Sunday, July 23, 2006
No Chocolates and Flowers For U.S. Troops In Iraq
Comparison with Vietnam back again! Lessons, what lessons? Cannot be true. It is a piece of leftist, anti-war propaganda. The chocolates and flowers are late in coming. The Iraqis will eventually greet us as liberators after the Iraq they knew ceases to exist. Thomas E. Ricks write in the Post: "In Iraq, Military Forgot Lessons of Vietnam"
- But there is also strong evidence, based on a review of thousands of military documents and hundreds of interviews with military personnel, that the U.S. approach to pacifying Iraq in the months after the collapse of Hussein helped spur the insurgency and made it bigger and stronger than it might have been.
Trust them to find justification for murder of civilians -- Rules of Engagement (ROE). Soldiers facing charges for killing Iraqi civilians are being defended on the ground that their actions were based on ROE. That is how we are going to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis! "Army Lt. Col. John W. McClory found that Spec. Nathan B. Lynn, 21, of South Williamsport, Pa., did nothing wrong in shooting Gani Ahmad Zaben in the post-curfew darkness outside a group of homes on Feb. 15. McClory ruled that Lynn thought the man was armed with an AK-47 and believed he was a threat."
- The military ROE in Iraq are central to most homicide cases against U.S. troops and are at the heart of a major investigation into the killings of two dozen civilians in a group of homes in Haditha. Lawyers representing several Marines in that case -- which has so far yielded no charges -- have said they plan to argue that their clients were following the ROE when they thought they were under attack.
- Yesterday, the Associated Press reported that four Army soldiers charged with killing three detainees they captured in raids near Samarra told investigators their ROE were to kill "all military-age males." They said commanders authorized the rules for a special mission and initially cleared them of wrongdoing, according to the AP.
