Next job: keeping rebels out

[leftchick]

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1121/p06s01-woiq.html

<snip>

The marines have been told by their commanders that a positive climate here is essential to keep insurgents away.

One marine approaches a man standing alone and offers a handshake, but the man pulls his hand away, offering instead a stern nod of acknowledgement. At the next house a group of men and boys wave. "Good, good!" they shout.

"The situation is very miserable. All the people in this city spent outside the city," says Abu Abdullah, a political science professor, in rusty English. He refuses to give his full name. "All this destruction and death came under the slogan of democracy. Is this democracy? Is this a civilization? Is this freedom?"

But on the same street where Abdullah stands, three men are trying to get the marines' attention to show them where two IEDs were hidden in the garden of a home.

"I'd hate to shoot one of these kids in the head.... You do what you can because the enemy blends in. 'no better friend and no better enemy,' because you never really know who" you are dealing with, Farmer says.

[Judi Lynn]

1. Thanks for the article.The citizens must be so deeply exhausted by now.

It's time this farce ended.

[Thom Little]

2. What about all the ones that are already in?

[TomClash]

3. Change the names

and this could have been written about Hue or Saigon in 1969.

[necso]

4. "...because you never really know who you are dealing with..."

Which is a real fundament of why we have no chance of ever "finishing off" the "bad guys" -- and only the "bad guys".

When the organs of the old Iraqi state were dismantled, abandoned, ruined or looted, we lost intelligence, intelligence gathering capabilities and something as simple as people who knew who was who -- and we lost, if I recall correctly, the intelligence files of the former regime -- taken, if I recall correctly, by everyone's favorite triple-crosser.

It's hopeless.

And it's a disaster we'll be paying-for for years.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

5. We are paying a great deal of money each year for so say

competent leadership.... is this the generic brand somehow swapped for the real thing?

[necso]

6. No,

but it is their idea of competent leadership.

Or, perhaps more properly, they don't believe in government solutions (that is, competence in doing (or even doing at all) many things that others accept as the routine business of government), and their idea of leadership is achieving political success through cynical manipulation and other ruthless tactics (and strategies) of "total war" politics -- making such policies (and the systems, processes, etc, that these entail) the centerpiece of a political movement and a de facto ideology, as opposed to, say, effectiveness in solving real world problems within the bounds of available resources.

[damntexdem]

7. I'm confused. Keeping rebels out of Iraq, or ...

out of the White House?

[bemildred]

8. Couple years too late. nt