PSYCHIC IN HORNBECK CASE PREDICTED IRAQI CIVIL WAR

[Don Davis]

Sylvia Browne, the fraudulent psychic (redundant?) who shamelessly told the Hornbeck family four years ago that their son Shawn was dead, simultaneously predicted that a Shia-Sunni civil war would follow a U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Appearing jointly with the Hornbeck family on the Montel Williams show in February 2003, Browne said she saw “brown-skinned men, their faces wrapped in scarves, shouting ‘Allah Akbar’ (God is Great) and ‘Americans Must Die’.”

She also predicted that no weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq, and that “a Shia crescent anchored by an Iranian-Iraqi axis would roil the Middle East for decades to come, and cause a fundamental shake-up of the geopolitical balance in the region.”

Ms. Browne said that she would have had more predictions about Iraq, but that the failing electricity grid in Baghdad made it difficult to see more clearly.

CONTINUED at: http://satiricalpolitical.com/?p=554

[Briar]

1. Millions of people

knew there were no WMD and predicted civil war, of course. We also didn't need psychic powers to know that Bush and the neocons would just continue to make bad worse as long as they were given leave by the electorate. How depressing that this satirist is probably right - most votes are probably cast by people who put more credibility in magic than reason.

(Edited to correct grammar.)

[Ladyhawk]

2. Everyone who wasn't in bed with Bush predicted civil war.

:shrug:

[ShortnFiery]

3. Oh Brother!

You are gifted!

Too weird! Millions of us PREDICTED the above and even marched in the streets all over the world. In fact, we represented The World's Largest Mass Demonstration BEFORE King George's invasion into Iraq. Too bad we were dismissed as a focus group.

Here I've believed all along that we were well educated, in addition to, not investing into the corporations that support the Military Industrial Complex.

But you've convinced me otherwise: Millions of us were merely PSYCHIC! :P

[leveymg]

4. The DIA and RAND foresaw the same outcome - without watching the Psychic Shopping Channel.

http://fling93.com/blog/archives/foreign_affair/2005/rumsfeld_iraq_and_troop_levels.html
Phil Carter

A couple of months ago, Paul Bremer made some remarks on troop levels. Phil Carter, a former Army officer and longtime writer on military affairs (and someone with a reputation of calling it as it is), had this reaction after Bremer quickly backtracked under pressure:

http://www.intel-dump.com/archives/archive_2004_10_00.shtml#1096961024
Sorry Mr. Bremer — you had it right the first time. And don’t worry about the backlash — you’re in good company. I’m just glad you had the intellectual honesty to say what so many smart folks have been saying for nearly a year and a half: that we did a spectacular job of winning major combat operations, but failed to put the troops on the ground to secure the peace. This failure, driven in large part by bad judgment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (see, e.g., the decision to rewrite the Army’s TPFDD and deployment orders before the war), continues to impede the ability of U.S. forces to establish a secure environment in Iraq.

Unfortunately, this is anything but a new lesson. As Amb. James Dobbins writes in his RAND study America’s Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq, http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1753/ we have learned this lesson over and over again during the small and large wars of the 20th Century — in Nazi Germany, Japan, Korea, Lebanon, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Winning the war is one thing; winning the peace is quite another. It quite often requires more troops and resources to effectively secure the peace than to win the war. Technology can only do so much to help win the peace.

Wolfowitz has claimed that it was not logical for the occupation to need more soldiers than were required to win the war. But while it might not seem intuitive (a better word to describe what he meant, because he didn’t actually make a logical argument), our recent experience has shown exactly that. Carter elaborates much more on that in this Washington Monthly piece from June 2003, http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0306.carter.html discussing the examples of Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan.

SNIP

[leveymg]

5. Even I wrote as much about the breakup of Iraq in 2004:

http://mboard.rediff.com/board/board.php?boardid=news2004sep27iraq

Subject: CIA Iraq Covert Political Plan Aired and Then Axed

This is the most absurd thing I've ever heard of! All of the candidates were vetted by the PA. It's like the RNC saying it won't play covert games to determine the outcome of Republican primaries!

The choices are utterly proscribed to begin with -- the object being to keep the majority Shi'a clerics from taking immediate control over the central government, where they might actually keep Iraq together in one piece long enought to reunify the country with Iran! You know, those borders are just lines drawn up in the British Foreign Office 90 years ago. For a long time before that it was all the Ottoman Empire. That common identity never really went away.

Everyone knows that the game plan is to break Iran up into three more managable pieces -- Shi'a south, Sunni center, and Kurdish north. Each oil exporting region will have its own U.S. controlled pipeline and its own petty tyrant, and some randomizing terrorist groups thrown in to keep everyone off balance. These squabbling potentates will assure the need for an American armed presence for years to come.

The British tried to do things more directly -- by putting the larger minority faction in control over the rest. But, that would mean resurrecting the Ba'ath Party by another name.

The stuff I read in the major U.S. papers about the "New Iraq" is recycled Pentagon press releases -- it's the Saigon Five O'clock Follies all over again. It's like reading about how Thieu will be more of a democratic leader than Kye, who was more of a democrat than Diem, who was too French and too Catholic. And poor Diem, before Ambassador Harriman offered him "safe passage" and coaxed him to meet his maker inside that armored personnel carrier, he was so much nicer than that wicked Madame Nhu. Big crocodile tears at MACV and CIA.

Even if there are elections in January, this has absolutely nothing to do with the warlords who will actually be running all those little warring fiefdoms a year later.

M
Posted by Mark Levey on 28-SEP-04

[peacetalksforall]

6. Did you mean Iraq or Iran in para 3, first sentence? If Iran, it is

something that makes all the lights go off. Are you saying three horizontal regions acrass Iraq AND Iran?

If yes, everything makes so much more sense. And I mean, to me, it means 'everything'.

Even their torturing and tormenting human beings makes sense - it's a lesson?

The intent all along was to divide up Iraq into three parts?

The same for Iran?

If yes, I am so slow to catch on. I have been trying to understand why they have to bomb Iran under the ruse of imminent nuclear preparedness (when our own NSC in the summer of '05 said it would take 10 years, perhaps a little less if they found the right places to buy supplies - which we know involves certain people in the U.S., Pakistan, and Russia).

I've often thought that we were using our children and our taxpayers money to serve the U.K. and the international baron's agenda.

Please tell me you meant Iran, because it is easier to understand everything.

[leveymg]

7. That was a Freudian slip. Meant Iraq, or did I?

Makes even more sense this way, come to think of it. Three ethnic bands across the region - how neat and tidy.

Add Arabia without the Saudis as The Grand Prize -- move them to Monaco -- and that's the complete neocon map of the new Middle East.

Anyway, that's what they hoped back in '03, before America lost the war.