Posted on 12/08/2003 9:59:26 PM PST by kattracks
Edited on 07/12/2004 4:11:03 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
BAGHDAD
(Excerpt) Read more at washtimes.com ...
Yet what he is doing keeps us there longer. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
Wait a minute... does that mean that some reporters are paying these terrorists for interviews? If that's true, and some or all of that money goes towards buying weapons or paying attackers, that makes some of these "neutral" reporters accessories to attacks on our troops, if you ask me.
After promising another meeting to mark the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Abu Mujahid disappeared. Neither he nor his men has been in contact since and their status cannot be established.
Hopefully, Abu Mujahid and his buddies are dead or captured. I hope we keep up the Iron Hammer operations. I don't want to see any let up. Give these guys some breathing room, like we did during Ramadan, and we can see what happens. I hope we keep the pressure on them, and from what I've read from commanders in the area it sounds like we will.
Well, yes, but that's only second prize.
The theme that struck me was that these guys were irritated enough to pick up guns by a couple of incidents in which, and I don't think this guy was lying, U.S. troopers acted in a manner I suspect was inconsistent with their guidance, gratuituously insulting people and roughing them up after mistaking them for some Ba'athist jerks.
And that comes back again to the fact that these troops are being told to do things that they were never trained for. We're using pipe wrenches to tune pianos over there, and it has finally bitten us in the ass, big time.
We needed a big police force to enter the country right behind the spearheads -- but Rummy was too busy paring down the invasion force to keep the cost low ("I want to do this on the cheap", I think was the famous quote), and he didn't bring the guys with the tools.
But that "cheap" stuff goes back to Dubya, who stiffed DoD on promised funds to rectify the Clinton "hollowing-out" policy to the tune of $60 Billion, which was Rumsfeld's initial budget request just to get the services up to snuff. Bush told them all to stand fast, and then went and did tax cuts first. I suspect he's still trying to save money as Job One, trying to avoid having to take back any of those tax cuts he staked himself out on when he first came into office.
Of course, that was before 9/11, when lots of people thought we could go on hollowing out DoD and NASA ad infinitum, and get away with it. Now we know better.
I noticed that, too. I thought it was really interesting that he thought he might have to fight in two directions -- which he shouldn't have told his commander, btw, lest it get up the chain of command to some big Ba'athists who might not be as understanding of his brand of patriotism.
We want this guy to turn himself in and go to work for an Iraqi security agency or force. We don't want him out there at night getting shot up by Iron Hammer. His losses will embitter him over time and make him very tough to deal with and possibly impossible to reconcile with whatever Iraqi government does emerge. We've got to get on top of this security situation very fast, get real police and civil-administrative people in there to relieve the Army, and get the Army out of the town centers where they're rubbing up against the general population.
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