Free Republic

What if someone gave a war & Nobody came? Life would ring the bells of Ecstasy and Forever be Itself again. -- from"Graffiti," poem by Allen Ginsberg [1972]. Maybe so. But what of the converse? What if someone sued for peace but the enemy didn't go along? That was General David Petraeus's observation today on the Obama withdrawal plan, in a line that could well become my favorite of the year. Petraeus made his comment in the course of an interview with Andrea Mitchell, in Baghdad. A clip of the interview was aired on this evening's Hardball, with Mike Barnicle...

US election: Barack Obama wobbles on withdrawing Iraq troops By Tim Shipman in Washington Last Updated: 12:20AM BST 04/07/2008 Senator Barack Obama has rushed to clarify his position on the Iraq War after he appeared to wobble on a commitment to withdraw US ground troops within 16 months, a central plank of his candidacy. Barack Obama speaks on his Iraq policy during a news conference in Fargo, North Dakota The Democratic presidential nominee used a press conference to say that the timetable was not set in stone and that he would adjust his plans based on conditions on the ground...

Below is the survey question at Senator Ben Cardin's website. If you are a Maryland Freeper, I invite you to visit the website - http://cardin.senate.gov/ - and participate in the survey. If you are not a Maryland Freeper, vist anyway.

Hedge Funds Make It Hard To Say Goodbye Thursday April 10, 2:58 am ET By Gregory Zuckerman If you thought getting into a hedge fund was tough, try getting out of one. With the markets sputtering, some high-profile hedge funds are rejecting withdrawal requests, with some telling investors that it could be years before they will see all their cash again. And it isn't just big institutions and the wealthy that are getting rebuffed. Some smaller investors who took advantage of lower minimum investments by putting their cash into so-called funds of funds, which invest in numerous hedge funds, are...

...With all-too-rare exceptions, our politicians, right or left, really don't give a damn about our troops... they really only value our troops as tools of partisan policies or for photo ops. Between the incumbent president and his would-be replacements, only one has served in uniform or had a son or daughter serve in uniform?... We've seen President Bush dressed up in a flight suit, grinning like Alfred E. Neuman among troops who desperately want to believe in their commander-in-chief. We've seen Sen. Hillary Clinton do drive-bys in Iraq- just long enough to make political statements, pose with the troops, then...

How badly would an American pullout affect Iraq?  According to the nation’s foreign minister, all of the security gains would evaporate and bring the country back to the brink of civil war.  Hoshyar Zebari spoke to the Associated Press to make sure Americans know exactly what is at stake: Iraq’s foreign minister said Tuesday that he believes his country has averted a civil war after five years of “tears and blood,” and warned that an abrupt U.S. troop withdrawal would be disastrous.Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told The Associated Press that mistakes had been made by all sides but Iraq has...

The Los Angeles Times editorial board not only contradicts its previous editorials on Iraq, today's editorial contradicts itself. After pushing for withdrawal from Iraq on the basis that the US and Iraqis had made no real political progress, today they argue that we should withdraw because political progress has undeniably begun. And in conclusion, they wind up arguing for exactly the opposite: It has taken nine bloody and difficult months, but the deployment of 30,000 additional U.S. troops appears at last to have brought not just a lull in the sectarian fighting in Iraq, but the first tangible steps toward...

UNCOMMITTED 2008. Fred Thompson should not drop out. He should, instead, campaign for an Open Convention, allowing every voter a choice. America’s Primary System needs to be challenged. Since Fred Thompson’s address to his supporters early Saturday evening, his campaign has been silent, a silence becoming louder by the hour. Precious time on the ground in Florida is being wasted as Senator Thompson ponders his next step. The pressure and crocodile tears from competitors follows his sharing of a weak third place with Mitt Romney in South Carolina. The networks have already removed him from their lists, though it was...

BAGHDAD (AP) — Attacks against British and Iraqi forces have plunged by 90 percent in southern Iraq since London withdrew its troops from the main city of Basra, the commander of British forces there said. The presence of British forces in downtown Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, was the single largest instigator of violence, Maj. Gen. Graham Binns told reporters Thursday on a visit to Baghdad's Green Zone. "We thought, 'If 90 percent of the violence is directed at us, what would happen if we stepped back?'" Binns said. Britain's 5,000 troops moved out of a former Saddam Hussein palace at...

President Bush has endorsed General David Petraeus's recommendation to begin withdrawing 30,000 U.S. troops from Iraq by next summer. Yet the drawdown would only restore troop levels to where they were before the surge began in January 2007. In the final months of 2006, debate in Washington centered on how fast a reduction from pre-surge levels could occur. The Iraq Study Group recommended that approximately half of the 130,000 troops then in Iraq be withdrawn by early 2008. In marked contrast to that and similar proposals, President Bush is now endorsing a step that would mean a return to the...

