Topic: 'The hell That is Iraq?' 10 Years on

[RojoLeón]

One observer told Saddam:

    "Go to hell!"

Saddam replied,

    "The hell that is Iraq?"

10 years on and the true cost is only becoming apparent. The decision to invade Iraq was a costly one. For the few positives that can be drawn, many terrible consequences weight against it. Undoubtedly, the removal of a sadistic and corrupt tyrant should be of comfort. However, the country is disintegrating - it was probably never meant to be drawn together as a nation: A legacy of British Imperial hubris and contempt for what may have seemed to them to be primitive and alien traditions and cultures.

The facts is, sadly, that it was bound together through Saddam's iron will and capacity for compulsive violence. For all our cultural mores and ideals, Western style democracy was never going to be enough to make it work. The age old sectarian hatreds - tribal and religious, run too deep.

The war was a disaster militarily and also in terms of public opinion - at home (for the US and UK) and in the wider Western world. The only people that benefited in reality, were the myriad and corrupt 'defense' industrial complex, and their parasitical sleazy contractors. The people of Iraq are arguably in a position of promise, but currently stand no better off and in many cases worse than before. Woman's rights (which flourished under Saddam, relative to many of their neighbours) are at an all time low. Live expectancy is nosediving and career options are limited - there is a low intensity conflict being fought and it is likely that this is all that the majority of Iraqi men and women have to look forward to.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/14/us-iraq-war-anniversary-idUSBRE92D0PG20130314

The U.S. war in Iraq has cost $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest, a study released on Thursday said.

The war has killed at least 134,000 Iraqi civilians and may have contributed to the deaths of as many as four times that number, according to the Costs of War Project by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

When security forces, insurgents, journalists and humanitarian workers were included, the war's death toll rose to an estimated 176,000 to 189,000, the study said.

The report, the work of about 30 academics and experts, was published in advance of the 10th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003.

Excluded were indirect deaths caused by the mass exodus of doctors and a devastated infrastructure, for example, while the costs left out trillions of dollars in interest the United States could pay over the next 40 years.

http://truth-out.org/news/item/15166-iraq-wars-legacy-of-cancer

Contamination from Depleted Uranium (DU) munitions and other military-related pollution is suspected of causing a sharp rises in congenital birth defects, cancer cases, and other illnesses throughout much of Iraq.

Many prominent doctors and scientists contend that DU contamination is also connected to the recent emergence of diseases that were not previously seen in Iraq, such as new illnesses in the kidney, lungs, and liver, as well as total immune system collapse. DU contamination may also be connected to the steep rise in leukaemia, renal, and anaemia cases, especially among children, being reported throughout many Iraqi governorates.

There has also been a dramatic jump in miscarriages and premature births among Iraqi women, particularly in areas where heavy US military operations occurred, such as Fallujah.

Official Iraqi government statistics show that, prior to the outbreak of the First Gulf War in 1991, the rate of cancer cases in Iraq was 40 out of 100,000 people. By 1995, it had increased to 800 out of 100,000 people, and, by 2005, it had doubled to at least 1,600 out of 100,000 people. Current estimates show the increasing trend continuing.

As shocking as these statistics are, due to a lack of adequate documentation, research, and reporting of cases, the actual rate of cancer and other diseases is likely to be much higher than even these figures suggest.

"Cancer statistics are hard to come by, since only 50 per cent of the healthcare in Iraq is public," Dr Salah Haddad of the Iraqi Society for Health Administration and Promotion told Al Jazeera. "The other half of our healthcare is provided by the private sector, and that sector is deficient in their reporting of statistics. Hence, all of our statistics in Iraq must be multiplied by two. Any official numbers are likely only half of the real number."

Toxic environments

Dr Haddad believes there is a direct correlation between increasing cancer rates and the amount of bombings carried out by US forces in particular areas.

"My colleagues and I have all noticed an increase in Fallujah of congenital malformations, sterility, and infertility," he said. "In Fallujah, we have the problem of toxics introduced by American bombardments and the weapons they used, like DU."

During 2004, the US military carried out two massive military sieges of the city of Fallujah, using large quantities of DU ammunition, as well as white phosphorous.

"We are concerned about the future of our children being exposed to radiation and other toxic materials the US military have introduced into our environment," Dr Haddad added.

A frequently cited epidemiological study titled Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005-2009 involved a door-to-door survey of more than 700 Fallujah households.

The research team interviewed Fallujans about abnormally high rates of cancer and birth defects.

One of the authors of the study, Chemist Chris Busby, said that the Fallujah health crisis represented "the highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied".

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/18/iraq-war-among-worlds-worst-events/print

At 10 years since the launch of Operation Iraqi Liberation (to use the original name with the appropriate acronym, OIL) and over 22 years since Operation Desert Storm, there is little evidence that any significant number of people in the United States have a realistic idea of what our government has done to the people of Iraq, or of how these actions compare to other horrors of world history. A majority of Americans believe the war since 2003 has hurt the United States but benefitted Iraq. A plurality of Americans believe, not only that Iraqis should be grateful, but that Iraqis are in fact grateful.

A number of U.S. academics have advanced the dubious claim that war making is declining around the world.  Misinterpreting what has happened in Iraq is central to their argument.  As documented in the full report, by the most scientifically respected measures available, Iraq lost 1.4 million lives as a result of OIL, saw 4.2 million additional people injured, and 4.5 million people become refugees. The 1.4 million dead was 5% of the population. That compares to 2.5% lost in the U.S. Civil War, or 3 to 4% in Japan in World War II, 1% in France and Italy in World War II, less than 1% in the U.K. and 0.3% in the United States in World War II. The 1.4 million dead is higher as an absolute number as well as a percentage of population than these other horrific losses. U.S. deaths in Iraq since 2003 have been 0.3% of the dead, even if they’ve taken up the vast majority of the news coverage, preventing U.S. news consumers from understanding the extent of Iraqi suffering.

