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From the Bandar Beacon, aka The Washington Post with thanks to Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald.
HAWIJAH, Iraq - After midnight on a bare stretch of highway near this ramshackle town last week, Staff Sgt. Jason Hoover saw what looked like a fishing line strung across the road and ordered his Humvee to a screeching halt.The cord was connected to an old, Russian artillery shell half-buried in the earthen shoulder and rigged to activate with a firm tug. Hoover traced its path nearly a half-mile though a plowed field, over another highway, and across a canal, where he found four Iraqi infrastructure policemen who were supposed to be guarding an oil pipeline. They said they had no idea what the cord was doing there.
"There's two kinds of Iraqis here, the ones who help us and the ones who shoot us, and there's an awful lot of 'em doing both," said Hoover, 26, of Newark, Ohio. "Is it frustrating? Yes, it's frustrating. But we can't just stop working with them."
The incident is a window on the mixed results of U.S. efforts to train Iraqi forces. American troops trying to tame the restive northern town of Hawijah have done what has proven impossible in many Sunni Arab enclaves: raised a security force from local volunteers. More than 1,500 Iraqi soldiers and 2,000 policemen patrol the area, virtually all of them drawn from the city and the pastoral hamlets that surround it.
But in a town where the local population is hostile to the American presence in Iraq, U.S. soldiers have developed a deep distrust of their Iraqi counterparts following a slew of incidents that suggest the troops they are training are cooperating with their enemies.
The top local Iraqi army commander here was sent to Abu Ghraib prison in November, accused of tipping off insurgents about the routes taken by American convoys, said Lt. Col. Marc Hutson, commander of a Hawijah-based battalion of the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division. The city's police chief was also fired and briefly arrested in January for refusing to go after armed groups.
Earlier this month, a U.S. sniper team caught 14 policemen placing roadside bombs in the nearby town of Riyadh. More than 60 other police officers are named on a watch list of suspected insurgent collaborators, according to U.S. military policemen who train them. And last week a raging fire erupted from a sabotaged oil pipeline 50 feet from a police checkpoint, covering the sky with a blanket of black smoke...
Posted by Rebecca at April 30, 2006 9:27 AM
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Who cares? All of us NeoCons know the Media are a bunch of liars, and that the War in Iraq is going great!
Posted by: Guillermox![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jihadwatch.org/nav-commenters.gif)
at April 30, 2006 9:48 AM
there is going to be things like this happen, US soldeirs a quick to learn. you also have many insurgents using stolen police uniforms.. so
US military know how to deal with this.
at April 30, 2006 10:32 AM
This reminds me, in a very disturbing way, to something I read about Vietnam. The book "War of Numbers" was the most insightful story of how the US failed and lost the Vietnam war, written by an intelligence analyst or the time, Sam Adams (not the beer). He tried to get his superiors to admit the situation in Vietnam, the order of battle of our enemy, and the extent to which South Vietnamese in the military were playing both sides, preparing for the day the US left. He was consistently turned down by the higher ups, who were determined to present a rosy picture of progress, as our enemy grew stronger and domestic support withered.
If this has made it into the MSM it is no doubt widespread, and understandably so. Wouldn't an Iraqi want to prepare for the day the Americans leave? What better way to protect oneself from the massacres and beheadings, than to cooperate. The quagmire is deep. It will be a neat trick to get out of Iraq without an openly Jihad-friendly government left in our wake.
Posted by: Quijybo at April 30, 2006 11:14 AM
Muslim leader declares jihad by BMW:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/04/28/BAGVDIHGJ59.DTL
He didn't like being thrown out of that strip club.
Posted by: sanman at April 30, 2006 11:15 AM
Here is a link to Amazon, with a synopsis of "War of Numbers":
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1883642469/102-3180231-4644947?v=glance&n=283155
Posted by: Quijybo at April 30, 2006 11:15 AM
Does the old saying, "kill them all and let God sort them out" apply here?
How in the world can you sort these guys out? They all have one religion. Islam teaches them to lie. To kill. To hate. How would you sort them out?
Posted by: freewoman at April 30, 2006 11:20 AM
Any child can see how tragically absurd our 'mission' is in Iraq. The light at the end of the tunnel is blazing and nuclear.
Posted by: poetcomic1 at April 30, 2006 11:33 AM
Kill them all and let God sort them out, would work, but probably not acceptable....
or
Pull our troops back to Kurdish lands and let the Sunni and Shia settle the old scores then clean up the mess......
Posted by: Texican at April 30, 2006 11:52 AM
Islamic female athletic-wear:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/04/0427_060424_muslim_sports.html
I'm waiting to see the Islamic HazMat suit, for Iranian clandestine WMD development.
