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You may remember the Pentagon Study that reported that only "38 percent of Marines said noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect" and "thirty-nine percent of Marines and 36 percent of soldiers said torture should be allowed to gather important information from insurgents?"
Scarecrow and I had a few things to say at the time.
Well, according to the AP, it seems the Marine Corps commandant was really disturbed by that report and "He is telling his officers to make sure their Marines understand the importance of ethics in the fight." So what moral message does Gen. James T. Conway, the commandant, want to "make sure" his Marines receive?
"I was a little bit disturbed by what I saw because, one, Marines were more likely to do those things than were soldiers," he said. "I want to get after that because, again, those things are things that either incite the population or, conversely, help to win the fight if you do them right." (emphasis mine)
He followed up this rigorous moral advice with advice for his fellow commanders:
At the same time, Conway said an Army commander in Afghanistan was wrong when he issued a public apology for an incident in March where Marines "killed and wounded innocent Afghan people."
Conway said Army Col. John Nicholson "was premature to apologize, in that there is an investigation ongoing to determine what happened. If the investigation should determine that there are charges that should be levied, then there will be a hearing, perhaps a court martial." Conway added that the military was not wrong to make $2,000 payments to the families of those killed.
Nicholson this month read to reporters an apology given to the families for an incident in Nangahar province that left as many as 19 Afghans dead and 50 injured.(emphasis mine)
General Conway has already demonstrated his moral leadership – yesterday, he sent a memo to his officers "directing them to re-emphasize the importance of values." and on Monday, he'll hold a "Values Conference."
I am so relieved that we are regaining the moral highground in Iraq … perhaps it was this type of stellar values-based leadership which lead to yesterday's events in Fallujah where, according to Al Aswat, an independent and usually reliable Iraqi news service (h/tp for story and translation to the team members at GorillasGuides )
Doctors, nurses, administrators, and all other staff in Fallujah hospital have gone on indefinite strike after the second episode in as many months in which the American controlled, directed, trained, and financed, green zone forces and police in Fallujah supported by American troops violently stormed the hospital, severely beat staff, and destroyed equipment and supplies.
The strike was called as the result of an attack on members of the rescue crews by green zone forces and green zone police. The police and militia beat the doctors and staff, smashed doors and windows and destroyed quantities of hospital supplies.
Accroding to the young doctor in the hospital who alerted the news agency to this latest attack the attackers: “justified their attacks on the pretext that hospital staff treated the gunmen inside it”
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ZeD☼
Hi Siun!
I want my country back.
I want my country’s sacred honor back.
Thank you, General Conway.
——————————
(check my .SIG above in a day or three) :)
How many ways can we, the US, screw this up? Good God.
Standing on the moral high ground and watching shoe heels fly by overhead.
Kid walks into my office, says he wants to be a freewayblogger…
http://freewayblogger.blogspot…..oiled.html
Hi Gang!
OtherWA – kinda amazing, eh?
Thanks for the post!
The best way to regain the moral high ground in Iraq is to leave it.
The blank look in his eyes (at least in this photo) is not reassuring.
What do you want to bet the REAL reason the Green Zone Goons attacked the hospital was that it was treating the “wrong kind” of patients?
Oh, yeah, we’re going to greeted as liberators…Riiiiiiiggggghttt.
I wonder if every country is as deluded as we are when it comes to atrocities committed by our forces.
Siun, want to see something else amazing?
Salon has an article about CPA documents with easy to reveal redactions the writer’s 8 year old figured out. From TPM Muckrakers.
Isn’t this the same general who made those statements several months ago about gays in the military?
He needs to make sure his underlings (down to the lowest enlisted or pressganged person) understand that doctors are supposed to treat everyone, not pick and choose on the basis of who they like.
We are so scr*wed: these are the people who often come back and join law enforcement.
Tim Russert asks himself:
“Am I doing God’s work?”
http://newsweek.washingtonpost…..th_to.html
About damned time. I’ve been railing about the Honor Code for years. About time the General staff started giving a damn about it too.
Sorry, as soon as you illegally invade a country to take over its oil and enrich your Big Oil cronies, all possible morality has vanished. There is nothing our military can do to fix that, except leave.
