
...
The Tuesday truck bombs that targeted the villages of Qahtaniya, al-Jazeera and Tal Uzair, in northern Iraq near the border with Syria, were a "trademark al Qaeda event" designed to sway U.S. public opinion against the war, a U.S. general said Wednesday.
...
Al Qaeda in Iraq is predominantly Sunni, and Mixon said members of the Yazidi religious minority have received threatening letters, called "night letters," telling them "to leave because they are infidels."
...
Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said there were three suicide trucks carrying two tons of explosives. At least 30 houses and other buildings were destroyed.

Through it all, the Democrats have tried to deny any significant role for al Qaeda and to convince the world that the violence in Iraq was nothing more than a civil war. That is, they behaved exactly as al Qaeda hoped they would, and I cannot quite bring myself to forgive them for it. Here is a mind boggling example from May of 2007:

Transcript: Sen. Chris Dodd on 'FOX News Sunday'

Monday, May 07, 2007
...
WALLACE: Let's talk about one aspect of that. The Democrats now seem in a race to try to come up with a plan to get out of Iraq.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number two Al Qaida leader, says the bill that you Democrats sent the president is proof of the American defeat in Iraq. And we'll talk about the details in a moment.

But does your party run the risk of being seen by the American people, as they were after Vietnam, as soft on national security?

DODD: Again, this is a civil war going on in Iraq. This is not the United States versus Al Qaida. It's Shia versus Sunnis tearing each other apart. It's gone on for centuries, but particularly here right now.

The United States is being asked to, in a sense, referee a civil war. And at $2 billion a week, $8 billion a month, Americans believe that we have done all we can possibly do, and Iraqis have to decide whether or not they want to end this civil war and the sectarian violence.

The idea that this is a winnable conflict by the United States -- every military leader from the very outset have said this is not a situation where there's a military victory for us here.

...
WALLACE: But, Senator, if I can just press this point, though...

DODD: Certainly.

WALLACE: ... Here you have Zawahiri in a video -- he seems to think that Al Qaida has a stake in this fight.

DODD: Well, they may think that, but I'm not going to let my foreign policy be decided by Mr. al-Zawahiri. Obviously, he's playing his game here.

He'd probably like to see us stay down there, bogged down, at the costs we're increasing here, the loss of lives, not to mention the isolation of the United States. The status quo is unacceptable.

Zawahiri was playing a game? In truth, Senator Dodd was playing a game (a political game). And, of course, Barack Obama has long adhered to the same politically convenient fiction:

Thursday, 11 January 2007

Obama: 'We're Not Going To Babysit A Civil War'

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration is working to persuade a skeptical Democratic-led Congress to accept the president's announced troop buildup as the last best chance for reversing Iraq's slide into anarchy.

President Bush's new strategy, announced Wednesday in a prime-time address to the nation, increases U.S. forces in Iraq by 21,500 and demands greater cooperation from the Iraqi government.

"We're not going to baby sit a civil war," Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., told NBC's "Today" Show Thursday. He said the Democratic-controlled Congress would not undercut troops already in Iraq but would explore ways to restrict the president from expanding the mission.

No wonder he wanted to withdraw our troops at the very height of sectarian violence in Iraq. His conception of what was happening was completely wrong, so it made sense in his mind to accept Harry Reid's assertion that "this war is lost" and to withdraw our troops (thereby condemning the innocent people of Iraq to an even more horrible fate). Fortunately, General Petraeus was not as misguided:

The U.S. military commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, said on Thursday al Qaeda was bent on committing what he called "sensational" attacks designed to fuel more sectarian violence.

Speaking in Washington, Petraeus said al Qaeda was now "probably public enemy number one" in Iraq.

The results of the general's analysis are plainly apparent in my chart above. They are also evident in this chart of U.S. military casualties from hostile fire:


As I said, Barack Obama will not "end this war" because the U.S. military has pretty much already done so (i.e., they have nearly achieved victory in Iraq).

A few days ago, I analyzed the violent death rate in Iraq relative to the other nations of the world. I used a figure of 575 deaths per month (an estimate of civilian deaths plus deaths of security forces and other combatants). For the last two months, the Associated Press puts the overall number of deaths in Iraq at about 500. Thus, using the most recent months to estimate the annual trend, it seems that my chart is fairly accurate, so I will show it again:



As you can see, Iraq is not the most violent place on earth by any means. Take out mass casualty attacks by al Qaeda (as will eventually happen, I believe) and it will be noticably less violent than Mexico and Russia.

