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Author: TriSec    Date: 01/06/2009 11:27:56

Good Morning.

Today is our 2,120th day in Iraq.

We'll start this morning as we always do, with the latest casualty figures from the warron terra...courtesy of Antiwar.com:

American Deaths
Since war began (3/19/03): 4221
Since "Mission Accomplished" (5/1/03): 4082
Since Capture of Saddam (12/13/03): 3760
Since Handover (6/29/04): 3362
Since Election (1/31/05): 2783

Other Coalition Troops - Iraq: 316
US Military Deaths - Afghanistan: 630
Other Military Deaths - Afghanistan: 412
Contractor Deaths - Iraq: 445

We find this morning's Cost of War passing through:

$ 585, 898, 600, 000.00




So. We've all torn the page off the calendar, and most of us are looking at 2009 with a fair amount of hope and optimism. Unfortunately, for families with someone in the military, 2009 is the same as 2008, or 2007, or 2006, or....

Some families are adopting unusual coping mechanisms to deal with the endless cycle of separation and worry. There's an interesting story from yesterday's Globe about one family.




HAMLET, N.C.—When her son got his orders to head back to Iraq, Rosa Lamourt hatched her scheme to keep him stateside.

She didn't sleep much during the four months Spc. Jobel Barbosa spent in Iraq in 2004, driving a Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle with the North Carolina National Guard. The idea of her only son, born when she was just 15, spending an entire year overseas was too much.

So when Barbosa -- a 29-year-old single father -- asked his mother to care for his daughter Christian, as she'd done during his first deployment, she simply refused.

"I thought that if he didn't have anyone to watch (Christian), they wouldn't send him," Lamourt said recently. "Maybe they would say no."

Such wishful thinking often consumes the families of soldiers sent to war, whether they're full-time fighters or part-time warriors such as Barbosa and his fellow members of E Company, the engineer company of the 120th Combined Arms Battalion, 30th Heavy Brigade Combat Team. The unit from the tiny town of Hamlet, in southeastern North Carolina, left this weekend for four months of training ahead of a 12-month tour in Iraq.

As Lamourt's situation shows, reality inevitably sets in for the relatives. Her plan backfired when Barbosa's boss at the repair shop in Hamlet where he's a diesel mechanic volunteered to watch over Christian, a fourth-grader.

Lamourt quickly caved.

"There's no way I would let my baby live with a stranger," she said. "She's my first grandbaby."

And so, years after Jobel and his three sisters moved out, 9-year-old Christian moved in.

"It's like being a mom again," Lamourt said. "Imagine that."




There's a very interesting story out of Iraq this morning. Mr. Bush has made his entire "presidency" about bringing democracy to Iraq. But it turns out that nobody in Iraq really wanted it.


BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Despite repeated warnings, U.S. officials blindly foisted a Western-style democracy on Iraq, helping plunge it into sectarian bloodshed and a political morass, a former U.S.-installed prime minister said on Monday.

"I told President Bush many times. I said we should not photocopy the model of the United States" in Iraq, Iyad Allawi, selected interim prime minister in 2004 by a council hand-picked by U.S. officials, said in an interview with Reuters.

"I said to (Bush and ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair) categorically: 'Don't copy the Western model in Iraq; don't copy the Lebanese model; don't copy the Iranian model."

Allawi, a secular Shi'ite who led Iraq for nearly a year at a time when U.S. officials still held many levers of power, had a scathing assessment of Washington's management in close to six years since the U.S.-led invasion to oust Saddam Hussein.

Despite a sharp improvement from the horrific sectarian bloodshed of 2006 and 2007, Allawi described a country still held hostage to religious and ethnic rivalries, one in which ministries remain party fiefdoms and reconciliation is elusive.

"The decision to invade Iraq was a good decision, but unfortunately there have been grave mistakes that have been committed in parallel to liberation," he said, including the fateful U.S. decision in 2003 to purge government of members of Saddam's banned Baath party.

The instant unemployment of tens of thousands of Iraqis not only crippled the country's ability to govern itself but helped fuel a bloody insurgency.

By ignoring a strong tribal structure, interwoven by Sunnis, Shi'ites, Kurds and Turkmen, as they pieced together post-Saddam Iraq, he said U.S. officials allowed sectarian strife to grow.

"It was the wrong concept of doing things ... These are some of the real mistakes, grave mistakes, that have led the country to a great vacuum which we are suffering from after six years."



So whatever that nebulous "victory in Iraq" is....even the Iraqis are saying that democracy isn't it, and it's likely that 4,000 GIs have died in vain.

 

140 comments (Latest Comment: 01/07/2009 03:22:09 by Mondobubba)
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