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Born at the Crest of the Empire

Saturday, January 05, 2008

Iraqi soldier kills two US troops

Unfortunately, with the greater mixing of US and Iraqi forces, this was bound to happen sooner or later, an Iraqi soldier turned his gun on 2 US soldiers and killed them. (He's been caught.)

At this point, we don't know the details. The Shia generals are quickly trying to blame "Sunni Arab insurgent links," but, right now, there's no way to tell.

Also in Iraq, (LATimes) Shia members of the Iraqi parliament have increased their efforts to strip Sunni IAF leader Adnan Dulaimi of his parliamentary immunity.

6 Comments:

  • I imagine something like that could give people second thoughts about joint patrols.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 11:18 AM  

  • Yeah. I'm actually pretty surprised that we haven't seen more of this, however, I also don't know the procedures.

    It might be Iraqis 50 yards in front, no ammo clips until we reach the target area.

    That's how I'd run my Iraqis.

    By Blogger mikevotes, at 11:34 AM  

  • Which of course doesn't do much for their dignity.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 12:05 PM  

  • If you look back on Bush's speech where he proposed the surge the idea was supposed to be that our guys would be in a support role while the Iraqis take the lead and disarm (or kill off) the militias.

    None of that worked out.
    WE did the work, while the Iraqis stayed in perpetual training. Then we co-opted the militias instead of disarming them - Hell, we even armed them better than before.

    Now we can't turn our backs on the Iraqi troops, and the militias are the ones guaranteeing the peace. The Iraqi Army still has "loyalty issues" and can't "stand up" without training wheels.

    So how does this "success" square with Bush's vision of the surge? The only "success" has come from completely disregarding his "vision" and going with what works.
    Whatever progress we've seen has come in spite of Bush, not because of his "stay the course" mentality.

    By Blogger Todd Dugdale , at 1:28 PM  

  • That's what happened todd. The American Way came up against Inshallah. Could be a long, long fight with no clear winner.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 2:38 PM  

  • Sorry (and I mean that sincerely), but I'm not buying the idea that we're in Iraq to fight 'radical jihadism', however it's being defined these days.

    There were no 'radical jihadis' in Iraq before we invaded. AQ has been a factor, but it's been a marginal one. It's not the "American Way" against "Inshallah", it's us trying to referee a football game with baseball umpires. There is nothing involving our "vital interest" as to whether Iraq is dominated by Sunnis or Shia. It's a civil war, not some battleground where Western Civilisation fights a battle to the death with the Islamic Menace.

    It makes as much sense to say that the American Civil War was all about payback for the attack on Fort Sumter, or that it was a fight to prove the dominance of an industrial economy over an agricultural one.

    The entire premise of Iraq was that the world's supply of 'radical jihadists' would flock to Iraq and wait in line to be killed by our troops. It didn't work that way, did it? They struck in London, they struck in Bali and Spain, they struck in Pakistan, and they're fighting us to a standstill in Afghanstan. If we would have invaded Tunisia, sure, some of the 'radical jihadists' would have fought us there, too. That wouldn't make it the Central Front of Anything. It just so happened that the Decider picked a country that was ripe for a civil war to fight his Death Match against Islam. Bloody brilliant choice, eh?

    Instead of showing the Islamic world that we're tough enough to take on radical Islam and "win", all we've done is prove that a few thousand AQ can get America to squander a trillion dollars and 4000 men and have nothing to show for it.

    When will people realise that the War On Terror is primarily a law-enforcement issue, not a military conflict?

    The American Way bought itself the job of settling a religious civil war created by the piss-poor job the British Empire did in drawing up Iraq's boundaries way-back-when. Quit pretending it's anything more glorious than that, because it bloody well isn't.

    I'm not buying it.

    By Blogger Todd Dugdale , at 5:41 PM  

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