The Iraq thread 3

[Pathy 0]

Sounds like a WW1 era general

"Nothing like a good war to keep the lads in shape, wot wot!"

[Gollum1 0]

I think it´s kind of funny to hear this:

Quote[/b] ]Mainly uneducated young people who pick up an AK after an Anti-American and scream Jihad. They have no idea what they are fighting for, they just know that Americans are evil and that they are not Islamic

from a person who wrote this:

Quote[/b] ]We needed this war to give our troops an Idea of how war works now adays and get them to gain some experience. Right about now, we are one of the most war ridden armies in the world. Armies need exercise too. I got experience, my buddies got experience. We are all proud that we coudl serve our country and hope we can do it again

...

no comment

Heh, that's a good point Balschoiw.

[miles teg 1]

Actually I don't see the point. People can change their minds. I actually respect people who are able to change their minds about things when they see the overwhelming weight of evidence going agains their previous beliefs. Ain't nothing wrong with that.

However its a little more complicated then just a bunch of young people who have no idea what they are fighting for. I think that they want to kill Americans for a few reasons more then just because they are not Muslims. US forces there are occupiers, have killed many thousands of Iraqis since the end of the actual invasion part of the conflict, and generally have not fullfilled many promises. They are humiliated by the invasion coupled with the fact that often these angry young men have lost friends and family members to the coalition forces.

Obviously they are not thinking long term or they have some fantasty about what Iraq will become without a US or international presence (a utopic Islamic State in many of their minds). Alot of their fantasies and hatred are fed by the hundreds of Islamic imams who preach hatred and anger at every Juma prayer (Friday prayer) service at the mosques. That gets these young men all pumped and fired up. That idiot Al-Sadr got thousands of his followers killed with his sermons as they would immediately go out and attack US forces...and get massacred.

The only possible solution in my opinion is a pan-Islamic peacekeeping force so that at least they can not then use the excuse of religion to attack the peacekeepers... that would take alot of the thunder away from Al-Qaeda and related militant groups in Iraq.

About the Bradley, yeah those things are tough. DU plates work miracles.

However also the suicide bomber likely was not wearing a shaped charge explosive. Properly manufactured IED's with shape charged explosives will blow the crap out of a Bradley if it is large enough and well made by an engineer knowledgable in such things. There are also lots of other variables such as the distance of the IED from the APC. But so far I think only one Bradley has been destroyed by IED's and that was a HUGE one under a drainage culvert that a Bradley passed over as it detonated. One also had its driver killed by an RPG. Unfortunately the Bradley still has its weak spots.

Chris G.

aka-Miles Teg<GD>

[Scorpio 0]

I'd agree entirely with the first part of your post, Miles. Very well said and a definite perspective of the whole picture.  

However, about this idea:

Quote[/b] ]

The only possible solution in my opinion is a pan-Islamic peacekeeping force so that at least they can not then use the excuse of religion to attack the peacekeepers...  that would take alot of the thunder away from Al-Qaeda and related militant groups in Iraq.

You would still have the problem of sects, though. Al-Qaeda is composed mostly of Wahabis, and I think it's obvious that because the Wahabi doctrine they exist in the first place. The Wahabis hate the other sects to death, mostly the Shi'as.

If there were ever a pan-Islamic peacekeeping force then it should be composed of Malaki/Hanbali Sunnis or Sufis. That

way, first the wahabis would lose a great deal of support from the other Sunnis when they attack this force (their doctrine states that it is permissible to kill a member of another sect.) Also, I guess they would get along quite alright with the Shi'as in Iraq, because at least they live in peace together for now (and some also fight alongside eachother in the insurgency).

But where would we get such a force? From which country(ies) in particular?

[edit] typos

[Baron Hurlothrumbo IIX 0]

I'm sure there are a few countries with Islamic forces well versed in 'peacekeeping' - Maybe Afghanistan has a few Taleban left?

Then we'll see some nice, tolerant peacekeeping. And there won't be any trouble from those pesky women exposing more than a couple of square centimetres of skin, either. Some stonings will sort that out double quick.

Forces based on religion = intolerance and cruelty.

[Rishon 0]

I think it´s kind of funny to hear this:

Quote[/b] ]Mainly uneducated young people who pick up an AK after an Anti-American and scream Jihad. They have no idea what they are fighting for, they just know that Americans are evil and that they are not Islamic

from a person who wrote this:

Quote[/b] ]We needed this war to give our troops an Idea of how war works now adays and get them to gain some experience. Right about now, we are one of the most war ridden armies in the world. Armies need exercise too. I got experience, my buddies got experience. We are all proud that we coudl serve our country and hope we can do it again

...

no comment

Heh, that's a good point Balschoiw.

Yeah it is. I wrote something stupid. Don't we all every now and then?

[IsthatyouJohnWayne 0]

Baron Hurlothrumbo IIX-

Quote[/b] ]Then we'll see some nice, tolerant peacekeeping.  And there won't be any trouble from those pesky women exposing more than a couple of square centimetres of skin, either.  Some stonings will sort that out double quick.

Forces based on religion = intolerance and cruelty.

So the world should only be policed by good abyss gazing atheists? (sorry, its a little bit hard to come up with a snappy atheist version of 'god fearing')

It seems likely muslims will generally prefer to be policed (if they must be) by other muslims. And seeing as the vast majority of Iraqis claim to be muslims it would make some

sense really. If convincing muslims to do the peace keeping in Iraq were to increase the peace i would be all for it. Theres no inevitability about it translating into religious policing. In fact it seems fairly unlikely to me, if anyone will try to police some idea of religious conformity it seems likely to be Iraqis themselves.

I probably should have ignored this post as a potential diversion but im drunk and its two fifty three am. I dont know how thats relevant except to my Monday morning.

