The Bravery Of Iraqis - Michael J. Totten’s Latest
Michael J. Totten’s latest is actually posted in Commentary and you can read the whole thing there:
Iraqi Army soldiers have a terrible reputation for cowardice and corruption – especially in Baghdad – but it’s unfair to write them all off after reading the news out of Iraq’s capital Sunday. Three Iraqi Army soldiers tackled a suicide bomber at an Army Day parade and were killed when he exploded his vest.
While embedded with the United States Army and Marines I heard over and over again that the Iraqi Army and Iraqi Police have improved a lot in the past year. This is encouraging, on the one hand, but at the same time it is worrisome. If they are as bad now in some places as I’ve seen myself, they must have really been something in 2005.
At the War Eagle outpost in Baghdad’s Graya’at neighborhood, I was told by a military intelligence officer that the most likely reason we weren’t under mortar attack is because huge numbers of Moqtada al Sadr’s radical Mahdi Army militiamen had infiltrated the ranks of Iraqi Army soldiers who shared the base with us.
A colonel at Camp Taji north of the city told me the U.S. Army doesn’t dare inform their Iraqi Army counterparts about sensitive operations until the very last minute because they don’t want infiltrators to alert the insurgents.
The Iraqi Police in Mushadah, near Taji, were more of a military force than a police force when I visited last July. As many as half were thought to be Al Qaeda operatives, and the other half were so scared they refused to go on patrols until a female American captain showed them up by going outside the station herself.
And this is the new and improved Iraqi Army and Iraqi Police of 2007 during General Petraeus’s surge. Progress in Iraq is relative. It’s hard to say if the Iraqi Army and Iraqi Police could hold the country together by themselves in 2008. Personally, I doubt it. So do most American soldiers and Marines I’ve spoken to. The Iraqis certainly could not have held it together in 2005 or 2006.
The Iraqi Army and Iraqi Police deserve kudos for progress, even so. And they deserve more credit for bravery than they’ve been getting.
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The names of the three fallen Iraqi patriots should have been trumpted far and wide across Iraq and the ME. They along with the shieks who died are the true heroes amoung Iraqis.
Don’t they have a hero of the motherland or fatherland award or something like Saddam had? WTF?
Someone needs to crank up the Iraqi media machine and start framing this war as the good guys (Iraqis and Coalition) against the bad guys (haj and AQ).
Could be because the Shit-ites are in charge? And all the dead were Sunnis.
The day should come when all Iraqis are neither Sunni, Shit-ite or Christian…but one Iraqi people. Here’s a good place to start that idea rolling…
January 11th, 2008 at 3:13 pmAmen Dan!
January 11th, 2008 at 4:16 pmMalik Abdul Ghanem.
Asa’ad Hussein Ali.
Abdul-Hamza Abdul-Hassan Rissan.
Rest in peace, brothers.
It’s strange. Usually, anytime you hear a bunch of muslim names, at least one of them is a variation of ‘Muhammed’. Of course, usually it’s in a story about a jihadi attack or a heinous crime.
Three heroes, arabs with eleven names between them, sacrifice themselves not to kill, but to save lives, not one of those names is ‘Mohammed’.
Think about the life of Mohammed. Most muslims know quite a lot about him. Think about the kind of person who’d choose this name for, and how they’d raise, their kids. Most muslims are decent human beings held prisoner by their ‘religion’. They need to know that there’s a better way.
These heroes’ names should be on the front page of every newspaper from LA to Baghdad to Jakarta. THEY, not the cowardly piece of shit who blew himself up, are the true martyrs.
In Islam, murder is heroism, rape is virtue, and death is salvation. The jihadis consider such men apostates. Nothing I can say condemns Islam more than that.
January 11th, 2008 at 6:06 pmI agree with the comment above.
January 12th, 2008 at 2:29 amI also agree with the above statement
January 12th, 2008 at 3:48 amDan(TheInfidel) & ticticboom
Amen. You guys said it best.
Malik Abdul Ghanem.
Asa’ad Hussein Ali.
Abdul-Hamza Abdul-Hassan Rissan.
Rest in peace, brothers.
January 12th, 2008 at 10:41 am