Allegations all this week have been surfacing about the conduct of U.S. soldiers in the war in Iraq. So far, to my knowledge, four cases have been brought up, of which one has allegedly been disproved and dropped. The cases are allegations that U.S. soldiers have massacred Iraqi civilians, in the biggest case that you've no doubt seen on TV, I think the figure is two dozen men women and children, the one that has evidently been dropped was supposed to have been one Iraqi civilian who was wrongfully killled.
The reason according to some, is that the soldiers are under too much stress. There aren't enough of them, they don't get long enough breaks, and they are a war-fighting force, not an occupation-force. They're being expected to police Iraq, to rebuild Iraq, to protect private contractors extracting oil and such, to protect the Iraqi government, and on top of that to fight an Insurgency-war.
They were really only trained to win a lightning war against conventional forces, which is fine for an army, fine for gun-boat diplomacy, but you can't
occupy a country successfully unless your troops are trained, to occupy a country! That should be an obvious fact.
There are not enough men there to successfully occupy Iraq. There are, by official numbers 150,000 men there, and by some experts' calculations around 200,000, which means the figure should be somewhere between the two estimations. We need at the very least twice that, in my opinion. Every region in Iraq that is relatively stable is stable because of U.S. troop-concentrations. As soon as the troops leave, the situation deteriorates. With more men, we'd have more stability, which means an easier time for our troops, less incidents and more winning of "Hearts and Minds", more infrastructure build-up in the hopes of winning over some Iraqis.
Every general that doesn't work for the government anymore agrees that there aren't enough U.S. soldiers, the soldiers on the ground agree that they're short-handed, as a matter of fact the D.O.D. and the Whitehouse seem to be the only people that think 150,000 men is enough. Why don't we use more? A few reasons; one, the government fears putting too much immediate strain (as opposed to delayed economic strain, of which there wil be plenty) on the American people, it fears war-weariness.
The second reason is not enough people want to join the army, so man-power is down. They don't want to join because A; the rewards are minimal at best, and B; the physical and mental constitution of the American people has declined considerably since World War 2. Not enough men are willing to fight a war, or win a war. Americans have grown soft and lazy since our era of prosperity began, in the early 1900s or so.
And thirdly, we have too many of our men stationed in other countries around the world! Over 100,000 in Europe, most in Germany and Italy, and another 80,000 in South Korea and Japan, as an advance force against the Chinese and North-Koreans, and to stiffen the South and Japan's resolve, and another 10,000 plus in places like Africa, South America and the Pacific.
These men don't do much, except "Secure American Interests" through their presence (and it is doubtful how effective they are at that).
Further, this war is costing us too much. Why? We are not fighting it cost-effectively. I saw a show on the History Channel, called "Firefight". The story was of a squad in Iraq who came under fire from a sniper while they were moving through a grave-yard. The sniper killed a couple of them, wounded a few, and pinned down the rest. They figured out that he was in a hotel-building across the street, but he would move from room to room after each shot, so they couldn't get him.
Now, I'm not a Military man, though I am something of an arm-chair general, I've read many books on famous conflicts. It seems to me that in World War II, say, the troops would have, perhaps, called up one of their own snipers to counter-snipe this amateur "Vagabond" as Rumsfeld would call him. You know, a man trained by our beloved government to defeat enemy snipers with a few 30-cent bullets.
The men called up a tank, an Abrams, I believe. The tank fired a depleted Uranium shell into each and every window until there were no more balconies for the sniper to shoot from, and he left. Then the U.S. troops advanced. Depleted Uranium shells are as expensive as they are unnecessary(they are used to penetrate armour, to fight other tanks, so why use them in an infantry-based insurgency?), and they tend to kill plant-life and make men sterile.
This is a good example of how effeciency is ignored so that the government can use the expensive gear it bought from it's friends in the Military Contracting Industry. Likewise, we use ridiculous rockets and missiles to assassinate "Terrorist Leaders" in a tremendously imprecise way, rather than sending men in to do the job.
So, we are fighting the war on-the-cheap, in that we aren't using enough men, and hugely inefficiently, in that waste-spending is considered exceptable. If we doubled or tripled the manpower of our Iraq-Force, re-trained our men to up their tactical thinking and independance and prepare them for a war of occupation, and stopped using ridiculous, expensive and unnecessary hardware, we might be doing better on the ground, and we might not be going bankrupt from this venture.
In short, our politicions and our Generals are to blame for this mess in Iraq, and the longer these hacks botch it, the longer our men do too much for too long, the more of these incidents we are going to see.
In the Georgia governatorial race in '02 Republican Sonny Perdue beat tremendously popular Democrat Roy Barnes to become the first Republican governor of Georgia in 130 years. Diebold voting machines were used. The machines' codes were changed right before the election, and there have been many questions raised and un-answered, about what happened during the period when the machines were left un-protected as the codes were changed, and why they were changed.
