IEDs, PTSD But No Nudity
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As the Iraqi and Afghan wars continue, the frustration and horror of US GIs on the ground seems to have no bounds. Not only do they have to endure a violent and senseless situation every day, but they have to suffer double and triple for it, even after coming home.
- American and Iraqi forces in Baghdad have been targeted with 251 improvised bombs this month — nearly double the monthly average — as fighting in and around Sadr City intensified.
Some of the attacks involved deadly armor-piercing bombs that the U.S. military has linked to Iran, said Army Brig. Gen. Mike Milano, deputy commander of the American division in the capital.
The numbers, provided by the Multi-National Division-Baghdad, include bombs that were detonated or found before they were triggered.
On average, 42% are discovered before they are detonated.
The increase in bombings partly reflects a struggle for control of the roads into Sadr City, a Shiite slum of more than 1 million people in eastern Baghdad.
…
At least 14 of the 33 American combat deaths in Iraq this month have occurred in Baghdad, according to a database maintained by USA TODAY.
– Jim Michaels, USA Today, http://www.usatoday.com/news/military, (4/28/08)
Urban warfare warapped in an intense religious insurgency is a horror in which the US has found itself. Stress levels everywhere are always on an extreme-high level.
Sucking on Red Bull and watching the alleyways, US GIs continue to do the job, though, day-after-day for now over five years.
While assholes arrogantly blubber:
- “As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
– Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, responding to a U.S. soldier serving in Iraq who asked him why troops had to dig through scrap metal to armor vehicles, Dec. 8, 2004.
And what if the entire GI breaks down, dumb-ass Don?
- WASHINGTON — The latest and most comprehensive study of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has concluded that nearly 1 in every 5 veterans is suffering from depression or stress disorders and that many are not getting adequate care.
The study shows that mental disorders are more prevalent and lasting than previously known, surfacing belatedly and lingering after troops have been discharged.
…
An estimated 300,000 veterans among the nearly 1.7 million who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan are battling depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. More than half of these people, according to the study conducted by the Rand Corp., are slipping through the cracks in the bureaucratic system, going without necessary treatment.
The Rand study underscores one of the lessons of modern counterinsurgency conflicts: Such wars may kill fewer troops than traditional fighting but can leave deeper psychological scars.
– Julian E. Barnes, latimes.com/news/science, (4/18/08)
And what kind of shithole awaits returning GIS in the good-old US of A?
One parent got really pissed:
- (CNN) — The U.S. military is promising action to address conditions in a barracks at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, after a soldier’s father posted images on YouTube showing a building that he said “should be condemned.”
“This is embarrassing. It’s disgusting. It makes me mad as hell,” Ed Frawley said of the building where his son, Sgt. Jeff Frawley, had to live upon his return this month from a 15-month deployment to Afghanistan.
Frawley said Monday that Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Dick Cody called him to say he shares Frawley’s anger and that “there’s no excuse.” Cody said he would not want his own sons or any troops to return to such conditions, Frawley said.
Frawley’s 10-minute video shows still photos from throughout the building, which appears to be falling apart and filled with mold and rust.
Paint — which Frawley said is lead-based — is chipping. Ceiling tiles are missing. A broken drain pipe allows sewer gas into the building, while another one has tissues stuffed into it in an apparent effort to stop the gas from coming in.
– cnn.com/2006/us/04/28/barracks.bragg, (4/28/08)
And now no more girlie mags.
Conservative Republican and “Pro Family” bozo Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia along with 15 like-minded co-sponsors and propped up by the likes of the Alliance Defense Fund and the American Family Association are pushing legislation that would ban sales of adult-themed publications on military bases.
They have the unmitigated gall to call the bill the Military Honor and Decency Act.