Practically speaking, apologies go a lot farther the sooner they follow the events that made them necessary.
You don’t need to know every last detail of exactly which Marine did what, provable before a court martial, before a commander stands up and says, “I, as the commander of this unit, am sorry for what happened to your family at the hands of my Marines. I don’t know yet all the circumstances, but I am appalled at what has taken place. I will work to hold those who committed any misconduct accountable, and will strive to see that it doesn’t happen again anywhere else.”
That beats the hell out of three months of “I can’t comment because of an ongoing investigation.” While everyone’s waiting for that to finish, the initial anger becomes resentment, resentment becomes resistance, and resistance becomes opposition.
It’s a helluva bad way to fight a war that requires the support of the local populace to win.
Oh, and it’s incredibly immoral as well — wouldn’t want to leave that part out! Great post, Siun!!
Biodun @ 13
No, that was Pace, also a Marine but Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
Dear god. And these troops will all be home at some point. They have endured more than human beings are programmed to handle. May all of the neocons who planned this out suffer.
It is wrong to excoriate all our servicemen for disobeying ‘the rules’. “Other Ranks”, whether Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Roman, or Ours, have always been brutal, have always had a casual attitude towards whatever the rules were/are.
Where we have fallen down is in not rigorously teaching our officers what the rules consist of, and equally rigorously requiring them to supervise their application. It is the selection of officer candidates and then their training that we must examine……
But then we must examine ourselves generally too. What the hell sort of society are we that we elected this amoral conscienceless pair running our Administration, who appoint an equally conscienceless lying coward henchman to chair the World Bank?
“Ethics training” is often reserved for those least likely to benefit from it. It’s usually cover for the institution: in a corporate setting, to minimize sentences for those convicted; in a govt setting, to hide that the absence of ethical behavior is widespread.
If it’s done correctly, it’s integrated into routine management training and routine performance evaluations – specifically of upper managers. If they don’t model the behavior, the training is like putting a naked model in the shop window. It gets attention, but not the kind you want.
Sounds like the Marine Corps Commandant has too much of Cardinal Law in him. Formalistic arguments aren’t leadership; they are about laying blame, preferable on somebody else. The Commandant should be leading by example. He’s not, but then Shrub approved his appointment. So it goes.
Had you ever been in the Marines, you’d know that the Commandant stresses ethics for the media audience. He is the public face of the Marine Corps, after all, and that face has to look and sound good.
Out in the foxholes, however, the grunts (who listened to the same words) heard a different message, and it is this: “Do what you feel like you gotta do but remember: If you get caught you’ll be prosecuted, cashiered, and maybe go to prison.” In other words: Kill the witnesses.
There it is.
TheOtherWA @ 4
Think of the worst that could happen.
Bush and his minions will find 5 ways even worse then that to screw it up.
Jimmy Montague @ 23
The Few. The Convicted. The Marines.
Rob @ 17
Fixed.
Jimmy Montague – nodding. What amazed me was that Conway doesn’t even hide it well in his comment. He is after all talking about torture and abuse but says “hose things …conversely, help to win the fight if you do them right.”
P J Evans @ 14
Fixed.
dakine01 @ 19:
Thanks. Pace. Joint Chief’s Chairman. Even worse.
How to be moral in an immoral and illegal war?
I have had conversations with 7 young soldiers in Appalachia that have returned from Iraq. I have asked them some tough and direct questions. Many of them are not proud of what they were required to do and not required to do in Iraq. They all and I do mean all 7 have said that the American people do not have a clue as to what is really taking place in Iraq.
They were all shocked by the lack of “real” coverage in the MSM on just what is taking place there.
dakine01 @ 19
Right. In his world, morality only means sex, apparently.
Of course, as JCS Chair, Pace’s silence on other questions of morality in the military has been mindblowing.
Peterr @ 30
Which may in fact be why he was chosen as JCS. He’s a “good, dogly Christian warrior” fighting the heinous ravages of people who have sex out of wedlock and all that.
Dont we need to keep up the pressure to bring them home? Bush is crazy. Reid and all cant back down now.
