Ethnic cleansing is going on all over Iraq. Walls are being built between neighborhoods. Partition is underway.
Baathists. Cry me a river
Many have said that it took a monster like Saddam to control the backward and tribalistic factions of Iraq and nothing less than ruthless domination will work there. As we, the US, can’t do that I suggest dropping this on the UN until most of the hotheads have killed each other off to to the point where most of the populace gets sick of the carnage, funerals and attrition.
btt
What goes around, comes around...
Payback can be a deadly bitch...
At least the murder and mayhem is being conducted by THEM in THEIR country against THEIR fellow murderous Muslims..
Sounds like a win/win scenario to me...
I checked the bbsnews site and by the headlines featured there, it seams to me they are a bunch of bleeding hart liberals. Their statement is misleading but to find out whom they are see the contact information: “… We would like to focus on geo-political issues that touch on real people and their cultural and social lives.” How touchy?!
The article is based on NGOs observations. They are good at what jimmy carter presumably is good at: hammer some nail in wood and feel very important person.
Grizzled Bear said it correctly: “Some joined the Baath party to play it safe. However a lot of them were thugs who enjoyed working for Sadam.” And, I would add, that the Baath party was/is a socialist party. Therefore, is not surprise or news that the Shia militia (today’s Islamist fundamentalists) will try to eliminate them. If given the opportunity, here they will start their mass killings with the liberals and socialist.
Hmmm, the beeb and ngo’s. Anyone want to buy this bridge ...
Militants in Southern Iraq being eliminated by America's Finest!
Excerpts for insight:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1873827/posts
Duncan Hunter: Hey thanks Mike. First with the respect to imposing democracy from the barrel of a gun, the only guns we held on the days when they had Free Election in Iraq was the Americans along with the Iraqi Police who were protecting the voting places and that included the suicide bomber that rushed in to try to blow up a bunch of voters and one of the Iraqi Policeman bear hugged him and pulled him out of the voting area and was killed with him when that guy tried to kill voters. So those people that voted in the Iraqi Elections voted in a Free and Fair Election. All the international observers agree with that.
And I would say this Mike, over the last 60 years, we have brought freedom to large parts of the world. For example in WW2, after the war with Japan, we gave them a constitution while we were occupying Japan. We taught them to have free and fair elections. Today they have a democracy in Japan. In South Korea, we did the same thing. In El Salvador, and you know I was in Congress during the Contra Wars in South America. El Salvador which was once run by a military dictatorship was protected by Ronald Reagan while they stood up a free democracy, a free voting system. In which a person both liberals and conservtives both agree was a great leader, Jose Duarte was elected in a free and fair election while Ronald Reagan held that shield of military protection around that fragile government. I saw left wingers protesting in the streets. That was going to be our next Vietnam according to them. You know I think we have liberals that die of old age waiting for our next Vietnam. And yet, the President persisted, and we have a free El Salvador today. And people vote for their leadership. And we brought down the Berlin wall and now you have all those former captive nations that were under the Tierney of the Soviet Union.
This country have freed 100s of millions of people since WW2. And sometimes you have to be strong to free them. It wasn’t peace marches that brought down the Soviet Union. It was Ronald Reagan’s military strength of the Soviet Union. And when they tried to match us military equipment for military equipment they realized they couldn’t. They picked up the phone and said let’s talk. And when we talked, it brought down that massive empire that oppressed 100s of millions of people and you have free nations today. You ask people in Poland, who brought them freedom. It is the United States. Now let’s go to Iraq.
Laura Knoy: The question people are asking, how long? Matter of fact Ron Paul who also is running for the Presidential nomination, when he said, this war was ill advised, how do we preemptive war poor strategy, there was a fair amount of cheering in the audience. So, Congressman Hunter, even Republicans are saying how long can we stay in there and do this?
Duncan Hunter: Well, actually I was in those debates and I didn’t see any cheering in the audience, maybe I missed it, but I didn’t see any cheering when Ron Paul implied that it was our fault when we were struck on 9/11. Let me say this, I have a picture in my desk drawer. It is a picture of a bunch of Kurdish mothers laying dead on a hillside in Northern Iraq, holding their babies killed in mid stride by poison gas that was dropped by Saddam Hussein’s leader of the Poison Gas Campaign, Chemical Ali. It killed thousands of people mid stride. I’ve seen the pictures of people being excavated from those mass graves where they were bulldozed into graves. Again mothers with 45 slugs in the backs of their heads and slugs in the back of their little babies heads also who were executed along with their mothers. That is a regime that we displaced. Now my son has served two tours in Iraq as a Marine. I understand how tough it is for folks to wait on the tarmac for their kids to come home. That is tough. War is always tough. And I’ve not been one of the people saying this is going to be easy. Occupation is tough on two parties, the occupied nation and the occupying nation. And what America sees today is wall to wall car wrecks on television. If it bleeds, it leads. So a burning HumVee is much more news worthy than an American GIs giving inoculations to kids or building schools. So that is what is shown the American people.