At long last, and as might be expected, the American public is coming around to the idea that the war in Iraq will be successful , a perception that will eventually severely complicate the media's effort to portray George Bush as the "worst president ever:"

War on Terror Update

Plurality, For First Time, Says Iraq War Will Be Judged A Success

Tuesday, September 30, 2008
...
In a national telephone survey Monday night, 41% said history will rate the war in Iraq a success versus 39% who said it will be seen as a failure, with 20% undecided (see crosstabs). These findings echo those of the previous two weeks (see trends).

By contrast, in August of last year, 57% believed history would judge the U.S. mission in Iraq a failure, and only 29% disagreed.

By August of next year, these numbers will look even better, unless Barack Obama wins and makes good on his stubborn pledge to withdraw U.S. forces regardless of conditions on the ground. But if he does that, failure in Iraq will be his burden to bear, not George Bush's.
-end.

-red- Engram is a registered Democrat and research professor who has documented each phase of the Iraq war since the beginning using the liberal left's own data and casualty numbers to demonstrate exactly what went wrong, how the US surge worked, how close we were to losing the war and where we stand today.

Democrats Lose Ball; Playing On Wrong Field

While claiming Republicans took their eye off the ball by going to war in Iraq which eventually led to the crippling of Al Qaeda, Democrats don't even know where the ball is.

Obama and Democrats continue to claim we need to be in Afghanistan fighting Al Qaeda in spite of the following facts which are conveniently ignored by the democrat controlled main stream media...
The one exception, and it is an important one, is the editorial board of the Washington Post. In an editorial two months ago, they said about Obama:

He insists that Afghanistan is "the central front" for the United States, along with the border areas of Pakistan. But there are no known al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, and any additional U.S. forces sent there would not be able to operate in the Pakistani territories where Osama bin Laden is headquartered. While the United States has an interest in preventing the resurgence of the Afghan Taliban, the country's strategic importance pales beside that of Iraq, which lies at the geopolitical center of the Middle East and contains some of the world's largest oil reserves. If Mr. Obama's antiwar stance has blinded him to those realities, that could prove far more debilitating to him as president than any particular timetable.

Obama and Democrats have no clue.
We are supposed to trust the safety of our grandchildren to these morons?
I think not.
-red

Obama... Naive or Deliberately Deceptive?

September 27, 2008

Obama is Dangerously Naive

(Thanks TO Engram at BackTalk Blog...)

Either that, or he is deliberately deceptive. I hope it is the latter.

This does not mean that his performance in last night's debate was politically ineffective. Never forget that in presidential debates, as amazing as it might seem, style is what mostly matters to the American people. Stylistically, Obama did a fine job of creating the impression that he is someone other than his long history suggests he is. And that's good for him. Substantively, however, McCain simply cleaned Obama's clock and showed that the junior senator from Illinois is dangerously unprepared to be our next commander in chief. I wish that mattered to the viewing audience, but history suggests that it will not. To most Americans, it's all about style. Thus, we probably won't see any major shift in the polls as a result of last night's debate, and I cannot even predict the direction of any minor shift that might occur.

Overall, it was a fine debate, and both did well in terms of achieving their political objectives. And the moderator (Jim Lehrer) was simply outstanding.

Although it does not matter all that much to the voting public, substance does matter to me, so that's what I'll focus on. On the Iraq war, Obama was at his best when he said:

And so John likes -- John, you like to pretend like the war started in 2007. You talk about the surge. The war started in 2003, and at the time when the war started, you said it was going to be quick and easy. You said we knew where the weapons of mass destruction were. You were wrong.

This made me wonder if Obama believed that the Iraqis did not have WMDs or if he instead believed that we should not invade even though he thought they did. Based on the one anti-war speech that might catapult him all the way to the presidency, I conclude that Obama thought that Iraq had WMDs:

Now let me be clear - I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity.

And Saddam Hussein is the man who would be in charge today had we not invaded. Under that scenario, he would not be sitting on his hands watching his mortal enemy -- Iran -- develop a nuclear bomb. Obviously, after our troops were gone, Saddam would get on with developing the WMDs that he wanted the world to believe that he already possessed. Perhaps ensuring that this scenario became a reality reflects profoundly excellent judgment on Obama's part, but that's not obvious to me. Still, it is clearly debatable, and the fact that Obama opposed the invasion is certainly not what makes him dangerously naive.

