{"id":1979,"date":"2008-03-28T04:40:44","date_gmt":"2008-03-28T09:40:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2008\/03\/28\/scenario-iii\/"},"modified":"2008-03-28T09:48:18","modified_gmt":"2008-03-28T14:48:18","slug":"scenario-iii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2008\/03\/28\/scenario-iii\/","title":{"rendered":"Scenario III: Circumstantaial Evidence"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\"><strong>Scenario I: <\/strong>Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Malaki using his Iraqi Army engages the rogue elements of Cleric Moqtada al-Sadr&#8217;s Mahdi Army setting off a full scale Shiite Civil War in Iraq.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\"><strong>Scenario II:<\/strong> Cleric Moqtada al-Sadr&#8217;s Mahdi Army engages the Iraqi Army of Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Malaki setting off a full scale Shiite Civil War in Iraq.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\"><font color=\"#400040\"><strong>Scenario III: American President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney [recent visitor to Iraq] initiate active hostilities against Cleric Moqtada al-Sadr&#8217;s Mahdi Army claiming it is an operation of Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Malaki and his  Iraqi Army in hopes of bringing the Iraq War to some successful end &#8211; re-electing a Republican President in the U.S., insuring the oil flow is in&nbsp; the hands of &quot;friendlys,&quot;&nbsp; and finding a place for themselves in history.<\/strong><\/font><\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"center\"><strong><u>What is the evidence that Scenario III has to be included in the possibilities<\/u>?<\/strong><\/div>\n<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"240\" height=\"180\" border=\"1\" src=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/images\/oil_well_animation_5.gif\" \/><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\">Last week, <font color=\"#400040\"><strong>Vice President Dick Cheney<\/strong><\/font>, Senator John McCain, and Senator Joe Lieberman were in Iraq for week-long visits. <\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\"><font color=\"#400040\"><strong>Basra, the center of the fighting, is the oil export hub for Iraq&#8217;s oil.<\/strong><\/font> <\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\">Earlier this week, John McCain made a foreign policy speech <font color=\"#400040\"><strong>reaffirming his committment to the War<\/strong><\/font> in Iraq.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\">General <font color=\"#400040\"><strong>David Petraeus is scheduled to go before Congress<\/strong><\/font> to discuss dropping troop levels in Iraq [and Bush is signalling that we aren&#8217;t going to do that].<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\">When this melee started, Dana Perino come out with this fanciful interpretation that the hostilities were evidence of the strength of the Iraqi Army and that the &quot;surge was working&quot;:<\/div>\n<blockquote>\n<div align=\"justify\"><strong>DANA PERINO:<\/strong> This is an Iraqi led and Iraqi initiated operation. And this is what we&rsquo;ve been wanting to see the Iraqis do is take on more responsibility&hellip;<br \/>                   The surge created new opportunities and in fact created many more Iraqi Security Forces&hellip; <br \/>                 So I would characterize it as a bold decision &mdash; precisely what the critics have asked to see in Iraq, more movement by the Iraqi Security Forces.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\"> On the third day [yesterday], President George W. Bush made this same claim in a speech to soldiers at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. <\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\">Last week, Karl Rove was on O&#8217;Reilly saying a prelude to such a scenario:<\/div>\n<blockquote>\n<div align=\"justify\">&quot;<em>&hellip; the creation of the democracy in the historic center of the Middle East with <font color=\"#400040\"><strong>the third-largest oil reserves in the world<\/strong><\/font>. If we have a functioning democracy in Iraq, that&rsquo;s an ally in the war on terror, a counterweight to the mullahs of Iran and to Assad in Syria, this will create a very hopeful center of reform and energy for reform throughout the Middle East.<\/em>&quot;<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\">Today, we read in the <font color=\"#003366\"><strong>Washington Post<\/strong><\/font>:<\/div>\n<blockquote>\n<div align=\"center\"><strong>U.S. Armor Forces Join Offensive In Baghdad Against Sadr Militia<\/strong><\/div>\n<div align=\"center\"><strong><u>Americans Appear <\/u><u>To Take the Lead<\/u> As Iraqi Units Wait<\/strong><\/div>\n<p>            <\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\">U.S. forces in armored vehicles battled Mahdi Army fighters Thursday in Sadr City, the vast Shiite stronghold in eastern Baghdad, as an offensive to quell party-backed militias entered its third day. <u><strong>Iraqi army and police units appeared to be largely holding to the outskirts of the area as American troops took the lead in the fighting<\/strong><\/u>.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\">It is a <font color=\"#400040\"><strong>classic Bush\/Cheney<\/strong><\/font> ploy to do something like this.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\">I am not generally a paranoid person seeing plots behind the scenes when they aren&#8217;t there. <\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<div>It&#8217;s my story and I&#8217;m sticking to it&#8230;<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scenario I: Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Malaki using his Iraqi Army engages the rogue elements of Cleric Moqtada al-Sadr&#8217;s Mahdi Army setting off a full scale Shiite Civil War in Iraq. Scenario II: Cleric Moqtada al-Sadr&#8217;s Mahdi Army engages the Iraqi Army of Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Malaki setting off a full scale Shiite Civil [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1979\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}