And this is why we have two more journalists trying to tell the truth, killed today in Iraq. Doesn’t matter who killed them. They were killed in a conflict that never should have happened.
maunga @ 21
They weren’t elected. Not in 2000 and not in 2004. Look at Supreme Corrupt Court decision and voter fraud. The real voter fraud.
Some mental health factors to consider around these issues – and to relate to the study.
The study itself was a brave thing for the military to undertake – it has never been done before, and they knew that the results were not going to be positive. So that’s one step in the right direction – don’t kill the messenger -praise the military for examining itself.
Currently, it’s estimated that one in three returning military personnel have acute symptoms of mental illness – and there is another significant percentage who have traumatic brain injuries.
That is the known incidence. Not all personnel have been evaluated or diagnosed.
With each return to the front line, the incidence of mental illness goes up dramatically (can’t find my stats, I’ll keep searching). With multiple deployments, traumatic stress disorder increases – and I believe this directly relates to the willingness to use torture or unacceptable force on all others – as a reaction to actual mental trauma – not post trauma stress disorder.
Anecdotally, soldiers report that they are never out of the front lines. The battleground, so to speak, is all around them. The “enemy” doesn’t wear an identifiable uniform. This is a perpetual high stress/high distress situation. And like any prolonged crisis (try to imagine a five month long tornado warning with high winds and you having to repeatedly go outside and protect your family and neighbors – now extend that mental image to fifteen months), one will not be able to sustain rational, calm and reasonable conduct at all times. There will be breaks in the behavior.
That’s what’s happening now. And the Marines are trying to send clear, concise and appropriate commands to personnel so that they can “hang their hats” on it in times of crisis and action.
In effect, Bush, by recycling soldiers and Marines over and over again is assuring their permanent mental illness. If I didn’t know better, I would think that it looks like intentional destruction of these service men and women – to save the lifetime of healthcare costs and disability that they will surely have if they return alive. For they will not be whole, ever again.
snowbird42 @ 33
Reid should just stall it out until they run out of money and then dump it on Bush and the GOP for refusing to sign the bills giving the troops funding.
Not the cleanest way to victory, but a win is a win.
………”the American controlled, directed, trained, and financed, green zone forces and police”…….
The training, one presumes, incorporates ethical values?
Iraq will need considerable help to recover from this catastrophe whenever the occupation ends and it has to end, hopefully sooner rather than later. A great deal of that help has to include training of personnel to rebuild social and economic infrastructure.
What bothers me is that nobody in the world is focusing on this. This is not just an American or coalition issue, this really needs to be considered by international forums, particularly the UN.
Many think tanks have concentrated on highlighting the problems. That is important to get past Murdoch’s talking points. Equally important are plans to deal with the future. The world knows that the occupation will end one day because it is unsustainable even with mercenaries.
We make our futures by looking ahead and planning to achieve that we would like to see happen. This is more than just an American responsibility. Even if many of us never agreed with whatever has transpired to date and could not prevent this disaster from coming to pass, Iraq will need a lot of help from all of us the world over.
sona @ 38
Problem is, after this Iraq will NEVER want outsiders coming in ever again.
Those that do will be killed.
It is a wound that will never truly heal.
P J Evans @ 14
I think they’re talking about American trained Iraqis, not American troops here.
That said, returning troops are going to be a real problem for the country.
Our professional military is broken beyond repair. Not the troops, they live up to their training. It’s the top of the system, the very structure of our fighting forces. We train the troops to be soulless killing machines instead of the Canadian or British approach of learning to cooperate with the local communities we occupy. Our philosophy is based on our advanced technology and the pre-Vietnam view of warfare as two large armies fighting each other on battle fronts.
Personally I think it’s time to eliminate the professional military and focus on adequate National Guard resources and making sure the Guard is only used within US borders. If any president wants to wage a foreign campaign he (or she) should be required to raise the army at the time, which would necessitate getting majority buy-in from the general populace. This way wars become a shared burden by everyone and not some isolated class of military families that is becoming increasingly disconnected from everyday America.
Just to follow up on Lew’s comment:
May 17 – Two ABC journalists, cameraman Alaa Uldeen Aziz and soundman Saif Laith Yousuf, are killed in Baghdad. They were returning from the Baghdad bureau when their car was attacked.
