iraq

To mark the fifth anniversary of our invasion the NY Post gave an optimistic appraisal I replied
“Iraq may be in for some difficult times - but that's war.” Thus ends your editorial. One would assume that before the Sadr attacks everything was peaceful. One would be wrong. After five years of war and 150,000 US troops, deaths were still averaging over a thousand a month. Five million Iraqis (twenty percent) are refugees! Normal everyday living is still a mirage in much of that benighted nation. And “surprises happen in war”. Funny, we’ve got the same platitude every year. By now there would be no more surprises of this magnitude! But then again we were told that elections would lead speedily to our withdrawal. Surprise! We were told of the great strides the Iraqi army was making, that as “They stood up, we’d stand down”. Surprise! We were told that the surge would provide the Iraqi “government” the space to enact the necessary reconciliation legislation, so we could reduce our forces. Surprise! We’re told that the surge has been a great military success. If reducing Iraqi deaths from cataclysmic to merely disastrous is success then, yes, But for the Iraqis? Surprise! They’re still dying! Sadly the Post’s boosterism for this disastrous war is NO SURPRISE!

Let me put in context the continuing loss of life in Iraq. Even befor Sadr's insurrection the claim was that deaths were down to 30-40% of the pre-surge number. Now the estimates are that around 3,000 people were dying each month. Since Iraq's population was (in 2003) about 26 million or 8% i=of the US's, let us multiply the fatalities for comparison. So per capita the Iraqi deaths translate to 35,000/month in the US population, or 400,000 a year. The reduction is now down to an equivalent for the US population of 12-15,000 a month or 150-200,000 a year! I doubt Bush would be crowing if that numbger (remember the same percentage of our population) were being killed monthly! And what if twenty percent of our population were refugees? ^0 million! And this is after FIVE years! Remember where we were five years after Pearl Harbor? At peace in December 1946. US military casualties from enemy activity? ZERO! Some genius wrote to the Post saying that US casualties on an annual basis were much lower than WWII. DUH! In WWII we were fighting two of the world's biggest best equipped andbattle experienced military forces (OK and Italy!) two ruthless nations as well armed as we were (or more so)! And we were invaading well defended islands, with suicidal soldiers in the Pacific, and Fortress Europe.
The Iraqi army may have been large but it was ill-equipped, and poorly led and poorly trained. Our forces are equipped with the latest hardware, had complete air control, and well trained forces. Technologically it was rather like Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in the 1930's, with the added lack of warlike zeal of most of the Iraqi army! In Vietnam the casualties were also ten times higher, but again we were faced with a well equipprd enemy, a nation determined to fight through any hardship and jungle conditions ideal for the Vietcong type of war. Here the military is faced with a thousands of enemy rather than millions, with inferiopr weapons and little discipline. So our casualties are mercifully lower, but should never have occured at all.
And let us be clear. This nonsense about fighting the terrorists in Iraq, so we don't have to fight them here, is sheer disinformation. If Al-Qaeda is our enemy, which it is, why have we not fought them for over six years where they live? That is Pakistan where bin Ladin and the rest fled when we let them escape from Afghanistan.
Instead of using our entire military power to wipe out this terrorist band in 2001-2002 Mr Bush turned his attention away, to manufactured claims of WMD and spurious Saddam-Al-Qaeda connections. We sat by rather than rooting them out in the Pakistani wilds with or without the help of our "good friend" Musharref and he did zero to oppose them.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq? Didn't even exist till 2005 and even now is a mere flea bite compared to the Sunni-Shia religious feuding, responsible a couple of percent no more of the deathtoll.
Of course I will be getting back to Iraq as the year goes on, but now it's time to borrow Ed Murrow's phrase, recently approriated by Keith Olbermann
"Good night and Good luck" and that's the way it is!