Diyala and the limits of the surge
[Phillip Carter,
Thursday January 17, 2008 at 11:23am ]
I've written a bit about the current offensive in Diyala and commented on the characteristics of the province which make it so thoroughly intractable. However, I've been optimistic that recent U.S. operations there — a combination of combat operations, local diplomacy, humanitarian assistance, and political outreach — have made a difference. That's what we've been hearing from commanders there too, and I wanted to believe that things were improving in my old area of operations.However, this report from the Associated Press (LAT / NYT / WP) regarding another suicide bombing in Diyala makes me think things are significantly worse today than four months ago. The bombing is the 4th in recent weeks involving a female suicide bomber, a notable evolution in tactics for the insurgency. But, more important, it represents a significant spike in civilian casualties — perhaps our best indicator of general violence and sectarian warfare:
Diyala has defied the trend toward lower violence over the past six months in Baghdad and much of central Iraq, largely because it became the new base for insurgents pushed out of Baghdad and Anbar province.Query 1: If Operation Arrowhead Ripper (run by 3rd Brigade / 1st Cav in June) and the current offensive have been so successful, why are civilian deaths in Diyala rising sharply? I think the answer is clear. Notwithstanding the concentration of troops on the current offensive, we've reduced the aggregate troop level in Diyala to lower than it was at the height of the surge, spreading troops more thinly across the province to provide security for the Iraqi people. And the Iraqi security forces (army and police) have not picked up the slack. So, in the vacuum formed by the drawdown of U.S. forces, violence has surged.
At least 273 civilians were slain in Diyala last month, compared to at least 213 in June, according to an Associated Press count. Over the same span, monthly civilian deaths in Baghdad dropped from at least 838 to at least 182. [emphasis added]
Query 2: What is the relationship between increased airstrikes by Multi-National Forces - Iraq and civilian deaths? According to today's Wash. Post: "The U.S.-led coalition dropped 1,447 bombs on Iraq last year, an average of nearly four a day, compared with 229 bombs, or about four each week, in 2006." What's the significance of this for the overall counterinsurgency and stability effort in Iraq? Although human rights observers express concern about the collateral damage from these strikes, they don't think we're actually causing the uptick in civilian deaths in Diyala with these airstrikes. Rather, I think there's a more subtle link, possibly the relationship between our airstrikes and the aggregate level of violence among all parties. But I'm not sure. What do you think is going on here?
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What amazes me about your PBS commentary wasn't so much the information about Diyala, but how you didn't go ballistic when Mr. Kagan opened his mouth.
You were there which makes your opinion worth listening too, but he's talking like he was there?
WTF?
Has this self appointed "specialist" of military matters ever served in the military?
Has that sad sack of flesh who has been breathing my air ever been to Iraq? Kuwait?
Has he ever been shot at during this whole affair in Iraq?
Has he sat down with the tribal sheiks, mullahs, and the common guy to find out how to get them to cooperate?
I'm willing to bet the closest that ignorant and pathetic fool has ever come to Iraq has been Europe or Israel.
Why the hell do they have a mouth piece for the Neocon's puttering about a war he's completely and totally ignorant of?
I think you should've put that fat, fleshy know-nothing in his place, and exposed him for the fraud that he truly is.
Anyway, the mere mention of that guys name pisses me off.
Moving on.
The current "Diyala offensive" will be a limited success, namely because of the inherent nature of guerilla warfare, and the "jello" affect.
Smash a cube of jello...you'll see what I mean.
BTW, I find that picture of the soldier looking like something out of a scifi movie contrasting rather poignantly with the family on their carpets.
Independent
17 January 2008 08:49
Opium fields spread across Iraq as farmers try to make ends meet
By Patrick Cockburn
Published: 17 January 2008
The cultivation of opium poppies whose product is turned into heroin is spreading rapidly across Iraq as farmers find they can no longer make a living through growing traditional crops.
Afghan with experience in planting poppies have been helping farmers switch to producing opium in fertile parts of Diyala province, once famous for its oranges and pomegranates, north- east of Baghdad.
At a heavily guarded farm near the town of Buhriz, south of the provincial capital Baquba, poppies are grown between the orange trees in order to hide them, according to a local source.
The shift by Iraqi farmers to producing opium was first revealed by The Independent last May and is a very recent development. The first poppy fields, funded by drug smugglers who previously supplied Saudi Arabia and the Gulf with heroin from Afghanistan, were close to the city of Diwaniyah in southern Iraq. The growing of poppies has now spread to Diyala, which is one of the places in Iraq where al-Qa'ida is still resisting US and Iraqi government forces. It is also deeply divided between Sunni, Shia and Kurd and the extreme violence means that local security men have little time to deal with the drugs trade. The speed with which farmers are turning to poppies is confirmed by the Iraqi news agency al-Malaf Press, which says that opium is now being produced around the towns of Khalis, Sa'adiya, Dain'ya and south of Baladruz, pointing out that these are all areas where al-Qa'ida is strong.
The agency cites a local agricultural engineer identified as M S al-Azawi as saying that local farmers got no support from the government and could not compete with cheap imports of fruit and vegetables. The price of fertiliser and fuel has also risen sharply. Mr Azawi says: "The cultivation of opium is the likely solution [to these problems]."
Al-Qa'ida is in control of many of the newly established opium farms and has sometimes taken the land of farmers it has killed, said a local source. At Buhriz, American military forces destroyed the opium farm and drove off al-Qa'ida last year but it later returned. "No one can get inside the farm because it is heavily guarded," said the source, adding that the area devoted to opium in Diyala is still smaller than that in southern Iraq around Amara and Majar al-Kabir.
After being harvested, the opium from Diyala is taken to Ramadi in western Iraq. There are still no reports of heroin laboratories being established in Iraq, unlike in Afghanistan.
Iraq has not been a major consumer of drugs but heroin from Afghanistan has been transited from Iran and then taken to Basra from where it is exported to the rich markets of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Gulf. Under Saddam Hussein, state security in Basra was widely believed to control local drug smuggling through the city.
The growing and smuggling of opium will be difficult to stop in Iraq because much of the country is controlled by criminalised militias. American successes in Iraq over the past year have been largely through encouraging the development of a 70,000-strong Sunni Arab militia, many of whose members are former insurgents linked to protection rackets, kidnapping and crime. Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the powerful Shia militia, the Mehdi Army, says that criminals have infiltrated its ranks.
The move of local warlords, both Sunni and Shia, into opium farming is a menacing development in Iraq, where local political leaders are often allied to gangsters. The theft of fuel, smuggling and control of government facilities such as ports means that gangs are often very rich. It is they, rather than impoverished farmers, who have taken the lead in financing and organising opium production in Iraq.
Initial planting in fertile land west and south of Diwaniya around the towns of Ash Shamiyah, al-Ghammas and Shinafiyah were said to have faced problems because of the extreme heat and humidity. Al-Malaf Press says that it has learnt that the experiments with opium poppy-growing in Diyala have been successful.
Although opium has not been grown in many of these areas in Iraq in recent history, some of the earliest written references to opium come from ancient Iraq. It was known to the ancient Sumerians as early as 3400BC as the "Hul Gil" or "joy plant" and there are mentions of it on clay tablets found in excavations at the city of Nippur just east of Diwaniyah.
