Summary: The New York Times reports that a senior American military adviser in Baghdad has concluded in an unusually blunt memo that Iraqi forces suffer from entrenched deficiencies but are now able to protect the Iraqi government, and that it is time “for the U.S. to declare victory and go home.” The author, Col. Timothy R. Reese, details Iraqi military weaknesses in scathing language, including corruption, poor management, and the inability to resist Shiite political pressure. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on the 16th day of his campaign against U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann for the Republican nomination as House of Representatives candidate in Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District, Aubrey Immelman attended the St. Cloud area joint town hall meeting with the mayors of St. Cloud, St. Augusta, St. Joseph, Sartell, Sauk Rapids, and Waite Park to learn about the concerns of area civic leaders; and attended the Little Rock Lake TMDL Public Meeting to learn about water quality issues on Little Rock Lake and efforts to mitigate phosphorus, the water quality limiting nutrient responsible for the toxic blue-green algae blooms in the lake.

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Summary: Declassified notes of FBI interviews with Saddam Hussein in 2004 show Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction at the time of the U.S. invasion in 2003, but that Saddam falsely allowed the world to believe Iraq had WMD because he feared revealing his weakness to Iran, the hostile neighbor he considered a bigger threat than the U.S.

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Summary: There were many domestic reasons voters handed an American-backed coalition a victory over a Hezbollah-led coalition in Lebanese parliamentary elections, but political analysts also attribute it in part to President Barack Obama’s campaign of outreach to the Arab and Muslim world.

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Summary: When former Vice President Dick Cheney, in a speech on national security delivered May 21, 2009, lambasted the change in security policy under President Barack Obama, he was not attacking the Obama administration so much as the Bush administration itself — considering he was essentially repeating many of the same arguments he had made unsuccessfully within the Bush White House as policy decisions increasingly went the other way in President Bush’s second term.

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Summary: A series of bombings hit Baghdad and the northern Iraq city of Kirkuk, killing at least 25 people (including three U.S. troops) and wounding dozens more (including nine American soldiers), one day after a car bomb exploded near a group of restaurants in a Shiite neighborhood of northwest Baghdad, killing 41 people and injuring more than 70.

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Summary: Iraq’s security forces, despite significant improvements, remain hobbled by shortages of men and equipment, bureaucracy, corruption, political interference, and security breaches that have resulted in the deaths of dozens of Iraqi and American troops.

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Summary: President Barack Obama has won crucial backing for his Iraq military withdrawal plan from leading Congressional Republicans, including Senator John McCain and Ohio Rep. John A. Boehner, the House minority leader.

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Summary: With the reduction of violence in Iraq following a U.S. troop “surge” and other measures, foreign militants are now flooding into Afghanistan to join Taliban insurgents battling Afghan and international troops, according to Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak.

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Summary: President George W. Bush rejected a plea from Israel in 2008 to help it raid Iran’s main nuclear complex, opting instead to authorize a new U.S. covert action aimed at sabotaging Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program, according to the New York Times.

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Summary: As Minnesota 6th Congressional District constituents ring in the New Year, they can look back on the historic election year of 2008 with some measure of pride in the knowledge that their representative in Congress made a strong showing (of sorts) in several “Year in Review” lists. That’s no easy feat, considering the U.S. House of Representatives has 435 members, each vying for attention.

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