Why the U.S. will never win in Iraq

Here's an article about some of the raids that the US Army conducts on Iraqi households. I was disgusted, and I can only imagine how this would make me feel if it was my house and my family.

This is one of the reasons why the US will never win in Iraq. These are the kinds of things that can turn an Iraqi who welcomes the U.S. into an Iraqi who hates the U.S.. And it's not the soldier's faults, necessarily. they're trained to kill, not to be policemen in a foreign country, sensitive to cultural and religious differences.

www.atimes.com...

"By 0100 the vehicles are being moved into position, guided by flashlights and their own headlights. The mood among the men is like that of athletes before a big game. They joke, psyche themselves up and receive final reminders from their team leaders, like coaches, to focus, to keep their eye on the ball.

One after another the vehicles in the convoy rumble out the gate of Tiger X Ray, round the bend, go past the electrical station, and stop at the test fire range. Some of Bandit's vehicles get lost and Tiger 6 gets on the radio: "We have some roaming elephants," he says, in jest. Bandit 6 is not amused.

Apache 6 and his driver Sergeant Bentley discuss football. Brown likes the Dallas Cowboys. "The hardest part of the mission is going in there and pulling some father away from his kids," says Brown. "Yeah, it sucks," sergeant Bentley avers. "But," continues Brown, "if it's gonna let my men get home safe to see their kids, I'll do it."

Apache's teams drive in black light, guided by the nods, or night-vision goggles, worn by the driver. After half an hour of navigating in the dark, the convoy approaches the first house, and the vehicles go into white light, illuminating the target area as a tank breaks the stone wall. "# yeah!" cheers Sergeant Bentley. "Hi honey, I'm home!" The teams charge over the rubble from the hole in the wall, breaking through the door with a sledgehammer and dragging several men out...

The barefoot prisoners, dazed from their slumber, are forcefully marched over rocks and hard ground. One short middle-aged man, clearly injured and limping with painful difficulty, is violently pushed forward in the grip of a soldier who says: "You'll #ing learn how to walk."

Each male is asked his name. None of them match the names on the list. A prisoner is asked where the military officer lives. "Down the road," he points. "Show us!" he is told, and shoved ahead stumbling over the rocky street, terrified that he will be seen as an informer in the neighborhood. He stops at the house, but the soldiers run ahead.

"No, no, it's here," yells a sergeant, and they run back, breaking through the gate and bursting into the house. It is a large villa, with grapevines covering the driveway. The women and children are ordered to sit in the garden. The men are pushed to the ground on the driveway and asked their names. It is indeed the first high-value target. His son begs the soldiers: "Take me for 10 years but leave my father!" Both are taken as the children scream, "Daddy, Daddy!"

House after house meets the same fate. Some homes only have women in them; they, too, are ransacked, closets broken, mattresses overturned, clothes thrown out of drawers. In one house, the CIA commando and soldiers fail to recognize the smiling face in the large picture pasted to the suspect's bedroom dresser. It is Oday, one of Saddam Hussein's notorious sons, dressed in tribal clothes.

As her husband is taken away, one woman angrily asks Allah to curse the soldiers, calling them "dogs! Jews!" over and over. When his soldiers leave a house, Brown emerges to slap them on the back like a coach congratulating his players during half-time in a winning game.

In a big compound of several houses the soldiers take all the men, even the ones not on the list. A sergeant explains that the others will be held for questioning to see if they have any useful information. The men cry out that they have children still inside. In several houses soldiers tenderly carry out babies that have been left sleeping in their cribs when families are ordered out and hand them to the women.

When a house is complete, or at the Home Run stage (stages are divided into 1st, 2nd, 3rd, Home Run and Grand Slam, meaning ready to move on), soldiers relax and joke, breaking their own tension and ignoring the trembling and shocked women and children crouched together on the lawns behind them.

Prisoners with duct tape on their eyes and their hands cuffed behind them with plastic "zip ties" sit in the back of the truck for hours without water. They move their heads toward sounds, disoriented and frightened, trying to understand what is happening around them. Any time a prisoner moves or twitches a soldier bellows at him angrily and curses...

...Bandit troop does not return to base until 11am. They have arrested 38 men. Six of them were from the list, three others were relatives and the rest were "military-age males" who were present. One man confronted Bandit troop demanding, "Arrest me, I have some information for you." Like many sources, he did not want to be seen as a collaborator.

That night the prisoners are visible on a large dirt field in a square of concertina wire, and beneath immense spotlights and to the sound of loud generators they try to sleep on the ground, guarded by soldiers. One non-commissioned officer is surprised by the high number of prisoners Apache has taken. "Did they just arrest every man they found?" he asks, wondering whether "we just made another 300 people hate us".

