US army fucks up. Film at 11
From The American leftist comes the news that Operation Matador was very succesful –in driving Iraqi allies away from the US.
When foreign fighters poured into villages with jihad on their minds and weapons in their hands, some Iraqi tribesmen in western desert towns fought back.
They set up checkpoints to filter out the foreigners. They burned down suspected insurgent safe houses. They called their fellow tribesmen in Baghdad and other urban areas for backup. And when they still couldn’t uproot the terrorists streaming in from Syria, tribal leaders said, they took a most unusual step: They asked the Americans for help.
The U.S. military hails last week’s “Operation Matador” as a success that killed more than 125 insurgents. But local tribesmen said it was a disaster for their communities that’s made them leery of ever again assisting American or Iraqi forces.
There, in a nutshell is one of the reasons why I would’ve opposed the war in Iraq even if it had been fully legalised by the UN, Al Gore had been president and it wasn’t based on a pack of lies. The US army is wholly unsuited to this kind of war and the occupation duties and always will be, no matter who is in charge. (Not that I think any other western army would do much better.) Its culture is just wrong for it.
The US Army’s primary goal is to kill as many enemies as possible for as few of its own soldiers as possible. If this means more civilians get killed, so be it. This has always been so from at least the First World War onwards: the army is protective of its soldiers. This attitude works against it when it is in situations where there is no clear battlefield, no well defined enemy and where innocent bystanders, allies and enemies mix freely. Which is why Iraq is such a mess now and will remain so.