| Opinions On The Situation in Iraq
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Tuesday, eighty-seven bodies were found in Iraq. Twenty-nine of those bodies were found in a mass grave in an eastern Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad. Also Tuesday, a suicide bomber on a bicycle killed one and injured six in downtown Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. This past weekend fifty-nine people were killed in a Shiite slum-Sadar City.
Two soldiers, from the Pennsylvania Army National Guard, were killed Monday. This brings the number of U.S. military members killed to at least 2,310 since the Iraq war began March 19, 2003.
(source: Hurst, Associated Press Writers)
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THE PERILS OF DENIAL
(AFP/DOD-HO/File)
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For many of us who have worked over the years with addicts, the first thing we grasp is the power of denial. An addict can deny "what is" and continue to do drugs-not a lot different than how we think about fighting the war in Iraq.
The Pentagon, the President, and many more of us need to consider much of what we are doing in Iraq now is not working and we need to change strategies. We need to think about our soldiers.
March 19 is the third anniversary of the war in Iraq. Yet, the question looms: In which direction is it headed? The President said Monday that Iraq's security forces are becoming strong enough to handle conflict on their own and that he's confident a civil war will be prevented. Let's hope so.
WHAT IS HE SMOKING?(FROM E-MAIL)
I'm in full agreement with your writer, Kelly Thomas. I don't think we can leave, but we have to get the mix of soldiers changed. Get conventional soldiers out of there. The President simply goes along. We don't have any fresh ideas about Iraq because the President blindly sticks with a guy like Rumsfeld who has exhausted any originality that he ever had.
He is not a bad person and has served his country. But, I think that the way Rumsfeld has involved the military, especially Generals, by parading them before the public, is absolutely deplorable.
A DIFFERENT APPROACH
We have to have a substantial number of Special Operation troops who act like insurgents, a "nobody army", who are virtually unrecognizable from the locals and support the Iraqi police and army. Even this may not work because we have such tribal allegiances and militia controlling certain areas.
The next best thing is to have a true mercenary force, one that is older, perhaps
ex-military, who are in the so-called security forces now. We could pay these mercenaries to fight and support the Iraqis and maybe prevent civil war. It would be cheaper.
LIMIT THE PRESS
(AP Graphic)
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I definitely believe that the press needs to be limited. For them to constantly report about military operations creates problems.
In a recent Sixty Minutes segment a very fine American Colonel embarrassed himself, in my opinion, by saying we have things under control in Ta Afar, Iraq, once an Al Qaeda stronghold. The situation is better in Ta Afar, but there still are problems and the full insurgency could come back just as it did in August 2005 after we had already rooted it out in 2004.(read the 60 minutes article Ta Afar: Al Qaeda's Town)
There's no need to bemoan the fact that we are in Iraq, but we are engaged with religious zealots that are violent and the concept of reasoning and democracy, as we know it, is simply not workable. We are in denial and it keeps us from doing any of the things like I've mentioned above.
Do I know better than the experts? In this case, I do, or those like me do, because we are willing to try something different. Now we are screwing up because we keep doing the same things that we have always done and they're not working and we expect a different result. It is insanity. JHL
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