Posted on 07/01/2003 12:28:11 PM PDT by My2Cents
A relatively small number of foreseeable attacks - predicted by this column months ago - have been blown wildly out of proportion.
Our troops are doing remarkably well - but the headlines make it sound like a disaster. Last weekend, almost as many Americans died in a residential balcony collapse in Chicago as have been killed by hostile fire in "postwar" Iraq.
As a former soldier, I don't discount any American casualties as unimportant. But the fact is that, despite real errors and miscues, reconstruction efforts in Iraq are going surprisingly well.
How bad is it in Iraq? It's terrible - if you're a former Saddam loyalist, ex-secret policeman or Ba'ath Party muckety-muck on the wrong end of Operation Sidewinder. The party's over for Baghdad's bully-boys, and they don't much like it.
As one pal of mine serving in Iraq puts it, the attacks on U.S. forces are foolish acts of desperation. The last hardcore loyalists - those whose futures and fortunes were tied to Saddam - have recognized how unexpectedly smoothly the U.S. occupation has been going (Saddam's guys don't read the Western press, so they don't realize we're doomed to failure). And they're trying everything they can to disrupt things.
We shouldn't be surprised that the last embittered thugs are engaging in occasional acts of terrorism against us - on the contrary, we should be relieved that we see so little continuing resistance. After toppling a totalitarian regime that ruled a population of 25 million for over a generation, it's amazing that we face only one or two attacks every few days. We could be suffering hundreds of incidents daily, if the population stood behind Saddam & Co.
On our worst day last week, when two convoys came under attack, more than 600 other U.S. convoys didn't hear a single shot. Two patrols got into firefights. The other 500 patrols didn't even get hit with a water balloon.
Are the Iraqis "turning against us"? Bull. Our best sources of intelligence continue to be Iraqis who are glad the regime is gone and don't want it to come back in any way, shape or form.
The Iraqi population is complex, with varying interests, loyalties and levels of political sophistication. But the masses aren't demonstrating to bring back Saddam, Uday and Qusay. They may find the integrity and diligence of our soldiers frustrating as they try to work their local scams - but they don't miss the secret police.
Pounded onto the ropes, the last regime terrorists are trying to disrupt power supplies and public services, while assassinating key Iraqi citizens who cooperate with us. But the Iraqi people aren't stupid - uneducated in the demands of democracy, yes, but with the innate intelligence of human beings everywhere. And the Iraqis are survivors. They know who's cutting the power now. They know who's threatening them. The terror techniques employed by the holdout regime loyalists are going to backfire.
And this administration won't run. It will take months, but our troops will root out the killers. A year from now, we'll still see occasional acts of terror. But we won, the terror regime lost - and the whining of the Democratic leadership won't change it.
We should be cheering for our troops, not insulting their performance.
Of course, the beleaguered Democrats, for whom incompetence is an art form, make the Bush administration's weak planning for postwar Iraq look insignificant. Last week, Sen. Joe Biden, one of the key trigger men in the Democratic Party's circular firing squad, disparaged the progress our troops are making in Iraq. He bought into the cheapest headlines, instead of examining the evidence.
Sen. Biden, who has been wrong on nearly every foreign-policy issue of our time, made the lunatic suggestion that we should beg Paris for French troops to help us out.
Leaving aside any rancor we may feel toward the French for betraying our alliance, human rights and the fundamental values of Western Civilization, and allowing that Biden might be happier sipping a third-rate Bordeaux on a Parisian boulevard than drinking from the bitter cup of reality in Washington, the fact is that any French involvement would be disastrous. You don't put a rattlesnake in the baby's cradle.
First, the French can't fight worth a damn. Oh, the Foreign Legion's OK, if you don't mind extreme human-rights abuses. And their paratroopers have a history of refined torture techniques, massacre and mutiny. But the average French soldier is as worthless as the average French intellectual. And the French would have no incentive, whatsoever, to engage in serious efforts to bring Saddam's loyalists to justice.
Paris is still on Saddam's side, for God's sake. Oh, they don't say it openly. But Chirac & Co. want us to fail in Iraq. And they want their oil contracts back.
Perhaps Sen. Biden should take a cue from President Bush and make an African tour of his own - to examine the wreckage French support for dictators, mass murderers and cannibal-emperors created in their former colonies. (Check out Jean-Bedel Bokassa, who made paté out of his political opponents - when he wasn't playing kissy-face with former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing.)
Iraq's our baby, and we have the muscle and the moxie to bring it up right. The kid may turn out to be a juvenile delinquent, but it won't be because we didn't do our best.