In a very American parallel, the U.S. government has only been willing to value the life of an Iraqi at that same 0.3% of the financial value it assigns to the life of a U.S. citizen.

The 2003 invasion included 29,200 air strikes, followed by another 3,900 over the next eight years. The U.S. military targeted civilians, journalists, hospitals, and ambulances  It also made use of what some might call “weapons of mass destruction,” using cluster bombs, white phosphorous, depleted uranium, and a new kind of napalm in densely settled urban areas.

Birth defects, cancer rates, and infant mortality are through the roof. Water supplies, sewage treatment plants, hospitals, bridges, and electricity supplies have been devastated, and not repaired. Healthcare and nutrition and education are nothing like they were before the war. And we should remember that healthcare and nutrition had already deteriorated during years of economic warfare waged through the most comprehensive economic sanctions ever imposed in modern history.

Money spent by the United States to “reconstruct” Iraq was always less than 10% of what was being spent adding to the damage, and most of it was never actually put to any useful purpose. At least a third was spent on “security,” while much of the rest was spent on corruption in the U.S. military and its contractors.

The educated who might have best helped rebuild Iraq fled the country.  Iraq had the best universities in Western Asia in the early 1990s, and now leads in illiteracy, with the population of teachers in Baghdad reduced by 80%.

For years, the occupying forces broke the society of Iraq down, encouraging ethnic and sectarian division and violence, resulting in a segregated country and the repression of rights that Iraqis used to enjoy even under Saddam Hussein’s brutal police state.

While the dramatic escalation of violence that for several years was predicted would accompany any U.S. withdrawal did not materialize, Iraq is not at peace. The war destabilized Iraq internally, created regional tensions, and — of course — generated widespread resentment for the United States. That was the opposite result of the stated one of making the United States safer.

If the United States had taken five trillion dollars, and — instead of spending it destroying Iraq — had chosen to do good with it, at home or abroad, just imagine the possibilities. The United Nations thinks $30 billion a year would end world hunger. For $5 trillion, why not end world hunger for 167 years? The lives not saved are even more than the lives taken away by war spending.

A sanitized version of the war and how it started is now in many of our school text books.  It is not too late for us to correct the record, or to make reparations.  We can better work for an actual reduction in war making and the prevention of new wars, if we accurately understand what past wars have involved.

 

[RojoLeón]

These are from the dark, genius mind of Gary Brecher; a self styled 'War Nerd'. Funny, horrifying satire. But I just can't help with agree with many of his conclusions. Powerful insight into the violent urges that drive us all..

http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-who-won-iraq-answer-anyone-who-stayed-out/

The War Nerd: Who Won Iraq? Answer: Anyone Who Stayed Out

A funny thing happened on the floor of the Senate last week. Somebody asked a serious question: “If the war in Iraq is lost, then who won?”

Of course Sen. Lindsay Graham, the guy who asked the question, didn’t mean it to be serious. He was just scoring points off Harry Reid, the world’s only Democratic Mormon. Reid had made a “gaffe” by saying in public what everybody already knows: “The war in Iraq is lost.” When you say something obviously true in politics, it’s called a “gaffe.”

So Graham, McCain’s bitch, jumps in to embarrass Reid with his question.

But let’s take the question seriously for a second here: who won in Iraq? To answer it, you have to start with a close-up of the region, then change magnification to look at the world picture. At a regional level the big winner is obvious: Iran. In fact, Iran wins so big in this war that I’ve already said that Dick Cheney’s DNA should be checked out by a reputable lab, because he has to be a Persian mole. My theory is that they took a fiery young Revolutionary Guard from the slums of Tehran, dipped him in a vat of lye to get that pale, pasty Anglo skin, zapped his scalp for that authentic bald CEO look, squirted a quart of cholesterol into his arteries so he’d develop classic American cardiac disease, and parachuted him into the outskirts of some Wyoming town. And that’s how our VP was born again, a half-frozen zombie with sagebrush twigs in his jumpsuit, stumbling into the first all-night coffee shop in Casper talking American with a Persian accent: “Hello my friends! Er, I mean, hello my fellow Americans! Coffee? I will have coffee at once, indeed, and is not free enterprise a glorious thing? Say, O brethren of the frosty tundra, what do you say we finish our donuts and march on Baghdad now, this very moment, to remove the Baathist abomination Saddam?”

It took a couple years for Cheney-ajad to get his American accent right and chew his way into Bush Jr.’s head, but he made it like one of Khan’s earwigs, got us to do the Ayatollahs’ dirty work for them by taking out Iraq, their only rival for regional power. Iraq is destroyed, and Tehran hasn’t lost a single soldier in the process. Our invasion put their natural allies, the Shia, in power; gave their natural enemies, the Iraqi Sunni, a blood-draining feud that will never end; and provided them with a risk-free laboratory to spy on American forces in action. If they feel like trying out a new weapon or tactic to deal with U.S. armor, all they have to do is feed the supplies or diagrams to one of their puppet Shia groups, or even one of the Sunni suicide-commando clans.

All these claims that Iran is helping the insurgents really make my head spin. Of course they’re helping. They’d be insane if they weren’t. If somebody invades the country next door, any state worth mentioning has to act. If Mexico got invaded by China, you better believe the U.S. would react. We’d lynch any president who didn’t.

What really amazes me is how patient Iran has been about it, how quiet and careful. They’ve covered their tracks carefully and kept their intervention to R&D level: just enough to keep Iraq burning, and patiently test out news IEDs.

