Letters to the Editor
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Thanks, Salon,
...for laying out in a clear way the ugly facts of IEDs. It is astonishing to me that we seem to have put ourselves in the position of the hapless Turks in "Lawrence of Arabia."
I've wondered why we don't have better surveilance over the roads our troops travel on. Iraq is a desert county with few clouds, just look at the clear photos of Baghdad on Google Earth. So it should be fairly easy to keep watch on the roads, even at night.
However, it would probably take a tremendous number of eyeballs to watch all of the cameras. This is something for which we could use the draft--that is, assuming we really do care about winning in Iraq.
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We should use our skills to solve this one.
Why not develop and deploy unmanned surveillance drones over the roads most used by our troops. Just a fraction of the $5B spent on a fruitless jamming effort could put inexpensive eye in the sky drones just about everywhere.
We could use the 20k "surge" troops to operate them or go with a more netroots operation.
The ideal solution would be a pilot + copilot arrangement operated via standard PCs over the internet. Something like flight simulator controlling a lightweight drone that could destroyed in event of control failure before it fell and caused damage. One soldier should be able to oversee 5 to 10 drone crews much like the cashier at do it yourself checkout lanes.
I bet you could find a lot of volunteers for this effort. Gamers would love it, and so would the relatives of those deployed.
If nothing else more Americans would get a chance to see what is really going on over there.
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Just a number
3,054
It's a number. Just a number. U.S. military deaths to date in Bush 43's war.
ZERO.
It's also a number, just a number.
And, aside from zero being the aggregate number of days of battlefield service of the Bush 43 top administration and their chickenhawk cheerleaders, it's also the number of U.S. troops killed by Saddam's "WMD" -- the vast majority of whom have in fact been killed by the most crude weapons this of rocks and spears.
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Please get the terminology right
This was an interesting and informative article, but this line made me cringe:
"... the M1A1 Abrams tank -- the backbone of America's armored infantry ..."
No, the M1A1 is the backbone of America's armor, which is a different beastie from infantry. Armor: tanks. Infantry: guys walking around with packs and rifles. Mechanized infantry: infantrymen riding around in things that look like tanks, but aren't. These are three different things.
This may seem like a trivial point, but it's this kind of screwup that will lead a lot of vets to say, essentially, "That bunch of lefties at Salon can't even get the basic facts right, why should we trust anything they say?" As a liberal and a veteran, I desperately want to see more of my fellow vets realized how badly the military is being used. Articles in left-leaning publications with correct information will help move us toward this goal; articles with elementary errors will have the opposite effect.
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Guess I should have checked my own facts first ...
The M1A1 is no longer the front-line tank of choice for the US Army; it's been superseded by the M1A2. So again, it's important to check first. And really, none of this information is hard to find. Changing one line of text could greatly improve the entire article's credibility among military readers -- and trust me, there are a lot more active-duty personnel and vets reading Salon than you might think.
(My only excuse is that the last time I was up close and personal with one of these things, in Desert Storm, it was still the A1. Not to mention that I'm just some guy writing a letter to the editor, not a journalist for a major publication.)
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Surge
Its like sending a snake to ah gator fight but wit the right knowledge. Every dogg has its day
I just want free money for college
or a realestate deal like the donald
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In Refusing to Ban Mines, U.S. Hoist on It's Own Petard
By conspicuously refusing to endorse a ban on land mines, which is what IEDs are (perhaps they are called IEDs to avoid calling to mind the term "land mines"), the United States has played a major role in condemning its soldiers to agonizing tours of duty in Iraq. The global movement to ban land mines, akin to the ban on nerve gas decades ago, fell apart when the United States, guided by the Pentagon, refused to agree to anything. The rationale was that the mines in the DMZ were critical to the defense of South Korea.
Hamlet's line about hoist on his own petard literally refers to someone being blown up by their own grenade (petard is an early term for what we call a grenade, bomb, mine or other infernal machine). Of course, the people being blown up are not the ones who refused to join the international movement to ban mines. They are the soldiers send to fight. IEDs are the poor man's artillery and anyone who has endured artillery barrage (mostly WWII and Korean vets, along with some Vietnam vets) will tell you there is nothing the infantry soldier likes less. Not only do the blasts come without warning, they tend to destroy the body in ways rifle and machine gun bullets do not.
Obviously, a ban on land mines would not have prevented their use in Iraq. But violation of an international convention would makes the stakes considerably higher for IED insurgents who got caught. They would branded as war criminals of the kind recognized worldwide, and would not have to treated with the standard usages of the Geneva Convention. For example, they could be tried and convicted of war crimes, even as the war was going on. With no one second-guessing the validity of the trials.
The IED menace is part of the price the United States has paid for invading Iraq with an army that was too small for the job. Had we gone in with half a million troops, the country would not have dissolved into chaos and we would have been able to control the streets and cities and restore normal life a few months, especially if we had not disbanded the Iraqi army, but instead made them our partners (see MacArthur in Japan) in making the occupation work. In other words, securing the neighborhoods of Iraq. Once it became obvious that the Americans were interested only in the oil and didn't care what happened people and culture of Iraq, the Iraqis ceased to care whether American soldiers were ambushed or not. So no matter what happens, "Nobody seen nothing," to use an old New York phrase.
And by the way, we're not getting the oil, either.
Of course, the problem with that is that we did not have half a million soldiers to send to Iraq in 2003, which is what Shinseki was saying in his Congressional testimony and later with his crack about sending a ten division army to do a 12-division job. Actually, it was closer to sending five divisions when 20 were needed.
The IED menace is the product of cowardly polical leadership, unwilling to ask the American people for the measures required to actually win the war it wanted to fight. In other words, Bush and company wanted their war, but lacked the courage to ask for a draft to raise an army big enough to win it. Because they knew that was a price the public would not pay, and worse, by raising it, they would kill popular support for the prospective war.