Anybody watch PBS Frontline's "Beyond Baghdad"???

[SmileyBoy]

Pretty intriguing stuff. I almost cried when I saw those armed soldiers passing by the mother and her child on the street, and quickly getting out of the way.

[BeatleBoot]

1. No, but I love that show!

Its awesome. I'll have to catch a repeat.

[Bonobo]

2. I watched. It underscored the utter futility of this 'mission'.

Bust down a door and make a lifelong enemy. And that's for a busted door!
How about a dead son or daughter. Or a ruined house x 1 million.
Or a daughter or wife frisked by a soldier!?

No fuckin' way are we EVER gonna have ANY success there! No way on the gods' green earth.

[JohnyCanuck]

3. An account from a member of aChristian Peacemaker Team

after returning from a recent visit to Baghdad.

The most vociferous complaints, however, concerned nighttime raids and detentions. Military people had previously acknowledged to us a policy of "45 seconds of rage and fury"on entering a house. They consider this necessary to obtain immediate submission and keep their troops safe. Soldiers break down doors, yell commands to lie on the floor, run through the house, and generally try to frighten the occupants into submissive behavior.

"Why do the soldiers break down our doors and smash our cupboards. We would give them the key if they just asked?" was a typical question from the outraged lawyers.

"When Saddam raided," said one, "he took only the person he was after. Now the whole family is taken, even when the soldiers know they have the wrong house."

<snip>

There is an absolute difference between military occupation and peacekeeping. There is simply too much violence in an occupation for genuine peacekeeping to occur. As long as the U.S. military occupies Iraq as the harsh representative of a foreign power, the resistance will increase.

http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?pid=1218

[DrBB]

4. The Tom Fiedman moment

Most touching moment for me was the guy wanting to build his internet cafe.

Because it was juxtaposed with just SO much stuff, so MUCH stuff that made it absolutely plain what anybody with any brains knew from the git go.

That this is a VASTLY complicated part of the world. That you DON'T just go waltzing in there and wave your wand and suddenly democracy blooms, Tom Friedman notwithstanding.

I saw the soldiers putting bags over the heads of Ba'athist insurgents, and I thought, my god, you poor dimwits, do you think anything you can do to these guys comes anywhere near even a remote approximation of the kinds of terror that were the norm under Saddam. I saw the buldozer shoving over the house of the parents of the guy they arrested, and I thought, Why is this OUR job? Why is it our job to be bulldozing peasant hovels in the Mesopotamian desert? What in the bloody FUCK makes it OUR job to be in someone else's country running a bulldozer through the house of a weeping elderly man who can't even stand up without crutches? Because his kid tried to blow up our guys? Okay, so what were our guys DOING THERE? WMD? Nope. 9/11? Nope, no connection. Al Qaeda? Ditto--none of them there before we came in. They want to kick us out, forcefully? I got news for ya: it's THEIR country, not ours. It's called NATIONALISM.

I kept seeing all these American commanders rationally explaining how, well, there's this faction and that faction and these clans and those clans and how difficult it is to untangle all this stuff.

Well, guess what, dudes. Same thing I and millions of others were saying before the war: You go in there, you make it YOUR problem. All these deep-seated hatreds and convoluted interwoven interest struggles and jealousies and vendettas. You go in there without sufficient reason, without adequate international backing and legitimacy, without a plan to back the US military out of there and let neutral civilian groups start arbitrating and setting things up so the Iraqis can figure all this shit out themselves--all you've done is make all that shit YOUR problem.

All those young hotheaded Shi'ites. Making it America's problem, blaming it on us. Anything that goes wrong: our fault. Why? Because we ASKED for it, that's why. We fucking BEGGED for it. We fucking blew up half their country to take it on, without having a CLUE what we were getting into.

The ONLY thing that can justify taking on such a massive clusterfuck of a situation is overwhelming national danger, or overwhelming international resolve to clean up a bad state for humanitarian reasons. Then you are in a position to say, well, it sucks but we had no choice, or you are in a position to say, well, it sucks but we're all taking it on together for the greater human good.

Neither of those, of course, obtains. All we've done is make it our problem--everything that goes wrong, from now on. And the insurgents can ensure, with very little effort, that shit goes wrong. And all those naive, fresh faced, highly disciplined, white-bread young American faces, filled with good will and pathetically naive "USA! USA!" rah rah ideals--soon to be rotated outta here--up against the massive wall of inconceivable suffering and history and tangled alliances and hatreds that are Mesopotamian civilization in the 21st century.

