Troops See Progress, Grow Weary of Negative Reports on War

Troops on the ground in Iraq are not as much tired of the war as they are of those who are not in the fight saying that no progress has been made, a top commander in the region said today.

The troops there see progress every day, said British Army Lt. Gen. Graeme Lamb, deputy commander of Multinational Force Iraq and senior British representative in Iraq, speaking to Pentagon reporters via satellite.

"They see the water going to people who didn't have it before. They see electricity coming on line. They see stability to the networks. They see all the stuff that no one really portrays," Lamb said. "While it's so clear to them that we're making progress, it's not reflected by those who are not in the fight, but [who] are sitting back and making judgment."

Overall, Lamb called the day-to-day work there by coalition forces "hard pounding," and said that extraordinary things are being accomplished by ordinary people.

"You should be enormously proud of what I see your Marines, your Air Force, your Navy, your Army and the civilians who are in the fight out here, as to what they do, and gladly,"

Lamb said.

The British general has served in Iraq since August 2006. This is his second tour to the region. He said, that in the first month of the surge there has been

"good progress, steady momentum, hard fighting, [and coalition forces] going places where they haven't been before. I see -- unequivocally -- that this surge is making a difference."

Lamb compared the complexities of the mission there to playing three-dimensional chess in a dark room - while being shot at.

But, he said, Iraqi forces are making ground in their training and several units own their own battlespace. This is key as coalition forces begin clearing and holding new sections of the capital city.

Only a few years ago, after coalition soldiers would leave cleared areas, insurgents would return and again take control. Under the new strategy, coalition forces now hold sections of the city allowing for local governments to be formed, construction of key infrastructure, training of security forces and the rebuilding of the economy and workforce.

Now, when coalition forces leave, Lamb said, the "vacuum" is not filled with insurgents, but a trained security force and a growing economy.

He said it is a concerted effort on the parts of coalition forces, the local community, Iraqi security forces and the Iraqi government. "The sum of the parts is so much greater than where we were before, and the difference should not be underestimated," Lamb said.

Already, several Iraqi units are holding their own north in Diyala and Salahuddin and south in Babil and Basra.

Still, most units require U.S. help with logistics, command and control and intelligence, he said.

Iraqi security forces and the Iraqi government are busy weeding out those who are aligned with the insurgency and sectarian violence, especially within the police force, he said. U.S. forces are arresting, and turning over to the Iraqis, any of their security force who are guilty of using their positions to promote sectarian violence, Lamb said.

"We'll take the individuals, arrest them and put them through the Iraqi criminal justice system,"

he said.

Already, 11,000 members of the police force have been removed and 4,000 are in the criminal justice system under review.

"I've seen over my time here people ... looking to improve and deliver a force that is Iraqi rather than sectarian,"

he said.

Talk Show America 7/20/2007

EnviroMental Nut Jobs Suggest Extinguishing Humans to Save Planet

From Newsweek:

The Second Coming may be the most widely anticipated apocalypse ever, but

Environmentalists have their own eschatology-a vision of a world not consumed by holy fire but returned to ecological balance by the removal of the most disruptive species in history. That, of course, would be us. There's even a group trying to bring it about, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, whose Web site calls on people to stop having children altogether.

And now the journalist Alan Weisman has produced "The World Without Us," which conjures up a future something like ... well, like the area around Chernobyl-just forests that have begun reclaiming fields and towns, home to birds, deer, wild boar and moose.

Weisman's intriguing thought experiment is to ask what would happen if the rest of the Earth was similarly evacuated-not by a nuclear holocaust or natural disaster, but by whisking people off in spaceships, or killing them with a virus that spares the rest of the biosphere.

In a matter of days or weeks, nuclear power plants around the world would boil off their water and melt into vast radioactive lumps. Electrical power would fail, and with it the pumps keeping New York City's subways from flooding; in a few years Lexington Avenue would collapse and eventually turn into a river. Lightning-caused fires would blow out the windows in skyscrapers.

Sound appealing? Well, it did to Weisman, too, when he began work on the book four years ago. And "four out of five" of the people he's told about it, he estimates, thought the idea sounded wonderful.

Talk Show America 7/16/2007

North Korea Shuts Down Nuke Reactor

According to Reuters:

North Korea has told the United States it has shut down its Yongbyon nuclear facilities, the U.S. State Department said on Saturday.

"We welcome this development and look forward to the verification and monitoring of this shutdown by the International Atomic Energy Agency team that has arrived in North Korea,"

said spokesman Sean McCormack.

UPDATE:IAEA Confirms North Korea Has Shut Reactor

U.N. inspectors have verified that North Korea shut down its nuclear reactor, the watchdog agency's chief said Monday, the first on-the-ground achievement toward scaling back Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions since the international standoff began in late 2002.

The main U.S. envoy on the issue, meanwhile, said that the United States is looking to build on momentum and will start deliberations on removing North Korea from a list of terrorism-sponsoring states.

North Korea pledged in an international accord in February to shut the reactor at Yongbyon and dismantle its nuclear programs in return for 1 million tons of oil and political concessions. However, it stalled for several months because of a separate, but now-resolved dispute with the U.S. over frozen bank funds.

The shutdown over the weekend was confirmed by a 10-member team of IAEA inspectors, said Mohamed ElBaradei, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

"The process has been going quite well and we have had good cooperation from North Korea. It's a good step in the right direction,"

ElBaradei said, speaking in Bangkok ahead of an event sponsored by Thailand's Science Ministry.

The Yongbyon reactor, about 60 miles north of the capital, generates plutonium for atomic bombs; North Korea conducted its first nuclear test explosion in October.

Talk Show America 7/16/2007