Do Not be Surprised If We See
American Troops Pulled Out of Both
Iraq and Afghanistan by the end of 2011!
September 12, 2009
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
Begin Excerpt from New York Times via World News
September 11, 2009
Of all the countries in the Middle East, none is better suited for guerilla warfare and terrorist attacks than Afghanistan. The mighty Soviet discovered that in its effort to establish control of Afghanistan
I have consistently contended in all my blogs and prophecy updates the impossibility of sustaining an American style democratic government in an Islamic country in the Middle East. I advocated the overthrow of Saddam himself, a quick withdrawal, and a policy of letting the Kurds, Shiites,
and Sunnis slug it out for supremacy after we pulled out. I was told that would cause “instability” in the Middle East if we did it in that manner. Good Grief! Instability in the Middle East has reigned supreme since 1948. The quicker we get out of Iraq and Afghanistan the better!
With the fantastic deficit in the trillions we now face, and the sour pickle America is being forced to eat in the form of political corruption, massive bailouts, insane shifts of money, chaotic moves toward socialism, czars, ACORN improprieties, outright lies by politicians, and growing hatred between ethnic groups, surely it will dawn on Washington politicians we need to bring our troops home, and stop trying to play the role of world policeman in trying to accomplish mission impossible. Our deficit is not helped by large military expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the deaths of our military personnel will not change the eventual outcome in the Middle East.
I admit my viewpoint is tied to the fact I believe that God’s Word indicates what must happen in what I believe is the near future. So, admittedly, I must confess my mindset is religiously extremely biased and opinionated, in that I do not believe we can go anything to stop what I will write about in the next paragraph.
America cannot stop the coming Middle East War. America cannot stop the final battle of Armageddon. American cannot stop God’s horrific coming judgment on the earth. America cannot stop the Second Advent of Jesus Christ. But men and women can turn to God in repentance of their ways, and they can put their faith in Jesus Christ, whose Second Advent is not a far distant event.
We might as well bring them home because we can’t change what the Scriptures say MUST happen sooner or later. So, believing what I believe, THE SOONER THE BETTER.
Acts 20:20,21 – And how I kept back nothing that was profitable unto you, but have shewed you, and have taught you publickly, and from house to house, [21] Testifying both to the Jews, and also to the Greeks, repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ.
Revelation 5:9 – And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation;
Luke 21:25-28 – And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; [26] Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken. [27] And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. [28] And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh.
Begin Excerpt from New York Times via World news
Obama Faces Doubts From Democrats on Afghanistan
By ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON — The leading Senate Democrat on military matters said Thursday that he was against sending more American combat troops to Afghanistan until the United States speeded up the training and equipping of more Afghan security forces.
The comments by the senator, Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who is the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, illustrate the growing skepticism President Obama is facing in his own party as the White House decides whether to commit more deeply to a war that has begun losing public support, even as American commanders acknowledge that the situation on the ground has deteriorated.
Senator Levin’s comments, made in an interview and in the draft of a speech he will deliver Friday, are significant because his stature on military matters gives him the ability to sway fellow lawmakers, and his pivotal committee position provides a platform for vetting Mr. Obama’s major decisions on troops.
Underscoring the increasing unease, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said earlier on Thursday that the president would face opposition if he sought to fulfill an expected request from Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, for more American combat troops.
“I don’t think there is a great deal of support for sending more troops to Afghanistan in the country or in Congress,” Ms. Pelosi told reporters, emphasizing that she was eager to see a report due from the White House in two weeks on benchmarks to measure the success of the administration’s six-month-old strategy.
The White House has begun to indicate that it could be weeks or perhaps much longer before Mr. Obama decides whether to send more troops to Afghanistan.
Administration officials say they want to do a complete review of the effectiveness of the last troop increase, which will put the American presence at 68,000 troops by year’s end, an all-time high. They are also digesting a strategic assessment of the Afghan mission that General McChrystal has submitted.
A delay on deciding whether to increase American troop levels would also have the political advantage of pushing down the road a split within Mr. Obama’s party while he is trying to build coalitions for overhauling the health care system.
In the telephone interview on Thursday, Mr. Levin said he was not ruling out sending more troops eventually, but rather insisted that the United States try again on a years-old project: finding a way to expand and accelerate the training of the Afghan security forces.