The whole problem with Obama's judgment is that he thought made great sense, once Osama bin Laden decided to make Iraq the central front in the war on terror, to accept defeat in Iraq. That is, after opposing the invasion, Obama's next big idea was to withdraw our troops and hand al Qaeda the glorious victory it sought in Iraq. Fortunately, and no thanks to Obama, al Qaeda has been crushed in Iraq, and their reputation throughout the Muslim world has been greatly diminished, not enhanced. Thus, I was surprised to hear Obama say this:

And I wish I had been wrong for the sake of the country and they had been right, but that's not the case. We've spent over $600 billion so far, soon to be $1 trillion. We have lost over 4,000 lives. We have seen 30,000 wounded, and most importantly, from a strategic national security perspective, al Qaeda is resurgent, stronger now than at any time since 2001.

He was apparently referring to this article:

Government report: Al Qaeda strongest since September 11, 2001

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Al Qaeda is the strongest it has been since the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a new U.S. government analysis concludes, according to a senior government official who has seen it.

Some unnamed senior government official who says he has seen the report makes this claim, and that's good enough for Obama. It gives him cover to make a misleading claim, but it is a seriously flawed assessment because it glosses over a critical detail: what would al Qaeda's position be today had we abandoned Iraq at the height of al-Qaeda-induced sectarian violence there (as Obama proposed that we do)? Obviously, they would be very much stronger than they are today. Also, al Qaeda's strength, whatever it might be, derives from its safe havens in Pakistan, which was also noted in the article:

"We actually see the al Qaeda central being resurgent in their role in planning operations," John Kringen, head of the CIA's intelligence directorate, testified at the hearing Wednesday. "They seem to be fairly well settled into the safe haven in the ungoverned spaces of Pakistan there. We see more training. We see more money. We see more communications."

Thomas Fingar, deputy director of national intelligence, told lawmakers that al Qaeda leaders hiding in Pakistan are able to maintain relationships "with affiliates throughout the Middle East, North and East Africa and Europe."

And this fact brings up the complete non sequitur that an enthralled media allows Obama to get away with every time (and will do so again now): Because al Qaeda's safe havens are inside Pakistan, how will withdrawing our troops from Iraq and sending them to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban serve to defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan? There is no reasonable answer to this question, which is why Obama constantly blurs the critical distinction between Afghanistan (where the Taliban are fighting with the help of some al Qaeda field commanders) and Pakistan (where al Qaeda's leaders are and where al Qaeda has established those safe havens). Only by blurring that distinction can one create the false impression that pulling troops from Iraq and sending them to Afghanistan is a way to directly confront a resurgent al Qaeda. From the debate last night, watch Obama make this misleading move:

OBAMA: Well, this is an area where Senator McCain and I have a fundamental difference because I think the first question is whether we should have gone into the war in the first place.

Now six years ago, I stood up and opposed this war at a time when it was politically risky to do so because I said that not only did we not know how much it was going to cost, what our exit strategy might be, how it would affect our relationships around the world, and whether our intelligence was sound, but also because we hadn't finished the job in Afghanistan.

We hadn't caught bin Laden. We hadn't put al Qaeda to rest, and as a consequence, I thought that it was going to be a distraction. Now Senator McCain and President Bush had a very different judgment.
...
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates himself acknowledges the war on terrorism started in Afghanistan and it needs to end there.

But we can't do it if we are not willing to give Iraq back its country. Now, what I've said is we should end this war responsibly. We should do it in phases. But in 16 months we should be able to reduce our combat troops, put -- provide some relief to military families and our troops and bolster our efforts in Afghanistan so that we can capture and kill bin Laden and crush al Qaeda.

That's the misleading move. Completely, 100% misleading. Let me emphasize the key point, one that is not debatable: because there are no al Qaeda safe havens in Afghanistan, sending more troops to Afghanistan will not help us to capture and kill bin Laden and crush al Qaeda (because bin Laden and al Qaeda's safe havens are inside Pakistan). There is nothing complicated about this.

Let me further illustrate how cleverly deceiving Obama can be:

And right now, the commanders in Afghanistan, as well as Admiral Mullen, have acknowledged that we don't have enough troops to deal with Afghanistan because we still have more troops in Iraq than we did before the surge.

All true. The Taliban are fighting more effectively these days, and I assume that's because they now have some al Qaeda field commanders helping them out. Defeating them is a priority, and we need more troops to do that, but this has nothing to do with capturing and killing bin Laden and crushing al Qaeda in Pakistan. That's the point that no one appreciates (not Barack Obama or those who are enthralled by the man).

Here's more:

So I would send two to three additional brigades to Afghanistan. Now, keep in mind that we have four times the number of troops in Iraq, where nobody had anything to do with 9/11 before we went in, where, in fact, there was no al Qaeda before we went in, but we have four times more troops there than we do in Afghanistan.

