Iraqi soldiers show contempt for American soldiers in Baghdad - 26-Jan-07 - Generational Dynamics

Generational Dynamics Web Log for 26-Jan-07

Iraqi soldiers show contempt for American soldiers in Baghdad

This is the other side of the question, "What's REALLY happening in Iraq."

A story in Friday's NY Times shows the contempt that many Iraqi soldiers have for the effort to remove the insurgents from Baghdad.

In this situation, American forces arrived on Haifa Street in Baghdad planning to join up with Iraqi forces to dislodge Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias, but the Iraqi forces didn't show up! Here's what happened, according to the embedded reporter:

"When the Iraqi units finally did show up, it was with the air of a class outing, cheering and laughing as the Americans blew locks off doors with shotguns. As the morning wore on and the troops came under fire from all directions, another apparent flaw in this strategy became clear as empty apartments became lairs for gunmen who flitted from window to window and killed at least one American soldier, with a shot to the head. ...

Many of the Iraqi units that showed up late never seemed to take the task seriously, searching haphazardly, breaking dishes and rifling through personal CD collections in the apartments. Eventually the Americans realized that the Iraqis were searching no more than half of the apartments; at one point the Iraqis completely disappeared, leaving the American unit working with them flabbergasted.

“Where did they go?” yelled Sgt. Jeri A. Gillett. Another soldier suggested, “I say we just let them go and we do this ourselves.”

Then the gunfire began. It would come from high rises across the street, from behind trash piles and sandbags in alleys and from so many other directions that the soldiers began to worry that the Iraqi soldiers were firing at them. Mortars started dropping from across the Tigris River, to the east, in the direction of a Shiite slum.

The only thing that was clear was that no one knew who the enemy was. “The thing is, we wear uniforms — they don’t,” said Specialist Terry Wilson."

This is the other side of the story of what's happening in Iraq.

To analyze this situation, once again we start from the point that Iraq is in a generational Awakening era, as we've discussed many, many times. In simplest terms, this means that the Iraqi people don't want any part of a war, certainly not an all-out civil war that the idiots in Washington can't stop talking about.

We've shown how this works out in Lebanon, which is also in a generational Awakening era: In the summer war, Hizbollah fought the war with Israel as a "war from the comfort of home," launching missiles toward Israel and then returning home to their wives. And then, Hizbollah chief Nasrallah's attempt to overthrow the government in Lebanon has caused Nasrallah to lose support among his own Lebanese supporters, in reaction to the 1980s civil war.

And yesterday, we showed how this works in Iraq: Al-Qaeda cannot get Iraqi jahidists to fight, except when paid. So they have to import suicide bombers and other jihadists from other countries, mostly from Saudi Arabia, which is deeply into a generational Crisis era.

The New York Times article quoted above shows that the American forces have exactly the same problems with Iraqis: They simply don't want to fight. They'd just as soon let the Sunni jihadists and Shia death squads kill each other.

Surely this convinces anyone who is not yet convinced that there's nothing resembling a civil war going on in Iraq, except for the airheads in Washington most of whom believe whatever supports their political position.

However, the fact that it means there's no civil war doesn't mean that it's good news. The war in Iraq is a proxy war between al-Qaeda and Iran. If the Iraqis aren't willing to fight for the Sunni jihadists (or the Shiite militias), then they aren't willing to fight against the Sunni jihadists or the Shiite militias.

In simplest terms, this affects our strategy in Iraq as follows:

If we withdraw from Iraq, there won't be a bloodbath civil war, as almost all the airheads in Washington are assuming. (Isn't it amazing how the entire political debate in Washington is based on an assumption that's completely wrong? Amazing.) But if we withdraw from Iraq, then al-Qaeda and Iran will rush in to fill the vacuum, and other countries (especially Turkey and Saudi Arabia) will rush in as well.

If we continue to fight in Iraq, which is what we're doing, then we have to focus on removing the imported Sunni jihadists and Shiite death squads, and we can't count on disciplined support from the Iraqi forces. But the good news is that we only have to clean out a few hundred people, and we aren't in the middle of a civil war as the Washingtonians claim.

Always keep in mind, though, that when historians look back at this period, the Iraq war will be a minor sideshow. The main show, the center ring of the circus, is still in Israel and the Palestinian territories. The situation in those two regions continues to deteriorate every day almost without fail, and a major war cannot be far off. And that war will engulf the entire region, with Iraq becoming far less important than it seems today. (26-Jan-07) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 26-Jan-07 Iraqi soldiers show contempt for American soldiers in Baghdad

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 26-Jan-07
Iraqi soldiers show contempt for American soldiers in Baghdad