A sample of the ole Dufus Dick Cheney chickenhawkshit bluster (a freakin’ mouthful):
- “As a Marine, I am deeply concerned for the welfare of our troops and their mission,” Broun said on April 17. “Allowing the sale of pornography on military bases has harmed military men and women by: escalating the number of violent, sexual crimes; feeding a base addiction; eroding the family as the primary building block of society; and denigrating the moral standing of our troops both here and abroad. Our troops should not see their honor sullied so that the moguls behind magazines like Playboy and Penthouse can profit. The ‘Military Honor and Decency Act’ will right a bureaucratic–and moral–wrong.”
…
“Let me get this straight,” The Carpetbagger Report‘s Steve Benen added. “U.S. troops are fighting two wars, neither of which are going well, and the American Family Association’s biggest concern is what kind of magazines the troops can purchase on base?
“Here’s a radical idea: maybe those who wear the uniform and put their lives on the line for their country should be able to read whatever they want.”
– Nick Langewis, raw story.com/news/2008/Bill_seeks_to_jack_soldiers_off, (4/26/08)
Hypocrite bastards!
Original Intent
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Now more than seven-and-a-half years later, the US has been sidelined from pursuing bad guys and instead is on a quagmire-like, downward spiral via a couple of savage sinkholes.
Although a military strike into Afghanistan appeared to be logical move in the fall of 2001, original intent had been Iraq.
- “We will definitely have to draw down in Iraq,” he said. But he was reluctant to give a date, saying “the size of our force will come down when the Iraqi Army is capable of defending itself.”
However, he sees no light at the end of the Afghanistan tunnel.
“We have a lot further to go there than in Iraq,” he said. “We’ll be there for the long haul.”
– Gen. George W. Casey Jr., US Army chief of staff, Knight Ridder Newspapers, (4/22/08)
Launched Oct. 7. 2001, the war in Afghanistan has morphed into a long-term nightmare. After all reserved resources of the US military were required to halt the spreading horror of Iraq, the conflict to subdue the Taliban, find Osama bin Laden and put “democracy” in power has slipped backward in time.
Lessons learned in Iraq find pupils in Afghanistan:
- A spate of suicide bombings and other attacks on security forces in southern Afghanistan Wednesday left 13 people dead and 24 others wounded, officials said.
In Kandahar province, a suicide bomber blew himself up next to a vehicle carrying intelligence agents in the border town of Spin Boldak, killing three civilians, Kandahar Gov. Assadullah Khalid said.
Two children and three intelligence agents were among the 14 hurt, Khalid said.
Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi said the insurgent group was behind the attack and identified the bomber as a man named Gul Mohammad.
A 16-year-old boy who was wounded in the explosion said police shot at the bomber before he detonated explosives.
…
More than 900 policemen were among the 8,000 people killed last year in insurgency-related violence, officials said. The high death toll comes despite some $4 billion the U.S. has spent to train and equip the police in the last three years.
– Noor Khan, Associated Press, (4/23/08)
In the autumn of 2001, Decider George wasn’t Decider George. He was President Bush.
We hadn’t then much of a true inkling of his actual character — we had no idea the man was a complete incompetent, arrogant asshole.
However, we sure-as-shit should have known.
The following a British look at the US head of state a couple of days after the World Trade Center/Pentagon attacks:
- President Bush was still struggling yesterday to come to terms with how to lead and unify the nation.
When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, Franklin D Roosevelt struck just the right note when he spoke of a “day of infamy.”
After the Oklahoma bombing six years ago, Bill Clinton’s eloquent and heartfelt response showed that he could rise to the occasion during a national crisis.
…
Mr Bush was not helped by the confusion surrounding him after he left Florida, where he had been about to deliver a speech at an elementary school. “I, unfortunately, will be going back to Washington after my remarks,” he told his audience.
…
In the crucial first hours when the nation began to look to him for reassurance and a sense of unity, Mr Bush appeared stunned and uncertain. There was a sense of panic around him as he was flown across the country instead of being returned to the capital.
…
It was not until the evening that it touched down at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington.
