No doubt, the Americans are learning and improving in Iraq. It is a real learning army. The pic (from a PR blog maintained by the Pentagon - Kol HaKavod to them!) shows several things:
* The Americans have adopted the ridiculous Israeli headdress
* They seem to have obligatory sunglasses. The uniform has the background color of the desert, and it is wide and open, providing good ventilation. This is the first American uniform in Iraq that is appropriate to the hot desert environment, and does not look like a clown.
* All the equipment is used, maintained, clean and neat.
* They have improved firearms and it looks clean, greased but without excess dust, which must be difficult in the desert. The thingie he holds seems to be some kind of MAG, a heavy ametralladora. Israeli soldiers walk around with Viet Nam war surplus materiel, which is like bow-and-arrow technology compared with this.
* They are doing house to house searches, just like the Israeli army
* The Iraqi house has the traditional Hamsa (the hand) against the evil eye.
The American marine looks like the superior version of our garden variety, undisciplined, unkept, poorly equipped Israeli soldier. Truth is truth. The Americans are by far the best.
The story that goes with the pic sells the latest politically correct version of what American marines are doing 5,000 miles away from home and doing house-to-house searches with the finger on the trigger of their monstruous machine guns.
“These people that live in this area are citizens who make an honest living farming or herding. It’s our job to ensure they aren’t influenced with corruption,” said Lance Cpl. Kevin T. Webb, a scout with Delta Co. Since the beginning of the deployment, the company had been able to provide security for the villages and issue medical attention to all who need it. “We went from being a [security] force to being advisors and now it’s time to finish the job.”That is the way to talk, and not like our confused, doubt-ridden soldiers, that give the impression on TV that they are ashamed of themselves and as if in their pure bleeding hearts they would prefer to fight for the enemy.
7 comments:
I believe you are correct that the machine gun the soldier is carrying is a Belgian made MAG, which the US Army designates as a M240, which has been made since the '50s. I think the Israeli Negev machine gun is a better and lighter and more modern design - I would not want to have to carry that 12 kilo MAG around all day.
This is not a gun that the average soldier would be carrying in the US Army . In each squad 1 machine gun gets issued and the rest of the squad members carry automatic rifles.
Sir, Thank you for your comment. I am no expert in firearms, and I am happy that almost guessed what the marine in the pic is holding. The MAG is a large mass of iron and is very heavy but Americans are, in average, larger and stronger than Israelis. I may be wrong, but Israeli soldiers dont carry these things in routine house-to-house searches but it is mounted on jeeps. All the American soldiers photographed are very neat, which contrasts to my experience in Israel. I wonder if it is a publicity photograph effect. Be what it may, we dont have it and it is a pity. That is the way I would like the soldiers of my country look and talk to the media.
I am no machine gun expert either but ordinary US soldiers don't all carry around 12 kilo machine guns. There is a lighter (7 Kilo) machine gun called a SAW - squad automatic weapon (which is also a Belgian weapon - the Minimi) which, as I said before, one soldier in each squad would carry - the rest would carry an M-16 rifle only. A heavier medium machine gun such as the MAG in the picture is rarer still. Such a weapon does absolutely have to be mounted in some way to be used for automatic fire - you'll notice that there is a built in tripod on the underside of the gun. These same guns are also found mounted on Humvees, etc. - the US Army no longer uses Jeeps. Even a giant American Marine could not operate such a gun accurately in automatic mode without mounting it due to recoil.
The modern US Army is obsessed with not taking casualties so the soldiers walk around very heavily armored. I was very surprised to see this photo of an Israeli soldier carrying a Negev, the first google hit that I found:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/Negevtatmikla.JPG
No American soldier would be allowed to go around half-naked like Rocky anymore, even for a photo.
In general, despite their endless money and better weapons, the US occupation of Iraq was carried out in a very stupid fashion - they did not make effective use of collaborators, informants, etc. and so suffered many needless casualties from roadside bombs, etc. Recently, the US realized that it was much cheaper just to buy the loyalty of the tribes, who were always ready to switch sides for the right price and now casualties have dropped. We could have saved thousands of American lives by doing this much sooner, but Americans are clueless as to how foreign cultures operate.
There is no doubting the military effectiveness of the modern American army - remember that the Iranians spent many years and maybe 1 million lives fighting Saddam with no result while it took the American army maybe 2 weeks and a couple of hundred casualties to occupy the whole country. The war was a great success but there were no good plans for the occupation.
I realize that the pic is a PR work but even so, it is effective and I am all for good military PR. I think (but I dont know) that part of Saddam Hussein's collapse had to do with pre-war money-changing-hands contacts. The largest error of the occupation was delivering the power to Mr Chalabi, who was not up to the job, not like Tacho Somoza Sr. And the instant disbandment of Saddam Hussein's army, police and bureacracy, leaving the Americans without a working State.
I would have chosen one of Saddam Hussein's experienced officers, one that happened to be in disgrace and in jail, to take over under American occupation.
Initially following the conquest of the Nazis, the first impulse of both the Russians and the Americans was to exclude from authority anyone who had any position with the Nazis. But then the Cold War began and both sides realized that the most effective persons under one system are generally the same as the most effective under some other system, regardless of any distateful ideology, so they gave everyone below a certain level (and in some cases even high level people) their old jobs back. The same thing happened after the collapse of Communism in Russia (and I assume Hungary though I have no knowledge). My late uncle was a very clever businessman - though he came to America with nothing and was not formally educated, by the time he died he was many time a millionaire. During the war he was exiled to a forest kolkhoz in northern Kazakhstan. Within a few months, he had made friends with the leader of the kolkhoz and was his trusted deputy - the cream always rises to the top of any system and changing the system does not change who is competent and who is incompetent.
The Americans have finally begun to realize this in Iraq.
If the American Occupation in Iraq has sense, it is employing the policemen, soldiers and bureaucrats of the old regime. You have a very limited pool of available capable and educated officials in these countries. And many have been leaving because of the internal conflict.
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