Posted by: sanman at April 30, 2006 12:19 PM
Those who read the full story in The Bandar Beacon (Washington Post) with care will note how revealing it is. For this article tells us a great deal about the fatuity, the waste, and the danger unfairly imposed on American soldiers and Marines, by an Administration both too obstinate (in sticking to a policy that squanders resources and prevents the intelligent exploitation of divisions within Islam, so obviously present in Iraq, and encouragable outside Iraq), and too ignorant (how many people in the Pentagon, or in the State Department, are worrying about the islmamization of Western Europe, and its military, political, and civilizational consquences? And how many of them are permitted to connect that theatre of the Jihad with the one in Iraq, and to comprehend how trivial Iraq really is, except possibly as a way to encourage Sunni-Shi'a and Arab-non-Arab Muslim divisions?
Below are some excerpts from the full story, and commentary just below each
1.
"There's two kinds of Iraqis here, the ones who help us and the ones who shoot us, and there's an awful lot of 'em doing both," said Hoover, 26, of Newark, Ohio. "Is it frustrating? Yes, it's frustrating. But we can't just stop working with them."
Comment:
Why not? Because he, that soldier, has not been permitted even to think such things. American soldiers have had dinned into them that they cannot possibly leave Iraq because then it might lead to “civil war” and “instability” and that, of course, would be a “bad thing.” Why? Oh, because it would. Just lthe way the Iran-Iraq War was a bad thing, presumably, for Infidels. Poor, misinformed soldiers – deliberately misinformed, deliberately kept ignorant of Islam, or the ways in which, if the enemy were properly defined, one would come to understand that leaving Iraq, and exploiting its internal fissures, both sectarian and ethnic, make the best and only snese]
2.
"In some places they hide the fact that they don't like you. They don't hide it here," said Hutson, who stops by his base's medical station periodically for a shot of Toradol to soothe a shoulder injured when his vehicle flipped during one of the attacks.
Comment: so this officer has after fighting with, and beside, Arab Muslims in Iraq, and had contact with all kinds of civilians, has realistically concluded that there are two kinds: the kind of Iraqis who show you that they hate you, and the kind who hide the fact that they hate you.
"It sounds strange, but more police have been killed lately, which means some of them are finally doing their job," one American officer here said."
Comment:
Almost all recruits to the “Iraqi” army and “Iraqi” police are doing it not to “save” Iraq but to make money; there is no large “Iraqi” patriotic impulse, much as American government propaganda tries to create it, or to convince us that it exists.
3.
Horton said he gives Iraqi officers just minutes' notice when bringing them on a mission, and never tells them exactly where they will be going to prevent them from tipping off insurgents."
Comment:
The American officer (Horton) doesn’t tell them because, based on preivous betrayals of American forces, including information about the routes convoys will take to those setting I.E.D.’s, he doesn’t trust them. And shouldn’t – not now, not ever.
4.
"I've seen them laughing when we come back in with a vehicle destroyed by a bomb," he said. "I've seen them stand 10 feet away and do nothing but watch when we are in the middle of a firefight."
Comment:
So these “Iraqi allies” laugh at the sight of a destroyed American vehicle, and no doubt find equally hilarious the dead American soldiers – American soldiers who are being kept in Iraq to somehow make something of nothing, for people who hate or at best dislike them. The Americans are being asked to create, by their own willfully blind government, a nation-state out of a collection of warring ethnic and sectarian groups, a nation-state that will somehow be a model for all the other Arab states. Those states, either Sunni-dominated or Sunni-ruled (except for the Ibadis so prominent in Oman, and the Alawite military caste that rules in Syria), or both, cannot possibly look with favor, much less model themselves on, an “Iraq” in which Sunni dominance has been transferred to the Shi’a]
5.
“ Over sweet tea in a grubby police station at the center of Hawijah last week, the station commander, Maj. Ghazey Ahmed Khalif, assured Horton and his team that things were quiet in town that day. But when Horton asked some Iraqi officers to accompany him on a drive through town, Khalif discreetly whispered something into a translator's ear."
"All of a sudden he remembers he got a tip about an IED," said Horton, using the military acronym for improvised explosive device, or roadside bomb. "If we hadn't asked his guys to come, put them at risk, no way he tells us about that."
Comment:
Our Iraqi allies. Our loyal Iraqi allies. Our loyal and staunch Iraqi allies. The ones American soldiers are being asked to lay down their lives for.
6.
"Soldiers working with the Iraqi army here report similar problems. Iraqi soldiers have been reprimanded for selling their government-issued ammunition in local gun markets and for hocking their boots, only to turn up for duty in leather loafers."
"Before a highway patrol to search for roadside bombs last week, an Iraqi unit accompanying U.S. soldiers refused to ride in American Humvees, which provide far better protection from bomb attacks than the unarmored pickup trucks normally used by Iraqi forces."
"Shaking his head and staring at the ground, Sgt. Ghazi Esa Muhammad, 25, explained that a local cleric had decreed that Iraqis killed in an "occupier vehicle" would not go to heaven.
"Tell your guys, if they refuse to ride in the Humvees, they will go to jail for 10 days. It's not a choice," said Lt. Aaron Tapalman, 23, the patrol leader. "They want to be able to claim they are not associated with us," said Tapalman, after the Iraqi sergeant relented and told his men to mount up."