But that’s the Persian way: behind all the yelling, they’re sly, clever people. If Iranian intelligence really wanted to flood Iraq with weaponry that would turn our APCs into well-insulated BBQs, they could have done it long ago. It’s clear they’re not doing that. They’re smart enough to follow Napoleon’s advice not to interfere with an enemy in the process of destroying himself – and stockpiling the new IED designs on their side of the border in case we’re stupid enough to invade.

The situation in Iraq right now is optimum for Iran. Iraq is like a nuclear reactor that they can control by inserting and removing control rods. If Shia/Sunni violence looks like cooling off, Tehran’s agents, who’ve penetrated both sides of the fight, play the hothead in their assigned Sunni or Shia gangs and lobby for a spectacular attack on enemy civvies or shrines – whatever gets the locals’ blood up. Then, if things get too hot, which would mean the U.S. getting fed up and leaving, they drop a control rod into the reactor core by telling Sadr to call off his militia or letting the Maliki regime stage some ceremony for the TV crews, the kind that keeps the Bushies back in Ohio convinced it’s all going to come out fine.

They need to keep us there, because – makes me sick to say it but it’s true – our troops are now the biggest, strongest control rod the Persians are using to set the temperature of this war. They want us there as long as possible, stoking the feuds and making sure nobody wins. That’s what we just did under Petraeus: switched sides, Shia to Sunni, because the Shia were getting too strong. Yeah, God forbid we should be unfair to the Sunnis, God forbid we should do anything to let somebody win. Let’s just make Tehran happy by keeping the feud going another few centuries.

One thing Iran is pretty clearly not scared of is every American amateur’s dream: A punitive U.S. invasion of Iran. In fact, like North Korea, their partner in the Axis of Evil, Iran is all but begging us to invade. Guys in junior high used to hold their chins out, tap them with a finger and say, “Come on, fucker, come on, hit me!” That’s Iran now, chin out and begging for a right hook. Because with all the anti-armor know-how they’ve gained by now, they have traps waiting for us that would make Lara Croft’s cave expeditions look like a backyard tea party. Even Cheney’s team knows that, which is why they’re talking about air raids on Iran these days, not invasion.

Another way countries can win in a regional war like this is from the money flooding in. The big winners of the Vietnam War were Thailand, Malaysia and Hong Kong. Thailand went from a failed state with a half-dozen insurgencies everywhere outside its central valley to a rich, happy tourist paradise during Nam. Modern Thailand is a country built on the backs and, uh, other body parts of its bar girls. Every time a GI spent his pay at the ping-pong shows in Bangkok, Thailand gained foreign exchange. The neon got brighter, the huts went split-level, and the Commie rebels swatting mosquitoes out there in the elephant grass started to feel a little foolish. Finally they said the Hell with it, bought suits and went Yuppie.

That’s one way to beat an insurgency: bribe it. Unfortunately, the two neighboring states likely to benefit from the Iraq war are…yup, those twin towers of evil, Syria and Iran. Just imagine how much money is flowing into their border provinces right now. Need any U.S.-issue supplies, weapons, toilet paper, or GPS units cheap? Just ask at any bazaar in Damascus or Tehran. Uncle Sam’s guarantee of quality – fell off the back of a two-and-a-half ton truck.

See, this is why I keep thinking Cheney’s got to be an Iranian mole. How could he not see that a war in Iraq benefits noncombatant neighboring states? He had to know. He can’t be that stup — Wait, I withdraw the comment.

Some paranoids want to list Israel among the winners, but I don’t see it. Perle, Feith and Wolfowitz thought invading Iraq would help Israel, or rather Likud, but like everything else these geniuses predicted, it didn’t happen. Iraq was never a threat to Israel. Iran is. And Iran is much stronger now. Last summer’s war with Hezbollah was one the Israelis didn’t really want to fight, but Cheney insisted. That was the deal, I guess: the U.S. takes out Saddam, then you take out Hezbollah. Instead, the IDF looked scared and weak in South Lebanon, so now Hezbollah and Iran are the poster-boys of every red-blooded Muslim kid on the planet.

Turkey, America’s one real ally in the Middle East, is a huge loser in this war. We slapped them in the face, gave the Kurds a base to destabilize southeastern Turkey, and helped elect the first Islamist president in what used to be a proudly secular country. Happy now, Cheney, you Khomeini-loving, anti-American mole?

When you zoom farther out to look at the global picture, the question “Who won Iraq?” doesn’t have such an obvious answer. It’s much easier to see who lost: Us, and anybody who backed us. We looked invincible after taking out the Taliban. Not no more. If you use armored columns as stationary cops in enemy neighborhoods, you give the locals plenty of time to figure out their weak spots. That’s what we did: gave the Arabs a trillion-dollar, multi-year seminar in how to defeat U.S. forces. Another lesson in the Brecher Doctrine: Nuke ‘em, bribe ‘em or leave ‘em alone.

To find a winner in this war means looking outside the box, like they say — or rather outside the theater of war. Because the winners are the countries smart enough to stay out of it.

A little historical perspective first. Who won the Thirty Years War? France and England, the European powers that stayed out or just dabbled. France played that war a lot like Iran has played this one: tinkered around, tampered, spied and whispered to all the contenders, but never risked a big chunk of money or force. Every country that took part lost, and the Germans, who had what you might call the home field disadvantage, lost most of all, up to a third of their population. So if you cared about the Iraqis, which I don’t and neither do you, then they’d win the Oscar for biggest losers here. But then they had that one locked up already.

So the likely winner of a war like this is an up-n-coming world economic power that has been investing in its own economy while we blow a trillion — yep, a trillion — dollars on nothing. Not hard to figure out who the likely suspects are here.

