Posted on 09/12/2006 7:07:59 AM PDT by presidio9
The commander of the U.S. Marine force in Iraq on Tuesday denied his troops had lost control of the vast province they patrol, after newspapers reported his intelligence chief had written a bleak report.
A division led by U.S. Marines has faced some of the highest casualty rates in Iraq patrolling the vast western desert of Anbar, Iraq's biggest province and a center of the Sunni insurgency.
The Washington Post reported that officials who have seen a study by the Marines' top intelligence officer in Iraq say he described the situation in the province as lost. Iraq's Shi'ite-led government holds no sway there and the strongest political movement is the Iraq branch of al Qaeda, it concluded.
The Post said it was the first time a senior U.S. officer had filed such a pessimistic assessment from Iraq, and described it as having had an impact among policymakers in Washington.
But Major General Richard Zilmer, commander of the 2nd Marine Division, said the press reports "fail to accurately capture the entirety and complexity" of the situation in Anbar.
"The classified assessment, which has been referred to in these reports, was intended to focus on the causes of the insurgency. It was not intended to address the positive effects Coalition and Iraqi forces have achieved on the security environment over the past years," he said in a statement.
"In areas where the presence of Iraqi Security Forces is combined with an effective local civil government, we have seen progress made. Not just in the area of security, but in economic development and the establishment of social order and public services," he said.
The statement did not indicate which parts of the province he believed had effective local government. Anbar includes such present and former battlegrounds as Falluja, Ramadi, Haditha and Qaim in the Euphrates valley, sites of some of the heaviest fighting since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
According to the New York Times, the report described Falluja, which the Marines recaptured from insurgents after two major battles in 2004, and Qaim near the Syrian border as comparative bright spots.
The rest of the province "lacks functional governments and a respect for the rule of law," the Times said.
It said the report had concluded an additional division, some 16,000 troops, would be needed to back up the 30,000 in the province to prevent the situation from getting even worse.
Otherwise "there is nothing (the Marine command) can do to influence the motivation of the Sunni to wage an insurgency," the paper quoted the report as saying.
Reuters? NYT? !!!!!!
OOOps Washington Post too. All the usual suspects!
Sounds like we got them where we want them.
Close. Rooters & the WP.
They ran the NYT story as a headline on the front page of the Dallas Morning News!
The headline read: "FAILURE LOOMING IN IRAQI PROVINCE".
Did the commander write the report or not?
New York Times, Washington Post, their all Al-Queda sympithizers and twist & destort technicians.
They could say the sky is blue, and I wouldn't believe those "R-tB-----d's! The Hell with 'em and their worthless lying rags!
Every military situation produces multiple reports. Some are highly optimistic, some are highly pessimistic, but it all depends on what, specifically, the writer is instructed to look at. If he is told to look ONLY at the status of the "insurgency," he cannot, by mandate, look at other aspects that may have an impact on the situation, but not be directly in his tasking. Moreover, since this is the NY Times, we don't know how many OTHER, different reports were also submitted---only the one that was curiously leaked, and which curiously conforms to the NY Times' view of the war.
Here's the USMC's response to Tom Ricks junk journalism.
Here's the USMC's response to Tom Ricks junk journalism.
Did the commander read the intelligence report before it was published?
Tom Ricks is full of sh*t.
Who is Tom Ricks?
