'Americans don't know how to be peacekeepers'

[dArKeR]

By Peter Graff

London - Fear that ruthless United States tactics could lead to disaster in Iraq has caused Washington's most loyal ally Britain to waver in its support as never before.

In public, Prime Minister Tony Blair remains as staunch a supporter as ever, defending the performance of US troops on the ground at the flashpoints of Fallujah and Najaf.

But the country's military and diplomatic establishment, which overcame reservations last year to back the decision to go to war, has begun openly distancing itself from harsh US military tactics it increasingly fears could backfire.

http://iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=3&art_id=qw1083243241981B262&set_id=1

[opihimoimoi]

1. Bush did admit/boast he is a WAR PRESIDENT

One trick Pony we got here, eh whot? Wicked bad from this perch I dare say.

[izzie]

2. Well it sounds OK to me but will the DOD read it?

Did anyone in their right mind think the world would really line up behind Bush and match to this endless war thing? Even the Brits are waking up as a lot of the people in that country have always been turned into. Lets see now if they send in more people? In a place like Najaf? Come on would you? Let the US get killed in that place and look like a crazy army. We are starting to look like the a country alone.Bush and Co have make us a great country for sure.

[Lisa]

3. "this is not the face of a peacekeeper"

I'm reminded of that quote from one of the US troops, about a year ago. He had painted his face to resemble a skull, as he prepared for the attack on Baghdad.

It wasn't so much the fact that he didn't know how to be a peacekeeper, that troubled me -- it was his attitude that he didn't want any part of such activities. And my friends in the Canadian Forces have commented that they have encountered US soldiers during joint training exercises who disparage them as being somehow "second-rate" because they would rather do peacekeeping than "real" fighting, and that it's no fit job for a soldier.

I know that there are plenty of US servicepeople who don't feel this way, but if a lot of the soldiers have the same views, no wonder morale is so low.

[PATRICK]

4. this was the simplest thing

to predict. That the US image and tactics could not use the necessary force or the effective brutality to quell real resistance. To stop real resistance would have necessitated much smarter moves and LOWER US visibility than occurred too. If the US decides to get ugly it loses its necessary image. If it doesn't it loses as a weakling. Thanks to Bush, we see both, the worst of both worlds. The Iraqis themselves are also split and misguided in some of their tactics, but just as with Saddam, you can depend on the Americans to do something dumb from the top on down.

Why? Because of the falseness necessary to this regime such two-faced madness is the only sustaining thing to replace real thought, real solutions, real liberation, real American ideals. It is like a tweaked quantum alternate universe of gamed instabilities/impossibilities maintained by will and force and immature imagination. It has to keep going forward forever or it collapses as if it had never been. If you are lucky.

Tinkerbell with nukes.