doctor robbins

I disagree. I think most dinar investors are somewhat confused about the subject. All you have to do is listen to how excited they get when reading re-denomination articles or listen to gurus talking about the CBI removing the zeros.

Any trade conducted with Iraq for dinars today would just be conducted with the new dinar. It doesn't mean that the current dinar won't be demonetized.

You raise some interesting points. You're right about the specific wording. Maybe I should have elaborated. There were a few hundred military advisers after the troop withdrawal. It wasn't the 10-20,000 that the Defense Department recommended but given the political climate in the US and Iraq it wasn't likely that Bush could have struck a better arrangement. There were too many abuses by US troops for the Iraqis to grant immunity and the American people were tired of the war and wanted out, which is one of the reasons Obama was elected. The main point that I was addressing is that this video clip of Bush was from 2007 when he was promoting his surge policy. A year later the surge had gone so well Bush felt comfortable signing the SOFA agreement for a pullout by the end of 2011. This is what Bush said when he announced the SOFA agreement in November of 2008. If FOX News is suggesting that Bush wanted to stay and fight but Obama pulled all the troops out and now all hell is breaking loose they are completely misrepresenting what happened. Personally I feel that Bush was pushing to get this done prior to the 2008 election in an effort to steal some of Obama's thunder and maybe help the Republicans keep the White House, but the Iraqis weren't willing to cooperate. Whether that's the case or not Bush did sign an agreement that was carried out during the Obama administration. Also, many of the Iraqis who joined ISIS did so because of the shortsightedness of the CPA in their de-baathification of the Iraqi military, and Obama had nothing to do with that.

Unfortunately Bush also signed the SOFA agreement in 2008 agreeing to have all US troops out by 2012.

I don't think that's the same girl. The voices don't sound the same.

The story of the Ferguson shooting wasn't driven by the media. It was driven by the riots that came after the shooting. If there were riots and looting and tanks in the streets of Salt Lake City I'm sure the media would be there, too.

Not really. The IQD is a different currency from the Saddam dinar. It's tightly managed to keep the auction price near the market value. It would be disastrous for their economy if they allowed it to climb back to $1 or more.

The value fell due to hyperinflation in the 80s and 90s. The rate was arbitrarliy set by Saddam Hussein at over $3.00 when the value had actually dropped as low as 3000:1. When Saddam was removed the CPA oversaw the replacement of the Saddam dinar with the IQD at around 1500:1. It wasn't a controlled drop by any bank. It was a valuation based on the market value at the time.

The UK and Canada have a parliamentary system which allows every group to have some representation. The US has a winner take all system which means that the smaller groups have no representation. If your party's candidate gets 49% of the vote but another party's candidate gets 51% your party gets no voice. That's why Sharia Law is not an issue in the US like it is in the UK and Canada. Until the Muslim population in the US is large enough to get the majority of the popular vote they won't be able to control legislation.

The caption under the photo of Ronald Reagan says "Ronald Reagan meets Afghan Mujahideen Commanders at the White House in 1985". Notice it says "Afghan" not "Arab". The Mujahideen were Afghani and Al Qaeda is Arab. Bin Laden was from Saudi Arabia, not Afghanistan. The "Sleeping with the Devil" article claims that "Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted on CNN that the U.S. organized and supported Bin Laden and the other originators of “Al Qaeda” in the 1970s to fight the Soviets", but when I clicked on the links there was no such admission. The statement that "Israel and the U.S. CREATED Hamas, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda" is wrong. Israel may have inadvertantly created Hamas by attempting to balance the power against the PLO, but they didn't create Hezbollah. Hezbollah was formed in response to Israel's attacks on the PLO in Lebanon. And they certainly didn't create Al Qaeda. In fact the article doesn't even make that claim anywhere after the title. And the US didn't create any of those organizations either. We funded and trained Afghanis in their war against the Soviet Union, and members of Al Queda showed up and fought alongside the Afghanis, but we didn't create Al Qaeda. Bin Laden created Al Qaeda in 1988 at the end of the Afghanistan/Soviet war. I'm not saying that the US and Israel haven't made some bad choices when it comes to fighting these organizations, but that's a far cry from actually creating those organizations.

I did click on his links and look through them. Some of them were 9/11 truther sites so I don't consider them credible. One of them was from Alex Jones' site, and I consider him a lunatic. In that story Rand Paul and Hannity just discussed our foreign policy in Syria and Iraq, and Paul didn't say anything about the US backing ISIS as thegente claimed. Some of the articles were just talking about Qatar and Saudi Arabia backing rebels in Syria. That doesn't prove anything about the Mossad. Some of the links said that Obama had the CIA train moderate rebels in Syria, which isn't news to most people. Nobody is arguing that the US didn't support moderate rebels. The point of contention is the article that claims Snowden's documents prove that ISIS' leader was trained by the Mossad. I think it's much more likely that this article was put out by Iran as propaganda to turn Muslims against ISIS because they will think that Israel is backing them. Iran is mostly Shia and ISIS is Sunni so they would have an agenda to stop support for ISIS.