[python3 0]

I'm sure there are a few countries with Islamic forces well versed in 'peacekeeping' - Maybe Afghanistan has a few Taleban left?

Then we'll see some nice, tolerant peacekeeping.  And there won't be any trouble from those pesky women exposing more than a couple of square centimetres of skin, either.  Some stonings will sort that out double quick.

Forces based on religion = intolerance and cruelty.

i doubt any arab force would become a religious police force just because the are muslim. That is for the iraqi's to decide if that is what they want for themselves, since more than 95% of them happen to be muslim. Might be bad in your eyes, but fine in theirs.

Secondly, many arab nations dont have religious police because they are secular. Nations such as Egypt and Jordan and Pakistan would contribute forces like they have in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia etc. To the best of my knowledge, they havent become religious police in those nations either.

[Gollum1 0]

Yeah it is. I wrote something stupid. Don't we all every now and then?

Of course we do, np, I hope your brother is doing OK.

[Rishon 0]

Yeah it is. I wrote something stupid. Don't we all every now and then?

Of course we do, np, I hope your brother is doing OK.

Yeah, He never talks about it. I don't blame him either.

[Apollo 0]

Quote[/b] ]But where would we get such a force? From which country(ies) in particular?

Well the following country's (with large muslim poppulations) IMO could conform with the humanitarian standards we expect of a peacekeeping force.

-Pakistan (though it has lots of religous fanatics large components of the army supports Musharrav and the moderate forces in Pakistan)

-Indonesia (very good candidate ,millitary quite powerfull country ,got the largest muslim poppulation in the world ,got some terrorist problems to deal with itself thus experience on the matter)

-Marokko and Tunesia (two of the most stable and democratic country's in the middle east ,not a large millitary but trustworthy)

-Egypt (good millitary ,fairly democratic country)

-Bahrain,koeweit,United Arabic emirates and Quatar (the smaller natons on the arabic continent ,tiny army's but their funds could be important.

-Kazachstan and Uzbekistan ,the 2 most succesfull "Stan" country's ,they profited a lot from their independance from Russia ,their goverment is remarkebly democratic for the region ,the country is growing strong economicly and theyr got an army of well trained proffesionals.

-Jordania and Syria ,although having a reputation are both relative stable monarchy's actually.The new king of Syria is a young monarch with intrest in modernization etc.

Last but not least:

-Turkey ,wich can serve as a bridge between the West and the Muslim world.Millitary quite powerfull ,experienced in anti terrorism.A non-secular country with an religous party in power that promote's the extension of democratic right's and wich is working in close coorperation with Europe to conform to European standards for being allowed in the EU.Turkey is the proof in the middle east that a religous party shouldn't be nessecarily un-democratic ,this is a powerfull message to the middle east ,that one can have a religious party with it's morality's in a non secularized country.Highly respected by the US and Israel ,though while turkey helps Israel in exchanging technoligy and experience in anti terrorism (and vice versa) ,Turkey doens't nessecarily picks a side in that conflict.

Turkey is highly respected by some Middle east country's ,while despised by some other's that once lived under their scepter ,yet today they may very well be the most modern and powerfull country in the middle east ,not purely millitary as indonesia for ex. may surpass them on that ,but in a total package.turkey has a lot of diplomatic influence ,got strong friends and is booming economicly and technologicly.

20 years ago Iraq served as the example of the modern and powerfull Middle east country ,today Turkey is taking that symbolic position of most prominent muslim country.

[EiZei 0]

-Kazachstan and Uzbekistan ,the 2 most succesfull "Stan" country's ,they profited a lot from their independance from Russia ,their goverment is remarkebly democratic for the region ,the country is growing strong economicly and theyr got an army of well trained proffesionals.

Yeah, the latter one has quite a record when it comes to dealing islamists.

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/03/29/uzbeki8309.htm

http://hrw.org/reports/2004/uzbekistan0304/

[Baron Hurlothrumbo IIX 0]

So the world should only be policed by good abyss gazing atheists? (sorry, its a little bit hard to come up with a snappy atheist version of 'god fearing')

No no no, you misunderstand. Merely that the only criterion shoudn't be 'muslim.' Their religion should not be the most important thing in determining if they should be policing or not. They can be muslim, but they shouldn't base their actions on it ; a secular force, not a religious force.

(Its probably hard to come up with a snappy atheist version of 'god fearing' because thats a NEGATIVE trait)

Quote[/b] ]

It seems likely muslims will generally prefer to be policed (if they must be) by other muslims. And seeing as the vast majority of Iraqis claim to be muslims it would make some

sense really.

Have we forgotten the Taleban already? Their enforcement should be secular, not based on religious hatred and intolerance.

[red oct 2]

i don't really think having a muslim peace keeping force whether its secular or not will make any difference. these terrorists, and insurgents and already shown that they are more than willing to murder police officiers and civilians working for either the coalition or the UN and have shown little care for any civilians who get caught up in one of their IED's. send in a muslim peace keeper force and most likely they will be accused of being coalition lackies and face attacks just the same.

[Monkey Lib Front 10]

Article Link

Quote[/b] ]Five days in the life of an invisible war

Monday July 19, 2004

The Guardian

One morning earlier this month a fan turned too slowly to stir the air much in a dark little room in al-Karmah, a town west of Baghdad between Abu Ghraib and Fallujah. In one corner of the room, a US marine corporal sat counting out new dollar bills, balancing them on the toe of his desert boot as he prepared each slender wad.

An armed American lawyer sat at a desk in a straight-backed chair, facing a succession of Iraqi claimants who took their place opposite on a two-seater sofa. The sofa put the claimants, dressed in long white Arab tunics - dishdashes - at a lower level than the lawyer, and they stretched to gain height, eyes flicking between the lawyer's face and hands. The lawyer wore a pistol strapped to his thigh, a flak jacket and glasses. He was sweating heavily. The claimants spoke little, and the lawyer's speeches were brief. What was said was translated by a marine interpreter. The interpreter was armed, too, with an M16 automatic rifle. Everyone in the room was scared.