Considering the Sumerian's always viewed the eye's as the "window to the soul" and their artwork always reflected that world view, and considering that opiates dilate the pupils...I'm not surprised.
I wonder if it was considered a religious drug/artifact reserved for priests, or used by commoners for special occasions; Or was it a prescribed form of expressing social/corporate/community identity?
Hmm, think I'll shelve that one for awhile...to much on my plate as it is.
The US has always been highly sensitive to collateral damage, friendly fire and unnecessary destruction of property. The small diameter bomb is specifically designed to hit and destroy targets without collateral damage.
To put 1447 bombs in perspective, an F4 Phantom's typical load in Vietnam was 12 Mk 82. 1447 bombs equates to only 121 sorties - fewer than I flew in a one year tour.
Yes, things are going to get bloody there. But the big question is whether Diyala eventually gets pacified at the expense of other provinces, or if Diyala's violence can be isolated and eventually reduced. At the micro level yes, the situation there is bad, however given the trending of the country it is not surprising that AQI will try to make a concentrated effort someplace.
With regard to the increase in airstrikes, I think one factor is the availability and diversity of ordnance this past year compared to previous years. Specifically, the small-diameter bomb. At the beginning of the war, the only GPS-guided option was the 2000 pound weapon. In 2005, iirc, kits became available for 500 pound GP bombs. Earlier this year, the SDB, a 250 pound class weapon (with a much better CEP than other GPS guided munitions) started becoming available in enough quantity to affect the numbers. This is speculation on my part, but it stands to reason that the greater availability of lower-collateral damage weapons would allow ground commanders to exercise the air strike option in more cases than they could previously.
To add to that may be the clearing of AQI (or whatever they're called now) and associated factions out of Anbar, Baghdad and other places - forcing them more out in the open and away from civilians making prosecution from the air a more viable option.
Additionally, it appears the planned airstrikes are increasingly being used against the IED threat, particularly the deeply-buried IED's. Again, this is speculation on my part, based on reports I've read of the coalition conducting these types of strikes frequently this past year.
Finally, I'll add the increase in munitions capable UAV's to the mix. The Air Force has been buying these platforms as fast as they can be made and from what I've read the numbers have increased substantially since last year. These platforms are both ISR and strike platforms and it appears they spend a lot of time searching for and killing those actively emplacing IEDs at night.
I'd also like to remind everyone that decisions to request and drop ordnance are made by ground commanders vetted through the air component and not, as some have alleged, by AF Generals at the CAOC or Washington. As always, the air component makes available a variety of airborne capabilities based on ground component requirements.
What about those armed UAVs? Who "request" the weapon release there? Isn't it the AF UAV operators w/ eyes on?
And aren't they operating at the CAOC? :)
It depends on the situation. The "operators" are actually at Nellis, but authority still runs through the CAOC. Release authority would depend on how the aircraft is tasked. If tasked to support the ground force, then that's where authority is given. If it's operating as an independent search platform then authority can come from the CAOC. So in those cases it's situational.
— John Paul Vann
Actually, platform no longer matters much in an age of gps guided weapons.
Yeah! Platform no longer matters! When we have to retire the B-52s, we'll just push JDAMs out the back of the C-130!
Make that the B/C-130! They've got SO much more time on station anyway :)
Because of opsec, I've held off from commenting, Phil. But here are some things you might want to consider:
1. When the COIN fight shifts from urban (Baghdad) to increasingly rural (riverine Diyalah), the ROE for CAS and indirect fire shifts drastically. Without getting into the exact working process (FDC, you probably should remain silent here, too), as the risk to civilians shifts downward, the likelihood of pulling CAS from the toolkit increases. If you've got five bandits holed up in a goat shack near a cache in the reeds 850m from the nearest (unoccupied) structure and they're firing at you and you've called TIC, CAS is one of the LEAST bad options you've got available to eliminate the enemy. While I completely agree that too many air missions were ordered at times in Anbar in 2005-06, we learned from those mistakes and a didn't set of assumptions guides us now.
2. Successful, "hardened" units not so paradoxically tend to get attacked LESS by insurgents. The more successful you are at killing the bad guys, the less likely you will find the bad guys challenging you on the battlefield. The more efficient you are at detecting IEDs, breaking up bomb-making and -laying cells, uncovering caches and detaining the RIGHT targets, the more likley the bad guys will turn to softer targets. The softest of the soft are civilians, typically women and children, far enough from the immediate "front lines" to be wary about foreign insurgents. These insurgents themselves, not being tied organically to the community and without the fear of personally being held accountable for "collateral damages" to civilians they've perhaps inconveniently turned unwillingly into "martyrs" (that's actually how they think) will use VBIEDs, suicide bomb vests, et al, more indiscriminately.
3. Insurgents always face the dilemma of what we term the "lethality self-limit." IEDs, et al, work very well at limiting the a cell's casualties because they can place a lot of bombs and mines clandestinely and detonate them often from a distance without the concern of being detected, then detained or destroyed. If a well-trained, smart, aggressive unit working closely with a community becomes efficient at removing IEDs and mines from the insurgent's tool kit, then that unit forces the insurgent leader to start doing things that are increasingly hazardous to him. He needs to appear resolute and successful to the larger community, lest he lose their support. To do so he must attack the "occupier." To attack the occupier without IEDs and mines, et al, requires him to attack with SAF, mortars, et al. These weapons put him at a disadvantage with better armed, better armored, more cohesive Coalition troops. He starts to lose more and more men and must try increasingly riskier operations to achieve the same psychological results, which exposes him to more and more casualties. For the insurgent, it becomes a spiral, and time no longer is on his side.
4. The more successful you are at inserting yourself as a neutral, policing force within a community, the less likely that community will side with the insurgents. Since insurgents depend on those communities for intelligence, food, volunteers and -- most especially -- money (typically gained through criminal enterprises such as blackmarket trading for fuel and narcotics, gun running and extortion rackets), when you begin to whittle away support you start to force onto the insurgent the need to re-establish his intimidation to secure those vital resources. When a village kinship leader decides to join with the Coalition to evict a bad guy, the bad guy must kill him. By killing him, however, he begins a blood feud cycle as family members of the kinship leaders exact revenge on the insurgents and the insurgents seek to visit violence back on the family. This obviously increases civilian casualties.
Not all of these things might be true at once, but typically some of them are working in concert to produce the milieu the Coaltion commander must face. While civilian casualties for all these various reasons might rise during initial operations, the longer and more successful the unit is at COIN the more drastically civilian casualties will shrink and civil society return to something approximating normal.
a DIFFERENT set of assumptions guides us now.
BTW, thanks for the interesting remarks above.
When did this "always" period start exactly?
Comerstone, you got a point. The greatest generation was not too sensitive in these matters.
But compared to the people we are fighting all over Iraq, we are 10,000 times more sensitive. That's one of the reasons we won in Anbar and will win in Diyala. We put our army in the heart of Arabia, fought the Islamic extremists both shian and sunni, and won. There's a lot of people psoting here who need to deal with that.
