Twenty-one reasons Iraq is not working

[tocqueville]

By Tom Engelhardt

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So what exactly does "victory" in Bush's Iraq look like 1,288 days after the invasion of that country began with a "shock and awe" attack on downtown Baghdad? A surprising amount of information related to this has appeared in the press in recent weeks, but in purely scattershot form. Here, it's all brought together in 21 questions (and answers) that add up to a grim but realistic snapshot of Bush's Iraq. The attempt to reclaim the capital, dipped in a sea of blood in recent months - or the "battle of Baghdad", as the US administration likes to term it - is now the center of administration military strategy and operations......

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HJ05Ak02.html

I picked 3 ,for me blatant reasons, out of the 21 (copyright rules) :

How many freelance militias are there in Baghdad? The answer is "23" according to a "senior military official" in Baghdad - so write Richard A Oppel Jr and Hosham Hussein in the New York Times; but according to US National Public Radio, the answer is "at least 23". Antonio Castaneda of the Associated Press says there are 23 "known" militias. However you figure it, that's a staggering number of militias, mainly Shi'ite, but some Sunni, for one large city.

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How many Iraqi soldiers are missing from the US campaign in Baghdad? Six Iraqi battalions or 3,000 troops, again according to Thurman, who requested figures from the Iraqi government. These turn out to be Shi'ite troops from other provinces who have refused orders to be transferred from their home areas to Baghdad. In the capital itself, US troops are reported to be deeply dissatisfied with their Iraqi allies. ("Some US soldiers say the Iraqis serving alongside them are among the worst they've ever seen - seeming more loyal to the militias than the government.")

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How is Iraq affecting the army's equipment? By the spring of 2005, the US Army had already "rotated 40% of its equipment through Iraq and Afghanistan". Marine Corps mid-2005 estimates were that 40% percent of its ground equipment and 20% of its air assets were being used to support current operations, according to analyst Carl Conetta. In the harsh climate of Iraq, the wear and tear on equipment have been enormous. Conetta estimates that whenever the Iraq and Afghanistan wars end, the postwar repair bill for army and marine equipment will be in the range of US$25 billion to $40 billion.


read and bookmark the whole article, it's one of the best factual assessment of the real situation I have read so far...