Monday, November 26, 2007

Pressure for Results

Those of us who served in 'Nam, or really any insurgent conflict, and anybody else who were paying attention understand the Government Propaganda used to make things look rosier than the reality on the ground.

One of the most blatant is "The Body Count". Used to show success, in 'enemy kills', and used to show success in the citizens feelings security because of actions by an occupying force or a puppet government.

Real Honesty is not a popular tool of propaganda!

Newsweek and the New York Times are carrying articles about the returning Iraqi's to Baghdad, looking deeper into the reasons why, reasons anyone paying real attention already understand.

In the Newsweek article called There’s No Place Like … Iraq?

We find this subtitle:
Actually, yes. Refugees are returning—but it's tough to resettle them without worsening sectarian divisions.

Why are some returning, and they actually are, is it because of how Secure? Baghdad has become, or are other reasons in play.

Dawood (he won't risk the use of his full name) is a 33-year-old IT engineer, but he couldn't find work outside Iraq. His Lebanese visa ran out, and Canada refused his asylum application. So a few weeks ago, practically broke, he returned to Baghdad. His old district is torn by an ongoing Shia-Sunni turf war, but Dawood says he feels safe in the family's new, mainly Shia area.


Syria, the region's last country that offered free access to Iraqis, has cracked down on new entries and forbidden Iraqis to hold jobs. "They put a stamp in your passport that says NO WORK," Dawood says. Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt enforce similar bans.


The money is about enough to fix all the broken windows, but it won't begin to replace the furniture that was looted in their absence. Besides, the house is a triplex. Hamoud's in-laws used to have the other two units, now occupied by Sunni fugitives from Shiite-led ethnic cleansing in the Jihad neighborhood. Hamoud says when her husband asked them to leave, they refused, saying: "If you get the people out of our house in Jihad, we'll go back there."


It closes with a little girls wish to return to her real home and that her father not leave again:

"She told me to promise not to leave again, but until now I don't promise," says Dawood. "We don't know what life will bring."


The New York Times looks a little deeper into the 'body count' of the returning Iraqi's.

The Politics of Tallying the Number of Iraqis Who Return Home

The description of the scope of the return, however, appears to have been massaged by politics. Returnees have essentially become a currency of progress.

Under intense pressure to show results after months of political stalemate, the government has continued to publicize figures that exaggerate the movement back to Iraq and Iraqis’ confidence that the current lull in violence can be sustained.


They admit to just 'counting the bodies':

“We didn’t ask them if they were displaced and neither did the Interior Ministry,”


The UN though dug abit further:

A United Nations survey released last week, of 110 Iraqi families leaving Syria, also seemed to dispute the contentions of officials in Iraq that people are returning primarily because they feel safer.

The survey found that 46 percent were leaving because they could not afford to stay; 25 percent said they fell victim to a stricter Syrian visa policy; and only 14 percent said they were returning because they had heard about improved security.


Furthermore, people are still leaving their homes — 28,017 were internally displaced in October, according to the latest United Nations figures. In all, the United Nations estimates that 2.4 million Iraqis are still internally displaced, with many occupying someone else’s home.


We are getting a number of reports of how we are creating alliances with once insugents, fighting us and each other, by training and paying them to rid their area's of al Qaeda of Iraq.

What are we really doing?

To my view of those reports, added to the reports, reading between the lines of the returning Iraqi's, it seems we are training and arming Militia's that are now protecting their ethnically cleansed neighborhoods, that we allowed, in Baghdad and other cities, as well as pockets of Iraq outside of the cities controlled by the verious sect tribes of Sunni and Shiite.

I fail to see where 'The Surge' main objective is being realized, a functioning Iraqi Government, and especially one creating their own security for the country we destroyed.

We tore open, and destroyed, 'Pandora's Box' of Iraq. The Iraqi's still want All Foreign Troops out of their Country, a Country where these sects, despite what our Allie Saddam did to many lived and worked together, married and had children, were friends, lived side by side.

Can they be brought back together by Buying them off, Nope!

Will these militia's we are creating join forces to really bring about a more secure Iraq, a Big Question!

Or will they once again revert back, or have they really left that, to the Killing and Maiming of each other, and the occupying militaries, in order to keep their own ethnically cleansed area's safe for their own????

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