But it seems like we're studying very twitch of the fingers to try and predict whether the suject is going to become a concert pianist or an axe murderer.
While I agree that what's going on in Diyala is important - particularly to the people fighting, and dying (or living) in Diyala - I'm not so sure that a snapshot of Diyala justifies all the energy we all seem to expend arguing about whether this makes the 2003 invasion worthwhile, who "won" or "lost" this thing (as if it's over - shades of Dopey McFlightsuit and his "Mission Accomplished" banner).
The Army seems to have gotten much of its head out of its collective ass regarding COIN. That's good. Getting things to the point where we can get the bulk of our deployable ground troops out of a relatively backward, politically unstable and sectarianly volitile part of the Third World? Even better.
But for us to wrestle furiously over what it means for an extra hundred people to die violently in a violent corner of one of the Twenty-first Century's more violent parts of the world? Hmmmmm...
Just as only the ead have seen an end to war, I suggest that five, ten years from now we may only be beginning to see the shape of this thing we birthed when we sowed the cadmus' teeth of the dead Tikriti klepocracy. Think about it - who in 1971, looking at the brilliant festivities that the Pahlevi Shah celebrated the 2,500 years of Persian dynastic rule, would have guessed that ten years later a glowering cleric would rule in Tehran (or Qom, as it were).
I've said before - I truly believe that at the end of this calvary we will meet the Iraqi strongman who will emerge and put and end to the sectarian squabbling. If we're lucky we'll get a Shiite Ataturk. But it's just as likely we'll see another kleptocrat, a Musharraf or - the wort case - a vest-pocket Stalin.
But at this point...WTF? I'd opine that the state of affairs in Diyala tonight is a murky crystal ball, if that much of anything at all...
May I add my whole hearted "AMEN" to your comments.
I like "Dopey McFlightsuit".
What is going on here is a gaggle of geese claiming to be able to pick the fly shit out of the ground black pepper. LOL.
Al
Happily back in our Greek Island home after a delightful month's trip back to the States to see our kids, grandkids, siblings and friends. Was a nice change to be where the Dollar isn't worth so little.
Buck
Leaving aside, for the moment, that you may be flat out dead wrong, could you share with me the elements of this victory you speak of? What will "winning" mean? More troops? Less? More dollars spent? Less? Lower oil prices? Higher? Are they going to like us/respect us now more in Asia and Europe because of so called victory? Are we closer to capturing OBL et al now that we've won? Do we now move on to Afghanistan? Are the criminal gangs in the Basra region now going to stop exploiting their position in the region? Are the Kurds going to stop their push in Kirkuk? Please tell me what we have won. I've been waiting so long to hear it.
Because I have to admit that all I think we have 'won' is their undying hatred of us. Take all the bright and brave boys with COIN operations, all the diplomats, all the press PR types, spinning the latest 'victory', when all is said and done, we are bombing them, we are searching their houses, in front of their women, we are eying their women, and we are 'infidels' in the middle of Arabia. They will embrace us, and use us, and take our money, so long as it serves their purpose. And not one minute longer. And they will hate it us.
You need to call the armed services committees and get you an earmark for a "study" of this option. An RFP is sure to follow in which case you could land the big bucks contract!
He claims the name is a "typo," but it actually has its roots in Elizabethean prose and is currently used as slang by RAF Warthog pilots, which outed Charles as who he really is: Not the lurking fireball against the Bush administration, but a CAS killer for the Coalition.
It's interesting to see a layman call one person for making what sees (rightly) to be simplistic comments, and then dropping an equally reductive, simplistic comment as how it "really" is.
There are many different "Iraqs," many different sorts of Iraqis. They are not flat characters in a cartoon strip. There are many complex assumptions about the US-led Coalition filtered through the many cultures inherent to Iraq.
The caricatured "Iraqi" featured above isn't even the dominant archetype today in traditionalist Sunni Anbar, much less the Chaldean in North Baghdad, the Sadrist in the eastern stretches, the descendants of the Iqta in Basra's bazaar or a Kurdish family.
The US-led Coaltion is seen in many different ways by many different people. Just as there is no monopoly on a definition of an "Iraqi" there is no gospel about what is the nature of the occupation.
Moreover, in a COIN struggle metrics for indicating "victory" found in FM 3-0 just won't work in FM 3-24. If one decides to apply military force to COIN, one should be prepared to accept these murkier endpoints.
If one can't live with those endpoints, then don't commit troops EVER to ANY conflict that has the potential for allowing enemy forces to do what they will, inevitably, do. If we're not trained, equipped, doctrinally prepared and motivated to engage in these sorts of wars, then US troops probably shouldn't be used in ANY war, because there's always the likelihood today that this is what the Phase IV will become.
But the president and the Congress have sent US troops to prosecute wars in OIF and OEF, and so the institution of the military must adapt itself to the conflicts and their potential participants.
The military, I think, has done a better than anticipated (belated!) job at this in OIF since 2006, most especially in learning to understand the various cultures and the utilities of our military force can be applied to achieve (limited) results.
I'm not sure the public and the civilian policymakers have accomplished the requisite chore of learning the rudiments about the peoples with whom we are in contact or the policy choices that are available to achieving our (now diminished) goals.
I'm not sure that's the military's fault.
Harper's --
January 18, 2008
THE OFFICIAL STORY UNFOLDS
by Scott Horton
As to "Mission Accomplished" I would say a battle is made of many missions a war is made of many battles. Removing Hussein form power was the first mission. Suppressing the insurgencies was the second. The Sunni Baathist insurgency is over, we beat it. The fight against Al Qaeda in Iraq is now pretty much localized to Diyala. The Shia insurgency of Al-Sadr is quiescent. For a very interesting story of how it was shut down one time go here
It's changed its tune since then to embrace COIN, but for those of us who strongly opposed what we viewed as a failing mission up to 2006, Blackfive was an enabler, not an agent for change.
Any revisionist idiocy they might toss out about the "real story" in OIF before 2006 I'd strongly discount.
Listen to those who were there, not those who blogged from the comforts of their recliners or who were part of the failed system and now are trying to rescue their reputations.
Let's leave aside the fact that you know nothing about me....whether I am as, you describe, a "layman", or otherwise. In any event....its a red herring. Sure, there are all kinds of Iraqis. And they are as complexed as any other people. Even lay people know that....and, indeed, perhaps they know it better than the bright minds in the military that drew up, and implemented, the initial plans for this debacle.
I write, whether foolishly, or not, as a lay person, or not, not about Iraqis. I write about occupier v. occupied. Those dynamics, I would argue, are near universal. And coming a close second to those near universal, are the dynamics between Muslims, and non-Muslims, regarding questions of occupation. Hey, Mr. Non-layman, you see the look on that person face in the picture above? As the foreigner, armed, comes thru his home? You see that? That look is near universal as well. And you don't need to be COIN specialist to grasp what it is about. You need to be human, and have a bit of imagination.
BS. Spending $100 to earn $1 isn't a limted result, it's a loss. The OCCUPATION of Iraq is nothing but a pointless FAILURE and a disgraceful CRIME.