“I just think we should hold off on a commitment to send more combat troops until these additional steps to strengthen the Afghan security forces are put in motion,” he said.
Mr. Levin, who returned from a trip to Afghanistan just last week, said that the Afghan national army should be increased to 240,000 troops by 2012 from a current goal of 134,000 by next year, and that Afghan national police forces should grow to 160,000 officers from 96,800 in the same period. These troop goals are consistent with General McChrystal’s planning but would be reached a year earlier, the senator said.
Mr. Levin acknowledged that more American trainers would be needed to meet that goal, but he said that he did not know how many. In the most recent deployment of 21,000 American troops, about 4,000 were trainers. The last of those forces will not be in place until November.
In counterinsurgency operations, there are sometimes few distinctions between trainers, support troops and combat forces, a fact that Mr. Levin said he recognized.
He said the United States should send Afghan forces more equipment — including rifles, bullets and trucks — and shift more equipment to Afghanistan from stocks now in Iraq.
Finally, Mr. Levin said the administration needed to adopt a plan to separate low- and midlevel insurgents from hard-core Taliban fighters and commanders. He said the current American efforts to do this had been tentative and halfhearted.
Mr. Lev in, who said he
intended to outline his proposal in a speech on the Senate floor on Friday, said he explained his concerns in meetings on Wednesday with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Mr. Gates has indicated that he is willing to consider a request for more forces. Separate from any troop request forwarded by the commanders in Afghanistan, Mr. Gates has said he will press for more troops and equipment to protect American, allied and Afghan forces from improvised explosive devices, which are the roadside bombs that have been the leading cause of death and injuries in Afghanistan.
Troops for the mission to counter roadside bombs, which potentially could number in the thousands, would include route- clearance teams and ordnance-disposal units — some of the most dangerous jobs in the military — as well as intelligence analysts and medical personnel. They would be in addition to a substantial increase in the number of armored troop transport vehicles sent to Afghanistan.
While Mr. Levin traveled to Afghanistan last week with two other colleagues, the lawmakers did not agree on all positions.
Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, said in an interview that he agreed with the need to speed the training and equipping of the Afghan security forces and to reintegrate any Taliban fighters willing to recognize the Afghan government.
Mr. Reed said he was waiting for the analysis by General McChrystal on possible troop increases before making up his mind. “What the president has to do is continually point to the fact that Al Qaeda is operating in the border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan,” he said. “Given the chance to reconstitute themselves and operate in those border spaces, they’ll pose a threat to the United States.”
Representative Adam Smith, a Washington State Democrat on the House Armed Services and Intelligence Committees who traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the past week, said he also wanted more information before deciding. “But my general position is we have to give General McChrystal what he needs to get the job done,” he said.
Other Democrats said Mr. Obama and his military commanders needed to make a more persuasive case to sell the administration’s Afghanistan strategy.
“They have a relatively short period of time to show that we’re on a path that’s going to demonstrate positive results,” said Representative Earl Pomeroy, a North Dakota Democrat who visited Afghanistan last week. “This is our last best chance to change things around.”
Thom Shanker contributed reporting.
Begin Excerpt from The Independent via World News
1 in 2 believe Afghan war not making UK safer
By Craig Woodhouse, Press Association
Friday, 11 September 2009
Almost half the country believes the war in Afghanistan is doing nothing to reduce the threat of terrorism on Britain’s streets, according to a poll out today.
On the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks in the US, 49 per cent of people interviewed in a Populus survey for ITV News said military operations in Afghanistan were not reducing the terror threat in the UK.
A further 27 per cent said the war was reducing the threat of terrorism but did not justify the loss of UK service personnel, with just 17 per cent saying that Britain’s continuing military presence in the country makes a terrorist attack less likely and goes some way to justifying British
military deaths.
The poll suggests a growing lack of support for the war in Afghanistan following a bloody summer which has seen the British military death toll since the start of operations in October 2001 rise to 213.
Gordon Brown’s official spokesman said the Prime Minister had used a speech last week to set out Britain’s objectives in Afghanistan and would continue to emphasise the importance of operations to Britain’s security.
“We continue to communicate that and get people to understand that this comes back to the overriding issue as we all know of ensuring that the streets of the UK are safer as a result,” the spokesman said.