Their deaths bring the total number of journalists killed in Iraq since 2003 to 104, according to a tally kept by the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Reuters
IIRC…The Army brass was for it before they were against it:
Pentagon Casts Report Of Increased Combat Stress Among Troops As Positive News!
Set your alarm for tonites episode of Bill Moyer’s SECRET TRADE DEAL
Concur, it was Pace, whose name is the Italian term for “toady.” Conway, from my personal experience, is a straight shooter and is very concerned about the poll showing the Marines’ attitudes.
oofda @ 44
It’s Italian for peace, calm, or tranquility. Ironic, but not toady.
Lou Costello @ 42
Well, another point to consider to put this in context: Pollack is a nurse in the acting Army SG role. She was catapulted into that position with the ouster of the Army SG. She actually has been active in both Army clinical nursing (she’s a nurse anesthetist) as well as an administrator. I think she’s had a lot of things thrown at her because she’s also dealing with an extreme Army nurse shortage (10% and nurse officers leaving at twice the rates of all other Army officers). I tend to give her the benefit of the doubt, as I follow her testimony and actions fairly closely – I think she made a poor choice of words. I also think her intent was to reassure that those soldiers and Marines who were studied weren’t acting on their thoughts of unethical actions. That’s actually a key feature in psychiatry of determining impulse control.
And I think that was what she was trying to convey.
Not to excuse the alarming results of the study – but to put them in more of a healthcare context.
There’s a point where the command’s high-falutin’ talk meets the ground troops’ eye-rolling cynicism. I’m not sure where that disconnect happens, but it’s inevitable in an illegal and immoral occupation.
There’s no moral and ethical path in this occupation. It’s oxymoric. Leaving now is the only moral high ground — and not through Tehran, you PNAC dirtbags!
TROOPS
HOME
NOW
Brendan: top of the long quote says
If we-as-a-country support this kind of thing, we-as-a-country deserve criticism.
I don’t know if ‘ethics training’ has the scope to cover this.
I do know this is the sort of story that Bush and Cheney don’t want reported.
How long would support for the
waroccupation last, if MSM covered stories like this?Siun!
you always break my heart
Priceless. Or is that ‘Clueless’?
Sparkles the Iguana @ 15
scarlet p. @ 6
nice work, in many ways
Elliott – the news breaks mine daily. The link to yesterday’s GorillasGuides is good example – go through what happened just yesterday – from the hospital through the reports on each local region.
The troops aren’t as bad their immoral Commander-in-Chief who loves all things evil.
thank you siun! real moral leadership would require acknowledging the moral bankruptcy of our invasion and occupation.
Two unwritten but brutally enforced rules of the criminal thugs who have seized our public offices to serve their private interests:
Our government’s police powers must only be used to harass, arrest and prosecute “Democrats” and “liberals.” Or else fire the prosecutors.
Iraqi doctors and hospitals must only treat Americans and pro-American-occupier Iraqis. Or else destroy the hospitals to ‘fire’ the doctors.
[Isn’t it past time for Congress to call the CEOs of Shell, BP, Exxon, Chevron, etc., in to testify about their “hydrocarbon bill” that mandates transfer of most of the wealth in Iraq’s multi-trillion-dollar oil fields to global corporations - you know, the oil bill that was written by the American company Bearing Point and is now promoted as necessary by everyone in the American government, including apparently almost everyone in Congress, but that is thoroughly unwanted and resisted by the Iraqi people and their parliament?]
TeddySanFran @ 47
Our troops are needed here to protect their country from a “domestic enemy”. The neo-conservative fascist army BLACKWATER.
Siun @ 53
bless you for having the fortitude to keep going back down there and bringing up that which others would prefer remain interred.
I confess there have been days when I turn away from one of your posts, but I try not to because we all need to look, we need to see this, we all need to act.
scarlet p. @ 6
fun
I just love the juxtaposition of those two posts.
*sigh*
Lt Colonel Bob Bateman wrote about the Marines and the possible collapse of their values at
http://mediamatters.org/altercation/200705170003#3
It’s an interesting and frightening perspective from a career soldier who still seems to believe in “duty, honor, country” and upholding the Constitution.
