--- In [email protected], [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > In a message dated 7/31/07 11:12:22 P.M. Central Daylight Time, > [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > > Parliament headed into a monthlong summer recess on Monday, > halting work despite calls from the United States and the prime > minister for lawmakers to shorten their break to push through > important legislation. > > The decision to take off the month of August almost surely > eliminates hopes that the 275-member Council of Representatives > will pass laws sought by American officials as evidence that > the country is making progress toward stability... > > The Iraqi Parliament was originally scheduled for a two month > recess. They shortened it to one month, the same amount of time > our Congress takes off each summer to "listen" to their > constituents at home.
The U.S. isn't in the middle of a civil war with a largely nonfunctional/dysfunctional government. And U.S. troops don't get to take a month off; they have to continue to fight and die in the blistering heat on their extended and repeated deployments, whether the parliament for which they're trying to provide breathing room so it can get something done is around to actually get things done or has taken off for a month of rest and relaxation out of the heat. Rome wasn't built in a day > and it took over a hundred years for us to guarantee the rights > of freed slaves and give women the right to vote. The Iraqis are now down to one to two hours of electricity per day, and: "roughly four million Iraqis, many of them children, are in dire need of food aid;...70 percent of the country lacks access to adequate water supplies, up from 50 percent in 2003; and...90 percent of the country's hospitals lack basic medical and surgical supplies....43 percent of Iraqis live in 'absolute poverty,' earning less than $1 a day....Unemployment and hunger are particularly acute among the estimated two million people displaced internally from their homes by violence, many of whom are jobless, homeless and largely left on their own...." The surge as > you said earlier was meant to give the Iraqi government and > it's people more security and breathing room. It has just > been in place and effect a couple of months and showing > promise but that is not enough for those that called it a > failure before it ever started, for political purposes. Nobody called it a failure before it started. Many thought it was highly unlikely to be successful, including top commanders in Iraq, who were forthwith replaced by Bush. As to whether there's any progress, according to Michael O'Hanlon's testimony yesterday before a House subcommittee, "progress has only been against aqi [Al Qaeda in Irag],...sectarian violence and the civil war is as bad as ever, and...the current strategy will probably fail." (I'm quoting Matthew Yglesias, who attended the hearing, on O'Hanlon's testimony.) O'Hanlon was strongly in favor of the war. The Democrats have set them selves up that > they need it to fail to stay in power. Bullshit. The war is already a failure. The Democrats don't want it to be an even *bigger* failure.
