Why Iraq Has No Army

Today, after 2 1/2 years stuck in an increasingly violent quagmire Bush gave a speech and the White House gave us their "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" book. You can download load it from the White House web site. Now that’s progress. Over 2100 American lives lost, over 15,000 wounded, unknown Iraqi lives lost, over $220,000,000,000 and we got a new book, all 35 pages. Bottom line, Bush won't stop the crusade. Iraq is a lost cause no matter what happens at this point. The incompetence that followed the fall of Baghdad cannot be repaired and the U.S. will pay the price for decades. You want to read something, go get the December issue of The Atlantic Monthly and read "Why Iraq Has No Army" by James Fallows. The web site is for subscribers only so you cannot get to it online. It covers a lot more than the Bush book. The Atlantic Monthly | December 2005 Why Iraq Has No Army An orderly exit from Iraq depends on the development of a viable Iraqi security force, but the Iraqis aren't even close. The Bush administration doesn't take the problem seriously—and it never has by James Fallows ..... When Saddam Hussein fell, the Iraqi people gained freedom. What they didn't get was public order. Looting began immediately, and by the time it abated, signs of an insurgency had appeared. Four months after the invasion the first bomb that killed more than one person went off; two years later, through this past summer, multiple-fatality bombings occurred on average once a day. The targets were not just U.S. troops but Iraqi civilians and, more important, Iraqis who would bring order to the country. The first major attack on Iraq's own policemen occurred in October of 2003, when a car bomb killed ten people at a Baghdad police station. This summer an average of ten Iraqi policemen or soldiers were killed each day. It is true, as U.S. officials often point out, that the violence is confined mainly to four of Iraq's eighteen provinces. But these four provinces contain the nation's capital and just under half its people. The crucial need to improve security and order in Iraq puts the United States in an impossible position. It can't honorably leave Iraq—as opposed to simply evacuating Saigon-style—so long as its military must provide most of the manpower, weaponry, intelligence systems, and strategies being used against the insurgency. But it can't sensibly stay when the very presence of its troops is a worsening irritant to the Iraqi public and a rallying point for nationalist opponents—to say nothing of the growing pressure in the United States for withdrawal. It's about 20 pages and worth the read