"Coalition forces regret the loss of your brother," said the lawyer. His name was Captain Jonathan Vaughn. "We understand it is a great loss to your family. We wish to offer something to you by way of sympathy and sorrow to help your family to rebuild after the loss of your brother. My commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Buhel, has authorised me to pay you $500 as sympathy for your loss. We understand that it is not enough money and nothing can replace the loss to your family. We wish that this small gift will help in some way. Much of the money that we had previously, the coalition forces have transferred to your government to help rebuild. We wish the best for you and your family and your country as you do rebuild. Thank you very much."

Vaughn stood up and the claimant stood up. The corporal handed Vaughn the dollars and Vaughn gave them to the claimant, who took them. They shook hands and the claimant left. The transaction took less than a minute.

The marines don't like to call it blood money, but it is money paid for human blood spilled. A lot of blood, Iraqi and American, has been spilled in Karmah and Fallujah, in the heart of rebel country. The marines in this area have paid out roughly $3.5m in compensation for damage, death and injury since April. The money is paid at the local marine commanders' discretion, and since it comes from the same funds that buy fresh food or air conditioners for the commanders' troops, and since it is possible that at least some of the Iraqi casualties were part of the armed resistance to the American presence, the incentive to pay out is not great. There is a limit of $2,500 per death but now the marines are paying much less.

Vaughn is the lawyer for the 3rd battalion of the 1st marine regiment, "3/1". The fact that 3/1 only replaced the previous regional garrison, 1/5, a few weeks ago, may seem a trivial detail. To Vaughn and his comrades, it isn't. The marines now patrolling this hostile area are fresh out of California and have not been responsible for the deaths of any Iraqis yet. But naturally, in local Iraqi eyes, nothing has changed. In Iraqi eyes, they are still the same occupiers whose clashes with the resistance in Fallujah and Karmah in April and May saw many civilians die, alongside marines and mujahideen. It cuts no ice with the families of the dead and wounded that Vaughn is compensating them for the acts of his predecessors. And in Karmah, little reported in the world beyond, the war goes on.

Vaughn was dealing with a queue of 15 claimants. He comes from Cleveland, Ohio, and it was his 29th birthday.

Vaughn: (to claimant): Hassan?

Hassan: Salam aleikum.

Vaughn: It's a beautiful son you have. I'm glad he could make it today. How is your other son doing? (Hassan shows Vaughn a scar on the little boy's head.) Oh, this is the son who was injured? He's a very strong son. A very strong boy. We are sorry that your son was injured in these conflicts. It is the children of this war that suffer the most. I wish there was much more that our country could do for you.

Hassan: It is in God's hands.

Vaughn: My commanding officer has authorised me to pay you $250 for your son's injuries that he suffered. However, I'm going to offer an additional $100 for his future surgery to make sure he grows up healthy and strong.

Hassan: My house was badly damaged.

Vaughn: I understand that there was much damage through all this conflict. However, right now all I'm authorised to pay is to try to help your son recover from his injuries. We regret that we cannot do more for you. I offer this $350 to try to help your son. He is a strong boy and we look forward to him growing up in a free Iraq. Is that the last one? OK.

At home with India company

In the past 24 hours, Vaughn's battalion has taken its first serious combat casualties. The previous afternoon, two marines based in the town of Shababi, just south of Karmah, were injured by roadside bombs. The US military calls them Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs. The IED was detonated by a remote watcher, or "triggerman", as the last vehicle in the marine convoy went past. Both of the wounded had their eyes peppered with shrapnel. Because no US serviceman was killed, the Pentagon didn't put out a press release.

The men, who would ultimately be taken back to the US via the clearing house hospital at Landstuhl in Germany, were first taken to battalion headquarters, at a place called Camp Abu Ghraib - close to the prison, but not part of it. As I came out of the mess hall at the camp that evening, I passed a marine holding two M16s by their barrels. When I walked past I heard the marine say to a superior: "Bloody weapons." I thought it an odd, English sort of complaint for an American until I realised that he meant weapons with blood on them - they were the injured men's rifles. Overnight, not far from the camp, four marines from another unit were killed when an IED exploded underneath their armoured car. The armoured car, a powerful steel box on massive wheels, flipped over like a kicked Dinky.

Next morning, in the back of a Humvee in a convoy en route to Karmah, I tried to make conversation. The marines weren't talkative. The marine opposite me said he was the battalion chaplain's assistant. The chaplain wasn't allowed to carry weapons, he explained, but his assistant was. On my left was a young marine called Chris Reed, from Idaho. Was it his first time on a convoy?

"No, I've been on lots."

Been shot at?

"No, not yet."

Worried?

"No, not much." He was tapping his fingers, though, on the receiver of his M16. Later, when I came to write this article, I was reading through the most recent Pentagon casualty press releases and saw that, four days after I spoke with him, Reed was killed in a non-combat road accident, along with three others. I think I shook his hand before we parted, but I don't remember for sure.

We drove on to Karmah. The unit of marines based there, a 200-strong group known as India Company, occupies the town's tallest building, which also happens to be its main school. They know this gives the townspeople another reason to dislike them, and they say they will move out before the school year starts in September, although it is not clear where they will go. For now the school has the character of a fortress under siege. Sandbags and their 21st-century equivalent, Hesco barriers - wheelie-bin-sized open sacks filled with sand - gird it. There are sandbagged observation points, and a mortar, on the roof, and a maze of concrete and razor wire at the entrances to the compound. A rocket, fired just after 3/1 moved in, left its imprint in the concrete. The showers, washbasins and toilets are on the far side of the schoolyard from the living quarters in the school classrooms. There is a strict rule that anyone crossing the yard, even to clean their teeth, dons helmet and flak jacket.