All very confusing if this is true:
Sept 12th 2006
| Fallujah Under Threat Yet Again |
| by Dahr Jamail |
|
With Ali al-Fadhily FALLUJAH - After enduring two major assaults, Fallujah is under threat from U.S. forces again, residents say. "They destroyed our city twice, and they are threatening us a third time," 52-year-old Ahmed Dhahy told IPS in Fallujah, the Sunni-dominated city 30 mi. west of Baghdad. "They want us to do their job for them and turn in those who target them," he said. Dhahy, who lost 32 relatives when his father's house was bombed by a U.S. aircraft during the April 2004 attack on the city, said the U.S. military had threatened it would destroy the city if resistance fighters were not handed over to them. "Last week the Americans used loudspeakers on the backs of their tanks and Humvees to threaten us," Dhahy said. Residents said the U.S. forces warned of a "large military operation" if fighters were not handed over. A U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad said he had no reports of such action. Fallujah was heavily bombed in April 2004 and again in November that year. The attacks destroyed 75 percent of city infrastructure and left more than 5,000 dead, according to local non-governmental groups. But following the heavy assaults, resistance fighters have continued to launch attacks against U.S. and official Iraqi forces in the city. Fallujah remains under tight security, with the U.S. military using biometric identification, full body searches, and bar-coded IDs for residents to enter and leave their city. "The Iraqi resistance has not stopped for a single day despite the huge U.S. Army activities," a city police captain speaking on condition of anonymity told IPS. "The wise men of the city explained to U.S. officials that it is impossible to stop the resistance by military operations, but it seems the Americans prefer to do it the hard way." The police captain said anti-occupation fighters had increased their activities in the face of sectarian violence in which Shia death squads have killed thousands of Sunnis in Baghdad. Many residents of Fallujah have relatives in the capital city. Lack of reconstruction, and the U.S. military's failure to pay due compensation to victims' families have added to the unrest, the captain said. "There used to be resistance attacks against the U.S. and Iraqi forces in Fallujah daily," added the captain. "But now they have increased to several per day. Many soldiers have been killed and their vehicles destroyed. So it is clear that the security measures they have taken in Fallujah have failed." Several residents told IPS that all sorts of killings have been taking place over the past eight months. Religious leaders have been targeted regularly, with no group claiming responsibility. On Sunday Sept. 10, former chief of traffic police Brigadier Ahmed Diraa was shot dead in his car. Residents in Fallujah told IPS that Diraa had quit his post a month earlier. In the face of killings, and now threats of a new attack, residents remain defiant of the occupation forces. The hardships that people have endured seem to have strengthened rather than weakened them. "There are so many arrests and killings, and collective punishments such as random shootings, violent inspection raids, repeated curfews, and deliberate cutting of water and electricity," Mohammed al-Darraji, head of an Iraqi human rights group in Fallujah called the Iraqi Center for Human Rights Observation, told IPS. "What is going on in this city requires international intervention to protect civilians and to punish those who seriously damaged Fallujah society and committed serious crimes against humanity," al-Darraji added. His group has been monitoring breaches of the Geneva Conventions in the city since the April 2004 siege. "There is a long list of collective punishments that have turned the city into a frightful detention camp," he said. Another human rights campaigner in Fallujah who asked to be referred to as "Khalid" said human rights activists in Iraq felt betrayed by the United Nations. The UN had played ignorant "by leaving U.S. troops to act alone in the city," Khalid, who works with Raya Human Rights, a non-governmental organization in the city told IPS. "This was after the media exposed the enormity of the violence and human rights violations |
The MARINES do not lose - the political machines and others surrender instead.
If Bush will not release the "Dogs of War" - pull them out!
http://www.gohotsprings.us/m37/images/USMCmascot.jpg
What? Sounds just like Washington DC......
This particular province is always going to be difficult to manage. They need the local warlords to do it, and this will be the case for many years, until cultural changes take over. Every Islamic state has one of these "nomad" areas, and they are quite typical, and can be brought under a limited control with some inventive governing.
When newspapers print things from Intel assesments they fail to realise two things; the first being that assesments give both best and worst case scenarios. The paper chose to run with the worst case. The second thing is the fact that printing this garbage puts enormous pressure on Commanders to prove the story wrong, it also chips away at the individual Marines confidence in the mission. The Marine Corps needs to find the jackass who leaked this assesment and hang him by his gonads!!!!
I've learned a long time ago not to trust the media's word on any book, paper, documentary, speech, etc. of anyone.
Their analysis ALWAYS conveniently overlooks major sections, key phraise, important words, and overall tone.
They are either incredibly prejudiced against anything except their own opinion, or they are incredibly stupid and incapable of comprehensive understanding, or both.
(Register vote here: _________) (Both.)
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