The answer to “Who won Iraq?” is Iran in the short run, and in the long run, China and India.

While we flounder around in the Dust Bowl, they’ve been running up their reserves, putting the money into infrastructure and bullion. The moment you wait for in a setup like this is the inevitable alliance between the regional winner and the global winners. And voila, it’s already happened: In February Iran and India signed a pipeline deal sending Iranian oil to the exploding Indian market, bypassing Bush’s Saudi/U.S. petro-outpost. If it weren’t for Pakistan, the pipeline would already be in place. And as you might have guessed, Iran and India are talking about how easily the pipeline can be looped over the Himalayas to China — an overland route invulnerable to U.S. sea power.

Luckily Pakistan lies right across the route and Pakistan is so hopelessly messed up that the CIA and ISI between them should be able to keep the black smoke pouring out of any section of line the Asiatics manage to finish.

But even that’s bad news: we’re reduced to a spoiler role, conspiring with the nastiest creeps in the world, the ISI, to keep our blood enemy Iran from forming a natural, inevitable market relationship with the two rising powers that have spent their money smart while we pissed it down the Tigris. A country as big and resilient as America can afford to lose a war now and then, especially when it’s in a place like Nam, way off the trade routes. But a war like this… I don’t know.

What’s worst is that the war’s made us dumber. When Sen. Graham asked his question, “Who won Iraq?” he thought he was being clever. He thought we’re too dumb and soft to face that question and its answers. Because there are answers, pretty grim ones. I just hope people are tough enough to start thinking about them.

Anyway, for those of you collecting War Nerd guidelines, here’s what I think are some general rules for “Who wins wars?”

1) In a big bloodbath like the Thirty Years War or WWI, the winner is usually the powers that don’t fight, but dabble in spycraft and wet ops, meanwhile consolidating their own economic power.

2) The biggest loser is almost always the country on whose territory the war is fought. (Note: You could argue that America entered WWII fairly early and still came out ahead, but on the European Front up to D-Day our role was supplying materiel to the Russians and letting them do all the bleeding for us. On both fronts we were far away from the action and that allowed us to pick where and when to commit money and troops, so the generalization still holds: the further away you are, the better.)

3) In a regional war, the big winner will be any neighboring states that can stay out of the war and work out supply contracts with the richer combatant (Thailand during Nam, Argentina in WWI, Switzerland in every war since Ur took on Ur South).

4) However, if there’s an ethnic spillover, like Turkey has with the Kurds, this relationship can backfire.

5) The worst thing a major power can do is go to war alone for “moral” reasons. This is how medieval France wasted its huge advantages on pointless Middle Eastern crusades that did nothing but revitalize the Muslims and drive down the price of white slaves in the Cairo market.

Damn, another unbelievably infuriating deja vu deal: we end up wasting our armies in the deserts of the Middle East, just like the French. Except even the French were too smart to fall for it this time around.

[RojoLeón]

One more from Brecher

http://exiledonline.com/war-nerd-bush-fought-the-wars-and-the-wars-won/

War Nerd: Bush Fought The Wars And The Wars Won

What George W. Bush loved best about his job was being a war president. Playing war, that is, as opposed to making war like a grown-up. Remember him strutting onto that carrier in his little flight jacket? You never saw Eisenhower, a real general, playing out his martial fantasies this way. You can take the drink out of the drunk, but you can’t take the swagger out of a fool.

Compare Bush’s eight years to Clinton’s, and you see how much he loved to play the soldier. No one expected that from a Republican: Reagan and Bush senior were cautious about betting America’s chips. Liberals used to make fun of Reagan for picking on tiny helpless nations that couldn’t fight back. Now they are remembering with pure nostalgia Reagan’s invasion of Grenada, air raids on Libya, and even our 1984 withdrawal from Beirut.

We’ll never know how far W. would have gone to find himself a war because he had all he needed delivered by air on Sept. 11, 2001. Remember how people felt in those days? A friend of mine said, “It was like the aliens had invaded.”

We needed our president to be a hero and made him into one, even though it was obvious he wasn’t up to the job. He didn’t take the first plane to Manhattan, stand there and say, “We’re coming for you bastards!” Instead he sat in a roomful of children, reading The Pet Goat, then dropped off the radar for hours before his handlers got him ready.

Maybe there’s a lesson here: if the president doesn’t cut it in a crisis, we’re better off admitting that to ourselves and telling him so instead of pretending he’s a great leader. When you make a weakling into a hero, you give him a lot of power. If we’d kept our eyes open and faced the fact that Bush reacted badly to 9/11, we might have been able to ask for a little more detail about his big plans.

Those came courtesy of Cheney and his neocon punks. What a crew these guys were! Like their boss, they were also woofers, boasters—but of a different variety. Dubya was your standard frat boy loudmouth, but Cheney, with his talk about “working the dark side,” was more like the ultimate Dungeons and Dragons nerd. And you couldn’t ask Hollywood to serve up a goofier selection of dorks than his neocon staffers, who drifted from the universities to D.C. the way has-been pop singers switch to country and western to leech off a new bunch of suckers.

On the one hand, they were scared to death of Arabs and hated all Muslims. On the other, they were convinced that every Muslim on the planet really wanted, deep in his heart, to be magically turned into an Ohio Republican. That was their theory: take an anti-American Arab country, add an invading army, and voila! a nice fluffy democracy soufflé.

