U.S. soldiers will now stay in Iraq on regular tours of 15 months and then will have 12 months at home. The original policy back in 2003 was 12 months deployment and 24 months home – 33% deployment time is now up to 56%. Over the years, that breaks all personal relations.
Not that I do care so much for U.S. soldiers’ personal relations, but pissed off GIs will vent their anger somewhere and the lengthened deployment time will lead inevitably to more killed Iraqis.
How does that happen you may ask. ACLU has a file of Iraqi claims of civilians killed by U.S. soldiers. As the NYT reports:
Recently, the Army disclosed roughly 500 claims to the American Civil Liberties Union in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. They are the first to be made public.
They represent only a small fraction of the claims filed. In all, the military has paid more than $32 million to Iraqi and Afghan civilians for noncombat-related killings, injuries and property damage, an Army spokeswoman said.
That number does not include some other payments made but claims are only accepted if the death or damage was definitely not combat related. Often claims are simply ignored:
“I know plenty of lawyers who did not pay any condolences payments at all,” said Mr. Tracy, who is now a legal consultant for the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict. “There was no reason for it. It was clearly not combat, and the victim was clearly innocent, all the facts are there, witness statements, but they wouldn’t pay them.”
With deployment time going up, discipline will go down and more civilians will get killed for no reason at all.
As Juan Cole wrote this morning, the Iraqi parliament is falling apart. Several factions seem to be ready to skip out while lots of parliamentarians are living abroad anyway and are not available to vote. After today’s bombing within the parliament cafeteria, more members of parliament will stay away.
Who will now legislate the oil revenue sharing (90% to U.S. interests, 10% to Iraqis) law Bush and the Democrats in Congress are demanding Iraqis sign?
The bridge bombing in Baghdad today was hardly the job of one or two suicide bombers. The bridge is broken at two distinctive points and the extensive damage as visible in pictures looks much more like the result of experienced demolition engineers. More bridges will go down like this one.
Turkey’s military, which has a very strong position in the Turkish political structure, is demanding a free hand in Iraq:
"An operation into Iraq is necessary,” said Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, the head of Turkey’s powerful military. "The PKK has huge freedom of movement in Iraq … It has spread its roots in Iraq.”
Buyukanit is a hardliner – he will get his way or …
Meanwhile in Afghanistan bomb drops killed some 35 Taliban. Actually Taliban is the description of an ideology. These folks killed are first of all Pashtun tribes people who lost their share of power when the U.S. invaded their country. Now they want some power back and/or revenge for the death of their tribes-folks. To always and indifferent label the people of the biggest tribe in Afghanistan as Taliban is just like calling every Iraqi patriot or enraged citizen as "anti-Iraqi force." It is misleading and stupid.
Such propaganda labels end up being believed by the decision makers themselves. Which then leads to more wrong decisions that exacerberate the problems. On Afghanistan, some NATO members don’t believe in the U.S. propaganda (yet), others do. NATO may break over this, which is fine with me as the reason for NATO’s existence ceased to exist some 15 years ago anyway. Afghanistan is hardly near the North Atlantic.
As a bonus to this rambling war post: This picture by CentCom shows a place in Baghdad last weekend where people "call for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq."
There is a picture of the same place in Baghdad when Saddam’s statue was dragged down there by a U.S. salvage tank.
Compare the number of people at each event. What story do these pictures tell?