· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 12 — A bleak top-secret report by the Central Intelligence Agency suggests that the situation in Iraq is approaching a crucial turning point, with ordinary Iraqis losing faith in American-led occupation forces and in the United States-appointed Iraqi Governing Council.
The report, sent to Washington on Monday by the C.I.A.'s Baghdad station chief, suggests that the situation is creating a more fertile environment for the anti-American insurgency. Officials said the report was adding to the sense of urgency behind the administration's reappraisal of its policies in Iraq.
The officials said that the report, dated Nov. 10, had been explicitly endorsed by L. Paul Bremer III, the top American official in Iraq, and that the warnings it spelled out had been a factor behind Mr. Bremer's abrupt return to Washington for consultations this week.
posted on November 13, 2003 07:12:34 AM new
From Vietnam, A History by Stanley Karnow
A common assumption was that "antiwar" signified "pro-peace." But that was not always the case. On the contrary, most Americans were dispirited because they felt that President Johnson was not prosecuting the war dynamically enough. Their attitude, summed up succinctly, seemed to say: It was an error for us to have gotten involved in Vietnam in the first place. But now that we're there, let's win---or get out"
p.546
George Soros__Bush's Inflated Sense of Supremacy
“I see a parallel between the Bush administration's pursuit of American supremacy and a boom-bust process or bubble in the stock market. Bubbles do not grow out of thin air. They have a solid basis in reality but reality is distorted by misconception. In this case, the dominant position of the US is the reality, the pursuit of supremacy the misconception. Reality can reinforce the misconception but eventually the gap between reality and its false interpretation becomes unsustainable. During the self-reinforcing phase, the misconception may be tested and reinforced. This widens the gap leading to an eventual reversal. The later it comes, the more devastating the consequences."
_______Amount Soros Gave in 1996 ___U.S. Aid in 1996
1 Russia _____$24,198,000 _______ $108,140,000
2 Hungary ___ $15,769,000 _______$15,096,000
3 Ukraine _____$15,323,000 _______$141,100,000
4 Yugoslavia _ $11,180,000 _____0
5 Albania _____$10,219,000 _______$19,900,000
6 Romania ____$10,180,000 _______$28,680,000
7 Bulgaria _____$9,326,000 _______$27,865,000
8 Bosnia _____ $8,869,000 _______ $245,294,000
9 Poland _____$7,568,000 _______$44,445,000
10 Belarus ___$6,019,000 _______ $4,600,000
Sources: Open Society Institute; U.S. Agency for International Development