There is a common assumption that the US military, once settled for more than a few months anywhere, will feather its nest with creature comforts. This has not happened in Karmah. The marines live on bottled water and field rations and, at a time of year when shade temperatures reach into the high 40s and above, few of the rooms have air conditioning or fans. It might be some small comfort to the Iraqis, perpetually bothered by power cuts, to know that the marines at Karmah don't have enough power from their own generators to run anything beyond their essential battle operations, and rely for comfort, like the locals, on the Iraqi grid. The marines do punishing three-day spells of patrols, punctuated by a few hours sleep, then get trucked back to battalion headquarters for two days' rest. There is no drink, no drugs, and no fraternising with the people of Karmah. The marines have even been banned from decorating their helmets. Off duty they sleep, smoke, bitch, fantasise, read, dip (chew tobacco) and watch violent films on the big DVD in the common room: tired, middle-aged actors loosing off magazine after magazine of blanks at each other. In real life these days, the marines, tooled up as they are, don't do much shooting in Karmah. Their opponents are too well hidden.

Lieutenant Michael Deland, the stocky company executive officer with a pencil moustache, talked me through the recent attacks. A rocket hit the school on June 26. Next day another rocket flew over the building and landed in a house, injuring some Iraqis. On June 28, marines noticed a new roadside advertisement. Wedged into the hoarding they found a mine. On June 29, a car bomb exploded about 600 metres away. No one was seriously injured. On June 30, the marines found a suspicious car, cordoned it off, and sent for their bomb disposal team. As the team's robot approached the car, it exploded with the force, Deland reckoned, of three artillery shells, destroying the robot.

Captain John Green, a marine Harrier pilot whose job it would be to call in air strikes if the Karmah garrison got into serious trouble, took me up to the roof. The land around Karmah is a lush, flat pattern of date palm groves, fields, irrigation channels and dykes, working in the rebels' favour. They can watch convoys from afar, while the terrain makes pursuit difficult for the marines after IEDs are detonated. From the roof you can see a mosque and another school, where the marines found "a bunch of anti-American graffiti. It supposedly said, 'We beat the Americans in Fallujah and we'll beat them again.' So we painted over it. 'Kill the Americans,' it said. We painted over it."

Green said it was hard to be sure what the locals thought about them. Women would come out of their houses to wave, but there were contrary signs. "It seems to change every day, whether they like you or don't like you. They'll point to the soles of their feet. Make the evil eye sign. You'll raid their house, and they'll say: 'Why don't you stay for tea?'"

The fierce fighting of spring, in which hundreds of Iraqis - including women, children and the elderly - and dozens of American troops were killed, saw Fallujah become a no-go zone for US forces. The city was, in theory, to be policed by an Iraqi force, but the marines question whether the Iraqi force supports them. The decision to pull out of Fallujah was a political one, in the face of Iraqi and international revulsion at civilian casualties, which the marines feel has left them vulnerable. Some of the long-range rockets being fired at them, one marine officer said, come from southern Fallujah.

Karmah also saw ferocious battles, however, and the marines are in the middle of it. In one 14-hour firefight in April, the marine unit serving here at the time said they had killed 100 rebels. Journalists who visited Karmah at the time speak of seeing RPG rounds being unloaded openly by resistance fighters from trucks in the street. No one has done a count of the number of civilians killed and injured amid the mayhem but the number must have been high.

If Washington has decided US troops do not need to be in Fallujah, why do they need to be in Karmah, or Shababi, presenting targets for the rebels? It is a question with no obvious answer. Officially, India company is in Karmah to act as a surrogate police force until the Iraqi police and army, which they are helping train, are ready to take over. Yet at close quarters it sometimes seems to the outside observer that the marines' sole purpose is to protect themselves from, and pursue, a group of clandestine bombers whose sole reason for being is to try to kill the marines.

The road which curves north from Karmah in an s-shape, called IED Alley by the marines, is a case in point. India company devotes much of its scant resources, and exposes itself to great risk, keeping this road clear of IEDs. Yet the reason the road is infested with IEDs appears to be that the marines of India company spend so much time patrolling it, looking for IEDs.

Another day, another bomb

In the late afternoon of the day I arrived in Karmah, India company's 1st platoon rolled out of the schoolyard and headed through town towards open country and the s-curve. The platoon was heavy with firepower but was unlikely to get the chance to use it. Its most important weapons were protective. Besides flak jackets and kevlar helmets, the marines have been issued with blast goggles and black, tinted wrap-around glasses, which the troops hate but which might save their eyesight in the event of a bomb. Since last year, the half-dozen Humvees they were riding in had all been armoured, either with panels of the same composite materials used in flak jackets or with sheets of centimetre-thick steel. They offer protection, but only up to about the shoulder level. The marines riding shotgun in the back have their necks and faces exposed. In the front, the driver and passenger are vulnerable, too. The latest US army Humvees have blastproof windows and air conditioning to stop the occupants being boiled but the marine Humvees have heavy steel doors with holes cut in them for side windows.

Short of the s-curve the convoy halted and civilian traffic - which is heavy on this road - was stopped while an engineering corporal, Brandon Webb, went ahead, sweeping the flat dusty verge with a metal detector. Within a few minutes, he had found an IED: two 155mm artillery shells, buried a few yards apart and wired together in a "daisy chain" configuration so they could be detonated simultaneously. The platoon had arrived before the rebels had been able to wire the shells up to a remote trigger. Webb uncovered the shells with his foot then swept away the sand with his hands so that the bomb disposal team's robot could see them and marked their position with a water bottle and a Pepsi can.

