NYT: Iraqi Forces Foundering in Face of Killings and Threats by Rebels

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/30/international/middleeast/30police.html?ei=5094&en=0cdce6a0cd5fe86f&hp=&ex=1101790800&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print&position=

Iraqi police and national guard forces, whose performance is crucial to securing January elections, are foundering in the face of coordinated efforts to kill and intimidate them and their families, say American officials in the provinces facing the most violent insurgency.

For months, Iraqi recruits for both forces have been the victims of assassinations and car bombs aimed at lines of applicants as well as police stations. On Monday morning, a suicide bomber rammed a car into a group of police officers waiting to collect their salaries west of Ramadi, killing 12 people, Interior Ministry officials said.

While Bush administration officials say that the training is progressing and that there have been instances in which the Iraqis have proved tactically useful and fought bravely, local American commanders and security officials say both Iraqi forces are riddled with problems.

In the most violent provinces, they say, the Iraqis are so intimidated that many are reluctant to show up and do not tell their families where they work; they have yet to receive adequate training or weapons, present a danger to American troops they fight alongside, and are unreliable because of corruption, desertion or infiltration.

Given the weak performance of Iraqi forces, any major withdrawal of American troops for at least a decade would invite chaos, a senior Interior Ministry official who did not want his identitydisclosed said in an interview last week.

Just like Vietnam. I wonder how big the Iraq Wall memorial will have to be by then?

Does this mean no elections?

They think just because their US appointed leaders have been long-time CIA assets that they still work for the U.S. Ha! Ridiculous! And they think that just because Iraq swims on the second largest oil reserves on earth that the US is interested in it. Tin-foil hat stuff.

Mosul's militants fight mostly from shadows
<snip>Many Iraqis "don't believe in the new government," says Botan Nadir, 28, an Iraqi-born contract translator for coalition forces. "They think the United States is after the oil and the new government works for the United States." <snip>

Who wudda thunk it, eh?

But there's a solution:

<snip> U.S. commanders say local mistrust can be overcome with more involvement from the Iraqi military and police. "The way ahead here is the Iraqi security forces," says Army Lt. Col. Todd McCaffrey, commander of the 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry Regiment. "They are the future of Iraq; we're not. The Iraqi people respond very well to seeing their own soldiers on the streets."<snip>

Huh? Respond very well? They're being massacred by their countrymen.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-11-28-mosul-militants_x.htm

In VietNam, and nobody but us troops seems to have learned anything from it! There's nothing like bullets whistling past your ears to make you pay attention...

To bad none of our chickenhawk "Leaders" ever enjoyed the Vietnam experience. So now we veterans get to watch this agonizingly sad replay of history.

Too early to withdraw

Given the weak performance of Iraqi forces, any major withdrawal of American troops for at least a decade would invite chaos, a senior official at the Interior Ministry said in an interview last week.

South of Baghdad, where American troops are still trying to drive out insurgents after the recent offensive in Fallujah, American officers warn their own troops to be prepared to "duck and cover" to avoid stray shots fired by Iraqi recruits.

In the northern city of Mosul, almost the entire police force and large parts of several Iraqi National Guard battalions deserted during an insurgent uprising this month. Iraqi leaders were forced to use guard battalions of Kurdish soldiers to secure the city, kindling ethnic tensions with Arabs.

In VietNam.

The moment that this bogus govt. is not protected by the US it will be overthrown by Iraqis who are not on the US payroll.

Probably Islamic extremists.

when he was informed of his transfer into a "combinded action platoon" (half ARVN, half Marines). In essence, he had received a death sentence and we ALL knew it.

I hope he made it home! To you, welcome home, Brother. Thank you for your service to America!

country as it were some 2nd string US army. If anyone really wants people (both Americans and Iraqis) to stop dying in that country and for there to be any hope of a future someone is going to have to secure the borders. After the borders are secured then the roads have to be secured.

Once you have control of everything and everyone coming and going out of the country and then control of everything and everyone moving in that country, you can then control the cities, towns, villages and neighborhoods. What we are doing right now is insane. People will continue to die in the same way they are now because we don't control the country and are unwilling to what is necessary to gain control.

to do all the things you listed? Control the borders? Control the roads and highways? Control the cities and villages? I can only hope that I missed your sarcasm...

Maybe we shouldn't have invaded in the first place.

...that Generals Shinseki, Zinni, Clark, and others said it would require to do the job, instead of rumsfeld micro-managing the war, as was done in Viet-Fucking-Nam!

,...is that what that anonymous "senior Interior Ministry official" is really saying?

