Great progress is being made in Iraq though, conditions in Iraq are improving and insurgents being defeated, see this link for a very long list of progress reports:
 http://www.midwestheroes.com/docs/progress/

A long list of "progress" almost entirely sourced from asssertions made by the US military or government. Not exactly an unbiased and independant source of information...

"Journalist", that link is a site paid for by the PNAC Regime, nothing but more of the Pentagon, multi-billion dollar Propaganda effort against their own citizens.

Iraq is a mess, and getting messier everyday. Every small success in Iraq is a result of good people working towards a goal the criminal neo-fascists who started this war speak loud, while pursuing the exact opposite.

Hi Journalist are you 'Concerned' in disguise?

Anyway, great progress is being made in Iraq. More and more iraqis are being killed every day, and if we're lucky we'll have pumped all the oil out of that country for a nice tidy profit before the iraqis can get their shit together, unite, and kick us out. We've created a generation of muslims who hate us, who'll continue to bomb us, so that means like, TOTAL WAR for 100 years. How cool is that? With any luck, they'll get so pissed off that they blow up the Senate in Washington, then our glorious, perfect leader George Bush can take on emergency powers, and declare himself God Emperor of Planet America.

Things are going perfectly to plan.

Iraqi Women Under Siege: Read Report!
CODEPINK Women for Peace

April 20, 2006

Dear CODEPINK Activist,

The Iraqi women who toured the United States last month told us that they were amazed by how misinformed many Americans were about the lives of Iraqi women. Most Americans thought that before the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Iraqi women were sitting at home oppressed, heavily veiled and secluded, and that thanks to the US invasion, they are now liberated. This is what the Bush([search]) administration would like us to believe, but after listening to our Iraqi friends many people now know better. To further shed light on the true status of Iraqi women, CODEPINK has released an in-depth report Iraqi Women Under Siege ( www.codepinkalert.org/downloads/IraqiWomenReport.pdf ). We encourage you to download this report, read it and pass it on to others.

The report shows that from 1958 to the 1990s, Iraq([search]) provided more rights and freedoms for women and girls than most of its neighbors. Though Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial government and 12 years of severe sanctions reduced these opportunities, Iraqi women were active in all aspects of their society. After the occupation, with the exception of women in Iraqi Kurdistan, women’s daily lives have been reduced to a mere struggle for survival.

– Women walking on the streets face random violence, assault, kidnapping or death at the hands of suicide bombers, occupying forces, Iraqi police([search]), radical religious groups, and local thugs.

– Women trying to raise families in the midst of this chaos find themselves beset by a lack of electricity and clean water, and a dearth of social services like decent schools and health care.

– Unemployment among women has skyrocketed. Of the 260,000 reconstruction contracts in Iraq, less than 1,000 have gone to female contractors. Before the occupation 70% of the public workforce, by far the largest employer in Iraq, were women.

– The constant violence has trapped women and their children — particularly their daughters — inside the homes. Fewer girls go to school and illiteracy among girls is on the rise.

– Though 25% of the seats in the National Assembly are reserved for women, the real power in Iraq is increasingly in the hands of Islamists determined to move Iraq from a secular society towards a theocracy. They are forcing women to wear veils and are trying to curtail women’s rights in areas such as marriage, divorce, and inheritance.

But as we learned from our amazing delegation, Iraqi women are not mere victims, passively watching the destruction of their lives and the fabric of their communities. As delegate Nadje Al-Ali writes in our report, "Despite the chaos and violence that restricts their activities and mobility, the women struggle on, meeting in each other’s houses, establishing refuges where women can learn skills to make a living, providing free health care, legal advice and literacy and computer classes. Iraqi women also organize conferences, sit-ins and demonstrations to get their voices heard and to influence the political process."

CODEPINK will continue to support the efforts of Iraqi women, and to push for the withdrawal of foreign troops so that the Iraqi people can determine their own future. Our next major CODEPINK action to end the occupation and support Iraqi women will be a 24-hour Mother’s Day vigil in front of the White House in Washington DC from May 13-14. Click here for details ( www.codepinkalert.org/article.php?id=894 ). Join actress Susan Sarandon, peace mom Cindy Sheehan, Nobel Prize winner Jody Williams, doctor/clown Patch Adams, as well as Iraqi and Iranian women, for an inspiring weekend that will include a performance of the historic antiwar play Lysistrata, an evening concert, antiwar films, activist trainings, an interfaith service, writing letters to Laura Bush ( www.codepinkalert.org/article.php?id=878 ), and a pink pajama party.