"You're crazy, man," said Lieutenant Tim Strabbing, commander of the platoon. "I hope you have nine lives."

Strabbing, who spent two years studying Russian and Eastern European culture at Hertford College, Oxford, pulled his vehicles back from the IED while we waited for the disposal team. "We swept this road last night at 1800," he said. "We sweep it pretty much every day." The rebels are persistent with their bombs.

I asked about the marines' purpose here, and Strabbing acknowledged the dilemma. "Because we are here they shoot at US troops, and because they do that, we stay here, so I guess this negative cycle feeds on itself. The key is to decide when the Iraqi police can make enough order to stand on their own and we can stand back."

What would happen if the marines simply pulled back now, closer to Baghdad?

"All I know is Karmah, and I wouldn't feel comfortable now leaving Karmah to its own devices," said Strabbing. "I think right now our police forces in Karmah are not ready to step in and take that role. The Iraqi National Guard is a little bit better. The marines will patrol with the Iraqi National Guard. But on the other hand the police forces don't seem like they want to cooperate at all."

The tarmac had softened in the heat so that boots sank into it. When the parked Humvees moved, the Tarmac came away in strings, like toffee in a Mars bar. While we waited for bomb disposal, one of the NCOs, Sergeant Kevin Denton, led a squad off to investigate a suspicious-looking Mercedes parked outside a house across some fields. The owners of the house, and, it turned out, the Mercedes, were friendly in a nervous, over-eager kind of way. The car was clean. We sat on their verandah and the owners brought us glasses of chilled orange squash. The marines relaxed sufficiently to overcome their mistrust of the local water and drank the squash. They even took off their helmets. I asked Webb, who is 21, what he had felt when he had found the IED.

"Nothing bad really, at first, until I see it and then, it's like: O, God, please don't let it blow up," he said. Webb is married. His wife is in California. He told me then that he hadn't wanted to come to Iraq again. It was his second tour.

Webb joined the marines on September 25 2001. On the day before he joined, it was discovered he was partially colour blind. He had signed on to be an electrician. The marines made him switch to combat engineering. I asked if being colour blind wasn't a bit of a problem when dealing with bombs. "We're not here to clip wires," he said. The bomb disposal crew arrived, an hour and a quarter after they got the call. By this time civilian traffic was backed up for miles in both directions. "We come up and deal with one IED and an hour later we come back and they've put another one in there," said the head of the crew, Staff Sergeant Michael Clark.

"It's the terrain. The fucking canals. They can sit in the distance and see us. They've got powerlines to gauge distance and they can get away before we can reach them across the canals." A tracked robot whined out to the bend in the road where the IED was placed. Guided by a specialist with a joystick, the robot laid explosive charges on the artillery shells and came scurrying back. After a few seconds the charges were ignited with a white flash and the shells exploded, sending dust and shrapnel flying across the road and high into the air. We were some 200 metres away and still a cricket-ball sized lump of shrapnel fell from the sky on the other side of the road.

The traffic began to move again. The Iraqi drivers showed no curiosity; they had seen this so many times before. Some looked angry, others resigned. The marines have a standing order to wave and smile as much as possible but they get few waves in return, except from the small, yelling, grinning children by the roadside - and the marines don't know what they're yelling.

In my Humvee a young machine-gunner from south Texas, Lance Corporal Gregory Farias, and a sergeant not much older, Jeremy Dunagan, started talking about vacations and food. "We should just get a cow, man, and have a fuckin' barbecue," said Farias. "I could even eat a goat ... You know, my girlfriend, she can just take an onion and bite it like an apple."

"This would be a perfect spot for them to ambush us, man," said Dunagan. "RPGs. And talking about onions, there's one right there on the ground."

A minivan was parked 100 metres away among a group of houses. A man stood with children around him.

"If he slips an RPG out of the door, you'd better light him up," said Dunagan. "Light up" is marine slang for "shoot".

"I'm on it," said Farias, taking the safety catch off his machine gun.

"If they don't wave at you I think that's a sign they don't want us here," said Dunagan.

"Once, you remember, we were doing a convoy and there was some kid throwing rocks?" said Farias.

"My back is killing me, man."

"If my girlfriend's still with me when I get back I'm going to take her on a cruise to the Virgin Islands."

There was a terrifying yell from Sergeant Piano in the passenger seat. "Holy shit, it's a fuckin' sauna in here!"

"You fuckin' scared me, man," said Farias.

We passed a kid who made the thumbs down sign at us. Farias gave the thumbs up and a boy on the back of a passing pickup shouted proudly, in English: "No!"

"Oh my God, I'm gonna go insane!" yelled Piano. Yet it was getting cooler. A mist was forming over the reedbeds and there was a smell of fresh hay from where Iraqi farmers had been baling grass. We stopped one last time, to set up a checkpoint, before returning to Karmah. The sun had just gone down and the light shone horizontally across the land and it struck me, seeing Denton walking down the road without his goggles, what a good-looking man he was. The following day, his head was ripped open by shrapnel.

[Monkey Lib Front 10]

Article Link

Quote[/b] ]Part 2

A bad day - and some good luck

That day, Wednesday July 7, started badly for India Company, and got worse as the morning went on. At seven, two artillery rockets fell about 500 metres from the school, and a unit of marines on standby went off in a futile attempt to find the firers. During their search, their convoy was hit by an IED. No one was injured. At about the same time, Lt Strabbing's platoon went out again to the s-curve to resweep for fresh IEDs planted overnight, and to fill in the holes from the previous day's explosions. Fortunately for myself and my two American colleagues, we had decided not to go with them. As the second Humvee in the platoon's convoy was approaching the old craters, a watching resistance triggerman detonated a freshly planted explosive device. The IED had been covered by an old car engine block and when the device exploded car parts flew in the air, making it look as if the Humvee had been obliterated.

