Stripes letter: "Lack of cultural training" (DSM mentioned!)

[lebkuchen]

**I had to type the letter from my hardcopy of Stars and Stripes because the URL Stripes provides for the date of June 18, the day the letter below was published, is a mish-mash of combined letters, not including this one, that I can tell.

http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=125&article=29827

June 18, 2005
Lack of cultural training

"Result of Quran flushings" (letter, June 4) and "Bell didn’t visit motor pool," (letter, June 3) inadvertently underscore one reason why Germany and France had refused to join President Bush’s "coalition of the willing": the lack of cultural training of US military/civilian personnel.

These writers apparently haven’t read President Bush’s latest epiphany—that reports of abuse of the Quran are responsible for the violence resulting from thousands of Muslim demonstrators in Afghanistan and beyond. Imagine how eager Newsweek, and its overseer, the Pentagon, will be to interview these writers about their own experiences with the Quran.

Germany and France refused to send troops to Iraq because of a lack of evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The "Downing Street memo," published in the London Sunday Times, is ample justification for our allies’ apprehension. The memorandum, of a July 2002 British government meeting between Tony Blair and his national security team, reported MI6 British intelligence concerns over Bush’s determination to oust Saddam Hussein despite "wobbly evidence" that Iraq posed a threat to the United States. It detailed how Bush would have to manipulate the intelligence, and create conditions, such as goading Saddam with bombing raids in the no-fly zone, to justify war with Iraq. "he intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," which led to our $400 billion a year "quagmire by design," a minimum 10% U.S. military casualty rate, a 12 percent drop in Army re-enlistments in the last fiscal year, and dismal Army/Marine recruitment numbers, whose media release the Pentagon now controls.

In “Chaplain offers his blessings” (letter, June 8) the writer explained that the fall of the Roman Empire was the result of Romans becoming "fat and lazy." Today, Baghdad ranks as the world’s worst place to live, and yet I’ve noticed very few fat, lazy Iraqis. Prior to the U.S. invasion, Baghdad was one of the world’s most beautiful cities, where Iraqis of all faiths, including Christian, worshipped freely. Not anymore.

As to the chaplain’s warning about America being "like Rome of old," fat, lazy, and soldier-hating—isn’t it amazing where anti-Americanism breeds these days?