"About an hour later, the patrol came across a white bag on the roadside that Tapalman suspected might contain a bomb. When he asked some Iraqi soldiers to move it off the road, their commander balked, saying it wasn't his job.
"It is your job to protect the people," Tapalman said, increasingly exasperated. "I can go and move it myself, and you know what? I will, but don't you think your people should see you doing that kind of stuff. Someday we're not going to be here anymore." The Iraqi soldier declined again, apologetically, and drove away.”
Comment:
Let the Americans risk their lives The Americans said they were here to help us. Well, then they’re the ones who should risk their lives removing explosive devices. Why should we? Hell, it’s not our country, this Iraq. We’re Sunni Arabs and Shi’a Arabs and Kurds. We’re not risking our lives for “Iraq.” The Americans can do that.
Conclusion:
Remaining in Iraq squanders every kind of resource: men, money, material, military morale and civilian willingness to engage in measures necessary to check the Jihad to spread Islam, and furthermore, it distracts from other matters, not only Iran (where the presence of American troops as hostages to Iranian retaliation gets in the way), but most importantly, the subject of Europe's islmaization, with the military, political, even civilizational catastrophe that that would bring.
Stories shuch as those above show how dangerous and foolish it is to force American officers and men to work with, to train, to fight alongside or attempt to, those who do not wish you well, who wish you ill, who have given every visible sign of wishing you ill. There is no "Iraqi" patriotism. There is potential and actual betrayal and treachery, of the Americans, by those to whom they have done nothing, and whom they have tried to help, in removing a despot, in spending tens of billions in aid (and hundreds of billions to conduct the whole operation). To remain in Iraq will simply mean a further waste of American lives, vast amounts of American money (that could have been spent on energy projects -- $400 billion might have gone a long way to ending the oil wherewithal that has made the Jihad go from theoretically potential to practically possible), materiel, everything.
And those who have failed to criticize the Iraq policy for being such a squandering, in precisely the manner, and for the reasons given here during more than two years, are also to be blamed. For they, unable to conceive of the Jihad as the enemy, and willing to abide by those foolish phrases such as "a war on terror," have been unable to come up with any criticism of the Administration that makes sense.
They deserve each other. The leaders of the United States, and of the rest of the Western world, with a few remarkable exceptions, have been weighed in the balance, and found wanting.
Posted by: Hugh at April 30, 2006 12:47 PM
The behavior described is very similar to the behavior described of the PLO "police".
Posted by: HaMalach at April 30, 2006 12:58 PM
l wonder how far the Allied forces would of went if there was this constant biased media coverage during WW2?. this war is being pd'd to death. l like Michael Savage's method to fight this war, he said he would take the sunni triangle and cordonned it off, and tell those civilians to leave, all else will be bombed to allah. thay way you would kill most of the insurgents, and do this at several other cities, with insurgents. enough of this crap fight the war to win. the terrorist know they can fight and win this war from the politicians in wash dc and leftist biased media.
Posted by: Lulu at April 30, 2006 2:44 PM
wanted to say thank you robert,when i warn my family and friends of the threat islam poses i use this blog among others and your books.
Posted by: campingman1 at April 30, 2006 3:45 PM
---Hugh---
Another brilliant commentary.
You are a national treasure.
Why not put some of your essays together in book form?
I'd buy a copy for myself and many more to give away to friends (as I've already done with The Politically Incorect Guide to Islam)
Posted by: CufferHarvey at April 30, 2006 5:15 PM
All well and good, Quijybo, but I note a few weeks ago Rush Limbaugh scoffed at people who claim we lost the war in Vietnam. Strange, but true. There are many folks who belive we won in Vietnam because they refuse to believe it is even in the realm of possibility that we could lose. Even after-the-fact.
Posted by: Charles Bogle at April 30, 2006 5:55 PM
Another time where we win every battle, then lose the war...tragic.
Posted by: WIDEAWAKE at May 1, 2006 12:58 AM
British troops are afraid to open fire when facing deadly Iraqi insurgents in case they are prosecuted, a leaked Ministry of Defence report revealed yesterday.It flies in the face of persistent MoD denials that soldiers are worried about 'witch-hunts' by human rights lawyers.
And it confirms what soldiers tell the Daily Mail - that if they shoot insurgents they may be embroiled in a long inquiry and will not be supported by top brass and the Government if they are prosecuted.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=384750&in_page_id=1770
Blair's Britain is a haven for Jihadis, so why should be a surprise.
Posted by: DP111 at May 1, 2006 10:50 AM
Shy Guy
Yup. It comes from dawdling over the post.
This manipulating terrorist is now going to be deported, and he will be the talk of Al Jazeera - maybe he will even get a plum job as a presenter of Al Jazeera and thus get even better acccess to the West.
Deportation though the best antidote to Jihad in most cases, is really not suitable in this case. I'm sure there is still evidence that has not been presented to the courts, and can form the basis of a new prosecution on a different set of charges. He needs to be incarcerated for a long while as he poses a significant threat.
Posted by: DP111 at May 1, 2006 11:21 AM
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