The following day 57 prisoners are transported to a larger base for further interrogation. Some are not the suspects, just relatives of the suspects, or men suspected of being the suspects. Three days after the operation, a dozen prisoners can be seen marching in a circle outside the detention center, surrounded by barbed wire. They are shouting "USA, USA!" over and over.

"They were talkin' when we told 'em not to, so we made 'em talk somethin' we liked to hear," grins one of the soldiers guarding them. Another gestures up with his hands, letting them know they have to raise their voices. A first sergeant quips that the ones who are not guilty "will be guilty next time", after such treatment.

Even if the men are guilty, no proof will be provided to the community. There will be no process of transparent justice. The only thing evident to the Iraqi public will be American guilt"

I can't see how this would work in any country, I don't care what cultural differences or similarities there may be.


jakomo

Guess what Jakamo, it's worse than you even know.

Another awesome article about this, this time from Counterpunch.

www.counterpunch.org...

""Mow the Whole Place Down"
Political Barbarism and Iraq
By BRIAN CLOUGHLEY

...This is grim. Here am I, a retired and wizened soldier who has seen warfare at several levels, an old campaigner who you would think would be at the right hand of Genghis Khan or Trent Lott and applauding victory over all sorts of wogs, gooks, slopes or whatever ; yet I despair about what is going on in the name of 'freedom' in Iraq. Because American soldiers are behaving barbarically and without regard to human rights, Geneva Conventions, or just plain decency.

I never thought American soldiers would permit this, for example, in a recent raid on a village:

"Prisoners with duct tape on their eyes and their hands cuffed behind them with plastic "zip ties" [handcuffs] sit in the back of the truck for hours without water. They move their heads toward sounds, disoriented and frightened, trying to understand what is happening around them. Any time a prisoner moves or twitches a soldier bellows at him angrily and curses."

What on earth has happened to decent American boys?

"By daylight the whole town can see a large truck full of prisoners. Two men walking to work with their breakfast in a basket are stopped at gunpoint, ordered to the ground, cuffed and told to "shut the # up" as their basket's contents are tossed out and they are questioned about the location of a suspect."

What has happened to decent American boys? How could a normal American youngster willfully destroy someone's breakfast? Is it army policy for American soldiers to bellow "Shut the # up" at unarmed civilians on their way to work who are unfortunate enough to be within sight of an American squad and are therefore treated as the worst of enemies? The Iraqis don't understand "shut the # up", of course. All they understand is that they were walking peacefully to work with their breakfast in a basket and were threatened, humiliated, physically abused, made captive and bellowed at by the invaders of their country.

After this particular sweep, in which 'Apache Troop' was searching for alleged terrorists, Nir Rosen of the Asia Times reported "From the list of 34 names [of suspects], Apache brings in about 16 positively identified men, along with another 54 men who were neighbors, relatives or just happened to be around. By 0830, Apache is done, and starts driving back to base. As the main element departs, the psychological-operations vehicle blasts AC/DC rock music through neighborhood streets. 'It's good for morale after such a long mission,' Captain Brown says."

Does not this oaf realise he has just made hundreds more enemies for his country? Not only by the jackboot-style raid, the conduct of which would have been well regarded by the Waffen SS, but by his immature gesture of playing triumphal mega-decibel foreign rock music to mark his victory over nothing. The entire town hates Americans. Its citizens may or may not have been supportive of Saddam Hussein or the occupying power before the raid, but it doesn't take a genius to work out who they detest now.

Iraqi prisoners of the Occupying Power have no rights of any sort. The Geneva Conventions are irrelevant, so far as the US military is concerned. Let me emphasize this. The Geneva Conventions regarding treatment of prisoners of war and civilians (protected persons, as the Convention defines them) might as well not exist. No Iraqi citizens have any rights once they fall into the hands of the conquerors. Indeed no Iraqi citizens have any rights if they go anywhere near US soldiers. Alex Berenson of the New York Times reported October 28 that (ttp://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/29/international/middleeast /29IRAQ.html?pagewan>) "American soldiers killed six civilians just west of this city on Monday after a roadside bomb exploded near their convoy, according to town officials and witnesses. The soldiers, who were on the main road to Falluja when the bomb exploded, fired on a minivan heading in the opposite direction on a different road more than 100 yards away, witnesses said.