"I'm surprised, to be honest with you, they survived," Farias told me later. He had been in the vehicle behind and had seen the explosion engulf his comrades. "If you saw it from my point of view it was a direct hit. It exactly broadsided that vehicle. We couldn't see the vehicle, we couldn't see past the smoke. All I saw was engine parts falling and at that point I thought that vehicle had just been demolished. Pieces. You know. I was thinking, 'Oh my God that vehicle is totally destroyed', and my first thought was they're all dead. They're all dead. But thank God, thank God, you know ..."

The driver of the stricken Humvee, a diminutive 18-year-old private called David Negron, who was barely out of puberty when George Bush became president, was only slightly hurt and kept his wits enough to drive the vehicle on beyond the blast zone. In the seat next to him, Sgt Denton - who had just rejoined the marines after several years out of uniform - was calling out for a medic. His head had been lacerated by shrapnel which had flown in through the open window-gap in the Humvee's armoured door and into the unprotected space between the top of his body armour and the rim of his helmet. Four others had been injured in similar ways. One private, Joshua Stedman, almost lost an eye, although doctors now appear to have saved his sight. One marine said he had gone up to the Humvee just after the explosion and seen Stedman laughing. He had a piece of metal sticking out of his jaw.

Corporal Webb, the engineer who had found the IED on this same stretch of road the previous day, was hit by a single fragment of metal in the back of the head, on the hairline. Making a hole 1.5 cm wide through skin and muscle, it bounced off his skull, driving pieces of bone 2.5 cm into his brain. The fragment lodged in Webb's neck four cm down from the bounce point where, doctors reckon, it might as well stay, as long as it doesn't bother him.

In search of an enemy

When the platoon returned to the Karmah schoolhouse after their casualties, they were pouring with sweat and dark with rage. They had interrogated Iraqis at a car workshop close to the blast site and many were convinced they had been in some way responsible, but they had no evidence. No one was arrested; the marines hadn't fired a shot. Captain Clark, the company commander, had the difficult task of assuring them righteous vengeance would be theirs, while reminding them that they couldn't just go around shooting people.

"Today, this wasn't necessarily a victory, but it could have been worse," he told the platoon. "You're going to want these guys so badly you can taste it, like acid in your mouth, but you've got to have proof of hostile intent. You've got to catch them red-handed. If that's the case, hopefully, they're dead. You've got to turn your frustration to focus. Don't make it doubt your motives and wonder why you're here. Our job's to find and kill these shitasses and look after each other while we're doing it."

Two hours later, the platoon was out on patrol again, this time on foot. The idea was to prevent them brooding on their losses, but it was a risky sort of distraction. We walked out of the schoolyard at 11.30am. The hours between 11 and four are the hottest of the day, and July is the hottest month in Iraq, which is one of the hottest countries in the world. I don't know what the shade temperature was - somewhere in the mid to high 40s - but we weren't in the shade. The heat and the light enveloped the platoon, bleaching the senses, tunneling vision. The tops of helmets became too hot to touch. Temples began to throb as if with a hangover. The heat and the fear silenced everyone after a minute and as the platoon walked forward, strung out on either side of a dirt track, the loudest sound was the rustling of the bordering green reeds, taller than the tallest marine, in the breeze. I was only carrying a flak jacket, a helmet and half a gallon of water; the marines were each carrying - in weapons, water, ammunition and gear - well in excess of a standard airline baggage allowance. Sweat trickled into the eyes and its saltiness stung. As fast as you sucked on the hose from the water pouch on your back, your body sweated the water back out. By the time we approached the farm, which was the destination for this patrol, the platoon, spread out across a field and moving towards some buildings set in a line of palm trees, looked as if it was re-enacting a scene from Vietnam.

The marines interrupted the farmer's family lunch. Suspicions aroused by an old ammunition crate, they searched the farmer's house, pulling heaps of mattresses down off a dresser. They didn't break anything, nor did they tidy up afterwards. They found two Kalashnikovs, half a dozen magazines, an ancient bolt action rifle and a plastic sack full of ammunition. The farmer had an ID card declaring that he was a member of the new Iraqi defence forces but no one had provided Strabbing and his men with the means to verify whether the card was genuine. In the end the lieutenant confiscated most of the weaponry, but didn't arrest anyone.

By this time he had other worries. Even though we could see the school just a couple of kilometres away, the heat was beginning to hurt the marines. Staff Sergeant Shawn Ryan, a powerful, tough, experienced marine with an apparently sun-resistant Mediterranean complexion, collapsed with heat exhaustion. This is not a minor complaint: it means the body's ability to prevent its core temperature rising above the narrow margin necessary to support life is breaking down. Ryan was put in the shade of a tree and an intravenous drip put in his richly tattooed arm to rehydrate him.

We walked back to the base past the site of that morning's bomb. The field next to where the explosion had happened was strewn with lumps of metal.

In the strangest way, the distraction worked. By the time the platoon came to debrief it was clear that the rage at the morning bomb had been displaced by hatred for the more recent enemy, the sun, and a sense of achievement for having survived it. But none of the marines had even seen the human enemy who tried to kill them that morning, let alone shot at them or arrested them, and there would be more IEDs to come.

"It's a snake eating its tail," said Captain Clark that evening. "We are here to help the people but it's difficult. If we left, would the IEDs go away? I think they would stop targeting us and start targeting the local authorities. It would be just another regime that ruled by intimidation and fear. If I didn't believe in the mission, it would be like Columbus not believing in Copernicus."

And did the men believe in the mission?

"The majority, yes. There are some that doubt. They never doubt their brothers ... the greater political picture is pretty irrelevant. All that really matters is boots on the ground. It's not so much the mission, it's the brotherhood, the camaraderie, before anything else."