By that time, the lost hours immediately after the biggest national catastrophe for 50 years had made Mr Bush’s task as president all the more difficult, even as Americans joined together to rally around him.
– telegraph.co.uk/news, (Sept. 13, 2001)
And the key phrase, a notion Decider George “appeared stunned and uncertain,” seems about right for the little chickenshit.
Dufus Dick Cheney, Decider George’s able number one, another yellow-bellied, let-the-other-guy-and/or-his-children-die-for-me warrior: He was hunkered down in a deep pit somewhere in Washington, D.C., as the tale of Sept. 11 unfolded across US TV screens.
No one has reported how Dufus Dick appeared, but most-likely piss-his-pants scared.
Dufus Dick, by far, is the brains of this two-muled, trainwreck of a presidency — if brains is the right word, maybe more the ‘asshole soul’ (but that’s a mouthful) — and he started near-immediately building the infrastructure to completly deface the world.
One has to give the boys credit: they moved pretty fast.
Just in his second week, the-then-President Bush created a so-called energy task force, officially known as the National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG) with Dufus Dick as its boiler head.
Since Dufus Dick had his slick fingers all over big oil and big construction firms like Halliburton, it was only fair all the fat cats get their share.
A near-complete secret operation, though some details were eventually leaked to the press, and via a couple of lawsuits, Dufus Dick and his task force never had to account to anyone and anybody.
According to” the Washington Post, Dufus Dick met in early 2001 with executives from the oil and gas industries, including Anadarko Petroleum’s Robert Allison and then-Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay: All the king’s gold lay at their feet.
Oil and all its subsidiary connections and industries was the goal of the task force.
Iraq had the oil.
A pressing need was to get to the oil in Iraq.
History can be real cute at times, horrifyingly cute. The attacks in New York, Washington and in a quiet Pennsylvania pasture was the linchpin for Iraq.
And like spoiled boys, Decider George and Dufus Dick, aided and abetted by Big Don Rumsfeld, along with a giant host of other incompetent assholes, abandoned Afghanistan for the ultimate toy: Iraq and its oil.
And now a double quagmire when no one in either Afghanistan or Iraq greeted the US as liberators.
- “Go fuck yourself.”
– Dufus Dick to Sen. Patrick Leahy during an angry exchange on the US Senate floor. Leahy was asking about profiteering by Halliburton (June 25, 2004)
‘Wild Bill’ and the TV Generals
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A first read and seemingly nothing new. A few minutes, hours and now a couple of days to contemplate. The scenario now sickens us to the bowels.
- Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.
The effort, which began with the buildup to the war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.
…
Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said.
…
Five years into the Iraq war, most details of the architecture and execution of the Pentagon’s campaign have never been disclosed. But The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.
These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated.
…
In interviews, participants described a powerfully seductive environment — the uniformed escorts to Mr. Rumsfeld’s private conference room, the best government china laid out, the embossed name cards, the blizzard of PowerPoints, the solicitations of advice and counsel, the appeals to duty and country, the warm thank you notes from the secretary himself.
“Oh, you have no idea,” Mr. Allard said, describing the effect. “You’re back. They listen to you. They listen to what you say on TV.” It was, he said, “psyops on steroids” — a nuanced exercise in influence through flattery and proximity. “It’s not like it’s, ‘We’ll pay you $500 to get our story out,’ ” he said. “It’s more subtle.”
The access came with a condition. Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon.
…
As it happened, the analysts’ news media appearances were being closely monitored. The Pentagon paid a private contractor, Omnitec Solutions, hundreds of thousands of dollars to scour databases for any trace of the analysts, be it a segment on “The O’Reilly Factor” or an interview with The Daily Inter Lake in Montana, circulation 20,000.
Omnitec evaluated their appearances using the same tools as corporate branding experts. One report, assessing the impact of several trips to Iraq in 2005, offered example after example of analysts echoing Pentagon themes on all the networks.