"An American convoy of about eight vehicles was traveling east toward Falluja, on a road where United States patrols are often attacked. Two bombs planted in the center median exploded, damaging one of the vehicles but not stopping the convoy's progress, witnesses said. Still heading east, the convoy began to fire, shooting at several vehicles heading southwest, away from the patrol, on a nearby road, said Amir Ahmed Saleh, a passenger in a vehicle on that road. The convoy's targets included a minivan carrying employees of Iraq's state oil company, Mr. Saleh said. . . . Four people in the minivan died, and two were severely wounded . . . He showed what he said were photographs of the shattered van that he had taken immediately after the incident. The photographs show a gruesome scene. Pieces of bodies cover the van's seats, sharing space with a set of brown prayer beads. A headless, legless torso lies on the ground beside the van. There was no independent means of confirming that the van pictured was the one involved in the incident . ."

Long article, but an eye-opening read.

I wish to God that the mainstream media was able to pursue stories like this instead of the regular BS.

jak

That certainly makes sense to me.

Huh, imagine that. Also, imagine for a second that you are a US marine, or equal counterpart in the Iraqi conflict. You have people, who seem to be civilians, shooting your friends. You have people, who appear to be civilians, driving truck bombs into the locale of you and your fellow soldiers. This, however, does not matter to Anti-US "humanists". I don't hear you and your ilk screaming with outrage when the redcross building is bombed.

And so, the Anti-US, oedipal fetish, rages on in the hypocritical members of ATS.

Of course our troops are frightened, paranoid, uneasy, quick on the draw. And of course they mistake those with good intent for the bad. They're jumpy and they kill indiscriminantly. Sometimes with calculation. So would you.. They are not murderers. They are made to murder. You would, too... They are protecting their own. It is all they know. That is their job.

This administration has created a whole new generation of psychiatrically shattered and mamed soldiers. the liars will answer for that, ultimately.

...The true purpose of this whole conflict may be to eliminate the resistance of the common people in the middle east and simultaneously dispose of a bunch of pesky American military personnel.
The goal may be to lose the war but win the oil assets in the Persian Gulf region.
An Oil War based on lies.

goregrinder: "Huh, imagine that. Also, imagine for a second that you are a US marine, or equal counterpart in the Iraqi conflict. You have people, who seem to be civilians, shooting your friends. You have people, who appear to be civilians, driving truck bombs into the locale of you and your fellow soldiers. This, however, does not matter to Anti-US "humanists". I don't hear you and your ilk screaming with outrage when the redcross building is bombed. "

Did you even read either article? Are you saying that Iraqis (or anyone else for that matter) deserve to be treated like dogs in their own homes? Are you saying that it's okay for US soldiers to indiscriminately kill Iraqi civilians because they're POTENTIALLY in danger?

Hey, let me open your eyes a bit.

This is THEIR country, the US is a FOREIGN INVADING FORCE. The U.S. has no right whatsoever to even BE THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE. The Iraqis have every right to resist occupation.

You'd resist if your own country was occupied, wouldn't you? Or would you roll over and welcome your "liberators" even as they paw at your wife and scream obscenities at you and your children, all in the name of THEIR security?

jakomo

Montreal is next..........


regards
seekerof

Seeker: Haha! You could invade Montreal with 800,000 troops and you'd lose them ALL within one week.

Half would end up AWOL in some of our 400 strip clubs, the rest would be so drunk off Canadian beer that they'd surrender.

And French-Canadians explode all on their own, no need for strap-on explosives

The US will never win Iraq because we refuse to understand the country and its history.

Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied

By Toby Dodge
Columbia University Press, 260 pp., 2003

Reviewed by Jan Barry

Long before the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance was set up in the Pentagon to establish democracy in Baghdad on just eight weeks notice before Bush’s “shock and awe” invasion was launched, the British empire had a plan to make Iraq the very model of a modern democratic state.

The failure of British colonial administrators to plant a viable parliament in the Cradle of Civilization in a tumultuous 12-year effort (1920-32) should be a sobering lesson to those running the American campaign, warns Toby Dodge, a British historian. In his timely book on the origins of Iraq, published amid daily news bulletins of violent attacks on “postwar” U.S. military patrols, Dodge shows how terribly relevant history can be.

Carved out of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I, Iraq was a British invention, a cobbling together of disparate desert tribes who were to be molded into a “modern” state. When the natives resisted, the reformers dispatched by Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill and other leading lights in London unleashed a deadly new device and bombed rural villages. “The British in Iraq in the 1920s, because of a lack of finance and soldiers, came to rely heavily on the coercive power of airplanes. Governance was delivered from two hundred feet, in the shape of regular bombing and machine-gun fire,” Dodge notes.

