Update: Contact House Minority Leader Boehner at Capitol switchboard: (800) 828 0498
Direct line: (202) 225-6205
Time is up for Boehner---Duncan calls him out on what he promised! Boehner told CNN it was the last, best chance in Iraq 90 days ago today...Today is the day...
Q: How long can you and your membership give the Iraqi military before you say, you know what? You're not doing your job.
BOEHNER: I think it will be rather clear in the next 60 to 90 days as to whether this plan is going to work. And, again, that's why we need to have close oversight, so that we just don't look up 60 or 90 days from now and realize that -- that this plan is not working. We need to know, as we -- as we're -- we move through these benchmarks, that the Iraqis are doing what they have to do.
Let's take a look at what's happened in Iraq last week---shall we? It's a clusterf*&k!
Military planners have abandoned the idea that standing up Iraqi troops will enable American soldiers to start coming home soon and now believe that U.S. troops will have to defeat the insurgents and secure control of troubled provinces. Training Iraqi troops, which had been the cornerstone of the Bush administration's Iraq policy since 2005, has dropped in priority, officials in Baghdad and Washington said.
CNN:
Gunmen shot and killed 23 members of an ancient religious sect in northern Iraq after stopping their bus and separating out followers of other faiths, while car bombings in the capital killed at least another 20 people.
AP:
A suicide car bomb struck a restaurant in Iraq on Monday, killing at least 19 people and wounding 35, police said. The attack occurred on a highway near Ramadi, a city that is 70 miles west of Baghdad, a policeman said on condition of anonymity out of concern for his own safety. Three suicide bombers launched attacks in different parts of Iraq on Monday, killing at least 27 people and wounding nearly 60 on Monday, police and politicians said.
Pentagon lawyers abruptly blocked mid-level active-duty military officers from speaking Thursday during a closed-door House Armed Services Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee briefing about their personal experiences working with Iraqi security forces. The Pentagon's last-minute refusal to allow the officers' presentations surprised panel members and congressional aides, who are in the middle of an investigation into the effort to train and organize Iraqi forces.
American military commanders in Baghdad are trying a radical new strategy to quell the widening sectarian violence by building a 12-foot-high, three-mile-long wall separating a historic Sunni enclave from Shiite neighborhoods... A doctor in Adhamiya, Abu Hassan, said the wall would transform the residents into caged animals.
After an hour of bench-pressing a log weighing several hundred pounds during Army Special Forces selection training in February 2006, five soldiers lying on their backs at Fort Bragg, N.C., reacted quickly to the next order: "Drop back!" So quickly, in fact, that when they dropped the log, it landed on Spc. Paul Thurman's head. "I shook for a moment, and then went limp," Thurman told Military Times. "I was unconscious for a minute or two, and then I went back to training." An MRI later showed that Thurman had lesions on the right parietal lobe of his brain, a condition that led to a "don't deploy" order — which the Army violated, according to Thurman. Worse, rather than providing compassionate understanding of the symptoms associated with traumatic brain injury, he said leaders at Fort Carson, Colo., have harassed him, refused him medication and pushed for an Article 15.
AP:
The 65-year-old Sunni sheik was the only one who campaigned to take the helm of the Fallujah city council after three previous chairmen were gunned down by suspected Sunni insurgents. Sami Abdul-Amir al-Jumaili was eager for the job and once he got it, promised to improve services and work with the Americans to ease traffic-clogging checkpoints in the city with an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 people. But Abdul-Amir died Saturday as his predecessors had - in a hail of bullets. It was a blow to recent U.S. optimism about efforts to tame Anbar province - a vast desert area that includes Fallujah - after alliances were struck with influential Sunni sheiks once arrayed against American-led forces.
A U.S. Army officer said Sunday that the coalition has no technology capable of detecting all suicide bombers before they strike, and that the only solution is for Iraqi forces, government officials and civilians to work together to stop the terrorist cells that plan such attacks while hiding in populated areas. (h/t C&lers for some of the articles)