– nytimes.com/2008/04/20/Washington, (4/20/08)
As the US ran hard up to the war and after the invasion, we figured these retired military types were just trying to make some extra money by appearing on every TV news show on the planet. They could give what we’d call an “educated guess” about what was happening, about certain strategies and how situations might play.
We figured at worst, these retired military bozos were just loud-mouthed dumb shits.
We had no idea they were liars, cheats and as a blogger on the liberal dailykos called them: traitors.
Even as the “Generals’ Revolt” in 2006 broke, the Pentagon worked their in-house mouthpieces to dull the outcry from the former officers about Decider George’s totally botched operation in Iraq.
And on the other side of the coin: Gen. William Odom. We like to call him “Wild Bill” Odom because he looks nothing like someone who’d be called “Wild.” The name is similar to “Speedy” — attached to a slow person. He doesn’t look like a “wild” type guy if seen on PBS.
We call Odom “Wild Bill” out of the greatest respect.
He’s been on the mark a long time:
- I said before the war in February that if we invade Iraq, this will serve primarily the interests of two people: Osama bin Laden, because it will make Iraq safe for al Qaeda, and it will allow him to have access to kill Americans, which he cannot do in the U.S. very effectively; the second party that would benefit greatly would be the Iranians.
Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, and they fought for eight years, and Iranians hated that regime as much more than we did. Therefore it was very much in their interest, and it is clearer now that a Shiite majority will probably end up in control in Iraq, and it will not be pro-American, and it probably will be an Islamic religious republic.
– democracy now.org/2005/10/4/ret_army_general_William_odom_u, (10/4/05)
Earlier this month, in testimony before the US Senate Committee Foreign Relations On Iraq, Odom again called on the US to leave Iraq quickly: “The only sensible strategy is to withdraw rapidly but in good order. Only that step can break the paralysis now gripping US strategy in the region.”
The operative words now from Odom’s testimony is “in good order.”
Why can’t people listen to words of wisdom from a guy that knows his shit instead of all those TV generals mouthing Decider George’s wayward notions.
Wild Bill is telling the truth.
And soon, however, everyone will acknowledge what Odom’s been saying, but by then the blood of US GIs will be knee-high.
Surging ‘Uptick’
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Just as soon as we think the situation in Iraq is going to get worse, it does.
Business for the new, improved Iraqi version of al-Qaeda is booming. The Iraq central government is farther pushing the country into a wide-open, no-holds-barred, bloody civil war each and every day.
And literally scrambling around in the crosshairs of a shitload of gun barrels are US military personnel.
- U.S. troops killed 12 militants during an “uptick” in fighting Sunday, the military said, as fierce clashes broke out in Baghdad’s Sadr City district after radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr warned he will declare war if a crackdown against his followers persists.
…
Sadr City, a sprawling district of some 2.5 million people in eastern Baghdad, has seen daily clashes between U.S.-backed Iraqi forces who have launched a crackdown against Shiite militias led by al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia.
But (US military spokesman, Lt. Col. Steve) Stover said the fighting on Sunday was among the fiercest.
“There was an uptick in violence in comparison with the past couple of weeks,” Stover said, although he declined to link it to al-Sadr’s warning, which was broadcast over mosque loudspeakers in the district late Saturday.
“We’re not looking for a fight but what we are doing is protecting the Iraqi people,” Stover said.
– Bushra Juhi, Associated Press, (4/20/08)
According to Sadr, however, protecting the Iraqi people means for the US to get the shit out of Dodge — or Baghdad.
And Col. Stover’s little verbage from the AP story — “uptick” — might be the call sign for the last phase of US involvement in Iraq.
From “Mission Accomplished” to the “surge” and finally to an “uptick,” Decider George’s horrible little war, now officially considered a “major debacle” by his own Pentagon people, could be gearing for a traumatic ending.