N=1 @ 46
Well, another point to consider to put this in context: Pollack is a nurse in the acting Army SG role. She was catapulted into that position with the ouster of the Army SG. She actually has been active in both Army clinical nursing (she’s a nurse anesthetist) as well as an administrator. I think she’s had a lot of things thrown at her because she’s also dealing with an extreme Army nurse shortage (10% and nurse officers leaving at twice the rates of all other Army officers). I tend to give her the benefit of the doubt, as I follow her testimony and actions fairly closely – I think she made a poor choice of words. I also think her intent was to reassure that those soldiers and Marines who were studied weren’t acting on their thoughts of unethical actions. That’s actually a key feature in psychiatry of determining impulse control.
And I think that was what she was trying to convey.
Not to excuse the alarming results of the study – but to put them in more of a healthcare context.
Sorry N=1, Her ‘excuse’ was spin, not analysis or leadership. I know, let’s just say she was following orders and she’s off the hook.
Lew Koch @ 34
So long, last of the MSM.
Back to Wolf Shitzer talking about Edward’s hair.
Sparkles @ 15, someone should tell Russert it depends on which god he is working for. He certainly can take credit for working to spread the word for the god of the neocons.
Elliot at 59: Noirblogger.
TeddySanFran @ 65
that is the prefect word for it
pow wow@55:
This is so important! The supplemental which the Ds are pushing for uses as one “benchmark” that must be met, the passage of this horrendous bill of theft.
But then, as long as petro is happy, so, it seems, are all the pols.
Lou Costello @62
That’s not what I’m saying, at all. She is on the healthcare side of the Army – and I think that those folks have a different perspective from the fighting folks, yes? She’s trying to deal with a long period of nurse shortages, growing physician shortages, and years of a Rumsfeld dictated outsourcing of personnel, services and accountability. So far, she hasn’t backed away from presenting data fully – even when it has been damning, as far as I’ve been able to ascertain.
Are you seeing issues where she has looked the other way or has shirked responsibility? I’d be interested in links, please.
WRT oil companies — wonder if they’d change their tune if Congress instituted a plan to nationalize them?
You know to “keep the gasoling flowing.”
Siun writes
And
pow wow @ 56 says:
It’s as if Frank Burns and Col. Flagg have taken over…Unfortunately.
Attacking doctors and hospitals, destroying medical supplies, this happens in many places.
Just ask in each case, Cui Bono?
Lew Koch @ 34
I must strongly disagree that it doesn’t matter who did it. If our tax dollars are supporting right wing “accidental” killings of journalists, it matters very much.
The truth can be dangerous.
OT -and forgive me if you’ve seen it
Rumsfeld To Create Research Foundation To Teach About ‘U.S. Engagement In World Affairs’
The world’s next generation of Donald Rumsfelds will soon have a place to study and grow.
check out “Some potential lessons Rumsfeld could offer his pupils” :)
Another reason Bush has refused to implement a draft — apart from it being politically catastrophic and making it clear on Main Street and in the MSM that we’re in a real shooting war — is that it democratizes the fighting forces and makes it harder to instill unit discipline.
That is, kids from Iowa never forget they’re kids from Iowa, and when a commander says or does something stupid or unethical, they say it’s stupid or unethical. A lot of professional service personnel do the same, but not in the numbers required to affect change, or so it seems. They, after all, want to stay in the service for a career.
We will also have to remake the military services after Shrub gets through with his forcible rape of them, too.
echoing Elliott at 58.
From the WaPo story in the ThinkProgress link in the post:
Military training says that you are to report breaches of conduct up the chain of command. If 2/3s of the Marines and half the Army is predisposed not to do that, I can’t see how Gen Pollock can make the statement “They’re not torturing the people. And I think it speaks very well to the level of training that we have in the military today.”
I can sympathize with Gen Pollock’s postion, N=1, but her grasp of the scope of the problem outlined in the report seems a bit shaky at best.
