thedrifter
12-25-04, 06:35 AM
12-23-2004
From the Editor:
By Ed Offley
What should we give the troops for Christmas?
By that question, I don’t intend to gin up a gimmicky wish list of gadgets, political one-liners and Hallmark card slogans. By all accounts, the armor kits are on the way, the chattering classes have fired their broadsides at Don Rumsfeld (and missed yet again), and the troops whose Christmas will be coated with dust and stink with cordite don’t need any haiku poems from this corner.
So here’s my gift to the troops in Mosul, in Baghdad, in Landstuhl and Walter Reed and Arlington National Cemetery: The name of your enemy and the nature of your fight.
For several years now, I’ve watched with a mixture of incredulity and despair how journalists, politicians and even military leaders have cloaked the exact nature of this struggle under inaccurate and imprecise language. We’ve been embarked in a war against terrorism, which is as meaningless a term as if we had called the great Pacific military campaign of 1942-45 a war against kamikaze pilots. We’ve called the Iraqi enemy insurgents, which may satisfy a strict legal definition of their willful disavowal of human rights and the laws of war, but still avoids identifying them for what they are and what they want.
So as our young men and women hunker down behind their sand bags and Kevlar for a bit of turkey dinner and cheer this grim Christmas 2004, here is my small offering to you: You are fighting an evil that, if unchecked, will spread violence, chaos and suffering far beyond the artificial borders of Iraq and the wider Middle East to poison the entire world as we know it.
This realization dawned on me when I saw one of the more horrific photographs to come out of Iraq this past week. It wasn’t the destruction from the two bombings in Najaf and Karbala last Sunday that killed more than 60 Iraqi Shiites. Nor was it the scenes of devastation from the mess hall tent at Forward Operating Base Marez where 18 Americans and four others died in a suicide bombing on Tuesday. It was something much worse.
Here’s the proof of the enemy you fight and the stakes that are in play:
http://www.sftt.org/csNews/image_upload/FTE_2edb.article12232004a.jpg
This is the execution-style slaying of three Iraqi election workers by armed gunmen on the streets of Baghdad earlier this week. They were pulled from their car and shot dead as stunned witnesses helplessly watched. They were murdered because they believe that freedom and self-government are as much theirs to claim, as it is ours to celebrate. They perished because the practitioners of a vicious tyranny still believe they can murder their way back into despotic power.
This is the true face of your enemy and his deadly ambition. Where the United States is working with the interim Iraqi government to conduct interim elections at the end of January that will lead to a permanent, democratic government, the killers loyal to the Stalinism of the former Ba’ath Party, loosely allied with the Islamofascists of Al Qaeda, want to reimpose their reign of terror on all Iraqis. And should by some unlikely development the Al Qaeda clones were to win out in Iraq, their end-state would be even worse: the imposition of a Taliban-like regime that, as in Afghanistan, would execute women for showing their faces in public and behead anyone who stood against their 7th-century dictatorship.
Obscured by the carnage this week was one hopeful sign that merits better display: By a 54-32 percent, a group of several thousand Iraqi civilians polled by the International Republican Institute, a U.S. government-funded nonprofit organization that promotes democracy worldwide, expressed confidence in the direction their country is moving. The positive responses showed a remarkable increase over the 42 percent positive tally from earlier surveys in September and October.
There is much, much more to do in Iraq, and there are many more steps that the Defense Department, Central Command and your on-scene commanders must take to improve force protection, to better train your Iraqi colleagues, and to learn how to thwart the enemy’s own future moves against you. No doubt there will be more bloodshed and terrorist attacks in the weeks ahead, and the number of grieving families here at home will grow.
Even before Centcom launched Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003, there were spirited and impassioned debates. Experts argued over strategy, tactics, equipment and supplies, on the feared threat of WMD attacks, and the quality of training of reserve troops. Those debates will continue.
But here’s one concluding thought I wish I could wrap in a gaily decorated gift box and mail to every man and woman in Iraq – and Afghanistan – for opening on Christmas Day. The words aren’t mine, but rather, those of Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain as he led his men of the 20th Maine up the Taneytown Road toward Gettysburg and their moment of history at Little Round Top in the waning days of June 1863: “This is a different kind of Army. ... We’re an Army going out to set other men free.”
In the rubble of your landscape, in the ache of your hearts far away from loved ones, in the shadow of your own fear and isolation, keep this as a gift: You still are.
