Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] a worrisome problem in Iraq: losing helicopters to machine gun fire [POLITICS]

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Fri, 2 Feb 2007, Jonathan King wrote:

> It's not that I really want to see stuff like this, but I have noticed 
> that we have recently been having serious issues with getting 
> helicopters shot down in Iraq. It now appears that the culprit here is 
> heavy machine gun fire:
>
> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16942784/?from=ET
[snip]
> To put it another way, whatever you think of our current strategy and 
> tactics in Iraq, I think you should worry if we really continue to lose 
> 2 Apaches per week, and any increase in that loss rate could make things 
> much, much worse.
>
> So: does anybody out here have any comforting news on this front?


Nothing comforting, but here is something that might help to explain 
partially our failure in Iraq....  This is from a PBS Newshour with 
Stewart Bowen, the special investigator general for Iraq reconstruction:

   http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june07/bowen_01-31.html

   STUART BOWEN: Barham Salih, the deputy prime minister of Iraq, pointed
   out that corruption at the Beiji refinery resulted in a loss of perhaps
   up to $1 billion, and that money may have gone to the insurgents.

Thus, of $21 billion, a mere 5% may have gone to the insurgents, so I 
guess we should be happy that we gave our enemy $1,000,000,000 that they 
can use to buy weapons to kill our soldiers.

When Bagdad fell back in 2003 a lot of looting ensued.  Experts on Iraqi 
antiquities had been assured by Rumsfeld that the museums would be 
protected.  Rumsfeld did not protect the museums.  Many precious artifacts 
were removed.  We can say "so what, this is a war, we are tough fighting 
guys who could give a shit about some old pottery," but other people value 
those items greatly.  They were sold and some of the money was used to 
fund the insurgency.

I often wondered how the Iraqis were getting such powerful explosives to 
attack us, but it turns out that they had hundreds of tons of explosives 
at the time of the US invasion.  Some of this was located and removed by 
US forces, but about 370 tons of high-grade explosives found at Al Qaqaa 
were left unguarded and were taken by the enemy.  Judging from the size of 
some of the IEDs that can take out trucks, 370 tons of that stuff goes a 
very long way.

In addition to starting a war we didn't need to have, Bush and company 
have managed to fund their own enemy.  This is how reckless these guys are 
with money.  It's truly amazing that they can still command a shred of 
respect in some subgroups of our population.  Fortunately, the great bulk 
of Americans know what they are seeing and polls show very low approval 
for Bush and very high disapproval:

http://www.pollkatz.homestead.com/files/graphic-approval_files/pollkatzmainGRAPHICS_8911_image001.gif
http://www.pollkatz.homestead.com/files/graphic-disapproval_files/pollkatzmainGRAPHICS_9432_image001.gif
http://www.pollkatz.homestead.com/files/graphic-spread_files/pollkatzmainGRAPHICS_10331_image001.gif

Another interesting graph comparing Bush to Nixon with Clinton and Reagan 
for comparison:

http://www.pollkatz.homestead.com/files/nixonbushchart_files/BNCapp_12756_image001.gif

Mike

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