One last point: going back to the Rumsfeld outsourcing, no planning years -
The Army, if it HAD been able to plan, would have also been able to predict with more accuracy, what kinds of injuries would be incurred by soldiers and Marines, their severity and how many would be injured. This was never done, through all of Rumsfeld’s tenure. Therefore, the wave upon wave of injured and mentally ill totally overwhelmed the Army. And then the “new” dictum by Rumsfeld not to discharge the injured and release them into the VA system kept long term patients in the Army as active duty -those Walter Reed outpatients – needing care that the Army never had provided before, and had no pre-planning heads up that it needed to do so. Only now is Pollack and the military healthcare system across the branches able to handle so many traumatic brain injuries, antibiotic resistant infections that are peculiar to the Middle East (acinobacter is one bug commonly referred to as Baghdad Boil – and those bugs are the real terrorists following us here – they will soon be found in the US as those returning with them spread them here), complex open wounds, multiple fractures, amputations and major burns. Those are just the physical injuries – there is also PTSD, closed head trauma with delayed presentation and a host of other health problems.
This is roughly the equivalent of being a 1000 bed emergency department with 50,000 severely injured patients arriving at your door.
No one has covered this, although I blog about the systems problems frequently. Why? Because the services most lacking are those of professional nursing. Nursing care gets no healthcare reporting from any news source. If you don’t believe me, have a look around on my blog -read the posts tagged with Walter Reed, and see what you think.
P J Evans @ 14
Yes.
They have come back to join law enforcement: some years ago.
On the second day of the 1999 Seattle protests, medics (marked, treating patients) were targets of tear gas grenades.
[When you and the casualty - seated - are the only people for dozens of yards, you know the riot squad officer you watch taking aim and firing at you is targeting you.]
They have come back to join law enforcement.
Ever since December 1, 1999 “action medics” across the US have reported very deliberate attacks upon our persons, activities, and temprorary “clinics”.
In April 2000 the DC PD seized our entire clinic (with tens of thousands worth of supplies) and the warehouse convergence space housing us.
The pretext: fire code violations.
Enforced at 7 AM by an armed phalanx of DC Riot PD who just happened to show up with the Fide Dept.
The DC PD just happened to hold the entire convergence space – and our deadly puppets and bandages – until after the IMF/WB protests.
They are back from Central America, Southeast Asia, and the Mid East.
They target clinics and clinicians.
They have come back to join law enforcement.
They are back.
Peterr @ 76
The only lesson these generals learned from Mai Lai is that it’s only considered a crime if you get caught on camera.
New Thread
Emptywheel is upstairs!
Didn’t Nichole say something about arranging to commit your cruelties all at once and then never again if you wanted to keep order in a conquered land? A constant stream of cruelties gives Iraqs a daily new reson to hate us and gets them used to our efforts. Which means we have to commit more cruelties than before to have the desired effect. Which leads to a growing spiral of hate for us. Bush may be a tyrannt but he is a bad one its almost like he is trying to lose control of Iraq.
Marcy nails it again in the new thread.
Will The Republicans Back Up Their Condemnations With A Vote Of No Confidence?
Peterr @ 76
I agree with you that from the in-the-field side, she isn’t presenting the data accurately. From the healthcare provider side, she probably is, if you look at it as a psychiatric impulse control issue.
In healthcare, there is also a strong trend to analyze problems with care and procedures from a non-punitive and process improvement approach. Her report read, to me at least, as if that was the perspective from which she was reporting – not from a military soldier accountability perspective. But I’m not from a military background – just healthcare – I could be misreading.
N=1 @ 67
Again N=1, Her comment sounds like ‘CYA at all costs’ and salute while you do it. Now if YOU are saying it’s amazing it’s not worse than reported because of ____________ (insert excuse here), then that’s just spin. Sorry, I’ve got no links for that. No offense.
Phule (#39) – I totally agree with you:
“Problem is, after this Iraq will NEVER want outsiders coming in ever again.
“Those that do will be killed.”
This is why planning for the end of occupation is vital and needs to happen now.
A lot of training has to be organised out of Iraq not just for security reasons but also to reinforce the counter productivity of the meme of ‘eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth’ that mires everybody, particularly Iraqis, in an abysmal hopelessness.
Life is about living not mere survival but that doesn’t happen unless we acknowledge what we want to live for and how to get there.
brendan @ 40
As the US military commenced sustained collective punishment of the citizens of Fallujah, the US shut down civilian access to hospitals.
