Iraq Impressions From A Soldier On The Ground: "This Place; Big Picture-HOPELESS"

[kpete]

IRAQ IMPRESSIONS FROM A SOLDIER ON THE GROUND:

Note from Larry C Johnson: Received this today from a CIA buddy who in turn received it from a friend in Iraq. One soldier's perspective from the ground level.


..............

Anyway, here's the assessment. This place; big picture - hopeless. Wrong plan, wrong place. 2003-2004 was done so wrong that we can't recover. The Iraqi leadership doesn't really want us here, they just want our money and equipment and they want us to get out of their way so they can accomplish their own personal agendas. Everything is about positioning themselves for when we leave. And they know we're leaving, every invader/occupier always has and this current one isn't shy about stating it in the press. Corruption is an art form here and we just keep playing into it.

In our collective arrogance, and our administration is pretty arrogant about projecting our democracy throughout the world, we thought that we'd be able to hand these folks the big "binder" on democracy, they'd thank us and immediately transition to it. Don't worry about 6K years of culture and history, surely they're smart enough to see that the 250+ year history of success in the U.S. trumps theirs. Surely the majority Shias, who had been repressed and murdered for 40 years by the minority Sunni Baathists, were big enough to overlook that short period of history. After all, everybody was killing everybody for the previous 5600 years, what's a mere 40 years? I guess we thought that the 5600 years of history had grown out of them during the Saddam era when he was killing people just out of suspicion or for the sake of killing. His two sons, evil murderous barbarians that they were, lived near here where I am and the stories from the locals abound with horror. However, I digress.

more at:
http://noquarter.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/12/iraq_impression.html