Posted on 10/09/2007 6:58:42 AM PDT by SJackson
In late July when I visited a police station in the town of Mushadah just north of Baghdad, I worried that Iraq was doomed to become the next Gaza. As many as half the police officers, according to most of the American Military Police who worked as their trainers, were Al Qaeda sympathizers or agents. The rest were corrupt, lazy cowards, according to every American I talked to but one.
No one tried to spin Mushadah into a success story. By itself this doesn't mean the country is doomed. How important is Mushadah anyway? I hadn't even heard of it until the day before I went there myself. But Military Police Capt. Maryanne Naro dismayingly told me the quality of the police and their station was “average.” That means one of two things. Either Mushadah is more or less typical, or roughly half the Iraqi Police force is worse.
I had a much better experience when I embedded, so to speak, with the Iraqi police in Kirkuk. I trusted the Iraqi police in that city enough that I was willing to travel with them without any protection from the American military, even though Kirkuk is still a part of the Red Zone.
In Kirkuk the police are Kurds. The Kurds of Iraq are the most pro-American people I have ever met in the world. They are more pro-American than Americans. There is no Kurdish insurgency, and the only Kurdish terrorist group — Ansar Al Islam, which recently changed its name to Al Qaeda in Kurdistan — is based now outside a town called Mariwan in northeastern Iran.
(Excerpt) Read more at frontpagemag.com ...
Frightening but probably true.
Yep, it's true.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
OK. Kirkuk is pretty mellow and I'm sure most of the police there are cool. More volatile parts of Iraq are calming down (although the last couple of days in Baghdad have been a little noisy), but no way would I go anywhere with Iraqis and no US military!
Not yet, anyway.
The change has been particularly amazing over the last couple of months.
We're not at all surprised that the media isn't reporting on this very much, but I imagine people will eventually notice the drastic reduction in car-bomb, IED, etc. stories coming out of Iraq.
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