So we poured American blood and treasure into the Iraqi dust to prove the half-baked theories of a bunch of tenth-rate professors. The most expensive experiment in the history of the world, all to learn something any 10-year-old could have told them: people don’t take to foreign troops on their streets, and not everybody wants to be like us. You know those Ig-Nobel awards they hand out to the dumbest science projects of the year? The Iraq invasion is the all-time winner. Retire the trophy with the names of the winning team: Bush, Cheney, Kristol, Wolfowitz, Feith.

But first came Afghanistan—“the graveyard of empires.” Every military-history wannabe was conjuring the ghosts of that Victorian British army slaughtered by the Afghans, along with all the propaganda we’d been pushing about the invincible mujahedeen who’d driven out the Soviets. Looking back, what they had routed was a dying Soviet state, and they didn’t even manage to do that until we took the risk of giving them Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. But all the pundits’ knees were shaking about going into the Afghan haunted house.

We started slow, the way American armies tend to do, taking a while to limber up. There were weeks of bombing the Shomali Plain to no visible effect and a Special Forces raid on Mullah Omar’s compound that was more “Naked Gun” than “Top Gun.” Then Mazar-i-Sharif in the north fell suddenly, and it turned into the kind of war that Northern Alliance fighters and fighter-bomber pilots both love: hunting down a fleeing enemy.

The campaign went so well, so fast, that it taught Bush and Cheney the wrong lessons. They started exporting democracy to Afghanistan, even hiring a local Pashtun girl to read the Kabul evening news. When you tell a big, backwards tribe like the Pashtun that you’re going to turn their whole world upside down for them, you shouldn’t expect them to be grateful. But we did, setting ourselves up for a whole lot of trouble later on

Worse yet, Bush’s people figured that since Afghanistan, the tough nut, cracked so easily, their pet project, a second Iraq invasion, would be a cakewalk. This time they would do it right, occupying the Iraqi cities instead of just crushing Saddam’s army and withdrawing like Bush senior did.

Nobody wants to recall what Americans believed back then. That’s OK: I’ll remember it. People thought that Saddam was “connected to” 9/11, and his agents were going to poison our water, nuke our cities, and gas our subways. At least they claimed to believe all that unlikely James Bond stuff. I don’t think they really did. There was just so much revenge momentum after 9/11 that it had to burst out somewhere. Everybody wanted payback. It’s natural. But most of the time, in your average democracy, cooler heads are in charge. Not this time. Bush and his team were foaming at the mouth far more than the average citizen. It was like a crazed sheriff trying to talk a lukewarm mob into a lynching frenzy. With the help of people who should have known better—I’m looking at you, Colin Powell—he got his way.

That, in the short version, is why George W. Bush is about to leave office the most unpopular American president in history. You can spin Iraq a hundred different ways, but it still comes up bad news because once the dust settles, the Iranians are in control of the whole region, and they didn’t have to fire a shot. We destroyed their old rival for them.

It’s a simple story: we crushed Saddam’s army, occupied the cities, and then acted like the whole country would turn itself into a neocon fantasyland. Paul Bremer’s cult kids were talking tax reform while the Iraqi army they had sent home unemployed was busy digging up the weapons they had buried in their yards. Bush’s counterinsurgency policy was pretending there was no insurgency then pretending it was just Saddam’s “deadenders.” When Saddam’s capture at the end of 2003 didn’t slow the insurgency, Bush’s defenders stopped acting like they knew what was going on and just settled for blaming the Iranians—as if it was a nasty surprise that Iran, the country that openly hates America most in the whole world, might get involved in anti-American operations when we occupied Iraq right next door.

People ask what our counterinsurgency strategy was before the surge. Easy: we had none. We were doing nothing but offering the insurgents moving targets. A standard operation for the occupation force in those dark days was patrolling through an alien Sunni neighborhood, waiting for an IED to go off under the lead vehicle or for an RPG or small-arms ambush. When that happens, conventional forces have a grim choice: do nothing, withdrawing while the locals snicker at your dead and wounded, or open fire on everyone in sight. Either way, the insurgents win. If you withdraw, they’ve hit you with impunity and gained respect in the neighborhood. If you open fire on the slums, you kill civilians and make enemies.

Effective counterinsurgency means not relying on massive firepower the way conventional forces are trained to do. The idea is not to fire until you know exactly who you’re up against. It’s the opposite of shock and awe. It’s discipline and patience. Gen. David Petraeus implemented a set of reforms usually called the surge, though they were about tactics more than reinforcements. All he really did was initiate overdue standard counterinsurgency doctrine. He integrated U.S. units with Iraqi forces then sent them out into the neighborhoods. You can’t run any kind of counterinsurgency plan without good street-level intelligence, but Bush’s people wouldn’t admit that there was an insurgency, so they wouldn’t commit to learning about it. Their style was to ignore it and hope it would go away.

That’s why Afghanistan went well in the early stages: we didn’t go in trying to turn the Afghans into democrats, but trying to crush the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In Iraq, Bush was dreaming from the start, so the whole effort was doomed.

The surge worked about as well as any good counterinsurgency effort could. We know a little about the enemy now, and there’s less violence because all the neighborhoods had already been ethnically cleansed. Baghdad is now a Shi’ite city. There are a few Sunni enclaves, but the Shia rule the city and the country, with the Kurds fortifying themselves up north and wishing they could saw their territory off and relocate it somewhere in mid-ocean.

That’s what Bush’s trillion-dollar investment in Iraq has bought. Meanwhile, if you look at the rest of the world map, you get a real shock. Regions like Latin America and Central Asia that eight years ago were American protectorates in all but name have turned against us while we were distracted with Iraq. Many times, the real winners are countries that manage to stay out of a war, the way England benefited by not getting sucked into the Thirty Years’ War. Iran is much stronger now, and so is Russia. The Russians, who seemed to be in their “throes” when Clinton left office, just slapped down Georgia, one of our few remaining allies among the old Soviet states, and there wasn’t a thing we could do but grumble.

