Due disclosure, I'm sitting in southwestern Baghdad as I type this. Don't thank me. I'm here because the Pentagon said go and I think we shouldn't be here any more...
No, we aren't carpet bombing like we did in Germany. But yes, Iraq is destroyed.
But the destruction of basic infrastructure and death toll are most certainly comparable. Pound for pound, Iraq has a death toll and an impact on infrastructure that is quite comparable what Germany suffered in world war II.
Okay. I'm not sure if you are implying that this is the fault of coalition forces or not. It's a little hard to tell. But you seem to be implying that.
Let's be clear on this. The majority of that destruction is because these people are busy VBIEDing (car bomb) the crap out of each other or shooting their neighbors execution style. In the time I've been here, we've killed relatively few people (all of whom were actively shooting at us) and destroyed a handful of (abandoned) houses that were being used as bunkers or hides to detonate IEDs from. Also, those people blowing oil pipelines and stuff. That's not us either.
I still can't quite determine what you are trying to say w/ that post. If you are implying that it is the fault of coalition forces that Iraq is destroyed I'm going to get very heated.
So are our guys over there chasing the leaders of AQ or are they trying to stop Iraqis from killing each other? I hope you see the distinction. If our main objective is to defend ourselves from people there, the best way to do that is to leave.
griz,
We are doing both. al-Qaeda is definitely a big target for us. But we are trying to stop the sectarian violence and targeting people like the Shia
Jaysh al-Mahdi (JAM) militia. JAM is a local, as opposed to international, organization and really just wants to kill Sunnis and doesn't want us to get in the way. But since we are getting in the way, they are going after us too. One thing someone pointed out to me that really hit me was that
Explosively Formed Penetrators (EFPs) are a *expletive deleted*it weapon, because they come from Iran, not an al-Qaida weapon. And believe me, EFPs are the big boogeyman for soldiers today. It takes a LOT of armor to stop one and most vehicles are vulnerable to them. Those thing will wreck a vehicle and kill soldiers in a big way.
Our battalion commander likes to compare our job to trying to break up a fight at the Rock Fabrique (a bar back in Germany). Which is what most of the upper military and civilian echelons like to say. I prefer to compare it to jumping into a fight between several angry drunks armed w/ knives and broken bottles. Even if you pull one or two of them out of the fight they are still going to keep fighting and no one has a problem stabbing you either.
To summarize, the Sunni and the Shia do NOT want to get along. They don't want to work together. They want to kill each other. That's why I believe that ultimately the solution lies with homogenizing the Iraqis. Whether that means the Shia eventually drive out the Sunnis or partitioning Iraq into sections. It's interesting to note that "Kurdistan", the northern Kurdish area of Iraq is doing well. They have a functioning government and are largely very peaceful. But that is because they are all Kurds, without the Sunni/Shia tensions. A good analogy might be Yugoslavia, which settled down once the hostile ethnic groups were separated into their own little countries, rather than being thrown together and given the opportunity to fight.
The U.S. had soldiers stationed in China for close to 100 years.
Yes, but were they doing patrols and getting blown the *expletive deleted*ck up (there's no other word when you see a HMMWV blown away down to the floorboards with the whole crew dead)? I think a continuing presence in Iraq is necessary and even a good idea, since it gives us easy access to much of the Middle East. But it needs to be along the lines of Germany or Japan. Not keeping one third of ALL of our Army Brigade Combat Teams (active AND reserve) stationed there with the soldiers going out, doing patrols, and getting killed every day.