What are the objectives MSR?
I keep asking that question and you keep dodging it. The truth is that there isn't any legitimate purpose: the worst problem Iraq has is the US occupation.
It's not even part of the Arabian Peninsula, and even the most devout Sunnis who live in Iraq would consider themselves "Arabian." As a geographic identifier, one could say that part of the desert in "Iraq" blends into "Arabia," but as a practical political demarcation, it's obvious that "Arabia" would include KSA, Kuwait and the traditional Gulf Arab nations and Yemen.
Nor would one begin with a caricature of an "Iraqi" and then try to polish the turd into some hazy notion of "occupier vs. occupied."
Because it's not that simple. If you're a supporter of the Dawa-led government, and the US military for several years basically did exactly what the
corrupt, incompetentcentral government wanted, then is that force a bunch of "occupiers?"Not to those getting the benefits of the force projection!
If one is a Kurdish leader and watches the US slug it out with insurgents intimately opposed to Kurdish separatism, is that "occupier" such a bad guy?
What if one is a traditional Sunni leader in Anbar or Diyalah, and one has watched two of his sons get killed by foreign operatives allied loosely with organic insurgents who really are just part of a rival tribe or have a caste-based argument against your further leadership over the local government? The "occupier" who sides with you to restore traditional order isn't exactly the bad guy with an "eye" for your women, right?
Whenever I read someone making very broad assumptions about "Iraq," I see someone who must be a layman.
The fact that Charles has you pegged as something else it probably the best argument that you're NOT THAT. If Charles told you the sky was blue, go to the window and make sure.
Re: Franks and his involvement with the "charity" for $100,000.
I'd say his participation transcends idiocy. I'm not sure what the right description is but it's probably very ugly, if not criminal. What a disgrace.
How stupid does Feith really have to be for this guy to have called him the stupidest so and so on the face of the earth?
What if it's a joint patrol, and the person standing next to the American officer is an officer in the Iraqi Army or the Police, like with did at the JPs in Baghdad?
What if the officer or NCO in the picture is responding on the behalf of the areas traditional kinship leader, who has been targeted for murder by a foreign insurgent cell? Is the American arriving with a representative of the traditional leader MORE legitimate at that moment for MOST of the area than those doing the bidding (often criminal elements) of the foreign salafists?
Neither Iraq nor the world is so simple that all can be boiled down to quick assumptions. It's always more complex than that.
Keep believing they like us and they want us there one second longer than they need us. The Kurds included. Keep believing it. Such a belief covers, as it has for many gone before us, the nakedness of the Empire.
"think I know..."? "think I know"? Anyway, as I said, keep thinking they welcome you there...
And your rhetoric models of attack suck, as always. "You know what you are dealing with", you say, and that is a deeply immature answer if I may patronize for a few seconds. Because my experience of combat left me with a deep conviction that pre-disposed opinions are CounterProductive. Sir.
I'm thinking liberal arts, but not anthropology or history or literature or anything like that. Something fuzzier. Public education, maybe.
But it doesn't really matter who you are exactly. The reason why I termed you a "layman" is that you've displayed absolutely ZERO competence understanding where Iraq actually is, the diversity of the cultures inherent to the "nation" of "Iraq," or the range of diverse perspectives about the occupation by Iraqis themselves.
You don't seem to have any ready understanding of how our COIN tactics have developed, how we look at the cultural terrain of the battlefield or much even about the shifting views of Americans in a particularly vital part of the world.
Which is to say, even if you ever actually deployed there, you were particularly incurious, probably a young Marine or Soldier last there in, what, 2004? Maybe 2005? Who really wasn't in a position to learn much or wasn't intellectually disposed into seeing beyond a very limited set of assumptions.
In other words, a layman, no better at making rash statements than Charles.
More likely, given the demographics of this forum: You were in Vietnam, or a Vietnam Era Soldier or, more likely, Marine. In previous threads you've identified yourself as suffering from PTSD or related mental trauma (chemical abuse program, but for the time that didn't mean you were an addict of any sort), and you're not affiliated in some way with a public agency, probably a college.
Which is to say, you can probably tell us a LOT about coming home from war, how VA treats vets, etc.
I'm not sure you can properly place Iraq on a map or tell us about how the many different sorts of Iraqis view us.
Obama, they say, is "unpredictable."
Having invaded Iraq and not found WMDs (wasn't this the mission/justification for the war in the first place?), I would have advised Bush to get out of Iraq ASAP, while the going was good. However, since Bush was able to use "stay the course" to win another term in office, I'll have to give him credit for sticking to his guns.
Now, in 2008, as someone who wishes nothing but the worst for said President and his political party, I hereby reverse directions and heartily recommend that he and all the other GOP candidates shout out from the rooftops that we will stay in Iraq come hell or highwater, until The Sacred Mission To Slay Islamofascism In Iraq (TM) is complete. Until 2018, as the Iraqi defense minister said? Why not? A hundred years, per McCain? Bring it on!
I'm sure there are plenty of experts about Iraq and the region who would recommend this as well: namely, the foreign policy advisers of the states of Iran, Russia, and China, to name a few. The past five years have been real good for them foreign-policy wise, and I'm sure it has nothing to do with the spectacular success of our policies in Iraq.
But I am just a layman, after all.
And by the way, let's hope the hobgoblins and stereotypes in your mind, which led you to a series of erroneous guesses about me do not mislead you in something important. (well, you got two things right, I am a former enlisted member of the military and I have never been Iraq....(even a blind hog finds a truffle now and then) Take your last shot Mr. Non-Lay person, I'm done with this particular thread. Gotta go to work.
Actually, I don't think you're an utter buffoon. I don't think you're a buffoon at all.
I think you're probably a former Marine who served back in Vietnam, had some bad times, brushed yourself off, got a decent gig (I still detect something academia-like, and Berkeleyish, most probably a religious studies or philosophy or counseling or education background where notions of "empire" are tossed around).
Since I was put on the spot for your guessing parlor game, I did my best, giving two possibilities and my favorite (Vietnam vet, Marine, enlisted, bad problems arriving, then transitioning to counseling or academia, most probably at a large state system where people use terms like "empire" without effacement).
Probably got more right than wrong. Regardless, still a layman.
A disloyal liar who pretends that crimes are not crimes and abject failure is really success.
WHAT ARE THE OBJECTIVES IN IRAQ?
Remember, everything we do is to personally spite Charles Gittings and make him call people "a new-age Nazi" or a "disloyal liar who pretends that crimes are not crimes and abject failure is really success."
That way at your commitment hearing, no judge would dispute your immediate, involuntary transfer to a mental health facility.
In another thread you mentioned that you would want a media officer to advise you of the outcome in the media of your combat decisions.
You state that the above photograph is a snapshot, a moment if you will, in the world of Iraq.
I want you to take your experience of Iraq, the Iraqi's, and what you know of them...and take a good long look at that photograph again.
Now, with that in your mind...what do you think will get more play in the Arab world...your nuanced vision of respecting the Iraqi's sensibilities overall, minus the isolated incidences of social faux pas, or that picture which carries a whole lot of unspoken baggage?