Whether or not you can join us, please consider making a donation to help us bring Iraqi and Iranian women, as well as US military families against the war, to speak at the DC vigil and to travel to communities throughout the US (  https://secure.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizations/codep
ink/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=1434 ... ).

For the sake of our Iraqi sisters, let’s educate ourselves, spread the truth and redouble our efforts to build a more peaceful world.

Sisters in solidarity,
Allison, Dana, Farida, Gael, Jodie, Medea, Nancy, Rae and Tiffany

P.S. Don’t forget to forward this email to your friends and help spread the word!

www.williambowles.info/iraq/2006/0406/iraqi_women.html

The Missing Girls of Iraq
Sex trafficking, virtually nonexistent under Saddam Hussein, has resurfaced in Iraq. TIME reports on a seldom-discussed epidemic: girls being kidnapped and sold to brothels
By BRIAN BENNETT/BAGHDAD
SUBSCRIBE TO TIMEPRINTE-MAILMORE BY AUTHOR

Posted Saturday, Apr. 22, 2006
The man on the phone with the 14-year-old Iraqi girl called himself Sa'ad. He was calling long distance from Dubai and telling her wonderful things about the place. He was also about to buy her. Safah, the teenager, was well aware of the impending transaction. In the weeks after she was kidnapped and imprisoned in a dark house in Baghdad's middle-class Karada district, Safah heard her captors haggling with Sa'ad over her price. It was finally settled at $10,000. Staring at a floor strewn with empty whiskey bottles, the orphan listened as Sa'ad described the life awaiting her: a beautiful home, expensive clothes, parties with pop stars. Why, she'd be joining two other very happy teenage Iraqi girls living with Sa'ad in his harem. Safah knew that she was running out of time. A fake passport with her photo and assumed name had already been forged for her. But even if she escaped, she had no family who would take her in. She was even likely to end up in prison. What was she to do? Safah is part of a seldom-discussed aspect of the epidemic of kidnappings in Iraq: sex trafficking. No one knows how many young women have been kidnapped and sold since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. The Organization for Women's Freedom in Iraq, based in Baghdad, estimates from anecdotal evidence that more than 2,000 Iraqi women have gone missing in that period. A Western official in Baghdad who monitors the status of women in Iraq thinks that figure may be inflated but admits that sex trafficking, virtually nonexistent under Saddam, has become a serious issue. The collapse of law and order and the absence of a stable government have allowed criminal gangs, alongside terrorists, to run amuck. Meanwhile, some aid workers say, bureaucrats in the ministries have either paralyzed with red tape or frozen the assets of charities that might have provided refuge for these girls. As a result, sex trafficking has been allowed to fester unchecked.

"It is a problem, definitely," says the official, who has heard specific reports from Iraqi aid workers about girls being kidnapped and sold to brothels. "Unfortunately, the security situation doesn't allow us to follow up on this." The U.S. State Department's June 2005 trafficking report says the extent of the problem in Iraq is "difficult to appropriately gauge" but cites an unknown number of Iraqi women and girls being sent to Yemen, Syria, Jordan and Persian Gulf countries for sexual exploitation. Statistics are further made murky by tribal tradition. Families are usually so shamed by the disappearance of a daughter that they do not report kidnappings. And the resulting stigma of compromised chastity is such that even if the girl should resurface, she may never be taken back by her relations. A visit to the Khadamiyah Women's Prison in the northern part of Baghdad immediately produces several tales of abduction and abandonment. A stunning 18-year-old nicknamed Amna, her black hair pulled back in a ponytail, says she was taken from an orphanage by an armed gang just after the U.S. invasion and sent to brothels in Samarra, al-Qaim on the border with Syria, and Mosul in the north before she was taken back to Baghdad, drugged with pills, dressed in a suicide belt and sent to bomb a cleric's office in Khadamiyah, where she turned herself in to the police. A judge gave her a seven-year jail sentence "for her sake" to protect her from the gang, according to the prison director.