Now here’s the capsule lesson for Americans too busy reforming Iraq to read a history book: “The Iraqis of the 1920s were deeply suspicious of British motives. Through violence and political mobilization, they forced the colonial power to leave much sooner than they had anticipated,” Dodge writes. “Ultimately, however, it was the way the British understood Iraqi society that came to undermine their attempt to build a stable state. British colonial administrators…set about devolving power to indigenous Iraqis they believed had social influence. Resources were channeled through those individuals in the hope that they could guarantee social order at the lowest possible cost. The resulting state was built on extremely shallow social foundations. The governments that inherited the state after independence had, like the British before them, to resort to high levels of violence and patronage to keep the population from rising up and unseating them.”

The ink on Dodge’s book is barely dry and The New York Times Magazine cover story for Nov. 2, 2003, is titled “Who Botched the Occupation?” Journalist David Rieff writes: “What went wrong is that the voices of Iraq experts, of the State Department almost in its entirety and, indeed, of important segments of the uniformed military were ignored.” Judith Yaphe, a former CIA analyst on Iraqi history, is among those interviewed, whose expertise was brushed aside by Rumsfeld’s neo-colonial clique. “In some ways, we’re even more isolated than the British were when they took over Iraq,” Yaphe observes.

In Dodge’s view, the parallels between British and American occupations of Iraq are hauntingly similar in their hubris. “The British did not mean to undermine the nascent Iraqi state. But, hobbled by an ideologically distorted view of Iraqi society and facing financial and political limits, they did,” he writes. “The United States in Iraq today must understand that it is both living with the consequences of that failure and is in danger of repeating it.”

BUY THE BOOK


Jan Barry is a journalist and author who served in the U.S. Expeditionary Force in Southeast Asia.

Posted November 3, 2003

Ahh..but who said we were trying to "win" in Iraq? The objectives have been acheived:

1. The ousting of Saddam and Sons
2. Establishing a second staging ground for future military actions in the middle east
3. Control of the oil through a puppet government
4. Control of a middle eastern government's vote in both OPEC and the UN, etc. through said puppet government...

In the administration's view, we have won, and losing a guy or two now and then, is an acceptable administration fee....

Unfortunately, you are correct in that assessment.

I'm puzzled by the title to this thread. How is rounding up suspected terrorists going to make us lose?

I think a better statement for the thread starter to label this topic with would have gone something like this:

"Why the U.S. will never win the war of opinion in Iraq"

Technically, we've won, but the somewhat clean way we won the first Gulf war has upped people's expectations of "Victory" in war. Still, we *are* continually losing kids in both Iraq and Afghanistan (Another war we supposedly won) and the people whose opinions are the easiest to hear over the cackling on the cable news networks are declaring this another Vietnam. (Which, although the death tolls aren’t quite the same, they are both *very* ugly)

The problem is that Bush & co. advertised this war as a cakewalk and told everyone that we'd be in an out before you could say "Re-election campaign". The problem was, we didn't get the war we were promised. We got a dirty, ugly, bloody little spat in the middle of the desert.

My Cousin was over there for 7 months. He just now got home a few weeks ago. He was a Marine Medic and told me stories that are too gross to repeat on this forum.

We will never win the war of opinion in Iraq because the Iraqi people are caught between loving us for getting rid of Saddam, and hating us for not butting out of their business once we were through.

We should just listen to those Iraqi protesters and let them elect that Muslim Cleric they want. Unfortunately, Bush has already stated he will not let any religious leaders rule their nation.

Sense the irony here?

Well it is all about how the rest of the world perceives who are the good guys, and who are the bad guys.

The US is rapidly running out of friends and allies around the world. The only countries that backed the US in this were Australia and Spain, and we could not get our troops out of there fast enough.

The US might eventually stand alone against the rest of the worlds six billion people.

Technically, we've won? Technically doesn't mean SHYTE. You tell them boyz and girlz over there gettin' shot at and mortered day in and day out that the war is TECHNICALLY OVER and they'd probably kick your littl azz for bein' ate tha frock up.

If the pipelines and oilfields were to be secured there would be no reason for the conflict to go on.
In my opinion, the only way to scare the resisting forces in Iraq into ceasing these attacks would probably be nuclear weapons.
These possibilities have been discussed on mainstream media in the US over the past few months.
It won't end until it gets a lot worse,I just pray it doesn't get that bad.
All of the countries who want the oil and have nukes would probably respond harshly to the US using nuclear weapons,this is probably why it has not happened yet.
Bad.

Don't think so...

Nukes in Iraq? That ain't gonna happen.