Sure, you'll be able to converse individually with each Iraqi, expressing your apologies in a convincing manner, but can you do that to every Arab who sees that picture?
What do you think the take home message of that picture will be in the Arab world?
I'm just letting you know that you may see the picture as a single time point, but for the Arab world, they'll see that picture as what Americans are really like despite the assurances. The old adage..."pictures speak louder than words" should be on your mind everytime you see something like that.
A media advice service provided free of charge.
You're asking me to do the impossible. Unlike the rest of the world's media, this picture is uniquely without the freight of context. If one clicks on it, one goes to a NYT website that simply accumulates stories about "Iraq."
There's no story that goes with it. There's not writing telling me where it was taken, by whom, when it arrived, etc.
In other words, it tells me nothing. And I'm now supposed to imagine what's going through the minds of the people in the bed?
I certainly have been the man kicking in the door and going into rooms. But there are different contexts even to those operations. Sometimes, we were greeted as friends. Sometimes as foes. Typically, something in between.
When we kicked in doors in pursuit of Baathist secret police in Saddam City (now Sadr City) in 2003, we were cheered as liberators.
If we went with the IAs or IPs in Baghdad today, we would have more legitimacy, depending on the neighborhood. But that's what I mean: IT DEPENDS ON THE LOCAL BACKGROUND.
I don't know that background because I have zero idea what the photo is about. Was it even taken in Diyalah? In 2008? I have no idea.
I've taken to the value added portion of this blog to give everyone a spotlight every day of the top stories in the Middle East. It's part of my daily job (well, it's not required, but enough of that), and moreover I think it illustrates sort of how a different part of the world looks at themselves and others.
The way they arrange what they think are their top stories is interesting. What I've been waiting for everyone to see is that "Iraq" typically is NOT even in the top six or seven daily stories for most major regional news outlets, and that for the outlets within a country it might never show up at all.
I try to divide the stories for you between different media (typically TV and newspapers/magazines) and some blogs (such as those for the Moslem Brotherhood).
For example, the day the Diyalah campaign kicked off, the top stories within the Iraqi media weren't about that, but rather the sort of tabloid crime and political scandal stuff that would be interesting to most people here.
The biggest regional story lately hasn't been Iraq, but divides on any given day between Lebanon and Bush's recent diplomatic tour.
You're too chicken-shit and dishonest to answer a fair question.
Who did you liberate MSR?
Nobody. You helped replace one form of tyranny with an even worse form of tyranny, and now you spew lies to pretend that tyranny is something else and the disgraceful failure in Iraq is really a success.
What a phony you are.
Pictures have a way of carrying their own context, whether supplied by the photographer, or by the viewer.
As you have shown in your two links, context only works when the viewer grants the photographer the license to explain the picture.
For example, the first one could be not an angry mob, but the first people in line to buy a wii, while the second picture could be about how easily westerners are adaptable to sharia' law.
Context is maleable, hence the reason why the picture above is so maleable to a media's prejudices, or to a viewer's prejudices.
Biases do exists, whether you recognice them or not, they are there, and the ability to see a situation from the biases of another's viewpoint gives you, the observer, the power to either avoid that situation or present a different intepretation.
For me, the above photograph could be of an soldier kneeling before his liege informing him that the barbarians have been successfully driven from the gate, or of a oppressor detailing that the girl will make a useful cleaning lady for the base.
It's all based on the biases of the viewer.
As I indicated...just something to be aware of.
That was entirely my point, which is why I'm skeptical of photographs and the media more broadly.
The top story is calm in Lebanon (not that is news!). The Maronite patriarchal authority (pictured) called for a day of calmness and reflection following what everyone would concede has been a whirlwind of political intrigue and violence.
On a recent TV program, there was an outburst between two notables (Hezbollah-led opposition
pawnleader Suleiman Franjieh and his target, Nasrallah Sfeir). He said Sfeir was an old goat who should step down since he was in the "pay of the American and French embassies" anyway (al J forgot to add the French, but the Lebanese press had no problem with the exact words).Sfeir, you see, made the mistake of telling the truth, which was that Hezbollah and their
dupessupporters like Franjieh are in the pocket of Syria and Iran. For that, he must be attacked!The second story is from Kenya and involves a recent riot, during which cops killed 17 demonstrators.
Other demonstrations broke out in Nairobi.
Next, Mauritanian authorities have arrested a suspect in the murder of four French tourists on Christmas Eve. The man, apparently, also is wanted by KSA for possible ties to al Qaeda.
Before you say, "Yah!," you should know that he's the 15th person -- so far -- accused of involvement in the slayings.
Morocco and Guinea-Bissau also seem to be assisting in the intelligence operation to ferret out these salafist terrorists.
At rival al-Arabiya, Iraq actually is the top story (shows you what I know): Moqtadr al-Sadr is causing a ruckuss about his self-imposed truce when the government, he says, are little more than a gaggle of gangs, too.
Sadr, you might recall, pulled off a particularly boneheaded operation in Karbala that killed 52 people and wounded another 300. In Nasiriyah, apparently, forces loyal to the government clashed with a Sadrist militia recently.
Meanwhile, the Turkish airforce bombed 60 targets in PKK-controlled parts of northern Kurdistan. CPT Carter protested the Turkish use of CAS in what is really a COIN war. It was reported that their aircraft missed Obama, a man they consider "unpredictable."
OK, I added all that.
The TV network follows with the Mauritania/al-Qaeda suspect arrest, and then a weird story about an old Saudi Arabian guy who won a huge malpractice award for losing his ability to reproduce children.
I don't know how many further children he wanted to have past the age of 70, but there you have it.
To take a closer look at the doings in Karbala, I see that the top story is the arrest by the Holy Police (real name) of a suspected al Qaeda in Iraq (no longer called that) operative with explosive suicide belts in the holy city.
The next story is about the advent of Ashura (this is a particularly important part of the year for Shiites), and cops are worried about attacks on the estimated million or more pilgrims who come to Karbala and Najaf by goofy splinter sects and salafist terrorists (see above).
There's also an interview with al-Sistani about all these goofy doomsday cult Shi'i nutjobs flocking to the shrines of Shiism. He blamed Saddam Hussein for tolerating the rise of these heretical sects and he vowed to ensure that the Holy Police take care of these troublemakers.
Do you want to know about the Jund al-Samaa (Soldiers of the Heaven/sky) and why they're causing so much trouble this year?
They were founded near Najaf by a bloke -- Zia Al-Krawi -- who who believed he was the second coming of the Mahdi. We're coming up on the anniversary of a firefight between US forces and the cult at Zarqa where, it was alleged, Jund al-Samaa was going to disguise terrorists as pilgrims (including women and children) and then let them loose to murder key Shiite leaders in the holy cities.
It started between IAs/IPs and the cultists, and the US and, later, the UK got pulled (unwillingly) into it. Much of the conflict was not only sectarian (weirdly so) but also tribal.
Anyway, over the past year there were several hundred criminal trials involving the incident, a great deal of parliamentary debate about a "cover up" of a "massacre" by (name your party), yada yada yada.
