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Returning Marines critical of Iraq plan
Edited for brevity.
Occupation not run well, some say
They were trained for fighting -- not rebuilding a society upended by years of dictatorship and war. But the Marines of 225 Fox Company returned Saturday after more than four months in Iraq, confident America’s war was just. And, they were happy for the comforts of home -- family above all, but also showers, toilets, home-cooked meals and the relative cool of a Hudson Valley summer. ’’The government should have had thousands and thousands of MPs waiting and ready to go in immediately afterwards. They planned meticulously how to take over the country, but I don’t think they planned very well how to run it once it was taken,’’ said Lance Cpl. Derek McGee, 26.
With all due respect, there are people of rank higher than lance corporal privy to more information making those decisions.
’’We’re an infantry unit and they kind of used us as an occupying force,’’ said Sgt. Chris Masterson, 25, a Wappingers Falls resident who left his pursuit of a business degree at Dutchess Community College to serve. ’’I know we went in there and we hit hard, we hit fast and we did a whole lot of good. Where it went bad was way up above us -- the political side of it, establishing the government,’’ he said. ’’It kind of came to a screeching halt.’’
Too bad you can't run a political and diplomatic offensive the same way the Marines run an invasion...
’’Thank you’s’’ the company heard proved to them the war President Bush sold as a quest to destroy weapons of mass destruction was good because it ousted a cruel and ruthless dictator.
No bias on the reporter’s part there, eh?
Masterson recalled getting thanks even from an Iraqi who believed his wife and child had been killed by an American shelling -- so-called ’’collateral damage’’ in the march to Baghdad. He also heard it from a man who said his daughter had been raped and murdered by men loyal to Saddam Hussein. Those with experience as civilian peace officers trained a new Iraqi police force, said Sgt. Joseph Martino, a LaGrange resident and Yonkers fireman. ’’They took them by the hand and built them from the ground up, and I tell you the policemen there were very grateful for what the Marines did. Everyone was,’’ Martino said.
The article isn’t nearly as doom ’n’ gloom as the headline, is it? Any idea what the political feelings of the reporter or editors might be?
Posted by: Dar 2003-08-06
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=17355