That poor guy with his internet cafe. I hope you get it someday, bub, I sincerely do.

[Bozita]

5. loud, enthusiastic applause from this DUer

Thanks for sharing those thoughts.

[Zero Gravitas]

15. Great Post!

:yourock:

[Indiana_Dem]

6. I just saw Frontline......

I feel so sick right now. This just makes me feel so disgusted with our country. Iraq is going to be in a civil war bigtime before this is all over. Why can't we ever do the right thing for the right reasons? We are going to get paidback one of these days....my stomach is in knots and I'm sick and depressed after watching this.

[BillZBubb]

7. Extra, extra, read all about it...

Iraqi civil war is inevitable. It's not a matter of if, just when. And Shrub is the reason we'll be in the middle of it.

Talk about dumbasses.

[5X]

8. It is not only civil war that is inevitable

but a whole new crop of terrorist recruits that hate the usa.
That is why al queda is now said to be moving in, they know
they will find lots of eager new soldiers.
It is this kind of thing that has gotten us into a position of being
a target in the first place.

and the war was all about corporate profits from the beginning, money in amounts we can't even imagine, money that makes 60 million in
over charges look like a drop in the bucket.

[Mattforclark]

10. Not inevitable

Inevitability is a cop out.

There is a very significant chance, however... :(

[truthspeaker]

11. we got paid back on 9/11/01

Some of us didn't get the message.

[Gin]

18. that show should be mainstream TV..it was very good...and sickening..

and depressing..what have we done to our soldiers and the Iraqis?

[Columbia]

9. May Peace and Prosperity spread throughout Iraq

Inshallah

[Eurobabe]

12. I watched it

with a sense of futility and anger against the bonehead Bu$h administration that went in there WITHOUT a plan, trashed what was already pretty much a wasteland, and now leave it to dangle on a string with no knot on the end...civil war? probable. (And this show was shot back in November, the frustration level has ratcheted up since then.)

Oh, yeah, they will welcome us with open arms, what a friggin' joke. Just another mess Bu$hCo has gotten us into.

[Ernesto]

13. Thanks for the post northwest

This AM, that show is theee only thing I'm talking about.... Last fall the chimp said that the media needed to get out and show all the "good stuff" that is happening in Iraq. Well it looks like PBS did just that. The only problem is that Frontline found very little "good stuff". What a crappy place to live even if the people were allowed to enjoy peace..... Talk about the curse of crude oil!

[callous taoboy]

14. I was struck

by how the mess in Iraq is so similar to other messes the bush team has gotten us into, all due to its weird ideological bent that completely disregards reality. The one female commander of an engineering squad (I beleive) summed up the bush approach in terms of her experience in Iraq by saying that you can't expect engineering progress without security. Same goes for our economy: You can't grow a healthy economy with a Wal-Mart pay scale. Education: You can't expect progress unless you attract qualified teachers and provide the money for programs. Environment: Can't have a healthy environment if you owe the polluters big-time. The Presidency: Can't be president if you're as dumb as a sack of hammers.

And I, too, was pissed off all over again that our macho cowboy, who never should have been placed in a position of power, has gone in and completely opened up situation that looks to only go down hill from here.

[eissa]

16. But we're spreading freedom

Why can't we realize that we can't spread freedom through force? Change -- wheather it's to quit smoking, get married, elect a new president, or change the system of an entire country -- MUST always come from within. Outside interference in any such decisions (personal or political) are bound to fail.

The shot of us using gestapo tactics of bulldozing the home of an elderly couple to get them to turn in their son broke my heart. Gee, I wonder why they hate us?

[Gin]

17. The bulldozing is what is happening in Palestine...that was unbelievavble

then...the guys who have built some rapport with the Iraqi's are tranferring out this month...a whole new crew will to have to learn the cities and the culture...I do not see a rainbow anywhere...the cities looked like slums....Sistani will not meet with Americans...he didn't mee Rummye, Bremer, or Wolfowitz...THAT says volumes...

It seems like a volcano ready to erupt.

I wonder if the funds for reconstruction came through for those poor soldiers trying to make a difference...we are spending 3 billion a month...where in the hell is it all going?