Hi geode00; Re: "It's astonishing to see Camp Anaconda with its freshly made pizza and multiple flavors of ice cream, tv, videogames and extraordinarily nice (!) quarters in contrast to 2 million Iraqis being without water in 120 degree heat (!)"
The fact is that it's fairly easy to arrange for Camp Anaconda to have pizza. It's pretty much impossible to provide the general Iraqi population with electricity in the face of the insurgency. The reason for the difference in difficulty is that there are a lot more Iraqis, and the Iraqis aren't cooperating that well.
Re: "What the blooming hell are we spending US taxpayer money on other than lining the greedy pockets of KBR and Halliburton?"
War is the most wasteful thing humans do. It's always been this way. And hey, if we weren't providing pizza to our soldiers at Anaconda, the military would just have that much more of a problem maintaining a force there. It's a volunteer military.
Re: "Why are we spending money on those creature comforts while being unable to secure 7 miles of road to the Baghdad airport?"
Creature comforts are easy, security is not. It's pretty clear that, in retrospect, they should have included an airstrip in the green zone.
Re: "Who the blooming hell said it was a good idea to build a western cowboy style post office instead of fixing the sewer system or up armoring all vehicles?"
Up-armoring all those vehicles isn't as easy as it looks. The work has to get done by little civilian contractors, not all of whom are that good. As with anything done by the government, there is undoubtedly huge amounts of paperwork. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that the "western cowboy style post office", which I'd never heard about, was either a lot easier than up armoring many thousands of army vehicles, or it just got lucky and managed to get done.
It's not that our forces are picking between different things to do. Most of what they'd like to do in Iraq is simply impossible. That's why there's so much reconstruction funds that are sitting unspent. Iraq is a massive security problem, and as far as quickly modifying military equipment, it's easier said than done.
I don't think that the war is being badly run. Instead, I think that it was a bad war to get started.
My whole problem with Kerry boils down to exactly this issue. I thought that Kerry (and the Democrats in general) were convinced that the war was being badly run, but that they could win it. In your comments I see that sort of thinking. That is, you're complaining not about the fact that the war was the stupidest thing the US and Britain have done since the war of 1812, but instead that the war is being run incompetently. Hey, all wars are run with vast amounts of incompetence. Hell, everything humans ever do is done with vast amounts of incompetence. You want to win a war the easy way? Simple, just make sure that your soldiers never miss.
-- Carl |