...might it be just plausible then, that - at least some of these legislators and their allies - in their heart of hearts and their private moments regard the "...brave American service men and women" fighting in Iraq in terms similar to those expressed by the progressive-liberal-Democratic-leaning journalist Seymour Hersh, when he commented that - "If Americans knew the full extent of U.S. criminal conduct, they would receive returning Iraqi veterans as they did Vietnam veterans..."

"This is John Smith, reporting live from the beaches of Normandy, where Allied troops have launched a massive invasion aiming to defeat the Axis." "John, this is Bob Brown back in the studio. Can you tell us when General Eisenhower thinks the first Allied troops can start to come home?" "What the . . ?" OK, the surge isn't D-Day. But surely an important part of what we are looking for in General Petraeus's report today is his assessment of the prospects for success in Iraq, right? Wrong -- if by "we" you include CNN. According to it's 9 A.M....

Investors withdraw $55bn from hedge funds By James Quinn,Wall Street Correspondent Last Updated: 12:30am BST 05/09/2007 Hedge funds suffered their worst month of redemptions in seven years in July after some $55bn (£27.4bn) was withdrawn by jittery investors concerned by lowered returns amid the global credit crunch. The sector, until recently seen as one of the most invincible within the financial community, took a heavy battering as investors redeemed funds when the markets began to fall. advertisement In total, withdrawals for all hedge funds totalled $55bn in July, based on data from the TrimTabs and BarclayHedge reports, with inflows in...

Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said that after reviewing a draft of the Government Accountability Office report — which has not yet been made public — policy officials "made some factual corrections" and "offered some suggestions on a few of the actual grades" assigned by the GAO. We have provided the GAO with information which we believe will lead them to conclude that a few of the benchmark grades should be upgraded from `not met' to `met,'" Morrell said. He declined to elaborate or to spell out which of the benchmark grades the Pentagon was disputing. A bar was set...

Last Updated: Monday, 27 August 2007, 11:10 GMT 12:10 UK France ready to apologise to Iraq Mr Kouchner said there was strong support for Mr Maliki to quit French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner has offered to apologise to Iraq if he had meddled in its affairs. The statement comes a day after Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Maliki demanded an official apology because Mr Kouchner had suggested he resign. Meanwhile President Nicolas Sarkozy has called for a clear timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops from Iraq. He was making what was described as his first major foreign policy speech since...

Those who think the United States can withdraw from Iraq with no risk to our troops aren't living in the real world. On a playground someone who doesn't want to play any more can use his hands to make the letter "T", call "time out" and say he wants to go home. Iraq isn't a playground. It's a combat zone and withdrawing from a combat zone is difficult to do without getting killed. The first to leave might get out safely, but the last ones would have little hope. General Douglas MacArthur was able to withdraw only a portion of...

And it is under the weight of the aforementioned circumstances that the currant administration, or any that follow, will have to fight and prevail in wars very similar to that now being waged in Iraq. They may be able to do many things worse or better than the ways in which they are being done now, or have been done in the recent past, but, it is unlikely that they will be able - or willing - to change the culture sufficiently - and/or quickly - enough for our nation and its liberties to survive the currant conflict with the...

A call by Puerto Rico's governor for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq earned a standing ovation Saturday from a conference of more than 4,000 National Guardsmen. Gov. Anibal Acevedo Vila said the U.S. administration has ''no new strategy and no signs of success'' and that prolonging the war would needlessly put guardsmen in harm's way. Acevedo, a Democrat, has called on Washington to withdraw troops from Iraq in the past, but has not been a vocal critic of the war. Col. David Carrion Baralt, the Guard's top official in the U.S. Caribbean territory, said Acevedo received a standing ovation. The...

By the co-author if the June 7, 2007 NYT op-ed Defeat’s Killing Fields. "Not everybody would regard it as a badge of hon-our to be cited favourably by President Bush in a speech about Iraq, but it happened to me last week when Bush warned that the consequences of leaving Iraq precipitously could be a bloodbath even worse than happened in Indochina after the American defeat in 1975. Alas, I think he is right." ******************** "I have always thought that those of us who opposed the American war in Indochina should be extremely humble in the face of the appalling...

Aug. 23, 2007 - The Soviet Union was in its final days of existence when I visited Vietnam in late December of 1991. The cold war was about to end forever with the collapse of one of the two adversaries that had kept it going for 40-odd years. A lot had changed in Vietnam, too, I discovered during my trip. The coziness between Moscow and Hanoi, once comrades within the Soviet bloc, had curdled into mutual hatred. Throughout the country, but especially in the North, the Vietnamese had come to despise the large resident Russian population for its cheap spending...