One of Ours

Thousands of troops are to be sent to Iraq to take control of the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf in the largest expansion of British forces since the start of the war more than a year ago.

Up to 4,000 troops will begin arriving in Iraq in the next few weeks to plug the gap left by the 1,300 Spanish soldiers who were withdrawn from the country last week...

...Prime Minister Tony Blair made the decision to send additional troops to Iraq after meeting President Bush at the White House two weeks ago.

The British government has refused to make an official announcement about the decision.

Defense officials have backed the deployment, but have warned the government that the army is fully stretched and would struggle to deal with any other international emergency requiring the use of troops...

...The British force will be composed of troops from the Royal Marine commandos, a parachute regiment battalion and an infantry battalion, as well as supporting elements from the artillery and logistics units.

The force will be lead by Brig. Jim Dutton, the commander of 3rd Commando Brigade, who also served during the war.

The first move toward deployment began Thursday when a strategic reconnaissance team of senior army officers from the Permanent Joint Headquarters, in Northwood, England, flew to Iraq.

It is understood that officers from 3rd Commando Brigade headquarters also will be flying out within the next week to conduct reconnaissance of the area...

Saddam Hussein’s former general entrusted with bringing security to the rebellious city of Fallujah says there are no foreign fighters in the city despite US insistence around 200 of them are holed up there.

[…]

Maj Gen Saleh...said he had yet to receive information on the men wanted for the murder and mutilation of four American contractors which sparked the siege.

"There are no foreign fighters in Fallujah and the local tribal leaders have told me the same,” Maj Gen Saleh said.

[…]

Maj Gen Saleh, who is being assisted by another former general, Abdullah Wael, said he represented the old Iraqi army, not the old regime.

A former general from Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard has not been given command of an Iraqi force that entered Fallujah after Marines ended a three-week siege, U.S. military chief General Richard Myers said Sunday.

Gen. Richard Myers said news media were “very, very inaccurate” in their reporting about Maj. Gen. Jassim Mohammed Saleh...

...Myers said: “He has not been vetted yet and probably won’t be the one in command.”

...General Taguba saved his harshest words for the military-intelligence officers and private contractors. He recommended that Colonel Thomas Pappas, the commander of one of the M.I. brigades, be reprimanded and receive non-judicial punishment, and that Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, the former director of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center, be relieved of duty and reprimanded. He further urged that a civilian contractor, Steven Stephanowicz, of CACI International, be fired from his Army job, reprimanded, and denied his security clearances for lying to the investigating team and allowing or ordering military policemen “who were not trained in interrogation techniques to facilitate interrogations by ‘setting conditions’ which were neither authorized” nor in accordance with Army regulations. “He clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse,” Taguba wrote. He also recommended disciplinary action against a second CACI employee, John Israel. (A spokeswoman for CACI said that the company had “received no formal communication” from the Army about the matter.)

“I suspect,” Taguba concluded, that Pappas, Jordan, Stephanowicz, and Israel “were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuse at Abu Ghraib,” and strongly recommended immediate disciplinary action.
[…]
General Taguba spent more than four hours interviewing Karpinski, whom he described as extremely emotional: “What I found particularly disturbing in her testimony was her complete unwillingness to either understand or accept that many of the problems inherent in the 800th MP Brigade were caused or exacerbated by poor leadership and the refusal of her command to both establish and enforce basic standards and principles among its soldiers.”...

...we arranged a meeting where we invited people coming from falluja, and a reporter and photographer from UStoday, during the clashes period in falluja, then after hours of questionning them in our house, the article that was published in UStoday didn't say one word about falluja or people of falluja, it only took some sentences that mom said about Iraq, and the rest of the article talked about two Iraqi bloggers who were saying "American and Israel are our friends". How about that? I have been in this city since 1991, and I haven't seen one person who can say that sentence...sunni or shee, anti Saddam or pro Saddam, drunk or sober, not one person, but UStoday did it...They found two of them, two brothers actually.

The single greatest error in the Rebuild of Iraq is the lack of speed in processing the US Congress mandated funding ($18 billion in 04) for the Iraqi Rebuild. The Washington DC professional bureaucrats considered the disbursement of approved funds as just “Business As Usual” that has lead to slow political and economic progress, even delaying building security forces...

...U.S. Troops are still in harms way in Iraq. The rebuilding of Iraq falls prey to government bureaucrats, Byzantine contracting rules and politically correct contactor preferences.

I personally worked two programs, one for $110 million and one for $15 million, for security forces for six months. The $110 million was nickled and dimed, bits and pieces according to the desires of accountants, not the people building the seurity forces. Heck, the $15 million for weapons security, a usable program in Iraq, has not been still spent due to financial bureaucratic bungling. Rather than rant, I will say only that accounts and the bureaucracy delayed the implementation of the program...

The real failure in Iraq is in the lack of timely disbursement of funds that allowed chronic unemployment and disrupted services to demoralize a liberated people.

One year after the war, the initial funding has put in more electricity and water capacity than Iraq ever had even before the war. The $18 billion has not yet hit Iraq. The rebuild was not to restore Iraq infrastructure but to have an overwhelming, visionary program to create a representative government within a free economy...