Populus interviewed a random sample of 1,005 adults by telephone between 4 and 6 September. Interviews were conducted across the country and results were weighted to be representative of all adults.
Begin Excerpt from the UK Guardian
Obama’s impossible ambition
The US president’s intention is to bridge the divide between Israel and Palestine is bound to fail
Benny Morris
The Guardian
Friday, 11 September 2009
President Obama’s efforts to revive the Middle East peace process are bound to fail because of the unbridgeable divide separating Israel’s and Palestine’s political goals.
The minor problems are Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s unwillingness to partition Jerusalem and enable the Palestinians to constitute the eastern half of the city as their capital, and his reluctance to freeze the settlement enterprise in the West Bank. The major problem is that the two-headed Palestinian national movement is averse to sharing Palestine with the Jews and endorsing a solution based on two states for two peoples.
Hamas, which won the Palestinian national elections in 2006, says so bluntly.
Its charter of 1988 explicitly calls for Israel’s destruction and assures the believers that “Islam will destroy Israel”. It repeatedly compares Israel to the medieval crusader kingdoms and states that its end will be identical.
(This comparison, incidentally, has been a constant in Arab discourse on Zionism. In September 1947, the Arab League’s secretary general, Abdul Rahman Azzam, told Zionist emissaries: “Centuries ago, the crusaders established themselves in our midst against our will, and in 200 years we ejected them.”)
Fatah too has a constitution, never revised since the 1960s, which advocates Israel’s destruction. During the 1990s, Fatah – then the leading component of the Palestinian national movement – agreed in negotiations with Israel to produce a revised Palestinian National Charter that deleted the clauses calling for Israel’s destruction. No such revised charter was ever produced, though these clauses were ostensibly revoked by a gathering of Palestinian notables in Gaza in 1998.
Fatah’s head, the president of
the Palestine National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, in effect continues to promote the same rejectionist message. He publicly hails, to propitiate Washington, “the two-state solution”, but when pressed declines to endorse it. Yes, one state for Palestinian Arabs and another for whoever lives in Israel, but not a “Jewish state”. He seems to be hoping that Israel’s 20% Arab minority, with birth rates double those of the Jews, will overtake the Jews demographically; or that Israel will accede to Palestinian demands to allow the return of refugees. There are around five million refugees (nine-tenths are the descendants of the 1948 refugees). Israel has 5.5 million Jewish citizens. A mass repatriation coupled with the incumbent Arabs would turn Israel instantly into an Arab-majority state.
Hence Abbas’s unwillingness to recognise Israel as a “Jewish state”.
The Jewish national movement, Zionism, and the Palestinian Arabs’ national movement enjoyed common starting points but, over time, followed radically different trajectories. Both initially sought to establish a state of their own over all Palestine.
This was the Zionists’ aim from the movement’s inception in the early 1880s until the late 1930s. All of Palestine, the ancient land of Israel, rightfully would be theirs.
But the Arab revolt of 1936-39 and the resurgence of antisemitism in Europe persuaded the Zionist leaders that they would have to make do with only part of Palestine.
They accepted, in principle, the 1937 Peel commission partition proposal and, a decade later, the UN General Assembly partition resolution; thus, since the 1990s, they have reaffirmed the principle of two states for two peoples.
But from the beginning, the Palestinian national movement saw the struggle as a zero-sum game. As Palestinian notables told the King-Crane commission in 1919, “We will push the Zionists into the sea, or they will send us back into the desert”; there could be no partition.
This was to be the stance of the Palestinian national movement’s first major leader, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and of its second, Yasser Arafat. (His only concession to the realities of power was that Israel would have to be destroyed not in one fell swoop but in stages.) And this remains the goal to this day. The rejection of Israel as “a Jewish state” and the unwavering insistence on the refugee “right of return” are the “tells”.
Obama will press Netanyahu on settlements and achieve some sort of freeze.
But once the negotiations begin, the issue of Jerusalem will loudly surface. And then the refugees. And Israel will insist that Abbas – who does not represent Hamas and perhaps only a minority of Palestinians – accept the Clinton-Barak formulation of an “end to the conflict” and an “end to all claims”. And Abbas will demand Israeli acceptance of the “right of return” – the demographic battering ram designed to subvert Israel’s Jewish character and existence. And the talks will founder, possibly followed by a new round of violence.
I fear that history is against Obama.
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