In a statement today, Sadr ripped into Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for allowing the fighting to continue against his Mahdi Army.
Maliki said earlier in the day the central Iraq government would not tolerate armed groups, including Sadr’s militia and the country was not going to become the “the new Somalia.”
(Nothing but chaos and turmoil in Somalia since 1991 — tribal factions have continued to slaughter each other — and the US was slightly, but terribly involved, i.e., the ‘Black Hawk Down’ episode in 1993, and on Sunday, news reports indicated 81 civilians were killed in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, during the current fighting between Ethiopian troops and Islamic militants).
And Sadr appears fairly pissed. Just yesterday, he gave a “final warning” to the government to halt a U.S.-Iraqi crackdown against his followers or he would declare “open war until liberation.”
And on Sunday, in response to Maliki, the words got harsh:
- “As far as I’m aware, the Iraqi forces supported by the occupation forces attacked some of our believer brothers.
“They killed them in the most gruesome of ways and then burned them, and refused to hand over their pure bodies for burial,” he said, referring to clashes in Nasiriya on Saturday that left 16 militiamen dead and another 22 wounded. Eleven police officers were also wounded in the fighting.
– cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast, (4/20/08)
While Sadr was delivering his “final warning” on Saturday, the real US nemesis, al-Qaeda, also exploded some words out into the riddled air:
- BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — A man claiming to be the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq mocked the death toll of American troops and urged his fighters to launch an offensive against U.S. forces in the next few weeks.
“The reason I give this speech is that the enemy declared — even though it might be lying — that its death toll in Iraq has reached 4,000,” he said.
“So we call upon our heroes … to ask every group within a month from the time it hears this, to offer the head of an American as a gift to the deceitful [President] Bush,” he continued.
As of Saturday, 4,036 U.S. troops had died in the Iraq war.
– cnn.com, (4/19/08)
Talk about a damn uptick! These nasty-assed al-Qaeda boys are booming bombers. Decider George and his follow-up boy, Jackboot John McCain, won’t and can’t bear the understanding there would not be an al-Qaeda in Iraq without the US invasion and subsequent Iraq meltdown.
The best foreign newsman in Iraq gives an assessment:
- “God is Great,” screamed a man seconds before he blew himself up, killing 10 people in a restaurant in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province in western Iraq. A series of suicide bombings have shown over the past week that al-Qa’ida in Iraq, though battered by defections over the past year, is striking back remorselessly at Sunni Arab leaders who ally themselves to the US.
In another attack in the village of Albu Mohammed, south of Kirkuk, an elderly man thought by guards to be too old to be a bomber, walked unsearched into a tent filled with mourners attending the funeral of two Sunni tribesmen who had been killed after they joined al-Sahwa, the Awakening Council, as the pro-US Sunni group is called. The man detonated the explosives hidden under his long Arab robes, killing at least 50 people.
A vicious civil war is now being fought within Iraq’s Sunni Arab community between al-Qa’ida in Iraq and al-Sahwa while other groups continue to attack American forces. In Baghdad on a single day the head of al-Sahwa in the southern district of Dora was killed in his car by gunmen and seven others died by bombs and bullets in al-Adhamiya district.
– Patrick Cockburn, independent.co.uk/news/world, (4/19/08)
And last week:
- “Where the American invasion stands now, after five years, is failure and defeat,” the voice on the tape — supposedly that of Ayman al-Zawahiri — said in the roughly 16-minute recording, which was posted Thursday on several militant Islamist Web sites.
The tape referenced testimony by David Petraeus, the top U.S. general in Iraq, before Congress this month, when he said that further troop withdrawals in Iraq will have to wait at least another 45 days.
“It is all a silly episode to disguise failure in Iraq and so Bush would avoid making a decision on withdrawing troops — which is considered to be a declaration of crusaders’ defeat in Iraq — and move forward the problem to be the next president’s issue,” he said.
– cnn.com, (4/17/08)
Uptick of the situation is grim indeed.