But I would say this. We are standing up Iraqi military. So the question is how long. The Iraqi Army consists of 129 battalions. We need to make sure that every one of those battalions of the Iraqi Army gets a 3 or 4 month combat tour in Anbar Province, Baghdad or Sunni Triangle. A top area where they have to exercise their change of command, their discipline, their leadership and prove themselves. When they are battle hardened, we need to rotate them into the battlefield and then rotate out American heavy combat forces. That is the right way to hand off the security burden to the Iraqi Army. And here is my difference with a lot of folks that have called in. I think the Iraqi government which was freely elected will hold. I think if you have an election tomorrow, you will have the same incumbents. And I think the Iraqi Army will hold. So I think we will ultimately be successful in Iraq. That will mean having a country in that strategic location which will not be a state sponsor of terrorism for the next 5 to 10 to 20 years and will be a friend to the United States will be a good thing for American Foreign Policty.
Laura Knoy: Congressman, you said the Iraqi battalions have to prove themselves, they have to be ready. Yet you hear form the public we have been hearing that for a long time. How long do we wait for these Iraqi units will be ready? Some democrats say as long as we are there, we are holding their hands.
Duncan Hunter: Well here is the deal. It is kinda like teaching someone to ride a bicycle. The question is when do you let go of the bicycle. The Iraqi battalions that are in Baghdad right now which is a major operation we have got 10 Iraqi brigades there we have roughly 30 to 40 battalions that are rotating in and out the additional 3 brigades were sent in there. A lot of the Iraqi battalions now have seen a lot of combat. Some have become very proficient. Some from the quieter areas, haven’t seen much. And my urging is to get them all a battlefield tour of at least 3 to 4 months. And when they have that and we rotate them into the battlefield and the American heavy units can come out and can be moved to other places in central command or come back to the United States.
The point is this shouldn’t not be a function of a political decision that everybody leave now. And I know it is tough. I know a lot of people say we should have keep Saddam Hussein’s Army in place. Saddam Hussein’s Army had 1100 Sunni Generals. It would have been a big mess right now. We had to build this army from scratch. Building an army from scratch aint easy.
(snip)
Duncan Hunter: Thanks for the question. First, I think the job is a long hard difficult road and as I said, there is no smooth road to occupation. So the implication that somehow that we made these terrible decisions that we should have let Saddam Hussein’s army stay in place, I think that would have been a mess, or the idea that we should have stuffed more Americans in there earlier, I think that would not have necessarily been good. There would have given more targets and that certainly doesn’t give an Iraqi face to the security apparatus. Occupations are a tough, long difficult road. I think it is worth while, I think we have done a fairly good job to this point, and I think we are close to having success here.
(snip)
Laura Knoy: And Congressman, I just want to go back just briefly to one more question about Iraq. And that is, when you talk about it, you use the word occupation a lot. That seems to be a word that has negative connotation. That some people don’t want to use. No we are not occupying Iraq we are helping the Iraqi government stand on its own.
Duncan Hunter: Well I use it because it’s an accurate description of what we are doing. I think the American people are smart enough that we can just talk straight to each other. And sure it’s an occupation. Whenever you have the 82nd Airborne, the 1st Infantry Division, the 3rd Infantry Division, and the 2nd Marine Division, in a nation in a strategic or a tactical posture and they are undergoing battlefield operations everyday, that is an occupation. Of course it is. That comes from the administration too. They refer to it as an occupation. And it is an occupation. But occupations are good. I mean occupations, we occupied Japan after WW2 because we realized it was important to have a friend on that side of the Pacific. You know what is great? When we took Japan after we dropped the Atom Bomb, the Japanese warloads warned the people that we would be as brutal to them as they have been to other people. You know they killed 100,000 people when they took NanKing China in 1 night. Americans GIs walked down the streets of Tokyo passing out Hershey Bars and there were very few instances of violence against civilians. Americans were very good in that instance. And you know, we gave Japan a constitution. MacCarther taught them to have a democratic country. Today, they are a democracy. They are a free country. That is in our interest. They are also a strong economy. We gave them a lot of jobs after WW2. We stood them up. We helped them up. We helped up Europe. We gave freedom to countries like El Salvador. We gave freedom to South Korea. We protected them. We occupied South Korea. We occupied Japan. Today they are good friends of the United States. So why is it bad to occupy a country if you bring them freedom and then, the most important thing, then you leave. Americans will leave Iraq.
(snip)
We have had those glimmers of hope. We had the free election where people held their fingers up in the air with the purple ink on it showing that they had voted. And interestingly, the Iraqi people take to voting. They take to politics. We have a chance to make this work.
So, just as any nation is different you can say El Salvador is different too. It has a different make up, different borders, and different demographics than Japan did. South Korea is different, it was split off from the North so it is half a country, right? On the other hand, they now have freedom. Every country is different. We have a chance to make this work. If we can have a friend, not an enemy in Iraq, a country that will not be a state sponsor of terrorism with those massive resources, and a country that has a modicum of freedom for people. And you saw this Laura, when we had those first elections all of a sudden you saw the people in Lebanon pushing back against the Syrian occupiers. Then you had Egypt announcing it would have its first elections in many years, remember that? Multiparty elections. So you had a little ripple that went throughout the Middle East for freedom. After they saw the Iraqi example.
Now people say, that is faded now. Syria has its iron fist back around Lebanon. And Egyptians are still clamping down, well that is true. But United States never stops trying. And I think we have a good opportunity to make this work. So let’s do everything we can to make this work rather than come up with 85 reasons why it probably won’t work and we should all come home and be fortress American.
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Paybacks are a bitch.