I don't know how much of a buzz this has created back home in the mainstream media, but a high ranking officer here whose role was to advise the entire command leadership on Iraq policy recently released (some say it was leaked) a memo stating that US forces need to go home.
It has a lot of detail and supporting examples of why we have overstayed our welcome and that by staying longer, we run the risk of becoming targets, both kinetically (in the military sense) and politically. Many folks with Iraq experience agree with the points he makes, but the word is that up in Baghdad, the big cheeses are either too committed to the path they have chosen (and admittedly, nothing turns on a dime and things are thought out for a reason), or fundamentally disagree. Buzz is that the emphasis is on finding out and controlling the leak of non-official, yet attributable opinion pieces instead of whether the logic has merit. This is the second such "leak" in the past couple of months.
Take a look if you want to understand what some of the frustrations are. This is a very different Iraq deployment than even one or two years ago.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/world/middleeast/31advtext.html
Can anyone tell me how to post entire articles as originally formatted in as blog posts?
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So I just got back to Basrah two nights ago after 3 weeks on the road. Never thought I'd think it, but it's nice to be "home" in Basrah. Fortunately, all my stuff was intact at my desk, but in my room, all the stuff was gone from the bathroom....again. Lesson learned is to not put anything there when I'm gone for extended trips. I now have to cover down on my colleague at another brigade, so I will probably split my time between there and here.
Thinking about that memo again and my earlier comments I shared about creating a dependent culture, I am a little sad. A bunch of young Iraqi soldiers came out to greet me the first night I got back. These were the bunch that my roommate, a captain, hung out with. I tend to stick with a few of the older, quieter guys. Within 2 minutes of chatting with them, one of them goes, "Give me DVD." I figure that this is his learned, broken English and he doesn't understand the nuance between "may I" and "give me." I kind of beg off, giving a white lie that all of my movies can only be played on the computer. But, it's pretty clear that it's not just choice of words -- we go through the same game with, "Give me drink," "Give me bandage," and the next morning, "Give me black t-shirt." It really did bum me out. We created this.
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