Sunday, August 20, 2006

Chuck Hagel is right, it's just like Viet Nam

Reading the piece by Michael Gordon in the Sunday Times magazine brought back memories of similar articles written about the South Vietnamese Army so many years ago.
By reputation, Colonel Mujeed is said to be a decisive and experienced officer, which is all to the good, as his forces are approaching a critical phase. The Iraqi Army is scheduled to assume the entire responsibility for securing Falluja this fall, though a Marine unit will be poised to rush in if there is major trouble. The Iraqi colonel said he needed more troops to carry out the mission but expressed no apprehension about doing so.

“I think they will take it over, struggle with it a bit and then grow into it,” Major Richardson said. “That is the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is they take it over, heavy, heavy violence breaks out and essentially the people don’t have any confidence in the army. I don’t see that happening because there are some pretty strong battalion commanders, Mujeed being one of them.” The Iraqi troops “are brave soldiers,” Richardson added. “They can operate. They can shoot. They can communicate, but they can’t sustain themselves. That is the next level. From pay to Humvee tires, they’ve got to be able to sustain themselves.”

One of Mujeed’s bravest performances may have come that day at the soap factory, when Iraq’s new defense minister, Abdul Qader Mohammed Jassim; its new interior minister, Jawad al-Bolani; and Gen. George Casey, the senior American commander, arrived for a visit. Pointing to the list of 70 casualties his battalion suffered in an earlier fight for Ramadi, the Iraqi colonel recounted the familiar litany of problems — the failure to pay soldiers according to their new ranks, the difficulty in getting the Ministry of Defense to approve promotions, the higher pay provided to the local police — and in this case the failure to provide any salaries at all to 34 recruits who graduated from boot camp in April. Because of combat losses and a dearth of recruits, the battalion had less than half of the 759 troops it was authorized.

The Iraqi defense minister insisted that he was only now learning of such problems and promised to take corrective action. Later, I asked Mujeed if he thought anything would come of his appeal. “Sure, he is going to work on it, but he won’t get results soon,” he said. “It is going to take a while.”
As the French say so well; plus ca change, plus ca meme.

The more it changes, the more it is the same.

Comments:
Absolutely correct on all accounts. Cool blog by the way cheers.
 

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