Our Military is Unraveling
In “Nemesis”, author Chalmers Johnson commented on the American made human catastrophe in Iraq.
He states that our military exhibits a striking resemblance to the failures of the Vietnam era, thirty years ago. Apparently, the Pentagon hasn’t learned any lessons from the defeat of 1975. Our military went to war on the basis of its own propaganda of being the “lone superpower power the likes of which the world had never seen”. In Iraq that has turned out to be nothing but arrogant nonsense.
Instead of behaving in a professional manner, our military invaded Iraq with far too small a force; failed to respond adequately when parts of the Iraqi Army went underground; tolerated an orgy of looting throughout the country; ignored international obligations of an occupying power to protect the national treasures of an occupied country and fanned the flames of an insurgency, by committing numerous atrocities against unarmed Iraqi civilians.
Our former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas W. Freeman, says of Bush's recent “surge” strategy in Baghdad and al-Anbar Province: “The reinforcement of failure is a poor substitute for its correction.”
Retired General Barry McCaffrey, commander of the 24th Infantry Division in the first Iraq war and a consistent cheerleader for Bush strategies in the second, recently radically changed his tune. He now says, “No Iraqi government official, coalition soldier, diplomat, reporter, nor contractor can walk the streets of Baghdad, nor Mosul, nor Kirkuk, nor Basra, nor Tikrit, nor Najaf, nor Ramadi, without heavily armed protection....The U.S. Army is rapidly unraveling.”
Chalmers Johnson expresses grave concern that military failure in Iraq is still being spun into an endless web of lies and distortions by the White House, the Pentagon, military pundits, and reporting of propagandists disguised as journalists. Chalmers uses the example, in the first months of 2007, rising car-bomb attacks in Baghdad were making a mockery of Bush regimes claims that the U.S. troop escalation in the capital had brought about “a dramatic drop in sectarian violence.” The official response to this problem was for the Pentagon to simply stop including deaths from car bombings in its count of sectarian casualties. The Pentagon has never attempted to report civilian casualties publicly or accurately. Since August 2003, there have been over 1,050 car bombings in Iraq. One study estimates that through June 2006 the death toll from car bombings alone has been a staggering 78,000 Iraqis.
He states that our military exhibits a striking resemblance to the failures of the Vietnam era, thirty years ago. Apparently, the Pentagon hasn’t learned any lessons from the defeat of 1975. Our military went to war on the basis of its own propaganda of being the “lone superpower power the likes of which the world had never seen”. In Iraq that has turned out to be nothing but arrogant nonsense.
Instead of behaving in a professional manner, our military invaded Iraq with far too small a force; failed to respond adequately when parts of the Iraqi Army went underground; tolerated an orgy of looting throughout the country; ignored international obligations of an occupying power to protect the national treasures of an occupied country and fanned the flames of an insurgency, by committing numerous atrocities against unarmed Iraqi civilians.
Our former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas W. Freeman, says of Bush's recent “surge” strategy in Baghdad and al-Anbar Province: “The reinforcement of failure is a poor substitute for its correction.”
Retired General Barry McCaffrey, commander of the 24th Infantry Division in the first Iraq war and a consistent cheerleader for Bush strategies in the second, recently radically changed his tune. He now says, “No Iraqi government official, coalition soldier, diplomat, reporter, nor contractor can walk the streets of Baghdad, nor Mosul, nor Kirkuk, nor Basra, nor Tikrit, nor Najaf, nor Ramadi, without heavily armed protection....The U.S. Army is rapidly unraveling.”
Chalmers Johnson expresses grave concern that military failure in Iraq is still being spun into an endless web of lies and distortions by the White House, the Pentagon, military pundits, and reporting of propagandists disguised as journalists. Chalmers uses the example, in the first months of 2007, rising car-bomb attacks in Baghdad were making a mockery of Bush regimes claims that the U.S. troop escalation in the capital had brought about “a dramatic drop in sectarian violence.” The official response to this problem was for the Pentagon to simply stop including deaths from car bombings in its count of sectarian casualties. The Pentagon has never attempted to report civilian casualties publicly or accurately. Since August 2003, there have been over 1,050 car bombings in Iraq. One study estimates that through June 2006 the death toll from car bombings alone has been a staggering 78,000 Iraqis.
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