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Morning, y’all, Jebediah Murphy here, with some of that old truth thing. Good news bad news (Yahoo News)
The threat from al-Qaida in several former strongholds in Baghdad has been significantly reduced, but criminals who have established “almost mafia-like presence” in some areas pose a new threat, the top U.S. commander in Iraq said Sunday.
Gen. David Petraeus stressed, however, the terror organization remained “a very dangerous and very lethal enemy” and said the military would maintain pressure to keep them from regrouping.
“Its presence has been significantly reduced and its activity and freedom of action have been degraded,” Petraeus told a small group of reporters at a U.S. base near Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, 80 miles north of Baghdad.
But he said the reduced threat from al-Qaida had given way to nonsectarian crimes — kidnapping, corruption in the oil industry and extortion.
“As the terrible extremist threat of al-Qaida has been reduced somewhat, there is in some Iraqi neighborhoods actually a focus on crime and on extortion that has been ongoing and kidnapping cells and what is almost a mafia-like presence in certain areas,” he said.
Now, I understand that this AP “good news from Iraq, however…..” story is meant to say that as one thing gets better, something else truly sucks. Consider, though, when it comes to replacing Islamic extremists with commonplace criminals, these are things that our military is not going to have to get involved in, as we are more concerned with the former, and the Iraqi military and police can deal with the latter. Meaning that we are one step closer to being able to leave with a win. Which would piss of liberals beyond belief.
Heck, in Ramadi they had a parade by the good guys, something they couldn’t have done just last year.
And why no watch the lastest Freedom Journal?