Doesn't it bother any of you that this story came from an Iranian news site that also reported that Snowden documents prove extraterrestrial intelligence has been driving our foreign policy since 1945?

I clicked on the link that thegente gave us at the beginning of his post and read through the comments. One of them gave a link to the Iranian site and said that they also did a story on Hitler and aliens. I googled it and found the story. So it looks like the two stories came from the same site, which tells me that the Snowden Mossad story isn't very credible. Yes I did look into the Liberty story. You might be right about that. I haven't decided yet.

The story appears to have originated in an Iranian newspaper called FARS. http://arabic.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=9303226106 Here's another Snowden story published by FARS. http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13921021000393

The USS Liberty was ruled a friendly fire incident and Israel not only apologized for it but they compensated the victims' families with millions of dollars in 1960's money. The US has killed allies in similar incidents in wartime. I can't see any scenario where Israel would gain anything by knowingly attacking an American vessel.

I don't support Obama, and never stated that I do. But neither do I support lying about somebody because you don't support them. Obama is not a Muslim. If he was he wouldn't have attended Jeremiah Wright's church for 20 years. He would have attended a mosque. As I stated before and must now state again, the word "republic" doesn't mean "not democratic". It means a representative democratic system (or representative democracy). It is not wrong to say that we are a democracy. Most people understand that this just means that we have a democratic process (or democracy) of majority rule, even if it is representative in nature. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_democracy

There's no deceit here, LGD. Just facts. You seem to be hung up on semantics. We are a republic, which is a representative democracy as opposed to a direct democracy. "Democracy" means majority rule, and the majority in our system choose the representatives so we are still a democracy even if we aren't a direct democracy. As I said, the two terms aren't mutually exclusive any more than the terms "caucasian" and "human", so when Obama refers to our system as a democracy he's not wrong. In order to believe that Obama is a Muslim you have to believe that the twenty years he spent in Jeremiah Wright's church was done to mislead everybody about his true identity as a Muslim, which hardly passes the giggle test IMO. I do seek truth, which is why I don't wrongfully accuse people even if I don't like them or agree with them. There's plenty to criticize Obama for without resorting to lies. Obama was exposed to many cultures and faiths in his childhood, but his only religious practice as an adult has been in Christian churches, not Muslim mosques. That is a fact.

A republic is a form of democracy. The two terms aren't mutually exclusive. Ocdude is right in that George W. Bush also met with Muslims, appointed Muslims to positions in his administration, and said nice things about Islam. And Obama is not a Muslim. He attended Jeremiah Wright's church in Chicago for twenty years, and nobody would consider Jeremiah Wright a Muslim. Obama lived in a Muslim country for a few years when his mother was married to a Muslim, but Barak Obama Sr. was not a Muslim. He was an atheist.

I stand corrected. I messed up the TLA (three letter acronym) Thank you Maggie123.

Well if you don't think that ISIS is any threat to Saudi Arabia maybe you should get in touch with King Abdullah because he appears to be under the impression that they do present a threat. Tony Blair seems to think so too. And yes, ISIS was considered too extreme for Al Queda. And the CBI did not fund Bin Laden per se. They funded the Mujahideen, and after the Russians left Afghanistan the Mujahideen splintered off into several groups with different agendas. Some of the Arabs ended up in Al Queda and some of the Afghans ended up in the Taliban and other Afghans fought both the Taliban and Al Queda.

No offense easyrider, but that's absurd. The last thing the kingdom of Saudi Arabia wants is a radical Muslim caliphate next door in Iraq threatening them. King Abdullah has put his forces on high alert to defend against these terrorists that you claim he is ordering around. The Saudi royals kicked Bin Laden and his radicals out which is why they were in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Why would they encourage another more radical group to invade Iraq?

Actually he did. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/15/AR2006021502003.html

It's not really about numbers as much as it is about resolve. The Iraqi soldiers who are deserting are mostly Sunnis who have little allegience to Maliki who is a Shia. This tells me that the civil war that people were predicting is finally here.

Most ot the reports I've seen originated in the UK, not the US.

Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) aren't the same thing as a foreign exchange rate. For example, the SDR exchange rate for the dinar on April 30, 2013 is shown as 0.000568833 when the CBI had it listed it as 0.000857. The only records for the dinar in the years leading up to the war were the ones provided by Saddam Hussein, so that's what these numbers are based on. I believe the point he was making is that the rates prior to the 2003 invasion were arbitrarily set by Saddam when in fact the market price was as low as 3000 dinar to the dollar in 1995, as is stated on the CBI website's history page.