Two other girls, Asmah, 14, and Shadah, 15, were taken all the way to the United Arab Emirates before they could escape their kidnappers and report them to a Dubai police station. The sisters were then sent back to Iraq but, like many other girls who have escaped their kidnappers and buyers, were sent to prison because they carried fake passports. There, they wait for the bureaucracy to sort out their innocence. What happened to the gang that took them? The sisters hear rumors that the men paid their way out of jail and are back on the streets. "I don't know what to do if the prison administration decides to release me," says Asmah, pushing back her gray head scarf to adjust her black hair. "We have no one to protect us." Women's advocates are trying to set up halfway houses for kidnap survivors. The locations are secret to keep the women safe from both trafficking gangs trying to cover their tracks and outraged relatives who may try to kill the women to restore their clans' reputation. But the new Iraqi government has set up several bureaucratic roadblocks. Even organizations that do not receive government money have to secure permission from four ministries and the Baghdad city council for every shelter they hope to operate. Wringing her hands in exasperation, activist Yanar Mohammed says, "They want to close our women's shelter and deny our ability to open more."

That means that for girls like Safah, there are few havens left in Baghdad. In 2003, after Safah's father died, her grandmother took her to House of Children No. 2 orphanage in Adhamiya without the knowledge of most of her family. At the orphanage, she was befriended by an affable nurse who spent hours chatting up Safah, a fresh-faced girl whose fingers are still pudgy with baby fat. The nurse's modest hijab framed a sweet face that made Safah feel that the nurse was a good, spiritual woman, one she could trust. The nurse convinced Safah that she could be killed over the shame her disappearance had brought to her family. The nurse offered to adopt her. But official channels would have taken too long, so the nurse told Safah to hold her lower-right abdomen, scream and writhe on the carpet of the orphanage director's office, pretending to have appendicitis and requiring emergency medical assistance. Once at the hospital, the nurse whisked Safah into a waiting car.

The next three weeks were the worst in Safah's life. "I was tortured and beaten and insulted a lot in that house," Safah says. She wouldn't provide many details about what happened in the whiskey-soaked den in Karada. But she says that when it became apparent to her that she was about to be sold to Sa'ad, the man on the phone from Dubai, she became desperate. She passed word of her confinement to a neighborhood boy, who reported it to the local police station. Officers raided the place and arrested the nurse. Bureaucratic red tape somehow kept Safah and the nurse in the same prison for six months before Safah was finally released back into the custody of the orphanage a month ago.

At the orphanage, nestled behind a 10-ft. wall on the breezy banks of the Tigris, Safah can take computer classes, practice sewing and paint portraits of the family she wishes she had. But she doesn't feel as safe as she used to there. A social worker tells her that the nurse wasn't at the Khadamiyah Women's Prison during her last visit. Suddenly Safah rushes out of the room, crying and beating her head with her hands in the hallway. "If she is released," says Safah, her eyes darting back and forth in a panic, "I'm not staying here." But deep down she knows she has nowhere else to go. —With reporting by Yousif Basil and Assad Majeed/ Baghdad From the May. 01, 2006 issue of TIME Magazine.

 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1186519,00.html?promoid=rss_top

Too Much of a Good Thing
George Monbiot

Underlying the US drive to war is the need to open up new opportunities for surplus capital

Attacking Iraq offers the US three additional means of offloading capital while maintaining its global dominance. The first is the creation of new geographical space for economic expansion. The second (though this is not a point Harvey makes) is military spending (a process some people call “military Keynesianism”). The third is the ability to control the economies of other nations by controlling the supply of oil. This, as global oil reserves diminish, will become an ever more powerful lever. Happily, just as legitimation is required, scores of former democrats in both the US and Britain have suddenly decided that empire isn’t such a dirty word after all, and that the barbarian hordes of other nations really could do with some civilisation at the hands of a benign and selfless superpower.

Strategic thinkers in the US have been planning this next stage of expansion for years. Paul Wolfowitz, now deputy secretary for defence, was writing about the need to invade Iraq in the mid-1990s. The impending war will not be fought over terrorism, anthrax, VX gas, Saddam Hussein, democracy or the treatment of the Iraqi people. It is, like almost all such enterprises, about the control of territory, resources and other nations’ economies. Those who are planning it have recognised that their future dominance can be sustained by means of a simple economic formula: blood is a renewable resource; oil is not.

 http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2003/02/18/too-much-of-a-good-thing/

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. ~George Orwell