So far, the police in the holy cities have done a good job making sure none of the splinter group peeps cause trouble. The Iraqi media reports continue to completely discount the
typically incompetentaccounts of the event by Paul's Independent.That's the big news today!
Inside baseball: The ministry of the Interior is ordering a curfew in 11 districts (including central Diyalah). The order not only bars vehicles on the roadways at certain hours, but even "horse drawn wagons" in the capital.
The curfew is expected to be lifted by Saturday evening.
Since the so-called "Surge" began, Iraqi newspapers are reporting that violent attacks have dropped 60 percent, and civilian casualties 75 percent. There is some talk that the Dawa-led coalition government could show some reconciliation by commuting the executions of a pair of Sunnis recently convicted of their part in the Anfal genocide.
lol, then it's my bad, I missed your point completely.
MSR, I seriously do read your New's round-ups. I think you should open a blog of this type, because I think it's very useful to see what's important to others aside from the daily dish I, or we, get from our own sources here in the US.
Anyway, sometimes I don't only read the stories and watch the videos, I actually peruse the comments.
What I thought was interesting in the story about Sadr was that there were some people who thought the entire war in Iraq was being fought between Iran and Israel!
They see Iraq and Lebanon as basically the same things, proxy wars.
Iran, it is said in the comments, really is an agent for the US (!) just like it was during the days of the Shah, and that's why Iran wants to rename the Persian Gulf (don't get me started because we already give Iran the name).
Which is to say, there are weirdos and conspiracists who post blog comments even on Arabic sites.
this means somebody is usually always drunk.
its reasonably infrequent for things to degenerate into chairs being broken across the backs of heads, and bottles being smashed on the edge of the bar. but looks like blood and teeth are being hosed out tomorrow morning.
in any case, my 2 cents.
the only thing you need to know about iraq is that it is a tribal society.
things go well when elements of the US forces behave as a tribal entity, an armed to the teeth one. alliances are negotiated, life goes on, things settle into a normal level of tribal warfare (fanned or not by the actions of external forces - turkey, syria, iran, russia, usa, aq etc)
things go badly when the US presents itself as the new ruler of Iraq, thus uniting all the tribes against the, bar one or two (at any given time)
Furthermore, The US presence comprises several tribal units in itself, playing off, with and against each other.
when the imperialist lackey formerly known as msr talks about the drinking tea paradigm, its means iraq's back to business as usual.
and i think a news feed would be great, imperialist lackey formerly known as msr. it would be like the daily show hosted by hunter s thompson.
I think that site [Blackfive] is more a cheerleader for the miltiary in General. Maybe that blinds there judgment sometimes, I don’t know. Their heart is on the right side.
Also, If I ask myself - would the surge tactics have worked if tried in 2004? I am skeptical. Training the Iraqi army and building the bond between the US and Iraqi armies takes time. Building a corp of reliable translators takes time. And it takes time for US forces to get smarter culturally about Iraq.
But now all of that is in place. It is dead certain there are tens of thousands of US military personnel who know way, way more about Iraq at a detail level than anyone reporting on them, anyone running for President and, in particular, anyone the New York Slimes, except maybe John Burns. This is actually a very powerful weapon I think. Withdraw from Iraq and it is lost.
The problem with blackfive is they take political and partisan policy positions which basically mirror those of the GoP. I used to read that site quite a bit and originally I thought it was pretty good (a couple of years ago), but has since degenerated. That isn't to say they are always wrong or are inherently bad people - just that they appear to support a particular partisan agenda.
It is a fact of physics that the FARKED-22 can have either 1.) Maneuverability, or 2.) Time on station. It can't have both. W/o time on station, it's not going to do the CAS mission, nor the B-52 mission.
For F/(A)-22 to do the CAS mission, it will require a tanker overhead to support it at all times, because the supercruise will burn fuel at too fast a rate. (Plus, if the pilot is not careful, he'll easily stray into Iranian/Russian airspace, sparking WW3). If you are going to keep a tanker up there, you might as well fit it w/ a JDAM kit, too. Then, there's no reason to keep the F/(A)-22 there. Same w/ B-52 mission.
In the future, w/ the fuel cost skyrocketing, the USAF will not have the money to keep the F-22 in the sky. They could buy all 400 of them, tho, if they use their future gas money.
The market will find a cure for high oil prices, probably in 5 years or less.
and when the uav version comes out, the limits of human endurance will be irrelevant.
yesiree bob, the FARKED-22 is all we gonna need.
It wasn't stealthy. I always thought that Ramadi-East looked like the opening of a car sale or Day Four at the Masters with that thing overhead. Never could figure out why the mujis didn't figure a way to blow it out of the sky.
I've always thought a fleet of tethered airships loaded with cameras and other sensors put above Baghdad, etc. would be really helpful in COIN. Persistent ISR anyone on the battlefield can access - what's not to like? And it seems it could be done cheaply with COTS equipment - which means, of course, it won't ever actually happen!
If you've ever been to Huachuca, you would have seen THESE
Article is HERE.
Didn't know about those - thanks!
Reidar Visser is one of our finest scholars. I have nothing but the highest respect for Reidar, but I take him with some caution. I'd like to think that 90 percent of what he says is dead-on, and the rest speculative. My problem is that I'm a pessimist by nature, so the 10 percent gnaws at me.
So let's get that out of the way. From his latest, outstanding essay on the importance of Ashura, politically (among other things):
BS. I'll believe it when I see it.
That said, the rest of the essay is outstanding, especially when he calls many of the major regional media (al-Arabiya, et al) on missing the real story about the "Soldiers of Heaven/Sky" cult army and last year's Ashura in Karbala.
Whenever I hear people yapping about the need for "political reconciliation" in Iraq, I wonder if they understand that the "politics" include death cults intent on assassinating key Shiite leaders and bringing about an apocalypse in their own time by violently assaulting the rituals in Karbala and Najaf?
What's nice about Reidar is that he puts this "Mahdism" into an historical context, so that the reader understands that this revolutionary theological/cultural movement is always just under the surface in Shi'i southern Iraq, gathering and then thundering.
Elsewhere:
The top story on al-Jazeera is renewed fighting in Gaza. Al J, of course, calls it "stepped up Israeli military aggression," part of a strategy of "collective punishment" against the Palestinian peoples.
They quote some humanitarian organization tied to Gaza that says as much!
No mention is made of the fact that Israel does NOT occupy Gaza, that violence within Gaza escalated AFTER the Israelis quit policing it, and that far, far, far more Gazans have killed each other during the brutal civil war between Hamas and Fatah and their various supporters than have perished because of IDF returning fire on Hamas batteries raining missiles down on civilians.
So, Israel can't win. If it does what the humanitarian groups want it to do -- allow the unfettered importation of missiles, guns and explosives to Gaza -- then it only feeds the civil war within the quasi-independent state and allows Hamas and splinter groups to kill innocent Israelis across the border.
If it returns to occupy Gaza to protect the Gazans from each other and the Israeli civilians from Hamas, then it's an "occupier."
If it does nothing but target missilemen before and after they fire into Israel, then it's an "occupier." It's an "occupier" by occupying and an "occupier" by not occupying.
Don't expect al J to parse this inconsistency.
