'Wash Post' Obtains Shocking Memo from U.S. Embassy in Baghdad

...I hadnt heard yet what my longtime friend's son is headed...but the other one is actually in jumpschool last I heard. I talked to him when he came home after basic, adn he was seriously considering OCS...which would be great since it would keep him over here for a bit longer.

best wishes to anyone here that has friends or relatives in this position....it aint easy to deal with a close friend having to risk his life for our president's clusterf*ck....gotta be evenworse if you voted for Bush and you know you are partially responsible for this.

 

Hey guys,

I'm back for my trip! My take on this: nothing really new or earthshattering. Look at the memo piece by piece. Embassy personnel are being harassed. Go figure. Not sure what's new about that or what insight it gives us that might change our opinion one way or the other. The new government is just now getting on its feet. It's a wait and see situation. Hopefully they'll be able to integrate the militias as they've announced and get basic services back up and running. I think the recent developments give a positive expectation for the situation re: death of the AQ leader, formation of an inclusive coalition, and negotiations with the insurgents.

 

I'm going to turn into Roxran for a minute. Why not give all these people guns and let them just kill the people who are trying to intimidate them. That's the kind of civil war that Iraq need-- kill all the thugs.

 

Good to have you back Hayes.

 

Why thank you, sir!

 

I don't understand what part is shocking. They're in the middle of a war zone so none of that is shocking. Bush lied us into war so it's not shocking at all he'd paint the rosiest picture possible about the events on the ground there.

 

well, thats what poor white boys do when they can't afford college and have very little real prospects in the real world until the do attend a college.

Not everyon in this country can get a scholarship or have parents that can afford real colleges...they want to better themselves just like everyone else...they just want to take advantage of the military incentives to get a education.

Getting sent to Iraq is a very real threat...but being young, they are pretty sure if they do go....they will be ok. Ahh..the innocence of youth.

 

No kidding. My Dad was the first member of his family to go to college, as far as anyone knows. (the family place in East Texas burnt to the ground in the '20's, along with the family bible that had the family tree in it, and the rest of the family history and heirlooms) He went on the GI Bill, being a WWII vet, and ended up a department chair at large Houston University for 30 years.

As you say, R2K, not everyone has the breaks some of us have. Not only that, but some Americans are actually patriotic, as hard as that may be for some to believe.

In fact, many of them are liberals and Democrats.



Keep D&D Civil.

 

How is stopping murders preventing people from themselves?

The people made a choice to live in a flood prone area. It'd be like people in California getting upset that the government didn't help them enough in the aftermath of a mudslide or an earthquake. They chose to live in that area despite the risks.

As for the Superdome, I don't recall mentioning that episode as an example of helping protect people from themselves. I could be wrong, though.

 

The government's job is to protect people from external and internal threats. A massive hurricane and flooded chaotic city certainly qualify as a threat. People lived there with a false assumption of safety partly fostered by faith in a faulty levy system. Yes they should've known better but again the government is obliged to save them. A fireman is obliged to save someone who's house got hit by lightning as much as he is someone's who's caught on fire because they fell asleep with a lit cigarette.

 

They all have guns already. Iraq is one of the most heavily armed places in the World and pretty much everyone has a Kalishnikov. That's why there are so many people getting killed people are taking the law into their own hands and engaging in self-defense not based on a societal basis but on a sectarian basis.

 

I don't like the argument that our troops are there because they can't get work anywhere else. I know people who are serving who are very capable and educated but have chosen to serve because of patriotism and there sense of duty. While its true many of the soldiers come from poor backgrounds and are uneducated but that's a stereotype that is a disservice to todays military.

 

I don't understand why a person from a poor background that is a soldier with limited education at the time of their service, would be disservice even if it is a stereotype.

The idea that people join in order to better themselves because of training and educational benefits shows initiative and a willingness to do what it takes to better themselves.

I don't think we should stereotype the soldiers but we should recognize that people enlist for a variety of reasons. It is possible to be poor, want a shot at an education, and be patriotic at the same time. We shouldn't believe that everyone in the armed forces are there because they are ultra capable and wanted to donate their talents to the armed forces out of a sheer feeling of patriotic zeal. Nor should we deny that some soldiers are there under those circumstances.

But we should also recognize that the armed forces recruiters target those that can't get into a top college, need money to pay for college, and would fall into the category of those that are from a poor background with a limited education.

 

People were living there because of a false sense of safety created by an underfunded and poorly maintained levy system. The government at the very least deserves some level of accountability.

Your logic literally eliminates the very role of government. Why can't we blame someone for a robbery by saying you chose to live in an area with a greater level of crime? All government services like police, firefighters, emergency medical support, are all government services meted out to those who just had unfortunate incidents happen to them and Katrina is no different.

I'm sure all of us would go nuts if firefighters decided to be slow and inefficient and in the process your house burns down because they were just too slow. Katrina was the same on a larger scale. A bad thing happened and the government response was slow on all levels.