It’s no puzzle: we pretended a goon was a hero, let him play out his foolish fantasies about remaking the Middle East, and wasted our strength on a losing effort while the rest of the world drifted out of our power. Our leader was a laughingstock around globe, and he made America the butt of the world’s contempt. But Bush got his wish—he was a war president and then some. The rest of us were the casualties.

[Malaysian Kopite]

I wonder how many Americans can actually properly explain why the Iraq War was waged?

[RojoLeón]

I wonder how many Americans can actually properly explain why the Iraq War was waged?

Rank stupidity? Greed?

This is the war that took the US down from number one spot - China got rich as Bush squandered global goodwill and pissed away much of the USA's economic strength. And for what - I don't think there was a good reason. They could have got rid of Saddam in other ways.  The WMD were never found, and never posed the threat they fearmongered about anyway. Iraq was a secular country that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or 911.

So, I don't know the real answer to your question. The given reasons were lies or gross exaggerations. And you can't take the moral high ground about rescuing Iraqi's from Saddam, when you deliver them into a chaos far worse than they would have been had nature taken its course. It boggles me to this day - I lean towards the rationale being based in plain corruption and greed, but can't rule out that the decision makers in the Bush admin being colossal morons.

Oh, and the media were spectacularly dumb, also

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Happy_Anniversary#ixzz2O5btCeia

Pleased To Be Shutting The Piehole Now

The "public editor" of The New York Times tells us today that the paper's coverage of the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War is likely to be less of a hoot than back in the drum-banging days when Judy Miller was standing atop a great pile of stove-piped bullshit while Bill Keller threw roses at her feet.

   

I asked Dean Baquet, a managing editor, about the low-key approach. He said that while a few stories are planned, editors did not see a need for a major project or special section, as they did with the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "The war itself has been dissected to a tremendous degree," he told me. "You have to have something new or fresh to say." He would not provide specifics about the articles that are planned, but said there might be one or two that would make their way onto the front page this week...Is The Times's own role in the run-up to the war a part of this relative reticence, as some readers have suggested to me? Is there reluctance to revisit a painful period in the paper's history? Mr. Baquet said that's not a factor. "The Times has probably acknowledged its own mistakes from that period more than anyone," he said. "We certainly haven't been shy about doing that. We're doing the stories that make sense to us and that offer our readers something worthwhile."

That is, of course, all bollocks. Keller still writes a column. The Times is playing this on the downlow precisely because it never truly has atoned for its role in a fiasco. The op-ed page still welcomes submissions from people whose work on this most grotesque foreign-policy blunder should have been as definitive a career-killer as were Joe Hazlewood's navigational abilities.

I can hardly wait for this week to end. If it's not Dean Baquet, copping a cheap alibi for his newspaper's unforgivable malpractice, it's Richard Perle. who should be displayed in a pillory outside Walter Reed for the next 10 years, being allowed to vomit blood all over the op-ed section of USA Today.

   

Many commentaries on the Iraq War, including the one to which this is a response, show little understanding of what it means to manage risk. We do not normally consider it to have been foolish to pay for fire insurance when the house does not burn down - or particularly clever to have done so when it does. When thousands of American lives are at stake, insurance, sometimes pre-emptive military action, is not cheap.

And precisely what risk did you "manage" ? What chance did you take? You gambled with other people's children in a game you'd helped rig. What cost was exacted from you, sitting your fat ass in a swivel chair at a wingnut intellectual chop-shop while kids are still staggering around the wards without legs and arms, or the cognitive functions to get them through the day? What price did you pay? You have to send out for lunch one day? Show me the butcher's bill for the Perle household, you vampire son of a bitch.

And let us not forget Perle's onetime co-author, David Frum, who's mysteriously been allowed through the tradesmen's entrance back into the discourse conducted by decent people. It should be recalled, before we all start doing that which Winston Wolf cautioned us not to do, that Frum did a lot more than write one speech in 2002. Two years later, he also wrote a discreetly McCarthyite book with the aforementioned Perle called An End To Evil. If we'd found a single cache of biotoxins anywhere in Iraq, Frum would have been waving his warrior dick at CPAC last weekend. Instead, we hear about Dick Cheney, and Tony Blair, and how really sorry David Frum is for the hand he played in the deaths of so many people who are not named David Frum.

Shut up, all of you. Go away. You are complicit in one way or another in a giant crime containing many great crimes. Atone in secret. Wash the blood off your hands in private. Because there were people who got it right. Anthony Zinni. Eric Shiseki. Hans Blix. Mohamed ElBaradei. The McClatchy Washington bureau guys. Dozens of liberal academics who got called fifth-columnists and worse. Professional military men whose careers suffered as a result. Hundreds of thousands of people in the streets around the world. The governments of Canada and France. Those people, I will listen to this week. Go to hell, the rest of you, and go there in silence and in shame.

[Zeb]

Robin Cook's resignation speech where he clearly highlights that war was the agenda and any pretext would serve those determined to push it through.

His thoughts after the the London bombings:

President Bush is given to justifying the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that by fighting terrorism abroad, it protects the west from having to fight terrorists at home. Whatever else can be said in defence of the war in Iraq today, it cannot be claimed that it has protected us from terrorism on our soil.

Blair and those MPs, of all parties, who supported him have a lot to answer for still on this issue. Especially those involved in fitting the evidence in order to make the public case.

[Anywhichwayicant]

On the topic of Iraq. `Did My Son Die In Vain?` on  BBC2 now.

[andy in warrington]

Tony Blair should be in jail .

