Are Iraqi Soldiers Really Ready for Stand-Alone Operations?

[Manchot]

Charlie, think about what you're saying; two battalions out of a hundred. One thing.

LOL, this argument doesn't make any sense. He acts like the two battalions becoming worse is insignificant because there are a hundred battalions, even though all but three of those were never ready. That's like a serial killer saying to the judge, "But I only killed one billionth of the people on the planet!"

 

[Astronuc]

Iraq rebuilding slows as U.S. money for projects dries up

By Rick Jervis, USA TODAY
Mon Oct 10, 7:33 AM ET

On paper, the Iraqi Army barracks was a gleaming example of the future Iraq. The plans called for a two-story, air-conditioned barracks housing 850 soldiers, a movie theater, classrooms, basketball courts, a shooting range, even an officer's club.

Makes one wonder if they would ever leave.

But when the $10 million project in southern Iraq is finished this month, it will fall far short of those ambitious plans. The theater, classrooms, officer's club, basketball courts and shooting range have all been scrapped. The barracks will be one story instead of two.

The reason for scaling back the barracks? The U.S. government is running out of money. The higher than expected cost of protecting workers against insurgent attacks - about 25 cents of every reconstruction dollar now pays for security - has sent the cost of projects skyward.

The result: Some projects have been eliminated and others cut back.

"American money has dried up," says Brent Rose, chief of program/project management for the Army Corps of Engineers in southern Iraq.

And tracking the billions of dollars that flooded into a war zone in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion has proved difficult, too. Nearly $100 million in reconstruction money is unaccounted for.

The ultimate price of a slowdown in Iraq's reconstruction could be steep. U.S. strategy here is based on the premise that jobs and prosperity will sap the strength of the insurgency and are as important as military successes in defeating terrorists.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20051010/ts_usatoday/iraqrebuildingslowsasusmoneyforprojectsdriesup

 

[Astronuc]

Anthony Shadid Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0805076026/?tag=pfamazon01-20

Amazon.com

Most of the accounts of the Iraq War so far have been, to use the term the war made famous, embedded in one way or another: many officially so with American troops, most others limited--by mobility, interest, or understanding--to the American experience of the conflict. In Night Draws Near, Washington Post reporter Anthony Shadid writes about a side of the war that Americans have heard little about. His beat, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 2004, is the territory outside the barricaded, air-conditioned Green Zone: the Iraqi streets and, more often, the apartments and houses, darkened by blackouts and shaken by explosions, where most Iraqis wait out Saddam, the invasion, and three nearly unbroken decades of war.

Shadid is Lebanese American, born in Oklahoma, and he has a fluency in Arabic and an understanding of Arab culture that give him a rare access to and a great empathy for the people whose stories he tells. Beginning in the days leading up to the American invasion and closing with an epilogue on the January 2005 elections, he talks with Iraqis from a wide range of stations, from educated Baghdad professionals who look back on the country's golden days in the 1970s to a sullen, terrified group of Iraqi policemen in the Sunni Triangle, shunned as collaborators for taking jobs with the Americans to feed their families. (Perhaps his most telling and characteristic moment is when he trails behind an American patrol, recording the often hostile Iraqi comments that the soldiers themselves can't understand.) He takes the ground view and gives his witnesses the particularity they deserve, but the various voices share an exhaustion with a country that has seen nothing but war for 30 years and a frustration with a liberator that has not fulfilled its promises of prosperity and order. It's a despairing but eye-opening account, told with an understanding of the Iraqi people--hospitable, proud, and often desperate--that, were it more common, might have led to a different outcome than the one he describes.

--Tom Nissley (for Amazon)

I heard today an address by Shadid to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. He talked about his book, his experiences as a journalist in Iraq, and the horrors and tradgedies experience by ordinary Iraqis since the US-led occupation. IMO, Iraq is hardly liberated and the current situation is no better for ordinary Iraqis than during the regime of Saddam Hussein. How can I say that? Well, based on what I heard, the Iraqis are still suffering from deprivation and less security than under Hussein. So many Iraqis have died at the hands of Americans, and so many other Iraqis have witnessed it that it is hard for many Iraqis to see US as liberators. Rather, the US is seen as one more insult after Saddam. Iyad Allawi did not fair well in recent elections - but he is supported by US. What will happen as anti-US politicians become the peoples' choice? Will the US really accept democratic rule, even if the government is not pro-US? In the absence of true leadership in Iraq, tribal and religious law is established.

Read the book. And I will try to find the address.

 

[Informal Logic]

Anthony Shadid Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0805076026/?tag=pfamazon01-20
Amazon.com
--Tom Nissley (for Amazon)
I heard today an address by Shadid to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. He talked about his book, his experiences as a journalist in Iraq, and the horrors and tradgedies experience by ordinary Iraqis since the US-led occupation. IMO, Iraq is hardly liberated and the current situation is no better for ordinary Iraqis than during the regime of Saddam Hussein. How can I say that? Well, based on what I heard, the Iraqis are still suffering from deprivation and less security than under Hussein. So many Iraqis have died at the hands of Americans, and so many other Iraqis have witnessed it that it is hard for many Iraqis to see US as liberators. Rather, the US is seen as one more insult after Saddam. Iyad Allawi did not fair well in recent elections - but he is supported by US. What will happen as anti-US politicians become the peoples' choice? Will the US really accept democratic rule, even if the government is not pro-US? In the absence of true leadership in Iraq, tribal and religious law is established.
Read the book. And I will try to find the address.

A couple of days back there was a news program with footage from an embedded journalist. I wonder if it was the same person?

In any event, the footage of the Iraqi soldiers really struck me. It seemed that their hearts are not in this war effort (probably because it is against fellow Iraqis). They seemed apathetic, as if they were just showing up to get a paycheck, and the US soldiers seemed frustrated with them. I was thinking it might be better to train them to work at the DMV. No offense to anyone - It just struck me that way, and that we will never get out of there.

 

[Psi 5]

The destiny of Iraq is either one of 2 things. Either we (US) never leave like many other countries where our troups went and still are (unlikely) or Baghdad will become the sole and shrinking bastion of democracy until it disappears and they revert to an islamic state (extremely likely). If democracy takes root there after we are gone I'll eat my turbin.

"Peace is an illusion, you merely haven't yet seen what is trying to kill you." old Spathi proverb

 

[pattylou]

"Peace is an illusion, you merely haven't yet seen what is trying to kill you." old Spathi proverb

Peace might be an illlusion.

But the reason we went to war was because the tension of worrying about Saddam, was more than people wanted to stand. They wanted some sort of resolution - either way - they didn't care if meant war.

Living with uncertainty is scary. I mean it. It isn't a reason to go to war. The people I find most inspiring, understand that you have to live with tension and uncertainties. At the moment, that might mean, for example, being uncertain about Iran's nuclear goals -- Being uncertain indefinitely, rather than blowing them away with a nuclear bomb. Because the latter strategy is unconscionable (as was invasion of Iraq) and it is not at all guaranteed (as seen with Iraq.)

The tension we feel with Iran is as good as it gets - and it's a hell of a lot more 'peaceful' than aggression and mounting casualties.

 

[Smurf]

Spathi? You're using a proverb from a socio, xeno and spectrophobic race that exists only in a fictional computer game universe?


Geeze man, if you're going to use a cop-out at least get a quote from someone reputable?