But how is that going to help you to kill Osama bin Laden (in Pakistan) and crush their safe havens (in Pakistan)? He does not say because he wants Americans to believe that Afghanistan is where al Qaeda is resurgent.

Obama does mention Pakistan as well, and does say that al Qaeda is there, but it is his attempt to create the false impression that al Qaeda is resurgent in Afghanistan that I object to. He needs to create that false impression so that it will seem to make sense to say that sending more troops to Afghanistan will help to kill bin Laden and crush al Qaeda.

I have never seen any mainstream media reporter address this glaringly obvious problem with Obama's reasoning, so I assume that reporters are as ignorant of the relevant facts as Barack Obama appears to be. The one exception, and it is an important one, is the editorial board of the Washington Post. In an editorial two months ago, they said about Obama:

He insists that Afghanistan is "the central front" for the United States, along with the border areas of Pakistan. But there are no known al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, and any additional U.S. forces sent there would not be able to operate in the Pakistani territories where Osama bin Laden is headquartered. While the United States has an interest in preventing the resurgence of the Afghan Taliban, the country's strategic importance pales beside that of Iraq, which lies at the geopolitical center of the Middle East and contains some of the world's largest oil reserves. If Mr. Obama's antiwar stance has blinded him to those realities, that could prove far more debilitating to him as president than any particular timetable.

As they point out, "...there are no known al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, and any additional U.S. forces sent there would not be able to operate in the Pakistani territories where Osama bin Laden is headquartered." Glaringly obvious, but top secret (except for on this blog and in that one single editorial). Creepy.

Will The Real Barack H Obama Please Stand Up?

Hiding the Ball

by David Limbaugh

09/26/2008
Thanks to Human Events.com

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Why does Barack Obama play "hide the ball" with his personal résumé, concealing his extreme leftist ideology and denying his damning associations? Question kind of answers itself, wouldn't you say?
Be concerned, very concerned.

Obama hides his liberalism for the same reason every other liberal presidential candidate has: The electorate tilts center-right. This isn't just my gut speaking or some self-serving theory I'm propounding.

The Battleground poll -- a well-respected bipartisan affair conducted by the Terrance Group, a Republican polling organization -- and Lake Research Partners, a Democratic organization, tells us 60 percent of Americans identify themselves as conservatives.

But the specifics are even more telling. Twenty percent consider themselves very conservative, 40 percent somewhat conservative, 2 percent moderate, 27 percent liberal, 9 percent very liberal, and 3 percent don't know or didn't answer.

So John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008 didn't deny they were the most liberal senators because liberalism has become a dirty word through a clever conservative propaganda campaign. They denied it because liberalism is a minority position in reality, albeit an extraordinarily effective vocal minority.

Obama will only come clean about his liberalism when he thinks he is in safe territory, as he did at the San Francisco fundraiser where he trashed small-town Americans, thinking his words wouldn't reach those he was belittling. Nor is Obama upfront about the liberal nature of his policy proposals, choosing instead to mask their liberalism and even disguise them as conservative.

How else do you explain his whopper that he is recommending a tax cut for 95 percent of Americans when we know that the bottom 50 percent of income earners pay very little income tax at all? His plan calls for giving many of these people tax credits, even though they are paying no tax or are paying a small enough amount that the credit would result in them netting money from the government. As others have pointed out, this is welfare, not a tax cut. "Tax cut" resonates well among center-right voters; "welfare" does not.

On foreign policy, suffice it to say that Obama would never want the center-right electorate to know the extent of his appeasement and retreat-and-defeat orientation, his support for the bankrupting and sovereignty-forfeiting Global Poverty Act or his goal of eliminating U.S. nuclear weapons, as reported by The New York Times.

But where Obama is really playing hide the ball is in his past and present associations. His campaign operatives and the mainstream media have done their best to divert any attention from these relationships by saying it's dirty campaigning to smear him through the acts of others. Well, folks, that's not how ordinary people think. In sizing up someone's character, we often consider with whom they associate. Sue us if you wish -- even start a class action -- but it won't change human nature, which leads us, rationally, to consider this factor.

Endless reports and many books have been written documenting Barack Obama's discipleship in the thug tactics of Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals." For Obama, community organizing was not an innocuous vehicle for assisting the needy. It was and is a cynically dangerous vehicle for the politics of extortion and intimidation and the usurpation of power by socialists, whose ideology and methods more closely resemble those of Josef Stalin than those of Mother Teresa.