Decider George has already gone down in history, gone way down, down to a place where there is absolutely no uptick at all.
And the horrible, aching horror of it all is that he’s dragged everybody else down with him.
Especially those mostly-young US peoples having to live and survive in Decider George’s inferno.
War Thunder and the UN
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Authoritative voices in the bright light:
- WASHINGTON — The war in Iraq has become “a major debacle” and the outcome “is in doubt” despite improvements in security from the buildup in U.S. forces, according to a highly critical study published Thursday by the Pentagon’s premier military educational institute.
The report released by the National Defense University raises fresh doubts about President Bush ‘s projections of a U.S. victory in Iraq just a week after Bush announced that he was suspending U.S. troop reductions
The report carries considerable weight because it was written by Joseph Collins , a former senior Pentagon official, and was based in part on interviews with other former senior defense and intelligence officials who played roles in prewar preparations.
It was published by the university’s National Institute for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research center.
“Measured in blood and treasure, the war in Iraq has achieved the status of a major war and a major debacle,” says the report’s opening line.
– McClatchy Newspapers, (4/17/08)
And as a major debacle, the ferocious Iraq catastrophe continues to amaze:
- BAGHDAD – A suicide bomber struck the funeral of two anti-al-Qaida Sunni tribesmen in a town north of Baghdad on Thursday, killing at least 50 people and wounding dozens, police said.
The blast was the latest this week to break a period of relative calm in Sunni areas, raising concerns that Sunni insurgents are reorganizing.
Over the past months, violence has dropped with the increase in U.S. troops and the growth of so-called Awakening Councils, groups of Sunni tribesmen and former insurgents who have joined American forces in fighting al-Qaida-linked militants.
Thursday’s attack took place in the town of Albu Mohammed about 90 miles north of Baghdad, during the funeral of two brothers who belonged to the local Awakening Council and had been killed in an attack a day earlier, police said.
The suicide bomber walked into a tent crowded with mourners in the village and detonated explosives strapped to his body, police in the nearby city of Kirkuk said.
The head of the local Awakening Council, Sheik Omar al-Azawi, was just pulling up at the tent in his car when the blast went off.
“I first heard a thunderous explosion and when I turned my eyes to the tent I saw fire and smoke coming out,” al-Azawi, 51, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.
…
He said the bomber, believed in his late 50s, was dressed in traditional Arab robes and that guards in charge of searching mourners allowed him in without a search.
– Associated Press, (4/17/08)
Arming these Sunni groups last year, these so-called Awakening Councils, to do battle against US enemies, other ‘terrorist’ groups, of which al-Aqaeda is only one, may be another strict, shit-fire miscalculation by Decider George’s army.
Not only is it just al-Qaeda, there’s tribesmen, factions, families and all kinds of assorted wads of insurgents, or maybe just common local cutthroats, who’ve found a full-time job butchering people.
And armed to the munitions-teeth by the US in hopes of making Decider George’s “surge” work. Hence, despite the human carnage at the funeral, the most important, terrible but interesting point in the AP story was the council chief’s observation, that guards in charge of searching mourners allowed him (the bomber) in without a search.
An opening was created last August to at least possibly bring an US conclusion to Decider George’s horrifying Iraq misadventure, but the offer went by the wayside in a summer’s crowded news cycle.
The seemingly real center of the upswing in violence and turmoil in Iraq this past month is the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Although the Sunni insurgency does have some bad boys, it does not have the popular appeal of Sadr, who has played Decider George and his dipwad lackey Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki like a concert violinist — or maybe like Eddie Van Halen on ‘Eruption.’
Sadr’s Mahdi militia withstood Maliki’s govenment forces in Basra and Baghdad during the coordinated assaults at the end of last month. Only a US GI military bail-out kept the government forces from completely falling apart.