The second top story? Gaza! Basically the same story, only this time adding that Morocco, et al, also is demonstrating against the Israelis.
The third top story? Mauritanian demonstrators take on Israel! No, I'm not kidding. Al J says that the Arab regimes (there's always some dispute about just how "Arab" Mauritania really is) need to be carried along by the demonstrators to abandon their "humiliating collusion" with the "Zionists."
At rival al-Arabiya, more about those bad ol' Israelis!
So, what's causing all this? The IDF increased scrutiny at the border crossing from Egypt to Hamasistan. This has delayed shipments -- most especially fuel -- for the past four days. PM Olmert says that when missiles quit falling from Hamasistan on Israel, they'll relax the border controls.
Food and medicine are still being allowed in. But here's where it gets trickly: The UN basically runs a welfare state in Gaza, distributing food and medical care to 860,000 people. That's about 60 percent of the people.
Yes, three out of every five Gazans is a welfare case. So, where are all the Arab nations and Iran when it comes to helping out the Gazans? They slough the hard work off on the EU and the UN (mostly funded by the US), and continue funding Hamas, Islamic Jihad, et al, who spend these petro-dollars hurling missiles into Israel when they're not killing their Fatah Gaza-mates in a brutal civil war.
The reason everyone is at odds with these moderate Arab governments? They see Hamas (and Hezbollah) as the far-west military wing of Qum, and believe Fatah -- although corrupt and oftentimes incompetent -- is less likely to continue the pointless bloodshed and found a real, workable state at peace with everyone and not intent on drawing neighboring states into losing wars against Israel.
For that, they're pilloried.
We'll start with al-Badeal (or, as I like to call it, "The Bad Deal"). Top story: A French painting from 1889 showing a nude woman.
No, I have no reason why this should be the top story. The Bad Deal is a weird "news" outlet.
In honor of Visser, I'm on the magic carpet to southern Iraq, where correspondents report crackdowns on one of those creepy messianic Ansar al-Mahdi cults!
A joint task force (between, one presumes, one Holy Police faction and another Holy Police faction, plus some Ministry of the Interior special former Holy Police officers who got promoted) clashed with Ansar al-Mahdi/ Soldiers of Heaven/Sky separatists and chased them around Basra.
The toll: 100 dead, 200 wounded. Police arrested 100 people believed to be tied to the cult. A key leader of the group is believed to have been killed by security forces.
The roll up also netted members of a "criminal organization" (whether these are the same blokes as in Soldiers of Heaven/Sky isn't really plumbed) who had missiles, explosives, guns and forged identities.
Basra really isn't the epicenter of radical politics. It's led by a bazaar class of Persian Gulf (I know, I know, can't call it that) merchants and Iqta-like landlords who strongly oppose all these cultists and Sadrists. The cultists, therefore, as said to come from Nasiriya, Diwaniya and Kut (all places I've been).
This is troubling because it shows that what began as a millenarian revolt north of Karbala now has spread throughout the south and is staging armed shootouts with police in Basra and the holy cities.
I'm tempted to believe that by standing down his caste-based Mahdi Army (I hate to call it that), Sadr created a vacuum, one that's been filled by revolutionary cultists who are linked to dissatisfied rural tribes. Their ideology is now catching fire with the same dispossessed Shi'i poor in the urban slums in southern Iraq.
Just my guess.
CORRUPT SECTARIANCENTRAL GOVERNMENT UPON RETURN.The US recently allocated $20 million to help Iraqi refugees in Jordan (didn't know that, did you?), but a lot of the refugees really don't want to be refugees in Jordan. Since they lost their house and farm or business (and, probably, their village/neighborhood), they have little left to pay to go back (the exact criminal act is overstaying the terms of their visa).
A return visa is expensive, and one gets the feeling that the confessional government in Baghdad doesn't exactly want them back. Better to let Jordan and the US foot the bill in Amman.
More of that national reconciliation!
Anyway, Iraq's ambassador to Jordan -- who has been inundated with requests from refugees to return home -- has asked the
corruptcentral government to waive the fines.I should mention that one metric for "success" in the so-called "Surge" might be the number of applicants seeking to return from Syria and Jordan. We need to see if Brookings will follow that.
Meanwhile, gripping pictures from the running gun battles in Basra, courtesy of Radio Sawa. Sawa reports outbreaks of Ansar al-Mahdi violence in Nasiriya, too.
What was interesting to me was how the reporter characterized the so-called "Surge" as an Iraqi-led initiative that had some help from "multinational forces."
If that's how it's increasingly being perceived, that's good.
Sound like a good group to recruit spies from. Hope we are doing it.
Read the Visser essay, Sheer. It's first rate, as usual.
I thought the point of this value added feature was to follow the lead of CPT Carter and discuss how the "story" of Iraq and the larger "Middle East" was framed by the media.
I always find it interesting to see how the Arabic language press views "Iraq" or the "Surge" or the "US." It's typically not like how we think they view us. Typically, it's all over the place.
In Iraq today, the big story is NOT our operations in Diyala (even if this is our big Iraq story). It's what is going in southern Iraq if you're living in southern Iraq; Mosul if you're living in northern Iraq (there's a crackdown on affiliates of al-Qaeda in Iraq, no longer its name); and continuing pacification, largely by IRAQI security forces, of the troublesome neighborhoods in Baghdad if you live in the capital.
This is normal and, in part, goes to show you that "Iraq" doesn't really think of itself as a "nation." What bleeds in Diyala does NOT lead in Basra. What bleeds in Basra does not lead in Baghdad.
Now, a wag might say that there's a lot of bleeding. But the crazy Soldiers of Heaven/Sky business in the south is hardly tied to the ongoing US operations in Diyala, and the raids in Monsour have nothing to do with the Ashura in Karbala.
Complicated, complicated, complicated.
As for Visser - good article - but what will fnord think now that you are praising a son of Norway???
mike
I did this for you. You get to "read" the article because I have explained it for you and added, in my typically understated way, context that frames the daily headline.
For the Radio Sawa photos, the actually stories aren't very interesting (I kind of already translated them above), but the pictures really let you into a slice of Iraqi life.
The funeral in Nasiriya (complete with band) is what a martyr's funeral is like in the Middle East, only in this case you can tell the entire city came out for it and not just some TV cameras.
For the pictures from Basra, I thought they were interesting and seem to have been taken from a cell phone camera, which shows you what the confusion was like as they moved door to door and detained people.
But the stories written in English typically are NOT the way they're conveyed in Arabic! Why? They speaking to a different audience, and give that audience what they think they want to hear. Many of the stories aren't even the same (al Jazeera's Africa bureau, for example, runs outstanding stories about the continent that do NOT appear on the station's Arabic feed).
If you read a news outlet's "English" side, be prepared to be bamboozled.
Besides some here (not me of course) might wish a more detailed look into the French nudes story.
mike
They loved it too much ,-)?
