H13823
Headlines : IraqIraqi details 'shocking' U.S. missteps
“First came the “monumental ignorance” of those in Washington pushing for war in 2002 without “the faintest idea” of Iraq’s realities. “More perceptive people knew instinctively that the invasion of Iraq would open up the great fissures in Iraqi society“
Very well said.
The American invasion of Iraq would be a cakewalk they said. They had no idea of the geo-politics of the region nor the culture of Iraq. Now they find themselves in a civil war they started. If they stay they will bleed, if they leave, Iraq will burn then heal.
Military might does not guarantee victory. A lesson we thought the U.S. had learned long ago. With Afghanistan in flames, perhaps Guevara’s dream of “one, two, three Vietnams” is coming true. A self-inflicted wound from an empire struggling to retain as much as possible after an overreach.
[Posted By Dilated_Rebel]Republished from Yahoo! News [AP]
NEW YORK – In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi government insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation’s “shocking” mismanagement of his country — a performance so bad, he writes, that by 2007 Iraqis had “turned their backs on their would-be liberators.”
“The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order,” Ali A. Allawi concludes in “The Occupation of Iraq,” newly published by Yale University Press.
Allawi writes with authority as a member of that “new order,” having served as Iraq’s trade, defense and finance minister at various times since 2003. As a former academic, at Oxford University before the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, he also writes with unusual detachment.
Posted by Dilated_Rebel
Born and raised very humbly in a “small town” in southern California, I was a product of different worlds. Literally, part of my family descends from Mexico the rest from Portugal and Uruguay. This mixture had kept me from supporting any racist psyche found...
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Breaking the Army
OPEN QUOTE
“The truth is, the U.S. Army is in serious trouble and any recovery will be years in the making and, as a result, the country is in a position of strategic peril,” ret. Gen. Barry McCaffrey, former head of the U.S. Southern Command, told the National Journal, elaborating on a much-cited memo he had written for his colleagues at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
. . .
Counting reserve and National Guard forces, the Army’s total strength stands at about one million soldiers, of whom less than 400,000 are trained for combat.
. . .
In addition to lowered standards for recruitment, the biggest concerns at the moment have to do with readiness and training. As more troops are rotated into Iraq for the “surge”, the amount of time devoted to training has been substantially reduced.
. . .
“On the equipment side of the equation, the Army is pretty much broken,” Tom McNaugher, an expert at the RAND Corporation, told the Journal.
. . .
[T]he Army is currently short about 3,000 mid-career officers, a number that will be impossible to make up as the army expands over the next five years — a situation that Scales called “pretty much irreversible”.
END OF QUOTE
Well than, start the lottery draft!!!!!!! Have a good time fighting Americans!!!