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. © 2004 Ed Offley.
Ellie
From the Editor:
By Ed Offley
What should we give the troops for Christmas?
By that question, I don’t intend to gin up a gimmicky wish list of gadgets, political one-liners and Hallmark card slogans. By all accounts, the armor kits are on the way, the chattering classes have fired their broadsides at Don Rumsfeld (and missed yet again), and the troops whose Christmas will be coated with dust and stink with cordite don’t need any haiku poems from this corner.
So here’s my gift to the troops in Mosul, in Baghdad, in Landstuhl and Walter Reed and Arlington National Cemetery: The name of your enemy and the nature of your fight.
For several years now, I’ve watched with a mixture of incredulity and despair how journalists, politicians and even military leaders have cloaked the exact nature of this struggle under inaccurate and imprecise language. We’ve been embarked in a war against terrorism, which is as meaningless a term as if we had called the great Pacific military campaign of 1942-45 a war against kamikaze pilots. We’ve called the Iraqi enemy insurgents, which may satisfy a strict legal definition of their willful disavowal of human rights and the laws of war, but still avoids identifying them for what they are and what they want.
So as our young men and women hunker down behind their sand bags and Kevlar for a bit of turkey dinner and cheer this grim Christmas 2004, here is my small offering to you: You are fighting an evil that, if unchecked, will spread violence, chaos and suffering far beyond the artificial borders of Iraq and the wider Middle East to poison the entire world as we know it.
This realization dawned on me when I saw one of the more horrific photographs to come out of Iraq this past week. It wasn’t the destruction from the two bombings in Najaf and Karbala last Sunday that killed more than 60 Iraqi Shiites. Nor was it the scenes of devastation from the mess hall tent at Forward Operating Base Marez where 18 Americans and four others died in a suicide bombing on Tuesday. It was something much worse.
Here’s the proof of the enemy you fight and the stakes that are in play:
http://www.sftt.org/csNews/image_upload/FTE_2edb.article12232004a.jpg
This is the execution-style slaying of three Iraqi election workers by armed gunmen on the streets of Baghdad earlier this week. They were pulled from their car and shot dead as stunned witnesses helplessly watched. They were murdered because they believe that freedom and self-government are as much theirs to claim, as it is ours to celebrate. They perished because the practitioners of a vicious tyranny still believe they can murder their way back into despotic power.
This is the true face of your enemy and his deadly ambition. Where the United States is working with the interim Iraqi government to conduct interim elections at the end of January that will lead to a permanent, democratic government, the killers loyal to the Stalinism of the former Ba’ath Party, loosely allied with the Islamofascists of Al Qaeda, want to reimpose their reign of terror on all Iraqis. And should by some unlikely development the Al Qaeda clones were to win out in Iraq, their end-state would be even worse: the imposition of a Taliban-like regime that, as in Afghanistan, would execute women for showing their faces in public and behead anyone who stood against their 7th-century dictatorship.
Obscured by the carnage this week was one hopeful sign that merits better display: By a 54-32 percent, a group of several thousand Iraqi civilians polled by the International Republican Institute, a U.S. government-funded nonprofit organization that promotes democracy worldwide, expressed confidence in the direction their country is moving. The positive responses showed a remarkable increase over the 42 percent positive tally from earlier surveys in September and October.
There is much, much more to do in Iraq, and there are many more steps that the Defense Department, Central Command and your on-scene commanders must take to improve force protection, to better train your Iraqi colleagues, and to learn how to thwart the enemy’s own future moves against you. No doubt there will be more bloodshed and terrorist attacks in the weeks ahead, and the number of grieving families here at home will grow.
Even before Centcom launched Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003, there were spirited and impassioned debates. Experts argued over strategy, tactics, equipment and supplies, on the feared threat of WMD attacks, and the quality of training of reserve troops. Those debates will continue.
But here’s one concluding thought I wish I could wrap in a gaily decorated gift box and mail to every man and woman in Iraq – and Afghanistan – for opening on Christmas Day. The words aren’t mine, but rather, those of Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain as he led his men of the 20th Maine up the Taneytown Road toward Gettysburg and their moment of history at Little Round Top in the waning days of June 1863: “This is a different kind of Army. ... We’re an Army going out to set other men free.”
In the rubble of your landscape, in the ache of your hearts far away from loved ones, in the shadow of your own fear and isolation, keep this as a gift: You still are.
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. © 2004 Ed Offley.
Ellie