Our brave military
war criminalsleaders on the scene justified the hospital closure with concerns about insurgents using the wounded for propaganda.Related article and the full briefing -
“Almost half of surveyed troops say torture OK”
Link:
http://www.marinecorpstimes.co…..cs_070503/
The team was commissioned by U.S. Central Command. A copy of the team’s findings was obtained by Army Times April 30, and then released to the public May 4 at a Pentagon news briefing.
Full briefing (PDF):
http://www.militarytimes.com/s…..8apr07.pdf
Sona – Iraq belongs to Iraqis and the only actions taken should be at the request of Iraqis – not from the outside. Iraq has quite competent people – we just have made sure they are not allowed to exercise that competence. But is it *their country* and their sovereignty must be respected -for a change.
Kirk – thanks for the reminder of the actions against medics. Another unreported story that deserves attention.
N-1 – very useful information, I’ll be checking your blog.
Punaise – waving, hi!
merci for what you do, Siun.
Thanks for the posting Siun. Sorry I didn’t get here earlier.
Just to point out a few things:
“Guides” isn’t written either with a lay (non-military) or western audience in mind and also that the English language service is the smallest part of what we do.
The commenter who said they were American trained:
They’re American trained, financed, controlled, and supervised. Particularly in Al-Anbar they don’t do a damned thing without American approval and American backup.
Moreover as markfromireland pointed out in that posting there’ve been plenty of times when the Americans have attacked medical facilities and personnel directly.
There’s a very nasty and unfortunately true point to be made here and it’s made by people on “Guides” most of whom are Iraki.
If you want to see a society’s real values in action all you have to do is look at how their troops and their police behave. We have this quote from a senior American officer about Irakis on our masthead for a reason:
I think my comment has gone into moderation
[Mod: try refresh, it should be there]
Erdla! Great to hear from you. I see your comment, did you try to refresh? Our greetings to your family and thanks for what all of you are doing for peace.
Erdla @ 90 –
many thanks for the truth you tell.
a small sample of what will go up on guides tonight when they’ve finished verifying and then translating the reports:
Erdla – thank you for stopping by … esp when you have lovely new babies to care for!
And thank you for making it quite clear that the Fallujah attack is but one of many and also simply part of a continuing policy and practice of abuse and destruction of our Iraqi sisters and brothers.
Thank you as always for all you and the Guides team does!
Rob @ 17
Don’t make “the perfect” the enemy of “the good”.
Every step in the Right direction is worth taking. After all, it’s gonna take us a while to evict the pResident, so we should take every gain we can until that glorious day.
You’re welcome – it’s another posting being done by many people on the team tonight which means that very early in the day whoever was monitroing reports put out a message saying things are bad.
It probably wont go out for quite a while. Friday is prayer day in Muslim country’s so …..
sona @ 1:12 pm
Do you really think that they want training from a country that has treated them as barbarically as yours has?
You have no IDEA the contempt with which they refer to your country your troops and your values if you say things like that.
Your country has managed to treat them infinitely worse than Saddam ever managed and you have the gall to say that your country has to arrange training for them?????
Siun thanks again – the twins are being peaceful tonight :-)
Kathleen @ 30
It sounds like FireDogLake.com needs to give them a stage and audience so they can tell the story.
MarkH – there is no “good” option here …
Iraq belongs to the Iraqis and they have no desire to have any more of our “help”.
For those who do not know Erdla, she is a member of the GorillasGuides team and the new mum of twins. She is based outside Iraq.
I have to echo Siun. American “help” in the Middle East means:
Starving them.
Bombing their water treatment plants.
Depleted urnanium.
Child cancer courtesy of that.
Denying them the medicines for those children.
Bombing civilian targets.
Invading them.
Looting their country.
Mass murder.
American troops using chemical weapons (Fallujah, Haditha, Tal Afar.
Torture.
Arming, training, and financing death squads.
Unlawful detentions.
Trying deleiberately to start a civil war so you can control their assets.
Turning large parts of their capital into gigantic open air prisons.
Doing the same to some of their citys.
