The New York Daily News buried this story on page A22 so you have to give USA Today some credit for publishing somewhere other than their obit page.

European and Asian companies are beating their American rivals into Iraq now that security has improved the investment climate, Iraq and U.S. officials say.

“It’s starting to turn … and the people who are getting in on the ground floor are not American,” said Paul Brinkley, the Pentagon official who is leading U.S. efforts to help Iraq rebuild its economy. “It’s ironic.”

Foreign companies, including U.S. investors, have committed to deals worth about $500 million so far this year and Brinkley expects at least $1 billion in foreign investment by the end of the year.

So far, Romanian consortium and a Lebanese company have signed revenue-sharing deals with Iraqi state-owned cement factories. Each group will invest about $150 million.

China has also aggressively pursued the Iraqi market, selling machinery to the government and electronic products to consumers.

Gee, does this mean someone was full of more shit than a Christmas fruitcake in declaring the “war lost” over a year ago?

Does it mean Rep. Pelosi Rep. Felosi was not just incorrect but a blithering idiot when she said the war was “failure” as little as 4 months ago?

Why yes, yes it does!

And what of all those Benchmarks the democraps were all in a tizzy about?

Technorati Tags: Iraq, Pentagon, Iraq War, Middle East, Barack Obama, Cranial Cavity, Terrorism

The Pentagon has confirmed that a Kuwaiti released from the US detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, three years ago carried out a suicide bombing in Iraq last month.

Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi and two other Kuwaitis are reported by their families to have taken part in an attack on Iraqi security forces in Mosul, a northern city that is the scene of intense fighting.

Although the families did not specify a date, seven people were killed in a suicide attack in Mosul on April 26.

In answer to the title’s question, why yes, she was. Along with these five nitwits and the appeasement monkey Obama-wamma-slamma.

What do all you weak-kneed idjits have to say now?

This is an appropriate place for the sage advice of Jeffrey Breinholt:

It is easy for human rights organizations to criticize Gitmo. The harder problem is finding an acceptable solution to detain terrorists willing to give their lives to kill us. So far, the best one seems to be the Military Tribunals, which might have offered a better alternative than repatriating Abdullah Saleh al-Ajmi to Kuwait, where could try to kill those who helped liberate his home country on behalf of those who invaded it.

Technorati Tags: Guantánamo Bay, Gitmo. Terrorism, Hillary, Obama

The haters, moonbats, anti-Iraq war types and otherwise unstable will go even further batshit nuts when they read this.

“Esteem for US rises in Asia, thanks to Iraq war” via The Australian.

The Marine Corps has dropped its case against a serviceman accused in the killing of 24 Iraqis at Haditha in 2005.

The Corps has given full immunity to Lance Corporal Stephen Tatum who’d been accused of involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment and aggravated assault in the killings.

And yet another case dropped, this one to gain Tatum’s testimony against Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, whose civilian attorney says the dismissal is a demonstration of how weak the government’s case has become.

Yeah, whatever. It also demonstrates the need for The Despicable Murtha to issue another apology. Not that he ever will. I’m just saying is all.

“The Iraqi Perspectives Project — Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents.”

Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al-Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri) or that generally shared al-Qaeda’s stated goals and objectives.

Captured documents reveal that the regime was willing to co-opt or support organizations it knew to be part of al-Qaeda — as long as that organization’s near-term goals supported Saddam’s long-term vision.

Huh!

Well, I guess this settles it then; Researchers at Harvard say that publicly voiced doubts about the U.S. occupation of Iraq have a measurable “emboldenment effect” on insurgents there.

Periods of intense news media coverage in the United States of criticism about the war, or of polling about public opinion on the conflict, are followed by a small but quantifiable increases in the number of attacks on civilians and U.S. forces in Iraq, according to a study by Radha Iyengar, a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in health policy research at Harvard and Jonathan Monten of the Belfer Center at the university’s Kennedy School of Government.

The increase in attacks is more pronounced in areas of Iraq that have better access to international news media, the authors conclude in a report titled “Is There an ‘Emboldenment’ Effect? Evidence from the Insurgency in Iraq.”

D’OH!

That conclusion is patently obvious. To most sane rational thinkers. Which discounts any possibility Murtha, Durbin, Shillary, Reid or Pelosi will ever come to the same conclusion.