StrykerFSU wrote:Laxfan respectfully, I'm not sure what you're asking here. I couldn't find any news story on this to get details but taken at face value I'm not surprised in the least that there is corruption within the Iraqi police force. Every American in Iraq is right to be suspicious of the Iraqis working around them but that is not to say that every American is a racist killer like the helicopter gunner in Platoon.
I only have regular contact with one American Marine over there, now on his third tour, and from what he tells me there are good Iraqi troops and bad ones but that as a whole the Iraqis are making great progress. In fact, the Iraqi security forces were one of the 8 criteria that received passing grades in the recent government assessment. And now PM al-Maliki is saying that the Iraqi government doesn't need the US there anymore at all.
Cliff, my point was that we are really making miserable progess in developing the Iraqi army, in spite of the spin being put on in Washington. The story about the battle with the police was in Saturday's news. The Iraqi Army is better than the police, which is really just an extension of the Shiite militias, but even the Army is heavily stocked with militia members. Numbers have been put out on how the Army is close to reaching its target levels, but desertions and absenteeism is rampant along with a prpensity for disappearing whenever a dangerous raid is planned. I was reading yesterday that many soldiers will not report for duty outside of Baghdad. There was one region where they were supposed to have 50,000 troops and 1,500 have shown up. So the progress on "standing them up" is not nearly as good as we are being told officially.
As far as Al Malaki wanting us out, you need to remember that he is part of the Shiite majority, with an Interior Ministry that is controlled by militias. If we leave, then they are free to cleanse much of the country of Sunnis, which wouldn't trouble them at all. We are so stuck though, because our stated enemy is Al Qaeda, which is an extremist Sunni group and so you think we would want to align with the Shiites. However, the largest Shiite country is....Iran. We took advantage of this Sunni/Shiite split when we helped Saddam take power, because back in those days (early 80's) he was doing battle with the revolutionaries that had taken over the embassy in Tehran. Now there is little to stop Iraq from becoming a Shiite country as well.
The good news is that Ahmadinejad (sp?) is not a very strong or popular president in Iran, so that nut case can be gone fairly easily, as long as we don't do anything stupid. Whether that will bring more moderate leaders is still open to question, but the general population in Iran is mych more pro-Western than you might believe.
It is a very complicated situation in the region, with Arab vs. Persian vs. Kurd; and the Sunni/Shiite split, one that we badly misunderstood or ignored. While Iraq, Iran and Syria get a lot of the play in the news, the influence of Saudi Arabia can't be ignored. They are one of the most strict Sunni countries and are actively serving as a proxy for the US behind the scenes. The great irony is that they are one of our strongest allies (i.e. oil suppliers), but they were also the source of approximately 15 of the 9/11 hijackers and are the home of the bin Laden family. THAT is where we should have been looking for the Al Qaeda links, not in Iraq.
