President Bush (5-23-06):
It is a difficult task to stop suicide bombers. That’s the — but that’s one of the main — that’s the main weapon of the enemy, the capacity to destroy innocent life with a suicider.
I can believe that Bush would tell lies concerning Iraq, and unfortunately I also believe that plenty will take him at his word. What neither he, nor his crew of lackies, understand at this point is the American public is on to him. So when he says that suicide bombers are the “main weapon of the enemy”, more than half of the people who read or hear it know that he’s lying through his teeth.
Now imagine being a soldier who was crippled by an IED hearing this. Many already feeling like they gave up their life for a lie, now they hear the President of the United States talking ragtime about what’s actually killing our guys over there.
Mortar rounds and IEDs – the insurgency’s version of what we’d call…well, mortar rounds and remote claymore mines. The difference between us and them though is that we’re driving around like ducks on the pond every day, whereas the insurgency is keeping themselves hidden. For every one of ours they wound or kill, how many of them do we get? Whoever pretends to know the answer to this question is full of shit!
One thing you don’t hear much about is the difficulty of fighting a guerilla war. Just the fact that the US army is wearing uniforms and stand out, where the insurgents can blend in with ordinary people makes the war very difficult to fight.
Yea, that’s a basic fact most everyone tends to ignore. This is where money, intelligence assets and local law enforcement could help. Simply patroling the same roads several times a day doesn’t solve anything.
Let’s get real here…Iraq outsmarted us. They said, “alright USA…you’ve got billions of dollars worth of weapons, equipment and training, but we’ll just learn how to set off bombs using a radio frequency until you leave.”
Bush always says that his number one obligation to us is to keep us safe, protect the homeland…I think he’s full of it, because when it comes to Iraq, Katrina or anything else concerning national security, he’s 100% politics, 24/7.
That’s what he’s doing when he states that suicide bombers are the main weapon of the enemy…he’s playing politics. Only this isn’t a social program, this isn’t a tax cut or prescription drugs…this is LIFE and DEATH.
Clearly the man doesn’t understand the difference, because three years in, he’s just as apt to lie about the war as he is the economy.
It’s all politics to him. No matter what goes wrong, he’s going to try to talk his way out of it…which is ironic considering how bad he is at talking about anything, especially when he has to talk ‘off the cuff’, or be spontaneous in any way. That’s when his dishonest nature goes into hyperdrive.
Next he’ll be telling us that in order to win in Iraq we’ll need to start bombing entire neighborhoods where we think terrorists are hiding…like the Saudi’s do to their own people. Like we’ve been doing in Pakistan and Afghanistan lately. Throw out the baby, bathwater and anything else that’s lying around.
You wait – these defense firms have had 3 years to stock the military up with bombs and missiles. If they don’t use them up, they won’t have an excuse to buy more…just like the Doozers in Fraggle Rock, those sticks they used to build with…when the Fraggles stoped eating them, the Doozers had to leave. Same goes for every piece of equipment used in the military today.
At this point I honestly think it’s more about that, keeping the machine running so in the end (whenever that is) we’ve got to spend the money to replace it all. That’s Cheney’s game, I’m certain of it. Dubya might actually be foolish enough to be used as a pawn in all of this, but what else is an Anthony Soprano clone to do once people start kissing his ass…because of who his DADDY is!
Recentely Blackhawk down was on TV, and one thing the movie shows is that low tech weapons kill just as well as high tech ones.
That’s one I haven’t seen…probably haven’t shared this w/ everyone here, but a really good friend of mine was involved in that. The whole time I knew him, in his head it was touch and go…
Enough of that – what I want to say is, he was an MP during Somalia and during a foot patrol his squad got broken up (this story is one I heard from him over way too much whiskey, way too many nights, but I like to think that it made a difference for him, being able to get it out and know that I cared, I was listening), he finds himself alone for a minute or two, native folks eyeballing him in a different way than when his unit was together, suddenly about 5 start towards him…at that moment he could have fliped to three round burst and taken them down, they knew it and didn’t care, he knew it and did care, just long enough for his arms to get pined, weapon taken, kevlar riped off his head, then a blunt object BOOM right to the side of the head.
He was MIA, but soon found in that exact spot, naked.
They took every last piece of gear he had, including his underwear and dogtags, but DIDN’T kill him.
Now, what I eluded to above about his head, you can imagine…because that’s a mindfuck for a trained killer, not only what happened to him, but the fact that he didn’t open fire, and having not done that, he may or may not have ensured his own safety…who knows.
What he kept going on about was how it all happened in a community, shantytown, but a community nonetheless…so with the hell those people were going through already, with how it must have felt to have armed soldiers all over the place (imagine looking out your window and seeing foreign soldiers patroling up and down your block), killing this man was against their code…or at least, against their code as long as everyone in the neighborhood could see what was happening.