I wonder why the Busholinis ever believed that moving military from Saudi Arabia to Iraq would be a great idea?

Just remember, neocons, they hate our policies (raping their natural resources and force-feeding western capitalism), NOT OUR FREEDOMS. Of course, the neocons already know that and really don't give a damn.

...can only be called one thing: civil war. And we did little-to-nothing to prevent it (and are the main factor behind it). Tell me again why Rumsfeld still has a job?:grr:

of the Nation. Look at the results:

Dolar value falling to new lows

Nat Debt up to $8.4 trillion

Uncontrolled spending far worse that the Pubs ever accused the Dems of. These guys are FOOL and Spend.

Osama still loose on purpose?? So we have a clay pigeon to shoot at? A reason to be at the firing range?

etc etc

Right on!

(An email from a European friend. He told me to go see "The Fog of War" which I told him I had already seen on PBS. Then he gave me more details on Iraq.)

1. It was projected in some parisian movie theaters last year. It is strange to me to learn that quite a few americans have difficulties with the facts (something must be wrong about the teaching of contemporary History in american high schools).
It sounds like a bad excuse and to me that is scaring. As Mc Namara said a person (or a country) should learn from his mistakes and never repeat them twice. Had America listened to its allies, it would have never gotten into the vietnamese or iraqi's traps!

Americans tend to see the war in Iraq as a part of a "war on terror" to establish a US style democracy in the Middle East. Iraquis see americans as invaders coming to enslave them and steal their oil on behalf of israelis politicians and texan oilmen interests.


2. Many russian archives are now being declassified and almost every months we can learn something new about the cold war in European History magazines. For instance, Gorbatchev knew that Reagan's "stars war" was nothing but pure bluff. Also, the soviet army didn't want to intervene in Afghanistan in 1979 but Brezhnev assured his generals that it would be over "in a few weeks" (a position similar to Rumsfled's cakewalk about Iraq while facing some reluctant US generals).
There doesn't seem to be much interest about those discoveries in the US.


3. Some old french and algerian officials that participated in the franco-algerian war are now talking about the dark side of the war : the use of torture by the french army under government's approval, the elimination of rivals among algerian nationalists, the betrayal of pro french algerians by de Gaulle, the inability of algerian nationalists to totally control their troops, the use of the Saharian dessert to detonate the first french A-bombs...

We also learned that at some point the french state oil company paid some protection money to the algerian rebels for not sabotaging the first pipe line (oil was discovered in Algeria during the last years of colonial rule).

Forty years after the war ended both countries have now started to normalize their relations (you had to wait for one generation to fade away on both sides of the mediterranean). Algeria just recently reintroduced the compulsory teaching of french in elementary schools (their Ministry of Education said he wanted some educated citizens and not some islamists). Some old french colonists go visit their former possessions there and sometimes encounter their old algerian employees or workers.

The facts that 1 million french colonists arrived in the Motherland in May / June 1962 (actually some of them had never been to France - their families being settled in Algeria for 3 generations and many were not of french origins as you had many spaniards, italians, maltese, jews among them) and that 4 millions algerians reside in France complicated relations in between both countries.

You should rent in DVD "The Battle of Algiers" by Gillo Pontecorvo (1966) distributed by Studio Canal (in french with english subtitles) . For 30 years it was forbiden in France (I first saw it in a Taipei' s Barcelona MTV on Hsin Yi Rd...)The Pentagon projected it to the high ranking officers serving in Iraq after realizing in May / June 2003 that the country was out of control...

The movie has be shown again in all movie theaters in France in November 2004 to commemorate the beginning of the algerian war (1954 - 1962).

Good info.

all along.He never intended to pull out of Iraq.They wanted bases there so they could better control the Oil.

...should never have been put in charge of better men and women's lives! I curse the day he profaned the Earth with his vile touch!

we all must realize that the goal of Bushco was never democracy in Iraq, nor was it American victory and withdrawal.

The goal was always chaos. Extended chaos.

It's chaos that profits Bushco. And extended chaos means perpetual profit for decades.

They're looting our treasure; transfering it all to the pockets of Bush cronies.

It's a spectacular failure -- it just keeps on raining money.

is good for some. Starve the Amerikan Economy. Get rid of all Social Programs. Force the Middle Class into the Working Poor. Privatize everything. Feed the Multi-Corps. Outsource, mfg. re-location and immigrant labor. Destroy the Constitution. These are some of the goals of the Neo Fascists alligned with the Amerikan Corps that view themselves as Global Corps.

...into Carlyle Group's stash!