Death and Doritos

Next day the platoon convoyed back to the battalion base for their two days off, via an hour's shopping at a Filipino-run military supermarket. Lt Strabbing and his marines queued in exhausted, sweat-encrusted silence to buy boxes of Mountain Dew, bags of fried pork skins and Doritos, chocolate chip cookies, copies of Maxim magazine and drinks coolers. In the shade outside I saw a marine from another unit, just in from up country, with a bag of cheese biscuits in one hand and a can of spray-on cheese in the other, mechanically feeding his dream canapes into his mouth.

The battalion base offers the chance to phone home, check email and eat cooked food, but not much else. The electricity is as erratic as in Kharma. In the evening darkness outside their cell-like, barracks lodgings, the young marines milled around, smoking, dipping and complaining.

"This theatre sucks," came a voice from the darkness.

"This is the worst episode of the OC ever," came another.

Another: "I just wonder why we can't come to an agreement with the fuckin' retards out there. If you stop tryin' to kill us we'll stop tryin' to kill you."

Another: "I'm serious. If I don't get to kill somebody while I'm here, it's a wasted deployment."

I sat with 19-year-old Farias, who told me why he'd joined up. "I'm just like my brother, he's always been into military movies, and explosions, and stuff like that. I've always been into explosions and, you know, just, just, uh, just action movies. I'm not a fan of comedy movies."

Farias is loyal to the US military presence in Iraq. He believes in the mission. He worships Bush and despises the conservative hate trinity of John Kerry, Bill Clinton and France. That doesn't mean he's confident about the way it's going in Karmah.

"It's really frustrating 'cause I mean we can't find these guys. They shoot at us all the time, they run away, we try to figure out who it is, we interrogate people - do they know who it was? No, nobody knows who it was, yeah? Ali Baba, the bad guy, nobody wants to tell us where they're at, you know, so we're basically on our own, trying to figure this out, trying to put this puzzle together, where they're at and you know it's frustrating 'cause we can't operate like we should be, cause we're more worried about getting blown up and trying to find these bombs at the side of the road instead of going on a patrol and trying to find these guys."

Just before we part, Farias grew a little more thoughtful and melancholy. "I don't want to get killed here," he said. "I don't want to die here. You know. This is the last place I'd probably ever want to die. You know, it's just - I want to go home. I want to go home, I want to see my family, I want to do everything I did, do everything I did, you know, when I wasn't here. I'm not necessarily scared to die. I'm scared to not do the things that I want to do."

Maybe that's what being scared of dying is? "I guess."

The hidden cost

A few days ago, I went to see Corporal Webb in Landstuhl hospital. The US military presence in Germany has been scaled back radically in the past decade - the budget airline airport where I landed west of Frankfurt still had the fortified aircraft shelters of its previous incarnation as a cold war US airbase - but Landstuhl, between Kaiserlautern and Saarbrucken, has never been busier. Under cool grey European skies, the green, rambling, low-rise blocks of Landstuhl look wonderfully trim and peaceful. Inside, immaculately clean and shinywhite, they seem half-deserted.The sinister hospital smell of disinfectant is curiously missing, too, but the rooms off the corridors are full enough of interrupted lives.

Marie Shaw, the Belgian Nato employee who runs the hospital's PR operation, said Landstuhl has seen 16,000 casualties pass through since the US began combat operations in Afghanistan in 2001. The majority were not combat casualties, though the proportion varies according to the severity of the fighting. "When we had the battle of Fallujah, we had a whole lot of battle injuries ... we had a thousand patients in one month," she said. "The body armour is being extremely helpful to the soldiers, but we're seeing a lot of injuries to the parts not protected by body armour ... our enemies have become pretty good at shooting for non-protected areas."

Most of the engagements and accidents that bring US military casualties to Landstuhl are never reported in the media, because of the Pentagon's policy of reporting only deaths. Even when there are deaths, no details of the incident are given beyond date and place, the names of the casualties, their units and home towns and the genre of unpleasantness - bomb, car crash, firefight. Had it not been for the presence of the Guardian and Newsday, the bomb which struck Cpl Webb and his comrades would have remained unknown to the wider world.

Webb still had a bandage round his head. Sitting up in bed, he talked a little slowly but was expecting to be home by today - his wedding anniversary - and to make a full recovery. He can walk unaided.

"I remember being in the back of the Humvee and we were just driving and then all of a sudden I couldn't see anything, and my whole body was numb, and I couldn't move," said Webb. "I couldn't move so I tried to talk. I yelled for help and the other engineer, [Private Jeffrey] Arroyo, was saying my name, saying I was OK and holding on to my hand.

"I knew something was wrong 'cause my head hurt really bad and they kept telling me not to go to sleep because I was trying to and they kept telling me not to and I had to look at them."

As a marine, Webb remains loyal, obedient, brave and reluctant ever to go to Iraq again. He is unlikely to be forced to return this year but he may have to go a third time in 2005 before his service runs out. "I was pretty ticked off about having to go back this time, but nobody wants to go back. They know what it was like ... Should we be there? We are doing something good, but I don't know. It's what the president wants."

[walker 0]

Hello all

It sounds like Vietnam.

Sadly Walker

[billybob2002 0]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,126217,00.html

Quote[/b] ]

Guilt by Association

Monday, July 19, 2004

By David Asman

Is Al Jazeera (search) guilty of a crime when it films terrorists in the act? A court may soon decide.

On May 31st, a Saudi truck driver named Su’aydan Sa’dun Su’aydan was kidnapped in Iraq while taking supplies to a military camp near Fallujah. His captors tried to recruit him to become a suicide bomber. When he refused, the leader of the group sentenced him to death.

While awaiting his execution, Su’aydan heard his captors call the local Al Jazeera correspondent, who arrived a short time later. Su’aydan was forced to read a statement in front of the Al-Jazeera camera and was told his execution would take place on June 4, after Friday prayers.

