And that is exactly the argument being made by the conservative talking head on my TV right now. Time for Republicans to wave the bloody shirt again.
If it has any kind of impact on how people think about the war, I’d be stunned.
I don’t know about this but I’ll bet it will result in a lot of trigger-happy GI’s and will spell grave danger for Iraqi. Any group that approaches a checkpoint is in extreme peril even if its members are merely going to the grocery.
The 101st have had problems recently.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5096660.stm
The murder of these men isn’t going to help.
That’s it. The pooch is now officially screwed.
That’s not normally what “screw the pooch” means - but holy shit, that’s bad. None of the news sites I’ve checked are reporting it yet, but when you hope it was a friendly-fire incident, you know how bad things are.
I agree- how many turning points can one country have? For that matter, since we’ve “turned a corner” so many times, doesn’t that mean we’re back where we started?
There’s probably some sort of metaphor connecting turning points to WMD’s, here, but I can’t find it.
Y’know what the answer to this is? Train more Iraqi soldiers!
Man, where’s Ryan_Liam when you need him? I shouldn’t have to make these points on my own, you know.
Well I’m sure you count it as another Grim Milestone. There must be enough Grim Milestones to pave a three lane highway from London to Berlin. But sure. As you said, the answer is to train more Iraqi soldiers and more Iraqi police officers. What else would you suggest? Scrap the Iraqi army and police force? Perhaps the screening and training could be better or should be altered in the light of this situation. But shit happens, and you never rid yourself of rotten apples. As unfortunate as it is for the cruelly murdered soldiers and their families, this incident should only help to reinforce our resolve and convince us there can be no negotiated solution with such enemies.
Well, it really was more of a joke and a snipe at Ryan_Liam than a serious post, but since you ask…
I would suggest, for a start, a phased withdrawl of American and British troops, starting tomorrow. Ideally, they would be replaced by UN peacekeeping forces, but the main thing is to get them out. I believe they are no longer helping to maintain stability in Iraq, and are instead contributing to the instability. Extra funding to the coalition government, scrapping the ridiculous biased contracts awarded to large American corporations for the “reconstruction” of Iraq in favour of large amounts of reconstruction money given to international aid agenencies to sponsor creating infrastructure, and efforts to open negotiations with both those insurgent groups not involved in terrorism (yes, they do exist) and those backing them (ie. Iran) would also help, IMO.
Incidentally, we already tried scrapping the Iraqi army (shortly after the invasion, in fact), and many now see that action as the biggest single factor contributing to insurgent activity. I am not, therefore, in favour of dissolving either the army or the police force. I would be in favour of dissolving the militias which have sprung up across Iraq, and which are frequently no more than paramilitaires serving the local cleric or tribal interest.
I am also annoyed by your ridiculous language, and your implied suggestion that I want Iraq to destabilize. I would love nothing more than for Iraq to instantly transform into a beacon of democracy and liberalism, but since it shows no signs of doing so, I think it is important to mention the “grim milestones” because of the fact that plenty of other people are pretending that things are not going to hell in Iraq, and still maintaining that the invasion was a great idea. Absent that, the manipulative appeal to think of the “cruelly murdered soldiers”, the dismissal of those Iraqis who killed them as “a few bad apples” when evidence increasingly suggests that the antagonistic feeling towards those seen in Iraq as foreign invaders is present in all levels of Iraqi society, including the police and army, and your jingoistic little trope about “reinforcing our resolve” all suggest that you’ve been taking speech-writing lessons from Scott Mclellan. This sort of attitude is exactly what got us into this present mess, and without the willingness to recognize the mistakes made by the American and British in Iraq and act both to correct them and repay the population of Iraq for our errors, the insurgency is only going to draw more people to its cause, and the ordinary people of Iraq are only going to become more hostile.
Has Bush made a public speech since this came out? Because I think we just saw a preview.
-Joe
Translate that to Arabic and I think you’d have a good summation of the speeches of the insurgents, too.
You mush have one of those thin-skinned days, because I nowhere implied you wanted “Iraq to destabilize” (and don’t you have one thread like this going in the pit already) But in fact I did not ask in any but a rhetorical sense, and what should be made of a man who likes to make jokes of others, but can’t handlea bit of joking coming back without getting hurt and annoyed (not to speak of personal and insulting). The “bad apples” evidently referred to the reports coming out that it was an inside job, so to speak. I have yet to see a big avalanche of Iraqi soldiers turning on their non-Iraqi allies. As for the rest of your jingoistic little trope and armchair solutions. Immediate withdrawl against the express wish of the democratically elected Iraqi governments to be replaced with UN peacekeepers of the battalion of flying pigs? Now how’s that for a plan.
That’s because the insurgency is smarter than that. Once they have successfully infiltrated an Iraqi army or police unit, it would be a waste of a valuable asset to just have them directly kill Americans they work with. A much better strategy would be to let the mole remain embedded with the unit, and feed information about operations to outside insurgents, who then ambush patrols or other targets of opportunity. Which is what is happening all over Iraq.
Reinforce “our” (be careful there, Dane) resolve to do what, exactly? Kill everyone who presents a risk to our people there? How? Who’d be left? Who are the “good guys”? And who’d be the bad guys then?
The time for a UN pace keeping mission is gone, which country would send cannon fodder to Iraq just so the US can save face?
The mole, hell, whole units are infiltrated. This is why the US doesn’t provide real weapons to the Iraqi army. As one of the US Army leaders said, no one knows who is on whoses side.
Sure, go the distance, but for what? Who is going to be the last American killed for a losing cause?
I think Yeats said it best:
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre…”. If you’re spiralling out of control, you can have ∞ of turns and still not get on a straight course at the end.
I whinced a little at a military news briefing that one coalition member was killed and a number injured in the search for these two men. That’s a 50% return rate on recovering (already-dead) men, and probably just what the freedom fighters wanted. “Leave No Man Behind” never seemed to make any sense to me.
It probably makes a lot more sense if you were the guy left behind.