Regarding the previous entry, I'm getting responses from both newsgroup conversations and private conversations that the Army is operating under a much more restrictive set of rules of engagement than the Marines are. The alleged ROE is that unless the troops are engaged in planned combat operations, the soldiers are to have no heavy weapons (meaning anything larger than an M-16), no more than two magazines, and to fire only after the enemy has fired first.
I'm not going to try to comment further on that. I don't think there's much I could say.
I finally am starting to get ahead enough with work to be able to put a couple more entries in here. Over on The USS Clueless, Stephen Den Beste has written a voluminous post responding to a lot of the claims going around about the war. Looking over at some of the responses to his article, I see that a lot of the same old arguments are going around.
I wish I had this weblog back during the ground war, because there was a post to a newsgroup to the effect that we had lost the initiative, and control, of the ground campaign. The Iraqis were "inside our OODA loop," which is a fancy way of saying, according to the terminology of John Boyd (John Boyd was an Air Force officer you can read more about here), that they were thinking and reacting faster than we were. It Was Going To Be A Quagmire. In short, the same things they're saying this week. I had written a response then, to the effect that things weren't as bad as they seemed, and that the Iraqis did not have control of the situation. Although it's rather dated, I might yet post it here, in case anyone still needs to be convinced that we won the ground campaign.
But getting back on topic, the same sorts of arguments are going around. You know, that morale is the lowest it's ever been since the Vietnam War (lower than after the Cole attack, and the Marine Barracks bombing in Beirut?); that we've entered into a vicious cycle where the American presence incites anti-American violence, which invites reprisals, which soon spirals into the sort of guerilla war that defeated us in Vietnam (never mind that that particular piece of mythology might be wrong to begin with , and that the North Vietnamese won with what was basically a large conventional mechanized force).
Rather than write a long drawn-out post, I'd like to point out the letter here, which was posted today on Winds of Change. Of particular note are the gentleman's comments concerning events he witnessed, and how they were reported in the press. I'm seeing second and thirdhand reports to this effect elsewhere, that the reporters on the ground are trolling for statements to exaggerate.
You can read statements that bolster both sides of the argument, BTW, at Lt. Smash. He reports on the sort of morale problems they are having here. He also writes about the whole alleged deception issue here, and talks about the morale situation in a more general sense here.
What I find of particular interest: the "Iraqi resistance" is mostly confined to the "Sunni Triangle," and according to the letter posted on WoC still is mainly composed of non-Iraqis.
A lot of what appears to be a standard "party line" among the opposition (and has anyone noticed that when conservatives criticize the current administration, they all say something different, but when the left does, they all seem to say the same thing?) is that we need to internationalize the occupation in Iraq, and crawl back to the UN for forgiveness and help in managing the country. I believe this to be wrong, because I don't think the UN could make the situation better. The UN is extremely ineffective at peacekeeping, or nationbuilding, or whatever you call it, because they either refuse to choose sides, or once in a while choose the wrong side in a case where it can do the maximum amount of damage. There are a large number of web sites out there that write about the UN's problems with corruption and the like, but I'll just link to this from LGF, because a picture is worth a thousand words.
Finally, I was in an argument a couple weeks ago with someone on this subject, and they asked if I even cared about the situation over there, or about the casualties US forces were taking.
There's a big problem with this argument. I believe that it is a cold, hard fact that the press is not going to make the US forces there any safer by telling the world at large, and the Saddam Fedayeen in particular, that their most recent chickenshit little ambush that killed one soldier and wounded two was some sort of great military victory and the work of great genius. I also believe it's a cold hard fact that every time the press reports that it is, it encourages the resistance, increaces the chance of further bloodshed, and lengthens the time US forces will have to be there to keep the peace.
Oh, before I go: this open letter was published on LGF a while back; the original seems to be in the comments section here. And that should be it for a while.
See y'all sometime next month!
Addendum: I cleaned up some of the formatting after posting, and added one link. - pgf
I'm sorry about the lack of updates; I've been very busy with work. I'm also not sure whether, when I get around to serious updates again, whether I'll still want the page here, or still be using movable type.
I may also be experimenting a little with the stylesheet.