[Corkboy]

The Last Letter

A Message to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney From a Dying Veteran




To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.

I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.

I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.

I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.

My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness. 

source

[RojoLeón]

Powerful stuff

I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.

My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.

Meanwhile; in Crawford, Texas..

[Anywhichwayicant]

Very saddening.

[youll never walk alone it]

everyone seen the footage of where bush was with the kids when the news of the 2nd tower had been hit?  he said yes i saw the footage earler on tv? did you bush? an where did  you see this footage?  love to know the answer to this ? off topic slightly but all the same.

[Armchair expert]

Ashamed that it was a Labour govt that took us into this illegal war.
Blair should be up for war crimes, I wonder if he would have been so quick to invade if one of his sons had been in the services.....and what is especially sickening is the amount of money he made from talks in the U.S.

[Mutton Geoff]

On the topic of Iraq. `Did My Son Die In Vain?` on  BBC2 now.

watched that last week very moving and thought provoking, and what a dignified guy the Father was.

[Quantum]

everyone seen the footage of where bush was with the kids when the news of the 2nd tower had been hit?  he said yes i saw the footage earler on tv? did you bush? an where did  you see this footage?  love to know the answer to this ? off topic slightly but all the same.

Just another example of Bush tying himself up in lies when it comes to 9/11. There was no video of the first plane crash to watch at that time.

Cheney and Bush refused to testify under oath before select individuals of the 9/11 Commission even though the families wanted them to. They testified together, not in public, and no recordings were allowed. The families requested the transcripts of their meeting, but were denied.

The 9/11 families deserved better than this.

[RojoLeón]

Just another example of Bush tying himself up in lies when it comes to 9/11. There was no video of the first plane crash to watch at that time.

Cheney and Bush refused to testify under oath before select individuals of the 9/11 Commission even though the families wanted them to. They testified together, not in public, and no recordings were allowed. The families requested the transcripts of their meeting, but were denied.

The 9/11 families deserved better than this.

With all due respect, lets keep this Iraq related only. '911' tends towards thread locking, and its not like there isn't a veritable bounty of Bush admin malfeasance to discuss, specific to their illegal war of aggression against Iraq.

Just a friendly reminder - I mean, the only real on topic of 911 here is how the Bush admin knowingly disseminated lies linking Saddam Hussein to 911 and Al Qaeda.

Lets keep it open for a wee while longer by not posting about 911 otherwise.

[Corkboy]

Ten years ago today...

[Quaid]

Ten years ago today...

Ha! Mission Accomplished.

[CheshireDave]

There is an interesting half hour audio article on the BBC Outlook..

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p015m7fx

Ten years on, Matthew Bannister hears three different perspectives on the US-led invasion of Iraq. Kadhim al-Jubouri found fame after he was pictured taking a sledgehammer to a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad's Firdous Square.

[Corkboy]

Russia on Iraq: ‘We told you so’

[alfonso]

About ten years ago I remember reading about the plans from the early 80s about the desire to split Iraq into three segments and thus make it a non threat to the rest of the middle east and Israel.
And some would argue the Iraq war was a success as it is no longer a threat and shit loads of money was made by contractors like Halliburton for doing and not doing things they were paid for.
The Saudis are more than likely funding the nut jobs, but they are our 'friends'.
Much like the basket case that is Libya, Iraq is fucked too.

[BarryCrocker]

Pretty challenging what's happening over there now. How an army can just walk away from defending its sovereignty is beyond belief. I heard on the radio the other day that it's one of the few countries that never went through and 'Truth & Reconciliation' program which has greatly impacted its ability to move forward as a nation.

[Carly]

Pretty challenging what's happening over there now. How an army can just walk away from defending its sovereignty is beyond belief.

It wouldn't really be that challenging if the Iraqi army werent such big cowards.  Outnumbering the insurgents by thousands upon thousands and they run...  If they stood their ground then the insurgents wouldnt have got very far.

Anyway the Iranians are on the ground now in Iraq.  They along with the Shia Miliatias have pushed the insurgents pretty much of of tikrit now and are now pushing them further and further away from Baghdad.  Looks the the Iranians have come in and saved the day while Obama sits back for another few days and considers his options 

[Anywhichwayicant]

Obama considering his options.


Nothing to consider, the Americans have done enough damage there already.

[Macphisto80]

Obama considering his options.


Nothing to consider, the Americans have done enough damage there already.

So much for getting rid of Saddam, eh? Bet they wish they hadn't now.

[TSC]

Notwithstanding the spurious rationale for the last invasion and the disaster that ensued etc, if reports are to be believed re this extreme group taking control surely something will have to be done?  But then you wonder when or where will it end?  It may get to the stage that the western govts will have to permanently have a presence there.  There are so many different groups and tribes not just in Iraq but in the middle/far east in general that it's almost impossible to control.

No easy answer.

[outlaw_nas]

Another Saudi terrorist group causing havoc. Wonder if the west will do anything to saudi?

[TepidT2O]

Another Saudi terrorist group causing havoc. Wonder if the west will do anything to saudi?

No they won't.... And there's a good reason (apart from the money and oil reason).

Were The Saudi government to be over thrown by the extermists, it would be a disaster for the world economy and the Middle East,, and absolute disaster....

And it's not as unlikely as it may seem.

The problem that is Iraq would probably have occurred had the west invaded or not...... (Eventually).


The biggest problem was the lack of a coherent plan to stabilise Iraq after the invasion....

[outlaw_nas]

Majority of 911 hijackers were Saudis, virtually all the terrorist in Syria and now Iraq are sponsored by Saudis. Yet nothing happens.
Behind the scenes Saudis are opening extreme wahabi ideology maddrassas around the world since the 70s and nothing is being done about it.how many more extremist are Saudi going to create before they are stopped

[youll never walk alone it]

Bush and bin ladens family were as thick as thieves..

