By Monday, more than 1,000 Marines backed by Cobra helicopters and Hornet warplanes were pouring into an area north of the Euphrates River where few American troops and no Iraqi forces have been for at least a year.
This bothers me. It appears they may be the source of the car bombs and suicide bombers hitting the country recently. Why has it taken a year to get at these multiplying cockroaches? And how is the border to be secured once we finish this job? Are we going to have to go back again in 6-months or a year to repeat the process? And where are these terrorists getting the special ammo that is so powerful it will shoot through concrete floors and walls to injure and kill our men?
Answers anyone?
Iraq is a big country with lots of fairly inaccessible places.
Just remember that the leaders in DC deny the need for more troops.
Having been there I have always thought that we had too few to do the job. Qaim is extremely remote. Haditha has always been treacherous and many convoys have been hit there.
And speaking of Hit, they have always hated us there, too. Trust me on that, you could see it in their eyes.
"This bothers me. It appears they may be the source of the car bombs and suicide bombers hitting the country recently.
1)Partly so. Foreign terrorist come in from many many crossings in Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran, and even some come in via. Kuwait. The borders are as porus as lets say the Canadian/US border. As you can imagine one does nto have to enter the US via a road. It would take a few million border patrol police to keep the border closed. Like wise in Iraq we are faced with a similiar situation. In Al Anbar Province which easily has over 800 miles of border with Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia alone it simply is an impossible task. All one can do is do their best to provide air recon of various types and concentrate ones forces over a few hundred miles at best per Battallion and do 24/7 patrols.
Why has it taken a year to get at these multiplying cockroaches?
2)The article as expected is a bit misleading in that both the Army units and now the replacement Marine units in these areas have been doing only occasional SASO in towns and hamlets in these vast area. Truly some areas are pure desert environments, hills with wadi (dry creek beds) that extend for hundreds of miles etc.. no man's land that even Saddam Hussein's forces could not control when in power. But the article makes it sound like nothing has been done in this vast area in the past. That is a complete falsehood. One must understand that Al Anbar is a huge area, mostly desert with few east/west, north/south routes in it's grid. It would take a few divisions of our Army to actually occupy the whole area to any effect. But to say it has not seen action in the past is wrong. Our Intel has known for two years that a lot of activity has gone on in these areas, names of towns dating back a few thousand years, that are known in recent times to be towns that sponsor smuggling and drug trafficing for instance are well understood. The problem is one of logistics. How many companies of some Battallion for instance can you put into a given remote location for so long to properly interdict and stop some activity? How many Marines or Army folks are needed to patrol a given hundred square miles of desert that contains lets say three towns that are suspect of harboring local and foreign insurgents/terrorist?
And how is the border to be secured once we finish this job?
3)That is a headache for the Iraqi government and military to deal with. Just like Saddam before them. Like I said earlier, this area was a thorn in Saddam's side and ironically it was mostly populated by Sunni Arabs!
Are we going to have to go back again in 6-months or a year to repeat the process?
4) Once we leave, we leave. But do realize we will not totally leave, but provide a presence in the area with permission of the Iraqi government, to work with their new military for many years to rebuild them, and maintain most likely spook shops to monitor the whole mideast. Iran,Syria, and the rest of the mid east will not like that but tough shit. We need to be able to monitor things closely in the area and what better place then Iraq, it is in the geographic center of the mid east.
And where are these terrorists getting the special ammo that is so powerful it will shoot through concrete floors and walls to injure and kill our men?
5) This is misleading. The article did not say the bullets fromo their 50 caliber machine guns where going through any significant amount of concrete. Concrete is to dense and hard for that to happen. Likewise the article is ball shit as usual when it says their machine guns could penetrate one of our main line tanks. So as usual. The gentle readers must understand we have most often rabid ill informed at best L/MSM reporter types who most probably could not hit a nail stuck in a board, let alone accurately fire a M16 at a mere 50 yard target and hit in the kill zone, reporting things that mislead the reader.
Hope I have partially shed some light on questions you ably presented. Let me leave you with this. Hypothetically if we would have had an additional full Army division (20-30 thousand strong) in Iraq earlier on, it would not have made hardly any difference in what has been happening. The only thing I can say about the insurgency to their credit is they most often run like hell once our military engage them. They escape to their little holes in the sand. So for instance the perhaps 2000 that fleed Fallujah in the early moments of the battle that we could not take out, got away. As we continue to kill them in the main Sunni and triangle of death triangles and upward toward Mosul, Kirkut, Erbil etc., those still alive scurry to lets say the far Al Anbar province. Now we are going to kill as many in this province as we can find.