 

Because it gives the impression that those enliting have been easily duped into joining and are too stupid to do anything else. Its harmful as every stereotype is since it doesn't address the complexity and diversity of who serves in our military and why.

 

Like I said, the vagueness of the one liner "Is it the government's job to save the people of New Orleans from themselves?" could be taken many different ways, and I wasn't sure if what I interpreted it to mean was actually what you meant. That said, I wasn't the only one that misunderstood your point.

You're right though. I shouldn't expect people to live anywhere along the coast where there are possibilities of hurricanes and tsunamis. All of the major ports that are major parts of our county's infrastructure should be abandoned, because there's a remote chance that a hurricane could wipe the city off the coast. Let's move everyone that lives in Houston, New Orleans, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Miami... Well, actually I guess Florida shouldn't even be inhabited. Move all those people somewhere safe.

Don't forget though, no one should live anywhere along active faults either, so actually don't worry about the ports of Seattle, San Diego, LA, San Francisco and Portland and the rest of the West Coast, because if people don't want to worry about their homes potentially being destroyed by earthquakes they shouldn't live there. We'll leave the Eastern faults out for now, because we have no proof their active. We'll also ignore the New Madrid Fault, because God forbid anyone live in tornado alley.

Don't the silly people that do live there know better? Everyone in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, northeastern Texas, northern Louisiana, northwestern Mississippi, central and southern Illinois, southwestern Indiana, parts of central, southeast and southwest parts of Nebraska, as well as small parts of far western Tennessee and Kentucky. No one living in any of those areas should expect help from the government if a tornado hits.

I guess that pretty much leaves the mountains. Let's get everybody into the Rockies and the Appalachians. Wouldn't that be amusing.

There are risks to living just about everywhere. The government has money budgeted for natural disasters, and if New Orleans didn't help from that, I don't know who does. Luckily though, our president even after the fact was claiming there was no way any of us could have known that New Orleans was going to flood like a soup bowl.

My cousin, who lived across the lake from New Orleans in Mandeville until 2002ish, mentioned to me a week before the hurricane hit that if it went to New Orleans that the city would be destroyed - a concept that I'd heard as a possibility in the past. The National Weather Service was predicting disasters of "Biblical proportions" days before Rita actually hit. How Bush could claim to have had no forewarning, I have no idea.

The people stranded on their roofs during the storm didn't deserve to be helped. They all should have died, they knew that they should have evacuated before the storm. The people that took "refuge" in the Super Dome should have expected what was coming. Supplies shouldn't have been there for them. Despite the fact that many there were in the process of losing all their worldly possessions, they should have had been prepared for what was coming. After the storm they should have been prepared not to be allowed to leave the area that had been destroyed, looted, and out of supplies.

The funny thing about all of this is that the question whether the government should respond isn't even the point. They did respond, and they did a crappy job which cost even more lives. There wasn't help for people who didn't have options beforehand and the response afterwards was halfhearted. They claimed they weren't ready, that this couldn't have been forseen. Government agencies that were specifically in place for events such as this acted incompetently. There were excuses that there weren't enough troops to assist in the aftermath. I won't bother to point out where troops that could have helped were, who sent them there, and for what reasons.

Because I'm sure someone will miss it, this post has been laced with sarcasm. I'll also apologize for derailing the thread.

 

I agree that we should address the conplexity of reasons for why people enlist. I just wouldn't call joining in order to get money for an education that would be otherwise unavailable, as being too stupid to do anything else.

I also don't think it necessarily means they have been duped just that they made some tough decisions they felt were necessary to improve themselves.

I say this because one person I know was extremely bright, and was accepted into a couple of different medical schools, but wasn't able to pay for it, so enlisted in the armed services. He wasn't happy about going into the army(though he wasn't unpatriotic), but he did so in order to pay for the schooling he needed to pursue the career he wanted. It was very difficult for him, and he had to give up a few years of his life doing something other than what he wanted. He wasn't stupid, or duped. He also didn't feel a need to serve the U.S. by joining the army. He did join primarily in order to get the education and training he wanted and was qualified for.

I am very tired, so I'm not sure exactly what my point is, but I believe it is this. To classify anyone who joins the armed forces in order to get college money as stupid or duped, is stereotyping at least as much as saying that people join the armed forces for the purpose of college tuition.

Hopefully I am getting somewhere near enough of my target meaning to make my point.

 

in many cases, it isnt that they cant get work anywhere else cause they are stupid...in most cases, that is a product of today's economy tha says without a college education..your prospects are limited.

Patroitism and sense of duty play into the decision in some case(one of the two I talked about factored his fathers Marine service quite heavily into his decision)...but the fact remained that he could find nothing that paid better than 10 bucks an hour without some higher education.
Parents cant afford college...his school resume wasnt good enough to get him scholarhips...so here we are.

You may not like the stereotype...but most stereotypes have a basis in fact at some level, even if it is just a small minority that it applies to.

 

Not only that, but there are plenty of jobs in the military that do not translate to the civilian world.

From my experiences, I think it applies to more than a small percentage.