Routine Weekend

Hey folks,

Just getting back to the blog after two days of no network access. The truck that comes to clean out the porta johns backed into the overhead fiber optic cable and ripped it down Saturday morning. We didn't come back up until about 1500 Sunday.

There's just something poetic about being in this place and having our link to the outside world brought down like that.

I spent some of the offline time on Sunday reading a fascinating trip report written by a defense analyst in Washington named Anthony Cordesman. He is a guy who is on CNN sometimes explaining military tactics and terminology and what not, and commenting on military operations. Definitely a smart guy. He spent 8 days over here at the end of last month, and his trip report is available here for downloading:

http://www.csis.org/component/option,com_csis_pubs/task,view/id,3994/type,1/

I have to admit that when I was reading it I had to get up a few times and take a break. It is a little dry, and after 18 years in the military I am used to dry reading. However, I was able to read it in about an hour or two, probably less. The most striking part of the report to me is how he completely rips the administration's conduct of the whole war. He doesn't pull punches. He makes the statement that, "[T]he US is rightly seen as having gone to war for the wrong reasons, as having consistently mismanaged the 'peace' that followed and been largely responsible for the suffering of some 27 million Iraqis" by the world community. Amen, brother Tony. I recommend that anyone who sees this blog go and download the trip report.

A few of the other gems he drops in there:

-- it is "absurd" to think that the US does not have a direct moral and ethical responsibility for the immense suffering that is touching every ordinary Iraqi;

-- he calls the new US Embassy in Baghdad "an extraordinary monument to human folly even by the demanding standards of the Middle East;"

-- there have been plans or ideas put forth that the US forces can basically transition over to fighting Al-Qaida in Iraq and sealing or protecting the borders so the Iraqi Police, Iraqi Security Forces, and the Iraqi Army can deal with the insurgent and sectarian fight; Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) has made statements to that effect. Cordesman, concludes that, "[T]he idea that the US can somehow simply stand aside and deal with Al Qaida or the Sadr militia by relying largely on air power and Special Forces is equally absurd. The US could not target, it could not cover the country, it could not secure its bases, and it would lack the force numbers to act decisively without relying on Iraqi forces. Such concepts are little more than childish in practical military terms." Yes, that one was always a head-scratcher for me;

-- Iraq's international debt is crippling its ability to rebuild, ignoring for a moment all other challenges to infrastructure reconstruction;

-- "The current F-Troop in Washington--and the F-Troop that existed in Iraq during the key initial years of the occupation--has been replaced by the A-Team." For those of you as old as I am, you may remember a TV show called "F-Troop" about a bungling Cavalry unit in a frontier outpost in the Old West. They were morons; confused obtuse morons. They understood nothing about the culture, language, and mores of the native tribes of the area. Sounds VERY familiar;

-- and finally, as a result of the A-Team being on the ground, "professionalism has replaced the vacuous ideological reliance on hope that crippled much of the initial US effort." OUCH! So the CPA was a bunch of boobs and right-wing ideologues with an agenda. Who knew?

Time to get back to work here. Read the whole paper. It's very interesting, and it crisply written and clearly lists some of the challenges here. Yes, it is titled "The Tenuous Case for Strategic Patience in Iraq," but he makes a very compelling case not for "staying the course" but for changing course and taking responsibility for the catastrophe that has occurred here. Bye for now...