These sources also prove beyond any reasonable doubt Obama's close -- not remote, not casual -- relationship with the nihilistic, America-hating, Pentagon-bombing radical William Ayers. Obama glibly dismisses the very idea that he should be blamed for a passing acquaintanceship with a guy who was bombing the Pentagon "when (Obama) was 8 years old."

Enough with the insults to our intelligence, Mr. Obama. You were not 8 when you launched your state Senate campaign in Ayers' home. You were not 8 when you served in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which Ayers was instrumental in establishing. You are not 8 today, though you are still Ayers' close friend, while he remains an America-hating radical, wholly unrepentant about his terrorist activities, other than to say he didn't do enough.

The fact that Obama would be seen in the same room with this guy should disqualify him from presidential aspirations. But he's not just in the same room. In many ways, he's on the same page, as evidenced by his default instinct to apologize for America and to blame America first.

But Obama will continue striving to hide the ball on this association and many others, including those with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Tony Rezko.

But beware; if anyone dares to expose those relationships and their sordid details, he will open himself up to malicious and fraudulent charges of racism and other Saul Alinsky thug tactics that make Bill Clinton's politics of personal destruction look like child's play.

---

Mr. Limbaugh is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Bankrupt: The Moral and Intellectual Bankruptcy of Today's Democratic Party, Absolute Power and Persecution.

Remedial Iraq For Liberals

Two excellent posts by Engram at Backtalk Blog (a registered Democrat and moderately liberal research professor)
The first compares the violence and murder rate of Iraq to other countries around the globe and the results may be surprizing... at least to democrats for certain.

Murder Rates Around The World (And In Iraq)

The second excellent article should be required reading for anyone planning to vote for Obama and/or any/every Democrat.

Two Visions Of Iraq

Both are well worth the read and then some.
-red

Obama Outraged At Peace and Prosperity In Iraq

I had to laugh this morning at a radio ad by the Obama campaign which made the claim that we should be outraged that Iraq is considering building a giant ferris wheel as part of a theme park in Baghdad.
The ad also claims that we should all be outraged that Iraq has generated a $79billion surplus in it's budget.

These are the same people that not long ago said we should all be outraged at the never ending civil war in Iraq...that the war would never ever end... and now of course they are outraged about a theme park and a prospering economy?

LOL... sour grapes are so funny to watch.

How embarrasing for Democrats.
-red stater

Terrorist Attacks In Iraq Down 85% From One Year Ago

General: Iraq needs long-term US military help

By ANNE FLAHERTY – Jul 9, 2008
Washington (AP)—

The general who led efforts to train Iraq's army and police units said Wednesday that progress is mixed and long-term U.S. help is needed.
Army Lt. Gen. James Dubik said Iraq's security forces have grown from 444,000 to 566,000 since he assumed command of the Multi-National Security Transition Command in June 2007 and they are better able to execute operations on their own.
But the fast-growing force still lacks experienced leaders and the ability to train all its new recruits, Dubik told the House Armed Services Committee.
"As I often said to my command in Baghdad, `Progress doesn't result in no problems, it results in new problems,'" he said in his written testimony.
The war, now in its sixth year, is an important issue in the presidential election and the progress of Iraq's security forces is seen as necessary to help smooth a U.S. exit.
Republicans and Democrats said they were eager to see Iraqi security forces take more control.
"The ability of the Iraqi forces to move out and accomplish a mission in a professional manner I think is a lot of concern to us," said Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, the committee's top Republican.
Dubik, who is retiring after 37 years of service, said he can't estimate exactly when the Iraqis will be able to take control of the country because many factors — such as aircraft purchases — are undecided. When pressed by panel chairman Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., the general said he does expect Iraqi ground forces to be operating proficiently by the middle of next year, possibly as early as April.
"Our assistance may change in organization and size, to be sure. But some form of partnership and assistance, consistent with our two nations' strategic objectives, in my opinion, is still necessary," he told the committee.
The Iraqi military said Wednesday that the number of "terrorist attacks" in June declined 85 percent from the same period a year ago. Despite the security gains, frequent attacks continue throughout the country.
When Dubik testified before Congress in January, he said Iraq was on track to reach some 580,000 security force members by the end of the year but that the forces still were a long way from becoming self-sufficient. Iraqi officials estimated to him that the country probably would not be able to assume responsibility for internal security until sometime between 2009 and 2012, or defend its borders before 2018, he said.
In his testimony Wednesday, Dubik recommended streamlining laws and rules that he said have delayed U.S. military equipment purchases by Iraq. Iraq has ordered $2.7 billion in equipment, but received just $1.4 billion, he wrote.
Army Lt. Gen. Frank Helmick assumed control of the U.S. training command last week.