They Doth Trumpet Too Much
I've said it before, but if you're not occasionally checking out less-traveled information byways like daily Centcom press releases, you're missing some telling nuggets. Here's one from a few days ago:
ISF CONTINUE STRING OF SUCCESSES WITH SMUGGLER'S HAUL; CACHE FINDOur military is putting out press releases about a taxi driver getting pulled over and some guns buried in a field -- incidents separated by only hours! -- as evidence of improved Iraqi troop readiness. Feeling confident?
RABIYAH, Iraq - Iraqi Police working at the Rabiyah Port of Entry discovered money, gold and jewelry being smuggled into Iraq during a standard search of incoming vehicles June 16.
The suspected smuggler was driving a cab from Syria into Iraq through the Rabiyah POE when his vehicle was stopped for a routine search.
While conducting the search, IPs found the equivalent of over $300,000 in Iraqi currency and precious metals including gold ingots.
The driver was detained and the money and gold was inventoried and secured pending disposition.
This discovery came only hours after soldiers from the 3rd Battalion, 3rd Brigade, 3rd Iraqi Army Division found a weapons cache while searching a farmer's field in the village of al-Jadida.
While excavating suspicious looking loose dirt, the IA soldiers discovered assault rifles, ammunition and other suspicious materials.
The IA soldiers collected all of the items and have detained four suspects.
posted by The Cunning Realist at Wednesday, June 20, 2007
6 Comments:
...No
This just in: the local population despises U.S. and wants us out.
Yeah, Mission Accomplished.
Can we bring them home now?
Really, the whole idea of Iraqi troop readiness is a canard. The Iraqi army is the insurgency and the insurgency is the Iraqi army. It just depends on what uniform they are wearing that day. If anyone here has seen the PBS series America at a Crossroads, you may have seen the scene where some American and Iraqi forces have discovered a weapons cache. The Iraqis, speaking in Arabic, are talking about how this is not the big cache, and that their Mullah told them the bigger cache is elsewhere. They talk about this, with the Americans unaware, until one Iraqi notes that the camera has a microphone on it. At which point they shut up. The footage was not translated for over a year.
This is what our people are dealing with over there. The line between friend and foe is often non-existent. This more than anything makes me wonder what we can hope to accomplish there. Whenever I hear people talk about training the Iraqi military or them standing up so we can stand down I wonder what the hell they're talking about.
Ah, yes, and another metric that has had shown a dramatic increase, is the Iraqi Army ass wiping efficiency index (IAAWE). Apparently, this latest increase in the IAAWE was the result of a recent infusion of 2.4 billions dollars in upgrading the toilet paper quality. The U.S. Ambaddador to Iraq stated that the “increasec ass wiping efficiency was further evidence of the success of the surge”, but that “further work had to be done in also improving the ass wiping efficiency of the Iraqi Police Forces, to match the progress of the Iraqi army”.
I'm going to check out that centcom website now...
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