Besides the blockade of Gaza and the Soldiers of Heaven stories, there was also the news of Nasrallah making a physical appearance at a massive Hezbollah gathering at south Beirut. Certain comments made by Nasrallah seem to suggest renewed interest on a prisoner/remains exchange. As part of the Ashoura procession, Hezbollah paramilitary troopers paraded a knocked out IDF AFV, captured during the 2nd Lebanon War. (That war also goes by two other names. Some Arabs refer to it as the Sixth War, some Western analysts call it the 33-Day War.)
Regarding the blockade of Gaza, the Israeli paper HaAretz recently noted that 810 Palestinians were killed by the IDF in Gaza in the two years 2006 and 2007, with some 360 of those judged by HaAretz to have been civilians. Meanwhile, in the seven years since 2001 twelve people in Israel have been killed by military actions launched from Gaza.
I actually did link to the report -- first mentioned on al Jazeera -- about the deaths caused by IAF/IDF incursions. That said, they pale in comparison to the death toll from the brutal civil war currently waging between Hamas and Fatah.
This is so obvious to anyone that we must mention the Haaretz mini-piece to gloss over the real war in Gaza -- it ain't involving Israel.
For those who don't know, Egypt, among others, has been supplying Fatah with arms and money to kill Hamas fighters. No one wants to mention this salient fact.
A lie.
Between 2001 - 2006, suicide bombers alone killed 545 Israelis (half the terrorist death toll). Terrorist attacks have wounded nearly 6,000 Israelis in the same period.
These figures do NOT include Israeli Defense Forces, nor the three American diplomats slain in Gaza (John Eric Branchizio, John Martin Linde, Jr., and Mark T. Parso, murdered when a bomb detonated on their convoy).
Since they can't call what you vomited onto this forum a lie, as it is, I'll let some of the dead speak the truthto you. Those civilians killed near or in Gaza by terrorist actions since 2000: David Biri, Noa Dahan, Gabi Zaghouri, Constantin Straturula and Virgil Martinesc (Romanians), Etty Fahima, Prof. Baruch Singer, Tuvia Wisner (79 years old) and Michael Orlansky (70), David Smirnoff, Uriel Bar-Maimon, Nisan Dolinger, Assaf Tzfira, Amos Sa'ada, Rabbi Yitzhak Arama, Zachar Rahamin Hanukayev, Ahmed Salah Kara, Ran Baron, Dominique Caroline Hass, Carlos Andrés Mosquera Chávez, Yaakov Yaakobov, Fatima Slutsker, Dov Kol, Rachel Kol, Dana Galkowicz, Bi Shude, Salah Ayash Imran, Muhammed Mahmoud Jaroun, Yitzhak Buzaglo, Aryeh Nagar, Yael Orbach, Ronen Reuvenov, Odelia Hubara, Gideon Rivlin, Nissim Arbiv, Jitladda Tap-arsa, Assaf Greenwald, Hafez al-Hafi, Rotem Moriah, Tzila Niv and her two sons, Gilad, 11, and Lior, 3,Oleg Paizakov and his wife Ludmilla, Khalil Zeitounya, 10, Michal Alexander, Roy Avisaf, Einat Naor, Pratheep Nanongkham, Yuval Abebeh, 4, and Dorit (Masarat) Benisian, 2, Tiferet Tratner, Menashe Komemi, Mamoya Tahio, Mordechai Yosepov, Afik Zahavi, Weerachai Wongput, Rishon Lezion and Tali Hatuel.
And don't forget Yanai Weiss, Tali Hatuel and her daughters - Hila, 11, Hadar, 9, Roni, 7, and Merav, 2.
A joint operation in 2003 (bus firebombing) credited to both al Aqsa Brigade and Hamas (meaning it was launched both out of Ramallah and Gaza) murdered Avraham (Albert) Balhasan, Rose Boneh, Hava Hannah (Anya) Bonder, Anat Darom, Viorel Octavian Florescu, Natalia Gamril, Yechezkel Isser Goldberg, Baruch (Roman) Hondiashvili, Dana Itach, Mehbere Kifile, and Eli Zfira.
You can assign blame to whichever group you want.
I think there might be more than 12.
Let's put the lie to rest. Forever.
In one week in June alone, the BBC estimated that 100 or so people perished when Hamas stormed the presidential compound in Gaza City.
The death toll is probably somewhere around 2,000 or so (and rising!), then triple that for the number of wounded over the past two years.
But it's Israel's fault. Of course.
Look at what they are doing. Maybe not cheaply, but the organizational knowledge is what is key. The mighty IED is being routed by a few hundred Americans. Lower cost ways to keep it going can be innovated in. Please note that this operation Odin's Thunder is one of the ways we can win militarily in Iraq. While it is true there is no solution without a political solution, the political solution needs a military solutionto move forward.
I do coke, so I can work harder, so I can make more money, so I can buy more coke, so I can work harder...
Buck,
Um..hmm, you know, it could be just me...but t'ah...yeah, we've been applying the military solution for the past four years...perhaps it's time to reverse that last bit. Kinda like this, "The military solution needs a political solutionto move forward."
I seem to recall four mighty IEDs that routed me, to the point that I was on profile for more than a year with extensive head and ear trauma.
Glad to know that by getting blown up so often, I defeated four mighty IEDs.
Any military outcome will have a political outcome. Dictating the politics of other countries simply is not a valid reason for a war or occupation.
And it isn't worth the cost either: not even close.
Actually, that is the SOLE reason for states to go to war. There is a failure of one state influencing to an acceptable degree the politics of another.
You might not believe it was correct to do so in the case of Iraq, but you initially supported the assault against the Talibi government in Kabul because of its foreign policy and internal politics that kept al Qaeda on retainer.
Of course, this is hypocritical. You can't say that it's unacceptable for military force to be applied to changing one enemy nation's politics (Iraq) but fine for another (Afghanistan).
MSR,
My point is that IEDs have been portrayed [by people easger to see the US fail in Iraq) as this unstoppable thing against which hold the US military are only victims. That is not what is happening. Lethal countermeasures are being developed.
Easger?
I take it to mean eager, which I find...well, kinda reprehensible to be honest.
I'm not eager for anyone to die, and I seriously think there is a fallacy in thinking that "leathal countermeasures are being developed" is something to hang our hat on.
What bothers me is the "eagerness" of those who are not part of the big green machine to be cheerleaders for something they themselves would never join in on. I'm not saying you're one of them, but there is a palpable cheerleader mentality of some who are...well, not sure what to call them...armchair soldiers...walter mitty's...who vicariously link their own courage to that of someone like MSR, or Phil.
War groupies is about the only thing I can really say they are, but honestly, war sucks. I've seen it on video which was as close as I ever want to get to it...Gulf War I cured me forever of anything that could be called attractive/romantic/glamorous about war.
I'm sorry Buck, I'm not eager for defeat, I'm eager for peace...I'm eager for my fellow countrymen to come home from Iraq...I'm eager for my cousin to come home, and the men in my Church to come home...but eager for defeat...no, not eager for anything to do with war...but I am eager for a quiet moment of peace.
What your arguments show is that you have no real understanding of the problems and that you're as much a terrorist as Bin Ladin is. He just uses a different brand of theological BS to decorate his excuses.
Harper's --
January 23, 2008
DECONSTRUCTING JOHN YOO
by Scott Horton
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/01/hbc-90002226