Non-Coms of the 82 Airborne Have Great NTY Op-Ed Piece

Talking Points Memo alerted its readers to an excellent article in the New York Times for Sunday, August 19th, 2007. The article is written by enlisted men and non-commissioned officers of the 82nd Airborne. It is a realistic look at what is going on in Iraq. It is definitely not going to make the White House or its supporters of the Iraq War happy.

This is a quote from the article:

The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the “battle space” remains the same, with changes only at the margins. It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers’ expense.

A few nights ago, for example, we witnessed the death of one American soldier and the critical wounding of two others when a lethal armor-piercing explosive was detonated between an Iraqi Army checkpoint and a police one. Local Iraqis readily testified to American investigators that Iraqi police and Army officers escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb. These civilians highlighted their own predicament: had they informed the Americans of the bomb before the incident, the Iraqi Army, the police or the local Shiite militia would have killed their families.

Clearly the authors of this piece see this war far differently that politicians like Joe Lieberman or John McCain who go into Iraq for a few days, are heavily guarded, only talk to officers or troops picked by officers, and then come back and tell us how much better things are going. People like Lieberman and McCain don't want to hear that our efforts in Iraq are leading to us being viewed as an occupation, not a liberation, army.

Check out this piece and then see that your friends, relatives, everyone you know gets a link to this article. It is a powerful indictment of where we have been in Iraq and under Bush's leadership, where we are going.