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Reality-based commentary on politics.

WaPo Tells it Like it is in Vietraq

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Hats off to the Washington Post, which brought its readers straight to the uncomfortable reality of the hell hole that the Bush administration has stuck us all in in Vietraq. If there is a more perfect metaphor for the Bush administration’s incoherent “guaranteed defeat” strategy, I don’t know what it is:

The soldiers called him Bob, and for the past several weeks, until Tuesday morning, he was the biggest obstacle to the success of an important mission in a small but crucial corner of the Iraq war.

“We can’t get anybody to get Bob out. No one wants to do it,” Army Maj. Brent Cummings, executive officer of the 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, said with worry one recent morning as Bob’s story began unfolding. Cummings was looking at an aerial photograph of an area in east Baghdad called Kamaliya, where there was an abandoned spaghetti factory with a hole in the courtyard, a hole in which some of his soldiers had discovered Bob.

Bob: It’s shorthand for “bobbin’ in the float,” Cummings explained.

Float: It’s shorthand for “two to three feet of raw sewage,” he further explained.

Read the rest of the piece here.

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Comments

  1. Sorry, someone had to say it.  đŸ™‚

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    Seriously, that article blew me away.  It’s articles like this with the nitty gritty, smelly, violent, deadly, day-to-day life in Vietraq that make it real for people.  I’m glad to see it in the Washpo. 

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    Now I must wash.

  2. We must run away, post-haste, so that the freedom fighters can get on with the extermination of all of the nervous men, the dozens of children, and the smiling pregnant women in their flimsy houses.

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    What a proud day that will be!

  3. Confessions of a Torturer by Tony Lagouranis:

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    In November…Lagouranis was sent to Fallujah. American forces had launched a major offensive to secure the city, and corpses were being taken to an agricultural storage facility that the Americans called “the potato factory.” Lagouranis was assigned to go through the pockets and clothing of the dead to attempt to identify them and gather intelligence from their papers. The Defense Department had provided retinal scanners to aid identification, Lagouranis says, but the technology wasn’t useful. The bodies, many having lain in the street for a week or more decomposing and being picked over by animals, often had no eyes-“just sockets with maggots.” The marines were in protracted negotiations with the local authorities and imams over how and where the bodies should be buried, and until that was settled they stacked up. “It was terrible. We were handling these dead bodies all day. We are like living with them, maggots and flies everywhere. We couldn’t shower-there was no shower there. We couldn’t wash our clothes.” Lagouranis lived that way for a month. He estimates there were 500 bodies in the warehouse by the time he left.

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