[outlaw_nas]

It wouldn't really be that challenging if the Iraqi army werent such big cowards.  Outnumbering the insurgents by thousands upon thousands and they run...  If they stood their ground then the insurgents wouldnt have got very far.

Anyway the Iranians are on the ground now in Iraq.  They along with the Shia Miliatias have pushed the insurgents pretty much of of tikrit now and are now pushing them further and further away from Baghdad.  Looks the the Iranians have come in and saved the day while Obama sits back for another few days and considers his options 

Saudi concern is they going to surrounded by pro shia countries.hence why they sponsoring extremist in neighbouring countries(Iraq,Syria)

[Herby]

wahabi ideology maddrassas

Mmmm; I love curry - never tried that one though

[CornerFlag]

Christ.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-15/jihadist-websites-boasting-of-massacre-show-widening-iraqi-rifts.html

Jihadist Sites Boast of Massacre Showing Widening Iraq Rifts

An al-Qaeda-affiliated group said it killed 1,700 Iraqis, setting social media and jihadist forums ablaze with claims that could further fuel the country’s sectarian tensions and propel it closer to civil war.

The claims by militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, posted on jihadist forums and on Twitter, couldn’t be independently verified. They were accompanied by photos of the purported mass shootings, images that recalled some of the footage from the civil war in Syria, where about 160,000 people have been killed, many of them civilians. If verified, the massacres would be among the worst atrocities in Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein unleashed sectarian battles between the Shiite Muslim majority and the Sunni minority that had held power for decades.

Iraq’s government is seeking to regain territory held by the Sunni militant group. Its advance after capturing the city of Mosul last week put in doubt Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s rule over a unified Iraq, OPEC’s second-largest oil producer.

The images showed scores of young Iraqi soldiers, either piled into trucks after their purported capture, or lying down at the mouth of long ditches that were to serve as mass graves. Some pictures showed militants, clad in black or in civilian clothing, firing into groups of 30 to 60 men. The captions mocked the victims, with one saying: “A lion against the weak and in war, an ostrich.” It described the men as apostates.

All-Out War

The massacre, if proven true, would represent the latest atrocity by ISIL, a group that began as al-Qaeda in Iraq at the start of the U.S.-led invasion and has since morphed into a battle-hardened body seemingly intent on plunging Iraq into all-out civil war pitting Shiites against Sunnis.

Al-Maliki’s government has struggled to counter ISIL and avert sending the embattled OPEC member deeper into chaos. The fighting has left some elements of the U.S.-trained army in disarray, with defections reported in the face of militants who have honed their skills on the battlefields in neighboring Syria.

The army killed more than 279 “terrorists” with the group within the past 24 hours, army spokesman Qassim Ata said in a televised news conference today. While the U.S. has warships positioned in the area in case they are needed to defend American interests in the country, President Barack Obama remains reluctant to order the use of force in the nation after ending U.S. troop involvement there in 2011.

Suicide Bombings

The posting of the images recalled images of the campaign of suicide bombings and decapitations carried out by al-Qaeda in Iraq -- a campaign designed to boost its following as much as it was aimed at terrorizing Shiites and others who the militants saw as working to marginalize the Sunni population.

The Sunni Muslims are a majority in the Anbar Province to the east and in areas to the north of Baghdad, mostly areas that lack the oil wealth concentrated in the Shiite-dominated south and the semi-autonomous Kurdish regions in the north.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq changed the decades-long power balance in Iraq, leaving Sunnis feeling marginalized and victimized by Shiites. Militias on both sides waged a bloody campaign between 2005 and 2007, in battles that polarized the nation and thwarted hopes of stability.

[BUSHMILLS]

Lots of echoes of what happened in Yugoslavia once Communist rule ended. All the ethnic and nationalist rivalries and hatreds that had been suppressed by a dictatorship all came to the surface and resulted in a horrific civil war.

[McrRed]

It wouldn't really be that challenging if the Iraqi army werent such big cowards.  Outnumbering the insurgents by thousands upon thousands and they run...  If they stood their ground then the insurgents wouldnt have got very far.

Anyway the Iranians are on the ground now in Iraq.  They along with the Shia Miliatias have pushed the insurgents pretty much of of tikrit now and are now pushing them further and further away from Baghdad.  Looks the the Iranians have come in and saved the day while Obama sits back for another few days and considers his options 

That seems to be what happens when you have an army of conscripts facing "battle-hardened" fanatics.

[viteslesrouges]

Christ.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-15/jihadist-websites-boasting-of-massacre-show-widening-iraqi-rifts.html

 . word is that he thinks they're fucked too.

[Devon Red]

It wouldn't really be that challenging if the Iraqi army werent such big cowards.  Outnumbering the insurgents by thousands upon thousands and they run...  If they stood their ground then the insurgents wouldnt have got very far.

Imagine you are a young lad who joined the army because it's the only job in town. You go through basic (very basic) training, get a second hand gun that probably jams every other shot and a couple of bullets if you're lucky. Then imagine that your unit is under attack by a group so bloodthirsty and fanatical that they gleefully post videos on the internet of the mass murder of captured soldiers.

Did you see the photos of the massacred 'soldiers'? Boys in football shirts.

[TSC]

Did you see the photos of the massacred 'soldiers'? Boys in football shirts.

Yep stood out for me that re those photos.  Seen one lad in a brazilian shirt and another in a utd shirt.  Young lads probably enjoying the world cup and mercilessly slaughtered of an afternoon.

[planet-terror]

what an absolute mess

[Snail]

God almighty.