In the meantime, we'll hold on to the family-car keys, thanks. And neither the remaining terrorists in Iraq, nor the soulless opportunists in Paris, nor human helium balloons like Joe Biden are going to stop us.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
An invasion of NV, of course, would have been a disaster and brought massive Chinese intervention (a la Korea).
The French have troops? Since when?
Well, SOMEONE has to surrender on the field of battle...
XXX: Here's the type of stuff I have to deal with. This steaming you-know-what was dropped in my lap at the last moment. Fortunately, most of the description/narrative came through me and the story came out pretty balanced. It just underscores the perception obstacles over here.
_________________________________________________________________________ Click here to read this story online:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0623/p01s03-woiq.html
Headline: In Iraq, a battle for credibility
Byline: Scott Peterson Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Date: 06/23/2003
(BAGHDAD)The way Riad Fadel Hamza tells the story, the six days he spent in US military detention were a horror show of abuse.
"They poured water on me and used electricity," Mr. Hamza says, pointing to a graze on his forearm, as a cluster of Iraqis around him nod sympathetically. "They shocked me repeatedly."
US military officials investigating the case at the Monitor's request firmly reject those allegations. "We found absolutely nothing to substantiate that claim," says US Army Lt. Col. Kirk Warner, the deputy staff judge advocate for coalition forces in Iraq.
The conflicting versions illustrate that, as the US tries to crush pockets of armed resistance here, it is also locked in a struggle for credibility. With Iraqis seeing little improvement in their lives so far, and amid Iraqi criticism that American methods are too heavy handed, Iraq is increasingly fertile ground for resentment and rumor.
Three recent examples of alleged torture, alleged execution of an Iraqi in US medical care, and the alleged rape of two Iraqi women - all later proven to be false, or almost certain to be - show how such perceptions take seed, spread and can be believed.
"Because of the tough way Americans are behaving and treating people, Iraqis tend to believe anything they hear about the Americans," says Saad Jawad, a political scientist at Baghdad University. On top of that, the civilian administrator Paul Bremer, "is doing nothing to win over Iraqis," he says. "That's leading to anger - people see no positive sign, and so [they] believe anything."
US officers insist that they adhere to the Geneva Conventions as the occupying power in Iraq. But a preoccupation with security and frequent lethal attacks by anti-US forces have triggered questions of possible abuse, and resulted in civilian deaths.
Applying electric shocks to a prisoner in US custody is not unprecedented - an American soldier was found to have done so to a detainee in Somalia in 1993. But US legal officers in Iraq who investigated the case of Hamza and his fellow detainees say that the claim in this instance is false.
"These folks were not abused," says Warner. "[They] are taken to a pretty sizable detention facility. It's not like they are taken to a back room somewhere."
US forces came under fire last week from human rights watchdog Amnesty International for tough detention conditions in Iraq, though US officers say it never visited a US facility. The International Committee of the Red Cross has twice visited the detention facility at the Baghdad Airport, the officers say, and US officers say they can enter any time.
The US military is investigating whether its troops were responsible for the death of an Iraqi prisoner of war in a detention camp near Nasiriyah. And the British military is looking into the deaths of two Iraqis who were under British control and into allegations of torture or beatings by British troops.
By Saturday, more than 90 raids conducted in a week during "Operation Desert Scorpion" brought in 540 new detainees.
Hamza and four others were picked up in a raid of an Islamic cultural center June 3 in Jubayl, about 55 miles south of Baghdad, by US Marines acting on a tip that the building was being used to prepare anti-US attacks.
According to a narrative compiled for the US military's Baghdad legal office by the US units involved in the arrest and detention of the five Iraqis, a copy of which was provided to the Monitor, the reason for the raid was information that 20 people reportedly linked to Islamic militants were "training to go against coalition forces." During interrogation, the narrative states, one detainee, Assad Tali al-Duleimi, said they were "instructed to collect weapons and await the arrival of a sheikh from Iran who would lead them against the coalition."
While Hamza claims that he was pelted with rocks while handcuffed and that a burning chemical was applied to his eyes, the US military narrative paints a different picture. It describes how detainees were asked if they needed medication, and noted that one was a diabetic, and that they received daily medical checks. Hamza "was caught numerous times faking convulsions" and "observed to attempt to bite his knees and hitting [sic] himself on the head with his knees," the narrative states. He was released June 9, when he was deemed to be of "no further military intelligence value."
Hamza's version of events has convinced his colleagues from the Islamic Cultural Center, however: "I think this was against Islam, because we have nothing to do with terrorism," says Said Mahdi al-Hassani.
Excerpted...
I was there. I don't remember getting whupped. I had just arrived and didn't know anything special was going on until I read about in newsweek.
I don't recall suggesting fighting Chinese troops.
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