This guy was and probably still is a right-wing ‘bomb-em to hell’ type, but while I knew him there was something else there, perhaps a feeling of gratitude, perhaps a feeling of having been lied to all this time about these people in far off lands and how they live and our moral superiority, yada yada
I could go on for a while, but I’ve got to get back to cleaning the pool. I need to look this guy up before it’s too late. He was discharged for physical/mental issues at least a year before I got out. Hadn’t thought about him in a long time, but I’ve definitely been thinking about aspects of his experience for years, trying to incorporate it into my writing somehow, the idea that we’re all the same in more ways than we’re different…
Anyway, I haven’t seen that movie, had the chance a number of times, but turned it down…probably subconsciously since I already had a Somalia story I was partial to.
You’re right though karl – – – our technology is cutting edge, the terrorists’ is barely a step above Ham-radio…and because of our tactics, they enjoy success picking our soldiers off in clusters.
There’s a general vulnerability we all face as soldiers, whether we see action or not, just knowing deep down that it could come down to something gruesome at any time…but that feeling is exponentially greater for every single one of those soldiers patroling up and down Route Irish day after day. I feel like the luckiest man who ever lived for not having to EVER feel like that.
President Bush mistaking or purposely misleading whoever was listening into believing that suicide bombers were killing more of our people than anything else…it’s essentially him taking a dump on every single soldier going through that today. That the man on top of their chain of command is unwilling to represent their reality truthfully, it’s an insult. To lie for the sake of his own poll numbers, whether or not it honors the force or not.
This got me back in my Bush-hating groove after a significant hiatus. I can’t help it, the guy’s a loser.
You guys are soo far off the mark on this one that I don’t know how to bring you back to reality so I’ll comment on this one item.
For every one of ours they wound or kill, how many of them do we get?
When my brother was over there he told me once that the numbers come out to about 82-83 KIA for every one of our guys killed or injured for nay reason, including accidents.
That is how we’ve ground the insurgency down to almost nothing and in a year they will be 99% eliminated, except for Karl’s town where the Insurgents have already won the war on Terror and now rule through marshall law.
No surprise there. The problem is that those 82-83 may not be combatants.
My brother-in-law was in Northern Iraq two weeks after the start. He said that as they drove from Kuwait to their final destination they saw dead “stuff” everywhere. He told me that the first soldiers in were given shoot to kill orders on ANYTHING THAT MOVED. He told me that at first his unit was pissed that they missed the first 2 weeks of action, but that after they drove through the carnage they were all very glad that they missed it.
Removing 99% of the insurgency means nothing when it is Shiite militia vs. Sunni militia. And as for your “in a year” prediction, yeah I think I remember hearing that somewhere before. All flowers and candy eh?
Right:
If it is an 86 to one ratio, then roughly 2500 us soldgers have been killed which would mean that roughly 215,000 insuurgence have been killed. According to the pentagon the insurgency numbers about 20,000 people. Either the collateral damage has been extreme or the pentagon number is off, or we are starting to see exagerated body counts. It also shows an interesting problem that with guerilla warfare it is almost impossible to figure out who is winning or even who is rally an insurgent and who is a civilion.
Some of those 215,000 “insurgence”?
From lalkleft.com:
A group of marines “carried out extensive, unprovoked killings of civilians” in Iraq, according to congressional and Pentagon officials who have been briefed on the results of an inquiry into the deaths of two dozen Iraqis last November.
Evidence indicates that the civilians were killed during a sustained sweep by a small group of marines that lasted three to five hours and included shootings of five men standing near a taxi at a checkpoint, and killings inside at least two homes that included women and children, officials said.
The military first claimed the civilians were killed by a makeshift bomb, then announced that they were caught in a cross-fire between marines and insurgents.
A separate inquiry has begun to find whether the events were deliberately covered up.
Right – the argument you posed seems to me like the kind of thing Rush Limbaugh will routinely say about Vietnam…that if we hadn’t left, the war would have been won in a matter of weeks.
It’s like telling a born again Christian that Jesus would have bitch-slaped every homosexual he came across if they had them back then. The born-again WANTS TO BELIEVE IT, and therefore it becomes a fact in their mind.
I urge you to watch Baghdad ER – I’ll send out a copy through the mail if needbe (do you have HBO?)…because punditry and reality tend to exist in seperate universes when it comes to a war being fought in a far off land. Patriotism clouds our judgement if we allow it to.
As for the numbers – what you shared is far from anything official. I’m going ape-shit w/ school assignments, but the reference for what I said about Guantanamo detainees having been handed over by warlords for cash is out there, and one of these days I’ll find it. That said, as of right now, I can say with 100% confidence that the ratio you posted is bunk.
Isn’t that the the whole GOP message, keep telling people what they want to hear, and they will support you. In the end the entire Bush presidency comes down to the fact that he never made a tough decision. He declared war, but didn’t ask for any sacrifice. He lowered taxes but did not reduce spending. In the end Bush in many ways is like an over-indulgent parent who is now dealing with ta spoiled child. At least if you read any of the conservative blogs, the way they are talking about Bush sounds like a a sulky teenager bitching that their parents wont give them a thousand dollars for prom.
Good luck with school, I just finished and I still feel like I should be studying something.