I just saw the return of Pvt. Lynch on MSNBC, and she looked heavily sedated.
I still have a lot of things I want cleared up about this story- including an apology from the UK newspapers regarding her rescue.
This post is in: War
I just saw the return of Pvt. Lynch on MSNBC, and she looked heavily sedated.
I still have a lot of things I want cleared up about this story- including an apology from the UK newspapers regarding her rescue.
by John Cole| 3 Comments
This post is in: War
More good news in Iraq, as the de-Ba’athification continues in earnest:
American forces have captured Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti, Saddam Hussein’s presidential secretary and No. 4 on the U.S. most-wanted list of Iraqi leaders, the U.S. military said Wednesday.
U.S. forces captured Mahmud on Monday in Iraq, a statement from U.S. Central Command said. It did not say where in Iraq he was captured.
Third in power only to the former Iraqi president and his younger son, Qusai, Mahmud controlled access to Saddam and was one of the few people he is said to have trusted completely, a U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
For those keeping track, he was the Ace of Diamonds.
by John Cole| 2 Comments
This post is in: War
This was the worst part of Iraq/Kuwait when I was there:
In the back of a Bradley fighting vehicle, the still air soars to 130 degrees and sweat stains the soldiers’ desert camouflage uniforms as they patrol central Iraq, hunting for insurgents.
When the ramp door drops, the soldiers scramble into the blinding sun and a hot wind fails to cool them through body armor and helmets. The only thing cold is the reaction of Iraqis whose cars they search.
The unrelenting heat, the ambiguity of their mission, the longing for home and the indefinite duration of their deployment has crushed morale, the soldiers say.
I was a tanker on an M1A1, so to add insult to injury, I got to wear this gem, the scratchy CVC suit. It was so damned hot that while we were there, we initially had a buddy system for when soldiers wanted to urinate. Your buddy had to watch, and if your urine was yellow, you were put aside to drink more water, because you could overheat that quickly. Maintenance was miserable, too, because your tools would get so damn hot you would burn your hand if you did not wear gloves. It was also so dry that perspiration dries immediately, and at the end of the day you would have salt caked all over your body. Since showers were sparse or non-existent, this would build up in your armpits and other areas, and you would get rashes if you didn’t wash carefully. The best description I have for what it is like:
Close all your windows. Turn the heat on in your house. Turn your oven up to 500, sit right in front of it, and then occasionally have a friend throw sand in your face. Enjoy.
by John Cole| 9 Comments
This post is in: War
Bill Keller, in a few paragraphs, ends the ‘Bush lied” debate once and for all (if it were only that simple- there will be months of partisan bickering ahead of us):
The threat was a dictator with a proven, insatiable desire for dreadful weapons that would eventually have made him, or perhaps one of his sadistic sons, a god in the region. The fact that he gave aid and at least occasional sanctuary to practitioners of terror added to his menace. And at the end his brazen defiance made us seem weak and vulnerable, an impression we can ill afford. The opportunity was a moment of awareness and political will created by Sept. 11, combined with the legal sanction reaffirmed by U.N. Resolution 1441. The important thing to me was never that Saddam Hussein’s threat was “imminent”
This post is in: War
The good first:
Still, Iraq is in most respects further along the road to recovery than we could have expected before the war. All major public hospitals in Baghdad are again operating. Sixty percent of Iraq’s schools are open. Nationwide distribution of food supplies has resumed. Despite some damage to the oil wells, petroleum production exceeds domestic needs, and exports should begin again soon. More Iraqis are receiving electric power than before the war. This progress is the result of efforts by capable Iraqi civil servants working with experts from the coalition governments and international humanitarian groups.
The bad next:
After World War II, the United States rebuilt Germany and Japan with great success. Against this admittedly very high standard, the country’s performance in the 1990’s began abysmally, and improved only slowly. While it is too early to pass final judgment on the Afghanistan and Iraq missions, it would be hard to present them as improvements over their most recent predecessors, Bosnia and Kosovo.
In other words, things are gong better in Iraq than some would like you to think, but we have a really lousy record at nation building in recent years.
by John Cole| 4 Comments
This post is in: War
The Washington Post has a collection of pictures of all the photos of our soldiers lost in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Very depressing.
This post is in: War
Via Tacitus, we see there is some good news coming out of Iraq:
In a city so sacred that its soil is used to make the stones on which Shiites bow their heads in prayer, the American occupation of Karbala — 1,110 U.S. troops in a city of 500,000 — has emerged as a rare example of a postwar experience gone right.
In gestures large and small — from reopening an amusement park with free admission to restoring electricity to twice its prewar level, from stopping looting with a rapidly reconstituted police force, to a conscious effort to respect religious sensitivities — Karbala seems to have avoided the bitterness and disenchantment that has enveloped Baghdad and other cities.
Go read the whole thing. Iraq will not be rebuilt overnight, and we are still losing soldiers, but we are making progress.