More Realities About The Iraq Mess
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Foreign Policy, WarFirst, if you sell enough stolen ammo on the civil-war fueled black market, you can make enough to get out of the country.
From The Guardian:
These days Rami gets most of his supplies from the new American-equipped Iraqi army. “We buy ammunition from officers in charge of warehouses, a small box of AK-47 bullets is $450 (£230). If the guy sells a thousand boxes he can become rich and leave the country.” But as the security situation deteriorates, Rami finds it increasingly difficult to travel across Baghdad. “Now I have to pay a Shia taxi driver to bring the ammo to me. He gets $50 for each shipment.”The box of 700 bullets that Rami buys for $450 today would have cost between $150 and $175 a year ago. The price of a Kalashnikov has risen from $300 to $400 in the same period. The inflation in arms prices reflects Iraq’s plunge toward civil war but, largely unnoticed by the outside world, the Sunni insurgency has also changed. The conflict into which 20,000 more American troops will be catapulted over the next few weeks is very different to the one their comrades experienced even a year ago.
And by the way, warnings that point to how ineffective the 20,000 additional troops will be are stacking up…
Like Abu Omar before him, Abu Aisha, a mid-level Sunni commander, had come to understand that the threat from the Shia was perhaps greater than his need to fight the occupying Americans. Abu Aisha fought in Baghdad’s western Sunni suburbs, he was a former NCO in the Iraqi army and followed an extreme form of Islam known as Salafism.Deep lines criss-crossed his narrow forehead and his eyes half closed when he tried to answer a question He seemed to evaluate every answer before he spoke. He claimed involvement in dozens of attacks on US and Iraqi troops, mostly IEDs (bombs) but also ambushes and execution of alleged Shia spies. “We have stopped using remote controls to detonate IEDs,” he volunteered halfway through our conversation. “Only wires work now because the Americans are jamming the signals.”
On his mobile phone he proudly showed me grainy images of dead bodies lying in the street, their hands tied behind their backs . He claimed they were Shia agents and that he had killed them. “There is a new jihad now,” he said, echoing Abu Omar’s warning. “The jihad now is against the Shia, not the Americans.”
In Ramadi there was still jihad against the Americans because there were no Shia to fight, but in Baghdad his group only attacked the Americans if they were with Shia army forces or were coming to arrest someone.
We’re sending 20,000 additional brave men and women into this mess. Sorry people, but those forces will be spread too thin and ultimately won’t make a dent.
What a mess.
This entry was posted on Saturday, January 13th, 2007 and is filed under Foreign Policy, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
January 14th, 2007 at 8:25 pm
Thanks; This link is an eye-opener. It’s just amazing we coud be so obvlivious to all of this happening until it’s too late to do anything. If this is reality in Iraq today then what can we say about our role in this world as a self acclaimed ’superpower’ ?
I can’t tell if this was simply too lofty a goal; trying to force democracy on Iraq in hopes that it would spread and help in our fight against terrorist. Or if this was just idiocy from our leaders empowered by the extreme circumstances but not up to the task.
What I know for sure is that it wasn’t good conservative doctrine, or thoughtful religious idiology that was used to get us into this situation. And I know that it may be a waste of time to be thinkiing about the past all the time. But to all of you good Conservatives, and thoughtful Christians out there, is this what you wanted?