And many government fighters, maybe up to 1,300 soldiers, deserted or swapped sides during the heavy fighting, a trend that continues as earlier this week an entire Iraqi unit left a battle site on the outskirts of Sadr City, creating a gap in street defences, which then put US troops in even-more jeopardy.
The Mahdi army is more disciplined with better equipment:
- “After clashes that continued for hours between us and the Mahdi Army militiamen, I became positive that I could not go on fighting.
“I found out that it was a lost unequal battle. The Mahdi armament was much stronger than the Iraqi army’s. We had no heavy mortars while the Mahdi fighters had mortars of all calibers, not to mention the improvised explosive devices they planted everywhere,” the 35-year-old officer told VOI.
– Voices of Iraq, aswataliraq.info/look/English/article, (4/15/08)
Sadr’s rapidly-growing impact, however, is not in guns, but in bread:
- BAGHDAD – For Um Wissam, a small office packed with food aid in Shiite-dominated Sadr City is a lifeline. With her son killed two years ago, the widow has nowhere else to turn for support.
“They’re really great,” she said. “They give us whatever they possibly can.”
‘They’ are fervent anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army.
– Ned Colt, NBC News, worldblog.MSNBC.com, (4/16/08)
As the price of oil climbs, so does the Iraq national treasury — last reported to be $30 billion in reserves — but because of bickering political alliances, massive corruption and incompetence in the Iraq government there is no help for ordinary Iraqis.
A report released Tuesday from Washington, D.C.-based Refugees International, titled ‘Uprooted and Unstable: Meeting Urgent Humanitarian Needs in Iraq,’ reveals the problem in not getting real-life, real-survival help to a good-sized chunk of the population will eventually boil over into a grave security situation.
According to the preamble to the report, the chaos has already formed:
- …a vacuum of humanitarian assistance created by the failure of the Iraqi government and the international community to administer aid to civilians.
During a mission inside Iraq, researchers for Refugees International found that Iraqi militias are creating a Hezbollah-like dynamic by becoming major humanitarian providers of food, clothing, oil and other basic resources.
As a result, militias are recruiting civilians, including displaced Iraqis, at a rapid pace.
Refugees International cautions that failure to address this problem will have dire consequences for the humanitarian and security situation in Iraq.
The report recommends that aid organizations, including the UN, navigate the complex landscape by partnering with local groups inside Iraq, and discourages refugee returns until more effective aid channels are established.
– refugeesinternational.org, (4/15/08)
The UN hasn’t had much of a presence in Iraq since August 2004 when its Baghdad headquarters was blown up, killing 22 people. A skeleton crew of 35 are currently on duty there.
A opening for the UN to return to Iraq was offered last August by Sadr.
In an interview with the UK-based newspaper, The Guardian, in August, 2007, Sadr proved he’s a more-able politician than his counterparts in Baghdad and Washington.
Although he and Maliki were once good buddies, not any longer.
He told the Guardian: “Al-Maliki’s government will not survive because he has proven that he will not work with important elements of the Iraqi people.
“The prime minister is a tool for the Americans, and people see that clearly. It will probably be the Americans who decide to change him when they realize he has failed. We don’t have a democracy here, we have a foreign occupation.”
Most of the news reports highlighted Sadr’s bad mouthing of Maliki, but skipped the most important part: “If the UN comes here to truly help the Iraqi people, they will receive our help in their work. I would ask my followers to support the UN as long as it is here to help us rebuild our country.
(Adding an ominous note): “They must not just be another face of the American occupation.”
Attitudes such as from Ned Colt’s story above about Sadr being “fervent anti-American” will keep the US from having anything to do with the cleric and not responded to his offer — last August Decider George would have scoffed at Sadr’s proposal (if he had known, most-likely didn’t), but now with his war officially a ‘debacle’ a rational person might think twice.
But then, we have to remember who we’re dealing with here.
Sadr fright will keep Decider George away from the man.
Although Sadr is just being natural — he wants his country for his countrymen.