Interesting Iraq info

Since 9/11, I’ve done a lot of reading and studying about America’s foreign policy and the world we all live in. With Nathan’s deployment to the Middle East comes more questions and concern from everyone around me so after a conversation with Roger and Ardy this weekend, I thought I would write a bit about some of the things I come across. I don’t intend this site to be political in any way; it’ll still just be “Boerger Times”. I just know that I stumble across a lot of information that you typically won’t get by just watching the news or reading the paper.

As a great example, this weekend, The Washington Post (yeah, it’s a newspaper and I just said you won’t find these things in newspapers; so sue me!) had a fantastic article by an Army Lt. General in Iraq. It’s refreshing to hear about what the Army is actually DOING in Iraq as opposed to what the terrorists are doing. From my perspective, I find that even though much of what is written in the media about Iraq is negative, the things I hear and read from military people who are actually there are overwhelmingly positive.

I urge every one of you to read this right now. I’ll wait until you’re done. (You may have to login to view it. If so, use my username (whboerger@mindspring.com) and password(hoser) so you don’t have to register.)

Here are the bits I found most interesting:

• 164,000 Iraqi police and soldiers, 100,000 of which are trained and equipped
• 74,000 facility protection forces
• 45 National Guard battalions

These are all current levels. By January, they expect:

• 15 additional regular Iraqi Army battalions (I’m not sure how many soldiers that is, it may be different for Iraqis than US battalions)
• 6 additional Intervention Force battalions, all Iraqi

By spring, police training will be graduating 5000 police per month.

Now that’s not to say all is rosy. It certainly isn’t or we wouldn’t be there. Everyone that is responsible about the situation knows that the terrorists want so badly to disrupt the elections (certainly the Iraqi one in January and possible our own here in the US), things will likely be getting worse in the next few months. Even this General says so. But I believe that proper perspective would lead a rational person to see that the Iraqis are doing more and more to take control of their own security. And that is clearly good for Nathan and all of our soldiers there.

It’s easy to get caught up in the bad stuff because that’s what the newspeople show for ratings. But it’s clearly not the whole story. There are quite a few soldiers there, as well as Iraqis, that keep weblogs similar to this one and I’ll be putting links up to some of them in the next few days in case anyone is interested. I’ll keep posting some of the good/obscure news that I find elsewhere as well. If anyone has any specific questions that they haven’t been able to find the answers for, let me know too and I’ll see what I can do.

UPDATE: Another interesting article that I would recommend was in National Review today. It is a recap of 2 polls recently done in Iraq. My favorite bit:

The point is that if we are going to have a public discussion of how the war is going or whether we should be optimistic about the future of Iraq (and I think we should be), our views should be based on something more substantial than off-the-cuff remarks by political spokesmen. It is understandable that news coverage will focus on violence, and administration critics will spin events as negatively as possible. But if solid majorities of Iraqis believe conditions are improving, I think we should take them at their word. They have a better grip on their own reality than we do.