Really with “help” like that maybe they’d be better off with some hindrance. Here’s what one of our writers has to say about your help:
This is what we posted that day – one of many funerals
Image
I also have both a father in law and a husband (who has not yet had a chance to hold his children) now in Irak working with humantarian organisations trying to mitigate not even undo just mitigate some of the evil done by America to the Iraki people. I get very p*ss*d off when I read that garbage about “help.”
Go dance on some other mass graves.
Siun @ 88
Perhaps I am not expressing myself well to explain the misunderstanding. I do not doubt that Iraq has capable people – it had a functioning system, including a heath care infrastructure which was the envy in the middle east despite the sanctions throughout the 90’s. The Moustansihriya University was an elite academe that attracted both students and academics from the region, including Iran.
De-Ba’athification has sidelined many professionals who had to join the party to be able to exercise their profession. Many have been killed in the ensuing chaos and many many more are in exile or refugees. We are dealing with a situation where Iraqi refugees, in and out of the country, outnumber the population of Eire.
Iraqis should have sovereignty to exercise but all the talk about benchmarks affirm an occupation, not sovereignty.
Why should the Iraqi Parliament need to come to an agreement re their oil industry that is against their own national interests within a specified timeline dictated by the occupying powers?
The Parliament was put under indecent pressure to finalise a Constitution because without that the oil contracts could not be formulated. Now, these need to be ratified but Iraqis do not accept the terms for good patriotic reasons. Yet, this is touted as a benchmark, so much so that the occupation decrees that the Iraqi Parliament cannot recess for the unbearably hot summer with little electricity, let alone security, available. Is that sovereignty?
Occupation needs to end asap with no benchmarks tied to Iraqi performance.
I am not American though I have lived and worked there for a number of years.
My point is that the world cannot simply wash its hands off Iraq even if the US does as it did in Vietnam. I don’t see a Marshall Plan for Iraq in view. Yet that is what is needed. I referred to training because de-Ba’athification has decimated the country’s intelligentsia. Repatriation and resettlement of displaced Iraqis are also issues that need to be addressed – yes by Iraq, if there is an Iraq after all this, but with help from outside too.
My country(ies), Australia and the UK, are equally complicit in this unjustifiable war crime. But who picks up the pieces? The world cannot make the US do anything it will not do nor can disempowered citizenries exercise their representative democracies except at periodic elections.
I have worked at the UN on secondment from the Australian Public Service (APS). I know the labyrinthine backroom deals and the woeful bureaucracy that one has to work with. I have also worked at the OECD, again as an APS employee. I am well aware of the length of time it takes to get anything meaningful on the radar screen. I have retired now on medical grounds but I am not an invalid by any means. I still have contacts within the bureaucracies. That is how I know that there is no focus on what needs to be done for the future.
I really don’t want to see the World Bank and the IMF dictating Iraq’s future because it will go down the gurgler even faster with no hope of return.
Public pressure is important if only because politicians every now and then need to refer back to their electorates for legitimacy. I have worked tirelessly (in the background) against John Howard’s draconian and inhumane immigration policies re refugees. The gains have been small but important.
I am a fan of the FDL and its many contributors and also of Glen Greenwald. I do not comment often because I know the US democracy has what it takes to assert itself and address abuses. I wish I could be as confident about Australia where I returned last July. Then again, things have a tendency to unravel which I hope is happening here too.
Sona—
You raise good points that I fear no one will see, as people have moved on to other threads. You might try posting them again later or even tomorrow for a wider audience.
Sona—
The concept of the Iraqi population being held hostage—poor electricity, dirty water, attacks on hospitals and doctors, war in the streets—until the government turns over the future of their oil to US corporations…
Sobering.
Please do post again, every day if necessary, to get this idea thru. We don’t get it yet. I’m not even sure I get it. Try again to educate us this is really important.
edit—I think it was the attack on the hospital that pushed me over the line into understanding how this game is being played out. We have them in a sqeeze play. Nice country ya got here, too bad all these attacks are happening. Oil change?
thank you egregious – i will try to repost but i don’t want to be off topic – my postings on this thread related to values grounded in ethics. I tend to shy away from the word ‘moral/morality’ because i reject the implicit religiosity inherent in that and prefer ‘ethics’. Ethics are universal rather than embedded memes in particular socio-cultural zeitgeists as morals/moralities often are.