Shouldn't we consider giving "medals of freedom" to each of the soldiers that have been ordered to "serve" in Iraq, for two, three, and even four "tours" of duty, and consider putting on trial, the "architects" of the invasion of Iraq, and the officials who continue to order our troops to "engage the enemy" in Iraq? Read the inner, lower, quote box about reporter Tom Lasseter. He seems qualified to write the following article, and he seems to know of what he
speaks. Can they same be said about the author of these words:
<a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/06/20050628-7.html">And we fight today because terrorists want to attack our country and kill our citizens, and Iraq is where they are making their stand. So we'll fight them there, we'll fight them across the world, and we will stay in the fight until the fight is won."</a>
I submit that every night, the "2 or 3" innocent Iraqi bystanders killed by U.S. troops as they conduct their "counterinsurgency raids", trigger the minting of additional, "angry young men", new jihadist, bent on revenging the deaths of their innocent relatives, at the hands of our troops who have no fucking business, now....if they ever did....being present on the ground there to conduct those raids, in the first place.
Add to this dysfunctional and counter productive American military policy, incidents like the killings of 19 women and children, last november, in Haditha, and then try to convince readers here that the U.S. has anything signifigant left to accomplish in Iraq....how any of this madness is worth the risk of deploying or losing one more of our troops, after you read the description of where are leaders have them "operating", in bold print, four paragraphs below:
Quote:
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/14746733.htm
For U.S. troops, it's hard to know who is friend and who is foe
By Tom Lasseter
Knight Ridder Newspapers
.....Be careful, Oliver told his men, not to get shot. And be careful, the company commander said, not to shoot any unarmed civilians.
Despite those warnings, last Thursday's mission would serve as a reminder that counterinsurgency is among the most complex forms of warfare, and sometimes the wrong people are killed.
While outrage gathers over the reported killings of 24 civilians by U.S. Marines in the western Iraqi town of Haditha, U.S. military units such as Oliver's Delta Company quietly go about the daily task of patrolling a very complicated battlefield.
As part of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team of the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division, <b>Oliver's soldiers are responsible for an area south of Baghdad where there are Sunni Muslim insurgents who kill U.S. soldiers, Shiite militiamen who kill Sunni families, Sunni insurgents who kill Shiite Muslim families, and an assortment of smugglers and criminals.
Most Iraqis are caught in between, just trying to make it to the next day.</b>
Cremer's job on this mission was to make sure that Oliver, 31, from Sierra Vista, Ariz., and his men had the clearest possible picture of the line between friend and foe. He is, in military jargon, a Joint Terminal Attack controller - the front line of the U.S. Air Force........
......... The Bradleys stopped and soldiers began to pour out.
The light of Cremer's computer flickered in the darkness, and he stared at the video feed, in which dark spots - soldiers - circled and entered the buildings.
It looked, he said, "like a video game."
The radio crackled with a report of one shot fired, then a second, third and finally a fourth. Soldiers called in as they cleared rooms of the seven houses. They'd come in expecting about 17 people; there were 27.
Time passed. Cremer kept watching the screen. The radio squawked: Two men and a woman were dead. The details were vague. A soldier had seen the woman and said he thought she had a rocket-propelled grenade launcher on her shoulder.
A sergeant's voice boomed on the radio: "I need to know what the (expletive) that rocket (expletive) ended up being."
Cremer called in for illumination rockets, and the white balls bounced in the air, turning night to day. The soldiers didn't find a rocket-propelled grenade or its launcher. They scoured the compound and found only two AK-47 assault rifles, common in Iraq.
The insurgent leader wasn't there. The soldiers detained a man who intelligence reports suggested was an associate...........
........ At the mess hall later that day, <b>Oliver said he would have to return to the compound to give the family compensation payments for the woman and probably for the two men as well, depending on whether intelligence officers determined they were insurgents.
Oliver wasn't looking forward to the trip.</b>
Cremer's boss, Capt. Jason Earley, said there would be plenty more missions to come - bringing the chance to stop insurgents who've killed and maimed innocents, but also bringing the risk of killing the innocents themselves.
<b>"We're trying to give these people freedom, which I think is an incredibly noble thing,"</b> said Earley, 32, of New Buffalo, Mich. But, he added, "it's complicated."
|
If the choice is between "trying to give these people freedom", after our military destroyed the repressive "checks and balances" that kept the lid on 75 years of grievances of factions knit by the threat of force of foreign armies, into a "country" populated by folks who never intended to be "united" in the first place, and the choice of keeping our walking, oft redoployed to Iraq, PTSD casualties from killing anymore Iraqis, I vote for at least withdrawing all of our troops to bases, Over the horizon". I won't put the word "innocent" before "Iraqis", because....who the fuck knows who the "innocent" are....and if I was deployed on my second or fourth tour "over there", I doubt that sorting out "the innocent" would be much of a priority, for me.
It's over....folks, no one has posted anything on the "Good news about Iraq" thread, here at TFP, in quite a while.