On Iraq

From the below story from Newsweek, and I highlighted some of the email sections that stuck out. I think people can tend to fall into two camps whether they like Bush and decry anything critical of the war or they hate Bush and will smother any good news.

What people should be doing is focusing on victory and actively trying figure out how best to do that with the least amount of American casualties. The left wants to retreat but the Bush administration doesn't seem to want to change tactics.

While it is easy to play Monday morning quarterback, many people including myself, were saying the Muqtada Al-Sadr should have been dealt with over two years ago. Bush said he wouldn't appease terrorists, but as soon as Saddam fell, we began appeasing terrorists (Al-Sadr)

Some people don't think the Iraqis can govern themselves and need an iron fist. Many of those people are liberals, but to say that they imply that the Iraqis (and Arabs in general) are inferior people.

Nov. 6, 2006 issue - Robert Secher had a passion for history. Until his death in Iraq on Oct. 8, the 33-year-old Marine could recount all the major battles of the Civil War

His job there was one of the toughest in Iraq: making raw Iraqi recruits ready and able to take over the fight against the militants. Secher found the task exasperating and often discouraging; in e-mails and letters home, he expressed doubt that the Iraqi military would ever be ready for a handover, and criticized the way the Bush administration had directed the war. "Without the U.S., this army will fail and get eaten alive by the insurgents," he told his father in an e-mail this past April. Chatting with a friend during a brief leave five months later, he spoke of suspicions that some of his trainees were loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr and would have no compunction about betraying their American instructors if the radical Shiite cleric told them to.

At other times Captain Secher's messages expressed fondness for his Iraqi trainees and respect for their courage. He was no pacifist. His parents describe him as an unswerving Republican, and his own dispatches consistently defend the invasion of Iraq even as he anguishes over its dwindling prospects of success. "Don't mistake us for Cindy Sheehan," Pierre Secher told NEWSWEEK at his Memphis home ... "To me, pacifism could have led to Hitler's victory. We might have all been speaking German and Japanese right now." But as President George W. Bush speaks positively of setting benchmarks for Iraqi troops to "stand up" and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declares that their training is going well, Captain Secher's messages from the front give a more complicated picture....

[From his emails:]

"Anytime an American fires a weapon there has to be an investigation into why there was an escalation of force. That wouldn't have stopped us from firing, but it prevents us from just firing indiscriminately. We have to have positively identified targets. That is why I am now a big fan of having the Iraqis with us. They can fire at whatever the hell they want, we call it the "Iraqi Death Blossom."

"My 3 month informed opinion (based entirely on what I see in the Hit region) is that this war is futile. Even the Iraqi soldiers tell us that when America leaves, they'll quit. They trust us because they know Americans can take care of them, but they don't trust their government, or the Ministry of Defense, and they especially don't trust their officers"

"And anyone who calls those young Marines killers should think twice. War puts perfectly ordinary young men in situations that can't be judged by laws. They are the situations of survival. The dirty little secrets of war, no one would want to know the horrible things that the "greatest generation" did to German and Japanese soldiers and civilians. [...] If you really want to win a war you have to be brutal. You have to be Sherman and raze Georgia as you march to the sea."

"The biggest lesson I have learned over 6 months here is that the Iraqi culture is incapable of maintaining a western style military. The Arabic-style military [...] is distasteful to western soldiers: officers who hit their men; officers and senior enlisted men who regularly steal from their men; using leadership to openly grant yourself more food and 'standard of living' items while your men go without "

"This is such a long process. Maybe 20 years from now I'll look back with pride that I helped make a difference in Iraq, but right now I'm just not into it. I just want to come home alive. [...] The war in Iraq itself, yeah, it was the right thing to do, but the way it was carried out, man, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney have nothing to be proud of."