But on the day of the execution, Su’aydan escaped during a gun battle between U.S. forces and members of the group that was holding him. When he arrived in Kuwait on June 5th, the Saudi trucker saw his Al Jazeera interview rebroadcast on BBC.

Outraged, Su’aydan found a lawyer and says he will sue Al Jazeera for collaborating with his kidnappers. His lawyer claims that Al Jazeera had prior knowledge about the place where his client was being held, the identity of the kidnappers and their intentions. He also plans to sue BBC and the U.S. subcontractors for whom he worked.

This looks like a bit more than a frivolous lawsuit.

And that’s the Asman Observer.

Is Al-Jazeera crossing the line....  

[Balschoiw 0]

Quote[/b] ]Is Al-Jazeera crossing the line....

If you take it like this, Foxnews, CNN, all embedded reporters, the Pentagon and any other news agency had to be sued...

[Apollo 0]

Quote[/b] ]Is Al-Jazeera crossing the line....

Do you know how many Al-Jazeera buildings and reporters have been killed/destroyed by "accidental" US bombing's? Heck even if Al-jazeera provides the USAF with coordinates of their building location their buildings still get bombed. Their website's get professionaly hacked by " US symphatists" ,co workers mysteriously dissapear ,investor's pull back their investments.

Before we judge Al Jazeera ,lets see how the court trial turnes out.it wouldn't be the first time that Al-Jazeer gets a pretty controversial lawsuit on it's back ,however i have yet to witness Al-Jazeera actually losing one of those lawsuits.

But i sure suspect that their are some powerfull people in the world who'd love to break Al-Jazeera.

Not that i find this "CNN of the middle east" superb of quality ,it's pretty comercial ,but it's rediculous that they get boycotted that much because they give coverage on events in the middle east that many country's wouldn't like to show to their people.

For ex. Al Jazeera at one point i think a year ago spread footage of American soldiers killed in action.Sure these picture's shocked America ,but the reaction against it was redicuulous ,the whole American media just worked toghether to show as few of the carnage in iraq as possible to the American viewer.

But the reality must be shown IMO ,especially in democratic nations ,if you can't face the fact that 100's of soldiers die if you send then in such a conflict ,then you shouldn't give the orders to it.Almost all American people supported the president at the start of the war ,by this they are also responsible for the casualty's they suffer.It's easy to keep war weariness low if you minimize the footage and information on the conflict.

It's easy to support a war if you don't have to face the grim carnage of it and can live hapily in youre western safe haven in ignorance.

They tried that in vietnam to ,until private reporters actually went to the region's itself to witness the war first hand.The cruelty's that were shown by their footage resulted in the massive peace demonstrations.

But the cruelty  was there ,the war was senseless and useless ,it deserved to be demonstrated against.

[Donnervogel 0]

Quote[/b] ]the whole American media just worked toghether to show as few of the carnage in iraq as possible to the American viewer.

not totally true. They did show plenty of burned and shot iraqi soldiers. (double standards anyone?)

[walker 0]

Hi all

The Draft is looking increasingly likely as predicted by several of us in this thread about 6 months back.

Quote[/b] ]Signs of trouble:

• The Army Guard's total number of soldiers — "end strength" in military terminology — is 343,846, more than 6,000 below its target of 350,000. End strength has been declining since January. Guard officials say they can recover by Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.

• The Army Guard is having trouble recruiting new soldiers. At the end of May, the most recent figures available, it was more than 5,400 recruits short. That's about 14% below its goal of 37,486 recruits by May 31.

• Only 58% of Army Guard recruits this year have achieved "quality recruit" scores on military aptitude tests, compared with 72% for the Army Reserve and 80% for the Air National Guard. The Pentagon's target for quality recruits is 60% for enlistees. The last time the Army Guard met that was in 2001.

• The Pentagon recently activated more than 5,600 members of the Army's Individual Ready Reserve (IRR), in part to fill gaps in the Army Guard. The IRR is a rarely used group of soldiers who have finished their voluntary active-duty tours.

Personnel experts and some members of Congress had predicted problems would surface this year. The Army National Guard and Army Reserve make up nearly 40% of the 141,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. Overall, 131,000 Army Guard and Reserve soldiers are on active duty in the United States and overseas, in most cases for 15 to 18 months. Full-time soldiers' foreign deployments typically are one year.

"We can't continue like this," says Paul Monroe, a retired commander of the California National Guard. He says recruiting will get harder as long as the National Guard or Army Reserve are called up for full-time duty as frequently as they have been since 9/11.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-07-20-army-guard_x.htm

Overstretch is a bad sign it means your combat effectiveness reduces and you start taking more casulaties and making more tactical and strategic errors.

As I said already this begins to look more and more like another Vietnam everyday.

Sadly Walker

[bucket man 2]

The situation in Vietnam didnt develope in one or two years. It took many years to be the full size war it eventually was where in the worst weeks 500 US soldiers were killed in action.

Iraq can is very much being like Vietnam in early stages. If they get their act together so to speak they can avoid the Vietnam thingie all over again.

[billybob2002 0]

Quote[/b] ]If you take it like this, Foxnews, CNN, all embedded reporters, the Pentagon and any other news agency had to be sued...

Those folks who chop off heads in Iraq are terrorists...

[billybob2002 0]

Quote[/b] ]It's easy to support a war if you don't have to face the grim carnage of it and can live hapily in youre western safe haven in ignorance.

They tried that in vietnam to ,until private reporters actually went to the region's itself to witness the war first hand.The cruelty's that were shown by their footage resulted in the massive peace demonstrations.

But the cruelty  was there ,the war was senseless and useless ,it deserved to be demonstrated against.

Good ole Vietnam....another time and place....